by Adam Thorpe
‘Fifty years old, this could be. Wych elm. Look. Tragic.’
It crumbled in his fingers like dried tobacco.
‘David, that’s the last damn book or it’s divorce.’
‘I could say the same about your cigarette.’
She hesitated. She felt the smoke in her chest.
‘Alright. We’ll do a deal. Fags versus those books.’
He looked at her over his glasses for a moment, then at the book open in front of him.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘I don’t need any more. This is the ne plus ultra, this is.’
‘Why?’
‘Listen.’
He put a bit more distance between the book and his glasses (another sign of age) and read.
‘Milton Keynes is a homely place. Fields encroach upon the dusty by-lane, and brim over the scattered cottages. There is nothing here of the conventional beauty spot, for indeed no one seems to have heard of the place, save the handful of its inhabitants; and these think so well of it they rarely leave it. I have known and loved Milton Keynes since I was a boy, but at no time in my legion pilgrimages thither have I met a stranger. The church at Milton Keynes, which is among the finest—’
‘I think you’ve made your point. You’re not going to do your thing at Milton Keynes, are you?’
‘Of course. A circular walk from Newport Pagnell via Milton Keynes, Woughton and the – I quote – “delightful hamlets” of Little Woolstone and Willen, with a detour to Bradwell Abbey and then on to Great Linford, with its single-branch railway back to Newport Pagnell. In the author’s footsteps.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It’s England,’ he said. ‘I’ve every right. Listen. The church is approached through a line of small trees, having a farm that reaches to the church wall itself, so that cows sometimes browse upon the backs of unsuspecting worshippers who have stopped to discuss the result of the Crimean War, or whatever else passes for news in this most blessed haven of pristine sanity.’
‘Then you won’t be wanted there, dearest. If it’s a haven of sanity.’
David smiled.
‘The cows are concrete cows now, aren’t they?’
He almost made it to the end, too; he was only arrested while trying to enter the grounds of the Gyosei Japanese boarding school in Willen.
‘Willen is unspoiled because it is unknown,’ he shouted, waving the book about. ‘The cottages here wear an air of permanence; the oaks have a great girth; and old men are hale.’
The policemen had received about a hundred calls relating to this bloke with his tatty green rucksack, and hauled him unceremoniously across the cycle way to the van. The fun had started when he’d crossed the MI near Junction 14, where Mr Peel had admired the view of ‘innumerable drowsy villages cupped within the trees’. A lorry had swerved onto the hard shoulder because David liked to think of the M1 as a phantom. He was surprised – disappointed, even – to find the village of Milton Keynes intact. The photographs of Milton Keynes in the book, showing thatched cottages humped like natural grass mounds off a dusty lane, with a church tower in the distance beyond grand elms, had nothing much to do with the clipped suburban verges and Lawson cypresses of the present incarnation, but at least it wasn’t under a Tesco storage depot as that ancient wood had been on the last hike.
‘At the inn you will strike a footpath south-west to Woughton-on-the-Green.’
Days over old maps had established this footpath, as well as the inn. He crossed a few executive gardens and ended up inside the Asda superstore, where the route went up the Prepared Meals aisle. With the help of a compass, he followed the path with its primroses and snowdrops under oaks and elms (it was early spring) through the Chilled Foods section and on via a goods delivery bay into Dixons, which had a special offer on Toshiba laptops. He got into a bit of trouble in Topshop, because the footpath curved into the back area where an off-duty cashier was snogging with a deputy manager. But he wasn’t arrested: when he explained what he was doing, producing the book from his knapsack, they just thought he was a daftie.
Bradwell Abbey was in the grounds of the City Discovery Centre, and he ate his picnic in peace. He had a spot of bother when the footpath, after crossing twenty mini-roundabouts, eight Redways and a multiplex car park, wound its delightful way through several offices and the gents’ toilets of Mercury Communications. They thought he was one of the Albanian field workers at first, until he opened his mouth. By now, he’d been tracked by a total of 243 CCTV tilt-and-zoom cameras – a brief, shadowy figure doing odd things: he was saved only by the difficulty of someone watching all 10,000 or so tapes on the go at any one time in the local CCTV centre.
Once he’d climbed his way over the sea of parked cars and reached the nearest executive estate, he was again in the realm of private householder security. An alarm rang somewhere while he was crossing a neat lawn with a whirly brick feature in the middle, and the cops picked him up as he was scaling the wall of the Gyosei Japanese boarding school a few minutes later. In fact, the alarm was in the form of a member of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, who thought he was her estranged husband come back to do her harm. He did not resist the police, he only quoted Mr Peel, but they arrested him anyway. Reports of a trespasser had come in thick and fast over the last hour. Several people had phoned the police from their mobiles when he’d climbed on their cars, which had been in the line of the footpath. He’d even been roughed up by the owner of a Mazda MX-5 convertible, and lost his bobble hat. The police had got fed up: they were sick of alternative theatre at Milton Keynes, all these arty bods down from London littering the public space with their Lottery-aided wank, high on wacky backy or whatever. So they hauled him in.
But they decided he was a genuine nut, going on about primroses and elms and meandering, drowsy streams.
‘I just want to get to Great Linford,’ he kept saying, ‘down the winding English lane and its high-banked bend, the fields studded with hedgerows. Look!’
And he’d flash the book at them, which they finally confiscated.
‘Jesus,’ said one of the coppers, ‘what are you on, mate? Bang him up for the night, will you?’
When they let him go in the morning, he was not charged. Gillian stopped smoking and got very crotchety. David went quiet for a while and watched a lot of television. Gillian was almost relieved when he came back one day with Rambles through Middlesex, published in 1929. She went straight out and bought ten packets of Marlboro.
‘At least he’s not a drunk, at least he doesn’t hit the old bottle,’ she murmured to herself, as he plotted the next hike with his old maps, his finger cutting clean across the slumbering hamlet of Heath Row.
THE PROBLEM
He wondered if it had started long before he thought it had started, so he spent a few days rummaging in his childhood for signs. True, he’d had an unusual number of old school chums dying young, but he couldn’t find any indication of his Problem in the days preceding their deaths. The whole point, he thought, is that it’s related to pleasure, which is incoherent – no, illogical. Pleasure is definitely not logical. At least, it’s not logical when it’s at the level that stirs the gods, that sets off the bastards’ bleepers.
One incident, however, gave him a kind of clue, a shiver of recognition. A scrap of the victim’s clothing, as it were.
In those days – up to the age of twenty-three, in actual fact – he lived with his parents on Princedale Avenue, on the outskirts of Latham (about twenty minutes on foot from where he was living now, well into his fifties). Princedale Avenue was a very steep road, lined with thirties houses of the semi-detached, bay-window, pebbledash variety, and it made straight for the summit by Broad Hill Farm (now the Tech College) with only a few shallow bends in concession to the slope. It was the kind of road people got vertigo on, especially where, at one point, it gave a view of Latham and the Chiltern beech woods beyond.
The bus he took to and from the local grammar in neighbouring Bellridge – the 361, whic
h was a green RT double-decker with a rear open platform on which the usual conductor would stand daringly close to the edge and only lean against the pole with his shoulder, not holding on tight, the road surface a blur beyond his shoes – would always have a job getting up that hill. It would huff and puff, spewing out diesel fumes and shuddering at each shift of gear until first was reached and some kind of massive, mysterious equilibrium was arrived at between the 9.6 litre diesel and the natural force of gravity.
There was one hitch: he had to get off halfway up, at the stop opposite his house. As a small kid, looking through his bedroom window, Ted would move his head until his eyes were at the same angle as the road – and the bus stop’s sign looked as if it had been bent over in a strong wind. It was a weird place to put a bus stop, because even to wait there you had to sort of brace yourself against the slope, one foot lower than the other, like one of those blokes on the wing of a biplane in an old film.
And he was, in fact, the only person who ever got off at that stop.
It must have felt pretty hairy for everyone else inside. Ted would watch from the kerb as the bus, releasing its air brakes with a hiss, settled back a bit until enough power was accumulated and the engine hauled it up again, away from catastrophe, and off it throbbed, labouring up out of sight beyond the spindly ornamental cherries that lined the road. Sometimes it stalled, and the application of the hand-brake made it bounce. There was a pause, like a bomb about to explode, and then the six massive cylinders were fired again and off it chugged, tall as a house, wobbling from side to side. Or so it seemed.
One very cold day, when he was about thirteen and flourishing with spots, the bus had sounded a bit rough as it approached his stop, the whole interior juddering so much that you could hold your nail against the window glass and get a machine-gun effect, or fantasise that you were doing a fab solo roll with Ringo Starr. He’d grown out of the thrill of the top deck, which anyway tended to get the yobbo smokers from the Secondary Modern these days, and stuck with the old folk in the lower saloon, generally choosing the transverse seats over the rear wheel arches to get the fresh air and some decent elbow room.
The conductor looked at him, as he got up from his seat, with the usual Here’s-the-swot-in-glasses-as-wants-to-get-off-at-the-bloody-Princedale-Avenue-Request-Stop look. Ted even felt bad about pulling on the cord and sending that little ping ringing through the saloon up to the driver sitting high in his glassed-off cab – the faceless driver one never knew, apart from the back of his head, unless you remembered to look in the near-side window over the radiator as the bus slowed down on arrival. Who knows, maybe it had always been the same driver, all these years?
The conductor had gloves cut off at the top knuckle and a Latham Rovers scarf today, on account of the cold. He was pretty young – in his late twenties, probably – but to Ted at thirteen he seemed middle-aged, or as if he had always been that age, and Ted was vaguely frightened of him. His name was Ron, that much Ted knew, and he had bright red hair with long sideburns shaved off at an angle. He leant against the pole and the juddering made the handle on his ticket-machine revolve on its own. He leant out to look forward, one foot swinging away from the platform like a sailor, then gripped the pole and swung even further out. He started to sing, his breath making a big cloud in front of his face.
Have you seen your mother, baby, sta-anding in the shadow . . .
Ted’s elder brother, Mike, a Stones fan, had bought the single a few months back.
‘There’s bloody ice on the hill,’ Ron said, swinging back in again, his money satchel bouncing on his hip.
He’d sung the song as if he was making fun of it, harshly, but then that’s how Mick Jagger sounded.
Ted nodded. He scrunched up his ticket and popped it into the used-ticket holder at the bottom of the stairs, but fluffed it. Litter. The wind caught the ball and blew it out.
‘Ice,’ Ron the conductor repeated, raising his eyebrows under his cap. ‘That ain’t nice.’
Ron was looking at Ted while he said this, which Ted found unpleasant. Then the bus juddered to a stop, as Ted had ordered. Thinking back to this incident, now, forty-odd years later – trying to see when the Problem started – Ted realised with a flush of shame that he should have said, ‘We’d better not stop then. I don’t mind getting off at the top, by Broad Hill Farm.’ But he didn’t say that, either because he was too shy or because it hadn’t occurred to him.
So the bus stopped and he alighted and he watched open-mouthed from the pavement as the vehicle, instead of slipping back a few feet as the driver revved – the semi-automatic preselector transmission doing its job, trying to do its job, not quite doing its job, the thrust and weight ratio audibly out of sync – slipped back a few feet more and then a few feet more and then some more. In fact, the bus passed Ted on the pavement and carried on going downhill, but backwards – Ron the conductor not saying a word from the back but just looking down at the ground passing by with his mouth open. Looking quite scared, in fact.
The driver took evasive action and yanked the wheel, so the big bus ended up sideways on, its back wheels bumped up on the pavement and giving those on the transverse seats a bit of a shock. If there’d been a car behind or if a mum with a pushchair, say, had been passing by at that moment it would, Ted realised afterwards, have been more than a little scary incident. The bus didn’t topple over, either, despite the fact that it was sideways on to the slope and looking as if it was drunk. In fact, all it did do was get started again, the engine revving madly, and avoid the stretch of ice in front of the stop as it throbbed its way back up.
‘Nice one, kid!’ shouted Ron, as the bus passed Ted on the kerb – the back advert still demanding, as if nothing had happened, Have you MACLEANed your teeth today?
Ted felt like shouting, ‘Piece of cake!’ Or was that what his older self invented, in memory? One couldn’t be sure. One thing he knew: he was more embarrassed and ashamed than he’d ever been in his life before.
As if in proof of this, Ted was told by Ron, the next time, that the Princedale Avenue Request Stop was no longer in use, non-functional, out of service – kaput. There was no sign that it was no longer in use, but that’s what Ron told him, and added, ‘You’ll have to jump off, kid. If you ring the bell he’ll slow down for you. OK?’
The bus was always going slowly at that point anyway, but when Ted rang the bell, blushing furiously, the bus slowed down to less than a walking pace.
‘Go on, then,’ said Ron. ‘Hop off.’
Ted felt a bit like a parachutist waiting to jump – more because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself than from nerves. He’d seen loads of people jumping on and off when the bus was moving, but had been told by his mum never to try it as she knew the son of a friend of Marjorie Nield’s who had done just that and hit his head and gone funny. He’d been a clever, hard-working boy; now he just picked up cigarette butts from the gutter. But Ted hopped off, because he had to.
Surprisingly, the ground rushed away under his feet and he all but lost his balance. Ron laughed from the retreating platform.
Bastard, thought Ted. I ought to ask for my thruppence back.
Ted’s voice broke, he started to shave, he kissed his first girl, Gillian Knowles, behind the youth club where he went to play pool and drink Tizer and feed the juke-box every Wednesday night. He got shoved about by the black-leather Rockers one evening up Watercress Lane and was left with a fractured rib (which, although very painful, he told no one about because he didn’t know it was fractured until an X-ray for suspected colon cancer when he was in his mid-forties revealed the fact, and he remembered those days of gritting his teeth that seemed like last week).
All through this time he would wait for the 361 to slow down every weekday up Princedale Avenue, and jump off. Ron was replaced by others, including a long-haired blonde conductress, Phyllis, with green mascara and a big bust, whom Ted and most of the other males on the bus fancied a great deal as her machine, bounc
ing above her groin, rasped out their tickets or as her arm stretched over their heads to pluck the cord accompanied by a ‘Sorry, darlin,’ or a ‘Mind yer ’ead, duckie’ – her leather satchel so close to your nose you could smell it over her sweat.
But the bus still refused to stop at Princedale Avenue Request, as if the incident had gone down in legend, like the misty legends Ted was into at the time: Fantasy literature to go with his penchant for Fantasy board games.
And he did actually dream of it, now and again: appearing out of swirls of fog, it was a phantom spot that only he and some cackling skeletons would alight at, surrounded by a bubbling, evil-smelling marsh. The marsh would gradually creep nearer the little concrete island, its bus sign leaning like a dinghy’s mast in a storm, until it crept over his knees and he would wake up, sweating. His house had been nowhere in sight.
But Ted no longer feared the hopping off. In fact, with the years of practice, he had become an expert. He did it with style. The faceless driver would hardly slow down, now: Ted would ring the bell, nevertheless (sometimes Phyllis anticipated him, giving him a knowing smile, and he would say ‘Ta,’ and try to swagger a bit behind his blush), and you could hear the engine soften a little, clearing its throat – but the change in speed could be measured only by an extremely sensitive instrument. Ted would nod his cheerio and swing right out, gripping the pole, and just take the ground running up to him by running in turn to meet it, his school satchel bouncing on his full-grown spine. He felt like Dean Martin, or John Wayne, especially when there was a girl or two on board – maybe one of those pretty, dark-haired types from one of the posh old houses on Broad Hill Lane. It was very like riding into town and slipping off his horse before it had stopped – yeehaa in a cloud of dust – and all the townsfolk scratching their foreheads and wondering who this goddamn good-lookin’ stranger was.
Yeehaa!
He’d never once take a look after the bus as it strained up the hill and out of sight, leaving that weird silence behind it, that delicious quiet in which, for a few seconds, he was alone and life was complete and full of promise, his whole body relaxing, in repose for a moment and the birdsong that had begun again seeming to be inside him, coming from inside him. No, he would never once look back before striding over for tea and a chocolate Bandit with his mum and Mike. The passengers’ eyes were upon him through the bus windows (certainly the pretty girls’ eyes), and he would gaze into the mountainous desert ahead, his eyes narrowed, his shoulders squared, a rifle on his back instead of a school satchel, about to embark on some great and perilous quest rather than tea and bloody homework. The Dr Malliner’s Grammar School shield on his blazer was like a deadly target, by now, inviting bullets of ridicule. But just for a moment, when he hopped off the 361 at Princedale Avenue Request, he was a hero, an athlete, bold and true. He surprised people. He took it running, swinging right out and just letting go. No one else, in all those years, ever got off there or hailed the bus down anxiously with an arm stuck straight out. He was, therefore, unique.