England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  Shit—was it something bad? Was it something he should know first?

  ‘I’m in Waitrose, Doug. By the pasta. Doug! Doug! How’s it going?’

  What a stupid way of putting it: ‘How’s it going?’

  But Doug had wanted to know all about his shopping list. He’d seemed tickled by the picture of his father pushing a trolley, holding his list, dithering by the shelves. And while Doug was so keen on the situation in Waitrose, he hadn’t wanted to ask his son about the situation in Afghanistan. His anger, if that’s what it was, had dropped away.

  ‘You should stick with dried, Dad. Fresh is a scam.’ Doug had said this in Helmand. ‘Try the fusilli for a change. The little curly ones.’

  A November evening, days before Remembrance Day. But Christmas was coming apparently. Doug had called from Helmand.

  He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t not think about it. He could hardly enter Waitrose again. It was almost impossible to go now—though he had to—to the spot, in the aisle, where it had happened. Where he’d spoken to Doug and looked around at all the others with their trolleys and baskets and thought: They don’t know, they don’t know I’m talking to my boy in Afghanistan.

  He and Jenny would never eat fusilli again, that was for sure, they’d never eat those things again.

  And had it been anger, just before Doug called? Anger was sometimes supposed to be a substitute for fear, so they said. Or grief. Had that surge of anger, or whatever it was, been some sort of advance warning? If he hadn’t had it, if he hadn’t got angry, then would nothing have happened? But then if he hadn’t had it, would Doug have called, just then?

  Everything, now, was a matter of mocking superstition.

  But Christmas before Remembrance Day! And now it was almost really Christmas. The aisles were crammed and glistening with it. He couldn’t bear it. The only good thing was not to think. The only good thing was to ignore, ignore. But he couldn’t.

  He pushed the trolley. He couldn’t even bear to think of Jenny. Maybe she took the opportunity while he did these supermarket trips just to sit with her head in her hands, tears trickling between her fingers.

  He couldn’t bear to think of calling her to ask, like he used to, about the rice. ‘What sort, Jen? Regular? Basmati?’ Such things. It couldn’t be done, it just couldn’t be done any more. Their little foodie fads, their fancy cooking. Their being nice to themselves and splashing out—Waitrose not Tesco’s—now the lad had left home.

  Puy lentils, Thai green sauce. That sort of shit.

  He couldn’t bear to think about how thinking about Jenny only half a mile away was the same as thinking about Doug three thousand miles away. He wasn’t here, he was there, but you could talk, just the same, on the phone. Now the simple words ‘here’ and ‘there’ confused him utterly. Doug wasn’t here, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there at all.

  Or—and this is where it got really terrible—Doug was there. Doug was in a mortuary in Swindon, pending a coroner’s decision. They couldn’t have Doug yet. It was pretty clear now that they couldn’t have Doug before Christmas, maybe even for some time after Christmas. All they wanted for Christmas was Doug. But Doug would be spending Christmas in a mortuary in Swindon. And anyway Christmas wouldn’t happen this year.

  ‘Christmas is coming.’ He remembered when he was a kid how the words had excited him almost more than the word Christmas itself, the idea that it was on its way. At Christmas, or when it was coming, you made lists, you dropped hints. He wanted to remember now—but at the same time didn’t want to remember—every present they’d ever bought Doug for Christmas, every one.

  Had they ever bought him any kind of toy gun? If they had, then it could have been another of those signals, those things that become real. So they must have done. If only they hadn’t. Or if only Doug had been a girl. If so he’d have been called Natalie and the list of presents would have been different.

  He tried to think, while trying not to think, of all the presents. But it wasn’t so hard to remember being the man, in years gone by, in the days when Christmas was coming, looking for a gift to give his son. Not to remember being that man was the harder thing.

  Fifteen, twenty years ago. Wars on TV. But there were soldiers to do all that stuff, and he’d never thought it was wrong or unmanly of him to be traipsing round Mothercare with Jenny and Doug—‘Dougie in his buggy’—while there were wars going on. He felt it was the right thing to be doing. And it had never occurred to either of them that one day Doug would get it into his head . . .

  ‘Stick with dried, Dad.’

  Why had he been so interested in pasta? Was that what they got out there? Dried stuff. Not stuff in tins. Pasta, all the varieties. Had it been a soldier’s advice?

  Before him suddenly was one of those floundering young mums with a loaded trolley, two small kids swinging from the sides, using it as a jumping-off point for marauding charges up and down the aisle.

  Nothing, once, on these shopping trips used to get his goat more than these bawling little bastards, these kids their mums or dads seemed unable to restrain, Doug never having been a noisy, out-of-control child. He’d been proud of that. He’d been proud of his soldier-son too. But now these screaming brats in front of him simply made him stand stock-still. They were kids. There was their mother. They were, all of them, both there and here. The kids were only doing what kids do. He looked at the mother’s strained, about-to-burst face. He thought: She doesn’t know how lucky she is. He wanted to look hard at her, to catch her eye, so she would see something in his.

  But beyond her was the pasta section. He couldn’t go there. He had to go there. They were out of pasta, he’d checked. They weren’t interested in food any more, but they had to eat. They were out of even basics now: pasta, rice. Fuck mince pies.

  He’d told Jenny, of course, about the phone call, of course he had. Should he have kept it a secret? It was why they’d eaten the things, that same evening—with a tomato, garlic and basil sauce. A bottle of Sicilian red. They’d been Doug’s ‘choice’. They’d never eat the fucking things again.

  He had to go there, yet he couldn’t. And now anyway this losing-her-grip mother was blocking his path. She was standing exactly where—

  Everything was like this now: a reason for, a reason against. He was suddenly furious with this useless hopeless mum. Was it anger? What was it exactly? He understood how violence gets done. He pushed his trolley forward, in a no-swerving, no-yielding way, as if to smash into her trolley. Did she catch his eye? Did she see something in it? She was probably thinking: Bastard of a man. She moved in any case, she got out of his damn way, so did the screaming brats. And he was suddenly there, on the spot where he’d spoken to Doug.

  His mobile had rung. He’d thought: What now? What had Jenny forgotten to ask him to get? It was the last time he’d heard Doug’s voice. It would have been the middle of the night in Helmand.

  He saw them, in their little clear-plastic bags, alongside the lasagne and the tagliatelle. He even knew what the word meant now. Had Doug known? He picked up a packet. He knew that it wasn’t for them to eat. It wasn’t even for Jenny to see, to know. He had to do it. He held the scrunchy packet. He’d put it separately somewhere, he’d hide it. He grabbed a big pack of spaghetti and tossed it into his trolley anyway.

  ‘Fresh is a scam, Dad. The dried lasts for ever.’

  He clasped the fusilli close to his chest. They’d never get eaten. He’d put them somewhere, God knows where. Under the seat in the car.

  Christmas wouldn’t happen this year. No presents, no lists. But this was his gift for Doug, or it was Doug’s gift to him. He didn’t know. Everything was this and that. The woman had gone. He’d somehow even cleared the aisle. He felt the pieces of pasta beneath the shiny plastic like the knobbly, guessed-at things inside a Christmas stocking long ago. The little curly things.

  I LIVE ALONE

  THERE WAS A moment, as Dr Grant spoke, when he didn’t see Grant’s face at all
. He saw Anne’s face, streaming with salt water. He saw her wet arm held out to him, as if she herself had delivered this news. It made it strangely bearable.

  It didn’t otherwise help to know that he was the victim of a rare disease, with some foreigner’s name—as if the rarity, so Grant seemed to be suggesting, was some kind of compensation. He didn’t feel privileged to have been introduced, in this intimate way, to this Dubrowski or Bronowski or whoever he was—as if he too might have held out a hand across Grant’s desk. He saw his wife’s hand. Anne’s hand, Anne’s face.

  He saw, but in a different way and more vividly than ever, what he’d never failed to see every day for ten years.

  He stopped listening to what Grant was saying. There was only so much you could take in after the announcement of such a basic fact. He was trying to take that in—along with his vision of Anne. He was trying to take in the fact that his life was no longer the indefinite thing of which he’d always been the subject, it was a closed thing, a finite thing, an object.

  And he suddenly remembered himself, distinctly, at primary school, aged perhaps ten, holding a cricket ball. It had been a matter of some debate—he remembered this—whether small boys should be allowed to use proper hard cricket balls. But this was the school team, it was serious grown-up stuff, and they were playing St Michael’s. Astonishingly, he remembered even that. He saw himself in the outfield on the off side, picking up a cricket ball struck in his direction. He saw the dry summer grass beneath him, the flattened dandelions. He saw the ball he’d grabbed, its scuffed red surface, felt its solidity.

  His life was now like a cricket ball.

  But he saw himself, too, fling back his arm and hurl this same ball, with inspired force, not just towards the wicket keeper, but directly towards the stumps. Saw it shatter the stumps long before the running batsman—or batsboy—even with bat outstretched, could gain the crease. Saw the wicket keeper lift his gloved hands in jubilation. Saw everyone lift their hands.

  It was a spectacular throw, perhaps thirty yards, and perhaps his only moment of sporting glory. And the strange thing was that he’d known it wouldn’t miss. He hadn’t thought about it in decades, but he saw it now, in Grant’s consulting room, as clearly, as triumphantly as yesterday. He saw the ball, with its dense red weight, briefly clutched in his hand.

  After leaving his office he’d taken the bus across the city and by the time he’d entered the now familiar private hospital and sat in the waiting room he’d set out in his mind three possible outcomes for this visit and given them each a percentage. One was that Grant would say the latest tests had revealed nothing of further importance and, though they should keep it under review and meet again in, say, a couple of months, there was really nothing to worry about. Thirty per cent. Second, Grant might say there was now a clear diagnosis, but the problem, though significant, could be treated. Sixty per cent. Third, Grant would say that unfortunately the diagnosis was that he had a rare incurable fatal disease. Ten per cent.

  He’d considered these options to be fairly weighted, if anything rather tilted against him, and he’d believed in them like a superstition. Of course he’d hoped for option one, if not exactly for an ‘all clear’. Though he was technically prepared for it, he hadn’t believed in option three, but to have left it out would have been tempting fate.

  Yet he’d known from Grant’s face, even before Grant began properly to speak, that option three was actually the one.

  There’d come to him the absurdly calming notion that since Grant was a doctor and he was a lawyer a certain professional comportment should be maintained. The roles might be reversed. As a lawyer he’d often had to give clients grave disquieting news or maintain a quasi-clinical detachment while they exhibited signs of distress. He couldn’t complain if it was now the other way round. He should handle himself properly. He should look Grant in the face. He did.

  But he saw Anne, he saw her arm. And seeing Anne was really the thing that saved him, not his professional decorum.

  This was what kept (these very words came to him) his head above water and made it look to Grant perhaps that he was taking it rather well, he was taking it like a man.

  He told himself: I deserve this, I’d even wanted it. This too was the other way round. Ten per cent.

  So then.

  Then the notion of his life as some small separate finite object, like a cricket ball, had rushed towards him.

  He told himself (he actually had the sense of standing outside himself to do so): And anyway it’s hardly unfair. I’m fifty-nine. Many will live to a much riper age. But many, many—though, above all, Anne—have died long before.

  And with that supremely balanced thought there’d entered his head—no, it seemed that they themselves had entered Grant’s room—the actual roster of all those he’d known but who’d died before him. They appeared with remarkable clarity and in remarkably organised reverse order, taking him all the way back to the very first of their kind he’d known.

  Yes, he remembered now. It popped up from some submerged place as if it had only been waiting for this moment. The very first had been little Howard Clarke. Now he remembered even the name—and remembered the other thing too. Howard Clarke had been the wicket keeper, his small hands encased in monstrous gloves, the wicket keeper whose skill had not been needed when he’d made that legendary throw. The wicket keeper who’d raised his exultant arms.

  The point being that Howard Clarke, aged ten yet already marked out as a wicket keeper, had gone off as they all had for the summer holiday, but had never returned. It had been somehow conveyed to them, early in September, that he was never going to return. A brain tumour, someone said, whatever that was. A brain tumour, perhaps as dense and undeniable as a cricket ball, inside his head.

  Grant continued to speak, but he didn’t listen or couldn’t focus. It was enough—surely enough since it was everything—to have to take in the main thing. He’d already asked the question that he’d never thought he’d hear himself ask, the question people only asked in films. And Grant had answered, though through a sort of fog. Had he said six months or eighteen, or that it could be anywhere between the two? Grant was now speaking of what might be done to ‘maximise his quality of life’ (had he heard that phrase?). But he wasn’t really listening. Oddly, given the crucial nature of it all, he wasn’t concentrating.

  Again, he knew this sort of thing from the other side. How many times, after telling clients some urgent sobering fact, had he watched their faces glaze over as he went on to explain the repercussions? They were still digesting the main thing. But what could you do except carry on? It was your professional obligation.

  But mainly he couldn’t concentrate on Grant because of the way Grant was crowded out, in his small room, by these others, by these ranks of dead ones, or of living memories, going back as far as Howard Clarke. They were far more important than Grant. Grant was being replaced by them—he’d even for a moment turned into Anne—so that his voice seemed to become increasingly feeble. It even seemed—but was this another confusion with Anne?—that Grant was the floundering and struggling one, the one in difficulties, and he felt a great gush of pity, mixed with something like wise seniority, for this man placed in the awful position of having to make the announcement he’d just made.

  Grant, he supposed, when he wasn’t being a physician, was a family man with a wife, and children perhaps now in their teens. He would go back to all that this evening. Which meant that he belonged, unquestionably, to the freely living, to those whose lives were not closed and finite. Whereas he, now, was of the other sort, the minority. He was not now of the same kind as Grant, though he had been moments ago, before entering his consulting room.

  Yet he’d always been—or had been for the last ten years and those ten years had become a sort of ‘always’—a man of a different kind of minority. Of a kind who’d sometimes say, by way of giving a general, guarded account of himself, ‘I live alone.’

  Had he said it at s
ome point to Grant?

  It had become his watchword. He said it to clients, particularly clients he was guiding through the troublesome process of divorce, and he could say it with a judicious ironical tone, even a crinkly smile. So they could never tell what he really meant. An expression of sad fact? Or of proud resolution? An explanation, or a recommendation?

  Grant, he thought, was speaking, in his flailing voice, with the strange loquacity of the living, with the gabble with which one might speak about all the detailed necessary arrangements for a wedding while somehow forgetting the main thing, that two people were about to commit themselves to each other for life.

  Except this wasn’t a wedding.

  Yet he saw himself clearly for a moment (no longer a small boy on a cricket field) at his own wedding, nearly thirty years ago, and all the other people at it, several of whom were now dead and thus among this muster here in Grant’s room. It had been a thronged lavish wedding because Anne came from a large and wealthy family, while he was just a suburban boy who’d landed on his feet. West Ealing to Winchester. The Sixties song had lodged in his brain. Win-chester Cathedral . . . Would they have to get married, he’d joked, in Winchester Cathedral?

  How strange to have had such a packed wedding when he was now a man who said, ‘I live alone.’

  And he remembered how before the wedding he’d gone with Anne down to the jetty at Lymington with two bottles of champagne clanking in a bag. And they’d rowed out to where the Marinella was anchored. It was theirs now. It had been in Anne’s family for years, but it was officially theirs now, a wedding present, though the sort that can’t be wrapped or hidden. And before they climbed aboard—to drink the second bottle and make ceremonial waterborne love in the cabin—Anne had smashed the first bottle, with a fine flourish of her arm, against the bows, saying, ‘I name this yacht the Marinella, the yacht of our marriage. May God bless all those who navigate and copulate in her.’ He’d never thought he could become (with Anne’s instruction) a sailor. That, with Anne, he could sail the Marinella to Jersey, Guernsey, Brittany, Portugal. He was a provincial lawyer, a decent fish in a smallish pond, whose only act of physical prowess had been that amazing throw at primary school, Howard Clarke’s leathered hands raised high.