by Ray Timms
Chapter 3
Friday: 19:41–Pear Tree farm.
I should have felt over the moon but I didn't.
Preferring not to use Dave’s phone with the added complications of him having to work out how much I owed him for the call, I took a short walk to the phone box in the village. The inside of the booth stank of stale urine. Despite the fact that I had some great news to tell Julie I hesitated.
In my hand the keys to our new home felt cold and unfamiliar.
Two weeks back, when I set off from Crawley I had been all gung-ho about me finding work and a new home in Devon and now having paused to take breath, my confidence was holed with doubts. Perhaps it had all happened too fast. I was reminded of what I often tell others: “be careful what you wish for”.
I hadn’t seen Julie in almost two weeks. In recent calls home Julie had been getting increasingly hostile and despondent. I was worried what kind of mood I would find her in when I told her about Moors Cottage. It was entirely possible she had gotten cold feet about the whole idea. I was having second thoughts myself. With the phone in my hand burring away I rehearsed in my head what I was going to say. My other hand was waiting to drop the coins in the slot.
I would keep the conversation upbeat. The last thing Julie needed was for me to sound like I was having second thoughts. I would need to reassure her, fire up her enthusiasm. She would need to feel confident that I knew what I was doing… Now that was a scary thought!
I finally got around to dropping the twenty pence coins in the slot. I held the receiver to the side of my head unaware that I was drumming my fingers on the sticky metal shelf or holding my breath or pulling a face at the smell of stale tobacco in my nose when my wife picked up on the third ring.
‘Hi Julie. It’s me.’ I blustered. ‘You’re not going to believe this… I’ve found myself a job and a place to live’.
The truncated version I poured down the phone sounded nothing like what I’d rehearsed.
Finally. I paused and waited for her reaction. You could have reached out and pinged the tension on the line. The silence became intolerable. “Julie’…?
‘Sorry…. did you…’ Julie enquired. ‘Did you say that you’ve got a job and a place to live?’
‘Yes.’ I said picking up a hint of excitement in the tone of her voice and wishing I were there to visually confirm this.
‘Oh my God! Are you serious? That’s terrific news.’
‘Yeah, great news eh?’ I said stiffening my knees that felt about to give way.
‘Well done you… oh…’ I heard her voice trail off. Oh! What? I sensed bad news.
‘What? What’s happened Julie?”
‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ she said hurriedly, ‘It’s just I need to apologise for last night.’
‘Last night… what happened last night?’
‘Art. I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean it when I said that you were sitting on your arse down there having a holiday with your mates.’
Yeah it had hurt.
‘That’s okay. This has been tough on all of us.’
‘So, tell me… tell me,’ Julie said excitedly. ‘Where’s the house? What’s it like? Don’t tell me…’ she said lowering her voice to a deep throated gasp. ‘You’ve got us a thatched cottage! Oh my God Robbie,’ she squealed turning her mouth away from the phone, ‘Dad’s gone and found us a thatched cottage’
That’s it. I was in trouble.
Taking the path of least resistance I decided not to deflate her enthusiasm. I would tell her all about it when I got home later.
‘Julie,’ I said solemnly, ‘I’ll be leaving here in about an hour and I will be home around eleven, I need you and Robbie to start packing. Before I leave here I’m going to call a van hire company in Crawley and book a removal lorry.’
Total silence.
‘Julie are you still there?’
‘This is really happening isn’t it?’ She sounded subdued.
‘Yes. We are moving to Glorious Devon. Things are going to get better from now on Julie. No more bloody unexpected visits from the likes of Paul and Leroy, no more nasty letters or phone calls… this is it Julie, finally we can be free of them toe rags that would see us on the street. We’ll just go for it Julie … what’s the worst that can happen?’
I couldn’t see her but I sensed she was nodding.
‘You’re right. Let’s just do it. Robbie and I’ll get cracking on the packing. Is Daniel okay?’
‘He’s fine.’ I said. ‘He’s very happy. We’ll be home soon.'
If there was ever a time when I wanted to see into the future this was it. Mixed in with the excitement of us moving to Devon were nagging doubts. My gut and my head were locked into a furious debate about how I should proceed. Finally, three miles from Crawley, with Julie about to discover that Moors Cottage was not the Chocolate box cottage that she was expecting, and that it wasn’t near the sea, and that it was located on the edge of a bleak moor an hours drive from the nearest beach I told the nagging voices in my head to shut hell up. She’ll be fine. She's going to love it.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘That’s it. That’s the house. Great eh?’
‘That’s’ nothing like what you told me. Where the hell is the thatched roof and the picket fence and the roses round the door?’
‘I never told you that,’ I said frowning. I saw Robbie slip out of the room. ‘Julie, it’ll be great. You have to give it a chance.’
She sat down heavily on the sofa staring at the image of Moors Cottage on the flyer.
‘Read what it says about the house and the area on the back.’ I said taking the flyer out of her hand, turning it over and holding it front of her face.
‘You lied to me. How far is it from the sea?’
‘I… I don’t exactly know,’ I lied. ‘I haven’t driven there from the bungalow. I only got to see it a few hours ago.’
‘Not walking distance then?’
‘We have the moors…. Deer and buzzards and….’
‘And the Beast of Dartmoor!’ Daniel chimed in.
I shot him a look that in biblical days might have turned him to stone. ‘The photo doesn’t do it justice does it Daniel?’
‘No. You’ll love it mum. It’ll be great.’
Julie got to her feet and kept her back to me when she studied the flyer. I was holding my breath when she returned it to me at arms length. Her mouth looked a little pinched. I saw her take in a deep breath. I winced.
She’d tipped up her chin to look down her nose at me. I was right to be nervous.
Her disappointment was visceral. “Hmmm,’ she said. ‘Not quite as chocolaty boxy as I might have hoped. It will have to do for now.’
Around ten that evening we paused from packing up the house to eat a takeaway curry on the sofa. Julie’s earlier dark mood had improved.
I guess it must have occurred to her that moving to Moors Cottage had to be a whole lot better than remaining in Crawley, waiting to be thrown out onto the street to live in a cardboard box under Waterloo bridge. (Yeah I know… that sounds a little melodramatic?)
With so much to do, the next day we were up bright and early. Having spent the past ten years renovating Holly Cottage I was damned if the banks were going to get it back in good order and so with gusto I set about stripping the place of everything unscrewable, including the brass light switches, plug sockets and door furniture that I’d paid a small fortune for.
By midnight, exhausted, we were done packing.
Sunday morning, a little after nine, I had loaded up the Transit van up with stuff of lesser value from the house and then drove it across town to the van hire company where I parked it up outside a chain link fence. I was taking a risk, leaving it there but I had no choice Julie had the car to drive. It was going to have to stay there overnight.
Through a wire fence I c
ould see a long line of white hire trucks of varying sizes all parked up nose-out. I wondered which of these they had set aside for me.
Amongst the line of smaller vans there was one huge lorry. It had been parked up nearest to the gates, so it could be easily driven out I guessed!
When I made the telephone booking I hadn’t give any thought to the capacity, the sort of questions they throw at you. I now realised I should have interrogated the guy more closely while I had him on the phone. What do I know about cubic capacity?
‘Look.’ I’d told him in monosyllabic italics. ‘I need to move a three-bedroom house and a garage. Can you please set aside any vehicle that you consider adequate for the task.’
I crunched my way across the gravel forecourt heading for a Portacabin with a sign above the door that said: ”Office”.
A skeletal thin man I calculated to be in his mid-forties, peered at me over the top of his newspaper before sliding his feet off the desk. He folded his copy of the News Of The World and blew cigarette smoke in my general direction. I wondered how he might have imagined that combing a web of thin hair from one ear to the other improved his looks. I guessed he lived alone. His skin was the colour and texture of ancient scrolls. The room stank of stale tobacco smoke.
Employing a modicum of communication, skeletal man had me sign the hire papers. When he stood to remove a set of keys from a hook above the desk I noted he had a discernible stoop.
With a hand motion he bade me follow him out into the yard where I had to almost run to keep up with his rangy gait.
After passing several trucks any of which would have done the job, rather worryingly we were drawing nearer to the huge pantechnicon at the end of the line. I dismissed as ludicrous the worry he was about to give me that. Something that big, surely was set aside for proper removal men and not someone who had never driven anything bigger than a one tonne Luton. I groaned when we stopped in its shadow.
‘My God! ‘ I uttered when he thrust the keys at me.
‘Here you go mate.’ He said digging a nicotine-stained finger around in his mouth attempting to dislodge from a back molar a remnant of the bacon roll he had eaten earlier. ‘You got it for the weekend.’ He grunted past the finger and then turned smartly on his heels. ‘Bring it back with a quarter tank of fuel.’ He called back over his shoulder.
‘Whoa!‘ I cried out having finally found my voice. I was more terrified than angry. You can’t be serious?’
Ten paces from me he stopped and looked back. The gingerish comb-over appeared to be waving at me.
‘Do I look like someone who likes to joke?’
Actually, he didn’t.
‘At least you can show me how it works!’
He stomped back puffing smoke from the fag clenched in his teeth. I was not about to be deterred by the look of utter scorn on his face.
On tiptoes and stretched to my full height of five feet four and one eighth inches I struggled to reach the door lock. I was probably going to need some sort of hop-up to get inside.
“I’m sorry mate,’ I said shaking my head, 'this… this lorry is far too big. I can’t possibly drive something that big. Don’t you have anything smaller? Can't I have one of these?' I said indicating no particular van in the line-up.
Using his finger and thumb he flicked the butt of his cigarette into the litter-strewn grass growing up the chain link fencing. He then lit another. He sucked in greedily and then blew smoke in my face. With the cigarette wobbling between his lips he said.
‘You could have had one of those mate... but this was the one you booked.’
I did my best to commit to memory the lecture he conveyed with as much enthusiasm as a bad teacher. I settled for the basics, such as: where to find the fuel filler cap and that I must only ever put diesel into the tank and never petrol… how to find reverse gear… and lastly and most importantly, how to lower the driver’s seat?
Leaving me feeling like an abandoned child he turned his back on me and walked away shaking his head.
I solved the problem of getting up into the lorry by taking a running jump at the beast and snatching at the grab rail by the door of the cab.
The steering wheel felt as big as a Ships Wheel. I was horrified to see there were no less than twelve gears. Crap!
I turned the key. The engine fired up first turn. I eased my foot down on the accelerator and felt the seat beneath my bottom tremble. The engine sounded like a restless volcano. After considerable crunching and grinding of metal and having reversed into the chain-link fence twice I eventually found a gear that propelled the beast forwards travelling at a relatively sedate momentum. That would have to do. I thought that I might be in second! Steering the huge animal out of the yard I was imagining all manner of disasters lying in wait on the 300-mile road trip.
Fifteen minutes later having made the entire journey using only two gear positions I managed to reverse the truck through the gates of Holly Cottage. I turned off the engine and sighed.
My initial thoughts about this lorry being far too big and capable of consuming two entire households of stuff were about to be confirmed as pure unscientific folly.
After half filling the truck I discovered that the occasional boot sales and frequent dump runs had been monumentally inefficient in trimming excess from our bloated homestead. The amount of stuff that Julie and I had accumulated in nine years at Holly Cottage was truly astonishing.
Three hours later, having filled the entire rear of the lorry, I surveyed the amount of stuff still on the driveway. I had the contents of three garden buildings and the garage to find room for.
Scratching my head made no discernable difference to the problem. There was a forest of potted plants, stone statues, stone planters, plus boxes and boxes of plumbing bits, scaffolding, planks of wood… the list went on…. Motivated by spite and determined no bugger was going to get another penny out of me I began ramming stuff in the van. The banks when they slunk in after we were gone were welcome to the cobwebs and the dead flies. Everything else was coming down to Devon. What we couldn’t fit in on this trip would be stowed and locked in the garage and collected another day.
Julie, Robbie, Daniel, and my brother and his wife, who lived just next door, were chatting on the driveway when I went back inside the house to check to see if we had left anything behind. Stripped of its contents my home for the past nine years felt eerily creepy. It was as if we had never lived here.
I walked into the lounge and looked down at the chipboard flooring that I’d lain soon after we moved in having discovered the floorboards and the joists were alive with woodworm and decayed with dry rot. The carpet I had rolled up and stowed in the back of the lorry.
On the edge of an emotional meltdown I strayed through each room fighting to breath past what felt like a painful rock caught in my throat.
I was fearful for the future and grieving for my loss. As poor as church mice we were about to venture into the unknown and that scared the hell out of me.
I found myself upstairs. Funny the things you notice when a room has been stripped of what made it what it was. The crayon marks left on the walls by my children, the knocks and digs in the woodwork on the landing, odd bits of Lego in the bottom of a cupboard, stickers of fairies on a window. I ran my fingers over the series of lines cut into the doorframe. I fought to get air past that painful lump in my throat. I could hear the others laughing in the garden. I brushed the back of my hand across my eyes and looked closer at the marks that represented how much our children had grown in a single year. I wondered if it were ever possible to eradicate the spirit of a person from a space they had come to love? Leaving this house was like leaving my children behind.
My heart was not in this. It was all too painful. I wanted to be outside with the others. I went back downstairs to the reception room that led directly off the front door. I paused with my hand on the door latch and looked back along the narrow corridor that led out
to the kitchen. My feet carried me unbidden out to the back of the house where I routinely inspected every cupboard and pulled out every drawer. I crossed to the window where I would no longer be able to watch the birds feeding as I ate breakfast, and stared at the empty peanut feeders hanging from the Cotoneaster tree I had planted five years a go.
Everywhere about me was my handiwork. Just a few years ago, before my life went to hell, I had refitted this end of the house. In just seven days, having packed my family off on holiday to Italy, single-handedly, I installed a new kitchen, knocked down and rebuilt walls, removed windows, rearranged and fitted and tiled the bathroom and then built a purpose-built sunroom that led out to the garden.
Absent-mindedly I checked my watch. I wasn’t able to join the others yet. This was painful.
I found myself crossing the yellow flagstone patio passing the raised, semi-circular fishpond and then passing under the pergola with the hanging Wisteria now vibrant with colour to look up at the sign I’d fitted above the door of the twenty-foot long cabin we called: “The Studio.”
I hesitated on the threshold of the wooden building that had served many functions. I paused with one foot on the threshold and poked my head inside. A soft hazy mist blurred my vision. I sniffed and ran the back of my hand across my upper lip. I bit my lip and taking a deep breath I stepped inside.
The tragic figure of a broken man was reflected in the wall of full-length mirrors I’d fitted when Louise wanted this as a practice room for her dancing. I straightened my back and wiped my sleeve across my eyes. The ballet bar I’d fashioned from two-inch curtain poles brought on flashbacks of my daughter wearing a pink leotard with matching leg warmers and pink ballet shoes, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a scrunchy. She was up on her tiptoes practicing her dancing that would one day become her profession.
I sighed as my eyes settled on the corner of the room where I once had my drum kit set up and where Robbie would compose music on his keyboard. I made my way over to the vanity unit I’d installed when Louise needed a bigger bedroom and a place where she could entertain friends.
Outside in the warm sunshine I began to breath normally. I made my way across the lawn and poked my head inside what used to be Robbie’s summer bedroom. The black and purple painted walls had been his idea of a colour scheme. Blobs of Blue Tack attached to the walls tugged at my heart. A cloak of sadness felt suffocating. I questioned why I was putting myself through this. It was as if I were paying my last respects to a deceased loved one. I was now almost at the far end of the garden. Sounding like a wind chime I could hear the gentle tinkling of the brook that ran across the far end of the property. I looked up into the canopy of the tall Victoria plum tree that attracted the wasps in August. There would be a bumper crop this year, but not for us. I came to the dog kennels that I’d built at the back of the garden. They pens were silent now. There was a time when my approach would be greeted with excited barking and wagging tails. I turned my head in time to see a frog leap into the clear ruining water of the brook.
Turning to my left I swung back the gate that led out to the woods. It squealed in surprise at the assault on its creaking hinges. I crossed the wooden bridge over the summer dry ditch. The deciduous trees were in the process of upheaval. Small saplings that may not have expected to survive, free of the choking shadow of the giant Horse Chestnuts that lay like fallen warriors, struck down in the storms of October 87 reached up for the sky. Among these I could see the young of the stricken trees, Mother Nature resisting the might of the elements.
The ancient oak tree had survived the carnage, but not quite the tree house I’d built in the lower branches. Robbie had made a horror film out here using the new high-spec video camera we’d bought him for his eighteenth birthday. The cast was his family, plus a few press-ganged friends. Louise got to be the murder victim complete with fake blood. I wasn’t to know it at the time that Robbie would one day turn that latent talent into a successful filmmaking career.
I stopped revolving in giddying circles looking up at the blue sky through the canopy of leaves and closed my eyes. In the whisper of the wind I could hear my kids laughing. Louise shrieked at Daniel who had wanted to introduce her to the worm he had befriended. Then there was silence. I listened harder. There… as faint as gossamer beyond the rustle of the leaves I could hear my children calling. “Coming ready or not.”
In my minds eye I saw Daniel. He might have been around aged eight. He was wearing the red and white leather Yamaha jacket and matching crash helmet, and was astride the tiny Yamaha motorcycle that we’d bought him for Christmas. With the throttle fully open and with his face gripped with the determination that he was known for he was racing around the dirt tracks and over the wooden ramps that he and I had made last year.
This magical place was where armed with nature books; he and I tracked down and identified bugs and small mammals, and birds, and wild flowers…. This was where we exercised the dogs and planted spring bulbs. These shaded pathways represented more than the passage of our feet. They embodied the drama of my children at play. These woods were much more than a copse of trees and shrubs and muddy pools. This place was embroidered with the passage of their childhood, marked out as special times, cherished times, and never forgotten.
This place… this awesome arena was no longer ours. Like our home, it had been taken from us. Like fallen leaves, over time, these memories would be reduced to dust.
Right now these woods made me want to cry.
I turned my head. My children were calling me. Not a whisper this time.
‘Dad! Are you coming?’ It was Daniel.
I brushed away a tear and hurried back to the house.
The others gathered on the driveway were waiting to go.
My brother Ben and his wife said they would come down soon for a holiday… real soon.
I dusted off my hands… I hugged Ben… kissed Alice. We were done.
Leaving Holly cottage, our dream house was tough on all of us. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Julie waiting in her car, the engine running, when I climbed aboard the truck. I held down the triple-horn and waved at Ben and Alice. They waved back.
It was midday and after a great deal of crunching and grinding I rammed the stick into first gear. The huge truck lurched out into the nearside lane of the A23 and watching through my wing mirror, I was relieved to see that that Julie had tucked the Nissan Bluebird in behind me. I began to relax a little.
The sky was a vast blue blanket of infinite hope. I popped a couple of liquorice allsorts in my mouth, pressed down on the gas pedal and frowned at the sound of furniture jostling about in the back of the truck.
The drive down to Moors Cottage proved to be unremarkable. Even swinging the huge truck around the hairpin bend at the foot of the hill I managed with consummate ease.
With the lorry parked on the driveway, Julie, Robbie, Daniel, and I set about offloading it and by eight o clock that evening we were done, but knackered.
In the kitchen, it took me five attempts to get the temperamental Aga to abandon its resistance. I could now get some hot food on the go and heat the water.
Midnight: Within seconds of my head hitting the pillow I was asleep.
The following morning, anxious to hit the road before the traffic built up, I was up and about at first light. I needed to get the hire lorry back before I incurred additional charges.
After a hurried breakfast of toast and marmalade, I went into our bedroom and said goodbye to Julie who grunted from under the covers.
When I swung the truck out onto the hill, the sky was overcast. I could sense rain was on the way.
With no weight in the back, the lorry seemed to fly along and once on the motorway. I unwound a little.
I steered the lorry through the gates and into a parking bay, turned off the engine blew through my cheeks. I felt the cab tremble under my seat. I jumped down from the cab and made my way over to the office,
which, as expected was closed. I popped the keys through the letterbox as instructed and walked out to the Transit parked up in the road. I was relieved to see no one had broken into it.
It felt odd driving something so small as the Transit back to Devon, a journey I imagined I would never have to do again.
I couldn’t have been more wrong!