Light

4 Operations of the Heart

“But you never phone!” Anna Kearney said.

“I’m phoning now,” he explained, as if to a child.

“You never come and see me.”

Anna Kearney lived in Grove Park, in a tangle of streets between the railway and the river. A thin woman who fell easily into anorexia, she had a constantly puzzled expression; kept his surname because she preferred it to her own. Her flat, originally council housing, was dark and cluttered. It smelled of handmade soap, Earl Grey tea, stale milk. Early on in her tenancy she had painted fish on the bathroom walls, papered the back of every door with letters from her friends, with Polaroid photographs and memos to herself. It was an old habit, but many of the memos were new.

If you don’t want to do something you don’t have to, Kearney read. Do only the things you can. Leave the rest.

“You look well,” he told her.

“You mean I look fat. I always know I’m too fat when people say that.”

He shrugged.

“Well, it’s nice to see you anyway,” he said.

“I’m having a bath. I was running it when you called.”

She kept some things for him in a room at the back of the flat: a bed, a chair, a small green-painted chest of drawers on top of which lay two or three dyed feathers, part of a triangular scented candle, and a handful of pebbles which still smelled faintly of the sea, arranged carefully in front of a framed photograph of himself at seven years old.

Though it was his own, the life these objects represented seemed unreadable and impassive. After staring at them for a moment, he rubbed his hands across his face and lit the candle. He shook the Shrander’s dice out of their little leather bag, threw them repeatedly. Larger than you would expect, made from some polished brownish substance which he suspected was human bone, they skittered and rolled between the other objects, throwing up patterns he could make nothing of. Before he stole the dice, he had cast Tarot cards for the same purpose: there were two or three decks in the chest of drawers somewhere, grubby from use but still in their original cartons.

“Do you want something to eat?” Anna called from the bathroom. There was a sound of her moving in the water. “I could make you something if you like.”

Kearney sighed.

“That would be nice,” he said.

He threw the dice again, then replaced them and looked round the room. It was small, with bare untreated floorboards and a window which looked out on the thick black foul-pipes of other flats. On the off-white wall above the chest of drawers, Kearney had years ago drawn two or three diagrams in coloured chalk. He couldn’t make anything of them, either.

After they had eaten, she lit candles and persuaded him to go to bed with her. “I’m really tired,” she said. “Really exhausted.” She sighed and clung to him. Her skin was still damp and flushed from the bath. Kearney ran his fingers down between her buttocks. She breathed in sharply, then rolled away onto her stomach and half-knelt, raising herself so that he could reach her better. Her sex felt like very soft suede. He rubbed it until her entire body went rigid and she came, gasping, making a kind of tiny coughing groan. To his surprise this gave him an erection. He waited for it to subside, which took a few minutes, then said:

“I probably have to go away.”

She stared at him. “But what about me?”

“Anna, I left you long ago,” he reminded her.

“But you’re still here. You’re happy to come and fuck me; you come for this.”

“It’s you who wants this.”

She clutched his hand. “But I see that thing,” she said. “I see it every day now.”

“When do you see it? It doesn’t want you anyway. It never did.”

“I’m so exhausted today. I really don’t know what’s the matter with me.”

“If you ate more—”

She turned her back on him abruptly.

“I don’t know why you come here,” she whispered. Then, vehemently: “I have seen it. I’ve seen it in that room. It stands in there, staring out of the window.”

“Christ,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“Why should I tell you anything?”

She fell asleep soon after that. Kearney moved away from her and lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the traffic cross Chiswick Bridge. It was a long time before he could sleep. When he did, he experienced, in the form of a dream, a memory of his childhood.

It was very clear. He was three years old, perhaps less, and he was collecting pebbles on a beach. All the visual values of the beach were pushed, as in some advertising image, so that things seemed a little too sharp, a little too bright, a little too distinct. Sunlight glittered on a receding tide. The sand curved gently away, the colour of linen blinds. Gulls stood in a line on the groyne nearby. Michael Kearney sat among the pebbles. Still wet, and sorted by the undertow into drifts and bands of different sizes, they lay around him like jewels, dried fruit, nubs of bone. He ran them through his fingers, choosing, discarding, choosing and discarding. He saw cream, white, grey; he saw tiger colours. He saw ruby red. He wanted them all! He glanced up to make sure his mother was paying attention, and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things—if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.

In that moment he was lost. Out of the sand, the sky, the pebbles—out of what he would later think of as the willed fractality of things—emerged the Shrander. He had no name for it then. It had no shape for him. But it was in his dreams thereafter, as a hollow, an absence, a shadow on a door. He woke from this latest dream, forty years later, and it was a pale wet morning with fog in the trees on the other side of the road. Anna Kearney clung to him, saying his name.

“Was I awful last night? I feel much better now.”

He fucked her again, and then left. At the door of the flat she said: “People think it’s a failure to live alone, but it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.” Pinned to the back of the door was another note: Someone loves you. All his life Kearney had preferred women to men. It was a visceral or genetic choice, made early. Women calmed him as much as he excited them. As a result, perhaps, his dealings with men had quickly become awkward, unproductive, chafing.

What had the dice advised? He was no more certain than he had ever been. He decided he would try to find Valentine Sprake. Sprake, who had helped him on and off over the years, lived somewhere in North London. But though Kearney had a telephone number for him, he wasn’t sure it was reliable. He tried it anyway, from Victoria Station. There was a silence at the other end of the line then a woman’s voice said:

“You have reached the BT Cellnet answering service.”

“Hello?” said Kearney. He checked the number he had dialled. “You aren’t on a cellphone,” he said. “This isn’t a cellphone number. Hello?” The silence at the other end spun itself out. In the very distance, he thought, he could hear something like breath. “Sprake?” Nothing. He hung up and found his way down to the Victoria Line platforms. He changed trains at Green Park, and again at Baker Street, working his way obliquely to the centre of town, where he would interrogate the afternoon drinkers at the Lymph Club on Greek Street, one place he might expect to get news of Sprake.

Soho Square was full of schizophrenics. Adrift in the care of the community with their small dirty dogs and bags of clothes, they were brought together at sites like this by an attraction to movement, crowds, commerce. A middle-aged woman with an accent he couldn’t quite place had annexed a bench near the mock-Tudor shack at the centre of the square and was staring around with a lively but undirected interest. Every so often her upper lip folded back and a fey, unpremeditated sound escaped her mouth, more than an exclamation, less than a word. When Kearney appeared, walking fast from the Oxford Street end, an educated look sprang from nowhere into her eyes and she began talking loudly to herself. Her topics were disconnected and various. Kearney hurried past, then on an impulse turned back.

He had heard words he didn’t understand.

Kefahuchi Tract.

“What does that mean?” he said. “What do you mean by that?”

Mistaking this for an accusation, the woman fell silent and stared at the ground near his feet. She had on a curious mixture of good-quality coats and cardigans; green wellington boots; homemade fingerless mitts. Unlike the others she had no baggage. Her face, tanned by exhaust fumes, alcohol and the wind that blows incessantly around the base of Centre Point, had a curiously healthy, rural look. When she looked up at last, her eyes were pale blue. “I wonder if you could spare me the money for a cup of tea?” she said.

“I’ll do more than that,” Kearney promised. “Just tell me what you mean.”

She blinked.

“Wait here!” he told her, and at the nearest Pret bought three All Day Breakfasts, which he put in a bag with a large latte. Back in Soho Square, the woman hadn’t moved, but sat blinking into the weak sunlight, occasionally calling out to passersby, but reserving most of her attention for two or three pigeons hobbling about in front of her. Kearney handed her the bag.

“Now,” he said. “Tell me what you see.”

She gave him a cheerful smile. “I don’t see anything,” she said. “I take my medication. I always take it.” She held the Pret bag for a moment then returned it to him. “I don’t want this.”

“Yes you do,” he said, taking things out to show her. “Look! All Day Breakfast!”

“You eat it,” she said.

He put the bag down next to her on the bench and took her by the shoulders. He knew that if he said the right thing she would prophesy. “Listen,” he assured her, as urgently as he knew how, “I know what you know. Do you see?”

“What do you want? I’m frightened of you.”

Kearney laughed.

“I’m the one frightened,” he said. “Look, have this. Have these.”

The woman glanced at the sandwiches in his hands, then looked over her left shoulder as if she had seen someone she knew.

“I don’t want it. I don’t want them.” She strained to keep her head turned away from him. “I want to go now.”

“What do you see?” he insisted.

“Nothing.”

“What do you see?”

“Something coming down. Fire coming down.”

“What fire?”

“Let me go.”

“What fire is that?”

“Let me go, now. Let me go.”

Kearney let her go and walked away. Aged eighteen, he had dreamed of himself at the end of a life like hers. He was reeling and staggering down some alley, full of revelation like a disease. He was old and regretful, but for years something had been combusting its way from the centre of him towards the outer edge, where it now burst uncontrollably from his fingertips, from his eyes, his mouth, his sex, setting his clothes on fire. Later he had seen how unlikely this was. Whatever he might be, he wasn’t mad, or alcoholic, or even unlucky. Looking back into Soho Square, he watched the schizophrenics passing his sandwiches from hand to hand, peeling them apart to examine the filling. He had stirred them like soup. Who knew what might come to the surface? In principle, he felt sorry for them, even amiable. The praxis of it was bleaker. They were as disappointing as children. You saw light in their eyes, but it was the ignis fatuus. In the end, they knew less than Brian Tate, and he knew nothing at all.

Valentine Sprake, who claimed to know as much as Kearney, perhaps more, wasn’t at the Lymph Club; no one had seen him there for a month. Eyeing the yellowed walls, the afternoon drinkers, the TV above the bar, Kearney bought a drink and wondered where he should look next. Outside, the afternoon had turned to rain, the streets were full of people talking into mobile phones. Knowing that he would be forced, sooner or later, to face an empty apartment on his own, he sighed with impatience, turned up the collar of his jacket, and went home. There, ill at ease but worn out by what he thought of as the emotional demands of Brian Tate, Anna Kearney and the woman in Soho Square, he turned on all the lights and fell asleep in an armchair.

“Your cousins are coming,” Kearney’s mother told him.

He was eight. He was so excited he ran away as soon as they arrived, off across the fields behind the house and through a strip of woodland, until he came to a pond or shallow lake surrounded by willows. It was his favourite place. No one was ever there. In winter, brown reeds emerged from the thin white cat-ice at its margins; in summer, insects buzzed among the willows. Kearney stood for a long time, listening to the diminishing cries of the other children. As soon as he was sure they wouldn’t follow him, a kind of hypnotic tranquillity came over him. He pulled his shorts down and stood with his legs apart in the sun, looking down at himself. Someone at school had shown him how to rub it. It got big but he couldn’t make it do anything else. Eventually he grew bored and climbed out along a cracked willow trunk. He lay there in the shade, looking down into the water, which teemed with tiny real fishes.

He could never face other children. They excited him too much. He could never face his cousins. Two or three years later, he would invent the house he called “Gorselands,” sometimes “Heathlands,” where his dreams of them, prurient yet somehow transfiguring, could be worked out in a landscape without threat.

At Gorselands it would always be full summer. From the road, people would see only trees, thick with ivy, a few yards of mossy driveway, the nameplate on the old wooden gate. Every afternoon, the pale, scarcely teenaged girls his cousins had become would squat in the warm sun-speckled gloom—their grubby feet slightly apart, their scratched knees and bundled-up skirts close to their chests—rubbing quickly and deftly at the stretched white fabric between their legs, while Michael Kearney watched them from the trees, aching inside his thick underpants and grey school shorts.

Sensing him there, they would look up suddenly, at a loss!

Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life, had, by the age of eight, already made Kearney vulnerable to the attentions of the Shrander. It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the willow, just as it had sorted the stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its attentions had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal water, or felt something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks. Dragons were expressed as the smoke from engines, while the mechanical parts of the engines themselves turned over with a kind of nauseous oily slowness, and Kearney woke to find a rubber thing soaking in the bathroom sink.

The Shrander was in all of that.