The Finding Gene by Mike Fox
At a certain point it occurred to me that my nan, stooped and splay-footed but a formidable walker even after parting company with her memory, had always been what you might call an urban forager. My dad, too, inherited her gait and posture and, once he retired, the tendency to scour the streets of our locality for a couple of hours each evening. He said he just saw abandoned items and didn’t feel he could leave them there.
So at the very least I grew up thinking it was normal for people to bring things home. By ‘things’ I mean any sort of detritus – coins, scarves, badges, keys, passes of various descriptions, even, latterly and in my grandmother’s case, discarded shopping lists. Then there was the fruit that she continued to insist fell from the market stalls where she’d shopped all her life until mum thought it wise to take over.
The coins, and the fruit, nan always passed to me. So perhaps, without realising it, I began to attach a sense of beneficence to the plain pavements and gently cambered roads near our home.
When she started going out in her nightie, often after dark when no-one was looking, it was decided she’d be better off in a home, but shortly she before she was due to make the move she died. A couple of the market traders attended her funeral and one left a basket of fruit by her grave.
‘Once she got confused we all turned a blind eye,’ I heard him say to my parents.
Something unusual happened to dad’s face when he heard that, and mum stepped in and said we should make our way back to the function room for a bite to eat.
Not long after this dad took early retirement and, I suppose, resumed where nan left off. I’d moved out by then, and perhaps that’s when it really began to occur to me that something was going on.
‘Dad’s doing what Nan did,’ I said to mum.
She gave me a long-suffering look.
‘Nature abhors a vacuum,’ she said. By that time she’d instigated a large wooden box with a hinged lid and an unambiguous commandment in red felt tip.
‘I don’t want crap all round the house,’ she explained, when I opened the lid and peered inside. It was three-quarters full of street matter, and something made me want to thrust my hand into it, as if it was a sort of manky but intriguing lucky dip.
In fairness, unlike my nan, dad seemed to have a sense of the connectness of things. He became a regular hander-in of ‘significant’ personal items at the local police station. I went with him once and thought I saw a hunted expression in the desk sergeant’s eye as we approached. It seemed pretty certain that dad generated a high quota of the station’s admin duties.
That was before Mum’s box disappeared.
‘I took it to the recycling,’ she said, when I commented. ‘I’ve put my foot down.’
Soon after that, the only way I can explain it is that the paving beneath my feet began to exert a new magnetism. I just found myself scanning it, oblivious to everything else, the way most people are with their phones. By then I was self-aware enough to wonder if what was happening might somehow be genetic.
The thing is, nan and dad had their physiology as an excuse. They were both born looking down. I inherited mum’s straight spine, but as it turned out that made no difference.
My new habit gave scope to my inner nerd. I bid for some cheap display cases at a local auction and started labelling my discoveries. I even began to fantasise about building an archive that would have people peering over it in fascination a hundred years hence.
The idea of this made me choosy. I created parameters. Badges, I felt, almost always held social meaning – scratch cards, rarely. But I soon realised the greatest fulfilment lay in notes: random scribblings on shreds of paper, rearguards against technology. The least I could do was honour them.
Remember to smile, keep nodding, and the job will be yours.
Nutmeg – soy sauce – leave the goat mask out for Sally
Such fragments I came to view as koans, aphorisms, even portents.
So it was that a sheet of lined notepaper, the sort people once tore from pads to write letters, caught my eye. I bent to pick it up, but the wind suddenly gusted and I had to chase it. Once it was in my hands, I saw it was headed with that day’s date, above a few lines of careful print in black biro.
I have jumped in here. My granddad was the lockkeeper. I hope I don’t float too far and am sorry for any inconvenience. My will, with provision for funeral expenses, con be found on the kitchen table at the following address:
I stopped reading. You don’t expect to find someone’s soul blowing about on the pavement. Especially when it was meant to be somewhere else, weighted down. I started running towards the lockkeeper’s lodge, now defunct where the Grand Union Canal subsided into the Thames.
The elderly man standing at the river’s edge acknowledged me as I approached.
‘I’ve always been a failure,’ he said.
It didn’t seem right to comment that if he went ahead and jumped this trend might continue, because the tide had been ebbing for a while, and he was more likely to break something than drown in the shallow froth remaining.
‘I found your note,’ I held it up, waving it like it was a piece of empathy.
‘Couldn’t even do that properly,’ he said.
I stepped a bit closer. ‘With your permission, I’d like to add it to my collection.’
‘Collection of what?’ For a moment he looked puzzled, even curious.
‘I’d need you to see it, to get the full picture,’ I said.
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Mike Fox’s stories have appeared in journals in Britain, Ireland, America, Australia and Singapore. His stories Breath and Outliving the Muse (Fictive Dream), and Blurred Edges (Lunate Fiction), gained Pushcart Prize nomination. His story The Homing Instinct (Confingo), was included in Best British Short Stories 2018 (Salt). His story The Fun Police (Fictive Dream) was listed in Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (BIFFY50) 2019-2020. His story Voices (Ayaskala) was nominated for Best of Net 2020. His story, The Violet Eye, was published by Nightjar Press as a limited-edition chapbook.
Twitter: @polyscribe2