Martyn Rosser
We Have All the Time in The World Wide Web
It’s after the phone call that it starts.
I answer and nod and offer my thanks and try desperately to think of a question that will convey my anger and sorrow and composure, but my mind slips and I tumble away, watching myself, watching my wife watching me, watching myself watching her watching me – spinning like a cartoon animal trapped in a whirlpool. I have no idea how she feels, but every idea about what’s happened. Ideas appearing in rotation, a series of slides from an ironically endless briefing about the end; the snap of the clicker, the whir of the motor. I see everything we weren’t allowed to: the jagged line falling flat; the squeak of plimsolls on vinyl, the white sheet pulled overhead; the gurney tucked into the lift at an improbable angle; the closed casket in the church; the cross behind the altar, its scale emphasised by the emptiness; the slow drive to the crematorium; the indifferent flames burning like a childhood vision of hell. I was blind but now I see. All these events unfold in silence. The reverend is waiting for me to reply. I thank her again, hang up and look at my wife. I nod and offer a smile that will never quite be enough, that is an admission of our awful limitations. She rises from the stool and leaves the kitchen.
She doesn’t want to talk. I understand – I have to understand – after all it’s my job to be supportive. Admittedly, I never really knew my own father, but I did lose my mum in her fifties. I’ve been here before, approximately, and I’m not saying it was a good or a bad thing, but it did change my life, God knows. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. So, I’ve offered to listen, practised my open questions and eye contact. I’ve waited, refusing to placate my own anxiety by kicking away the heavy blanket of silence. I’ve given practical support. The kids are fed and watered, the house spotless – clothes on the line, beds made, vacuum recharging. I even struggled through the list of calls. Stressed but sympathetic colleagues, forgotten relatives and chatty strangers. Odd how much they want to talk about this person I barely know. Barely knew. I mean, I was never really sure if my father-in-law liked me. Even when it wasn’t mandated, he kept his distance. Or how, instead, they start discussing the weather or their new hobby or make little jokes about how they never really got out anyway. It’s a pity there wasn’t a proper funeral, they say. God is always watching, I reply.
~
I drive to the house and stand in the garden not chatting to my mother-in-law. We grow drowsy with the scent of spring flowers. Neat beds of trumpeting daffodils and wilting snowdrops; heavy towers of hyacinths; bushels of starry rhododendrons; aubretia clambering hungrily up the shed wall. Yellows and whites and blues and reds and purples offering a wordless eulogy. Margaret acts like it’s normal. Says he had a good run, that it gives her a chance to clear out some of the clutter. Grey-haired and knock-kneed, she looks as if she’s been up since five scrubbing the kitchen floor and darning socks. When I ask if she’ll move somewhere smaller, easier to manage, she answers my question with a question: how’re the kids doing? As I back out of the drive, watch her wave and walk back into an empty house, I’m reminded that my troubles are relatively minor. That I should come again. Halfway home, I put my foot on the brake and tap a reminder into my calendar. There are no other cars on the road. Haven’t been since the rumours infected the headlines, since they told us to travel only when necessary. You think it’s impossible to forget until you do.
~
I spend too much on the shopping, and the delivery guy gives me a look like I’m hoarding vital supplies. I guess it’s my own fault, I didn’t know what to buy so asked the kids. Katie, with the world-weariness of a teenager, complained about the amount of packaging. Libby tried, but what does an eleven-year-old know of well-rounded meals? Peanut butter and burgers? Tomato soup and crisps? I gave her a hug which, thankfully, stopped her talking, and sent her back upstairs. Within a couple of minutes, I heard her sister telling her to get out but decided to let it go.
The cooking, at least, I can manage. I produce sloppy piles of stew, pies dripping in gravy and bubbling pasta bakes. The veil of steam and the aroma of melted cheese remind me of when I first met my wife. Back then she was so consumed with her writing, or with toddler Katie, that she’d forget to eat. I’d arrive in her kitchen with carrier bags of comfort to peel and dice and simmer my way into her heart – to stir her leftover emotions. The cracked tile behind the stove. The flabby grind of the extractor fan. The seasoned assurance of a home-cooked meal. It’s strange how a scent can evoke a memory; how our thoughts are tangled up with what we smell and see and hear and taste.
At five pm, we sit in front of the telly and watch the daily briefing. The living room, with its doughy sofas and wide screen, felt cavernous when we first moved in; the girls suddenly too old to share, the money from her marketing job heavy in our pockets, but it’s amazing how things gather. Houseplants and shoe racks and occasional tables and cubes of shelving and floor lamps and leather puffs coalescing into a tidy mess, forming the rocks around which our lives used to run.
We’re allowed to eat in here because she never joins us for food, and because I find it easier than actual conversation. It’s not like the kids are really listening anyway – they spend most of their time staring at their phones – but there’s something soothing about the academic tone, the endless rotation of slides, the line that goes ever upward, that never stops.
Testing capacity is now at 51,254 per day.
If you can stay home, stay home.
We will be totally transparent about what comes next.
Protect the NHS.
There is no link between these two things.
Hands. Face. Space.
Makes it feel like the world is still turning, that the people in charge are in charge. Meantime, I leave optimistic snacks in opportune locations and then can’t bring myself to tidy them away. Biscuits soften in the trapped air. Red apple skins crinkle. Cups of tea catch cold, their milky heads slumping. At two am, I find her eating a plain tortilla, wrapping on the floor, a glass of water half-empty. I pray for guidance.
I get why she shuts herself in the attic, I do. I wouldn’t want to talk to me either. But the rules are there for a reason, I was just doing the sensible thing. Time unravels, days falling into hours falling into minutes, the excess pushing at the sides, spilling over the top, piling up until we have to wade through it in slow motion. The only thing we have too much of. I wish I could donate it to some good cause. Fast forward a year and still feel worthy. By then, maybe, we’ll be back to normal, whatever that looks like. Maybe she’ll have stopped blaming me. Don’t shoot the messenger, I’d said. How would you feel if you could never see your father again, she’d replied, what damage could it really do? She’d had a point.
~
Overnight, her laptop disappears from the office giving me a reason to investigate – right after breakfast. I manage to add a little to long enough by checking the kids are at their desks. Libby looks at me through half-closed eyes and offers the memory of a smile. Her golden hair, growing wild, sprawls over her forehead, threatens to envelop her face. Katie won’t open her door, tells me I worry too much. Didn’t I just watch her eat her damn cornflakes? I want to tell to be careful with her language. That sitting there hoping won’t get her through GCSE maths. That just because her dad lets her talk like that doesn’t mean it’s okay here. Maybe now’s not the time. Sunlight dapples through the window. The metal ladder winks at me. I dust the skirting, evicting a spider from its home, before stealthily poking my head through the trapdoor to scan the dusty savannah like some fragile mammal. There’s a moment where I believe she’s gone. That’s she’s at work, the kids at school. That I’m alone in the house again, thinking I heard a noise. That’s there’s nothing to worry about, that this madness is mine alone. Then I spot the light at the back and, as my eyes adjust, find her pouring and pawing through a warped cardboard box, head bent in concentration, and surrounded by flimsy towers – an avatar walking through a city of paper memories.
“Hey.” I try for eye contact, but she continues to scan the sheet in her hand. The laptop is sat by her feet, the pale light casting shadows.
“Hey,” she mumbles.
I embrace the silence, ask an open question. “So, er, how’s it going?”
“Pretty good.” Then, as if remembering herself, “All things considered.”
I take a few steps up the ladder, rest my arms on the floor, and wait. When she doesn’t protest, I lever myself up, briefly, thankfully, squeezing my middle-aged spread through the hole without incident. Then I stand and crack my head on the roof. While I wince – checking once, twice, for blood – she drifts, pauses in contemplation, skims through the top of one pile, then another, and another, before turning her attention back to the first. I offer support, “Can I help?”
She bites her top lip. Finally, she glides beyond the towers – a phantom spirit, dressing gown streaming behind her – kneels and starts construction on the bare brownfield beyond. “No, not really,” she replies.
“Right,” I say, wondering whether it’s a statement or a question. I watch for a few minutes, recalling a sermon on forgiveness – Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven – then head back to the kitchen.
~
I get an email from Libby’s form tutor that leaves me mortified. My child has not been to a single lesson in the last week. They understand the situation, it’s difficult for everyone right now, but it’s important she doesn’t fall behind, especially so soon after starting a new school. What should I say? The kid just lost her grandad, for goodness’ sake. I know what her mother would say. Words would not be minced. Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up. I listen for the distant pad of her feet. Then I draft and redraft an apology. I’d prefer to go in and talk to them. Break the ice. It’s what I do. What I did. I miss chatting to the customers while I made teas and coffees. St. Luke’s, the place meant something to me, gave me grip after mum passed. Dallying at the end of my shift. Popping into the shop if it was quiet. Taking the new recruits under my wing. The jobcentre called their placement mandatory. I joked: man, de Tories; to break the ice. Though definitely never in a West Indian accent.
We finish eating and, as cutlery clangs onto porcelain, I take a breath, mute the telly, and try to sound casual, “So, Libs, I got a message from Mr. Carr.”
I watch her hand dart up and down the chair arm, a spider fleeing the light. Then she looks away and shrugs. I’m about to ask her what’s wrong when Katie interrupts, “Idiot.” She manages to imbue the single word with contempt despite never looking up from her mobile.
Libby is quickly to her feet, fists clenched, body leant forward, a half-empty bowl clatters to the floor. I watch the soup spread, a circle of brown on the carpet, noodles twisting like earthworms. “Who are you calling an idiot?” she says. I want to run and get a cloth. Leave them to it.
Katie is big enough – five years older and blessed with the graceful authority of an apex predator – to remain nonchalant. She’s wearing a white dress, thin shoulder straps, black ankle boots. Dressed like Friday night, she raises a contoured eyebrow then responds, “You. Idiot.”
Libby drops her head, pulls an arm back and prepares to charge.
“Girls. Girls. Girls!” I’ve gone sotto voce, though have no idea why. I grab her Libby the waist and pull us both onto the sofa. Katie offers a grunt of amusement, nudging her hair away from her eyes like a god flicking away a fly. Then there’s a knock at the door and we freeze. Who on earth could it be? We look at each other as if the answer is harder to discover than it is. Although we don’t hear anything, suddenly, there she is – wife, mother, dead father’s daughter – opening the door and picking up the parcel. It’s size, and the white cross, reminds me of a tithe box. Then we watch her turn away, hear the steps on the stairs – heavy now, certain – the metallic twang of the ladder and the wooden clap as the trapdoor closes.
Katie looks up, as though there’s nothing left that can surprise her, and catches Libby with a questioning glare, “Why don’t you just sign in and turn your camera off, like everyone else? No one cares anymore.”
I care, I want to say. God cares. But it seems stupid.
*
The following evening, I start hearing voices. I’m in the kitchen putting away the dishes, steam rising from the sink, when Libby begins talking. She’s at the top of the stairs, telling some story about a trip to the zoo, the rhinos and how they were grumpy like grandad. Some story that elicits a familiar laugh, but by the time I arrive she’s gone, every door closed apart from one – my, our, bedroom. It rocks gently on its hinges, tapping out a message in Morse code, beckoning me in. I tiptoe forward and reach for the handle, almost expecting my hand to pass through. The door opens onto a pile of my wife’s clothes. Business suits wrapped in plastic mingle with crumpled summer blouses. I spy her jogging pants, a blue velvet jumper, that cocktail dress she wore on our first anniversary. The hood of a winter coat hangs from the wardrobe where Katie – acting as though it’s completely ordinary, as if she isn’t in her parents’ room, isn’t rifling through her parents’ belongings – pulls out another dress, hanger and all, and tosses it into the mire. Then she looks over, eyes grappling mine and says, “Mum said I could.”
I take a moment to rank the possible responses by order of importance. I fail. She knows what I’ve done, is old enough to understand. Knows what her mother thinks of me. Has decided what she thinks of me. The day I refused to let them go to the funeral, when I blocked the doorway and hid the car keys and threw her mother’s phone, I exhausted any authority I’d acquired. Katie doesn’t have to listen to my sanctimonious bullshit anymore. She hoists the pile of clothes into her arms and pushes past me and out of the door, fabric rustling in the silence.
~
The reverend says I should make more of an effort to connect. I head upstairs to see Libs and lose track of time watching her sing tunelessly to herself, comically large headphones slipping down her head. When I wrap her in a hug she leans in, like a dog nuzzling for treats, and I don’t want to leave. On the way down, I spot the bruised and broken notebook that contains my wife’s unfinished, unfinishable, novel. Unearthed, perhaps, during her late-night wanderings and set aside. It shivers through me, a visceral memory, the scent of blood and iron; a lamb sacrificed at the altar of our family’s future.
~
“I found some old photos of your dad.”
Once again, I’m a disembodied head, upright on the floor. It makes me think of John the Baptist, the loner, the beheaded, the Nazarite, who could not drink wine, or cut his hair, or come near a dead body.
“Thanks.” She’s sat cross-legged on the floor, laptop in her lap, fingers poised in thought. She looks at me and smiles beatifically, “But I’m not sure I need them.”
“Then…” I pause and she looks at me patiently, looks ready, “Er...”
“It’s not what you think.” She seems awake, aware of me, for the first time in – what’s fair – days or weeks? She rests a hand on the parcel box beside her, “Do you still have that stuff from when we were first dating?”
She knows I do, knows I can’t bear to throw those things away. “I guess.” I look at her and I look at the box. “Though they’re pretty tatty.”
It started with me leaving messages – saying the things I couldn’t say – on her kitchen table after she’d snuck off in the morning. We could have texted, but it’s not the same. She responded, then I again, and so on, until the backs of envelopes, or flyers from local takeaways, or council tax bills became festooned with the chaotic awkwardness of our courting, and I, with unsuccessful secrecy, snaffled them away. Even after all this time my cheeks redden at the thought.
“Super,” she smiles again, goes back to typing, “If you can rustle anything up, anything at all, I’d be forever grateful.”
“Great. But…” The word balances on my lower lip, pulling it down until I’m almost gawping. “Why?”
She glances at the box, then back at me, and brings her hands together in a ball, “I’m pulling my life together.”
“Well. Good. But…”
She finishes my sentence, “Why?” incorrectly as it happens. That smile again, like a politician answering the question they wanted to hear, “Because it helps. Because it’s good for the family.”
“But…”
“You’ll understand when it’s finished.”
“But…”
This time she waits, reaching into the cool dark for a sip of water.
I look at the box, the only solid thing in the room, and find a train of thought to follow, “What are you trying to do? You can’t put your whole life in there. It’s here. We need you, me and Libby and Katie and…” I realise I don’t want to say her mum.
“The girls are fine. You’ll understand when it’s finished.” She’s as certain as a line falling flat.
“But…” my lower lip must have dropped below the floor by now, must be working its way down the ladder and towards the landing, “When?”
“Soon,” she continues, “If you’ll help.”
And, so, of course, I help. What else is there to do? What else am I supposed to say? I help happily and reluctantly, doling out utility bills, holiday snaps, school reports, prescription slips, warranty guarantees, car MOTs, Christmas cards, TV licenses, tax returns, security passes, CDs and DVDs, recipes, newspaper clippings, home videos, and magazine subscriptions in incremental doses, testing the impact, reviewing progress, updating my hypothetical charts. I take it as a good sign that she leaves the attic most days now, and try not to feel disheartened when, after the first box is taken away, a second and then a third arrive. I look up the company name, Total Recall, but only find the sci-fi film from the nineties. I need expert help so go in search of the children.
Katie rolls her eyes, looks as though this is more embarrassing for her than me. Why don’t you just ask her, is all I get. Well, that and a mutter as I leave which sounds something like grow a pair. Teenagers require the patience of Job, especially if you’re locked indoors with them.
I discover Libby dragging a box across the hallway. Turns out both girls were recruited to their mother’s cause a lifetime ago – Libs was easy pickings once her big sister was onboard – and have been busy gathering digital footprints ever since. She shows me on her computer, so I nod and pretend to understand. Then I wait until everyone’s asleep and open the box. My head throbs but I don’t throw up. I don’t throw anything, thank God. How’s it possible that I’m the last to realise? Did the girls figure it out for themselves, or did she tell them? And when did she tell them? Worse still, the whole thing is legitimised by this revelation. It’s hard to have an issue with something that’s been happening for weeks. That all your family have agreed to. You can’t, halfway through your baptism, complain about the temperature of the water. But – while I have no wish to be categorised as difficult – it doesn’t seem fair. I don’t like feeling isolated in my own home.
~
It’s weeks before I work up the courage, even though I know it’s unavoidable. I lie awake at night, thinking and rethinking how I might approach it, listening to the inhospitable silence, questioning my own beliefs. I tell myself I have to say something, if only because I promised never to lie, even by omission. Yet, trapped inside these walls of things unsaid, it becomes easier to say nothing. Time thrums by, enumerated by boxes arriving empty and leaving full. With little else to distract us we become a well-oiled machine. We fill the present with the past until it blocks out the future. We grow to understand our roles, are consumed by the gathering weight of our workload, rediscover the imperative joy that can only be found in a sense of purpose. Even when we begin to chronicle the present, keeping records about keeping records, setting up cameras and watching our lives on playback, counting hours of sleep and steps made, calories consumed and defecations completed, itches scratched and spots picked, the girls just get on with it. They capture every moment and I crunch the numbers and draw the graphs, like an epidemiologist preparing for the next briefing, so we can submit our findings to some invisible overseer, who like us find their life enumerated by the sending and receiving of boxes. But little by little, in the dark, my courage grows. Nurtured by resentment and fed on a terrible fear, it grows.
And this is that fear: that each day she becomes a little fainter, a little less recognisable, like a garden at twilight. That, in trying to hold on, we’ve created something eternal. Have become trapped in a recording of our lives, and are now compelled to wander aimlessly, our heads turned forever backwards, victims of a self-inflicted torment plagiarised from the inner circles of hell. And everyone else is okay with that.
I climb the ladder. I squeeze through the hole, embarrassed that the kids, woken by the noise or kept up by the expectation, are listening. I pull myself upright and hit my head on the ceiling. She ignores me, looks at her laptop and is pleased with all she’s created.
“Hey.”
She takes a moment, considers me with a distant kindness, like my teachers on the last day of school, then says nothing.
“So, I, er, look...I don’t want to be the bad guy here, but I don’t think you’ve...I’ve been left with much choice.”
I pause, expecting something. She places the laptop on the floor, screen tilted upwards so that it catches her face, shrinking it to a circle, to eyes and nostrils and lips shaped by shadow.
“Look, I think you know this already. If we’re being honest, there’s nothing I can say that you won’t have already thought of. I know you,” I used to think I knew you, “You’re smart. Much smarter than me. I still thank God every day that you chose me, chose us. But sometimes I wonder whether you’re only doing this for the kids.”
I look at the floorboards. Can they hear this? Do they understand? Libby is probably recording it like a good girl.
“And if it’s just for them, is this really how you imagined it? Shouldn’t we be trying to make their lives more normal, not less? I get the structure, I do, I like the structure...but they should be at school.”
I shake my head, retrace my steps, “They should be doing their schoolwork. Katie has exams in less than two months, and you’ve got her running around collecting our online shopping history and fuc...and Facebook posts. Libs is still a child and, instead of encouraging her to value education, you give her an excuse to do nothing. They just lost their grandfather, they need their parents. They can’t afford to lose anyone else.”
I look up. I’ve gone too far. She looks back, her lips curling upwards. A slight smile or awkward frown, I can’t say.
“You act like none of this means anything. Look, if you’re trying to punish me, I get it. It isn’t like anyone in this house is damn…is talking to me properly these days. I can leave if that’s what you want me to do?” The words rise in me, self-determined, “Libby and I can just go.”
She stares and blinks and stares.
“Alright, I’m sorry. I’m fuck…fucking sorry. I’m sorry he’s dead. But he’s with God now. Well, I believe he’s with God now. Funeral or not. I get that’s no excu…”
She moves and I hesitate. I watch while she picks up a piece of paper, turns it over, puts it down again.
“I don’t want to do this, alright. You must know I’d never want this. I was just trying to be sensible, reasonable, yet here I am dragged ever further into this...godless debacle.”
She reaches out, pulling a glass from the darkness. I see the fissures in her lips as the rim closes. When she pours the water into her mouth it overflows at the corners, rivulets catching the light as they run down her chin and dampen her nightdress.
“I’m just worried about you. I get what you’re doing, I do. I’m terrified too. We’re all terrified. But whatever this is, however it ends, if it…if it, God willing, ends; this thing, these boxes and boxes and boxes won’t be you. Can’t be you. You are you. Here and now. Here. We have all this time and this how you want to spend it? The glory of creation on all sides and here we are watching. Watching screens, watching ourselves, watching life pass us by. Do you think that’s what your dad would want?”
A quote I’ve been saving dashes through my mind – and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it – too quick to wrestle into words, “Tell me it’s right to teach your kids that he’s not in heaven. That he’s nothing but bone fragments and dust. That your soul can be captured here on earth. That eternal life is less a matter of faith and more a matter of careful cataloguing. Did you even think about discussing it with me? You must have known how I’d feel. They’re not just your DAMN...sorry. But how can you think whatever you leave behind will be you? How can anything but you be you? I’m sorry he’s gone but you know we couldn’t have saved him. We can’t even save ourselves. Only God can do that.”
Her mouth moves, forming a small parting between the lips shaped like a yogic exhalation. Nothing escapes. I watch the pale membrane stir and shimmer, a bubbled surface stretched flat by the movement of her jaw, transparent across the neat white rows of incisors and molars, and sewn tight at the gums. I want to reach out and punch a hole through it. Then, the mouth closes and she steps back into the darkness.
The fear that fills me is not for her but for all of us. I whisper to myself, “Oh Becca, what have you done?”
“Hey baby, I haven’t done anything.”
The tinny sound rises from the laptop. At some point, it must have turned toward me. I see her face, pixelated but perfect. The hair falling over her brow in a neat line, cut back across the ears to fall into a bob; the face shaped like a cartoon heart; the fierce brown eyes shining with curiosity; the pale skin against rouged cheeks; the nose like a Victorian doll. She tilts her head and offers an impudent smile, “Not yet, anyway.”
Martyn Rosser is a teacher. He has been published as part of the “On Silence” podcast featured in the Lincoln Review. He lives in Yorkshire and spends far too much time thinking about the dangers of solipsism, the ambiguity of everyday acts, and how easy it is to make sweeping judgments about things he knows almost nothing about.
