Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  Luke has grown quiet, even quieter than before, and I worry about that. So I’d give just about anything if he would come to me with a question, even one I couldn’t answer. But I know too that we’ve all grown quieter, with some part of ourselves needing to find shelter. Only Lorna refuses to follow that path and has become the cheerleader for the family, the one insisting on everything going on, maintaining the customs and rituals that every family has with a strength she draws from somewhere closed to me. I’ve always thought she was the stronger and she’s proved it again and again, doing much of the heavy lifting, keeping us moving forward, ensuring that the outside tree has its decoration of lights. That’s one of the many reasons I love her.

  But I can’t think of that love without being frightened because there are things I haven’t told her and which I think I can’t without risking everything I want and need. And sometimes I hear Daniel’s voice and it’s always in a whisper and without the cheery bantering tone that he likes to adopt so I know he’s serious and he’s threatening to tell her. I say that I’m going to tell her myself, tell her very soon – maybe when we get Christmas over – so he’s wasting his time because unlike him I know how to offer the truth. But he doesn’t believe me now any more than he believed the things I tried to make him understand. The flashing lights disappear into the distance. Someone else’s pain, someone else’s loss. I’m sorry for them but they’re welcome to it and I can’t share it because I’ve got my own share and even a little more might be more than I know how to bear.

  The urgent voice on the phone wanted me at the hospital and he needs me as soon as I can get there. It’s the maternity department at Dundonald where Lorna had ours.

  Mother and newborn, but he doesn’t tell me until outside the side room that it’s mother and stillborn. This shouldn’t be for me to see because it’s a private moment but he insists it’s what she wants and suddenly I’m there with a camera and she’s sitting up tenderly cradling the little girl and it’s too late to walk away, much too late, so I ask them if they’re sure and they’re both saying yes and a phone photograph won’t be good enough. I tell them she’s beautiful because I don’t know what else to say and then I take the photographs and worry that they’ll be blurred because my hands are shaking. Afterwards I print them up and frame them as best I know how and I don’t charge.

  I think too of another photograph locked and hidden in my camera that I’ve never shown Lorna and I feel sick until I open the window and let the cold air rush about me.

  A kestrel hovers in a field with its wings thrumming the air. Further on there are two men wearing green army-style clothing and carrying shotguns and I think of Bruegel’s The Return of the Hunters. The snow encompasses everything and as I pass Gretna I know it must hide what little is left of the giant munitions factory they built here during the Second World War and which is now largely forgotten in our memory of those years. But I remember the photographs I’ve seen somewhere of the women who worked in the factory. A dangerous job, often mixing volatile substances that got named the Devil’s Porridge to make the propellant for shells. Not allowed to wear rings or earrings in case they caused a spark and set off an explosion. Called the Canary Girls because if they came into contact with sulphur it would turn their skin yellow. There is one particular photograph that I recall – it’s a shot of a group of women taken at a distance so their dark figures look thin and spectral. They’re preparing nitre that sits like a white mountain of salt. There’s something ghostly about it, as if they’re labouring in the underworld, and it contrasts with the more common group photos where the women swarm together in a tight phalanx of smiles, ill-fitting overalls and turban-style hair coverings.

  They say people still come to Gretna to get married, come from all over the world, presumably because they think it’s romantic getting married in a blacksmith’s where previous generations of runaways turned up to pledge their vows. But maybe a forge isn’t such a bad place to promise to spend the rest of your life with someone. And the more I think about it the more I believe that two people surviving together is a matter of strength of purpose and character, so those who made their vows amongst the irons and anvils did so surrounded by truer symbols than most of the weddings I get to see where they seem steeped in some sugary concoction of candyfloss and tinsel and look as if they might combust at the first spark of reality. I’ve come to believe over the years that there’s an inverse ratio between marital longevity and the lavishness of the wedding day. So if that theory is correct at least half of those I’ve photographed probably collapsed when the first cold wind blew. And there’s no dignity any more for some people. Even setting aside the orange spray tans that always require colour adjustment, they want to copy things they’ve seen on YouTube so they’re doing a dance down the aisle or the groom and his groomsmen are performing some boy-band sequence. Themed weddings, wedding favours, doves, sky lanterns, ice sculptures – so much debris falling on my head like confetti, even though in most places they’re not actually allowed to throw the stuff any more unless it’s biodegradable. So as I pass the town I feel some respect for it, as it was, if not now they’ve probably turned it into a theme park with a tourist shop and fifty-seven varieties of shortbread and kilted kitsch.

  Biting the hand that feeds me, thinking like that. And I don’t even have to stay to the death when the drink’s in and if there’s going to be mayhem it’s the time to cry havoc. All those smouldering family tensions, all those drink-loosened inhibitions and flirtations set free like the sky lanterns. Ready to burn the house down.

  Somehow Lorna and I have stayed together. And I’m grateful for that, frightened of doing anything that would put us in danger, so I have to think things out on this journey but I don’t know if the monochrome world I’m travelling through makes it easier or harder. Things are more complicated than choosing between what I think is right and what I don’t know is wrong. The snow conceals everything but I’m not sure if I can go on covering what for the moment is hidden and I’m not always a strong person inside so I’m frightened that like some sudden thaw I’ll let it out when she’s not expecting it and when it’s not the right time to release it.

  We never had a wedding album, nothing except a few photographs taken by my sister, and if we had, what would it have shown except things that we don’t want reminding of? It wasn’t a dream day where we were bathed in the well-wishes of family and friends. A registry-office job and a few sandwiches and drinks back at the flat we were already sharing. Hard to make an album out of that. But none of the paltriness of the day’s ceremonies or the negatives of the events surrounding it can ever stop me thinking of it as the very best thing I’ve ever done and would do a thousand times over.

  Lorna’s going to help you, I get told when I enter the primary school on the first of two days during which I’m taking individual and class photographs. It’s my first ever school job and I’m nervous. I’ve done a police clearance check, got the certificate to prove that I’m not a threat to children. And what I notice about her is that when she smiles everything else falls away and she steps out of what some might see as her unassuming self and becomes beautiful. She smiles a lot. At the children, at the teachers, even at me, and not when I try to say something funny but when I do something stupid like stumble over the lights. She seems to know so many of the children by name even though she’s a classroom assistant with a particular set of responsibilities. And she’s good at organising them, getting them into the right places, coaxing the unenthusiastic and calming the hyper. Without her I know the day would be a nightmare but she’s got everything under control and the children respond to her in a way that seems relaxed but respectful. She hunkers down a lot when she’s talking to the younger children and sometimes she touches their hair or lays her hand across their shoulders when they’re animated, as if they were her own. I try to be as good as she is with them but I don’t think I quite manage it. And to be honest it’s a nightmare job because never working with children
or animals applies to photographers as well as actors as they’ve an uneasy relationship with stillness and an unpredictable tendency to facial tics, blinking, grimacing, looking in the wrong place and generally pulling faces at the wrong moment. With one you can mostly manage it through bribery or distraction but when there’s a group of them that’s another challenge altogether. Getting everyone sitting straight and looking at the camera requires either luck or some kind of magic spell that momentarily freezes them. She could see that I was struggling and so she came and stood at my shoulder, got them all to focus on her just long enough for me to click.

  She’s always been able to see when I’m struggling, always come and stood at my side. Sees it without me having to say anything and there’ve been times when I’ve struggled a lot. There was the year when I got depressed, not the absolute black depths that some plunge into and are left unable to function but enough for me to glimpse the misery of the condition. I didn’t even know I was at the start and soon the way you feel is just the way you feel and you begin to believe that it’s normal, and to forget that there was a different time. It was her who made me go to the doctor’s and get help. It’s Lorna too who sees if there’s a time when I momentarily dip and helps me through it.

  What I needed on that day was a cup of tea and at break she invited me to the staffroom. Not the teachers’ staffroom but a store under the stairs where classroom assistants, ancillary and office staff hung out. A few chairs, a table and a small kitchen area. About half a dozen women getting their break and sharing a laugh. The school cook in whites and apron, large, her face florid as if she’d just looked in a hot oven, hearing I was the photographer soon piped up, ‘So, Tom, do you think we could do a Calendar Girls shoot?’ Lots of giggling, Lorna embarrassed.

  ‘I don’t see why not, but what’s your charity?’ I asked, taking a cup of tea from Lorna. The builder’s tea she still makes. ‘And you need a theme.’

  ‘Charity? More like our retirement fund. There’s no sign of our lottery syndicate getting us out of here.’

  ‘You only need to win once,’ claims a woman in the corner without looking up from checking her phone, the tone suggesting she’s offered a profundity.

  ‘Well my suggested theme would be school, naturally, things from all our jobs. I have a couple of very large colanders out in the canteen I could put to use because as you can see, Tom, I’m a woman not unfamiliar with a fish supper.’

  More giggles, the women enjoying my embarrassment. Me trying to smile and pretending to be studying my tea.

  ‘And you know what I’m going to do if our numbers come up? I’m going to send the school-meals department in Academy Street a menu from some swanky hotel in the Caribbean and ask them what they think I should have for starters.’

  Everyone laughing. Someone coming in from playground duty and flicking the kettle on the boil again. Lorna taking my cup to wash it and then showing me round the assembly hall again. A complete day of children: children with grazed knees, earrings and missing baby teeth, assorted twins, children of every ethnic background, children with extravagantly double-barrelled first names and some with an inexhaustible need to torment the person beside them. And she’s smiling all the way through it and every meltdown and tiny trauma and children who need to go to the toilet and some who don’t want to be in a photograph because they’ve been in one before. So what I took from those first encounters was that she was someone with an infinite sense of patience and that’s a virtue I’m grateful she possesses because I guess there’s been times when she’s needed it with me and the rest of us.

  Driving this car ever closer to Luke I have entered a world that in part is beautiful but in its endless sweep remorseless and cold, indifferent to all other life. I try to evoke Christmas to dispel the shiver of that feeling and am momentarily helped by passing a man wheeling a bicycle with a Christmas tree stretched from the saddle across the handlebars. The hacked base of the trunk suggests he’s liberated it from some woodland rather than bought it. He’s gone all too quickly and I’m left once more with the soft plumpness of white fields but the road ahead stretching into an increasingly glittering eye-dazzling sharpness.

  She wore an engagement ring and I didn’t think of her other than as someone who was good at being kind and the pressure of getting my business up and running was more than enough for me to concentrate on. I’d worked for a magazine for a couple of years and I’d reached the end of the line in shooting the Association of Chartered Accountants or golf-club dinners, the opening of some new boutique fashion shop or school reunions. The unsocial hours didn’t help and to be always looking through the lens at someone else who was having a good time, or at least pretending to be, had reached a point where it was beginning to do my head in. And a couple of times I was careless in noting names so I married people off who were married to other people and there were a few indignant complaints, almost as if they’d been publicly outed as members of some swingers’ club.

  I hadn’t seen Lorna for three months when I got a call from the school to take photographs of their sports day. All the traditional stuff – sack races, egg and spoon, three-legged – with the new ethos that discourages competition so prizes for everyone and the only hard edges came in the mothers’ races where elbows were much in use. Not enough fathers had turned up to run one. There was something that seemed different about her and it wasn’t just the new, shorter hairstyle. She was quieter, smiled a little less and was more at the edge of things than I recalled. Then towards the end she held her arms out wide to a child with special needs and that smile broke across her face and suddenly rendered her beautiful and I knew I felt something. That’s why, without embarrassing us both, I managed discreetly to include her in a photograph. And it was her photograph that I first fell in love with.

  But I knew too that was something I used to do at regular intervals. At some function or other there would always be a woman in my photographs who I fastened on, secretly attributing a life to her, a personality, and in the absence of a real girlfriend would imagine that she returned my love. Said like that it sounds creepy but these were fleeting unsubstantiated feelings generated by loneliness and a desire to share my life with someone. I suppose if Facebook had existed then I would have continued my feelings for Lorna by looking for her online, learning what I could about her, trying to cross her path with my own, but the most I did was drive past the school a couple of times when it wasn’t the quickest route to where I was going. And there was the engagement ring on her finger to shadow whatever hopes I might have harboured.

  A car pulling a grey caravan passes in the opposite direction, its roof striped with snow so it looks like a badger on wheels. My track record with women wasn’t great. A couple of short-term fizzle-outs and one relationship that lasted just under a year before she decided it wasn’t going anywhere and called it a day. I don’t know even now where it was she wanted it to go and as for me I wanted it to lead to happiness and above all something secure. Something on which you could depend.

  The phone rings and it startles me, pulling me too suddenly back to the moment.

  ‘Hi, Dad, are you still in Scotland?’ Lilly asks.

  ‘I’ve just left Scotland and am heading towards a place called Carlisle.’

  ‘There’s a girl in my class whose second name is Carlisle.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s where she came from then? Does your mother know you’re using her phone?’

  ‘She says it’s OK. Is there lots of snow?’

  ‘Lots and lots. I’ve bought you a sledge. It’s nothing fancy, made of plastic but should do the job. When I get back we can go sledging in Stormont if you like.’

  ‘Can Luke come too?’

  ‘If he’s well enough he can come. Put your mum on.’

  ‘What does Santa say when his wife asks him what the weather’s like?’

  ‘I don’t know, what does Santa say when his wife asks him what the weather’s like?’

  ‘Reindeer.’


  ‘Very good, Lilly, very good. Now put Mum on.’

  She asks me how I’m doing, what the roads are like, am I going to make it and I tell her yes I’m going to make it, that barring something unseen we’ll catch the last sailing if we miss the earlier one. As soon as I’ve said it I regret using the words ‘something unforeseen’ because right away it plants a seed of doubt in both our minds and we don’t need to let that grow because if we give it free rein then we’ll be able to imagine things that aren’t going to be good for either of us. So as a distraction I ask her if she’s switched the outside lights on yet but she tells me it’s not dark enough and she’ll do it later in the afternoon. Then she tells me I shouldn’t be on the phone when I’m driving and we end the conversation.

  I still keep that first photograph in my wallet. Cropped down to the size of a postage stamp so it’s just her head and she’s not looking at the camera, doesn’t know that I’ve caught her smile. After all these years she’s still never seen it and I keep it because I like how she is in that moment with her face turned in praise towards a child without pose or artifice and that makes it different to most of the photographs I spend my life taking. I’d like to be able to tell her the next time we speak that this is what I’ve always liked most about her.