Signs of Life (16 page)

I remember going into the chief executive’s office one day. This woman was a role model for me, so normally I liked going to see her, but I was tired all the time by
then, working too hard. She was on the phone when I entered, motioned me to sit and swung her own chair round to face the window as she finished the call. My exhaustion surely affected how I saw
things, but all I saw was a grey woman in a grey office on a grey day: grey skin, grey hair, grey suit, grey voice. The sky was the same colour as the walls inside so that it didn’t look like
outside. At that moment it didn’t even seem possible that there was such a thing as outside.

On dull days here, the rooms in the flat opposite are as dark as caves and I think they are empty. Then I see something white and shiny move across a back wall like a thin neon
ghost and I can just make out the faint outline of a body underneath. These vests, with the fluorescent strips, are the only protective clothing they wear. They work with their bare hands. I
suppose they could be wearing steel toe-capped boots but I have never seen any of them wear a helmet. Today they are working on the roof. They stride nonchalantly across it, attaching hat shaped
vent covers. The roof now looks ridiculous, dotted with silly little white hats, but I know I will get used to them and stop seeing them soon enough. If the builders fell they would die. They
don’t look like they want to die. They look like they believe they are invincible super-heroes. From that height – five storeys, if you count the roof as a level – helmets
probably wouldn’t be much protection.

Behind them, on a much bigger building site a few streets away, there’s an enormous crane. It reaches up into the sky like a giant ladder you could never climb, or part of a huge steel
ship. On one side of the crane, at the top of the mast, there is a cabin and a platform, and from the platform, there is a jib, longer than the mast itself. The lifting hook is attached by cables
and via wheels and pulleys to the top of the jib. These cables look very heavy. When the crane is lifting they go taut, and when the crane is idle they dip into an elegant curve, which contrasts
with all the straight lines and sharp angles.

I can see the man in the cabin. He is always alone up there, in his bubble among the clouds. I imagine that it is the same man every day but I have no way of knowing this because I am not close
enough to distinguish any of his features, nor to get an idea of his height or build. I can make out the colours of his clothing. Today, and most days, he is wearing pale blue jeans and a white
T-shirt. I can see him put his hand to his head. A lot of the time he just sits there but I can see him if he leans forward or stands up. And I can see his chair, at night, empty.

I convinced myself that I still loved Johnny. We got back together after a small party at my flat. Johnny arrived late, already drunk. He started a fire in the kitchen by
spilling a bottle of whiskey and then knocking over a candle so that there was a patch of flames, which scarred the work surface. It was an accident, if you believe in those. Anyway, he stayed late
and missed his last train. Johnny and I stayed up drinking and talking until it was light. We passed out in bed together, and later that morning, with terrible hangovers, we made love.

They seem to have an awful lot of breaks over there. Maybe they have to wait for other people to complete things or for deliveries or for things to dry or go hard, maybe, in
this way, waiting is part of the job. Sometimes they barely seem to be doing any work at all, and yet visible progress is being made on the flat. More progress than I am making. Often, I will get
down a couple of hundred words and then notice a dragging in my stomach that is getting more insistent and I stop, knowing I am veering away from the curve, and by more than a few millimetres. At
other times, when I am working well and the builders, or some of them, are also engaged and busy, I feel a sort of companionship-in-work with them.

Johnny once woke me when it was still dark and trundled me over to a window because he thought we could watch the sunrise together; he had got up to go to the toilet and seen a
glow on the horizon. We stood there for ages, getting cold, waiting for the dawn. Johnny had his arms around me, mainly to prop me up because I was half asleep. I finally realized what we were
watching was not dawn but a fixed light on a crane some distance away. I told him and we went back to bed.

I was finding work increasingly stressful; I don’t now think it had got any harder, but my ability to cope was dwindling. Often I would find myself dizzy and anxious and
I would fear a panic attack or worse, but usually the problem was simply that I had a hangover, had drunk too much coffee and not had enough to eat.

One day, I had been ranting about something and stalked out of the office. I walked around the block and smoked. On the shady side of the pavement, coming towards me, were a mother and small
child. The child had a toy puppy on a lead and he and his mother were dawdling along, pretending to walk the puppy. The mother kept glancing up to see if they had been noticed. My anger flooded in.
I wanted to kick that puppy clean out of that child’s hand, not so much to make the child cry, though that wouldn’t have bothered me, but more to rid the mother of her bovine
contentedness. The mother’s eyes found mine, aren’t we adorable, her look said, and oh, the urge was strong, to pitch my sharp toe into the toy and whip it away. The mother quickly
looked down; she had seen something deeply wrong in me. I imagined one long strong kick, the kind of kick that would have scored goals, the toy puppy describing a high arc and coming to land in the
middle of the hot dusty road with a soft but satisfying
thud
. There is violence in me. I don’t know how much.

This is what it is like to have a secret; it is like hiding a pebble in your fist and having to remember to keep holding it all the time, because if you drop it other people
will see and you will be found out. It’s like being at the end of a long, satisfying day at the beach, when the whole of you should be spread out to dry in the sun, relaxed and open –
but with a secret, there’s always one hand clenched. It’s lonely. Many affairs must continue way past their natural end because of this loneliness, especially if the two lovers are the
only ones who know. If they end the affair, they don’t have anyone else to share the secret with.

Confession is not always an impulse towards honesty; telling the truth can be selfish. When I told Johnny about Carl, I thought I was being honest but really I just wanted to unburden
myself.

Carl fascinated me because he was new to me. Johnny had become my standard for what a man was like and it was a revelation that there were other, saltier, versions of maleness.
I was interested in everything: the length of his arms, the breadth of his hands, the depth of his voice. But there was one early autumn day when we visited a beach together, the third and last
time, and he knew by then that I was looking past him, at any available horizon, trying, failing, to make out the difference between the flat grey sea and the flat grey sky.

We walked along the beach, which was not deserted. I remember that he was wearing a denim jacket. On the sand, close to the shoreline, I saw a wallet and bent over to pick it up. Inside there
was a small amount of money, two credit cards and a card with the owner’s name and address. When I looked up from my find to tell Carl, he was standing a little way off. I noticed that he was
standing weirdly, looking at me. His posture was like a vulture; shoulders hunched over in a tight curl and his head sticking up and out. His face was screwed up in apparent concentration. Then I
saw his belt undone and the top of his trousers open, his hand inside, moving fast. I turned and walked quickly away.

My alarm clock broke. Actually it was Johnny’s alarm clock, but anyway it broke, and I discovered that it was possible to book an alarm call: you phone a service, tell
them what time you want to get up, and your phone rings at that time in the morning and someone, a real person, would say: This is your alarm call, and I would say: Thank you, and then me and the
real person would say goodbye to each other, and it was a little bit like having someone there with you to wake you up: a little bit, a tiny little bit, like not being alone.

I left Carl on the beach and travelled home alone to my empty flat, arriving late, and went straight to bed with a bottle of red wine. It was cold. I wore a jumper, scarf and
socks and pulled the duvet up to my chest. I drank too much of the wine, and I meant to. I didn’t read anything, didn’t listen to any music, just sat in bed, drinking, smoking, trying
not to think about Carl on the beach but thinking a lot about Carl on the beach and how it had become such a mess with him. The cold white walls reflected the city light. I looked out from my
crow’s-nest bed at the wooden floorboards and heard the city roar like waves pouring onto a far off shore. And I was adrift, a drunken sailor.

When you booked the alarm call, it was also a real person. But the person you spoke to at night was never the same person who called to wake you in the morning, which was a
shame because having spoken to someone just before sleeping it would have been comforting to have the same person wake you. I often got the same night time person, a man. He had a nice voice. I was
usually drunk, and he must have heard the alcohol sloshing around my words but he never rushed me when I was prevaricating over a slight variation in my wake up time. I had him for a long stretch
– four or five weeks in a row. Foolishly, I felt I was getting to know him. One night I even said to this man that he was becoming a friend.

You don’t need a friend. You need an alarm clock, he replied. He didn’t sound unkind. In fact, he sounded deeply kind, but embarrassment seared me anyway. Embarrassment and blind,
drunken panic, because I didn’t know, couldn’t think, had absolutely no idea where I could buy an alarm clock.

I don’t know where to get one, I said, and hung up.

I wrapped up the wallet I found on the beach and posted it back to its owner, with a note explaining where I had found it. A week or so later, I received a letter from the
owner. The letter thanked me for returning the wallet with credit cards and money intact and said that the enclosed cheque – for double the sum I had returned – was a reward for my
honesty.

After most of my long days at work, I would arrive back at the flat, pour myself a glass of wine or vodka and read, mainly short stories and poetry. I wasn’t reading
novels because I didn’t want that kind of continuity; I didn’t want to carry over any part of any narrative from one day to the next. Sometimes I read poetry in languages I didn’t
fully understand – with a sense of the meaning, but reaching for it, grasping after it. One of my other pleasures was smoking, but I didn’t dwell or savour; I narrowed it down to
lighting up and the first few drags – after that I lost interest. I read like I smoked: fixating on my new favourite in its entirety to begin with then honing in on the exact phrase or
phrases that gave me the fix, then reading only for those, discarding the rest and when that poem had been emptied out, moving on to the next. I liked this line, from Nerval, ‘ma seule
étoile est morte’ (my only star is dead), and this one, from Virgil, ‘Sic itur ad astra’ (Thus is the way to the stars). I had enough French to work out the line from
Nerval, but struggled with the whole poem. I never studied Latin so I can only read it in translation and I have only ever read a few lines of Virgil. Not knowing exactly what the lines mean
transforms the words into objects on a shelf, little bottles of amber.

Emily came soon after she heard from Delilah and Shirin. She was brisk. Come on, we’ll make a list, she said.

How is a list going to help? It won’t solve anything, I said.

Lists are great, very comforting – one thing after another in a nice straight line, said my sister.

I thought that writing a list in this situation was like trying to catch a storm in a butterfly net – this must have been only a few weeks before Carl’s death and though nobody
guessed that this was what was coming, the feel of something dreadful was hanging, low, in the air. Undaunted by the threatening weather, my sister set to work like the fairy godmother arriving
just after the wicked fairy has cast her spell; she can’t undo the magic, but she can soften it a little.

She looked in the fridge and tutted. She listed the days of the week and against each day she wrote what I would have for breakfast, lunch and dinner, which we consulted on, and then this list
branched into a detailed shopping list, and she summoned Harry, her smooth new man, to come along in his sleek black colt of a car and charged him with the shopping, which he did, generously adding
some ideas of his own, mainly chocolate but also one bottle of very good red wine, which was brave of him because I think he had been instructed to omit alcohol. Harry delivered the shopping
discreetly, and left, which, had I been paying any heed, was a clue to how serious things were, or how seriously my sister and friends were taking things.