This is an excerpt from Issa Quincy’s debut novel Absence, published by Granta in the UK and Two Dollar Radio in the US.

*

When I think of the time before now, as remote as it seems, it is my mother that I think of. When my thoughts are with her, I think of the poem that I’d so often hear her whispering or reading aloud to herself. As a restless little boy, unable to sleep, she’d sit at the foot of my bed softly singing its passages from a pale-yellow book to lull me to sleep. Even now, so far from those moments, I can still hear the sound of her voice, soft and gentle; distant as to suggest that it, along with her image, is slowly disintegrating in my mind. And so, at times, to suffuse that slowly appearing gap, I read a single line from the poem, or on my laptop I listen to the recording of a stranger reading it aloud. I close my eyes and allow the memories of my mother to surface, and in tunnelling through those narrow passageways, those burnt-out tracts of memory, I find her. I see her again sat there on the edge of my bed, in the half-light, melodically whispering those holy words; words freighted with pain, inflected with years of damage, emanating from the historic and the imperceptible which at such a young and naive age I could not fully grasp but only sense. When I find her there, she is facing away from me, hunched and perched towards the foot of my bed, and I see myself, my limpid and tired eyes watching her dolefully, resisting sleep for fear that, if I were to succumb to it, she would not be there when I woke. Slowly, as her image swells in me, the sound of her reading the poem rings clearer. She talks against the silence like a cry against a storm, and gradually, in this way, my mother re-forms in me, and that inevitable effacement is resisted. I have defeated it for now. It is with her there, so many years past now, I am reminded of who I was before I myself disappeared. 

As I became older – as an adolescent – lines from the poem remained cut in small fragments and stuck on her fridge until eventually they fell to the floor, out of sight. When I left my mother’s home and moved through the world, encountering and listening to others, for listening is where language both ends and begins, the poem returned to me, perpetually making its way back to me in ways so strange and surprising, I felt cosmically entangled with it, like I would never be able to escape it. At times it felt like the world had its own sly way of reminding me who I was, from where it was I had first walked, even as I dispersed further into nobody at all, into nothing more than a voice without a vessel silently drifting through old images, memories, voices and histories and ever slipping beneath the black water of that ever rising and murky past. 

The poem appeared to me again shortly after I turned thirty. I had just returned to my mother’s home to help her as her health had deteriorated so severely she’d become unable to complete most day-to-day tasks. It had been during one of those quiet and ambling days that I fell back in touch with an old favourite teacher of mine who had disappeared from our school in the winter of my final year under mysterious and unexplained circumstances. Following his departure, my peers and I would often ask our teachers in class what had happened to him, and each lunch break we would scour the news for any information. There was always nothing, nothing other than a resounding and suspicious silence. By the time I had left school we all presumed that he was dead, and by the time he first reappeared to me I had spent so long not knowing that when I finally came to understand the reason that he had suddenly left our school all those years before, I wasn’t quite sure how to feel or how to react.

I first saw Mr Rothlan again more than a decade after I’d last done so at school. It was one of those empty days that slouches freely into the next. I had been walking up to a now-closed grocer on Magdalen Road to collect a list of ingredients, hastily scribbled by my ailing mother, when I spotted him on the opposite side of the road with an exhausted and rugged look etched into his face. He walked with the same odd gait he always had: balling his weight onto his heels and springing up onto his toes with his arms straight down and unmoving beside his hips. Doubtless, he had seen me and subsequently made an awkward and somewhat embarrassing attempt to avoid my gaze: unconvincingly looking up and away at the sullen red-brick Samaritans building to his left. But I’d already seen him and called out eagerly, Mr Rothlan!

I recall him feigning surprise at seeing me so poorly (like a street mime artist) that I struggled to suppress my smile as he crossed unsteadily over to my side of the road. He was unnaturally unkempt: wearing stained jogging bottoms too short and a baggy white T-shirt that in parts clung to the dampness of his skin. Slung across his shoulder he held a navy swimming bag from which a bundled towel flopped partially out. We spoke for some time there and he explained how each day he swam in the local council pool. He expressed to me his enjoyment of that pool – despite it famously being the smallest and dirtiest – over the others in the city simply because, as he put it to me, It is emptier than the rest. Only when thinking of that encounter years later did I trace beneath his words his want for privacy; it sprung forth as a kind of veiled admission, one which at the time I didn’t understand the reason for. He seemed to be withholding something. As much was clear in his attempt to ignore me, in his distracted gaze that moved between my eyes and the pavement and further off down the road. It was uncharacteristic of him, but then again I was seeing a different man from the once brilliant teacher I’d known. I was presented instead with a feeble and impotent figure who had been bowed and broken by something he wasn’t willing to reveal to me.

We spoke for only a few moments. I told him of some of the authors I’d been reading, names which he smiled at, knowing these were all ones he’d suggested to me in class. Seeing him so undone, I was overcome by a burrowing sadness which moved from me a sudden burst of anxious concern for him: I explained that I appreciated his classes and his teaching and had been Sad to see him leave – remarks I immediately regretted making when I noticed him fall into the wordless stupor that tends to be provoked by the rising of the past above one’s mouth. His gaze fell down to his scuffed black leather shoes, his lips slightly trembled and his right hand, very steadily, rubbed the whiskers of white hair on his head. Several times in that short moment did he seem to attempt speech, and each time he stopped his words. Words I will never know. Returning gradually to the present, he suggested I join him and his dear friend Gilles, a scholar at the university on Hume (whom I already knew distantly through family), for dinner at his house on Cherwell Street. 

I had always felt as though Mr Rothlan and I had a unique student–teacher relationship. We frequently talked after class, discussions which often left me late for my next class, or if lunch or dinner followed the lesson, we’d walk together from the classroom to the dining hall and along the way we’d discuss the books and essays he’d told me to read or the films he’d impressed the cruciality upon me to watch. This led me to believe that he had a special interest in my abilities despite my being an otherwise disinterested student. He inspired something in me, pried it out of me, and his invitation to me then, all those years later, felt like the offer of an extension of our relationship.

I recall being oddly taken aback at seeing his house, it was a modest terraced one-up, one-down with two windows, both parallel to the door, and a bare patch of brick directly above it that betrayed basic symmetry, which bothered me. The flooring consisted of stripped hardwood planks, misshapen and distorted over time, that shifted beneath you as you walked and between which blew a stone-chill draught. His living room was composed of a floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall bookshelf, a dusty couch and two torn armchairs that were in dire need of re-upholstering. In the centre of the room stood a flimsy, cheap-seeming coffee table with a neat stack of periodicals and some tea-stained coasters. The kitchen was thin and ill-designed and extended backwards into a small concrete garden without pots or plants, only a metal garden chair and a forgotten pale-blue mug half-full of rainwater. There were no familial or personal photos anywhere. Instead images of Cocteau’s drawings I recognized from Les Enfants Terribles covered the walls of his hallway, a large sepia portrait of Pasolini’s gaunt and sculpted face watched over the living room, while in the bathroom there was a framed black-and-white photograph of Edith Piaf, holding herself as she sang, looking up into a spotlight as though looking out onto the world, alone yet unafraid of it, beside a much smaller picture of Thierry Henry celebrating a goal.

For dinner, sat beneath a low-hanging bulb, we ate a poorly cooked but well-intended pasta dish and briefly discussed our favourite season, the sweetest hymns, the best brand of tea available in supermarkets, and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the Aimé Césaire play that followed it. Mostly, however, Gilles talked about his poor health: he had suffered from tuberculosis as a boy and undergone surgery for it that resulted in, at times, debilitating respiratory issues that had plagued him since and caused him to talk with a gravelly wheeze, which pronounced itself at the end of each sentence. Mr Rothlan jokingly made a point (which had clearly been made continuously throughout their friendship) to stress the unsettling similarity that his life bore to the famous French philosopher with whom he also shared a first name. To this, Gilles angrily proclaimed, My God, Iain! He was just fifteen when I was born; it is only chance we share so many biographical similarities, as well as speaking with a degree of smug cynicism that was characteristic of him. Besides, I have absolutely no intention to end my life the way that he did his, and Mr Rothlan, I recall, replied to this in a way that has remained with me since: But that choice is the most human of all choices. 

This would be the first of several times that I would visit Mr Rothlan before his death.

My former teacher was found after Gilles grew worried when he had failed to answer his door a number of times and missed two engagements he had previously agreed to attend. Containing his worry for long enough, one wintry night, Gilles accompanied two police officers to Mr Rothlan’s door and despite the officers ordering Gilles to Wait outside, don’t come in, he waited only a few seconds (fourteen exactly) before following them in through the low and austere hallway, the same hallway that Gilles had walked through so many times before, when greeting or parting, meeting or waiting for his dear old friend. Only this time, Gilles noticed a difference in the house: in the corners of the walls, which usually collected darkness, there was instead a diaphanous quality, like translucent bundles of light were caught jittering there, static and humming. Sensing this and taking it as no illusion of the mind but what instead he called ‘true knowing’, Gilles rushed right up to the bedroom and was met by the sight of his dear old friend’s body hanging in that odd way that bodies hang – both entirely limp and completely rigid and shamefully facing away from the eyes of his only friend and from those of the two strangers.

When Gilles first recalled that night to me, he explained how when the officers entered the house and disappeared from his sight, he knew that Mr Rothlan was dead: When I couldn’t see them anymore, it was as though the officers slipped momentarily into his state, or non-state rather. And as I watched them vanish into his house, I knew he was gone too. When in response I asked Gilles what he meant by this–how could he possibly know from the simple fact of the officers entering a dark house that his friend was dead–he couldn’t quite answer me. He floundered and grasped for something to say, some words to make plain his feeling, but when, after trying and failing, he fell silent, exasperated and annoyed at himself for being so inarticulate. I knew not to press any further. Besides, in a sense, I understood what he meant: in that particular moment, he had felt the tremor of a true and deep-rooted spirit, an impulsive intuition that was – owing to the length of his and Mr Rothlan’s shared history – impossible to explain to anyone outside of that particular passage of time. It is that which can only be felt, maybe even visualized, but never verbalized. 

(I recall once reading in the news about a mother whose child had gone missing. After a day or two of extensive regional searches for the child, at a press conference, the mother, having until then remained silent beside her stern and pleading husband, proclaimed wildly and suddenly that her child was dead. After a brief and confused pause she was questioned about her statement and she explained to the reporters – rather eloquently, I thought – that she had woken up crying that morning after a string of nightmarish dreams and an overbearing feeling, one she hadn’t ever felt before, of her child no longer being on earth. Of course, the mother’s words were disregarded as simply originating from a kind of hallucinatory grief, but some days later her child was found dead. The coroner ruled that the child had died some days earlier, to be exact: on the day the mother had woken up crying.)

By the time the fact of his passing had reached me, Mr Rothlan had been dead for little over a week and a strange silence lingered around it: it wasn’t in the news nor was there any kind of In Memoriam email from my former school (the school he had taught at for over a decade); there wasn’t any chatter between those that knew him, nor did there seem to be any family of Mr Rothlan’s to mourn him or organize his belongings. It was instead left to Gilles to clear out his home, rifle through his old friend’s things, and enact his will, which decreed that his possessions be donated (he named five charities) or recycled (near his home).

It was Gilles who revealed Mr Rothlan’s passing to me while also asking of me a strange favour, To pass on a letter to a former peer of yours, from Iain. The front of the letter bore the name of the boy and was written with my former teacher’s usual scrawled and looping hand. The peer of mine was known to me despite being in the year below, and his name was one that I hadn’t heard since I’d left school. Recalling to myself the times the boy had been mentioned, I found they were all often in passing, to mock him or when a female friend of mine would point out how uncomfortable she felt around him, as though he were some freak. He was a timid boy who rarely spoke and one who seemed entirely contained within himself and content in passing through school (and life?) unnoticed, in fact, happier that way.

The boy reluctantly agreed to meet me so that I could give him the letter. We chose to meet in Florence Park, a public park close to my mother’s home and not far from his own.

It was a sharp, mid-winter morning. The park was entirely empty and the trees dripped a black dew. The air was filled with a thinning mist that I remember obscured the park I had played in many times as a child in an achromatic grey. As I worked my way through the intersecting concrete footpaths with my visibility diminished, I felt unsure of my footing. Despite my acquaintance with the park’s banks and paths, the trees and its avenues, the grounds felt faintly indeterminate, like I was passing through a distant but dear memory, battling the effects of both familiarity and foreignness.

I found the boy sat on a bench staring at a row of bare flower beds: the empty mud was topped with a dainty layer of frost that gave the earth a fragile and beautiful veneer. The boy, who was now in fact a young man, was sat shivering with his coat wrapped tightly around him. He’d hung his scarf through itself and had his hands nestled deeply into his pockets. Because of the rigid cold and the cold alone, instead of shaking hands we faintly tilted our heads at each other, hoping to signify some vague acknowledgement between us. Before I sat, he asked if we could walk, Just to warm up, so we moved towards the north of the park, at first walking in total and tired silence. 

I wasn’t sure whether to offer him the letter immediately and be done with it or to converse with him. I hadn’t read the letter’s contents and was desperate to understand why my former Languages teacher, Mr Rothlan, an eccentric and brilliant individual, an unorthodox teacher and maverick mind, was in any way connected to this fairly innocuous and unremarkable student so much as to write him a letter that required delivery by hand. Despite my doubts and considerations, in the end it didn’t require my talking, as the young man began by asking me questions about Mr Rothlan’s death and so, I explained to him, brashly and without much affect, that the old man had committed suicide by hanging in his bedroom closet and been found by Gilles, his old and only friend. 

The news seemed to further quieten the young man, as if a remote part of him contracted a little more, and now his disposition, both verbal and physical, was burdened with ever-increasing pressure and his speech from then on was confused but delicate like the sound of glass shards hitting the ground: tinkling, felt, all at once.

He asked me about the letter and I explained that I hadn’t any idea of its contents, that I hadn’t so much as looked at it and lied to him in saying that I hadn’t the slightest interest in what it said either. Yet in spite of making my disinterest clear, as we passed under the sodden bough of an oak tree, heading towards the empty tennis courts, he stopped and turned to me, catching my gaze for the first time, and as voices so seek to sculpt themselves, to give distinction to the tangled meshing of their hidden images, he slowly and rather painstakingly explained to me the nature of his and Mr Rothlan’s relationship.

Before I continue, I ought to recall the final time that I saw Mr Rothlan. He invited me over to his home for tea, and in the dimness of his living room we sat and spoke well into the evening. While the conversation felt as though it occupied at least some great importance in my mind (perhaps solely due to my unwavering admiration for the man) I have forgotten nearly all of it. That is other than the few words he began with and some final words about his family and his upbringing. This is what I can recall:

Outside Warrington, 1952 

In a town that sits equidistant between Manchester and Liverpool, Iain Gregory Rothlan was born to Iain Rothlan Sr, a worker at a local chemical plant and Mary-Lou Larkin, a mother of five, both devout Catholics. His family were of Irish descent, his father arriving as a young boy in Liverpool in the early 1930s on the SS Lady Munster. 

Mr Rothlan explained that each Christmas Iain Rothlan Sr would insist upon visiting his remaining family in Cork, and with each passing year, and with the number of family members dwindling, Mr Rothlan’s father would compel his children and Mary-Lou to join him in taking the slow ferry back to Ireland that set from Liverpool.

I believe, Mr Rothlan confessed of his father, that his insistence on making this trip came from him wanting us to experience the same distress he had suffered at the hand of his father when he’d suddenly forced his family to England in search of work. This had led them away from their friends and the rest of their family and had been  deeply painful for them all. An incredible cruelty. Or, perhaps, he said softly, it was as a means of reliving it himself. I mean, making that traumatic passage, like it was an act of masochism that arose from his feeling guilt at abandoning his brawny rural roots. But perhaps, he tried again somewhat more exhaustedly, even that is rather far-fetched and it is simply without him knowing, when he left Ireland, he had begun a ritual that he’d go on to complete almost every year for the remainder of his life, as so many of us do. When he said this to me, I recall that Mr Rothlan pressed the side of his thick index finger to his lips, nodded and eventually, after many minutes, moralized: I suppose we are all constantly in the process of ritual-making, falling deeply into ones and forgetting others. We don’t stop ritualizing until we forget it, and after that it is forgetting that becomes ritual.

Mr Rothlan then described to me one such Christmas boat-journey, one he described as being Impressed upon my memory like the mark of a crumbling flower upon a page of a diary. He was just sixteen and was embarking on what would become his penultimate return to Ireland: It had been one of those miserable and gloomy December mornings you grow accustomed to in this part of the world, where the sea reflects grey skies, cancelling all and any colours aboard the boat or beyond. As we always did, my father and I spent some minutes – despite the spray of cold rain and cutting wind – on the front deck of the boat watching as Ireland, beneath the broken clouds, at last came into view. When we approached land, my father pointed out Lambay Island as it emerged through the mist, the sea stacks surrounding Ireland’s Eye, the striped chimneys of Dublin port and at last, Sugarloaf and the Wicklow Mountains, which appeared out of the grey fog that receded from the shoreline, sort of cupping the city within them. At the time, we had been sharing the deck with fellow passengers, most of them young children wanting to watch the bow cut the thrashing sea and hoping to spot a seal or whale in the water.

As Iain Rothlan Sr pointed out and talked about a Martello tower–with the same story and same words he used every year about the same tower–Mr Rothlan noticed a young boy no older than ten leaning over the edge of the boat as it crested a wave, eager to see the sea foam thrusted apart by the liner or perhaps, as Mr Rothlan opined to me with anguish, the boy spotted a seal and sought, as children often do, to follow it from over the rail for as long as the seal permitted. But as the boat bounced up over a wave, the boy swung over the edge and was suddenly swallowed by the unctuous water.

He resurfaced rather quickly, Mr Rothlan recalled mournfully, and flailed on the surface. His face was contorted and helpless, his eyes stricken with fear. I can’t escape the sight of the boy’s mother and the sorrow with which she cried his name over and over again, no other words, no cries to God, only his name and never for help, like she knew his fate. There were no ring buoys on the deck and she tried to jump over the edge but was stopped by a crowd of people. When someone did eventually arrive with a buoy, the ship had long passed and the boy had since sunk into the sea whose waves fell totally still. Across the deck a silence descended. People raced to console the family but my father, when all had settled, waited a moment before continuing with his story of the Martello tower, like death was no distant stranger and where at once it had extinguished dreams and memories right before us, it too was a part of that inevitable metamorphosis: that forever things changed and on they’d continue, no differently to the manner in which the boat pulled into Dublin harbour and we all disembarked. As with all things, the tragedy of the boy was slowly shuffled to the back of our focus and most of us soon forgot. But I couldn’t, no matter how I tried. I couldn’t ever seem to forget and now I see it was less to do with the boy and more to do with the indifference of my father.

Mr Rothlan recalled to me the anger and resentment he felt towards his father for this, and from that moment Mr Rothlan began an act of distancing himself from him that would in fact last his entire life, growing with each passing day. He was never able to shake the face of the boy’s mother or the cry of the boy’s name, and the boy would visit him in dreams and visions so vivid that the sense realized in Mr Rothlan was one of guilt for not having done more. He explained to me that he felt as though he were somehow at fault for the boy’s death despite knowing he’d had no part in it nor any way of assisting in the tragedy. The apathy, however, of Iain Rothlan Sr was doubtless what birthed this guilt in Mr Rothlan. He felt shame at his father’s inhumanity that turned to disgust, and that inevitably resulted in Mr Rothlan not facing his father again until the old man lay supine in a coffin at the age of fifty-two after suffering a short spell of asbestosis. 

After that particular trip to Ireland, Mr Rothlan explained to me, I was granted early admission to Cambridge, where I studied Modern and Medieval Languages, and after my graduation I took up a number of different posts in the Middle East and North Africa: in Beirut, Libya and finally Syria. I worked mostly in risk consultancy but in translation too, and in my early thirties I returned to England and gained admission to Oxford to study International Affairs for my Masters. After finishing at Oxford, a city which to my mind is far superior to Cambridge, I was offered a job in policymaking in the United States. A job that he would explain he declined and decided instead, after meeting a man he would describe to me as his first and only love in this world, to remain in Oxford and take up teaching. He began as a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, or Oxford Polytechnic as it was known then, but quickly became disenchanted with academia and decided to take a role at a local state school. He did this happily for seven years and rather successfully too; he eventually succumbed to the offer of becoming the Academic Director of an independent school, a position which he quit within two weeks, while remaining as a Languages teacher at the same school for close to twelve years before, of course, abruptly leaving in the middle of my final year.

The young man stopped in front of a laurel bush and inspected my face closely. He was taller than I remembered, there were the scars of pimples pitted across his cheeks, and a burgeoning rail of stubble along his chin. He had long, thin eyebrows that nearly connected in the middle and his hair, choppy and brown, was greasy and hastily shoved to the left. He had a kind face and dark eyes, around the edges of which I noticed an exhaustion that he had so far attempted to resist.

He explained to me that he and Mr Rothlan had been engaged in a sexual relationship for two years, from when he was fifteen years old until he was seventeen. I was in awe of him. I was a bad student. I skipped classes and he brought something out of me, a desire to care, to learn. I fell in love with the books he gave me to read, but more than that I loved the movies he told me to watch, you know, Truffaut and Bresson, Marker and Varda, and soon I found myself wanting to direct my own films and to make them in the style of those directors. The way he spoke to me about them having their own language, the ones they’d created, made me feel as though I could also create my own language with images and sounds, my own system through which to understand and misunderstand the world.

Upon hearing this, I lapsed into that same speechlessness, inner soundlessness, that I had when I heard of the old man’s death. A Gordian knot of disgust, pain but, above all, uncertainty fluttered through me so quickly that I became hollow, unsure what to say, what to feel, and this sense remained trapped within me in the weeks, months and a few years after I was first told. Only now, some years since, have I come to notice more sharply, more distinctly, against all other opinion, in that strange and precarious place within me, a lambent sense of tragedy for my former teacher.

The young man went on: painstakingly detailing to me the advice that Mr Rothlan had imparted upon him, the example he led by, and the sensitivity with which he thought and critiqued himself and the vicious world that he found himself trapped within. He recalled to me, in what became an almost soundless mutter of monotony, various intimate resonances and anecdotes: the evenings they’d spend in the Languages building watching films from a projector, and afterwards how they’d sit and talk in the darkened classrooms before walking home together as they lived close to one another. 

As the young man spoke, recalling various intimate details, I felt the quietening of an illusion in me. I realized then that my own relationship with Mr Rothlan, albeit platonic, hardly grazed the surface of what this boy and Mr Rothlan had shared. I became enraged, bitter, jealous even of him, and then realizing I hadn’t yet handed him the letter, I thought to hold onto it and read it; I thought to tear it up, to never hand it over, and as these feelings washed over me, almost reflexively, rather suddenly, as he was mid-sentence, I passed him the letter.

In the boy’s penultimate year, his parents found a tranche of text messages, notes and emails between Mr Rothlan and their son and immediately informed the school, who immediately informed the police, who immediately arrested Mr Rothlan and charged him.

The mist was gone by then. We crossed a bridge that rose above a brook slowly lapping over grey stones and fallen brown sticks. As we walked, the young man told me of the shame that he was made to feel by his parents. It was hell. My father wouldn’t even look at me most days and my mother was left to interact with me alone, which for months she struggled with. Months passed by. I couldn’t leave my bed and would remain for the longest hours of the day in a dark and dirty room, avoiding any contact and conflict with the world beyond the one I’d created for myself. I fell behind on my studies, and on some days I would struggle to remain in classes, often rushing out in fits of panic to the health centre. On other days, I was unable to even make it into school, and eventually, after a series of meetings between myself, my parents and my teachers, my teachers and my parents, my teachers and me, I was asked to leave. It was almost two years later that I eventually came to realize I couldn’t go on as I was. I had put on weight and had become so unhealthy that people I’d known for years no longer recognized me. Where was the life after this? There wasn’t one. 

When I questioned him as to what he meant by this, he explained that the life he lived was not life but instead the life of a dead person. He saw no one, not even the light outside of his room. He filled his time with protracted and painful silences; he despised the world that he made up, coming to hate both his parents and yet relying solely and increasingly upon them. When his friends, concerned and anxious, would visit the house to check on him he would tell them to Fuck off. He would abuse his mother and, fearing his father, would wait for him to depart from the house before leaving his own room. He’d hear his father muttering insults whenever they crossed paths, or shouting from through the floorboards, I want him out of my fucking house. Soon thereafter, he left home but not before endlessly tunnelling through the narrow and dark channels of thought that always seemed to land upon that final question: And if I weren’t here?

Within months, he signed on for benefit payments, took some money from his mother and eventually was allocated a council flat above an elderly couple in a low-rise housing complex in Littlemore. He began working at a cinema in an expansive and empty entertainment complex on the edge of the city, spending his shifts shovelling popcorn and pouring large fizzy drinks for teenagers who had bunked off school. And in the evenings and mornings, he would speak to his neighbours and discuss small things: When the roofing will be done; If I’ve spoken to the management about the leak under the kitchen sink; If I want to go round for dinner with them, which he always did.

Despite this marked change in him, although on the surface there seemed to be something positive that echoed through him as he described these things with a forceful pride, the young man felt a great aloneness within him, and after spending most of his nights absorbing the old images and sounds of films he’d once aspired to make he’d lie wondering what lay ahead for him, sleeping beneath a black mould that would eventually be left for so long it would cause him to be hospitalized; he’d think about the joy he once felt in his life and wonder if he’d ever feel it again, and with each day providing further distance from that feeling he’d come to wonder if he’d ever felt it at all, if he ever had the capacity to feel like he once did; a feeling he had to imagine now, a feeling he couldn’t be certain of and, naturally, he’d think about what he had lost, what he no longer had in the moment of his thinking that he had had in his moment of feeling, and he’d mourn those things with a naked grief that usually arose in the hours of the night when he was most alone and drifting with ease between the world of dream and the inconstancy of actuality; between here and somewhere beyond reach; between the misery of the present and the dilation of the past which bloated into a shadowy distance. There was something behind him and nothing lay ahead of him, and in these moments he’d think of his teacher, Mr Rothlan, the one who had given him something to grab hold of, the one who had whistled at the embers in him, the one whomdespite what he’d been told – how Sick, Wrong, Repulsive, Disgusting the old man was – he still missed and thought of every day and would continue thinking of every day, every minute, every fraction of a second right up to when he walked to the edge of the multi-storey car park near his home to throw himself from just two years after I met with him in the park.

I remember we walked on to a bench and talked a little more but quickly our conversation dissipated into an uninterested silence. I thought about the letter and what it might mean for him to read Mr Rothlan’s words; I wondered what the words were. I imagined that the letter might change his disposition, his confidence and his energy. I wondered if it might enliven something in him or if it might provide some degree of closure that would be important for him to have, important for him to relight the dim glow that still burned in him, somewhere. But this was my blind faith in words, nothing more. The more I reckoned with what might occur if he opened it, the more I could see the stark reality burgeoning through my visions of him. He might not read the letter at all. He might, in fact, throw it away as soon as we parted, discard it in some bin along a path or simply drop it into the brook unopened. The words might forever remain unknown. 

He eventually said he had to go and stood to shake my hand. As I rose to meet him, he reminded me of his name again and I realized then that it was the same name as the boy that Mr Rothlan had watched drown as a teenager, the same name the boy’s mother had called, Over and over . . .

After realizing this, I wanted to speak to Gilles about it. He asked me to meet him in Mr Rothlan’s house on Cherwell Street as he was in the process of sorting out most of the clutter. The house was half-cleared and the trembling air that Gilles had told me about in those first weeks immediately after Mr Rothlan’s death had seemed to still. No longer did it tremble or pulse with anything other than its own quiet darkness, and I shivered at the whip of a numbing cold air that blew through from the garden, into the thin kitchen and the hall. Hunched in a corner beside the sofa, Gilles was rifling through a number of books. He had taken a slim edition of one in his hand and turned it over in his palm, inspecting the cover, muttering to himself as he did. 

From the doorway, I couldn’t make out what the book was, but it was an old edition; the pages were yellowed and crumbled as he thumbed through them. I crouched on the other side of the room to help him, and as we packed away some books into boxes in the living room I posed the coincidence to him of the names of the two boys in the vague hope he might offer some mystic answer to it, some psychological resolution that would provide a kind of causal root to confirm my belief that it was, in fact, not a coincidence. But he ignored my query, still holding the book, reading through it and tracing the lines with a finger, muttering them into the walls of the silent house. Eventually, he looked up at me and, as though breaking from a kind of trance, he said with a sunken smile, Iain loved this one dearly. He used to read to me from it and recite the passages after dinners. I asked Gilles if he’d heard my question, but again he had slipped into that sacred silence, following the lines with his finger quicker and quicker now, seemingly hoping to find a specific passage in the text. I continued to pack away some books into two separate boxes as Gilles had stopped entirely. Until at last, he perked up and intoned in a low voice like a minister reading his orisons:

He is at peace – this wretched man – 

At peace, or will be soon:

There is no thing to make him mad,

Nor does Terror walk at noon,

For the lampless Earth in which he lies 

Has neither Sun nor Moon. 

He thumbed forward a page and then began reading again:

Yet all is well; he has but passed

 To Life’s appointed bourne:

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men, 

And outcasts always mourn.

 I knew almost immediately the text that he was reading from but didn’t respond as though I did. A strange kind of fatigue had numbed me, and the effort, the usual determination with which I would want to explain my connection to the poem, sank beneath a heavy cloud of sudden and unremitting exhaustion. Gilles lay the book onto his greatcoat which was folded over the arm of the sofa and together we continued to sort through the books, separating them into different boxes, some for donation and others for recycling. As I continued with the task, my thoughts of the young boy, of Mr Rothlan, dissolved beneath a grey that refused to recede and my mind became blank, totally empty, just as when I was a boy lying in bed as my mother read to me from the poem she loved so much and I listened to her, thoughtless, mute, allowing images to form in me only for them to quickly wash away again.