Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain
Page 23
In the mornings when my shifts have finished and I have returned the dog to kennel I walk round the haunts of my childhood while the sun comes up. I can never really revisit them now, never inhabit these places as I once did and belong there completely, because I am no longer the child I was, and what I try to revisit when I walk round this city thinking of the past is my own history, not any place in the real world. I glimpse myself like a ghost sitting on certain steps, climbing trees, drinking on benches. In those hours when the world is coldest just before the dawn, I can admit I took on a dead-end job here because I was trying to live in hiding from the exile of my future, the exile that is the fate of everyone who ever watched childhood and youth streaming away from them, behind them, receding into the blue of the distance. I don’t know how everyone has the strength to face it, the way that life burns up into memory, until there is no life left except what you keep in your head, until even that snuffs out; it is extraordinary to really look at how strong people are. In those hours I can admit I ran away to this place because it was where I remembered feeling safe, because I had got old enough that being alive had started to feel perilous, to feel like a miracle, and I had started to feel afraid of it. And I can see now that’s unhealthy. I can see what I was doing was looking back over my shoulder at a world I can’t revisit, when what I should have been doing was finding a way to go on, because that’s what people do every day, that’s human, that’s heroic. And I’m almost ready to leave, move on, find a new world, and take hold of my life, and really begin. But then I walk through Lizzy Gardens as the sky begins to open like a flower, as the world around turns blue in the half-light of morning, passing through curtains of dew falling from the high, loving arms of trees that have held the water close all night and now set it down with the arrival of morning. And I remember nights on shrooms in this park, vodka burning in my throat on these benches, kisses so beautiful I could never have dreamed of stealing them behind these hedges, songs played on out-of-tune guitars that felt electric in the moments when they broke the peace of this place. And I hear the song of birds around me lacing their music together through the air. And I think, not yet. I won’t set off quite yet. I feel as I walk that there is a grace to cupping your hands and catching your life as it pours past you, holding it close for just a few moments before it’s gone for ever and new water, new time, flows over, and loving your life as it passes. The world is ending all around us every moment we’re living. Every bar in the score of ourselves is receding already into memory, into imagination, even as we play it out. We might as well listen.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone who has supported me over the years of this writing. In particular, this book is the result of a collaboration with my agent, Laura Williams, which has been as rewarding as any creative relationship I have been privileged to enjoy in my life, and I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to her and all the family at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop. The other family whose adoption of my cause has made this book possible is the extraordinary team at Transworld, whose enthusiasm for this work has been completely humbling. I would like to thank Suzanne Bridson, my editor, and Sophie Christopher, my publicist, for shaping the work, and changing my life, and teaching me to be proud of what we’ve made together.
Finally, I would like to thank Charlie Young. I will never know whether I would have had the courage, back in 2013, to walk away from my job and commit my life to writing if she hadn’t been there to tell me I might as well try; I’ll never need to know, because she was there for me, and that has made everything possible. As rivers end at their beginning, I would like to conclude by dedicating this song to her.
About the Author
Barney Norris was born in Sussex in 1987, and grew up in Salisbury. Upon leaving university he founded the theatre company Up In Arms. He won the Critics’ Circle and Off West End Awards for Most Promising Playwright for his debut full-length play Visitors. He is the Martin Esslin Playwright in Residence at Keble College, Oxford. This is his first novel.
Follow him on Twitter @barnontherun.
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Barney Norris 2016
Barney Norris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540026
ISBNs 9780857523723 (hb)
9780857523730 (tpb)
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