Our Picnics in the Sun

by Morag Joss

  He knew. Even though when she kissed him she didn’t keep her lips long enough against his cheek for him to reach out and stroke her face, he knew that if he were to touch her—not as an invalid reaching for support but really to touch her—her skin would feel alien. Its warmth would be no longer her own but would emanate, somehow, from some other source; it was the thought of someone else that put the life in her these days. She couldn’t wait to be rid of him.

  I could say it’s none of my doing, or out of my control. Or a necessity—that I have no choice but to give in to whatever brought him to me, or me to him, in the first place. I could say I didn’t look for it to happen, that I haven’t consciously brought it about in any way. But the truth is I allow it. I’m ashamed.

  I could claim not to understand it, as if that would make any difference, for who’s to say there’s even anything to understand, that there’s a mystery to solve or some elusive truth to expose? Maybe I’d only be casting around for a hidden meaning because that’s what I do, and am always doing—looking for reasons, looking for something I need to understand, when the thing itself is enough. And surely what the thing is—pure sensation—is quite enough. I really shouldn’t be fretting as though the why matters when the why may not exist at all, never mind be unknowable. All that really matters is that I submit to it and that it consumes me. That each time it burns me up and leaves me with nothing. Needing and wanting nothing.

  It happens like this. To begin with there has to be the yes, a decision of sorts: to let go, to let it happen, to concede to myself I have the desire, the will, the temerity to do this. In my son’s bedroom, his former bedroom, that is. In the daytime. Like this.

  There is the arranging of myself on the bed, with a secret intake of breath as if this will make me a little lighter and less of a creaking burden on the springs. I allow some time to elapse: time enough to roam, of course only in my mind’s eye, all through the rest of the house, peering across rooms and checking behind doors, interrogating and then establishing as actually true the extraordinary notion that Howard really is not here. Oddly, it’s only when I’ve given myself reassurance on this point, which I already know to be a physical fact, that I can leave go of all self-consciousness.

  Then I breathe more easily, the mattress shifts under my weight; I spread my limbs across the covers and roll my hips, raise my pelvis. I yawn and hum and sigh, just for the sake of making sounds of heedlessness and pleasure. Outside, the wind catches this exposed corner of the house and rattles the window; the curtains move. Perhaps there’s a moment when I could—am even tempted to—return to the winter’s day and the kind of thing women like me are supposed to do on ordinary afternoons at home: read a magazine, bake a cake, watch an old film. Women like me seldom even use the word sex. We’re not supposed to think about it. I’m heavy and middle-aged and out of practice at it; even so, was it ever any easier? But although I may be out of sympathy with my body I’m slightly impressed, and no longer embarrassed by its uncomplicated readiness, by the audacity of its little cues and prompts. The very thought that I’m considered too old for all this makes me inclined—though I never give in to it—to giggle.

  Instead I concentrate on the pricking of air on my skin as clothes are peeled away in this cold room, and I no longer want to laugh; there’s a seriousness now, an intent in it. The shivering and tingling as my body is exposed is like fingertips playing on the back of my neck, the draught from the window like the edge of a single nail drawn lightly down my spine. I shiver also with the awareness that the same undressing and the same stroking gesture, performed with less patience, would alarm me. This revealing of myself is never total, however—I think through modesty, although for whom should I be modest? But being entirely naked would be an ordeal, so I clutch at folds of cloth and wrap them around my breasts and press them between my thighs. At this point I don’t look at my discarded clothing, which is worn-out and ugly, or at myself. Too much of my skin is like a plucked chicken’s, pale and clammy and loose over the muscles and bones. In the hinges of my joints it crimps like glove leather and the pores are dotted red from years of washing in cold water and the abrasions of rough towels.

  I don’t look at the spread of tufted, graying thatch at the base of my belly, either. I don’t need to, because recently—appalled and delighted, equally, at my own nerve—I took a hand mirror and examined the wet gash beneath and between my legs, just to see what he’d see, perhaps to understand what all the fuss is about. I still don’t understand it, really, but now lying back I can imagine it, the rose-pink envelope exuding its warm gloss and opening under his tongue. Another thing I don’t need to understand: whether this is seducing or being seduced.

  What I do understand is the polished tightness of skin over fingertips, poised for the gliding in. And my own salt-sweet emulsion licked from them. This whetting of my body is a little clumsy, somewhat mechanistic, but always assiduous, and so quite soon after the excitement comes the solid ache all the way down from the neck of the womb, and the want. The change from want to need, for the hardness pushed inside me, a kind of desperation. The soft-throated groans I hear in the room sound like the sobbing of the lost, and the found. There is plenty of time and yet there is also hurry. Tendons, in one movement, pull tight and dissolve. His name slips like liquid from my mouth, but no other word is said. Afterward I realize my eyes have been closed since I lay down.

  I turn on my side so I can’t see the door. My arms are empty and I need a long time to recover. My body feels scuffed and sore. But I have the whole day.

  Until Howard comes back, whole days slip past me in this manner. Tasks lie undone. The telephone rings a lot but answering it is out of the question. Yes, I am ashamed. But not ashamed enough to stop it.

 

  To: deborah​stoneyridge@​yahoo.​com

  Sent on sat 29 oct 2011 at 14.22 EST

  Mum where are you, where’s Dad? Is he still at that place or is he back? Is he any better, have they sorted out all the medication and stuff for him? I didn’t think there was much they could do, or can they?

  I think you must have gone with him in the end. They’ve got facilities for family in some of these places, haven’t they? Hope you get a break anyway.

  Is the render fixed yet?

  I’m always asking you questions, you could ask me a few now and then! Well I’ll give you my news anyway though there’s not much. Office has gone back a bit to how it was before (but it’s still ok for time off over Christmas, don’t worry, I’m booking flights this week probably).

  Sacha’s doing really well considering. But I was going through a final sanity-check on a couple of inventory schedules the other day with Gemma and she showed me a couple of photos Sacha sent round of her son’s birthday, he was seven last week. Just ordinary photos, him opening his presents plus this Lord of the Rings cake and him and his little mates going mental playing with the Wii – it looked manic! Apparently when Sacha showed them to gemma she said it was really hard just doing the birthday as normal and not turning it into a really, really big extra-special deal, like taking him to Disneyland or something. So I said why what’s the problem and Gemma said Sacha doesn’t even know if she’ll be around for his birthday next year. Her other kid’s only 3. Mum, I can’t get my head round it. It’s so unfair.

  Hopefully you’re okay, I think I would have heard if you weren’t?! Let me know anyway. I’ll send you the flights when I’ve got them sorted. Remember I can do some stuff round the house for you when I’m there. Lots of love Adam xxx

  ADAM’S BIRTHDAY 1990

  “Adam, how many times do we have to go over this? One of the reasons you’re being home educated is precisely because we don’t believe in that kind of institutional straitjacket. It’s not about holidays versus term-time. You should be learning every day of your life,” his father said, with his wise eyes fixed on the wall behind and above Adam’s head. As usual, he sounded sad.


  “Yes but I just want to be off school at the same time as Kevin and Kyle,” Adam said. “Please, Dad. It’s my birthday.”

  He held his breath. His father began to knock rhythmically on the kitchen tabletop with his knuckles. “In fact, we reject that kind of regimentation. It’s archaic, outmoded, and discredited. Do you understand?”

  “Yes but it’s my birthday.”

  His father sighed. “Listen, Adam. In the past, children only got the summer off because they had to go and help their parents bring in the harvest. Not even their harvest, the landowner’s! And the whole system supported it. We don’t have to follow those rules anymore.”

  “Yes but they’ve been off five weeks already. They’re going back soon. And it’s my birthday.”

  Howard sighed again and smiled. “Oh, all right. We’ll just do two hours and then you can go. But remember, getting six weeks off in the summer isn’t really a holiday, it’s just a remnant of oppression. You shouldn’t think of it as a good thing. Wait, where do you think you’re going?”

  Adam was already at the door. “I’m just going to tell Kevin and Kyle to wait,” he said. “They’re outside. Back in a minute.”

  When he went outside he found Kevin and Kyle slouched in the yard, peering through the windows of the weaving studio where his mother, with her back to them, was bent over the loom.

  “All right?” Kevin said. Adam kicked at the ground, and a sudden flutter of knowledge came to him: there’s nobody watching us. He gazed back at the house. Then came a second one: I am not going back in a minute. Kevin and Kyle caught on at once; glances were exchanged; the agreement to flee was made among them with eyes alone, not a single word said. With no other signal they took off running out of the yard. Kevin, the oldest and biggest, hit the track first and with a long skid turned left up toward the moor. Kyle followed, skinnier and faster than Adam, who panted behind. He didn’t think to shout to them to wait, or to drop back and let them race on without him. In permanent and abject need of their company, he’d chase after them anywhere. He was afraid they knew this.

  By the time he caught them up at the stile, the brothers’ mood was already changing. The wind off the moor blew through the silence that descended. Kyle wanted to go home and play on his bike and Kevin suddenly didn’t feel like doing anything. Adam felt his morning of freedom drifting away with them, and he had nothing with which to lure them back. He tried, nevertheless.

  “My dad, he’s got all these knives for wood-carving. They’re dead sharp. If we go back to my place he might let us have a go of them. Anyway, I know where he keeps them.”

  Kevin considered. “So what? My dad’s got a gun.”

  “Two guns,” Kyle corrected him. “He’s got this really big one that’s just for deer. If you tried to shoot a rabbit with it”—he made a loud exploding noise—“you’d blow it to bits. The rabbit wouldn’t even ’xist no more.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve got to come back to yours this afternoon anyway, haven’t we,” Kevin said, wearily. “My Mum says. You’re having a party or something.”

  The way he said party conveyed the inferiority of any party of Adam’s in comparison with any of theirs. It was obvious. At their parties there were always lots of kids their age making lots of noise, and proper party food from a supermarket, the kind you actually wanted to eat, and their mum shrieked a lot and was funny. They didn’t have homemade decorations and nobody asked you to read a poem or sing a song. Best of all, their parties were indoors. Gloom swept over him.

  “It’s not a party, it’s a picnic,” he said.

  “Don’t you want a proper party, then? Aren’t you allowed one?” Kevin said slyly. He knew. Adam’s parents didn’t do proper stuff.

  “There isn’t any girls going, is there?” Kyle said. Kevin gave his brother a shove and they broke into squeaky laughter.

  “My mum bought you this present we’ve got to give you when we come to the picnic,” Kyle said. “Want me to tell you what it is?”

  Adam did want to be told, but he shrugged the question off. Any talk of presents might lead to questions about what else he’d had for his birthday, and he was so ashamed of the homemade wooden scooter he’d got from his parents he had to keep it a secret. For the rest of his life.

  “ ’Course there isn’t any girls coming,” he said.

  Kevin didn’t say any more, but Adam had lost ground and he knew it. There weren’t any other people coming on the picnic except for Callum and Fee, friends of his parents who talked and dressed the same kind of way, and they didn’t have kids. They always came on his birthday. Adam had the feeling that Callum and Fee were sorry for his parents and his parents were sorry for them.

  Kevin spat out the grass stalk he was chewing. “Okay, gotta go. See you later. C’mon, Kyle.” He set off down the lane and Kyle shambled after him.

  Adam climbed up and sat on the stile and watched them go. They conducted a kicking and tripping-up contest as they went, which had Kyle upended and yelping on his back every few yards. Back at their house the telly would be on. They were allowed to have fizzy drinks and help themselves to Pop-Tarts whenever they felt like it. They were so lucky.

  Adam couldn’t go back to his house and the moor was too boring to absorb the next four hours, so his pride would have to give. He ran after Kevin and Kyle and tagged along behind at a distance, saying nothing. They didn’t object, and after a while he drew level again. Then Kevin took them on a detour up the fields to see if they could find the place where his dad had turned up a rats’ nest the day before, but they couldn’t. When they got to the boys’ house an hour later their mum, Louise, was in a bad mood. She told Adam his dad had been on the phone three times and he was to go straight home.

  Back with his father, Adam tried to work some more on his model of a dinosaur but no matter what he did to it, it still looked like just a lump of clay. He’d forgotten the name of the dinosaur he was supposed to be making and he’d stopped looking at the picture he was supposed to be using for inspiration (“And don’t just copy it, Adam, try to be original”). He sneaked a look at his father working at the pottery wheel, his hands wet and gray and gnarled, cupped around the clay. Like a dinosaur’s, he thought, staring with pleasurable disgust.

  His father looked over and frowned. Adam dropped his gaze. Running away from lessons had been the biggest act of rebellion of his life so far and, although it hadn’t felt it at the time, a calculated one, trading on the birthday goodwill and cheerfulness that had to be kept up for the picnic. Inside him there burned a lovely, hot little bead of satisfaction that his father was angry with him today and could not show it.

  “Adam. You’re not concentrating,” he said.

  Adam picked up a fork and drew a few squiggly tracks down the dinosaur’s back.

  “I can’t do dinosaurs,” he said. “Can’t I make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle instead?”

  His father sighed. “What, imitate some American mass-market commercial rubbish instead of creating a figure from your own imagination? Is that what you’d rather do? Really?”

  Adam nodded slowly. “They’re only turtles,” he said quietly. For the first time, he was beginning to think he could get to enjoy wanting the wrong things.

  His father sighed again. “Oh, all right, then, Adam, we’ll leave it for today,” he said. “I suppose you want to go and play on your scooter, eh? Off you go, son.”

  Adam was glad to be reminded about the scooter. If he played on it now he stood more chance of not being made to get it out and show it to everybody when they arrived for the picnic. He wheeled it outside and made at least twenty circuits of the yard on it, in view of his father, who remained at the pottery wheel, and his mother in the kitchen. It was more fun than he thought it’d be. Then he pushed it into the old pig shed and propped it against the pile of old timbers that filled one end. The back wheel was already wobbly.

  It was still only about eleven o’clock. His mother came into the yard with the hens’ bucket and the egg b
asket and he followed her down the vegetable garden to the poultry pen. As she lifted the latch of the wire gate and stepped in, he stayed outside. She emptied the bucket into the feeder and at once, as he knew they would, the hens came shrieking at it with smacking wings and stabbing beaks, their eyes unblinking in their jerking heads. He watched, fearful for his mother, as she collected the eggs from the coop and waded back through the cackling mob around her bare legs. She was actually laughing and clucking back at them. Couldn’t she see they hated her for stealing the eggs?

  “If a hen pecked you really hard would it make an actual hole in your leg?” he asked on the way back to the house. “You’d lose loads of blood, wouldn’t you? You’d have to go to hospital.”

  “What? Oh—oh, Adam, I don’t know. I’m not sure about that,” she said. “Look, we got five today. Do you want to help me hard-boil them and make sandwiches for the picnic?”

  He didn’t. He couldn’t bear the smell of hard-boiled eggs, he reminded her. He didn’t like egg sandwiches. Also, if they were made with her brown bread (which they were going to be), he didn’t like any sandwiches. She smiled vaguely and went back inside.

  Adam got the scooter out again and trundled round and round the yard, thinking. His mother had always been that way, ignoring or forgetting things, never being sure what she knew or didn’t know; it didn’t bother her that she couldn’t untangle even the simplest thing for him. When he was five they’d found all the hens dead one morning and he’d cried and cried and asked why foxes didn’t sleep in the night-time like everybody else. Oh, they’re just not sleepy, I suppose. Another time he wanted to know why they couldn’t get a tractor, so he could have rides on it. Oh, well, imagine! Then we could grow a whole field of beans instead of just a few rows. But maybe it’d be unkind to the earth. When he asked what was unkind about growing a lot of beans instead of a few, she seemed not to hear and only much later, half in a dream, said, Well, a field of beans. What harm could that do?