Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  ‘What can I do for you, Rita?’

  ‘Well, nothing really. If I done the crime, I do the time.’

  This is how she talked. A sad, depreciated sort of language really, with a very free approach to the matter of tense. Everyone in the south of England speaks Estuary these days. I read about it in a magazine article. After the war a lot of Londoners were rehomed across the counties in new housing built more cheaply than it could have been in the capital, and I think that movement has levelled out the accents. I don’t know what else it has done to us – imagine a whole community, a whole city, where nobody’s grandparents are buried in the same county everyone lives in. What kind of displacement is that? What does it lead to, to be distant from your history, from the roots of you?

  Rita went on, blowing her nose loudly into a handkerchief she took from her sleeve. ‘The people who don’t care I’m talkin’ about are my people, my family. And that almost makes me feel better really, cos if I’m not hurtin’ anyone I don’t care where I lay my head, even if it’s a nick bunk bed. I just don’t want to hurt anyone, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t think you could hurt anyone, Rita, especially your own family. I think you have a good heart.’ I was surprised at myself for saying that, it felt a little over the top, a little unguarded, but Rita looked at me very intensely, as if the thought mattered to her very much.

  ‘Well, I always liked to think I did, but I’ve had all these doubts, do you see?’

  ‘No, you mustn’t. You must believe this much in yourself – that you’re a good person. And obviously good people, the best people, make mistakes all the time. I’m sure Gandhi made mistakes; I bet there are whole chapters in the Bible where Jesus makes mistakes – I don’t know, it’s been years since I read it.’

  ‘You should read it. It’s good, the Bible.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s parables, isn’t it? It’s a How To guide. I’ve read all the books of all the different religions. I go back to them a lot, for advice, for comfort, to make me feel better. I’ve got almost all of them. The big ones, I mean. I’m not reading the book of fucking Mormon. Or the one whose god is called The Bob, have you heard of them?’

  ‘I don’t think I have.’

  ‘They done an interview on Radio Four. A woman who said she worshipped The Bob. I thought, fuck off, to be honest. If you go in for all that shit you’ve gotta dress it up in a bit of dignity, haven’t you?’

  ‘That seems like the thing to do, yes.’

  ‘But I’m pleased you say I’ve got a good heart, Alison. I am. Thank you. I think I have. I just sometimes wonder.’

  That, now I come to think of it, is the last thing she said to me, really. I bought some chrysanthemums and thanked her and wished her luck with the court case and went about my day, and I suppose she was right. I didn’t think about her again until I read in the Journal that she is in a coma in Odstock hospital. It doesn’t say whether they expect her to regain consciousness. I should go and visit. But if she can’t hear the world, what would be the point of it? I would only upset myself and waste more of the nurses’ time showing me in and out. I suppose I must just think of her and hope she wakes up and that when she does she is still able to live her life.

  I didn’t feel at all well thinking that it was Rita who had been on that moped, but when the light started to go out of the day I pulled myself together and got in the car and got to my ushering shift at the Playhouse. I couldn’t stop thinking of my ribs caving in on themselves, of my bones crushed to dust. On the drive over I felt very dazzled by the lights of all the cars that were travelling in the other direction. It seems to me always that it would be so easy, so terribly easy, to lose control of the steering wheel and veer like a moth right into the bottomless endlessness and pain and agony and shrieking and screeching of metal through limbs of those lights one evening. Apparently moths don’t actually aim for the flames of candles – that’s a misunderstanding. They navigate by the sun, or the moon – I don’t remember – by keeping it always on their right. Or their left. Electric light confuses them; they mistake it for the moon, or the sun, and circle it, thinking if they only keep the light on their right, or their left, they’ll get to where they’re going eventually. Then sometimes their circles decrease in circumference as they continue to circle, and that’s when they tumble into the flames. It’s a terrible thing to see a moth burn itself, I think. People swat them sometimes, like you might swat a fly, but I couldn’t bear it. If you look closely at a moth after someone has crushed it, you’ll see its wings powder up into silver. They scatter apart into grey dust, like solid smoke, like the lead from a pencil. They are made of different stuff from us; I think perhaps they are spirits. The thing to do when you drive at night, of course, is not to look at the lights that are coming towards you, because we tend to direct ourselves towards where we are looking. If you look at the lights it’s hard not to turn the wheel a little as well.

  I think I’m going to have to ask the doctor for some sleeping pills.

  Monday, 20th May

  Rehearsals this evening. It is a little bit nerve-wracking, watching the first night creep closer and still knowing you aren’t any good, no good at all. Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night feeling cold about it, all the people who will be watching me, all the lines I will forget. I have a real part, you see, a big lead role with a lot to say, a lot of stage time. What I never know is what to do with my hands.

  Tuesday, 21st May

  Rose at work’s husband has died. It happened last week, but the news was announced to us this morning. He had cancer in the lungs and lymph nodes; people say once it’s in the lymphs there is very little hope left and you must prepare yourself. All us girls on the reception desk at work have been looking after her while he’s been ill; it is very sad now the story has come to its ending.

  She was told straight off it was going to kill him. All that was possible was slowing the progress of things, so of course they went for chemotherapy. He wanted to last as long as he could. I think anyone would, although I must admit I wondered at the time what the point of all that pain could be when there was so little left to fight against. But that was because it wasn’t happening to me, that was a failure of sympathy. I only had to think of you or James falling ill and then I knew what I would do to keep you both from pain, to make anything better. Which is that I would die for you and James, gladly; I would do anything I could, anything that was asked of me.

  Rose cried and cried and couldn’t answer the phones or deal with the boys when they came to us sick or asking for anything. We’re the catch-all team you find in every school or big organisation – secretaries and receptionists and amateur nurses who look after all the lost property and deal with angry parents and confiscate mobile phones from the boys. We sweep up whatever isn’t covered by an actual job description, that is our role. ‘The front desk’ is how we’re summarised, and I don’t think it’s ever so different from your life on the front line, in a smaller way of course. Whatever goes wrong, it’s our job to fix it.

  The headmaster had to give Rose time off, and we all worked round the space she left behind her. They told him he had six months. And it was awful of me, but I thought of myself when she told us that, because six months is such a long, long time to say goodbye to something, I was almost jealous. If you were to die I would most likely have no warning. No explanation or reason, no sickness I could use to rationalise what happened. I would have only violent death and loose ends; everything would be interrupted and unfinished. I would have to go to my son and explain to him, and he would have seen nothing coming, and I don’t know if I would be strong enough to carry him through that. I don’t know whether James would even be able to take it in if you died. The young spend too much time on computer games to take the thought of death as finally as they need to. I grew up in a society that said there was a second life, a life after death, but even us Christians never had to deal with the psychological effects of being able t
o replay a level in a computer game if you couldn’t get through to the end without getting shot. We never thought you got more than one shot at life. I wonder how easy it is for James and his generation to understand that.

  I felt so bad, so vain and self-centred thinking of anything but Rose and her situation when I first heard how long her husband had to live, but I thought as well how strange it was that time can mean different things and stretch or contract depending on the situation. Because we will have been more than half a year apart next time I see you, and that for me is an ocean, a lifetime. I can hardly bear it every time it happens. But of course for Rose and her husband, and I think they have a son as well, that is the shortest sentence they will ever have read.

  She cried and cried and cried.

  I have pains in my hands sometimes. Very strange. I don’t know where they come from. I take a few paracetamol and they go, but of course there’s caffeine in paracetamol, it’s not good for me, and too much of the stuff and you get addicted and it stops working anyway. I wonder whether I have carpal tunnel syndrome? I don’t really know what it is; I remember it makes your wrists hurt, though. Am I driving enough to give myself RSI? Whatever it is, it keeps me up nights. I buy a new packet of aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever comes to hand every other day at the moment, it seems. Just so I know I’ll have something nearby if my hands are aching. If I can’t be sure there’s anything for me to take I get so uneasy.

  Rose is strange, really. Every other woman on the reception desk where I spend my days is there because she can’t start any more of a career than working in a school. When your husband’s in the army you are tied to his life and must surrender that part of your own. But Rose’s husband runs a shop. Or I suppose I should say he ran a shop. I don’t know why she has stopped at this and not built up anything more for herself. Perhaps there is nothing more she could do, but I don’t believe that. It’s probably not true, but I like to think we’re all as talented as each other. It’s just that some of us find what we’re good at and some don’t. Perhaps Rose is a good mother and that is her talent. I always think she worried too much to be really good at anything, though. She is too convinced of her limitations to ever really be calm in what she does, and wonder whether more might be possible, and try to find out.

  Apart from Rose we’re a group time forgot, a ragbag of unemancipated women, and that makes me hate working at the school. A gaggle of army wives, wives of academics, married to the medical profession, whatever life our partners chose. We can’t put down roots, or climb any ladders, or build anything; whatever metaphor you want to offer will be useless to us. We do this simple, unskilled, unrewarding work and pack the house up when we’re told and tell ourselves these are our lives. But it’s like we’ve been missed off a list; it’s like our real lives are passing us by.

  I don’t know how I allowed this to happen to me. There was a time in my twenties when my work didn’t matter to me at all – it was just a way of bringing in money, a sideshow to the main event of you and me and James and our evenings together. But some time in my thirties, things started getting away from under my feet. James turned ten, and from then on it felt like I never did quite reach him again, because there was never another day when I really believed he would rather have been with me than on his own in his room with his music or his radio or his toys or his thinking. And I think somehow I got it into my head that when we really got started on life together, you and I, the house moves would slow down and we would find more of a rhythm, or, rather, more of a rhythm that suited me. Which of course was never going to be the case for as long as you were in the army. But I think as the years went by and our lifestyles didn’t change, I began to feel lost about the way we were living, as if I had no control over things, as if I didn’t know where we were going. And once you have started to feel you’re adrift, everything gets worse, doesn’t it, because the whole trick of a good life as far as I can tell seems to me to be not to admit that life is drifting. To forge as much of a path through the swell and ebb of everything. Somewhere between being thirty and happy and feeling things had a purpose, and turning forty, I lost my enthusiasm for things. Because you didn’t leave the army, and a time didn’t come when I got to make the choices, and even now we still haven’t reached it.

  What makes me feel so bad is that I don’t know what world I might have succeeded in, and I think now it’s not very likely I’ll ever discover what my talent was. It seems awful to me that a woman my age should think in the past tense the way I do. Or in the future tense, speaking of you. But never in the present. Perhaps if I had been an actor then things would have been different. The job of an actor is verbs. They get to do things, and live.

  After Rose’s husband fell ill someone at work suggested we might do something for Cancer Research. It’s so difficult to show support and solidarity when the case is already terminal, because what you do must of necessity always seem a bit apologetic, I think, but we thought entering a race or something like that could show Rose we were with her as much as we could be. So we entered a Cancer Research race on the rugby field up by Old Sarum and started to train in the evenings, thudding through the streets in ones or twos. I joined the gym at the Five Rivers Leisure Centre because I didn’t want people to have to put up with the sight of me sweating round Tidworth with my earphones in. I felt I’d be glad of the excuse to stay at the leisure centre in the evenings too. I’ve never been a fat woman, but I lost a lot of weight at that time. It was very liberating. I didn’t have to go home till nine, evenings I went to the gym. I didn’t like the running, but I enjoyed not being in the house. I found I could fit back into clothes I hadn’t worn in years, had more energy. So a month ago we all ran the Cancer Research race together, all wearing pink, and raised a few thousand pounds. I know I told you this at the time, I just like to remember it, and I almost felt guilty because I enjoyed it so much. I didn’t feel like I’d done it for Rose or to raise money. I felt I had got so much that was good from running that race, I couldn’t believe I’d done anything worthy. Rose didn’t come to watch us either, and that just fed the feeling. We had no one to look to on the sidelines when we got to the finish, no one to remind us of what we had been doing, so all of us who had run together hugged each other, and I wondered how many of us thought about Rose. I stopped going to the gym after that. I couldn’t pretend I was doing it for Rose or her husband after the race. The one time I did go back reminded me I hadn’t really done it for them in the first place, how selfish I am.

  Sunday, 26th May

  Going through the attic yesterday evening I came across a shoebox of old photographs of us. I can’t tell you quite why I was shuffling round the attic. I was hunched up under the roof, and now my back aches, my calves are aching, I can feel how old I am, how mortal. At first I was looking for my CDs, because I wanted to listen to Joni Mitchell, so I went up in search of For The Roses. But once I was in amongst our things I just forgot myself. Silly, really. I was poking through all the boxes, all the records, remembering the days when we had a record player, which was so pretentious of us really, but I loved it. And this shoebox was in amongst your old papers and some old school books of James’s. From the time before we were married, so we look very young and slim and full of the future. It’s quite a shock to see what you used to look like when you’re not expecting it. I can’t help always feeling that I never really change, but there it is in the shoebox, plain as day, I very clearly have, I have got much older, as we all do, as no one can help doing.

  So much has changed since you and I first met that if I ever had the chance to meet my younger self now, I don’t think I’d recognise her. When we first met I was so sure I was going to be an actress, and you were just a bit of squaddie rough to flirt with over the summer. Even if you were at Sandhurst, that was my fantasy of you. It was quite dirty, some of what I imagined of who you were. What did you do that forced me to revise that first crude stereotype I had, to start looking at you differently, like a human being, and
respect you a little? I suppose you were always well turned out. Always well spoken. There was always a reserve about you, and when you don’t know what people are thinking they become more interesting, don’t they?

  I think I fell for you over that week when you drove me to my drama school auditions. It feels like it happened to a different woman. We got lost in the suburbs of Bristol looking for the Old Vic Theatre School, having got the wrong end of the stick and gone to the Old Vic Theatre first, which is ages away in a different part of the city, and I started to panic because I wasn’t going to have time to do my warm-ups, so you made me practise my singing in the car and laughed along with all my scales. I always used to think when I made you laugh that you were laughing at me. I could never understand until I loved you how I might make you so happy. In the audition they thought my singing was much better than my acting, I could tell, and perhaps I have you to thank for that, for making me do my warm-ups. I didn’t get a call-back in the end.

  Then you drove me out to Oxford, to that field in the middle of nowhere where they had set up the Oxford School of Drama. I would have loved to have gone there. It was so isolated and alone; for three years you could do nothing but think and look at the fields and sky and learn how to live in your body. I don’t know where you went while I was in the workshops and the audition; I think you had a Thermos flask, so perhaps you parked the car somewhere with a view and put your feet up and read a book. I remember you were reading Hardy at the time, because you read me a passage after Bristol where he described a dawn as being like a stillborn child and we agreed he had the bleakest mind ever. I was quite good with my audition pieces in Oxford, I thought, but I could tell I fluffed the movement session. I just felt so silly waving my hands around as slowly as I could to their music. At lunchtime they took me into a room with a dozen other hopefuls and told us we wouldn’t be needed for the afternoon. So you and I went into Oxford and got drunk instead, as if we were students there. I hope the students of Oxford are drunk all the time, because their pubs are lovely. And perhaps that was when I loved you, when you shook me out of feeling sorry for myself that day and held my hair back when I threw up later that evening, and when we made love in the back of your car at the end of the night and lay together afterwards, you telling me all you knew about the red kites who flew in pairs in the skies above Oxford.