An Irresponsible Age

Naked, she hesitated. ‘They were right about all those scatter spots giving it a salty atmosphere. Absolutely right. It’s my favourite room.’ Then she put one foot on the edge of the bath, her groin towards his face.

He made no space for her. ‘I know.’

‘It’s yours, too, isn’t it? Your favourite room,’ she continued, climbing in to crouch at his feet.

‘Don’t you think,’ Jacob was saying as he stood up so abruptly that the water rocked, collided with itself and washed over the side, ‘that you overdid it? Just a bit?’

He got dressed, still wet, and had his hand on the front door when she jumped out of the water and ran naked through the flat to stand behind him.

He waited, blank and tolerant, as she fought to control her voice: ‘You wanted it … as much as … I did … more … so … don’t … don’t … make me feel … all this is … just …’

Jacob had buttoned his shirt wrongly and left it half untucked, not because he was in a hurry but because this was what he did. About five years earlier, Barbara had stopped finding it charming but she had never done what she did now, which was to reach out and tidy him up.

‘You’re forty-three, not seventeen.’

In his smallest, most exhausted voice: ‘May I go now?’

Juliet wrapped herself up in an eiderdown, turned on the television and drank whisky from a teacup, as if that made it good for her. Nothing worked. The room did not become anything more than its four brown walls, its grey windows and warped door; it did nothing to hold her. Damp sat in the icy air and the air sat in her lungs so that what circulated in her body was a kind of slush, neither forming nor melting, grubby, soggy and chill. She wondered why a stranger’s voice could affect her so much.

The pain began, as it often did, when her thoughts ran out. The first twinge at the base of her spine repeated itself and then unfurled, pushed and gripped. I’m not in agony, she thought, it’s not like earache or toothache or being burned, but the pain travelled and accumulated until it possessed her. More than that, it occupied her so fully that she felt thrown out of herself.

She decided to prepare for bed and clutching the eiderdown around her shoulders, moved into the kitchen where she boiled the kettle and filled two hot-water bottles. These she carried upstairs. Then she fetched a can of paraffin and filled the two heaters that stood in the hallway upstairs, heaving one into her room and the other into the bathroom. After trimming and adjusting their wicks, she persuaded both to stay alight. Downstairs again, she coaxed the boiler into action, filled her cup with more whisky, and then went up and ran a bath.

She undressed in a cloud and lay back in water as hot as she could stand, knowing that it would soon cool and that the steam would condense and drip down the walls to feed the mildew, which she would then be able to see, like her poor pink body, far too clearly. The bitter paraffin fumes stung her eyes and mouth, but the smell was a sign that something beyond this bath was giving off heat.

Wrapped in a towel which would never quite dry, Juliet scuttled to her room and turned on a tiny fan heater. She had the largest bedroom, the one with two windows, at the front. It was painted matt duck-egg blue and she kept the navy slatted blinds down, preferring striated light to a view of towerblocks and corrugated iron. Her clothes were arranged on a rail and folded on shelves and in boxes. Her desk, chair and lamp were army surplus, metal-framed and painted grey. She allowed herself one postcard at a time. Her floor was painted dark green and covered in a rug that had belonged to her grandmother. Since childhood, she had loved its lack of traceable pattern.

She surrounded the rug with dullness in order to see it more clearly. She thought about things like this a lot and had impressed Tania at her interview with her ideas about framing space and the importance of absence in display. The truth had been that she liked the empty gallery so much that she knew she would never like anything brought into it. Her PhD, which she planned to finish the following year, was titled ‘Framed Departure: the Empty Metaphor in Post-Iconoclastic Netherlandish Art’.

She got dressed in vest, socks, pyjamas and jersey, and was in bed reading when Fred knocked on her door. Pleased to see him, she moved over and he climbed under the covers, claimed one of the hot-water bottles and lit a joint. Allie had grown cannabis in his attic room, punching holes in the roof above each plant to let in light. His crop had been so successful that the cupboard under the stairs was crammed with large plants hung upside-down to dry. No one had been sure when they would be ready but over the winter they had turned into something like dried seaweed and had a striking effect.

‘How was it?’ she asked.

Fred was too full of delight at his evening with Caroline to want to talk. He shrugged and shook his head, giggled and sighed and smiled so hard that Juliet laughed for the pleasure of something as absolute as his happiness. She was still laughing as she tried to get up, so at first Fred didn’t notice that she couldn’t straighten and when he did, he waited.

When she could speak again, Juliet said, ‘I keep meaning to see someone about this, but then it goes away. It’s as if someone’s turning a switch off and on. And it’s not just my back any more. There’s so much blood and it’s full of –’

‘No!’ Fred covered his ears.

Fred’s room was at the back of the house where he slept in the brass bed he had had since growing out of his cot. He had painted his walls red, thinking this would make the room warmer. His shirts, pounded in a bathful of suds and inadequately rinsed and ironed, were arranged on hangers suspended from picture hooks hammered badly into the wall. His two suits were squashed up on the back of the door while his shoes and ties, underwear and waistcoats were scattered about.

Juliet came to wake Fred at six-thirty. He had to be at his desk within the hour. She stroked his cheek. ‘Every time I come in here,’ she said, ‘I think you’ve just exploded.’

TWO

Juliet continued to listen through the office wall. Jacob Dart might have been sitting beside her, including her; she had no choice.

‘Hullo, Sally.’

Juliet had guessed by now that Sally was Jacob Dart’s sister. He talked to her in the kind of shorthand that siblings use, swore a lot and laughed more from his belly. She imagined him sliding down in his chair as if he were at home and it was just after dinner, and he and this sister (they also talked about a Monica – ‘Bloody Monica’, ‘You know what Monica’s like’) were drunk and up for a late night of banter.

‘Hullo, Sally.’

He said ‘Hullo’ in the old-fashioned way, with an audible ‘u’ rather than an ‘e’. Juliet tried it out when answering her own telephone: ‘Hullo. The opening? Yes, she’ll be delighted. You’re not sure? Fine. I don’t suppose she’ll notice whether you’re there or not. Yes, I can spell it.’

‘Right … right … right …’ with each repetition, the word grew smaller. ‘Which hospital? Are you there now? I’ll be, it’s alright, I’ll be right there. It’s OK Sally, I’m on my on my my way.’

Juliet realised that he was crying. He cried for a long time, as if letting go of something that once it began to unravel would go on and on. What came to mind was a story Fred had written as a child about a magician who was cursed and went to hell, where, ‘leaking small tears and tidy sobs’, he had to spend eternity pulling a scarf from his sleeve.

She couldn’t go and knock on his door. They had not yet met and what would she say? Then his door opened and shut. Juliet looked at her watch and saying loudly, ‘Time to go home!’, put on her coat and stepped outside.

As she cycled into the alley, she glimpsed a figure in a pale coat and a dark hat passing under a lamp, and hurried to catch up. She turned into the street so fast that she found herself overtaking him and had to keep going so that he wouldn’t suspect. Guessing that he was heading for the main road, Juliet sped on and hid round a corner. How could he not spot her immediately? He continued past with a loose stride that made him seem more like a farmer walking his fields than someone hurrying across a city to a hospital. She liked this walk; it made her think of him as a generous man.

The road was a one-way system which gathered up everything heading west and forced it east for a while, around the bend where Jacob vaulted over the railing and danced across four lanes. He hopped over a crash barrier and crossed through the traffic on the other side, where drivers accelerated, relieved to be once more heading the right way. Juliet cycled round and was just in time to see Jacob slip back onto the pavement through a gap where the railings had been wrenched out of place. He continued, half running now, lightly, lightly, disappearing as the road squeezed under the first of the railway bridges which fused here so thickly that they created long tunnels of blackened brickwork and squalid tiles, under-powered striplights and dummy speed cameras, encrusted girders, pallid chickweed, lush moss, pigeons and power cables, all faltering on and on.

‘Can I help you?’ The man patrolling the hospital forecourt was wearing a vaguely military uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie.

‘I’m visiting,’ Jacob whispered.

‘What’s that?’

Jacob shrugged and the man decided that the best way out of this was to pretend that he had heard.

‘Know the way?’

‘No,’ Jacob admitted, then turned and walked off.

‘Which ward then?’ the man called after Jacob, who loped up one of the ramps marked ‘Ambulance Only’ and then came down the other side.

‘Which ward then?’ the man repeated, more challengingly.

‘How should I know?’ Jacob murmured, heading for the steps that led to the even-numbered floors.

‘What you say, mate?’

Jacob came strolling back down the stairs and headed for the opposite set. The man bellowed after him: ‘Here!’

Jacob stopped and turned very slightly, and the man half sang, half spat: ‘Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that hat?’ He grinned, expecting Jacob to grin back only he didn’t but took the hat off his head and held it out: olive-coloured corduroy with the high cleft crown and a feminine, extravagant brim.

‘Have the fucking hat,’ he said evenly. The man coughed to disguise the red in his face, and put his hands in his pockets.

Level 3 looked like a section of multi-storey car park filled with signs that said ‘Do Not Park Here’. The patients who had come out to smoke, some in wheelchairs, others toting drips, huddled together on a strip of turf-like matting. They threw their dog-ends into flesh-coloured plastic barrels planted with dwarf conifers. The man in the floppy hat and coat hurried past. He jumped to peer through the dark glass façade, which was designed to be looked through the other way. At one point he even went up to the glass and pressed his hand against it. Eventually he stopped by the smokers, who indicated that the doors were right there, just behind them. He would have to go in now.

Jacob walked past the hospital map and along a corridor until he reached a lift. He walked back to the map and ran his eye down the list as far as ‘N’: Nye Bevan Ward. The name was in pink and so when Jacob set off again, he followed the line of pink tape on the linoleum floor only then he was following the blue, or the green. Where had the pink line gone?

‘There you are!’ Sally found him by the emergency staircase. He had got as far as the right floor and had not been able to go further. ‘You must have got lost. She’s through here.’

Jacob’s sister led him along a row of blue-curtained cubicles, so tightly packed that they billowed inwards under the pressure of neighbouring furniture and visitors. He sidled along the edge of the bed and squeezed himself into a chair just as a toddler visiting her grandmother rolled under the curtain’s hem. He edged the child back with his foot and leant over to kiss his mother.

‘Hullo there.’

‘Hello, love.’ She tried to raise a hand to greet her son.

‘You sound completely pissed. So you still know who I am, then?’

Monica smiled. The left corner of her mouth had been yanked down, making that side of her face sadder and younger.

Jacob ran a finger across her cheek as if testing a surface. ‘A half smile! You know how they say in novels “She half smiled”? I’ve never known what that meant before and here it is – a half smile.’

‘If I could lift this arm, my boy, I’d give you a clout.’

Jacob took her hand and stroked it.

She could see how tightly wound his mouth was and knew what that meant. ‘Don’t worry. Not much damage done. Good thing I was staying with Sally when it happened. They say London hospitals are the best.’

Sally leant in from the foot of the bed and patted her mother’s leg: ‘You’re to stay put. If we let you out, you’d only frighten the horses.’ She was speaking too loudly, Jacob too much. They would have liked a little distance from which to observe what had happened to their mother and she, too, would have appreciated more space than the cubicle allowed. Jacob and Sally veered and loomed in front of her as parents must appear to a newborn.

Jacob found a tissue and dabbed Monica’s lips. ‘You’re drooling. Must be the smell of that hospital dinner. Now let’s run a few checks!’ Jacob was going to be bluff and cajoling because this is what would make his mother feel comfortable. He could adapt perfectly when he chose.

‘Who’s Prime Minister?’

‘That bloody woman. She is a woman, isn’t she?’

‘Clement Atlee! Absolutely right. And who’s on the throne?’

‘That other bloody woman.’

‘Boudicca! Nothing wrong with you at all! And the year?’

‘Just another bloody year …’

Half an hour later, Jacob and Sally fled. When the lift doors closed, Sally asked, ‘Did you understand anything she said?’

Jacob shrugged. ‘Not a word, poor old cow. Still, at least something’s finally rid her of that dreadful west-country burr.’

Sally screeched, delighted. She did not notice that her brother was shaking.

Jacob walked down to the river and east along the difficult north bank, where he was forced into detours among churches, coffee houses and money houses on streets that jack-knifed or divided, or brought you into alleyways and newly inserted corners, as if to compel you to keep up some kind of attention and pace. He walked tirelessly and lightly, and believed that he could keep moving forever and leave no trace. He hated his mother. When his father died, fifteen-year-old Jacob had caught her looking at him in church in a way he could only describe as triumphant. He hated his father, too, for forcing her to be so small and for, in the end and despite everything, belonging to his wife and not to his son.

It was raining hard. Jacob walked on with his coat open and his hat in his hand. His hair grew wet and his face cold and still he walked, wanting to find the dark that ought to come. Further east he reached a certain street where he stopped and waited. Two hours later, Barbara came downstairs and found him. She ran him a bath, took off his wet clothes and left him.

‘You can stay if you like,’ she said when he re-emerged wearing things he had found in cupboards neither he nor Barbara had emptied. ‘In the study, though, not –’

‘Thank you.’

Jacob offered to make soup. He found potatoes and kale, chopped them roughly and cooked them briefly with a lot of garlic and chilli. He made Barbara watch him cook and told her when to sit at table. He watched her eat and jumped up to fetch whatever she might need – a napkin, a glass of wine, a tissue for her streaming eyes. She praised him energetically and he cleared everything away, and although Barbara knew that nothing would be properly clean or in its right place, she let him.

That night, they were gentle.

‘Will she be alright?’ Jacob asked.

Barbara had spoken to Sally, made some calls and done some research. ‘Not entirely, but within a month or so she ought to be able to go home, providing there’s some local care.’

Jacob had nothing left to do, so he sat down.

‘You must be exhausted,’ Barbara said. ‘What a shock.’

He shrugged, stretched and closed his eyes. ‘She’s a tough old boot.’

‘Yes.’

‘And she gave up on me years ago.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was it at Sally’s fortieth, in that nasty little restaurant?’

‘Suppose so.’

‘Not since then?’

‘What’s the point? She has no interest in me.’

Barbara could have pointed out how avidly Monica tried to follow her son’s career and that she only telephoned so rarely because Jacob made her nervous, but she also knew that this was what he did when he thought someone might leave him – insist they had left him already. As for when he wanted to leave …

‘Are you really here?’ Barbara asked. It was a serious question but one she knew she would have to answer for herself. ‘I don’t think I ever believed, in all those years, that you were really here. Or even that you were real. Because you don’t even feel real to yourself, do you? You haunted our life and you haunt yourself.’

‘It is,’ said Jacob, without opening his eyes, ‘a question of style.’

‘As serious as that?’ said Barbara, with more kindness than you might expect.

The next morning, Juliet woke up and blushed. ‘I was spying,’ she said to herself, and then to Fred as she hauled him out from under his blankets, ‘Do you think I’d make a good spy?’

‘No, too bad-tempered.’

‘Why can’t a spy be bad-tempered?’

‘Because people notice you. They notice your temper. But don’t worry, it’s your charm.’

‘Don’t you mean part of my charm?’

Fred considered this. ‘No.’

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