Damascus (34 page)

‘Hey, Spencer, I just wanted to say.'

It was always you who made each day distinct, every time I phoned you. You gave my life a difference which made me proud. Talking to you, I never felt like I was going to turn into my mother. I was never frightened, and I'm not frightened now, even though I often think about Mum. She was right to say that marriage is a sports team or a place safe for diversity or Jerusalem or an identity card or a hell on earth. It's probably all these things at some stage, but it's also one of the few chances we get at a happy ending.

Spencer, it has to be you.

It's too late for Hazel to learn the people she meets now, where they've been and what they've done and why. They carry in themselves too much information from elsewhere, which takes too long to absorb and understand. Spencer's past, however, she knows almost as well as her own, and she wants each of them to work a miracle on the other. She wants change and lightning and revelation, even though it's easy to doubt such things exist when they're not actually happening. Life flattens itself out retrospectively, to make itself understood. Memory takes any thunderbolts and cools them and lays them down in a flat observable sequence, as if surprise itself was never worth remembering. But Hazel refuses to grow any older unmiracled, and her life is going to start right now because she's determined to make it start.

‘It has to be now!' she says, and then takes several quick breaths, rounding out her cheeks as if stepping up for a swimming race. She does it again, and pushes the phonecard into the phone. She dials Spencer's number and while she's waiting for an answer, time draws itself out, making an exception, almost miraculous, from the more common divisions of seconds minutes hours.

What it is: it's when you look up and around, wherever you are, and suddenly ask yourself how the hell did I get here. But then that becomes insignificant against the fact that here is where you are, and now what are you going to do about it?

Spencer picks up.

It is Hazel's last phonecard, and also her first. It is the greyish one with Charlie Chaplin's eyes, and for each one sold a contribution is or was made to the Royal National Institute for the Blind. A unit disappears, sinking into silence. It is nearly the end, and after so many other phone calls there's nothing much left to say if not goodbye. Nothing much to say if not I love you.

‘Hold on to your hat, Spencer,' she says. 'I'm coming on over.'

11/1/93 M
ONDAY
17:12

‘That was amazing.'

‘Unbelievably amazing.'

‘Completely utterly amazing yes.'

They lie sprawled across the mattress, only outlines now that outside it's almost dark. The street-light turns itself on, and an amber glow filters their skin between the darker shadows trailing from limb to limb.

‘Rapid,' Hazel says. ‘But still amazing.'

She pulls at the blanket until it covers them both.

‘What a day,' Spencer says.

‘What a day.'

‘Tomorrow we'll do something different.'

‘Something a lot calmer, maybe.'

Tomorrow, yet again, anything is possible. They could take a trip in Hazel's car or by train or by bus, to the country or the seaside or the nearest swimming pool. They could search Oxfam or Help the Aged or Mencap shops for animal ornaments or detective novels or mugs with funny messages on. They could check the travel agents for bargain flights to Malta or Egypt or the Algarve, or laze about the house with nothing planned but the return of Spencer's library books. They could visit Hazel's parents or her sister, or Spencer's Mum or his Dad or his brother. They could read the papers or watch videos or play computer games. They could work or not work, see William or not see William, stay in or go out.

‘No more either ors,' Hazel says. ‘Let's just make up our minds.'

‘Okay then,' Spencer says. ‘We'll make up our minds.'

‘A fresh start.'

‘Like any other day.'

‘So what's it to be then?'

‘Easy. Let's spend the whole day together in bed.'

‘Excellent plan, Spencer,' Hazel laughs. ‘Impeccable.'

They grow quiet, remembering and re-arranging the events of the day. Already the details vary, multiply, or disappear altogether. But the feelings are clear, and what actually happened, and today is already being added to their catalogue of formative events. Like everybody else, Hazel and Spencer carry their past with them into the present. Their most intense memories, even as they revise and clarify them, remain the clue to who they are now.

Just getting things straight, Hazel asks Spencer what he'd have said to the Italians who cancelled their visit to look at the house.

‘I usually tell people it's unsafe,' Spencer says. ‘I try to discourage them from buying the place, seeing as it's where I live, and where William lives. I say it's a very old house with very old ceilings which have been known to collapse. I warn them about the flight paths from Heathrow, and the danger of debris from passing aircraft crashing through the roof of the swimming pool, tumbling lethal daggers of glass down towards the pale unformed bodies of their naked children splashing innocently below. Easy, scary stories, anything like that.'

And just for a moment, both Hazel and Spencer imagine a hundred and one unlikely but possible catastrophes, of the kind routinely reported in newspapers. Hazel holds Spencer tight, and he closes his eyes in the curve of her neck. Whatever it says in the papers, it's not going to happen today. Or at least not to them.