From Something Old

by Alexander, Nick

From the kitchen, I heard a peal of Amy’s laughter. The sound brought a smile to my face, and I decided, in that moment, that this would prove to have been a good idea after all. She’d laughed a lot when I’d first met her, but I was realising, only now, that laughter had become a rarity for both of us. In fact, the only time I could remember either of us laughing in recent times was the drunken meal we’d had with Ant and Heather.

  When I returned outside for more plates, I saw them silhouetted against the flaming night sky. There was a rickety old wooden bench on the far side of the track and they were seated on it, looking out. The sky was so impressive that I decided to join them for a moment.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked when I got there, and they twisted in their seats to look up at me.

  ‘Um?’ Amy said.

  ‘I heard you laughing at something,’ I told her. ‘I love to hear you laugh like that.’

  ‘Oh, I asked her what you do around here for kicks,’ Ant said. ‘That’s funny, apparently.’

  ‘You look at that,’ I said, nodding at the sky. It was turning purple along the tops of the mountains, and a deep red to the right above the fields.

  ‘Amazing, huh?’ Amy said.

  ‘Yeah, it’s pretty cool,’ Ant said. ‘But I’m not sure it’s gonna keep me entertained all week.’

  Despite an early night, I woke up late. A strip of sunshine was leaking through the gap beneath the door and I could hear children’s shrieks coming from the pool.

  I lay there for a moment in the darkness, slowly coming to, and then, realising that Amy was beside me, and concerned that I couldn’t hear any adult voices outside, I got up.

  The sunlight, when I opened the door, was blinding, and I had to hunt down my sunglasses before it was physically possible to step outside.

  All three kids were in the jacuzzi and Heather was sitting on the side, dangling her feet in the water and reading a magazine. She was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and an off-the-shoulder T-shirt.

  ‘Oh, good morning!’ she exclaimed, looking up. ‘I was worried you’d died in your sleep.’

  I blinked, a little shocked by her off-key remark. ‘Late, is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Ten thirty,’ she said. ‘We’ve been up since eight, haven’t we, kids?’

  ‘Where did that come from?’ I asked, indicating the pink lilo the kids were playing on.

  ‘Ant found it in the outhouse,’ Heather explained. ‘There were two, actually, but the green one had a puncture, so . . .’

  ‘Is Ben being good?’

  Heather nodded and smiled vaguely. ‘As gold,’ she said.

  ‘And where is Ant?’ I asked, looking around.

  ‘Oh, he’s around,’ Heather said. Then, ‘Look, have either of you ever managed to get phone reception? Because I think it’s going to drive him insane pretty soon.’

  ‘Amy did, briefly,’ I said. ‘Ben? Where was it Mum managed to get a phone signal?’

  ‘Down the track,’ Ben said, pointing. ‘Where the trees are.’

  ‘Only barely, though,’ Amy said.

  I turned to see her standing in the doorway, shading her eyes with her arm. ‘It picked up for, like, a minute. But I couldn’t even listen to my voicemail. Why, what’s up? Does someone need to make a call?’

  ‘It’s just Ant,’ Heather explained. ‘He doesn’t like to feel cut off.’

  ‘Came to the wrong place then, didn’t he?’ Amy laughed. She started to turn towards the interior, then hesitated and asked, ‘Coffee, anyone?’

  Just as she returned with two mugs of coffee, Ant appeared as well, still waving his phone around in the air. ‘Nada,’ he said.

  ‘Wow!’ Amy joked. ‘Speaking the lingo already, are we?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Ant said.

  ‘It’s Spanish,’ Heather explained. ‘Nada. It’s Spanish for “nothing”, right?’ She glanced at me and I nodded.

  ‘Oh,’ Ant said. ‘Right. And what’s Spanish for “no bloody phone signal” then, clever clogs?’ he asked her.

  ‘Sin señal de teléfono,’ Amy said. She put her mug down on the table and circled the pool to join Ant. ‘Try over there,’ she said, resting one hand in the small of his back and pointing down the track. ‘I got a signal there yesterday, briefly.’

  Once Ant had headed off, she returned to the table. ‘If not, we could maybe take him into town later,’ she suggested. ‘I totally get how frustrating it is.’

  ‘We probably need to get some bits anyway,’ Heather said.

  ‘You mean food, or . . . ?’

  ‘Yeah, you know, just this and that,’ Heather said.

  ‘Oh, I think we’re OK for food,’ Amy said. ‘I’ve got the next three meals planned, at least.’

  ‘There’s still a few bits I’d like to get,’ Heather said again. ‘There are things Ant likes, his little habits. You know how it is.’

  ‘Non-vegan things,’ I said, explaining it for Amy, who seemed to be missing the point.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, of course. Sorry.’

  ‘Just some proper milk and some cheese and stuff. You know.’

  ‘Sure,’ Amy said again. ‘No problem. There’s a public pool apparently, too. So we could take the kids, maybe. Make an outing of it.’

  They left just after lunch, and for the first time in ten days I found myself alone.

  Initially, I went to lie down, but when sleep didn’t come I got up again and sat beneath our olive tree. A dragonfly was flitting over the surface of the pool and the cicadas were making so much noise it was on the verge of annoying – something I would never have thought was possible.

  I thought of Ant and his phone addiction, and I’ll admit that in that instant I judged him for it. He’d been here less than twelve hours, after all. How urgent could it be?

  But then I made an effort to understand him. I thought about the fact that, like me, he had his own business. Maybe he was waiting for important news. I remembered that his mother was elderly and lived alone. Perhaps he was worried about her.

  I thought of Dad then, and wondered if there was any news of his romance.

  Despite the heat, I decided to go for a walk. I felt pretty sure that I could find a sweet spot somewhere with a phone signal even if nobody else could. And if I could solve that, it would make things easier for Ant, too.

  I packed the e-reader I’d bought for the trip and a bottle of water; I slipped on a T-shirt and a hat and set off.

  I didn’t have to walk far before my phone picked up – in fact, no further than the same group of trees Amy had mentioned. I sat down on the ground in the shade and called Dad, but there was no answer. He was out, and I wondered if that was a good sign.

  The four trees were situated at the point where the track curved around the ‘corner’ of the hill our house had been carved into, and there was a gentle breeze coming from the north that felt good. I pulled my e-reader from my bag, but I’d forgotten to charge the damn thing. Long live paper, I thought, returning it to my little backpack.

  I swigged at the bottle of water and fiddled with my phone instead. But though there were two bars of reception, there seemed to be no data connection. This meant no emails, no Facebook, no Guardian . . .

  I wondered if there was anyone I needed to call, but the truth was that, other than Dad, I’d got out of the habit of speaking on the phone. Nearly all of my communications happened via text messages or emails these days. In fact, if I did get an incoming call, as likely as not I’d ignore it and wait for the follow-up text message to arrive instead. I wondered when actual calls had come to feel like an intrusion.

  I remembered when phones had just been phones and felt a bit melancholic for the calmer, simpler times when you could be unaware for hours of everything that was happening in the world.

  I slipped it back into my bag, took another swig of water, and wiped my brow on my sleeve.

  I looked out over the plain – it was shimmering in the heat. A single, unreasonably cute cloud – like a cloud in an
animated kid’s film – was moving slowly towards the mountains, casting a shadow over the countryside as it wafted by.

  A movement caught my eye – it was a beetle, dragging what looked like a rabbit dropping. It passed in front of me, right to left, pausing to rest or to change its grip from time to time. I wondered why it wanted that dropping so badly. It looked like bloody hard work.

  I thought of my own life then, and how hard I worked, and wondered what I was striving for. I checked the time on my phone and wondered why I’d done so. It was 15.32, but so what? What possible meaning did 15.32 have here, today?

  I thought about time, and how important it had become in my life. Every job I undertook seemed to take longer than I expected, and the available time was always slightly less than I hoped. I seemed to be living in a perpetual state of negotiation with myself, constantly checking the time, calculating how long whatever task I was doing was taking, and judging if that was acceptable or not, and whether I should be moving on to the next thing yet. Even just sitting here now, thinking, felt illicit, as if someone might come and ‘catch me’ doing nothing and tell me off.

  And the weeks, the months, the years . . . Everyone tells you that time goes faster as you get older, but no amount of warning can prepare you for the reality. In my twenties I used to pray for Friday to come around. In my thirties I’d be surprised that the end of the month had already arrived. But nowadays it was the years. It was spring, summer, winter again, and I’d think, Winter? Again? When the fuck did that happen?

  And Ben, above all Ben, that special time went by so fast. He’d stopped mispronouncing marmalade at some point, and I hadn’t even noticed when that was. It had been so cute, as well . . . When had he first pulled on his own shoes? When had he told his first joke? When was the first time he’d failed to care that I was home from work?

  A raggedy cat with bald, flea-bitten ears appeared. It sniffed around one of the trees and then came to sit right in front of me.

  To start with, I thought it was after something – food, or caresses, or something. But it seemed just to want to sit beside me. Then again, perhaps it was nothing to do with me at all. Maybe it just wanted the same shade, view and gentle breeze that I was enjoying.

  I stared at the back of the cat’s head for a while and then looked out again at the scenery. A big bird – a buzzard or an eagle, I couldn’t tell which – was circling. ‘You want to watch yourself,’ I told the cat. ‘Or that bird will have you for breakfast.’

  The cat turned then, and looked at me, and I swear it nodded before it turned back to look out at the bird.

  I thought about the dog I’d had as a child. He’d been middle-aged when I was born, so by the time I’d got to Ben’s age, he’d been ancient. An old, smelly bulldog called Butch. I’d loved that dog to bits – in fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that Butch had been my best friend. I’d always intended to get Ben a dog, but the years had slipped by and it hadn’t happened and then suddenly we had a cat. And Ben seemed to love him just fine, so . . .

  I remembered sitting with Butch in our back yard, and at other times on Whitby beach. Sometimes I’d put my arm around him and talk to him, and I was convinced that he understood everything I said. Sometimes, if I’d been told off, I used to bury my face in his fur and cry salty childish tears. But most of the time he was just there, beside me, a witness to whatever was happening, a witness who made the moment real, like this cat.

  The strangest feeling rose up in me, a sort of flashback to being a child, to the long summer holidays, to the beach, to riding a bike aimlessly around, to poking at ants with a stick and just . . . Just what? Just being, perhaps?

  I felt suddenly overcome by sadness, by a sort of grief for the loss of my childhood. It had slipped away unnoticed, and I’d failed to mark its passing; I’d failed to grieve for the loss. But now the moment was upon me.

  When exactly had it gone? Had it been when Butch died, or when school ended? Was it when I started working for a living, or when Mum died? When had I lost the ability to just sit and be? When had I started counting the hours but letting the years slip by unnoticed? And how the hell had I got to forty without noticing?

  My eyes were watery, blurring the landscape. ‘Come here, will you?’ I said to the cat, and though it turned and glanced at me again, though it blinked slowly at me, in what looked to me like an expression of compassion, it didn’t move. It was too busy sitting there, looking out. It was too busy being present in the moment.

  Altogether, I sat there almost two hours, until the cat walked off, and the feeling, like the cloud, drifted away. The moment became like any other and I started to feel hot and uncomfortable and bored, so I stood and started to walk back to the house.

  But as I walked, another sensation rose within me, a strange sense of rage at the way my precious hours on this planet were being wasted. Something needed to change, I thought. And perhaps, even though I couldn’t even begin to think what that meant, everything needed to change.

  By the time they all returned, it was nine and the sun was setting.

  The kids were babbling excitedly – something about a pig and a fish – but as they were all shouting at once, I couldn’t really make head nor tail of it.

  Ant was carrying four big pizza boxes and, for some reason, he handed them to me, as if he’d just arrived at my place for dinner.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I was wondering if I was meant to be cooking. Did you manage to get phone reception?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah, it works everywhere except here.’

  Over pizza, which was a bit limp, but which having actual cheese on it tasted like a treat to my part-time vegan palate, they told me about their day out.

  They’d explored Orce first, and it was there that they’d seen the piglet.

  ‘It was just running around,’ Lucy explained. ‘It was really friendly.’

  ‘Like a dog,’ Ben said.

  ‘It licked my hand,’ Sarah said.

  ‘I was worried it might bite her,’ Heather told me. ‘It did seem to have quite big teeth.’

  ‘An old local guy told me it was safe,’ Amy explained. ‘He’s a friendly pig, apparently. Tame.’

  ‘And why is there a pig running around?’

  ‘It’s a tradition, I think,’ Amy said. ‘The whole town feeds it scraps. They let it run free.’

  ‘How cute,’ I said.

  ‘And then at the end of August they have a party, and you know . . .’

  I frowned at Amy.

  ‘A spit roast,’ she said, winking.

  ‘Oh God, they eat the poor fucker?’ Ant asked.

  ‘Ant!’ Heather said. ‘Language!’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I was actually trying to avoid saying that in front of you know who,’ Amy said, nodding at Sarah.

  ‘Can we go?’ Ben asked. ‘Can we go to the pig party?’ He’d clearly missed the point somewhere along the way.

  ‘No, I’m afraid it’s after we’ve left,’ Amy said.

  ‘How sad!’ I said, with irony.

  ‘I want a pig,’ Ben said. ‘Can I have a pig when we get home? It’s way more fun than a cat. It could come to school with me and everything.’

  ‘And there were fish in the pool, too,’ Amy said.

  ‘In the swimming pool?’

  ‘Yeah, a lot of wildlife in Spain,’ Ant commented. ‘Pigs in the streets, fish in the pool. Goats on the road.’

  ‘I was scared they were going to bite, too,’ Heather said. ‘They were all a bit deformed.’

  ‘The goats?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the fish, silly,’ she said.

  ‘They were sort of Chernobyl fish,’ Ant said.

  ‘So, the pool is freshwater, right?’ Amy explained. ‘There’s a hot spring that just, like, bubbles up at one end.’

  ‘It’s lovely and warm,’ Heather said.

  ‘But years and years ago, someone put some fish in it. And they’ve reproduced, so there are load
s of them. But they’re all a bit inbred. So they’ve got weird heads and lumps and things.’

  ‘Ooh,’ I said, pulling a face.

  ‘But it’s kind of fun, swimming with the fish.’

  ‘And are we talking big fish, or little fish?’

  Ben held up his hands to represent a fish of about four feet in length.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ant laughed. ‘That one was called Jaws, but only Ben saw it. No, they were the size of trout, maybe ten or twelve inches.’

  ‘The biggest one was like this,’ Ben insisted, waving his hands around again. ‘You saw it, Lucy, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lucy said, nodding seriously. ‘That looks about right, Ben.’

  ‘But you had a nice time?’ I asked. ‘No one got mortally wounded by the pig or the fish?’

  ‘It was lovely,’ Amy said. ‘We have to go back there together. The pool’s pretty big, and free. The water’s crystal clear and no chlorine or anything, obviously.’

  ‘Just fish.’

  ‘Exactly. Just fish. And all around it there’s a lawn, so you can just lounge around in the shade of the trees.’

  I glanced at Ant, who nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s cool,’ he said. ‘Phone picks up there, too.’

  I looked at Heather then, and raised an eyebrow. ‘Yes, it was nice,’ she said, smiling falsely, and I wondered what had gone wrong.

  Five

  Heather

  I had not had a particularly nice day in Orce, as it happens.

  Amy had driven us into town. She’d parked in the centre, and I’d looked out at the deserted streets. It was 2.20 p.m. and the car thermometer, I noticed, read forty degrees. ‘Here we are,’ she said.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to go to the pool first?’ I suggested. ‘Then we could come back here when it’s cooler. And when the shops are open.’

  ‘Oh,’ Amy said. ‘But we’re here now. The pool’s on the other road, out of town.’ She turned to Ant, who was in the passenger seat. ‘What do you think?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ignore her,’ he said. ‘She’s never happy, that one.’

  ‘That’s unfair!’ I protested. ‘It just makes more sense to do it the other way around because it’s so hot, that’s all I’m saying.’