In a Land of Plenty

by Tim Pears

  They walked back through the village suburb and onto Wotton Road. Adamina hadn’t spoken again, but her one sentence echoed in James’ mind. How come it was familiar? He was distracted, though, by his own utterances; when they traversed the stretch of road where he’d sung on the outgoing journey, so the association triggered melody in his brain, song on his lips, without him even being aware of its doing so.

  ‘Hark, hark,

  the dogs do bark,

  the beggars are coming to town,

  some in rags

  and some in jags

  and one in a velvet gown.’

  As they passed the municipal Nissen huts Adamina suddenly exclaimed: ‘It’s raining.’

  ‘Is it?’ James asked, and held out his hands. ‘You’re right,’ he agreed, feeling spots of rain so light and intermittent it was hard to identify the sensation as coming from the outside rather than the inside of his skin. Drops became visible on the tarmac.

  ‘Look,’ said James, ‘you can’t really tell whether they’re landing from above or seeping up from below, can you?’

  Adamina frowned at him. ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ she said. And James suddenly knew that her voice was familiar for the simple reason that it reminded him of Laura’s: the child’s voice had begun to acquire something of her mother’s intonation.

  They came to the churchyard, and made their way to Laura’s grave. The rain was beginning to drizzle.

  LAURA FREEMAN

  1960–1992

  REMEMBERED

  There were flowers, two or three days old, in a jar. Who’d put them there? Alice? Natalie?

  ‘We should have brought flowers,’ James admitted. ‘We could go and buy some and come back.’

  ‘I’ve got these,’ said Adamina, emptying her pockets and producing Laura’s jewellery, driver’s licence, and the wooden mixing spoon.

  ‘Do you want to bury them?’ James suggested, and Adamina considered the idea and nodded. James produced the Opinel penknife he always carried.

  ‘This’ll have to do for a trowel,’ he said. ‘Where shall we put them?’

  Adamina marked three places, and James hacked at the earth with the knife and scrabbled away loose soil with his fingers. The rain was falling. Adamina watched him from beneath their umbrella.

  Rain fell into the three small pits that James had gouged. Adamina put in Laura’s possessions, and James filled the holes in, scooping clogged soil with his hands.

  ‘Mummy will like these, won’t she?’ Adamina asked.

  ‘Yes, she will,’ James agreed. He hugged her tight, feeling her sparrow’s body through sopping clothes. ‘We better get you home,’ he said, ‘or we’ll both catch cold. Do you want to take the lookout position?’ he asked, and he hoisted her up onto his shoulders. The rain drummed on the umbrella above her head.

  It was only early afternoon but the sky had darkened. The rainfall intensified, from splattering to drumming to an indivisible roar around them. The rain collected in puddles and gushed thirstily along the gutters. Car headlights were turned on, people ran splashing for shelter, raindrops bouncing and dancing around their footsteps.

  A shock of lightning lit up the town and a few seconds later thunder rumbled. James strode as fast as he could manage with Adamina on his shoulders.

  ‘Are you all right up there?’ he yelled.

  ‘It’s a flood,’ she yelled back.

  He couldn’t see her face but could tell from the tone of voice that she was grinning.

  ‘My name is Noah,’ James shouted. ‘You’re my monkey, and we’ve got to get back to the Ark.’

  They reached Factory Road a few streets down from the flat. The rain was so heavy many car drivers had simply pulled over to the side of the road to sit out the cloudburst. When lightning spat, thunder cracked immediately afterward, in hot pursuit. People sheltered in shop doorways. James crossed the road: his shoes sloshed through the water, as if he were crossing a ford from pavement to pavement.

  Shop lights, traffic lights, car head- and tail-lights, windows, neon signs were dazzling in the pouring rain. Fuck, it’s beautiful, thought James of this sudden alchemy of man and nature.

  ‘It’s beautiful!’ he yelled up.

  They had fifty yards to go to the flat. Halfway towards it Mr Khan darted out of his shop, grabbed a box of vegetables from the rack outside and rushed back in with it. James had hold of Adamina’s calves. He couldn’t hear anything any more, with the roar of the rain and the traffic drone. ‘Orange is the colour of the human soul,’ he quoted from somewhere in his head. And then a car went out of control.

  It was a Vauxhall Viva driven by an eighteen-year-old youth, who had two friends with him. He was trying to impress them (they said later) and they egged him on (he claimed). The police estimated his speed at forty-five miles per hour. The windscreen wipers swished lazily to and fro: the rain rendered the glass a fabulous screen of splashes exploding against a sheeting cascade. It was hard enough to see through the windscreen; it was also so hypnotic in itself that you didn’t want to (the driver confessed).

  The car glanced a parked van forty yards up from James and Adamina, and veered across the road. The driver wrenched the steering wheel down to the left and brought it careering back onto his side of the road, avoiding an oncoming bus by inches. James’ hands gripped Adamina’s calves at his chest. Mr Khan came out of his shop: looking to his left, he saw the Camera Man and the little girl, drenched, approaching a few yards away. He didn’t see – and couldn’t hear – the car screeching, back over his right shoulder, approaching very much faster. At that moment he assumed, sadly, that James was staring so fiercely away from him in order to avoid eye contact.

  James was staring at the car. Coming too fast back to his side of the road the driver had again thrust the wheel down, this time to the right, and then as soon as the car responded swung it back to the left, twenty yards away from James. It was happening so fast, yet it was happening in slow motion: the car couldn’t take another swerve, and locked into a diagonal slide. It came at an angle towards James, the driver’s-side front corner pointing directly at him.

  James’ fingers gripped Adamina’s calves. He pushed up his hands, lifting her body up over his head, and felt her haunches settle on the back of his fists. The car was ten yards away. The driver’s front wheel lifted onto the pavement without being deflected a degree from its trajectory towards them. James had no time to swing back for momentum: he threw forward, hurling Adamina clear of the on-coming car, towards Mr Khan, who as the car struck James caught the flying child and cushioned the impact for them both by falling backwards across what remained of his crates of rain-soaked fruit and vegetables.

  PART FOUR

  THE HOSPITAL (4)

  JAMES’ PRIMARY INJURY was a diffuse white matter injury; the diffuse white matter is fluid cushioning the brain within the skull. It was sheared by the impact of the accident, resulting in a number of haemorrhages, and the loss of brain function.

  Zoe sat beside James, holding his hand tight as she read to him a memory from her notebook. She put it down and took off her glasses.

  ‘It’s better to be wrong in our watching than not to watch at all,’ she said. ‘You had to watch; you had to assess how things were before you acted. That’s something I’ve learned, slowly, that’s what self-confidence, or security, means: the ability to act spontaneously.

  ‘Some people are born with it, or gain it. Others never have it, they fail to gain it; they know the lack of it.

  ‘I always had it, I think – which is why it took me a while to understand what it was. I think you used to have it, James, and then lost it.

  ‘If you feel good about yourself you can act. If you don’t, then you have to watch, to discern what the rules are. You’re convinced there are rules that everyone else knows. You don’t realize there aren’t any. You think all those self-confident people out there know the rules when really they just know they don’t need them, that there aren’t any.’r />
  Zoe held James’ hand tight and looked around the quiet, half-empty ward: there were no other visitors there, only two or three patients; machines hummed; distant clattering echoes sounded from the labyrinthine depths of the hospital.

  ‘Can you hear me, James?’ she said. ‘Oh, God, I’d give my life to see you rise.’

  Deep down inside a silent world James dreamed. He came through the gates of the big house on the hill and walked along the drive. He saw himself walking: his sandy hair bleached blond, almost white, by the sun, his sticking-out ears, the anxious expression of a boy wondering why the world is empty. He started trotting towards the house; his school satchel bumped against his backside.

  It must have been the hottest day of that or any other summer: the whole world was dazzling bright, almost white in the glare of a huge sun that seemed to be hanging in the sky a few yards above him.

  He began running towards the house, and as he ran he grew older but it wasn’t strange because it was a dream, and he felt his anxious heart careering; then he saw someone in the garden with her back to him. She had on a long mac and her hair fell around her shoulders, and she was cutting dead heads off flowers or something, he couldn’t see. He ran towards her, his heart thumping, crying, ‘Laura!’ only the word wouldn’t come out of his mouth as he ran towards her. And the sun hung low in the sky and it was sinking lower, the heat was liquid and the world was bleaching out.

  She was bending over flowers and her hair fell around her shoulders. ‘Laura!’ he cried as he ran towards her, and she turned, slowly, she turned towards him. But it wasn’t Laura, it was Mary, his mother, and then he saw himself again and he wasn’t older after all, he was an eight-year-old child. And his mother smiled as he ran towards her. The sun hung huge and low and was sinking, the world was bleaching into white, and he ran into his mother’s arms.

  Zoe felt her hand being squeezed. She jumped up and stared at James’ body. Then she turned and called for a nurse. Gloria came to James’ bed. She took his pulse. It was still.

  ‘It’s over,’ Zoe whispered.

  After Zoe had gone and the doctor had come to make out a death certificate, Gloria proceeded to lay out James’ body: stuffing and binding his orifices; washing him; tying his mouth and weighting his eyes closed, and setting his arms across his chest, before rigor mortis set in.

  Not for the first time in her nursing life she had the odd feeling she was doing more for a patient now than she had done when they were alive, in this final ritual. The sun was setting outside, and spread around the dim ward, soft as candlelight.

  Gloria finished laying out the body, and telephoned down to the mortuary.

  Chapter 13

  THE TRAVELLERS

  ZOE COLLECTED ADAMINA from the big house on Saturday mornings through that winter, into 1993. They bought flowers and took them to the grave where James had been buried, his name added to Laura’s on the headstone.

  Afterwards Zoe took Adamina back to the cinema, treated her to lunch in the café, and got her to help putting up posters, passing ice-creams out of the freezer and issuing tickets for the children’s matinée. Sometimes Adamina slipped away to the projection booth. The projectionist was a shy young man with long, blond, bandannaed hair and patchwork clothes, and he left Adamina to herself. She could have gone into the auditorium but preferred to watch from up here, through a small window close to the beam of bright light, beside the machine that threw it across the dark; every now and then she’d turn and watch the film threading its steady circular way from reel to take-up spool, as if to convince herself that this mechanical device really was casting those shadows onto the screen down there.

  Adamina also explored the flat above the cinema, as James had once done; being, unlike James, even smaller than Zoe’s grandmother Agatha, she felt at ease in its dimensions.

  When Zoe told Adamina it would be time to get back to the big house in five minutes she disappeared, and Zoe found her sulking in the loos or crouched behind the popcorn counter.

  ‘Come on, sweetheart,’ she coaxed, ‘Alice ’ll be getting worried.’

  Adamina handed her a note.

  I want to stay here, it said.

  ‘Oh, honey, you can’t stay here,’ Zoe told her. ‘I mean, I’d love you to, but there’s things you need that I can’t give you. Look, come up here, sit down. See, I’m on my own, plus I’m very busy, sometimes I’m on the phone all day, some days I have to go to London to see people in meetings.’

  Adamina found a pen and scrawled another message on the same piece of paper.

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘Sweetheart, I can’t do that. You need to go to school, and to be with people your own age. You know kids only come here to the Saturday matinée.’

  Adamina’s muteness, Zoe discovered, made her loquacious. She was forty years old, and was developing the growl of a middle-aged smoker.

  ‘I know their kids are a little inert, but they’re not bad. They’re all Taureans, of course, a herd of Taureans, you might say, hey? They may be plodders but they’re honest and kind, aren’t they? You can always come and visit. Not just on Saturdays, either. We’ll teach you to operate the projector, how about that? You can be my apprentice projectionist. Come on, I have to get you home now.’

  Zoe was in no mood for celebration, but that was exactly what she was now planning: a celebration of a hundred years of cinema. The precise date of such a centenary had been a matter of debate, since the birth of cinema was a long series of experiments rather than a one-off invention. Some identified 1891 as the crucial year, in which Thomas A. Edison filed a patent for his kinetoscope camera and viewing device. Others preferred 1893, when the first public demonstration of the perfected kinetoscope took place, in New York.

  The British Film Institute had finally settled on 1995 as the year in which to stage its official events, publications and screenings: the centenary of the Lumière Brothers’ first films. Perhaps for that very reason, in a spirit of contrariness, Zoe had opted for 1994, a hundred years after the first kinetoscope parlour had opened in London: it made her think of her grandmother Agatha as a child at a demonstration of the kinematograph in the town hall. Zoe planned to screen a hundred great films throughout the following year, she told Natalie in January, explaining that she wanted to choose them herself, not be on an itinerary of regional cinemas all showing the same films.

  ‘Not all the ones I want are available, needless to say; or else they are but in torn and tattered prints,’ Zoe explained. ‘As you can see from the list here.’

  Natalie looked at Zoe’s selection of films, with many deletions and additions, and the names of distributors beside them. Natalie didn’t admit how few of the films she’d ever even heard of.

  ‘Which are the ones directed by women?’ she asked.

  Zoe blanched.

  ‘Relax,’ Natalie told her. ‘I don’t expect you to know all of them off the top of your head. Just tell me some.’

  Zoe grabbed the list off Natalie and scanned it. ‘Shit,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ Natalie asked.

  ‘There aren’t any,’ Zoe confessed. ‘I forgot to think about that. I just chose my favourite films. A hundred isn’t actually that many.’

  Natalie regarded her with scorn. ‘You could start thinking about it now, I’d say.’

  So, thanks to Natalie – who knew nothing about them – films by Larissa Shepitko, Margarethe von Trotta and Leni Riefenstahl were added to the list. A list of a hundred classics for a hundred years of cinema that would never be shown.

  Shortly after Natalie left, Zoe received a phone call from her solicitor.

  ‘It’s about the lease,’ he said.

  ‘I thought we’d sorted that out,’ she replied. ‘You said our option for renewal is assured.’

  ‘It was,’ he agreed. ‘But there’s a new complication.’ He hesitated. She heard him cough. ‘The thing is, the agents have just informed me that the owners have obtained a compulsory evic
tion order.’

  ‘Can you explain that?’ Zoe calmly requested.

  ‘The cinema is on the site of a proposed new inner ring road. Being considered by the council and the Department of Transport as part of a scheme to keep traffic out of the town centre.’

  ‘I’ve not heard of it,’ Zoe exclaimed. ‘Sounds like bullshit.’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ her solicitor agreed. ‘It appears the new owners suggested this route, north-west of the centre. They’ll get a price above market value for their property; apparently they own quite a bit more along this proposed strip.’

  ‘Jesus, I told you we should have bypassed the agents when we had a first hitch, last year or whenever it was,’ Zoe told him angrily.

  ‘Well, as I say, there are new owners now,’ he pointed out.

  ‘And who might they be?’ she demanded.

  ‘They’re called Harry Singh Developments,’ he told her. ‘I believe they’re something of a one-man show.’

  ‘I know who the hell they are,’ Zoe exploded. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ she exclaimed.

  The brass nameplate was so small Zoe had to go right up to it to confirm that these were the offices of HARRY SINGH DEVELOPMENTS. She entered the Georgian building. The door closed behind her and the noise of traffic was instantly sealed off.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the receptionist whispered.

  ‘I’d like to see Mr Singh’s secretary, please,’ Zoe requested.

  ‘Who should I say is here?’