Turning for Home

by Barney Norris

  ‘I don’t quite know. I suppose the bar needs setting up – could you do that?’

  ‘Of course. Under the willow again?’

  ‘That worked well before, didn’t it? And it won’t rain today.’

  ‘It’s a bit cloudy.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s not going to rain. Bit breezy, but we can put up with that.’

  ‘We’ve got the marquee, after all.’

  ‘Exactly. Now, if you could fill up the cool boxes hiding in the larder with a bit of ice, that can look after the lagers. Ale doesn’t need keeping cool and we’d want separate ice for actually putting into the drinks, but that’ll need taking out of the freezer over the course of the day, we can’t take it all out now.’

  ‘Or it’ll melt.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m sorry, you know what you’re doing, don’t you? I like to fuss.’ Good of Laura to admit that she was treating me like an idiot.

  ‘Where’s Grandad?’

  ‘Oh, rumbling round in the cellar the last time I heard him. Fetching something.’ As Laura speaks, Grandad appears in the kitchen doorway.

  ‘Rumbling around, was I?’

  Laura jumps, her shoulders shooting up to her ears as she turns to see him, like an actor over-egging her way through a bad play. There are many things people do in real life that you could never put into a movie. No one would believe them; they would say people don’t really do things like that. But then there are lots of things that happen in stories and on TV that never seem to happen in the real world, either. Perhaps the mistake is to assume the two are supposed to have anything to do with each other. Perhaps that isn’t the point at all, and stories are supposed to be dreams, not realities.

  ‘Robert, you’ll give me a heart attack!’

  ‘Sorry. Are you all right, Kate?’

  ‘I’m fine. I had a nice walk. I feel awake now.’

  ‘Clears the lungs out, doesn’t it, stretching the legs,’ Grandad says.

  ‘I’m just going to set the bar up under the willow.’

  Grandad makes sure Laura isn’t looking at him, then rolls his eyes at me. ‘Oh yes? Shall I give you a hand with the trestle table? They can bite your hand off if you’re not careful, those things.’

  Laura turns to look at him, frowning, as if she’s been wronged. ‘I need plenty of help in here.’

  ‘I’ll just help Kate with the table, then I’ll come back. Only a minute. They’re difficult to manage on your own. All right?’

  Laura turns her back on us both in order to plunge despairingly once more into the work. ‘All right,’ she sighs, and it is clear no one has ever had to put up with more than she will have to today in the whole of the history of the world. Christ in his thorns didn’t know agony like she is battling through.

  ‘Come on then, Kate.’

  I turn and follow as Grandad strides out of the kitchen and on through the main room, then opens the French windows and steps into the garden, stopping for a moment to drink in the light falling honeyed and gentle over his face. I did the same thing, half an hour earlier. It makes me feel close to him to see us moved by the same sensation. I notice the quality of the light has changed. But still we stand together and enjoy the day. These are the things people really share – the light, the weather.

  ‘Still not very warm out here,’ Grandad says.

  ‘Aunt Laura says it won’t rain though.’

  ‘No, it won’t rain. That’s not in Laura’s schedule, after all; we don’t have time for that.’ Grandad chuckles to himself.

  There’s a marquee on the main part of the lawn, put up yesterday by a hire company who are booked to come back at the end of the day and take it down again. I think marquees always find a way of looking shabby, even the beautiful ones people hire for weddings. There’s something self-conscious about a structure that’s going to disappear again with the sunset, to last only as long as the light. I follow Grandad as he turns away from the lawn and crosses the mounting yard to unlock the big side barn, where the trestle table waits for us somewhere at the back in the smell of old straw and the dark.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right about helping out with things?’ Grandad asks.

  ‘Of course. I enjoy it.’

  ‘I don’t know whether anyone can enjoy it all that much, pouring everyone’s drinks all day, but it’s such a help. We so appreciate it. I suppose you will end up pouring everyone’s drinks all day, won’t you?’

  ‘I think I probably will, yeah. That’s what I used to do.’

  ‘Only till things are swinging along though. People can look after themselves once there’s a bit of a crowd and everyone’s happy.’

  Grandad has succeeded in unlocking the barn door, and we step through into the cool of the cavernous space inside. He finds the light switch and turns it on, but the room hardly grows any brighter at first, as the bulb stutters slowly before starting to warm into life. It’s a strange room, this one. A peace lies over everything. Somehow you can tell no one has come in here for a long time. The quietness has weight, it stretches back through time, you can hear the echo of it.

  All around us lies old furniture in plastic sheeting – stacks of outdoor chairs, a table-tennis table, a lamp without a shade. I look up to the loft attics, which seem to hang above us either side of the entrance, propped up by the pillars holding the roof. The attics can only be accessed by means of an old wooden ladder, which is leaning now against the back wall. They were haylofts when the barn was first built. They haven’t been used for hay since Grandad owned the place, but that undoubtedly was their first purpose. It was a way of keeping things up and away from the rats that must have once thronged in here, back when farmers all kept terriers. One of the attics used to be a sort of dangerous playroom in my childhood, where I used to find things to dress up and parade around in. The other was filled with the abandoned, forgotten and outgrown toys and clothes and cots and bedside tables of Mum’s childhood, the sloughed skins of the years when she grew up here. None of that’s here any more. Both are empty now.

  Joe visited this house with me a couple of times. Once to come to a party like this one, and again the following autumn, when we stayed here for a night to get away from the city and catch up with my grandparents. He found the party easy. Knowing no one, he was able to treat everyone the same, and talk to anyone who wanted to talk with him, without having to wade through the secrets and old feuds that made up the politics of any family. I hardly saw him all day. He was whirled around between uncles and great-aunts, laughing at one story after another, loving the day because that was the person he was, happy, uninhibited. I never knew anyone before or since who seemed so confident, so young. When I’m with Sam, I swim in the shyness of both of us. But Joe used to be different. I used to smile so widely. He managed to draw me out of myself.

  The time we came here alone was stranger. We sat with my grandparents, making conversation and drinking too much. Grandma and Grandad put Joe in a separate room to me, and we wondered whether to talk to them about it.

  ‘Of course, it’s not their fault for arranging things like this, it’s perfectly normal to them,’ I said. But obviously I was mortified. We sneaked off for a minute before dinner to sit down together on the bed in Joe’s room, and work out what to do. He held my hand to show me it was OK, but I remember feeling sure I must be blushing, and Joe would look at me differently now, and think I came from some strange, old-fashioned family. I had been excited to show him some more of the world I thought I belonged to. Once we got there, I wasn’t sure I liked what it said about me, after all, what the landscape of my childhood holidays might reveal.

  ‘It’s their generation, isn’t it?’ Joe said. ‘This is what was normal for them. They probably didn’t share a bed till they got married.’

  We agreed that the adult thing to do would be to bring the subject up, and ask whether we could share a bed. They might respect us for asking. In the end, though, the idea of that conversation seemed too frightening to both of us. We
weren’t quite as grown-up yet as we sometimes liked to think, and a conversation like that felt like a cliff face too steep to climb. We waited for half an hour in our different bedrooms till we thought Grandma and Grandad were asleep, then Joe crept to me across the hall.

  I remember the half-hour of waiting for him as clearly as if it was still happening now. Sometimes, you feel like you might be able to step back and live inside a lost moment for ever, holding on to it and drinking it in until the details rub off it and vanish, until the images get old and the sharpness of the colours and corners wears away. It was wonderful to lie in that bed and think there was someone so close by who wanted to be with me. A tender feeling. Sometimes if I think about Joe for long enough, I can still imagine that’s where he is now, lying and waiting to come to me when the night is late enough, thinking of me waiting for him in another room. I can still imagine what he might think of everything that ever happens to me, and see through his eyes even though he isn’t with me. Sometimes I’ll be walking through a building or a quiet, empty street, and the thought will come to me that behind one of the doors I’m passing is my grandad’s spare room, and all I have to do is open the right door and step through, if I only knew which one to open, and only had the key. Then Joe will be there for me again, and all the rest will be forgotten. It’s dangerous to dream like that. It’s too sweet a feeling to bear.

  When I was fifteen I lost my spare house key in a pub where I was drinking, and got home to find my parents were already asleep. I was too embarrassed to wake them, so I broke into the garage, and lay down on the concrete floor by the car on an old cardboard box like I’d seen tramps doing, because it was supposed to keep you warmer not to lie directly on the floor. I waited like that till morning, freezing, wide awake. It feels like that to be me now. It feels like the key to my life is missing, and I’m waiting in the garage, and I can’t get back in.

  That’s where I’ve been ever since the night of the accident, the hour when life went wrong, when my optimism ended. I had been seeing Joe for a year, and was wading through my degree, while he was coming to the end of a Teach First year in Brixton. Joe was living in a flat-share near Tooting, despite his mum’s best efforts to persuade him to stay at home. One night he was driving back from a day by the sea catching up with university friends who’d dropped out and moved to Brighton, and there was an accident by South Wimbledon station. Joe seems to have tried to run a red light. There was no alcohol in his blood; perhaps he had been listening to music and wasn’t concentrating on the road, or perhaps he just wanted to get home faster. He carried on over a crossing, and a lorry ploughed into him. The car hit a wall. In the windscreen, there was a perfect circle drawn where Joe’s head cracked the glass into a whirlpooled spider’s web. He had to be cut from the car, which lay on its side, mauled to death by the lorry looming over it. I learned later that it took a long time to get him out. There must have been a lot of blood. I saw what was left of the clothes he had been wearing; I knew he had lost a lot of blood by the time he got to the hospital. I remembered the sky that evening as I rushed to see him was alight with violence, red and glaring; I remember thinking at the time: Perhaps that’s the heart going out of him. They carried him into a helicopter, and took him to Tooting, where they landed on the roof of St George’s Hospital, one more sorrowful cargo, one more frail heart trying to carry on beating.

  The call when it came was from Lizzy. I was eating beans on toast for my dinner, in front of bad TV, alone on the sofa, and my phone rang. I answered it still bent over my plate as I finished a mouthful of baked beans, knowing Lizzy wouldn’t mind if I spoke with my mouth full.

  ‘Heya.’

  ‘There’s been an accident.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Joe. He’s been in an accident.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘They’re taking him to St George’s Hospital.’

  ‘Are you there?’

  ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘Is it serious?’

  ‘They’ve taken him in the air ambulance.’

  I felt the fear like a punch in the gut. I remember noticing even then, in the first rush of panic, how simple people really are when you strip away the language we dress ourselves up in. What coursed through me in that moment were the same chemicals that had electrified me the first time a pet cat had been put down, the first time I’d ever been dumped. I felt terror in the same place in my stomach as the time I was nearly hit on a zebra crossing, and everything reminded me of everything else, and everything seemed to have been leading up to this feeling all along, all my life, because everything else was cast into shadow by this.

  I left the plate of food on the sofa and went into the hall, and noticed as I did that I wasn’t running, I couldn’t move my legs right. The light from the hall lamp seemed to be lighting a dream. There was a knife sliding in between me and reality, I felt sure of it; this couldn’t be real, I was trapped on the wrong, dream side of the blade. I put on my shoes, and picked up my coat and keys and purse, then went outside, and when the freshness of the night air hit me, I found my strength and started running. I went too fast down the road where I lived and round the corner out on to the pavement of the main road into the wraithlike ribbon of people passing ghostlike on their phones, boxed into themselves, far away from the crisis I was facing. Halfway to the station, by the entrance to the cemetery, I had to stop and walk for fifty metres, because I wasn’t fit enough to run all the way at the pace that I’d set myself. I dragged the air into my lungs, and the air was cold in my throat. I felt like the whole of the city must be bathed in red from the spectacular light in the sky, the skein of red cloud scarring over everything. Red getting under fingernails and eyelids, red in our mouths and shining from belt buckles. Red in the sewer grates, gurgling to the rivers, red in the aisles of the supermarkets, red hearts beating. I got to the Tube and went underground. I wanted to scream but all I could do was stand and rock slightly, panic slightly, fear holding on to my gut. When I got to Tooting Broadway I ran out of the station again, across the mad blur of the road and the cars blaring at me and the buses huge and looming. I followed the map on my phone down hurried residential streets, certain I had done something wrong, taken a wrong turning, because surely there couldn’t be a hospital down a street this quiet; then I saw the building looming in the distance and ran towards it, as if I expected an embrace. I went in through the main doors and ran to the desk.

  ‘Where’s A and E?’

  ‘You need to go back out and it’s along to the left.’

  I turned again and ran. In A and E there were great lines of people massing with the evening’s injuries. I blundered through them. I rushed up to another tired-looking woman working at another desk.

  ‘I’m looking for someone. I’m looking for my boyfriend.’

  The woman was clearly annoyed with me; I must have jumped a queue. I didn’t care. ‘What’s his name?’

  He had already gone through to surgery, and of course I wasn’t allowed to follow him. They took me to Lizzy instead, Lizzy sitting with her parents, frozen in shock, the blood all drained out of their lost white faces. Neither of the women were crying, but Joe’s dad had his head in his hands when I rounded a corner and saw them. Then they looked up and saw me, and all four of us collapsed into tears.

  It was the end of youth. All of the plans Joe and I had both cherished were gone in a moment. The world grew colder for me from then on. I thought sometimes what a fool I had been for having thought so well of it till then. For having believed that things might turn out well, as if I was living a story. I couldn’t help but look back on my dreams and see the absurdity of all of them after that night. The planning and dreaming and thinking of the future that everyone did, putting off one thing after another when they might have been living for now, when life could vanish from you as fast as one vehicle ploughing through another. It made all Joe’s ambitions, which I had believed in and stoked myself, seem so small, so fragile, so unreal. Eve
r since then, it’s been difficult for me to care about my own life, my own ambitions. What’s the point of expending that energy if you can just suddenly die?

  I never went back to university. I trailed the student debt along behind me, a reminder of all that had happened, a taunt. Sometimes I thought about trying to find a way to pick up what I had left off doing, and get through a last year of study somewhere, and find a way to graduate, just so the debt could be worth something to me, but I didn’t feel brave enough to try. It would be like picking a scab, and I felt sure I’d bleed out under the pressure of it. I needed the wound to grow older before I tried.

  The trestle tables are stacked against the back wall of the barn. Grandad leads the way towards them. As we lift one and start to make our way back to the barn door and the yard and garden beyond, he slows, and clears his throat.

  ‘There’s something I might need your help with today.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’m going to have a visitor. Someone rather unexpected, who’s not exactly connected with our party. We’re going to need some time alone, I’m afraid.’

  I look up, but he’s staring intently at the joint of the table, and won’t meet my eye.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s highly inconvenient, I know. But it’s also rather unavoidable. However, that doesn’t mean Aunt Laura would be likely to be very supportive, so I’d be grateful if you could try and keep her off my trail, if I do disappear for a while.’

  ‘Of course. Is everything all right?’

  ‘All absolutely fine, yes. Just a development I need to deal with.’

  ‘A work thing?’

  Grandad smiles. I guess he’s never used that phrase himself.

  ‘A work thing, yes, that’s it. But don’t say that to anyone. As a rule I’m not really supposed to have any work things any more. Not all that good for the heart.’

  ‘No, sure. Mum’s the word.’