Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  We watched Rita as she calmed down, as she seemed to become more sure of herself. After a few months she came and told us she’d got a job. It wasn’t long after that before she brought us the news that she had found a flat in town, and that was when she left us. We were very proud to see her go. We felt we had made a little contribution to someone’s life, to see her walk away from the house the last time she left us, making her way down the drive as if it was all just starting for her, as if everything lay before her to enjoy.

  It is so strange to think that now I am the only person in the world who knows about everything Valerie and I ever did together, all those lovely evenings when the night drew in, all those afternoons when the shadows lengthened over the long lawn till they touched the house, while we listened to the larks, the sound of the river in the distance. Did all those days happen any less, are they less real now I am the only one who knows about them? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps everything is unimportant and eventually forgotten, and all that matters and all of the meaning we’ll find is the taking of pleasure in the life that flows through us and round us and finally over us, so we are submerged once more, returned to the heart of the river.

  I have always been so fascinated by the life in other people. I wish I had spent my life among people and not in the fields. I wish I had taken up my interests and done something with them – done what I wanted with my life and not just what was in front of me.

  GS: I ended up under the cathedral. And I looked up at it, and I don’t have the words for how I was feeling. I looked up at it, and it didn’t seem to care about me at all, does that make sense to you? Like the whole world was oblivious to what was happening to me. I was only on the surface of it, I never mattered to it, I never got under its skin. But I looked up at the sky and I thought of her and I sat for a long time on a bench there, in the close. And I started to feel calmer once I was still. I’ve never really known whether or not I was religious, but I started to feel calm there. Like perhaps it didn’t matter that no one knew what had happened to me. Perhaps that was just the way things were. But it felt very soothing just to stare at that building, and not have to think any thoughts, but just get lost for a little while in staring. And then I knew I ought to go home, but of course it’s only me in the house now, and I used to have a whole family, and I used to have her, and now there’s no one else in the world who minds about me, and I feel like I must have got something very wrong for things to end up this way. Because no one should be on their own, I don’t think. And that was when it happened. I drove through the Market Square towards the Brown Street junction. The moped drove out as I was about to go round the corner, and I couldn’t stop for it. I hit the woman on the moped, and the car went, you know, I lost control of it, and I went into the building. My air bag went off, and I sat there till the paramedic got me out. And I knew what I’d done, but I couldn’t even get out to see if she was all right.

  MH: Thank you, Mr Street. That’s all we’ll be needing for the time being.

  GS: Are you going to charge me?

  MH: With what?

  GS: With killing that woman, of course.

  MH: She isn’t dead, Mr Street.

  GS: Not dead?

  MH: She has been taken to hospital, where she is in a critical condition. She isn’t dead. If she doesn’t pull through, we’ll review the statement you’ve given us, but honestly, Mr Street, in the interests of setting your mind at rest, I think I can say from what you’ve said and from corroborating statements that you have done nothing wrong in this case.

  GS: What?

  MH: You are not responsible for the accident that occurred, Mr Street. You were an unwitting and innocent party in a road traffic accident – that’s all as far as I can see.

  GS: I thought I’d committed a murder.

  MH: No.

  GS: So I can go home then?

  MH: Yes. I can arrange a lift for you back to your farm, since your car is damaged, if that would be helpful?

  GS: I thought you were going to arrest me. I don’t know whether I want to go home.

  MH: I see.

  GS: Once I get back there I’ll be on my own for ever. I don’t want to go home. She’d had it all done up in the last year; it doesn’t even look like it used to when we were first together. So how can I remember her there? She had them change all the central heating. She put in a stairlift. She got a new fridge.

  MH: Perhaps you should consider the possibility that these things were your wife’s gift to you once she knew she was dying, so she was able to die knowing you would be all right in the house?

  GS: Do you think? Do you think it was her gift to me?

  Deep in the Middle of Nowhere

  Saturday, 11th May

  I saw an accident in town tonight and it made me so scared because I was sure it meant you had died. I was walking past McDonald’s. I’d just crossed the road by the Cross Keys in front of this car that frightened me because I didn’t think it was going to slow. It let me pass then sped right on down the road into the corner, you know that corner where you think you should give way but you don’t actually have to? And just as the car got to the turn, a moped came out of the side road in front of it, and the car hit the bike, and veered, and went into the front of a second-hand shop. I stood and watched it all happen; I couldn’t move. All I could think was that it must mean someone had shot you. Your jeep had crashed. An IED had blown off your leg and the ripples had made it all the way back to Salisbury. I was sure I had just seen your life end, as if I was standing on the shoreline and you were miles out and drowning.

  A police car and two ambulances turned up while I was standing there in the light of the McDonald’s window, frozen and thinking of James and what I would tell him if the news ever came of your death, feeling my heart in my chest because I thought yours must have stopped and now I was living for both of us. I thought I could feel the strain of it like a plumb line pulling heavy through me. It looked plain enough to me that the woman on the moped must have died. I had no context for comparison. I have not had much experience of violence or death; I suppose you have had enough for us both, but something about the way they stood around her made me think there was nothing to be done. There was a boy about James’s age watching who hurried away; I thought he was going to throw up from the look of him. The driver who had hit her was an old man. They put him in the back of a police car and took him away, while a second and third police car turned up and a little flock of officers spilled out from them and cordoned off traffic. It must have snarled up all the roads round Salisbury for miles, to close that corner, because there’s no other way round the one-way system. I wonder what diversion they put in place. The old man stood on the pavement and had a light shone into his eyes before they swept him off, a killer now, though he looked like he wouldn’t have hurt a fly. I suppose they were checking for concussion. Even if you have killed someone you might still be concussed, you might still want help. He looked childlike. You know the moment after a child has fallen on its hands and can’t yet decide whether it has hurt itself enough to cry or whether it would rather get on with playing? That was what I saw while they were checking him on the kerb, the child buried deep under the surface of that old man’s face, hopelessly out of his depth, hopelessly uncertain. Because we never really grow up, do we?

  It looked just like losing your balance, the way he waited on the pavement with the paramedic, head bowed down. The weight of the world seemed to be on him, and I wondered how he could stand up. He must have been too old for driving. Eventually the statement-takers started doing the rounds, and a woman came over to talk to me, and that was when I fainted, and that was how I woke up in the Odstock hospital.

  My first thought when I woke was that I might be able to find out whether the woman on the moped really was dead. She would be here, perhaps, if they were treating her. I thought there was no doubt at the time, but when I came back to consciousness I found myself filled with the hope she might somehow have
lived. She might not have broken her neck, perhaps only her back, perhaps she would only be paralysed. Would that be better, to be paralysed rather than dead? I have sometimes asked myself that, would I stay with you if you lost all movement, or all memory, or speech? I think I would. Would I be right to? I don’t know the answer to that; that’s a harder question. Would you stay with me? That’s harder to answer again.

  What does it mean when a back breaks? Have the vertebrae unslotted or are they themselves cracked or shattered or powdered up? It’s probably not what happens to the bones, it’s how it shoves the spinal cord around that does for you. Someone said to me once all our emotional thinking is done not in the brain but in the brain stem and the spinal cord. A teacher, maybe. I can’t believe that’s quite true, but it has made me careful of this root running through me.

  My second thought was for you, when I had finished imagining the state of that poor woman’s spine, and then I was terrified again. I got out of my bed, pulled the tube from my arm and started to walk out of A&E. I could hear a child screaming. All of the little booths were filled with too many people. You’re only supposed to have two visitors at any one time, I remember that from the time James broke his leg, but everyone here had three or four people with them. Everyone except me, that is. There were only two chairs in each booth, so people were standing around or sitting on the floor, like this was a big airport and a plane had been delayed, and I thought about offering them my chairs since no one was waiting for me in them, but then a policeman put his hand on my shoulder and took me back to my bed. You’re not allowed to wander round, it seems, if there’s a chance you might be ill.

  They already knew there was nothing wrong with me. They had taken blood samples to make sure. A nurse came, and I told her I had been afraid, that was all, and I was very sorry to have wasted their time. She told me not to worry, but she didn’t seem to have much sympathy. Why would she? I had wasted her time, and the hospital bed, and the waiting chairs. I suppose a lot of people waste nurses’ time. I suppose I wasn’t even the first that evening. She discharged me, and I walked out into the night, caught the bus back to BHS car park, got into my car and drove home to Tidworth. I texted James to see whether he was alive, and he texted straight back, which was good of him and not very like him, and I’m not ashamed to say I read the text while I was driving, because I knew it would make me a better driver to be certain he was alive. If a lorry had ploughed into the wrong lane while I read that text, I wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it, of course, and normally I hate people who check their phones while they drive, but sometimes things are more important than the rules.

  I still didn’t know whether you were alive. I went to the computer and started Skype up and I saw you were online, so I thought it must be all right. But then I started wondering, would you go offline if you died? Probably you wouldn’t. Your laptop was at the base; if you died, you’d probably die on patrol and no one would shut down your laptop for you. So I called, and you picked up, and I couldn’t tell you what was wrong, because it seemed so silly once I thought about it, and that was why I was so quiet tonight. You told me such horrible things, now I think back over them. About a new recruit who had been tied up in a sleeping bag and dragged round by his mates from the back of a Landy. About two boys of sixteen under your command who had blinded themselves in a competition to see which of them could stare longest at the sun. That’s what happens to you, that’s the world you have to live through. And I hardly had the strength to say a thing. I barely managed a sympathetic sound. I suppose I am far too wrapped up in myself. I suppose I live in too small a world, where even something as ordinary as a car crash, two used-up lives colliding with each other, looks to me like the end of the world. I couldn’t shake myself out of the fear that was in me.

  And now I am doing what I always do when I can’t find the strength to tell you what I’m actually feeling. I am telling you everything here instead. I am unburdening myself where no one else can see the shame of my struggle to do a thing as ordinary as cope. I am hiding in a diary.

  Sunday, 12th May

  A good morning. I had shopping and chores to keep me busy; I didn’t have to think. I was tired, of course. It had been a late night. I couldn’t sleep for hours even after I had finished writing. Normally I can sleep once I have emptied myself here and the ink is drying, normally that way things are out of my head. Isn’t that the point of a book like this?

  Not last night. I lay there listening for you for hours, and you didn’t come.

  On an average day very little you might constitute as real actually happens to me. I don’t think I experience very much of actual life. Perhaps that is everyone’s feeling – that they are just sitting around and life is happening in the next valley, I don’t know. So last night was inevitably a shock to the system, a human being shattered in front of my eyes. That is a far cry from Lucy across the street and what she thinks of the new road markings, or whatever it was I wrote about last week. I can’t read it back. It would look too small and cheap in the light of day, and none of us want to think about how small our lives are.

  After lunch I didn’t do so well. I kept imagining I was her – the woman on the moped, I mean. I tried to do something, keep myself occupied, read a book, but I felt faint and even had to put my head between my knees. I went upstairs and lay on the bed for an hour without undressing. You would not have been proud of me. I couldn’t stop thinking of my back closing up like a concertina. Fear, again and again. I wished that today was a day for rehearsals, but there was nothing at all in the calendar till tomorrow.

  When did this start happening, this fear? It creeps up on us so gently. I don’t remember when I lost my head for heights, or when I first became uncomfortable with running down hills, but now I think of snapping my leg and the break never quite healing, or falling on my neck and never moving again. There – I am thinking of the woman who died once more. Now I think of the fragile body of our son, though he thinks he is so strong, his body that he hurls around the rugby field or through the woods when he rides his bike without thinking of the consequences. It gives me a rush of blood to my heart when I see him racing around the way he does – a rush of joy and fear and anxiety for this boy we have created between us, who is so free and unafraid. I wonder how I could ever teach him how precious a thing his strength is, and I know he’ll have to lose so much before he realises.

  Forgive me, but I did what nervous housewives have always done and hit the gin about three o’clock. It doesn’t feel any better, but I will be asleep by nine, and we must count our blessings where we can find them. I have been sitting with a glass till then, trying to learn my lines. I used to be good at line learning, but these days I find the bastards won’t go in. I don’t know whether I’ve lost the habit or whether my head’s filled up.

  Thursday, 16th May

  Awful sickness in my stomach that will not go away. I read in the paper that the woman in the accident was the woman who used to run the flower stall in the market square. I was speaking to her just last week.

  Her name was Rita, and she always seemed very free, because she never cared what anyone thought of her. I suppose I shouldn’t speak of her in the past tense – that’s terrible, that’s tempting fate. The last time I saw her she had been convinced she was going to prison. I don’t know whether it was true, or what anyone would send her to prison for, but I wasn’t completely surprised, because there was undoubtedly something sharp at the edges about her, and I worried afterwards that she might have seen that in me. I have always struggled to suppress the assumption that people who work on market stalls or work outdoors in any capacity come largely from less fortunate worlds than my own, and all have their crosses to bear, and perhaps lash out against it all from time to time. I don’t know a very great deal about country people, not really; even living round here I feel I’m only visiting country people, and I wish I could get deeper in amongst them.

  ‘Thing is, Alison,’ she said to me, a
nd I liked that, the fact she remembered my name, that was always one of the best things that happened in my week, ‘I almost don’t care, you see, cos no one else gives a toss, so why should I?’

  I’m not sure why I’m writing down this whole conversation here. In person I would never think for a moment that you would be interested in this story. I must be careful not to idealise you so much in written form that the real you becomes a disappointment. It would be unfair of me to expect you to be interested in every last person I speak to when you get home.

  ‘I’m sure people do give a toss,’ I told her, trying not to sound silly swearing in my posh voice. I suppose I must have sounded posh to her, anyway. It’s all relative, isn’t it? In Kensington I sound like a country woman. ‘I give a toss.’

  ‘Yeah, but you don’t really, do you? It’s just a story for you to feel bad about. You’re not actually gonna do anything about it, are you?’