Midland

by James Flint

  ‘Uh, sorry. Didn’t mean to kick you,’ he said, turning his head to glower at her and then rolling his eyes until they were looking pointedly upstairs.

  Emily took the hint and held her tongue, but after breakfast she cornered her brother in his bedroom. Now she was the one waving the speeding ticket by its corner.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ she demanded. ‘How come my car was in Warwick that day?’

  ‘I went to see a friend.’

  ‘So that’s why you fixed my tyre. You little sneak. You’re crazy, you know. You haven’t even passed your test. If you’d been stopped …’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘But you were speeding, weren’t you? It’s a miracle they didn’t pull you over there and then, they usually do.’

  ‘Not having any insurance didn’t seem to bother you much when you took Mum’s car out.’

  ‘I am insured. I checked.’

  ‘Yeah, after. But you didn’t know that at the time.’

  ‘At least I’ve got a bloody driving licence! You’re totally irresponsible.’ She glowered at him, hands on her hips, but he just shrugged.

  ‘You sound like Mum.’

  ‘I know how she feels.’

  ‘Look. I’ll pay, all right? I’ll pay the fine.’

  ‘You haven’t got any money.’

  ‘I’ll get some. I’ll pay you back.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that.’

  ‘You can. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise. But just chill out, okay? Or I’ll tell her that you took her car, and then we’ll both be in the shit.’

  —————

  Matthew did pay back the money for the fine. He got a summer job working on a local farm and settled up with Emily out of his first wage packet. The trauma of the abortion had begun to fade by then, and things had settled down with Caitlin too. The farm was not far from Shelfield, which was mainly why Matthew had taken the job there in the first place. When he had a late shift running one of the corn dryers, which during the harvest needed to be manned around the clock, she would come and spend the evening with him. They’d listen to the radio, drink supermarket beers and smoke cigarettes while the noctules and pipistrelles jinked for midges in the twilight. Sometimes she’d let him kiss her, and maybe put a hand upon her breast.

  By the time school resumed the following September there was no doubt that the two of them were a couple. Matthew passed his driving test and was able to ferry Caitlin to school himself in the Renault 4, which had passed to him now that Emily had started university, so most days they retraced the path of their trip to Warwick Hospital for reasons that had nothing to do with ghost children and medical procedures. Gradually these re-enactments, difficult at first, began to overwrite the memory of that awful day, and by the following spring it was as if the whole thing had never taken place.

  But still Caitlin wouldn’t sleep with him. She acquiesced to other things but drew the line at penetration and insisted that they kept their clothing on. Matthew tried hard not to press her, though he didn’t always succeed. He understood how after what happened she’d be reticent about having sex. But his frustration was intense and he couldn’t fully shed his resentment that Caitlin had given herself to someone else, but would not give herself to him. He stuck by his vow not to ask her who the other boy had been, but that didn’t mean the question wasn’t ever-present in his mind. He turned it over and over, and in the end, as much to retain his own sanity as anything, he decided on an answer: that she had in fact been raped, possibly by someone that she knew, and she wanted nothing more than to erase the entire incident from her memory. As well as explaining her behaviour, this had the added benefit of giving Matthew a mission. By setting his gentleness and patience in opposition to whatever violence had befallen her, he would help her rebuild her sexual confidence and learn to love again.

  As their A-Levels loomed this indeed seemed to be happening. They discussed their plans for their life together at enormous length, starting with university and going on from there. They even decided to sync their UCAS applications, putting the same universities in the same order on their forms so that they should have the maximum chance of studying together instead of having to spend three long years apart. Caitlin told him she loved him, said she’d never been so happy, said she wanted them to be together for ever. Matthew felt like he’d been let into the most profound and glorious of all secrets. He wanted to sing his delight to every living being he came across; wanted to pin his heart to the moon. This happiness and the confidence it bred helped him to secure excellent exam results, which in turn meant good university offers, one of them from Cambridge. He hadn’t wanted or expected an offer from that quarter. He had only really put the university on his shortlist because his teachers and his parents had said he should. Caitlin had followed suit, but they knew that the chance of both of them getting in to the prestigious university was close to zero.

  Heart set on studying alongside his girlfriend, Matthew had been deliberately diffident and uncompromising at his interview, but it seemed that this very attitude had tipped the balance in his favour with the admissions tutors, swamped as they were by a tide of nodding, smiling hopefuls with little to say and less nerve with which to say it. Amidst this damp contingent Matthew’s nonchalance and easy answers had, presumably, been read as intellectual bite.

  Caitlin’s results, however, were disastrous. She managed a D, an E and a Fail. Fails were almost unheard-of even from the worst students, and Caitlin had been tipped to get good results. She’d almost have been better off not turning up. There followed something of an inquisition. Her parents petitioned the exam board, the school. Her papers were recalled. But there was no mistake. She’d not even attempted answers for most of the questions she’d been asked.

  When presented with the evidence Caitlin was impassive, saying only that she didn’t know why she’d done what she did. She’d frozen when the papers had been put in front of her. She’d had plenty of knowledge spinning in her head, but couldn’t write it down. When she’d tried it had all come out wrong. So she’d stopped trying.

  Tony and Sheila asked Matthew to talk to her about it, but he couldn’t draw any more sense out of her than they could. The oddest thing was that she didn’t seem remotely troubled by what had happened – every time it was raised with her she dismissed it or laughed it off. Her lack of seriousness hinted at a profound gulf between them, an unseen tectonic fault, and it bothered Matthew more than outright rows or silences would have done.

  Her parents felt the same way. Caitlin was sent to see an educational psychologist who diagnosed general anxiety disorder and suggested that she undergo cognitive therapy. The school agreed that she would be allowed to retake the year, as long as she continued with the psychologist. Caitlin said she would.

  Matthew found these developments extremely difficult to bear. Caitlin refused to accept that they had anything to do with her termination, but he couldn’t see how that could be so. He wasn’t at all sure any longer that he’d done the right thing in helping her keep the whole affair secret now that it appeared that all the focus on the physical side of things had been misplaced and it was the psychological impact that was proving far more traumatic. But at the time he hadn’t even considered that an issue.

  What he couldn’t do now, under any circumstances, was abandon Caitlin to her fate. Cambridge was the other end of a tortuous, three-hour cross-country drive, with no direct motorway and no direct train. If he went there he’d see her once or twice a term, if he was lucky. Given what had happened, there was no question about it. He simply could not take up the place.

  He drove over to visit her one afternoon to tell her what he’d decided. She got in the Renault and he drove it a little way down the road and parked in a gateway so they could smoke.

  When he felt the moment was right, Matthew gripped the steering wheel and took a deep breath. ‘I called the Cambridge admissions office to see if they would defer my place for a year,’ he said. �
�They wouldn’t, so then I called Warwick admissions, and asked them the same thing, and they said they would. So I’ve accepted Warwick and I’m going to take a year out.’

  Caitlin felt giddy, even though she was buckled into the passenger seat. ‘Have you told your parents about this yet?’

  ‘I wanted to tell you first. It means we won’t need to be apart. I can get a job around here, get some work experience or something, earn some money while you do your retakes. And then we can have a shot at going to Warwick together like we’d planned.’

  ‘But I thought we’d agreed you’d be crazy not to go to Cambridge,’ she gulped. She was finding it hard to breathe. She wanted to get out of the car, right now, and run back to her house.

  Matthew started playing with his Zippo, flicking the metal lid open and closed. He couldn’t look at her. There it was again, her desire for him to leave. It made him feel almost exalted to hear her confirm it because now, by staying in the Midlands, he was going to be able to find out whether or not she was being honest about her feelings for him. This was love he was talking about. Love. Wasn’t it the most important thing in the world? Didn’t it always boil down to just that? And shouldn’t it, therefore, always come first? But did she love him, or did she just owe him? He needed to know which it was.

  Matthew broke the news to his parents at dinner that night, and they were about as stunned as Caitlin had been. They objected of course, and his mother cried a little, but when he repeated his reasons calmly and rationally – he loved Caitlin, didn’t want to leave her, he wanted some work experience and, conclusively, he preferred the course at Warwick, which he thought was more appropriate to his career – he found, somewhat to his surprise, that they actually listened to what he had to say. Usually his parents acted very much as individuals, their reactions to him different and characteristically unique. Now, though, he noticed that they seemed almost as one, their faces wearing identical expressions of apprehensiveness.

  ‘Well you’ve clearly thought this through,’ his father said when, eventually, he spoke. ‘You’re an adult now, Matthew. You have to take your own path. If this is really what you want, then good luck to you. I just hope you don’t come to regret it.’

  At these words Matthew felt happy and triumphant, but afterwards, after he’d hugged his parents and thanked them for their understanding, it was as if the apprehension he’d seen in their faces had been somehow transmitted to him, and he began to feel extremely anxious. He hadn’t expected everything to fall into place so easily. On some level he’d expected someone to stop him: the admissions officers, Caitlin, Miles, Margaret, someone. But no one had. It was a shock to realise that people didn’t have that power over him any longer. His father was right. He was an adult now. He could do as he liked – and suffer the consequences.

  Another trapdoor was opening beneath him. He knew the signs this time. Action was required if he were to close it again. And so, before the week was out, he’d made contact with his local Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace groups and announced his intention to volunteer for whatever work they had going.

  —————

  He spent much of the next twelve months fund-raising in town centres across the West Midlands, initially drawing social security to cover his expenses until his commitment and tenacity were spotted by a manager in the Greenpeace regional office, at which point he was promoted, put in charge of a team, and given a small salary.

  As the world of charity work slowly began to reveal itself to him, however, his relationship with Caitlin became ever harder to negotiate. His plan to continue to drive her to school every morning proved wholly impractical now that he had to be on site first thing in the morning in Birmingham, or Coventry, or Leicester. And without that daily interaction and the social glue of school to bind them, the intimacy they’d shared began to fade. Caitlin’s parents were insisting she focus on her studies, and Matthew was finding new friends among the activists he was working with. Mostly in their early twenties, they seemed more centred than any other group of people he’d ever met. Many of them were already veterans – or talked like veterans – of quite militant pieces of direct action that made his efforts standing on street corners handing out leaflets and rattling collection boxes seem paltry by comparison. They had an unshakable confidence that what they were doing was right, acknowledged no authority beyond the planet and what they judged was best for it, and communicated an intellectual excitement he’d not previously encountered.

  On top of that, they opened his eyes to the tangled politics of knowledge. He’d always taken it for granted that scientists were scientists and that the reports and developments he read about in the papers or heard on the news were more or less accurate. But now he was learning that science was as riven and partial as any other area of human endeavour, and that little about it could be taken at face value, especially when it came to the environment.

  The activists also smoked strong weed that many of them grew themselves in grow-lamp-equipped cupboards in the dilapidated rental properties they inhabited. Far more potent than the mild hash that had been traded at his school, the skunk chimed well with all this new relativity, transforming Matthew’s surroundings into a pulsing sensorium that seemed both more vivid than anything he’d previously experienced and tantalisingly harder to grasp. It had a similar effect on his inner world, accelerating the flow of ideas into a torrent, at least while he was stoned. But each insight, however apparently lucid and self-evident it was at its inception, seemed to resist further examination, morphing like a cloud into another version of itself at the very moment it was probed.

  Exposed to these influences Matthew soon became tuned to a constant state of reassessment, happy to replace what he now regarded as his parochial worldview with a more complex set of axioms. Certainties were now, he saw, part of the problem, unless they had contradiction built right into their heart. The world was changing and under threat. There was, in a way, a war going on, a climate war, a war in which he’d just enlisted as a mere grunt, the lowest of the low. He didn’t expect to know anything much about it, not yet. He wouldn’t be entitled to an opinion until he’d done a legitimate and recognisable tour of duty. In the meantime he needed to shut up and learn as much about it all as he possibly could.

  Twice he shared some of the skunk he was now regularly smoking with Caitlin. On the first occasion it sent her mildly crazy. They were in Stratford with friends, hanging out in the Bancroft Gardens by the river, and she began running round and round in circles giggling, forefingers held extended by her ears, pretending to be what Matthew took to be a bull, an impression that was reinforced when she hit on the idea of butting him, prompting cries of ‘Toro! Toro!’ from the others along with much waving of imaginary capes. Matthew worked hard to see the funny side while Caitlin rode out the high, but the joke had been on him and he hadn’t liked it. It killed his mood, which stayed dead for the remainder of the evening.

  The next time he made sure the experience took place under more controlled conditions: just the two of them alone, one weekend, at his house when his parents were away. But this time it had the opposite effect. Instead of coming with him on a stoned walk through the woods like he had suggested, Caitlin stretched out like a cat on his bed and passed out, leaving Matthew bored, horny and frustrated, with nothing to do but lie next to her and read. Eventually she woke up with a headache and declared she didn’t like skunk, and he figured it was just as well. It certainly hadn’t made her seem any more inclined to sleep with him, though that afternoon she did promise that she would do once she’d finished her resits. And with this in mind he kept his eyes fixed on the prize of her getting good enough grades for a place at Warwick, at which point the two of them would be able to start things fresh.

  The longer he held out for Caitlin, however, the harder Matthew found it not to feel that sex was something that she owed him. He had hoped to collect on the debt the night of her final exam, but when that day finally came she wanted to celebrate
with friends rather than dive into bed – and that was fair enough, he could understand that, he could wait a little longer. It proved hard, however, to get her attention at all in the maelstrom of graduation. A week went by, and then another; she always seemed to have another party to go to, another friend to whom she had to say goodbye. He accompanied her to these socials even though they did little for him except emphasise how the gap between him and those in the year below, always difficult to bridge while he’d been at school, had been significantly widened by his experiences out in the world of work.

  He had been them, just twelve months previously. In the mirrors of their dazed and excited faces he could see his old self, and it made him want to grab them and tell them that no, it wouldn’t be like they imagined it, they weren’t about to become bigger and more expansive and more inflated, that instead the opposite was going to happen: despite this great wave of change they were all convinced was about to break over them they weren’t going to really change at all; they were just going to carry their selves forward into a new realm in which their inadequacies would be far more conspicuous than they had ever been during their education, and the lessons far more unfathomable.

  Depressed and frustrated, Matthew finally had to all but insist that Caitlin let him take her out for a celebratory dinner. She liked Chinese food and there was a reasonable Szechuan restaurant on the first floor of the block on the corner where Sheep Street met Stratford High Street, right across from the Vintner. So he took her there.

  At Caitlin’s request they stopped for a preliminary drink in the wine bar. As soon as she’d said this, Matthew’s heart had fallen. And just as he’d feared, a small group of Caitlin’s friends was already sitting in one of the booths when they walked in. By the time he returned with a couple of drinks she was deep into her little scene.