Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  ‘Aren’t we happy just spending time together?’

  ‘Yeah. Obviously. But we should come up with plans, shouldn’t we?’

  How has it come to this? I had a child because I thought it would be wonderful to have a best friend for life, to be so close to someone that you’re part of each other, to have someone in the world who needed me. And he just doesn’t need me at all.

  I am an irrelevance to everyone. I simply exist, and there are a handful of people who have undertaken to deal with me for as long as I do.

  ‘I suppose so. What do you want to do with this summer then?’

  ‘I don’t know, really. Me and Tim and Raj are starting a punk band next year, so I have to work on that.’

  ‘A punk band?’

  ‘We sort of want to shake the whole country awake.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘School and everything. Have you seen the film If by Lindsay Anderson? We want to be in a punk band called If. So we have to practise, and we have to come up with songs, and look out for places we might get gigs once we’re ready, and sort of – I don’t know. Be on the look-out for a movement to be part of.’

  ‘Well, we could go to political meetings and research anarchism in Salisbury library.’

  ‘That might be good.’

  I could tell there was nothing he wanted to do less than research anarchism with his mum in Salisbury library in order to write better punk music. Sometimes it’s fun embarrassing your children.

  ‘I want to write a novel as well.’

  ‘Oh yes. What about?’

  ‘The last days of Woolworths. I want to call it, The Last Days of Woolworths.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘It’s about the recession, obviously. I think the first time all that sort of stuff really hit home to me, to everyone in my class, you know, was when Woolworths closed. Cos that was where we got our pick’n’mix. Then suddenly it was gone. So I might write about that. Because there was this amazing ‘everything must go’ sale in the final week, it was like the end of days. And then my friend told me in the Woolworths in Salisbury, after it closed, the sprinkler system broke, and for days it was raining inside the building and no one did anything about it because it wasn’t anyone’s job. That was before we moved here, obviously. I thought it was a coincidence, and my English teacher said the whole point of novels is to write about coincidence, so I thought it might be a good start.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And an amazing metaphor too. For us. The sprinklers raining down and no one doing anything about it.’

  ‘What does that say about us?’

  ‘That everything’s gone wrong and no one’s doing anything about it.’

  I wondered what exactly he thought was wrong with the country he lived in, whether he meant anything in particular or was just expressing the Sodom and Gomorrah moral reflex teenagers often have against the world. Teenagers can be the most conservative people.

  ‘I think that’s a good story. What will the plot be?’

  He became suddenly hostile at being questioned, and said he didn’t know that, and went back to drying up, and I wished I hadn’t asked, because he seemed to have taken the question badly, as if he had been challenged.

  ‘There’s a good story to how Woolworths started,’ I told him.

  He looked up at me, interested in spite of himself.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Have you ever noticed how all the Woolworths in every town were in really ugly buildings?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Those were the Army and Navy stores. They were put up in a hurry in the war, which is why they look like that. Built as quickly and cheaply as possible. And when the stores closed after the end of conscription, Woolworths bought them up as a job lot. They just sort of flooded into the space that was left.’

  ‘Was that while you were growing up?’ he asked.

  I laughed. ‘No, I’m not that old! Your Mum just knows a few things.’

  Wednesday, 31st July

  James asked me today what I had wanted to do with my life when I was his age, and I tried to remember what my dreams had been, whether the theatre had interested me at that time or come later. And it dawned on me as I tried to remember that all his talk, all his filling the air, might not be a new confidence but rather a new insecurity. Perhaps he is growing up just like we did, unsure and wanting to test out his place in the world. I decided I hadn’t known at his age what I wanted to be. If I ever did have a firm idea at all. My idea about acting is long abandoned, and I suppose that probably proves that in the end it can’t have been a thought worth having. Because if it’s really going to be what you do with your life you keep going, don’t you? You don’t just give up when someone says no. So acting was probably just a phantom, one of those ghosts you see when the dew rises up from the grass in the mornings and into thin air, never a thought with any weight or gravity to it.

  I think that’s why I fell so in love with you. In you I could find a purpose. I was always so aware, when those chats with the careers adviser came round in school, or when I came into the last year of my degree and people asked me what I was going to do next, that I didn’t actually know why I was doing any of what I was doing. The careers advisers never thought acting was a real career, even that was something I was made to feel guilty about. Meeting you that summer, at that party on Liverpool Street, our first kiss at the Spaniard’s Inn, that was the first real thing that happened to me. I was always clingy with you when we were first together, even after we were married, and I think it was because I was very afraid I was wasting my life before I met you. And it’s creeping up on me that I feel the same way now, as if I am wasting all of my time. We grow into our little neuroses, don’t we, the little unhappinesses at the heart of us, and have to live with them all our lives, they are never solved, and mine has always been this restlessness, this sense there must be more that comes either of doing too little or wanting too much or just looking the wrong way through the binoculars and seeing with the wrong perspective. You eased me for a little while, but that fear I have that I will never mean anything has always been there under the surface, waiting. It was very bad back then, at the end of my teenage years. It’s not much better now, and I can feel myself sliding further into it. But for a time you eased things.

  I didn’t tell James all this, of course. I told him when I was his age I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, except I knew I wanted to go to university and continue my education, which seemed like the right hint to drop. He gave me a look. There was disappointment in his eyes but pity too. I could feel my face getting hot. He can hear as well as me when I’m dropping hints instead of being honest. It frightens me to think how much he must know about me that neither of us discusses. How low I feel, what a lie I am living whenever I smile, whenever I imitate happiness. I hope, very much, that he doesn’t suspect about the pills. That is the horror of having a family. They see right through the act, the lie you construct; they know everything.

  Friday, 2nd August

  James said yesterday that he would like to visit Stonehenge, as it was only down the road now and he’d never seen it for real before. I said we ought really to go tomorrow, as my work meant I couldn’t easily go with him in the weeks. So tomorrow I have official permission to turf him out of his bed at a reasonable hour, put a mug of tea in his hands and force him to have a shower. Then we will drive to Stonehenge, to see the new visitor centre being built, and the site itself. It’s supposed to be a bit of a rip-off, the Stonehenge Visitor Experience, because you’re not allowed within twenty feet of the thing – too many hands run over the surface of the stone would wear it away. But I’m looking forward to it all the same. It will be so good to do something with James. It felt like such a relief to hear him volunteer something he might like us to do together, that he might like us to do something, anything together.

  Perhaps that made me overly optimistic though, because this evening I made him go to a concert with me, and
I don’t think he was very grateful for that. The local choral society were doing the Mozart Requiem in that big church on the roundabout by the Andover road, and I’ve always loved that piece of music, so I wanted to go. I asked James if he wanted to come, because I thought it couldn’t hurt him to get out of the house. He didn’t feel brave enough to say outright that he didn’t want to, and when I saw the look on his face I couldn’t think of a way of taking back the suggestion without it turning into an argument, so we had an early dinner and got in the car and headed into Salisbury. He was sulking and wouldn’t talk to me while we waited for the show to start. I didn’t really mind at first. Even if he’s annoyed, it’s nice to go out and do something with him. We sat near the back, and James played on his phone till the music started, and I read the programme and looked at the people around.

  We sang Mozart in my school choir. I suppose perhaps it is a ritual half the children in England are put through while they’re growing up. It would be good if that were true, I think; if that music was part of the inheritance we shared with one another. The performance we were treated to that night was a mixed bag, the women much better than the men, and the soloists not all as good as each other, but it’s still an absorbing experience, listening to a thing like that. Because you don’t know the plot, it’s not one thing after another like a normal story, it’s more complex than that, and you can’t think your way to the end of what you’re listening to, not really. You just have to suspend yourself in the ritual for a little while and listen. The bit of your brain that wants to solve things has to lose the argument while the choir is singing, while all the poems play themselves out.

  James said it had been all right when we got in the car to go home. He didn’t feel moved to say anything more than that, but I was glad to have got that much from him. If it had been really bad he might have wanted to start an argument.

  ‘Are you in a choir at school?’

  ‘No. We have to sing in assemblies.’

  ‘Don’t you like singing?’

  ‘It’s all right. I like proper singing, like the band. I like good music. I’m not into choirs or whatever.’

  ‘What do you do instead then?’

  James turned away from me to look out of the window and into the night.

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever.’

  We drove in silence for a little while, and he didn’t turn back to look out in front or to look at me again.

  ‘Up early tomorrow,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for taking me.’

  ‘That’s all right. Thanks for coming to this tonight.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We got back to the house and James went up to his room, saying he would go to bed. I said good night as he went. Of course he wouldn’t go to bed for hours yet; he stays up late; he sits on his computer; he watches TV. I wondered what the point of trying to be friends with him really was, if he was always going to prefer to go upstairs and be alone in his room. What would be the point of Stonehenge, or any other place, or any other time I might get him to spend with me, if it was all just waiting for something more exciting to come along. It seemed so pathetic to me then, the little rations of experience we eke out and called our lives. A trip into town to hear a mediocre rendition of something that someone else had invented just to fill the silence of their lives, years and years ago. And they had died anyway. In the end, what difference had it made to them, what real difference? And we call that an evening. We call that a life. It is all just a shroud for something, I felt certain, a way of filling in the emptiness of ourselves. How could I ignore how pointless my life was when another evening of it was past, was gone, and James still just went back up to his room? Couldn’t he see that both of us were very slowly dying, that time was running forever down through the gaps between the lino and the skirting boards, that we were the only people in this house? Couldn’t he see I was alone? Did he mean to be cruel? Did I even deserve it, perhaps?

  I stayed in the sitting room and couldn’t think of what to do. I stared at the blank black screen of the television and I couldn’t think of anything in the world that I would ever want to watch. I got up and went to the foot of the stairs, and I couldn’t hear anything. It felt as if someone else was in my body and moving me through the house. James must have had his headphones in. Otherwise I would hear music coming from his room. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a drink, a glass of brandy. I don’t know why I have brandy in the house; I suppose it’s left over from Christmas. I drank it back. It was difficult, the burn in the throat, in the pit of the stomach. I’m not used to drinks that strong. I wanted to retch. I poured myself another glass and drank.

  What I could feel all around me was the terror of death. You must live with it all the time, I know you must; it is so much more real and immediate for you. I have had it on and off since my early twenties. I don’t remember being afraid before then. I think I was twenty-one when I discovered what it meant, being mortal, the fact that I was going to die. Sometimes I can go for months without thinking about it, but then there are days where, for no particular reason, the knowledge that I am going to die one day quite soon is almost overwhelming to me. I stared into the brandy in the glass and wondered, if death was so inevitable, why anyone ever put it off, why people didn’t just get on with it now. I drank the rest of my glass and poured another. Even as I stood there, I could imagine how ridiculous I would look if James were to come downstairs now to get himself a drink. A woman standing alone in a kitchen, drinking a bottle of brandy as fast as she could, who had seemed perfectly happy when she was driving him home just half an hour earlier. But there’s no logic to the things in our heads. One thing simply connects to another, and there are no maps between neurons, only leaps in the dark, only darknesses.

  I could not understand, staring into that glass, gripping the kitchen table so the whites of my knuckles showed, the light of my bones, my head bowed, with the light of the kitchen striplight on the back of my neck, why any of us have ever been alive at all. If all that is going to really happen to us is that we are going to waste our time then stop being alive again. I couldn’t understand the grief of it, the loss after loss of being alive – what was the value of that? To anyone at all? And the brief interludes of happiness, what did they mean to anyone if everyone you ever met was going to die one day, and all the memories anyone ever collected would one day be lost, almost as soon as they were gathered? Thinking about how close it was now for me – because I am getting older all the time, by the law of averages I feel bound to say I am more than halfway through – I could not understand how anyone ever got through the day. What do other people do to deal with the fear of it? How do other people live?

  I went upstairs to the bathroom and found all the paracetamol and ibuprofen and sleeping pills in the bathroom cupboard, my shameful hoard, and I popped them out of their blister packs and took the little chalky things downstairs. A handful. Perhaps I had about forty pills of different shapes and sizes. I sat at the kitchen table with the pills and the brandy and I thought of Owen, and I wondered what the point was of not kissing him if you and I were both going to die practically any day now, any year now anyway. Or twenty or thirty years, but what was the difference, really? And how could people bear to take the gamble that their lives would last that long, and keep going to work doing jobs they didn’t love, and all that just to pay rent to live in places they couldn’t love – how did people live with that compromise and that hazard all the time? I wondered why I hadn’t slept with every man who had ever looked twice at me, if life was going to be so cruelly short.

  You know what? The truth is that I wish I had gone to bed with Owen. Even if it had ended up being the worst thing I ever did, even if it had proved to be the end of us. There is a part of all of us that doesn’t feel safe around open windows, isn’t there? Something in everyone that wants to jump from the bridge. And at least it would have been an action. Something deliberate, something that proved I was alive. My whole life has be
en a catalogue of fears that stopped me from acting on any impulse that ever passed through me. One plan after another that I never saw through because I worried about the consequences, because I didn’t have the courage to commit to anything. I have dreamed again and again of escapes I might make into different lives. I have never made any of the necessary leaps. All the time I am held back by timidity. I have asked myself each time a dream took hold, what would I lose if I went for this, what would I risk, what would I miss out on? And as a result, all my life it seems I have been standing still.

  If I were to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t have done anything I was glad of, not really. Except you. Except James. But neither of you were there with me then. And I’m not sure any more that either of you are glad of me. I tried dissolving a pill in brandy, but it didn’t seem to work. So I took a pill and washed it down with the brandy instead. I took another pill and washed it down with the brandy. I kept taking the different pills, swallowing becoming harder and harder as I went along, because of course if you swallow several times in a short space of time it always does become harder. I came upstairs and lay on the bed and waited. I am still waiting. I don’t know what for.

  It is late. It is dark and silent in the house; all I can hear is my own breathing. After that last furious entry I threw the book away, off the bed. It was no more use to me. I had failed at it like everything else. But then suddenly I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be better than I was. I wanted to keep existing. I went to the toilet and threw it all up. All the drink, all the pills. I could count the pills in the bowl. I stared down into them for a long time, and they started to stare back into me. I left the lights on downstairs and got into bed and hid from the world. I curled into a ball and looked at the wall of my bedroom, and it was so sad to me, that I have lived a whole life, I have felt so much, but all I have to mark out the parameters of my living are these anonymous rooms I rattle round, this cheap furniture, these small ambitions, this diary full of pointless ramblings. I tried to write it all down here, but before long my eyes hurt and my hand cramped, and I knew I wouldn’t get everything I was feeling into writing. How is it that I have never found a way to express the scale of the feelings inside me? How have I never managed anything more than to be ordinary?