Humor (9 page)

The gap between you and me. The gap between you and me. In art class, the teacher would say to look at the spaces between objects. That was how you could see what the objects really looked like. Well. Well, I was fairly certain of your shape. I’d looked at it quite a lot. It was the shape of billowing wheat or sad violin music or a quiet discussion in the coat room at a party, or something. I wasn’t so clear on my own. I had looked at it, in mirrors, or in confused reflections from shop windows, and to me it looked unremarkable. Just the shape of some man or other. Could’ve been anyone, really. When I tried to remember my shape it was the silhouette of a murderer, a torturer, a rapist, or some kind of fiend. There was no end to how bad my shape could be, when I tried to think about it. Our shapes, together? The gap between them was bigger every day. I couldn’t see what we really looked like. The only thing I could think of was the sad violin music and the rapist; very far away, never any nearer.

It is an old house that had once known grandeur but now has faded, moth-eaten curtains, cobwebbed windows whose sills are graveyards of desiccated insects, rising damp, mildewed furniture, dry rot, woodworm, subsidence, peeling wallpaper, rotten carpets, treacherous staircases, choking attics, dead smells, wasp nests, leaking ceilings, creaking doors, collapsed chimneys, grimy sinks, sagging floorboards, rat-shit-scattered corridors, cracked walls, crumbling plasterwork, dry toilet bowls, decades-old newspapers coated with decades-old dust on leaning tables, prone chairs, silent telephones, and vacant, forgotten ghosts who have nowhere else to go.

Though on the ground floor, in the west wing, is one single room where there is a small stove that burns gently through the day and the night. There is a comfortable chair here, threadbare on the arms. There is a narrow bed and a table that is clean. The floor is swept and the window, though small, is open on sunny days.

And if you want to come and see me, I will make you a cup of tea and try to remember.

I was just staring out of the window, trying to see past my reflection on the rain-streaked black glass of the night-train window. Then I heard a woman saying to a man, ‘I thought you only drank one bottle of port and some champagne. Well, more fool me.’

She sounded quite angry, but I didn’t know the whole story and for all I knew she could have been completely justified in being angry. There was a kind of mumbling, then she said, ‘That’s all very well. All very … clever.’

I wondered what he had said that was clever. There was a bit more mumbling, and the next time the woman spoke she said, ‘I don’t want to go there. Simple as that.’ Straight away the man hissed at her, ‘Simple as what? What exactly?’

I more or less glued my face to the window.

‘I mean, you haven’t slept with me in weeks. Months,’ he hissed again. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you don’t want me to.’ The man hissed again, ‘It’s not surprising. Your tone. It says it all.’

We were the only people in the carriage, hurtling through the lightless wastes of England. Your tone. It says it all.

I married during a sweaty fever of happiness and had been considering distaste for some years when it started. My face and chest began to feel too warm, as if I had run too far. On the morning following our third anniversary I awoke blearily, and padded to the bathroom where I found my mirrored self an impressionist caricature of what I expected. My skin had become my enemy; my self incarcerated within a prison that displayed my unhappiness publicly. I pulled at my features, pressed hard on my cheeks to bring a brief semblance of my previous normality to my face, but the details were all gone. I had to blur my eyes to see my past.

I left our house, and moved like a ghost through the streets, unhappily aware of the sharp three-dimensionality of my surroundings, the microscopic actuality of other people. I took short breaths, the air entering shallowly through my misty nostrils. It was like inhaling through cloth. I needed solitude, and walked quickly to the edge of the town. I passed along deserted roads, scuffing dust, keeping by the high walls in the shadows where I belonged.

It got late, and I worried that the dusk would assimilate me, that I would disperse like blood in the ocean. Reluctantly I returned home. My wife greeted me, and asked after my day. She talked for a while, but I didn’t really
hear what she said. I sat, morosely prodding at my face, unwilling to look at her eyes. I knew she would be squinting, making small head movements in an effort to force me into focus.

We divorced quite soon after. For a long time I thought that I understood why, but when I asked her one afternoon when we met in a café, she said I had got it wrong. It wasn’t that, she said. It wasn’t that at all.

During the war I visit some relations in the country. The privations of living for years in a battle zone have hit them hard, and although the war is nearly over they remain locked into the habits of the frightened.

After a frugal meal of potato soup, I am invited to look round the smallholding that surrounds their scarred house. Oddly, in each paddock is a smaller fenced area, sometimes one, sometimes five or six. Puzzled, I ask why they are there.

The reason is simple: each small fenced area represents an animal that has long been eaten. The fences are there to remind my relatives of the livestock they once had. I peer closer, and on each there is a small label – goat, horse, cow. Numbly shaking my head, I walk back to the house.

We speak in hushed tones, discussing the war and the friends we have lost. As dusk falls, a single candle is lit.

The world outside is almost silent, and I have an eerie feeling that we are drifting alone, surrounded by susurrating space.

Nothing much grew around the village any more, except yellow nettles, giant hogweed and twitch grass. Both of the shops had been closed for ages, with net curtains hung in the display windows, barely concealing the dusty emptiness of the redundant shelves, the avalanche of unopened junk mail below the letter boxes, and the ghosts which left no footsteps on the dirty linoleum floors.

Faded typescript taped to the inside of the door of one shop explained the falling-off of trade, the lowered profit margins, the forlorn blame laid at the automatic doors of the out-of-town supermarket thirteen miles away. I read this notice many times, as if one day it would explain more. There was no such explanation on the door of our house, though perhaps there should have been.

Things had been going awry between us for some time. We had difficulty in understanding one another somehow; as if we spoke different languages and our interpreter had more lucrative work elsewhere. We moved around each other in something approximating silence, in a wan ballet that owed more to exclusion zones than elegance or grace.

Often it seemed as if we were the only inhabitants of the village. On my aimless perambulations I would see no one at all. No dogs, no cats. I saw only birds; crows circling high overhead in the white sky, calling out in the
air, laughing, or perhaps crying. Their nests were knotted cancers high in the tallest trees. I watched them as they wrote indecipherable messages against the clouds. Not for me. No messages. I went home, and our front door was heavy as lead.

My life was dust in a sunlit stairwell; tiny fragments of things that were no longer there, floating aimlessly, sinking slowly. I shared my room with a fly that moved erratically round the light bulb. I copied its movements into a notepad, hoping that they would spell out letters, words, sentences. And that there might be some meaning there.

– on

– and on

– at

– last

Nothing, I thought. The fly lived in my room all summer and never said anything useful. Just round and round the light bulb. Every day. It never seemed to rest, or eat. Maybe it slept when I slept. I didn’t know much about that. It doesn’t do to think too hard about sleep. Or love, or hunger. Some things get easier with thought, like mathematics. But other things are best left alone. Just going round and round.

I wanted to be like a piece of music played on a piano in a circular room at the top of a tower. When I looked out of the window I wanted to see a rolling pine forest stretching to the horizon. The truth was that my music sounded like traffic and my view was of a wall five metres distant.

4½ litres (8 pints) tears

1 kg (2¼ lb) white sugar

Juice of 2 lemons

General-purpose yeast

Boil the tears as soon as possible after crying as they can very easily sour. Add the sugar to the boiling tears. Add the lemon juice. Start the yeast in a glass. Leave the tear mixture to cool to blood heat, then add the started yeast. Leave to ferment in a darkened room for three days then strain off into a 4.5 litre (1 gallon) jar and seal with an airlock. Bottle, cork and store when fermentation ceases. This wine may be drunk after a month but it is even better after six months.

– on

– and on

– at

– last

I am too late, I am too old, I am late. Perhaps I am apprehensive and weary. We drink coffee from paper cups while we sit in a polystyrene medieval castle. There aren’t many people.

The Burger King has a thatched roof and I briefly wonder about the employment prospects for thatchers in this wet, cold and foggy part of the country. I once wanted to be a thatcher, but today I am glad I am a nothing. Whatever. There is a glass roof arching over everything here anyway. And I wouldn’t want to thatch a Burger King in a polystyrene castle.

Motorway on such a grey day with fog and the town we drove through was dead and then a slip road and huge signs loom out of the fog saying ‘designer-outlet village’. We park in the car park with the other cars.

After walking to the designer-outlet village there is music outside in the fog but it isn’t very good music and even without fog it wouldn’t be very good. Inside there are a lot of clothes to buy but I don’t buy any because they aren’t very good. There are a few people from the dead town here and they aren’t buying any of the clothes either.

Everyone is very subdued.

This is quite nice, she says to me, holding something with sleeves up for me to look at but I can’t find any words.
Perhaps I am apprehensive and weary.

We drink coffee from paper cups while we sit in a polystyrene medieval castle.

She said that the couple who own the shop are nosey and given to gossip. If I went to the shop there would be talk in the village, she said. There had been a power cut and I thought it would be a good idea to get some candles in case it happened again.

The shop was shut and it was cold so I didn’t hang around. I walked around in the empty village and there wasn’t much to see. Some of the houses showed evidence of having once been shops also; there was a plinth and a cross that seemed to suggest a former market place. Sometimes a car went past. But mostly there was just me and my thoughts and a grey sky overhead that may have indicated rain. The rain didn’t come which was sort of good and sort of bad.

By the time I got back to the shop it had opened so I went in and I was the only person in it except for the couple who owned it and they just looked at me silently in the kind of way you can feel even when your back is turned.

I got the candles and it was maybe quite exciting to hear the talk in the village after I’d gone but I doubt it.

There’s just the muffled crunchy sound of teeth grinding and scraping of boots on tarmac or something and a noise far away that maybe is someone crying or a cat and everything moves a bit in the wind.

There’s a tape on of people talking about probably nothing important at a restaurant and a marching sound that’s a bit like a lot of soldiers and a bit like a wheel rubbing against metal but it might not be a tape it’s hard to tell. And everyone’s run out of jokes because no one’s laughing at anything although they probably would if they had a sense of humour.

Probably nothing important. Just a noise in the dark when you’re half asleep something behind the curtains don’t look it’s nothing don’t look honestly it’s nothing.

Maybe it’s the town you live in making these noises or maybe it’s you. Just a million mobiles and modems squawking and spluttering and hissing like piss on a fire like a million gallons of piss on an inferno just think of that eh?

Just think of that. Vertebrae being sawn apart sounds like this.

And when I opened the curtains they were taking the set away and packing up for the day, the cameras and lights
turned off. The darkness, the grey skies, the blind whirring of machinery.

I’d like to write a beautiful story about love:

We loved each other so much that sometimes it hurt, even when we were close. I wanted to be her and she wanted to be me. Sex never felt complete, and afterwards we talked carelessly about easy subjects to avoid discussing the ache that bruised us both. So one day, in the kitchen, she cut me and I cut her; gently, slowly, too easily. It was the knife we used for onions and our tears were painful but expectant. We dripped the blood into coffee mugs, then bandaged up and went to bed. We fucked and there were stars but we saw different constellations.

The next day the blood was dry and rusty in the mugs. We scraped it diligently onto sheets of paper. We looked at each other silently and lowered our heads to snort each other’s dust. Afterwards we both carried a pouch of powdered blood, and when we were low and apart we would retire to a rest room and sniff, sniff, sniff.

Oh my darling, we went on and on. Our blood was there always, red and viscous, burnt ochre and blowaway. My blood in your nasal membranes, filtering into your capillaries, finding its inexorable way to your heart. Your blood. My nose. My heart. We belonged to each other and we had made our love tangible, real; something that could be weighed and consumed, taken and enjoyed.

It wasn’t a surprise when we used the scalpel to shave
flesh from each other’s upper arms. We dried the flesh, though it was difficult to desiccate it completely. We used the airing cupboard. The powdered flesh was better; cocaine to blood’s speed.

Did it end badly? Did we go too far? Was our love replaced or deleted by want or need? In losing ourselves in each other did we lose the essence in ourselves that the other loved? Did time simply bore us with its slow wearing down?

I have no answers to any of those questions. But now, sitting here in the kitchen, I admit I am scared of the knife, that I can’t dig deeply enough to draw blood, that I will have nothing in the morning but red, raised scratches on my arm. I don’t want her to cut me.

Did we kill each other, or are we living happily; but only as happily as you are?