If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (6 page)

But later, when I got up, it was heavier and faster, pouring streaks down the windows, exploding into ricochets on the pavement outside.

I stood by the window watching people in the street struggle with umbrellas.

I phoned work and said I can’t come in I’m sick.

I thought about what my mother would say if she saw me skiving like this, I remembered what she said when I was a child and stuck indoors over rainy weekends.

There’s no use mooching and moping about it she’d say, it’s just the way things are.

Why don’t you play a game she’d say, clapping her hands as if to snap me out of it.

And I’d ask her to point out all the one-player games and she’d tut and leave the room.

I wonder if that’s what she’ll say when I finally tell her, that it’s the way things are, that there’s no use mooching and moping about it.

It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely.

She used to lecture me about it, about taking what you’re given and making the most of it.

Look at me with your dad she’d say, gesturing at him, and I could never tell if she was joking or not.

But it’s how she was, she would always find a plan B if
things didn’t go straight, she would always find a way to keep busy.

If it was raining, and she couldn’t hang the washing out, she would kneel over the bath and wring it all through, savagely, until it was dry enough to be folded and put away.

If money was short, which was rare, she would march to the job centre and demand an evening position of quality and standing.

That was what she said, quality and standing, and when they offered her a cleaning job or a shift at the meatpackers she would take it and be grateful.

She always said that, she said you should take it and be grateful.

And so I tried to follow her example that day, hemmed in by the rain, I sat at the table and read all the information they gave me at the clinic.

I tried to take in all the advice in the leaflets, the dietary suggestions, the lifestyle recommendations, the discussions of various options and alternatives.

I read it all very carefully, trying to make sure I understood, making a separate note of the useful telephone numbers.

I even got out a highlighter pen and started marking out sections of particular interest, I thought it was something my mother might approve of.

But it was difficult to absorb much of the information, any of the information, I kept looking through the window and I felt like a sponge left out in the rain, waterlogged, useless.

I was distracted by the pictures, by all these people looking radiant and cheerful, smartly dressed and relaxed.

I knew I didn’t look like that, I knew I didn’t feel relaxed or cheerful.

I didn’t feel able to accept what my body was doing to me, and I still don’t.

It felt like a betrayal, and it still does.

And I kept trying to tell myself to calm down.

To tell myself that this is not something out of the ordinary, this is something that happens.

This is not an unbearable disaster, a thing to be bravely soldiered through.

It’s something that happens.

But I think I need somebody to say these words for me to believe them, I don’t think I can speak clearly or loudly enough when I say them to myself.

One of the leaflets mentioned telling people, who to tell, how long to wait.

I thought about why I haven’t told anyone yet, and what this means.

Perhaps not telling people makes it less real, perhaps it’s not even definite yet, really.

Perhaps I need time to get used to the idea of it, before people’s good intentions start hammering down upon me like rain.

Another of the leaflets had a section on physical effects.

You may find you become tired it said, you may find yourself experiencing dizziness, insomnia, a change in appetite.

There was a list of these things, half a dozen pages of alphabetical discomforts and pains.

I spent a long time thinking about them all, wondering which ones I’d get, wondering how well I would cope.

I thought about backache, nausea, indigestion, faintness and cramps and piles.

I thought about waking in the night with a screaming pain, clutching at the covers with clawed hands.

I thought about banging my fists against my head to distract myself from it.

I thought about religious people who train themselves to walk over burning coals and I wondered if I could control my body in the same way.

I didn’t think I could, and I got scared and gathered all the leaflets up, stacked them away in a kitchen drawer with the scissors and sellotape and elastic bands.

By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.

The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.

I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.

Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.

Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.

I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.

There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.

That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.

I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.

And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.

Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.

I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.

I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.

But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.

Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.

Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.

I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.

But there was no one there, and no one came.

I stopped eventually, when I noticed my hands were bleeding.

I must have cut them with the smashed pieces of crockery, picking pieces out of the sink to throw them back in.

I stood still for a few moments, breathing heavily, watching blood drip from my hands onto the broken plates, wanting to sit down but unable to move.

I watched the blood pooling across the palms of my hands.

I looked at the broken plates and mugs.

I wondered where such a fierce rage had come from, and I was scared by the scale of it, by the lack of control I’d had for those few minutes.

I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, and it worried me to think that I might be changing in ways I could do nothing about.

I washed my hands clean, letting the blood and water pour
over the broken crockery, counting about a dozen cuts, each as thin as paper.

The water began to sting, so I wrapped my hands in kitchen towel and held them up into the air, leaning back against the worktop, watching the blood soak through.

Later, when the bleeding had stopped and I’d covered my hands in a patchwork of plasters I found in the bathroom, I tried to get myself some food.

I thought it would make me feel better.

I’d been planning to go out and buy something, but I couldn’t face it so I stayed in and ate what I could find.

Peanut butter, sardines, cream crackers, marshmallows.

It gave me a belly-ache, which seemed an appropriate end to a bad day, a wasted and damaged day.

And it kept on raining, rattling endlessly into the ground, piling up in the streets, wedged into the gutters and the drains.

It made the street look squalid and greasy.

People were scurrying along the pavement, their coats tugged tightly around themselves, their heads bowed as though they had something to hide.

And I was locking the door and closing the curtains, and I did have something to hide.

At number eighteen, the boy with the sore eyes is crouching on the floor among his arrangement of things, he is still thinking about the girl at number twenty-two, the girl with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses, the girl with the nicest sweetest smile he thinks.

He’s thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d
gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.

Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.

He rubs at his bloodshot eyes, the young man next door, he piles up his collection of things and squeezes them into a coffee jar, writing the date and his name on a sticker on the lid. He thinks about that Wednesday night, waiting in, trying to be relaxed, waiting for the doorbell, checking that it worked, putting music on and off. Sitting outside at midnight and realising she wasn’t coming.

He pulls the large floor-rug to one side and lifts up a loose section of floorboard. His brother, when he’d emailed him about it, had said well she was probably just so drunk she forgot, that’s all it is, go and talk to her again, she’ll still be up for it, but he’d never been so sure, maybe she’d forgotten or maybe really she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He remembers the next time he’d seen her, how she’d looked at him vaguely and said hello and looked away. He remembers how beautiful he sees her, the way she walks, the way she lifts her head when she laughs. How easily they’d talked together that night, the touch of her hand on his arm. It could have been there is what he thinks.

He places the jar between the floor joists, nesting it among the dust and the cables and pipes like an egg, a
bundle of memories waiting to hatch into the future. Tomorrow he will pack his bags and move to another house a few streets away, and he is reluctant to vanish without a trace. He replaces the floorboard, lays the rug over the top, returns the bed to its original position.

Today, he thinks. He could go and talk to her today. Say excuse me I hope you don’t mind me asking but do you remember that night, that party? Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you. He smiles at the impossibility of it, blinks, scratches the back of his hand.

He puts some bread in the toaster, he walks down the stairs and out into the street. There is hardly anyone out yet, except for the art student at number eleven, and the boy on the tricycle, his head down, rattling and racing along the pavement. He looks up at the clear sky, stretching his arms, turning and briefly looking at the closed front door of number twenty-two. He hears the kerchang of the toaster and goes back inside, leaving the door open.

She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers. The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand. She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone, and then she strides along the pavement with her fingers linked behind her back the way she’s seen her father walk when he’s walking with the other old men. She watches her feet as they spring between the paving slabs, enjoying the bounce and the hop of it, counting each step, stopping when she gets to twenty because that’s as far as she knows.

She looks up, balancing on one foot, and spins around and around and she can see a spiral blur of sandy-coloured
houses and blue sky and streaks of red and blue and yellow from people’s curtains and all the colours spin round and when she stops suddenly it all carries on spinning for a moment and she feels dizzy. She sees a man sitting on his garden wall, a young man, and he is looking at her and smiling. She looks away quickly, and counts twenty steps back towards her house, bounce bounce, not stepping on the cracks.

The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street. He has pens and pencils and rulers and erasers and a compass and a protractor, and he is drawing a very detailed picture of the row of houses opposite, trying to get the correct perspectives and elevations, trying to capture all of the architectural details.