Chapter 3

Cordonnery

Cordonnery slid his betting slip across the table, stood and left the bar. The amount he’d lost was negligible, and anyway, he was ahead on the day. Not much, but then he never wagered much. The quickly tallied counting up had no effect on his state of mind. By the time his foot hit the pavement, he’d forgotten the name of the horse.

He checked his watch. The lunch hour had finished five minutes before. Perfect. Walking none-too-quickly he would arrive back at the office not late enough to get in trouble, but late enough to be noticed nonetheless. It was imperative that, at least once a week, his colleagues clocked him returning late.

Strolling along, he considered the afternoon ahead. He thought about his commute, his wife, their son, the evening meal and the long, late-autumn night. He thought about Luce in her studio apartment. For all that she protested her freedom, insisting that she came and went as she pleased, and with whom, he knew that the evening would find her alone. Darkness was already closing in, or at least he felt it was; the day’s cloud cover hadn’t budged, the air had thinned; shop window lights looked warmer and more golden. Cordonnery pulled his coat around him. Immanence was winter. He breathed it in.

As he buried his hands in his overcoat, Cordonnery stopped in his tracks. He patted his trousers and took his phone, keys and wallet from his pockets. Once emptied, he rootled around until his fingers found the paper he was looking for: a receipt from lunch and, folded up inside it, another betting slip. He checked the date on it to ensure it was the day’s. Satisfied, the betting slip was slotted in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. He gave his chest a pat for luck, fastened his overcoat and walked on.

The light at the next crossing was red. Cordonnery, humming an oompah tune, unbuttoned his coat and took another look at the ticket. He checked the horse’s name. It’d been called Cravan Rides Again. He tried to recall why he’d chosen it. Cordonnery never followed the form. He had no particular interest in either horses, racing or gambling. Brow furrowed, he stared at the paper until the lights changed. He crossed the road and went on walking.

When he reached the street where his office was, Cordonnery didn’t pause or turn. Instead, he continued along the boulevard. It lead to the city centre. He thought about his lunch, a plate of wan and watery fish, boiled potatoes and greying beans, and picked back over the bets he’d placed. The names of the other horses he’d put money on escaped him. And if it weren’t for the ticket in his hand, Cravan Rides Again would have escaped him too. If I’d thrown the slip away, he thought, there’d be no way of knowing I’d wagered anything on anyone. He tried to dredge up the names of the horses he’d backed the day before. His mind was blank. Nor could he recall the tally of his wins and losses. Irrelevant, he reassured himself. As long as I have this – and he gestured with the slip.

The first receipt of the previous lunch’s flutterings, as per his usual routine, had gone in the bin only when he’d arrived at the office that morning.  It’d been kept overnight in the pocket of yesterday’s suit jacket, retrieved when he’d been getting dressed, and deposited once he got to work. The system was fail safe. Should Celia have investigated his whereabouts, the whole of the previous day could be accounted for. It would have been the same for today, if he’d gone back to the office once he’d left the bar.

Only once a week, routinely speaking, would he have engaged a more delicate scheme. That would see him popping by momentarily, as though just wanting to check a result, and pilfering the first abandoned ticket he could put his finger on. As he was a regular, Yon, behind the bar, never minded that he sometimes called in and didn’t buy as much as an espresso, even occasionally not saying hello. Whether or not she’d ever noticed him picking up someone else’s ticket, he couldn’t say. She’d certainly never confronted him about it. She was discreet and sympathetic. She’d once told him airily, as she’d brought his food, that her uncle had been a gambler too. She remembered, she’d said, as a little girl, how he’d pull her ponytail as she passed and say it was for luck. But she also remembered the arguments, the fights between him and her father, his destitution. “Under every ponytail is a horse’s arse,” her dad would tell her. “Watch yourself, is all I’m saying.” She’d squeezed his shoulder. Cordonnery had been so touched that he almost revealed the whole imposture. He’d avoided conversations since, fearful that should it come up again, he wouldn’t be able to hold his tongue. Yon had taken this distance with good grace and continued always to serve him smiling, commiserate his losses and celebrate his wins.

Cordonnery crossed the river and made his way towards the arches of the Royal Arcade. He followed the avenues as they opened out before him, no thought of destination in his head. Rather, as he considered the lengths he went to daily to ensure he had a dated betting slip, his thoughts turned to Luce again.

They’d met one Sunday outside of a revival house. For the sake of a spell in the velour darkness, Cordonnery would often spend weekend afternoons in the stalls of poky cinemas, watching whatever their programmes provided, as long as he arrived before the adverts had begun. On the day they met, only moments into the opening credits, the projector had broken down. After a brief delay it was made clear that the showing was not going to go ahead, tickets to be reimbursed or exchanged in the lobby. Despite the management’s announcement, however, long after everybody else had left, Cordonnery remained in his seat. Luce was sitting on the terrace of the next-door café when he finally emerged. “I was wondering how long you’d stay in there for,” she said, unabashed. Cordonnery joined her for a kir, as much surprised by her address as the ease with which he took a chair. She didn’t ask him to explain a thing. Soon Luce, an aspiring nostalgist of twenty-six, had become his regular cinema companion. It went from there. For their first Christmas together, he’d bought her a framed poster of the film they’d been supposed to see the day they met. Now, for all he could picture it on her wall, the title of the piece escaped him.

He’d also still never seen the film, often putting it off by saying he was waiting until they could watch it together. The right opportunity had never come up. She had occasionally asked to, or messaged when a showing was announced, but recently that seemed to happen less and less. He wondered for how long she could keep the whole thing up; how long before her disappointments overcame her love. I’ve never promised anything, he told himself, surprised, when he counted up, that it’d lasted for as long as it had. She did love him, though. She’d said as much. Perhaps a desperate gambit, but it had been said. He found the word difficult to use himself: too heady, too hard. It rounded like a pebble on his tongue. It couldn’t be love really, could it? It wasn’t. It was.

He loved Celia, he knew that much. No gag there. He could say to himself “I love Celia,” the same way he could count to ten: without thought and speeding up towards the end. No matter how garbled it came out, it was impossible to mispronounce. If I didn’t love Celia, after all, he told himself, I wouldn’t keep up this gambling charade. He also loved his son, another self-evident proclamation.

A day will come though, he went on, if this does keep up, when the edges have been weathered from the stone in my throat and I’ll be able to get it down without choking. Swallow them down, those words, for Luce, and all their implications. He stopped in front of a perfume shop, it’s display, full of bulbous flasks and flacons, done up like an apothecary’s. In his reflection in the window, and the rows of rounded glass, he watched his Adam’s apple bob. He felt a rock hit his gut. “Not yet.” As he moved along the boulevard, his stomach cramped.

Apart from the discomfort in his belly, and the thought that he’d looked old and tired reflected in the window of the perfume shop, Cordonnery knew he had few reasons to complain. His job was adequate for his needs, in terms of challenge, compensation and time off. His home, though in no way grand, suited him and his family, who seemed content. He was not beset by unslakable desires, nor was he wracked with guilt over his infidelity. His relationship with Luce, indeed, seemed as unremarkable as everything else in his life; an affair with a younger woman being a more or less predictable development in the passage of a man through middle age. Until today, still walking, further and further from where he was supposed to be, he’d never felt much of a will to shirk responsibility, cast off or escape into some new unknown. He wasn’t looking for that now. He simply didn’t feel like going back to work. And, when he put his mind to it, nor did he feel much like going home.

*

By the time the train was leaving the station, the streetlamps were coming on. There was little that Cordonnery enjoyed more in life than a journey on a train, and a ride in an empty carriage was as good as a dream come true. Soon at speed, he stared out over the tenements and blocks of the city’s outskirts. With jaundice spreading across the evening, every street and crossroad seemed murky and intriguing. In the cuts of yellow shadow everybody looked clandestine. I’m fleeing, Cordonnery said to himself.

Before buying his ticket, he’d left a message on their answer phone. “Celia,” he’d said, “I won’t be home for dinner. Don’t wait.” He’d then dropped his mobile into the bin along with his wallet, emptied of what he’d thought he’d need. On the back of the day’s betting slip, he’d written Goodbye, I’m off to the station, addressed it to Luce, affixed a stamp and posted it.

*

As the train broke from the suburbs, the landscape lay like a bruise beneath the pummelling sky. Flat, puce fields rolled out before him, the horizon indistinct, indifferent and distant.  There was a sunset somewhere he was travelling towards. Along the tracks, meagre creatures, waking at dusk, met his eyes from the shadows of the sidings. He had no idea when he’d get to his destination, but it didn’t matter. His was the last stop on the line. “What could be better than a train through the night?” he asked, aloud. As he spoke his voice cracked from unuse. He’d never sounded more like himself, or less.

He thought about when he’d first arrived.

Cordonnery wasn’t originally from the city or the region, though there was little way of knowing it anymore. Aside from the occasional glottal betrayal, the odd skew-whiff phrased expression, in the thirty or so years he’d been there, everything foreign had worn off. He’d left home at the first opportunity, and not looked back. In all the years that had passed, he’d not once thought of returning either. He’d had no interest in bringing up his son with a sense of mixed identities or with split sympathies in matters of sport. His origins had been almost totally forgotten. Even to himself.

Now he was setting out from home again, similarly guileless and without a plan.

“Tickets, please,” the conductor asked. Cordonnery looked up, admiring his moustache. It occurred to him that had he been born in a different era, at his age, he probably would have worn one himself. He thought about his reflection in the perfume shop window. There was no particular reason why he’d never worn a moustache. I think it would suit me, he said to himself. There’s no particular reason, he thought, tucking the returned one-way stub into a pocket, for much of what I’ve done in life.

Leaning his head against the window, Cordonnery drifted off. He dreamt of the haunted mill at Clun, of being caught up in its mechanisms, hoisted on its cogs and mangled. It was a nightmare he’d not had since childhood, growing up amongst the abandoned remains of his hometown’s former industries. He woke with the desire to pray. As a boy, he remembered, he would kneel at his bedside and vow to live each day as an offering to God. Every morning would begin with the opening of a prayer, and every night would end with an “amen”. That, anyway, had been his plan. And though he often remembered to close the day out, he never remembered to start it off with a sign of the cross and “Dear Father in heaven”. Then, at some point he can no longer recall, all the devotion had sloughed from him. He hadn’t been to church or passed a prayerful thought in all the years since he’d moved.

The conductor was making his way back down the train. He stopped and took a seat at the otherwise empty table across from Cordonnery and checked the list of tickets he’d scanned on his console.  Cordonnery watched him from the corner of his eye, still curled towards the window, as though asleep. The conductor was tapping his gadget with a stylus, the sound of which was pleasing to Cordonnery’s ear. The man’s face glowed with the screen’s fluorescence.  Cordonnery envied his concentration, admiring, again, his doughty, timeless look. Though he couldn’t have been many years older than him, he looked to Cordonnery as a father should.

“Excuse me,” Cordonnery said, sitting up. “You wouldn’t happen to have a pen and a bit of paper I could borrow, would you?” The man’s frown was as full as his bushy upper lip. “Not on me, sorry.” His voice was deep, formal and yet gruff. Exactly how Cordonnery had wanted it to sound. The train entered a tunnel. When they emerged from the other end, the conductor wasn’t there.

Cordonnery slumped back in his seat. He thought about his son. Would the boy be better off with him gone? He’d grown up without his father around, and it hadn’t done him any harm. Being that the boy was already fourteen, it was less of an abandonment than the one he’d known. He wondered whether Celia would marry again, and felt certain that she would. He wished her well. Outside, a slick, black night began to coat the window, seeping up the sides of the carriage and streaming down it. Cordonnery heard no sound of patter as he watched his face diluting in the lacquer of the rain.

The conductor returned. “Will that do?” He held out a stubby plastic biro and a folded paper towel. “Couldn’t find much else, I’m afraid.” He smiled conciliatorily down at Cordonnery, mouth bunched up by his chin. Cordonnery was on the brink of tears. “Thank you. So much. Really. I wasn’t planning on coming away. I wasn’t prepared.” The man frowned again, mouth still bunched but no longer smiling. He nodded. “Well, not to worry.” “I’ve never done anything like this before, not in years – ” Cordonnery said, but so quietly the man didn’t hear. He’d already turned away and was walking down the aisle.

Cordonnery opened out the towel and began to write Dear R–, but as he made the upward stroke of the capital, the nib of the biro tore through the paper. He folded it and began again, Dear – and stopped because he didn’t know what to say.

Once more he thought of his arrival; the night before he’d first made his way into the city. He thought about the cheap hotel by the bus station from where, the next morning, he’d set out on the last stage of his journey. He’d stayed up all night dancing on the mattress, slugging whisky from his father’s hip-flask, a cheap thing made of dimpled steel that he’d taken from a bedside drawer months prior, without his mother noticing. He’d filled it from a bottle that his dad had left behind. That’s what they did, poets, drink all night and prance amongst the bedsheets; sing what incantations came to mind and scrawl unfettered what words emerged from the music that played which only they heard. That was what he’d been leaving for. “That’s I’,” he said aloud, less confused by his desires.

He started scribbling across the paper towel; his son, his wife, forgotten. From this point on, he wrote, From this point on. And on the next line he wrote it again. And again. And on the next line, again.

When Cordonnery had left home, he’d pared himself down to the bare essentials. In a rucksack, he’d had all the clothes he’d thought he’d ever use. He’d had no other pair of shoes. He’d had the documents he would need for crossing borders and some cash. He’d had a notebook and a couple of pens; a spare pouch of tobacco and a packet of rolling papers. He’d had his father’s hip-flask, and a sterling silver cigarette case, which had been his maternal grandmother’s. He’d had a letter, which he intended to send once he could get it stamped with the city’s postmark. In that, he’d told his girlfriend of the time both that he loved her and would never return. He also had a postcard with a picture of the village where he’d been born, and the only family photograph he knew of in which him, his mum, his dad and his brother, were all posed and smiling together.

Just like religion had fallen away, Cordonnery had given up on poetry. He no longer carried notebooks or pens. He’d given up smoking and barely ever drank more than a single glass of wine. He’d never posted the letter he’d been planning to send, allowing it to moulder somewhere waiting for its stamp. The cigarette case and the hip-flask were in his bedside cabinet. If I’d known this morning I wasn’t going back, he thought, I might’ve brought them. As he hadn’t thought about them in years, however, they could hardly be considered essential. He hoped that Celia would pass them down. From the things he’d taken from his wallet, he had a photo of his son and a cinema ticket stub from Luce, on which she’d drawn a little heart and a little bird. He had nothing from Celia, except their wedding ring. It seemed enough.

Hoping the conductor wouldn’t see him, Cordonnery screwed up the paper towel and pressed it into the gap between the seat and the window. The pen, he kept. When I arrive, he told himself, and find myself a room, and before whatever comes next comes, I’ll write my story on the linens.

Chapter 4