Sam Thompson - Communion Town

It had been a long time since he had tried confessing to anybody what he wanted. It never went well. They didn’t understand when he told them that the aspiration had been folded inside him long before he could put a name to it, and that he had spent years pretending he was like everyone else, years in which no plan worked out for him and he started getting migraines which left him blind and speechless. They always got the same look on their faces, as if they thought he’d made a joke so tasteless they could not have heard it right. For most people, what he wanted was just about the worst fate they could imagine. As a desire they found it unthinkable; their skin crawled. It wasn’t even real, the Flâneur — it was just some folklore nightmare, some hallucination generated by the city. Why would you dream of seeking it out? That ancient, lonely thing, wandering the city forever in search of someone to whom it could speak its tale. No one knew what that story was, or what happened to those who heard it, but everyone knew that if you listened you were lost. You would never be the same again.

Weeks after the library, he and Florence had spent a bleak afternoon walking around Lizavet Heath while he tried to explain himself. As they skirted the pond, exposed between the damp dish of the heath and a low winter sky, she kept her overcoat wrapped around her small body and her gaze fixed on the rooftops, but she listened as he told her what his aspiration meant. He did his best to put it in terms she would find appealing. He said:

‘We’re always telling ourselves the story of ourselves, every waking moment, as if nothing matters more. Isn’t that a selfish way to live? Shouldn’t we try and get outside that?’

He knew he was doing himself an injustice by phrasing it that way, but it was as close as he could manage. He wanted to tell her: the beauty of this broke my heart at sixteen and it still hasn’t finished breaking. But she turned her face to the grey disc of the water. She couldn’t understand why he would want to do something like that to himself, she told him, and she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Walking away, she said: ‘You sound as though you don’t want to be here at all.’

He thought that would be the end of it with Florence. As she moved past and left him standing by the pond, he was at a loss to understand why he had even tried. And yet when he left the heath she was waiting for him at the gate; she took his hand and asked him to walk her back to the house, and when they reached the three steep stone steps that led up to her front door she said she was going to take him out to dinner. She telephoned to make reservations at a restaurant on the Mile.

Later they walked through the Esplanade as the daylight failed. Simon offered his elbow and Florence folded her arm through it, taller than him in her heels. He was wearing a high-collared overcoat that she had found for him in one of her upstairs rooms, and he felt old-fashioned and graceful strolling among the carnation sellers with pigeons fussing around their feet. In the restaurant, a tiny underground place with three foreign waitresses who tended to them approvingly, they drank a whole bottle of red wine and found themselves talking a good deal. They did not mention his aspiration. She took him home in a taxi, led him up the steps of the house and pinioned him in the bed. Her mouth tasted of tannin and to his surprise they were not disappointed.

Thirst woke him early the next morning, with Florence curled towards him in the sheets sleeping deeply and giving off a powerful warmth. The room was bright because they had not closed the curtains, and he watched as a magpie arrived on the windowsill, snatched some morsel and leaped out of sight. For a while he lay there and tried to gauge the severity of his headache.

Ignoring the grey cat’s keening, he went down to the hall, the timbers of the staircase popping under his feet. His migraine had not subsided. It was a sinuous thing which now opened its poisoned veils all through his head, now shrank into a pebble in his eyeball. No one could have blamed Simon if he’d gone back into the bedroom, drawn the curtains and given up on the day, but he refused to admit defeat. The season was here and his aspiration was within reach.

In the parlour Florence sat curled on the sofa, holding the black-and-white kitten against her chest. Her forearms were goosefleshed and her hair hung as if she had just dried it with a towel. She had been listening to music, it seemed, and a record still turned on the gramophone, the needle popping and crackling along the rim. Simon hated the corroded brass horn: its gross organic shape sprouting in the corner was so obsolete it was beyond ridiculous. It was like living with his grandmother, but along with everything else, Florence had inherited a superb vinyl collection — opera and lieder, piano concertos and string quartets — and she would never be able to give that up and start her own.

As Simon hesitated in the parlour doorway, torn between saying something and pressing on for the front door, the kitten wriggled free, dodged around his feet and sprinted upstairs. The fat ginger cat lifted its head and projected a perfect lack of interest from its copper-green eyes. The record crackled on. Florence took a cushion and drew her knees up around it, retreating deeper into the sofa, and Simon suppressed an impulse to cross the room and kick over the side table. All of this might have been planned specifically to prevent him from leaving. He wanted to ask if it was so hard for her to summon a couple of words or just a smile of assent; but she had never once given him that. He wasn’t sure she would even recognise the idea. He marvelled, not for the first time, at how neatly she could put him in the wrong.

The elderly animal wailed from upstairs. Florence flinched, and Simon knew what she was thinking: the poor thing was suffering and she didn’t know what to do, it couldn’t clean itself any more, could barely eat without help; maybe she should ask the vet again; it was all too much to cope with. He saw these anxieties swell through her mind, then ebb as she returned to the main task of denying him any scrap of approval, of permission, before he left. His eye was a lump of gristle implanted in his head but he paid it no attention.

She could seem like a lonely spinster with the stink of catfood through the place and the shed hair everywhere. There was an atmosphere of shame about her empty house and its sodden, sunken garden where wrens flickered their tails and skipped tauntingly from the sills to the branches and back. If he stepped into the room, he could sit down and slide towards her along the cool, glazed cloth of the sofa, holding out his arms until their ribcages bumped like teacups. She would let him hook his chin over her shoulder to gaze into the warped gloss of the windowpane and the mass of tree-fingers beyond. She always let him, if he tried. A throb went through his back teeth and all at once he was desperate to get outside and walking, not having to think about Florence sitting in her parlour with her cats. It was time to go.

Florence drew a deep breath and dared another look into Simon’s eyes. He opened his palms to her helplessly. The ginger cat made an approving noise.

‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’

It took him a moment to make sense of the words. He opened his mouth, pushed the heel of his hand into his left eye and laughed at how completely she had failed to understand him. Then, shaking his head, he walked out of the house.

He could not understand how she had drawn him into the life of these past years. It was as if she had never doubted that he would join her for walks and shopping trips and cinema outings, that she was qualified to lace her fingers in his and lay her head on his shoulder, that he would let her cook him dinner in the evenings and would stay with her afterwards — and without quite knowing why, he had allowed her to carry on believing all this. He was good at the deception, talking with every sign of enthusiasm about the books and films she liked, making her laugh with his wry remarks when they went people-watching. He even took her into town and helped her buy some new clothes. He waited for her to notice how bored he was — that wherever his heart might be, it was not here — but she saw nothing. To dissolve her contentment would have been so easy that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, even when he was ready to scream at her for the way she had entangled him.