‘That’s nice.’
I should tell him about Mandy. Why don’t I tell him? But after all this time – we left school, what, ten years ago? – it feels wrong to burden him with my present horror. I shared too much with him before: things he should never have had to hear. No wonder we’ve hardly spoken since.
‘We have this boat,’ he says.
A boat. Christ. I had had it in my head, until the accident, that I had done pretty well for myself. A place in a pretty, watery, wedding cake-y part of town. Michel’s woman has a boat?
‘We’re going to sail around the world.’
That sort of boat. A working boat that you sail. That’s all right, then. I had visions of them sunbathing in public view in exclusive marinas.
‘We’d love you to see it,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of a wreck.’
Which reminds me.
‘I’ve not been going out much,’ I say, without thinking. ‘Since the crash.’ I should have said I was back at work. I should have said I was working all hours, trying to catch up on myself.
Stupid. Stupid. Now how am I going to get out of visiting them? Given that I have told him I’m my own master, alone and fancy-free, and on the sick? Of course I cannot go. Shall I tell him that I am incapacitated? That I have lost my face, my hands?
‘Well, how about just for a week, at least?’ he says.
‘I can’t,’ I tell him, increasingly desperate. ‘I can’t.’
Mandy has a touching belief in mornings; in her mind, for a little while at least, they have the power to set all things to rights. ‘Come on in,’ she says. ‘The door’s not locked.’
She’s in the bath. The water’s heat has flushed her scars: her face is edged and crazed, more shattered than torn.
‘I’ll wash your back.’
She’s put on weight, slumped here, undone, day after day in these white rooms. Slim pads of fat give under my fingers as I work soap along her spine.
‘That’s nice.’
‘I’ll do your hair.’
She turns, her face sliced up into a smile. ‘You do too much for me.’
She slides deeper into the water, raises her legs out of the water, and fetches me the shampoo from the shelf behind the bath. I take the pink bottle from between her clamped feet, my throat in spasm, and she shimmies herself upright again. While I work the shampoo through her hair she raises her knees and rubs her stumps against them, washing them. A smell rises. Soap and roses.
‘Who was it on the phone last night?’
Falling in love with a person is hard. Falling in love with a world is easy. Confusing the two loves is easier still. I spend the day wandering round the house in mourning for it all. Mandy’s kitchen. Mandy’s underwear. Mandy’s pillows and shoes. I love her scarves and her seven different kinds of toothpaste (a flavour for each day of the week). I love those little blue bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf. I was always a sucker for Mandy’s world. Her visits to out-of-the-way antique shops. Her cutlery drawer, every knife and fork a ‘piece’. Wine glasses from an arcade near the Palace of Sports. Cushions from a woman who lives on one of the old lime tree avenues in the Turkish quarter. In Mandy’s world, everything has an aesthetic value. The humblest objects acquire a small but telling erotic charge.
Packing is the work of a moment. Laptop and charger, a couple of jumpers, underwear, jeans. Mandy has a hospital appointment this morning. She’s back from her fitting at two. I haven’t got long. Every time a taxi passes outside the window, my heart gives a tiny jolt.
It’s all right. There is time. I wonder if Mandy’s hands are dexterous enough yet to allow her to unlock her front door? They must be. She managed all right the day she walked out on me in the restaurant. Only that was a Tuesday. Maybe the cleaner was in.
I don’t know.
Anyway, I should phone her, if only to warn her, to tell her I’m gone.
FOUR
At its grandest, the north-coast highway is a monster. Its four-lane carriageways are barely enough to feed and relieve the half-dozen ferry and container ports that have spread – a slow and steady flood of glass and steel – to fill the mouths of every valley, making islands of a dozen basalt hills.
To the east, the landscape is economically unimportant and much less dramatic, and the road, having expended its strength on valley-spanning ribcage viaducts and swooping white-tiled tunnels, withers at last to a tiny, chicaned, suburban memory of itself. A main road. A high street. A bus route. At each junction, mini-roundabouts form pronounced bulges.
There is not much else to see. A shingle bank blocks my view of the waves. There are some shops – an uneasy mix of tourist services and struggling convenience stores. Hair Trendz. Raz the Newsagent. Artisanal Fruit Beer & Cheese for that ‘Tasty Gift’.
This is as far as the national rail network will take me. The regular railway loops south from here, its banked-up rail bed forcing the narrow-gauge local service into a weed-choked alley, embankments on the landward side and a sloping sea-wall on the other. Dead turfs and twigs poke up through its concrete honeycomb. A solitary string of barbed wire makes a notional boundary between the two railways, the big and the small.
There is a café at the station, its chunky pine furniture slathered over with a glassy, polyurethane varnish. At the back of the café is a flight of stairs leading to a model railway exhibition. A 00 gauge layout runs round three walls. In the centre, vitrines display larger, stripped-down engines and mechanical toys. Not all of them are very old. Some I recognise from my childhood. I pause to study a model circus, with cages for the lions, and slop buckets hung on little hooks outside the cages, and caravans with washing lines strung between them, and a make-up tent. The flaps are tied back and there is light inside. I hunker down to see in. A female clown is preparing her face in front of a mirrored make-up table. Her frown is illuminated by light thrown from tiny bulbs embedded in the frame of her mirror.
I stand up quickly, self-conscious, the butt of an obscure cosmic joke.
Wooden steps and boxes bring small children up to the height of the railway’s lower reaches, where a variety of goods trains, car transporters, tanker trucks and passenger locomotives weave in and out of sidings and through plaster-of-Paris tunnels, braking and accelerating with an unnatural facility. Clear panels protect the exhibit from curious fingers. Here and there, where the light hits it at an angle, you can see, printed on the glass, the handprint of a child.
The railway crosses a rugged, stepped landscape, rising in one place almost to the bobbly-papered ceiling. (In one out-of-the-way corner, small figures hung on thread simulate the plight of climbers attempting a dangerous, off-width chimney on lichenous rock.)
The trains weave around each other, stop at red signals, go at green. (The abrupt physics of this miniature world is its only unavoidable shortcoming.) The choreography is complex and contingent, signals responding to signals. I wonder if the pattern ever repeats itself. The exhibit may be self-organising, not operating according to some master timetable but to regular readings of its own internal state. Anyway it runs so seamlessly, the eye tires of it in the end. The trains will run and stop and run again as the stars will rise and set, interminably. The rest of the diorama is, by contrast, steeped in incident and drama. True, its occupants – people, road vehicles and animals – are frozen in place. But this actually heightens the drama, bringing to mind scenes glimpsed from a speeding train carriage.
A car has crashed into a safety barrier on a narrow mountain switchback. Witnesses are running up the hill, around the blind bend, to warn on-coming drivers and prevent more collisions.
In the valley below, a lorry driver rests his arm on the sill of his side window as he waits for a flock of sheep to cross a ford. The livery on his truck is written in Cyrillic. He has driven a long way – is he going to fall asleep at the wheel?