051
The groan of thunder. Grey light. The cold smell of rain coming through the open window. There was the sound of a plane, soggy through the rain; the long swish and wince of cars, the sob of a police siren. I leant on the sill and watched the rain fall past the window, the trees below glistening and black. Suddenly I caught a blur of movement on the opposite roof, a shape indistinct in the drizzle. At that moment the rain began falling heavily again. I crossed the room and turned out the small reading light and went back to the window. I looked out again. For a long time I saw nothing and then, for a few seconds, I saw the shape of someone on the roof, smudged by the falling rain. The phone rang. I glanced towards it and when I looked up at the roof again there was only the rain.
I picked up the phone. It was Fran calling from a kiosk because her phone was broken. She was just calling to see how I was. Hearing the crackle of rain in the background I pictured her in the call box, hair dripping into the receiver, her hand idly wiping condensation from the fee-display.
I looked out again, my breath fogging the window. I wiped the cold glass clear, held my breath and stared out. The thump of my heart grew steadily louder. I turned my head, exhaled and breathed in deeply once again. The rain was as it sounded.
050
I did not see Steranko or any of the others for several days. The market research company was conducting a survey for British Rail — What sort of tickets were people using? Where were they going? What did they think of prices? The buffet? — and I spent the next week shuttling up to Manchester and back four times a day, handing out questionnaires. On most trips it only took an hour to dish them out and then I sat back in the wide First Class seats and enjoyed the ride, reading and drinking, eating hot and cold snacks from the buffet bar, not thinking about Steranko or Foomie, just watching the damp landscape slide past the big windows.
On the last day of the survey I got back to the flat and found a note from Steranko pinned to my door: ‘ON ROOF — S.’ I chucked my bags in the flat and made my way up the stairs. The roof was the single best thing about the block. At the top of the stairs a door opened on to a flat concrete rectangle about the size of a tennis court, a low wall and railing running along the edge. At the other end the same arrangement was duplicated with an identical door leading to another flight of stairs and another lift. The roof of the lift-housing was also flat and since it was eight or nine feet higher it got another half an hour of sun at the end of each day — if there was any sun to have.
Steranko was reading by the light of a hurricane lamp that covered him in a warm tent of light.
‘Hey, how’s it going?’ he said, looking up.
‘OK.’
‘Come over. .’ I sat on the rug next to him. Gnats clung to the side of the lamp. Our shadows crawled the floor.
‘Nice light, isn’t it?’
‘Beautiful. Where’d you get it?’
‘This friend of Foomie’s found it. She didn’t want it so I cleaned it up and fixed it.’ I wondered whether I should say something about Foomie and then decided against it.
‘What are you reading?’ I asked after a while. Steranko held up a battered paperback selection of Nietzsche.
‘You read him?’
‘Only odd bits.’
I flicked through some pages without reading them. The light from the hurricane lamp made the sky look dark as ink. A few feet in front of us there was an unfinished sculpture of a woman, with rough-hewn head, arms and waist protruding from a block of white stone.
‘Is someone who lives here sculpting that?’ Steranko asked.
‘Yeah, I don’t know his name though.’ On the afternoons that I’d been up on the roof I’d watched him work on it, enjoying the gentle tap of the chisel and the way the form of the woman slowly emerged from the hard block and the cloud of white dust.
Today had been the first time in several weeks that it had been hot and sunny; little progress had been made since I’d last seen the sculpture. The bricks of the low wall behind our backs were still faintly warm, breathing the last of their accumulated heat into the cool night air. On the roof of the opposite block I saw the dark shapes of a man and a woman, his arm around her shoulders. I waved at them and they waved back, the red glow of a cigarette tracing the movement of a hand.
‘Shall we have a joint?’ I said after neither of us had spoken for a while.
‘Good idea.’
‘Can you sort that out?’ I pulled a bag of grass and some papers out of the pocket of my trousers. ‘I’ll bring some coffee up.’
‘Hey, can you bring up your cassette player? I made this tape today — it’s unbelievable.’
‘Sure. What’s the tape?’
‘It’s a Mahler symphony. The third.’
Making coffee in the kitchen I thought about Foomie. There was an inevitability about her being attracted to Steranko that destroyed even the possibility of jealousy. Instead of wishing that Foomie was attracted to me I found myself wishing that I was more like Steranko. Just as there are individuals who are always on the periphery of a given group so there are those like Steranko who, you know, will always be at the defining centre of other people’s lives.
By the time I came back up with everything Steranko had rolled a clumsy joint with the home-grown grass. Steam floated off the dark surface of the coffee.
We took turns pulling deeply on the joint and exhaling grey smoke that hung sweetly in the air for a moment and then disappeared. To the west the sky was tinted orange. I read odd pages of Nietzsche. My mind wandered. We watched clouds moving fast across the moon; the lights of a plane overhead. Neither of us said anything for a while. Steranko rewound and fast-forwarded the cassette player until he found the place on the tape he wanted.
‘Right, this is the fourth movement: Vas meer die Nacht erzalt,’ he added in Colditz German.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I dunno. Something, something, night, something.’ Our laughter floated away and quietness gathered round us. The noise of the traffic was still there but quieter, further off, like the sea at low tide. Sheets hung out to dry on the opposite block, visible only as grey squares in the darkness, shrugged in the breeze. There was no sign of the couple we’d seen earlier. A few lights were on. The steady flame of the hurricane lamp, the tape running noiselessly. Then, hardly audible, barely distinguishable from the silence that preceded it, came the sound of a woman’s voice.
Each syllable was like a breath, insubstantial as the night air. The voice was so frail a gust of wind could have blown it away. The singer’s lone voice gathered the night’s silence into itself and slowly overcame it, pulling itself out of the silence like the sculptured form of the woman, pulling herself clear of the rock. The voice continued its long, slow ascension, angular syllables stretched out and hanging for long seconds in the darkness.
O Mensch! O Mensch!
Tief! Tief! Tief ist ihr Weh!
Tief ist ihr Weh!
The voice came from the throat of the darkness. The light from the hurricane lamp wavered.