i.

I was sitting with my back against the wall and my legs out on the grass and I heard a sound like a voice. A figure was gesturing beyond the bottom of the garden. I walked down until we were separated by a short section of waste ground thickly overgrown with weeds and, beyond it, a rusted chain-link fence. He hooked his hands in the fence and explained to me that he worked for the church there, cultivating vegetables in the grassy patch behind it that lay between our two properties. As he spoke I looked up at the church’s large plain back, its grey windows with lead traceries, and wondered if they showed coloured pictures to the inside. He talked about the vegetables he was growing and what he had learned about the soil and discussed the weeds in my garden, whose names he did not know but which he was able to describe by approximating them to other plants: perhaps this is mint, this may be like horseradish, these might once have been cages for tomatoes. I wondered if his interest in those plants expressed an anger at me for letting them grow wild and interfere with his vegetables.

He said that the church had only a small congregation now and that it was still shrinking. He asked in an unembarrassed way if I had any religious beliefs and when I said that I didn’t he said that he hadn’t either, although he was the son of a minister, until he was in middle age. It seemed to me that he was speaking in the way that he was because he thought I was young. When I was young, he said, I thought God hated me and despised what I was. I rejected him and hated him until I learned that he doesn’t judge and doesn’t command anyone to do anything. There are phases in a person’s life. I asked if he had been reading any theologians or philosophers at the time when he realised this and he said no, I’m not really that kind of person. I read a lot when I was younger but that’s back when I acted like God hated me and rejected me for what I was. He had glasses and a wide brimmed hat for gardening in the sun and behind the fence I could not make out his eyes or much of his face and I realised that if I saw him in the street later I would not recognise him, even though here we were, getting to know each other.

I thought maybe there was something he was trying to bring up since he returned several times to the smallness of his congregation, to his gardening, and to his thoughts about the care of old people. I wondered if he was fat or if he just had clothes that billowed out and I tried to make out his face in the shadow and behind the glare and the way the fence broke his face up. I wondered if he had been watching me for long and I thought about what I might have been doing in the period before I thought I heard his call. When I felt he might be asking me too much about myself I said that I ought to return to my writing, and when I made it back to the house I was hesitant to sit back down against the wall because a theatrical element seemed to have intruded. I went back inside briefly where I could watch him from behind the glass.

ii.

I could guess for you what the fields out back of my office are like: you come down, out the foyer, turn back from the street and head along the side of the building, past the fire exits, bins, drifts of wet leaves and cigarette butts, humming electrical boxes, through the low slit and the back corner where an ivy-choked hedge meets the chain-link fence, and straighten up to see low green scrub and dirt all the way to the grey band of the horizon. The ground would be slippery mud that clags up your shoes, the plants some bristly vine being grown for feed. Culverts for drainage and cold wind on your ears and neck. You could skirt the edge and probably head round, after a while, to the motorway. I haven’t been, but you don’t have to go to know what’s back there – my office is in a newish building, sturdily built, hard carpeted floors and hollow sounding walls, what other kind of place would it be?

I can walk or drive home, depending. 

iii.

The pair of us were riding the bus together. We’d had a few drinks and we’d gotten dressed up for the night and we didn’t have firm plans about where we were going. The whole city was celebrating. We gave up our seats for a woman with a sleeping baby in a pushchair and stood and jostled each other for a while as it all filled up. There was a man next to us, easily twice our age, and he smiled approvingly and said he liked our suits. Thank you, we said. It’s important to dress well, he said. Especially for a young man. It shows you know where you’re going in the world. People respect you. Well, I like your suit too, my friend said. I always wear one, said the man. Since I was a young man. I’d never be without one. In my country it made a lot of difference. I had very little at the start but I made a lot of money there. He told us where he was from and he told us about the war in his country. He said that he had been in government, for a time. I remember being young, he said, and wanting to make something of myself. We all did. What were you in the government? I asked.

In the way of a crowded bus we twisted where we were hanging and were bounced away. I looked at my friend’s reflection in the window, saw the lights passing through him. We were gathering our spirits for the next thing. My old country, I could hear the man saying. I think you’re from there too. He was trying to talk to the young woman with the baby, but something in the pushchair had caught her eye. My family had a monopoly, the man said to my friend. I suppose you know what happened out there? I began to wonder how drunk the man might be. I have an idea, my friend said. I hadn’t noticed the man’s unsteadiness at first. Now I’m here, he said. I own a club. My friends and I own a club. It’s where I’m going. Where are you going? Well, we don’t really know, I said. It’s a very good place to relax, he said. On a night like this it’s a very good place. Of all nights. You should come. It’s impressive, I thought, to meet a person like this, but then if you make an effort to face the world then this is just the kind of thing that happens to you. I wondered if my clever friend was thinking the same. You are more used to it than I am, I thought. I don’t see you frequently. Maybe you meet people like this all the time. But the man is right here. How can I ask you if we should go?

The crowd thinned. In his stately good humour, the man leaned down. Beautiful, he said, as he dropped his face to the pushchair. Beautiful. Don’t touch my child, the woman said.

iv.

We had moved somewhere remote and, we felt, saturated with history – not with historical events, but the sort of history of labour expressed in rough unfinished textures and an orientation of rooms and streets that made them inhospitable to certain objects and activities; those objects and activities I suppose we thought were ‘modern.’ At the same time another family had moved in and rented a place identical with ours, and we felt ourselves uncomfortably twinned with them. I could not move in public without feeling their hostility, and was eventually pursued by their sons in a circuit of the fields which lay on the valley walls overhanging our house, fields that were bordered with crumbling stone walls and which were much too small, steep, and angular ever to have been any use for farming. I should have outpaced them easily but found myself in confrontation with them back on our street, where stucco walls and leaning top storeys hung closely over us. In desperation we appealed to the powers who had leased us our time there. At the critical moment, I realised that we and our neighbours had been deceived into enmity by those individuals on whom we were now relying for help. Our neighbours, whose strength so exceeded our own, lifted them bodily over the rails on the viewing platform where we had our summit. By now you had left, and I wished that you had stayed around to see where it all ended.

v.

In the middle of the night I would sit out front on my step and smoke and look at the shops opposite. I liked to be the sort of person who would do that. Tonight a man asked me for a cigarette and, when I gave him one, sat down beside me. We squeezed together in the little doorway. The light from our cigarettes went and came. He was making his way up out of the city centre, where he had been drinking, to the outskirts, where there was a shelter he could stay in, if he made it in time. He asked what I did, and I told him, although I did not do much.

Sometimes when we were not talking he made low sounds, like someone worrying. He told me he was recently out of jail. I asked what he had done. It was for strangling my dad, he said. But it was nothing, a joke. Things must have been bad, I said. Just my old man, he said. I’ll show you. That’s alright, I said. It was nothing, a joke, he said. Here. You can do it to me. That’s alright, I said. Go on, he said. You’ll be interested to see what they send you down for. I had to learn. I sat still and thought about performing actions that were not my own. His clothes were stiff and fit him poorly and they rubbed against me. We had finished our cigarettes. I wondered what pretext he was asking on, or for. There was no one else on the street. I’ll just show you, he said, and he lifted his hands to my neck.

Years before, when I was very young, I made friends with another boy while my family was on vacation. Over our week together we developed a routine joke for the evenings, in which, when the pesticide spray trucks came out to circle round the little roads in the resort, I would pretend that their sweet-smelling fog had transformed me into a monster, and I would chase him. One evening, our last night there, he tripped, and I caught up. As a joke, while he lay there, I put my hands around his neck, the way they do in cartoons.

A voice called for me to stop. There was a young man, a worker at the resort who ran the activities. He was tall and athletic, and all week long my friend and I had silently looked up to him. What were you doing to him? he said. Nothing, I said. We were just joking. So do it to me, he said. What? I said. Do it to me, he said. Show me. Put your hands up here. And he crouched down in front of me and lifted my hands to his neck and I let them rest there.

vi.

We had moved to a city that was warm and damp and much greener than our previous home. From early spring, waves of growth and decay layered dead and living leaves and vines on the ground, and the air was moist and hot and felt flatulent. The place we had come from was older, cooler, more barren, and we sweated in our clothes and in our bedsheets at night, and our skin felt sticky and itchy with unfamiliar pollens. The new city was grander and wider and built somewhat on the model of the old, which had once been the administrative centre, but we experienced no general sense of familiarity, only occasional shocks of recognition in the face of some angle or street corner or colonnade; we could not always say what it was about them that reminded us of our home. The streets were long and, where not overshaded by large drooping trees, intolerably bright, and the effect, when walking through, was of tight hot enclosure relieved only partly by flashes of coruscating white light. But each day, unpredictably, there would come at some point a meridian, and the hot breath rising from the ground would pause, and draw back down, and there would be a great silence in which every sound was distinctly heard and the intolerably bright light would give way, in the instant, to the perception of the crystalline outlines of even the minutest things. As if the air had become a sound, as if the air had become a light. It was what we loved about the place. Thus to lie so in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds. And just to know.