Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  Someone was standing by the entrance to the church, greeting people as they went inside but not following any of them in. I saw her from a distance – a girl in school uniform, leaning against one of the walls. When I had crossed the roundabout I knew it was her. Sophie and I had spoken a couple of times in the rehearsals since I had walked home with her, but it had been nothing more than saying hello. I had been too afraid of her to say anything more, I had just wanted to keep my distance. She moved away from the wall when she saw me and walked towards me, looking like she was feeling as awkward as I was.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Do you have to go in? I don’t really want to talk to everyone in there yet.’

  ‘No, we’re not late, are we?’

  She started walking away through the graves and round the west end of the church, and I followed her. She asked me how I’d been, and I didn’t know what to say so I told her I was fine. She started to tell me about school, then seemed to tire of the subject, and stopped, and turned to face me.

  ‘How are you getting home tonight? D’you wanna walk home together?’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’

  ‘Your parents aren’t giving you a lift?’

  ‘They can’t come.’

  ‘They all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I couldn’t have told her anything else. That was the first thing I had discovered when I went into school on the morning after Dad went into hospital – it was impossible for me to formulate the words for what was happening. I hadn’t told anyone anything about him.

  ‘And I was gonna say, I’m free this Saturday in the afternoon, if you wanted to go for coffee or something.’

  Why on earth would I want to go for coffee? I’d have to sit and think of things to say that weren’t embarrassing for a whole hour. Coffee was worse than going for a walk. At least on a walk you saw different things that could start conversations. With coffee you were just sitting in the same place, desperately trying to impress a stranger with nothing but the cobwebbed contents of your head.

  ‘Yeah, coffee would be great. I’m free Saturday.’

  She smiled, and I knew that even if it went terribly wrong, coffee with her would be the happiest thing that ever happened to me, if only she would keep smiling like that.

  ‘Great. And let’s walk home after this.’

  ‘Aren’t your parents coming?’

  ‘Yeah, but they always slink off with the car. They think I’ll spend hours talking to people. So I get left behind. I think they want me to make new friends.’ She grinned, as if this was hilarious. ‘We should go in, shouldn’t we?’ Around us the graveyard was emptying as the other singers heard some call from inside, the orchestra clearing its throat or the rap of the baton against the music stand.

  I didn’t know what I had done to make things better. It couldn’t have been as bad as I thought. I sat down next to Adam and grinned at him. He smiled but said nothing. As the concert began, the lights were turned up on the stage for the first time. I could feel the heat on my face, and because the orchestra opened an ocean of space between us and the audience I found I was singing into the dark. We sang some spirituals. Sophie’s school sang John Rutter. I watched her, brilliant under the lights. In the interval we didn’t talk, but I thought I caught her eye once as she looked across towards me from where she stood with her friends. I couldn’t tell exactly where she was looking; the light was behind her. She didn’t go over to talk to her family. I supposed the embarrassment of talking to your mum in front of people in your class was as sharp for her as it was for me. But all the same I thought of Mum and Dad and what might be happening to them at that moment.

  In the second half we all processed back on together. The Fauré started with the band, and I was swept along with it. If I timed the look right, in a bar when the boy in front of me moved his head out of the way, I could watch her singing. At the end everyone clapped and it was hard not to feel that they really had enjoyed it, that they hadn’t just given up an evening out of duty to hear their children sing. I looked over at Sophie again, but she didn’t look back. She went over to her parents. I watched them from a distance, a couple in their forties, maybe they were fifty, well-dressed, kind-looking, civilised-looking people. They smiled. They hugged her. You could see they loved her. They made for the exit, smiling, encouraging her to stay on, go into town, have a drink if she could get served anywhere, have fun. I lowered my head and pretended to be putting my music away when she turned towards the place where we had all dumped our bags. Looking, I realised, for me.

  ‘That was good, wasn’t it?’ she said. Her eyes were shining and I wanted to reach out and hold her, be part of the happiness visible in her. ‘Do you need to hang around, or—’

  ‘No, I’m good to go.’

  I walked past the whole audience of parents and schoolchildren and out of the church with my head held high and my heart bursting, because even though no one noticed us going, even though we weren’t really the centre of attention at all, I felt like nothing else in the world was as important as we were for as long as it took us to walk out of that church together in front of everyone.

  This time I walked her to her front gate. She stopped, leaned on the post and said, ‘This is me. So shall we go for coffee on Saturday?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be cool.’

  She looked at me, and I had the strangest feeling that what she was waiting for now was a kiss. It couldn’t be possible. She couldn’t mean it. She was just being nice to me, she was just wonderful; she didn’t fancy me, she couldn’t.

  ‘What’s your number then?’ she said. ‘So we can work out where to meet.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ I gave her my number and she pranked my phone so I had hers.

  ‘Right. I’d better get home then,’ I said.

  ‘Are your parents home?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They couldn’t come to the concert, so I thought they might be out.’

  ‘Oh. Yeah. They’ll be home by now.’

  ‘I was going to say you could come in for a cup of tea if you fancied it.’

  If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was asking me into her house. But it couldn’t have happened.

  ‘I’d better get home, really. Thanks though.’

  She shrugged, put her hand on the latch of the gate, and I wanted to hold her.

  ‘That’s all right. See you at the weekend then?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Night then.’

  ‘Night.’ I turned and walked back down the road the way I had come, headed for the swimming pool park and the two miles home. Such well-worn miles, but they both seemed new, box-fresh this evening. I heard her open and close the gate, heard her key in the lock of her front door, her parents’ voices rising to meet her, ‘Bravo’ ringing down the street behind me. Nothing has ever been more perfect than that walk home, remembering what had just happened, hoping for no more than that, not even dreaming any more of a kiss or the woman in the porn film with the plumber. All that mattered was the feeling that carried me home.

  Mum was still out when I got back. I hated nights like that, because it meant Dad hadn’t been feeling well. Mum turned her mobile off on the ward, like you were supposed to, so I couldn’t call her, and it was eleven o’clock, far too late to go over. He must have felt very ill for her still to be out. Perhaps she would stay at the hospital all night.

  I got out my phone and there was a text from Sophie. Thanks for walking me home. X. I read it five, six times. I had her phone number. I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that someone like that would ever let me have their phone number. I typed a reply. Pleasure. See you at the weekend hopefully. Xx. The second kiss was agony. I made myself a sandwich then checked my phone again. There was another text from her. Definitely. X x x. I sat down on my bed but didn’t undress. I knew I wouldn�
�t sleep if I tried now, there was no chance for hours yet. I looked down at my shoes and wished I had the money to buy new ones. I would have to work out what to wear on Saturday. Whenever I talked to her I felt as if there was another conversation, real speech, contained in the looks between us. A tension in the air that felt like ours and no one else’s, where things were actually being said, not small talk. I was never quite able to hear it, couldn’t quite make out the words. But I knew they were there all the same.

  There was once a boy who was afraid of everything. Other people could walk quite calmly down the street as if nothing was happening, but to this boy the whole world seemed like a pit of jaws longing to snap shut round him. It was his curse to be born with an overactive imagination, and he saw the potential disaster in all things. Shops could topple forwards and crush him; wiring could burst into flames; a bath might be filled too full to the brim and become too heavy for the floorboards and crash down on to his head. This was to say nothing of asteroids or lightning or sharks. Because of his terror at the possibility of anything happening to him at any moment, the boy couldn’t live or enjoy himself at all. He stayed at home, ate as little as he could because food was full of dangers, and only touched things passed to him by people he trusted. He never saw anyone in case they decided they wanted to kill him or infected him with illnesses they didn’t know they had.

  The boy’s mother and father told each other they were half the problem. If they weren’t around he would have to find his own food and leave his room; by dribs and drabs he would have to live. One night, making as little noise as possible, they packed a suitcase and left. They would live for a time in another country. They hoped when they came home they would have cured their son.

  The boy realised at once what had happened when no one came to feed him the next morning. With no one to help him get what he needed, he was going to have to overcome his fear of the world.

  Dressing in clothes without buttons or zips, so nothing could stab him, he walked up to the door of his bedroom, took a deep breath and opened it. When nothing happened, when the world didn’t end, he stepped out on to the landing. He made himself walk round the house, waiting for something to lash out and scald him. He went into the bathroom and practised turning on taps. He began to experiment with the shower head, starting back every time the water flowed. Taking his whole heart into his mouth, he took off his clothes and stood in the bathtub while the shower ran ice-cold down his back. Still the world did not end. He went downstairs to the kitchen and opened the fridge. He took out a piece of cheese and ate it. He took out a bottle of milk and drank. He began to believe he could do this. He could learn to live. He opened all the drawers in the kitchen, picked up a carving knife. The urge to drive it into his eyes did not overwhelm him. The boy put the knife back down, crossed the room, opened a window and breathed in the air. Then he found the spare keys, unlocked the front door and went outside. He walked out of the garden gate, hobbled shaking and sobbing over the road and into the fields beyond, hardly able to believe what he was capable of if he forced himself.

  The boy lived at the very edge of Salisbury, in a place that had once been a village in its own right but had long ago been swallowed up as the city grew. Immediately around his house was a new estate, but a path still ran through those houses to a playing field and an undulating view of slope fields beyond, old holloways and drovers’ paths you might have been able to walk back in time along till you got to a year before the city was even thought of, sloe hedges and a river curling like smoke at the bottom of the deepest dip in the fields. This had been the boy’s playground when he was very young. Here, he had seen a buzzard startled up out of the hedgerows, skylarks bursting bright and sudden as their song from the cover of grasses and crops, and he had visited the gypsies’ horses that were always tethered there, cropping the grass into UFO circles prescribed by the length of their securing chain. It was to these the boy now made his way; if he could look one in the eye, perhaps even step into the circle of short grass where it could reach him, then he would have become braver than he could remember being in the longest time, since he was very young, since he was new and not afraid of anything.

  He found one at the very top of the first field he entered past the playground, an old mare puffing and blowing in the heat of the day and lapping at a bucket of water someone had left her. The boy forced himself not to run away. Even in the teeth of his fear he remembered something, an echo of an older time. He watched the old nag’s face as it slobbered at the water and remembered that horses were beautiful. The mare looked up from her drink, saw him, went as still as the boy was. The boy stepped forward, and nothing happened. He stepped forward again, into the circle of short grass where the horse could reach him, and waited. He stepped forward one more time and patted the horse on the nose.

  Suddenly he could do anything. He could feel the change happening inside him. It was as if the pillow he was resting his head on had been turned to face the other way up and he had discovered a new coolness around him. Everything was different. All the time he had been hiding from the dangers of the world, life had only seemed dangerous because of what he was thinking, not what was actually around him. All he had ever needed to do was change the way he thought. His first emotion was grief. He had thrown great shovels of his youth away for no reason. He had never made a friend. He lived off memories ten years old and had no more recent life to speak or think of.

  He would make up for lost time, for years when he had experienced nothing. He would put himself in the way of every danger he could imagine. He wheeled away from the horse and looked around him for something to risk.

  I looked at my phone again. I went out into the hall and took my coat from its peg by the front door. Looking behind me once, checking I had a key, I opened the front door and stepped out into the night.

  The strangest feeling in the world is knowing your dad might be dying, or that there is a war, or that a bomb has gone off somewhere, and still being distracted by hunger or shopping or homework or who you fancy. I don’t know how I ever thought of anything other than Dad in those last weeks we had together, but I would spend whole hours not thinking of him every day.

  It was colder, and a night wind had brought cloud cover overhead, hiding the stars. The moon was visible as a pale blush to the clouds. I did my coat up and put my hands in my pockets. Down the hill into town, past the cathedral lit by floodlights, along Exeter Street past the Guildhall up Endless Street then right till I came to the swimming pool park, till I came to her house. I walked down the street till I got back to where I had left her. I looked at the upstairs window and wondered what the hell I was doing. I picked up a handful of gravel from the square of front garden of the house next door and threw it at what I guessed from the fairy lights round the frame must be her window. The stones rattled briefly like rain, and as I stood waiting a fine rain began to fall. After a couple of seconds a light went on in her room, pouring out in a yellow glow through the curtains. I pulled the collar of my coat up round my neck and watched as the curtains opened, tentative, light of the room silhouetting Sophie above me. She saw me, leaned forward, opened the window.

  4

  THERE WAS ONCE a boy who got everything he wanted. In the arms of a girl he loved, he found perfect happiness. They went on expeditions into the New Forest, caught a bus to North Gorley and vanished into a landscape buried in gorse till she said she was hungry. They laid out a picnic blanket. He took out Oranginas in their fig-like bottles and they sat down with their legs crossed, facing each other. She took from her purse a packet of baccy, Rizla papers and a bag of hash, and rolled, cupping her hands to her face so he heard rather than saw the flame’s flaring. He pretended he’d done it before, but she guessed and laughed when he coughed. She took the spliff back off him.

  ‘Come here.’ She filled her lungs and put her mouth to his, opening his lips with the tip of her tongue and breathing in. They had sex for the first time there on the bank among the rabbit warr
ens. He doubted he lasted a minute. But for as long as his mouth was on her breasts, as she pulled his jeans clear of his heels, not speaking, not quite stoned enough to lose all self-consciousness, as long as he held the white instep of her foot and her nails scored him, touching, loving, they felt as though they had invented something.

  They went to the cathedral, doing the tour for the first time, seeing the view and the thirteenth-century graffiti, the builders’ names carved into the wall. She took a disposable camera and they snapped each other all the way round, leaning out over parapets, smiling shyly, standing in the tower, sitting in the cloisters. Hardly any of the pictures came out once the film was developed. But there was one of the boy sitting in the cloisters she said was nice. She kept it in her purse and gave him a picture of her eating an ice cream on holiday by the sea. He put it in his wallet and looked at it in lessons. He carried the thought of her and the image of her everywhere. If that had been all of his life, if that could have been the only thing in his life, he would have been perfectly happy.

  But none of it matters when your dad starts losing his hair; none of it matters when you come home and find your dad back from the hospital and sitting at the table in the kitchen again, waiting to tell you bad news, again. He wished he could tell her the truth. But something always stopped him from saying the awful words out loud. So he kept it from her, and the silence ate him up.

  There was once a boy who fell in love with a balloon. He chased it through the streets of Salisbury, over the hills, over mountains and through rainclouds and out across the sea. He chased it through France, Spain, Portugal, all the way down the coast of Africa, up the Zambezi, through the dark woodland of the Congo. He chased it through the townships of Pretoria, across the field of a rugby international, eyes fixed all the time on a red balloon that hovered in the sky, never wavering. He chased it through shoals of killer whales and packs of penguins. He chased it to Antarctica. When the balloon got to the South Pole it finally gave up, stopped and waited. The boy staggered to meet it. When the boy held the balloon, put his arms around it at long last, it popped.