The High Places by Fiona McFarlane

Author:Fiona McFarlane
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374710736
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Violet, Violet

Mr Kidd’s bird looked like an ordinary budgerigar: blue, with a yellow face, black dots at the neck, and zebra-striped wings. It spoke three words: ‘hello’, ‘knock’, and ‘Violet’, which late in the night sounded like ‘violent’ and worried Christopher, at first, as he heard it through the thin walls of his room at the St George Hotel. His room was small and oppressively tidy; the television attached to a bracket on the ceiling above the writing desk made Christopher think of a hospital; his clothes filled no more than one-third of the wardrobe; and the words ‘violent, violent’ issued through the left-hand wall from a voice not quite human.

Christopher had lived at the St George for three weeks before he met Mr Kidd. If he hadn’t been so wary of his surroundings, they might have met earlier: waiting for the lift, in the lobby, or in the communal bathrooms that dripped with a listless mildew. But Christopher took the stairs rather than the lift, and joined a gym in order to shower there. He walked quickly through the hotel lobby because he was afraid of being caught in conversation with a man like Mr Kidd: a man in a raincoat, a formless man, perpetually sodden, with a hopeful and lonely look, carrying an unredeemable briefcase. Being in the lobby generated a feeling of queasy anticipation, as if some terrible thing might happen at any moment. Christopher passed through at eight every morning on his way to the city library, and he returned just after six. He climbed the stairs and flung the door of his room open wide in case someone was concealing himself behind it. He urinated in his basin so that he might avoid the bathrooms for anything but more substantial needs. The pigeons in the eaves of the St George Hotel filled Christopher’s room with their amorous clatter, and he peered up at them through his scuffed window, most of which had been sacrificed to an air-conditioning unit. He looked at the pigeons with the boredom that comes of a temporary life in an unknown city. Who was this man he’d briefly become? He had no hobbies or preferences or appetites.

This was why Christopher crossed the lobby looking only at his feet. It was why he was so cold to Mr Kidd – in his own politely imperceptible way – at their first meeting.

This meeting took place on a Monday that Christopher had forgotten was a public holiday. It was easy to lose track of these things while living in hotels and libraries; time took on a different, interminable aspect. He set out from the St George at his accustomed hour and discovered, upon arrival, that the library was closed. Something like panic flared in his chest. He was frightened by the thought of the librarians – those helpful, faceless beings who moved quickly through his slow days – relaxing with friends and family in unknown houses all around him. He was unmoored by the locked doors of the library, by the untried city, by his own confusion.

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