Half Broken Things (7 page)

She was standing next to a plump, lavishly graffitied, moulded resin elephant whose hollow insides were filled with cans and empty crisp packets that someone at some time had tried to start a fire with. She looked away, and with her head lowered she scraped with one fingernail at some peeling grey paint on one of the elephant's ears, finding that she was managing to turn the growing bare patch into a very good likeness of Marge Simpson. She could draw a pretty good Marge Simpson, and an excellent Homer. She had thought at one time of being a cartoonist, until her art teacher had told her cartoonists have to create original characters and not just copy things. She had actually come up with one or two quite good characters of her own, but then found that they refused to cooperate. They just looked at her from the paper. She had not been able to make them say or do anything.

Are you listening to me, you two-ton cow?
As she looked up, Jace's hand cracked off the side of her head, which hit the grey elephant wall like a sounding gong. It was such a weird noise, so unexpectedly deep and grand that Steph, leaning against the vibrating elephant's side as the sound died and the singing in her ears became an echo, wondered about laughing. Instead she lowered her head once more and made her way over to the car, where she waited at the passenger side while Jace unlocked the doors with a single, bad-tempered click of his keys in mid-air. Steph understood that he intended only to unlock the driver's door for himself. She understood that it was nothing to him if the click happened to unlock the other doors at the same time because (and it made no difference to him) she could get in or stay out; she could spend the whole night inside the kiddies' elephant with the fag ends and crisp packets for all he cared. She got in.

It took me a day or two to get over the trip. Not for a moment did I feel sorry I'd done it, of course not. What took it out of me was having to be out there again, I mean on the outside, where nobody knew who I was. It made me feel angry that nobody was able to see that inside I had become so much more myself.

I was angry in the way I was when Father died. Father and his clock that became my clock, and the anger I felt apparently towards him but really, even before I found out he wasn't to blame, towards myself. I haven't gone over the clock business in my mind for such a long time. When I do think of it, I tend to remember the way Father would sometimes give me one of his kind looks when Mother was not in the room, and nod towards the dining room and the direction of the ticking and say never you mind, that clock's yours when I go and I would look upset and then he'd say you're not to mind selling it. It's to see you through college, you sort yourself out and you be a teacher, now. Like your Dad. He had been an English teacher, I think not a very good one. It was another of the things Mother kept ready in her mouth, seldom said but ready to sting him with, how hopeless he was not to have made it even to head of department, let alone headmaster. I thought I would like to teach history.

So he always meant me to sell the clock, to see me through university. I think that's why he never really explained to me how beautiful it was, how wonderfully it was made. He never showed me its workings or pointed out what made it so rare, so fine and valuable, for fear that he would not be able to hide from me how much it meant to him. If only he had! If only he had given me eyes to see his clock for what it was, and the words to understand it. I wouldn't have been so deceived over it later if he had just let me see it as he did. I wouldn't have spent so long cursing his memory and thinking he was as big a cheat as Mother.

After I went on the bus to Bath that day to do all that was necessary to place the advertisement, I resolved not to go out again. How it rained in the week that followed! But on the next fine day I found some paraffin and made a bonfire at the side of the orchard. I burned my old navy coat, and then all my other old clothes. Standing out there watching the clothes go up in flames I went on thinking about Father and the clock, and I remembered another of the things he would sometimes say if Mother was not in the room. I suppose it was the nearest he came to letting me see the clock as he did. I can't remember the exact words he used, but it was something about time passing painfully—so this must have been in his last year, then, though by some trick of memory it seems to me that he said it at times all through my life, even if time had to pass painfully, even if your minutes and hours offered up nothing but indiscriminate and bigger doses of pain, it was still consoling in a way to have time measured so beautifully, on a clock like his.

And as I watched the old clothes burn I thought how solitary I must look, a woman standing by a bonfire in an orchard in winter. Yet I was not lonely, for I knew that the house and all that it contained would be company enough until such time as my son should come to me.

February

A few weeks later a stale sense of familiarity with what he was doing surfaced in Michael's mind. He had had times like this before, times when dark and light became the same, when a part of him seemed to absent itself from the world that his body lived in and inhabit some ditch all of its own. Such times could come upon him without warning, but usually they followed something difficult such as his court appearance. And they were worse in the winter because around the end of the second week, when he might be feeling that he could wash or get out of bed, he would then have to overcome the cold and this extra battle could, as it had this time, delay him by several more days.

He was even thinner, because eating, like washing, was another thing that required unimaginable effort. When he absolutely had to, he would manage to trudge up to the shop and buy a half dozen or so cans of soup and a packet of bread. Over the next few days, as and when he became aware of a need to put something in his stomach, he would eat soup straight from the tin, cold. Neither the sweetish, half-rotten vegetal smell that came from it, the sticky feel of the soft lumps in his mouth nor the message his stomach would afterwards send, of being sickened rather than satisfied, seemed to have much to do with him. Nor did the accruing pile of opened and unfinished tins by the side of his bed, whose metallic stink soured the room.

As if bitterly half-in and half-out of an affair with death, he lay for days waiting to see if it would come to him, in the belief that he would let it. Uninvolved, he would put up no resistance, but nor would he seek it out. So he thought about being dead without planning suicide, which would have required of him a degree of inventiveness and purpose of which he was incapable. To engage with the problem of his body for long enough to bring about an end to its improbable beating, breathing, filling and emptying seemed overwhelmingly effortful; even the smallest deviation from habit required what felt like impossibly original thinking. And it was that, rather than pride or even a vestigial notion of decency, that made him get up when he needed to pee. Dimly he realised that a wet mattress might eventually force him to get out of bed and stay out, but his torpor was so deep that he would put off the moment until he could barely stand up straight and then, with a nearly bursting bladder, he would stumble to the bathroom.

This time he ate his soup perhaps once a day, and slept off and on. At intervals, over the top of his bedclothes, he stared at the television with the sound off. Because he did not have a television licence and guessed (for he had no idea how these things worked) that a detector van must pick up the noise somehow, he was in the habit of watching in silence. And as he was anyway unable to connect with anything he saw, the silence was also a protection against the incomprehensibility of what was happening on the screen. He watched faces: listening, talking, laughing, shouting, weeping; seeing not just strangers but beings whose functioning he observed but could neither understand nor imagine sharing. He watched and half-wondered why it was that he was so different, for it was obvious that he lacked some fundamental understanding that bound all of them together, and excluded him. Where they had opinions, hopes, ideas, peculiarities, quirks and eccentricities, he detected in himself neither feature, form nor preference. He was unbearably flat and weightless. When he slept he sometimes had dreams in which he was not a person at all, although what he might have been instead was never clear. In other people it seemed that a river flowed, some animating liquid seemed to bubble and burst along their veins whatever they were doing. His were dry, still, and silent. If he was filled with anything, it was dust. Michael sensed in himself an empty space that in other people was occupied by any number of reasons for living.

Early one morning before it was light, on the way back from the bathroom, he picked up his copy of
Heidi
from the floor and took it back to bed. It lay there next to him unopened for several more hours, but he touched the cover from time to time, and thought about the story. It was one of his favourites, along with
David Copperfield, Oliver Twist
and
A Little Princess;
books that he had been given years and years ago, in special editions for children, by Beth. She had been no reader herself so she had given them to him just to encourage his apparent interest in reading. In order to dislodge the thought of Beth, Michael sat up and opened the book. It pained him to recall how she had always tried to encourage him, without managing to understand him at all; she made such efforts with the books, with his acting. She even tried to explain away how he made up stories when everybody else said he told lies. He switched on the light by his bed, not to read but to look at the pictures. As long as he could stop Beth taking hold in his mind, he thought he might soon be all right. He knew it for certain when, having begun almost by accident to read the words, his favourite part of the story (where the gruff old Grandfather made Heidi a soft little bed all of her own in the hay loft) made him cry as it always did.

Later he got up, gathered together a change of clothes and knocked on Ken's door across the walkway. Ken seemed grateful to see him. Michael had a bath and afterwards returned to Ken's sitting room. The community nurse had been so Ken was doped up and not saying much, parked in his day chair in his usual combination of clothes and pyjamas with a thing on a cord round his neck that he could press if he fell, which rang an alarm somewhere. On the plastic hospital tray table next to him the nurse had left his sandwich lunch on a plate covered with cling film, the remote control for the television, yesterday's
Express
and a jug of orange squash. A plastic cup with several tablets in it sat on a piece of paper with 12 O'CLOCK AFTER DINNER NOT BEFORE written on it. He seemed more bloated. His walking frame was within reach, though Michael noted that the commode chair was now positioned just behind Ken's day chair and not in the bathroom, and the telephone had been pulled across the floor from its little table by the door so that he could reach it without getting up. Not that it ever rang. Michael was not feeling completely better, so while Ken dozed he dried his hair by the fierce gas fire, still unable to locate the space in himself that held any real pity. He did not ask if Ken had missed him. He would not have known what to do with the information, with the burden of having let him down, if Ken were to say he had. How he managed during Michael's bad spells, when his popping in to chat or fetch his little bits of shopping came to an abrupt stop, was something they never discussed.

‘Got a big deal on today, Ken,' he said. ‘In the Cotswolds. There's some nice stuff going in the Cotswolds. Nurse coming back, is she?'

The nurse always came back at four thirty to wash Ken and get him ready for bed and Michael knew it, but his checking up struck a note of concern that seemed to please Ken. He nodded and croaked that he was a lucky chap, and that Michael was to mind how he went, and when he had dismissed him with a valiant lift of a hand, Michael took his leave.

The van got to Sherston under protest, but Michael was feeling so much better now that this seemed merely an added challenge. After all, a groan under the bonnet was not a thing that would trouble Jeff Stevenson, curate of St Mary's, Burnham Norton. Michael had telephoned this time and spoken to the woman at the vicarage so the vicar was expecting Jeff Stevenson, and Michael, as he drove along, began to enjoy the transition from himself into Jeff.

It would be the usual doddle. Michael had always been able to act; he had shown a real ability in drama, his teacher had said so. In fact, he might have become an actor. If he had spent those years anywhere other than in Beth's house on that estate on the edge of Swindon he might have made it, but it was impossible to get started from a place like that. Beth had had no idea. But he had definitely had some sort of knack for acting, for forgetting altogether that he was Michael. Probably he had been born with it, because it was the one thing he could do that felt effortless and natural. He just shucked Michael off, left him somewhere and sailed away in his mind and his body, becoming somebody else. It was like taking a holiday from yourself, and always brought with it a whoosh of joy that would make him gasp.

People were wrong if they thought it was a game, though. It was a way of life. He owned clothes that he had picked up from stalls on Walcot Market, knowing they were not really for him but for one or other of the not-Michaels. He had shooting clothes, double-breasted suits, bomber jackets, flamboyant waistcoats—even a silk cummerbund—that he would never wear as Michael. Today, the unfashionably bright blue jeans, checked thick shirt and Timberland boots were helping him to be Jeff Stevenson, and as he drove along he rehearsed Jeff Stevenson phrases about the troublesome van for the benefit of the vicar, whose name was Gordon Brookes.

Gordon Brookes was waiting in the vicarage, which sat in the shadow of the church. From the window of the parish office at the front he could see down the churchyard to the lychgate, which needed re-thatching and where used needles and condoms had been found again two days ago. Sighing, he was trying to rearrange his restless dissatisfaction about the absence of his wife, coupled with the problem of his son, and re-mould them into the shape of the lychgate problem. The lychgate seemed to him, as he looked at it, more and more of an affectation. It wasn't as if it was ever used, he thought petulantly. Coffins came in by the south door, even Wendy's had, on one of those wheelie things, because all the hearses went straight round to the far side where the car park was. The lychgate had probably not been used properly since the last time a horse-drawn cart carrying a coffin stopped in the lane.

Jeff Stevenson was now three minutes late and the problem of his son Simon floated to the top of Gordon's mind. The problem troubled him because although it was as yet still vague, it was not vague enough. Certainly Simon's deciding that he needed to ‘make a contribution to global equality' had seemed as flimsy as most of his previous notions about what he should do with his life. But his intention, announced a fortnight ago, that he and his wife and the new baby should embark on ‘a new life based on service to others', was solidifying in a way that Gordon did not like. Simon was leaving in four weeks' time, and his wife was refusing to go with him. This morning his daughter-in-law had been on the phone in tears, asking him to change Simon's mind; Gordon had felt distressed for her but at the same time irritated. It was the sort of call that Wendy would have dealt with. And the ringing of the telephone had interrupted him in a mood of guilty introspection about Wendy, so that instead of agreeing with his daughter-in-law that Simon was simply running away from his responsibilities, he had heard himself suggest that perhaps, if a person feels a calling to higher responsibilities than the ordinary domestic ones, a wife might find her own happiness in supporting him in that calling. Wendy had been happy in
her
supporting role for thirty-eight years, he told her in a cracking voice, hoping very much that he was right. He had been met with silence. Then he had said that not for a moment did he underestimate the effort and difficulty, even sacrifice, that would be involved. ‘Oh no?' his daughter-in-law had asked tearfully, and rung off.

Gordon sucked on his bottom lip, feeling misunderstood and a little peeved. Women were better at these things, that was all. It had been Wendy who made sure that Simon's many lurchings in and out of physical and psychological health, education, employment and relationships remained, to Gordon, vague; with Wendy gone Gordon now felt in danger of having too much expected of him. This raised in him a mixture of fear and indignation because, having forgiven himself within a year of Simon's birth for a detached paternal style which some might have called inadequacy, he no longer worried that inadequacy was what it was. Since Simon had been born he had devoted himself almost entirely to parish matters that, he had persuaded both Wendy and himself, were more deserving of his attention. He had wanted, he said, to set Simon an example of life and work that would be worth following.

So the lychgate, Gordon now considered, might be a problem whose time had come. The lychgate could be his next project. And for as long as it would demand his energy (Gordon was known by his parishioners to be terribly focused) he could not be expected to lavish the kind of attention that Wendy had had time for on the grandchild with an absent father. In fact, he thought, with Wendy gone, he
needed
a project. Gordon liked to be committed. Over the years, ‘commitment' was what he had come to call the habitual and sustained expenditure of his energy on a range of projects of his own devising. ‘Commitment' was the personal quality of which he was proudest in himself. He no longer noticed much about the church or his parishioners except the things he disliked, one of which was a lack of commitment. He was just thinking he might bring it into the sermon on Sunday and also get in something about the needles and condoms (obliquely, of course) when he saw a man, presumably Jeff Stevenson, standing under the lychgate, his head raised in apparent admiration of the timbering of the roof. What was the attraction? It was not nearly as interesting as the church—you could say it detracted from it—and it was only nineteenth century, Gordon thought, simultaneously deploring Jeff Stevenson's taste and framing the first arguments he would have to meet and demolish on his way to reinstating the lychgate in the parish's affections. Not wishing Jeff Stevenson to see him waiting at the window, Gordon turned, selected his deerstalker from several hats hanging in the hall, pulled on his jacket and set off from the front door of the vicarage to meet him.

‘Hello there! Gordon, how
are
you?' Michael demanded, meeting him on the churchyard path and advancing with a handshake. Gordon submitted his hand, Michael seized it and grabbed Gordon's wrist with his left hand. As he beamed at him and yanked his arm up and down, Michael was trying to see beyond the smeared glasses, which reminded him of the chip shop window at the top of his road on Snow Hill. He searched through the lenses for eye contact and fixed him with a look of concern. The hat was perching so ridiculously on Gordon Brookes's head that he had to concentrate on not staring at it.