Observatory Mansions (11 page)

Temporary relief
.

On my way back from work, walking this time, furious with my lack of inner peace and unable to remove the image of the
smiling new resident from my brain, I found relief through an overheard conversation. Two elderly women walked and talked and stopped to look in windows:

Yes, it does look lovely on you.

It’s a family heirloom. My grandmother used to wear this sable stole. Sadly, the weather’s getting warmer and I’ll have to put it away again until winter. I almost chide the summer for being so warm, it means I can’t wear my stole. It feels so soft. Feel it.

I’m sure it’s lovely.

Feel it.

Yes, so soft.

Take it. Wear it for a while if you like.

Really?

Yes, of course.

So soft. It feels wonderful wearing it.

Look in the window there. Look at those silks!

What colours!

Do you think we dare go in?

Oh, let’s!

Darling, where’s my sable?

Just here, around my neck – Oh!

Where’ve you put it?

It was just here.

Where’s it gone? My sable stole! My stole!

I don’t know.

It’s been stolen!

Perhaps on the floor. No. Oh, no.

You bitch, you let it be stolen!

Then I felt happier (lot 987).

Peter Bugg’s betrayal
.

When I had finished cataloguing my new exhibit, I travelled up to the third floor to see what had happened to Anna Tap, and found an unpleasant progression: the original door of flat eighteen had been changed, the old lock had been replaced, the new lock was nowhere to be seen.

Miss Claire Higg’s television set could not be heard, despite it being her usual viewing time. Instead came the distasteful sound of talking; there were not two, but four voices. Higg had company. Two of the voices I immediately recognized. Claire Higg. Anna Tap. Of the other two, one confused me, the other confounded me. The first of these two I could not recognize at all. I had not heard it before. What was more, I could not understand a word it was saying. It was speaking, in a somewhat broken fashion, a foreign tongue. Suddenly this voice, the first voice, laughed. It was like a child’s laugh but it wasn’t coming from a child. That beautiful laugh, so natural, so disturbing in its beauty, was completely out of place there; Claire Higg’s sitting room should not have a laugh like that inside it. The second voice conversed alternately in the foreign language, but more fluently than the other voice, and then in our own language. It belonged, I am ashamed to admit – ashamed, that is, not for myself but on behalf of the owner – to a retired schoolmaster, retired personal tutor and ex-companion of mine who reeked of a hundred different smells. Peter Bugg, without a doubt. I even knocked on his flat door, labelled ten, on my way down the stairs just to make sure. No one replied to my knocking. Peter Bugg was out, call back later. Peter Bugg was out, indeed he was. Out of favour and out of his flat, upstairs with Higg, Tap, a foreigner and himself.

They’ve all been taken in by Anna Tap, all gone:

The Porter
(I wasn’t concerned about this one, let him go)

The man with the bathroom scales
(his pockets will weigh, each week from now, two coins less)

The girl that Francis had known for two years but never spoken to
(struck off my list)

Twenty, Dog Woman
(I only ever cared for one dog, and she’s been dead these many years)

Higg
(wait till the next power cut)

Bugg
(who cares about Peter Bugg?)

I did. Francis did. I raised my hand in the school classroom of Peter Bugg’s mind. Please, sir. Sir! Sir!

Silence.

Wait, I thought, they’ll be back. One by one, in reverse order, they’ll all come running back. Just wait. And so I waited. For three hours. And then, finally, I heard a quiet knocking on our door. And who did that knock belong to? The man with a hundred smells.

A dog collar
.

Peter Bugg was, as was his custom, sweating and crying an extraordinary amount, though these I noticed were excretions of excitement and not of nervousness. He told me that a wonderful thing had happened.
The lock, the lock
. Some other time for that.
Now! Now, Peter Bugg
(not sir, this time),
now!
Listen, something wonderful has happened to the woman who lives in flat twenty.
But the lock!
Later. Listen. Sit down.

The woman who lives in flat twenty has begun to speak. I’m sure you never heard her speak. Well, she started today. At about five o’clock it happened. No sentences yet. But a communication of a kind has gradually begun. Just words. Foreign words. But being a teacher of many subjects, as I am—

As you
were
.

—I have managed to join some of the words together into a kind of meaning. It seems that the woman, whom I have seen about but never paid much attention to, is very attracted
to dogs. At first that was the only word she came up with – just dog. In her own tongue of course. Then, with our encouragement, she went a little further. A name. Max. The name, we wondered, was it Max, short for Maximilian? When we said the name in full she yelped with excitement. A yelp that was not unlike a dog’s yelp. We tried to find out who this Maximilian was. Her husband? No. Her father? Her boyfriend? Her brother? No. All she kept saying was dog, dog. We presumed that she was stuck upon the word dog. But then she showed us a dog collar. On the dog collar was a name tag, the tag said MAX, in capital letters. Max
was
a dog, you see. That was what she was trying to tell us.

Fascinating. And the lock? Anna Tap’s reaction?

It was Miss Tap, the new resident, who discovered that the woman could speak, though she could not understand her, she was sure that she was speaking words, but in a different language. She asked Claire if she understood, if she spoke the language. Claire suggested, and rightly so, that I might be of assistance, explaining that I am a teacher and personal tutor—

Were a teacher.
Were
a personal tutor.

I could understand the woman, you see. I knew the language. And we’re trying to find out more about her. It appears she’s been in some terrible tragedy. She, as yet, seems unable to remember anything about her life except that she had a dog named Maximilian. Indeed, she clutches the damn collar to her and won’t let anyone touch it. It’s the sole clue to her life and she’s petrified that someone might steal it.

My ears pricked up. Doggy fashion.

And when we make progress the woman from twenty laughs. It’s such an extraordinary laugh, Francis, you should hear it. We’re endeavouring to find out more. She’s very stuck on Anna, won’t say a word unless she’s by her. She keeps
licking her face and hands when she has the opportunity and she whines when Anna’s out of the room. I just came down to tell you. I’m going back up there now, they’re sure to be ready. Anna and Claire have been washing her; she’s in a terrible mess. She smells too, but that can all be remedied.

And the lock?

Ah, yes. The lock. I’m sorry, Francis. Shortly after you left for work, someone knocked on my door. I opened it. There stood the Porter with Miss Tap. The Porter hissed and then spoke: Give me the key to the new lock on the door of flat eighteen.

You denied having it, of course.

No. I gave him the key. Then he said: Give me the old lock to the door of flat eighteen. It seemed a trifle difficult for him to speak. His sentences were, I believe, rehearsed.

You insisted you didn’t have the old lock.

No. I gave him the lock. You know how I abhor physical violence. The threat of it was certainly there. I was sweating and crying so.

Sir!

The Porter took the key and lock and left.

Useless!

Miss Tap remained behind and had a few quiet words with me. Did you move my possessions around in my flat? I did. Do you promise never to do such a thing again? I did. Thank you, she said, and began to leave. I tried to say something, stammer a kind of apology. She turned and said, rather kindly I remember – she said – Don’t say another word. We’ll forget about it. It never happened. Besides, I am entirely convinced that you were put up to it. Goodbye, she said, and left. She came back later, enquiring about my knowledge of foreign tongues. I hope you don’t mind, Francis, not now, not now this business with the woman from twenty has cropped up. I was sure you wouldn’t mind. All
that fussing with locks and keys and things suddenly seems rather petty, don’t you think?

It seemed to me now that it was most unlikely that Miss Anna Tap’s stay in flat eighteen would be a temporary one. Her arrival had changed time in Observatory Mansions. Like the arrival of Christ which ruptured time and shifted it from BC to AD, Anna Tap’s arrival and presence had somehow applied sutures to the broken years of the inhabitants of Observatory Mansions, and by doing so had, unintentionally perhaps, unleashed an inferno. Unlike Christ, Anna Tap, an amateur in controlling time, was not able to stand us on our feet and say – Forget all the yesterdays, let’s start from today and go forward. No, she was unable to do that, instead she sent us hurtling back into our pasts.

I went to bed early.

That white.

That cotton.

I slept, while above me memories began to flutter awake.

III
THE FOUR OBJECTS

The Time of Memories
.

We now entered the time known as the Time of Memories, a strange time in which we residents of Observatory Mansions were forced to ingest the recollections that were sent out of each of us to knock on each other’s doors, to fly around our rooms, to swim up our nostrils while we slept. Memories were everywhere during that time, they lurked soppy-eyed or listless with unspent energy, begging for attention on door handles, on window sills, on bedheads. We could not ignore them, we listened to them, we drank them up, we swallowed them and still they would not go away. In that time filled with our memories it was difficult to find the present. We did not know what the hour was, or the day, some of us even searched for the name of the month. During the Time of Memories we saw our rooms and possessions and ourselves shift through clouds of history. No object was to be trusted, for all the objects of Observatory Mansions gleefully took part in this confusing episode in our lives. If we reached for a chair, we might find that that chair was not actually there: it had been years ago, we had just remembered it, that was all.

The Time of the Four Objects
.

A sub-division of that time went under the name of the Time of the Four Objects. The idea of these four, contemptible possessions entered each of our brains and once inside expanded until they were all that we could think of. A leather
dog collar (with a name tag inscribed MAX), a pair of round steel-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, a black and white passport photograph of a sickly man (inscribed on its reverse –
Claire, Claire, I love you so –
and signed –
A. Magnitt, flat nineteen, Observatory Mansions
) and a wooden mahogany ruler with markings on its sides to indicate the length of inches.

The air had grown sticky with memories, we had to struggle to breathe and as we breathed we sucked in yet more memories. Everyone was remembering. Childhoods ran up the stairs of Observatory Mansions, deaths lay in our beds. In the dust of our home were minute skin particles which we had shed sometimes years, sometimes only days before. These particles began to connect themselves so that we saw the skins of our former selves take up our shapes, their former shapes, and wander about us, ghosts of skins past. Only Father, agile in his stillness, managed to gracefully step over, managed to dance around all the histories that tugged at his socks. He did it by keeping his thoughts empty, by achieving that perfect inner stillness where there are no thoughts, where memories suffocate.

The prologue to the Time of Memories had begun with the arrival of the new resident, Miss Anna Tap. And it was she who conducted the histories out of us, until, that is, there were too many voices, too many ghosts of objects for her to control. But the Time of Memories proper began with a dog collar belonging to the woman who lived in flat twenty and ended in a death, not in the memory of a death, though memories do sometimes end (or begin) with deaths, but in a real death. In a real body that refused to sink back into a past when we touched it. The body was cold and it was solid.

The residents of Observatory Mansions were trying to populate their present lonely lives with people from their pasts; so that they might feel sociable again. They didn’t realize that memories could hurt, but soon they would.
Memories should be locked up inside skulls or in a tunnel that narrowed as it progressed. At first I did my best to ignore the business that went on two floors above me in flat sixteen but only one evening later, after a more successful day at work, I was disturbed again by the knocking of the man with a hundred smells who insisted on introducing me to the memories that had been set free.