Jon McGregor - If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

I stopped, and I looked at him, and I realised what an important distinction it was.

I said, I don’t know, maybe when I was a kid and I got lost at the funfair but, I’m not sure, let me think about it I said, what about you? and I sucked at the thick red soup, I wrapped my hands around the warm paper of the cup.

He said I was in the back of a transit van driving across rough ground, I didn’t know where I was and I thought I’d been kidnapped.

I looked at him, I thought he was joking but he didn’t smile or say not really.

He said it sounds worse than it was, but at the time I was terrified, I thought I was going to die.

I look at him, he’s staring at the van and he says, sorry, it reminded me, that’s all, the van, I just remembered.

I said and so what was it, what happened?

He said I was hitching home once, and I’d been there a long time, and this van stopped and these two men said I could get in the back.

He said there were no windows, just a couple of thin slits in the roof, and these shafts of sunlight were scanning around the inside of the van as we turned corners and I was catching glimpses of things in the van, bricks, ropes, a spade.

He said they kept braking really suddenly, and laughing these really high-pitched laughs.

And we’d been driving for too long he said, and they’d stopped laughing, and then we were driving along some kind of dirt track, bumping up and down, and I didn’t know where we were.

I said oh my God what did you do what happened, he said nothing, nothing happened, they dropped me off at the end of my street in the end, it was just some kind of joke he said.

He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worst thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.

He looked at me and he said can you imagine that?

He said can you imagine anything more lonely?

When I got back to my flat in the evening, the green message light on my answerphone was flashing.

I stood there looking at it, hypnotised, I left the front door open and the lights off and I looked at the small green light, blinking in the dark.

I wondered if my mother had called, if she’d had time to think and wanted to say now that she wasn’t angry or upset, that she was glad I had told her and could she maybe come and visit soon?

I wondered if it was my dad, telling me to be okay, saying that my mother felt these things but found it hard to say them, saying she loves you as much as I do you know.

And I watched the light, on, off, on, off, like a persistent knocking at a closed door, I stood closer but somehow I couldn’t press the button marked listen.

I had a sudden idea that my parents had called some people in Scotland, had somehow tracked down the boy who worked at the place where they’d held the wake, had given him my number and told him to call me.

I imagined his rich voice, made thin and brittle by the wires and the machine, bursting suddenly into my flat, saying something like hello well it’s been a wee while hasn’t it how are you.

I wondered what that sound would do to me, if I would recoil or rise up, if whether inside me, somewhere beneath my heart, something would flutter and jerk in recognition.

I remembered the words I had said to Michael, and I wondered if I could say them again, in response, if I could say I’m sorry but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t anything, it was just a thing.

And then I looked at the small green light and I thought of Michael’s brother, and I imagined his quiet voice hesitating out of the machine.

I imagined Michael having been in touch with him, saying I’ve met her, telling him that I’d said I’d like to meet him one day.

I imagined him by a public telephone, somewhere on the other side of the world, pacing around it, reaching and withdrawing his hand like an uncertain chess player.

I wondered what he would say, I wondered what I would say if he called again and I spoke to him.

I thought maybe I would ask him about the pictures Michael showed me, the things he’d collected and hoarded, I could ask him why he had them all, if they meant anything.

And I thought I could ask him about the broken figure, what it was, where it had come from, how it had got broken, I thought these would be things we could talk about.

And, of course, I wanted to talk to him about that afternoon, that moment, I wanted to share the remembering of it, I thought somehow he wouldn’t be someone who would say actually can we talk about something else now.

I pressed the button, and the machine said you have one messages, first message, and I listened.

There was a pause, the tiny half-kiss sound of someone opening their mouth to speak, the hard jolt of a phone being put down.

I listened to it a few times, listening for clues, guessing, rationalising.

It was a wrong number, a mistake.

Or it was Sarah, wondering whether to come round, she was just passing, it didn’t seem worth leaving a message.

That pause, short and huge, not even the sound of breathing, no background noise, no movement in the room.

And that half-kiss, the lips parting, no sound passing through them, no air passing through them, just the opening of the mouth and the clatter of the closed phone.

It was nothing, it wasn’t anyone, it was just kids, bored, phoning numbers at random, this was how I made it okay, it was just one of those things.

But I had wanted it to be him, this barely known neighbour calling from some other country, saying something like, my brother said, I wondered, I could come back soon, if you like.

It’s not that I want him, I don’t picture myself lying in bed beside him, I wasn’t listening to that sound and hoping to taste it, I just, I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to know, I wanted to say thankyou and sorry.

But it was not him, it was no one, and I went to bed and thought about the people I know and the people I don’t know and all the people in between, and it took me a long time to sleep.

The man with the scarred hands eases out of his doorway, he sits down on the step and leans back against the damp doorframe, he is looking at the dark shine of the tarmac and he is thinking about the shine of his wife’s hair.

He is trying not to, it is difficult.

He remembers a time, in the early months soon after they were married and they had very little money, and his wife allowed him to cut her hair.

He remembers how easily he held the scissors, how delicate and precise his movements could be, then, his thumb and finger as flexible as when a stalking cat bends its body to the ground.

He remembers the soft weight of her hair across the palm of his undamaged hand, the slish of each careful cut he made, the broken handfuls of hair tumbling down her back and onto the floor like branches blown down a hillside.

The way she closed her eyes and quietly trusted him to not spoil her remarkable good looks. The two of them, in their empty kitchen, the noise of the world drifting in through shuttered windows, no conversation between them, his deep concentration, and when he had finished the bare floor around her chair was like a lake at midnight, still and dark and shining.

He does not speak of these things to people, there is nobody to speak them to here, nobody who knows. If he was asked he would say okay mostly, mostly I am okay, it is okay. But there are times when he feels too much, when if he could tell someone he would say I cannot possibly bear it anymore I want to tear the paper from the walls and fall to my knees and hammer upon the floor with my useless ruined fists.