The door swung inward noiselessly, and I found myself being
looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.
He rubbed his eye with a finger, as if he had just got up.
He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and his ribs stuck out like that
of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut. The skin stretched over them was nearly
colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were
bare, he was only wearing a pair of old Khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by
a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were
obstinately melancholy, as if he was assuming the expression on purpose.
***
He must have been equipped with a kind of science fiction extra
sense, a third eye or antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he
couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, ‘I can tell you’re admiring my
febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an
invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.’ He was
looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. ‘You might do something destructive:
hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.’
***
What is character? Maybe we know them only by the dent they
make in our emotional landscape. Some are so odd in shape you are left
wondering for years afterwards what difference did they make? What did they
change? Like someone who came into your house when you weren’t around and
rearranged, ever so subtly, the things on your shelves. You are compelled to go
back and back over anything you can hold onto to find an answer, but like a
seed that refuses to grow, the dent gives you no answers.
There is a character from a book I read years ago who won’t
let me go. The character is an aimless graduate student called Duncan from The
Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Aimless, thin, unattractive, sly, manipulative
and selfish, he was completely, smugly and self-consciously comfortable with not
conforming to expectations. He was calculatedly deceptive and so he often
pierced through to the truth. It’s not clear if he brings redemption or
destruction – or just nothingness - as he (metaphorically) devours the heroine
at the end.
I feel like I’ve received the occasional long
distance phone call from a ‘Duncan’ over the years. I hear the ringing mostly
when I’m asleep and have slept so long I can hardly wake up. I feel like I’ve
met many ‘Duncans’ over the years, he keeps reappearing in different guises. Sometimes
he even feels like a permanent fixture, there at the back of my mind, being his
sly mocking self, making things uncomfortable, offering no answers.
***
The long time she had been moving through…had been merely a
period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no
real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an
event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy
of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future… Duncan was
irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He didn’t seem to care about what
would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present.
She found it comforting, and she didn’t want to know why.
***
‘I don’t want you to think all this means anything. It never
sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really, to somebody else.’ He kissed
the end of her nose. ‘You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’
Marian wondered if her feelings ought to be hurt, but
decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. ‘I wonder what you’re
a substitute for, then,’ she said.
‘That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the
universal substitute.’
***
He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his
elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater,
like a turtle’s into its shell… He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have
been talking to himself. I leaned
forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting
of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his
skin was even more unearthly.
***
His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and
an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around
and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment
stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.
***
She wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow
sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence…
‘Hello,’ a voice said.
Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure
seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees.
She walked towards it.
It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing
between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had
settled on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she removed
her gloves to touch them, was cold and wet.
***
His ringing jolts me from my sleep. But that's it. I wonder what he would say if I ever picked up the phone? I imagine it would be something like this: 'hello, sugar,' he'd say. 'It's me.'
