My Life and the Sea: chapter 1

Yesterday I started another story, this time a short novella. I don’t really intend to finish it, but I’ll try to post a few more chapters over the next week or so.

Chapter 1. My Debut

I was born on the sea, in the teeth of a storm. That’s where all the trouble started, at least that’s what my mother used to say. She was a fierce stern-faced woman who read a lot of books and grew the hair in her armpits and never owned a bra in all her life. One night she was riding the ferry back to the island – she’d been at another meeting on the mainland, plotting to bring down the System – when a storm blew in, one of those wild ones that swell the sea and send the boat pitching so hard that the side railing looms beneath you like the edge of a cliff, and you know at any moment you could slip directly from your seat into the abyss. When I call it a ferry, you mustn’t think of one of these newer types, a luxury vessel with padded seats and a roof and glass windows – no fancy catamaran for my mother. Instead you must picture a charming, cheerful old rustbucket named Paluma, painted orange once upon a time but now the colour of old nails, cruising at eight knots while the six or seven passengers perch on plastic chairs bolted to the deck, with nothing between them and the wrath of God but a single low handrail and a strip of canvas overhead for shade. That was the noble vessel that pitched so wildly on the waves that night, while the captain wrestled with the wheel and the passengers clung to their seats for dear life, looking out with horror at the great black rolling hills each time the lightning lit the sea as bright as day.

Then halfway to the island, my mother went down on the floor and gave a startled cry that you could hear even above the howling tempest, and that was when I made my grand debut, slipping out onto the wet wooden planks, the warm amniotic fluids mingling with the cold white spray of the sea that swept the deck. Thank God for umbilical cords or I would have shot overboard in an instant, but as the ferry pitched me towards the starboard railing my mother caught me midair, clutching my slippery little self under one arm the way Americans hold the football as they’re running flat-out down the field. Then she put me on the breast and wrapped her knees around the chair legs, securing us both to the deck. That is how we made our safe passage home to the island, my white-faced mother sliding wetly side to side across the deck, the other passengers crossing themselves and vomiting and looking on in disbelief, the captain’s one good eye wild with panic, and me grinning from ear to ear, happy as a lark, slurping my mother’s milk and farting blissfully and looking up at her with my black adoring eyes, watching in joy and wonder as each new crash of lightning lit her face up like a beacon on a dark sea.

I was never baptised in a Christian church, and some have blamed my later troubles, my crimes and triumphs, on that omission. But what need had I for a second baptism? I, who was christened the hour of my birth not by any priest or by the rites of younger gods, but by gods or devils more ancient than earth and sky. And not by some paltry liturgic sprinkling, bland and saltless, but by the full-faced salty spray of the boundless deep. It was the baptism of the sea that washed my mother’s blood from off my face before I’d ever drawn a breath.

So it was that, when the ferry docked at the grey and barnacled Magnetic Island jetty, my mother wiped the seaweed from my brow, cursed me under her breath, and named me Dylan Jackson Jones.

Why she invoked the name of Jackson, after my father, that mongrel dog (as she often said) who’d knocked her up then run off back to Lismore, well, that’s another story. But I received the holy name of Dylan because of an American folksinger whose records my mother knew by heart (the Voice of the People, she used to call him), and because someone once told her that the word meant sea, and she reckoned a name like that was just the thing for a little bastard born as I was, in the maternity ward of the Magnetic Island Ferry during a storm at night at sea.

His Lucky Day: a short story

OK, I know it’s time to get back to some theology here at F&T. But first, here’s one more story – admittedly a bit long for a blog post, sorry about that. Some people said they found the last story too depressing, so I thought I’d write one with a happy ending. This one's called “His Lucky Day.”

1.
In a white house with a red roof, in the quiet suburb of Clear Lake on the outskirts of Houston, shortly after sunrise an alarm clock rang, and he was awake. He shaved and showered, checked his shoes for scuff marks, buttoned his neatly pressed shirt, selected a tie, the blue one with the stripes, and went downstairs. He sat at the little round table and had a bowl of Toasted Honey Crunch cereal, a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a tall cup of steaming black coffee. Then he went upstairs, cleaned his teeth, made the bed, took the dark blue sports bag from under the bed, opened it, put in two bottles of water, a clean shirt, the Smith & Wesson .38 Special and four boxes of ammunition, and closed the bag. On the way out he checked his tie knot in the mirror, straightened it a little. He drove fifty minutes to work. In the car he wore dark glasses and listened to 88.7 FM, where he heard Beethoven and Chopin and Shostakovich and the morning news.

2.
The camera panned across the scene, the big glass doors at the front of the building, the cars and flashing lights, the white news vans, the officers with rifles and black helmets, the crowd of bystanders behind the police barricade, the helicopters circling above. It panned back to the front door of the bank, and to the woman who had begun to read the teleprompter as she paced slowly forwards. She recapped the story, the investment banker who opened fire on his co-workers earlier today, reports from cell phones inside the bank confirming at least six dead and many wounded, police have surrounded the building and the entire block here in downtown Houston has been cordoned off, the gunman is still at large, just moments ago – here she left the teleprompter and began to ad lib – we heard gunshots from the second floor of the bank, police snipers have occupied the adjacent buildings. As she mentioned the police snipers (the last thing she would ever say in front of a news camera), two things happened at the same time: there was another series of gunshots in the background, and the heel of her Gucci shoe slipped into a sidewalk grate. At that moment, the most important and exhilarating moment of her life, her first appearance on live television, the heel snapped, her ankle twisted, and she fell. Her hip was broken, she would walk with a slight limp for the rest of her life, and her career in live television was finished, though the video achieved considerable celebrity on YouTube, where it was viewed nearly a million times in the first week, and later won a satirical award as the most dramatic and riveting news blooper of all time.

3.
In Alice Springs, a woman known to everyone in those parts as Auntie Joy was making her cup of tea and watching the live update on the Texas Bank Shooter. She held the cup in one hand and dunked the Dilmah teabag with the other, and had been doing this for exactly two minutes when, right before her eyes, there were gunshots and the reporter on the tellie dropped like a stone to the ground. On three occasions Auntie Joy had seen people fall like that: the shooting accident with little Billy when they were camping out by the Rock as children; the morning at the train station when that young fellow, a blow-in from up north, had thrown himself on the tracks, and Auntie Joy had seen the whole thing and had not spoken for three days afterwards; and the night her husband, Lord rest him, had gone down with a stroke while they were brushing their teeth and making jokes together in the bathroom. That is why, when the girl on the tellie fell, Auntie Joy’s eyes stung with tears, the cup clattered across the kitchen floor, the teabag went sliding under the fridge (where it would remain for several years), and her foot was slapped by scalding hot Dilmah tea. When Auntie Joy cried out, you couldn’t have said for sure whether it was for the stab of pain in her foot, or for the TV reporter, or for her husband or the boy on the tracks, or for dear little Billy.

4.
Three doors down, an old cattle dog heard a woman bellowing from her kitchen, and he put down the shoe and lifted his grizzled head and barked twice. He had a weakness for shoes, a tremendous weakness, it was true. He had killed a six-foot brown snake, had braved the great housefire back in 98, had split the ear of a Rottweiler in a fight, but against shoes he was powerless. Once when the people went away for the weekend, he had jumped the fence and prowled the streets all night, quiet as a thief, eyes glinting in the moonlight. When they returned two days later, they found him sleeping in the backyard, innocent as a baby, with thirty-one unmatched shoes spread out around him, shoes lovingly appropriated from the doorsteps of thirty-one houses in Alice Springs, all beautifully, assiduously chewed. After he heard the woman’s cry and performed the obligatory barks, he resumed his work upon the shoe; around the corner and down the road, six more dogs, one of them a black Rottweiler with a torn ear, began to bark.

5.
He had been reading on the front veranda, sprawled across the big cane chair, and had fallen asleep. He woke with a start, sat bolt upright, said bloody dogs. The book, still lying open on his stomach, was a Penguin paperback, Jane Austen’s Persuasion, he was up to the part where they go to Lyme, just before Louisa Musgrove has her fall. Nobody knew of his guilty secret, his taste for literature. His friends didn’t know it, certainly the blokes at work would never know it. Some guys looked at dirty pictures or dressed in women’s clothes, he read English novels of the nineteenth century. The bedroom cupboard was full of them, crinkly old black paperbacks nearly worn to death, Hardy, Thackeray, Trollope, Collins, George Eliot, the Brontës, all of Dickens and Austen. He could have recited from memory the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, though he never would have admitted it, and you’d never see him do it, not in a million years. This was how he passed the time on the long night shifts at Toddy’s Resort, when the cleaning was finished, when there were still a couple hours to spare, he’d go out to the backroom, make himself comfortable, crack open a Penguin paperback, read till dawn. He’d even written a few stories himself on those nightshifts, mysteries after the manner of Wilkie Collins, though he’d always destroyed them afterwards, running the pages through the shredder at work so that no one would ever find out. When he woke that afternoon to the barking of the dogs, he looked up just in time to see a rickety circus bus coughing and spluttering its way up Mulara Street towards the Stuart Highway. The words MISTER BONG BONG AND THE BANANA REPUBLIC were painted in bright rainbow colours down the side, and in the front beside the driver was a woman he recognised at once, though he had not seen her in nearly fifteen years. For several seconds he did not breathe. Then he jumped to his feet, stuffed the book in his back pocket, and ran to get his keys.

6.
When the circus troupe arrived in Eumundi they headed straight for the markets. She spent the first couple of hours walking on stilts, then stood on a corner juggling, collecting coins in her huge checkered top hat, while a hand-drawn sign announced that the Banana Republic Circus Troupe would be performing tomorrow avo in the Eumundi showground. Then Little Jim brought the balloons and the gas tank, and for the rest of the morning she made balloon animals, not only poodles and giraffes and elephants, but also penguins and crocodiles and lobsters and bouquets of flowers and centipedes and redback spiders and fairies with movable wings. She had once spent an entire day on a single balloon sculpture, two big fish swimming above a brightly coloured coral reef in a shaft of sunlight. A bookshop owner in Dubbo had given her fifty bucks for it, and she’d been happy when she saw it there, exhibited like a work of art in the shop window. That what was she was doing, inflating and tying and twisting balloons, making a pirate for a piratical little boy with his grandmother, when she saw him standing there. He stood a whole hour, said nothing, watched her twist the balloons as the children lined up and watched and went away. When the markets were closing and the crowds had thinned out, he approached her at last, timidly, like a little boy, said hello Penny. He bought roasted macadamia nuts and two cups of ginger beer and they sat on a bench in the shade, talking for the first time in thirteen years. He’d seen the bus in Alice Springs and followed them (he still had dad’s old Ford) for four days, all the way through Port Augusta, Broken Hill, Bourke, Goondiwindi, Brisbane, finally to Eumundi. He’d followed them to servos and diners along the way, he’d seen their act in Port Augusta, but he didn’t have the guts to come talk to her, not till now, not till Eumundi. Dad’s dead Penny, he said at last. Come home.

7.
The markets were starting to close, she had decided to call it a day, when her last customer came to the booth. She was a pretty young thing, Aboriginal girl, mid 20s she guessed, dressed up like a clown with a canvas bag on her shoulder and a catastrophe painted on her face. Come in luv, come in, she said to the girl, have a seat. How much, asked the girl doubtfully without sitting down, and the woman patted her arm and said sit down luv, it’s on me. Then, seeing she had embarrassed the girl, she added with a wink and a gesture to the huge top hat the girl was holding, I mean a woman like me would pay to read the fortune of a girl like you, and besides, you’re my last for the day. The girl smiled then, and the woman saw that she’d been crying, her clown’s cheeks were smudged with tears. She sat down and the woman laid out five cards on the table. She looked at them a long time. That was when her hands began to tremble and the big silver earrings started to wobble and her face went all pale, as white as the High Priestess on the card in the middle of the table. She leaned forwards a moment, clasped the girl’s hands violently, and whispered something so faintly that I do not know whether the girl ever heard it, the dark and fatal prophecy that she’d seen there written in the cards. Then she tumbled backwards from the chair, quite dead, as the girl gasped and the table turned on its side and all the cards were scattered on the ground.

8.
He was in his office cubicle on the eleventh floor of the redbrick Parramatta building, behind towers of printed pages and handwritten receipts, doing the tax for a little Chinese restaurant down on Phillip Street, punching numbers on the keyboard and hitting the tab key, over and over, honest to God a monkey could do it, he’d often thought so. He’d just decided to get another Diet Coke – it was nearly 3.00 – when he got the phone call. There was complete silence in his cubicle for two minutes. When he hung up the phone, a pile of receipts tottered over the edge, fluttering like greasy confetti around his feet. When he stood up, he could not remember what he had done with his keys, and had to stand there a moment, staring at his desk like a fool. On his way to the lift, when someone asked if he was feeling alright, he said with a small apologetic smile, I think my wife has died. In the car, he tried calling his daughter’s mobile but it was turned off, he’d have to go home and wait for her. How could he tell her? What could he say? She would blame him, she’d say it was all his fault, he could see that. Was it his fault she left the way she did? Was it his fault she’d been too bloody selfish to stick it out? Christ, when other people have a midlife crisis they buy a boat or screw the secretary or take up landscape painting. But she goes and runs off with her good-for-nothing hippie friends, at the age of fifty-five, thinking she’s a psychic, selling fortunes to morons up in Queensland. Was it his fault she’d never come back, never even bothered to call? They’d had to drive up there, him and his daughter, and beg her to come home, and she’d just looked at them, calm and smiling, like it was all a dream or a big bloody private joke. The man on the phone said she’d died there, right there, in her booth in the middle of the markets. He wiped his eyes furiously. God how he hated that fucking woman, God how he loved her.

9.
The boy had left school early that day, slipping out before his last English class. He had walked to the bus stop on Pennant Hills Road, where Marie was already waiting. On the bus to Beecroft they talked about her new CDs, a box set of Beethoven’s nine symphonies by the Berlin Philharmonic; Cluytens is sublime, she said, and the boy agreed with all his heart. They walked to her house on Blackwood Close. As always, they left their shoes and schoolbags by the front door, got a drink from the kitchen, then went down the hall to her room, rummaged for a few minutes among the CDs, put on the music, and took off their clothes. That is how he came to be wearing nothing but his school socks when, twenty minutes later, while the speakers throbbed out the propulsive rhythms of Beethoven’s Ninth (it was the second movement), the door crashed open and Marie’s father stood inside the room. He was home early. He looked like he’d been crying, but instantly his face went the colour of beetroot and his eyes turned murderous red. He stammered as if to speak. The boy tumbled headfirst to the floor, still half tangled in the sheets and Marie’s milk-white thighs. The man in the doorway flailed about for something to hold on to, and the nearest object was a tall glass vase, which he plucked and brandished above them like a club. Somehow the boy found his feet and, quick as a thunderclap, launched himself across the bed and out the open window. Running in nothing but the skin God gave him and his high blue school socks, he tore across the backyard and catapulted over the fence, he could hear behind him the drums of Beethoven and the crash of furniture and profanities being hurled across the room and, above that, something else, a single, unbroken note, a sound so strange that he did not recognise it until he had already cleared the next fence. It was the long, wild, wailing shriek of the girl he loved.

10.
Jen had been studying all day for tomorrow’s big chemistry exam, she was tired as hell, making another pot of coffee, rubbing her eyes and yawning at the kitchen sink, when, looking up, she saw this guy, stark naked, sprinting across the backyard, his enormous half-erect member springing from side to side as he ran. From the sound of it, he was running away from someone, a woman who’d started screaming like a banshee next door. Before the naked sprinter had made it past the garden shed, she’d whipped out her phone and taken a picture. (It would later become famous on social networking sites, and would lead to the boy’s eventual expulsion from his elite private school: that was how his promising career as a concert violinist was aborted.) A moment later, the streaker had bounded over the fence and disappeared into Mrs Walcott’s vegetable garden. While the coffee brewed, Jen sent a text message to her best friend – OMG, you’ll never guess what I just saw from the kitchen window, lol – and attached the photo. She took the coffee and went back to her bedroom, back to the chemistry textbooks that were lying in ambush on the floor, plastered in frantic pink and yellow stickynotes. But after seeing the backyard streaker she found she couldn’t concentrate, she texted the pic to a few more friends, uploaded it on Facebook, replied to comments from her friends, checked her email, and next morning sat her CHEM311 exam at the University of Sydney, which she failed.

11.
Two seconds after Jen had sent the text message, a young woman in a tight dress and dark glasses reached for her phone and read the message, smiling. She clicked to open the attached photo. She waited for it to load. But she would never get to see the backyard streaker with his shock of red hair, his improbably high blue socks, his lanky bent knees, his soon-to-be-famous airborne penis, for at that moment the front wheel clipped the curb and her car began to spin. In the next three-and-a-half seconds, her thoughts became clear and precise. She solved the problem of quantum gravity; she realised that her friends and lovers had never meant more to her than the love of her father; she recalled the lessons from Sunday school, and discovered that she had believed in God all along, had always believed, though secretly; and she saw that she would miss her 3.30 appointment at the King Street Hair Salon in Newtown, and wondered if she’d ever be able to get another appointment in time for the ceremony. For tonight she was graduating from her Masters in physics, her father was flying in from Seoul, he would arrive in two hours in a new suit, face shining, bearing gifts.

12.
He was walking down Carillon Avenue with his backpack and guitar case, just past the Missenden Road lights, when a little red two-door car came spinning towards him. It looked, he thought, like one of the whirligigs he had played with as a boy. He stood quite still, and knew that he was going to die. He wondered if the guitar would be damaged, he hoped not. He flinched as the car spun closer. But both he and the guitar were saved by a telephone pole which brought the car to a sudden, miraculous halt, just a few feet from where he stood. His ears still ringing from the shriek of twisted metal, he put down the guitar and let the backpack slide to the footpath. He took four steps to the wreck and bent down at the thin squashed window. There was only one person in the car, an Asian girl with dark glasses. She was perfectly still, except for her lips, which were moving soundlessly, as though searching for the right words. Blood streamed from lacerations on her face. Carefully he removed the glasses, out of habit he folded them, even though they were smeared in blood and one of the lenses was already broken, and put them on the road. Then he took off his shirt and pressed it to the place beside her ear, trying to staunch the bleeding. He tried to find something to say to her, something reassuring, and he was still trying to find the right thing to say when the ambulance arrived, and someone in uniform took his bloodied hands and led him away from the girl, saying sorry mate, she’s gone, come sit down here, sorry mate, nothing you can do. He sat on the curb a long time, he accepted a cup of water from the ambulance driver, he watched the police directing traffic and the firemen cleaning oil from the road, someone came with wet towels and cleaned his hands and face, how did he get so much blood on his face, he was surprised to see the red wet towels in front of him. When he had given his statement to the police, he opened the backpack and dug out a clean shirt, a white T-shirt that had “429 FM, Living It” across the front. He shouldered his backpack and picked up the guitar case and kept walking.

13.
Khalid Rashid Hassan, whose English was poor and who had come to Sydney two years ago, who had once lived in the biggest house on the street but now slummed with his wife and two children in a damp one-bedroom flat with a broken doorknob and the constant noise of traffic and, God protect them, the biggest cockroaches they had ever seen in their lives, an electrical engineer with degrees from three European universities, whose passions were French literature, old maps, and the way his wife’s neck leaned ever so slightly to one side as she was speaking: here he is, Khalid Rashid Hassan, and it is his lucky day, though he does not know it yet. After another week of fourteen-hour shifts, he had woken that morning, his day off, with a cold. Perhaps we must blame the cold for his uncharacteristic actions that day, his lapse in judgment, his moral torpitude, but in any case, whatever the reasons, at 4.00 that afternoon Khalid Rashid Hassan found himself standing at a newsagent on King Street, blushing from ear to ear, and handing over money, may God forgive him, for a lottery ticket. The man behind the counter showed him how to fill out the ticket, you just choose five numbers from this table, put a cross over your numbers, any numbers you like. He stood a while holding the pencil stub, looking at the numbers. First he selected the 3 and the 8 (his wife’s birthday was the third of August), but after that he was stuck, he could not think of another three numbers. He looked out on the footpath, a man with a sad face and dirty long hair was walking up the road, smoking a cigarette and carrying a guitar. His shirt had three numbers on the front, big and red, and without further ado these numbers were marked down on the lottery ticket, 4-2-9. Two days later, Khalid Rashid Hassan won ten million dollars in the Saturday night Powerball, and that is how he came to be proprietor of Hassan Antiquarian Maps on King Street, the country’s finest trader of maps and navigational literature. Each morning he would kiss his wife and children and leave their quiet street to set out for the shop. When it was not busy, he would recline in one of the small brown armchairs by the window reading French literature, Stendhal and Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and from time to time his wife would visit him at the shop, and as she talked her neck would crane to one side, ever so slightly, beneath the fine smooth silk of her hijab.

The horses

Here's another attempt at a one-paragraph short story:

She complains that he is always distracted, always off in his own world, emotionally distant, that he doesn’t understand her anymore, doesn’t really listen, it's as though you're not even here she said. When she told him one night that she wanted a divorce, he worried for weeks afterwards, wondering why she wanted the horse, wondering how they could afford it, how they would feed and groom it, where they would ride it and how often, where it would sleep on the cold nights, whether it would need to be vaccinated, and whether she really wanted the horse, or if the horse signified something deeper, some repressed need, whether perhaps she was unhappy, whether she lacked companionship, whether he was no longer satisfying her, whether she had found someone else or was starting to dream of a new life without him, free and unbridled. They never spoke of the horse again, but from that day on he spent more time with her, went on long rambling walks with her, looked and listened attentively, bought her ice cream in the park, and, once, on her birthday, presented her with a large lavish illustrated book on the history of artistic representations of the horse. She turned the book over in her hands, mystified, and asked him why horses, what did it signify, what did it mean, but he only gave her a small knowing smile, and kissed her brow, and asked if she would like to go out for ice cream.

The nightmare

Inspired by Lydia Davis, here's an attempt at a one-paragraph short story:

Once I dreamed my whole life. I dreamed my childhood, the easy early years in the shade of mango trees and frangipanis, the joys of solitude and reading, the boredom of high school in a boring town, the humiliations of puberty, the happiness of friendship, the perplexing misery of teen romance. I dreamed I loved a girl on my street with small brown curls, but then I moved away, I met someone else and we were married, we made a home, we made children, we shared all the tenderness and drudgery of married life. But as the years passed we grew apart, our closeness became an intolerable burden, a slow suffocation, until one day I knew, with a breathless, terrifying certainty, that I had married the wrong person. I saw that the only one in the world I needed was the girl on my street, the girl with the small brown curls whom I had loved all those years ago. But she had long since gone away, she no longer knew me or remembered my name. When I woke from the dream, I lay in my bed beneath a suffocating blanket of despair. The truth of the dream was acute and unbearable: my whole life had been a mistake, one immense and sickening catastrophe, and nothing now could ever make it right. I heard the breathing of my wife next to me, and, choked by grief, I knew she was wrong, a mistake, the reef on which all my life was shipwrecked. Then she turned in her sleep, and I saw a single dark curl slide from her naked shoulder, and saw that she was not the wife of my dream, but the other one, the girl from my street whom I had loved as a child, whom I had longed for, desolate and unrequited, in my dream.

Happiest Moment: Lydia Davis

Yesterday I was reading the The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Picador 2010). She has some exquisite stories, including some that are no more than a single paragraph. Here's one of my favourites – a tiny, perfect, intricate little story titled "Happiest Moment":

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

The Shakespearean Death: a short story

I've been writing a bunch of short stories to unwind over the holiday break. Here's another one:

Many years later, he would be found dead in the university courtyard beneath a high open window, a single sheet of paper clutched in his lifeless hand. But long before that fatal accident or suicide or murder, before his life and career came to ruin, B was a promising young Shakespeare scholar, serving a tenure-track appointment as Assistant Professor of English at Ithaca College, New York. He published his Yale dissertation, a study of metaphors of revenge in Titus Adronicus; he attended conferences and presented papers; he read the latest books and wrote reviews; he stayed up late into the night preparing classes; he began a second book on Shakespeare’s early comedies; he sat on committees and learned to drink coffee and cultivated all the right collegial relationships.

One day Ithaca advertised for another associate professor, and B found himself on the selection panel. Scouring the morass of CVs, he noticed that N, a specialist in English Renaissance drama, had applied. N seemed a capable and industrious scholar: B had met him twice at conferences, had heard his paper at last year's MLA convention, had even reviewed his book on the early works of Christopher Marlowe. He had not, admittedly, found the book altogether convincing; but how marvellous, B thought, to have another Renaissance man on faculty! In several sittings of the selection panel, he argued eloquently and methodically in favour of N’s appointment.

In the first two years of his position at Ithaca, N published a book on the comedies of Ben Jonson as well as several journal articles on Shakespeare. He collaborated with B on the revision of the introductory course on early modern literature. He had encouraging suggestions for B’s book (which would never be completed) on early Shakespearean comedy. He was invited to B’s home for family dinner. B’s wife (she was still alive at the time) got on well with him; B’s son played baseball with him in the backyard; even the family dog took a shine to him.

N’s performance at Ithaca was so outstanding that he was given early tenure, a full year before B himself came up for tenure review. By this time the two were fast friends, and B was delighted with N’s success. A year later, N sat on B’s tenure review committee.

To everyone's surprise, however, B was denied tenure. He had a year left on his contract with Ithaca, and he resolutely kept on writing and publishing. He completed another chapter of his book, thanks largely to animated lunchtime discussions with N. Every Wednesday N came to his home for dinner, where B's wife joined in their Shakespearean discussions. B applied for numerous jobs, but though his CV was impressive and his referees distinguished (including N, who was becoming a noted authority in the field), he remained without prospects. When the teaching year ended, he found himself suddenly, startlingly, unemployed.

For several months he sank into a depression. He took Prozac, he grew a scraggly beard, he watched daytime television. N visited often and tried to keep his spirits up.

One evening B’s wife announced that she was leaving him. She was in love with N, she said, and would move in with him. And our son? B asked, and the dog? His wife took their son to live at N’s place; B was allowed to keep the dog. His son’s fourteenth birthday party was held in N’s backyard. B brought two books, all he could afford, lovingly gift-wrapped. N gave the boy a laptop and a one-year subscription to World of Warcraft (a sort of videogame, N explained). It was the first time B had seen N in several months, and he was relieved to talk with his friend again, in spite of everything. B’s wife seemed happy. She drank wine all afternoon, though she never used to drink, and she asked about the dog. They talked amicably, N sauntered up and refilled her glass, the three of them talked together, just like old times.

By now B had remortgaged the house. At some point he had stopped applying for academic jobs (in fact, he would set foot on a college campus only one more time in his life, and that was the day of his death). He ate microwave dinners alone, in his pyjamas, standing in the kitchen or sitting on one of the kitchen stools or slumped on the kitchen floor with the dog's head in his lap. He began selling off the furniture, then the kitchen appliances, then his library, to settle the late mortgage payments and pay off the credit cards. He was tired all day but could not sleep at night.

Finally, bleary from Prozac and insomnia and harassed by letters from the bank, he walked one morning to the newspaper stand, stood there a few minutes in his pyjamas and slippers, trying to remember why he had come, then shuffled home again with three newspapers under his arm. He opened the first classifieds page and circled the first job at the top of the first column, and dialled the number. He found a clean shirt in the closet and went to an interview the same afternoon, and that is how he became caretaker at the South Hill Town Caravan Park in Ithaca, New York.

At first it was only weekends and Thursday mornings. He mowed the grass, swept the paths, emptied the trash, cleaned the barbecues. After two months he was entrusted with the keys and taught to manage the office; after three months he was promoted to fulltime caretaker, and he sold the house and moved permanently to an old 1950s Greyhound bus conversion, euphemistically known as Caretaker’s Lodge, in the middle of the campground. He brought with him the dog, the dog’s dish, some kitchen utensils, a cardboard suitcase filled with clothes, a razor and toothbrush, and one small box of books, all that what was left of his Shakespeare library. Everything else had gone to the divorce settlement and his debts. The converted Greyhound smelled of mould and stale tobacco. The heater was broken, the water from the sink tasted strange, the flyscreen door was crumbling, weeds grew up around the chassis, and the wheels had long ago rusted into the ground. But the afternoon light was good, and at the end of a day’s work B would sit out front on an old wooden deckchair, with the dog beside him, and would read Coriolanus or Measure for Measure or Othello, and in those moments, at least, it would not have been true to say that he was unhappy.

During those prosaic days at the South Hill Town Caravan Park, B’s friendship with N was renewed. N came to visit him several times a year, and they would sit in the bus in the yellow-green polyester armchairs and talk about N’s new book or love affair and about university politics and Shakespeare and tragedy and love and revenge. The dog would sleep at their feet or sit up and rest its head on B’s lap while the two friends talked.

N’s affair with B’s wife had not lasted long. After the breakup, she wiped the mascara from her cheeks, bundled up her clothes and her regrets, and bought a one-way bus ticket back to Topeka, Kansas, and moved in with her parents. B never saw her again. It was rumoured that she eked out her remaining years in a haze of short-term jobs, short-term lovers, and perpetual drinking. Her life ended one Christmas eve in a handful of sleeping pills and half a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. There was no note.

Shortly after the death of B’s wife, N came once more to the South Hill Town Caravan Park. He brought a gift, two bottles of Laphroaig scotch, and stayed for two hours, talking and drinking. It was dark by the time he left, and as his car reversed away from Caretaker's Lodge there was a terrible yelp, and when he stopped the car they heard the small sad whimpers and found the broken body of the dog. B buried the dog out front, at the place where it used to sit beside the deckchair in the afternoon sun, listening to B's voice and the aching words of Shakespeare.

B’s son had remained in Ithaca. By the age of fifteen he had discovered his purpose in life, by sixteen he was a level 70 mage in World of Warcraft, and by seventeen he had dropped out of school to devote himself single-mindedly to online gaming. He lived on Domino’s Pizza and Dr Pepper and unemployment benefits until his early 30s, when he got his first job working at the video store in Brooktondale. He lost the job at age 38 (disabled by morbid obesity) and his virginity at 39 (a prostitute from Lansing with tired middle-aged breasts, not at all like the pictures he had seen on the internet). When he died two years later, they found delicate charcoal sketches, hundreds of them, of his mother, his father, the remembered home of his childhood, the streets and houses of Ithaca, the street seen from his bedroom window, the street on Brooktondale where he had worked. No one had ever seen him drawing, nor had he ever mentioned it. He had seen his father only twice in all those years. When his mother died, he did not attend the funeral but stayed on the sofa and ate twenty-seven Domino’s buffalo chicken pizzas over a period of five days.

With his wife and son dead and the dog buried beside the deckchair, B spent his remaining years in a sedentary solitude, as full of grief as age. The campground succumbed to weeds and decay, and one summer the gates were closed and the signs taken down, and nobody even noticed that someone was still living inside the ruined carcass of a Greyhound bus. B himself scarcely noticed that he was still there. One day he glanced up from the bathroom sink and saw himself in the mirror, and for a second he was frightened, thinking that someone else, an older man, a stranger with sad wide frightened eyes, was in the room. After that he broke the mirror and took the pieces down and spread them carefully like compost among the weeds.

In all those years, B had no visitors except N. Even after his appointment to the chair of Shakespeare Studies at Columbia University, N had kept on visiting the campground every year or two. Each time he brought news of the wider world and scotch (B found he had a weakness for it) and small gifts, usually a copy of his latest book. Once, he took B to a horse race and gave him fifty dollars and showed him how to bet. That was the first time B had gambled, though it was not to be the last. As the infirmity of age crept upon him, he spent more and more time at the track, gambling his meagre pension and whatever he could pawn from Caretaker's Lodge or the ruins of the campground. One black afternoon – he must have been nearly 70 by then – he parted with his last edition of the works of Shakespeare, promising himself to buy it back from the pawnbroker, and lost it on a chestnut thoroughbred named Kansas Jack.

That is how, with no money and nothing to eat or read, he found himself the following day hitchhiking to New York City, and making the long walk down Amsterdam Avenue, and at last to Columbia University. In all the world there was only one person to whom he could go for help, the same one who had come to visit him all those years, the one true friend he had ever had. He found his way to the Department of English and Comparative Literature, six floors up. A woman behind a glass reception window stood and looked at him nervously and asked if he needed help. He told her he was looking for the office of N, Emeritus Professor of Shakespeare Studies, a former colleague he added reassuringly, but her eyes only widened and her fingers fidgeted with the beads around her neck. He walked the corridor to N’s office, he saw the name on the door, he knocked twice, but N was not there. He went in.

It was a long opulent study, lined with shelves that climbed like ladders up to the white neo-Renaissance ceiling. A locked glass cabinet displayed early editions and small sealed boxes and strange collected artifacts of Elizabethan theatre. A mahogany desk looked out across the courtyard towards the imposing granite dome of the library. The tall windows were thrown open and a warm breeze stirred the room.

Beneath the windowsill a single shelf displayed copies of N’s own writings, bathed in afternoon light – books on Jonson, Middleton, Marlowe, Webster, plus his six thick books on Shakespeare and his Norton anthology. (B had received many of these as gifts over the years, though his own unread copies had been lost to the damp or the horses.) At the end of the shelf was a deep wooden tray filled with loose pages. B leaned closer and saw that they were photocopied reviews of N’s books. He leafed through the pile. London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Harper’s, New York Times Book Review, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly. Here and there, N had underlined words and phrases or jotted questions or witty rejoinders in the margins. It was at this moment that B realised, for the first time, that his friend was famous, a celebrated literary critic, “our greatest reader of Shakespeare,” as one reviewer for the New Yorker had said in October 1998 (the words were neatly underlined in blue pen).

B was returning the pages to the tray when he noticed the sheet right at the bottom, a single page, older than the rest, yellowing and crumbling around the edges, a photocopy from a decades-old issue of the Sixteenth Century Journal. It was a review of N’s first book, published nearly forty years ago, even before N's appointment at Ithaca College. B began to read. It was a typical book review, bland in description and exaggerated in criticism, yet something about it seemed familiar, like the distant echo of something he had once known. He skipped to the end. The final sentence had been underlined: “In sum, although the author has furnished his study with a formidable armoury of historical minutiae, one cannot help feeling that the result is a discouragingly superficial analysis of a disappointingly trivial theme.”

In the margin beside this acerbic judgment, written in faded blue ink in N’s meticulous cursive hand, were four lines:

The sight of any of the house of York
Is as a fury to torment my soul;
And till I root out their accursed line
And leave not one alive, I live in hell.

B had read the chilling inscription three times, slowly, before he recognised the name at the bottom of the page. It was his own name, printed in capital letters beneath the review, neatly underlined, twice, in pale ghostly ink.