Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘Can I take your coat?’ I asked.
She stared at me: then I noticed that she wasn’t wearing a coat, just jeans and a cotton blouse. I found this a little puzzling, but managed to hide the fact by joining in her nervous laughter. It was hot outside, after all, and still fairly light.
‘So,’ I said, once we had both sat down. ‘How can I help?’
‘Well, it’s like this.’ And then just as she started to explain, my attention was caught by the liver spots on the back of her hand, and I found myself trying to guess how old she was, because her face, and especially her eyes, still had this questioning, fresh, youthful quality, and going by that alone I would have said that she was in her early thirties at the most, and yet now I was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t nearer my age, or even older, early to mid forties perhaps, and as I was trying to reach a decision on this I realized that she had finished talking and was waiting for me to answer and I hadn’t been listening to a word she’d said.
There was a long and difficult pause. I got up, put my hands in my pockets and walked over to the window. There was nothing for it but to turn round after a few seconds and say, as politely as I could: ‘Do you think you could run that by me again?’
She was taken aback but did her best to hide it. ‘Sure,’ she said, and then started explaining the whole thing again, only this time, now that I had come over to the window, I found that I was facing the television and couldn’t help staring at the swarthy, dark-haired, smiling gentleman on the screen, who had his arm around this little boy, and seemed to be trying so hard to be liked by this kid who was standing rigidly to attention and staring into space and almost pulling away from the avuncular figure next to him, with the permanent smile and the thick black moustache. And there was something so compelling about this scene, something so charged and unnatural, that it made me forget I was supposed to be listening to the woman until she had almost finished, and then I realized that I still didn’t have a clue what she was talking about.
There was another pause, longer and more difficult than the first. I thought out my next move carefully before making it: a pensive, nonchalant stroll across to the other side of the room, and then a casual lowering of my buttocks on to the edge of the dining table, so that I was leaning back slightly as I faced her. At which point I said: ‘Do you think you could see your way clear to repeating that, by any chance?’
She regarded me intently for a few seconds. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking this, Michael,’ she said, ‘but are you feeling all right?’
It was a fair question, by anybody’s standards: but I didn’t have it in me to give an honest answer.
‘It’s my powers of concentration,’ I said. ‘They’re not what they used to be. Too much television, I expect. If you could just … one more time … I’m listening this time. Really, I am.’
It was touch and go for a while. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had simply got up and left the room. She looked at her sheet of A4 paper and seemed to be wondering whether to drop the subject altogether, to jack in the clearly thankless task of trying to get me to listen to a few simple words of English. But then, after taking a deep breath, she started speaking again: slow, loud, deliberate. It was obvious that this was my last chance.
And I would have listened at this point, I really would, for my curiosity was aroused, apart from anything else, but my brain was spinning, all my senses were in a whirl, because she had used my name, she had actually called me by my first name, Michael, she had said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking this, Michael,’ and I can’t tell you how long it was since anybody had called me by my name, it can’t have happened since my mother came down – two, maybe three years – and the funny thing about it was that if she knew my name, then in all probability I knew hers, or I had known it once, or I was expected to know it, we must have been introduced at one time or another, and I was so busy trying to put a name to her face, and to put her face into a context where I may have seen it before, that I completely forgot to pay any attention to her slow, loud, deliberate speech, so that as soon as she finished I knew we were in for something more, something much more and something much much worse than just another long and difficult pause.
‘You haven’t been listening to a word of this, have you?’
I shook my head.
‘I get the sense,’ she said, rising quickly to her feet, ‘that I’m wasting my time here.’
She stared at me accusingly; and not having much to lose any more, I stared back.
‘Can I ask you something?’
She shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Who are you?’
Her eyes widened, and it felt as though she had taken a step away from me, although as far as I could see she didn’t actually move.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I don’t know who you are.’
She gave a mirthless, incredulous smile.
‘I’m Fiona.’
‘Fiona.’ The name dropped into my mind with a heavy thud: there were no echoes. ‘Should I know you?’
‘I’m your neighbour,’ said Fiona. ‘I live just across the hall from you. I introduced myself to you just a few weeks ago. We pass on the stairs … three or four times a week. You say hello.’
I blinked, and came a little closer, gazing rudely into her face. I steeled myself to make an enormous effort of memory. Fiona … I still couldn’t remember having heard the name, not recently, and if it seemed that something about her was starting to take on a distant familiarity, the origins of this feeling were obscure, and tasted less of day-to-day encounters on the staircase than the sensation, perhaps, of being presented with a photograph of a long-dead ancestor, in whose sepia features it might just be possible to detect the ghost of a family resemblance. Fiona …
‘When you introduced yourself to me,’ I asked, ‘did I say anything?’
‘Not much, no. I thought you were rather unfriendly. But then I don’t tend to give up very easily: so I’ve kept trying.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and sat down in an armchair. ‘Thank you.’
Fiona was left standing by the door. ‘I’ll go then, shall I?’
‘No – please – if you could just bear with me a little longer. We might get somewhere. Please, sit down.’
Fiona hesitated, and before coming to sit down on the sofa opposite me, she opened the door to the landing outside and left it ajar. I pretended not to have noticed this. She perched on the edge of the sofa, her back arched and her hands folded unhappily in her lap.
‘What were you saying just now?’ I asked.
‘You want me to go through all that again?’
‘Just briefly. In a couple of words.’
‘I was asking you to sponsor me. I’m doing a sponsored bike ride, for the hospital.’ She passed me the sheet of A4 paper, roughly half of which was covered with signatures.
A few lines at the top of the paper explained the nature of the event, and what the money was being raised for. I read them quickly and said, ‘Forty miles sounds an awful long way. You must be very fit.’
‘Well, I’ve never done anything quite like this before. I thought it would get me out and about.’
I folded the paper in two, laid it aside and thought for a moment. I could feel a new energy rising in me and the temptation to laugh, odd though it would have seemed, was quite powerful. ‘Do you know what the funny thing is?’ I said. ‘Shall I tell you the really funny thing?’
‘Please do.’
‘This is the longest conversation I’ve had – the most I’ve talked to someone – for something like two years. More than two years, I think. The longest.’
Fiona laughed in disbelief. ‘But we’ve barely spoken.’
‘None the less.’
She laughed again. ‘But that’s ridiculous. Have you been on a desert island or something?’
‘No. I’ve been right here.’
A confused shake of the head. ‘Well how come?’
‘I don’t know: I just didn’t want to. It hasn’t been a conscious decision or anything, it’s just that the occasion’s never arisen. It’s easy, you’d be surprised. I suppose in the old days you’d have to have talked to someone: going into shops and things. But now you can do all your shopping in the supermarket, and you can do all your banking by machine, and that’s about it.’
A thought occurred to me, and I got up to lift the receiver on the telephone. It was still connected.
‘Does my voice sound strange to you? How does it sound?’
‘It sounds fine. Quite normal.’
‘What about this flat? Does it smell?’
‘It’s a bit … close, yes.’
I picked up the remote control for the television and was about to switch off. The young boy with the locked, expressionless eyes, his back as tense and rigid as Fiona’s when she had sat down on my sofa, was no longer on the screen: but the avuncular man with the big grin and the heavy black moustache was still stomping around, this time in full military uniform and surrounded by men of the same age and nationality and bearing. I watched him for a few seconds and felt another memory beginning to recover its shape.
‘I know who that is,’ I said, pointing and clicking my finger. ‘It’s – whatsisname – President of Iraq …’
‘Michael, everyone knows who that is. It’s Saddam Hussein.’
‘That’s right. Saddam.’ Then, before turning the television off, I asked: ‘Who was that boy with him? The one he was trying to put his arms around?’
‘Haven’t you been watching the news? That was one of the hostages. He’s been parading them on television, as if they were cattle or something.’
This made little sense to me, but I could tell it was not the moment for elaborate explanations. I switched the television off and said – listening with interest to my own voice – ‘I’m sorry, you must think I’m being very rude. Would you like a drink? I’ve got wine and orange juice and beer and lemonade, and even a bit of whisky, I think.’
Fiona hesitated.
‘We can leave the door open if you like. I don’t mind about that at all.’
And then she smiled, and sat back on the sofa, and crossed her legs, saying, ‘Well, why not. That would be very nice.’
‘Wine?’
‘I think orange juice, please. I can’t seem to shake off this dreadful sore throat.’
∗
My little kitchen had always been the cleanest room in the flat. I never dusted or used a vacuum cleaner because dust is not easily visible to the casual observer, it’s possible to turn a blind eye to it, yet I could not tolerate the sight of smudges and splashes of dried food caked to my brilliant white surfaces. When I withdrew into the kitchen, therefore, and turned on the two 100-watt spotlights which sent their beams of pure brightness fearlessly exploring every gleaming angle and corner, it restored my self-confidence. The night was slowly darkening, and from the kitchen sink the first thing I could see was my own reflected face, hovering like a spectre outside my fifth-floor window. This was the face that Fiona had been addressing for the last few minutes. I took a good look at it and tried to imagine how it would have appeared to her. The eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and bloodshot from too much glassy staring at the television screen; deeply scored lines were beginning to appear around the corners of the mouth, although these were partially obscured by two days’ worth of stubble; the jaw-line was still reasonably firm, but another three or four years would probably see the onset of a double chin; the hair, once tawny, was now streaked with grey and stood desperately in need of cutting and re-styling; there were the shreds of a parting, so tentative and wasted that the onlooker might easily have been forgiven for not noticing that it was there at all. It wasn’t a friendly face: the eyes, a deep, velvety blue, might once have suggested wells of possibility but now seemed guarded, fenced off. But at the same time it was honest. It was a face you could trust.
And if you looked beyond the face, what did you see? I peered out into the twilight. Nothing much. A few scattered lights had been turned on across the courtyard, and the gentle babble of televisions and stereo systems drifted over from open windows. It was a muggy August evening, entirely typical of a summer which seemed to be taking a malicious pleasure in testing Londoners to the limit, drenching them day and night in dense city heat. Looking down, I noticed the movement of a shadow in the gardens. Two shadows, one very small. An old woman walking her dog, probably struggling to keep up as it zig-zagged from bush to bush, its nerves stretched and tingling with the excitement of secret, nocturnal pleasures. I listened to its intermittent rustles and scuffles, the only distinct sounds to be made out, apart from the occasional siren, above London’s buried monotonous hum.
Turning away from the window, I fetched a carton of orange juice from the fridge and cracked three or four ice cubes into a tumbler. I poured the juice over the blocks of ice, enjoying their dull music as they clinked together and rose to the top of the glass. Then I poured myself a glass of beer and took the drinks into the sitting room.
As I paused on the threshold, I tried to look at the room with the same objectivity I had brought to the reflection of my own face: wanting to imagine the impression it would have made on Fiona. She was watching me, now, so I didn’t have as much time, but some quick observations presented themselves: the fact that the curtains, which had come with the flat, and the pictures, which had been bought many years ago, reflected nothing of my present taste; the fact that so many of the surfaces – the table, the window-sills, the top of the television, the mantelpiece – were stacked with papers and magazines and videotapes rather than the few well-chosen ornaments which might have given the room form and personality; the fact that the bookshelves, which I had put up myself, also many years ago, had been largely cleared of books (now jumbled into a tower of cardboard boxes in the spare bedroom) and were scattered, instead, with still more videotapes, piled both horizontally and vertically, some pre-recorded and some filled with scraps of films and programmes taped off the television. It was a room, I thought, which presented an aspect not dissimilar to the face reflected in the kitchen window: it had the potential to be welcoming but for the moment seemed to have transformed itself, through a mixture of carelessness and disuse, into something ungainly and almost eerily neutral.