Their 23rd

Music:

P. Duaks: The Sorcerer's Apprentice

A. Khachaturian: Masquerade Waltz

Content Warning:

Moderate threat

Transcript

Their 23rd

Edward wouldn’t allow anyone except Owen to call him Ed. Owen was the sole acquaintance from secondary school with whom Edward had managed to keep in touch. Owen was Edward’s best friend. This wasn’t exactly true but as an adjective “best” sounded better to him than “only”, and so Edward thought of Owen as his best friend, and if he thought of it hard enough it became true, in a way, for a while. They were always very cordial with one another, in fact there was a good deal of genuine warmth as well as cordiality between them. 

On the weekend of their wedding anniversary, Edward’s parents had decided to take a trip to Pairs. They left on the Friday and wouldn’t be back until after dinner on Sunday. On the Friday evening, Edward found himself suddenly alone in the large house, larger now with the loft extension’s new third storey. He felt full of a strange, dark-toned elation. The house was his, his for an evening, a night, a day, another night, and then almost a whole further day. The possibilities were legion and exciting. 

To begin with, he ate his dinner in a part of the living-room that was different to the normal. He listened to orchestral music, epic, dissonant, and loud, on the sitting-room speakers. Before he went to bed that night, he sent a text to Owen, inviting him over to the house. He specified in the text that his parents were away; he promised to supply a sizeable quantity of booze. 

The first night was uneventful, though it took him longer than usual to fall asleep. For a period of about twenty minutes before shutting his eyes, he heard a sound he couldn’t identify, a low, repeating, creatural murmur, almost human-sounding but not. He wondered if there might be something wounded and groggy hiding in the shed next to the house, something with scales, or hooved feet, or perhaps a long spiny tail. He wouldn’t intrude upon its cluttered refuge. He lay in his bed, beneath the covers, scared for a while, and then relieved when the sound quieted, for good. 

The next day, Edward woke up a few minutes before ten, the sole, lurking tenant of the house. He already had a reply from Owen. He read it eagerly and discovered that his best friend was busy all of Saturday but would love to come over Sunday morning to afternoon. Not ideal. In fact, it was depressingly sub-optimal. If it was today, then they could drink as much as they liked and Edward’s parents would be none the wiser. They would have to be more careful, more discriminate on Sunday. Edward’s parents had been vague about their Sunday arrival time. Still, it was better than no visit at all; he hadn’t seen Owen for nearly five months. Edward texted back, saying Sunday was perfect, and that he should come as early as he liked on that morning.

            Edward enjoyed his freedom immensely. He became more brazen towards the end of Saturday, as the day darkened and his second night drew near. He bought and drank, in front of the television, a six-pack of beer, he smoked a cigar- which he had bought with the beer- indoors with the window open, he had five minutes of paid phone-sex. When he asked the deep, harsh voice how old it was, it replied: twenty-two. Just a year older than Edward. Finally, just before midnight, he ordered pizza and ate it straight from the box. Setting down the steaming blue box on the carpet, he thought he heard a voice shrill from the toybox behind him. It had been a long time since any of the toys had been played with, but the toybox, crammed full of its dense and miscellaneous population, remained on perpetual display. The voice said, in piercing, Punch-and-Judy tones: Put it on a plate! Then again, like a parrot: Put it on a plate!  Edward, drunk and dazed with the day’s excitements, took his first triangle of pizza and the voice was hushed. 

Waiting to fall asleep, he heard snoring from his parents’ bedroom. A loud, penetrating sort of snoring. He was quite certain of it. He tiptoed, with needless timorousness, across the landing and up the incline of the new set of stairs leading to the new attic room his parents had made theirs. Within it was dark. The door was just slightly ajar. There was no snoring. Edward crept back down to his bed, and went to sleep. 

Sunday. Edward rose at nine, not fully rested and reluctant to rise. The beer had disturbed his sleep; he had even woken up with a start in the middle of the night, around three o’clock, just as though he had been propelled awake by some alarmed force from within. 

He had some coffee, and some toast and marmalade and felt a little better. Then he experienced a not entirely painless movement of his bowels. When that was dealt with, he improved considerably, and felt much better in mind and mood and body. He readied the house for Owen, who was aiming to arrive at 10.30. He had been to Edward’s house before and knew the way, even though it had been just the once, and at least three years ago. Owen had a preternatural memory. Remembering the way from the little train station to Edward’s parents’ address wasn’t such a formidable feat but he had others to his credit that were disquietingly impressive. His memory was certainly his most striking strength. 

            Edward and Owen’s relationship was a little unusual. It wasn’t a friendship of unusual or singular intensity. It had a platonic distance and politeness which seemed, to both parties- (though each thought only they and not the other felt this way)- to inarticulately verge on something deeper, more intimate. Neither was same-sex attracted, but they each felt, privately, that it was a cruel trick of nature that this was so. It was a feeling, unwittingly mutual, that had they been able to be more than friends then they would’ve leapt at the chance.

In the forty minutes before Owen arrived, a little later than he said as it turned out, Edward sprawled on his bed. He stared up at the ceiling, tracing its plaster patterning with his eyes. He realised that he felt sad, that he was full of an engrossing, thoughtful kind of sadness. It was a curious contradiction he felt himself inhabiting, that he both longed for his parents to return, and wanted them to stay away for a while longer. He was just getting the hang of this house. The soft clang of church-bells faded away; an insistent breeze allowed itself to be soothed to nothingness. 

Then there was a sound, sudden and startling in the quiet. A squeaking of some kind. It stopped and then began again. It was laughter, a tiny, nasal, feminine giggling. Edward followed it, across the landing and up the flight of uncarpeted stairs to his parents’ bedroom. He remembered that the door had been ajar. Now it was shut. He opened it. It opened with a creak. The little laughter came closer. It remained a stifled, diminutive sound; but it was close by. Lovely morning light flooded in through the unshaded skylights. And with a shining shock, Edward noticed that his parents’ room was full of glistening spiders’ webs. In every corner of the room, along every wall’s upper edge, dangling from various places in the sloping, roof-shaped ceiling: scores of perfect, spangling webs. Under the spell of such natural and strange magnificence, Edward nearly forgot about the unnerving laughter, the ethereal industry of the many webs deafened him to its menace. He heard it again, with new certainty, and he followed it to a square, dark-green bag on the floor by the bed. The bag had a strap. The top of the bag had a zipper but it was not zipped up. Edward opened the bag and found, beneath a black spaghetti of wires, a very big, unwieldy video camera. It was a decades-outdated object, without modern compaction, but palpably of value. In fact, Edward remembered it. He was just about able to recall its presence at certain moments in his life when he was a very small boy. In a pocket of the camera-bag, there were rectangular tapes in tape-cases. They were labelled in red or black biro with events, dates in days and months, sometimes years- the early noughties mostly, occasionally addresses as well, addresses that no longer meant anything to Edward or never had.

He didn’t know what to do at first. His digits took the cassettes without certainty, with a kind of scepticism and reluctance, a lack of fluency when it came to handling them because of their archaism. He cluelessly pushed buttons on the camera’s main control-panel until there was sudden whirr and a suddener jolt. A section jutted out, thrusting its loaded jaw at Edward. From this rectangular jaw he took the tape that was inside the camera. The cassette itself had a narrow label with something written on it that he couldn’t read. He laid it aside and took out the tape from a box marked Greenway Gardens, 2004. He played it, realising he had to rewind it first. Eying the screen, he deduced immediately that it was his mother holding the camera. It shook with her unsteady hold and from behind it there sounded a younger, brighter version of her voice. Less frequently, he heard his father’s voice, its youth and old health captured with the same fidelity. The investigative camera wandered around an apartment Edward did not recognise. There was a blue and white rug on the floor, an alarmingly red sofa, a tiny bookshelf with just a few books whose spines seemed half-familiar and a glossy green piggy bank. Suddenly the camera found a small, naked child. He walked upright and produced a constant, bubbling speech. He ambled into and out of the frame and the camera would lurch in pursuit. Then the child saw that he was being filmed and spoke to the camera, gazing into the intrusive, recording eye with both of his giant and inquisitive, pearl-blue eyes. There was a towel of pale gold in the child’s right hand which hung down and dragged along the floor. The child stood, in the innocent, unsexual spell of his nudity, the tiny penis so small it was nearly non-existent, staring amazed at the camera, listening to his mother’s voice. 

When the child spoke, there were audible words surrounded by general gargles, gargles of enthusiasm, sometimes consternation. He mostly ignored the extemporised interview directed to him, and this very nonchalance enabled the moment, in all its guilelessness, in its spark and tender candour, to be captured. 

And Edward suddenly realised that the child being filmed was him. He had known right away that it was him, in a factual sense: for who else could it have been? But for those interested, intense minutes that he had stared at the screen of the camera as the cassette played, he had looked upon that child as another. Now it was as if the disparate phases of his life had been allowed the oneness of a single personhood. It was him. It was him. Right away he had been amazed at the beauty of that child. Now he took ownership of that beauty as something that, though no more, once belonged to him. He shut the screen of the camera. 

Not long after that, Owen arrived, and Edward forgot about the laughter and the spiderwebs and the video cassettes and the camera.

Owen and Edward talked in the garden. They smoked and they drank cider. At one point, Edward noticed on Owen’s face a flickering, many-leaved shadow. After a while they went inside and Edward ordered Chinese food. They watched a bleak, deadpan comedy Edward thought was a work of genius. Owen tolerated it, laughing politely where Edward laughed. All too soon, it was time for Owen to go home. Owen offered to transfer the entire cost of the Chinese takeaway to Edward’s bank account. Edward said there was no need. Owen was ready and it was time for him to leave. It was nearly five o’clock, Edward’s parents would be back from their weekend in Paris before too long and his solitary reign would be over, the house would no longer be his. Edward felt like his heart was breaking.  

“Wait just a minute,” Edward said. There was a note of desperation in his voice, veiled but tangible. “I want to show you something.”

“Okay,” Owen said. “Quickly though…I don’t want to miss my train.”

Edward hurried upstairs, up both flights to the attic room. The spiders’ webs were still there but it seemed like there were less of them now than before. He scooped up the camera and rewound the tape, holding down the rewind button for about fifteen seconds. The room filled with the whining whirr of those hectic revolutions and the images performed their backward dance behind forks of white static. Edward looked at the battery sign in the top right corner of the screen. It blinked. The graphic suggested that the battery was almost empty but not quite. Edward hurried downstairs, leaving behind the plug and main cable. 

Downstairs, he found Owen gazing through the French windows at the garden. 

“Was that sunflower always there?” he asked. “I don’t think it was there when I arrived… or when we sat outside.”

Edward looked where indicated. An enormous lion-like sunflower, a huge disc of black petalled in a perfect sunlight of fiery, yellow blooms had sprung from a little pot and was staring at Owen and Edward like the strangest, blankest face. Edward didn’t know what to say. He powered through any hesitation regarding what he was about to do and forcefully, maybe a little too abruptly, offered to Owen the camera, its screen open like a single bird-wing. Edward pressed play.

            “What’s this?” Owen said.

            Edward almost shushed his friend, as though his speech had been a blemish on some sacred silence. After a moment, Edward answered him:

            “Me. When I was tiny. I just found it upstairs in mum and dad’s room.”

            Owen gazed at the screen. He seemed about to say something as he heard the words of voices new to him, as a tiny, blond child he had never seen before wandered into the shaky frame. He took a courteous interest in the forms that moved, as the moment of captured time played out. He looked at Edward for some kind of consolation, or confirmation that his intention was humorous. But he didn’t find any. Edward watched with Owen; he watched him watch the video.

The nudity of the three-year-old Edward on the camera-screen both mattered and didn’t matter. Owen didn’t react much, he tried to make his face as objective and free of judgement as possible; but his expression masked a kind of mesmerised mortification, not at the innocuous images themselves but at the context in which they were being shared and glimpsed. What did Edward want from him? what did he want for him? Enjoyment? Interest? There was interest. Even if it came at the price of discomfort. Owen did find interest in it, in the sheer fact of time and change and growth laid bare on the camera-screen; as he watched the impossibly graceful childish movements, as he followed the pale body made almost blinding in the sunlight that washed it, and as he heeded and tried to understand the bright, young babble of the little voice, the faltering answers it gave to its mother’s chirpy questions.

            They had seen enough. Owen, about to offer some diplomatic adjective, “nice” or “cute” perhaps, offered neither. He asked his friend the question that needed asking.

            “Ed, why did you show this to me?”

            Edward’s heart was racing. He felt the same way one feels when there are no further possibilities of deflection, for digression, for pacifying half-truths; he felt the way he had always imagined it would feel to have no option but to tell the truth, perhaps to someone whom he was in love with and had the opportunity- no, the duty, the duty of telling. He knew the answer to Owen’s question. 

Because I was beautiful. Aren’t I beautiful there, in that film of the past? Tell me how beautiful I was, how beautiful I am in that footage of the past. 

            But he said none of this. He shut the screen-door with a click, and it was just as though the camera had dropped abruptly into a grumpy sleep. The camera was heavy and ugly in his hands. The truth, its painfulness, its neediness, would not come out.

            “I don’t know,” Edward said, gazing into Owen’s face, intimidating in its focus upon his own. “I just stumbled upon it upstairs. I thought it was… anyway, I’m sorry to keep you. Please don’t miss your train. You know the way? Well, obviously you do…”

            “Yes,” Owen answered.

            Edward encouraged Owen towards the front door, where Edward opened it.

            “Bye bye. Don’t leave it so long next time. See you!”

            “Bye, Ed. Take care of yourself.”

            “Bye!”

            “Bye”.

            Edward shut the door, just as soon as it did not seem premature to do so. Owen parted from the house, sure that he would never forget that little naked child and, nearly twenty years later, its peculiar eagerness to exhibit itself.  

            Edward took the camera back up the stairs, climbing both flights a little sombrely. The thuds of his footsteps filled the silence of the house. There wasn’t a spiderweb in sight in his parents’ bedroom. Every inch of the floor and walls and ceiling was immaculate. Edward stowed the camera where he had found it. He put Greenway Gardens, 2004 back in its little box and replaced the cassette tape that had been there before it in the gate. He hid the camera beneath its nest of  wires and shut the foamy lid of the bag. He did not zip it up. As far as he was able, he made the site look undisturbed. Walking away, he heard a tiny little laughter stealing from his parents’ empty room, but chose to ignore it.

            His parents texted to say they would be home around nine o’clock. Edward put all the empty bottles and cans into a plastic bag which he hid in the shed. He folded up the empty pizza box and shoved it into a cranny where it would be out of the way and not discovered for some time. The sunflower stood up, tall and vertical and loud, in its humble soil-pot. Edward severed it from its stem with the kitchen scissors and took it to his bedroom. He stood the cut sunflower against a wall by the window where it could wait to wilt in the perennial glare of the sun. 

            Edward lay on the living-room floor, supine, and considered his actions. Not only those in the last hour, but all those since his parents had left for their brief sojourn in Paris not quite two days before. He tried to remember which anniversary they were marking but couldn’t with any certainty arrive at a figure. He pondered what he had learned during his time alone in the house, if anything. He concluded nothing. Actually, he concluded that his parents belonged in the house, in their house, that in their absence, without them maintaining some natural balance, things were liable to go awry, things happened that Edward wasn’t ready for. He looked forward to them returning. They would be restored to their proper seat, and he would be restored in his. Without ambiguity, he felt that he needed them, that they couldn’t get home quickly enough.