Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain Page 3

  ‘Did you think about that?’

  ‘No, I thought—’

  ‘I don’t think you thought at all.’

  ‘I thought nothing was going to happen.’

  ‘You were dealing – of course something was going to happen.’

  ‘All those years and they never busted me.’

  ‘Busted you for plenty else.’

  ‘Yeah, but they never fucking busted me for this.’

  She just shook her head. And I didn’t argue, cos it’s no defence, is it? Not once it’s happened.

  ‘You should have seen it coming,’ Mum said, as if it were a train and I’d been playing on a line trying to flatten out pennies. ‘You should have seen it coming.’

  So I got in my car that evening and I drove to Southampton. Heart in my mouth and Spire FM playing on the radio till the signal gave out and I had to listen to Solent. The spirit of Salisbury – one oh twoooooooo, Spire FM. I’ve been listening to that jingle all my life, and I don’t think they ever changed it. Play half the same songs and all. Spandau Ballet must be minted. Tonight the DJ was taking the piss out of me. They played all sad songs about love, and I don’t know if I ever felt so lonely in my whole life as I did on that drive listening to Celine Dion and Tina Turner. Cos I haven’t got no one, see. No hope any of the ones I miss are coming back to me again.

  Rich lives off the Portswood Road. He’s a teacher; they’re all teachers or students round there. He was always a clever, lovely, lonely boy. He stopped talking to me so long ago I hardly knew how to get to his any more. When I parked up I already knew how it was going to go. But I had to go through with it. Sometimes the play writes itself. I’ll walk up the same garden path with the same slope shoulders the day I get my diagnosis and the cancer starts eating me up. Some things just have to happen. When you know you’re going away somewhere as far as the nick or the grave you try and see your kid.

  Lucy came to the door, Lucy’s his wife, and when she saw me she turned white like she’d seen a ghost. I tried to be nice, and she went to find Rich. I could hear a TV playing inside. I could hear a family evening. My granddaughter in there, growing up, and I’m missing all of it. Last time I saw her she wasn’t even talking. She’s a nice girl, Lucy. He did so well. She never got involved with us, me and Rich, knows it has to play itself out. I can tell she looks after him, and that’s the main thing for me. Rich came to the door and stood in the doorway with his back to the light, and I knew he wasn’t going to let me in whatever I said.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  ‘Hi, love, how are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. Are you all right?’

  ‘Not bad. What you been up to?’

  He looked mad when I said that.

  ‘Getting on with it, Mum. I’ve been getting on with it.’

  ‘Have you seen your dad?’

  ‘Not recently.’

  ‘But you keep in touch?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘He all right?’

  ‘He’s the same. People don’t change, do they, Mum?’

  I knew I had to tell him now, cos he didn’t want to make small talk, and he’d shut the door if I didn’t get on with it. It was so sad knowing just what shape his face was going to make. It was so sad thinking I was going to disappoint him again.

  ‘Listen, Rich, I needed to talk to you, cos I need to tell you I’ve gone and got myself in a bit of trouble. I don’t want anything. I’m not asking for anything. I just thought you ought to know something’s going to happen.’

  He watched me. Careful like.

  ‘Right. What is it?’

  ‘I might have to go away for a little while.’

  ‘What do you mean? Abroad?’

  ‘Inside.’

  He nodded. He’d known too, I guess, the scene we were playing, known it could only be one of a few things from the minute Lucy said I was at the door in the dark of the night and waiting for him.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They think I’ve been dealing.’

  ‘Have you?’

  I couldn’t look at him any more.

  ‘Actually, yeah.’

  He put his hand on the handle of the door.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So I just thought we should see each other before I went away.’

  And then he decided the scene was played out.

  ‘Well, now we’ve seen each other. And now I have to go, Mum. I’m sorry you’re in trouble, but you know I won’t get involved with it any more, all right? I’m sorry you’re in trouble.’

  I would not cry. Whatever happened I would not cry.

  ‘Thanks, Rich. I just wanted to see you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right. You’ve seen me now. So I’m going to go back inside, all right?’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Good night.’

  He closed the door on me. I could see through the window in the top of the door he was still standing in the doorway, so close, yellow light glowing out behind him from the light in the hall. And I remembered when he used to be scared of the kind of dark I was standing in now. And then I remembered the time he told me he was done, he wouldn’t have anything to do with me any more. It is like a tattoo. I will never be rid of it. There below the surface of me – that memory for ever. And then I went back to my car and drove home, and didn’t turn on the radio cos I didn’t know a song that wouldn’t hurt to listen to now.

  It was the years we lived in Fordingbridge did for us I reckon. After Jonno went I was fucked right up. No clue what to do with myself and my feelings. The shouting and crying didn’t stop when he left. Grief’s not like a cancer, doesn’t go when the operation’s done and the darkness is out. It’s a knife wound. Take out the blade and you still got the bleeding, wait long enough and it turns to a scar, but it’s always with you the rest of your life. I was still bleeding pints for him those days, bleeding buckets. I started boozing. Pretty heavy on the drugs. Weed and speed and coke and whatever. Anything, anything, anything got me out my head so I didn’t have to think about my life all day. I got straggly. I got starey-eyed. Youth went in about three months of damage, and I never did get it back. That’s the thing about youth, you never do. Then realise it’s the only beauty you were ever in love with, and you’ve chucked it out with everything else you thought you didn’t want. While you were planning the parties.

  Mum was panic stations. She was watching me killing myself, that was what she thought was happening. She was watching me forget about Rich, and she was ready to call social services. For my own good, she said. His good. So when I should have started loving him most, what I actually did was more or less abduct my own kid from my mum’s house and run off to live with the gyppos in Fordingbridge.

  If you don’t know Fordingbridge you ought to give it a visit some time. Some of it’s quite nice, if you like little towns in the middle of nowhere. There’s a pub by the river with seats outside, and you can have your lunch there if you have any money. There’s a bookshop. They’ll order in anything they haven’t got. You wouldn’t think I’m a reader to look at me, but I read all the religious books. I know all about what everyone thinks is coming for us after the end. There are all quite nice shops either side of the bookshop on the main street too, and a Tesco and whatever, and there’s a statue of Augustus John by the river cos he used to live there. I didn’t know who Augustus John was the first time I saw it. He used to be a painter. He’s dead now. He painted nice portraits, and I heard a story about him once I like. When Augustus John went over to Ireland he’d stay with a woman called Gregory, in a big house in the west of Ireland where she liked to put up dossers and poets on their uppers. And he was very athletic, Augustus John, and one day while he was dossing there he climbed a tree in the wood at the end of her garden, high as he could go, and carved something into the top of it. And he wouldn’t tell anyone else what he’d carved, and people tried to climb and see, but they all got too scared before they got high enough and had to climb back down. He was br
ave, see, Augustus John, he was a proper Wiltshire brave and climbed trees better than the Irish. Then one day about a hundred years ago there was a big storm and the whole wood this tree was in blew down, and no one found the carving before the lot went up the chimneys of western Ireland, so this carving of Augustus John’s was lost for ever. Except another dosser called Yeats wrote all poems about the wood that had vanished and wrote down the story about the secret carving in his diary, so we know it was there once, and now no one will ever know what it looked like. Though I reckon if he was anything like the Fordingbridge boys I knew, it was probably a carving of a great big cock and balls.

  I didn’t spend much time in arty Fordingbridge though, or even Tesco Fordingbridge. Cos the other thing about that town is there’s a lot of travellers there, see. They live all round it in their caravans. I’d been seeing this pikey lad after Jonno left, lonely and wanting someone, and he was all right with me living in his caravan for a bit. So we moved in there, and then for a little while we were wilder than you’ve ever known anyone. The lads I ran with got away with murder. They used to rob anything, ram raid anything, and the police always knew all their names when they came round knocking, but they never found a thing. It was already sold or smoked or snorted.

  It was hard to keep up with. The nappies and the rusks and the sleep and the mealtimes. I managed and I had my fun. I lived my life real simple for a little while, drank my vodka, ate my mushrooms. And my baby ran wild with the other wolfcubs.

  The travellers are the real heart of Wiltshire. They’ve drunk deep and long from the rivers, and it’s turned them loose and wild and free. They ride their horses round the country, and they know things the stuffed shirts hiding in their houses can’t imagine, secret things we think are amazing but they live among all the time. The way you hear the sea when the wind’s in the trees, like the whole world sings this one song you can make out if you listen. The way the world sings.

  I couldn’t handle it in the long run. I was only ever there for a holiday, really. I don’t think there’s fate or anything, that there’s any belonging or anything permanent to us. I think we’re visitors here and seeing the sights while we’re at it, but all the same there are worlds you visit you know will never be yours. I suppose it’s about what you get used to when you’re growing up, when you’re getting together a personality out of your odds and ends. I knew I was only there for a little while till I was ready to have another go at being alive and living in the real world. But I did see that wildness for a little while, and I was glad, because most never taste it.

  What I had to give up to know what it felt like to make a fire every evening, listen to the kestrels, catch a glimpse of the panthers that roam the plain, was the love of my son. I didn’t know it at the time, not for years afterwards. But when I look back I can see what happened. He was drinking shandies and smoking fags when he were eight year old, and once we left, after the five or six or seven years we spent in that life, he must have worked out how weird that was, must have been angry. And wanted to know why I didn’t send him to school, why he couldn’t have been normal, known the same things as everyone else. I taught him his spellings and his times tables, course, did my bit, but I know when I think of it now he missed out on a thing or two as well.

  That’s where the anger came. That and not having his dad around. When he was fifteen he went into this shell, didn’t want anything to do with me. He found fucking books and that was it. Wanted a different hand to the one I’d dealt him. We were fighting from when he was sixteen. I told myself it was him growing up, but the fights went on and on and they got cold, got calculated. He went away to university, and I was so proud, but he didn’t want to share it with me. He never really came back from Solent. Met his Lucy, got his first job, just seemed to avoid answering the phone. I was so sad. Then one day I was pissed and I drove to see him, drove to have it out. He told me anything he ever done, anything he ever made of his life was in spite of me and the start I gave him, the poison I poured and poured and poured on his days. He was so cruel. But when I started to answer I caught a sight of my pissed-up face in the mirror in his hall, my bloated face, and I thought of the time he burned his hand on the hot plate, and the first time I saw him smoking, and the mornings I woke up not knowing a thing about the night before to find him looking at me, and I knew he was right. So he told me he didn’t want me near his family, and I took it. Cos he was going to be a dad, and he wanted to be a dad you could be proud of, so I couldn’t be in his life, he said, and I took it. Cos he was right. Everything I’ve ever done I’ve fucked right up.

  I sat in my house the whole of that night thinking. When you’re young you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. You do everything, try everything, cos you don’t know what’s going to be important. It’s years before you work out what tune it is you’re whistling. And it stands to reason if you live like that you’ll let a thing or two slip past you. We all do it. We’ve all got someone it turns out we ought to have loved, a job we should have taken. My trouble is when I sit still, when I look at what’s happened to me, I can see my real life, the life I should have been living, going on just under the surface of the world around me, and I can’t get at it. It’s like there’s another me just under the skin, who I buried there, who’ll never get out, who could have had such a fucking life but instead she’s had to watch me have this one. Every day I’m haunted by my fuck-ups, ghost family, ghost house, ghost money, ghost happiness. That’s a proper fucking gyppo curse, I tell you. To be able to see all the things might have happened if you’d only got it right.

  About an hour before dawn I got up and went back to my car. I’d been on the gin all the time I was sitting in my chair, shouldn’t have been thinking of driving really, but I was fine once I was going. You get in a sort of zone where everything’s easy. Like your arms are doing your steering for you. I started north, and when I drove past Stonehenge the light was coming into the sky like air into a lung, colour into a movie. I’d have stopped and got out and gone to the stones cos the grass looked so pale singing in the wind, grey almost white, the hair on my head, but I couldn’t stop now, cos I knew where I was going and if I did any thinking I’d realise I was mad.

  I reckon what happened in Marlborough is some rich bloke bribed the train companies, back in the day when they were laying the lines, to keep a station out. Someone wanted to dodge all the mess and clutter that was going to come when us people started sloshing around, keep things individual, stop their place turning into every other place, cos it must have been clear enough from the start that what would happen if Londoners travelled everywhere was they’d want London things even in the middle of nowhere. So whoever the bloke was behind it, they made sure the train didn’t stop in their town. There’s a whole world of stories of blokes rich enough to get train stations built at the end of their gardens. I reckon someone round Marlborough way did the opposite. Shut it out, the modern world, the fleeting world, I don’t want any part of it.

  I don’t blame him. Way I see it, all this shit we think is our lives, think is permanent, is only a moment we’re living through. I mean what the fuck is plastic? What the fuck is plane travel? What the fuck is an iPad? In a hundred years people will look back at this time and see a bubble that blew up then burst. And all our human life we think is so big and important will just have been a brief little flowering that’ll never come again. We’ll look like mayflies when the music stops. And in my lifetime, or Rich’s at least, I reckon we’ll be driving horse and cart to market once again.

  This is where my Jonno ended up. In a funny town in the barren heart of the Plain that saw all the shit we’re gonna have to live through coming long before it started, the water shortages and food wars and migrations out of where the land burns up. He always liked to play the oracle. Place suits him in that way. Only trouble Jonno has is that Marlborough’s way of turning its back on the nightmare fuck-up of the future was to freeze time in 1855 and live there for ever, and that was nev
er Jonno’s style. He wished he was a punk. Wanted to fuck everything. When he was mine he’d have laughed at everything you saw in Marlborough as wank and wanted to sweep it away. But this is where he’s ended up, running an antique shop of all things, because that’s the way life blows you. You don’t really get to decide the direction if you’re one of us who isn’t born with money. Sometimes the wind changes and your face gets stuck.

  It wasn’t open when I got there of course, so I got a coffee and sat with it in my car in the silence and the morning, waiting. And the time passed ever so slowly, like it does when you sit and listen to it properly. I worried I was gonna fall asleep, but it was just worry for the sake of it really, cos I felt so wired with thinking I could hardly shut my eyes to blink. Jonno turned up at half eight, and I’d been worried I wouldn’t recognise him but I knew him straight away, his walk, the way he held his head, it was my man. Of course it was. People don’t change. I followed him into the shop, and he heard the bell and turned to see me, and he knew who I was and fucking all.

  ‘Fuck me. Hello, Rita, what are you doing here?’

  I didn’t want to tell him yet, not when I felt like I had the power, like I had the surprise.

  ‘Hello, Jonno. You all right?’

  ‘Yeah, not bad.’ He looked round him and I could tell what he was saying with that look was fuck you, course I’m all right. I got all this, haven’t I? What you got? That’s cos I know him, see, know what he’s fucking like. ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’ Too needy, I thought, too desperate, and already looking in his eyes I could feel I was losing the game.

  ‘Oh, yeah? What about?’

  ‘Our Rich.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘You know he doesn’t talk to me.’

  ‘He’s said.’