Empty Space

NINETEEN Anyone Can Make a Mistake

‘Look at all these women,’ Anna Waterman said.

Nine in the morning, and the radiography reception area at St Narcissus, Farringdon was full of them, their anxiety expressed as a tendency to text. Their thumbs brushed the keys of their phones at ferocious speeds; they weren’t going to look up, in case that meant admitting something about their predicament. The reception area helped. It was less a waiting room than a stylised version of one — a quiet postmodern whimsy about lines of chairs against a wall — featuring upholstery in calm warm shades of blue-grey, uplighters like white porcelain cups, clean little round tables piled with the terrestrial editions of property and gossip magazines which no one read any more. Framed on the walls were silhouettes of a cat, which, when you looked at them in a certain way, proved to resemble 2-dimensional slices through the animal, a joke cooked up between the radiologists and St Narcissus’ artist-in-residence. But underneath the joke everything it referred to remained, and when you looked up there was a stain on the ceiling tiles, shaped, according to your mood, either like the map of a distant island or a section through someone’s tumour.

‘That,’ said Anna, who hated hospitals, ‘is the giveaway.’

Marnie laughed.

‘I quite like the uplighters,’ she said, then: ‘Mum, I’ve just got to send a text.’

‘No one can like uplighters, surely?’

‘Mum —’

The receptionist interrupted them. ‘It’s an IUV appointment, isn’t it?’ he shouted at Anna.

‘Excuse me?’ Anna said. ‘I’m not the patient.’

‘You’ve had your kidneys done, dear, haven’t you? Last week? Now look, why don’t you just read this leaflet for me while you wait?’

‘Why? Can’t you read it yourself?’ She glanced at the leaflet, made out the words, ‘Please attend promptly at the Radiology reception desk,’ and repeated with ominous clarity, leaving plenty of space between the words: ‘I’m not the patient.’

During the exchange that followed, Marnie’s scan was called. ‘I won’t be long,’ she promised. ‘Why not sit there, where you can watch the TV?’

‘Don’t you start.’

While she waited, Anna leafed through the magazines. Homes You Can’t Afford offered high definition photography of listed buildings in Surrey and Perthshire. Old issues of Mine and Get brought her the clothes, gadgets and, especially, the elective surgeries of the rich. The eight-year-old male heir to one of the bigger hedge-fund operations of the 2010s had persuaded the family surgeons to fit him with the uterus and womb of ‘an unknown East Asian donor’ for a month; while his mother, upon having her skin genetically modified to produce downy feathers a calculated charcoal-grey colour, announced with satisfaction that she had ‘achieved the look she had always wanted’, as if she’d done the procedures herself at home. She looked a little like a Porsche. Mother and son smiled languidly out of the papagraphs, thoroughly warmed by themselves. September’s Watchtower, meanwhile, promised Comfort For The Elderly. Anna stared at it with dislike. Then, because she had been awake all night, she fell asleep and dreamed about sex. Marnie woke her not long later, and they went across the road to a branch of Carluccio’s to drink cioccolata calda, ‘nun’s revenge’, a favourite of Marnie’s since she was eight. Anna ordered an almond croissant, but instead of almond paste it turned out to have a kind of thin, rather unpleasant custard in it.

‘Well, I’m glad that’s over,’ Marnie said. She put her hand on Anna’s. ‘Thanks for coming with me,’ she said. ‘Really.’

‘Just remind me what kind of scan it was?’

Marnie took her hand away. She looked despondent. ‘You might at least try and keep up with my life.’

‘I think you probably told me but I forgot.’

‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘I don’t feel as if you have any kind of grip on things.’

‘If you’re still upset about the bathroom —’

‘It’s nothing to do with that.’

‘Marnie, anyone can make a mistake.’

‘It isn’t the bathroom.’

‘Well then what?’

Marnie turned away and looked out of the window. ‘I’m ill and you pick a quarrel with the receptionist.’

‘He was patronising me.’

‘I’m ill,’ Marnie said stubbornly. ‘I wouldn’t have gone for a scan if I felt well.’

‘I thought you said it was nothing.’

‘It is nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But that’s not the point. I tell you not to worry and you just accept that?’ Marnie made a dismissive gesture. Suddenly she pushed back her chair. ‘We don’t seem to live in the same world any more, Anna,’ she said. She got up and walked out.

For some time after she had gone, Anna sat at the table with her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to do or think next. Outside the huge windows of Carlucci’s, rain poured down through the sunshine, turning Farringdon — for the first and last time, you imagined — into a romantic film of itself. People hurried by, laughing; Anna watched them until the rain stopped. Across the road, an optician’s sign blinked and shifted: her eyes followed that. When the coffee machine hissed, her head turned that way. She listened to the people at the table next to her. Other people went in and out of the doors. For a minute or two a toddler ran about behind her, laughing and shrieking. People never seem to grow up or change, she thought. After about half an hour, Marnie came back and said she was sorry, and went off again to work. Anna took the tube to Waterloo and was home by midday.

She went out into the garden to have lunch and found that in her absence vegetation had filled the beds at the base of the summerhouse again. It was taller this time. Thick bright green rubbery stems wove about in the sunshine, almost as if they were moving, ending in flowers like trumpets or Tiffany lampshades. At the base of the tangle sprouted those unearthly copper poppies; and on the earth between their stems, gelid organs in rose and pastel blue such as the cat brought in nightly. Small birds flew out of the vegetation, all colours but all single-coloured — birds from a child’s rag book, they peeped at Anna with their heads on one side. The summerhouse itself seemed to fall away upward in a distorted perspective, the parts of it leaning together as if they had been propped there loosely and abandoned, dilapidated yellow lapboard like a drawing of itself, looming against a sky too blue. She dragged open the door like someone determined to get to the bottom of things, but inside it was just a shed in anyone’s garden — dusty, hot, full of slowly bursting boxes, layered spiderwebs and a kind of archaeological time. Gardening things. Unused things. Things of Tim’s or Marnie’s, markers of the fads and bad decisions of long ago: a rolled poster here, too brittle to unroll ever again; there a small lay figure, its limbs arranged to represent a Degas dancer. Suddenly she was bloody sick of it. She could no more manage it than Marnie’s mystifying behaviour at Carlucci’s. She took her lunch back to the house, binned it and went to the de Spencer Arms instead. There she came across the boy with the dogs, without his dogs. He was sitting at a table as far away from the building itself as he could manage, his arms wrapped round one knee and his donkey jacket bundled up beside him.

‘If I buy you something,’ Anna said, ‘will you drink it this time?’

Early afternoon at the de Spencer Arms. Warm sunshine. A light wind bringing the scents of gorse and salt over from the other side of the Downs, blowing deflated crisp-bags between the outside tables. The car park was empty. Skylarks hung in the air like clockwork toys, whirring and pouring out notes of music, rising and falling abruptly according to no obvious plan. Inside, it was wall-to-wall weekday afternoon: rank smell of carpet grease, cheese & vegetable fritters, ancient beer fumes; madness of boredom in the blue eyes of the pub collie behind the bar. A couple in matching dark blue double-breasted suits stood by the fake wood fire, posed as if it was October, the woman distinguishable mainly by her stature and the way her bottom stuck out. She sported ear-rings like little wheels, a piece of ribbon worn as a bow-tie, the air of an American comedienne in a knockabout film of the 1950s. ‘I told him at Niagra,’ she was saying as Anna entered, ‘as I’d told him in Datchet.’ They looked like tour guides. It was the usual warning, Anna thought, against getting old.

She carried the drinks out carefully.

‘This time I got us both Harvey’s. I enjoyed the last one. Where are your beautiful dogs? I was looking forward to seeing them again.’

‘They’re dead, those dogs.’

‘Dead?’

‘Wasted away,’ the boy said. ‘Some say it’s nature, but I’ll have none of that.’

‘You must be heartbroken!’

He seemed to consider this. Then he shrugged. ‘See over there? Over the Western Brow? Buzzard.’ He laughed shortly. ‘He’s out for something, that bugger,’ he said. He drank half his beer in one long swallow. ‘Them down the fields say it’s my fault, but I’m having none of that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The boy shrugged. ‘Why should you?’ he concluded. ‘But they ran well to the lamp, those dogs.’

Though Anna waited for more, that seemed to be the end of it. They sat in the sunshine, half-awkward, half-companionable, then she bought another drink. The Downs were gilded. Something about the slow drift of afternoon to evening, the slow lengthening of shadows under Streat Hill, made objects seem closer than they were. Distant sounds seemed louder, too. Everything seemed more present. Behind them, the car park began to fill with people down from London: single men squeezing their TVRs and Italian motorcycles in between the ill-parked SUVs; single-activity tourists descending from the Downs in their cycling, walking or birdwatching outfits. Half a dozen women, one of whom wore two-tone breeches and brown suede boots with fringes, arrived together on immaculately turned-out horses. Two of them went to get drinks. The boy watched the women. Anna watched the boy.

‘Tell me about lamping,’ she said.

He thought about that. ‘You want a good dark night,’ he said eventually.

She could see how hard he found it — how emotionally clouded it was for him. How do you describe something you know so well? His focus was too close. It was a struggle to distinguish sensation from practice, to find sufficient distance without merging all the subtleties; and now his dogs were gone too. ‘And you want a good lamp, an old Lightforce or like that. You can get that second hand. Another thing, get a battery with a flat discharge curve. Them down the fields know all that, they’re always talking about what lamps to get. It’s a million candlepower this, a million candlepower that with them.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t pay much attention to all that,’ he confessed, as if surprised by himself. ‘I like it when the dog runs down the light.’

‘You’re hunting the rabbits with your dogs?’ Anna said.

He looked at her as if she was mad, as if she had made some statement so simplistic he didn’t know how to refute it. At the same time it was a relief to him: it was somewhere to start. ‘Rabbits, foxes,’ he said. ‘Anything.’ He’d preferred hares until the last time he was out: now he couldn’t seem to care about them at all. ‘You want a good dark night and a bit of a breeze.’

‘You find the animal with the light?’ she said. ‘Then you encourage the dogs to chase it? That seems cruel.’

‘I don’t know about cruel,’ he said.

‘But it’s killed?’ Anna said. ‘They kill the animal?’

It seemed cruel to her. For the boy, though, the light was the thing, the light and the chase: nothing was like slipping a dog then watching it run down the light. ‘It’s only the most exciting thing in the world!’ he said. He wasn’t even particular if he caught anything. Any rabbit could make a yard or two on the dog, parley it into an escape. ‘They’re in the hedge before you know it.’ He could show her if she wanted. ‘I’ve took videos of those dogs before they died.’ He gestured vaguely towards Wyndlesham. ‘I keep them over there.’ He kept the videos of his dogs over there, the other side of Ampney, in the bothy where he lived. It wasn’t far. ‘I could show you!’ he said.

Both of them were surprised by this. They stared at each other, puzzled by so much contact. The boy turned away.

‘If you wanted,’ he said, in a different voice.

Half past five: in an hour the de Spencer Arms would be rammed again. The sloping back garden would fill with people, shoulder to shoulder in the warm dark. There would be a run on nervous laughter and narcissistic shouting. By closing time the Downs would have bulked up black against the stars. They would absorb it all and provide no echo. Anna raised her glass, considered the inch of beer left at the bottom of it.

‘All right,’ she said.

The bothy, a long single-storey wooden structure which had once housed the unmarried male servants of the local fox hunt (an institution known in its heyday as ‘the Ampney’), stood in the middle of a field next to a few courses of brick and an overgrown cobbled yard. It was a shed, really, already cold in the afternoon, its untreated cement floors polished by decades of use. There was a kitchen at one end, a storage unit full of rusting bed frames and plastic-wrapped supermarket pallets of dog-food at the other. Between them, five or six empty rooms opened off a narrow windowless passage lighted by a single twenty-watt bulb. To the extent that he had any, the boy had moved his belongings into the kitchen, where it was relatively warm. Two shelves held packets of cereal, tins of baked beans and 8 per cent-proof lager. A single bed was pushed up against the wall in one corner. ‘I don’t need much,’ he said. ‘I was never much for things.’ There was a paraffin heater but no kettle. He made tea using lukewarm water straight from an ancient Creda heater mounted on the wall above the sink and paid his rent directly to ‘them down the fields’, who had acquired the bothy in some cash-free transaction he didn’t understand, and who sometimes dragged a bed into one of the other rooms for weekend use.

‘It’s cheap enough,’ he said.

The only contemporary thing in the kitchen was a reconditioned laptop from the early 2000s, wired into the overhead light socket through a brownout-protector. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, with a kind of shy irony: ‘My life.’ He showed as much pride in the machine as in his uploads to YouTube. These unsteady, ill-lit glimpses, caught on a pocket camcorder, didn’t even seem cruel, only difficult to interpret. Jittery ellipses and smears of whitish light appeared and disappeared suddenly in a black rectangle. They picked out a hedge, a patch of long grass in a field, a fence post at an odd angle. Something zigzagged into the light and out of it again. Something else turned and turned and vanished suddenly into a hedge. At the end of each clip there was the boy, an ethereal smile on his face, holding up dead rabbits by their ears. Once, the dogs put up a deer, which stared at them then walked slowly out of camera. He had set some of the videos to contemporary pastoral music, others to thirty-year-old Death Metal. Watching them galvanised him all over again, the way a passing scent had once galvanised his dogs. He sat on the bed next to Anna. There was nowhere else to sit. She could feel him trembling with excitement. ‘What do you think?’ he asked her. ‘What do you think of that!’

Once she had got over her distaste, Anna felt bored. She was glad when he turned off the computer and with a smile half diffident, half sly, pushed her down. ‘Let me get these jeans off you,’ she said. She laughed. ‘They could do with a wash.’ And later: ‘You’re hurting me a little bit.’ He went on without seeming to hear and soon she had forgotten, the way you forget the creak and bang of the bed or the people coming and going in the corridor outside a hotel room. To fuck at all is a blessing. He wasn’t Tim Waterman, but he wasn’t Michael Kearney either, and he got hard again as quickly as most boys.

Anna fell asleep. When she woke the bothy was cold and the boy was standing naked by the window gazing out across the fields towards the village. The light had begun to fade. Wisps of mist were already coming up over the river. He’d had enough for the moment, she could see. His back, whiter and thinner than she had expected, seemed vulnerable, illuminated from within. Anna watched him a minute or two, then gathered her clothes and began to get dressed. When she thought the time was right, she said:

‘I’ve got some work I need doing.’

The boy made a movement with one shoulder, a shrug or perhaps a wince. He wasn’t looking for work, he said. He had enough work.

‘What kind of work is it?’ he asked.

It wasn’t much, she said. It was just some painting.

He had enough of that kind of work, the boy said.

‘I need someone to look at my bathroom,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t live far. If you called later in the week, you could do the work I need.’

He moved his shoulder again and kept looking out of the window. ‘Those dogs of mine were company ’til the grey hare got across them.’ Anna, receiving this as ‘grey hair’, had no idea what he meant. ‘That spoiled everything. I could talk to them until then.’ As she was leaving he turned round and said, ‘I’ll come and see you though? I’ll be coming to see you?’

Anna touched his arm and smiled. ‘Put your clothes on,’ she said. ‘It’s cold in here.’

The lane outside had filled with mist, yet if you looked directly upward you could see the stars. Anna turned towards Wyndlesham, walking as briskly as she could. Once or twice she raised her arms in the air or smiled for no reason. She wondered what had really happened to the dogs. Those lovely, lovely animals. Perhaps he’d sold them. Perhaps he’d just grown tired of them. I can’t imagine what Marnie will make of him, she thought: although it’s none of her business. She looked for her phone, couldn’t find it; stopped suddenly, brought both hands to her mouth and laughed. I can’t believe myself, she thought. When she looked back, the bothy seemed to hang without support in the gathering dusk. Everything it represented was history. Since the banking meltdown of 2007, the stable-block itself — built by John Ampney in the late 18th century from locally-sourced brick and pantile and not then intended to house the hunt — had tracked closely the declining economic curve: redevelopment, first as prestige office space, then as a paintball ‘shoot house’; a decade of squatting and abandonment; finally, annexation by the local authority as Kent and Sussex struggled to contain thousands of Chinese economic refugees washing up in the old Cinque Ports; after which it had been allowed to fall down.

At home there were several messages from Marnie — ‘Mum, I‘m trying to call but your mobile is off again. Mum? Mum, please pick up.’ — and one from Helen Alpert reminding Anna of her appointment the next morning. Anna, starving, made baked beans on toast. While the beans were heating up, she walked to and fro eating slices of quince cheese with some cold lentils she had found at the back of the fridge. She swept the old cat up in her arms and squeezed him in a way he had never liked. ‘James, James, oh James,’ she said: ‘What have you been up to?’ She awarded herself half a bottle of Calvet Prestige Rouge, which caused her to fall asleep in front of the TV.

When she woke, it was late. The cat was out again. She drank a glass of water and went to the garden window. The summerhouse seemed quiet. And yet the dreams she had had! She went out and, standing barefoot on the lawn, worked her toes into the damp turf to wake herself up. ‘James!’ she called. A great beam of off-white light struck out from somewhere behind the house — like the sweep of headlights as a car turns in off the road into your drive, but silent, frozen and prolonged. Or like a huge door opened: light squared-off somehow, sharp-edged, looking for something to reveal, in this case the thousands of cats boiling across the water meadow towards Anna’s home in an alert, silent rush. Every one of them was either black or white. They poured into the garden, parting around the summerhouse, and up towards Anna, of whom they took no more notice than the garden furniture. On and on they came like a problem in statistical mechanics, without any apparent slackening or falling away of numbers, pouring out of the meadow, pouring away behind the house. Anna, deep in explicatory failure, had no way of placing herself with regard to this event: she did not in any sense know what she felt about it. Now she winced away and tried to climb the garden fence. Now she waded directly into the stream of cats, and stood with tears of pure delight streaming down her face, feeling them flow around her, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell — until suddenly the light turned itself off and the garden was empty again. She stood for a moment wiping her eyes and laughing. Then she went back into the house and left a message with Dr Alpert’s answering service: ‘Helen, I don’t feel I want to carry on with our conversations. I feel as if I would rather take charge of myself again.’

She left a similar message with her daughter. ‘I’m not sure I can explain. I’m just not such hard work for myself as I used to be.’ She searched for something else to say. ‘I saw a lot of cats in the garden this evening!’ Since this didn’t seem to approach the facts, or give any feeling of the rest of her day, she added: ‘And, Marnie, I met someone, but I don’t know if you’ll like him.’

She put the phone down and looked for Michael Kearney’s computer drive. Excavated from the litter at the bottom of her bag, it lay on the kitchen counter like an enchanted egg, its surface rich with wear, magically transforming ordinary reflected domestic light into year upon year of guilt. Anna Waterman had no idea if the old man in South London was really Brian Tate. She would have to accept that her memory of the scandals surrounding Michael’s death and Tate’s downfall would always be clouded; that her struggles with Michael — like her struggles with herself — would grow increasingly meaningless. At a certain age, she now understood, you owe the past nothing except to recognise it as the past. Michael could go to hell, if he wasn’t already there. Tomorrow she would take the pocket drive to Carshalton and, one way or another, relinquish responsibility for whatever data it contained; and that would be that.