"But what if she's not interested in a reunion?"
"I'll suggest we meet anyway. She can only say no. Maybe even that'll be enough to put an end to it all. I just need to,… make some sort of contact,… with that part of my past."
Perhaps it was menopausal, if such a thing can truly happen to a man. Since turning forty I had been expecting some form of madness to overtake me and this might have been it, a sort of panic at the passing of the years, a sense of going nowhere, a desperation to turn back the clock - to simply feel the way I had once felt. And how had I felt? Indeed what had I felt? It was impossible to say except it had all been much sharper, the edge to my emotions much keener than now. These days it seemed my brain was too muddled to feel anything deeply, yet now the mere thought that I was writing something Rachel might soon be reading filled me with an incredible excitement. And it was this awakening that drove me, my mind craving more and more of the emotion that it seemed only Rachel could arouse.
It took two weeks for the letter to come back with "not known at this address" scribbled on the envelope. I was at once deflated. I tried to think of other ways to trace her, but girls have a habit of getting married and changing their names, so it's not simply a matter of trawling through the 'phone book for a list of possibilities, and this was before such things as Friends Reunited. In the end, it was a mixture of luck and coincidence, that brought me one step closer.
I was on my way out to work one morning when the 'phone rang,
"Hi, this is Sonya."
"Sonya?"
"The secretary at County High?"
"Ah, yes,… Sonya."
"I thought you'd like to know, I was clearing out some cupboards here and I found an old letter. It was an invitation to a reunion. I remember you said you'd left in '77? Well this was your year - they held it - oh - in 1987, obviously a ten-year thing. There was a contact number and a name, Carol Gent,… . have you a pencil handy?"
"Erm,… . great. Thanks."
Carol Gent! Yes, I remembered Carol. She was one of the brightest and prettiest girls - very quiet, with a wonderfully dignified manner. Years later I'd seen her working at the bank on Main Street. She'd served me a few times, but either she hadn't recognised me or she'd been too busy to make the time. I rang the number later from work only to have a crotchety old girl telling me there was no such person living there.
"Gent did you say?"
"That's right."
"Not lived here for years."
"Ah,… well, sorry to have bothered you."
But then, having remembered the bank, I decided to try there. It was a younger voice this time, the voice of the bank.
"Good morning, this is John speaking, how may I help?"
I almost couldn't answer. It had struck me that although the voice was human, his words sounded as if they'd been scripted by a machine. I didn't suppose for a minute a personal enquiry would be covered by his list of categories.
"Erm… is Carol there, please?"
"This is First North West Bank. Do you have the right number, sir?"
"Yes, I believe so. I'm trying to trace Carol Gent,… . she works there, I believe."
"There's no one here by that name, sir." There was a pause and then, possibly suspecting he wasn't dealing with a customer, he came back with a less formal tone. "Do you mean Carol Conner?"
Thinking she may have married, I took a chance: "Conner,… of course. Could I speak to her please?"
"She's left."
"For lunch?"
"No, for good. She's not worked here for six months. Redundancy."
I was amazed. "Banks make people redundant too?"
"I'm afraid so, sir. Going myself at the end of the year. Can anyone else help?"
"Well, I was at school with Carol,… I'm trying to organise a reunion. You wouldn't know anyone who's still in touch with her would you? Perhaps if I gave you my number,… someone could pass it on?"
There was another pause and I had the impression this time I was pushing my luck.
"Go on then," he said.
I had done all I could in the pursuit of my fantasy, and the only thing left was to wait. In the meantime, I returned to reality and the strangely serene atmosphere descending over the winding down of a company that had been in existence for the better part of a century.
There were twenty two of us in the design office at Derby's and I remember thinking that each of us must have had some therapeutic distraction because we were carrying on as if nothing had happened - except there seemed to be no haste, no urgency to anything any more. I continued to work on my valve, a last minute design change to a couple of enormous marine engines that now looked like being the last things Derby's ever built. I wanted to see the job through, see my contribution completed before I left. That was my distraction,… the valve and memories of Rachel.
In those days of winding down, I pitied Stavros. We drones were expected to become down hearted and cynical, but the likes of Stavros had to rise above such petty emotion, to go on turning treadmill of middle-management with nothing but the prospect of dismissal at the end of it, like the rest of us. I took this to account for his somewhat weary expression that morning when he clapped me on the back half heartedly in passing.
"Hi, Tom. Sorry to hear about your trouble. "
"Trouble? "
"Annie,… and all that. "
"Oh,… sure. Don't worry. It's been coming for a while. "
"If there's anything I can do, you know where I am, mate."
Mate? We had always got on, but at a distance. Suddenly though, it seemed we were mates.
"Thanks, Stav. Why are you dressed so smart anyway?"
He brightened a little and did a mock twirl, showing off his new three piece suit to a sudden chorus of whistles and jeers. "I'm on escort duty," he said.
"The Swedes?"
"They're witnessing the acceptance trials on the MV30's this afternoon. You'd better join me, just in case they've any questions about the changes to that valve of yours."
"Okay. I'd better 'phone Eleanor and tell her I'll be late. "
"Eleanor, eh? You're a bit of a dark horse, Tom Norton!"
"Don't look at me like that. Eleanor's my step mother. "
It was, a time of strangeness in which curious alliances were formed, and people one normally steered clear of suddenly appeared in a new light. Stavros was an example,… Fred Arbuckle was another - a bluntly spoken, pipe smoking detail-draughtsman with forty years of service, a man who had become painfully obsolete since they'd chucked his drawing board away and replaced it with a computer workstation. He'd been eavesdropping on my conversation with Stavros, hovering in the background as if he had something to say to me that would have to wait until Stavros was out of range. I caught him looking over my shoulder around midmorning.
"What's up then Tommy?" he said.
"Not much, Fred."
"On lifeboat duty for old brown nose are you?"
"Stavros? Oh, he's all right - there's no harm in him."
"Suppose not - or he'd have made it to the boardroom years ago. "
"So what can I do for you, Fred? "
"Well, me and a couple of lads are planning a raid at dinner time - you with us?"
"A raid?"
"Sneakin in 't shed."
The shed was a vast factory complex across the road from the office. It had served as Derby's centre for production since 1910, but had lain empty since the early nineties and was now fenced off.
"What do you want to go in there for?" I asked.
"One last look around. A bit of nostalgia, like."
"Gets you nowhere, nostalgia," I replied. "Nostalgia is useless."
He shrugged as if to say it was okay, that it didn't matter, but I had the feeling he'd been relying on me and I'd let him down. And anyway, who was I to talk, dredging up the past as I'd been doing? "Go on then. Give me a nudge when you're ready."
Fred was in his sixties now. He'd walked to Derby's every day since he wa
s sixteen, a journey of a couple of miles, rain or shine. So far as anyone could work out he'd never had a day off sick and never had a holiday longer than a week at a time. The routine of Derby's was the backbone of his life and a few jokers in the office reckoned he'd be dead within six months of the place closing.
It was in walking past the shed he'd spotted a gap in the mesh fence where he told me a bloke could probably wriggle though without too much indignity. It was also off the main road and out of sight of the security cameras. At the appointed hour, I followed him through this gap. There was no one else. They'd all chickened out, he said, though I suspect now he hadn't actually asked anyone else. The main entrance was securely boarded, but we both remembered a door around the back which led onto the machine shop via a dingy cellar. It was locked but, with alarming expertise, Fred drew a crowbar out from under his overcoat and had it open in a few seconds.
There was light enough to see inside, though the windows were grimed and hung with cobwebs. There were workbenches and papers scattered everywhere, but amid the chaos of dereliction there lay curious islands of order. By the wall, a kettle was plugged into a socket, and a little ring of expectant mugs all sat there, having waited all these years for someone brew up.
Fred seemed not to notice the poetry of it and we pressed on, groping in the half light until we came out onto the machine shop. It was empty, all the decent machines having been shipped out and sold, the knackered ones dragged off screaming to the scrap man. All that remained now was a vast, echoing cavern of a place. Fred seemed to be looking for something, some specific location as he padded intensely around the oil stained floor.
"Here," he said and then he handed me a camera. "Take us me picture will 't"
"Eh?"
"Right here,… . I worked on a turret lathe on this spot for twenty years. It was the first job I had when I came out of my time."
I looked around. Part of the roof had caved in and the place seemed hollow and cold. It felt like we were standing in the remains of a dinosaur but Fred was seeing something else, feeling something else,… the noise, the sense of something going on, a powerhouse, hot machines, hot metal. I remembered it too. It had been ugly and dirty, and a frightening place too for a teenager, but also I could not deny I'd also felt a tremendous sense of involvement in something big, something important.
I took his picture while he posed - an heroic pose, I thought, one foot up on a bucket like he'd just shot a lion. Then I laughed. "Fred in his shed, eh?"
On the way out I asked him for the camera again and I took a picture of the kettle with its cups. I expected some manly abuse, but he just waited.
"Things move on, eh Tommy?"
Did they, I wondered? Was it a process of moving on, or merely one of falling apart, like in nature, a process of flowering followed by inevitable decay? I looked at him and I realised then he was afraid.
We build a shell around us as we grow, the older we are the thicker the shell but deep inside, we're all the same, all of us still children blinking wide eyed at the world and wanting someone to take us by the hand, someone who will show us the way and tell us what the hell it's all about.
"You'll be all right with your payout, Fred. Forty years! You'll be a sodding millionaire. I've another twenty five to work somewhere."
He laughed. "That's right," he said. "A millionaire." But his voice rang strangely hollow.
We're rarely aware of living through change - only later, when we look back. But suddenly then, I glimpsed the enormity of the change sweeping the likes of me and Fred along, a great tidal wave. Me? I had a chance, I'd find something once I got my mind around whatever was haunting me, but Fred? At sixty you might say it shouldn't have made much difference to him, that he was overdue a rest and retirement to his cabbage patch anyway. But not all the Freds have cabbage patches. They have routines. They have walks to work, and the company of other men.
Not many years ago, there had been a fuss about some old geezer who'd worked in the grim, half lit world of Derby's tooling stores. He'd lied about his age so he could go on working. He was seventy five before they'd found him out. Was it just the money, I'd wondered? Was it a fear of poverty, a lack of pension provision? Or had it been more to do with an overriding desire to belong somewhere?
The MV30 trials took longer than planned, as these things generally do. It was a noisy business - each engine, the size of a transit van roaring full throttle, straining against a flywheel. It was boy's own stuff,… banks of digital meters and switches, and a half a dozen computers to bear witness, to print out their columns of Newton-meters and Dynes, and Joules, to present their analysis in the form of neatly coloured graphs.
Stavros was sweating beneath his lab-coat and ear-defenders, great beads running down his forehead. The Swedish engineers poured over their data and pretended not to notice. I gave him a handkerchief and, yanking off one cup of his defenders, I put my mouth to his ear and suggested he went and took his jacket and waistcoat off. "It's boiling in here, Stav!"
"Right, Tom. Right." And then: "Do you think they noticed?" he said afterwards. "Do you think they were suspicious - I mean it looked like I was guilty over something and hoping they wouldn't find me out."
"Don't worry," I told him. "Those engines are the best Derby's have ever made, and they know it."
"They are?"
"Sure," I said and I smiled because he really had no idea, nor did he care, just so long as the acceptance was signed and the engines were delivered to the shipyard on time. Nor did anyone care really, or so it seemed to me. Derby's had accumulated a century of knowledge, a knowledge passed on and improved from generation to generation, a continuity that was about to be written off as irrelevant in a more enlightened age, an age where they teach our children that it is no longer the nature of the problem that should concern us, but more the way we organise ourselves and the efficiency with which we interact in solving it.
I was in a pensive mood when I finally escaped the factory and drove the couple of miles across town, from Derby's to Arkwright Street. The Midget was running sweetly, though it seemed to be burning an absurd amount of oil. I had the top down, taking my time, letting the wind massage its way into my head.
A couple of lads tore past me on the A6. They were driving a knackered old Nova hatchback, blaring out a chest-punching bass from a stereo system that was probably worth more than the car. They looked about fourteen, the pair of them wearing reversed baseball hats. The passenger mouthed something unintelligible at me, but I guessed they were trying to goad me into a race.
Perhaps I could have kept up with them, but I was afraid of bursting the engine in the process, so I gave them a smile, slowed down and let them go. The road ahead belonged to them, even though it seemed to me as if they'd already taken one look at it and said: "Fuck that for a lark."
Me? I was more like one of those cups sitting around the kettle, waiting for a brew all these years, not knowing the lights had gone, the power had gone and the whole place was falling down around my ears.
Eleanor was waiting when I walked in. She sensed something of my mood and hugged me. It was a spontaneous gesture and I clung to her for a while longer than was perhaps necessary. No one else could do that for me. No one else seemed prepared to get that close. Thank God for her, I thought.
"Carol 'phoned," she said.
"Carol?"
"Carol Conner. The reunion secretary, remember?"
"Oh,… that Carol. She 'phoned?"
"Yes. She sounded nice."
"She did?"
"I told her you'd be round at seven."
"What?"
"Did I do wrong? I thought you were serious about this business with Rachel."
"Did you tell her about that?"
"No, of course not, stupid. That's our secret. I said you were interested in organising a reunion, that's all. What's wrong?"
"I don't know, perhaps it's best just to leave it."
"What harm can it do? And you need to get ou
t more. Go and have a shower while I make some tea."
I was afraid. For weeks now, I'd been probing the past, trying to tease out the emotions and the passions of my youth from the safety of the here and now. But suddenly it was as if a door had opened and the past had beckoned me inside.
Chapter 11
I arrived half an hour late. The Midget had cut out on the way and it had taken ages to figure out it was a broken throttle link. I'd fixed it at the side of the road with a bit of fuse wire and then I'd turned up with my hands full of oily grime. When she opened the door she took my breath away. At first she seemed exactly the same, at least inside my head, and it took a moment to register the years she now carried in the wrinkles around her eyes and in the little strands of grey twisted into her great bush of auburn hair.
"Is it Tom?"
"Yes. Hi,… sorry I'm late. I broke down."
She was dressed up,… a short, strappy dress and dark stockings. There was perfume, too, something fresh and lemony - it made me anxious. "I'm sorry," I said. "You're on your way out somewhere?"
"No. Come in." She saw my hands. "Bathroom's just through there."
It was a decent flat, one in a block of four on a new development on the eastern outskirts of town. It had been the site of the Victorian workhouse, which had survived as a mental hospital until about five years before. My father had spent a year in its antiseptic and oppressive wards before being moved to a brighter, lighter place in the suburbs of Preston.
This was prime land, on a little rise overlooking the West Pennines. When they'd demolished the hospital I'd thought there'd be some posh houses going up to take advantage of the view, but they'd filled it with little brick boxes, all overlooking one another, as if starter homes were not allowed to have a view in case it made them too expensive.
It didn't take me long to figure out Carol was living alone even though she was wearing a ring. It was the bathroom - the bottles. They were all soft colours, feminine concoctions,… no manly toiletries, and only one toothbrush.
"Tea?"
"Great. Look, I can come back some other time if it's not convenient."
The Road From Langholm Avenue Page 7