The Reasons I Won't Be Coming Read online

  If the earth was hit by a giant meteorite it would’ve made so much dust that the sunlight wouldn’t have been able to get through and the dinosaur food chain would’ve been wrecked. Without any sunlight they would’ve frozen too. Even the biggest of them would’ve needed protection from the cold. Everyone does. It’s just a theory. No one knows for sure about the meteorite. If you don’t know something for sure, you might as well just dream it.

  Bill Economou dreams all the time. He dreamed Dad was outside one night, outside our flats in the wind doing nothing; leaning against the wall of the empty chocolate factory, staring at our flats. At first, he tried to tell me he actually saw it. Mum said there aren’t many letterboxes at the Southern Playing Fields.

  Nicholas dreams but he doesn’t remember. When we shared the same room I could hear some of his dreams. I told him I heard them all. I’ve got our room to myself now. He’s been sleeping in Mum’s bed since he started wetting his bed again. He says he doesn’t wet the bed. He says it’s Mum. I wanted to check this out because he lies much more than me now. I went in and checked one night when they were both asleep. I wasn’t sure about him, but Mum’s side of the bed was wet. Her pillow. Nothing surprises me much anymore, not really. It’s because I’m growing up, I suppose. That’s my theory.

  YOUR NIECE’S SPEECH NIGHT

  Why is it later than you think so much more often than not? Many questions arise here in the dark, interrupted only by the polite applause, questions like “Where are you?” Do the high terrazzo walls of the cubicle take you back, put you in your place? They must. Is that it?

  I am assuming you find it comforting or at least thought-provoking in some way to be sitting in one or other of the cubicles tucked away deep in the bowels of this great stone monstrosity that housed you all those years ago and in which you were taught, inter alia, Latin, French, algebra, some English history and deportment. But your deportment seems to have failed you momentarily just as something else about you, something I had never suspected, has failed me. I would apologize for seeming angry, but you are not around for any rudimentary apology that, in any case, I would not mean, which is why I am angry in the first place; in your first place, your alma mater.

  I am sitting in a school hall, your old school’s hall, with your sister, your brother-in-law and one of their daughters as they wait for another of their daughters, the eldest, to accept some award, or perhaps she is to sing. I am not your husband. He gets out of these things now, and so—at the last minute, I find—do you.

  I do not know why I am here, although I would be able to recount with great accuracy how I got here—not that this is something you need to be told. It was arranged some time ago. Even had you not disappeared inexplicably, leaving me literally in the dark, it is hard to imagine feeling more uncomfortable. Your sister, poodle hairstyle—is it just for the evening?—pearl earrings with a matching brooch and matching breasts, each perfectly shaped and straining to make a point in cashmere reminiscent of more genteel times; does she always chew gum? It does you no harm being her sister—you are not your sister’s keeper and you look good next to her—just as it does you no good to be ashamed of her. She should have married an astronaut and it looks as though she has. Her husband, as if freshly returned from an audition for the part of Dad in a U.S. situation comedy, replete with painted-on hair and perfect teeth and intoxicated by his own congeniality, bobs around us in the foyer of the school hall like an apple in a barrel of water. You were here then, I know that, touching my arm briefly and by accident. He tells me what he does for a living but I am having trouble remembering his name. I do not want to sit next to him in the hall during the assembly for fear that, in his bliss at being a father at his daughter’s speech night, he might reach for my hand. But I am spared this fate and find myself seated between your immaculate sister and you—that is, before you got up to leave.

  I would have had no expectation of anything but kitsch coming down at us from the stage tonight had I turned my mind to it, but the truth was, I did not and could not have turned my mind to it and still have agreed to accompany you here. It seemed important to you that we attend—or, rather, that you attend not alone—which has meant, of late, going with me. It has never before meant leaving without me, but perhaps I am precipitate to draw this conclusion. Perhaps you are in the wings, waiting for some response from the chorus before reappearing. Or is it the chorus from whom you are hiding?

  When I first saw you, by the lift well, it was for an instant and I was not even sure that you were working with us. So what was it that I noticed in that instant? I had already been divorced for quite a while, and my female registering reflexes were permanently cocked, ready for quick action in the sense at least of acknowledgment, the lightning start of an Olympian being one of the few consolations of the truly lonely long-distance runner. Do you, wherever you are, want to know what it was that I noticed in that first instant? Yes, you do have a kind of beauty that is more than merely physical, I have told you that; but it wasn’t that. The smile, I have seen it so many times since. The smile that plays around your lips and cannot be counted on kindled a curiosity in me that I had not felt for some time. The smile, and something with a life of its own residing in your eyes, suggested that you knew something most of us did not know, something which made you unsafe. Of course, there are many things we didn’t and still don’t know. These days I don’t even know if I’m meant to be in Sales or in Marketing. But unfortunately I do know something that you don’t. I might tell you if you come back from your ill-timed nocturnal creep down memory lane.

  “It’s a small world after all . . .” sing the girls from Mrs. Dowager’s Year Seven music class. Is that really her name? Couldn’t be. It sounded like Dowager when the Principal introduced her. But she’s hardly a dowager, is she, smiling side-on to us like that, seated at the piano in a tight skirt and white blouse looking barely old enough to be either married or fully qualified to smile side-on at us from a piano. What charm she brings to a melody so banal it can only have been composed to drive people mad. Surely it was not her choice. If you are not back by the end of this, I may have to seek her out. Perhaps if there were teachers here like her in your day, this seat beside me might be warmly occupied instead of conspicuously empty.

  A small world after all? Perhaps, but after all what? After all the sanctimonious middle-class fund-raising and collegial and national flag-waving in all the speech nights ever orchestrated? Was it Dorothy Parker you were paraphrasing when, in describing your school milieu, you said that if all the girls that ever went to this school were laid end to end you would not be a bit surprised? But they surprised you once, didn’t they? It began with an invitation not received, then another and another. For a bright and capable girl, pretty and later beautiful and famously coordinated, there was no excuse for not being selected by your peers for sporting teams and pubescent pyramids formed for the purpose of commemorating one or other school camp in photos ready-made for the back of a drawer. You found yourself, without warning, out of season.

  You were the last to know your father had lost his money and these young women, ribbons in their hair and hearts so full of spring, already knew enough to know that your newfound affliction warranted, at the very least, profound abandonment. So why do you do this to yourself? Why do you visit this place pretending that it holds something for you, something pure and joyous? And why have you dragged me here only to abandon me?

  But that is not it, is it? That’s not all of it. I don’t think you have ever realized that what is left out forms part of the story. You don’t need these people, and even then only part of you thought that you did, the part that was left out. How is it that I came to know so much of what went on all those days ago inside these sorrowful gates? I have listened, put things together and hung on to them and you didn’t notice this because you were too busy either pretending these stories were meant to be funny or else that they were in lieu of what you had meant to say while undressing for bed or leafi
ng through a street directory in the front passenger seat. Just when you thought I suspected the value in pursuing something, you would pull us both up short: “There is probably more than one way of getting there,” you might say, “but why are they always digging up the road I need?”

  I am not so dull as to draw conclusions about you from the fact that at fifteen or so, in extremis, you turned state’s evidence, sending scores of young women to their detention for smoking. And it is funny that you convinced an influential echelon and perhaps even a few teachers that your archrival was infected with a highly contagious disease so rare that no one could be sure of its name. Eventually reaching a new equilibrium, you survived and then prospered academically. I know all of this, if it matters to you. But now you have felt the need to touch the iron gates again and breathe deep the disinfectant that stained your youth. We never completely lose our childhood appetites; we just add to them and, in doing so, they become a little less conspicuous. After a half life of apparent conscientiousness, are you finally indulging a taste for truancy? Don’t do this to me, not now, when I have something to tell you.

  Your presence at the lift well was no coincidence. We soon learned that you worked on our floor, and since our floor was one of five the company leased in their entirety, you had to be working for the company. This was somehow reassuring, perhaps because you were so unlike the rest of us. For a start, you seemed unafraid. I had been unafraid for some time, too, but with you it was different. You were efficiently unafraid. There was no mindlessness or sycophancy in your efficiency either. It was as though you were working for yourself. Head Office was not even in your firmament. This is the kind of state most of us had hoped for, years ago when we started our working lives.

  When you begin, you always think that having done everything right as a child, adolescent, secondary and then tertiary student, you’re going to be the one that success will snuggle up to while you are busy, that it will grab hold of your leg and never want to be without you. We know of course that very few among us will achieve this but, at least initially, we also seem to just know that we will be among the few. We will be the ones. Someone directly above us might be intractable; we hadn’t planned for this, but we can handle it. In fact, as we walk down the carpeted passageway, the perfect generator of static electricity, to present our work to this person, we begin to imagine our colleagues in the tea room expressing amazement, admiration, envy, that only we seem to be able to handle him or her. “It’s just a matter of reading them,” we say nonchalantly, knowing this skill is innate and cannot be taught. And if, in addition, we possess those skills that can be taught, well, there will be no stopping us.

  But there is always stopping us. Whether it is the temperament of the direct superior which we thought we had handled but had not; the office politics of which we were unaware; sexual politics, be it harassment or inopportune indifference; time-honored racism, religious animosity, paranoia, a hungover economy, our personal appearance or the perception that we were not really like them after all, the walls we streamed past first thing on those first mornings turn into barriers, broken only where necessary to allow the passage of air. So, after a while, we just hang on and do not bother ourselves too much about success.

  My figures had been down and I had just about given up on rising any further within the company. In fact, it is not too dramatic to say I was working on surviving, just hanging on. My marriage had ended not with a bang but with a Wiltshire, the now famous last argument concerning specifically a putative need for steak knives, and touching more generally on consumerism and various forms of hunger. By the time you appeared I was no longer living my life properly and was in grave danger of having it taken off me. When I first saw you something awoke within me, an inexplicable nervous pain which got me to work early. We soon learned that you were married but that did not bother me. I did not anticipate any kind of outside relationship with you. In my prime you would have been out of my league, and I had been relegated a number of times by then. It really would have been sufficient just to watch you around the office, to be your friend within it and to maybe start to rehabilitate myself. I was droll around you but not unhelpful. Your suggestions at the section breakfast meetings did not evoke my usual contempt. Across the conference table I would detect, I thought, a swift glance of inquiry from you, perhaps of apology. Had I approved of what you said? Had I detected that it was a performance? You can fool many of the people all the time.

  But what do you call this performance tonight, this disappearing act, and what is it in aid of? Young Mrs. Dowager has long since vacated the stage, leaving behind a feast of expectation and unanswered questions; what is it about Mr. Dowager, whoever he is, that this musical patron saint of Year Seven will do no more than sit side-on at the piano for anyone but him? So certain am I that I will not forget the image of her in that white blouse that I feel I must have seen it before. Perhaps you have one like it? It is a small world after all.

  The Principal is back onstage. Once he was a teacher, now an MC always with an eye to the sponsor. Soon he could have his own show. Or is this his own show? There is a great turnout tonight. In this he is completely correct. Looking like he is out of the same mold as your sister’s husband, the astronaut, the Principal invites us to sing along with whatever is coming up next. Perhaps it is your niece? Your brother-in-law stirs. The Principal is working the auditorium. He will sing along. One can only hope he relinquishes the microphone before this happens. “Just doing his job,” you would say, far more accepting than I of people making fools of themselves for money. But he has to work particularly hard tonight. There is disquiet among the faithful. Ten days ago a young girl was dragged to the bushes, still within the grounds, and raped. There is nothing reassuring about the police caravan set up by the side of the front gate. Notwithstanding that it has been on the news, in the papers, and that all the parents know about it, the police caravan serves to remind everyone how helpless we all are. The Principal has the mike in both hands. He is panicking. All together, now!

  Somewhere at this moment, while the young girl, who has not returned to school, plays jacks on the end of her bed with a family friend she calls “Auntie,” the man who did this, who took away her nights for years to come, is doing something else. It is too easy for us to picture him as we would like to paint him. Perhaps he is reading the newspaper, and if he is not, one day he will, as we do, and something will appall him. Now we say he is demented, sick. The trick is to call it that before the screams, the nightmares and the shivering. But we never do because we are too busy buying real estate from him, playing golf with him, wishing him a happy anniversary or coming to him for a personal loan. What is going on inside the caravan while I am sitting here? Police are on the lookout for a man who looks like everyone.

  They are just doing their job. I know. I can hear the way you would say it, such a convenient expression. It is redolent of long suffering, but this, I have learnt, is not your forte, not when you are just doing your job. I am angry. You have been gone too long for comfort. Should I say something to your sister? I was not always angry, and even now, sitting here like an idiot, embarrassed, bored, I know I will not always be angry. I have something to tell you.

  It was not so long after you came that it seemed, just for a moment, that I had reached a turning point. You had reached it for me, just by being there the way you were. You were an affirmation of life, and the weight of the last few years felt as if it had lifted. Everything seemed somehow possible again. And this was before we became—what have we become?—involved. You wore a silk scarf around your neck. It had colors that had never been seen before in this building. Your voice, confident but friendly: it was a pleasure to hear it no matter who you were talking to or what you were saying. It suggested, in the way you spoke to a secretary or someone from Accounts, that perhaps I would be all right. The prospect of lunch with you infused in me a kind of golden exuberance. Your interest, even your professional interest in me, reminded me of
what I had wanted, hoped for, when I had started with the company. It was almost as though I respected them more for your association with them or rather their association with you.

  Why did I start with them? Why do any of us choose one company over another as an employer? The money? At the beginning they all offer more or less the same, and no one knows how it will go after that. I guess it is often not so much your prospects at a particular firm, because these are essentially unknowable, but whether people will think you have done well to get the job there, that determines your choice. That was largely it in my case. It was really the prestige. They gave good letterhead.

  But you know what can happen. You work their hours and sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually you can’t tell how it is going so you give it just a bit longer. You set yourself a deadline to be somewhere or something by a certain time but you don’t tell anyone, so you can shift the parameters and no one knows whether you have failed. If they throw more money at you, you upgrade your car and get a bigger mortgage. That’s how they keep you. You are not the same person anymore. Immaculately dressed over a skin irritation and chronically time deprived, you have jettisoned all those interests you talked about at your first interview all those years ago. You have dead-lines to meet or budgets to fulfill and you’re not going anywhere, unless or until you find yourself microeconomically reformed and slumped catatonic in the ergonomically designed chair of some employment consultant talking about the possibility of taking up painting again. Until then you are getting in earlier and leaving later, never finding the time to stop and smell the Prozac.