by Tim Pears
The weak shower slowly rinses the shampoo off; it slides down their pink pale bodies, long rivulets of foam.
Owen dries off Holly first, then Josh. By the time he gets a turn to use their only towel it’s wet through. When he pulls on his clothes they stick to his damp, shivering skin. He realises Josh is looking at him, smiling. He stops dressing, looks at the boy, expecting a sardonic observation.
‘You’re really clever, Dad,’ Josh tells him.
They walk out of the wood, skirt a village. On either side of the road there are birds on the aerials of houses, nattering as if to each other across the street. It is spring. A car passes at speed, a thump of music like the vehicle’s angry pulse. Then they head off away from the road along a footpath. The brown mongrel dog trails a yard or two behind whoever’s at the back.
The sky is grey, and brown. Colours appear to have been drained from the earth. The one vibrant plant is holly. Its red berries are gone now but the deep rich green is visible from a distance – in a hedge, across a field – it renders all the hibernating plants around it pallid by comparison, feeble. Other conifers are dull. All else is dormant. But as they walk Owen begins to see snowdrops, then yellow and pink primroses, and yellow flowers in a ground-spreading plant. Aconites. It’s far too late for them. He looks closer at the trees they pass, sees on the branches of hazel, elder, sycamore, leaves emerging from the wood of branches wrapped up in tight little bunches, like sushi. The new buds. It’s as if the whole of spring is showing itself in a moment.
From a large white house in a wood full of daffodils comes an anxious, imperious cry. When Holly asks what the sound is, Josh says, ‘A peacock, of course.’ Owen wonders how he knows, when or where he might have seen one. On TV probably.
The path passes through a grove of slender beech. Every trunk is wrapped around by ivy. Owen feels sorry for the trees, knowing what is happening to them. A creeping strangulation.
At times the path becomes pure sand. ‘It’s like being at the seaside,’ Holly says. A long narrow beach threading its way through a wood.
Another time the path widens, on the ground are large pebbles, rounded stones, as if they’re walking along a dry riverbed. On either side are the straggly remnants of last year’s bracken and brambles.
The children walk in silence. Holly seems lost in her own thoughts. Josh is more watchful.
Sometimes the path is cut deep between banks, it’s old, much older than the houses and roads, the pastures and arable fields around it. Old paths through the forest. At times they leave the path and walk along a lane a while before finding a new path westward, reconnecting to a network that Owen begins to visualise criss-crossing this island, behind, underneath, intersecting yet apart from all the monuments and machinery of civilisation. He wonders whether his brain, in constructing the image, does so with a similar network of pathways and connections. The image is a liberating one. A person might choose to be a wandering soul and be able to manage it, here, on these ancient paths. Kept open by whom? Owen wonders. An army of council workers and volunteers placing bridges over streams and stiles over fences, replacing gates and putting up signposts pointing the way here, and there. What a job, he thinks. That’s what he should have done if only he could have taken orders; surely he’d have been happy to, directed to a stretch of path with a map, and a trailer full of fence posts and wooden planks, wire and tools.
‘I’m hungry,’ Holly says, and Owen is surprised to see from his watch that it’s after noon already. They sit on a fallen tree trunk looking out and up across a steeply rising field. The children drink orange juice, eat apples. It must have been the perfect temperature for walking: now that they’ve stopped Owen sees goose pimples appear on Holly’s bared arms; Josh shivers. They pull on their jackets. In the field in front of them a large brown horse appears. It raises its head and lifts its tail and there, right ahead and above them, prances along the high ridge. It wishes to show them that this is precisely how a thoroughbred trots, with just this much dignity and poise.
They cross the River Severn, waiting till there’s no traffic on the bridge. The wide river flows silent below them. The children jog ahead.
A little further on there is a phone box at the side of the road, beside an empty lay-by. The three of them crowd inside. A smell like old machinery. Owen finds coins. Josh knows his home phone number, and presses the buttons, while Holly holds the receiver, ready to speak first. But there’s no one there, only the answerphone. The children leave messages: Owen is relieved to hear their enthusiasm for the journey they’re being taken on, even as they tell their mother they miss her, and love her. He wishes he could add his voice to theirs. When Josh holds the receiver to him, Owen shakes his head, and Josh places it back in its cradle.
During the early part of the afternoon the landscape is more open. They are rarely out of sight of some farm or other dwelling. Owen imagines people looking up from pictures in a newspaper of this man and the children he’s abducted, or listening to the news on the radio as they do the washing-up and seeing through a window the trio of distinctive figures cross the rolling vista, plus an unexplained dog.
Is it possible to hide? Everywhere in England is known. Hasn’t every pat of soil been trodden on, turned over? But this pessimistic appraisal is followed by another: actually, nobody sees them. They move like ghosts across the open country, this tamed land.
Walking, Owen recalls the conversation in the car. He’d asked Sara what she was going to be when she grew up.
‘A teacher,’ she said, without hesitation. She loved school, couldn’t wait to leave the house in the mornings. Mel was even a little jealous of Sara’s class teacher, whom the girl adored.
‘I’m going to marry a doctor.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, and I’m going to have children.’
‘How many?’ At the time Mel was pregnant with their third.
‘I don’t know. Maybe three. They’ll run around in the country. One of them will ride a horse.’
‘You’re going to live in the country?’
Owen looked at his daughter. She was frowning. ‘In a small town in the country,’ she decided.
Up ahead the lights changed. He pressed his foot on the accelerator. The dog appeared from nowhere. An image of the life Sara, aged six, had envisioned for herself, and would not have, had stayed with Owen.
They walk without talking for some time. Owen becomes increasingly aware of birdsong. It’s as if birds accompany them, passing news of their journey from one to another. The day is warming up now. Crossing a field in which sheep graze, Holly wrinkles her nose at the sweet-sour smell in the air, of greasy wool and shit. She forgets her distaste when she finds a horseshoe, and insists on carrying it with her. Josh tells her it’s too heavy.
‘No, it’s not,’ Holly says.
‘You won’t be able to carry it.’
‘Yes, I will,’ she insists.
Over stiles the path crosses fields, following a stream that has carved a deep gully in soft, red-brown soil. At its widest points the gully is maybe thirty feet across, and twenty feet deep: they look down from the short-cropped grass into a river landscape. Trees have rooted in the banks. Huge boulders force the stream to weave in lazy loops. There are waterfalls, lagoons, sandy beaches. Josh makes a frame with his fingers like a cameraman. ‘There were this thing on TV,’ he tells his father, ‘how they used to film with models. A ship floats into view, and this tiny stream turns into a wide river. Everything suddenly changes whatsit.’
‘Scale?’ Owen offers.
‘Yes.’
They walk through a noisy copse of tall trees. There’s a rookery overhead, the birds arguing in the high nests.
‘Birds can’t talk,’ Holly says.
‘Yes, they can,’ Josh says.
‘Birds sing.’
‘Those aren’t singing,’ Josh says. ‘They’re disagreeing with each other.’
‘No, they’re not.’
‘Yes, they
are.’
Owen is about to interrupt, to tell the children to stop bickering, when he realises that they are cawing the words at each other.
‘Oh no they’re not.’
‘Oh yes they are.’
Holly is the first to break into giggles.
‘Can you carry this, Daddy?’ Holly says. She is holding the horseshoe, having carried it in her rucksack for miles.
‘I’ll carry you instead,’ Owen suggests, letting the horseshoe drop back to earth, and he hoists her up onto his shoulders. He catches Josh scowling at them, resentful of this preferential treatment even though there’s no way he’ll ask it for himself. No one’s going to carry him, he’s eleven years old and he’ll walk as far as anyone.
The footpath they’re on cuts straight through the middle of a mobile home holiday park. Closely packed trailers. The park is on the lower slope of one side of a wide valley. The hill has been landscaped, terraces cut, each plot barely larger than the caravan upon it. It’s hard to see how defunct mobile homes can be removed, their replacements situated. Perhaps they’re lifted in and out by a monumental crane. Or perhaps none of them are ever moved. Here each one stands, now and forever.
There’s barely anyone around. Outside one caravan a white-haired man kneels on a tiny lawn, cutting the grass with a pair of shears. An old woman walks her Yorkshire terrier on a long lead. It stops by Josh, sniffing him; he shyly puts a hand down to pat its head. It moves on to their dog – each sniffs the other’s posterior, moving around in circles – then breaks off and resumes its journey.
The sun shines. The park is virtually deserted except for a large population of small inanimate beings: around every mobile home red-clothed, white-bearded gnomes stand on plastic rocks with hands on hips, or fish in tiny ponds, or grin at the world from behind white-dotted red toadstools. Bird feeders hang from rods stuck onto caravans, but the birds haven’t found them, put off perhaps by plastic herons, pigeons, doves and ducks with whom they’d be forced to mingle. There are signs on the sides of the trailers. A SWEET NATURED WOMAN AND A GRUMPY OLD MAN LIVE HERE, reads one. A grey rabbit appears to twitch. Then it scampers off between caravans – the mongrel in hot pursuit – as if a plastic animal has come suddenly to life.
Holly is enchanted. ‘I want to live here,’ she says. ‘I love it.’
A mile further on they stop to rest, the children drink the last of their juice on a track beside a field in which brown bullocks graze. Josh counts them. ‘Twenty-three,’ he decides. The calves all face in the same direction, and each one moves gradually forward as it eats, one hoof at a time, the whole small herd advancing slowly across the green field.
‘Looks like they’re playing a game,’ Owen says. ‘Creeping up on something in the hedge.’
Josh nods.
They pass dull green fields across which are scattered bales tightly wrapped in black plastic, and then a large field covered in curtains of black plastic, the earth being blacked out.
The footpath takes them through a graveyard. Owen hesitates. The church is right at the edge of a village and beyond the graveyard the path looks to carry on away from the houses, but he wonders whether they shouldn’t skirt the village in a wider arc. The children, the dog, wait as he watches, and listens. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around. A sign asks people to PLEASE CLEAR UP AFTER YOUR DOG. They advance slowly along a grassy path towards the church. Many gravestones lean at a mournful angle. There are a number of box tombs. ‘The bodies are in there,’ Josh informs his sister. ‘They’re not buried in the ground.’
Owen says nothing.
‘Stone full of bones.’
The path passes the porch. ‘Can we go in?’ Holly asks.
‘It’ll be locked,’ Josh says.
Holly looks dumbfounded. ‘Why?’
‘People who don’t believe in God,’ Josh tells her, ‘steal things from his churches.’
Owen is relieved they’ll carry on past without a quarrel, but then Holly walks abruptly into the porch and tries the door, turning the heavy iron ring-handle with both hands. She pushes against the door: it opens. She proceeds into the church. Owen steps warily forward. Who knows what might be going on inside? A funeral, a prayer meeting. He peers into the gloomy interior. Silence. Emptiness.
The dog stays in the porch. ‘Good boy,’ Josh tells it. Owen whispers in his son’s ear, ‘It’s a girl, actually.’
Inside, the church is large for what seems to be a small village; it is many degrees cooler than outside, and has the smell of damp stone. There are pillars along each side of the nave. The children wander round together, walking along each pew, exploring the intriguing nooks and crannies – it’s as if a church had been designed to engage their children’s sense of mystery.
Owen studies the large font of white stone at the back of the church. It’s ornately carved, with knotted, interlacing shapes as well as strange creatures: a griffin, a centaur. A lamb. The Lamb of God. Owen is sure the font is very old, Norman, even. He’s not really sure, though. He’s so ignorant. He curses his ignorance. Would it have taken so much education, self-learning, to be able to date such artefacts? Perhaps it was actually carved in the nineteenth or even twentieth century by someone purposely harking back to an earlier era.
‘Come and see,’ Josh demands. The children drag their father into the chancel. To one side are seats cut into the wall, for priests or servers, Owen assumes. Beside arches above them are two carved faces. Holly is pointing at one of them. It has horns. ‘It’s the Devil,’ Josh says.
‘Yes,’ says Holly.
‘What’s he doing in the church?’ Josh asks.
Owen sits in a pew near the front of the nave. The children have checked out the choir stalls and been up into the pulpit, and now they are rooting around at the back of the church.
A memory. He and Mel were in a cafe. It took up the whole of the ground floor of an old, wide, two-storey industrial building, a factory that had been converted. Sara was two, maybe three years old, Josh a baby. Sara was restless, Mel tired. Owen took his daughter by the hand and wandered round the large cafe. There were some stairs leading up to some kind of balcony. They climbed them, slowly, the small girl accomplishing one step, then another.
There was a door leading from the balcony. Owen tried it, it opened, and they stepped through into what seemed to be some kind of rehearsal room. It was empty except for a drum kit, some speakers. An ashtray on the floor, loose pages of a newspaper. When they tried to go back through the door to the balcony they found it locked: some kind of security catch had clicked. At the far end of the rehearsal room was another door, which was unlocked. It gave onto a hallway or landing, with a lift and a dark stairwell. The stairs descended into darkness, they were oddly forbidding; Owen didn’t want to go down them, especially with Sara, so he pressed the lift button. The doors opened, they stepped inside.
The sign in the lift indicated that they were on the sixth floor; there were buttons for five others below. But they were surely on the first floor – having climbed those stairs – and needed to go back down one storey to reach the ground. Perhaps the lift was second-hand when it was installed here. Owen pressed G, the lift came to life and descended down through 5, 4, 3. They could hear music being played. Down through 2, 1, before coming to rest at the ground floor. The lift doors opened onto a similar landing to the one above, although this time the stairs went up rather than down. There was a single door here too, but on the other side of the landing. Owen opened it and he and Sara stepped into a large concert hall. There was a stage to their right. The auditorium was cleared of seating and two men were shining the wooden floor, lazily swishing polishing machines from side to side.
They returned to the lift and went back up a floor. As they stepped out the music they’d heard was suddenly loud. Owen pushed the door off this landing surreptitiously open: this was less a rehearsal room than a studio, with all kinds of recording equipment, and a band of four young men was playing raucous thumping rock mu
sic.
The dark stairways. They took the lift. On another floor they stepped out and the only light was from the lift. When the lift doors closed behind them Owen and Sara were plunged into pitch blackness. Owen groped for the lift button, praying that no one else had summoned it, he pressed it and the doors opened once more, spreading light.
Always the stairway, descending into black nothingness, and each time Owen took the lift. He discovered later on that the building was on a hill, with the cafe at the top. On the fourth floor they stepped out, opened the one door off the landing and found themselves in a shopping arcade. They walked along, past small shops, turned a corner and found themselves looking through the large windows of the cafe, in the middle of which Mel sat reading a paper, sipping her coffee, Josh asleep in her lap. They reached the door to the cafe and Sara ran towards her mother.
Owen has spent so much time forcing himself not to think of Sara; almost as much energy as he’s spent trying not to forget her. What a disorientating experience in the cafe that had been, unsettling, surreal, but fun. When they returned to Mel she was unworried, unaware of their adventure. They hadn’t actually been gone long at all.
Holly is almost the same age now as Sara was. Tears slide down Owen’s cheeks. For a moment he misses Mel as much as Sara.
The silence of the church is desecrated by a loud booming sound. Reverberating. Even before he has identified what it is Owen knows the children have caused it. It is so close, within the church. Then he understands it was a bell ringing, and he is up, out of the pew and running towards the back of the church. He yells, ‘Josh!’ Past the organ there is a door, into a tiny chamber, and another door, into the tower. There the children stand, transfixed by their transgression.