Etiquette for a Dinner Party (23 page)

18
He works hard to contour the land, levelling the tee and green with
a blade on his tractor. When he has done all that is possible with big machinery,
he gets down on his belly and reaches wide to scrape the dirt smooth flat
with a long sewing ruler.

He moves across the surfaces in the manner of a rolling pin: arms straight, hard up against his sides, so as not to ruin the fine job with his footprints.

Angela is inside, crafting golf clubs out of brass fireside instruments. She has unscrewed all eight bed knobs off the two beds in the house, and she whittles them into golf club heads, using the tiny nail files from his wife's manicure set. She attaches the heads to the shafts with very strong glue.

While he smoothes out the first hole's final imperfections, Angela tries her swing. She slices to the right, but he believes she could sort it out with practice.

19
'Are you bored?' he asks her one day, just testing. 'Do you want
to go for a drive to the coast?'

'Oh no,' she says. 'What would be the point of that?'

20
At the supermarket, he carries a list. A full stock-up is in order,
Angela says. How he has survived for so long on canned fruit and frozen Hereford,
she has no idea.

'Hey, mister, I remember you,' says the girl with the uninterested face and black rings around her eyes. 'You're not here for boxes are you? Because I already gave you seven. That's all you're allowed. That's the rules.'

He stares at the girl, wondering what she is talking about.

Angela has written: fresh fruit and vegetables, fax paper, cheese and ice cream. And vitamins for them both, to help them stay strong while they finish the golf course. Her handwriting is exactly the same as his wife's: the neat, sloping script, the tiny hearts she used for full stops.

It is hard being the guardian of the museum.

First, the entrance must be watched at all times, in case a visitor arrives. My desk is in the foyer, to the right of the door — it is a nineteenth-century oak rolltop with twenty little compartments useful for storing small items of documentation. This type of desk has been designed to sit hard against a wall but I have been obliged to turn its back towards the door. Thus when I sit at the desk attending to museum business, as now, I can also see the entrance.

The foyer is a cavernous area — there is no ceiling as such, only steel girders high above me, supporting the roof. The floor is bare concrete. The foyer becomes stiflingly hot in summer, due to the absence of windows. I chill to the bone in winter, sitting at the desk. I bring a little heater to work during the coldest months.

The museum building is a corrugated iron shed, on the rear half of a neglected piece of land in an industrial park. The front of this land also has a building on it. That building was once a warehouse, stacked to the rafters with brown cardboard boxes full of I know not what. But the boxes have gone, their contents sold, I presume. The front building is derelict; the windows are smashed and the door has disappeared completely. It is, most recently, home to drug addicts who come and go. They sleep, fight, and share their needles there.

The museum building has no sign to indicate its purpose, at the roadside or on the shed itself. It is unpainted, and rust is beginning to show in places. I see that the iron sheeting is disintegrating where it meets the woodwork of the window frames. The hinges on the grey tin door are also falling to pieces; one good wrench and the door could come completely off.

These matters are not the responsibility of the guardian. It is difficult enough to watch the entrance, without conducting building inspections on my way to and from work.

As if all this is not difficult enough, I must protect a collection that officially does not exist — make sure precious items from another time are never seen or touched or damaged. Doing my job is not an easy task. To do it well, I must be seen at all times to be not doing it at all.

I have created all manner of untruths to cope with being the guardian, and now I tell them without flinching, without even noticing that I am doing it. My work has turned me into a competent, compulsive liar.

As a person of the faith, I struggle with this daily. Of course, I must continue telling the lies in the course of the struggle. This leads me to question whether my claim to be a person of the faith is in fact the lie.

It is too much to be dealing with.

So.

From nine to five, Monday to Friday, I sit at my desk, watch for visitors, and attend to museum business. I also often come to work on Saturdays, if I am not busy. A visitor is as likely to arrive at the museum on a Saturday as on a weekday. .

The museum is always closed on Sundays, when I attend church.

My place at church is in the third row from the front at the left end of the pew. It is the seat nearest the wall. From there I have an unfettered view of proceedings, and am not bothered by people moving to approach the altar.

This might suggest that I am an attention-seeker — that I need to be close to the front, where the action takes place. But this is not the case. Those that sit in the third pew also comprise the back row of the congregation. The same goes for the right-hand side of the church. There are only two occasions during the year when more than six pews are filled — Easter Sunday and Christmas Day. There are fifty-seven regular church-goers, and we arrive early on those days to ensure our places are not taken by others.

This might suggest we are a community of a sort, that we plan what happens at church. Not so. We do not meet each other outside the church service, or at least I do not meet any of the others. I cannot speak for them. Upon arrival at church on Sunday we are civil to each other; nod to say hello, and trade a handshake at the appropriate moment in the service. But that is it. From Monday to Saturday, I am too busy with museum business to participate in parochial activities.

There was a time when this was not the case. When I was a child, the church conducted its business in an entirely different way. It would be fair to say, looking back, that the services were primal — savage, almost — in nature. This was before we learned how to express our devotion to Him in more sophisticated ways. We are attuned now to the mores and expectations of the modern world. There are not many of us that remember.

From time to time, the size of our congregation decreases by one. A parishioner will be present one Sunday, absent the next. I see the gaping space on the particular pew where he or she used to sit and try to recall that person. Elderly, frail, stooped is what I always remember. Head down in supplication; pale, veined hands clasped together around the black prayer book. Maybe an uncontrolled spasm of the hands as he or she opened pages to the right place. Then, over weeks and months, the space on the pew slowly disappears. The gap is filled from both sides, extra centimetres stolen for hats, gloves, scarves, wider buttocks. Such is the nature of worship.

It is at church, there, in His arms, that I am loved, excused of my failings, spiritually protected. Every Sunday we bow our heads and thank Him for the good things in our lives, and we ask Him for protection against the bad things that may be visited upon us. We thank Him for showing us the way, for helping us understand that miracles do not have to be witnessed in order to be true.

We pray that more people may see His light; that they might come through the doors and fill the empty pews. It is during this period of reflection and devotion that I also quietly ask Him to forgive me for the lies I tell. .

I sit at my desk at the museum and attend to business. It is mid-summer and the air inside the foyer is thick and slow.

To the left of the entrance door is a black wrought iron coat stand. It has a capacity of eight coats and there is room, in the little basket around the bottom of it, for several umbrellas. It has a single coat on it, my grey windcheater. The only other thing in the foyer is the postcard stand. The stand, also constructed of some type of black steel, is a two-sided affair, each side holding sixteen stacks of postcards in two columns of eight. It swivels on its solid black base, so that one may see the full range of postcards without taking a step.

There is no reason to have a swivel base postcard stand. All the postcards are the same. They feature a black and white photo of the museum's exterior. The photo has been taken from a strange angle — almost an aerial shot, ten metres above the ground — and there is no sign in the photo of the building next door or the activity that takes place there. Some of the postcards at the front of the stacks are becoming yellow and curled around the edges; I am obliged, as guardian, to periodically take the front ones out and put them at the back of the postcard stacks.

There is incoming and outgoing correspondence. I have received a letter from the postcard company, asking whether I might consider having a new photograph of the museum taken and the postcard updated.

I draft a reply to this offer, explaining that we are still well-stocked with the previous postcard. I assure the supplier that as soon as I sell the final twenty, I will be in touch to reorder, or maybe discuss the idea of a new image.

As I write, there is a rattle at the door. Someone outside is trying to enter the museum.

A visitor.

I know that the door is locked, so I continue drafting my letter. But this person is persistent. I see the door handle moving up, down, up, down, jerking. The door's hinges, from this side, slide a little further with each tug of the handle.

This is a maintenance issue. Not my responsibility.

I walk to the door, unlocking it with one of two keys attached to a silver chain around my neck. I open the door to find a man standing on the step. It is difficult to focus in the bright daylight; I must be squinting at him because he asks me:

'Did I wake you?'

'No,' I reply.

'Is this the museum?' he asks.

I am seeing clearly now. I appraise his appearance. He is an older man, perhaps seventy. His clothing is typical of his generation: grey flannel trousers, sharply pressed; a white shirt under a dark green pullover with a v-neck. He wears black leather shoes polished to a shine.

'Yes it is,' I say.

'I would like to visit. May I visit?'

'No,' I say. 'I'm so sorry. The museum is closed at the moment. For inventory purposes. You will have to come back another time.'

The old man nods and begins to turn away.

'Wait a minute,' I say, remembering the letter I was writing. 'Would you like to buy a postcard instead?'

His face lights up, I can see he is pleased the visit has not been wasted.

'Yes,' he says. 'Yes I would, that would be lovely.'

I go inside and take one of the better postcards off the rack. I use my handkerchief to wipe the dust off, and take it to the man at the door.

'Thank you, thank you so much,' he says. 'How much is it?'

'Twenty-five cents,' I reply. This has always been the price.

He shuffles along the path towards the road, head down, looking at his postcard.

'I'm sorry,' I say again to his back, and I watch to make sure that he gets past the drug addicts safely. Then I return to my correspondence. .

My first memory of church is clear. It was winter, and the church was still surrounded by countryside. The city had not yet crawled out to surround and suffocate it. Mother and I left home early on that Sunday morning, before light. She lifted me into the back of the old car, wrapped a prickly blanket around me to keep me warm until the heater functioned properly. Underneath, I wore my very best clothes — my ironed shirt stiff with starch, my pullover freshly washed, my black shorts and my long white socks with little garters made out of hat elastic. Nothing but the best for Him, Mother said. I drifted in and out of sleep as Mother drove into the breaking day, singing hymns to warm her vocal chords.

We had to leave early otherwise we would miss out on a good seat.

There were prayers and blessings, and then it started. One by one, hurt people made their way to the front of the church. There were walking sticks, crutches, even wheelchairs, pushed by people with tears in their eyes. I sat very still. Though Mother told me not to, I couldn't help but stare at the poor people dragging their sick bodies forward.

I tried to spot the exact injury or deformity of each person. One old man dragged himself along using a single crutch. He had one leg that had given up on him; muscle and bone wasted away and what was left trailing behind in his brown trousers like an empty, floppy sack. I stared especially hard at the sick children, because it was less impolite than staring hard at the adults. I stared at the problems they had, and then at their faces. I wanted to know what they thought about me and my fast-running legs and my strong, perfect arms.

When the last of the cripples reached the front of the church, there was a moment of silence. Then the singing began. Louder and louder, the voices of the believers rose into the roof of the church until it seemed to me that the windows might shatter with the strain of it all.