Halfway across the bridge, though, I stopped. I don’t know what had changed inside me, but I was suddenly appalled, almost to the point of nausea, by the idea of going over the same wretched ground, prodding that same old wound, and attempting yet one more time to construct the semblance of a living being out of absence and empty air. Clutching the marble tightly in my hand, I looked down into the drop. A wire mesh had been installed since my student days to prevent people throwing themselves off, as so many had done in the past, but there were small square holes cut in it, so as still to allow an uninterrupted view.
What did I remember of Nicola, I challenged myself? What did I really remember? I could call to mind, at least approximately, the colour of her hair and her eyes (brown in both cases, though her hair had likely faded by now, as my own had done). I could remember roughly how tall she was, and the fact that she was fairly slim. But now I tried, I couldn’t call to mind even the vaguest image of her face, or hear in my head the sound of her voice. Yes, and apart from a few iconic words – ‘You and me are two of a kind’ – which had very possibly themselves been worn into new shapes by constant rehearsal, like buffeted pebbles in a stream, I couldn’t clearly remember anything she’d said. All I could really be certain of was the fact that, at the time, I’d found her words engaging, and that she’d found my words engaging too. But that was a long time ago. I fancied myself to be a communist back then. I found Monty Python funny. I thought On the Road was the greatest work of literature I’d ever read. And Nicola, though I still thought of her as excitingly older than me, had been twenty years younger than I was now.
Wasn’t it really the case that what I most loved Nicola for was simply her interest in me? Hadn’t I loved her so very much because she was the first grown-up woman who’d treated me like a grown-up man, when I’d feared that might never happen at all? I remembered Nicola’s friend Fay, that other mature student on the course. She’d been really strikingly beautiful, like a model or a film star, and I’d actually noticed her before I noticed Nicola, though she’d seemed so far out of my own league as not even to be worth fantasising about. But suppose Fay had sought me out to help her with her project, and suppose she’d been the one who’d leant towards me over a café table and told me that she and I were two of a kind. Was there really any doubt that I would have fallen for her just as I fell for Nicola?
After all, I didn’t know who I was back then. Dear God, I didn’t even experience myself as having a face! Wasn’t it the truth that I’d have been happy to be told I was just like them by any halfway attractive human being, perhaps even men as well as women? And wouldn’t I have been happy to believe it too?
I opened my hand and looked down at the marble. I’d been clutching it so tightly that it had made a small bruised dent in the flesh of my palm. Tears came to my eyes. I had invested so much in this little ball of glass. I had laboured so long and so hard to keep the cold flame burning.
But I reached out over the railing and let it fall.
10
Still Life
A small greenhouse stood on the paved backyard of a long unoccupied house. It had a concrete floor and a single aluminium shelf. On the shelf stood three empty plastic flowerpots, with a fourth lying on its side. A watering can, moulded from red plastic, rested on the floor by the door.
It was the middle of a summer afternoon. Up until midday, the sky had been clear. All morning, the radiation had been pouring down from the sun, with no cloud in the way to reflect it back. Outside the greenhouse, the sun had warmed the soil and the roof of the house, and heated the black tarmac of the road it stood on to the point that it had become soft and sticky. In their turn, the soil, the road and the roof had warmed the air above them. As the air warmed, it had risen upwards, cooler air flowing in beneath it to take its place.
Inside the greenhouse the sun had also heated everything that was there: the aluminium, the concrete, the plastic pots and the red watering can. They too had warmed the air above them, but, unlike the air outside, the air in the greenhouse was trapped by the glass roof, which meant that, even when it was hot, it still remained close to the warm concrete and the aluminium and the plastic. And so the concrete and the metal and the plastic had continued to heat the same already-heated air, as if they were a hotplate on a stove, and the greenhouse was a saucepan with its lid on. The air became very hot in there, and far hotter than the air outside.
Later on, as morning turned to afternoon, the sky clouded over and a cold wind began to blow. The air outside the greenhouse, already so much cooler than the air within, became colder still. But the air in the greenhouse, still sitting over that warm concrete and aluminium, stayed warm. It would cool down eventually, of course, but it would do so much more slowly than the air outside. Only the glass cooled quickly, because of the cold air rushing over it.
It so happened that the humidity was high that day. Inside the greenhouse, the warm air came up against the much colder glass, and some of the water vapour that it was carrying began to condense on the cool surface. Quite soon, the whole inner surface of the glass was steamed up, covered in a layer of tiny water droplets.
Some of these water droplets were heavier than the others, to the point where the constant tugging of the planet Earth beneath them became stronger than the surface tension that held them against the glass. The droplets on the glass windows began to slip downwards and, as they slipped, they collided with other droplets, absorbing the water into themselves and so becoming heavier still. The larger they grew, the smaller was their surface area in relation to their mass. As a result, the pull of the planet became stronger, relatively speaking, and the surface tension weaker. So the drops moved more quickly, and absorbed water more quickly too from yet more droplets. And all the greenhouse’s windows were striped with the paths that these heavy drops had made.
The same thing happened under the glass roof, but here, when they had accumulated enough mass, the droplets didn’t just slide down the inside of the glass but also began to drip. The drips fell straight downwards through the still-warm air inside the greenhouse, to splash onto the concrete floor, or the aluminium shelf, or sometimes onto the plastic pots or the can.
Having shed some of its weight in this way, a droplet would stop dripping, its surface tension once again strong enough to hold it together, and it would resume its descent down the inside slope of the roof, until it had accumulated enough water from smaller drops to rupture once more and release drips.
This sequence of events had happened many times. One of its consequences was that, while the glass of the roof, like that of the windows, was striped with the trails of water droplets, these roof trails were punctuated at more or less regular intervals with bulges, like beads on a necklace, where the water had paused and dripped.
And so, although the glass inside the greenhouse had been dry in the middle of the morning, now there were stripes of water on the walls, beads of water on the ceiling, and drips of water falling at regular intervals from the ceiling to the floor.