17 Alma Road

The thirteenth section...

XIII

Given he made a point of having his room painted every few years, its colours ranging through some kind of muted rainbow, it is perhaps only to be expected that the tone which greets him — something just on the yellow side of magnolia — is surprising. He wants to recall liking his shades bold and vibrant, and so, standing in the centre of the room, tries to remember each of them in turn, hoping that in one corner or another traces of the walls’ previous lives might just show through. Yet there is nothing to disturb the pastel yellow; George was far too methodical a decorator to allow past shades to see the light of day. It is a colour — this yellow — which, along with his not really remembering it, also surprises him because it seems relatively bright after Maddie’s room. He cannot help but wonder whether the decor in the two rooms shouldn’t have been reversed to better fit with their divergent personalities — even if, in the end, his sister’s sombre wallpaper proved entirely appropriate. The again, perhaps the magnolia arrived after he had left.

Walking to the wall in which the dormant fireplace is inset, Owen runs his hand over its surface as if feeling for history, imagining his eyes catching feint tell-tale marks where the chemical residue of some sticky substance or other resisted over-painting. After they won the FC Cup in 1974, he had insisted on erecting a picture of Liverpool’s football team; and though he can’t remember how long it remained there, he is almost certain it was replaced by a Star Wars poster. Imagining himself a Jedi was probably as far as his imagination took him.

Apart from recalling this rudimentary decoration, he has bizarrely contextless memories of pieces of furniture, rugs, boxes of toys; then, just before he left for university, a desk, a half-filled bookcase. Such things represented the transition between one stage and the next. He thinks back to Maddie’s room and can only remember it as a single entity: a den of artistic chaos.

“A trifle harsh,” she observes, “but I’ll settle for that.”

And even though in his old room, he cannot escape thinking about her. He stares at the wall which separates the two bedrooms, tries to project himself through it.

“What?” There is a degree of impatience in her voice.

“I don’t know.” Stalling, Owen senses that she is fed-up being the point of focus. Her words — ‘your turn’ — come back to him. “I was just wondering, all those times when your work wasn’t selling…”

“You mean most of the time.”

“I suppose so… All the while you must still have been trying to sell things, submitting to exhibitions or contests, striving to get galleries interested.”

“And your point is?”

“What was that like? I mean, the hope, getting knocked back, trying again…”

To buy Maddie time, Owen walks to the window and looks out, the view from here only marginally different to that from her room. He wonders how it is possible that from remarkably similar yet shared views such different lives could develop. Perspective had much to answer for.

“It was brutal.” Her tone is flat, matter-of-fact. “Brutal. How could it be otherwise? How could it not gnaw away at your soul? I’d be so optimistic…” She allows her voice to fall away.

Owen turns back into the room, scanning his own space for clues, as if he might alight on something which would make Maddie’s statement concrete. Or make her real again. There is nothing but absence. He looks at the unshaded light hanging from the ceiling and then over to the switch. How often had his hands flicked that over the years?

“Not that rejection was something you had to worry about. Professionally, I mean.” She moves them on.

He weighs up the concept, tries to take a quick mental skip through his cv.

“Only once, I suppose. At the end.”

“And what was that like?”

“Nothing like your experience, I’m sure.”

“Why so certain?”

This time it is an easy enough question to answer.

“Because I knew it was coming. Because I’d lost my mojo. Because I didn’t care any more. You choose.” Yet in Owen’s mind this was not a valid example of multiple choice because all were true. He realises he is in danger of trivialising his experience, something which might inadvertently devalue his sister’s. “I mean, at the heart of it I wasn’t as invested in my work as much as you were in yours; it didn’t matter in the same kind of way. That’s why I asked about you I suppose, because I didn’t know what professional rejection felt like. I couldn’t know. Not until the end.”

Uncertain whether he has done enough — either to satisfy her enquiry or exercise his responsibility for having had ‘a turn’ — he is prepared to leave it at that. In comparison to Maddie’s life, his one rebuff didn’t even make the same scale; it was like comparing a single fragment of a peppercorn to an entire chilli.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she says, breaking the silence.

“Oh?”

“I was thinking about Grace, Lisa, Wendy.”

“Oh,” he says again, this time his emphasis very different, wondering if what she has executed was an entirely fair segue on Maddie’s part. There is enough of a link to their earlier conversation of course: her men friends, his women friends; a commonality of theme. And she is undoubtedly right that his most meaningful experiences of rejection was not professional but personal. “What was your word? Brutal? I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply.”

Sensing her settling down somewhere, he leans against a wall and scans the room, waiting.

“And all made worse in that you didn’t know those rejections were coming — after all you hadn’t stopped caring, and thought you still had your mojo.”

He laughs to himself. “I see what you did there.”

“Clever don’t you think?”

“I would expect nothing less.”

If she had been in the room with him, Owen imagines the obsequious little bow she might have been tempted to offer at such recognition. Having the picture in his mind is sufficient. It feels a little like a reward, proof that a link still exists.

“But you know the stories, Maddie, all of them. They have — don’t you think — a certain similarity about them; a symmetry almost.”

“Boy meets girl; boy and girl fall in love; girl leaves boy?”

“Nothing so superficial.”

“Sorry.”

Not that she is wrong, even if she didn’t bear witness to the minutiae of each unravelling. The house saw as much of that as any one person, himself excepted. There were evenings when they came to visit — he and Grace or Lisa or Wendy — and sat at opposite ends of one of the living room sofas, the chasm between them as evident as the nose on your face. Yet he had been the last to observe it, certainly well after Florence.