‘Please,’ Clare said, ‘wait, don’t go. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.’ He was half walking, half falling down the bank. ‘Benjamin, wait.’ She said more after that but he was moving faster than her, despite his knee, and the breeze that blew along the canal carried her voice away. On the path, cosily hugging itself, a duck was asleep on its webbed feet. Its soft body, stout in the middle and tapering at the head and tail, was the same shape as a rugby ball balancing on its tee. He imagined his boot catching the bird flush, the choked squawk, the sudden rush of air and whatever else being expelled through the too narrow gap. He imagined the largest section of whatever would remain of it, the crushed middle part with its caved-in flanks, flying through the air and splashing flatly on the far side of the canal, like a carrier bag full of small stones.
Who was this Clare, really? Where had she come from? How quickly she’d bounced up onto her feet, as though fearing he might try to inflict another kiss on her. He wanted to scream at her. More than that, he wanted to take out this rage on himself. He didn’t think he was a special case. He thought he was far less than that. He thought that on every street, perhaps in every house almost, there were people who had carried greater burdens, who had seen greater obstacles placed in front of them and had overcome them. He was a less than a special case. His obstacle was still there. For twenty years his nose had been pressed up against the sheer face of it. He wondered, truthfully, if he’d ever properly tried to get over it, or around it, or through it. Maybe he had. But what did trying look like? Maybe he’d tried so hard he’d smashed himself to pulp against it, that all he was now was a dark, liquid stain, absorbed into it, part of it.
He was walking, lurching rather, pitching forwards. His body was taking him home. There was that cat, on the wall again. It was the same cat as before. It arched its back and hissed and then jumped onto the pavement and loped away across the road in that soundless way that all cats have. He turned left. It wasn’t late, but the streets were quiet. Dark pools swirled between the lampposts. Cars parked up against the kerb eyed him anxiously as he approached, braced as he drew level, relaxed as he passed. He felt, alongside the anger, a sort of liberating elation. A low branch hung down and he reached up, snapped it and dropped it over his shoulder without breaking stride. All around him the houses were closed up, doors closed, windows and curtains closed. Behind them the families would be settling in for the night, telling their stories. And his family? Those two little boys that played about his heels, his wicked and wild wife? Where were they? He thought of his empty flat – empty even when he was there – silent, unmoving, lifeless, devoid of life, unlived in. He wanted to be there again, right now, with a heavy implement in his hands. He saw himself tearing at things, pulling stuff over, breaking things, throwing them into harder things and then stamping on whatever of them remained. He slapped himself in the face so hard it made him yelp. There was relief in that. He did it again. Why had he never self-harmed? He imagined that had he started he might never have stopped.
He strode on. He wasn’t going home. He had assumed he was but had already passed his flat. There was that white building, still white even in the dark, white in the reflected glow of the stars and the moon and all the other lights whose effervescence was somehow absorbed by it. It rose up from the ground, towered over everything like it believed itself to be some great monument to heroic deeds. He had wasted most of his life there. All his adult life. He wanted to take a torch to it. He would. He would, but not tonight. He circled around its perimeter and kept going. He knew now where he was going. It wasn’t far. It had never been far, yet he’d managed, somehow, to never go back.
‘My friend calls me Florence Nightingale,’ she had said. ‘I just like helping people, is that so terrible? Let me help you. Tell me why you are the way you are?’
‘The way I am? I’ve managed for twenty years by myself,’ he’d shot back. ‘I don’t require an intervention.’
‘What happened twenty years ago?’ she’d asked keenly.
He was approaching it from the other side now. Would it look the same? What, he suddenly wondered, if it was no longer there? Town planners were always busybodies, looking for new ways to justify their positions. But no, it would be there, unchanged. He knew it would. It was no distance now. Less than a mile. He was walking as fast as he could. If only he could have run.
Maybe he should have just grabbed her, Clare that is, or Madeline, or that old whore, or anyone. What did it matter? That feeble, trembling little creature he’d hid inside for so long, he wanted to grab him too, shake him, shake him until he dropped down dead. He wanted to drag what was left to a bridge and dump the limp weight over the edge. He imagined the slow submerging before the black surface closed over where he’d been. He heard, shockingly through the silence, a horrible shriek. He realised the noise was coming from himself. All around dogs started barking. He hurried on. To his left was a supermarket, unnaturally bright on the far side of the deserted car park. Where was everyone? What time was it, really? He kept going, past the bus shelter, also empty. His knee was aching now. Good, let it ache. He approached a bin pinned to a pole and drove his knee into its side with all the force he had. Maybe that’s why the cars had winced. He collapsed on the ground and remained there for several minutes. Eventually he pulled himself up using the pole and walked on.
And then, all at once, he was there. He stood on the bend and looked down at the soft grey of the pavement’s ridge and the gutter, the black tarmac in front of him, the roundabout a short distance away. He looked to his left and saw a concrete wall – that was new, or different – behind which he saw the top of a brick building which he knew was the electric substation.
He stepped off the pavement and walked a few paces. He looked both ways down the road, then down at his feet. He couldn’t be certain, but he imagined he was in the exact spot. He stood very quietly and paid close attention to his body, searching out new sensations, listening for the beginnings of things profound. He expected to feel something, although he wasn’t sure what, but he felt nothing. He sat down and waited.
‘You want to get off there,’ a voice said. On the opposite side of the road an old man had stopped walking and was watching him. He had both hands on his hips. One hand had been inserted through the loop of a lead, at the end of which was a small dog, nose to the ground, stub tail stuck straight up, flicking back and forth in the air.
‘I used to live nearby,’ Benjamin Tate said.
‘Right.’ The old man hesitated, as if replaying in his mind what had just been said to him. ‘Well, it’s a dark corner. Whether you live here or not.’ He put out his hand. ‘Here. Come away now.’
Benjamin Tate looked down the road. There was something there. He couldn’t see what it was, but it was there. He looked back at the old man, pointing off into the dark. ‘See?’ he said. The old man, who still had his hand out, said something back but Benjamin Tate had stopped listening. He looked back down the road. In the brief moment he’d not attended it, it had crept closer, although it still couldn’t be seen. Benjamin Tate leant forward from the hip, stretching out his neck. He was conscious of not wanting to move his feet. ‘It’s just over there. Can you see?’ The dog was yapping silently on the end of its lead. The old man put a foot into the road and then withdrew it. His mouth was moving. The hand not holding the lead was gesticulating in the air. He looked angry. Benjamin Tate started laughing. Down the road the thing that was there was closer still. It had a shape now, a black, formless bulk. He only had to wait a moment longer and it would reveal itself to him.
Would Clare ever let him kiss her? What did it matter. He realised he didn’t want to kiss her. For the first time he imagined her without any clothes on. How old was she? She had told him, but he’d forgotten. She would have been about Clare’s age now. She. Yes, this was the spot. He felt sure of it now. They’d both been ended here. He would have to speak her name.
Suddenly the thing in the road began to charge. It moved with alarming speed towards him, gulping up the ground. He could hear a whirring sound. He wasn’t sure if it was the thing itself, or the sound of the air being shoved aside in front of it. The small dog tried to leap away but the lead pulled taut, jolting its head back and sending its hindquarters flaying out in front of it. Two eyes, two dazzling eyes at the front of something monstrous coming at him, hurtling itself at him. He looked down at his feet, immobile. He didn’t care. He had tried to kill himself many times. With rope. With pills. Be brave. But he was such a coward. He realised they were headlights at the same time he realised it was too late to get out of the way.
Just before they hit he saw the driver’s face illuminated in the dashboard lights. It was his own face, younger, with sun on it, although there was no sun. Then the car was on top of him, crashing over him, ploughing through him, and he was tumbling backwards through empty space. The moon and the stars and the black road spun around him, faster and faster until they merged and he couldn’t tell them apart. He saw himself with his arms folded across his chest, travelling at light-speed through a tunnel. He realised he’d run out of time. He began to shout out her name, but he was moving too fast now and the words were behind him before they were ever heard, like those white puffs of smoke that had once disappeared over his shoulder. Then, with one final whoosh, the tunnel ended, and he went spinning off into open space, like something rigid dropped out of the back of a plane.
‘You crazy bugger!’ The excited dog, he thought it was a terrier, reached him first. It jumped up onto his chest and began licking his face. He was surprised by how light the animal was. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ The old man caught up, coughed. He looked flushed. Benjamin Tate stood up. The road, in both directions, was empty. He bent down and stroked the dog. The fur around its nose was hard and course. There was a white patch beneath its chin like a small goatee beard. ‘Good boy,’ he said. ‘What a good boy.’ He thought he’d like to get a dog. ‘Sorry,’ he said, addressing the old man now, but not looking at him, still stroking the dog. ‘Just a dizzy spell.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Benjamin Tate looked at the fan, parts of the fan, smashed on the floor. He regretted it now. Where had this heat come from? It had sat on top of him, stagnant and thick, for days. He’d reach for something, stretch out an arm or extend himself in some other way, and bits of him would peel apart, like he’d been smeared with a paste that didn’t dry. It was too early in the year for this. It was still spring, the tree was all made up but already it seemed to be wilting. ‘I don’t know what’s happening either,’ he said to it. When had the seasons started playing fast and loose with the natural order of things? Didn’t they realise that order was there for a reason, that everything had its place, that one thing follows another thing and makes the next thing possible?
The poor fan, it had been all abuzz with giddy enthusiasm when he’d retrieved it from the airing cupboard, but almost immediately it became apparent that it was no longer fit for purpose. He contemplated it for a moment, watched it toil desperately back and forth in its cage, rattling annoyingly, continuously, coughing out gusts of hot air at whatever crossed its path, then he had picked it up and swung it against the wall. The doddering old fool had died immediately of shock, but Benjamin Tate had continued swinging until its ribcage split open and its brittle innards splintered off in all directions. He had glared about then, seeking a next victim. He’d focused on the perfidious television – perhaps its hunchback, its deformity, is what made it so snide and resentful. He thought of the brassy number four with its impish, irreverent smirk. He imagined it on the floor jumping up and down as he pummelled it.
The fan wasn’t an isolated case. Various bits of crockery, a cup, two plates, one breakfast bowl which had still been full at the time, had all met similarly abrupt and brutal ends in recent weeks.
These furious squalls that blew up in him now, they had caught him unawares. He lived now in an almost constant state of volatile unease. It’s not what he’d expected. He’d expected instead a gentle return to peace and quiet, boredom, a safe, ordered progression through the days with no sudden movements. Just like before. But nothing was as before. Or, more to the point, everything was as before, and that was the problem.
It was Thursday. The crack-and-whip of the sheets wasn’t quite as crisp as he’d have liked. He took the dressing gown and slippers off the stool and then wrestled with the hot tap in the kitchen while the kettle gurgled behind him. He sat down at the table. The brown shoes, the black ones, he hardly noticed. At 8.35 he slammed the door behind him, hearing the number rattle and shake on its hook as he descended the stairs. Would it never fall down?
The cat might have been there again, on that low wall, or it might not have been. Benjamin Tate walked with his head down, staring the entire way at the pavement a yard in front of him. The vast white building glared at him as he approached. His steps echoed down its stairway and at 8.56 – he must have been walking quicker than normal – he sat down at his desk.
Dunne, K. Thirty-six. He scanned down the list. All the normal things, along with a succession of broken bones. The clavicle, the humerus, the sacrum, the radius, the femur, the tibia and fibula, multiple ribs, carpals, metacarpals… Osteogenesis imperfecta. A collagen deficiency. Years ago, Benjamin Tate would have winced, going through that list, imagining the pain of each fracture. He’d seen it once, that man in the mud, balancing on the bank before momentum and gravity took him, or most of him. His oversized wellies had been sucked down, holding fast his feet to the spot. He’d teetered a moment, at an unlikely angle, until something gave way and he went crashing over. Benjamin Tate had laughed; the man’s rain jacket had ridden up his back, tipping his hood over his face and exposing, above his belt, a slab of blotchy white skin. But then the screaming had started. Of course, each break is different, both by degree and location. Would a leg bone hurt more than any other? He remembered his own injury. It hadn’t hurt at all at first. Then it had hurt a great deal. Poor K, whoever he or she was. He turned the card over. The entries stopped abruptly. Whoever he or she had been.
Chairs shuffled around him, voices, loud and then much softer, Pete laughing. Benjamin Tate kept his head down and continued working his way, diligently, reliably, fastidiously, through the cards. Tap, tap, tap went his fingers on the keys. Tap, tap, tap. The clock had been replaced. Next time he would be the one to throw it. Time moved ever on. At lunchtime, he made his way to the bench out the front, ate the sandwiches he’d prepared and looked alternately at the sky, the grass and the trees until the hour passed. At one point a man sat briefly beside him. When he stood up a bookmark fell from somewhere about his person. Benjamin Tate picked it up. It was a patch of material onto which the word ‘daddy’ had been embroidered with three kisses beneath it. He put it in his pocket and watched the man walk away.
Dylan, B. Eighteen. More voices around him. One voice missing. Darren wasn’t there. Damien rather. Pete and Sophia sat next to each other now. He noticed them, when he got up from his desk or returned to it, leaning into each other, murmuring things under their breaths, earnest things, playful things, exclusive things just between them. Tap, tap, tap.
At day’s end he returned to his flat. Things were where he’d left them, where they were meant to be. The window was closed. Thursday was meat night, which offered him a great many options. Were there more types of edible meat than bones in the body? He’d have to look it up. He always had chicken. It was the most versatile of the meats, in his opinion. He did little with it that evening, just let it cook for ten minutes and then heated up some peas. He ate quickly at the table, taking little enjoyment from the dish. Then he washed up what he’d used, checked the water level in the kettle, and went to bed.
It was not yet 8pm, it was still light outside, but he didn’t feel like reading, wasn’t interested in watching television, or being watched by it. He stomped into his bedroom. It felt strange, retiring at such an hour. He kept the curtains open and stayed as still as he could, watching the sky change colour and darken like a bruise. Eventually it grew so dark he could see nothing of it at all, just a vast, depthless void that seemed to press against his window and then seep into and fill up his room, and he wasn’t sure if he was even still awake.
Benjamin Tate was a boy again, he dreamed he was a boy again. He knew the house. It was a long way from where he was born but it is where his memories had begun. He saw himself standing in the kitchen. He had a dishcloth in one hand and a plate in the other. He can’t have been more than six years old. The radio was on and his parents were dancing on the tiles in front of him, as they so often did. He and Charlie were watching them and making faces at each other but he certainly was warmed, reassured, by the sight. He saw his mother’s bare feet, hard and cracked at the heel – she danced on tiptoes – and the way his father looked at her, with amusement and something else. It was longing, but he didn’t know that then.
He saw the trunk of the great oak tree that split in two the wooden fence at the end of their garden, could feel again its cold surface, hard and smooth as stone. Who lived on the other side of that fence? A slight woman, but stern, who always wore dark-green slacks and industrial boots. He remembered her as being unfeasibly old – but then aren’t all adults unfeasibly old when you’re young – and that he’d been afraid of her. She used to let them, he and Charlie, hop over the fence and swing on her hammock. Onto the trunk his father had chalked three cricket stumps and they would all, his mother too, charge about late into the evening. He recalled the grass-itch on his legs when he climbed stickily into bed.
How dismal it was, reliving those days, knowing the wreck that was to become of them all.
‘What about your family?’ Clare had asked him.
‘I’ve a brother, but we’re not in touch anymore.’ Can you be estranged from a sibling?
‘That’s all?’ she asked. ‘Just a brother?’
