My Life With Eva

by Alex Barr

  Wayne smiled. “Guess you about kept up with inflation.” They tried to fix his smile in their minds.

  “Home,” Bernard told himself. “Not abroad, home.”

  The big black taxi moved quietly through grey light. It was like being under the sea, Rosalind thought. The bare plane trees left a disturbing amount of sky. They didn’t arch over to form a vault like the trees in their street in Kansas. The taxi turned onto the road where Terry lived.

  “I know this road,” Bernard told her, surprised. “I used to come this way to school. There were no trees then.”

  The taxi stopped. Rosalind peered out. So this was Manchester.

  “I even remember this house,” he said.

  He’d walked past it day after day. First in new cap and blazer. Later, hoping to avoid the searching eyes of prefects, smoking Woodbines to calm exam nerves. This roof had been here then, with its lozenge pattern of lighter coloured slates. As well as this gable with scalloped barge-boards. Waiting years and years for his brother to buy it. But houses didn’t wait, did they? Houses didn’t know there was a future.

  Terry opened the door. “Well.”

  He was shiny-bald. Rosalind hardly recognised him. But of course, she hadn’t seen him since he married Jill, well before Gulf War I. Whereas Bernard had seen him a year before Gulf War II, at their father’s funeral in Abergele. By that time he was thinning. He shook Bernard’s hand crisply and briefly, a business handshake. When Rosalind hugged him hard he looked embarrassed.

  “Come along in.”

  But there was a great deal in the way: wooden gate, iron gate, porch door, front door, hall furniture, living-room door. Their suitcases came to rest looking forlorn, Bernard thought, after the bumps and scrapes.

  “So,” said Terry, with a round Mancunian ‘o’. He looked at them briefly, then at the room, as if trying to guess how it seemed to them.

  “So here we are,” said Bernard. “How’s Jill, Terry?”

  “Off on holiday.”

  Bernard and Rosalind sank into unfamiliar chairs while Terry made a pot of tea. A young woman in Lycra leggings with short blonde hair came in. An au pair, perhaps.

  “Oh, hiya,” she said, and rummaged in a pile of magazines. Rosalind suddenly recognised her profile. It was their niece Angela. She waited for her to find what she was looking for, then hug them and ask, ‘What was it like in the States?’

  “Well, see you.” Angela went out with a mail order catalogue. It was Terry, when he brought the tea, who asked the question. Bernard and Rosalind looked at each another. Where could they start?

  Rosalind began, “Different from here, for sure. I’ve already noticed several differences.” She paused, about to begin the list, and was saying, “One is—” when Terry cut in.

  “These madmen. These militias. Sounds like you got out just in time.”

  Rosalind looked puzzled. They didn’t know any militia members. A fellow in Mulvane drove a Humvee, but he was a loner, unconnected.

  “Of course,” Terry grinned, “you were into uniforms, Bernard.”

  “What?”

  “In your business.”

  “Not uniforms, Terry. Work wear. Contract hire of work wear.”

  Terry smiled broadly. “Do workers in the States really have their name on their overalls? On a little embroidered badge with Dave or Sue?”

  “Of course.”

  Terry’s face turned pink with amusement. They realised he was laughing silently. He laughed for a long time. They joined in politely, briefly.

  In return for two months’ food and lodging, Bernard was to help Terry in his electrical repair business. That had been arranged by letter. ‘Further ideas when you get here.’ Bernard thought this referred to a possible partnership, but as days went by and they fell into a routine Terry seemed to feel no need for discussion. When he talked it was to complain about the council, the VAT, or customers with delusions about prices.

  By the second week Bernard was agitated. The heavy wire screens on the windows made him feel caged. The radio channel Terry favoured played songs he’d known in his youth. It was as if for forty years nothing had happened. As if he’d never left Manchester.

  “Terry,” he said suddenly halfway through a slack morning. “This is your decision, okay? But if there’s some way I can fit in permanently, into this organisation I mean, tell me.”

  Terry didn’t look up and nod and say, “Sure, Bernard, I’ll think about it.” He just scowled at the rusted terminals on a solenoid he was fixing. “Shit,” he said.

  After a moment Bernard added, “If there’s anything I can do.”

  “You name it,” Terry said dully, still not looking up.

  “So, the scenes of your youth,” said Rosalind.

  He was showing her the playground in his old primary school. It was hard to believe so much had happened in that small hard space: feuds and alliances, fights and friendships, games of ‘stag’ and five-stones. Hard to believe that, apart from getting smaller, it hadn’t changed. They leaned their elbows on the green railings that had once loomed above Bernard like the walls of Jericho.

  They walked round to the chip shop where he’d first set eyes on his first girl-friend. The girl herself had married and taken a surname he didn’t know. Amazing: it was still a chip shop with white cracked tiles and brown plastic vinegar-shakers. In a third of a century nothing had been lost – except a sense of anticipation.

  Rosalind felt she couldn’t breathe. So these urban crannies were Bernard and Terry’s patrimony. She herself had been brought up on different farms all over the South, with aunts and uncles, while her parents built and sold – or tried to sell – pipe organs to fairgrounds. She’d spun round in sunlit fields of barley-stubble till she fell down. She loved the dizziness, the confusion of up and down, the way the earth fitted against her back as if she were the one supporting it.

  “Show me the hills,” she said. “A stone circle if there is one.”

  She’d met and married Bernard in Southampton. Till now, all she’d seen of the North was Terry and Jill’s wedding in Wilmslow. They hired a car, even though they thought it an extravagance, and set out for Arbor Low. They drove down the A6 through Stockport. In Hazel Grove they came to a standstill, then crawled at slower than walking pace. Bernard beat his hands on the wheel.

  “Goddamn! What’s all this traffic? What’s happening today?”

  “Maybe it’s always this bad.”

  “You could drive to the hills in half an hour. What’s gone wrong?”

  “Relax, Bernie, there’s no hurry.”

  But the tiny car oppressed him. The traffic was packed impossibly tight, the lanes were too narrow. The truck in his mirror was too close. Each time the traffic ahead moved on a yard or two, it roared impatiently and jerked forward. Bernard began to delay moving on, leaving a long gap ahead. The truck hooted. Bernard left even longer gaps. The truck pulled sharply into the inside lane, to aggrieved hooting from other traffic, and roared past.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Stay calm.”

  He drove on, steeling himself to the ridiculous fits and starts, holding back the things he wanted to say. He looked for a King’s X or an Uncle John’s where they could pull in and have coffee. Where they could look across a booth at each other, where he could say, “Who are these people, where are they all going? And why in cars? I thought in England people still walked or cycled.” Where he could say, “I’m scared, Roz, what are we doing here? What am I doing with my life?” But there was nowhere like that here, only the odd small café straight onto the pavement, with no conceivable way of stopping outside. He was carried on in a slow tide of vehicles.

  Out in the hills the road became dual carriageway. This was new. Bernard thought he recognised farms and hidden valleys he’d once seen at the mid-point of long walks, miles from a road. He slowed to look. It was hard to tell. He stopped. Traffic blared and swerved past him.

  “Bastards!”

  “I th
ink that sign means don’t stop.”

  It was an X in bleached-out red on a blue disc.

  “It means Mac Fisheries,” Bernard told her.

  “What?”

  “When I was a kid there was a Mac Fisheries in every high street. White X on a blue disc with four white fish.”

  “There are no fish on that one, Bernie.”

  “No, the seas have been trawled to death.”

  Rosalind looked at him coldly. “I want to go home.”

  “Home?”

  “You know what I mean. Home is wherever I’m staying.”

  Bernard sat unable to move. She got out, went round, and opened the driver’s door. Cars flashed and hooted. She prodded him and he moved across automatically, as he did if he was half asleep when she came to bed.

  Rosalind found work, making phone calls for a bank to explain a new savings scheme. The call centre had a thick atmosphere of anxiety and a fast turnover of staff, but it would do for now. Bernard stopped trying to discuss the future with Terry. He forced himself to go through the local paper, passing ‘Brownies take to the stage’ and ‘Off-licence knife attack’ to reach ‘Business Opportunities’. There he read ‘This is what you’ve been looking for’. The advert was signed Ken.

  Ken lived in a brick duplex – no, Bernard corrected himself, a brick semi. He was small and intense, with liquid eyes and a goatee beard. Every surface was piled with papers. The phone kept ringing. Business seemed to be good.

  “So you’ve been in the States? Useful experience.”

  Bernard couldn’t pin down Ken’s faint accent. Australia? Birmingham? He wondered what Wayne was doing right now. Maybe this very thing. The old partnership had compressed to the nugget experience, like a forest crushed into coal.

  “Business is business, Bernard. Whether it’s work clothes or these little critters.” He handed Bernard a lump of metal. “They go on fuel lines and save fuel. You can read all the science in this leaflet, but let me tell you, they work. Figures prove it.”

  Bernard hefted the thing and turned it over. It was stove-enamelled a nice daffodil yellow. He put it down and studied the papers. There were testimonials from well-known firms, saying how fast they’d recouped their capital investments. He could feel Ken’s eyes on his face, trying to construe his thoughts.

  “But people are so hard to convince,” Ken went on. “Suspicious. That’s the bugger of it. And I need good people.”

  Bernard picked the thing up again. It was solid, for sure.

  “I need time to think.”

  “Of course you do, Bernard. You must feel unsettled, just back in the UK. Tell me, do Native Americans really hug trees when they feel unhappy, or is that an urban myth?”

  Bernard stared. He thought of young Cherokees, shown round the firm on work experience. How dazed they’d looked, as if their souls were off visiting elsewhere. He thought of the sullen Navaho help in South-western diners.

  “Never heard that, Ken.”

  “Well Bernard, maybe you should try it.”

  Bernard laughed. The laugh relaxed him. He drank the coffee Ken had made and suddenly felt fine. Maybe this unlikely product was okay. Ken seemed okay. It didn’t matter about his Nowhere accent, that was just prejudice. Wherever he was from, he’d chosen Manchester. So it would be okay for Bernard and Rosalind to live here.

  “So where would I hug a tree, Ken? Chorlton Park?”

  Ken pulled a face. “Nowhere here, Bernard. Haven’t you felt it?”

  “Felt what?”

  “That the energy is blocked.”

  Ken looked at him intently, eyebrows raised, as if to say ‘Significant moment – trust being established.’

  “So why do you live here?”

  Bernard was aware that his voice was sharper and higher.

  “Good place to do business. Fortunately I have a little retreat in Cornwall. I go when I can.” A long pause. “Convinced yet?”

  In the States Bernard would have said, “No Ken, I’m not.” Now he just looked away and shrugged.

  Rosalind said slowly, “Perhaps it was a mistake.”

  “What?”

  “Coming here.”

  Bernard said angrily across the dining table, “How can you say that? You think we can just pack up and go somewhere else? Where? How do we decide where? Drive round the country like tourists? How long will our stash of money last at that rate?”

  Rosalind looked outside. In front of the clouds a 747 strained upwards with a noise like an over-revved motor-bike. In the kitchen Terry, washing up, coughed. From Angela’s room came a faint thump of music.

  Bernard sighed. “We should have known it would be like this. We should have psyched ourselves up for it.”

  A pause.

  “I wanted to see you in your old home,” Rosalind said. “To catch some of that belonging second hand. It’s what all my life I thought I’d missed. But maybe it isn’t something real.”

  He didn’t know whether she meant it or was just being provocative, advertising herself in some way. He thought about the playground again, and suddenly longed for the certainties of childhood. The girls who were mysterious and unsullied. The boys you could be angry with and wrestle, then friendly with again. The games of sheriffs and outlaws you never doubted were worthwhile.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Maybe there’s no such thing as belonging any more.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because …” She couldn’t explain. Because of technology? Fashion? Pollution? Globalisation? No, there was something else underneath it all, something she couldn’t get at. “Because everything is up for grabs.”

  “What does that mean, Roz? What the fuck does that mean?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. It wasn’t exactly what I meant.” She thought, There’s no exploring together any more, no groping in the dark and finding a friendly hand.

  Bernard said, “Well if you can’t say what you mean, shut up. And stop casting gloom. Over there you got away with casting gloom because people were so upbeat, but don’t do it here, right?”

  She looked through the window angrily. The sky was still ruled into lines with contrails. The sound of dishwashing had stopped, apart from a plate being moved carefully now and then.

  He went on, “And stop saying it was a mistake to come here. I do belong. So—”

  “For God’s sake get off my back!” Now it was too late, anger was in her head like rods. “‘Stop saying, stop saying.’ If you hadn’t kept saying ‘stop saying’ you might have heard my warnings, the business might not have failed.”

  A terrible silence. Not a plate to be heard. Angela’s music repeated the same pleading phrase. Bernard picked up a mug to throw on the floor, then realised it wasn’t his. And the floor was carpet, not ceramic tiles like they’d had in Kansas, so it wouldn’t have smashed anyway.

  He went to Angela’s bedroom. The door was open, she was sitting on the bed reading Hello! magazine. He knocked and walked in but she didn’t hear him. When she saw him she jumped up and backed away. Her eyes slid all round the room. Bernard turned off the music.

  “Will you lend me your bike?”

  “What? I don’t know.”

  “Just say yes or no, Angela.”

  “I suppose.”

  Which way? The Cathedral, perhaps, built on a rock outcrop, even though streets had risen around it and changed the topography. The day was damp and not cold, not like winter – or any other season. He cycled past Manchester City football ground. A huge new stand in some pale metal soaked up the pale grey of the sky.

  The surrounding streets of terraced houses echoed with isolated shouts. Women with thin white legs hurried along with pushchairs, as if the street wasn’t where they wanted to be. Young men laughed, clustered round cars, hands cupping cigarettes. Cars crawled by throbbing with music from open windows. Bernard had once walked down this street with his father, and an old woman had said, ‘Here y’are love,’ and given him a mint impe
rial.

  He cycled on. Yes, it had changed – for the better, he decided. Roz was wrong – he still felt waves of anger against her – a place could change and you could still belong. This neighbourhood had been a backwater, now it was a miniature Bronx or South Central L.A. Richly diverse, and—

  He was going to be killed. Then he wasn’t. He was just half off his bike, his heart like ice, with the front of a car six inches away. It had shot out from a side road without warning and halted with a terrifying squeal.

  He wrenched the bike sideways and came alongside the driver’s door. His legs were trembling.

  “Idiot! Jerk! Moron!”

  A youngish man swore back at him in some strange rhythmical code of unrecognisable words. Bernard rode on. The exercise calmed him. But when he stopped at a red light it occurred to him that the man might not take all that lying down. And indeed two or three cars behind was the roar of a gunned engine.

  The lights changed, he rode on slowly, apprehensively. Before he could look round he felt the slipstream as the car shot past a few inches from him. It squealed to a halt ahead, at an angle to the pavement. There was something appalling about that angle.

  Bernard looked for an escape route. He saw a passage between backyards, paved with setts, littered with used nappies and plastic bags. He took it. Brick walls went by in a blur. The fear gave him a feeling of elation. But this is my home, he thought, Manchester not L.A. This shouldn’t happen.

  He shot across the next street, looking out for the car. No sign—but he could imagine it about to squeal round the corner, right down on its offside springs. He pedalled into the passage opposite, slowing, his legs tiring.

  It was like the way he once walked to school. As a small child he thought Manchester was formed of passages, like Venice with its canals, the air heavy and thick with smells from breweries and old men’s pipes. Number One Passage, Number Two Passage, all the way up (he thought then) to Number One Million Passage. They were the heart of everything he’d belonged to. What number was this one? He didn’t dare slow to look. What number would he die in?

  He came out onto another street, quiet, without traffic, and turned left. Then right onto Moss Lane East. A sign said Universities. So there were two now. And a new cycle route along the edge of Whitworth Park. He took it. He was safe.