The Fall of Man

Part I chapter 13

 Chapter 13

I wake early the following morning. I am keen to talk to Noah about our upcoming trip. By the time I carry the breakfast tray through to the dining room, he is already perched at the table, busily scrolling through weather reports on Calgary.

“Noah, can you pass me the juice?” He pushes the orange carton towards me without looking away from his laptop.

“I spoke to Trisha last night.”

Click. (Another cold snap in the third largest city in Canada.)

Click.

“You know, you ought to eat something. My father always-”

Click

“-said that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

Click click.

“Would you like some eggs?”

Click.

“Fine. Well, in case you’re interested, she said that we can stay with them.”

At this, Noah glances up from the small screen in front of him. The weather report shines in the dilated black pupils of his eyes. I envisage myself imprisoned in those dark pools; a Vermeer-like figure all but forgotten; trapped deep in the mute boy’s subconscious.

“She’ll take us to that place in the picture – to the spot by the mountains that your mother always talked about.”

He looks straight at me for the first time in what seems like an eternity, then smiles and pushes his empty plate forwards.

The same morning, we hatch a tentative plan to step outside of our bubble for the first time. By 11:00am we are both dressed and the television is switched off. The house sounds deathly quiet without its reassuring cicada hum. I sit at the foot of the stairs, and stare suspiciously through the softly dimpled Cotswold glass in the front door. The world outside is difficult to make out, rendered crudely in a series of broad, vague impressionist strokes. In my mind, prying eyes lurk behind every window on the street beyond, watching and waiting for signs of life. At my feet, Noah sifts through a thick pile of leaflets and flyers, mostly for the fast food we have been guiltily subsisting off of late, which are littered about the floor. I pick up a printed pamphlet entitled Looking to Move?, fold it in two and slip it into my back pocket.

“Let’s go out the back door, Noah.”

It takes considerable effort to pull the white PVC door open on the small knob of the Chub security lock. Through lack of use, the door has gathered the inertia of a great stone. When the airlock finally gives way with a swoosh, I notice that lichen has taken hold around the rubberised seals surrounding the doorway. Nature appears to be waiting in the wings, ready to reclaim all of the little fortifications we have made against the elements, like so many sandcastles piled up in the face of an advancing tide.

Outside, the slight breeze is a welcome surprise after so many months of dry recirculated air and stale plug-in fragrances. In a Disney-inspired moment, I am overwhelmed by a myriad of movement, smell and sound all around us, in the little green and grey microcosm of the back garden. The plaintive chirps of a family of birds living up under the plastic guttering of our roof are briefly drowned out by a rush of water in pipes buried in the concrete beneath our feet, as a neighbour flushes their toilet. Inside the same house, the juddering orgasms of a washing machine at the end of its spin cycle overpower the brittle rustling of a pile of dry leaves that swirl against one another in the ebbs and flows of the wind. Away to the south-east, lost in the glare of the sun, an airplane rumbles into the horizon. Its wake is a single white line - already broadening and dissipating - across an otherwise empty sky that stretches, vast and blue, to eternity in every direction.