Glass (22 page)

I had to think of other things. That was something to think about later.

I turned onto Great Marlborough Street and saw the sun cleaving the road into light and dark. It was so obvious, so clear-cut. I saw the
LIBERTY
sign, the beautiful exotic flowers by the entrance. Along the shop front, from floor to ceiling, was plate after plate of cool, pristine glass. I stepped out into the road to get into the sunlight and saw the golden weathervane, in the shape of a ship, sailing on air towards some land of hope, the sunlight caught in its intricacies as if charging it with energy. I walked out further into the middle of the crossroads, and stopped. This was the moment that everything had been building up to. This moment. Now, here. The sun blazing like a furnace, the clear light, liberty, purity. This is it. I feel a blistering rush as if I am being lifted from the ground, hear a screech as of shuddering tyres, the split of metal and the fracturing of glass.

In this moment, I see God's teardrop start to form: the universe is flung outwards, matter grabs on with its fingertips and waltzes with its nearest partner; stars form, stars waltz, combine; and then whole groups of stars, waltzing and combining. Some of these huge bodies start to collapse under their own weight; I am born and die; life is born and dies; and still the teardrop wells, gathering weight, becoming rounder, pregnant. More stars collapse to become so dense that the light itself is waltzing around them, gathering itself into a compressed black mass, finding other darknesses, feeding. The teardrop has formed. It ripples ever so slightly. The darknesses begin their last waltz around the unseen centre of everything, God, antimatter, all worlds. They waltz closer, faster, like water down a plughole. The teardrop falls, and when it lands, all worlds collide, and there is a monstrous splash. The universe is flung outwards.

‘You have to get him to hospital,' someone cried in distress.

‘No!' I croaked. I couldn't feel my body.

‘You're pretty mashed up,' said another voice, speaking softly from the throat. ‘You're losing a lot of blood.'

‘No,' I heard myself reply. ‘I want to go home. I want to go home. I want to go home.' I repeated it like a mantra, like a spell. I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew I was lying in a bed.

‘You're awake,' he said.

‘Yes.'

‘I thought you might be dead.'

‘No.'

‘Don't be alarmed,' said Frank.

‘I'm not.'

‘Good. But try not to be alarmed when you see your chest. And don't try and pull it out. That might make you die.'

I looked down at my body. There was nothing obviously untoward, except that I could see something out of reach in the very bottom of my vision. I craned my neck, trying to pull my head upwards, and saw a thin but discernible sliver of glass, lodged in my chest like an award.

‘How far in is it?' I asked.

‘Far enough that taking it out is worse than leaving it in. They want you to speak to your family before they operate.'

In the face of this injury, which was so obviously mortal, I became calmer than, perhaps, I have ever been. I was to die. It was decided. There was not a thing I could do about it; to struggle against it would only bring death closer. I imagined the edges, just atoms thick, cleaving my cells like a knife through hot butter on a scale so minute that it almost didn't matter which side they were on.

‘What happened?' I asked. It hurt to talk, or breathe.

‘I tipped off the muck from a phone box and then got your text and realised I was late to meet you, so I was driving a little over the agreed speed limits and I caught you as I came out of a side road. You really took out my bumper. Half a shop front too.'

‘Is Blades okay?' I asked, somehow unable to believe any of it.

‘He's not going to get any worse.'

‘Have they diffused the bombs?'

‘Don't know. Spoke to one of the lads who'd come down to see the body and he seemed to think the cameras were all filming the sky to do a time lapse video.'

‘That's probably just what Blades told him.'

Frank didn't say anything.

‘But he really was planning to blow up the Shard, wasn't he?'

‘Wouldn't rule it out. Either way, you've relieved the world of a prick.'

‘I didn't kill him.'

‘Course not. He fell.' Frank cracked a good-natured grin. ‘You get some rest. Your family will be here soon.'

He looked anxiously at the door. I closed my eyes. I tried to shift in the bed but it hurt too much. I should do more exercise, I thought. Here I am, alive, a miracle of muscle and joint, unused.

My mind lapped gently at the shores of consciousness. I thought of the seaside. It was so vivid, the ocean so impenetrably deep. I could almost smell fish.

A hand took my hand. A strong hand. An expressive hand.

I couldn't muster the breath to speak, but my hands still worked.

I'm sorry,
I signed.

You're just saying that because you think you're dying,
Max signed back miserably.

I really am sorry. I'm sorry that you'll only have one person left to care about.

You're sorry for your behaviour?
he signed.

No. You are my brother. It is your job to put up with me. And tell Lieve—

Lieve was real
No way! So you finally got laid?
he replied.

Yes. Tell her she will be a good mother. Important.

He nodded. We could not say anything else. I could not say
love
without disturbing my wound, and wouldn't have known how to say it to Max. I hoped he knew.

Sometimes it is hard to tell whether you are crying without touching your face. My temples felt hot. There could have been tears running down them, I supposed, but my hands were heavy now. As the late afternoon sun fell, it shot in through the window and filled my eyes with light. I didn't close them. I wanted the image of that light burned onto my retinas. The sheets around me were soft and hot.

For a long time I have been looking for something simple to reach for, something that stays the same always, that is not subject to conditions. Something pure and clear as light through glass.

When it comes down to it, though, I suppose I don't know what that is. You can't rise up out of the world. Nothing that exists can be pure. Purity can't feel, or interact; it might as well not have been. I have tried to live by ideals, to find something after my mother that might carry me over the rocks. I wonder what she would say. ‘You tried your best, and that's what counts.' I did. I did try my very best. But I suppose I wasn't up to the job. I suppose, if anyone's up there counting the scores, they might concede that they have made it too hard to be good.

Still, I suppose a lot of things.

Dad was trying to show me a text message.

‘Your friend the Dean is on her way.'

Too late
, I signed. I imagined her sitting on a train, her hands curled up into each other like a Grecian key, and tried to smile.
Any messages for Mum?
I signed.

‘Tell her I broke one of the plates from our nice set but I've found a wholesaler who can replace it.' Dad chuckled through his bleary eyes. He never knew what to say when it mattered. But that was for the best too. ‘Tell her I love her, and I hope it's bikini weather up there. She always had a cracking pair of legs.' He shook his head, choked up, and covered his face with his hand.

It's okay,
I signed.
Get some rest. I think we could all do with a rest
. I don't know if he saw me. I don't know if anyone did.

Footnotes

1
John 2:4. dw: I know one is not really supposed to use the King James Version in this day and age, but it's a damn sight more poetic than that awful New International Version.

2
DW
: Some deaf people can't hear music at all. They are called ‘profoundly deaf', their ears being about as much good as if they were submerged under a hundred tonnes of water. Max can, in fact, hear music, but it's the difference between a live orchestra and a touch-screen phone.

3
DW
: I can't find any record that Günter spoke German, even later, in London. His mother seems never to have taught him, perhaps because she had spent so long convincing herself she was English.

4
DW
: It's called The Broadfield House Glass Museum. It's still there, if you're ever stuck for childcare.

5
DW
: Günter only ever called them Dutch waffles.

6
DW
: I never quite knew where he got this notion. As Günter's beloved Wikipedians might have put it, ‘[citation needed]'.

7
DW
: As you may know, sadism is when it gives you pleasure to cause other people pain. What I don't understand is that sadists often team up with masochists, who get pleasure from receiving pain. I hardly think sadists would enjoy knowing they are in fact causing masochists pleasure.

8
DW
: You would think Günter had to get a category B licence (car) so that he could obtain the category L licence (electrically propelled) in with the bargain. In fact all the floats were diesel, because only about one in eight people have their milk delivered in Salisbury. Günter passed his test third time, with thirteen minors (stalling x 2, signalling too early, signalling too late, approaching a junction too fast, passing too close to a parked car, stopping too close in traffic, failure to overtake a slow-moving vehicle x 2, lane discipline, ancillary control, undue hesitation x 2).

9
DW
: Alcohol is one of God's stranger gifts. On the rare occasion that I am out walking late at night, I am reminded of Isaiah 19:14: ‘The Lord hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.'

10
DW
: In Russia they obviously don't call them Russian dolls. They call them Matryoshka dolls, coming from the word for mother. So really the dolls are a metaphor for offspring, rather than the other way around.

11
DW
: ‘He will never amount to anything.' At twenty-six, became the most important physicist of all time, but hindsight, as we shall learn, needs no spectacles.

12
DW
: It seems clear that during this time he was, if not depressed in the modern sense, at least melancholic. The Reverend Robert Burton defined melancholy as ‘a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.' Rev. Burton wrote a 1,400 page book on the subject,
The Anatomy of Melancholy
(1621), during which he complained rather unselfconsciously that there was too much to read these days, and that ‘our eyes ache with reading, our fingers with turning.' His remedy for melancholy can be summed up in the last six words of the book: ‘Be not solitary, be not idle.'

13
DW
: Or, to be accurate, The Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in Salisbury.

14
DW
: For a long time, glass vessels or windows were the preserve of the rich. It is comparatively recently that they have swapped place with lobsters.

15
This is Bishop Richard Poore, who is commemorated holding a scale model, in case visitors are somehow oblivious to the building on which the statue stands.

16
2 Kings 4:40. dw: There's nothing like a cry of ‘there is death in the pot' to put one off one's food.

17
DW
: Günter related his experience of the funeral to me later. As far as I am aware, I did no such thing.

18
Proverbs 14:12. dw: People too often think of laughter and crying as opposites, when really they are at the same end of the spectrum. Their opposite is being underwhelmed.

19
Jeremiah 9:21. dw: If I'd known what was going to happen, I might have saved this one for the next funeral.

20
Hebrews 9:16-17. dw: I am absolutely sure that life is one's only true message to the world, and to God. One's message can even be quite coherent if one dies young enough not to dribble a comeback album down one's cheek. For those who die young, their
oeuvre
is complete, their contribution known, evincing none of the compromise that comes with age. Can there be any word more antithetical to greatness than ‘reunion'?

21
DW
: The scale only goes up to 4 (‘Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel') though halfway up the scale, one is still in a great deal of pain (‘Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door').

22
DW
: My hands were cold.

23
Luke 11:7.

24
DW
: The rotter keeps coming back. It's on a mole and I could swear it grows faster than bamboo.

25
DW
: Everybody talks as if Dan Brown's success is an accident, when really it took a great deal of hard work, trial and error. First, as a musician, he made a cassette for children, then he tried releasing an adult album called
Angels and Demons
. When the music career didn't take off, he wrote humour books, then thrillers. So his success was assured eventually.

26
DW
: The French don't say this, but Günter did, once or twice. Such are the perils of autodidactism.

27
DW
: Günter seems to have used this word interchangeably with ‘constructions'.

28
DW
: Günter always professed ignorance of conjugal matters until his move to London, but the occasional slip seems to suggest that he may, under the privacy of his own duvet, have begun to educate himself. Admittedly, one doesn't necessarily tell the vicar about these things.

29
DW
: It was ever thus. As an interesting historical aside, there was an unfortunate typographical error in the King James Bible of 1631, now referred to as ‘The Wicked Bible', which caused Exodus 20:14 to be printed as, ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.' King Charles I was not greatly amused and publicly ordered all copies to be destroyed, though if he had kept a private copy for his son, that would certainly explain a proliferation of Fitzes in the subsequent decades.

30
DW
: Ecclesiastes 3 suggests that ‘to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.' There's even apparently a time to gather stones, presumably not regularly. But since God is omnipresent through time, from his perspective it's all happening at once. Though our meeting seemed a coincidence from our perspective, I tried to imagine how it might have appeared to God: two sharp lines on an infinite sheet of white paper, angled infinitesimally towards one another, seeming to run parallel but eventually converging at a point predicted exactly by their vectors.

31
DW
: I thought I'd been quite clear, but the subsequent news article in the
Salisbury Plain Dealer
seems to contradict this.

32
DW
: It dates from 1386. Don't listen to the Bishop of Beauvais if he tries to tell you otherwise: ours is the oldest. Beauvais couldn't even finish building their cathedral.

33
‘Miracle Worker',
Salisbury Plain Dealer
, 15 May 2012.

34
DW
: Following a slightly terse exchange about the relevance of this research detail, Max explained that he had received a ‘download confirmation' email minutes after sending it – so Max was simply goading Günter here.

35
DW
: One typically assigns a gesture to a new name, so that you don't have to spell it out each time.

36
DW
: He really would.

37
DW
: I still don't know exactly why Günter reacted quite so strongly against the service. Most people profess to enjoy the Choral Eucharist.

38
DW
: Günter could not cook, according to Arthur. Shortly after Max moved out, Günter found a website that sold out-of-date airline food, which he bought in bulk and microwaved for the two of them.

39
DW
: Satanism is the only truly contrarian belief system. Either Satan doesn't exist, or he does and he is out to destroy you and everyone you love. There's no use in trying to get on the good side of the embodiment of evil.

40
DW
: The interrobang (
) is a tremendous typographical invention, used where a question is too loud or emphatic to expect that the speaker will listen to the answer.

41
DW
: The Dalai Lama says that we are only one and indivisible with the universe at the moment of orgasm, and the moment of death. I know he's on the wrong team, but he's a lovely chap.

42
DW
: On a personal note, I'm not sure how seriously one should take Freud. He was a cocaine addict who wrote papers with titles like ‘Character and Anal Erotism' or ‘Dreams and Telepathy', and only became a doctor so he could get married. He was, however, correct that ‘time spent with cats is never wasted'.

43
DW
: Allan Pinkerton was a particular favourite: the detective who codified the first surveillance and undercover strategies, founded the US Secret Service and supposedly died of gangrene of the tongue.

44
DW
: One of Günter's shorter-lived obsessions, his collection ran to just a few dirty bronze coins, which he kept in a shoebox with some old (valueless) stamps and a surprisingly large number of novelty keyrings.

45
DW
: As we have discovered, he sometimes knew more than he let on.

46
DW
: The popular ‘missionary' version of this position tends not to require a cushion, since missionaries are expected to travel light.

47
DW
: Actually – if you're interested – the best thing to do if one encounters a bear is to back slowly away, keeping one's posture erect, preferably carrying pepper spray. Though I'm not sure this approach would have worked analogously with Lieve.

48
DW
: If we're being a stickler for the facts, the ‘pedestrians' were some young boys with a slingshot (‘BFI Smashes “Glass Cancer” Riddle at Avery's £20m IMAX,'
Architects' Journal
, 7 September 2000).

49
DW
: It's one of those oxymoronic phrases that has somehow made it into usage against all sense, like ‘devout atheist' and ‘good grief'.

50
DW
: Football fans pluralise.

51
DW
:
Sic
.

52
DW
: There is a story in the Bible (Judges 12:6) in which two tribes are at war. In one tribe, people pronounce a word ‘shibboleth'; in the other, ‘sibboleth'. They use this to identify the enemy, and to kill them, little realising the real tragedy that this is the sum total of their difference.

53
DW
: Perhaps not in the East, where they rush to embrace impermanence as a pre-emptive strike. A nice chap the Dalai Lama may be, but he doesn't have all the answers. He's not winning the Game of Life so much as refusing to spin the wheel.

54
DW
: The Reverend Malthus is credited with foreseeing the problem of overpopulation; he is less often credited with suggesting that the poor shouldn't breed.

55
Sisyphus was a (non-Biblical) king who tried to cheat death and was punished by being made to exercise constantly; truly, a modern parable.

56
Murder in the Métro: Laetitia Toureaux and the Cagoule in 1930s France
, by Gail K. Brunelle and Annette Finley-Croswhite (Louisiana State University Press, 2010).

57
DW
: Lit. ‘Star'

58
DW
: A painter whose work has recently been singled out for unfavourable comparison on the internet with that of an elephant who is capable of self-portraiture. The young reverend showed me and I must admit I was swayed. In Pollock's defence, the elephant really is very good.

59
DW
: It's a landline with a curly cord like a pig's tail. We might be a cathedral, but we're not made of money.