by Jonathan Coe
I don’t think Alison had. She just said: ‘You’re as bad as my mum. She goes bonkers if she sees a spider, especially a big one. Once she actually fainted. Really.’
Clearly she regarded this as pathetic behaviour, although I was very much in sympathy with her mother, as it happened. Not caring to think about it any more, I looked around and said: ‘Do you think we could climb that tree?’
We walked to the back of the garden to take a look at it. I realized, as we did so, that although my grandparents’ house did not look very impressive from the front, the back garden was actually quite large. The lawn was in two tiers, each with a slight incline, so the patch of soil from which the tree grew was itself quite high up, almost on a level with the first floor of the house.
I don’t know why I had suggested climbing it. At home, I liked to borrow quite old-fashioned children’s books from the library, the sort of stories in which middle-class kids ran wild in the countryside, having picnics, building dens and apprehending local criminals while they were at it. Trees, in this universe, were there for climbing. So Alison and I might as well climb this one. It was a plum tree (Gran told me this later) and there were plenty of sturdy-looking branches close to the ground, but even so, for two townies like me and Alison, who both lived in places with no gardens to speak of, it was a daunting prospect.
Alison went first, and seemed to make pretty short work of shimmying up to a branch about three-quarters of the way to the top of the tree. After a few seconds’ hesitation I clambered after her.
‘This is cool,’ she said, as we sat on the branch together and surveyed our new domain.
From here we had a good view of the adjoining gardens and indeed the whole neighbourhood. Neatly kept gardens similar to my grandparents’ were spread out on every side: trimmed lawns, lily ponds, patio furniture – all speaking of the same modest, comfortable, unadventurous life. Next door, a couple about the same age as Gran and Grandad were sitting at a white plastic garden table, drinking glasses of white wine and nibbling from a Tupperware bowl filled with Pringles. They looked up at us and Alison waved back cheerily, calling out, ‘Hi there!’ The man just stared back but the woman raised her hand in cautious reciprocation.
I don’t know how long we sat there. It was fun. It was a long, warm, mellow July evening and we could have stayed in the tree for the whole of it. After a while Alison looked at her watch.
‘Our mums’ll be taking off in a minute,’ she said.
‘Do you two girls want some cake?’
It was Gran, calling from the back door of the house. I climbed down from the tree first, taking it fairly slowly and warily. Alison, though, attempted to jump from about five feet above the ground, and she landed heavily on her left leg.
‘Ow! Fuck! God dammit!’
I stared at her in amazement, blushing. Never in a million years would I have dared to use the F-word, even with no grown-ups around. But it wasn’t the time to dwell on niceties of speech. She seemed to be in real pain. She couldn’t even get up, at first.
‘I’ll get Gran.’
I ran indoors and came back with both my grandparents. Between us we helped Alison to her feet, and then she limped down towards the house, resting on our shoulders.
‘Off with those jeans,’ Gran said, as Alison sank down, wincing, into one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ Grandad was hovering in the background, but she glanced at him and made a ‘Get out!’ gesture with her eyes. When he still didn’t take the hint, she said: ‘Go on, Jim – make yourself scarce.’
Seeing Alison peel off her jeans, Grandad finally understood. ‘I’ll go and … take some air, I think,’ he muttered.
Gran took a good look at Alison’s leg but couldn’t see very much wrong with it. ‘Well, there’s no bruise,’ she said. ‘And I can’t see any scratches either. Bit of a swelling here, though.’ She laid a finger on Alison’s leg just above the knee and applied some gentle pressure.
Alison winced again. ‘That’s been there for a while,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s anything much.’
Gran rubbed some cream on the swelling and after that Alison decided she’d had enough of the great outdoors and stayed inside to watch TV. I wandered out to the garden again and found Grandad talking over the fence to his next-door neighbour: the one whose wife had waved at us.
‘Hello,’ said this red-faced, white-haired man, beaming down at me. ‘It’s Rachel, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I remember you from the last time you came. Goodness, but you’ve grown up a lot since then.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, since it seemed to be intended as a compliment.
‘And this time,’ said the man, ‘you’ve brought a little black friend with you, I see.’
Now this really flummoxed me. It would never have occurred to me to describe Alison in this way, and in fact I’d never heard anyone mention the colour of her skin before. All I could do, rather stupidly, was to say ‘Thank you’ again, and wonder why this peculiar man was smiling at me so kindly.
4
Death is final. I know that’s a banal observation but what I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that this week in Beverley was the first time I had really understood it. And yes, that must be the real reason I’ve never forgotten the death of David Kelly. It was the first time the reality of death had been brought home to me. It was, if you like, the first death in our family.
Up until that point I’d known almost nothing about the war with Iraq but now I could tell that something had changed; a line had been crossed. A good man had died, and could not be brought back. And our Prime Minister (I realized now that this was who Grandad had been talking about) had blood on his hands.
‘Whatever else you say about her,’ he told me, ‘Mrs Thatcher would never have allowed anything like that to happen. She was a great lady.’
‘Has he been going on about that woman again?’ Gran said, as we did the washing-up together. ‘I wish he’d change the record.’
She was always criticizing Grandad for something or other, I noticed, and yet they seemed far more devoted to each other than my own mother and father had been. (Mum and Dad had split up by now. That holiday they’d taken without me – the time my brother and I had been sent to Beverley together – had been a last-ditch attempt to patch things up, I think. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked, and they’d gone their separate ways soon afterwards.) It struck me that Grandad would rarely let Gran out of his sight and did not like her to carry out any tasks that were remotely strenuous.
‘Has Gran been ill or something?’ I asked him, one day near the beginning of our visit.
‘What makes you ask that?’ he asked, not looking up from his Telegraph crossword.
‘I don’t know. You never let her do anything. Mum was the same with me after I had chicken pox last year.’
He glanced up at me now. ‘A few weeks ago, she had a bit of a … funny turn. So the doctor asked me to keep an eye on her, that’s all.’
I realize now that this way of speaking was completely typical of Grandad. What he referred to as a ‘funny turn’ had in fact been an epileptic fit, following which Gran had been sent to hospital (after a wait of four weeks) for a brain scan. Now they were waiting for the results, but both were aware that the news could be bad. A brain tumour was the most likely explanation for the fit, and many patients die within a few months from cancerous gliomas.
Of course, I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I did not know that the shadow of death, in all its terrible finality, had arrived so suddenly, without invitation, a
nd was hanging over the two of them. But I noticed something, at least: I noticed that Gran and Grandad seemed closer to each other than any grown-ups I had ever seen before, and this closeness manifested itself, not only as a constant need to be in physical proximity, a refusal to let each other out of their sight, but also as a perpetual state of – for want of a better phrase – loving irritation. Almost every word that the one spoke to the other would touch some nerve, provoke some petulant spasm in response; but this was testament only to the state of near-unbearable anxiety in which they were both living, to the renewed awareness of love that had been kindled by the prospect of losing each other.
As I said, I didn’t understand any of this; but I was aware of its outward manifestations. What really annoyed me about Alison, over the first few days of our visit, was how insensitive she seemed to be to what was happening around her. Seeing my grandparents sitting in the garden one afternoon, sipping from their mugs of tea and holding hands lightly across the space between their plastic chairs, she said, ‘Look at those two. Let’s hope we never get to be like that, eh?’, and she never missed an opportunity to remark on how old and decrepit they appeared to her.
We had little in common, I soon realized: the significant friendship was between our mothers, not between Alison and me. At school we were not together often enough to irritate one another; here, sharing a house and indeed a bedroom, our relationship was already under strain. Another thing that had started to annoy me was the way she picked up on everything I was feeling and tried to make it her own. The death of David Kelly was a typical example.
‘What are you doing?’ she’d asked me on Saturday morning, when she found me in the living room after breakfast trying to make head or tail of Grandad’s Daily Telegraph.
It was pretty obvious what I was doing. ‘I’m reading the paper.’
‘Since when have you cared about the news?’
‘Did you even know there’s been a war in the last few months?’
‘’Course I did,’ said Alison. ‘But there are always wars. My mum says war is stupid and people are stupid.’
‘Well, we had no choice this time. We had to go to war, because Iraq had nuclear weapons aimed at us and they could have nuked us in forty-five minutes.’
‘Come off it. Who says?’
‘Tony Blair.’
For the first time, Alison seemed to be showing a flicker of interest. She pointed at the front page of the newspaper. ‘So who’s this guy, then?’
I explained who David Kelly was – to the best of my knowledge and ability – and something of the circumstances in which he’d died. Halfway through my somewhat garbled explanation I could tell that Alison was losing interest again; but she could sense that I was troubled by this story, and she wanted to share in this disquiet, either as a way of getting close to me or in order to appropriate it for herself, to claim it as hers. So she seized upon one detail: the discovery of Dr Kelly’s body, propped up against a tree in that lonely patch of hilltop woodland.
‘Wow, that’s scary,’ she said – missing the whole point, as far as I was concerned. ‘Imagine that. You’re out for a stroll one morning, walking your dog or something, and suddenly … you find that, smack in the middle of your path.’
‘Nobody really knows why he did it, though,’ I said. ‘Grandad says it’s Tony Blair’s fault but he hates Tony Blair anyway …’
Alison didn’t care. All she wanted to talk about was this single image, which seemed to play in her mind like some scene out of a horror movie.
‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘That would so freak me out. Finding a dead body like that. Right in the middle of nowhere.’
I stared at her, feeling a sudden wave of hatred. She was using that word again – inside my grandparents’ house. I wanted to say something and was furious with myself that the words wouldn’t come. I was a coward. A scaredy cat.
5
Alison owned a device which seemed to me, at the time, to be literally magical. It was called an iPod and even though it was not much bigger than a matchbox it was apparently capable of storing thousands and thousands of songs so that you could take them anywhere with you and listen to them any time that you wanted. It was a beautiful clean white colour and had a little wheel in the middle which clicked when you turned it with your finger.
Nevertheless I thought it rather sad that, with all this storage capacity, Alison only ever seemed to listen to one album. She listened to it over and over and when she wasn’t listening to it she made me listen to it instead.
‘Your mum’s got a nice voice,’ I assured her, easing the slightly waxy earphones out of my ears and handing the machine back. In truth I hadn’t cared much for the song she’d played me for the umpteenth time. Precociously, I was more interested in classical music in those days, and my favourite CD at home was a recording of Fauré’s Requiem.
‘She sang that song on Top of the Pops, you know,’ said Alison.
‘Yes, you told me.’
‘She’s pretty famous.’
‘I know. You said. Only …’ (I had been meaning to say this for some time, but hadn’t been able to think of a way of putting it tactfully) ‘… only, this was a few years ago, wasn’t it?’
‘So?’ Alison pouted, and put the iPod away in the little satchel she was carrying with her. ‘She still sings, you know. Makes demos and stuff. You can always get back in the game.’
It was quite late in the evening, and we were sitting at the foot of the Black Tower, our backs against its glistening brickwork. We had become quite fearless, over the last few days, about exploring by ourselves and staying out until it was almost dark. Most times we would head for Westwood, which we knew well by now, although as children of the city we could still not quite get used to the idea that this sprawling tract of moor and woodland was ours to roam, freely and at will. We liked to come here because we were hoping to get another glimpse of the Mad Bird Woman, whom I had described to Alison in some detail, her image having been stamped indelibly on my memory ever since that one transient encounter four years ago. According to Gran and Grandad she still lived in Beverley, in a big house which had been left to her by the wheelchair-bound old lady when she died. Her real name, it seemed, was Miss Barton.
‘It sounds as if people don’t like her very much,’ I told Alison. ‘They say she shouldn’t have been given the house. Gran said there was something fishy about it.’
‘Fishy? What does that mean?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Maybe … Maybe she murdered the old woman. To get her hands on the house.’
Typical Alison, I thought. Silly and over the top. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, at which Alison fell silent. Worrying that I might have offended her, and wanting to keep the conversation going, I added: ‘She doesn’t have the bird any more either.’
‘Probably doesn’t come up here much, then,’ said Alison, getting to her feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
‘All right.’ There was a television show I wanted to get home to see, one of my favourite comedy programmes. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock anyway.’
‘Eleven o’clock in Corfu,’ Alison said, failing to quicken her pace so that I had to slow down in order to fall back into step beside her. ‘Almost bedtime. I wonder if either of our mums has got lucky yet.’
‘Lucky?’ I didn’t understand. ‘I don’t think they’ve gone on holiday to gamble, or anything like that.’
Alison laughed a nasty, superior sort of laugh. ‘Come on, Rache. Even you can’t be that innocent.’ And, when I still looked bewildered: ‘Why d’you think they’ve gone away to
gether, then?’
‘I don’t know … Everybody needs a holiday now and again.’
‘They’re both single. They’ve both been single for years. Don’t you get it? They’ve gone looking for men.’
This idea horrified and enraged me. ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ I said.
‘What’s disgusting about it?’
‘Shut up, Alison. I’ve just about had enough of you.’
‘You need to get real.’
‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ I was fighting back tears now.
‘’Course I do. And I don’t see anything wrong with it either. If your mum wants to go abroad for a week and spend her time shagging the arse off a Greek waiter, why shouldn’t she?’
For a few seconds there was nothing but appalled silence between us. Then I slapped her, hard, across the cheek. She shouted out in pain and put her hands to her face and while she was like that I pushed her to the ground. Then I burst into tears and stormed off in the direction of the house. I looked back once and she was still sitting there, on the yellow sun-baked grass, nursing her cheek and staring after me.
*
I never did get to watch my TV comedy show, because when I got home Grandad was watching a political programme on another channel. It seemed to be making him very angry, but the angrier he got, the more he seemed to want to carry on watching it. It was a report about people-trafficking and forced labour in modern Britain. Of course, I’d never heard either of these expressions before, and when the narrator started talking about migrant workers enduring conditions of ‘slavery’ I was very puzzled, because to me the word ‘slavery’ conjured up images of Roman galley slaves being held in chains or whipped by muscular guards with their shirts off. But the subject of this programme, in a way, seemed just as horrifying: I was soon distressed by the litany of tales of builders and agricultural workers being made to work long hours and live twenty to a room in horrible bedsits.
