In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  He would have drunk more, to obliterate even those few fugitive glimpses, to drown her deep down, but he had also to function for Adamina, and so it was a kind of controlled alcoholism. He waited till she’d fallen asleep before he hit the bottle, and in the morning he hauled himself out of the aching sludge of drunken sleep to run her bath, wash, shave, make breakfast.

  No more dreams; and no more photos. James would take no more, and neither, it seemed, would Adamina: she had abandoned her camera. But then one evening at the beginning of November she produced it from a drawer and brought it over to James and mimed rewinding the exposed film inside, which James duly did. He sprang the catch on the camera and removed the film. Adamina tugged him towards the darkroom.

  ‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘It’s your bedtime.’ But she persisted. ‘Why the urgency now?’ he asked. ‘This film’s been sitting inside your camera for months.’

  She made no response to his question, only walked to the darkroom and stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips. James felt irritation rise fast inside him.

  ‘We’ll do it tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘Bedtime is bedtime.’

  Adamina didn’t move, just glared at him from the doorway in a familiar posture, showing a side of her character that had been buried these last months of mutual support. Disobedience, obstinacy; a step towards a normality they would have to reach. She was a seven-year-old child. Of course he’d have to be a parent, strict on occasions. But maybe not yet.

  ‘OK,’ James said. ‘We’ll compromise. We’ll make a deal. You go to bed and I promise I’ll develop the negative this evening, and then tomorrow we can make prints. How’s that? All right?’

  Adamina considered his offer, and nodded her head. It was a deal.

  James put his hands through the elasticated arms into the black changing bag. Snapped off the metal rim of the tiny capsule using his fingernails, extracted the film, attached the end to the developing-canister spool and wound it on. Pulled the film free of its old spool and peeled off the minute strip of sticky tape. Put the spool inside the canister and twisted on its lid till it fastened tight. Double-checked that it hadn’t wound on askew; and unzipped the bag.

  Pour in developer, turn it upside down and back again, shake it around, keep the liquid swirling, across every surface of the coiled film inside. Wash the canister out with water, and repeat the action for fixer. Then unscrew the lid and place the canister in the sink under a flow of water from the cold tap, rinsing it through thoroughly. Familiar smells; tedious and soothing ritual.

  When James freed the strip of wet, developed negative he held it up to the light and studied it, not its inverted compositions but rather to check both that no part of it was undeveloped and that it was sufficiently exposed in the first place to offer decent prints. Then he hung it up to dry, with a weight pinched on the end so that gravity might uncoil its wound-up energy. He was already trembling for a drink.

  An hour later James was on the sofa, placid, a third of the way through the bottle, watching TV as he did every evening now: his attention drifted towards it and nothing came back. Whether he had dreams the memory of which whisky erased or whether booze flooded the intricate nervous connections of dreams, he wasn’t sure. But the TV he watched and retained nothing, a perfect anaesthesia.

  He didn’t know what moved him: he was surprised to find himself walking to the darkroom, already planning to surprise Adamina in the morning.

  The negative was dry. He cut it into strips of six frames each. He put chemicals in their trays and switched the light to infrared; laid the strips of negative on a sheet of photographic paper, with a pane of glass to flatten them, and exposed a contact strip. It came up fast in the developer and he washed it and put it in the fixer, and then left it in the tray while he slid the negatives into the sleeves of a plastic page. The first, though, he placed in the neg-holder of the enlarger ready to print, and cut up a sheet of photographic paper into test strips. He put them back in their black plastic packet and switched on the main light, ran the contact strip under water for a while, then held it up to the light to have a good look.

  They were the pictures Adamina had taken at the wedding. They began outside the churchyard, with James grinning while shielding himself from a cascade of confetti but only Laura’s back, because she’d turned to get into the car. The photos progressed through the reception in and around the white marquee on the lawn; and ended with images of increasing obscurity, taken outside as night fell, until the last ones were entirely black.

  James made a print of each of them. They were taken at odd angles, with people’s limbs cut off by Adamina’s eccentric framing, and some were out of focus, though that was difficult to determine because James laboured through a screen of tears. He made 10″ × 8″ prints of Laura laughing at something Natalie was saying, of Simon fooling with Alice’s children, Charles making his impromptu speech, Laura dancing with Garfield. The last photograph James printed had been taken at dusk, from the marquee towards the house: the empty lawn and there beyond, standing at the sunlit window on the landing directly above the front door, was Robert, watching. James hadn’t seen the figure on the contact sheet. Now the image came up on the paper in the developing fluid and James grabbed it clear of the chemical and held it up and stared at it until, without water washing it, the developer carried on working and drew the image into black. And so James had to make another one, his fingers fumbling with hatred. He wished more than anything in his life that he’d succeeded in strangling his brother all those years ago, when he came home and found Laura beaten.

  James printed all the photos; and he wondered whether over the years he’d been dreaming of this moment, of standing in this darkroom, printing these photographs of his wedding, taken by Adamina. At four o’clock he went to bed sober for the first time in months, and the alarm clock woke him from a dream of a football game, stunning in its banality.

  Charles Freeman put a brave face on things. He’d always regarded introspection as a recipe for mental illness, and saw no sense in looking backwards: he lived in the present and looked to the future. Unpleasant things happened in life and one had to ignore them and move on. How could a man cope with what Robert had done if he dwelled on it? You had to press on, find hope and cause for gladness in other things, he told Alice; like her children who showed us all the way ahead, he said: they didn’t mope around, they knew they had their lives to live and brooding on what couldn’t be undone would only hinder them.

  As far as work was concerned, Charles was seventy-four years old and had taken, he claimed, early retirement: bankruptcy had come just in time, he declared, otherwise he might have spent the rest of his life as an overstressed workaholic and had no time for his garden, for his grandchildren, for the yoga exercises that Simon had recommended. Hundreds of people who’d worked for him had been made redundant, and now hated the boss they’d once admired, but if he felt guilty Charles refused to show it, urging everyone else to treat changed circumstances as a new opportunity, as he was doing.

  ‘Life is just beginning,’ he told Alice in a voice without conviction.

  The truth was that something was happening to Charles, but no one could quite tell what it was. There appeared an unaccustomed gauntness in his features and a certain sluggishness in his once abrupt manner.

  ‘Is your digestion functioning normally, Father?’ Simon asked him.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Charles replied. No one had heard those three words pass his lips before.

  Charles began to weigh himself regularly, and he confided in Simon one evening that he weighed less than last week, and last week less than the week before. Was it possible, he wondered, that he was losing weight from inside, and was it connected to the weariness in his bones? He was growing no smaller: his tailored clothes still fitted him with flattering grace; belts were tightened to the same notch. He wasn’t contracting, shrinking; he was emptying; he was losing substance.

  Simon advised his father to stick to a diet
high in carbohydrate while taking plenty of exercise.

  ‘In fact, I’ll join you, Father,’ he said, ‘let’s go for a walk. Don’t worry about your weight, it’s normal for the metabolism to change with a shift in lifestyle. It’ll all iron itself out.’

  They strolled out of the gate and along the road out of town, taking by force of habit the customary direction they’d driven in each morning, and found themselves heading for the factory, which they reached after half an hour. Except that it wasn’t there. The entire site was shockingly denuded, flattened rudely as a skinned animal. It stretched before them, a vast plain of mud and sand. In one far corner was a pile of rubble, the last evidence of the demolished buildings, not yet carted away. In the opposite corner, along the road, rebuilding had already begun, and they walked towards it past large noticeboards proclaiming East Side Scientific Park, and offering light industrial units for sale. Underneath was emblazoned HARRY SINGH DEVELOPMENTS, and the names of architects and building contractors.

  Already three warehouse-type buildings appeared to have been completed, if not yet occupied. They looked impossibly new, plastic, unblemished; Simon couldn’t imagine them as functional workshops of industrial production. He and Charles walked slowly through the deserted building site to where others were under construction. Two gigantic cranes loomed over them; a long heavy chain swung slowly, clanking. The workmen had packed up and left the site an hour or two earlier but something of the energy of their activity lingered; the din of construction could be imagined, faintly. Simon empathized with what his father must feel: the business he had built up, until at its height five hundred men and women worked here, the largest private employer in the town, exporting parts all over the world, was really gone; the manufacturing base of Charles Freeman’s empire had been erased from the surface of the earth.

  ‘You know, Father,’ said Simon, ‘an ancient Persian surgeon, Rhazes, sited the first hospital in Baghdad by hanging carcasses at various points around the city. Where the flesh took the longest to putrefy, that was where they built the hospital.’

  ‘If there was a market for ruddy useless information,’ Charles replied, ‘you’d be a rich man, Simon.’

  Simon stood behind his father, looking across the site. He realized he was some inches taller than Charles, something he’d barely noticed before. He reached a reassuring hand forward towards Charles’ sloping shoulders, and squeezed them; his father smelled like wood.

  After a few moments Charles turned around, with a wry grin on his face.

  ‘Well, old son,’ Charles said, ‘we had a fair crack of the whip, didn’t we? It was fun while it lasted. And now it’s some other bugger’s turn.’

  Simon shook his head, turned away from his father, gazed across the wasteland. He’ll never change, Simon thought; stubborn old sod. When he turned back, Charles had sat down on a stack of bricks.

  ‘Just need a rest,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute.’

  Charles wasn’t the only one in the family made redundant by the closure of his factory, of course. Simon, too, had lost a job. But he took responsibility – at Harry’s suggestion – for the sale of all the computers (whose installation had caused all that trouble years before). He sold most of them to a small company that dealt in the burgeoning market for hard- and software; they asked if he had any more where these came from and so he got hold of some, and before he knew it Simon was making a new living.

  He’d also discovered he had another gift. His weekly evenings of alternative health discussion had grown into something between a surgery and a seminar. Experts came to address them, like the American doctor who explained that most serious illnesses are caused by chronic dehydration, and if people only drank ten glasses of tap water daily they could cure themselves of osteoporosis, rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, high blood pressure, asthma and peptic ulcers.

  ‘People think thirst is signified by a dry mouth,’ he explained; ‘but a dry mouth is the last, not the first, signal of a profound, chronic thirst.’

  The group took his advice and found that it worked, except that the busier ones had to curtail the practice because they couldn’t afford to waste so much of the day peeing. Until, that is, another guest expert advocated amaroli, the drinking of one’s own urine, because it contains both melatonin to cure eczema and psoriasis and a naturally diluted homoeopathic dose of the body’s illnesses, so that a regular draught acts as an autonosode to boost the immune system.

  At the same time, Simon observed it was taking ever longer to say goodbye at the end of each session: people shook his hand and seemed reluctant to let go, they embraced him, and the boldest asked him to put his hand on some ailing part of their bodies. The bald woman wouldn’t leave until he’d laid hands on her smooth skull; Mr Smith had Simon touch his stomach.

  They finished their sessions with a group massage, whereby they took it in turns to lie down on a mat and have everybody’s hands knead a different part of them, swapping techniques and feedback. Increasingly it happened that the others would cease their own ministrations to watch what Simon was doing, and to listen to the recipient of his restorative touch, who without realizing it was purring like a blissful cat.

  At the beginning of November a psychic healer came to give a talk: her demonstration wasn’t very successful, and afterwards she confessed to Simon that she’d been distracted by his aura, because it was a mirror image of her own.

  ‘You’ve got the healing power,’ she told him. ‘You should use it.’

  * * *

  During the second week of November James and Adamina were walking the last untrodden streets of the town – inaccessible avenues and odd cul-de-sacs that could only be reached, now, via streets they’d walked before, some many times. Adamina pored over the map in search of them.

  I could become a taxi driver, James thought. He didn’t say it out loud; it sounded too flippant, and he knew that Adamina’s game was becoming more serious the nearer they came to its conclusion. The map told the story, though how Adamina perceived it James wasn’t sure: either hope was being squeezed out by the inexorable strokes of the red pen; or else they were getting closer to the centre of the maze – even if it was, finally, right out on the far edge of town, in Wotton: a dead-end lane that had been cut off, stopped, by the ring road.

  That morning, Thursday, 12 November, they looked at the map before setting out.

  ‘This is where we’re heading, then,’ James showed Adamina. She studied the map for a moment, turned and ran downstairs.

  She doesn’t want to go, James thought. She’s hiding down there. I’ll just have a cigarette, then I’ll go and get her. We have to do this today. He sat down. Or maybe we don’t; maybe we should pin the map to the wall and leave it with this one last lane unvisited.

  Adamina, however, re-emerged a few minutes later, with a handful of Laura’s things: a bracelet, earrings, driver’s licence, a wooden mixing spoon with a circular hole in it.

  ‘What do you want to do with those?’ James asked her.

  She shrugged: she didn’t know. She stuffed them in the pockets of her coat.

  When they got outside Adamina looked up at the grey sky and frowned.

  ‘I’ve brought the umbrella,’ James said, taking her hand. ‘Come on.’

  During the course of their journey across town James sang three or four songs, which he often did as they walked, songs from his own childhood that he’d long forgotten and then rediscovered through a tape of Adamina’s that they’d kept in Laura’s car and played on long journeys.

  ‘I buyed me a little hen

  all speckled, grey and fair,

  I sat her on an oyster shell

  she hatched me out a hare,

  the hare it sprang a handsome horse

  full fifteen handsful high …’

  James hoped that music might be therapeutic; that Adamina might find it easier to begin to speak again in sung rather than spoken words. An accompanying tune might render words less daunting. He
held no great store by these intentions – he didn’t want to put any pressure on her – James just sang and hummed them as he walked. James was tone-deaf; he couldn’t sing in tune. With Adamina as his captive audience, though, as they walked along wide, airy Wotton Road – past the church; the DSS, tax office and driving-test centre in old Nissen huts set back from the road – he felt no self-consciousness. She was even appreciative: when he hesitated before a line then came into it with a flourish, when he did a quick jig on the wide pavement in time with the rhyme, she grinned, and even clapped when he bowed once. But she didn’t join in: Adamina remained a mute audience.

  They walked on, into Wotton village, as it was still called, though the town had long since spread out and absorbed it, another suburb but of old houses and cottages. They passed its small store. A shopper had tied a dog up outside, a wiry mongrel, and Adamina stopped to stroke it. It struggled to enjoy her attention while keeping an anxious eye on the shop door, from which its master or mistress should emerge.

  They carried on, past thatched and wisteria-covered cottages, and reached the lane they’d been heading for. It stretched before them for some eighty yards, then turned a corner and, James knew from the map, continued for roughly the same distance as far as the ring road, whose rumble they could hear clearly. One house stood on the corner, and there would be a small cluster near the end of the next stretch.

  ‘Here we are, Mina,’ said James. ‘Let’s check it out,’ he declared light-heartedly, but then he felt a pull on his sleeve and heard the word:

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘You want to hang on a sec?’ he asked. ‘Fair enough,’ he added, before registering the fact that Adamina had spoken.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, turning to her, but she interrupted him.

  ‘Let’s go to the grave to see Mummy,’ Adamina suggested. She spoke in a hoarse, rusty voice, without a lisp. James nodded, and they turned around and retraced their steps, James floored with relief that she’d spoken. Her voice had changed. It was tentative – understandable for lack of practice – and so sounded more serious, older, an impression completed by the lack of a lisp. Yet her new voice was, somehow, though different, more rather than less familiar. He ached for her to say more, but he didn’t want to scare her voice away. Maybe the words had slipped past her defences and she would retreat inside her shell of muteness once more.