Landed

by Tim Pears

  They stumble along the verge, a grassy bank on the left-hand side of the road.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Josh asks.

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ Owen says. ‘An adventure.’

  ‘What about Nana?’

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Holly complains.

  It must be lunchtime, at school. ‘We’ll eat soon,’ Owen assures her, holding her right hand. Few cars pass. He puts out his hook as he walks, turning when he hears an engine, in time to catch a glimpse of a driver’s glance at this suspicious trio. Immigrants, tinkers, New Age travellers, the man holding out not a thumb but a claw. Who would stop for them? The breeze that precedes rain unsettles the air. The earth trembles like skin, trees shiver. Josh hugs his jacket self-protectively. ‘I’m cold,’ says Holly. Owen keeps walking, towing her forward.

  A white car slows down. It is a low vehicle and the verge is high above the road, so that they cannot see the driver and it’s as if the car itself is inquisitive, sidling along beside them.

  The passenger window slides calmly down. Owen, Josh and Holly stand still as if on command, and the car, though barely moving forward now, stops with a visible lurch. Owen bends down. The driver, a woman, the vehicle’s only occupant, turns towards him. ‘Get in,’ she says.

  ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  The car is warm. It smells of mints, and plastic, and a faintly cloying perfume.

  Such is the relief to be cruising along an open road, it’s a minute or two before Owen remembers to introduce himself and the children. The woman says, ‘I’m Claire.’

  Owen tries not to look at her. Conversation gives him the opportunity to. ‘No school?’ she asks.

  ‘Doesn’t hurt to take them out once in a while, like.’

  She has short, dark hair, sallowish skin. She is almost good-looking, Owen thinks. Each of her features is a little exaggerated, she’s not plain.

  ‘You shouldn’t pick up hitchers,’ the woman says. ‘But I used to hitch myself. Spain. Greece.’

  ‘Good of you,’ Owen says. ‘Appreciate it.’

  ‘Heading south?’ she asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Taking them to see their grandmother,’ Owen says.

  ‘I’m going to Devon,’ Claire tells him.

  Owen studies her surreptitiously. No earrings, but you can see where her earlobe, and her left nostril, have been pierced. A scar above her eyebrow. No make-up, only the thick perfume. Brown eyes. Her nose naturally imperfect, or perhaps once broken. It’s hard to tell how tall a seated person is, but her legs look long. She wears a black T-shirt, skirt, tights, black pumps. She stares at the road ahead, glancing in the mirror whenever she says something. ‘I’ll be looking to stop for something to eat soon.’

  She is forced to slow down for a tractor trundling like a toy along the road; overtakes it when the way is clear.

  ‘We’ll be hungry,’ Owen says.

  The road runs straight, curves around a scarp or chasm, runs straight again. Past an almost empty field: one horse, poised, patient as an athlete. A convoy of motorbikes comes the other way: old chromey beasts, ridden by portly men.

  ‘Harley-D’s,’ says Josh with authority. They pass, one after another, each with a throaty burp. After they’ve gone it seems almost silent, the white car’s engine rendered quieter than before. Rain is falling in the fields.

  The motorway is chock-full with traffic, stuttering south. In two lanes container lorries, one behind another, like the carriages of an endless train, dwarfing the occasional car sandwiched between them. Josh opens the window. The terrible urgent roar of tyres on tarmac. He closes it again.

  Josh invites his sister to spot a particular shape or make of car – ‘Red Mini: that’s five – two to me’ – widening criteria to keep well ahead of her.

  White caravans towed by saloon cars occupied by white-haired couples sucking Everton Mints and barley sugar. Top-of-the-range vehicles in the outside lanes, stopping and starting with everyone else: motionless across the carriageway, a blockage, then everything shunting on again.

  Heavy eyelids, heads droop. The children drift in and out of sleep. The slurred consciousness of travel.

  ‘How about here?’ the woman says. SERVICES. She presses the indicator lever attached to the steering wheel, a green light on the dashboard blinks, they pull off the motorway.

  The cars in the car park are so similar they might be at a factory: mass production, row upon row, line after line. Perhaps they’re brought from the factory to this car park beside the motorway, to be collected and delivered to garages across the country. The white car joins them as the woman steers it into a snug parking space. Only the company symbols on the backs of the cars are different, identified by Josh as they walk towards the service station: Vauxhall, Honda, Citroën . . . The woman locks the car behind her. She presses her thumb hard on the remote key fob, muscle flexing right up her arm, an almost punitive gesture.

  At the entrance to the service station Owen and the children pass men and women in different uniforms, selling membership of motoring organisations. They wander through the crowded, bright emporium.

  Holly holds her father’s hand. ‘Look,’ she says, dragging Owen towards a poster of the menu in one of the cafeterias, a photograph of each dish on offer. Holly touches the poster on a picture of sausage and bacon, eggs, waffles and baked beans, shinily succulent. ‘Dinner,’ she says.

  The food when it arrives is less glossy than depicted. Owen expects the children to be disappointed, but they tuck in with enthusiasm. Everything is extraordinarily expensive, as if this place were located at the end of some coastal peninsula and not on a major artery of the road network. He calculates that he cannot afford to buy food for himself if he’s not to run out of money on the journey, but sips an expensive cup of tea while Claire and the childen eat.

  Claire goes to the toilets, saying she’ll be back in a minute. ‘She said south,’ Josh tells his father. ‘Nana lives east. I know that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Nana,’ Owen tells him.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’ll explain later. I promise.’

  Josh’s eyes narrow. He nods at something behind Owen. ‘There’s games,’ he says. ‘Holly and me could go on them.’

  ‘We can’t afford to play games,’ Owen says. ‘Sorry, Josh.’

  Josh gazes around. Unlike an adult, who would glance here and there, he stares at one particular person, then another, mesmerised. At length, looking at a counter with half a dozen computers, he says, ‘We’ll go on the Internet over there. It says there’s free sites. Come on.’ Holly gets up and follows.

  The S-shaped central avenue of the service station gives on to various franchised cafes, retail outlets, toilets. Owen can see the entrance, as well as the children. He glances at them every few moments; sometimes one or other of them is checking on him.

  Pale orange, green and grey plastic chairs and tables, many empty, some occupied by casually dressed pensioners. They look as if they’d been slobbing around at home and were called here unexpectedly. They wear floppy cardigans, sloppy tracksuit trousers. They sit in couples, saying little, their fallen faces suggesting a disappointment to which they are almost resigned.

  There are no other children here on this weekday. Owen knows his own must look suspicious. Will someone alert social services, the police? They rejoin him now, Josh letting out a dolorous sigh. ‘They’re rubbish,’ he says. ‘Only free sites are ones for you to buy stuff.’

  ‘Yeh,’ Holly concurs.

  ‘Come on,’ Josh says, and she follows him once more.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Owen asks.

  ‘Look around,’ Josh says, over his shoulder.

  ‘Keep in sight.’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Just a look,’ Holly explains. ‘That’s all.’

  Owen watches the children move towards a room of fruit machines. He is alert, tense, seeing everything. He sees Josh move stealthily from one machine to the next, sli
pping his fingers into the coin trays. Holly kneels, her head on the floor, peering underneath the machines. Each evidently comes up with pickings, for they become animated: put money into a machine which blinks and flashes back at them in multicoloured gratitude.

  The coffee machine hisses and snorts like a horse. Ambient pop music plays, just loud enough to swim in and out of Owen’s awareness. He finds himself humming a familiar tune inside his head without noticing it had got in there. The smell of cooked eggs.

  Businessmen in suits and ties pay for their food and carry their trays to a carousel, where they help themselves to cutlery, serviettes, small sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, pepper and salt. They sit in pairs, converse excitedly, then hunch towards each other, furtive, wary of being overheard here, this anonymous meeting place. One will open a laptop, the other move around the table to join him, and stare at the screen together. One of them catches Owen’s eye. Owen wonders if the man is comparing his face with a photo on the screen.

  In their early days together Mel called Owen her beachcomber of the city. He couldn’t pass a builder’s skip without leaning in to poke about, pull out some piece of broken furniture or child’s toy, weigh it in his hand. She understood he was mentally stripping it down, taking it apart, assessing the potential reordering of its component parts. ‘I’ve got a use for this,’ he’d say, as if he’d been searching the past half-year for precisely such an object. It endeared him to her, this talent for envisioning utility for something cast aside. Benches made from floorboards, pallets for bed frames; plant pots were parts of chimneys, pipes. Most of their furniture inside the flat came free. Once he took a bicycle apart, borrowed some bloke’s welding gear, laboured in the backyard. Mel came home and he led her through to the kitchen with her eyes closed, put his hand on her head and tilted it towards the floor so that when she opened her eyes and Owen said, ‘See what I made,’ it took her a moment scanning the room before she raised her gaze and saw gifts hanging: from hooks on bicycle wheels hung pots and pans; in the lounge the frame had become a candelabra, with eight candles burning.

  Their dinner service was a medley amassed from charity shops. Owen trawled them in rotation, alone then with Sara, then Josh, when they were babies, toddlers, on Saturdays. The children’s clothes were cast-offs, their toys second-hand. He took them blackberry picking along the railway line, apple scrumping in the nature reserve, crayfishing in the river by the bridge.

  Mel found it charming. Except that Owen had little discernment, a subtle failing that became evident with time, as the house filled up. ‘It ’s like living in a car boot sale,’ she told him, smiling at first.

  He was nonplussed.

  ‘I’m ashamed to bring people back here,’ she said in time. ‘It’s a family home, not a junk shop.’

  She was changing her mind, Owen understood now, about the man she’d fallen for, even before the accident. He wondered if he could have known this would happen, what he should have done.

  ‘Sorry to take so long.’

  Owen turns. Claire is standing beside him. ‘I had to make some calls.’ She holds two fresh mugs of coffee. ‘Need one for the road. Keep the driver alert. Then we can go.’ Claire sits and texts. Owen drinks coffee from the mug in his left hand, his hook resting on his lap.

  A young cleaner calmly pushes her trolley from one abandoned table to another. She scrapes leftover food into a bin, stacks dirty plates, pours cutlery into trays which makes a sound like water through shells. She has a canister of pink detergent in a holster on her belt, its trigger attached to a twisted length of hose: she unclips the trigger and sprays each table top, then slowly wipes it with a balled-up wad of kitchen roll.

  The cleaner scrapes waste into her bin. Chips, baked beans, vegetables, toast, so much food ordered then left behind. Owen gets to a table before her, calmly carries a plate with a halfeaten fry-up back to his place.

  He watches the children move into another room. Successful gamblers, they are using fruit-machine winnings on computer games. Josh is waving a large gun, shooting at a screen. Owen can read the words, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD. Holly is driving a virtual car along a racetrack in some Nintendo game.

  The service station seems to be filling up. Detritus builds up on abandoned tables. Owen becomes selective in his gleaning, picking portable items of food, slipping them into his rucksack. He glances at the computer room. It is empty. Owen’s heart thumps in his chest, he looks around wildly. He sees Josh signalling to him, pointing outside, to a play area. Holly stands beside him. Owen nods and they trot out. He watches.

  The play area is an adventure playground. Diminutive commandos, Josh and Holly climb netting, balance their way along a swinging, slatted bridge. Owen watches them, his heartbeat settling. Beyond, a man lets his dogs off their leads: two brown pointers run pell-mell across an ungrazed field towards a wood. A stand of silver birches.

  Outside, the repetitive cars come and go, vacating spaces for one another, filled within moments.

  In the playground Holly cruises down a slide. Josh leads an assault on a wooden turreted castle, spraying its defenders with imaginary bullets. Owen knows they must leave now, he no longer belongs, as if this station is becoming either more or less real than he himself, this transit area, where people are being sorted in some kind of selection process of which some are almost aware.

  ‘Forecast not so good,’ Claire says.

  Owen had forgotten her. ‘Maybe we’ll stay in a hotel,’ he says. ‘I have a backup plan,’

  She sips her coffee. ‘What kind of plan?’ she asks.

  If I tell her the truth, Owen thinks, all will be lost. If I tell her a lie, she’ll spot it. His mother once told him that his father, faced with a simple question requiring a straightforward answer, would rather spin a yarn. Whereas she, at the first thought of falsehood, would feel her vocal cords constrict, and squeak. Her son is the same. He says nothing.

  ‘I had a plan once,’ Claire says, and smiles at the memory, this gift from herself. She begins to tell him the story. It concerns her persuading a group of her teenage friends to do something none of them wanted to do. She had to change one person’s mind after another. Owen is absorbed, though he doesn’t follow the story. He’s drawn into Claire’s force field, her animated self.

  It occurs to Owen that he and Claire are sitting slightly closer to one another than they were a minute ago, drawing towards each other by imperceptible degrees. He can feel her breath now, see the imperfections of her skin, blotches in each cheek. Variegations of colour, tone. She has become desirable, and he finds himself changing, his libido brought alive, a long-forgotten sensation. They speak, but it is in code, and even as he listens, or occasionally interjects, Owen cannot say whether or not it makes any sense, it is gobbledegook, nothing more than an excuse to watch her lips move, enticing, to look into her eyes looking into his.

  Their fingers meet on the wiped-clean table, the fingers of her right and his left hand touch. Semi-independent from their owners’ minds, the fingers stroke, caress, pinch each other, as their owners watch. Claire stops speaking. Her face is blushing. Beneath the table, Owen feels his knees push forward in search of hers: they meet as if underwater. Two bodies yearning towards fusion.

  Suddenly, with his hook, Owen grabs his left forearm and yanks it aside. He stands up, looks outside. The children are still playing in the adventure playground.

  Claire is embarrassed, irked. She looks at her watch, holds up her phone. ‘I need a top-up. Be a moment. Right back.’ She heads towards the newsagents. Owen watches her wide shoulders, her long legs. Her posture makes her look taller than she really is. It’s a repeated visual surprise when slouching men pass her and prove to be an inch or two taller than her. She disappears behind magazine racks.

  Strip lights on the ceiling. No shadows. Owen can’t understand how there are no shadows on people’s faces. The glare from the strip lights fall to the floor and bounce back, and off the tables and the walls, filling in where there should h
ave been shadows.

  ‘He’s hurt.’

  Josh is holding his elbow and grimacing, struggling not to cry. As Owen embraces him, Josh’s eyes fill with tears.

  ‘He fell off the log,’ Holly explains.

  ‘It were slippery,’ Josh says.

  ‘His arm hit the wood.’

  Josh nods back over his shoulder. ‘Vikings was after me.’

  ‘Where does it hurt?’ Owen strokes his son’s elbow. Josh rests his head on his father’s shoulder.

  ‘We done the law of gravity last week,’ Josh whispers. ‘I hate it. It’s too strict. Everything falls.’ He’s stopped crying, is absorbing himself in telling his father his idea. ‘Why can’t things just float down to the earth sometimes? It hurts when you hit the ground.’

  ‘Where’s that lady?’ Holly asks.

  Owen eases his son off his lap to the floor and stands up himself. His skin tingles.

  The place is crowded, people make such slow progress it takes a while of observation to see that they are not stationary, as if in some jam-packed nightclub, but moving each in one direction or another. Countless negotiations every moment. Owen glimpses Claire in the far distance across the mall, in the company of three or four men and women in white shirts, the black police epaulettes upon their shoulders, talking into radios attached to their chests.

  ‘Pick up your rucksacks,’ Owen says. ‘Back to the playground.’

  They walk through the cafeteria, Owen bent forward, he hopes undramatically. Doors swing open, the coolness of the day a shock to him after air-conditioned warmth. ‘Quick,’ Owen says. He suspects he doesn’t need to, that the children understand the urgency required. Holly is not dawdling as she naturally does. They follow him out of the play area and turn right, away from the service station, into the field where dogs are exercised. Owen is drawn to the silver birches, he can almost see the three of them half a minute hence dissolving into the wood. But the field is too wide, and in less than half a minute a police officer would be at a window and could spot them scarpering. He turns left instead, and they run along a hedge. One or two people are in the field, drivers stretching their legs, and Owen is conscious of a need to make their running look like fun, not flight, so alternates between leading and theatrically chasing his children.