Another reason for keeping quiet, hauding the wisht.
Which I am, by now, good at. I haud it with both hands and squeeze until it gets no air and I am silence.
Although he did currently want to make a remark, perhaps in the hearing of someone sympathetic.
I would say — if the opportunity presented, which it doesn’t — that I am being compelled to put my affairs in order, which has a bad sound. It’s not aspirational.
He’d have added a comment or two on the way life had been for the last few weeks, or months.
It’s been a year.
Maybe he was noble, to some degree, for putting up with it. He’d considered this, but dismissed the idea because he’d seen better behaviour in other contexts and courage was only real, anyway, when someone else was watching. Then it occurred to him the truly noble act nobly with no one there to see and this meant perhaps he qualified, because he was unseen. Perhaps he was slightly admirable. The only certain thing was that he felt nauseous most days and as if he mustn’t slow, or stop moving until exhaustion dropped him, because otherwise he knew he’d have to cry.
I do persevere, you can’t fault me on that account.
And I have gone to my place of residence and am putting my affairs in order. Which used to be a sign of ill omen in the kind of British films they no longer make, ones that showed chaps in suits, or chaps in uniforms, or — at a pinch — chaps who wore suits for Sundays and were working-class and ill-kempt otherwise, but also Nice. Everyone had noticeable consonants. And in would come the dreadful news from the doctor who’d wear a waistcoat with his suit and side-whiskers, or else the shock would spring from a letter revealing some fatal disgrace. Or one of the chaps — in his uniform, or suit, or Nice Sunday Best of appropriate period — would clip out deftly structured phrases, explaining to some other chap that he was in trouble, insolubly so.
Next would be a show of dignity: compressed working-class dignity, repressed middle-class dignity, suppressed upper-class dignity, and then came the ordering.
Dear chap, I will have to go now and order my affairs.
Mike was unclear about what the phrase properly meant, beyond the imminent removal of the chap from his affairs and the looming end of comforts and contentments of every type for solely awful reasons. It also seemed to imply that a real man should leave substantial effects behind him: a catalogue of family mementoes, letters bound with ribbon and medals from appalling wars, an orderly trove of stored wounds. It ought to be taxing to order his things, because a man should produce a legacy, at the very least of secrets honourably kept and kind regards.
I’ve none of that.
Or, ideally, a man was a man of substance and had an estate with dependent cottages, fishing rights, a manor with a slew of ballrooms, livestock and portfolios, diamonds, the newer of the Bentleys he’d leave to the wife.
I’m not leaving anything to the wife.
Mike was, in fact, simply leaving. He was letting his withdrawal run its course, combing through every material proof of himself and either abandoning it, or tamping and taping it down into cardboard containers. He had — and this wasn’t startling — proved to be of unimpressive substance. There were also too many items he couldn’t stand the sight of, as it turned out, so he was chucking most of them.
I might have kept more if I’d got hold of tea chests for storage. I remember them as being reassuring.
When I was a kid, Mum and Dad still had a few up in the loft from when they’d finally arrived at Windsor Gardens, their Nice Street in the east. Their pinnacle of Niceness. Neither of them ever had to pack up and move on after that. They abandoned their responsibilities in the traditional order — him first and then her — and each of them was carried out, boxed and beyond caring, by Nice Undertakers. Then the house was cleared.
By me.
Nicely.
So I’ve done this before and should have been spared.
Or at least if I’d searched out tea chests to keep me company for this bit — proper wooden boxes that smelled of exotic places and quality cuppas — then I’d have been happier, I think. I’d have believed I was surviving.
Mike remembered the chests as having interesting labels and stencilled marks and strips of thick metal foil protecting their edges. When he played with them, he had to be careful the foil didn’t cut his fingers.
I wasn’t careful. Naturally.
Blood everywhere. Naturally.
So deep it didn’t hurt. Two stitches at the hospital on the last occasion and then lectures about the appropriate levels of caution to maintain if I was to manage myself as an adult operation.
Crying into my mother’s cardigan until she stopped scolding.
I never intended to grow up and have to be adult.
But I did. Naturally.
Although I’ve heard it said on several occasions that I simply got taller and faked the rest.
I’ve heard that said with affection.
Around Mike were rafts and walls built out of bland cardboard. His removers had supplied the containers: nothing about what they brought him suggesting terraced hillsides under extravagant heats and skies. And nothing involving effort on his part. This was how grown-ups handled things.
Tediously.
He wasn’t taking to it.
But I’m getting through. Like a sterling individual, a fine chap.
Or rather, he wasn’t. He was spending increasing periods trying to be some other person, further off. There was a fairly constant pressure inside his flat which combined the stresses of heavy lifting with those of unearthing familiar objects and their more or less savage echoes, with noticing cracks in the plaster and the eradication, in some way he couldn’t fathom, of his hope. Becoming other than himself had relieved this and allowed him, more or less, to prepare his home for sale and then himself for his removal. He was, if not a kind stranger, then competent.
I am getting through.
I am doing so as another man who looks and sounds impostorish, but is better than me, and that is okay. I’ve rarely cared how I look and always sounded like an impostor, so none of this matters. It’s minor details. I’m a minor detail here.
Sometimes, mostly at night, traces of his personality, spasms and fears, rub between his brain and the interior curve of his skull. This was how he visualised the process. And he was almost convinced that the bones which protected his thinking, which allowed it a moist and warm security, were being worn away exactly and precisely by that thinking.
I mourn the passing of my thoughts.
And, whoever I am, this has been frankly a right pain in the arse and everywhere else.
No one to care except me, but even so.
Throughout his autumn he had stayed in most evenings. This wasn’t unusual for him, but seemed an imposition when enforced. He’d been waiting for viewers to come and see his flat — as advertised with a fair degree of honesty in the customary ways. Mike had decided his home should be set beyond his reach and lived in without him, or his ornaments, or his dust.
He hadn’t warmed to the prospective purchasers. For one thing, they knew they were in a buyers’ market and could therefore act like jaded princelings and empresses.