Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  We limped through the music. It wasn’t very good yet. There were too many of us to make keeping time together for very long a realistic goal at this stage, and I felt drowned every time the instruments swelled. But I knew all this from previous years; the rehearsals always took the same pattern. The slow dredging together of a performable version of whatever it was we were singing. There would be a sudden gear change as we reached the concert itself, when all the notes were sung and played in the order intended, when the presence of an audience made us all stand straight. I was used to the rhythm of these rehearsals. What was new was her.

  When we spoke at the last rehearsal she told me she lived in town, near what we both still called the swimming pool park, though there hadn’t been a pool there for years. They had knocked it down when they built the leisure centre on the other side of town. She told me she walked to school in the mornings and liked the Fauré. When I told her what my dad did she thought her father, an estate agent, might possibly buy his shoes in my dad’s shop, although she couldn’t be certain. She had said she would find out, and I wondered now whether she had gone home and asked, whether my name might have come up over a meal at her dining room table, as if I might live in the same world as her, as if I might intersect with a part of her life. I had learned all I could of her in the two minutes of breathless, agonised, halting conversation we had shared at the first rehearsal. Now I wanted to know everything else. Everything that had ever happened to her, every thought that had ever crossed her mind, every inch of her body.

  At the start of the week I had been looking forward to this rehearsal. The idea of seeing her, hearing her voice, filled me up, and I began to dream impossibly of getting her on her own somehow, walking her home after rehearsal, even asking her out to do something at the weekend.

  There was once a boy who wondered where you were supposed to take girls on dates, what you were supposed to do alone together with an afternoon or an evening to pass in one another’s company. He could not understand how anyone could enjoy spending time with him.

  What date could I possibly get through without her discovering how far below her I was, how little of her time I deserved to occupy? I had read somewhere that the cinema wasn’t cool any more as a place to go on dates. You were supposed to spend a first date talking. I couldn’t imagine having enough to talk about that might be interesting to her, and I wondered whether that wasn’t exactly the point of having a first date at a cinema: you could sit in silence and get your nerves out of the way the first time, then try talking later.

  The rehearsal trudged on towards the half-time break, and I realised with a sudden certainty that I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t talk to her. What would I say? How are you? Been busy? Do you remember who I am? We only met for a moment. Since we met at the last rehearsal I have thought of nothing but you, dreamed of nothing but kissing you, wanted nothing but to see you smile at something I say, wanted nothing but to hold your attention, even for a moment, and make you laugh, and I wondered whether you might like to go for a coffee some time?

  And yet I had fallen in love with a girl named Sophie Lawrence. So that was it. I was lost. How could I not do something about it?

  Mr Richardson dropped his baton and announced we would stop for quarter of an hour, and I stood at once. I would go outside. I could loiter by the gravestones, pretend I was on my phone if anyone came near. The whole thing was so pathetic, I wanted to laugh at myself. It was ridiculous to make such a drama out of something no one else in the world would have noticed or known about at all. How can such huge things as feelings only exist in our heads? How is it that they never take form in the real world?

  Adam put a hand lightly on my arm.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, just feel a bit – I’m just going outside.’

  Adam nodded. It was nothing to him. He must have found me strange. He was doing me a favour, giving a younger boy the time of day when he didn’t have to, offering me a way into the social world around me. It was nothing to him if I didn’t want to take it.

  I spent the break trailing round the side of the church and watching the cars on the roundabout, some with their lights on, that hour of the evening when it is neither light nor dark, and wondering what she was doing. Surely some other boy would start chatting her up? Even now she would be smiling and giving out her number. I could imagine the scene, one sweaty-palmed classmate of mine or another thumbing the digits into his phone then pranking her so she had his number too, going back to his seat with a smile on his face, feeling as if he had a fish on a line and was reeling her in. They would all know how to get what they wanted from her, they would know how to talk about sex, but none of them would love her like I did. I wondered whether the men who ended up living alone could be picked out from a very early age, if in fact our whole lives could be diagnosed in our childhoods, all the patterns established in school spooling out through adulthood or old age.

  The other little groups that had wandered outside headed back into the church, and I followed them back to my seat. Adam wasn’t there, and I looked across to see him standing among the sopranos, holding forth slightly too loudly. He seemed to have no trouble talking to girls, but it crossed my mind watching him from this distance that he had the look of a bore at a grown-up party, like those uncles who think too much of themselves, and I wondered whether there was something too polite in the smiles of the girls listening to him.

  Mr Richardson took to his stand again. I realised as the girls Adam had been talking to moved away that she had been there, standing with her back to me. As she turned to find her seat her eye caught mine, and my heart leapt as she held my gaze for a moment and smiled.

  ‘Budge up.’ Adam stood over me, hands on hips, mock-serious. I moved along one.

  ‘Sorry.’ I looked back at her. She had turned to face Mr Richardson again, but as I watched, her eyes flicked across to me again. I wondered whether I was imagining it or whether she blushed when she caught me looking.

  ‘You fancy her, don’t you?’ Adam said.

  ‘No.’ I knew I was blushing.

  ‘Why not? I do. I’d love to fuck her.’ He looked at me, smiling. ‘You don’t like the rude words, do you?’

  ‘I don’t mind rude words.’

  ‘I wonder what her cunt tastes like? Wouldn’t you like to strip her naked and pull her legs open and find out?’

  ‘Erm. I dunno.’

  Adam laughed then, and I didn’t know what else to say. Every other boy I ever met seemed to know so much about girls. Why could I barely look at her? Why did I live my life so afraid?

  After we finished, Adam made his way across the hall to the girls he would be catching the bus home with. He leaned into the conversation like a ship cresting a wave, and I followed as he tried to make a joke about Mr Richardson. I never liked laughing at Mr Richardson, and didn’t laugh along, though everyone else did. I felt someone’s shoulder against mine.

  ‘He’s a bit of a prick, isn’t he?’

  I looked around and she was standing right next to me, flesh and blood and breathing the same air I was. She was smiling, conspiratorial, head inclined towards Adam. ‘Thinks he’s brilliant.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I wondered what would happen if I was honest, and then the silence was stretching too long, so I tried it.

  ‘I really like Mr Richardson,’ I said.

  She nodded. ‘I go round his house sometimes. His daughter’s in our year, but she doesn’t do choir.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I guess it’s a bit like hanging out with your dad, isn’t it?’

  It must have been a trick in the way she stood, but she made me feel as if we had left the other group entirely, though we still stood in the middle of it; as if we were the only two people talking in all the world. I wanted to keep looking at her, but couldn’t. I found myself looking down at my shoes, back up at her face, back down at her shoes, until I got a grip on myself and took to studying my hands.
/>   ‘It’s good music, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I like it. You lot are better than us though; we’ve got a shit choir this year.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘We can’t keep in time. It’s Sam, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. You’re Sophie?’

  Her smile seemed to say she knew very well I had remembered who she was, and I felt shy again. She must have been able to tell everything I was feeling, read me like my skin was water and the thoughts in my head so many fish swimming beneath it.

  ‘Yeah. Where do you live?’

  ‘Harnham.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Tell you what, wanna walk home? I’m sort of on your way, aren’t I? If you’re not getting a lift. My parents don’t let me walk home on my own.’

  I shrugged, nodded, tried to look casual while my heart hammered in my chest.

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘Otherwise I’ll end up spending half an hour at the bus station with this lot, and I just want to go home. You don’t go to the bus station much, do you?’ She said this like it was a good thing. The fact I was never invited to hang out at the bus station with everyone else, the epicentre of all social interaction, had always been a source of shame and humiliation to me. Now it seemed to have become the thing that made me worth talking to.

  ‘I normally just walk home.’

  I felt like my legs were going to give way. Some energy shot through my arms, my whole body, not a rush of blood but something else, some electricity pouring into every nerve ending. She was so brave. Was it really as easy as that? It felt like nothing had ever happened before. Or nothing that had ever felt half as alive as this.

  She turned to her friends and announced she was leaving, and I watched to see whether some smile passed between them, but everyone reacted as if the two of us walking home together was perfectly normal. Perhaps we were the loners and it seemed logical we might get on. Adam raised an eyebrow when I waved goodbye to him, and I couldn’t help smiling at the thought he might be impressed. Perhaps she was trying to get me away from everyone else. Perhaps I was going to have a story to tell tomorrow. But I already knew I would never tell anyone anything Sophie Lawrence said to me this evening. It was my adventure, my story to read to the end; it was secret. She was waiting for me in the door of the hall, and I hurried to catch up, smiling, sheepish.

  ‘You good to go?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Come on then.’

  It was getting dark outside. The air was a deep blue and there were clouds coming out of the west and the sunset, but above us was only the sky and telegraph wires strung over the road like the streamers of air that get left behind in the wake of aeroplanes. She led me back a quicker way to town, through an underpass, past anonymous suburban houses you would never have suspected of containing whole lives if you didn’t live in one yourself. The pavements were orange in the light of the streetlamps. It was cold enough for me to wish I had a jacket.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve met before really, have we?’ she said.

  ‘No. Except the other week.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re not in Adam’s year though?’

  ‘No, I’m in yours.’

  ‘Are you doing music?’

  We talked about composition; we talked about the fun of picking apart music we had never understood before, how you learned the language it was written in. We got to the swimming pool park very quickly, and I wanted the road to curl round and lead us away again, wanted to be lost with her, to walk with her for ever.

  ‘I’m just up there, so I guess this is where I leave you,’ Sophie said, smiling and slowing her pace.

  I breathed deep. I might never get to walk with her again like this.

  ‘OK. Listen, Sophie—’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I was wondering whether you were around at the weekend? Whether you might fancy meeting up?’ I knew before I had finished that it had gone badly. She seemed to flinch, to screw up her face as she thought ahead.

  ‘I’m really sorry but I’m not free,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. OK.’

  ‘Sorry. My grandma’s ill and we’re going to see her. I promised I’d see her this weekend.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Sorry. I’d like to.’

  I wanted to say, there are two days in a weekend. What are you doing with the other one? But that wasn’t the point. It didn’t even matter whether or not there actually was a grandma to give the story any substance. The point was that she was saying no.

  ‘That’s fine. Have a good evening then.’ I started to turn away, wanting to get away from her as quickly as possible before she could see the shame in me, but she said my name and I stopped, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Sorry. Maybe some other weekend.’

  I wondered whether she meant it. I couldn’t tell. I was too embarrassed to look very hard.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘See you soon then?’ She stood looking at me, and I didn’t know what she wanted.

  ‘OK. Night.’

  ‘Night.’

  I turned again and walked away. When I looked back for a last time, she had vanished, gone inside to her parents and the warmth of dinner and the evening and sleep. I wondered whether I would be more or less able to sleep that night. I thought I knew the answer. I wondered about the shadows under my eyes. How deep could they get before my eyes caved in?

  I had to walk another two miles home. I stuck to the narrow pavement of the ring road – that would save me going through the centre of the city and the darkness of the Greencroft. I didn’t like walking through the Greencroft once the sun had gone off it. Boys from other schools hung about in little gangs by the basketball net or on the playground, and there was a bench where drinkers gathered like a murder of crows. They had been boys on swings scaring passers-by once as well, I supposed, and now, in their twenties or thirties, too old to participate in that game, they brought their cider or Super along to watch their successors enjoying themselves intimidating the choirboys. There was something sad about it, to see men returning to their childhood haunts, worse for wear. They didn’t belong in those parks any more, but they hadn’t found anywhere new to belong to either. Perhaps all adult life was an attempt to keep alight the fires that burned when you were young, when everything was possible and new, when a smile from Sophie Lawrence had the power to change the world.

  The cars on the ring road flashed past, and when a lorry came I felt myself buffeted in the violence of its wake, the wind shaking me on my feet. Somewhere near the mouth of Winchester Street, where the road rose up on steep banks and reached roof level, I heard a voice below me. I looked down to see a woman with a dog.

  ‘Excuse me? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m walking home.’

  ‘You should come away from the road. Come down. You’re going to die, my love.’

  I know, I wanted to say.

  2

  THERE WAS ONCE a boy who had a story to tell but couldn’t bring himself to tell it. So he distracted himself with other things, talking about love, talking about youth, talking about the surface of his life. But the story lay there all the same within him. And he knew he would not sleep again until he spoke it out. He knew there had to be an exorcism.

  My father was my hero, and I loved his life as some people love their own life or success or adventure or the pursuit of women. While I was growing up I knew so little about him, and I hated that, felt it keenly as an absence. Few children enquire about the details of their parents’ lives while they still live with them. It’s once you fly the nest you stop to wonder where you came from. But my whole life, even while we lived together, was filled with wishing I knew more about my father and not knowing how to ask.

  Dad wasn’t the most approachable man in the world, but it was Mum who sealed my lips and kept me from starting conversations with him, from hearing about his life. All my T life I’ve been afraid of my mo
ther. There has never been any good reason. But when I look at her I see emotion buried, and the pressure under the skin of her has always scared me, the violence of it, the way it waits in the house for me every evening. I suspect my mum of depression; I suspect my mum of bipolarity; I suspect my mum of anaemia, which makes her short with the rest of the world because she gets so tired; I suspect my mum’s character was formed by a great deficit of affection in her childhood, or at least by the perception of a lack of love, which she has never worked through, never confronted or resolved. What I know is that she has never been happy in her life, and so she guards Dad jealously as her territory, her treasure, the one good thing that happened to her. Our love for him always felt like a competition. Not one he was aware of, but a battle we fought between ourselves, a cold war we never admitted to, which meant I could never have asked Dad about his childhood or youth. It would have been conceding a position, giving Mum a chance to demonstrate how much more she knew about him than me. It would have made me vulnerable. An undisguised attempt to get closer to Dad might have brought retaliation in one form or another. Some love withheld down the line, some grounding for spurious reasons, some form of trouble me and Mum would both know could be traced back to my indiscretion but which she would conceal too well beneath some other anger for me to confront her about it. Above all else, Mum was an angry woman, though I do not know what wrong had ever been done to her.

  Dad was everything I wanted to be from my first memory of him. That had been the time he saved my life. I was four years old and we had gone on holiday to Cornwall, to a farm outside the village of Delabole. I discovered later that Delabole had a story like anywhere else – King Arthur was supposed to have fought his last battle up the road at a hamlet called Slaughterbridge. At the time of the holiday, though, it was simply a paradise of cow parsley, strange lichen-licked rocks, open spaces I was unable to enjoy because I had earache. Mum fed me a disgusting banana medicine that made me want to retch, and Dad took me for walks. He showed me foxgloves, their softness when I put my finger inside the flowers, and glow-worms in the hedges at night, but all I really paid attention to was pain and how sorry I felt for myself.