Inch Levels (20 page)

‘So, nothing to worry about, I suggest,’ he said. He sighed, a hand moving up slowly to touch in his turn the soft paisley cotton. ‘You might change these, though,’ he said, and his body moved a little, straightened slowly and with effort. Preparing itself for this latest, miserable, small indignity.

There was more he might have said. The room is too light, the curtains unlined, skimpy, insufficient; the silence insufficient too, making sleep an endurance pursuit. No wonder I bitch at you all. Last night, though, I managed something approaching a deep sleep – and this was the result. He might have said – but all of it unwise. He held his tongue.

It hovered, this dream, on the edge of his sleep. Always had – for years and years. It had changed its complexion with the years, naturally enough, morphing with circumstance: at first, his mother ran it as a solo operation, dominating proceedings like a Colossus; and when he was younger, before he knew the names of certain plants, the masses of creeping foliage had presented itself as an undifferentiated mass of leaves and stems and tendrils. Knowledge, then, sharpened the dream – which just proved, he thought, that a little knowledge was certainly not always a good thing.

When Robert met Margaret and she opted to marry him, the dream took on a changed form. Following their meeting in London, following the disturbed realisation that this unprepossessing character wasn’t about to shuffle away once more into the shadows – following this, Robert seemed to make common cause with Sarah: in his head, the pair of them moving smoothly to colonise his subconscious mind. And so the dream began, and lurked stubbornly – for years now, morphing and altering in complexion, but remaining essentially, tediously the same.

This, Patrick had very often thought, was like having a tapeworm. You didn’t
choose
such a guest: you simply inhaled or ingested an egg – and there it grew, arranging itself happily, settling down for a good feed. This is what it felt like, to him: as if he had his own personal tapeworm. He had read in the paper one morning about a woman who managed to get a tapeworm lodged in her brain. It stayed there – oh, for ages, getting up to all sorts of terrible mischief. He spread some more marmalade on his toast and realised that he could identify easily enough with the poor dear.

And yes: in the mornings, after yet another repetitive episode, he would wake to feel himself wet: his pyjamas – and then when at length he decided was too modern for pyjamas, his tee-shirt – damp, unpleasantly moist. If the dream woke him in the middle of the night, as it occasionally had the power to do, he would find the cloth saturated, and sometimes the sheet saturated, sweat trickling in runnels on his chest.

Deeply unpleasant – not that there was ever anyone to share the sensation of a night sweat, to offer comfort in the darkness. No chance.

Patrick always – always, always – for a moment imagined that this dream was real. Always, always did: always it took his brain a moment, two moments, to recover something of a grasp on the actual world. Then he would cross the room, his pyjamas hanging damply, and pull the curtain – or rather, yank it across – and open the window and pull air into his lungs, as though they were filled with some pestilence or miasma of disease. And then: then, he would shove his dream aside: until the next time it presented itself.

And always there was a next time. Over and over this episode recurred; and over and over he shoved it aside.

Patrick told himself from time to time that at least the whole phenomenon was a sign of his mind’s independence. It did its own thing, it made its own mind up, it sifted and sorted and judged. Well, perhaps: but this was a profoundly unconvincing argument, most of the time – though occasionally it retained a little power. He could see why: he had never been good at having things his own way.
If Patrick has his way
: not a sentence, he thought, to make a blushing appearance all that often in his life.
Patrick will do as he’s told
: this (of course) from his mother.
Come on then, Patrick
: reluctantly, at school, when chosen last at PE.
We’re not going anywhere, not really
: this from the boys at school, slipping off at home time for a bit of craic.
Let Patrick have his way
: seldom. No, never. He learned how to manage; later, as a teacher, he observed that all such children learn fast, and with such skill. Fleet of foot, speed like quicksilver: they learn how not to be hurt. Some of them in the process learn how to hurt others. Then they became adults. He watched all this, and said nothing.

At least, he thought, at least my dream had the – something, the grace to change itself, to adapt itself a little to the changing circumstances of my life. At the beginning – when he began to dream it as a child in their little terraced house, the first house that had no garden worth speaking of – the garden in the dream was small, walled, circumscribed. He was still able, though, magically to step from his bedroom window on the first floor straight into that walled place, crammed with silvery plants and darkness.

Later, when they moved – exchanging that barely remembered house on the red Victorian terrace on the hill for the long, sprawling, modern bungalow with its skylight and big back garden – the old dream and his new life, his real life, seemed to come to some hellish accord: in the new house, his bedroom was of course right there on the ground floor; how easy to creep through the bedroom window, creep outside into a moonlit garden! Although aspects of the dream of course adapted themselves too: the shape of the window, the form of its clasp, altered as the dream retold itself; the one became a ghostly facsimile of the other.

And later still, Robert joined his mother, there behind the closing door.

Robert. Medieval Robert, shadowed Robert, placed there in half-darkness on the tapestry, placed in the embrace of sullen-leaved ivy. Their mutual dislike was absolute.

He had had such little practice at liking Margaret’s boyfriends: little practice at putting together a bland, dissembling face, false smile, falsely firm handshake. There had been none. Robert was the first and the last, really.

Margaret had finished university and at once left Ireland for London. Magnetic London, a place with jobs, with air to breathe. Air with a different flavour, as Margaret put it. She would go to London, she would do her own thing, she would like it in a place with choice, with anonymity. She went – as it turned out, for a couple of years.

The famous summer of 1976: the summer of the heatwave. The summer that Patrick, now at the unripe age of twenty-one, was visiting from Ireland, staying with Margaret, dragging her through the comparatively cool, echoing halls of the Tate to look at Victorian painting. The summer that she in turn ushered him onto a hot London bus on Millbank for the short – but stifling – journey up to Piccadilly Circus, and then on to Regent Street to do a little shopping.

Margaret was living alongside half of Ireland: as she wrote in one of her infrequent letters home, she could have gone to a hoolie every night of the week, had she been minded to do so. Or pub crawls through Kilburn. But hoolies and Irish bars were not quite her style – or his, come to that: marches and killer demonstrations were one thing; but their mother had schooled them too rigorously in ways of thinking and behaving for hoolies and smoky Irish dives in Kilburn ever to attract.

She lived, for her two or so London years, in a little flat in a little street at the bottom of the Caledonian Road. Caledonian Crescent: a dinky little half-moon of Georgian houses around the corner from King’s Cross: fallen on hard times, to be sure, but pleasant enough, and handy, too. Not at all bad, if you could avoid the King’s Cross prostitutes plying their trade; and the druggies shooting up on the basement steps. She didn’t have to step over these druggies though, because her little flat was the first floor of one of these Georgian houses: the druggies, then, could be circumvented easily enough; and with time she even found herself on nodding terms with some of the prostitutes.

Patrick, watching the nurse slide a needle into his arm, watching a drip being administered, was reminded of the glint of a syringe on those basement steps, long ago.

He was distinctly green about the gills on the evening he arrived. Fresh out of university: in Belfast, which meant home to Derry each weekend on the bus; set aside the political ferment and shaves with death, and you could almost say he hadn’t seen much of the world. And he had never been to London before. On that first evening, they went for a walk to see the local colour – the anarchist bookshop and the Greek grocer at the end of the road, both places soaked, to him, in extreme exotica; and then up the road, through the thick, hot air to see the gloomy walls of Pentonville prison – and then back; and Margaret made something to eat while Patrick hung around the windows and looked down into the London twilight as the first of the prostitutes took up her station nearby.

‘I could watch them all night,’ he said, absorbing like a sponge the girl’s get-up and hair and carriage.

Margaret said, a faint pulse of pride in her voice, ‘A couple of them are my friends now.’

‘Friends!’ Patrick said in pious horror.

She backtracked a little. ‘Well, not friends, maybe. But during the snow back in January, a few of them set fire to a litter bin – you know, for warmth – and I was coming back from the tube, and one of them called me over –’

‘Called you over?’

‘For a gin.’ She laughed. ‘It was like the Girl Guides, you know, around a brazier.’

She stopped. He was staring.

‘Maybe not really like the Girl Guides,’ she ended, limply. ‘Not with the gin.’ She added, ‘And there was no tonic.’

An explorer’s heart? His exploring heart ought to have pulsed a little at the thought of hanging out with a clutch of prostitutes on a London street. But no: he preferred even then to skate around, to leave behind any sights disagreeable, challenging, unpleasant.

‘So what did you do?’ he said.

Margaret glanced over from the cramped little kitchenette, a pan in her hand. She shrugged a little defensively. ‘Joined them.’

‘Joined them!’

She spun from the little hob: put the pan down smartly on a cold gas ring; the overhead grill tinkled faintly. ‘For God’s sake, Patrick! You’re not in the suburbs now! And you’re my brother, not my mother!’

Which stung. He felt a gap at that point: not one of emotion, simply of experience. She drank neat gin with prostitutes – well, she had once. And she had a boyfriend now, and he would have to meet this boyfriend the following evening. At the age of twenty-three, Margaret was an adult at last. More than he felt himself to be.

How intimidating.

The theme of the summer visit to London, in hindsight, was one of intimidation. He was intimidated by the anarchists and Greeks, the prison officers and gin-swilling prostitutes of the Caledonian Road – and so in turn he set out to intimidate Margaret. It was easily done: their mother had softened her up, over the years. She was duly intimidated, a little, by the Victorian art that Patrick insisted she look at the next day – before she rallied, applying her psychological insights to
Pegwell Bay
.

And then another form of intimidation. It was Patrick’s idea to meet this Robert person and go for a walk on Hampstead Heath: he had a plan that involved showing off his knowledge of culture and history, to put this new man in his place. He and Margaret quarrelled their way through the hot day, then, through London’s grimy landmarks: in the Tate and then in Liberty; then again on the top deck of the red London bus as it jerked its way through Camden Town in the gathering rush-hour traffic. And then, at last, the rendezvous with Robert outside Hampstead Heath station.

Patrick’s wickedness had not been leeched from him as a result of that long, hot day in central London. If anything, it had been concentrated still further: super-concentrated. He decided they should go the long way round to the Heath: climbing up the hill from the station to Hampstead High Street in the muggy evening air, passing under its barely heeded quaint gas lamps, before turning onto Flask Walk and down into the trees. Toiling, sweating, climbing: all in order to explore the area’s cultural heritage. To show off Patrick’s education, and to expose this new man’s relative absence of same.

He was irked by his presence, yes. Of course he was. By his existence. By the look of him, his simian look, he thought then, and by the sound of him: that harsh Belfast accent capable of slicing through steel. By his presence in Margaret’s life. In – though here Patrick’s uptight Catholic sensibilities paused, retreated from the scene – in her bed in those nasty Caledonian Road digs. And so he would get to him. He would wind him up.

*

Robert eyed the boy walking along in front of him. The brother: young, younger than he had imagined, and young for his age. Tall, skinny, not much to him at all. Walking like this: a few steps ahead. Who was kidding who?

As he watched, the brother gestured at a house.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘That one.’

Margaret slowed, looked, took in the house, the scrubby garden. Robert stopped too, not that he had much choice. They stopped, they caught their breath in the hot, polluted air. They looked.

‘Doesn’t look like much to me,’ Robert said.

The boy slid a glance. ‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

But something had altered here, in this moment. Robert heard his accent, his tones, his entire Belfast voice and manner carrying unpleasantly. Suddenly.
Doesn’t it?

How did the brother manage that?

They looked at each other.

Though the tone was set just a few minutes before. The bus pulling in (late) and the introductions (awkward) in the middle of a cloud of diesel fumes, of anxious, clucking mothers and grannies and grim fathers getting their bearings, looking for the entrance to the Royal Free Hospital. Margaret tense – and then this proposal to go looking for this damned house.

‘We might as well,’ the brother had said, ‘we’re practically there already.’