Living As a Moon (4 page)

‘I REMEMBER NOTHING THAT HAPPENED WORTH RELATING THIS DAY. HOW MANY SUCH DAYS DOES MORTAL MAN PASS?’

Diary of James Boswell, Thursday, 21 July 1763

‘Would you like to make love?’ Graeme asks his wife.

‘No,’ she says, and goes into the bathroom for her shower. Where the bedroom curtains don’t quite meet he can see a strip of sky, and it’s all cloud. He enquires loudly if his wife expects a busy day, but there’s no reply: not because she is out of sorts at all, but because the plumbing is particularly sonorous when the shower mixer indicator is at that one point of the 360 which delivers water at the desired temperature.

An inconsequential dream is fading; something about mountaineering and the crevasse death of a fat boy who bullied him in Standard One, and whom he hasn’t given a conscious thought in forty years. He remembers now how the mud used to cake on the bully’s big knees in the winter playground, and how his pink gums showed when he sneered. When Graeme pulls the curtains he sees from his neighbour’s dogwood tree that the wind is southerly and therefore cold.

‘So, you’ve got a busy day?’ he asks his wife at breakfast.

‘Absolutely flat out,’ she says. ‘And then there’s the meeting tonight to organise the thingy.’ His wife is a school dental nurse, and the thingy is a conference on fluoridation. ‘How about you?’ she says. He could tell her that the futility of his existence gapes before him, that he was bullied in Standard One by a fat boy, that the lustre of the world is now quite worn away.

‘The Mycenaean kingdoms at eleven, Ionian cities at three,’ he says. They are lectures he has given many times, and he feels a twinge of guilt that yet again he hasn’t got around to updating them. The Ionian lecture, in particular: there is new material on the influence of the Persian satraps which needs to be included.

‘Would you mind going round to that Powys street address sometime today? I won’t have a chance,’ his wife says.

‘What address?’ he asks.

‘Where they advertised the used bricks. I told you we should consider them for the barbecue surround.’

‘Ah.’

‘Don’t make a decision on the spot. Just see what condition they’re in, and if there’s still mortar sticking to them.’

There is time after his wife has left for work and before he must leave for the university, for him to get some of the satrap material into the computer, but he doesn’t do it. Without a conscious decision he makes a cup of coffee instead, and reads the newspaper. There is a story about a Nigerian faith healer who made a woman parade around him naked while he sprinkled her with camel urine and recited incantations to increase her chances of receiving immigration papers for England. Female nakedness is always newsworthy: nothing else in the story is of the slightest concern. Prurience has taken a trivial incident from African obscurity and placed it on the breakfast table of the world.

Cicero, a terrier with hair like the bristles of a worn toothbrush, whines behind the door. He is let in and impatiently waits to be fed from the Doggie Woggie Giant Roll with heart and kidneys. Graeme talks to him, draws fingers through his sparse coat, but Cicero has become self-absorbed and depressed with age. No longer does he display disinterested affection, bring in the paper or hold up his paw in a greeting. Only his appetite and body odour are undiminished. Domesticity and abject loyalty have palled for Cicero, and his joints grown stiff. ‘Good fellow, aren’t you, yes,’ says Graeme, ‘and you like that Woggie Woggie don’t you just, old fellow. Yes, you do.’ Cicero says nothing.

Graeme has a glimpse of the red-jacketed postie passing, and stops talking to his dog to concentrate on a new distraction. Letters and emails are moments of possibility in his day. The air is cold on his bald head as he walks to the gate, and the daisies on the lawn, rather than having a wildflower allure, remind him of yet another duty. Yet, there is a good handful of mail, and he resists the inclination to check it out until he’s back in the house, seated by the window and upwind from Cicero.

All, however, is winnowed away without leaving solid grain or gain. The rates demand, the 134th issue of the
Ancient History Review
, a credit card statement, a slip announcing the milk round has changed hands, with apostrophes twice missing from abbreviated it’s, a note from a former colleague, now in the States, saying she has married an evangelical preacher from Alabama, seven multicoloured advertising circulars, and a donation envelope from the support group for those with clinical flatulence. What more did he expect? But he did, of course — he yearned for a gift unsolicited and undeserved, a lightning strike that would galvanise his world. ‘Cicero, old boy,’ Graeme says, ‘I cannot believe the earth is not flat.’ Cicero doesn’t bother to reply.

His eleven o’clock lecture is in Room C25. It’s a long time since Graeme has visited Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos, and years of reading and conferences have dulled that bright immediacy. He makes an effort with the PowerPoint display of the burial treasures, but the majority of students are impassive. Yet the lecture is well attended and a good many students stay after its conclusion. The reason for both occurrences is soon disclosed: the third assignment is almost due and half the class want extensions. The applications are more statements of entitlement than requests for clemency. He listens to their trite justifications and allows all their requests from weariness rather than goodwill.

In the staff club he lunches with Brendon Connor of Linguistics and a visiting Fellow from East Anglia who is an expert on the economic consequences of war. They talk of rugby, the naked African woman and the loss of savouries since the new caterers took over. ‘I used to have curry wontons two or three times a week,’ laments Brendon.

‘Not even a sausage roll now. Jesus. It’s not right. Who makes these decisions on our behalf is what I want to know,’ says the East Anglian Fellow. Graeme thinks he may say something about the demise of pinwheel pastries with bacon and corn, but instead gazes at the full cloud cover clamped over all the campus. Everything seems on a small scale, and shrinking further.

In his room, J47 on level four of the Humanities Block, he works on a departmental submission to the university library, which has decided to reduce its subscriptions to academic journals on classical antiquity, then has a session as supervisor with Carl Lemms, who is preparing a PhD thesis on the rise of equestrian political influence in Rome during the second century BC.

Lemms is a toiler who twenty years ago would not have been given the opportunity for a doctorate: a glum, uninspired and prodigiously determined young man, with hair like dry pine needles, and sprouting ears that threaten to ramify. Graeme knows the future for Lemms and others of his increasing tribe — a rotation of lesser, untenured academic appointments and the final bitterness of expectation unfulfilled. In the present, however, Lemms scratches in his dry hair and looks about Graeme’s room with a stolid avarice. His glumness is a contagion, and Graeme feels its emanation.

The afternoon lecture is poorly attended, perhaps because no assignment is due, and there is a flickering fluorescent light close to the lectern, which is unpleasant. Also Graeme has no PowerPoint display to bolster his unrevised Ionian notes, and a commonplace boredom drifts in the still room. He is aware of the lack of animation in his voice, but cannot manage even spurious enthusiasm. No one waits to ask anything of him concerning Cyrus the Emperor, or the city of Miletus, and a tall, young guy leaving with others slaps his open hand to his temple in what Graeme takes to be mockery of the time spent in the lecture.

As he drives home Graeme remembers the advertisement for used bricks, and finds it in his case. Powys Street is in the older part of the city, and Number 189 is a weatherboard house, but despite that there is indeed a large dump of bricks on the tufted front lawn. No one answers his knock at the front door and then the back, so he goes to the brick heap and makes an appraisal. Most of them seem to be damaged in some way, and most have an icing of mortar. Graeme scrapes one brick against another to check the grip of the mortar, and judges it difficult to remove. He then stands for a moment, a brick in each hand, in the grass of a stranger’s unkempt section and wonders what he’s doing there. No one comes, no neighbours are to be seen.

Where have they come from, these used bricks piled outside a wooden house? What disintegration of dreams do they represent? Who owns them, yet doesn’t bother to be there for a customer? Why on earth would he and his wife wish to corral their barbecue trolley with old bricks? When does the world end?

He’s about to leave when a small and battered car pulls into the unsealed drive. A woman gets out, waves and then ducks back into the car to retrieve a bag of groceries. A tall, rather gaunt woman wearing tracksuit trousers with a yellow stripe, and what looks like a man’s corduroy jacket. ‘The ad for the bricks,’ says Graeme, in explanation, and gestures towards them.

‘Come inside, come inside,’ she says boisterously, and leads the way through the front door with hardly a pause.

Down the burrow of a narrow hall they go, and into an old-fashioned kitchen with a table in the middle. The woman dumps the groceries on it, and whirls disconcertingly towards him with a hand outstretched. ‘Sally,’ she says. ‘Some call me Sally Army,’ she adds with a barking laugh.

‘Graeme,’ he says, and is surprised by the strength of Sally’s grip. ‘I was just having a look at the bricks, but I don’t think they’re quite what I’m after.’ He feels he’s inside the house, has been greeted with familiarity, on false pretences. ‘Sorry.’

‘They belong to the former tenants. The landlord said if they hadn’t collected them by last week, I could sell them off. They’re a bit of an eyesore, aren’t they.’

Sally Army looks like a man. She has a lined face of character, without make-up and with bristling eyebrows. Her hair is long, grey, parted tautly in the middle and held at the back by a blue band. ‘Forget the bricks then, and give me an honest opinion,’ she says.

‘Pardon.’

‘I’ve just been down to the gallery to see the curator about my exhibition there. Forty-two pieces and only three with a red sticker. She said my work doesn’t appeal to the man in the street, and she said it unkindly. You’re a man in the street, well on the doorstep anyway, and you can tell me what you think.’ Sally tilts her chin and gives a laugh free of bitterness.

‘At the gallery?’

‘No, here, here! There’s plenty of my work in the studio here. You give me your man in the street views and I’ll give you a cup of coffee, or maybe the old bricks you want.’

‘I’m no expert on art,’ he says.

‘That’s the point — Graeme isn’t it? That’s the point, Graeme. The man in the street, the curator said.’

‘I do have an interest in ancient pottery and sculpture as part of my studies,’ says Graeme. He’s trying to suppress a slight affront at being assumed a representative of the proletariat.

‘So much the better: history provides perspective. Excellent. I’ll just put these peas and fish fingers in the freezer before we go through.’

She does so, then opens the back door and leads Graeme to what he’d assumed to be a garage, but which has become her studio. The afternoon sun has escaped the cloud and slants through the small window, but Sally snaps on the lights as well. Graeme’s first impression is of a bizarre produce show, or harvest festival. Dry pumpkin and marrow like ornamented shells on a trestle table, a scatter of incising tools, coloured leather and foil leaf, beads, lacquers, paints, brushes and bubble wrap. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she says. ‘Don’t say a word till you’ve had a look round.’

Sally may not want Graeme to say a word, but she can’t repress her own enthusiasm. ‘Gourds,’ she says. ‘I tell people that my art is always gourd.’ She laughs in his ear, bending to see what he’s taken up from the table to examine. ‘The calabash gourd was the first plant species ever domesticated. Long before pottery, gourds were used as containers and for display. Creek Indians in the US used gourds for centuries as purple martin birdhouses as well as storing corn. They knew purple martins fed on insects that damaged their crops.’ Her hand is halfway towards the gourd he has picked up, as a mother’s instinctive movement when another picks up her child. ‘Bicolour pear,’ she says. How light and balanced it feels in the hand, how glowing the red and yellow geometric patterns Sally Army has given it.

‘They’re lovely,’ says Graeme. He feels slightly uneasy in the glare of Sally’s almost obsessive enthusiasm. For a stranger to reveal so much emotion is almost an exposure.

Sally is delighted to have someone she can instruct, assuming everyone was bound to love a gourd. ‘People think of pumpkins and Halloween jack-o’-lanterns,’ she says, ‘but there’s a whole culture tied up with gourds. Musical instruments even — marimbas, maracas and gourd banjos. In some places they were a currency.’

‘The decoration is so intricate, so colourful.’

‘The galleries tell me they won’t sell at the price, though, that I shouldn’t spend so much time on each one. People don’t understand about the curing, polishing, the special paints and gold foil and everything. There’s cheap ones brought in from overseas. Stuff done for the tourist trade with machine scrolling.’

‘Where do you get yours?’ Graeme asks.

‘I grow them on my son’s farm at Ashburn. He and his wife think I’m potty, but they humour me.’

‘They’re not actually pumpkins, are they?’

‘No, but all the same family. Pumpkins are the world’s largest fruit. Did you know that?’

‘Really.’

‘In 2002 in New Hampshire there was one officially weighed in at 1337 pounds.’

Graeme shakes his head, not in disbelief at giant pumpkins, but to convince himself that he’s here, in a backyard garage with a tall, mannish and ageing woman who spends her life creating wonder on vegetable shells. ‘I’d better be on my way,’ he says.

‘But as the man in the street, what’s your opinion?’ asks Sally.