Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  We met at a disco in a scout hut in Harnham. Not a place you set out for expecting to meet the love of your life. I’d gone looking for lads, and there was a bar, and they let us bring vodka. Me and my ladies, me and my girls. I don’t know any of them now. Wonder where they ended up, whether they’re rich, whether they’re happy. I fucking hope they’re all as miserable as I am.

  He was the tallest boy there, and I knew from the minute I walked in he’d picked me. Sometimes you can feel it, like gravity. Wherever I stood in the room I could tell where he was, which corner of the room and when he was listening to me. Like he was a plughole and sucking me into the middle of the world, cos I always thought the middle of the world was where he was after that evening.

  And we made out in the car park and I put my hand on his cock and he took it away. So I undid his belt and I reached in and thought about blowing him there behind the scout hut against the Astra we were leaning on, but he said no, took my hand away, and I didn’t understand it, felt embarrassed, felt ashamed like he didn’t like me. And he said it wasn’t like that, he just wanted to see me at the weekend, just thought we might get to know each other before we did anything else maybe.

  I was seventeen years old. I fell in love for the first and only time, fell in love with the idea of just talking. Like he wanted to hear me, like he thought I might be interesting.

  Even then, first night behind the scout hut, my hand on his cock down his trousers, he was playing the long game, reeling me in.

  I’d never had a boyfriend before. What a funny word, that – seems cutesy and old world even when you’re a kid. I still hear people using it today though, old people, scared to commit to any more of a real fucking life than they had when they were sixteen, scared to be anything more than provisional. Most of us are fucking suitcases buffeting our way through lost luggage, aren’t we? That’s the problem.

  It was better, of course. Better than one-offs, I mean. The sex got better when you learned each other’s secrets and you talked and you went on adventures. I didn’t always believe him when he told me he loved me, but I always liked hearing it. Fucking massive feeling that. Like something in you’s bursting if you love them back, like a massive fucking cardiac arrest.

  He started fucking around pretty early. And I’ve had enough NHS counsellors tell me ever since he was a leech, he was a wanker, he picked me out cos he thought I was weak enough to keep in his pocket while he fucked around. Cos what it was was he didn’t like shagging or nights out or pretty women, what he was addicted to was cheating on girls. Thrill of it, fun of it. Black ops. Fuck ops. He needed someone he was hurting before he could come, that was more or less the shape of it, the trouble with his dick. And I nod when they tell me, I nod when they explain me my life like it happened in a textbook. But they don’t know shit all, really. They don’t know anything. And if they were in my place they’d have forgiven him and all and gone on taking him back every fucking time he got caught with his cock in some stranger. Wasn’t like there was anyone else in the world for me. Wasn’t like I didn’t need him just cos he fucked me over. I was in fucking love with him, wasn’t I?

  We had fights. I’d go back to my mum’s, if we were talking, or I’d stay at a mate’s house. He’d always find me, cos the other thing he got off on was having me forgive him. Got a hard-on crying to my shoulder, crying at my feet, crying down the phone in the middle of the night. And I’d always fucking melt in the end. I was like a fucking snowman round him.

  That was the first two years. Then there were the good years, cos he stopped. He stopped for ages the minute he knew I was up the duff.

  I went back to the stall and hung out there for the rest of the day, and it was just like most other days of my life – fucking quiet, fucking boring. Day after day after day after day nothing happens and it all feels so like waiting, but the thing is, the thing that scares you if you stop to think about it is, it’s not waiting; there’s nothing to wait for; you’re not waiting for anything. It’s just your life. Fuck me, it’s awful when you stop to think. We’re all in training for a race that won’t happen. That’s why I try not to think more than I fucking have to. Cos it’s most of your life, the awfulness, so you put up and shut up and make your money and have your evenings and try to distract yourself and try to stay pissed enough or stoned enough to not stop and think. And most of the time that’s enough to keep out the cold.

  Night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night.

  At the end of day I packed up and binned up and locked up and went to the Hatchet and bought half a kilo off Dave. He stared at my tits the whole time we were talking, but I don’t mind him. I’d put my push-up on so as to give him an eyeful. He’s all right, is fucking Dave. I had a vodka and tonic and a vodka and tonic and a vodka and tonic and then we were out back having a jump in the ladies. No one ever uses the ladies shitters in the Hatchet. No fucking ordinary women ever drink there; they only keep them open for shagging or coke. And that was how my night ended, up against a cubicle wall again with lovely dirty Dave. Going back in the bar for another drink and thinking of the old girl standing in the graveyard for some reason, not able to stop thinking about that sad old fucker in her sad old outfit, shiny at the cuffs where she’d spent so many years rubbing her nervous fingers trying to make the arms long enough when they just weren’t. Walking home alone to Coldharbour Lane at end of evening with the thought of her and half a kilo of weed in my bra, the swallow tattoo on my hand my only star to steer by.

  What was she doing now? That was what I wanted to know. What do you do the first night after you bury your feller?

  I got the booze sweats, every year as the pounds keep piling on and the bulk of my body drowns me a little further I sweat worse and worse when I drink. I lay on my back and I stared at the ceiling. And I thought of her lying the same way somewhere in Wiltshire, saw her face again and again as the room span. I forgot to close my curtains, and all the time I was awake and lying there I thought the cathedral might come over and get me, pull its legs out like they were roots and walk right over my ends to peek in the window. I hate the red eye of that spire. Staring into you like Lord of the Rings. It sings you to sleep when you let it into your head, when you start to wonder of an evening whether you really belong here. It’s like nodding off to heavy fucking metal. So you think you deserve to live here? it says. You think you deserve to breathe the same air as me? You think you belong with my people, you’re one of my people? You can fuck off if you think that.

  Dealing’s more like running a club than a business. I don’t sell to anyone if I don’t know them. I’ve got my regulars, and they’re all I want to keep me ticking over. It’s nice. You get sort of close to them over the years. Plenty kids I been selling to since they were fourteen or fifteen are thirty now. I watch their lives happen to them, clothes change, haircuts, shoes they walk in. They’re my favourites, kids whose A Level results I remember better than they do. They all work in Londis or Costcutter or Co-op or Tesco now, but I remember how excited they used to get about turning into rock stars. Some of them get somewhere of course. A boy called Liam went and worked for the Guardian. I don’t know whether he works there any more. Another boy called Andy joined the police. But most of them, I have to admit your average stoner’s not an aspirational type.

  The other trade comes from passers-through. Posh kids, grammar school boys. Rubberneckers thinking they learn something smoking. You pick them up by word of mouth, give your number out careful, and the strivers fuck off after a few years to London, cos they don’t think there’s life worth living in Salisbury. Smug cunts. But you take their money while they’re knocking around. It’s fair to say there’s a fair bit of preying on the thick or the fuck-ups. You can’t feel bad about it; you get used to it. You’re t
he highlight of the week for them, and even if you’re not doing them any good it’s hard to feel guilty when they’re that pleased to see you. I never sell from the stall, can’t be mixing that up, so I deal in the evenings. Mornings I’m getting the flowers. And the texts roll in all day and I line up my trades. And I run my stall and I smoke my fags. And I meet them here and there in the evenings.

  And it was on the night after I did the old lady’s funeral I got busted. I was waiting outside the shitters in Vicky’s for a sale and the cunt was late. There’s a lesson for you: don’t fuck around with timekeeping, never fucking wait if they won’t turn up, cos you’re out there with your arse in the air and your pockets stuffed and you never know what’s gonna happen to you. Some cunt of a gavver, a pig like, he comes round the corner, grin on his face like he already knew he had me. Stopped and searched and I had an ounce in different baggies – that’s the way you do it, buy in kilos, sell in ounces. And he carted me off, and I told him if I had a prick as big as he was I’d fuck his good day’s work up his nose till it came out his eyeballs, and then I was in a cell and he’d locked me up, the fucking cunt that he was. And I sat on the little bench you get there and I wanted to cry, cos with my record and eight little baggies in my pocket I knew I was fucked, simple as. They’d roll it all out in front of me.

  Smallsbury, they call it. Everyone knows everyone and everyone’s business and everyone’s treading on everyone’s toes and of course if you sell long enough in a town that small you end up busted, and I was stupid, I suppose, for not thinking that when I still could have done summat about it. All the places I’ve been I’ve never known nowhere like this place for showing you how petty people are and how they like to stick their nose in and have a fish around in the guts of you and find out how your life is and what you’re doing with it. How stuffed their shirts, how up themselves, how self-regarding, how cliquey, how insecure, how vain, how careful looking after number one. Smallsbury’s a club parades itself in front of you but you never join, and in the end if you keep on getting under their feet they fuck you up down some side alley.

  I lived a lot of places in my wandering years. Chichester Putney Harlesden Holloway Shepherd’s Bush Norwich Northampton Oxford Scarborough Aberystwyth Hull South Shields Ipswich Exeter Plymouth Watford Hereford Golders Green Andover Tooting Brixton Earlsfield Upavon Corsham Melksham Trowbridge Chippenham Devizes. Oh, my wandering days. I never found people anywhere with sticks fucked further up their arses than Smallsbury, though. But some reason or other I still ended up coming home. That’s what people do. That’s our lives. We don’t pick em, we’re born living them, and there is such a thing as home, you see.

  My little one was born, my little boy, and for a long time I didn’t give a fuck about anything else. Only how things might matter to him, what might happen for him if this or that changed or this or that happened. We rented a flat with my dole and his site work, and he got a job in a caff to top us up, and we didn’t have anything, no money and nothing in the flat except what we scrounged off our parents. It must have been shaming for him, a job in a café – woman’s work, really. And that’s why I’ll never hate him. Cos he did that for us, and it must have been a big fucking thing for a boy who wanted so much to act like a man. We went round the charity shops and got all our things for our baby – videos and toys and a cot and a mobile for over the bed and a pram, kind of thing. You get such a list together when you’re having a baby, believe me. I’ve never been so happy before or since than when we filled that flat, and it felt so exciting cos we were acting like grown-ups but we weren’t grown-ups, really.

  When Rick was six months I started working some at the same caff as Jonno and leaving Rick with Mum. Every time I saw Mum she’d ask me when I was getting married, and somehow or other, I suppose it must have been me or Mum while she was pissed at some party, that got back to Jon and we started talking about it. How we’d like our little boy to have married parents, one surname, normal family, real life, you know the kind of thing. We had a colour TV by this time, we were proper strivers for a bit. And before we knew it we’d booked a slot at the registry office and a knees-up at the Red Lion, proper man and wife love story we were gonna be. Then Jonno got done for assault one Saturday night town centre, and we had to cancel the hotel and the guests and the registry office so sharp they all got pissed and kept their deposits.

  That was a hard time. It was a bad fucking idea to work in the same fucking cafe as your feller, and I didn’t miss that when he went inside – bawling each other out in front of strangers, smashing cups cos every minute of every day we were round each other – but it was worse than that having to move back in with my fucking mum to that horrible house I’d sworn I’d never go back to, and said as much to Mum when I left as well.

  I kept my head down. Mum paid for everything and helped me with my Ricky. I wrote Jonno letters and I visited. I was always faithful. He didn’t believe me, but I never went with any other bloke. I had more important things to be thinking about than anything like that. But he was suspicious, I suppose, cos he knew if I’d ever gone away that’s what he woulda fucking done in a heartbeat.

  My little boy. My Ricky. He was so perfect you couldn’t ever describe it, not with a million words if you had time to write them. I was like some kind of fucking wolf when I thought about what my boy meant to me. I’d show my teeth, cos the muscles in my face went taut when I thought how much I loved him. Jonno missed his first steps, first word. I had to tell him so much he wasn’t there for, and he cried in the visiting room to think of what was happening, and I tried to be kind but I was angry all the same because it was his fault, wasn’t it, it was him had taken himself away from us.

  Ricky’s first word was still Dad, though.

  When Jonno got out I thought we’d get back to starting our lives again, but it was all changed. He didn’t want to get another flat straight off, said he hadn’t the work or the money, needed to build himself up again, so we both stayed living in our parents’ houses. There was no talk about marrying ever again. But I think if there had been he would have said it was kids’ stuff. That was how he acted – like he wanted me to think scales had fallen from his eyes and he saw the world was harder than he used to believe it. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I never thought he loved our little baby like I did, but I thought he’d got caught up in it all and I thought that was enough. But six months away and all that feeling died down. Six months away and the spell broke; he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, couldn’t see why all his life had to be paying for the life of this little fucker he wasn’t sure he loved very much. I don’t think he was really up for love.

  So I knew what was coming. I watched his eyes when he told me he was out with the lads this or that Saturday, and I knew what was going to happen. I looked after my baby and I fought with my mum, but I didn’t think about moving out or asking him if we might live together again, cos the moment had passed. I could see it drifting away behind me like a station you’ve been through, like passing through Basingstoke on the way home from London and you see the lights fall away behind you as the train goes back into the dark. And I could tell what was waiting for me at the next stop.

  Still, it was a shock when I did catch him at it. It was humiliating more than anything. He was shagging one of my mates from the caff.

  They granted bail, course – couple of hundred quid of weed they were always going to bail me even if they lock me up later, and I walked out the station and got in Mum’s car and we drove home. Mum looked after me like she always has. I don’t know why I’ve always been so bad to her. If there’s one thing I regret it’s how old she is now and how long she’s had to put up with me acting the fucktard, cos even if I apologised now, even if we kissed and made up, it wouldn’t matter. She’d still have spent most of her life with me like a cloud over her shoulder, she’ll always have had all that shit in her life even if she forgives it. That’s why I’ve never tried to make up, I guess. No point, really. We drove wi
thout talking, and then she was in my ear while we were still in the hall, before we got in the kitchen, before we even stuck the kettle on.

  ‘What were you thinking, love? What were you doing?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t apologise to me, Rita. It’s your life, isn’t it?’

  And then Mum, she sat me down, stuck a cuppa under my nose, and she balled up the sleeves of her skanky blue cardigan in her fists and laid it all out for me. Spoke it all out, what I already knew but thought I’d hide in the back of my mind for a little while yet, all the news I didn’t want on the radio – she sat me down and made me listen to it. What I’d done, who I’d turned into, what the fuck was going to happen to me now.

  She told me I’d fucked it. For a few extra quid I’d given all my freedom, cos they were sure as hell gonna send me down. I didn’t even need to do it. Paid my rent off the stall, didn’t need the money. She told me I’d lose my stall if six months was what they gave me, even if it was only six months it was a sure thing there’d be fuck all to come back to. She asked me what I’d been thinking. How I could have risked all I had for no fucking reason. And I couldn’t tell her. I’d always fucking done it, it was what I did, never thought of getting out I’d been doing it so fucking long. How do you put a stop to something so inside your life? How do you cut a bit of yourself off? As normal as breathing, dealing was, ever since my baby was born.

  Then she talked to me about Rich. My boy, my baby boy. The man he turned into. And this was what I didn’t want to have to stare at. This was what I wanted to leave alone. Cos there was no way he’d ever fucking talk to me again now. No way he’d ever let me see my granddaughter.