Monday, 19th August
We are almost all back together now. James came back from Norfolk to find me much changed, a woman with something to work towards, a woman with a purpose. I feel so much more capable, life is coming so much easier now I am doing something with it and I don’t have to ask what to do with our evenings or how he feels. I know it all. I can tell what is needed. We are planning for your return. We are planning our futures. I don’t think he could believe that I had more or less bought a house while he was away. I think he thinks I’m mad. It’s nice to make your son feel you’re mad now and then.
‘When will you move in?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. We might own it and not live in it for a bit, if that’s what Dad’s work needs, if he has to take up one more posting before he comes out of the army. We could rent it out for a year. Or you could use it for house parties and drinking and impressing girls.’
He blushed, in spite of himself.
‘I don’t drink, Mum.’
It was the youngest I had heard him sound since he came home, and I smiled at his obvious fib.
‘Sure you don’t.’
He looked at the ground.
‘I don’t mind if you have a drink now and then, James. It’s a normal thing to do. I just don’t want you to get smashed and throw up everywhere.’
He smiled, in spite of himself.
‘There are boys at school who do that. I just think people who get properly drunk are really boring.’
‘Wait till you meet people who take cocaine. That’s what boring really looks like.’
He stared at me in amazement.
‘Have you met people who’ve taken cocaine?’
‘Of course I have. I haven’t always just sat in this kitchen, you know.’
‘I know, but I didn’t think you’d know that sort of people.’
‘Cool people?’
‘No, I suppose – dangerous people.’
‘Oh, I’ve been dangerous in my time.’
We were silent then for a moment, smiling, taking in the light through the window as it fell on our hands, our faces.
‘I’ve enjoyed this summer, Mum,’ James said. I was careful to say nothing, in case I broke the spell. ‘It’s been nice hanging out with you.’
‘I’ve enjoyed hanging out with you as well.’
‘Stonehenge was cool, wasn’t it?’
‘Did you think so? I’m so glad. I wish they let you get closer to it.’
‘Yeah. But it was still cool. Thanks for taking me.’
It was the closest I had heard him come in years to a declaration of love.
‘I love you very much, James. I hope you know that.’
He rolled his eyes and smiled.
‘I love you too, Mum. You’re all right, really.’
‘When did anyone say I wasn’t all right?’
‘Never. You just sometimes stare out the window for ages, you know?’
‘Oh. OK.’
‘Oh, Mum, by the way, is there any Lemsip? I feel like I’m getting a sore throat.’
‘Oh, no. Sorry. I threw it all away.’
‘Why?’
‘It was out of date.’
That night when I was brushing my teeth before bed I looked in the mirror and said through my toothpaste, Alison, you are not lonely. You are alive.
I feel much better for having written all this down. I could never really tell you how much I love you because I could never put it all into words, what you mean to me, no matter how hard I try. I don’t mind that, though. I have the rest of my life to try to show you what I mean to say.
The Burning Arrow of the Spire
STORIES WEAVE INTO one another. Lives intertwine. And the result of tracing these patterns through the air is that you begin to know the air they are moving through a little better.
About a year ago I was in McDonald’s having dinner before my shift when I witnessed an accident. From my window I saw a car being driven by an old man plough into a woman on a moped. I saw a young boy watching from one side of the road and a woman watching from the other. It seemed no more real to me than a piece of theatre. An event, a real event like that, always seems to take on a dreamlike quality when it happens to you, as if it had some greater meaning you didn’t understand. You think to yourself, this is the kind of thing that only happens in stories. Why is it happening to me? What is it trying to say? Surely there’s some meaning waiting for me here, under the surface?
In my work I have a lot of long evenings I spend on my own. And these four faces I had seen while I ate in McDonald’s started coming into my mind while I drifted through the nights. They sank deep into my imagination and rooted there, lives I knew nothing about, which I had seen coalescing for a moment around that street corner, that accident. I found it extraordinary to think that five strangers – five if you included me, the observing eye who saw it all and so cohered the picture – could have been brought so close together like that, for that fleeting moment.
Perhaps it was something to do with togetherness that meant I couldn’t stop thinking about them. When I came back here to Salisbury I’d broken up with a girl I thought I was happy with. I hadn’t seen the end of our story coming, and when she left I didn’t know how to cope, I felt unmoored. Perhaps I was feeling susceptible to the neatness of coincidence when I saw that crash, because even if it was awful, it still fascinated me. It felt like something to belong to. I started to wonder what I might learn if I could only find out more about the lives I had glimpsed for that moment, if I could only get to the heart of them.
The five rivers that meet in the middle of this floodplain never come together in the same place at the same time. The Nadder and the Ebble and the Wylye and the Bourne flow into the Avon at different points, intersecting piecemeal with these other bodies of water, gathering in halting increments into the single voice of the Avon, so that, while five rivers flow into this city and this story, only one sings on out of it, and all the other voices are lost in the chorus, all their stories never end, but disappear instead back into the greater body of water they came from, and make their way out to the sea. There is never a clean chord where these five rivers are all singing in the same moment, and yet they are the rhythm and the pulse of this landscape; if you map out the passages of these rivers and their songs, you will have mapped out the whole of the city.
I thought to myself, what if the same might be true of the lives brought together that evening on the corner of Brown Street? What if there is a map of the world waiting to be excavated beneath the surface of that moment?
I was born here and grew up here and moved away to be a student, like so many people who come from Salisbury. When I had finished with those years I gave no thought, really, to how I wanted to live my life. I did what everyone else was doing, and moved to London, and found myself a bedsit, and got a job on a paper in digital media. I never thought I’d want to come back to the city where I had grown up. There’s nothing for anyone here, really. Not for the young. And my parents had separated while I was at university, and it felt strange to go back to the place where they had been happy together and know they weren’t together any more. I didn’t like to wonder too much about whether they had been happy at all, all the time we had lived under the same roof, or whether they had just kept up a pretence for me. What a terrible waste of a life that lie would be. But people do it, I know, never thinking that the guilt for the child when they work out what happened might be worse than the legacy of the absent father, the visits at weekends, the second Christmases, the extra presents. Both Mum and Dad moved out of Wiltshire after the divorce, so I put Wiltshire behind me as well. I didn’t want to belong to a place where no one knew me. In the course of a life you will build up plenty of debts to other people, but we never owe anything to the stages where we play out our days. They are pure circumstance, after all; we could have been born somewhere else just as easily. And you can be sure the land you walk on will forget you when you’re gone, so why
tie yourself to any part of it, when that tie can only ever be imaginary? The world is other people, not the places you visit. That was what I told myself, anyway.
In London I lived off the Holloway Road, caught a bus to King’s Cross in the mornings, and tried to be ambitious, and tried to enjoy what I was doing, and struggled to fit in. If you grow up where I did, you experience London as a whole different way of life, a whole new philosophy flowering around you. And that’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing, it’s just difference and change, but if you’re going to cope with it, with the pursuit of growth as an absolute good, with the fetishisation of novelty over continuity, then you’re going to have to make an adjustment. Because it’s a different way of seeing the world, to live in the city or live in the country. The country I come from, anyway. So I tried to adjust, and stay out late, and enjoy the conversation of strangers, because that always seemed like the ultimate goal for everyone around me, to lose a night discovering someone they had never met before. What it seemed we were all supposed to be chasing was delicious anonymity.
I met Chrissy at a gig in Kings Place. I hadn’t been in London for long, and I was going to gigs or plays whenever anyone in my office invited me, to make sure I got out of the flat. June Tabor was playing, and the person I’d gone with knew the person Chrissy had gone with, and the four of us were decades younger than everyone else in the audience, so we ended up talking to each other afterwards. I asked her out, and we met for drinks on Upper Street a week later, and then she came home with me, and before either of us had really discussed what was happening three months had passed, and we had seen each other every weekend, and it seemed like something was beginning between us. We started to meet each other’s friends. After half a year we even met each other’s families. We never discussed living together or anything as serious as that. We just liked seeing each other. For eighteen months we spent the weekends together, and sometimes we’d stop and look in the windows of estate agents, or Chrissy would talk about how much she wanted us to have a dog, but I thought both of us were happy with the way things were. We were both young, our lives were just starting; we didn’t quite want to be fixing anything. That was the way of things as I understood it, anyway. Then one Saturday Chrissy told me she thought we should stop seeing each other, that she didn’t know whether our relationship was going anywhere and couldn’t honestly say whether she wanted it to, either. Then she collected all her things from my flat and told me to come round and get mine from hers. I never did. I was too afraid of what it would feel like. I had never been so frightened of anything in my life as I was of how I felt about her when she left me.
I went into retreat, I suppose, into hiding. I hadn’t known I loved her, not really. I’d said the words, but I hadn’t known what they meant. Then I couldn’t tell her any more, and I understood. So I slept around to try to forget, trying to drown myself in other feelings, other highs, other breakups, other silences, other one-night stands. Her friends, who had briefly been my friends too, thought I was a dick, I knew. I let them – it was better than them knowing the truth. It felt very empty.
That was more or less when Mum remarried. I liked the bloke she’d met, and I was happy for her, but all the same, it was disquieting. I became a visitor in her house, and an infrequent one at that. We would sit in the living room with our tea and our biscuits, and talk about the view out the window, and struggle for things to talk about, because we had stopped belonging to each other. We were strangers with history in common – that seemed to be all there was between us. I never stayed the night there because I wouldn’t have known how to behave in the mornings, whether I would feel the need to get dressed before I went downstairs, whether I would feel like I was allowed to make my own breakfast or whether I ought to have waited for them. I felt as if my parents were moving on from me. And all of a sudden I found myself lost in the middle of the project of my life without any purpose, with nothing to cling to, with no roots anywhere among anything I loved. Of course I still loved my parents, but they had started new chapters, and I couldn’t help feeling I had held them back all the years they had looked after me.
It was very sad, in a way, to watch what they were doing. Dad got an allotment and spent all his time there, and even though I could see him beginning to walk with a bent back, as if the digging was caving him in, as if he was doing an impression of an old man, I wondered whether he might not always have preferred to have been on his own, with his broad beans and his wind-up radio and the sky above him and nothing to do all day. Maybe the whole life of our family had been some kind of accident.
Both Mum and Dad talked about starting again, but they were both over fifty and planning out lives like they were still twenty-five. There was no talk about the pensions they were going to need before very long; they only spoke of new things. It seemed to me like they’d somehow got something the wrong way round. Moving somewhere new, meeting new people, planning new adventures. Perhaps that was beautiful, but it frightened me. I was frightened of seeing them fail, of seeing them realise my lack of faith in their new beginnings, that I suspected them of being too old. And I was frightened of them rubbing out the years we’d spent all together, the little things that had made those years, my life, matter to me. Because the places where our lives happen are purely coincidental, yes, and I could have been born anywhere, of course, but the thing is that I wasn’t. I was born in Salisbury, and that was the stage on which my life and the lives of my parents had been played out, and arbitrary as that might be, it is still inarguable, and all my memories are still tied to the same landscape. To change that halfway through felt like an act of near panic to me. An abandonment of the life that had been lived there. As if both my parents were trying to ward off their endings. I couldn’t believe it was completely healthy.
I started to wonder, what do you need in order to be able to say with a semblance of conviction that you had got your life right? What are the necessary components of that successful fiction? I looked at my own life, and it struck me that now was the time to make choices if you wanted to be happy when you came to the end. Now was the time to build the foundations of your life, and find a purpose, and imagine a trajectory into being that could guide you through the vastness of your days. To think your life was still ahead of you was only a way of delaying and robbing yourself of years when you might have been able to live deliberately, to build something. To let life happen to you was the way to bad marriages, and missed opportunity, and needing to take things back. I didn’t want to live a life that started again when I was in my fifties. Because no matter how happy my mum was with her new husband, I could only imagine that if they loved each other, really loved each other, then whenever they thought of the years they hadn’t known each other, when they hadn’t been together and might have been, their hearts must have broken. To love someone is surely to want to breathe all of them in. I never wanted to love someone whose first fifty years of life I could only learn about from stories, anecdotes, photographs. I wanted to make my choices and build a life. The trouble was that I looked around me for something to live for, and nowhere could I find anything I loved, except perhaps Chrissy, who had left me, and what was behind me, my youth, the days when I had lived in the future tense.
I started to think about home. About what it meant, and whether such a thing existed. The feeling came over me as I sat in my office day after day that I was floating through my life, that I was not really living. I felt like nothing I saw was really happening to me. And the real reason for that may have been that I just didn’t like the flat I was living in, or my boss, I don’t know, but for want of any firmer foothold, I found myself performing the age-old human reflex in stormy and uncertain waters, and turning back to the port I had come from. And I’d never been totally happy in Salisbury either, of course, no one is ever totally happy for more than a few moments at any one time. But I had nothing better. So I let the idea of my city grow in my imagination, and I started to see its attractions. I started comi
ng back to Salisbury at weekends, walking the streets and wondering why it was that the more dissatisfied I felt in my work, my life, my bedsit, the more interested I became in this place, which I had thought I might have left behind me. Was that just a variation of the child’s knee-jerk need for its mother when it falls over? Or could it be there was something here that I had lost or walked away from?
After six months of visits at weekends, I saw an advert on the English Heritage website one afternoon for a security guard who was needed to work nights watching over Old Sarum. Must have own car and be comfortable working with dogs, they said. I clicked on the link. In a sort of dream I made an application. I didn’t know whether I was really going to do it. It wasn’t the kind of work you do with my degree, and I knew in a way I was being stupid, I was being irresponsible even to consider giving up what I had in order to become a security guard on a hill in the middle of nowhere. Because I was one of the lucky ones. I’d been to a good school and a good university, and found a route into the kind of work most people would think might be enough to fill their whole lives. But the thing was that I wasn’t happy. And in the end that changes everything, doesn’t it? Everything becomes possible or impossible because of that. So when English Heritage interviewed me and subsequently offered me the job I could think of no earthly reason to stay where I was. Living in London, I never stopped feeling that if I died one morning, no one would notice. It would be as if I had never existed. And I had imagined into being this world in Wiltshire where people knew each other, people smiled at each other, where lives had weight. I logged on to Facebook and went to Chrissy’s profile and looked at photos of us for a little while. I thought about calling her. I dreamed a scene where she changed her mind, where I told her I was thinking of leaving the city and the thought of my disappearance made her realise she wanted me after all. But I knew it was never going to happen. It had all been so clear. I knew that if I called her and told her I was thinking of leaving, she wouldn’t really care. So I didn’t tell her, or any of my friends. I left them to figure out I was gone, let them think I didn’t care about any of the life I had been trying to build. I handed in my notice and moved back to Salisbury, was assigned an Alsatian and began spending my nights up on Old Sarum listening to all-night talk radio, patrolling the perimeter with the dog and watching the city. At night I would look down on the cathedral and listen to the roar of the trains that passed through the station and tell myself stories about the people living far below me, the way that living in the shadow of that cathedral changed them, the way their lives revolved around it. I started to imagine that the cathedral, which seemed so vast and solid across the distance from which I viewed it, was really no more than an idea, a reflection as if in water of a feeling in the city that had been there long before the spire was ever dreamed of, a longing that animated the place where I lived. I started to think it was something in the water. I started to think it was something to do with this being a place where five rivers met. I thought to myself, this city has a life that is far more vivid and turbulent and beautiful than the view of the spire from this hillside alone can express. No map has ever caught the looks in the eyes of these people, or what this place means to me, and perhaps that’s not important – mine is only an ordinary life, after all, there’s no reason what matters to me should matter to anyone else. But it’s important to me. It’s my life. It’s the most important thing in the world to me.
Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 21