I noticed the three men the first day back after Christmas. They were sat, in plain view, in a second-storey window of one of the decaying Victorian buildings characteristic of that part of the city – all blackened brick and high cold vestibules. Like its empty neighbours, it had been converted awkwardly to offices, knocked through between houses at different levels. The floor was raised at that window. Their feet were on show. They sat and watched.
Of the three, I had the tall one down as in charge. The middle one was wearing a faded police uniform and did nothing but shift on his chair and take notes, while the crumpled dark suit on the right would disappear when the tall man spoke to him and come back with papers or folders, or shaking his head.
Within a few weeks, I was on nodding terms with the middle one. Arriving for work, I'd catch his eye; sometimes raise my umbrella. I wondered what they were writing about me. The scruffy one took my photograph. I could see him manouevring the long lens when I stopped to look at them. I would walk up and down the street, and try to work out what they were watching.
I pointed them out to one of the regular drivers at the taxi rank. He nodded. Couldn’t say how long they'd been there. We watched them together for a couple of minutes. They didn’t do much, just pretended not to notice that we were watching them.
One morning the middle one was gone, and a new, sterner middle one had taken his place - balding, with a weathered Picasso face. Always taking notes. He didn’t last long. Two weeks, no more, and a new middle one was in place. Younger and skinnier. It looked like they'd given him the same uniform as the first. It was short on his arms and baggy elsewhere.
I caught him one morning at the bakery, buying a pain au chocolat and a fizzy drink. Sweet tooth? I said. He looked sheepish. I got the feeling he wasn't supposed to do this on duty. Are you supposed to do this on duty? I asked.
Unexpectedly, he invited me up to the office. His supervisor seemed unconcerned. We watched the print shop, and we watched video of me walking past over and over. I limp slightly. I look suspicious. Hadn't known.
For an hour or so, I stuck around. Work wouldn’t miss me. They watched the shop across the way. From time to time, at intervals from a minute upwards, they shared a joke, or perhaps a remark about one of the women passing in the street. They were coarse men. They spent a lot of time flicking through photos of the girls on their way to the music school or the drama college; they had nicknames for most of the street women and some of the taxi drivers. They showed me their notes, but couldn’t say what they had been watching for. I left on good terms. Maybe some other time.
Afterwards, they seemed to take more of an interest in me. The long lens followed me every step every time until I turned the corner beyond the bus shelter. It became unsettling. The middle one wouldn’t make eye contact. Hands in his pockets, the boss winked at me once, as I turned to check that they were still there, watching. Things were not good at work. I'd been called in several times, and asked questions that seemed to be driving at something I hadn't been told about. Maybe someone higher up had said something, or one of the taxi drivers or the newspaper seller on the near corner had voiced some concerns.
I had no one to talk to. I never have. One evening, after work, I waited beyond the bus shelter, just out of sight. Later than expected (I was hungry by then, sodium light, long shadows, so cold), the three of them shuffled out, two one way, the other the other. When I caught up outside the institute, the middle one seemed unsurprised. He called me by my name. Taking me well out of reach of the cameras, beyond the billboards around the next corner, he advised me to get out of town.
I did so later that week.
March 2010. © 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
- Things were not good at work
-
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1)
tjfryan- April 5th, 2010
- I drive her from house to house without a word
-
- tjfryan
- April 5th, 2010
I drive her from house to house without a word. She walks in without looking back. I wait, watching, phone in hand, and when she is done (half an hour, an hour), we drive off. Sometimes, we leave quickly. When that happens, I enjoy the shape of her moving towards the car. She moves mechanically, with arms swinging out and head pivoting, counterbalanced, side to side, eyes and nostrils in a blank face. She can run. Her hips are narrower than her shoulders and she is made up of long lines that turn sharply only at the end. I could draw her with French curves – the skinny one, stretched out, laid down again and again. When I ask to compare, I see each time that her arms are longer than mine, though her hands are smaller and whiter. I can take them in mine and they are powdery and smooth. They weigh almost nothing but are full, slightly rounded with the joints hardly showing. Mine seem like half the icing's been squeezed out.
We watch a lot of TV. We film each other. I film her, mostly. I can work the camera, I can drive, and this makes me useful. She has friends, but no money. I have neither, but do have time. I've read her reviews, though wish I hadn’t. I'm drawn to them. The words seem more real than the delivering and the collecting and the car with both windows down. I run them over and over, and can shape the sentences out. They stick with me.
When we talk, we deal in repetition. Words mean other words. We have pet names that change each day. She laughs a lot. Sometimes we argue. She has ambitions, I know from her diary. We don’t talk about work.
Some nights I press against her and she'll turn towards me; more often, away and I'll grind out my hurt on her back. Sometimes, she reaches back to coax me along. It’s easier. She never needs to look.
Afterwards, she talks about London and I nod. We'll see, I say. We’ll see.
March 2010. © 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
- I never liked the way my dad looked at Katie.
-
- tjfryan
- March 16th, 2010
I never liked the way my dad looked at Katie.
He'd nod, and puff up a little, like I'd done him proud. But he'd also look her over. I'd see his Adam's apple bob as he snuck a look. Even his swallowing was male. As we arrived at a restaurant table, he'd crane over his shoulder, all stiff and rheumy and used-up, but still hanging in there. I didn’t want to think of him anywhere near her, asking about us.
We hadn’t been sleeping together. Not properly. Not since the first few months. Now she was in Berlin and I was still here, and it was difficult. We saw each other holidays, the odd weekend, a quarter of the year at most, and could never quite get it back before it was time to argue, make up scrappily and leave.
I'd begun to not miss her. He'd ask how we were doing. What was I supposed to say? I thought it had to show and had got the words down to boilerplate. I would listen to myself reaching the end of that and picture his face, the way he'd shape his lips and nose-breathe forcefully down the phone, waiting. Dead air, reduced evening rate.
When she said she wasn't coming back, I stopped answering his calls.
February 2010. © 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
- Later I drink too much coffee
-
- tjfryan
- February 8th, 2010
Feels like a stroke. Not that I'd know. How could I? One eye closed. One side numb. Maybe lying awkwardly. Or maybe a stroke.
I ask Monica.
Michael from work had a stroke when he was 40, I whisper to her back. I'm close enough to 40. Stroke time. If it's not a stroke, something else will get you, at 40, 45. It can happen. Monica.
Monica.
Monica frees her feet from the tangle of kicked-up sheets. She is not close enough to 40.
It tastes of rum, this morning. I can taste it at the back of my mouth behind the dryness and the swallowing and the boiled tongue. I don’t remember rum. I remember arguing about my drinking. The journey brought it on, mostly, I tell myself – a bus with old people on the hospital run and the kids all talking faster than I could follow. She'd adjusted my collar before we went in; levelled my shoulders and looked me over like I was up for a rosette. It hit me I couldn’t face it sober. All those people. Her friends.
By twelve, I've fetched the papers, coffee, and aspirin, and confirmed that the Jean Seberg girl still works Saturdays. I don't know where she's from, and maybe prefer it that way. The sun out there had some real warmth to it; first time this year. Given warmth, given sun, given Saturday, we ought to do something, but we stay inside and the curtains stay drawn. In the dark, I can open both eyes; move both ways. No stroke, yet.
Under the covers, with all the tenderness I can generate, I warm my hands on Monica's back and think of wet sand and dry sand. I admire the symmetry of her collarbone and feel the way her head joins to the neck, the blockage at the top of the channel. When I start to work on her shoulders, she shrugs off my attention. I leave the pills on the side and bring her water.
Later I drink too much coffee and listen to Hasil Adkins. I picture Monica eating hot dogs until she can eat no more. I picture her head on the wall.
February 2010. © 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
- Nessy
-
- tjfryan
- February 3rd, 2010
For 120 nights that year, I slept in the next room to Aunt Nesta. I knew her every kind of breathing, her sometimes pungent sleeptalking, her choking, her fumblings of novels that, spine down, would make the floorboards ring through the partition wall. She favoured 400-pagers. Large type. Humus-rich prose that she'd turn over, plough page by page. They piled up around the house in frosted library covers, those romances; face down, hidden, or wrecked on the bedroom floor when sleep came too soon. Other nights, the click of the bedside lamp would start a timer on the onset of contralto snoring, easily interrupted. I would catch her champing and half-commentary as she jerked awake. She sounded surprised; oddly pleased with herself, whether to find herself alive or still wandering a better place where people were kind and silence was never awkward, I couldn't tell. There was often a chuckle. She never laughed in the day. Not any more. Why would she? Sleepless at three or four, I'd step on the creaking board and hear her mumble something disconnected from any world I could imagine her imagining, then shift weight on to new springs and roll over, once more unburdened with consciousness. I grew to hate those noises; and kept my own as muffled as possible in the unforgiving box room. Those squelchings and rustlings were nobody's business, and despite my theoretical willingness to argue the case for freedom of sexual proclivity, I was keen to avoid a breakfast-table revelation in the kind of semi-sane religious language she was sometimes still capable of.
We had, of course, nothing to say to each other. In our enforced conversations, I followed my dad's lead – heavy on the closed question, with whatever short-change answer eclipsed by nodding, by answering for her, giving her no space to loose off a sentence that we'd have to listen to, or ignore. On some long-forgotten shame. On how she was shunned by my grandparents. On God, whom she loved, despite his evident lack of interest.
We were incomers here, Aunt Nesta and I. Not part of the original plot, but still written in because my parents were too frightened of their own good nature to write us out. I was back for a few months; she'd been there two years. Plenty long enough for this unsatisfactory present to have been smeared all over the past and future. My story was simple enough. Catherine had been sleeping with another man. She was like that. We'd not talked about it, beyond some late-night abstractions, but I knew she'd long been driven to affirmation through rougher handling than mine. It didn’t bother me, but I didn't so much want to be around to see it. Was happy instead to go on thinking of her arms reaching back, her nudging into me in a crowded kitchen where I'd be called on to periodically derail whatever conversation she was bored with. She laughed a lot when I was around and I'd push that to the point where she went cross-legged and her face was coarsened from its usual clean symmetrical arrangement of calligraphic strokes to all gob and streaming eyes. I could smell her hair with a moment's conjuring, and imagine lifting the weight of it, all rich, smooth, and reddish on a near-black base, off her nape to nuzzle against. There wasn't much to worry about. We'd enough of each other squirreled away to know this wasn't the end. Catherine aside, I was unemployed just then, and happy enough to step back into suburban luxury from years of bleak flats where the walls had ceased to give fight to wind and damp, and the gas only nervously emerged. The current place was one and a bit floors of disappointment off the Holloway Road. A damp lobby with locked bicycles, overhead lights, high ceilings, taps that sputtered and hissed. Twenty minutes there was enough to bring sharp awareness of my misfortune, and no amount of posters and travel-won tat could distract from the slumping wallpaper and barely functional electrics. So, coming to my folks' place was ok. It felt good to be surrounded by skins shed, by clothes that evidenced slow progress on coolness, by old music that I no longer listened to and books stodgy enough to resist all but the most enzyme-assisted repulping. With this selected junk around, I was willing to indulge my teenage self maximally. He knew no better. He still knew no better while I was now this hard-won triumph. It pleased me, too, to be living among traces of old misdemeanours: tables still imperfect from ten-year-old spills, the faint outline of a schematic cock scorched on to the back lawn through drunken morning dew, and parents who would still knock when they wanted to come into a room in their own house. I was comfortable there. Accepted. The setup could not have been better designed to contrast the inhibited past with the accomplished present. Except for Aunt Nesta.
I had gone years without thinking of her before she was relocated to the guest bedroom, and she had not seemed real until that first evening of laughter-proof TV two Christmases back. There was no mention of responsibility towards her. And I took none. I was a guest, after all, and she wasn't my aunt aunt. I told myself that her continued life was nothing more than a tangent to mine, ignoring the whisper that anyone with a heart would have made the effort. I knew, and had struggled with, my selfishness, tried to keep it channeled, locked away in the attic alongside those versions of me I found less winningly awkward, and the overwhelming possessions (as a late single child, I was always over-equipped, bought off with racquets and electronics). And recognised that it was sometimes better not to fail in sympathy, to instead adopt impregnable neutrality, lest reflection brought a sense that I was what was left over when the good stuff had been burnt away. I could be gloomy.
Nesta was sick. Most obviously with a wasting illness that had finalised her frailness, reduced her to a stooping skeleton, left her with extruded arms and bony wrists controlling chicken feet. A flightless ugly thing. She had been tall in her prime and still had six inches of reach on me if things turned nasty; I had no reason to think they would. More painful to those who professed to care was the progressive dementia that had jumped her some time after her retirement. It was said that her decline had been rapid, at least early on. She had gone from quiet but reliable to full-spectrum hopeless between visits, calls, or moments of concern. Now, though, it seemed to be taking forever as those around her adapted to every gentle unravelling, retying a pretty, talked-through bow, with reassuring focus on each unthreatening loop. Maybe the medicine kept her from showing. Maybe.
She hardly spoke these days – no need to, for the most part – but after dinner, Dad would hustle her to the phone to nod at her sister. Grace lived three-and-some hours away, still worked a few hours in a small school, still called her younger sister 'Nessy', was still sane, by most accounts, though there was some long-choked-back pill of a family reason why she would never come further east than Reading. This going unchallenged, twice a year a package was wrapped in coat and headscarf and driven 150 miles for a visit. The Nesta hand-off would be accomplished at a convenient neutral point, and the frail old ostrich parcelled into successive back seats like pasty offspring in a bad divorce, though without, I imagine, the fast-food fingers or spiteful sugar-loading. Grace once said that Nessy was always very talkative when she came to stay. It's perfectly possible that this was a wind-up. Aunt Grace had a reputation.
The fortnight my great-aunt was away that summer was a little more lively. Without the nembutalised calm considered essential to the management of her situation, a different set of patterns was allowed to surface in the old house. Not those of the unmentionable deep past, but something to fill the sudden freedoms of the senility vacuum. The prospect of a day when no one would be sent to knock awkwardly on the bathroom door. A kitchen without a grey corner of weakness and desiccation. The freedom to talk as adults, albeit adults with nothing to say. I cooked adventurously with ingredients I could not afford, to my mother's misplaced pride, and settled in for nights of aunt-free sitting with my dad, who now used TV drama as the focus of his disenchantment with the modern world. The characters he hated all seemed a little like me: book-learning types, shirkers and verbal showers-off, and I could see his colour rising as he identified with whichever browbeaten everyman he was supposed to. He'd snort disapproval or, in piano moments, turn so I'd not catch him welling up in the dark corner armchair he favoured. Bad TV was a new addiction for him and he lacked the experience to strap on protective irony, or carry the ever-ready aside. Maybe he lacked the energy. I noted that he still made out he was stumbling afresh on the shows he watched each day, and that he kept his knowledge of the back-story of minor characters well hidden. Channel-hopping maliciously, I would enjoy his silence, his failure to protest. I wanted to see how much he needed it. Maybe he saw this need for something outside of his shrunken world as weakness, or feared I would.
We talked about the future one evening. More accurately, I talked about their future, since mine was my concern. I said that Aunt Nesta was not going to get better. As they knew. That they couldn’t be expected to care for her as she slipped, as she would, the illness being what it is, further cuckoo, into depression and amnesia and incontinence. That at the very least she should be rotated through surviving relatives until the time was right for somewhere else. Somewhere she could be cared for. She had assets. The bungalow could be sold. She had savings, from fifty frugal years, and that money would see her out. That they should think about their own plans. This was their retirement, after all, and there wouldn’t be another. I knew, I said, that he wanted to feel useful. And that she was too soft-hearted to think of herself. So. You know. All this as gently as I could. I was careful not to let the wine (the best of it rescued from dusty neglect over the course of my stay) creep into what I was saying. But that was the gist of it, over a few elasticated minutes. It did not go well.
On her return, I was careful to be good to Aunt Nesta. I took a turn or two of the unspecified duties involved in keeping an eye on her as my mother ran errands, and Dad spent one of the long, sparingly alcoholic afternoons with former colleagues that was all that was left of his former life. I'd be deep in the web, engaged in some perfunctory jobhunting, assigning an eye or an ear to the rest of the house as I trawled an endless succession of musical obscurities, or slipped into comparing Latin Hotties. I could spend hours finding music that I would never listen to again. And staring at girls who in solid form would, rightly, want nothing to do with me.
It was in one of these blank periods of theoretical auntwatching, trudging distractedly to search the cupboards for whatever snacks had been left unused-by, that I found the back door open. This was odd. Nobody went out there, unless it was to gather dew-musty washing for a third wash, or refill feeders for squirrels already bloated with three kinds of birdseed. The garden had been helicoptered in four years back, strips lopped off some standard design to squeeze into the length of the narrow outer suburban plot, down to the back wall and the waste ground beyond. It was a typical piece of incompetent husbanding, a present for my mum's sixtieth, turning the drawings she'd been working on for as long as anyone could remember into bleak standard reality. The garden and her mood had entered an immediate steep decline. She had aged, the lawn had developed a sag in sympathy, the local wildlife had bailed from the eutrophic pond, and the arrangement of bricks, sinking paving slabs and concrete filler propelling-pencilled in as the terrace had remodelled itself less imperial Capri, more Croke Park. No matter. That late afternoon, hurrying into autumn, the drizzle was gusting through the open door, and cold outdoors had pooled on the fake-parquet lino (it needed replacing). Grimacing into the wind with the wet grass turning my toes dark, I tracked the footprints flattening the grass to the back wall. Aunt Nesta had left no other spoor, no pellets to pick of cotton and half-digested scrabblings from the Radio Times. The listing trellis at the far end was scalable and had been scaled, picked free of dead Russian vine, clearing a path to the next low wall.
I found her four doors down. She was standing in Mrs Wilder's kitchen, holding a slightly unnatural pose, both arms lifted slightly, her eyes drifting across the dresser and a cork wall of photos and recipes and postcards from Ajaccio and Funchal without snagging on anything familiar. I crept up on her with words that were coming from a part of me that had previously found no use. I felt for her. I felt shame. I watched her standing as if her body could find nothing to do. She seemed unaware of her surroundings. I thought she might have had a stroke, but her pupils were even, and her pulse was not, to my minimally trained hand, bounding. She seemed to sink into herself as I led her to sit down. She moved like she had lost interest in movement. She had certainly lost weight since the last time I had been unable to avoid contact, and felt porous or hollowed out, under a fruit salad of a dress that descended from child's shoulders and was garnished with burrs and goosegrass. She wore no shoes.
Mrs Wilder – Veronica – was sympathetic when I talked her out of the locked bathroom with reassurances that I (that we) meant no harm, in my most Church of England tone. Maybe she had seen us around. Maybe she had spoken to my mother once or twice. She had. She fussed. Aunt Nesta said nothing as we fed her milky tea and bread and butter. She was exhausted. She showed no sign of knowing where she was.
It took my father twenty minutes to return my call. And another half hour to reach the house. There was little eye contact. At his signal (odd that he, smaller, frailer, took charge here too, but perhaps not so odd), we started to manoeuvre Aunt Nesta out of the house. She resisted. She was surprisingly strong. She cursed. She told us that we were devils and Jews and we would get what was coming to us. It took the two of us five minutes to bundle up her arms and contain her kicking legs, to almost drag her back along the pavement as she scratched at our faces and keened. The windows watched. When she had calmed a little, back home, we talked. She was lucid. She had no reason to live. She hated it here and she hated us. Later, she slept, sedated.
I was gone by the next evening. When I went back to collect the last of my bags, two days later, I knew that I would not see her again.
January 2010 © 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
- It is important not to show less pain
-
- tjfryan
- February 2nd, 2010
The specials are twelve in number. They are not impressive creatures and their often tired faces show no pleasure in their work. They are, to a man, underfed and drawn. Their uniforms seem theatre props, a size or two too big, shabby, buttons tailed with cotton, the shimmer of grease (or greasepaint) on a pocket flap. Their role is to inflict pain. They do so. It is a repetitive task – a standardised violence is sought. There are degrees of pain, which, within a certain tolerance, must be achieved. And so we play these tolerances.
If the treatment is mild, it is important not to show less pain, or they will start, like a shopkeeper fumbling change; they will awaken, recalibrate for the next subject, and the next. Important too, not to cry out, for the specials' sake if nothing more. They too are watched.
At night, and when the food is brought, we are able to whisper and exchange rumours, talk of sickness, of other, more imaginative treatments, and to barter apprehension. We fear change. We fear informers. Some of our number seem not of our number. Our suspicion falls on those who cry loudest, or those who show no pain.
They have always been the 'specials', just as the warders are warders and the commandant the commandant. We are told nothing.
I have few complaints. I have been treated, as far as I know, consistently, fairly, justly, within the system of this world, which extends only as far as the walls and the single gate. Beyond is a desert. Some claim to hear voices and the scutter of machines, far off – a city, or a village. I can hear nothing but the wind and, some evenings, tyres on gravel: the warders, unloading, refilling the water tank.
The pain is routine. Even its near anticipation has become, if not numbed, then distanced. If expected, if bestowed as expected, the pain may come so far and no further.
I do not hold that nature equips us to deal with what she deals us. Rather, I have come to accept that nature is malleable. If the cause is external and the performance customary, the consequences, the meaning, may be slipped.
I fear sickness above all. This place is not hell. Its design is mundane, though its purpose is unclear. Some say it is a test. Some say we are prisoners of war. Or criminals, left here by a state that has long since collapsed.
We are fed. We have shelter. We have accepted the necessity of the treatment, and would confess to our crimes, whatever they may have been. It no longer seems to matter.
October 2008
© 2010 Tom Ryan. All rights reserved.
