The Night Following

by Morag Joss

  ARTHUR WE WANT TO KNOW YOU’RE ALRIGHT, IT WILL WASTE POLICE TIME IF YOU DON’T LET US KNOW, I’M SUPPOSED TO LET THEM KNOW IF YOUR STILL AWAY BY TOMORROW. WILL KEEP EYE OUT FOR YOU.

  HOPING YOUR ALRIGHT Rosemary (Mrs. M)

  Arthur has nodded off, waiting for me in the conservatory. While I was packing he has been round the house collecting up more papers, and now he sits with them clutched against his chest; clearly he won’t be parted from them. Even asleep he looks fierce, like a little boy ready to put up a fight if the adults try to say it isn’t sensible to bring his stamp album to the seaside.

  I’ve never touched the car keys but I know they’re hanging on the line of hooks just inside the kitchen door. We leave by the conservatory and enter the garage from the back garden. There’s an old-fashioned mechanical smell of oil and linseed and rags and grass. When I’ve loaded the boot Arthur lets me help him into the passenger seat. There isn’t enough room to open the door properly and several parts of his body encumber him. His left leg is uncooperative; once he is seated half in, sideways, he drags it after himself as if it were made of wood. The shin scrapes slow and hard against the door edge and his foot flaps about uselessly, but he doesn’t flinch.

  I’m trying to think methodically. The car hasn’t been driven for months. What if it won’t start? I climb in and turn the ignition, and it does. With the engine running, I get out again and open each of the garage doors as quietly as I can. But the bottom of the first one screeches in its worn semicircle in the tar of the drive, loud enough, possibly, for people to hear. Now there is no time to waste. I don’t bother fiddling with the hooks and brackets in the ground that hold the doors open, so I shove them back as far as they’ll go and throw myself back into the driver’s seat. Before I can move forward they are already shuddering and swinging back on us but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Our departure is announced by two loud thwacks as the garage doors glance off the sides of the car. All I can do is keep going. I drag the gear lever into second, then third, and we roar off the drive, straight towards the dustbin that’s standing at the far end, slap bang in the middle under the trees. Those bastards. I forgot today was bin day. It’s too late to stop and move it, and it’s also far too late to miss it. My hands turn numb and over it goes with a bang. The car veers into the wall with a horrible rasping noise but I grip the wheel and swing us past the splintered dustbin and pell-mell into the avenue. My left-hand turn is more of a swerve and isn’t tight enough, so we clip the side of a car parked invisibly on the far side of the road; the other thing I’ve forgotten is to put headlights on. I can’t slow down to find where the switch is, so we have to lurch along for now, avoiding obstacles if possible. The trick is to keep going. Arthur tips back his head and lets out a whoop that scratches his throat and turns into a fit of coughing. He stamps his feet on the floor and turns to me with a mad spark in his eyes. Then he starts to clap one hand down against the other that lies dead in his lap.

  Four hours later we drive into the canopied artificial daylight of a service station on the M6. As I fill up the tank I study the docile shuffling of people inside, queuing at the registers and swaying among the shelves and cabinets. I wonder that they seem unembarrassed to be so lumpy and dark and heavy in a place so garish and streamlined. They appear quite undisturbed by the lights, and I want to learn how they do it so that I will look, when the time comes for me to go in, not as though I belong there (because none of them manages that) but just enough like one of them to pass without notice.

  But before I’m ready, Arthur is wheezing his way out of the car. He needs a bathroom, he says, and sets off across the forecourt in a bizarrely careful way as if he thinks he is elsewhere, perhaps walking sideways down a flight of stairs. He’s lost one of his slippers. I retrieve it from the foot-well of the car and catch up with him at the entrance and we go in together. He halts, flinching, overawed by the piped music and excruciating light. He seems about to collapse under the glare. The toilets are at the back. Once I’ve got his slipper back on I steer him across the floor, concentrating on finding the shortest route between the stands of magazines and banks of candy and bins of DVDs and thermos flasks on special offer. Through the music and the plopping of the cash registers I sense people in mid-transaction going quiet and turning their eyes on us, but maybe I am only imagining it.

  I push Arthur in the direction of his place and take myself to the ladies’ room. There’s a long mirror at the entrance that I can’t avoid, and that’s when I realize I probably wasn’t imagining that people were staring. I haven’t seen my own reflection in a while. I’ve changed. My face has puckered and turned a bready white, and my eyes are different, too, both faded and darkened. Rings have appeared around the irises, which are now a filmy watercolour blue. The pupils are sunk and tiny, like punctured holes. My mouth has the clamped, institutional look of someone whose incarceration, wherever it is, is chronic but no longer open to question, like a sanatorium patient or a life prisoner. Most dramatic though, is my hair. It’s grown, of course, and looks like grey, drought-stricken grass, but I hadn’t realized how flatly it sticks to my skull or how it sprouts up at the ends for being left unbrushed. The clothes could be better, too. They are plain enough and should not attract attention in themselves, but I am now aware my proportions have changed. The trousers flap at half-mast and the sweater seems empty in front and the sleeves hang over my hands to my fingertips. I see that I am wearing earrings, and the very idea of a surface such as mine being decorated in any way is preposterous. And being indoors so much has made me careless about footwear; the sandals don’t fit and never would have fitted, and the brown socks practical enough for an evening in the house seem here both to demand and to defy explanation.

  Arthur’s getup, as I notice when I come out and find him leaning for support on the plastic dome of a pay phone bolted to the wall, is filthy. In this light I see that his purple sweatshirt with Let’s Cruise emblazoned on the chest is crisscrossed with stains from our picnic in the attic, and his trousers are spotted with the dribbles and spills of innumerable little accidents of one kind or another.

  His free hand is fumbling with his trouser front and he’s oblivious to all else. I grab his other hand and pull him away, and he sets his eyes firmly on his feet and concentrates on getting them to move. We’re conspicuously slow. The attention we’re attracting is unmistakable now, and all I want is to get us through the door and back into darkness where the car is waiting. I’m trying unsuccessfully not to drag Arthur faster than he can go. We very nearly make it.

  Hey!

  I look up and see that the boy in the red T-shirt behind the register is talking to us. He has cinnamon skin and lustrous eyes. He can’t mean any harm.

  Yes, what? I say pleasantly.

  ’Scuse me a minute!

  Now the whole queue is turning to look at us-why? We’re not doing anything wrong, I know that, so the best thing we can do is ignore them. I grip Arthur’s arm and tug at him so hard he nearly falls over, but I have to get us out of this place.

  The boy glances over his shoulder and calls into a little office behind the counter. Another man in a red T-shirt appears and swiftly crosses the floor in front of us. When he’s in position between us and the door, the boy speaks again. His eyes gleam like wet plums.

  ’Scuse me, madam, these premises are protected by surveillance cameras. I have to inform you that you and your car-

  What? What’s the matter?

  He pats a few computer keys and his machine makes some pucking and scratching noises.

  I have to inform you that you have been recorded on the company’s CCTV security equipment getting fuel. Pump number 8, right? That’s twenty-six pounds eighty-seven, please. The company operates a strict zero tolerance policy with regard to non-payment. Cash or card, madam?

  I simply forgot. It’s an honest error made in a moment of absentmindedness, brought on, no doubt, by the strain of events. In my past life, if such a thing was ever t
o happen, that’s what I would have been assumed to be: honest and absentminded. Now I look like a thief. They think I’m a thief, and suddenly I feel like one, so how can I do otherwise than act like one? I thrust the money over as if I were paying a fine. I don’t say anything; if I try to explain I just made a mistake I’ll sound like a liar, then they’ll think I’m a liar as well as a thief. But saying nothing makes me seem stealthy and even more guilty; it’s confusing me, being both exposed like this and wrongly accused, and my confusion, too, looks like guilt. I try an apologetic smile but that must look guilty, too, because the boy’s glare shifts from me only long enough to exchange a knowing look with his colleague. Arthur is shaking.

  We make it out the door and back to the car. As we drive away it strikes me I’ve made another mistake. We’ll have to stop again. I should have bought food there. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to forget about paying for the fuel. Now we’ve got next to nothing to eat and I can’t let Arthur starve. I am more unnerved than I can say; the thought of braving such a place again fills me with absolute dread.

  We drive for many hours. At around three o’clock in the morning we leave the motorway, and immediately the rushing in my brain eases. Arthur’s head is lolling back, and as I turn up the slip road and steer around the roundabout, it tips and rolls and he wakes up. Just off the junction there’s a long lay-by with a couple of parked lorries and at the very end a food van, lit and open. I pull over and stop. Arthur staggers out and pees against a tree while I buy four of everything: burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, kebabs, chips-enough to keep us going for a while, appetizing or not, stone cold or not.

  For the rest of the journey we are travelling into the light. Arthur is cheerful now. He fishes out various maps and points all over them with a pen from the glove compartment, though he isn’t saying much. Somehow he has three pairs of spectacles in his pockets and tries them all, finally using two pairs by wearing one and holding the other halfway between his eyes and the page on his lap.

  Ruth, he says, making a face, the old B596 is no more. I’m rerouting us west of Bakewell, we can’t be doing with all this bypass nonsense.

  His words are muffled, as if he is chewing on a mouthful of wet paper, but I obey his directions and he settles back and says, Isn’t this nice?

  I agree it is. He beams and places a hand on my arm. Oh, isn’t it nice? Going back?

  It’s lovely.

  Going back together, he says with satisfaction, and we drive on until I have to start singing to keep myself awake. I wind the window down to let in some cold air. We’re climbing higher; the rushing wind has lost the oily tang of the main roads and has the magical pricking sweetness of cut fields and a heavy, early autumn dew. Arthur laughs and joins in with “Green Grow the Rushes-o” and when we finish that he starts up at once with “Jerusalem,” as if he knows a hundred songs and can pick one without thinking. The words come easily, and give him delight.

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountain green?

  Remember, Ruth? Jerusalem?

  Just in time, I do.

  Fourteenth of June, 1972, I say, and he smiles at me and squeezes my hand on the steering wheel.

  But still I can’t stay awake, and although it’s very nearly light and it can’t be far now, I pull off the road into the opening of a rutted track. Across it just a few feet back from the road there’s a barrier of barbed wire and baler twine, stretched between fence posts set in old concrete-filled paint cans. An electrified livestock fence is drawn across a couple of yards behind that. Beyond it, at the horizon, the sky is solidifying to a pale solid gold, like cooling beeswax. I tip the seat back and close my eyes. Arthur sighs and settles beside me and takes my hand. Except for the occasional soft buffeting of air as a vehicle roars past us, it is quiet and still.

  The sun on my face wakes me up. There’s a tight ache around my ribs. The day is already garish but when I get out of the car to stretch my body, I discover it’s also windy and cold. By the side of the track, sparse and stemmy weeds dusky with exhaust fumes wave back and forth, and here and there in the ditch the meagre yellow stars of a wildflower dip among cigarette packets, bottles, and shreds of paper and buckled cans. Miles above us, a few birds fleck a giant, chaotic sky.

  Arthur wakes in a bad mood. Of course, he says, peevish and flatulent, he will remember the turnoff out of Netherbarn Cross for Overdale, but we drive three miles too far before he admits in an injured voice that I have missed it. His stomach is upset; he wriggles and scratches and fidgets with the window. I turn the car around and we crawl back the way we came but still he can’t find the turnoff because, he says, he can’t be expected to recognize it approaching from the wrong direction. We persevere, but after more studying of the maps and the tattered hand-drawn directions from nearly forty years ago, twice he chooses the wrong track. One takes us into a farmyard; the other ends at a barred and padlocked brick building stuck with aerials and antennae, property of the electricity company, sitting at the base of a pylon.

  It’s not as if you, Arthur says sniffily, as I reverse the car and we start to bump our way back to the road, were ever a natural at map-reading.

  I’m too exasperated to reply so we drive on saying nothing for a while, back in the direction of Netherbarn Cross. We pass the same small garage we’ve seen half a dozen times; the situation is getting so desperate that I am steeling myself, if we have to drive past it again, to go in and ask for directions.

  Still, he says, I suppose you’d better take a look.

  I park at a disused turning that looks as if it might once have led to a hopeless golf course that never prospered. It’s a derelict little place that we’ve passed and repassed in the last hour, but while I’m peering at the map Arthur is staring hard out the window.

  Those trees are new, he says eventually.

  It seems we’re here. We’ve found it by accident. It’s the trees that threw him, a line of conifers on each side behind low, curving brick walls that also, he says, never used to be here. The old Overdale track has been transformed into an entrance, and the entrance is now in disrepair; in front of each of the two trees nearest the road stands a pair of upright, rusting metal struts, buckled and stricken. One set is quite bare and from the other hang the stiff plywood shreds of a sign long ago ripped away.

  And another thing, Arthur grumbles, waving a hand behind him: How could I be expected to find it when everything else is so different? The garage never used to be there, either. And they’ve widened the road and stuck those things in the middle.

  There are barriers between the two traffic lanes and a long white-hatched space in the road where coaches can wait before turning. His memory of the old hazardous junction is useless, and the old directions no longer make sense.

  They’ve flattened out the bend, he says, aggrieved. No wonder I missed it. After all, you missed it, too, didn’t you?

  I start the car again and we set off up the track. The posts of the brick entrance have fallen away and lie crumbled and biscuity on the ground, and across the walls zigzag fissures in the mortar skew the brickwork. There are gaps in the rows of white copestones. Where the conifers end, the way reverts to a country track through fields. A tall green line of weeds grows down the centre of it and swishes the underside of the car. Every few yards we drive over ruts that have been filled with stones or patches of tar, but not recently; thistles and dock sprout through puddles and cracks. I have to stop and get out to move a coil of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron out of the way, and about half a mile on we come across a burned-out, rusted car, tipped halfway into a field. The front wheels and bonnet are missing and its boot gapes open. Nettles stretch up through the engine.

  Gradually we leave the tussocky fields behind. The hills on either side of the way begin to climb towards the sky. As they rise into slanting mounds and suave, tilting cones they assume new distinction and character; they acquire the presence, even sentience, of sculpture or of peop
le standing peripherally and very still, alone or in deliberate clusters. Light brims over the shoulders of the eclipsed hills to the east and pours itself over the opposite side in cold, showy pinks and yellows. The track rises ahead and then dips, and in the distance disappears round a curve into the dark swell of a valley. I glance at Arthur. His eyes are running with tears and his mouth opens and closes wetly.

  Nearly there, I whisper, and he nods.

  After another mile or so the wide pebbly stream that is now running alongside the track veers away extravagantly. We round the next curve and Arthur cries out. I stop the car on the edge of an apron of pitted tarmac tatty with weeds and the mangled remains of benches and litter bins. The building before us is a small redbrick mansion with a miscellany of dark elaborate turrets and impractical chimneys and gabled windows, set into the hillside in front of a sparse plantation of twiggy shrubs and trees. Even derelict and vandalized, it looks pompous.

  The whole place is surrounded by high chain-link fencing, bearing warning signs about trespass and the hazardous state of “these premises.” I leave Arthur weeping quietly in the car and walk the fence. I go as far as the ruin of a modern single-storey extension, not visible from the car, that abuts on the far side of the lodge. Here is where two sections of fencing have been forced apart and where, against the walls of the extension, fires have been set. Smoke stains snake up the boards nailed over the front doors as far as the asphalt overhang of the flat roof. The blistered, prefabricated panels under one of the windows have sheered off and now curl outward. Like all the others, this window had been boarded up, but now it’s a jagged dark rectangle. Traces of another fire on the ground underneath it reach as high as the sill. The window board itself, prised off and split and partly burnt, lies nearby in a bed of broken glass.