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d.d ruby
Published by Red City Press
Smashwords Edition
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Copyright © d.d ruby 2011
The author asserts their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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When the chicken landed on the plate it was stiff. The peas, they made a run for it but the chicken just lay there charred and pitiful, part of itself suspended an inch from the plate. Its foot was not present, amputated at the ankle. It did not want to bathe in the gravy and so remained still, the peas still running for cover beneath its breast. The potatoes had not the sense to hide. They stayed where they were put, heavy and now sodden. But was it the pouring of the wine that swam around Murella’s head or the click clack of their jaws, as they chewed, that hit her hypersensitivity right where it hurt, the meeting of their upper and lower teeth in mutilation of the meat? The lickety lick of their tongues as they slapped against the cavernous roofs of their mouths? The otherwise discreet filtering of the teeth as the tongues scooped the gummy crevices?
How in the hell could people eat with all this noise? How could they use their knives and forks and resist the urge for the hands to fly to their ears? A rogue pea had somehow managed to unshell itself whilst a single grain of rice lay clinging to the side of the chicken leg. It made her blood curdle. Why? She did not know. The manners of food could not be puzzled out the same way as a human could. She made up her face in such a fashion as to cause the others to exchange glances. Her nose, her eyes, her mouth, all showed disapproval for the abomination sat upon her plate. She did not know why the antics of a naked pea and a grain of rice should unsettle her so. She did not know why she had allowed her husband, Edris, to persuade her to go on a night out. She barely knew these people. She barely knew herself nowadays. Now here she was, sat here, struggling to eat a meal they could barely afford in a restaurant that could barely tolerate her presence.
“Is everything to your satisfaction?” The waiter was hovering over them waiting for an answer.
“No.” The answer flew out of her before she had an opportunity to fashion her thoughts appropriately. Two sets of eyes were now upon her. What was she saying? How could she explain that she was disturbed by the posture of her dismembered chicken as it sat allowing the peas to bury themselves beneath it? What words existed that could provide adequate comprehension of the ice cool quiver that a single grain of rice was now sending through her body; ice cool water slowly expanding in a maze of glass tubes, blood in vessels waiting to explode. Instead the explosion came from her lips as she realised she could not articulate the nonsense arising from her hypersensitivities.
“Yes!” She meant to round off the sentence with an ‘everything is fine’ but before she realised that she might once again be capable of something more than monosyllabic speech the waiter had fled and so she directed the remainder of her words towards her dining partners. “It’s delicious.”
“But you haven’t tasted it yet.”
“No, but… yes you can tell just by looking at it… it’s delicious. It is very delicious.” The green of the peas was hard on her eyes and the potatoes were clogging her thoughts like big globules of mucus. Her gullet starched in on itself as she hopelessly stabbed at her plate in a crazed effort to feign dining normality. She decided to try scooping instead and after several attempts managed to capture the running peas. She released them into her mouth and made an attempt at chewing, this time trying to ignore the click clack of her own jaw. After two or three mouthfuls she decided it might be better to swallow them whole and so allowed them to ricochet around her throat like pinballs. After a short period of this intolerable scooping and gulping one of the men leaned in on her. His neck snaking off his shoulders, his head extended so far into her space that it hovered over her plate. It seemed he was offering his head up as part of the unsavoury meal but he whispered in a low, sympathetic tone of camaraderie, “Are you a vegetarian?” One of the peas seemed to ricochet its way back up into her mouth. She let it rest on her tongue as her eyes became locked in.
“…because we’ll understand if…”
“I’m not. I’m not a vegetarian.” At this, the pea expelled itself fully from her mouth and bounced back onto her plate, narrowly missing the nose of her fellow diner as it launched itself from her heavy tongue. “I’m not a vegetarian,” she repeated. What was she then, at this moment in time? “I like meat.” And what did she expect them to say to that? “I love meat. I hate vegetarians.” She was going mad. Had to be. The loss of words and manners was causing such a spillage of nonsense. “I do. Love meat. But I don’t…hate vegetarians.” That was better. There was no way to punctuate this to make it sound better but the words were an improvement at least. She was in such haste to declare love for the entire contents of her plate that this came at the expense of logic and reason. She did not hate vegetarians. Some good friends of hers were vegetarians. Where in the world had it ever been said that to love meat you must be a hater of vegetarians? In truth, she implausibly hated the entire contents of her dinner plate right now, for no apparent reason, but somewhere in her confusion declaring all vegetarians loathsome seemed far more socially acceptable than saying that her food was behaving in an intolerable manner.
The whole night was exhausting in the way that listening to a conversation is sometimes exhausting; a conversation between other people which is intellectually above your level of understanding. Such a time is full of striving and longing and frustration. The conversation Murella was each day struggling to understand was within her own body, her entire body not just her mind. Her entire self seemed to linger on ridiculous things then slope off into stupid Never Never Lands.
As a toddler her youngest son, Tadesse, was always pointing to random specks on his plate and presenting them to her, with a look of disgust. Balancing them on his accusatory little index finger, as if a tiny morsel had offended him greatly. Often a rogue flake of lettuce was enough to necessitate total food refusal for the rest of the day. She had never tried to understand it. Didn’t need to understand it. It was what it was. Perhaps, like her, his manners at the table had very little to do with the food on his plate but was instead due to some kind of internal disturbance. It was nothing to do with the digestive processes. Nothing to do with the physiological perhaps, but internal none the less. She felt the need to excuse herself but did so without words. Suddenly she pushed her chair out and stood up, making her way to the bathroom. She didn’t expect Edris to follow her.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to the toilet.”
“No I mean what are you doing?”
“I think I should go Eddie.”
“You can hold it for a few minutes, eh?”
“No. Back to the flat. We should go back to the flat.”
“Why? We haven’t even finished eating yet.”
“We’re not here for the food anyway. We’ve got food in the fridge. We’ve heard all we need to hear haven’t we?”
Eddie had heard about this little sideline from a friend, being an agent for some company she’d never heard of. Everyone they knew seemed to be running sidelines nowadays. One job was never enough. Most people seemed to be getting involved in the supply end of the retail trade; modern day Avon ladies, each with their miracle cures for this that or the other. She was surprised when Eddie started taking an interest. He was usually so sceptical about these schemes which almost always seemed to be dodgy, engineered to extract money from its members and train them in the art of doing the same to their friends.
“A few more minutes babe.” He traced the V of the dipping neckline of her dress with his index finger finishing off by lightly lifting her chin to tilt her head. It was a nice touch.
“We don’t need this. You’ve got a regular job.” She said this knowing full well that this regular job didn’t pay enough to get them out of their situation and into a place they could call home. Their dinner companions had been rattling on for over an hour but they both knew it was too good to be true. “They look like con artists to me these lot. They smile way too much. Every time I look up at that Eva she’s grinning in my direction. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses, you can spot them a mile off with their little black briefcases. They’re always sidestepping to catch you.”
“Babe!”
“It’s true. You can’t trust them, they’re too pushy and if you give them a way in you’ll never get rid of them.”
“Jehovah’s Witnesses? What has that got to do with it? You’re givin’ me a headache tonight. What kind of foolishness…? Speak sense girl.”
“They’re the same these people. They always find an angle, a way to rope you in. Next thing you know you’re stuck with a load of shit that you don’t want and you can’t sell.”
“David’s making some good money you know.”
“So he says. You don’t even know him good. Besides he makes a commission out of every new person he brings in so he’s bound to say that innit.” David. The bloody man was like a walking infomercial, only every month his passions changed. There was always something new and phenomenal that ‘absolutely changed his life’. Always some new venture. How many life changing experiences did one man really need? Surely one was enough. She’d feel sorry for him if only he wasn’t quite so annoying.
“Look just go toilet, come out for the dessert at least and we’ll have a proper talk later innit?” He was playing with the seam of her dress near the point of the V now, his finger lightly playing against the softness of her breast. “Oh, and when you come back, don’t start going on about Jehovah’s Witnesses. I don’t know what the hell you were thinking with all that ranting and raving about vegetarians.” She didn’t know what she was thinking either. She pushed the door to the ladies and walked into one of the cubicles. She put the toilet lid down and just sat for a few moments. She tried to clear her mind of any foolish debris. Now all she could think of was how late it was getting and how many times she’d be woken up unnecessarily tonight. At least the rage she’d woken with this morning was steadily subsiding but the conversation she’d had over the intercom last night was still bouncing around her head.
“Who is it?”
“Let me in please.” The ‘please’ wasn’t necessary because the words were spoken in a commanding tone anyway.
“Well who are you?”
“Open the door please.”
“You’ve got the wrong flat.”
“Will you just open the door.”
“It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Look…just… I’m here to see someone.”
She put the phone down and walked away from the intercom. Eddie was now up. The kids were stirring. She could hear them shuffling around under their duvets. The buzzer went again.
“Let me in.” Giggling in the background this time. Not one but two fuck ups hitting her buzzer at this ungodly hour. She was tired. Eddie was stood there swaying with his eyes half closed, without his top on, his pyjama bottoms hanging nicely on his hips, though of course Murella was too knackered to appreciate it.
“Look you’ve woken up my kids.”
“Let us in and we’ll go away.”
“Let you in and you’ll go away?” She gave Eddie a look, a look that said ‘what the fuck?’ but he was still too sleepy to decode the puzzlement in her face. She was tired, felt well and truly fucked up tired, but even in this state she knew enough to know that what they said made no sense at all.
“Let you in and you’ll go away? Go away! No let you in.” It wasn’t proper English. What the hell was she saying? Never mind. Surely they’d get the gist of it. She put the handset down, took one step away before the buzzer rung again.
“Look. Do you want me to come down there and smack you round your fucking face?” She put the handset down. The door downstairs banged against its frame and she heard heels on tiled concrete steps. They must have worked out that the main entrance door was buggered to shit. They didn’t need to ring her buzzer again, hadn’t needed to ring it in the first place. No matter. Perhaps she’d just go down there and smack them round their fuckin’ faces anyway. Eddie resettled the kids and then led her back to the bedroom. She was still cursing when she pulled the bed covers over her head. They could hear the birds singing, a deeply depressing sound. They had to be up in less than three hours. Here, many hours later, sat on the toilet of this restaurant, she could hear the birds still singing in her head. The longer she sat there, the more time was wasting and the later her bedtime would be. Let’s finish this and do it quick, she thought, and rose with the steel minded determination of a fighter rising at the sound of the bell for the next round.
Now sat back at the table she pulled her mind back into the moment, looking around at the other people in the restaurant. Most of them seemed to be enjoying their meal or at least behaving in a relatively normal fashion. A family of four, two adults and presumably their two adult children. An elderly couple who shove their food around their plate with their forks apparently in tandem with one another. Two men, one of whom looks slightly uncomfortable in the other’s company. Father and son perhaps. She can’t quite see the elder’s face. He leans back in his chair, relaxed slightly to one side, his index finger and thumb extended to frame the right side of his face while the remaining fingers fold casually to rest on the cheek. He appears to lever himself up slightly with the other hand which rests on the arm of the chair. He must be saying something because the younger one, although avoiding his direct gaze, appears to be listening. Perhaps he is being chastised, Murella thinks. He seems to gain some momentary relief when the waiter approaches their table.
“Ready to order gentlemen?”
“Lobster for me. Monroe?”
Monroe has only just got as far as the appetisers.
“The lobster for my friend too.”
“No… thank you.” He looks up at the waiter just as he is putting pen to paper. He casts a brief look, apologetically, across the table towards his colleague before briefly skimming the menu again.
“The chicken, number 11… if you have it… please.”
The waiter takes the two menus and excuses himself with a polite nod.
“Not a fan of lobster?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Why not? Is there a reason for that?”
“I suppose I just have never liked the taste.”
“You grew up near the sea didn’t you? Childhood incident perhaps?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Look at them, feeling their way along the tank, aimlessly clambering over one another for survival maybe. No, no, there’s a pathetic aimlessness about it all. Pity they don’t have the sense to realise that soon they’ll be tossed alive into a pan of boiling water for our benefit, screaming and floundering.”
Monroe glances fleetingly at the tank then runs the palm of his hands down the thighs of his trousered legs. He feels the sweat grab at the material then release the heavy cotton gathering beneath his touch.
“I’ve always said there’s too much humanity in you.”
Monroe takes this comment exactly as it is intended, as an insult.
“The preliminary results?” He waits. If Monroe fails to interpret the full meaning of his unfinished question he will furnish the empty dinner table with sarcasm.
“Oh yes. They were satisfactory.”
“Satisfactory or pleasing?”
“Pleasing. Very promising.”
“Can’t say I’ll be sorry to move on. You?” He scans the room, slowly, confidently. “Anyway, we must resist stagnation.”
In all his professional life Monroe had never met a scientist with such a distaste for life forms. In the beginning he had not known this about him. He had only heard of his brilliance. Now all he saw was a man fully arrogant in his own truth, infected with the need to pursue his own personal ambition.
Monroe could pinpoint the exact moment when all things changed; the morning when Davenport abandoned an alternative destiny by tossing that rejection letter into his wastepaper basket.
“We have been refused again. Time to consider other avenues.”
“This is not the first time. What other avenues are there?”
“There are certain private sector organisations that can be persuaded to see this as a more commercial venture. And let’s just say there are those within public life who might help.”
“You mean…step outside the regulations? I’m not so sure that’s a good idea. There’s still the matter of licensing.”
“Then what would you have us do? Do you want to spend the rest of your career tinkering around with micro-organisms and mice for the sake of curiosity?”
It was right. Monroe had lead the archetypal life of a scientist; hungry for discovery, wanting to know how things worked purely for the sake of knowledge itself, thirsty to know the nature of things. As a young boy he had spent many hours of many days dismantling household objects so that he might learn the workings of things, anything he could get his hands on, radios, telephones, clocks. And when the challenge had gone out of that sport he had moved onto living breathing things; dead crabs scavenged from the seashore, small murdered frogs which his cruel cousin Jacob had stamped on just for the pure hell of it. He never let Jacob see of course, for fear of being the next thing to get caught under his boot. Even at age eight this cousin of his was as ruthless as a rabid pit-bull. He was a corporate lawyer now, doing very well for himself thank you very much. Monroe would only take a backward glance when his cousin wasn’t looking and then steal back at some appropriate time to surreptitiously scoop the animal into a small plastic bag carrying with him a sense of guilt like a dog owner whose pet had soiled the pavement. He always carried small plastic bags with him wherever he was going but he had a secret fear that his cousin might find his stash and shove his head into one and suffocate him in a fit of rage. Or perhaps it might be he who lost his cool one day, fuelled by the anger of being forced to spend summer days with this satanic imbecile simply because their parents felt that the mere fact that they were relatives should be enough to breed some kind of natural kinship. The truth of the matter was that Monroe hated the sadistic little bastard and prayed each night that he would choke on his own saliva and die. He was a skinny little wretch of a boy with a long thin neck. Each night Monroe would watch his larynx rise and fall as he slept lying on the guest bed. He would light him up with a tiny little reading torch and watch him twitch as he furtively passed it over his face. Then, in the silence of the night he would take a handful of chillies which he had gathered from the kitchen using one of his little plastic bags and rub them into some part of his clothing; his shirt collar, his hat, his underpants. His parents deduced that there must be something about the seaside that didn’t quite agree with his skin but they still brought him every year believing that the good sea breeze would do them all some good. At some point during their childhood Monroe stopped doing this. He feared that the evil which ran through his cousin’s veins might also be running through his. But no-one else saw what he saw. Jacob was a master. He was fully in command of himself, a shape shifter who would allow people to see only exactly what he wanted them to see. Monroe was left with one question, a question which had lingered unformed within his mind since those early days but which Davenport had articulated and asked him to confront some years later. “Do you believe that the balance can be tipped, tipped to allow the emotional life to govern the physical life? There’s a difference between how we believe things to be and how they truly are.” As a boy he’d perceived Jacob in a certain light and his every action sought to protect himself from the boy’s ugly shadow. If only he could command himself to be unaffected he might not physically quake and shrink in the boy’s presence. Was he right in believing that his every movement elicited quiet shame from his own father who at times seemed to secretly harbour an ever so slight disgust for him? Monroe’s mind is pockmarked with memories of his father’s subtle distaste. A certain incident with a dead bird provides one such example perhaps. From a distance, though, a love of precision and a certain way of doing things is what one might see. One may view this particular incident with a wider more impartial lens, as a whole rather than part of a whole.
From where he was reading in the living room Monroe’s father, Mr Douglas Monroe, could see the dead bird on the kitchen floor. He selected the puzzle page and removed it from his morning paper. The rest he neatly folded and placed on the coffee table along with his glasses which he put very precisely on top of the business page he was just about to read. Then he got up and carefully laid the paper on the kitchen table. He took one of his wife’s spatulas from the kitchen drawer, scooped the small bird up in one slow easy motion, and rested it on the grid of the crossword puzzle. He laid the spatula across the top of the page. He then went back to his morning newspaper, positioned his spectacles on his face, unfurrowed his brow and continued to read, waiting for the rest of the house to wake up. Jacob had just had his eleventh birthday, Monroe was eagerly heading towards his tenth. When they finally came downstairs they sat down so hastily, their hungry bellies yearning, that they didn’t even notice the dead breakfast guest.
“Anything to do with either of you?”
Side by side at the kitchen table Jacob and Monroe both looked at the creature. There is something to be said for the fact that they barely blinked. To them, the sight of a dead animal was neither obscene nor unusual (though it has to be said, being met by one in the place where the cereal and milk would normally be was slightly out of the ordinary). Jacob ran the sleeve of his pyjamas across his snotty nose and sniffed. Monroe just stared with interest at the partially open beak and the wings laying flat against the body.
“No, nothing to do with me.”
“Monroe?”
“Not me.”
Douglas Monroe paused, tapping the spatula on the surface.
“Do you think maybe it could have something to do with the cat?”
“I suppose.”
The cat was called Spag, so named because he liked to snack on spaghetti Bolognese. Monroe and he shared a somewhat symbiotic relationship. Monroe was shamefully ineffective at shovelling spaghetti into his mouth. More food ended up on the floor than in his mouth and Spag gleefully benefited from this clumsiness. Mr Monroe Senior refused to call Spag by his name. He thought it sounded stupid and common. He much rather just to call him ‘the cat’. Spag may well have brought in the dead bird as a present. He certainly was very efficient at catching the odd mouse or two.
“We bought you a pet on the condition that you what...? That you take full responsibility for it and that includes cleaning up after it yes?”
Casually ejecting himself from the discussion Jacob pulled a breakfast bowl towards himself and began to fill it with frosted flakes, gulping down huge quantities in front of the poor slain bird. Monroe watched, thinking of the slingshot he’d seen resting on Jacob’s clothes in his suitcase the day he’d arrived. If this crime was the work of Spag then surely he’d have been caught at some point toying with his prey, batting it this way and that with his gently curved paw. But then again, if it was the work of Jacob why would he have brought it indoors? To prove that he could perhaps, that he could get away with anything? Or maybe to get Monroe in trouble. He’d always hated Spag as well, insisted on calling him Spaggers. He was the worst kind of swine, one who could tone down his bad qualities at will to appear almost… charming. He was a proper psychopath in the true sense of the word. But the most galling thing was that Monroe had a sneaking feeling that his father wished him to be more like his cousin – bolshie, aggressive, bordering on downright rude.
Looking back on that day Monroe is quite sure that he never felt sad or sorry for the bird. All these years later and he still can’t put his finger on the exact emotion that he felt. What he does remember, from this and other similar experiences, is his father being a very even man, controlling his emotions, his rage, his love, his movements. What a contrast to what he’s exposed to today. Now, Monroe walked streets where the people were very animated, even during phone conversations, waving their arms about for emphasis, pushing their heads forward on their necks so that you felt every word with force.
Monroe’s eccentricity of youth had not left him. He had carried his inquisitiveness with him right through to early adulthood where biology and the natural sciences posed so many unanswered questions. But now all the fun was gone out of it. There was always someone or something casting ugly shadows over his cravings. As for Davenport, he couldn’t imagine him ever having been such a child. Even so, it was many years into their relationship, at an academic conference, that Monroe began to see things in a critical light, to view this colleague and mentor through someone else’s eyes.
“That man is no longer a man of science.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean. He is brilliant.”
“Yes he is brilliant, but his brilliance has been surpassed by other things within him. He no longer questions things because he thinks he already knows everything there is to know.”
“Is it such a sin, to be confident in your own knowledge and abilities?”
“Well no, but we’re not talking about confidence Monroe, not even arrogance. Arrogance and confidence both drive you on towards progress in some small measure. But think, what was it we were always taught by the professors, the good ones at least? Never be afraid of ignorance. Davenport has become so petrified of the very idea of personal ignorance that he indulges fully in his own conceit. He’s like Narcissus himself, so blinded by his own self-regard.”
Monroe had known Sinclair since University, still valued his opinion somewhat, but wasn’t he being a little unfair? After all they both knew it was easy to feel boxed in in research institutes, starved of the room needed for free thought, stifled by four feet of bench space, so bogged down by the minutia of one’s science that you could not find room for manoeuvre.
“I think he’s just lost patience. Progress can be painfully slow.”
“It depends how you define progress doesn’t it? A man can devote twenty years of his life to finding the answer to one particular question, but if at the end he’s successful our entire world pivots on his answer. We’ve seen it many times before. That’s progress, perhaps chased across an entire lifetime, yes. But if by progress you mean bring people round to your own truth without actually taking the time to convince them properly, step by step, then that’s another thing all entirely isn’t it?”
“He’s a maverick, it’s true.”
“He used to be. He’s lost something of that.”
Monroe preferred the romanticised idea of the maverick scientist stepping outside the box, solving some of life’s little questions. The idea of tainted idols was not so easy to bear. And so he followed him, knowing that they had yet to answer the question of ‘what is life’? They moved on, the brilliant mentor confident in his judgement of the quality of life while the student still harboured lingering doubts about the quality of their research.
“I think you misunderstand him.”
“He’s not an adolescent. He leaves no room for misunderstanding. He always says precisely what he means. He knows the way to change science, to change the world, and the rest of us are too stupid to keep pace with him, isn’t that right? He shows no respect for peer review or for open debate. He…”
“He can be a little gruff.”
“Well he has no right to. There are things that have been around a hell of a lot longer than him… including the things that I look at under my microscope every day. Even they have a greater sense of progress and evolution than does he.”
“Hello Sinclair. Still fiddling around with your little bacteria?”
“Ah, Patrick, right on cue. Yes, yes, still fiddling around as you say.”
“Thought you’d be done with all that by now.”
“Well you needn’t be so smug. What is it they say? Our bodies are all bastardised by our little microbial friends? Of course, some of us are more bastardised than others.” At this, Davenport looked away, steadily shifting his gaze onto Monroe.
“We must get back into London by 4.15 this afternoon. I’ll get our coats.”
Right there was the crux of it. Davenport had gone beyond respect for other living things. His irreverence for microorganisms, with their extraordinary capacity for evolution and survival had long since passed. He had no patience to pursue finer details. Oh yes, these two men were very different. As a young man Monroe remembered being very excited to learn that certain cell components, vital organelles within our bodies, had started out as bacteria millions of years ago. Their powers of survival fascinated him. They couldn’t discuss that sort of thing together though. And one thing was for sure, Davenport didn’t like to be challenged. Monroe knew this and never could find the right way to disagree with him. Sinclair and other members of the establishment had the benefit of distance, could go back to their own labs. Monroe, however, was professionally tied to him. His professional career depended on his ability to appease himself with the man and soon, almost against his will, he was to be embroiled in matters beyond his control, matters which could end his career altogether.
Murella and Edris returned from the restaurant just before ten. The stairwell was surprisingly quiet and had remained so for most of the night. Her sleep was restless but served to carry her through to the early hours of the morning. She was then out for most of the early part of the day but knew she had to come back at some point. When she returned she was acutely aware that she was stepping further and further away from the rowdy bustling of the outside and would soon be entering the quiet loneliness of the stairwell. It was precisely 4.15 in the afternoon. From the moment she turned the corner into her street she stepped a little slower (as if the quickness of a step could alter anything). When she reached her doorstep she peered in through the glass panel of the door like a visitor unsure of their surroundings. Tadesse had been chatting, in that incessant way of children’s, all the way from the school, but when she turned the corner into what should have been the comfort of her street she heard nothing more than the noise of her own head. The threads were too scrambled to be coherent thoughts but had the resemblance of panic. She heard the hum of the traffic and hypersensed movement all around her and kept on walking. By the time she got to the front door there was something at her side interminably saying, “Mummy Mummy Mummy Mummy…” Looking down at him she was at least able to say, “Yes baby?” He, having forgotten what he wanted to tell his mother, now shut up and turned his mind a little inwards to thought. She pulled the door, which was already open, and she felt her organs envelope in on themselves. Once in, she could see feet resting on the stairs, coats hunched over, rolled up like hump backs, attending to business. The Kryptonians; two men and one woman this time. When they saw her, two out of the three straightened up. The third remained hunched, bold faced.
“Alright?” said one.
“Cold out there innit?” said the other. She had seen him before but her eyes did not linger too long on his face. Something within her would not now allow it. Holding his hand tight she pulled her child close and turned his face towards her, burying it deep in her skirt (as if lingering stares could alter intention). Still, through the light cotton of her skirt she could feel the blink of his eyelashes as he turned his one free eye outwards to look at these people who made a couch of the cold stone steps.
“Yes it is,” she pushed the words through her teeth; polite but not quite friendly. His was a question that sought a little bit more than a monosyllabic ‘yes’ but the shortness of her reply was a sour tipped sweetness which invited no further conversation.
“Can I help you with that?” He nodded towards the shopping bag, noting that her fingers were straining under the weight of it.
“It’s OK thank you.” Murella adjusted her grip. It was true, she did not need help. Hall etiquette hovered over her. She did not want to appear rude, distrustful even (as if pre-conceived thought could alter intention). The son, her baby, as if sensing anxiety, made a comfort blanket of her skirt, clinging to it with fingers and a mind that trusted in her instinct.
“Let me help you with that.” He took the bag from her hands, gently but forcibly, his fingers lightly brushing against hers as she reluctantly disentangled herself from the £15.27 she had just spent at her local supermarket. He had taken ownership of the moment, changed his question into a gentle command. There was no-one about to hear any screams she might choose to release from her throat. She now took her baby’s hand in both her own (as if possession could alter intention). They walked up the stairs, they three, and the two at the bottom turned their noses upwards at the sight. Her child’s mouth stayed shut… and it was still shut as she said, “Thank you,” reclaimed the £15.27 and closed the door behind them. He skipped into his room and began to arrange his world; the world of cars and trains and farmyard animals. Everything, all this, was done before he even took off his coat and gloves. Today she would allow him that at least, for unfortunately a mother’s cotton skirt cannot remain a comfort blanket forever.
The druggies that inhabited the stairwells of Murella’s block of flats were mostly polite, able to pass the time of day as good as any man. They were mostly vulnerable, almost apologetic of their presence.
“Is it still raining out there?” They would ask of Murella as she passed them on the stairs. English weather was as much a punishment to them as anyone else and as much a point of debate, and of course such chit chat also succeeded in lowering the level of intimidation that the residents felt. Such statements made them a part of the world again, a human being, not just an unwelcome pariah waiting to pounce. With such niceties they were able to flip things slightly, make you look in their eyes and see that they were truly hiding from something – not the patrol wardens, who were never ever seen (despite council letters attesting to their existence), and not the police who rode around in their cars and vans sounding their sirens. But from something more threatening – pimps or drug dealers owed money or maybe homes that they did not want to go back to which already lay in ruins or were ruins of their own making.
“I’m just sheltering from the cold a while.” To such statements residents could only nod because had they not themselves just run from the wind? Had they not themselves just longed for hot cups of cocoa in front of log fires and fluffy cosy rugs? Still, they too would take a departure from the outside world, close their doors and find something less – a radiator, a pair of old socks and a cup of tea. Although you could not rub your hands in front of a radiator, running along the side of a wall, with the same sense of contentment, it would at least do. There was a time and a place for cocoa and this seemed not to be it. All could imagine that big houses and log fires came with their own problems. At least that’s what they would tell themselves to endure what must be endured.
It was in many ways a forgotten place, bloated with forgotten promises and forgotten people. They did not have cockroaches or rats and they did not have ants diving into cooking pots, but what they did have was the Kryptonite druggies… and very, very thin walls. At night you could hear the whispers in the hallway from men and women who had made their home in the stairwell of that three floor block, to remain long after the crack-house had been shut down.
Murella was there the day the authorities came. She could not distinguish the council from the police. They took a drill to her neighbour’s door to remove it from its hinges. She heard more voices in the hallway then, even laughter, from drug squad officers and council officials. They would be able to go and later lose their thoughts in paperwork for fear of emotional infiltration. Their voices provided a soundtrack as a lone sniffer-dog paraded up and down the crack-house. The villain himself was dealt with with much care; spoken to in a genial fashion, not carted off in handcuffs and not jailed for any length of time, but simply re-housed elsewhere still at the expense of the state. She was there also later on when they replaced the broke down door with a secure metal one, the colour of aluminium foil. She was there later still when the postman came by day after day and insisted on sticking the absentee resident’s mail between the tiny crevices around the big metal door that no normal key could open. The property had been officially ‘Sitexed’ (as the council liked to call it). Official words implied action, care, authority. Each day a new letter grew from the door like some kind of bizarre paper mail tree. It just kept on coming until the immovable metal door was completely surrounded. Each time she thought there could not possibly be any more space to wedge stuff into, another piece arrived, until it stood as a ridiculous mocking eyesore. The council sent letters, duplicates of letters and then further letters and more duplicates of those, all talking of the imminent repair of the main entrance door downstairs, a door which had seen too many days of keyless visitors. It had been pulled at, kicked in, barged at, stumbled out of and now the lock no longer worked properly and any would-be stairwell dweller could just wrench it open to gain entry.
And so… although a root had been temporarily plucked, and transplanted elsewhere, the branches still lingered, lying lost in the evenings on the steps of the block making nice nice with the residents who could still remember the days when the hallway voices were even louder and the hinges of doors looser. The stairwell was their toilet, their dining room, their living room and their bedroom and they left the ribs of chickens, the meatless legs, and the butts of smokes and all the while the rightful residents sniffed the rankness of urine and vomit. There was an unexpected considerateness, for those who lived behind doors never witnessed these atrocities…only smelled them. They guessed that such things must belong to a little seen night-time that took place long after their tired eyes were closed – a night-time which could only be inhabited by those dwelling in a certain plane and thanked God that plane was not, as yet, an option for them. So they closed their doors and prayed for strength and resistance. Their children needed feeding and the bills needed paying and there were certain things which were a part of their normality. So they tossed the council letters of promises into the recycling bins and tried to do their best to make the world a better place, or at least resisted the urge to make it a worse one.
For Murella though, life here had never been a game of endurance. There had always been a gentle curve to her day. It had the grace of a ballerina’s pose. There was no posturing, no forced effort. In the mornings of her life she had always been ready and waiting. She rose into it with ease, sitting up to gently capture it. Alarm bells would ring for her and she would float up gently from the surface of her dreams to willingly meet the day ahead. With purpose of thought, without fear, she was fully open. With total absence of hurry, she had always managed to get things done. Her attentions were always divided yet full – such was her energy for life.
Children cannot teach their bellies obedience, this she understood, and so the muscles of her bowels did not tighten when her toddlers set their faces and pushed their bowls far from them. The fatty dimple pits that once sat beneath their fingers at the knuckles were fast disappearing but there was still room for her to become lost within them for a time. So why fret? The smile that these little details drew from her mouth was as definite and unchangeable as the naughty pout that sat upon theirs. Within her her offspring could find no weakness to exploit. There was no satisfaction to be gained from eliciting a reaction from her because she dealt with all their little nuances with a fondness. In this way she learnt about little Kai and Tadesse in a way that escapes most parents. It was obvious to her that her children did not behave in a certain way to simply pester and annoy but misbehaved in their way for reasons that were known only to themselves… and that was enough.
In many ways she was not unique. Like all true mothers she conspired to always leave for herself the least, the smallest, the most meagre, the slimmest, the most charred. In her wake she sometimes left hardened spoiled little things. There were some other factors that distinguished her from others though. In her world of motherhood a cut knee was a cut knee not a portal for infection and amputation. Spilt milk was spilt milk not money down the drain and an untimely interruption to her daily routine. The teasing little fingers pushing and playing, picking and picking never bothered her but soon would come a time when she would realise that she anxiously held her breath as morsels were carefully selected from miniature plates and meticulously inspected by these pedantic connoisseurs. Instead of eating they placed songs in their mouths or set their faces with stony little lips. She was their eternal plaything. Moreover, outside of her immediate circumstances, the meagreness of her portion in life was never seen or questioned. Back then she missed nothing of herself or of any former existence. Life experiences were simply sequential. The days did not pile up one on top the other. The challenge of motherhood in this unstable environment was still as easy a thing as the parting of her thighs in labour.
“The time will come for you to decide Monroe, are you in the race or not.”
Monroe stood with his hands in his pockets feeling like a schoolboy sent before the headmaster. Davenport was speaking calmly, without his usual irritation, leaning towards a more gently persuasive manner.
“It may seem as if we have reached that point already but there is still much work to do. Don’t you realise what we’re doing here; we’re questioning authority, creating our own wisdom, leading the field.”
“I know what you’re getting at.” And he did. It was perhaps a perverted subversion but was it not their job to push boundaries. This concept had meant something different in his university years; there he had been encouraged to form his own opinions, to think for himself, to identify true knowledge where it existed, yes, but to repeatedly ask questions of oneself and one’s peers.
“People like your friend Sinclair will never understand such things. I don’t mean to criticise. He’s like most, reductionism has such a firm hold on them they can’t progress forwards from it. Don’t get me wrong, it does form the foundation of everything we do but what’s the point in studying life in all its minute detail if we find ourselves paralysed, incapable of moving on to bigger and better things?”
“All of us are hungry for the bigger picture.”
“In that case forgive me for the analogy but most of them are like intellectual anorexics or bulimics, either denying themselves any new insights or purging themselves uncontrollably whenever they come close to making a breakthrough. They sicken themselves by convention.” Anorexics and bulimics? At least he’d moved away from the term ‘fossilised fools’. “Must you insist on shuddering at all my criticisms? You must always remember, Monroe, that our peers are also our competitors. Not close competitors, but competitors none the less.”
“Yes, but I doubt that any are taking the same course as us.”
“They do not dare. I’m inclined to pursue the impossible. I’m not frightened by what I might find. Our job is to make the unanswerable answerable.”
There was something about the way Patrick Davenport said his name. Something about the way he over-used it in every conversation they ever had. His father would often adopt a similar tone, use his own family name against his son in a tone that often seemed derogatory.
“Monroe,” he would say, as if addressing an adult rather than a child, like an employer getting ready to reprimand his staff.
“Yes Daddy.”
“Does that look like the right foot to you?” Monroe would have no choice but to look at his foot half way in, struggling, yet again, to navigate the curves of his shoe. He has a familiar vision of himself. He is sat on the floor, his father towering over him.
“No Daddy.”
“Then perhaps you’d care to explain to me why, for the last ten minutes, you’ve been trying to mercilessly push your foot into that shoe?” Monroe gave no answer, for how could he explain why, at the age of ten, he still couldn’t put his shoes on the right feet? Oh Monroe, Monroe, Monroe; thrice would run his name in his head, a mocking despairing tone teetering towards sarcasm, for that is how Mr Harris his school teacher would also refer to him, peering over his shoulder astounded by his failure to grasp simple numeracy. Oh Monroe, Monroe, Monroe. But when Monroe discovered his gift for science he took all his chastisements well, quietly imagining that his role of the backward genius would soon be realised. No Daddy, I can’t put my own shoes on properly, but as you see I have solved the mysteries of the universe. No Mr Harris, I do not know which way round the letter ‘s’ goes, but do not despair I have unravelled the human genome. ‘Riddle me this, riddle me that’. Necessity is indeed the mother of all invention and it was truly necessary for Monroe to believe that although he could not perform the simplest of tasks he would in fact later fulfil his role as some kind of idiot savant prized and praised throughout the land answering all life’s little riddles. Little did he know that all life would present him with was other people’s coat tails, hanging on for dear life, not flying but being dragged along the ground with his face metaphorically rubbing in the dirt while the so called real heroes of science bullied and berated him with as much fervour as the other bullies who preceded them. Monroe was more than capable, he was gifted but constantly condemned to play the sidekick, thwarted by, of all things, his own passive personality perhaps. Clever as he was, he had still to unravel the mystery of his own unfulfilled potential. He’d done alright but he was already pushing thirty eight and there wasn’t much time to make a solid mark. He felt as if he was a young man when he met Davenport but a few years had since passed and he was older but somehow shrunken.
Their work found its base in an area that seemed to be the ugly gut of the universe; crowded, smelly, intolerant. At the end of the day he had to drag his feet wearily through the street’s entrails to retreat to his home. It seemed most had soaked themselves in salt to harden themselves against what they saw. Like this sight of a woman sat on the corner of the pavement, head down, eyes closed, hands together as if in prayer, her long black skirt shrouding the dirty pavement, her head loosely draped in a black scarf. She said nothing. Monroe paused a while, began to reach into his pocket.
“Come along Monroe.”
Davenport was already across the road stood by the car with his hand on the door handle. Even from this safe distance Monroe could make out the scowl of distaste morphing its way across his face; his brow making its way from impatience through to annoyance all the way to frank disapproval, his hand gripping the door handle on the passenger side as if he had the power to open it. Monroe quickly withdrew his hand from his left pocket and retrieved the keys to his car from his right pocket. As he crossed the road Davenport was still looking upon the woman at the roadside as if ready to fly upon her, or so Monroe thought. But as he got closer he realised that it was discomfort which had managed to break through on the man’s face. As if he knew that his eyes had betrayed him Davenport was quick with his words.
“Just as I said, too much humanity.”
Monroe unlocked the car and assumed his position as dutiful chauffeur. He was about to say, “It’s open,” but Davenport had already assumed the same and was now sitting comfortably in the passenger seat staring straight ahead. He didn’t like to drive. Sometimes they took the overground, occasionally the underground and frequently taxis but sometimes, when Monroe felt he had the strength to maintain concentration through the barrage of criticism and sarcastic remarks, he would drive…his own car, a barely roadworthy battered old Lada Riva with a well worn leather interior.
“No change for the weary then? I actually thought you’d changed your mind half way through and were about to toss your car keys into her cup.” Monroe could have given a wry laugh but decided not to respond. “You do know you’d be perpetuating the cycle don’t you?” Monroe starts the engine and checks for traffic. He hopes he can resist the urge to plough the vehicle into the nearest bollard. “She was probably shipped over here to beg for purpose.”
“For what purpose?” Oh, what arse Monroe. Now you’ve gone and encouraged him.
“So naïve. Were I a lady I’d probably find it quite charming. How on earth are you still single?” Here we go. “You don’t imagine that she’ll get to keep the money she makes do you...? Crime rings Monroe.”
Monroe absent-mindedly drives through a zebra crossing. He realises just in time to see the furious face of a pedestrian peering in at him, mouthing curse words towards the closed window. As Monroe proceeds slowly on his way the man swings his leg and his foot connects sweetly with the back of the vehicle, so hard it seems to jolt. Great, another injury to add to the long list of war wounds.
“Never heard of crime rings? No matter. I’m sure you’ll become intimately acquainted with them when you go to prison for dangerous driving… that’s if you survive the road rage incidents.”
“I was just thinking about what you said that’s all, lost concentration.”
“I’m saying that your pointless act of charity would have made very little direct difference to her life and would only have succeeded in making the streets a lot more crowded with more beggars – there.” He now stopped, as if he’d finally got something off his chest, hacked it up like some great big lump of congealed phlegm ridden with tuberculosis. Spat it out in a ‘there, I’ve said it now’ kind of fashion. When the truth was, these things were very easy for him to share, as if he took the business of educating Monroe as his own personal burden. His was a crusade that had its very beginnings right from the very first encounter – a meeting of minds that had turned out to be an interview. One might have expected him to start lecturing on the crime rate of this area which housed some of the poorest people in London, but Monroe knew to expect more than simplicity from his self-appointed mentor. For all his faults, for him it was about possibility and the recognition of progress. By now Monroe knew him well enough to know that he was merely frustrated by wasted potential, squandered opportunities. There was a certain element of frustration and boredom about his mood wherever he was, whether he be at an academic conference or in a general public place. Monroe would watch that look come across his face as if he had caught a bad stink under his nose.
Monroe has his hands set tight around the steering wheel now, white knuckle riding, but he is trying to release his grip on the past, a past which saw him young and a little more confident, lounging in comfortable leather chairs gossiping about science, colleagues and the way forward.
“I see Turner and Ramamurthy are making some progress.”
“Really?”
“I thought that the German team had surpassed them but they seem to have had a bit of a breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?” He sat with the Nature journal balancing on his lap casually thumbing through the pages. Back in those early days Monroe was a little more relaxed. Some would say he was a little too laid back, not driven enough to make any real mark in his profession. The pressure of time had not yet seized him. Nowadays, though, he had a constant ache around his neck and shoulders. He was fairly gripped by ambition coupled with the crippling feeling of already having failed. He read on in the journal and before he had a chance to answer the question he’d been asked Davenport continued on. He was in a fretful and dismissive mood. Monroe wasn’t to know at this point that this was the default setting on his personality.
“No matter anyway, I find the whole thing rather pointless.”
“Pointless?”
“Yes. Like asking me to repeat something I’ve clearly already stated.”
“I just wondered what your justification was…”
Davenport looked at him rather sharply he thought. Monroe did well to back away. ‘Justification’? he acted as if he was unfamiliar with the concept; a man who had sat in public debate time and time again, making controversial statements, sometimes without any scientific evidence to cushion the verbal backlash of general outrage that would follow. Monroe dug around in the sulci of his brain to find a way of rephrasing. He was already learning but the dynamics of the relationship had not yet been fully set.