If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

Chapter 18

The upstairs flat at number twenty is empty for now, the husband and wife gone for their day of quiet celebration, the bed neatly made and the breakfast things stacked in the draining rack. It’s a small flat, ordered and tidy, wingbacked armchairs in the living room arranged to suit the television, a welsh dresser in the kitchen parading unused fine china, the bed in the bedroom wrapped in eiderdown. In the kitchen, on the formica-topped wooden table, there are two cards, propped up against the salt and pepper mills like telegraph boys leaning against postboxes. The cards are similar, both cream with gold lettering, both depicting a bouquet of flowers, roses on one, carnations on the other. Happy Anniversary they both say, with all my love. One of them says darling inside, the other says sweetheart. On both of them the handwriting is awkward and scratched, as though written on a moving surface, a table with uneven legs, the dashboard of a cornering car.

There are photographs on the dresser, amongst the decorative teapots and the royal doulton figurines, a lifestory waltzing across the varnished wood. A wedding photo, framed in carved oak, he in a soldier’s uniform, face shiny and tight and smiling, breast pockets fastened down with rigorously polished buttons, and she tucked into the side of him, the pins in her hair concealed with small white flowers, her dress curving away from her neck and puffing proudly out around her arms.

Another photo, perhaps ten years later, the two of them standing by the sea, somewhere sunny, the sky bright and crisp and he has a handkerchief knotted across his head, the four corners poking up like cloth thumbs, and she has a wide-brimmed straw hat which casts a weave of shadow across her face. There are small boats on the sea behind them, small boats with square red sails and long pointed bows, and there are islands on the horizon, a woman dressed in black in the background, stooping to pick something up off the beach.

There is a larger photo, a wide curve of people standing in a garden, couples with their children, the husband and wife from these other photos standing to one side, smiling as broadly as the rest.

And in smaller pictures, mounted in oval silver frames, the children from that wide photo in the garden grow up, bursting into colour photography, going gap-toothed, long haired, surly, squeezing partners of their own into the pictures, holding scrolls of paper, holding babies.

But mostly there is this husband and wife, in colour photos taken by friends and relatives, or by passers-by on daytrips and holidays. The two of them outside Buckingham Palace. The two of them blowing out candles on a cake. The two of them on a ferry, wind blowing their hair, pointing at the white cliffs of Dover.

On the windowsill, in between the tobyjugs which hide missing buttons and foreign coins, in between the bowls trophies and the decorative egg timers, there is a medal, mounted on a plain white card, propped up against the windowframe. He hadn’t wanted her to put it on display, but she had, and he’d turned away from arguing about it. It’s a plain-looking medal, like a large thick coin, no ribbon, The Defence Medal written on one side and a younglooking King George on the other. She polishes it sometimes, when she thinks he’s not looking. You know it’s nothing that, he said to her once, not so long ago, you shouldn’t shine it up he said. They only gave them out for making it back home he said, and there’s nothing in that worth a medal. She’d looked at him when he’d said that, and he’d left the room. It was the first thing he’d ever said about it.

When he came back to her he knew he would be unable to talk, knew it as soon as he put his hand on the cold metal tailgate of the truck heading home and climbed up into the damp canvas darkness. He could see her face all through that long journey, waiting to hear his stories, wanting to comfort his sadnesses. He could see the expectation she would have in her eyes, not knowing what he would say but knowing that he would surely say something, the same way he’d always told her stories when he’d been away.

But this was different, and perhaps she’d understand. He’d never really been away before, not actually away, he’d only been on training, done exercises, and the stories he’d had to tell were interesting and funny and easy to put into words. Wading through sodden marshland carrying wooden rifles, and his boot had come off and got lost and when he put the rifle down to find it the sergeant had shouted at him for damaging his weapon. Slitting open sandbags with fixed bayonets, the sand spilling onto the ground and the sergeant shouting twist and withdraw, twist and withdraw. Hiding in the forest all night with green makeup on his cheeks, everything silent and black except the red firefly tips of the other men’s cigarettes and in the morning the sergeant had said you would all be dead by now. He’d told her these stories over the long weekends they spent together, short snatches of time they were granted between his long spells of duty. What have you been doing this time she’d say, and he’d tell her about the marches, the assault courses, the shooting practice, the running around in deserted villages commandeered by the government. And she’d take off his jacket and circle her fingers around his arm, testing his muscles, telling him what a strong man he was.

He’d thought about that on the journey home, her squeezing the strength of his arm like that, and he’d thought about how much bigger his arms had got while he’d been away, how she wouldn’t be able to circle her small hands round his muscle anymore and whether that would make him feel strange to her. There would be nothing else to make him feel strange to her, he’d thought, he had no wounds, no broken bones, no scars or missing limbs. Just very strong arms, and a new quietness.

He’d worried about going back, all the way he’d worried, wondered how she would be, if she would still be there, if things could be as they were before, if they could get on now with making the home they’d been kept from making, and then she’d stood behind him in the rain and said there’s no need to shout I’m right behind you and he’d known that things would be okay.

They’d talked a lot about making a home, before he’d gone away, during those weekends, talked about where they might live and what they might do, names they might give to their children, furniture they might buy, or make, or inherit. I’d really like a Welsh dresser she’d say, her fingers tracing absent-minded outlines across the bones of his face, I’ve always wanted one, with the plates all lined up nicely, and he’d said yes that would be nice and had to ask someone later what a Welsh dresser might be.

In the entranceway of their small flat, their home all these long years, in a small cupboard where the coats and hats and shoes should be, there are gardening tools, a spade, a fork, a hoe, a small trowel, a reel of twine, paper bags full of seed packets and bulbs, an unruly coil of hosepipe. She used to keep all the tools in a small shed on the allotment, but they were stolen so many times that she’s taken to wheeling them backwards and forwards in a tartan shopping trolley. She doesn’t grow as much as she used to, she gets more tired more quickly, so now she’s planted half the allotment with bulbs. It’s nice to sit amongst the flowers when she’s having a rest, and sometimes in the spring she’ll bring a bunch of them home, put them in a vase. It brightens the place up she says and he says yes love it does, thankyou love, and he puts the kettle on and cuts her a slice of cake whenever she comes home from her patch of ground, and she drinks the tea with soil-blackened fingers, eats the cake with a napkin wrapped round it. He never goes to the allotment, he says I don’t much like all that gardening, he said I never have done love, when she first got it from the council, he said it’s the digging love, I can’t be doing with all the digging.

So he lets her go up there on her own, watching her pulling the tartan shopping trolley with the spade sticking out from the top, and when he hears her returning he puts the kettle on and she puts the things away in the small cupboard by the door.

Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is on the telephone again, leaving another message with the waste department of the local council. He says hello, it is me again, I telephoned earlier about the removal situation in my backyard, okay. He says I just want you to note that last time you wrote to me my name was spelt incorrectly, because you used an S and not a Z. This is close, but it is not close enough, he says. These things are important, the way you spell a man’s name, it matters, yes? he says, and he puts the phone down. He looks around him, drumming his fingers against his trousers, anxious or agitated or just at a loss as to what to do next. He will be attending a fundraising event at the club later in the day, but before then he has no plans and he doesn’t enjoy having no plans.

He takes a brush and dustpan from a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and he kneels in his front room, sweeping. He starts from under the bed, and he moves in a methodical line, backwards across the room. When he has finished there will be very little dirt or dust in the dustpan. He keeps his small flat exceptionally tidy, his clothes laundered and folded, his dishes washed and stacked, his rubbish doublebagged and put outside on the correct day. His friends have commented on it, when they’ve visited, and he is surprised that they consider it unusual. Because you never know do you, he says to them, you don’t know when you will be taken and you would not want people to remember you as a person without good housekeeping habits, would you? He is surprised that not everybody thinks like this, he is surprised how casually people will drop things in the street. He asked the lady at the council office about it once, he said do they not care what people think of them, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.

He puts the dustpan and brush back under the sink, he takes a duster and runs it around the clean white woodwork of the windowframe. The glass is the worst, he said this to the lady once, these piles of broken glass where people have robbed into the cars, can’t you come and at least sweep this away? This is important, he said this to her, please can you understand what broken glass in the street means, to a man of my age, coming from where I come from? He had said this, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.

Outside, in the middle of the street, the twins are still playing cricket. The first boy, the older boy by a few painful minutes, he bowls a high loop of a ball which bounces easily, his brother swinging at it with an old split-handled bat and sending the tennis ball pinging towards number fifteen. It bounces off the boarded-up window and buries itself in the overgrown front garden, and the older brother shouts it doesn’t count it doesn’t count as he kicks around in the brambles looking for it. You’re out if it hits the window he shouts, as his younger brother leaps up and down the street counting up his runs.

The young man outside number eleven watches the boy looking for his ball, his sharpened pencil hovering over his sketchpad, his protractors and rulers laid aside. A girl with a hairband flattening her hair steps out of the door behind him, she touches him lightly on the head and says do you want anything from the shop? He says no no thankyou without looking at her, and she says okay and keeps walking, she turns round and says so how’s it going anyway, the masterpiece? and he turns and sees her looking at him, she is smiling, he looks at his drawing and looks up, he shrugs and he smiles and he says oh is okay. She says I’ll buy you some chocolate, you look like you need some chocolate, and she turns and he watches her walk, he looks again at the boy hunting for his ball, kicking at the tangled overgrowth of number fifteen’s garden.

Inside number fifteen, the boy’s younger sister is standing very still, looking around in the cool dark silence. The house is almost empty, boarded up and abandoned years ago, and she is excited to be in such a private place. It feels as though she has discovered an underground chamber, a secret garden, an Ali Baba cave. She wonders what would happen if she said open sesame. She’s been in here before, once, there’s a tiny gap between the boards on the shattered back window, hidden by a huge tangle of weeds, and she thinks only she knows about it, it’s scary but it’s exciting too. She stands there, waiting for her eyes to get used to the thin splinters of light forcing their way through the cracks and gaps in the boards, and she smells the cold damp air.

Whoever it was who lived here last, whyever it was that they left, they seem to have left quickly, slipping quietly out through the back door perhaps, taking a bag of clothes and a handful of money and leaving everything else behind. There is still furniture in here, just, there are still books on shelves and pictures on walls. There’s a clock, stopped. She looks around her, wondering if anyone is here, ready to run. She can hear her own breathing in her ears, like the noise of a television without any pictures. She moves into another room, her imagination and her excitement racing ahead of her, holding her hands out as though for balance, stepping carefully.

She can see, in the near-darkness, a textbook left open on a bed, the pages speckled with mould. She can see a radio with the front hanging off, spilling wires and fuses across a desk, a screwdriver jabbed into its innards. She moves from room to room, looking, occasionally touching. Everything is soft and damp, crumbling wetly beneath her small fingers. She sees a record player with the needle still resting patiently in the groove of a record, she sees a photograph pinned to the wall, curled up and hidden from view, she sees ashtrays balanced on the arms of skeletised armchairs, snuffled clean of ash and still waiting for new cigarettes to be pressed against them.

She treads delicately up the stairs, holding onto the soft banister, swallowing, feeling guilty and delighted and scared. The rooms upstairs are the same, wetter perhaps, a little lighter, she can see more clearly the way that all of it, the carpets and the walls, the beds and the chairs, the record players and the shoes and the clocks and the ashtrays, the way that all of it is hidden, furred over, concealed by a slow slather of wet growth, mould and moss and crusted lichen creeping over it all like a lascivious tongue, muffling the hard edges, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, clinging from the ceilings, thickening and flowering and spraying out spores to breed in any untouched corners.

She shivers suddenly, she hears a noise, she turns and treads quickly down the damp stairs, through the back room, squeezing through the secret gap and bursting headfirst into the bright clean sunlight of the world, sucking in the sweet air, dazzled.

But if she had stayed, if she had found the courage to poke around in the dank corners, to push open rotting doors, to let her eyes see into the gloom and the shadows, she would have found a lot more.

Mice, making nests from scraps of magazines and bedding, their tiny pink eyes staring back at her. Bats, hanging in wardrobes like tiny folded umbrellas. Pigeons, clustered in the corner of another room, murmuring and scratching and loosening their droppings onto the threadbare carpet. Spiders’ webs woven thicker than net curtains, skirting boards honeycombed by woodworm, blue-green algae blooming in the bathroom sink.

And in the attic, if she had managed to find her way up the steep and crumbling steps, she would have found the one room left open to the light, she would have stood, breathless, picking cobwebs from her fingers and her face, staring at a whole meadow of wildflowers and grasses, poppies and oxeyes and flowering coriander, all flourishing in bird droppings and all lunging pointedly towards the one square foot of available sky.