Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

He boiled the kettle for tea, brewed it in a cup, dropped the tea bag into the swing-bin and opened the fridge for the milk. On the shelves were the empty plastic tubs that had once contained the ingredients of Alice’s diet, souvenirs from the time when she had sought to guard herself against the cancer’s return, to make herself inviolate by consuming only the purest and most wholesome of foods. The search for these foods had been expensive and time consuming, and seemed largely useless now; all that vigilance and fibre, those trips to health-food co-ops for boxes of misshapen vegetables brought out to the car by people who looked in desperate need of a blood sausage. But nothing that might provoke the beast had been allowed into the kitchen, and the effort had perhaps rewarded her with a few extra months of comparative health, though in the end organic broccoli and alfalfa seeds would not save your life, and Alec swung shut the fridge door more firmly than he’d meant to, rattling half-empty bottles of flower remedy and vitamin C, of shark cartilage, emulsified linseed capsules, and a dozen others that had once teasingly suggested themselves as the necessary elixirs.

Sipping his tea, he crossed the living room and went the length of a short corridor of scuffed and torn lino into the ‘playroom’. In the twenty years since he and Larry had used it as a den the room had become a kind of depositary, a ramshackle museum of family history, the boards piled high with junk. He had visited the room on the previous two nights at about the same hour, each time on the pretext of starting to determine what from among this tidal wash of oddments might be kept, though the truth – which standing in the doorway he now admitted to himself – was that the room still retained for him something of its air of refuge. It soothed him, and among those stations of the night that were becoming increasingly apparent to him, it was an interlude of calm, a place where he could breathe the gentle anaesthetic of nostalgia.

Some of the objects in the room had reached their last declension, existing only in a stubborn limbo of silence and inutility. Others were immediately eloquent. A beige and purple oil heater of curious design, sitting where it had been placed perhaps fifteen years before, instantly revived a scene of winter evenings after school, a scent of oil mingling with the smell of sausages or fish-fingers, and the wafting all-pervasive smoke of Alice’s cigarettes. And from the box he had emptied the previous evening he had pulled out, as though lifting something precious and extraordinary from the pharaoh’s tomb, a single tan boxing glove, lone memento of his slogging matches with Larry, fights which, however temperately begun, often ended with a flurry of wild punches, and Alec on the floor bawling with frustration, while Larry stood over him, anger already cooling to remorse as he glanced nervously at the door.

Tonight’s box, which he dragged under the light of the ceiling bulb, was a large supermarket fruit carton with SPAR in green letters along the side. Here, with a rush of whatever chemical such recognitions released into the blood, he discovered the pieces of an elaborate toy that must have been given when he was about seven, and Larry nine or ten: a lunar landscape made of moulded plastic, and a little spidery landing craft of great simplicity and delicacy that had once had a balloon attached to it, and which was directed on to the sheet of moon by small battery-powered fans. It belonged to a period that now seemed bizarrely remote, when space travel was front-page news and children kept scrapbooks with pictures of astronauts. No self-respecting child would waste time on such a toy now. For a start, there was no screen.

Under the moon, though from the same era, was a brightly coloured tin with a picture on the lid of a man in a smoking jacket holding a magic wand. Inside were three red cups, each smaller than an eggcup, and half a dozen pea-sized balls. A booklet illustrated with sketchy and perplexing diagrams explained how, by sleight of hand, the balls could be made to disappear from beneath one cup and reappear beneath another. To do this it was necessary to obtain the knack of holding a ball pressed inconspicuously into the crease of your palm. Alec tried it a few times; it was surprisingly difficult, but it was, he thought, the kind of trick that any good uncle should be able to perform, and he determined to learn it, thoroughly, and entertain Ella with it when she came over.

Other stuff: a school gazette from King Alfred’s with a grainy still of boys on sport’s day – small, ghostly figures, bizarrely intent, strung out across an enormous grey field. The finishing line, which might have given the picture some context, was out of shot, and far from being redolent of a summer’s afternoon, of youthful athleticism, the boys seemed to have been posed there to illustrate some idea of human futility. Farther on, another Xeroxed photograph showed a group of adolescents standing about with stick-on moustaches and frock-coats for a production of the school play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which Alec had played Algy Moncrieff, ‘creditably’, according to the gazette, though all he could remember of it was the angry crimson mottle on his throat brought about by first-night nerves; the urge to bolt.

A box of Cluedo.

A card game called Pit.

A ‘spud’ gun in the style of an automatic, the spring action still functioning.

A Frank Zappa album, warped.

A hardback copy of Struwwelpeter.

Finally, stashed at the very bottom of the box, was an American girlie magazine from June 1977, Miss Valley Forge on the cover in a stars-and-stripes bikini and Davy Crockett hat. Inside – the month’s theme was American revolutionary ardour – other models pouted beside cannon or reclined on couches wearing only tricorn hats, or leered obediently from the froth of a Jacuzzi with a provocatively handled flintlock. All sexual promise had leached away from the images, as though they were time sensitive. The models, with their huge roseate breasts, looked as if they belonged to a super-race of wet nurses. All that was missing were the babies themselves, who should have been glimpsed in the background, crawling blindly over the basques and boas. It was hard to believe that these women, now perhaps winning glamorous grandmother competitions in Amarillo or Grand Rapids, had been among the cast of his adolescent fantasies. Their nudity roused no appetite in him now, but they reminded him – as almost everything did – that he had not had sex for eleven months, and that the last occasion, with Tatania Osgood, a girl who had slept with almost everyone he knew, had been so wretched it could never be spoken of, too bleak even to be converted into one of those humorously self-deprecating narratives of sexual failure that might have seemed, in certain company, endearing and funny. Fragments of the evening, a series of tableaux, adhered in his memory with a kind of malicious clarity. Tatania at the street door of his flat in Streatham holding a supermarket carrier bag containing two bottles of a wine called Tiger Milk. Tatania on the sofa of his little book-strewn sitting room, braless in a tight black dress and exuding a wantonness that was genuinely sad. Himself at 2 a.m. kissing her and trapping his fingers in the gusseting of her tights. The pair of them on the bed, she in tears as he tried to comfort her for a succession of cheating boyfriends. Then the act itself, a pleasureless dry wrestling, Mr Bequa’s TV jabbering away in the next room. And when at last the soft hammer of drink had sent her reeling into sleep, he had lain beside her listening to the thick of her breath, and thinking how the evening’s meanness and failure were part of a much larger failure, and that this was the price of his timidity; that he had earned such a night and would earn others by never having the courage to ask for anything better. He had had the urge then – still associated in his mind with the dawn tinkling of milk floats – to commit some act that would close the road behind him for ever, some extravagance of love, or something violent perhaps, murderous.