Getting Home

by Celia Brayfield

  The telephone rang right on cue as she shut the door. It was F A W Capelli, Liaison Officer at the Foreign Office, a brisk, even voice, not too young, reeling out words which, when she tried to repeat them afterwards, seemed to have no meaning. ‘We expect things to move rapidly at this stage. The usual pattern is either an immediate resolution or possibly quite protracted negotiations,’ she heard him say. ‘Controlling the time-scale is an important advantage, so we will be doing our utmost to bring things to the swiftest conclusion possible.’

  After, he had hung up, she went to sit with Max. She would have liked to hold him, and draw some strength from the solid little body, but he never liked to be held. She watched him watch the TV, oblivious of the danger to his father. Would she have to explain to him? Stewart was not due back for another week, at least.

  ‘How strange,’ her mother said when Stephanie called her and tiptoed through the facts. ‘What did he want to go to such an out-of-the-way place for?’

  ‘They were invited. All the biggest developments are in those kind of places. You remember the hotel they built in Poland?’

  ‘Business. Oh yes. Are you all right, dear? Is there anything you want me to do? There is a committee dinner this evening but I suppose I could—’

  ‘No, no. We’re fine. There’s no need to put yourself out.’

  ‘I could come over tomorrow …’

  ‘No, please. You stay where you are. We’ll just have to wait and see how things develop. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ She hated to have her mother visit because she transplanted so badly. As a house guest, she was fidgety and unpleasable. From the height of her own motherhood, Stephanie was coming to understand that after the divorce her mother had painfully built a life for herself. It was admirable; many abandoned wives of that generation recited a daily litany of resentments and dedicated their lives to trashing men. Her mother had swallowed pain and waged war on hardship with a show of smiling serenity. She had painted a bright facade on her shame and presented it with such conviction that when another man had appeared he had taken her at face value as an elegant, independent woman; so there she stayed, petrified in competence. Only her daughters knew how fragile she was, how thin her veneer of calm. Her second marriage was a support to which she was clinging in terror. Sometimes Stephanie felt that her daughters reminded her of her dark years.

  She made food for Max. She talked to him, her hollow happy words falling into the silence like water from a fountain. The sun poured over the table-top. The buds of her Souvenir de la Malmaison were blushing and swelling. Time is vague to a five-year-old, a long time could be two days or two weeks. He would never know about this. Stewart would be home before the time when it would be necessary to tell Max anything. It seemed wrong to be forced to make this monstrous calculation. The whole thing seemed wrong.

  ‘Ted – Chester.’

  In the corner of Ted’s office stood a tree in a tub, a tree which was meant to be living but had died. Its shrivelled brown leaves rustled spookily in the current from the air-conditioning vent. Ted swung around in his chair to get the miserable sight out of his eyeline. ‘Chester!’ He responded with maximum cheer.

  ‘Ted, people here are looking at a site on the Thirty-four extension past Whitbridge. Adam’ll fill you in – it’s between two little places, Butterstream and …’ there was a pause and a crackle on the line, ‘Strankley. There could be something out there for us.’

  ‘Got you. I’ll take a look.’

  About a year earlier, the BSD had stopped saying ‘our people’ when referring to the site acquisition division of Magno; it became ‘people here’. At the same time, he started to talk about ‘us’. Ted anticipated the day that Chester would say ‘my people’and mean Tudor Homes. BSD was Adam’s name for his boss. He had told Ted it was an old Afrikaaner acronym for Big Swinging Dick.

  Ted keyed ‘Butterstream, 34X past Whitbridge’into his notebook and felt a tremor of premonition. Chester had nominated a notorious region. The extension of the 34 past Whitbridge had mired the Department of Transport in a public enquiry into the highway’s route across an area known as Strankley Ridge.

  Ted folded his arms and sat on the edge of his desk. He had three things on the walls of his office: a large abstract painting selected by the suite’s decorator, forty-two brightly coloured rectangles in lines on a white ground; the original 1910 advertisment for homes in Maple Grove; and a map. On the map he traced the 34, which branched west from the city’s orbital highway north of the 31. The 34 ought to have run in a straight line to meet the 52, leading due south from the Coffin. Instead it kinked southwards, as if avoiding the horror ahead.

  Geographers first called the imploded industrial conurbation of five towns grouped along the coal seams and canals of the northwest the Coffin. It was a good name for a feature which was coffin-shaped, and distinguished by exhausted fuel, redundant industry and mass unemployment. People said a young man leaving school in the Coffin had a 60 per cent chance of remaining unemployed all his life.

  The Transport Department wanted to extend the 34 logically to meet the 52 running south from the Coffin, through smiling irrelevant farmland, thousands of pointless pigs, millions of acres of unprofitable wheat and oil-seed rape, unviable villages, uneconomic copses and unfeasible water meadows. People did not like the idea. On a long chalk escarpment named Strankley Ridge stood a Neolithic stone circle which had become the focus of protest against the plans. It was an archaeological site entangled in protective legislation more hostile than razor wire.

  The original path of the 34 veered to the southwest of this region, grazing the hallowed university town of Whitbridge. As Whitbridge University became a world-renowned centre for information science, the 34 swiftly became a principal artery of commerce, encrusted with bright plastic-cladded parks of modern enterprise. Ted visualised the earth thick with cables, the air crackling with radiation, a dementia of polarised ions streaming in all directions like the commuters through Central Station at 8 am and 6 pm.

  The Coffin had no gaudy industrial parks. After riots, the government had targeted parts of the Coffin for urgent programmes of urban renewal. The putative investors demanded fast access to the 34 corridor; the pension funds which owned the farms in the way had been induced to sell.

  The government had not moved fast enough. The high-speed trains hurtling to the city from Whitbridge had already tempted a small herd of maturing yuppies to move into the abandoned countryside dwellings. The husbands commuted every day, the wives colour-washed the farmhouse walls and limed the old oak beams, the children grew sturdy and freckled on honey sandwiches and country air. With all the cunning their MBAs suggested, these settlers were now fighting the road scheme, and with them ranged a motley army of native inhabitants, Green party anoraks, Iron Age researchers, a famous actress and two hundred eco-warriors who were encamped close to the stone circle on Strankley Ridge. This was the neighbourhood Chester Pike had selected for a new Magno supermarket, and where a supermarket appeared homes sprang up like mushrooms.

  The face of one of the protestors, a veteran of several earlier demonstrations, had caught the eye of the media. Radiant as a dirty seraph, his photograph accompanied every report on the inquiry’s progress. He appeared on TV shows next to fashionable comedians who were entranced by his innocence of shower gel and the name of the Transport minister. They called him Crusty and, to some sections of the population, he was a hero. Ted remembered that his daughter Cherish had his picture on her bedroom wall, in pride of place between the wet-eyed seal pup and Leonardo DiCaprio.

  As he closed his notebook and sped out to his meeting, Ted’s shoulders sagged in apprehension. He felt the shadow of public attention. He sensed his wife’s sorcery looming close. Sixteen years he had shared his life with incubi like Crusty, ephemeral monsters summoned by the media to ravish the public mind until the day a fresh demon appeared to supplant them. Ted was forming the idea that his wife too was a creature of that half-life, and had just taken
mortal shape to entrap him.

  He was afraid of these gremlins and of the process which spawned them, he had an instinctive fear which nagged from his subconscious and would not be silenced by reason. Jealousy played a part, for he saw that his wife had the gift of calling up the devils and giving them names, and was rewarded for it. He had blamed those rewards for changing a fond girl to an ice queen whose contempt blasted to dust his naïve dreams of a family. It seemed as if some evil breath emanated from Channel Ten through his wife to his home and himself. Every time he and his children were rounded up for a magazine photograph a little of their lives drained away, while the media thing got stronger and tightened its grip on them all. Straying towards Strankley Ridge felt to Ted like yelling into the mouth of the dragon’s cave.

  He left his office, and his dead tree, and the sickly thicket behind his secretary and the senescent creepers in the atrium – an atrium, at last! Littered with dead leaves as it was, the atrium still thrilled him. If a man had an atrium could the Fortune 500 be far behind? He took a cab to the offices of the Oak Hill engineers, which also had an atrium, verdant and flowering, where he met Adam deSouza. They delivered the brief for a feasibility study and it went well, without hard questions, just a short assent to the limits of the specification.

  They went to lunch. Agile with high confidence, they did into the discreet corner of their chosen oyster bar.

  ‘Whitbridge,’ Ted began as their order arrived on a bed of crackling ice. ‘The Thirty-four extension. Chester talked to me this morning.’

  ‘The inquiry is expected to go on another couple of months, maybe three.’ Adam’s joyful gaze ran around the platter of oysters nestled in ice, assessing the molluscs for plumpness. He ate such dishes ritually in order of size, saving the biggest until last.

  ‘As long as that?’

  ‘Tsk. Waste of public money. Only people getting rich there are my colleagues, I’m afraid. The site we are interested in is about a mile further down the thirty-four, at Strankley. We are looking at it seriously. The result isn’t really in any doubt, it’s a question of the timing. Government’s just playing along and changing the window dressing for the sake of public opinion.’

  ‘I guess. It’s the press I don’t like.’

  Adam chose his first specimen and lifted it off the ice with due ceremony. ‘Me neither. Not that we’ve anything to hide in any way.’

  Ted’s unease suddenly returned, twice the size it had been in the morning. ‘We don’t want too much interest in Oak Hill …’

  ‘No harm, no harm.’ Energetically, Adam anointed the oyster with lemon juice.

  ‘It could look … it’s the history of the site. We’ve agreed that the cost of investigation is prohibitive, I know, but looked at a certain way …’ He was not getting through.

  Adam was intent on his food. Three oysters down he registered a distressed silence in his companion and ruled, ‘That’s why we undertook Oak Hill as a separate enterprise and set up the Trust. The Whitbridge thing will be a straightforward Tudor Homes show. No obvious connection.’

  ‘Strankley Ridge – it’s a feeding frenzy for the media: Crusty, the inquiry, all of it. When the media get interest, people start digging around, might do a Dun and Bradstreet on us …’

  ‘They’re very stupid, the media. Easy to get them in hand. Don’t run away with the idea that there’s anything like old-fashioned investigative journalism still going on. We’ll allow for a few sweeteners here and there.’ Adam swallowed his fifth choice, threw down the shell and picked up the next. ‘I’m feeling good about Oak Hill after this morning.’

  ‘Adam, I’ve got to say this, I haven’t felt good about Oak Hill from the beginning.’

  ‘Your idea, as I recall.’

  ‘I agree, I agree absolutely.’ Adam suddenly stopped feeding contentedly and fixed his companion with a glare as flinty as the oysters’shells. ‘I put the site up for consideration. But now …’

  ‘There’s no risk. You heard the guys this morning. Natural biodegradation processes would have reduced toxic residues to undetectable levels. We’re in the clear.’

  ‘But you and I know—’

  ‘What you and I know is for ourselves alone, Ted. What do we know, anyway? One set of experts says one thing, another says another. Who’s to say what the actual truth is, really? What’s eating you, all of a sudden?’ Adam was icing Ted with his flat, blue-eyed stare. ‘Trying to rattle my cage?’

  ‘Adam, I wouldn’t dream—’

  ‘Good.’ He went back to the oysters. There were two of his portion remaining.

  ‘But I can’t see any benefit to Tudor in becoming a side-show to a media circus out at the Thirty-four extension.’

  ‘Absolutely not. Not what we’d care for at Magno, either.’

  ‘Not that I’m afraid of the media – for Oak Hill I’d like to see a supplement in Architecture Today and a five-page spread in House & Garden when we’re at the stage of getting a designer in for our show homes. But we don’t belong on the evening news.’

  ‘Quite agree.’

  ‘But if the BSD says go …’

  ‘No harm in taking a look.’ Adam now spoke encouragingly, as if a very disadvantaged child had suddenly discovered how to tie its shoelaces.

  ‘Get a good price if we buy now before the inquiry reports.’

  ‘That’s certain.’ The lawyer’s large, pink, thoroughly manicured hand was poised over his last oyster, the largest, the juiciest, the plumpest, the most invitingly wet. It was time Ted stopped talking. ‘The commissioners aren’t obliged to report immediately, either. Law provides for them to take due time to consider the evidence. Gould be another two years. In a way, the more kerfuffle that fella – what’s his name, gets on TV nowadays …’

  ‘Crusty.’

  ‘The more fuss Crusty and his chums kick up, the better for us.’

  ‘Two years, eh?’ In the end, Ted allowed himself to feel encouraged. He reached for his first oyster as Adam downed his last. Nowadays oysters seemed to be smaller and thinner and less velvety in texture, but perhaps it was his advancing sophistication. Oysters made him think of the sea, and how he would like to sit somewhere in a fisherman’s bar and share them with a smilling woman while the sea salt was still on them. One day.

  Back in his office the map was looming over him, with an intrepid marker at Oak Hill. Tudor Homes was still a small concern. There was another marker the other side of Helford where he had a smaller development almost finished, and half a dozen query flags around the outer city limits to fill up space and make the thing look busy.

  Ted did not care for maps, either. The logic of a map was ruthless. His map showed him the roads snaking over the land, and the businesses following the roads, and the homes following the businesses, and the area between the city and the Coffin gradually ceasing to be country and becoming conurbation, just as earlier the five dying cities in the north had grown into each other and become the Coffin, after which their industries had become extinct and the colonnaded public buildings had become soot-blackened graffiti-soiled shells and whole districts of homes been deserted by those lucky enough to be able to leave.

  Anyone with any knowledge of history would be aware that the two cases were not comparable, that the demographics in the final quarter of the twentieth century were quite unlike those of its beginning. This was not Mexico City, this was not Los Angeles, this was not the end-of-the-millennium suburban nightmare, but no argument he could construct stopped the map staring down at him, swarming with black specks of housing development like flies swarming on a carcase.

  They all had their little bit of floor, the Cappuccino Crew at The Cedars. Every Friday, there they were, same women, same clothes, same places – it just killed him. And they all drove past the security cameras into the car park and fought for the parking spaces nearest the path to the door, when their reason for coming to the club was to get some exercise. Rod Fuller enjoyed naturally ocurring irony. It put the flint in his ey
e and the curl in his lip and spun his handsomeness into something supernaturally fascinating; even in these black days, it comforted him to notice the random stupidity of life.

  The regulars had claimed their territory. There was Arty T-Shirt right at the back, although she had nothing to be shy about with those legs. Beside her was the Jade Princess, who ran to a different drumbeat but balanced like an angel, and in front of them in all-black stood Catwoman, hypermobile and flaunting it with a leg on the barre. Blubberlugs in Day-Glo pink worked at second row centre with her little black eyes clamped on his backside like leeches. Next to her was Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-it, who came in with all her jewellery but worked like shit, and in front of her, as usual, the black hole in the front row, Sporty Stripes, fiddling with her hair and dropping the combs and retying her shoes and adjusting her bra and doing everything a woman could possibly do to avoid working up a sweat.

  ‘Hi, team,’ he greeted them. There had been a debate about what to call them – they said ‘girls’was sexist and ‘ladies’was bourgeois which was some joke, but he could hardly run in with ‘Hi, women!’

  ‘Hi, Rod,’ they answered. Catwoman shook out her feet.

  He strapped on the mike. ‘Earth to class.’ His throat was sore. ‘Earth to class, ready to go.’ Management told him he ought to yell more, but he never knew what he should yell. The other guys could do the verbals, it wasn’t his style. He had to save his voice. In five years he’d be working again, auditioning again. Shin splints he would live with but his voice was sacred; not that he was that kind of actor, but he had played Anthony.

  Last night’s booze sloshed up his oesophagus as he began the warm-up. His eyeballs were sore and there was a pain like an iron bar through his back teeth. The mirror told him he was dehydrated, eyes like ‘The Scream’but great definition. When he reached down for the floor his head swam and he nearly fell over. I can’t do this, he told himself. I cannot drink any more. I will not. If there’s anything left at home I’ll throw it overboard. Ambition’s made of sterner stuff. I will not go on like this.