by Tim Pears
‘We’re all ready,’ the voice whispered, and she turned. It was Joe the Blow, her old friend Luna’s man.
‘OK,’ she said, and she followed him, slipping out of the crowd, away from the scene, along the road, the thud and rumble of the demolition and the crowd’s loud indignation receding behind her.
Zoe didn’t turn around: she was walking into the future. She didn’t realize she was being followed; she didn’t hear the footsteps echoing her own.
Joe the Blow’s new van was parked up a side street, in front of two others, each with the words ELECTRA TRAVELLING THEATRE on the side. Luna was inside the van with two of her children. She opened the door.
‘How did it go?’ she asked.
‘Well, it was something, Luna,’ Zoe replied. ‘I’ll tell you all about it on the road.’
‘You’ve tied up your loose ends?’ Luna asked.
‘All except about a hundred,’ Zoe laughed. ‘Hell, let them sort it out.’
She made to climb into the van when she felt a tug at her skirt, and looked down. Adamina was standing there. She was holding a carrier bag. She looked up at Zoe with a resolute, expectant expression.
‘Mina! What on earth …? How did you get down here?’ Zoe asked, but Adamina said nothing and neither did her expression change.
‘Did you walk across town?’ Zoe asked, and Adamina nodded. ‘You crazy girl,’ Zoe said. She knelt in front of Adamina.
‘This is it, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’m going away now. We’ve been through this. I can’t take you with us.’ Zoe tried to think of how to explain why not. ‘We’re going abroad,’ she said. ‘We’re driving down to Dover now.’
Adamina looked inside her carrier bag and produced her passport.
Zoe couldn’t stop herself laughing out loud. ‘You think of everything, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she told Luna and Joe. ‘This is Adamina, she’s my … I don’t know what exactly. What are you?’ she asked Adamina. ‘My best friend’s stepdaughter. My cousin’s niece. What else have you got in there?’
Adamina produced two or three items of clothes, and two photograph albums, which Zoe opened: one with black-and-white pictures Adamina had taken of Laura and James’ wedding, which James had printed for her; the other with James’ photos of his family. Zoe flipped briefly through. Even if she had time, she wasn’t sure she was ready to look at them; and now there wasn’t time. She closed the second album.
‘What are we going to do with you?’ she asked, and Adamina pointed at the van.
‘We may never come back, you know,’ Zoe told her.
Adamina nodded gravely. Zoe looked at Luna, and at her two children: a boy of about eight, a girl a little older.
‘Oh, God, I don’t know,’ Zoe exclaimed, and sat in the side-doorway of the van. She looked up and took in grey clouds in the warm sky.
‘I don’t want to rush you, Zoe,’ Joe said, ‘but if we’re going to get that ferry, if we need to drop her off or anything …’
‘No, we don’t,’ Zoe decided. ‘We’re taking her with us. Come on, Mina, get in. Let’s go.’
Adamina climbed into the van, Zoe slid the door shut behind them. Joe signalled to the drivers behind and the small convoy pulled away. Zoe stepped forward into the passenger seat, wound down the window and rolled herself a cigarette. Adamina got up beside her and strapped herself in. She lifted the end of Zoe’s seatbelt and offered it to her.
‘Not just yet, thanks,’ Zoe said. ‘God, I’m tired,’ she murmured.
‘It’s a pleasure to drive, this beast,’ Joe told her, changing gear. ‘It’s a good investment, Zoe.’
‘I hope so,’ she replied. ‘Does the phone work?’
‘Of course it does.’
‘I ought to tell Alice Mina’s all right.’
Zoe didn’t know what lay ahead, but she was glad that she was leaving. She’d telephone Alice again when they reached Calais, although she’d say she was calling from Dover: having made the decision, she didn’t want any trouble erupting at Customs. She did know Adamina’s legal guardianship hadn’t been sorted out, and maybe Alice and Harry would be relieved to let Zoe take her.
She put her arm around the mute child beside her. ‘Shall we adopt each other, then?’ she asked, as they drove along Stratford Road, out of town.
Owing to their travels, it has taken over two years (during which time they’ve kept in touch with Alice with weekly phone calls) and a convoluted adoption process, for Zoe to become Adamina’s legal guardian; but in time Adamina has become somewhat less of an orphan. As has Zoe herself. Harry administers a trust fund. In this instance Zoe agrees they shouldn’t let feelings interfere with business: there’s little doubt that under his stewardship Adamina will come of age with a helping financial hand.
Zoe Freeman misses her cinema; she’s made the troupe stop so that she could spend a couple of hours in out-of-the-way fleapits and at outdoor screenings in warm town squares across the Continent. It’s been some compensation to Zoe that images of people being carried out of her cinema locked to their seats (in particular a picture of Dog, the least militant of men, with head bowed and defiant fist raised in dignified protest) played a large part in mobilizing protest against an inner ring road in the town. Receiving national coverage, the campaign swelled overnight, drawing large support, and vilification for the scheme; no more buildings were demolished. The Transport Minister blamed the scheme on Whitehall incompetence and three months later announced new plans for a showpiece pedestrianized area in the town centre; an enlargement of the existing park-and-ride system; and a widening of the outer ring road – his one tactical error. Within the space of a sentence he quelled one protest and inspired another. He’d missed the point.
Harry Singh, on the other hand, doesn’t miss a thing. He isn’t sorry the inner ring road was scrapped: he’d already sold the properties he owned to the Department of Transport; he even bought some of them back again at reduced prices. Harry has achieved what he set out to achieve. He’s a contented man. He’s wealthy, he owns the house on the hill, he loves his wife – a distracted woman who’s dispensed with the services of all but one of the three gardeners and spends much of her time in the garden. Their children are still well-behaved models of decorum. The eldest, Amy, is ten years old; adolescence awaits her (and the others too) and who knows what rebellion may stir even now in their burgeoning hearts?
As for Charles, his world – as well as his weight – continues to diminish. He’s a little-seen figure, and few of those who do see him recognize the man-in-charge, Charles Freeman. He doesn’t shout at people any more, and he doesn’t greet them with his suffocating bear-hugs. Alice says her father walks with a stick, slowly, as if feeling his way through fog. Charles isn’t unhappy, he’s just lost his energy, he’s a tired old man who fills his days with habitual activities, in the solitude of forsaken power.
His work identifying photographs is completed. The James Freeman Photographic Archive, in the Local Studies section of the public library, is used regularly, both by individual browsers through local history and for commercial purposes. There’s talk of a book.
Simon isn’t at home much these days – and when he is he’s shut in a room a lot of the time, staring at a computer screen; it’s very different, though, from that brief period he once wasted in front of the TV, in his teenage oblivion. For Simon was galvanized by the cinema sit-in, and by his arrest: nowadays he communicates through e-mail with environmentalists around the world for a group called Earth Action.
It may also be that Simon was galvanized by love. His assistant chef of a miraculous breakfast is now his partner, and they make the oddest couple in both their circles: with the fastidious hypochondriacs of Simon’s health group, with the rainbow warriors of George’s acquaintance. They make fine spontaneous breakfasts, too – in the house on the hill as well as in a tepee in a Welsh valley that George calls his home.
The rest of his time Simon spends at a surgery he set up i
n Northtown with three of his colleagues from the health group. It’s called the Back Clinic, and they treat exclusively disorders of the spine: sciatica, slipped discs, rheumatism, lumbago, fibrositis, pulled muscles, osteoarthritis and the common backache. Which, they soon discovered, covered just about everyone over the age of thirty in the town. The other three are a chiropractor, a practitioner of the Alexander Technique and an osteopath; Simon refers to what he does as Greek massage, but everyone knows that’s just an excuse to have him lay his fat hands on their skin and feel the hot liquid heat that flows like honey through their body.
Simon has given Natalie Bryson a computer for the refuge. She said they had no use for it but he pressed it on her anyway and now the children there play computer games on it. He also gave her a fax and a photocopying machine, which are more useful. Natalie moved into the cottage in the grounds last year. She told Zoe the last time Zoe telephoned that she wouldn’t mind doing something different, if only there was no call for the refuge she offered. That need would always be there, though; and having failed the friend she’d promised to protect, she wasn’t planning to fail any more.
Lewis Roberts no longer DJs. He’ll be forty next year, and figured either his credibility or his hearing would be damaged if he carried on. He owns a bar, in partnership with one of his old footballers, and he’s doing fine.
Gloria is now a ward sister in the town’s hospice. She’s writing a book about nursing care of the dying patient and hopes she’ll finish it before the hospital trust privatizes the hospice, as is rumoured. If and when that happens, she’s planning to quit nursing. She says marriage is a good moment for a career change, anyway: Gloria’s engaged to Nick, a probation officer, and their wedding is set for next summer. Her father, Garfield, is glad and tactless at the prospect of grandchildren; he’s already announced that he’s sure there’ll soon be another decent cricketer in the family, because he can’t be expected to play on much longer.
Zoe didn’t know any of these things back then. ‘Shall we adopt each other, then?’ she asked Adamina.
The convoy drove along Stratford Road out of town, and round the roundabout. A few hundred yards further on, the road crossed a bridge over the river.
‘Hey, stop the van, Joe,’ Zoe exclaimed.
Joe did as he was asked; the other vans slowed to a halt behind him.
‘This won’t take a minute,’ Zoe explained, as she opened the door, jumped down from the van, and began to undress.
‘You drive over and meet me on the other side,’ she said.
‘What are you doing, Zoe?’ Luna asked. Her children stared.
‘I’m leaving, and I want to do it properly,’ Zoe replied. ‘See you in a minute,’ she told Adamina. ‘It’s a good thing there’s not much traffic,’ Zoe added, as she stripped naked and set off down the bank to the water. They watched her scramble down.
‘You’d better get a towel ready,’ Joe suggested to Luna. ‘Your aunt is bonkers,’ he told Adamina.
Adamina, who’d been watching motionless, suddenly sprang to life. She jumped out of the van and threw off her clothes, and scurried after Zoe, reaching her just as she was treading gingerly into the cool water.
‘Mina, what do you think you’re up to?’ Zoe demanded. ‘Go back to the van, this is too dangerous for you.’
Adamina shook her head. Zoe scowled at the grey sky, and back down at Adamina, but the child stood her ground. A soft, warm rain began falling, speckling the surface of the river.
‘Look: let’s not kick off with an argument,’ Zoe pleaded. ‘I’m not a strong swimmer. I’m certainly not a lifesaver. And I’m not standing here, naked to the world, arguing with you. Now go back to the van this minute!’
Adamina looked across to the far bank, then back at Zoe, and smiled. It wasn’t such a long way; the river wasn’t so wide. And, as she’d later tell Zoe, someone had taught her how to swim; a good teacher. She plunged forward into the water and began a smooth breast-stroke towards the other side.
THE END
About the Author
Born in 1956, Tim Pears grew up in Devon, left school at sixteen and had countless menial jobs before studying at the National Film and Television School. He is the author of five other novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves, which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden memorial Award, In a Land of Plenty, which was made into a ten-part drama series for the BBC, and Blenheim Orchard. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature, and Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, and has taught creative writing at Ruskin College and elsewhere. He lives in Oxford with his wife and children.
ALSO BY TIM PEARS
In the Place of Fallen Leaves
A Revolution of the Sun
Wake Up
Blenheim Orchard
Landed
Published by Windmill Books 2011
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Tim Pears 1997
Tim Pears has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
‘Queen Victoria’ words by Leonard Cohen/Stranger Music Inc./Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ words by Bob Dylan/Special Rider Music & Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers
First published in paperback in 1998 by Black Swan
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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781446473443
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