She fries an egg but leaves it then, lying in the pan until it is completely cold. She bites at her nails and glances repeatedly at the window, seeing nothing but her tiny empty garden and the tiny empty sky, until eventually she sighs and lowers the blind. She feeds the cat, though not with the egg, which she seems to have forgotten. While wiping the table she stops suddenly and listens. There is silence but for the usual sounds of the house in the evening and a light breeze outside—no hint of rain—and the tick of the kitchen clock. Perhaps it was that. She resumes wiping, and brushes absolutely nothing into her cupped hand, which she examines briefly then slaps against her hip.
Her neighbors had knocked on her door during the week, on Thursday, just as she was finishing her tea. Two boys. No, no. Men. They’re men, and it annoys her, the way a part (what part?) of her brain insists on them as boys. They aren’t boys. They are certainly men, and almost or perhaps even middle-aged men. Objectively. They are younger than her but they are not young. How could they be, buying a house? In fact, they are probably the same age she was when she and . . . her husband had bought their house. Her house. So, thirty. About thirty. Probably they are older because it takes so long now to find the money. They are either older or richer. Probably both. To be able to buy, just the two of them, a house like this. It was exactly like her house, mirrored. When they walked through their front door they had everything on the right that she had on the left.
A couple, full of smiles, loud friendly voices, one of them northern, bits of tattoos poking out from under collars and cuffs, earrings, nice boys, men, and there they were at her door, one of them with a bag and both speaking more or less at once, all smiles, though, and they have never done this before, it’s always been chats over the wall in the summer, meeting out the front sometimes, the northern one calling over when they had a leak, worried that it would spread, but it didn’t, but she had never, she thought, had the two of them together like this, certainly not at her door, and she looked from one to the other and was baffled as to what was going on, what on earth they were saying or what they wanted. She invited them in.
—It won’t be insane.
—No, no, not at all, I mean it won’t even be, it certainly won’t be . . . Oh this is lovely.
—We’re keeping numbers down, oh it is lovely.
—Is this bigger than ours? It looks . . .
—It looks it doesn’t it? It’s lovely though. Much brighter, feels bigger doesn’t it? You have the sink under the window, that’s much better, ours is in that corner. Oh, well, that corner I suppose, ha, it’s confusing . . .
—It’s a mirror image isn’t it?
—Yes, I know, the same but opposite.
She nodded and smiled and motioned at chairs, but they didn’t seem to notice and all three of them were just standing there, the two boys looking at her sideboards as if a little annoyed.
—It was done, she said, ending a small silence that had risen like gas. Last year. The presses. I mean the cupboards. The floor, new taps, work, uh, work surfaces? All that.
—So bright. Cheerful.
—We should start saving.
—We’ll add it to the list!
—The infinite list!
And they just stood there for a moment, smiling at her. The two young men, in her kitchen, with their faces and their hands and their necks.
—Do you want to sit down? I can make some more tea?
—No no no please don’t, no need for that at all, thanks very much.
—We only wanted to let you know really.
—As I said, we’re keeping the numbers down, and it’s not going to be a wild affair, we promise. We’re too old for that now.
They both laughed loudly at this, which she didn’t really understand until she realized they weren’t laughing because they thought it was funny, they were laughing because they thought she was old, and the one who had said it had said it without thinking and he had laughed to cover his very slight embarrassment, and the other one was laughing at his boyfriend’s minute, barely felt discomfort, laughing at this small faux pas which he had stumbled into in this old woman’s kitchen, and the fact that both of them were laughing a little too much at this was making them laugh a little more, laughing at the fact of their laughing, and it was only when all this was going on that she fully understood that they were telling her they were going to have a party.
She goes upstairs again, stepping into each room, looking around. It’s warm. She stares out of windows, but the sky is clear and in the back bedroom she scowls at it, gives a pantomime shake of the fist. There’s never any rain. There hasn’t been rain in weeks. The cat follows for a while, complaining, then disappears. She can’t hear anything, but the cat is skittish. But maybe she is making the cat skittish because she is skittish. Skittish, she says out loud. Skitt. Ish.
In her bedroom she closes the curtains almost completely, leaving a gap which she tests to make sure that it gives her a view of the front of their house. Impossible to see the door. Just their patch of gravel next to her patch of gravel. And the bins, theirs and hers, back to back with the wall between them, the colors matching, green, blue, and brown. Had they done that on purpose? Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe the bin men did it. She looks at her watch and the cat reappears, a living thing at her legs. A motorbike roars by. She sits on her bed and then lies on her bed, and then the cat joins her and she gets up.
—No, she says.
She goes to the wardrobe, deciding that she wants to change her clothes.
They had offered her things. For the noise. Not that there would be much noise. It would not be very loud, they said. They hoped, they said, that it would not be very loud. They had just wanted to tell her in person, rather than sticking a note through her letterbox. Notes through letterboxes wasn’t very neighborly, was it? Bit passive-aggressive somehow said one of them, and Yes, I suppose so said the other. So they’d argued about that. One of them, that one, had said Let’s just stick a note through the stupid old cow’s letterbox. Or something like that. Anyway, they said, we thought we’d just call around. Really sorry to interrupt your tea. And bring some things, said the other one.
—What things?
—Well, where are we, here we are, this is a
He was pulling some sort of, what on earth, headphones? Big black things, with the big fat pads for the ears.
—Headphones here, for this, which is this old
A small . . . a phone?
—An iPod. My old iPod. And I don’t know what you like obviously, or even if this is a stupid idea, you might not want to listen to anything at all, but there’s playlists on there, some easy-listening things, some pop stuff, and some classical as well, you can, will I show you what, will I show you how this works?
—I know how an iPod works she said. I have an iPod.
—Oh! Oh, well, there you go.
He started to put it back into the bag, laughing again.
—Well, you’re all set for that already then, not that I think, you know, like we said, I really don’t think it’s going to be all that, well you never know, anyway, most likely just the music, the bass, and a bit of, ha, babble, and here are some earplugs as well
He laughed and showed them to her. A little box from Boots. He put them down on the table.
—It might get a bit loud at some point said the other one. You know. And they, the earplugs I mean, might just let you get to sleep or whatever. Because you know the way these things go. They can go late sometimes, people won’t leave. So the earplugs might just
—Well, O.K. Thank you.
She had her own earplugs. She didn’t have an iPod.
—And this is in case none of that works said the other one. He was holding a bottle of wine. He laughed, put it on the table. It’s a nice red, well, we like it. In any case, that’s yours.
—Thanks. There’s no need for that.
—Well, it’ll do no harm. And here’s some chocolate mints, if you like that sort of thing. I love them. I could go through a whole box without even noticing.
—He could, and he does.
—Anyway, that’s the lot.
She looked at what they’d brought for her. She pictured herself in the living room, in the armchair, her ears plugged with foam, drinking wine and eating the After Eights.
—What time is your party?
—Oh, I don’t know. I imagine it won’t get going until after nine or something.
They looked at each other.
—Eight, nine. Whenever people show up I suppose. With the long evenings no one thinks it’s evening until the sun goes down. Especially if it’s a nice day, which is what’s forecast.
—Saturday?
—Yes, Saturday. This Saturday. You’ll be here?
—Yes. Yes, I’ll be here.
Where else would she be? They all looked at each other.
—That’s everything. I think.
They moved toward the door, quieter now. She had not helped, she thought. She had been silent and they could see her face. She wanted to smile and laugh and joke with them. Tell them that it was fine, they weren’t to worry, they should have a nice night, make as much noise as they liked, she wouldn’t mind. But she did mind. She felt anger. She was angry. That, in any case, was what she told herself.
—Such a lovely house.
—So lovely.
—Thank you.
—Bye!
—Bye!
—Bye.
She runs her hands over the wall as she goes downstairs. Over its peculiar bumps and mounds. She has put on a pair of pale cotton trousers which are too baggy but cool, and an ancient top that had been his. Hers. Hers then his now hers. It is difficult to explain. The cat is annoying her, following her, looking at her, making plaintive little noises.
—I don’t know what you want.
In the kitchen she runs her hands over the wall between the fridge and the cooker. Stares at it. Turns her head and rests her ear against its cool lumpy surface. Everything is quiet. Everything. Nothing. Her hand in front of her is wrinkled, its skin doesn’t look like her own. She lives less in her body now, she thinks. After all that. Her body is ceasing to be relevant, even to her. It has less and less to do with her. And it is healthy, it remains healthy, which is the strangest difference. It is like having an elderly friend who you rarely see.
The paint on the wall is a very pale green. She has no interest in repainting anything. Ever, she thinks, childishly. Ancient. Lives are like buttons.
She takes her head away from the wall and steps back and wonders if she’s got the day wrong. She glances at the clock, and at her watch. It’s far too early of course, but why aren’t they in their kitchen, making preparations? Perhaps they are very organized.
She looks at the dent. It’s up near the top of the wall, out of her reach. A dent. She doesn’t know what happened. She thinks that it can’t have been there before he died because he would have fixed it. But she also thinks that he might have dented it—banged into it with a ladder or hit it with a stray hammer when he was doing something else, and that maybe he’d intended to fix it but died instead. His domestic life had been a cycle of breaking things then fixing them. Clocks, shelves, the boiler, himself. But maybe it had always been there. Always. An ancient indentation. Is that even the right word? A triangular bit of the plaster pushed in. A dark black upper edge to it—the start of a hole—that seemed wider now than it had been.
In winter she imagines that a draft comes through it and thinks briefly, for the duration of a slightly colder breath of air across her shoulders, that she should fix it. On the one or two times when she has been aware of noise from next door, she has looked at it suspiciously, as if it is responsible. Perhaps it would be a good place to put her ear. They’d had a fight once. Couldn’t make it out. Except, perhaps, cunt, very loudly, and a big, serious silence then. A door slammed. Maybe she was making that up, the door slam. She couldn’t remember if there had been anything else.
The dent is a couple of inches long, like a corner peeled back on a yogurt tub. No. Like a corner pushed in on something. The way you open a box of tissues. It was a year ago probably, the argument. It had embarrassed her more than anything. And there had been another time, not long after they moved in, when she had heard music and laughing and loud voices and had stood looking at the dent trying to make out what was going on. Maybe that had been a party as well. Maybe it had. And if so, perhaps this one would be the same. Not so bad in other words. Perhaps no one would turn up. Perhaps they were unpopular and no one would come. Perhaps it was too warm, perhaps it would rain, perhaps the world would end suddenly and without warning and the only remaining trace of humanity would be those robots, wandering through the cold empty universe like old women in empty houses.
She laughs.
She goes out to the hall again. Another motorbike roar. Then voices. Outside. She stops where she is. It’s too early, surely. It is too early. They are just passersby. Cars every few minutes. Sirens down on the main road. The rumbling planes. She thinks she might open the front door. She’s allowed to do that. She lives here. Open the front door. Go out to her gate. Stand there looking up and down the street. People do that. It’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Balmy evening. Neighbors, passersby. Hello. Yes, how are you? She had wondered, quite often, if the cunt was her. If they had been shouting so that she could hear. If they were drunk and they hated her and it hadn’t been an argument at all but rather a bout of abuse, a bout of neighborly elder abuse, and she was the cunt and they had shouted it so that she would have no doubt. She had thought all this several times and knew it was simply not true, that it was a manifestation of paranoia engendered by her depression, by the feeling of loneliness, worthlessness, with which she had struggled since his death.
So, whatever way you looked at it, it was her fault.
She goes upstairs again and lies on the bed and falls asleep.
When she wakes, the party has started and she cannot move. It takes her a little while to fully realize anything. The room is dim, as if forgotten. Her body has settled and failed. She is dead. Then she breathes and blinks her eyes and breathes again, and again. She has slept for far too long, a couple of hours maybe, and is confused and frightened, though she is also, as she begins to understand the situation, still alive, and still herself, and this is the room where she sleeps and has slept for most of her life. Various incorrect ideas about what is happening fall away from her and are immediately lost as she closes in on the truth, remembers who is dead, who lives next door now, who is having a party, that this is the party, that it has started, that what she is hearing is laughter and voices and they are not in her house they are next door, and that she cannot hear any music. She lies there, confused, still frightened, in a paralyzed grip, the grip of everything which feels about to fall apart in her life, her diminishing life, and why is there no music? But she is not paralyzed. She raises her head. The cat is curled up beside her but is also confused, and stares at her.
—Yes. Don’t worry.
She strokes the cat and they make stupid noises at each other.
Then the music starts up. She freezes.
—My God.
It has probably started up not for the first time but again. It is a throb and a pressure. The cat jumps off the bed and onto the wardrobe shelf and burrows into cardigans. She usually forbids that. But now she lets it happen. She might climb in there too. She might. This is awful. It occurs to her that perhaps the music stopping was what had woken her. Perhaps she could have slept all the way through it if the music hadn’t stopped. Her dream had been something . . . something sharp, but it has fled now.
She could go out.
It is too late. There would be nowhere open. Nowhere for her.
She could just walk.
She eases herself off the bed and stands up. The cat watches her. She is stiff and her mouth is dry and she thinks she will brush her teeth and find her earplugs. When she turns to leave the cat makes a furious protest, and then leaps out to join her. She walks along the corridor in the gloom, not daring to turn on any lights, to the bathroom, wary of the wall, imagining that it is bulging with sound, like the skin of a drum, though of course it is doing nothing of the sort. But this is so loud. She is still half asleep, and she knows that she is, but this is so loud, this is not what she had expected, surely it can’t be this loud? The cat is mewling behind her, following her all the way into the bathroom—no rules tonight, bauble—and she splashes her face and brushes her teeth and rummages in the drawer for her earplugs, which are many years old, and all the while there is the throb of next door at her back, a boom and press of bass, like a heat against the wall, like a fire, and sometimes the haze, the flick of other things on top of it, singing and instruments and melody, things jumping and spitting on a pan. And the voices, all the voices boiling together, people having to shout to make themselves heard, shouting out, and you might think they’re dying in there if it was not for the laughter, the huge bursts of laughter that come every few seconds, which punch through the wall as if directed at her personally. She stands in the bathroom staring astonished at her own face in the mirror and just listens. The cat at her legs.
Downstairs she considers what lights to turn on and settles for the lamp in the living room which throws light into the hall, and one of the kitchen lights, the one over the table. She isn’t sure why she is thinking about lights so carefully, or at all. It is something to do with her presence in her own house. She is . . .
There is a fried egg sitting in the frying pan on top of the cooker.
What an astonishingly odd-looking thing.
She thinks then that she might have left the ring on, and is momentarily furious, but of course the egg is cold, as is the pan. She has no explanation.
The earplugs are still in her hand. She is trying not to attract attention. She is trying not to disturb the people who are making the noise. She is trying to be unobtrusive next to this.
What is wrong with her?
A little white island with a little yellow lake.
Obviously there is an explanation. She fried an egg and forgot about it. Has she eaten? She can’t remember. Is she hungry?
She stands by the sink and pulls the side of the window blind toward her and peers through the gap. She can see a couple of people. Three or four people. Young people. One of them throws their head back and she thinks they’re laughing but . . . he, maybe, he . . . is drinking from a can. Another has sunglasses pushed onto the top of their head. But the fence is quite high and all she can see are the top halves of faces, or just hair, or skin, butterflies amongst them. They might all be naked, she thinks. The sky is a deep dark blue, far from turning black, and a plane crawls across it, and it is still warm.
She takes the pan and scoops the egg into the bin and feels tearful and goes to sit in the living room. She’s put the earplugs down somewhere. She thinks she should eat something. The noise is ridiculous. She sits in the armchair in the corner and looks out at the hall. She stares at the wall, she thinks she can see it moving, the way you can see a pulse in a neck or a wrist. But she can’t see that. It’s not moving.
It occurs to her suddenly that the shared wall between two terraced houses is often called the party wall.
She laughs.
—Party wall.
She’s right isn’t she? She thinks about it and decides that she is. This seems inordinately funny. It changes something. She laughs out loud, actually claps her hands together, has a little fit of the giggles. The party wall. What’s wrong with her? Why is she sitting miserably in the gloom in her own house, just because next door is having a party? Yes, it’s loud, but parties are loud. She has made plenty of noise in her time. It will not last forever. It will, in a few hours, be over. This is not Hell. Let them have their party. For God’s sake.
She gets up and finds the earplugs beside the cooker and puts them in her ears and that improves things too. It muffles and distorts the noise. And it makes her own breathing and her own voice when she talks to the cat loud and warm in her head and she likes that and talks more because of it. The cat won’t leave her side. I would put earplugs in your ears too baby, but you’d have my eye out wouldn’t you? You’d have my eye out!
She wanders around for a while. She looks out into the back again. No one there now. She goes to the front door, peers through the glass and can half see some shapes in front of their house. She pulls back when she realizes that she is a face at the glass. She goes upstairs and goes through the complicated procedure of lying on the floor to peek through the curtain. They are smokers mostly out there, the rise and fall of their orange dots. They murmur and laugh a little. She worries that she can be seen and ducks her head and lies flat. The cat climbs on top of her and she laughs. She waits for a while, to catch her breath, and the cat settles, and then she tries to crawl backward from the window and the cat is on her shoulder, confused, and she is laughing again, more giggles, and this is just ridiculous, look at her, lying on the floor with the cat practically sitting on her head, and it is no small thing for a woman of her age to get up from down here, with an animal attached, what on earth was she thinking, and she makes it eventually to the bed, still laughing, and manages to get awkwardly to her feet, calling herself a ludraman.
London, she thinks to herself. In England. Of the world’s many ludicrous places she had to choose London.
She goes downstairs, opens the bottle of wine, and pours a glass.
After a while, more people drift out to the garden at the back. Or they drift out there again. She can hear them. A clearer sort of laughter, more human, understandable, coming to her through the kitchen. She goes and looks, but the fence makes it pointless really, just the tops of heads, just young hair and fringes and she wonders how long she has to live. Of course, she might die tomorrow. He did. But if everything keeps declining at the same rate, and given the age of her mother when she’d died, and adding on a few years for better drugs and what have you, she might last another decade. That seemed absurd. What could she do with all that time? Although. It felt like no more than the click of a couple of seconds since he’d died, and a minute or two since they’d met, and maybe half an hour since she was a girl. Since Ireland. The whole thing was absurd no matter which way you turned. And how banal, she thinks, how predictable and dull, to think of time at all.
There is only now, in all its perpetual detail, as deep as a well.
She goes upstairs and spies on them through the back bedroom. Youngsters. Light summer clothes. Chatting and laughing. Drinks, joints, cigarettes. Those machines with the big clouds. It is a big party. Well done them. She goes downstairs and has more wine. A novel thing these days, wine. She musn’t overdo it.
After a while she finds herself with her ear to the kitchen wall again. It is muffled. She takes out her earplugs and immediately puts them back in. She stares at the hole above her head, and looks around for a while. The hole looks terribly interesting. She wonders if it goes all the way through to the other side. Whether she can look through it.
Let’s go to the party! Let’s make some new friends! Find out what the young people are like now. See what they get up to. Come on. I’ll look after you. This, his voice, still so easy to remember, and to hear saying these things, or things like them, though only glancingly. When she tries to slow it down, to actually imagine his face, and his voice, it falls apart. Not because she cannot remember, but because there is too much to remember and it all comes at once, and she is cowed by the scale of her loss. It seems too important and vast to be hers alone.
—Shoo shoo, baby, she says, bright as she can, ostensibly to the cat.
She goes to the cupboard under the stairs where there is a stepladder and she moves a couple of boxes to get at it. The boxes are light, just decorations, tinsel, and the stepladder is good, new—she bought it online after she fell from a chair while changing a light bulb in the living room. It was nearly the dying room she thinks and—because she is still battling something, or because of the wine—she laughs very loudly, a great explosion of mirth, good Lord, and stops.
Would they hear that?
She hopes they did, but they wouldn’t would they? Impossible to judge with the earplugs in. She probably hadn’t been loud at all. No. Maybe one of them might have heard her. Young, good ears. A shy girl in their hall, leaning against the shared wall—the party wall! what is wrong with you? it’s not that funny—pretending to be interested in her boyfriend’s conversation with his friend, but bored really, or that variation on boredom that comes chiefly from shyness, from wanting to be elsewhere. She would be listening to them have a conversation about politics, about sport . . . no, more likely politics, about the . . . what . . . the eccentric, in international terms, confusion of the British left. She would be drifting off in her mind, thinking how nice it would be if she were on her own, at home, reading a book, watching something, asleep, instead of here at this mostly male—but allowed, because also mostly gay—party, where the straight women are ostentatiously welcome, where the gay men think of themselves as the best sort of men, rather than what they might profit from, which was to not think of themselves at all, or certainly not as much, and to refuse that particular tail pinned on that particular donkey, but very few of them think like that, attached as they are to the business end of things, which they cannot, most of them—maybe she was being unfair—most of them cannot separate from the naming of the thing, and the naming rights, the bragging rights . . . now she has lost her train of thought.
The cat has vanished.
She stares at the stepladder. Yes. She had laughed. So maybe some shy girl on the other side of the wall who was not enjoying the party very much might have heard her. That was all. That was the thought. What if the girl, being curious, were to ask someone, Who lives next door? And on finding out that it is—what would they say—it’s an old woman, some deaf old woman who lives on her own, what would happen if the girl, being curious, were to wander out of the house then, being just a little curious and quite a lot bored, having said to her boyfriend something like I’ll be back in a minute, not that he cares anyway, talking now as he is loudly about the failure of social-democratic parties in Europe, and off she wanders, away down the hallway, down their corridor hallway to the front door, which is open, excusing herself past people, squeezing past people, and out into the little patch of gravel, probably walking on the gravel because the path has people standing on it, and out the gate and to the right and then again to the right, and through this other little patch of gravel, two steps up the path which she has entirely to herself, and she lifts the knocker and lets it drop.
Moments are eternal.
She steps back a little. Sticks her head around the corner of the cupboard under the stairs and looks at the front door. Just shadows and glows. Nothing sharp or definite, nothing moving. What would she have done if a tipsy girl came calling? She laughs again, but much quieter now. No one would hear that. No one would ever hear that. She imagines the awkwardness. The girl at her door trying to make friends with her, trying to escape the boring party, wanting to come in, expecting tea because she is so tired of these lukewarm sweet drinks that fuzz up her head and all she wants is a good refreshing tea and the chance to sit down for a nice chat with an old lady, a chat about what, tell me about your life she’d ask, tell me about the war, what bloody war what are you talking about I’ve never been in a bloody war, no more than you have you idiot and there is no girl she does not exist.
She picks up the stepladder. She puts it down again.
If a girl like that existed she would not be so rude. So stupid. You are simply deflecting away any possibility of empathy, connection, offer of friendship. You are running away from your own story. You are bitter and lonely and terrified that you will be like this for the rest of your life. But if someone were to knock on your door and ask you your story you would turn them away. Because how can you tell your story? How, now? There was a person I loved. Who says person? A man I loved. A man? A woman who became a man. Yes. There was someone I loved. And there it is. And I love him still, more than I can possibly explain, in that way that she doesn’t have to explain, in that way that everyone already understands, apparently, that same way that is not very different to anyone else who loves a person, a dead person, a gone person, as if all love is the same in the end, a click of the tongue, a single tear, and people nod and know, isn’t that terrible, she loved a man and he died, God love her, but better to have loved and died, loved and died, loved and . . . Because he died, the end of all stories, and all stories are the same story, and here I am, the leftover part, the unresolved plot, the loose end, the woman in the house, the house in the woman, the cat, the unkempt garden, the clothes in the wardrobe that she cannot throw out and cannot wear, the furniture she moves so that she can forget, and moves back again so that she can remember, and remembering anyway whatever she does, lost in a little roundabout life, the shopping and the library and the visit once in a while from people who were friends but who now are strange old men, strange old women, who sit in her living room and talk about the television and their internal organs, so that they confuse one with the other, and she confuses them one for the other and they ask her how she’s doing and she says all right. All right. I loved a person. She died. He died. That is all there is to it. A person. Love. Death. It is stupid. It is barely a story. It is not a story.
It is not a story.
She tuts at herself and takes the stepladder to the kitchen.
It is her life.
It feels foolish. To open the ladder and to set it sideways against the wall. So she does that and then stands back and looks at it, smoothing out her top with her hands. The cat has reappeared. The noise now is something she imagines. Perhaps it has stopped.
She goes and takes a sip from her wineglass in the living room, fiddling as she walks back with one of the earplugs, reassuring herself that things are as bad as she imagines them to be, and they are. But they are no worse.
She climbs the ladder and sees the kitchen from a new angle. The top of the fridge is covered in dust. The table looks small, the chairs childish, the sink below the window looks cheap and useless. She hovers for a moment close to the ceiling, looking down. It is like a doll’s house. She turns and peers into the hole. She can’t see anything. She pokes her finger into it and immediately feels a drop in temperature. The rim of the hole feels almost damp. She pinches an edge and it crumbles between her fingers, plaster and paint dropping to the floor. She takes her finger out and presses her eye to it. She can’t really see anything. A gap, then something dark and flat, presumably the wall on their side. Why are there no bricks? She is surprised that there seems to be nothing between two sheets of plaster. Is that how they do it? It can’t be. It seems absurd. It’s nothing. There is a definite smell of damp.
She gets a decent grip. Tugs, nervously, too gently. She tugs harder and a small clump of plaster comes away in her hand and the hole opens up to the size of her fist. She drops the clump and pulls at another. It feels a little like damp clay, like soil she tore as a child from the bank of a stream at the edge of a field, and she hasn’t remembered that in years. It would come off in big pieces that held for a moment, then collapsed.
She drops another clump and the cat runs off.
—Sorry, button.
She used to tell him about the place she grew up. He would get her to describe it all in great detail, because he wanted he said to draw a map of it in his head. She would ask him to do the same, but he had grown up in a place he did not want to remember, and he would make things up, castles and forests and elaborate and impossible fortresses cut into the sides of cliffs. That was their exchange. She took him back in time to a small farm and tiny adventures. He took her to places that had never existed.
He’d have taken her to the party. He’d have negotiated an invitation with a breezy laugh and a bottle of something. He knew how to have people in a house.
Soon there is a hole the size of her head, and then slightly bigger than her head. She sticks her head in it. Definite damp. A leak, she hopes. Rather than rising. She taps on the other side of the cavity. Also damp. She can even see, a little to her left, but lower down, a bit of light, which seems to be a small hole, on their side, through which . . . The noise is slightly louder, especially the voices. A dozen conversations riddled with laughter. She thinks of taking out her earplugs.
He’d have been laughing at her by now. He is dead and there is nothing of him left in the world at all. No one remembers him except her. He liked parties, liked people. He would talk to all of them, her hovering shyly at his shoulder. There are some who still remember him of course. She assumes. But they have stopped coming. And in any case, they had not known her.
She is surprised by the cavity. Surprised that it seems empty. There are wooden beams and there are wires and cables and there is something silver like a trestle to her right, and there are bricks beyond that. Old dark bricks and that’s where the damp smell seems strongest—in that direction. There will be mice. The cat does a good job, but they have their paths and the tunnels and their halls, and the inside of the wall—she thinks, and thinks it’s the way it should be—belongs to them. The cat does a good job. Where is the cat?
She leans too heavily and the plaster at her hands gives way suddenly and she sways slightly sideways, feeling the ladder tip away from her and for a moment she thinks she is going to fall completely, but she doesn’t, she’s fine, the ladder rights itself, and she is caught by the plaster on the left of what is now, suddenly, a very considerable hole.
They’ll have heard that, surely.
She gingerly regains her balance, grabbing one of the wooden beams in the cavity as a support. The cat has reappeared and is lecturing her, the squeaks finding a way through the complicated hum of her earplugs, and they look at each other for a moment, one looking down, the other looking up. The pile of shattered plaster on the floor seems smaller than the gap it has left behind. She slowly descends the ladder.
Now what?
She goes and has another sip of wine. She doesn’t care. He would hate this. He’d be angry. It will cost a fortune to fix. What have you done? His anger would be incredulous and would stretch and snap into laughter. He liked fixing things, improving them, making them over. She laughs at this thought. Everything is far too complicated to explain.
Back at the coalface. The cat is on the table, staring at the hole, astonished.
—I know, baby. I know.
She washes her hands and peeks outside again. The dark is rising now, and the tops of the heads are silhouettes. She looks at the clock. She tries to forget how to read the time. She is . . . it is as if she is stuttering through time or time is stuttering by her, arrested as she is every few moments by some internal or external distraction which catches her, snags her, holds her somewhere away from herself for an instant and when she snaps back to now it is a different now to the now from which she was, she feels, some seconds ago, abducted. Again and again, in her own kitchen, kidnapped by some minute and ridiculous mechanism of violence. She thinks of it as violence. For every time she is propelled back into now she has a definite though obscure sense of damage.
She snaps away from the sink, back to the hole. The cat is on the ladder, looking in, the brave thing, but jumps down as soon as she approaches. She looks at her work. It is the shape of a rough bell, a battered bell swinging right. The bottom of it is low enough for her to move the ladder out of the way and look in. Wooden beams. A narrow frame, plasterboard hung on each side of it. Cheap idea of a wall. Bricks to the right, the house proper. The kitchens of course were added on, and must have been added at the same time so why bother with bricks. She reaches in and feels around. Quite a wide cavity. The damp is just on her side. Theirs is more solid, drier. To her left, at about eye level, there is light. Definitely some sort of hole into their kitchen. She reaches for it, knocking a little more plaster off in the process. She thinks that if she tugs a line of plaster out on her side, as far as the hole on their side, she will be able to see through. As she is thinking about this she rests her hands on the plaster just below the level of her chest, as if she is looking over a fence, and she must think that’s what she’s doing, because she goes up on her toes, puts too much weight on it, and the whole thing suddenly crumbles and falls—plaster, paint, a great rubble of Sheetrock, falling on her legs and her feet, and for a second she thinks that the whole lot is coming down, the whole wall, the whole house, and she stumbles backward and loses her balance and falls with a clatter into the chairs around the table.
Clarity.
Not one then the other. Not day and then night. Not a woman and then a man. There is only one moment, and it continues. The body had changed but there was only one face. In her memory, there was only one. In the parks sometimes, they would laugh and the rain would never fall.
She finds herself sitting on the floor. She feels fine. But also feels that she may very briefly have lost consciousness. She has been away, somewhere. Something took her and now she is back. She feels her head, and looks at her hand. Nothing. Her legs are covered in a chalky dust. The cat is standing in the door with a look of disbelief on his face. He appears to be talking to her, but she cannot hear anything except the smothered confusion in her ears and she takes a moment to remember the party and to establish that it is still going on. She leans forward and peers over the cat toward the front door.
What an idiot.
She does not have words.
There is a dictionary on a shelf in the living room. But it works the wrong way around. There is no combination of words that can even begin.
Yes, there is.
Why now?
Why not?
She is trapped in the place where she hides from the world and suddenly the world has wrapped itself around her, embraced her house with music and laughter. The world is here. And she feels she should say hello.
She takes her time. She dries her eyes. Fishes a tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. She climbs slowly to her feet, gripping the backs of the chairs, the table. She is lucky she wasn’t knocked out but still feels that she might have been.
Perhaps she is dead?
She checks herself again for blood or bumps but there is nothing.
—Gather round, she says to the cat. Gather round and hear how sad I am. Boo-hoo.
After washing her hands again, and shifting some of the rubble with her feet, and pulling away the last of the plaster above the skirting board, she tries to extend the big hole in her side of the wall so that it meets the tiny hole in theirs so that she can look at the party. But all the remaining plaster is solid now, she can’t break it. She hurts her fingers trying. She presses herself into the hole and turns her head to the left and shuffles as far as she can in that direction, inside the cavity, toward the light. She laughs. She is this thin.
—Mother of God, she says, and laughs again. The cat is on her foot. She shuffles back and turns her head and tells him to get off.
—Go asleep now, button. Go have a nice sleep. You’ll be all right.
She thinks then about feeding him. There are hours until breakfast. Why would she feed him now? Nevertheless. She finds herself refilling his water at the sink and shaking some new chewables into his bowl. What is she at? She’s not going anywhere. He follows, peering at her, his eyes wide, chattering away as if she’s not listening, which she isn’t, but as if she should be, as if this is very important, this information.
—I don’t know what you want, baby. Shush now.
And she goes back into the wall.
She holds her breath and tries to squeeze further along, her left arm outstretched toward the light, such as it is, a glow from their kitchen.
She pulls in her stomach, her chest, moves another couple of inches. Behind her she can feel the plaster shift but it doesn’t give. She turns her head. It is difficult. She cannot quite. He was very funny. Always very funny. The two of them in stitches on the bus. As a child she had always made her brothers laugh. Then a long time without laughter. Then she met him, and the laughter started up again, and didn’t stop. Until he died. And since then it had been the memory only, and the stupid jokes she would fall into and he would be back for an instant then gone again, and the damage, the damage was considerable. Laughter, no laughter, laughter again, and then the ghosts. Two ghosts with the one face.
There is a rib of wood at her back stopping her. She pushes with all her might against it. She is not mighty. But something shifts. She moves another inch, another two, and she can see now, sideways, through the tiny hole. Light, shapes, the movement of figures. She pushes back and sideways again and she gets her head turned a little to the front and she can see.
She can see them.
It’s as if they are not allowed near the wall. They stand instead to her left, near the garden, and in front of her, leaning on the counters, in little groups, moving past each other. She realizes that there is a table against the wall. She can see the tops of bottles and cans down there. She can see the young people. She can see their full faces, their lips, their shoulders. She can see them happy.
This is great.
—Take off your life like trousers, she says.
She can’t remember what that’s from.
Then the music stops. What is this? The music has suddenly disappeared. Have they seen her? Oh, God.
She tries to move back the way she came, but she can’t. She is. She can’t be. She is. They aren’t looking at her. They are looking toward the door. She can still feel the wooden rib at her back. She is stuck. She thinks she’s stuck. Possibly stuck. She cannot turn her head. Oh, dear Lord.
She goes through a complicated procedure of raising her hand in the crevice and holding it out to her side and then over, and bending it above her shoulder, out and over, and she pulls the earplug from her right ear, and immediately drops it, idiot, but the sound is crisper, clearer, of people, so close, and she can practically hear the words. But it’s quieter now. The music has stopped. What is happening? There is laughter. They are all looking at the door out of the kitchen, the door into the rest of the house. Boys. Not boys. Young men. Young women. She sees them. In their T-shirts and tops, with their drinks. She sees a couple with linked arms. She sees a young man with a beautiful smile, leaning on another man’s shoulder. She sees the bored girl. Well, goodness. Her bored girl. There she is. That’s absolutely her. But she doesn’t look so bored. She looks anxious, poor love. She is standing with her arms folded, leaning against where the sink must be.
She thinks she can hear whistling.
Then a voice begins to sing. A man’s voice. A single voice. Singing. He used to sing. She, too. The voice never really changed, one to the other. Nothing did. Not really. They had loved each other better, maybe. More carefully. This voice, though. It’s very good. Very full. It is commanding. It carries a melody, strongly. It’s a good voice. Familiar, almost.
Then the whistling again.
Then the voice.
The bored girl has closed her eyes to listen. She no longer looks anxious. She is smiling. She is very pretty.
Her hand is still above her shoulder. She can’t seem to lower it. As it’s there, she puts a finger in the hole and pulls a little at the edges. It is smaller than her eye. The song is maybe French. She works at it with her finger, so that it becomes as large as her fingertip, then as large as the first of her knuckles. She pulls her finger out. It is as large as her eye now. The voice is beautiful. Full of emotion. She puts her eye against the hole and holds it there and looks at the girl.
The singing stops. There is a moment in which nothing happens.
Then there is applause, and there are raised voices and all the people in the kitchen seem to crowd around the door.
Except for the bored girl. She isn’t bored though, she’s curious. She has moved toward the table. She stands peering at the hole, an expression on her face. What is she doing? Oh. She is staring at the eye. Which is what she sees. An eye in the wall.
She lifts her hand.
She opens her mouth.
But wait. Wait until I tell you.
This story I have. ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment