If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (8 page)

I don’t like the sound of those lungs of yours she said, first.

They sound rather unhappy to me she’d said, with the ice-cold searchlight of a stethoscope pressed against his chest, with a concentrated look in her eyes like she was trying to imagine herself inside him.

I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said, do a few tests, make sure it’s nothing untoward. That was what she’d said, untoward, and he remembers thinking it was a strangely old-fashioned word for a young woman like her to be using.

He remembers noticing that she kept the stethoscope in a long black case with polished brass fastenings and an engraved plaque. It had looked like a present from somebody, and he’d thought it was a strange thing to give as a gift, and he’d wondered how long she’d had it, how many unhappy sounds she’d heard through its earpieces.

That was where it started, with unhappy-sounding lungs. I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said. He hadn’t liked the way she’d talked to him, not at first, it had seemed patronising, distant. But now, now that things are how they are, he is glad of her manner. It helps him to hear all that she says, the details, the projections. And he knows.

But his wife, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a thing.

That first time, when he’d returned from the clinic with a thumb-sized plaster over the puncture in his arm, he’d said everything was fine there was nothing to worry about, he was fit as a fiddle. And he’d gone on to prove it, in a way which surprised them both and made her feel much younger than she was. He’d only lied to stop her worrying, he’d only lied because he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. He’d thought the doctor would call him back in, tell him some things about the blood test that he didn’t understand, and then say he should exercise a little more. Cut down on fried foods. Drink less. And his wife does take to worrying easily and he didn’t want her fretting over something so insignificant.

Next door, the young man with the bloodshot eyes begins his packing by taking down his work from the walls. He is ready to leave this house now, he has left his mark here and he is ready to pack his things and leave, so he takes down the papers and photographs and objects that are blutacked and pinned to the walls.

Most of the papers are to do with his work, notes and plans and quotations to help him structure his dissertation, sketches of burning Viking longboats, of prehistoric burial mounds, of Indian funeral pyres, photographs of mahogany coffins with brass handles, of crematorium chimneys. He takes all these pictures down, rubbing away the blu-tac left on the wallpaper, and he puts them into a large red folder with funeral rites from pre-history to post-history written on it in thick black pen. He takes down photocopied sheets of poetry, of religious text, of lecture notes from his archaeology course.

And from a small shelf in the middle of all these papers he takes down an unglazed clay figure, a replica of a
Japanese ceremonial idol, and he wraps it in thin tissue and an old newspaper. He puts it in a box and turns away, he looks out of the window and sees the boy with the tricycle following the twins into number seventeen’s front garden, he looks up and sees someone leaning out of the attic window with a bucket of water.

In his kitchen, the old man refills the kettle with fresh water, and sets it to boil again. He thinks about his wife, and he thinks about what she doesn’t know. He hears shrieking from outside, laughter, children running.

He hadn’t even told her about the second visit to the doctor’s, or the third or the fourth. He’d invented stories, walks around town, bowls matches, shopping trips, surprise meetings with old friends. And once he’d started it had seemed so difficult to stop. There was a time when he could have spoken, after another test they’d done which had taken all day, a complicated thing where they’d smeared him with gel and scanned him like luggage in an airport, and he’d felt that perhaps the time had come when he should say something, make hints, leave clues.

A bloodied handkerchief in the washbasket, an appointment card on the noticeboard.

But he didn’t want to have to admit to having lied to her at all, and he couldn’t bear to think of her worrying and upsetting over him, especially not now that it seems there is nothing really to be done about it. So he knows, and she doesn’t know, and this makes it easier, and this makes it harder.

He knows about the look the doctor had on her face when she’d spoken to him about that first testing of blood, the look she’d tried to hide behind a shuffle of papers and a smile. Well now she’d said, things aren’t exactly one hundred percent the way we’d like them to be, we’d like
to do a little more investigating. I can’t pretend there’s nothing to worry about she’d said, but the sooner we know what’s wrong the sooner we can do something about it, yes? Which had seemed a sensible enough thing to say at the time, except that with each further test they did the likelihood of there being something they could do about it seemed to decrease. And unlike the doctor, he can very much pretend there is nothing to worry about, to his wife at least. All he can do now, it seems, is to protect her from the truth. This is what he thinks.

The kettle begins a low whistle which will soon become a shriek, and as he stands to move towards it he notices that the twins have disappeared. He moves the kettle off the heat and rolls a splash of water around in the pot.

She doesn’t know, as he knows, that after that scan with the gel they’d had him in for what they’d called a lumbar puncture, he hasn’t told her that the needle in his spine felt like a fist sunk into his bone, much as he’s often imagined a bullet might feel. He wore a vest to bed for a month to hide the bruising, bruising which spread across his back like purple flowers opening out their petals, and he could only say he was feeling the cold when she asked him about it. Say he was getting older. Make a joke about it.

In the attic bedroom of number seventeen, the room usually occupied by the tall girl with the glitter round her eyes, the boy with the pierced eyebrow puts down an empty bucket and laughs silently, crouched over, exclaiming a trio of yeses and slapping the palm of one skinny hand with the back of the other. He can hear the children in the street, he thinks maybe he can hear one of them crying a little, he runs his fingers through his short damp hair and laughs again. He looks at the time, it’s early but he’s wide awake now, he looks around the room and
thinks a moment. He looks at the girl’s bed, neatly made, unslept in, he looks at her makeup crammed across the mantelpiece, the framed photos on the wall, the textbooks stuffed under the bed. He puts the bucket back where it came from, carefully lined up under the leaky stain on the ceiling, and he leaves the room, running down the two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, and out the back door, crashing it shut behind him, striding out through the backyard and down the alley, a man on a mission, a smile still wrapped around his face and water still dribbling down the back of his neck.

In his room, upstairs at number eighteen, the young man blinks painfully, turning away from the window and holding the palms of his hands over his eyes for a moment. He takes the clay figure out of the box again, unwraps it, looks at it, runs his fingers over its smooth lines and rough texture.

The small figure is the reason he started working on the dissertation subject he did, the reason he argued with his tutors about the boundaries between archaeology and anthropology, and it’s the reason he wants to travel to Japan as soon as he has finished his course, to see the real things, to see what he has imagined so many times.

The figure comes from a place somewhere south of Tokyo, a place where mothers go when they have lost young children. Very young, as in not even or only just born; the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted. The mothers go to this place, a Buddhist temple on a wooded hillside, and they take tiny pieces of clothing for their ghost children, and gifts, and prayers. He has seen photographs of the temple grounds, and he has spoken to a lecturer who has been there, the lecturer who gave him this replica figure, and it’s a place and a rite that has stuck in his mind.
He imagines them, the mothers, walking up the steps, between soaring bamboo stems and carefully ordered miniature waterfalls, beside pools with carp drifting slowly among the lilies. He imagines them walking slowly, leaving gentle impressions in the gravelled pathways, moving to the place set aside for them, pressing their flat hands together and holding them against their faces, their limbs a triangle pointing skywards, the small space between their fingers filled with a hot breathlessness.

He opens the red folder again and pulls out a postcard of the place, holds it behind the figure, looks at it for the hundredth time. He looks at the figures in the picture, row after row after row, dozens, hundreds of them, identical little six-inch Buddhas, the smooth domes of their heads like pebbles on a beach, numerous, indistinguishable. Some of the figures, towards the back of the picture, look a little weathered, but mostly they are new and clean. None of them were more than a year old when the picture was taken, and when he goes to see for himself there will be a new set of figures not more than a year old.

He turns over the postcard, to remind himself of what he always thinks when he looks at this picture, he reads the words he wrote when he first saw it, the words in thick black ink, they are all named it says, each one of them has a name.

He turns it back again, looks closer. Some of the figures are dressed up, in traditional woollen caps and shawls, or in baseball jerseys, or with tiny coloured parasols to protect them from the sun. There is one with an unused Bugs Bunny bib strung enormously around its neck. At their feet are offerings, comforts. Packets of sweets. Money. A yo-yo.

He puts the postcard back in the folder, he takes down a photograph of Graceland, he takes down scraps of paper
with marker-pen diagrams and spidercharts, he tries to rub more blu-tac from the wall.

In his kitchen, the old man measures out the tea-leaves, drops them into the pot, fills it with boiling water. He sets out a tray, two cups, two saucers, a small jug of milk, a small pot of sugar, two teaspoons. He breathes heavily as his hands struggle up to the high cupboards, fluttering like the wings of a caged bird.

His wife doesn’t know, as he has known for weeks now, that any treatment they will be able to offer him will be, as the doctor had said, with a steady gaze and a hand to his arm, only in the form of palliative care. You do understand what that means don’t you she’d said, not even blinking, you do understand? And he’d looked straight back at her, holding her professional eye contact, and said yes, thankyou doctor, I do understand, yes. And he’d coughed, hard, repeatedly, spraying blooded phlegm into his handkerchief as if to prove how much he understood.

Yes, thankyou doctor, I understand.

Things are not exactly one hundred percent the way we would like them to be.

He slips a tea-cosy over the pot and stands by the window a moment.

He sees a young man sitting on the front garden wall of number seven, one of the foreign students it looks like, holding a pad of large paper, staring at the houses opposite.

He sees a dog trotting along the middle of the road, a bald patch across one shoulder, an unevenness in its stride.

He sees a construction crane rising up above the houses away to the right, a few streets away, stretching its neck over the rooftops like an anglepoise lamp.

He picks up the tray and carries it through to his wife.

And so today I’m back on the telephone.

I’m listening to my mother talking, and I’m waiting for the right moment to interrupt.

I know that I have to tell her, I know that I will be able to tell her if I use the right words at the right moment.

I know what the right words are, I’ve been sitting here for hours, choosing and unchoosing.

And I know that I need help now, that in spite of everything my mother is the person to ask.

I’m scared, I have always been scared at times like this, waiting to say something, waiting to be told off.

Falling off the garden wall, and she says what the hell were you doing up there anyhow while she cleans the graze and presses a bandage around it.

Dropping my dinner on the floor, and she shouts at me and sends me to bed, and when she brings me a sandwich later I throw it out of the window.

My dad, saying nothing at these times, averting his eyes, folding his hands.

I remember my dad taking me to school, when I was very young, when my mother was ill.

The feel of his huge hand wrapped around mine, rough and hard and warm.

The length of his strides, and having to run to keep up.

The very cold days when he’d wrap his scarf around my face until it almost covered my eyes, and when I breathed in I could smell him in my mouth, damp cigarettes and bootwax and the same smell as his hair when he said goodnight.

I remember that once he had to take me early so that he
could get to the shops before work, and I went and hid in the corner of the playground, behind the bins, with the scarf wrapped completely around my head like a mask.

I remember how safe I felt, wrapped up like that, blinded.

He didn’t say anything during those walks to school, but I used to look forward to them, I used to be secretly and ashamedly pleased if my mother didn’t appear for breakfast, impatient to leave the house.

I wonder if he’ll say anything now.

I wonder if he’ll turn away from the television, come to the phone, say something.

I listen to her talking, and I remember those times she was ill, those strange blotches on her otherwise busy life.

I remember the way it would go almost unmentioned, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

As though there was nothing to be concerned about.

I remember having to creep into her room to say goodnight, her puffed red face turning to me from amongst the pillows and the blankets, the curtains closed and a desklamp pointing up at her from the bedside table like a stagelight.