by Laura Beatty
Laura Beatty
United Kingdom
Pollard
2008, EN
Pollard tells the story of Anne, a bag lady, seen in the town as one of the older ones from ‘la la land’. Long ago, when she was fifteen, she ran away and made her life alone in the woods. It is her narrative that the reader hears, as Anne survives her first winter. She makes a shelter with her own hands, and decorates it; she forages for things to eat, experiences the pangs of love, watches the foxes and the deer and the changing seasons as the years go by. And in the wood there are other voices: the forest itself, the night, a man with a gun, boys splashing in pools…and the sound of distant chainsaws, heralding footpaths under the trees and walkways in the canopy. Laura Beatty has a gift for empathy and for challenging the reader. This is writing of the highest calibre.
Prologue
There was a wood once.
Just itself to begin with, turned inwards, filtering light and meditating on the seeds spinning down from its twigs to the tangle of its floor. Birds, wildlife.
Later, someone found it, defined it. “Wood for 800 swine.” – “3 shillings for the custom of the wood.” Used it. Gridded out, like a town, and its quarters named. Then it was cut into rides, hunted, managed, grazed, chopped about, foraged, felled, filled in again.
Now it’s a country park. Paintballing, archery. Rabbits, rats, squirrels, vermin mostly. And it’s where the runaways go. They run patrols every now and then, of course, and the Ranger’s pretty vigilant, but it’s a big place and if a kid doesn’t want to be found…
And the town’s right there, playing grandmother’s footsteps with the wood. There’s a scrubby path now, to the nearest housing estate. It’s meant to be an up-and-coming area, industry parks, logistics, 120,000 houses over the next twenty years. But it makes no difference. It’s like a bucket’s leaking. They pour out everywhere, the homeless, the misfits, the drifters. You can’t plug the holes fast enough. Riffraff. Bums. For every house they build there’s someone who can’t live in a building, a new person on the street, or that’s how it seems. If you took a bird’s-eye view, you’d see them blowing about the streets like litter, the same lost faces in the same places, moving around to rules of their own, rules that are difficult to understand. My patch. My pitch. Move it. You could mark them on a map if you wanted. They are as constant as the Eleanor Cross or the shoe factory.
Have a look round.
By the precinct, 10.30 p.m., boys from the estate. Just bad boys some of them but you can’t tell, who’s staying out tonight, who’s going home, who’s going down the plug faster than whoever else. That was Lola once, with the long legs and the sideways smile – someone else now – over by Marks, with a local policeman, giving it a bit of mouth. You’ll end up shagged, bagged and binned if you don’t look out, I’m just telling you, I’m not shouting. And she did. All three. So that was a short story.
Under the colonnade, Reuben taking over from Bucky. Tom, Dick and Harry on the bench by the canal, their chaos of cans, their glazed and bursting faces.
Or this one, always round the church somewhere, on the benches in the little bit of green at the back, part park, part graveyard. Anne, they call her, no family name known, age uncertain. She served a prison sentence once. Caught religion, like a cold, off the prison chaplain. Take no notice. Just walk quickly past. She mouths things, some strange words sometimes, from the Bible or off the billboards, and then there’s all the bags she lumps around. Useful for litter collection. She’s good at that. Otherwise no one at home.
♦
Meanwhile, at the bottom of its hill the wood waits, and watches the town’s bulging advance. It accepts the tides of people who pulse to and fro under its branches. It has little choice. Witness, it whispers, its leaves interlocking, witness the change. On the cut timber, stacked in pyramids down the felled rides, you can count the years. Trees keep time inside out, and in circles. But the wood’s older than that.
We are still growing, the trees tell each other. Despite everything. We are still working with water and with light. Breathing with many mouths. Balancing with exactness, and without thinking, the ratio of roots to shoots, calculating die-back.
Witness, the trees say, as the years go by. There are no similarities between a man and a tree. As far as we can see.
♦
And separate from both the town and the wood, aware of nothing, except her own dark limbo, Anne shuffles about the churchyard, under the scabby planes. Straining inwards, to where she holds her history, in time-rings of her own. She knows it’s there. She can feel it, though she has forgotten its detail.
So, no light for Anne, except what comes from a coloured plastic lighter that she holds up in moments of distress, depressing the gas flow and flicking the flint with practised ease. Her fingers are hooked like roots, purplish most days. It is amazing that she can operate something as finicky as the little cog on the front of the lighter, the cog that controls the flame. She is worried obviously that the lighter will run out, so she adjusts and adjusts. She only has the one. Lighten our darkness. She is a religious person and it seems to give her comfort, the flame.
Otherwise how much of it do you believe, what she mouths or mutters to the volunteers in the soup kitchen? I lived in a ditch for three months, she says. They can’t keep her indoors, that much is certain. She leaves every flat, every room she’s been given. Slept in someone else’s hut on the allotments until she was turfed out.
Three months in a ditch and I never felt a thing, she says. Who knows if it is true.
Suffer the little children, that’s another of her sayings.
Don’t even ask.
I can’t see the wood for the trees, Anne says, picking up a cigarette butt off the pavement outside Caffe Nero, gathering up her bags again. Not often lucid.
What have you got in your bags, Anne?
The sins of the world, she says, ramming the butt down into this bag or that.
Now that’s a heavy thing to carry.
And then she’s up and off again, lolloping down the main street, past Marks. She has a characteristic walk, raising her knees a little, as though her feet were catching in something all the time, as though she was walking through a bog. At Top Shop she stops by the window and looks at the mannequins, dressed for the beach and the disco, bare belly buttons and blue eyelashes. She stops and she rummages again and she holds up the lighter.
She speaks bird. She does speak bird. If you were to catch her on one of her bird days you’d be surprised. She must have all of a dozen different calls, whistled out between the teeth, or lips pursed, or somewhere weird near the back of God knows where.
So maybe.
♦
Beyond Marks she trundles across the road, slow, in front of a blaring bus. There were words once, Anne says unruffled, on the far side. Standing still, among pedestrians, who swivel to look. She can’t remember now. But there was a language once, before the dark came down, before they left her, with the glimmerings of memory and only the lighter to see by. Stumbling about among a jumble of catchphrases.
The world was alive then. You could put your feet down on something solid. You could depend on things to mean something after all.
So that’s what Anne’s doing, as she rootles in the bins, or stops with her lighter aloft, outfacing the commuter traffic. She’s waiting in a blizzard of words, for something to click to a fit. In the beginning, she says to herself, rummaging again, examining every scrap that floats wind-borne down the shabby streets. Blair, Going Going Gone, she reads. Back to School, and Over the Hedge. She makes her way down the gravel path to the church door. Leave not a stone unturned. So she doesn’t. But it’s not here, whatever she’s hunting. It’s gone, she knows that.
♦
Then, one day, while it was still dark, there was a fox. Just a fox licking like a stinking flame around the bins behind the bakery. And it flicked something matching in her head. So she followed it, although it was quicker than her and was soon out of sight, and she has been going ever since. Slow going, because she has her bags with her, six bags, all from Mothercare. She leaves the churches, St Giles and St Peter’s, and she lopes on flat feet, down the painted residential streets, taking a foxy direction, through back alleys of setts, scrubby with buddleia, round corners, out along a roaring dual carriageway. Over the bridge, and she’s never been this far before, and over a river and all the bad boys lounging on the bridge call out to her as she passes. Give us a light, Annie. Go on give us a light. We know you’ve got one. She puts her head down and pulls the bags tight and scuttles past.
Through the new estates. So many houses, so hard and so blank, and further out, the industry parks, brick and tarmac acres with familiar names. Foxhill, so that’s hopeful, the Willows, Sedge Mere. And as she walks, reading the signs, the dawn suggests itself to the urban sky, which has its own lights and doesn’t mind either way. Whatever, it says, shrugging in-turned shoulders. But Anne sees and somewhere inside her something lifts reciprocally and in gratitude. A connection of sorts. And it is in the murk of this, that she makes out, at last, a shape more like herself, where it could be she belongs. A shape that isn’t flat or square or angled, but like that for instance! – as she comes to a mile of chain-link fencing, broken down in part, behind which heave up the forms of something sloped, a curve, a rise. Hill, she says to herself, out loud and with conviction. That’s definite. So she slips through the fence to the foot of the hill and she climbs, toiling upwards, with her bags tearing because the ground is sharp after all, though it doesn’t matter because the dawn has begun, and when it breaks, at last, all will be mended.
She helps herself up with her hands. The ground is so many sided, so hard-edged, so metal and strange, and pools of sludge to surprise you, and meanwhile, the sun has one leg over the horizon now and all is waking to its light. The sky lightest blue and, Anne sees, filled with gulls, and on every side, as far as the eye can see, the ground is grey and whitish and rust-coloured. Hills of no colour and, beyond the hills, houses. Winter, she remembers, although the sun says summer, which is puzzling. And then, she thinks, be sure the green will come at last. She’s seen the ground dead before, she remembers that too, only that was under a dead sky, and the green still came. She’d never known the green not to come at last. On top of the hill, she settles as best she can, on the side of a fridge, with her back against the hillock of a filing cabinet. She arranges the mangled bags around her and looks out over the hills of rubbish, and the gulls scream and pick, as if they too were blown litter, and she waits.
Any minute now, Anne. Any bloody minute.
♦
The wood sees the lights of the town go out with the dawn, the dull sunset glow that hangs in its sky all night replaced by immediate morning. It could see Anne too – on top of her rubbish mountain, her back half turned, looking at her salvation only peripherally – if it wanted. It could see the toy cars drive up and the people get out, see Anne strain towards its outline, turning her head like an owl to ask herself, what’s that, while a pin man with a megaphone burps instruction and two others mount the rubbish matter-of-fact, as the law always is. It could see Anne, struggling with her darkness, face the wood now, looking at its furred edges at the suggestion of its own dark, which she almost recognises, almost names. It could watch her inevitable and forcible removal, undignified, eyes still on the wood, until the rubbish rises against her sightline.
♦
The wood does see, but its concern is with life, not the individual. It doesn’t matter. There’s always another time, for someone else, if not for you.
♦
We just witness, witness, witness.
Growing Up
Hands were a problem. She couldn’t look at her hands. She just practised making petite gestures like the ones her sister made, but with her eyes shut. What are you doing Anne? Nothing. I’m not doing anything. Well you look daft with your eyes shut feeling up your own face. So, keep it to yourself, Anne would think. Keep your mouth shut Anne, she said to herself. And she opened her eyes and shut her mouth and sat still to avoid drawing attention to herself. Which was impossible.
Suzie’s hands though, Suzie’s hands were pretty like little birds. Never still, always fluttering up and down, nestling in her hair, skimming her brand-new bosoms, sucking and sipping at the corners of her mouth. Up and down, up and down, they had lives quite of their own, so busy. Anne wanted hands like that, hands like little bald birds, tippety-tapping like that with their lacquer beaks. But hands weren’t her only problem. The shared bedroom was a problem because it was never far before Anne bumped into the bed or the dressing table, or knocked the lamp or barged the wardrobe.
Anne get your big bum out of that bleeding window you’re making the room freezing, for instance. What do you want looking out of the window at this time of the morning?
She wanted to watch things. She wanted to watch her father for a start. She wouldn’t have minded if he’d looked up and seen her but he was too busy wobbling with the first turn of the pedals, shoving his dinner in the bag over his shoulder. Everything was always difficult for her dad. Everything was against him – balancing the bike at the top of the hill, and the bag, whose flap was always the wrong way, fumbling at it in the stingy half-light, on his way to the poultry plant. The back of his neck was plucked chicken-raw and he moved his head with the motion of the bike forward and back, forward and back, the bike zigzagging just like a chicken did, till he got under way. She was a big girl now, boy was she a big girl. She shouldn’t have needed a father any more. She knew that. Bye Annie. Bye Dad. Be a good girl.
Nothing, not even that any more.
But if her father offered no companionship, that was not the case with the moon. The moon kept an eye on Anne. She would have settled for the moon, if Suzie hadn’t complained. She liked the moon because it had a white face like she did and because it knew how to make itself small. Bye moon. Bye Anne, have a nice day.
So she sat in the window, filling it right up, and she watched things and Suzie slept, not like a little bird but like a little pig. That was Anne’s secret, how horrible Suzie looked when she was asleep. Her mouth round and glistening and sometimes there was dribble on the pillow. And the noise that came out of it. Pig noise. Anne adjusted her shoulders in the frame and watched. She watched the red eye of her dad’s back light close in the fog. She watched the sky yawn itself wide awake over the wood at a pace she recognised and she breathed, because there wasn’t enough air to go round in the little room once Suzie had had her fill – or she would have breathed if Suzie hadn’t interrupted. What are you doing Anne? Nothing Suzie. Sorry Suzie. Well do nothing somewhere else. So she pulled in her head and backed into the room like every morning just about and like every morning she knocked something, inevitably, off the crowded bedside table, or the dressing table, or the shelf; nail polish probably. Clumsy tart.
Suzie had bad language when they were by themselves. She had a big mouth for a small person Suzie did. Anne did not like bad language. She found it offensive. When Suzie had gone, Anne sat by herself at the dressing table and opened out her big hands and put her head on one side like she’d seen Suzie do and mouthed the names of the nail polish. She had no idea whether she pronounced them right but she liked the sound, her private litany. Pink Two Timer, Gilty Party, Dusky Plum, S Cherry Zade. That’s a nice colour Suzie. That’s what she would say, one day, very matter-of-fact. Paint my nails for me Suzie. Holding out her hand again, the fingers extended, like now. Although when it came to it she never actually asked, although she still could, one day.
One day was Anne’s favourite day. One day I’ll have Bitter Chocolate, Moroccan Moon, Hi Ho Silver Lining. What are you doing Anne? You look like a goldfish, opening and shutting y
our mouth. Someone had sneaked up on her, propping up the doorway with their hands in their pockets. Mr Smartypants. Michael or John or Connor. They fancied themselves. She had God knows how many brothers and sisters and they all fancied themselves. Nothing, any of the above. Nothing, everyone else who’s asking. Anne wasn’t doing anything.
Bath the baby for me Anne wash the pots don’t just sit there. Get out the way are you listening to me do something useful do the tatties for me get the pizza out the freezer if I have to tell you one more time.
Couldn’t Suzie do something for a change?
No Suzie couldn’t. Suzie was busy for chrissake. She was on the phone. She was watching her nails dry. Get Anne to do it; Anne’s just parked in front of the telly box. She’s doing nothing as usual.
That was how Anne’s life went. One day after another and when her dad came back from work in the evening, that was the same too, pretty much. They talked about the new abattoir, mostly, when they did talk. He worried he should shift over. Karen’s Lewis was starting at the abattoir, did they know, or Paul’s Mary or Richard and Judy’s Joseph, Pat and Sarah’s Julie, Tim and Rita’s Michael. It was always a matter of interest and surprise to her parents when someone joined the abattoir and every day just about there was someone new; whole battalions of people setting out in white Wellingtons with steel toecaps and chemical-warfare boiler suits eager to cut throats and chop meat and hose down concrete with disinfectant. In Anne’s mind the abattoir stretched to a distant horizon busy like an ant heap with the children of her parents’ friends. She imagined it like Christmas, all noise and white and red. Must have been a party.
Then there would be no conversation except for the telly. Then her dad would say – it’s a small world. This made Anne feel uncomfortable so she sat very still and tried not to feel things pressing on her. She did not doubt her father. She was a trusting person and besides you couldn’t say the house was anything but small. Why would the world be any different?