by Morag Joss
Howard had stopped on the moorside several yards away and taken up a shepherdlike pose, staring across the ridge at his sheep, one hand folded over the head of his stick, the other stroking his beard. He was wearing a baggy smock that flapped girlishly around his body and his long hair streamed out behind him. Just then Deborah opened her eyes and called out to him, and he raised a hand, turned, and made his way slowly back. Maybe I am not normal, Adam thought. Maybe something in me is distorted. I am twenty-one years old, not a resentful adolescent anymore, but it really could be the case that I hate my parents.
After Howard sat down again Adam waited another ten minutes, during which there was a bit more offering and taking of picnic food. Nobody spoke much.
“Listen, I’m sorry it’s a bit of a flying visit, this,” he said. “I did tell you, didn’t I? I need to be off a bit later.”
“Off? Off where?” his mother said. “You don’t mean today? Where are you off to?”
“I have to go back to Leicester.”
“But you’ve just finished at Leicester,” Howard said.
“Oh, you mean go back to pack up your things? Will you get everything in your car?” his mother asked. “Shall I come up in the van as well? We could all go up!”
“No, I mean I’m going back properly, to stay. For another two years. I’m doing an MBA.” His parents didn’t speak. “It’s a post-graduate degree. Master of Business Administration. It’s all sorted, I’ve been accepted. Term starts last week of September.”
“Another degree?” Howard said. “And what would be the point of that?” The question wasn’t neutral, of course. Part of Howard’s credo of the general fucked-up-ness of the world’s systems and institutions was that formal education was shallow and overrated. Adam knew that when he’d demanded to be allowed to go to school after ten years of home schooling, he’d defected from one of his father’s core beliefs. He also knew while anger was against Howard’s principles (all those negative energies), he’d never really got over it.
“A master of what did you say, Business Administration?” his mother said. “But you’ve just spent three years doing Business Studies. Won’t it just be more of the same thing?” She picked out the words as if she were naming a disease, or a vice.
“Look, there’s no point arguing about it. I’m doing an MBA. I’m not asking you for anything, I’ll be paying for it.”
“But what for, Adam? Why do you want to do it?” Deborah asked.
Adam ground his back teeth. A typical Mum question, while what she would never, ever ask was how he was doing it, how he would manage to pay for it all. She wouldn’t be interested that he’d be working his arse off for the next two years to earn enough to live on as well as study. He said, “Mum, the MBA—it’s a recognized thing. Everybody knows about the MBA. It’s a … a sort of passport, okay? It helps you get a better career.” He cleared his throat. “Everybody knows that.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” his father said.
No, you wouldn’t, would you, Adam thought. You make certain you never hear about anything real, anything that’s part of the real world. He shrugged. “Well, just about everybody else has. Everybody but you and Mum knows an MBA gets you a higher starting salary, for one thing. Faster promotion. An MBA,”—he paused to draw breath for the next bit—“an MBA represents a high-recognition, value-added skillset with high transferability potential across a wide range of industry sectors.”
That struck them dumb, as he intended.
But only for a moment. Howard snorted. “Oh, I see, a higher starting salary. Money. Of course,” he said. “An MBA—Money Before Anything. Eh? Big salary, flash car—oh, yes. Thoughtless consumption, is that what you want? Selling your soul in the process.” He paused. “One day, Adam, I hope you’ll find out there are more important things than money.”
“Oh, yes? And what would they be?” Adam said. “Really. What things? I mean, for instance, what have you got that’s so much better than money?”
“Adam!” his mother said.
He stood up. “No, really. Go on, Dad, tell me. What? Your mangy sheep, your dump of a smallholding?”
Howard had assumed the stillness of a stone figure, staring into the wind, and did not look at him.
“Adam, please—don’t,” his mother said.
“It’s okay, forget it,” Adam said. “We’ve had this conversation before, anyway. We’ll never agree.”
He meant it. He’d always known his own attitude to money to be unromantic, unlike his parents’; even as a child he could see that nothing worked without it. Whether you liked it or not, money was necessary the way oil was necessary to the working of all machines, from a jet engine to a door hinge. On a personal level you couldn’t get moving at all without at least some, and plenty of it made things run nice and smoothly. Adam intended always to have plenty. He’d tried explaining this. But his parents, even though they were too short of money to be casual about it, went on behaving as if it were somehow optional to survival, never mind happiness. Later, he tried to put what he was learning at university into practice and intervene in the finances of the smallholding, but he couldn’t get them to grasp even the basics; they simply didn’t believe anything he told them about markets, or product development, or demand and supply. They went on regarding earnings from their handicrafts as a kind of tip, a bonus awarded in recognition of some superior moral quality that they felt attached to them because they didn’t set out to make big profits. They were chronically puzzled that more people didn’t appreciate that their pottery and weaving were “worth” the prices they asked, and of course they were chronically poor.
Adam didn’t ask any more how much they had to live on, any more than they asked him how much his student loan came to now he’d graduated or how he’d managed to put in thirty hours a week behind a bar and still work for his degree. The loom shed and pottery were virtually derelict now, though they kept on with the vegetables and the sheep and hens and sometimes a goat or two. Well, God help them. All along his parents had aimed to live on as little money as possible, so they’d got what they wanted.
“You’re entitled to your opinions,” he said. “And I’m entitled to mine. And now I’m sorry but I have to go.”
Deborah was snatching up the paper plates and spoons and cups and jamming them into the bag. She began to cry. “Adam, please. It’s all right. Surely you don’t need to rush off today. Don’t go. Adam, it’s your birthday. Please …”
“Sorry, Mum,” Adam said. “Thanks for the picnic. I’m really sorry but I have to rush. I’ll be in touch. See you.”
No, I don’t hate them, he thought as he strode off down the hill, but I cannot stand being with them a minute longer, and I have to get out of here before I start crying, too.
I didn’t put on a light or undress or draw the curtains. I was glad to be tired, and I climbed in under the quilt and after a while I managed to fall asleep and did not wake until around five o’clock, when the birds started up. I lay with my eyes closed, trying not to hear them and listening instead to the house, tuning in to the lonely acoustic of the time before the day began, its echoes and rattles: the dawn wind that swept between the hillside and the back of the house and around its north-easterly angle, a fresh resonance over floors and walls. A series of coughs like the crushing of dried leaves came from Howard’s room directly below mine and I waited for his voice, calling to me. But he just stirred a little and settled, and my heartbeat softened. From the double room at the front, far away down the corridor and around the corner on to the landing, not a sound came.
I’d thought it was the birds that had woken me. But then I heard two or three furtive thuds—quiet footsteps, a downstairs door closing—and they were familiar, a reprise of sounds of movement that must have broken my sleep in the first place. Outside, at the front of the house, a car engine started.
I got up and hurried round to the landing. Through the wide-open door of the double room I could see towels and bedclothes s
trewn over the floor. I knocked, but of course the room was empty. From the window I watched the silver car bump away down the track. On the mattress, placed inside a folded sheet of paper, were two ten pound notes. On the paper was written:
Madam, notwithstanding the unexpectedness of our arrival, your standards of accommodation, food, and, in particular, welcome and service have been deplorable. Enclosed is what I in a generous mood consider the stay with you to have been worth. It was an appalling experience. Goodbye.
I returned to the window and watched the car, now almost half-way to the road. It took the sharp left turn in the track and disappeared behind the line of wind-tormented hawthorn trees that clung in a ragged line down the hillside. I sank on to the edge of the bed and read the note again, trying to be angry but just feeling ashamed. What he’d written was true. I’d been so anxious about Adam I’d made no attempt to look after the guests well, I’d done nothing to make them comfortable. And Adam was not coming. He never had been going to come. I’d wanted so badly something I never was going to get, I’d poured all that effort into trying to make it real. I’d wasted money, too, and now I didn’t have enough to see us to the end of the month.
Another day alone with Howard was beginning. Beyond this one, countless more stretched ahead. I began to cry. One of Howard’s nurses had told me once it was common, only natural in fact, for caregivers to give way now and then; it helped to have a little cry. But there was nothing little about this. My whole body began to shake. Great sobs burst from me; I crossed my arms and clutched my shoulders tight to try to hold them in, I gulped mouthfuls of air, but I could not stop them. I mashed the heels of my hands against my eyes but more tears spurted from them. I could scarcely get my breath. I was afraid the noise would wake Howard and upset him and we would start the day badly, and three hours too early, yet I could not stop.
Howard knew he hadn’t lost his mind, but he also knew bits of it had been mislaid. He did think of it as in bits. The idea of damage to his actual brain he found quite unmanageable—squeamishness alone prevented him from thinking about the soft wet ropes inside his skull—so instead he pictured his mind as a clean, glass globe, like an old-fashioned fisherman’s float, that once had been buoyant and shiny and cool to the touch but was now broken, its pieces scattered. He would imagine himself trying to sweep them all up in a pile and glue them back together using only one hand, a Sisyphean labor of atonement for his failure to appreciate how fragile a thing it had been in the first place, and how fugitive now its millions of shards and splinters.
So bits were missing, still precious and searched for daily as if lost under furniture, and every day losing a little more luster and sharpness under gathering dust. Some days he could summon one faculty but not the partnering one that was needed to make it work: he might have ready in his head all the words he wanted to say but be unable to make his tongue deliver them, or he might feel himself quite able to talk, but not to chase out even the simplest words from his memory and bring them to his lips. His right hand and leg worked only when they felt like it, his left hand and leg hardly at all. Without warning, his guts seemed to forget what it was they were supposed to do with food and would create urgent and chaotic stomach upsets, at other times his jaws refused to chew. His sight could no longer be trusted; gathering information from his eyes and ears and making sense of both at once was seldom successful. The world had rearranged itself into two continents, and each eye scanned a different, opposing landscape, each ear was tuned to a different time zone; most unnerving of all, each continent had a habit of slipping out of existence while he was attending to the other. Moving objects, especially people, startled him with their arbitrary flitting between the two, and sometimes they disappeared altogether, making a fool of him for having thought them real. He wept copiously and often, and sometimes he laughed when nothing was funny. He was angry nearly all the time.
Then there were what Deborah called his shut-downs, days when he would sit in his chair worn out, saddened, afraid to move or eat or to hear or say anything at all. It was impossible to explain that he wasn’t being “difficult,” but simply could not face being present in a world so unreliable and alarming. With his eyes closed, and keeping very still, he would try to hold himself aloof from all the humiliating lapses and betrayals of his body and mind and by so doing, he hoped, stave off any fuller comprehension of the disastrous turn his life had taken.
After a while I stopped crying but I stayed where I was, sitting on the bed with my eyes closed and my hands over my face. It struck me much later that I must have sat there for a long time, waiting like a child hoping for a surprise, as if I knew he would make an appearance. (I didn’t, of course; how could I?) And how strange it was that he made not a breath of sound. He approached so silently that not even the air stirred, yet the moment I became aware of him, I wasn’t surprised. He must have entered the room on bare feet without touching the open door, and he sat down next to me on the bed so softly as to cause not even the slightest shifting of the mattress. I knew of his presence by neither sight, sound, nor movement, nor any other measure of the senses, but only by his presence, about which there was something pure. My breathing eased a little but I kept my hands over my face. I knew he was there without having to turn to look at him.
“I was in the other room. I heard you crying,” he said. He hadn’t spoken to me at all the night before and his voice, while not familiar, was exactly as I knew it would be: young but not boyish, and shy. “I slept in the other room. I hope that was all right.”
“What other room? Not the one next door? That’s my son’s bedroom! How dare you!”
“No, no, the back one. That little one past the bathroom, at the back. I’m sorry if I shouldn’t have.”
“Oh, well. No, I suppose that’s all right. That’s the other Bed and Breakfast room.” He said nothing to that. “But you only had one room booked,” I said.
I felt him shrug beside me, not by a touch but by a faint warmth, both male and childish, as if he’d moved fractionally but tentatively closer. Still I had not turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry. But I had to go and sleep somewhere else.”
I didn’t want to hear any of this. It was all quite irregular, sitting here on a bed with a Bed and Breakfast guest. “Even so. You can’t just go using unbooked rooms, you know. Just because you fell out with your friend.” I wanted a response, but none came. “He’s gone, you know. Your friend, he’s gone without you.”
“Good riddance,” he said. “I’m glad. I told him to go.”
“He went without paying properly. He only left twenty pounds.”
I waited for an expression of some sympathy, if not outrage. But the voice was calm. “Yes, he said he was going to do that. That’s why I wouldn’t go with him. It’s so unfair. Really unkind.”
Downstairs, Howard coughed again and called out for me in a sleepy, strangled voice. I stood up, yet I did not go to the door. I moved away to the window and remained there, looking out.
“I have to go and attend to my husband,” I said, almost to myself.
But I did not go, and for a while nothing more was said. Below the house, the track, fringed here and there by twiggy trees, slipped in a loose zigzag between the contours of the moor, all the way down to the road. Today was Adam’s birthday and again, Adam was not spending it here. I never should have expected him to. The last time he’d come for his birthday was in 2004 and it had ended badly; perhaps he’d resolved then never to be here for another. I felt a sudden stab of anger that if that were so he should have told me, instead of just leaving me to engross myself in futile attempts to make amends. I’d give him bloody Barcelona. In fact, what about all those other birthdays, all those efforts? Every year I’d tried to turn it into “a lovely day,” filled with celebration or at least a kind of exuberant disturbance, anything to deflect attention from memories of the actual day of his birth. Now I had to face this one alone, with Howard. How was it to be borne this year, how wa
s it to be managed yet another time? I wanted the day and all days henceforward to be held back, to be prevented from happening. The odd thing was that even as all this was going through my mind, I felt the stranger knew my thoughts already. I went over in my head all the words that we had actually spoken, and without turning round, in a whisper I repeated them, and the cool room seemed to answer back with a silence that stretched itself out until it lay, numinous, like a grace, across the space between the stranger and me, and over all that we had said. Also, over all that we had not said; the pauses between our thoughts were no less an exchange of understanding than the thoughts given voice. In this stranger’s presence, silence and speech were equal and precious gifts. Then Howard called for me again, more urgently. When I stepped outside this room, I would be once more alone. I did not know how I was going to go downstairs and carry on as usual.
The voice from behind me said, “My name’s Theo, by the way.”
It was a good voice, almost accentless; I liked the voice. But I had to get downstairs. I shook my head, as if the sound was a buzzing in my ear. I tried to remember Adam’s voice, and Howard’s, but could not recall them clearly. Why did this person want me to know his name, anyway? Did he think I’d respond by telling him mine?
“We’ll discuss the balance of the bill downstairs, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You should pack your things and then you can be on your way.”
He didn’t reply to that. I didn’t expect him to. I waited a few more moments at the window, until my breathing returned to normal. Then I turned around, and I was alone again, of course. The room was empty.
