Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  I went to see her after school. We walked round the back of her school, to the water meadows beyond the new leisure centre, into a wide field with a river running through it, and I laid her down and I kissed her and she wrapped her legs around me. I walked home in the evening, smiling, tired, a strength in my arms and legs that was like love coursing through me. He was sitting at the table and Mum was upstairs in their bedroom. Mum was crying. I heard her later when I went up the stairs.

  ‘Sam, they’ve seen how I’ve responded to the first course of chemo and they’ve decided not to go through another. It hasn’t actually done very much to slow the rate of – it hasn’t actually done very much. So I’m back now, and that’s good, and the good news is my hair will start to grow back! But the cancer’s not going to go away, Sam. Do you understand what that means?’ He couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say it either. I went to my room, and me and Mum and Dad sat in our different cocoons in the house and cried, and none of us thought to get us together so we could all cry in the same room.

  The lease on the shop was put up for sale, and until someone bought it the shop was boarded up. I couldn’t believe it had become as black and white as a phone call to an estate agent, a situation explained to a bank manager, the nails hammered in. Dad came home, and there was a lot of new medicine in the bathroom, painkillers mostly, nothing to cure him. Even at the start it had already been too late for that. I should have been there every day. I should have spent every evening sitting with him. But I had discovered Sophie Lawrence, and night after night I left him and Mum alone at the top of the hill and went into town with her instead, went to her house, went to the movies.

  I knew she wasn’t serious about me. I knew it was a passing thing, something I had made happen, something she would grow out of. So I had to drink up every second of her time while I could, I had to be near her. I didn’t let myself think about what was happening at home. I didn’t tell her about Dad. We never went up the hill to mine; hers was easier. I told white lies, said he was under the weather, said it might be pneumonia. I couldn’t let anything interrupt this moment while she was mad enough to want to spend her time with me.

  When I did go home we always ate guilt and silence for dinner: guilt because I hadn’t been there enough, silence because I didn’t know how to ask Dad how he was, what was happening to him, how he felt. I didn’t know how many more times I would see him. And a grief none of us knew how to speak out loud hung in the air, following us from room to room like cloud cover, like a fire that was choking us all. We watched TV in the same room. We ate at the same time, at the same table. We washed up the same plates and cups and cutlery. We were never together. Dad would ask about Sophie. He tried to be happy, to tease me. I suppose he must have thought at least it was something to have lived long enough to see his son have his first girlfriend. But his heart wasn’t in it. We could still talk about football. That was safe ground, the neutral territory we had always migrated to when we had been in need of a conversation. Men can always talk about football and avoid baring anything, exposing wounds or bones or terrors to each other. You could dodge any issue with Southampton FC. It wasn’t real speech, real sharing, just the batting of a ball of words from one mouth to another, but it kept out the silence. So we stuck to football and didn’t make eye contact while we spoke. Then one afternoon I came home and Dad was in the sitting room and Mum was still out.

  ‘Sam?’

  I put my bag down in the hall and stood in the sitting room doorway. He was reading a paper, glasses on the end of his nose. This was all he could do now he had stopped working. He got too tired going for walks. He paced round the house instead, read, slept, passed the days. It seemed so unfair that there might be so few hours left to him and the very thing which was making them rare, making them precious, should also ensure he had so little energy he couldn’t do anything, ended up bored for the last hundred days of his life.

  ‘All right?’ I said.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Come and sit down for a second.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I just wanted to talk to you about your mum.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘You’re going to have to look after her. Next year, for as long as you’re around. You understand that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re going to have to be good for her and not be any trouble, because I’m causing her trouble enough.’

  ‘You’re not causing trouble, Dad.’

  ‘In a way I am.’

  I looked at my hands balled up in my lap and tried not to cry.

  ‘You’re not causing trouble.’

  Dad stood, awkwardly, slowly, the strain showing in his face.

  ‘D’you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘All right. Thanks.’

  ‘I’m going to have to go back into hospital quite soon, Sam. Understand? And you have to be good to your mother.’

  I nodded. I had to close my eyes.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He went into the kitchen, and I should have run after him and held him, but I didn’t. I sat and blinked back tears in the sitting room armchair on the carpet I shouldn’t have been walking on in my shoes, until the flood receded, until I could bury myself and my feelings again. Then I went into the kitchen.

  Sophie was the only thing that stopped me from screaming. Seeing her, being with her, that dulled the feeling, helped me almost forget for an hour or two. I went into town after school the next day, wanting to be away from Dad, from the sorrow in the house, and knocked at her door. If only he had told me what would happen to him. If only he had said out loud what he must have known.

  It was her dad who answered. He smiled when he saw me but stood in the doorway so I couldn’t see past.

  If Dad had only told me how he was feeling I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place. I would have stayed home and done anything, if only something had been possible. I wouldn’t have left his side.

  ‘Hello, Sam.’

  ‘Hi. Is Sophie in?’

  ‘She is, but she’s a bit preoccupied this evening. She’s got a bit on her hands. On her mind. Would you be able to call her tomorrow maybe?’ His hand didn’t leave the doorframe. He was going to shut me out, leave me out in the street with my solitude and my madness, and I didn’t understand, didn’t want to leave. I wanted to see her. Why would she shut me out tonight?

  If only Dad had told me.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s fine; it’s just work. Sorry, Sam.’

  I felt like I was going to cry. Mr Lawrence seemed to notice, seemed to want to step forward in concern, to reach out a hand – ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  I walked away, getting as far as the swimming pool park, then sat on a bench and texted her. You ok? X I waited. The streets of Salisbury fell away before me, sloping down into the river basin, into the floodplain and the cathedral at the heart of it, jutting like a plug from the navel of the city. Ten minutes passed and my phone vibrated. So sorry. I had a boyfriend last year who went away to uni. He’s come back and I’m explaining to him about you. Don’t worry. X.

  I got up and walked into town.

  I didn’t know it then, but I had already missed my last chance at time with him. I would never see him in the house again. I would miss the moment the ambulance took him away.

  Getting served in Salisbury is easy. There are almost as many pubs as people. That’s what happens when you’ve got half the army training up the road. I went to the Chough in the Market Square, asked for a lager and didn’t get asked for ID. I sat in the corner and drank it. I had another. I went outside to call her. The woman who ran the flower stall opposite the Cross Keys was having a fag, leaning against the brick of the building and watching the cars slide past.

  ‘You all righ
t?’ she said. ‘Look pigsick.’

  ‘I’m all right.’ I called Sophie but she didn’t pick up.

  ‘You old enough to be drinking?’ the flower woman said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re about fifteen, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It doesn’t help,’ she said. ‘It really doesn’t.’

  Her flower stall was nowhere to be seen, and I wanted to ask her what happened to it, but she looked sad, so I kept quiet. I went back inside and got another beer. I had ten quid left in my wallet. I went into Tesco and bought a bottle of vodka, and an old bloke with watery eyes didn’t ID me at the till. His hands were shaking, and I thought, I never want to get old. I went outside again and looked around for somewhere to drink. I went into the park behind Tesco. I called her again but she didn’t pick up.

  He and I would never go into town together again. What if everyone in the world was as sad as I was and only some of us showed it? What if the whole world was sorry it was living?

  He would never drive me anywhere ever again.

  I called again. She didn’t answer. I started to cry because my dad was dying and I couldn’t swallow the vodka without a mixer. A text came. Can’t talk now. Don’t worry. Talk later. X

  I got up and started walking.

  I walked to Dad’s shop and peered through a bit of window that hadn’t been properly covered over. I could see my own eyes squinting back in the glass and hated them, their smallness, their paleness. I felt like everyone coming in or out of the Anchor & Hope on the other side of the road would see me for what I was, wretched and clueless, someone to pity or bully or ignore. At the junction of Winchester Street and Brown Street I saw the lamps of a car coming towards me. I watched as it approached the corner. The engine noise rose and drowned out the night. That was why I didn’t hear the bike. At the very last moment before the car swung right, a rider on a moped came out of Brown Street into the path of the bigger vehicle, a bluebottle humming dumbly forward, going half the speed of the monster that gnawed into it there outside McDonald’s in the place where the two roads met. The moped was flattened and the rider, head looking ridiculously oversized in her helmet, was flung across the ground in my direction. The car went into a skid, into the front of the second-hand store ten feet along the road. The night was torn open by the huge sound of the shop window shattering. I heard the thump of the moped rider hitting a bollard and looked over to see her curled unnaturally round the iron pole as if she were protecting it. The moped was caught under the bonnet of the car and had been dragged into the antique shop. There was noise behind me, the door of the Anchor & Hope flung open, light and voices and people pouring out to see what had happened. I walked up to the rider. She wasn’t moving. I could see her hands were curled into balls, feet tucked up under her. She had curled up like paper in a fire as she flew through the air. I reached for my mobile, but then a man walked past me and crouched down in front of the body, already talking on his phone, asking for an ambulance.

  ‘She’s not moving.’

  I watched him. He seemed calm, certain of how he should face the situation. I envied his confidence, the ease with which he leaned forward to put a hand on her shoulder, the octave his voice dropped when he said into the telephone, ‘She’s not conscious. I don’t want to move her.’ I watched other men rush past me to the car, grown men who knew what to do.

  I was frozen by the memory of an accident I had seen when I was seven years old. Mum had been walking me to school and we saw a woman walk in front of a lorry. I don’t know whether she knew what she was doing. There was a half-scream cut short as the lorry ploughed into her. She went under like a piece of paper going into a printer. Mum covered my eyes and pulled me away, and we took no part in getting an ambulance out to clear up what I suppose must have been the scattered phrases of her. Mum dragged me the rest of the way to school, and I spent the day trying not to think about what had happened. I expected us to talk that evening, but when I got home nothing was said. I never found out whether Dad had been told what I saw.

  That had been years ago, a tragedy happening almost too fast for me to take in. But now as I watched a crowd gather round the body of the moped rider it felt like someone was reaching into my stomach and wrenching at what they found. I was lost in the feeling of trying to look back while Mum pulled me away. Standing on the street with the vodka inside me I felt as weak and confused as I had been then, as helpless.

  The mind is like a floodplain. The slightest rainfall can leave it awash with old stories that seep into your newer terrors and swell them, drown you under long-forgotten feelings as your life rushes back over you. From the market square I saw the flashing lights of an ambulance approaching. I started to walk. I knew they’d want to talk to everyone who saw the accident, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I walked away from the poor broken body, the mangled snub nose of the car in the shop front, through Brown Street car park and along Endless Street. I walked out of town, over the ring road, through Vicky Park past the rugby pitches until I could see Old Sarum against the horizon. I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I didn’t want to be near the accident and I couldn’t go home to Dad. If only I had, one last time.

  I kept walking till I got to the Harvester at the foot of Old Sarum. The hill fort was visible as a denser darkness blotting the night around. I started down into the trench that circled the fort. The banks were thick with nettles that stung my hands, but I kept going, feet sliding on the earth below the overgrown grass, moving so I wouldn’t have to stop and think. I got to the bottom of the trough and walked out from under the yew trees, looking up at the next slope. The inner defences were much steeper. I waited a moment to catch my breath. I started to climb again.

  On an ordinary day I would have stopped before I got to the top. It was too steep to be safe. Halfway up I thought I was going to fall. I grabbed handfuls of grass and held on, dragging myself up when my body started to tire, till I reached the lip of the settlement. It was ringed by a waist-high fence. I would have to stand up at the top of the whole steep slope, lungs red with breathing, and swing my leg over the wire, so that for a moment I would be pirouetting eighty feet in the air, clear night opening around to catch me and wrap me in an infinity of broken backs and splintered necks and lying in ditches till morning came and a Japanese tourist found me and a paramedic pronounced me dead. I performed the manoeuvre without disaster and levered myself into Old Sarum.

  Old Sarum is a ruin now, but the foundations remain and the moon lights them up pale and shining and flinty after dark. From where I stood I could see the placement of the buildings laid out like a map, like an idea expressed in stone. The cellars and underground stores were still sunk deep into the ground, and here and there the blue light of the moon on grass fell away into pools of deep darkness that marked their position. These were all ringed with stones, the last resting places of a thousand lives that had been lived here and forgotten long ago. I thought I would walk around them. I thought I would look down into the cellar spaces that survived. I thought I would wait somewhere absolutely quiet till my heart stopped beating so hard. From one side of Old Sarum there was a view of the city, all orange lights mapping out the streets and the warm glow of hall lights falling into the street through house windows, and above and beyond it all the spire of the cathedral lit up and rising serenely into the night to greet Orion’s belt and the stars around it. On the other side, Old Sarum looked out over farmland. Quiet land. Arable fields ploughed and left for weeks on end for life to gather and grow there and be harvested again. This view, in the middle of the night, was nothing more than a stretch of wheat or grass that faded away into the absolute darkness of the night and the far distance of the west of England. No streetlights, no houses, only the dark for miles. I wanted to stop for a little while, loiter with the ruins and stare into that.

  I hadn’t walked ten feet when I knew there was someone else there. There was a light on in the gift-shop Portakabin
by the entrance. I could make out the dim sound of a radio playing. I looked around. I couldn’t explain why I had climbed up here, but the moonlight on the stones of the old grain stores and cathedral was beautiful, and I felt sad I wouldn’t get to explore it, as I realised it must be a security guard. There was no point in hiding. If there was a guard it was better to go to him than let him catch me. I walked towards the sound of talk radio, that seemed to be coming not from the Portakabin but a car parked next to it. When I was ten feet away the car exploded into sound and fury, and I saw through the rear windscreen the teeth and hackles and rage of an Alsatian. The driver’s door was flung open and a boy bundled out who didn’t look much more than five years older than me. He looked me up and down. Watching his fear I felt myself begin to calm, eyeing the dog that beat its muzzle on the window but feeling safer now, because the guard was a boy as surprised as I was.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said.

  ‘I was lost. Sorry.’

  ‘You were lost?’

  ‘I was walking and I didn’t know where I was.’

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  He relaxed visibly.

  ‘You’re not supposed to be up here. How did you get in?’

  ‘I climbed.’

  ‘Wasn’t it steep?’ He shook his head as if in admiration. ‘You’re lucky you timed it right; I was going to let the dog out in five.’