The Blue Folder

Content Warning:

Suicide References/Paedophilia References

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The Blue Folder

Spermy beads of cuckoo-spit lay in bushes of broom, lavender, and rosemary. It looked exactly like beer foam, and felt like it at first- if you fingered it- but was in fact stickier and more persistent. It was the time of year when such things are observed in the village; when dandelion clocks come apart and are borne on insistent breezes, when cuckoos call, beautifully, pesteringly, across wide distances; and nightingales fill covert, undisturbed places with much babbling song, when blossom the colour of strawberry milk blooms and hangs and falls. 

The day after the London marathon, Leonard was in agony. His feet and calves and thighs all ached so badly that there was not a single position he could be in without feeling physical pain. It hurt to stand, it hurt to sit, it even smarted to lie, supine, on the softest down. But his structural aches were nothing compared with what his nipples were enduring. Throughout the run, they had rubbed so consistently and chafingly against the tight spandex in which he had proudly costumed himself, that he now looked like he had been subjected to some kind of torture. His nipples had bled a lot already and continued to bleed, profusely. They were rubbed raw, two grim, darkened, screaming sites, dirtied in dried blood stains, bruise-coloured. Nothing in Leonard’s life had ever caused him this much pain. Nothing. Nothing… 

At any rate, he suffered, upstairs, at length, on the double conjugal bed, under the skylight, in the attic room. The swift, black forms of birds continually scampered across the white square of sky above him. Storeys below, but not visible to Leonard in his current position, lay the back garden, a forlorn, matted mess, everything grown thick and tough and recalcitrant. 

They never went into their garden, never made any attempt to penetrate it. In one place, three snake’s-head fritillaries, planted seven springs ago, hung their violet-freckled, (and astonishingly serpentine), heads. On the bedside table beside Leonard, on his side of the bed, a stack of lurid-coloured literature lay piled. The glossy literature concerned the work of several mental health awareness and suicide prevention charities. Leonard still wasn’t sure to which organisation he would donate his marathon funds. In secret, known only to Leonard, a blue folder lay stashed beneath his bed, in the wheeled clothing drawer. It was of great, undisclosed significance, this blue folder. 

            Hollie was shopping at the local Co-op. After bagging and paying for her various items at the self-service till- (deodorant for both sexes, toothpaste, balls of cotton wool for Leonard’s nipples, Febreze for the bathroom, red onions, garlic, spaghetti, Cathedral City Extra Mature, ham, beef mince, olives, red and white wine…)- she went to the community notice board and inspected it at length. That’s when she noticed one particular very humble, very unassuming advertisement. The advertisement wasn’t much bigger than a business card, and something about the way it looked- (the text handwritten in blue biro on white card)- and the way it was worded, seemed to Hollie almost despondent, or despondency-inspiring. It was an odd thing; as a piece of communication it was pretty inept, not because it was hard to understand but because of its tone. It began more like a personal dating ad in a newspaper than a public announcement of goods and services:

My name is Claude McGuire. I’ve just moved to the area after a long time abroad. I used to live here but I haven’t been in England for twenty years.

While abroad, I garnered many thousands of hours of experience in manual labouring positions. I am not officially certified but I am a capable bricklayer, handyman, and gardener. The latter of these is my favourite.

I would be very grateful for any work. 

Call or text anytime…

A mobile number directly followed.   

            The garden did require a lot of attention and, additionally, it had been Hollie’s wish for quite a while now to install a new, brass letterbox on the front door. There was also a picture she wanted hung, a framed painting: for months now it had sat on the floor of the bedroom cupboard, in darkness, its face turned away. She photographed the advertisement with her camera-phone and decided to hire this man. Not because she had a lot of faith in his abilities, (though experience had taught her that brilliance was often found in unexpected places- clumsily packaged, so to speak)- but because she was intrigued by what he had written and wanted to know him. 

It was a week later and Leonard’s nipples were still bandaged but much improved. 

Leonard slowed, realising that he was early for his fortnightly, four PM therapy session. He descended East Hill and passed the imperiously grand Anglo-Catholic church, imprisoned behind its high, forbidding railings. He slowed, believing briefly that he could hear singing, faltering yet confident, many-throated singing, organ-guided. Upon investigating, the noise of the singing vanished into silence, and the quiet murmur of birds, buses, and distant human hubbub told him that he had been mistaken, that he had only imagined the singing. He seated himself on the nearest bench, the one just before the turning onto Haig Street, beside a defunct phone-box. He knew there was no telephone incubating inside the narrow, red booth because he had once gone inside, hoping to place a call to Hollie. But there was nothing telephonic within. 

An old woman on a mobility scooter, muttering angrily to herself, descended the hill. Three swaying young people, two men and a woman, were blocking her way. This angered Leonard, the spatial insensitivity. 

He’d walked into town from the village, taking the footpath that joined the river just beyond the railway station. In preparation for the marathon, he had, (at first), jogged and, (later), run this route many times, back and forth, back and forth. Now, in the wake of the marathon, in the tranquil aftermath of the sweat and the chafing and the aching, he felt a peace, an ease: because he had done it, he had proved to himself that he could do it and he had done it. He walked, still a little sore, but quite content.

For a good two miles, this footpath ran alongside the bird-busy river, the surface of which had been brilliant with sunlight today. A bed of marsh separated the river from the path, flats of mud and moist grassland where small pools of water lay static and gleaming, where little arteries trickled. In this light, the mud looked purple. Those great land-lips, spangled with dewy brilliance, craned towards the river’s calm, feminine waters and they kissed each other passionately, powerfully, the river and the river bank. In the marsh, bullrushes towered over everything, over the feathered reeds and the bunches of samphire and sea-spinach. Oystercatchers ambled like the laxest sentries along the shoreline, cormorants disappeared and reappeared in the watery brilliance, and shelduck and grebes sailed over the surface of the water in placid squadrons. On occasion, a huge silent cloud of starlings, perhaps a cacophonic skein of Brent or Canada geese, broke upon the stillness of the sky and migrated onwards until they were completely out of sight and earshot.

At a certain point, the footpath, which had up to now wound obediently with the swerving river, broke away and made its own way through the land, still tightly encased in trees, and shadowed in the trees’ many shadows. It was about here that Leonard noticed an unusual man coming quickly towards him along the path from the opposite direction. The man was a strange, arresting presence. He was dowdily dressed and seemed rather retiring, as though he didn’t want to be noticed but knew that he was quite noticeable. Part of what made him noticeable was his undersized left hand. It was gently deformed by what Leonard did not know was termed Poland Syndrome—though he had come across this particularly distinctive symptom in the past. The man’s face had an intense pallor about it, and his eyes were penetrating and glassy. At the front, his hairline had considerably receded, revealing a well-creased forehead. But behind, he had long, silver hair which flowed as far as his shoulder-blades. He moved quickly but with a limp, taking tiny shuffling steps in fast succession. He passed Leonard and Leonard passed him, their speeds about the same, their ways of moving disparate. They didn’t acknowledge one another vocally but there was a very sure sense in which they had seen one another. Leonard looked over his shoulder and gazed after the man as he shuffled into the distance, as he disappeared into the light beyond the long womb of trees. (His head never turned).             

Fifteen further minutes on this same path would take you to the main-road and from there to a very long, one-road precinct, with narrow pavements either side of the road and two parallel-running over-stuffed rows of very slender terraced houses, with chipped paint and crumbling walls.

Leonard became a different person when he was alone. Alone, he experienced the world with an intensity he had come to consistently long for and miss when he was with others. The presence of other people tended to dilute the world around him, the world in which he walked. He hadn’t always felt like this. There was a time when, to him, the world was other people, when every other face or voice was, in its own way, representative of the universe. Now, he preferred to be alone, it was simpler to be alone. 

He had no issues at all with his current therapist, Mark O’Donnell. Leonard had been seeing him fortnightly for nearly four years now. There had been two extended hiatuses, between March and July, 2022 and between September and December, 2024. The first withdrawal was best explained by boredom: he had become bored with therapy and hadn’t been able to understand that such a fifty-minute bout of boredom might serve some kind of purpose in a life, that it was of value to be bored, sometimes. The second break was more considered in nature. He had come to the temporary, and seemingly errant, conclusion that dialectical behavioural therapy was ineffectual in cases of bereavement trauma like his and his wife’s. Leonard still did not fully understand the difference between dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), much as Mark tried to make him understand.  

At ten minutes to four, Leonard got up from the bench, and strode up to the entrance of the counselling services building. Three stone steps led up to a large, blue door with a brass knob, knocker and number- which in this case was eighteen. The brass knocker was not to be used. There was an electronic pin-pad and buzzer. 2512- (the date of Christmas day and easy to remember therefore)- was the code. Today, the door bore a laminated sign; the sign dangled from the nose of the knocker, flapping wildly every time a passing vehicle created a draught. The text was printed in red, capitalised Times New Roman: 

WET PAINT!!!

Indeed the door was gleaming and glossy, newly bold with a fresh coat of navy blue paint. Leonard punched in the code and the door clicked open. Grasping the brass, acorn-shaped knob, he went inside. It occurred to him that this door with its paint yet to dry, with its demand of acknowledgment and careful handling, was a good metaphor for the clients- the patients- within this building.     

            He sat in the waiting room. It was very quiet at first; except for a ticking clock and the sporadic thumps of doors opening and closing, of footsteps on the wooden floors of the third and second storeys and on the stairs.   

In the waiting room, there were three others, two bedraggled young people and a stylish woman in early middle age. In the past, Leonard always used to try and work out why people were there, at the clinic: he would look for the skinniness which might suggest an eating disorder, the twitchiness which might suggest past or present substance abuse, the low-serotonin posture and wayward gaze of what might be depression; he might hear the inappropriate loudness of ADHD- someone might enter the waiting room wearing headphones, singing along too loudly with their music. Now Leonard didn’t do that, he didn’t make any attempt to diagnose people by sight, or ear. Nor did he feel any shame about being there himself, about being seen there. 

That day, a ground-level door opened and a little girl came out with her therapist. The stylish woman, who was sitting the closest to the waiting room door, reacted immediately as the little girl and her therapist entered the waiting room. The woman, the little girl’s mother, embraced her daughter, handing her a little coat. That time of year, the afternoons turned chilly towards four-thirty. The girl put the hood of the coat over her face, hanging the coat on the front of her head. The coat, which was a black, puffer coat, went down to her knees. She said she was invisible, then she said she was a ghost. Then, very performatively, she bumped into the wall on purpose and said Ow! The therapist watched, quietly, professionally amused. The mother seemed embarrassed and disturbed. She made fleeting eye-contact with Leonard, who had noticed by this time that she was rather beautiful. Leonard mustered a polite half-smile. His lips were smiling but his eyes were not. It was all very sweet and innocent, it truly was. And yet, Leonard couldn’t help feeling that there was darkness there, depths. Depths.

It was two minutes to four. Leonard got up from his chair and climbed the stairs to the first floor of the building. He wondered what the history of the building was. If perhaps it had been a private residence before being converted into apartments, and then, maybe, office space, before finding itself a counselling facility, its current identity. How long would it last? How long would it serve its current purpose?

Fearing the possibility of silence as he approached the door to Mark’s practice room, he mentally rehearsed what he wanted to say, what he wanted to discuss. The room was called The Raindrop Room. From the laminated sign bearing the name of the room, a little, large-lashed raindrop winked flirtatiously. It was always tempting to begin a session by bragging, by gloating about one’s progress, one’s achievements or sources of contentment. But he had since learned that it was far more productive to put oneself down, to come out with some disturbing or shameful or jarringly candid admission. There really were no rules…except that it had to be true. He tried to find sensible words for his sense of general disquiet and despair, for the fathoms his heart sank when he bumped into certain village acquaintances in the pub or Co-op.

He tapped decorously on the door to The Raindrop Room, drawing a bright “come in!” from the man inside. It was then that he remembered what Mark had often said to him: You are the best and only expert in yourself. 

Whether he had suffered a lot or only suffered little in the fortnight between sessions, it was testimony which no-one but Leonard could offer.

He found Mark in his usual chair, sitting with his usual performed stillness, with a calmness and composure he surely used the ten minutes between each appointment to locate in himself and embody.

Leonard sat in the vacant chair, which, as usual, was placed a very precise distance from Mark’s. Between them sat a small coffee table, bare but for a box of tissues. The white, frozen flame of a single tissue protruded from the paper box.

Leonard grimaced and grunted a noise of complaint.

“Are you alright?” Mark enquired.

“Oh, yes, fine,” Leonard answered. “It’s nothing really. My nipples are a bit sore…from the marathon.” …and away they went.  

While Leonard was out, Hollie called Claude. She didn’t get through to him at first and there was no personalised answerphone message. So the sound of his voice still remained a mystery. But the second time she called him, about two hours later, she managed to get through to him.

            “Hello?” a voice said.

            “Hello, is that Claude?” Hollie asked.

            “Yes, this is Claude.” The voice was a distinctive tenor, and spoke with just the hint of a South African accent. His tone was quite genial, a little forced perhaps. 

            “Hello Claude. My name is Hollie. Me and my husband Leonard live in the village, at 2, Stanford Close. I was wondering if we might hire you to do some work for us?”

            There was a long exhalation of relief, and when the words came they sounded positively full of delight: “Yes, certainly…I can do that for you no problem.”

            “I haven’t told you what it is yet.”

            “Yes…no…erm…what is it I can help you with?”

            And she told him, about the garden which was a mess, the patio and paths that needed weeding, the trees which wanted pruning. She also asked if he could put a new letterbox on the door. And other things came to her, other things which needed doing or mending around the house. They came to her and she blurted them out, without thinking twice. She told the listener on the other end of the line about the kitchen cupboard door which needed replacing, the curtain-rail which needed to be put up, and a picture that she wanted hung. They arranged a date and time for Claude to come round and he quoted her a total cost. 

Church. A lifelong atheist, and by no means a believer at this point, it was only in the last six months that Leonard had become a regular attendee. 

            Therapy was on every second Thursday. At Sunday eucharist, only three days later, Leonard found himself in the same pew as a very tall, authoritative man whom he had seen a couple of times before but never interacted with. Leonard took an instant dislike to what he identified as a definite pomposity in the man’s character. Standing and sitting and kneeling next to this man, he felt strangely lonely as the service trundled along at that unhectic C of E tempo he normally found so comforting. 

            He never normally lingered after services. For some reason, he was never readily shown the friendliness that he thought, rather innocently, he could depend on in this setting. 

            After a few weeks “church-shopping”, he had settled on St. Saviour’s, a smart, formal, middle-of-the-road church, in a peaceful setting. The people there had a sense of propriety, and interacted with the sacraments at a kind of respectful distance, which comforted Leonard. He had a sense that this was a place of routine rather than enthusiasm, and seriousness rather than dogma. A red sacred heart of Jesus hung before the altar, and, behind the cloth-covered table itself, there was a magnificent woodwork engraving of the apostles adoring the sun-beamed host. The church was full of dark wood; lighted candles bathed the sanctuary in a bronzy, marmalade glow. Each time that he encountered this luminous effect, Leonard recalled that great Eastertide poem of Herbert’s, with its peculiar and surreal notion that the cross of Christ “taught all wood to sing”. On the right, the symmetric battalion of organ pipes bulged above the quire; the organist below moved in a miniscule passion, sinking his fingers into the keyboard keys of the little console, and pulling out the little mushroom-shaped stops. The laity were all men, kindly, mild-mannered, a little melancholic; the clergy all were women, white haired old maids who wore white cassocks and seasonal stoles but never chasubles. Beautiful voices.   

After the service, it disappointed Leonard a little that the tall, pompous man engaged him in conversation. After a few pleasantries, the man- a retired headmaster- gestured to the quire, where a young, dark-haired woman, still surpliced from the service, was loitering. She sat, her expression a little sad. 

“That’s my daughter,” he said. “Jean. Do you have children?”

Leonard paused a moment as he considered how to answer this. It was always such an internal hassle when people asked about children. He was never sure how to approach the matter, how to broach the subject if indeed he wanted to broach it, how to avoid and deflect without sounding rude or dishonest- if he wished to avoid and deflect that is. The time in which to decide was always so little.

“No,” he found himself saying. “No…we never…” and he found that he had suddenly planted a sad, ambiguous silence that suggested he and his wife had never been able to conceive. That wasn’t the truth but that is what was tacitly communicated. (This whole scenario was depressingly familiar, to Leonard and to his wife).    

“I hoped she’d be married by this time,” the man said grimly.

“Oh?”

“She’s an unusual one, Jean. She frustrates me if I’m honest.”

As he said this, the ex-headmaster was gazing off into the middle distance. His gaze seemed to light on a particular stained glass window. The narrow panel showed a honey-coloured sky and a river of deep blue, the same blue that stained the cloak of each Virgin Mary depicted in glass- (there were multiple Marys, dotted around the various windows). Winging their way over the river in this panel of stained glass, just a short height above the surface, there were several white forms, what Leonard initially thought were terns or little gulls but were actually white flying fish.

Leonard turned back towards the quire-stalls. Jean was still there, in the back bay on the left. A white- haired and -bearded man with big spectacles and misted eyes approached her, also surpliced. In an instant, because of something he had said, he had animated her and they were both laughing. 

A few days later, Leonard came back to the house and found his wife in the garden with a stranger. He didn’t recognise this stranger at first. This stranger was using an electric trimmer to tame the garden. He cut back the fecund thrusts of trees and decimated a dizzying nexus of ivy branches. The whine of the trimmer carried to the top of the driveway and sounded in the street, a gentle mosquito-like drone which wove itself into the afternoon quiet and became unnoticeable after a while. Hollie was sitting at the patio table, nursing a cup of tea. She watched the way Claude moved and handled his equipment; she sat, mesmerised, by his little hand, by the way it would seem sometimes to randomly clutch at things, at young leaves, at overhanging weeds- (before he neutered what had naturally occurred, curtailing that green, copious, spiky confidence with his whining implement).  

Leonard, feeling unexpectedly weary, came through the house and into the garden. The trimmer buzzed on and on in the same unbroken whine. He still didn’t recognise the man operating it. His appearance was half-disguised by a baseball cap and goggles. But then the man turned, changing position, and Leonard noticed the undersized left hand and he noticed long silver hair trailing down the back of the man’s chequered shirt. It was the same man he had seen the week before, walking towards him on the path by the river. The man was intent on his work and didn’t break to acknowledge Leonard. If he had, he may or may not have recognised him. There was something a little dreamy about him, something about him which suggested his grasp on the objective world was a little loose.  

Leonard wasn’t too keen on guests, guests of any description. Hollie explained that the man’s name was Claude, he was new to the area, and she had reached out to him to do some work for her after discovering his advertisement in the Co-op. After the gardening work, he was going to put a new letter box on the front door, a smart one, polished brass. Leonard thought of reproaching his wife for failing to mention any of this…but he didn’t in the end. He just nodded unenthusiastically, said okay. He then retired to the attic bedroom and slept. The weather, the time of day, (or was it the time of year), the whine of the trimmer, all proved quite soporific. Unlacing his shoes, he felt as sleepy as if he had been drugged. He lay on the bed and promptly fell asleep, still in his clothes.

He woke to find himself walking. It was the dead of night, a full moon. He was walking the long-grassed embankment beside a long stretch of road, an A-road where cars and lorries sped by at speed. At this hour, there were hardly any vehicles on the road. The occasional truck roared past, the more occasional car, always a single solitary driver in the driving seat. The drivers were all still and grave, their eyes intent upon the road ahead, upon the black distance, or the endless column of cats’ eyes studding the concrete- gently blinding. The wind boomed softly, coldly, in Leonard’s ears. He had no idea where he was but he knew that he had to keep walking. 

After a few miles of repetitious darkness and gloom and cold, the trees massing along the other side of the road sparsened and a watery vista was revealed. The moon, full and sorrowful, lay doubled in flooded marsh. Swollen, tearful pools of water gleamed, their gleam sharpened in the frosty moonlight. The moon’s reflection, its ghostly twin, rippled in the wind-agitated waters. This great nocturnal panorama was endowed with a sure, scary beauty.

A little further on, Leonard came to a garage and service station. There were no parked vehicles by the petrol pumps. Away from the pumps, there was a dormant-looking wagon, the kind of wagon that travellers make their domicile. Whether abandoned or occupied by sleepers, (or corpses), the difference was impossible to know. In the service station, outside, in front of the shop, there were sacks of charcoal stacked high, there were netted bags of wood, there were newspapers in a rack covered with transparent plastic. The lighting was bright white in the little shop- a standard convenience store, scaled down. He couldn’t see anyone behind the counter, anyone between the till and the backwall battery of glass bottles and tobacco products.

He thought he heard footsteps, a voice. He turned his head abruptly. No-one. There was no-one about, no-one in the petrol station, no-one in the shop, no customers or staff. He went inside the shop and he wandered the brief aisles with spectral nonchalance. Bread, medium-sliced, thick-sliced, granary, white; beans, solo cans, packs of four; a surprisingly exhaustive biscuit section; condoms, seven colour-coded varieties. The overhead lighting flickered briefly, as though it were clearing its throat, as though it were momently voiding itself of something unhealthy. The bright glare was steady and unbroken for about a minute after that. Then it stammered again, like a miniature flash of lightning. The failing bulb was right above Leonard’s head. The shop lighting was provided by flat, disc-shaped lamps, fitted tight against the ceiling. 

Leonard felt hungry. And thirsty. He suddenly felt upsettingly empty, his heart as dry as dust. He needed sensation; he craved immediate sensation of any kind, he didn’t care how fleeting. He went to the refrigerator and opened the door. He picked out a can of sprite. It was perfectly cold, and wet, perspiring icily. The metal against his hand reminded him of something, something he could not place very specifically. The memory moved in his mind, it drew attention to itself, gathering specificity. He could not say when or where it had happened, this scene he found himself suddenly recalling. 

In the memory, he was sitting on a wall with his son. His son was quite young. They had gone into a petrol station shop just like this and emerged with a single can of sprite, which they shared, on a wall. Crisps. Were their crisps as well? What flavour? Salt and vinegar; prawn cocktail; smoky bacon? It must have been about that time that Leonard started taking him to art galleries. The paints, the canvases, the easel, the palette, they must have all followed shortly after. All he ever wanted to talk about was Velasquez, and Rembrandt, and Stubbs, and Vermeer, and Van Gogh. 

The past vanished. The present was so still, so lifeless.   

Leonard took the can of sprite to the till. It was not so dissimilar to a Campell’s soup tin. The two were the same species of thing, (perhaps). Warhol might have cherished those large, avid letters, white against green, the succulence of the water droplets. Why not? Moisture, gleam. Desire. Consumerism. Lubrication. Gleam. Pussy. His son had spoken so often in this way: in enthusiastic, percussive bursts of imagination and perception.   

There was no-one behind the counter. There was a door, very slightly ajar. Leonard called out, alerting the counter-person to his presence. He could hear little noises, a chair creaking, a footstep, a very quiet murmur of speech, little more than a whisper. He was sure there was someone there, behind the door. He called out again. Still no-one came. He sought in his pockets for cash. Harsh textures answered his fingertips. His pockets were full of rusty nails and beer bottle tops. But as to how they got there he was completely mystified. There was also a section of foil packaging containing little spherical tablets. He didn’t know what they were. Searching his person, he eventually happened upon a debit card. He called out once more but still no-one came. He lost patience and walked out of the shop with the can of sprite, without paying for it.     

Outside, he opened the sprite and it didn’t foam. He took a huge gulp of it, a steady thread of excess liquid dribbling down the front of his shirt. The drink tasted flat, flat and dull. It was cold but completely without flavour or fizz. He sought and found the unknown pills he had just discovered. He took two of them. He felt nothing. No euphoria or energy, no sedation. He kept walking, along the grassy embankment, keeping the road to his right. He cast the Sprite can into the bushes with a loud grunt of contempt.

Just as an unusual feeling was beginning to flood his being, he heard a single siren. A police car came up behind him and slowed, driving next to him for a few moments. The officer in the front of the car made a hand signal which Leonard didn’t understand. Then he drove on with a brief roar of acceleration and parked the car in the layby just ahead. The officer, who was very old and fat, got out of the car, leaned against the boot, and calmly awaited Leonard’s approach.

The officer, who was bald as well as old and fat, explained to Leonard that he did not have to say anything but that it might harm his defence if he declined to say anything which he later relied on in court…or…that he did not have to say anything but anything he did say might be used against him as evidence in a court of law. The officer’s head was splashed with two very large purple port-wine stains and he spoke very unclearly, mumbling his questions and statements in a quiet slur. If Leonard had not been fairly familiar with the detention rubric he would probably not have understood it when the officer recited it for him. Leonard got into the back of the car at the officer’s instruction. He sat, behind an iron grate. The officer sat in the front seat, his form grim and squat and impersonal through the grid that divided them. He muttered something a few times. Leonard thought he said Nonce. Nonce. What? Nothing, mate. 

Though under arrest, presumably for his theft of the Sprite, Leonard felt safe and tranquil in the police car. Without delay, the smell of its seats and the clean hum of the engine lulled him asleep. The officer drove him home and handed him over to Hollie, who ushered him to the sofa and covered him in a blanket.  

The local farm. In early May, the sow gave birth to eight beautiful little piglets. At night, the eight brand-new juveniles slept in a tin shed, right at the centre of the pen-mud. They were a black breed of pig, black-bodied with milk-white feet. Their quite literally looked like they had been dipped feet-first in white paint. Their tiny tails would not attain the spiral of maturity for quite a few years. 

Every morning, the piglet shed sat silently, like a grave at the centre of the sleepy new day. And then, suddenly, the piglets would race out into the daylight, looking like silhouettes even when they were not in silhouette. One, two, and then about eight, so immediate and lithe and passionate. While the piglets chased one another around the corrugated tin shed in playful, frenetic loops, the sow trudged slowly, plodding slowly around the sand-brown mud-patch in post-partum rings, weary and sorrowful. She sometimes barked, occasionally bellowed her guttural pig-shouts at her unruly offspring. For the most part they ignored her, filling the dawn with their own defiant coloratura squeaks. 

There was a runt. Even among such a party, a party of such small, fresh infants, some innate, evolutionary coldness in their quick, little pig-hearts identified the smallest amongst them and the majority formed an adorable, inky gang and bullied the little runt, gleefully buffeting his flanks. .

Claude liked to come here, to the farm, to the piglet shed. Since first noticing the energetic litter of piglets, he had been back a number of times. He pilgrimaged to the farm almost daily now, sometimes twice-daily, mostly at evening. He would pass, he would slow, he would come to a stop by the pen. He would wait for the clouds of powdery dust he had raised from the path to settle. Resting both of his hands on the post and rail fencing which separated their two worlds, his tiny, babyish left hand on his perfect, useful right, he would wait to become invisible. His approach invariably startled the piglets into the shed; (the sow always ignored him, just as she ignored everyone). But if he stood still enough, if he allowed himself to figuratively evaporate, the piglets would come tearing out of the shed into the evening light, the half-light, squealing joyously. 

For a few moments, gazing at the piglets, Claude knew perfection. And then, quite without warning, some bitterness, as sharp as a thistle, would always pierce the moment’s tranquillity with its thorn and he would be sent on his way, fleeing the scene with supressed desperation, grimacing and angrily muttering to himself.

Therapy again. 

            “A dream?” Mark enquired.

            “No,” Leonard answered abruptly. “I went there I think. It was like a dream, it served the same purpose as a dream. But it wasn’t a dream because I went there, I was actually there.” 

            “You know what I’m going to ask you, don’t you?”

Leonard shook his head.

“You said that it served the same purpose as a dream. So, what do you think the purpose of a dream is?”

Leonard thought for a while. A familiar silence came between them. If anything of meaning was present, it was not expressible in words, not yet.

“I don’t know,” Leonard said. He felt foolish for asserting something he couldn’t defend. “It was bleak,” he continued, feeling a little angry. He wasn’t sure why.

“You sound angry?”

“I’m not angry at all,” Leonard said angrily. “It was bleak. But the worst thing was…”

What he wanted to say was on the tip of his tongue. But something prevented him from saying it.

“Yes?”

“I felt like I belonged there. I didn’t feel out of place. It was as if there was nowhere else to go, as if I had nowhere to go- as if I had no home. I can’t help thinking that it’s got something to do with this man my wife invited round to do some gardening…some other things as well.”

“Yes, you said that you were annoyed that she didn’t consult you before hiring him.”

“He makes me uneasy. I’d already seen him before I found him trimming the garden. I bumped into him by the river, it was precisely last week actually, while I was walking to my appointment with you.”  

“And what were your impressions?” 

Leonard thought carefully for a minute.

“A feeling of concern.” 

“Concern?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean concern as in attention, maybe interest, curiosity? or do you mean concern as in worry, anxiety?”

“Yes.”

“Which? Both?”

“Yes.”

In time, all the jobs around the house got done. It took Claude four separate visits to complete the work. He showed up one time with a bruised face, another time with his little hand dressed and bandaged. But these injuries didn’t stop him. The new brass letterbox was installed on the front door, the curtain rail was fixed in place, the kitchen cupboard door was re-hinged, and the picture Hollie had for a long time wanted hung was finally hung. 

The picture was a portrait, a portrait of an African tribeswoman. She was young, her body was young: upon it, not even the most preliminary sign of death was visible. (We all begin dying at twenty-two, thereabouts). She had skin the colour of chocolate and a completely shaved head. She had on a woven grass-skirt- pale brown and a little tatty. Above her waist she wore nothing, except for a glinting brace of rings around her long neck. Her neck shone red in the sunlight. She had a pair of small, sharp breasts. Behind her, there was nothing. No water or hills or sky. Just an impossible terracotta nothingness. Her lashed eyes were huge and dark: these she showed to the viewer, fully, withholding nothing. Having hung it, Claude stepped back from it and studied it at length. He was like a scarecrow now, without juice or potency; but at one time or another he had been as vital as she. As he often did, he felt the urge to cry but, as usual, couldn’t: for a long time now, he had found it physically impossible to cry. His eyes just weren’t capable of it anymore.   

Their son had painted this portrait, sometime in the year before his suicide. It was an enigma to Hollie, a wordless riddle. But she could not deny that she found comfort as well as questions in the image. She had no idea what it meant, why he had chosen this for his subject. He had had talent, and that talent endured. Maybe that was the comfort. Maybe the very fact that it was so enigmatic was the comfort, that there remained some possibility of dialogue: that she still had the chance to find out something new about her dead son, something she didn’t know already.            

Not long after the picture was hung, Leonard stopped and looked at it. He was aware of the portrait but he had never actually looked at it, not really. Perhaps it was its new position, its new and unfamiliar situation, that breathed so much new life into it. It was, he had to admit, so unbearably full of life. Or at least…a longing for life. He had never really felt able to look at it. Something in the image, combined with certain scraps of knowledge he had about his son, had always made the image discomforting to look it. Therefore, until now, he had never looked at it properly, because it had always hurt to do so. 

That night, he shared with Hollie the contents of the blue folder under his side of the bed. It had been acquired the very day he had journeyed to the halls of residence to identify his son’s body. It had just been sitting there on the bedside table, unhidden, regularly consulted it seemed. But ever since then he had kept it from her. Why? Well, mostly, he supposed, because he didn’t want to embarrass his son. Now, for whatever reason, though in some part of himself he still believed such a thing was possible, he wasn’t so concerned about embarrassing his son. Hiding things from his living wife was worse than mortifying, than exposing, his deceased son.

The blue folder contained hundreds and hundreds of photographs of black women, black women of every skin-shade, and shape, and size, in every state of dress or undress, from the most extravagantly clothed subjects to the most pornographic nudes, posed and unposed pictures, images of every genre, every visual register. Some of them were very young, very young, their bodies barely pubescent, their faces alarming, almost blinding, with shocking youthfulness. There were sometimes as many as three images on a single page and the folder was filled to capacity, overfilled even, beyond capacity. Together, husband and wife, they turned the pages, gazing unflinching into this secret cranny of their son’s existence, their minds dizzy with the variety and volume in the blue folder.

Leonard’s nipples healed speedily. In just a few short weeks he had no memory of his marathon aches and pains. For no other reason than their company logo featured a hummingbird- an attractive image of an attractive creature- he donated the money raised from the marathon to Papyrus, a suicide prevention charity founded in 1997.     

The garden came back to life. With his sharp implements, his whining electric tools, Claude nursed it to health, and roused it from its tangled sleep.