Sam Thompson - Communion Town

But we held whiskey to his lips and by degrees his breathing steadied. It took us a long time to calm him down and get him to focus on his surroundings instead of some awful imaginary prospect, but after a while he was able to clasp the tumbler in his hands. One of his friends said his name and, tongue-tied, with downcast eyes, he nodded. Eventually he raised his head. He drew a long, uneven breath, like a man recovering from a fit of sobbing, and we gathered around him, close, as if we wanted to keep inside the circumference of the light, weak as it was.

And then someone asked: ‘What happened to you?’

Slowly at first, in broken words and phrases, he began to tell.

Simon knelt with his body locked from groin to throat until the muscles opened and he succeeded in pouring out a caustic mixture of liquid and gas. When he could breathe again he flushed away the waste, rinsed his mouth and stood in front of the mirror, trying to decide whether the pain had lessened. The left side of his head throbbed from the eye-socket to the roots of the teeth. His migraines had been getting worse, forcing him to spend whole days lying half-awake in the darkened bedroom. In his dream Florence had murdered him but everyone had agreed that he was to blame. He scooped more water into his mouth and spat. From the silence downstairs he could tell that she was sitting in the parlour, listening out, waiting for him to appear. He studied his thin arms and the hollow of his chest. Isolated raindrops broke on the bathroom window and wet light came and went with the sway of the branches outside. It was the Flâneur’s season now, without a doubt: tonight, no one with a choice would be found in the streets after dark. But Simon was not going to waver. The reflection granted a nod of approval. The migraine didn’t matter; nor did Florence. By tomorrow none of these things would remain to trouble him. He believed that all of this would be changed.

He held his breath as he left the bathroom, but in the corridor a floorboard squealed underfoot. It made no difference. Florence would not let him escape the house unremarked. She had been in good form all summer, going out in the afternoons to visit galleries or see films, then coming home to fuss over her cats, but now that the season had turned she was showing indications of a decline. Her transitional moods were difficult for him: she stopped going out — neglecting even the short daily walks on the heath which she claimed were so crucial — and took to watching his every move around the house as if she knew he was plotting a betrayal.

Along the corridor he passed junk-crammed rooms with their curtains sagging half open. The sheets draped over the furniture made it seem that the upper floors were being colonised by giant mushrooms, but Florence continually put off sorting things out. She worried that she couldn’t afford to keep the house, or alternatively to get rid of it, but she could never seem to gather the energy to discover which was the case. Ectarine Walk was one of those placid avenues which recede into the heart of Lizavet, lined with iron railings and elm trees reaching higher than the rooftops. Well-fed tabbies watched from behind bay windows. ‘Salubrious’ was how she liked to describe the street, in a tone of dry scorn that made Simon feel she had learned the word from some disagreeable ancestor. The townhouses seemed so solid and flush, so complacent in their presence, that he wanted to insult them with some glaring unreality, and he often fantasised that by walking on past Florence’s house and turning a corner or two, you might discover the knotted navel of the world, with paving stone and tree trunk and space itself twisting impossibly and plunging out of sight. Such a thing, he felt, must be required as compensation.

In the bedroom he put on the first T-shirt he found in the bottom of the wardrobe and took his jacket from the bedpost. The vigilant silence continued downstairs. She could hear him getting ready but she sat tight-lipped in the parlour. The old grey cat yowled pitifully at him as he crossed to the head of the stairs. It did this all the time now, as though it needed to communicate some appalling realisation. The vet had said more than once that it was feeling its age and could only decline, but Florence, refusing to understand what she was told, really seemed to believe that with the right pills it would stop making that distressing noise and be again the contented kitten she had grown up with. It limped after Simon for a couple of steps before drawing back to its place by the bannisters.

He had first seen Florence at the city library, the one and only time he had been there. He should have known better, even then, but he had gone in the hope that the place might supply the kind of information he needed. The security guard at the turnstile eyed him and made him leave his bag in a locker by the front desk, and after that he didn’t dare approach the librarians behind their beechwood counters: he could picture their faces as he tried to explain what he wanted to know. Instead, he wandered the open shelves without finding anything, and toiled up and down the gloomy cylinder of the main stairwell while rain surged across the circular skylight far above. Later he sat at one of the catalogue terminals and tapped the keyboard, but a panel flashed up on the screen requiring him to identify himself. As he pushed the chair back its rubber heels screeched, causing students to look up from their books and old men to lower their newspapers.

He was trying angrily to get the locker open so that he could go when a woman came in, fumbling with a flower-patterned umbrella, shedding droplets and pushing hair out of her face. Her pastel raincoat was so outmoded that she looked at first glance like an elderly lady, but he saw that she was around his own age. He watched with interest as she tried to hold her umbrella under one arm and search in her bag, while at the same time unsticking the soaked hem of her cotton dress from her legs. Then, as she crossed the entrance hall, the string of her necklace somehow snapped and tiny beads poured across the flagstones — it was the same sound he had heard that morning when rain began to fall into the park. She grabbed at the middle of her chest and gasped as though she had been drenched.

There was an opportunity here, of course, if he were to step forward and help her collect the beads, joking, making light of the accident; but he found he preferred the scene as it was. He stayed quite still as she knelt down, her hair dropping into her face and the umbrella falling away from her with a clatter.

After following her up the stairs at a safe distance he loitered among the shelves of the art history section, watching her take a book down and leaf through the stiff pages. At the end of the aisle a notice listed the contents of the room. He picked out a name he thought sounded familiar and browsed along the shelf until he was beside her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This artist, Albert Gaunt? Do you know, where would I …?’

Only a little alarmed, she showed him where to find the books. He thanked her in a warm undertone and touched her elbow for an instant. She looked up and down the aisle, then told him that Gaunt was one of her favourites. He said, his too. Someone further along the shelves exhaled disapprovingly. Simon caught her eye and made a mischievous face.

At that first meeting it had taken him a few minutes to grow restless in her company. He had watched her trying to conceal how nervous he made her. It had been obvious that he would always be able to predict what she was going to say and do, and yet when she had mentioned an exhibition on Gaunt’s printmaking at one of the galleries in town he had suggested that they go together. He could not have explained why, but as soon as he had seen Florence he had known that he was going to speak to her about his aspiration.