Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain

by Barney Norris

  When I watched those people from the window of McDonald’s, I wanted more than anything else to know what happened to all of them. To drink in their lives. Then later that evening I was sitting in my car on the hill with the dog and the radio when the boy I’d seen watching the crash broke into the compound. The dog went mad in the cage behind me, and I nearly pissed myself. It had never actually happened to me before, someone breaking in. When I saw who it was that was standing in the light of the Portakabin, I felt like someone was trying to tell me something. It was as if someone had reached right into my life. The boy’s name was Sam. I let him out through the front gate and didn’t report him. I went back to my car and watched the night.

  The truth was that I was lonely. It was very simple, really. I was halfway through my life, and there was no one with me on the journey. I stared at the orange of the streetlights in the distance and saw as clear as day that I had done the wrong thing, coming back to Salisbury. I had confused one thing for another. I should have been looking for someone I could speak to, not a place I could watch. I had isolated myself. Now I was alone at the top of a hill, and the apparition of that boy appearing at the edge of the Portakabin light seemed to taunt me, remind me that life was going on elsewhere, that people were dreaming and drinking too much and climbing hills, and I had taken the wrong line trying to become part of it. I was out here on my own in the darkness, and I didn’t know what I could do about it. I imagined Sam walking away from me and back into town, perhaps stopping for a pint in the Harvester on the way, and I felt lonelier than I had ever been. I texted Chrissy. I said I was thinking about a trip to London, asked her whether she’d be up for going for a drink with some of the friends we used to share, said I fancied getting properly wasted. Of course, she didn’t reply, and I wished I hadn’t done it, wished I had thought of something smarter to disguise the fact that what I really wanted was just the two of us together. I looked at her photos on Facebook and wondered what she was doing now, who she was sleeping with, what she was planning for the summer.

  I read in the paper the week after the crash that the woman on the moped was in Odstock in a coma. I had a shock when I saw her full name; it turned out I had known her. She had been my dealer when I was in school. There had been a time when I had her number saved as a favourite in my phone. I checked to see if it was still there, but of course I’d changed my phone too many times since then, and somewhere along the line I hadn’t transferred her across into the new address book. I had thought I was going to move on. Now I sat with the paper and felt closer to her than anyone else whose number I did have. I had liked her, when Salisbury still belonged to me; she had been a florist in the daytimes. She was a good storyteller.

  I walked past her old pitch in the market square that afternoon, where she had sold her flowers, I suppose until very recently, until the accident, but there was nothing there. I watched the people passing the spot and wondered how many of them knew there had once been a woman who sold flowers from that street corner. Even if a few of them did for now, they would forget quickly if she didn’t come back and make the spot hers again. In ten years’ time, I thought, no one would remember that flowers had once been sold here. The thought upset me, and I went into Tesco and bought some carnations and went up to the hospital. I didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to gawp or to upset myself. I was willing her to realise that there was still a place for her in the world, that she should come back for it and live for it, although I knew there was no way a bunch of carnations from a boy she hardly knew could achieve that. But I asked at the reception whether I could leave some flowers for someone, whether they would be passed on, and the woman there said she’d do her best to make sure they were. So I gave her Rita’s name and headed for the exit. And I felt a little better to know that whether she woke up or not, I, at least, would remember for as long as I was on this planet that she had sold me weed and teased me about the girls I liked, and I had seen the moment her life was changed in the violence of that accident, and I had bought her flowers, because once she had sold flowers in the market square. A woman passed me at the door, in her seventies or eighties maybe, hobbling as if in pain like old women do, a worn-out blue cardigan with holes in the sleeves hanging off her. As I shut the door behind me, I saw the receptionist hand the flowers to her, and she turned to look in my direction. I hurried away. I didn’t want to intrude on her life, that family. I hadn’t meant for anyone to see.

  Three months passed, and someone else started selling flowers from Rita’s old pitch, and I knew what must have happened. Rita had died. She had never regained consciousness, the paper said, when I read it later in my car on the hill. I felt helpless, reading it. Now the process of forgetting would begin; one by one the people who had known her would disappear, in the years to come, the decades to follow, until no one living had ever known her, until she might as well never have existed. Now she couldn’t tell her story any longer it would start to disappear.

  I went along that Saturday to see her buried – the details of the funeral had been in the newspaper. I felt involved; I couldn’t help it. I had seen her life end, and now it was ending all over again because her story was being finished, a line drawn under it. I turned up ten minutes early and sat at the back. No one questioned me, and I didn’t introduce myself to anyone. I just wanted to sit and remember her. There were quite a few people who came to remember, or say goodbye, or whatever it is people think they’re doing at a funeral, I don’t know. That’s the mystery of rituals, they have so many meanings, you never quite get to the heart of them. Her family were at the front – a man who might have been her husband, a man and a woman sitting next to him, one of whom might have been her child perhaps. There was no way of knowing, really. They had a little blonde girl squashed between them. The room was full of people you could never imagine meeting anywhere else: hippies, druggies, drinkers, farmers, well-heeled women who must have been her customers at the flower stall. I thought I saw the old woman with the blue cardigan from the hospital off to one side, sitting huddled by herself in a coat that was too big for her, but I couldn’t be sure it was the same person. It is amazing how many walks of life a single life can touch. I hoped Rita had known while she was alive how many people cared enough for her to come to her funeral. The people who did the readings spoke of her with love in their voices. She must have known. You couldn’t share the world with so much feeling and not know it. It was horrible to think of how she had died, but as I sat there I felt better knowing she must have lived a happy life.

  Sitting with me at the back of the room was an old man who cried all through the service. I thought I recognised him but could hardly believe it. At the end, when everyone started to filter out, I went over to speak to him.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He looked up, and he seemed afraid.

  ‘Oh, yes. I’m all right.’

  ‘I think I know you.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I think I used to visit your house. You live on a farm outside the city, don’t you? I cut my leg one day, and your wife bandaged me up, do you remember?’

  He blinked, as if he must be imagining me, as if he was trying to blink me away. When he opened his eyes and I was still there, he spoke.

  ‘You’re Liam?’

  ‘Yes. You remember.’

  ‘Of course. How are you?’

  ‘I’m all right. Did you know her?’

  The old man – I am ashamed to say I had forgotten his name – turned to stare out the church door, in the direction the coffin had gone.

  ‘I did, in fact, yes. A long time ago, she used to live in a tent in my garden.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘A lifetime ago.’

  He didn’t speak again, and I supposed he was remembering things that had happened to him years earlier.

  ‘And how is your wife?’

  ‘She died very recently, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I b
uried her a few months ago.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘She passed away on the same day as Rita, really. I was coming from the hospital when I drove into her.’

  I thought I must have misheard him.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I killed Rita. I hit her moped, and she never woke up, she was never really alive after that. Even though they let me believe that she might be. I am the reason she died.’

  ‘Oh God.’ I sat down next to him. ‘I saw it. I didn’t know it was you.’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. She just drove out in front of you.’

  ‘The police have said that. The family have been kind too. I called, of course, to ask whether I could come to the funeral. They were understanding. They were happy to let me pay my respects. Once I knew her name, knew I had known her before, I was so filled with – I don’t know. When we took her in I really thought we were saving her life, because she was a very unhappy woman. Now I have killed her.’

  ‘There was nothing that you could have done.’

  ‘The worst of it all is that it doesn’t even seem to matter to me. Not really. Not after the loss of my wife.’

  ‘I understand.’

  He smiled and turned to me.

  ‘Do you?’

  And I bowed my head, because of course I knew I didn’t.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was an unfair thing to say. I should go. Would you help me up?’

  ‘Of course.’

  I stood, and helped the old man to his feet, and walked with him as far as the door of the church.

  ‘I’ll be all right from here.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I’ll walk down to my wife’s grave before I go.’

  ‘She’s buried here?’

  ‘Just at the end there.’ He pointed into the distance. ‘Goodbye then.’

  ‘Goodbye. I hope you’ll be all right.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He walked stiffly away, and I stayed by the door, watching him till he was in among the graves. All those stones he passed through had been whole lives once, and now they were bodies in the ground, they were just markers of something that was gone, though they had felt as deeply as I did and lived so keenly it had hurt and amazed every one of them. The lives of others are all too complex and extraordinary for us to really understand them. We spend little enough time looking at how we live our own. Surely it would be impossible, from the muddles of ourselves, ever to see into the heart of how someone else lived? I was still standing by the entrance to the church when the old man walked back past me, on the way to his car. He stopped and smiled when he saw me.

  ‘You know it’s so strange. I was standing there by Valerie’s grave, speaking with her, and I could have sworn as I did that she was standing beside me, just for a moment. I could swear I saw her for a second out of the corner of my eye, the colour of her hair in the sun.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, no, not really,’ he said, with an embarrassed little cough. ‘But all the same. Well, goodbye.’

  He walked on, and I didn’t say anything else but watched him leave through the gates of the churchyard.

  A little while after he disappeared from sight, a woman came out of the church arm in arm with a broad-shouldered man with grey hair, and I saw as she did that it was the woman who had been in the road when the accident happened, the woman who had fainted. I had watched as the paramedic revived her. She had been taken away in another ambulance, up to the hospital, out of sight. She must have known Rita as well, or otherwise wanted to follow her story all the way to its ending. I thought about stopping her, speaking to her, telling her we had both been there. It was so strange to think the world we inhabit could be so small and we might gather here like this. But I stayed still, and said nothing, and she and the man walked briskly away and out of the churchyard and out of sight as if there was somewhere they were hurrying to be. It wouldn’t have meant anything in the end, that we had both gone to the service. She wouldn’t have known what to say. We would both have been uncomfortable. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  I walked out into the churchyard myself once the woman was out of sight, and took out my phone, and called Chrissy. I didn’t know whether she was going to pick up. I was terrified when she did. I hadn’t quite decided what I was going to say.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hi.’ She sounded like she was outside. I supposed she wouldn’t want to talk to me in public. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. Look, I just wanted to ask you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was wrong with me?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why didn’t you want me any more?’

  She didn’t speak for a moment. I suppose I sounded pathetic. But suddenly I wasn’t afraid of that any more. It seemed so important to know. All I could think was that I wanted, more than anything else, to be that old man when I was his age. To have lost something worth losing. The colour of a girl’s hair in the sunshine, a shoulder to lean on, a house full of happy memories that didn’t disappear because the people in it left. I wanted to learn that. I wanted to know why I hadn’t been able to before.

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  ‘I just want to know. It’s OK, you can be honest.’

  ‘No, Liam, you don’t get it. Maybe that’s your answer. You don’t get it. It’s not as simple as that. I have to go.’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m late for something. I have to go.’

  She rang off, and I stared at her number in my phone for a moment. Then I turned around and saw that the people who had followed the coffin to the grave were coming back towards me. The people I had thought must be Rita’s family walked at the front of the group. They smiled at me as they approached, and I smiled back at them.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The older man I had guessed must be Rita’s husband replied, nodding his head as he spoke. He was holding the little blonde girl by the hand, and she leaned into his side shyly when I looked at her. And again, I wished I was him. I wished I could have something worth losing. I stood at the side of the path till the group had passed. Then I put my phone away and walked out of the churchyard, and I knew at last what it was I should be looking for. I knew more clearly than I had ever done that the world is other people.

  I should leave this place now. Perhaps it was a mistake even to come here. I solved nothing, changed nothing, only succeeded in carrying my problems with me into a new landscape and isolating myself yet further. I’ve known that for a little while now, but I haven’t quite been able to act on the knowledge. Not yet, not quite. Soon I’ll make a change. I am going to leave this job, this hill, this relic, from where I have watched life going on in the city where I grew up and felt so distant from it. I’m going to re-enter life, and spend my time with the living, and not among these memories, these imaginings, these ghosts. It’s not a way to spend a life. What I have to find is something to long for, something to actually love. I thought I might try and find work in a florist’s, or a garden centre, or somehow doing something outside, gardening or farming or something as yet unimagined. I think of Rita sometimes, and what it might be like to spend your life among flowers, among life, and I wonder whether I could find a job like that. The good life. I’m sure it would be as awful as any other life once you got stuck into it, but all the same, perhaps it’s what I’ll go and look for. And perhaps the search for it will be where the pleasure hides. In a week, a month, a couple of months, I’ll hand in my notice, and I’ll go searching. But I haven’t done it yet. Because I think when I do, it might well be that I have to leave this city. I might have to be ready to go as far as to cross the world. If I really want to look for a life worth living, I’ll have to be ready to go anywhere for it, I think. So I have been waiting up here on the hill, saying my goodbyes. I wa
nted to stay here just a little longer and hear the song of this city where my life took shape played out to its ending, in case I don’t have the chance to hear it again.