His mother, untypically, had gone before his father, but then she had always been the instigator. She’d not been the same after the thing that had happened, she acted as though it happened to her somehow, and had developed dementia early in life, while still in her forties. He suspected, cruelly perhaps, but everyone was cruel for a while, that she’d gone there deliberately, that she was hiding.
He went to visit her in that desolate building with its misleadingly bright garden rimmed with benches and flowerbeds for as long as he could stand it, and had then given up the ghost – or given up on the ghost. His mother would gaze in his general direction, seeing nothing but the shape of a person. She’d look at him in turn indifferently, inquisitively, accusingly, which was when he thought she knew him best. She’d blurt out disconnected phrases, fragments of things that were impossible to piece together.
‘Don’t let it happen,’ she said once, fearfully, fretfully. ‘Promise me.’
He nodded at her but she grabbed his shoulders and shook them with surprising violence.
‘No, you must promise me!’ she shouted.
He said that he promised, and then leaned in to hold her, to offer comfort through the cage, but as soon as his arms opened, her face changed and she lashed out, catching him with a closed fist on the cheek. Her wedding ring had torn open the skin and he stood there, shocked, holding a hand to his face while she circled him warily, poised to strike again.
‘Don’t worry,’ his father had said when they were walking back to the car. It was late afternoon and the sun had been especially bright, making his father’s eyes water. ‘She won’t know the difference.’
Perhaps staying away after that had been the easy option. It hadn’t felt easy. But then she’d died a few weeks later, considerately, falling down the stairs and breaking her neck, sparing him long nights of doubt and self-recrimination.
His father hadn’t lasted much longer. The life-force had drained out of him the night the nursing home spoke to him in those tender, hushed tones and, after withering on the vine for a torturous six months, visibly shrivelling up from the outside in, he too broke off the stem and dropped to dust. The doctors named his disease to explain it to themselves, but Benjamin Tate knew it wasn’t that, knew it was simple sorrow that he’d been unable to endure.
‘Dad?’ he said. They were alone in the too-big house and the old man was in his favourite chair. The television flickered in his open eyes as the room darkened and cooled around them. What had they been watching, an old western maybe. When the film ended those dazed, unblinking eyes had been open still. ‘Dad?’ he said again, not daring to look. The room was cold by then, a chill had settled on all the surfaces he wasn’t touching. Then, much later, ‘You’ve left me all alone.’
Where was Charlie in all of this? He was never there. Perhaps he had already gone to the city. What did he do there? Benjamin Tate never fully knew.
‘Now we’re finally equal,’ Charlie had sneered at the funeral, their father’s. Benjamin Tate had hobbled away without reply, too absorbed in his own grief, but the comment had snagged in his thoughts like a burr in a dog’s coat and he’d carried it with him for a long time. He carried it still. Like so much else.
He recalled suddenly the night he’d packed up the house, discovered all that secret debris of lives interrupted. There were the love letters, hundreds of them, written over decades, from the time before they were married to the time just before the thing that had happened. There was a small ornamental elephant with a story behind it only the deceased knew, school reports, his, Charlie’s, old photographs, birthday cards. He found, late one evening, the star that he’d placed on top of the Christmas tree as a boy. What was it doing in a kitchen drawer, among the batteries and the bike locks and the broken bits of things that wouldn’t now be fixed? He’d picked it up and then sat down on the linoleum tiles, holding it in his lap for a long time.
Probably the hardest things to pack away were the clothes. There were grease stains in the collars of his father’s shirts, strands of dyed blonde hair, his mother’s, entwined in the wool of her cardigan. It was about 4am when Benjamin Tate noticed hanging behind the door his father’s suit bag. He took it down off the hook. It was flimsy and light without the suit inside it. His father had only ever owned the one. It was navy blue, blue enough to appear black when required. He wore it to weddings, christenings, funerals, his wife’s and his own. Something inside Benjamin Tate, at that point, had given way, and he’d rushed downstairs, to that same kitchen drawer, and returned with a black refuse bag into which he stuffed everything that had been stacked on the bed. An hour later that bag was slouched like a forsaken old dog on a doorstep in town, the neon sign above the charity shop blinking its thanks as he limped away.
He looked at the shattered television. When had that happened? How? But good. Good. The back end of a hardback stuck out through the last jagged shards. He thought of referred anger. Did it exist? Of course it did. He imagined most anger was in some way referred, caused by one thing, expressed on another. He was stupid to have left her like that. But who did he mean now? History repeats. Be brave.
The bench. Stay. The yellow car. The two bicycles. Had there been a great silent bird up there somewhere, peering imperviously down? Or was he embellishing? What did it matter. Details. Mere details.
In the few remaining pixels of the television screen he could see the vague, muffled outline of his trousered legs. Maybe it did watch him after all. Something did. Maybe it was showing him now. Or warning him. You’re not a whole person. You’re not really here. You’re just a faint impression of a person. He knew of creatures who existed only in the dark, at the bottom of oceans, in caves. These were anaemic, spectral beings that couldn’t survive the light. He was among them again, had always been among them. A cave dweller, the ultimate cave dweller, hidden away, out of sight, growing dimmer and less present all the time until people passed through him, saw through him, without ever noticing, like he’d never even been there.
It was Thursday. Or it was the following Thursday? Or was it the Thursday after that? Recurring. That was the word, wasn’t it, for these days? The crack-and-whip. The sheets had been changed and changed again. The brown shoes. The black shoes. The red door closing – slamming – behind him. Tap, tap, tap. The dim alleyways between the cabinets. Drawers that didn’t shut pouncing out to crack his shins. All the names. All the people he’d never know, who’d never know him. The pavement beneath his feet. The cramped kitchen. The sky changing out of the window. The blackness creeping in and then creeping out. The dressing gown and slippers. Beginning it all again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Clare was gazing vacantly in front of her. Without taking any of it in, her eyes passed in turn over the scrap of paper bent beneath the table leg, the table above it that fidgeted regardless, the menu that never changed. There was nothing very much on her mind. She was fortunate like that. It was Friday morning. There were two people in the café besides her; an old man who was seated at the unsteady table – thick languid drops of egg yolk dripped off it onto his grey slacks but he’d not noticed – and a man in a fluorescent-yellow jacket. Clare would not have been able to describe either of them. She was leaning forwards over the counter, resting on her elbows. Her chin was cupped in her hands and every so often she tipped her head forwards to allow a single finger to brush her fringe delicately out of her eyes. She had no idea that she was being watched.
Benjamin Tate would not have called it a lair, although from where he was he could see directly through the glass façade of the café while being fairly certain that anyone looking the other way would not have easily seen him. He had stumbled upon this spot by chance, when he had set off on the 749 steps that led to the café and stopped after 680 of them. At this time of the morning, it was now 8.43, the patch of grass between the path and the high wall was always in shade, and he’d discovered that if he stood very still against the bricks he would often be unnoticed even by the people walking past. Clare was there this morning. She hadn’t always been. Twice he’d seen instead a much older lady behind the counter, her mother, he presumed, although there was no obvious resemblance; perhaps Clare was her father’s daughter. Her hair was different. It had been cut and styled in a way that he thought quite caustic, shaved on one side, a fringe chopped angrily at an angle across her forehead. It didn’t suit her, or rather it didn’t suit the version of her he’d imagined for himself. It annoyed him, those hard edges, on something he wanted to be soft, but many things now annoyed him. He tried not to blame her and began walking.
Clare had been waiting for Benjamin Tate these past weeks without realising that’s what she’d been doing, and without any particular emotion. Each time the door had swung open at about this time of day she had looked over expecting to see his sad figure poised there, and each time it had not been him she’d continued on exactly as before. She would not visit him. The conclusion she’d drawn about broken pipes still stood. It was his turn, or it was no one’s turn.
It was a glorious morning, breathless and bright. He tried to imagine the world without people in it, with just the animals roaming around nibbling at the dewy grass. He wondered if it would be improved. At the kerb he stopped. A line of cars had been halted by something and were fuming impatiently and muttering beneath their breath. He looked up, watched for a moment a white line that was drawing itself arrow straight across a sky that was flat and blue and far away. We’re everywhere, he thought. The cars still hadn’t moved and he put his hand out, stepped into a narrow gap and sidled through it. Enough time had been wasted. He crossed the road. He was beneath the café sign. He was reaching forwards, grasping the metal handle that had caught the early sun and was warm to the touch.
‘Well, well,’ Clare said. Both customers glanced up, at her, at him, and then returned disinterestedly to their breakfasts.
He approached the counter. Behind her a coffee machine was clunkily realigning itself.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘And here I was thinking you were avoiding me.’
Since he’d started dreaming again one dream had kept recurring. It was less a dream and more a moment. He was on a mountainside. There was a thick, impenetrable fog all around him. High peaks reared up although he couldn’t see them. They emphasised his smallness, or his isolation, he wasn’t sure which. In front of him was a barely discernible dark shape. It seemed at first like the last glimpse of something departing, but he realised gradually that it was actually coming towards him, that what he believed to be its back was in fact its front, and he had only to remain where he was for a few seconds more and it would reveal itself to him. He always awoke then.
‘I think I’ve been avoiding a lot of things,’ he said.
Clare tilted her head and a large, hooped earring fell out of her hair and dangled on her shoulder. ‘That sounds to me like the start of a much longer conversation.’
‘Yes, maybe.’ He looked at his watch. It was 8:52. He didn’t want to be late. ‘I wondered if you’d like to borrow any more books?’ he said.
She smiled then. ‘Yes. I’d like that.’
Benjamin Tate was sitting on the only chair in the room. The two identical cushions had been thrown off at various times long before then. He could only see one from where he sat. It was slumped against the wall. It had a rip in it through which a plume of padding bulged. He surveyed the room, the smashed television, the marks on the wall where various cups and bowls, some empty, some not, had shattered, the corner of the carpet that had been curiously ripped from its staples.
So much chaos. So much chaos and disorder it was actually astonishing. How had he managed it, he of all people? He looked down at his tummy, patted it. The patting became harder until he was rapping it with a closed hand. Hello in there? Nothing to say for yourself? The little tyrant had been mysteriously absent all these days. He’d waited for him to emerge from under his bridge, fists clenched and cheeks all aflush, he’d willed it even, the confrontation that would inevitably occur, he thought somehow it would be cathartic, defining even, but there had been no sign of him. He leaned across towards the table with the vague notion of pulling it over. His fingers brushed the wood but couldn’t gain sufficient purchase and he sunk back into the cushions, disinclined to stand up. His poor mother. His poor dear dead mother. He started to chuckle. She would have been aghast at the state of this, she who had always been so house-proud, so fond of tidying up and putting away. His chuckle became a laugh. He was struck by the sound of it, fascinated almost, it was so strange to him. Abruptly he stopped. He looked at the door. Clare would come through it at any moment.
‘Come on,’ he said, banging his fist into the arm of the chair, ‘hurry up.’
He’d been sitting there for three hours when finally he heard the stairs creaking. He jumped up and rushed across the room, swinging the door open before she even had a chance to knock.
‘Hello,’ he said, beckoning her in eagerly. ‘You’re here. Come in, come in.’
‘Good Lord. What’s come over you?’ She had come straight from the café and was still wearing her black trousers and the blouse with her name badge pinned to it. ‘Why are you grinning like that?’
