Duty and Delusion

by Shawna Lewis

  Bud mused on all this, wishing someone would offer him a little comfort. He did not think of Marnie as a possible source. Although he’d warmed to her, there was no physical attraction. The memory of his trip along the corridor to Belinda’s room that first night was blurred, and he was unaware of the loss of his scant dignity. She was definitely fanciable, but maybe the motherly air was the attraction. Anyway, she was married, and he was no Edward Hatton-style marriage-wrecker. As if she’d be interested, anyway… No, he’d reached the age of forty-one without a steady girlfriend and looked likely to stay that way.

  Marnie opened her eyes and saw his sorrow.

  “Want to talk?” she asked.

  Bud gave a watery smile.

  “Nah. Not really. Just like to wallow in a bit of self-pity now and then.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  Slowly, a conversation of sorts began. They each struggled to express the cause of their own self-pity, although the common links between them gave understanding beyond words. Gradually, what emerged was a longing to be like other people, people with homes and partners and children, even with all the ups and downs that would inevitably come too. Each knew, instinctively, that the other party in this conversation was not the one to deliver the goods. Each needed someone more committed and stable, someone with the stamina to help them change.

  “Someone like Belinda,” Marnie suggested, “for you. For me, maybe someone like her Doug, though I’ve never met him. Bel seems to find him boring, but I’d settle for boring any day.”

  They agreed that they must look further afield for love and boredom.

  Talk turned to Belinda’s life and preoccupations, which were foreign lands to Bud and Marnie. Bud had never even been into a village hall, being an urbanite through and through, while Marnie skated swiftly over her own experiences in such facilities. Between them, they made a vague pact to meet up and visit Bel some time, take a look at what made her tick. It surprised them that their paths had never crossed before, operating as they did in that mid-world of society that moves just above the illegal and just below the socially acceptable.

  Certain names, places and characters were known to both of them, if only by repute. It wouldn’t be difficult to maintain the connection. Each had found a new friend, in a world where friendships were scarce.

  Bud had more work to do clearing out his father’s OAP bungalow before the council repossessed it on Monday. The legal stuff would be taken care of by little brother. It wasn’t likely that Dad had left any money above the few pounds in his trouser pocket when he died, so whatever Miles did about the will, or lack of one, it wouldn’t affect Bud. It was his father’s personal effects that bothered him more. Bud was too sentimental to bin them all, as Miles had suggested. On the other hand, he was unlikely to make use of anything, though he would keep the photo albums.

  Taking the scraps of furniture and clothing away by bus was out of the question; it was agreed that Marnie would drive Bud and Al’s belongings back to his lodgings in the city, only two or three miles from her own bedsit.

  *

  Sunday came: the final day. Belinda’s spirits were low. The time had gone even faster than she could have imagined. She had fluttered the wings of independence and caused some turbulence, but had not yet had the chance to soar. That it would come, she had no doubt.

  Her day was spent soothing and smoothing her snail. She had grown to love it; almost dared to believe that it might look good in the tidy back garden at home and be sturdy enough to work as a stool; ideal for watching the birds build their nests in springtime. What would Doug think of it? For him to call it rubbish would be devastating; even worse, he might mock.

  As the day slunk towards its close, adjustments and finishing touches were made to the artworks. Reluctant to leave this oasis, the sculptors hung around in small groups admiring one another’s work, eventually huffing and puffing their creations into the boots of cars, where they were wrapped, propped, wedged, protected as preciously as new-born babes. Awkward glances encompassed those remaining, quick waves, and one by one they were gone.

  Bel and Marnie lingered, not wanting it to end, although Ambrose was clearly anxious to see them off the premises. He shook hands with Bel and waved her off. As she pulled away, reflected in her wing mirror she could see he was still in conversation with the other woman. He stretched out his hand and passed something into hers. With her other hand, Marnie was tapping at her phone.

  4

  Of course Belinda was glad to be home, she supposed, though in reality the time away had been too short for strong emotions. She hadn’t been much missed. Melanie’s scare had been resolved with a visit to the chemist’s shop with Granddad, who purchased a pack of the minute blue inter-dental brushes which could save the girl from a toothless future. Aidan had been climbing during time off from his part-time job at the garden centre.

  Doug had some news: in partnership with other local tradesmen, he had landed a contract to renovate a rundown block of flats in a city further north. This would mean working away from home, Monday to Friday, for several months. She could cope with that. He would take the caravan to live in, perhaps sharing with one or two of the other guys to keep costs as low as possible. The money would be good, and with Aidan’s exam results only a few days away, his parents could now view the financial future with a little less dread. No parents of their generation had ever dreamed that, in order to take advantage of the higher education their children had been told was their right, they would have to choose between disappointed dreams or nightmarish debt.

  The threat to her afternoons at work had receded, for although the council had closed down eight of its sixteen small suburban libraries, Denswick’s survived for now. But looming with both threat and promise, like a storm cloud over a desert, was the imminent departure of Belinda’s son. (Doug’s son too, she reminded herself.) She wished he’d been a school refuser, that she had never nagged him to do his homework, or spent her salary on private tuition when he’d struggled with a particular mathematical concept in Year 10. She almost wished he’d got some local girl pregnant and married her at seventeen, so he would be tied to home and parents for advice and support. She wished these things, but loved too generously to want them in reality.

  When they came, the results were better than expected and Aidan’s place secured. Bel acted the part of a delighted and proud mother. Inside, she screamed.

  Melanie withdrew into adolescent angst. She had never been alive without her brother and did not imagine that she could survive such a change. She watched the heightened activity and preparations with dread, not knowing what it was she feared.

  Doug had made a plan for the family to take a weekend away together in the caravan, delivering Aidan, his books and paraphernalia to his university on the Welsh coast at the end of it. Belinda said little, knowing that planning complicated itineraries was Doug’s way of coping with difficult situations.

  *

  One Friday in late September they pulled onto a pitch on a small campsite betwixt sea and mountains. The scale of the vistas made the family’s business seem small and timeless, made them aware of their own insignificance in the grand design. With this came a release of pressure. “As it was in the beginning…” The words came to Belinda’s mind unbidden, from Sunday School days and prayers in assembly, though not many schools had them now. They had given her a sense of a greater power, which was reassuring. Are we any better off now these things have been lost? she wondered. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be…” seemed to sum it all up. She must come to terms, silently, with the umbilical severance, as all mothers must.

  Behind the caravan was the entrance to a wood; the coolness of its shadows beckoned the family inside. They sauntered leisurely, solemnly, into the gold-glinting emerald light, all aware that this weekend marked the beginning of an ending: the ending of the eighteen years of family since Aidan
’s birth had created this unit. Even Melanie recognised that she had hatched into an existing nest, built in the childless years of her parents’ marriage in preparation for the joys to come. The girl knew that she and her brother had brought joy; she knew she was loved without ever having given it thought. She kept pace with her brother and father, as they talked of football and rock climbing and which university clubs the lad would join.

  Belinda fell behind, and soon she could no longer hear her family’s voices or the snapping of twigs beneath their tread. It seemed that she had been drawn off the path at a predetermined angle, drawn by familiarity, a sense of déjà vu, overtaken by calm and ease; a certainty that this was where she was meant to be.

  Leaf mould, centuries old, softened tread and clung to boots. Grey-green blocks of worked stone – slate, maybe – ancient, lichen-splashed, leant or stood together like last guests at a wake. Angular gaps, raggedly framed by rotting wood, defined form between saplings; nettles and brambles dropping with moist fruit gleamed blackly where a single ray of sunlight shone through the leaves. Unseen, badgers would stride at twilight over slate slabs patched with moss and sharp wild garlic.

  Joy, rushing, kept company with the gushing stream, which leapt and forced its way between a confinement of boulders, before falling free and haphazard to a dark pool. Where shafts of sunlight glinted the surface with topaz, peacock-blue damsel flies hovered, staying or going as they pleased.

  Inside the ruins, Bel was consumed by the absence. This was, or had been, or could be, her home. A home it had been once, for sure, before comfort and commercialism had seeped into the pores of the nation.

  She dropped to her knees on a mossy slab, smelt the leaf mould. Plucking at the wild garlic, she rubbed its leaves and flower on her hands and face. Eyes closed, her ears tuned to the returning birdsong, sometimes distant, sometimes close by. What mysteries of birdlife were sung through the canopy above? she wondered. She longed to take part. To be free as a bird seemed such delight, but was it really like that? Did every hen bird feel the wrench of loss as each chick fledged and flew the nest?

  Raising her head, she discerned jerky, spasmodic movement on the bark of a giant conifer. She stiffened, stared, watched, until the shape of a small bird emerged. It was flat to the creviced bark and seemed to be crawling up the trunk. The name treecreeper came to her mind – from whence she did not know. The bird reminded her of herself: barely visible in her natural habitat.

  She sat on tumbled stone beside a gap which had once been a window, gazing through it, a part of the forestscape, feeling more tranquil than she could remember. Never here before in this life, she knew it was her home. From this she absorbed the certainty that we are more than physical beings: that each of us has a soul. Aidan would always be with her, wherever his life took him, and even after death she would be a part of his very existence. Her soul, if not her body, had known this place before, and she had been drawn back, secure that the spirits which dwelt here would look after her boy while he was in their land.

  Belinda heard them calling her name and left the rocky seat, brushing moss and twigs from her jeans as she made her way back to the path. She would be able to leave Aidan without tears, she believed.

  When they left him in the rundown hall of residence, there were a few. From Doug, hearty handshakes, warnings about drink and to make sure he phoned his mother, as she would be worrying. Belinda gave her son a soft kiss, a squeeze of the hand and an unspoken prayer with a false grin. Melanie wept, and sulked all the way home, not knowing how to deal with things in any other way.

  *

  By late October Belinda was growing used to Doug’s absence during the week, but not to Aidan’s. He responded tersely to his mother’s texts. His life was moving on. There was work, play and girls aplenty, and he rarely thought about home. Family security ran parallel to his current life like a banister up a flight of stairs. For his mother, Christmas seemed far too long to wait to see him again. Maybe they’d visit, soon.

  5

  It was Friday afternoon and almost dark outside by six o’clock. Bel was returning books to the library shelves. One old chap still sat at the computers reading The Mail online; she often had to send him home when she locked up at seven. It was his winter habit to use the council’s electricity to keep himself warm during the day, complaining about fuel poverty at every opportunity.

  The sound of traffic from the street surged in briefly and faded again, telling Belinda that another customer had come through the door. She moved from between the stacks. A smartly-dressed woman stood at the desk; it took seconds for her to recognise Marnie, who looked different, somehow. Her hair was longer and more subtly toned; she had filled out a little and there was no sign of the tarty dress sense. The woman Belinda saw looked businesslike in dark grey coat and trousers, with a vibrant jade-green wrap around her shoulders. A tilted cap in the same shade added that extra something.

  With a surprised laugh, Belinda gave Marnie a hug. “What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I got tired of waiting for you to invite me!” the other replied in mock indignation.

  “I wasn’t sure that you meant it when you said you’d come – and anyway, there’s been a lot going on at home… But never mind… it’s lovely to see you.”

  Disgruntled that his peace had been disturbed, the old man snorted and logged off. As the door closed behind him, Marnie said,

  “Actually, that brings me to one of the reasons I wanted to visit you at work.” Bel was puzzled. “The computers. People can use them for free, right?”

  “Yes, for an hour a day, but you have to be a member of the library first.”

  “I want you to teach me how to do it. I haven’t a clue.” It was all part of her plan to become more like other people: to become a proper, respectable member of society.

  Marnie eased herself into the still-warm chair and stared at the screen. Hands hovering above the keyboard, she stared at the desktop icons on screen. They meant nothing. Bel used her own login code and brought up a search engine.

  “What do you want to know first?”

  “This interweb thing. People talk about it a lot but none of it makes sense to me.”

  The quiet lull at the end of the day gave Bel time to demonstrate the basics to Marnie and let the student find some information for herself. Taking back the controls after half an hour, she typed in the name of the city authority’s library service. Within seconds she was able to hand Marnie a printed schedule of IT tuition close to her bedsit.

  “Get yourself down there on Monday morning and put your name on the list.”

  Marnie was excited. The sculpture course had cost an arm and a leg; this was free and in a warm place. This internet thing might be the means of delivering her plans; she had these and schemes aplenty, but it was not yet time to share them with Belinda.

  “I’ll be closing up soon,” said the librarian. “Why not come home with me? We can have a catch-up and something to eat.”

  Marnie nodded, with a smile.

  After sharing a meal with Melanie and her mother, she seemed keen to discover more about the village that they both took for granted, and asked to be shown around despite the threat of frost and a chill breeze.

  Typical of ancient English townships overlaid with industrial-level housing schemes of the twentieth century, Sallby was an uneasy mix of the picturesque and the brutally banal. Behind darkling yew trees, the Norman church hid from the ruffian, sixties, concrete working men’s club, now in its last throes. Detached and porticoed estates of the boom years interlocked with rows of brick-built, between-the-wars semis and OAP bungalows. Here, a scruffily hedged field, with two horses and an upturned bath for a drinking trough. There a ragged farm, spewing straw or fodder; a stone barn conversion too expensive to sell; ample, lumpy, white-washed cottages, and a soon-to-be-shut-down post office. Odd-looking houses that had once been shops spoke o
f the commerce and convenience stolen away by the all-providing, all-destroying supermarket five miles away. Hefty chunks of mud from the treads of tractor tyres reminded passers-by of the rural belt encircling the village, and metal posts bore plastic housing for unfathomable bus timetables to places nobody wanted to go to. It was a village closer to nowhere than its own demise.

  Four centuries old and boarded up, the pub was hung with For Sale and To Let signs. Four centuries of hubbub and ale, wars civil, wars of the world, wars between neighbours; four centuries of shove ha’penny and darts, fruit machines and tobacco, buxom barmaids and funeral teas. All finished, polished off in a decade by cheap supermarket booze.

  Set a little apart, alongside a field, was the drab village hall, built in memory of The Fallen, at a time when a numbed nation realised that building for the future was the only worthy memorial, the only way to cope with the loss of those who died securing a future they would never enjoy. It was this unprepossessing construction to which Belinda had given so much time and effort over the past fifteen years, and Marnie loved it at first sight.

  She loved it for its plainness and its permanence. It represented much that she had missed out on in life. She loved the idea of community. In that, she shared a politician’s rainbow-tinted idealism. Community was something she had always been excluded from. Whereas the politicians spoke in generalities and pipe dreams, Marnie believed in the myth. She wanted to be part of it.

  After much urging from the visitor, they walked down to the hall, where a dancing class had just finished. It smelt of little girls and their scented mothers. Belinda walked round dispiritedly, picking up odd, forgotten socks and sparkly hair slides jettisoned from tumbling curls.