Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Read online

  About the Book

  ‘There exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.’

  One quiet evening in Salisbury, the peace is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, the lives of five people collide – a flower-seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – all facing their own personal disasters. As one of those lives hangs in the balance, Norris draws the extraordinary voices of these seemingly ordinary people together into a web of love, grief, disenchantment and hope that is startlingly perceptive about the human heart.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Burning Arrow of the Spire

  The Other City

  A River Curling Like Smoke

  1

  2

  3

  4

  As Close to the Stars as Possible

  Deep in the Middle of Nowhere

  The Burning Arrow of the Spire

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Charlie

  We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.

  George Eliot, Middlemarch

  The Burning Arrow of the Spire

  LONG BEFORE THE steep trickle of the Channel widened to make an island of England, before the first settlers arrived and started claiming the land around, laying down tree trunks to make pathways through marshes from ridgeway to mountain to hill, something unusual happened in the green south of Wiltshire. By a trick of the land, the rivers known today as the Wylye and the Ebble and the Nadder and the Bourne, which all ran through this landscape, all found their way into the Avon in the same stretch of flood-prone fields, pitched into one another by the sly gradients of the county lying in front of me this evening. Five rivers met on a wooded plain, and under the weight of that water, an extraordinary thing took place. The startled world, stirred by this confluence of riverways, started to sing bright notes into the blue air. A great chord rang out in the deep heart of England, and feeling welled up through the skin of the water like a shaft of light that breaks through cloud. The earth was awake and alive and amazed by every sensation it experienced.

  Centuries passed, and people found this miracle in the green south of the island, this rare confluence of water giving voice to the song being sung by the world, either by accident as they passed through or drawn by the sound of it. However it happened, people undoubtedly came, and we know they heard the song. They kept trying to put it into words, to make a shape of it.

  The first attempt was Woodhenge. You can still visit. You will find the remains of a wooden circle that someone built in the middle of a clearing, heeding the call, feeling the need to worship. The place is surrounded by trees and hills. There are stone circles intersecting with it. There is a tea room for visitors. The settlers moved on within a few thousand years, looking for some more permanent expression of the feeling in the landscape than wood could provide.

  Stonehenge was what they made next, a few miles to the south. It was a miracle of Egyptian proportions. Great slabs of rock quarried deep in flint and rain of the Welsh hills and barged halfway over the country to stand opaque in the middle of nowhere, an Easter Island marooned on the soft green roll of a hill. People wonder what it was used for. The mystery must have been part of the point. The thing about stone is you don’t get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable. The stone circle gave life to a million ley-line stories that still sprout from the soil around that place today. It created a whole world of imaginings, freedoms, rituals. But the stories and solstices that are part of the Stonehenge myth are only subordinate clauses of a greater phenomenon. They are only new phrases in the song that was born in the rivers, as it seeks and finds other outlets, pouring into new mediums, expressed now in story, behaving like a river pursuing a path of less resistance as it finds its way into the mouths of women and men.

  The next iteration of the song in stone was a cathedral built in the middle of a hill fort. The men and women who worshipped at Stonehenge were long gone by the time Old Sarum was built a few miles to the south. Some other listener must have heard the rivers, understood there was life to be lived here and laid a foundation. Old Sarum, the first city constructed out of that impulse, was a garrison fort whose walls encircled a body of men, beds for them to sleep in, fires that kept them living and the cathedral at the heart of it. As had been the case before, it was the place of worship that best expressed the song in the air and the rhyming human desire to look up, imagine further, see the vastness of the world around and the ideas hidden in the landscape. It was around the cathedral and the sweep of its tower that this new society and its arguments were organised.

  The first cathedral collapsed and was replaced by a second, built on the same spot from many of the same stones. But faith and the army don’t mix well, and it wasn’t long before the church fell out with the soldiers. Tensions rose, the cohabitation of the hill became insupportable, and it was decided the cathedral should relocate. And it is now that this process of stanza following stanza I have been describing reaches its climactic, capstone rhyme. This budding on the vine of flower after flower each successive spring, the growth of form after form like shapes in a coal fire as Woodhenge and Stonehenge and the Old Sarum cathedrals tried to mimic the music of the land around leads now to the apex of our story, as Salisbury Cathedral emerges from these myriad discarded drafts, the best expression of the land around finally soaring up into the air.

  The minutes documenting the meeting where the decision was made to relocate the cathedral are lost, but someone, recognising their absence as a fault in the historical record, has invented a story to stand in their place. The story goes that on the day it was decided the church would leave the hill, the bishop of the second cathedral on Old Sarum took a bow and arrow and stood looking over the land around. He announced he would fire into the landscape below, and wherever the arrow stuck would become the site for the new building. His problem, of course, was the same chauvinism that hobbles most men. When the bishop fired his arrow, by way of reminder that he was not, never had been, never would be in charge of the world beneath his feet, a white hart interceded between the blade and the ground, and the bishop watched, perhaps crestfallen, certainly amazed, as the arrow lodged in its haunches. The startled deer proceeded to run for three miles before expiring in the middle of the floodplain south of Old Sarum where those five rivers met.

  Nowhere could have been harder to build on. Foundations could only be sunk eighteen inches. But the building work began all the same, and over the course of only five thousand years – the blink of an eye in geological terms – the song of the earth had coaxed the men who built their cover versions over the land fourteen miles south from Woodhenge, to Stonehenge, to Old Sarum, to the source of the music itself. It had reeled us in. And they say Christ was a fisher of men.

  Salisbury Cathedral was built laboriously, lovingly. It lay on foundations that should never have held. A spire was added which ought to have fallen, and the pillars at the heart of the nave bowed and sang like a tree after rain, when the rain still falls from the canopy long after the sky has cleared.

  Life welled up in the shadow of the building,
a city that was named New Sarum, though it came eventually to be known as Salisbury. Events of historical importance blushed up in the streets, couples met and were married and grew old together, harvests were good or else failed, falcons nested on the spire, and the invention of the aeroplane meant there had to be a light bulb at the top, which someone sometimes had to climb up and change. House prices rose and kept rising and took flight, drink killed too many, and young men and women fell in love, and some of the sex was good and some was forgettable. The song went on. Five rivers ran together, and the earth sang in celebration at the top of its voice, a music hidden in the details of the everyday, in the footfalls of thousands of locals, the ringing of cash registers, the great soaring dream of the spire.

  And the song sings on, finding a new path of less resistance to the sea and sky.

  Salisbury Cathedral is the most beautiful building I have ever seen. I don’t quite mean the look of the place. Buildings are not beautiful because of their shapes or patterns, the bricks or stones that make them. What are transfixing are the ideas and dreaming and longing they encase. They stand as memorials to the lives of the people who made them, who raised the money to raise the walls, who buried the men who fell from the scaffolding. What I see when I watch Salisbury Cathedral cutting the air is a diagram of prayer, the hope at the centre of my life expressed as the burning arrow of the spire shot into the sky, asking us to look up beyond the everyday, see the size and possibility and quietness of the landscape, and imagine something greater than we are. It asks us to stop walking and think. It demands we look outside ourselves.

  I have stared at that spire every night for a year now, and I think it is the purest picture of the human heart I have seen. It seems to me from this vantage point that the city has been built as an illustration of the way all our ordinary acts, our cups of tea and walks to the postbox and phone bills and potato peelings, are shot through with a heartbreaking and extraordinary love. That there exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the secret meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.

  The Other City

  ONE WAY I bung a bit extra’s the funerals. Cos there’s always flowers at funerals, aren’t there? In my trade you have a bit to do with dead people. Like you have a bit to do with brides and adulterers and all. It’s about extremes, is selling flowers, that’s why they’re such bright colours. That’s when people buy them – something banging, something shit. When I have a busy morning I know it’s either been a car crash or it’s Valentine’s Day and no one’s sent me a card again. I was never the one the nice boys fancied even when I was in school. But what’s a girl to do? I carry on, that’s always been my story.

  I made myself a couple of friends straight off after I got my stall. You don’t get anywhere without regulars. You have to have some steady trade keep you ticking. I did a bit of flower arranging in a couple of churches, charmed some grandmas, charmed some vicars. I shagged a couple of undertakers, and that’s paid off and all. They say it’s the ones you don’t fuck stay loyal, but fucking them’s a fair way of getting their attention, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

  So today I was doing this little old bloke’s sending off into the sunset, or the ground. It was in St Martin’s church, sweet little draughty place on the edge of the city with a lovely old rood screen they hid in the civil war. It’s so funny how recent history can feel sometimes when you live in a place like this; you can stand and look at a thing people were hiding in the 1600s so it didn’t get chopped up, and that was more or less the last important thing that happened in here. That might as well have been yesterday.

  I think the vicar at St Martin’s pulls the odd fast one. He’d sold this widow the works, had me doing lilies ring-a-rosy round the coffin, but no one came to the funeral. Just the family, poor little things feeling sad, though you could see in the photo they put on the coffin he’d been fit to bust a while before anything happened – wilted or withered or wrinkled or rotten, whatever the word. Dozen in all, dirty dozen snivelling in their dirty hankies. It’s so fucking sad, an empty funeral. This vicar, he’d sold them an organist pumping out Chopin, and someone had shifted a fuck-off coffin the old girl looked like she couldn’t afford – what are the best ones, are they oak maybe, mahogany? – and the old girl herself sitting there crying in her shit funeral outfit. Folk in Wiltshire don’t half look backward sometimes.

  I stayed for the service cos I like the music, it’s dreamy, and the family smiled and didn’t ask me who the fuck I was. People in England are that fucking scared, buttoned-up, stick up their arses, buried under everything, you can sit in a stranger’s funeral and no one asks how you knew him.

  I didn’t go the burial or the wake, mind. It’s not about taking the piss. I just like the words and the sweet dream music.

  I chavved my pennies out of Rev’s sweaty palm when it was over, his leering palm held out like I should lick it, like I’m a horse and he’s feeding me carrots. Bowed and scraped cos you have to be grateful with the God squad. Smug cunts. They know you need them, know as well as you all the trade comes trailing after the bodies they bury, know you want them to call you and not some other slapper, never let you forget it. I’d like to shove it in his fucking face and see him eat it. But I need my regulars. I’d have a hard time making friends again now. Not many undertakers fancy a go once you’re my side of sixty. It’s all about sex with the vicars, too – they always want you, that’s why they call you, that’s the game. This is what I’ve learned. Sex is everything. There’s sex in everything. Everything you do is sex, and you know for sure how it works when it stops fucking working. So I bow and scrape because I need the ones who don’t see the real me when they meet me. I need the ones who remember what I looked like when I were young. Who are looking at me through memories, who still fancy me cos they like remembering their lives when they were young as well. I need those boys, cos I’d never make new friends now.

  The old girl was standing in the churchyard like a dog without a master when I walked out the porch with my bags and my rucksack and my sadness over my shoulder. I thought she’d want to pass me by. I know what it looks like, a coffin in a grave, how far down it is, how fucking weird it is there’s someone in there who was part of you. I wouldn’t talk to anyone if I had someone to love and they went and died. But she seemed to think like the opposite, seemed to want the company. Cos she perked right fucking up when she saw me, like she was wagging her tail and trotting to sniff.

  ‘Thank you for staying for the service,’ she said, and she was looking at me like I might want to say some fucking thing back at her about how nice it was or where did she get her frock or what was she doing with her husband’s money now he didn’t need it. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never really been thanked after a show before. Ignored, usually. Once or twice someone feeling pissed off if I hung around to listen to the organ when they carried the corpse out. No one’s ever been glad about me at a funeral in my life.

  ‘It was a lovely service,’ I said.

  ‘Do you think?’

  ‘Yeah. It was lovely music. It was your husband?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Stupid question. I watched her want to burn up, want to wither up. Course it was her husband. People her age don’t know no one except the one they’re married to. That’s why it’s important to stay married if you can fool someone into marrying you. Cos your world ends around you all the time you’re growing older.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  She smiled, like she knew as well as I did what an empty fucking phrase is that one.

  ‘Thank you. Are you going back to your stall?’

  ‘Yeah. How do you know about my stall?’

  ‘I’ve seen you in the market. You’re in front of the Guildhall. I used to walk past you on my way to the library. I used to go to get him books.’


  I thought it was so strong of her she could say that.

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘And mine. But I never read as fast as he did.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘He was always a better reader than I was. Have a good afternoon, then.’ She bowed her head like she was letting me pass, and I suppose she wanted me to fuck off, didn’t she, so I said the same to her, have a good one or whatever, which wasn’t big enough words either, and I walked on out through the gate to the road beyond and the shutdown pub and the bowlin’ alley and the Laser Quest and the YMCA and the side way into town past the nightclub and the strip club and the dodgy Chinese and the cheap hotel. My Salisbury, the other city, the one you don’t see from the cathedral. And I thought, I wish I had big enough words I could do something for her. I wish there was some fucking thing I could say. I wish I could get out the feelings I’m feeling and make a river of them and help her.

  And then I thought I wish I had what she had. I wish I had something worth losing.

  I was a wild child but he was wilder. First notch at thirteen – I lay down in a wood with this boy, this blond tousle-haired boy I met in the fields outside my house. I don’t know why. I hardly knew him, didn’t even fucking like him. We ran around for a few weeks – we were kissing, holding hands, I let him rummage around up my skirt and then he wanted me and I suppose I let him. When I were fifteen I’d slept with fifteen boys. After that, one set of notches grew faster than the other for a fair bit. Then in my forties the years overtook the boys again, and I’m once more like a girl these days, having had more hot dinners than lovers. There’s second childhood for you. Long dry years stretching all around me for ever Amen.

  I used to meet them at gigs and go with them into the shitters. Used to go with them in parks, end up on my hands and knees on the benches in Lizzie’s and them disappointing behind me. Used to go with them at house parties, slip into bedrooms, slip into any empty room, more than one in a night if I fancied. I think I thought I loved it. Used to go with them in the shed at the bottom of the garden where we kept Dad’s stuff if he ever wanted to come back and get it, if they were nice enough or canny enough to walk me home. Used to go with them all because it always seemed like what they wanted. But he wouldn’t go with me first time.