What Becomes (2 page)

‘What if I'd brought someone back with me. What if they'd seen . . . you.'

‘I didn't . . .' and this was when he'd remembered that his finger was really currently giving him grief, extremely painful. He'd felt confused. ‘I didn't think you were bringing anyone.'

At which point she'd lifted up a small pot of thyme he kept growing near the sink and had thrown it towards his head and he'd bobbed down out of the way so it had broken against a wall behind him and then hit the tiles and broken again. Peat and brownish ceramic fragments were distributed more widely than you might think and the plant lay near his feet, roots showing from a knot of earth as if it were signalling distress. Thyme was quite hardy, though, he thought it would weather the upset and come through fine in the end.

‘It's all right. I'll get it.' Frank wondering whether the pan and brush was in the storm porch or the cupboard underneath the stairs. ‘It'll be fine.' He couldn't think where he'd seen them last.

‘It's not all right. It won't be fine.' And she walked towards him, sometimes treading on his track, her shoes taking his bloodstains, repeating them until she stopped where she was close enough to reach up with her hand and brush his forehead, his left cheek, his lips. This meant his blood was on her fingers, Frank softly aware of this while she met his eyes, kept them in the way she used to when he'd just arrived back from a trip, a job – this was how she'd peered in at him then, seemed to be checking his mind, making sure he was still the man he'd been before.

After the look she'd slapped him. Fast. Both sides of his jaw. ‘It's not all right.' Leaving and going upstairs. He didn't follow because he was distracted and he shook his head and ran his tongue along against his teeth and felt he might have to accept that he no longer was the man he'd been before.

Not that he'd been anybody special.

And this evening he was apparently even less: the sort of man who'd sit in a cinema but never be shown a film.

The projection box had quietened, the rattling stilled. There had been a few ill-defined thumps a while ago and then silence and the sensation of being watched. Frank was quite sure the projectionist had decided not to bother with the movie and was waiting for Frank to give up and go away.

But that wouldn't happen. Frank was going to get what he wanted and had paid for. Overhead, deep mumbles of amplified sound were leeching through the ceiling, so the other feature had begun. Still, he suspected that no one was watching upstairs, either – he'd not heard a soul in the foyer.

Half an hour, though – if the comedy had started, that meant he'd been stuck here for half an hour.

He removed his hat and then settled it back on again.

Being left for half an hour was disrespectful, irritating. Any longer and he would be justified in growing angry and then making his displeasure felt.

He coughed. He kicked one foot up on to the back of the chair in front, followed it with the other, crossed his legs at the ankle. He burrowed his shoulders deeper into the back of the seat. This was intended to suggest that he was fixed, in no hurry, willing to give matters all the time they'd take. The next step would involve conflict, tempers, variables it was difficult and unpleasant to predict.

Only then a motor whirred and the light dimmed further then dispersed and the screen shivered, jumped, presented a blurry certificate which adjusted to and fro before emerging in nice focus and showing him the title of his film, the entertainment he had picked. Silently, a logo swam out and displayed itself, was replaced by another and another. Silently, a landscape appeared and displayed itself, raw-looking heaps of brown leaves, blades of early mist between trees, quite attractive. Silently, the image altered, showed a man's face: an actor who'd been famous and attractive some decades ago and who specialised these days in butlers, ageing criminals, grandfathers, uncles. Silently, he was looking at a small girl and silently he moved his lips and failed to talk. He seemed to be trying to offer her advice, something important, life-saving, perhaps even that. But he had no sound.

The film had no sound. What Frank had, at first, thought was an artistic effect was, in fact, a mistake – perhaps a deliberate mistake.

He kept watching. Sometimes, when he'd been abroad, he'd gone to the cinema in foreign languages and managed to understand the rough flow of events. He'd been entertained well enough.

But this was an artistic piece, complicated. People seemed to be talking to each other a good deal and with a mainly unreadable calmness. As soon as the child disappeared, he was lost.

So he stood, let the chair's seat bang vaguely as it flipped out of his way, and strode up the incline of the invisible floor towards the invisible wall and its hidden doorway.

Outside, the projectionist's box was clearly labelled and its door was, in any case, ajar, making it very easy to identify – an unattended projector purring away there, a dense push of colour and motion darting out through the small glass window in a bundle of shifting strands and rods that thinned as they spanned the cinema and then opened themselves against the screen. It was always so clearly defined: that fluttering, shafted light. Frank briefly wondered if the operator had to smoke, or scatter talc, raise steam to make sure it stayed that way, remained picturesque.

In the foyer, there was the boy with the dirty shoes, leaning against a pillar and looking drowsy.

‘There's no sound.'

‘What?'

‘I said, there's no sound.'

The boy seemed to consider saying
what
again before something, perhaps Frank's expression, stopped him.

‘I said, there's no sound.' Frank not enraged, not about to do anything, simply thinking –
no one helps and you ask and it doesn't matter because no one helps and I don't know why.
He tried again: ‘I can't hear. In the normal way I
can
hear. But at the moment I can't. Not the film. Everything else, but not the film. That's how I know there's something wrong with the film and not with me.'

The boy was eyeing him, but didn't seem physically strong or apt to move abruptly.

Frank believed that he felt calm and was not being threatened. He continued to press his point. ‘There is a problem with the film. The film is playing, but there's no sound.' And to explain what he'd been doing for all of this time. ‘It's not been started long and it has no sound.' Although this maybe made him seem foolish because who would have normally waited more than half an hour in a cold, dark room for a film to start.

‘There's no sound?' The boy's tone implied that Frank was demanding, unreasonable.

Frank decided that he would like to be both demanding and unreasonable. If he wasn't the man he had been, then surely he ought to be able to pick the man he would be. ‘There's no sound.' Frank swallowed. ‘I would like you to do something about it.'

This wasn't a tense situation, he'd thought it might be, but he'd been wrong. His potential opponent simply shrugged and told him, ‘I'll go and find the projectionist.'

‘Yes, you should do that.' Frank adding this unnecessarily because the boy had already turned and was dragging across the foyer carpet.

Something would be done, then.

Frank sat on the small island of seats provided, no doubt, for short periods of anticipation – people expecting to be joined by other people, parties assembling, outings, families, kids all excited by the prospect of big pictures, big noise, a secure and entertaining dark. The door to the larger auditorium was open and he could see a portion of the screen, the giant chin and mouth of a woman. There were also figures in some of the seats, filmgoers. Or models of filmgoers, although that was unlikely. They must have been stealthy, creeping in: or else they'd arrived before him, extremely early. Either way, he'd not heard them, not anticipated they'd be there.

That was surprising. Frank prided himself on his awareness and observation and didn't like to think they could fail him so completely. In a private capacity this would be alarming, but it would be disastrous in his work. He was resting at the moment, of course. Everybody who'd said that he ought to rest had been well intentioned and well informed. He'd needed a break. Still, there would come a day when he'd return and then he'd need his wits about him.

Expert
. That's what he was.

‘There are other things you can do.'

She hadn't understood. When you're an expert then you have an obligation, you must perform.

‘There are other things to think about.'

She'd never known the rooms he'd seen: rooms with walls that were a dull red shine, streaking, hair and matter: floors dragged, pooled, thickened: footprints, hand prints, scrambling, meat and panic and spatter and clawing and smears and loss and fingernails and teeth and everything that a person is not, should not be, everything less than a whole and contented person.

Invisible rooms – that's what he made – he'd think and think until everything disappeared beyond what he needed: signs of intention, direction, position: the nakedness of wrong: who stood where, did what, how often, how fast, how hard, how ultimately completely without hope – what exactly became of them.

Invisible.

At which point, his mind broke, dropped to silence, the foyer around him becoming irrelevant. A numbness began at the centre of his head and then wormed out, filling him with this total lack of anything to hear. He tried retracing his thoughts but they parted, shredded, let him fall through into an undisclosed location. And the man he'd been before was gone from him absolutely, he could tell, and whatever was here now stayed suspended, thoughtless.

No way of telling how long. Not even enough to grip hold of and start a fear. Maybe mad. Maybe that's what he was. Broken or mad. Broken and mad.

Then in bled a whining: a thinner, more pathetic version of his voice and his mind seemed to catch at it, almost comforted.

No one helps.

It felt like a type of mild headache.

No one ever helps. I just stay at home and the light bulbs die and the ceilings crack and everything electrical is not exactly as it should be – there are many faults – and I call the helplines and they don't, I call all kinds of people and they don't help, I spend hours on the phone and I get no answers that have any meaning, I get no sense – there are constantly these things going wrong, incessantly, every day, and I want to stop them and I could stop them but no one helps and I can't manage on my own.

Like that evening with the blood – he couldn't very well have been expected to deal with those circumstances by himself.

He'd done all he could, waited in the kitchen and kept the soup on a low heat so that it would be ready for her. Except that wasn't the main point.

His finger was the more important detail. He washed that under the tap and then wound it round with an adhesive dressing from the first-aid kit. He'd used the kit in the hallway cupboard rather than go and maybe disturb her in the bathroom.

The bathroom, that was more important than his finger. He'd been guessing she was in the bathroom, because the hot water was running, he could tell from the boiler noise, and she'd probably been in there adding bath oil, enjoying the steam, getting the temperature right for steeping in – he hadn't known. He never had seen her bathing, the details.

The bathroom was connected with his finger because he'd bound his injury downstairs so as to avoid her and had possibly not done this well, maybe he should have taken better steps to close the wound, because the scar that he'd eventually grown was quite distinct. If anyone examined his hands closely they would see it – an identifying mark.

Then – a key point – he'd noticed that his shirt was bloody and he should change it and that had meant changing his plans and going upstairs, sneaking into their bedroom, pulling out any old sweater and wrestling it on.

The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you'd get when you hugged her, or rolled over on to her pillow when she wasn't there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they'd fit their chin down over the woman's shoulder and there would be this smile, a particularly young-seeming expression with closed eyes – always made him think –
bliss.

That one soft word, which in every other context he did not like or use.

Going up to the bedroom had been unwise – she might have been there, too, resting on her pillow, or undressing and having some kind of large emotion that she didn't want to be observed. But he'd been careful to listen at the bathroom door as he passed it and had heard the sound of her stirring in the bath, a rise and fall of water, some kind of smoothing motion.

Somehow, that was another point to emphasise. It should not be forgotten, that moment of leaning beside the door and listening to a movement he could not see and imagining his wife's shoulder, side of the breast glimpsed, her cheek, the lift of her ribs – always a slim girl – and a glimmer of water chasing over and down, being lost.

Once he'd put on his sweater, Frank thought he was hungry and so he'd gone down to the soup, cut into the bread he'd baked – a moist, yeasty loaf made with spelt, which was a little difficult to get, but worth the effort – and he'd ladled out some soup. When he took the first spoonful, though, it tasted salt, peculiar, and a lassitude in his arms and throat disturbed him and he ended up throwing his bowlful away.

It wasn't that he didn't realise she was upset.

He did know her and did understand.

She'd brought no one home and they had no children, no child, and she was the only person who'd seen him, just her, and they were married, had been married for years, so that should have been all right. But her feelings did exist, of course, and should be considered. She was upstairs bathing and having emotions. Undoubtedly the most important thought that he could have, should manage to have, would be that she had feelings. These feelings meant she didn't like his soup, or his bread, or his hat and she blamed him for terrible things, for one terrible thing which had been an accident, an oversight, a carelessness that lasted the space of a breath and meant he lost as much as her, just precisely as much.