the corners. Those edges are lethal. I started to my feet and moaned, feeling the metal slice into his tongue, seeing bright red marbling appear across its coating of thick yellow oil, and run down and stain his lips. I could taste the tinny little plumes of blood mixing with his mouth juices all cloudy with fish scales and crumbs of bone as soft as pumice. I waited to hear him cry out. But all he did was drop the can and calmly wipe his mouth on his sleeve.
I felt a rush of triumph, as if my watching had averted disaster. And I liked the thought that it might have; perhaps something as supposedly intense as the power of prayer was at work in my willing him to keep himself safe.
So I aspired that my watching would be more than watching, and I resolved to surrender myself to it. It was no less than a debt owing to Arthur and Ruth for Ruth’s fatal invisibility to me on the road that day, and no less a pact with Arthur for all that he was unaware of it. And I could not hope to repay the debt, or honour the pact, by mere observation; it would call for observance, the keeping of a vigil both devout and penitential.
A.
As the nights grew warmer, I drew closer to the house and tracked him from the terrace. I could see into all the downstairs back windows, and I saw him moving slowly to and fro in the kitchen and in and out of the conservatory and dining room. If I didn’t see him from the back, I went round to the front of the house and watched from under the tree in the garden. On clear nights, his outline was bright in a wash of quicksilver from the moon and he stumbled through rooms and between objects that shone back upon him the same luminous white.
Often in his wanderings upstairs he would come to the window, sometimes lit and sometimes not, but always uncurtained. He would be holding wads of paper and a pen, and sometimes he would lean on the windowsill to write something down. Sometimes he seemed agitated and sometimes he stood very still, but in either case I could tell he was distressed.
On this particular night, the house looked the same. There were lights on upstairs and no curtains drawn. I crept out of the shed to watch until I had worked out his whereabouts. I waited close in by the shrubs bordering the side of the garden. It had been raining and the air smelled of torn leaves; a dampness lay on my skin and my breathing grew hard and noisy. Then the lights went off upstairs and I imagined him there at the window, peering through the glass trying to see what animal was out there, rasping in the dark. I did and I didn’t want him to know it was me.
But suddenly a light snapped on in the kitchen and he appeared in the doorway. His hands, one in an oven glove and the other swathed in a cloth, were holding a covered dish. Smoke rolled out in soft waves above his head. He walked the length of the conservatory and came out onto the terrace, priest-like, bearing the dish before him. I heard a hiss as he set it down on the ground. He dropped the glove and cloth and stepped back. With his bare hand he lifted the lid, yelped, and hurled it hard across the garden. Then he picked up the pot itself and threw that, too. It landed somewhere on the edge of the grass and rolled away into darkness.
Smoke was still pluming out from the kitchen. He stood for a while, sucking on his hand and chewing the insides of his cheeks. I watched, aghast, desperate to know how badly he was hurt. I wanted to call out; only his apparent calm and the realization that I would shatter it by emerging out of the dark and running to him kept me quiet and invisible. For he seemed to be considering the matter, trying to puzzle out the reasons for this, why certain things had gone wrong: why had this scorching hot object been in his hand, and what did it have to do with him that he had burned himself? He picked up the cloth from the ground and wrapped his hand in it. Then, by the light escaping from the house, I saw the line of his face as he tilted his head to the sky, his mouth open in a voiceless howl. If he had stood there another moment I would have had to go to his side and lead him back to the kitchen, draw his burning hand under cold water, talking to him all the while, soothing and reassuring him. I would have heard him whimper and I would have smelled burnt smoking meat mixed with his old man smell, both rank and dry, like rotten wood. I would have begged him to be comforted, and unafraid.
But just then he cried out, in a yowling moan. It was a cry of defeat, as if the burning of his hand betrayed to him the futility of a simple attempt to heat up something for his supper. His head drooped. I couldn’t go to him yet. He wiped his face with his good hand, turned away, and shuffled into the house.
The kitchen light went out. I watched the smoke disperse across the terrace in pale waving strings. Then I stepped out from the shelter of the shrubs, and feeling my way and still keeping an eye on the house, I began searching. I found the lid at once; it had rolled a track through the uncut grass that was easy to follow. It took longer to locate the dish, which had spun away and landed deep in the border at the other side of the garden.
It was one of those expensive enamelled casserole dishes, and still warm to the touch. Whatever had been in it was now a bumpy carbonized heap fused to the base, a tiny burned-out pyre sitting in a lake of tar. On the side of the lid there was a big, fresh-looking chip. I was a little careless; walking back to the house I set the lid back on the dish and there was a loud clang and scrape that echoed across the garden. I stopped dead, expecting the noise to bring Arthur back out, but it didn’t. I walked into the smoky kitchen clutching the dish tight against my chest.
First, I switched off the oven. Next I found scouring pads under the sink and I got to work in the dark. I scraped and scrubbed and after a while I could feel my fingers gliding on the enamel as the burnt flakes loosened and liquefied. The surface was too far gone for a perfect result but the dish would be at least usable again. I left it out on the draining board with the lid next to it so he might see how well I had done. I would have given a lot to see a look of pleasure on his face, the corners of his mouth tipping upward into even the faintest smile.
Then I went back to the conservatory. Litter had amassed all over the shelves and floor. Torn cartons and banana skins, discarded cups and bottles, newspaper cuttings, photographs and piles of papers, dirty dishes and cutlery were strewn among a crowd of indoor plants and clusters of rotting garden flowers. I shifted some dead geraniums along so that I could lean against the window ledge for a moment while I decided what to do first; they were desiccated in their plastic pots and top-heavy, and the movement tipped them straight onto the floor. I kicked at them. The pots rolled and scraped on the tiles, scattering mulch and fingery white plant roots among the litter and dry leaves. Clearing up the mess I had made myself seemed as good a place as any to start, and I went back to the kitchen to look for a dustpan and brush.
Arthur, I felt, was aware of my presence and stayed away out of politeness. Yet as I worked, I was not entirely alone. In her conservatory, with her dustpan and brush in my hands, sweeping up the relics of plants she had tended and maybe even grown from seeds she had sown herself, I knew myself to be under an authoritative
