He puts the pen down, he breathes out slowly, and I say I’m sorry I didn’t mean, I just, I mean I don’t know him really I was just saying.
He says look I’m sorry I think I should go I don’t know what I’m doing here.
He stands by the door, and he can’t get out because the key’s not in the lock.
He waits, and I look at the back of his head and I want him to turn around and I want him to tell me what’s wrong.
And suddenly more than anything I don’t want him to leave.
He says have you got the key the door’s locked, and he still doesn’t turn around, he’s talking to the door and his voice sounds strange.
I say don’t go.
He says my brother isn’t shy, but people never give him the chance, people don’t make the effort to get to know him, nobody knows him really.
He says I’m not sure that I even know him, and he’s still facing the door as he says this and I’m still looking at the back of his head.
I say don’t go.
He turns around and he says I don’t want to go I don’t know where to go.
He sits down and there is a quietness between us for a long time.
He says I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just, I feel like he needs protecting sometimes.
He says he was born a few minutes before me but I’ve always felt like his big brother I’m not really sure why.
I say you know every time you talk about him I feel worse for not knowing him properly when we lived there, I feel as though I missed out and it was sort of my fault, as though I should apologise.
I hold one hand in the other and say doesn’t he ever phone, do you think he could phone here and I could speak to him?
He says no he never phones, just like that, no explanation, and I think maybe I’ve upset him again, maybe this is too much hard work and I’m out of my depth here.
He says you know I told you he collected stuff, and took photos, I, he gave me them to look after and I think he wouldn’t mind if I showed you, I mean I think he’d like it, would you like to see them, and already he’s standing up.
I look at his sudden change of mood, I smile and say yes and unlock the door for him and watch him walking out to his car.
I look at my room, at the table with the flowers and the pot of tea, the two cups, I think how nice two cups on a table can look.
Chapter 26
A shadow passes across the street, a faint imprint rolling briefly across the pavement and the tarmac, noticed only by the young daughter of the man with the aching hands, she is looking for things like this and she sees it passing as fast as a shiver and she looks up and sees a pair of wings high above her, perfectly white in the huge sky, a thin ribbon of vapour trailing out behind it.
As she looks up, a layer of cloud comes sliding into view, heavy and grey like unwashed net curtains and she watches the wings disappear, she watches the sky darken. She turns around and sees her father standing up, he is picking up his chair, hooking his arm through the seat back and dangling it from his elbow like a bag of shopping. She sees him stepping through their front door and looking over his shoulder at the sky. A cold wind pushes suddenly down the street, her hair lifts away from her neck, the milk crates in the street topple over and the bowler shouts you’re out even though he’s still holding the ball, the batsman stacking them back up and yelling it doesn’t count it doesn’t count you never even bowled I’m still in.
She looks up and sees more clouds scuffing in from the south, she sees the clouds swelling and darkening, the whole sky looking like the basin of water after her father has washed his hands. She is excited and she looks around her and she jumps from the pavement into the street. She sees the older girl, the one who told her about angels, she sees her at the end of the street, she comes running round the corner and straight along the pavement, her arm lifted high and the yellow ribbon streaming out behind her like a pennant from a car-radio aerial, she runs straight past and doesn’t say a word, her shoes slapping on the pavement like slow applause.
The boy with the paper and pencil, sitting outside his house at number eleven, making a drawing of the street, he hasn’t finished but he looks up at the sky and he gathers up his things and backs away into his house.
The man with the ladder, repositioning it against the side of his house at number twenty-five, he feels the drop in temperature and he glances above him and he hurries to put the lids back on his pots of paint, he picks them up and puts them in his hallway, he wraps the brushes in damp rags, he undoes his overalls and he steps back into his house.
The man cleaning his car, on the other side of the road, he curses to himself and he tries to rub the metalwork dry in time, he spreads a large cloth between his two hands and runs it over the roof and the bonnet and the side panels, he looks up and he empties his bucket of soapy water into the drain, he feels a splash of water on the back of his neck.
And there’s a smell in the air, swelling and rolling, a smell like metal scraped clean of rust, a hard cleanness, the air tight with it, sprung, an electric tingle winding from the ground to the sky, a smell that unfurls in the back of the mouth, dense, clammy, a smell without a name but easy to recognise and everyone in the street knows it, besides the children, everyone is smelling the air and looking upwards, saying or thinking it smells like rain.
The boy on the front step of number eighteen, running his fingers along the red rims of his eyes, he sees a fat drop of water land on the ground in front of him, it spreads flat, it sucks up dust and it stains the pale concrete. He sees people drifting away into their houses, he sees the quietness that has come across the street, even the twins stopping their argument and looking upwards, expectantly.
He looks at the sheer blackness of the air, and he holds his breath.
He wonders how so much water can resist the pull of so much gravity for the time it takes such pregnant clouds to form, he wonders about the moment the rain begins, the turn from forming to falling, that slight silent pause in the physics of the sky as the critical mass is reached, the hesitation before the first swollen drop hurtles fatly and effortlessly to the ground. He thinks about this, and the rain begins to fall.
One, two, three drops at a time, a slow streak down a bedroom window, a wet thud onto a newspaper page, a hiss onto barbecue coals.
And after these first kissed hints there is the full embrace, the wetness of the sky pouring suddenly down upon this street, these houses, this city, falling with a strange quietness at first, gently gathering momentum until suddenly there is a noise like gravel slung at windows and the rain is falling hard, heavy, bouncing off the tarmac with such force that at ground level it’s hard to tell if the rain is coming up or down, pounding the pavement and skidding across the hot dry surfaces of the street, gushing down rooftops into gutters and cracked drains, washing against windows and worn-out windowframes, hammering insistently against anything left open to the sky.
And the people who are still outside are taken by surprise, they gather up their wet newspapers and duck into their doorways, laughing at the sudden change, shaking their heads like bathtime dogs, they turn to each other and say where did that come from, they watch the children getting wet in the middle of it all, the children drenched already, soaked through with excitement, waving their tongues in the air to catch it, the boy with the tricycle, the young girl from number sixteen, the twins, the older twin waving the bat in the air, they are all dancing and shrieking at each other as if these were the first rains for months.
And the twins’ sister reappears from further down the street, she is running, her ribbon trailing behind her, a nunlike expressionlessness lighting up her face, she stops beside the young daughter of the man with the burnt hands, she whispers something and they run together, side by side with the ribbon cutting into the rain, like a naked washing line, like a finishing tape, they run to the end of the street and they turn and they run back again, the older girl lost in the hidden delight of her secre
ts, the younger girl puzzled but exhilarated, she giggles and she tries to skip while they run.
Her father calls to her from his doorway, he calls her name, he says come inside now you are getting wet, and she drops her end of the ribbon and runs to him, the older girl running on, oblivious.
And the rain suddenly doubles, impossibly, a blind blanket of water falling right across the city and now even the twins retreat to shelter and now only the girl remains, the only daughter of the couple lost in each other in their room, she is using her ribbon like a butterfly net, she is trying to catch a baby, a sister, she asked her father where she came from once and he said my darling we plucked you out of thin air and so now she is trying to do the same, she stands in the road and she leans her body up into the rain, closing her eyes against the force of it until a car appears from round the corner, slooshing through the surface water like a snowplough and the girl looks at the car and the music in her head is silenced and the car squawks its horn, and the wheels lock, and there is a slight slide as the car rides over the surface of the water. She looks at the car, and the car knocks into the milk-crate wicket, and the milk crates topple, and she turns and runs into her house, leaving the ribbon lying in the road.
The car sits in the road, its windscreen wipers blipping angrily from side to side, its horn inaudible beneath the thunder of the rain.
And the rain falls hard and heavy, changing the colour and texture of the street, polishing every surface to a dark shine, soaking the dust from the air and drowning all other sound so that people can only watch.
The rain falls against the boy with the sore eyes, leaning out of his upstairs window taking polaroid photographs of it, shot after shot without moving the angle or changing the focus, plucking each newborn image from the camera and laying it wetly aside, the same frame changed each time, the rain falling through his viewfinder like missed opportunities and he watches and presses the shutter release and he doesn’t blink and
the rain falls and seeps through the cracks in the felt roof of the attic at number twenty-two, the girl with the short hair and the glasses repositioning an empty icecream tub for the last time, watching the pond-ripples slipping back and forth as each invading drop falls from the stained ceiling, she is packing her possessions into bags and boxes, she is making herself ready to go but she is not sure where she is going or what will happen now, she takes CDs down from shelves and retrieves lost books and clothes from under the bed, she doesn’t know where to put it all and she moves with the slowness of a child under orders to tidy her room and
the rain falls sauna-like into the barbecue outside number twenty-three, smoke piles from out of the hissing coals, the boy with the big hair and the grazes rushes suddenly out of the house and hefts a rainbow-striped golf umbrella over it, holding it out at an angle and swapping his scalding hands and
the rain falls against the bedroom window of number nineteen, waking the mother of the twins, she is sleeping with her face pressed against her husband’s face, their limbs woven together like the branches of two yew trees, they are sleeping and she is woken by the water pummelling against the window. She doesn’t move, she watches the ripples running down the glass through a gap in the curtains, she feels the satisfyingness of things like a physical sensation through her body, as if her breathing was the slow bowing of a cello, a hum and a met yearn playing through her and
the rain falls, catching the trailing edges of net curtains which flow out of open windows like fishing nets lowered over the backs of boats, nets hung neatly between the outside and the in, keeping floundering secrets firmly hidden and
the rain falls, easing, the noise dropping away, light beginning to leak back into the street through thin places in the clouds and the architecture student from number eleven presses his face to the glass and looks at the way the light falls through the water, he thinks about a place where he worked in the spring, an office where they had a stack of empty watercooler bottles against the window, and how he would sit and watch the sun mazing its way through the layers of refraction, the beauty of it, he called it spontaneous maths and he wanted to build architecture like it, he looks at the row of houses opposite and he pictures them built entirely of plastic and glass, he imagines how people’s lives might change if their dwellings shook with endless reflections of light, he does not know if it’s possible but he thinks it’s a nice idea and
the rain falters and she still doesn’t move, the mother of the twins, she is deeply happy and she breathes a kiss onto her husband’s cheek, she feels a slow wave of it passing through her body like a memory, she closes her mouth and her eyes and holds the soft sound inside herself, letting it circle around the back of her mouth, drinking it quietly back down and
the rain slows further, and the man in the car finally opens his door and moves the milk crates, he flings them to the side and he glares at the twins hiding in their hallway, he drives away and the street is empty, washed and filled by this new and unexpected change and
the rain falls, gently now, past the small window of the attic flat of number twenty-one, the man with the tattoo is in bed again, smoking, and the woman with the henna-red hair is scooping up fallen petals from around a vase of roses, roses she has already kept for longer than they were intended to be kept, she takes the fallen petals and stuffs them into an empty jamjar and the man says what you doing that for? and she puts the jar on the windowsill, she turns to him, shadowed in the rain-darkened room, she says it catches the light that way, the light kind of comes through them and they look alive she says, glowing she says and
as the rain fades away there is stillness and quiet, light flooding rapidly into the street and through windows and open doors, the last few drops falling conspicuously onto an already steaming pavement, there are streams and dribbles and drips from gutters and pipes in various states of disrepair, there is a quietness like a slow exhalation of tension that lasts only a moment before the children move back into the road, leaping into puddles, their wet clothes and hair drying rapidly under the returning heat of the sun and the boys set their wicket back up and allow play to resume, the storm passing across the rest of the city and out into the hills beyond.
Chapter 27
When he comes back into the room his face seems lighter, there’s an excitement about him, the box looks awkward and heavy but he’s holding it as though it were weightless.
He puts it down on the table and immediately starts taking things out, you’ll like this he says, you’ll like this.
I say won’t he mind, isn’t it private or something, but already I’m standing close to him and looking down into the box.
No no he says, no, he’ll be pleased, he always likes to show people this stuff, and he picks up a wooden case with a glass front and says look I told you about this didn’t I?
I look at the row of syringes mounted in the case, the plungers at different heights, one of the needles snapped in half, all of the chambers smeared with a translucent brown coating, like tar from a pipecleaner wiped onto glass, and on the back he’s written a date and some numbers that look like a map reference.
I start to ask him about it, but he’s already passing me other things, a handwritten letter uncrumpled and pressed in a clipframe like a leaf, a washing-up glove, the bottom half of a broken wine bottle, a bunch of keys.
I look at these things, I say so what’s it all for and he says he calls it urban archiving, he told me it was part of his archaeology, he says hold on that broken-glass necklace is in here somewhere.
I go to make some more tea, I stand in the kitchen doorway while the kettle boils, looking at him rummaging through the box, listening to his voice, and I say you’re really proud of your brother aren’t you, I can tell.
He stops, and he turns and looks at me, and he quietly says of course I am.
I pour another pot of tea, and I take it through to him, I put it down on the table next to the case of syringes and the pressed letter, next to the wine bottle and the keys, next to
postcards covered in handwritten notes.
He’s sitting down now, he’s reading the notes, his excitement seems to have passed.
He picks more things out of the box, a cigarette packet, an unopened can of lager, a white plastic purse with a gold chain looped through its clasps, he holds each object and turns it over in the light, concentrating.
He says do you think there’s too much of it?
I say I don’t know, I mean some of it, some of it seems a bit, you know, less important.
He says he was talking about that a lot, before he went away, about there being too much, that’s what all these things are about, his projects, he was trying to absorb some of it.
I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too many places, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don’t know where to begin but I want to try.
I look up and see that he is reading these words from one of the cards, his voice is slightly different and I wonder if it’s his reading voice or if he’s trying to sound like his brother.
He picks up another postcard and reads, there are so many people in the world he says, and I want to know them all but I don’t even know my next-door neighbour’s name, and when he puts the postcard down I see it’s actually a photograph, a picture of the old couple next door, taken from an upstairs window, walking down the street.
I pick up the postcards, they’re all photographs, stuck onto card, and each one of them is of people living in that street.
There’s one of the man with the scarred hands from a few doors further down, he’s lifting his daughter up, she is sitting on the chair of his crossed forearms.
On the back of the card, he’s written I think his name is Avtar, I wonder how long ago the fire was, his daughter is quite nervous, I don’t know her name.
There’s another one, of the twins from the house opposite, a picture of them in someone’s backyard, pulling bin-bags out of bins, and on the back it says I don’t know their names, they’re always shouting, their sister is quiet and always seems to be hiding something behind her back.