The Shapeless Unease Read online

  This morphing of the word great is a subtle, gentle confusion, a little play on words that seems harmless. Then it’s used in ways that evoke two very particular ideas of nationality – one that conjures an imperial virtuosity – Great British Bridges, Great British Railway Journeys – and another that conjures a wartime zeitgeist, an almost quaintly collective pulling together – The Great British Bake Off, The Great British Sewing Bee, The Great British Allotment Challenge. This is all very nice; why not celebrate our illustrious past, why not pull together? Why not celebrate ourselves as a nation of tea and gingham tablecloths and bunting and fox-glovey summer days and deep, sensible conservatism? Team Britain. Why not? It’s innocent enough, and surely we should be allowed to have and celebrate a national identity.

  But changing the meaning of the word ‘great’ is insidious. It gently touts the Daily Mail line of our grand old sighing nation, avuncular and nostalgic, superior, granting favours to its less great nieces and nephews. It’s never clear what exactly the ‘great’ refers to – what deed or quality. Great at what? Great in what way? The echoes of the phrase Great British are of stature, standing, pride at best, pomposity at worst.

  This might not be a new use of our country’s name, but it’s been used these last few years to the point of becoming a strapline, a brand. Great British Values, the Great British Public. These are straplines belonging to the rhetoric of David Cameron’s Big Society government and frothed up by the right-wing press – an article in the Telegraph after the 2015 election that gave Cameron a clear win sported the headline: The election’s other winner? The great British Public. (Hindsight makes this headline even more absurd than it was at the time.) Great here isn’t capitalised; the Telegraph isn’t even pretending that the word ‘great’ belongs to the country name Great Britain; it’s just an adjective that describes it. The brilliant British People. The super British People.

  I find this deeply strange, and deeply suspect. Who says we are great? Great meaning what, exactly? I ask again: great at what? At being British? At voting the way the Telegraph wanted us to vote? Great since when? Always great, or quite recently? All of us? Or just the ones who voted the way the Telegraph wanted us to vote?

  I’m angry about death. I’m angry about factory farming. I’m angry about this family of Yemeni people who’ve been reduced in number and made homeless by the senseless machinations of war and alpha-male politics. I’m angry that my MP, the person who represents me in parliament, is Jacob Rees-Mogg. I’m angry about the heedless repetition of historical mistakes. I’m angry that the week we gained Donald Trump as a world leader we lost Leonard Cohen, in some deal that even the Devil must have flinched at. I’m angry that nobody obeys the speed limit through my village. I’m angry that nobody even obeys double the speed limit through my village. I’m angry about the great national con that is Brexit. The rip-off of our values. The insult to our nationhood, where by some horrible trick our self-assurance has been swapped for arrogance, our tolerance for superiority, our power for meanness, our natural trepidation for outright fear. The people are angry, they say. The people are hitting back.

  It’s true; the people are angry. This person is angry. And I know fear. I have seen more 4 a.m.s this last year than I can count and 4 a.m. is a time rife with fear. A car races through our village too fast, hits the speed bump outside our house, drops from it at such pace that our bed shakes and I’m awake. You fucker, I think. I bet you voted Leave. Then I want every speeding car, every over-entitled SUV hurtling through a 20-mph zone at 50 with Darling #1 and Darling #2 in the back and Spencer the Spaniel in the boot to be banned from my village, banned from polluting the air I have to breathe. Maybe we could give Leave voters Kent, I think. We could partition it off and they can have it.

  The thought lends a rare deep hour of rest.

  6 a.m.:

  The night is another planet a bit like our own. Dark, of course dark, but darkness is a hundred things coming by degrees, darkness is spilling around multiple points of light. The rectangular outline of street light around the blind. The clock on the oven that makes me cry with its painful reporting. 2.26. 3.49. 4.11. 5.48. The neon LED display of the homemade weather-forecasting gadget that colours the kitchen green and orange (coolish now, warmish tomorrow). The standby of the stereo. The flashing red of the monitor. The green of the battery charger. The night sky through the French doors and sometimes the moon turning the living room blue. The various blacknesses of the garden as it slopes away. The distant bulk of the hill opposite and car headlights winding down it in a steadier stream. A police light.

  Tonight the moon has been a rich sumptuous yellow, a fat crescent, low as anything. And Jupiter by its side. Now I look for it, as a winter morning edges in, and it’s on the other side of the sky, smaller, higher, but still surprisingly bright.

  The garden table emits whitely from the patio, the copper beech is a giant emerging to the trained eye. I can imagine the grass and the borders and the acer in its pot, but can’t see them. Is the garden in darkness or is darkness in the garden? Is darkness an appearance? A dark garden, like a blue coat. Is darkness a state? A dark garden, like a cold sea. Is darkness a quantity? A dark garden, like a full glass. Is darkness a judgement? A dark garden, like a difficult sum.

  Beyond panic, and well beyond sleep, I sit on the sofa and watch as the day comes, grain by grain, like ash falling. Black things turn toneless grey. There emerges in the garden the things I know – the paving and the steps and the grass and the broken bench, the pile of branches from the cut-back hazel, the sculptures I made and never finished, the little cherry tree with its prayer flags. A square of greyish yellow, a square of ashen red.

  Proliferations of love.

  He sticks the headphones in his ears, he doesn’t like those little earbud things but he’s too old to wear the over-ear ones, his son says he looks like a dick in those. Which is probably true. He still has an old MP3 player which he insists on using because it’s simple and it does one thing which is the thing it was made to do, not like phones which do two hundred things, none of which seem to involve phoning. His son’s put ‘Absolute Beginners’ on the MP3 player, but that’s all. That’s as far as he got. So he listens to ‘Absolute Beginners’ all the way to the shopping centre, six times over.

  The height of irony, really, that this fifty-two-year-old luddite should have just jackpotted three cash machines. Jackpotted. A good word, better than ‘robbed’, more innocent sounding. In truth he has no idea how it was done – how a computer a few miles away can control a computer in the machine. Even when he and James were growing up, James would do things with their Atari that were beyond his comprehension or interest, program it, code your own game. It beats him how James ever learned to do any of that, where the knowledge came from; not their parents. But it seemed to be in James’s genes somewhere. That, and risk-taking – a kind of screw-it approach to everything.

  I absolutely love you. He loves that line, absolutely loves it. His last act of freedom, if you like, was going to see Bowie in Berlin with James in 2002, when Gail was pregnant with their first, and it was like being dropped onto another planet for one night. There was no way of describing it when he got home, so he didn’t. But he wished afterwards that he’d chosen ‘Absolute Beginners’ to play while Gail was walking up the aisle.

  Imagine it, it’s perfect really. As long as we’re together the rest can go to hell, I absolutely love you, but we’re absolute beginners. Perfect. Maybe he should marry her again just so he can make that happen. Though divorce is more likely on the cards if he doesn’t find this ring – or, not divorce but something worse, silence, disappointment, a gradual soft killing of him because he’s let her down.

  He isn’t going to find this ring. He doesn’t even know what he’s doing going back to look for it, as if it would still be lying there by the cash machine five days later. When he gets to the entrance of the shopping centre he can already see that it was a mistake; the machine has been taped off
by the police, with a sign too far away to read but which must be asking for witnesses, and the sight of it makes him feel like throwing up again.

  Just tell her you lost it, he thinks. So what?

  Go back, you idiot. Go home.

  /

  She looks for a long time at something just past his ear. A really long time. The only part of his body that he’s aware of is his ring finger which feels indecently naked, like that man on the beach at Dorset last summer. Gail hadn’t been able to look and had sat, staring ahead and occasionally throwing small stones at her own feet. ‘Why does he have to keep walking around all the time?’ she said. It was true, he did a lot of walking around, that man. It was weird to see a man starkers like that, ambling up from the sea. No matter what, you could only see what was hanging between his legs, wherever you tried to look, that was all there was. Weird, because who cared? It was just an old man’s dick. But it was somehow everywhere.

  ‘I’d really like you to find it,’ she says. ‘It’s our wedding ring.’ Her gaze falls briefly to her own hands, but then lifts to stare past his ear again. Teary-eyed. ‘Anyway.’ She shrugs. Her shrug seems to say, go on, fail me. Then she shifts round and stands up from the bed and disappears to the bathroom.

  It’s just that it’s always been too small, is what he said. That’s why he has to take it off when it’s hot, because he’s scared that his fingers will swell and the ring will cut off his circulation. Nothing to do with him not loving her, just to do with it being a bit too small. That was when she looked past his ear. ‘Well, sorry about that,’ she’d said. ‘Next time I spend everything I have on you I’ll try to be more thoughtful.’

  That was when he’d failed her. Not in losing the ring, after all – she’d taken that pretty well – but in seeming to blame it on her. He lies down in bed. He hears her go downstairs and the TV go on; it’s gone eleven. He’s about to follow her down and make things up but suddenly he’s thinking of that candelabra in the cabinet in the living room, not even on display – just at the back of the cupboard behind some unused place mats and a box of wallpaper paste that had never found its way out to the shed. He’d thought Gail would like that candelabra. When he said it had belonged to his mother she’d tried to look grateful but she’d put it straight in the back of the cupboard almost as if it disgusted her.

  I absolutely love you.

  There they are, the perfect words. I absolutely love you. For a while he listens to the half-comprehensible drone of the TV in case there’s news and his jackpotting is on it. Police think they’ve found evidence that might be connect ed to the robbery of a cash machine in the Chequers Arcade last Tuesday.

  But there just seems to be the babble of a sitcom.

  /

  Proliferations of love. Vows and confidences and wedding bands, long nights up with the children, years of devotion, doing your best. Years of being stuck staring at surveillance screens, him, Mul and Lenny, a quartet of screens, nothing happening four times at once. My husband works in security, Gail has been known to say, and it’s a phrase that’s both somehow bland and enigmatic at the same time so that people tend not to ask more.

  James is looking at him with a kind of tender judgement. ‘Where’ve you gone?’ he says.

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ James smiles. ‘Everyone is always going nowhere.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Have you ever noticed that if you ask someone where they’ve gone or what they’re thinking about, the answer is always nowhere. Nothing. And I believe it, that’s the trouble. It’s sad that we can do anything with our thoughts and instead we go nowhere and do nothing.’

  His impulse is to reply, ‘Actually it wasn’t nowhere, I’d gone somewhere, I was thinking about escape.’ But he can’t decide if James is trying to bait him and wants him to admit something like that. Also, he’s bothered by that word, escape. Was that really what he was thinking about?

  ‘I want to do another one,’ James says, and he marks the declaration by hurling a teaspoon of jam at his scone. ‘Just us two. It’s not worth anything if you split it five ways, but halves is worth it.’

  That’s it, right there – the way James eats his scone. His stupid bloody scone. He eats it as if it’s a stupid bloody scone and as if it’s the best thing mankind could eat, at the same time. It’s like he realises how pointless everything in the world is, except things stop being pointless as soon as they’re done or touched or eaten by him.

  ‘No,’ he says, just like Mul said to him a few days ago. ‘No way.’

  James just keeps eating. So he says it again: ‘No way.’

  The place is packed and noisy and one of those bullshit places that has people getting hammered at the bar on £9 pints of Belgian lager while off to the side others, like him and James, sit on plush seats at white-clothed tables by purposefully tarnished mirrors and have afternoon tea. £35 a head, is afternoon tea. He laughed out loud when he first walked in and went up to the table James was rising from, and James grinned as he does and hugged him lovingly as he always does.

  ‘Well I’ve got the technician’s outfit now,’ James says, ‘so I might as well get my money’s worth out of it.’

  ‘Don’t you think you already have?’

  ‘Come on. Think about it. All you have to do is stand there and let a cash machine empty its contents into your hand. That’s all. I’ll do the rest and we’ll split it in equal halves.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he says. ‘How can I? I’ve got a family for Christ’s sake.’

  In response to which James elaborately pours them more tea, from a great, splashy height.

  My husband works in security. He hates the phrase and wishes Gail wouldn’t say it. It’s not MI5, he’s told her. I monitor an office block at night. Sometimes I monitor the car park. Mul and Mary long ago made a joke of it – Mary says Mul works in insecurity, given that security jobs never seem to last more than a few years; budgets get cut and security guards are the first to go, or their jobs are outsourced. You can look at a screen from anywhere. But Gail has never really had a sense of humour, not like that anyhow; she wouldn’t be one to see the opportunity for a joke like that.

  James sits back and says nothing. He has such a nice face, does James – all boy-next-door, slightly tanned honest goodness, and something really, truly kind in his eyes that can’t be faked and can’t be lost even as the years pile on.

  He looks like their mother. Any sighting of James is a sighting of their mother, and also the opposite – a sighting of her disappearance, if you can sight a disappearance. When she left, he had to look after James because James was eight years younger, so James – his strange devotion towards James and James’s towards him – has become the same thing as their mother leaving. It’s also the same thing as the silver candelabra and goblets given to her by her parents, which she polished whenever their dad had laid into her. And that she left, that she got fed up with being laid into and beaten up, was the evidence of a part of her that got handed down to James, not him. James walks away from strife, or doesn’t get himself into it in the first place.

  ‘D’you have any – qualms, about what we did?’ he asks.

  James’s answer is immediate but thoughtful enough, as if he’s already weighed it up and resolved it in his mind. ‘No. Not even a bit. We’re ripping off banks. Banks. They’re ripping us off all the time. We, the taxpayers, paid for their folly when it all went tits up and they got away without a scratch. This is a small scratch, what we’re doing, it’s puny but it’s something.’

  ‘I still can’t believe we did it. I did it.’

  ‘Do it again,’ says James.

  He has an image of Gail looking past his ear, not at him. James is looking squarely at him, always does – whatever he’s done or hasn’t done, James still looks him in the eye.

  What would he do with another fifteen, twenty grand? What could he buy for Gail or the kids that they don’t already have or that would be appreciated without re
ally going noticed? Too many hand-outs would start to look suspicious, and anyway, his life probably isn’t long enough to spend it that way. He’d die with a small fortune in a lock-up on an industrial estate and the storage company would get it since nobody else knows it’s there. He could leave it to James, but James doesn’t need it. Or he could just run off with it. He wouldn’t. But he could. In fact, that’s the only thing he could do with it.

  Proliferations of love, love which on occasions looks like servitude. More and more it looks like servitude these days. He doesn’t like to think, doesn’t like to think how much money he’s given, then there’s the time, then there’s these cash machines and the stupid, monumental risks he’s taken – not for himself.

  Now, suddenly he’s thinking. He’s thinking of hills for some reason, not mountains but soft hills and thunderstorms and David Bowie on stage in Berlin with his hair fluttering and The Women of Renaissance Ferrara and a drum beat and twenties spewing from a cash machine and his mother by the window in their living room and James’s undeniable smile and there’s James in front of him now and looking at him feels like something rushing through him, a wind blowing open a multitude of doors. That’s what it feels like. That all his doors have blown open.

  He goes to speak and he suspects the word that’ll come out is yes. Yes. I’ll do it, is what he’s going to say. Then his gaze follows James’s, which has gone towards the bar where two policemen are talking to the bar staff. The policemen turn, then, and start scanning the room. The thing rushing in him keeps rushing, rushing. He feels for the bit of flesh where his wedding ring used to be and the doors that have flung open in him are pinned back and the thing keeps rushing, rushing.