Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

I looked again at the car’s rear window. The boy seemed to decide to be lenient with me. ‘I’ll have to escort you off, all right? Down to the main road. Will you know where you are from there?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so.’

  ‘And don’t come up here again, all right, because he bites.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘This way.’ He gestured past him to the site’s main gates, closed off and spiked at the top so you couldn’t get over them. I walked past him, and he fell into step next to me.

  ‘So do you sit up here every night then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Salisbury.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  ‘I’ve been away. I just moved back. I’m Liam.’

  ‘Sam.’ It seemed amazing to me that all the time my life had been going on, there had been a bloke sitting up here nights, oblivious to me or anything else happening, just sitting here waiting for moments like this one and listening to the radio.

  ‘Do you get a lot of people coming in?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve never had it before actually. You gave me a fright.’ We could see the Harvester from the gate. He bent down to work a padlock, then swung one of the gates half open.

  ‘So don’t come back up here, yeah?’

  ‘OK. Thanks.’

  ‘No worries. Just don’t climb in again.’

  I turned and left him to his private kingdom. Once I was back on the road I looked around and wondered what I was going to do.

  I would walk in her direction, back to the swimming pool park. Not to talk to her. Just to be near where she was.

  Mr Lawrence answered the door. I could see in his face how I looked.

  ‘Sam? Are you all right? You ought to come in.’

  ‘I won’t come in.’

  ‘You ought to.’

  ‘I can’t, I don’t want to annoy …’

  I couldn’t get any further. I couldn’t say her name because it was too sad. She didn’t want me. I could tell. I could smell it in the air. She didn’t want me any more; someone better had won her back. And I had never told her about my dad, and now there was no one I could share it with. I started to cry.

  ‘Come on, Sam. Come and sit down,’ he said.

  He led me into his sitting room and helped me down on to the sofa. I wanted to talk to him and tell him I wasn’t coming in, I didn’t want to come in, but there was another noise in the room that was too distracting, a deep moan like someone had something terribly wrong with them, like someone was in terrible pain. It took me a moment to realise I was sobbing, deep sobs getting the bends as they came up for air.

  Sophie came down the stairs. She looked at me from the doorway. I couldn’t speak. She watched while Mr Lawrence pushed me back into the sofa, laid my head on a cushion while the world ended around me.

  ‘Sam?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘He’s very drunk,’ Mr Lawrence said. ‘We should get him home.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we let him sleep it off here?’ she said.

  ‘I won’t come in,’ I said.

  She sat down. She put her palm on my forehead. I wanted to hold her but I couldn’t move.

  ‘You are in, Sam.’

  The whole world was ending around me, and as I passed out I tried to imagine myself driving away from it all in a car with my dad, getting out of the place we were in, getting to the seaside, taking our shoes off, drowning our feet in the water.

  There was once a boy who was trapped in a car going somewhere he was afraid of. It was very dark outside the vehicle; he couldn’t see anything, except sometimes bright lights flashed by. When that happened he heard people shouting, but he couldn’t see where they were. It looked very cold on the other side of the glass, but inside the car it was too hot. The boy started to sweat; he couldn’t help it.

  He wasn’t driving the car. It sped through the night alone, and the boy couldn’t get out of the passenger seat. He didn’t know exactly where he was being taken. All he knew was that he couldn’t slow or alter his progress, and he was heading somewhere bad. By the light of the headlamps he counted osiers on either side of the road – twelve, thirteen, fourteen, like a scoreboard until he felt sick. One side was in leaf, the other had been cut right back. They looked like thigh bones sticking out of the ground. He had the feeling that as soon as he passed each tree it didn’t exist any more, but he couldn’t turn his head to check. The car sped through a pack of horses weaving in between each other right across the road, shoaling like fish, like clouds, running fast, not getting anywhere. The car went right through them and the horses were all around but somehow none of them went under the wheels. As soon as he had passed them the boy was sure the horses didn’t exist any more. The car took off and started to head up into absolute night. The boy wondered what you flew too close to when there was no sun in the sky.

  And that was where I woke the next morning to find half a dozen missed calls on my phone and a text from Mum telling me Dad had gone back into hospital and asking where on earth I was. I could hear Sophie and her parents in the kitchen. I thought about going to see them or writing a note, but then I realised it didn’t matter. None of them would talk to me again now. I had been so stupid. My head hurt so much and I wanted to throw up. I tiptoed out of the sitting room, let myself out of the house and walked into town. I knew I ought to go to the hospital. I knew he was lying there; I didn’t know for how much longer. All I could think about was Sophie: her face as I passed out, her kind face, her lips I would never kiss again because I had been so stupid, the way I had lost her. I played her back like a film reel.

  I couldn’t go up to the hospital and didn’t feel ready to climb the hill for home. I headed for the close and the great impassive sight of the cathedral gliding through sky and history while my life raced by under it, a pebble beneath the wet belly of a river, hardly rippling its hide. And my head split open with each step, and I wanted to take it in my hands and crush till yolk spilled out and the shell was pressed between the flesh of my fists. Entering the close from the High Street and stopping to stare when the spire reels into view, the picture is enough to break your neck as you crane to gulp it. What you see is more than the day around you. Other lives lurk under the thin skin of the world. Your own, of course. Almost visible to you are the other times you’ve looked up at that view. Where you stood, who you stood with, what you were feeling. But in the shadow of a very great monument you get to feel you’re treading water in the wash of other people’s afternoons as well. As if a mirror might hold some trace of the last person who looked in it, a ghost who looked back into you.

  That’s how it is with a thing like grief as well. It lies oil-slick over everything you do. It will pour out through the gaps in the most ordinary afternoons.

  I didn’t look left or right as I crossed the little road to reach the grass and was secretly pleased when I wasn’t mown down by a verger or lay clerk on a bicycle, as if I had taken on the Green Cross Code and won. I passed the statue of the Walking Madonna. Some misty winter nights walking home she had a way of looming out of the whiteness as you passed that was almost like movement. She might have seen so much in this place if they had only carved her eyes a little better. People walking towards their God, kids making out and smoking and eating pizzas and sniffing glue on the benches at the edges of the close. The trees were bowing low after the rain to weep and console the grass beneath them.

  I wanted to cry and I couldn’t. I wanted to be sick and I couldn’t throw up. If the world turns its face against you, there are ways of fighting back. Or if you don’t have the strength for that, you can hide somewhere for a little while.

  I went into the cathedral. I walked past the donation kiosk, nodding to the woman sitting behind it, because you don’t have to pay, they only want you to think it’s compulsory, and went into the tree-high hull, roots of the roof darning together above my poor head. There were rows of empt
y chairs. I sat down near the back, not looking at anything. This was killing time. I had no reason to be here. I would just sit still for as long as I could bear and then I would go home. The place meant nothing, except it gave me access to memories of other times spent here, processing or watching prize days or singing in the choir. Nothing happy or unhappy, just days in my life. The mind slides back and forth, imagining tomorrow, free-associating endlessly from memory to memory because each day always seems to suggest another you have already lived, to pull you further back into the past. Of course the past is denser and pulls us more closely into its orbit. The present is only ever one day long. The past grows richer and subtler each day as it snakes behind you all the way back to the source and centre of your life.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  I wiped my eyes and looked up to see a woman dressed as my mother peering down at me. She had a green sash over one shoulder, so I knew she was a tour guide. They were sad people. Talking to them, you got the impression they volunteered not quite out of love for this place or anything it meant but because it was better than sticking your head in the oven or going back through the Radio Times once more just in case you’d missed something worth reading. They seemed to live alone. Their children were the sort who forgot to visit. She would have seen me come in without paying. She would have come over to give me a piece of her mind. There was something kinder, more solicitous in her face than that story, but I knew what she wanted to say.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you like an order of service?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An order of service. We’re about to start.’ She held a piece of paper out towards me. I looked down at her small soft hands, the nails unpainted, took the paper and thanked her. She walked away without a second glance at my bloodshot eyes or the hair hanging lank across my face. I watched her all the way to the chancel, where she disappeared from view. The service sheet had a logo on the front I didn’t recognise – I never came to church for the religion, so I never really looked at the handouts. The organ started playing, and I looked up to see there was a man in the pulpit. Thirty or forty people sitting further forward had stood up, presumably at the chaplain’s or vicar’s or bishop’s suggestion. Habit and the strength in my legs took me over. I found myself standing in turn, like a Mexican wave washing round the empty section of a stadium. I leafed through the hymn book just fast enough to have time to look back up and wonder what I was doing when the organist got through the introduction and we started to sing.

  Dear Lord and Father of mankind

  Forgive our foolish ways

  Reclothe us in our rightful mind

  In purer lives thy service find

  In deeper reverence praise

  In deeper reverence praise.

  The miracle of a ritual. I felt my shoulders begin to ease. I thought to myself, I don’t want to believe in this. But when you run a story through your neural pathways like a line of beads through your hands, it stands to reason you unblock them, and your own life flows through afterwards, rushing out of the oxbow lakes of the plans you didn’t see through to their conclusion, the phrases that wouldn’t come till long after it was too late to use them. A hymn, nothing more than a tune and a string of words someone had invented, was somehow making things feel better.

  Drop thy still dews of quietness

  Till all our strivings cease

  Take from our souls the strain and stress

  And let our ordered lives confess

  The beauty of thy peace

  The beauty of thy peace.

  Prayer and faith didn’t need to be hated really, even if they weren’t mine. They were just a route people took to a place where they could be safe and think and listen. Sometimes the church seemed like a cruel runner’s-up prize, a compensation for people who couldn’t be happy in their own lives. Better luck next time, sort of thing. A way to fill a gap, keep people quiet. But as I sang, the picture changed. It was so clear once you were in flight that the church, like any other ritual, was nothing but a ladder to help you reach the high fruit of a feeling. And then to kick away and soar.

  Breathe through the heats of our desire

  Thy coolness and thy balm

  Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire

  Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire

  O still small voice of calm

  O still small voice of calm.

  I wished I was holding her now, that she was with me. I wished he wasn’t lying now in the bed in the hospital, rationing each breath like sweets or painkillers till he came to the last.

  I didn’t go up for the bread and wafer or the blessing on my head. I listened, dried my eyes, sang again when the appropriate moments came round like choruses. The rhythm of that ritual was a song in itself, just as day and night or anything you choose to name looks like verse and chorus in a certain slant of light. When the service ended I stood up and left. There was a lightness in me that was like wanting to tell someone something extraordinary, wanting to speak out loud and affirm in the sound of my voice the fact that I was alive and asking questions, but my head still beat a rhythm like the sobbing of someone who has been crying a long time. I walked down to the far end of the close, towards Harnham, my village at the edge of the city, past a cricket pitch where the England team were supposed to have once played a match some time between the wars, past yew trees, through a blackbird’s song, listening to the crunch of gravel till I passed through St Anne’s Gate and out of sight of the cathedral.

  All this happened in what seems like the long ago now. I turned sixteen just the other day, a hard birthday to celebrate when your dad’s not there, because of course it’s hard to know what it means to become a man when he’s no longer around to show you. So I had my cake with Mum, I went to school, and after school I thought about what I had learned in the last year. All I could say I knew any more about was the past. But I thought if I could meet my younger self, sit down over a Diet Coke with the boy I was, knowing what I do about what was about to happen to his life, I would tell him to go to bed early so he never lost any of the last days of his childhood to lying around. I would tell him every day he didn’t keep a diary was a library he was burning, because already there is an island of small things whose coordinates are lost to me, whose forms were too intricate and delicate to survive the transit of the passage of time in the mind alone. I might have so much more life to live when I will have to rely on nothing but the outlines of memories of that year for my sustenance, days I can only see as the imprint of a body in a bed, not the body itself. I should have taken photographs.

  I would tell him his life doesn’t start when he leaves school; he’s already in it. It has been passing since the day he was born, and everything he puts off, chooses not to do or say because he is hoarding experience for his real, adult life isn’t a thing safeguarded but a treasure risked. The world is full of things put off for the wrong reasons, which can suddenly become impossible without any warning. They hang in the air like ghosts, their mouths and eyes sewn up for ever. They will never be able to speak, but if it was you who put them there, you will always be forced to see them.

  I would tell him that doors have a way of closing.

  I would tell him the things he does with his days aren’t his real life. School and going into town and TV and team sport are only the surface he should dig beneath, because his real life runs deeper than that. It is his family, his heart, births, marriages, deaths, friendships, other people. I would tell him the world is other people, and everything he doesn’t share with someone else is an event that never really took place. I would tell him it’s life and the living and the meander of a conversation that holds all the meaning in the world.

  I would point out which of his friends were going to drop him, who was going to laugh when they heard the news. I would tell him to keep doing his homework, because the worst of all is that whatever happens, unless it’s your own life that finishes, the world is going to keep revolving, and th
ere will be no choice but to keep on moving through your life as day follows remorseless day. You will be whisked away from the scene of the accident before you have time to really look, your exams will come round and there will be new decisions, though all you will want is to stop and stare at the world on fire. You won’t be allowed. The world doesn’t just lie around waiting for anyone. It moves on. I would tell him if everything starts to spin out of his control at a pace he can’t take, he should try to tell it like a story, make a shape of experience he can control, find a way to understand it, make a moral out of random experience and live by that.

  I would tell him to love as if he might never get the chance to love again. Because a day never dawns when it is impossible that the person you love most in the world is about to die. Your dad can die at a moment’s notice, and so it is important, while you’re in the world, that you remember to love.

  I got to the house and walked down the little path through the vegetable patch, and while I was fumbling for my key Mum opened the door. We looked at each other for the moment, then she slapped me hard in the face.

  ‘Do you know how worried I’ve been? Where have you been? Where have you been?’ She turned and strode back into the house, and I followed her, raising my hand to my face.

  ‘Is Dad OK?’

  She didn’t speak for a moment but held the back of a chair by the kitchen table, staring hard at the apple trees in the garden.

  ‘I’ve just come back to pick up some things for him and then I’m going straight back.’

  ‘Is he OK though?’

  ‘I’ll be there for the rest of the day and the rest of the evening, so you’ll need to sort your own supper.’

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  She turned to face me, and there were tears in her eyes, but drowning them out was an anger that made me afraid.

  ‘I think I’d rather you stayed here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want you at the hospital while you’re in that state. Why don’t you sort yourself out, and then we’ll speak later and see whether you can come? I don’t think your dad needs to see you like this.’ She walked past me, heading upstairs to their bedroom. She would be finding him clothes; she would be finding him a toothbrush. I stood very still in the hall till she came back downstairs. ‘Have some paracetamol and a glass of water and get an hour’s sleep,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’