Tenth Day

The lights were still off when I woke up with the weight of an anvil pressing on my chest.

I had dreamt of you and the children, and Dad and Mum and the neighbours. I had come home that night and you were all there. I was sat at the kitchen table in the midst of your buoyant clamour; food was piled high on the table, you had uncorked bottles for the occasion, and I thawed, nudged between your warm flank and my father’s shoulder. I looked at your glowing faces in our home’s evening light and I felt I’d reached the shore of the living again. Finally, I was going to tell you: you would know what I had known there, you would know how my days had been there; I would drop the icy ballast of silence and be in your warm midst again. As I started to speak you stood up to toast me. I asked of you to listen first, I tugged your sleeve, but you didn’t notice. I waited. You finished. I resumed. Now the children sang a song and you spoke to my father over me. I shouted in your ears. You didn’t hear me. I grew smaller. I tugged your sleeve again from much lower. I cried. You didn’t hear me. I panicked; I stood up on my chair and spoke loudly over your heads. Everyone was eating from their plates and chatting to their neighbour. No one heard me.

I did not wake up drenched in sweat or tumbling in my musky sheets. I woke up still as cold stone under the mortar of a nameless, infinite sadness. No one knows I’m here. You will be back with the children soon and there will be not a note, not a word, not a call; all you will find in my place will be throbbing silence. Will you even think of enquiring whether I’m being held on suspicion of terrorism? Of course not. How grotesque. Will you think I’ve left you? What will your days be like until I come out of here? To the kids I’m sure I will be gone on a seminar, I trust you on that one – it wouldn’t be the first fictional seminar in our lives. Except I spent the last one at my parents’. The plus side of a job with lots travelling, really…

In the end, all these important-looking, charcoal-clad people you meet at distant airports, in generic, air-conditioned offices across the globe – wouldn’t know you were a thousand miles away from home from the Starbuck coffee and the Palo-alto English – all these people brought together at world’s end for such incredibly random reasons as the course of the cashew-nut after the housing-market crash and its effect on the Indonesian outsourcing industry, flaunting their plastic name-tags with assumed ridicule – exotic names which no one ever remembers, that’s why the function is always in bigger letters – in the end, they all go back to their cosy homes and their anonymous families. Off-stage their husbands, wives and children, their sick sister and annoying brother-in-law have the say. I always wonder what colour their pyjamas are. Sometimes you meet the same randomer again. That wonderful moment of acknowledged intimacy: the nod on entering the meeting-room.

That’s about as intimate as I ever got with M. He’s from another branch but we attend the same seminars with more or less regularity. When you’re on such a tight schedule as is generally the case on a three-days business trip, you feel lost as a child when there’s an hour-long gap. I remember now, we sat and had a drink at the hotel bar – I think it was in Hong-Kong – it was a couple of years ago, in any case. Can’t even remember what we discussed. The news, probably: BBC World in airports, planes, hotel and office lobbies, and in three days’ time you’re a political analyst. Funny, we never came to discuss that one yesterday. I’d honestly completely forgotten – but if they knew about it, why didn’t they ask about it? They must be thinking I deliberately kept it from them – that I’m trying to hide something. Oh God, that’s really giving the worse possible impression. I’ve got to talk to them again. Hopefully they’ll come soon. Maybe I can tell the guard I’ve got something to say? They’ll be interested. But then they’re going to think that I’m willing to admit to something, that I’m giving way under pressure. That’s guilty behaviour. Shit! I can’t wait until they come to me again, that could be weeks! They’re convincing themselves I’m guilty while I sit here! Maybe talk to the CCTV?