by Joe Treasure
They offered a sample of his lyrics. Put them in a box in bigger print. Don’t care if she black or white, long as she right in the head, not dead from the neck up. Don’t want no girl who don’t know jack. Don’t care if she beige or pink, long as she got no smalltime rinky dink dream in her eye, no chink of a cash machine.
I read it out and asked the boys what it meant.
‘It don’t mean nothing, boss,’ Kevin said. ‘It’s a song.’
I googled Random later. Somebody called him a leading exponent of anarcho rap. There was a link to the title track of his new album. The party’s over. Get off your well-fed arses and on your feet. We’ve burst your pretty balloons. Randomocracy is in the street.
He looked like the enemy – it was the end of my party he was celebrating, the bursting of my balloon – but as a class warrior I didn’t take him seriously. We were both riding the same wave.
I was always good at pushing things out of my mind and dealing with what was in front of me. But I’d never really shaken the thought of Penny in that squat. I felt bad about her. And my life had changed since then. I was feeling more sure of you, Caro. The recession had slowed me down, but it had also given me Talgarth Hall on a plate. I had a sense that I’d arrived somewhere. And Penny was family. So I tracked down Random’s agent and emailed a message for Penny with my new number telling her I’d like her to call.
We met for a drink. I almost didn’t recognise her, walked right past her table looking for the same rat’s nest hair and refugee dress I remembered from her squatting days. She’d dyed her hair silver blond with a pink forelock. She was bubbling with excitement. I asked her where she was living and she said Random was renting a flat with a recording studio in the basement and for now she was living there with other members of the band, and Random sometimes, though he had his own place. But they had plans, her and Random. He just had to finish with his girlfriend.
‘And you’re a singer now?’
‘I’ve always been a singer, Jase. It’s just no one ever noticed before. We weren’t supposed to sing in Hebron, remember. Random’s about the music but about so much more than the music. Random’s got something really important to say.’
What I’d never noticed was how good-looking she was, my kid sister. And there was something fierce about her that made you pay attention even when she was talking crap.
She wanted us to get together, the four of us. I said OK, on condition that she didn’t talk about the Jesus bus. I explained that as far as you were concerned I’d lived in Southwark until my Dad died and my mum had taken up with Derek. Penny said she’d finished with all that anyway, never thought about it. She was making her own life. Sod Caleb and sod Jesus.
So we met in that pub in Borough Market. Random was a performer and I saw how you took against him, Caro. You were kind to Penny because she was my sister and because you were a kind person. But Random pressed all the wrong buttons. ‘You so fine, Caro-line’ wasn’t the kind of flattery you were susceptible to. I watched your eyes roll and glaze over. Me he called the Argonaut, which I didn’t mind. It was a step up from Tory wanker anyway. He had a nickname for Penny too. You thought he was calling her Masha, and asked if it was Russian. He laughed. ‘Russian, that’s good. She might be Russian. She might be from Paraguay. That’s why I call her Mash-up because she come from all over, you know, bit of this, bit of that. She my mongrel queen, my riverside penthouse life-on-the-street scene, my going-some-place has-been. She a champagne and caviar backroom piss-up. Gotta get real, gotta fess up, she my hard living, feather bed, down and dirty, pristine mash-up.’ He’d do that, without asking anyone’s permission – break into words. And then he’d laugh enough for everyone. His accent was hard to place – two parts Peckham, one part Caribbean, with a dash of something more exotic – Tonbridge, maybe. I had him pegged as a fraud from the start. I couldn’t help liking him though. He was just making his way in the world. No different from me. It was just that I sold property, while he sold himself, or some version of himself. That’s what we did back then, when there was a world to make your way in. We lived on our wits. And he was being nice enough to Penny, so I liked him for that. I’d run out on her twice, which so far he hadn’t. I was happy for him to put on whatever face worked for him.
Afterwards we walked through the market to the station. You led the way, eager to get home. Random kept pace with you, knowing he’d failed to charm you, not ready to give up on an audience. Penny and I trailed behind, wandering among the iron pillars.
‘Remember,’ I said, ‘you can always come to me if you need help.’
‘Why would I need help? Random loves me. He’s excited about our baby.’
‘Jesus, Pen, you’re not pregnant are you?’
‘Why shouldn’t I be? I’m old enough.’
‘And Random’s the father?’
‘Obviously.’
‘And you think he’s going to stick around?’
She stopped walking. ‘You’re a real shit, you know that?’
‘I’m just looking out for you.’
‘I don’t see you for years and then you crap on my life, on everything I’ve got.’
‘What you’ve got is great. It’s what you’re going to have when this baby is born that worries me.’
‘He loves me, Jase. He’s my family now. He’s done more for me than you ever did.’
‘And what about his career?’
‘Our career, you mean – his and mine and the band’s. You see, we don’t think the way you do. The whole money system’s on the way out, by the way, the whole property thing. Then you’ll be the one needing help.’
‘Yeah, come the revolution. Meanwhile family values aren’t exactly an asset in his line of work, are they. It’s not like he’s a vicar or an MP. His life isn’t meant to be tidy. He doesn’t call himself Random for nothing.’
She called me a bastard and a mean-minded capitalist fuckhead and some other things I couldn’t hear for the train screeching overhead.
Later I put a cheque in the mail with a note telling her to buy something nice for the baby. I got a text saying ‘ta bro’. After that she blipped off my radar.
Agnes
What have I done? I heard his bones break. Unless it was the branches breaking under him to slow his fall. There was a cracking anyway that held my heart from beating until it must race to catch up. It was a long fall and I’d never have had the strength to do it, but he stood on the edge of the road where it rises on stalks above the forest.
There are walls in perfect lines on either side, and places where the road has crumbled and the wall has fallen away, or the wall arches through the air and nothing under it.
It was a long fall. How long I don’t know with the trees in leaf, the green roof sagging under him to sway up again once he was gone.
I think he’s dead. Or I wish him dead but think the branches saved him. He may be dead whether I wish him dead or not. I hope he doesn’t lie broken for wolves and crows to find.
It was night still when I heard him on his horse come after me. I was on the high part of the road and nowhere to hide, no shadow to stand in and a staring moon. I was walking, leading Gideon by the reins. He shouted to me and said he’d ridden hard to fetch me back.
‘Ride all you want,’ I told him, ‘I won’t come.’
He dropped from his horse and came closer. I thought even then he would beg me to claim him from himself, to lead him by the hand to my father’s cottage, as if I had come that night to his calling and we’d slept, and just then woken dew-stained in the woods, blushing at muffled footsteps and laughter and the primrose petals falling from our hair.
But he said only that he’d find a cottage boy to take me, to call my child his and care for it.
I wouldn’t let myself answer I felt such bitterness, but turned my back and walked on, pulling Gideon after.
He shouted that I’d never find my way. ‘The scroungers will kill you, or worse,’ he said. He caught up with me and spoke
in a softer voice. ‘Don’t judge me harshly, Agnes. I can’t choose for myself as you can.’ I turned and saw tears on his face and his arm rising roughly to smudge them.
‘You dare to cry? I was friendless and far from home and knew nothing and you took what you had no right to take. And then you stood by and let them punish me. I’ll never trust you again or like you or think you wise.’
He looked at the ground then, and let the tears come, which made me more angry.
‘And you can’t call it love, or say you didn’t know what you were doing. Because I wasn’t the first. There was Sarah before me.’
‘I did my best for Sarah.’ He wiped his face with his sleeve and lifted his eyes to meet mine. ‘If you’ve found out her secret it wasn’t me who told it.’
‘Half the village knows how you took her child from her and gave it to the scroungers.’
‘To save her from shame.’
‘To save yourself. Everything, always, for yourself. Even my poor mother.’ I’d meant never to breathe a word of what I’d learnt about Janet’s baby, born dead or smothered soon after, of the belt she’d tied around her neck, and the punishment that followed. I didn’t even want to think of it. But seeing Brendan so mawkishly sorry for himself, I found I had to speak.
He was staring at me in surprise.
‘You see,’ I said, ‘I know about that too, and I wasn’t yet born.’
‘What harm did I ever do to Janet?’
‘She was driven mad, I know that, by the death of her baby, and suffered as I did in the red room, and she was only half alive when my father married her and there was nothing left for him but your leavings.’
I watched him labouring to take this in. ‘You don’t know, Agnes.’ He shook his head bitterly and looked away over the canopy of trees. ‘There’s so much you don’t know.’
‘What, though? What don’t I know?’
‘I was a boy when Janet came to my bed.’ He met my eye, daring me to say otherwise. ‘A boy without parents to watch out for me. And Janet was the girl who’d held my hand and led me to the spring to wash and to the kitchen to pour me a cup of milk, and had settled me to sleep before walking home from the Hall each evening. I understood nothing, except that it was daybreak and she was doing what she had never done before, getting into bed beside me.’
‘Liar.’
‘She meant me to be the father of her child but her child already had a father.’
‘How could you know that? How could you be sure?’
‘Because when she made to kiss me I could tell she didn’t mean it, and she left off soon enough and turned away and I heard her sobbing. I understood none of this till later.’
‘Liar, liar.’
‘I never harmed her.’
‘Who then, if not you?’
‘Oh, Agnes.’ He looked at me fiercely. ‘Only your Uncle Morton is left alive to say what went on in that cottage.’
I hit him then, letting go of Gideon’s rope to swing at him with both fists as I would have swung an axe at a tree. He stepped backwards, caught his foot on a vine branch. He frowned at me as if I was a puzzling sentence in the Book of Windows. The branches swung apart to let him in and closed again behind him. If he had fallen dead in the pond, the green water would have closed over him just so, settling again as if it thought nothing of him and couldn’t tell the Reader from a dropped corn sack. I heard branches breaking and the movement of startled birds, and a grunt like the last breath pushed out of him. Then more cracking that might have been his neck or his limbs or the limbs of trees. I waited for the noises to stop. I forgot to breathe while I waited to see if he would cry in pain from the ground. But I heard nothing so I let out my own gasp of pain and went on my way.
Day has come and thunder with it and now rain enough to drown me and make a muddy river of the track. I take shelter under a sagging iron roof while I eat and write.
I would never have hit him if he hadn’t told such lies about my mother. If he hadn’t come so close to the edge of the road he would have come to no harm.
Soon I must ride again, drenched as I am. Ruins lie all around me in the forest. I start at every sound, thinking it’s the Monk, swinging by his tail to catch me, though I don’t believe in the Monk and have worse things to fear. There is nothing for me here but sadness and danger.
Jason
From up here on the roof I can see the world – the woods and fields our world has shrunk to. It was hairy getting up this high. Aleksy helped me lay some boards on the stable roof and we raised an extension ladder from there, roping it to a downpipe to give it some stability. I found a couple of claw hammers in the shed and a bag of roofing nails and we hauled up a stack of slates reclaimed from the old outhouse. The trees in the High Wood are our nearest neighbours and their branches wave at us and sing. The wind is strong up here, but the rain has held off and for now we’re safe inside the parapet.
When I helped Aleksy on to the roof, I asked him if it reminded him of his circus days.
He wasn’t amused. ‘I work with animals. Sometimes a strongman act with elephants. For one season, when I was fourteen, shot from a cannon. But the tightrope and trapeze I left to others. These are different skills, you understand Jason, like bricklayer or plasterer.’
He’s careless of his bandaged arm, but I can see it hurts him to use it. We’ve made a late start, after clearing a patch of thistles and digging it over to plant cabbages, but we’ve still got an hour or so of daylight. We’ve brought up a broom and a stiff brush. I set Aleksy sweeping up whatever’s blown into the valleys, checking to see where the lead might have buckled or split. There’s spleenwort sprouting from the brickwork round one of the chimneystacks and moss on some of the lower slates where the water is slow to drain. I clean out the drainage holes in the parapet walls and lean over to pull an old nest from a cast iron hopper head. I see where some of the slates have slipped and a couple with long cracks in them, and I begin patching.
After a while we hear the cattle clattering into the yard for their second milking – the Friesians and the Jerseys. I have a better sense of them now that Abigail has walked me through their field at sunset. Deirdre shouts a question and falls silent while Maud, I suppose, shows her what to do. There are footsteps below in the house, a window slides open and shut again, and I picture Abigail dusting and cleaning, a few strands of hair escaping her headscarf to fall across her work-smudged face. There’s a smell of smoke from the lawn and faintly in the distance a two-note call.
‘Listen, Aleksy.’
‘What is it?’
‘Can’t you hear the cuckoo?’
Aleksy laughs. ‘Too late for the cuckoo, old man. It’s September already, maybe October. Cuckoos all flew south three, four months ago.’
The smell of the bonfire gets sharper. They’re burning the dry thistle stalks. I lean over the parapet and see the orange glow and the grey smoke rising from it. And there’s Simon – the dark mop of his hair appearing from under the portico. He waddles towards the fire, his movement hampered by the weight of whatever he’s got in his basket. Perhaps Abigail has recruited him to help her clean the house. Approaching the flames, he pauses and shifts into a slow orbit, staying as close as the heat will allow, throwing things from his basket, little patches of darkness to scatter sparks and sink into the flames.
‘What do you think they’re burning down there?’
Aleksy looks up from his sweeping. ‘They’re cooking our dinner. Hot dogs maybe. Remember sausages?’
‘Remember bread rolls…’ I hear the cuckoo again. Something isn’t right. ‘Have you seen Django?’
‘Not since he took to his room.’
Simon’s basket is empty. He looks towards the house, raising his face to an upstairs window. He puts the basket down and picks up something else – a jug or vase. Holding it in both hands he hurls the contents towards the fire. There’s a belch of white flame which sends him staggering backwards. Then the sound reaches me – a whoop and a flutt
ering pressure in the gut.
‘Jesus Christ. It’s petrol.’
The noise has brought Aleksy to the edge of the roof. ‘Who got petrol?’
‘Help me down before that boy kills himself.’
Aleksy follows me around the edge of the roof. I stand for a moment looking down into the yard where the cows are still penned. The first step over the parapet is the worst, turning your back on the drop and feeling with a foot for the first rung. The stonework seems to tilt and I have a strange feeling that I’m suspended under it looking up. A shadow crosses my vision and I think I’m going to black out. Then the world rights itself and I’m clinging to the parapet with my feet on the ladder. And I’m able to make the descent.
In the yard, Maud looks up from her milking. I see the question in her eyes but don’t stop to answer.
When I reach the bonfire, Simon is sitting at its edge, rocking forward and back, muttering, the empty basket on one side of him, the jug on the other. Smoke and ash rise behind him and the trees at the lawn’s edge shimmer in the heat. ‘I won’t burn mmm…’ he says, and makes his carp face. ‘I won’t burn mmm…’ – lips pursed, neck bulging.
‘What is it, Si?’
He looks up and I see he’s got his favourite book. He clutches it tight to his chest. ‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’
‘Burn Moon?’
‘I won’t, I won’t, I won’t.’
‘Course not. Why would you?’
‘Just the others.’
‘What others?’
‘The others. From the house.’ And I see what’s on the fire. The smouldering remains of books – your books, Caroline. Your favourite girls – George and Virginia, Margaret and Angela, Ali and Zadie. Books I’d never got round to and maybe never would, but important to you, part of who you were. Because if my way of knowing the world was to feel its texture and to shape it under my hand, yours was to read. You once said you thought of characters in a story as leaves that show you the force and direction of the wind. The wind is too big, too unseeable, you said. But the leaf stirs and twists and makes the wind visible.