A Bit of Earth

by Rebecca Smith

  Even so, just meeting a person who said hello at the supermarket made Guy feel, at least temporarily, that he had a footing in the real world, and was perhaps a real person. He didn’t get the same feeling from dealings with his students at all. He could barely remember their names. They were all getting younger and they all looked the same. It was lucky that Erica, his PhD student, was taking on some of the teaching. She was very friendly to Felix too, whenever he was hanging around in the garden or the lab. She would chat to him and sometimes play a game of boxes or hangman. Guy had seen them fishing in the stream with bits of bamboo.

  The other day Guy had seen Erica walking across the campus, her tall figure, like a young poplar, striding along, talking animatedly with some young fellow who was even taller than she was. They were both carrying motorbike helmets, swinging them as they walked. Perhaps she had other reasons for staying around. No, he thought, she’s far too sensible to be swayed by anything like that. Watching them walk away made him remember a damp holiday he and Susannah had once taken. Why on earth had they wanted to go to Herefordshire? All he could remember about it now was the chill of the mattress and the line of poplars that marked the boundary of the farm. Had they been happy? He had thought so. Perhaps he had been too preoccupied, his thoughts as usual elsewhere, to notice. And had Susannah been happy? She had seemed it. He had never been in the habit of asking her. Did that mean that she was? Was that a sign of a good marriage, or of happiness, not having to ask these things?

  Professor Judy Lovage sat in her office looking through some of the year’s applications for undergraduate places. Of all the extra duties one had to undertake, this was one of those she minded the least. There were so many dreadful committees and sub-committees that one might be manoeuvred onto instead.

  Each year she was surprised at how recently her potential students had been born. It was interesting to see how names came into and then fell out of fashion. She always found some of the forms touching. Unfortunately plenty of others would be irritating. Surely somebody at each candidate’s school could take it upon themselves to check their students’ grammar and spelling? Talk about not putting your best foot forward. At the moment the department received far more applications than there were places. She had to be scrupulously fair. Here was one from a Madeleine Jones. So many of the students came from Sussex and Surrey …

  Madeleine Jones tried to imagine Gatwick as being glamorous. There were posters from about a hundred years ago of an aerodrome and people in flying jackets and silk scarves. Her mum had told her how, when she’d been a teenager, they’d gone there in the evenings to drink delicious freshly squeezed orange juice and eat ice cream from the new American café that had thirty-six flavours and gave you free tasters on little spoons. Her mum couldn’t remember if it had been called something like Dayvilles or Baskin Robbins. Anyway, it had been exciting.

  London Gatwick. How could they call it London Gatwick? It was a million miles from London, a halting train ride through sodden Surrey fields. She hated the stupid way that cows didn’t stare when a train went by. But Gatwick was all right sometimes.

  Sometimes she stayed on the train through Gatwick, all the way to Brighton. Ideal destination, as her mum put it, for a bit of bunking off. (Her mum used to bunk off to Brighton too.) But when Madeleine got there, she wandered the Lanes, and each time she couldn’t quite believe that she had found it all, that that was it. She had a feeling that there were a whole lot of other Lanes she couldn’t find or was being denied admittance to. She always seemed to get caught in the same loop, going past the same antique shops (closed) and clothes shops where she couldn’t have afforded anything, the same cafes, and the same bars. She always ended up in the proper shopping centre, looking at the same things she had looked at in the same shops (but nearer home) the weekend before. Sometimes she bought an ice cream and ate it in the garden of the Brighton Pavilion (she was doing the Regency for A level). What she needed was more money. Then she could really buy stuff.

  The next time she had a day off she just got the train as far as Gatwick. Loads of people at college worked there. There were signs in almost every window. She could have her pick of jobs. She would never do anything fast food. She quite fancied Lush but maybe the smell would get to her after a while. A few years ago she’d imagined that every branch of Lush had people out the back making all the scrubs and soaps and stuff. She would have loved doing that, she really liked cooking. No, if she worked at Lush it might put her off nice things.

  How about Accessorize? She really liked Accessorize. Her mum would love it if she had a staff discount there. But there had been that time in the Croydon branch. She’d been about to put a pair of earrings up her sleeve when Raquel Palmer had been caught putting some gloves into her bag. They’d taken all of their names, and they probably had a database. She didn’t want to work anywhere that sold shortbread and Union Jack stuff. What she should really do was go round and see where they paid the most. She went into BagelExpress to think about it over a Danish. There were only two other people in there, and the guy behind the counter who looked like Dr Kovac, her favourite doctor in ER.

  This one might be all right.

  Dr Kovac gave her an application form, and she filled it out there and then. The manager was on his break.

  The manager had rung her on her mobile before she even got home. Yes, she could do Saturdays and some Sundays, even some evenings. She could do bank holidays and school holidays. Would she go for an interview on Saturday and maybe start then too if it all went well?

  When she went on the Saturday she thought it must be Dr Kovac’s day off. It turned out that he’d left. Her shifts seemed to coincide with those of two Dutch students. They were quite nice, but they kept lapsing into their private language. She and the Dutch girls were very clean, but she kept wondering about all the stages before them, and all the stages before any food anywhere reached anybody. Imagine all the processes, the ingredients, the production, refrigeration, the transport. Too many people involved; and yet the customers ate up every scrap.

  Then she got bored. She kept accidentally going shopping in her breaks and spending almost as much as she was earning. Sometimes she hardly had anything left for shopping with her friends. Her mum said that she shouldn’t be working so many shifts, and that she should be saving up, anyway. She kept saying that Madeleine would earn much more in the long term if she went to university. And she’d meet some really nice people. And somebody special.

  Madeleine Jones’s application was very average, but ‘Visiting the Brighton Pavilion’ was listed as an interest, and even though it came after ‘jazz dance’ and ‘baking’, Professor Lovage put it on the ‘Offers’ pile.

  It was around this time that somebody on the Estates and Grounds Sub-Committee thought of the botanical garden. Funding had been identified and sponsorship was in the process of being secured for the new sports science facilities; facilities that would include a 400-station gym and a sports injuries treatment centre. There was nobody from the department of Botany on the committee, nobody on the committee who even knew of the department of Botany’s interest in the garden; so when the garden was suggested as a potential development site, there was nobody there to raise a hand or even a word in protest. Minutes were taken and sent up to be ratified. A working party was formed of members of the Acquisitions, Developments and Maintenance Committee. Professor Swatridge (Modern History) was to chair it. The wheels began to turn.

  Chapter 5

  Felixno longer remembered the phase he’d gone through when his globe had been new. Every bedtime, after his story, he’d begged his mum or dad, ‘Show me some things on the world.’

  He had really wanted to know, it hadn’t just been a way of making them stay, and keeping the light on for a few more minutes.

  ‘Show me some things on the world!’

  ‘Where do komodo dragons live?’ they’d ask. ‘Where do pangolins live?’ ‘Where do polar bears live? And penguins?’ Felix would poin
t to the place and get it right every time.

  ‘Tell me all the scary things that live in South America,’ he’d implore them.

  ‘Where was Mummy born?’

  ‘Where do we live?’

  ‘Where does Uncle Jon live?’

  ‘Where is the highest mountain in the world? And in Europe? And in Africa? South America? Scotland?’

  Felix knew all the answers.

  The game had turned into ‘Where shall we go tomorrow?’ They would spin the globe and Felix would close his eyes and point. They were usually going to end up in the ocean or in Indonesia.

  Now, a year since Susannah had died, they hardly ever went anywhere. Their whole world had shrunk to the botanical garden, Guy’s work, school and home. Their orbit was predictable and tiny. They shopped at the same shop and bought the same things week after week. They went nowhere. Once Felix was in bed Guy would work, or just sit in silence. He found that if he hummed on one note, almost constantly, it was comforting. He had never been much of a whistler. Felix picked up the humming habit too, so that they often couldn’t tell which one of them was doing it.

  Guy hardly ever fell asleep for the night in bed. He would doze off on the sofa, or at his desk, or on Felix’s floor. One night he fell asleep sitting on his own bedroom floor in front of the wardrobe with its looking-glass door. He startled himself back to wide awake. There he was, sitting alone in his room. With his muddy trousers and crazy needing-a-cut hair, he looked like an intruder, or someone on the run from an institution. Behind him in the mirror was the blue, green and white patchwork bedspread made by Elfie and Susannah when Susannah had been a girl. Guy never bothered to make the bed now – it was perpetually rumpled, the sheets were soft with dust mites – a disgrace to the quilt’s Scandinavian ancestry.

  He saw too that he’d spent the day with his shirt buttoned up wrong. Dear God. He exchanged his clothes for another, equally crumpled set, pyjamas that Susannah had bought him, it seemed ten thousand years ago. He got into bed. Of course he couldn’t sleep.

  Here I am, he thought, alone in my room. He got up again and padded through to see Felix. He had his duvet right over his head. Guy pulled it back. Felix’s hair had been turned into hot damp feathers. Guy went back to bed with a glass of whisky. He turned on the World Service …

  What good, he thought, is sitting alone in my room? He smiled grimly as he remembered the school production of Cabaret. He had played his oboe in the band. The girl who’d played Sally Bowles had been fearsome and stunning, in character and on the stage and on the athletics field. Strange, he thought, that a combination of fishnet stockings and shorts, plus a waistcoat and a bow tie worn without a collar, could ever be considered alluring. What was the girl’s name? Oh yes, Sandra Johnson. A good all-rounder. Had she carried on being wholesome, but into amateur dramatics? Was she living in Berlin, or perhaps sharing some sordid rooms in Chelsea with a girlfriend known as Elsie?

  Eventually he slept. He dreamt that he was searching for his oboe. He kept discovering its case in different places, but each time he opened it he found that the oboe was missing.

  The next morning, the first thing Guy did was look for his oboe. He hadn’t played it in ages. How could he have let it go that long? He took it out, cleaned it and pieced it together. The reed was dry and looked about to crack. It made his lip sore. It was just how it had been when he’d first been learning, and was sometimes too lazy to practise. His fingers were stiff. Oil can, he thought, oil can! He was like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, all rusted up. What was it the Tin Man said at the end? Oh yes. ‘Now I know I’ve got a heart because it’s breaking.’

  He’d been in the band for a production of The Wizard of Oz too. He played a few bars of ‘Over the Rainbow’. Much too maudlin. Back to Cabaret. Felix came in.

  ‘What’ cha doing, Dad?’

  ‘Come hear the music play!’ said Guy.

  Felix sat on the bed and listened. Guy played ‘Yellow Submarine’ (rather badly) for him, then ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window?’ Felix fetched a pile of music books. ‘My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean’, no thanks. ‘Oh Susannah’. Oh hell, thought Guy. Why did everything, all his stupid thoughts, come back to this? If only he could stop having thoughts, if only they could get away. Get away! What a dolt, what a dunderhead, what a dunce not to have thought of it before!

  Susannah had spent hours poring over brochures of holiday cottages, circling some in coloured felt pen and then making longlists and finally shortlists. She consulted Guy and would let him pick from the list she had drawn up. It was very strange that his first choice always turned out to have been booked already, and that the one she favoured always happened to be free. This time Guy would draw up the shortlist and let Felix decide on the first choice. There was still a pile of brochures behind the sofa, now several years out of date. Guy rang up for new ones. Wales, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset. He wasn’t sure which was best. Maybe North Wales was the place for a father and son holiday. He pictured them climbing mountains, placing a small rock each on the cairn at every summit, maybe a bit of kayaking … or at least playing football or Frisbee on some almost empty golden beaches. Maybe they should borrow a dog to take along.

  ‘This one is in Wales, and Wales is the one with the dragon on the flag, right?’ said Felix when Guy showed him the brochures and the shortlist.

  ‘Right,’ said Guy.

  ‘I like this one,’ said Felix. ‘It has a swing in the front garden.’

  That settled it.

  They crawled along the A5.

  ‘We would have got there quicker if we’d walked,’ said Felix. He was feeling sick. At Little Chef they’d been told it was a three-quarters-of-an-hour wait for hot food. They’d ordered chocolate cake. It had been damp and heavy. And now that they were in Wales …

  ‘It doesn’t always rain in Wales,’ said Guy. It had the ring of ‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here …’

  Oh, the A5, thought Guy. The A5. If only it were as small and neat as a piece of A5. How they would zip across that. If only the journey to the holiday house could be as smooth and frictionless as tearing along the diagonal folded valley of a sheet of A5. If only they could just zoom along the hypotenuse … but they were stuck in a long line of traffic. The Misselthwaites’ old Golf, though reliable and fast enough, was woefully inadequate for this trip. It had no top box, no bikes on the back, and seats for just five people, only two of which were occupied. And their luggage! Well, Guy had tried, but even with a football and a plastic cricket set it didn’t amount to much, and the view through the rear window was hardly blocked at all.

  This doesn’t look anything like a holiday car, Guy thought. We are impostors in the land of holidays. They had been stuck behind the same car since somewhere around Oswestry. It was a big red SUV. The large, fair, healthy heads of at least six people, a brace of cycle helmets, and many rucksacks and body boards were visible from the Misselthwaites’ position below and behind them. Some French loaves were also there in silhouette, ready to make a convenient but tasty supper for the first night of the holiday. Guy had forgotten to plan anything for supper, but had thought of the next day’s breakfast. So that was OK, they could have cereal for dinner – it would make them feel at home.

  ‘Daddy, why do all the other cars have boats on top?’

  ‘Boats? They don’t have boats.’

  ‘Those canoe things,’ said Felix. ‘We’re the only car without one of those.’ He was pointing at the roof of the SUV ahead of them. He could never remember that Guy wouldn’t be able to look at what he was pointing at.

  ‘Oh those,’ said Guy, realising what he meant. ‘They’re sort of roof-racks with lids.’

  ‘What’s a roof-rack?’

  ‘In the olden days people had these metal bar things on the roofs of their cars for strapping stuff to, mattresses or bikes or bits of bedroom furniture or suitcases. Then they would cover it up with a tarpaulin thing which would flap in the wind as they drove along, and som
etimes blow away altogether. Now they have those canoe things.’

  ‘But why haven’t we got one? I wish we had one.’

  ‘They’re just for extra stuff. I guess we don’t need to take as much with us as other people.’

  ‘They look like those Egyptian things, but plain.’

  ‘Plastic sarcophaguses, sarcophagi. Well, they might be. There’s no way of telling what all those families have inside them.’ Could well be mummified remains, thought Guy. Perhaps the paterfamilias, instigator of outdoorsy holidays, or perhaps the bodies of the fallen. Perhaps friends or relatives who had perished in sandboarding accidents were being taken on holiday, transported aloft as though by giant wood ants. He smiled grimly.

  ‘What’s funny, Dad?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Guy. ‘We’re nearly there. We turn off soon. I have to concentrate now. It’ll be after the next little town.’

  It was easy to spot the turning because the red SUV slowed and took it first.

  ‘No escaping them,’ said Guy. They followed them at the next junction and the next.

  ‘They must be going to the same place as us,’ said Felix.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ said Guy. He had memorised the directions. ‘There should be a white house and a garage called Conwy Morgan Motors …’

  ‘White house!’ shouted Felix. ‘Garage!’

  ‘Then it’s the next turning on the right. With a post box.’

  ‘There, Dad!’ yelled Felix.

  The SUV had got there first and was through the five-bar gate and heading up the drive.

  Oh, thought Guy, there must be a number of cottages on the farm. He had been hoping for complete isolation.

  There was just one cottage with an annexe. He saw Mrs SUV jump out and beat them to the key, which he had been looking forward to telling Felix would be under the flowerpot beside the boot-scraper. The over-sized SUV children were switching off their in-car DVD players and piling out of their vehicle with what looked to Guy like exaggerated, self-indulgent stretches. How could they possibly feel cramped in that huge conveyance? Mrs SUV had the cottage door open.