In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  ‘It’s an illusion, then,’ James told her. ‘Ever since I was a child I’ve felt these two conditions of my life: freedom and loneliness. Right now I feel neither and that’s the problem. Maybe it’s my destiny to be free and lonely and I shouldn’t fight that, I should accept it, embrace it.’

  Zoe shook her head. Her ringleted hair rippled and her brass earrings tinkled.

  ‘James Freeman,’ she said, ‘maybe your destiny’s a psychoanalyst. Maybe I’m not the one to help you out here.’

  She got up.

  ‘I’ve a film to screen,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a cinema to run. You can let yourself out after you’ve washed the dishes.’

  She reached the door, and turned round. ‘Nothing I say can make you accept yourself,’ she told him. ‘But I accept you. More than that. I … you know, I feel … Oh, shit.’ She turned and went down the stairs. James took the plates to the sink.

  James walked. Out of the cinema and down to the canal, along the rutted, muddy towpath, north out of town, and over to the meadow. It was a warm late-summer day. James was thinking, I am wretched; he thought, This is my town, and this is James walking …

  Onto the meadow, five hundred acres of flat land, of space to breathe into on an overcast late-summer Sunday. There were blue crows, and the sun broke through: cows and horses slowly turned towards it; coal vans on the railway track flickered through the trees.

  He crossed the meadow to the river thinking, I am worthless, but also seeing, and he wanted to see outside himself. A heron stood on the bank. A boat from the rowing club came, its cox a midget who shrieked at gasping men, their eyes closed, somnambulists locked into a dream of pain. Their oars smacked the water, then rose and beat the boat like a drum. And James was a sleepwalker too and he felt their pain, their athletic ecstasy of endurance.

  Children’s sailing dinghies, bright sails flapping and thudding, danced like fireflies around a sluggish barge. A mallard skimmed along the river; perhaps, James thought, he’s really underwater and it’s only his reflection in the air. There is always more to see. He walked back across the meadow. An anguished jogger in mulberry tights interrupted a flock of geese in silent meditation, grey on green grass. They cackled as they scattered, and rose with hollow wings and flew across the sun.

  Beyond, a gardener scooped up horse manure, a kite ripped up the sky, men flew model aeroplanes, the drone of their engines inexplicable music. And two tired lovers walked barefoot slowly; the smell of mint, lifted by their footsteps, will always remind them of this moment.

  He crossed the allotments. Wiry men and leather-skinned women with crooked backs put tools away in potting-sheds; onions overflowed the baskets of ancient bicycles. He took an apple from an abandoned tree, and there was no past or future.

  He walked straight through the Infirmary, along its arterial corridor. He loved – despite or perhaps because of his own pubescent incarceration – the smell of hospitals, in the wards where miracles took place, where the afflicted gritted their teeth and prayed for return to the human race.

  Outside, a bunch of people chatted around placards saying SUPPORT THE NURSES and SAVE OUR HOSPITAL and HANDS OFF THE NHS.

  In the road a yellow-clad street-cleaner, his shovel a shrimping net, fished for rubbish in the gutter. A black man in a white car with a sunroof passed and music escaped like a trail, an aroma, tantalizing, thumping rhythm and thuddy bass and a voice saying, ‘PUMP UP THE VOLUME, PUMP UP THE VOLUME, PUMP UP THE VOLUME, DANCE! DANCE!’ The music burst through James’ head and he laughed with the man telling the world he was alive.

  Another driver threw litter out of his window. A boy and girl sat cross-legged on the pavement with their dogs, playing tin whistles. James emptied his pockets of change to the girl with plaited hair and a ring through her nose and he smelled sandalwood as he bent towards her. He walked by a man in his mid-fifties, preoccupied, worrying a cigarette with toothless lips; his trousers were too short: the cruel, thoughtless badge of institution. So many images. I am a camera. ‘You’ll wear your eyes out, James,’ said Zoe in his head.

  James entered the park, sounds came from all directions. A hesitant beat from the tennis court; small boys whose bicycles were really motorbikes changed gear with a guttural whine; the cloc, and cloc, from a bowling green where pensioners shed their years in slow-motion duels. Then he was lost in the trees on the far side, monumental trees, oak, beech, sycamore. The wind giggled; the trees whispered to one another. They sounded like the voices of young children.

  The wide sky became blue and empty save for vapour trails of silent planes. Knees green with chlorophyll stains, two sisters turned cartwheels on the grass, ponytails flying. A man and a woman lay side by side; it was hard for James to tell from where he walked whether they were crying or sighing. So much to see.

  Children were running, a dog was barking. In an empty playground James swung higher and higher, his stomach laughing.

  He walked up the hill, past the house on the hill, the walled garden of his childhood, walking in the dusk, and on out to the ring road and round to his father’s factory on the edge of town. He didn’t pause there but walked back in the dark along Factory Road. This is my town, he thought. I must see everything.

  All the way into town along Factory Road past four Indian restaurants, two Chinese, one Jamaican, two Italian, five pubs, two greasy spoons, one kebab take-away, one fish and chips and a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  Past the Golden Scissors Hair Salon, the Tattoo Studio, Honest Stationery, Valumatic Laundry, Joe’s Discount Store, Gala Bingo, Bilash Tandoori Take Away (We Deliver), Bombay Emporium, Fundamental Whole-foods, Good Gear Second-hand Clothes, the Inner Bookshop, Vinyl 1234 (We buy sell exchange CDs Tapes LPs), Bangladeshi Islamic Education Centre and Mosque, Chopstick Restaurant, Ashraf Brothers General Grocers & Halal Meat, Hughes Cars of Distinction, Star of Asia (Fully Licensed – Air Conditioned), Boots, Tesco, the parish church of SS Mary and John, and a hundred other shops and institutions all along the road. This is my town.

  He was soon back beside the canal by the brewery behind the prison, and he followed it towards the town centre. The mud on the towpath had dried, ossifying push-chair grooves and horses’ hooves, cigarette butts and bicycle ruts; here were a child’s footsteps, immortalized, at least until it rained again. At that moment he felt soft drops kiss the skin of his face, and saw others alight upon the water.

  He walked past Sonia’s house and crossed the bridge into the town centre. A radio somewhere played the Moonlight Sonata and the rain in the streetlights was falling. He walked in the rain past pubs spilling out quiet girls and raucous girls, youths cheerful and youths belligerent with beer, and two down-and-outs begging still and staggering, their brains and bodies fused. Twenty yards away shattered glass scattered on the dazzling pavement.

  He scrounged a can of Coke at a kebab van from an Arab whom he recognized from Lewis’s house. He leaned against a wall in the falling rain and drank the Coke and smoked a cigarette till the cigarette was soggy. I am free and lonely, he thought. He felt empty, and he felt a sense of exaltation that made him tremble in the falling rain. He walked on to the bedsit, took off his clothes, towelled himself dry and collapsed on his bed.

  James handed in his notice at the newspaper. No one was surprised.

  ‘I’d do the same in your position,’ Frank told him. ‘I wouldn’t have worked for my old man.’

  No one made a fuss of James’ departure – no party, no farewell – because others were also leaving, including the editor, Mr Baker. It was said that he went upstairs to a meeting with the new proprietor, Charles Freeman, came back down to his office and cleared his desk without a word to anyone, not even his secretary.

  James also gave notice to his landlady and, with Lewis driving a hired van, removed his possessions from the bedsit in one load and into a rented flat above a chemist halfway up Factory Road. It took another load to move his stuff out of Sonia’s.

  ‘What do you think love is?’ she
demanded. ‘We were nearly there, you moron. I was never a bloody princess. You see me yelling at my kids, you see me tired and dirty. I know you think I’m superficial. How could I know what you want? Did you ever tell me? You never talk. You have to work at it, James.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sonia,’ he said.

  ‘Fuck your sorry,’ she told him. ‘You’re so stupid. I thought you were serious. I should have realized you weren’t. You’re not grown up, are you? You don’t know how it works, do you?’

  Sonia didn’t cry. She was too angry to cry, and she contained her anger. James packed up as quickly as he could as Lewis stood by the van outside, and he stayed just long enough to give his abrupt abandonment the finality he’d decided upon.

  ‘You’re a bastard, James,’ Sonia told him on the doorstep. ‘I hope for other women’s sake you grow up.’

  He thought she was probably right. He felt no guilt. Or at least, what remorse he did feel was outweighed by relief, and release. The flat was dirty and cheap, on the second storey above the chemist and another flat, and it comprised two large and one small room, plus a kitchen and a bathroom. The interior staircase had been boarded up, and the flat was reached by an iron staircase at the back. The metal stairs bent under the climber’s feet and then sprang back a moment later, giving a person the impression they were being followed.

  James piled his belongings in the middle of the large room overlooking the street and bought white paint, a roller and brushes. He painted everything white – walls, ceilings, skirting-boards, windows and doors. The decorating took a week, and he played the same tapes over and over again as he worked: Vivaldi’s L’Estro Armonico, Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. The music swirled around; the flat became new, reeking of oil paint and emulsion.

  He bought an answerphone and installed it with the message: ‘James Freeman is unable to answer. Please speak after the long tone and I’ll get back to you.’ He let the phone ring and the machine click on, and then stood there listening to callers’ faltering messages. He answered them assiduously, not with return calls but with postcards, half a dozen of which he had made from his own photographs, saying how busy he was and asking them to call again.

  He also bought a half-size, second-hand washing-machine with a mind of its own. As it spun it bounced around the kitchen, and reminded James of pogo-ing nights lost in noise ten years earlier. Sometimes in those first weeks, indeed, he joined it, banging his head on the ceiling, giggling to himself the deranged laughter of a recluse, while the Clash roared at full volume inside his skull. Until finally his neighbours on the floor below – three students at the college of further education – introduced themselves all at once. They invited him downstairs and showed him where the plaster from the ceiling in their kitchen was snowing into their supper.

  ‘I’ll wedge the washing-machine in one place,’ James promised. ‘Otherwise I won’t be able to complain when you have parties.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ they assured him. ‘We won’t bother you.’

  ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘You’re students. You should do.’

  ‘There’s not much time for that kind of thing,’ they explained. ‘We’ve got degrees to get. We want good jobs.’

  ‘You make me feel old,’ James said. ‘Or young. I’m not sure which.’

  Laura was almost eight months pregnant when she moved into Alfred’s cottage tucked inside the wall around the grounds. Each of Alfred’s three successors in the garden was a specialist, so that Ron tended the flower beds, Henry disappeared into the walled vegetable garden and young John mowed the lawns. They each owned their own battery of power tools – strimmers, chainsaws, rotovators and Flymos – besieging the house with a whining, raucous racket of activity, while failing to meet the horticultural standards that pottering old Alfred had maintained to the end, because, as he’d often explained, the secret to hard work is not showing off but working steady. The three gardeners drove into work from outside, clocking on (like the rest of Charles’ employees) at eight o’clock each morning, and Alfred’s cottage had lain vacant over the years since his death.

  Laura woke up one autumn dawn with the baby kicking inside her after dreaming of her mother for the first time in many years. It was as close to a memory as a dream can be, Edna at her kitchen table surrounded by the Freeman children, smiling her fat cherubic smile as they demanded one cake or pastry after another, and each one she had somehow to concoct instantaneously from ingredients before her. Her fat fingers were lost in dough and jam and cream and sugar as she performed culinary conjuring tricks, producing an apple turnover for Simon, a jam doughnut for Robert, a meringue for Alice, sliding them in and out of the oven, all the while smiling her fat-woman’s smile through a pale cloud of white flour. And yet, Laura knew, watching – in the dream – from across the kitchen, although her mother was smiling, was happy, was a willing, infinitely yielding servant, she was also dying.

  Laura woke up, pulled on her dressing-gown, and walked through the empty, foggy morning across the garden to the vacant cottage. Alfred’s furniture was more or less untouched after all those years and Laura made her way through the musty rooms, her mind racing, seeing little of what was there but rather how she could transform it.

  At breakfast Laura told Charles she thought it was time she moved out of the house, and she asked him whether there would be any problem in her taking over the gardener’s cottage by the south wall. Charles agreed. He treated Laura with more respect than he had her mother: he always checked first whether it would be all right if an Italian media magnate could be fed and watered this weekend, or extra people come to next Sunday lunch, rather than simply foisting such inconveniences upon her.

  The cottage had stood idle and neglected for fifteen years only as an oversight, perhaps because it was so close to the house that no one noticed it. Charles congratulated himself on having kept it empty all this time for just such a need.

  By the time she gave birth Laura had replaced most of the furniture in the cottage, redecorated from top to bottom, and completely redesigned the kitchen, planning to expand her catering business as soon as she’d recovered from maternity. Those around the big house shuddered when they saw her, in a headband and swollen dungarees, moving tables and chairs, scraping and sanding and filling walls from dawn to dusk, and waddling up and down a ladder to paint the window sills on crisp October mornings. But Laura knew she was strong. And she suspected that the boy growing inside her was even stronger.

  That child was so active inside her belly that Laura thought he was trying literally to break free of his walls of confinement. ‘Let me out!’ he seemed to scream. ‘I want to live out there!’

  Robert stayed away, as he had throughout the pregnancy; no one had seen him, no one knew where he was, apart from occasional rumoured sightings around the town. And Alice’s hands were full with her own offspring. But Natalie stayed close to Laura.

  The contractions started when she was painting the ceiling of the last room in the cottage. She lay down on the floor, gasping, and suddenly Natalie appeared in the doorway, breathless herself. She dragged Laura to the car, despite her protestations that this was only the beginning.

  ‘You can’t go on what the midwives say,’ Natalie told her nervously. ‘We’re not taking any chances.’

  By the time they got to the hospital the contractions had receded and the doctor, after a brief examination, advised them to go back home.

  ‘The head’s nowhere near engaged,’ she explained. ‘I should get a good night’s sleep if I were you. It’s your first, you know you ought to be prepared for a long labour.’

  On their way out of the doors of the maternity ward Laura told Natalie she needed the lavatory, so they turned round and went back to the Ladies. Natalie refused to leave Laura’s side and followed her in. Laura entered a vacant cubicle and instead of sitting on the toilet seat, as she meant to, she abruptly squatted on the floor, her waters broke, and it was
there that a short time later Laura gave birth to her daughter, Adamina, who came squelching and sliding into Natalie’s astonished, unwavering hands before she could even call a nurse.

  Zoe, who believed in reincarnation, had advised Laura that she should get someone to watch her baby closely when it was born. Adamina arrived, after months of shifting and kicking, in a state of calm. Her eyes open, she gazed at the people around her – as well as the walls and fittings of the ladies’ toilets – with a look of curiosity, as if with a sense of déjà vu, ascertaining that things hadn’t changed so very much since the last time she was here. But with a look also, Laura maintained, of purpose, as if saying: ‘Right. This time, you lot, we’re going to do things my way.’

  And then she opened her mouth and her lungs and let out a scream that echoed around those cubicles.

  James had business cards printed saying: JAMES FREEMAN – FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER. He installed a darkroom in the small room of the flat, where he could develop black-and-white, and opened an account with a colour lab in St Peter’s.

  He began with postcards. Bulk orders of his six calling cards worked out so cheap that he had 500 printed of each, and hawked the surplus ones around shops to offset the printing costs. While doing so he noticed that there were hardly any postcards of the town itself; the same few appeared in every shop and looked like they’d been taken twenty years ago, judging by car number plates and people’s clothes. Their corners curled in the stands like stale sandwiches.

  ‘There’s not much of a call for them,’ one shop proprietor told him.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ James agreed.

  ‘It’s not exactly a tourist town, is it?’ she said.

  ‘We get plenty of visitors, I’d have thought,’ he demurred. ‘Enough, anyway.’

  All through the spring and summer of 1987 James woke to the alarm an hour before dawn, five days a week, and cycled to a different vantage point on the hills outside town. There he set up his tripod and waited for sunrise. When the day came grey and overcast he packed his stuff and went straight home, but often enough the sun made the brown sandstone buildings glow. The town’s horizon was, James had to admit, nondescript; but church spires rose through morning mist in the river valley, and he used long lenses and colour filters.