Surveillance

The shakes begin. You’re thinking about what we just did. I see it there in your face, in the bleak, staring blankness in your eyes. You shake in the seat beside me. You shake and stare straight ahead, seeing not the road, not the streetlights, not the houses drifting past as I carefully drive at the speed limit. You’re seeing again what we just did.

I won’t speak. It’s dangerous to speak to a sleepwalker. Dangerous to touch someone who has just fitted. Dangerous to encroach on the private staring horror of someone shaking in the seat beside you. So I look, then look away again.

I am slowing for traffic lights, drawing the car to a halt. You suddenly lurch and grapple frantically with the controls for the car radio. You press buttons, desperate to fill the car with noise, to block out the visions you are seeing of what we just did. The lights are changing, I let out the clutch, smoothly and controlled. You sit hunched forward beside me staring at the red glow from the buttons on the stereo. I did not know when I bought it that it would glow red. It’s a small thing, but irritating all the same. You sit there, hunched and trembling, the shakes have subsided, but you are not still.

I am thinking of the straightness of the road as we drive up through the suburbs, of the flicker of the streetlights up the centre of the windscreen, of the way they briefly bring our faces out of the dark, revealing to me the expression on your face as you sit there beside me trembling. I am thinking of the taste of metal in my mouth when I bit into the KitKat which had a piece of foil melted into the chocolate, and of how you laughed at my attempts to remove it from my tongue. It was a tiny piece of foil, but the taste of it filled my mouth.

The static of the radio begins to grate on me, low level white noise, so I tune in to some local radio station playing big band music, like the sort your dad listens to. I think of him whistling along. I think of him at home, your mum and dad’s house, his home, listening to big band music. I wonder whether you will tell him what we just did.

More lights turn to red, and this time when they change I will turn left, down another straight road, crossing other roads equally straight, until I bring the car to a stop outside your flat. My guess is that we will sit for a while in silence and then you will get out of the car without a word and I will not follow you.

The lights change and I turn the car into School Lane. You start to weep noiselessly, the only sign is the jerk of your body with each gulping, silent sob. I admire this quality in you, to cry so silently and yet so physically. No roar of grief, no wail of misery, no catch in your throat like a cough that will not come. Just shaking gulps of silently drawn breath, and tears wetting your cheeks and falling plumply to your lap.

You know what we have done in a way I somehow don’t. You know it physically. To me it is abstract.

It has rained. The road is still shiny and slightly slick. The air is freshened, the taste of the rain still there. I open the window to let the air into the car and I taste the rain on the edge of my tongue, sharply biting. It brings with it a smell of earth, this rain-freshened air. A smell of earth in a city suburb, like a memory of fields, and suddenly I am tired and want a warm summer evening and a field and to lie down and stare at the sky.

You shiver slightly as the breeze coming in through my window plays across your bare arms, your hands clasped tightly together sitting on top of your knees pressed tightly together. Your tears have finished and the bleak staring blankness is back in your eyes, making them dully black like coat buttons fixed in your face. Your face is set rigid, the skin stretched over it making it seem like marble, or waxed paper like that you used to get on Warburton’s loaves, that you used to use to make the slide slippy down the park.

We have driven down another straight road, across other roads equally straight, and I am turning right now into a leafy street where the large detached houses have been converted into flats, and I am pulling up outside the one containing your flat, beneath the streetlight to the left of the driveway.

My guess earlier was right. We sit for a while in silence, beneath our own yellow-sulphur glowing moon of light, your face made bleaker still by its harsh artificiality. We sit. I have turned the engine off, removed the keys from the ignition, so the radio has finally stopped as well. No more big band music like that your dad listens to.

You fumble with the door release, you can’t get it to work. I lean across you and pull the lever, springing the door open with a dull clunk, or is it a click? Your strong left hand pushes at the door, widening the opening. Your feet are on the still-wet road and your body angles itself out of my car, your large frame unfolding itself. Absently you push the door shut, your back to the car, your arm extended behind you, pushing the door shut as though you are pushing away some memory. You stand there, paused for a moment, then you turn and walk in front of the car so I can watch you through the windscreen. You do not look my way. I watch you walk up the driveway to the house that contains your flat, walking as though in a dream, walking like a somnambulist.

You know what it is we have done. You feel it. To me it is clinical. Hyperreal, and so therefore surreal. I know the theory, you know the fact.

I watch you walk up the driveway and pause at the door while you search out your key then slide it into the lock. The door opens and you pass through it, into your private world. I sit and look at the door after it has closed behind you and I can no longer see you.

The instant you are gone I wish that I had spoken, because now in this instant I know what we have done, and I am frightened. Your quivering bleak realisation next to me in the car as we drove kept me sane, and now I fear madness.

This killing, this rupture, this rending asunder. This is what we have done. You know it, and so do I.

And now four days later, we are here. I have seen you. I can see you now. I am looking, but not looking. I am looking away, away from where you are standing, your face set as you half-listen to the woman in blue with the too bright lipstick. I am looking away and looking at the same time. Are you listening to her words? Are you observing her, that half-smile on your face? Storing her up for future reference? I am looking away, scanning the room without seeing, because all the time I am looking at you, my eyes keep flicking back to check you are not looking my way.

This room is too crowded, all of us here to see the celebrated writer, home again to be fêted by the people he rejected. And here he is now, entering the room in his Nicole Farhi shirt, his Dolce & Gabbana trousers, his DKNY wool jacket. Softly tailored, smoothly confident, smiling his way through the room. All eyes follow him and if he walks near me your eyes will follow too closely and I mustn’t look to see if they do.

The celebrated writer is stepping up onto the podium, is taking his seat. The representative from his publisher’s is fussing around him and smoothly, suavely he is letting it happen. I am looking at him intently, not looking, not seeing, but definite in my attempt not to look at you. I look at him and I can feel myself go almost cross-eyed with concentration, staring impersonally at the slight fleck of grey in his close-cropped hair.

I am listening, but not listening, as he begins to speak about his latest work that will surely be as celebrated as all the rest. I can’t see him losing his touch. He has not lost his conviction. I am listening to the sound of his voice, not listening to his words, trying hard not to think or wonder about what you might be thinking. Whether you are listening but not listening also. Whether you are cataloguing his flaws, his foibles, his fallacies. Whether your guts churn at the thought of what we did.

I look. I can’t resist it. I can’t see you. The woman in blue is still there, over by Authors G-I, leaning against the book shelves, a glass of something in her right hand, elbow resting on her left arm, crossed over the front of her stomach, beneath her chest. I have looked at her just long enough to absorb this, but now too long because she has felt me looking at her and now is looking my way. As her eyes find mine, I flick mine away, too late for comfort, too late for her not to know that I was looking. I look along the shelves of books by authors among whose names mine will not be found. Nor yours either. My eyes scan the half-turned heads of the people listening to the celebrated writer speak.

I can’t locate you. Panic half-rises in my throat. I need to know where you are. I need to avoid your presence. I should not have come here tonight. Not alone. I should have known. We had the same thought.

I decide to leave and then I will not have to think about the possibility of you seeing me. I decide to slip out unobtrusively, hoping my rudeness goes unnoticed by the celebrated writer I came here to see.

He is standing now, the celebrated writer, speaking to his audience, reading selected passages from the book he hopes we will buy, the book people here hope he will sign, wishing to look into his sad hang-dog eyes as he does so.

I want to look into his eyes and tell him it is done.

I am turning, making my way through the people packed into this room behind me. I am cutting my way through, right hand, right arm raised and preceding me, parting the way. I am making my way to the door, to the staircase, to the ground floor and out to the covered courtyard in the centre of the building where news used to be created. I am making my way out and here I am at the door, and there you are just to the left of it. I baulk. I lower my gaze, my head, and walk towards the door, casting a side-ways glance your way. I must look like my neck does not work.

Having pressed my way through the tight-packed people, here only to see the celebrated writer, and withstood their distracted huffs and tuts, having offered up muttered apologies, alluding to a sorrow I do not feel, I am here at the door with you just to the left of it. So near. I begin to push the door, push it, pushing and it is resisting. I push and I see the sign that tells me to pull, so I push once more, then someone else’s hand pulls at the handle and the door is opening, obscuring you, covering you up, and I slip through and out and down the stairs.

I pause halfway down the stairs. I think I have heard someone else leave that tightly packed room. So why do I pause? Why not carry on my rush and hurry down the stairs? It is to allow him, because I believe it is you, to catch me there on the stairs. So I pause. There is silence. Because no-one else has left that room, no-one else is making their way down the stairs.

I am paused but no longer know whether the resumption of motion will take me down and out of the building or up and back into that room where you will be standing to the right of the door, though you will not have moved. It is me who has moved.

I am paused, facing the handrail, now looking up, back to where I have just come from. How long have I been paused here? I do not know. I should not have come. I should have known you would be there.

Suddenly I am no longer paused. I am making my way downstairs and outside. I came to a decision without knowing it. I am leaving. I feel like a coward. I should go back. I walk down the fake cobbled street and out into the warm August evening. Exchange Square is before me, with its BBC screen and its giant windmills. I should not have left that room. You must have seen me. This should not bother me. I am making my way to the nearest Metrolink platform, up Shudehill. I will catch the tram to Piccadilly. I will not walk. You are in that room. The celebrated writer will see you and know that it is done.

He will know that it is done, and that will be an end to it.

© J R Hargreaves 2003