Black Chalk

‘Emilia, Emilia,’ said Jolyon, ‘come on. We all know Jack is a terrible, terrible human being. But if you use physical violence against him, you’re only giving him the attention he craves. And there’s also a very real danger that he might one day mistake attention for affection.’ Emilia sat back down. She crossed her arms and made a face as if she had tasted something sour. ‘Now then, Em,’ said Jolyon, ‘you live next door to Dee so maybe you know more about her than whether she likes to wear wedding dresses. Now this is important. Are her parents rich?’

‘No,’ said Emilia. ‘Or if they are, or were, she wouldn’t have the faintest idea. Her mum died when she was three or something and God only knows who her dad was. She was taken into care. And then as a teenager she went through a series of foster-parents but they could never handle her for more than a year. So you bloody well deserved that kick Jack effin Thomson.’

‘All right, all right,’ said Jack, ‘So she’s Little Orphan Annie then. I’m truly and genuinely sorry, I didn’t know.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Jolyon. ‘I think we might have our sixth player.’ He waved his piece of paper like a flag, lowered it onto his thigh and underlined Dee/Havisham. And then he underlined it again.

XIX

XIX(i) The air feels fresh and my mind temperate today. Reading back through my words reminds me of several incidents from the past few days. Although I will admit to a few black holes, some lines I do not wholly recall writing. I discover a note to myself and immediately institute its suggestion. I place a matchstick in a coffee cup and the coffee cup on my morning plate. Yes, breakfast al fresco.

Which also prompts me to think –

Note to self: Remember to place your shoes on the bed. And when you come across them at night, find for them a place in the daily routine, beneath the second plate perhaps. Post-lunchtime walks every day would do you a power of good. Routine is vital.

XIX(ii) I remember that the outside world is my medicine now and so after my lunchtime routine I pull on my shoes and stand near my front door, by my apartment’s rear window. While taking some deep breaths I look out through the glass, gazing at the rear windows of other apartments. I see a man who waves his TV remote like a magic wand, a woman forking out food for her fat ginger tom. Lower down I see dark yards, metal ducts, chain-link fences.

But then something more interesting catches my eye, a rooftop standing directly across from my own and fringed with a white picket fence. A roof garden with large blue-glazed tubs holding sapling trees, terracotta troughs full of flowers, tables and chairs. It reminds me of Blair, our own building’s roof garden on the Upper East Side. Sipping rosé on cool evenings with neighbours, a life littered with surface pleasures. Everything I have lost.

XIX(iii) Down on the street I turn left and soon reach the shade of the park. I sit on a bench near the entrance, across from the stone chess tables clustered at the park’s corner like mushrooms in a forest glade. There are only two chess games in progress but the seats at the other tables are full. I feel the old itch as I look at the games in progress. I get up and make my way along paths that curl and sweep around the park. I pass the dog run, lively with little dogs pedalling and scrabbling. Larger ones hooping its dusty length.

Despite my itchiness this has been a good start. Perhaps this was all I ever should have looked for from life, the pleasure of watching the world turn.

Leaving Pitt after less than a year, and never earning a degree, my dream of becoming a barrister was shattered. My snowballing nerves would not have made for a good courtroom orator in any case. So that was that. My life’s ambition – crusader for justice, defender of the innocent – destroyed.

After my premature departure from university, I spent almost a year standing mournfully by a conveyor belt in a factory, returning each night to my small bedroom in my mother’s house. And then out of the blue there came a surprise, a helping hand from the warden of Pitt. I moved to London to work for a legal newspaper, my first job in the world of journalism. I could write well enough and so it seemed I had finally found something at which I might excel. The theory was good but in practice the scheme proved unsound. I was a mediocre journalist. The timid creature I had become struggled to ask the pertinent questions. I wrote fine words about nothing. In every interview I felt wary of causing offence, I became someone who wished not to pry. People would tell me things when I was young, I had an interested nature, I looked out at the world with an appealing thirst. But I started to become a very different person in my twenties. Someone who looked only within and found shadows. The world clammed up.