The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 4

Chapter 4

After the funeral, Noah and I drive back to 23 Arlington Close in silence. My son hasn’t made a sound since we found her. In the back of the car, he perches on his booster seat, thin fingers wrapped tightly around the green and purple plastic of his Hulk figurine. Through fleeting glances in the rear view mirror, I can detect no emotion on his face; he stares blankly out of the window to his left. The space to his right is conspicuously devoid of his mother.

I park the car in our garage alongside my dead wife’s Volvo, and instinctively click the remote to activate the roller-shutter doors. While walking from the car to the connecting door to the house, it occurs to me that our garage is roughly the size of a smallish one-bedroom apartment. If Joanna and I had sat out in our respective cars with the engines running, we could have been entombed like Egyptian kings in our own mausoleum – and perhaps discovered thousands of years from now by a daring explorer - or buried Viking-style in our vessels with the paraphernalia of our lives pressed in around us. Bags of groceries, a chest freezer, a plethora of power tools still in their packaging, an adopted son and a gargantuan leaf blower surround me, hemming in my every movement and preparing me for the next life.

Inside the house, I now feel more detached than ever – no pun intended. Cars snake, bumper to bumper, around the perimeter of the culs-de-sac outside. About forty people are pressed around me, all dressed in dark suits or dresses. Each of them juggles a glass of wine in one hand and a paper plate piled with canapés in the other. It strikes me that this is the first time I can remember that our house has felt close to full. In the six years that Joanna and I have lived here, only three of the five bedrooms have ever been used, and one of those functioned only as a dressing room – now a shrine to the dead. Its walls are lined with outfits the size and shape of a woman whose ashes have just been scattered against the blustery wind in the park, over her favourite rose beds.

It is difficult to imagine a less efficient way to live than this suburban condition – bloated houses full of empty rooms, driving to get to school, to get milk, to go out for a drink. The areas between each house aren’t even gardens – just gravelled left-over space, defined by ugly close-boarded fences; awkward places for lawn mowers and wheelbarrows to grow old in. The streets don’t go anywhere with conviction – they snake listlessly against one another like the eternal coils of Celtic knot work – and yet they are all three cars wide with a pavement to either side, committing as much of our precious land to flood-lit tarmac as is humanly possible in the simple act of getting from A to B.

In spite of all this, the British public continues to demand housing of this kind, and to insist on living in places with this mediocrity of character. This is the bit that my dreams don’t show; the results of the exodus of almost the entire population from town and city centres back to the countryside. The green and pleasant lands have been parcelled up like so much wedding cake into tiny pieces of a mundanely consistent nature, all of which was made possible by the beloved motor car. The same swollen rash encircles every town I’ve ever been to, meaning that there is no point in going to any of them. This is our epitaph, the legacy that we are handing on to the next generation.

A swathe of black fabric brushes against the frayed knuckles of my right hand and distracts me from my reverie. Another gauzy scarf draped ceremoniously over the shoulder of a sumptuously black mourner. She must be roasting; the thermostat on the wall opposite tells me that the whole house is a very comfortable twenty one degrees centigrade, but the guests seem reluctant to shed their dour uniforms. Most of them have their backs to me. Many probably don’t even recognise me. In spite of - or perhaps in some cases because of - her long term sickness, Joanna had a broad spectrum of friends, a large number of whom I have never met. Her gregarious popularity counterbalanced perfectly my insular, self-conscious agoraphobia. I snatch snippets of conversations as they drift over my head; once again, the price of fuel appears to be the main topic of the day. Only the children are looking directly at me, as scientists might study a laboratory rat having given it a taste of something toxic. Waiting for a spasmic reaction to the dose perhaps, notebooks at the ready.

My mind wanders to Noah – he is mimicking my catatonic pose in the chair opposite mine. The green superhero is still clutched tightly in his small hands, and he is staring at a wine glass on the coffee table. Or maybe he is meticulously studying the gaudy cover of the heavy Picasso oeuvre it is sat on – and probably marking. His thin, bird-like features and heavily lidded eyes are, as always, inexpressive and difficult to read. The grandmothers are arched defensively above him, their rich black frills and cheap beaded jewellery providing a textural background to his blank face, like a Titian painting that is all velvet opulence and lace ruffs, overpowering his drawn alabaster skin. They are talking in conspiratorial tones about THE FUTURE, I should imagine…

“Joanna always knew what was best for him.”

“I know. It’s a terrible thing to have happened to the boy. Just what will become of him now?”

“I really don’t know. How will HE look after the poor child?”

“Please. HE couldn’t even look after HER. All he thinks about these days is doom and gloom and global warnings and the end of the world…”

We adopted Noah five years ago. Joanna decided that we needed a child to complete our suburban package. She was already sick, although we didn’t know it then. But the few attempts that we had made at natural pregnancy all ended prematurely, and we decided that adoption was the better way to go.

The fact that we weren’t looking for a new-born infant made the whole process of adoption a lot easier. Noah had just turned five when he came to us for a trial, after only nine months of waiting – already out of nappies, taking himself to the bathroom, blowing his own nose... The agency didn’t tell us a lot about his background – he’d been living with his biological mother periodically, but she had struggled to cope. Problems with drug dependency. The boy had no medical history. This lack of detail allowed us to slot him into our little family unit all the more easily – and to make up the gaps in between the facts we’d been given with stories that would, with time, become our family history. At that age, he soaked up human contact like a sponge. It wasn’t long before he was exhibiting Joanna’s mannerisms, using her vocabulary, calling her ‘mum’.

The action figure lies alone and abandoned, face down on the foot-rest where Noah sat a moment ago, green fists railing silently against the padded brown leather. The grandparents, caught up in their planning of my witch hunt, failed to notice him slip away. Pushing through the flapping black crowd that circles and crows over the tattered remains of the hors d’oeuvres, I bypass the kitchen and find him sitting on the downstairs bathroom floor with the blinds closed. The fluorescent shaver strip light over the mirror is on, and a very slight flickering buzz gives the shining porcelain below an unearthly glow. I look away from it to see the same ethereal light reflected in Noah’s tear-stained face, his soft skin like fine bone china. Her crumpled note is held tightly in his hands again, the spidery letters creeping out from between his thin fingers.

“Would you like to talk about it- about her?” I hastily correct myself.

Silence.

“If you tell me what she said in the letter, I might be able to help you understand it.”

More silence. His eyes refuse to leave the floor at his feet.

“Is there anything that you would like to talk about?”

Barbs of anger creep insidiously into the tone of my voice. Without a sound, he pushes himself up off the floor and brushes past me into the light. My clenched hand twitches involuntarily as he passes.