by David Park
For a while I’ve been making good time but when I pass Carlisle and start heading eastwards the conditions worsen. From my previous journeys I remember that everywhere on this part seems to start with an H – Haltwhistle, Hayden Bridge, Hexham – and I encounter roads less well-cleared and where there is something in the sky that seems to suggest that the snow hasn’t finished with them. At the fourth roundabout take the first exit on to the A69. There are fewer signs of life getting back to normal and everywhere feels as if they’re bunkered down for a longer haul.
Perhaps it’s to do with the closeness to the Pennines and I’m grateful that I don’t have to venture further south towards them because in my imagination they have taken on the feel of something akin to the Himalayas. And I never think of snow and mountains without seeing that photograph of George Mallory and his wife with their eyes wide and slightly startled as if something unexpected has crossed their vision, and the side of her hair is a darker shadow separating their faces, making it easy to think of it as a portent, and there are times when I’ve looked at someone my camera is focused on and I believe in that moment, just as it did for them, the subject’s future life has flickered across their consciousness. He carried a photograph of her in the pocket of his tweed jacket to leave on the summit and when they found that desiccated body with the frozen skin bleached white like alabaster there was no trace of it. So I like to think that just maybe against all the odds he did reach Everest’s summit and that disaster happened on his descent, but even though I don’t want to, sometimes, despite my best efforts, I think too of that fall – the sudden spinning into darkness away from the solidity of rock and into the nothingness of frozen air. Did he see her face in those final moments or was everything just a plunging fear-blinded loss of consciousness and loss of self? I guess it’s no longer possible that they’ll find that image but I believe it’s still there, formed out of particles of memory and love, existing in some place where time can’t ever annihilate it.
Keep on the A69. The voice pulls me back to the moment. I’m hungry now but not willing yet to give up travel time to eat more of the provisions Lorna has organised and because I moved the coolbox behind the passenger seat I can’t reach it. So I try just to keep on going but hunger is like an itch and as soon as you’re aware it’s there it nags away until you are compelled to respond but there isn’t an immediate or obvious place to stop safely. She tells me again to Stay on the A69 where I start to pass signs for Hadrian’s Wall. All through history young men, and now sometimes women, huddling against the cold or the heat, wondering what their purpose is and dreaming of home. Belfast, Helmand, Hadrian’s Wall. They say the length of the wall is a popular walk for hikers now and in Belfast we’ve made the most of our past troubles and package them for tourists in soft-focused bus and taxi tours of murals and the peace wall. Decades after the Germans got rid of the Berlin Wall we’ve still got ours and I’m never sure why we call it the peace wall when its original purpose was to prevent the ease with which communities living in close proximity might attack each other. Now such interactions are generally limited to the occasional lobbing of missiles – golf balls seem especially popular but I don’t imagine many of those doing so play that particular sport, so I don’t know where they get them.
I don’t know either what purpose our troubled days had and I’m grateful that I wasn’t the guy arriving with a camera at each scene of atrocity, trying to measure up the public effectiveness of an image against respect for the privacy of individual suffering. But as a languid drift of snow starts to fall I am mindful of the right image’s power to impact on our consciousness. So I think of the little boy lying in the surf on a Turkish beach, drowned trying to reach a Greek island in a plastic dinghy.
And even though I forget his name I do remember the feeling that it produced and I know that somehow for a time, however short it proved, it changed things. Changed more than any reporter’s words or politician could do because in a photograph there’s nothing between you and the subject, nothing to sanitise or mitigate – it’s just you there in that moment as close as the camera places you and held still and silent.
Sometimes it’s closer than we want to be, so there is no escape from those Vietnamese children running towards us with their bodies burned by napalm or the bewildered stare of the Syrian boy sitting traumatised in the back of an ambulance, and perhaps because it’s more recent I remember his name was Omran.
I pull into the cleared entrance to a farm shop. One side of the door has a row of Christmas trees huddling white-branched against each other and the other holly wreaths bedecked with baubles and red ribbons. There is a large homemade sign declaring ‘Business as Usual’ hung above the entrance and someone has drawn holly leaves in felt tip round the lettering. The memory of the children in the photographs and the falling snow has made me desperate to talk to Luke, both to reassure myself he’s still OK and to try to invest all my hope in a safe future untouched by trauma or one of those random and fatal encounters with the deranged or purely evil – a madman looking for a fight – that litter the news headlines and make every parent stop in their tracks then seek to find comfort in the ineffectual reassurance that statistically it’s not likely to be your child. But after what has happened I know that this is meaningless and I think of the woman in the school store under the stairs telling us that you only have to win once and how easily this might become the only one time you lose. He takes just long enough to answer his phone to allow me to torture myself with a flail of dark imaginings so when I speak my first words they contain both a mixture of irritation and relief.
‘Are you all right, Luke?’ I ask, unable to stop the urgency pressing into my voice.
‘I’m OK. Where are you now? Is there something wrong?’
It’s not impatience I hear but something closer to longing and so I reassure him that I’m not so far away, about an hour and a half all being well.
‘What are the roads like?’ he asks, as he did the last time I spoke to him.
‘Not so bad but it’s starting to snow again. Nothing heavy, though.’
‘It’s not snowing here,’ he says and I know he must be on or in his bed looking up at the skylight.
‘Are you keeping warm? Is there any heating on in the house?’
‘The landlord has it on some kind of timer – early in the morning and then at night so there’s not a lot about. But I’m staying in bed so it’s not so bad.’
‘Your mother’s lit a fire at home.’
‘I thought we weren’t allowed to.’
‘She thinks Christmas makes it a special circumstance. Her and Lilly are toasting marshmallows.’
‘Don’t think that’ll help Santa.’
‘Luke, do you know why Santa always comes down the chimney?’
‘No, why does he?’
‘Because it suits him.’
‘Did Lilly tell you that?’
‘Yes, and listen, when we get you home and you’re feeling well again she’d like to go sledging with you. All of us. We can go into the grounds of Stormont. What do you say?’ And it feels as if I’m asking him one of the most important questions I’ve ever done.
‘Sure, if the snow hasn’t melted by then, and I’ve got a bit of work to do over the holidays. I’ve to make a five-minute film on a particular location and add music.’
‘Got anywhere in mind?’
‘Yes, I want to film it in Roselawn.’
‘Roselawn – the cemetery?’ I ask, unsure if I’ve heard him right, and there are so many things springing to my lips that I struggle to stifle them.
‘I don’t mean to shock you or anything but yes that’s where. There’s a part of it I saw and it’s a separate section from all the rows of headstones. It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen. I went back on my own and took some photographs. I’ll send them to you if you want to see them. It’s a part of the cemetery where people have personalised the burial place of whoever – it’s really weird, with plastic flower
s, football scarves and figures, all sorts of ornaments and decorations on the branches of trees. And there’s lots of wind chimes so I thought I would incorporate them into the music.’
‘Do you not think it’s a bit morbid?’
‘It’s not a place that feels like it’s to do with death so much as the lives that people once had. It feels like it’s full of their memories. But I’m not asking you to take me.’
‘I’ll take you.’
‘Are you sure? I’ll understand if you don’t want to.’
‘I’ll take you,’ I tell him with no pretence of enthusiasm. ‘We don’t need to let your mother know.’
He agrees and then he’s gone. So the call I had hoped would lead to a sense of reassurance about the future only amasses new anxieties. It’s not a place I want to go back to and I’m surprised my son thinks it’s somewhere he should film. But I’ll go there and watch over him. My father’s there too. A father who never saw my wife or my children. His hands shaking so much towards the end that I wanted to clasp him tightly just to make it stop. And it feels as if everything is shaking now with this fine fret of snow slanting slowly down, the wind casually brushing the branches of some of their burden, the collective tremble of the whitened world I’m driving into. Keep straight on. Straight on and steady – it’s what I must do now, despite everything. Just concentrate on the road that’s visible, not look too far ahead or let my eyes be dazzled by the light that radiates from all around me. At my father’s funeral when I was going out to the street to lead the mourners my mother called me back – it was the tradition that only men followed the coffin – and handed me the two envelopes that I’d left behind. ‘For the gravediggers,’ she whispered and I put them inside the jacket pocket of the suit I had bought the day before and had almost forgotten to pull one of the labels off. My mother’s small-town community believed that in all things and not least in death there were rituals and proprieties that should be observed. I was impatient of them but have come to understand their importance, if not to the dead then to the living.
It’s always cold in Roselawn, wintry and exposed to rain and wind, but perhaps it’s because that’s often the time when old people die. The minister labours on and I grow impatient as I search for whatever it is I’m supposed to be feeling and then with the last Amen I hand the envelopes to the gravediggers who stand a little way off and lean on their long-handled shovels and they touch their foreheads in a gesture that feels like it comes from a different century. Now of course there is another reason I don’t want to go back there but if it’s what Luke feels he wants to do I know I have to help him even if it’s only to drive him there and back, sit in the car and wait.
You spend a lot of time driving and waiting on your children, hours and hours and sometimes the waiting turns into slow time. Luke had a girlfriend for six months during his last year at school but allowing them to get together involved me driving him into Belfast, dropping him off and then picking him up again later at night.
Staying dry between the drives, not allowed to arrive a moment earlier than the designated time, not knocking on the door of her house but announcing my arrival by sending a text and then waiting until he deigned to appear. I always used to write, ‘Taxi here,’ but even though I thought those journeys home might have been an opportunity to talk it never worked out like that and they passed mostly in silence because it seemed whatever was in his mind, or was important to him, was left behind and conversation was just a distraction. Some nights I thought that if I had been a taxi driver he might have felt more obligation to talk.
Once, after thinking about it on the drive to get him from Amber’s, I decided it was right to tell him something about myself that he didn’t know and that in the sharing of it something personal would be brought into existence between us.
‘Luke, there’s something I want to tell you, could you come off your phone for a second.’
He knows that requests to disengage from phones are always a prelude to something of possible significance and although we’ve banned them from our evening-meal table we don’t ask very often because I know it’s the teenage equivalent of leaving the mother ship and floating away untethered into the emptiness of space. He stops scrolling and holds it in his right hand. Sometimes when it’s as close as this I’ve felt the urge to reach across, grasp it, then dispatch it through my side window.
But I remain steady and only glance at him. I can tell he’s started to feel appropriately nervous.
‘Is there something wrong between you and Mum?’ he asks.
‘No there’s not. Why did you say that?’
‘Amber’s parents are splitting up.’
‘Sorry to hear that. Is she upset?’
‘Says she’s not bothered, that they’re always arguing anyway. So maybe it’s for the best.’
‘Who will she live with?’
‘I don’t know – her mother probably. Did you and Mum ever think of splitting up?’
‘You never listen to Al Green but if you did you’d know one of your mum’s favourite songs of his is “Let’s Stay Together”.’
‘I don’t think favourite songs stop people splitting. What is it you want to tell me?’
I’m backtracking from the idea but can’t think of a convincing substitute and seeing he’s in a ‘just say what you need to say so that I can get back to my phone’ frame of mind, I tell him without soft-soaping or hesitation.
‘A while back I was depressed. I didn’t know at first that I was, just couldn’t get my head up and didn’t feel right. Your mother made me go to the doctor’s and he told me I was depressed. I wasn’t the worst type or anything – just not feeling like I was supposed to. Anyway, she put me on some low-dose pills and after a while things got better.’
He doesn’t say anything but I think he’s listening. How I’ve said it doesn’t do any justice to what happened or what I want to tell him. His phone beeps and to his credit he only glances downwards for a second.
‘And the reason I’m telling you this is because if you ever find that things aren’t right in your head you need to talk to someone and not bottle it up. You understand what I’m saying?’
He nods and when silence ensues and it’s clear that I’ve nothing more to say he looks at his phone and then begins to text. Amber’s parents decide not to split and the only break-up comes a month later when she texts to say that she doesn’t want to go out with him any more. And if songs don’t stop people splitting, when it does happen sometimes they help by offering whatever it is you want to say and so for a couple of nights I hear him listening on repeat to ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loves Me’ by The Smiths and Morrissey singing about love’s false alarm. Once I think of knocking and going in, trying to say something that might comfort but I don’t know what it would be and so I pass on by, switch off the landing light, leaving only the one in the porch as the last in the house, a light that will burn until the morning.
Lorna thinks he’s struck up a friendship with a girl on his university course because she was snooping on his Facebook page and saw some photos of them. But he’s never spoken of her and so his mother can’t mention her because he’d know she was snooping. And that’s a parental crime that comes close to every child’s idea of a capital offence. It’s a mystery to me that they want to pass through life without oversight or monitoring and yet leave a trail across virtual space like scattered debris so that someone with the time and inclination can piece it back together the way they reassemble those planes after a disaster. But I suggest to Lorna that it’s not always a good thing to do because if they find out then everything gets made private and sometimes the fragmented pieces you’re trying to reassemble have something missing and form an impression that is probably distorted and produces nothing but concern. I tell Lorna that if this nameless girl becomes important in Luke’s life he’ll let us know so she shouldn’t go dropping hints or asking questions that will arouse his suspicion and we agree that all she’s going to s
ay is that if he ever wants to invite anyone home to stay with us during the holidays then there’d be no problem. No problem at all and she’s promised that she won’t even suggest she’s talking about a girl.
The snow is still falling but it feels merely like the leftover remnants of the previous days and there is a lack of conviction in its half-hearted drop and sometimes the wind catches it and almost turns it round as if deciding it doesn’t want any more of it covering the earth. I try to imagine what it must have been like to be holed up in one of the forts built into the wall, what it was like to stand on the ramparts with the wind sleeting in against your face and stare into the distant darkness. Coast to coast – that’s a wall. Some day I’ll go to look at it – maybe on the return journey after I’ve left Luke back at the start of a new term – because I want to understand how you build a wall, how you keep out the darkness. But what is it you need? It can’t be as simple as money because even the rich fall victim to invasion and when a French priest has his throat cut in his own church it can’t be divine protection. I try to offer up the possibility that it’s karma but get into a mental mess trying to equate the relationship between past actions and future consequences. As I pass a stretch of land at the side of the road where the snow is inexplicably pockmarked and stamped, as if by the incessant march of heavy feet that appear to arrive from nowhere and lead nowhere, I hear Daniel’s voice. And I’m not sure where it’s coming from and whether it’s in the satnav, the spaces in between the music or the very pores of my skin. I don’t know and at first it’s whispering so I can hardly hear it but then the words become clearer.