Empty Space

SEVEN England Calling

In London, the weather had turned. Anna Waterman changed trains at Clapham Junction, and, taking the twelve-ten to Epsom, alighted at Carshalton Beeches. From there she walked east then south under a sky that looked like both sunshine and rain, through long suburban perspectives off which the dense ranks of detached and semi-detached suburban homes — each with its hundred-metre garden and mossy old wooden garage — stretched towards Banstead. Not far from HM Prison Downview she wandered into a street she thought she might remember, entering the garden of the first house she came to. It was three storeys, detached, with gable-front dormers, walls done out in whited pebbledash, and clean bay windows on the ground floor. Clean windows were a counter-indication: the house she was looking for, Anna felt certain, would have dirty, unused-looking windows, as if the person who lived there did not place a great premium on seeing out. It would be a house turned in on itself.

Neverthless she took the pocket drive from her bag just in case, and held it in one hand. If she was stopped, she planned to offer it as proof of her good intentions. She could say, ‘I came to return this,’ and it would be the truth. She was used to trespassing in people’s gardens by now. She had never been caught anyway.

A short, weedy drive gave on to the garage, and a front garden where ilex and old roses greened in a fitful light. Standing up at the bay window, squinting between her cupped hands to eliminate reflections, she found herself looking into a room full of partly-unpacked boxes and crusty dustcovers, as if someone had started to move in years ago and never finished. Items of furniture, including mismatched dining chairs and a hospital bed, were shoved up against the walls, off which hung narrow triangular strips of wallpaper stiff with old paint. Unplugged electrical leads curled and trailed about the floor. The upper surfaces of everything, from the treads of the stepladders to the shoulders of the unshaded light bulb hanging from the ceiling rose, were laminated with the gritty dust that collects in unused London houses, baking on year by year like a specialised industrial coating. The effect was of a room abandoned but not yet used. At the rear, a door lay open — wide enough to admit some light, not wide enough to see if a similar dereliction prevailed the other side of it.

Anna was shrugging and moving away when she heard footsteps on concrete, and a boy of about sixteen came round the corner of the house, glancing back over his shoulder as if he had been up to something inside. He was dressed in tight jeans rolled at the ankle, a T-shirt too small for him, lace-up boots covered in drips of black and pink enamel paint. Such disorder had been gelled into his short yellow hair that it resembled an old scrubbing brush. When he saw Anna, he jumped in surprise and said hastily:

‘I don’t know what you think, but I’ve come to read to a woman who lives here. Sometimes I bring her a film, but mostly I read.’

Anna, not knowing how to answer this, said nothing. The boy stared expectantly. He was shorter than Anna, and his face had a raw appearance, as if he lived in a blustery wind no one else could feel. Perhaps in an attempt to convince her, he held up a paperback book, thick, warped, browned at the edges of the pages. ‘She’s an old woman,’ he said. ‘She’s lived here years. Some people like her, some don’t. She does her shopping down in Carshalton. She enjoys a film but it’s always something old-fashioned, that old-fashioned kind of film she likes.’ He shrugged. ‘You want something more modern than that, don’t you. My eyes get tired though, with all this reading. It’s the dust. It makes your face feel tight.’

‘I came to return something,’ Anna offered.

The boy didn’t seem to hear. He wiped his left forearm across his face and said, ‘I could read to you, too, if you like. That’s an idea! I could come to your house and read this book.’ He held the book up again, and Anna, filled with fear and disgust, saw that it was a very old copy of Lost Horizon. Its pages were bunched and rippled where it had been dropped long ago into someone’s bathwater; the back cover was missing. It might easily have come from the room she had been looking into.

‘I don’t think I want that,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I never use the toilet here,’ the boy called after her, ‘even if I need to go. She’s too dirty, the old woman.’ Anna lurched into a flowerbed, then away across the lawn. He thumped along behind her, without, she thought, making any real effort to catch up; then, as soon as they reached the road, jogged away towards the Royal Marsden hospital. ‘It’s a good book,’ she heard him say. ‘I’ve read it more than once.’

She hurried in the opposite direction until, out of breath, she reached Carshalton Ponds. The ponds lay under a leaden sky, two strange, shallow, purposeless, industrial-looking sheets of water separated from the road only by a railing, home to fractious ducks and gulls. Anna walked around them twice. I’m calming down now, she thought, surprised by her own resilience. He was only a boy. He was as guilty as me. To demonstrate calm to herself — to act it out — she bought a tuna wrap and an apple from the supermarket on the High Street. These she ate sitting on a bench by the water, while the young mothers more or less patiently urged their toddlers to and fro in front of her to feed the ducks. Sunshine came and went, but then it began to rain. To Anna, something smelled stale, perhaps the water itself, which had a light, cobwebby film, a skin of dust supported by surface tension; perhaps the birds pottering about in front of her. She hoped it wasn’t the children.

Carshalton is served by two stations; to reduce her chances of meeting the boy again, she decided against Carshalton Beeches and made her way up North Street to the other one. It was closer anyway.

Arriving home an hour or two later, she discovered Marnie in the garden, frowning puzzledly over the contents of the flower-border at the base of the summerhouse.

‘I don’t know where all these have come from. Did you plant them?’

Anna, who had anticipated having her house to herself and felt put out, first claimed to have no idea; then, feeling that she ought to show some kind of authority, though she hadn’t gardened for years, amended: ‘They’re exotics, darling. I think they’re doing rather well. Don’t you?’

They were. Though none of them were tall, they occupied the little border with a kind of dense self-confidence. Slack, poppyish blooms predominated, but there was a form of lunaria too, and something that promised to uncurl into an oversized altar lily. The poppies had a curious brown metallic colour to their petals, which drooped from pale green fleshy stems, curved towards the top like the stems of anemones, as if they weren’t made to support weight. Between them, lower down, as thick as a lawn, you could see the pubic tangle of a single dark feathery growth — similar to yarrow leaves but finer in construction — which seemed to repeat itself at every scale; you soon lost your place in it. There was no point in admitting that the border had fostered no poppies before today. ‘They look as if they’re made of paper,’ Marnie said, separating the flowerheads with her fingers, bending the stems this way and that so that she could peer down between them — as if she had been thinking of buying them but was changing her mind. ‘Do you think they smell of anything? They’re very artificial colours.’ She stood back, stared up at the summerhouse, and seemed about to speak further.

‘Before you start,’ Anna warned her, ‘I’m not having it renovated, pulled down or redeveloped as a granny annexe.’

Marnie looked disappointed but gave the most uncombative of shrugs. They stood there a moment or two more, listening to the liquid early evening notes of a blackbird in the orchard; then made the mutual if unspoken decision to go back into the house. On the way, Marnie said: ‘I thought we’d do omelettes.’

‘I hope you brought wine, Marnie, or you can bugger off.’

While her daughter cooked the omelettes Anna made salad.

‘That box of old things you found?’ Marnie said. ‘I put them back in the summerhouse. They were just some old pin-badges and things from college.’ She laughed. ‘God knows what I was like,’ she said. ‘Early 1980s social science postgrad, fifty years too late. You’d have thought the world would change more in all that time.’ Her career in contemporary economic history prompted her to add, ‘But the money went, I suppose.’ There was, she believed, no money without change; no change without money. She poked about in the back of the fridge where Anna stored, for periods of fourteen days to three weeks, very small portions of leftovers: half a boiled Maris Bard potato, two dessert spoons of frozen peas dried up in a saucer. ‘What’s in this awful bit of paper?’

‘It’s cheese, darling. Please don’t make faces like that. I bought it because of the name. But then I forgot the name. It was something like “100 yards”,’ she decided. ‘It’s cheese. I bought it at the cheese shop in the village.’

After they had eaten, they finished the bottle of wine. Marnie switched on the TV and surfed desultorily, sampling a reality show in which people were invited to queue for items they couldn’t afford to buy; then Ice Melt!, now in its fifteenth season; before fixing with an impatient sigh on the second half of a documentary which traced the slow demise of the great Chinese manufacturing cities of the 2010s. Anna was reminded of the images of Detroit and Pripiat popular in the early days of the century, when decline and reversal — quick or slow, economic or catastrophic — had seemed like temporary conditions, anomalous and even a little exciting. Long bars of light falling obliquely into the vast rubble-filled interiors of factories already stripped of everything from doors to heating ducts; smoky pastel dawns in abandoned flagship housing projects where drug addicts queued patiently for an early fix; vegetation pushing up through orbital roads closed to traffic less than ten years before; faded, uninterpretable graffiti: lulled by these dreamy images of dereliction, she felt herself falling asleep.

‘While I was in the summerhouse,’ Marnie said suddenly, ‘I thought I heard something moving about.’

‘That James!’ Anna complained.

‘I don’t think it was him. I haven’t seen him since I arrived. If this is boring you, Anna, we could always watch one of those old films you like.’

Anna shuddered. ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said.

She thought she would call in the cat, then go to bed. She felt as if today had been too much for her. She couldn’t forget the boy with the book, that was one thing — it was as if she had found him creeping around outside her own house: but there was more —

Huddled on the platform that afternoon, waiting for the service from Carshalton back into central London, she had watched rain spill out of a clear sky while a train from Waterloo pulled in on the other side and the station announcer warned everyone on board, ‘This is Carshalton. This is Carshalton.’ And when the train pulled away again, it had deposited half a dozen commuters, among whom she made out the old man she had encountered some days before in the café at Norbiton station.

He seemed disoriented. Long after the other passengers had gone, he stood trembling on the platform, looking bemusedly about, his underlip hanging loosely. The afternoon light slicked off his bald skull. His raincoat was undone. In one ropy-veined hand he clutched his walking stick; in the other, a damp-looking brown paper bag, which, every so often, he seemed to offer vaguely to the empty air, as if expecting someone to take it from him. Eventually, two men did come and try to help him. He began to argue with them immediately, though he seemed to know them. While they were persuading him to leave the platform, Anna went out through the ticket hall and stood on the pavement outside. She couldn’t have explained why. A single minicab waited in the parking area: after perhaps five minutes, the old man, now minus his paper bag, was ushered out by the railway staff, who manhandled him gently but firmly into the back of it. For a minute or two nothing happened except that he wound his window down and stared out into the rain.

‘Found anything real yet?’ Anna was prompted to call.

He gave her a cold, alert look and wound the window up again. The driver turned round to speak to him, but he didn’t seem to answer. Taking a right into North Street, the cab was balked by traffic; as soon as things started moving, it vanished towards Grove Park. Anna imagined the old man sitting in the back alone, looking from side to side as the vehicle slipped between Carshalton Ponds, listening for the faint action of his own blood. She wondered where he was going. She imagined him being driven back to a house like the one she had seen that afternoon. She imagined him meeting the boy with the bad hair there and though the picture was incongruous found that it had lodged itself as solidly in her world-view as Carshalton itself.

After a few minutes, the voice of the station announcer drifted out on to the forecourt again — ‘This is Carshalton. This is Carshalton.’ — its bland yet rawly self-conscious accents clearly recognisable as those of a fictional 1940s radio-operator, pumped up with the importance and strangeness of a brand new official medium. It had sounded, Anna now tried to explain to Marnie, as if he was auditioning for a part in an as-yet unmade Powell and Pressburger film. But Marnie, who had never been convinced by Powell and Pressburger, didn’t seem interested.

‘Can we turn this off, darling?’ Anna said, piqued. ‘Because I find it rather depressing.’

‘England calling,’ she had expected to hear the announcer say. England calling, into night, bad weather and bad reception. England begging, with that desperate but almost imperceptible interrogative lift of the last two syllables, ‘Is anyone out there?’