Sottopassaggio Read online

  The sky and sea are a uniform grey and the seafront is quiet. A very workaday atmosphere has descended upon the town. Men in suits stride purposely, replacing the casual strollers of the weekend. I reach the pier and move onto the cycle path.

  I pass the Grand Hotel where Margaret Thatcher was nearly bombed out of existence, and remember actually being disappointed that she had escaped unscathed.

  Opposite the Odeon, a man is painting the railings, slowly covering the faded blue with fresh paint. I smell the paint and remember when they repainted the railings of Eastbourne, remember the fuss that my parents made when they changed the colour, and I realise that these towns, Eastbourne, Brighton and Nice for that matter, are profoundly similar.

  Of course working-class Eastbourne is clearly not Brighton, and gay-trendy-Brighton is clearly not poodles-and-gold Cote d’Azur, but these south-facing coastal towns, with their big facades and their pebble beaches; well there’s a symmetry that cannot be denied.

  I wonder just how much the destiny of a life is influenced by the desire for one’s lost childhood; even Owen, I realise, lives on the seafront of south facing Melbourne, cycles along his very own east-west cycle path, halfway around the world to recreate the experience of his earliest memories.

  When I get back home, Owen has returned. He’s listening to classical music and leafing through a mass of paperwork spread across the dining table. He looks up as I enter and frowns.

  “Hiya,” he says. “We need to talk.”

  I make tea and sit opposite him. “This music’s lovely,” I say. “It seems really familiar.”

  Owen stares into the middle distance, still thinking about the documents before him, or searching for the name of the composer, or lost in some other reverie, I’m not sure which.

  “Corelli,” he says eventually. “Dad had it,” he adds. “This very recording in fact.”

  I nod. “So what do we need to talk about?” I ask.

  Owen stares into the distance again, apparently lost in the music, which is swelling to a sumptuous climax.

  As the music wanes he snaps back into the room and looks at me.

  “I spoke to the estate agent,” he says. “About this house.”

  I nod.

  “The guy is coming around to do a new valuation of the house but basically everyone agrees that it’s not the best time to sell right now. They all say that house prices are still rocketing and that the best place for my equity is right here.” He taps the table to show where here is.

  I nod again and sip my tea.

  “I don’t want to rent it again though. It was so much hassle last time.” He looks around the room before adding, “So I guess, what I need to know is if you’re going to stay here. Or are you going back?”

  I open my mouth to speak, but then close it again.

  “Maybe you haven’t decided yet?” Owen prompts.

  “Yeah …” I say.

  Owen nods. “I have to get back to Melbourne,” he says.

  I nod.

  “I’m missing Beverley and we have that trip planned for the beginning of May,” he says.

  “Trip?” I question.

  Owen nods. “We’ve rented a camper van. We’re driving along the south coast. I thought I mentioned it.”

  I shrug. “I don’t think so, but yeah, that sounds great.”

  I picture our father’s camper van parked outside the house. Forever gleaming. Forever outside the house, always ready for the imminent, but never actually realised trip across Europe.

  “So?” Owen nods at me, his eyebrows raised.

  I frown at him.

  “Will you be OK?” He leans across the table and stares into my eyes.

  I glance away to avoid the intensity of his gaze. Since the accident expressions of love or sympathy just make me cry, and I’m exhausted with crying.

  “If you need me to stay longer,” he says.

  I sigh. “No, I’m fine,” I nod. “You’ve done so much already, I’m sorry to have …”

  “No, this has been good.” Owen lifts a pile of papers from the table. “I had to deal with all this,” he says.

  I nod.

  “So?” Owen asks.

  I realise that this is the third time he has asked the question. I look at him blankly and perform the mental equivalent of pulling straws.

  “Here,” I say. My voice has an unintended aggressive quality.

  Owen smiles at me, encouraging me to continue.

  “I can’t really think about anything else right now,” I say. “I need the space I guess.”

  Owen wrinkles his brow in concern and sighs.

  The music is swelling again and I can feel pressure building behind my eyes, so I force a smile and stand.

  As Owen shuffles paper behind me, I stand in the window and watch the sea and think about the dozy dreamlike quality within my mind.

  I once dreamt I was falling from a skyscraper and when I awoke, I was convinced that I knew something new; that I knew how it feels to fall from a skyscraper, and though it was only a dream, though it never happened, I can still remember the sickening, free-fall sensation today.

  Right now, I feel as though I have dreamt my own death; I feel like I know how it feels to have died.

  I feel detached from the outcomes I always worried about, detached from the endless goals I was building towards, a relationship, a good job, a home of my own … They’re all gone, all irrelevant. Equally all of the options seem to fit just fine. Here or Nice, what’s to choose?

  I lie down on the sofa and close my eyes and listen to the rise and fall of the music and the rustle of paper behind me. The feeling of dozing while someone works nearby is reassuring and wonderful. It will be hard when Owen leaves.

  As I doze I forget where I am, and then as I linger on the edge of dreams I become confused about which sofa this is and I think I am back home in my flat in Nice, and then that I am on the sofa of our childhood home. As sleep overtakes me I think that Owen, behind me, is my father.

  When I open my eyes everything looks more, almost too much. Too much like itself.

  The information from my senses seems fresh and different; everything looks a little sharper, like when I took acid.

  The colours are brighter, the sounds more distinct, and the floating dust strikes me as a little more beautiful than usual, perhaps a little less usual than usual. I yawn, stretch, then sit and scratch my head.

  Owen looks up from his paperwork. “Nice sleep?” he asks.

  I cough. “Yep,” I say standing and heading for the door. “It was good.”

  Spinning Free

  A grey Saturday morning, Owen and I alight at Victoria and trundle through the London underground with his suitcase.

  We are talking about which museums I should visit after his departure and are completely unprepared when suddenly, mid-phrase, the moment is upon us; Owen must take the right hand path, I must take the left hand one. This suddenly is where the lives split. It’s obvious and natural but we’re not ready.

  Owen looks at me shiny-eyed. “Um, I have to go this way,” he says.

  It’s a strange moment, and the simple division of the tunnel belies the profundity of the moment.

  We were born from the same womb, shared a house, toys, and even at times a bedroom. From that simple accident our lives will forever be intertwined. We will be together, then apart, then together again, as chance and need dictate, and right now, right here, one path leads to the Piccadilly line, Heathrow airport, then Singapore and Melbourne, and the other to the Northern line, to something called, “Life in Brighton.”

  It’s arbitrary that I have decided to go back to Brighton, to live in Owen’s house rather than return to Nice. It would seem more logical if Owen went back to his old house in Brighton, but bizarrely that life fits me too. I’m perfectly at home lying on his sofa in his lounge listening to his records.

  In fact, it strikes me that any of these lives, in Nice, Brighton or Australia would suit either of u
s, and I have the strangest notion that in some way our lives are not only entwined, but almost interchangeable. We are in some profound way the same thing; we are at some level a single set of desires.

  We are the lives our parents accustomed us to; we are their preferences for seaside towns, their love of France, their unrealised dreams of cross continental camping trips. We are the dreams they built for themselves and also, maybe more so, we are the dreams they didn’t managed to realise, the ones they saved for us, passed on through their angst as the only route to true happiness, to true self realisation. We are that vision of a shiny camper van waiting to go somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere happier.

  I swallow hard. I feel shaky and scared but I bluff through it. “Yeah,” I say, “I know.”

  Owen and I hug rigidly. “You look after yourself,” he says.

  I nod. “You too!” and aware of a tidal wave of emotion swelling suddenly from a distant undersea tremor, I whack him on the back, force a grin, and head off down my tunnel.

  I don’t look back until I hear his suitcase trundle into the echoing distance.

  Slightly dazed, I wander along the tunnel towards the Circle Line.

  I think about Owen heading off at a different vector, being pulled back towards his wife, his projects, his camper-van, and I think, not for the first time, how amazingly centred heterosexual lives are when compared to mine; just how many ties and stays – mortgages, dinner parties and schools – straight families have holding them centred, bang in the middle of their lives.

  My own life seems so fragmented, so un-tied to anyone or any one place, that spinning like a top, or perhaps circling like an electron, the slightest nudge and I could oscillate out of control and spin off into space. I could end up just about anywhere. The possibilities are infinite, terrifying.

  The greatest tie for most is the responsibility to feed and clothe and educate. It’s something I will never have, and something I will never have to worry about either. My straight friends are so often jealous of my freedom, jealous precisely of the free-electron aspect of my existence, and I wonder briefly who actually gets the better deal.

  I descend a small flight of steps and catch a glimpse of a poster advertising the National Gallery, which my father loved with a passion. As a child of course I thought it was boring and would watch my own feet scraping along the floor as he dragged me around the building.

  As I head out onto the deserted platform, I decide, in memory of my childhood, to take my eyes, which are in some way his eyes too, not only to the Tate Modern, but to the National Gallery as well. I wonder if other peoples’ childhoods are as intense, as all consuming as mine was. Can they too pause at any moment and sense in every atom of their being, the events of childhood that made them what they are today?

  It’s a shame we didn’t organise this differently, I realise. Owen would have loved to visit the National gallery too. It’s going to be hard without him. I knew that of course, but it’s just hitting me now, quite how difficult everything will be.

  I wonder if even Owen realises. I wonder if even he understands that I can do anything, go anywhere, and that in some way it matters not one jot. For what’s the point in going to the National or the Tate on your own? What’s the point of spending a day in London if you have no one to tell about it when you get home?

  I take a deep determined breath. I will snap out of this. I will make this OK. I will get myself to the National, and then the Tate, and then back to Brighton, and it will all be fine.

  The platform is deserted. There are only four of us: three standing waiting for the train, and a wide-eyed tramp on a bench muttering to himself.

  “I can do this. It’s easy,” I tell myself. “Life is just one step at a time.”

  Wind from the tunnel blows a crisp packet along the floor and a distant screeching announces the train’s arrival.

  As the headlights of the train appear in the darkness, I absently note that at exactly the same moment the two other people standing on the platform move in opposite directions. The man in the sombre suit with the fluorescent pink tie steps backwards, and the ashen grey woman in the woollen coat forwards; it looks almost as though their steps have been choreographed.

  As the train bursts from the tunnel, at the precise moment its leading edge thrusts into our presence becoming a rumbling, shrieking reality, the grey woman – for everything, her clothes, her hair, even her skin is grey – takes another step forwards. It’s one step too many.

  With unexpected grace she drifts and tips and pivots over the edge of the platform. In a strange weightless movement, drifting like an autumn leaf, she tumbles and vanishes beneath the hulk of the train.

  The train shudders to an early halt halfway along the platform. The man in the suit sprints past me, tie flailing, to an intercom beside the tramp. My own mind is empty, possibilities of action have not even started to form, so I stand mouth open, staring at the space where the grey woman once existed as the image of her fall, of the weary elegance with which she tumbled out of life plays over and over in my mind.

  A driver jumps, green-faced and shaking from the front of the train. Two staff in yellow jackets push me towards the exit. A tannoy bursts into life with a recorded message.

  “Evacuate the station,” it shrieks.

  People from other platforms are flooding up the escalator, running terrified from an unknown menace.

  “A track incident,” the tannoy echoes. “Please leave by the nearest exit.”

  I let the machinery carry me slowly upwards and watch the people stream past.

  “Why did she do that?” I wonder. “What can make someone so desperate, so completely hopeless that falling in front of a train seems like the best option?”

  As I reach the top of the elevator, and am carried by the panicky swell out through open ticket barriers and into the dingy daylight of Leicester Square I think, “I can’t tell Owen.”

  Owen has gone, and I realise with a shudder that there’s no one else I want to tell, no one I can tell. I lean back against the wall and watch people gushing past, streaming away from me, trying to put maximum distance between themselves and the unknown horrors of the tunnels.

  It’s such a brutal thing to have witnessed; I’m amazed to have seen such a thing and to have been simply ejected onto the pavement. Surely that can’t be right?

  Some distant part of my memory conjures up my own accident. It’s not a visual memory but a physical one, the subsonic thud of the impact.

  My hands are shaking so I thrust them into my pockets and stare at the crowds and wonder if it’s actually possible to survive this world alone. As a single soul, isn’t the world maybe just too hard-edged to actually be survivable?

  I lean against a wall and stare numbly at a man selling newspapers. Stupidly I look at the posters to see if the tube suicide is already in the headlines.

  I watch a Japanese woman fighting her way through the sudden crowd with a mass of high-class shopping bags and I see the tramp from the platform as he appears at the top of the stairs.

  “Was he watching too?” I wonder. “Is he feeling shaky and alone as well?”

  Carried by the crowd, he drifts along still muttering to himself. But as he passes in front of me, moving from left to right, I hear his voice.

  “She had nobody,” he says.

  I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or just rambling.

  “That’s why she did it,” he says. “She had nobody.”

  I watch, frozen, as he disappears around the corner. My mouth fills with saliva and for a moment I think I might vomit, but then the feeling passes, and I cry instead, salty tears dropping shamelessly onto the tarmac as a hundred indifferent strangers stream past.

  Double Entendre

  I spend my days wandering along the pier, surfing the net, sleeping rather more than is normal, and watching English TV – a novelty.

  I feel lonely and disjointed, as though this isn’t my life, which of course it isn’t. />
  I read Owen’s old books, listen to Owen’s old records, look through Owen’s old windows at the sea. It’s not even Owen’s life that I’m living. It’s his past.

  I battle on, waiting for the wind to change and for things to start to feel like they fit, but on Friday as I stand looking at the sea, I realise that I haven’t actually spoken to a human being for three days. I haven’t uttered one word since the woman in Safeway said, “That’ll be twenty-two-fifty.”

  I know that this isn’t healthy. I know from experience that the time has come to be brave, and acting quickly, before I have time to chicken out, I swipe my keys from the counter and head out the door.

  The Bulldog Tavern is shouting, heaving, laughing.

  It’s only 8pm and my initial shock at how busy the place is fades as I remember that unlike France it will close at 11pm. Back in Nice, people don’t even go out until midnight.

  The noise and the laughter are also a big surprise after years of living overseas. French bars are such a serious affair; here people look like they are actually having fun.

  As I push towards the counter, I scan the diverse shapes and forms around me, none of the homogenous thin, olive skinned posing of the Côte d’Azur here. There are fat guys with beards and thin guys in suits, and old men in leather, and, more than anything, I note that there are lots and lots of people, of all shapes and sizes, with buzz hair cuts and goatee beards. I have slipped, unnoticed, into the fold.

  I randomly select a pint of bitter and move back to the centre of the room in order to free up the limited access to the bar.

  For a while I fidget, unable to choose a point amongst the crowd and a position, leaning, sitting or standing that feels comfortable. I finally settle against a pillar, hanging up my denim jacket and placing my pint on a little shelf.

  I have never been good at hanging around alone in bars, it has always made me feel self conscious, but by the time I have drunk half a pint the place has become so full that it would be impossible for anyone to realise that I am alone.