by Nina Allan
“Time doesn’t really exist,” he said. “It’s a human construct.”
He said he could prove it to me, that all we had to do was stay up all night and I’d see how the future was really the present all along. We laughed and swore we’d do it, that we’d take blankets and food up to the allotments and wait for daylight, that we’d feel the planet revolving beneath our feet like a great spinning top.
We didn’t go through with our plan, though. It was just too complicated. I kept imagining my dad going into my room and finding me gone, the trouble it would cause. I guess Edwin imagined the same, or something like it. We were still children, really. Children tend to think of danger in terms of what they see on television: wars, or getting lost on a mountain, or a forest fire. The kind of random disaster you can fight or run from.
Danger can be ordinary, though. Something that doesn’t seem threatening at all, until it sinks its teeth in.
The old Newham line used to run from Truro to Sweetshouse before joining the Hayle branch line at Par. Originally it was part of the old china clay railway. Later it was amalgamated into the West Cornwall line, which lost more than half of its branch lines and stations in the Beeching cuts. My father didn’t get angry at people as a rule, not even customers who were late paying, or who didn’t pay at all – he always said that losing your temper over money was to pay to devil’s wages – but he hated Dr. Beeching, who he referred to as a robber baron. Dad said Beeching didn’t care what losing a station could do to a town, that his appointment had been a travesty and a sin.
Many of the branch lines were torn up and built over. Some, like the Newham line, eventually came to life again as cycle paths. The Newham path ran in a loop around the western outskirts of Truro then climbed uphill over the old viaduct. People tended to stop walking before they got that far, and the upper stretch of the pathway could get quite overgrown. On the day I’m telling you about, I remember the scent of greenery was overpowering, that there were butterflies sunning themselves all along the top of the viaduct.
When we reached the other side, I flung myself down in the grass and looked up at the sky. Edwin sat down beside me and took off his glasses. I remember he looked different without them, younger. He leant back on his hands and gazed up at the trees.
“There’s a saying around here, that if you fall asleep under the viaduct you’ll dream about the ghost train,” he said. “A local folk singer wrote a ballad about it – I looked it up in the library. He’s in an old folks’ home now but there are still people who believe the old quarry trains never stopped running. They say that on a still night you can hear the whistle blow, if you listen hard enough.”
“You don’t believe that though, do you?” I said. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”
I knew about the old quarry pit – we’d learned about it at school, how the china clay deposits dried up and there wasn’t enough work left to keep the trains running. The clay diggers moved east to St. Austell and the quarry was shut down. There was talk of flooding the quarry pit, of turning it into a reservoir, but that never happened.
You can still go there, if you want. The pit has been fenced off now because it’s dangerous but you can see it through the bushes still.
Dr. Leslie told me a local charity has started campaigning to turn it into a nature reserve.
Edwin said he didn’t believe in ghosts the way they were in films, the spirits of the dead come back to haunt us. He believed most ghost sightings were more likely to be people who happened to be living in parallel universes.
“Parallel universes?”
“Like if there was another version of reality right next to ours, a version of the world in which the quarry never closed down, and so the trains kept on running. And maybe sometimes people in our world can hear them, the way you can sometimes hear people talking through the walls in the house next door. There are plenty of scientists who believe in the possibility of parallel worlds. More than who believe in ghosts, anyway.”
“Because they’re less frightening?”
“Because they’re more likely.”
I asked him if he believed in God and he just laughed. “I’m not much of a one for beliefs,” he said. “I prefer observations. Things that can be proved by science.”
He touched the side of my neck, removing a blade of grass. Then he ran a hand down over my shoulder and around the curve of my right breast, as if he were outlining me in chalk, like the police do with dead bodies in the TV detective shows, or maybe just proving my existence. He laid his arm on the grass next to mine as if comparing their lengths.
“Let’s get back off the path,” he said. “Someone might see us.”
We fought our way through the undergrowth to a sun-striped, grassy clearing between the trees, young green oaks, their foliage bright and sharply outlined against the blue sky. The air was very still. Edwin took off his trousers and knelt above me, his penis hard and tight against his belly. I reached out to touch it. The feel of it was curious, like soft leather stretched over stone. The blue veins stood out starkly, like aquifers in granite. He stroked the hair back off my face then reached down and touched me between my legs. I could feel his fingers, pushing gently and then more vigorously, going deep inside. I closed my eyes, flinching slightly as if I’d been stung.
“Does it hurt?” Edwin said. “Should we stop?”
“It’s all right,” I said. I touched his wrist where it moved between my legs, felt the reedy, fragile bones working his hand. He withdrew his fingers then lay down on top of me and put in his penis. It hurt less than I thought it would, though being joined with him in that way felt strange to me, almost as if in becoming one we had been made to give up a part of who we were. I knew that sex was supposed to bring us closer, but in those moments when it was happening I felt more distant from Edwin than I’d ever been.
Perhaps it was too soon for us. I really don’t know. All I can say is that when I think of that afternoon I still feel sad. I wish we had talked more afterwards – that might have made things all right – but we were both so young.
A short time later Edwin gasped, then rolled away from me. I touched his hair, his forehead. He felt hot, sticky with sweat. Broken leaves and pieces of grass clung to my bottom and thighs. I heard the scatter and rush of birds in the depths of the trees, then from somewhere further away a train blew its whistle.
“It’s the ghost train,” Edwin said. “It’ll come for us now, you’ll see.”
I laughed. “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said. My voice sounded unreal to me, like a tape recording, although Edwin didn’t seem to notice and as time wore on and the sun bore down I began to come back to normal. This is the way things are supposed to be, I reminded myself. You’ll soon get used to it. The thought that I could get used to it made me feel stronger and older and, in a curious way, protective of Edwin – Edwin who knew so much, but who still did not know these thoughts of mine and never would.
We must have fallen asleep then, but not for long. We walked back into town along the cutting, then went our separate ways. I hoped I might find the house empty but both my parents were at home. My father was in the lounge, sitting in his armchair watching the football scores. Bars of sunlight filtered in through the closed curtains, crisscrossing the carpet with fuzzy yellow lines.
“You look like you’ve caught the sun,” he said. He smiled. “It’s good to see you getting some fresh air.”
He looked tired, even though it was a Saturday and he’d most likely been asleep all afternoon.
The radio was on in the kitchen. My mother was singing along to the music, a pure, high keening that was utterly unlike her normal speaking voice. The music made me shiver. The idea that a person who produced such sounds could also be my mother seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t make out any of the words, and after a moment I realized she was singing in a foreign language.
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�It’s German,” said my father, as if reading my mind. “Lizzie learned German at college, as part of her training. She had to know French and Italian as well. All part of her training,” he repeated. He closed his eyes.
“Why did Mum give up? Her singing, I mean,” I asked him, much later. After I came to West Edge House, Dad sold the house on Harlequin Road and went to live in Swanage to be closer to his sister. For a while – before he had to go into hospital, I mean – he still drove down most weekends to see me. If the weather was warm enough we would sit on the patio, in Sylvia’s deck chairs, looking out over the garden and exchanging news. We never spoke about my mother, except for that once. It was as if the curtains parted, just for a moment, and then slid closed again.
“She fell over on stage,” Dad said. “It put her off her stride and she forgot all her words. She asked if she could start again, but then she dried up completely. Everyone said it was nothing, just a college recital, she should forget all about it. Her confidence was destroyed though. I used to think it was how a tightrope walker might feel. You perform this miracle every night of the week for years and years, and then one night you look down at the ground and the only thing you can think about is how far you have to fall. Lizzie never sang in public again after that and it broke her heart.”
I still think about what Edwin said, about parallel worlds. What if there were a world where my mother had never tripped up on stage, where I had never pushed Helen in front of the ghost train and where my father had found my mother dying that night instead of me?
Can you imagine a parallel universe? I think you can. Sometimes when I go to sleep I think about what it might be like, to wake up in that world instead of this one, how quickly everything that happened here would seem like a dream.
Dear Andrew. I do hope you don’t mind me telling you these things.
Your friend, always,
Bramber
West Edge House
Tarquin’s End
Bodmin
Cornwall
My dear Andrew,
Jackie told me she still remembered the night she won a pierrot at the Tavistock goose fair.
“It was on that game where you have to catch a rubber duck with a fishing line,” she said. “I was nine years old. I called the pierrot Ponchinello, like the leprechaun in the song we learned at school. My brother was so jealous. He spent all his pennies on the rifle range but he didn’t win a thing.”
It was the first and only time she ever mentioned a brother. I asked her what had happened to Ponchinello but she didn’t reply.
“I always loved the fair,” she said instead. “Even if you didn’t win anything, there was always the feeling something marvelous was about to happen.”
Something marvelous. Her words made me think of Jennie, and what she had said about her and Paul running away with the circus. Ewa Chaplin wrote a story about a traveling carnival. Freak shows and carnivals were very popular in Eastern Europe. It was only the war that did away with them. I always assumed freak shows were a bad thing, that they exploited people who had no other way of making a living. But the carnival in Ewa Chaplin’s story acted as a kind of refuge, a sanctuary for people who would have been rounded up and killed by the Nazis otherwise.
When I was little, my father used to take me to the goose fair in Truro. I liked the candyfloss machine, and the treacle toffee stand, but I was afraid of the fair people, of the way the lights from the stalls and rides threw strange shadows across their faces. The fair is a different world, I think, the kind you have to be born into to understand properly. I remember the huge carousel with its painted horses, the contest to guess the weight of a large black pig. Dad always had a go at the hammer. I kept hoping he might win a goldfish but he never did.
By the time we were doing our A Levels, the goose fair was a thing of the past. We had the bank holiday fête instead: stalls selling cakes and assorted jumble and a bran tub full of prizes that weren’t worth winning.
It was Edwin who suggested we should go. “There’s going to be an elephant,” he said. “They’re bringing it in from Helston zoo and if you pay three pounds you can have a ride on it.”
He sounded excited, as if he’d never seen an elephant before, which perhaps he hadn’t. All I could think about was how they were going to get the elephant from Helston to Truro and whether it would be frightened, having to be led up and down among all those people suddenly. It was the only time I ever felt older than Edwin and the feeling scared me. It was as if, for a tiny moment, I had glimpsed another Edwin, an Edwin who played football in the park with all the other kids and who would laugh in my face if I so much as mentioned parallel universes.
The fête took place on the last Monday in August, the bank holiday. I kept thinking about how a month from now we would be back at school. There was bunting strung from the fence posts and a bouncy castle under the trees. One end of the football field had been roped off, and people were standing in line outside a striped marquee. The thought of the elephant inside unnerved me, the prospect of something mythical and terrible all at once.
Suddenly I spotted Helen, standing at the edge of the crowd, craning her neck to see over the heads of the people in front of her. I started at the sight of her. I hadn’t known she was going to be there and I felt guilty, I suppose. I hadn’t spoken to her since the start of the holidays and I’d been spending so much time with Edwin I’d hardly thought about her.
She turned around then and caught sight of us, her hair flashed bright in the sun. I raised my arm and waved.
“Who are you waving to?” Edwin asked.
“Helen,” I said. “She’s over there, by the tent.”
Edwin shrugged, as if the name meant nothing to him, and I wondered if he remembered her, even. “Would you like an elephant ride?” he said. “I’ll pay.”
I shook my head. I found I hated the idea of it, the poor elephant being walked in circles at the end of a rope, the people looking on, as if the elephant were part of a freak show, something monstrous and wonderful to be gaped at and then discarded. All those cameras pointing, all those instamatic cameras chirping like crickets. “Helen might, though.”
I offered her name as a consolation, a way of saying no to Edwin without making him feel that his suggestion had been unwelcome. And of course Helen would want an elephant ride – for someone like Helen, an elephant’s back was just another kind of stage. She had worked her way to the front of the queue by then, anyway.
I watched as the elephant was made to kneel, as Helen mounted the short flight of wooden steps that had been placed beside it. There was a cloth on the elephant’s back, a patchwork of satin and velvet in scarlet and gold. Helen’s light summer dress rode up around her knees, revealing her freckled shins and lower thighs. As the keeper led the elephant around the top corner of the football field, Helen let go of the red silk rope that formed the elephant’s harness and raised both arms above her head. Her cheeks were flushed, and her hair stood out in fuzzy corkscrews about her ears. A couple of people in the crowd began to clap.
As the elephant came to a standstill outside the marquee, Helen fixed her eyes on me. For a moment her expression appeared utterly blank. Then she smiled.
“It’s like feeling the world turn,” she said, as she came towards us. “You should try it. You might never get a chance like this again.”
“I’m scared of heights,” Edwin said. The way he spoke to her made it sound as if he knew her, as if they’d talked together before, many times. Once again I glimpsed that other Edwin, the Edwin who would say something just to be funny. His words sounded made up to me, like small talk, the kind of thing people say to each other in films.
Were they in a film now, Edwin and Helen? I found I could picture it, quite easily, Helen in one of those cartwheel hats with roses around the brim, Edwin as the young country doctor, thin and rather earnest but still good looking.
Edwin blushed. “Do you feel like getting something to eat?” he said. “We were just thinking about going for hot dogs, weren’t we, Bramber?” He turned to look at me as he said it, but didn’t quite meet my eye. I realized I had become insubstantial to him, a piece of stage scenery. He never used my name like that when he spoke to me, not normally.
“I can’t, I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I have to go home now. My dad’s taking me to an audition.”
“See you later, then,” said Edwin, as if he really might.
We headed away from the elephant tent and back towards the food stands, where Edwin bought us both hot dogs, though I no longer felt hungry. Then I asked Edwin if he’d like to come back to my house. I felt startled by my own suggestion, almost panicked, but in the end there was no need to worry because my father was asleep in front of the television and my mother was out. I led Edwin quickly upstairs, the taste of grease and fried onions still thick on my tongue.
Sunlight flowed in through my bedroom window, unspooling itself on the bed, the luminous, depleted warmth of a day that is almost spent.
Edwin examined the books in my bookcase, picked up a framed photograph of my father standing beside a 1950s racing car. Dad looked young in the photo, so young I could almost not recognize him. Edwin put down the photograph and picked up the snow globe, the one with Hampton Court Palace inside that I’d been given for my birthday when I was a little girl.
“I can’t stop thinking about her,” Edwin said. “Ever since we saw the play, it’s as if she’s become trapped inside my head. You’re her friend. Do you think if I asked her to go out with me she’d say yes?”
He held the snow globe up to the light, flooding the palace rooms with afternoon sunshine. Then he shook it, hesitantly at first and then with more vigor. The little world under the dome turned instantly white.