‘Who is it?’ It was Jones’s voice. She had, momentarily, a flash of remembering the knock knock jokes.
‘Jones?’ she said.
‘Bree?’
‘Yes.’
The door opened. Jones was there, and from behind him there came a gust of old cigarette smoke. He had his trousers on, and no top. He was well muscled. In one hand he had a toothbrush and in the other a lit cigarette, and his eyes were red and sore. He looked at her a moment, winced, and resumed brushing his teeth. Foam appeared around his mouth.
‘Jones?’
‘What?’ he said, removing the toothbrush. He put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a pull. The end was dabbed with shiny foam when he took it out. Then he turned round and went back into the room. His room was exactly like Bree’s, except that beside the laminated no-smoking sign on the bedside table was the polystyrene cup from the bathroom, filled with butts.
Jones tapped his ash into this cup, went into the bathroom and spat noisily.
‘I was just going to bed,’ he said.
‘What the hell’s up? Was that you crying?’
Jones looked at her as if slightly affronted.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Easy, Jones,’ Bree said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘My mother is dead,’ Jones said.
‘Oh, Jones. I’m sorry. Shit. You should have said. What happened?’ Bree moved in, awkward because of her bulk and because of Jones’s semi-nakedness and his being a colleague and being covered in toothpaste and waving a cigarette. She thought she ought to hug him but contented herself with reaching up and squeezing his shoulder. Jones’s face crumpled, then recovered. He sat down on the bed.
‘Jones, look, we’ll – where’s home? Do you want to drive there? Did you just hear?’
Jones sat down on the bed, and Bree sat down with him.
‘No,’ said Jones. ‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’
Bree didn’t say anything for a bit, then she said: ‘Twenty-four years?’
‘My mother has been dead for twenty-four years.’
‘I heard you, Jones. I mean: what? What’s making you cry? Twenty-four years is a long time.’
‘She’s still dead,’ said Jones.
‘Jesus, Jones. Of course. I know, but it’s like you just found out -’
‘It is like I just found out. I always cry before I go to sleep,’ said Jones. ‘I have emotions. I don’t have an imagination: I can’t see things that aren’t there. But I have emotions. I had something and it made me happy and I lost it and now I don’t have it.’
‘Tell me about her,’ said Bree. Bree thought of Cass again, and then stopped the thought. ‘What do you remember about her?’
‘Everything,’ said Jones.
‘You’re -’
‘I remember everything she ever said to me. Everything she ever wore. Every time she touched me. Every smell and taste of her.’ Jones sighed. ‘I have an eidetic memory. That is my condition. Everything that ever happens to me I remember it exactly. If I didn’t have that I couldn’t function.’
‘But.’
‘Why would I not be sad when I am alone?’
‘Jones, people get over things. They have to. You can’t just -’
In the light from the wall lamp, Jones’s face was a sick yellow. He looked miserable. He got up and went to the sink, rinsed his toothbrush and stood it in the other polystyrene cup.
‘I can’t. I know that this is not like other people. It’s not important. It is what happens to me. But I have no way of “getting over things”. I have no expectations, no desires that live in what you call the future. That is what apsychosis means. Everything I want is in the past. Everything I want to happen has already happened. Everyone I love is already gone, and I can remember everything about them.’
Bree didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. Jones lit another cigarette from the butt of the last. Bree felt sad and annoyed and a bit awkward.
‘Would you like me to leave you alone?’ she said.
‘I don’t…’
‘OK, I get it. You don’t know what it would be like. But you must know – from your experience – if you’re happier when you have someone with you or if you’re happier when you’re alone.’
‘I’m happier when you are with me,’ said Jones.
‘OK then,’ said Bree. And she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the bed. When he finished smoking he turned off the light and lay down, apparently without self-consciousness, on the bed next to her. The keening noises he made rose a little, then settled, as Bree put one of her arms over him and held him as he fell to sleep.
Chapter 10
Isla walks up between two rows of beanpoles towards the cabin. She thinks: nobody is here.
A cane chair, empty, sits outside the cabin. The windows are shuttered. There is an outer door, with a gauze screen in it, that looks like it once had some paint on the wood. It’s very slightly ajar, and she pulls it open. She waits a minute, listening to nothing, then knocks on the inside door. She waits, turns on her heels and looks around her. There’s no reply, still, from inside, so she walks round the side of the cabin. There’s a sloping roof coming off the wall a bit below shoulder height – mossy slates, sheltering a pair of tall red gas canisters and a neat stack of chopped wood.
The back of the cabin is windowless, and faces an escarpment – there’d be room to wriggle past, but not comfortably. As she peers round she sees a cat vanish into the crawl space under the cabin. It smells of sawdust and wet earth. He’s in the woods somewhere, presumably. She wonders about leaving a note, decides against.
She puts her face up against one of the windows, cups her hands around her eyes so she can see in. The room looks bare – there’s a dark rug of some sort on the floor, some sort of pallet up one end, drifts of yellow paper stacked on and around a table on the blank wall. On the table is an old-fashioned hurricane lamp.
The yellow paper… This is it. The letters all came on long sheets of ruled yellow paper from legal pads. The writing disciplined, intense, very small. She is remembering the first letter she had: two years ago, out of the blue, apparently in response to something she had written about him.
‘Dear Miss Holderness,’ it had begun. ‘The order of things is changing.’ The letter was written in English, albeit some of it curiously constructed.
It had been addressed in scrawled block capitals with her first name gone over several times in ink, care of ‘EtUdes/RecOltes’, University of Nice. On the back was a poste restante address in Carcassonne.
He had read, he said, the short introductory commentary she had written – there’d been some sort of dodgy French translation – on the value of his work to number theory for this small mathematical journal with its tiresome capitalisation.
She hadn’t believed it at first. Clearly Mike was winding her up. But would even Mike write forty pages just for the sake of a joke? And Mike didn’t know the maths well enough, she realised as she went on, to have written some of the material in the letter. Then she thought that it meant something momentous: if it was Banacharski, and he was still reading journals, it meant he might still be doing maths.
A subsequent page suggested otherwise. He had bought some artichokes at the market, and they had been wrapped in a photocopy of her article. This, Banacharski said, was of tremendous importance.
‘I ate these artichokes. There were four of them. And I counted each one the number of their petals, and counted each one the number of the fibres around their hearts. This took me several days. I have started to see what you are talking about. Your article shows a deep grasp of theory. Not in the meanings of your words, which are banal, but in the patterns of your words. You know this. I am now starting to learn. The problem is in disorder.’
Isla had been taken aback by this. She’d thought her article sensible enough.