Swallowing the Sun Read online

  There is a new calmness now as he listens to the guest speaker’s address and he even nods his head as she talks about the future, about opportunity, about the things that are important. He even smiles at her jokes – the little digs at men, the giving of the future to women – and does his best to concentrate. The splash of children dropping their pennies into the water, the press of their faces against the cases where the past is stored, safe and perfect. Where everything is explained. His mother’s face flitting like a ghost behind the glass. It feels as if the future is being given to Rachel, given with the stars. She is a good girl. Why should she choose to forget them? He has a photograph of her on the inside of his locker at work. It’s always been his favourite. She’s about four years old and wearing a blue dress covered with white, yellow-centred flowers. She has no shoes on her feet and she’s holding a small camera to her eye. But the camera is the wrong way round – she’s looking through the lens and he likes to think of the light of the world flowing into that eye. All the light of the world. Light and the future, more than he’s ever known. More than he could ever grasp for himself.

  The choir are finishing the afternoon and they’re singing ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles. He doesn’t understand why they’ve picked it, but at least it’s something he knows and Alison smiles at him as she sings quietly along. The voices are soft and whispery like the wind through grass. He thinks that no one could ever believe in yesterday, no one could ever hold it to their heart like a bird throbbing between the hands. There is only the future now. Only the future, so why now does he think of Takabuti, her mummy’s face black and wizened like a walnut as she sleeps in her coffin? Children hunch over the glass – it’s the exhibit they always want to see, the one they want to touch, the one by which they want to be frightened. On the lid is a prayer asking good fortune from the Sun God, asking for good burial and on the breast of her coffin there is a goddess depicted as a beautiful young woman kneeling with outstretched wings. The goddess of the skies who wears the sun in her hair.

  *

  It isn’t the inner circle of hell. Thankfully, at seventeen her birthday requires a greater degree of sophistication than McDonald’s and so she has selected Pizza Hut. He’s not unhappy with the choice and if he has to eat somewhere other than in his own home, then he thinks there are worse places and he almost feels relaxed in the booth they share. But while they are busy with their birthday chatter, he watches a woman at the salad bar as she pulls her baggy sweatshirt over the hump of her behind in a counter balance to the rising pyramid of food in her bowl. There is an expertise in her movements – the deft handling of the tongs as she builds the textured layers. The sides of this pyramid are a structure of red and green peppers, softened and held in place by a smear of cheese and coleslaw. Higher still. He decides it is the payment of money that precludes shame, thinks that everything in the salad bar should be free so people might be spared this humiliation. Alison is asking what he thinks of his pizza and he mumbles a vague reply. Rachel and Tom are squabbling over who has eaten more than their share of the savoury fries.

  He can’t take his eyes away. She has paused for a reassessment of possibilities, for a final perusal of the options. He remembers once seeing a woman putting salad in her ashtray, rather than pay for a bowl. But this one’s going higher. He sees no limit to what she thinks is her need, her entitlement through payment, and then he feels embarrassment for her and looks about in the hope that some loved one might come and put his arm round her and shepherd her back to the privacy of their table.

  ‘Are you going to have a sweet, Martin?’ Alison asks.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’ The thought of eating more food that he doesn’t need places his nose in the communal pig trough, makes him share the world’s greed.

  ‘Go on, have something, it’ll not kill you,’ she says. ‘Spoil yourself.’

  ‘Come on, Dad, you have to have something special – it’s my birthday tea,’ Rachel pleads, her eyes fluttering, her face contorted in her favourite parody of childhood. She often uses it now, mostly when she’s asking for something – money, permission to go somewhere, to stay out late. The expression says that she is an adult but to please, to get what she wants, she will impersonate a child. But every time she does it, it only serves to remind him that she is no longer a child and when he says yes, it is because he wants her to stop the act. So he nods and picks some ice-cream extravaganza whose name it embarrasses him even to say.

  Alison tries to catch the waitress’s eye and instinctively starts to stack the plates as if she’s clearing the kitchen table at home. The woman at the salad bar has finished now and turning away, carries the trembling edifice in front of her chest like a wobbling third breast. He looks at her face and it’s devoid of any trace of shame. There is only the grim concentration of a competitor in a big race. He doesn’t want Rachel to be seventeen and he doesn’t understand but somehow it’s this woman’s fault for taking too much, for leaving nothing for anyone else. And it’s the way time takes away something he wants to hold on to and the woman falters a little and maybe everything’s going to spill all over the floor. He’s praying to God it doesn’t spill and his hand grips the end of the table. Then she’s passed and he hates her a little.

  Tom picks some morsel off the stacked plates and Rachel tells him off and the moment gets lost in the squabble. ‘Spoil yourself’, the words linger corrosively in his mind and he looks at Alison as she pacifies and clucks at her children and wonders how she doesn’t know, and for one terrible moment he thinks of telling her as soon as they get home.

  ‘Would you like to order dessert?’ the waitress asks and he stares ahead as if she’s not really there and waits for Alison to speak. But she starts to ask them if they enjoyed their meal, if everything was all right for them, and he has to nod slightly, wondering why they have to endure these little rituals, these impersonations of the personal. The girl is pretty, even his brief glance reveals that. Perhaps only a couple of years older than Rachel. A student probably, trying to make a bit of money to help her pay her way. And she is too hot and so softly blows the stray strand of hair that has slipped on to her brow. The way a child might do. It lifts lightly, then falls back to its original place. He tries not to look at her as Alison gives the order.

  Another two years and Rachel will be in university and that’s going to cost a packet and Alison will be at him again about going for promotion, or getting a different job. The future fault-lines of argument and counter-argument splay out in predictable patterns. He’s safe where he is – he’s not giving that up. He’ll do extra hours, grab whatever overtime comes his way and there’s bound to be grants. But he’s staying where he is. Staying for ever. She might even go to Oxbridge. He decides to look it up on the map, see exactly where it is, how you’d get there. And he thinks again of the stars, allows himself to suggest that despite what he felt at the start, whatever way they’re looked at, a part, even some thin little sliver of them has to belong to him. And Alison. These things don’t fall out of the air. Whether it’s genes or even just encouragement, somewhere there has to be a part of him in it all.

  The waitress returns with exotic ice creams and as she sets them on the table he wants to whisper to her about the stars. He lowers his head in embarrassment, ponders the best way to tackle the ice cream, then glances about to check if anyone is watching him.

  ‘Martin, now might be a good time,’ Alison says and for a second he’s confused but then remembers the small package in his pocket.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better in the car on the way home?’ he asks.

  ‘No Martin, now would be better,’ she insists and so with the back of his hand he wipes away any ice cream there might be on his mouth and shuffles the package across the table to his daughter. ‘Martin!’ Alison hisses at him, her eyes wide with exasperation.

  ‘Happy birthday, Rachel,’ he says softly. She scrunches off the paper without an attempt at sophistication and her pleasure at the mobile phone
is all on the surface and unfiltered by any sense of teen cool. It’s what she’s wanted, it’s what she’s been asking for and for some reason they’ve made her wait. It’s red and shiny and she waves it in the air as if that’s how signals are picked up.

  ‘Can I get one for my birthday?’ Tom asks, and in the tone of his voice is the message that to be denied would constitute an inequality of treatment. It is a tone his parents increasingly recognise as the inevitable consequence of having a sister whose achievements so constantly eclipse his own.

  ‘Who would you ring on a mobile phone, Tom?’ he asks and Alison and Rachel smile, despite themselves. He thinks it is an unkind thing to ask but something makes him do it to his son who has no friends except the family computer, and the characters who run and jump across the screen, who fire their lasers at the touch of his fingers. It is his glasses he touches now with the tip of his finger, adding a whorled print to the existing smear.

  ‘There’s lots of people I could ring,’ he asserts.

  ‘Who, Tom?’ he persists.

  ‘Martin, leave him alone,’ Alison says as Rachel puts her arm round her brother in a gushing display of mock sympathy. ‘Rachel’s older than you, Tom. She had to wait. But maybe if you get a better set of exam results at the end of third year, we might think of it.’

  Tom blinks his eyes and shrugs off his sister’s teasing arm. ‘That’s not fair,’ he says, and the words make him sound smaller and younger than the thirteen-year-old boy who’s puddled into overweight. ‘That’s not fair,’ he repeats, pointing the long spoon at them over the top of his glass. There is a little furrow of white on the top of his lip and he uses his nose to snuffle his glasses back on to the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Hello, is that the loony bin?’ Rachel asks into her phone. ‘I’ve got a younger brother here who’s taking a mad psycho. He’s starting to foam at the mouth, can you come and take him away?’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Tom says, wiping his mouth and digging the spoon into the bottom of the glass to spear the last remnants. ‘Very funny – not.’

  ‘I think Tom should get a phone,’ Rachel says, starting to read the instruction leaflet. ‘He could use it to phone Esther Rantzen on Childline, tell them all his problems. How badly everyone treats him.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Alison says. ‘No one treats Tom badly. Don’t be horrible to him, Rachel. Keep working hard and we’ll see about a phone. But I’ll tell you one thing – it’s up to you both to pay for your calls. Your dad and I aren’t made of money so you needn’t expect us to subsidise your conversations.’ She leans across the table and uses a napkin to wipe away some of what her son has missed on his lip.

  ‘So am I going to get one?’ Tom says, screwing his eyes closed at his mother’s touch.

  ‘We’ll see, we’ll see. I’m not saying any more than that.’

  The answer appears to mollify him and smirking at his sister, he licks the spoon clean. Now they think they’ve finished. They’re getting ready to go but the waitress is coming back towards them and she’s carrying a little cake with sparkly candles. He knows nothing about this, Alison must have arranged it without telling him. ‘Happy birthday,’ the waitress says, carefully setting it on the table and passing each of them a side plate and fork. ‘How embarrassing!’ Rachel says, but he can see she’s pleased. ‘Blame your mother,’ he says and then Alison gets her to blow out the candles and make a wish. He wonders what she wishes for at seventeen but knows that to disclose it would be to destroy the chances of it coming true. He thinks of all the other birthdays, the blowing out of the candles. All the wishes. What were they for? For a bicycle, a puppy, the latest fad? For a front tooth to replace the gappy smile? What does she wish for now at this moment, at seventeen? For the future? For Oxford and Cambridge? For more stars? For love? He watches the determination on her face as her breath sweeps round the candles, the same determination that has marked everything she’s ever done. From first steps, to riding a bike, to learning to swim, to school, to everything. Her eyes are wide and blue. Or are they grey? He can’t be sure. Everything is changing. She’s growing older. She’ll probably never do this ever again. It’s probably her very last wish. Her hand brushes back her blonde hair from her face. They’re blue, they must be blue.

  ‘What did you wish for?’ Tom asks.

  ‘She can’t say,’ Alison says, ‘or it won’t come true.’

  Rachel suddenly pulls her hair into pigtails and makes a pantomime, pretty girl face.

  ‘Sugar and spice and puppy dog tails,’ she lisps.

  ‘Should have been for a better face,’ Tom answers, smiling at his own joke.

  ‘Sticks and stones,’ she says and gives her brother a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Yuck!’ he says, scraping his cheek clean, then elaborately flicking the invisible contagion from his fingers.

  There is a little thread of blue vein on her eyelid, so light you might not even notice that it’s there. ‘Be nice to your sister on her birthday,’ he says.

  ‘She’s never nice to me.’

  ‘He doesn’t know how to be nice,’ Rachel says, picking at a piece of icing with her fingers.

  ‘You should be nice to her,’ Alison tells him, ‘in a couple of years she’ll be going away to university and then it’ll be too late.’

  ‘Can I have her room when she’s gone?’ he asks.

  ‘No you can’t, weevil,’ Rachel insists and for the first time he thinks she’s serious. ‘I’ll still be coming home for holidays and things, so keep your mitts off. Stay in your own cave, your little hidey-hole, your Stygian gloom.’ The light washes against the smear of his lens and bleaches out his eyes as he turns his head.

  ‘Well, when you’re away, who’s to stop me?’

  ‘Tell him, Dad, tell him he can’t,’ she says, appealing to his authority in a way she hasn’t done in a long time.

  ‘It’s Rachel’s room, she’ll be coming back to it, so no one’s moving anywhere,’ he says, pleased to see Alison nodding her head in support. But he knows that Tom thinks he’s found a weak spot in his otherwise infallible sister so he expects to hear the issue used again and as the waitress places what’s left of the cake in a box for them to take home, he seems almost happy.

  Afterwards in the car they feel like a family. Tom sits in the front with him and it feels like the old days when they used to do things together, go places. He takes the long way home. He doesn’t want to get there. Alison is happy: he watches her in the mirror as she squeezes against Rachel and they gossip and giggle like girls in the same gang. How could he ever tell her? Tom slumps down in the seat so that it looks as if his spine is impossibly curved. He’s opening the top button on his trousers – he’s put on weight again. There is a faint cheesy smell from him and it seems to stir and seep from his trainers as he leans forward to put on the radio. As the sound of garage fills the car he shakes his head at his son and pushes in his own cassette. It’s Billie Holiday. His children groan but he insists he’s not listening to what he calls ‘that rubbish’ and ignores the rising wave of their complaint. Later on he will look in the dictionary he keeps in his locker at work, try to find out what a Stygian gloom is.

  ‘You belong in a museum, Dad,’ Rachel says and everyone, including Tom, smiles. It’s the family’s favourite joke.

  *

  He spends his life looking at people and things. Sometimes he walks about a little, sometimes he checks things – dials, temperatures, doors; things like that. He feels comfortable with the little rituals, the routines that have to be followed. They rotate the areas for which they are responsible – it’s to prevent boredom, to keep them on their toes, but he’s never bored, can’t understand those who are. Although he has his favourites, his dislikes also, he’s glad they do that. The whole of the museum is open to him and he feels as if he shares ownership of everything it contains. He loves the very building, its smells and surfaces, the way there is an inner catacomb of corridors and rooms that the public never get to see,
the way the outer galleries fit perfectly over this inner body like a tailored suit. He knows the doors, the pathways that link the two worlds, moves effortlessly and quietly between the two.

  He watches the visitors, too. They change – with the weather, the day of the week, the time of year. He watches them but they don’t see him. It’s as if he watches them from behind the protection of a glass and even when their eyes rest on him it’s only for a second and then they move on. He likes to stand still, become part of the building. He likes to be invisible. And on those rare occasions he’s called on to speak it’s no more than to give a direction to the toilets or the café, or point out the nearest exit. He takes a detailed interest in everything he has to watch over, knows each exhibit with an intimacy that is prompted by respect and mostly with affection. But it’s driven also by self-interest because now he understands the value of knowledge and so he stores it all away as an investment that will one day pay a dividend, and just maybe that dividend will be to know enough things to stay within the orbit of his daughter. Out on the rim perhaps, out on the very edge – it doesn’t matter how far away, so long as he’s there and not blown by the currents of time and space into another world that’s coloured and shaped by shame or ignorance. So as he walks he reads the labels, the explanations, tries to commit them to his memory, repeating learned phrases like a catechism.

  It irritates him to see those of his colleagues who parade their indifference, or even disdain, for what is all around them, and thinks they don’t have the vocation. Because he considers it to be a vocation – preserving the best things of the past, keeping them safe for the future. Safe for people to look at. He believes, too, that looking is what a museum should be based on – looking and learning. There used to be a children’s magazine called Look and Learn but it belonged in the distant world of encyclopaedias and train sets, of games like Monopoly and Scalextric. But there’s still time to learn, to make up for what was missed in the past.