The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore

by Paul Burman

  “Hello, Kate,” I call, and walk through.

  But instead of Kate, there’s a figure – a man – who fills the kitchen with the many folds of a long, black coat. The coat’s so large and dark that it swamps the light from the room, and it takes a moment to realise he’s got his back to me and is holding the back door open for an escape, urging Kate to run away. Of course it’ll be Old Lofty.

  “Bastard!” I say. “Ask her to come back. Why did you do that?”

  He turns then, and it’s my father. All this time Lofty and my dad have also been one and the same, and this revelation paralyses me. The kitchen door is open, Kate’ll be scrabbling away beneath the hooked-back fence, and I can’t move.

  Though he stares in my direction, his expression never changes. He might be a statue or a photograph, frozen in time.

  I want Kate back, but there’s so much I need to ask him too. There’s a question I have for both of them – Dad and Kate – and so I shout it as loud as I can. Maybe Kate’ll return, maybe I’ll unfreeze him.

  “Why did you leave me?” I shout.

  *

  Andrew and Annette are still asleep when I ease my way downstairs. Each time I return ‘home’, the house is smaller in every dimension, making me duck my head, squeezing me out, although I figure that won’t matter much by the end of this visit. Sometimes it’s hard to imagine how the place ever contained me.

  Brian’s in the lounge, engrossed by the morning news on his pride and joy: a brand new, large-screen TV. An outside broadcast shows a reporter and a policeman standing in front of a cordoned-off bungalow, where an eighty-one-year-old widow has been raped and murdered.

  “Watching TV already?” I say.

  He looks up from his chair, peering over his glasses. “I’m waiting for the weather. It’s after the news round-up. Unless you can tell me what the three-day forecast is?”

  I begin walking away, then step back, make a show of looking towards the open French windows and the brightness of the summer morning, and announce: “Rain, rain and more rain.”

  In the kitchen, my mother enters through the open back door and she’s carrying a colander of strawberries.

  “You’re up,” she says. “Did you sleep well?”

  “Not bad.”

  She holds the colander out for me to see the crop. “Thought I should pick these before the birds do.”

  I reach out to take a couple, but she pulls them back.

  “Not now. They’re for later. You haven’t even had breakfast yet.” And she begins rinsing them in the sink.

  I make a mental note to buy two punnets of strawberries and a bottle of Asti spumante for Elin’s birthday breakfast in a couple of weeks. We’ll gorge ourselves in bed, not get up until midday, and enjoy every guiltless minute of it. And then I head out the back door.

  “Where are you off to? Aren’t you having breakfast?”

  “In a minute. Thought I might have a walk round the garden first.”

  But she’ll know what I want to see. It was too late and dark when I pulled into the driveway last night.

  Two weeks previously they phoned to wish us well in our new flat in Great Shentonbury.

  “It’s good,” I told Brian. “Only one bedroom, but it’s big enough for us.”

  “That reminds me,” he said. “Andrew needed more cupboard space, so we boxed up the last of your stuff and put it in the attic. There was only a couple of boxes – you might not even want it – it’s been sitting in that cupboard for years, but you might want to go through it next time you’re home. Old school books, reports, that sort of stuff.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “What else is news? Got your holiday booked?”

  “Your mum said to tell you we’ve taken the old tree down – got some men to come and saw it down and take it away. You should have seen the mess. The garden looks twice the size now.”

  “Which tree?”

  “That big old pine thing. It was pushing the back fence down. I spent last weekend putting in new fence posts.”

  “The spruce? My Christmas tree?”

  “Well there was only one, so I guess so. But hardly your –”

  “Shit!”

  “What –”

  “You might have told me beforehand.”

  “Why? It had to come down. The neighbours were complaining. It’s not as though you live here or ever pruned the damn thing.”

  “Okay. Alright. It doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it, Brian.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  So I kneel beside the sawn-off stump and place my hand on the remaining bark, pick at a piece of resin bleeding from the cut, sniff it and roll it into a bead. In the corner of the garden, tucked under a bush, several long cones lie like fat cigars, and I pick these up, pull back some of the cardboard-like scales and shake them until I’ve gathered several seeds. These I drop in my pocket, along with the best three cones.

  I’m perched on a kitchen stool, with a mug of tea and a bowl of muesli, when Andrew shuffles in. His hair sticks up, his pyjama top hangs off one shoulder, and he yawns.

  “You look like you haven’t woken up yet,” I say, and ruffle his hair.

  “You talk in your sleep,” he replies. “You shouted one time. Woke me up.”

  “You snore.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Like a piglet,” I say. “Oink, squeal; oink, squeal.”

  The kitchen door’s still open, and Kate’s drifted irrevocably away from me. I haven’t seen her in two years, and know that two will become five and five will become ten. We’re following separate currents and it seems we’ll never meet again. In a fortnight, I’ll start work with the Wiltshire Library and Museum Service, and Elin has a teaching position in a small primary school. She’ll have returned from her literacy conference by the time I leave Nenford.

  When I finish my muesli, I take a sip of tea and make the announcement: “Elin and I are getting married next March.”

  There’s a moment’s stunned silence to savour.

  “What? You’re not? You’re joking,” Mum says.

  “Nup.”

  “Congratulations,” says Brian.

  “Really?” says Andrew.

  “You’re too young,” Mum tells me.

  “Too young?”

  “You’ve only just finished university.”

  “I’m older than you were when you married Dad.”

  “Things were different back then. We had to grow up quicker. Maybe we were too young as well.”

  I stand up and push the stool against the wall. “We’ve lived together for two years. We’re getting married next March.”

  “I still think you’re too young,” she says. “Twenty-two’s nothing. You’ve seen nothing of the world – of life.”

  “We’ll see it together. Don’t you like her?”

  “She’s lovely. But she’s too young too.”

  I begin rinsing my dishes in the sink and Mum pulls the colander of strawberries out of the way.

  “The first week of the school Easter holidays,” I tell her. “Thought you might be pleased.”

  She says nothing, but reaches for a tea towel to catch the drips from the strawberries.

  “Thanks for your good wishes,” I say, and step past Brian and Andrew on my way upstairs to the bathroom.

  Annette’s on the landing.

  “What’s the fuss about?” she asks.

  I shake my head, intend keeping quiet. “Nothing,” I say. Then: “The same old crap. Some things never bloody change.”

  “Mum! Dad! Thomas swore!”

  That afternoon, I take the stepladders and climb into the attic. It should be cluttered with boxes, old toys and junk maturing towards antique-hood, but it’s practically empty.

  Close to where I perch, my legs dangling into the hallway below, sit two cardboard boxes with my name daubed on each, and only a little further away, protected by a dust sheet, the family Christmas tree: a two-foot-tall, ready-decorated, green plastic job. Apa
rt from a few Christmas cards clustered on the sideboard, this is Mum and Brian’s annual concession to Christmas decorations. Each year he’d lift it down from the attic, remove the cover, sit it on top of the TV, plug in the lights, and there it’d be.

  “Easy,” he’d probably say.

  “Too easy by half,” I’d reply.

  I haul my boxes down the ladders and sit on the bed to go through them. In the first, there’s thirteen years of school reports, a biscuit tin full of badges, and several History exercise books with assignments written in fountain pen, using a careful script I no longer recognise. In the second box, there’s a small, red tin containing two Neolithic flint points, a bag of marbles, a badly torn poster of The Stones, the black pretend-leather diary that Brian and Mum gave me one Christmas, and a wad of letters (green envelopes, green writing paper) tied together with a length of red cord.

  Afterwards, I shovel everything into the boxes again and stack them next to my carry-all. Nothing will stay here; not even the stuff I’m gonna chuck out. And then I escape the house and walk a while. There’s another, bigger argument looming and, having been bullied into avoiding the topic all my life, I need anger more than courage.

  Walking past Gazza’s old house, three streets away, I wonder what it’d be like to knock on the door and speak to his mum.

  “You won’t remember me,” I’d say, “but I was a friend of Gazza’s, back at primary school. You showed us how to make doughnuts. You won’t remember me, but I just wanted to say that I’m really sorry for your loss. It might be several years too late, but I am sorry. Really. I just didn’t know it at the time when I read that he’d been killed, nor how to speak it. I just wanted to tell you this.”

  And she’d look at me, with the front door half-open, and she’d either try to smile or she’d look blank, or stunned, or stung, or she’d begin crying and shut the door in my face. Or no one would answer the door in the first place. Or someone else would answer the door, like a young mother with a crying child on her hip, and I’d learn that Gazza’s mum had moved away soon after her loss or that she’d died of a broken heart.

  But I look at the house and the garden, at the peeling paint around the windows and at the uncut grass, and walk on. Too little has changed in some respects, too much in others, and the connection between yesterday and today is getting too thin to trace.

  Two streets away, instead of crossing Northampton Road into Ald Lane, which once led to the River Nene, six lanes of ring road stop me. On my left, instead of a market garden, there’s an enormous shopping centre, car park and petrol station. Further across, where fields once stretched to the horizon, stands three car dealerships, an electrical goods discount superstore, a carpet and flooring showroom, a McDonalds, KFC, Burger King and a cut-price furniture warehouse, surrounded by more car parks and another petrol station. A labyrinth of concrete and bitumen.

  Close to the supermarket complex, a dark and fetid underpass leads to the other ‘superstores’. It takes me away from Ald Lane, but to a less frantic stretch of road, which I dash across, before following a fence line to where I wanted to be in the first place.

  How can anybody walk to the river these days? Where do kids make their hideouts or roast the apples they’ve scrumped on dull Sunday afternoons? They’re rhetorical questions, answered by the smell of piss in the underpass and the graffiti across every wall in sight.

  Ald Lane is still an unsealed bridleway leading to a farmhouse, next to the old mill – originally built in the Middle Ages – but is nothing without the hedgerow of hawthorn, crab-apple, elder, ash, cow parsley, nettle and burdock that defined it for centuries. In its place is a wire fence, complete with snagged plastic bags, a couple of shopping trolleys, a tyre, plastic crates…

  Beyond the mill race, I come to the main artery of the river; still a popular stretch for anglers, who perch among flattened reed beds despite the drone of traffic bustling across the landscape from roundabout to roundabout. But two minutes later, I freeze. Across the footpath, some gun-happy, moronic bastard has arranged a row of dead birds. There are ten, all lined up to face the same way, from smallest to largest: seven finches, two starlings and a blackbird. The act of a sicko. I step back, scan the fields for some cretin skulking with an air rifle, and wish I could bury each bird down the bastard’s throat.

  It’s then I see the dead swan.

  Several metres up-river, its neck and most of its body is submerged, but part of one leg is on the surface with its head and bill, and a few feathers ruffle in the breeze.

  How could anyone do this?

  It’s drifting with the current, and as I draw closer I watch its feathers ruffle again, except this time I hear them rustle. The rustle of plastic. It’s not a swan, but a white, plastic carrier bag, partly submerged, with air trapped inside, caught in the fork of a branch. What I thought was part of a leg is a lollipop stick trailing next to it, and as I look at the markings on the swan’s bill I realise there’s a printed banner in orange: FRESH FOOD.

  I watch it drift.

  Déjà vu.

  Returning to the house, for an alfresco meal, the mood’s become celebratory, almost apologetic, and I can’t bring myself to break it. Not at first.

  “Red or white?” Brian says, pointing to two wine casks sitting by the back step. “Grab a glass from the kitchen.”

  “Nice walk?” Mum asks.

  I nod.

  “See anyone?”

  “No.”

  There’s little breeze here; just a calm summer’s evening. The smell of a barbecue wafts from one side of the neighbours’ fence and the sound of a TV washes in from the other. Bees and hoverflies drift around the flowers, even though the sun’s dropping, and a couple of wasps drone around the border of rocks, exploring crevices. It’s the calm before the storm, but I’ve shouldered her bitterness for too many years.

  After dinner, when the twins have been sent to do the dishes and Brian’s checking out the Saturday Night Movie, Mum says: “We are pleased, you know, love. About you and Elin. She seemed a nice girl.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “She is.”

  “A pity she couldn’t have come back with you this weekend. It would have been nice to get to know her better.”

  I watch an ant struggle to carry a crumb through the grass.

  “There’ll be other times.”

  She takes a sip of wine. “We don’t see you that often.”

  I take a sip of wine. “Yeah, well.”

  “What?”

  I empty my glass. “Nothing.”

  She gets to her feet, holds a hand out for my empty glass. “Well, this won’t get my knitting finished, will it? I can’t sit here all evening.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’ve got jobs to do, that’s why.”

  Pulling in a deep breath, I hold it, then exhale. “Tell me one thing,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Tell me about Dad. Now. I want to know. I need to know.”

  She doesn’t wince or flinch, but turns away, then turns back; her eyes angry darts and her mouth pinched tight. “Don’t. Don’t you do that. Why would you… why spoil a perfect evening?”

  “Nothing’s that perfect. I need to know.”

  She walks inside, leaving me empty and outside. Two minutes later, she’s shouting at Annette for teasing Andrew.

  The evening midges start to swarm, and I slap at a couple. It takes two commercial breaks in the movie before Brian comes out. He looks down at me, his arms crossed.

  “Why do you always go out your way to upset your mother?” he says. He doesn’t exactly whisper, but his voice is hushed; he doesn’t want the neighbours to hear.

  “I thought it was the other way round.”

  “You’re a self-centred bugger, aren’t you?”

  “If you say I’m a self-centred bugger then I must be, Brian. You’re the expert.” I refuse to lower my voice.

  He steps towards me and I’m ready to duck.

  “Grow up,” he his
ses. “Stop acting like a schoolboy. Try thinking about other people’s feelings for a change. It’s always the same; after you’ve been home a few hours you can’t help but stir things up.”

  “Well you needn’t worry about that anymore, Brian. It’ll be a long while before I set foot in this house again.”

  He laughs and begins heading back inside. “Don’t be so bloody dramatic.”

  “It’s a fact, that’s all. If you and Mum won’t accept there are things I need to know about my past – about my dad – then there’s no point me being here. We’ve got nothing in common. What else is left?”

  “Childish,” he snorts, and returns to his programme.

  In the morning, when I go downstairs, Brian calls me as I pass the lounge door. Mum’s still in bed.

  “Come here a minute, will you.” He mutes the TV and nods at the settee. “Sit down.”

  I sit. “What’s this about?”

  “Your dad. Your mum wants me to tell you.”

  “Really?”

  “On one condition.” He stands, shuts the door into the hallway, then sits on the edge of his chair.

  “What’s that?”

  “That you don’t mention anything to Annette or Andrew, and that you never raise the subject with her again – not ever. You have to promise that.”

  I look across the room and realise he’s missing his weather report. “And if what you tell me doesn’t answer my questions, what then?”

  “I think it will. I’m sure it will.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?”

  “Then you can ask me about it if you must. But not in anybody else’s ear-shot.”

  “Why? Why the big secret?”

  “Some things are best forgotten.”

  “Buried.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Buried alive?” I mutter.

  “What?”

  I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter.” I wish he’d turn the television off.

  “Well then?”

  “Yeah. I suppose. What choice have I got?”

  He sits back in his chair and it’s my turn to lean forward.

  “Your father hanged himself,” he begins.

  “I know.”

  “He worked for Elfords Glass.”

  “Yeah, I know that too.”