What You Make It (15 page)

Finished, the drawing was like nothing on earth, and I suppose that's exactly what it was. I can't hope to describe it to you, although I've seen it in my dreams many times in the last ten years. You had to be there, on that heavy summer night, had to know what was going on. Otherwise it's going to sound like it was just a drawing.

That tiger was out and out terrifying. It looked so mean and hungry, Christ I don't know what: it just looked like the darkest parts of mankind, the pain and the fury and the vengeful hate nailed down in front of you for you to see, and I just stood there and shivered in the humid evening air.

‘We did him a picture,’ Tom said quietly.

‘Yeah,’ I said, and nodded. Like I said, I know what ‘catharsis’ means and I thought I understood what he was saying. But I really didn't want to look at it much longer. ‘Let's go have a beer, hey?’

The storm in Tom wasn't passed, I could tell, and he still seemed to thrum with crackling emotions looking for an earth, but I thought the clouds might be breaking and I was glad.

And so we walked slowly over to Jack's and had a few beers and watched some pool being played. Tom seemed pretty tired, but still alert, and I relaxed a little. Come eleven most of the guys started going on their way and I was surprised to see Tom get another beer. Pete, Ned and I stayed on, and Jack of course, though we knew our loving wives would have something to say
about that. It just didn't seem time to go. Outside it had gotten pretty dark, though the moon was keeping the square in a kind of twilight and the lights in the bar threw a pool of warmth out of the front window.

Then, about twelve o'clock, it happened, and I don't suppose any of us will ever see the same world we grew up in again. I've told this whole thing like it was just me who was there, but we all were, and we remember it together.

Because suddenly there was a wailing sound outside, a thin cutting cry, getting closer. Tom immediately snapped to his feet and stared out the window like he'd been waiting for it. As we looked out across the square we saw little Billy come running and we could see the blood on his face from there. Some of us got to get up but Tom snarled at us to stay there and so I guess we just stayed there, sitting back down like we'd been pushed. He strode out the door and into the square and the boy saw him and ran to him and Tom folded him in his cloak and held him close and warm. But he didn't come back in. He just stood there, and he was waiting for something.

Now there's a lot of crap talked about silences. I read novels when I've the time and you read things like, ‘Time stood still’ and so on and you think bullshit it did. So I'll just say I don't think anyone in the world breathed in that next minute. There was no wind, no movement. The stillness and silence were there like you could touch them, but more than that: they were like that's all there was and all there ever had been.

We felt the slow red throb of violence from right across the square before we could even see the man. Then Sam came staggering into view waving a bottle like a flag and cursing his head off. At first he couldn't see Tom and the boy because they were the opposite side of the fountain, and he ground to a wavering halt, but then he started shouting, rough jags of sound that seemed to strike against the silence and die instead of breaking it, and he began charging across the square and if ever there was a man with murder in his thoughts then it was Sam McNeill. He was like a man who'd given his soul the
evening off. I wanted to shout to Tom to get the hell out of the way, to come inside, but the words wouldn't come out of my throat and we all just stood there, knuckles whitening as we clutched the bar and stared, our mouths open like we'd made a pact never to use them again. And Tom just stood there too, watching Sam come towards him, getting closer, almost as far as the spot where Tom usually painted. It felt like we were looking out of the window at a picture of something that happened long ago in another place and time, and the closer Sam got the more I began to feel very afraid for him.

It was at that moment that Sam stopped dead in his tracks, skidding forward like in some kids' cartoon, his shout dying off in his ragged throat. He was staring at the ground in front of him, his eyes wide and his mouth a stupid circle. Then he began to scream.

It was a high shrill noise like a woman, and coming out of that bull of a man it sent fear racking down my spine. He started making thrashing movements like he was trying to move backwards, but he just stayed where he was.

His movements became unmistakable at about the same time his screams turned from terror to agony. He was trying to get his leg away from something.

Suddenly, he seemed to fall forward on one knee, his other leg stuck out behind him, and he raised his head and shrieked at the dark skies and we saw his face then and I'm not going to forget that face so long as I live. It was a face from before there were any words, the face behind our oldest fears and earliest nightmares, the face we're terrified of seeing on ourselves one night when we're alone in the dark and It finally comes out from under the bed to get us.

Then Sam fell on his face, his leg buckled up and still he thrashed and screamed and clawed at the ground with his hands, blood running from his broken fingernails as he twitched and struggled. Maybe the light was playing tricks, and my eyes were sparkling anyway on account of being too paralysed with fear to even blink, but as he thrashed less and less it became harder and
harder to see him at all, and as the breeze whipped up stronger his screams began to sound a lot like the wind. But still he writhed and moaned and then suddenly there was the most godawful crunching sound and then there was no movement or sound anymore.

Like they were on a string, our heads all turned together and we saw Tom still standing there, his coat flapping in the wind. He had a hand on Billy's shoulder and as we looked we could see that Mary was there too now and he had one arm round her as she sobbed into his coat.

I don't know how long we just sat there staring but then we were ejected off our seats and out of the bar. Pete and Ned ran to Tom but Jack and I went to where Sam had fallen, and we stared down, and I tell you the rest of my life now seems like a build up to and a climb down from that moment.

We were standing in front of a chalk drawing of a tiger. Even now my scalp seems to tighten when I think of it, and my chest feels like someone punched a hole in it and tipped a gallon of ice water inside. I'll just tell you the facts: Jack was there and he knows what we saw and what we didn't see.

What we didn't see was Sam McNeill. He just wasn't there. We saw a drawing of a tiger in purples and greens, a little bit scuffed, and there was a lot more red round the mouth of that tiger than there had been that afternoon and I'm sure that if either of us could have dreamed of reaching out and touching it, it would have been warm too.

And the hardest part to tell is this. I'd seen that drawing in the afternoon, and Jack had too, and we knew that when it was done it was lean and thin.

I swear to God that tiger wasn't thin anymore. What Jack and I were looking at was one fat tiger.

After a while I looked up and across at Tom. He was still standing with Mary and Billy, but they weren't crying anymore. Mary was hugging Billy so tight he squawked and Tom's face looked calm and alive and creased with a smile. And as we
stood there the skies opened for the first time in months and a cool rain hammered down. At my feet colours began to run and lines became less distinct. Jack and I stood and watched till there were just pools of meaningless colours and then we walked slowly over to the others not even looking at the bottle lying on the ground and we all stayed there a long time in the rain, facing each other, not saying a word.

Well that was ten years ago, near enough. After a while Mary took Billy home and they gave us a little wave before they turned the corner. The cuts on Billy's face healed real quick, and he's a good-looking boy now: he looks a lot like his dad and he's already fooling about in cars. Helps me in the store sometimes. His mom ain't aged a day and looks wonderful. She never married again, but she looks real happy the way she is.

The rest of us just said a simple goodnight. Goodnight was all we could muster and maybe that's all there was to say. Then we walked off home in the directions of our wives. Tom gave me a small smile before he turned and walked off alone. I almost followed him, I wanted to say something, but in the end I just stayed where I was and watched him go. And that's how I'll always remember him best, because for a moment there was a spark in his eyes and I knew that some pain had been lifted deep down inside there somewhere.

He walked and no one has seen him since, and like I said it's been about ten years now. He wasn't there in the square the next morning and he didn't come in for a beer. Like he'd never been, he just wasn't there. Except for the hole in our hearts: it's funny how much you can miss a quiet man.

We're all still here, of course, Jack, Ned, Pete and the boys, and all the same, if even older and greyer. Pete lost his wife and Ned retired but things go on the same. The tourists come in the summer and we sit on the stools and drink our cold beers and shoot the breeze about ballgames and families and how the world's going to shit and sometimes we'll draw close and talk about a night a long time ago, and about paintings and cats,
and about the quietest man we ever knew, wondering where he is, and what he's doing. And we've had a sixpack in the back of the fridge for ten years now, and the minute he walks through that door and pulls up a stool, that's his.

Signing with a vehemence that made his lips vibrate, Richard dropped his pen and waved his right hand about in the air. While he waited for the cramp to ease he sipped a mouthful of tepid coffee and gazed vaguely out at the street. The short crescent his house was in started to turn outside his window, and with the trees just beginning to come into leaf looked almost like a little square. A bedraggled old woman with nicotine-stained hair struggled past on the other side of the road, and he watched her as he dredged his mind for any event of the past week which could be pressed into service as a letter-lengthener.

He couldn't think of any, and found the effort both tiring and actively depressing. Instead he settled for a long concluding paragraph, stopping himself at the last moment from including an excuse for the shortness of the letter. He'd used pressing appointments, the lateness of the hour and a desire to catch the post all before, and a letter was a letter, after all. Susan's were only longer than his because she drew from a much wider net of material. Her last letter had included over half a page on a couple he was fairly confident he'd never even heard of, much less met, and he was far from sure how he was supposed to feel about the problems they were having. He'd wondered in the past if there was some subtle point being made in these obscure vignettes, but had never been able to discern one and had long since given up trying.

They did make for long newsy letters though, whereas at less than two sides this was his shortest yet. Still, as they were seeing each other at the weekend, surely it was the thought that counted.

Pushing the completed letter aside, he lit a cigarette and
turned his attention to the other lying on his desk. As he reread it he quickly saw that he was in no position to criticize Susan's letter-writing. The minutiae of his life were all here, interspersed with little reflections and jokes, described in happy detail over five pages. The difference, he realized, was not just due to the fact that he wouldn't be seeing Isobel for almost two weeks. Even the final paragraph was longer, and he hadn't needed to think of padding it out with an excuse.

The chore finally over, he sat back and stared at the two unequal piles of paper on his desk. He hated writing letters, especially by hand. On a word processor you could just let the words flow down, carried forward by the speed of the typing and the momentum of transcription. More importantly, you could go back and fix anything which didn't come out right. Slogging it out by hand was different. For a start it was much slower, and worse, it was uncorrectable. If he was halfway down the second side and a sentence didn't come out right, he couldn't face the idea of tearing up and starting again. Instead he'd try to fix it in the next sentence, taking back streets and B – roads in an effort to cut back towards the point he'd been trying to make. Usually the sense ended up having to stay the night at some motel within striking distance of the intended destination, hoping to make it there the next time. The alternative was coldly planning and drafting, orchestrating a progression of facts in a letter that had duty rather than love between the lines. Neither was ideal, and he wished at least one of them didn't mind getting typewritten letters.

Absently pulling a piece of jotting paper off the desk pad for the checklist, Richard ran his eyes over the letter to Susan a final time. It was okay. He sounded like him in it, at least. Or the him that Susan knew, anyway. He sounded like him in the one to Isobel too, of course, but it was a different him, and he shuddered at the idea of Susan ever finding out that he existed.

As he pulled two envelopes out of the drawer, one blue, the other lilac, the phone went. Richard winced at finding
Mr Baum on the other end, and immediately started feeling guilty. Mr Baum always had that effect on him. Having him as a client was like perpetually sitting in the corridor outside some headmaster's office.

Mr Baum expressed himself keen, even anxious, to know when he was likely to see the preliminary designs for his new stationery. Babbling slightly, Richard rootled through the papers on his desk until he found the work he was supposed to have done for the businessman. By pure chance he'd actually finished it, and his hand went back into the drawer for a manila envelope.

As Mr Baum chuntered on Richard glanced at the clock. To stand any chance of catching a post which would land the work on the man's mat tomorrow morning he would have to leave the house almost immediately, but he couldn't afford to irritate one of his most regular clients still further by chucking him off the phone. So while he made the assorted noises of agreement and contrition which seemed to be all that was required of him he folded the two letters and slipped them into the envelopes, writing Susan's address from memory and copying Isobel's current crashpad from his filofax.

The conversation ended in an amicable draw, with Richard managing to slip in a deft reference to an unpaid invoice. He gathered his various envelopes to him, grabbed his coat and made it as far as the door. Then he went back to the desk, checked all the cigarettes were out in the ashtray, and headed for the door again. Swearing at himself, he then returned to the desk, picked up the ashtray and carried it to the sink. Quickly filling it with water he walked away without looking back, and finally made it out of the flat.

He got to the mailbox at the bottom of the street with a couple of minutes to spare, and lobbed the envelopes through the slot with a feeling of relief. He was about to head back to the flat when he realized that he wasn't half as cold as he'd been expecting. In fact, he saw, the sun was in the sky and there was even a touch of spring in the air. On impulse he decided to take a walk down to the high street, maybe pick up something
different for lunch. What the hell, he thought. Go wild. Buy a scotch egg.

When he reached the high street he slowed from his usual intent stride to a more desultory stroll. This was partly forced upon him by the unusually high numbers of young mothers and old people meandering blinking into the sunlight, and partly an attempt to relax. Susan always said he shouldn't work so hard, and on that she was probably right. He felt tired.

Within a few minutes he was back to walking quickly, barely glancing at the shops as he passed. Something about the street didn't feel right. Both Susan and Isobel had visited him here in the couple of months since he'd moved, and with them the high street had a purpose, a comfortable set of points to amble between. Susan liked to browse in the poster shop, and could never resist a pastry from the Jewish bakery on the other side. Isobel enjoyed poking around in the second-hand bookshop, and resolutely refused to pass the Italian café without going in for a coffee, issuing the laconic waitress with precise but forgivable instructions on how much cocoa powder she'd like on top.

Richard thought he liked the high street, but today it seemed different. Today there was no track for him to follow, no reason for being here. He felt oddly displaced and lost, adrift in a gap between paths. Though the sun was weak his coat was heavy, and before long he was hot and irritable, buffeted by squealing children and peevish tramps. In the end he shopped briefly at the supermarket and turned back for home, feeling bluntly rejected by everything around him, as if he had no place there by himself.

On the way back to the flat he tried to shake himself out of his mood, realizing it was the letters that had started it. Writing them always made him feel depressed, and lonely too.

He knew that some men would think of themselves as pretty flash for having two women to write to, two women who had shared his double bed and lounged swaddled in his worn-out bathrobe in the mornings. Richard didn't. He realized it made him a bit of a bastard, and he didn't like to think of himself
in that way. It didn't seem to fit, somehow. Or he didn't want it to.

It didn't seem to fit because he hadn't courted the situation, and because he felt guilty about it about all the bloody time. He hated the constant undercurrent of potential disaster, hated having to find excuses to put the answering machine on when he was actually worried that the other might call, hated the idea of hurting either of them in any way. Feeling bad wasn't the same as doing something about it, of course, but surely it counted for something.

He really
hadn't
gone looking for the situation, either. Somehow it had just happened. Susan had been his girlfriend since college, on and off. Fair-skinned and blonde, she still lived in Nottingham, wielding a variety of power suits as an up-and-coming solicitor. One of them made the trip to the other about every third weekend, and in between it was letters, phone calls, and mixed memories. Every now and then they talked of changing the situation, but it remained the same, and as time went on neither seemed more inclined to do anything about it.

Isobel was dark with an unruly volley of thick brown hair, and a mouth that seemed always on the verge of a smirk. The first time Richard had seen her had been across the room at a friend's party, and the memory of her grin then could still make him shiver. They had been too drunk to stand by the end of the evening, but somehow they'd managed to swop numbers and meet up for dinner. For five minutes it was strange, and then it was warm, and dark, and very exciting. She was an actress, in the sense that she'd been to drama college and the thing she spent most of her time not doing was acting. At the moment she was in Bristol, rehearsing for a play that seemed increasingly unlikely to ever make it to the stage.

Both girls were slim, and tall, but there any resemblance ended. Susan was solid, dependable, and Richard knew when he could call and find her in. Isobel worked on Martian time, never being where she'd said she would, and calling him at random
times in the small hours to tell him that she loved him. With Susan he went to plays and watched films with subtitles where nothing happened, but with Isobel he prowled drunkenly down alleyways and dark canal banks, trying to keep her in hand as she shouted up at windows and then ran gleefully away. Susan had a time and place for contact, and would never have suddenly clamped her mouth over his in public as Isobel sometimes did, but Susan always knew what he meant, and Isobel sometimes didn't. Susan held his hand and Isobel gripped it, Susan put her arms round his waist and Isobel draped them round his shoulders, Susan smiled at him and Isobel grinned that grin.

So many differences, but in the end there was only one. With Susan there was always a backdrop, a context. Sorting out their problems, forgetting the past, getting back together, putting the bad things behind them: those were the things their dreams were made of. With Isobel everything was new, and different, and nothing had ever gone wrong between them. It was Love, not love, and after two quiet years he didn't think he could give it up now he'd found it again. Just as he couldn't give up the slow, tidal reassurance of shared times and thoughts, the comfort that comes with years and old love.

As he unlocked the flat door Richard made a determined effort to put the whole thing out of his mind. He knew he didn't possess the willpower to deny himself either of them, and five months had passed without either finding out about the other. Okay, yes, he was a bit of a bastard. Maybe even a complete bastard. Fair enough. But let it go on a little longer, he asked quietly: it makes me happy.

After lunch he sat back at his desk and kicked his computer into life. As today was Thursday he had plenty of time to clear his desk before the weekend. An afternoon spent hard at work would leave him comfortably ahead of schedule on his various commitments, which meant that he could take the evening off to watch television or do something equally untaxing. Remembering ahead of time for once that he should go shopping on Friday to get in the kind of food Susan liked, he reached across
to make a note on the deskpad. Then, hand hovering over it, he stopped.

Lying behind his keyboard there was already a piece of jotting paper. For a moment he wondered what it was doing there, and then he knew.

He picked it up and turned it over, and then looked back at the front. There were no marks on the paper. None at all. Quickly, he tilted the monitor of his computer back enough to check if a piece of paper could have slipped underneath it. There was nothing there. He lit a cigarette and picked up the piece of paper again, feeling hollow.

He hadn't done his checklist.

Clasping his hands tightly in front of his face, he tried to remember the ten minutes before he'd left the flat, tried to picture himself doing the list, and perhaps throwing it away. He couldn't, and didn't bother to check the bin. He knew he hadn't done it.

Suddenly it was as if for once there was only one thought in his head, and he went cold with the purest fear, the fear of being found out. Then parts of his mind leapt different ways to huddle up against the wall, taking terrified glances at the fear in the centre. Nothing to do with me, they squealed: someone else's problem. Wide-eyed, he got up and put the kettle on, trying not to pace around the kitchen area as he waited for it to boil.

The checklist had developed slowly, as had his cigarette rituals. It was only in the last couple of years that he'd become so paranoid about leaving a smouldering butt behind that he'd felt compelled to do what he could to ensure they were all out. At first just rigorously re-stubbing all of them had been enough. That was okay, normal, and had only taken a few seconds.

But once the worry had taken root it got worse and worse. After stubbing had come leaving the ashtray in the sink, and then filling the ashtray with water as well. Together with checking and rechecking that all of the windows were locked it took him about five minutes to ever leave the house. Unless he was in a real hurry, like today.

By the time the kettle pinged at him, Richard was not only pacing but rubbing his upper lip with his forefinger as well.

Somehow, and for some reason he didn't understand, he just didn't believe he did things. Setting the alarm clock every night took five minutes of checking and rechecking that the time was right, the alarm time was right, that the alarm time was a.m. not p.m., and that the alarm function was in fact on. He did this time and again, staring at the numerals as if this would somehow make the adjustment more real, more something that he had done.