You Are Not A Stranger Here (13 page)

As she leaned against Clive by the cigarette machine, the girl came no higher than his shoulder.

"It was good to meet you," James said but a waiter glided between them and when he'd passed, the girl had looked away; repetition would seem overbearing, he thought. He waved good-bye, and ahead of the others, made his way out of the restaurant.

On the curb in front of him a bus pulled alongside the shelter, and a small group of passengers stepped off the rear platform, disbanding as they gained the pavement. He headed east, behind the quickly disappearing figures.

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T H E B E N C H B Y the wall of the common was empty, the streetlamp already on. He should go home, he told himself. But then there was a rustling of feet by the beech hedge, the sound of shallow breath. He kept walking. At the copse, he saw an unshaven man in a tank top picking his way carefully around the glimmer of the ground's muddy patches. James moved farther toward the shed and waited just in from the path. Men, young and old, wandered among the trees, stopping now and again to pierce the shadow, a white piece of clothing or the whites of their determined eyes catching a speck of lamplight and floating for an instant in the darkness. He let them pass by, trying still to convince himself, as he always tried, that he would thank himself for turning away. Soon a man with thinning black hair, wearing a suit and polished shoes, approached and hung beside him. James remained still, reminding himself to breathe. There were muffled greetings, a hand placed flat on his beating chest. He reached out to loosen the man's tie, and then their lips met. James closed his eyes and the pent welter of longing rushed into his limbs. He ran his hands down the man's back, pressed his shoulders, grabbed at the back of his head. In the now perfect darkness, he had the oddest sensation it was the girl from the restaurant he was embracing, her slender frame, her plight. He moved more gently, holding her like he would hold an old person, or someone who has lost their strength, trying to forgive by the way he touched. Then he felt the scratch of stubble along his neck, ran his hand past the dangling tie, and it was no longer the girl he was pressed against 129

in this dance of apparitions, but his father. The hands at the fly, the condom, the warm mouth, they all came as a disappointment. O N E M O R N I N G A month later, a man from British Telecom knocked on the door. For weeks, James had thrown his post in the garbage unopened and the habit seemed to be attracting unsolicited visits. They had sent warnings, the man said, they had tried to contact him by phone, but his service had now been disconnected. Was there a problem? He told James there were installment plans for people with financial difficulties.

"It's not the money," James said. "I don't want a phone."

The man looked confused, as though perhaps James were a disturbed character and the service under discussion that of a halfway home. He peered through the front window, presumably looking for the person in charge. The previous Tuesday, the cable service had gone out, and soon thereafter, James had noticed that the newspaper no longer appeared on the doorstep each morning. Stepping into a taxi on the way to a cinema one afternoon, he had seen two men in sunglasses knocking at his door, and recognized them as employees of the collection agency Shipley's used for its rental properties. They must do a sideline in credit cards, he'd thought, for while he ignored his mail, he had been careful to pay his rent.

"Here," James said to the man as he picked up the tele130 phone, which he had wrapped up in its cords and placed at the foot of the stairs a week before, "I imagine you've come for this."

T H AT E V E N I N G , A S the light faded over the common, he wrote:

Dear Father,

We are well past the summer solstice now and the days are getting shorter. I suppose it's with this sort of observation a letter should begin, in the safety of neutral facts. Since I've stopped working, time has slowed. I

think a lot about the past, and the memories tend to make the present less real, like the memory of you standing at the back door in your blue suit, leaning your head against the stone as dusk encompassed the yard. Some days I feel as though I am still in that yard, watching you, wondering what you're thinking. Do you see me there? Do you remember?

You will be glad to know I've been responsible

about my money. Everything's been drawn up and

signed. Mum should have no problem with it. I find you now and again here on the common, bits and

pieces of you scattered in the woods, but as the days go by, so the need lessens. I'll be coming home soon. 131

He remained seated at the end of the bench, listening to the trees and the music from the flat behind. His breath was shallow, though not from excitement. In the vestibule, his hands shook as he held his key to the lock, and he had to steady himself against the wall. On the stairs, he made good use of the banister.

I T WA S A rainy morning later that week when the doorbell rang again. Wary of the bill collectors, James looked through the curtain to identify the visitor. It was Patrick, his colleague from Shipley's. James was supposed to have returned to work five days ago, but by that time he'd unplugged the phone. If they had been trying to call, he knew nothing of it. He considered letting the doorbell ring, pretending to be away, but his nerve gave out and he went round to the hall. Patrick stood in the doorway in a raincoat, his red hair clustered into dark strands by the rain.

"James! You're here!" he bellowed. "What's the story, mate? We thought you were dead down a ditch somewhere."

James stood staring at this young man over whom he had fretted so during his year at the office, catering, invisibly, to his whims and preferences, whims and preferences James had likely imagined to begin with--an elaborate set of spinning wheels, attached to nothing.

He hadn't spoken to anyone in over a week and found himself caught off guard by Patrick's presence, as though this person ought to have moved on by now, the way a thought 132

passes from the mind. But there he was, dripping rain, a dopey half smile playing across his face.

"Come in," James said.

Patrick hesitated, glancing at James in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, sensing, it appeared, that he'd wandered into something larger than expected. "Simon was worried,"

he said. In the twilight of the hall, he narrowed his eyes. "You don't look so great. Have you been sick?"

"Yeah. This rash, I . . . It won't go away. I've had a head cold too. I was going to call but there was some problem with the phones--in the building, I mean."

Patrick was looking through to the living room, taking in the clothes strewn on the furniture, the mantel cluttered with jars of ointment and old prescription bottles.

"As a matter of fact, I won't be coming back to the office. I'm moving."

"What's this, then? Does Simon know?"

"No. I should tell him. You see, I've decided I need to spend some time with my family, so I'm not going to stay on here. It's a bit sudden, I know." He felt himself balking at the ruse and yet beneath that feeling was a relief, an unsentimental farewell to the bond of simple honesty, to the assumptions they might ever have shared. He had occupied himself with the idea of this man's happiness and now he could cast at him a distant glance, fiddling with the truth.

"Pardon me, I should have taken your coat," James said, suddenly all politeness. "Won't you come in and sit down?"

"I should be getting back." His expression grew con133 fused, the expression of a man who has wandered into the wrong cinema and finds himself in the dark with strange or disturbing images.

Before he knew what he had done, James had his hand on Patrick's cheek and was passing his thumb over the soft, freckled skin beneath his eye. "Thank you," he said, "thank you for everything."

Blushing, Patrick turned his head away and reached back for the handle of the door. "I must go."

He stepped down the walk to the gate and didn't turn back on the street but kept moving until he had disappeared behind the bus shelter and was gone.

J A M E S D I D N ' T C A L L Simon. At first, he harbored a feeling of guilt, a worry he had let someone down, but as the weeks went by, his sense of the world became ever more abstract. He began to doubt that if he went to the office there would be anyone there he recognized, or who would recognize him. The doctors had said this could happen, one's memory might go, confusions could overtake you as the virus entered the brain.

Slowly, time began to evaporate, the process swallowing whole periods of his life. He forgot Simon and the office, Patrick and the year he had spent worrying over his affections. One morning he no longer recognized the flat he was occupying and began to imagine that the real occupant might return and send him onto the street. He wandered about the unfamiliar rooms, thinking at times that he was in the yard of 134

his childhood, crouched by the birdbath, where he would wait as dusk fell.

There was a common nearby and he would walk there in the evening. Often, as he approached the far corner, where a bench sat empty in lamplight, he would feel nonplussed. From somewhere would come a barely audible whisper, one that vanished as soon as he stopped to listen, as a dream vanishes beneath the effort of recollection. Returning from his walk one evening he was accosted by a young woman. It was by the pedestrian crossing. She had just come over the road and was about to pass by when she came to a halt before him and looked intently at his face. She had the overlarge eyes of a lizard and a gaunt face that matched the color of her hair. She began to speak to James, asking him questions about his health, exclaiming how much weight he had lost. Did he need money? she asked. He smiled and answered the questions as best he could, hoping she would continue on her way. He had seen her at a bad time, she said, riffling through her bag to find a cigarette; things were different now, she was out of all that racket. He nodded in agreement, and this seemed to comfort her, for her hands ceased to move so rapidly, and she placed one briefly on his arm. She was sorry about everything, she said, she hadn't meant to bother him about herself. Was there nothing she could do? Politely, he declined, imagining she had mistaken him for someone else. J A M E S S AT I N a room by a window trying to read a book. It was afternoon, and outside a steady rain fell. The novel was 135

about an old man who captivated his grandson with stories of his ancestors, drawing closer and closer to the present, until finally he was telling the boy the story of the boy's own life, and the narrative became a prophecy that frightened the listener. He read a few pages at a time, resting his eyes now and again, or just staring out onto the street. There, shawled women queued for the bus and old men with their caps pulled down hung in doorways, waiting for the rain to pass. Their silhouettes appeared fuzzy, blurred by the weather, their dark shoes blending with the wet pavement until it seemed to James as though they were sinking in mud. He shook his head a bit and returned his attention to the page. But he had lost his place in the story and he found himself reading the same sentences over and over until the words made no sense at all. He put the book down and, looking out, was transfixed by what he saw: his father standing across the street, gazing up at the window. He was in his blue suit, his arms hanging straight at his sides, the corners of his mouth turned down. Motionless, he stared at James, who felt as though heavy cables were being cast from the sockets of his father's eyes over the street and through the window until they wrapped themselves around his skull. He rushed to the window and put his hands against the pane, but when he looked again, the figure was gone, dissolved into the rectangles of concrete and the soot-stained wall behind. It was later that day that he fainted, standing over the sink with a glass of water in his hand. He saw the counter begin to move quickly to one side, then blackness. When he came around he was lying on his back on the linoleum floor. The 136

room was dark, and by the projection of car headlights sloping across the ceiling, he could tell it was dark outside as well. He lay there awhile, listening to the cars pass, and farther off the sound of jumbo jets descending to earth. When he moved to rise, he found he had no strength in his arms, and shifting about on the hard floor, realized he was lying in a pool of sweat. For a moment, panic gripped him and he felt he might scream. But just as it had arisen, so it passed, and he stared again at the sloping lights on the ceiling. Gently, images flowed before his mind, and the inscrutable enormity of remembered life washed back over him, leaving him weightless and expectant. He thought of Stockwell, and the exhilaration he had felt on winter afternoons when games were through, running back over the fields to where the parents waited in their heated cars. And he thought of his sealed letters gathered on the living room shelf. He was calm. Soon he would be home again, resting beside his father's grave, just as the minister's letter had promised.

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D I V I N A T I O N

2

O N T H E F O O T B A L L pitch, daylight had begun to fade. The other boys were inside already. Samuel had stayed on the field half an hour to practice penalty kicks with his friend Giles, who stood now in front of the goal, waiting for another shot to come. Samuel took ten steps back, then ran at the ball, kicking it high and to the left, missing to the outside by a foot or two.

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"Shall we pack it in?" Giles said, dragging his foot across the grass to clear off the mud.

"Don't you want to have a go?"

Giles shook his head. "I'm knackered, let's go in."

It was as they were walking back toward the old manor house the school occupied that Samuel became aware of the cooing and flapping of wings inside the crumbling dovecote, the muffled sounds echoing over the lawn. At that moment, for no apparent reason, he thought: How sad that Jevins should die now, like this, alone in his apartment over the sixth-form dormitories.

Mr. Jevins, who had stood over them just that morning in his gown and oval glasses, reciting Latin--by whom, or what it meant, none of them knew. They'd discovered if they set the wall clock forward ten minutes and rang Bennet's alarm, Jevins, half deaf, would imagine the sound to be the bell and let them go early. Eighty he must have been, or older. His voice a gravelly whisper, only now and then rising to a pitch, on about some emperor or battle, Samuel guessed. Boys ignored him freely, chatting and throwing paper. Ever since he'd come to Saint Gilbert's, Samuel had felt a pain associated with this man, a feeling he couldn't articulate or conceive. This morning for the first time Jevins had slammed his leather book down on the windowsill and with a strain shouted, "Do you boys want me to continue with this lesson or not!"