Wide Open

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Jim focused on the shells again. Ronny held them in his left palm. Jim noted, once more, that Ronny’s fingers were strangely waxy at their tips, but also that his wrist had been lacerated. Scars as thick as pale maggots, long scars, nosed out from the dark shelter of his cardigan.

‘Maybe there is a difference,’ he said, in a spirit of compromise, although if there was then it was so slight that he could hardly detect it. Ronny nodded, gratified.

The squeal of seagulls alerted Jim to the arrival of a woman and a man on a distant section of the beach. They were disrobing. Jim observed them, unobtrusively, from the corner of his eye. Ronny continued to sort the shells, oblivious. The couple undressed completely and then ran into the sea. The cold made the woman yell and the man laugh. Ronny looked up.

‘Are they naked?’

‘That’s the nudist beach. There’s a sign over there to say exactly where the nudist zone begins and ends.’

‘Ah,’ Ronny peered over. ‘I was wondering what that said.’

‘Why?’ Jim picked up a random shell and placed it gently on to one of Ronny’s piles. ‘Can’t you read?’

‘I can read,’ Ronny said, carefully removing the shell and placing it on to another pile. ‘It’s just that I prefer to read only certain types of lettering.’

‘Certain types?’

‘I met someone once who worked in printing and graphics. She told me how there were certain kinds of letters that made you feel happy.’ He looked into Jim’s face. ‘You think that’s reasonable?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on lettering.’

‘Well, there’s a particular kind of lettering that’s apparently very friendly. And because of the shape of the letters – their roundness, their whole design – they can’t help but make you feel cheerful when you read them. They use them a lot in adverts to make people feel good about certain products.’

‘I never knew that.’

Jim was fanning at the beach with his hand, shifting shells aside and revealing the sand below.

‘How about,’ Ronny said, ‘you clear a space about as big as a table and then I lay out my shells on it.’

‘Like a picture?’

‘No,’ Ronny spoke gently, but very seriously, ‘not like a picture, like a table.’

Jim sensed something contract. His face. His mouth. His chest. He felt a dart of panic. Was it a sickness? Then he realized that he was not in pain. It was not uncomfortable. It was simply a smile. A smile. He was smiling. It was nothing to worry about.

It was a real smile and it had started off from somewhere deep down inside him, somewhere numb next to his breast-bone. He tentatively touched the spot where the smile came from with his index finger as he shifted forward, clumsily, to clear a patch on the beach. It was all very sudden and rather peculiar. He looked around him, squinting, like he was all at sea in familiar territory.

10

Nathan had received three letters and he hadn’t responded to any of them. The first came from the authorities, the second from a lawyer, and the third was from a young woman whose name he did not recognize. Connie. An old-fashioned name. It made him think of lavender and starch and thimbles. But her writing was bold, and her demands – which she clearly thought reasonable – struck Nathan as entirely unfeasible. So that was that.

Each time Nathan received one of these letters, he took it to work and secreted it into a special file, a private file that nobody else ever accessed. He didn’t stop and think about why he had done this. Why did he take something so personal from his own private arena and carry it, so brazenly, into such a public one?

Possibly he did it to avoid a confrontation with Margery. In some respects, where information was concerned, where the past was concerned, she was his enemy, she was his inquisitor, his conscience. He had allowed her to enter his home, his life, his bed. But he would not offer her a window into his past. His past was a graveyard that he did not visit. His past was a cemetery full of dirt. Nothing lived there.

The letters found a home in Nathan’s Lost Property Kingdom. In his quiet folder they found an appropriate, a gentle and unobtrusive resting place. They snuggled comfortably up against pictures and scraps and other fragments. They had been opened, digested, closed again. They had offered up their information. They had made requests – unfulfilled – but that was not their responsibility. Like butterflies, they had spread their wings – all gaudy glory – and then they had softly closed them. That had to be enough.

The letters referred to a lost friend, a lost soul. They concerned a stranger whom Nathan had once known. But they had no bearing, now, on anything. That part of his life was gone, was lost. It was so private that it was not even private any more. And that should have been an end to it. But like a child with a scab Nathan felt compelled to pick, to poke, to ponder. He nudged at the scab but he refused to contemplate the wound just under. He came back to the file; once, twice, many times. He couldn’t drop it.

And then he did drop it. He was discovered, one night, after hours, paging through this private document. It had slipped, it had fallen. Its contents were exhumed. They looked curious in bright light. The letters, the photographs; polaroids, mainly.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ Laura had said, squatting down to help Nathan gather up his past, scooping up his secrets, his life, ‘the things people leave behind?’

Nathan had nodded. He’d muttered something. But he’d been flustered. He had given himself away. He sensed it. And he simply hadn’t felt right with Laura after that. In fact he felt wide open. A moth with its wings pinned, under the microscope. A girl with her legs spread, no knickers.

And Margery would have said, ‘Has it ever occurred to you that you might actually have wanted to be discovered? Have you even considered that possibility, Nathan?’

Margery would have said that. So he didn’t mention it to Margery. He didn’t mention the letters. And when the girl arrived, out of the blue, he didn’t mention her either. She called herself Connie.

‘You know what Connie’s short for?’ she’d asked, following him upstairs, and then not waiting for his reply. ‘It’s short for Constance. But I’m not in the slightest bit constant by nature.’

‘Except in this matter, it seems,’ Nathan said, prickling with resentment.

‘Yes,’ she took a deep breath and then looked around her at Nathan’s living room, ‘but I didn’t really feel like I had much choice.’

Nathan was relieved that Margery had gone after breakfast. Sometimes, on Saturdays, they spent the morning in bed together.

‘Have a seat.’

He pointed at the sofa.

‘Thank you.’

She sat down. He saw her eyes take in every detail. She looked like an angel, literally, with short, strawberry blonde, kinky hair and a child’s face. Skin like a macaroon. She was tiny. Barely five foot. Little hands, little feet. Breasts you could fit into an egg-cup.

But Nathan had no interest in angels. And he mistrusted small people. Especially women. They were usually aggressive, like terriers, yapping for attention. Yet when Connie spoke she did not yap. She leaned forward and slipped her two hands between her knees. ‘So you got my letter after all?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t answer it.’

‘I had nothing to answer for.’

Connie frowned at this. ‘Answer for? Why do you say that?’

Nathan sat down, stiffly.

‘Look,’ he said, after an edgy silence, ‘Ronny was my brother. But I haven’t spoken to him in a long while. Ten years or more. I just can’t help you.’

Connie didn’t blink. In a flash she said, ‘Well, I suppose if you did know where he was then you’d be breaking the law. You’d be concealing a felon.’

‘Exactly.’

Nathan paused. ‘And the only reason I knew he’d run away from prison was because the police contacted me. Just after. But it’s not even as if I could conceal him. He’s dead to me. It’s as though he’s dead,’ Nathan smiled grimly, ‘and how could I conceal a dead person?’

Connie’s head jilted. ‘People have managed it. In the past.’

Nathan thought this comment throwaway – which it was – but also morbid and inappropriate. He grimaced. Connie digested his expression. She was feeding off him, he could tell. He hated that sensation. He resented it, sorely. Without thinking, he covered his mouth with his fingers so that she could not see it. Then he realized what he was doing and uncovered it again. He had nothing to hide.

Connie wanted to get to grips with Nathan. She needed a handle. There was something so tender about him, something gentle, and yet he behaved so abrasively. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t know what Ronny did. I only have his letters.’

Nathan cleared his throat. ‘I have no interest in any letters. I have no interest in Ronny. Or in this.’

Connie sighed, then said softly, ‘He must have done something so terrible …’

Nathan scratched his neck. Connie noticed a heat rash near his collar.

‘Water under the bridge,’ he said.

After an interval Connie said brightly, ‘I’m an optician, incidentally.’

Nathan stopped scratching. ‘What was that?’

‘I said I’m an optician.’

Nathan smiled thinly. ‘How does that relate to anything?’

She was a crazy angel. A crazy angel-optician.

Connie laughed. ‘You don’t know anything about me. Why the fuck should you want to help a complete stranger?’

Nathan stared at her intently. He hadn’t expected her to swear. She’d surprised him.

‘But you think I might consider helping an optician?’

In a flash he was flirting. It was out of character.

‘I don’t know. Perhaps. It’s been hell for me, too,’ she said, apropos of nothing, not smiling any more, but suddenly tragic. Nathan was taken aback. Tragedy, at this juncture, was the last thing he’d expected. His spine straightened. She was slick.

And because she was slick she saw how her change in tone had affected him. Nathan withdrew again, into himself. She felt a deep frustration. She didn’t want to manipulate. She simply wanted to come clean. ‘The way I see it, Nathan,’ she said curtly, ‘we’re in pretty much the same position. You don’t want to encounter your brother again and I have no particular desire to see him. I simply have an obligation to fulfil.’

Nathan nodded, but his voice was tight. ‘You said in your letter that your father had died.’

Connie winced. She was still raw.

‘Five months ago.’

‘And he had some kind of a relationship with my brother?’

‘He was involved in a committee, a government committee that was drawing up a report on prison reform. He was a barrister, originally. He did all this charitable stuff after he retired. Anyhow, he met a wide selection of prisoners during the enquiry and he must have met your brother at some point, because they became acquainted. They became friends.’

‘Why did he do that?’

Nathan was talking to himself. Connie didn’t understand. ‘Why did he do what?’

‘Why did he befriend Ronny? Ronny doesn’t understand …’ Nathan corrected himself. ‘I mean he didn’t understand. About friendship. I still get hate letters. From total strangers. I’ve not seen him for almost ten years. I’ve moved house twice. But still they find me.’

‘That’s scary.’

‘Yes it is.’

Connie had stopped glowing. When she’d come in she’d been glowing. But not now. She looked tired. Washed out.

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘my father saw fit to leave Ronny a bequest in his will. Money, basically. A nice amount.’

‘A nice amount.’ Nathan parroted, aimlessly.

Connie’s eyes tightened. ‘Do you want to know how he died?’

She was suddenly vengeful, like she needed to prove something. Her tragedic legitimacy, her righteousness. Nathan said nothing.

‘He was waiting on the platform at Gravesend station for my mother. She’d been to Cheltenham races for the day with her lover. He was standing too close to the edge. Someone opened their carriage door before the train had slowed down. It hit him like a hammer. It killed him.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘We were very close.’

Connie rubbed her hands together, like her fingers were cold or her knuckles stiff.

‘But not close enough …’ she faltered. ‘I wasn’t close enough to know anything about Ronny. Nor did my mother for that matter. And it actually felt kind of creepy. Especially when we found out that he was in prison, and then, shortly after, that he’d absconded. It felt sort of …’

Her eyes scanned the carpet near her feet, as though she might see the word she sought enmeshed in its fibres. Instead she saw only an empty wine glass, an ashtray, a tea stain and, poking out from under the sofa, a slip of paper. She focused on this as she completed her sentence. ‘It felt almost threatening.’

For the first time during the interview Nathan felt pity for the girl. He imagined that before this trouble her life had been smooth and shiny as new Tupperware. It was no wonder she was shaken. He cleared his throat. ‘If I were you I’d forget about the money. Ronny was never particularly materialistic.’

Connie remained unmollified. ‘Unfortunately it’s a legal matter, not a private one. A large portion of the money Dad bequeathed was tied up in my practice, which has left me in a slightly tricky position …’

Nathan could see how this might be the case. ‘As a kid Ronny always broke things,’ he said, appearing to marvel in the memory of it. ‘I mean, he never grew attached to anything. He had no interest in money.’

‘He broke things?’ Connie’s voice was an echo, she wasn’t listening, she was trying to figure out what the slip of paper said. She saw an R and an O, an N and an N.

For some reason Nathan felt a touch of anxiety. ‘Not aggressively. It was never an aggressive act. Nothing like that.’

‘Actually, I’d really like you to see something.’

Connie put her hand into a leather satchel she’d been carrying and withdrew a bundle of letters. She removed a ribbon that tied them together. She offered them to Nathan.

‘What are they?’ He stared at them fearfully, as if they might spit or bite or combust. As though they stank.

‘Ronny’s letters.’

‘I already said that I have no interest in Ronny’s letters.’

Yet for an instant Connie appeared not to understand him and leaned forward further, proffering the letters until, as seemed inevitable, they slipped from her grasp and cascaded down on to the carpet, forming a small paper puddle at her feet. She swore and knelt down to gather them up again.

Nathan felt a curious sensation of déjà vu. He didn’t move. He remained seated. He wanted nothing to do with these papers. They contained more secrets, more facts, and he’d had enough of secrets and facts in the past. A gutful. Connie picked up the letters and then surreptitiously included among their number the tantalizing slip of paper. She glanced over at him as she did so. Nathan seemed in another world. He was unfocused. He didn’t appear to notice. She stuffed the letters back into her bag and then smiled, the very image of angel-innocence.