Trading Futures

by Jim Powell

  The words of a Phil Ochs song float towards me from the house. Some long forgotten song of yesterday. A song whose time has now come. A song that talks of warm memories of younger years. A song that speaks of changes.

  ‘How are you feeling, Matthew?’

  ‘Good,’ I say. ‘Really good. Thanks for looking after me.’

  ‘It was nothing.’

  ‘It wasn’t nothing, Anna. It was a lot.’

  ‘You’d have done the same for me.’

  ‘Would I ever need to?’

  ‘I hope not. Not now. Once, yes. Once I was in a very similar place to you.’

  ‘So you knew what to do.’

  ‘No,’ says Anna. ‘I knew what not to do.’

  ‘I think I got confused when you weren’t here last night. Where were you?’

  ‘I help out with a local charity. That’s where I was. And on Saturday too. Normally the hours are regular. From time to time there’s an emergency and there were two this weekend. Well, one in fact, but it came twice.’

  ‘And then there was me.’

  ‘And then there was you, yes.’

  ‘I think it’s fantastic,’ I say, ‘doing something like that. I wish I did something like that.’

  ‘Why don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a bit late now.’

  ‘No it isn’t. You’ve got plenty of time. What else are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Good question,’ I say.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know. I need time to think about things. I can’t seem to help myself at the moment, so I don’t see that I could help other people.’

  ‘That might be the best way of helping yourself,’ says Anna.

  ‘Is that why you decided to do it?’ I ask. ‘Was it what had happened to you?’

  ‘Not really. I think you could say it was a recognition of limitations. Like you, I once had a long list of everything I wanted to change. Some time around fifty, it occurred to me that not only hadn’t I changed anything, but I never would. Some things had changed of their own accord, a bit, no thanks to me. I hadn’t made any difference at all.

  ‘I began to wonder how I could make a difference, and it came down to small things. It came down to forgetting about the world, forgetting about grand schemes and causes, and considering how I lived each day. The only thing we can control is how we behave towards other people, so we might as well try and get that right.’ She pauses. ‘Did you really tell Judy you were leaving her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By telephone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We sit for a while, not saying anything.

  ‘Can I have another glass of wine?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘One more?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have let you have the first, Matthew. No more.’

  We sit for another while, not saying anything.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asks Anna.

  ‘Can I stay here?’

  ‘No, Matthew. Sorry. You can stay tonight. Tomorrow, I will put you on a train to London.’

  ‘I don’t have any appointments in London. Besides, you’ve forgotten that my car is here.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ says Anna. ‘I think the train would be better.’

  ‘Are we going to sleep together tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘Matthew, when you told your wife you were leaving, had you thought about it, or was it a spur of the moment decision?’

  ‘Both,’ I say.

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Both. I can’t explain. It was both.’

  ‘The bit of you that thought about it. What was that bit going to do next?’

  ‘That bit wanted to convalesce here,’ I say, ‘like a mutilé de guerre with his own seat on the Metro. I like it here. I don’t mean here here, I mean the whole area. It feels very peaceful. I want to stay here. I think it suits me.’

  ‘So you don’t want to go back to Judy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘What’s wise?’

  ‘Looking after yourself is wise,’ says Anna. ‘As for the future of your marriage, I couldn’t begin to say.’

  ‘You could look after me.’

  ‘No, Matthew.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Even if I was prepared to, I don’t think it would be a good idea, for you or for me. Somehow I’ve got bound up with everything else that’s going on in your head. I don’t know what, and I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but I have. I don’t want to be bound up with it. I think you need to separate these things out in your mind, whatever they are, and deal with them one by one. And if you want my advice, which you don’t, I think you need to start with your wife and your family. After that, perhaps other things will become clearer.’

  ‘Everything seems perfectly clear now,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘You’re not fine, Matthew. You’re ill. You think you’re fine only because you’re back on the pills.’

  ‘I am not ill.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘This is like ringing disconnected bells on the doorways of the dead.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a line from a poem.’

  ‘Strange,’ says Anna. She looks puzzled. Then she gets up. ‘Just a moment.’

  Anna goes into the cottage. I can’t imagine what she’s doing. Perhaps she’s gone to get another bottle of wine. After a few minutes, she comes back to the lawn with a sheet of paper in her hand.

  ‘I thought so. I thought the line sounded familiar. I’ve got that poem.’

  She takes a sip of wine, looks at me, and starts reading by the last light of the day.

  ‘We are the listless ones,’ she says, ‘who dwell

  this side of paradise:

  entangled for ever in dreams that exist

  to be for ever unfulfilled.’

  Anna has my poem! The one I sent her in the autumn of ’67! She has kept it all these years! She has remembered it!

  ‘People are watched on street corners,

  going happily to their own particular nowheres,

  knowing nothing of what we feel,

  as we ride alone on wild horses of the imagination

  into an endless desert . . . .’

  ‘Stop!’ I say. ‘I know how it goes. I would never have guessed that you still had it.’

  ‘Funny the things one keeps,’ says Anna. ‘I saw it in a university magazine years ago. A friend had it. I copied it out.’

  ‘I had forgotten it was published,’ I say. ‘I must have sent it to one of the student papers.’

  She looks at me doubtfully.

  ‘It’s my poem, Anna! I wrote it!’

  She seems confused, as if she doesn’t know whether to believe me, as if uncertain whether yesterday’s insanity has returned, or has never entirely dissipated.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘So you must have gone to Southampton,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘No you didn’t.’

  She looks at me strangely again. ‘Yes I did. What an odd thing to say, Matthew. I should know where I went to university.’

  ‘You were going to Exeter.’

  ‘When was I going to Exeter?’

  ‘It’s what you told me on Blackdown, that afternoon in 1967. That you were going to Exeter.’

  I wonder now if I’ve remembered correctly. I must have done. I couldn’t possibly have forgotten if Anna had said she was also going to Southampton.

  ‘What afternoon on Blackdown? I wasn’t in Somerset in ’67.’

  ‘Not this Blackdown. The other Blackdown. The Surrey Blackdown.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘It’s my fault, Anna. It’s all my fault. I should have mentioned it earlier. I thought it’d be fun
to go on pretending.’

  ‘Pretending what?’

  ‘Pretending that we’d forgotten that we knew each other, back in ’67.You were Anna Purdue then, of course. That July, when I came down to Lurgashall, where you lived, and Simon was playing cricket – do you remember Simon? – and we went off in my parents’ Austin and spent the afternoon lying on Blackdown Hill, your special place. Lying on the hill and talking to each other.’

  She continues to look puzzled.

  ‘You’ve forgotten. I can see you’ve forgotten. That’s all right. That’s quite understandable. Why should you remember? It was only one afternoon, a long time ago. Anyway, that’s when I fell in love with you, and you asked me to come to France with you the following week and I couldn’t, and I was incredibly sorry about that, because I really wanted to come, but I didn’t have any money. I thought it wouldn’t matter because we’d be sure to see lots more of each other, but you never returned my phone calls, so I didn’t see you again. Until Tate Modern.’

  Anna gets up, moves her deckchair so that she is now facing me. She fills her wine glass and pours a small amount into mine. I am breathing quite heavily.

  ‘Matthew, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.’

  ‘If you say so, Anna.’

  ‘Matthew, listen to me, please. Don’t say anything. Just listen.’ She leans towards me, touching my arm. ‘My name is Anna Halfyard and always has been. I’ve never lived in Lurgashall, wherever that is, and I don’t know any other Blackdown. I didn’t go to France in 1967; I went to Italy. I didn’t go to Exeter; I went to Southampton. I don’t remember meeting you there. They were difficult years, so I may have done. I’m not the person you think I am. I’m sorry. I would like to be, for your sake. But I’m not. Do you understand that?’

  I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything. I stare straight ahead of me, unblinking, unseeing. I’m not sure whether I believe her. She may be saying these things to get rid of me. There seems to be a choice. Either I believe myself or I believe Anna. Or perhaps she has forgotten certain things, quite a lot of things. Or perhaps I have.

  In a contemporaneous universe, a phantom with the assumed name of Anna is saying something about going indoors to make supper. I rise from the deckchair, walk steadily to my car, start the engine, drive off. The phantom is waving frantically in the rear-view mirror.

  13

  In some beginning, too long ago for me to remember, the larva that was to become me pupated and took form. Chrysalis became imago. Imago became image, became self-image. A hybrid insect has half flown and half crawled through these years, blessed with the imagination to soar, cursed with puny wings. I want now to retract my legs like the wheels of a Jumbo jet, to fold my wings like summer clothes put away for winter. I want to roll my shell into a ball, a tight ball of soft material with an encasement of goo, and pretend that I am again the larva I once was and to become it again. I want to be a globule that someone will step on without noticing.

  I’m on the road again. Not the A303. My car is on the road to Frome. Other cars pass it and their drivers are saying, ‘That car is going to Frome.’ They’re not saying that, of course. Other drivers couldn’t care less where this car is going, their eyes only on the car ahead and the prospects for overtaking. This car is going its own way. This driver is going somewhere, wherever somewhere is, on a road that leads to, well, anywhere. This driver is trying to select a route in the dark, not knowing his destination. This driver is dazzled by the bright lights of those who come towards him.

  I couldn’t remember what had happened to my bottle of whisky, so I stopped at an off-licence for another one. I had decided not to, but the imperative was too great. For many miles I wrestled with an overpowering desire for whisky. When I succumbed, I found that I no longer wanted it. The bottle sits beside me on the passenger seat, unopened, making small talk.

  There is no hurry. I have the luxury of time and the luxury of money, the two things I once most wanted. I could drive for a hundred years and still have money to pay for the fuel. I could decide this instant that I will drive to Mongolia and do it. No one is stopping me. There is always more road. Always one more town to go to. Always another tank of petrol to get you there.

  I’ve been thinking of a slim blonde girl, anorexic almost, with whom I had a one-night stand in my first year at university, trying to remember if her name was Anna too. I think it may have been. I can’t be sure because I screwed a lot of slim blonde girls then. I can’t remember the names of any of them. The only reason I think that one of them might have been called Anna is the coincidence of the name. Maybe that is why I screwed her in the first place, if I did. It’s the coincidence I remember, not the girl. The song, not the singer.

  Not that it matters now. I’m not going back to the Blackdown Hills. I’m done with Anna. She probably hopes that she’s done with me. I don’t know how our brains work, or our hearts, or if they work at all in any competent manner. I fancied the phantom Anna as much as the real Anna. I enjoyed her company just as much, found her just as stimulating. Whatever she thinks of me, it’s not impossible that I could work myself back into her favour as a neighbour, not impossible that a year or two of certifiable sanity might reinstate me. But I’m not interested. She’s a counterfeit and that’s the end of the matter. I was looking for someone else.

  I think I believe her, on the whole. I think she was probably telling the truth. In that case, I no longer believe myself. I’m not sure that I ever did.

  The fact that this Anna is a fake means that the real Anna probably exists somewhere. I expect I could track her down if I wanted to. I’ve probably always been able to track her down, come to think of it. For some reason, I haven’t. But I think I’ve had enough of chasing Annas for the moment.

  I might end up going back to Judy. The direction in which the car has chosen to point itself is not inconsistent with Barnet as a destination. Nor is it inconsistent with many other destinations.

  I’m going to turn off here. Here? Yes, here. This is the road I want. This is the one.

  I wonder what Judy’s doing now. I expect she’s bearing up. People like Judy always bear up. It’s a useful qualification, better than a bad degree from Southampton University. Judy has what is best described as phlegm, one of the four vital humours of ancient medicine: black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. It makes me think of coughing up mucus, which is perhaps why I have such a low regard for it. I’m more of a bile person, myself.

  I wonder if Judy has told the children. You’d think she has, not out of a need for sympathy, but to keep control of the narrative. That’s all anyone does these days. It doesn’t matter how crap the story, as long as you control the narrative. Could anything be more pathetic than spinning our own lives to ourselves? If Judy thinks I’m coming back, she may decide to say nothing for a while. She probably does think I’m coming back. She may be right.

  This is not my favourite road. My brother died on it, what, nearly forty years ago. I’ll be reaching the place in a mile or two. I’ll recognize it as soon as I see it. I expect the tree is still there. I’ll recognize the place even if it isn’t. The tree will be taller now, of course. It wasn’t that big at the time. I remember being surprised it was still standing after the crash. I put flowers by it. People didn’t do that then, but I did. My dad said it was morbid. He cried when I did it, all the same.

  We stood by the tree, my dad and mum and me, crying, trying to understand how it had happened. Alan was on his own, late at night, no seat belt. They weren’t compulsory then. The weather had been fine. No other car was involved. No one witnessed the crash. There were no skid marks on the road. He hadn’t been drinking. They examined the car and said there was nothing wrong with the brakes. He must have nodded off, Dad said, ploughed off the road at the bend, into the tree. The police didn’t contradict that explanation. It became the accepted truth.

  Alan was three years older than me. When I was about nineteen, three years before he
died, he asked me if I’d ever felt like killing myself. It must have been around the time that I met Anna. Suicide was the last thing on my mind at the time. I had a future at the time.

  I said no, I hadn’t.

  ‘I have,’ said Alan. ‘I think about it often.’

  We talked about it for quite a long time. He had it all worked out. There was nothing unhappy about his life, nothing especially unhappy, nothing that didn’t happen to anyone at some time or other. He knew already that life itself was unhappy. He was most worried about how Dad and Mum would feel about it. He didn’t want them thinking it was their fault. It wasn’t their fault, he said. It had nothing to do with them. It was him and how he was. Life and how it was. He said he would make it look like an accident.

  I didn’t tell anyone at the time. Alan didn’t swear me to secrecy, so I could have done. I thought about telling Mum and Dad. There wasn’t anyone else to tell that might do any good. I couldn’t, not at nineteen. I couldn’t tell my mum and dad that my brother was planning to top himself. Nothing happened for a long while after that. We were both wrapped up in our own lives. I can’t say I forgot the conversation. I suppose I thought of it as being Alan’s state of mind at one particular moment, an existential crisis that came and went. Until the ‘accident’.

  I still didn’t mention it to Mum and Dad when it happened, or later. What was the point? It could have been an accident. I didn’t know that it wasn’t. I still don’t know. There is no proven connection between the event and a conversation three years earlier.

  I sometimes wonder if they had any inkling. I don’t think they did. And I wonder whether, if my own children felt like Alan did, I would have an inkling either. Probably not. I can tell if they seem to be happy or sad. That’s about it. I’ve never talked to them much about their feelings. Judy does. At least, I imagine she does. I expect Judy would know if they were feeling really low, or at least have some instinct about it. I worry that these things are hereditary.

  This is the place. I’ll pull in here for a while. It hasn’t changed much. The tree is still standing. There are one or two flowers growing at the foot of the trunk. I wonder if they could have seeded from the ones I left in 1970. I unscrew the cap of the whisky bottle and take a long, long drink.