Everything You Need: Short Stories (27 page)

‘If I might make an observation,’ he said, when I’d finished, ‘You’re bottling it up, my boy. Let it all go. Release it. Will you try doing that, John?’

I said I would. I then spent a few minutes trying to position my lack of further ideas about his book as being an analysis worth six hundred quid. He heard me out with good grace, appeared to even think about it for a nanosecond, but then said he was confident I would have made more progress soon — and that he’d look forward to an update in his office on Monday... which was days and days away, so at least I didn’t have to sort it out right now.

On the way to the pub I took his advice, however, and (when no one else was around) treated myself to a good old cough, a third-hangover-in-a-row and let-yourself-go-red-in-the-face and double-up-and-go-for-it job.

It felt like something important was coming loose inside, but then —
bam
: it was over, and I felt fine. Well, better, anyway. Head still fuzzy, but chest suddenly absolutely back to normal.

I’d been in the pub half an hour, and was on my second pint, when I noticed that someone was standing in front of my table. I glanced up to find Cass looking down at me. You have to be sitting down for her to do that — she’s pretty tiny. I’ve always liked skinny, petite girls. There’s such a weird contrast between the amount of space they appear to take up, and their actual weight, both physical and psychic. It’s as if they extend beyond the range of their bodies. Because they look so small, it’s surprising, too, how much mass they actually contain. Someone so light on the planet still weighs in at over a hundred pounds, which is a lot to have in your arms, or on top of you — and the difference between the sight of them and their unexpected physical heft has a great attraction, not least because of the surprise and shock of them actually
being
there, voluntarily that close to you. This density also means that once encountered, the attraction continues, as a matter of their gravitational pull.

This, I knew even as I was thinking it, was not the kind of thought that usually ran through my mind. It sounded rather grown-up and brainy, in fact. I wondered about telling Cass some of it, but then realised she was frowning at me pretty severely.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Was all that supposed to
mean
something?’

‘Christ — was I talking out loud?’

‘You was saying
something
, but fuck knows what it was. Are you calling me fat?’

As she sat down I saw she’d already got herself a drink, which made me feel a bit rubbish, because I knew she’d have done this on the assumption I might not have the cash to buy one for her, and that I might actually be intending to let her buy all mine.

I realised suddenly that I was thirty-four and not making a very good job of it. ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘Haven’t got long,’ she said, businesslike. ‘Me and Lisa is going clubbing.’

‘On a Wednesday?’

‘It’s Friday, you nutter.’

‘
Really
?’ That explained why the pub was so full. It also meant that I had less time than I’d thought to come up with something sensible about Portnoy’s book. Bollocks.

Cass sipped her bucket of Chardonnay and looked at me pretty seriously. ‘You alright, babe?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Got flu, or something. Head’s a bit ropey, that’s all.’

‘Still hungover, I should think.’

‘Look — what actually
happened
the other night?’

‘You was in here,’ she said, briskly, as if reading back dictation. Do people still do dictation these days, sit there writing down the gist and rhythm of what people say? No idea. ‘You’d had a few already. You called me, said come over and have a beer. I wasn’t doing nothing, so I said okay. Got here about an hour later, which time you was three sheets and scribbling all over some bits of paper you had with you - but we had a laugh and I’m thinking, okay, he’s pissed as a fart but I do like him, so, you know. We stayed for the lock-in, gave it some welly, an’ all. Then you said you’d walk me home.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad,’ I said, relieved. I mean, by my standards, that’s like a week working for a charity in Rwanda.

‘But you
didn’t
, see.’

‘Oh.’

‘We got halfway there, and you suddenly said you wanted to show me something. I said “Yeah, right, and I bet I know what it is, an’ all,” but you said no, it wasn’t that, and be honest I was so pissed by then I thought fuck it, why not, even if it is a shag he’s after. So you start leading me down these side roads and it didn’t look like you knew where you were going, but then there’s this alleyway and at the end there’s a kiddie’s park or something. Locked up. And you said you used to play there when you was little, and why don’t we climb the fence and go have a look around.’

‘Right,’ I said, feeling cold. Maybe Cass remembered that I’d grown up out in Essex, and had never even been to London before I was eighteen. Maybe she didn’t.

‘Fucking nearly killed yourself getting over that fence. Nearly killed me, an’ all. But we get inside, and it’s cold enough that I’m feeling even
more
pissed, and I’m thinking “Well, this is one to tell the grandchildren anyway” though not if we actually
do
shag, leave that bit out, obviously, but then...’

She stopped talking. Her face went hard.

‘What?’

‘You went funny.’

‘Funny how?’

‘You’d been doing this muttering thing half the way there, saying something over and over really quietly. But now you’re standing in the middle of the park, and you don’t even look like yourself. You was... you was being really fucking odd.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Dunno. You just didn’t look like yourself. And you was saying things, but it didn’t sound like you.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘I sat on a bench, had a ciggy. Thought “let him get on with it”. Then just as I’ve put out me fag, suddenly you make this weird sound, and fall down.’

‘What, just keeled over?’

‘Flat on your back. I laughed my head off until I realised you was out cold.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I pissed off home, didn’t I. Checked you was breathing and everything, but you know, fucking hell, babe, it was freezing and I’d had enough.’

I didn’t know what to say. I sat looking at her.

She rolled her eyes. ‘You know you’re doing it again, don’t you.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Saying things, under your breath.’

‘Yeah, of course,’ I lied. ‘It’s, uh, I’m memorising something. For work.’

‘You’re fucking barmy, you are.’

She drained the rest of her glass in a swallow, and stood up. ‘Got to go. If I don’t get to Lisa’s before she opens the second bottle then we won’t be going nowhere, and I really fancy a boogie tonight.’

She gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and then she was off, cutting through the crowds at the bar like a fish through reeds it had known all its life.

I honestly didn’t mean to have another pint. I was just sitting there, looking at all the people, trying to gather the strength to leave, and to find some distraction from the fact I was a bit freaked out by what Cass had just told me. Ron caught my eye from behind the bar, and I gave him a quick upwards nod, just meaning ‘hello’ — one of those things you can say without saying, a physical utterance — but he mistranslated my intentions and starting pulling me another Stella instead.

And so it went.

1
1

I
don’t know
how many hours later it is, but I’m standing outside somewhere and it’s very cold. My hands hurt and I look down and I see I’ve cut the back of one. How?

Climbing the fence, presumably.

Because I’m back there again. In the park.

I turn around and recognise the things in it. The big slide, the small one. The pirate ship. The swings and the little wooden house.

But when it comes to this last item, I’m not recognising it in the right way.

It’s drizzling a bit and so I walk over to the wooden house. It’s small and battered, about four feet by three feet, open at both ends and with a roof over it, painted yellow some time ago. I go in the front end and perch on the tiny bench inside, and I know I’ve been there before; that though all the rest of the children’s stuff in the park is fairly recent, this house has been here a long time, as long as the park itself.

I get out a cigarette, and try to sort through my memories of the other night, the one Cass told me about. She didn’t say anything about me sitting in a little house, and she would have mentioned it, if I had. I didn’t sit in there after I woke up, either — I just tried to find a way out. So why do I think I’ve been in there before?

I put my head in my hands. I don’t feel right. My mind is full of beer and I can’t think straight. Having my eyes shut isn’t helping either, and so I raise my head and open them again, and as I do I’m suddenly overcome by a memory, so sharp and vivid that for a split second it’s more real than anything else.

In the memory I’m sitting exactly where I am now, on this bench in this little wooden house. I’m not here because I’m drunk and sheltering from the rain, however. I’m here because it’s a wooden house and I always sit in here for a while when we come to the park.

I do not feel cramped. There’s plenty of room.

And then I turn toward the little door at the front, and...

Suddenly I jerk up, banging my head on the roof, and lunge outside.

But he isn’t there.

I know who I’m expecting to... no, not ‘expecting’ to see, because I know now that what I’ve just experienced was a memory, and not happening in real time. I know who I was
remembering
looking up to see, on some unimportant Saturday morning a long time ago.

I look around, still convinced he’s going to be here somewhere, maybe over at the bench, or looking vaguely at the houses, or slipping behind a tree.

It’s my dad.

This is our park, the one we come to together.

And when I find I can’t see him, and the memory suddenly starts to fade, I feel miserable, because it has been so long since I’ve seen my father’s face, so many years since he died, and I miss him.

Then it’s gone, whatever long-ago morning I’m remembering, and I’m just a very pissed man standing in the middle of a park, in the rain and the dark, and feeling alone and pretty scared.

I lurch over to the main gate and very slowly, very laboriously and very carefully, clamber back out — on only three or four occasions coming close to tumbling off and smashing my skull to smithereens.

I trudge up the alley and find a street I think I recognise. I walk along it, and keep going, and by the time I get back to the house in which I live, I’ve remembered both that my dad isn’t actually dead, and that the bastard never took me to a park in his life.

1
2

S
aturday and Sunday
blurred into one. I spent some of it in the pub, some in the park, some of it walking the streets, but most of it in my flat. Whenever I was at home, I found myself reading from the book.

Not ‘reading’ from it in a literal sense, I suppose, but letting it sit in front of my eyes. The conscious extraction of meaning from a procession of words is not, after all, the only way of interacting with a text, or with anything else in the world. By now I had become sufficiently familiar with the book’s contents that I’d realized there was more than one rhythm to the words, that in the beginning they fell into one loose pattern — the one I thought I’d heard in the voice of the man who’d let me out of the park — but that by the end it had changed. No matter how much time I spent looking at the middle sections, however, I couldn’t put my finger on where the transition occurred. I found that I was intrigued rather than bothered by this. I cannot, after all, recall the point where I became the person who lives in this flat and exists how I do, after being the person who was so far in advance of the other students at university that the lecturers just let me do my own thing, convinced I would amount to a great deal. I cannot recall when the four-year marriage I abandoned, toward the end of my twenties, started to be something I no longer wished to be involved in — nor at what point I stopped bothering to send birthday and Christmas cards to the daughter that I’d gained from it. I cannot remember when I became exhausted instead of merely tired.

Things rarely stop and start at easily identifiable points, after all. If they did, then it would be much easier to know when to hold up your hand and say ‘Wait, hang on, hang on,
stop
— I’m not sure I like where this is going’. Life tends to shade from one state to the next, to evolve, or devolve, to grow and develop, or fade and fall apart. Books and sentences and words hide this, with their quantized approach to reality, their pretence that meanings and events and emotions stop and start — that you can be in one state and then another that is different and that the whole of life is not one long, continual flux. Whole languages collude too, especially the European ones, setting object against subject and giving precedence to the latter over the former: only rare exceptions like certain Amerind dialects structuring themselves to say ‘a forest, a clearing, and me in it’, instead of the individual-as-god delivery of ‘I am in a clearing in a forest’.

I think of these things as I sit. I find other things changing, too, aspects of the world becoming different. In the local corner store, for example, I discover myself chatting fluently to the strikingly beautiful Polish girl behind the counter, in her own language. I find myself walking away with her phone number, too, which is not the kind of thing that usually happens in my life.

I begin to feel hopeful that change is still perhaps possible in life, and that it is happening to me.

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