The next morning I found myself standing by the petrol pump outside the café. The sky hung low and grey over the car park, throwing no shadow, making the edges of everything sharp and clear. Inside the café, the business of the morning. Why after all disturb them, I thought, turning away, why force the contact? Two dots never meeting, never meaning to meet. And yet, I told myself, one might take a first step. One might establish the conditions for a reconciliation, I thought, opening the door of the café. The usual tinkling bell, the usual sudden silence, the very walls of the café seeming to swallow the words of the townspeople as they watched me cross the threshold. I thought of the entrances of my teenage years, the exits, the collectively held breath that attended these arrivals and leave-takings. At times I comforted myself with the thought that my position enabled the connection of others, my exclusion a service undertaken in the interests of community cohesion. And this, I told myself, looking around the café, this after all was not so very different. In fact, I reflected, these people might be my family, so similar were they to my brother, to our immediate family so far as I could remember them, in colouring, in bone structure, in the sparseness of their hair. Was that not one of my brothers, sitting by the window? And there, at the counter, that older couple: were those not my parents? I slid into one of the booths. A young mother seated at an adjacent table turned her child’s perambulator to face away from me. I observed the solemn faces of the café-goers, their right hands twitching in their laps, unconsciously forming the sign, I could just make it out, of a cross. And yet, I thought now, as I had thought at other times, was it not possible that none of this had anything to do with me at all, that the silence of the assembled people predated my arrival and would continue after I was gone, that each couple, each group of friends, had merely fallen into silence, separately and at the same time, silences that were after all only natural in the course of a conversation, over the course of long friendship. Was not the antagonism I had long imagined merely rather a projection of my own inflated sense of self-importance, I said to myself, feeling on more comfortable footing now. I looked down at the place setting, everything aligned just so, the paper mat, the paper napkin, I took pleasure in the symmetry while I awaited the server. Somewhere in the back of the café a radio was going. Otherwise, silence. Eventually a youngish man edged towards the booth. He wore an unspeakable apron and kept his gaze fixed on a point somewhere beyond my left ear. I had prepared myself for this. I pointed to the young mother’s coffee cup, and then back to myself. The mother burst into tears. For this too I had been prepared. I persevered, pointing to the counter, whereupon sat a cherry pie under a glass cloche, and then back to myself. The young man waited a moment, seemingly to ascertain whether further instruction was forthcoming, and, receiving none, crept away. Did I not have a right to a cup of coffee, a slice of pie? What after all had I ever done wrong? And if these people resembled my family so closely as to be basically interchangeable with them, did they not then resemble me, too? What was there to mark me out especially? At this point, the young man emerged from behind the counter, holding a cup of coffee cupped between both palms. He walked very slowly, one foot and then the other, his eyes on the lip of the cup, the liquid barely moving, the eyes of the townspeople fixed upon him, I felt for this young man, so diligent, so careful, I knew well how difficult it was to carry a drink over to a table without spilling its contents, without losing the feeling in one’s hands and dropping the drink, dropping a plate, dropping a tray, I had done it myself many times before. I watched with bowed head as he placed the cup down on the table before me. I felt a brief release of tension pass through the café. The young man retreated behind the counter, emerging a moment later with the plate of pie. This he managed more easily. With the utmost care, he placed the slice of pie down on the table but, due to an unlucky tremor of the fingers, a sudden loss of faith, the plate was propelled a few inches further than he had intended, directly into the salt shaker, causing the latter to fall on to its side. An easy mistake, and another one I had made so very many times myself, I thought, reaching forth, righting the cellar, throwing a pinch of salt over the left shoulder, an automatic gesture, an old habit, learned at the Sabbath table. The young mother emitted, and then suppressed, a scream. The server fled behind the counter. The hands of the other diners, briefly stilled in their laps during the service, resumed their motions with renewed fervour. I broke into the pie. I watched the steam rise from the coffee. I looked out the window on to the shadowless day. Muscle memory, then, was that what marked me out? Tradition? What was it they thought of, the townspeople, when they saw me walking the streets of their town? What was it they remembered?

  It had been a mistake to come, I understood that now. The diner had none of the pleasures I had imagined, not the satisfaction of anonymity, not the joys of the Bunn coffee makers I remembered from childhood or the free refills that came along with them; smoking, even here, had been banned indoors. And instead of ingratiating myself with the townspeople as I had hoped to do, arriving in the diner with my hair brushed, a bit of makeup carefully applied, wearing plain and modest clothing, I had done the opposite, inflaming their superstitions, bringing out their fears, my gesture with the salt meant to reverse the server’s bad luck clearly taken as injurious. I looked around. Eggs stood cold and untouched on the plates of the other diners, resting alongside a few dried-out strips of bacon. Everyone it seemed had stopped eating on my arrival, or had never started, worried, I could tell, that in opening their mouths, in swallowing the runny egg, the bit of toast, whatever contagion they associated with me would attach itself to them, following the masticated food down the throat, into the stomach, lodging somewhere in the intestine which, everyone knew, was the seat of bad feeling and ill health. For a moment, I wished it had. I had done enough. I left a few bills on the table and rose to leave.

  The sun had come out. I walked the town’s sidewalks for a time, observing the way my shadow swung round as I changed direction, as the sun followed its slow, aestival arc. I sat in the town square, I walked past the playground, I looked through the chain-link fence at the municipal pool. Everywhere that same blank look. A few hours passed, it was coming on late afternoon when I found myself standing on a path outside the church. I followed it round to where it terminated at the churchyard, a lovely green and wooded place. The graves were well tended, even the oldest tombstones in good shape. I wondered whether the local tombstone company helped to maintain the grounds, in exchange, perhaps, for a monopoly on the memorials, whose designs were uniformly simple and poignant. So many years of the town’s dead lay here, unmolested, in good shape, each townsperson, I imagined, could come here to visit even the most distant of their ancestors, centuries removed. A single, unbroken line into the past. Perhaps that was the essential difference between me and these people, the tangible threads of time that held them fast to this earth, to one place, that entitled them to live and to go on living. What blood feeds a soil like that? Overhead, the leaves trembled in the breeze.

  I had reached the far end of the churchyard, where a gate let out on to a flight of wooden steps that ran down a ravine to one of the town’s rivers. My brother had explained that some part of the place name reflected the point of convergence of all these waterways, where they clove across one another before running on, certainly, in different directions. As I placed my hand on the gate, I noticed movement down by the river. I stilled my hand and watched. A group of the townspeople, some of whom I now recognised as the shopkeeper, the server, the young mother, the garage owner and a few others, strangers still to me, were gathered at the river’s edge. Each of these people held something in their arms, they held, and I could hardly believe it myself, the grass talismans I had woven with so much care and attention. A man I did not recognise – the preacher, perhaps? or priest? what word did they use here? – spoke a few indistinct words. The rest responded as a group. Someone handed him a spade, and he began to dig into the soil upon which they all stood. He dug for a long time, deeply, a hole whose edges met at right angles, just so. By the time he had finished it was getting dark, and I felt the stiffness in my body, in my hand that rested still on the gate. Hours must have passed. The others helped the preacher out of the ground. He wiped his brow, straightened himself, and uttered a single, unintelligible word. The rest turned as one and flung the grass dolls into the pit. They took it in turns to throw shovelfuls of the silty soil on top of the dolls, one by one, until the hole was filled once more, until it had become a small mound. The group stood in silence, in the twilight, with their heads bowed.

  It was a perplexing ritual, so laden with potential meaning it was difficult to discern whether it might constitute a blessing or a curse. I worked through the symbology. The proximity to the water, was that life? Wisdom? Undifferentiated chaos? A purifying ritual, of course, of course. But if purifying, why bury the dolls, why not merely submerge them? Why not throw them into the river, allow them to be taken out and away to some far estuary of the world? Too much to hope, I supposed, that the timing of this ritual, so soon after my visit to the café, was merely coincidental. It was clear either way that the townspeople had decided, for how could they do otherwise, that I had been responsible for the mysterious and threatening appearance of the dolls. For what townsperson could have done such a thing, could have hidden a thing like that? Impossible. The gate creaked underneath my hand, and the townspeople, so far down the darkened ravine, too far out of earshot surely to be affected by such a small sound, turned to look up. I dropped my hand and ran, I cannot explain why, ran down the churchyard path, ran up the main street, ran by all the large and beautiful clapboard houses on the town’s outskirts, ran under a row of ancient oak, all the way back up the road to my brother’s house.

  I had hoped, as I have said, that my efforts at the community farm, in making me more visible in the town, might have overwritten some of the bad feeling I sensed had been gathering against me. I had just begun to feel it, pressing at the edges of my brother’s property, a mustering of ill will, but after my visit to the café it seemed to take on a more distinct shape, something palpable reaching out to grab hold as I ran and ran. Once safely inside the house, I locked the door and shuttered all the windows. From then on, I told myself, I would perform various rituals to ward off the evil eye, rituals taught to my siblings and me by our mother, one of the few concrete things she had passed down to us, almost by accident. I learnt by observing in any case, observing her, for instance, at the glass in the bathroom, her sadness and her lassitude. Yes, I learned much incidentally and by observing the people around me. That evening, I fed Bert and I retired early to my room.

  Nothing had happened, I told myself, no catastrophe, no untimely encounter. I was fine, I thought, pressing my face into the pillow, I was whole. All might still be well. Perhaps all manner of things might after all be well.

  And yet my mind reeled. I was unable to sleep, unable to silence the thoughts which presented themselves, unbidden and at all hours. Accepting that my arrival had coincided with the madness and necessary extermination of the cows, the demise of the ewe and her nearly born lamb, the dog’s phantom pregnancy, the containment of domestic fowl, a potato blight which I have so far neglected to mention – acknowledging that all these events had occurred in quick succession more or less upon my arrival in the place, and admitting that not one of these things had happened singly in recent memory, that the town and surrounding areas had actually lived through a blessed and prosperous fifty years, and that these unfortunate events had still less ever, in recorded history, happened simultaneously – granting all this, yes, still, it was difficult for me to accept the bad feeling of the townspeople. However hard I toiled at the community farm, however many muckheaps shovelled, however many chicken coops scraped down, however many nettles pulled up by the roots, hung to dry or boiled for soup, still I felt their hostility. All these efforts, I realised with a great sadness, had been in vain, had in all likelihood been doomed from the outset. They had not gained me citizenship in the place; I remained, as I now understand I must always remain, outside. Nevertheless, in the days after I witnessed the burial of the dolls, I continued to present myself at the community farm. No one objected, and I would not have understood even if they had. I wanted so badly to right things before my brother returned, wanted to show him how I had things in hand, how I had behaved correctly, how I had been obedient. I went so little beyond myself, practised a strict economy of hope and communicated no desire to myself or to others. I did all this without seeking any praise, without any self-love, without even (it must be said) much effort or will and yet, I admit, with perhaps a slight degree of avidity, one might say rapacity, even, looked at a certain way, an unsightly if clumsy fanaticism. In spite of all this, all these efforts, I felt radiating from the landscape, surely as ever now, the anger of the townspeople, who after all could not help but think historically, and who, having been in a sense exiled from the modern world to their own home town, a town like any other, whose people had behaved like those in any other, who thus understood the need for roots, whose continued existence depended on this understanding, depended in fact on the pact of silence, on groping, blindly, for the future, saw me as nothing more than a stranger of a fixed, old age, who had appeared out of nowhere to herald, perhaps even bring about, a truly inauspicious time. I was so different to my brother, could hardly be related to him, had perhaps been collected in childhood as a servant waif by a soft-hearted father away on business, only to appear in the township in these too-late days, yes, in order to make them look at themselves, take a long, hard look at their wretched selves, slaves to the past, slaves to their ancestral hatreds, who had lived for so long, for a time anyway, in blithe forgetfulness, in the beautiful rush of the seasons, finding refuge in an earlier way of being, skipping right over the cold and terrible machine age into the distant past, drawing then a line from that much beloved past directly to the present. Things remained ever the same, I thought, sitting on the terrace in the afternoon sun, Bert in my lap. Only the names of things changed, from time to time, from place to place, moving according to whatever was expedient, whatever might affirm the beliefs held by a given people, by a given person, beliefs one needed to hold about oneself, stories one told oneself in order to live, to go on living with oneself, knowing what one was capable of, knowing the things one had witnessed, the things one had done.

  In retrospect, from my present vantage point, I can see that all this, taken together with my brother’s sudden and unexplained disappearance so soon after my arrival (for so it must have seemed to any onlooker), considering too my new habit of hanging nettles and other plants, hanging chamomile flowers, to dry from the walls of the town’s barn, in such great profusion, in truth positively covering every available inch of wall, communicated perhaps a very particular aesthetic that may have tried the patience of the townspeople, though of course I did not see this with such clarity at the time. As far as I was concerned, I was parsimonious, remained resolutely within my own circumference, and because of this I could cast no shadow, I did not see myself reflected in the bearings or mien of any other. This was no curious thing. I had always been susceptible to the desires of other people, any strong feeling experienced in close proximity to me I reflected, like the still surface of a pond at dawn, fathomless, untenanted, so often coming to live these feelings as though they were my own. In the case of the townspeople, although they kept their physical distance, so powerful was the sentiment, so critical the mass, that at times I was overcome, it worked on me, and I lay down on the ground, on the floor of the barn. All of my senses were taken over in these moments and what I could hear, so clearly, were the words that had followed me my whole life long: Lie down little dog, lie down at last. And I would. I would lie down, only to get back up again after a few moments, the stone flags of the barn so hard, the grass outside so wet or so cold, in spite of myself, I would keep on and on, as I had before, as I would continue to do in future, for no rhyme or reason, with no encouragement whatsoever, I would keep on, a perfect specimen of bare life, better off, no doubt, and as had been repeatedly suggested to me, out of it all, put out of my misery, creeping into some earthen hole somewhere never to return. But to my everlasting regret I lacked the genius of self-annihilation and, out of some animal cunning crouched somewhere deep inside of me, I carried on my career of hopeless survival, not undisturbed and surely having exhausted the mercy of providence, such as it was. It was not wisdom, no. I just continued to scrape at the sky.

  * * *

  —

  But my brother was to return and I knew that the impulses that were just beginning to disclose themselves would have to be checked, they would have to be tucked back in. In preparation for his arrival, I got back into his routine. I rehearsed the steps of the morning, the opening up, the airing out, and then those of the closing down and curtaining of the evening. I cleaned each piece of silverware meticulously. I shined the brasses in the kitchen. I laundered the soft furnishings. And before long, there he was, coming up the drive in the same car in which he had driven me from the airport to the house. I thought he looked well, at any rate he looked as though he were in control of the vehicle, he drove with purpose, he had a tan, was probably wearing cologne. I was devoted to him, yes. I opened the drivers-side door, I helped him out, how elegant he looked in his light suit, I told him, brushing the travel from his shoulders. I followed him into the house, carrying his holdall, pursued him into the kitchen, pressed him into a seat, served him a drink, offered the small morsels of refreshment I had prepared, mindful of my brother’s tastes and of the challenges posed to the digestive tract of one who has been long travelling. I pushed in his chair, I asked about his work. I felt he was flattered by the attention, that he tucked in gratefully. After this small repast we went out into the garden, the late afternoon sun goldening everything. I brought drinks out on a tray, I lit his cigarette. If at times I detected a slight suspicious cast in my brother’s glance, in his aspect, as though my attentions were insincere, as if there existed in me some obscure motivation, I simply bowed my head, lowered my voice, sweetened my look. By the end of that first afternoon I had regained his confidence, he was satisfied with my service and we sat happily alongside one another. We kept to his routine, talking together in the drawing room in the allocated evening hours, as he read the papers, as I read my book, as the television droned in the background, as Bert dozed in front of the fire. He was energetic, in control, and I was content.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12