A conversation near a window

I will always remember how bright the sun had been shining at the time of my short holiday to the village by the sea. I forget the name of the village. It was not Polperro, but it was similar. It is no longer possible for me to check. 

I can tell you that the days I spent on my holiday were filled with an endless light. Wherever I went – to the little pub garden for lunch, or down on the stone harbour to look at the cold ocean, or into the village to consider the shops selling crystals – all I wanted was to drape myself in the light. I felt that it was charging me up, all this radiance. It wasn’t even very warm, not summer sun at all, but a light that had a physical power to touch me, to energise my pores and my bones. 

In the evenings, I continued to feel the charge of this light, even though the sky was moonless and clouded. I felt as though I had batteries that would last forever. I became charming. Or at least, I certainly felt as though I was being charming to all I met. At night I slept inside dreams of golden magnificence. I woke without even a trace of tiredness or dehydration. It was an amazing holiday. I was alone the whole time, and yet also present in crowds of people, treated like a dignitary. Left alone when I made it politely clear I wanted to return to my thoughts. Perfect, really, perfect. 

You can imagine the slump in my spirits when I had to return to work. I hadn’t been back more than two days before the light charging had completely worn off. 

On the third day, I received a call from my doctor, insisting that I should come in for a conversation. 

Come today, if you can, she said. This afternoon. 

When I didn’t reply, my doctor went on a long verbal detour. She explained that a conversation was not the same as a surgery consultation. She told me about successful pilot studies, exciting new trials, exceptional results, she described through the phone static, where conversations have been used in place of full blown consultations. 

I tried to detect clues as to what might be the problem with my health. It’s not normal for a doctor to call you up, even if it is for a conversation. Even if it is mostly to describe academic research into conversations. But, then, I am getting older. I’ve had my share of problems.

Is there something specific? I asked. Should I be worried?

No, not worried no. You should just come in and see me very soon. 

I see, said.

I realised that all the time I had been on the phone, I had been walking aimlessly around the office. I came to a stop. I looked at the people around me. I saw Rianne going into the small client conference booth to make her update call to New York. I pictured the meetings in my own calendar that would now be cancelled: a nice one with the marketing team, always very civilised, mostly just a chance to catch up. Nice scenes of casual holiday chat, of biscuits and coffee from the stand outside came to me and blew away again like smoke. I felt burdened suddenly, as though a great debt rested on my shoulders, which of course it did, but that was not the trouble. I was sick. 

The doctor was talking still, I was making polite noises about how interesting it all sounded, and listening to her trying to get Outlook to open on her computer. 

I felt sure that something was very wrong, and I looked again at the people in the office. There was Sam going to the desk of Katarina, leaning there, the two of them smiling, saying things, invisible things. The tangibility of these people put me on edge. I had the inescapable impression that I was encased in webbing of some kind, and that this webbing was pulling me away from Sam and Katarina. 

Are you free this afternoon? repeated the doctor’s voice. She sounded rather desperate in fact, which troubled me. I said I was free. 

Good, don’t worry, she said. She sounded relieved. Come in for a conversation and then we can get a handle on things. 

I asked what things? but she had hung up. I was speaking to nobody when I said what things. Only Sam saw me: he saw me say ‘What things.’ Then he looked away and began doing his usual stretches. Sam liked to stretch in the middle of the office. He was revealing his arms, which were tanned and long. He held his forearms out in front of himself as he stretched some well-honed muscles in an area of his back. Sam was covered in the muscles. He always needed to stretch them, and look at himself. He went to another desk to talk to someone else. 

I want to say that he had a tail, but of course he did not have a tail. 

These things have become blurred.

I walked back to my desk. I saw that it was only 10:15 and time for my catch up meeting with Declan, the assistant to the CFO. 

I went to the meeting room, as usual. Declan came in and we said hello and I began describing how I could help the finance office with their internal newsletter – you need more structure, I explained. It’s quite simple, I said. You’re not writing a whodunnit. You can tell people the best news right at the top of the page. You don’t need a big reveal.

Declan seemed not to hear me. He was absorbed in his own smiling. The meeting room was made of glass. Declan stared out, across the office. There was a sorrowful look within his smile. 

Such nice people, he began to say. I guess you can’t ask for anything more. 

He leaned back in his chair and gestured to them again. Lovely people, he said. 

In the dining-slash-play area Eloise and Katarina were battling out the semifinal of the latest intra-office ping-pong tournament. A few watchers had gathered. Katarina was a former pro tennis player, and Eloise had won medals in squash in recent years. It was close, but, as Declan and I watched, it became clear that Katarina’s professional training, the hard-wired need to win, would carry it for her. The flow of perfect smashes came too thick for Eloise to handle. She began to make errors. Katarina, always smiling, gave no quarter. 

Lovely people, and such hard workers, Declan said. 

Yeah, I know what you mean, I said, unable to think of anything else. 

We watched the game in silence for a while, and then I remember distinctly that when I looked back towards Declan, after a long rally had ended, his face and head rapidly became a walnut right before my eyes, the skin wrinkling, hardening. A dry sound emanating from within the head as this occurred, the sound of something completely irreversible. He seemed conscious and aware of the world around him while his head became a walnut. 

Declan, I said. He did not reply, but looked at me.

We sat with his walnutting for a moment. He touched his face, gasping a little as he explored the new contours he had. His eyes, on rigid stalks, were layered with a kind of papery rind: his new eyelids. They made a hushing sound as he blinked.

Declan, I said. 

I couldn’t think of anything else to say at all. He had just been musing about how nice everyone was, and now this! This was his life now. He was a walnut head – and that’s how he would have to go home to his family. When his mother called for their mother’s day video chat, he would have to present her with a walnut head. His children would get driven to swimming lessons by a walnut head. His partner would have to tenderly caress his walnut head. Of course, we could never call it that. We could never call it a walnutting. Nor could we call Declan a walnut head. Not to his face. Not outloud.

In all office settings, the event would have to be given its medical name. A code sounding name – Syndrome BER-21 – something like that. Declan would have to overcome his need to call it a walnut head too; which, I thought at the time, is just another burden on his shoulders. 

Declan and I spent a further moment in silence. Of course, I wanted to say something – even to mouth ‘sorry’ – but I couldn’t get there. The best I could manage was to look into his wood-coloured eyes and, at the appropriate time, blink, nod, and turn my face down to my hands on the desk. 

The meeting finished. I left him where he was, alone with his thoughts, looking at his non-walnut hands with his very walnut eyes. 

Several minutes later, I sent him an email promising to raise a ticket for several major areas to improve the Finance team’s internal content. 

It was overkill – nobody is interested in the quality of the finance team’s internal content - but I wanted to do something for Declan. Declan himself remained in the glass meeting room, slowly moving his new head, scanning the office. 

I tried to imagine what he was thinking. Perhaps he was hoping someone would tell him it was reversible, or that it had happened to an uncle or a sister of a friend of theirs, and everything just calmed down after a few days. Or for someone to tell him that it hadn’t happened at all, but it had. 

Or rather, as I said, this is what I remember happening. 

You may say otherwise. 

When I looked back after sending several more emails, mostly cancelling afternoon meetings so I could attend my appointment with the doctor, I saw Declan hurrying towards the lifts, putting his jacket on as he went. Most of the people in the office watched him in stunned silence. 

At the doctor’s I was very nervous. I had arrived early. My hands were sweating in the waiting room. I was surrounded by children, as many as three of them, playing with the beads on the wire game. I do not know, even now, why I chose that place to sit. I wanted more than anything to be alone and quiet. 

I wanted time to rationalise my doctor’s need for a conversation with me. I wanted to smooth out the day, and – if possible – smooth out Declan’s ridged head. But no: I had not observed the first rule of waiting rooms, which is, of course, to never sit next to the balls on a wire kids game table. 

This way, the receptionist said. At first I couldn’t tell if she had said my name, but she was looking right at me, and had come out from behind her desk. 

Me? I said, feeling a little foolish. The two children had looked up from their game. 

She’s been calling you for a long time, one of them said. It was the oldest of the two. A boy in blue shorts with sun cream thick on his nose and front teeth that were the size of gravestones in his mouth. 

I followed the receptionist, apologising profusely. She gestured with her hand not to worry as she walked ahead of me. Her thin peach cardigan swung lazily behind her as she walked. I wondered if this was the millionth time, perhaps, she had made this journey. A milestone of some kind. 

We arrived at the doctor’s door before she could say anything. The door was open a crack. Inside was the brightness of the sun. I recalled my doctor’s magnificent French windows, which I had seen many times, beyond which she had a little kitchen garden, with a high brick wall and an apple tree in the corner. The light from the sun intensified as I entered the room. My doctor was sitting in her usual place, in a loose arm chair by the French window. Her desk, and computer were out of view, around a corner. We would go there later, I realised, to enter details and make our next appointment. 

Have a seat, my doctor said. Tell me, has anything happened today? Are you feeling alright? 

I told her about my holiday. How I had been, as I saw it, powered up by the sun’s dazzling light. I had been a radiant friend to the locals in the evenings, and the world’s most tranquil dreamer after dark. 

What about the daytime? she asked. She looked like she knew something about my daytimes that I did not. 

Oh, not much, I said. Pub, harbour, crystals in the village.

Alright, she said. I detected a little note of weariness in her voice. She blinked, encouraging me to keep talking. 

I went walking, I said. Wearing short sleeves and short bottoms and canvas shoes. 

That sounds very relaxing. 

I got the sunshine! 

That’s good, she said.

Apparently I was wrong then, it was not about my days that I had been called in for this conversation.

She offered me a seat and I slumped into the armchair, which I normally did after our greetings, as I preferred to do greetings standing up.

I wriggled and got comfortable in the chair. I looked at the books on her shelf. They were all the same as usual: many books about parenthood, many books about experiments, social experiments. She also had books about the human body, several large blue books about loss, and several orange books about a healthy mindset. 

After I had looked at the books on the shelves, I felt my eyes snapping into my doctor’s gaze. She was wearing so many performances of beige and grey, it was hard to see the garments themselves, only several long, cooling, flowing layers. I felt very tight and blotchy suddenly, even though, as I have mentioned, I had recently been at my most radiant and graceful. 

Without being asked, I started telling her about my day. I revealed that Sam had a tail, which she accepted. There have been several medical examples of tails, she said. It’s unusual, but the human tailed are more numerous than one might think. 

We decided that Sam should be proud of his tail positivity. I agreed. Sam was generally a positive person, very fit, constantly flexing in some way. 

We talked around in circles for a while then, about how much more accepting society is of these different bodies. 

She asked me if there was anything else on my mind. She asked me if I knew why I was there. I felt as though she was daring me now. She had shifted her position in her chair. She leaned forward, challenging me to talk about Declan’s walnut head. 

I refused to speak. 

Nothing to say at all? She said. Nothing else has happened recently? 

No. 

I see, she said. 

We remained in a stubborn silence for a while. Something on the sun’s side of things must have ignited – on the surface of the sun I mean – because the next moment the light became even more dazzling than before. I gasped at the intensity of the light. my doctor too was momentarily taken aback. The bloom pitched up, peaked, and before it could blind us both, faded back to a more manageable and pleasant level. 

All my reticence faded away. I felt that surge of power come over me once more. I was once again fully charged with light. 

I opened up, instantly. I told my doctor all about Declan’s walnutted head. She nodded as I spoke, because she understood how sudden and appalling it had been. She shook her head at times too, agreeing that it was very sad. But I realised, of course, that she did not mean sad for Declan: she meant sad for me. A head cannot and does not walnut in this way. Sam might have a tail, but nobody has a walnut head. But Declan does have one. He was, right at that moment, explaining to his oldest child that things would be different, but that the family would struggle on together. 

There’s nothing that can be done for him, I said at last. At least, that’s how it seems. 

No, she said in a leaden voice. Nothing can be done. 

We seemed to have spoken about everything that could be spoken of. I still didn’t understand the difference between a conversation and a surgery consultation. 

It was over. I rose from my chair, turned and headed for the door, saying thank you as I went, but the door was locked. 

I think there’s a mistake, I said, turning back to the doctor, but she had gone. Her voice came from round the corner, where her desk and her computer were. 

No mistake, she said. Use the other door. 

But – that’s just your walled garden, I said. 

Use the other door she said again, this time she sounded like someone else. Someone very dry indeed. 

Imagining that there must be some garden exit, I went outside through the French doors. 

I stood and looked at the wall, I looked at the trees, and then all at once, I felt it rushing down upon me, the soaring, unhinged galaxy of light, and then all of them were here reaching down to me, all the walnut heads, all so beautiful and crazy and streaming with imagination.