In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  They left without fuss, and Zoe watched them go without envy. The episode somehow stilled her impatience. She’d enjoyed both offering hospitality and antagonizing some of her neighbours. Maybe she had found a happy medium for herself: as long as she didn’t feel too much at home here, maybe she could stay with a certain contentment. She didn’t know then that a few years later people would be dragged out of her cinema chained to their seats; that a large crowd held back by barriers would cheer them as they were loaded into modern-day Black Marias. Nor that Zoe herself would then leave the town for ever with a young girl who, unknown to anyone at all, was at that very moment having her destiny set in motion, as an egg fertilized by her father’s sperm sought refuge in the lining of her mother’s womb.

  Another witness to the travellers’ departure was James: alerted by Zoe, he brought his camera and took not the usual full roll of photographs but a single one. Back at the newspaper Keith printed it and put it, along with James’ brief caption, in Roger’s tray.

  When James returned from further assignments that afternoon Roger confronted him.

  ‘We can’t use this,’ he declared. ‘Why aren’t there any more?’

  ‘I didn’t need to take any more,’ James explained. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘You know what’s wrong with it,’ Roger told him bluntly.

  The single image was of Luna handing the toddler to Joe the Blow already in the van. The child, who had just knocked his elbow on the van door, was bawling. Standing behind Luna were two donkey-jacketed bailiffs, whose expressions could be read as either bored indifference or heartless persecution.

  ‘It’s the truth as I saw it,’ James declared.

  ‘As you chose to see it,’ Roger corrected him. ‘This isn’t reportage, James, it’s an interpretation of events. You’ve been here over ten years, man, what are you doing pulling a stunt like this?’ He shook his head. ‘With my retirement less than a month off,’ he complained.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to upset your final days.’

  ‘No coverage,’ Roger continued. ‘It’s so unlike you. Unprofessional. What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up,’ James replied bad-temperedly.

  ‘I can tell you this, James. Mr Baker won’t like it. Not at all.’

  ‘Oh, screw Mr Baker,’ James declared, and stalked out of the office.

  James planned to hang fifty photographs in his exhibition at the Old Fire Station in September 1986. Making the final selection was a bewildering task. Thirty or so pictures chose themselves, but as for the rest, he gazed dumbly at contact sheets of the same subject taken from different angles, eventually making up his mind only to change it again five minutes later. It was impossible.

  Sonia was his saviour. She was a harsh critic, and had no compunction about telling her lover if she thought his work was rubbish, apparently unaware that even if he agreed, it hurt to hear it from someone else. Despite his discomfort, however, her adjudication was what he needed. He narrowed his choice of a particular subject to three or four variations and offered them to her, and Sonia pronounced: ‘This one’s the best. The rest are crap, James.’

  She was usually right. Sonia was right about most things. She was down to earth and matter-of-fact, chasing her career, enjoying her social life, bringing up her sons, each day an itinerary that began with breakfast, ironed skirts and efficient briefcase, packed lunches and brushed teeth and leaving the house on time; days to be crossed to sleep on the far side with James for company. She made James feel normal, and he was grateful to her. She grounded him; she filled the emptiness inside him.

  * * *

  As the date of his exhibition approached James barely noticed what was going on around him. At the newspaper he dashed off to complete assignments in a rapid and perfunctory manner.

  ‘Your work’s been excellent lately,’ Frank (who’d taken over as chief after Roger’s retirement) told him. ‘It’s sharp and plain,’ he said. ‘At a time like this Mr Baker wants everything straightforward.’

  James wasn’t listening; nor did he join in the gloomy conversations over coffee in the office. He avoided the canteen, too, where printers and journalists exchanged worried rumours at lunch. James was busy in the darkroom at every spare moment and then rushing his final work-prints over to the Framing Workshop off Factory Road, where Karel tried to dissuade him from using the same plain ramin frame for every single picture.

  ‘They’re all different from each other,’ Karel opined. ‘Why you want the same bloody frames? We’ve got the whole range here.’

  ‘It’ll bring them together,’ James insisted. ‘It’ll help make them one homogeneous group.’

  ‘If the photos aren’t homogamous the bloody frames won’t make them that. Still, it’s your money, innit?’

  James had invitations to the private view printed, and leaflets advertising the exhibition which he distributed around town, calling in old favours and leaving small piles of them in shops and pubs, restaurants and cafés, the public library and the sports centre, as well as Zoe’s cinema and Lewis’s nightclub.

  ‘Where have you been lately?’ Lewis asked. ‘You haven’t brought that gorgeous woman of yours here for weeks.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ James shouted above the noise. ‘We can’t keep away for long.’

  The Old Fire Station provided one large, airy room for a fixed fee plus a receptionist on hand to take payment for any work sold. Zoe suggested James ask Laura to provide catering.

  ‘Ask the old man’s cook?’ James frowned. ‘Are you joking?’

  ‘No, didn’t you know? Laura does that sort of thing, catering for dinner parties and stuff, as well as at the house. She’s expanded.’

  So James rang Laura up. They’d hardly seen each other in years, but she responded as if they’d spoken yesterday.

  ‘Sure, James, sounds simple enough,’ she replied. ‘Why don’t you pop in and we’ll go through what you might need.’

  ‘I can’t come to the house, Laura,’ James told her. ‘You must know that.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘I was just testing, to see if you’re as obstinate as ever. Which you obviously are. So let’s meet somewhere in town.’

  A couple of days later they rendezvoused for coffee in a café in the covered market. James got there a few minutes early. When he looked up and saw Laura making her way between the tables towards him he felt his heart thud in his chest, constricting his lungs and making it difficult to breathe: because either the dress she was wearing was quite ingeniously unflattering, or else she was reacquiring the puppy fat of her childhood, turning back into her mother. Or else … Laura was about six months pregnant. James wrenched his eyes from Laura’s midriff to her face, and stood up to greet her.

  ‘You look wonderful,’ he said spontaneously. ‘You look great, Laura. The cliché’s true about pregnancy: you are kind of glowing.’

  Laura smiled and thanked him. He fetched her a mug of peppermint tea from the counter.

  ‘No one told me!’ James blurted out. ‘I’m just shocked.’

  ‘Well, everyone’s a bit sheepish about it,’ Laura said mysteriously. ‘As I was coming down here, James, I was wondering: will he say anything when he sees me? I thought you wouldn’t. And what do you do? Respond straight out. It means you’ve changed, James.’

  ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, you’re not a timid boy any more.’

  ‘Thanks, Laura!’ James laughed. ‘You, however, are still like a patronizing younger sister, it seems. I’m thirty years old, you know.’

  ‘We’ve hardly seen each other, have we?’ Laura frowned. She’d put her hand on James’ arm on the table. It was an instinctual gesture: she didn’t even know she’d done it.

  ‘I’ve hardly seen anyone,’ James told her.

  ‘Why be a stranger?’ Laura asked.

  James sighed. ‘I know it sounds stupid, but I can’t be in the same house as that man.’

  ‘Your father.’

 
‘Bad things happened, and whenever I’ve thought about them, they always come back to him.’

  ‘James,’ Laura said seriously, squeezing his arm. ‘It wasn’t your father that beat me. Or made me have an abortion, or anything that happened then. It was my father.’

  ‘I know, Laura, but it wasn’t just that incident with you. That was the breaking point.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted you to come back.’ She swallowed. ‘I’ve always felt responsible for you being estranged from your family.’

  ‘What?’ James exclaimed. ‘You’re not serious, Laura. It’s just between me and him, it’s nothing for you to feel bad about.’

  ‘Well, I did,’ she replied, with her head bowed. ‘Plus, of course,’ she said, brightening, ‘I’ve missed you. I mean, you and me and Alice were little buddies, weren’t we, and everyone knows what’s happened to Alice, poor thing.’

  ‘What’s happened to Alice?’ James asked worriedly.

  ‘She’s been turned into a Stepford Wife, that’s what,’ Laura informed him.

  ‘Oh, that,’ James said, relieved. ‘Maybe she’s happy,’ he shrugged. He laughed. ‘I thought we’d meet and discuss sausage rolls and cheese on sticks, Laura, and that would be that. I’ve heard you’re very businesslike.’

  ‘I am,’ she replied, pulling a notepad and pen from her handbag.

  ‘Hang on,’ James said, putting his hand on her arm. ‘So who’s the man, the father-to-be? I mean, are you with someone, or what? You’re not married, are you?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Laura frowned.

  ‘I didn’t know you were pregnant, did I?’ James said.

  ‘It’s Robert, James,’ she told him.

  James froze. Laura looked away. Then she said: ‘We’re not together or anything. We made a mistake. Well, I did, I guess, It’s my body. And, well, here we are.’

  She looked back at James. ‘I’m going to be a single parent,’ Laura told him. ‘From what I hear, you wouldn’t object to that.’

  James blinked. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘I heard you’re living with someone with two kids,’ she resumed.

  ‘Almost,’ James replied. ‘Practically.’ He felt her hand on his arm again.

  ‘So, are you in love, James?’ Laura asked, smiling.

  The child is the woman, James thought. She hasn’t changed. She disarmed me then and, twenty years later, she disarms me now. It wasn’t just that he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, lie to her. It was that Laura asking him the question made him know instantly the answer.

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘I’m not in love.’

  Laura looked sorry she’d asked. She didn’t mean to cut through his defences; she was only making conversation. James felt sorry he’d answered.

  ‘So how about this reception, then?’ he asked. ‘What can you do?’

  Laura picked up her pad and pen with relief, and they set to assessing quantities of olives and canapés.

  The private view took place on the second Saturday in September, at seven in the evening. Despite his anxiety James slept like a log the night before and woke slowly, finding Sonia doing the same; they groped their way dozily out of sleep together. James was more readily aroused in the morning than the evening; he wondered whether that was true for most people, and if so why did they court at night? Sonia had only to snuggle herself up to him in her somnolence, draining the final luxurious dregs of sleep before reluctantly facing the day ahead, to turn him on.

  It was warm under their duvet and cool outside it. They both had their eyes closed. James stretched and yawned and took Sonia’s breast in his mouth; he licked her nipple. He felt her hand caress his body, and reach his erection.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he whispered drowsily. ‘It’s late.’

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ Sonia murmured. ‘The boys’ll be watching TV.’

  They kissed; her warm, sleep-stale breath assailed him. She eased him inside her. ‘Let’s do it quickly,’ she murmured.

  It might have been because he wasn’t fully awake; it might have been the contrast with their customary leisurely love-making; but when James ejaculated the orgasm came like an electric shock and scattered his brain.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, when he’d got his breath back. ‘That was a real animal fuck.’

  ‘It was great,’ Sonia whispered.

  ‘You too?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  James spent most of the day hanging the photographs in the large, light room. He’d set aside Friday for the job, but he should have known, after his vacillation in selecting the images in the first place, how difficult it would be. Hanging fifty pictures in a room offered an infinite number of possible permutations, and his original plan to exhibit them in chronological order was clearly – when he leaned them against the walls on Friday morning – an unimaginative solution. So he spent the rest of the day arranging them according to subject matter: a cluster of music gig photos here, sports ones there, children together, wedding photos on the far wall. But when he surveyed those results, grouping them by subject seemed even more banal than chronology, and he thought there must be a more appropriate order, a less obvious but more telling pattern to his work.

  As before, he needed someone else’s help to select his own work. He didn’t want to ask Sonia – at least not outright. He did drop a hint on Friday evening when she asked how it’d gone and he told her that it was fine, no problems, only none of the prints were actually up on the walls yet, that was all; it was impossible to decide which ones went beside each other, but he’d sort it all out tomorrow.

  ‘Sure you will,’ Sonia assured him. ‘Well, you’ll have to, won’t you?’ she laughed, and failed to volunteer her services. On Saturday morning James phoned Zoe, and she joined him at the Old Fire Station at lunchtime. She rolled a cigarette, frisked herself for a light, and walked slowly around the room pondering the prints overlapping each other, leaning against the foot of the walls.

  ‘Very good, James,’ Zoe pronounced when she’d got right round, back to the door. ‘Very good. Now, I’ll just move them here and there and you tell me how they look, OK? I’m your curator’s assistant. I’m at your service.’

  And from then on it was easy. They hung the photographs on alternately long or short forks of nylon wire from a picture-rail that ran around the room. James was perfectly capable of making up his mind – Zoe only proffered three or four suggestions all afternoon – he’d simply needed someone else to reinforce his decisions, to nod or ‘yup’ agreement; even just to be there at all, allowing James to see through eyes other than his own.

  James had tended to agree with Zoe that most of the other artists in the town whose work they’d seen, so desperate for attention they organized exhibitions long before producing the work to fill them, were trivial dilettantes. Having finished hanging his photographs, and surveying the result with one of Zoe’s rollies, James concluded that he was one as well.

  He didn’t say anything to Zoe, but maybe she read his mind. ‘One of my yoga teachers told me,’ he heard her say, ‘it’s not what you’re doing now that counts, it’s what you’re doing when you’re fifty.’

  ‘You think I need another twenty years?’ he asked her.

  ‘I think I was thinking of me, actually, sweetheart,’ she smiled.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ James told her. ‘I really appreciate it. You’ve got me out of another hole. You’ve made a habit of it, you know. You’re always there for me.’

  ‘Well, you’ll probably be doing the same for someone else some time. Now, you better go and get changed so you can be back here in time. It’s almost six o’clock.’

  The evening unravelled like a dream.

  When James returned with Sonia and her sons Laura had already laid out red and white and sparkling wine, and fruit juices, and covered a trestle table with hors d’oeuvres: taramasalata, houmous, coleslaw, guacamole, smoked salmon, sliced peppers, baby tomatoes, bowls of fruit, pitta and crispbreads, devilled eggs, galantines and
other cold meats, salamis, sausages and pâtés, shrimps in avocado.

  ‘What a banquet,’ James gasped. ‘They bloody better all come.’ Sonia and the boys helped themselves. James couldn’t: he was far too nervous, both sweating profusely and icy-cold with apprehension.

  Lewis set up a mobile turntable and speakers: he’d volunteered to provide music, begging or borrowing an assortment of classical and world music to play in the background. Lewis greeted James with a Masonic handshake signifying membership of a nightlife underworld.

  ‘Looks good, Jay,’ Lewis declared. ‘I like that one best,’ he said, pointing to a photograph of twenty men in a public park all in different colours, every one of whom appeared to be hurtling in a different direction, each focused on an invisible football. There was a ball visible, suspended in the air above their heads, but they appeared oblivious to it.

  James saw a small red sticker on the wall beside the print. He looked back at Lewis, who was grinning.

  ‘Yeh, I wanted to be the first to buy one, Jay. It’ll look great in my pad.’

  Then the guests began to arrive; and more red stickers went up beside the pictures: James was selling them as runs of ten prints of each picture at £50 each. Zoe came back with a man she called Dog, and bought a photo James had taken at one of her matinées, of a group of children staring spellbound, open-mouthed, at the cinema screen.

  ‘I’ll hang it in the foyer,’ Zoe told him. ‘It reminds me of Spirit of the Beehive.’

  ‘It reminds me of us,’ Laura said.

  ‘Who?’ asked James.

  ‘Us,’ she reiterated. ‘Don’t you remember the arguments we used to have on the way home?’

  The artist photographers arrived. They went straight to the food, Karel muttering that he wasn’t to blame for the bloody frames. Then the other photographers followed them in, James’ colleagues. They and the artists seemed to recognize each other, so decisively did they avoid contact. Instead Keith the printer spent a long time staring at each photograph through his tinted glasses, shaking his head. While Roger, James’ retired chief, congratulated him on the clarity of his images until they came to three photographs together of audiences in crowded, sweaty, smoky pubs dancing to music from some unseen band.