Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

I cycled home, my mind clamorous with unanswered questions.

Abbey was up, flicking through an encyclopedia of divorce law. My landlady worked in some mysterious capacity for a city legal firm, although the precise details of what she did there always eluded me. I’d asked her about it several times, desperate for any excuse for a conversation, but she was always evasive on the subject, saying that it was too depressingly humdrum to talk about. Whatever it was, I was in no doubt that she was bored of it, as she had complained to me on more than one occasion about wanting to do something better with her life — something more noble, she said, something worthwhile.

“Henry! I was getting worried.”

“I was at the hospital.”

“No change?”

“No change.”

“Sit down. I’ll get you a coffee.” Abbey was up on her feet and into the kitchen before I had a chance to protest. “Two sugars, right?”

I said a grateful yes and sank into the sofa, relieved that the day was drawing to a close.

Abbey pressed a hot mug into my hands and I thanked her. She was wearing a baggy T-shirt several sizes too big for her and I’m a little ashamed to admit that I wondered whether she was wearing anything beneath it.

She sat cross-legged on the floor. “Henry? Do you…” She trailed off, embarrassed. “Do you notice something different about me?”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“I mean is there anything different about me?”

Grateful for the opportunity to admire the contours of Abbey’s face without her thinking I was gawping, I gazed for a minute or two, uninterrupted.

“No,” I said at last. “Not that I can see.”

She tapped the side of her nose and at last I saw what she meant — a flash of gold, a small, discreet stud like an expensive outbreak of acne. My first thought was that she’d had it done to impress someone — some square-jawed hunk at work, some broad-shouldered pin-up of the assizes.

“You like it?”

Too tired and guileless to lie, I said: “I prefer you without.”

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “I thought you might like it.”

“It’s just that you’ve got such a lovely nose it seems a shame to spoil it.” Even as I said it, I could feel myself turning pink.

“Have I really?” she asked. “Have I really got a lovely nose?”

I was just about to stutter out some reply when rescue arrived in the insistent peal of the telephone. As I picked up the receiver I looked back at Abbey and saw that she seemed almost as grateful for the reprieve as I.

“Hello?”

The voice, cracked with age, seemed faintly familiar. “Am I speaking to Mr. Henry Lamb?”

“You are.”

“I represent Gadarene Glass. Would you be interested at all in purchasing a new window?”

“Haven’t you called before?”

“I have, yes.”

“The answer’s still no,” I snapped, “and I thought I asked you last time not to bother.”

Click. The hornet buzz of the dial tone.

Abbey rolled her eyes as I replaced the receiver. “I don’t know how they get this number.”

I yawned. “Think I’ll go to bed.”

“Sleep well. But Henry?”

“Yes.”

“If you need to talk…”

“Of course.”

Abbey smiled. As I turned to go, I saw that she was touching the side of her left nostril, running her fingers over the stud, suddenly, sweetly, adorably self-conscious. I stole another look and felt something unfamiliar, something strange but wonderful, begin to flutter in my chest.

If I’d known at that moment all that was to come, I would have stamped out those feelings right then. I’d have those flutterings at birth.

The next day I made up my mind to go to Granddad’s house. Not one other member of the family (nor a single constituent of his fair-weather entourage) had emerged to offer their assistance, and as the only relative who had ever admitted to actually liking the man, I felt the persistent tug of responsibility.

The day passed in a blur of routine — Hickey-Brown’s jokes, lunch with Barbara, an errand in the mail room, a dirty look from Philip Statham, an eternity spent idling on the computer, staring at my screen and waiting for five o’clock. Once it was over I cycled up to London Bridge, forced my bike onto the train and headed for Dulwich — specifically for 17 Temple Drive, where my grandfather had lived since long before I was born.

Pushing my bike up the hill, I turned into his still, suburban street, past the ranks of plane trees and those signs which hysterically insisted that this was an area under the jurisdiction of the neighborhood watch. This was time-travel for me. It was a wormhole into my childhood.

Granddad lived in a small terraced house running to seed — books pressed up against the windows, dying weeds curled around the grate, a handwritten sign at the door which read in emphatic Biro: NO HAWKERS.

I let myself in, kicked aside the hillock of mail which had accumulated on the mat and was immediately overwhelmed by an acute sense of sadness. The same smell was everywhere. Fried sausage — fat, greasy and black — the only thing the old man had ever been able to cook. It was what he had invariably fed me when I went to stay at half-term, what was on the table when I got back from those operations at the hospital as a boy, what he’d made for me on the night my father died.

The smell of the past was in my nostrils and I collapsed as though winded into the big armchair in the lounge. At that moment I would have given anything to be eight years old again, for Granddad to be OK, for my father to be alive, for everything to seem sweeter and more innocent.

Something small and soft brushed past my legs and I looked down to see a plump gray cat gazing up at me with optimistic eyes. Tentatively, I reached out a hand. The animal didn’t shy away so I stroked it again, at which it started up a contented purr.

“You must be hungry,” I said.

There were a couple of tins of cat food in the kitchen cupboard. I opened one and spooned out its contents, which the creature attacked with relish. As soon as it was done, he started to pester me for more.

The cat was not the only thing that seemed unfamiliar. As usual the lounge was filled with books — but they had changed. I remembered dog-eared scripts (Galton and Simpson, The Goon Show, ITMA, The Navy Lark ), yards of comedy stacked halfway to the ceiling, but now it seemed quite different. There were volumes here on the most recondite and esoteric subjects — bulky, valuable-looking hardbacks on divination, telepathy, palmistry, the tarot, Freemasonry, Rasputin, metempsychosis, Madame Blavatsky, astral projection, Nostradamus, Eliphas Levi, the preparation of human sacrifice and the end of the world. Books with terrible, wonderful titles. Strange-smelling books, tingly to the touch.

All gone now, of course.

In the past few years I’d not seen Granddad as often as I ought and had barely visited him at home at all. Only twice really — once when I was looking for a job and we’d spent the afternoon trawling the employment sections of the broadsheets, and once again, a few months ago, when we’d done much the same thing searching for flats and he’d pointed out the place in Tooting Bec. After that, once I’d met Abbey, my visits dwindled to nothing.

Guiltily, I told myself the usual homiletic lies — that I’d been busy at work and settling into a new flat, that it wasn’t the frequency of my visits but their quality — though none of this made me feel any better about my neglect.

But I still wondered why I hadn’t seen any of those books before. I suppose he could have bought them recently but, with their cracked spines, makeshift bookmarks and frequent marginalia scribbled in a hand that I recognized at once as his, they had to look about them of a cherished library.