by Carol Birch
She was all excited about it, wanted to talk about it, wanted him to see how savvy she was, her phone bingbonging some stupid tune, and yap, yap, sure will, be in touch, sorry, I’m on a job, can’t speak to you now. Later. Bye!
They reached her car and stood for an awkward moment looking at one another. Oh look at him, God bless, she thought. Poor old Dan. The idea of people knowing she’d ever been involved with him in any way was now terrible. Simply awful. And the physical thing, oh God, what the hell was I thinking? And his horrible mother! When you think of how he was, though. Poor Dan! What an embarrassment he was, she thought, and always had been. She’d thought he was sweet. Well, he was in a way in those days. She’d had a lucky escape. Thank God she got away.
Ach, too horrible to think of.
We all make terrible mistakes when we’re young.
‘Well, Madeleine,’ he said.
She remembered how irritating he could be.
And how he could turn, the temper on him.
Her eyes were noticeably narrower. They’d been pale blue and very wide. Still nice though.
He turned to go and realised he was blushing. It had been ridiculous when he was sixteen but now it was just pathetic.
Half-way home he realised he hadn’t got milk for the morning, swore, plodded back, and returned by the track along the back of Gallinger’s field. On the dark stretch where the trees joined arms above, and along this lonely track he realised someone was on the other side of the hedge.
He stopped. Stared at the bushes with his big fierce look. Don’t you mess with me, I’ll split your fucking skull. But it was nothing.
Pete Wheeler’s kid, Sam, an affable lad with spiky yellow hair and a pierced lower lip, picked up the car, and after that Dan put his boots over his trousers and went to check on the bees. He never bothered with all the gear, the smoke, all that, never had. It was OK as long as you kept it all slow and steady. They never troubled him. The two hives were up against the garden wall, the land in front of them, covered with white and purple clover and thyme and spotted with dandelions, sloping gently down to another arm of the wood. Cautiously he lifted the cover and began chivvying out the first frame, removed it and let it rest against the side of the hive. Now the next one. The bees crowded, crawling. There she is, the queen. Everything looked fine. Put the new super in tomorrow. He still glanced sideways and up before he left, to the far end of the wall – always would, even though it was, Christ, nearly twenty-six years since his mother hanged herself there. There’d been spikes all along the top then, put there by the fabled Grandad Jack to keep kids from climbing over, and she’d tied the belt of her dressing gown to one. The spikes had been removed after that. He’d been somewhere between Shetland and Faroe when the word came, and by the time he got home it was all over, someone had cleaned the house and she was in the chapel of rest in Gulliford. He didn’t go to see her. No point, poor silly soul. It was a terrible thing. Terrible.
Time for a drink. Three or four straight whiskies fast, then toast. He fried a few eggs, shoved them down while watching the news. Bloody depressing crap. The body was on the local. A man, they said. Blow to the head with a heavy object. Dan walked out the back with his bottle and stood swigging. His yard was a tip. A heap of broken bricks was piled up against the hedge, and tyres lay about near a half-dismantled wreck. The fog had gone completely. Wild kittens skittered by the gate leading into the wood. He went round the front for no reason, just walking aimlessly with his bottle. The swish of the tail of something whisked itself away between the ancient wreck of the old car his gran used to occasionally drive in a very slow and dignified way along the narrow country lanes to the huge irritation of other motorists. It and another rust heap were sinking together into the surrounding greenery, becoming part of the landscape. Some of the cats had made a home in the two old wrecks. Three big elders sat there now, one on a roof, the others on the bonnet of his gran’s Wolseley, watching him indifferently. And again, for no good reason, because there really never was any particular good reason for anything but what he and his bottle felt like doing, he lay on his back in the long grass and closed his eyes, and tried to think of some other thing apart from what was left of a body after thirty years in the ground, washed down in the swill like a bit of rubbish. He’d have been at sea then. Didn’t anybody miss the poor fucker? Well, no one would miss me either, he thought. It’s not that bad. It’s not unusual. Then he got ferociously, stupidly drunk. It was getting dusky, bats appeared, first just one or two then a constant skittering. When he got up, his head swirled in a pleasant familiar way. He went out and looked down the lane at the bats swooping drunkenly all along the tops of the hedges in both directions. There was no one about. He walked a little way for no reason. The corncrake grated. Walking back, he got that good feeling, the loose softening perception, and there was his house – hello! – glimpsed from the road through the wild hedge.
You’d think it was derelict. The scent of jasmine came to him. He felt sorry for his house. At heart he was a sentimental man.
The high wall of his garden was covered in toadflax. He ambled over, swinging the bottle, kicked the door open and looked at the garden in the fading light. Two paths crossed in the middle and there was a flaking white bench in the corner where he sometimes sat and smoked. That’s where the jasmine ran wild. It had always been there. He imagined the bees in their hives, a hum of sleep. The bees and the bats would outlast him. Are all the bees dying? His aren’t. His are just the same old bees, living on like pioneers. The last bees on earth. Nothing much was growing but parsley and spring cabbage and a bit of mint. Down at the far end was the open place where he thought he might build his hen coop and a good run whenever he finally got round to it. Sometimes he worked at his garden in the middle of the night if the fancy took him. It was nice out digging under the moon, the bottle propped in the earth. If only he didn’t feel so shattered sometimes. But what could you do about it? It was life. He loved it here. If you stood still sometimes your ears caught things. The trees hissing. Something that croaked and keened under its breath. His ears still listened for a sound from the far wall where the hives stood but it was slightly less than conscious now and fairly tolerable. A couple of times lately he thought he’d heard a new rustling in the woods at night, and he didn’t like that. He liked to know what was what. But he often doubted his senses. They’d let him down too many times.
At the back of the house were three circular overgrown red-brick steps, on which he’d scraped his shins when he was three. Foxgloves and Herb Robert ran wild. He sat down and cried, again for no reason. That big orange tom that talked to his feet was snoozing on the bottom step, the one that was scarred with a long gouge on the right-hand side.
‘You stupid old fucker,’ he told it.
He went back inside, threw some cabbage leaves into the kitchen for tomorrow, drew all the curtains, locked up thoroughly and put some music on. He liked old soul, Motown, stuff like that. He got out his knife and did a bit of whittling. He’d been trying to make a dog out of a bit of pine but it wasn’t much cop and the knife needed sharpening and he couldn’t be bothered to get up so he lay back and drank and sang along, drank himself to more tears, and talking and singing. He’d lived in this house on and off forever, and almost continually for the past twenty-three years. It had accumulated round him like a soul he didn’t want. His things: a few books, guitar, plectrums, pictures that had always been there, CDs out of their covers, vinyls never played because he no longer had a record player. All filthy. He was a pig, he knew. The sugar he spilled last week was still on the rug.
A cat with a big white face jumped up on the arm of the sofa. The stupid ginger one clawed away at the dark red swathes and cataracts of the armchair’s side, a magnificent shredding like the hangings of moss in the wood.
In the kitchen he put the kettle on, stood in the big bright space and sang along to the music, distorting his face, ‘In the beginning –’
sweep of strings
–
‘you really loved me… but I was too blind, too bli-ind… to really see-ee-ee…’
The room was like a castle kitchen, with a massive central table and an old doorless pantry painted fifteen shades of dirty cream.
‘Which one do you like?’
‘They’re all fine.’
‘Oh come on, you must have a preference.’
‘No really.’
His mum obsessing over a colour chart. Every little rectangle looked exactly the same. Cream. Cream. Cream. She was bonkers. She’d go on and on and on till he said ‘That one’ randomly to shut her up.
‘That one?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah.’
She’d keep coming back at it.
‘What about that one?’
Cream. Cream. Cream.
‘Yeah, that one, fine.’
‘But do you really like that one better?’
‘Honestly, I like them both, I don’t mind.’
Then she’d stand back with a look of profound concern on her face and he’d lose his rag and walk out and if she followed him, he’d say, ‘For God’s sake! What the fuck’s the matter with you?’ and slam his door. Sometimes he’d get a horrible feeling he was going to hit his mum. She just went on and on. On on on. Couldn’t block her out. Falling back again on how unlucky she was and how horrible it was being a widow. Widow. The way she said it was loaded. She seemed to always wear an invisible set of black widow’s weeds, complete with a long black veil.
The kettle boiled and clicked off. He poured water on a teabag. The kitchen windows all down one side were dark. Here and there green eyes peered in. Always a few cats round the windows. He stirred his tea, mushed the bag against the side of the cup. The music in the other room stopped. As if commanded, he stopped too, and just stood there. The following silence felt like something physical slowly pouring into his ears. Beat beat beat, blood in his head. He heard a sound. Outside, neither near nor far.
Click.
His head jerked up. Bastards. The gate at the back of his garden, the one that opened right into the woods.
Quietly he went to the back door and opened it. The woods and the dark night delivered a sudden eerie shiver. Damned if I’m going out there, he thought. The supernatural scared him stiff, he couldn’t watch horror films. So he closed the door and locked up, went back into the kitchen and got milk from the fridge for his tea, ignoring the gaping blackness of the windows.
5
Took a walk up to the Wights this morning.
It was such a nice day and the woods woke me up early. Funny, I never used to be able to get out of bed and now I’m up before first light. The birds get going in the dark, the few little whisperers, then the chatty ones; and I lie listening, waiting for the moment when the full chorus begins. It comes along with the light, and suddenly everything’s alive. Another night. Got through, I should say, but that makes it sound like an ordeal and it’s not, though it doesn’t always go easy. But my God, my head’s so full! Or rather, the fullness is out there. My head just lives in it.
I got up to the Wights, and sat against one of the biggest stones, and it felt cold against my back. I thought: Fuck you, Long Wights, you never deliver. All that crap about vibrations and earth energies and currents and how you can feel it, well, I never do. Put your hands on the stone and you’ll feel a tingling. Some may experience it as a kind of heat. Bollocks. I’ve tried. Nothing. The stones draw down thunder and lightning though, that I know. Wouldn’t want to be up here in a storm. This place is full of stories. This is where they brought the nasty old baron and killed him for what he did, boiled him alive or something vile like that. Didn’t happen. He lived to a ripe old age. Those old stories, you know, you can bet something really happened but it got garbled. She’d be a lovely fair maid in the ballad – oh the baron’s fair daughter was walking one day – and the serving lad, the lovely boy, he’s bonny and he’s rough, well, who could resist? Probably had acne and adenoids, poor love, but was the only one who was ever kind to her. She, a pasty plump stammering girl, fourteen, greasy-haired, knicker-wetting. And she got a massive crush on him and couldn’t help it. Neither could he.
There were cattle in the meadow and a few sheep nibbled below me. Creatures hummed and ticked in the grass and the sky was deep cloudless blue. The land around here is full of holes, even now, but I know my way around. Somewhere above me is the old storm drain, its sticky black mouth opening to the underground. I went down into the woods. People mostly stick to the paths but I go anywhere, I know all the signs, the curve of a certain trunk, the particular pattern of shading on the bark of one special fallen tree. I went back to my bower. My bower is hung all over with long strands of beads, inside and out, and brooches pinned here and there, and inside I have small round raffia boxes filled with beads and clasps and chains, and an old musical box that no longer plays music. It’s full of gauzy flowers and brushed felt and pretty buttons.
After tea and bread and cheese and some wine from my box, I sat for ages imagining the tortoise now, still in the woods but grown to a giant, a prehistoric beast. Beware the Jabberwock, my son. The teeth that snap, the jaws that drool. Time stopped all over again as I sat there – it does, it does –
When it had been dark for some time I thought I’d go see if the cat man was playing music, the poor scruffy man who wears those horrible old baggy trousers that sag at the knees. So I took some wine in a bottle and went to the place near the back of his house where I could sit among the trees and listen. I like that. He plays corny old stuff, things I haven’t heard in a long long time, like ‘Misty Blue’, and ‘When the Deep Purple Falls’, and ‘What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted’. Sometimes, in the dark after a drink or two this heartsick music is unbelievably beautiful. You sit there going, oh remember this one, oh –
He’s a sad old thing, his face all frazzled and a look of puzzlement as if someone’s just told him off and he doesn’t know why or what to say. Poor idiot. Poor drunk. Yes, I can hear it in the distance, so off I go and find a nook, and there are lights on in the house. Weirdo.
Once I heard, played on a fiddly jazz sax, ‘Lily of Laguna’. Remember that? Ah no, of course you don’t.
She is my Lily of Laguna,
She is my Lily and my rose.
I used to sing it to her when she was a baby.
*
So there I am lying on my back on Acid Tree Lawn, Holland Park, 1969, the sun hot orange through my closed eyes. A shadow falls upon me and I open my eyes and there’s this young black guy with a hooked nose and a long chin saying, ‘S’cuse me, love, is this your shoe?’
Me and my friend Fiona had dropped out of university and gone to London. I didn’t realise I wasn’t clever till I went to university because up till then everyone told me I was (I could seem to be clever sometimes, I think) and boy could I pass an exam. The trouble was, I wasn’t clever, really I wasn’t clever, but everyone thought I was. And I wasn’t tough. Everyone else was. Tougher, harder. No one else seemed scared like me. I wished I could be hard, but I don’t suppose it’s all it’s cracked up to be. And those intellectuals made me feel stupid. It’s a closed shop and I can’t be doing with it. I couldn’t stand the way they talked, and they were all posh, and if they weren’t posh, they were hard, and everybody putting everybody else down as the song says, and I hated it. I’d sit in a seminar feeling dumb while everyone else talked like Malcolm Muggeridge and snortled superciliously. And everyone banging on loudly about oppression and the domination of the few, when it was still all the same, the ones who banged on the loudest were themselves always the ones rising to the top, the strong, the loud, the confident, and no one else mattered. It got harder and harder to hide my dumbness and lack of tough. But Fiona was OK. She was on my Biology team, and when they brought us in the trays of maggots for scientific purposes – we each had our own personal tray – she joined me at the back of the room. Can’t, I said, just can’t.
Me neither, she said. No point in going home, my parents had moved to Halifax and I didn’t know a soul there. Anyway I couldn’t have lived with them any more. I’d spent years wanting to get away and it would have been a massive capitulation to go back. Mainly it was because of my dad, who’d always treated me with embarrassed contempt and made me feel afraid for no reason I could articulate. I don’t suppose it was personal, he was like that with everyone. And my poor old mother, she just put up with it. What a way to live – no choice, always in the shadows, always just enduring. My brother though, twelve now, still at school, stuck there with all that, though to be honest whenever I did go home, he seemed fairly happy with his friends and his football and his scouts. So we went to London, Fiona and I. Fiona had big grey eyes and tumbling red curls that flowed everywhere and she could dance like Isadora Duncan. She ended up a model. Used to see her sometimes in catalogues. And me! I’m laughing now. Look at me! What a state. Oh, but it was such fun! To be young and free and stupid and land in London in 1969. It was a dressing-up festival. Clothes were like fancy dress. Fiona was a medieval princess. I had a floppy yellow bow-tie. I just let my hair go and it went all wild and frizzy like an Afro, and I dyed it black and painted my nails green, and we lived in a wardrobe in Fiona’s brother’s room in a house in Notting Hill. We had to stay in there in case the landlady found out about us. Sitting in the wardrobe putting on our smudgy black eyes. It was a very conscious decision to run wild. It was the first thing I’d found that I really wanted to do. Oh Portobello Road and the Dilly. All those pretty people. How hard it was. No one could be beautiful enough. Inside I felt like the geek in ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, lost in it all, no confidence at all, but coasting along like a colourful duck on thin ice. We smoked dope and took orange pills, oh those orange pills, Christ, I could do with one now – and one night in the middle of some music thing in a park I looked down and realised I was wearing a Tyrolean milkmaid’s outfit. My God, I thought, what the hell am I doing? And on summer days we’d go down to Holland Park and lie in the sun on Acid Tree Lawn. I was lying there one day on my back, eyes closed, when a shadow fell over me.