So He Takes the Dog. Jonathan Buckley
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tank filled with clear water and one-quarter filled with shells, crab claws, stones and miscellaneous beach debris, but apparently devoid of fish. ‘When he went AWOL, where did he get to? Any idea?’ he asks, addressing the side of Hannah’s face.
‘Last year it was Penzance, during the summer,’ she replies, as though the question had been put not by Ian but by his companion. And he was in Plymouth too, on the same trip. Why he’d gone there, how he’d got there, how long he’d spent there, she can’t say. When he came back from his travels he usually didn’t seem to know where he’d been. Once he was away for a short time, no more than a week, and when she next saw him a bus ticket fell out of his pocket while they were talking, and he picked it up and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. And a couple of years back, she remembers, Henry reappeared wearing a T-shirt that had come from some car museum, yet Henry was almost certain he hadn’t been to any such place.
‘Almost certain?’ Ian interjects, having decided that the fishless fish tank is evidence in favour of the judgement he’d made on the basis of the black rag by the door.
‘That’s right,’ Hannah responds coolly, again to the non-speaker.
‘So he was confused,’ Ian summarises. ‘Mentally confused.’
‘That’s not how I’d put it.’
‘How would you put it?’
‘He was confused when he saw the ticket. When I asked him about the museum. But from day to day his mental state wasn’t confused.’
Mimicking the perplexity of the dense, Ian scratches his head, scowling at the effort of thinking. ‘You’re going to have to run that one by me again,’ he says. ‘He goes walkabout for a few days and when he comes back here he doesn’t have a clue where he’s been but his mind isn’t confused? I’m not getting it.’
Bestowing on Ian a brief irritated glance, Hannah explains, speaking slowly to the wall behind him. ‘When you talked to Henry he wasn’t confused. He made sense. He understood what you were saying to him. He answered in sentences. OK? But when he came back from his walkabout, as you put it, he seemed to have lost the time that he’d been away. It was as if he’d been sleepwalking. Make sense to you now?’
‘In my experience, when people wake up after sleepwalking they tend to be confused.’
‘He was, at first, a bit. But he wasn’t confused in the way you meant it.’
‘And how did I mean it?’
‘On the way to ga-ga. He was more blank than confused.’
‘So if you said to him, “Henry, where were you yesterday?” he’d say, “I haven’t a clue?” Is that right?’
‘He’d remember stuff. Things he’d seen.’
‘In that case he wasn’t blank, was he?’
‘Not entirely, no. He’d remember bits and pieces, but they wouldn’t join up. Things would be vague. Like remembering a dream.’
‘Sounds to me like he needed medical attention.’
‘That’s not the sort of help he needed.’
‘What sort did he need?’
‘Some money wouldn’t have gone amiss,’ Hannah replies. Asked whether Henry was as vague about the more distant past as he was about the weeks just gone, she confirms that he was and smiles faintly to herself as she says it, as if Henry had cleverly anticipated the problems his vagueness would cause after he’d gone. He once lived in London, many years ago. Sometimes he talked about buildings or places in the city and he’d struggle to see them clearly, because it was so long since he’d been there. He said that explicitly. Did Henry ever name any friends or acquaintances he might once have had? No, there were no names, none that she could recall at the moment. How did Henry come to be homeless, did she know that? She knew that he’d lost his job and that he lost his home as a consequence. What was the job? Henry didn’t say. Where was it? Henry didn’t say. How long ago? Henry didn’t say.
‘You didn’t ask him?’ Ian intervenes.
‘If he wanted to tell me more, he’d have told me more,’ Hannah firmly replies, as if repeating a rule that Ian had forgotten. ‘If he didn’t, he’d change the subject. He’d shrug and go quiet, and that would be the end of it.’ Again she consults the sky, which seems to bring the recollection of a particular episode with Henry. She is about to speak, then halts herself, narrowing her eyes, putting her thoughts in order. ‘With Henry the past was dead,’ she says, and grimaces at herself, because that’s not quite right. ‘It was irrelevant to him. He was lonely and bored a lot of the time, but he never gave the impression of being nostalgic for the life he’d lost. Or hardly ever. There was no bitterness in him. What was gone was gone. He was where he was, and he was making the best of it. But occasionally he’d remember something,’ Hannah goes on, offering a rueful smile. She inspects a finger, attending to a speck of dirt caught under a nail before continuing. ‘He’d be struck by a memory. It would just seem to hit him, out of nowhere. Little things: what something looked like. A street, a market, a face. He’d be really jolted by it, and delighted, for a while, then he’d begin to get sad and he’d do this,’ she says, with a swat of the hand. ‘Move on. No dwelling on the past.’
Stifling a yawn that appears rhetorical, Ian closes his notebook. ‘Cuts down the topics for conversation, doesn’t it? If your past is off the menu,’ he observes. ‘You say you liked talking to him. What was there to talk about? I mean, it’s not as if he’d had an action-packed day at the office.’
The crudity of the question makes Hannah sigh. They talked about the things they could see, she explains. They talked about what she’d been doing since the last time he saw her, about things that had happened in the town, about the weather, the news, the things people talk about.
Ian’s notebook goes into a pocket; it’s time to wind up. ‘But he never named anyone he knew? He saw faces but they had no names?’ he asks in conclusion.
‘No.’
‘Remarkable.’
‘That’s the way it was,’ says Hannah, again not to Ian. She’s staring at the photographs of the field with the drystone wall, remembering something about Henry, it appears.
‘Well, if you think of anything else, call us on this number,’ Ian finishes, depositing a card on the floor beside her knee.
She gives the card a second of her attention. Henry could tell when it was going to rain, she adds. His fingers would swell up and shrink with the changing air pressure. The pulse in his wrists would become so prominent, it was like looking at the flank of a frog as it breathed. He was like a human barometer, never wrong, she says.
The next day new flyers were issued, using Hannah’s photograph instead of the fuzzy beach snap, and stations in London were given the new improved mugshot. The response was silence. It felt as if we were lobbing marbles into a bog.
One Monday lunchtime we take a message from Tom Gaskin, saying he has some information that might be useful and asking us to drop by his house, whenever was convenient, so as soon as the paperwork is out of the way, around five, we drive over there. As when we’d left him all those days ago, he’s sitting at the table in the window, wearing a crisp white shirt, though on this occasion the tie is a stripy blue-and-yellow cricket-club number. When he sees us arrive he gives us a stiff slow wave of the forearm, a tired and polite little gesture, like the wave of a man at a car park barrier greeting the five hundredth driver of the day. You get the impression he’s been sitting there for hours, staring out at the sea and the hills.
He seats us around the table, asks if either of us would like tea or coffee, glances at the view from his window, passes comment on the weather. He asks us how the