Family Album (26 page)

Charlie finished his rehab shortly before Paul did, swearing eternal friendship. He wrote down a phone number; “Give us a bell, right? We’ll get together—go out on the town.”

Paul never saw him again. When he called that number the person at the other end had never heard of Charlie. Only now does he occasionally visit, grinning away beside the bed at Allersmead. “Remember me?”

Sometimes it is Dad who appears beside the bed. Dad of course is asleep in the bedroom along the corridor; this is another Dad, the Dad who refused to cough up for you to go to Amsterdam with your mates, once upon a time, the Dad who appeared grim-faced at Bude police station, with Mum bleating behind him. That Dad is terse, sardonic, the tone is infinitely familiar and indeed it is still to be heard from Dad of today, but it carries less weight now, it is bleached with repetition, it has become a kind of white noise—irritating but without the power it once had. Paul looks at Dad these days and sees a man who is getting old, and that seems somehow pathetic. Even him, even Dad.

But that Dad carried weight, way back. Oh dear me, yes. His tongue could scorch; he could make you feel more inadequate than you already knew that you were. The way he always won an argument, produced the definitive put-down. His scrutiny of a school report, handed back in meaningful silence.

When we played the cellar game, thinks Paul, and I was always the father, the idea was to be as absolutely un-Dad as possible. Shooting buffalo. Captain of the ship. Turning into James Bond if I felt so inclined. But a kind of shadow Dad crept in, I seem to remember—I’d make everyone else toe the line, boss them around. My turn now, down here.

From time to time a sibling pops up. Sandra opens her clenched fist and puts a spider in her mouth—or does she? Roger takes a clinical interest in Paul’s gashed finger: “I need to see how much it’s bleeding.” Clare wants him to watch her doing handstands. Katie looks worriedly at him—he is ill with the flu or something and Mum has sent her up with a glass of lemonade. “Are you going to die?” she says.

Gina tells him to sort himself out. She is fierce. “You can’t go on like this,” she says. “One dud job after another.” It is years ago—the hospital porter period. They meet for a drink; she is hot from some TV studio, he is off duty from trundling fodder to the operating theaters. She talks about training schemes, about City & Guilds. She is trying to send him back to college, it sounds like, and he veers away. This is just to fill in for a bit, he assures her; he’s going to look around for something serious when he’s ready, a real job. She frowns at him. “You cannot go on like this, Paul.”

It is only Gina to whom he talks now, in the world of today. Odd, the way all the others are so far flung. Roger in Canada, Katie in the States, Sandra—where? Italy, is it? Clare hither and thither with that dance company. He hasn’t spoken to any of them in ages. Time was, you were all on top of one another, every day of the year, their faces and voices were as intimate as your own, and then—whoosh! Blown away. Allersmead is a dandelion clock, its seeds dispersed.

Except him. And Gina is still local, as it were—but she goes global half the time. Did everyone want to get as far away as possible?

Mum speaks. Frequently. Of course. She speaks in torrents, as she ever did, and most of it is just atmospheric crackle, but every now and then a snatch is loud and clear. She is telling him that Dad won’t see that terrible school report: “I’ll sort of lose it, dear.” She weeps, at Crackington Haven: “It was those wretched other boys, wasn’t it? On your own you wouldn’t have done it, would you?” She beseeches: “Give us a
phone
number. I never know where you are.” From a tempest of her recollections, he hears only this: “Of course you were always my favorite.”

These days, at the Garden Centre, he never lets on where it is that he lives. “Actually, I live with my parents and their—er—au pair girl.” Definitely not. He attracts inquisitive interest, inevitably—too old for this sort of job. Why’s he doing it? What’s the problem? He fends off inquiry, his policy for years now; he is adept at striking up cheery temporary acquaintance without ever letting anyone close enough to probe. The landscape is littered with people who have known Paul quite well—have chatted with him, drunk with him, slept with him—but who have subsequently realized that they know nothing of him. They would say that he appeared to have no past.

Lying in bed at Allersmead, with that inescapable and populous past reverberating, Paul sorts through those who offer themselves and allows Sophie to step forward, the teacher from that school where he was care-taker for—oh, a couple of years. Commitment, that was, and Sophie was responsible to a large degree. They shared a flat, eventually, they were a couple, the head teacher knew and smiled benignly.

Sophie teaches the infants—the reception class. She is delightful—a small, smiling, sociable girl, and it is thus that he likes to think of her, rather than the other Sophie who will surface in due course. He sees her laughing at him across a table in a pub, he sees her striding beside him on a walk in the park, he sees her in bed, rapturous. But once he has let her appear, then inevitably that other Sophie will muscle in, talking differently.

“Shouldn’t I meet your parents?”

“
Where
was it you were at college, Paul?”

“The trouble is, school caretaking doesn’t really lead anywhere.”

Sophie becomes someone else. She finds a voice that is tediously familiar to Paul, first heard long ago at Allersmead, and subsequently from one authority figure after another—the voice that tells him what he ought to be doing rather than what he is doing, that questions and criticizes and recommends. He had thought better of her.

She hints at a long-term arrangement. Marriage. A baby.

Once, a while ago now, when confronted with the prospect of an unanticipated baby, Paul had seized upon the notion of another kind of life. But that was then, that was a different girl, she who had him on the ropes. This is not like that. This is becoming another of those occasions when he may have to take evasive action.

Marriage, Paul considered then and thinks now, is for others—not for him. How do people endure that proximity, that having to consider the other person, that fetter? Well, with difficulty; witness the divorce rate, witness the marriages one has known.

Them. Mum and Dad. Dad does not do much considering, on the whole; his study door has saved him from excessive proximity; he has not always felt fettered, it would seem. For Mum, marriage is her profession, or rather, the by-products of marriage have been. Allersmead; us.

Paul thinks of his mother, asleep along the corridor. She too is now on the brink of old age, of course, but somehow in her case this is less unexpected; when he flicks back through his images of her he sees a mutation, she has always been getting a bit stouter, a bit more gray. And what she says was always just the background music of Allersmead—wallpaper music, a domestic form of Vivaldi, the accompaniment to childhood, to growing up. It pattered around one’s head, both heard and not heard. And does so today.

Paul takes evasive action. He ignores Sophie’s hints. He absents himself more and more. Sophie objects. And then one day he is simply not there anymore. He has given in his notice at the school, and, as Sophie will bitterly tell all and sundry, scarpered. All and sundry remark that he was a bit of an odd sort of guy and maybe she is best off the way things are. Sophie is not entirely sure about this but she appreciates the sympathy and, being a sensible sort of girl, she sets about expunging Paul and looking around for a fresh interest. She might derive a certain satisfaction did she know that, in years to come, she will occasionally put in a brief appearance at Paul’s bedside.

The members of this nocturnal troupe chart Paul’s life—a higgledy-piggledy assortment of people, some of them crucial, others incidental. Sometimes, they crowd in; other times a person will sneak up, unexpected, and require that Paul revisit a particular site. Sophie sits on the sofa of that shared flat and scolds him for disappearing all evening,
and
yesterday. Fat face holds out his hand for the key to the bike. The shrink at the rehab place wants to know how he feels about himself.

That policeman leans out of the window, saying, “Paul, let’s have a talk.”

Let’s not, says Paul, years later. Just clear off, do you mind? I know you mean well, but let’s not go there.

The room is at the top of this tall building, this office building in which there has been a fire. He is alone in the room, the smoke-blackened walls of which he must clean. The contract cleaning company is perhaps the furthest down that he has got—a job that mops up those who have failed to find more congenial employment. His fellow workers are as motley as they come—a polyglot crew, many of whom do not speak much English. No matter—a cleaner can be briefed by gesture and exhortation. Paul is amongst them because this is a time when he does not care about anything, he does not care what he does or where he is, he would prefer not to be anywhere at all, he would prefer not to be. He is simply moving through days, one pointless painful day after another, he is without anticipation—except for a fix when he can achieve that—without expectation, without will. What will he has is addressed to the operation of cleaning machinery, because otherwise the supervisor will be on his back.

He has been alone in this room for quite a while. It is his room, his task. It is largely empty; furniture and carpets have been removed. There is just one large desk, which is water damaged, and those black and oily walls to which he has addressed himself for an hour or so. The door is open, and he can hear the voices of others from rooms along the corridor. The supervisor was in five minutes ago; he will not be back for quite a while now.

Paul goes to the window, which is flung wide and opens onto a narrow balcony shared with other rooms on this floor. The balcony runs the width of the building, and has a parapet. Paul stares at this, and then he puts a leg out of the window, then the other, and stands on the balcony.

He looks over the parapet. It is a long way down to the street below, a good long way. Not a busy street—parked cars, a few people walking by, a man going into the newsagent opposite, a waiter smoking a cigarette outside the bistro next door to it.

Paul looks. He stands looking for some while. For a minute, for five minutes, for a quarter of an hour? Goodness knows—time has not much meaning anymore.

The parapet is fairly high, but not too high. He moves a few paces to his left, away from the window, until he is at a point between that and the next window. He gets one leg over, then the other, and he is sitting on the parapet, legs dangling over the edge, over the street. He is feeling dizzy now, which actually makes things easier. Go on, he tells himself.

The waiter looks up. He drops his cigarette and shouts. Paul cannot hear what he says. Another waiter comes out, and someone who is perhaps the proprietor, in shirtsleeves. The three of them look up, as does a woman who was passing and now stops. The man who went into the newsagent comes out and he too joins the staring group. He gesticulates, and shouts.

Paul looks down at them. They seem very far away, and nothing at all to do with him. Go on. Go
on
.

Another passerby has stopped. And another. There is conversation going on, consultation. The proprietor of the bistro goes back inside.

Everything is entirely real, and also quite unreal. Paul hears a car horn, an airplane, the slam of a car door. He sees a face at a window of the building opposite, he sees two pigeons sidling down the roof, he sees a gull floating overhead. When he looks down he feels dizzy again, everything swings a little, the street ripples. He hears a police car’s banshee siren.

The police car rounds the corner into this street, and pulls up below, silent now, its blue light flashing. Two policemen get out. Paul sees them, but also does not see them. Go on. Now.

The policemen are not there anymore, and the little crowd on the pavement has grown. A woman has her hand to her mouth.

Paul watches an airplane crawl across the sky above the roofline. So slowly. How do they stay up? He will put out his arms and be an airplane.

Someone is talking to him. There is a head at the window a couple of yards away. The head speaks. It says one thing, and then another, and then another, and then something else. Sometimes Paul answers.

“What’s your name?” says the policeman.

“Paul,” says Paul. “Just don’t come near me, OK? Just keep away.”

“Listen, Paul,” says the policeman. “Let’s have a talk. Come inside and we can have a talk.”

“No,” says Paul.

“Have you got family?” says the policeman. “Is there anyone you’d like us to get hold of?”

“I don’t have family,” says Paul.

“Anyone else?” says the policeman.

Paul does not reply. The policeman is outside the window now, standing. Paul edges along the parapet away from him, and then he sees that there is another policeman at the farther window.