Burial
by
Neil Cross
Copyright S Neil Cross, 2009
This story is for Nadya, Ethan and Finn, for holding my hand and making me happy. It's for Jack the dog, too, if he promises to stop running away, and eating my macaroons.
1
The doorbell rang.
Nathan had a feeling - but he dismissed it, muted the TV and went to the door. There stood Bob; hunched over, grinning in the darkness and rain. Saying: 'Hello, mate.'
Nathan said, 'How did you find me?'
'I looked.'
Nathan tried to slam the door, but Bob put out a big hand, stopping it. Then he removed the hand and said, 'They're digging up the woods.'
'They're what?'
'Digging up the woods.'
'Why?'
'Does it matter? They're building a housing estate.'
'Of course it doesn't matter. What kind of housing estate?'
'The kind people live in. Are you actually listening?'
'Yes. Yeah, of course.'
Nathan glanced backwards, as if somebody was standing at his shoulder. But nobody was; it was Tuesday night. That meant Holly would be back late.
He said, 'Look. Give me a call. Phone me at work.'
'I'm here. Right now.'
'You can't come in. I'll meet you somewhere. Tomorrow.'
'I'll be gone in two minutes.'
'My wife will be home.'
But Bob just stood there, waiting in the rain. So Nathan gathered his breath and moved aside. Bob stepped over the threshold and stood dripping on the wooden floor.
He'd noticed the many framed photographs that hung in the hallway.
Nathan waited while Bob took a squinting step forward, examining the photographs more closely. A baby girl, naked on a towel. A gap-toothed girl with a pageboy haircut. The fringe was blunt and a bit crooked - obviously trimmed by her mother. A holiday photograph in which the girl was a very young teenager, her hair short and bleached and spiky. She stood on the deck of a boat, wearing an orange life jacket. She was holding up a long, silver mackerel. In that photograph, she was laughing.
Bob looked at the photographs for a long time.
When he turned to Nathan, his voice had gone.
'What the fuck is this?'
'I told you not to come in.'
Using the wall for balance, Bob lowered himself. He sat on the stripped Victorian floorboards. He looked wrong, like an optical illusion, like a drawing where the perspective and the scale have been altered.
Fingertips brushed the hair on Nathan's nape.
In the living room, the TV flickered - and it seemed to Nathan that the lights dimmed, and flickered, then rose again.
Nathan and Bob had met fifteen years before, in the summer of 1993.
Nathan was renting a small room in a house on Maple Road. A year after leaving university, he was claiming benefit and waiting to be awarded a job on the city's biweekly listings magazine. The magazine had yet to bother rejecting his unsolicited job applications, or any of his unsolicited gig, film and record reviews. Nathan was encouraged by this lack of explicit rejection: his plan was to sit around and keep applying.
Because all the rooms in 30 Maple Road were rented out, there was no communal space in which to gather. So Nathan and his housemates spent the dole days drifting from bedroom to bedroom, drinking lots of Happy Shopper tea.
That afternoon, Pete's room was pretty quiet: from it there emerged only the earthquake throb of an Estring fed through a large amplifier and a digital delay pedal.
Nathan lay in bed, listening to it. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, put on his trousers and a washed-out band T-shirt, and wandered across the mangy hallway.
Because Pete had lived in the house the longest, he'd graduated to the biggest room. In it, an old mattress doubled as a sofa. The sofa had been rescued from a skip outside next-door's house. Propped against the wall was a monumental, patched-together stereo -- assembled from gaffer-taped components joined by coloured leads and soldered interconnects.
Pete always had people in his room. Often, they were members of what was still called the convoy -- patchouli-ripe crusties who told endless dull tales of the Battle of the Beanfield. There were Goths, too, and sometimes ravers, a youth culture for which Nathan didn't much care.
There were oblique Rastafarians, a benevolent hippie called Fuzzy Rob, a speed-dealing biker called Carnie Frank, a morbidly obese West Indian truck driver called Reds. There were dangerous-looking, sarcastic men in baggy old jeans and prison tattoos.
But this afternoon, there was just a big, scruffy, feline man lolling on one of the old sofas. He wore an ivory shirt, a navy-blue suit threadbare at the cuffs and long, knotty hair that might have been backcombed since last being washed.
Nathan nodded hello and sat on the floor, hugging his bony knees.
The stranger put a Bic flame to the end of a John Player Special.
When it was lit, he leaned forward to offer Nathan his hand.
'Bob.'
Nathan shook the hand. It was very big. Shaking hands made Nathan self-conscious, like a kid playing grown-ups.
Pete sat cross-legged beneath the monstrous, teetering stereo. He wore a matted red dressing gown and dirty white socks.
Bob had a leather briefcase with him; scuffed at the seams, perhaps a lucky find in a charity shop. From it, he withdrew a Dictaphone, which he put on the floor in front of Pete, saying: 'Shall we get on?'
Nathan said, 'So, what's this all about?'
Bob was producing a spiral-bound reporter's notebook and a chewed-up Bic. 'A friend of a friend put me in contact with Pete.
He's agreed to be interviewed.'
'For what?'
'My research.'
'Cool. Are you a journalist?'
'No. It's just research.'
'For . . .?'
'My PhD.'
Nathan looked from one to the other and back again; at big handed, cumbersome Bob -- and Pete in his tatty scarlet dressing gown.
He said, 'Really?'
'Really.'
