The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore

by Paul Burman

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” Her hand straightens and tenses, ready to slap.

  “I couldn’t sleep. You’re talking about Dad,” I say. It’s an accusation. “You can’t talk about Dad,” I tell Brian. “Mum doesn’t like it.” Now I’m parroting the day’s lesson back at him.

  He seems to expand several inches when I say this, like an angry red balloon, and I’m ready to duck if he explodes.

  “This is bloody ridiculous, Margaret. Tell him. You have to ruddy tell him.” In two steps, he pushes past me and then I hear the front door slam.

  We’re alone in the kitchen now and, with both hands, she beckons me. I think she’s going to hug me, because I’ve stood up for her against Brian, but she puts her hands on my shoulders and grips them hard, digging her fingers in, clamping me in place.

  “Your father killed himself,” she hisses. “He put a rope round his neck. Do you understand me?” Her face is hard; she isn’t crying.

  I stand looking at her and can’t speak or blink. She might as well have hit me.

  “There, is that what you wanted to know? I hope you’re proud of yourself. Does that make everything better, does it?”

  I try taking a step back, but she grabs me tight again and I lose one of my slippers. There’ll be red marks under my pyjamas. “He was in a car crash,” I say. “I saw the policeman come round. You told me he was.”

  “Now you damn well listen to me and listen well.” And she begins shaking me backwards and forwards. Her fingers are pressing in and hurting, and when I try shaking them off she shakes me harder. “He hanged himself. Put a rope round his neck, rather than… couldn’t… the coward… He was weak.”

  “He was in a car crash.”

  “I sold the car to pay the bills.”

  “No!” I shout. “No!”

  And now she lets me go. She takes a step back and turns to face the window.

  “Yes,” she says. Quietly. “He gave everything up, including you. That’s how much he cared.” She turns from the window and begins tidying her hair. “Don’t you ever ask about him again. I don’t ever want to hear him spoken about. Not ever. I forbid it.”

  “Why? Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Get out of here. Go to bed this minute.”

  The year after that was the year the twins were born. Annette and Andrew. A half-sister and a half-brother, but too young to be fun.

  *

  I begin digging my way to Australia, I suppose, and twenty-odd years later we arrive.

  Beyond the runway and airport traffic, is a vast, dry plain and, on the distant horizon, an eruption of hills. There’s a clear, sharp light and a cloudless, soft, deep blue to this morning sky, which is wider and higher than anything I’ve ever met before. I almost trip over with looking up.

  “Birdie,” Elspeth says, tottering towards some kind of honeyeater.

  A line of ants trails across the red brick pavement and up a palm tree, but the taxi rank is empty.

  “We’ll have to phone for one,” Elin says.

  “The phones are yellow,” Daniel announces. “I saw one in there, didn’t I, Mum?”

  Jingling a few foreign coins in my hand, I hold them out as if I’ve minted their foreignness myself. No longer pounds and pence, but dollars and cents – the small currency of a new everyday life.

  Daniel, Tamsin and Elspeth chatter like a flock of excited birds; chattering to me, to Elin, to each other. And the trees are busy with the birds chattering too. And I think of the subdued silence of our British garden, with only the drone of the motorway in the background.

  “It’s hot already,” Elin says, “and it’s not even eight o’clock.”

  Instinctively, she leads the children under the shadow of a tree – long, pendulous, grey-green leaves; strips of bark dangling like brown snakes – and we draw our gaggle of cases and hand-luggage into the fringe of it. But, after so many cold, anaemic years, I stand in the sun and let it warm me. I want everything to be different, to leave my ghosts behind. I’m ready to begin a new day.

  Closing my eyes, it seems only an instant later that we’re paddling though the shallows of a low tide, just a hundred metres or so from the apartment we’re renting. The beach is a wide belt of sand that stretches on and on and on in both directions, holding the Southern Ocean up on one side and everything that’s the city on the other, and it’s all but empty.

  “Look, you can see the bottom!” Daniel declares. “See-through sea.” Reaching down, he picks up a shell, then another and another. Perfect spirals. “Can I keep these?”

  “They’ll still be here tomorrow,” I point out.

  But Elin nods and he slips them into the pocket of his bathers, and Tamsin reaches down and chooses a couple herself.

  “Birdie!” Elspeth squeals, pointing and stepping backwards out the water.

  “Fish!” Elin shouts. “I can see fish. Over here. Hundreds of tiny fish!”

  “Fish!” we all shout.

  “See-through sea,” I repeat, picking up a shell too, tracing its whorls with one finger.

  And Daniel throws himself down and starts splashing about, and Tamsin joins him. Elspeth reaches up and holds onto my hand, and I scoop her up and hold her horizontal so that, when I spin around, she becomes a bird flying in circles across the sea. I stop when she screams too loud, swinging her instead onto the perch of my shoulders, where she grips hold of my hair and kicks her wet feet against my chest, and giggles.

  “Dad,” she giggles.

  “Dad,” I say.

  An elderly man wheels his bicycle along the sand, watching the ocean, a couple of swimmers cutting broad strokes, the endless churning and chasing of the surf perhaps, and he stops. His trouser cuffs are tucked into his socks, and he wears bicycle clips on top of these; his shirt is unbuttoned and he wears a white vest beneath.

  “Beautiful – no?” he says.

  He can only be talking to us.

  I nod. “It certainly is.”

  “Beautiful, for sure. Yes?”

  He looks Greek or Turkish. I like his accent, his lyrical intonation. He makes me smile.

  “Yes.”

  “You swim – yes?” He points the stump of a finger at Daniel and Tamsin who are now building a sandcastle with a moat leading down to the waves.

  “The water’s so warm,” Elin says.

  “I not swim,” he laughs. “I look, I like, I fish, but not swim.” For each phrase, he mimes an action, but at the end he pulls a face to emphasise he’s not a good swimmer. “A stone – yes?” And he points downwards.

  Elin and I laugh, the kids stare.

  He pauses a moment. “On holiday – yes?”

  “We’ve emigrated,” I tell him. “Arrived a couple of hours ago. Thought we should have a paddle. This is our first day.”

  “Ah. Big move for pehdheeah – childs.” And he leans down to adjust his bike clips.

  “For all of us,” Elin laughs, but there’s an edge to her voice.

  “We flew here on a big plane,” Tamsin chips in.

  “For sure, is long way to swim. Is long time to dig,” he tells her, and winks.

  For sure. I look at him closely, waiting for something else, but the moment passes, and he climbs onto his bike and cycles along the sand, waving at us with one arm, waving at the sea.

  “Have good day,” he calls.

  And the waves drift in, draw out.

  In.

  Out.

  FOUR

  The first time I notice Kate Hainley is at a New Year’s Eve party given by a friend of a friend of a friend. I’m seventeen, insecure and incomplete, while she… well, she’s something else.

  The party takes place in a sparsely furnished flat above a down-at-heel shoe shop in the centre of Northampton, and I’m one of the early desperate dozen to arrive. Having arranged to meet friends in The Lion’s Head – a fine establishment for scoring a tab or two of acid – I’m late and they’re nowhere among the crush of pissed New Year’s Eve revellers. I figure
they’ve moved on already, but they’re not at the party either. As a result, I begin the evening pretty much how I’ll end it: leaning against a wall in the hallway, smoking too much and listening to people crap on about nothing I give a shit about, and staying because there’s nowhere else to go this New Year’s Eve, and because it’s sleeting outside.

  She blows in with a group of eight or nine. They’re laughing and exuberant and, straightaway, half-fill a room that’s garlanded, I now notice, with sprays of holly and sprigs of mistletoe. With her at their centre, they begin dancing to the very next song and the party isn’t half-empty and dull any longer, the flat is no longer cold, and the bleakness of winter grows more remote. After a few steps, she kicks off her clogs, peels off her jumper, and begins pirouetting.

  Beyond the main rhythm picked up by her feet, her fingers pull threads of music towards her and she spins them into something new with each gyrating sway of her neck, shoulders, hips. Fanning her fingers across her face, then flowering them into an arch above her head, she cascades them down her body, outlining her waist and hips, and I think of flamenco dancers I’ve seen on TV. My foot taps to the music and I inch along the wall to keep her in view as she turns and twirls and turns some more.

  After three or four songs belting from the amplifier, she stops, flicks her hair out of her face, picks up her bag and slips on her clogs.

  “Excuse me,” she says with an open smile, stepping in front of the guy standing next to me, but she doesn’t glance in my direction.

  Five minutes later, she’s got some bloke by the hand, pulling him to where her friends stand drinking, and he’s pretending to resist, but loving every second of it. They cheer and she makes him dance too.

  Because of the embroidered gilt patterns on her skirt, the cut of her blouse, her long, dark hair, and the seductiveness of her dance, there’s something Latin or gypsy-like about her. More than anything though, she radiates a wholeness and vitality I’d love to possess. She shines with it, is a light because of it. She’s alive, awake, fresh. If I knew her, or someone like her, then my life would be richer too – but I don’t and I’m just some hollow nobody leaning against a wall with a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a pocket of over-cooked cannabis cookies.

  “Hello, my name’s Tom,” I should say. “There’s something about you I… Something about you makes me feel… well, I don’t really know because… Can I dance with you? Will you dance with me? Please.”

  As if.

  In one of Dad’s old books, which Mum doesn’t know I’ve found, there’s a passage by a guy called Bede, who in 731AD compared life with a sparrow’s flight through a banqueting hall on a winter’s day. Bede wrote: ‘In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside, the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came.’

  Watching her reminds me of that image. Life is fleeting and there are too few opportunities to snatch happiness. Perhaps this is the lesson the old suicide, my old man, learnt too late.

  And it pisses me off that this might be the only truth he left me.

  What happiness did he fail to grasp and hold onto? What loss or regret had been impossible to live with? How do I know I won’t inherit the same miserable, shitty defeat?

  Someone says, “It’s almost time,” and I glance at my watch – his watch – tap its glass, as several people start counting down: “Ten, nine, eight, seven…’ And every clock in the country is ready to chime twelve.

  ‘Should old acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to mind…’

  Everyone is singing and I’m lip-synching along, and taking two or three steps closer towards her group, and wishing. I’m wishing that she’ll dance in my direction, find herself facing me and end up kissing me under the mistletoe. She’d wrap her arms around me and learn to know who I am.

  But she doesn’t and I can’t do anything about it, weak bastard that I am, so I grab my damp coat and sidle out into the bleakness of an icy night to trudge the five bitter miles to bed.

  She had the widest eyes of glistening burnt umber that ever smiled, a flow of hair that was deep chestnut brown and lips of rose, but more than that she glowed, and sometimes when I’m at other parties or sitting in a pub or listening to a band I look for her.

  When I see her two months later at the Spring Dance, chatting with a friend of mine, and without the other moths clamouring for her light, it’s so far beyond all probability it’s as though a greater force is in play – a syzygy. Sometimes, the yoking of the sun and moon to the earth creates king tides and bizarre cross-currents, which wash up exotic treasures, the flavours of other worlds. Everybody has some luck once in a while.

  It’s the first Saturday in March and the first day in ages it hasn’t slashed down with rain from morning to night. All the same, the sports field next to the Students’ Union Hall is flooded and I’ve had to weave between vast puddles in the car park to get to the entrance. Even though the forecast promises a week of brighter weather, spring doesn’t feel any nearer and, at that point in the evening, it’s impossible to imagine winter ever coming to an end.

  “How ya going, Andy?” I say, unwrapping my scarf, unbuttoning my coat and letting him punch me on the shoulder. “You managed to get across then? I didn’t think you were going to make it.” He lives twenty miles away, and Saturday night buses aren’t reliable.

  “Jez decided to come – the DJ’s a friend of his – and he’s giving us a lift back to Abetsby, so everything’s hunky-dory.”

  “Hunky-dory,” I repeat and laugh. I’ve never heard this old-fashioned expression used by someone my age before, but it sounds good. They probably think I’m stoned. “Everyone’s fishing for hunky-dory,” I say and laugh some more.

  She’s looking at me and smiling, so I shrug and say, “Hello.”

  Andy makes a joke I don’t hear, then says: “Kate, this is T.P; he’s –”

  “Hunky-dory,” she says.

  “Gone fishing,” I say.

  Andy winks at me. “Fly fishing.”

  “Teepee?” she says. “Like a wigwam?” She tucks a lock of hair behind her ear.

  “Tom,” I tell her. “Tom Passmore.”

  “I’ve seen you somewhere before, Tom. D’you live in Northampton?”

  “Nenford,” I say. “But I saw you at a New Year’s Eve party last… well, last New Year’s Eve. I don’t think you’d have noticed me.”

  “Oh. I wish it had been some other time. That wasn’t a night to remember.”

  “You looked like you were having fun.”

  She shrugs. “Not really. I drank too much. It wasn’t good.” She looks at Andy and then says to me: “Will you dance with me?”

  Andy laughs.

  How easy she makes it seem.

  “Um,” I say.

  She pulls a strand of hair away from her mouth. “You’re not one of those cowards who won’t get out and dance until the floor’s packed, or you’re too pissed to know you’re dancing, are you?”

  “Usually,” I admit.

  “But not tonight? You’ll dance with me tonight, won’t you?”

  I look to Andy, unsure what their relationship is. Don’t want to get in his way. But then think: what the hell. He’s not that close a friend.

  He reads my hesitation and deliberately misinterprets it. “I don’t want to dance with you, Tommo. You’re not my type.”

  “He dances by himself,” Kate says, raising her eyebrows as if it’s some form of self-gratification, like masturbating, that everybody does now and then, but few admit to. “We’re very old friends. Very platonic.” She kicks off her clogs and holds her hand out to me. “Come on, Tom.”

  “I might step on your toes,” I say.

  “Then I’ll forgive you.”

  The dance-floor is a dark, em
pty expanse. It’s early in the evening. She’s right: usually I won’t dance until the place is heaving and I’m pissed or stoned or both, but tonight – with her – we’ll be the first.

  I take her hand and she leads me into the music. Sober.

  “Hello, Kate,” I say.

  “Hello, Tom.”

  And we light the place up with a dance that’ll last all night and for months to come. For one of many evenings, we’ll find the rhythm that draws everyone else to dance. Together, we’ll bring in spring and summer.

  She lives on the other side of the county, in Abetsby, a town I’ve never visited. Our worlds are separated by the epidemic sprawl of Northampton’s suburbs and industrial estates and by the remaining patchwork of villages and fields, hedgerows and fences and spinneys, by the winding of the Nene and its many streams, and by a tired public transport system. She only has a few months before her end-of-school exams and starting university; I’ve got another year to go. We move in different circles of friends, beyond the forecast of too many freak tides. Yet, she’s gripping my hand a week later and smiling.

  “There are buses,” she says. “We got here tonight okay, didn’t we? You don’t mind catching the bus to see me?”

  “No, course not.”

  We’re inside The Royal Oak, at a table by the door of its crowded bar, amid tobacco and beer fumes, the clatter of a skittles game.

  “We can meet midway.”

  “Definitely,” I say. “If that’s okay with you.”

  “And the telephone. You’re on the telephone?”

  “Yep.”

  “So am I.”

  “I know, Kate. I looked your number up.”

  “Did you now?” And she slips an arm round my waist. “Good. I’m glad you did that.”

  There’s a flurry of people at the door. They’re laughing and flushed and bring a cold blast of night air with them. No more seats to be had. Standing room only. From behind the bar comes the sound of a glass breaking and a loud cheer rings through the pub.