Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  People have cheated on me. Long ago, when I was at school. You feel all sorts of things when you find out it’s been happening. Stupid, embarrassed, ugly and rejected and low, angry and spiteful. You dream of revenge. You feel uncertain and lost and sad, like the ground’s falling away from under you. I could not believe that in some way, however small a way, I had risked exposing you to that.

  I drove home barely able to see the road through the tears I found myself crying, and I had to turn up the radio so as not to have to listen to myself and the way I snivelled all the way home, feeling stupid and fooled, feeling duplicitous towards you. And it is so hard lying here now wanting only to call you but knowing I can’t, for the thousand usual reasons – because you won’t be free, because we have our schedules, and also because I will cry again when I see your face and think what an idiot I’ve been, and you will ask me what’s the matter, and then I’ll either have to lie or tell you the truth, and which of those could possibly make me feel better? Or do any possible good to you?

  What would happen to me if I took the bottle of bleach from the toilet, or snapped the razor blade by the bath out of its plastic casing, and swallowed one of them down? Would it all be easier not to be alive any more, not to have to think about all this? And wouldn’t I deserve it, whatever happened to me?

  It is dark in the room; only the reading light throws a pool of light over this paper. I want to sleep, but I know I won’t for hours. All I can do is lie here or go for a walk and weigh my head heavy in my hands. The pills are tempting, but I have been taking too many of them and it scares me. I have to stop. I have to get clear of them. I cannot go through my life half drugged; I want to do more than half experience everything. I can’t stop wondering what it would be like to have sex with someone new after so many years only knowing one man’s body. This is my life, it is my one and only life, and I am spending it alone with the thought of you, and the whole world seems to be getting away from me, and I wish I had the bravery or ingenuity to grasp all life and drink it in.

  Wednesday, 24th July

  A brief entry. I am tired. I have to sleep. Only to say that work was very hard today. I could not keep my smile on.

  At lunchtime a young man came into reception and loitered by the trophy cabinet, looking at the names. I asked him whether I could help him, and he told me no, he was just passing, and he used to go to school here, he was sorry, he didn’t know why, he had just wanted to look in. I asked him when he had been here, and he said it was ten years ago now. Before my time, I said, and he said, yes, I don’t remember you. I introduced myself and he said his name was Liam. He asked me the names of a couple of teachers, whether they were still knocking around, and I had to tell him I hadn’t heard of either of them. He left. Ten years from now, I don’t want James to look like that. Lost and drifting, already overcome with an old person’s romantic vision of their history. Just like me, I suppose.

  It has been days now since I remember writing here that I was going to buy a house plant, and I still haven’t got round to it. But there is no need to now – James is coming home for the holidays tomorrow. James is coming home, and I won’t be on my own any more.

  Monday, 29th July

  James came back three days ago, and since I heard the doorbell and found him waiting on the front step looking as though he felt nothing to come into this house, I have tried to spend time with my son. I have tried to live in the same world as he does and not go off into little stares or dazes and live too much in my own mind, or let him go off to his room and live too much in anticipation of going away again when the school year rolls back round. Because I can see us both starting to do that, it’s what we have to guard against. I have tried to get to know the new person he has become this holiday, because of course he has changed again. Every time he comes home from another stretch at school I see he has become someone else. His ideas, his points of reference, his ambitions, his imagination. His stories, his friends, his jokes, his fears, his dreams.

  I know why we sent our boy to boarding school, why it had to happen. But I do feel like we lost the best part of him to other worlds on the day he first left us with your old luggage and that blazer we’d bought for him to grow into flapping round his fingertips and knees. People change so fast in those teenage years while they’re becoming themselves. Every time he comes home it is like I meet another person, and every time that person is a little harder to get close to. And he and I are forced to share the same failure to get to know one another, again and again.

  He came quite quietly into the house this time, announcing himself with the taxi’s crunch on our gravel, and we had a polite, strained cup of tea together. It was as if he felt for the first time that he had become a guest when coming home to me, that the protocols of visiting needed to be observed here and he couldn’t just head straight to the room we had called his bedroom this time and turn his music on and shut the door. He had never come into the kitchen and asked for tea before. I would almost rather he had disappeared off with his music, even though I was desperate to talk to him. Talking to him hasn’t been entirely easy since he went away to school, of course – he developed a difficult, teenage manner of communication some years ago. A strange detachment, a way of speaking that is not accompanied by eye contact, as if I weren’t his mother but a family pet he never quite learned to love, who is nonetheless part of the furniture, something he neither appreciates nor questions.

  But I had thought I heard a change in him when we spoke on the phone this term, felt very distinctly a reserve towards me and everything around him I had never noticed before. And now at the kitchen table I saw it more clearly. It was as if the child had gone out of him, like air from a balloon, and he had become suddenly conscious of the size and strangeness of the world.

  This is how we talk to each other now.

  ‘So how was your term?’

  ‘Good, yeah. Have you been all right?’

  ‘Yes. Always busy, you know. And Dad’s all right.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he’s in touch with you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had no idea at the time, when I was a teenager myself, that my mother must have been coping with me every day, tiptoeing round my truculence, but now I know James as he is these days I feel sure my mother must have had as much of a fight keeping the smile on her face while I moped around. When James had finished his tea he went upstairs to change and unpack his things, and I loaded our mugs into the dishwasher and wondered what we two perfect strangers were going to do together in the long stretch of time before you came home.

  The number of obvious days out it is possible to go on diminishes as your child gets older. Until he was ten, of course, just taking James anywhere that was out of the house was good enough. We could stroll to the park or the nature reserve, and I could pass an afternoon watching him tire himself out chasing beetles or climbing trees. Then when he got a bit older, when he was ten or so, that was a wonderful time, because we started to go further afield to keep James interested. Trips to the seaside or the woods, nature trails and adventure playgrounds, trips to castles and stately homes and other towns. Sometimes if it was a special day, when you had just come home and he was home as well, it would be Alton Towers or Legoland, and I used to love those times because he would talk about them for weeks afterwards, months sometimes, and it meant something to know he had enjoyed days with me so much. It is a wonderful thing to build memories with your child. But in the last few years it has become more difficult for me to keep him entertained, and seeing the latest change in him I have started to despair of finding anything we could enjoy doing together. You can’t take a fourteen year old or fifteen year old for a walk or a day at Paultons Park. The sea still works, but he’d rather go with someone other than me. It’s difficult not to feel hurt, that first summer when you realise what he’d really like to do is not spend time with you but go into town with friends or with a girl if he could meet one, and go round the shops
and do nothing at all as ostentatiously as possible. It’s the natural shape of things, of course, but I still can’t help feeling rejected. I hate the fact that mothering isn’t just one thing you can get good at and keep improving, but a thousand different relationships you have one day after another as your child goes through the shapeshifting process of becoming himself.

  I had once been in the habit of listing the things we would do together in anticipation of his coming home. This time he was in the house and up in his room already, and I still hadn’t thought of anything we could do, except maybe taking him to the Playhouse and letting him get his hands on my tape collection and teaching him about Joni Mitchell and Janis Joplin and Joan Armatrading, because last holiday he had seemed to be getting into music, and I might not be very up to date but I think I know a thing or two about music of a certain type, and I thought he might be interested in that.

  I cooked macaroni cheese for us in the evening, which I hoped was still his favourite food – he didn’t let on either way – and once we had started eating he warmed up into speech. He has developed, I fear, that curious, somehow third-person self-interest teenagers grow into, as if they begin to see their lives as a story being told, begin to watch themselves from above. He was interested in detailing his experience of the world, recording its sensations, outlining its future trajectory. I think it is something in education now that makes teenagers believe as they grow up that they are important, leads them to think in terms of destiny. Perhaps that’s all very well if the opportunity exists for you to truly excel at something that will make your name, or to marry a millionaire. But that doesn’t describe very many of us.

  There ought to be conferences on the kind of fairy tales that can be told to the mass of children who are statistically unlikely ever to earn over £26,000 a year. They ought to be given dreams they can realistically aim at. But it would so quickly become political. Lots of stories about learning to accept your lot and performing your role within the social order efficiently, ‘The Diligent Warehouseman’, at war with tales of men and women who went on quests to search out other ways of valuing a life, other models of living that might equalise the whole thing and make it all irrelevant. ‘The Passionate Jobseeker’. ‘The Happy Hobbyist’.

  During termtime James has started going into London at the weekends with his friends. I’m not particularly happy about it but I was assured they always had to be back at the school by a certain hour, and I supposed I used to go into town at the weekends and it must have terrified my mother as well, so what she had been able to tolerate I ought to tolerate in turn. He wanted to tell me about his experience of that city, the new stage on which he saw his future playing out, and I listened happily enough, because I haven’t spent time in London for years now, not properly, and it was interesting to overlay my old map of the place with another version, and I thought perhaps I would learn something about this stranger who was my son.

  ‘You don’t hang out in the centre. That’s rubbish – it’s just tourists and overpriced pizza. Soho is the most awful consumerist, capitalist slum. Lots of people on middling incomes limping round looking to blow the little bit extra they get each month on an overpriced shirt.’

  I found it sad to listen to the way he spoke. How can a boy sound so bitter and weary with everything? I suppose it’s the Internet. There’s so much cynicism to be memorised for free on the comment pages of the Internet, I’m sure every child can mimic a political position reasonably deftly without having actually read the books or been to the meetings these days. I thought about telling him almost everyone in England lives on a middling income, and a lot of them enjoy shopping, and why would he want to sneer at that? But I don’t think learning off the Internet equips you for counterargument, so apart from making him angry I didn’t see the point of answering back.

  ‘Honestly, Mum, if you spent an hour in central London you’d think we were all slaves. Bad shops, bad fast food, bad bars, bad clubs, and loads of people wandering round for something to do, trying not to think about how awful their lives are.’

  I wondered whether I liked the person James was pretending to be this time. It is easy for young people to pose as cynical, because they do not know the emotional cost of anything. I never know what right I have to say anything about the poses he has tried on over the last few years of his growing up. I’m always terrified that if I draw attention to the face he’s making, the wind might change and leave him stuck with it.

  ‘We’ve been to all the places people think of as hang-outs. They’re all rubbish. In Camden these kids dress up as punks and charge you a quid to have your photo taken with them. It’s awful. In Shoreditch everyone wears these, like, self-consciously bad jumpers. And drinks chai lattes. It does have a kind of personality, though. The shops haven’t all been dictated by the same three or four American companies or whatever, and there’s this type of Shoreditch haircut where people shave one half of their head, like they fell asleep and a lawnmower ran them over. But it’s sort of sad, because these people are trying to be individuals, but they wear more of a uniform than anyone else in London. I’ve been to Brixton too. Electric Avenue. That’s got a life of its own, actually, people I don’t really see anywhere else in London, but the shops are horrible and there are all these expensive bars that want to be in Shoreditch and look like they’re trying too hard because they’re next door to a kebab shop or whatever. And it’s so strange, because you realise walking around there that you can’t have, like, nice things, expensive things, without taking money away from somewhere else. That’s what I think walking past the Ritzy in Brixton, then past a pound shop five seconds later. And in east London, you can have a coffee in the nicest cafe in the world in Stoke Newington, but if you walk along the road to Stamford Hill or Dalston you see these places where the council’s not spent any money in years, and it feels like there’s, like, an imbalance. So I actually get quite sad.’

  I had lived on Stamford Hill for a little while. You know that, but I suppose he doesn’t. It’s strange to think of the things your son doesn’t know about you, things you might think were perfectly obvious or at the core of your personality. And yet he has an understanding of you that omits those essential facts but is still enough with which to operate a relationship, a friendship, a love. We are not our deeds, are we, or what we know.

  When I was a Londoner I used to catch the bus into work down the Seven Sisters Road. I loved it. I thought it was a bit like the Bronx you see in old Robert De Niro films, everyone playing dice in the street, half the shops not paying any tax, everyone greeting each other as they passed, landlords in fur coats eating in the greasy spoons and threatening anyone who didn’t pay their rent on time. Except on Seven Sisters everyone was North African instead of Italian, so you added to the mix the beautiful clothes of Egypt or Morocco, and the beautiful sounds, the dense crowds of the call to prayer. I thought it seemed so alive and beautiful because it was so separate to everything around it, nothing to do with the chain shops and anonymous bars that tried to take those people’s money back from them as soon as it ran through their hands. Sort of what James was saying, really. But I had a feeling he wasn’t talking in order to tempt me into talking back, he was talking to hear himself talk, so I kept my mouth closed and kept listening, and tried not to smile at how certain he seemed.

  ‘What we like to do is go to out-of-the-way places. Real London, the places people don’t think about visiting. Brent Cross, walking on those grey flyovers past these sad houses where people are living whole lives. All Polish, or on benefits anyway. Peckham in the evening, when it feels like a film set because everything’s closed and you don’t recognise the name of a single shop, and they’re all in these, like, Portakabin buildings that look so temporary. I saw a load of kittens shivering by some bins in Peckham one night, tiny little newborn kittens. I suppose rats and foxes got them all. Putney’s brilliant. We walk round these beautiful quiet houses, or up the river to Hammersmith past Craven Cottage, and when the s
un sets it reflects off the river and lights up the undersides of all the bridges.’

  Apparently he has a new group of friends he was doing all this exploring with, three boys whose names I couldn’t remember hearing before, that he spoke of as if they had been around for ever. I thought to myself, I am missing this, I am missing out on him, a whole world is passing me by because he’s not here with me in the evenings. But then I tried to remember the names of his friends this time last year, the boys he had told me about when his interest had been comics, and I wondered whether I was really missing anything at all. Or perhaps trying to keep up with him is just a losing battle. His life changes so fast. Minutes after he’s devoted himself to one cause I find myself unable to get him to acknowledge it had ever been something that concerned him at all. What is that, I wonder? The trying on of young lives preparing to live a real one? Or do we start out moving through life as if it’s water, experiencing whole new worlds each different day, and only when we’re older end up wading through treacle, stuck in the life we were in when the strength went out of our legs or we lost the will to change, and plough onwards?

  After we had finished eating I washed up and he dried up, and a silence fell between us as he ran his wet dishcloth over the pans, spreading the water around them.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to think of things for both of us to do till Dad gets home,’ he said.

  I could have sat down and wept to hear it stated so baldly.