by Bella Pollen
‘What’s that?’
‘Truce?’
I hesitated then linked my finger with his.
‘Truce,’ I said and shook it.
* * *
‘So I couldn’t help looking at them after the interview and wondering…’
‘What?’
‘Well how they go about it.’
‘It being sex?’
‘What else?’
‘You’re thinking he has to make a noise like a capercaillie and she must respond like a terrified hen pheasant?’
‘It’s that whole politeness thing … go ahead, darling … no, I shouldn’t really … oh go on, treat yourself, you come first … no, I insist … after you, my dear.’
‘Thanks to you,’ Rory said, ‘now they’re more likely be mounting each other neighing like warthogs.’
I burst out laughing. ‘OK, so whose turn?’
‘Mine unfortunately.’
‘OK, truth or dare?’
For the first time since embarking on this oddball journey, Rory and I had managed to spend two hours in the car together without exchanging a single snitty remark. We’d come off the highway a while back and were now beetling through a series of small country lanes. A strong northerly wind was sending needles of rain across the windscreen of the Rover.
‘I’m not up to another dare from you.’
‘So truth then. Tell me one personal thing about your life.’
‘Uh … name three birds of prey,’ he said. ‘How about we play that instead?’
‘Coward.’
‘Well what do you want to know?’
‘I don’t know. Anything … brothers … sisters, where you went to school. What do your parents do for example?’
‘Uh … they’re retired.’
‘And before?’
‘Unemployed.’
‘They’re retired from being unemployed?’
‘See that?’ Rory wound his window down.
‘What?’
‘Over there, church.’
The red herring was so obvious it might as well have been wearing a false beard.
‘That heap of old stone you mean?’ Actually it was beautiful. Tall and elegant, the church was built of honey-coloured brick.
‘That is one of the few remaining sixteenth-century churches in England.’
‘No kidding?’ I said. Rory back-pedalled every time he came close to talking about himself so I was becoming an expert on ruined monuments of the English countryside.
‘In 1537 Cromwell ordered the church to be plundered then burnt. When his soldiers came over the hill, Lord Haven, who owned the estate, set fire to his own house. The soldiers thought it was the church burning and so they left it standing. It has survived to this day.’
‘Fascinating,’ I executed a giant yawn.
‘The sincerity of your sarcasm is impressive.’
‘No, really,’ I folded my jacket under my head and closed my eyes, but like all other personal fragments I’d wheedled out of him, I stored away the unemployed/retired family comment like a credit note to be redeemed later.
* * *
Rory Jones’ car was a wreck. Stylish, sure, but mechanically a piece of junk – and it died on us without warning. Wolf and Dwight were ahead of us in the van, so no help there and the steep banks on either side of the road were too high to get a signal on my cell. We pushed the Rover onto the grass and waited for someone to come along and rescue us.
‘Why do you drive around in something that doesn’t work properly?’ I pulled the collar up on my coat.
‘I like old cars, they’re romantic.’
‘How can it be romantic to be standing in the rain waiting for a pick-up truck?’
‘The English have a very strange definition of romantic. You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘Oh I don’t know,’ he sighed, ‘extreme discomfort is romantic, crazy ideas are romantic, insane optimism is romantic, noble hopelessness is romantic – oh for Goodness sake, what is it now?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘You’ve got that irritating face on again.’
‘What irritating face?’
‘Sort of smug, knowing incredulity.’
There was this great stand-up routine Bob Newhart did in the sixties, you probably remember it. Sir Walter Raleigh calls from America to try to sell the head of the West Indies Company on the idea of tobacco and this guy is not exactly convinced. ‘It’s a kind of leaf…? Uhuh … Let me get this straight Walt, you put leaves in your mouth?… and you do what? You set fire to them? What can I say, Walt, don’t call us, we’ll call you.’
Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, these were all names I grew up with. When Jay found a signed copy of Mort Sahl’s ‘Iconaclast’ in my loft, he said, ‘Aha … when satire and America coincided for the first and only time to my certain knowledge.’ Jay claimed that Mort Sahl’s tragedy was that he was brilliant with Eisenhower, but when Kennedy came in he was so happy that he ran out of material.
Anyway, every time Rory started with his how to be English lessons I’d say, ‘Let me get this straight. What age are your children sent away to boarding school? Seven????????’ Then he’d drop in something about these little seven year olds being made to fag and I’d say, ‘Yeah, sure I knew it all along.’ He’d say, ‘No, no it’s a kind of slavery of younger boys to older boys.’
‘Uhuh?’ I’d say. ‘Well don’t call us, we’ll call you,’ then give him my Bob Newhart face just to see how crazy I could make him.
‘What can I say,’ I shrugged helplessly, ‘I feel it’s my duty to more fully understand your people.’
‘Well my people feel they have to romanticize trials and tribulations in order to accept them. Once they’re accepted, we can have a nice cup of tea and forget all about them.’
‘Aha, as in a nice cup of tea solves everything?’
‘Exactly, as in when the Second World War was announced over the radio there was a power cut over the entire country because tens of millions of people rushed from their armchairs to boil the kettle for a nice cup of tea.’
‘That’s a great story. Is that true?’
‘Perfectly true – war, by the way,’ Rory added, ‘being the embodiment of romanticism for the English, combining as it does discomfort, hopelessness, crazy ideas and insane optimism.’
War again. I couldn’t get away from it. Not long after we started seeing each other I asked Jay whether he considered himself a war junkie. I’d spent most of the evening in his flat reading articles he’d written for Doctors without Borders. The articles were brutal but nothing to what being there must have been like. I wanted to understand what took him back time and time again. He’d been angry at the question. He took his coffee into the bedroom and didn’t come back. I didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t known each other long enough to have laid down rules of engagement. I ended up staying because I had no idea how to leave. I fell asleep in his leather armchair and woke to find him removing the coffee cup from my hand.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound flip,’ I told him.
‘You’re just young enough to think that love makes the world go round, Maggie,’ he said heavily. ‘Well it doesn’t.’
‘What does make the world go round then?’ I knew what he would say; hate, war, grief, pain. Maybe he saw it in my face because he laughed. ‘I don’t know, kiddo … Pepsi probably. Could be Pepsi makes the world go round.’
He said he didn’t like the word junkie, but was prepared to admit to being a recidivist. He told me war and danger held a hypnotic lure for him, and that for most people who got involved this was also true – until they burnt out. Most people in Jay’s line of work burnt out a lot quicker than he did, so I wondered then, where were the scars from Jay’s wars? Where was the blood?
My mother had two great theories. The first was her Scotch tape theory. She liked to mend things with it. This applied to everything. If it was broke it got Scotch taped. It
ems that were badly damaged got the double Scotch tape treatment; anything unScotch-tapable just got thrown away. It became a good joke for my father when I started dating.
‘Is it Scotch-tapable?’ he’d ask, finding me in tears over a boyfriend.
‘I don’t think so,’ I’d sniffle.
‘So throw him away.’
My mother’s other theory was the blood. As a little girl, whenever I fell down and started bawling my mother would say, ‘Is it bleeding?’ as I presented her with my wound. ‘Because if it’s not bleeding it’s OK.’ Blood was her sole criterion for concern. No blood meant no crying allowed. This trick, believe it or not, worked until the day a neighbour’s dog was hit by a car right outside our front door. Dad and I joined the small crowd that gathered. After a while the dog was pronounced dead. I looked for blood but there was none. That evening I asked my father what the dog had died of. ‘Internal injuries,’ he replied and this had profoundly scared me.
I had told Jay about my mother’s blood theory and he thought it very funny. He remembered it that night in his apartment.
‘I’m not going to die from internal injuries if that’s what you’re worried about.’ He laughed when he said it, but for some reason it made me want to cry.
* * *
‘Now I come to think of it,’ Rory was saying, ‘your obsessive and rather tragic preoccupation with the repressed British and their stiff upper lips is simply an extension of this form of romanticism.’
‘Oh,’ I smiled, ‘how do you work that one out?’
Rory pulled an old paper bag from the side pocket of the car and smoothed it against the bonnet. ‘I’ll make you a graph.’
Jay had sounded exhausted the last time I’d spoken to him. I asked him how he was and he said, ‘Well behaved in many a doctor’s office,’ but I heard the tension tighten every word. We had one last gap coming up in the filming schedule, only a couple of days away. When Jay told me being in Bosnia made dealing with mudslides in Northern Pakistan seem like a stroll in the park, I told him he needed a break. We agreed to meet in Paris.
‘Please do me the courtesy of paying attention,’ Rory was saying. He’d drawn a circle on the paper bag, ‘Extreme discomfort equals romantic equals insane optimism (because we believe a cup of tea will make everything all right) equals we bear with fortitude equals a stiff upper lip – ergo you think we’re repressed.’
‘Ergo?’
‘Latin, ergo equals therefore.’
‘Ergo,’ I looked at the empty road, the broken-down car, the rain slicking his hair flat to his forehead and began laughing. ‘You know, maybe it’s not that all Englishman are hopelessly romantic, I think it could just be you.’
* * *
‘What do you mean by “netting the sea”? Could you be a bit more specific?’
‘Fishing,’ Rory said, ‘as in the deliberate trapping of the denizens of the deep.’ He hauled a tangle of netting from the back of the Land Rover he’d borrowed.
‘Fishing, as in poor harmless creatures flip-flopping around before they die a horrible painful death?’
Rory shook his head. ‘Where does this appalling PC attitude come from? You wear leather, you pig out on steak.’
‘Pig out on a steak – surely another very unfortunate mixed animal metaph—’
‘Besides who was it who killed two beloved family pets in one afternoon?’
‘That was accidental death—’
‘And do you not eat fish?’
‘Of course, I eat fish, I just think that whole hook in mouth thing is icky.’
‘What’s your preferred method of slaughter then? Shoot them with a rifle, electrocution? Or you could just question them to death perhaps?’
‘Jesus,’ Wolf rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t tempt her.’
A few gulls wheeled over the sea, squawking some unidentifiable warning to each other as we slid down the dunes. A group of tiny birds bowed their heads against the wind. Their legs, skinny as toothpicks, were mirrored on the wet sand. ‘Dotterel,’ Rory said, barely glancing at them.
It was a beautiful afternoon, sunny, crisp, the sky darkening to orange as dusk approached. By the time we’d had the Rover towed to our next pit stop, it had been too late to start filming. ‘Netting the sea’ had been Rory’s alternative form of entertainment.
‘For your next “how to be English lesson”,’ he announced, ‘you have to be cold and wet for two hours without once complaining.’
‘Oh God no,’ I’d said, ‘anything but that.’
We trudged along the beach. ‘It’s dead low tide,’ Rory shouted over his shoulder. ‘Perfect timing.’ He turned and walked backwards, leaning against the wind.
‘This can’t be legal,’ Dwight muttered. He looked apprehensively down the length of the deserted beach. Dwight was strictly a dry-dock boy, viewing the sea like some sixteenth-century Bruegel painting, dark, oily and filled with all kinds of scary monsters.
‘It’s highly illegal,’ Rory said, ‘but great fun. Sure you don’t want to try?’
‘Positive,’ I said. ‘I’ll film.’
‘Make a base over there.’ Rory pointed at a small bay of rocks. ‘You’ll get some shelter. ‘Take my coat if you’re cold.’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ But holding onto the camera, my hands were stiff as baseball mitts. He draped his coat over my shoulders. ‘Keep this dry for me, would you?’ He pulled it together under my chin and I was uncomfortably aware of his touch.
‘This is what?’ I said breezily, ‘the North Sea? Famous for its oil rigs and freezing temperatures?’
‘As opposed to – say the Pacific, famous for its balmy waters and palm trees?’ Rory pulled off his boots and slung them towards me. ‘Look after these too could you?’ He rolled up his pant legs, picked up the wooden pole at the end of the net and stepped over a low breaker. He forged on as if walking fully clothed into the sea was normal and he was just running a little late for an appointment with King Canute. When the net was taut he stopped, waist high in water.
‘Wolf, you come in halfway,’ he shouted, ‘and tell Lady Bracknell over there, he’d better stay on the break-line.’
Only then did I catch sight of Dwight’s outfit glowing underneath the oilskin jacket he’d borrowed. Some sort of knickerbocker thing in garish check tweed cinched in at the knee. He saw me staring and had the grace to look faintly embarrassed.
‘My grandfather’s,’ he said defensively.
‘Oh yeah, sure they are, Smallboy.’ Wolf stepped gingerly into the soapy water. I saw the shock of the temperature hit him. Resolutely he pushed on, waves breaking below his waist. Rory motioned for him to stop. Wolf groped in his shirt pocket for a half smoked joint and jabbed it into his mouth. He got a match to it and took a long hit.
From somewhere a cloud had snuck up on us. It was now starting to rain and I had to laugh. If this was Rory’s attempt at bonding with his American brothers, it was going to backfire badly. Dwight and Wolf looked the very picture of horrified urbanites. I know my crew and let me tell you, ground cement runs in their veins. Besides, from the way he was pulling at his crotch, I guessed that Dwight’s pants were already shrinking painfully. The rain soon became relentless. Water seeped through the coat, through both sweaters I’d put on and I could feel it cold on my skin. I kept the three boys in the viewfinder as they moved forwards, parallel to the beach. Dwight was still hovering on the break-line, dolefully clutching his corner of the net.
‘They swim out into the shallows to feed,’ Rory yelled, ‘they’ll come back in when the tide turns.’ He wiped spray off his face with his shoulder. ‘When I say now, pull the net round as hard as you can.’
I ran along the water’s edge to keep up. The weather had cleared for an instant to reveal the sun, dipped low in the sky. Gallantly it tried to hang on but eventually yielded, slipping into the ocean as if the effort of suspending itself all day had finally proved too exhausting.
‘Now,’ Rory bellowed. He curled the net in a high
arc. ‘Dwight you bloody great poof … bring it in closer.’
Cautiously Dwight inched himself out to sea. A wave broke over the tops of his rubber boots. He looked over at Wolf, desperate for a little empathy, but Wolf had problems of his own. Puzzled he stared at the water. His enormous body jerked, he looked shocked, like he’d had his leg bitten off by a hammerhead but hadn’t yet taken in how serious a problem that might be.
I watched in amazement as a smile broke over his face. He hollered something then gripped the net and whooped with delight. I panned round to Dwight, waist high in water. His face was flushed with excitement. Rory, holding the two sides of the net aloft, struck out for shore. I couldn’t believe it. Laughing and shouting the three boys dragged the net in then collapsed, panting on the sand. Rory was first up. He hauled the net to safety from the advancing tide then peeled back its four sodden corners. Inside was a squirming mass of silver. He turned towards the camera and made an elaborate bow grinning from ear to ear. For a moment he was captive in my sights. He was Mandras from Captain Corelli, and his catch was for me and me alone. I found myself looking at him much longer than the image warranted, protected by the camera’s clinical lack of emotion. With his fisherman’s jumper, bare legs underneath rolled-up trousers and his black hair blowing in the wind, he looked twelve years old. I wanted to pull the camera down to film the fish but I couldn’t. I was held by Rory’s face and then it struck me why. I felt my heart beat. It was just the one thud, but it was loud enough to make me freeze-frame the image in my head. There was nothing in his face, nothing except pure joy of the moment.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They don’t mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
– Philip Larkin
daniel
During the next break in filming when Maggie heads to Paris, Rory drives to Bevan. In the hall he breathes in the musty smell of the house and knots his scarf round the throat of the Chinese Buddha on the stone table. It’s Friday evening so as he pushes through the swing doors to the kitchen it occurs to him that this week he could have been on that dig in Turkey. He could be squatting on his haunches and feeling the hot sand sifting through his fingers. He could even be flirting with that lithesome interpreter with the buck teeth from Fez – or maybe he could have talked Maggie into blowing out whatever business she was supposed to be taking care of and dragged her along with him …