Last night I had an experience that had me sitting into the early hours staring out over the city as the sun rose. The church that I could clearly see through my bedroom window was bathed in the orange glow of the dawn and a sight that usually filled me with awe over the birth of a new day just filled me with dread on what that day might bring with it.
But the story didn’t start with last night’s occurrence, the story started a little over a year ago; back before that pandemic that changed all our lives, and the world, in a way like no other thing did before it. This story started back when I began a new job, my first ever office job, and the man I met who would quickly become a friend and even a guru of sorts.
David was a strange character, this was something everyone agreed, but he was also well liked. He was smartly dressed, a little too smartly dressed some might say, and he appeared to be the perfect employee for an architectural office. Like me he was an assistant, a glorified go-fer, but visitors took him for someone far more important and he would always let them believe whatever they had assumed.
He was a character, but a quiet character and it took effort to understand his humour and appreciate his strange brand of wisdom.
‘We are but shadows.’ He would say, and most would raise an eyebrow while I raised a smile. We are but shadows; it was true and as my life tumbles on to yet another year on this spinning rock of weirdness, I learn its far truer than I had originally believed.
Three months in, a year ago, we were working late, and we stumbled into our first discussion that delved deeper into our respective worlds than favourite music and pet peeves.
‘Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same experience.’ He said drily.
‘No?’
‘Unfortunately, I did have a father and there was many a time I wish I hadn’t.’
For a moment I didn’t answer, allowing him the time to elaborate that he didn’t take; instead, the silence of the empty office was shattered by the grinding of the hand cranked shredder as we cleared old files.
I had never seen a shredder before, and the first time I had used it I wanted to touch the rotating blades as they glinted. David hunched over it, and I hunched over the index cards. Each file was checked and noted as ‘destroyed’ on the cards before he sent it to its final rest. There was something incredibly rewarding about seeing the files sliced into unusable shreds of paper and it was a job for which we readily volunteered.
‘He wasn’t such a bad guy,’ David said, almost to himself, ‘he was never violent, and almost never raised his voice’ but there was always something scary about him; you know?’
I shook my head. Of course, I didn’t know, I never knew him.
‘Maybe it’s because everyone always talks so much without saying anything that when you know someone who only speaks when there’s something to say it can be a little creepy.’
Oddly people had the same thing about me, I think even David had said it; but I didn’t remark on this, I remained silent and let him speak.
The irony of that decision was not lost on me.
‘I suppose his silence was oppressive, I know Mum felt it too, we would wait for his response. We would wait, and then wait some more, and sometimes the waiting wouldn’t end.’ Then, after a moment of indecision as if he wanted to say more, David fell into silence.
The silence didn’t last long, I can’t remember what broke it but before either of us knew it we were talking in Star Trek quotes and discussing the state of music again. It was as if that short moment of introspection, something very unlike David, had not happened; but it had, and I found that it changed our relationship and though I never saw him outside of the workplace I still considered him a friend.
I found out more about David’s father over the next few months. He had been an architect, which had obviously influenced David’s work, and he had a successful one that had designed buildings all over the globe. He spent long hours in his office filled with scrolls of drafting paper and calculated and drew. The door was always open but no one else ever entered through it, the office was the man’s domain, and he was a quiet king within it.
After he fell ill and was committed to hospital for long term care, the room was maintained as he had left it and a layer of dust accumulated across the rules and squares lined up next to the angled drawing table.
David would stand at the door, but he would not enter the room.
His mother would not even look in the direction of the door.
I could feel David’s loss and his confusion at the loss.
How could you lose someone who was never there?
I could see the question in his eyes sometimes as he spoke.
I ask myself the same question all the time.
Across the world people started to fall ill and some of those people began to die of their illness. We watched from what we believed was a safe distance as countries began to close their airports and there were rumours of pits being dug in the Middle East to be used as mass graves.
It always happens to the other guys; we all believe this deep down inside; but of course, this is not always true.
No more than a few days after the news hit, I received a phone call that said, ‘stay home’ and suddenly my world was a thing I didn’t recognise.
Immediately I called David.
‘Did you get a call from work? What’s going on? You have any info?’
‘Yup. Charles carried the bug back from his holiday, he’s in hospital and you’re at home for two weeks! Enjoy!’
I sat stunned for a moment, certain that David was playing an elaborate practical joke on me. Perhaps he was at work right now with Charlie sat next to him laughing. It was possible but for the fact that David couldn’t stand Charlie.
‘You mean we’re confined to the house?’ I asked. ‘You sure?’
Outside a siren wailed in the near distance, a police siren. It grew louder for a few moments then began to diminish as it moved away: leaving an almost palpable silence in its wake.
For the first time ever, I realised how isolated I was living where I did.
The view across the canal to the railway tracks on the far side was an isolationists dream and though at first, I thought the trains would be an issue I barely heard them now even through the ancient single glazed windows.
The dilapidated cottage was liveable, and I supposed I could use the following couple of weeks to find that leak that discoloured the wall under the upstairs bathroom; assuming we weren’t called back sooner than that of course.
Obviously, I had no idea those two weeks would stretch to almost four months; four very long months.
‘Fourteen days.’ David replied. ‘No contact with anyone, this should be easy for you, hermit! At least this’ll give you a chance to listen to those Ricki Lee Jones albums I gave you to listen to!’
That was true, I remembered David’s horror that I had never heard of the singer-songwriter and his insistence that I listen to her immediately; I also remembered me putting the LPs on a shelf with the inner convictions that I wouldn’t.
I could be stubborn at times.
I moved from the computer and found the collection, randomly selecting one and slipping it on the platter. Immediately I realised that stubbornness was not my best attribute, and the rest of the albums made up the soundtrack of my day.
The next morning, I took out my tools and began searching for the offending leak by popping up the soggy bathroom floorboards. The carpet had long since found its way to local refuse and I suspected the boards would too at some point.
Downstairs Ricki was playing, and the volume was high enough that I wouldn’t hear anyone if they knocked but under the present circumstances that seemed unlikely, so I didn’t worry.
The job was easier than I’d imagined, a seal had worked loose and required nothing more than tightening. As I did, I silently admonished myself on all the damage my tardiness had caused in the room below; now I would have to strip the wall and check the plaster hadn’t been damaged but there was little point getting myself irritated by it.
I guess I should add ‘laziness’ alongside stubbornness on my list of personal sins.
When I returned to the ground floor, I made coffee and the phone rang; predictably it was David and suddenly my coffee, Ricki and my floor-less bathroom were all forgotten.
‘Have you seen the news? Something like a thousand dead, a thousand! Can you believe it? I tried to get in touch with work, but the phone just rang, no-one picked up. I don’t know if the office is even open.’
It was hard to believe. I turned on the TV as we spoke and switched channels until I found the news, I don’t have to tell you what I found on it.
I spent the rest of the day alternating between the phone and the TV as David and put all the worlds ills to right as daytime TV droned on in the background.
This became my default day; I would start a project ‘ or finish one abandoned the day before ‘ and at some point, I would call David ‘ or he would me ‘ and we would spend the rest of the day passing the time in idle conversation.
I have never made friends easily; small talk is not something that comes naturally to me and when do I start conversation, I often alienate those around me with my tone or view on a situation. It was a long time before I realised this, many years in my youth I would look on friendship as an alien occurrence and I settled for acquaintances. It may be sad to say but I believe that David was my first actual friend, at least the first one who seemed unperturbed by those elements of my personality that made so many smiles and move on.
David didn’t smile much, but he didn’t move on either.
Before I realised it a week had passed. The bathroom floorboards had been re-laid and I had stripped the wall beneath it and fixed the damaged plaster. Next, I had to repaper but was waiting for my phone order of six rolls of Faux Country Brick with Embossed Roses that I was sure would be tacky trash but had the appeal of being cheap.
I sat back and watched the rain as it ran down the living room window and listened to what might have been the far-off rumbling of thunder. Twenty feet from my front door the canal waters had risen, and I could see at the far side the train tracks were under threat from being flooded. The workmen who often inspected the tracks during floods had not been present, because the train services had been ceased. I had not seen another human being since the phone call from work and the only evidence that I was not alone on the planet had been the television, and my daily conversations with David.
‘Do you feel the same?’ I asked him one day.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, ‘even Mother seems distant. She barely speaks to me anymore and when she does it’s like she can’t look me in the eye.’
The idea stabbed in the heart; he was as close to his mother as I had always been with my own. Since Mum died, I have noticed a strange affection to mothers regardless of how well I knew them; I suspected a therapist would have a field-day with that one.
‘I hear her wandering around this big old house like a ghost and sometimes the sight of her scares me a little. I think she might be going a bit senile. What happens if she has a fall or something? What do I do?’
I couldn’t answer him; I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to tell him he was fortunate that someone was there with him, that the loneliness would be worse; but I wasn’t sure that was true. Isn’t the truth that loneliness was the price I paid for the emotional safety I felt from being alone? Was the trade-off worth it?
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said instead, ‘a few more weeks and everything will be back to normal. You know as well as I do that this is all paranoia and politics.’
Paranoia and politics; but that wasn’t all it was. We both knew this. I hit send and waited, looking out of the window over the water. It was ten o’clock, but I couldn’t immediately tell if it was a.m. or p.m.; for a moment I couldn’t recall.
Had I slept?
What day was it?
Week?
Year?
I said my goodbyes and curled up on the couch.
Whether it was morning or night I still slept; but I shed a few tears first.
My dreams that night, or morning, were strange ones. They were the kind that sit with you for the following say like good books where the themes carry more weight than the story. The dreams were of sun and sand, beach, and surf, but in places the sand was the green of tarnished copper and the surf was angry and untamed.
Violence sat under the dreams veneer, people with bronzed bodies and toned flesh cavorted, while their smiles seduced and beguiled, something writhed under their skin and those smiles were caught just before they became grimaces.
I lay on the hot sand, I felt it burn, and I knew I had never seen a real beach, I had never seen a real sea; what I knew of the ocean came from movies and glossy television.
Had I really lived?
I pondered this thought as the sun beat down through my eyelids and the cries of laughter around me turned into screams of terror; and the veins in my eyelids hooked to claws to tear out my eyes.
I woke to darkness, and I didn’t know if I slept a few hours or a days’ worth. The phone was ringing. Outside the window mist covered the water and formed a veil over anything further than the canals nearest bank.
I reached for the handset and raised it to my ear.
Speak to me’
I was still asleep, I must be. Who is this? Who’ what on earth could be behind me?
Reflected in the living room window I could see my own reflection, my eyes wide and my skin pale. Did I see movement behind me? Or was it a shift in light from outside?
Questions, questions, questions’
I half turned; and then I woke.
I woke to light, morning light that bathed the room in a rosy glow that pushed aside the dream. The specifics evaporated but the unease remained. The world through the window glinted with morning dew, pinpricks of light reflecting from the canal waters.
I washed and considered shaving, decided against it, and cracked open the front door. On the doorstep were two parcels.
Inside one was rolls of wallpaper, paste, a thick brush. In the last was three albums: David Bowie’s Hunky Dory, Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel and Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’.
Ten minutes later I was reading the lyric sheet of Heart Like a Wheel, the only one I hadn’t owned before, while mixing the wallpaper paste with my other hand. In the near distance I heard bells chime, church bells, and I paused.
Was it Sunday?
I had a sudden disassociation, a reverse Deja-vu.
I hadn’t known what day it was for weeks, and I was hazy on the month, but I had not cared. There was no value to time when it was all your own, when you were the last man on earth.
But the bells, they were rung by someone else, another human being was out there doing things and making a change in my perfect unchanging world. It wasn’t like the appearing parcels or the shifting waterline; these were forces of nature, autonomous effects that required no human hand.
There was something not right with this thought, I felt something tugging at the edge of my mind, but I pushed the barely formed thought from it.
But the bells.
The bells’
I thought of Quasimodo swinging through the bell tower, howling with the sheer joy of it, an act of creation that felt like destruction.
Where was my mind going with all this?
I looked down at the bucket of wallpaper paste in front of me and Linda Ronstadt stared up at me from where the cover had fallen. The paste was thick, almost solid and when I pulled the brush free it left a pit in its wake.
The bells were silent and outside the sky was dark.
The next day I called David.
‘It’s no wonder you’re losing you mind,’ he said, ‘even a hermit like you must be affected by all this. Why don’t you get up? Why don’t you talk to us?’
‘I have been speaking to you!’
‘We back on this again?’
‘Back on what? What are we talking about?’
‘You have other things you must do. You must look after Mother; I can’t babysit you all day every day.’
The seconds pulled out to a minute, time stretching to a point where I was expecting it to snap.
Did I hear that right? I thought.
‘I don’t have a mother,’ I said, ‘she died so long ago I can’t remember her face. What are you talking about?’
My strongest memory of my mother was the pale blue cardigan she habitually wore and the sound of washing and the smell of lemon disinfectant. I had a mother; but I had lost her, she had left me six months after my father had died; everyone said she died of a broken heart.
‘Are you having a breakdown?’ I heard my voice hitting high notes. ‘Is this a joke? Do you think this is a joke?’
I slammed down the phone and something in the handset cracked. I shook the curve of plastic, and it rattled inside.
Just like me.
I sat back and stared through the window.
I never had a father.
My father killed himself.
The handset slipped from my hand and swung in an arc on its cable, swinging like a clock’s pendulum. I watched it swing back and forth in decreasing arcs. I kept watching it waiting until it hung still, but it didn’t stop; it just kept swinging.
It was the isolation, I told myself with a certainty I did not feel. Even a hermit like me needed human contact, and this is what happens when you take that contact away. My eyes drifted back to the window and the water had risen again, mist hung over it like a death shroud and the sky was obscured to a dirty grey.
Wasn’t it sunny the last time I looked? Or was that yesterday?
I couldn’t remember yesterday.
Perhaps it was the same as today.
The phone was still swinging on its cord.
I reached for it and again I stopped in shock. My hand was old, spots of discolour dotted the back of it and the knuckles were distended by arthritis.
Speak to me’
I almost heard the voice from my dream, as is someone was leaning close and whispering into my ear. Or was it…?
I caught the phone as it swung my way and raised it to my ear.
‘Hello?’ I asked hesitantly.
On the other end of the line, I thought I heard a sharp intake of breath, a gasp of surprise. After a moments silence, I heard someone swallow and then begin to speak.
‘Can you understand me?’ She said. Her voice was quiet and soft but had a breathless quality as if she was trying desperately to control her breathing. Something like panic hung on the edge of her words but despite this I found her voice comforting.
‘Of course, I can.’ I replied and quietly I heard the woman begin to cry softly. The tears seemed weary ones, the intakes of breath between her muted sobs were gentle; and for a moment I just listened.
Behind the woman was another voice, but this one was indistinct and all I could tell that it was probably female. The two women spoke for a moment, all their words were a jumble to me, and then the first woman spoke directly to me again.
‘Do you know where you are?’ She asked. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘I’m at home,’ I answered, ‘but I’m sorry. I don’t know you.’
An anguished sob escaped her, suddenly, as if she had been pierced by a hot iron.
The phone rang’
But I was holding the phone.
‘Hello?’ I said hesitantly over the sound of the bell; and the ringing stopped.
‘Hi!’ It was David and I felt relief flow over me like cool water.
‘Hi David, I’ve had a strange morning.’
I could hear noises in the background of the call, somewhere I thought I still heard crying.
‘Well, I’m not surprised.’ David said, and his voice seemed weary.
‘How’s your mother?’ I asked, as an attempt to distract myself.
‘Ah, she’s not well; she misses her husband.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I know you are, but I don’t think it’s your fault.’
My chest tightened and I thought of my own mother.
It didn’t occur to me then that it was a strange way for him to put it.
‘I’m tired.’ I said to him and as the words flowed from my lips, I realised how true that was; I was more tired than I had ever been. ‘I think I’ll rest.’
‘You do that,’ David replied. ‘We’ll speak tomorrow.’
There was a click, and the phone went dead in my hand.
That night I had another dream.
I was on the beach again, and the sun was beating down on the hot sand and glinting from the boiling surf. The sky was a perfect shade of blue, cloudless, and perfect. Around me people laughed and ran through the shallows, while here and there women dotted the sand sprawled across beach towels as they display their bodies to the sun.
‘Not a bad life, eh?’
I turned my head and a young woman lay across the sand beside me. Huge sunglasses covered her eyes, and a purple swimsuit covered her modesty and for a moment I just looked at her.
‘Take a picture,’ she smiled, ‘it’ll last longer.’
‘If I had a camera I would.’ I replied and almost immediately a tiny pocket camera was held under my nose.
‘Here!’ The young boy who was holding it said. His hair was a little too long and fell over his eyes in an unkempt mass of curls, but his eyes shone through it; eyes so blue they almost shone with a power of their own.
I took the camera and snapped off two pictures, a moment later the camera turned into a bundle of photographs, and I looked up to see snow clinging to the corners of a window.
A little boy ricocheted from brightly wrapped parcel to brightly wrapped parcel. Wrapping paper was discarded across the carpet and a small tree stood decorated in brightly lit baubles in the corner of the room.
‘Here,’ The woman beside me cried out and threw a ball to the boy. He caught it and turned to me. ‘Here Dad.’ He giggled and the ball flew in my direction.
I caught it and the photographs flew from my grasp and a moment later the little boy had one of them in his hands.
‘We all look like shadows.’ He said, and then I woke but I didn’t move.
Around me the room was painted in pale blues and bright whites. A window displayed the tops of trees and a sky dotted with grey clouds. Somewhere I heard voices, but they were far off and indistinct.
I tried to lift my head but the muscles in my neck screamed their disapproval, so I remained still.
The air smelt faintly of lemon disinfectant.
I’m still sleeping, I thought, it was like that time when the phone rang.
Somewhere a phone rang, and I smiled.
I woke again, this time to darkness; to the familiar water and the familiar mist above it. At some point I had made my way to my bedroom, outside of my window the Church tower cut through the mist. I left the view and made my way to the living room. The wall that had been damaged by the water from the bathroom above it had been stripped and repapered, but I did not remember doing it.
This didn’t surprise me; I had expected it in fact.
I rose and walked around the cottage, slowly taking in the LP’s stacked in the large hallway and the crockery, far too much of it for one person, stacked on the draining board beside the sink.
I returned to the couch and watched the stars as they arced over the night sky and then the dawn that obscured them; marvelling on how vivid I found it, how complete and real it appeared.
The day ticked by with every second feeling like final heartbeats. The sun rose to its zenith and the phone had not rung, the sun passed and began its trek to the horizon and still the phone was silent.
I waited.
I suspected.
As I’m sure you do too.
I was unsure of my world now.
Perhaps you are too?
As the clock struck 9:00 the phone began to ring, I waited until the church bells rung all nine bells until I raised it to my ear.
‘Hello son.’ I said.