What Becomes (11 page)

And the man – who may be stunned by his situation – murmurs in with, ‘Ah, yes . . . I'm sorry. I didn't mean to –' and then he stops.

‘
Bastard.
'

I have to assume he is pondering what he should say. Clearly he'd like to prove for the screaming woman that he doesn't know me, so he can't simply offer, ‘I didn't mean to call you.' That implies former acquaintance. He may also wish to seem incapable of sustaining an interaction as sophisticated as an affair – and he
has
succeeded – as far as I can tell – in sounding quite stupid. If I were him I might reel off
sorry
for as long as I could, but then would that mean I was sorry for getting caught rather than sorry for inconveniencing a stranger? It would be hard to tell.

Half asleep, I can't think of suggestions which might be useful and, in any case, it's 3 a.m. and someone who knows this man – someone who sounds like a wife – is screaming at him in his house. No advice could save him at this point.

He starts again, ‘I was the wrong number. When I rang a few minutes ago.'

‘
Bastard. You think I believe –
'

There is the sound of some object dropping, perhaps breaking, in a way that is violent and yet unclear. ‘
Fu-cking. Bas-tard
.' The woman's voice sheers off on her final syllable and subsides.

The man is whispering by this time, ‘I am very sorry. I didn't . . .' His voice seems to huddle in close.

And I am immediately very sorry, too. ‘Yes. Yes, I know.' Even though I have been inconvenienced, I do want to show solidarity.

‘Do you?'

There's an odd shade of innocence in his question which makes me need to reassure. I try, ‘Well, I . . .' and run out of gentleness after two syllables.

‘
Fucker!
'

Another object, undoubtedly glass, hits an unforgiving surface with audible results and I say, less kindly than I might have hoped, ‘I'm going to hang up now. Goodnight.'

Of course, I shouldn't have said
goodnight
to him. I should have said
good morning
.

Ten minutes later, he made his third call. Or else, I supposed it might be the screaming woman this time, whoever she was: pressing redial, wanting to scream at
me
now and badger out a vindicating truth. So I raised the receiver and slapped it down again at once.

The phone rang repeatedly after that, but I ignored it, let it drill and drill, not giving up, until I had to disconnect it at the wall, listen to the milder nagging from the kitchen and the living room. In the end I unplugged the whole lot, silenced my home as an intruder might. Then I crept through and watched my television.

The twenty-four-hour news was reviewing some survey: an occupied population soon happier with lowered death tolls, but worried by abductions and also rapes. Mutilations up 15 per cent. Degrees of normality returning, expectations readjusted, many officials pleased. Pictures of sand and litter, a low house with something uneasy about it, out of kilter – I don't see it long enough to find out what, because I change the channel, because I don't need to be depressed.

Getting by, that's my aim, locating and holding on tight to whatever will bowl me along. I value fitness, sanity, a pattern of healthy and restful nights, survival. And when I can't rest, I watch the call-in shows. They help.

They also make it wonderfully clear that people throughout the country are wakeful as I am and ringing up strangers – television's friendly strangers – and they're paying to call and guess out mysterious things: what names might be included in a list of celebrity chefs, or prominent adulterers, or which fatal diseases can be spelled within a thirty-letter grid, or what could have been blanked out from famous headlines, popular proverbs, debt collector's letters, rules of engagement – the details don't matter, the sleepless are eager to take part. They'll try roulette, they'll chat about their relatives, they'll buy jewellery, adjustable ladders, craft supplies, they'll call psychics and spend warm, expensive minutes hearing the news from tarot cards, rune stones, star signs, the I Ching – they're happy to be game for anything. As long as there's somebody inside the screen talking back like a loud relation – or maybe not someone that close, more likely a visitor from a local church, or perhaps a nurse – as long as the sense of being cared for is filling up their room. I can understand that.

Last night I watched a woman with an honest face – dyed hair and a caring manner – she extrapolated karma and future events from birth dates and vocal auras. She talked quite slowly, comfortingly, didn't badger, ‘Love and light to you, Leo girl, and what I'm getting here is that he's afraid. I know you haven't heard from him, not for six months, but that's because he's afraid. Men, we know men, they have to work out their feelings and sometimes it's difficult for them to confront, to deal with them, the way we have to. I do see, my love, that he will be coming back to you, there is a past life connection there and he will be coming back to you in either June or July. And there's something here that you had a very strong physical connection, too, quite kinky, even – because you have that passionate side to your nature and you'll want to nourish that and enjoy it. All right? Call back again if you need a longer session and to all our callers, if you want a longer session then you can give us your credit-card number and that will mean you'll be able to go beyond the twenty-minute limit.'

If she made jokes they were self-deprecating and never cruel. She giggled with another lady who wore large rings and a thick red cardigan and was also a very gifted psychic and had been all her life. Both women looked directly at the camera and smiled just enough. ‘Samantha here, she was spot on, spot on. I was having trouble with a relative, quite a lot of worry and it was giving me pain in my back and my shoulder – and she told me all of that before we'd been even introduced. Didn't you?'

‘And I'll be giving confidential readings for the next hour if you want to call in, if these little short readings aren't enough for you and haven't just got the detail that you need to really look at a situation and resolve it.'

They were people you could take to.

I watched for a couple of hours: the betting, the answers, the questions.

‘In the spring that will be much more the way you want it. I can't tell you how, but that's going to work out and you'll be amazed, really amazed.'

Anyway, last night is why I am currently exhausted. I have no other plausible reason. And today is the first Sunday after the clocks are adjusted for spring. So you lose one hour of the sleep you didn't get and you alter your watch and your alarm and never mind the dusty leftover on your mantelpiece because it doesn't work and you can't be fussed to get it mended – it's more to look at, like a clock-shaped ornament – and after that you sit in the garden all afternoon and think there is too much light, more than an hour's worth of extra light, which is intrusive. And you spend a significant period with your self neither dreaming, nor free of night, only caught in some gap. A gap of light. The birds sing wickedly in the hedge until you bang a stick along it and send them off, the blackbirds scattering with those hard little chips of alarm, like somebody hammering at slate. I think there are nests hidden in the privet, several, and even if I am mistaken I know that the birds will return, unstoppably.

There is nothing for it but to leave the garden, the house, take a walk – for health and fitness – and in the street that loops around my garden wall it is even more clear that the new year is rising, gathering strength. The air is softer, moister, the distances changed by oncoming growth and – as you might say – the breath of seething earth, which is enough to make you feel grubby, interfered with, claustrophobic.

But I'm canny enough to avoid that and rush for the shoreline, choose the lane by the ploughed field which is barely stirring yet – the quiet, clotted one, seeds perhaps dead in it, or unwilling – and I will reach the sand and be with freshness while I pad along the beach. Silly to live so close by the sea and not take advantage.

The town catches me first, though. It's riddled with Associations and Committees, folk who set up hanging baskets for competitions, who impose their aspirations upon others. This is a place where we are supposed to think well of ourselves and of our fellow men and women and to expect the best. Which is why every lamp post I pass has a picture taped to it. Someone has lost a dog. Someone imagines that I will help them look for it, give it back if I have stolen it, apologise if I have made it into gloves. On either side of the road for as far as I can see, they've set up pictures of their missing dog.

This kind of thing is always immensely, unpardonably grim – plaintive flyers showing monochrome snaps of unrecognisable creatures that already look run over, or drowned, or vivisected, or dropped from heights. But this is worse than usual. This is tangible panic, set out on display and trying to trap me: pin-sharp colour shots of a tubby old retriever that's looking up at the camera as if it trusts me, trusts children, trusts absolutely everyone: a few white hairs on the muzzle and sitting in a kind of happy slump surrounded by what seems a pleasant garden – much neater and bigger than mine – and signs of a pleasant existence, the kind that pleasant people would provide: people who care about animals and render them fat and unwary and who own a good computer that can print across an image in crisp, high type

MISSING
FROM THE AFTERNOON OF 21 MARCH
HE IS A MUCH LOVED FRIEND AND PET
WHOLE FAMILY WITH YOUNG
CHILDREN DEVASTATED
PLEASE HELP US WE ARE AT A LOSS

Why force me to know this? I've done nothing to them.

All that detail – it's unnecessary. I can already see that the dog is a nice dog, a dog I would like if we met, and I would prefer if it wasn't lost; but I never
have
met it and I don't know where it's gone and there is nothing I can do. I am powerless in the face of these events. What purpose is served by making me feel guilty?

Beyond that, the levels of sadness involved couldn't possibly need explaining – they're what I'd assume, because I am not a psychopath, not someone entirely without imagination. Of course you don't want your dog to disappear: you feed him and love him and tend to him so that he won't. If he goes, you'll be hurt: I am fully cognisant of that. Which means you can dispense with the full-scale advertisement of household misery: dragging the kids in to make things more grisly: suggesting tears and sleepless nights and maybe – why not? – the terrible scene where Mummy, or Daddy, or possibly both, will be driven to talk with their children, however many they happen to have, and tell them all about the Facts of Death.

They will be the kind of parents who explain things and by doing this will helplessly imply that every single one of the people their children see, play with, talk to, love, may leave them without notice eternally and the truth is that huge and harmful forces stalk reality unopposed and meanwhile something shadowed and appalling may have happened to their dog, their big lovable dog with the tender muzzle and the patient eyes. They're monsters. Well-intentioned, good-hearted monsters. Their children should be rushed immediately into care.

Enough.

Much more than enough.

I take it for granted that dogs and mums and dads and children and people who have been children and the whole of the rest of everything will die and this will frequently be sudden and insupportable and unfair and in the end – no, at
my
end, the rest of the pantomime rolling on beyond me when I stop – at the end of
me
I will join them, the mysterious or rotting dead, and I am not even remotely in favour of that, but also try to never indulge such thinking unless I am overtired and lack the speed to slip out of its way. I don't want my existence to seem impractical, absurd and particularly not beyond salvation. Plus, I can't deal properly with others when all I feel is sorry they'll be leaving fairly soon and sad that so many unimportant things are so distracting.

And, then again, distraction is often exactly what I need.

The dog posters keep looking at me right along the street. Down by the crossroads he's there, too: repeating a regular perspective, unwittingly mournful in four directions. I find it impossible not to feel his household waiting somewhere close, planning further strategies. Like anyone else, they'll want to believe that effort is always rewarded.

I'd be the same.

Because it should.

Lots of dogs on the beach – unmistakable, that final pelt towards the seagrass, knowing how great it'll be when they get there, over and on to the sand, when they bark at the wave fronts, gouge the water, run themselves hoarse.

Then they come and sit beside you when they're tired. They lean against you as if two different species can communicate at certain levels and be friends. It's a nice feeling. Had it. Owned a dog when I was young. Don't exactly want to focus on that now – the long-ago, lamented companion – but naturally I am tempted because of those bloody pictures, that bloody family.
Fu-cking bas-tards
.

And the beach should be a distraction, but only if I ignore its generous and varied display of dogs and loving owners, children and loving parents, arm-in-arm loving couples, hair flaming away from them in the wind, tangling, binding. Always a good, stiff, tangling breeze when you're here, something to speed your good fortune, send it kiting. Or else the wind just blows it thin – I'd have to conduct a survey to be sure.

I see there must have been a storm. I don't remember one, nothing dramatic, but the beach is banded and heaped with dead razor shells, mussels, sea urchins, some type of delicate, pale little bivalve that I don't recognise, everything washed ashore. And a dark, new granular surface has been laid down here and there, a layer of pale grit beneath it. Signs everywhere of some great upheaval out to sea and now all this evidence of death.