Catherine O'Flynn - News Where You Are

After getting a glass of water he goes to his office. He pulls down the blind before turning on the desk lamp. For a while he moves about listlessly, adjusting the angles of photos, moving piles of paper from one place to another. All the while, though, he feels the pull of the locked door. He doesn’t put up much of a fight before getting the key from his drawer and opening the cabinet. He knows Michelle disapproves of him watching this stuff. She allows that once might be okay, but anything beyond that is damaging, is essentially unhealthy. He twists his head to better read the labels. His eyes drift past the DVDs back further in time to the shelves of video tapes. He plucks one at random, puts it in the machine and flops back onto the leather sofa with the remote control. He holds a cushion on his lap.

The tape hasn’t been rewound from a previous viewing and it starts with a crackling of distortion and white lines before the image settles down. It’s the old Heart of England Reports studio. Phil looks at the suit he wears on screen and the shape of his haircut and is able to date the broadcast to somewhere around 1985 or ’86. He and Suzy are out from behind their desk and standing in the small circular studio area reserved for all manner of nonsense. Phil is halfway through a sentence as the picture clears.

‘… of course invited John, Peggoty and Roland down to the studio.’

Suzy looks off camera and starts laughing delightedly. ‘And here they all are now!’

From the back of the studio a man slowly walks in a crouched position waving a celery stick at ground level. Behind him emerges a complicated arrangement of wheels and fur. The camera closes in to reveal a guinea pig harnessed to a miniature cart upon which sits an immense white rabbit. The guinea pig pulls the rabbit along following the celery.

Phil laughs. ‘My goodness, I hope you can see this clearly at home. Here he comes now, our very own Ben-Hur of the hutch.’ The camera closes in on the dissipated face of the rabbit.

Suzy turns to John. ‘John, thank you so much for coming down to the studio today and bringing Peggoty and Roland along with you. What an extraordinary sight they make. Now Peggoty’s the guinea pig, is that right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And is she or he quite …’

‘Her’s an her.’

‘Right, good, is she quite comfortable there? Roland looks like he’s eaten more than a few carrots and Peggoty’s really very small.’

‘Her loves it!’

‘Perhaps we should let poor Peggoty have her celery reward now.’ John seems reluctant, but eventually drops the stalk on the studio floor, where the guinea pig seizes upon it. ‘Gosh, she’s enjoying that, isn’t she?’ says Suzy.

‘John, I have to ask,’ says Phil, ‘how on earth did all this start?’

John starts to give his answer, but Phil, sitting in the dark, isn’t listening. He looks instead at his own youthful face on screen. He watches how his eyes are focused on John until Suzy says something causing Phil to turn, smile and then look to camera before making his own comment. He freezes the image and then rewinds it a few seconds to play the reaction shot and his turn again and then again. The look at Suzy, the smile and then the full turn of that smile to camera. Every time he watches it his heart seems to take a gasp. The simple combination of ease, grace and timing in those few seconds captures something he feels he has lost forever. He watches it over and over again as if repeated viewing will bring it back to him, but he knows it is not something he can relearn. The clip shows him in his fifties with all the confidence and sureness of successful middle-age. He freezes the screen and looks at the face he had over twenty years ago. Surgery has provided him with a poor, tautened imitation of that face, lacking the fullness and fleshiness it once had. He reaches up slowly and runs his fingers over his stretched skin, feeling only the skull beneath it.

He drops his hand onto the cushion on his lap and stares at the back of it. His mother always said to look at the hands to know the real person. She would notice the bitten fingernails of glamorous starlets, the small feminine hands of certain leading men; she saw hands, not eyes, as the windows of the soul. She was right, of course. His hearing aid is invisible, his need to piss every half hour easily covered up, but his hands dangle there at the end of his arms for all to see. The skin on the back of them is loose, covered in coarse grey hairs and dotted with liver spots. He wonders why cosmetic surgery is never offered for hands. He stares at them until they seem entirely alien to him. Two lumps of bone and gristle lying on a purple velvet cushion. He imagines them touching Michelle’s smooth skin. He sees them cupping her breasts, stroking her stomach and he closes his eyes to try and block out the image.

When he opens them, the freeze frame has released and the tape is playing again. There is mild chaos on screen as Roland has leaned too far to the side and pulled the cart over with his substantial weight. He lies inertly on the studio floor, allowing John to scoop him up, while Peggoty drags the capsized cart around behind her looking for more celery. The camera closes in on Phil’s face to block out the scene behind him. He’s unflustered, with a wry smile, as he hands over to the weather report.

Phil turns off the TV. He sits for a few moments and stares at the dark screen, but the silhouette of his head is still reflected by the light of the lamp behind him. He reaches back for the switch and turns it off. His reflection disappears. He stays there awake and upright in the dark, blessedly invisible to the world and to himself.

Frank found it harder each time he went to locate his father’s headstone. He visited the cemetery so rarely that the rows of graves expanded in vast leaps between each visit. They proliferated faster and further than Frank ever managed to predict, always leaving him struggling to navigate his way around the featureless landscape. Once his father had been a pioneer, breaking new ground for the dead on the far west of the cemetery, but now he had been overtaken by legions of newer recruits advancing steadily down the gentle slope.

After fifteen minutes of wandering, he found his father’s stone looking nothing like he had remembered it, in a place he wasn’t expecting. It was a dark, flecked, rose colour, not the black he had thought. In front of the imposing stone was a plot-sized rectangle of stone chippings, surrounded by a low chain. Frank had no idea what that was supposed to be; he lacked any understanding of cemetery aesthetics. He thought of it as a kind of front garden to the headstone’s house and it seemed ridiculous to him. Were the loved ones supposed to put deckchairs on the shingle and admire the stone? Perhaps lay a towel down on it and recline there just a few feet above the deceased?

He’d always felt resentment at the idea that this was the place he was supposed to reflect on his father, that this anonymous plot was where he should care. He felt no connection there. In his experience the only thoughts that cemeteries inspired were of the physical remains beneath the ground, not the lives that once animated them. The sole reason he came, albeit occasionally, was that to not come, to allow the grave to fall into total neglect, would suggest an utter lack of respect or care for his father. It would make a false statement. As it was, the plot looked pretty bad compared to its near neighbours. The bottom of the stone was caked in dried grass cuttings and blackened stalks poked from the holes of the mildewed flower container.

Today would have been his father’s eighty-fourth birthday, though the date was as meaningless as the location. He didn’t think of his father any more or less on certain days. It was just habit that he came on this day, a habit started by his mother and continued now by him. What he remembered about the visits with his mother was the silence. They would stand by the grave saying nothing. Frank would wonder what he was supposed to feel. He would look at his mother’s face and find no clues there.