The World and Other Places (15 page)

‘You don’t know how he came to be in the fridge?’ I shrugged and smiled and tried to disarm her.

‘It’s a big fridge. Don’t you ever find things in the fridge you had forgotten about?’

‘No Tom. Never. I store cheese at the top, and then beer and bacon underneath, and underneath those I keep my weekend chicken, and at the bottom I have salad things and eggs. Those are the rules. It was the same when my husband was alive and it is the same now.’

I was beginning to regard her with a new respect. The Grim Reaper came to call. He took her husband from the bed but left the weekend chicken on the shelf.

O Death, where is thy sting?

My neighbour, still holding my Camus, leaned forward confidentially, her arms resting on the table. She looked intimate, soft, I could see the beginning of her breasts.

‘Tom, have you ever wondered whether you need help?’ She said HELP with four capital letters, like a doorstep evangelist.

‘If you mean the fridge, anyone can make a mistake.’ She leaned forward a little further. More breast.

‘Tom, I’m going to be tough with you. You know what your problem is? You read too many geniuses. I don’t know if Mr K Mew is a genius but the other day you were seen in the main square reading Picasso’s notebooks. Children were
coming out of school and you were reading Picasso. Miss Fin at the library tells me that all you ever borrow are works of genius. She has no record of you ever ordering a sea story. Now that’s unhealthy. Why is it unhealthy? You yourself are not a genius, if you were we would have found out by now. You are ordinary like the rest of us and ordinary people should lead ordinary lives. Like the rest of us, here in Tranquil Gardens.’

She leaned back, her bosom with her.

‘Shall we go and help your mother?’ I said.

Outside, my neighbour walked towards a closed van parked in front of her house. I’d seen her mother a couple of years previously but I couldn’t see her now.

‘She’s in the back Tom. Go round the back.’

My neighbour flung open the back doors of the hired van and certainly there was her mother, sitting upright in the wheel-chair that had been her home and her car. She was smiling a fearful plasticy smile, her teeth as perfect as a cheetah’s.

‘Haven’t they done a wonderful job Tom? She’s even better than Doug, and he was pretty advanced at the time. I wish she could see herself. She never guessed I’d laminate her. She’d be so proud.’

‘Are those her own teeth?’

‘They are now Tom.’

‘Where will you put her?’

‘In the garden with the flowers. She loved flowers.’

Slowly, slowly, we heaved down mother. We wheeled her over the swept pavement to the whitewashed house. It was afternoon coffee time and a lot of neighbours had been invited to pay their respects. They were so respectful that we were outside talking plastic until the men came home. My neighbour gets an incentive voucher for every successful lamination she introduces. She reckons that if Newton will only do it her way, she’ll have 75 percent of her own lamination costs paid by the time she dies.

‘I’ve seen you hanging around the cemetery Tom. It’s not hygienic.’

What does she think I am? A ghoul? I’ve told her before that my mother is buried there but she just shakes her head and tells me that young couples need the land.

‘Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There’s no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.’

I have tried to tell her that if we stop dying, all the cemeteries in the world can never release enough land for the bulging, ageing population. She doesn’t listen, she just looks dreamy and thinks about the married couples.

Newton is jammed with married couples. We need one-way streets to let the singles through. I hate going shopping in Newton. I hate clubbing my way through the crocodile files, two by two in Main street, as though the ark has
landed. Complacent shoulder blades, battered baby buggys. DIY stores crammed with HIM and shopping malls heaving with HER. Don’t they know that too much role playing is bad for the health? Imagine being a wife and saying ‘Honey, have you got time to fix the toilet?’ Imagine being a husband and figuring out how to clean the toilet when she’s left you.

Why are they married? It’s normal, it’s nice. They do it the way they do everything else in Newton. Tick-tock says the clock.

‘Tom, thank you Tom,’ she cooed at me when her mother was safely settled beside the duck pond. The ducks are bath-time yellow with chirpy red beaks and their pond has real water with a bit of chlorine in it just in case. I had never been in my neighbour’s garden before. It was quiet. No rustling in the undergrowth. No undergrowth to rustle in. No birds yammering. She tells me that peace is what the countryside is all about.

‘If you were a genius Tom you could work here. The silence. The air. I have a unit you know, filters the air as it enters the garden.’

It was autumn and there were a few plastic leaves scattered about on the AstroTurf. At the bottom of the garden, my neighbour has a shed, made of imitation wood, where she keeps her stocks for the changing of the seasons. She
has told me many times that a garden must have variety and in her ventilated Aladdin’s cave are the reassuring copies of nature. Tulips, red and white, hang meekly upside down by their stems. Daffodils in bright bunches are jumbled with loose camellia blooms, waiting to be slotted into the everlasting tree. She even has a row of squirrels clutching identical nuts.

‘Those are going out soon, along with the autumn creeper.’ She has Virginia Creeper cascading down the house. It’s still green. This is the burnt and blazing version.

‘Mine’s turning already,’ I said.

‘Too early,’ she said. ‘You can’t depend on nature. I don’t like leaves falling. They don’t fall where they should. If you don’t regulate nature, why, she’ll just go ahead and do what she likes. We have to regulate her. If we don’t, it’s volcanoes and forest fires and floods and death and bodies scattered everywhere, just like leaves.’

Like leaves. Just like leaves. Don’t you like them just a little where they fall? Don’t you turn them over to see what is written on the other side? I like that. I like the simple text that can be read or not, that lies beneath your feet and mine, read or not. That falls, rain and wind, though nobody scoops it up to take it home. Life fell at your feet and you kicked her away and she bled on your shoes and when you came home, your mother said, ‘Look at you, covered in leaves.’

You were covered in leaves. You peeled them off one by one, exposing the raw skin beneath. All those leavings. And
when what had to fall was fallen, you picked it up and read what was written on the other side. It made no sense to you. You screwed it up in your pocket where it burned like a live coal. Tell me why they left you, one by one, the ones you loved? Didn’t they like you? Didn’t they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves.

‘The leaves are turning,’ said Tom.

She asked me back to supper as a thank you, and I thought I should go because that’s what normal people do; eat with their neighbours, even though it is boring and the food is horrible. I searched for a tie and wore it.

‘Tom, come in, what a lovely surprise!’

She must mean what a lovely surprise for me. It can hardly be a surprise for her, she’s been cooking all afternoon.

Once inside the dining room, I know she means me. I know that because the entire population of Newton is already seated at the dinner table, a table that begins crammed up against the display cabinet of Capodimonte and extends … and extends … through a jagged hole blown in the side of the house, out and on towards the bus station.

‘I think you know everyone Tom,’ says my neighbour. ‘Sit here, by me, in Doug’s place. You’re about his height.’ Do I
know everyone? It’s hard to say, since beyond the hole, all is lost.

‘Tom, take a plate. We’re having chicken cooked in bacon strips and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs. There’s a salad I made and plenty of cheese and beer in the fridge if you want it.’

She drifted away from me, her dress clinging to her like a drowned man. Nobody looked up from their plates. They were eating chicken, denims and chinos all, eating the three or four hundred fowl laid on the table, half a dozen eggs per ass. I was still trying to work out the roasting details, the oven size, when BAM, one of the chickens exploded, pelting my neighbour with eggs like hand-grenades. One of her arms flew off but luckily for her, not the one she needed for her fork. Nobody noticed. I wanted to speak, I wanted to act, I began to speak, to act, just as my neighbour herself returned carrying a covered silver dish.

‘It’s for you Tom,’ she says, as the table falls silent. Already on my feet I was able to lift the huge lid with some dignity. Underneath was a chicken.

‘It’s your chicken Tom.’

She’s telling the truth. Poking out of the ass of the chicken, I can see my copy of
L’Etranger
by Albert Camus. It hasn’t been shredded, so I can take it out. When I open it I see that there are no words left on any of the pages. The pages are blank.

‘We wanted to help you Tom.’ Her eyes are full of tears. ‘Not just me. All of us. A helping hand for Tom.’

Slowly the table starts to clap, faster and louder. The table shakes, the dishes roll from side to side like the drunken tableware in a sea story. This is a sea story. The captain and the crew have gone mad and I am the only passenger. Reeling, I ran from the dining room into the kitchen and slammed the door behind me. Here was peace. Hygienic enamelled peace.

Tom slid to the floor and cried.

Time passed. In Newton it always does and everyone knows how long it takes for time to pass and so nobody gets confused. Tom didn’t know how much time had passed. He woke from an aching sleep and put his fist through the frosted glass kitchen door. He went home and took his big coat and filled the pockets with books and the books seemed like live coals to him. He walked away from Newton, but he did look back once, and what he saw was a table stretching out past the bend in the road and on through the streets and houses joining them together in an orgy of matching cutlery. World without end.

‘But now,’ says Tom, ‘the hills are ripe and the water leaps at my throat when I shave.’

Tick-tock says the clock in Newton.

My fiancé and I would like to be married in church; an ordinary hypocritical sentimental impulse from two people who do not believe in God.

My fiancé and I would like to be married in church but this is proving difficult because the people who do believe in God are selling them.

Now I know that Jean-Paul Sartre and Mr Camus were right when they claimed it is the Absurd that obtains. The Absurd, with a most capital A, that declares in this Year of our no longer Lord that unbelievers still wish to use the churches the faithful have denied. What you sell reveals what you value. The Church must be accountable. Why should I care? Why should you? But what then for my spirit now that every spirit-thing has been price-tagged?

Pity St Peter. Pity the charred ranks of martyrs, their fired bodies in the cool earth. Pity uncounted sacrifices and recorded zeal, work of hands and hearts to raise monuments in stone to the Invisible. Pity those who could not guess that to convert the unconverted the latter day Church would hire an architect.

Lengthen my stride. How long a stretch to get away from the insistence of the past? The past, ripped out, pulled
down, sold off. What my parents were and what my grandparents were, and further back, through time, landmarks of a people built on more than rock, built out of bone, the framework of a commonwealth, a commonweal. What you inherited and what you were to leave behind. A thousand years of history and an island faith.

My fiancé and I will get married in a consecrated tent. This tent will be supplied and erected for the day by Dazzle Bros. Matrimonial Ltd. and all proceedings under canvas will be blessed by the Flying Vicar. These Persons of the Cloth, strategically based and conveniently close to rail and air terminals, will travel at speed and First Class to any wedding funeral or christening to offer that special touch of godliness. Video and details 0800 666.

Lengthen my stride. Walk as fast as I can, north, south, east, west. Do some complain of tinnitus? The bells are ringing across the city, faster, faster, my back to the bells, the bells at my back, each vertebra live-notched to the scale where the past still hammers its communal note. The round metallic sound of warning, of death, of summoning, of celebration. The hollow bell, and in it, teeming life. Look up; the towers are swarming.

It is not so. The light on the copper is killed. The bells
have been carted away to back lots on film sets, museums municipal and maritime, well groomed gardens in need of a folly, even as sculpture in a concrete park. Forgetting, all, that a bell’s business is to ring.

The Reverend Wreck. Trap jawed, a guffaw man who likes a belly laugh and owns the necessary surface area. Monkish habit, salesman’s eyes and a worrying twitch of the right hand that he claims he picked up whilst in India, unlike the left which he bought at a car boot sale. I believe that Dazzle Matrimonial supply the jokes.