by Peter Benson
1
I worked on a building site in Battersea, but was accused of sloppy work and got the sack. A man on a hot-dog stand offered me a job. I had to fry the dogs and burgers, and keep buns warm. It was warmer in the stand than on the site, but the view wasn’t much.
I began to smell of onions. I was staying with friends who complained about this. I moved in with a labourer from the site, but he only gave me a week. He wasn’t tall, but he was heavily built – like a bull terrier. I never had his strength, or the way he moved with a hod.
My mother used to keep a bull terrier called Bruce. She bought him a week after Dad died. She died last year. Her sister – my Aunt Alice – has lived in Brighton since she was eighteen.
Neighbours complained about Bruce when Mum let him into the garden to piss and bark at the trees. One day, he burrowed under the fence and got next door while next-door were at work. They were newlyweds; he wanted to extend the back of the house and landscape the garden. She was very slim and made him concrete an area and sink a pipe in the ground so she could have a rotary clothes line. Bruce sat beneath the sheets, shirts and trousers as they rotated. Inevitably, one of the sheets got wrapped around his neck; Bruce began to turn with the clothes before he stopped and tugged the other way. The sheet came away and he ran back to Mum.
She said, ‘Bruce! You bad boy!’ The sheet was torn, soiled with earth, a white cotton wedding present from next-door’s cousins.
Living on her own with Bruce had made Mum lose her sense of difference. She went upstairs, fetched a blue nylon fitted single sheet and replaced the ruined one with it before next-door got back from work. They were teachers and planning to start a family in five years. Mum bought and cooked better meat for Bruce than she did for herself, so he became strong, fierce and loyal.
One night, someone broke into the stand and stole a packet of frozen dogs and the float. The owner accused me. I proved my innocence by producing witness to my presence in a pub. The owner blamed me. I shrugged and said the stand was his responsibility. The owner fired me, and told me my career in fast food was over. I’d never work a dog stall again, if he had anything to do with it.
I tried to get another job, and another place to live. People told me to forget it so I told them to forget it and went to visit Aunt Alice in Brighton.
I had a vinyl holdall, and caught the last train to Brighton with two minutes to spare. I watched the lights all the way. I had a book in my bag called The International Seed (a thriller by Stella Cardini), but I didn’t read it.
A woman got on at Reigate. She was going home from a dance, flopped down in a seat away from me, glanced at me once, crossed her legs and closed her eyes.
At Brighton, I walked two miles to Aunt Alice’s. It was past midnight when I banged on her door. I had to bang three times before a light came on and I heard her say, ‘Who is it?’ She was right behind the door.
‘Greg,’ I said.
‘Greg?’
‘Your nephew…’
‘Gregory!’ she said, and pulled the chain back, took the latch off and opened the door.
Aunt Alice is a Leninist. She bit a policeman at Greenham Common, and spent twenty-one days in prison at the age of seventy-six. ‘Why didn’t you call?’ she said when she saw me.
‘I didn’t have time,’ I said.
She didn’t want me to explain why I was there. We sat in the kitchen and she said I was looking more like my dad.
‘Sometimes I feel like him.’
‘How could you?’
‘I do.’
‘Have you eaten?’ she said.
‘No.’ It was half past twelve. She made some toast, fetched a can of beans and said, ‘You’ll waste away.’
‘Yes, Auntie.’
‘And don’t call me that!’
‘Sorry.’
‘And don’t start apologising!’
I held my hands up, but didn’t say anything.
Her hair was tied in a sensible bun. She kept a pencil behind her ear, ready to scribble a thought down on a pad she kept in her pocket. The house was littered with rolled-up balls of paper that bore messages like ‘Phone Kenneth’, ‘Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’, and ‘Type minutes.’
I didn’t do much at Alice’s place. It was a tiny bungalow – I slept on her sofa and got in the way. She was patient, and spent her time addressing envelopes to party faithful or writing letters to newspapers.
I didn’t know anyone in Brighton – I spent a week roaming the sea front, strolling along the deserted beach and clearing my mind. I could have gone back to London, or to Bristol where I knew people who needed a driver, but I was tired of living on wits. I couldn’t help it, but I was tired.
I wanted a quiet life. Alice was writing to the local paper about council housing policy. I was lying on the sofa, eating a biscuit. ‘I just want a quiet life,’ I said.
‘Typical!’ she said, and put her pen down. ‘Typical! Don’t you have any fight?’
‘Depends…’ I said.
‘On what?’
‘On who pays me.’
She huffed. ‘Well, I’m not paying you for anything. You’re as bad as your father…’ She was burning to say something about him, but wouldn’t.
‘He did his best!’ I raised my voice but didn’t get up. ‘Mum never complained!’
‘She never got the chance!’
‘Yes, she did!’
‘There!’ She laughed, and turned away from me. ‘You wouldn’t stand a chance in a fight, would you?’
‘What do you mean?’ I swung my legs off the sofa and stood up. I took a deep breath.
‘A fight.’
‘Want a bet?’
‘If I was a fool, maybe I would. Maybe someone like Marjorie… She could do with someone like you. You wouldn’t go the distance with her.’
‘Marjorie?’
Alice nodded. ‘Yes. And she’d pay. She could afford to pay…’
‘Who is she?’
‘Didn’t you ever meet her?’
‘No.’
‘Marjorie…’ She picked up her pen. ‘She’s an old friend. We nursed together, before the war. She was…’ Alice looked down at what she’d been writing.
‘She was what?’
‘A good nurse. She went abroad, came back a few years ago. Look…’ She got up, fetched a letter and said, ‘It’d be real work. Chopping logs, digging her garden. She was only saying the other day…’ She read some of the letter, but didn’t show it to me.’
‘Digging her garden?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Where?’
‘Dorset.’
‘What?’
‘Dorset. You know. It’s in a forest, not far from the sea. The fresh air would do you good.’
‘There’s fresh air in Brighton.’
‘She’s getting old.’
‘I don’t know…’ I said.
‘Do you know anything?’
I shrugged.
‘You’ll thank her for the opportunity.’
‘To do what? Chop logs?’
‘That’s honest work. Have you ever done any honest work? Do you know anything about that sort of life?’
I didn’t think so.
‘Digging is as fundamental as you can get,’ she said.
‘It’s in the country?’
‘Yes. Bow and arrow country. They eat their babies, all that. Back to basics, Gregory.’
‘And fundamental?’
‘As you can get. If you want a quiet life, it’s the place for you. Quiet as the grave.’
In the morning, I took a train to Waterloo. I had an hour before the Dorset train left, so I sat in a restaurant facing the door and o
rdered a coffee.
I don’t know why I attract people but someone had to sit next to me although there were empty tables all around. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘They say the train’s going to leave at three, then they tell you it’s not leaving till half past. Then it’s a quarter to four…’
I don’t understand why people use the wrong words to mean the opposite. Like ‘Beautiful weather,’ when it’s raining, or ‘See you soon,’ when they will not.
‘I said it’s wonderful,’ the man said. He lit a cigarette and let the match burn until the flame was touching his finger before dropping it into an ashtray.
‘I heard.’
‘And the fares! Who do they think we are?’
I didn’t know.
‘And if you’re really lucky, you get somewhere to stand!’
I didn’t say anything. I finished my coffee and left London at quarter past three.
The Waterloo-Exeter line was run down. I sat in a draughty, rattling train, in a lake of rubbish. Tea came in a cup the size of an ashtray - I didn’t bother.
I’m no good in the country. I don’t mind a park or trees in the street, but endless fields and woods doing nothing worry me. I’m not just irritated - I feel a heavy, thick dread. I don’t like the thought that there’s no shop for miles, or that it’s miles to the nearest town that never sells anything anyway. I don’t know the difference between heifers, steers or bullocks. I like cars passing regularly, and people you don’t have to talk to. I don’t want to be remembered and then recognised by people I don’t know. I never have the right shoes for fields.
I wanted a quiet life, but began to worry that I might be heading for coma. Dad had memories of Kent he used to try and impress me with, but I was never interested. I’m sorry about that now, not because I wanted to listen to what he had to say, but because he wanted someone to hear him talking. Talking about things made them more real to him. Talking over old photographs could make him cry. For a long time, I saw Dad as a strong young man in a photograph, but now all I can remember is him shrunk.
In the year before he died, I got into the habit of taking him for drives to the country, or just around town. It was easier to cope with drivers signing at me for dawdling than it was to keep Dad quiet if I went over thirty, so we caused long tailbacks.
Once I took him to the hop fields of Kent, where he had worked as a boy. He remembered the farmer being generous with food and drink, and the smell of hay. We had to stop near Dunk’s Green so he could get out and stick his nose in a barn.
I had to support him as he walked. We had a wheelchair in the boot but he refused to sit in it. As I held him, I smelt the sense of fun and games he’d had with me when I was a child.
We used to play football in the hall. It drove Mum up the wall. We used to play first to ten. He was always the Hammers and would get to nine and then wait for me to catch up, and then let me score and win, but sometimes I beat him square. We had a little rubber ball, and broke the window in the front door five times.
The thin bloke across the road came over once and said, ‘You know what?’
‘What?’ said Dad.
‘You want to stick a board over that window. You’ll get a hell of a draught blowing in.’
‘You want a game?’ I said.
The thin bloke smiled, looked over his shoulder; when he looked back the smile had gone. ‘I’d better not,’ he said, and went back to his house. His wife was called Eve. We didn’t see much of them.
I propped Dad against a wall while I opened one of the barn doors. He took shallow, gasping breaths; I never saw him look so shrunk. His nose was like a small prune.
He staggered into the barn and made me lead him to a stack of bales. He stuck his nose right in them and tried to take a deep breath. I stood well back.
Outside, it began to rain, but he didn’t notice. An old trailer was parked in the barn, so I sat on it and smoked a cigarette.
‘It was like this’, he gasped, ‘when I was a kid.’ His throat made a rattling noise, like supermarket trolleys being pushed into a line down a windy alley.
When I was a kid, I never knew exactly what he did. For a while, he worked in a garage, then it was for the council, then it was for a brewery. Sometimes he’d sign on and paint the house. Mum said he did the best he could for us, and that meant us. I was never unhappy, but often felt insecure because our landlord was inhuman. He refused to mend the roof or fix the plaster above my bed. A piece of board was tacked there instead, so I spent five years - of the hour in bed before I slept - staring at the words GRADED EGGS, lit by a screw of light that came over the top of the door from the landing.
When Dad had had enough of the hay barn, I put the cigarette out carefully and led him back to the car. We drove towards Tonbridge. I had my elbow resting on the window ledge. The weather was hot. He swore the old hop fields were outside Whetsted, but they weren’t. Someone was building at a crossroads he said he’d waited at with his mother. I never met her. He pointed at an oast house someone was living in. We did find one hop field, but he said it wasn’t right, so we drove home.
The train was slow. The fields started quickly after London. Some kids ran up and down the carriages, and foreign students were playing new cassettes on new stereo machines. A man opposite me read a book about the Vietnam war. I wondered about hedges.
One farmer has them for centuries and another grubs them out. Why did the first farmer have them? Why do farmers let single trees grow out of hedges? Why do they make stripes in fields? Why do they leave machines in the rain?
Why don’t fields have anything going on in them? For miles and miles through Surrey and Hampshire, thousands of acres were empty. All I saw were a few cows, some sheep and two tractors.
After Salisbury, the train emptied, and the country-side beyond the city seemed denser than before. The fields were smaller, there were more hedges and trees, and big blocks of forest.
There was something hidden out there - I felt safe in the train. I bought a lager from the buffet and drank it standing in the space by one of the carriage doors, with the window closed.
Marjorie met me at Axminster station. The train was three-quarters of an hour late.
The station was a disgrace. Paint was peeling from the building and the platform was untidy. The staff reflected this decay by saying (when I complained about the late train), ‘Yeah. Makes you sick, doesn’t it?’
‘That all you got?’ Marjorie said, interrupting my complaint and pointing at my holdall.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good for you. Nothing like travelling light, is there?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said, ‘no’.
She didn’t introduce herself, and had me in her car before she said, ‘I knew who you were straight away! Alice phoned. It’s wonderful. Thank you!’
‘I—’
‘She told me all about you!’
‘Oh, no,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry. Nothing incriminating. And you look like a good boy.’
She didn’t look like anyone I’d met before. The first thing I noticed about her was a tiny blister on her right eye. The second thing was her hair. It was long and snow-white. She wasn’t tall (five foot six); the hair blew around at the slightest excuse. She was dressed in army surplus fatigues, all two sizes too big. She didn’t wear any jewellery.
‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘A good boy.’
‘I’m thirty-three,’ I said.
‘What does that mean?’ she said, and reached across for my safety belt. ‘Do it up.’
She smelt of boiled vegetables. Her voice was strong and loud, but not irritating. She knew exactly what she wanted.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I didn’t think you would.’
I’d been the only passenger to get off at Axminster. She drove an Alfa. I put her at sixty-five, seventy. I thought I was in an unlikely position, but only because the car was so smoot
h.
‘Nice car,’ I said.
‘Like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not bad, is it?’ she said, and revved up behind a Mini. ‘Hear that?’
I nodded.
The engine had a musical note. She patted the steering wheel, and overtook the Mini.
‘How is Alice?’ she said.
‘Fine. She sends her love.’
‘I haven’t seen her for ages. Has she grown up yet?’
‘Grown up? She’s eighty!’
‘She’s a Marxist.’
‘Leninist,’ I said.
‘What’s the difference?’ She warmed the Alfa for a stretch of dual carriageway. ‘Marxist, Leninist. Leninist, Marxist. It’s like saying Mickey Mouse isn’t a mouse because he wears a dinner jacket.’ I leaned towards her. We were doing ninety. We overtook a lorry-load of live chickens. They were poking their heads out of stacked plastic crates, and looked very confused.
Part Two
2
Dad was in the merchant navy for two years. He joined as soon as he was old enough, and got drunk and made love for the first time in his first port, Naples. The ship was carrying lumber; he always remembered Italy as more than a country. ‘A bleeding state of mind, Italy,’ he told me once. We were driving slowly through Kent. He would have been alarmed by Marjorie’s driving.
‘They know how to build a car,’ she said.
‘You know how to drive.’
‘Does that surprise you?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘My father taught me when I was fourteen. Hell of an old bus we used to have.’
She had lived an exciting life, spoken her mind, and lived in different countries. Once she had nursed in West Africa; at a different time she had motor-cycled across Australia, when riding astride was not recommended for women. Aboriginals were amazed. She didn’t mind eating bugs with them, or taking all her clothes off for a ceremony. Then, in the night, she was gone. The Aboriginals thought the motorcycle was powered by her thighs, and the headlight shone because she wanted it to.
Her father had owned a shirt factory. Her mother’s alcoholism drove her away from home, and then a sense of adventure pushed her abroad. Her father had understood. Secretly he had wished he was her, but he couldn’t leave. He had been faithful to his wife, and wished she had had a real interest.