Observatory Mansions (13 page)

Anna Tap, crouched over so many fabrics, focusing her
bespectacled eyes on minute strands, had begun to go blind. She wore, over the years, ever thicker spectacles, until it was that she had to rely more on touch than on sight. And this was not good enough. She might mistakenly snap one of those tiny fibres, she might make stains of her own, she had to go. For the objects’ sake, the objects had decreed it. Once her eyes had become too weak, she was dismissed.

Then Anna Tap, out of work, had little to think about except for her eyes, and the last eye surgeon had said that, sadly, there was nothing he could do, that, sadly, she was going to go blind. After the failure of the trabeculectomy, he said, and continued resistance to acetazolamide and pilocarpine, it seems it is impossible to reduce the pressure building up inside your eyes. We are incapable, in short, of reducing the production of aqueous humour. The eye tissues are being stretched, he said, the conjunctiva will grow intensely inflamed and with that the eyeballs will become as hard as two small rocks inside your skull, after which I am afraid, but there can be no doubt in this, the vision will go. The process will cause you some severe irritation which you will relieve by taking these. He handed her a bottle of pills labelled DIHYDROCODEINE TARTRATE – High in codeine, he said, that should dampen the pain. Anna Tap remembered how many eye surgeons she had visited and how they all could not remember a case as bad as hers and that there was nothing they could do for her. Soon afterwards Anna Tap began praying. She prayed for her sight to be saved, and, she remembered, her prayers had not yet been answered, though she was certain that they would be in time. Just in case, she had sold many of her possessions, reduced them to a manageable few and positioned them carefully in her new home so that she would be able to recall their places if she went blind, practice for her all-night years to come. But that was only if her prayers failed, she remembered, which they wouldn’t, she insisted. There would be no need for this dihydrocodeine
tartrate, even with its high level of codeine. What were pills when compared to the strength of faith?

Claire Higg remembered – 3
.

Then Claire Higg, needy for attention once more and having lost it during Anna Tap’s reminiscence, remembered placing a full and unopened milk bottle outside her door every morning at seven o’clock. She also remembered opening her door again at half past seven to retrieve the milk bottle. And at precisely picking-up-milk-bottle time a certain Mr Alec Magnitt would be seen leaving his flat for work. They would see each other through the caged walls of the lift shaft. They would exchange smiles usually, sometimes swap a good morning, sometimes comment about the weather. That was all. But that was something. She at least saw him every day. And all because of those milk bottles of hers. Milk bottles of love she used to call them, she remembered. Poor Alec Magnitt never did work out that the milkman did not call at Observatory Mansions.

Peter Bugg remembered – 1
.

And after that memory, Anna Tap suggested they all take a break, and took Twenty, who seemed increasingly restless, across to her flat to feed her. Peter Bugg, during the day’s lunch break from their memories, in the privacy of his rooms, neat, tidy, smelling of a hundred smells, was not one willing (as yet) to share his past, but he remembered too. In his largest room with its strange and inappropriate wallpaper (left over from the tenant before him) of greatly enlarged photographs of some distant port in some faraway land with bizarre ships and scantily dressed fishermen, Peter Bugg let in his remembrances. He stared at his own photographs, sealed in frames, of schoolboys stacked together for their yearly portrait.
These boys had been neatly hung over ships, fishermen and port buildings, but Peter Bugg didn’t see the foreign harbour, he saw only the boys from his life. He put names to the faces of each of those smiling boys. Then he saw, quite by accident, for he tried never to look in that corner, the face of his father, a black and white photograph. And he remembered how that face of his father’s moved. Then he started sweating and crying a little more than was common for him. And in so doing he remembered a time when he neither cried nor sweated. But once his remembrances had been connected to his father, his father would not let him go. He kept his son in his seat, watched his son sink down that seat, petrified. Remember that fear, Ronnie? – for his father always called him Ronnie, he remembered that, couldn’t forget that – oh yes, Ronnie remembered the fear.

It was that same fear, he remembered, that he handed out so easily to his pupils. And especially to one pupil in particular. His name: Alexander Mead. No, put that name away, screamed Peter Bugg (aloud now), for he was suddenly terrified. His heart began to race. Sweat and tears rushed on to his skin. Put that name back, he screamed. Put it back, back, back into the abysses of my brain. Let it stay in the darkness. But the boy, encouraged by his name being remembered, comes out to play. A fair-haired boy: tidy, precise, an exceptionally bright, friendless student. Go away, boy – screamed, aloud, the boy’s retired schoolmaster. Go and do your homework. But the boy says he’s done his homework, sir. Peter Bugg opened the window of his sitting room but the boy wouldn’t go out with the heavy air smelling of one hundred smells. Instead, he sat on Peter Bugg’s head and slipped off every now and again when the sweat became too slippery. Into Peter Bugg’s eyes.

Yes, Peter Bugg remembered too.

Twenty remembered – 4
.

Twenty, when they had all returned to flat sixteen after their lunch break and with some encouragement from Anna Tap, remembered walking for days, perhaps months, maybe even years, she had no way of knowing for sure. The time, she said, was vague in her, as yet, still vague mind. She did remember, though, certain dogs on this long walk of hers. She remembered she took her food from the dustbins kept outside people’s houses. Some of those people kept dogs. She remembered dog fights. Ferocious dog fights. She remembered licking the dog Maximilian’s wounds after the fights. She remembered the taste of dog blood.

Each time Twenty remembered she grew a little less confident.

Anna Tap remembered – 2
.

Then Anna Tap remembered the second time that she visited the museum in which she was employed for so many years, in which her eyes were irreparably damaged. She could not remember her first visit at all. When she first visited the museum she was only a few days old. She had been wrapped in blankets and left in the women’s lavatory, in a basin with her head beneath a tap, she explained. She thought it might have been the hot tap. She was found, she did not know by whom, and taken into care. That was all that Anna Tap could recall being told about her first visit to the city museum.

Her second visit, however, she remembered without help. She was sixteen then. She had been told that she had been abandoned in the women’s lavatory in the museum and wanted to see it for herself. She saw it, she spent two hours inside it, trying to get closer to Mummy, she remembered. Then, when she had seen enough, she walked around the museum. She called the museum objects her brothers and
sisters. The closest, she explained, she was ever likely to get to brothers and sisters. She decided she wanted to work in the city museum, to be in a place where, she believed, her mother had once been, and also to be close to those so-called brothers and sisters.

She had never, she remembered aloud, lost her fondness for women’s lavatories.

Francis Orme remembered – 1
.

This recollection, when it was presented to me later that day by Peter Bugg, reminded me of one of my own memories. And so it was that even I remembered. Anna Tap’s museum story breathed life into my own first visit to a museum. The museums are different. The museum I remembered was a waxworks museum. I was taken by my father to the waxworks museum shortly after the death of Emma. I was taken there, I suppose, to cheer me up. Emma’s death had saddened me greatly and I was deeply preoccupied in mourning her. I even insisted on being bought liquorice.

But nothing, save the beginnings of my own exhibition, thrilled me quite so much as that afternoon I spent wandering around and between the men and women of wax who loomed over little me. I considered then that since I had no friends the wax museum would be an admirable place to find them. I could spend, I remembered thinking, my days here surrounded by people and never get lonely. I could talk to them, I could give them voices and I could keep still and close my eyes, as I had practised at home with my toys, and imagine that I was made of wax.

I was impressed that day, so much so that I forgot to mourn Emma. Father, I remembered thinking, was impressed too. I vowed that when I had grown beyond child age to adulthood I would get myself employed at the waxworks museum.

Twenty remembered – 5
.

Twenty remembered, earlier that day than my remembrance of the wax museum, that she walked from her homeland all the way to Observatory Mansions. She remembered that when she set off she did not say to the dog Maximilian – We shall carry on until we reach Observatory Mansions. The fact that she arrived at Observatory Mansions was entirely coincidental. On the evening before she took up residence in flat twenty, Twenty and Maximilian had got caught in a dog fight, a particularly bad one, she remembered. That night the dog who fought with them was particularly fearsome. It had scratched Twenty in many regions. But it had, she remembered, chewed poor Maximilian nearly to death. And running from the fight, she remembered in tears, Maximilian had been hit by a car. He howled so when he was hit, she said, and later he whimpered and whined and shivered. She needed, she explained, in her foreign tongue, with Peter Bugg translating, a place of shelter to lick Maximilian’s wounds. But Maximilian, sad Great Dane, died during the night. She buried him, she remembered, under some dried earth outside Observatory Mansions. Then, she recalled, she did not know what to do with herself, nor could she remember why she had walked so far, or in what country it was that she had ended up. Looking around Observatory Mansions she saw the number twenty written on a door and that number seemed to mean something to her, so she decided, she remembered, to stay there. In flat twenty.

Twenty was not laughing when she remembered this.

Claire Higg remembered – 4
.

One morning Alec Magnitt, remembered Claire Higg without invitation, had come out of his flat to go to work and had as usual smiled at Claire Higg as she came out to pick up her
milk bottle of love. But that day Alec Magnitt had said something, he had said – I didn’t know that we had milk delivered here. Oh, yes, Higg said, Higg lied, Higg remembered aloud, I can fix it for you if you want. Would you really? said Magnitt. Absolutely, said Higg. And she did. She bought an extra milk bottle every night, one for Higg, one for Magnitt, and placed one outside her door and one outside Magnitt’s door every morning at seven o’clock. She remembered that morning very clearly, she said, because it had seemed to her on that occasion that Alec Magnitt was in fact flirting with her. He didn’t have to ask me about the milk bottles at all, did he? she asked. And receiving no response she went to her kitchen to pour herself a glass of milk. She said, on returning:

I always love to drink a glass of milk.

Personally, I can’t stand it.

Anna Tap remembered – 3
.

It was Anna Tap who remembered her detestation of milk. Claire Higg looked offended. Anna Tap offered her a cigarette and went on to remember a time when she was sent to orphanages. We lived in dormitories sometimes of only ten, sometimes of fifty or more, she said. One orphanage dormitory she remembered particularly. This one, she said, was so full that there were two girls in every bed, and girls lying between the beds, and girls along the passageways. If you slept on the floor you slept on a mattress, she said, if you slept on a bed you slept without a mattress, lying on the cold stiff planks with only a sheet between those planks and yourself. The sheets were dirty, almost always. And there was only one pillow to each bed or mattress, so that the weakest child in each pairing always went without. We lay down with our heads at opposite ends – if we were found
lying or sleeping together head to head we were beaten. There were windows there, but the windows needed cleaning and were bolted and barred. And during the night the dormitory door was always locked. The beds were wooden and on each bedhead and foot were scratched children’s names or words of hatred or of love or simply scrapes and dents, signatures of those children who could not write. The children might remain in that orphanage or be moved on (at least three quarters would be), and so the priests who ran the orphanage took less care over those potentially temporary boarders, since they could be sent away before they had even had a chance to learn their names. It would have been easy for the priests to sit down and listen to each child’s story, to pass her a handkerchief and comfort her as she went through it. Each story carried a similar charge and passion, the priests could spend their lives listening to them. If they stopped for one child, then others would insist on attention too, and so all were left alone. Cried alone. Covered the already dirty sheets with their snot and tears. The sheets, such flimsy mothers, too weak to resist, would be stretched, ripped, loved and smudged over and then left without a goodbye for the next girl to mistreat. Sometimes we lay there all day as well as night. During the day the door was always open. From the door a stone passageway could be seen and, every now and then, other children, better dressed than us, Anna Tap remembered, would pass. Adults passed too: priests, cleaning women, doctors. But only the other children looked in and they never stopped to speak, offer comforting words or insults because on a wooden stool in the doorway sat an orderly. The orderly was a well-built man in his twenties. He sat there on those days and in those hours when we were forced to stay in the dormitory. He sat with a paper, reading it through and through, starting with the sports pages and then working backwards. He only looked up if one of us approached the door. Then he would
point the child back to her bed or stand up filling the whole door frame.