EPILOGUE
Southern England,
2020
Blank. A blank wall faced Virgil. He’d been in this waiting room a month and a half previously, shortly after he’d returned to bury his mother. In the waiting room, he found himself sat in the same chair. He liked to do that, he realised, even when he returned to a bar, in some faraway place, where he’d only once drank, he’d sit on the same barstool as before – or, at least, the one he vaguely recalled. One of the crow-like women at his mother’s funeral had suggested he went for a “check-up” and he got “looked over, just in case,” as they looked down into her grave. He didn’t recognise the woman, but his mother had moved back to where she was from, after forty years away, after what had happened with Virgil’s father – something inside of him had expired long before he died.
Several years after the fishing trip Virgil so often recalled, with varying intensity, Virgil’s mother, Christina, left his father with the cheerful pragmatism that only a middle-class Englishwoman can muster, and which would remain forever alien to Virgil. No one in the village blamed her. His father, Simon, had grown morose. He no longer sang or read. On his nightly walks, he was more like a shadow than a living man; a lone figure on the path that snaked through moonlit dunes, down to the blackened sea.
Sat again in this nondescript waiting room, Virgil wondered what it was that perplexed his father, recalling the way in which everything he had wanted to say to him had remained a lump in his stomach, where still it weighed heavily. The smell of the NHS disinfectant in the waiting room reminded Virgil of the last time he saw him. He didn’t even say goodbye properly, though, as Simon repeated how the Greeks loved the sea, it was clear to them both that he didn’t have long to live. Virgil pictured Simon’s cataracted eyes, with long feminine eyelashes – stray hairs on a pork chop; his eyes, dark as his son’s, had sunken into a gaunt, suddenly ancient face, twisted with the agonies of cancer. Aging, Virgil had realised, is no process, but a sudden outrage.
Terrified, those dark eyes stared at his son, whom he had scarcely seen since Virgil had to move away for work. Virgil stared back. The two men gazed upon each other with incomprehension, rage, and sorrow, but not – it seemed to Virgil – with much love. Simon’s world had gradually shrunk from the vast seas of his youth in the navy to the dank one-bedroom maisonette bought after his divorce. In his later years, he scarcely left his little damp refuge. Then, there was the little room in the hospital, of course, crowded with drips, morphine, and feeding machines. And it was there, alone, one Tuesday morning, that Simon died, as Virgil stared vacantly out of the window of a foreign train; Virgil found out the following Monday, for he had always been carelessly attached to the digital world.
A church bell rang nearby, waking Virgil from his oedipal reverie. That crow-like woman had a point, though. Something was out of place, he felt, something inside him ached, or beat out of time. Perhaps it was the aches and pains of early middle age – ‘dying pains’, a colleague had joked about them – or perhaps it was the realisation that his mother’s death had finally bumped him out of the suspended animation in which he had lived for so long, forcing him away from his lassitude; from the women he had loved; the friends he had made; the fish he had caught, and a million forgotten meetings, half-recollections, and all their future perfects and imperfects too, forcing him back to that strange, empty place, where he was born. A place called home, almost entirely for want of a better word.
To most people, especially as he moved towards middle age, it seemed that Virgil had been living in a state of suspended animation – that web of affection, duty and financial responsibility, hadn’t quite been woven around him, although there had been times, when it looked like his life would finally stretch out before him like a well-laid patio. Indeed, he might well have stood on his very own patio as the years wore drearily on. Until he was gone, of course. But then, when he had expired, sooner or later, someone else would stand on the same patio for a few years, along with their unknowable lovers, wives, and children. And so, this cheerful cycle would continue. But instead of this, instead of patios, three sets of garden furniture, and the varied lifespans of three or four family dogs, Virgil was to ride trains, buses, drift from one shabby apartment to another, and talk. To him, men with patios must have seemed like children – bloated stomachs, and a woman to do their ironing. Yet, he was not like those without patios, either – those skinny, bearded fatalists, burning with their own neuroses. It was just, many of his friends thought, that something inside of him was numb, something beat out of time.
The contours of the waiting room’s wall came into focus. Like the surface of the moon, Virgil thought. A small crack wove its way downwards, as if it were a vein or a root reaching for water. The smell of disinfectant now mingled with that of talcum powder from the elderly woman, who had shakily taken a seat opposite him; why was it, he wondered, that she didn’t use antiperspirant? She must have seen it in the shops. On the wall opposite, he faced a placard, advertising the local hospice. A word he detested; a notion that left him cold with terror. A frank-faced brunette in her late 40s lay a cold, practical hand upon the frail shoulder of an elderly woman in a light blue cardigan. He imagined the insides of the body under the cardigan and mused on its sclerotic systems, from limbic to libidinal. He briefly imagined himself as a tiny explorer, diving into her belly: the sickly yellowing intestines, the ancient heart thumping faintly, the liver’s mild cirrhosis, before chastising himself for such a strange, childish fantasy. Fortunately, the stench of her failing kidneys emitting that unmistakable odour of human ammonia soon brought him back to reality. Perhaps the doctors and nurses get used to this smell, he thought.
He’d done nothing over the last couple of months, save clearing his mother’s things with an encumbered reverence, drinking tea from the cups he recalled from his childhood, and surveying in incomprehension all the objects that had made up her fine, purposeful life. She had a lot more than him, but it ultimately seemed so little. He wondered if she had been saddened by his absence, by the lack of grandchildren and family Christmases. Smiling, she’d always just stared into his eyes and brushed his tanned cheek with a familiar hand. So, it was the last time they met and probably the first too. He half-wondered if his mother had ever fallen in love with a stranger on a bus. She seemed like she had. He hoped she had.
Chapter 1: Adam
Naughton, England,
Late 1990s
Adam heaved a sack of fertiliser onto the back of the golf buggy. Behind him, the bluish-grey contours of the bay below glittered in the late summer sun. But having worked at the golf club since he had left school ten years previously, Adam no longer regarded the view as beautiful. Even the most profound beauty eventually becomes commonplace. So, he turned his unshaven face towards the bar’s window and saw Virgil’s head bowed; he pictured his friend wiping the bar clean of the tiny yellow gnats, which had drowned in the ecstasies of Friday night’s beer.
Saturday again. Framed by the bar’s dirty window, with its sunburnt, red frame, Adam gazed at his friend, thinking absentmindedly of his other friends too, and of the few lovers he’d had, and his many acquaintances. What they said and did somehow spread out from them, somehow escaping their grasp. This effect, he thought, was almost like a row of dominoes falling, or the stone his stepson had thrown into the rich, still waters of the local lake the weekend before. Concentric ripples had radiated out from the stone’s point of impact to the far shore. So, it was with what people did and said, Adam supposed. Our smallest expressions of kindness or malice spread out far, far beyond us. And, in this way, we encounter – at one or several removes – dozens, hundreds, thousands of people we will never know we touched. Someday, he thought, he would try to tell his boy the story of a life from the outside, through the eyes of all those it moved.
Suddenly, a distorted voice from a loudspeaker broke Adam’s reverie, a man speaking about the economy and the election. Somewhere else, though. Something, he supposed, that mattered up where Virgil was at college. Nothing changes here, the groundsman thought, proudly. From a factual perspective, he wasn’t wrong. The Conservatives had always held this seat, despite the astonishing poverty of this damp, greyish mining and fishing town, which lay squat in a valley of greening slag heaps – nothing added to them since the mine had closed. Not that Adam knew this, nor wanted to. He knew only that all that clangour of progress, race, culture was somehow distant, factors in the half-imagined lives of more suburban friends, or his wife’s life. Before she chose him. Distant, as she was, sometimes – but, somehow, present too… somehow… enough, more than enough.
Virgil, he thought, must know about all this, though, about politics and Westminster, the economy; but like many things, like football, golf, and cars, Virgil didn’t talk much about politics. He couldn’t even drive until he was 21. Tall, though; disinterested, certainly. He would speak slowly and articulately, though almost distractedly, about beer sometimes. More often about that girl, up there, somewhere else. Lifting another sack of fertiliser, Adam recalled Virgil’s story from a few days previously, which echoed in his head, as his voice often did: “Vera and I were so drunk at this thing… we’d been up for days.” Tellingly, Adam thought, Virgil didn’t specify how they had stayed awake, or what he had been doing. His friend always took as explicit what was implicit. But Adam didn’t mind. His friend’s voice continued to course through his memory: “We went up to the Apollo” – Adam, of course, had no idea where or what this venue was, but the best stories are not necessarily the most intelligible – “they let us in late, to see that play, so drunk we somehow fell asleep in the gangway of the theatre. And when I woke up, her hand was in mine. It was pale, small like a child’s, but belonging to that strange, wild woman of rage, drugs and… Oh, another one, mate? Carlsberg, was it?” Virgil’s story was forever displaced. Left unfinished. And, Adam thought, somehow profaned by his precise and unconvincingly colloquial “mate” – an affectation from a boy just a little too posh to pull it off. Memories of the rarest tenderness are often interrupted, or half finished.