The Cost of Living

I saw your eyes twitching. I hoped you'd wake up.

Such a voice. Each vowel a journey,  a voice like the sweet lower notes of a cello, heard in a warm bath, whiskey in hand. A voice which has sold thousands of mortgages, packet soups, cars and air fresheners, has introduced popular classics on a mid-morning radio show, and coached reluctant viewers on the savagery that exists beyond the curtains of their living rooms. Specifically familiar to her, but part of the national experience, instantly recognisable though unseen. She hasn't seen him much recently either. 

The bed shifts, all by itself, lifting her by the shoulders and straightening her legs. Just an inch or so. Not an unpleasant sensation. The painkillers have her floating a little. She smiles and nods off briefly. He's still there when she opens her eyes again.

Dad? she says. Where's Mum?

Gone to get a sandwich.

Did you fight?

Not much.

She turns to look out of the window, tries to turn but there is pain still, unmasked by whatever they're giving her. She looks at the wallpaper instead. Very beautiful and expensive she thinks, gold with branches of cherry in bloom.  She finds herself in a garden

somewhere just after the rain.  A crooked old man is talking to her in a language she doesn't know. 

He is telling a story, she realises.  Why?  She has heard all of his stories.  Why is he here?  Impossible old man.

So, knees knocking, fully expecting to be sent down, I enter the Master's sanctuary. A cave of books. The smell of pipe smoke.

He conjures the quintessence of this remembered space with a twist of his fingers.  Straight from the RSC, that gesture, she thinks. My Leontes was universally applauded.

Denton, is it? he says. Sit down old chap. Need a favour, and Clarke says you're the man.

Nobby Clarke was the porter, you see, knew all the ins and outs. Fat fellow. Liverpudlian.

Tells me you're down to London every fortnight. Is that right?

Yes sir, I tell him.  My sister's not been well. Which was quite true of course. Never saw me graduate.

Sorry to hear that. Let me show you something. Opens a box on his desk. There are two 

rather dirty-looking wine glasses inside, nestling in velvet.

Need to get these cleaned.

I suppose I could have a go, sir.

Very plucky of you Denton, he says, but you can keep your Brillo pad in your pocket. These are Cristallo, do you know what that is?

Some kind of glass, sir.

Spot on.  From Venice, four hundred years ago.

Really?

Yes, the age of Caravaggio, Tintoretto, all that crowd.

The bed moves again, cradling her. She feels trapped, almost.

A thin-lipped, sour-faced old fellow he was, the Master, but quite a card with it. It's not a matter of national importance, he says, but I've heard you're a safe pair of hands. I want you to take this box to a pal of mine at the V & A. Didn't have a clue where that was. I suppose I still do that, for a living I mean, pretend I know what I'm talking about. 

How do I get there? 

Take a cab from Paddington, he says. 

She dozes again, struggling to remember who is who. Doesn't matter. It's more like music.  She must have heard this voice in utero, absorbed its rhythms there. She sang to her own children, hummed along to Mozart as well, supposed to make them brighter. Both out of the country now, free from their grandfather's incantations, and bright enough.

So they usher me through some important looking doors, with No Admittance to the Public painted on 'em in gold leaf, to another old man's office. More books and leather.  He looks the part, brass spectacles, white goatee.

You're the young man Sir David has sent me then. Well, let's have a look. Opens the box and marvels at these two grubby glasses. 

He wondered if you might be able to clean them. Thought it might take a while so said to leave them with you.

She was out of danger, Mum had said. No-one's out of danger, she wanted to explain, we are all terribly, terribly fragile. But she had been too exhausted or medicated or both to speak so she smiled instead. She interrupts him, panicked suddenly.

Where's Mum gone?

She'll be back in a moment, poppet. Gone to the cafe. You were asleep so she thought

you'd be safe with me.                                                       

They are silent for a while. She calms herself by watching him. Downcast, twiddling his thumbs. He is the only person she has ever seen who actually twiddles his thumbs, which is odd, she thinks, given the currency of the expression. A big man on a small chair. She got his height but not his breadth. Spliced genes: Dad's hair too, Mum's eyes (monochrome crescents) and narrow, round shoulders. Her ex-husband had once compared her to a wading bird. She had laughed at the time but the distorting mirror of their divorce reflected back ambivalence as malice, wit as unkindness. All the men in her life scattered, her son in Hong Kong, Tim with someone shorter, blonder, less stooped (but at least not punishingly younger) and Dad, well for once Dad was here. She ought to be kind to him.

You were telling me about the glasses. 

The drip glugs quietly and the bed moves. Her father's thumbs cease whirling and he looks back up at her like a large, grateful dog. 

So I leave the box with the curator chap and hop on the tube to see your Grandparents and Kitty. She was never very strong, poor old thing. And then I make a date with Mum

and we go out dancing and before I know it I'm back up at Oxford in a tutorial on Piers Plowman or somesuch and I give the Master the change from his quid and a debrief and don't think any more about it. Mission accomplished. 

A nurse enters, preceded by a brisk knock. In rubber slippers which match her overalls.  She takes a look at the notes at the end of the bed and checks the monitoring equipment and the drip.

How you feeling? Okay? Any pain?        

I'm a bit sore when I move my head. 

The nurse leans over her and adjusts the drip. Magda. Polish presumably. Something birdlike about her too, thick, curly hair pulled away from her face, like a crest, and a raptor's nose. No kinship between them really; the young nurse belongs to the world of the upright, the ambulant and athletic. She looks as if she might go and play netball after her shift. Do they have netball in Poland?

I be back later. Let me know if you need anything. There's a button. 

Ah, yes.

She tries to turn, but is stopped once more by a rumour of pain. She reaches for where she thinks the call button will be, groping like the blind heroine of a cheap thriller. There.  She rests her fingers on it for a moment. 

How did you and Mum used to travel around town? Not in the Hillman, surely.

By tube, mostly, like anyone. Everyone smoking as if their lives depended on it. Filthy. Got some funny looks sometimes, her being, well, exotic. If we were going out of town Dad would let me borrow the Jag. Very occasionally. We didn't get the Hillman until after you were born. And it was pretty knackered then.

She can't imagine him on the underground, silent amongst his crowding peers. He seems too big for it, his presence too operatic to be plagued by beggars, buskers and body odour.    

She met Tim on the Victoria Line, of course. His long arm reaching between the carriages,  pushing through the void to tap her on the shoulder. Your jumper's still got the label on.  Thanking him, reaching for the unseen tag and yanking it off. Standing on adjacent escalators at Warren Street, him laughing. I'm not following you, I promise. From their very first moments together telling her she'd got it wrong, pointing out her absent-mindedness.

Her father is staring at her hand on the call button, daring her, almost, to press it. Willing her to misbehave.

The glasses, Dad. He nods.

A couple of weeks into Hilary and the Master summons me again. Denton, I need you to retrieve those goblets, there's no-one else I can trust. Think nothing of it, I tell him. I'm your man. He gives me another quid, tells me to get a receipt.

Will that cover it?

What's that, man?

The repair? 

Never mind about the repair, Denton, the curator and I will sort that out between us. 

Old boys' club, she says.

Exactly.  All pretty straightforward until it starts to snow, and the snow gets tramped down by thousands of chilly undergraduates.  By Friday it's five below and George Street is like an ice rink.  I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck before I get to the station.

Her hands are shaking.  She lifts them from the bed covers and looks at them, as if they belong to someone else. 

What happened, Dad?

Don't rush me, sweetheart.

No, I mean what happened to me?  How did I end up here?

Did your mother not explain?

I didn't ask.

An exhalation, which is neither a sigh nor a whistle but is both of these things.

They think you might have tripped or passed out.  At work.  Went down pretty hard.  One of your students found you at the bottom of a flight of stairs. 

Did I break my neck?

No, darling.  Your neck's okay.  Just sprained, they think.  Her disembodied hands, still quivering, shape themselves into a gesture of inquiry.  Why all this?

You banged your head.  A nasty one.  They thought they might have to operate, but  your skull's too thick, he laughs.  They've got you wrapped up like a Punjabi, though. 

Her hands to her head now, finding the bandage.

Fuck, she says.  How's Mum doing? 

Scared, worried.  As ever.  At least you've given her something to fret about. 

Dad...

Sorry. She feels a pang of unwonted tenderness towards her mother, imagines her lost and beige, wandering the corridors. A corncrake blown in through an open fire exit, pecking at a stale bun.

Where's my bag? He retrieves it, noisily, from the bedside table and hands it up to her.  She finds her phone and unlocks it, searches for her mother's number. Before she calls

she opens the camera and reverses its gaze. Her face, or something like it, on the screen.    One black eye, no make-up, her hair sticking straight out above the bandage. She looks like a street lunatic, a shaman down on their luck. She starts to swear again but swallows it, in obscure, belated deference to her father, and says Oh dear, instead. The phone freezes, as if in horror at what it is displaying, and expires. 

Dad, can you ring Mum and find out what's keeping her? I think she might be lost.

I can try, darling, but I think she may have blocked my number. 

Really? 

Well, let's try. She watches his long, thick thumb scroll through the contacts.    

Tomoyu? Yes, she's awake. Just about. Where are you? 

Her mother is in the room when she wakes again. She smiles at her parents, and tries to remember how long it has been since she has seen them together. Ben's christening?  Getting on for twenty years, anyway. There is, she notes, something comic about the difference between their physical presences. Dad occupying every cubic inch of available space, asserting that he is more than just a voice. Mum next to him, disappearing into her chair. He could probably eat her, if he put his mind to it.

Hello Mum. Her mother answers by resting a hand on the edge of the bed. Dad was just telling me a story. About his Oxford days.

Oh.

Not a rude story. At least not so far. Was I asleep for long?

I got back about half an hour ago, darling. Her mother's voice has its own charm.  From sweetness came forth strength.

That long? It's the drugs, I think. My neck hurts most of all. Funny that. Not my head but my neck. 

The room is silent for a moment. She finds that it makes her uncomfortable. 

Dad, she says.

Darling?

You were skidding through Oxford in the snow. Her mother nods as if to say, oh it's that story.

Well, it was rather like the previous weekend, but backwards. Went to see Kitty, she was better, we thought. Took your Mum to the pictures.

What did you see? They look at each other, some happy energy passing between them, something she doesn't remember ever having seen. Their eyes separate and fix on the wallpaper as they try to remember. It's not important, she begins to say, but two hands – one large and fleshy, the other slight and clawlike – are immediately raised to hush her. It has become very important, suddenly, that they nail this down. The moments before her.  When they were still happy. 

Peter Sellers, her mother says.

Yes, yes. Inspector Clouseau. Bloody funny.

The Pink Panther, they say at once, as if they'd rehearsed it.

And went for Chinese food afterwards, do you remember?  Her father nods.

All the waiters looked like Cato. 

Slightly racist, Dad.

No, I mean they were all dressed like that. Black pyjamas. So I had a super evening with Mum and went back to the V & A in the morning. The old curator chap beckons me in and there's the box on his desk. He opens it, takes out one of the glasses and holds it up to the light. Finally, I can see what all the fuss is about. This thing is exquisite now it's clean. A hint of blue to it, and beautifully proportioned, golden ratio at work or whatever. Observe, the Prof says, these very fine lines. This is crizzling. The word stuck with me, obviously. I have cleaned the goblets but there is nothing to be done with the crizzling. This is the worst of the two. He hands one to me for a second. It seems solid enough, but what do I know? Be very careful with them, the slightest knock could cause them to shatter altogether. So he puts the glass back in the velvet.  Shuts the box and hands it to me.  I'm literally shaking, thinking about negotiating the steps, getting in and out of a taxi, on and off a train, skating back down George Street to  college. The old man puts a hand on my shoulder.  For heaven's sake don't drop the box, he says, and sees me out. 

Cato wasn't in the first film, her mother says. It was the one with David Niven we saw. She watches her father contain himself, and is reminded of a python swallowing a goat.

I'm sure you're right, darling, he says. It probably wasn't snowing either. 

She feels faintly reassured. This is how things are supposed to be with them. Dad doing the talking, Mum saying very little but always managing to undermine him somehow with

inconvenient matters of fact. It was an Irish Wolfhound, not a Great Dane. I doubt she would have eaten it, she's a Muslim. Dad barely suppressing his rage, Mum barely concealing her delight at having thwarted him. Pulling against each other, like biceps and triceps, and so functioning. Until she told him she was leaving and he moved his girlfriend in a week later.  A month or so after her twelfth birthday, just before she went back to school. Dans les grandes vacances ma mère a décidé qu'elle ne voulait plus habiter avec mon père. A relief, really. Her own marriage had lasted a little longer, hardly a source of pride. And Tim had been the one to pack his bags.

It was very cold, I remember, her mother says. You had a college scarf and you put it around my neck when we left the cinema. It was rather itchy.

Her father smiles, the crisis has passed. 

So I sit in the taxi  with this thing on my lap, wincing at every pothole we go over and then I have to wait on a freezing bench at Paddington, trying not to shiver, and my train's delayed because of the weather.

She is so tired. But warm. She pities young, scarfless Dick Denton, risking hypothermia for the sake of a couple of ancient objets d'art, sees her father slimmer, healthier, red of lip, cheek and nose, his breath visible against the thick air of the concourse.

Wasn't there a waiting room?

Yes, but it was terribly crowded, as you can imagine, and I couldn't risk getting nudged by a stray suitcase or whatever.

You poor thing.

We get on the six fifteen, eventually, and it's still bloody freezing on the train, some

problem  with the heating, and again I've got this box balanced on my knees, expecting a derailment or an emergency stop at any moment. Nothing but black out of the window, nothing to focus on but not dropping the box. 

We get to Didcot and a chap gets on and sits down opposite me, lights his pipe. He's had a couple of drinks, I can smell it on him. He looks at me for a bit, then he leans forward and says What's in the box?  And as he says this he TAPS it.  Like this, TAP TAP, twice, with the tips of his fingers. I'm ready to knock him into the middle of next week, of course, but I'm somewhat hindered by my precious cargo. The fellow takes one look at my face and scarpers off into the next carriage.

She finds herself laughing at this. The restrained laughter she employs for her colleagues' jokes in lectures. In that context more of a signal to others that a joke has, in fact, been made. She has seen her father's face redden with murderous intent, but he has never lashed out, not at her nor, she is sure, at her mother who latterly has taken to sharing the worst episodes from their doomed union with her daughter. No mention of wife-beating, though his other faults were extensive in scope and degree. Her mother is smiling too.

Were you ever in a real fight, Dad?

Me? Handbags on the rugby pitch, maybe, as a callow youth. And plenty of swordplay on the boards. But no, people have tended to keep out of my way. Just as well really, I don't think I've got the stomach for it.

She rather admires him for this, this rare interval of self-reflection in which he manages to see himself in a less than heroic light. 

Were they okay, the glasses?

At this point, as far as I know, they remain virgo intacta. 

He has returned to the remembered present of his story. Shame on her for dragging him away.

I safely disembark amongst the dreaming spires, thinking that by now it's too late to trouble the Master but there's a note in my pigeonhole instructing me to visit him at any time before midnight.  So I trudge, very carefully, along to his lodgings.  He opens the door himself, I'm half expecting him to be in some Victorian sleep getup, like Scrooge, but he's still wearing his suit and an expression of cosmic indignation. He wasn't much of a smiler.  He looks at me, looks at the box, puts two and two together.

Denton, he says. Do come in, old chap. You must be frozen.

Somewhat, I tell him. He brings me back into his study, where there's still quite a fire going.  I put the box on his desk along with the change from his quid.

Let's have a look, shall we? He opens the box. Magnificent, he says. Takes one out, examines it.  Puts it back.  Consummatum est, Denton.  A job well done.  Comes out from behind his desk and shakes my hand.  As he does so we hear a sharp pop – her father puts one stout forefinger into the side of his mouth and flicks it out – not loud, like that.  Could have come from the fire.  Then another – the same gesture – and the Master's eyebrows go up, like two grey caterpillars, levitating.

Oh dear, says her mother. 

Nothing but dust.  It's as if they've evaporated, somehow.  My knees start shaking again and I'm sure that it's somehow going to be my fault and he's going to send me down or tear me a new one at the very least.  He stands there looking at the box, which is, to all intents and purposes empty now.  Then he leans forward against the desk and his shoulders start to shake, and eventually I realise that he's laughing.  I daren't laugh along, of course. 

Magda reappears.  She watches the younger woman as she moves around the bed.  She is real, she thinks, for everyone who occupies this bed.  Am I real to her?  Or just a passing symptom, floating on the sheets.  Today a head injury, next week a knee replacement, a tonsillectomy.  With a shiver she pictures her father telling the same story, in the same place, holding her mother's hand.  And there she is, on the bed, deceased.  A moral in parallel, returned, like a piece of sixteenth century cristallo, unto dust.  Or as good as. 

We'll have to say you dropped them, you understand. 

Not quite sure what you mean, I tell him. 

Accidental damage, he says.  Not insured otherwise.  Might buy a couple of cases of the good stuff for the college cellar, no?  Laughing the whole time, he was. 

She need to rest, Magda says.  Five minutes, okay?  They mumble and nod.

We should let you sleep, darling.  Her mother presses her hand. 

I always wondered, he continues, rising slowly, if I was set up.  It was the time for that sort

 of thing.  JFK, Jack Ruby.

You were a patsy, Dad? 

Never occurred to me at the time, obviously, you just go along with these things. But when I thought about it later I wondered.  Was I meant to fail?

Magda is standing by the door now, applying pressure.  They lean over and kiss her in turn. 

I'll see you in the morning, darling, her mother says.

Yes, says her father.  Not really committing to anything, as has been his way for as long as she can remember. 

Then they are gone, empty air and two chairs left behind, and it is as if the latent pain in the side of her neck, which she has experienced for the most part as a kind of pressure, departs with them. It could also be that Magda has tweaked the drip to help her sleep again. She wonders if the tension and discomfort she felt was not a symptom of the fall but of having the two of them there. His half-disguised reluctance and her anxious solicitude. Either way it was good to be alone, to reinhabit her habitual state.

This room was really all she needed.  With its soft lighting and bionic bed.  There was free Wi-Fi and the food would presumably be as tasteful as the wallpaper.  She might enjoy an occasional visitor, perhaps coming to an arrangement with Magda that no-one should be allowed to stay for longer than twenty minutes.  Nothing much to see out of the window,

not until Spring anyway, and that was five months off.  Keep the blinds down until then.  No real rush, is there?  She chuckled to herself, buoyant.  

Why that story?  He probably didn't know himself.  Introspection wasn't his thing. He was Polonius, and had never been Hamlet.  If she pressed him on it he would probably say, Oh, y'know, every cloud has a silver lining, something of that sort.  It was a harmless enough story, she supposes, but even in her present mildly euphoric condition there is something about it which nags at her.  The thing of beauty with a fatal flaw, a commonplace idea, a cliché really.  But what was the parallel that her father, if only subconsciously, was drawing?  Was she the gorgeous object?  Probably not.  He had never been terribly enthusiastic about her appearance.  Marriage, his or hers? Love itself?  This seems the most likely, she thinks.  Imagines him delivering his velvet-voiced thesis on the fragility of human affection.  Nothing lasts forever, that's what life has taught me.

And this, in the end, was the only story.  Never mind a stranger coming to town, or a heroic quest, the truth behind any fiction was that things ended.  Existence meant finitude.  In my beginning is my end.  She feels her heart flicker slightly at this helix of thought.  

Magda appears at the push of a button.

Do you I might have some hot chocolate, and some biscuits, perhaps?

Sure, I bring you.  Five minutes.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.  In a sense though, she reasons, biting into a piece of shortbread, she is bucking the trend.  Reversing the curse. Extremely good shortbread, she says aloud.  Because something pretty serious has happened to her.  And now she is healing.  Almost everyone is getting worse and she is getting better.  Time-travelling, almost.  She sips the last of her hot chocolate and lets her broken head push back into the pillow behind her.  Like a hotel pillow, from a nice hotel.

It has rained again, she notices. Close to evening now. The clouds have cleared but the sun is already below the acers. The path, darkened by rain, is in shadow. The old man is there, thin and stooped like a crane, in his black pyjamas. He is worrying at the soil with a narrow spade. When he sees her he pushes the tool into the earth and gestures to her. Follow me.  

She walks beside him along the path. Above them the trees, none particularly tall, reach towards each other but do not touch. There is light still between the trees and the sky a deep, late afternoon blue. He is talking, the old man, softly, and she nods from time to time as if she understands. She doesn't understand but she agrees somehow. The curves of the path are mannered, artificial, as if something is being deliberately concealed.

The old man's patter ceases. The path widens and turns. A flight of shallow steps, formed from crazed stone, rises between low box hedges up to a temple. Water drips from the trees. The red tiles on the roof of the temple glow in the fading sunlight. The old man indicates that he will walk no further then spreads his hand, as far as his worn joints will allow, in the direction of the temple doors. He nods.

The steps are uneven and slippery with dewfall or rain. She walks up them with care, turning midway to check that the old man is still there. When she reaches the doors she looks behind once more. The old man nods to her, bends at the waist, exaggerating his stoop, then walks away.

She pushes the left hand door which swings open silently. She enters the temple and closes the door behind her. It is very dark. Her eyes adjust to the lack of light.

Guernica and The Black Paintings (I)

I am in Madrid with my eldest daughter, Daisy, who is fifteen and a half. It is early August, around six weeks after the disastrous Brexit vote, and it's very hot. The heat assaults us every time we step out of the hotel lobby. We haven't been here long, but we're already feeling a little aggrieved by the Metro system. Every time we arrive on a platform a train is just leaving, it seems, and there is invariably a wait of around five minutes for the next one. One of the lines which serves our nearest station is closed for the summer, so it's already a little harder to get around than it ought to be. But the city has charmed us, proving to be cleaner and quieter than we were warned we might expect it to be. This afternoon we're following my itinerary, which will place us in front of Guernica and some of the highlights of the Prado.

We emerge at street level in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, where the streets seem to smell of last night's barbecue, and walk down towards the Museo Reina Sofia. Closer to the museum locals and tourists are lunching in great numbers on shaded pavements, and I am baffled again by the instinct of so many of my countrymen, which urges them to be more remote from civilisation (exemplified here by the cosmopolitan mix of diners talking at sensible volume over food and drink consumed in a spirit of leisure) rather than closer to it. No-one at the ticket booth is in any rush to assist us, and it becomes clear, eventually, that this is not to do with any native indolence, but rather because admission is free after 1.00pm. Now, I was aware that the Prado offers free admission after five, but this is a bonus. At least I think it is.

Guernica is hemmed in by smaller galleries displaying Picasso's preparatory sketches and the room in which the painting itself is hung is long but reasonably shallow. It is also extremely crowded, so you feel a little like you're at the back of a crowd waiting for a parade to pass, rather than experiencing one of the Twentieth Century's great expressions of artistic energy. The painting itself is huge, but not surprisingly so, as some pieces already familiar in reproduction are when you first see them. It is as if the reputation of Guernica has outstripped even its expansive dimensions. Perhaps one's impression of the painting suffers as a result of its overfamiliarity (though I did not find this to be the case with Las Meninas, an earlier masterpiece which I saw later in the day and found immensely moving, in spite of my still greater familiarity with the image.) Perhaps it is necessary to imagine seeing the work during or in the immediate aftermath of the war whose effects it seems to depict, although I had just flown to Madrid from a nation which seemed to be turning against itself, informed by a wider reinvigoration of fascism that threatens to poison the whole continent. Anyway I found myself focusing more on what troubled me about the painting rather than enjoying what Picasso had achieved.

I have an idea about what Picasso was trying to accomplish in making the surface of the canvas so resolutely matt (apparently he commissioned special oil paint in order to create this effect). It seems that the painting is in some way supposed to resemble a black and white photo reproduced in a newspaper. To me though, this flatness deprived the picture of some energy, as if he hadn't really progressed from the drawings through to the finished work. The contrast between flat blacks, greys and whites is not as dramatic as it would have been had conventional oils been used. The components of the image are more harmoniously placed than they appear in the claustrophobic reproductions I was used to seeing, so that what I had expected to be chaotic seemed overly ordered. At the same time I found that the execution of the painting was almost sloppy, though I am also aware that this may be part of an intended aesthetic, that Picasso may have been attempting to create a tension between composition and realisation, that the canvas, in parts, was supposed to appear scruffy and unfinished. Nevertheless I felt a sense of wavering conviction, as if the artist had understood, too late, that the finished work would not live up to what was originally conceived.

What bothered me most about Guernica, I think, was its very consideredness. The tortured figures were too neatly balanced, the cartoonish limbs and digits too mannered. It is of course possible, laudable even, to investigate the insanity of war in a calm and measured fashion, but this is not what Picasso was at, if I understand his masterpiece correctly. He wanted Guernica to be a vast, mad yelp of a painting, a cry from the heart echoing the pain and horror of conflict, but for me, standing in front of it with a hundred or so other people, it seemed a bit too sane, too self-conscious and too public. I would only have to wait a couple of hours to find a more convincing and intimate argument about the senselessness of violence. One which wouldn't seem sane at all.

Minus the Shooting

Younis loved his country, all of it that he had seen anyway, and he had seen more than everybody he knew. He was a commercial traveller, buying fabric mostly, and some leather goods. Business took him south to the edge of the desert, where low, white villages were dwarfed by sand dunes, and all along the Mediterranean coast. Some mornings he would pull up beside the coast road, get out of the car, and stand in the play of wind between the land and the sea, would throw his suit jacket on to the back seat and stand there in his shirt, arms slightly away from his body, his tie flapping around his shoulders. He loved the people of his country too, a humorous nation, excitable, generous though largely underfed, speaking a rich creole of French and Arabic with countless oaths borrowed and often spliced from both. A good-looking people. More handsome than those from either side, at any rate. Younis himself was much admired, though unmarried. His moustache was broad and his hair still thick. The Lexus belonged to the company, in truth, but the apartment, in a good part of town, was his.

He might have called himself a patriot, but here, as in certain other countries, the word had assumed some negative overtones. It had come to connote a kind of small-mindedness, and a parochial, or at least less than cosmopolitan attitude to non-Arabs. Younis regretted but understood the recent upswell in patriotic feeling amongst the lower classes. Though he was a businessman he thought of himself as being essentially of the left. He bought a socialist newspaper two or three times a week and always on a Thursday. He dressed in western clothes but maintained some local habits. What bound him to the masses, to the young men in the squares who veered between political discontent and nationalist fervour, was his passion for the national football team. This passion created a literal queasiness in him. He was so invested in the fortunes of the team that watching them made him sick. He would heave with nerves if the opposition crossed the halfway line. So he couldn't watch. Or could only watch the game's neutralities. The national anthems. The ball being shuffled across the back four. The pundits at half-time (though he would have, occasionally, to avert his eyes from the screen as attempts on goal at either end were analysed in slow motion).

Later on this particular September day the Desert Falcons were to play a World Cup qualifier against Senegal, in Dakar. Younis was not optimistic about the result, nor indeed his chances of avoiding the match. If he stayed in his hand would drift towards the television remote like some disembodied horror, and he would curl and cringe on the sofa until the rout was complete. Every café in the city would be showing the game, every laundrette and takeaway. Market stalls and taxis would have the radio tuned to a sports channel. He thought about driving out of the city, but again foresaw a twitching hand, one that could almost be identified as his own, fiddling furiously with the dial of a car stereo. He would have to go out on foot, he realised. Younis decided to reacquaint himself with the stuffed fauna in the Musée National. He would set out just before six, walk directly to the museum, sit in front of some paintings, be transported back to an idealised childhood amongst the tatty taxidermy in the basement, then make his way back. He estimated that the whole adventure would take up to two hours, long enough for the match to reach its unhappy conclusion.

The afternoon had begun to cool as he put on a linen jacket and skipped down the stone staircase of his building, a free man. On the corner of his street a workman and a gendarme were arguing over a flag, which the labourer had tied to a barrier. Younis listened as he waited for the lights to change. It seemed that the cop had told the workman to remove the flag because, as he pointed out (and not unreasonably, Younis thought) it considerably reduced visibility for anyone turning left on a filter light. The labourer, who seemed to be in a less reasonable frame of mind, kept repeating that the flag was 'symbolic', and it emerged besides that the flag was a permanent fixture on the barrier, had been tied to it, in fact, since the Desert Falcons had last made it to the World Cup, seven years previously, and was therefore, in all likelihood, irremovable. The gendarme then enquired if the navvy had an alternative barrier at his disposal, which enquiry was duly answered, somewhat insolently, in the negative. Younis imagined retelling the story at some later point, of The Flag and the Hole in the Road, perhaps as an amusing antidote to the disappointing reversal about to visited upon his beloved national team by the Senegalese. The lights changed and he let them, patting down his jacket for an imaginary billfold, or pack of cigarettes, a charade performed so that the two interlocutors would not think he was merely loitering in the hope that they would come to blows. He made an effort to record their continuing dialogue in his mind, more or less as it happened.

“I can't just leave the hole unprotected.”

“Well cut it off then,” replied the constable.

“I can't and I won't. The flag is a symbol.”

“So you've said. May I ask what the flag symbolises, and how?”

“It symbolises our nation. Our struggle.”

The policeman nodded.

“I'm still struggling to understand how, exactly, this dirty bit of cloth symbolises the whole nation. Isn't it just a flag? And a flag in the wrong place? Tell me.”

The lights changed again. Younis let them.

“So the white band,” the workman began, “represents the peace we have achieved.” The cop surveyed the noisome junction.

“I suppose we're not actually at war, just at the moment.”

“The red is the blood shed by those martyrs, our fathers and brothers, with which peace, and our freedom, were bought.”

“Did you read that in a pamphlet?” The workman lit a cigarette and smiled but did not answer. Younis sensed that the situation was moving towards detente. Tempers cooling like the day, energy dispersing towards the end of the universe.

“And the green?” The workman wasn't sure.

“I guess it represents the country. The green land.”

Islam, thought Younis, crossing the road, finally. Green is for Islam, spine of the nation, its laws, sacraments and customs. There was a lot of desert, yes, but even here in the north it wasn't particularly green. A strange conclusion to reach. He imagined an alternate flag, with a beige stripe at the bottom. That might best represent the country's topography, was that the word? And yet it was a beautiful country, and no greener now, after the revolutions of his lifetime, than when the French were in charge, nor the Spanish before them. So the green represented a national religion, an established faith. Younis could have done without it. People needed to forget about the next world and focus on their desires in the here and now. Want something, buy it. Don't worry too much about what you can never possibly know. At the western end of the harbour the land rose up a thousand feet. There was a Moorish fort there, and a Spanish chapel beneath it. Less close to God. Tourists were driven up in coaches to see the battlements and the icons. Once a year, on Ascension Day, some pilgrims from the city walked up there. For what? There was a café and some souvenir stalls and a view over the port. Nothing special.

The boulevard was empty. Younis strode along it at a military pace. He imagined himself as the sole survivor of some biological outrage. The whole world at his disposal but no-one to share it with. He shivered and fell out of rhythm for a moment, becoming conscious of each footstep. Ahead, four hundred metres on the left, loomed the museum. Richly coloured friezes running in a band around the building. White stucco, black railings with an occasional soft drink can impaled upon them. A border of coarse grass. Palm trees every twenty yards or so. It was, Younis reflected, a modest, colonial sort of affair. Not the Louvre, nor the Prado, but something out at the edge of things. And perhaps all the better for it. A uniformed man stood on the steps and addressed Younis as he approached the gates.

“No admission after five forty-five.”

“Since when?”

“Since I've worked here,” said the man.

“Was it your decision, then, to change the opening hours?”

“What? No, I just work here.” The two men stood regarding each other for a moment, then the security guard lifted his chin and looked back towards the port. “Go home and watch the match,” he said. “That's what I'll be doing.”

Younis offered the man a limp salute and turned around. He was disappointed, but the walk had killed some time and kept his mind off the game. He walked north, staying on the shaded side of the boulevard. Ten minutes later he turned right towards the centre of town. He had decided to take refuge in the shop of Murad, his barber, who was a Christian and possibly a homosexual. Anyway, Younis remembered, Murad took no interest at all in football, and the television in the salon was invariably tuned to an entertainment channel. He skirted the bazaar, walking through the jewellery district. This was the oldest part of the city, the blackened buildings crowding closer, gutters almost touching overhead. Most of the shops were open. Old men hunched behind heavy glass cabinets. Men who had lived through everything but had seen nothing, hidden away in this dark corridor, insulated by diamonds. They beckoned to him. “Buy or sell,” he heard repeatedly, muffled by closed doors and old velvet. Six forty-five. Half time. He sat outside a small café and ordered a coffee. He sugared and sipped it. Very good, like the coffee in Spain, he thought. A moment later his stomach seemed somehow to violently rotate within him as, looking away from the café, he saw the match score reflected in the darkened window of a shop across the street. Any other score might have taken a moment to absorb, to reverse the characters and to recall which was the home team. It was nil – nil. Gloriously and unambiguously scoreless. Younis allowed himself a brief moment of hope. Perhaps they could pull it off. But hope was almost immediately overwhelmed by memories of past failures. The team defending a narrow lead, dropping deeper and deeper into their own half, throwing themselves in the way of every shot and cross, until tired legs can no longer perform. A low drive deflected twice in a crowded box. A foot withdrawn just too late from the path of the overlapping left back. All that effort for nothing.

Younis pulled a note from his wallet and tucked it under his saucer. There was a photograph in there, sandwiched between two business cards. His niece aged about four. He had always been fond of the girl, grown up and living in America now, but the reason he kept the photo was because of an unusual quality he felt it possessed. Her hair is long and uncovered. She wears a knee length brown dress which he remembers being stitched from a heavy fabric, corduroy perhaps. She is leaning forward at the waist, her arms stretched down in front of her, her hands half a metre apart. There is a red ball in mid-air. This was the thing about the photograph. It seemed to capture not only a moment, but also what preceded and followed this moment. You could see that the girl had just bounced the ball, but also, from its position slightly beyond her reach, you could see that she would not catch it and that the ball would skip away from her over the hard ground. He had taken the photo himself, and did not remember if this had happened, but looking at the image it was impossible to conceive that it hadn't. That the girl hadn't shrieked slightly, and skipped along after the ball. He wasn't sure what significance this had, really, but he felt that it must have something to do with how humans experience time and space. This was the kind of thinking he tried to avoid, particularly when it was late, and he was alone. But his mind was generally unquiet. The little girl in the brown dress provoked another question, as he rose and put on his jacket. How, he wondered, did we get from that innate instinct to play, to the present moment, where nation was staked against nation, across the globe, where the kicking of a ball could not be an unpolitical act, if only because of the great numbers of souls, his included, who were invested in the trajectory of that act? He heard the whistle blow for the start of the second half.

There was a red sign above the barber shop window with Murad's name and line of business hand-painted upon it in Arabic, French and English. This last, lowest set of letters was smaller than those above, as if added as an optimistic afterthought. The town attracted few tourists, and those who made to these narrow streets were usually looking for hashish rather than a haircut. A tricolour was pinned up in a corner of the window, just big enough to reassure nationalists that their custom was welcomed (Younis thought of the roaddigger) and not so big as to prove distasteful to everyone else. 

Murad was not busy. He sat alone on the vinyl banquette where, during the week, his customers would wait their turn in the chair. Younis watched him for a while before entering the shop. His attention, it seemed, was divided between the large tropical fish tank at the back of the shop and the television in the corner. Nothing was happening in the fish tank, nothing that Younis could perceive, anyway. Meanwhile on the flatscreen young men and women threw themselves about in silence. Murad rose as he entered and greeted him warmly. The barber's own hair was thinning somewhat, and was unnaturally black, and as he spoke to Younis he repeatedly scraped his palm over his scalp from front to back. Funny, Younis thought, that you never saw a dentist with bad teeth.

“I was just thinking about closing up for the day.” Younis stepped backwards, smiling.

“I can come back, if you prefer. I've already been turned away from the Musée National...”

“No, no, sit down.” The barber was flustered. “Not a soul for two hours. On a Sunday.”

“There's a football match going on,” Younis explained. “An important one.”

“Not important to me.”

“Well, important in the sense that it has robbed you of your usual customers.”

“But their hair will still need cutting, whoever wins.”

It was then agreed that the client's hair would be washed, prior to cutting, and that afterwards a wet shave would be in order. The great black chair was duly lowered and Younis leant over the sink. Murad's voice, sharing some gossip about the mayor and his mistress, was only intermittently audible as water and hands and shampoo and more hands and more water swilled about his client's ears. The effect was not unpleasant. As Murad towelled his hair dry Younis watched a young man approaching in the mirror. A young black with untidy hair. Murad saw him too, and made towards the door. Younis still had water in his ears. Murad explained that he was with his last customer but the young man offered to pay double as he had a job interview in the morning and felt it important that he resemble, at least somewhat, the small square figure in the photo he had attached to his curriculum vitae. Just a trim with clippers, a five minute job. Murad's resistance to the young man's appeals seemed, to Younis at least, distinctly unchristian, and as a representative of at least one minority (almost certainly two) the barber might have been expected to empathise with the plight of a fellow who was similarly marginalised by the random circumstances of his birth, and the conditions which informed themselves upon these circumstances. It was not so apparently. But Younis hectored Murad, without referring to this surmised parallel between the two other men's conditions of life, querying instead if the barber could afford to turn away a paying customer in the current climate, determined in this last afternoon to be a whimsical thing altogether. The young man sat down on the banquette, eventually, and nodded his thanks to the older man in the chair. Almost immediately Younis regretted taking sides. The young African asked if he could watch the end of the match while he waited. Half an hour to go, or thereabouts. Murad tossed him the remote.

Younis clenched each part of himself and tried not to look. The familiar nausea swelled over him as Murad, with exquisite slowness, moved around him with the scissors. Statistics appeared in the lower third of the screen. Senegal could boast eighty-five percent possession, most of it in the Falcon's half. Twelve corners to none. Seventeen attempts on goal (nine on target) to none. The away team hadn't had a shot. The sound was still off but Younis was confident that the commentator would be recycling some variation of “The statistic that really matters is the score”. Younis tried to focus on the blades of the scissors. He saw them moving in the mirror and listened to them clicking. Yick-yick-yick. It was impossible. Eighty minutes. Murad produced the small mirror and showed him the back of his head. It looked, Younis thought, reassuringly similar to the back of his head after the last dozen or so haircuts he'd had. Murad was still brushing cut hair from his neck as he rose to leave. The barber pressed him gently back into the seat. “Let's shave you.” He disappeared into the back of the shop and reappeared with a small pile of steaming towels. The Falcons keeper tipped a forceful header on to the crossbar. As Younis sat with the lower part of his face shrouded in hot towels Murad shaved the African's head. The young man pronounced himself satisfied with the job done, and paid double, as promised. Murad gave him back one of the notes. He stayed in the chair next to Younis who appeared to be ill. The older man, whose skin had taken on a grey tinge, was watching the game closely now, though his head seemed to wobble rather on his neck. He reached for the remote and unmuted the television. Forty thousand people whistling. This was odd, he thought. Did the home crowd want the game to end? Perhaps it was a cultural thing. Were they jeering their team? Murad removed the towels and began lathering his chin.

Three minutes of extra time. The whistling intensifies. Murad is saying something. His two customers urge him to be quiet. Another corner. Senegal leave one on one at the back. The corner is too close to the Falcons keeper who catches it and punts it towards the halfway line. It looks like a training drill. The ball bounces over the Senegalese centre-back and is seized upon by the solitary Falcons forward. He is smaller and quicker and pulls away towards the edge of the penalty area, but shifts the ball too far in front of him. The Senegal goalkeeper sees this and charges out to clear but gets to the ball a quarter of a second after the centre-forward who lifts it over his sliding legs. The forward is flipped, almost and the ball rolls goalward. The Senegalese centre-half recovers and hooks it around the post.

Younis remained in his seat. As the ball rolled towards the line he refused to admit the possibility that it might cross it, that the retreating defender might stumble or fluff the clearance. Three points away in Dakar was simply too much to dream of. A draw seemed certain now. Senegal were down to ten men, and without a goalkeeper, having used their three substitutions. The left-back had taken the gloves and stood behind the wall half-laughing as he directed them into position. A draw was an excellent result. So he would not rue the chance that hadn't quite gone in. The incident had secured the point. Murad peeled a blade from its wrapper and slid it into the razor. It felt odd to experience this calm, Younis thought, to watch as a disinterested observer might. He felt the blade against his cheek. The stand-in goalkeeper gave a thumbs-up to the referee who blew his whistle. Mohamed Shahili, nineteen years old and perhaps sixty-five kilos, took two steps towards the ball and poked it with the outside of his right boot, still on the toes, but kicking slightly across it. Murad began to pull the blade down over his client's left cheek, in short staccato movements. Like a Bernard Herrmann score, thought Younis, listening at the same time to the TV pundit who was explaining that the biggest difficulty from this distance was getting the ball up over the wall and down again in time for it to squeeze beneath the bar, while Shahili's strike seemed to be overcoming this difficulty in the most convincing fashion, leaving the locum keeper flatfooted as it slid down the back of the net and the ball rested there, its energy spent, an object newly weighted with history.

Younis jumped this time and the razor marked a thin red line an inch below his cheekbone. Murad stepped back from the chair and the young African pointed at the older man beside him. The cut was narrow and red and there was still white foam above it. None of the men would swear to it, and they didn't mention it to friends and family in the following weeks and months, but they all saw it. The blood beneath the wound had changed colour entirely and was now bright green, the green of the flag in the window of the small salon.