– The Man in the Black Pyjamas
This is a story about planes. This is a story about two brothers—One and the Other—who used to lie in their back garden and watch the planes this story is about feel their way like jellyfish across the night. This is a story about that garden. This is a story about how they used to lie in the part of the garden that’s taken up now by the extension their parents had built. This is also a story about that extension, a conservatory that was meant to give them more space as both brothers grew taller than their father (which was how their family marked out progress from generation to generation—taller children who can stay).
This is a story about that space, which is bigger and emptier now than their parents planned for and needs to kept hidden behind wood-panelled French doors lest it get out and spill everywhere and demand to be filled with One or the Other or both or the lives that aren’t happening there: girlfriends who don’t visit every day and become secret allies of their mother; grandchildren who don’t make a beautiful mess of it all; the conversations One and the Other don’t have as they get older together and realise there is something between them after all behind the successful oneness of the One and the addled otherness of the Other; the ‘we’ll manage’ resolutions all four of them don’t make about the debt their parents took on to build the conservatory, which happen instead on Skype between their parents and the Other and then the One, and happen nowhere at all between One and the Other.
This is not a story about snow though it is a story about it not snowing enough. It is also a story about the only time One and the Other were alone together in the conservatory, when they were home again for Christmas and about to go back—One to San Francisco, the Other to Berlin. This is a story about how they stood there, after coming separately back to the house from more goodbyes with friends who were going too, and watched snowflakes hit the garden like white moths in thrall to the sensor-lit grass.
This is story about the time they spent watching the snow fall on the grass and on the absence of grass. This is a story too about the absence of grass: in the mouths of the goals they made for themselves and played in for years; in the holes her high heels sank when One brought her there at sixteen to watch the planes, or years later, when he brought her there again as he was leaving to tell her he was leaving; in the place the other used to bury his weed in shallow graves; on the bumps that brought the grass up earlier to meet the blade of the mower on summer evenings, as the birds flicked from sky-dish to sky-dish and their father pushed the humming lawnmower after weeks of meaning to.
It is those bumps the Other remembers—though he hasn’t told the One—when his plane slants their estate into view so the green country around looks like a garden and their estate like a bump and their garden like a blade of grass. For that reason, and one more, the Other leaves in the morning when he comes home. (Reason Number Two—he needs a day to force himself clean and a night to sweat it coldly out in Berlin so he doesn’t have to do it at home, with their mother making up for lost time by watching him closely, and his head reeling from the late twenties vertigo of his old room asking where it all went wrong as the future and the past spins around him).
This is a story about that humming lawnmower too, which their father, with his back, can’t use anymore—though he has a third less to cut now—and has to pay the young lad from six doors up to do it for him. This was another reminder for One and the Other, though they didn’t mention it as they watched the snow fall, of all the things they aren’t doing and how, every time they get home, their parents seem to get smaller and more afraid and more in need of shielding from the dangerous, careless world they once shielded One and the Other from.
This is a story too about silence, the silence they stood in that night in the conservatory, hoping it would snow so much that their flights would get cancelled, hoping in the extra days they would find words other than those you would use with a stranger to break it. They watched as the snow fell silently on the rectangle of yellow grass that went that way (and never grew green again) back when One was eight and the Other was ten and they pitched a tent in the opening flare of summer and camped out and listened for what might be moving outside. The garden was a square of silence marked out in sound: a house alarm from four doors down beating like a cricket; traffic noise breaking like waves against the hedges; someone three gardens down mumbling a tune and inhaling a cigarette through their lips; the pwishpwishpwishpwish of a cat being called; the whole world seeming to grow in circles around the garden as if it were the stone that made the lake ripple.
They were silent too when they poked outside the tent and found that night had thrown its purple cloth over everything familiar. They shone their torches up at planes passing and felt that they too were looking down from above at the estate tiled in squares of shade, at the dark given form by the glow from their torches, at someone next door waking and clicking on the light to see the ceiling better. It is this floating, seeing-from-above, centre-of-the-world feeling that One now finds in work and the Other finds in drugs.
This is not a story about snow, for the snow melted as they watched in silence as it fell, and their planes left as normal the next day and they left as normal, hugging their mother, shaking their father’s hand, separating gruffly in the shine of the airport. Their parents drove home and watched, as was their secret way, in the garden for a plane that could be One or the Other passing above. This is not a story about snow but it is a story about the storm that followed the snow, which their parents took shelter from in the conservatory as the lightning pinged like a camera flash stealing a half-second for eternity. This is a story about that storm, which brought rain and thunder to the Irish Sea (where a plane brought the Other to meet it), and brought gales to the Atlantic (where the One’s plane met it with a shrug).
This is a story about the way both planes rocked and dipped and rose like they were ships on the seas below them. This is a story about the gut punch we-are-so-high-and-the-sea-is-so-deep feeling each separately felt as their planes turned back towards Ireland. This is also a story about the moment each found their planes above Irish soil again and thought, like men at war, if we fall now at least we’ll fall on Ireland, and they’ll find us and put us to rest and people with accents like ours will tell the story of what happened to our parents in words they’ll understand.
This is a story about the hope each had: that this moment of panic would pass and they would land safely and find themselves ringing each other to say, well, what about that. And ‘that’ would take in not just the almost crash but the actual crash, the one that made the gesture of leaving a poise that became as permanent as the boredom they thought they were leaving behind. And ‘that’ too would cover the whole range of ups and downs and things that can happen to people that happened to them, and the horrible things they did and had done to them and the horrible things they did to each other in the name of one-upmanship or in the humid, intimate hatred that is so often the climate of brothers.
This is a story about the way each looked down from the window of their plane at the rash of lights that’s Ireland from above, which is easy to admire and feel part of from up there, as it’s easy to convince yourself you love someone who’s miles away, who you don’t really know or even speak to. This is a story about the way One and the Other met back in the airport again, a story about how they stood in silence and watched the bristles of rain brushing the tarmac. This is a story about how, after a few hours of small talk, which, like the snow the night before, threatened to become something more and never did, they took off into the night again. This is a story about the stories they didn’t tell.