James Roderick Burns
1/ Sound, Silence
I read somewhere that the reason silent film has become a thing of the past is that it belongs to an extinct tradition which people can no longer decipher. Yet the other day in my office the screening of an image in silence seemed necessary, somehow.
I'd looked up from my papers at the firing of an engine, and gone over to the window. On the other side of the street a workman was cutting into the asphalt of a rooftop, dipping the blade quickly into the grainy black fabric and pulling it out, unpicking the seams of the surface. He'd jammed his boot against the wall, and every now and then as he progressed orange sparks would race across his toecaps when the blade glanced on stone. I watched as he detached most of the roof from its surroundings, then switched off the saw and began to pull up and fold the material into long heavy flaps. Behind him, in the distance, the city was taking its usual course. Without the whine of the engine he became just a figure moving behind glass, small yellow lurching smudges and the clean sides of buildings marking his position as he moved.
I went back to my desk and began to work again. I had a report to prepare and was correcting a first draft. Pages turned every few minutes; the nib of the pen scratched across the paper. When I next looked up all I could see were the rooftops shining against a blue sky. The office was very quiet. I remembered something: that moment five years ago when time stopped like a lens opening and she walked past me on the street corner, turning her head; the lustre of her hair as it swung onto her shoulder, the darkness of her eyes as they slid into mine. Her picture ate into the filmstock. It faded, moving away from me, only to reform and run slowly by with flickers and burnt out scratches and the knowledge that this mute image was all that I had. Then another image came, playing on the white wall by the window. My grandfather, as he rose from his chair and slowmotioned the back stairs to die a choking death eight years before I was born. I struggled to take it back. There, to the armchair, the spectacles, the book. I looked, and saw the long lines of script rolling up his lenses as he raised his eyes to the window. He was thinking about the rainclouds and the houses he had painted that day. He became still. Sometimes things persist, I think, somehow.
2/ Groundfloor Windows
From this distance, my childhood looks like the figures I watch through dirty windows as they shuffle down the alley: old men muffled up in greatcoats and thick-fingered gloves, heads lowered, eyes scrunched up against the cold, their dirty scarves flapping in the wind. Visible, but not really there. I can't walk upstairs and look down at them - by the time I part the bedroom curtains they're long gone, and the back street is empty. They're not much more than animated shadows.
I don't get a great deal of satisfaction thinking about stuff that's happened. I'd rather sit and look over the lip of a mug of tea, listening to the wind lift up bin lids in the alleyway and clatter them across the cobbles. If I hold the mug at just the right angle I can get steam to creep and spiral through the chip in the rim; it curls up to the ceiling in shrinking and fattening ribbons, making me think of my father. He was always surrounded by pipesmoke. My mother would complain that it made her eyes red, got into her hair, and move with ill grace to the other end of the settee. She wouldn't stand for it, she said, but he just smiled and kept puffing away. Then when they stopped speaking she didn't come home, and he had the place to himself.
We knew it was safe to sneak out into the hall when the last traces of that sweet, wooden smell had disappeared and there were no more flintings in the stuffy darkness. The coast was clear! He'd lumbered off to bed, would soon be asleep. My brother and I liked to watch the goings on at the houses across the street. Sometimes the older couple above No. 10 set to in their kitchen, their shadows cutting back and forth in dark lines behind the roller-blinds, or the teenage daughter in No. 18 left a chink in the curtains and let us see the heavenly curve of a breast being levered from its cotton cone. Once we caught sight of a glistening wetness on the edge of the lawn: a hedgehog, nosing out from under the scrubby bush that separated our patch from the neighbour's. My brother glanced at me. Gesturing, he slipped open the window. I crept out and across the grass to lie down beside the creature. For a moment its little eyes glittered like chips of coal: it looked at me. Then shrinking it spread out its spikes, and curled up tight into a ball. With my chin on the short grass, the soil cool and salty in my nose, I saw my brother, way up on the window sill, smiling faintly. But I can't see him now - that window's filthy, and the one upstairs is painted shut.
3/ Ordinary Clothes
When she had gone, it occurred to me that the coats they wore always looked that white: they washed them, bleached them, perhaps, and hung them to dry on a hanger, ready for the morning. In the ordinary world, beyond the moments of silence that burst above our heads like shells, there was a normal day in the hospital, a routine accretion of things and movements and spoken words that everyone moved through like water. Time rolled off the clock hands and oozed from white heels turning quietly on the polished tile, but nobody noticed. On the fifteenth floor the air was rubberized.
A nurse padded silently in, asking under her breath (now, we don't want to alarm the old gentleman on the other side of the hall) for us to leave my grandmother's room for a few minutes, and we complied. She kicked the chock away from the door and it swung to, gasping into the jamb. We heard a curtain screech along its metal track, then a soft calming voice begin to move with the undulations of a brook beneath a thin layer of ice. We wandered into the hallway and found a broken rectangle of brown chairs by a coffee table. Another nurse came by, and stopping offered to make us coffee: I watched the stiff pleats near her underarms rise and fall as she dug the brown granules out of the jar and scattered them in the cups. I wondered how smoothly she might pour other liquids, or fold cloth, like the napkins she spread on a battered tray, and how the fabric of her dress reacted when she lifted someone's body. It seemed very fluid, just then. Rather natural, like skin. The coffee turned my stomach and I went to the window.
Outside the town was settling to its afternoon activity, tightening its belt of traffic and turning solid concrete shoulders to the falling rain. The sky had little colour; perhaps the yellowed white of used cotton, where it spread its arms around the horizon. It seemed unconcerned.
I turned back to the hallway. The first nurse had come out of my grandmother's room, and was conferring with my grandfather. Now's the time, her nodding head seemed to say, and who's to come? I followed the nurse back to the room, over to the window. Here my grandmother lay, cream, red, brown, blue, in a gown the colour of flowers. Behind their blackened sockets her distant eyes crept into mine. I took up her old soft hand, squeezing, as the morphine slid into her bloodstream. It began to twist and turn, eating into the pain, loosening her connection to her pupils like fingers unfastening a worn clasp. I felt a lessening of heat and her fingers clamp, then relax, inside mine. And slowly, silently, without any sense of what I was holding, I watched her undress.