Inch Levels (3 page)

These fields ran to the cliff edge: beyond stretched the Atlantic, calm, smooth, unwrinkled. The coconut scent of whin blossom faded out there on the edge of the land, to be replaced by a clean smell of salt, carried on the mild wind. A haze gathered on the blue horizon – and islands floated in the haze: a few doubtful, faint, domed shapes in the warming air. To the left and right the coast swung away, all black gnarls of rock and white foaming waves, and a scattering of offshore skerries and islets, their tips stained a little with guano. And there were the gulls that take refuge on such places: there on the wind, with black-streaked heads and black legs; and cormorants and fulmars, wheeling silently in the blue sky, or perched on crag and rock, or sitting peaceably on the surface of the sea itself.

Yes: this was better. Patrick felt his thin body relaxing a little under the blue coverlet. This was better, this was a comfort.

And the light. The light was not cool as was customary in such high latitudes, but luminous on this day, radiant, pressing: light welled from the sky and broke from the sea; and started in fine, silver, infinitesimal lines and needles from each individual blade of grass waving and moving in these green fields.

Up here, up on the unfenced cliff edge, the ground fell quite steeply down to the sea. Here also was an unexpected hint of the tropics, for the long slopes of the hill were not bare rock but instead were dense with heavy vegetation: a dark bush landscape, suggestive of warmer climes; and the sand on the curving beach at the foot of the slope was brilliant white in the sunshine, and the sea shallows brilliant too, in a range of turquoises, azures, peacock blues. Offshore, the sea broke against the skerries, against a reef of black basalt rocks, which formed a natural breakwater; within this sketchy lagoon, the sea swelled softly, lazily.

Still early in the day: the sun in the sky suggesting eleven o’clock, perhaps; and only a handful of family parties on the beach. And new arrivals to the scene – five small figures walking there in the distance below, picked out against the white sand. A man and two women: and dressed in a way that suggested subtly, in hems and cuts and cardigans, another time. Their car, tucked in the sandy, rough little car park at the end of the beach, made this manifest: a Triumph, perhaps, or something of that sort, in solid, dark green, all curves and outsized headlights.

And with these adults came a pair of children: a boy, aged five or six, perhaps; a girl a year or two older. They dropped their sandals, they wriggled from clothes, they rushed for the water: the boy made it first, only to be pulled up sharply by – it must be – the frigidity of these northern seas. He waded in more slowly now, the girl behind him, then the boy seemed to take a breath – and went under. And now the girl plunged too, and the two children seemed to vanish for a few seconds. A head popped up, vanished again. Now the man, paddling in the shallows, waded a little further in: more splashing, and the children emerged from the water. Definitively emerged: waving arms, and angry gesticulations; and now a raised voice carried along the beach, floated up the slope, up, up here to the edge of the cliff.

The two women waiting on the sand watched. They sat and faced the sea, the pair of them, watching the dipping, the plunging, the gesticulations. One of them motionless; the other stretching her legs out into the sun, pushing her heels, her hands into the warm sand.

A family in early summer up on the northern fringes of Ireland. Dark figures, white sand, black rocks, silver light, green fields, purple heather and blue ocean.

The starkness of it all, silhouetted against the sea. Impressed on the landscape.

Impressed on his mind. Patrick woke.

The nurse – busy with a chart, with a pen – looked up to the head of the bed. ‘Alright there, sweetheart?’

Patrick nodded his head, a very little.

‘A dream. I was dreaming.’

‘A nice dream, I hope.’

He flinched at her hearty tone. ‘Remembering when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘With my sister. A trip to the beach we made.’

The nurse nodded knowledgeably. This was standard, she knew from her training. The patients tended to go back as the end drew near: to evaluate and shuffle memories, reassessing, considering.

‘What beach was it?’ she asked. It was always best to encourage them.

‘Kinnagoe,’ he murmured. ‘The summer of –’

‘– not all that long ago, then,’ the nurse said.

‘– 1960 or so, I suppose it was.’

‘Kinnagoe: that’s a nice spot,’ said the nurse and left a pause, as she was trained to do, for him to fill. There was silence. ‘And what happened in the dream?’ she coaxed. ‘Can you remember?’

He murmured, ‘We were all there. My sister and me, and my parents and Cassie.’

‘Cassie? Is that another sister?’

‘No. Just someone who lived with us.’

The nurse waited.

‘We were in the water. Diving to touch the sea bed.’ He stopped.

‘And –’

But – nothing now, suddenly: a slight shake of the head and eyes firmly closed; and after a few disappointed moments, she moved towards the door. A difficult patient, they’d already told her: didn’t like to play the game. A squeak of shoes on the rubber floor and the door wheezed: and behind her, in the bed, Patrick opened his eyes again. If it wanted to, it would resume. It was out of his hands.

Impressed on his mind: that was it. Like a tattoo, he thought: impressed on the skin, on his brain. He remembered that plunge into the freezing Atlantic – as if it was yesterday and not twenty-five, twenty-six years ago. His mind was humming along today: sorting, arranging, wrapping up, discarding, making sense of a life.

It was true: he had no say in the matter. The clifftop vantage point was a – what? A useful tool? Lying there in his bed, fogged by pain and medication, Patrick was able nevertheless to admire.

To admire – myself, he thought. This is my mind, he thought, my imagination. This is all my doing. Setting the scene: stretching a canvas. Blank, to begin with, a
tabula rasa
to begin with – but already peopled, already filled in a little: a background, a few colours tested here and there. This is not bad, he thought. I wish she hadn’t gone, he thought – the nurse, I wish I hadn’t chased her away. I want some tea. I never learn how best to manage these people. I was distracted, my mind running away with itself. With myself. Making stories and shapes inside my head.

Outside, the bell began to toll in the school: the end of another lesson. The sound cut his head.

As in the past.

Until four months ago he had been obliged to listen to it clanging in its belfry just above the classroom, every forty minutes, all day long, day and daily. Only a few years, fewer than ten, really – though like so many of his colleagues, he had spent most of the period willing time forward, too much time calculating how many years remained until retirement. Wishing it would come sooner.

‘Be careful,’ he told a visitor, ‘be careful what you wish for.’

‘Oh, Patrick, stop,’ the visitor replied. She was a teacher too, a colleague; she tittered uneasily.

‘I’m serious,’ he said. His mouth tended to be dry these days – a side effect of the medication, so they’d told him – and he ran his tongue along his bottom teeth. ‘I’m serious: teachers spend too much time at that lark. Look what happened to me.’

The weight, he meant, that began to fall off his frame, which had been lean to begin with. He was perplexed for a little while and then alarmed and then – and then rapidly other people began to notice; and then a belated visit to the GP, and tests and more tests.

And then whisked to the hospital – and gradually upwards through the wards, settling at last here on the eighth floor. Now he resembled his brother-in-law: now his skin was stretched taut on his skull, now his cheekbones stood out, now his reflection shocked him. Now he saw this shock echoed in the face of each fresh visitor. Now his wish for an early retirement had come true. ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he said. ‘Don’t I know what I’m talking about?’

His life shrunk to this one room: this bed, this locker, this corkboard on the wall, festooned with a card or two, those unlined curtains and that shiny, wipe-clean, yellowish paint on the walls.

That was it – and the grating sound of the bells – the sound that had accompanied him all the way through his teaching years. ‘Well, my comfort is that I won’t have to listen to it for all that much longer. So they tell me.’

The visitor tittered again, uneasily.

And in the meantime, he was a fixture.

‘A fixture, Mr Jackson,’ they said, cheerily. Presumably a good proportion of their eighth-floor residents didn’t last much beyond a day or two. He also noted that the ‘Mr Jackson’ vanished fairly quickly: soon it was ‘Patrick’ this and ‘Patrick’ that. Or ‘Pat’, the sound of which made him curdle. His name shrinking as he approached the end.

Pat: noun: a potato-digging farmer or similar.

Or ‘dear’ or ‘sweetheart’: all of these choice monikers proffered by slips of things five or six or seven years younger than he was.

And the bells.

There was, he thought, probably some comfortable idea doing the rounds they were doing him a favour, installing him in a room with a side view into his old school, his old stamping grounds, complete with green copper belfry, grey stone buildings and hipped roofs and smooth green lawns. Do him good, perhaps they said, slapping themselves on their collective backs, he imagined, in true self-congratulatory style. Poor guy, perhaps they said: struck down much too soon – but now he can remember the good times. What a comfort for him.

Clang, clang.

He had thought of complaining, raising a stink, demanding a new room – and then in the very next moment waving a feeble hand in the air and tell them not to bother, that everything was just fine. This was always part of his knack: to turn from waspish to self-deprecatory in a moment: the better, of course, to keep people feeling ill at ease, confused. Well, he thought, it worked on my students; and it sometimes worked on the adults too.

Oh, Patrick
, they’d murmur,
he’s a laugh, so he is. A right laugh.
Backing off. Glad to shed him and his moods, glad to leave him behind.

Discomfiting people. He’d a lifetime of practice at it.

*

‘At what, Patrick?’ said the nurse. She paused, turned towards the bed. He opened his eyes.

‘What was that?’ A thin, whistling voice: this fella was only thirty-odd, she’d glanced at his notes; but he had an old man’s voice.

‘Practice, you said.’ The nurse – was it another nurse, this time? She was poised to go, but something – a native compassion, perhaps, overriding the time-management skills drummed into her during training – something caused her to pause for a second. She said, ‘At what?’

He looked – not at her, but at the flat, white ceiling. He was perfectly aware today, she thought, for a dry smile was curling the corner of his mouth. ‘God knows, Nurse,’ he said quite clearly. ‘God only knows.’

And she left, smiling a little too. He’s a character, so he is. His eyes were closed once more: when she turned at the door and glanced back, though, only one eye was closed, and the other peeped for a second in her direction. Then it too closed. He’d probably been a decent-looking man, once. She left the room.

‘Perhaps you could keep a journal,’ Margaret said.

Unthinkingly: and he made certain that she regretted rapidly the comment.

‘And what would I write?’ he said. She opened her mouth to reply, and he said, ‘Or should I say, what would I leave out?’

Instead of replying, Margaret stood up abruptly, went to the window. ‘And thank goodness for windows,’ he pursued, ‘to look out of. They fill awkward gaps just wonderfully, I find. I had Robert looking out of the windows the other day too, did he mention?’

This was one of his good days.

‘He did, actually.’

‘So, come on then. A journal. What would I write in it? What would it be called?
The Unfortunate History of Patrick Jackson, and of his Family
; or,
A Decision Made
?’ He eyed her over the blue coverlet. ‘But perhaps that’s a bit too eighteenth-century, a bit too wordy. What about going for something a bit more pithy? What about, let’s see, what about,’ he paused, ‘
Crossroads
? Or
The Snare
? Or, wait, what about
Judgment Day
?’

‘Stop it,’ Margaret said in a low voice. She was still looking out of the window.

‘I like
Judgment Day
,’ he said – but now the fire was leaving his belly; and he sank into his pillows.

And in fact, he had considered beginning a journal of some kind. Just once, when his dreams had cut in once too often and rattled his nerves like the lid on a saucepan. Might his mind, his dreams, be short-circuited in some way? Might he wrestle some control out of this situation? But he had always been reluctant to keep any written record, any account of myself.
Really, Patrick?
– so the conversation had gone once, at Wednesday night history club, the meandering conversation moving around to diaries.
Haven’t you a diary, tucked away somewhere? Well now, I’d’ve thought you’d be just the type. Your books, your papers, your pen flying across the page. That was a missed opportunity, wasn’t it?

Oh, shut up, you gaggle of geese. I’ve never kept a journal, I said. Can’t you just listen? – he had wanted to say.

What had he said instead? He couldn’t remember.

There was too much to put down. Or perhaps there was not enough of substance. Perhaps ‘not enough’ was more like it. Not enough that he would want actually to see the light of day.

Too much, and not enough.

And besides, what would he be writing about? The inside of his head, really – and the inside of his head was just not that attractive a prospect, with its blood vessels pulsating, and grey matter shining a little, its cords and muscles and veins. And some of what these blood vessels and grey matter and cords and muscles and veins had produced over the years was not that attractive.