Free If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

funeral pyres, photographs of mahogany coffins with brass handles, of crematorium chimneys. He takes all these pictures down, rubbing away the blu-tac left on the wallpaper, and he puts them into a large red folder with funeral rites from pre-history to post-history written on it in thick black pen. He takes down photocopied sheets of poetry, of religious text, of lecture notes from his archaeology course.
    And from a small shelf in the middle of all these papers he takes down an unglazed clay figure, a replica of aJapanese ceremonial idol, and he wraps it in thin tissue and an old newspaper. He puts it in a box and turns away, he looks out of the window and sees the boy with the tricycle following the twins into number seventeen’s front garden, he looks up and sees someone leaning out of the attic window with a bucket of water.
    In his kitchen, the old man refills the kettle with fresh water, and sets it to boil again. He thinks about his wife, and he thinks about what she doesn’t know. He hears shrieking from outside, laughter, children running.
    He hadn’t even told her about the second visit to the doctor’s, or the third or the fourth. He’d invented stories, walks around town, bowls matches, shopping trips, surprise meetings with old friends. And once he’d started it had seemed so difficult to stop. There was a time when he could have spoken, after another test they’d done which had taken all day, a complicated thing where they’d smeared him with gel and scanned him like luggage in an airport, and he’d felt that perhaps the time had come when he should say something, make hints, leave clues.
    A bloodied handkerchief in the washbasket, an appointment card on the noticeboard.
    But he didn’t want to have to admit to having lied to her at all, and he couldn’t bear to think of her worrying and upsetting over him, especially not now that it seems there is nothing really to be done about it. So he knows, and she doesn’t know, and this makes it easier, and this makes it harder.
    He knows about the look the doctor had on her face when she’d spoken to him about that first testing of blood, the look she’d tried to hide behind a shuffle of papers and a smile. Well now she’d said, things aren’t exactly one hundred percent the way we’d like them to be, we’d liketo do a little more investigating. I can’t pretend there’s nothing to worry about she’d said, but the sooner we know what’s wrong the sooner we can do something about it, yes? Which had seemed a sensible enough thing to say at the time, except that with each further test they did the likelihood of there being something they could do about it seemed to decrease. And unlike the doctor, he can very much pretend there is nothing to worry about, to his wife at least. All he can do now, it seems, is to protect her from the truth. This is what he thinks.
    The kettle begins a low whistle which will soon become a shriek, and as he stands to move towards it he notices that the twins have disappeared. He moves the kettle off the heat and rolls a splash of water around in the pot.
    She doesn’t know, as he knows, that after that scan with the gel they’d had him in for what they’d called a lumbar puncture, he hasn’t told her that the needle in his spine felt like a fist sunk into his bone, much as he’s often imagined a bullet might feel. He wore a vest to bed for a month to hide the bruising, bruising which spread across his back like purple flowers opening out their petals, and he could only say he was feeling the cold when she asked him about it. Say he was getting older. Make a joke about it.
    In the attic bedroom of number seventeen, the room usually occupied by the tall girl with the glitter round her eyes, the boy with the pierced eyebrow puts down an empty bucket and laughs silently, crouched over, exclaiming a trio of yeses and slapping the palm of one skinny hand with the back of the other. He can hear the children in the street, he