Communion Town (27 page)

She could seem like a lonely spinster with the stink of catfood through the place and the shed hair everywhere. There was an atmosphere of shame about her empty house and its sodden, sunken garden where wrens flickered their tails and skipped tauntingly from the sills to the branches and back. If he stepped into the room, he could sit down and slide towards her along the cool, glazed cloth of the sofa, holding out his arms until their ribcages bumped like teacups. She would let him hook his chin over her shoulder to gaze into the warped gloss of the windowpane and the mass of tree-fingers beyond. She always let him, if he tried. A throb went through his back teeth and all at once he was desperate to get outside and walking, not having to think about Florence sitting in her parlour with her cats. It was time to go.

Florence drew a deep breath and dared another look into Simon’s eyes. He opened his palms to her helplessly. The ginger cat made an approving noise.

‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’

It took him a moment to make sense of the words. He opened his mouth, pushed the heel of his hand into his left eye and laughed at how completely she had failed to understand him. Then, shaking his head, he walked out of the house.

He could not understand how she had drawn him into the life of these past years. It was as if she had never doubted that he would join her for walks and shopping trips and cinema outings, that she was qualified to lace her fingers in his and lay her head on his shoulder, that he would let her cook him dinner in the evenings and would stay with her afterwards – and without quite knowing why, he had allowed her to carry on believing all this. He was good at the deception, talking with every sign of enthusiasm about the books and films she liked, making her laugh with his wry remarks when they went people-watching. He even took her into town and helped her buy some new clothes. He waited for her to notice how bored he was – that wherever his heart might be, it was not here – but she saw nothing. To dissolve her contentment would have been so easy that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, even when he was ready to scream at her for the way she had entangled him.

One afternoon they parted on Ectarine Walk after she had spent half an hour debating with herself whether she dared make an expedition across the city to the Strangers’ Market. She wanted to browse the bookstalls, but feared that the effort of doing so might prove too much for her; she could not make up her mind. Simon had listened in mounting disbelief, his expression portraying concern, and he had asked sympathetic questions just as if he had nothing more important to worry about. Once she had disappeared into the house his face twisted into an ugly mask which churned on his skull all the way along the street.

And yet a few days later he went with her to the Market. Having finally made the decision, she was in a good mood, and as they surveyed the paperbacks she waved at the bald, flaccid man behind one of the smaller tables.

‘I always find something here,’ she said. ‘Henry has good taste.’

Astonishingly, the man lowered his eyes and shuffled his feet, his patchily shaven jowls wobbling. Simon had not imagined she could produce such a response even from so raddled a specimen. As Florence took her time over the stall, the man’s loose grey tongue pressed out between his varnished teeth and his eyes stayed on her. She glanced up and threaded a strand of hair behind her ear. When she looked away again the man’s face turned to Simon and twitched in a sort of pantomime, servile and insinuating at once, as if he was trying to share some lecherous joke. Simon was surprised by how badly he wanted to overturn the stall and break that pendulous nose; but then he saw that Florence had moved to another stall, and he hurried after her without replying. The fat man’s expression crumpled as he watched them leave.

The next time Simon was walking in Glory Part, fingers grasped his elbow, an oniony sweat smell enclosed him and the same sorry character greeted him like a bosom friend. It was a good thing they’d met again, he said, breathing heavily, because last time they had been interrupted. As Simon permitted himself a silent laugh at the kinds of difficulties she could get him into, the man launched into a story, some incoherent hard-luck tale about something bad which had happened to him: a mistake from which he had never recovered, the cause of his present state. Simon did his best not to hear, and after a few minutes he was able to get away by joining the flow of shoppers into the Part High metro – but he took with him the irrational unease that this meeting had somehow enmeshed him with Florence further.

Soon enough she wanted him to move into the house on Ectarine Walk, and although he squirmed when she asked him he was penned in by guilty obligation. He had let her continue happily in her fantasies for so long now. Besides, he had nowhere to go – a malicious landlord had given him notice on his tenancy – and Florence’s house was big enough, too big: it was full of the impediments of the past, heavy furniture and leather-armoured books and brown oil paintings, and when you came in from the street the hall closed over you like woodland. The wallpaper was a diagram of an overgrown garden and a giant cobweb of shadow hung always across the upstairs landing. When he arrived with his rucksack he felt a tingle of excitement at the sense that these rooms might carry on unfolding indefinitely, that the house might be the secret entrance to an underground world of limitless dim galleries and stairs. Only as he was unpacking did he realise that if Florence’s house had offered an image of escape, it had been nothing but a lure.

Living with her, he had grown baffled by the excuses she made for herself. In all this time he had never grasped what was really supposed to be the problem. The story, as far as he could make out, was that she had once had a viral infection and that ever since then she had been too tired to do anything. She suffered from an inconclusive catalogue of complaints – aching joints, the occasional fever – but all Simon knew was that she could lie despondent on the sofa for weeks on end.

Her more active periods were even more irksome. She fretted continually about tiring herself out, and was always fussing with a notebook in which she wrote down everything she did; she appeared to believe that walking to the shops was an achievement worth recording. The transparency of her tactics infuriated him as much as their success. When it suited her, she could manage well enough to go on daytrips into town, or cook complicated meals and insist that he eat them with her sitting up at the drop-leaf table in the dining room, but after a few weeks she would remember how tired she was meant to be and retreat to the sofa again. It still took Simon aback that she could behave like this in front of someone with a genuine affliction, but he said nothing. Soon enough, he reminded himself, it wouldn’t matter.

He ran down the front steps and set a smart pace along Ectarine Walk. Branches shook droplets on him as he walked, acid daylight stung his eyes and he thought of returning to Florence: he could apologise and lie in a darkened bedroom for the rest of the day, letting her press cool flannels on his forehead. He cursed himself for a faint heart and kept walking until he saw the green glass canopies of Lizavet Heath metro station.

He bought a ticket and went down to the platform. When he was small, he had liked travelling on the metro, the tramcar jogging him along tracks that stitched themselves through the city and led off into the hidden maze of all the places you could go. He had tried imagining that one day he would own all the trams, so that all of those destinations would belong to him too, but the idea had not convinced him even briefly. It felt more like his father’s than his own. His father had been a limited man who had made a lot of money in property and, having no real personality, had settled for the usual pretence: bluff, hard-nosed, no-nonsense. For years he had behaved as though Simon was incapable of managing anything for himself, but later he had refused to support his son in the smallest way, laying down platitudes instead about how we all have to learn to stand on our own two feet. Then he had gone bankrupt.

Simon rode the metro over to Sweatmarket station and climbed through chipped tiling and wet concrete up to the streets of Glory Part. He crossed a footbridge and turned down Sluice Lane. He had lived in digs near here for a couple of months, at one time, and had never forgotten it. The landlady had chewed raw garlic for her blood pressure. The kitchen had barely been large enough for an electric kettle, a hotplate and a cupboard smelling of mildew; there was a view of the canal. Sliding open the drawer, he’d discovered a lone fork, the tines bent in four slightly different directions and the handle stamped
Not to be removed from hospital
. In the early mornings that room had been bright, and crammed with a sense of promise so pure it was hard to bear, like a sound pitched at the limit of hearing.

He was angry with Florence for spoiling his departure from the house. By rights, all he had to do was walk until the day ended – the afternoon was already dimming – and keep walking for as long as it took, a pilgrim thinking only of his journey, on faith, letting the rest of his life fall away. But instead he was rattled and distracted. She had done it again. To settle his mind he walked fast in no particular direction until he emerged from the alleys to the quays.

The waterfront was in the process of redevelopment. They had laid tiny, pastel-coloured paving stones, planted blue bollards, and put up a bronze image of a stevedore hauling a rope. Most of the gutted buildings were dressed with scaffolding, but a few restaurants and shops were ready, their dim interiors poised for customers. The sky, overcast and unsettled, was opening itself in an endless slow gesture to the waves. The waterfront was empty except for a man slumped on one of the benches. Simon cursed: he had grown accustomed to ducking down the side streets of Glory Part whenever he saw that grey face approaching, but this time he was caught in the open. Before he could turn on his heel, the figure on the bench raised a hand and began to get up. Simon walked on past, ignoring the cry of abject greeting and the snagging of fingernails on his sleeve. As he hastened away from the quays the fat man shambled after him, still calling out as if to start a conversation.

The streets were almost dark, the daylight retreating into the clouds where it would soon fade, and the evening was colder than he had thought. He pushed his fists into the pockets of his jacket but the wind went through the cotton and the pavement’s chill had infiltrated the soles of his shoes. The migraine was a clenched fist behind his eye. As he stepped off the pavement on the Part High Street the front corner of a single-decker bus snapped at his sleeve and the driver leant on the horn, loosing a long peal of abuse. He looked up and down the road before trying again. Shopkeepers were hauling down loud steel blinds and some of the streetlamps had come on, their glow darkening the air.

On Dapper Street some youths were killing time by the ash-bins, bullying a dog that kept nosing around their ankles. Once he had slightly known a man who died when a group of boys and girls had knocked him down and jumped on his head. Having an aspiration was like carrying a wad of cash in your pocket: they knew by instinct there was something they could take off you. On these afternoons the city was nothing but cold brick and closed faces, and it made him feel that he was no different from the fat bookseller, a shabby clown wandering the streets in search of some delusion. But that was not true. His aspiration was not like that.

It was the earliest desire he could remember. He had always known that there were clues in the city, traces of what he was looking for, certain streets which he was sure would lead him where he needed to go. In childhood he had discovered that anything could be a signal: guano on red brick and white pavement, blackberries under a concrete walkway, water swirling into the mouth of a storm-drain. Gradually he had come to understand that hidden in some fold of every scene was the Flâneur, always moving on around the next corner, and sometimes he felt on the brink of understanding why he wanted so much to follow; sometimes he felt sure that the real mysteries do not conceal themselves but live beside us in plain view. Once he had seen the corpse of a blackbird splayed on the pavement with its body scooped away, leaving the head, wings and feathered ribcage, a shaman’s cloak. Another time it had been a one-eyed yellow tomcat whose punctured orb had shrivelled in the socket like dried egg in the bottom of a pan. These encounters were promises of a kind.

Two seasons ago he had come close, closer than before or since. It had happened at the end of an afternoon like this one when, heading back to Florence’s house, he had lost his bearings. He had kept on walking as the dusk gathered, sure that he must soon recognise a street or a building, but it was as if he had chanced into another city where he saw only dead ends and locked metro stations. He had walked faster, his watering eyes smearing the streets with light. When he saw the figure, it was far off, standing at the other end of an echoing pedestrian tunnel whose walls angled inwards to give a false perspective. For an instant he thought it was another citizen out walking late, but it turned its pale head towards him while beside him a film of dirty water coursed over tiles like teeth, and in that moment his feet tangled so that he tripped and spun and slammed into the wall. He picked himself up and walked away, not quite daring to run, never once looking over his shoulder, half-expecting to hear a lame footfall close behind.

He had never found out where he had been that night, but since then he had been keeping to familiar parts of the city.

Now he crossed the Part Bridge and continued towards the Old Quarter until the Impasto Street metro came in sight. On days like this, days when he decided to leave Florence and begin his search for the Flâneur, it was here, more often than not, that he would change his mind and catch a tram back to Lizavet Heath. When he saw the yellow mouth of the metro station glowing among the smaller lights, he would discover that he was not yet ready for the pilgrimage, and, knowing that readiness was all, warmed by a certain wryness at his own expense, he would pass through the turnstile and buy a ticket home.