Forensic Songs Read online

  They come out of the car park and stand on the pavement while she searches, and draws a pair of sunglasses from her shoulder bag. The sunshine and the throng of people in the street confirm the rightness of her decision; she can do no wrong today.

  ‘I say we get something to eat,’ she says, ‘how about that?’

  Nathan looks up at his mother. Her eyes are lost behind her sunglasses but he has sensed a kind of giddiness about her all morning. That might not be a bad thing, he feels, because, as far as he can tell, she seems like a lot of fun in this mood. Still though, you can’t be sure.

  They head off in the direction of Quay Street, to where the restaurants and cafés are. Skirting by the huge building site that is the city park, Nathan’s mother marvels that they are still working on it a full two years after they started. For his part Nathan would not have minded stopping for a look – dumpers, bulldozers and cranes are always good for a few minutes’ gaze. But there is no stopping his mother, she is into her stride and he needs to work up a little trot to keep abreast of her. Pretty soon they are standing in the middle of Quay Street and she is pointing to a café.

  ‘How about that one?’

  Nathan shrugs and takes her hand once more; he has no strong feelings about it one way or another. They head towards the café and to anyone watching there is nothing in their manner of going that would make you fear for them.

  Afterwards, in an attempt to explain the incident to herself and her friends, she would lower her eyes and with a searching grimace on her broad face say hesitantly, ‘I don’t know, I just stepped into the street and …’ And with that, her voice would trail off as if words themselves had faltered at this crucial moment. And for a long time afterwards – several months, in fact – this was as close as she could get to explaining what had happened. Sometimes she might draw on some small corroborating detail and fix the whole incident against it; something like, ‘A child came by, she was carrying a small bag.’ But the following day, in a complete reversal, she would deny both the child and the bag. ‘There was no child,’ she would declare adamantly. ‘At that hour of the morning there was no one in the street but myself.’ Sometimes, in addition to this she might add, ‘It was a Tuesday and I was standing at the corner of Augustine and Abbeygate Street.’ The next day these co-ordinates would have shifted and the whole incident would be situated at the other end of the city on a different day …

  All she knew for certain was that she woke up on the pavement shortly after six o’clock in the morning. Two municipal workers, watering window boxes along the narrow street, came upon her. Her blue security uniform marked her out from those few vagrants who were around at this hour. They turned her into the recovery position and after a moment she opened her eyes and struggled to get up. The workers saw a heavy-shouldered woman in her mid-thirties with hair swept back from a broad, pale face. They sat her up and got her to drink from the open flow of the hosepipe. Later, as they watched her being taken away in a taxi, they would agree that if you were attracted to big women you could do a lot worse.

  Her hapless groping towards an explanation tried the patience of her friends.

  ‘It was as if all things existed in that one moment,’ she would say. ‘A moment of surpassing plenitude and superabundance, a joyful irruption of all possibility. It was a moment of limitless potential, as if the universe had revisited that instant before its birth, that moment before its limitless potential became lawful and structured. It was a childish moment.’

  This was the type of gnomic utterance that now dismayed her friends.

  Reaching further she might add, ‘All things existed in that moment, all things and their annihilating opposites at one and the same time and these in their turn negated all down through the galleries of infinity where at its farthest point, it too, in its turn, was negated. It was as if the world indulged in one, sudden flexing of all its possibilities. And it chose to do this in the early hours of the morning when no one would experience it. It was like that,’ she said, looking imploringly around her, ‘only completely different. That is as close as I can say.’

  That said, she would lapse into silence. Her friends would subside in irritation, pursing their lips in anger and disbelief.

  Resentment gathered to her.

  What was seen at first as an intellectual shortcoming on her part was now suspected to be a wilful hoarding of some sacred knowledge, something to which she did not have exclusive rights.

  So they gave her books, both sacred and profane, as the saying goes, so that she might have the broadest parameter within which to speak her experience. These books spoke of the ultimate things, those things of which nothing greater can be thought. She read them and handed them back, shaking her head.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not even close.’

  They threw up their hands in bafflement.

  ‘That cannot be,’ they protested, ‘these are the uttermost things, the things beyond which it is impossible to speak.’

  The more irritable among them lost all patience and accused her outright of being perverse, of attention-seeking. She ignored them and went on.

  ‘Nor can it be identified against the things it is not. I cannot say that it was not love, nor that it was not justice. Saying it was not God brings us no nearer the truth, either.’

  This lapse into antique locutions was the last straw for many of her friends.

  She had some idea that maybe her work had disturbed her. One year of night shifts, sitting alone in the control room beneath those security monitors that collapsed the space and time of the shopping mall into four-hour video tapes – had prolonged exposure to this continuous abridgement disturbed the fundamental co-ordinates of her existence? Had something concentric in the recurring emptiness of the shopping mall, the vacant geometry of its car parks and the lifeless facades of the shops and boutiques spiralled down to this moment of collapse? That and the five-year archive of abbreviated time-space that was stacked on the shelves above her head.

  After several months’ frustrated groping and disappointment in which she found herself drifting thoughtlessly towards the furthest edge of her imagination, she began to come apart – not just within herself but from the world, also. At first it was the simple shedding of the accidental attributes – her shadow and reflection deserted her. And without those echoes of herself there also went an essential aspect of her spatio-temporal co-ordination. All sense of continuance broke down; with no before or after and with each moment stripped of any prior or subsequent reference, all sense of duration atomized.

  Nor was there any within or without. Sitting with a friend in a café she found herself bracing her feet to the floor against a giddy feeling of disconnectedness. All relational webs and connections fell away. She was neither beside nor before her friend; she was neither there out of love nor companionship nor gratitude. Gripping the table, she closed her eyes and held her breath.

  ‘Hold onto what?’

  Her friend placed a hand on her wrist.

  ‘You were talking to yourself. Hold onto what?’

  Weeks later, in this very same café, she found herself severed completely from all memory and awareness of herself. There was a final and total collapse of all prepositional grammar within and around her. Cast beyond every identity and empathy, she found herself freed into an infinite sense of loneliness. Now she was beyond feelings of sorrow and love and fear. A blunt pressure in her head drew her to her feet. She stood up, uttered a few garbled words, and in the instant before she pitched forward found herself stepping onto an incline that would carry her into a latitude where the fulfilment of those words she could never speak opened up – a latitude beyond this world and possibly and inconceivably beyond God himself.

  And at this precise moment, two tables away, six-year-old Nathan is busy with a mug of chocolate and a muffin. His attention is drawn across the room to the pale woman who has risen to her feet and begun to bleed from her nose. He watches as the woman, in a dull reflex, opens h
er hand and the crimson drops spread in her palm like livid coins. Before she falls, Nathan hears her utter something but cannot say what it is. Then she topples forward across the circular table, landing sharply in the narrow aisle in front of the cash register. Nathan’s view of the ensuing commotion is partly obscured by the protective embrace he finds himself swept up in. He struggles to see out over his mother’s shoulder, rising above her by planting a foot on the edge of her chair and hauling himself up over her head. He stands there rapt, deaf to his mother’s panicked pleas, a querulous expression adding years to his child’s face. People congregate around the woman but Nathan has a certain feeling their efforts are futile. His mother has seen enough. With a swift flourish she throws some money on the table and hauls him by the wrist out into the bright sun.

  Later that evening he will tell his mother that as he looked out over her shoulder he saw a ghost rise out of the woman’s body and that this ghost moved off between the people gathered around her and made for the door without a backward glance. At this point, seeing his mother’s face, he will stop. He does not doubt what he has seen but young and all as he is, he knows that adults do not always have eyes for these things. Nevertheless, the ghost lives with him and time after time, down the days and years of his life, he will catch himself keeping an eye out for it. Seven years later he will walk into this same kitchen with a biology textbook in his hand. Pointing to a blue and red diagram of the central nervous system he will say to his mother, ‘It was something like this. Only made of light. And completely different …’

  Shortly before nine o’clock, Mark Hanlon came out of the service station and headed towards his jeep, which was parked on the farthest edge of the forecourt. It was a fine evening but the September light had declined to a fading glow and any moment now the shutters would come down, leaving the service station in darkness.

  He climbed into the jeep and pulled the door shut, then peeled the lid from the cup of tea. He did this a lot lately, mornings and evenings sitting in the jeep with a cup of tea or coffee, watching the station’s clientele come and go – the morning tradesmen with their sandwiches and newspapers, the evening customers with cartons of milk and Lotto tickets. Now he settled himself deeper into the leather seat. He liked this jeep, he reflected, everything about it appealed to his recent mood of sullen vehemence. He appreciated its capacity to offend – its bullying contours and greedy consumption – and he would admit also that it satisfied in him some blunt and shapeless desire for revenge.

  ‘A fucking tank,’ Susan had breathed with disgust when she saw it for the first time. She backed away from it, flicking her wrist as if casting some sort of protective spell against it. In hindsight, Mark recognized this moment as one of many to which he should have been more attentive; there was a lesson there. But right now any remorse he felt on account of the jeep was well outside the armoured space that enclosed him. He adjusted the seat and pushed out his feet.

  And he liked these service stations, too. Standing on the edge of towns and villages, Mark always imagined that they held out some large, beckoning promise. It took him a while to get an accurate sense of what exactly this promise was but when it finally came into focus he recognized it as something he had always known. Out here, the myth of space and distance still held to places like these service stations, these staging posts between settlements. While it was always the case that the next village lay less than a couple of miles down the road, it was nevertheless easy to get caught up in a wide vision of rolling countryside within which a man might clear his head and come to his senses – all the different ways in which a man might take the measure of himself.

  Those were his thoughts as he watched the shutters coming down and the lights go out. As the forecourt darkened, he drained off the last of his tea, crushed his cup to the floor and turned the key in the ignition.

  Lately, whenever he came home after dark, he would kill the headlights at the gate and pull the jeep into the side of the house so as not to wake the old man in the front bedroom. He’d turn off the ignition and wait a few minutes while the engine ticked and cooled: all this as if a too sudden entry into the house might prove a disturbance.

  Tonight he marvelled that he had become so mindful of these small considerations. How had that happened? Mark was straight enough with himself to know that considerate was not a word that would spring readily to the mind of anyone who knew him; any man who came home one evening and found his wife gone and a note on the kitchen table telling him so could safely presume himself short of consideration among a whole slew of other things. Even now, six months on, he has a vivid sense of that moment. He saw himself in his working clothes, standing at the table with the note in his hand, his head swimming with concussive waves of disbelief. Barely twenty words long and yet that note had divided the whole world between them – he got space and she got time. As ever, the memory of that moment threatened to swell up and engulf him, so Mark, careful of his willingness to succumb to it, got quickly out of the jeep and walked around the house.

  Inside the back door he pulled off his boots and turned into the kitchen. If the old man was still up this was where they would invariably meet, this small back kitchen off the hallway. This was their intersection, the point at which their paths would cross – two ghosts passing on to their separate realms. Sure enough, he was up. He came through the hall in his socks, pushing the shirt into his trousers, smoothing back his hair. Mark watched him pass, cinching his belt tight as he made for the kettle by the sink.

  ‘You’ll have a cup,’ the old man called softly.

  ‘If you’re making one.’

  ‘I’m making one.’

  Mark drew a chair from the table and sat down heavily. Outside, at the bottom of the garden, the night had gathered into its full darkness. Beyond the yard light he was aware of the dark bulk of the blackthorn hedge that circled the half-acre site on which the house stood. Over the past two years the hedge had grown tall enough to block off completely any view of the hills to the north. It was one of the things Susan had harped on towards the end. ‘It’s closing around us,’ she’d protested time and again with that irritable flick of her hand. ‘Soon we won’t be able to see beyond our noses.’ And it was only when she drew his attention to it that Mark saw how indeed the whole site had become enclosed. How could that have happened without him noticing?

  The old man handed him the mug and he raised it to his lips. The scalding heat nearly burned the mouth off him. Why did he always have to make it so hot? The old man smiled, drawing his lips into a kindly grin.

  ‘Tough day?’

  ‘The usual,’ Mark replied, ‘were there any calls?’

  ‘No calls,’ the old man said as he shuffled past, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’

  Mark sat there a while longer waiting for the tea to cool so he could swallow it in a single gulp. After rinsing the mug under the tap he went down the hall to his bed in the furthest room. He lay on the covers fully clothed and let his fatigue wash through him. His last thought before he fell asleep was to wonder how his life had come to the point where his wife was replaced in his own house by an old man in his seventies, an old man whose presence Mark had become grateful for, but an old man who, in all probability, would be dead in a month. He had considered all this before but tonight these thoughts came with a sharper, nagging insistence.

  He weighed and sifted in the darkness and it kept him awake longer than he would have wished.

  The following morning, Saturday, he woke to the sound of someone opening the bedroom door; his father’s voice carried loudly over his bed.

  ‘It’s no wonder she left, a man too lazy to take off his fucking trousers.’

  Mark groaned and turned over. He’d lain awkwardly on his shoulder and a vivid pain now lanced down into his forearm.

  ‘The cut of you,’ his father continued, with the same patient aggression, ‘it’s about time you got sorted out and stopped feeling sorry for yourself: time you stopped acting the bollock
s.’

  Mark sat up and eyed his father straight on. The pain in his shoulder and this sudden ambush had drawn up his temper and now he gave himself over to its full vehemence.

  ‘Acting the bollocks,’ he repeated slowly, ‘look who’s talking, a man who at my age had already done a six-month stretch in prison, am I right? I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll sit down together this minute and draw up a list of all the stupid things both of us have done up to my age and we’ll see who’s the bigger bollocks. We’ll start with one count of affray and six months at Her Majesty’s pleasure. How about that for a start?’

  The swollen look on his father’s face told Mark he had gone too far. He closed his eyes in dismay and sucked in a deep breath. He couldn’t help it; this was how he woke these days, this sudden rising from the depths of sleep into violent moods of black temper, which appalled him for being so savage and fully formed. What the hell was happening in his sleep? Whatever it was, he always woke sore and angry. Now his father raised a placatory hand and moved into the room. Mark was surprised to see him setting aside his ready instinct for further argument; it wasn’t like him. This willingness to sidestep a row could only mean that there was something more pressing to hand. Mark braced himself.

  ‘There’s no sign of the other lad?’ his father said softly.

  Mark sighed with relief. ‘Did you check his room?’

  ‘He’s not there.’

  ‘He’s around somewhere; he might have gone for a walk. Let him be for a while.’

  His father sat on the end of the bed. The worried look on his face was unmistakeable. ‘Did you speak to him last night?’

  ‘Just a few words.’

  ‘How was he?’

  ‘Fine, same as he ever is.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you what we did yesterday.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything, it was late.’

  His father shook his head and sucked a narrow breath through his teeth. Mark recognized this as a sign that once again the old man had tried his father’s patience. The sudden reappearance of his older brother had wrong-footed him in subtle ways. Since his arrival he was less sure of himself, quicker to bluster and lay down the law, quicker to pick hopeless fights for little reason. And right now he looked particularly bewildered.