Splinter

30

Once, when Marc was twelve years old, he had staggered his mother by announcing that tidying his room would be contrary to the laws of nature. A Michael Crichton thriller had just, for the first time, confronted him with the phenomenon of entropy, a thermodynamicist’s term from which it can be deduced, inter alia, that everything in nature tends towards a state of the utmost disorder. Just as a car tyre loses its pressure and tread, or a T-shirt fades in the wash and becomes frayed, or roof tiles sometimes need replacing, so human beings eventually disintegrate into their component parts and lose the energy that binds their extremely complex anatomy together. They become old and ill and die. So why waste a brief human lifetime tidying things when all your efforts are bound to be nullified by a force of nature?

His mother’s response to this lecture had been to plant her hands – which in Marc’s recollection were usually encased in yellow rubber washing-up gloves – on her ample hips. Then she threw back her head and roared with laughter. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘in that case I won’t give you any more pocket money because you’ll only spend it.’

Today, more than two decades later, one might have gained the impression that Marc had gone along with that deal. His flat still looked like a chaos theorist’s ideal object of study.

‘Good God!’ As he walked in, Constantin gave a noisy sniff as if he expected such a pigsty to give off an awful stench as well. In fact, the place was redolent only of freshly sanded floorboards, freshly applied emulsion paint, and the other smells typical of redecoration that had been lingering in the air since Marc moved in.

‘What happened here?’ Constantin asked, doing his best not to tread on any of the numerous objects strewn across the floor of the little hallway.

‘Nothing.’ Marc shoved a stack of CDs aside with his foot. ‘I dropped a box, that’s all.’

‘Only one?’

Lying on the floor surrounded by remote controls, income tax files, two multiple sockets, an overturned lamp, three photo albums and numerous books were several overturned pot plants. All had dried out, even the cactuses.

Marc stepped over the box whose contents lay strewn across the lobby. He’d left it out in the rain for too long, and the cardboard bottom had become so sodden it couldn’t support the higgledy-piggledy contents and gave way. It was the very last box, which he’d meant to leave out for the dustmen in any case. He was so furious with himself he’d deliberately hurled the box full of house plants at the front door.

Sudden rages…

Another new trait laid bare by the scalpel of grief.

‘What on earth has happened to me?’ he muttered to himself as he went into the living room to turn on the standard lamp, which doubled as a DVD rack.

This, the largest room in his two-room flat, made a better impression, although the numerous unopened boxes littering the floor resembled aid packages jettisoned from a helicopter. There were no shelves or cupboards that could accommodate Marc’s few possessions, so he lived out of a suitcase like a commercial traveller. He took anything he needed straight from the box – if he could find it. Sandra had always been the practical one of the two. She would have neatly labelled the boxes with their contents.

Marc heard a cupboard door being opened in the adjoining room. He slowly subsided on to a black leather sofa which the removals men had deposited in the middle of the room facing the window. The raindrops that were lashing the panes at irregular intervals created an inappropriately snug atmosphere in the gloomy, rather overheated living room.

‘Nobody here.’

Marc swung round. Constantin had somehow contrived to enter the room silently in spite of his leather soles.

‘I’ve checked the kitchen and the bathroom. I even looked under the bed. There’s nobody here.’