England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  Don had called and said, ‘Seb’s in trouble, deep trouble.’

  Trouble? Wasn’t Seb making telephone numbers? Wasn’t Seb making them all look silly?

  Don said, ‘They’re going to pull the rug from under him. Him and everyone else. Something big’s coming, Charlie, something big and bad. If you ask me, from what Seb’s heard—it’s not just Seb who’s in trouble, it’s the whole fucking world.’

  Did Don have drink in his voice? No. Charlie didn’t say anything to Brenda, only that it was Don calling about tomorrow, though Brenda would have thought: Why did Don need to call? It was a Saturday night. Charlie didn’t hear anything on the late-night news. Later, cuddling up, he said, ‘Aren’t you glad, Bren?’

  ‘Glad what?’

  ‘Glad I was never a marine biologist.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  He didn’t really know, himself. There was something about Don’s voice, there was something about that ‘whole fucking world’.

  His instinct the next morning was to get up and do the usual jog, to be on his feet, to prepare—to prepare his mind by preparing his body. And it was such a beautiful morning, early September, the tingle of autumn in the air.

  Now he gets up from the bench and takes a last look at the towers. They gleam back. Then he turns and jogs again through the glistening trees, feeling at fifty-seven as light on his feet as he did when he was seventeen.

  WONDERS WILL NEVER CEASE

  WHEN AARON AND I were younger we used to chase women. It’s a phrase. How many times do you actually see a man chasing a woman, say ten yards behind and gaining? We were both runners anyway, literally—athletes. With me it was the hurdles. We both did the same PE course at college, and girls were part of our physical education. I’ll be the first to say that Aaron was better at it than me. In his case it was more that the women chased him, or crawled all over him. It was how he was made. I tended to get his rejects. But even Aaron’s rejects could be something, and one day I married and settled down with one of them. Patti.

  After that I didn’t hang out with Aaron so much. In fact we hardly heard from each other. Maybe he thought that by marrying Patti and settling down I was also letting the side down. Well, too bad.

  I wouldn’t have said this ten years ago, but I think I’m the type who sees life like a book, with chapters. In one chapter you mess around, then you marry, have kids, get a place of your own, and so on. I’m not like Aaron. I wouldn’t like to guess how many books Aaron’s read. But that’s the point perhaps with physical education, it’s not really about reading.

  It was an option anyway. If you did the course and got the certificate you could make a career, a life out of it. It was a chance. Meanwhile we were athletes too.

  I never had any illusions about making it to the big competitions. I was just quite good at hurdling, I loved the hurdles. Aaron used to say, ‘Count me out, man. When I run, I want to run. I don’t want to run at something that’ll trip me up.’

  I didn’t say, ‘Doesn’t that apply to women?’

  They tripped him up and they crawled all over him. And they crawled all over him because he was quite a specimen. It was a vicious circle. But Aaron, I believe—just to talk about his running—could have been championship stuff. I say this as a qualified PE teacher.

  Anyhow, the time came, years back, when I’d settled down with Patti, and Aaron and I had almost lost touch. Just now and then Patti and I would have our ‘wondering about Aaron’ conversations. I was always a bit nervous about them, Patti having been one of Aaron’s rejects. I sometimes thought this was the reason why the gap had opened up between Aaron and me. It was Patti’s doing, it was Aaron’s, it was mine. I don’t know. Once—we were having Sunday breakfast—I actually said to Patti, ‘I wonder if those women aren’t catching up with him.’ I might have said ‘the years’ instead. It was just a casual, private-joke thing, but it was a bit careless perhaps.

  Patti didn’t pick it up one way or the other. She said, ‘Mmm, I wonder too.’ She took a bite of toast. Then she said, ‘If you’re worried about him, give him a call, look him up.’ As if she was daring me.

  She was pregnant with Daryl, our first, around this time. She was crazy about marmalade! Maybe she was thinking: Well, if he’s hankering for a last boys’ night out, he better take his chance while he can. Now we have the two boys, Daryl and Warren, two growing boys. Lots of boys’ nights in.

  Anyhow, I never made the call. But one day, years later, I get a call, out of the blue, from Aaron. He sounds just like the old Aaron, but he also sounds a bit cagey. It turns out he’s called to tell me he’s going to get married. I wait a bit, in case I’m being wound up. Then I wait anyway, in case he has some joke to make about it. I wait for an ‘Okay, man, don’t laugh’. But the only joke is that he’s speaking in a sort of whisper, as if it’s top-secret information he can trust only with me.

  Then he says he’d like me—me and Patti of course—to come to the wedding. To make things clear, he says it’s going to be a ‘low-key’ thing, in a registry office, just the two of them. Except you need a witness. So would Patti and I like to be there, to witness?

  All the time, apart from swallowing back my surprise, I’m thinking: He didn’t have to tell me this—a witness could be anyone—but I get the feeling he thinks that by telling me and having me as his witness he won’t have to tell anyone else. I feel honoured and I also feel arm-twisted, but how could I not say yes? Even though, apparently, it means a trip to Birmingham. That’s where he is now. Guess what—teaching PE.

  I say, ‘Yes, of course.’ Before I’ve even spoken to Patti. I also feel like saying, ‘Don’t worry, Aaron, I won’t breathe a word.’

  I say, ‘So what’s her name then?’

  ‘It’s Wanda.’

  ‘Wanda,’ I say, trying to form a picture of a Wanda. I don’t say, ‘So, is she pregnant?’

  Fortunately, Patti more or less has the same thought as me: How can we not? Perhaps she’s really thinking: Must we? But she looks all keen and interested, she even makes a joke about it, a pretty good joke too. ‘Well, Wandas will never cease.’

  So we go through with it, this low-key, hush-hush event. We manage to park the boys with Patti’s parents. We’re even ready to book a hotel. But Aaron says, ‘Nah, man, stay with us, no problem.’ This needs a bit of thought. I don’t like to spell it out: this might be intruding on Aaron and Wanda’s wedding night. We aren’t at PE college any more.

  But I soon get the picture that, apart from the business at the registry office and a few drinks and a meal, nothing much out of the ordinary is going to happen. There’s not going to be a honeymoon. Aaron and Wanda have apparently been shacked up together for quite a while. There’d be a spare room in their flat for Patti and me. It’s just that they’ve both decided it’s time to get married.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, slightly wishing it would be easier to insist on paying for a hotel anyway. With the two boys, Patti and me have to watch the cash. But of course what I’m mostly thinking, and so’s Patti, is: What’s this Wanda like? And, given all the years that have passed: What’s Aaron like?

  Well, it may put me in a bad light, but I have to say Wanda was a disappointment. At least at first. A surprise and a disappointment. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean she wasn’t perfectly—fine. But if all those years of what Aaron once got up to were supposed to be a selection process, so that in the end he’d pick out a real star—well, Wanda was nothing special.

  I even felt, which doesn’t put me in a good light either, I did better with Patti.

  I didn’t share this thought with Patti, but I could feel her tuning in to it and relaxing. It put me in a good light with her. I think Patti’s fear was that we were about to meet some woman who’d have me, in spite of myself, spending the whole weekend with my tongue hanging out. That this might have been the real purpose of the exercise. Aaron just wanted to show off his trophy.

  To be honest, it was my fear too.


  Wanda was built along pretty pared-down lines, which wasn’t, as I recall, how Aaron had liked them. She wasn’t skinny, but she was, well, wiry, with a tough little pair of shoulders. And her face, though it had a cheeky way of making you feel good and want to laugh, wasn’t a face that would stop you in your tracks. It could even sometimes look a bit hard and locked up.

  She wasn’t a beauty, but she had a way of carrying herself, of moving, an energy, an intensity. I liked her. I was glad I didn’t fancy her. And pretty soon I twigged it.

  I found a moment to say in private to Aaron, ‘She’s a runner, isn’t she?’ This was barely an hour after the two of them had become Mr and Mrs.

  ‘I hope she’s not running anywhere, man, after what we’ve just done.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ In fact a glint had come into his eyes. We were at a bar, fetching drinks.

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘Four hundred. Eight hundred maybe.’ He gave me a quick stare. ‘Maybe hurdles. She has to find where it really is for her.’ Then he said, with a certain pride in his voice, and he even looked across the crowded room to exchange a wink with his new wife, ‘Yep, a runner. She’s going places. Same again, man?’

  As for Aaron himself, how did he look? Well, he looked good—right then he looked very good—but I could see how the years had affected him. They’d blunted and blurred him a bit, taken off some shine. Enough to make me think: How will he look in another five years? And to make me think: He’ll be having the same thoughts about me.

  Except I didn’t kid myself and I hadn’t just got married and I was a father of two. And my viewpoint had perhaps been different all along. I keep people fit for a living, so I keep fit myself, but there are limits, and no one gets any younger. That’s why these days I spend a good deal of time with a man called Jarvis who’s starting up a sportswear company. It’s why I enrolled not long ago on a business course. It’s my plan B. For the boys’ and Patti’s sake. For my own sake.

  I could have been a hurdler? Maybe. But, as I said once to Patti a long time ago, I saw the hurdles.

  All the same, people reach their peaks, I believe this. They come into their best. There’s the book with the chapters, but there’s something else. We reach our peaks and we pass them. There’s nothing to be done about it, but it’s a sad thing if you never even knew the peak you had it in you to reach. In the world of physical fitness you see a lot of this. You see the chances and you see a lot of missed ones.

  What I’m really saying is that you might have thought that for Aaron and Wanda their wedding day wasn’t their moment of coming into their best. It was important, but their best was somewhere else. Maybe Aaron knew that his had already gone.

  Anyhow, after a few drinks—it was a three o’clock wedding—they took us back to their place before we went out again for dinner. It was a top flat, on two floors, and our room was a tiny little spare room under the roof, but I was relieved we wouldn’t be sleeping just the other side of a wall from them.

  More than relieved. As we went upstairs Patti was ahead. She was wearing a nice outfit for the occasion (maybe for Aaron too, but I’ll let that pass). I was carrying our overnight bag, but I couldn’t keep my free hand to myself. I couldn’t help giving Patti a good goosing. And no sooner were we behind the door and supposed to be, according to Aaron, ‘sorting ourselves out’, than we were at it, quick and breathless and more or less still standing up. A chilly attic room in Birmingham, dark outside. Patti with her skirt up, holding on to the back of a chair. The kids off our hands. Two newly-weds below. Wonders will never cease.

  We had a good time—I mean we had a good time, too, with Aaron and Wanda. Because of the head start we had, of having been married for five years already and having two kids, being with Aaron and Wanda was like being with a couple of kids. And, not having our own kids around, it was like being a couple of kids ourselves.

  True, when we came back later that night—it was their wedding night—our top room, above theirs, might still have been a bit tricky. But we’d all been drinking and then Patti and me—well, we’d had our head start. All I remember is curling up with her, this time just for warmth, and crashing.

  When I woke up I could hear a lot of scuffling below. I don’t mean bedroom noises. I mean scuffling, on the stairs and then in the hallway. The sound of people on their feet and busy about something—very early on a Sunday morning, in January. On the day after their wedding.

  I heard muffled voices. I think I heard, ‘Okay, Wan? Keys?’ Then I heard the front door being shut with an effort to keep it quiet. Then I heard more voices below in the street. I wondered if Aaron and Wanda were still drunk. And I couldn’t help getting up to peep through the curtains of our little front window.

  It made me think of getting up once when I’d heard strange noises at home. It was just two foxes, under the streetlamps, mucking around with an upended dustbin. I remember thinking that I wasn’t young any more—I was someone who worried about noises in the night.

  What I saw this time, under the streetlamps, was Aaron and Wanda. To say they were mucking around wouldn’t have been quite right, but not quite wrong either. They were in tracksuits and trainers. On the morning after their wedding night—it was still dark and freezing—they were going for a run. But they were also mucking around as if they couldn’t yet get down to serious business. They were laughing. They were like two foxes in their own way. They more than once kissed and ran their hands over each other. I thought: They could be doing all that snuggled up in bed.

  Nonetheless I saw Aaron had a stopwatch on a loop round his neck. They actually took up positions, side by side, in the middle of the road, half crouching, as if their toes were on a line. Aaron held the stopwatch, looking at it, then Wanda tensed and Aaron spoke. I’m sure I heard, ‘Set! Go!’ Wanda sped off and Aaron kept looking at the watch—maybe it was a ten-second handicap—then he sped off too.

  His challenge to her, or hers to him? I’ll never know. Or what the distance was or the route. It was 6.30 a.m.

  Wanda’s an eight-hundred-metre runner now. The real deal. It’s less than a year to the London Olympics. And she’s Aaron’s missis.

  I turned from the window. Patti had woken up. She switched on a bedside light and stared at me. ‘What the hell are you doing? What’s going on?’

  Well, the phrase came to me. I had to laugh. I said, ‘I’ve just seen Aaron chasing a woman.’

  I explained. I explained what I’d heard and what I’d seen and I expected there’d now be some chuckling head-shaking discussion between us about this weird post-wedding behaviour. Or that this might be the time for our in-depth analysis of the whole Aaron-Wanda thing.

  But Patti just said, ‘You mean they’re not here, they’re not right below us? We’ve got the place to ourselves?’

  And she grabbed my wrist and yanked me back into bed.

  PEOPLE ARE LIFE

  ‘BUT YOU HAVE friends,’ I said.

  I don’t know why I said it. It was somewhere between saying and asking.

  ‘Friends?’ he said.

  ‘Friends. You know.’

  He was my last of the day. I’d already told Hassan to turn the sign on the door. I was tired, but sometimes the last of the day is different, if only because it’s the last. It was a little before seven, already dark.

  I snipped away.

  ‘Friends,’ he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. Then he went silent. ‘I have meetings,’ he said.

  Now it was my turn. ‘Meetings?’

  ‘Meetings. I know people and I meet them. People I’ve known for a long time, but I just meet them. Know what I mean? Time goes by, then we meet, for a drink or something. Then time goes by again. Is that having friends?’

  I wasn’t sure now if he was saying or asking.

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  Maybe what I’d meant by friends was no more than just that—what he’d just said. People you could talk to. People he coul
d talk to.

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  It’s not every day that one comes in and lets you know that since you did them last their mother has died. And who puts it this way: ‘That’s both of them. My dad last year, my mum last week.’

  Well, that was certainly saying.

  I’d never known, or I couldn’t remember, about his dad.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ I said. ‘The two of them.’

  And I’d never known till now the truth of this one’s situation. He didn’t have to say it, I didn’t have to ask. I saw it in his face in the mirror, in the way he looked at his face in the mirror.

  ‘Well it has to happen,’ I said, ‘sooner or later.’ I might have said, ‘When you get to our age,’ but I didn’t.

  You see things in the way people look at their own faces. It’s not a thing they often do or even want to do, but in a barber’s shop there’s not much else to do. In a café people pay to sit and look out at the world going by. In a barber’s they pay to stare at their own faces, and you see what goes on when they do.

  You don’t see much in the top of a head. Though sometimes I think: Right there beneath my fingers is their skull, their brain and every thought that’s in it.

  What this one was telling me, by his look in the mirror, was that he’d lived with—lived for—his mum and his dad all his life. Some men are big children. That was about the whole of it. And he must have been past sixty. One of those big, hefty but soft types. What he was telling me was that he was all alone in the world.

  I carried on snipping. What I thought was: Well, what can I do about it? I cut hair.

  ‘Still, it’s tough,’ I said. ‘How old—your mother?’

  ‘Eighty-three,’ he said.

  ‘Eighty-three,’ I said. ‘That’s not bad. Eighty-three’s not a bad age.’

  Then after a silence I said, I don’t know why, ‘But you have friends.’

  People to talk to, I meant, in your time of trouble. Everyone has friends. But he only had ‘meetings’ apparently.