Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

He takes a brush and dustpan from a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink, and he kneels in his front room, sweeping. He starts from under the bed, and he moves in a methodical line, backwards across the room. When he has finished there will be very little dirt or dust in the dustpan. He keeps his small flat exceptionally tidy, his clothes laundered and folded, his dishes washed and stacked, his rubbish doublebagged and put outside on the correct day. His friends have commented on it, when they’ve visited, and he is surprised that they consider it unusual. Because you never know do you, he says to them, you don’t know when you will be taken and you would not want people to remember you as a person without good housekeeping habits, would you? He is surprised that not everybody thinks like this, he is surprised how casually people will drop things in the street. He asked the lady at the council office about it once, he said do they not care what people think of them, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.

He puts the dustpan and brush back under the sink, he takes a duster and runs it around the clean white woodwork of the windowframe. The glass is the worst, he said this to the lady once, these piles of broken glass where people have robbed into the cars, can’t you come and at least sweep this away? This is important, he said this to her, please can you understand what broken glass in the street means, to a man of my age, coming from where I come from? He had said this, and she didn’t seem to know what to say.

Outside, in the middle of the street, the twins are still playing cricket. The first boy, the older boy by a few painful minutes, he bowls a high loop of a ball which bounces easily, his brother swinging at it with an old split-handled bat and sending the tennis ball pinging towards number fifteen. It bounces off the boarded-up window and buries itself in the overgrown front garden, and the older brother shouts it doesn’t count it doesn’t count as he kicks around in the brambles looking for it. You’re out if it hits the window he shouts, as his younger brother leaps up and down the street counting up his runs.

The young man outside number eleven watches the boy looking for his ball, his sharpened pencil hovering over his sketchpad, his protractors and rulers laid aside. A girl with a hairband flattening her hair steps out of the door behind him, she touches him lightly on the head and says do you want anything from the shop? He says no no thankyou without looking at her, and she says okay and keeps walking, she turns round and says so how’s it going anyway, the masterpiece? and he turns and sees her looking at him, she is smiling, he looks at his drawing and looks up, he shrugs and he smiles and he says oh is okay. She says I’ll buy you some chocolate, you look like you need some chocolate, and she turns and he watches her walk, he looks again at the boy hunting for his ball, kicking at the tangled overgrowth of number fifteen’s garden.

Inside number fifteen, the boy’s younger sister is standing very still, looking around in the cool dark silence. The house is almost empty, boarded up and abandoned years ago, and she is excited to be in such a private place. It feels as though she has discovered an underground chamber, a secret garden, an Ali Baba cave. She wonders what would happen if she said open sesame. She’s been in here before, once, there’s a tiny gap between the boards on the shattered back window, hidden by a huge tangle of weeds, and she thinks only she knows about it, it’s scary but it’s exciting too. She stands there, waiting for her eyes to get used to the thin splinters of light forcing their way through the cracks and gaps in the boards, and she smells the cold damp air.

Whoever it was who lived here last, whyever it was that they left, they seem to have left quickly, slipping quietly out through the back door perhaps, taking a bag of clothes and a handful of money and leaving everything else behind. There is still furniture in here, just, there are still books on shelves and pictures on walls. There’s a clock, stopped. She looks around her, wondering if anyone is here, ready to run. She can hear her own breathing in her ears, like the noise of a television without any pictures. She moves into another room, her imagination and her excitement racing ahead of her, holding her hands out as though for balance, stepping carefully.

She can see, in the near-darkness, a textbook left open on a bed, the pages speckled with mould. She can see a radio with the front hanging off, spilling wires and fuses across a desk, a screwdriver jabbed into its innards. She moves from room to room, looking, occasionally touching. Everything is soft and damp, crumbling wetly beneath her small fingers. She sees a record player with the needle still resting patiently in the groove of a record, she sees a photograph pinned to the wall, curled up and hidden from view, she sees ashtrays balanced on the arms of skeletised armchairs, snuffled clean of ash and still waiting for new cigarettes to be pressed against them.

She treads delicately up the stairs, holding onto the soft banister, swallowing, feeling guilty and delighted and scared. The rooms upstairs are the same, wetter perhaps, a little lighter, she can see more clearly the way that all of it, the carpets and the walls, the beds and the chairs, the record players and the shoes and the clocks and the ashtrays, the way that all of it is hidden, furred over, concealed by a slow slather of wet growth, mould and moss and crusted lichen creeping over it all like a lascivious tongue, muffling the hard edges, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, clinging from the ceilings, thickening and flowering and spraying out spores to breed in any untouched corners.

She shivers suddenly, she hears a noise, she turns and treads quickly down the damp stairs, through the back room, squeezing through the secret gap and bursting headfirst into the bright clean sunlight of the world, sucking in the sweet air, dazzled.

But if she had stayed, if she had found the courage to poke around in the dank corners, to push open rotting doors, to let her eyes see into the gloom and the shadows, she would have found a lot more.

Mice, making nests from scraps of magazines and bedding, their tiny pink eyes staring back at her. Bats, hanging in wardrobes like tiny folded umbrellas. Pigeons, clustered in the corner of another room, murmuring and scratching and loosening their droppings onto the threadbare carpet. Spiders’ webs woven thicker than net curtains, skirting boards honeycombed by woodworm, blue-green algae blooming in the bathroom sink.

And in the attic, if she had managed to find her way up the steep and crumbling steps, she would have found the one room left open to the light, she would have stood, breathless, picking cobwebs from her fingers and her face, staring at a whole meadow of wildflowers and grasses, poppies and oxeyes and flowering coriander, all flourishing in bird droppings and all lunging pointedly towards the one square foot of available sky.

We went out for breakfast this morning.

Michael said he owed me.

We went to a place with plastic gingham tablecloths, and big red and yellow containers of squirtable ketchup and mustard on the counter.

The door jangled when we went in, and a woman in a dirty white apron said in a minute love and went into the kitchen.

The radio was playing a rap song, the singer going my name is my name is, over and over again, as if he’d forgotten.

I said I don’t think I’ve ever been to a cafe for breakfast before, and he said don’t worry there’s nothing to be scared of it’s all quite simple and I said ha ha.

I said, but maybe, I think my mum and dad once took me to a Little Chef, I’m not sure.