Travelling in a Strange Land

by David Park

  And how I got to find her was through my short-lived attempt at photographing the natural world which was what brought me to the towpath that summer morning but with nothing to show for it except a heron on the far bank that looked like a metal garden statue and a blurred out-of-focus image of what might or might not have been a kingfisher. A pathetic return but one at least that made me understand that I didn’t have either the patience or knowledge to go down that road. Then just as I was deciding to pack it in there was a jogger coming along the path, head down with a fine sheen of sweat on her bare shoulders, and as I stepped back to let her pass she lifted her face to say thanks and in that second we recognised each other. I thought she was going to run on but she stopped, dropped her hands to her hips and said, ‘Hi.’ Her voice was breathless and I think she was embarrassed and as a distraction asked me what I was doing. In that moment I would have swopped lions in the Serengeti, killer whales, dolphins dancing, just for the chance to take one photograph of her as I tried not to stare while explaining about attempting to capture the wildlife of the river.

  Then we ran out of things to say until I heard myself asking did she want to get a coffee or a cold drink and didn’t quite believe that it was actually me who had spoken the words and for a second wondered if some invisible ventriloquist had said them on my behalf. Her glance at her watch made me think that she was going to say no and I was already trying to compose some face-saving get-out for both of us when she said yes and smiled, not one of those transforming smiles but the neutral type you might give when a stranger opens a door for you. So we sit outside at the Lock Keeper’s Inn and she has bottled water as we try to think of things to say. There’s no engagement ring. Maybe she doesn’t wear it when she runs. Something to ponder but then things just become easy and whatever nervousness I’m feeling fades and we talk, talk through two coffees and two slices of lemon drizzle cake. Afterwards we walk back to the car park and my heart is doing whatever hearts are supposed to do in situations like this but which always sounds stupid whatever word you choose to describe it because I know when we reach the cars I’m going to work up the courage to ask for her phone number. And courage isn’t something I’ve ever felt I possess in any great measure.

  The images of a stone-still heron, a blurred flash of colour that might have been a kingfisher and a phone number – best morning’s work I’ve ever done. You can torment yourself by thinking too much about the role of fate or even simple coincidence in affecting the course of your life and I think there’s nothing much to be gained from it except some vicarious thrill of ships in the night and roads not taken. Sometimes now as I drive through the snow I see individuals out walking but there’s no obvious source of their journey or destination. So what is the purpose of this dark-coated figure’s slow walk past the metal railings of an industrial estate or this young woman’s trudge along a road that appears to connect neither homes nor shops? It feels like these journeys speak silently of an unsolved mystery at the heart of our daily lives and once I see a young man who looks like Daniel and as I pass him I turn my head to try and see his face but it is hidden under his hooded cowl. As I leave him behind I catch him in my side mirror and see my son raise his hand and slowly lower his hood, then he isn’t there any more and there are no footprints in the snow.

  Keep left. Drive for eight point seven miles. Listen to the music. Let the rhythm and the words fill the opening space. Robert Wyatt with his wonderfully wonky English voice that I like and I try to follow him into the songs and think of building ships when we could be diving for pearls but there are other insistent voices that refuse to be pushed aside so easily. And if everything with Lorna had been straightforward then I tell myself that perhaps nothing would have formed strong enough to endure but if I am given a choice I would want to try and arrive at where we are through a different path. So it was a naïve foolishness to think that the exchange of phone numbers secured or sealed anything and, if it paved the way, the year that was to come filters through my senses and nothing can be dulled or set to the side. It feeds its pulse into the series of lights in the car’s dashboard, in the brake lights of the van in front, the very rhythm of the music, and makes me want to tell the woman in the satnav who’s talking to me now in her pitch-perfect voice that she’s no idea what it was like.

  So there asserting his right to his place in the story is Johnston Bailey, the man who gave her the ring and someone who if he was to step out in front of my car right now would see me press the accelerator rather than the brakes. So he thinks the ring signifies ownership and isn’t prepared to relinquish what he sees as his entitlement and all that time I’m so bewildered how someone like Lorna could link herself with a piece of shit like him that it makes me think her relationship with me might be hopelessly misjudged if in a different way. He’s from the same area of the city and they went to the same school together so right from the start I feel the insecurity of what they have shared and I shall always be an outsider to that. He works as some kind of partner in a company that hires out skips and I find out enough about him to believe that he has at the very least a peripheral connection to an organisation that claims to defend its community but makes its lucrative living off it through the full range of extortion and drug dealing. I don’t think that he’s directly involved but it’s soon obvious that he knows people who are. And at first, if I’m honest, I felt she was tarnished by her relationship with this man and I couldn’t understand how it had happened but soon what I felt for her was stronger than anything else and I know now I’d no right to my silent judgement.

  We go out and I never ask her about him and what happened between them, waiting until she’s ready to tell me and there’s also a part of me that doesn’t wish to know, just wants to live in the present with the happiness I’m feeling but still too frightened to put all my faith in. But soon I realise there’s something wrong and maybe it’s because I spend so much of my time looking at faces that I’ve become sensitive to changes and understanding what states of mind they might signify.

  Eventually she tells me as much as she’s willing to, so he’s still calling her up all the time, sometimes late at night when he’s had a few drinks, and he’s talking about them getting back together, that they were ‘right for each other’ and it was only a matter of time before she realised it. Then he hears about me and things turn bad. So she’s supposed to owe him the money for things he’s bought her and the holiday he took her on and when the calls become abusive and threatening she blocks him on her phone. When she talks of going to the police her family argue against it and tell her she’d put them all at risk because in some people’s eyes there’s no bigger crime than ‘touting’. The best they can offer is that they’ll try to talk to someone who might be able to have a word, warn him off, but it seems they don’t know anyone high enough up the food chain. Her parents and brothers look at me with barely concealed resentment as if I’m the cuckoo in the nest and a poor substitute for Lorna’s previous.

  One night after I’ve left her off I drive to the end of her street, a street that has a paramilitary mural on the final gable wall with three black-clad figures in balaclavas holding guns. The figures however are amateurishly painted which serves to weaken the intended image of menace. I am about to turn on to the main road when there’s three guys suddenly standing in front of the car and before I have a chance to react one of them has opened my door and I find myself looking at Bailey for the first time. He has to bend down to speak to me so our faces are closer than I want them to be and he asks me my name even though he knows who I am. I’m not taking my eyes off him but trying also to be aware of where the other two are.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he says when I don’t answer him. ‘And I thought it was time you and me had a talk. So why don’t you get out of the car.’

  He’s wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt and it looks like he works out but his face is thin and almost sharpened into the point of his chin and it makes him seem as if he’s borrowed someone el
se’s body. I try to appear casual, disguise the fear I’m feeling.

  ‘What is it you want to say?’ I ask without showing any inclination to get out.

  ‘You’re somewhere people don’t like strangers. You’re somewhere you don’t belong.’ When I still don’t say anything, he offers, ‘And there’s no guaranteeing your safety. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ He looks over my shoulder and sees a camera on the back seat. ‘Do you work for a newspaper?’ Then when I tell him no he says he’ll give me some advice which turns out to be that I should fuck off and not show my face again around Lorna if I know what’s in my best interests. That my type aren’t wanted and I should do myself a favour by walking away and not looking back. When he stands back up straight I shut the door and press the button that locks all the doors. As I start to drive away all three blatter at the car with their feet.

  Until that moment I’d got through my life without ever having a fight, without ever being threatened, and if I’m honest I’m probably someone no one really notices very much and the only time they do is when I’ve a camera in my hand and I’m asking them to, so I was pretty shook up and unsure about what I would do. I’d already understood that involving the police was considered an unacceptable and dangerous form of behaviour and that, in this world I’d stumbled into, normal rules didn’t apply. So as I drove and tried to work out my response I consoled myself with fantasies that involved retaliatory acts of violence with purchased guns or the hiring of a hit man, played out stupid improbable scenarios in my head and tried to use them to stem the spreading flare of humiliation, fear, and then in their wake the rising wave of anger. And did I ever think of taking the advice and walking away? I don’t think I did, I don’t think that I ever did, and I’m glad because this allows me to stem some of the curse of this memory and leaves me in a place which although precarious is where just for a moment I can feel better about myself. I had to decide whether to tell Lorna or keep it from her but in my life I’ve come to understand that lies mostly lead to disaster – that’s why in soaps everyone lies to each other all the time, and it’s these same lies that eventually and inevitably end in some form of car crash. A car crash that might make compulsive viewing but isn’t something you ever want to experience in the flesh. When I told her she too was angry and then apologetic as if ashamed of what had happened and almost suggesting that it was her fault.

  Past a white-roofed church where either someone has got lucky in their timing or had a spiritual and meteorological insight into the coming weather, with the large poster on the noticeboard near the entrance proclaiming, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be white as snow.’ And I think it’s true even now that although we never talk about this time we both feel as if in part our early days together bore the stain of something that had fastened on to us and which we didn’t know how to shake off.

  ‘Perhaps we should cool it, take a break and see how things work out,’ she says as we sit in my car looking out over the sea.

  ‘Is that what you want?’ I ask, frightened of the answer.

  ‘No, it’s not what I want.’

  I reach across and take her hand, all my relief transmitted into a simple tightening of my grip.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she says. ‘He’s unpredictable and now he’s behaving like this I don’t know what he might do. And he knows people.’

  The sea is wind-worried, the waves white-tipped and churlish, but there is an underlying steadiness as if nothing’s happening that’s not meant to. There is an island whose name I don’t know.

  ‘Maybe that’s where we should go and live,’ I tell her, pointing towards it and not telling her that I’m frightened too.

  ‘I think you can walk out to it when the tide’s out. Need to watch you don’t get cut off.’

  Living on an island, cut off from everything that wishes you harm – that’s what seems the very best of things.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I ask her, because even then I needed her to be the one telling me what was best.

  She says she doesn’t know and we both sit and stare silently at the sea for a while. Looking back it’s always tempting to reshape things so that you come out better but it would be a lie if I try to pretend that in those days I was anything other than lacking in direction and blindsided by every fear let loose in my head. And although I don’t know if I did so then, now when I think of those days they always merge in jagged edges with that night when my father smoked the bats out of their nesting place and I watched the tight black funnel emerging from the roof and then splintering into skittering single shapes.

  The sea seems to fall momentarily into a greater sense of calm. There is a bobbing black head of a seal which disappears almost as soon as we have identified what it is.

  ‘You’re not to come to the house any more. We’ll meet in the town and I’ll get a taxi home. And I’m going to move out and get a place of my own when I’ve saved up a bit.’

  ‘Maybe things will blow over,’ I say. ‘Maybe he’ll wise up. See he’s wasting his time.’

  But she doesn’t seem convinced by my attempt at optimism and into the silence that follows flow all the doubts and imaginings that deep anxiety has the power to generate. I try to find a pleasure in her presence that might dispel them, look at her hair, the side of her face as she stares at the sea, but wonder if I’ll be able to see her fully smile again. I want to hold her close but when I eventually do I know that I’m holding all those worries tight and nothing seems able to ease the stiffness out of her body.

  Soon after, I turn up at my studio to find someone has spray-painted the word Paedo in large letters across the shutter on the front door that I can’t fully remove despite scrubbing at it while enduring the accusatory stare of every passer-by. I come to think that there is the real possibility of having petrol poured through a broken window and the place set on fire. But I can’t afford the cost of security cameras and so each morning’s journey to the studio is fraught with fear about arriving at a pile of smouldering ash. And I tell the woman speaking to me through the satnav whose perfectly modulated voice is calm that living with fear is the worst way to live and that it darkens even the bright things you try to do and that it’s incessant, gnawing away at the very things you need to exist. So there comes a point when your anger about what’s happening to you boils up, overflows, and you become willing to consider any remedy, however desperate or foolhardy it might seem to the rational mind you once possessed.

  After the spray-paint job and then subsequent damage to my car and finally a bullet in an envelope, I enter what I guess is a fight-or-flight moment and I can’t flee without losing Lorna so I find myself sitting outside his business yard, watching the comings and goings, following his car at lunchtime to the cafe, the bookie’s or the football supporters’ club he seems to frequent. I start with stupid childish things like ordering skips from payphones to be delivered to different addresses across the city, tell myself he’ll think he’s in a turf war with another firm, be distracted. Then I discover when you take a step forward, even a small step, the fear doesn’t exercise such a tight grip. It’s still there but it’s somehow reduced and you allow yourself to feel less of a helpless victim because ultimately it’s the sense of powerlessness that does you in.

  And with each small step you gain the desire to go bolder because wounding isn’t ever going to be enough – there has to be a final fatal blow. But I can’t think of how this might be achieved without going close up and I don’t yet have the courage for this.

  With our troubled legacy of history I guess there’s a network out there of self-employed shooters and enforcers whose services are employed in drug wars, internecine factional disputes over territory and simple old-fashioned score settling. But they don’t advertise themselves in the papers or online and I don’t know the type of people who know this type of people.

  The slow ferment of hatred. Schemes and dreams. The business operates out of a Portakabin in the corner of the yard.
They only have one vehicle to deliver the skips. It’s flaking with rust in parts and looks like it should be consigned to one of the skips it carries. This business isn’t raking in profits. The signs warning of security cameras and a security firm with guard dogs have been bought off the Internet and I don’t imagine there’s much worth stealing in the dilapidated building that acts as an office. The windows are protected by wire grilles and the night I climb over the wall and take a close look round there is enough light for me to see that damp has seeped into the side walls leaving them with a bulging blister and weeds grow out of the guttering. A row of yellow skips lines the back wall of the yard. One of them is loaded to the brim with what looks like household junk, as if some house has been turned upside down and all its contents shaken out. I start to think that this would be the perfect place for a body. Wrapped in an old carpet, covered with a layer of debris to be buried in some landfill site. Buried and forgotten. This of course is all fantasy. And what happens is a crime of a different nature.

  Without telling me until afterwards Lorna goes to see him and she’s vague about what happened, what she said, and even now all these years later she doesn’t want to talk about it and I know not to push her. But I can’t ever get it out of my head that it should have been me dealing with him and if that’s just a bit of hurt masculine pride it still smarts. But I’m also filled with admiration for someone who had the courage to face him. And perhaps his hurt pride is mollified by the arrival of a new love in his life. Much younger and almost instantly carrying his child and he has other things to give his attention to as well as this newly acquired family because he’s involved in some drugs-deal fallout and soon decamps to Spain where he sinks his money into a share of a bar. The word is that it’s not safe for him to return and we outwardly forget about him but when ten years later his death is reported in the press – a stabbing in front of his bar after a late-night dispute with some locals over an unpaid debt – my quiet relief is challenged by Lorna’s sense of shock and upset that at first I find bewildering and then come to accept as part of the complexity of life. I say something wrong and she’s angry with me for days so it almost feels as if his shadow is still lingering over us but eventually I understand that being married to someone and however close you are doesn’t entitle you to own their memories or be part of their story before you met.