by David Park
Everything conspires to remind us that we are outsiders – both the well-meaning people who are energetically kind and constantly welcoming, and those who stare with suspicion or make personal comments to each other which my English is good enough to understand, even though the accent I hear is so different to the one I am familiar with. But it is the sky and sun under which I run in this my new home that are the most inescapable reminders. The sun is mostly absent or lurking behind clouds like someone secretive who wants to spy on the world below. And the sky seems to be a remote memory of the one under which I ran so often, with all its intensity of colour leached away so that it resembles some faded rag of a flag, a wind-blown tattered memory of its former self.
I know it is the hijab that attracts attention when I run, even though it is part of me and what I believe. They look at it as if it is a mystery to them and, in a way I don’t understand, some see it as disrespectful to them, to whatever it is they believe in. There are some who have greeted my passing with shouts, calling names, and one man even offering an insult that suggested he thought I came from Pakistan. That is why I mostly run in the early morning along the towpath where the only people I meet are the occasional dog-walker and other runners. And I like the river, the light slowly stirring it into life and the trees that border it, the clean crispness of the air. Sometimes too I am able to think of Masud without it opening the wound inside again, remembering the early-morning visits to the market where he would buy falafel for us from a stall and which we’d eat sitting on the grass in the local park. Afterwards we would fly a kite – one that Masud would have made himself, and I wondered how such strong hands could make something so light. And of course he’d tease me by saying if I didn’t hold the string tightly, the kite would lift me high in the air and he’d have to tell our mother that I’d been carried far away.
There are birds that sing along the riverbank and once I saw two swans. And how I like to think of Masud in these moments is as a kite that lifts his broken body back into the light, back into life. Lets him breathe once more the purest air and feel the sun warm his face so he’s able to give me his smile again, tell me that everything will be all right. The water is glazed by the light so that it might mirror my reflection if I were to stop and stare into it. But its current is slow-moving, dreamlike, and I need to keep moving, keep running until I arrive at somewhere other than where I am.
I prefer to run on my own, to run in silence without the distraction of music or conversation, so joining the group is not what I wanted to do but it has been offered with such enthusiasm by the person who is charged with looking after us that I couldn’t refuse. And everyone is friendly but I want to run, run until I am empty of the sharp-edged thoughts that plague me, run until I am able to remember the good things that go to make a home and gave me a place in the world other than the one allocated to the vulnerable. Not intersperse it with walking, not interrupt it with talking. So in this fourth week running for only five minutes before walking again feels like a kind of waste, a waste of the breath in my lungs, of the dreams in my head and the future I am desperate to reach.
But there is no evading Pauline, who for a minute runs beside me to see how I am getting on, tells me that I have a good style and then asks me how I find my new home.
‘It’s very nice,’ I say. ‘The people are very nice.’
The words trip off my tongue because I have used them so many times. It’s what I say, and there is at least some truth in it so I don’t feel guilty. And I know already it’s what people like to hear. That it makes them feel good about themselves and where they live. But when I speak the words I can’t always stop myself seeing again a blue sky, feel the taut string of a kite dancing on the lightest of breezes and taste a warm spice on my tongue. But I know too that I dream of something that only exists in memory and at night before I sleep I comfort myself with the thought that I have escaped a city ravaged and broken, its walls tumbled into dust. A place where my life and that of my family hung in a precarious balance.
As I force myself into the final walk of the session, I glance at the rest of the group and can’t help wondering how many of them would have survived the journey out of Syria and across the border. A journey in which some of the very old and very young died on the way. A journey too that we had to make with only what we could carry and which ended up taking all our money to secure safe passage. In the sprawling camp I felt like a small grain of sand in the face of so many, the numbers swelling by the day, and where there was no possibility of privacy except inside my own head, when I’ve always been a private person, happy to be on my own. When things were really bad my father talked of attempting a sea crossing, but our mother’s objections and the absence of funds to finance it saw his idea come to nothing.
Once the session is finished we stand in a half-circle and wait for Pauline to address us. I look at Maurice who walks with his hands on his hips and whose face is the colour of the red dust my feet once kicked up, at the couple who seem to be arguing quietly and at Cathy the woman who sometimes tries to talk to me, as Pauline tells us how well we’re doing, that we’re almost halfway there but that we need to be ready for Week Five so we must complete our independent run. She makes us give ourselves a round of applause before saying she’ll see us next week.
The nights are really drawing in is what I hear people share with each other as we begin to disperse. I’m not sure what they mean. I am used only to the simplicity of two seasons – long hot summers and mild wet winters – but here everything is more complicated, unpredictable like a person who wears a different set of clothes every day. And there are times when I yearn for the sun to warm me, for it to seep into my skin and warm my very bones. But it too often feels like a stranger, someone who only begrudgingly acknowledges my existence, and as I walk home I understand that the days are heading into winter and know that this will be the time the light begins to die. That this is what is called the drawing in. Already the leaves on the trees along the river have turned brown and red and the water is slowly losing its sheen, so some days it looks like the colour of broken earthenware.
My eyes turn to the restaurants and fast-food shops as I walk. It is a city that is always eating and that is a good thing because both my mother and father are good cooks, and already they are talking about the possibility of having their own business once more, of making the food that has its origins in Syria. But how do they even start when there are so many obstacles in their way? I don’t know the answer to this and do not want to see my parents stumble into the bitterness of another disappointment.
But no hurt will ever be as great or as lasting as the loss of Masud. And there’s something I’ve never told them and which I know I never can. On the night before he secretly left, Masud came to my room just as I was falling into sleep and told me of his plan. He couldn’t tell our parents because he knew they would try and stop him. There were so many things I wanted to say but he put his finger across my lips, briefly smoothed my hair and then he was gone into the night’s darkness. Gone forever and if I had told my parents then maybe he would still be alive, be with us in our new home. It feels as if the world itself is suddenly drawing in, the light dying, and because there is nothing else I can offer in resistance, I start to run.
Maurice
It’s the one I’ve been dreading. Week Five. By the end of this we’re supposed to run for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes! A big jump from previous weeks. But I’m going to give it a go and my running style is changing. I’m never going to be able to stride out like Brendan, or Ciara who’s aiming to be a firefighter and who looks as if she’s already hoping for some blazing inferno to rush into, but I’m not doing so much sideways moving any more. I’ve developed what might be called a soft-shoe shuffle, finding a pace that allows me to keep going even though that blazing inferno Ciara’s looking for sometimes feels as if it’s in my chest. I’ve still not got enough surplus breath to contribute much to the conversation that Cathy likes to engage me
in – I can’t make up my mind about her. Is she a good person or a bit of a busybody? She’s a bit of a shuffler too, so we generally end up running together, and she’s definitely an organiser because she’s arranged for a small group of us to combine on our independent run. There’s no escaping her even if I wanted to.
A twenty-minute run and it’s raining tonight. A fine rain that sifts down from a gloomy sky then grows gradually stronger. It’s not a good omen. And suddenly I’m fearful that I’m going to humiliate myself, that I’m going to pull up on the hard shoulder of life with a clapped-out engine while everyone else motors past. The nights are drawing in and I pass a long-since-plundered horse chestnut tree, the grass below littered with discarded spiked shells. I have a sudden impulse to feign an injury – a pulled muscle, a sprained ankle – but I look at Pauline and think she’s not going to accept a forged sick note and I know that I like her too much to lie to her. So after our five-minute brisk walk, off we set and yes, it’s not about how fast we go but keeping going and in fact Pauline’s urging everyone to slow down, to find a rhythm. Mina liked to dance but I never really had much sense of rhythm so I was mostly a kind of hand-holder, or a human maypole, while she gyrated around me and I’m truly sorry she didn’t get to do ‘Dancing in the Dark’ with Bruce Springsteen. Sorry she didn’t get to her post-retirement dance with life. Sometimes I’ve thought of visiting the places that were on our list but the idea of going alone holds no pleasure for me: every moment would be filled with the knowledge that she’s not here any more. It’s hard being one person after being two, and one of the many ways I miss her is that there’s no one to give me advice on our daughter Rachel, no one to hold me back, no one to push me forward as situations demand.
I haven’t seen Rachel and Ellie in three weeks. Well, that’s not exactly true because while she hasn’t called in that length of time, I have caught glimpses of her. Never on our small group run that takes us past her house, but when she’s walking Ellie to the swimming pool or doing her weekly shop. And the phrase ‘caught a glimpse’ suggests something fortuitous, a happy coincidence, when the truth is I’ve started to try and anticipate where I might be likely to catch sight of her. So I park up the car and sit like some detective, except I guess most detectives don’t drink tea from a flask while they’re listening to ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ as they keep their suspect under surveillance, and it’s not a suspect I’m watching out for but my own daughter, my own child. I don’t believe in telepathic bonds or anything like that but I increasingly feel that things aren’t right. I sense it in the way she walks, the way she holds Ellie’s hand like the child is a kite that’s going to be suddenly swept into the air when the first breeze blows. And if I don’t look out for them both, I know I can never let myself think of Mina without bringing a sense of shame to her memory.
She never recovered consciousness after the car crash and, when I remember the hours I sat beside her hospital bed, I sometimes try to avoid that moment when they turned off the life-support system by imagining the things she would have said to me if she’d been able. And right after she’d told me to take proper care of myself, she would have made me promise to look out for Rachel and Ellie.
The rain is stronger now and I’m glad because I hope it might help cool my engine that is in danger of overheating. It feels as if there’s something in my chest wanting to break out and, as Cathy burbles on about some book she’s reading, I think that I’m about to re-enact a scene from Alien and a grotesque mutation is going to burst out. But maybe it’s only my heart, my heart that feels as if it’s going into overdrive as it pumps frantically while my lungs send out an SOS for more oxygen.
‘All right, Maurice? You’re doing great. Keep your posture upright – it holds your lungs open,’ Pauline says.
‘Please, sir, I have a stitch. Can I go and get changed?’ are the actual words forming in my head in the voice of a young boy who’s wearing nylon shorts and on one of those muddy cross-country runs so beloved by PE teachers. Instead I say, ‘Doing OK, Pauline.’
But something is happening to time because Pauline is telling us we’ve completed ten minutes when she should be telling us that there’s only a minute left. That we’re halfway there when I want to hear that we’re about to finish. And Cathy’s not chirping in my ear any more, so she must be feeling it too. I glance at her and her face is forward-looking and glazed by the rain. It makes her seem a little saintly and I think she’d be pleased if I told her that, but it’s not the type of thing you can say and I haven’t any breath to spare.
Puddles are forming on the path but they’re not deep enough for me to waste energy going around so I just plough through, skittering little diamond droplets of water about both our ankles. And the big question at the heart of this is: when does it get easier? When does it stop hurting? I’m hoping it’s soon because I can’t go much further. And I’d be more than happy to do a Captain Oates and for the good of everyone say that I’m just going outside and may be some time. Except I am outside and, as we pass the naked horse chestnut tree again, I’ve started to feel like one of those hollow shells with all my insides plucked out.
Mark didn’t even come to Mina’s funeral and that suited me fine. He was in Scotland, supposedly seeing some mate, and he never made it back. So it was me and Rachel sitting in the front pew and there was a moment when we held hands but it wasn’t long enough. And while I sat in the church that our family only frequents for christenings, weddings and funerals, I thought how good it would have been to walk my daughter down that same aisle and see her marry some guy who’s going to love her, look after her. Make her happy. But maybe that’s what’s wrong with life – we’re all needing someone to make us happy as if we can’t ever achieve it by ourselves. And if we’re lucky or unlucky enough to find someone, what happens when they’re not there any more?
I don’t know if it’s because I’m seeing her from a distance that Rachel looks thinner, and even though she once took pride in her appearance, spending a small fortune on clothes and make-up, now she looks a little throughother. A little gaunt. And one morning after she had left Ellie off at nursery, she spent about an hour sitting in the park as if she didn’t want to go home. I thought of suddenly appearing but bottled it, telling myself that I didn’t want to risk her knowing that I was watching out for her. It’s the same park where I used to take her as a child. She liked the swings best, always wanting you to push her higher. And that’s how I like to think of her – not sitting alone on a park bench, looking cold and thin, but on a swing, swinging out over the city, swinging so high it feels like she’s flying over the roofs of the terraced streets and even over the shipyard cranes.
The rain is really heavy now but we have five more minutes to go. I start to hope for a ‘rain stops play’ announcement over some invisible tannoy, but under an increasingly sullen sky there’s only the wet slap of feet. All day long I see five minutes pass in the blink of an eye and now every minute, every microsecond, is an eternity in itself, the hands of Pauline’s stopwatch seemingly trapped in permanent and malevolent slow motion. In my delirium a song starts in my head and I silently sing it with rising desperation and it’s ‘Come On Eileen’ except on its own internal loop it becomes ‘Come on, Pauline. Come on, Pauline. Blow that bloody whistle.’
And then finally it goes and we’re all supposed to fall into a brisk walk, but I’ve found a wooden post to embrace and it feels like the only thing keeping me upright. I’m hunched over it, holding the top of it with both hands, trying to find a breath that doesn’t feel like it’s travelled from the furthest regions of outer space. This must be what it’s like to be in the death zone on Everest where the air is so thin it makes a single step a monumental effort. And then I’m conscious of hands patting me on the back and people are saying ‘Well done’ and it’s a bit of a shock because the only intimacy I associate with group physical activity is the snap of a wet towel in a school changing room. ‘Well done, Maurice,’ the voices say and h
ands are still patting me even though I can’t see whose they are because my face is pushed up into the post as if I’m about to kiss it. At first I don’t want to let go of it in case I fall over and then Pauline’s encouraging me to loosen my hold, to straighten myself and get some air in my empty lungs. And I’m touched. Touched in so many ways that I can’t begin to explain.
‘Well done, Maurice, you did it,’ she says and I try to smile but say nothing in reply because I know that if I am to speak, I shall start to cry and that’s not a good look for a man of my age who’s wearing an extra-large royal-blue Fusion Pro quick-dry long-sleeve half-zip running top and a pair of also extra-large tracksuit bottoms. And it’s not because I have reverted to childhood, conscious that my feet are wet, or that I have a damp bottom where the rain has sluiced down off my top. It’s because I hear Mina telling me that I have to look after myself and have to look after Rachel and Ellie, and because while I’m trying to do the first of these, I don’t know how to do the second. Don’t know how to care for our daughter and grandchild, except to watch over them and keep myself ready. And then as everyone begins to walk ahead, I linger behind until, despite my best efforts, a few tears start. I wipe them clear, hoping that if anyone turns round, they’ll think it’s only the rain. Only a man wiping away the rain.
Cathy
Even though I said I’m not actively looking for a partner, and for the minute at least am concentrating on running this 5K, it doesn’t stop me thinking about men. Martina in the library tried online dating a year ago and ended up with a man sending her a photograph of a body part that she really didn’t want to see. Before she blocked him she sent him a message saying she’d prefer to see an image of his brain, but as that was probably as small as his – well, you-know-what – she’d have to invest in a magnifying glass. It made us laugh over morning coffee, but setting aside those suitors whose behaviour and motivations categorically and eternally debar them from serious consideration, I worry about men who are good at pretending to be one thing when they’re really something else. And I worry about finding out the truth when things have gone too far and you’re vulnerable, enmeshed in some too-plausible spider’s web.