by Rachel Joyce
The words meant nothing. They might as well have been Chinese. There was no bridging the gap that lies between two human beings. Just before his retirement, he had suggested they might for once go to the brewery Christmas party and she had stared back at him with her mouth gaping as if he was guilty of assault.
Harold stopped looking at the hills, the sky and the trees. He stopped looking for the road signs that would mark his journey north. He walked against the wind, with his head bowed, seeing only rain because that was all there was. The A38 was far worse than he had imagined. He stuck to the hard shoulder, and walked behind the barrier when he could, but traffic tore past at such speed he was drenched and constantly in danger. After several hours, he realized he had been so lost in remembering and mourning the past, he had wasted two miles heading in the wrong direction. There was nothing for it but to retrace his steps.
Walking the road already travelled was even harder. It was like not moving at all. It was worse; like eating into a part of himself. West of Bagley Green, he gave up and stopped at a farmhouse advertising accommodation.
His host was a worried-looking man, who said he had one available room. The others were occupied by six female cyclists on the trail from Land’s End to John o’Groats. ‘They’re all mothers,’ he said. ‘You get the impression they’re letting their hair down.’ He warned Harold it might be better to keep a low profile.
Harold slept poorly. He was dreaming again, and the mother-cyclists seemed to be having a party. Harold slipped between sleep and consciousness, afraid of the pain in his leg but desperate to forget it. The women’s voices became those of the aunts who had replaced his mother. There was laughter, and a grunt as his father emptied himself. Harold lay with his eyes wide, and his leg throbbing, wishing the night was over and he was somewhere else.
In the morning the pain had worsened. The skin above his heel was streaked with purple, and so swollen it would barely fit inside the shoe. He had to ram it home, wincing at the pain. He caught his face in the mirror, and it was haggard and burnt, covered in sharp stubble like pinheads. He looked ill. All he could picture was his father in the nursing home, with his slippers on the wrong feet. ‘Say hello to your son,’ the carer had said. Catching sight of Harold, his father had begun to shake.
Harold hoped to finish his breakfast before the cycling mothers awoke but just as he was draining his coffee they descended on the farmhouse dining room in a burst of fluorescent Lycra and laughter.
‘You know what,’ said one, ‘I don’t know how I am going to get on that bike again.’ The others laughed. Of the six women, she was the loudest and gave the impression of being the ringleader. Harold hoped that by remaining quiet he would go unnoticed, but she caught his eye and winked. ‘I hope we didn’t disturb you,’ she said.
She was dark-skinned with a skeletal face and hair cropped so close her scalp looked fragile. He couldn’t help wishing she had a hat. These girls were her life support, she told Harold; she didn’t know where she’d be without them. She lived in a small flat with her daughter. ‘I’m not the settling kind,’ she said. ‘I don’t need a man.’ She named all the things she could do without one. It seemed to Harold there were an awful lot, though she spoke at such speed he had to concentrate on her mouth in order to understand. It took effort to keep watching and listening, and taking her in, when within himself there was such pain. ‘I’m free as a bird,’ she said, and she stuck out her arms to show what she meant. Puffs of dark hair sprouted from her armpits.
There was a round of wolf whistles, and cries of ‘Go, girl!’ Harold felt the need to join in, but could only go so far as a light clapping of his hands. The woman laughed and smacked her palm against theirs, although there was something febrile about her independence that made him nervous on her behalf.
‘I sleep with who I want. I had my daughter’s piano teacher last week. I had a Buddhist on my yoga retreat, and he was sworn to celibacy.’ Several of the mothers whooped.
The only woman with whom Harold had slept was Maureen. Even when she threw away her cookery books, and had her hair cut short, even when he heard her doorlock click at night, he had not looked for anyone else. He knew other chaps at the brewery had affairs. There had once been a bar lady who laughed at his jokes, even the poor ones, and nudged a glass of whisky across the bar so that their hands almost touched. But he hadn’t the stomach for more. He could never imagine himself with anyone other than Maureen; they had shared so much. To live without her would be like scooping out the vital parts of himself, and he would be no more than a fragile envelope of skin.
He found himself congratulating the cycling mother, because he wasn’t sure what else to do, and then he stood to make his excuses. A flash shot up his leg so that he stumbled and had to reach for the table. He pretended to be scratching his arm while it came and went, and came again.
‘Bon voyage,’ said the cycling mother. She rose to embrace him, bringing a thick smell of citrus and sweat that was half pleasant and half not so. She laughed as she pulled back and rested her arms on his shoulders. ‘Free as a bird,’ she told him; her face very full of it.
He felt a chill in his heart. Glancing beyond himself, he saw that her inner arm was lacerated with two deep scars that scissored the flesh between her wrist and elbow. In places, one still wore the beads of a scab. He nodded stiffly, and wished her luck.
Harold couldn’t go for more than fifteen minutes without needing to stop and rest his right leg. His back, neck, arms and shoulders were so sore he thought of little else. The rain drove at him in thick pins that bounced off the roofs and tarmac. After only an hour, he was stumbling and desperate to stop. There were trees ahead and something red that was maybe a flag. People left the strangest things at the roadside.
The rain plashed on the leaves, making them shiver, and the air smelt of the soft leaf mould at his feet. As Harold grew closer to the flag, his shoulders hunched. The splash of red was not a flag. It was a Liverpool FC T-shirt, hanging from a wooden cross.
He had passed several roadside memorials but none of them disturbed him so much as this one. He told himself to walk on the other side and not look, but he couldn’t. He was drawn to it, like something he shouldn’t see. Evidently a relative or friend had decorated the cross with glittery Christmas baubles in the shape of pine trees, and a plastic wreath of holly. Harold examined the wilting flowers in cellophane, bled of colour, and a photograph in a plastic wallet. The man was maybe in his forties, thickset, with dark hair, and had a child’s hand trailing his shoulder. He was grinning at the camera. To the best dad in the world, read the words on a sodden card.
What eulogy would you write for the worst one?
‘Fuck you,’ David had hissed, as his legs failed him and he seemed to be in danger of catapulting down the stairs. ‘Fuck you.’
Harold wiped the rain from the photograph with a clean corner of his handkerchief, and flicked it from the flowers. As he walked on, all he could think of was the cycling mother. He wondered when it was that she had felt so desolate she had cut her arm, and left it to bleed. He wondered who had found her, and what they had done. Had she wanted to be saved? Or had they dragged her back to life, just as she believed she was free of it? He wished he could have said something; something to make her never do it again. If he had comforted her, he could have let her go. As it was, he knew that in meeting her, and listening, he was carrying another weight in his heart and he wasn’t sure how much more of that he could take. Despite the pain in his calf and the cold in his bones, despite the trouble in his mind, he drove himself harder.
Harold reached the outskirts of Taunton by late afternoon. The houses were packed together, and studded with satellite dishes. At the windows hung grey net drapes; some were boarded with metal shutters. The few gardens that were not concrete had been flattened by rain. The blossom of a cherry tree lay scattered like wet paper across the pavement. The traffic sped past so loud it hurt and the roads looked oiled.
A memory sur
ged into his mind, one of those that Harold most feared. He was normally so good at repressing them. He tried to think about Queenie, but even that wouldn’t work. He shot his elbows out sideways to go faster and drove his feet against the paving stones with such fury he hadn’t the breathing to keep up. But nothing would hide him from the memory of an afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end. He could see his hand reaching for the wooden door; feel the warmth of the sun on his shoulders; smell the mouldering, heated-up air; hear the stillness of a silence that was not what it should be.
‘No,’ he shouted, batting out at the rain.
Suddenly his calf exploded as if the skin-side of the muscle had been sliced open. The ground tipped at an angle, and seemed to swell. He reached out a hand to stop it, but in the same moment his knees buckled and his body lurched to the ground. He felt his hands and knees smart.
Forgive me. Forgive me. For letting you down.
The next thing he knew, someone was tugging at his arms, and shouting about an ambulance.
13
Harold and the Doctor
HAROLD’S COLLAPSE CAUSED cuts to his knees and hands, and bruising on both elbows. The woman who rescued him had spotted his fall from her bathroom window. She helped Harold to his feet and retrieved the contents of his plastic bag, and then she supported him across the road, waving at traffic. ‘Doctor, doctor!’ she shouted. Inside her house, she led him to an easy chair and loosened his tie. The room seemed sparse and cold; a television had been angled on top of a packing box. Close by, a dog was barking behind a closed door. Harold had never been comfortable with dogs.
‘Did I break anything?’ he said.
She said words he couldn’t understand.
‘There was a pot of honey,’ he said, more panicky. ‘Is it still in one piece?’
The woman nodded and reached for his pulse. She covered his wrist with her fingertips and stared into the middle distance, as if seeing shapes beyond the walls, while she counted under her breath. She was young, but her face had a scraped-back look, and her jogging trousers and sweatshirt hung from her body, suggesting they belonged to someone else. A man, perhaps.
‘I don’t need a doctor,’ Harold said with a hoarse whisper. ‘Please don’t call an ambulance or a doctor.’
Harold didn’t want to be in her house. He didn’t want to take up her time or get close to another stranger, and he was afraid she would send him home. He wanted to speak to Maureen, but he was also afraid he wouldn’t know what to say without troubling her. He wished he hadn’t given in to his fall. It had been in him to keep going.
The young woman passed a mug of tea, offering the handle so that he wouldn’t burn his fingers. She was saying something else but he couldn’t make it out. He tried to smile as if he had understood but she kept looking at him, waiting for his reply, and then she said it again, with more volume and less speed: ‘What the fuck were you doing out there in the rain?’
He realized now that she had a thick accent. Eastern European maybe. He and Maureen read about people like her in the news. They came over for the benefits, the papers said. Meanwhile, the dog was increasingly sounding not like a dog and more like a wild beast. It was hurling its full body weight against its temporary imprisonment, and sounded in danger of biting at least one of them when free. You read about dogs like that in the papers as well.
Harold reassured her that as soon as he had finished his tea, he would get going. He told his story, which she heard in silence. This was why he couldn’t stop or see a doctor; he had made a promise to Queenie and he must not fail her. He took a sip from his mug, and looked at the window. A large tree trunk stood right in front of it. Its roots were probably damaging the house and it needed cutting back. Beyond, the traffic came at fast intervals. The thought of returning outside filled him with dread, and yet he had no choice. When he looked back to the young woman she was still watching him, and still not smiling.
‘But you’re fucked.’ She said it without emotion or judgement.
‘Ah yes,’ said Harold.
‘Your shoes are fucked. So is your body. And your spectacles.’ She held up the two halves of his reading glasses, one in each hand. ‘Every way you look at it, you’re fucked. How do you think you’re going to make it to Berwick?’
It reminded him of the very deliberate way in which David swore; as if he had carefully considered all the options and, given what he felt for his father, the foulest expressions were the only ones suitable.
‘I am – as you rightly point out – fucked.’ Harold hung his head. His trousers were splattered with mud, and frayed at the knees. His shoes were sodden. He wished he had taken them off at the door. ‘I admit it is an awfully long way to Berwick. I admit I am wearing the wrong clothes. And I also admit I have not the training, or the physique, for my walk. I can’t explain why I think I can get there, when all the odds are against it. But I do. Even when a big part of me is saying I should give up, I can’t. Even when I don’t want to keep going, I still do it.’ He faltered because what he was saying was difficult and caused him anguish. ‘I am terribly sorry but my shoes appear to have wet your carpet.’
To his surprise, when he stole a glance at the young woman, she was smiling for the first time. She offered him a room for the night.
At the bottom of the stairs, she kicked the door that housed the angry dog with the underside of her foot, and told Harold to follow. He was afraid of the dog and he didn’t want her to worry about the amount of pain he was in, so he tried to keep up with her. The truth was that his knees and palms felt spiked after his fall, and he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg. The woman told him that her name was Martina; she was from Slovakia. He would have to excuse this shithole, she said, and also the noise. ‘We thought this fucking place was temporary.’ Harold tried to make his face look like that of someone who was used to her sort of language. He didn’t want to appear judgemental.
‘I curse too much,’ she said, as if reading his thoughts.
‘It’s your house, Martina. You must say what you like.’
The dog was still barking and clawing the paintwork behind the door below.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ she yelled. Harold could see the fillings at the back of her teeth.
‘My son always wanted a dog,’ he said.
‘It’s not mine. It’s my partner’s.’ She threw open the door of an upstairs room and stood aside to let him enter.
The room smelt of emptiness and new paint. The walls were a stark white, with a purple bedspread that matched the curtains, and three sequined cushions over the pillows. It touched Harold that Martina, for all her bitterness, had taken such care over her soft furnishings. At the window, the upper branches and leaves of the tree crushed themselves against the glass. She said she hoped Harold would be comfortable, and he assured her that he would. Left alone, he eased his body on to the bed, and felt every muscle throbbing. He knew he should examine the cuts, and wash them, but he hadn’t the will to move. He hadn’t even the will to remove the shoes from his feet.
He didn’t know how he was going to carry on like this. He was frightened, and he felt alone. It reminded him of his teens; of hiding in his room, while his father crashed into bottles or made love to the aunts. He wished he hadn’t accepted Martina’s offer to stay the night. Maybe she was already phoning a doctor? He could hear her voice downstairs, although listening hard he didn’t recognize any of the words. Maybe it was her partner. Maybe her partner would insist on driving Harold home.
He pulled Queenie’s letter from his pocket, but without his reading glasses the words spilled into one another.
Dear Harold, This may come to you as some surprise. I know it is a long time since we last met, but recently I have been thinking about the past. Last year I had an operation on a tumour, but the cancer has spread and there is nothing left to be done. I am at peace, and comfortable, but I would like to thank you for the friendship you showed me all those years ago. Please send my regar
ds to your wife. I still think of David with fondness. With my best wishes.
He could hear her steady voice as clearly as if she were standing before him. But the shame. The shame of being the one who had let down a good woman, and never done anything about it.
‘Harold. Harold.’
He must get there. He must get to Berwick. He must find her.
‘Are you all right?’
He stirred himself. The voice wasn’t that of Queenie. It was the woman whose room he was using. It was Martina. He was finding it hard to distinguish the past from the present.
‘Can I come in?’ she called.
Harold tried to stand, but the door opened before he made it to his feet, so that she caught him in an odd crouched position, half on the bed and half not. She stood at the threshold, holding a washing-up bowl, and two towels over one arm. In the other hand she held a plastic first-aid box. ‘For your feet,’ she said, nodding in the direction of his yachting shoes.
‘You can’t wash my feet.’ Harold was standing now.
‘I’m not here to wash them, but you’re walking funny. I need to look.’
‘They’re fine. There is no problem.’
She frowned impatiently, and slouched with the weight of the plastic bowl on her hip. ‘So how do you take care of them?’
‘I put on plasters.’
Martina laughed but not in a way that suggested she was amused. ‘If you think you’re going to get to fucking Berwick, we need to get you right, Harold.’
It was the first time anyone had referred to his walk as a shared responsibility. He could have wept with gratitude, but instead he nodded and sat back down.
Martina knelt and retied her ponytail, and then she carefully spread one of her towels on the carpet, smoothing out the folds. The only sound came from the traffic and the rain and the wind, jamming the branches of the tree with shrill cries at the glass. The light was dimming, but she did not put on a lamp. She held out her cupped hands, waiting.
