by Graham Swift
He’s no saint. Or: She’s no angel.
Could he have thought it, of his own mother, as she stooped like that to kiss him in the morning? She’s no angel.
His father had said that it had all happened just as Jesus had said. Those who came to accuse and arrest him accused Peter too—of being a follower of Jesus. Three times, in fact, Peter was accused and three times he said that he had nothing to do with Jesus. Even though he’d been told by Jesus that this was just what he’d do—which should have been the severest and most unbreakable command not to do it—Peter had gone ahead three times with his denials.
His father didn’t say about this that it was because Peter was only human and he was afraid. He just said it was what happened. Peter had slept because his eyes were heavy. Now he made his denials, three times. Immediately after the third time the cock suddenly crowed. Then Peter had wept.
FIRST ON THE SCENE
NEARLY EVERY WEEK now—more often if he could and if the weather was good—Terry would catch a train to the country and take a walk in one of the places where, not so long ago, he and his late wife Lynne used to walk together. They’d discovered these places and the appropriate train timetables when he’d had to give up driving because of his Parkinson’s, and because Lynne had never learnt to drive. In just an hour or so from town they’d be stepping out into quiet countryside with good walks, fine views and maybe a handy pub. It was all a lot better, in fact, more free and easy, than driving somewhere. They’d never have discovered these places in a car. It made him less miffed about not being able to drive, even about his altered state of health.
He’d always thought that, with his Parkinson’s, he would go first, but it was Lynne.
Now Terry went on these same walks, caught exactly the same trains on his own, because it was the nearest he could get to being with Lynne and enjoying it. At home, in the house they’d shared for years, the same theoretically applied, but it wasn’t enjoyable, it was the opposite. He needed the countryside, the trees, the open air, the familiar paths.
On these walks he’d sometimes say to himself: This is as good as it gets. It was something he’d never have thought of saying to himself when he was young, it would have seemed foolish, but there’d come a point in his life when he began to say it quite often, like a reminder. He used to say it to himself nearly every time he walked with Lynne. But he said it also now. It was important. It wasn’t true now, because when he’d said it to himself while walking with Lynne everything had been so much better. But it was also true now. It was true and it wasn’t.
When Terry took the trains for these walks he would look at other passengers as if he were a complete outsider, as if he might be invisible. He’d listen to their chatter. All of this wasn’t an uncomfortable feeling, in fact he sometimes felt a strange tug of warmth, of soothing fascination for these creatures he was no longer one of. He couldn’t have had these feelings driving in a car.
It might have been that on these walks he would have just felt lonely, but it was the opposite. It was only on these walks that he felt totally free to imagine that his wife was walking beside him, that he could be uninhibited about talking to her out loud, not even in his head. He couldn’t do this at home, it would seem like the first sign of madness, but on these walks he’d initiate and conduct whole conversations with his wife, and, yes, as he spoke or even as he just walked he’d sometimes really believe, turning his head quickly to check, that she was there.
It might have been, too, that, wrapped up in this process, Terry wouldn’t have been so attentive to the countryside around him, to the pleasing views, to the observation of nature. Yet it was all the more important to notice these things, to point them out to his wife, to see the butterfly, or the woodpecker, like a speck of paint, against the tree, or the kestrel quivering in mid-air. These things were alive.
So, in fact, he was all the more observant. He’d sometimes be drawn, with a surprisingly tender concentration, to just a cluster of primroses or a clump of moss. He’d notice things even at a distance.
So he noticed very quickly now, through the ferns, the patch of bright colour—bright red—up ahead.
There was a place where if you left the main path and struck out through the undergrowth you emerged onto the brow of a hill. There were bramble bushes, a thick bank of ferns, then a small clearing of grass and more ferns. Then the woods encroached again. It was a semi-secret place and, with the grass and the view and the enclosing bushes and ferns, a perfect spot in fine weather just to sit for a while and rest before walking on, or walking back. Or (with Lynne) to have had a small picnic—to have got out the thermos and the plastic box of stuff he’d carry in his backpack. He’d sat here with Lynne many times and, surprisingly, they’d never found it occupied by anyone else.
He thought that this might be the case now and that he should stop, back-track into the woods and circle round. Too bad, that the place was taken. But the red patch, though it seemed like a patch of clothing, didn’t move and there were no sounds. He concluded that it was something left by somebody, and this at first annoyed him. How could anyone leave behind anything so glaring?
After a few more steps and without yet emerging from the narrow gap through the ferns he saw that the red patch was indeed an item of clothing. It was a woman’s red T-shirt and it was being worn by a woman in her mid-twenties, and the woman was alone and very still and dead.
He knew this at once and for certain, without ever drawing close: the woman was dead. She was lying on her side in a curled-up position, in what is known as the foetal position, but she wasn’t asleep, she didn’t stir. She was dead. If he were questioned—and he soon realised that he would be—as to how he knew the woman was dead, it wouldn’t be easy to explain. He’d never come across a dead person in a clearing before, but some ability in him that perhaps all humans come equipped with, to recognise another human who is dead, instantly asserted itself. Perhaps he possessed this ability more keenly now that Lynne was dead.
There was nothing else in the clearing and the woman appeared unmarked, but she was dead. There was the unavoidable impression that she’d lain there for some time. There was a total immobility about her and a sense that the passage of hours, the weather and other, more mysterious processes had worked on her to claim her as just an inanimate part of the surroundings.
Apart from the red top, she wore blue jeans and lightweight, stylish trainers—clothes for a summer’s day, but not for sleeping outside through a summer’s night. This thought was merely technical. The thought that she would have been cold was irrelevant. The clothes seemed attached to her in a way that was not the usual way of clothes. Her hair was strangely tangled about her face as if the hair and the face were only incidental to each other. There were tiny bits of vegetation, things that might fall from trees or be blown about the air, dotted all over her. A small leaf was lodged in her exposed upturned ear.
He was no expert, but he didn’t need to go any further to verify that she was not alive and had lain there like that, without stirring, since at least the preceding evening. He was sure of this, if he was sure of nothing else.
It was now not long after ten on a warm Sunday morning. He’d taken a fairly early train.
He stood still. He didn’t want to emerge from the screen of the ferns. He peered carefully around. There was only the innocent sunny aspect the scene would have had if he were the only one there—which he was in a sense. Or if nobody was there. Indeed the absurd phrase came to him: ‘first on the scene’.
In all his life—and he was sixty-nine—he’d never been first on the scene. Was this remarkable, a sort of achievement, or just the norm? In all his life with Lynne, in all their walks, they’d never been first on the scene either. It had never even occurred to them that it might happen. But he was now, for the first time, first on the scene. He was the one who ‘while out walking’ . . . It was another phrase that came to him.
He stood and looked. He also shook. But this was his Pa
rkinson’s, his occasional and really not so violent tremor. It was another virtue of his solitary walks that this sometimes embarrassing symptom no longer mattered. It was anyway the lesser of his plights. He was so constituted now as to have from time to time a condition usually associated with strong emotion—and now he was under the sway of strong emotion his body had no separate way of signalling it. But he wasn’t sure what the emotion was. Was it fear? Or rather anger?
Whatever else this sight before him signified, it was something that had brutally interrupted—swept away, cancelled—his much-needed conversation with his wife, his being still with her though she wasn’t there. It had desecrated the memory of being here, in this same grassy clearing, with her in the past. It had made it impossible ever to walk this way with her (though without her) again.
It was hardly the appropriate emotion: anger. Yet he felt it. He would never tell anyone about it, though he understood that he’d have to tell people about other things. It was an inescapable consequence of his being here right now that he’d have to explain things and carefully answer questions. He’d have to justify his actions.
What were you doing walking in the woods? Why were you there?
She was in her twenties. If she were alive (and since he was sixty-nine) he might have called her a girl. The trainers were pale blue and white and had red laces to match her top. There was something impossible about the small swell of her ankle bone.
‘Stumbled upon’: that was another phrase. In all his life he’d never stumbled upon. He understood that his role in all this—though it was not as if he’d been assigned a role—was minor, incidental, the result of the merest chance, yet at the same time it was critical and would involve him a great deal. He might have walked another way, he might have caught a later train, he might not have come for a walk at all. This encounter might have been entirely someone else’s, but it was his.
If he gave an honest answer to why he was walking in the wood he might at once be thought to be a little peculiar. Why are you trembling? It’s Parkinson’s disease. I have Parkinson’s disease. Anyway, why shouldn’t he tremble? Who wouldn’t tremble at such a thing?
As the first on the scene, he might automatically—this possibility suddenly hit him—come under suspicion himself. Automatically and provisionally, yet almost definitely. A young woman, a girl. A retired man, a widower, with a tremble, walking alone in a wood . . .
What would Lynne think of this predicament he’d walked into? Suppose it had happened while he’d been walking with her. But he couldn’t now turn to his wife and say, ‘Lynne, what should I do? What should we do?’ Lynne, who just moments ago had seemed so assuringly to be with him, had now totally disappeared.
And that was really the worst of it all.
A great temptation came over him: to make the hypothesis, the other, not realised possibility be true. He might simply retrace his steps, go back into the woods, rejoin the main path. He might never, after all, have forked off through the undergrowth to this spot that only he, he and Lynne, and perhaps just a few other walking folk knew. He might just carry on with his walk. He might contemplate nature. There would be a story, a news story, which he might not even hear about, which would have nothing to do with him.
But he knew he couldn’t do this. It was true that he hadn’t gone near the body, let alone touched it, he’d only stood here and looked. Yet he felt that his presence, the path he’d taken, brushing aside twigs and stems, his tread on the ground beneath him were as indelibly imprinted as any scent an animal might pick up. There was something irrevocable about his being here. It was so much the case that the emotion afflicting him was perhaps neither anger nor fear but a sort of contaminating, trapping, but unjustifiable guilt. And he wanted to cry out suddenly to Lynne, who wasn’t there, to be his witness, his alibi.
The woman was not in any way like Lynne. She was not even like Lynne had been when she was, say, twenty-four. Except, of course, she was like Lynne in one fundamental way.
The trees, the ferns all around him were trembling, shaking in their way too. It was just the summer breeze. It was only for entirely extraneous reasons, an unlucky gene, that he was trembling himself. And yet he made a determined and futile effort—as if it were something both vital and within his power—to stop doing so.
Then he saw the whole truth of what must ensue, of what he and no one else must inescapably instigate, the truth of what was embodied before him—setting aside the immense riddle of why it was there at all. This was someone’s daughter, someone’s . . .
He reached for his mobile phone. It wasn’t easy. Mobile phones aren’t designed for people with Parkinson’s, but he still carried one, even on solitary walks, and would have said that it was in case he got into difficulties, in case of emergencies. And this was certainly an emergency. Even before his symptoms had appeared he hadn’t been a great user of his mobile and had called it his ‘walkie-talkie’ because he used it almost solely for communicating with his wife. Walkie-talkie: he should never have used those mocking words. When Lynne died he wished he hadn’t recently deleted all her inconsequential voice messages. But how should he have known?
It took time and was a struggle, with the shaking of his hand. But then others in his circumstances, without his condition, might have found this to be the case. He had no choice but to remain here, to be fixed to this spot. He even resolved not to budge from his position among the ferns, to stay as still as possible (setting aside his tremor), as still as that woman over there. Look at the ferns, the green ferns. Look at the butterfly, the woodpecker. Look—
He looked at the woman in her red top and saw, almost with a longing, the absolute absence the dead have even as they are there.
A voice crackled in his ear. He hadn’t a clue how to begin. He hadn’t a clue how to describe his situation or to pinpoint exactly where he was. What a terrible thing it can be just to be on this earth.
ENGLAND
HE CAME OVER the familiar brow and saw at once the red lights of the solitary vehicle, perhaps half a mile ahead on the otherwise empty stretch of road. It wasn’t moving, it had pulled up. Then, as he drew closer, he saw the odd angle. Its nearside wheels had lodged in one of the treacherous roadside gullies where the tarmac stopped.
It was not yet five. His watch began at 5.30. Only minutes ago, while Ruth still slept, he’d eased the car, in the dim light, from the garage. At this hour the straight stretch of road, the only straight stretch in his short journey, was normally all his own. He seldom rushed it. It was so starkly beautiful: the mass of the moor to his left and up ahead, in the scoops between the hills, the first glimpses of the sea. He told himself, routinely, not to take it for granted.
It was dawn, but overcast, there was even a faint mist—a general breathy greyness. The sort of greyness that would burn off, to give full sunshine, by mid-morning. The weather was in his professional blood. Fair weather, calm seas, late July. But it was the busy season.
He looked at the dashboard. He could spare perhaps ten minutes. He slowed and pulled over—not too far over, taking his warning from the car ahead. In it he could see a solitary figure in the driver’s seat, who must be amply aware by now that help was at hand. It was a blue BMW, but of a certain vintage, not a rich man’s car. Exmoor, these days, was full of rich men’s cars. Every species of plush four-by-four. Well, it was four-by-four territory. The joke was that since they drove the things around Chelsea, then here, surely, they should use their dinky little town cars. He didn’t quite get the joke, never having been to Chelsea.
He stopped. He could, in theory, have driven on. He was under no obligation. But how could you? In any case rescue was in his professional veins too. He understood at once what the situation might look like—he was even wearing a dark uniform. It must be why the driver didn’t open his door and, back turned, seemed almost to be cowering.
He walked forward, inhaling the cool air. A thin dreamy envelope of sleep still clung to him. There was the tiny cluck of wa
ter in the gully. A stream, barely more than a trickle through the grass, came down off the hillside and, in the slight dip, cut away at the edge of the road. It was a dodgy spot.
The driver’s window was down. He was met by a sudden blast of the foreign.
‘Fookin’ ’ell. Fookin’ ’ell!’
The driver’s face was black. He had, in silently noting the fact, no other word for it. You might say it wasn’t deep black, as black faces go, but it was black. This was not a place, an area, for black faces. It was remarkable to see them. There was, on top, a thick bizarre bonnet of frizzy hair. It looked cartoonish in its frizziness.
‘Fookin’ ’ell.’
‘It’s okay,’ he quickly and pacifyingly said, ‘I’m not a policeman. I’m a coastguard. It’s not a crime to be stuck in a ditch. Can I help?’
‘Co-ahst-guaard!’
The man’s voice had changed in an instant. The first voice (the normal one?) had a strong accent which, nonetheless, he couldn’t place, because all northern accents eluded him. The second voice was a foreign voice in the sense that the accent wasn’t English at all. He couldn’t place it exactly either, just that it was broadly—very broadly—Caribbean. But the man had slipped into it as if it were not in fact his natural voice. It was turned on and exaggerated, a joke voice.
On the other hand, since both voices were alien to him, both voices were like joke voices. That wasn’t a fair-minded thought, but he knew that people not from the West Country made a joke of the West Country accent all the time. It was one of the standard joke accents.
‘Where de co-ahst, man? Where de co-ahst? I is lookin’ for de co-ahst. You guard it, you tell me where it is.’
