Looking for Jake: Stories Read online

  The burglar was crying. Desperately, Morley kicked him. “Tell me,” he said.

  “Is it you I done?” the man whimpered. “It didn’t mean nothing, it didn’t mean nothing, don’t cut me . . .” Urgently Morley watched his arms, his legs, ready for an attack. His quarry was thin, and his face was scabbed. It was hard to make sense of his expression. For one moment, Morley saw a calculation on the man’s face, and he opened his own eyes aghast, but the expression was gone, and he was unsure.

  “Who are you?” Morley said again, and the man, the young man, flapped his hand at the blood on him.

  “I ain’t nothing,” he gasped, and Morley watched him and suddenly understood and came in close.

  “What did they tell you?” he said urgently. “I’ll make sure you’re safe. Whatever they threatened you with, I can, we, the police can protect you. Who were they, the ones told you to break in? What did they want?”

  But though he shook him and hurt him again, badly, Morley could not make the man talk. He would only cry, holding his arms limp, and Morley had at last to throw him down and run, leaving the young burglar howling and tearing himself from tension and frustration. The man was a flawless actor; or was well-chosen by the hidden agency, for ignorance and expendability; or was too terrified to tell the truth; or the police had the wrong man.

  Morley cleaned his flat, took the plant off the disc. He heard no more from the police. When he heard about the poison gas attack, he sat staring at the heavy circle, the evidence of his mutiny.

  On the screen, rescuers in chemical suits dragged young men and women out of the subway. Most were dead; some were still dying, noisily drowning on their own deliquescent lungs. Morley watched. Their families mobbed the site, broke through the cordons, were held back by the police and by gusts of gas, braved them, reached their dead lovers and family with their eyes streaming from more than grief. Some succumbed.

  Simultaneous attacks in other parts of the city, and Morley heard what the journalists heard, the screams and foreign entreaties. In places of worship, in the offices of giant companies, and in that modern subway, gas made hells. Several devices were found and defused before they were triggered: even more had been supposed to die than the hundreds who did.

  A coalition of armies was amassed. There was an onslaught on the poisoners’ refuge. Morley watched the conflict.

  When his prime minister appeared, came onto his screen to ask for Morley’s and his compatriots’ support, Morley could focus only on the bookshelves behind the leader. Amid the spines were tasteful statuettes, a couple of plaques, and there at the prime minister’s right hand an empty space, what looked like a deliberate gap, what looked like a stand for something, something circular, something the size of the pallet that had propped up Morley’s flowers.

  Morley felt as if he were choking. It’s a message, he thought. They’re saying, ‘See what we’re missing?’

  If I’d sent it on, they would have had it, and they might have stopped this.

  It was too late to send it now. Morley was stricken.

  He saw photographs of the hideouts from which the masterminds of the attack had fled, and in an alcove in the wall were two saucer-shaped things, covered with writing, and a space for a third, that was not there. It could have been even worse, Morley thought then, and his heart surged and misery lifted. Oh thank God, that was it, it would have been even worse, if I’d not held this back from them. He stared again at his container, but did not remain convinced. He could not.

  Is it too late?

  I’ll send it. I’ll send it. But he did not want to make things worse.

  It was murderous, it was going on, people were dying, and he had started it, or possibly perhaps had softened it and made it better. Morley felt that the guilt would destroy him. If it weren’t for the great pride he felt at other times, he was sure he could not have survived.

  The battles did not stop, and he stared and stared at the address on the container. Once he took a knife to it, to open it, but he stopped, in time, when all he had done was score scratches on the surface. He could not risk making things worse.

  “I might make it better,” he whispered, and nearly prised it apart again, but did not.

  Your work is done, it said to him, every time he looked at it. Your work is done, but it was not, and it never would be.

  You never had any work, he heard, but ignored, inside himself. Your work meant nothing.

  He could send it and the fighting would end and the right side triumph. He would send it, he would end the killing, he decided, except that he could not risk the catastrophe he would or might let loose if he did.

  Perhaps it was too late, anyway. It might make no difference. If I send it and it makes no difference, that’s why, it’ll be because I left it too late, like a fool. His burden bent him.

  There is no burden, he heard and ignored. You have no work to do. Your work was always done.

  Outside moved many people carrying parcels. Morley held the disc and watched the war that he had started or contained or had no effect on at all.

  DIFFERENT SKIES

  2 October

  Seventy-one and melancholy.

  I suppose it should be no surprise. It was not like this last year, though. End of my biblical quotient, should have been hugely traumatic, but the big not-very-secret shindig Charlie et al. organised for me rather took the sting out of it. I didn’t think much about the age itself until later. This year, though, I woke up and straightaway felt as old and dry as kindling.

  Physically I’m weak but no weaker than yesterday. I still feel as if this fatigue were some interloper. It doesn’t bother me as much as it might because I cannot take it seriously. It is so absurd that I should be out of breath after a flight of stairs that I feel I must be victim to some trick. It is not so much the effect as the simple fact of being past seventy that sticks in my craw. It frightens me. I do not believe it.

  No visitors this year, and no great welter of presents. Last year must have exhausted budgets and indulgences. I am down to a couple of handsome books from Charlie (there are other trinkets, of course, but not worth mentioning). People my age have no money, and I think the younger ones resent buying something which will be ownerless again so soon.

  I am being morbid. I am hardly at the end. I know that if I were frail, or made a great deal out of birthdays, or were lonely, that I would have visitors. But as I am not and do not, I have subsisted—happily enough—on cards and telephone calls.

  I had an extended lunch with Sam at the café, that he gave me gratis when he learnt it was my birthday. Then I came home to supervise the installation of my present to myself.

  It is a whimsical thing, which has been a monumental faddle to organise, but as I sit here looking at it, I really can’t say I regret it.

  I’ve bought myself a window.

  I saw it a fortnight ago at Portobello Market. It was in one of the antiques shops up near the top, by Notting Hill. I can’t say why it appeals—it’s hardly fine art. But there is something about it which is awfully compelling.

  It’s about a foot and a half high by two wide. In the centre is a lozenge of deep red glass. Surrounding it in radial sections like slices of pie are eight triangles of what I think was intended to be more-or-less clear glass—to my spoilt late-twentieth-century eyes it looks green or blue, dirty and discoloured. The segments are held together and separated by a framework of thin black lead.

  It is a rude piece. Each pane is streaked with knotholes that warp the world behind them. Little scabs of clotted glass. The colours are not pure, and the paint on the pane is at the point of flaking. But still, there is something in it I can’t ignore.

  The second time I saw it, I realised I was relieved it was still there. So I thought, “This is ridiculous, I don’t have to wait for my pocket money,” and I bought it. It sat around for a week without being unwrapped. Today I paid a man from the hardware centre to pop round, remove the top central pane from my study window, an
d replace it with my new—old—window.

  I’m sitting at my desk as I write, and I can see it above me. It is fractionally smaller than the other panes, and the man made some wooden frame to fit it tight in the space. He’s smoothed the edges down until the frame is totally unobtrusive. He’s warned me not to touch the glass for a few days until the putty dries.

  It sticks out, I suppose, surrounded by five other, cleaner panes—one to either side and the three below which can be swung open a crack. They are probably half its age, and consequently much purer, flatter glass. But I like the look of the odd thing.

  It is at about head height. From up here on the fifth floor, my view over west London is enviable, over half an acre of grassland and then the ranks of lower houses. When I sit at the desk the old window rises to hang suspended over the roofs beyond like a heavy star.

  The evening light comes right through the middle piece, the red lump. I suppose it is a sun itself, rising or setting. It is an odd colour for the sun, that dark scarlet. It sends extraordinary coloured rays onto the wall behind me. It is like a fat glass spider in a metal web.

  I will resist the temptation to write forlornly “Happy Birthday to me.” I do not know what is coming over me. I am going to bed, where I will read one of Charlie’s books. A nice day, really. I must put a lid on this mawkish forlorn-old-man thing that I seem to have going.

  4 October

  I have finished one book and moved on to the other. I phoned Charlie today to tell him how much I was enjoying them (a small lie, as regards the second book—it is not nearly so good). He was pleased but slightly bemused to hear from me, I think. After all, we spoke only three days ago.

  This morning I went for a walk long enough to make me ache (not a Herculean feat, of course). I had a chat with Sam on the way back, then got home to this armchair. I will admit to being slightly aghast at the relief it was to sit down.

  That was when I spoke to Charlie, and I must admit that it was not the best conversation. Nothing was wrong, of course. I am not angry and nor was he. I was just made aware (not deliberately—he was raised too well for that, I like to think) that he does not know what to make of me these days.

  I am in a halfway house. We have never been close as friends are close; we do not trade intimacies (his choice, and one I have respected since he was a lad). He is much too old to need me, and I am not yet old enough to need him.

  Perhaps he is biding his time until then. Then our affection can come into its own; then roles will become clear, and he can wipe up my drool and cut up my supper for me and wheel me over to the window to enjoy the view.

  Since that phone conversation I have sat dumb for a fair old while.

  I found myself—I sort of came to, I suppose—gazing at the window over my desk.

  It is a splendid thing. It is very good to stare at.

  I was thinking of it while I walked. All the obvious, idle thoughts: Who could have made it? When? Why? Over what did it look? And so on and on. When I walk into the little study into its light, those questions do not dissipate but return in strength. When I look at that strange glass it makes me think of all the other old windows that have been lost.

  It comes to life at this time, in the gloaming. When the light deepens and seems to send spears directly at it.

  Although . . . it is not right to say that it comes to life. That is not right. “Life” has never, I think, been its attraction. It is too still for that.

  I know it very well, by now. I have spent some time over the last days looking at the eight evenly spaced triangles around the central stone. Each is stained with its own impurities; each is a unique colour. Counting clockwise from the top, my favourite is the sixth, the slice between west and southwest. It is a little bluer than the others, and the ruby at its apex makes that blue shine.

  I have reread the words above with amusement and discomfort. For goodness’ sake, am I turning into some sort of mystic? I knew I was smitten with the thing—I cannot remember being so thrilled with ownership of anything material. But I am perturbed by what I have written: I sound like an obsessive.

  The fact is, I have read today, and walked and chatted and all of that, but I have been thinking always of my window.

  All manner of whimsies enter my head. The sun has gone, now. The darkening sky is moiling pointlessly with cloud cover. Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

  This is not healthy at all. The low(ish) spirits that settled on me on my birthday must have taken deeper root than I had thought. I think I must be lonely. I will make some phone calls. I think I will go out tonight.

  Later

  Well how terribly deflating.

  My good intentions to snap out of this reverie have been stymied. I do not know anyone who is alive, local, and up for a meal, a drink, or anything else. Flicking through my address book was depressing and led to a meagre list—a pathetic list—of possibilities. And none of them wanted to come out to play.

  It is night, now, very quiet, and I feel awfully bloody deserted.

  5 October

  I was not going to write today, as nothing of any note had happened by the evening (I will not dutifully record the tedium of shopping and television and more bloody reading). But then the oddest thing happened.

  It is late, and my sitting room is cold and dark. I am still trembling slightly, nearly half an hour after the event.

  I came into the study at about 10 p.m. to fetch a book. I did not bother with the light: I could see what I was after on the desk quite clearly in the light from the hall.

  As I bent over for it, I felt a tingling on my neck, less than a breath but much more than the vague sense one sometimes has of being watched. I straightened quickly, in some alarm.

  It was dark outside. Not a clear, starlit dark either, but a cloudy shadow. It was a drab night. Desultory sodium-light from the streetlamps before and below me, that was all. No moon.

  But the red glass at the centre of my window was shining.

  It sent icy scarlet light onto the desk below, and onto me. I swear that was the source of the raised hair on my neck.

  I gaped up at it. My mouth must have been slack. All the impurities and the scratches on the inside of that central panel were etched and vivid. It seemed to have a hundred shapes, all of a sudden, to look momentarily like a huddled embryo and a red whirlpool and a bloodshot eye.

  I must have been staring at it for no more than three or four seconds when it stopped. I did not see it happen. I was not conscious of any light going out, anywhere. Perhaps it was extinguished as I blinked. All I know is that one moment it shone, and then it did not. My retinas retained no afterimage.

  Perhaps it was an isolated light from some aeroplane or somesuch, that happened to shine directly and strangely through my window. I am thinking much more clearly now than when I started to write, and that seems the only possibility. Looked at like that, I do not know why I bothered to record this.

  Except that when the room was lit up with that light, something felt very strange in the air. Very wrong. It was only three seconds, but I swear it made me cold, deep down.

  8 October (Night. Small hours)

  There is something beyond the window.

  I am afraid.

  I am no longer bemused or concerned or intrigued but truly afraid.

  I must write this quickly.

  When I came home in the evening (having thought all day about what happened last night, even when I denied that that was what I was doing) I felt a peculiar disinclination to enter my study. When I finally conquered it, of course, there was nothing untoward in there.

  I looked nonchalantly enough up at the window and saw the sky through it, just as I should. Pitted and cracked by the old glass, but there was nothing out of place.

  I dismissed my nerves and pottered around for a few hours, but I never relaxed. I think I was mulling over the odd light of the previous evening. I was w
aiting for something. That was not quite clear to me at first, but as the evening grew older and the sunlight was smothered, I found myself looking up more and more through the sitting room windows. I was thinking of what to do.

  Eventually, when the day was quite gone, I decided to go into the study again. Just to read, of course. That’s what I told myself, in my head, loudly. In case, I suppose, anything was listening.

  I settled down in the armchair and leafed through Charlie’s tedious book, that I am labouring to finish.

  I glanced up at the window, now and then, and it behaved as glass should. I had turned off the main light, was reading by a little lamp to reduce the reflections. Beyond the window I could make out the occasional intermittent lights of some aeroplane passing from the left-hand windowpane through that central, much older one, and out again. They ballooned briefly as they slid behind old bubbles in the glass.

  I read and watched for at least an hour, and then I must have fallen asleep.

  I woke suddenly, very cold. I could only just make out my watch—it was a little after two in the morning.

  I was huddled like some pathetic child in the armchair, in darkness. The bulb of the lamp must have blown, I remember thinking. I stood shakily and heard the book fall from my lap. I looked around, confused and shivering.

  I think the white noise of rain was what woke me. It was coming down hard. I saw the dull shine of the streetlights glint and move slightly through the slick of water on the windowpanes.

  I fumbled, trying to gather myself, and saw the room by red moonlight passing through that central pane. As I turned, I saw the moon briefly.

  I stopped suddenly. My throat caught. I looked back at the window.

  The old pane was dry.

  Dirty rain was pounding against its neighbours, but not a drop spattered against it.

  The moon was shining full in my face through the glass, distorted by its impurities. I was quite still.