Hard Copy, page 9
‘…And that ashram turned out to be enormously helpful for all three of us. Meditation is something I generally advise my clients to try. Sitting down with yourself, finding a moment to check in, asking: What am I feeling right now? In your case it’s about the mind just as much as the body. They can’t really be separated from one another, naturally. For your allergy, meditation might be the perfect solution.’ The coach is growing more and more enthusiastic. ‘There’s a remarkable number of alternative therapies, which goes to show how very little traditional medicine understands about allergies, whereas yoga and mindfulness can be enormously effective.’
This man doesn’t know a thing about me, and he doesn’t know a thing about my allergy. I regret ever mentioning it.
‘I’ll email you the name of the programme and a link, but you don’t have to sign up for an expensive course, don’t worry.’
I want to say, that’s lucky, I don’t have any money because I’ve been put on leave and have been getting by on a portion of what was already a meagre salary.
He stands up. ‘I’ll walk you to the door.’ His hand hovers in the air. I shake it.
It’s time to put my plan into practice. ‘Actually, I need to use the toilet.’
‘Oh. Well…’ He’s a bit taken aback. ‘You know where it is!’
‘But thanks so much, really. I really appreciate it.’ Together we make our way, step by step, into the hall. ‘I’ll start on the exercises as soon as I get home.’
The coach slaps his hands together and says, sincerely, ‘Fantastic to hear that, [my name].’ He steps into the office kitchen and I walk away. Part one of my plan is complete.
*
When I reach the toilets at the far end of the hall, next to the stairs, I open and close the door, making sure the click of the handle can be heard. Then I sneak across the marble to the staircase. The stairs are carpeted, dingy from all the feet that have trodden them. The fourth stair creaks, I know; years of training myself to negotiate the building as quietly as possible are finally coming in handy. If someone comes down the stairs now, I’ll have a problem. What should I say? I shouldn’t be here, I’m on leave, I even signed a statement saying so. I don’t have an excuse and, because I don’t automatically smile at people, I always look like I have something to hide.
Could my office be occupied by someone else? I don’t hear the printer, but that doesn’t mean much. Maybe someone wanted a secluded space for their deep work, somewhere they could concentrate. My little room would be ideal for that. If someone’s in there, what do I do? I’m almost at the top of the stairs when I hear a door open on the first floor. Quick! Back down! Is this too much stress for me? I take some calming breaths, try not to make a sound. I’m paused halfway up the winding staircase, out of sight of the person at the top as long as they don’t decide to make their way down. I’m trying to breathe as quietly as possible. If the coach were to step out of the kitchen with a cup of tea right this second, he would see me standing here, frozen on the fifth step. Maybe I could pretend I’m practising his meditation. The person up on the first floor has gone into another room. Now I have to be quick! I dart up the stairs as quietly as I can, take a few long strides to my office, grab the doorknob. It’s now or never.
My office is empty. There’s a layer of dust on the printer. Has no one touched him since I was last here? Is my job so expendable?
‘Don’t worry,’ I whisper softly. ‘I haven’t forgotten you.’ He’s just too heavy to lift, he could slip out of my arms at any moment. My head swims with panic at the thought. I won’t risk it. But maybe I can dust him with a rag, or write ‘I’m dirty’ in the dust with my finger? He would enjoy the joke. But if I wrote something funny my ex-colleagues would immediately know who did it, since nobody else in this office has a sense of humour.
*
The package is still exactly where I left it, waiting unopened on the desk. I know it’s heavy, but I am so used to it by now, it almost feels like a part of me, considering how much time I have spent with it, how painfully slowly I walked with it, clasping the box in both arms as if rocking a baby. It fit there perfectly. When I finally put it down, it felt as if I were surrendering a body part, and now it’s going to be reattached again. I’m not happy about it, this body part that drains me of my strength, might even make me ill, but it belongs to me, so I’ll just have to deal with it. I lift it into my arms. I have to use my elbow to push the door lever down. In four strides I’m back at the staircase, five seconds later I’m on the ground floor. Behind the kitchen door I hear the clinking of a teaspoon against a glass. Now I’ll have to be quick. I’m alert but not stressed. I tiptoe stealthily to the front door. I have the package, so I’ll finally have the answer. It’s very simple, all I have to do is open it, see what’s inside and find out who sent it.
The wooden door sticks. In the hall behind me I hear the click of the kitchen door’s lever. Someone is coming! I give the bottom of the door a kick. It swings open just in time, and one smooth move later we’re outside. The heavy wooden door falls shut behind me. It’s so hot out here, and I have at least a forty-five-minute walk ahead of me with this heavy box in my arms. I’m already sweaty, but I know I can do this, my body will comply. I have taken an important stride in my development, that’s how it feels. I have moved the goalposts. My career coach, if he really understood the situation – if he really knew me – would be proud to see me now.
When I get home my arms are burning, I am drenched in sweat, and the note is still there.
*
I once read a post on an online forum from a guy who’d found all these cryptic Post-it notes in his flat that were addressed to him. He was asking for help: there were no other signs of a break-in, all his belongings were still there and the front door was securely locked. Where had the mysterious notes come from? Could anyone tell him what they meant? In the end the hive mind decided that he should see a neurologist. They were right. It turned out that he had written the notes to himself and simply forgotten, there was something pressing on part of his brain, a benign tumour in his frontal lobe, causing paranoia and memory loss. He was sent to the hospital, had surgery, and a few months later there was a new comment on the thread: ‘Thanks all, I’m so happy I’m back to the old me!’
*
I go in, drop the package on the little table by the window. I wiped it down with a rag in preparation. The conditions have to be perfect, that’s important, because at least then I’ll know I’ve done all I can. I look out the window to make sure there’s no aeroplane leaving a white trail across the sky. That would disturb the symmetry of the moment, and I can’t have that right now.
I finally have the time and the focus of mind to take a good look at this package. It is a wooden box, wrapped in layers of plastic and see-through tape. There’s a label on it with my name and the wrong office address, nothing else. No logo, no return address, no brand name, nothing. From the outside there’s nothing to show where the package is from or what it could be. I finally rip off the packaging. That’s when I see that the lid of the box is attached with screws. I don’t own a screwdriver.
*
The next morning I take the early train to visit my mother. I don’t have time to stop at the hardware store to buy a screwdriver, so the package will remain unopened for another day. But what’s one day in a lifetime? I hate going to my mother’s house, but I promised I would, and the coach said, as if it was the most original advice in the world and he had just thought of it, that it would be a good idea for me to spend more time visiting family and friends. I feel my body weakening the closer I get. The place looks different every time I dream of it: sometimes it’s a labyrinth, sometimes a city in the desert, sometimes a dark field full of dying trees with a blue owl high up on a branch looking down on me. Still, I’m going. It takes three hours by train. The longer I sit in the carriage, which is getting emptier at each stop, the closer I am to a panic attack.
*
That street and that neighbourhood, the parking lot and the alleyways, they can only live in my memory, not in real life (even then, I’d prefer it if they didn’t live too vividly there either). In real life they no longer exist, not in this world, not in my life as it looks now. These places are places of the past, and they should stay there. Just the very idea of walking up that street makes me hot and dizzy, as if I’m sitting in the back row of an old coach that’s taking the tight bends on a winding mountain road too fast. This was a bad idea, I ought to stay far away. Why am I going there anyway, and why now? Everyone knows summer is the best time to visit this region. You’ll often find the residents in their little gardens then, if not round a barbecue. Are you visiting during or after an international football match? Then you’re in luck. You’ll find the street adorned with orange bunting, like the bared fangs of a yawning beast of prey. You may even spot local townspeople wearing traditional dress. But be warned! Unsolicited picture-taking of the locals is not welcome. Yes, it is true that a resident lost her life here after being stabbed fifty-two times, right, you read about it in the paper and yes, there’s still a bouquet outside her door. We aren’t going to get into it during the tour – no, sadly the police investigation is still open, so we’re unable to draw any conclusions yet. The temperature is just as hot here as elsewhere in town, so you won’t need to change your clothes. The currency is the same as well, although the only place to spend your holiday money is in a half-deserted corner shop. You can get something to eat at the snack bar: reasonably priced, simple, national cuisine. You wouldn’t be wrong to call this neighbourhood a diamond in the rough. And it’s precisely those rough edges that make it so rewarding to visit. It’s important to know that many of the residents have lived here all their lives. It is one of the few traditional areas still left in the city. We wouldn’t want its unspoilt character to be lost to gentrification, would we! That would be such a pity. These working-class council dwellings, their ceilings black with mould, their gardens overrun with weeds, give the people in other neighbourhoods (who, by the way, never set foot here) a feeling of authenticity. The feeling that they live in a real City with a capital C. That’s a good feeling. And we say yes to good feelings!
*
When I was young, if I told my mother something, she’d hardly ever understand what I meant. Her responses had little to do with my questions. If I was feeling poorly, she’d give me a rock crystal to put under my pillow at night. She’s been mostly alone for the past few years, I’m not sure what happened to the circle of friends she once had. She sits at her computer ordering things online almost all day long. She never opens the parcels when they arrive. The woman next door stops in every now and then, but my mum can’t stand her.
‘That woman…’ (that’s what she calls the neighbour) ‘that woman acts as if she’s worried about me, but really she’s just coming to see what she can steal.’
When I walk into her house it smells of patchouli oil. Every time I visit, the house seems to have got a bit smaller. We sit down at the table, around the fake tealight that sits in the middle. The plastic flame flickers. We eat sweet potatoes, that’s good energy, according to my mother. I don’t tell her I’ve been furloughed, I don’t mention the package, the note on my door. My mother doesn’t ask how I am. My grandmother never asked her how she was, and my grandmother’s mum never asked my grandmother, and the mother of my grandmother’s mum didn’t ask my grandmother’s mum either, and so on. So we eat in silence.
*
Did I tell you about that man in Central Station? The morning I took the train to go see my mother. In the big station hall there was a man lying on his side at the bottom of the escalator leading to Platform One. I could see him from a distance, people just walking on by. I thought: maybe he’s homeless. He was wearing a shabby brown jacket. A strange spot, really, for a homeless man to decide to stretch out, at the bottom of an escalator. When I got closer I saw that he wasn’t a homeless person, he was a man of about sixty, he could have been my father. He looked pale. I asked him how he was and he said, Not so good, darling, I was feeling a little light in the head. Just then station police arrived. They pushed me aside. But how long had he been lying there? Everyone had just been stepping around him. When are you supposed to look away, and when are you supposed to get involved? If someone might be dying, surely you should help? At night, returning from my mother’s house on the train, I saw the lights burning in the windows of the houses flashing by. They looked snug and cosy. I was the only one in the train compartment. I thought, it isn’t supposed to be like this. I am not supposed to be sitting on this train, not at this time, the time of day when people are sitting on the sofa together, I too belong inside a house with warm lights, I’m not supposed to arrive home to a tiny dark flat, a flat where, if I stay very quiet and don’t move, it feels as if there’s nothing there, like there’s no life at all.
*
A few days later I invite my best friend to the park. I need someone to talk to now that I can’t see my printer. Every day I sense his presence a little less, it feels increasingly like I’m talking into a void. I haven’t got round to buying a screwdriver for the package, but I have taken a few steps in the right direction (taken out my money, found out where the hardware store is located). A couple of things are stopping me from putting my plan into action. For example, how do I know what kind of screwdriver I need? I’m sure I’d only buy the wrong one, the difference between different screwdrivers is very subtle. And the hardware store is quite far away, will I have to take the bus? Which bus should I take, and how do I know someone won’t take the seat next to me on the little two-seater bench, spreading out and letting his knee touch mine?
The people in the park stroll past us. They’re all doing the same thing, all wearing the same thing, all holding the same coffee cup, and I just don’t understand how they all know how to follow the same rules. Does it get announced in the newspaper? I don’t have a subscription. I’m wearing my waterproof overalls. People are looking at me strangely. My best friend is much better at knowing what’s going on. She peers at everything from a distance, smoking a cigarette and observing like she’s looking at animals in a cage. She tosses her smouldering cigarette butt into a drain. If it was quiet, you’d have heard it hiss, but it isn’t quiet. Everyone is making mumbling sounds. Across from the bench, in the grass, lies a huge slab, a giant stone coin. It’s engraved with capital letters: YOU, NOW! I think I’m looking at things, but it’s really the other way round. The things are looking at me.
‘Jesus, just go and buy a screwdriver, take the note off your door. It’s probably nothing.’
I stare straight ahead, at the big stone sculpture. I, Now.
She lights another cigarette and keeps talking. ‘You just (inhales). Need (inhales deeper). To grow up (blows out). And sort it out.’
What I really want to ask her is if she thinks the package and note could have something to do with what we did, you know, back then, but I know she’d make fun of me for asking. It’s just like the supernatural: there’s a time and a place to talk about it, but it rarely happens that the time is now, the place here. Anyway, I know she’ll think I’ve lost it if I tell her my theory, that someone is watching me. It’s often like that with gut instincts: you can try to put them into words, but the words are always inadequate.
‘Look, you act like everyone else on Earth is made of plastic and you’re made of glass. But that’s not how it works.’ She takes another drag of her cigarette. ‘Here’s what I think: there are people who can go with the flow, people who do something, and there are people like you. You can wait for something to change, but that just isn’t going to happen, the world isn’t going to adapt itself to you.’
My best friend’s father walked out on the family when she was two. He found family life too stifling, like a cowboy who has to be free, has to be released, has to go his own way. At least that’s my best friend and her mum’s theory. They’re not actually sure why he left because they never saw him again.
‘Really, never?’ people will say, shocked. ‘But what if you wanted to get married? Would you invite him to your wedding anyway?’
What it comes down to, according to the psychology magazines: our formative years determine the rest of our life, and in the case of my best friend and me, those years left us warped and misshapen. Those years dictate how we will relate to other people in the future: lovers, relatives, authority figures, et cetera, and in our case, those relationships are completely skewed. All kinds of patterns and behaviours have unconsciously been drilled into our brains. You start off on the wrong foot, you adapt to it, and so your personality is built on shaky foundations. Ah, are you Pisces on top of everything? Ah, but then you’re an old soul, born before the children of Spring! Ah, that explains a lot, too.
A young man climbs on the big stone, lies down on it. He takes his phone from his pocket, chooses a song and puts it on speaker, places the phone with the tinny song next to his ear. A leaf drifts slowly from the nearest oak tree.
*
That summer, in the time before the car fire, my best friend and I head downtown. We stroll from her house, round the corner from mine, all the way to the centre. It’s July and very hot. We’ve seen each other almost every day this summer. Nobody in our class ever goes away on holiday. Some of the kids in our school do attend youth camp, a local politician’s passion project meant for a particular group of people on the lowest rung of society. (We didn’t know this at the time, we thought it was a normal thing that everyone did.) You could line dance, or paddle a canoe, build huts, that sort of thing. Anyway, we were too old for the camp. We usually hang out downtown or at the park, sometimes at the swimming pool. Today is the third day in a row the swimming pool has been closed because some kid tried to drown another kid. We don’t know why the pool has to be closed so long, since the boy survived. We take a different route to the centre that day. It isn’t until we are halfway there that we realize we’ve made a mistake, because this route takes us past the house where Christina lives. It’s too late to turn back without attracting notice. Christina is best friends with Danny’s sister Romy. Romy and Christina are two years older than us. Christina went to our school before she went off to secondary school. Last summer she was sent to prison because she and Dave, a sixteen-year-old from our neighbourhood, had tied up Dave’s ex. Or rather, Dave had tied her up, carved his name into her chest, poured petrol on her and threatened to light her on fire. Christina was there, but what she was accessory to we don’t know, maybe she was just sitting on the sofa watching TV as Dave was doing all of that stuff. In any case, Christina was charged and sent to prison. She’s back home now, though. We hurry past the house as quickly as we can, and to the end of the street.
