Charles Lambert - With a Zero at its Heart

They sit on their rucksacks in a lay-by in Harris. It is Sunday and all the cars are driving into the town they are trying to leave, for church. They have used trains, coaches, other people’s cars, a ferry and their feet to get here and the only book he still has left to read is Don Juan . They stand up and start to walk across a wilderness that reminds him of that canvas by Holman Hunt, of the scapegoat crowned in red. Last night the wind blew fat from their chip-shop haggis in horizontal ribbons. This morning they have eaten nothing because there can be no cooked breakfast on the day of rest. It is probably about to rain.

The first flight he ever takes is to Milan. It is a charter flight; some of the seats face backwards, like a train, an arrangement he will never see again. The food is dreadful but exciting; the drink is free and plentiful. He has a sick bag, which he folds and slides into his pocket when no one is looking. He stands in the bathroom, too cramped to turn, and flushes the lavatory experimentally to see what will happen, if some bright hole will open up in the plane itself. He stares through the window and wonders if what he sees are the Alps or some artful film projected onto the walls of a hangar as big as the world.

A friend tells him a story about a train journey she made with her boyfriend. It’s a compartment train, with seats that pull out into beds. They’re sharing the compartment with a Greek man, on holiday in Italy. They pull the seats out and settle to sleep, his friend in the middle. She can’t sleep; she can feel the heat of the two men’s bodies each side of her. When her boyfriend starts to snore, the Greek man turns and touches her breast. She lies there, silent, willing him on. He rolls on top of her and they fuck as the train heads south. It was wonderful, she says. I’ll never forget the smell of him, like honey and thyme.

The taxi picks them up in a square so full of cicadas they can barely hear each other speak. The taxi driver thinks they’re both Italian, and they don’t correct him. In heavily-accented but fluent English, he talks to them about women, how Scandinavian women have cleaner private parts than women in Greece. He wants to know what women in Italy are like ‘down there’. They’re vague. He has a Swedish mistress he tells them, she comes each summer. She is very clean ‘down there’. The following day they see him with a woman who is clearly his wife. He spots them, turns away. There are cicadas here too. They are tired of pretending. They’d like to be at home.

They stop for the night on Route 66, in a motel that claims to be the oldest motel in Williams. That morning they’d brunched in T-shirts outside a place near Phoenix. Now they are sitting inside a run-down room with snow banked up outside the door. They have eaten rib-eye steak and baked potatoes in a restaurant with a life-sized plaster cow outside the door. The bathroom has rusty water and the bed dips in the middle. They lie there, breathing slowly in the high thin freezing air, thinking of their lives and what has brought them here. Three rooms down, their dear friend and companion on the trip, a single woman, sits fully dressed all night, facing the door.

He is in a bar with a blind made of faded plastic strips at the door to keep out flies. The blind’s knotted back on itself, so that one or two flies penetrate the semi-darkness to buzz around the scuffed plastic dome protecting the last third of a crumbling sponge cake. There is no other food; it’s far too hot to eat. The light outside the bar is intense. A dog of indeterminate breed is lying halfway beneath one of the three zinc-topped tables squeezed under the shelter of the station eaves, each with its plastic ashtray advertising Crodino. The barman, a middle-aged man in pressed black trousers and a vest, has all the information he will ever need.

They have planned a fortnight in Paris, but his mother falls ill and they come back to England to be with her. They are in Cologne when his father’s health fails, and they find a flight home. They are sitting in the bar of their hotel in Madrid when his partner’s father is taken to hospital. They are holidaying in the valley of the shadow of death. They cancel everything to be with his mother and travel becomes what it once had been, when he was a child and there was nothing beyond the walls of the house, and within it everything, a weight and a lightness, miraculous as the weight of metal in the infinite lightness of the air.

Sometimes he wakes up at night and his arm has gone dead. He lifts it with his working hand and moves it across his body like a Geiger counter. He lets it rest on his stomach and his chest, his legs and face. He lets it touch his lips to see what it feels like to be touched in this way. He strokes his balls, then bends the senseless fingers around his penis, already hard, to learn about the body from outside, to see what it must be like to be held by someone else, who is not dead, as his arm is, but alive to him and to his needs. He wishes his arm would stay dead for ever.

He wakes up in his own bed but the weight of the blankets is too much for him and he can’t move. He calls out for his mother. The next thing he knows he’s in his parents’ bed and the doctor is poking him, tapping his knees and ankles with a metal hammer, asking him what he feels and if it hurts. Nothing, he says, and no. He’s looking at the ceiling, the central light, the lampshade the colour of skin, the fringe around its bottom, the crack that runs from one corner of the room to the other. He is given enormous pills to take. His mother holds his hand. Can you still feel me? she wants to know.

They’re standing in a line in the corridor outside the infirmary. They’re in their underpants, the girls are somewhere else. It’s cold and some of them are shivering. He has goose pimples on his arms. The back of the boy in front of him has a birthmark the shape of a strawberry, with a single hair growing out from the heart of it. He wonders if the boy knows. Some boys have nicer underpants than others. The boys go into the room in groups of three and leave from another door further down the corridor. They don’t look back. He’s been told there’s a nurse inside, who’ll touch his balls and ask him to cough, but he doesn’t believe it.

His uncle and aunt from Australia are staying with them. It’s summer, which means it’s winter where they come from, his uncle tells him a hundred times. He has a loud voice and large rough hands. The boy can tell his mother doesn’t like him, and he doesn’t like him either. His wife is fat and sad, she doesn’t know where to put herself. She’s wearing flowery dresses that are too tight round the waist. One morning, as he’s walking past the breakfast table, his uncle grabs him by the elbow and twists him round to face away from them all. Just look at the size of that arse, he says. He’s more like a girl than a bloody boy.

He is standing in front of his mother’s mirror in his parents’ bedroom. It’s another house, the house with the piano and the cowboy wallpaper. His room doesn’t have a mirror this big, so he’s sneaked in here from the bathroom with only a towel wrapped round him. He’ll say he heard a noise if anyone comes. His heart is beating hard in his chest. He’s thin, bony even, his arms are like stalks. He drops the towel to the floor and stares at this alien being before him. He watches the belly-button moving in and out as he breathes. He tucks his penis and balls between his legs and imagines what it must be like to be a girl.