Landed

by Tim Pears

  Appealed. Blatant perjury by Johnny and Janice. Also I believe by professional witnesses. I was described as violent, not only to Johnny but also children, which is untrue, have never struck either of them. Again, refusal by judge to allow even the older child, J, to correct this.

  Ordered to keep paying mortgage payments in full. Wife not working, debts building, council tax and other arrears. Johnny now living in family home but this denied, wife claimed he was resident elsewhere.

  Ordered to make maintenance payments. £190 per month for children’s keep plus half cost of children’s clothes. Solicitor’s fees I estimate £1,200 per annum over three years (solicitors quote approximate costs and exceed them threefold). Ex-wife on legal aid.

  Attitude to courts and justice after the accident cases, before the divorce, was good. Realise now I was naive. Judges in two interim maintenance and one ancillary relief hearings considered it their job to squeeze as much out of me as possible, in the name of ‘what is best for the children’.

  The law is all to hell. Judges do as the mood takes them.

  Divorce a three-way split: mother – father – children. But courts adversarial in tradition and can only deal with oppositions: children are grouped with the mother, to create two opposing forces: mother/children versus father.

  Want to take them wild camping. In the hills of my homeland. Theirs as well, see, though I’ve never shown them. There’s a place I know we could peg a tent where no one would see us, a cave we could hide in when the weather breaks, in a stream runs water that tastes like rain and a person can slip from God’s sight.

  Flat I live in now condemned. Currently seeking income support owing to harassment from Child Support Agency. Have no car, just trailer attached to bicycle. Have cycled from Old Oscott to Thimble End to work, from Kingstanding to Perry. Nothing I will not do if I can get it. Desperate. Cards printed: No job too small, no grass too tall. Have no fixed income being self-employed and not entitled to unemployment benefit or disability allowance having use of one arm and prosthesis.

  Have paid mortgage religiously and now the CSA are demanding £2,500 arrears and £272 per month. A nightmare I do not understand, see.

  Not seen children for more than twelve months. In one month eligible to appeal for contact order. Light at the end of the tunnel, have never taken my eyes off it. Josh eleven, judge has to listen to him now.

  Had heard from mutual aquaintance that wife and Johnny’s relationship is over.

  Yesterday given two weeks notice that Mel is moving with the children to Canada. House has been sold. Even if given access: air fares, accomodation. Impossible.

  The tunnel is blocked now, black. There is no light.

  Am posting this on forum now. It may be finished, see. Bitterness, in my mouth, but also shame. I have two children, they are mine. Josh is too much like me. Holly is a child who makes you smile. I do not know her. The longer I go without seeing them, fear I will forget what they look like. Have they forgot me? This brain can’t get a handle on it.

  Full of energy, see. Energy is rage. Must do something, walk in circles, chew on ways to make it change. But how? Sit down, energy evaporates, hours later still sat there. A day goes. Another. Night comes. I will never see them. I have a knife.

  Not necessary, see. Here but superfluous. Have reached the end of the tether.

  Part Two

  Abandon

  he cometh up, and is cut down

  In the dream the lapwing flies around the summit, its green upper plumage irridescent in the sunshine. It makes its mournful, haunting cry. Owen turns away, unwilling, unready. He sees the boy, who runs, arms outstretched, down the hill, away from him. He cannot follow.

  Sunlight streams through the window, the bare room is brittle, obliterated in brightness. Owen wakes. He is lying in a cloud made of glass. As he wakes a plan appears. The plan carries its own charge. It’s possible he dreamed it but it doesn’t feel that way, it feels like deep inside the cells and out along the neural pathways of his brain the plan bloomed in the moment of waking.

  He lies still a while. His eyes are closed but he is aware that at some point the light alters. It’s some time around eight a.m., on a Monday in the middle of April. The sun has been sucked deep into a blue and grey coagulating sky, and a plan to deliver him from all his offences blossoms in his mind.

  The flat is on the top, ninth floor. The tower is scheduled for demolition. People have been moving out ever since Owen slipped in, their apartments boarded up with brown chipboard, not just doors but upper windows too, as if the authorities are afraid that some group of rock-climbing squatters might scale the sheer concrete like spiders. Parachute onto the flat roof and abseil down from there. The flat is in someone else’s name. For months one window after another in the grey block has been sealed, the tower looking as if it is slowly suffocating.

  He blinks. Walls the colour of winter heather; the ceiling like dirty ice cream. A shallow built-in wardrobe, its doors long gone. His few clothes neatly stacked. Clean, bare floorboards.

  The bed is a metre from the window, and there is half a metre between the end of the bed and the wardrobe. No other furniture. In their house in Wylde Green Mel used to keep her clothes in a chest of drawers in their bedroom but her dresses in the built-in wardrobe in the children’s room. Owen’s stuff too was spread between rooms. The arrangement had evolved. Getting dressed in the morning the pair of them were required to perform an interconnecting choreography. Moving in various states of undress from one room to another. Meeting in doorways. Illogical, annoying, intermittently erotic.

  The muddle and make-do of a marriage, before it is put asunder.

  Owen has a plan but he cannot move. There is one photograph Blu-tacked to the wall: himself and Mel on their wedding day. They’d got married in a register office, but this image was of them arriving in the late afternoon for a party, on the side of Corndon Hill, the two of them, seen from the waist up. Mel looks past the camera: out of shot, behind the photographer, sixty people mill around. Mel has a broad and lovely smile. A white dress. A diaphanous shawl. A tiara of white flowers – irises, carnations – on her full, rich head of red hair. In her right hand she holds a bouquet with one huge red rose, one yellow one, and lots of smaller flowers.

  With her left hand Mel holds the right hand of some skinny, short-haired oddity standing at her side. He wears a bright new white shirt. You can see clearly the fat ring on the finger of his left hand, placed there that morning. It would be hard, Owen thinks, for a stranger to make sense of this photograph. Why is this lovely woman, in her finery – long grass blowing from right to left in the wind that also seems to have pushed the couple to the left-hand side of the frame; the valley behind them attired in fields and trees and tiny buildings; above, bright cotton-wool clouds that you sense must have been shifting and turning across the gusting sky – what, you would ask, is she doing with this plain, dull-looking man?

  They’d mown a serpentine path up through the long grass from the gate at the bottom of his grandparents’ old field, marking it with bamboo poles. Attached to the top of the poles were strips cut from plastic agricultural bags. Green, blue, yellow and red, flapping in the wind.

  Owen thrusts aside the duvet and rises from the bed. At once he sits back down to save from staggering, a tornado spinning in his skull. It settles, his brain pulsates, a steady rhythmic throb against his cranium. He is so hungry that he can feel an emptiness in the middle of his body. A nothingness, a vacuum. He can visualise it. It would show up on a body scan. If he does not eat, the hole will grow.

  Two dessertspoons of coffee beans pour into the electric grinder that Josh and Holly gave him for his birthday two years ago. When the kettle boils he puts a little hot water into the small cafetière. He likes the sound the grinder makes, a kind of crackle through the electric engine whirr that in another machine would suggest serious internal dysfunction, but in this case reassures you it is doing its job. Gradually the crackles thin out in the
sound, until the beans have been fragmented to a sandy consistency. He transfers the hot water from cafetière to mug, switches the kettle back on, and pours the ground coffee into the cafetière. As soon as the kettle clicks off, he fills the cafetière three-quarters full, producing a good head, an inch or so of froth, which will give to the eventual mug of coffee, after milk has been added, a richness of texture and taste.

  Owen leans on a stool in the empty kitchen. The hot drink in his mouth, taste on his tongue, the warm liquid easing into his stomach, the caffeine working its way along the nerves of his arms and up into his brain, where it has a rousing effect, a concentrating, energising influence.

  Grey nylon rucksack. Owen puts in a compass, a lighter, a torch, his grandfather’s knife and sharpening stone, his own multi-tool, a mug, a small camping pan, a ball of string. From the bathroom cabinet, an out-of-date bottle of Calpol, shampoo. A towel. He tightly rolls two plastic groundsheets, ties them to the bottom of the rucksack.

  The shower is tepid, the towel is damp. Owen shaves, wielding the razor in his left hand, holding the skin tight over his jaw with the stump of his right arm. Strapping the holster over his shoulder, he attaches the prosthesis to his right arm and dresses in a fresh white shirt, black trousers, socks and shoes, and a grey jacket. Puts his khaki cap on his head.

  Owen runs the kitchen tap for a long time until the water is cold, then fills a plastic bottle, and puts apples, tea bags, sugar, a lump of cheese and the end of a loaf of white bread in the rucksack.

  The door hangs open behind him. There will be no turning back. Four flats on this landing are boarded up, two including his remain occupied. It is much the same on the other floors. He descends the wide echoing stairs. The last of the children, he thinks, left long ago. Some of the remaining residents are single, others in couples; Owen has been unable to work out quite who is who. He sees people come out of flats he didn’t think were theirs, only to turn and lock the door. Sometimes Owen is convinced that everyone in the tower knows everyone else, and is involved in a rigmarole of all kinds of intercourse. But when he actually speaks to anyone, he often finds them shy, ill at ease.

  There is the sound of feet trotting up the stairs, and a man he’s not seen before comes into view. They meet on a landing. When the man sees who it is he looks surprised. ‘You on your way out, chap?’ he asks.

  Owen nods.

  The stranger shakes his head. ‘Looking a lot better.’

  Owen is unsure whether the man refers to him or to the world outside. ‘Feel good,’ he says.

  The man brings his hand up before his face and points his index finger at Owen in a conspiratorial way, narrowing his eyes as he does so. ‘The power of positive thinking,’ he says. Then he climbs on up the stairs, and the sound of his footsteps recedes into the air above Owen’s head.

  He walks towards the shopping centre. Cars browse the streets. A dog slouches along the opposite pavement. A van with its front corner staved in, immobile beside the pavement. Uncollected skips, piled high with rubble and rubbish.

  Muddy pools on rugby pitches. Owen cuts through a small park, an old cemetery. Headstones, unearthed, are propped up against the outer brick walls. Lopsided tombs have been left in place. Brown ducks scatter, laughing. A perfume of roses.

  He heads for the post office. Owen has a plan that involves a number of steps to put into operation. He must be calm, methodical. He needs a drink. He must pull his mind together.

  The sky is made of clouds, layers of light grey and darker grey. He hears a slapping noise, repeated: an elegant young woman runs, her flat heels flapping on the pavement. In a car park a lorry lies on its back, its big wheels in the air. Behind a supermarket two men rummage through a large refuse bin: inside it, their heads bob up and down, intermittently into view. Owen stands and watches, wondering why he has not thought of doing this himself. One of the men climbs out with an armful of out-of-date packets of food. He doesn’t seem to see Owen, who resumes walking.

  An office block is being built. Up high, two workmen lean on a horizontal scaffolding pole like the railing of a promenade, enjoying the sea view.

  Owen switches on his mobile phone. A moment later it throbs in his pocket.

  A text from Josh from yesterday. we 1. i scored.

  He stares at the phone, then places it on the flat top of a fence post and walks on. Josh still secretly texted his father, though he knew that Owen was not allowed to reply. Well, they would see each other soon enough now.

  He buys a can from an offie, just the one, pulling it loose from the plastic rings of a four-pack. Outside, he holds the can with his hook, pulls the tab with thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The can opens with a pleasant hiss. He sinks the lager in one long slow draught, stands still on the pavement. His thirst is endless. His body is like a sponge, he can sense the beer spreading through him, his flesh, every cell drenched in booze. Then, eyes closed, he savours the alcohol rising from his body as, carried in blood, it reaches his brain, swims there a moment until, like the last thin vestige of a wave on sand, it washes through his head, and is gone. Owen opens his eyes. The world is shining. He drops the can in a bin and walks on.

  Owen turns a corner and enters a street. Houses set back from the road. Along each pavement men in yellow fluoro jackets run away. With gloved hands they pluck black bin bags from the pavement, carry and drag them into piles every twenty yards. Some bags are ripped, their contents strewn: bones, yoghurt pots, bread crusts, bones.

  Behind him, a lorry comes into the street. More runners. He lets them overtake him. They hurl the black bin bags into the mouth at the back of a foul-breathing vehicle, which grinds past him.

  A sound carries, of the tide hitting a pebbly shore, the sound of waves crashing in a nearby road, a different lorry, swallowing glass.

  He takes a left, a right, once more the emptiness.

  Electronic noise bursts out of an open window, a bedlam of various beats. It sounds like someone inside the house is throwing metal balls down the stairs, musical juggling; a racket of repetitive precision. It dissipates behind him. Owen feels jittery. He wants to hurry up.

  The bicycle is a white racer, leaning against a silver birch tree. It has no lock. Owen stops, looks around. He squeezes front tyre, full of air, back one too. The brakes function. The bike has no accessories – no mudguards or lights or basket – it is naked, skeletal like a bird. The next thing Owen knows he is riding it along the wide pavement, his hook clamped to the handlebar, his left hand ready to brake. Weaving in and out of trees, then sliding onto the road and pedalling hard.

  Out of the suburb and into the urban entanglement of metal, noise, velocity. Free as air, veering in and out of nervous traffic. The vast roundabouts on the inner ring road. Sailing under the wheels of juggernauts, pantechnicons, the suicidal frailty of a bicycle, a sailing dinghy in these shipping lanes.

  Owen enters the main post office. Inside, the queue is long and layered back onto itself like an intestine. Owen is moved intermittently forward by some kind of peristaltic shunt. Television screens on the wall above the row of serving kiosks advertise a succession of commercial products and services. Red numbers on a counter high up on the wall rise gradually higher. ‘Cashier number five, please.’

  In front of Owen are two women. They address each other every now and then, while they gaze around the room. ‘So obvious,’ the dark-haired one says. ‘Who’s she think she’s fooling?’

  There is a long pause, as the other woman, with brownblonde hair, tries to imagine exactly who she does think she’s fooling. In time she replies, ‘Makes her look a lot younger though, don’t it?’

  Now it is the dark one’s turn to ponder. ‘Bob said he’ll get me one for my birthday,’ she announces. ‘But that’s years off.’

  Owen enjoys the stately pace of their conversation. It reminds him of childhood. There is something old-fashioned, rural, about it.

  ‘I don’t mind having stuff taken out,’ the blonde woman resumes, dre
amily. ‘Wouldn’t have nothing put in, mind.’

  The dark-haired woman nods at the ticket in her companion’s hand, says, ‘About time,’ and they advance upon a vacant kiosk.

  When it is his turn Owen clears his post office account. One hundred and seventeen pounds and fifty-nine pence. The young man behind the counter presses his knuckles against the wad of notes and turns them over with his thumb, counting them at incredible speed.

  In the library there are two long rows of computer monitors, back to back. People peer into them, bathing their faces in the pale glow. Owen is fortunate to be given a slot when the person who’d booked it fails to show up. A moderate amount of mail. Spam, mostly. Using the index finger of his left hand and a pencil in his hook, Owen taps the keyboard with two digits. He sets up an auto out-of-office reply. Owen Ithell is no longer to be found at this address.

  Owen looks for a book to take on the journey. It would need to be something he could share with the children. He wanders up and down the aisles. Children’s Guide to the Wildlife of Britain. People sit and read, study. The illusion of peace. Their minds within the mind of the library. He has heard of a library in the shape of a human head. Windows in the eyes and ears, was it? No, it had walls of glass. I am in it now, he thinks.