Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  8

  ‘CARAVANS,’ Ellie had said, as if it were a magic word, the secret of the universe she’d been saving up to tell him. And she must have known how it would have touched something in him and made him prick up his ears and listen and not just think it was a damn stupid answer to anything.

  ‘Caravans, Jacko.’

  There they were, sitting up in the big bed at Jebb on a July afternoon, and he’d realised later that she must have planned it that way. Not that he’d resisted. And anyway for him the word did have a kind of magic.

  Ellie would have remembered—though she hadn’t been there—those weeks in Brigwell Bay. One week in July, two years running. She’d have remembered him talking about them afterwards, talking at a gabble, perhaps, that wasn’t like Jack’s normal way with speech. He was thirteen, fourteen, so was Ellie. Not so long before her mum made her run for it.

  Ellie hadn’t been there. ‘Send me a postcard, Jack.’ And he had. Greetings from Brigwell Bay. ‘Miss Eleanor Merrick, Westcott Farm, Marleston …’ God knows if she’d kept it. Or kept them, since she’d got another one too, the second year.

  Maybe they were here right now, those postcards, in the Lookout, in some secret stash of hers. Maybe they were at the back of a drawer, right here in this bedroom. They might have been the first postcards Ellie had ever received. They were certainly the first Jack had ever written. And the first of the two would have been a serious struggle for him, if his mother hadn’t helped him and, after a little thought, suggested he write, ‘Wish you were here.’ And he had. He hadn’t known it was the most uninventive of messages. He’d written it. And he’d wished it. He’d even thought sometimes, there at Brigwell Bay with Mum and Tom: suppose it was just him and Ellie, just him and her in the caravan. It was a sort of burning thought. But on the other hand, sometimes he was having such a whale of a time that he forgot altogether about Ellie.

  And then again, perhaps those unoriginal words on the back of a postcard might have touched a tender, even burning spot inside Ellie, such that she would have wished to send an answer back (though it was only a week), ‘Me too, Jack.’ But she hadn’t sent an answer or even, later, expressed the wish. And after he’d come back and spouted on about the good time he’d had, she hadn’t even given him much of a thank-you for that postcard or seemed to want to pursue the subject. By which Jack understood, at least by the second time around, that she was jealous.

  And then her mum had skedaddled.

  So Jack had been careful, ever since, out of respect for Ellie, not to mention those visits to Brigwell Bay or the postcards he’d sent each time. As if, even for him, after a while, those two trips hadn’t really meant so much or remained so special in his memory. Whereas the truth was they were fantastic. They were the best times of his life up to that time. Maybe even, he sometimes thought, the best ever.

  How could he have said that to Ellie, ‘They were the best times of my life,’ when she wasn’t even there, without inflaming her jealousy? Girls. But how many girls did he know? He only knew Ellie. How could he have said it by the time they were having those private sessions at Westcott Farmhouse, without getting into even hotter trouble. What, not these times, Jacko?

  Let alone say it when they were sitting up like that, each cradling a mug of tea, stark naked, in the Big Bedroom.

  So he’d shut up and pretended it was all forgotten and had never been so important to him. For Ellie’s sake. He could be good to Ellie.

  But Ellie would have known he was only covering. He had a wall of a face, he was born with it, but Ellie was trained in seeing through it. And she’d have known, that afternoon, what a tender spot she was still touching in him and how it couldn’t fail to put a seal on things when she said that word. Caravans. As if it was the password and the key to their future.

  And the truth still was: those weeks had been fantastic.

  When Jack was thirteen and Tom was not yet six Vera had taken them both for the first of two holidays at Brigwell Bay, Dorset, not far from Lyme Regis. And what had made them particularly fantastic was that they’d stayed in a caravan.

  They’d gone on their mother’s instigation and insistence. She must have said to Michael, with perhaps more than her usual firmness with him, that she was going to give those two boys a holiday, a seaside holiday that when they’d grown up they’d always have to remember. They weren’t going to go without that. And Michael must have relented—for two years running—though Jack would have counted then, even at thirteen and fourteen, as full-time summer labour on the farm.

  So they’d taken what was for them an epic journey, part bus, part train, to the south coast of England and (if only just) across the border into another county. And they’d stayed in a caravan, in a small, three-acre field, with hedges all around it, a little way back from the cliffs and the beach below. There were only six caravans, positioned any old how, and compared to the snazzy, lined-up giants Jack can see in the distance now, they were like rabbit hutches on wheels. But they each had a name, and theirs, both years, had been ‘Marilyn’.

  Those two stays in a caravan in Brigwell Bay were, by the time Jack sat up in bed with Ellie on that July afternoon, the only two holidays he (or Tom) had ever had, and he still might have said that during each of them he’d never been happier. So much so that during the first one, finding himself suddenly so clearly and unmistakably happy, he’d wondered if he’d ever, really, been happy before.

  When he sat down at the tiny pale-yellow Formica-topped table in the caravan and wrote his postcard to Ellie, it was with a mixture of honesty and guilt. Yes, he really did wish she was there. But if he really wished that, how could he be so happy in the first place? Wishing she was there was like admitting he was happy without her. It was like saying he was writing this postcard because he’d betrayed her.

  And in Ellie’s case, on that July afternoon, the total number of holidays she’d ever had was nil. And ‘holidays’ was another word she’d invoke and let ring that afternoon, like the word ‘caravans’.

  How strange, to have been born into a farmhouse, into a hundred and sixty acres, yet to have felt so happy, perhaps for the first time ever really happy at all, in a tin-can caravan in a little grubby field, with in one corner a standpipe with some rotting sacking around it and a dripping tap.

  Yet so it was. Jack knows that, at thirteen, he might very well have taken the view that he was too old for it all, it was kids’ stuff, buckets and spades—he should have been above it. But the truth was he knew he was only getting these holidays now because of Tom. And those two years, he later realised, would have been his mother’s only realistic window of opportunity. So he owed them to Tom. And the fact that he himself had missed out when he was smaller only meant that during those weeks Jack was, most of the time, perfectly ready to regress. It wasn’t, in fact, so difficult. It was as though an unspoken agreement operated between him and Tom that while Tom should try to act as if he were thirteen, Jack should try to act as if he were five or six. Then, between them, they might be like two boys of nine.

  Yet in practice it was Tom who led the way in being just a kid—who was better and quicker and more naturally equipped to excel even at that. It was Tom who found the secret route, like a tunnel, through the hedge to the clifftops, and then that other path, not the one everyone used, down through the tumbled, broken bit of cliff to the beach. It was Tom who made better sand-castles.

  Why had he never minded? Even then. In the evenings, it was true, back at the caravan, it could all turn round. Something quite new could happen to Jack. It could seem that he might be twice thirteen. It could seem that he and Mum were a couple and this was their little home and, for this one week at least, he might be Tom’s dad. That was how it could seem.

  And if ever he’d had the chance to learn from his mum how to crack eggs into a pan and how to put together a breakfast, that was it. But he hadn’t, and the fact was it was Tom, just a little kid, who picked up before Jack ever did on things that weren
’t just for little kids. It was Tom who asked him, years later, if he’d ever noticed that each of those caravans had been named after a Hollywood film actress. There was a Betty, a Lauren, a Rita. Jack had spent a week each year, two years running, inside Marilyn Monroe, and never even known it.

  Mum must have had that tough conversation with Dad, must have argued and insisted. Those two boys. And Dad must have yielded. Acted the martyr, no doubt, but finally reached in his pocket. ‘Your doing, Vee, not mine.’ It was mid-July, after the hay was in, when work on the farm was lightish. On the other hand, it was peak-rate time for renting a caravan.

  And the situation for Dad while they were away was that he’d have to ‘fend for himself’. Jack could remember his mother using that phrase with a sort of edge to it, as if when they returned they should expect to find Michael looking half-starved and the farm gone to pot—which had mostly come true later when Mum was permanently absent. But this was just a week in July, although the days were long and, to Jack at least, they weren’t like ordinary, unnoticed days—they were fantastic. Yet when they returned, both times, Dad had said, in his slow, dry way, ‘Back already? Hardly seems you’ve gone.’ Or some such words. Mum had taken a careful look around while Michael had looked patient. Then he’d said, or just meant it with his eyes, ‘See, not gone to rack and ruin yet.’ And his face had finally cracked with pleasure to have them back again.

  So they’d always have it to remember. Well, if that’s how she’d put it, Jack had never forgotten.

  Ellie had surely picked her moment. The hot afternoon, the cool of the farmhouse, its timbers creaking, breezes wafting about it. And before that, he came to realise, she must have done her homework. Talked to those lawyers, talked to all the right people, checked it through, checked to see if it was real and not some leg-pull. She’d even made a trip out here on the sly, so it emerged, to see for herself, to see the lie of the land. But she’d saved it all up for the right moment. To drop that word first into the air, she’d known how it would chime for him. Then show him the letter.

  And all, Jesus Christ, in the very bed where his own mother had breathed her last. And consummated her marriage to Michael Luxton, and even once, in the small hours of a September night, given challenging birth to a son called Jack.

  Ellie had whisked him up there pretty smartly, and could he say he’d even feebly resisted? As if there was no time to lose and it couldn’t be anywhere else. As if it was her own damn bedroom.

  ‘What’s the matter? Afraid your dad’ll catch us? Afraid your mum’s going to see?’ She giggled. ‘Hey, lighten up, Jack.’

  And if the truth be known, the sheer outrageousness of it had got to him, driven him, tipped him over. The sheer fact of it. They could do it, do as they pleased now. They were king and queen now of their (ruined) castles, of their finally united kingdoms, even if Ellie was about to spell out to him what he didn’t exactly need telling, that the only way was to sell up and leave, cash in and leave—and now they could. But with an answer all ready, up her sleeve, to the inevitable next question. If you can have an answer up your sleeve when you’re wearing nothing.

  She’d had that letter with her anyway. Hidden somewhere. From ‘Uncle’ Tony, or rather from Uncle Tony’s lawyers.

  Ellie’s vanished mother Alice had, so it seemed, fallen ill and died before her time—not unlike Jack’s mother (though in a nursing home in Shanklin)—without having broken her silence with her estranged daughter, or having revealed that she was now married to a man, Anthony Boyd, many years her senior. But not long afterwards Uncle Tony had fallen ill and died too. And he was the one, it seemed, who’d died with a conscience.

  ‘It gets better, Jacko. Listen. It gets better.’

  Was there any argument, once Ellie had produced that letter? For some while Jack had been imagining that the next stage in the decline of Jebb Farm might be when the whole damn farmhouse and all its outbuildings would start to slide physically down the hill, crashing to pieces as they went.

  Yet, just for a moment, as they’d sat there with their tea, he’d let himself slide into the opposite picture, and almost believe it. That this was their place now. Here they were at last, where they should be. He’d felt that, even as he’d felt the other thing: that they were like two ransacking burglars who’d burst into a place that wasn’t theirs at all.

  ‘Still sleeping in your little cubby-hole, Jack? But you’ve got the run now. This is the master bedroom.’

  He’d never used that expression. He vaguely knew it was an expression used by estate agents. It was the Big Bedroom. For years now Dad had slept in this bedroom, in this same big bed, all alone, till one night he couldn’t bear to any longer.

  And he had still been sleeping in his own little cubby-hole. Ellie saw everything.

  ‘Well,’ she’d said, a little later, ‘at least you can’t say we never gave it a whirl.’

  She’d sat up with her back against the bedhead, not minding that her tits were on display. He’d pulled himself up against the bedhead too. Like a shameless king and queen, yes, surveying their realm. Through the window before them, across the drop of the land, you could see the far side of the valley, the line of the hills. A blue sky, a puff or two of cloud, the speck of a buzzard wheeling. In between was the green, stirring crown of the oak tree.

  ‘Now,’ Ellie had said, ‘you stay here and I’ll go and make us a pot of tea.’

  And she’d gone down, in her bare arse, to the kitchen, Ellie Merrick, in her bare arse in the Jebb kitchen, in Jebb Farmhouse. And he’d thought, it wasn’t a bad arse (nor all the rest), if it wasn’t the baby arse he’d first clapped hands on fifteen years or more ago. How long had he known Ellie? Long enough to have forgotten how long. Long enough for it to have been at times an on-and-off thing. Long enough to have watched her change and change back again, to come in and out of her best. He must have done the same himself, even if he’d never noticed. Always feeling anyway like the same old lump.

  He couldn’t say, by any stretch, that he was a connoisseur of women, but he was a connoisseur of Ellie. And, judging by Ellie, it was strange the way time could work on women, and not always against them. There was no saying when suddenly they might hit peak condition.

  She’d gone down and come back with a tray with the tea on it. But on the tray too, of course, though he hadn’t noticed when she’d put it down on the floor on her side of the bed, must have been that letter, taken from her bag in the kitchen.

  ‘Caravans, Jacko.’

  He couldn’t help seeing—as she let that word hang for a while and took a long sip of tea—Tom, aged six, hopping ahead of him down that path. Or seeing the wiggly letters by the door, with its two steps up: ‘Marilyn’. Or smelling salt between his fingers. Or smelling the smell all over that field, in the morning, of frying bacon. And when just a little later he was looking, himself, at that letter, he couldn’t help seeing that little yellow tabletop and that first postcard, with its blue sea and white band of cliffs, that he’d written to Ellie.

  So just when he’d been thinking that this was his bed now and Ellie belonged in it, he was suddenly also thinking he was really all hers now, he belonged to her. She knew the places in him, she had him.

  He’d said, as if at least he must put up some token opposition, ‘But no one takes their holidays in a caravan any more.’

  But apparently they did. Or they did at the Lookout, formerly known as the Sands. The caravans weren’t like the ones Jack remembered from Brigwell Bay (and how much had that farmer charged for a week?). Nor were the caravanners. They were all sorts. With thirty-two units, when they were all on the go, you got all sorts. There were die-hard old couples who’d been coming for years and weren’t so sure about that change of name, but liked the fact that the place had ‘stayed in the family’ (how sad, about Alice and Tony). They seemed to know more about Ellie’s mum than Ellie did—or even wanted to. There were big burly families, all tattoos and noise, who in the course of a week became gen
tler, sweeter. There were two- or three-unit gangs of young people with windsurfing gear who, when they weren’t wearing wetsuits, wore hardly anything most of the time and liked to party all night.

  All this had fascinated Jack. It had brought something out in him. You never knew what might be going on in any one of those units at any given time. It was certainly a form of livestock. You never knew what might be arriving next. Caravans. It would make him think, sometimes, of a circus, and it could sometimes be like a circus. Entertaining, raucous, a touch of danger. You had to be a bit of a policeman sometimes. You had to be their smiling host in a joke of a shirt, but there were times when you had to show them who was in charge. Jack had found he was surprisingly good at this. At both things: the smiling and the policing. Perhaps his big, lumbering weight was on his side. Or maybe it was that he’d just sometimes let slip, with his straight, blank, unreadable face, that if there was any real trouble, he kept a shotgun handy, up in the cottage, having been a farmer once, and he knew how to use it.

  As for the caravanners, the Lookouters, they generally took the view that Ellie and Jack were okay. They ran a good site, they looked after you. It was all right for some, of course—sitting up there all summer long, then winging off to the Caribbean. But, at the same time, there was something a bit misfit and oddball about the two of them. There didn’t seem to be any little Luxtons, you couldn’t even be sure if they were really married. Something just a bit hillbilly. But that was okay, that was fine. There was something just a bit wacky and hillbilly about taking a holiday in a caravan anyway. And when you were on holiday you wanted colour, you didn’t want dull and ordinary. You didn’t get it, either, with those shirts of his.

  Farmer Jack. It’s well over ten years now since they sat up with their tea in that bed at Jebb and Ellie uttered that word. And he’d never said then, if there had to be some token, or more than token, opposition: ‘There’s Tom, Ellie. There’s Tom.’