by Stuart Evers
He unfolded the map, the route simple and direct, M6 and onto the new M40, opened earlier in the year, a treat that in itself, and then down the A34, lunch scheduled at a pub Carter knew in Oxford. Carter manoeuvred the Jaguar down the track, his glasses changing from translucent to tinted as they moved out of the shade.
‘You’ll get used to it,’ Carter said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Being a passenger.’ He smiled, tapped the wheel.
‘Put on the tape,’ he said. ‘It’s real blast-from-the-past stuff.’
Drum put the cassette in the player. Tape hiss and spindle, a tremor through the speakers, the amplified hum of distant feedback, intergalactic transmissions, an ambient wash of electronic communion. He did not recognize it. And then the drums, marching in the drums, like hooves coming over the prairie, and behind the drums something coming, a buzz, like a saw or a swarm. Knew it then.
‘I’ve not heard this in years.’ Drum said. ‘“Telstar”, right?’
He saw stars and planets, the infinite beyond, a rocket speeding through the dark, tourists waving down at Earth, looking down and humming along to the tune, subtle vocals over the electronics, the space-age cabaret of it.
‘The bloke who wrote it, Joe Meek, he never saw a penny of profit,’ Carter said. ‘Some French composer said he’d nicked the melody from one of his film scores. Meek killed himself and his landlady before the thing was ever resolved. Poor bastard.’
‘He murdered someone?’ Drum said.
‘His landlady. Shot her in the face.’
‘And you feel sorry for him because he got shafted on his royalties?’
‘The man wasn’t well by all accounts. It’s still a great song.’
‘It’s macabre is what it is,’ Drum said.
‘Meek wasn’t a killer when he wrote it,’ Carter said. ‘And Caravaggio was a murderer. People still look at his paintings.’
Drum shuddered, the song different now, violent now. A noise from the tape player, a drift of static, not on the murderer’s record, but just the hiss of no noise, then the louche, almost somnambulistic refrain of ‘Stranger on the Shore’. The record he’d played more than any other, one he whistled when milking, when waiting for a kettle to boil. Thousands of songs he’d heard in his life, this the one he came back to, a constant soundtrack, always playing, deep down in the recesses.
‘You’re going to tell me now that Acker Bilk is a war criminal,’ Drum said.
‘No,’ Carter said. ‘Bilk was a gun runner for the mafia. There’s plenty of blood on his hands though. You can hear it in the way he plays the clarinet.’
The two men laughed, the song played, its maritime drawl, something boat-like about being inside the Jaguar, an ocean-liner making swift passage through placid waters.
‘Would you still like this song if you knew Bilk was a rapist or a pederast?’ Carter said.
The beauty of the sound, the safety of that refrain.
‘It’d sound different,’ Drum said. ‘It wouldn’t be the same song.’
Carter took a mint from a bag in the side pocket of the car, offered them over to Drum. Glacier Mints. A cartoon polar bear and a cartoon fox on the packet.
‘Did we always talk like this?’ Carter said. ‘Even back in Service?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a confessional mixed with a comedy routine.’
‘You think that’s how we talk?’
‘Maybe how I like to think we talk.’
Carter sucked on his mint, looked to the cigarette lighter, back to the road, then to Drum.
‘I don’t remember how we talked back then,’ Carter said. ‘We talked all the time, but I haven’t got a clue what we actually talked about.’
‘It’s a long time ago,’ Drum said. ‘Probably for the best we don’t remember.’
All those nights in the berth, all those days in the kitchens, the evening whiskies and the morning teas. Thirty years before, no time at all, and yet so little recall. So little that came to mind. Doom Town, yes. But little else.
‘I read my Service diaries the other day,’ Carter said. ‘Names I’d so confidently written down, names I can’t now place. Incidents I not only don’t recall, but sound so fantastical they seem like lies. Why would I lie in my own journal?’
‘Why not?’ Drum said, smiling. ‘You lie to everyone else.’
‘Take the wheel,’ Carter said and leaned over to the back seat, removed cigarettes from his bag, pressed in the cigarette lighter. He took back control of the car, put a cigarette in his mouth.
‘I didn’t write down the stories we used to tell,’ Carter said. ‘I just wrote things like “the Cyprus routine”, or “the Sudan stories”. As if I’d always remember them. As if they’d be imprinted on my mind for as long I as lived.’
‘I remember the Cyprus routine,’ Drum said. ‘That was one of your favourites.’
‘But the Suez routine? The Korea stories? Lost now. Utterly lost.’
Drum cycled through the lies, the routines they’d honed. Nothing for Suez. Nothing for Korea.
‘We could try to remember them,’ Drum said. ‘We could work them up. We have time.’
Carter cracked the window and lit his cigarette.
‘You go first,’ Drum said. ‘You were always the best at establishing.’
*
Halfway through an intense hostage scenario in Korea, they arrived at the Carter-selected pub. Drum felt somehow honey-trapped, as though the intention had always been to divert conversation from the present to the past; to play a parlour game in which they would both gladly engage.
On the day of Anneka’s birth, her thirtieth, he’d ducked into a small church and lit a candle for her, a tenner dropped in the honesty box: Florence Nightingale to watch over her. Thirty. Already almost a decade older than his parents had managed; seven years older than the man who cooed over her, a cold day in 1961. To think of her skeins of lives; all her later unknown masks.
The pub was small, narrow, student-populated, sticky-floored, the air densely smoked. They quickly took a small table near the lavatories, the only one left, the stale air piss and beer and bleach.
‘It doesn’t look any different,’ Carter said. ‘Scruffier clientele, but the bar’s not changed a bit.’
He got up from his seat, exhilarated for a moment, scanning the paintings hanging on the wall.
‘Same pictures!’ he said. ‘The exact same. I remember this one. It’s my college. I sat here once and looked up at it, and it was like my father was staring down at me. Go home, James. It’s time to study, James. Ha. I remember looking at it and saying, “Piss off, Dad, leave me be.”’
Carter sat back down at the table, his brief high crashing. Nostalgia first as friend, then as assailant. The material things, the wood, the lino, the paintings, the pumps: a comfort, these. Those surrounding him, the patrons and the two barmaids, despoiled the stage; miscast and incongruous. No stout publican behind the bar, but a young American woman with a nosestud; no suited, gowned, short-back-and-sided young men, but youths with long hair down their backs, big baggy trousers, thick tongues poking through unlaced trainers.
‘I’ll get the drinks,’ Carter said.
Drum watched Carter initiate conversation with the barmaid. She poured the pints, shaking her head. No I don’t know him. No, I’ve never heard of him. Oh, he died years ago, I think.
Gwen once said the grand delusion of the pub regular is that they believe they’re family. That if they don’t come in one day, the staff and regulars will wonder after them. Old regulars who came back years later expected her and her father to remember their usual. It’s the magic, she said, the bullet-trick of the pub: you think when you go back, you’ll still belong.
‘Bob might be dead,’ Carter said coming back with the drinks. ‘but the beer looks as well-kept as it always did.’
The beer was dark, pissy-headed, smelled of sulphur. Carter drank and lit a cigarette and continued his manic sweep o
f the barroom. Looking for what? Bobby-socked women who’d stayed miraculously young, waiting for Carter’s return? Dons to tell him he was the most brilliant student they’d ever had? Something like that. This what friendship comes down to: knowing what the other is trying not to think about.
Drum wondered whether Carter was dying; whether this was the true meaning of the trip. This the kind of journey the dying take: to say goodbye, to wave a last animated hand at the past, at the ghosts who lately stalk; a passing-out parade of all lives led. Drum looked at Carter, hale and leaner these days, a rose hue to his nose and cheeks, but not the face of a dying man. No suggestion of cancer, no intimation of vascular problems. Carter fiddling with his lighter, alive and living, still looking lithe despite his years, still looking invincible.
Someday Carter would die. The thought came as a sudden realization. Drum had imagined a life without Gwen, the harrow of that; the cold house, the unmade bed, waking and there being no eggs in the pan, coming home and finding no stacks of library books, her not sitting there, drinking tea. That, yes, but never Carter. The idea absurd that there could be a space unfilled by him. Not dying. No. Not that.
Drum looked around, saw some of Carter’s Oxford stories play out, the few he remembered. In the corner, a don pissing into a bottle because he was too drunk to navigate to the lavatories; forgetting, then pouring the piss, thinking it whisky. In the back room, towards the garden, a French woman slowly stroking Carter’s cock through the worsted of his trousers until he came with a gasp and she walked off as though nothing had happened. Both with the ring of inauthenticity; second-hand stories, effortlessly told. Carter’s descriptions of the place were pitch-perfect, though; the place familiar through his eyes, through the precision of his words.
They decided on food and Drum went to the bar. As the barmaid took their order, Drum looked up to the optics, the photographs hanging behind the bar. Several were of a pair of actors pretending to pour pints from the pumps. The precision of Carter’s words! The pitch-perfect descriptions! No such thing. The familiarity, the sense of proprietary knowledge of the place, coming not from Carter, but from barroom scenes filmed for a television detective show he liked.
‘I used to come here alone,’ Carter said when Drum got back from the bar. ‘I read more in this pub than I did in any library, in any university room.’
‘It’s a nice place,’ Drum said, wanting to mention Inspector Morse, feeling the conversation heavy in his mouth.
‘I had friends,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I didn’t. There was Luke Ellison, Joseph Rowley, old Chips Henderson. Good fellows all. They’d come and join me here at seven. We’d have a few and then head out into the night for adventures.’
The expected stories didn’t come. No high jinks, no saucy tales, no barroom catastrophes. Carter just sat and looked at the end of his cigarette, put it to his mouth, put his glass to his lips.
‘You know?’ Drum said, and Carter raised his eyes in something like anticipation, hope possibly.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I’m just going to the lav. Be back in a tick.’
There was a latch on the toilet stall door, the door covered in graffiti, giant cocks and balls, numbers to ring for sex with men. He sat down and read the door from top to bottom, left to right. Should have realized, this the reason for coming here. Should have seen it. All the lives Carter could have lived, all the people he could have been, here was a crucible for them all. Should have realized. The excitement of remembrance, the sag of its quick passing. The possibilities ganging up, laughing like schoolboys in the nook and snug.
He wondered how it would feel to go back to Dagenham, to walk the factory again. He could be a floor manager now, deaf as a post; could be unemployed, off on the sick. The pub was possibilities; the factory their end. Both as blighting, both as immovable in the memory.
Their food was on the table when he returned, the service quick, or he had been gone longer than he’d realized. Carter was smoking, seemingly oblivious to both the food and Drum’s absence. He’d drunk almost all his beer.
‘Come in number two, your time’s up,’ Drum said, clicking his fingers.
‘You know,’ Carter said. ‘They filmed some of Inspector Morse here. Right here in this bar.’
‘Is that so?’ Drum said.
‘I must watch it one day,’ Carter said, and took a bite from his steak sandwich. Blood dripped from the bread onto the plate, onto his chin. Smiled then. Alive. Would always be alive.
*
Drum had imagined Jerrick’s home as a small cottage, a modest property, something slightly ramshackle, gone to seed. A place for a man to rewind old wars, compile his memoirs, decompose day by day. All he could see was hedge. A wall of hedge, twenty feet high, a hundred feet long, sheared perfectly, level as thatch. No breaks in the leaves, the livid green tightly woven, no sense of what was behind. The hedges protectorate, disallowing any glimpse of the house from the road, the gate only revealing a gravel driveway between two further hedges of a marginally smaller size.
Carter buzzed the intercom. A mumble of static and the gate swung inward, unsure at first, then reckless quick. Carter drove slowly over the gravel, took the car through the slalom, the car going dark, a canopy of some kind above them. They turned left and back into the light, and in the sudden brightness, in front of them, Jerrick’s house, his pond and his gardens.
The house was squatly cruciform: a central tower tapering to a thin spire, four smaller spires beneath it; the brick a deep russet; the arched window frames, of which there were many, a deep black; the inset glass crisscrossed with lead. Gargoyles looked down from gables, wisteria spilled from under sloping, oxidized roofs. The house was too dark and gnarled for the brightness around it: the surrounding garden well-tended, a large pond at its centre, sprinklers shooting water at random onto billiard-table lawns. The house looked like it was scowling at them all, grousing at sharing the same space.
‘Well, it puts your ancestral pile to shame,’ Drum said.
‘If you like neo-Gothic nightmares, yes,’ Carter said.
He thought of Carter’s death; he thought of Carter’s funeral: his white-piano-key coffin, the flowers and the raucous elegies, the chapel in Wildboarclough standing room only, mysterious women crying. A wake full of whisky, Drum in the corner, thinking maybe of this last trip, this last hurrah. And what then. What after. What to do. Silent crying in Gwen’s arms. Unable to look beyond the field, the big house a brick-and-lintel reminder of his passing.
‘Thanks for this,’ Drum said. ‘For organizing it.’
Carter nodded and they walked to the opening door, Jerrick standing there on the threshold, shrunken now, ruffles down an old shirt. As though every crease he’d ever ironed had come back to haunt him. He looked them both up and down, old inspection technique, unimpressed with what he saw.
‘You’re late,’ he said. ‘I said three o’clock, did I not?’
‘Traffic was terrible, sir,’ Carter said. ‘And it’s a long drive.’
‘Depends on where you start,’ he said. ‘All depends on that.’
He smiled, crooked teeth, one side worn away with pipe; hairs on his top lip, missed by shaving, a stealth moustache.
‘Yes, absolutely, sir,’ Carter said. ‘We’re very sorry.’
‘Well come, come, come. I don’t have all day.’
Jerrick turned back into the hallway. They followed, walking the lozenge-shaped tiles on the floor, black and white, scuffed and in need of scrubbing. The walls black-blue, crowded with boxes of taxidermized seabirds and ravens. Jerrick disappeared through a door to his left, a sparse drawing room, walls peeling William Morris paper.
‘You boys’ll be ready for a drink by now, I expect,’ he said and went to the dresser, took out a fresh bottle of whisky and three glasses filmed with dust. He poured without wiping the tumblers, handed them the drinks.
‘To the end of history,’ he said, holding up his glass.
They clinked
their glasses. He stood by the bare fireplace, as though it were lit and roaring, warming himself though the day was humid and close.
‘This is an incredible house, sir,’ Carter said. ‘Never seen anything quite like it.’
Jerrick laughed.
‘It’s a bloody monstrosity is what it is, soldier,’ Jerrick said. ‘My father’s grand folly. Sunk everything into it. He was an occultist. Crowley held some of his rites here, Conan Doyle used to pop by. All before my time, of course. It was a house of scandal –’ he laughed, motioning with his glass to the walls – ‘and now it’s just an old man’s hermitage.’
Jerrick sat down in the armchair. Drum looked for somewhere they could sit.
‘So, you boys are here to see the cave?’ Jerrick said.
‘If it’s not too much trouble,’ Carter said.
‘No trouble at all,’ he said, and then to Drum. ‘You’re not MI5 though, are you? MI6?’
‘No, sir,’ Drum said. ‘We’ve met before. At Haverigg.’
‘A Doom Town boy?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Same time as Carter? Yes. Vague bells ringing. Very vague bells . . .’
He finished his Scotch and poured more from the bottle on the coffee table.
‘How does it feel to be part of history, soldiers? To be both of the present, and of the past?’
‘Sir?’ Drum said.
‘The war is over and no shots have been fired. A million contingencies planned, and none ever arose. The only casualties mental health, the only fatalities caused by stress, cirrhosis and cancer. We are the most pointless soldiers in history. Fifty years of war-gaming and nothing to show for it. Just a lot of shadow lives, blinking now in the bright new dawn.’
He stood and beckoned them to follow.
‘When those hardliners put Gorbachev under house arrest, how did you feel?’ Jerrick said as they walked past the staircase, its newels grotesque parodies of devils.
‘I jumped for joy,’ he said, stopping by a closed door. ‘Not literally. Not with these birdy bones. But I felt something like true joy. The world going back to its intended path, getting itself back on the rails. Yanayev! What a President he would have been! No concessions, no brokering of peace. The kind of man who would make a bomb a senator. For two days, I was beside myself. And then it was over. The whole thing finished. I was mortified.’