William Boyd - The Blue Afternoon

I remember that afternoon, not long into our travels, sitting on deck in the mild mid-Atlantic sun on a slightly smirched and foggy day, the sky a pale washed-out blue above the smokestacks, when I asked my father what it felt like to pick up a knife and make an incision into living human flesh. He thought seriously for a while before replying.

'It depends on where you cut,' he said. 'Sometimes it's like a knife through clay or modelling wax. Some days it's like cutting into a cold blancmange or… or cold raw chicken.'

He pondered a while longer and then reached inside his coat pocket and drew out a scalpel. He removed the small leather sleeve that protected the blade and offered the slim knife to me.

'Take this. See for yourself.'

I took the scalpel from him, small as a pen but much heavier than I had imagined. He looked down at the remains of our lunch on the table: an edge of cheese with a thick yellow rind, a bowl of fruit, four apples and a green melon, some bread rolls.

'Close your eyes,' he said. 'I'll get something for you, an exact simulacrum.'

I closed my eyes and gripped the scalpel firmly between my thumb and first two fingers. I felt his hand on mine, the gentle pressure of his dry rough fingers, and then he lifted my hand up and I felt him guiding it forward until the poised blade came to rest on a surface, firm, but somehow yielding.

'Make a cut,' he said. 'A small cut. Press down.'

I pressed. Whatever I cut into yielded easily and I moved the blade down an inch or so, or so it seemed, smoothly, with no fuss.

'Keep your eyes closed… What did it feel like?'

I thought for a second or two before replying. I wanted this to be right, to be exact, scientific.

'It felt like… Like cold butter, you know, from an icebox. Or a sirloin, like cutting through a tender sirloin.'

'See?' he said. 'There's nothing mysterious, nothing to be alarmed about.'

I opened my eyes and saw his square face, smiling at me, almost in triumph, as if he had been vindicated in some argument. He was holding out his bare left forearm, the sleeve of his coat and shirt pushed back to the crook of his elbow. On the bulge of muscle, six inches above his wrist, a thin two-inch gash oozed bright blisters of blood.

'There,' he said. 'It's easy. A beautiful incision. Not a waver, with even pressure, and with your eyes closed too.'

The expression on his face changed at this moment, to a form of sadness mingled with pride.

'You know,' he said, 'you would have made a great surgeon.'

I turned off Sunset Boulevard and drove up Micheltoreno to the site. The day was cloudy and an erratic and nervy wind rattled the leaves of the palmettos that the contractor had planted along the roadside. As I pulled into the kerb at number 2265 I saw the old man. It was the first time I had really noticed him but in doing so now I immediately, for some reason, remembered I had seen him loitering around the site before. When he spotted me staring at him he looked first at his hands and then, most oddly, with some awkwardness, at the soles of his shoes, as if he had stepped in dog dirt or on a ball of chewed gum, and then, finding nothing, he turned and walked briskly away.

I thought little of it, he looked scruffy and unsure of himself, perhaps someone searching for work. Perhaps, also, he didn't realise that I was the architect-it happened all the time. I forgot about it as I slipped off my shoes and pulled on a pair of galoshes. The house was built on an incline and last week's rain had left the exposed earth and clay around the house moist and slidy.

This small almost finished house on its steep plot was my future, and whatever future frustrations it held for me, every time I saw it I still experienced a small frisson of… of what? Of love, I suppose, or something akin to that emotion. I had dreamed that house, had designed it, was overseeing the building of it and, nailed to the fencepost, was the ocular proof of this fact – my shingle. K. L. Fischer, architect. The small blue sign was only slightly marred by the blunt erasure of my ex-partner's name-no more Eric Meyersen-a simple stripe of black paint obscuring his identity. I wished I could obliterate as easily the memories of our association: Meyersen and Fischer, five years of lies and duplicity, of cheating and bad faith. The only consolation was that I knew that one day he would get what he deserved.

I stepped across the threshold into the shadowy hall. From upstairs came the noise of hammering and sawing and the enthusiastic tenor of Larry Rugola, the foreman, singing 'If you was the only Girl in the World'. I walked slowly through the downstairs rooms. The house was small, its size dictated precisely by the shape of the site, and of two storeys: the second floor consisting of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a wide porch – which I rather fancifully called the 'wind landing' – and the first of a large living room with dining room, kitchen and patio garden. The roadside facade presented a series of cream stucco curtain walls, flat rectangles of painted cement arranged to reveal gaps-of glass, of space – or to overlap slightly, giving a sense of the house's volumes receding. The strict geometry of this composition was highlighted, and counterposed, by the two pine trees that I had left growing at the road edge. The juxtaposition of sinuous knotted pine trunk and flat sunwashed cement with clear hard shadows worked exceptionally well. The valley facade was pure International Style: sheer walls of glass with hard horizontals and odd vertical stucco panels. The gap formed by the wind landing looked as if an entire segment of the building had been removed, as if by a giant hand, but the integrity of its space remained, formed by the big oak beams of the trellis.

Inside it was all simplicity. Low ceilings, teak cabinets, closets and panelling, walls either of glass looking out to the view or of smooth buff stucco. The floors were a pale buttery oak and where I thought a softer texture would complement the severe planes I had had laid a rough-weave, taupe carpet. All this took on a life in my mind's eye, of course, as I stood amongst the stacks of lumber and blonde curls of woodshavings and discarded tools, walls unpainted, wiring dangling from would-be sockets. We were still a short way from perfection.

'Ah, Mrs Fischer.' Larry clattered down the stairs, a ballpeen hammer spinning in one hand like a hoodlum's sixgun. 'We never got that panelling. Lumber yard said… ' He grinned at me shyly, knowingly. 'They said, ah, they can't take an order that size, without there being a cash deposit.'

'But we have a credit account there, for God's sake.'

'That's what I said. But the guy says it's Meyersen and Fischer, the account. He don't have no K. L. Fischer.'

I swivelled round and walked to the plate glass of the window wall and looked out at the view. Silver Lake was the fancy name given to the area bordering an artificial reservoir cut between two ranges of hills, north of downtown and east of Hollywood. Narrow metalled roads swerved and looped around the contours through the pepper trees and the oaks. Micheltoreno was one of the longest, starting on Sunset and rising and falling, weaving and winding all the way up to the reservoir. At the top views were to be had both east and west, but here the steep sides furnished a panorama of the sprawling city below which, in certain cases, could stretch all the way to the ocean, its fishscale glitter a lucent line of shimmer on the horizon. I concentrated hard on what I could see, noting the burnished glare off the roofs of the traffic moving up and down Sunset; a small man hanging out a big Mexican blanket on a line; a woman in a cobalt two-piece sunbathing on a tarpaper roof. I rested the palps of my fingertips on the warm glass and felt the tiny sonic vibrations of the city shiver through the transparency. The girl on the tarpaper roof smoothed what looked like Oleo margarine on her midriff. When I was calm again I reassured Larry that I would go down to the lumber yard and sort everything out myself.