Writer, essayist. Psychologist.

23. The Life of Objects in the Past

She had been cooking with butter, its smell resisting all attempts to apprehend it, journeying into the corners of the room and causing his thoughts to jar and wander. She had been wearing a pale knitted hat, which she had taken off and placed on the table. It looked like a puddle, returning to form, correcting the space around it. Her mouth was open, her lips looked blurrily magnified, stung maybe, descending at the corners into what looked like brand new skin. On the radio, a voice was explaining Newtonian paradigms of time and lunar tides. How water and the moons of Jupiter correct temporal observations and the velocity of light, and that we should have confidence in their calculations, in laws. The voice was repetitive and emphatic, on infinite inertia and having no mass, the looping speed of light, fast moving trains and balls thrown and how the universe won’t let you lose. Outside, there were gunshots in the woods, he looked up and over at a makeshift tree house and a blue acrylic rope swing, tied in a hitch knot and hanging unevenly from an apple tree with a short split plank acting as a seat. The kitchen, extended in the sixties, now felt new and impermanent. He liked the unlikely arrangement of its structure, its absurdity soothing him. His gaze rotated and stalled briefly on the circuit diagrams once scratched into wet plaster of the kitchen wall. Beyond the room, the woods were disruptions visible as measurements in degrees of belief; second order geometries within the sounds of screeching clusters atomising from the trees’ crowns and described in the gunshots echoing flat into the trees, reduced to silence, to a point at which absence and presence curved into each other. The gun sat on the table between them, the world accepting the construction in its pure state and making it’s indifference clear. He wondered for a second if she was going to shoot him, and felt oddly and briefly excited. They sat and ate at the elm table, at chairs unrelated to each other in form and purpose. 

“Muntjac” he said “Or Fallow. They’re everywhere. You don’t knock.” 

“No, I don’t knock. Where did you go?”

“I went for milk. Do they seem recent to you?”

“What?”

“The woods”, he said, “. . . maybe they’re something I have preferred to think.” She ignored this, but he felt satisfied just to have said it out loud, as if it corrected something that might come next. His look slipped into some kind of solidity along with the now yellowing butter, allowing time to lapse as the tomatoes and eggs brightened on the plates between them. 

“ I wonder if the only thing that’s real is that fucking box.” He pointed towards the shipping container. Its colours seemed to have deepened, its insistence becoming a dull absolute. 

“That box isn’t real. It’s ridiculous. You should put up polytunnels. ”

“What?” She pointed with her knife towards the container. 

“Polytunnels. I have too many. You could use one over there. Grow something.” 

He nodded, now looking blankly into and beyond the trees. What looked like an electrical impossibility lingering on the husk of spent hollyhock, irritant nodes spiking and receding in intermittent tall moor grasses and common reeds, the woods' monochrome, filtered into a spectrum leaving as orange, pink and dissipations of electric greens where it ran into the sky.

“I haven’t decided what to do with it yet and . . . and I’m not sure that I remember you. I mean, I do, but it comes back in bits, pulses. Shards. And, well, you’re still here.”

“I am” she said; 

“Who are you?”

“I am German. Turkish. Ottoman really. I’m your best friend. I am Veronika. Or Vee.”

“You know me?” She ignored this too and carried on;

“I was told three times there was no hope. The oppression of the gendarmes. We weren’t allowed to sing. We only spoke Kurdish at home. They called it unity. You see, I am a terrorist. I was chained up in my bra and panties for listening to the radio. Like we are now. We sang Bella Ciao and danced outside the cafés in Çorum, we swam in both seas. We robbed banks. And we used to trap bears. Brown bears and sell them to the circus. I was at university in Istanbul at the end; pamphlets, surveillance, unions. We made fertiliser bombs. They were rich and we were farmers. Then we were guests. Gastarbeiter. In Berlin, West Berlin. I’m both a believer and a charlatan, a mountebank.” 

She elongated the ou; he followed it.

“It was the best Empire in the world. The mathematical centre of God’s green Earth. I thrive on possibility, you see, in change. How it works, the dance we all dance. Timers, timing. Old films. You know, Spielberg. Kids on bikes, experiments on frogs. That one; that’s how I can feel your feelings. It’s more than real. It’s Hyperreal, Technicolor. I know what you’re going to do next. I see things, like a road. The cosmos, the gun; it’s mine. I saw you before, next. It’s the same, it’s a sort of magic.” 

It was the most excellent promise you can make, he thought. To be seen. He continued his stare, dropping from the woods to the cantilevered extension, a planting table emerging unsupported from the wall. He wanted to say no, to remove himself from this conversation and carry on with his day alone. He mapped the half walls leading from the kitchen into the littered yard. A paler brick, its eaves and windows painted green, cushioned and sprouting moss flattening and erupting from wall tops, greying on roof tiles. He felt the inside of the house darken around them and brighten again from its centre. She saw his hesitance, that these events contradicted whatever models he was throwing at them, and that somehow in their speed and persistence, they would fall into continuity. The shots accelerated outside, becoming a train track clattering. He continued to eat, apparently unconcerned. As if holding something hot to the touch with no tactile hallucinations of consequence.

“Please” she said; her contralto betraying tragedies beyond this conversation and indicating an understanding of his unease; “. . . the laws of physics don’t even follow the laws of physics.”

She was the difference between yesterday and today, of low temperature and weak measurements, in time becoming legible in matter out of place. He had burned everything he had done and there was an order to that he liked, a pattern that had in time become pleasing to the eye. Now it was being overwritten, a storage efficiency was there in the trees, the eggs, the table; a future position latent in each tangent error. He wondered who he’d be if this world hadn’t happened, had he paused as it rushed past in the lurid coherence of others’ lives. Maybe this was it.

“You’ll stay. I mean, are you staying? You’re here now?” he said; “It was just a …… there was something.” 

When he closed his eyes, it was a man in a heavy, green Jermyn Street suit, lucid images of bushes and trees in the wind. A motorway bridge lit from below.

“I’m around, yeah”

Restless, he slowed his breathing, a competitive antagonist flooding membranes, bringing him back to himself in perfunctory loops. She picked up the handgun, a blue-label police sale Glock 21, it’s nitride black reflecting everything back towards itself, absorbing itself into a smoothed, high-resolution void. She removed the magazine, popping thirteen bullets onto her empty plate. She pulled back the slide mechanism and ejected one more, then fired the empty weight and checked that the chamber was clear, looking through the barrel. He looked at his hands, extending them slowly in front of his face and flattening them onto the table top.

She looked at him and turned the radio off. He could smell rain beyond the gun oil.

“I’m here to rescue you” she said; “no, not here to rescue you. I’m here to pick up my things. Well . . . that” she nodded at the gun. “. . . and to give you something. The keys to the castle. Here, I got this for you.”

It was a note, scratchily legible as if written by a seaside aunt, but written in capitals. At its top it said: HANDSOME BOBBY, underneath, printed in a green ink was what looked like: 𝓜 → 𝓜′, dim(𝓜) → dim(𝓜′), g𝓜 → g𝓜′ (2).

He was holding his jaw, rolling his tongue in and around the gaps where his teeth once were, a notified dialogue of pitch and duration remaining as the world collapsed, still tasting blood. They both understood what it should look like, how these trees should speak, small voices with wings, marsh harriers clawing into each other and becoming greater within a second architecture. She had barely noticed the woods at first, the floodwater path and the field dispersing into loose flint and unwanted and unclaimed fields. His garden a disappointment of land, fading into a sharpening point leading into the coarse embankment of the railway. Hooped corrugated aluminium, two decaying tractors lined precisely as if tanks for battle, equidistant piles of scrap, red now from years outside. Her assumption was that of what was around her, and she could do with it what she liked.