Communion Town (10 page)

At this, the feeling of déjà vu returned, redoubled. This room too was familiar, but as it would be familiar to hold your own polished skull in your hands. My eyes moved to the metal boxes on their shelves, and to the labels on their sides. Written on each label was a person’s name. None that I recognised. They were in alphabetical order. I searched along the shelves … but the one I was looking for wasn’t there. I broke the silence by laughing at myself. Why in the world would it be? Nothing but a gap on the shelf. I looked again at the box on the desk, and felt my face drain. Sinking into the chair, I leant closer to make sure. My name was on the label.

I glanced at the door behind me, undid the catches of the box and lifted the lid.

Most of the space inside was taken up by a thick, scuffed hardback binder with my name on the spine. I opened it and began to leaf through pages of closely printed text. It looked old – the pages, thin, low-grade computer printout, were faded, dog-eared and soft at the edges. As I tried to make sense of the contents, I became calm, giving myself up entirely to that sense of uncanny reiteration, because now I knew that I was dreaming or mad. It was an impossible book. I could not bring myself to read more than a few words at a time. ‘
Later I strummed my guitar …
’ Wincing inwardly, I thumbed back and forth through the pages. ‘
… Without looking at her, I walked out …
’ I felt dizzy with embarrassment. ‘
The first time we met, she was climbing into a rickshaw. It was a bitter night …
’ I tore my eyes from the page. Of course, I had never written any kind of autobiography – I had never even kept a diary, never thought of it – but still I recognised the words right away. There was no accounting for it and no denying that they were mine. I slapped the binder shut, mortified.

At the bottom of the box was a bundle of data cartridges, labelled only with codes scrawled in soft pencil. Part of each number seemed to be a date, the earliest corresponding to last spring, the latest just over a month ago. I chose one at random; the old console on the desk had a slot the right size, so I clicked the cartridge into place and pressed the button. Then I nearly leapt out of my skin as the monitor and the player piano both came to life simultaneously.

It took me a minute to realise that the clonky old piano was playing one of my songs. It was exactly as I had written it, but it sounded oddly unfamiliar, perhaps because I had never heard it performed on anything other than the guitar. The monitor screen was split into several parts, one showing a horizontal line fuzzing out into jagged peaks and valleys in time with the sound from the piano, while a second showed staves full of black and white spots; I don’t know how to read musical notation. In the third, my lyrics scrolled up the screen. I listened through to the end of the song, took out the cartridge, and tried another. The song that played was one of my very earliest attempts: I had never dared perform it to anyone, had all but forgotten it, but here it was, exactly written out and reproduced.

There weren’t very many cartridges. One of them, I noticed, didn’t have a code at all: the label was marked only with a circle, or perhaps a figure zero. I turned it over in my hands, wondering if I’d ever get rid of the feeling that all of this had happened already.

I was distantly aware, as I clicked the cartridge into the console, that the front door of the house had opened and feet were climbing the stairs, but by the time she burst into the room with Leo at her heels, the music was already playing.

The tune from the pianola consisted of several neatly overlapping, tinkling phrases – jaunty, sentimental and melancholy all at once. We stood facing each other as we listened. After half a minute it finished and immediately began over again. I knew the song well. It was the music that had always been pulsing through me, marked by each spasm of my heart, and all my other songs were only variations on the theme. I breathed in and out to the pulse of that tune, tapped my fingers to it in idle moments and dreamt it whenever I slept. I could hear it, now, in the ripple of my gut. Its harmonics were the vibrations of my blood pressing its way through the tissues of my brain. Its banal melody described the limits of my emotions, and its prosaic structure was the absolute framework for my thoughts. It had been jingling away inside my body, in my heart, ingrained so deeply that I had not been able to recognise it until it was played back to me by an automatic music-box. I had never before heard it: its cheapness, its small, comprehensible ingenuity, its limited charm.

Watching me carefully, she moved over to the console and pulled out the cartridge. The player piano ran down to silence, but the tune tinkled on inside me. For the first time I could hear it, and I knew I’d never stop hearing it now. Shivers ran through me; my fingers twitched. Neither of them had taken their eyes off me. I lifted my hand and she flinched. I clutched at my ribs as if I could keep the noise from spilling out. Leo edged forward with his palms raised in placation, but I was too ashamed even to try apologising for what I had done. I knew she couldn’t excuse me this.

I understood that she was the single person I wanted and the only one I could ever want, the love of my life. Without looking at her, I walked out.

I remember all of this, and I remember how for the rest of the night I walked, not minding where I was going. For a while, my uppermost regret was that I hadn’t taken my guitar when I left: I could have pawned it for breakfast and a place to stay and still had change left over. As it turned out I had enough in my pockets to rent a rickshaw for a few hours’ work around dawn, and after that, life soon enough returned to the way it always was. The only difference is that I often think about the time we were together. Sometimes I remember it so deeply that I even forget the tune jingling away in my heart. This morning, I watched her disappear and then carried on just as before: but I was thinking of a certain time in our first few weeks, when I had returned to her flat dog-tired and aching after a long shift at work, wanting nothing so badly as to sleep, and she had helped me lie down, loosened my clothing and brushed strands of hair out of my face, tutting at the state of me. But as I began to sink with infinite gratitude into sleep, hands strayed over me, fluttering at my breastbone and throat, soft hair tickled my eyelids, fractional, insistent movements touched me, teeth grazed my skin, refusing to let me alone. And something happened that a moment before I had not been able to imagine. Strength ran into my limbs, my body was glad, my mind cleared, wide awake, and the taste of salts on my tongue opened into hot, liquid softness that plunged into me and drew me into itself, and at that very moment the first phrase of a new song dropped into my head. I caught her waist and rolled her over and drank until I had to gasp for breath. I tangled my hands in her hair and gazed into her face until we both breathed together. We moved together. A warm chord sounded. I filled my lungs. We were making a discovery, and it grew ever more remarkable, this disclosure of what each of us had at heart. All I needed to know was the way it unfolded, the song.

The City Room

In from the street, through the hall and down, one palm making a squeak on the bannister, his feet pattering softly on the stairs, he can go at such a speed and still be so quiet. As he enters the dim corridor his eyes crowd with blocks of a colour that doesn’t have a name, a colour that no one else has discovered.

He steals past the open kitchen door, as quiet and quick as he can, past his grandmother who is standing at the sink cleaning a chicken and listening to the radio news. In his cupped hands he hides what he has stolen. He wonders what the canal man will do. He would take it back if he could, but he knows he’ll never be rid of it now.

The blocks of colour pulsate: they take their shapes from the doors and the walls, but get detached and drift free across his vision. The kitchen window is open, and in the distance the city murmurs its invitation. The autumn is laced with leftover summer. Without turning from the sink, his grandmother puts her sharp knife down on the counter. That is not a toy.

She has a straight back, a handsome nose bent like a knuckle and hair dark as lead soldiers. She wears wool stockings and lace-up shoes. When they go out into the city, she haggles with market traders while he stands with his fingers twisted into her skirts. She knows all the people in the district. She chats to the greengrocer who sells them string bags filled with apples, and she jokes with the large, straw-haired woman who checks out books for them at the library. Whenever she takes him to the open-air swimming bath she greets the old ladies on the benches, and when they hear music from the bandstand in the park they can stop and listen for as long as they want. She rides the buses as though she owns them. She likes to press his face with her cool palm. Where she first came from, he has no way of imagining: he has never considered what she is like in herself.

He passes the kitchen and continues down the corridor, which runs the length of the basement flat. Her room faces him from the far end behind a door with a scrollworked brass handle. It is full of water-damaged books, boxes of ancient letters, clothes from long ago, significant jewellery. Once, late at night, he took himself down to wake her because he had stomach pains, and found her sitting upright in bed, awake. The green-shaded lamp on her bedside table shed light on the book open in her lap. The clock pronounced a slow nocturnal tutting. From this, he formed the impression that she does not sleep. She is always there in that room, upright in that bed, at all times of the night.

Halfway down the corridor another door stands ajar. Rather than move it on the hinge he eases through the narrow gap. This room holds things from his grandmother’s past: insectile armchairs, a hard horsehair couch, a cherrywood rolltop desk owned by someone long gone. The windows look into slots of brick which are open at the top to let in the light.

The floor in here is covered with an elaborate model city, and he used to believe that the room was named accordingly: the City Room. He now knows that he misunderstood what his grandmother was saying, and that really the room is the Sitting Room. And yet, although he burns with shame to recall how often and how blithely he must have got it wrong – he imagines his own piping voice making the mistake over and over, and he can sense how it must have sounded to her, a lisping childish fault to be kindly overlooked – still he knows, deeper down, that this is the room’s true and secret name. The City Room.

It has grown far beyond its origins, this city. He built the first crude settlement with small wooden blocks, originally the playthings of an earlier generation of children, some of them plain and some painted primary colours, but all stained and faded. Most were just bricks, but there were doric columns, too, and cornices and broken pediments to crown town halls and triumphal arches. Once these were complete, he glimpsed further possibilities, and a dusty cardboard box full of thin metal plates and girders that bolt together with the help of a spanner provided the city with rail tracks and fortifications.

The game must have lasted weeks – certainly as long as he can remember – but his grandmother has not objected. She doesn’t understand the importance of the city, of course. He would try and explain if he could, but instinct tells him these things can’t be communicated. He knows with absolute clarity that the model city is far more remarkable than anyone else can understand. It must in fact be more important than anything else in the world, but he can never admit it, because when his grandmother or someone else looks into the room and sees his creation spread across the floor, it makes him squirm. Only when he is alone can his mind move through the streets and buildings he’s created, imagining the textures of their reality. This gives him a strange pleasure. He likes to perch on the floor, barely able to keep still, and hold it whole in his mind, letting the image deepen. What secrets. He floats in a warm capsule of possibility.

He has not grown; he is slight and tender, not like the boy from upstairs who has a greasy face and a forehead bristling with stiff fibres, and who would kick the city into rubble if he knew it was here.

He remembers a time in the upstairs boy’s room. The window looked into the shared back garden, where the frame for a swing drowned in weeds and a tract of rough brown grass ran down to a decrepit fence. The light out there was failing. The bonfire had been smouldering all day, its gymnasts of smoke somersaulting upward through the branches of the trees. In the room no one had turned the lights on. He could sense the upstairs boy’s father moving around downstairs somewhere, but he did not know where his grandmother was. He had to pretend not to be disgusted at the meaty smell of the room. Meaningless objects, strange furniture. The bed was not like his bed, and the toys were fakes intended to deceive him, manufactured evidence of a world that didn’t exist. There were comics as well but they were too strange to look at directly.

The upstairs boy, who had a large yellow spot in the back of his neck, collapsed on the floor, then got up again to kick over a chair, and came close, making gluey clicking noises. Nonchalantly, an arm grappled around his neck, fingers thrust themselves into his hair and a leg hooked behind his knees to try and bring him down to the floor. He had to fight off these attempts while pretending not to have noticed them. Time was strange in here. He knew that the scene was in some way permanent, pinched out of sequence: it is still going on, somewhere, in the inturned landscape of houses, waste grounds and streets where memory begins. In that loop of unevent he stands in the room with the upstairs boy prowling and grabbing, and a presence moving around downstairs, and the muddy, darkening garden lying under the window.

The city has spread and mutated, using whatever materials it could find. Roads from strips of cardboard, expanded polystyrene packaging for brutalist architecture. Once, abandoned beside some bins, he found three beautiful bricks of weathered yellow clay. They looked soft enough to crumble, but they chimed when they touched. They were rough and solid in the hands and two together were almost too heavy to lift. His grandmother helped him carry them home and in the City Room they became great landmarks. The city moulded itself to the terrain. One quarter flourished beneath an armchair, always in shadow, while elsewhere bridges and stairways gave access to the massif of the couch, and outposts spread along the ridge of its arms and back. He divided the city into districts and gave each one a name.

Under a windowsill, his grandmother’s plants trail down towards the floor in a strange perpendicular jungle. On the sill sits a heavy wooden box which she gave him. It has a sliding lid like an old-fashioned pencil case, and it contains a regiment of lead soliders in chipped red coats, the grey showing through, jumbled in their mass grave. Perhaps she meant him to use them for the garrison of his city. Who knows what dead darling they first belonged to? When she gave the soldiers to him, he emptied them out on the floor – they were identical men with pigeon chests and white faces – and began to set them on their feet, but he could not pretend to care much. What he wanted at that time was a Captain Maximum figure.

For his birthday she took him to the toy shop on Bittergreen Street and they had a whole rack. There must have been twenty. When he saw that, he was bereft, because he knew he could only have one. Captain Maximum led the goodies. The baddies were led by Caesar Skull. He wanted a goody but he did not know which were which: they looked at one and his grandmother said it must be a goody because a baddy would not have such a sad expression on his face. He agreed. One figure was a girl, the only girl allowed in Captain Maximum’s team. He did not look at her in case his grandmother noticed. He got the man with the sad expression, and carried him home hidden in a crackling white polythene bag, concealing his excitement.

But at home, when he freed the green man from his transparent plastic blister and studied the back of the packaging card, he realised he was a baddy after all. It was a ridiculous mistake to have made. This was a minion, a fish-man who lived underwater and could not do anything good. Any other Captain Maximum figure would have been better. He felt an awful pity for the fish-man, then wrenched both his arms from their sockets. Overcome with remorse and terror, he hid the figure in the bottom of his toy box. If only he had got the leader of the goodies. But he knew he could never ask for another.

He has made a map of the city and its surroundings by taping four sheets of paper together, and whenever he thinks of something new he squeezes it in, making tight marks with a pencil-point. He keeps the map safe in the narrow space between the wall and the bookcase. Not long ago, his grandmother came into the room as he was working, and he crumpled the paper in his haste to hide it.

He touches the edge of the map for reassurance but does not draw it out. He looks again at the thing he has stolen. It sits so lightly in his hand that he can hardly feel it, but he has the curious sense that in truth it is much heavier. He has a few hiding places but none of them is good enough for this.

Earlier this afternoon, down in the garden, the upstairs boy led him to where several fence-planks had grown sodden and fallen away, leaving a gap. It was choked with brambles but they stamped these out of the way and went through into a forgotten space, an alley running between the back of the fence and a brick wall. These enormous weeds must always have been here, crowding together competitively, stiff and furry and tall as men: all this time, through his life, they had been here. They sneaked along the alley past the backs of houses and past gates of peeling wood, corrugated iron and chain-link. A puddle ran in a channel down the centre of the track. There was something the boy wanted to show him. The upstairs boy is always pushing and pulling, he always wants to show you something.

Further down was another flaw in the fencing. They squeezed between the planks, and on the other side dragged themselves free from the bushes into the bottom of a garden edged with long box hedges. Netted raspberry bushes hunkered to the ground in a dark clump, hovering below the horizon of the long, bulged lawn, and far off he saw the heavy-lidded windows of a house. The upstairs boy prised apart the limbs of the hedge, and vanished.

Following, he found himself in a tunnel woven from twigs. It was a secret passage. If you knew the hedge was a corridor, then it became one, close, tangled, hidden, floored in mulch. They fought their way along past the trunks and through twigs that scratched at his face. The earth made his knees wet and his hands dirty. Maybe you could travel unseen for miles inside a network of hollow hedges.

When they finally broke out of the sticky branches they were beside the unfamiliar house. He heard indistinct voices inside: they were unaware of his presence, saying words not meant for him to hear, and he looked up fearfully at the window. But the upstairs boy, unconcerned, lifted the latch of a tall garden gate and led them out to the canal path.

He and his grandmother had often been along the canal, and he had been here by himself, as well, but he had not known you could reach it this way. The upstairs boy’s hidden corridors wrenched the city, folding parts of it closer together than it was possible for them to be. They came at familiar places from different directions, making them hard to identify. But now, as he followed the upstairs boy under a low bridge and saw the long shape in the water at the canalside, he recognised where he was.

Once, he and his grandmother were walking home from the bus stop, and the road took them beside a tangle of wet trees held in by a green wire fence. His grandmother liked there to be trees around. Woods were necessary, she would tell him, and so was water, especially for children. The light was slanting and the leaves dripped. In a certain place, a gap in the fence meant that he could plunge under the trees and along a narrow track of earth in the gloom, under the low branches and down to the towpath. Then he only had to run a short distance, under a bridge and past an old canal boat, to wriggle through another fence-gap in easy time to meet his grandmother. And all that time she would have gone along only a simple stretch of road. He had done it before and she had been pleased by his adventure.