If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (7 page)

That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched, between a scattering of dots and noted numbers and angles. He wants to do a good job of this today. He’s been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it, and he doesn’t want to lose his place on the course so he is trying very hard. He begins to measure the widths of the houses, squinting along the length of his arm, looking for the correct proportions. These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another, the height of them, it is all different from his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago, and that they were built for the owners of the textile factories, houses big enough to have servants squeezed into the attics and cellars, houses rich enough to have stained glass over the doors and sculpted figure
heads amongst the eaves. He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first, the rich gentlemen and their elegant wives, their cooks and butlers and footmen, what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits, their gardens mostly unkept, their paintwork mostly crumbling.

But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street with wide pavements and plenty of trees for shade and life. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks towards the far end of the street he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing.

He looks at her. She looks at the paper, at him, and back at the paper.

It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous. Where are the windows she says, in a very still and quiet voice, and she rubs her finger on the page.

Not yet he says, smiling at her, first I draw the walls and roofs and then I will draw the windows and doors and all the things. She looks at him, and at the page, and across the street. Where is the dog she says in the same voice, and she moves her finger across the page to where she thinks the dog should be.

Okay he says, I will put the dog in for you. But only after the windows he says, and he smiles at her. She looks at him, she turns around and skips across the road.

He watches her for a moment, he takes a pencil and sketches in the lines of the rooftop, the ground, the eaves, carefully, hesitantly, joining the marks of the measurements
he has made. He looks from the page to the building, he sighs and he pulls at the loose skin around the corners of his forehead, it is very difficult he is thinking.

Upstairs at number twenty, the old man stands by the window, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the twin brothers creeping into the garden of number seventeen, raised up on the fronts of their feet like a couple of Inspector Clouseaus.

The old man pushes his fingers into the thick white strands of his hair, he watches.

The boys are carrying elaborate waterguns, bright coloured plastic, blue cylinders and pink pressure pumps, green barrels and triggers, and they move to stand either side of the open front-room window, pressing flat against the wall like miniature sentries in a Swiss clocktower.

The kettle behind him sighs its way to a boil, and he watches the boys plunge their heads and arms into the billow of the drifting net curtain, their thin high voices echoing up to his window.

They re-emerge, they turn and they run from the garden, waving their guns like cowboys and indians, their faces hysterical with laughter and excitement and fear. A young man with wet hair appears at the window, shouting, wiping his face with the palm of his hand.

The old man laughs quietly. He likes the twins, they’re funny, they remind him of his great-nephew, the same energy, the same cheek. He laughs again, and the breath whistles in the top of his lungs, the pain is suddenly there again, like cotton thread being yanked through his airways, the whistling getting louder, the hot red streaks beginning to splinter across his vision and he leans against the worktop, gulping for oxygen, jaw flapping, a fish drowning in air.

The kettle shrieks to a boil. The lid rattles with the pressure of the steam.

Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is getting dressed. He is standing in front of a mirror, fastening the top button of a crisp white shirt. He combs his thin black hair, straight down at the back, straight down at the sides, either side of a straight central parting on the top. He puts the comb back in its plastic wallet and takes a bowtie from the open leather suitcase on his table, where he keeps all his clothes. He loops it around his collar, lifting his head to tie the knot, adjusting it, tweaking at the corners until he gets it straight.

Upstairs, the old man clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel.

It took me a long time to get to sleep that night.

The rain was still spattering against the window, and there was a loud fall of water from a broken gutter onto the concrete below.

I blocked my ears with the bedcovers, I breathed slowly and deeply, I counted to a hundred, I counted to five hundred.

I gave up eventually, and put the light on, and sat up in bed to read.

But I couldn’t concentrate, I kept thinking about that day, that moment, the afternoon.

About what happened and why there are so many names I can’t remember.

About whether I knew the names in the first place.

Whenever I tried to read my book the images kept returning, small moments from that day and I don’t understand why I can’t leave it alone.

It’s a strange feeling, almost like a guilty feeling, almost like I feel responsible.

I thought about going back up to my room that morning, after a shower and a mouthful of breakfast.

Swinging the window open, and the flood of fresh summer air that had come sweeping in, the sweetness of a rolling wind that was still clean from the countryside.

Seeing the guy from over the road poking his head through an attic skylight and tipping a bucket of water over some kids in their front garden.

I tried to remember his name, and all I could remember was the ring through his eyebrow, the way he used to smack the palm of one hand with the back of the other.

I remembered how hard it was to pack, how I spent the morning rearranging boxes and bags and rewriting lists.

I hadn’t known what I was going to need, what I should throw away or leave behind, what I should give to someone for safekeeping.

I still hadn’t known where I was going.

I remembered phoning the landlord and asking for another week, and panicking when he said people were due to move in the next evening.

I remembered looking at my overflowing room, and the empty boxes, and not knowing where to begin.

I thought about how I’d gone and stood in Simon’s room for a while, looking at the sunlight brightening and fading on the ceiling.

Thinking about him leaving the week before, and how bare his room was now.

The unfaded squares on the wall where his posters had been.

The naked mattress on the floor, a curve in the middle where the springs had begun to fail.

And the things he’d left behind, unable to fit them into the boxes he’d squeezed into his dad’s car.

Coathangers in the wardrobe that rattled like skeletons when I stood on the loose floorboards.

A muted noticeboard on the desk, pimpled with drawing pins.

A paper lightshade he’d taken down but left behind, folded on the floor like a deflated accordion.

The room had a hardness in it without his things there, an emptiness that made me want to close the door, leave a do not disturb sign outside, let the dust settle.

I remembered going to the shops to buy binbags, and saying hello to the boy at number eighteen.

He was on his doorstep, reading, and I caught his eye and he smiled so I said hello.

I think it was the only time I ever spoke to him.

He said how are you doing, how’s the packing going, he said it with a little laugh, as though it was a joke.

Oh I said, fine I said, and I wondered how he knew that’s what I was doing.

There was a silence, and we looked at each other, and I noticed he was blinking a lot and I thought he looked nervous.

He said, last day of summer, everyone’s packing aren’t they, and he did the little laugh again, and I said well you know, all good things come to an end and he said yes.

I said well I’d better get to the shop, I’ll see you around, yes he said, yes, okay, well, see you then.

And he held up his hand, a wave like half a surrender, and by the time I walked back he had gone.

I remembered going back to my room and trying to imagine it being like Simon’s.

I took a poster off the wall to see how much the sunlight had faded the paint in the time I’d been there.

I took all my clothes out of the wardrobe and made the coathangers rattle.

I couldn’t picture the room being as changed and empty as Simon’s already was.

I wanted to leave a note for the next tenant, leave a trace of myself behind, I wanted to be able to go back years later and find a plaque with my name on it screwed to the wall.

I thought about all this, lying in bed listening to the rain, looking at the room I sleep in now, another room in another city.

I looked at the objects that make it my room, the calendar on the wall, the colour of the curtains, the photographs.

I thought about all the other people who’ve slept in this room before me, about what traces they’ve left behind.

It took me a long time to get to sleep.

And when I woke up in the morning the room felt different, haunted, and I had to get out of bed quickly.

It had stopped raining, finally, but the street outside was still wet, swathes of dirty water across the road, sodden pages of newsprint glued to the pavement like transfers.

Perhaps the words will soak into the stone I thought, yesterday’s stories imprinted like cave paintings, like a tattoo.

I left early for work, I didn’t want to stay in my flat after the previous day.

I couldn’t face cleaning up the broken plates or reading those leaflets again.

I got dressed and slipped out of the door without any breakfast, down the steps and past the back door of the shop downstairs.

There was a cold wind, but it was a dry wind and it felt good on my skin and I sucked big mouthfuls of it into my lungs.

There was a girl with a striped overall standing by the back door of the shop, smoking, I’ve seen her there before.

She smiled and said hello and I was surprised so I think I only nodded.

I walked along the main road, the wind blowing across my face, the traffic steaming slowly past me in fits and starts and stops.

I felt better than the day before, much better, I could feel the blood in my cheeks and the light in my eyes.

I felt like a spring was uncoiling inside me.

I could feel the creak and sing of my muscles loosening, like
a child bouncing on an old leather sofa, and the faster I walked the better I felt.

I began striding, my arms swinging, my bag banging against my back, my shoes click-clacking on the pavement like a runaway metronome.

It had been weeks since I felt like that, since I felt such a simple exuberance at being alive and outside, and I felt cleansed by it, by the noise and the light and the wind all rushing in upon me.

I wanted to sing.

I wanted to run.

But I managed to contain myself, and keep a blank face, and anyone seeing me would only have thought I was late for work.

I walked myself out of breath in the end.

I stopped at a cornershop by the ring road and went in to buy something for breakfast.

The man said good morning and I smiled and nodded.

I bought a bread roll and some fruit, and I sat on an upturned milk crate outside to eat them.

The man came outside and began arranging his boxes of vegetables, straightening the price labels, wiping off the dirt.

It’s better day is it? he said to me, yes I said, much better.

Yes he said, and he stood back and looked up at the sky like a soothsayer, too much rain, is bad for the heart, you know, do you know what I mean?

I smiled and said yes and stood up, holding my banana skin, not knowing what to do with it.

He looked at it and said ah, bin is over there, pointing to the other side of the road.

And at work I spent the whole day trying to decide how I could tell someone, who I could tell.

I even wrote lists, names, opening lines, all by the way and actually there is something and can I tell you.

I wondered if a conversation could turn that way, if I’d get the chance to say oh well it’s funny you should mention that because.

I wondered if I’d take the chance, even if it were to be offered.

I still had the plasters on my hands, I had to keep them hidden, I kept my fists closed, hid my hands under the desk to peel them off.

They left sticky trails around the edges, like chalk outlines on crime scene pavements, and when I rubbed at them they curled into dark strings and twisted across my skin.

I looked at the wounds for a long time, turning my hands under the desklight, a dozen pink unstitchings already beginning to fade and heal.

The marks are still there now, and I’m worried they might scar, I’m worried what people might think.

If they saw, if they looked at my hands and they noticed.

He knows. He sits in his kitchen, breathing clearly again, the old man upstairs at number twenty, he listens to the sound of his blood crashing through his ears. He sits, and he looks at the cooling kettle, and he knows. The doctor told him, told him as much as she could, over the course of a few appointments, in between various tests.