A Shock Read online

  She is surprised by the cavity. Surprised that it seems empty. There are wooden beams and there are wires and cables and there is something silver like a trestle to her right, and there are bricks beyond that. Old dark bricks and that’s where the damp smell seems strongest — in that direction. There will be mice. The cat does a good job, but they have their paths and the tunnels and their halls, and the inside of the wall — she thinks, and thinks it’s the way it should be — belongs to them. The cat does a good job. Where is the cat?

  She leans too heavily and the plaster at her hands gives way suddenly and she sways slightly sideways, feeling the ladder tip away from her and for a moment she thinks she is going to fall completely, but she doesn’t, she’s fine, the ladder rights itself, and she is caught by the plaster on the left of what is now, suddenly, a very considerable hole.

  They’ll have heard that, surely.

  She gingerly regains her balance, grabbing one of the wooden beams in the cavity as a support. The cat has reappeared and is lecturing her, the squeaks finding a way through the complicated hum of her earplugs, and they look at each other for a moment, one looking down, the other looking up. The pile of shattered plaster on the floor seems smaller than the gap it has left behind. She slowly descends the ladder.

  Now what?

  She goes and has another sip of wine. She doesn’t care. He would hate this. He’d be angry. It will cost a fortune to fix. What have you done? His anger would be incredulous and would stretch and snap into laughter. He liked fixing things, improving them, making them over. She laughs at this thought. Everything is far too complicated to explain.

  Back at the coalface. The cat is on the table, staring at the hole, astonished.

  — I know baby. I know.

  She washes her hands and peeks outside again. The dark is rising now, and the tops of the heads are silhouettes. She looks at the clock. She tries to forget how to read the time. She is . . . it is as if she is stuttering through time or time is stuttering by her, arrested as she is every few moments by some internal or external distraction which catches her, snags her, holds her somewhere away from herself for an instant and when she snaps back to now it is a different now to the now from which she was, she feels, some seconds ago, abducted. Again and again, in her own kitchen, kidnapped by some minute and ridiculous mechanism of violence. She thinks of it as violence. For every time she is propelled back into now, she has a definite though obscure sense of damage.

  She snaps away from the sink, back to the hole. The cat is on the ladder, looking in, the brave thing, but jumps down as soon as she approaches. She looks at her work. It is the shape of a rough bell, a battered bell swinging right. The bottom of it is low enough for her to move the ladder out of the way and look in. Wooden beams. A narrow frame, plasterboard hung on each side of it. Cheap idea of a wall. Bricks to the right, the house proper. The kitchens of course were added on, and must have been added at the same time so why bother with bricks. She reaches in and feels around. Quite a wide cavity. The damp is just on her side. Theirs is more solid, drier. To her left, at about eye level, there is light. Definitely some sort of hole into their kitchen. She reaches for it, knocking a little more plaster off in the process. She thinks that if she tugs a line of plaster out on her side, as far as the hole on their side, she will be able to see through. As she is thinking about this she rests her hands on the plaster just below the level of her chest, as if she is looking over a fence, and she must think that’s what she’s doing, because she goes up on her toes, puts too much weight on it, and the whole thing suddenly crumbles and falls — plaster, paint, a great rubble of sheetrock, falling on her legs and her feet, and for a second she thinks that the whole lot is coming down, the whole wall, the whole house, and she stumbles backwards and loses her balance and falls with a clatter into the chairs around the table.

  Clarity.

  Not one then the other. Not day and then night. Not a woman and then a man. There is only one moment, and it continues. The body had changed but there was only one face. In her memory, there was only one. In the parks sometimes, they would laugh and the rain would never fall.

  She finds herself sitting on the floor. She feels fine. But also feels that she may very briefly have lost consciousness. She has been away, somewhere. Something took her and now she is back. She feels her head, and looks at her hand. Nothing. Her legs are covered in a chalky dust. The cat is standing in the door with a look of disbelief on his face. He appears to be talking to her but she cannot hear anything except the smothered confusion in her ears and she takes a moment to remember the party and to establish that it is still going on. She leans forward and peers over the cat towards the front door.

  What an idiot.

  She does not have words.

  There is a dictionary on a shelf in the living room. But it works the wrong way around. There is no combination of words that can even begin.

  Yes there is.

  Why now?

  Why not?

  She is trapped in the place where she hides from the world and suddenly the world has wrapped itself around her, embraced her house with music and laughter. The world is here. And she feels she should say hello.

  She takes her time. She dries her eyes. Fishes a tissue from her pocket and blows her nose. She climbs slowly to her feet, gripping the backs of the chairs, the table. She is lucky she wasn’t knocked out but still feels that she might have been.

  Perhaps she is dead?

  She checks herself again for blood or bumps but there is nothing.

  — Gather round, she says to the cat. Gather round and hear how sad I am. Boo hoo.

  After washing her hands again, and shifting some of the rubble with her feet, and pulling away the last of the plaster above the skirting board, she tries to extend the big hole in her side of the wall so that it meets the tiny hole in theirs so that she can look at the party. But all the remaining plaster is solid now, she can’t break it. She hurts her fingers trying. She presses herself into the hole and turns her head to the left and shuffles as far as she can in that direction, inside the cavity, towards the light. She laughs. She is this thin.

  — Mother of god, she says, and laughs again. The cat is on her foot. She shuffles back and turns her head and tells him to get off.

  — Go asleep now button. Go have a nice sleep. You’ll be all right.

  She thinks then about feeding him. There are hours until breakfast. Why would she feed him now? Nevertheless. She finds herself refilling his water at the sink and shaking some new chewables into his bowl. What is she at? She’s not going anywhere. He follows, peering at her, his eyes wide, chattering away as if she’s not listening, which she isn’t, but as if she should be, as if this is very important, this information.

  — I don’t know what you want baby. Shush now.

  And she goes back into the wall.

  She holds her breath and tries to squeeze further along, her left arm outstretched towards the light, such as it is, a glow from their kitchen.

  She pulls in her stomach, her chest, moves another couple of inches. Behind her she can feel the plaster shift but it doesn’t give. She turns her head. It is difficult. She cannot quite. He was very funny. Always very funny. The two of them in stitches on the bus. As a child she had always made her brothers laugh. Then a long time without laughter. Then she met her, and the laughter started up again, and didn’t stop. Until he died. And since then it had been the memory only, and the stupid jokes she would fall into and he would be back for an instant then gone again, and the damage, the damage was considerable. Laughter, no laughter, laughter again, and then the ghosts. Two ghosts with the one face.

  There is a rib of wood at her back stopping her. She pushes with all her might against it. She is not mighty. But something shifts. She moves another inch, another two, and she can see now, sideways, through the tiny hole. Light, shapes, the movement of
figures. She pushes back and sideways again and she gets her head turned a little to the front and she can see.

  She can see them.

  It’s as if they are not allowed near the wall. They stand instead to her left, near the garden, and in front of her, leaning on the counters, in little groups, moving past each other. She realises that there is a table against the wall. She can see the tops of bottles and cans down there. She can see the young people. She can see their full faces, their lips, their shoulders. She can see them happy.

  This is great.

  — Take off your life like trousers, she says.

  She can’t remember what that’s from.

  Then the music stops. What is this? The music has suddenly disappeared. Have they seen her? Oh god.

  She tries to move back the way she came, but she can’t. She is. She can’t be. She is. They aren’t looking at her. They are looking towards the door. She can still feel the wooden rib at her back. She is stuck. She thinks she’s stuck. Possibly stuck. She cannot turn her head. Oh dear lord.

  She goes through a complicated procedure of raising her hand in the crevice and holding it out to her side and then over, and bending it above her shoulder, out and over, and she pulls the earplug from her right ear, and immediately drops it, idiot, but the sound is crisper, clearer, of people, so close, and she can practically hear the words. But it’s quieter now. The music has stopped. What is happening? There is laughter. They are all looking at the door out of the kitchen, the door into the rest of the house. Boys. Not boys. Young men. Young women. She sees them. In their T-shirts and tops, with their drinks. She sees a couple with linked arms. She sees a young man with a beautiful smile, leaning on another man’s shoulder. She sees the bored girl. Well goodness. Her bored girl. There she is. That’s absolutely her. But she doesn’t look so bored. She looks anxious, poor love. She is standing with her arms folded, leaning against where the sink must be. She thinks she can hear whistling.

  Then a voice begins to sing. A man’s voice. A single voice. Singing. He used to sing. She, too. The voice never really changed, one to the other. Nothing did. Not really. They had loved each other better, maybe. More carefully. This voice though. It’s very good. Very full. It is commanding. It carries a melody, strongly. It’s a good voice. Familiar, almost.

  Then the whistling again.

  Then the voice.

  The bored girl has closed her eyes to listen. She no longer looks anxious. She is smiling. She is very pretty.

  Her hand is still above her shoulder. She can’t seem to lower it. As it’s there, she puts a finger in the hole and pulls a little at the edges. It is smaller than her eye. The song is maybe French. She works at it with her finger, so that it becomes as large as her fingertip, then as large as the first of her knuckles. She pulls her finger out. It is as large as her eye now. The voice is beautiful. Full of emotion. She puts her eye against the hole and holds it there and looks at the girl.

  The singing stops. There is a moment in which nothing happens.

  Then there is applause, and there are raised voices and all the people in the kitchen seem to crowd around the door.

  Except for the bored girl. She isn’t bored though, she’s curious. She has moved towards the table. She stands peering at the hole, an expression on her face. What is she doing? Oh. She is staring at the eye. Which is what she sees. An eye in the wall.

  She lifts her hand.

  She opens her mouth.

  But wait. Wait until I tell you.

  This story I have.

  The Camera

  He wanted a new camera, he said. He’d had a decent camera maybe four or five years ago, but he’d lost it, or — this was vague — he’d given it to a guy he’d been seeing, or this guy had stolen it, or there had been some sort of misunderstanding which led in any case to him losing this camera, as well as the guy, who’d disappeared to Germany soon afterwards, as if — and here Gary went off on a confusing contradictory rant, somewhat sentimental and embarrassed as well as everything else — as if the camera, or getting the camera, had been the sole purpose not only of this guy’s involvement with Gary but also of his entire time in London. He was Italian. Or, Gary corrected himself, Sardinian in fact, which is completely different, and anyway he took off to Hamburg without warning, overnight, as if making a run for it. Which Gary admitted might have been only his own somewhat heartbroken perspective, having lost the guy, whom he quite liked, and the camera, which he’d liked at least as much. Though it hadn’t been, he admitted, a particularly good camera — just an ugly clunky bridge thing, well out of date now. And he’d never fully mastered it, though frustratingly he hadn’t needed to — it automated things so eagerly that it allowed him to be lazy. Now though, Gary said, with a certain comic haughtiness, now he felt that he was successfully putting laziness to one side. He was coming out of a shell he said. Not his shell, but one he’d borrowed somewhere, one that was not his and not him.

  He was maybe a little high.

  He was, he said, reading books again, not having read a single book for about a year. He said that he was much more, way more engaged with what was going on, politically — reading the news, listening to the political podcasts. He knew what was going on, for the first time in ages. And it wasn’t, he said to Stan, as if Stan didn’t know this, it wasn’t good. Stan nodded. It wasn’t good. Nothing was good. Stan smiled at his friend and went to get them another couple of pints.

  It was the first time he’d seen Gary in more than a month. He’d put on a bit of weight, and he seemed generally much better. The last time he’d seen him he’d been a mess — precise and paranoid, hanging around the back room of The Arms refusing a drink, refusing company, nipping outside every five minutes and then nipping back in, in out, in out, doing nothing but drawing attention to himself and then freaking out over the looks he was getting. Stan had had a word. But Gary said he was waiting for someone. Well wait outside. And Gary had waited outside. He hadn’t come back. There’d been a few text exchanges since, Stan trying subtly to enquire if he was ok, Gary taking forever to reply and then bombarding him with typos for an hour and going quiet again. But that was Gary. Always a bit high or a bit low. Always busy with himself. Good heart, bad head. Not exactly reliable. He’d asked Stan to meet tonight. They used to do this often — meet at The Arms midweek, just the two of them, chat over a few slow pints, veering between serious and stupid — books they were reading, a bit of politics, a little gossip. Stan had missed it, to tell the truth. Gary made him laugh. He’d worried that it would be weird or worse. But it was good.

  The Arms was deserted. The older gentleman with the glasses who always said hello and goodbye to Stan but nothing else was sitting at the bar, spun on his stool to watch golf on the big screen. Harry was in the backroom, where there seemed to be maybe three or four people together, working the jukebox, a little boisterous. It took a couple of minutes for Harry to come through, apologetic.

  — It’s cos there’s no one here. I drift off.

  — Yeah, where is everyone?

  — It’s Tuesday mate. This is everyone.

  Stan took the drinks back to the high table at the window where Gary fiddled with his phone.

  — Here’s some examples.

  — Do you take pictures on that?

  — Yeah loads.

  — Examples of what?

  — Cameras. Cameras I’m thinking of. Looking at.

  He was looking at digital SLRs he said. Canon or Nikon. He showed Stan some pictures of chunky looking machines, all black and heavy and identical as far as Stan could see. Gary was reeling off model names — letters and numbers that could have been motorways or washing machines for all Stan knew about it. So he was looking into that, Gary was.

  — They’re expensive.

  — They’re fucking outrageous man you have no idea.

  — Are you working?
r />   — Yeah yeah I have shifts at B&Q again.

  Gary was flicking through pictures of cameras. Stan thought about the fact that to take a photograph of a camera requires two cameras.

  — You back at your mother’s?

  — Stop worrying about me man it’s embarrassing.

  — I couldn’t give a shit about you.

  — You fucking love me.

  — In your dreams.

  — You’re not my type much Stanley. I’m at my mother’s. I’m working shifts at B&Q, and I got some jobs coming up with my uncle. I’m good.

  — What uncle?

  — My plumber uncle. Ronnie. Who you’ve met. Look at this thing.

  Gary was doing his research, he said. Taking notes, working out what he wanted, reading reviews, watching all the features videos people made, listing the pros, the cons, how they compared, how they performed, all this, all that. But these cameras — the ones he wanted anyway — they started at about £750. And went up sharp. And that was before you got into lenses, which were the whole point of going for SLR. You were talking about a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money.

  Gary, Stan knew, didn’t have any money.

  — Why don’t you just use your phone?

  Gary gave Stan a hard look. Held it. Held it a second more. Stan was smiling at him.

  — Just go be basic white girl somewhere else Stanley.

  — A bit racist.

  — I could cut you.

  — Also racist.

  Gary was smiling as well now.

  — Yeah, I grant you. Look at you. Cat got the cream, getting to joke about racism with your black mate.

  — Ooof.

  — Yeah.

  — Fair.

  — It’s the project of a lifetime man, never give it up.

  Stan nodded at that.

  — Money, though, said Gary. I need money. Give me money. Not literally. I’m not asking you for money.