Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  ‘That’s a journey,’ she says.

  ‘Has to be done.’

  ‘If you’d been doing it two days ago you’d never have got as far as Carlisle. Nothing was getting through here. But since then they’ve got most main roads moving again.’ Then, when she sees me looking at the newspaper on the counter that’s got the headline of WINTER WIPE-OUT, adds, ‘Yesterday’s news today, or is it today’s news yesterday?’ She laughs and says, ‘Whatever it is, they didn’t get here in time. You can take one if you like. No charge.’

  I lift one out of politeness and she wishes me good luck on my journey. It feels like a nice thing she’s done and I thank her and, going back to the car, move it away from the pump then pour a coffee from the flask and have another sandwich. I throw the paper in the back seat because I know to read it is to fill my head with stuff that runs counter to what you’re trying to feel about Christmas. So to make it through the coming days requires you to shut yourself off as best as possible, keep out all the bad things that are fermenting in the world. All the terrors and the tortures, all the detonations of hate. The tsunami of suffering. And I don’t know what we’re going to do about Daniel. Is he part of our inner world or locked outside? I avoid dwelling on it by telling myself that I need to be going. I’m already behind schedule but still doing all right, all things considered. As I turn towards the exit I see a woman standing there. Even though she’s layered in coats and a hat it’s obvious that she’s not young and she’s holding two renewable bags filled with groceries, one of which is emblazoned with a slogan that promises to last a lifetime. As I get closer she waves and I wave back before I realise that she’s not waving but trying to hitch a lift. There isn’t another car on the forecourt and she knows I’ve seen her so driving straight past doesn’t feel right. I put the window down and ask her where she’s going. She comes up close to the window and I can see she’s studying me, trying to decide whether I’m an axe murderer or not, so it’s only when I pass the test that she tells me, ‘Just a couple of miles up on the front of the road.’ I lift the coolbox off the passenger seat, squeeze it into the space behind and help her with one of the bags as she clambers in. The seatbelt gets lost in the folds of her coat and I have to search for it then fasten it for her.

  ‘Out doing your shopping,’ I say. ‘Getting stocked up.’

  ‘Need to get everything in so I don’t have to go out again. This is very good of you.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘The car wouldn’t start so it was walk or starve. But the bags are heavy enough so I thought I’d try to get a lift from some kind soul.’

  It makes me feel momentarily good to be thought of as some kind soul. The green wax coat she’s wearing looks dried out as if it’s been hanging in a cupboard somewhere and there’s a slight smell of mildew clinging to it. I lower my window about an inch. She must be in her seventies and when she takes off her gloves the veins on the back of her hands are raised and heavily inked.

  ‘Did you get everything?’

  ‘I think so. It doesn’t take much to keep me ticking over. And I got an oil-fill at the start of the month so I’ll not go cold.’

  ‘So you’re all set for Christmas then.’

  ‘Just another day for me,’ she says, but without any trace of self-pity in her voice.

  ‘Are you on your own?’

  ‘Sure I’ll have the Queen to keep me company.’

  ‘So you’re not an independence voter then.’

  ‘Well, I did vote for it,’ she says then adds, ‘but company is company.’ She rubs the back of her hand with the palm of the other and I turn the heater up, turn the music down that I had forgotten was even on. ‘I have a son. He used to work on the oil rigs but now he’s out in the Middle East. Sometimes in dangerous places but he says they pay him good money for taking the risk.’

  ‘And he won’t be home for Christmas?’

  ‘No, he’ll still be out there.’

  ‘Do you Skype him?’

  But she doesn’t understand what I mean and when I explain she tells me she doesn’t have a computer. Then she pulls a mobile phone from her pocket and looks at it as if she’s seeing it for the first time.

  ‘He got me this. I don’t use it much. It’s really for emergencies.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll call you on Christmas Day.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she says, but there isn’t much conviction in her voice. ‘Do you have children?’

  I avoid the new and unwelcome complexities of answering that simple question by telling her I have a son at university in Sunderland and I’m going to bring him home.

  ‘I hope I’m not keeping you back,’ she says then tells me her house is just a bit further along the main road.

  ‘You’re OK,’ I say.

  We pass a little hamlet of houses and a school that has already shed its children and staff. The windows are a blizzard of paper snowflakes.

  ‘This one here,’ she says, pointing to a small bungalow on the front of the road. The skin on her pointing hand is pulled taut and shiny. I draw up carefully to the kerb, crunching over a band of thicker snow, then tell her to stay where she is until I come round and open the door for her. I put out my hand and she takes it long enough for me to feel how small and cold hers is, then lift one of the shopping bags from her and help her down. She says thanks and after searching in one of the bags hands me a bar of chocolate, tells me to give it to my son. I try to politely decline but she insists and so I thank her and take it, then hold the front gate for her and watch her make her way carefully towards her front door, her feet stepping in the same prints she made when leaving. Turning, she asks me my name. Perhaps she’ll look for it when the final credits roll. I tell her and ask for hers.

  ‘Agnes.’

  ‘Have a good Christmas, Agnes.’

  ‘You too, and safe journey.’

  I nod and, slipping the chocolate into my pocket, get back in the car. As I’m starting the engine I see her open the front door before she disappears into the sudden shadows pooling in the hallway.

  Mile after mile. Making the journey that feels as important as anything I’ve ever done since Daniel and which I have started to believe might be able to somehow change things if I pull it off, even set things back in an older balance before the plates tilted and everything fell askew. A white glare dazzles off the snow and I look around the car for my sunglasses that aren’t there. I squint a little, drop the sun visor then suddenly breathe out heavily as a muster of crows lifts into the air, a ragged flapping black against the white.

  My father bought an old gatekeeper’s lodge at one of the entrances to the Sexton estate when it was being broken up. Small, but he says one of the internal walls can be knocked down and the whole place modernised for a quick turnaround. No one has lived in it for ten years and the windows are webbed and fly-trapped. He sends me into the roof space to check the state of the water tank. Almost the moment I push open the trapdoor and clamber in they are a moving black clot about my head, skittering shapes in the gloom pulsing about me, and I can’t help myself screaming like some child, so it’s a miracle that in my panic I don’t plunge my foot through the ceiling plaster as I swing my torch and clutch at a rafter to try and hold my balance. Even now after all these years the thought of the bats makes my skin crawl. My father curses loudly when I tell him, the words spat out like he’s hammering nails, and then swears me to silence. No one is to be told they were there, not a living soul, and when I don’t understand he tells me that they are an endangered species and any disturbance of them could result in a fine. I’m shocked by my father’s anger and confused by how anyone can value such creatures. He tells me that he needs to turn the place round as quickly as he can to recoup the outlay before the interest on the loan from the bank eats up all the profits. He asks me if I understand and I answer yes. That night we come back and smoke them out, then block up their entry point. I see them now in these crows lifting from the field, funnelling out from the roof, inky smud
ges staining the night sky.

  I lower the window and try to spit the bad taste out of my mouth. And the legacy of my father lingers in at least one other thing and steps outside the realm of memory. Each night like he would do I check the plugs are out, do a tour of the house and assure myself that we are protected from whatever lurks in the night. But after I listen to my daughter breathing I return to the front door and, even though I’ve already done it, check that the chain lock is not in place, so that it can be opened with the key. No one is locked out. Our door isn’t barred to our absent son. And each morning Lorna asks me with sleep still in her eyes if there’s been any sign of Daniel. I tell her no without having to go to his room because I sleep lightly, drifting out of shallow dreams and instantly alert to the slightest sound, registering everything and trying to arrange it into a coherent pattern that will make sense of it all and guide me through to the dawn. A plane flying overhead, the ping of a moth against the bedroom window, a little rush of water running inexplicably along a pipe, the squeak of Lilly’s headboard and light clink against our wall as she changes position – all these things must have their connection, be part of something greater, and if I can find the key that unlocks their meaning then I will perhaps slip into a restful sleep until the first light of morning. Keep left. Drive for seven point three miles. Sometimes at night she’ll put a hot-water bottle in his bed – ‘to take the chill off it,’ she’ll say. I suddenly realise that ‘Snow in San Anselmo’ has been on repeat for a long time. I couldn’t get tickets for his seventieth birthday concert in East Belfast but later I watched the recording of it.

  When it came to the end I cried without knowing why and was glad I was watching it on my own. In such moments I feel the flaring spark of a need to do more than I am called on by the daily requirements of my job. To make something that has value. To try and be more than myself.

  I had an exhibition once in our local library but it wasn’t a great success if I think only in commercial terms. Hardly anything sold and then only to people who knew me and wanted to be supportive. Maybe it’s just an excuse for failure but I think where I live most people want pictures of sunsets over Dunseverick Castle, the snowy peaks of the Mournes or right now the Dark Hedges, preferably also with sunset, rainbow or some similar piece of extra-visual drama. So what do I want to take photographs of? It’s hard to put it into words but I suppose the moment that lies just below the surface of things, or a glimpse of the familiar from a different angle.

  Maybe I don’t even know. But thinking about it as I drive, and listening to REM in the somehow reassuring knowledge that I’ve never heard a single one of their songs and understood what it was about, I try to make my eye register the photograph I’d like to take. But the vista ahead is partly blocked by a van emblazoned with Dial a Dog Wash and Pamper your Pooch. And those words blend with songs about orange crush, pushing elephants up the stairs and losing your religion so it’s a confused mismatch, a tumbling dice of inconsequence and uncertainties. I never had a religion to lose but sometimes in moments of weakness I envy those who can navigate the big moments of life that mostly involve loss of some sort by drawing on the comfort of faith. Then, in these circumstances, anything that serves to prop you up, even for a while, seems not such a bad thing but I know it’s not for me, not for Lorna, and although I hope not for our children it’s their call at the end of the day.

  ‘Where is Heaven?’ Luke asks.

  ‘I don’t know. Up in the sky probably,’ I answer Luke, reluctant to tell a young child that life merely ends in oblivion.

  ‘Does everyone go there?’

  ‘Only people who’ve been good,’ I say, deciding that at least I should take parental advantage of this unexpected line of questioning.

  ‘Do you have to be good all the time? What if you were bad just once or bad a little bit?’

  ‘I suppose it’s averaged out.’

  ‘So God keeps a score? Writes it in a book?’

  ‘Possibly,’ I say, then look for some distraction to the questions.

  A gritter passes me and even though I’m expecting it I’m still startled by the sound of the spray peppering the side of the car. A father pulls two children behind him on a wooden sledge that makes my plastic purchase look pathetic. So how’s my scorecard reading? Depends perhaps on who’s keeping it and if it’s been averaged out. I remind myself of the deficits, some of which are a matter of public record – not in any legal sense but because they’re familiar to those who know me – not least an over-readiness to take the easy path, to avoid any course of action that might bring more risks than I can handle. But the one I don’t want to face I leave unvisited, unwilling to turn that stone. I’m not good under stress, not good at coping. I like everything composed and ordered inside the frame through which I view life and when things slip outside it I don’t always deal well with it. I never want to think of the score Daniel would give me but because despite my best efforts the idea has lodged in my head I try to balance it with what might be thought of as my goodness, but there’s nothing that can feel more unconvincing than trying to list your virtues to yourself.

  They fragment and disappear into nothingness in an almost perfect synchronicity with the spray of water running off the windscreen. And I’m almost grateful when her voice interrupts, telling me to do this and do that, to follow this road and take that exit. Take the road to Luke and I can’t think of him without thinking of that house in which he waits for me.

  When we first saw them the rooms in the halls of residence shared a spartan neatness that at least had an interconnectedness and some vague sense of supervision, of someone watching over, if only to preserve their property, but in my memory where he is now has only an overwhelming sense of cavernous, hulking emptiness. An invisible landlord and the old house which once probably laid claim to a certain grandeur dissected and partitioned, then filled with shabby furniture and basic equipment, its fabric and patina smudged and stained by too many hands and too much neglect. His room is at the very top under the roof which initially pleased him because it was bigger than his first-year room and because of its location seemed to offer the welcome possibility of privacy and a respite from the incessant noise and stir of a student house. I want to ring him but am frightened that he’ll be sleeping and not pleased that I’ve woken him. For some reason there’s a photograph that lingers in my memory and sharpens into focus when I think of Luke’s house and it’s one of Denis Thorpe’s who took gritty black and white photographs of the north of England and worked for the Guardian. Mr Lowry’s Hat and Coat – taken the day after the painter’s death – shows two coats and hats hanging on pegs in a shadowed hallway, vaguely floral wallpaper, a dado rail. On one of the coats the lining is facing outward and catching something of the light. The photograph’s about absence, an opened space and a stillness flowing into it, homing in on the relics of someone who once was but is no more.

  Sometimes when I go into my children’s rooms I have a strong sense of how closely our lives and the places we live bear each other’s print. So it’s as if their breathing is still present even in the empty room and all their memories and dreams are somehow seamlessly fused with the folds of a fabric or the grain of a surface. Only the coldness of technology remains impervious and no matter how often you let your fingers brush the keyboard of a computer, or the cover of a tablet, there is no sense of your absent child. There’s a password, a firewall that excludes you from finding any trace of its user’s life so they stand separate from the rest of the room that everywhere else is infused with the full force of the being who claims this space. And that’s why I think of Luke’s house so much because if we press the print of ourselves into these spaces then it’s also probable that they assert their realities in return, so that rabbit warren of empty rooms full of unmade beds and the scattered debris of hasty departures, the dark hallways and landings – all these things might force their collective presence into his senses. And right now when he’s not well and the city he�
��s staying in is weighted with snow it might lead him to view his life in a way that’s not good for him so I want him to be home with his mother and father, in a house decorated and garlanded for Christmas no matter how much of that show is grounded in pretence.

  As I head towards Gretna Green it’s clear that the snow has been heavier and more recent, with thick slews at the side of the road, furrowed wheel tracks on the grey-slushed surface, and I pass a second-hand car dealer’s where all the cars are white-humped and indistinguishable. For some reason images of holidays free-flow through the music and the satnav voice. Camping in Tollymore Forest – the night the tent nearly blew away – rented cottages in Cornwall and the phase of bodyboards and wetsuits, fossil hunting on Lyme Regis beach. Donegal in the rain and once, just once, in a heat wave. The unbearable heat of Turkey, so hot I wanted to spend much of the day in a dark room with a cold beer. The globe is grown smaller now, constricted through terror and yet the randomness of it might strike even where we feel most safe. The world has turned ever crazier since that day the planes flew into the towers and even before, so it makes me think that all you can do is hunker down with your family, find shelter in closeness, be permanently on what they call high alert, and hope the storm passes over your head. Even now as I drive I see small bouquets of artificial flowers tied to roadside poles and there must be others buried in the snow, waiting for the thaw of some spring to blossom once more into lurid colour. But these single offerings to single tragedies blur into swathes left after atrocities, a crush of layered flowers and tea lights flickering in the wind.

  They pour scorn on the parents of those teenagers who run off to join Isis, claiming that they were either bad parents or must have known what was in their children’s minds. At best their radar is faulty and so unaware of what was making its way into their homes to infect the minds of their children. Maybe once I would have felt the same. Just maybe. But that was before. Now I make no judgements or easy assumptions. And bringing up a child isn’t like driving this car where I have the voice to guide me and, despite the snow, the tracks of other cars to follow, signals to tell me when to stop and when to go, warnings about possible hazards. Instead what you have is a kind of blizzard of conflicting and confusing ideas where, despite thinking you know the best direction to take, it soon becomes obvious that you’ve lost your way and the familiar landmarks that you put so much store by have disappeared in a white-out. There is the sound of a siren and for a second it makes me think I’m stumbling into the kind of danger that my imagination has been focused on and when I look in my mirror I see an ambulance with its blue lights flashing coming up quickly behind and I slow carefully then pull over to the side of the road, the car’s tyres crunching on the frozen nuggets of grey ice that litter the debris field scattered by the snowploughs.