Staring At The Light (24 page)

‘Your aunt refused a free check-up. She said she would save it for her martyrdom.’

‘I think I told you before,’ Sarah said, ‘my aunt used to tell me tales of the martyrs. She considered the best way to get
children interested in the faith,
was blood and guts. Mention of martyrs was probably her opening gambit. She never really stops.’ She sipped her wine. ‘Anyway,
you look remarkably cheerful on it. I was worried about you at the weekend. Cannon was shivering in front of my fire when
you phoned on Saturday.’

‘Oh, was he?’ He had forgotten about that and it was no longer important, that brief moment of jealousy, followed now by a
moment of relief. Cannon could linger in Sarah’s house for as long as he liked since he was not a lover, and he did not want
to discuss Cannon or have her discuss him either, not when he had such delicate plans for his long-lost brother, although,
at the moment, on the third glass of wine, they seemed the stuff of sheer imagination. Cannon and Cannon’s brother: that was
his challenge; his only. Besides, the man had not yet made an appointment. The fingerprints on his glass seemed to proliferate.

Do you like me? Your aunt liked me
.

‘She asked me to Sunday lunch,’ he said.

For all of the familiar ease, there was something troubling about this conversation. Sarah could feel all the strings controlling
her very secret life becoming entangled. There was Cannon, the loose Cannon, bringing the poisoned chalice of his friendship
to William, giving him to guard a golden sketch of a painting that would not gladden William’s heart if he knew either the
value or the history. Cannon made people keep secrets: he was a manipulator, bringing the nuns to William’s door, making all
these friendships and connections into spider threads, lacing
them together in a web, with a predator at the centre, waiting patiently. She felt the same chill of fear she had felt when
she had known that John Smith was on the other side of Matthewson’s door; an unaccountable, unquantifiable fear; a kind of
toothache.

Perhaps she should explain; tell the story as she knew it right from the start; tell him how Cannon was the harbinger of bad
news unless he was also an absolute liar. Tell him … but telling him would surely dent the shell of his innocence. She had
no business sharing her responsibilities; he had not volunteered for that. So she lit the sixth cigarette and watched him
watching. Regarded the frank gaze of admiration in his eyes. Almost love. She did not want to relinquish that; not yet, if
ever at all. He was quite odd enough for her to love.

‘Did you buy anything at the exhibition?’ he asked, jumping topics with accustomed ease.

‘No.’ Another stab of conscience; a vision of that stolen canvas; a reminder that she could lose that look of liking so easily.

‘Nor I,’ William said cheerfully. ‘I didn’t join you, but at least I went. Thought it was a load of rubbish, mainly.’ They
were both being evasive and finding it all too easy.

‘Any more bad dreams?’

‘I think they’re being temporarily displaced by new challenges. Shall we eat? I’ve been talking too much. I don’t listen to
you
.’

The bubble of her news had been blown away and no longer seemed as important. ‘I’ve fallen in love,’
she said, watching his face fall, enjoying the expression. ‘With an apartment. The person who lived in it left her dentures
behind. Do you think I’ll need them?’

She looked at him smiling at her, and felt unaccountably lonely. Felt, in the pit of her stomach, the same airtight bubble
of despair. Ah, William, I cannot trust you to
like
me. Nor anyone else either. I must put my trust into bricks and mortar. There was nothing else to trust. And, as if he knew
about the slippage of faith, Cannon had not phoned again today.

Cannon had no illusions about the durability of bricks and cement. A home was not a castle. No Belfast boy growing up in the
seventies could ever think that. Stones and wood became fragments, like bones; a home was a flimsy thing, flung down on to
the ground out of spite, out of a liking for the insurance money, or for an unscrupulous builder like Daddy to have the chance
to put it up again. The bomb was simply another form of blackmail, like a threatening letter, easily deployed.

Cannon wanted his wife and child to have a home with thick walls and a serious front door to foster the sensation of safety,
but he himself had no such illusions of permanence. He knew how soon a building could be destroyed if no-one watched. That
rumble of destruction, that cycle of wanton damage and noisy renewal was the music of his childhood. All he really cared about
in a room was the quality of light. Or its absence. Whether it had pictures on the walls. Otherwise it would all come to dust.
The interior was not important
unless it surprised him somehow into noticing, and it had to be beautiful or outstandingly ugly to do that – like the convent
or the prison at one extreme, but all the same he liked it here. William’s ambience; the smell of him, perhaps. It was a very
strange sensation for Cannon to have friends. He wondered if he would ever quite get used to it. Being around William’s things
gave him a quiet, intense pleasure, which was nevertheless tinged with the guilt of trespass. He tried to tell himself that
if he had asked William for a billet for this second night, William would have said yes, but he knew that this avoided the
issue because he had not asked for fear of a no, and a no would have prejudiced something as precious as it was fragile. Cannon
had scant talent for friendship. Johnnyboy had seen to that.
When me and Julie have a house, William, will you come and see us? Julie would like you. I like you. Be god-daddy to a baby,
will you
?

Besides, he had always liked mess, the stage in the construction of a thing, painting, building, when it was a mess. That
was when it was full of promise, long before the disappointment was clear in the vast difference between what was envisaged
and what finally emerged. Mess was the thing he liked in here, even though he had tidied a little. William would not notice,
surely: the room seemed so little used. William told him so, all that long time ago when he had let Cannon explore. A glory-hole.
Dentists are hoarders: they throw away nothing except ideas.

He felt guiltier, too, watching William go out in the evening dark before he himself got in. Guilty about
relying on the fact that, although William had a nice eye for a painting, he was not really an observant man, let alone streetwise.
He simply did not
expect
violation, as Cannon did, all the time. He didn’t see life as a series of booby-traps. There were sets of teeth, mounted
on a card, like buttons. He found those in a cupboard, grey with dust. There were the dental moulds on the table, looking
as if they kept one another company. Yes, he liked it here. He could sleep in this battered chair, eat his sandwich in peace,
drink water from the tap, look around and feel peculiarly safe, and if his hands itched with the idleness he would sit on
them. Enforced contemplation. Use the nail-file left by Tina to file his nails. Nothing wrong with doing nothing until the
early hours of the morning, although it seemed a long time in prospect. After an hour, the guilt got to him again: he had
only wanted a sympathetic, private place to do nothing but
think
, but his dedication to furious thought about what he should do next, other than play out the waiting game, was simply creating
confusion. Feeling guiltier still, he began to wander.

That William was out for the evening and the night was something of which he was fairly certain. He had not looked like a
man popping out on an errand: he had looked like someone washed and dressed, carrying a bag, locking up with care. Dear William.
Cannon found there was no toothbrush in the bathroom, the old rogue, out for the duration. His kitchen was empty of food;
if he had to eat, he would not be eating here. Cannon’s deductions made him feel cunning and, at the same time, treacherous.
Privacy was
not something he had ever been able to value much, but he knew that other people did.

A small, neat bedsitting room William had, featureless in style. A functional kitchen, again with no other mark of individuality
apart from the colour of it, as if he saved his efforts for the bits of his domain other people saw. Or as if he was on the
brink of moving on and did not care. All that mattered here were the waiting room, the entrance hall, which was the first
thing they saw, and the surgery, where they would recline in various states of anxiety until they got up, looking at nothing
except the light. He remembered looking at the light until his eyes closed; remembered William’s kindly face even better and
his hands most of all. You could judge a man by his hands. He drifted into the waiting room, noticing how the blinds were
drawn, another sign of William’s absence for the evening, a fact to be celebrated and also deplored. Cannon half wished he
would come back through the door, whistling. He decided he could risk raising the blind.

The glow from outside lit the picture in the centre of the wall – as if it needed light, containing so much of its own. The
painting he had loaned was its own complete world. There was Bonnard, not quite at his best, sketching his wife as she got
out of the bath, the way he had sketched her a hundred times, beautifully fleshed but delicate. Fastidious in her toilet,
pink and gold in skin, captured in the glow of his constant fascination, the little brown dog in the corner. A deliciously
clean, gorgeously familiar body, totally unselfconscious either of the gaze or the desire of a husband, the gloss of
familiarity suggesting
husband
, rather than mere lover, content to be exactly as she was. To Cannon, it told the whole story of a life he himself wanted
to live. Painting his wife, again and again and again, making love in the bright light of the day with every brushstroke.
Feeling the weight of her arm round his neck, the touch of her breast on his bare arm. Julie in sunlight for ever.

They had seen it together.
Could you ever love me like that
? she had asked. As if she could not know that he already did.

He lowered his gaze, and wanted to weep. Johnnyboy could never even look at a picture like this; it had been bought with Johnnyboy’s
money and it could never, ever be returned. Johnnyboy would slice it into ribbons rather than own it. It represented connubial
happiness; a vignette of fulfilment. Johnny would not want to know about Bonnard’s life.

He moved to the other side of the room, viewing from a distance, aching with longing, suddenly tired. He did not want the
chair in the basement room; he wanted a bed and the luxury of dreaming his way into oblivion. A state of nothing in which
he would wake in a sun-filled room with her by his side; watch her go to her bath and know she would come back. Let him know
before she left the house.

A bed. A bath. But he could not sleep on William’s bed or use William’s bath, not without asking. He could use the basement
room, because it seemed to him that such a room belonged to nobody and everybody. The sight of the clean coverlet on William’s
modest bed made him feel ever more the intruder; he
stared at it, saying to himself,
I am sick of always being in a place where I must not leave traces. Sick of it. Sick of reliance on kindness
.

Madame Bonnard might not have been kind for all he knew, but she was
there
. Go, get out,
go
. Out through the basement window. No. He felt safe here. He had felt peculiarly safe here from the very first visit. Dear
William had no idea what he had done, overturning the fears of a lifetime. Dear William had no idea of what he was like. He
did make a person feel safe. Although not safe enough to take the liberty of sleeping in his bed without prior permission.
Not when he was contaminating his life enough already.

William would not miss a piece of stale cheese from the kitchen fridge. No-one downstairs would miss one of those six lemons
past their sell-by date. And he
would
, one day, share a little of Bonnard’s experience. He
would
leave his mark on the world without his mark being some destroyed building in a street, looking like a gap in a row of front
teeth and an invitation to misery first, and the profit of a stranger second. There was a taste of salt on his tongue from
the cheese, which stuck to his teeth. Leave no traces, sit on the stairs. He had washed in the junk room in cold water, still
felt dirty. Finished chewing. Stopped with a terrible, weary sense of fear, mouth open.

Nobody hears what goes on in your mouth except you, William said. What is loud to you and visible to you is inaudible and
invisible to anyone else, unless you happen to grind your teeth, a sound with a certain resonance. He loved to lecture, did
William.
Cannon was on the last set of the stairs, which turned a corner into the waiting-room, part of which he could see. He was
absolutely sure he had never turned on a light – who needed a light to look at the Bonnard painting? There was one now. Cannon
detested any kind of God, but he thought of the nuns and prayed. You bastard, God, will you ever give me a night’s sleep?
Will you ever give me a moment’s grace of feeling safe? I sold explosives to thieves; I was never big-time enough for terrorists;
please, God, don’t stop my heart, not yet, please. I am safe here. We only have to get to Christmas. Johnny would never ever
be here. He could never even look at my wife’s face. He would never come inside the premises of a fucking dentist. Tell me
I’m wrong.

And yet there he was, crossing Cannon’s line of vision, in front of the painting, which he ignored, confident here as if he
had been invited, so oddly at home that the first thing Cannon felt was a spurt of jealousy. This is
my
place,
mine. I
found it, and there was a sense of
déjà vu
in that. How many dens, how many hiding-places had Johnny uncovered when they were kids? How many caches of paint and paper
had he ruined before he gave up? Beyond count, and here he was again, doing the same. Johnny was talking to himself, suited
and spurred with shiny shoes, as if for an appointment, convincingly debonair, fooling himself. Oh, how the devil did anyone
with Cannon’s use of words ever begin to explain the chameleon existence of Johnnyboy, when nobody else in the world had ever
known him, ever been
close
to knowing him? Hirelings,
paid and fired. These days, he was like a potentate with a series of speechless eunuchs who never lasted long. He looked so
lonely down there that Cannon wanted to leap off the step and touch him, hug him, but he was paralysed. The first touch would
never be the last; touch him, and his own soul and his own hope were as dead in the water as floating fish. No-one would ever
know. If he killed him now … if he killed him now … if he killed him now. He sat instead, the salt on his tongue, his mouth
slack, watching, listening.