Chapter 5 Adam #2
Leaf looks at Adam with interest. ‘Ok.’ He leads Adam to the far side of the hall, where there is a hatch door. He opens it. A dumb waiter shaft yawns black. It makes Adam think of stewed greens and sorrow. He feels like he catches a whiff of those things, ghosts on the air.
‘There was an apple farm here once,’ Leaf says. ‘We used the foundations for Nowhere House. It’s difficult building up here. You have to blast into the rock. Anyway, I thought since this shaft runs all the way up the house, we could put it in here.’
Adam waits. He isn’t good at everything but he can tell when people aren’t finished talking.
‘I want a staircase.’ Leaf’s words seem to come with physical difficulty. ‘One that runs all the way up the house. And it has to have places where you can … look into the rooms. Cameras are no good, the mountain messes with the signal.’
‘You want to spy on people?’
‘Yeah. I mean, no. I have problems with guests.’ Leaf scrubs his face, which is suddenly weary.
‘Not everyone is a friend. I always forget. They steal things. They take photographs of my bedroom and sell them. I need help.’ Leaf swipes a hand over his eyes but not before Adam sees the tears there.
‘I’m sorry. I get how it sounds. This is not your problem. ’
Adam closes his eyes – better not watch himself do this, it’s insane – and puts his hand over Leaf’s. Leaf grips it. His other hand clamps down on Adam’s like iron, crushing.
Adam makes an ‘ah’ sound.
‘I’m sorry.’ Leaf lets go. ‘I really hurt you.’
Adam can’t think what to say. He holds his throbbing hand.
Leaf holds out Adam’s coat. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he says quietly. ‘I’m sorry. You’ll want to leave, now.’
Adam doesn’t reach for the coat. He looks at the walls, the height of the house, imagines its inner life.
‘You could use the dumb waiter to create a false wall against this side of the atrium,’ he says slowly.
‘Hide the door with a bookcase that opens into the shaft. Put a spiral staircase in it which goes up through the storeys, ending in your suite.’
‘Ok.’ The tips of Leaf’s ears are red.
Adam takes his coat from Leaf’s hands and drapes it carefully over the back of the vast linen couch.
‘So you can do it?’ Leaf asks.
‘Maybe,’ Adam says. ‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Let’s go outdoors,’ Leaf says. ‘Everything is better outside.’
Adam follows Leaf’s straight back through sunlit hallways.
He stares at the man’s shoulder blades, the glimpse of neck beneath his dark hair.
Adam wonders if Leaf rides the carousel alone, sometimes.
He pictures him alone at the top of the Ferris wheel, surrounded by sky, the child shining out of his eyes.
For a moment an image crawls into his mind, of Leaf and him together on the Ferris wheel, talking, side by side.
Adam catches his toe in a fold of the soft wool runner that spreads along the corridor. He stumbles, nearly falls, but doesn’t. A firm hand catches him. When he looks up his eyes meet Leaf’s.
‘You ok?’ Leaf asks. Adam blushes, something he hasn’t done for years.
‘Yeah,’ he says, distant.
They come into a long gallery, sunlit. ‘Cool jukebox,’ Adam says. Anything to shift focus. It’s beautiful and neon, flush against the wall. He can tell it’s expensive, vintage.
‘It’s bust,’ says Leaf, rolling his eyes. ‘I got ripped off. Doesn’t work.’
They sit on the side porch looking out over a gentle rise of green. White crosses stand upright at intervals. The sinking sun makes a narrow stripe of gold on the hills.
‘What’s your girlfriend like?’ Leaf takes a thin pack from his pocket, which produces an impossibly thin cigarette. The light flares on his face, for a moment he is clear in the narrow Zippo flame.
‘She’s great,’ Adam says automatically.
‘Are you in love?’ Leaf takes a deep drag on his long slender cigarette.
‘No.’ Adam feels the world lift up like a physical weight. It’s a relief to admit it. ‘I love her but I’m not – not that.’
‘Have you ever been in love?’
Adam stops. He puts his head in his hands. ‘I guess if I had to think about it for that long, no.’
‘I’ve just been in love,’ Leaf says. ‘Recently escaped or fallen out of it or whatever. Or maybe it’s over, but I’m still in it. I don’t know.’ He takes a photo from his wallet.
‘Is that her?’ Adam asks.
Leaf looks at him with sunlit eyes.
Adam takes the photograph. It’s a young guy outside an Irish bar with a hand-lettered sign. His eyes look troubled. He wears a white vest, jeans, a purple velvet belt. His hair is long, courses down his back, red as autumn leaves.
‘Right,’ Adam says, embarrassed. ‘Ok. I mean, sorry—’ ‘
It’s not an emotion, love.’ Leaf examines his fingernails. ‘It’s more like violence. No one tells you that.’ He smokes.
‘Maybe only some people ever feel it.’ Adam has always known that he is not made for such things.
‘How lonely,’ Leaf says. ‘But also, how peaceful.’ He coughs and hands his cigarette to Adam. ‘I can’t. You have it.’
Adam holds the cigarette awkwardly. It makes him feel like he’s got too many fingers on his hand or maybe too few. He starts to put the cigarette out but Leaf takes it quickly.
‘Don’t waste it.’
Adam says awkwardly, ‘I’ve never liked …’
‘How unfair when I love it so much. There should be a happy medium.’
‘You should take better care of yourself.’ Adam is not sure what’s happening to him. Maybe it’s the altitude. Every moment feels lit with a brilliant intensity.
‘I wouldn’t be alive today if I didn’t smoke. The things these eyes have seen.’ He smiles. ‘Does Mrs Adam bake? Does she greet you with a kiss at the door in the evening after work? Is it checkers or gin rummy after dinner? A little blond darling on the way …’
‘Ok.’ Adam stands. ‘Thank you for the opportunity.’ It’s all some kind of rich person’s game and Adam has his own problems. He wonders how to find his way back to the central hall and the front door, the way out. He wonders how he’s going to get back to his car and whether it will start again.
A hand falls on Adam’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ Leaf says. ‘I am – I push and push. It’s an old habit. My family had nothing, when I was growing up. You learn to take things from people. My sister took purses from women at the mall. I learned to be hurtful.’
Adam sits down heavily. He puts his head in his hands.
‘You’re right, though,’ he says through his fingers.
‘Christie’s pregnant. I don’t know what to do.
We’ve got no money. I’m not a father. I’m not ready, I’m not …
I feel like I’m being killed,’ Adam says.
‘My throat cut right through. Every night I wake up from dreams I don’t remember and I can’t breathe.
Something terrible is going to happen. I know it. ’
Leaf touches Adam’s hand. ‘Look.’ Adam raises his head.
A butterfly is settled on the railing. It opens and closes slow wings.
‘It’s a purple emperor,’ Leaf says. ‘I had a hundred shipped over from England. For the first year after they were released, I thought they’d all died.
Didn’t see a single one. One day almost a year later I was up at the top of the barn.
And there’s this oak tree that leans in close to the hayloft.
And the branches were covered with purple – there they were.
They’d been living up there all the time.
Purple emperors are arboreal butterflies.
They live in treetops, not down here – usually in oak trees.
I hadn’t realised, or I’d forgotten, or maybe I didn’t care.
I wasn’t paying much attention to things outside myself at that time.
I was in a bad place.’ He smiles. ‘They do come down to ground level sometimes now. Maybe they’ve realised that it’s home.
But they needed that year to adjust. They needed time. ’
‘It’s beautiful,’ Adam says, hopeless.
‘The point is,’ Leaf says, ‘this place is kind of outside time. It’s like when you’re on a boat at sea, or in an airport. You can drink at any time of day and you can hide from the ticking clock. Not forever – but maybe for a little while.’
On the green hill wild rabbits move in the sinking light. They are ghost-grey and gentle among the white crosses. The sky is a haze of gold and blue.
‘Have I seen this before?’ Adam doesn’t mean to say it but the sense of familiarity has been growing in him ever since he got here. ‘I can’t have done but—’
Leaf smiles. ‘She likes you,’ he says. ‘Nowhere.’
‘She?’
‘Don’t you think Nowhere is a her?’
‘Uh,’ Adam says, uncertain.
‘Let me show her to you.’ Leaf takes a case from beneath his chair. He removes three black cylinders, opens them and spreads the plans out on the table carefully. ‘This is Nowhere.’
Adam looks closely. One is a blueprint for Nowhere House.
It has glass and steel and wood and metric measurements.
The next one is a plan for a farmhouse, on yellowing paper.
It’s simple, the farmer’s home when this place was an apple farm.
But you can see how the builders blasted the foundations out of the mountain, the rock.
The last is a crude diagram. The ink is faded to a pale taupe.
It shows a small structure with six rooms, around a central courtyard.
‘I’m not sure that one’s real,’ Leaf says, pointing at the oldest building plan. ‘It’s seventeenth century. People say there was a monastery up here once but it’s hard to check. The other two are ok.’
‘This is great.’ Adam knows his voice sounds vague. His brain is lighting up. He can see all the ways the old and the new Nowhere fit together, how what came before was used again. ‘They’re beautiful.’
‘They are,’ Leaf pauses. ‘Look. Would you like some weird advice?’
‘Sure,’ Adam says. He touches the plan of Nowhere Apple Farm with a cautious finger.
‘Sometimes if you hide, you really find things. So you could stay here. Take a break. It might help you work through stuff.’ Leaf keeps his eyes on the hill, the crosses, the rabbits, the ending day. ‘While you build the staircase. It’s much easier if you’re on site.’
‘That’s nice of you,’ says Adam awkwardly ‘but—’
‘It’ll all still be there,’ Leaf says. ‘Believe me. Whatever you leave behind, it will all still be waiting when you get back.’
Leaf looks at Adam and he feels like no one has ever actually looked at him before, or if they have, they didn’t see. His body floods with something. Oxygen, relief, something else he’s not ready to name.
‘Also,’ Leaf says, ‘I’m particular about work on the house. It’s good to keep me happy.’
‘I guess I could stay for a while,’ Adam says, ‘to start it all off.’ He feels dizzy.
‘Good.’ Leaf leans into Adam’s ear. ‘They feed on urine and dung,’ he whispers.
‘What?’
‘The purple emperors. They feed off bodily waste.’ Leaf smiles wide into Adam’s face.
Adam coughs. ‘That’s interesting.’
‘It’s why I relate to them,’ Leaf says. ‘It’s show business in a nutshell.’ He gets up from his chair. ‘Come down to the stable and meet the horses.’
‘Ok.’ Adam’s legs feel numb and clumsy. He follows Leaf as he steps off the porch and walks across the green hill, leading the way through the white crosses.
Adam pauses and does not follow. He takes the longer way around the hill.
The thought of walking over the dead makes Adam uneasy, even if they’re just pets.