Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  And so we hang out at Latitude. And queue. And by the time we inch to the front, the first venue tent is full, and this happens again and again. And so we miss Simon Armitage, whose tent is full, and we miss Marcus Brigstocke, and we miss Ken Shuttleworth. And then I need to queue for the loo. And the Ladies queue is miles and miles, winding like a snake, like an airport queue except outside; and now it’s begun to spit, so I join the ‘just-peeing’ queue, which is a quicker queue because you are given a cardboard funnel which is in fact a ‘Shewee’ – which means we can all pee together into a gutter, like the men. Which is actually quite a laugh, and maybe the highlight of Latitude for me, because I realise that I am not really a festival kind of person. I don’t like queuing, for one thing, but here, even if I queue, I seem to miss everything. Jonathan goes to see Seasick Steve and says it was great, but I missed it because I was queuing for the Ladies. And when we do get to a stage in time, we have to stand and wait for hours as it gets more and more crowded, and our once good view is taken by more and more people who just barge in front of us. Then when Jonathan goes to the bar and has to queue for half an hour to buy two more seven-quid beers, he comes back telling me that a girl at the bar turned on him and said, ‘It’s Latitude, not Attitude!’ I wonder how many times she’s said that. When Paolo Nutini eventually comes on everyone just piles in front of us, and in front of me there is a girl with a big backpack on who is bopping and butting me every time she swings about. I move. But then another girl hops up on the shoulders of her boyfriend and I can’t see a bloody thing. So we start grumbling and wondering why we bothered to pay £350 in entrance fees (a third of my hard-earned pop-up shop takings!) – a staggering amount, we feel, for being crushed and bumped and having to queue in the rain and pee into a cardboard funnel and park in the mud. We think of our garden and listening to music in the comfort of our own home, and we swear NEVER AGAIN.

  The spitting has of course turned into a steady downfall. Now we are sloshing about. All the stalls begin selling umbrellas and Wellington boots for exorbitant prices. And all the events we wanted to see, like the dancing over the lake and the moth theatre, are cancelled because of the rain. Our expensive exclusive camper-van field is the furthest campsite from the main venues, and my feet hurt with all the walking back and forth, sliding and slipping past the sardine rows of tents with feet in muddy wellies sticking out under the fly sheets. Back in the campervan field, campervans are already getting stuck and their wheels are spinning round spraying mud like wet fireworks. And it is just horrible so instead of staying another night we decide to make a dash for it before everyone gets stuck and we are trapped here for days; they are already getting tractors in to haul stuck cars out. Jonathan, experienced with VWs from old surfing days and being a New Zealand farmer’s son, says he knows what he is doing. And he does. He goes into tough driving mode, slip-sliding the accelerator, knowing just how fast to go and where to drive, and where not to – unlike our fellow campers, who are quickly getting bogged down. I am gripping the dashboard as a VW in front of us chooses the wrong direction and grinds into the mud. We skid slightly, speed up and slew around a corner. In the mirror we see the van behind us stuck up to its axles. Yay, not us! We are away! We are not trapped in the campervan field in the rain or waiting for the tractor or queuing for the Ladies or tapping digits into the ATM. So we go to a pub to celebrate with normal-priced beer and delicious crab sandwiches. And then we drive three hours to visit our friends Jane and Adrian in Sussex and drink a lot of wine and stay the night, and then we drive three hours home. By which time Bill and Barbara have left because the kids need to be back for school, and the dogs are in the garden as agreed, with (rather strangely) the kitchen chairs, out in the rain.

  Hooray, it is good to be home, rain or no rain, wet chairs or dry! But we can’t find the key. Bill must have confused the hiding place. But eventually we locate the key and open the door to find a bottle of vodka and a thank-you note on the dining room table from Bill, with their news, their outings, their Sunday tea at Wimborne St Giles, the dogs being sweet; they have had a good time and there is a sense about the place that feels like they have had a good time. The al fresco (damp) kitchen chairs, books down from the shelves; even the chessboard has had an outing. There are the dregs of a happy atmosphere, the towels are on the line, board games from the shed are in the house, books from the house are in the shed. And we are relieved that everything seems to have gone so well.

  Three days later I need some cash. But the purse is not in its place in the small cupboard under the gloves. After the initial moment of discovery, when I feel like I have just swallowed a chest freezer, my hands panic, throwing the gloves aside, throwing everything out of the cupboard, and I stare disbelievingly at the pile on the floor, which does not include the black purse. It is impossible. It is so impossible that I had completely forgotten about it and didn’t even check when we got home. I put my hot cheeks into my cold hands and stop breathing. I start breathing and search, going through everything again. It must be obscured by something, trapped between something. I can hardly form the words: the purse has gone. Maybe they pulled it out, looking for games, and put it somewhere, forgot where it lived. I search our tiny house from top to bottom. There are only five rooms, so it doesn’t take long. I search again. I take the house apart, look under cushions, behind the loo, everywhere. I know it was there, it was always there, I only had one hiding place for the purse. Through the cushions again, under the beds, in every drawer, up, under, on, beneath, down the back of. There are only so many places you can search in a two-bedroom house. The purse is nowhere.

  One day goes by. I tell Jonathan. He searches in all the same places (but not as thoroughly). Another day. I cannot sleep for trying to work it out, for the mystery, for the disbelief, and the worrying about what to do. Say nothing? Ask? Say nothing? But it is a thousand pounds. Not fifty. Not a hundred and fifty.

  Bill and Barbara are not well off, they both work hard, and they have a lot of outgoings, two strapping sons, one of whom is soon to go to university, with the other hard on his heels. I go through every permutation and Jonathan and I talk endlessly about what to do.

  Our imaginations fly about. But what if? And which one? It is just impossible. Round and round. But deep down I know we have to ask. We cannot carry on not asking. There might, after all, be a simple explanation. But how to bring it up without the whiff of accusation? And then there is that other thing, the unsayable, the horrible creeping feeling that we might, might have been taken for a ride. A person who has a thousand pounds in a purse – at one level it’s fairly bad taste, leaving a purse lying around like that stuffed to the gunnels with notes. My mind continues to spin with possibilities and impossibilities. The boys? We didn’t meet Socrates, but Lenster was unimpeachable. He loved the dogs. How could a boy who loved dogs be responsible? Or could a wad of bank notes prove too much temptation even for him? On the face of it, we had a cottage with a big garden and a campervan, and a purse full of money. An unimaginable amount. Monopoly money. All the things they could do with it. Don’t go there, don’t go there. Socrates is just about to begin university and summer is coming and all his friends are going to Greece while he has to get a job over the holidays. I really don’t think that even all this temptation would be enough. But maybe. Maybe it happened in a flash, bang, it’s in his hands, the match is struck, the deed is done. And then the idea of having it begins to nestle so sweetly, until the repercussions slide away. It could help so much. It could do so much! It is theirs. We have plenty. And then it’s too late. No. No. No. They were too smart, too clever, too nice. The younger one? Impossible. The elder? No! But then again . . . A moment of madness, a tiny puff of mischief that turned into something else, something he couldn’t return from? What I was capable of at sixteen I wouldn’t like to say. I remember nicking a china swan from a shop for my mum’s birthday, my only worry was if I were caught, for the shop had plenty of ornaments.

  I drive Jonathan craz
y, returning to it over and over. What do you think? Who do you think? Questions that, as each day passes, look like they will never be answered.

  Then another thought takes hold. A nasty despicable thought. Don’t think it. Don’t think it. Barbara. Barbara has this sort of dignified manner that one looks up to, but at the same time is slightly cautious of. She is a writer, a writer who is published (as I wouldn’t mind being). An explorer into the human psyche, into its mysteries and complications. She is respected and reviewed and asked to talk publicly and do writerly things. Which is another reason why this is so fucking awful. She is the distiller of Experience, the wordsmith; I’m the wannabe, riddled with discomfort and failings. At a party Barbara once asked me (she asked me, no one ever asked me) about the book I was slaving over. I imagine I looked eager – or, God forbid, grateful – and then she huskily whispered, ‘So tell me, what exactly would you say is the emotional core of your book?’ Fuck. The emotional core? With the emphasis on the exactly. The idea of putting everything I had been thinking about into one neat response paralysed me. My whole story spiralled down the plug. I needed a fine-tuned, one-sentence reply at the ready, and I didn’t have one. She waited. It was a test, and I was a galumphing heffalump. She understood not just the power of words, but the power of withholding them. I said something idiotic. Stuttering, tongue-tied and banal. She looked disappointed. Of course she did.

  Dare I say it, dare I think it . . . Barbara has fine tastes. We know this, even though we do not know Barbara well, because we bumped into her once, sitting outside Carluccio’s near Brunswick Square, and she had a balloon of very expensive cold white Burgundy with the bottle in the ice bucket, and a plate of antipasta, salamis and meats, and a bowl of giant olives, the enormous gourmet kind, the kind that costs you an arm and a leg. It struck me at the time as an expensive snack for an impecunious writer on the virtual breadline. Barbara frequents tasteful establishments, and wears elegant clothes, and, and . . . so I enter the dark cave-network of suspicion. Are we being laughed at? Because she knows we will never dare to ask? Oh God, our mutual friends, the discomfort . . . Stop it. STOP IT! What about Bill? No, Bill is funny, self-deprecating, imaginative, surprising; this scenario just doesn’t have legs.

  I know we have to ask. A week has passed and every night I toss and turn as my paranoia multiplies. I search the house again, countless times I return to the cupboard and look under the gloves.

  So we decide to call Bill. But we will do so carefully, very, very carefully and very diplomatically. I will call. I will say how difficult it is to ask, and that I hope he will understand, and how embarrassed I am, and that we know there is a perfectly good explanation, but that we have to ask, because something happened on ‘their watch’ and we are completely stumped, and we need to unravel it.

  So I do. I call Bill and I say how unfortunate and uncomfortable it is, but I have to ask a difficult question, and that please don’t misconstrue it (whatever that means) and that we are in no way accusing anyone, but we are mystified and need to check all lines of enquiry (ugh, I sound like a politician), and without meaning any offence, if he could find a way of finding out if anyone can remember seeing it . . . ? Bill is silent. Steely silent. And stupidly I fill the infernal silence up: moment of madness, blah, blah; when I was young I got up to all sorts of stuff; a mistake that couldn’t be undone . . . Bill says efficiently that he will ask the boys.

  I put down the phone. Not great. Not really how I had planned things in my head. But nevertheless I have at least shared the burden, I have passed the problem on. Fifteen minutes later the phone rings. It’s Bill. His voice is clear and concise. He has asked Socrates and Lenster and they didn’t take it. He could tell by their faces, he says. What, he just asked them outright? That wasn’t what I meant at all. I didn’t want him to ask his kids if they had stolen our money. I am appalled. I’d hoped he would be more subtle, investigative, less hurtful, talk to Barbara, maybe even have a look in the boys’ bedroom, see if there were any new purchases. I don’t know what I wanted, or what I expected, but not this. He asks me to let him know if I find it. I tell him I will. But his tone is cold and hurt, you bet it is. I search the house again. Nothing. I search the sheds. Nothing. I wait for Barbara to ring, for surely she must have been told and will want to sort it out. To talk it through. What could have happened to it? But she doesn’t. Day after day, no call. And we are left to stew. I sweat and lie awake in bed. Oh God, what have we done? Or what has been done to us? It is one or the other, it has to be. A week. Another week. Silence. I search the house again. And again.

  I knew a very respectable kleptomaniac once. She was a bookish highly educated woman who led her friends a merry song and dance, stealing from them. She was quite content to let others take the blame for her misdemeanours and borrowings: rings, precious family heirlooms, money, knick-knacks. Her boyfriend’s mother sacked their cleaner on account of so many disappearances. Eventually she was caught by her best friend, who became suspicious and laid a trap. It is a disease that grabs hold of you apparently, like gambling. It starts small then grows with every success, you make all sorts of justifications for it: you are liberating things; others have things unfairly; you have a right; you rationalise your wrongdoing. One of my friends once nicked a duvet from John Lewis. A duvet! And got caught. Of course. Quilty or not quilty. Some kleptomaniacs even accept their thievery as a kind of artistic exploration into nether worlds. They get used to it. Could Barbara be researching a character for a novel? I have stopped thinking it might be Lenster or Socrates. It is Barbara. That’s why she hasn’t rung us. It explains why sometimes she slid past not recognising you, making her way to wherever she wanted to be. I see it now. I wake at night thinking about it. It goes round and round.

  By now of course it is out. And massaged into a massive drama. We are the offenders. We have accused Bill and Barbara’s children of stealing our money. We have hurt their family to the core. Everyone is shocked. And I am pissed off because so far all we have done is ask. I call our mutual friend, Rob. Rob thinks we should never have said anything. That we should have just left it. Really? Just take it on the chin? Yes, he says. And you think I should just leave it now? Not say anything? Yes, he says, that’s what he would do. But it’s not what I would do. I want to solve it, and clear my head, and make it better. I certainly don’t want to be the villain in all this. I suggest I write a nice email to Bill and Barbara, and that I send it to him to check first.

  And so I do. I spend hours over it, and Rob tweaks it so it is as soft as peach velvet, and I step into their shoes, so that hopefully they can step into ours, so that we can try and work out what happened. And Rob says it’s okay, so swish – out it goes – and BANG! within the hour a reply straight back. From Naples, from their holiday (another one?), which I have interrupted, and which I am ruining: THEY DO NOT HAVE OUR PURSE! And that is that. The End. But of course it is not the end.

  *

  I am not thinking about any of it, thank goodness, which has been rare over the last few weeks, for it keeps flipping back into my head, like sour butter churning round and round – the fallout and the unsolved mystery. No, I am washing up, looking out of the kitchen window, when I see a man I don’t recognise walking down the garden path. Behind him, tentative, hanging back, a teenage boy. I go out to meet them. Not a delivery, but probably someone lost up our lane. The man pushes the boy forward. He says they have something to give me. The boy’s face is pale, which exaggerates the rash across his neck, he has liquid, see-through eyes and slightly greasy bark-coloured hair. And fiddly fingers. The teenage boy passes me the black purse. I look down at the purse that fills my hand. My eyes prick with tears, even though I do not believe them. I am completely speechless for a moment which feels longer, probably, than it is. I am making peculiar un-word-like noises. The man nudges the boy. The boy says he is sorry. That’s all. His eyes fall to the brick path and stay there, while my eyes flick from boy to man to purse to man to ask the man the questi
ons. He says he hopes the money is all there. And then he gives me my mother’s gold bracelet – which I had not even noticed was missing. I am literally dumbstruck as he tells me that his son, for this is who he is, made a big mistake, a prank that went wrong, with his friend, a few Sundays ago. They had been exploring, cycling down the lane; it was a dare, his father said, to nick something from somewhere, a shed or an open garage, and there was no one around, but apparently there was a window open . . . And while his son waited, his friend hopped in.

  Yes! There was a window open, I remember now how the sash window had been left open in the sitting room. I closed it when we arrived home. The man is extremely uncomfortable. The man’s wife had found the purse after first discovering three £50 notes in the boy’s bedroom. It took them a while to extract the information. I want to hug the man. And the boy. But the boy does not want to be here. He is looking at the bricks in the path. His foot is going back and forth, grinding something under his shoe. It is excruciating for him. But not for me. It is a blessed relief, this release from all the awful thoughts of treachery and deceit that have been marauding around my head and keeping me awake at night. And all my questions congeal into a knot of gratefulness. I am almost speechless, but at the same time I hear words coming out, half-formed sentences, about how relieved I am, and how terrible it has been, and, and, and . . . I can tell that the boy really does not want to be here, nor the man. They are under duress. So all I can do is thank them. I am in a mad thanking frenzy. Thank you, thank you. Almost, thank you for stealing my purse. Thank you that it is not Barbara or Socrates or Lenster. Thank you for coming. Thank you for having the courage and moral fortitude to come. For the miracle. Thank you God (almost) that the person who stole my purse had decent parents, a father who brought his son back, who made it right, who has given his son something he will remember all his life. I am overwhelmed with disbelief and thankfulness. I could kiss the boy. And the father. I have to stop myself. I am thanking them and thanking them and telling the boy how brave he is, and that it has caused SO MUCH TROUBLE, but now, because he has done this brave thing, I can right it all. I nearly open the purse and pay him. But I know that would not be the right thing. The father and son want to get this over as quickly as possible and be gone. They turn to leave. And I want to ask a million things, but my mind goes blank and I am so overflowing with gratefulness that I follow them out to their small silver car, watch them turn, and wave them goodbye. Our neighbour, Tony, appears, and it all gushes out and he is amazed. Then our other neighbour, Terry, walks past and the story gushes out again. Terry remembers seeing two boys on bikes, the weekend of the motocross, acting suspiciously and then zooming back down the lane at breakneck speed.