The Museum of Doubt Page 3

  And I said So what’s the point of having all the others.

  And he said It’s the complete set.

  And I said But you don’t need the others if you only watch one.

  And he said I like having the collection. I like having it there. It makes me feel complete.

  And I said So you don’t know what I mean.

  I came back from the restaurant without a job after I tore up the menus and started asking the customers why they ate so much when they weren’t hungry. I began taking things to charity shops. First the candles, then the candlesticks, the boxes and the scatter cushions. It was a while before my husband noticed and when he did I said we don’t need them. I decided we didn’t need the pictures, the plants, most of the kitchen equipment and the gardening stuff. It was only when I took the TV and video away that he got angry. When I told him we didn’t need them he said there was more to life than need. He was a salesman, of course, like you. He said I was ill. That was a bad day. It wasn’t as if I gave the electrical stuff away for nothing. It got easier after that. I managed to get rid of his records and his comics. I thought he was going to kill me then, although there wasn’t much left in the house to do it with. What are you so upset for? I said to him. You didn’t need any of that stuff. You’ve still got me.

  He left that night, after calling me a Jesuit, communist, Big Brother, fanatic, hermit, freak, nun, prude, evangelist, sanctimonious killjoy, Calvinist and bore. I said I loved him and asked if he really needed that other wristwatch? He said is there anything you need? I said I need you, and I took his hand and put it down inside my pants. He said I was a sex-mad Puritan who ought to be put away. He took what he could load into his car and left. It took me weeks to empty the house and sell up to get enough to buy this place and live on. The last thing I got rid of was that ornament I put on the mantelpiece. Then I was ready to open the Museum of Doubt.

  Jack had stopped crying. He was sitting with his shoulders still bowed, looking up at her, listening. He looked younger. His eyes were full of wonder and attention, like a child at the theatre, and his face had a cast of wisdom without experience. You’re right, he said.

  Adela smiled out of one corner of her mouth. I’ve convinced you, have I, she said, looking out of the window.

  I was always convinced, said Jack. It only needed someone to say it. I don’t have to ask how you live without music. You listen to yourself instead. You read the same five books over and over again. The world in daylight is your television.

  You’re making me sound like a mad hermit. I am a hermit. I’m not mad, though.

  Jack frowned and stood up. I’m wondering whether we really need this stool, he said. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall.

  The floor’s cold, said Adela. I don’t like to be uncomfortable. I thought you were a salesman?

  I was until today.

  What happened?

  I met you.

  Adela sat down on the stool, leaned her elbow on the table and looked down at Jack. Not so funny, she said.

  When I began to sell, it was good. It was paradise. It was my calling. I never thought of it as making money. The money thing was an obstacle in the way of me handing out gifts to people. I’ve walked and ridden and driven the roads for a time. For a long time. I’ve seen the clients’ homes get bigger to make space for the things I gave them. The homes are brighter now, especially the kitchens. I brought those small, dark homes so much light, space and music. I brought them so many cameras, so many motors, so much food. Why did it take so long for me to understand they didn’t really need it? Nobody turned me away before you did.

  First you make me out to be a hermit, now you’re turning me into some kind of preacher, said Adela. I just live this way. I don’t care who else does.

  A second sun put its head above the ground and ducked back. Yellow light splashed Adela’s skin, cycling to orange and red. A hammer of air cracked the glass of the window in half with a single vertical line and the Museum of Doubt trembled.

  You car’s just exploded, said Adela.

  They went to the doorway. There wasn’t much left. There were no flames. The frame smoked for a few moments and then the smoke blew away, like a blown-out candle. The frame and the wheels collapsed inwards into a neat pile.

  Propane gas canisters and that line of self-igniting chemical heaters, said Jack, shaking his head.

  It began to snow, rubbing white into the black star burned in the night’s fall. Jack walked to the nest of entwined metal, reached his hand into its oil-roasted depths and pulled out a new toothbrush in a cardboard and cellophane box. It was all he could save. By the time they went back inside, there was a snowstorm.

  Adela lit the fire in the bedroom and they sat on the sofabed, watching it.

  I could walk down the hill tonight, said Jack.

  Best not to, said Adela.

  I was wondering what I’d need to open a branch of your museum.

  What you wouldn’t need.

  Yes. But after I got rid of everything I wasn’t sure I needed, what would be left.

  Adela looked away from the fire and turned to him. What would be?

  Jack reached into his pocket and held out the toothbrush.

  Adela smiled. Is that it? I think maybe you must be planning to stop in someone else’s museum.

  Jack raised his eyebrows. Look, he said, beckoning Adela to move closer and examine the toothbrush. It had a blue plastic handle and white plastic filaments. The word Colgate was written on it.

  Look, he said again, when she was next to him, looking down at the toothbrush, held in his two outspread hands like an offering. When you eat, you use the brush to spear the food – he gripped it brush-end up and made a downward stabbing motion – spindle it, or brush it towards your mouth. When you sit down, you use it to brush the ground clean. When you want something to read, you use the word Colgate as an index for the things you know by heart. C is the Code Napoleon, O is Orlando Furioso, L is for Little Lord Fauntleroy. That’s the way it goes.

  You can’t sleep under your toothbrush when it’s snowing, said Adela. What do you do then?

  You hold it up in front of you like this, said Jack, go and knock on the door of somebody you know, and ask for help.

  Adela laughed, looked away and looked back into his face, still smiling. She stayed where she was, close to him.

  You didn’t have to call it a museum, said Jack. You must have been wanting people to come. You don’t doubt you need visitors, do you?

  No, said Adela, shaking her head. Her eyes were deep and bright and looking into his, where she was falling from altitude towards an unlit continent, self-eclipsed, falling and knowing nothing of the forest canopy about to catch her, only certain it was warm and filled with prey.

  D’you know what I need?

  Maybe I do. I don’t know what I need but I know what I feel like.

  Jack reached out an index finger and placed it between her lips. Adela opened her mouth a little and stroked the finger moist in a pout. A message of salt travelled into her and the answer was raw hunger. She closed her eyes, the moon rose and she was high with longing to wound a creature. She opened and closed her jaws and pressed her teeth into the finger, wanting to meet bone, wanting the knuckle to break. She felt blood run down her chin and the hunger stopped. She opened her eyes and saw Jack’s head hung back, his finger unharmed and unmarked. There was no blood.

  Oh, your finger, she said. She took it in one warm fist and squeezed it, kissed the tip. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I wanted to bite your finger off but I didn’t want to hurt you.

  Jack raised his head. You didn’t hurt me any more than I wanted to be hurt, he said. Stand up.

  Adela got up and Jack unfastened her jeans and took them down. He touched her vagina with his lips and looked up at her. I’d like to fuck you with my tongue, he said.

  Yeah, go ahead, said Adela.

  When they were tired they lay overlapped on the sofa facing each other, b
oy-thigh girl-thigh boy-thigh girl-thigh, elbows propping them up at either end.

  I’m in sails, said Jack. With an ‘i’.

  What is it you sell? said Adela.

  I sell as much as anyone can ever get.

  And how much does that cost?

  It doesn’t cost anything. It’s just Life.

  I don’t get it.

  Life. Guaranteed to last a lifetime. All you can eat, all you can drink and all you can wear before you die.

  But you’d get that anyway.

  Would you? You haven’t.

  I haven’t got life? Do I not seem alive to you? You thought I was alive enough when you cried my name a minute ago.

  Jack looked away. His body slackened and tensed and his face closed, as if he was preparing to reshoulder an intolerable load after a moment’s rest. He said: You are alive. You’ll die one day like all the rest but you never got what they call a life. That’s what they’ve got, life. But you’ll live till you die. It’s not the same. You’re alive.

  Adela shook her head. D’you want something to eat?

  Jack shook his head. You can’t spare it.

  There’s soup. You’ll have to have some.

  Only if you let me pay.

  Don’t be stupid.

  Here, said Jack. He reached into his jacket and took out a small box. He held it out to Adela. This survived. Take it. For the soup.

  Adela looked at the box for a while. OK, she said. She got up, put on her jeans and sweater, took the box and walked towards the kitchen.

  Adela, said Jack. What was that last ornament you got rid of when you left your old place?

  A gull. A grey and white porcelain gull with a yellow beak.

  Some time later Adela went to call Jack through for the soup. He was gone. She looked in the morning for his tracks in the snow, but they had been covered up by the freshly fallen.

  She opened the box and took out a grey and white porcelain gull with a yellow beak. She went up behind the house to the tall rocks, laid the gull on a flat place, took a heavy stone and pounded it to powder. By evening the weather turned and rainclouds crossed the ridge. Rain fell and washed the powdered porcelain off the rock, where it mixed with the melting snow and was carried away to the river on the floor of the glen.

  * Subject to availability

  Bonny Boat Speed

  When I see Arnold I remember the woman who could walk. I think about Jenny too of course, not that she looked anything like her dad. I haven’t seen her for a long time now. That was why I stopped the woman who could walk, to find out when the healing would be over and Jenny would come out. I didn’t go inside. I had nothing that needed healing then. Nothing that you would stand up and say you believed in Jesus for, or that you’d know if you’d been healed of. Praise the Lord! I can love the ones I didn’t love before, and stop loving the ones that didn’t love me! Hallelulia! I walked up to the hall entrance slowly, early, and I was reading the curved red letters on freshpasted white paper about Pastor Samuel’s Ark of Salvation when the woman who could walk walked out. I knew she could walk because she told me. She was big and mobile in skirt and sweater and her hands stuck in the pockets of her open raincoat which was flying behind her in the warm wind over the car park, her face was white and her mouth slightly open and she was staring straight ahead. She had a crutch tucked under her right arm. I had to catch her by the elbow to stop her.

  Excuse me, d’you know how much longer it’s going on? I said.

  She stopped, one foot lifted, balanced by my hand resting on her elbow – it was a soft, round elbow – and looked at me long enough to say: I can walk! before she walked, then ran, to her car and drove away. It was a straight slip road to the M8, a busy enough evening with no roadworks, and as far as I could understand from the paper next morning it happened within a couple of minutes of her merging with the flow that the juggernaut swung easily through the barriers and hit her car head on, with a combined speed of 150 miles per hour. I suppose Pastor Samuel might have said Well, I healed her, so the least she could’ve done was to have stayed to the end of the meeting. Now she walks, nay drives, with the Lord.

  I was concerned for myself. I kept her back for half a second and the juggernaut hit her. In half a second a truck moving at 70 miles an hour travels its own length twice – that’s what Arnold told me when I shared this with him, a free sample. From her side she could have avoided the truck by being more polite. We were both in the wrong. I suffered by not knowing I’d have to wait quarter of an hour for Jenny to come out. The woman who could walk suffered by being conscious for at least 30 seconds of the sensation of the destruction of her body by an oncoming lorry (spontaneous Arnoldism.) Usually when I think about the woman who walked the thought is: I didn’t summon up the juggernaut, did I. You don’t guess the instant when northbound and southbound collide, like a single bolt of lightning. Only when I see Arnold I think about how maybe everything is equalled out in the end, not in a good way, and how easy it is to summon up an irresistible opposing force, after all.

  What Siobhan said this one time, and the tenner pointing at my empty tumbler was sharp and fresh as a new razor, was even more ominous than Arnold lurking round the pub as he was: Same one again? she said. Not Same again? but Same one again?

  Ah, better not, last ferry and all. I looked down into the glass and dodgemed the sleek humps of ice around the bottom. The unnecessary One hung in the air.

  Go on, said Siobhan. You sold a house today, didn’t you? Take a cab.

  I sell a house most days. I sold one yesterday.

  It was a big one, you said.

  It was a big one. I felt like rewarding myself with a third g & t. But the taxis skin you for a ferry trip and it’s no better picking up a second one on the other side.

  I can’t drive after three, I said.

  Take a cab. Two gin and tonics please, she said. She’d seen the weakness in my face and got the order out the way so we could argue about it over a drink.

  I don’t want to take a cab, I said, looking over at Arnold sitting by himself at the table by the cigarette machine. He was working, he had the yellow pad out in front of him. He turned and smiled at me. I looked at Siobhan.

  It’s not the money, I said. I don’t like being screwed. I’ve got to take the car across. I’ve got a season ticket.

  Well drive then, she said, holding the two glasses out in front of her.

  But I can’t if I have a third drink, I said. I took one of the glasses from her.

  Don’t drink it, she said.

  I won’t, I said, and took a mouthful of the stuff and swallowed it down.

  You’re so weak, she said, smiling and touching her earring.

  You make it sound as if that’s good.

  Oh, I love weak men.

  So how do I get home?

  I’ll give you a lift back.

  I was very happy. It was easy to make me happy. Maybe I’d have four drinks and all in Siobhan’s company, and a free ride all the way to Kirkcaldy on the big white ship. There’d be time for one on the moon deck bar on the way over and we could sit there studying the constellations, talking. I was grinning too much too close into Siobhan’s heroic delighted face and turned again to Arnold. We smiled at each other and waved. I raised my glass to him. He raised his. It looked like water.

  Great, I said to Siobhan. In the rush of it I almost said I love you, not meaning it like that, but instead said: Why did you say Same one again?

  Confusion sluiced darkly into her face.

  You said Same one again instead of Same again.

  Did I?

  Yes.

  She looked into the middle distance, frowning, quiet for a while. So what? she said eventually.

  I took a deep drink and went under, groping for something good.

  We’re like sister and brother, you and me, I said.

  She looked at me without saying anything for a few seconds, then put her drink in my free hand. Arnold’ll give you a lift, she sa
id, and walked out the door.

  I finished my gin, sat on a bar stool and started in on hers, raising the side without lipstick to my mouth, turning it to the side with lipstick. It tasted pretty much the same. I was watching Arnold. He was scribbling away with a pencil. The bar was full but the only person I knew was Arnold, sober as an ayatollah and his car parked outside.

  Once there was a group of merchants who returned to the borders of the empire after months spent crossing the great wilderness. Everyone wanted to know what it had been like. Och, it was all right, the merchants said. Hot deserts of course, cold mountains, wet jungle – still, we made it.

  Folk listened to them politely, clapped them on the back and drifted back to their affairs. Some time later another group of merchants arrived. The locals gathered round – what was it like? Incredible, the merchants answered. Absolutely unbelievable. It was so hot that the beaks of the vultures would soften and fuse together and they would die of starvation if they were careless enough to close them. It was so cold that we had to breathe on each other’s eyes every five minutes to stop our eyeballs freezing solid. It was so wet that a cup held out would fill with rain faster than a man could drink it.

  A huge crowd gathered round the second group of merchants, stood them drinks for a year, offered them their daughters in marriage and secured them pensions for life.

  Arnold was making a good living on the discovery that folk hungered after apocryphal facts like drinkers hunger after salty snacks. He had a name. The editors would ring him up: Death Valley, Arn, they’d say, give me ten by six. And he’d sit around and write: In Death Valley in August, you can toss an ice cube in the air and it will have melted before you can catch it. Nine more like that. Or: Dead composers this week mate, say a dozen. And he’d write: If the Italian composer Vivaldi was alive, he would be the richest man on the planet, earning an estimated £1 million a minute from royalties on the use of The Four Seasons on telephone switchboards. The secret lay in the utter lack of research and confidence that anyone who could be bothered to challenge his published facts would be rejected as a nitpicking wanker. Besides, whenever one of his jobs appeared, it was so quickly plagiarised that it immediately took on the veracity of gospel – more so, in fact, since every second of every day somewhere in the world an average of 6.5 people challenges the authenticity of the New Testament (6.5 – what Arnold calls the precision principle in successful apocrypha) whereas no-one, not even the Vatican, had ever taken the trouble to complain about Arnold’s assertion that, for liturgical reasons, the Pope never flies in aircraft that can land on water.