thing called The House. From what I remember. All bony hands on banisters.
—Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
—Menzel?
—What?
—Closely Observed Trains?
—What?
—Not that one obviously. He had another one. Powerful. Powerful film-maker. Must get it on DVD actually – Trains. Lovely film. The boy in the bath, all that. There.
Just as he finished whatever it was that he was doing on his phone, and I was about to give out to him for doing it, there was a sudden cloudburst outside. I’m not sure if there was thunder. But a wave of darkness raced through the café, bringing hush and hesitation, and then the rain hit the ground like debris. The two of us watched as people ran for cover, some of them screeching between laughter and alarm, a couple of them coming into the café for shelter, others making it across the road to a second-hand record shop. The rain was torrential. It came down so hard that after a couple of minutes we could no longer see the other side of the street. We stared out at what I can’t really call rain at all. We stared out at falling water, as if we had been transported to some jungle and were crouched in a cave behind a waterfall, mute in fear and ignorance, cold little apes in the crevice. The café was becalmed. There was no noise of voices. The radio had disappeared. There was no clatter of dishes or cutlery or cooking, no ring of the register, no tunes from phones, no movement. Only the hysterical drumming of the rain, and the gathering rattle of running water. We stared and waited, as if there was a chance that this time, this time, it might not stop. Or this time, this time, it might presage something worse. The darkness covered us, and I was afraid. It was hard in the noisy gloom to pick out Michael sitting beside me. His telephone too went dark, its little lights vanishing in his hand. On my face I could feel a kind of paralysis, as if I had neglected to blink, or breathe. I thought that it would not stop. I thought that it would never stop, not now. But it did. After just a couple of minutes. The light returned. The water became rain again. And then the rain slowly ceased.
Michael broke the human silence with his laugh. He stopped, made a wide-eyed face of mock fear and laughed again. In the rest of the café, people relaxed. Others laughed too, some shook their heads, rolled their eyes, muttered. Conversations resumed, the hubbub rose unaltered.
Then a dog appeared, walking down the centre of the road; a large, dark dog that moved with a great swagger, slowly – almost, it seemed to me, in slow motion – right down the middle of the sodden roadway, as if it was in charge here. I’m not sure anyone else noticed. Michael was fiddling again with his phone. The dog’s big head bounced gently, its powerful shoulders rolled and rippled and its tongue seemed to glisten and ooze over its pointed teeth like a bag of blood. It glanced this way and that with huge cloudy eyes, and paused, and went on, and looked, as it passed, directly into the café – directly, it seemed, at me – registering my stare, taking note of me, its hard, intelligent mind considering and then dismissing me. It went from view. A huge, loathsome dog, a deep shadow in the damp sunlight, uncollared, unkept. Dry as a bone.
I took a sip of my very cold tea.
I can’t remember anything else about lunch with Michael. We talked about Rachel. We talked about a building haunted by another building. We watched the rain. I saw a dog. I think Michael enjoyed meeting me. Perhaps I was a little quieter than usual. I had the mouse on my mind, still. And I was a little depressed by the news of Rachel’s trip to Poland. And at the end, after the rain and the dog, I was uneasy, a little nervous. I don’t really like dogs. But I think Michael had a good enough time talking with me.
It is often impossible, however, to know very much about Michael. He is rather opaque.
The mouse’s corpse was washed away by the rain, I suppose. All the gutters were raging when I left the café. But a few streets away they were calmer, and when I got to the place where I’d seen the mouse, the ground was almost dry. I don’t know if that meant that the rain had been very localised or that the sun was very hot. It didn’t feel very hot.
I was feeling, by this time, if I’m honest, a little perplexed. I know that when I list the things that happened that day, they don’t seem to amount to very much. And they don’t. But nevertheless, I was, even by the time I left Michael after lunch, feeling somewhat rattled – on edge. Stress had crept into me. Even stepping out of the café I moved very slowly, nervously, afraid that the dog might still be around. So much so that I think Michael had to nudge me in the back to get me into the street. I think it was mostly the dog. The rain and the dog. They had, both of them, unsettled me slightly, but I wasn’t sure why, and maybe I was simply, unconsciously, the victim of various automatic associations that had no relevance to me personally. Michael was going to the left, and it made sense for me to go to the left as well, as there was a bus stop in that direction from where I could catch a bus home. But it was also the way the dog had gone. I can’t remember what I told Michael now – that I wanted to look in some shops or something – but I made an excuse, said my goodbyes and walked instead to the right.
I wonder now why I didn’t tell Michael about the mouse. Perhaps because I knew that he’d have wanted to look at the photographs stored on my camera, and that he would have had some wry way of making the whole thing seem a lot less strange, a lot more unremarkable. He would have been quick to puncture what would have seemed to him a typically inflated sense of significance and drama which I had attached, not for the first time, to something banal. I regret it now. Because that is probably exactly what I needed just then, and it may have proved useful later on. Delete the photographs if they bother you. Forget all about it. Put it out of your mind. But of course, as you know, I kept it to myself. Which is typical and predictable. But I shouldn’t make the mistake now of believing that my failure to talk to Michael – and the consequent failure to be convinced of the insignificance of the mouse – was in itself significant. There’s no point is replacing the ridiculous Oh my God a dead mouse with the equally ridiculous Oh my God I didn’t tell Michael about the dead mouse.
In any case, I have no way of knowing that telling Michael would have made any difference anyway. He might have had the same reaction as me. He might have been moved by the same odd mechanism and been knocked off balance – reinforcing my sense of peculiarity and low-level but elaborate menace. I was stuck with my weird mouse reaction. Nothing had defused it. And if you add to it my reawakened worries for Rachel and the slightly disconcerting talk of building ghosts (though, to be honest, Michael’s story hadn’t really made its full impact on me at that point), plus the rather biblical rain and the demon dog, then I think it’s fair to say that I had a head full of negative thoughts. I felt a little queasy.
I decided to go for a swim.
I took a bus home, dropped off my bag (I left it on a chair in the kitchen), changed out of my shoes into some trainers, picked up my swimming things, and walked to the quiet end of our street and through the park to the sports centre. It’s a brand new centre, and the local council has spent a lot of money on it, but it has been very badly designed, or perhaps very badly built (Michael suggests a little of both) and already it looks somewhat dilapidated. Most days when I go, some part of the changing rooms, or the reception, or the gym, is inevitably cordoned off – due to leaks or problems with ceiling tiles falling down or the floor buckling or otherwise giving way. One day I was in the communal shower area when a large tile fell from the wall, coming away as neatly as if it had been pushed out from the other side, and it shattered on the floor in a cloud of dust and fragments. Luckily, no one had been standing close to it at the time. Despite all these problems,
