What Was Promised (47 page)
Authors: Tobias Hill
‘Can’t do it, can I? I’m for Romford. Try Trafalgar Square, you’ll still catch someone if you’re lucky . . .’
He’s already starting away when Michael grabs the open window. ‘Shoreditch. You can do me that,’ he says, and when the driver glances down at his hand, ‘I’ll make it worth it.’
He gets in, leans back into leather. Eros wheels above him. In the blissful dark, as they start eastwards, he closes his eyes. He’d like to drowse, but his thoughts still nag, as if he’s forgotten or neglected something. He thinks of those he has left behind, Dora, his boys, his girls.
‘Long day, sir?’ a voice asks, and he opens his eyes to see the driver’s slot open, his face streetlit, in profile. ‘Not exactly the same thing, Shoreditch and Highbury. Got friends down there, have you?’
‘Good friends,’ Michael says, ‘good family,’ and the man peers back, one-eyed, measuring: it isn’t any of his business, so long as he gets paid.
‘Where am I dropping you, then?’
‘Home,’ Michael says, and the man laughs, none too kindly.
‘So where’s home, when it’s at home?’
‘The Buildings.’
‘Listen, I’m not being funny, but if you can’t tell me somewhere proper I can’t take you anywhere.’
‘Columbia Buildings,’ Michael says, scowling to remember, ‘Columbia Road.’
‘That’s more like it. You see, that wasn’t so hard, sir, was it? Now we’re both getting somewhere.’
He gazes out. They’re passing from the Strand into Fleet Street, Fleet Street to Ludgate Hill, leaving Westminster behind, entering into London according to the old boundaries, shadowing the unseen, guiding permutations of the river.
Southwards, between the buildings, the air is thickening, acquiring luminosity. It takes him a moment to realise what he’s seeing. A tide of mist is rising off the Thames. Look at that! he thinks. It’s like the old days. There was mist like that in the beginning, in the mornings, when he rose and went to work, his barrow elbow-deep in flowers.
He thinks, where am I going, now? Is it the street of flowers, then? He doesn’t mind. It hardly matters. Wherever he goes, he ends alone.
‘It’s always the last job,’ the driver is saying, eyes on the road, beyond appeal. ‘Always the last one does my head in. The state I see people in, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. I mean look at you, sir. How old are you? Old enough to know better, I’d call you. Older, greyer and none the wiser. No offence, I’m only saying. People should look out for themselves, look after number one. It’s not like anyone else will if you don’t, is it? Not these days.’
Momentarily they pass into some overarching darkness. A face looms up in Michael’s window. It is shark-like, monstrous: big-nosed, small-eyed, a thin-lipped mouth made for tearing morsels. They are out into lamplit night again before he recognises the features as shadowed burlesques of his own.
He thinks, am I a monster, then? The crowd outside the cemetery gates – the ghosts – they’d call him that, no doubt – and can he say for sure they’re wrong? After all, no one in Michael’s life has frightened him half as much as he frightens himself.
The driver is no longer talking to him, is remonstrating with the traffic. ‘Lanes!’ he yells, ‘lanes – yes, you, you numpty! Out of it. Get out of it!’
Michael no longer listens. He is dreaming with his eyes open. It is he who is driving. He turns from the road behind to that which still lies ahead. The dark woman stands in his path, between him and his deliverance.
She is stopped in the street of flowers, one arm bent to her hip. She is looking at him across forty years. Her young man is there beside her. He is at the last stall, buying flowers. They have come halfway across the world. They are all done up in their Sunday best, Clarence and Bernadette, as if they have just been to church, though it is not church they leave behind.
She is very beautiful. Michael never saw, but it is clear to him now. It is as if, in this small, late hour, something dull and ill falls from his eyes. Even heavy with child – more than ever, with child – Bernadette Malcolm shines. She has a dignity he has never possessed and which, now, he never will; golden-rayed, unrationed, pure. Her eyes are wide. Her smile of pain has had no time to fade.
Michael closes his eyes. His heart aches in his chest. Motes of light dance on his lids – glitterball afterimages – and then even they are gone, and there is just the void again, unrelieved, unsatisfied, still waiting to be filled.
Thanks are due to the Arts Council of Great Britain, for financial support; to John Woolrich, for a place of retreat; and to Helen Garnons-Williams, Victoria Hobbs and Hannah Donat, for everything.
Tobias Hill was born in London. In 2003 the
TLS
nominated him as one of the best young writers in Britain. In 2004 he was selected as one of the country’s Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the
Sunday Times
Young Writer of the Year. His collection of stories,
Skin
, won the
Pen
/Macmillan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize.
What Was Promised
is his fifth novel.
Year of the Dog
Midnight in the City of Clocks
Skin
Zoo
Underground
The Love of Stones
The Cryptographer
Nocturne in Chrome & Sunset Yellow
The Lion Who Ate Everything
The Hidden
‘Hill is among the most notable talents of his generation’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hill merges all the dynamics of a thriller – a riveting page-turning plot – with crisply poetic observation’
The Times
‘He writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world’
Observer
Order your copy
By phone: +44 (0) 1256 302 699
By email:
[email protected]
Delivery is usually 3 to 5 working days
Free postage and packaging for orders over £20
Online:
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury/fiction/
Prices and availability subject to change without notice
‘A beautifully paced thriller’
Observer
‘A wonderful novel’
Daily Telegraph
‘An elaborate mystery along the lines of
The Magus
or
The Secret History
, and a sustained meditation on the special ethics of terrorism in ancient and modern times’
Guardian
Order your copy
By phone: +44 (0) 1256 302 699
By email:
[email protected]
Delivery is usually 3 to 5 working days
Free postage and packaging for orders over £20
Online:
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury/fiction/
Prices and availability subject to change without notice
‘Hill is among the most noticeable talents of his generation’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hill, who is also an accomplished poet, writes the kind of fiction that can change the way you look at the world’
Observer
Order your copy
By phone: +44 (0) 1256 302 699
By email:
[email protected]
Delivery is usually 3 to 5 working days
Free postage and packaging for orders over £20
Online:
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury/fiction/
Prices and availability subject to change without notice
‘The first collection of short stories by the poet and critic Tobias Hill could serve as a masterclass in the genre . . . Quite apart from the excellence of their construction and the quality of the writing, these stories, with their many and far-ranging voices, all have a cool, clear beauty’
Sunday Telegraph
‘His prose resonates with the precise, sensuous energy of his poetry. He writes with astonishing assurance’
Observer
‘The poetry of his writing lies in its surprise and precision – a smell of mustard in the flash of a gun, for instance, which would have delighted Nabokov – or an understated lyricism which recalls Raymond Carver . . . Already an award-winning poet,
Skin
establishes Tobias Hill as an important writer of fiction’
The Times
Order your copy
By phone: +44 (0) 1256 302 699
By email:
[email protected]
Delivery is usually 3 to 5 working days
Free postage and packaging for orders over £20
Online:
www.bloomsbury.com/uk/bloomsbury/fiction/
Prices and availability subject to change without notice
