Born to Be Trouble

by Sheila Jeffries

  This land is your land, this land is my land

  From California to the New York Highway,

  From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters

  This land was made for you and me.

  ‘See what I mean?’ Susan whispered in Kate’s ear.

  Kate looked searchingly into Susan’s frightened eyes. ‘I think you should go and wait in the car, Sue,’ she said kindly. ‘Go on – I won’t be long. I want a little chat with Rowan.’ She turned Susan round and pointed her at the car, and Susan went, hugging herself round the middle and looking at the ground.

  Her departure raised a cheer from the group of hippies. Kate stood her ground, her hand fondling the ears of a tatty lurcher dog who was leaning against her legs.

  Rowan studied her with a quizzical expression.

  ‘Well, fancy you being named after a tree,’ Kate said. ‘I’m named after a bird! A golden bird, if you please – shall I tell you the story?’

  ‘Yeah! Go on, lady – we like stories.’ The man with the plaited beard stopped beating his drums. He sat down with his back against the wheel of Rowan’s converted horsebox, and the rest of the group followed him. Suddenly Kate had an audience. She sat on a wooden box and swept her bright brown eyes over the motley group. They’re just lost children, she thought, with nice parents out there somewhere, breaking their hearts – please God, tell me what to say to them.

  ‘When I was born,’ she began, ‘here in Somerset, at Hilbegut, my dad carried me over to the window. And there, in the tree outside, was a bright yellow bird, singing its head off. He got the bird book and discovered it was a Golden Oriole, a rare visitor to this country.’

  ‘That’s awesome!’ The man with the plaited beard was studying her with intense eyes. ‘A Shamanic totem. Did he know that’s what it was?’

  ‘No, dear, we don’t do that kind of thing,’ Kate said, ‘but he named me after it – Oriole Kate.’

  ‘Wow – Oriole Kate – Golden Bird Woman. Has the Golden Oriole appeared in your life?’

  ‘Well yes, dear, it has,’ Kate said. ‘It appeared to my wonderful husband, Freddie, before we were married – and when he saw it he thought it was a messenger, and so he leapt over the church wall and ran down to meet the train I was on – and that was the first time we’d seen each other for months – and we’ve never been parted since that day.’

  ‘Awesome.’

  ‘And she makes butter and cheese,’ said Rowan. ‘Golden stuff!’

  ‘And marmalade,’ Kate added. She looked around at each pair of eyes fixed on her. The plan was working. She had them in the palm of her hand. Soon she would persuade them to leave Ian Tillerman’s field.

  It would have worked, she was sure. But something broke the spell. A man in denims appeared at the door of Rowan’s horsebox, and the baby squealed and held out his little arms. ‘Dada! Dada!’

  Art came down the steps and took the baby in his arms. ‘Hello, Kate,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’

  Kate went cold. The magic died in her eyes.

  ‘Is Tessa there with you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not right now.’

  ‘I see.’ Kate’s eyes burned into his. He looked down. Guilty, she thought. She lifted her chin and fired the words at him like arrows of deadly ice. ‘Then you stay away from my daughter. You – you cheat. You’re beneath contempt.’

  She got up and marched off across the field, the east wind lifting her hair, leaving the shattered silence twinkling across the ground.

  Tessa felt vulnerable after the confrontation with Ian Tillerman. She wanted the comfort of familiar things. Her old bedroom, her books, her dog, Jonti. Even her Granny Annie who had always criticised her so much. She wanted to spend time with her father. She wanted to visit her friend, Lexi, and see Selwyn again.

  But Art had asked her to stay with the bus until he came back. Why was he so long? In Cornwall he’d often gone ‘to catch up with some mates’ on his own, or to visit his parents who lived in Truro. Tessa had never been sure exactly where he went, but she hadn’t worried about it. Being ‘free’ was part of the hippie culture.

  She found her watch and looked at it. Ten past twelve. Or had it stopped? She put it to her ear and listened for the tick. It had stopped. She wound it up, guessing by the hunger in her stomach that it was nearer two o’clock. Mum would give me lunch, she thought, remembering the taste of Kate’s homemade butter, and the apple pies she made from the mellow Egremont Russet apples in the garden. The cinnamon-scented steam. The way the juice soaked into the pastry. I’ll go, she thought. Why shouldn’t I?

  Tessa locked the bus and put the key under a stone behind the wheel. She glanced up at the source of the spring, tempted to go up there, and decided to wait until she had a Peace Rose in her hand, and Art by her side. Together they would float the petals and make wishes for peace. She walked on up the lane, past the apple orchards, over the railway bridge and into the small town of Monterose where she had grown up. She and her sister Lucy had run wild in the woods and water meadows. They knew every tree, every corner, every old stone farm and hay barn. They knew where the wild orchids bloomed in spring, and where the hedges were heavy with hazelnuts and blackberries in autumn, and where the white button mushrooms appeared in the grass on dewy mornings.

  In Cornwall Tessa hadn’t missed Jonti. But now she yearned to see the little white terrier trotting ahead of her, always so alert and responsive. Without him she felt unprotected and isolated. Her intense relationship with Art was emotionally engulfing and healing for Tessa. After being sexually abused by Ivor Stape, she had vowed never to allow a man near her – until she met Art. His understanding and his gentle love-making had healed her in body and soul. She no longer felt like a misunderstood loner. She felt LOVED. She felt like someone who mattered, and she wanted to explain that to her parents.

  The Pines looked welcoming, its windows open, its red brick walls clothed with Virginia creeper, the leaves in autumn fluttering gloriously in shades of crimson and magenta. Tessa opened the wicket gate and walked up the path through Freddie’s vegetable garden where a mini-forest of purple sprouting glistened alongside feathery carrot tops, runner beans and marrows. Her footsteps got slower and slower. She sensed something. A mood.

  She listened in surprise.

  Kate was banging pots around in the kitchen. Saucepan lids crashing and plates being scrubbed and thudded onto the drainer. It wasn’t like Kate. Usually she’d be singing or listening to the radio. Or chatting and laughing with a friend.

  Tessa walked in to the kitchen. ‘Mum?’

  Kate jumped. She spun round and for one terrible moment her eyes were darkly angry. Tessa looked at her in alarm. Her mother’s aura, usually so bright, was full of storm clouds and sparks.

  ‘Tessa!’ Sunlight spread into Kate’s eyes as she saw her daughter. ‘What a lovely surprise, dear!’ She held out her arms. In the reassuring closeness of their hug, Tessa could feel the tension across Kate’s shoulders.

  ‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

  Kate carefully rinsed the pan she’d been scrubbing with a Brillo Pad and put it to drain. ‘Nothing, dear – I’m just being silly.’

  ‘Silly?’ In Tessa’s memory, ‘silly’ meant a number of powerful emotions, most of them socially unacceptable. Fear. Anger. Anxiety. Jealousy. ‘You don’t fool me, Mum. What’s wrong?’ She steered Kate to the cottage sofa in the kitchen window and sat down with her. Kate’s face was flushed as if a maelstrom of worries were whirling in the heat of her mind.

  Tessa stared at her wordlessly, and at last Kate met her eyes. ‘You’re so like your dad, Tessa,’ she said, and her voice was low and subdued, not at all like her usual ringing cheeriness. ‘Nothing’s wrong, dear – I’m quite all right.’

  Tessa shrugged. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  But Kate continued to build a shining wall around her obvious distress. Talking brightly of other things. ‘You just missed your dad. He had his lunch and he�
��s gone out delivering bird boxes. Have you had lunch?’

  ‘No,’ Tessa said, glancing at the clock. It was two thirty. She adjusted her watch.

  Kate got up immediately. ‘My dear girl. No lunch! What would you like? Shall I boil you an egg?’

  ‘No, Mum, thanks. Toast will be fine – and I’d kill for some apple pie. I can smell it.’

  ‘We ate half of it – but the custard’s still warm.’ Kate gave her a dish of golden pastry and apple, glazed with brown sugar. She poured custard over it, and watched, satisfied as Tessa enjoyed it. ‘Where’s Art?’ she asked rather sharply.

  ‘He’s gone to catch up with some old friends,’ Tessa said.

  ‘So where are you parked?’

  ‘In my field.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Kate said, and the anxiety clouded her eyes again.

  ‘Why? Why not? It’s my field.’

  ‘I know that, but—’ Kate put two slices of bread under the grill.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Well, dear – I’m sure you’ve heard about The Convoy.’ Kate lowered her voice. ‘It’s been on the news every day.’

  ‘We don’t listen to the news.’

  ‘Don’t you? Well – it’s a convoy of – well, they call them travellers – but they’re hippies. And yesterday, they turned up in Monterose. The whole town is up in arms. They rolled into Ian and Sue’s field in the night, about ten vans and old horseboxes, and they won’t move!’

  Tessa stiffened. ‘So why should that stop me camping in my own field?’

  ‘For a start, dear, it’s not legally yours until you’re twenty-one,’ Kate said carefully. ‘We are the trustees – your dad and I.’

  ‘Well, you don’t mind – surely?’

  ‘No, dear – I’m delighted to have you home – but the point is, Tessa, if those hippies are evicted from Ian’s field, which they will be, they could see your bus and think they can go in there too – then you’d have kids running round, dogs, fires and they’d soon turn it into a dump. And I don’t want—’ Kate shut her mouth. She’d intended to say she didn’t want her daughter associating with them.

  ‘Mum – I AM a hippie.’ Tessa looked at her shrewdly. ‘I spent the summer with the commune on the cliffs in St Ives. And they’re great people. The best I’ve ever met.’

  Kate looked at her silently.

  ‘You don’t approve, do you?’ Tessa asked. She didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. She’d been free from those oppressive shadows all summer. Coming home ought to be happy. Didn’t it? Her mother looked flushed with anger. A mysterious, judgemental anger that Tessa recognised and no longer understood. Her mother was a warm, beautiful person. Why, why did she choose social prejudice over love? ‘You like Art, don’t you, Mum? I thought you did.’

  ‘Oh Tessa!’ Kate reached across the table and took her daughter’s hand. She squeezed it tightly.

  Tessa studied her mother’s hand. The old familiar fingers were dry and ingrained with the stains of blackberry juice, the nails cut short, the plain gold wedding ring embedded. ‘Look what Art has done for me, Mum. You’ve no idea. He’s totally, totally changed my life. I’m so happy now. We’re soul mates. Mum, I never thought I’d find a man who loves me the way he does.’ She spoke passionately. ‘He’s a fantastic person – I love him, Mum – I never EVER want anyone else. Our love is transformational, and healing.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you use those words,’ Kate said from between tight lips.

  ‘That’s because they were packed away in my mind, waiting for an awesome being like Art to coax them out.’

  ‘But—’ Kate was searching for sunbeams. Bright words to rescue them from an ugly confrontation. ‘Well – yes – I’m sure there’s good in him. But – do you think he’ll ever cut his hair and wear a suit?’

  ‘Mum – we’re not like that. We’re New Age people – phantasmagorical, multi-faceted beings bringing in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.’

  Kate’s eyes widened. Her aura bushed out like the fur of a startled cat. And Tessa watched it slowly darken again. Sinking back into convenient ignorance, she thought. ‘Jesus didn’t cut his hair and wear a suit,’ she added hopefully.

  ‘No, dear – but, supposing the Prime Minister looked like that.’

  ‘We’d be a nation of peaceful enlightened beings.’

  In that moment Tessa saw the spirit of her grandfather standing next to Kate. His eyes were twinkling as always, and he had Jonti in his arms. Tessa’s eyes filled with tears at seeing the little dog looking so shining and so at home. She was glad of her ability to see him, but she longed to actually feel the warmth of him, the way he wriggled and made conversational noises in his throat, the way his eyes gazed into her very private soul.

  ‘Will you show me Jonti’s grave, Mum?’

  ‘Yes, dear.’ Kate seemed glad to escape from the threat of an argument. ‘And you must see your bedroom. We decorated it while you were at college. I found the most beautiful wallpaper with pink roses.’

  Tessa winced. Pink roses? Mum still thinks I’m a child, she thought. She’s never going to accept that I’m a woman. Art’s woman! She hugged the secret thought to herself as she followed Kate through the house and into the garden.

  ‘Daddy made him such a nice wooden box,’ Kate said as they stood under the lilac bushes in the Anderson Hollow. As children, Lucy and Tessa had made a tiny cemetery there, a place to bury the dead mice and birds they had cried over. Some of the crosses made from lolly sticks were still there, the writing faded. One stood out. The grave of a song thrush Tessa had found dead in the lane. She’d spent ages scratching the words on a piece of slate. SILENT SPRING, she’d written, after the book by Rachel Carson, and to Tessa it marked the beginning of her passion for saving the earth from an environmental disaster.

  Freddie had carved Jonti’s name in beautiful Roman lettering on a slab of golden hamstone.

  ‘He’s not supposed to do stonework now,’ Kate said, ‘but he insisted on doing this. And he’s carving an angel for Granny Annie’s grave. It’s a pity you weren’t here for the funeral.’

  Tessa felt she couldn’t bear to see Jonti’s grave a moment longer. ‘Let’s go and look at my bedroom,’ she said. ‘There’s some books I want. Then I should go home.’

  ‘Go home? But you are home,’ Kate said.

  ‘No, Mum. My home is with Art now – in the bus.’

  ‘But you don’t need to be camping now that you’re back, Tessa. You can stay here with us – where you belong.’

  ‘We’re not camping, Mum. It’s how we live.’

  Kate took her daughter’s hand. ‘Wait ’til you see your lovely bedroom – you’ll want to stay in it,’ she said confidently.

  Tessa followed her indoors, struggling with remembered powerlessness and obligation. She clung to the fact that Art loved and respected her. But with that thought came a twinge of pain deep down in her pelvic area. She frowned. Her period was due in three days. She had three pills left. Then what? She would have to go to her old doctor – Doctor Jarvis – and ask him to give her the contraceptive pill. And he was bound to say no.

  The night rain was indigo and silver. It pelted on the roof of the bus, and Tessa snuggled up next to Art, enjoying the song of the rain, imagining the diamond drops secretly sparkling on scarlet rosehips, bramble leaves and twigs. Imagining a morning full of mirror-like puddles and glistening grasses. Listening to the gurgle of the Mill Stream and the patter of a fox’s wet paws in the lane, a haze of moisture glazing his ruffled fur.

  They slept close, like one being, their hands linked on the pillow, Tessa’s head nestled under Art’s bearded chin. She stayed awake, savouring the happiness after love-making, loving the closeness, admiring him while he slept. The details of him that she loved. The triangle of sun-bleached hair on his torso. His firm hand with its broad, curly thumb, the way his breathing was so powerful and peaceful. Touching him in the pitch dark was like touching the sun and the sea, as if the long hot salt
of summer was stored in his body, for her. Sometimes she twisted a lock of their hair together. Chestnut and gold, like a precious candlestick. She loved him so much that she didn’t want to sleep. Staying awake was like floating on a cushion of dreams, woven from strands of the loving words that had spun out of him. Words that healed her mind while the intensity of his gaze and the slow, thoughtful, electrifying touch of his hands healed her body. She felt reborn. Cleansed. Whole. Every time.

  Tessa was always awake early. Like her father, she was attuned to the natural world, its birdsong, its life cycles, seasons and tides. Today she woke up contented, happy to fling the bus door open and gaze at the raindrops winking in the sun, hanging from every leaf and blade of grass like tiny prisms. She took a bar of soap and a towel and walked barefoot to the stream to wash, shivering in the chill of an autumn morning. The water was clear and icy cold. Full of energy. She played with it, cupping it in her hands and watching the light flicker through it as it poured back into the stream.

  Feeling good, and alive, Tessa returned to the bus, dried her tingling feet and got dressed. She unpacked the willow basket she had brought from home, pleased to put Kate’s pots of plum jam along the shelf in the window where they glowed red like stained glass. There was a box of eggs from the chickens, a pat of homemade butter wrapped in grease-proof paper, and a 1953 Coronation tin full of golden brown fruit buns, each with a cherry on top.

  She took out the three books from her bedroom. A precious copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury which her father had given her, a navy blue embossed leather copy of The Water Babies, her favourite childhood book, and The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence, the first adult book she had loved. Tessa’s fingers itched to open them, but she put them safely in a wooden cubbyhole which Art had said was hers. Art liked to read with her, and she planned to share them with him later.

  Right now she could hear him yawning and waking up. She knew he liked to lie in bed and hear her pottering around, the kettle whistling, the smell of toast. So she lit the little gas stove and made breakfast.