If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

He says are you too warm?

I can change the ventilation he says, and he shuffles the sliding control from left to right, clicks another dial around, holds his palm over the vent to feel the air breathing through.

He says it’s just that I’ve never been in that situation, you know, I just wondered, I didn’t mean anything.

I look at him, and his eyes are squeezing and blinking just like his brother’s.

I say what did your brother tell you about me?

He says everything he knew, he says which wasn’t very much I suppose.

He told me what you looked like he says, and what course you were doing, and what clothes you wore.

He says he told me the way you smiled, what your voice sounded like, who you lived with, what flavour crisps you bought when he saw you in the shop, how different you looked when you took your glasses off, what it felt like when you touched his arm.

I say I don’t remember touching his arm.

He says no I didn’t think you would.

We overtake a lorry with its sides rolled back and I look at the fields and the sky through its ribbed frame, there are bales of hay rolled up like slices of carpet, there’s a sprawling V of birds hanging over the horizon.

I don’t know what he means.

He says, my brother, he could, he can be a bit strange sometimes, I say what do you mean.

He says, well, just strange things, like once he sent me a list of all the clothes you’d worn that week, really detailed, colours and fabrics and styles and how they made you look and how you looked as though they made you feel.

He looks at me and says and it wasn’t creepy or anything, he wasn’t being obsessive, it was just, you know, observations.

He was thinking he wanted to buy you a present he says, and he wanted to get it right.

He winds his window down very slightly, and a thin buffet of air blows in across us both.

He sort of collects things as well he says, things he finds in the street, like till receipts and study notes and pages torn from magazines, and one time he took a whole pile of shattered car-window pieces and made a necklace out of them he says.

He said they were urban diamonds he says.

He made a glass case he says, and he mounted a row of used needles he found in an alleyway.

And if he couldn’t take it home he’d take a photo of it he says, he had albums full of stuff.

He says he told me he hated the way everything was ignored and lost and thrown away.

He says he told me he was an archaeologist of the present, and he laughs at this and turns the radio on and I don’t know what to say.

There’s a boy band on, from years ago, singing when will I will I be famous, and I wonder what Craig and Matt and Luke are doing now.

I say, please, what’s your brother’s name?

He doesn’t say anything, he looks over his shoulder, overtakes someone, changes the radio station.

I say he sounds interesting, it’s a shame I didn’t get to talk to him more.

He says but you did, at that party, and he looks at me and a car behind us flares its horn as we drift across into the next lane.

He straightens out and keeps his eyes on the road and says sorry.

I say that’s okay, what do you mean, what party?