The Collected Short Fiction

The Retrospective (2002)

Trent had no idea how long he was unable to think for rage. The guard kept out of sight while she announced the unscheduled stop, and didn’t reappear until the trainload of passengers had crowded onto the narrow platform. As the train dragged itself away into a tunnel simulated by elderly trees and the low March afternoon sky that was plastered with layers of darkness, she poked her head out of the rearmost window to announce that the next train should be due in an hour. The resentful mutters of the crowd only aggravated Trent’s frustration. He needed a leisurely evening and, if he could manage it for a change, a night’s sleep in preparation for a working breakfast. If he’d known the journey would be broken, he could have reread his paperwork instead of contemplating scenery he couldn’t even remember. No doubt the next train would already be laden with commuters - he doubted it would give him space to work. His skull was beginning to feel shrivelled and hollow when it occurred to him that if he caught a later train he would both ensure himself a seat and have time to drop in on his parents. When had he last been home to see them? All at once he felt so guilty that he preferred not to look anyone in the face as he excused his slow way to the ticket office.

It was closed - a board lent it the appearance of a frame divested of a photograph - but flanked by a timetable. Stoneby to London, Stoneby to London . . . There were trains on the hour, like the striking of a clock. He emerged from the short wooden passage into the somewhat less gloomy street, only to falter. Where was the sweet shop whose window used to exhibit dozens of glass-stoppered jars full of colours he could taste? Where was the toyshop fronted by a headlong model train that had never stopped for the travellers paralysed on the platform? What had happened to the bakery displaying tiered white cakes elaborate as Gothic steeples, and the bridal shop next door, where the headless figures in their pale dresses had made him think of Anne Boleyn? Now the street was overrun with the same fast-food eateries and immature clothes shops that surrounded him whenever he left his present apartment, and he couldn’t recall how much change he’d seen on his last visit, whenever that had been. He felt suddenly so desperate to be somewhere more like home that he almost didn’t wait for twin green men to pipe up and usher him across the road.

The short cut was still there, in a sense. Instead of separating the toyshop from the wedding dresses, it squeezed between a window occupied by a regiment of boots and a hamburger outlet dogged by plastic cartons. Once he was in the alley the clamour of traffic relented, but the narrow passage through featureless discoloured concrete made him feel walled in by the unfamiliar. Then the concrete gave way to russet bricks and released him into a street he knew.

At least, it conformed to his memory until he looked closer. The building opposite, which had begun life as a music hall, had ceased to be a cinema. A pair of letters clung to the whitish border of the rusty iron marquee, two letters N so insecure they were on the way to being Zs. He was striving to remember if the cinema had been shut last time he’d seen it when he noticed that the boards on either side of the lobby contained posters too small for the frames. The neighbouring buildings were boarded up. As he crossed the deserted street, the posters grew legible. MEMORIES OF STONEBY, the amateurish printing said.

The two wide steps beneath the marquee were cracked and chipped and stained. The glass of the ticket booth in the middle of the marble door was too blackened to see through. Behind the booth the doors into the auditorium stood ajar. Uncertain what the gap was showing him, he ventured to peer in.

At first the dimness yielded up no more than a strip of carpet framed by floorboards just as grubby, and then he thought someone absolutely motionless was watching him from the dark. The watcher was roped off from him - the several indistinct figures were. He assumed they represented elements of local history: there was certainly something familiar about them. That impression, and the blurred faces with their dully glinting eyes, might have transfixed him if he hadn’t remembered that he was supposed to be seeing his parents. He left the echo of his footsteps dwindling in the lobby and hurried around the side of the museum.

Where the alley crossed another he turned left along the rear of the building. In the high wall to his right a series of solid wooden gates led to back yards, the third of which belonged to his old house. As a child he’d used the gate as a short cut to the cinema, clutching a coin in his fist, which had smelled of metal whenever he’d raised it to his face in the crowded restless dark. His parents had never bolted the gate until he was home again, but now the only effect of his trying the latch was to rouse a clatter of claws and the snarling of a neighbour’s dog that sounded either muzzled or gagged with food, and so he made for the street his old house faced.

The sunless sky was bringing on a twilight murky as an unlit room. He could have taken the street for an aisle between two blocks of dimness so lacking in features they might have been identical. Presumably any children who lived in the terrace were home from school by now, though he couldn’t see the flicker of a single television in the windows draped with dusk, while the breadwinners had yet to return. Trent picked his way over the broken upheaved slabs of the pavement, supporting himself on the roof of a lone parked car until it shifted rustily under his hand, to his parents’ front gate.

The small plot of a garden was a mass of weeds that had spilled across the short path. He couldn’t feel it underfoot as he tramped to the door, which was the colour of the oncoming dark. He was fumbling in his pocket and then with the catches of his briefcase when he realised he would hardly have brought his old keys with him. He rang the doorbell, or at least pressed the askew pallid button that set off a muffled rattle somewhere in the house.

For the duration of more breaths than he could recall taking, there was no response. He was about to revive the noise, though he found it somehow distressing, when he heard footsteps shuffling down the hall. Their slowness made it sound as long as it had seemed in his childhood, so that he had the odd notion that whoever opened the door would tower over him.

It was his mother, and smaller than ever - wrinkled and whitish as a figure composed of dough that had been left to collect dust, a wad of it on top of and behind her head. She wore a tweed coat over a garment he took to be a nightdress, which exposed only her prominent ankles above a pair of unmatched slippers. Her head wavered upwards as the corners of her lips did. Once all these had steadied she murmured ‘Is it you, Nigel? Are you back again?’

‘I thought it was past time I was.’

‘It’s always too long.’ She shuffled in a tight circle to present her stooped back to him before calling ‘Guess who it is, Walter.’

‘Hess looking for a place to hide,’ Trent’s father responded from some depth of the house.

‘No, not old red-nosed Rudolph. Someone a bit younger and a bit more English.’

‘The Queen come to tea.’

‘He’ll never change, will he?’ Trent’s mother muttered and raised what was left of her voice. ‘It’s the boy. It’s Nigel.’

‘About time. Let’s see what he’s managed to make of himself.’

She made a gesture like a desultory grab at something in the air above her left shoulder, apparently to beckon Trent along the hall. ‘Be quick with the door, there’s a good boy. We don’t want the chill roosting in our old bones.’

As soon as the door shut behind him he couldn’t distinguish whether the stairs that narrowed the hall by half were carpeted only with dimness. He trudged after his mother past a door that seemed barely sketched on the crawling murk and, more immediately than he expected, another. His mother opened a third, beyond which was the kitchen, he recalled rather than saw. It smelled of damp he hoped was mostly tea. By straining his senses he was just able to discern his father seated in some of the dark. ‘Shall we have the light on?’ Trent suggested.

‘Can’t you see? Thought you were supposed to be the young one round here.’ After a pause his father said ‘Come back for bunny, have you?’

Trent couldn’t recall ever having owned a rabbit, toy or otherwise, yet the question seemed capable of reviving some aspect of his childhood. He was feeling surrounded by entirely too much darkness when his mother said ‘Now, Walter, don’t be teasing’ and clicked the switch.

The naked dusty bulb seemed to draw the contents of the room inwards - the blackened stove and stained metal sink, the venerable shelves and cabinets and cupboards Trent’s father had built, the glossy pallid walls. The old man was sunk in an armchair, the least appropriate of an assortment of seats surrounding the round table decorated with crumbs and unwashed plates. His pear-shaped variously reddish face appeared to have been given over to producing fat to merge with the rest of him. He used both shaky inflated hands to close the lapels of his faded dressing gown over his pendulous chest cobwebbed with grey hairs. ‘You’ve got your light,’ he said, ‘so take your place.’

Lowering himself onto a chair that had once been straight, Trent lost sight of the entrance to the alley - of the impression that it was the only aspect of the yard the window managed to illuminate. ‘Will I make you some tea?’ his mother said.

She wasn’t asking him to predict the future, he reassured himself. ‘So long as you’re both having some as well.’

‘Not much else to do these days.’

‘It won’t be that bad really, will it?’ Trent said, forcing a guilty laugh. ‘Aren’t you still seeing . . .’

‘What are we seeing?’ his father prompted with some force.

‘Your friends,’ Trent said, having discovered that he couldn’t recall a single name. ‘They can’t all have moved away.’

‘Nobody moves any longer.’

Trent didn’t know whether to take that as a veiled rebuke. ‘So what have you two been doing with yourselves lately?’

‘Late’s the word.’

‘Nigel’s here now,’ Trent’s mother said, perhaps relevantly, over the descending hollow drum-roll of the kettle she was filling from the tap.

More time than was reasonable seemed to have passed since he’d entered the house. He was restraining himself from glancing even surreptitiously at his watch when his father quivered an impatient hand at him. ‘So what are you up to now?’

‘He means your work.’

‘Same as always.’

Trent hoped that would suffice until he was able to reclaim his memory from the darkness that had gathered in his skull, but his parents’ stares were as blank as his mind. ‘And what’s that?’ his mother said.

He felt as though her forgetfulness had seized him. Desperate to be reminded what his briefcase contained, he nevertheless used reaching for it as a chance to glimpse his watch. The next train was due in less than half an hour. As Trent scrabbled at the catches of the briefcase, his father said ‘New buildings, isn’t it? That’s what you put up.’

‘Plan,’ Trent said, clutching the briefcase on his lap. ‘I draw them.’

‘Of course you do,’ said his mother. ‘That’s what you always wanted.’

It was partly so as not to feel minimised that Trent declared ‘I wouldn’t want to be responsible for some of the changes in town.’

‘Then don’t be.’

‘You won’t see much else changing round here,’ Trent’s mother said.

‘Didn’t anyone object?’

‘You have to let the world move on,’ she said. ‘Leave it to the young ones.’

Trent wasn’t sure if he was included in that or only wanted to be. ‘How long have we had a museum?’

His father’s eyes grew so blank Trent could have fancied they weren’t in use. ‘Since I remember.’

‘No, that’s not right,’ Trent objected as gently as his nerves permitted. ‘It was a cinema and before that a theatre. You took me to a show there once.’

‘Did we?’ A glint surfaced in his mother’s eyes. ‘We used to like shows, didn’t we, Walter? Shows and dancing. Didn’t we go on all night sometimes and they wondered where we’d got to?’

Her husband shook his head once slowly, whether to enliven memories or deny their existence Trent couldn’t tell. ‘The show you took me to,’ he insisted, ‘I remember someone dancing with a stick. And there was a lady comedian, or maybe not a lady but dressed up.’

Perhaps it was the strain of excavating the recollection that made it seem both lurid and encased in darkness - the outsize figure prancing sluggishly about the stage and turning towards him a sly greasy smile as crimson as a wound, the ponderous slap on the boards of feet that sounded unshod, the onslaughts of laughter that followed comments Trent found so incomprehensible he feared they were about him, the shadow that kept swelling on whatever backdrop the performer had, an effect suggesting that the figure was about to grow yet more gigantic. Surely some or preferably most of that was a childhood nightmare rather than a memory. ‘Was there some tea?’ Trent blurted.

At first it seemed his mother’s eyes were past seeing through their own blankness. ‘In the show, do you mean?’

‘Here.’ When that fell short of her he said more urgently ‘Now.’

‘Why, you should have reminded me,’ she protested and stood up. How long had she been seated opposite him? He was so anxious to remember that he didn’t immediately grasp what she was doing. ‘Mother, don’t,’ he nearly screamed, flinging himself off his chair.

‘No rush. It isn’t anything like ready.’ She took her hand out of the kettle on the stove - he wasn’t sure if he glimpsed steam trailing from her fingers as she replaced the lid. ‘We haven’t got much longer, have we?’ she said. ‘We mustn’t keep you from your duties.’

‘You won’t do that again, will you?’

‘What’s that, son?’

He was dismayed to think she might already have forgotten. ‘You won’t put yourself in danger.’

‘There’s nothing we’d call that round here,’ his father said.

‘You’ll look after each other, won’t you? I really ought to catch the next train. I’ll be back to see you again soon, I promise, and next time it’ll be longer.’

‘It will.’

His parents said that not quite in chorus, apparently competing at slowness. ‘Till next time, then,’ he said and shook his father’s hand before hugging his mother. Both felt disconcertingly cold and unyielding, as if the appearance of each had hardened into a carapace. He gripped the handle of his briefcase while he strove to twist the rusty key in the back door. ‘I’ll go my old way, shall I? It’s quicker.’

When nobody answered he hauled open the door, which felt unhinged. Cobwebbed weeds sprawled over the doorstep into the kitchen at once. Weedy mounds of earth or rubble had overwhelmed the yard and the path. He picked his way to the gate and with an effort turned his head, but nobody was following to close the gate: his mother was still at her post by the stove, his father was deep in the armchair. He had to use both hands to wrench the bolt out of its socket, and almost forgot to retrieve his briefcase as he stumbled into the alley. The passage was unwelcomingly dark, not least because the light from the house failed to reach it - no, because the kitchen was unlit. He dragged the gate shut and took time to engage the latch before heading for the rear of the museum.

Damp must be stiffening his limbs. He hoped it was in the air, not in his parents’ house. Was it affecting his vision as well? When he slogged to the end of the alley the street appeared to be composed of little but darkness, except for the museum. The doors to the old auditorium were further ajar, and as he crossed the road Trent saw figures miming in the dimness. He hadn’t time to identify their faces before panting down the alley where brick was ousted by concrete.

Figures sat in the stark restaurants and modelled clothes in windows. Otherwise the street was deserted except for a man who dashed into the station too fast for Trent to see his face. The man let fly a wordless plea and waved his briefcase as he sprinted through the booking hall. Trent had just begun to precipitate himself across the road when he heard the slam of a carriage door. He staggered ahead of his breath onto the platform in time to see the last light of a train vanish into the trees, which looked more like a tunnel than ever.

His skull felt frail with rage again. Once he regained the ability to move he stumped to glower at the timetable next to the boarded-up office. His fiercest glare was unable to change the wait into less than an hour. He marched up and down a few times, but each end of the platform met him with increasing darkness. He had to keep moving to ward off a chill stiffness. He trudged into the street and frowned about him.

The fast-food outlets didn’t appeal to him, neither their impersonal refreshments nor the way all the diners faced the street as though to watch him. not that doing so lent them any animation. He couldn’t even see anyone eating. Ignoring the raw red childishly sketched men, he lurched across the road into the alley.

He oughtn’t to go to his parents. So instant a return might well confuse them, and just now his own mind felt more than sufficiently unfocused. The only light, however tentative, in the next street came from the museum. He crossed the roadway, which was as lightless as the low sky, and climbed the faint steps.

Was the ticket booth lit? A patch of the blackened glass had been rubbed relatively clear from within. He was fumbling for money to plant on the sill under the gap at the foot of the window when he managed to discern that the figure in the booth was made of wax. While it resembled the middle-aged woman who had occupied the booth when the building was a cinema, it ought to look years - no, decades - older. Its left grey-cardiganed arm was raised to indicate the auditorium. He was unable to judge its expression for the gloom inside the booth. Tramping to the doors, he pushed them wide.

That seemed only to darken the auditorium, but he felt the need to keep on the move before his eyes had quite adjusted. The apparently sourceless twilight put him in mind of the glow doled out by the candle that used to stand in an encrusted saucer on the table by his childhood bed. As he advanced under the enormous unseen roof, he thought he was walking on the same carpet that had led into the cinema and indeed the theatre. He was abreast of the first of the figures on either side of the aisle before he recognised them.

He’d forgotten they were sisters, the two women who had run the bakery and the adjacent bridal shop. Had they really been twins? They were playing bridesmaids in identical white ankle-length dresses - whitish, rather, and trimmed with dust. Presumably it was muslin as well as dust that gloved their hands, which were pointing with all their digits along the aisle. The dull glints of their grimy eyes appeared to spy sidelong on him. He’d taken only a few steps when he stumbled to a halt and peered about him.

The next exhibits were disconcerting enough. No doubt the toyshop owner was meant to be introducing his model railway, but he looked as if he was crouching sideways to grab whatever sought refuge in the miniature tunnel. Opposite him the sweetshop man was enticing children to his counter, which was heaped with sweets powdered grey, by performing on a sugar whistle not entirely distinguishable from his glimmering teeth. Trent hadn’t time to ascertain what was odd about the children’s wide round eyes, because he was growing aware of the extent of the museum.

Surely it must be a trick of the unreliable illumination, but the more he gazed around him, the further the dimness populated with unmoving figures seemed to stretch. If it actually extended so far ahead and to both sides, it would encompass at least the whole of the street that contained his parents’ house. He wavered forward a couple of paces, which only encouraged figures to solidify out of that part of the murk. He swivelled as quickly as he was able and stalked out of the museum.

The echoes of his footsteps pursued him across the lobby like mocking applause. He could hear no other sound, and couldn’t tell whether he was being watched from the ticket booth. He found his way down the marble steps and along the front of the museum. In a few seconds he was sidling crabwise along it in order to differentiate the alley from the unlit facade. He wandered further than he should have, and made his way back more slowly. Before long he was groping with his free hand at the wall as he ranged back and forth, but it was no use. There was no alley, just unbroken brick.

He was floundering in search of a crossroads, from which there surely had to be a route to his old house, when he realised he might as well be blind. He glanced back, praying wordlessly for any relief from the dark. There was only the glow from the museum lobby. It seemed as feeble as the candle flame had grown in the moment before it guttered into smoke, and so remote he thought his stiff limbs might be past carrying him to it. When he retreated towards it, at first he seemed not to be moving at all.

More time passed than he could grasp before he felt sure the light was closer. Later still he managed to distinguish the outstretched fingertips of his free hand. He clung to his briefcase as though it might be snatched from him. He was abreast of the lobby, and preparing to abandon its glow for the alley that led to the station, when he thought he heard a whisper from inside the museum. ‘Are you looking for us?’

It was either a whisper, or so distant that it might as well be one. ‘We’re in here, son,’ it said, and its companion added ‘You’ll have to come to us.’

‘Mother?’ It was unquestionably her voice, however faint. He almost tripped over the steps as he sent himself into the lobby. For a moment, entangled in the clapping of his footsteps on the marble, he thought he heard a large but muted sound, as of the surreptitious arrangement of a crowd. He blundered to the doors and peered into the auditorium.

Under the roof, which might well have been an extension of the low ponderous black sky, the aisle and its guardians were at least as dim as ever. Had things changed, or had he failed to notice details earlier? The bridal sisters were licking their lips, and he wasn’t sure if they were dressed as bridesmaids or baked into giant tiered cakes from which they were trying to struggle free. Both of the toyshop owner’s hands looked eager to seize the arrested train if it should try to reach the safety of the tunnel, and the bulging eyes of the children crowded around the man with the sugar whistle - were those sweets? Trent might have retreated if his mother’s voice hadn’t spoken to him. ‘That’s it, son. Don’t leave us this time.’

‘Have a thought for us. Don’t start us wondering where you are again. We’re past coming to find you.’

‘Where are you? I can’t see.’

‘Just carry on straight,’ his parents’ voices took it in turns to murmur.

He faltered before lurching between the first exhibits. Beyond them matters could hardly be said to improve. He did his best not to see too much of the milkman holding the reins of a horse while a cow followed the cart, but the man’s left eye seemed large enough for the horse, the right for the cow. Opposite him stood a rag and bone collector whose trade was apparent from the companion that hung onto his arm, and Trent was almost glad of the flickering dimness. ‘How much further?’ he cried in a voice that the place shrank almost to nothing.

‘No more than you can walk at your age.’

Trent hung onto the impression that his father sounded closer than before and hugged his briefcase while he made his legs carry him past a policeman who’d removed his helmet to reveal a bald-ridged head as pointed as a chrysalis, a priest whose smooth face was balanced on a collar of the same paleness as and no thicker than a child’s wrist, a window cleaner with scrawny legs folded like a grasshopper’s, a bus conductor choked by his tie that was caught in his ticket machine while at the front of the otherwise deserted vehicle the driver displayed exactly the same would-be comical strangled face and askew swollen tongue . . . They were nightmares, Trent told himself: some he remembered having suffered as a child, and the rest he was afraid to remember in case they grew clearer. ‘I still can’t see you,’ he all but wailed.

‘Down here, son.’

Did they mean ahead? He hoped he wasn’t being told to use any of the side aisles, not least because they seemed capable of demonstrating that the place was even vaster than he feared. The sights they contained were more elaborate too. Off to the right was a brass band, not marching but frozen in the act of tiptoeing towards him: though all the players had lowered their instruments, their mouths were perfectly round. In the dimness to his left, and scarcely more luminous, was a reddish bonfire surrounded by figures that wore charred masks, unless those were their faces, and beyond that was a street party where children sat at trestle tables strewn with food and grimaced in imitation of the distorted versions of their faces borne by deflating balloons they held on strings . . . Trent twisted his stiff body around in case some form of reassurance was to be found behind him, but the exit to the lobby was so distant he could have mistaken it for the last of a flame. He half closed his eyes to blot out the sights he had to pass, only to find that made the shadows of the exhibits and the darkness into which the shadows trailed loom closer, as if the dimness was on the point of being finally extinguished. He was suddenly aware that if the building had still been a theatre, the aisle would have brought him to the stage by now. ‘Where are you?’ he called but was afraid to raise his voice. ‘Can’t you speak?’

‘Right here.’

His eyes sprang so wide they felt fitted into their sockets. His parents weren’t just close, they were behind him. He turned with difficulty and saw why he’d strayed past them. His mother was wearing a top hat and tails and had finished twirling a cane that resembled a lengthening of one knobbly finger; his father was bulging out of a shabby flowered dress that failed to conceal several sections of a pinkish bra. They’d dressed up to cure Trent of his nightmare about the theatre performance, he remembered, but they had only brought it into his waking hours. He backed away from it - from their waxen faces greyish with down, their smiles as fixed as their eyes. His legs collided with an object that folded them up, and he tottered sideways to sit helplessly on it. ‘That’s it, son,’ his mother succeeded in murmuring.

‘That’s your place,’ his father said with a last shifting of his lips.

Trent glared downwards and saw he was trapped by a school desk barely large enough to accommodate him. On either side of him sat motionless children as furred with grey as their desks, even their eyes. Between him and his parents a teacher in a gown and mortarboard was standing not quite still and sneering at him. ‘Mr Bunnie,’ Trent gasped, remembering how the teacher had always responded to being addressed by his name as though it was an insult. Then, in a moment of clarity that felt like a beacon in the dark, he realised he had some defence. ‘This isn’t me,’ he tried to say calmly but firmly. ‘This is.’

His fingers were almost too unmanageable to deal with the briefcase. He levered at the rusty metal buttons with his thumbs until at last the catches flew open and the contents spilled across the desk. For a breath, if he had any, Trent couldn’t see them in the dimness, and then he made out that they were half a dozen infantile crayon drawings of houses. ‘I’ve done more than that,’ he struggled to protest, ‘I am more,’ but his mouth had finished working. He managed only to raise his head, and never knew which was worse: his paralysis, or his parents’ doting smiles, or the sneer that the teacher’s face seemed to have widened to encompass - the sneer that had always meant that once a child was inside the school gates, his parents could no longer protect him. It might have been an eternity before the failure of the dimness or of Trent’s eyes ...