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He looked at it and said ah, bin is over there, pointing to the other side of the road.
And at work I spent the whole day trying to decide how I could tell someone, who I could tell.
I even wrote lists, names, opening lines, all by the way and actually there is something and can I tell you.
I wondered if a conversation could turn that way, if I’d get the chance to say oh well it’s funny you should mention that because.
I wondered if I’d take the chance, even if it were to be offered.
I still had the plasters on my hands, I had to keep them hidden, I kept my fists closed, hid my hands under the desk to peel them off.
They left sticky trails around the edges, like chalk outlines on crime scene pavements, and when I rubbed at them they curled into dark strings and twisted across my skin.
I looked at the wounds for a long time, turning my hands under the desklight, a dozen pink unstitchings already beginning to fade and heal.
The marks are still there now, and I’m worried they might scar, I’m worried what people might think.
If they saw, if they looked at my hands and they noticed.
Chapter 10
He knows. He sits in his kitchen, breathing clearly again, the old man upstairs at number twenty, he listens to the sound of his blood crashing through his ears. He sits, and he looks at the cooling kettle, and he knows. The doctor told him, told him as much as she could, over the course of a few appointments, in between various tests.
I don’t like the sound of those lungs of yours she said, first.
They sound rather unhappy to me she’d said, with the ice-cold searchlight of a stethoscope pressed against his chest, with a concentrated look in her eyes like she was trying to imagine herself inside him.
I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said, do a few tests, make sure it’s nothing untoward. That was what she’d said, untoward, and he remembers thinking it was a strangely old-fashioned word for a young woman like her to be using.
He remembers noticing that she kept the stethoscope in a long black case with polished brass fastenings and an engraved plaque. It had looked like a present from somebody, and he’d thought it was a strange thing to give as a gift, and he’d wondered how long she’d had it, how many unhappy sounds she’d heard through its earpieces.
That was where it started, with unhappy-sounding lungs. I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said. He hadn’t liked the way she’d talked to him, not at first, it had seemed patronising, distant. But now, now that things are how they are, he is glad of her manner. It helps him to hear all that she sa
ys, the details, the projections. And he knows.
But his wife, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a thing.
That first time, when he’d returned from the clinic with a thumb-sized plaster over the puncture in his arm, he’d said everything was fine there was nothing to worry about, he was fit as a fiddle. And he’d gone on to prove it, in a way which surprised them both and made her feel much younger than she was. He’d only lied to stop her worrying, he’d only lied because he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. He’d thought the doctor would call him back in, tell him some things about the blood test that he didn’t understand, and then say he should exercise a little more. Cut down on fried foods. Drink less. And his wife does take to worrying easily and he didn’t want her fretting over something so insignificant.
Next door, the young man with the bloodshot eyes begins his packing by taking down his work from the walls. He is ready to leave this house now, he has left his mark here and he is ready to pack his things and leave, so he takes down the papers and photographs and objects that are blutacked and pinned to the walls.
Most of the papers are to do with his work, notes and plans and quotations to help him structure his dissertation, sketches of burning Viking longboats, of prehistoric burial mounds, of Indian funeral pyres, photographs of mahogany coffins with brass handles, of crematorium chimneys. He takes all these pictures down, rubbing away the blu-tac left on the wallpaper, and he puts them into a large red folder with funeral rites from pre-history to post-history written on it in thick black pen. He takes down photocopied sheets of poetry, of religious text, of lecture notes from his archaeology course.
And from a small shelf in the middle of all these papers he takes down an unglazed clay figure, a replica of a Japanese ceremonial idol, and he wraps it in thin tissue and an old newspaper. He puts it in a box and turns away, he looks out of the window and sees the boy with the tricycle following the twins into number seventeen’s front garden, he looks up and sees someone leaning out of the attic window with a bucket of water.
In his kitchen, the old man refills the kettle with fresh water, and sets it to boil again. He thinks about his wife, and he thinks about what she doesn’t know. He hears shrieking from outside, laughter, children running.
He hadn’t even told her about the second visit to the doctor’s, or the third or the fourth. He’d invented stories, walks around town, bowls matches, shopping trips, surprise meetings with old friends. And once he’d started it had seemed so difficult to stop. There was a time when he could have spoken, after another test they’d done which had taken all day, a complicated thing where they’d smeared him with gel and scanned him like luggage in an airport, and he’d felt that perhaps the time had come when he should say something, make hints, leave clues.
A bloodied handkerchief in the washbasket, an appointment card on the noticeboard.
But he didn’t want to have to admit to having lied to her at all, and he couldn’t bear to think of her worrying and upsetting over him, especially not now that it seems there is nothing really to be done about it. So he knows, and she doesn’t know, and this makes it easier, and this makes it harder.
He knows about the look the doctor had on her face when she’d spoken to him about that first testing of blood, the look she’d tried to hide behind a shuffle of papers and a smile. Well now she’d said, things aren’t exactly one hundred percent the way we’d like them to be, we’d like to do a little more investigating. I can’t pretend there’s nothing to worry about she’d said, but the sooner we know what’s wrong the sooner we can do something about it, yes? Which had seemed a sensible enough thing to say at the time, except that with each further test they did the likelihood of there being something they could do about it seemed to decrease. And unlike the doctor, he can very much pretend there is nothing to worry about, to his wife at least. All he can do now, it seems, is to protect her from the truth. This is what he thinks.
The kettle begins a low whistle which will soon become a shriek, and as he stands to move towards it he notices that the twins have disappeared. He moves the kettle off the heat and rolls a splash of water around in the pot.
She doesn’t know, as he knows, that after that scan with the gel they’d had him in for what they’d called a lumbar puncture, he hasn’t told her that the needle in his spine felt like a fist sunk into his bone, much as he’s often imagined a bullet might feel. He wore a vest to bed for a month to hide the bruising, bruising which spread across his back like purple flowers opening out their petals, and he could only say he was feeling the cold when she asked him about it. Say he was getting older. Make a joke about it.
