Authors: Alastair Bruce
I look along the fence, and there, a short distance away, is a gap. The wire is old and here the fence seems to have simply rusted away. Or perhaps, some time ago, it was cut. I step through. There is no grass here, only sand. My feet kick up clouds of it, though I try to move lightly. I walk up to the single-storey building, the walls a dull brown. I walk around it until I reach the window with the broken board. The ground in front of it is undisturbed, as far as I can tell. I peer through the gap. The glass is still in place, though grimy. I rub some of the dirt away and place my forehead against the window, my hands shielding the glare. My eyes take a few seconds to adjust. On the wall opposite me is a painting of a scene in England, where I now call home. At least I imagine it is England: a babbling brook, a green meadow, a water mill. It is out of place here, does not belong. I feel, and I cannot explain this, anger. I think that is the word. I force myself to look away.
The rest of the room is almost empty. There is a dresser along one wall and in the middle of the room a chair on its side.
I walk around the house. At the back is a porch. There are dead cactus plants in pots. Plastic sheeting covers one end of the porch – protection from sun and wind. I imagine an old couple here, their ghosts. They drink tea, eat ginger cake, wear cardigans. Perhaps they talk about their neighbour – the man who lives by himself after his father’s death and who never married and never goes out and is a bit strange, but also maybe a bit sad. They do not think that one day he will own their house. I think back and try to picture who lived here when I was young, but I cannot.
There is a sliding door. There are no boards across it. I would be able to see in but for the closed curtains. I pull the door and it begins to open.
We would have known these people, even if just in passing. I do not remember them. I have no recollection of this house at all.
I write ‘We.’ I have no business writing ‘We’, I know that.
As I slide the door open, I listen for an alarm, but I do not expect one nor hear one. I reach in and move the curtain aside.
The house smells as if it has been closed for some time. Mouldy. It would take a lot to get rid of this smell. I will not paint this one, I find myself thinking.
The room I step into is a lounge. There is an old chair that faces a television. I sit in the chair and look towards the television. I can see my reflection in it. The arms of the chair are sticky. I get up quickly.
I walk through the rooms. It is smaller than Peter’s house. I make this distinction, though this one belongs to him too. The lounge leads into a passageway. Three bedrooms and a bathroom, each empty, open off it. They are dark and I cannot see clearly, but I can see they are empty. Then I go into the dining room, the room with the loose shutter. It is lighter in here but there is not much to see. I take the painting off the wall, lay it face down on the ground and return to the lounge.
I see it then and I wonder why I did not notice sooner. There is a laptop on the floor near the TV. It is plugged in and I can see a light glowing. It is still on. Next to the laptop is a pile of seemingly blank DVDs. One case, though, lies apart from the others and is empty.
I press a key and the TV screen comes to life. The picture in front of me is of Peter. He is frozen in black and white, blurred. His face fills the screen and his eyes appear to be closed. In truth he is unrecognisable but I know it is him. Who else would it be, after all? Besides, this figure looks like me and I know it is not me.
I remember the cameras installed in the house next door.
I play the DVD. Peter springs back to life. I see him walking from room to room. That is all. The DVD is a collection of scenes of Peter doing nothing.
Until the end. He goes into the room in the eaves. There is a camera in that room too. He goes in there and he does not come out. And then I appear. I run into the room after him. On the DVD it is a split second after Peter; in reality it was a full day later. I rewind and watch over and again. But there is nothing else. This is all there is, all that is left of him. I flick through the other discs, but this is the only one out of its wrapper.
The room is silent. Not completely silent; there is a buzzing that comes from the screen. I put my finger in my ear but the sound does not change. Not from the TV or laptop then.
I leave, closing the door behind me. I stand still in the dark for some time. I do not know how long. I stand in the dark and when I do move, my limbs creak as if suddenly I have lost years of my life.
5
I am at the fence walking back to the larger house when I see it. Just a glimpse, fleeting. I am looking elsewhere – at my feet – and I catch it at the edges of my vision: a man disappearing around the side of the house.
The first thing I think is that the hours – for it is hours – I have spent in the dark, watching the DVD, has affected my vision. But that feeling lasts for just a moment.
I run. I run through the gap in the fence and round to the right of the house, the opposite direction to the figure, hoping to intercept him. My route takes me around the pool wall. A mistake. I am out of sight of the house for too long. I have locked it, though, I am certain of that. I emerge onto the lawn at the back of the house but can see no one. I run again, looking inside through the windows. When I get to the front of the house, I have still not caught sight of the intruder. I walk all the way around the house again and through the yard this time. Nothing.
I go into the swimming pool enclosure, opening the gate in the fence that runs along the side opposite the wall. I have not been in here yet. It has not been kept up. There is a metre of water in the deep end, a few centimetres in the shallow. I cannot see the bottom because of the leaves. I walk around the edge of the pool looking into it. For what, I am not sure. The sludge is undisturbed. In one end a crisp packet, faded by the sun.
I remember this place. Three boys. Long summers. I remember diving in, a towel around my shoulders. We had been watching
Superman
. I dived in on top of Peter as he lay on a lilo. He screamed at me. I remember being shocked at this. I had just been playing a game. It was wrong of him to react like that, even if he had been hurt. He swam off and did not speak to me for hours. In fact, I think the next time was in the car on the way to the Karoo. Our parents asked what was wrong, but neither of us said anything.
I look back at the house and away from the water. I am annoyed I have allowed myself to get sidetracked by a memory.
But whatever it was is gone. I am left feeling unsettled. I will call it unsettled. Whoever it was – not whatever.
What has thrown me most, though, is what I thought when I first saw the person. Peter: I thought it was him. Though I caught only a fleeting glimpse and could not have recognised him, I thought it was Peter.
A few days later I finish painting the house. It looks better. I have not done the best job but it will do. I have painted around the cameras, leaving them in place.
But I have made no move to sell the house or book a flight back to London. I am in the house of the man to blame for the death of my brother and cut out of my life because of it, a man who has also to bear at least some responsibility for what happened after Paul’s death: our own estrangement, my mother’s growing absences and eventual departure, the silences between the three who remained.
I am here, sitting in the same chairs he sat in, using the same bathroom, sleeping in the same bed. I feel him all around me. It’s as if he is seeping into me, this man I could not wait to get away from, whom I have been trying to forget my whole life. I feel as if he is somehow watching me, perhaps because of the cameras I feel peering down at me. I feel him sat in the bungalow before the screen, half a smile on his face, enjoying watching me flounder.
Why? I ask myself. Because I witnessed Paul’s death? Because I saw what happened and never told? It is more than that. What he wrote in that letter. He seems to have forgotten what happened, forgotten the truth of those events.
I cannot picture his face. Though I saw it just hours ago, I cannot picture it. When I try there is blankness where his face should be.
Or, I picture my own. I think of this man, for whom I feel only distaste, and instead I see my own face. Despite my inertia, I cannot wait to be rid of this, of all of this.
I resolve to change that and complete the clearing of the house. I have not opened any cupboards, any drawers yet. Though I have been here a few weeks, though I have painted the whole house and moved furniture, I have shied away from opening cupboards and drawers where there might be some reminders of the past.
I sit in the chair in the lounge, facing out to the garden, and I know what I must do, what I have been putting off all these days and weeks. I cannot move, though. It is as if I cannot feel my limbs, or, as if there is something sticking through my chest, through my spine, pinning me here. A needle through a fly.
It is one thing painting the house, quite another going into the heart of it, the guts of it. I begin, though, and start going through the cupboards. There are a few I have opened already: the kitchen, the one in the upstairs corridor where I assumed I would find bed linen. But not many. None in the bedrooms. They are mostly empty. Things may have been stolen of course. There have been plenty of people in the house recently. But I do not think that is the case and I remember again what he said in his letter about leaving only a few things behind.
As I start going through the drawers, I get a strong sense of him. It is like he is here with me, inside the house. Perhaps, I find myself thinking, there is another room, one I have forgotten about, in a corner of the house, where now he stays and watches; his death an elaborate charade, a trick performed with mirrors and lights and cameras.
This thought somehow does not strike me as ludicrous. I keep expecting to see him, keep expecting to be confronted by him as I walk from room to room. A man, flesh and blood. If not here, then in the house next door. I am less familiar with that. Perhaps he bought it and excavated underground, a hideaway unknown to the world. He flits between the two houses, always in the one I am not.
In one of the cupboards there is some linen. In another, empty boxes and magazines dating from five years ago. The cupboards in the main bedroom are the fullest. I pull clothes from them. I hold up a shirt, hold it up first to the light then to me. My size. Most I throw quickly into bags but a few I keep aside. There are no suits, few formal clothes.
From the drawer next to the bed I pull out junk. There are wires, buttons, a few coins, a penknife, a pack of cards. I take the cards out. They are still in the cellophane wrapper. I wonder at this. Did he go out and buy a pack of cards? I wonder who they might have been for, if they were meant for someone else, to be dealt by someone else, to someone else. But never used. I imagine a scene: my brother in the lounge downstairs. Two glasses of wine on a table. The lights turned low. A pack of cards, two hands dealt. On the chair opposite, a woman, her hair shielding her face. She flicks it and I see it is her: Rachel, my wife. I close my eyes and the picture goes.
I am used to those pictures by now. Rachel and Peter: the image of them talking in the café in the park. A period of my life I am trying not to think about. I did not handle it well, lost control. Thinking back, it was as if I was afraid of my brother, though without reason.
I wonder if there is, or was, a woman. I surmise not, given what was implied in the letter he wrote. No children either. But I could be wrong. Perhaps now, at this very moment, a woman is driving from the airport on her way to see him. She has been away for months on an aid mission, working for the Red Cross. She will ring the doorbell, skirts to her ankles, expecting a different man to open the door, not this one, one who looks similar, the same even, but who is very obviously not whom she is here to see. A doppelgänger.
Perhaps she will be holding a child by the hand, a girl with streaky hair and round brown eyes. My niece. My family. The story makes no sense. There is no girl.
In another drawer are more papers and a box closed with an elastic band. I empty the drawers on the bed: the total of my brother’s life. The houses, the letter he gave to Rachel, the photographs, these papers. The memories, too. Not many of these, though some appear to be returning. I wonder, briefly, whether any of them are real, or just made up. The photographs, I suppose, prove them real – at least, prove parts of them real.
I begin to sift through the papers. There are bank statements, till slips. There are notebooks with nothing written in them. I go through the bank statements. Some date back twelve years and the newest are from just a few weeks ago. The earliest ones cover the last months of my father’s life. There is little in them: payments to supermarkets, pharmacies, petrol stations, electricity bills, water rates. No restaurants, no cinemas. I go through them all. They are stacked in date order. There are some months missing, but not many. A history of my father’s and brother’s lives in withdrawals and deposits. The money going in is very little. The same amount, more or less, coming out every month.
There are a few items that stand out. About a year after the statements start, there is an entry for a funeral parlour: seven thousand rand. I don’t know, I have been out of the country for many years, but it seems like a lot. I picture an ornate coffin, gilded in bronze, flowers overflowing in a church. A priest, his hands held up. In the pews, one man with head bowed. Outside the pall-bearers smoke and mutter to one another, too used to grief to comment on the ornateness of the funeral compared to the scarcity of mourners.
A few months later there is a large sum deposited in Peter’s account. It stays there and does not diminish by much. My brother’s spending habits do not change. But salary payments into Peter’s account stop in 2009 and there is little in the account by the time of the last statement. I see the airfare to London, and I notice something else. Both my father and, after his death, Peter made payments to a company called 24/7 PI. I look them up in the Yellow Pages: a local private investigation firm. I make a note of the address.
I begin going through the till slips. There is little of interest in them. No receipts for funerals or detective agencies. I spend a few minutes looking at one in particular. It is for a can of Coca-Cola – one can. I cannot make out the date, but it seems old. I almost laugh. My brother drank Coke. It doesn’t fit. It is too mundane, too carefree, to belong in this house. I keep this receipt, throw the others away.
I open the box. At the top of it is something that takes my breath away. Another photograph, this one more recent than the others I have seen. A photograph of Rachel and me on our wedding day. It is not one of the official photographs. It has clearly been taken from a distance. The background is blurred, though our faces are perfectly in focus. We are looking at each other, smiling, waiting perhaps for the photographer, the official one, to compose his next shot. We are standing on the peace pagoda in Battersea Park. We came here for our photographs after the wedding. We could have had them taken in Richmond, of course, but this was where we had bought our first flat together. This was our place.
We are standing there, my arms around her. She has goose bumps. It is July but it is a cool day. I run my fingers over her arms, remembering the night at the bus stop years before. We are laughing, self-conscious, but in a happy way. We are proud, there is no other word for it, to be with each other, to be watched and envied by strangers. My eye catches a flash of light, sun on a lens perhaps. I look up and notice, though I forget it almost as soon as I see it, until now – a man in the distance, lowering a camera, a tourist, an amateur photographer.
This is the photograph taken a second before the lens was lowered.
I look closely at Rachel. I have never seen her more beautiful. I thought that then too. I touch her face with the tip of my finger. I remember touching her, the touch of her skin. It sends a jolt through me.
The box also contains the receipts for the detective agency. It adds up to a significant amount of money, especially for someone without a salary. There is only one photograph of me and Rachel, but I find my home address, my work address, both my and Rachel’s email addresses and a copy of my degree certificate. I pull out an invitation to Rachel’s thirtieth birthday party.
It was in our flat. At three in the morning, drunk on our bed after everyone had left. My fingers in her mouth. She had had a cigarette, her last. The taste of it turned me on even more.
When I think of this now, my gaze shifts from the couple on the bed to the corner of the room. Sitting in the chair in the dark, a man, his face invisible. I see him – as if he is real.
The watching. I wonder how long it went on for, how much they knew, how closely I was kept under surveillance. There is a copy of my degree certificate, but were they watching me then or did they get hold of it only recently? Somehow I know the answer. It makes sense. Since leaving, I have never been out of sight, save perhaps for a few months in the beginning. First my father, then Peter, kept watch over me. Why? Did they think they could know me by doing that? Get to the truth of me, the real me?
Perhaps they did. Perhaps they found out what they needed to know. Were they proud of what I achieved? Or perhaps they saw everything presented to them as a lie, some story painted by an amateur detective, and me, the main character, a charlatan, acting for an audience of two. Perhaps they thought that. I will never know.
These cameras in the house, I find myself thinking, somehow meant for me, some sort of lesson or communication.
In a small linen bag I find a watch. On the back a date, then my father’s and mother’s initials: 2 July 1980. NRH. SGH. Their tenth wedding anniversary. Rachel and I were married on the same date in 2009. It would have been their thirty-ninth anniversary. I have never thought of this until now. Coincidence. I try to remember if I suggested the date or Rachel.
She would have been pleased to know the significance of the date, I know that. It would have made her happy – more happy. Too late.
The watch has the right time on it, though the date has not moved correctly into place. It shows half a six and half a seven. I take off my own and put this on instead. There is a crease in the leather where it has sat in the buckle over the years. I do it up to there and it sits perfectly on my wrist. I wonder if Peter wore it as well as my father.
The contents of the second drawer are mostly rubbish. There are drawing pins, rubber bands, a pair of earphones, the wires frayed. The ordinariness of it. What did he buy drawing pins for? What music did he listen to, if it was music? Perhaps they were bought to listen to meditation tapes. Unlikely. Perhaps his investigator sent a sound recording along with the photograph and the addresses: a recording of the wedding; or, a recording of me asleep, Rachel too.