Z - Twenty

I can see it now, in the small room, no noise but the trees outside
making a sound like crumpled banknotes. It was during the first year
after I escaped from one of the poorest places in England and, after
many moves, ended up in the richest. I'd found a job in a decaying
Victorian institution in a small Surrey town, working with visually
impaired people, which survived on the charity of the very rich for the
disadvantaged, somewhere between kindness and guilt. You could see the
clients as soon as you arrived in town, white canes tapping through
meticulous flower borders and tall garden walls.

The institution sat surrounded by great century old trees, part stately
home, part red brick school. It had been just that, a school for the
blind, and although the years of disability rights and community care
had softened it, the high ceilinged rooms and corridors still had that
humbling, oppressive feel. Most of the clients were past retirement
age, but they'd first arrived as children. Imagine a school that you
could never leave.

As part of the job I got a little room to live in, with a small window
set in the thick wall, like windows in prison. Every morning I was
awoken by sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees, the
whitewashed room feeling somehow part of nature. It was like living in
a garden or a forest, the building surrounded by trees, the town
surrounded by fields. It was so different from the noise and chaos of
the city where I grew up that it had the feeling of a dream. I spent
all day with people who couldn't see me, watching them move around with
that unsure sleepwalker's gait, and at night I wandered around the
empty, quiet, dark streets and unlit country lanes, unseen again. It
was a tiny town and I knew no one. I could go almost weeks between
conversations, sitting alone in pubs, walking around, just me amidst
the greenery.

It might sound funny, but I even forgot my birthday. I picked up my
mail from the gigantic entrance hall with its mosaic floor and dark
wood panelling and the pigeonhole was stuffed with brightly coloured
envelopes addressed to me. My first birthday alone and everyone had
remembered except for me.

That night, halfway down a cheap bottle of wine, I sat at my window
listening to the coo of pigeons and the calls of other birds I couldn't
name, the rustle of squirrels jumping tree to tree, absentmindedly
pulling on a top that was tighter than the ones I usually wore. That's
what I'll do, I thought, I'll get dressed up and get myself noticed. So
I did, in that half fumbling, half-excited way that you do when you're
drunk.

The walk into town through semi-country lanes, where the first winds of
autumn had burned the tips of the leaves orange and brown, went in a
drunken blink. Arriving at the nearly empty pub I sat, my back to the
fire, slouched in my chair and drank, squinting at the various rustic
coaching-house paraphernalia that decorated the walls.

Usually anxious, the wine made me feel like I had another two skins on
over my own. Drunk already, I didn't think anything when a man came and
sat down at my table and introduced himself, lighting a fat
cigar.

We chatted. He was in his forties, face smooth and red, thick grey hair
on his arms and around his bald head and sticking out of his open
necked shirt. Gold rings sat on his thick fingers, a heavy silver watch
on his wrist. Blowing smoke, he laughed raucously and his grey eyes
crinkled. He looked like a man you'd see shaking hands at a by-election
wearing a blue rosette.

He asked where I was from, then laughed.

"I'll bet you're all good labour lads up there, eh? Not much money up
there. I'll bet that's good northern bitter you're drinking?" He was
right. "How old are you? Twenty-one? No, I don't suppose it matters
these days, does it?"

I told him I didn't know anyone. He nodded and looked me straight in
the eye. "I've been so lonely too, since my wife died of cancer, it's
terrible isn't it? Still, you've got to get on with business haven't
you? How old? Old enough to like your beer, eh?"

I remember thinking, as he bought me pint after pint, that we were just
two men who had seen the loneliness in each other. Come closing time he
asked if he could walk me home. I told him I was okay, but he came
anyway, and we talked loudly through the deserted, leafy streets,
walking quickly, the moon making great long shadows of us and the
trees.

When we got to the giant main doors, up the driveway, he asked if he
could come in. I told him that we couldn't have visitors at night, so
he sat close to me on the cold, damp grass in the shadow of the bushes
and smoked, talking in whispers.

Touching my arm he asked if it tickled. I said no. He touched my neck.
Still no. Then my chest, and finally slid his hand down the front of my
jeans. "I bet you like that."

We moved backward into the bushes, wet leaves brushing my face, the
smell of soil mixed with whiskey and cigar smoke. I looked up at the
moon through the dark trees as the world span "You like that, don't
you?" he hissed. Somewhere an owl hooted and I closed my eyes.

"You're an old hand at this," I said. I felt nothing.

Afterward he kissed me, bristles sharp on my face, and pushed something
into my hand, before making his way quietly back through the
trees.

Inside, I stood invisible as a client passed me, her old feet echoing
in the empty entrance hall. In my room I opened my hand and spread the
thing out on the table.

He never, ever, acknowledged that he had ever seen me when I often saw
him around town, smiling with his wife and children. In another time I
would have been a stable lad or a farm boy, rich meeting poor.

I can see it now like a flashbulb memory, somewhere between kindness
and guilt as the trees whispered outside, a crumpled twenty-pound note
lying on top of a twentieth birthday card.