Arthur Davies had fewer words than a wintry tree has leaves. If he ever showed emotion, it would arouse public comment.
He sometimes walked about the neighbourhood, a nod here and there amid the taciturnity. He was a small, stocky man, a human Oxo cube with short legs. Although only middle-aged, his wild tufty hair was white and resembled anarchic cotton wool.
On the day Kabul fell to the Taliban he went down to the promenade, sat on a bench, and looked out at sea. He was there hours, passers-by said, staring like a sailor trying to locate an object below the surface. The sea was still, impenetrable, its surface gleaming like stainless steel in the August sun.
Somebody wondered if he was recalling his son in that desert of seawater. ‘Bound to have been,’ said another. ‘Might be asking what his sacrifice was for.’ Eighteen years previously, his son’s tank had been blown up by a booby trap, three months after he arrived in Afghanistan. The son had been an idealist, apparently, wanting to do good for the local people of Helmand province, wanting to ‘liberate’ them, help girls get education, stuff like that, it was said. That would’ve consoled Arthur down the years, surely, one woman suggested across her fence to the woman next door. That would’ve kept him going, wouldn’t it? A branch to cling to.
At the end of the day, not having said a word to a soul, he returned from the prom to his flat on the estate, his face more wooden than ever. His son’s death hadn’t been his only loss; the death had destroyed his marriage. That’s how he ended up in that tiny flat, the woman told next-door. Split the money from the house sale, and Cheryl, his wife, vanished. She never got over it, they say.
That evening a fellow in a block of flats facing Arthur’s block saw him at his window, gazing out into the night like a searchlight probing for a skiff in stormy waters. Then the fellow went back to his tv, and the news programme showing the crowds of people at Kabul airport, panicking, desperate to leave, waving bits of paper at American soldiers, clinging to hope.
Late at night a wolf howl was heard across the estate. The elderly woman in the flat below Arthur’s was sure it came from his place. ‘Awful it was,’ she said next morning to her daughter when she phoned. ‘Like an animal caught in a trap, you know, crying to be released. Just awful. Frightened me it did.’
Next day Arthur was about the estate again, as closed-up as ever, staring straight ahead, emotions zipped tight, gait stiff as a robot, a nod here, a gesture there. You wouldn’t think any kind of change in his life had occurred. But regular observers of him felt there had been. Quite what they didn’t know. But beneath the impenetrable surface, inside the display glass, yes, something had altered.
