E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten
McGregor / Macgabhann / Johal Duets
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7398301-7-5
Verlag: Scratch Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-7398301-7-5
Verlag: Scratch Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Jon McGregor is an award-winning author and short story writer. He has been nominated for the Booker Prize for three of his novels, including his 2002 debut If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which also went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. So Many Ways to Begin followed in 2006. His third novel, Even the Dogs (2010), earned McGregor the International Dublin Literary Award in 2012, whilst his 2017 work Reservoir 13 scooped up the Costa Book Award.
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Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily
Nell Stevens & Eley Williams
When I strip the wallpaper in the new flat, I find, underneath it, strange scratches in the plasterwork, lines and curves like an unknown alphabet, finger marks covering the wall behind my bed. I’m anxious to get rid of the wallpaper, though there are countless more urgent things; faced with the splintered floorboards and rotting window frames left behind by the previous owner, and a leaking pipe under the kitchen sink that drips into an old lemonade bottle, it seems easier to worry first about the bedroom walls. I have it in my head that if I can just replace the yellowed chintzy pattern with something calm, I too might feel calmer. If I can just get that done, everything else might feel more manageable.
But now there are the marks, which could perhaps be nothing, maybe something to do with the way the wallpaper glue dried, but which seem intentionally communicative somehow, ubiquitous and affronting. I do not feel calm at all, even when I cover the walls with fresh plasterboard and then with blue-green-grey paint from an expensive paint company. I sense the scratches underneath, lingering and emphatic. I convince myself I can still see them, despite everything.
I practise saying, ‘this is home,’ as I move around the space. The dog runs from room to room, tail wagging so furiously his whole body bends into parentheses, sniffing out histories in corners, catching cobwebs on the wet of his nose. I order takeaway – which I eat sitting on boxes of unpacked crockery – and buy sourdough from the bakery at the bottom of the road, crust serrated against my hard palate. In the garden, I assemble a wooden table and chairs amongst overgrown, straggly rose plants that should have been pruned years ago and, having not been, now seem untouchable.
‘This is home,’ I say to the roses.
‘This is home,’ I say to the boiler, whose buttons and dials I am too scared to adjust.
It is natural enough to feel uneasy, I think. Everything is so new. Natural enough not to want to sleep beneath a wall covered in half-realised hieroglyphics, to find my changed circumstances, my sudden aloneness, unsettling. I fill bin liners with sheathes of torn-off wallpaper and vacuum the previous owner’s strange dust. There are ball bearings wedged between the floorboards in the hallway, an invoice from a vet taped to the inside of one of the kitchen cupboards. An eyelash curler, rusting, like a historic torture device in the dungeon of the basement bathroom. Soon, this unfamiliar rubbish will be replaced by my own rubbish, I tell myself, and I will feel calm again.
~
She has narrated me without knowing it, so perhaps it is not entirely rude to return the favour in kind. Right now she is holding a half-finished box of cornflakes and standing in the centre of the new-to-her kitchen, pivoting on the spot and pondering where best to commit to storing cereal. It says something about her, doesn’t it, that she thought it was worth packing a half-finished box of cornflakes when moving house. It certainly says something about me that I choose to dwell on this detail about her. I watch her trial the cornflakes on different heights of shelves and in different cupboards. She is talking to herself throughout this process, about the most humane way to trap moths. She had the same muttered monologue yesterday and plainly did not come to a resolution. Watching her, I have learned that she sings to herself sometimes too, but never seems to complete a tune. I wonder whether she knows that about herself, or is it entirely thoughtless? When I am able to recognise the lyrics, I pitch in and finish the songs as her own voice trails away – that is, when her interest in sustaining the song trails off, or her memory of its words trails off, or something better dislodges the song from her mind. On a bicycle made for two, I sing, once she’s finished with her Daisys as she is scrubbing the bathroom floor; Crying ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive-o!’, I add while she’s respooling the vacuum cleaner’s cable, having given up on her Molly Malone; at the end of a particularly dispirited rendition of half of Row Row Row Your Boat, I trill the final cheery Life is but a dream. She cannot hear me, naturally – or otherwise – but I notice that her dog wags his tail in something like recognition. The tap-swish of his tail against the floor disturbs the dust. I bend to pat the air above her dog, stirring it with my fingertips, and watch as he ducks a little, his happy tail at odds with the twinge of confusion creeping about his tongue-lolling face.
A dream, I sing again, refinishing the unfinished song to nobody. As she keeps working on the house, sweating a little, making private whinnying breaths of exertion and satisfaction, I think about why I feel compelled to supply any song’s end. For my own amusement? To imagine we are in a company, in a chorus? I suppose I can’t bear on some level to have anything else left hanging in the air, not even a nursery rhyme.
I speculate about her life, the fact that so many of the half-sung songs she knows are from childhood. Hers, or some others?
She has a good voice. I wonder whether anybody knows that about her, or maybe she only sings to herself when she thinks that she’s alone.
~
I wake up expecting someone to be here. I imagine my name is being called, that I am being summoned to tie shoelaces, to scramble eggs, that I am about to rush headlong into a morning full of school bags and spilled drinks and late-for-the-bus-can-you-give-me-a-lifts. How long has it been since anyone needed me to tie their shoelaces? And yet, still, that is what the silence suggests to me, and I jump up from bed and start towards the door before I realise, no, no, nobody needs me.
The dog’s claws on the floorboards. His paw against the back door, asking to be let out. His breath, ragged in my ear. The click of his tongue in his mouth when he pants. Sometimes he barks at nothing at all and I love it and wish he’d do it more, wish he’d startle me or be more unexpected, because one of the things, one of the most weighty, alarming things about my life now, is the feeling that I am the only thing that can change other things. But he is a creature of strong rhythms, and once he has overcome the shock of his new environs, he reverts to predictability. Kibble between his teeth. His tail thumping against my leg. The way that, when he drinks water from the bowl, the sound is somehow crunchy and small droplets scatter across the tiles.
I try out different ways of living in silence. First: drowning it out with radio dramas, or by playing true crime Netflix shows on my laptop, but I sense the quiet of the flat beneath the ominous sound effects and the voiceovers. It is like sweeping dust under a rug: the silence is still there, lurking. Next I try to expand into it, dragging my feet across the floorboards to make a louder shuffle than is necessary. Coughing, clearing my throat as though about to make a speech. And then, with increasing frequency, what happens is that I sing. I sing whatever I can think of, though I can never think of much more than the opening lines of things: nursery rhymes, silly childhood ditties, national anthems (British, American, and my favourite, French). The dog watches me sceptically, cocking his head to one side, half-whining and then, without warning, urinating in the middle of the floor of what is going to be my study, which is absolutely not the kind of startling thing I’d wanted him to do.
Row, row, row your boat, I sing, as I mop and disinfect. Gently down the stream.
When I look up I notice there are orange damp stains on the ceiling, blossoming across the white paintwork like flowers, and for a moment I feel as though everything is upside down, as though what I am looking at is not the ceiling but the patch where the dog pissed on the floor, and I am suspended above my life, detached from it all, and nothing makes sense anymore. It was not supposed to look like this, I think. Where has everyone gone? Where have I gone?
~
I introduce myself to the dog when her back is turned and she is stripping the wallpaper in the bedroom. In my limited experience and according to my limited observation, dogs can usually smell the difference when I’m in a room. As evidenced by his reaction to my singing, it seems clear that dogs can hear me, or detect some rearrangement of air or pressure in a way that is similar to hearing. Letting the dog see me might be fairer on this sweet little spaniel – allow him to know that I am keeping his mistress company. It feels cruel otherwise to let him catch drifts of me in this piecemeal way, scurrying with his nose pressed to the skirting boards and wainscotting with such a busy and bemused expression, as he tracks me from room to room without seeing anyone there. No need for fruitless snuffle-inquisition, little one.
Here I am, I say, and I reveal myself to the dog. We are in the doorway of what used to be my parlour, but since my time...
