The Book of other People Part 3

And I miss her, too.

And I miss her like you do.

The no one who comes home with you holding your hand.

The girl who isn't there to mind when I hurt myself.

'That'll be okay, then.'

Frank saw the young man's sneakers, the intentionally bedraggled cuffs of his jeans. Frank looked at them through his fingers, keeping his head low. 'I'm sorry.' This emerging less as a question than a statement, a confession. He rubbed his neck, his helpless sweat, and said again, more clearly and correctly, 'I'm sorry?'

'The projectionist's just coming back. You can go in and wait.'

Oh, I know about that, I've done that. Wait. I can do that. Past master.

Frank swallowed while his anger crested and then sank. These spasms were never long-lasting, although they used to be less frequent. That could be a cause for concern, his increased capacity for hatred.

'Are you okay?'

The boy staring with what appeared to be mild distaste when Frank straightened himself and looked up. 'No. At least, yes. I am okay. I have a headache, that's all.'

Standing seemed to take an extremely long time, Frank trying not to fall or stagger as he pressed himself up through the heavy air. He was taller than the boy, ought to be able to dominate him, but instead Frank nodded, holding his cap in both hands - something imploring in this, something anachronistic and disturbing - and he cranked out one step and then another, jolted back to the doorway of the cinema and through.

The dark was a relief, peaceful. He felt smoother, healthier as soon as it wrapped him round, cuddled at his back and opened ahead to let him pad down the gentle slope and find a new seat.

It was actually good that his film had been delayed. This way, his evening would be eaten up - back to the hotel after and head straight for bed. Double bed. Only one of him. No need to pick a side: her side, his side. He could lie where he wanted.

She preferred the left. He'd supposed this was somehow to do with the bedroom door being on the right. Any threat would come in from the right and he would be set in place to meet it. Frank had thought she was letting him guard her while she slept: Frank who was perfectly happy on whatever side was left free, who might as well rest at the foot of the bed like a folded blanket. It didn't matter. He didn't mind.

Really, though, she didn't expect Frank to defend her. Her choice had nothing to do with him. In fact, they'd had other bedrooms with the door in other places and with windows that could be climbed through, you had to consider them, too - their current window was to the left - and she'd still always lain on the left. She was left-handed, that was why. Easier to reach her book, her water gla.s.s, her reading lamp if she was over there.

She hadn't read on their last night, at least he didn't think so. He'd waited for her in the kitchen with the soup and she'd never come down. He'd cleaned up his blood and repotted the plant and listened to the sound of the water draining from her bath and her naked footsteps on the landing, not moving towards the stairs. Then he'd decided his first cleaning hadn't been thorough and he'd scrubbed the place completely - work surfaces, floor, emptied out the fridge and wiped it down, made it tidy. The cupboards needed tidying, as well. That took quite a time. Finally, he decanted the soup into a container, washed the pot, looked at the container, emptied it into the bin and washed the container.

It was two in the morning when he was done.

And when he had slipped into bed he had expected her to be sleeping, because that would be best.

'What were you doing?' Only she wasn't asleep, she was just lying on her back without the light on and waiting to ask him, 'What were you doing?'

'I . . . cleaning.'

'What's wrong with you.'

And Frank couldn't tell her because he didn't know and so he just said, 'I understand why people look at fountains, or at the sea. Because those don't stop. The water moves and keeps on moving, the tide withdraws and then returns and it keeps on going and keeps on. It's like - ' He could hear her shifting, feel her sitting up, but not reaching for him. 'It's like that b.u.t.ton you get on stereos, on those little personal players - there's always the b.u.t.ton that lets you repeat - not just the alb.u.m, but the track, one single track. They've antic.i.p.ated you'll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you'll want that. I want that. Just three or four minutes that come back.' Which he'd been afraid of while he'd heard it and when he'd stopped speaking she was breathing peculiarly, loudly, unevenly, the way she would before she cried. So he'd started again, because he had no tolerance for that, not even the idea of that. 'I want a second, three, four seconds, that would be all. I want everything back. No stopping, I want nothing to stop.' Only he was crying now, too - no way to avoid it. 'I want her to be - ' His sentence interrupted when she hit him, punched out at his chest and then a blow against his eye causing this burst of greyish colour and more pains and he'd caught her wrists eventually, almost fought her, the crown of her head banging against his chin, jarring him.

Afterwards they had rested, his head on her stomach, both of them still weeping, too loudly, too deeply, the din of it ripping something in his head. But even that had gone eventually, and there had been silence and he had tried to kiss her and she had not allowed it.

That was when he had taken his bag and left the room, the house, the town, the life.

I miss her, too.

Behind Frank, the projector stuttered and whirred, light springing to the screen and sound this time along with it. He fumbled into his pocket and found his phone, turned it off. That way he wouldn't know when it didn't ring, kept on not ringing.

Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening t.i.tles, the mist, the trees, the older man's face as it spoke to the small girl's, as he spoke to his daughter, while the world turned unreliable and salt. And the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again.

Gideon ZZ Packer

You know what I mean? I was nineteen and crazy back then. I'd met this Jewish guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he'd apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone, until he met me.

That one day, when it all began to unravel, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his Ph.D. had nothing to do with politics and was called 'Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry'. Even he didn't like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading it for a while, then closing it and saying, 'You know what's wrong with these fascist corporations?' No matter how you responded, you'd always be wrong because he'd say, 'Exactly!' then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you'd just said.

He was philosophizing, per usual, all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. 'And you you,' he said, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, 'you think the neo-industrial complex doesn't pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly partic.i.p.ating blah blah blah blah blah blah you're engaging in you're engaging in blah blah blah blah commodification of workers commodification of workers blah blah blah blah blah blah allowing the neo-Reaganites to allowing the neo-Reaganites to blah blah blah blah blah blah but you can't escape the dialectic.' but you can't escape the dialectic.'

His thing that summer was crickets, I don't know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed, with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those d.a.m.n crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he'd put it in one of those little jars - jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aioli. I'd never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I'd find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we'd rinse out the jar and voila voila, a cricket would be living in it.

Whenever he'd come back to bed from gathering crickets, he'd try to wedge his cold skinny body around my fetal position. 'Come closer,' he'd say. And I'd want to and then again I wouldn't want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal, or watercress. Plus he had a ton of calluses.

Sometimes I'd stare in the mid-darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he'd bruise deep fuchsia and you'd be able to see it even in the dark. I was very dark compared to him. He was so white it was freaky, sometimes. Othertimes it was kind of cool and beautiful, how his skin would glow against mine, how our bodies together looked like art.

Well, that one day - after he'd railed against the Federal Reserve Board, NAFTA, the gun lobby and the neo-industrial complex - we fed the crickets and went to bed. When I say went to bed, I mean, we made love. I used to call it s.e.x, but Gideon said I might as well call it rape. Making love was all about the mind. One time, in a position that would have been beautiful art, he said, 'Look at me. Really look at me.' I didn't like looking at people when I did it, like those tribes afraid part of their soul will peel away if someone takes a picture of them. When Gideon and I did lock eyes, I must admit, it felt different. Like we were - for a moment - part of the same picture.

That night, we did it again. I couldn't say for sure if the condom broke or not, but it all felt weird, and Gideon said, 'The whole condom-breaking-thing is a myth.' But we looked at it under the light, the condom looking all dead and slimy, and finally he threw the thing across the room, where it stuck to the wall like a slug, then fell. 'f.u.c.king Freestyles Freestyles! Who the h.e.l.l buys f.u.c.king Freestyles Freestyles?'

'They're free at the clinic,' I said. 'What do you want, organic condoms?' We looked it over again but that didn't stop it from being broke. Then Gideon made a look that just about sent me over the edge.

I had to think. I went in the bathroom and sat on the toilet. I'd done everything right. I hadn't gotten pregnant or done drugs or hurt anybody. I had a little life, working at Pita Delicious, serving up burgers and falafel. Almost everything there was awful, but the falafels weren't half bad. It was at Pita Delicious that I first met Gideon with his bobbing nosetip and Afro-Jewish hair. The Syrian guys who owned the place always made me go and talk to him, because they didn't like him. The first couple of times he came in he'd tried talking to them about the Middle East and the Palestinians and whatnot. Even though he was on their side, they still hated him. 'Talk to the Jew,' they said, whenever he came in. Soon we were eating falafels on my break, with Gideon helping me plot out how I was going to go back to school, which was just a figure of speech because I hadn't entered school in the first place.

When I came back to bed, Gideon was splayed out on top of the blanket, slices of moonlight on his bony body. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's get a pregnancy test.'

'Don't you know anything? It's not going to work immediately.' He made a weird face, and asked, 'Is this the voice of experience talking?'

I looked at him. 'Everyone knows,' I said, trying to sound calm and condescending, 'that it's your first missed period.'

He mouthed Okay, Okay, real slowly, like I was the crazy one. real slowly, like I was the crazy one.

When my period went AWOL, I took the pregnancy test in the bathroom at Pita Delicious. I don't know why. I guess I didn't want Gideon hovering over me. I didn't even tell him when I was going to do it. One pink stripe. Negative. I should have been relieved, relieved to have my lame life back, but the surprising thing was that I wasn't. Then I did something I never thought I'd do, something unlike anything I've ever done before: it was really simple to get a pink marker, and take off the plastic cover and draw another little stripe. Two stripes, Two stripes, the test said the test said, means you're pregnant.

When I got back home, I told him the test was positive, and flicked it into his lap: 'What do you care?'

I told him that I didn't know what I was going to do - what we we were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he put his arm around me, like I'd just told him I had AIDS and he'd mustered the courage to give me a hug. were going to do. He paced in front of the crickets for a while. Then he put his arm around me, like I'd just told him I had AIDS and he'd mustered the courage to give me a hug.

'What're we gonna do? do?' I asked. I don't know what I expected - whether I thought I'd catch him in a lie, or he'd say something about not wanting the baby, or what - I forgot. All I knew was that something was pressing down on me, drowning me. If he'd said anything, anything at all, I would have been fine. If he'd start talking about the dialectic or about mesothelioma or aioli or how many types of cancer you could get from one little Newport menthol - I'd have been all right. Even if he cursed me out and blamed me and said he didn't want the baby - I'd have understood.

But he didn't say anything. I saw everything he was thinking, though. I saw him thinking about his parents - Sy and Rita - growing worried in their condo's sunny Sarasota kitchen; I saw him never finishing his thesis and going to work for some grubby non-profit where everyone ate tempeh and couldn't wear leather and almost had a Ph.D.; I saw him hauling the kid around to parks, saying it was the best thing he'd ever done. Really. The best.

I walked out of that room, out of that house he rented with its really nice wood everywhere. I kept walking away, quickly at first, then so fast that the tears were the only thing keeping me from burning myself out like a comet. I wasn't running from Gideon anymore, but even if he was following me, it was too late. Even with no baby, I could see there'd be no day when I'd meet Sy and Rita, no day when I'd quit Pita Delicious before they quit me, no day when I'd hang around a table of students talking about post-post-feminism, no day when Gideon and I would lock hands in front of the house we'd just bought. Anyone could have told him it was too late for that, for us, but Gideon was Gideon, and I could hear him calling after me, hoping the way he always did that the words would do the chasing for him.

Gordon

Andrew O'Hagan

1. Pride.

They say Gordon nearly lost an eye in the 1950s, playing football by a slagheap on the edge of Kirkcaldy. 'Never mind,' said his father on the walk back from the Infirmary. 'We're all half blind in the face of Divinity.' Gordon felt a painful nip under the nurse's bandage and saw a presentation of cold stars in the road's tarmac. Years later he remembered that walk home and the way he had felt proud at the perfect ordinariness of his school shoes. 'That's a likeable person, that doctor,' his father had said with a cough as Gordon walked out in front. 'He knows how to be a doctor. He believes every man must suffer a little damage.'

2. Romance.

There was a linoleum factory up on the main road and Gordon could see it smoking from his room at the manse. He always had that strange ability - one emboldened by his reading of books and plays - to conjure some kind of high romance out of an industrial scene, though neither of his brothers had time for books, being busy all the while with haircuts and phone calls. Gordon would memorize quotations and say them to himself under the bathwater with his ears crowding around with noise. His eye was better by then and his father was deeper in league with the Lord. Gordon would stand in the talc.u.m-powdered air of the bathroom muttering calculations and strange moral sums about the cause of Hamlet's unhappiness. His mother knew her second son was bound for Edinburgh when he came down one evening with a sullen face. 'The problem in Hamlet Hamlet is the ghost,' he said. 'He's imprudent. He's unwise. You can't command a person's conscience. And by forcing a family into action you kill them all.' is the ghost,' he said. 'He's imprudent. He's unwise. You can't command a person's conscience. And by forcing a family into action you kill them all.'

3. Value.

Baked beans became a subject for a while. Gordon worked out that each bean had a certain value to the world, but he felt it curious that some beans were eager for their own preferment. On toast, some of those beans had a truly remarkable orange l.u.s.tre, and it seemed the biggest beans exactly understood - in a way the pulpy and burst ones certainly did not - what their role might be in the perfect meal. At his student flat in the Gra.s.smarket, the dishes were known to pile up in the general desolation of a Belfast sink, but Gordon was busy accommodating the facts of life to a nourishing vision of the future. He never got drunk because he feared more than anything a loss of control, and so, on Friday nights, as the squads of local boys went skidding up the Lothian Road fuelled by pints of lager, Gordon would be inside the Cameo watching old movies about blind pianists or soldiers mangled by war and self-consciousness. He often picked up a bag of chips amid the broad, late-night fraternity of the Gra.s.smarket, and would cradle them up the tenement stairs to have with his beans. That was the essence of his student years: the vapour of warm newspaper soaked in patches of vinegar.

4. Reason.

That's a terrible black sloshing out there in the North Sea. The very idea of people being trapped on those oil rigs for weeks at a time began to unsettle Gordon's sense of the perfectly deployed and the reasonably useful life, but then again the 1960s offered a vista of possibilities for the modernizing of Scotland, and it looked as if oil might certainly have its part to play in all that. It was just, to Gordon, that the substance itself seemed to be so little separate from the conditions of its retrieval. Dark, I mean. All dark. And he couldn't get away from that notion of living men with healthy bones using machines to suck out the dead carbon liquor of the earth. 'Wasn't that a wee bit on the savage side?' He said this several times to a girl he met for coffee at the George Hotel, and she paid close attention with her beautiful green eyes before saying she had better get going or she was liable to miss her bus.

5. Form.

He saw copies of his first book in the window of a leftist bookshop in Glasgow and had to admit he felt a tear forming in the corner of his better eye. He had captured - as was readily admitted by the Greenock Telegraph Greenock Telegraph - the often under-described lives of Scottish old-age pensioners in the second half of the century, and had done so in a prose of untrammelled epic beauty. He had invented a fragmentary style that was best suited to capture the frayed lives of his subjects, and the - the often under-described lives of Scottish old-age pensioners in the second half of the century, and had done so in a prose of untrammelled epic beauty. He had invented a fragmentary style that was best suited to capture the frayed lives of his subjects, and the Dundee Courier Dundee Courier, having caught Gordon presenting his findings to a formal gathering of accountants at the rear of Milne's Bar, was ready and indeed very able to form the view that the author showed considerable form as an orator.

6. Sensibility.

Gordon was forever finding restaurant receipts in the pockets of his suits or stuffed in his wallet. Sometimes they weren't receipts exactly but yellow Switch carbons, indicating how much he'd spent and whether service was included but not particularly saying what had been ordered. Over recent years he had developed an active resentment against fizzy water. When the taxi brought him back one night to Millbank, he pondered that Islington drink, and watched the news with a growing sense of hatred.

7. Enlightenment.

There is a statue of Adam Smith that stands in a fork in the road across from the church where Gordon's father once presided. The son always thought of the memorial as a thing covered in snow, though in truth the Scottish sun was always more likely to pour down its benisons on that n.o.ble pate, that head with the world-sized mind within, the very image of it leading out the brilliant and patient sons of Kirkcaldy. Gordon went back to look at the statue after his father's death in 1998. It was indeed snowing that particular day, and Gordon looked at the stone Adam Smith as if he might discover some marks on that famous countenance left there by his own former scrutiny. Gordon fancied the tenets of the Enlightenment might in fact offer a suggestion about how to live. He saw too little of himself in Smith's face, but felt the statue looked altogether smaller than how he remembered it back in the days of the school certificate and the worries of Higher English. There was no one about at that early hour, but Gordon instructed his driver to go if he would and see if he couldn't bring a ladder from the church hall.

8. Politics.

London is a smear of buses and chances in the afternoon. How colourful too is the capital city, how full of the foreign arts. Right at the opening to Horse Guards Parade a soldier stands on his horse wearing the helmet and red tunic, his sword resting on his right shoulder, the tourists taking their pictures and laughing at duty. A blonde girl from Athens, Georgia, and her friend threaten all of a sudden to climb up and draw on the guard with lipstick. They whisper to one another about how it is against the rules for him to speak and about how he can't move too much either. The guard simply stands there as if their dreams were none of his business. The guard can hardly hear them in fact, and he merely feels tired at the base of his spine and is gagging for a pint. He wonders if his wife made it to the supermarket, and isn't there a great offer on those stubby bottles of German beer? As his thought fades into the wan, persistent, Shakespearean sun, the guard looks up to see Gordon pa.s.sing in the Whitehall traffic, his head against the window and his one good eye on the road.

Hanwell Snr

Zadie Smith

Hanwell Snr was Hanwell's father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his person - he was a 'big personality', in that odious phrase - but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A f.e.c.kless and slapdash man - worse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all.

Hanwell Snr came to Hanwell like a comet, at long intervals. He was there when Hanwell was born, surely, and six years after that on a beach in Brighton, holding Hanwell by the armpits and dangling him over a pier. Hanwell Snr spent that evening away from his family, to whom he gave a little money with the generous idea of a round of fish and chips. It didn't stretch as far as that. A boyo, with charm in spades. That sounds antique, but 'boyo' was the word one would have used at the time. First to raise a gla.s.s and last to put it down - very much hail fellow, well met - although he was never a drunk, and never incompetent. The type to sing along with those far worse gone than himself, with the idea of gaining advantage over them in their weakness. Back at home, he had a machine he put tuppence in and a f.a.g came out, like in a pub. Also, an eye for his wife's nearest neighbour, a widow, Sue Boyd - Sue, Sue, I'm very much in love with you, to the tune of a famous ballad of the time, catching her round the waist and waltzing her from the back door to the gate, Mrs Hanwell smiling helplessly on from the window.

A big man physically, far bigger than Hanwell. And then later, maybe that same year, maybe the next, on November the fifth, suddenly at the back door in the blackness with the gift of some penny bangers. He didn't stay to light these with Hanwell. Then gone again. 'Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back': a common enough refrain in England, then and now. Only, Hanwell Snr was one of the periodic returnees. This makes it worse, as previously discussed. Leaving Hanwell standing in the blackness in short trousers holding bangers. This was never forgotten. It persists, a fleck of the late 1920s. It is recorded here by a descendant of Hanwell Snr of whom he could have had no notion, being as unreal to him as broadband or goblins. No one can explain the process by which these things are retained while much else vanishes - a lot of sentimental rubbish is written on the subject. Hanwell himself kept faith with scientific explanations. He knew nothing whatsoever of science. Dimly, he imagined chemical flare-ups in the brain chemistry, arresting moving images (his a.n.a.logy came from photographic film, of which he had some experience), and that these 'flare-ups' are random in their occasion and un.o.bservable at the moment they happen. Of course, the writing of this is also a kind of 'flare-up', albeit of a sadder, secondary and parasitic kind.

In the mid-thirties, Hanwell Snr went to Canada, an attempt to make his fortune in logging. Hanwell was given a brief, thrilling tour of the ship before it sailed, although not by his father; a crewman put a candle on a thick bra.s.s rail and thus demonstrated to Hanwell how crosswise scratches turn orderly and concentric in thrown light. Three years later Hanwell Snr returned, still with no money. He was now able to roll a cigarette with one hand the way the cowboys did. Hanwell was not especially impressed. Subsequently, Hanwell Snr became a conductor on the buses. Then came the war, from which he never really returned, having fallen for a middle-cla.s.s lady who drove an ambulance. Turned up once at Hanwell's own barracks, with a new name - 'Bill' - and the affectations of an Irishman. It was eerie to witness. Words held no security with Hanwell Snr, served as no anchor, bore no relation to the things of the world. A darker shade of this same tendency is called 'psychopathy'. He took out a few filthy photos from the Far East and told amusing, believable anecdotes set in Kerry. This, to a stranger, would appear to fit well with the copper-wire hair and the close eyes. Hanwell wished himself more of a stranger. As it stood, he could only wince inwardly at this second, false personality, while making a good show of laughing along as Bill made a friend of all the young soldiers whom Hanwell himself had not yet managed to befriend. 'Good sort, your old man! Lively, good for a laugh!' Said approvingly, and probably true (Hanwell tried hard to be generous in his interpretations), if you happened not to be his son. If you happened not to be his son. Bill walked out two hours later, merry as Christmas. Wasn't seen again by Hanwell for twelve years.

It was August of 1956. Hanwell got word that his father was nicely set up with a little business in an obscure village in the county of Kent. Without any real expectation - or none he could confess to himself - Hanwell got on his bike. This time, he would appear. It was nothing to him, back then, to ride from London to Kent. He was young, relatively speaking, though he wouldn't have thought himself especially so, with a young family already. He did not know then that a second family lay in wait for him, not yet sprung, coiled in his future.

A roasting August day. Hanwell had devised a water carrier out of an old plastic kerosene bottle and strapped it to the crossbar - an invention a little ahead of its time. He powered along a newly built stretch of the A20, wherever possible nipping off and taking byroads through the villages, feeling that the air was purer there. I hope I can say 'hedgerow' and it will be clear that I don't mean to be poetic, but only historically accurate. Hedgerow, thick and briary, caught his shirt twice and made it ragged round the elbow. He had it in his mind - as I have it in mine, with equal stubbornness, when I am writing at length - not to stop before a certain point; he would eat at his destination and not before. One more mile, one more chapter, one more mile, one more chapter. The village was in a little valley; Hanwell swooned round the bends and rolled into town, stopping at the village green, which was all the village there was. Two establishments stood nearby: a redbrick pub with pretty clumps of lavender growing in the window pots and, on the other side of the green, a luridly painted fish-and-chip van. Hanwell knew better than to hope. He got off his bike and pushed it with a sure touch round the perimeter, the faintest pressure of left hand to saddle. It was four o'clock - the van was shut up. He leaned the bike against gypsy-red lettering outlined in gold: HANWELL'S FINEST FISH AND CHIPS. He went to sit in the gra.s.s, beneath a tree, overlooking the cricket pitch and the marshy land near the ponds. He was unable to absorb these various lessons in the colour green. Instead, there was smell: sear-leaved, blowzy roses, last of the summer. Collect them, give them to your sister, 1931.

Recipe for Irene Hanwell's Lady's Perfume Six roses (stolen, petals removed) Water from the tap Empty milk bottle Squish petals in fist to release the odour. Put in bottle. Fill with water.

His feet stank. He took off his shoes. At home he had a wife who was not well, not well in a manner he could do nothing about nor understand, but, as he sat here now in the sun, the tense, resistant nub of flesh inside his back resolved itself for the first time in months. He lay down. His spine pressed into the soil a notch at a time, undid him. Upside down was a land of female legs. He was fond of these new bell-shaped skirts, wide enough to crawl under and be kept safe, and wished he had waited to marry, or married differently. He thought, What if I stayed here? Let the sun swallow me, and the orange dazzle under my eyelids become not just the thing I see but the thing that I am, and let the one daisy with the bent stem and the rose smell and the girl upside down on the pub bench eating an upside-down ploughman's with her upside-down friend be the whole of the law and the girth of the world. Wasn't it the work of moments, of a little paint, to change HANWELL'S FINEST to HANWELL & HANWELL?

Note: I have reconst.i.tuted Hanwell's thoughts for you, as seem likely to me, and as sound nicest. In the novel Middlemarch Middlemarch, we find the old adage of a man's charity growing in direct proportion to its distance from his own door. This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else manically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconst.i.tute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

It was 1956, as mentioned above. There was nothing but the sun, and Hanwell and the sun. Lying in a patch of long gra.s.s, Hanwell dreamed a conversation:

HANWELL SNR: (lying beside Hanwell) So you found me, then.

HANWELL: Yes, Alf. Wasn't I meant to?

HANWELL SNR: Now, look: have a smoke - don't get ahead of yourself.

HANWELL: (taking a Senior Service from its packet) Thank you.

HANWELL SNR: So, boy. How are you? I'm doing all right for myself, as you can see.

HANWELL: Ah, yes, indeed, and even so. Thus is it much liketh the great novel by George Eliot -

HANWELL SNR: Oh, don't talk guff, boy. You always do that - pretend you're something you're not and never have been. You never did read any of that. Anyone'd think you'd been up to the university, talking like I don't know what.