Animals

Animals Keith Ridgway A novel of confusion and paranoia, love and doubt, fear and hysteria: unsettling, unhinged, provocative and bestially funny, ‘Animals’ is for human beings everywhere.Keith Ridgway's third novel is a psychological menagerie of confusion, paranoia, searching and love. Narrated by an illustrator who can no longer draw, it tells of the sudden and inexplicable collapse of a private life, and the subsequent stubborn search for a place from which to take stock. We are surrounded here – by unsafe or haunted buildings, by artists and capitalists who flirt with terror, by writers and actresses and the deals they have made with unreality, and by the artificial, utterly constructed, scripted city in which we have agreed to live out a version of living. But there are cracks in the facade, and there are stirrings under the floorboards, and there are animals everywhere you look, if only you'd dare to look for them.Unsettling, unhinged, provocative and richly funny, ‘Animals’ is for human beings everywhere. KEITH RIDGWAY Animals Contents Cover (#u601bf53c-b5f2-5502-9270-db83be6e236d) Title Page (#ufa78c4a3-4870-528a-b9cf-52338f6b08cb) The Mouse (#u475cb8b6-4a94-5fc3-9468-1bb5c60f7504) Rachel and Michael (#u501bc02c-8bb0-5e6b-ae9d-caf50637680a) The Swimming Pool (#u3ca49254-49d4-5394-865d-60941d1f6cb7) The Spider (#litres_trial_promo) K (#litres_trial_promo) David (#litres_trial_promo) The Park (#litres_trial_promo) Slugs (#litres_trial_promo) The Terrorist’s Daughter (#litres_trial_promo) The Holy City (#litres_trial_promo) Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) The Mouse (#ulink_1c572349-aa3b-5082-b7fa-190d4c439967) All of this happened about a week ago. There had been rain, on and off, and I was worried about dreams. Not my dreams in particular, but all of our dreams. I’m not talking about aspirations or anything. I mean our actual dreams – dreams we have when we fall asleep. I think there’s something wrong with them. Before that, though, I have to tell you about what I saw on the morning of the first day, the Friday. I saw a dead mouse. I saw other things as well, and I’ll come to them, but chiefly, at the beginning, I saw the mouse. If anything is at the beginning then that is. I’m actually tempted to start somewhere else – with Catherine Anderson, for example (yes, the Catherine Anderson), or with BOX and all that Australia nonsense, or even with my friend David and his tiny writing. But none of that makes much sense really unless I tell you about what happened with K; and what happened with K doesn’t make any sense at all until I tell you about the mouse (and may not make much sense even then), and lunch with Michael, and a little bit about Rachel, and the thing about the strange rain. And the swimming pool, obviously. So I have to start with the mouse. Which is not ideal, because it’s not exactly what you’d call very exciting, in itself, even though, the more I think about it, the more it sums up everything else; and in a way, if I was brave, and if my bravery was confident of your bravery, I should just tell you about the mouse and leave it at that. Because, you know, the rest of it is just human. But none of us are brave any more. I left my umbrella at home. I left it standing upright in the thick glass vase on the floor of our hall, leaning against K’s umbrella – two tall question marks asking me if I was sure. There had been constant showers for days – some of them quite heavy. Fat black clouds scuttled over the grey sky as fast as birds, bringing cold bursts of rain that drenched people, took them by surprise – because before they happened they were hard to imagine, and because we never learn. But I thought that this day looked a little brighter. I usually watch the weather forecast on the television in the mornings. But on the Friday I slept late – in fact, I was barely out of bed – and I had just had a chance to bathe and get dressed before it was time to leave the flat. So I decided that an umbrella wasn’t needed. I opened the front door and saw a strip of blue sky torn through the grey, and I decided I didn’t need an umbrella and I stepped out into the world as it is. Our neighbourhood is generally sedate but can get a little agitated sometimes, and then you can feel a minor disturbance in the air, as if you’ve walked into a room where people have just stopped talking about you. I felt it that morning. There were some kids walking up the road towards me – about three or four of them, white and black and sullen, school age but not interested, obviously, in that, and they just looked like they were up to something – some kind of kiddie evil. I watched them carefully. Sometimes they can play that ancient joke of pushing one of their friends into a passing stranger, and I hate that – I never know which kid to be angry with, or how angry I should be. But these ones hushed their talk and parted for me as I passed through them. I glanced back and saw one of them spit, and two of the others glanced back at me, twisting themselves round in their hoodies and their low jeans with their boxers showing. They’re harmless really, though they’d hate to hear it said. They have their swagger ready-made for them in some East Asian sweat shop, and they wear it with the label showing. They are fully owned. As I turned away though, and looked where I was going, there was a sudden flurry of activity behind me, where the boys were, which sounded like they had scattered, voice-lessly, all limbs and splitting up, like they were a flock of pigeons disturbed. I spun round and sure enough, they had disappeared. I was startled and stopped in my tracks, and my eyes ran over the street looking for some sign of them because it seemed uncanny that they could have vanished so completely, so quickly. I thought I saw the shape of a shoulder, a hooded head, slip behind a wall on my left. There’s a small lane there which leads to a road which runs parallel to ours. But I saw nothing else. I thought it strange. I stayed where I was for a minute or so, looking around, patting my bag and my pocket where my wallet was. I couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps I had hesitated for longer than I’d realised before turning. Perhaps I’d been nervous about what the noise had meant, fearing that they were running towards me and not away from me. But surely that would have caused me to turn even sooner – so that I could be certain. So that I’d know as soon as possible what I was up against. Or, if I’d thought that I was going to be attacked in some way, surely I’d have started running myself, without turning round at all. We have instincts after all – flight or fight. I think I tend towards flight, although, to be honest, I’ve never been particularly tested in that way. But I hadn’t even considered running when I heard the noise. Maybe a third instinct had kicked in – that of pretending that nothing is happening for as long as is humanly possible, thinking that ignorance might be a shield. I shrugged and went on. I nodded hello at a woman from across the road who was making her way home with the shopping, and I had a long look at two separate elderly men who waited at the bus stop, ignoring everything but the corner from where the bus would come, when it came. I stood with them for a while, and looked at my watch, and decided to risk going into Eric’s. There is actually no one in Eric’s called Eric, as far as I can make out, although the very pleasant Turkish man who runs it seems happy to answer to the name. Sometimes there is also a woman who I assume is his wife, and sometimes a son, who I have also heard being called Eric, though he doesn’t seem to like it very much. They stock groceries and newspapers and sweets, and some general small-scale DIY stuff like nails and screws and hammers and other tools, and watering cans and ropes and drain unblockers and sink plungers and bulbs and batteries and smoke alarms and mouse traps. Eric’s is the first port of call for the entire neighbourhood when some small domestic crisis hits. It can be annoying sometimes when you go in just to get a newspaper or some milk and you have to wait while Eric whose name is not Eric rummages around for an ancient fuse for a customer whose dinner depends on it. When I went in this time, I thought I’d been unlucky. Eric whose name is not Eric was standing at the back of the shop with a large woman I didn’t recognise. They were looking at mousetraps – an old-fashioned one with a spring-loaded neck-breaking bar, and a more modern one, involving an adhesive-floored box. —They get stuck, you see, not-Eric was saying. Stuck there, they cannot move. —And it’s alive? —They’re trapped. They die of a heart attack or something. Who can know? They just die. —And how do you get it out? —You don’t get it out, you just throw the box away. No problem. —Oh, I don’t know. Seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it? She was laughing a little uneasily and looked at me. I smiled. Luckily, Mrs Eric who is not Mrs Eric appeared out of the back room and took for my newspaper and bottle of mineral water. —The other snaps their neck, it’s not cruel? —Well, it’s quick at least. Which one is cheaper? —The more cruel is the cheaper. It’s always the way. On the bus, I read, and drank my water and forgot entirely about mice and the vanishing boys. I read lazily, yawning, and glanced at the rooftops and the arches and at the signs that line the routes here, and at the teeth of scaffold and at the wires. It was all a blur. I made sense of nothing, but I was content I think. I have a smallish life. It doesn’t need much. There were seven different stories on the front page. Nothing specific seemed to be occurring anywhere. The bus went quickly and I got off in the centre, a couple of stops early, thinking that it was nice, I could walk, I could get some fresh air and look in the windows and think about things. I wanted to draw a quick sketch. I rummaged in my bag and found my sketchbook and my pen, and standing where I was, on some street somewhere near the centre, about ten minutes’ walk from where I was going, I drew a rough cartoon of a daffodil running through a field of children, knocking off their heads. I frowned at it for a moment, wondering if maybe it wasn’t an idea at all, but a memory of something I’d seen before. Oh well. One thing follows another. It was when I put away the sketchbook and the pen, and turned to cross the road, my head down watching my hands fiddle with the bag, that I saw it. I saw a dead mouse. Guttered, up dead against the kerb. A silky little thing, like a purse. Shut down, remarkably unruffled, thoroughly dead. There wasn’t even the slightest hesitation. I did not think, There is a mouse, oh, it’s dead. I thought, There is a dead mouse. He lay on his side, with his belly exposed towards me, and his limbs, with their little feet, stretched out from either end. He was a grey brown. With the underside lighter. You’d think, against the ground, the belly would be black with dirt. They are probably clean little things, in their world. Proud little cleansers. His eyes were closed. His mouth slightly open, with the smallest hint of a tooth. His claws at prayer, almost clasped together, above his head. The way he lay, I fancied he had fallen off the footpath. I could see no injury. I could see no blemish on his body at all. From what I know. I say he. I could see no genitalia. I was not aware of any genitalia in what I was seeing. But he was furry around the end regions. I found it hard to see, to tell. I peered at the thing. A stretched tiny creature, inexplicably ended, at the side of the road. I thought of course, though not with any great focus, of the woman in Eric’s looking for a mousetrap. It was a minor little coincidence. I noted it and paid it the deference I thought it was due (not very much) and put it out of my head. I wanted to prod it with my umbrella. An instinct in my arm, a twitch, so that I actually looked down at my side, as if for an umbrella, as if there was a chance that one of them, either K’s or mine, might have come with me, might have attached itself somehow, out of wisdom and the never-ending question. I had no umbrella. I had not brought one. I stood and stared down. I crouched a little. The thing was crying out to be prodded. I rummaged in my bag for something to touch it with. This small thing. Small dead creature. Just a touch. A little poke. Just to see. Just to feel. But in my bag there was nothing of any use. A novel, an address book, a half-empty bottle of water, half an apple in a tissue, a hat against cold, a glasses case, with sunglasses inside, my telephone, my camera, my sketchbook, my pen. I could see immediately of course how I might proceed: the pen. But I had only the one pen with me – and using a pen is what I do, it’s my role, I’m an illustrator and cartoonist, it’s what I do for a living, and I like to be able to sketch at any time and in any place – and I wasn’t that keen on using my pen on the mouse. Not really. So. I sought other options. I could take out the sunglasses, extend an arm, touch it like that. But I was afraid, frankly. Afraid of spillage. Of guts and ooze. I was afraid of what the touch would leave me with. And even if there was no obvious detritus left clinging to my glasses, I was not sure that I would want to wrap that arm around my ear, once I knew that it had prodded a dead mouse. The water bottle then. I could throw it away. But it was one of those wide-mouthed things, built to latch on to our own mouths, and it was too wide and bulky and awkward. I was sure it wouldn’t communicate to me anything of what I was after. What I was after was the body sense, the heft of it. The weight and the resistance. Things, I think, like that. So I would use the pen. I mean, I could buy another, if I really, suddenly, desperately needed to sketch something. Take the pen and poke the mouse and throw the pen away. Simply leave it there on the ground – a bewilderment for whoever came after. It would look, what, like the mouse had been hit from above by a falling pen. Maybe. Or that it had carried its pen as far it could before its miniature heart gave out. That the writing had killed it in the end. Some such thoughts might go through some kind of mind when I was gone. That’s what I thought. I could touch the mouse with the pen and then leave the pen by the mouse’s side. I put the pen in my hand. It was a nice pen, new or newish. It would be a shame. But I needed to know. I needed to touch the corpse. I needed to know the level of quiver and give, the degree of rigidity; the liquidity, possibly, of the innards. I took the pen in my hand. Which end? It was a rollerblade. No, excuse me, a rollerball. With a decent rubberised grip mid-shaft which would plainly be useless. I would be on one end of this pen, and the mouse on the distant other. One poke. One prod. That’s all. I decided on the butt end. I would hold to the rear. Clutch the base of it, the arse of it. Cap on or cap off? There was a danger I thought that if I used, as it were, the sharp end – the nib, or the ball in this case – that I would puncture something. That I would puncture the mouse. That there would be a barely discernible hiss of gaseous escape; an emission of mousey … life, followed in all likelihood by ooze – watery pink animal blood from grey string veins. About a mouthful in all, of bile and suppurations. I didn’t want that. And there was the remoter danger too (I looked around, the street was fairly quiet) of an explosion. Of a simple hideous pop. It didn’t look swollen, but how many dead mice have I seen? I would leave the cap on. I gripped the pen with my thumb and first two fingers. Right hand. Was there enough sensation there? Should I use the left for the sake of novelty? For the superior sensation from the lesser used limb? No. There was risk that the inexperienced left hand would over-poke or over-prod, and a resultant increased possibility of puncture or pop. Oh, I was just being stupid now. I thought of calling K. I put it off. I crouched, my coat skirting the ground, tenting my legs. My ribs rested on my thighs. My left hand held my bag beyond harm. My right hand went out. I was closer to it now, of course. Its claws were stretched up above its head. Yawning. Its forearms. Forelimbs. Why are we so unclear on the body parts of other creatures? Of how to name them. As if we’re a little embarrassed to let them have the same things we have. Arms. Hands. Feet. Belly. It looked like it … I can’t call him it. It’s him. I thought of him as a him, I still do. I could see nothing to confirm it, even this close, but I thought of him as him. I don’t know why. His arms stretched up over his head. His hands close to clasping. He looked like he’d surrendered, or been swimming. Perhaps he had been caught in a flood in the gutter. A sudden deluge, taking him and bringing him here, as helpless as a paper boat, choked in his little lungs and unable to hold. Or perhaps he had simply surrendered. Given up. Abandoned the fight. His belly was pathetic. It was open to anything. He lay there like a puppy waiting to be tickled, or a lamb waiting to be slaughtered, and either way he didn’t know and he didn’t care and he was better off in not knowing and not caring and in generally not being. Something stilled around me. I don’t know what I mean. I think I mean the city came to a halt. Which it didn’t. But I lost it for a moment. Lost the city and the city’s noise, and the world, and the world’s sorry items. Something got in the way. Just for a second. Something got in the way of my curiosity for details, facts, experiences. Something minutely sad. Something small and terribly strange. That pause in living. Sadness, I think it is. Sadness. All right. I thought of calling K. I put it off. I extended my pen. I sent it on its way, across that patch of air, that polluted patch. And all my sudden sadness went with it, expanded with it, pushed out from me like sound, and I wondered if I could carry on. It did quiver to the touch. And seemed to shrink. Its small extended limbs seemed to come in, to try to close, to try to cover its vulnerable front. It was as if a shadow briefly crossed its dream. Its uncontaminated dream. A slight disturbance in its sleep. A breeze rippled something that was closed, and lifted, for a second, an opening of sorts. A memory of something. A dim recall in the dirty street. It was nothing, was it? I prodded a dead mouse with my pen. There in the street. I crouched and touched its corpse. I felt a small resistance. Give and no give and give – a weak bundle of death on the end of my pen. I could have flicked it in the air with barely an effort. It was nothing. Nothing. It should have been nothing. It should have been utterly nothing. But since that, all of this. I tried once more. What was I trying for? I poked it again. Perhaps a little harder. Or perhaps a little softer, overcompensating against the risks run by attempting to go a little harder. There was the same small contraction, protective-looking, awful really, and the return then, the relax, like a last breath breathed again. It looked like it had looked when I’d found it. Let it be. Leave it in peace. I imagined I saw a tiny indentation left in its belly by the tip of my capped pen. I paused again. The world paused again. I felt something shift inside me, a worrisome realignment. I thought of calling K. I put it off. There was certainly an indentation. There certainly was. A pockmark in the shape of a pen cap. It seemed to shimmer like a morning puddle on the pale flesh. It was a sort of greyish shadow. I looked at the pen, and saw, much to my weird guilt, that there had indeed been some kind of small secretion. A minutely cluttered sheen of moisture clung to the smoothness of the plastic like a grimy sweat. It caught the light, and I could even see a tiny bead of it roll around the shaft, in and out of the almost microscopic debris of what must have been the first symptoms of rot. And I thought I could detect a mild smell to go with it. A sort of warm sweet sickness, very light, but present, like a childish bad breath. I remembered measles and chicken-pox. My mouth dried. I laid the pen on the ground. There must have been more than that. That’s what I think now. I think that I don’t have enough detail, and the detail I have is the wrong kind of detail – that it misses the point. Because although there was seepage and although there was a smell, these things did not, at the time, get in the way of the feeling I had that this was a very interesting and, in some obscure way, meaningful encounter. So the corpse was a bit yucky. So what? It was a corpse after all. It was not nearly so repugnant as it was striking. But it’s difficult now, if I’m honest, to say whether I genuinely thought that it was striking, or whether I just wanted it to be striking. Perhaps the significance comes later. Perhaps it wasn’t there then. But I think it was. I really do think it was. So I think about the face. The face of the mouse. Its eyes and nostril nose and its mouth and its teeth and its whiskers. What were all of them doing while I prodded its belly? I don’t know. I can’t remember. Did I even look? I mean, I only poked him twice, and my eyes have only so many things they can look at. But you’d imagine, would you not, that the face would be the obvious thing to monitor? We have that instinct. We look at faces. Do mice have faces? Something about that word ‘mice’ worries me. It is unlike what it describes. It has been corrupted and diminished by cartoons, and by its pronunciation as ‘meece’ in some of those cartoons. And the idea of mice faces, as well, is ruined somewhat by cartoons. Even now, trying to remember the face, I am interfered with by features entirely unmouselike but forever associated with mice because of the consistent use to which mice have been put in the last one hundred or so years. Mouse as Everyman. Cute resourceful little fellow with a twitchy whiskered nose and a spunky sense of humour. Why? I have never drawn mice. Never. They’re a devalued currency really, in terms of illustration. I draw all sorts of other creatures, but not mice. I’ve never liked them anyway. Crouching in the street poking this dead one was the closest I have ever willingly been to a mouse. That I know of. Something about their speed, their size, their ability to infiltrate, their capacity for turning up anywhere, at any time, has always half terrified me. I do mean half terrified. Because I feel the start of full terror but close it off quickly, with the thought that it’s only a mouse, it’s only a little mouse, mice are harmless, they’re not like rats. If rats did not exist would we feel the same about mice? I don’t think so. They are blurred things. Uneasy little shapes that flash by, on our periphery, on the sidelines, like a scratch on the surface of the eye, like fat black clouds across the grey sky. They cling to skirting boards and kerbs and edges. They come looking for the food we drop without noticing – the crumbs that fall from us daily, the rain of our chewing and our fumbling and our bad-mannered lives. They know something about us that we don’t fully comprehend. Mice is the wrong word for them. When I try to remember his face now I get a composite of memory and Disney and fear, and the backwards assignation of things that hadn’t happened yet. There’s a childish scrunch to it, a sort of eek-a-mouse fright. I see the mouth, and a glint of inner whites and pinks, God, and the nose, which is really no more than two wet nostril holes in the grey fur, at the point of the whiskered snout. The eyes must have been closed. Either that or I have blanked them out. Either that or something else. It all goes forward, leans out, presses out ahead of the body. They are pointed little creatures – missiles, arrowheads. No wonder they move at such speed. He looked like a child that had bitten something bitter. Something horrid and yuck. Perhaps he was poisoned? Perhaps they lay some toxin down here on the streets. Or perhaps just one of our idle by-products did for it. Some accidental spillage or fume. —It’s me. —Yes. —I saw a dead mouse. —Did you eat the apple? —I ate half of it. —All right. That’s a start. I suppose. —I saw, I see, I’m looking at a dead mouse. —Oh shit. —No, no, I’m not at home. I’m out on the street. In town I mean. —Oh, OK. —It’s just lying here, in the gutter. —Right. Are you sure it’s dead? —Yes. —You don’t want to attempt some CPR? Call an ambulance? —I can’t figure out how it died. —Old age maybe. —Do mice die of old age? —I’m sure some of them must do. —On the street? —What, you think they should have a sacred place where they go to die? —I find the whole thing quite moving. —Aw. That’s sweet. I think. —I mean, it looks somehow significant. Or, not significant, that’s not what I mean. It looks somehow terrible, as if, you know, here, in the midst of all this, all this life, there’s this dead thing. This death. —This mouse. —Yes. —Are you still meeting Michael? For lunch? —Yes. I suppose. —Life hasn’t suddenly ceased to have any meaning or anything? —No. —Where are you going? —To the place, the caf? place that he likes, I don’t know what it’s called. You know. —Well, you’re going to be late. What I wanted to tell K, what I wanted to say to K then was, I don’t want to leave the mouse. The sentence assembled on my tongue and started forward. I said, I … But it was of course a ridiculous thing to say. To even consider saying. It was mad. And of the alternatives which presented themselves, as don’t began to pass through my lips, I don’t want to leave the house seemed if anything even more suggestive of some kind of half-arsed melodrama. And anyway, I had already left the house. Want came out. I don’t want to leave you now simply made no sense at all. In fact, it suggested meanings and thoughts and even agendas which were simply not in my head. Out tumbled to. I bit down on leave, truncated it by a syllable. I don’t want to lee … and then corrected myself with an impatient little sigh. I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be late. Even that was suspicious. It was a thing I just wouldn’t say. K picked up on it. —Is it squished? —What? —The mouse. Is it squished and horrible? —No. No, not at all. Well … I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the poking. —Not much. Not at all really. It’s very passive, peaceful. It looks unhurt. Its face looks a little, you know, oh, I’m dying now. But there’s no injury. No wounds. That I can see. —No blunt-force trauma? —No … —Have you drawn it? Funny that it never occurred to me to draw it. That I used the pen to poke rather than draw. That what you would have thought of as my natural instinct had been somehow redirected towards touch. —Eh, no. No. I don’t have a sketchbook. Or a … I have a sketchbook. I don’t have a pen. —Well, have you got your camera? —Yes. —Then take a photo. —Why? —What do you mean, why? You’re transfixed by it. Record it. You might use it for something. —I’m not transfixed by it. —Yes you are. You’ve called me up to tell me you’re standing in the street staring at a dead mouse and you’ve gone all metaphysical. Of course you’re transfixed. Now take a photograph of it and go and have lunch with Michael. You’ll be late. The truth was that I didn’t want to take its photograph. It didn’t seem right. But I couldn’t say that to K, who would have laughed. —All right. —All right. Call me again later. Minus dead things ideally. OK? —Yeah. OK. Sorry. —I love you. —I love you too. I didn’t want to take a photograph. His photograph. Something about the scene was irreducible. To take out my camera and point and click would be an act of censorship. I would be editing out the noise of the traffic, the voices, the shuffle of feet on the pavement, the high rumble of the airplanes, the sound of the world as it is. I would be editing out the spring confusion of a clear fresh day and exhaust fumes; the low lumpen scent of the burger bar at my back; the ineffable musk of the city, never mind of the mouse itself. I would also be editing out my own reaction to this scene, which was, now that I had talked to K, beginning to strike me as immensely strange. I would be editing out the sadness. I would be reduced, I knew it even then, to showing a photograph of a dead mouse to the people I love, in an attempted explanation. For all of this blurred impossible. This life. To say it even now sounds ridiculous. But K had told me what to do. Not to do it would mean having to explain not doing it. I couldn’t quite grasp the explanation for taking a picture or the explanation for not taking one. Perhaps they were the same explanation, differently sized. Proportionate. But proportionate to what? To what they explained, or to our capacity for explanations like that? Maybe it’s better to reduce. To short-circuit the direct experience, to minimise memory’s chances of messing things up. If I had a photograph, maybe I would only have a photograph. A picture of a dead mouse. What could be simpler, smaller, more stupid, less significant? Really, it was nothing. I took out my camera. There was an amount of fumbling. Doing this always makes me feel like a tourist, like a visitor here. It is one of those cheap but clever digital cameras – it looks like a toy. The size of it is supposed to make it compact, discreet, easy, but it seems to me always awkward, unwieldy, and I feel I’m forever on the verge of dropping it. It has a bag that is not really a bag at all, more a jacket, an overcoat, which has to be taken off, the Velcro ripped and then the thing itself slipped out, balancing it in one hand, and the so-called bag in the other, and then the lens cap, which is just badly designed, and is attached to the body of the camera by a silver string, and all of this is important because it was distracting me, it was shifting my mind two thoughts away from where it was properly supposed to be. I put the camera around my neck. Hung it there. I think I still held the cover in my hands. I think my shoulder bag was hanging from my shoulder. Not what you’d call the relaxed demeanour of a regular photographer. I sorted it out somehow. Maybe I clenched the cover between my knees, or under my elbow. Maybe I put my bag at my feet. Somehow. All of my accessories, arranged and disassembled. I switched on the camera, heard its reassuring mechanical whirring and its patter of soft beeps. I raised it to my eye. I looked through the viewfinder. There was the mouse. I zoomed a little, let it focus, snapped. Did the mouse flinch? I looked at it naturally again, the camera lowered. I didn’t think so. But I seemed to be involved in something oddly resuscitative. I felt like a television doctor. I mouthed clear as I focused again, and felt the electricity, the shock of the exposure, travel the air between the mouse and me. The pen made it look like I had staged it, that I had put the pen down there to give the whole thing some scale. I took four photographs of the dead mouse beside the pen before I reached down, gingerly picked up the smeared pen, moved it, put it somewhere else, and took another seven photographs. That is all I can say that I remember. That I put the pen somewhere else. There I am, crouching in the street with a camera, documenting the death of a mouse, with my bag and the camera cover and my coat all getting in the way, and the badly designed lens cap swinging this and that way, and I picked up the pen because it made the scene look staged, and I put it somewhere else. I put the pen somewhere else. Even now, especially now, after all that has happened since, I find it hard to believe that my mind was so deflected, so absent, that I put the pen, the pen that had poked the mouse, the pen that had touched death – the death-stained pen – into my bag. But that, it seems, is exactly what I did. Seven or eight more photographs. I think. About that. I took them as simply as I could, framing the dead mouse against the grey of the road, against the scattered blotches of faded yellow paint that went to form a double line. They look so clear, so solid, from a distance – those yellow lines. Up close though, they’re ruined. I filled the frame with the dead mouse. Then I zoomed out to lend more context. In one of the shots you can see the tip of my left shoe. Then I zoomed in as close as I could on the face, the claws, the limbs, the tail, the head, the snout, the eyes, the feet, the mouth, the whiskers. I documented fully the mouse in death. Perhaps it was by way of a compromise between my fear of strong memory and its associations – and my knowledge that the photograph subverts and undermines such memories. I wanted, I think, the least bad thing. The possibility of appropriate placement, of getting everything in perspective, eventually. That’s probably how we live. Look at me. I met a dead mouse in the street. I stared at it. I prodded it with my pen. I called K. I photographed the mouse. I stared at it a little more. I glanced at my watch, and my shoulders rose and fell, and I went and had lunch with Michael. Afterwards, after lunch, I passed that way again. I looked carefully, and in several places in case I was mistaken, but the mouse was gone. That was it. That was how it started. Rachel and Michael (#ulink_22a8244a-e481-5eb8-b3c2-8aec3f1b7b92) Rachel had called the night before to tell us that she was going to go to Poland. Apparently she’d had some strange sort of communication from an old school friend of her brother’s, and she wanted to investigate. She was pretty vague about it all, but sounded cheerful enough; excited that it’s happening yet again. I find it difficult to tell with Rachel though. K is better at identifying her humours. I think she fakes it with me sometimes – probably because she picks up on my frustration and unease about her, and particularly about her Max project. She’s an artist, I suppose. Well, actually, I don’t suppose it – she is an artist, of course she is. She works mostly with photography, but also with film and audio, and with longer-term projects in which she usually perpetrates some kind of deception and then documents what happens. In the past these have been fairly playful and quite fun. She spent a month last year telephoning random people from the phone book, greeting them by name and telling them that she’d just called up for a chat. She recorded the conversations. Most of them ended pretty abruptly with a Who the hell areyou? kind of response. But a surprising number evolved into long dialogues, or monologues, some of them quite revealing. Rachel was never sure sometimes whether people believed they knew her, or didn’t care and talked anyway. Hi there [xxxx], it’s Rachel. Just thought I’d call for a chat. How are you? Her best-known project is the one that no one knows she’s responsible for. Until now, I suppose. It’s the Double-Decker Slasher rumour. She started that. It took off to such an extent that I think it freaked her out a bit. I suppose paranoia is a fairly easy thing to generate, or feed off, these days, and half the city seemed to believe at various times last year that people were having their throats cut on the upstairs of double-decker buses. It was an elaborate set-up and she did it really well. But it got out of hand and she has more or less disowned it now. Originally there had been plans for a show, but I haven’t heard anything about that lately. She has lots of eerie photographs taken on the upper decks of city buses, and she was going to show them, along with the fake evening newspaper front pages that she printed and left lying about all over the place, and she was going to record people’s accounts of the rumour, as they’d heard it, as they’d embellished it, and have the audio playing on a loop. But I think she’s shelved all that. Upstairs only, on buses that are about half full – less than half full, a quarter full; the point is that they don’t have to be empty, and you sit upstairs, towards the back; you’re aware that there are people sitting behind you but you haven’t really paid them any attention, you haven’t picked them out at all – maybe one or two, probably one man, two women, something like that, two on the left, two on the right, and you sit down and you read your book oryour newspaper or listen to your iPod or you look out the window, or you do all of these things because you can and the day is good and buses are nice, you can see the city go by, and then you feel something, at your shoulder maybe, what can that be, as if someone has brushed up against you, and then a sudden cold sensation across your throat, one that ends all the sounds that you’ve been hearing, one that seems to stop the world still, a thin abrupt clarity, as if you have plunged into cold water up to your neck, and you look down, you can’t seem to help looking down, and you are wearing, how strange, a flowing apron of dark blood, and you know in a slowing-down instant, in the last of your sight, out of nowhere, on such a nice day, that you’re dead. I was one of the team on the Double-Decker Slasher project. I don’t know how many of us there were, but I’m not sure it was that many really. I was told to drop it into conversations, casually, precisely. I wasn’t allowed to give any details. I was to ask a question rather than impart information. Did you hear something about someone on a number 38 getting their throat cut? The other day? No? Well, I don’t know, I heard something, oh, maybe I heard it wrong, never mind. No more than that. And when I was with her, when we were in a pub or having lunch, or on a bus, we would have the conversation, and she was very good at lowering her voice in such a way that it would attract attention from people within eavesdropping range. —I heard there was another slashing last weekend. —You’re joking. —No. The number 7. Some middle-aged woman. A passenger climbed the stairs and found her bleeding to death, throat cut from ear to ear, two people sitting three seats in front of her hadn’t heard a thing. —Jesus. —And the camera not working of course. And the conductor sitting downstairs reading the paper. Of course. It’s the third. —My God. —They don’t want to start a panic. It may be al-Qaeda. But it’s going to get out. City like this. People talk. She shut it down when the bus companies issued a joint statement saying that the rumours were no more than rumours, and that they suspected a malicious intent and a single source, and had asked the police to investigate. There was real panic then for a few days as Rachel made all of us swear a vow of silence – convinced that one of us had overplayed it, or that the fake newspaper pages she’d printed would somehow be traced back to her. But she’d used a printer friend, Serbian Stan, and I think practically his entire life is illegal and virtually invisible anyway, and she had no real reason to worry. For a while there were ripples in the (real) newspapers and on the radio about rumour-mongering and the climate of fear, before there was another wave of terrorist arrests and talk of a dirty bomb, and everyone forgot about old-fashioned throat-cutting and was terrified again for real. But the major thing that Rachel’s been doing, for about eighteen months now, is to pretend she has a missing brother. She’s given him the name Max. She has concocted photographs, using a picture of her uncle as a young man, altered digitally in a couple of respects – removing the moustache for example, changing the colour of the eyes, restyling the hair and updating the clothes. Her uncle is dead and she doesn’t actually have any brothers, so there is absolutely no one real to find. She’s given Max something of a biography, but she’s left most of the details blank. He was born in 1970, left school in 1987, spent some time travelling all over Europe and possibly North America and possibly the Far East, and possibly anywhere else that might come in handy, and returned here in 1992, possibly, where he lived at various addresses, mostly unknown, doing various jobs, mostly unknown, until disappearing completely in 1994, at the age of twenty-four. So she has a website about him, and she has these little posters that she sticks up, and she’ll sometimes go around asking all the people in a particular street or block of flats or bar or something, saying that she’s found out recently that he might have lived in the area or been a regular in the bar. And what she’s looking for really is exactly what she gets – people screwed up in various ways sufficient to make them believe that they knew this non-existent Max, and to offer Rachel hints and clues and insights, not into her fictional brother, but into themselves, which she duly records in some way, and stores, cross-indexed, neat, until she’s ready to stick it all in an exhibition. Anyway. Rachel called to say she was going to Poland, in connection with the Max project. This is not the first trip abroad that she’s undertaken in the course of this. She’s already been to Spain and Morocco, and to Israel twice. She makes quite a good living out of magazine photography. And I think her father was a pretty successful businessman. He’s either dead or has retired to Israel, I actually can’t remember. I think he’s retired to Israel. During lunch, Michael told me the story of the BOX building ghost. But before that, he wanted to talk about Rachel. He admires Rachel a great deal. He thinks she’s a great artist. Michael has strong views on these things. —She’s off to Warsaw, you know. —Yes, I know. She called last night. —Oh. He was a bit put out that she’d told us. That his news wasn’t news. He made a sulky face. He makes a lot of faces, Michael. And he does voices. I think sitting at a desk all day doesn’t suit him. —Well, he whined.—Did she tell you what it was? —An old school friend? —Isn’t that marvellous? You know, this is about the seventh or eighth one who’s claimed to be a schoolmate. This chap though also claims to have seen a photograph of him, of Max, behind a bar somewhere outside Warsaw. Some hideous little Polish dump full of vodka alcoholics and toothless Catholics, can you just imagine? He lives out there now, some EU chappie. Swears that it’s Max. On his life. Poor sod. And the really pathetic thing is that this fellow has told Rachel that he saw the photograph months and months ago, and recognised it then, and even pointed it out to his wife, or girlfriend or what have you, as in, Look, how strange, there’s a photograph of an old school chum, good old Max, wonder what he was doing here, and that it wasn’t until last week that he finally got around to searching for Max on the Internet and found Rachel’s website and discovered he was missing. —Jesus. That’s quite elaborate. —Isn’t it? People are elaborate, though. People are Byzantine. I’m sure that one of these days the Max project is going to go seriously off the rails. Someone is going to find out that they’re being taken for a ride and they’re going to get really angry. Of course Rachel insists that such a thing could never happen because such a person would, were Rachel genuine, actually be taking Rachel for a ride, and a much crueller and more disturbing one, and anger, should it all break down, would be entirely Rachel’s prerogative. She insists that the room for mistaken identity is slim. The photographs, while slightly altered, are photographs of an actual distinctive person, with distinguishing features (a small scar over the left eyebrow, what looks like a mole on the lower right cheek, a handsome gap between the two front teeth), and could not be easily mistaken for somebody else. Similarly, the name she has given her missing brother, Max Poe, is sufficiently unusual to rule out that kind of confusion. And the dates she has come up with – of birth and departure and return and disappearance – are unalterable. Put all of this together, says Rachel, and it simply doesn’t fit any actual missing person. She’s checked. And when someone does approach her with some story about Max, Rachel goes through (so she tells us) a complicated checking procedure to ensure that it doesn’t amount to valuable information about somebody who is genuinely missing. By which I think she means that she checks any checkable details against files for those who went missing at the same time and the same age as Max did not. But of course no one is deceiving her on purpose. What would be the point? Any deception involved is total, in the sense that the people who claim to have seen Max, or who claim to have known him either before or after he didn’t disappear, are deceiving themselves. Completely and utterly – almost religiously. And they’re doing it for a reason – it’s in their interest to deceive themselves. Because they are divided against themselves, like nations. They’re disturbed. And Rachel is flying out to Poland to have a chat with them. It makes me nervous. Of course she’s aware of all of this, she’s talked about it. It seems to be the point of it, in many ways. I once tried to tell her that I was worried on her behalf, but I think it came across quite badly, as if I had accused her of something, which I suppose I had. Well, I don’t suppose. I did accuse her. I actually accused her of abuse – of the abuse of vulnerable, lonely people. She was astonished, and angry, and in turn she suggested that I was jealous of her – artistically jealous – and that if I wasn’t fulfilled by cartooning I shouldn’t take it out on her. Which of course may be true to some extent – I’m not really sure – but it distracted me and confused me and I lost sight of the point that I was trying to make, which was that someone at some time was going to discover that the Max they claimed to know didn’t actually exist, and they would feel fooled, and they might become angry, even dangerously so. After the argument with Rachel I went over all the same ground with K, who immediately saw what I had been trying to say, but insisted that the disturbing nature of the Max project was exactly the point of it, that Rachel was that kind of artist, and that her work was for that reason hugely interesting, and that her friends should really only offer support, that anything else would be useless, that she was a grown woman who was completely aware of what she was doing, and that it would be patronising to tell her to be careful. Which, as I’m sure you can imagine, didn’t exactly comfort me. I was still nervous, and added to it now was a new nervousness, about myself and my own motivations and my own worth in terms of what I do and what I manage to understand. It left me feeling rather stupid, to tell you the truth. Michael never seems nervous at all. Or stupid. I imagine that appearing stupid would be the worst imaginable thing for Michael. Ever. I think he would rather die than appear stupid. I envy him really. He seems to exist without any difficulty, as if everything is easy. He is a very calm man, a sort of still point, who’s always at the centre of some derangement or other. His mother is Catherine Anderson, who I mentioned – the Catherine Anderson, the actress. His father, estranged from both of them, is currently serving a jail term for a ridiculous fraud perpetrated against a children’s charity somewhere in France, or Switzerland maybe. I think Michael is quite embarrassed about his parents. It’s difficult to get him to talk about them, though I’m always trying, just because I’m so curious. I think they’re fascinating. He will talk about his father sometimes, in a disparaging tone, full of distance and tired amusement, as if he’s talking about the latest misadventures of a character from a soap opera. Even then he’ll only talk about him while we’re alone or with other close friends. About his mother he was never very voluble. I used to think that was a kind of modesty, as if he was afraid that people would think he was making himself interesting by invoking her name. But I don’t think that now. I just don’t think he likes her very much. We used to get the occasional reference to whatever it was that she was up to, and annoyance that she had turned up to see him unannounced, or that she’d wanted him to accompany her to some function or party or other and how he felt obliged but resentful, as if it was her who was using him. But lately, he doesn’t mention her at all – not since she gave a long interview to a Sunday newspaper in which she detailed her elaborate sexual history. I don’t think they’re talking. So, over lunch, Michael told me the story of the building ghost. Or should that be the ghost building? Michael is an architect. He works for Edwards Patten Associates – the people who designed the Lacon Tower, among other things, and the new Technology Museum which won a big award last year. I like the museum. At least, I like the photographs I’ve seen of it. It seems rather elegant. The Lacon Tower, on the other hand, always looks to me like it’s about to fall down. It makes my stomach lurch a little every time I see it. I don’t like heights. Michael tells me that it contains movement in its line. He has a voice he adopts when he talks about his work, and I’m never sure if it’s just another one of his voices or whether it’s actually the real one. It’s quieter, more intense. He tells me that the design of the Lacon Tower is intended to convey forward momentum, like the bold cursive script of a self-confident person. I asked Michael about this, about whether it is really possible to speak about a building in other terms – to say that building design, architecture, is like something else, like people or water or air or handwriting. He admitted to me that he never thought of architecture in that way – as being like other things. He thought of it simply as itself – as function and line and, to some degree, intellectual occupation of a space. He thought about architecture – in other words, in the language of architecture – without the need to translate. He tells me that the similes of architecture are simply an interface with the lay community. A way of talking to the likes of me. Do you think that is true? I don’t know whether it’s true or whether he’s just teasing me. I don’t know any other architects. Comparisons make life easier, I suppose. We have two eyes. We see things in double before we can see them at all. In double and upside down, as far as I can remember. They are projected on to the backs of our inner skulls, and some process of the brain makes sense of them. We can’t see one thing unless it’s next to another. Michael told me about a building project that the practice has been involved with at quite a superficial, technical level. A small team, which doesn’t include Michael, have designed a necessarily complicated access route, vehicle and pedestrian, from street to underground car park, in a new office building in some previously anonymous inner suburb which is now attracting a number of fairly prestigious media consultancy companies for a reason which Michael, he said, knows but has forgotten. I’m not entirely sure what a ‘media consultancy company’ is, but I didn’t ask. If I asked Michael to explain all the terms he uses we’d never finish a conversation. The project is a new build on the site of a nondescript, three-storey office and retail unit which had been destroyed by fire. The principal architects designed an attractive (though dated, said Michael) strip-windowed affair, with the name of the commissioning company, BOX, in art-deco pushpin steel lettering on one side, vertically, at the front. Actually, I know about BOX. I thought they were an advertising company. I know about them because I know someone who works for them. Not very well. But I do know her. And we had talked once about the possibility of my doing some work for them. Or with them, as she put it. She had asked me to send her a portfolio, which I never did. I interrupted Michael to tell him this, and he frowned at me. —Why didn’t you? —Why didn’t I what? —Send them your stuff? Could have been something there, you know. —They’re advertisers. —Oh, no one is an advertiser any more. They’re brand presentation, media strategy, perception creation – all that. —Well, I don’t do that. —No, I know you don’t do that, of course you don’t do that, but the fact is you can do that, you can do it in your sleep. Visuals, I mean – the striking image, the simple stroke that conjures up a world of complexity. Don’t laugh at me. That’s their language. Could have been good money in it, you know. They’re worth a fortune. Why else would they be getting us in to make their bloody underground car park tunnel all lovely and light and poncing inspirational. The word was in the brief. Still might be money in it, for you I mean. If this whole thing doesn’t knock them off line. You should send them something. The building, Michael went on, is one storey higher than its predecessor, and was completed on time and within budget. But it’s empty, unused. Because, Michael said, hunched down over his plate, eyes wide, putting on a voice, it’s haunted. Haunted by the building it’s replaced. I had to wait until Michael went and got himself another pot of tea before I heard any more. It might be possible to guess that he’s the son of an actress and a con man if you didn’t already know. K gets quite bored with it all sometimes, but I enjoy spending time with Michael. I’m not sure what it is in life that he takes seriously. His work, perhaps. He likes films and music and always knows what’s new without ever describing it as anything other than old hat. And he wears, as it happens, old hats. Especially in this kind of weather. I can’t ever imagine him with an umbrella. He has a terrible fear of seeming very enthusiastic, and you can see him sometimes, taking a breath, calming himself down, dampening everything. And at the same time, he has a fear of not having anything to say. He looks stereotypically alternative, with his close-cropped hair, his experiments with beards, moustaches and sideburns, his black-framed glasses, his shoulder bag and his clever T-shirts and his canny shoes. A lot of our friends look like this. Vaguely arty, mildly unconventional, conscious of the irony but incorporating it. They incorporate everything really. And, of course, they are wholly incorporated. The first manifestation of the haunting, Michael told me, was the inability of the lifts to reach the top floor. The first time this had happened the lift engineers quickly solved, or seemed to solve, the problem. But within hours, the malfunction recurred. Each time the lift attempted to rise above the third floor it stalled and would not budge. Endless diagnoses were made. Electronic problems, gear mechanisms that were faulty or misaligned, magnetic interference, inadvertent vacuums – all were blamed in turn and then discounted. Every time they changed something it seemed they had fixed it – the lift would climb to the fourth floor – and then it would stall again, within a day, or within hours, or within minutes. A fortune was spent on delicate sensors and measuring machines, and countless man hours were invested in analysing the data. The architects went through their plans again and again, the lift engineers removed the entire cabling system. The builders rebuilt part of the lift shaft. The cabling system was reinstalled. It worked for three days. And then, to the despair of everyone involved, and much to Michael’s amusement, the lift would once more climb no higher than the third floor. As if there wasn’t a fourth. I told Michael that it sounded like an interesting engineering problem, rather than a poltergeist. No, he told me. There was more. While they tried to work out what to do with the lifts, and everyone started reaching for their lawyers, various other strange things began to occur. • The telephone lines on the fourth floor misbehaved. They would go dead. Or, while working, would pick up crossed lines in unison, so that from each extension could be heard a sample section of the city’s babble. • Two electricians, called in on a Saturday to sort out the non-functioning sockets in one of the fourth-floor offices, contacted the project manager to report the fourth floor inaccessible due to some joker having bricked up the stairwell on the third-floor landing. The project manager arrived and met the electricians downstairs. Together they took the lift to the third floor because, well, that was as far as it would take them, and went into the adjacent stairwell. The brick wall had vanished. Both electricians fled, upset, ashen (distraught, said Michael), and had refused to work in the building since. • Four workmen from the roofing contractors were asked to explain their presence on the fourth floor one morning – they could be clearly seen from the ground, moving around behind the windows, and at one point firing up a welding gun, by at least half a dozen people. They insisted that they had been where they were supposed to be – on the roof – the entire time. And indeed, as revealed by subsequent checks, they had no access to the fourth floor. The lift didn’t go there, and the door from the stairwell had been locked the night before by a security guard who reported that he had felt ‘uneasy’ patrolling there, and had sealed it off. • Carpets on the fourth floor had been replaced three times due to unexplained staining before they just gave up and left them as they were, including one with a strange Australia-shaped discoloration. • When the CEO of BOX came on his first visit he got out of his car, stared up at the building and asked why there were only three storeys. Those accompanying him, including the chief architect, the project manager and the main contractor, looked from him to the building and back again. But there are four storeys, they told him. He looked at the building and he looked at them, and he looked at the building again. No there are not, he insisted. Then they had that argument, Michael laughed – that argument – about whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and three above it, or whether a four-storey building was a ground floor and four above it, and what was the difference anyway between a storey and a floor. It was only when the CEO used his finger to point and count that they all finally agreed that there was a fourth floor. Inside the building, the CEO remained silent throughout the tour, until, on the fourth floor, he was taken ill and had to leave. The nature of the illness, Michael had not been able to determine. It was simply reported that he had been taken ill, a phrase which, as Michael pointed out, covers everything from the shits to a stroke. The CEO had not been back since. In fact, Michael believed, there had been efforts made to get BOX out of the deal entirely, and this having apparently failed, the company appeared now to be trying to sell the place without ever having taken up residency, and while still operating out of a cramped two-storey lease in the impossible city centre. But word was out, said Michael, and a sale would be difficult. He was surprised, Michael was, that it hadn’t made the papers yet. Actually, I am myself unclear about the difference between a storey and a floor – if there is one – and I get very confused by all talk of an x-storeyed building. Where do you start counting? Surely you include the ground floor as a storey? But if so, why is the first floor not the second floor? Because surely the ground floor has to be the first floor – as in Storey 1 – rather than the zero floor, the nought floor – Storey 0. Because if the ground floor is just that – the ground floor – and the first floor is the first storey, then a four-storey building, such as the BOX offices which Michael had described, was a building with five levels. A ground floor, and four storeys above it. Or was it a four-level building – with a ground floor and three storeys above it? I opened my mouth to voice this puzzlement to Michael, but shut it again because I was suddenly sure that we had already had this conversation at some previous time, and I was sure also that he had explained it to me and that I had forgotten. Then I opened my mouth again to suggest that the building wasn’t haunted at all, it was just jinxed by the fact that no one ever knew what other people meant when they said ‘a four-storey building’. But I shut it immediately. That was just stupid. I have a very amateur interest in architecture. By which, Michael tells me, I mean that I like buildings. He has explained to me that what I like is actually not really architecture at all, it is the placement of people against things. He insists that I am far too interested in people to really have any proper appreciation of architecture. Most of the time of course he is joking with me, teasing, but I think that he does actually, in truth, have quite a condescending attitude towards my interest in his profession. Which, I suppose, is fair enough. Architecture is probably one of those things that we all feel entitled to discuss without ever really understanding the principles. What I’m not so sure about is just how serious he is when he insists that architecture cannot concern itself too much with people. With actual real people and their physical needs and their practical necessities. These are technical matters, and should be given only minor, cursory attention. Sometimes I think he is not serious at all, that he can’t be. Other times I’m convinced that this is what he really thinks, and that he dresses it up in deniable humour because he is ashamed of it. Maybe it is a cross between the two. Part of one thing and part of the other. I was impressed, though, by Michael’s story of an old building refusing to allow a new one to take its place. I liked the idea that the space had been defined at a certain height, and the new construction would not be allowed to go any higher – that it did not have metaphysical planning permission. I thought it reminded me of a film I had seen once, though I couldn’t remember the details. I mentioned this to Michael. —Oh, I know what you mean. He was fiddling with his phone, reading a text I think. —It’s a Bob Hope thing, isn’t it? he said. —No, it’s European, subtitles, German maybe. —Fassbinder? Not like him I don’t think. Who was in it? —Oh, I can barely remember. Something about a house and the house is actually the one doing – —The Haunting. —Yeah … —Well, that’s American. —It wasn’t American. It was in German or something. —Well, The Haunting is an American film. —No, it wasn’t called that. —You just said it was. —I didn’t. I said that in this film the house was the one doing the haunting, and that the film was German. Michael was replying to his text. —You’re thinking of The Haunting. —I’m not! Is The Haunting German? —No, it’s American. —Then why were there subtitles? —Are you thinking of Tarkovsky? There’s a bit in Stalker – —I don’t know who that is. —There was a creepy Yugoslavian thing called The House. From what I remember. All bony hands on banisters. —Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. —Menzel? —What? —Closely Observed Trains? —What? —Not that one obviously. He had another one. Powerful. Powerful film-maker. Must get it on DVD actually – Trains. Lovely film. The boy in the bath, all that. There. Just as he finished whatever it was that he was doing on his phone, and I was about to give out to him for doing it, there was a sudden cloudburst outside. I’m not sure if there was thunder. But a wave of darkness raced through the caf?, bringing hush and hesitation, and then the rain hit the ground like debris. The two of us watched as people ran for cover, some of them screeching between laughter and alarm, a couple of them coming into the caf? for shelter, others making it across the road to a second-hand record shop. The rain was torrential. It came down so hard that after a couple of minutes we could no longer see the other side of the street. We stared out at what I can’t really call rain at all. We stared out at falling water, as if we had been transported to some jungle and were crouched in a cave behind a waterfall, mute in fear and ignorance, cold little apes in the crevice. The caf? was becalmed. There was no noise of voices. The radio had disappeared. There was no clatter of dishes or cutlery or cooking, no ring of the register, no tunes from phones, no movement. Only the hysterical drumming of the rain, and the gathering rattle of running water. We stared and waited, as if there was a chance that this time, this time, it might not stop. Or this time, this time, it might presage something worse. The darkness covered us, and I was afraid. It was hard in the noisy gloom to pick out Michael sitting beside me. His telephone too went dark, its little lights vanishing in his hand. On my face I could feel a kind of paralysis, as if I had neglected to blink, or breathe. I thought that it would not stop. I thought that it would never stop, not now. But it did. After just a couple of minutes. The light returned. The water became rain again. And then the rain slowly ceased. Michael broke the human silence with his laugh. He stopped, made a wide-eyed face of mock fear and laughed again. In the rest of the caf?, people relaxed. Others laughed too, some shook their heads, rolled their eyes, muttered. Conversations resumed, the hubbub rose unaltered. Then a dog appeared, walking down the centre of the road; a large, dark dog that moved with a great swagger, slowly – almost, it seemed to me, in slow motion – right down the middle of the sodden roadway, as if it was in charge here. I’m not sure anyone else noticed. Michael was fiddling again with his phone. The dog’s big head bounced gently, its powerful shoulders rolled and rippled and its tongue seemed to glisten and ooze over its pointed teeth like a bag of blood. It glanced this way and that with huge cloudy eyes, and paused, and went on, and looked, as it passed, directly into the caf? – directly, it seemed, at me – registering my stare, taking note of me, its hard, intelligent mind considering and then dismissing me. It went from view. A huge, loathsome dog, a deep shadow in the damp sunlight, uncollared, unkept. Dry as a bone. I took a sip of my very cold tea. I can’t remember anything else about lunch with Michael. We talked about Rachel. We talked about a building haunted by another building. We watched the rain. I saw a dog. I think Michael enjoyed meeting me. Perhaps I was a little quieter than usual. I had the mouse on my mind, still. And I was a little depressed by the news of Rachel’s trip to Poland. And at the end, after the rain and the dog, I was uneasy, a little nervous. I don’t really like dogs. But I think Michael had a good enough time talking with me. It is often impossible, however, to know very much about Michael. He is rather opaque. The Swimming Pool (#ulink_fb1ce8eb-3a9b-58c3-a6ed-4c1746ab52ed) The mouse’s corpse was washed away by the rain, I suppose. All the gutters were raging when I left the caf?. But a few streets away they were calmer, and when I got to the place where I’d seen the mouse, the ground was almost dry. I don’t know if that meant that the rain had been very localised or that the sun was very hot. It didn’t feel very hot. I was feeling, by this time, if I’m honest, a little perplexed. I know that when I list the things that happened that day, they don’t seem to amount to very much. And they don’t. But nevertheless, I was, even by the time I left Michael after lunch, feeling somewhat rattled – on edge. Stress had crept into me. Even stepping out of the caf? I moved very slowly, nervously, afraid that the dog might still be around. So much so that I think Michael had to nudge me in the back to get me into the street. I think it was mostly the dog. The rain and the dog. They had, both of them, unsettled me slightly, but I wasn’t sure why, and maybe I was simply, unconsciously, the victim of various automatic associations that had no relevance to me personally. Michael was going to the left, and it made sense for me to go to the left as well, as there was a bus stop in that direction from where I could catch a bus home. But it was also the way the dog had gone. I can’t remember what I told Michael now – that I wanted to look in some shops or something – but I made an excuse, said my goodbyes and walked instead to the right. I wonder now why I didn’t tell Michael about the mouse. Perhaps because I knew that he’d have wanted to look at the photographs stored on my camera, and that he would have had some wry way of making the whole thing seem a lot less strange, a lot more unremarkable. He would have been quick to puncture what would have seemed to him a typically inflated sense of significance and drama which I had attached, not for the first time, to something banal. I regret it now. Because that is probably exactly what I needed just then, and it may have proved useful later on. Delete the photographs if they bother you. Forget all about it. Put it out of your mind. But of course, as you know, I kept it to myself. Which is typical and predictable. But I shouldn’t make the mistake now of believing that my failure to talk to Michael – and the consequent failure to be convinced of the insignificance of the mouse – was in itself significant. There’s no point is replacing the ridiculous Oh my God a dead mouse with the equally ridiculous Oh my God I didn’t tell Michael about the dead mouse. In any case, I have no way of knowing that telling Michael would have made any difference anyway. He might have had the same reaction as me. He might have been moved by the same odd mechanism and been knocked off balance – reinforcing my sense of peculiarity and low-level but elaborate menace. I was stuck with my weird mouse reaction. Nothing had defused it. And if you add to it my reawakened worries for Rachel and the slightly disconcerting talk of building ghosts (though, to be honest, Michael’s story hadn’t really made its full impact on me at that point), plus the rather biblical rain and the demon dog, then I think it’s fair to say that I had a head full of negative thoughts. I felt a little queasy. I decided to go for a swim. I took a bus home, dropped off my bag (I left it on a chair in the kitchen), changed out of my shoes into some trainers, picked up my swimming things, and walked to the quiet end of our street and through the park to the sports centre. It’s a brand new centre, and the local council has spent a lot of money on it, but it has been very badly designed, or perhaps very badly built (Michael suggests a little of both) and already it looks somewhat dilapidated. Most days when I go, some part of the changing rooms, or the reception, or the gym, is inevitably cordoned off – due to leaks or problems with ceiling tiles falling down or the floor buckling or otherwise giving way. One day I was in the communal shower area when a large tile fell from the wall, coming away as neatly as if it had been pushed out from the other side, and it shattered on the floor in a cloud of dust and fragments. Luckily, no one had been standing close to it at the time. Despite all these problems, and the huge controversy which they have engendered, I still love going to the pool. You don’t have to be a member or anything, you just have to pay a small per-use fee. You have to be careful with timing of course. Sometimes it’s not open access, it’s booked up by clubs or schools. Or some days, especially on warm days, it can be very busy, and after-school hours can be filled with noisy kids. This time of day, though, is usually perfect, and when I got there I was cheered up greatly by the fact that there were only a handful of people in the changing room, and all of them seemed to be getting dressed, having finished their swims. I love to swim. I always have. It calms me, soothes me. I don’t really know what it is about it that has such a positive effect on me, but it’s not unusual I suppose. It’s sensual of course – being almost naked, surrounded by warm water; and it’s exercise, the only exercise I get really; and it’s also the only physical activity that I do relatively well. Perhaps it was for all these fairly mundane but sensible reasons that I decided to go for a swim. But I remember wondering, as I undressed, whether it wasn’t something as well to do with the rain I’d seen from the caf? during lunch with Michael. I wondered whether what I was actually doing was attempting to reassert myself over the element. As if I needed to reassure myself that I had the measure of it, that I had it tamed, that I could be a master of water – that it was, after all, only water, and that it was there for me to use and enjoy and not to fear. The thought made me laugh as I stepped beneath the lukewarm shower and slipped my goggles over my head. Then I made my way carefully through to the poolside, thinking that mine is a daft psychology, and that I would make K laugh later that evening with an account of my redemptive exorcism down at the sports centre. There was a middle-aged woman swimming slow, sedate lengths, and a young girl and her father, clinging to the side, chatting. They were all in the slow lane, and there was no one else. I had never known the pool to be so empty. I think I probably grinned as I walked to the middle lane at the deep end. I nodded to the bored-looking lifeguard slumped in his high chair and asked him if it was all right if I dived in. He nodded, unconcerned. Normally I ease myself into the pool, most of the time I use one of the ladders at the sides, and then swim to the middle lane. But I felt today that the more exuberantly I took the opportunity to enjoy myself, the better I would be able to clear my head of all my concerns and my worries. I dived. I’m not a great diver, but still, I dived this dive well, and my body went into the water as it should do – hands, arms, shoulders, head, chest, and then the rest of me, slicing into the water neatly, quickly, cleanly. It was a good dive. Something has to go through your mind at a moment like that. It is like a moment of violence almost – like a knife into skin, or the moment of an accident. It is heightened. I mean, things go through our minds all the time, endlessly, but there are certain moments when the thought gets caught, amplified, recorded. It’s like someone takes a photograph. And always, after that, you remember what it was you were thinking when whatever happened happened. When your car hit the kerb; when you lost your footing; when you heard the news; when you heard the bang; the moment you jumped; the moment you dived. I’m not saying that anything other than the dive happened. I just mean that a dive into a swimming pool, as you force your body to trust your brain – if you’re not used to doing it – is just such a moment. As with a trauma moment, the shock, or the adrenalin, or whatever it is, captures your thought and shows it to you in rare clarity, and stores it with those other heightened moments and their associated thoughts. And when I dived into the swimming pool that day, the thought I caught myself thinking was this one: the stain was shaped like Australia. It was what Michael had said, when he told me about the building ghost. That there was a stain on the carpet of the fourth floor and it wouldn’t go away and it was shaped like Australia. I couldn’t remember really what emphasis he’d given it, if any, and didn’t even know whether it was accurate or something he’d added himself as an evocative phrase, not knowing in truth what the stain looked like at all, thinking that it would assist me in visualising something. And perhaps he’d chosen Australia just because it has a distinctive shape, and also because it suggests something of considerable scale. You don’t really think of something shaped like Australia as being small. At least, I don’t. If it was something that someone had actually said to him, that had been reported to him as an accurate description, and which he had in turn reported accurately to me, did that mean that it was accurate in fact? That the stain really did look like Australia? Perhaps someone earlier in the reporting chain had added it as an embellishment, Chinese-whisper-style, and it had stuck. It might have been the person who told the story to Michael, or it might have been the person before that; it could in fact have been anyone at all in the chain, at any point, close to the original source or not. Even if it had been applied by one of the people who had actually been in the building, who had been to the fourth floor and had seen the stain on the carpet there – even then, how accurate was it? Shapes are fairly objective things, once you get past circles and squares and triangles. One person can look at a cloud and see the outline of a face. A second person can look at the same cloud and see the shape of a sailboat. A third person can look at the same cloud and see nothing but a cloud – shapeless, meaningless and fleeting. Even if you were to assume that several people had seen the stain and that they had all agreed that its shape resembled that of Australia, could it not be said that all stains, almost inevitably, look like Australia? It’s something about the large irregular blob-ness of it, with the single separate smaller blob underneath, Tasmania. Knock your cup of coffee and have a look at the resulting mess. From some angle, somehow, it will look a little like Australia. I don’t know why all of this suddenly seemed so important, but it did. I realised it with a sort of annoyance, a kind of underwater sigh of impatience, and a slight tilting of the head and a brief rolling of the eyes, as I dived down into the deep brightness of the pool, which felt to me less warm than I thought it should have, but which was, nevertheless, wonderfully refreshing. I knew that I’d have to call Michael and find out whether it was true, whether it was definitely the case that the stain on the fourth-floor carpet of the BOX building was shaped like Australia. I felt it was vital that I find this out, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t asked him at the time. My body was fully immersed by then. I was pointing downwards, head first, towards the bottom of the pool, still moving, and all the water seemed to panic around me, as if I was a catastrophe here. It seemed terribly significant – the matter of Australia, I mean. Significant in terms of what, I had no idea, and why it should occur to me that it was significant I had no idea either. But there was something in the notion of Australia. It wasn’t about the stain per se, or the idea that it remained, despite constant attempts to remove it. What was significant, if it was true, was its shape. I’ve never been to Australia. I know some Australians of course – it’s inevitable – but it’s not a country I know very much about or have very much interest in. And I did not know at that time, I think, what I could or would do with the knowledge – if it was forthcoming from Michael – that the stain was indeed, definitely and clearly and objectively, shaped like Australia. But I knew I had to find out. My momentum slowed. I kicked my legs briefly and did a quick breaststroke to keep myself going down. Why did I want to keep going down? I suppose I was exhilarated by the water, by being out of the world for a moment, by being so completely and alertly elsewhere. But really – the bottom of a swimming pool is a terrible place. There are tricks and corners there. There are hidden catches. There is the noise. The pool in the sports centre is white-tiled. It has black lane markers – elongated Is that attempt a kind of orientation, and fail, or fail me at least, providing only a mild sense of vertigo and a vague disappointment at the impossibility of falling. There is a slope in the middle somewhere, as the deep end becomes the shallow end. There are randomly spaced plastic covers over drains or filters or some such. There are the shadows of the lane ropes and their measured-out floaters, bobbing. There is the water: bubbles and distortions, glints of light, minute clouds of particles, debris, human dust, debris. We are disintegrating. Sometimes the sparkle of an earring or an unmissed bracelet or an unreachable delicate chain with cross or locket or twist. I don’t think I had been to the bottom of the sports centre pool before. And I think it was only when I reached it, my hands spreading out to brush the tiles, my body contracting, my feet tucking in, my eyes all around me, that I remembered how terrifying such a place is. My fingers touched grout. My hands pressed down on the strangely warm tiles. What were they made of, exactly? How did they not break? Leak? If they leaked would they leak inwards or outwards? How heavy is water? Why was I not crushed? Everything was above me. The shimmering surface, the lane ropes, the legs – kicking and still – the light. All of it above me. And the bubbles that came from my mouth fled upwards. And my hair lifted upwards. Everything natural wanted out of there. I glanced at a nearby drain or filter cover, whatever it was – an ugly sinister thing where you could easily trap a finger or a toe. The brightness was awful, the clarity utterly deceptive. I could see everything, and yet I suddenly expected a tap on the shoulder, a face in front of mine, a hand on my ankle – unseen before I saw it. I was swimming in a flooded hospital ward, a submerged asylum, a sunken abattoir, a place so full of ghosts that they touched every inch of my skin with their half-cold own. Perhaps the fear is about sound. Sounds there are so hideously distorted. It is an inverted silence – all unidentified roaring and the thump of your own heart. It’s a muffling that suggests being buried alive; the prolonged, strangulated fade-out of dying. Perhaps I watch too many films. Perhaps my fear isn’t my own at all but has been gifted to me by Hollywood. I’m sure my mind is full of a lifetime of images of trouble underwater. Of murder in the swimming pool. Of course, now that I try I can’t actually think of any. At all. Nothing specific. I can think of several celluloid underwater terrors at sea. But nothing in a swimming pool. I’m sure that they exist. They must. The relaxed swimmer, the pristine white, the lap of the water, the brightness. And then the underwater shot, the sudden odd angle, all sounds grotesquely altered, the light refracted, split and cutting, concentrated and threatening. The whiteness calling out for red. The sensual skin turned to vain vulnerability, the supporting water gone deep and thick and complicit. Everything suddenly stops. My worries about dreams came back to me then, as my body came upright in the water and my feet sought out the tiles below me. For weeks I had puzzled over this. I think I’ve mentioned it. I had not been able to find a way of thinking about it that did not disturb and confuse me. It had started very simply over coffee one morning, as K and I sat in the kitchen with the radio on, not long out of bed. We talked about dreams. That isn’t unusual, but that morning I remember that our conversation had been prompted by a story on the news. The security forces all over Europe were reported to be very concerned about the theft from an Italian laboratory of various poisons and toxins and that kind of thing. Vials of anthrax or botulinum or ricin or something. And of course, their concern was that the theft had been carried out by terrorists who would seek to use these toxins in an attack. As we listened, K looked up at me and frowned. —That’s very strange. —What is? I asked. —A lab, vials, all that. —Oh, it’ll just be another false alarm. It’ll all turn up somewhere, or they’ll arrest another cell because of it. It’s the stuff that doesn’t make the news that worries me. —No, that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s strange because I dreamed about it. Or something very like it. I think. I said nothing. K often relates dreams to me. I’m used to it. It’s a regular thing. I don’t really like it – I never have. Something in me clams up slightly when someone, anyone – not just K – tells me their dreams. I seem to have an instinctual resistance to it. I sipped my coffee, and my mind focused more on the radio than on K. —I was in a hospital, I think. All white and clean, and it had that disinfectant sort of smell. —You can smell in your dreams? —Apparently. In this one anyway. I was looking for someone. I’d come to visit someone, I’m not sure who. The place seemed deserted, there was no one around at all and there wasn’t a sound. It was all very creepy. K smiled a little and squinted, trying to remember the details. —Then this little boy appeared out of nowhere, wearing pale blue pyjamas, a real cute little kid, sleepy-eyed, straight out of a television ad for cough bottle or fabric conditioner or something, the only thing missing was the clutched teddy bear. And I asked him, could he tell me where I could find the Research Centre. I was very specific. And the boy told me that I would have to go and see Dr Harkin for my tests. And he took me by the hand, very solemnly, and led me down the corridor. The next thing I know is that I’m in a garden, outside the same building, and the little boy is gone, and there’s an elderly man leaning out of a window, on the same level as me, talking to me, and I know that this is Dr Harkin, and he gives me this long elaborate spiel about my tests not being very good, and that I may have to have my insides recounted, that there may have been some error in the counting. K laughed at this point. Although I was hearing the account, and remembering it obviously, I had the definite sensation of not wanting to hear about the content of the dream, of wishing that K would shut up, that the recollection was profoundly uninteresting to me, at the very least. —He told me to come in, and I had to find my way out of the garden into his surgery, but I couldn’t seem to find a door into the building. In the garden there were several people strolling and sitting around, and as I searched for the way back into the building, I realised that they, and I, were all naked. That didn’t seem to bother me, and nor did the fact that I couldn’t find a way back into the building. Then the door was right there in front of me – obvious – but I couldn’t get in because it was cordoned off by the police. I approached a policeman and asked him, could I go in. He said no. He said that there had been a robbery and that all the diseases had been stolen. He said, Everyone is a suspect. Then he looked me up and down and said, The naked people are obviously not suspects as they have no pockets in which to hide the vials. And that was it. That’s all I remember. I am not a suspect. —Good for you. —Yes. —Of course, all that means is that while you were dreaming about little boys and doctors and being nude in the garden, the radio alarm clock went off, and the news came on, and you heard the report about the Italian thing and you incorporated it into your dream. K considered this and nodded, impressed. —Very possibly. I put my feet flat on the bottom of the swimming pool and pushed off. There was a rushing sensation, not unpleasant, although I could feel some kind of discomfort in my right ear, brought on by pressure no doubt. I reached out my hands for the surface and looked along the line of my arms. There was a horrible confusion of noise – a combination of my progress through the water, and changing pressures in my ears, and the general sonorous bellowing of underwater ambience. Well, that’s what I thought. As I said, K telling me a dream was not an unusual thing, and given the fact that its similarity to the news report had been explained, it didn’t really stay in my mind. Other people’s dreams never do. I imagine that if you had asked me later that day, even an hour or so later, what K had dreamed of the night before, I would have been hard pressed to tell you. The only reason I now remember it so well is that, two nights later, I had the very same dream myself. It was not exactly the same. The hospital I went to was not deserted, it was busy, and it was the same hospital in which my mother had a minor operation last year. In fact, in my dream it was my mother I was looking for, not the Research Centre. But, like K, I couldn’t find my way, until a small boy in pale blue pyjamas appeared and took me to see Dr Harkin. I too stood in a garden while the doctor spoke through a window. I’m not sure what he said to me, but it seemed to be about my own health rather than my mother’s. Like K, I could not find the door back into the building. Unlike K, I remained fully clothed. My garden was deserted. When I did eventually find the door, my re-entry was blocked not by a policeman but by the same small boy, except this time he was naked. He told me that someone had stolen the diseases. At that point I became aware that my pockets were filled with vials. I woke up. Unsurprisingly, I think, I found this dream quite disturbing. I remember when I awoke from it that I awoke completely – I was immediately fully conscious and alert, and every detail of the dream remained as vivid as reality. I knew that I had had a dream that had left a huge impression on me, but for those first few moments I was not sure why. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, going through it several times, confirming to myself that I remembered everything – that there were no parts of it which had evaded me. It was after dawn – the room was filled with a soft grey light – but the alarm had not woken me, the dream had. I turned to look at the alarm clock, and despite the fact that the radio alarm clock sits at K’s side of the bed and that therefore, by turning my head, I saw K directly for the first time since waking up, I honestly believe that it wasn’t seeing K that made me realise the significance of the dream, but rather the actual physical movement of my head which somehow realigned my thoughts, so that I recognised that what I had just dreamed was, largely speaking, not my dream at all. It belonged to K. The time on the clock was 06:13. I couldn’t get back to sleep that morning. It didn’t even occur to me to try in fact. I got up, as quietly as I could, and I went into my office and sat at my desk and wrote out, quickly, the details of my dream. I also drew rough sketches of what I had seen, recreating, as faithfully as I could, the boy in the blue pyjamas as he led me towards Dr Harkin; Dr Harkin himself, leaning from the window as he talked to me about my health; the garden, from several different angles, with its paths and flower beds and the small fountain at its centre; and finally the door back into the building, and my way blocked by the boy. All of this I did in a kind of daze, determined that I would record it all before it left my mind, as it inevitably would. Strangely, it never has left my mind. But perhaps the simple act of putting it all down on paper ensured that. When K finally got up – astonished to find me at my desk so early – I made some coffee, and while we drank it I recounted the dream. As I related each detail in turn I watched K’s face for the signs of recognition, surprise, even shock. But there was no such reaction. There was nothing. Nothing at all but a sleepy shrug. I was dumbfounded. —Does none of that ring a bell? —Ring a bell? No. Should it? —Are you serious? Have you forgotten? —Forgotten what? —Just the other day, at this exact time, you sat there, where you’re sitting now, just like that, drinking coffee, in your dressing gown, and you told me the same dream. K considered me, bewildered. —I did? —Yes you did! Jesus! I don’t believe you’ve forgotten. —I can’t, well … I do remember telling you about a dream … I do remember that. But I don’t … Really? Tell me what you dreamed again. So I did. I went through the details once more. K was silent, but this time I was sure that there was some recognition, that I was not mad, that something odd had indeed happened. —God. That’s a bit creepy. I do remember. It seems very like my dream. Yes. The doctor at the window. The little boy. The policeman. —There was no policeman in mine though. —No. But still. We went through the details of K’s dream and the details of mine, and we sought out the similarities and the differences. The differences were all fairly plain, obvious, matters of stark contrast, such as the atmosphere in the hospital at the beginning and, of course, the different endings. But the similarities – or more than that, the identicals – of everything else struck us both as peculiar in the extreme. We stared at each other, baffled, at a loss to explain it. What did it mean? Then I went to my desk and got the sketches I had made. K went through them one by one, examining each for several seconds before commenting. —No. This isn’t the boy I dreamed of. Mine was a bit chubby. He had curly hair, freckles. Yours is a bit, what, blond and blue-eyed? —Yes. He was thin too. A bit spectral, I suppose. —Well. Who’s this? Is this the doctor? Mine had no beard. Mine had glasses and no beard. And you have yours wearing a doctor’s jacket, is it? I can’t remember what mine was wearing. I suppose he would have been. I can’t remember. The window looks about right. The brickwork on the wall looks right. I think I remember ivy though. Or do I? Ivy, or high bushes or something. —Look at the garden ones. K looked at them, and immediately frowned. —No. Mine was completely different. Yours is all neat and tidy. I didn’t have paths, or a fountain. It was just a lawn, with bushes around the edges, maybe some in the middle, not well kept, high grass. I wouldn’t have recognised this at all. The final sketch was the door back into the building. Again, this was different. —You have the boy there again. And he’s naked. Well. I was naked in mine, and there was a policeman. And you have the door open, but in mine it was closed, although it looks like the same door, to tell you the truth. Same arched thing, heavy wooden old-fashioned thing like a church door. There was police tape in front of mine. He wouldn’t let me in. K put down my sketches and smiled at me. —Also, in my dream I was innocent. In yours you’re guilty. Guilty of theft as well, you notice. Theft of my dream. —Seems that way. —Are you freaked out? —A little. —Well, I would have been as well if the sketches had matched my dream. But they don’t. So. You didn’t dream what I dreamed. You had my dream in your head and you dreamed about it. And you didn’t know what anything looked like so you made it up. I wouldn’t worry about it. It probably means you’re jealous of my life or something. K regarded it as a peculiar but really quite explicable coincidence, and I remember that although we did at that stage laugh about it a little bit, and the conversation veered off into mutual teasing, I was still troubled by it, and remained so. But my thoughts were at that stage limited to what had happened to us, nothing more. Before K left for work that morning, we had moved the conversation on to the original source for the first dream – the news report about the break-in at the laboratory in Italy. —It just goes to show, said K, that the most infectious thing of all is not anthrax or the plague or whatever, it’s paranoia, and they’ve already released that. It’s in all our conversations, in our private thoughts and our worries and our secret fears and our horror stories. And now it’s in our dreams. It’s contagious. That final word stayed with me. For the rest of that day I got no work done. Contagious. If it was as easy as it seemed for one person’s dreams to infect another’s, then surely it must have happened to me before? I tried to remember dreams. I found that I could remember very few. One horrible nightmare from my childhood stood out, as did one extremely erotic dream from some months previously. But of my recent dreams I could remember very little. There were a few peculiar, isolated images – a coach on a winding, perilous mountain road; a bridge made entirely of broken glass; a black river; a tangle of snakes knotted together in a laundry basket; sheets of yellow paper blowing down a hillside. But I could recall no contexts, no stories, no sense of where I was or if I was there at all, nothing that I could reasonably think of as a proper dream, such as the one I had stolen from K. I knew, though, that I had dreamed many such dreams. It was simply that I had forgotten them. It made me wonder whether there was something about dreams which did not allow them to be easily remembered. Did they contain some sort of self-destruct mechanism? It was hard to remember them when you first woke up; harder still, as K had demonstrated, just a few days later; almost impossible, as I now found, after any length of time more than that. Perhaps there was a reason for it. I remembered too how something inside me recoils from hearing someone else’s dream. My mind shies away from it in the same way that my body shies away from a height or a dog. Perhaps there was a reason for that too, and perhaps they were the same reason. I moved through the water and the muffled, riotous noise, towards the surface and the moving light. My feet kicked. There would be nothing at all to worry about if dreams were unimportant. But I don’t know that they’re unimportant. I mean, they may well be unimportant, and if they are then I’m being stupid, and if you believe they’re unimportant then this is going to make you very impatient. But the fact is – and I’ve done a little research – nobody really knows what dreams are. The scientists and the doctors and the psychiatrists have their various theories of course, but they are various, and no one really agrees about anything. So, imagine for a moment that dreams are important. Imagine that in some fundamental way they enable us to function. It’s not unreasonable, is it? Maybe dreams are the way our mind makes sense of itself. Maybe it’s in our dreams that we arrive at conclusions and make decisions which in our waking life take on the nature of givens, of truths, which we do not seek to explain. Maybe dreams are the way we develop our conscience, our morality, our personality. Maybe that’s how, and where, we allocate priorities and sort through aspects of ourselves and arrive at an understanding of how best to proceed. Maybe dreams make us wiser and better and more human. Maybe they make us ourselves. And imagine as well that what we remember of dreams is just the smallest part of what has gone on while we slept. It is highlights, and it is remembered as images and sounds and emotions and sensations because that is the language that our waking mind uses, while in fact, in dreams, the language is very different – something strange and irreducible, inexpressible in words or signs. So, dreams tumble through us, and only small pieces of them are remembered, and then only in translation as it were, recalled in a way that allows them to be recalled. When I realised that I had dreamed K’s dream, I realised too that this could not have been the first time that this had happened. It may have been the first time I had noticed it, but K has been recalling dreams over breakfast for years. And K is not of course the only person who tells me about their dreams. Rachel often does it, though I suspect she makes a lot of hers up, and another friend of mine, David, tells me regularly about his – complicated things that seemed to go on for ever. In the average week I will hear of strange images, unlikely circumstances, embarrassing situations, mysterious words and gestures and signs – all taken from the dreams of others. And all of this is fed into my subconscious and stays there somewhere, along with all the other things I hear and see in the course of my life. Inevitably, some of it will resurface in my own dreams. It goes into the mix. It is improbable to think that it wouldn’t. And I have the clear evidence of K’s dream to prove it. When I first thought this through, it took a little while for me to work out the implications. But what nagged at me was the sensation I have whenever someone tells me their dream. I feel, as I’ve said, a definite reticence, almost distaste. As if I know innately that hearing the details of someone else’s dream is bad for me. And of course, I eventually realised, if dreams really are evidence of a nocturnal, deeply unconscious process by which we become ourselves, then taking the translated highlights of one person’s dreams and inserting them into the dreams of another might well be bad for all concerned. It might well be very damaging. For what are we processing then? Certainly nothing that is entirely our own. We’re working on the detritus of a different consciousness. Someone else’s stuff. We’re taking in orphan manifestations of another inner life. We’re dealing in interference, static, muddied waters, a polluted stream, a mess of mixed metaphors, a heap of confusion. There are false reports in the dispatches. In among your bad day at work, your difficult relationship with your mother, father, husband, wife, your financial problems and the threat of terrorism, is the bicycle ride along the cliff edge that your daughter dreamed of last Thursday; and the man with the sombrero who followed your work colleague around a cathedral in a dream she had last night and told you about this morning. How will these be processed? Will they be dismissed? Will they be confused with your own reality? Are they translations of very specific subconscious conclusions or switches or trips, which, when redreamed by you, will affect, alter or stall your own sleeping deliberations? Is that why we find it difficult to remember dreams? Because our minds are naturally wary of contagion? Is that why I feel so uncomfortable hearing someone else’s dream? Because I know it is infecting my own? I voiced my theory to K. It would be wrong to say that the response was entirely dismissive. But my impression was that K was amused by it, thought it an entertaining conceit, a nicely ridiculous notion, and did not for a moment take it seriously. —Dreams are not for sharing then? —Well, no, they’re not. I don’t think so. —Because they interfere with other dreams? —Yes. I mean, I’m trying to think of an example. Imagine waking up in the middle of surgery and offering to help the surgeon. —Yes? —Well, it wouldn’t be good, would it? —Why? Was I dreaming? —No, surgery is the dreaming, is the process you go through while asleep, while dreaming, and then, in the middle of that, you interfere, or someone else interferes, in the process. It’s not a good example. —No. —OK, have you ever used one of those online translation services? You enter a web page in French or German or whatever and it gives you an instant rough translation? —Yeah. —OK, well, imagine that what you remember from a dream is like one of those translations. You know it’s not accurate, sometimes the inaccuracies are quite funny, but it’ll do, it gives you a rough idea. —OK. —Then imagine that you pass that translation on to someone else who then translates it again. Their translation will not only be an additional step away from the original, but it won’t even be their original that it’s one more step away from, it’s someone else’s. —Why do they translate it again though? —It’s an example. —You need to work on your examples. —But don’t you get it? Dreams are like your own personal, bear with me, your own personal essence. —Oh dear. —And telling other people about them risks, I don’t know. You exhale your essence and they inhale it and then their essence is compromised by your essence. —Jesus. —Well, it’s not an easy thing to get your head around. —No. I get it. There is too much telling of dreams going on. Too much exhaling of essences. We need a reduction in global levels of essence. We need a new Kyoto Accord, except for dreams. Less dreams in the atmosphere. The Americans will want a derogation, you know. What with Hollywood and all. I mean, the American Dream for God’s sake. You can’t tell them to stop exhaling that. —And that’s another thing. The use of the word ‘dream’ in all kinds of stupid ways. Hollywood ways. Aspirational. My dream house; my dream job; my dream girlfriend, boyfriend. These are not dreams. Or, dreams are not these. Dreams are not good things. Or, they’re not fluffy harmless diversionary things. They’re the motors of self-awareness. They construct our individuality. If we share them we cease to be ourselves. We merge into a banal gloop of similarities. We get stuck. As human beings, we get stuck at this aggressive, self-obsessed, materialistic stage of our development. K looked at me for quite a long time without saying anything, half smiling, but trying to work out as well, I think, how much of this I actually believed. —Motors of self-awareness? —Well, why not? —OK. I won’t tell you my dreams any more. My concern about dreams did not diminish over the next number of weeks, but I didn’t mention it again. I realised that it was a difficult idea to voice, and I realise it still. But it has preyed upon me considerably. I have had to stop people, a couple of times, as they began to tell me about a dream. I’m relieved when I wake and can remember nothing. I become agitated and nervous when details do get through. And all the time, my mind struggles with the notion of a polluted pool of dreams from which we are all drinking, oblivious, trapping ourselves in a dead end of shared, second-hand signs. All this talk of dreaming. I rose through the water, fingers first, propelling myself towards the unmediated light, towards breathing. With the things that had been going through my mind you would think that breaking the surface and re-emerging into the air, into the direct sound of the world, would have seemed like waking from a dream, like coming from an unreal place into a real one. But it was not like that. Something had happened. In the tiny space of time during which I had been underwater, something had happened. The first indication of it was sound. I had thought that the roaring in my ears, the drumming and the crashing and the jumble of noise that I had been hearing, was the water – the water going past me; my disturbance of it; the filling of my ears and my nose; the press of it against my head and my body; the echo of my inner spaces, suddenly surrounded. But as my head cleared the surface and I drew my first breath, the roaring continued. And it was more, it immediately seemed to me, than a matter of water. I had surfaced facing down the pool towards the shallow end. I caught a blur of the small girl, and her father, whom I’d seen earlier. She was climbing out of the pool, and her father seemed to be almost pushing her, while his head was turned towards me, or rather, past me, towards the deep end, with an expression which suggested some not inconsiderable alarm. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/keith-ridgway/animals/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.