by Tim Connolly
Ellis dragged himself inside and told Mafi that he was going out with friends and would be back at eleven o’clock. He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t know where to go. All that mattered to him was that he was not in the cottage when his dad got home and that he arrived back no earlier than eleven.
He wandered towards Sedgewick’s land at Dale Farm from the back fields above Wickhurst lane, avoiding the roads in case his dad was driving back into the village. Sedgewick, who was high up in the council, had sold a meadow to a developer who started to build a small, highly unpopular cul-de-sac of commuter houses there. There was a rumour in the village that every time the builders started to work there the site was vandalised, but Ellis and Tim hadn’t been to investigate. Now, Ellis climbed the site fence and found the burnt-out shell of an excavator and footings that had been set about with a sledgehammer. Some weeds and crops were coming up through the concrete.
He walked slowly out of the valley to the bridge at Hubbards Hill. He sat beneath it, watching the traffic on the bypass. When Harry Lyle, the son of the people who owned the post office, ran away from home, this is where they found him, huddled up beneath the concrete buttresses. Most children in the village ended up here at some point in their life, watching the traffic, having their first grope, avoiding PC Bachelor, running away from home or just feeling bored. Ellis had spent some time hiding here after he shot Des Payne, and now he was back again. He watched the cars and guessed at the time. He tried to calculate how long he’d been gone, how long it had taken him to cross Dale Farm and how long he had been sitting here. Another half-hour here would probably do it, he decided, and then a slow walk home. That should make it eleven o’clock.
In a rare lull in the traffic he heard a whimpering from nearby. He looked around but could see nothing. He heard it again, this time stronger and, he realised, from further away than he had thought. He looked across the road and as a fresh wave of traffic stole the silence back he saw, tucked under the bridge, Tim Wickham and Chloe Purcell, their arms and legs wrapped round each other. They shared kisses, more tender than the ones Chrissie and James had shared. Her eyes were closed and her face wore a depth of passion Ellis could never have imagined her capable of. He felt his legs buckling as he got to his feet and hurried away without being seen.
He was disgusted at himself. He cursed his naivety. He was sick of being the viewer. Sick of watching. Sick of wondering. Angry at never knowing.
He had always felt that of all the girls he knew, Chloe Purcell was the plainest and most quiet. He had presumed he would end up with her because she was so plain and he was so useless. And, despite himself, he’d always thought she liked him. She had once said she wanted to fly away with him, after all. Now, presumably, Chloe and Tim would laugh at how Ellis had gone to a barn dance with her and not spoken a word or made a move.
No one, he told himself, ever tells you what’s really going on. I have to do my own thing and have my own secrets, otherwise I’m just a baby. One day I’ll show them. I’ll be gone. I’ll meet people who don’t know me and I’ll be different with them. I’ll have lots of friends and I’ll get letters and phone calls. My girlfriend will be a prettier version of Chloe and she’ll get up out of bed in the mornings and walk naked to the kitchen and make us tea and bring it back to bed.
But as he marched furiously back into the village, another part of him said, “That won’t ever happen to you.”
He found Mafi in her kitchen. She asked him if wanted a cup of tea.
“Are you having one?” Ellis asked resentfully.
“Yes.”
“Yes, please, then.”
He moped into Mafi’s living room and threw himself down on to the armchair his dad usually sat in. He looked at the ship’s clock that a great-uncle he had never known brought back from his voyages. It was only half past nine.
“Bollocks,” he muttered. “Fucking virginal tatty bollocks.”
He sighed dramatically and listened to the ticking of the ship’s clock take over the room.
“Can’t be that bad …” Denny’s voice came from behind Ellis’s head.
Surprised, Ellis looked round and saw his dad standing at the window, smoking a cigarette and watching the night sky.
“I didn’t see you.”
“I guessed that.” Denny laughed under his breath and laid his hand on Ellis’s shoulder as he passed him and took a seat in the corner of the room. Between his thumb and forefinger, he played with the length of wire Tim had left protruding from the lock of Denny’s drawer.
“Oh …” Ellis sighed, involuntarily, when he saw it.
They sat in silence for a while until Denny said, “I’m not angry with you, Ellis,” and smiled cautiously.
“Well, I sort of wish you were.”
“Why?”
“Then I could get angry too.”
“I don’t want either of us to be angry. There’s no need, no need at all. But some things of mine are not for sharing. It’s private, Ellis. It’s very private.”
Ellis stared at the floor. “Now I am angry,” he said. “Private …” He muttered the word bitterly. “There’s nothing I hate more than bloody private. Everything is private. I’m not allowed to know anything.”
“We have a good life, Ellis, everything we need.”
Ellis felt unable to breathe and rose to his feet.
“That’s a stupid thing to say to me,” he said, and walked out.
Tim left school without finishing and went to work full time for Reardon. Chloe spent every weekend at Longspring. She remained quiet and plain and incapable of laughter, but the smile she smiled where others would laugh still overwhelmed Ellis.
Ellis kept himself to himself. He stayed in the cottage and returned to Treasure Island, surprised that no younger boys had made it their own. Once, he set out for the goat-lady’s house but turned back halfway.
He read National Geographic and imagined a score of different lives for himself, his favourite being the one in which he was a world renowned, hugely respected and sexually sought-after roving farmer, an international agricultural trouble-shooter, a genius with instincts for farming in any country and climate and an ability to read the landscape that inspired the awe of those who witnessed it. He slept out under the stars, on hillsides, by riverbanks and on beaches and saw things that no one in Kent had ever seen. When he imagined this life the technical details of his genius were omitted, as was the training and experience which would be required of him to attain it. He thought purely in terms of sensory pleasures; fresh air, travel, Eden-like views, excitement, being admired, looking rugged and, of course, indulgent women.
He tried to tell Denny little, to curb his lifelong instinct to share all his unedited thoughts and ideas with his father, in the hope that this would be the start of his being a grown-up. He attempted to create an illusion of there being much that Denny didn’t know about in Ellis’s life, even though this wasn’t true. He tried to smile and laugh less with his dad too, but repeatedly found himself looking back on the day and realising he had forgotten to do so.
It’s hard, he had to admit to himself, pretending you’ve some interesting secrets when you haven’t.
In the February of 1985, winter tightened its grip on the landscape for a few more weeks and Ellis heard from Michael Finsey that Chloe Purcell was going to run a livery yard for Reardon when she left school, and that her parents were furious she wasn’t going to college. The hurt poured into Ellis. He hadn’t been to the farm since Christmas, nor had he seen Tim, a feat that Mafi rated as “quite an achievement” in a village so small. At Easter, Tim phoned and persuaded Ellis to go for a drink.
“Just the two of us,” he assured him.
In the twilight of half-drunkenness, Ellis told his friend a half-truth. “I suppose I felt a bit annoyed ’cos you were always with your girlfriend, so I decided I’d come over a bit less.”
Tim laughed. “You disappeared!” His eyes sparkled and laughter-lines cradl
ed them in optimism.
“You didn’t come looking for me,” Ellis said.
“I was in love. Girls do that. I’m sorry.”
“Anyway,” Ellis said, “that’s that sorted out.”
They left the pub with their arms round each other and drove when they shouldn’t have, through the back lanes into the Rother valley. From the top of Catt’s Hill they saw an electrical storm heading inland off the Channel. At Fairfield, they ran in great circles as curtains of rain swept across the Marsh and soaked them through. When the lightning came it lit up the flatlands, silhouetting the lonely church and the wind-bent thorn bushes. They chased after lightning bolts and goaded the thunder. And when the storm had become a silent slither of white light above the ridge, they wandered aimlessly in the darkness, catching their breath and feeling the blood race around their bodies. They drove up the lane to the turkey farm at Becket’s Bridge and parked in the Dutch barn. They slept in the car until Ellis was woken by his own shivering, shortly after five.
They were at Reardon’s by seven. Ellis stood at the highest point on the farm and surveyed his village. It felt good to be back at Longspring, but it felt different too. A few months’ absence made him feel like a visitor now. He liked the idea of being a prodigal son, to his family, but most of all to Tim, and through him to Chloe. He wanted to be missed. He wanted to be a mystery. This morning, his ambition took no more form than that. He didn’t know what to do or where to go. But he knew now that he wanted to leave and go to that fictitious place where his daily struggle to communicate and to concentrate was cured. He would return regularly to see his dad and they would meet on the Marsh often. His dad would be proud of him.
Shivering and tired, he went home, resolved to force his way out of a life that threatened to consume him with disappointment, now that Chloe loved Tim. As he waited for the bath to fill, he looked at the framed poster on Mafi’s wall of a painting called Nuit d’Eté by Winslow Homer. In it, two women dance happily together on a moonlit beach. Silhouetted against a rough, silvery sea is a cluster of onlookers. A pale blue trail of moonshine beckons the dancers towards the horizon.
Denny appeared at his son’s side, just when Ellis wanted to be alone. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much. I’m just bored.” He pressed his index finger against the picture and said, “I want evenings like this. I want to go places and see things.”
Denny sighed heavily. “It’ll happen, dear boy. But there’s no hurry. You’ve plenty of time. Please, dear boy. Please.”
Later, after Ellis had bathed and eaten porridge with golden syrup, he saw from his bedroom window that Denny was in the far corner of the orchard, sitting against an apple tree, staring at the sky. He looked scared, as unlike Denny O’Rourke as Ellis had ever seen him look. And Ellis could hear his father’s voice in his ear: “Please, dear boy. Please.”
10
Katie Morton was the first. She was neither his girlfriend nor his lover but she was the first. He met her in the spring of 1985 when his school career was petering out a year short of the finish line and Chloe’s presence on Longspring Farm had made it yet another place where he fumbled for words, doubted himself and, consequently, no longer ventured. Katie Morton lay sunbathing on the green on the day her parents moved to the village. She was tall, with tight curly black hair and braces on her teeth. When she walked, her arms were folded across her chest, like a schoolteacher. She was nineteen. What a catch it would be for Ellis to go out with a girl two years older. Lazily, and without meaning it for one minute, he told Chrissie and Bruce, his sister’s current boyfriend, that he was going to go out with the new girl.
In June, Ellis’s headmaster wrote to Denny O’Rourke questioning whether there was any point in Ellis returning to school for his final year. He enclosed a questionnaire that all the pupils in Ellis’s year had completed.
Question 6: Where would you like to be in five years’ time? Ellis’s answer: The late eighteenth century. Question 4: What would be your chosen career if you were to decide on it now? Freelance contraband smuggler, self-employed. Question 20: What single change would most directly improve the world you live in? This test stopping at question 19.
Denny heard himself chuckle. The sound reminded him of his wife and suddenly, again, the bed he was lying on was enormous. A few yards away, Ellis lay on his own bed in deeply self-critical mood. What sort of seventeen year old daydreams they are a Marsh smuggler, he berated himself. My peers are daydreaming about having sex with Joan Jett or Bananarama.
He was too restless to sleep.
Smugglers would have got a lot of sex, his inner voice continued. Although women had brown teeth in those days so it can’t have been much fun. There again, men in those days had no concept of women with white teeth and you can’t miss what you don’t know.
Yes, you can, he remembered.
Fearing his mind could implode, he slipped downstairs and poured vodka into a glass and took it to bed.
Chrissie came for the weekend and brought with her some concert tickets and many questions.
“Have you asked the new girl out yet, Ellis?”
“No, but I saw her today.”
“What, you went to her house to see her or you saw her half a mile away?”
“We walked past each other on the footpath.”
“And what did you say to her?”
“Hi Katie.”
“And what else?”
“Just ‘Hi Katie’.”
“That was it?”
“When two people walk past each other there’s only a couple of seconds of actual talking time!” Ellis protested. “You can’t fit many words in.”
“You can if you stop walking.”
“And what if she doesn’t stop when I stop? I’ll be left standing there, looking like an idiot!”
“Ellis! What on earth – what on God’s earth! – makes you think that Katie Morton would walk past you if you stopped and said hello?”
Ellis didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry. I come with a plan,” his sister continued.
“Please don’t humiliate me in front of her,” Ellis said. “I have to live in this village, you know.”
“Well, you’re seventeen so that’s not strictly true.”
She handed him two tickets. “Bruce got hold of these for you.”
Ellis read them: Finsbury Park Rainbow – Friday 11 June 1985 – Whitesnake plus support band.
The Whitesnake album Bruce had taped for Ellis was his current favourite, a fact he hid from his contemporaries at school, who loathed hard rock. Many of them had started going to concerts in London. Their treks to the Astoria or the Brixton Academy were the stuff of legend in Ellis’s mind. How on earth, he wondered, did they know how to use the Underground system? How did they know where to go to find their seat when they got to the venues? How did they get tickets in the first place? How had any of them returned from London with their lives?
“What have these tickets got to do with anything?” he asked, dreading the answer.
“You’re taking her to the gig,” Chrissie said.
“Who?”
“Mother Teresa of Calcutta! Katie Morton, you nitwit.”
Ten minutes later, Ellis was out of excuses and Chrissie had got Katie’s number from the operator and marched Ellis upstairs to the privacy of the phone in Denny’s bedroom. Now, Ellis found a cold sweat upon him as Katie Morton herself answered the phone.
“Hello, it’s Ellis here, from down the lane.”
“Hello Ellis from down the lane.”
“Hello. How are you, Katie?”
“I’m fine. How are you Ellis from down the lane?”
“Fine thanks.”
“What do you want?”
Ellis physically recoiled from so blunt a question. Chrissie pushed the receiver back towards his mouth.
“What do I want?”
“Yeah.”
“Er … I just wondered if you fancied coming to a conce
rt with me?”
Chrissie mouthed the word “gig” at him.
“I mean a gig,” Ellis corrected himself, at the exact moment Katie Morton said, “What’s the concert?”
“Sorry, what?” Ellis asked.
“No, go on. What did you say?”
“Nothing. What did you say?”
“I just asked what the concert was. What did you say?”
“I just said it was a gig not a concert.”
“What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know,” Ellis faltered.
“What band is it and when is it?” Katie asked, in her shopping list kind of way.
Ellis went silent. At that moment, he realised that there was no way Katie Morton was going to want to go with him to a Whitesnake concert. She wouldn’t want to go to a Whitesnake concert with anyone and she would not want to go to any concert with him. The situation was peppered with negatives.
“You there, Ellis?” Katie asked.
“Talking Heads …” he replied blankly.
Chrissie looked confused.
Katie became animated. “Talking Heads! Really? Very cool. When?”
“I don’t mind,” Ellis muttered distantly, knowing he had screwed up.
Chrissie cuffed him across the back of the head.
“You don’t mind? How about David Byrne, does he mind?”
“Who’s David Byrne?”
“For fuck’s sake!” Chrissie mouthed, collapsing back on to the bed.
“Are you drunk, Ellis from down the lane?” Katie asked.
Ellis pulled himself together. “No. I’m not drunk at all. Sorry, I was distracted, my sister walked into the room.” He picked up the tickets. “The concert is on Friday June the eleventh at the Finsbury Park Rainbow and I would really like you to come with me.”