Was that a knocking? someone at the front door? No, whatever it was, it stopped. It was probably next door: they’d probably heard me moving the chair and decided to do some rivalrous moving-things-about.
I went back to the book. A matter of considerable doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at alclass="underline" this was interesting. Was being named a proof of survival? Without a name would something live less long? for instance, be doomed to being only a couple of pages long? And was naming to do with survival, and were both naming and survival also somehow both to do with time?
There, I thought. I’m okay. I’ve moved a really heavy chair. I’ve changed things. And I’ve read sixteen lines in a novel and I’ve thought several things about them and none of this with you, or to do with you; I even read the phrase ‘item of mortality’ and thought of something other than you. Time heals all wounds. Or, as you used to say, time achilles-heels all wounds. Then you would tell the story of Achilles’s mother dipping him in the protective river, holding him by the heel between her finger and thumb; that’s why the heel got missed out, didn’t get protected. Which, you said, when it came to story, was what suspense meant. And from then on all time’s arrows pointed at that unprotected heel.
Except, I don’t always have to be thinking about what you used to say. In fact I just managed a whole ten minutes there without thinking of you once, I thought, then I turned back to the book. Then I looked up over the top of the open book because it sounded like someone was coming up the stairs.
Someone was. It was you.
You were standing in the doorway. You coughed. The cough was you in a way that couldn’t not be you.
You were covered in dust and what looked like bits of rubble. Your clothes were smudged, matted, torn. You were wearing that black waistcoat with the white stitching that went out of fashion in 1995, the one we gave to Oxfam. Your skin was smudged. Your hair was streaked with dust and grit. You looked bruised. You shook yourself slightly there on the landing and little bits of grit and rubble fell off you, I watched some of it fall down the stairs behind you.
I’m late, you said.
You’re—, I said.
Late, you said again and brushed at your arms and shoulders. I’m later than—. I’m later than—. Than—.
You’re later than a rabbit in Alice, I said because that’s what you’d always said when you were late.
Than a what, in what? you said.
A rabbit, I said. In Alice.
What’s that, again? you said.
You put your hand to your head as if to find your glasses but there were no glasses there.
From Alice in Wonderland, I said. The White Rabbit. It carries a pocket watch. Remember? It’s always checking the time.
What time is it, again? you said.
I got my phone out of my pocket.
Quarter to eight, I said.
Then I realized I’d misheard you and what you’d actually said was: what is it, again, time?
It was you except for at the eyes. Where they’d been, a blue like no one else’s, there were now black spaces. It looked like your whole eyes had become pupil. You stepped into the room like you were blind. Leaving a trail of rubbly stuff very like what I’d had in my hand when we all stood round and I threw the urnful of you up and down the old Roman road in the wood on the path that’s lined with the beech trees, you went through and stood in front of your own old desk, all the papers piled on it pretty much the way you left them.
Then you groaned, stepped back and went through to the front room, left the doors all open behind you. You sat down in front of the off television.
You came back from the dead to watch tv? I said.
You didn’t say anything. I switched it on. You sat slumped in front of the looped footage on BBC 24 of a few young people in hoods loping about in a hunched way in front of a Debenhams. The announcers talked about riots and people phoned in sounding outraged over footage which repeated itself, then repeated itself again. Then I noticed that the phone-in people’s voices were also on repeat.
I sat with you, watching you watch it for half an hour. Then I thought maybe I should offer you a cup of tea. But wasn’t there some folklore rule about not giving the dead food, or not accepting food from them? Well, but this was you. And also, obviously, it wasn’t you; this was my imagination. I could offer a figment of my imagination tea if I wanted.
I went through to the kitchen and made one — milk, one sugar — in the mug you’d liked best. I brought it through and handed it to you. I went over to the tv to find the remote and when I looked round you had upended the mug and were pouring the hot tea out onto the floor. Then you put the empty mug in your pocket.
There was a report on about the 1991 Gulf War, about the epidemic of cancer in children all across Iraq which was still happening today, twenty years later, because the US military had used missiles and bullets coated in depleted uranium, sending a dust through the country which will still be radioactive, the voice-over was saying, four thousand five hundred million years from now. It was the kind of thing you’d have been incensed about, you’d have been jumping up and down in your chair about.
Now I know for sure you’re not real, I said.
You turned your black eyes on me.
What is it, again, real? you said.
I switched the tv off.
Okay, I said. As long as I’ve got you here, we’re going to use and appreciate this present moment. Because I wish, and I’ve wished a thousand times since you went, that we’d known it was the present, and that we were living in it.
You reached over and picked up the pencil sharpener from off the table at the side of the sofa.
So, there are two things I’ve wanted to tell you, I said.
You turned the sharpener over in your hand then dropped it into the pocket of your waistcoat. I heard it clink in there against the mug.
Well, a lot more than two, but these are the two that I’ve wanted most to tell you, I said. Actually, the first is something I wanted to show you.
I went through to the study, to the bookshelf, to the J’s, reached up and got down Volume 1 of your old 1909 copy of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. Back in the spring when I’d decided I’d try to read again I’d chosen this book, partly because you loved it. You particularly loved this copy, which you’d found in a charity shop and bought both volumes of for £4.00. I’d sat in the garden with it in my first spring for a quarter of a century without you and I’d tried to read it. But reading was one of the things I couldn’t do. On the day I’d decided was going to be the last day of me trying, I’d opened it at random and had remembered this: you rushing out of the garden and into the kitchen a couple of summers ago with the book open going, look! look at this! it’s probably a hundred years old, a hundred-year-old greenfly, it could literally be a hundred years since anyone’s opened this, look at its wings! you can actually see the veins, you can actually still see the green of it, think, a hundred years ago this greenfly could’ve been visiting hundred-year-ago roses, what about that, isn’t it a total beauty?
Page 338, I said now.
I opened it, carried it across and put it on your knee. I pointed to the word from, quite high up on the page, round which the greenfly, wings splayed, still very lightly green after all the years, was.
See? I said.
You held the book, looked at it, looked at me, bewildered.
Anyway, I said, taking the book back and shutting it and putting it on the arm of the chair, the second of the two things I’ve most wanted to tell you.
What’s two, again? you said.