Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  So I decide I will start at the end: that nowadays Adam does a job I don’t understand in a terribly complicated business I don’t see any need for, called supply chain management, and he got this job because he is very good at mathematics and logic and very interested in how big businesses work and make money. As I’m saying all this aloud, as if Theo is with me in the van, I’m listening out for the customary note of awe in my voice as I explain that Adam is much cleverer than I am and, I go on to say, I’m afraid that consequently my mothering has always been a little nervous and possibly overloaded with respect. I sense Theo nodding and waiting to hear more, and I drive on, now in silence, thinking.

  I am forcing myself to recall Pat’s breezy way of telling me her news of Flora; she gave no hint that she’s in any way impressed by her daughter’s brave, bold doings in Africa. By comparison, I speak of my son as if my feelings for him verge on the idolatrous. I imagine Theo weighing the possibility that, as I put it to him, it’s as though Adam’s being born to me was a gift I didn’t earn and that therefore demanded, as propitiation, that I fasten upon him a meek, even obsequious kind of love. For his part, Adam probably considers my being his mother a handicap. Even when he was very little, if I scanned his face for signs of a child’s affection I observed something more like fatigue, or at best a composed, possibly intellectual fondness. I wipe away the tears that are beginning to fall; I won’t be able to drive if I can’t see properly. Go on, Theo’s voice urges softly. “There’s more.”

  What is not in doubt is that Adam is qualified to do his inexplicably complex job because, when he was fourteen, Pat and Vince arranged for him to lodge on weekdays with Vince’s recently widowed mother and go to a school in Exeter, where he was immediately picked out as an academic high flier. None of that, nor his determination to go to university, nor his ambition to make a lot of money—and least of all his fascination with supply chain management—has anything to do with his parents. Except, perhaps, that he set out to realize an ambition to become as unlike us as possible in every way.

  Then you needn’t feel guilty about not liking Pat, Theo would reply to that. It’s no wonder. Even if she is a genuinely good person.

  This is the beauty of talking with Theo. He understands everything I say and also what I don’t say. I wasn’t talking about not liking Pat. I did not even know I was in need of reassurance on the matter of not liking her. In the juddering van I say “Thank you,” and shove my foot down on the accelerator. The engine strains. I pump my foot up and down; Theo’s patience may be infinite, but mine isn’t. I can’t wait to get back and tell him the rest of the story. I have a strong feeling he’s going to encourage me to conclude—although I am resisting it, even now—that Adam hasn’t always been a very good son.

  From: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  To:

  Sent on wed 12 oct 2011 at 11.12 GMT

  I’m so sorry Adam, I didn’t make it last week, Wednesdays not always so easy any more.

  I’m not sure the stroke club’s really worth it anyway, it’s a hassle getting him up and ready if he’s not in the right mood.

  I think I told you about that nurse turning up here a little while ago? Right out of the blue, very inconsiderate, it put D off for the whole day. There was no need, either, she was just dropping in because Dad had missed a couple of stroke clubs. You’d think she’d have enough to do! Anyway I told her on the QT we don’t welcome surprise visits, proper notice is preferred. I have plenty to do without having the routine thrown out – she seemed to take my point.

  Anyway, then they rang up just because he wasn’t there last week! He doesn’t need weighing, he’s eating as much as he wants and he hasn’t said anything so I don’t think he’s missing out by not going.

  Talking of unannounced visitors I saw Pat the other day. I don’t mean she dropped in unannounced (though she’s been known to), I saw her when I was out. It’s been at least three years – last time was quite soon after the stroke, she turned up here, I think I told you. I’ve nothing against her in the least and I know she did a lot for you but I can’t say I’m sorry she hasn’t been back – that last time Dad got very agitated, you know how he hates organized religion. I still think there’s something odd about a woman in a dog collar. But Pat and Vince were good to you.

  Seeing her got me thinking about your fourteenth birthday. Well, I’ll never forget THAT one. It all worked out fine in the end but oh, if you could have just talked to us!! Who knows I might have been able to persuade Dad about school and everything without all that drama! OK I know, useless to go over it now, and I’m not really raking it all up again, it’s over and done with. Are you still in touch with Pat, I think she said not. She moved to a different church didn’t she?

  What a shame about your boss Sara, that is sad. She’s young to have cancer but she had her children quite late didn’t she? She’s the same age I was when you were fourteen, that’s another reason I was thinking about it again I suppose. Speedy recovery to her, anyway.

  Re your visit – oh yes it would be lovely but how can you be sure about getting the time off because Christmas is still months away!!! You never know where they’re sending you next so I definitely won’t get my hopes up too much! (eg won’t mention it to D). The shops are full of Christmas stuff already of course, I was at Food For Thought last wed (hence no email) and it was just as bad there as anywhere else.

  D’s really getting around the place and doing more for himself at home eg when I got back from FFT he’d been all over the place making a terrible mess. Kitchen upside down and the old studio a bombsite. I’m getting rid of everything in there, did I say? It never occurs to him somebody’s got to clear everything up after him – he is the limit! I tell him I’m going to have to start treating him like a bad boy if he behaves like one and we’ll see how he likes that! Talk soon lots of love Mum xxx

  ADAM’S BIRTHDAY 1997

  Adam flung his backpack on to the shoulder where the track from Stoneyridge met the road, and crouched down opposite the log slice sign on which his father had burned the words FOR SALE POTTERY WEAVING TEAS BED & BREAKFAST. Another board propped against it read EGGS FOR SALE. His backside sank against a wet, frondy nest of couch grass and the rain came down harder, rolling through his scalp and dripping on to his shoulders, drenching his back. Getting soaked was part of all this, he supposed. It kind of fit with the rest of the crap.

  It was the ninth day of rain, his fourteenth birthday, and the first day of his freedom. Around him, through his half-closed eyes, the green landscape glittered. Past the bend in the road and in the distance the fields and the moor were misty, the sky over them gray and sodden. He wondered if, supposing a rabbit ran across that field right now, he’d stand a chance of getting it with the shotgun. He raised a hand, closed one eye, and scanned the width of the field, squinting down the barrel of his forefinger. Probably. He was a pretty good shot—not as good as Kevin but way better than Kyle. If he got the chance to practice he’d be excellent, probably he’d end up being able to shoot just about anything, if he got the practice. It was a skill, you’d think Dad would want him to get a skill like that. It was unbelievable—what was his problem? What was wrong with getting a shotgun for your birthday when it was only for rabbits and pigeons?

  It wasn’t like he was going to shoot people, it wasn’t like he was going off and joining the fucking army. Kevin and Kyle and their dad knew there was nothing wrong with it, that was why Kevin and Kyle gave him the gun today for his birthday, an old one reconditioned but practically the same as theirs and they’d had theirs for years and Kyle was still only thirteen. You’re best learning young to use a gun properly, you country lads—that’s what their dad said. Then you grow up respecting it, that’s the way you stay safe. Adam pushed his fingers into his scalp and tugged, ready to tear his hair out. His dad couldn’t be like that, oh no. His dad had to wait until they’d gone and then take the gun off him. Ju
st like before, taking stuff off him. No, Adam. There will be no guns in this house. That’s final. The only stuff he ever got that he really wanted, his dad took it off him, and he had no right.

  Adam filled his cheeks with air, held his breath, and shot his plug of gum hard across the tarmac. It came to rest in a puddle bubbling with rain. He put two more sticks of gum in his mouth and chewed fast. Once the flavor went he’d shape them into another ball against his teeth and shoot that out, too, see if he could get it farther than the first one, maybe across the white line. Or maybe he’d wait for a car to come snaking along the road and he’d stick his thumb out, and if it didn’t stop for him he’d time it so either the gum hit a wheel as it fizzed past or shot right underneath and bounced out on the far side. Hunkered on the shoulder, he smiled and looked up and down, hoping for a caravan—he might actually get the gum to stick on the side of a caravan—although he knew the road was too narrow and hilly for many of those. Not even that many cars came.

  Adam pushed his tongue through the gum to test it for stretch and blew a pathetic bubble. He gazed at the first rising bend over to his left and imagined it all: some tosser coming down with a caravan in tow, going too fast, squeal of brakes, caravan swings, car veers, skids, loses it—wham! Car’s crumpled in the ditch, caravan’s on its side.

  What would he do?

  He runs to help, obviously. What if the tank’s burst? Whole fucking thing could go up in flames! He takes charge, gets them all out. There’s three of them, a pair of stupid arguing parents and their daughter. She’s about sixteen, but he’s so tall everybody takes him for sixteen too, or older. The parents are tossers. They ignore him, they’re too busy shouting at each other. The girl’s slightly hurt but it’s only a bump on the head. Mainly, she’s pissed off. He knows this because the moment he sees her he understands her. For once he’s not afraid (this is new, this has never happened before). He tells her Look, you don’t have to take any more of this. Fuck, you could’ve been killed! This is their shit, not yours. Mine are just the same and I’m not taking any more, I just fucking walked out. Then over her shoulder he’d see another car approaching down the hill. So can you. You’re sixteen, aren’t you? They can’t stop you. And she looks him hard in the eye. Just as he’s waving down the car he notices properly how gorgeous she is—long hair, long body, short skirt, great tits, golden skin—and what’s more, she sees him noticing, and she’s cool with it. Now he, cool but determined, talks to the driver. His voice does not yodel like it sometimes can in real life. The driver talks back to him like he’s an equal, not a kid. Yeah mate, lift to Exeter? Sure, no problem, get in.

  You coming or not? he says to the girl. She really is gorgeous. She gasps Oh, yes, he grabs her hand, and they’re off, laughing.

  Adam spat the ball of gum across the road. It landed short of the first. He had no more gum and now his thing was swelling in a familiar way; the girl had been featuring in his daydreams for a few months now, though she was occasionally displaced by more pressing memories of some pictures Kevin had showed him in a magazine he’d found crumpled in the storage box under the seat of his dad’s tractor. Maybe there was something wrong with him, the way the same girl kept appearing, but mostly what felt wrong was the emptiness he was left with when she went away and ordinary life took over again. How then he almost hated her for real for not being there, like she actually did exist or something.

  He was feeling the emptiness yawn open right now. He let out a minty belch, stood up, wiped his hands down his backside, and wandered a few yards along the shoulder, kicking methodically at the heads of drenched cow parsley and showering the air with seeds and cold drops of rainwater. He heard a car coming, turned, and stuck out his thumb. It didn’t even slow down.

  In the next hour a dozen more passed him in the same way. When he wandered back and hunkered down again, he found a snail on his backpack. He picked it off and kicked it across the road, enjoying the intimate tap it made against the toe of his sneaker, the tiny rattle as it rolled. In the grass next to his foot he found another one and kicked that after it. Then he remembered a joke Kevin once told him about a snail getting kicked off somebody’s doorstep and couldn’t help smiling as he went hunting for more along the shoulder. But already he was sickened by what he was doing to them, and he was sickened by the rain, and most of all he was sickened by the knowledge that he was so wet and pissed off that if he hadn’t stolen his mother’s egg money from the box on the hall table he would probably go back up to the house. The thought of stepping out of the rain into the warm, empty kitchen wouldn’t leave him alone. But fuck it, as if he could. Anyway, the kitchen never was empty, and if ever it was warm enough the Rayburn stank.

  He slid his fingers over the notes and coins in his back pocket, trying to make them feel like his. Because they should have been. He’d asked specially for a bit of money (he knew it couldn’t be a lot) for his birthday. Just a bit to do what he liked with, to go and buy something normal with. A wooden seagull carved by his father out of a twisted bit of dead tree was what he got instead, together with another scarf knitted by his mother with wool from the manky sheep. You can hang the seagull from your bedroom ceiling, his mother said, when the crap presents lay unwrapped on the table. And the scarf’s from Celestia, her wool’s got a lovely touch of auburn, hasn’t it?

  Fuck Celestia. Fuck the seagull. Adam pulled the money from his pocket and counted it, a month’s worth of egg money, just over twenty pounds. A lot to his parents. They were always going on about money. How it wasn’t important, but also how it wasn’t important that they didn’t have enough of it to buy the things other people did. Making out it didn’t matter, as if the things weren’t worth buying in the first place, the liars.

  He wasn’t fooled. Since he was a kid he’d been clearer about money than they were. To begin with you needed it to get stuff you wanted, and yes, he did want stuff. Normal stuff. He wanted computer games and a video player, never mind that they didn’t have a computer or a television. But beyond that he understood money in a way he couldn’t put into words. He just knew there was a feeling that having money would give you, a safer, nicer feeling than the excitement of wanting and getting stuff. You wouldn’t even have to spend the money, you’d just have to know you could. Maybe it was a feeling of freedom—the wanting freed from the awful, dragging ache of not getting. However you defined it, Adam knew that money was a kind of enchantment that could settle over a person’s life like a magical form of dew. It was impossible that his desire for it, a feeling so pure and yearning and private—so spiritual—could be the ugly impulse his parents called greed.

  He put the egg money back in his pocket. Serve them right. It wasn’t like he’d been expecting a PlayStation, never mind an airgun, he knew they weren’t rich. The bit of birthday money he’d asked for wasn’t even the point either, not the whole point anyway, because more than anything what he’d wanted was for them just to listen. Just for once hear what he was saying. Then they’d see he was different, that he wasn’t like them. Actually, nobody else he knew (apart maybe from Callum and Fee but they’d gone away) was like them.

  Kevin and Kyle’s mum and dad weren’t rich either and Kevin and Kyle still got normal stuff, they had a PlayStation and a telly and computer games. They had takeaways and holidays and their house had proper carpets, and radiators that got warm. And their farm had sheep and stuff but it didn’t make their dad weird like his dad, their dad didn’t go on about fucking earth harmonies all day.

  He had to get out of Stoneyridge. And it was only twenty quid, for fuck’s sake.

  By the time a car stopped for him nearly two hours later—a white Volvo estate with two slavering dogs in the back, steaming up the windows—Adam was almost tearful. He was damp, shivering with cold, and also miserable with hunger. He’d thought of bringing some food but the idea of standing in the kitchen making sandwiches to run away from home with felt stupid and weird, the kind of thing his mother would think of. He’d left the house
with only a hunk of bread, which he’d eaten on the way down the track.

  The man driving the Volvo didn’t speak but the woman was nice. She said, “Oh, look at you, you’re simply drenched, are you heading for Exeter?”

  Adam said yes and climbed in. As the car drove off, he turned back to look at the hillside but could see nothing through the steamed-up windows. He thought about his parents going on with the day at Stoneyridge, unaware he’d left home for good. He pictured his father too busy counting sheep on the moor to notice the absence of his only son, his mother rolling out brown pastry to make three disgusting pasties lumpy with potato and carrot, her face a blank. He couldn’t eat his mother’s pasties unless they were smothered in ketchup, but nonetheless his cheeks watered at the thought of them. She’d be looking out at the pouring rain and hoping it would ease off enough to let her insist on the birthday picnic. Well, there wasn’t going to be a fucking birthday picnic, and for the first time that day Adam felt a wave of joy. He sat back in the Volvo and tried to concentrate on the journey.

  He couldn’t. The joy didn’t last. His parents would notice he was gone sooner or later but what if they never got it, what if they never really grasped how infuriated he was? He was angry not only with them, but also because it felt so bad to be invisible to them and on his birthday, and he was afraid that caring about that might mean he was still a child. He didn’t understand why, when he was the one who had left, the thought of them up at Stoneyridge without him made him feel so locked-out and lonely. Most of all he was angry that once again (and it kept happening) he found himself unable to feel the same way about anything long enough to know what his true feelings were.