Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  On the last morning, feeling better, I walked out into the yard to explore and say goodbye to the farm. The mounting block and gate, the drain and the hay barn. I decided to climb the straw bales. I clambered in a sweat of concentration. If I got high enough, I thought I might be able to touch the roof, and then I hoped I could roll or slide back down again. The biscuit smell of straw in my nostrils and the sharpness of the stuff against my knees and stomach, I climbed. At the top, looking up at the roof girders instead of down at my footing, I fell down a gap between circular bales, into the heart of the straw stack. Panic came sharp as the heat at the bottom of that well of close darkness. My arms were trapped reaching upwards, frozen the way I had fallen, the gap so narrow I couldn’t get them down by my sides. I thought I could hear rats, and there didn’t seem to be enough of that dry burning air to fill my lungs. Between hacking coughs I breathed and screamed. I felt sure I was going to die, that I would suffocate, dehydrate, cause the whole thing to fall in on my head. I was too small to think sensibly, regulate my breathing, try to lever myself back out, wedge my knees against the bales and shimmy upwards. I thought my life was going to end in the dark and the heat. But I had been down there less than a minute when I felt a huge hand grip mine, an extraordinary strength lift me out of my prison, and found myself gathered into my father’s shaking arms. That’s my first memory of Dad. He had been watching me from the kitchen window while he drank a cup of tea, and seen me fall in. While I grew up I watched him. What he did with his days, how he responded to situations. I tried to learn to be like him.

  A love for his father is always at the centre of the first years of a boy’s life. So the summer Dad died was already a kind of ending before I even knew he was ill. The first time you find love for a person who isn’t your flesh and blood begins a loosening of the earlier bonds you made in your life, as new colours come into the palette of your thinking, as you enter new orbits. What I had shared as a boy with my father was unspooling from the moment I saw Sophie Lawrence. The separation I experienced between myself and my parents the year I discovered love was starker than it is for other teenagers, as it ended with a line of words across a headstone. But it was only the scale of the thing that was different, not the feeling.

  In the war for my father I have this much over Mum – I knew before she did that something was wrong. If a score was being kept of the fight for Dad, if there is a double-entry bookkeeper taking note somewhere of the love or closeness we shared with him, I know that will stand against my name as a badge of some kind. By being the first person to speak aloud the fears that had already been circling him for weeks when I first felt them, I was the one who started the whole thing careering downhill, began to turn the idea of sickness into a reality. If you can name a thing, then you own it. You can call it into being. Sometimes I think I killed him. It was after I spoke up that the testing started.

  The Thursday after the rehearsal and my walk with Sophie Lawrence I walked back up the hill from school to find Dad already home. I liked Thursdays. Dad was usually out till six every day, and Mum worked later, so I got to spend a few hours with the house to myself. I didn’t have to stay in my room; I could sit in the kitchen or the sitting room and listen to whatever radio station I liked. I could take long showers without Mum making any comment. But today when I tried the keys in the door I found it wasn’t double locked, and when I stepped inside I heard retching in the downstairs toilet.

  ‘Mum?’ I could tell it was a man being sick, but it didn’t cross my mind Dad might be home. All I could imagine was Mum throwing up or a burglar taken ill while lifting our TV.

  ‘It’s me.’

  I heard Dad’s voice and could hardly understand it. Who was minding the shop if he was here?

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  I heard him reach for the loo roll, tear a handful, wipe his mouth. He flushed the toilet and the tap ran for as long as it took, I supposed, to wash the taste away. Then I heard the bolt slide back and he stepped out of the toilet and into the hallway, grey and tired.

  ‘Are you ill?’

  ‘I just didn’t feel very well.’ He walked past me into the kitchen. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Thanks.’ I followed him and sat down at the table, head full of a cloud I couldn’t put a name to. There was something wrong. I didn’t know why it was so clear to me, but I knew his answers, his dismissals, were lies. Something made me want to keep asking him what was wrong. From the vantage point of memory it’s hard to swat the idea that even then, at the first warning sign, I knew what was going to happen.

  ‘Did you eat something funny?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  There were different kinds of not talking where Dad was concerned. There was an evasiveness that came from being distracted or bored; another that was something like shyness. There was the silence that came from what he thought it meant to be a man, from growing up around men who kept themselves to themselves and called that a virtue. There was also a silence that fell when he didn’t want me to find something out, when he tried to conceal a present or holiday until the judicious moment, and it was something like that which I read in him now. Except the secret he was keeping was nothing like a holiday. He was feeling afraid. Diagnosing fear in your father is like watching the ground give way under you, like losing a map while you’re out on a moor, like hearing your voice called by someone you’re afraid of, like discovering your nightmares might be real, like becoming suddenly uncertain of everything. It is like the ending of the world. I watched him.

  ‘How long have you been feeling ill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think you should see a doctor?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I took the tea he offered, and we drank together for a little while with nothing to say to each other. Then he leaned forward. ‘Don’t tell Mum, will you? She’ll only worry.’

  I felt myself starting to panic. That was how wrong he thought things might be, that he wanted to keep it from her. All my life I had thought they shared everything. I muttered something in reply, said I had homework to be getting on with. I had to get out of the room. Homework is always a convenient phantom to call up when you want to be on your own. I said nothing to Mum, and Dad and I said no more to each other. But at dinner time and at the breakfast table I watched him, and I could see he was afraid.

  It was another week before he picked up the phone and booked an appointment at the surgery on New Street. I lived for that week with a doubt that crept like bindweed. When the balance of possibility and probability finally tipped I wasn’t with him. I was at school in an English lesson, reading James Joyce and talking about wanking in Dubliners. Dad went out of the shop to get a pint of milk. He doubled over outside the barber’s shop, then found he couldn’t stand up through the pain and the aching that shot through his body. Someone came out and helped him to a bench. He caught the bus home that evening, and when he got back fished out the number for the doctor.

  There was once a boy who discovered he was going to die. The possibility of his death had never occurred to him during the first fifteen years of his life. It had never crossed his mind he might be mortal, let alone that it was in fact inevitable his life was going to end, as sure and natural as the fact of his birth or the fingers on his hands. There had been grandparents, a hamster, a dog, and he had once found the body of a cat in his front garden, suspecting the life had gone out of it and certain when he nudged it with his foot and found it seized up in rigor mortis. It had moved awkwardly over the lawn, the deportment of limbs and head stiff and unchanging as it slid away from him, a piece of a jigsaw pushed across a table. But he had never connected those endings with his own story. None of them had pressed home hard enough.

  The diagnosis was so simple that the moment it happened was lost to the boy in the panic it caused. Probing his memory of the particular day when his youth had ended, the boy experienced a curious inability to focus
his mind. When you stare at stars in the middle of the night you will sometimes find the one you look at directly will disappear from your vision; only the fires either side, in the periphery of what you see, remain in sight. This was the boy’s experience of trying to remember the day he discovered he was going to die. From the corner of his eye it loomed large as the pole star, but when he tried to bring the events of that day to the front of his mind that clarity eluded him. The memory unravelled until all the boy could see was a slew of photo negatives overlaid one on top of the other so the individual images, which might have made sense on their own, started to look like schizophrenia, a thousand voices speaking all at once.

  The result of that day was catastrophic. The boy went into something like shock. He couldn’t sleep for weeks. It was as if he had fallen through ice into freezing water; his mind and his body seized up, shuddered and shattered by the car crash of this new and remorseless reality. He couldn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t find a way to express the profundity of what he had learned. Not least because he realised his discovery wasn’t profound at all. It was as normal as the morning or the evening. And yet for the boy that knowledge felt like a valley carved through his skull – a sickness that had been in him since birth, only now discovered for the first time as it tore him apart.

  Before it all happened I admit I didn’t really know what cancer was. I had never known anyone diagnosed with it before, so I wasn’t quite sure what was happening to him. I had heard it said that every man in the world died of prostate cancer eventually, if something else didn’t get to him first. From that I had acquired the vague, uninterrogated idea that cancer was the way we were designed to die – the way nature stopped us from cluttering up the earth. Till it happened to Dad, I thought of it as the most natural end to a story. I knew it was the body eating itself, so I had a picture of my cells combusting, curling up like leaves in autumn, clotting till they looked like slugs, till my whole body was made from black puddings. But I also knew it could spring up across the body, place after place, so this picture was confused by the thought of tumours, which I imagined swelling like air bubbles in soap or cheese sauce or chocolate. I didn’t know where cancers came from. Smokers got them, but they weren’t a virus, airborne, infectious, carried by badgers or mosquitoes. They came from inside us. They were like ideas, which swell up in our bodies as well, are part of and not part of us simultaneously. So I thought of cancer in part as the worst idea it was possible to have. Or the idea that came to you when you had lived your life and were ready to die.

  It’s not like that. It’s not normal. It’s not natural. It’s not easy and it’s not like an idea.

  There were once two ash trees standing in a clearing. One tree, older and broader in its trunk, began to die from the roots up. First its bark fell off. Then the leaves dried and fell from the lower branches. Then the branches fell to the leaf-strewn ground. Then the wood of the trunk began to soften and dry until it took on the consistency of Styrofoam and started to crack. Then one day the old tree fell with a great crash across the clearing. And the younger tree spread its leaves, which looked so much like the alveoli in a lung, across the blue air left behind by the ash that had fallen. It grew to fill the space, reaching up to the light of the sun.

  They told me over breakfast. We always ate together in the mornings, tea and toast and marmalade for them, strawberry jam for me or chocolate spread or greengage jam if Mum had been feeling adventurous the year before. Dad usually had coffee, but not this morning. I came into the kitchen last, as I usually did. He was sitting at the table, staring at his hands. Mum was bustling with the tea cosy, and I wondered whether they were having a row, but I knew what was more likely to have happened. Dad had gone into the hospital for his tests a week before. We had been waiting to hear the results ever since.

  ‘Morning,’ I said.

  ‘Morning.’ Dad looked up and smiled, but his heart wasn’t in it. I thought he looked pale, as if he might have been in pain. Pain is always worst in the morning, whatever the ailment. That’s when the fur lies over the tongue and the head aches and the back is stiff and the legs send shooting pains up your spine as you swing or crawl your way out of the well of yourself and the bed you’ve slept in.

  The kitchen was Mum’s territory. Some houses organise themselves around the sitting room or the patio, the conservatory if there is one, the children’s room or the master bedroom. It depends on the type of person who lives there. Our house located its pulse in the kitchen. Here Mum kept up a desperate lie by trying to make one room look perfect, like the Waltons’ kitchen, like a picture in a catalogue. This is where she papered over the cracks and tried to persuade the world her family was normal. There was an Aga and two of the walls were all windows; the sideboards were made from old school chemistry worktops. If you stuck your head into the cupboards you could see graffiti on the undersides. There were always flowers and candles on the table, and the walls were blue but the room felt green and living because of the garden pressing its eager face against the windows. Mum brought the teapot to the table and poured out tea, the steam rising into light of the morning, where it threaded through the dust motes and disappeared, perhaps entwining invisibly above our heads to make a single plume and buffet soft against the skylights and the mirror on the back wall and escape through the door into the hallway and the day.

  ‘How did you sleep?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’ I never slept well any more; I lay awake and thought about Sophie till exhaustion knocked me out, but I would never have told them that.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of news just now,’ Dad said. He breathed in slowly, preparing himself. ‘The hospital called, and they’ve got the results of my tests. And I’m going to need to go in for a few days for a few more assessments and a few other things.’ It was typical of Dad not to say out loud that they had told him he had cancer, that it had started in the lungs and already made its way into the lymphs. It was just like Dad not to be able to say chemotherapy out loud. Perhaps anyone would have been as evasive. It must be frightening to stare at your own death, to need to tell your son what was coming. I guessed what he meant. I couldn’t have guessed how quickly it was going to happen.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So I’ll be shutting the shop for a bit. It’s only a few days, so there’s no point looking for cover.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I wondered if you’d mind looking in on it whenever you pass?’

  ‘Of course. Have they said how long they want you in for?’

  ‘Just a few days.’

  I wanted to believe him. I drank my tea and we got through two rounds of toast. His appetite would fade in the weeks to come until we only made one round in the morning.

  3

  THERE WAS ONCE a boy whose father took his family on a last holiday before he went into hospital for a course of chemotherapy. The cancer hadn’t been diagnosed till it was already well advanced, so the holiday had to be booked in a hurry because there was only one weekend when it could happen before treatment started. The boy’s father booked the first house he found by the sea and drove his son and his wife there to spend three days together.

  The boy’s father tried to be cheerful about what was happening, to say a weekend by the sea was just what he needed if he was going to be stuck in bed for a few weeks, but the boy thought it felt more like saying goodbye than charging anyone’s batteries. When they arrived they went for a walk, but it couldn’t be a long one because the boy’s father said he felt tired. They had fish and chips looking over the sea and couldn’t think of anything to talk about. The boy’s mother started crying, and the boy and his father gave her a hug, but nobody felt any better. On the second day it rained, and they stayed inside reading and trying to play board games, but no one’s heart was in it. On the Sunday they went on the same walk and looked out at the same views and the same flat line of the ocean, and wished they hadn’t come.

  Dad went into hospital. Mum went up to sit with him every
evening. I was allowed to visit, but only for an hour a day. Mum said I had to keep doing my school work, that Dad would be home in a week or two. Dad didn’t say much.

  Odstock hospital is just along the road from us, within sight, give or take a few trees. I walked there every day after school. We’d have a cup of tea and I’d tell Dad what I’d done with the day. Then we’d try to do a crossword or an arrowword, and when visiting hours finished I would leave to walk home. The lanes through the fields between the hospital and home were like walking through a secret no one else knew. The fields turned blue in the light of evening, and the birdsong was brilliant as a lightshow some dusks. The best walk was by the river at the bottom of the Odstock valley. The silver arrow of the river and the soft earth of the banks, the long, long grass and the puddles that never dried out, the lost tennis balls hiding in the fields and hedgerows where dogs hadn’t been able to find them, the scurryings between the dock leaves and nettles that might have been blackbirds or might have been rats or mice.

  The concert was on Thursday evening, and Mum and Dad didn’t mention it, so I didn’t remind them. I thought I might not go, pretend to be ill and hide at home, but I couldn’t bear the thought of letting Mr Richardson down. After school on Thursday I walked to St Mark’s, back past the swimming pool park, back over the roundabout, wanting something bad to have happened, wanting the concert to be cancelled.

  The only consolation lay in the music. I didn’t know the Fauré Requiem before we started rehearsals. My CD collection was the Stereophonics and Red Hot Chilli Peppers and Foo Fighters and Radiohead and Oasis and Blur and Bob Marley and Placebo and Elbow. The exciting thing about Requiems is that they’re put together like the best concept album you’ve ever listened to. It’s even better than Pink Floyd, really – they’re all using the same words, so you can set one against the other, Mozart against Verdi, and see what they did with the same material, what shapes their brains made. I liked the Fauré best of all the Requiems I’d heard. The tunes were good. The baritone solo for the ‘Libera Me’ was great. I clung to this as compensation for the terrible fact that I was going to have to spend an evening in the same room as the girl I loved who didn’t love me back.