Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

  People are strange, it’s true, but when we’re not unhappy, and with a little tickle, people like to be skittish, frisky, if you only let them. That goes for different sorts of people, I’ve noticed. Occupants of the other towers in the city refer to ours as ‘The Transit’. Ask anyone. People come into our tower from all over, I think of it like a beacon calling people who need a home. A sanctuary. Like churches were once, before their doors were locked. And then when people have sorted themselves out, they move on. (Apart from Malcolm and his wife, who never have.) Alli and I have our eye on a place in Barton, near the pool and the primary school, ex-council. It belongs to a work colleague of Alli’s called Daina; she’s dividing it in two, she’ll live upstairs and we’d rent the downstairs, with access to the garden, and that’s the clincher, Alli says: French windows a toddler can toddle out of on to the grass. A paddling pool from Argos on a summer’s day. Washing on the line.

  I told Alli of Benny’s offer. She was aghast. ‘How can you even consider such a thing?’ she said. ‘For even a moment?’

  ‘It’s not my idea,’ I said. ‘I’m not recommending it. Heaven forbid. But Benny made the suggestion and I thought I should let you know. Shouldn’t I?’

  ‘What exactly is between your ears?’ Alli asked. ‘Sometimes I think there’s nothing but air. And in the air, midges and, like, moths are fluttering, those are your thoughts and that’s it and there’s nothing else.’

  Alli put her head in her hands. I wanted to step over and hug her, but I didn’t. I figured that wouldn’t help. Then she raised her head, and said, ‘I’d have a brain-damaged baby born with a drinking problem.’

  ‘An unquenchable thirst,’ I agreed.

  ‘All my milk would never be enough,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you idiot, if I was going to receive sperm from one of your brothers, it would hardly be that one, would it?’

  Benny and I have got two other brothers, the middle ones. Steve went to America years ago and we lost touch. ‘I suppose I could try to track him down,’ I said. ‘Connect with him on Facebook, and send a message. Hi Steve. Long time no see. How are you? How would you like to come home and impregnate my wife?’

  I suspect Alli wanted to keep scowling, really, but she couldn’t help a little smile. ‘What about Mick?’ she said. ‘He’s got four kids already, one more shouldn’t faze him.’

  ‘Five,’ I said. ‘You forget that Lisa produced another in the spring.’

  Alli shook her head. ‘I can’t keep up.’

  I must admit that when Mick and Lisa announced the birth of their latest child it occurred to me that they were not being quite as irresponsible as Alli considered them to be, but were at some subconscious level compensating for us and our infertility. I mean, if sensate Homo sapiens should seek to reproduce themselves, so that two people together have two children (enough to propagate the species but not so many as to infest the planet), Mick and Lisa have helpfully fulfilled our quota too – plus one for Benny. He’s got just the one daughter, Siobhan, who he hardly ever sees since he’s not allowed to be within five hundred metres of his ex-partner, Siobhan’s mother’s place. When he did go round there last year in a bit of an emotional state and barged into their flat, she ended up giving him a hammering, and Benny needed stitches. What he didn’t appreciate, I told him, was that he was the first person to be handed an exclusion order for his own protection.

  Siobhan is thirteen now. She’s into gymnastics and make-up. She adores her dad, and Benny likewise, he’d do anything for that girl. He showers her with gifts whenever he’s flush, which I don’t believe is often, to be fair. Siobhan’s going to be a lovely cousin. She could be our number-one babysitter – when we move to Barton we’ll be that much closer.

  Alli looked forward to Fridays in the Animal Sanctuary shop. At first she said it was so much more rewarding than on the line in the plant, meeting new people, serving her community. She said there was one old chap who came in every week, donated one book and bought another. The books he donated were all ones he’d bought previously, but he always rubbed out the price on the inside front cover. He told Alli he thought of the shop as his private library.

  But lately Alli’s been growing disillusioned. Maybe working in a charity shop causes a strange slow-burn stress, you can only do it for a while before you burn out. Last week, for example, she came home and told me that someone had donated a toilet seat.

  ‘Please tell me it was in the original wrapping,’ I said.

  ‘Sort of,’ Alli said. ‘It was in the original cardboard box of the toilet seat they’d bought to replace it.’

  ‘Are you telling me—?’

  ‘A used toilet seat!’ Alli cried. ‘With yellow stains!’ She shook her head. ‘Sometimes I don’t know what to make of this life. I mean most of us want to make a better world but we’ll always be human beings, right, so we’ll fuck things up one way or another. But why?’ She was speeding up towards full throttle again. ‘Why? Is it because all of us harbour enough cruelty, perversity and selfishness to fuck everything up? Or because enough of a minority of people are overwhelmingly cruel and greedy and perverse and psychotic and they fuck everything up for the rest of us? Not to mention for other living creatures and the earth itself! And let’s not forget, while we’re about it, future generations, eh?’ There were tears in Alli’s eyes now. ‘I don’t know, love,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’

  I could see that Alli was spiralling again. I asked if she had any weed and to my relief she said that she’d seen Kristina in Lidl after work the day before, and Kristina had given her some. And by coincidence during the week someone had donated a DVD of Koyaanisqatsi, did I remember that film? ‘We used to have a video of it and the tape got twisted, then we had a DVD but we lent it to Maz and Bobby, and they lent us Game of Thrones Season Three, only we’ve never swapped them back.’

  I said that of course I remembered it, it was ideal. That evening we watched Koyaanisqatsi and Alli smoked weed and calmed down.

  ***

  It was Malcolm on the third floor who you could say made it happen, in a way, one week later. He went looking for a nice item of clothing for Imelda, his wife, and got chatting with Alli. Imelda must be the largest lady in the tower, if not the entire estate. Malcolm once confided in me that his wife had put on weight every year of their married life. Then he rubbed his hands together and said, ‘Me, I loves a big fat woman.’ Malcolm treats his wife like a queen (I wouldn’t be surprised if he warms the toilet seat for her). He often drops in to the Animal Sanctuary shop seeking something for Imelda to wear, and the incredible thing is that quite often he finds it. Indeed, Alli and the other volunteers put such outsize attire by, for Malcolm’s personal consideration.

  Anyhow, Alli and Malcolm were chatting, and Malcolm told her about how his daughter is with a useless, feckless wastrel yet miraculously their children are all fine and healthy. ‘God’s beautiful creatures.’ He told her that heavy alcohol consumption affects sperm count and sperm quality, and it can also affect virility, but if despite all these obstacles a heavy-drinking male’s sperm reaches a woman’s egg and succeeds in fertilising it, there will be no detrimental effect on the resulting foetus. There are millions of spermatozoa in a single ejaculation: only one needs to make its way to a woman’s fallopian tubes and fertilise her egg. Just one. Alli explained this to me, and said she’d been turning it all over in her mind.

  ‘The thing is,’ Alli said, ‘I think we should take up Benny’s offer.’

  I was flummoxed. ‘Are you insane?’ I asked.

  ‘I think we should give it a try,’ she said. ‘Oh, and I forgot to tell you, Daina’s got her builder in, it’s time to give notice to the council on this place.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘When do you think we should do what needs to be done with Benny?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Alli said. ‘Tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes, love. This evening is the most propitious moment in my monthly cycle.’
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  With trembling fingers I texted my brother. He said he’d bicycle over at seven. My first thought was to urge him to wear a helmet, and put lights on the bike. I was suddenly worried for his safety.

  Alli had a glass of wine and smoked some weed. She said she needed to be relaxed, which I understood. I wished Benny and I had similar bodies, so that she might be able to shut her eyes, and imagine it was me attempting to help her make a baby, not my wiry, deranged brother. I expect you’re wondering by now why we didn’t go down a medical route: have Benny shoot his sperm into a bottle and Alli have an egg removed, these to be conjoined in a test tube and the fertilised egg reintroduced to Alli’s womb. In a word, IVF. And I can’t really answer this because the truth is that, during the hours after she informed me of her decision, neither Alli nor I discussed it in any further detail. I suspect she figured sex was more honest than a clinical procedure, it was messy in a way that she believed life should be.

  I offered to stay in the flat but Alli let me go. At ten to seven I left and walked down the stairs. I had no plans beyond a slow wander to the Cowley Centre. It would give me time to work out whether buying flowers to take back for Alli would be appropriate.

  As I passed the third-floor landing, I saw Malcolm through the glass of the fire door and pushed it open to say hello. He was still wearing his postal worker’s uniform, he must have just come off shift. ‘Bonjour, Monsieur Malcolm!’ I hailed him.

  ‘There’s my man,’ he said. ‘Hey, know what? I gat a treat for you.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘Wait there,’ Malcolm said, winking. He disappeared inside his flat, leaving the door open. I could hear him talking – to Imelda, presumably. I could hear a clinking of glass. Imelda raised her voice, Malcolm sounded like he was pleading with and mollifying her. Then he came out, wearing his duffel coat and a woollen cap and carrying a plastic carrier bag of bottles.

  ‘Come wid me, man,’ Malcolm said. ‘I gwan show you some ting.’ He stepped over to the lift, and pushed the button. Like some kind of conjuring trick, the doors opened at once.

  I know, I know. Malcolm was clearly the last person to use the lift, coming home from work a couple of minutes earlier, yet to me at that moment it was still kind of magical, inviting, the way those doors opened for us instantly.

  Inside the lift Malcolm pushed the button for the fifteenth floor. He winked again, but didn’t say anything. He clearly had a surprise for me and didn’t want to spoil it, so I didn’t say anything either. Malcolm just hummed to himself as we rose through the tower, and somewhere around the tenth floor I recognised the tune: ‘Legalise It’, by none other than Peter Tosh himself! It took me right back to childhood, dancing around the lounge to our dad’s records. I suppose it was perfectly logical that Malcolm would be humming it – if our dad was still alive, he’d be about the same age – but this was the kind of beautiful coincidence that gives me a glimpse of patterns which lie in the depths of our existence, glimpses of an order in the universe, and our place in it, that we can only dream of, yet might actually, after all, be real.

  The lift reached the fifteenth floor and the doors opened. Malcolm stepped on to the landing and took a key out of his pocket and held it up for me to see, giving it a tiny little shake. ‘This for you, man,’ he said. ‘I bin wantin to do this ting ever since I done tell you about it. Me brother work in the Buildins and I ask him. He say no, but I tell him it only be a one-off, I promise, and he relent.’

  Malcolm used the key to unlock a panel on the wall, gaining access to some kind of control box. He pushed some numbered buttons and suddenly there was a noise above our heads. I looked up: a retractable ladder stirred and unfolded, like some giant insect awakening, and reached down to the floor. Then a door, to which these stairs gave access, opened. We climbed the staircase and stepped through the door on to the roof. Malcolm strolled a few yards then put the carrier bag down and spread his arms wide and turned around, breathing deeply, as if the air up here was cleaner than down below. Perhaps it was.

  ‘I’ve not bin up here for years, man,’ he said.

  I walked around the roof – not too close to the edge, even though there’s a bit of a barrier, as I lack a head for heights – and looked down on the estate. Cars and occasional buses slid to and fro along Blackbird Leys Road. In amongst the traffic, illuminated intermittently by the headlights of the passing vehicles, I spotted a lean, darkly clothed figure riding a bicycle, pedalling furiously. Late as ever.

  I returned to the middle of the roof. Malcolm had built himself a big spliff and flipped the tops off a couple of bottles. He passed a Red Stripe to me.

  ‘Like the old days!’ Malcolm said, chuckling.

  We drank the Jamaican lager. It was cold and unfamiliar to me and tasted really good. It was one of those still autumn evenings, barely any breeze even up on the roof of the tower. I looked up and could see no stars above – whether because of clouds or urban light pollution I wasn’t sure.

  Malcolm passed me his spliff and I smoked some, and drank some more beer. I thanked him for bringing me up here. I said it meant a lot to me that he had done it.

  ‘In dem days most times I come up with me crew,’ Malcolm said. ‘But some time I come up on me own, you know? And I look out over the city north and south, east and west, I see the buildins and the lights, I hear the noise like the sea churnin below, and you know what I say to meself? I say this your city, Malcolm Garner. It belong to you. As you look upon it, so do you occupy it. It all yours.’ There was only me but he could have been addressing his old crew up there on the roof. Then he pointed at me. ‘And it all yours, too, man. It all of ours, you see? We are the people. We below but we come from on high. We be the kings and the queens a dis mortal world, there is none above us but the Lord.’ Malcolm raised his arms up and looked all around. ‘How great are his signs!’ he said. ‘And how mighty are his wonders! His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation!’

  Malcolm stopped talking. He took a deep breath, and sighed. Then he turned in my direction and peered at me in the semi-darkness. ‘What the matter, man?’ he asked. ‘Why you cryin for?’

  I sniffed and said I was fine, I was just emotional, that was all. I had things going on in my life. And what he said had affected me. We drank some more cool beer in the still autumn evening, and looked out over the lights and the traffic in the churning urban ocean below. There are so many of us, that’s what’s so hard to get your head around. A multitude of floundering creatures, plunging, lunging, towards our misbegotten destinies.

  Blood Moon

  They swam in the warm blue sea, or lolled in the hotel pool. Jemma let the sun dry her skin then dragged her lounger into the shade of a parasol. Mark dozed in the open, flesh baking. In their apartment after lunch they made love, lazily. Mark fetched water from the fridge. He was at ease naked in the heat. He had the loose paunch of an ex-athlete and it did not bother him. Perhaps having made a living for over ten years at his sport permitted him this premature middle age. Only his comically white buttocks let him down.

  ‘You deserve a naturist holiday,’ Jemma told him.

  He took this as a compliment. ‘I think you’re right, love.’

  In the afternoon they walked up away from the village, along overgrown paths, holding hands until sweat in their palms slid them apart. When they passed through a layer of scented air, Jemma broke off leaves and rubbed them between her fingers. Thyme. She raised her hands to her lover and he smelled the herbs too, identified them or attempted to. Fennel. They plucked ripe wild figs off trees. Small fierce sweet blackberries.

  Bony cows were chained singly in dusty fields. Occasional rank odour of goats. Chickens roamed, pecking at the hard ground like some odd species of archaeologist. They disturbed a hare, which sprang up and bounded off through an olive grove. Spiders laid webs across plants, woven with a tighter mesh than their English counterparts, fine as the material of white tights. Time and again in the war
m air came the scent of oregano.

  On their third day, grey clouds rolled over the mountains. Breezes stirred the canes. Warm rain fell soft and silent. The following morning the sky was clear blue again.

  They swam and dozed, read, made love, rambled.

  After they’d showered they sat on the balcony of their apartment. Mark in white T-shirt and green shorts; Jemma’s white dress, brown muscular limbs. Mark downed a beer. Jemma drank fruit they’d found or bought and blended into cocktails that picked her up as the beer dulled him. Fig, blackberry, orange. Then they strolled down to the restaurants along the shore.

  There were eight establishments. Waiters importuned potential customers as they passed by. Jemma and Mark studied the menus, ate in a different place each night. Their week-long holiday meant that all but one would get their custom.

  ‘I find it hard to convey to you,’ Jemma said, ‘how much I love Mediterranean food.’ Tzatziki: yoghurt with cucumbers, garlic and dill. Sardines baked in a dish with onion, red and yellow peppers. Subtle detonations of taste in her mouth. They swapped spoonfuls off each other’s plate. ‘You can hardly taste the nutmeg,’ she said of his moussaka. ‘It’s just there.’

  ‘This one has the best chef,’ Mark agreed. ‘Maybe we should come back here on our last night.’

  They ordered a carafe of white wine. Jemma sipped a glassful. Mark worked his way through the rest.

  ‘I’m going to run a 10K in the morning,’ she told him.

  He looked at her, and shook his head. ‘You’re insane, love.’

  ‘Pre-season starts next week.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Jemma laughed. ‘You want me to emulate your first-day-of-training stories?’