already said. If you’d prefer us to make it some other time, we will.’
‘I’m looking forward to seeing you.’
‘It’s been ages.’
He dictates the address again. He can hear a pencil writing it down.
They won’t try to reconstruct how it happened that two men who virtually lived together for years came to spend so long not seeing each other. If anyone should ask they’ll put it down to the distance, to being busy. There was a more definitive breaking point, however, Alphonse recalls. Although he can’t any longer bring to mind the precise details, he believes it happened in the underground passageways of a busy railway station, an ugly incident that would happily have remained as inconspicuous as it was banal. There in the station Amadou asked him for a loan, enough to cover lunch and a ticket, and he, Alphonse, refused, without explaining but convinced that it happened too often, that he kept lending people money when he didn’t have any himself, suddenly bitter about the many times he hadn’t got back what he gave. He was aware at once how much his refusal was resented, saw Amadou’s thin body bend, and afterwards he realized that Amadou didn’t belong in those statistics, that he’d made a mistake. After that day they still walked for a while at each other’s side, but both with a sharp stone in one shoe. The distance and being busy were just convenient excuses.
He’s glad that his friend has restored contact, and that he’ll soon see him again. Whether he’s missed him he can’t say for sure. Still, there are people he can’t simply dismiss as belonging to the past. Cat thinks that’s nonsense. If you haven’t seen someone for years, then it’s clear, according to her, that you don’t regard that person as important enough, either that or you’re not important enough to them. In their telephone conversation later that evening she calls the upcoming visit of Amadou and his girlfriend ‘strange’. She warns of disappointments, because it would be a fairly big coincidence if they’d ‘changed in the same way’. Aside from that, she thinks it’s a good idea.
That he thinks so too doesn’t tally with his hesitation about ringing back and making firm arrangements with Amadou. Sometimes he wonders if he likes his job so much because the contacts are as fleeting as they are intense. He listens, allows people to share, then leaves, as if they’d met while travelling.
In search of frozen soup his eye falls on the box containing Shaka Duran. He opens it and looks in. When he stands the figure upright, it sucks his finger tight to its ice-cold lips for a moment.
As he spoons his soup, he reads the newspaper. Dyslexia means he has to haul the letters of every word, more slowly than he’d like, into their places. This time the exhaustion induced by the struggle is outweighed by his interest in the article. One of the leaders of the largest party calls herself fundamentally happy. That touches him. He’s never felt any connection with the woman, but he has secretly called himself that too, not long ago either: fundamentally happy. Things in common, connections he’s not seen before, are less a source of confusion than of summery hope. He had a similar feeling on reading an article about the love letters an extreme right-wing politician wrote to his late mistress. ‘Soyons heureux, vivons cachés,’ the man told her in one of them: ‘Let’s be happy, hidden away.’ The French saying, which slipped out of a Flemish nationalist in a moment of passion, has often passed through Alphonse’s mind. It would have different resonances for Cat. Now that they’ve been living here for almost a year it turns out the advantages of isolation escape her. In any case she’d find it a less than credible slogan for Alphonse, a man who devotes so much time and attention to complete strangers. In the context of the extreme right, that ‘vivons cachés’ carries a hint of a back turned, a slammed door followed by crossed arms, a ‘not in my backyard!’ and a fist shaken at whoever dares walk past the window. But inside that house are the man and his sweetheart. For a moment Alphonse clearly sees the connection, a brightening bundle of immaterial threads between the most diverse people who—perhaps only sporadically, perhaps only now—find their fundamental happiness in isolation: a child at play, Lego-brick imprints on its bottom, mouth slightly open; an elderly Russian lady murmuring in front of an icon in a St Petersburg church; the politician, dreaming during a powernap, alone and united with the woman he misses; a Chilean singer disappearing into her song, sitting on her bed, in front of a mirror; and he himself, here, moved, close to tears. Dozens, thousands of others are on the point of taking shape, of soaring up, when the feeling disappears into the background just as abruptly, giving way to embarrassment, a dry cough, the sound of the dishwasher, his new habit of looking through the window to the far side of the street to check that no fresh posters have gone up. He finishes his soup. Is fundamental happiness a conceit, an illusion? Can it be taken away?
-
26
Sieglinde is about to step into her car when he slams shut the door to his van. Lana is already in the passenger seat and she waves to him over her shoulder, her face friendly in the rear-view mirror. After a furtive glance at her daughter and the windows of her house, Sieglinde makes a quick telephoning gesture with her thumb and little finger. He assumes she’ll call him. Five months, he thinks. Does her daughter know?
‘Door’s open,’ she calls.
Inside he finds Ronny, over a bowl of swollen Honey Loops. He’s reading a stapled wad of papers, which he slides into a leather briefcase when Alphonse walks into the room. His head jerks to one side a few times, a tic Alphonse hasn’t noticed before.
‘What’s he eating now, you’re thinking.’ Ronny jabs his spoon at his breakfast. The question had not occurred to Alphonse. ‘My daughter left them. I just hope it’s not anorexia. And I can’t throw anything away.’ Again those little jerks of the head. Now he’s put his hand over his ear like a shell and is moaning plaintively.
Don’t ask, thinks Alphonse. It’ll probably come of its own accord.
Which it does. ‘Yesterday I was working in the garden and I think something flew into my ear. Or crawled.’ He’s started using his hand as a sink plunger. ‘I’ve got to get it out.’
Insects in bodily orifices: a wasp sting in a classmate’s mouth, thirty years ago, rushed to hospital; a fly in Cat’s nose in a restaurant, making one eye fill with tears and he thinking it was emotion; a beetle in his own ear, on his last trip to Senegal.
‘It’s buzzing. Would you have a look?’
He consents, having expected to be asked.
Ronny goes over to stand by the window. ‘In the light.’
Alphonse cautiously steps into the man’s personal space, the territory of pores, hair roots, and vulnerability that deters him initially in anyone other than Cat, even though it somehow fascinates him at the same time. He concentrates on the surprisingly small, pink ear, pulling gently at the earlobe to get a slightly better view of the auditory canal.
‘Can you see it?’ asks Ronny, one alarmed eye up close, the iris in the corner.
The inside of the ear remains dark.
‘I can’t see anything, Mr … ’
‘Oh, just call me Ronny. I’ve got a torch. Wait.’
Ronny leaves him behind at the window, rummages in one of the kitchen drawers and comes back with a tube-shaped lamp.
‘I really can’t see anything. It might be a hair or something.’
‘But it’s buzzing! And it’s rubbing its legs together, listen!’
On
