Monuments to Nothing
We had walked for hours, passing in silence the red-brick houses with their smouldering chimneys, the pot-bellied men in white vests raking leaves in their front yards, the cracked asphalt lanes with their tangles of brambles and Hawthorn trees on either side, then the pines and steel-roofed barns and restless swallows, then the horses, the mossy wooden benches with ornate arms and dull brass plaques, then finally the soft and rolling fields, with their grasses and crops and little patches of wildflowers all drooping towards the setting Sun like ancient worshippers at mass. There we stopped. Marcus crouched on a flat-topped rock; David and I sat with our legs outstretched on the ground. We had come to rest at the peak of a hill, so even from our low positions we could see the miles of English countryside we had just traversed. The sky was the colour of apricot, and a great mass of gnats had risen from God-knows-where to swarm over the few puddles that remained from the morning’s rain. We sat in silence.
Then Marcus mumbled to himself. Several minutes had passed by this point, and the sky had deepened into the shade of freshly cut grapefruit. I was prepared to leave whatever he said unaddressed, but David - as he often did - had other ideas.
“What?” He asked, craning his neck up and back to look at Marcus, and squinting his eyes to protect them from the light.
“There’s so much waste,” Marcus repeated.
Something about how he said waste made me sit up. He had almost spat the word, as though it had tasted unexpectedly sour.
“What do you mean?” David asked, turning back to the ground and wrapping a long blade of dry grass around his index finger.
“I just wonder sometimes, whether it’s all for nothing.”
“Whether what’s all for nothing?”
“Life!” Marcus exclaimed, surprising even himself with his loudness. “Most of it, anyway. Think about how much time we waste, how much effort we put into work that either fails, or - worse - was never important anyway. Don’t you ever think about that? I picture sometimes - right now, for instance, looking down into the valley - what it would look like if you collected it all together.”
“Collected what together?” David asked, in the tone exhausted mothers use with their children while cooking dinner. His attention was still firmly fixed on his blade of grass.
“The work,” Marcus replied, in the tone exhausted mothers use with children who need to be told thrice where to find their shoes. “The wasted work. If you could go back through time, gathering every useless patent application, every unseen painting, every love letter read once then thrown away, and you dumped them all here in this valley, how high would the pile go?”
We looked over the valley and pictured the mound, blue on one side and glistening yellow on the other, writhing and creaking as more work was added by the second. We each, I’m sure, wondered how much of our own work might be found somewhere in the chaos, crushed like antediluvian fossils under the weight of so many other pointless endeavours. I thought of course of my writing, as I did constantly in those years, and felt with a dreadful certainty that, barring a freak coincidence of the sort so often found, ironically, in the pages of my manuscripts, no aspect of the world would be markedly different in ten years’ time for those pages having ever existed. And, by extension, for myself having ever existed.
I thought too of the many words I had sent to Audrey. The sun was slipping away by the minute now, and the sky had turned the purpleish pink of her cheeks. I wondered whether she ever thought of the words I’d sent her the previous year, or if they too were somewhere deep in the colossal heap I saw now with a frightening clarity.
David tugged his blade from the ground. A bird called out in the distance and a strong breeze swept around us, as though we were sitting on a giant sleeping monster that had stirred briefly at having one of its back hairs plucked out. Marcus and I turned our attentions back to the valley, where they remained until only a faint centimetre of light was left above the horizon, and David began talking about a film he had seen a few days earlier.