Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

In his room, upstairs at number eighteen, the young man blinks painfully, turning away from the window and holding the palms of his hands over his eyes for a moment. He takes the clay figure out of the box again, unwraps it, looks at it, runs his fingers over its smooth lines and rough texture.

The small figure is the reason he started working on the dissertation subject he did, the reason he argued with his tutors about the boundaries between archaeology and anthropology, and it’s the reason he wants to travel to Japan as soon as he has finished his course, to see the real things, to see what he has imagined so many times.

The figure comes from a place somewhere south of Tokyo, a place where mothers go when they have lost young children. Very young, as in not even or only just born; the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted. The mothers go to this place, a Buddhist temple on a wooded hillside, and they take tiny pieces of clothing for their ghost children, and gifts, and prayers. He has seen photographs of the temple grounds, and he has spoken to a lecturer who has been there, the lecturer who gave him this replica figure, and it’s a place and a rite that has stuck in his mind. He imagines them, the mothers, walking up the steps, between soaring bamboo stems and carefully ordered miniature waterfalls, beside pools with carp drifting slowly among the lilies. He imagines them walking slowly, leaving gentle impressions in the gravelled pathways, moving to the place set aside for them, pressing their flat hands together and holding them against their faces, their limbs a triangle pointing skywards, the small space between their fingers filled with a hot breathlessness.

He opens the red folder again and pulls out a postcard of the place, holds it behind the figure, looks at it for the hundredth time. He looks at the figures in the picture, row after row after row, dozens, hundreds of them, identical little six-inch Buddhas, the smooth domes of their heads like pebbles on a beach, numerous, indistinguishable. Some of the figures, towards the back of the picture, look a little weathered, but mostly they are new and clean. None of them were more than a year old when the picture was taken, and when he goes to see for himself there will be a new set of figures not more than a year old.

He turns over the postcard, to remind himself of what he always thinks when he looks at this picture, he reads the words he wrote when he first saw it, the words in thick black ink, they are all named it says, each one of them has a name.

He turns it back again, looks closer. Some of the figures are dressed up, in traditional woollen caps and shawls, or in baseball jerseys, or with tiny coloured parasols to protect them from the sun. There is one with an unused Bugs Bunny bib strung enormously around its neck. At their feet are offerings, comforts. Packets of sweets. Money. A yo-yo.

He puts the postcard back in the folder, he takes down a photograph of Graceland, he takes down scraps of paper with marker-pen diagrams and spidercharts, he tries to rub more blu-tac from the wall.

In his kitchen, the old man measures out the tea-leaves, drops them into the pot, fills it with boiling water. He sets out a tray, two cups, two saucers, a small jug of milk, a small pot of sugar, two teaspoons. He breathes heavily as his hands struggle up to the high cupboards, fluttering like the wings of a caged bird.

His wife doesn’t know, as he has known for weeks now, that any treatment they will be able to offer him will be, as the doctor had said, with a steady gaze and a hand to his arm, only in the form of palliative care. You do understand what that means don’t you she’d said, not even blinking, you do understand? And he’d looked straight back at her, holding her professional eye contact, and said yes, thankyou doctor, I do understand, yes. And he’d coughed, hard, repeatedly, spraying blooded phlegm into his handkerchief as if to prove how much he understood.

Yes, thankyou doctor, I understand.

Things are not exactly one hundred percent the way we would like them to be.

He slips a tea-cosy over the pot and stands by the window a moment.

He sees a young man sitting on the front garden wall of number seven, one of the foreign students it looks like, holding a pad of large paper, staring at the houses opposite.

He sees a dog trotting along the middle of the road, a bald patch across one shoulder, an unevenness in its stride.

He sees a construction crane rising up above the houses away to the right, a few streets away, stretching its neck over the rooftops like an anglepoise lamp.

He picks up the tray and carries it through to his wife.

And so today I’m back on the telephone.

I’m listening to my mother talking, and I’m waiting for the right moment to interrupt.

I know that I have to tell her, I know that I will be able to tell her if I use the right words at the right moment.

I know what the right words are, I’ve been sitting here for hours, choosing and unchoosing.

And I know that I need help now, that in spite of everything my mother is the person to ask.

I’m scared, I have always been scared at times like this, waiting to say something, waiting to be told off.

Falling off the garden wall, and she says what the hell were you doing up there anyhow while she cleans the graze and presses a bandage around it.

Dropping my dinner on the floor, and she shouts at me and sends me to bed, and when she brings me a sandwich later I throw it out of the window.

My dad, saying nothing at these times, averting his eyes, folding his hands.

I remember my dad taking me to school, when I was very young, when my mother was ill.

The feel of his huge hand wrapped around mine, rough and hard and warm.

The length of his strides, and having to run to keep up.

The very cold days when he’d wrap his scarf around my face until it almost covered my eyes, and when I breathed in I could smell him in my mouth, damp cigarettes and bootwax and the same smell as his hair when he said goodnight.

I remember that once he had to take me early so that he could get to the shops before work, and I went and hid in the corner of the playground, behind the bins, with the scarf wrapped completely around my head like a mask.

I remember how safe I felt, wrapped up like that, blinded.

He didn’t say anything during those walks to school, but I used to look forward to them, I used to be secretly and ashamedly pleased if my mother didn’t appear for breakfast, impatient to leave the house.

I wonder if he’ll say anything now.

I wonder if he’ll turn away from the television, come to the phone, say something.

I listen to her talking, and I remember those times she was ill, those strange blotches on her otherwise busy life.

I remember the way it would go almost unmentioned, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

As though there was nothing to be concerned about.

I remember having to creep into her room to say goodnight, her puffed red face turning to me from amongst the pillows and the blankets, the curtains closed and a desklamp pointing up at her from the bedside table like a stagelight.

I remember trying to hold my breath while she asked me how my day had been, if I had been good, if I had done the washing up.

And her voice sounding strange, thick and slow, as though she was talking from behind a closed door, through a thick wall.

I’m not sure if I held my breath because of the smell or because I was scared of catching her germs, but I always came out of that room dizzy, sucking down lungfuls of air.

And it never worried me, because she always seemed to be better the next day, saying oh it must have just been a bug, one of those things, you know, and she’d be back to normal.