The Gap Year

 © 2010 by the author.

 The first time was an accident. It was a cold, rainy Sunday toward the end of winter. Douglas had everything he wanted; there was no need to go out. He read the newspaper while he drank his coffee. He gave the kitchen and bathroom a long overdue cleaning. He had brought work home from the office and devoted an hour to reading the report of the administrative reorganisation committee and writing a response to it. Then he picked up a book and read. It wasn’t until he went to bed that he realised he had not said, had not heard, a word all day long. It had been, he decided, not a bad way to spend the day. Peaceful, unstressed. Although he didn’t know it at the time, that was his first day of silence.

The next day was a horror. The train into the city sat unmoving for half an hour between stops. No explanation was given for the delay. After five minutes had passed, a man seated two rows ahead of Douglas took out his mobile and rung his office to announce that he would arrive late for a meeting. His example catalysed the other passengers, and a wave of phone calls spread outward from him. A babble of shouted conversations soon filled the car, as each person struggled to be heard over the din. Douglas tried to bury himself in the newspaper, but the noise prevented him from concentrating.

 The underground was packed by the time the train arrived, and he had to ride one stop past his usual station before he could make my way to an exit and get off. He had to rush to the office to arrive in time for an appointment with a fractious author. He needn’t have hurried. Lydia Paskings wasn’t there. When she showed up an hour late, no one had to announce her arrival. Her progress down the hall toward Douglas’s office was marked by a tirade about the stupidity of the taxi driver who had brought her from her hotel.

 After complaining for the first fifteen minutes and demanding sympathy and a freshly brewed cup of coffee from the assembled staff, she turned to Douglas and asked irritably what he was going to do about his company’s ‘criminal’ refusal to arrange the author’s tour she wanted. When Douglas explained in a studiedly calm voice that the declining sales of her books made a tour infeasible, she exploded again. Douglas and the rest of the staff were treated to another outburst. It ended with her shouting that she would take her book elsewhere unless her wishes were satisfied. From somewhere down the hall came the sound of laughter, quickly muted. Douglas found it hard to keep from smiling. It has been almost too easy to manoeuvre her into making her oft-repeated threat again. ‘As you wish, Lydia. Have your agent call me. We will arrange to cancel the contract.’

 She paused in mid-rant as the meaning of his words sunk in. ‘You can’t mean that. I’m one of your best-selling authors.’

 ‘If that is true, Lydia, then you will have no trouble finding another publisher. Allow me to have the porter find you a taxi.’  Douglas lifted the phone and buzzed the porter’s desk on the ground floor. ‘Ms Paskings is about to leave. Please ring for a taxi for her. Thank you.’ Douglas stood up and opened a cabinet. He pulled out a manuscript box and handed it to the suddenly quiet author. ‘I think you will find this in the same pristine shape in which it was delivered to us.’

 Lydia Paskings suddenly found her voice. She slammed the box against Douglas’s desk. It slid onto the floor and the pages of the manuscript cascaded out. ‘I’ve made this publisher what it is today. If you think I’m going to stay here and be insulted . . .’

 Douglas cut in. ‘No, under the circumstances asking you to stay would be unreasonable on my part. I’m sure that a taxi has been found for you by now.’

‘I can find my own taxi.’

‘As you wish.’

Lydia stood up. She seemed uncertain of what to do next. Douglas knelt down and gathered the loose sheets of the manuscript and stuffed them back into the box. When he handed it to her, she appeared stunned by the suddenness of the dismissal. She stared at the box as if she didn’t know what it was. After a moment, she picked up her purse and set it atop the box. ‘You are a bastard. You know that, don’t you?’ She spoke softly, as if to herself. If anything, she appeared dismayed and saddened by the realisation of this side of Douglas’s personality.

Douglas made a dismissive gesture with his hand. He wasn’t sure whether he was indicating to Lydia that she should leave or whether he was pushing away her assessment of him. She took one final look at him and then left.  She hadn’t walked twenty feet before she found her voice again and started shouting. ‘If this is the way you treat authors, you soon won’t have any left. I’ll make sure that everyone learns of this outrage. All of you should start looking for jobs now. This place won’t be around much longer.’ She continued in the same vein until the lift arrived.

The lift doors had barely closed before Miles Pope, the managing director of the press, stood in the door of Douglas’s office. ‘Are we rid of her then?’ More and more often of late, he delegated the task of dealing with difficult authors to Douglas.

‘I believe so. I will call her agent. Sophie has already prepared the papers voiding the contract for the current book and arranging for the reversions of the rights to the previous books as they go out of print. I’m sure her agent and Lydia will make demands, but the matter should be settled within a week or two. She will need to find another publisher quickly. If the rumours are true, she needs the income to support herself in the style she wants.’

Behind Miles, several staff were looking out a window in the corridor overlooking the front entrance. They were pointing and giggling. Douglas heard one of them say, ‘There’s the old cow now. Pity the poor driver who picks her up.’ Another glanced around. When she saw Douglas watching them, she held her hands up and mimed applause.

Miles nodded with satisfaction. ‘Good work, Douglas. I knew we could rely on you to sort this out properly.’

‘Happy to have been of help, Miles.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look particularly happy.’

 To his surprise, Douglas realised that Miles’s assessment was accurate. He wasn’t happy about it at all, and even a man he thought unusually insensitive had seen that. ‘I’m becoming too good at this. I hope at least that I haven’t grown to like it. That worries me sometimes—that I am become good at being a bastard.’

A brief look of annoyance crossed Miles’s face. He did not welcome the intrusion of moral concerns into his business. If necessary, he could countenance the occasional platitude, but ethics were in his opinion best limited to unctuous utterances at the proper moment—after-dinner speeches and the like. As always when confronted by an employee acting in a way he found disagreeable, he opted for a work cure. ‘Well, we have a meeting with the design and marketing people shortly. I’ll see you there.’ He shot Douglas a brief speculative look as he left.

Douglas sighed inwardly, both because of the prospect of the meeting and because of that speculative look. Miles would be watching now for any recurrence of doubt or hesitation on Douglas’s part about playing his assigned role of hatchet man. Douglas knew that if he gave Miles much evidence of second thoughts, he risked being called in by another director and sent packing. He began gathering the files he would need for the meeting.He wasn’t looking forward to it. The meeting promised to be raucous and contentious. The heads of both departments would show up with an unnecessarily large contingent of staff from their offices. Their claques, thought Douglas. A dozen people getting absolutely nothing done while their managers wrangled over trifles.

The staff meeting was worse than Douglas had anticipated. The head of the design department and her staff seemed to view it as a forum to vent their inane complaints about being expected to actually do some work and bend their artistic sensibilities to production schedules. The marketing department rejected three-quarters of the proposed dust jackets for the fall list and complained that the mock-up for the catalogue was overdue. Miles sat at the head of the table, his elbows resting on the table and his hands steepled before his face. His eyes shifted from one speaker to the next. He appeared to be enjoying the tumult and noise. The perennial argument between the two departments was of long-standing and, in Douglas’s opinion, was approaching mortal warfare because of Miles’s reluctance to make a decision and then enforce it.

When the two department heads appealed to Miles and asked for a decision, he turned to Douglas. ‘You’re being very quiet today, Douglas. What is your opinion?’

Douglas recognised his cue. He spoke directly to Miles, as if the others were not present. ‘Sorry, Miles. My mind was elsewhere. I was thinking again about our discussion last week of outsourcing design and production work and of looking into hiring an outside marketing firm.’ Douglas did not look away from Miles, but he knew from the sudden silence in the room that he had the attention of everyone there. Douglas had in fact mentioned the possibility of eliminating the two departments only in jest, as a way to end the bickering. ‘But that is a discussion for the future. For the present, we must deal with the current problems with the current staff.’

Douglas looked around the table and found the head of the design department. ‘Philippa, I would remind you—again—that we will not remain in business if your department does not do its job.’

Philippa Henricks began to protest. ‘I cannot cope with this workload with the present staffing levels. I have spoken with you about this before and . . .’

‘Enough.’ Douglas held up his hand to stop her. ‘Your staff is adequate to do the work assigned it. It’s just needs to be better managed.’ The marketing department tried hard to suppress its smiles.The design department looked dismayed, with one exception. One of the more junior members of that group had looked up when Douglas spoke and then nodded almost imperceptibly. Douglas tried to remember his name. Robert something. ‘Now, the catalogue needs to go to the printer by the end of next week. That is an absolute deadline. I’m assigning Robert to do the design work.’ When everyone turned to look at the young man who had nodded, Douglas knew that he had at least remembered the first name correctly. ‘You will be working with . . .’ Douglas glanced down the row of marketing people present. ‘with Alexis.’ He picked out another young person he knew to be ambitious and anxious to impress. ‘Both of you will report directly to Miles and myself. Stay on after the meeting and we will discuss a schedule.’

‘Now, as for the jackets for the fall season.’ Douglas reached across the table and picked up the stack of boards with the designs. He turned to Miles again and held up each board in turn. ‘This one is fine, don’t you think?’ The two of them went through the various designs, accepting most of them and rejecting a few. Miles asserted his independence by disagreeing with Douglas about one cover. Douglas deferred to him. When they finished, there were two piles on the table. Douglas indicated the pile of rejects and began apportioning the work of revising them to various members of the two departments, ignoring the heads of the two departments. He was amused to see how quickly the staff abandoned their loyalty to their supervisors in their haste to demonstrate their willingness to follow him. When he finished, he turned to Miles and waited for him to speak.

The director smiled broadly and beamed at everyone seated around the table. ‘Well, I call that a good meeting. We have accomplished quite a bit today.’ Miles stood up and headed for the door. When Philippa Henricks tried to stop him, he said, ‘Sorry, I’m late for another meeting. Talk with Douglas.’

The look that Philippa shot Douglas said that she would rather talk with an axe-wielding psychopath. Her dislike of Douglas had become hatred in the past half-hour. It had been a mistake to promote her, thought Douglas. He wondered if the events of the meeting would encourage her to resign or whether she would attempt to hang on a bit longer. It might take more to get rid of her. She could be astonishingly dense about reading between the lines and understanding what was being said to her. The head of the marketing department would, Douglas expected, be more pliable. Andrew had proved himself capable of resilience in the past. The message to him had been delivered and received. Andrew will wait a day or two, thought Douglas, and then he will drop by to have a ‘chat’.

Douglas motioned Robert and Alexis forward to the chairs next to him. He picked up the mock-up of the catalogue and bent over it. The others filed out of the room.

******

The day left Douglas burdened with disgust, disgust at the people he had to deal with, disgust with his job, disgust with himself, at what he had become. His first thought upon leaving work was that the day had been crowded with noise. That thought was immediately followed by the admission to himself that he was also to blame. He had been too noisy. He had even enjoyed being noisy. He had enjoyed manoeuvring Lydia Paskings into cancelling her contract. He had enjoyed sorting Philippa out and removing the design department from her control. He enjoyed being Miles’s hatchet man. And the still, small voice at the back of his mind told him he should not have enjoyed those actions, no matter how necessary they had been. He hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time—surely there had been a time, he thought—when he would at least have tried to work with the two of them. It was as if the title of executive editor imposed a certain mode of behaviour quite apart from what he wanted to be. Words and names and titles had become tyrants that structured events and precipitated his actions. When had he let that happen? Had, he wondered, passed the point of no return? His life seemed to have escaped his control. Were his position and the status that went with it so important to him and his sense of self that he had to be what the job demanded he be?

It all came down to words. He used words the way a more physical man might use his fists, to batter and to wound. He had been trained to use words as weapons, to use them carefully to argue with implied disdain for his opponent’s intellect, to influence others with subtle deference and praise, to insult with the ironic quip. Even his pronunciations and his speech patterns immediately separated him from others and made his superior education apparent. Words were a constant invitation to misuse. He couldn’t control his use of them anymore. The wry comments escaped from his lips seemingly without thought on his part, bringing embarrassment to the target and amusement to the others. Was he capable of using words innocently again?

The quiet of his flat struck him the moment he walked through the door. The neighbourhood had little traffic at any time, but at night there was almost none. He was high enough above the street and the building solid enough that most of the noise was left far below. The front windows overlooked the park across the street. If they were open during the day, he could sometimes hear children playing there, but the park was seldom used at night, at least not by those who wished to draw attention to themselves by being noisy. He had bought the flat after the divorce, surrendering the one in which he had lived with Anne to her. He had brought only his clothes and books and personal belongings with him. All the furnishings had been new. He had intended to make it warm and inviting, but when confronted by a plethora of possibilities, he had opted to buy the first pieces of furniture that he found acceptable, a three-piece suite upholstered in an unobjectionably bland fabric.  He had bought the hooks and wire necessary to hang his pictures but stopped after placing one above the fireplace. The others remained stacked behind the sofa with their faces to the wall. At first he had invited people over for drinks or simple dinners, but gradually he had abandoned even that effort. He now socialised elsewhere, meeting his acquaintances and business associates in pubs or restaurants or in their homes.

Douglas liked it that way. The flat was his sanctuary. Its lack of claims on him and its sterile stillness, its palpable chill, were tonics to the office and the world outside. Nothing intruded on him here, nothing demanded that he be this rather than that. At the office he was what it required him to be. With his sister and her family, he was the good brother and, if generous gifts of money on the customary occasions counted, a good uncle to her children. With his neighbours, he was, as they were, careful to observe the boundary between friendliness and intrusiveness. With those with whom he socialised, he tried to be intelligent and witty, not without charm. But in his flat, he was free to be silent, to abandon the masks he wove from words.

Words were his only skill, and he was good at them. Words provided his living, and his colleagues and the authors he published relied on him to provide the words they needed. Sometimes words seemed the only thing left to him. He had once calculated that he was personally responsible for publishing close to three million words a year. He figured that indirectly he added another two million. Speech added another several hundred thousand. There were so many words in his mind. Fragments, groups of four or five words, would drift unbidden into his thoughts. He didn’t know why they arose. He seldom could trace a connection between his present and the words from his past. He would be working at his desk, reading a sales report or writing a memo, and suddenly he would experience a phrase like ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’.

Some mental quirk made his mind a random thicket of words in a dozen languages. And it had become worse as he had grown older. There seemed to be a bin labelled ‘foreign languages’ in his mind into which words from all the languages he had studied had been dumped. When he spoke French, he might insert a German equivalent in the middle of the sentence. Sometimes he felt that he hated all language.

His friends and colleagues treated his inability to forget as a parlour trick. His mind had become a reference work to be mined as a wonder or a resource. ‘Ask Douglas,’ they would say. ‘He’ll know the quote.’ And he did. He always did.

Words. Was it possible, he wondered, to live without words? Even the thought of doing so had to be framed in words. If one thought about being conscious, consciousness returned, in words. But was it possible to be conscious without words?

******

‘I don’t understand, Douglas.’ Miles lifted the letter from his desk and stared at it as if he expected it to speak to him.

‘I am resigning, Miles. As of May 30th.’

‘But why? You give no reason. Have you found a position with another publisher? Is it the money? We will better any offer you have been made.’

‘No, there has been no other offer. I am simply resigning. I plan to take a year off, and then I shall re-evaluate whether I wish to work again. A gap year, as it were.’

‘Gap years are for children, Douglas. People your age don’t take them. That’s ridiculous. If you need a leave of absence for, say, two months, I’m sure we can arrange that.’

Miles waved the resignation letter about helplessly. Douglas suddenly realised that Miles literally did not know what to do. This was the sort of task that he or someone else handled for Miles, and Miles had no idea of the steps he needed to take. ‘I will make all the arrangements with personnel, Miles. All the paperwork, that sort of thing. If I might make a suggestion, I think that Eleanor Williams is ready to take on more responsibilities. But it might be a good idea to separate out my financial oversight tasks and transfer those to Adrianna.’

As he had discovered in the past in dealing with Miles and had had so many occasions to practice, it was best to act as if the decision had been made and to focus Miles’s attention on the details of carrying it out. Miles wasn’t happy about losing his services, but he soon accepted that as a fact.

At the end of the discussion, Miles returned to the basic question. ‘But what will you do?’

Douglas had thought long about how he would answer that question. It was inevitable that people would be curious and want to know what he proposed to do during the year. But he was reluctant to tell them the truth, both because he knew that they would find it incomprehensible and try to argue him out of his decision and because he felt that his chosen course would remain his own possession if he kept it hidden. It would also be easier to follow it if no one knew what his intentions were. So he lied. ‘I’m going to travel. There are many places I’ve long wanted to see. But I don’t want to tie myself down to a schedule. If I find a place I like, I may decide to stay there for a month or two before moving on.’

His story was successful. At the farewell party on his last day at work, he was given a set of luggage and several items advertised as useful to travellers. His sister recommended some places that she and her husband had enjoyed.

*****

In May, Douglas spent his evenings and weekends preparing. He boxed his books and CDs and stored them, along with the CD player, the television, and the radio, as well as all the other noise-making and word-generating gadgets he owned, in the storage space in the basement assigned to his unit. He arranged with an accounting service to pay his monthly bills and for the telephone service to be suspended. He stripped his flat of everything but the essentials he needed. The evening of his last work day, he answered all the emails in his personal email account and then turned the computer off and carried it to the basement. It would remain off for the next year.

He returned to the lounge, turned on the one remaining lamp, and reread the memo he had written himself a final time. For at least the next year, he would reduce his contacts with words to a minimum. He would not initiate a conversation with anyone. He had thought about vowing not to speak at all but then decided that if the building manager came to the door and asked if he had a leak in the ceiling, he could hardly refuse to answer. And if he needed to visit a doctor, it might prove difficult to mime his symptoms. But he would keep speech to a minimum. Some trials runs and experiments had revealed that it was easier to say nothing in larger stores than in smaller ones. The workers in smaller shops interacted more with customers, but in large stores nothing more than a smile and a nod were required.

Nor would he intentionally listen to others speaking. Of course, he would hear others speaking on the street or in shops but he would not seek out sound of any kind.

And he would neither write nor read anything. He had removed all written materials from his flat. The only words that remained were the names on the appliances or the writing on food packages and the like. Covering those over would serve only to draw attention to them. He thought he could be disciplined enough to avoid all but the most cursory of contacts with the remaining words in his flat. When he finished reading the memo, he folded it and threw it in the bin.

He was ready to begin his search for silence, for wordlessness.

*****

Douglas quickly fell into a routine. He awoke early, between three and four he thought, and then went for a walk as soon as it became light enough to see. His route took about two hours to walk. He intentionally chose quiet streets. He seldom saw more than a few early morning joggers or people leaving for work. When he returned to his flat, he made a simple breakfast for himself. Then he satin the lounge until late afternoon, when he ate his second meal of the day. After he had washed and put away the dishes, he resumed sitting until he went to bed around eight. He kept the drapes on all the windows closed and never turned on a light. 

Words proved more difficult to exclude from his mind than he had expected, however. He would be out walking and glance in a shop window and see words. Every street corner had a sign. Every car and van carried a name. Words were everywhere. They were scrawled in the most unlikely places. Even in the park there were signs directing one to exits or to the children’s play area. He hadn’t noticed before how ubiquitous they were until he consciously tried to eliminate them from his life. Everything had a label, as if it would not exist if its name were not acknowledged in writing, as if we could not identify a loaf of bread unless its packaging stressed what it contained.

There was also, Douglas found, an extraordinary amount of speech on the street, even during his early morning walks. The quiet of a suburban street would be interrupted by the sound of the early morning news on a radio or television coming through an open window. Van drivers making deliveries to the shops or joggers rushing past him chattered into their phones. Even the earplugs he bought did not keep all sound out.

His days were filled with thought. He even thought about not thinking. Emptying his mind of words seemed an impossible task, the more so as he intentionally tried to do so. He tried staring at the wall and making his mind as blank as it, but the colour reminded him of the flat he had shared with Anne and that started a chain of thoughts about her and their marriage and the reasons for its failure. He tried occupying his days with simple repetitive tasks such as cleaning but found himself compulsively reading the instructions on the bottle of cleansing liquid.

He was more successful at carrying out his vow not to speak, but even in that area he found himself uttering a few words each week. Another early morning walker might nod at him and say ‘good morning’ as they passed, and without thinking Douglas would return the greeting. An assistant in a store would ask if Douglas had found everything he wanted and he would reply ‘yes’. Or a neighbour would stop him as he entered the building and comment on the weather.  Douglas could hardly refuse to speak without making an issue of not speaking, which would defeat his project of rendering words irrelevant to his life.

His frustration with words intensified as he struggled to do without them. It was as if the words were fighting back, overwhelming him with their insistent immediacy, their indispensability, their ability to organise raw experience into chains of ideas, to structure chaotic reality to meet their nature. He began to dread each day with its new torments, the cacophony of sound and meaning that invaded his life as soon as he awoke. But he found no haven in sleep. His dreams grew to taunt him with words. He dreamt of vocabulary lessons, of words on chalkboards, books, manuscripts, memos, letters, shopping lists, notices in the tube stations, signs in windows, lectures, plays, movies, television programmes, newsreaders, presenters, art galleries filled with pictures of words, words painted on hoardings and pavements and the sides of buses, words interjecting themselves into his consciousness from signs, food tins, stray bits of refuse on the street. No matter where he turned, no matter where he looked, words attacked him.

His attempt to avoid words developed into a mania. He began to plot how to keep away from them. He put off shopping for food because the stores were masses of words. He took to rushing into the grocery store and quickly buying only items he could decant from the packages and store in plastic bags and glass jars. As autumn arrived and the days shortened, he began taking his walks in the dark. He kept his head down. He wore earplugs to exclude the noise. He cut the labels out of his clothes.

The breakthrough came unexpectedly. He wasn’t even aware of it until it was over. One day he suddenly realised that it grown dark while he was sitting in his chair. He hadn’t been conscious of it. The previous memory was of finishing the washing up from breakfast and stowing the dishes away. He didn’t even remember walking into the lounge and sitting down. But he had to have done so several hours before. He couldn’t call to mind a thing, a word, he had thought of during the interim.

Thereafter he found it easier to lose himself. At first he could do so only in his flat. But he soon learned to enter the blankness even while walking. Words and thoughts ceased to assault his consciousness. Objects, situations, presented themselves, and he dealt with them appropriately, but without words.

Douglas even found that he could choose to think in words, or not. He could choose to hear them, or not. He could choose to be conscious of them, or not. And when he opted to be in words, the words grew richer and more laden with significance. It was as if he came to them afresh each time and uncovered new wonders in them.

Words had lost their power, and he was gaining control over them. ‘In the beginning was the Word,’ the evangelist claimed. And there were as many beginnings as there were words. He could combine them in new ways, create new universes with them, each with a logic determined by the single originating word. Everything was possible. He had become the being whose word engenders a world.

Later, it would occur to him that he was becoming insane, at least what the world thought of as insane. The thought amused him. The belief that he had been liberated from words and had gained mastery over them would be seen as a delusion, the raving of a mad man.

******

Douglas was only vaguely aware of the others at first. When he had first started the regimen of early morning walks, the park across the street from the building that housed his flat was deserted.At most there might be someone walking a dog or hurrying along the path toward the train station. When he thought about it later, it occurred to him that the gatherings had to have started with one person, but he was never sure. Perhaps there had always been a group since the beginning. One day as he left the building, he glanced across the street, and there on the two benches directly opposite sat four people. Behind them stood another half-dozen people. It was hard to tell in the half-light but all of them appeared to be watching him. Thereafter, they were always people waiting in the park when he emerged from the building. The number varied but grew slowly over time. Other than watching him, they did nothing. They were still there when he returned from his walk.

He took to pulling the curtain in the lounge aside and peeking out. His return seemed to be a signal for them to begin leaving. Within half an hour after his return, their numbers had noticeably dwindled, but two or three of them always remained. No matter when he checked, there was always someone sitting there quietly and watching his building.

Then there were the flowers. At first there had been only the occasional solitary flower on the pavement outside his building. Just a flower on the pavement close to the kerb. It might well have been dropped by a passerby. But they grew more frequent and more numerous as the days went by. Within a few weeks a pile of flowers greeted him every morning. Not just a flower or two, but bunches of them, some of them still surrounded by clear cellophane wrap from the florist’s shop.

A young woman was the first to approach him. She was standing outside the entrance to his building. There was nothing to distinguish her from thousands of other people her age. She wore jeans and a short jacket.  Small haversack dangled from one shoulder. When Douglas returned from his daily walk, she stepped forward and held out a rose to him. When he hesitated to take it, she pressed her palms together, with the rose held between them, in the South Asian gesture of greeting and then bowed slightly. She again presented the rose to Douglas, who took it. She smiled and then bowed again, backing away a step or two. Neither of them spoke.

A piece of paper had been folded around the stem of the rose. The young woman pointed to it to draw Douglas’s attention to it. He opened it, expecting to see a message. But the paper was blank. It held no words. Douglas smiled at the woman. He had been understood. He moved his right hand in an arc through the air. It simply felt the right thing for him to do, as if he were blessing the gift-giver.

That action set a precedent. The flower-givers multiplied. Soon he was greeted each morning by a dozen people bearing flowers. He took to gathering the flowers together and then placing them on the pavement before making the blessing gesture. One day a young man drew his attention to the crowd of people standing in the park, and Douglas crossed the street, followed by the group that had been waiting outside the entrance to his building. The crowd parted as he neared, forming a pathway to one of the park benches. Douglas walked through the crowd, closely observed by a hundred people.

He sat down and motioned to the others to join him. Slowly at first, those nearest him began to sit as they understood his meaning. Soon only a few people were standing. A woman walking her dog outside the circle looked at them with curiosity. The dog lifted its nose and sniffed at the unexpected crowd of people who had lowered themselves to its level. Douglas closed his eyes and emptied his mind of words and sounds. He formed a picture of the crowd in his mind and projected a wave of wordlessness outward from himself. He sensed all sound within the radius of his thought ceasing. 

That first day, Douglas sat motionless and silent for close to an hour. When he opened his eyes, he found that the size of the crowd had increased. Many of them looked stunned and shaken. When Douglas stood, so did the others. They began to close in around him. The young man who had earlier indicated those waiting in the park was one of those seated nearest Douglas. He positioned himself in front of Douglas and motioned to others nearby to help him clear a path through the crowd. They formed a cordon around Douglas. When someone reached out a hand to touch Douglas, one of his protectors interposed himself between Douglas and the person. Anyone attempting to speak to Douglas was motioned to remain quiet. The crowd followed Douglas across the street. When the parade reached the entrance to his building, the young man held the door open for Douglas. When Douglas was inside, he turned to the crowd and said, ‘He will return tomorrow. Please join us then. Please allow him to rest now. Please respect his silence.’

The next morning the young man and four other young men stood outside the entrance to the building waiting for Douglas. They wore identical outfits—a black jumper over a white shirt, black trousers, black trainers. The neck and cuffs of the shirt extended beyond the jumper, forming a white band at neck and wrist. As Douglas turned to the left to follow the usual route of his morning walk, they silently took up places behind him. At the end of the walk, they escorted him across the street to the park. He sat on the same bench as on the previous day and repeated the period of silence. That became the daily routine.

As Douglas became used to the routine, he paid less attention to it. He was aware that the throng of observers in the park was growing and spilling onto the street. He knew that some in the crowd took pictures of him or videotaped him with their phones. He was conscious that things happened around him, but awareness carried no necessity to act. Events had ceased to be of much importance to him. He emerged each morning, took a walk, and then sat in the park for a time. If it was raining, someone held an umbrella over his head. Then he spent the rest of the day sitting in his flat.

The young man followed him into the flat one day. A short time later, a cup of tea appeared on the table beside Douglas’s chair. He drank it. He hadn’t made tea for himself for several weeks. He had forgotten how much he liked it. Later he found food on the table. He ate that. He thought it might be the first food he had eaten for several days. The young man stayed until it became dark outside. He spent most of the day sitting quietly behind Douglas. That, too, quickly became part of the day’s routine.

No one spoke to Douglas. His silence was respected. Anyone who felt a need to communicate spoke to the young man, who answered in laconic whispers. His presence relieved Douglas of any necessity of speech or thought or willed action. The young man simply took care of the necessities, and Douglas no longer had to deal with them. Without thinking about it, he became dependent on the young man and let him make more and more decisions. It wasn’t so much that the young man learned to anticipate Douglas’s needs as that he gradually grew to determine them.

The crowds gathered in the park soon drew the attention of the media, the neighbours, and the police. The young man dealt with them all. He gave interviews to the media and arranged for them to interview the more articulate members of the daily gatherings. When the neighbours objected that the crowds were disrupting traffic and creating problems and complained to the police, he collected donations from Douglas’s followers and rented an old church and scheduled meetings to be held there. Douglas hardly noticed the change in surroundings. The young man and his inner circle of guards simply led Douglas to the church rather than to the park. There he sat on a chair on the raised dais at the front of the sanctuary.

The church could not accommodate as many people as the park, however. So the young man scheduled several ‘silent sittings’ each day. When each ended, he led Douglas to the room that had once served as the vestry. Douglas sat there until someone came again to lead him back to the sanctuary for the next sitting. He was not returned to his flat until after the last sitting ended around 10:00 pm.

The movement grew rapidly, and the young man soon found it necessary to hire other workers to deal with the finances and assist with the organisation. Douglas’s followers wanted to talk about their experience of silence, and he had to set up discussion groups. Others wanted assistance with their devotions. At first he counselled them himself, but these sessions proved so popular that he had to train other counsellors to help him deal with the increasing numbers of people wanting attention.

There was also the problem of the desire for more personal contact with Douglas. The devout wanted more direct access to Douglas than the sittings allowed. The young man instituted a system of allowing those who had proven their worth with constant attendance and generous donations to sit in the vestry with Douglas. They were, of course, schooled not to speak. They simply sat there for a few minutes and shared Douglas’s silence.

Soon, however, there wasn’t enough time for personal sittings for all those desiring them. Moreover, congregations had formed in other cities. There was even talk of overseas branches. All of them clamoured for Douglas. Unless Douglas could be cloned, the movement would be in danger of atrophying because of the sage’s limitations. An experiment with videotaping sittings for later viewing served only to whet the desire for personal contact. Pictures weren’t worth a thousand silences.

One morning when Douglas awoke, his first thought was, ‘It’s June 1st. It’s been a year since I took the vow of silence.’ He did not know how he knew the date, but he knew that he was right about it. His gap year was over. On the whole he felt it had been a successful experiment. He had harmed no one by being silent, and he had regained control over his own life. The question was what to do next. He needed to think about that. A glance in the mirror over the bathroom sink told him that he also needed a shave and a haircut. When had he grown a beard and let his hair get that untidy?

While he was shaving, he heard a key in the door to his flat, followed by the sound of the door opening and closing and then sandals flapping against the floor and a kettle being filled in the kitchen. He stopped in alarm, the razor poised to stroke upward under his chin. The filling of the kettle impressed him as an unusual act for an intruder. Surely no thief would stop to make tea, and in any case there was nothing left to steal in the flat. He had stored everything of value before beginning the year of silence. The refrigerator was opened and closed and there came the chink of a dishes being laid on the counter and items being taken from drawers and cupboards. The sequence of actions betokened a routine and familiarity with his flat. Obviously sometime during the year, someone had begun to help him. He wondered what other surprises awaited him.

Douglas walked quietly down the hall and looked into the kitchen. A young man was slicing a loaf of bread, the knife gliding quickly downward with little effort. Douglas vaguely recognised him as someone he had seen before and knew that for several months at least this young man had made his breakfast. He could not, however, recall why. The young man smiled at him, pointed to the teapot, and then pointed to his watch and held up five fingers, apparently indicating that it would take about five minutes for the tea to brew. Douglas could not understand why he was miming. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know your name.’

The young man looked startled. He turned around and stammered, ‘My name’s Geoff, Geoff Harkness.’

Douglas realised suddenly that the young man had never heard him speak before. Other memories flooded his mind. The young man had been his caretaker for almost six months now, almost his manager. In a rush of embarrassment, his first thought was the amount of work he had caused Geoff. ‘I seem to have put you to a lot of bother. I do apologise. It was never my intent that others assist me in my efforts. I thank you for helping me, but I couldn’t accept more of your time.’

‘It hasn’t been a bother. It’s been a privilege. It’s my life now—to help others understand your message, I mean.’ The young man stared at Douglas with dismay. ‘You’ve shaved your beard off.’

‘Yes, I need to have my hair cut as well. I’ll do that this morning.’

‘But there’s no time. The first silent sitting is scheduled for eight o’clock. Then you have appointments all morning until the noon sitting. In any case, people expect you to have a beard and long hair. They won’t recognise you without them.’

‘I’ll talk to them and explain. I don’t like my hair this long. I’ve never worn it like this. It feels dirty.’

‘No, you mustn’t talk. That would ruin everything.’ The young man stepped closer to Douglas. ‘People don’t want you to talk. That’s where your power comes from. That you don’t talk.’

‘You don’t need to raise your voice. I can hear you perfectly. In any case, it is my decision. I decided to take a year’s break. The year is now up. I wish to resume my previous life. That includes getting a haircut. And I will put a stop to these ridiculous sittings or whatever they are. And do stop waving that knife about.’

‘But you can’t. What about all our hard work? What about all the people who believe in you and have benefitted from your example? We’re in the midst of a fund-raising drive. A new temple is opening in Manchester next week, and you’re to be there.’

‘I have no intention of participating further in this charade. Now I must ask you to leave.’

‘I won’t let you do this.’

‘I don’t see how you can stop me short of murdering me.’

******

At the first sitting that morning, the young man announced that Douglas had entered a period of prolonged silence, a retreat apart from others so that he could renew himself. He would return at a later time with even greater powers. The announcement was greeted with respectful disappointment. Two acolytes reverently placed a large portrait of Douglas on the altar. The young man led the congregation in the silent sitting and contemplation of the meaning of Douglas’s silence. Several participants later said that Douglas had been even more of a presence in his absence.

At the end of the sitting, the young man made a second announcement. Since Douglas recognised that others needed his help, he had prepared a book and a CD. The book would be available shortly in both cloth and paperback editions, and as an e-book. Both proved to be popular items. Most of the faithful bought at least one of each. Many bought several copies so that they would always have one available no matter where they were. The sales funded the expansion of the church.

The cover of the book consisted of a picture of David sitting with his eyes closed and his head bowed. The only other element on the cover was the barcode for the ISBN number and the price on the back. The interior consisted of 320 blank pages. A deluxe edition was available, featuring a faux leather cover and heavy cream-coloured paper.  The CD contained 50 minutes of silence. Excerpts from it quickly joined the list of popular YouTube files.

Coffee in the Morning

 © 2009 by the author

‘Bitch.’ The word hung in the air between the two young men standing in the dark doorway. Neither paid me the slightest attention as I approached.

                                                                              ******

The snow began falling around midnight. On a trip to the toilet around three, I pulled the curtains away from the hallway window and looked out. Enough had fallen by then to hide the ground. Beneath the streetlamp in front of the Lovatts’ house, the flakes spiralled slowly downward. When I awoke again at six, there were three or four inches on the ground and a fitful wind had sprung up. The snow would be whirled about in a sudden gust only to resume drifting leisurely when the wind died. The weather forecast on the radio said that the wind chill had brought the apparent temperature down to minus twelve Celsius, and the snow was expected to continue until mid-day, with another seven to eight centimetres of accumulation. I don’t think I shall ever grow accustomed to the metric system. Too many years of inches and pounds. I mentally translated the figures into around ten degrees Fahrenheit and another three inches of snow.

 It was even darker outside than customary for that time of the year and that hour of the morning. I debated whether I should forgo my usual morning cup of coffee because of the cold and the snow. It didn’t take me long to decide. Coffee in the morning is a habit of a lifetime, and I’ve always liked walking in the snow, especially at night. I like the way one feels isolated within the snowflakes, the way they come cascading out of the sky in a vortex that swirls around you. The hissing noise the snow makes as it falls, and the crunch as it compacts beneath your feet. The hesitant way a flake touches your face or settles on your clothing, almost as if it were surprised at finding something in its path.

 I wrapped a woollen scarf around my neck and jaw and then pulled on my boots and heavy coat. I decided the day demanded a knit cap and thick gloves. As I walked out, I glanced at myself in the hall mirror. ‘Stocky’ would be a generous description of my build. I looked like an aerosol spray can with a domed lid and a push button on top done up in wool. I had pulled the scarf up over my mouth and the tip of my nose, and the only part of my face visible was a narrow band around my eyes.

 The snow was still fresh enough to be light and fluffy. I used the broom we keep in the small entryway between the hallway and street doors to sweep a path down the steps and along the short walkway to the street. The plough had been by earlier, but enough had fallen since then to leave an inch or so of new accumulation on the street. The snow had covered everything over and flattened the landscape, robbing it of detail. Our small front garden and those of our neighbours looked pristine and fresh beneath a smooth blanket of snow. Only humps with a few twigs poking out hinted at shrubberies growing beneath.

 Kinross Street is an old residential area. The houses, all of them solid brick structures, were built in the 1890s. The street itself is narrow, and the few streetlamps are spaced widely. Beneath each light, a radiant circle of white faded quickly into thick darkness. A few of our neighbours were awake, and lights dimmed by draperies cast yellow-grey squares on the snow. It was one of those magically private moments when one feels unobserved and free.

 I had to walk in the street because the pavements had not been cleared yet. No one had been out since the plough had been past. There were no tyre tracks or footprints. Mine were the first. I felt a responsibility settle on my shoulders to make my prints neat, to disturb the snow as little as possible. When I reached the corner at Strathmore Road, I looked back toward our house. It always surprises me to see evidence of how my feet turn out. I think I walk with my feet pointing straight ahead, but my footprints gave the lie to that notion. Two lines of prints, each one angled outward about thirty degrees, marked my passage down Kinross.

 Strathmore is a busy street, and the council gives it priority for cleaning. The plough must have been by only a short time before. The street itself was almost free of snow. The shops begin a block from the intersection with Kinross, and some of the pavements had already been cleared and salt crystals, or whatever ‘green’ product that is used now, thrown down. The snow was already becoming slush in the gutters. Not nearly as attractive as the fresh version, but then that never lasts long. A sharp blast of wind made me suddenly feel the cold, and I began to walk more quickly. I could see the lights of the Veneto coffee bar ahead. Other than the newsagent’s further down the street, it was the only shop open at that time of the morning.

 Veneto opened about three years ago. The shop is long and narrow. There is a counter on one side toward the rear, with the coffee machines on a ledge built against the wall behind it. At the back are shelves with packages of coffee and brightly coloured and intricately patterned cups and plates from Italy. Travel posters featuring scenes of Venice hang on what little open wall space there is. The small floor area is packed with seven round tables, with two wire-mesh chairs at each. A well-wisher might say that the seating is snug and conducive to friendliness. Someone intent on being truthful would say that it is crowded. The tops of the tables are made of stainless steel. The surface is polished enough to reflect objects and faces, but the patterns and accumulated scratches scoured into them break the images up and distort them. The odour of roasted coffee permeates everything in the shop. For a coffee lover like myself, the smell alone is a promise of heaven.

 Leo, the young man who owns and runs the Veneto, isn’t from Italy, but he has a love of all things Italian. I’m not even sure that Leo is his real name. I suspect he may have been christened Leonard and was a Len for all but the past few years. His light brown hair and fair complexion argue for an English background. He is in his mid-twenties, I believe, at most late twenties. He is unfailingly polite toward his customers and friendly with those of us who are regulars. I am usually the first or one of the first customers in the morning, and we have over the years since Leo opened the Veneto chatted often. He knows me well enough to know what role Gabe plays in my life and to recognise him on the street. Leo lives above his coffee bar, and we occasionally see him in the other stores and restaurants in the neighbourhood.

 Now that I think about it, I actually know very little about Leo’s personal life. I suppose I do most of the talking in the morning. I am become a garrulous old man since I retired. Well, truth be told, I was both garrulous and old long before I retired. In any case, Leo listens to me and seems to have some interest in my life.

 I have always been a quiet walker. Gabe sometimes complains about my ‘sneaking up’ on him. That may have been why the two men standing in the doorway of the Veneto didn’t hear me approaching. The man with his back to me as I walked up was wearing a duffel coat. The other man had no coat on, as if he had just stepped outside for a moment. There is no light over the door and the two men were illuminated only by the light coming through the shop window beyond the entrance. They were standing very close, almost embracing, and conversing quietly. When I was within a few feet of them, I saw that the man without a coat on was Leo. The two were so intent on each other that neither registered my approach.

 It was then that the man wearing the coat said, ‘What time will you be through today, bitch?’ Leo smiled at him and said something I didn’t catch. It was so cold that their words came out as white puffs that lingered in the air. Then Leo looked up and saw me. He stepped back from the other man and opened the door for me. ‘Good morning, Mr Simmons. I’ll be right with you.’ I nodded to both of them and greeted them. The other man glanced briefly at me as I went in, the polite smile on his lips quickly fading, whatever interest he may have anticipated dying as soon as he registered my age.

 Even before I had divested myself of my coat and other paraphernalia, Leo came bustling into the shop and took his place behind the counter. I always order the same thing every morning, a triple caffè lungo--at least that is what Leo has taught me to call it. Whatever its name is, I love the richly nuanced bitterness of the taste. There are days when I feel almost heady after drinking it, rather like the feeling I get when drinking whiskey on an empty stomach. Without asking, Leo began tamping the coffee into the filters and wedging the holders into the espresso machines. Soon the machines started to hiss, and the coffee began straining into the pots. Leo swirled the liquid in the first pot around and then sniffed at it cautiously. He scowled and then dumped the contents into the sink and started over. When he was satisfied with the brew, he poured the contents of all three pots into a large cup for me and carried it over to my table.

 ‘Sorry about that earlier, Mr Simmons.’

 My confusion must have shown on my face. I didn’t know what he was apologising for.

 ‘My friend.’ Leo tilted his head toward the door of the shop.

 ‘Ah.’ Comprehension. ‘Nothing to worry about. I’m glad to see that you have someone.’

 Leo gave me a rather uncertain look, as if my interpretation had drawn his attention to the question of what his relationship to the man in the duffel coat was. Perhaps I had simply misread the situation, and it hadn’t occurred to him that others might see a relationship where there was none. For a second I thought he was going to speak, but then he simply nodded his head and went back behind the counter. The surface of the coffee was covered with a layer of foam. As I waited for it to cool, several of the bubbles popped, and the black liquid under the brown foam began to appear. I cautiously took several sips to gauge the temperature and then half-turned in my seat to speak to Leo. ‘Oh, that’s perfect. You worked your usual magic.’

 Leo looked up from the cups he was arranging on a towel and smiled at me. ‘I think you may be my only customer this morning. No one else is about in this weather.’

 ‘You and your friend were the only other people I’ve seen this morning.’

 ‘We made a late night of it, and it had started to snow when he was ready to leave. So he stayed the night.’

 ‘May I ask something? It’s not personal. I am just interested in a word your friend used.’

 ‘Sure.’ He shrugged and looked at me with curiosity. ‘His name’s Jerome, by the way. Most people call him Jer.’

 ‘I’ve heard other people use the term on the telly and on the street. He called you a “bitch”--I know what the word means, but this usage is unfamiliar to me. What does it signify when one young man says it to another?’ Sometimes I sound stilted and pompous even to myself. I tend to ratchet myself up a notch when I fear that I am becoming rude--formal politeness seeking to excuse and ameliorate nosiness.

 ‘Means different things, doesn’t it? Depends how it’s said. Jer likes me. With him, it’s a . . . a term of affection, I guess. It also means that he’s trying to make a claim on me, calling me “his bitch”.’

 ‘Ah, I see. Thank you for enlightening me.’ I took another drink of coffee. I’m never sure what sorts of questions are considered too personal nowadays. The young seem to discuss everything so openly. I suppose that’s why my next remark was spoken so tentatively. ‘So this relationship with Jerome could be serious?’

 Leo looked toward the ceiling as if the answer might be written there. He hesitated not, as I first feared, because he was trying to think of a polite way to tell me to mind my own business but because he wasn’t sure of the answer. After a moment, he dropped his eyes and looked at me. ‘Might be. Not yet though. I think he’s trying to rush things a bit, and I’m not sure I’m ready to be his “bitch”--or anyone else’s for that matter. I hope you weren’t offended. He was just saying goodbye. He’s affectionate, like. Very physical.’

 ‘No, I wasn’t offended. It’s heartening to see that two men can demonstrate their feelings toward each other on the street. It wasn’t that way years ago. So we’re--gay people, I mean--we’re making some progress. When Gabe and I were your age, it was still against the law for men to have sex with each other, even in private. We could never have kissed on the street like that.’

 Leo gave me a polite half-smile and went back to his work. He wasn’t interested in ancient history. I returned to my coffee and the view out the window. Most customers at that hour of the morning read the newspaper or pull out a laptop or their phone and start tapping away. I like to look out the window and watch the traffic and the people walking past. I’ve reached an age when I enjoy being a spectator. I have all day to read the newspaper, and I feel no need to be linked electronically to everyone I know during every waking moment.

 It was still dark enough outside that the interior of the shop was reflected in the glass of the window. The images in the glass weren’t as clear and ‘solid’ as those in a mirror would have been, and they overlay the background of the scene outside. What one saw depended on the focus of one’s eyes. When I looked at the reflection, I saw my outline dark against the light behind me and Leo moving about in the background. When I looked at a distance, the reflection faded away, and I saw only the snow falling. Although long delayed by the heavy overcast, the light outside was growing. The wind appeared to be getting stronger. The snowflakes were no longer floating down but were being driven almost sideways and forcibly blasted into the ground.

 Gabe and I had been so circumspect when we were younger. Furtive. I suppose that lent our relationship a certain excitement. We were being daring. The camouflage of convention was as much a part of our lives as the wonders of love. Two staid young men at the beginning of their adult lives and careers secretly making out like rabbits as often as opportunity allowed. We thought we were being innovative and avant-garde. I’ve never spoken about it with Gabe, so I don’t know what he thought, but I was certain that we were inventing sex and creating previously unknown pleasures.

 Now, of course, an hour ‘surfing the net’ provides an advanced tutorial in the sorts of activities we stumbled across by chance. But there weren’t any models for us, sexual or otherwise. The only visibly gay people were comedians and actors who exaggerated their ‘swish’ side and camped it up for effect. We knew we weren’t like that. The only examples we had were straight couples--our parents and others--and we wouldn’t have been allowed, or allowed ourselves, to copy them openly.

 We didn’t dare live together at first. Gabe was a teacher in a secondary school before he retired, and in the nineteen-sixties and even up into the seventies he would have been dismissed if it were suspected that he was gay. If it had become known at the bank that I was gay, I wouldn’t have been fired, but I would probably have been shunted aside to some corner of the office doing tedious tasks that no one wanted to do, safely removed from contact with the bank’s customers and clients. I would never have been promoted or granted a rise in salary. The bank would have done everything it could to encourage me to leave.

 When Gabe and I met on the street, we greeted each other with hearty handshakes. In public, we were always careful to maintain a physical separation. Straight ‘blokes’ touched their ‘mates’ in public far more often than we did. We couldn’t do that because we couldn’t afford gossip about our friendship. When I visited his flat, I always left at an early hour, and vice versa. Our visits to gay pubs and other such places were restricted to occasional trips to London. Secrecy and discretion just seemed second nature to the way we had to live, part of the price we paid for being gay lovers if we wanted to remain respected members of society. Or even if we wished to remain members of society at all. We had so many subterfuges, so many masks. People who knew us may have suspected, but we were never indiscreet enough to supply them with proof for their suspicions. ‘Such good friends’--‘Bryan and Gabriel are such good friends’--that was the arch euphemism others used to allude suggestively to our relationship.

 Once in the mid-seventies, the bank sent me to San Francisco for a week to supervise the negotiations over a loan. The end of the term at Gabe’s school fortuitously coincided with the projected end of the negotiations, and I arranged to take time off to tour California. He flew over to join me. It was such a week of freedom for both of us. We weren’t making out in the streets or anything like that, but it felt so comfortable just to be able to walk around together and not have to pretend to be ‘just friends’. Nobody noticed one more couple of whatever gender or orientation. If anything, our accents attracted more attention than did the fact that we were a gay couple.

 It was our first trip together. It was a wonderful luxury to share a bed for a full night with Gabe. The bed was enormous, but we occupied very little of it. When I woke up the first morning, we were curled up next to each other, my face pressed into one of his shoulders. He held me tightly against his body. We shaved and showered and then went downstairs to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Oddly enough, that was the first time we had ever had breakfast together. Gabe conformed to the waiter’s expectations and ordered a pot of tea. My lover was very surprised when I asked for black coffee.

 ‘I didn’t know you drank coffee in the morning. Or is that just because we’re in the States?’

 ‘No, I always have coffee in the morning. Don’t you?’

 ‘Not very often. I usually drink tea.’

We had been together for nine years by that point. Each of us knew a lot about the other, but there were many details of our personal lives that the other never saw. In some ways, ignorance was bliss. When we finally moved in together, it was just such petty details that caused the most squabbling.

That visit to San Francisco did propel us into making a big change in our lives. We decided after that we could no longer live apart. Our jobs were secure enough that we could contemplate the added expense of home owning, but at that time there were legal complications about two, unrelated men buying a place jointly. We decided that, because of my connections in the bank, I would buy the house and take out the mortgage in my name. We found the place on Kinross Street. It was made for us and our situation. A previous owner had remodelled the place so that the top floor was a separate flat, reached through a back stairway. I had the first two floors, and Gabe ‘rented’ the flat.

It proved to be a perfect arrangement. When necessary, we could keep up the fiction that Gabe was just the tenant of the rental unit. He could invite his colleagues over for drinks without confronting them with the awkward question of who I was, and I could do the same with my associates. And when we were alone, we could spend time with each other.

We had a few gay friends, most of them couples of our age. None of us flaunted our orientation. We were true to our upbringing and kept our private lives private. Two of our friends lived together fairly openly as a couple, but most of the others were as careful in public as we were. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the 1980s that I noticed a change in attitudes. Change must have been happening all along, because when it finally drew my attention, it was well developed.

Oddly enough, it was remark of my mother’s that drove home to me how much things were changing. After my father died, I began taking her out to dinner every Wednesday evening. She was a far more adventurous eater than my father had been. Unlike him, she liked to try new dishes. She read the reviews in the papers each week and was always eager to try restaurants that had impressed the critics. One Wednesday she wanted to eat at a place in the country near Chelmdene. It was raining when we arrived at the restaurant, and I let mother out at the front door and then drove off to find a parking spot. The closest one was a good quarter of a mile away.

By the time I walked back to the restaurant, mother was seated at a table and deep in conversation with the two men who ran the restaurant. While I was hanging my coat in the entranceway, I watched her through the doorway to the dining room. She had taken her coat off, but she still wore her hat, one of the feathery confections she favoured. She belonged to a generation of women that never appeared in public with hair uncovered. In some areas, change could be tolerated, perhaps even welcomed. In others, tradition was sacrosanct. The feathers trembled lightly as she turned her head from side to side to talk to the two men. One of them, it turned out, was the chef, and the other was the maître d’/wine steward/waiter. The three of them had already decided what I was to order. Mother liked us to eat different things so that we could sample what the other had.

The two men weren’t flamboyant, but it was clear that they were gay. They were apparently a couple. Each demonstrated a familiar joy in the other’s foibles. When I asked about the contents of the starters that had been chosen for me, the non-cook informed me, ‘You have to be careful with Richard. He thinks certain dishes require an excess of pepper, and that’s one of them.’

‘I do not. I use only the amount of seasoning needed, never an excessive amount. If Geoff ran the restaurant, everything would be smothered in ketchup. We’d be serving sardines on toast with tomato sauce.’

‘Oooh, one of my favourites,’ said the man named Geoff. ‘That and beans on toast. Both underappreciated classics of English cooking. It takes talent to scorch toast to attain just the proper degree of crispness and burnt charcoal flavour. Not everyone can do it up right.’ He addressed his next remarks sotto voce to mother. ‘He’s been trying to educate my taste buds for years. He finally gave up and opened a restaurant so that he could feed people who appreciate his skills.’ The two men smiled at each other over our heads with easy affection.

When one left to cook our order and the other to open the bottle of wine for us, mother turned to me and said, ‘I think God makes people what they are, don’t you? What’s important is how people treat each other, not what sex they are.’

My face must have registered my shock. I didn’t know what to say in answer to that. It was a remark so unlike mother.

It was mother’s turn to look at me with easy affection. ‘It doesn’t matter so much about being gay these days. No one thinks anything of it anymore.’ One of my hands was lying on the table, and she reached over and patted it and then clasped it tightly. ‘I think it’s past time that you asked Gabriel to join us, don’t you? He must get tired of sitting at home on our Wednesdays eating beans on toast or takeaway while we’re feasting. Invite him next week.’

Another sign of the change in attitudes came a year or two later when the headmaster at Gabe’s school invited me to his annual garden party for the staff. The invitation came as a surprise. Gabe had introduced me to the headmaster many years earlier, but I had no idea that he was aware of our relationship. My inclination was to decline, but Gabe was uncharacteristically insistent that I accompany him.

The party was held at the headmaster’s house, and as was my habit when Gabe and I appeared in public together, I separated from him shortly after we arrived. I was sipping at a glass of wine and examining the rose bushes when a young woman accosted me. ‘I saw you arrive with Gabe. Are you Bryan? Gabe’s always talking about you.’ She didn’t pause for answer. She turned around and waved to someone standing with a group several feet away. ‘Andy, come meet Gabe’s Bryan.’ Everyone in the group turned to look at us. Six or seven pairs of eyes looked me up and down. I suddenly felt very exposed. I couldn’t imagine what Gabe might have said about me that would generate such curiosity. I had to fight an urge to bolt down the pathway along the side of the house to the street.

The next moment, I was surrounded and people began introducing themselves. I was able to identify some of them from comments Gabe had made about them over the years, but most of them were strangers to me, but not apparently I to them. To judge from their remarks, I was already well known to them. All the other guests were colleagues of Gabe’s and their partners. Most of them were married, but there was one other gay couple, much younger than Gabe and I. I felt rather envious of the straightforward way they passed in and out of each other’s orbit and how physically comfortable they were with each other. They weren’t kissing, but they felt no hesitance about touching one another in public, the same way that any married couple might do. When Gabe came up to me later, I automatically stepped back from him. I couldn’t bring myself to stand right next to him.

Later that night, when Gabe and I were together in bed, I expressed some surprise that he had spoken freely of our relationship with his colleagues. I tried not to let my dismay at his openness about us show. It took me some thought to formulate a neutral question that would not sound critical. We often discuss the events of our day in bed after turning the lights off, and I spoke in the most casual voice I could muster, as if I were half-asleep. ‘You’re not worried what they will think?’

‘No, they’re adults. They know other gay people. And why wouldn’t I talk about you? I’m very proud of you. We all talk about our marriages and our families. Don’t you talk about me at the bank?’

‘No. The subject has never come up. Some of the staff discuss their families, but I never pay much attention to that. Does everyone at your school know about us? Surely not the students.’

‘I think everyone on the staff does. Some of the students know that a few of the teachers are gay. William and Harry’ (the other gay couple at the party) ‘are the staff advisors for the student gay, lesbian, and bisexual club.’

‘There’s a club for gay students? And they supervise it? But doesn’t that hurt them in school?’

‘No, they’re both quite popular. They’re known as the “two princes”.’

‘What about you? Do the students know about you?’

‘William and Harry asked me to talk to the GLB club about the “old days” and how it used to be. So at least those students know that I am gay. I imagine that word got out and a few more students have found out that I am gay.’

‘You talked about us?’

‘Yes. They were very interested in how we had to live. They thought it hilarious at first that we had to be so careful, but I was able to show them why it was necessary. Don’t worry. I didn’t mention your name or what you do. There won’t be students coming up to you in the streets and asking about us.’

‘I should hope not.’ The very idea of teenagers confronting me on the street for information on my relationship with their maths master appalled me.

‘You know, Bryan, we don’t have to be as secretive anymore. Things are changing. At least in this area, straights realise that the world isn’t going to come to an end just because a few of us are gay. Despite what you may think, most of the neighbours have a good idea of what goes on between us.’ He kissed me on the side of the neck and burrowed his head into my shoulder. ‘We’re quite an old couple now. People can learn to accept us for what we are. If they can’t, then fuck them. Speaking of which--’

I do admit that I tend not to be very observant about strangers. I had schooled myself so strongly not to look at other men in public that I hadn’t really noticed how many gay men there were on the streets. I suppose that statement sounds stupid, but I had kept my own head down for so long that I truly hadn’t allowed myself to see what was there.

I did try to be a bit more open after that. But it’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime. I was so used to being in the ‘closet’ with the door tightly closed that I was reluctant to venture far outside it. I had grown, perhaps not to like--that would be an inaccurate word--but at least to be comfortable with its conventions and to draw some satisfaction from the notion that I was doing the right thing and behaving correctly. It came as a surprise to me that many people regarded this as old-fashioned and asinine if not immoral.

A week or so after the headmaster’s party, Gabe and I were having dinner at a friend’s house. I mentioned my reaction to discovering that Gabe’s colleagues knew about us. It turned out that everyone at the table was ‘out’ in both their personal and their professional lives. They all agreed that they didn’t make an issue of it but saw no reason to pretend to be other than what they were. In fact, several of them chided me for not being open. One of them even accused me of being a capitulationist and of failing to speak up for the freedom to be ourselves. I was giving aid and comfort to the enemy by allowing myself to be manoeuvred into obeying ‘their’ rules. He grew quite hot on the subject. The very behaviours I had adopted to forestall a negative reaction from outsiders were being criticised by a group I thought would understand. The support I expected wasn’t forthcoming.

Of course, I took it all with a show of good humour. I even had the presence of mind to defuse the situation by mocking my own insecurities. But Gabe knows how much that sort of unpleasantness upsets me. We’ve been together long enough for him to know what to do to excite me, and what to do to comfort me. And he realised that I needed comforting that night. As we lay next to each other in our dark bedroom, he pulled the covers up around me and then rolled on to his side so that he was facing me. He held me for a while and then began gently massaging my shoulders and the back of my neck. After a while, he kissed me on the forehead and said, ‘We just have to be what we are. We’ll take things at our own pace and not worry what other people think. Their opinions of us don’t matter. This is our life.’

I hope I provide as much to Gabe as he provides to me. I would guess that most couples at some point find themselves bored with their common life and irrationally irritated by some everyday behaviour on their partner’s part. I know both Gabe and I have at times longed for things to be radically different, if only for an hour or two. But there are moments when the familiar enchants and the well-trod path confers the blessings of unexpected grace.

Gabe was being polite in using the first-person plural and in pretending that both of us were still in the closet. He would in the months to come gradually ease that door open for me. I’ve always done most of the cooking, but he began accompanying me on the trips to the market, pushing around the trolley and making suggestions about dishes I might prepare. Anyone who overheard him would have no doubt that we not only ate together but lived together in every sense. Occasionally someone would stare at us or pull a child away. Perhaps I gave those acts more weight than they deserved. But for the most part we attracted no more attention than any other couple shopping.

One evening when I returned home from work, Gabe was standing in our driveway talking to a neighbour. When I walked up, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. And left it there. The neighbour’s eyes drifted to his hand on my shoulder, registered it, and then looked back at us. The three of stood there conversing naturally for several more minutes.

Loosening up in public did take some effort on my part. I did finally manage during a meeting at work one day to bring myself to refer offhandedly to ‘my partner Gabe’. One of the juniors in my department asked if Gabe was the ‘distinguished white-haired man’ she had seen me playing golf with. When I nodded yes, she said that we made a handsome couple and gushed, ‘Oh, you two must have looked absolutely fabulous when you were young.’ I advised her that her flattery would have been more successful had it not been tempered with an insinuation that Gabe’s and my looks were in decline. Everyone laughed, and that was that--a brief bit of banter, and Gabe and I were officially a couple at the bank.

Small things to be sure, but I found that the sky would not fall if I acknowledged being gay. Oh, life wasn’t suddenly perfect and everyone tolerant and understanding. There are still many who feel a need to register their hatred and contempt. But one learns to accept even that. There are people whose behaviour I disapprove. But my disapproval won’t cause them to change the way they act. It took me a while to learn not to let others’ disapproval make me feel I had to change mine.

 It isn’t a world I had ever expected to live in. I’m not sorry it’s here, but the habits of a lifetime still impose a certain reticence on me. I could never, for example, refer to Gabe as ‘my bitch’, even in private. I’ll tell him about the incident later. It will amuse him.

                                                                          ******

‘Thank you, Leo.’ I carried my empty cup over to the counter. ‘I don’t know what I would do without the Veneto. You start my day off right.’

He smiled at me with delight. ‘I’m always happy to make coffee for you. Not everyone appreciates a good cup of coffee. Most of them just want something so sweet and tarted up with other flavours that you can’t taste the coffee.’

‘My lover among them. If by some miracle I could ever persuade Gabe to come in here, he would want a weak cup of milky liquid with lots of sugar. The smell of coffee in your shop alone would be too strong a brew for him.’

‘Takes all sorts, doesn’t it? Well, it leaves more of the good stuff for those of us who appreciate it.’ He pointed to the snow falling outside. ‘Are you going to be all right walking home by yourself? I could close up and walk with you, just to make sure you make it back safely. It’s no trouble.’ He reached behind his waist and began tugging at the strings of the dark blue butcher’s apron he always wore at work.

‘Yes, it takes all sorts. And no, thanks for offering, but I’ll be fine.’

Message on the Pavement

 © 2010 by the author

 

 “I say I would relive what was.”

I found the message on the pavement outside my house as I was leaving for work. It was written in white chalk and faced the door as if it had intentionally been written for me to read as I walked down the steps. The letters were quite large and very readable, and the message was centred neatly on the square of pavement directly in front of the steps. A decorative border surrounded the message. The obvious care with which it had been written brought me to a halt. It felt curiously inappropriate to tread on the letters. I moved to the side and put my foot down just to the right of the message.

The message hadn’t been there when I returned the previous night. I was sure of that. I would have seen it. That meant it had been written after 10:30 pm, when I got back.  I drew back the sleeve of my coat and consulted my watch. It was 7:30. That left a period of nine hours in which it could have been written. The sun was rising around 6:00, and I thought it unlikely that someone would have chalked the message on the pavement in daylight. It somehow seemed an activity suited more to the night. And where had the person stood or knelt? The last words were so close to my steps. He—or she, it could have been a woman—the lettering betrayed nothing about the writer. As often happens when I confront a mystery, the lawyer in me takes over. I find it useful in working through a problem to imagine myself questioning a witness. “Let’s call the writer the ‘anonymous scribe,’ ” that self intoned. “Where did the anonymous scribe sit?” And the witness answered, “The anonymous scribe must have sat on your steps, at least to write the last words.”

Then, too, the phrasing was so odd. Why “I say”? “I would relive what was” was a simple statement of a desire. Surely that would be what most people would write. One wanted to relive an incident in one’s past—a happy time or something that one got wrong the first time and wanted to redo perhaps. But what was one to make of the “I say”? The old-fashioned exclamation “I say!” was unlikely. Was it “I say I would relive what was”? I as opposed to someone else. Or was it “I say I would relive the past”? Meaning, this is something I say I would like to do but not something I would actually do. Of course, it wasn’t possible to relive the past. So one could only claim to want to do it. But it seemed so unnecessary to emphasize that point. It was an ambiguous message at best, and one that seemed to mean less and less the more one thought about it.

“I see the hooligans have been at work. One would think the police would protect us against such filth in this neighbourhood. Our rates are certainly high enough.”

My head jerked up in surprise at the interruption. I had been so engrossed in speculating about the inscription that I hadn’t noticed the other man come up. I didn’t recognise him even though, to judge from his comments, he lived in the neighbourhood. My mind was still on the nature of the message. “Interesting phrasing, though.”

The other man harrumphed and eyed me with disdain. “I would write the council and complain, but those ninnies would just protect the criminal’s right to free expression. Useless.” His jowls shook with his indignation. He scuffed the message with the sole of one of his shoes in an attempt to efface it. All he accomplished was to smear the chalk.

 “Probably just some child amusing himself,” I said in an attempt to downplay any malicious intent behind the graffiti.

 “Then his parents should spank him and make him scrub it off and apologise. Teach him a lesson.” The man strode off shaking his head.

 The man’s excessive irritation left me slightly bemused. I shrugged and headed for train station. In the press of work, I soon forgot about the message. It was dark when I returned home that evening, and a day’s worth of traffic had all but erased the chalk marks from the pavement and my mind. In fact, I would probably never have thought of the message again if it hadn’t been for the book.

 The book was sitting on the hallway table along with my mail and a note from the cleaning woman explaining that she had found the book on the front steps and thought I might have dropped it. It was a paperback book, but the cover and the title page and other front matter pages were missing. Oddly, despite the missing elements, it appeared to be a new book. The corners of the pages were still square, and there was no sign that it had been read. The book block started with page 1. I turned it over. The last page was numbered 316 and ended midway down the page. I fanned the pages, looking for some clue to the mystery. There were no running heads indicating the title or the author’s name, but the frequent appearance of conversations among descriptive passages made it clear that it was a novel. I put it back on the table and picked up my mail. If anything, I thought of it as no more than a free book that might provide a few hours of distraction.

 A few nights later, I found nothing to interest me on the telly. It was drizzling outside, and I had no inclination to go out. It seemed a good night to turn in early and read in bed until I became tired enough to sleep. As I checked to make sure that the front door was locked and bolted, I saw the book lying on the table in the hallway and carried it upstairs.

 I don’t know what I expected to find when I started reading it. I assumed that it would be some sort of mass-market paperback, the sort of thing one reads while riding the train or waiting in an airport, where half the prose is boilerplate cobbled together from the preceding dozen novels in the series and the characters are the stock figures of television serials. The book was a mystery/thriller, and in that it fulfilled my expectations. It was, however, extremely well written, and the characters were drawn with great psychological insight. The plot was not all that original but the skill of the storytelling held my attention and kept me up far later than I had intended.

 Early in the year, a man—in the book he is called only Benjamin, no surname is ever given—sets off for a week’s holiday at his seaside cottage in Cornwall. The novel opens with a description of his busy life—he is some sort of important businessman—and the hectic nature of his days and the tension surrounding him contrasts strongly with the quiet and solitude he expects to find on the Cornish coast. At this time of year, he reasons, he will be alone.

 The final stage of his journey is a road along the coast. Late in the day, at a time of year when the weather makes the area unattractive, his is at first the only car. About halfway to the cottage, another car, a red car, comes up behind him, follows him for a quarter-mile or so, and then speeds past him. The coastal road has many curves, and he thinks the other car’s speed dangerous. That keeps the car present in his mind. Every time he comes around a curve, he expects to find the red car overturned, its front end crumbled. But when he sees no further sign of the car, he supposes that it turned off and that he didn’t notice it parked beside one of the many holiday homes lining the coast.

 When he arrives, he finds signs that someone has entered his cottage. Nothing is missing, and nothing is damaged, but there is a sheet of blank paper in the centre of the table in the kitchen. Most disturbingly he finds an attaché case on the floor of the wardrobe in the bedroom. The sheet of paper might be something he failed to discard on his last visit and subsequently forgot, but he knows that he has never seen the attaché case before.

 When he opens the case, he finds it filled with money, several thousand pounds he estimates. He searches the pockets of the case and finds the usual paraphernalia—a small pad of paper (not the same size as the sheet of paper on the kitchen table), a pen. He is intrigued, but he begins to worry when he finds one of his business cards tucked deep into one of the pockets. It was no accident that the case has been left in his cottage.

 The case also holds a slim mobile phone. He flips the phone open and discovers that it is fully charged. At that point the phone rings. He responds automatically—the phone is in his hand and open. Without thinking, he answers it. But his ‘hello’ is met with silence. Frightened, he terminates the call. He realises that he made a mistake in answering the call. Whoever left the money now knows that he has discovered the case. He becomes hypersensitive to sounds and begins to imagine that he can hear someone outside the cottage. He rushes downstairs and locks the door. He is still carrying the phone. He checks it, but there are no messages, no record of other calls, no stored phone numbers. Nothing. It is as if the phone has never been used apart from the one call.

 He is conflicted about the money. He wants it, but he reasons that the money has to be illegal—loot from a robbery, or drug money—and he doesn’t want it found in his cottage. But whoever left the case in his cottage knows who he is. The presence of his business card proves that. He worries that if he takes the money, the person will seek him out and demand the money. He decides that he has to get rid of the case so that it can’t be associated with himself. He rechecks all the pockets in the case to make sure that there is nothing that ties it to him and tries to wipe every surface that he remembers touching. Then, using gloves, he carries the case outside looking for a place to hide it. He finds objections to every place he considers. At one point, he feels that he is being watched, but then chides himself that he is becoming paranoiac. In the end, he takes the case back into his cottage and puts it back in the wardrobe.

By now it is late evening. He has worked himself into a panic and decides to flee. On his way back to London, he notices a red car keeping a steady distance behind him. He thinks it is the same car that he saw earlier. Every time he looks in the mirror, the car is there. He can’t decide if he is intentionally being followed or if the car just happens to be on the same road as he. He begins checking the mirror so obsessively that he almost has an accident. He realises that he should not be on the road and decides to stop at a motel. With great relief he sees the red car continue on the highway as he pulls off on the slip road.

 His relief is short lived. His life becomes filled with messages without content. He receives an envelope in the mail that contains only an empty sheet of paper. His phone rings but no one is on the line. He thinks he is being watched. A blank sign appears in the window of a shop near his house. He overhears conversations in languages he cannot understand. Most of the time, his television set produces only static, white noise with hints of voices in the background and ghosts of pictures slowly scrolling down the screen. When he does get a good signal, the sound does not match the picture. It is as if the spoken words and the visual images came from different programmes. He finds a file folder on his desk at work when he arrives one morning filled with pages of nonsense. None of his co-workers knows anything about it. He meets a woman. They become close, but there are hints that she is not what she seems.

 The plot was basic thriller—an innocent drawn into a mystery and implicated in it. However, something about the writing made reading the book an intense experience for me. I had very clear mental pictures of the man and those he encountered. It was almost as if I was hallucinating the narrative rather than reading it. As the man disintegrated further into paranoia and madness, I felt myself being carried along. The man’s thoughts became my thoughts, his actions became my actions. I became the man as he tried to convince others of the reality of what was happening around him and as he began to doubt his own sanity in the face of others’ disbelief.

 The man’s collapse (I almost wrote “our” collapse) was mirrored by the physical disintegration of the copy of the book I was reading. Without a cover to hold it together, the book began to come apart after I read the first half. First sections of pages began to come off in my hands, and then individual pages. Towards the end, the pages of the book were scattered over my bed.

 In the end, the man decides to return to the cottage and turn the money over to the police. And there my copy of the book ended. In mid-stream. What I had thought was the end of the book was simply the end of a chapter. I searched through the sheets of paper on my bed, looking for the next pages in the sequence. Finally, I methodically arranged them in order. There were none I hadn’t read.

 I felt bereft. It was as if someone I cared for deeply had vanished without trace. One minute we were intimate friends, privy to all details of each other’s life. The next minute he was gone, possibly in danger, his life threatened by the meaningless chaos threatening to engulf him. I had to find the end of the narrative.

 My search led me to bookstores and libraries. Most of the clerks I spoke with had no knowledge of the book. Their lack of interest in my plight was apparent. At best, I received half-hearted apologies for their ignorance. The few who thought my description sounded familiar were even worse. They tried to help, offering me this or that title. I never had to read past the first sentence to know that none of them was the narrative I sought. My hopes were raised only to be dashed. It grew difficult to thank them for their well-intentioned suggestions. In my desperation, I even snapped at one persistent helper who kept pulling new titles from the shelves and stacking them in front of me on the counter.

 I combed the fragments of my copy of the book looking for a significant phrase that might have served the author as the title and then searched the internet for a book with that title. I Googled unique phrases in the hope that I would find an online version of the book. I pestered the frequent readers among my acquaintances. All to no avail.

 In retrospect, my frenzy, for want of a better term, is inexplicable. It was after all only a book, a work of fiction. It was not the key to the meaning of life, it did not hold the answers to humanity’s problems. But the truncated narrative was suspended between meaninglessness and meaning. I think that more than anything else was what drove me. The break in the text abandoned the main character, and unless I could find the complete book, he would be left dangling in an unfinished story, a story made worse by its multiplication of signs without apparent meaning. For some reason, perhaps because of something in my own life, that struck home. In the end, it wasn’t the fate of the character in the book but my own future that concerned me.

 It became more and more difficult for me to hide my frustration. To judge from one of my colleague’s comments, others had noticed my lack of attention to my work and my growing distance from what previously had been the everyday routine of my life.

 I began reading the book obsessively, searching for clues that foreshadowed the resolution of the story. During one of these rereadings, it occurred to me that the description of Benjamin’s trip to Cornwall was meticulous enough to be traceable on a map. Even the local roads that lead to his seaside cottage were shown on the detailed map of the area available on the internet. And when I switched to the satellite image, I could see the group of cottages at the end of the road. I could even identify the one in which Benjamin found the case with the money.

 The moment I discovered that the narrative was anchored in a real place, I knew that I would have to visit it. It was around 11:00 pm by that point, and I should have gone to bed, but I was too excited to sleep. I called my office and left a message telling my clerk to cancel all my appointments for the remainder of the week. I hastily packed a bag and set off.

 The trip was uneventful, although I did notice what seemed an unusual number of red cars on the road. I knew that that was only a coincidence and that, because of the book, I was more aware of them, but I considered them confirmation that I was on the right track at last. Each time I saw a red car, my faith grew that I would find the answer when I reached Benjamin’s cottage.

 It was still dark as I drove along the coast. After I left the main road, I saw no other cars and the countryside seemed deserted. There were no houses, no lights. I knew from the map that the ocean was off to the left, not far from the road, but I could not see it. If there were waves breaking on the beach, I could not hear them. Oddly even the smell of the ocean was missing. It was as if the countryside had been sanitised of anything that might register on the senses.

 I almost missed the turning to the cottages. The book mentioned a fingerpost at the entrance to the road, with signs blazoned with the fanciful names of the holiday cottages. A storm must have blown it down, or perhaps someone had uprooted it and carried it off, because no evidence of its existence remained. It was only luck that I happened to see the gravelled path leading off to the right. As it was, I was going too fast to slow in time. By the time I braked and stopped, I had passed the road and had to back up.

 The gravel ended after twenty feet. Thereafter the road deteriorated into two parallel ruts with a grassy hummock between them. It was beginning to get light, and I could make out the cottages a mile or so ahead, at the end of the headland. Reluctant to risk damage to the undercarriage of my car, I decided to walk the rest of the way. I backed up to the main road and pulled over onto the narrow verge. There was no one about, and in any case there was no traffic on the road. I was certain that the car would be safe. I took my copy of the book from the car but left everything else.

 My decision to walk was wise. The road to the cottages was almost impassable, even on foot. All the low spots were filled with water, and a car would most likely have become mired in the mud. Clearly the road was not used much. It was a mystery how anyone living in the cottages would bring in supplies or where they would park.

 The solution to the mystery became clear as I neared the cottages. They were long abandoned. Vandals had left marks of their passage through the area, however. Doors were kicked in or missing, all the glass had been knocked out of the windows. Scorch marks on the walls attested to fires. Furniture and crockery had been dragged from the cottages and demolished. Spray-painted graffiti offered the usual selection of sexual terms and insults or assertions of the presence of this or that person. The joy of destruction was much in evidence.

 It was apparent that I would find no answers to my questions here. Having come that far, I was loathe to leave without at least visiting Benjamin’s cottage. It was in no better shape than the others. The floor was littered with refuse. Someone appeared to have used it as a squat for a time. Food boxes and old newspapers mouldered on the floor, their lettering long since faded by rain and damp. The smell combined mildew, rot, and piss.

 The staircase appeared to be solid, and I risked a visit to the upper floor to see the site of the wardrobe in which Benjamin had found the case with the money. There was only the one room—a bedroom under the steeply sloping roof. The vandals had destroyed all the furniture. Someone had taken an axe to the bed frame. The doors of the wardrobe had been torn off, and the wardrobe lay on its side. There was nothing in it.

 Here, too, the graffiti writers had been at work, but the fact that this had been a bedroom had evidently spurred them to even greater sexual assaults on the walls. The claims were predictable. “Sheilagh is a slag”, “Jeremy sucks Dick”.  The pictures were grotesque exaggerations of cartoonish breasts and genitals. The graffiti did serve one unintended purpose, however. They cleansed me of any lingering interest in the cottages.

 I turned and walked quickly down the stairs. In my haste, I almost overlooked the message painted on the inside wall above the door. The rising sun shone through a back window and illuminated the area around the door, lending a rosy patina to the scarred walls. “I say I would relive what was.”

 Like the message left months before on the pavement in front of my house, the message was neatly lettered and surrounded by a decorative border. I once stayed in a rustic hotel in Norway. Many of the doorways similarly had sayings painted over them, trivial wishes and trite sentiments such as “May wisdom guide our steps” or “Storms are followed by sunshine,” presented as if they were the perceptions of the ages. The lettering was an ornate Gothic-style script, and the mottoes were surrounded by elaborate and colourful floral borders.

 The message over the door in the cottage was less elaborate, but it had one feature the Norwegian decorations did not. Over the top of it was spray painted a picture. The final message of Benjamin’s cottage was an obscenity. There was no resolution to his story, only a rotten structure and wanton defacement mocking me and my search.

 I hurried back to my car. I felt much as I feel when I leave a doctor’s office—relief, no matter what the outcome, to be rid of that oppressive atmosphere. No matter how large the examination room, it feels small and the walls crowd in. No matter how careful and kind the doctors and nurses, they invade my space both physically and psychically. And overall lies the fear of the diagnosis. For now I am free. At the same time, a sense of dread clouds my thoughts and diminishes my relief. I will have to return in a few days.

 Weeks before, someone had left a message outside my house. The same person had probably left the book, a book that led to a cottage on the coast with the same message. I could escape Benjamin’s cottage but not its message. I had no choice about that. I had to relive that. “A bait on purpose laid to make the taker mad.”

 Did anyone ask Lazarus if he wanted to be brought back to life? Did he afterwards long for the cool certainty of the tomb? When faced with the ambiguous message, did he regret resurrection? Did Lazarus laugh?