by Paul Burman
Sometimes, in my head, I see two cavemen sitting on my mother’s lawn. They’re hammering away, underneath where the almond tree used to be – planted by my father and sawn down by Brian the fuck-wit – or under the Norway spruce (Picea abies). Around where they sit, as they knap the flint, there are so many shards scattered it looks as though they’ve been shelling nuts.
There’s comfort in knowing, I think, that this place was inhabited long before Nenford grew into a farming community close to a shallow stretch of the River Nene. There were settlements in the valley long, long, long before the invasions of the Romans and the Danes and William the Conqueror, before the civil war of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, before the agrarian and industrial revolutions, before the Space Age in which I grew up saw the village of Nenford in the county of Northamptonshire (as far from the sea as a place can be) become yet another boring suburb to yet another over-populated English town. There’s comfort in understanding our continuity with the past, that it stretches back thousands upon thousands of years, through all ages, and that we’re rooted to the land and the elements much deeper than we’re rooted to the concrete of ring-roads and motorways and housing estates, or to the detritus of modern civilisation with its choked rivers and its orange-glowing sky and its choking politics, its choking religions and its choking banks and, and, and…
We’re connected whether we know it or not.
For my two Stone Age flint workers, the garden was an edge of forest or heath of course. But what’s the point of so many points? Unless there was sweet fuck-all to do except make one and throw an old one away, like inventing disposable goods. Maybe they were dissatisfied with their lot in life – Neolithic ennui. Perhaps they were looking for hunky-dory, hoping to make the absolute, ultimate point, or discover metal, and thereby introduce a new age.
“Hey folks, welcome to the Bronze Age.”
Maybe Gazza and I were just dead lucky in what we found.
I hang out with Gazza a fair bit for a couple of years. We’re best mates for a while. We make a trolley in his driveway, his mum teaches us how to make doughnuts, and one warm, windy Saturday we catch the bus to Northampton.
We wander about, pressing our noses against shop windows, pushing the lift buttons at Walkers Department Store, playing guerrilla fighters between the maze of aisles in Woolworths, and he asks me whether I want to nick stuff, but I shake my head.
“Not even sweets? A choc bar?”
“Nah.”
He laughs.
Crossing Market Square, he says, “In here,” and leads me into Thorby’s Hardware & Garden Supplies.
“Wait here,” he says, leaving me in front of two carousels of seed packets: several varieties of pumpkin, cucumber, courgette; a thousand varieties of tomato.
Perhaps he’s after weed killer, I think, and we’ll be making fireworks in his bedroom later, and I almost miss seeing him lift the tube of greenhouse fumigators off the shelf and stick it in his pocket. He’s that quick.
“Follow me,” he mutters as he strolls out the shop.
We walk a few yards and then run down the nearest alley, out the other end into a car park, and I’m looking behind all the time to see if a store detective is chasing us.
“We’re okay now,” he says. “You can stop looking. You look like you’ve done something wrong. No one saw me. I’m too good for them. Don’t worry.”
“You got a greenhouse in your garden?” I say, looking at the shiny tube, prising the plastic cap off.
“Nah. These are great smoke bombs though. You got any matches?”
I nod. Of course I do; I always carry a box. And I love the idea of smoke bombs.
“Here, watch this,” he says. “And be ready to run.”
He takes the lid off a dustbin and places a tablet inside, then lights it. From the other side of the car park we watch smoke billowing upwards into a genie, and a middle-aged couple begin walking over to investigate. They’re lugging their shopping bags and looking around to see who’s set it off, and we scarper.
Dashing down a back lane, kicking and scattering a raked-up pile of autumn leaves, we pause to drop a smoke bomb in an empty milk bottle and Gazza dares me to lob it over the wall into someone’s garden. We peer through a crack in the fence to see the smoke streaming across a pocket handkerchief of lawn and up into bedsheets on the washing line.
Thick, acrid smoke.
We wander down to Midsummer Meadow, where old folks are resting on park benches, tapping the ground with their walking sticks, and where a pregnant woman pushes a screaming baby in its pram to and fro, to and fro, trying to rock the thing back to sleep. At the river, two young lovers are walking their dog on the opposite bank, so we run to the next bridge, light three fumigators and scarper. The wind pushes the smoke downstream, makes the bridge impassable for a few minutes, and we cack ourselves laughing until our sides hurt.
I stick one in the exhaust pipe of a car, parked at the side of the road, but lose the flame when I try lighting it, and don’t notice the driver of another car a few spaces back. He must have been watching us.
“Oi! You little brats!” he shouts. “What the hell do you think you’re ruddy doing?” He’s striding toward us, all red in the face like I’ve lit his fuse instead, and the miserable sod gives me no chance to light a second match before we have to run hell for leather.
When we’ve got fifty yards on him, Gazza turns and sticks two fingers up in the air. “Stupid old git!” he shouts, and we run laughing across the rush of traffic.
Perhaps he thought we were letting tyres down, but we’re just having fun. That’s all. It’s not like the old rust-bucket would’ve gone up in flames or anything.
There’s a demolition site we find our way to. Northampton’s full of flattened cinemas, theatres, factories, tenement housing, sitting there year-after-year, awaiting redevelopment, making the town look like the shit’s been bombed out of it. On this one, all that remains of where people’s houses once stood are slabs of concrete, lead pipes and ceramic toilet waste outlets hacked off at ground level, a few areas with broken floor tiles still attached and the suggestion of where a bath might have sat, as well as a mass of broken beer bottles, bundles of weather-wrinkled newspapers, and piles of bin liners spilling their guts of household rubbish. The only sniff of hope in so much crap is where weeds have begun growing through cracks in the concrete.
Gazza comes across a paper bag that looks full and is neatly sealed. He has a way of finding things and knowing what they are. He points to it and I’m about to kick it open, but he shakes his head and picks up a stick.
“Don’t,” he says, “not unless you want gunk on your shoe. Bet I know what’s in here.”
“A dead kitten,” I suggest.
“Nah. Wrong shape. And it’s a chemist’s bag.” Then he prods it open with the stick and says, “Jam rags. Used jam rags.”
I reckon it must be a sort of cake somebody’s thrown away, until I realise it’s blood, not jam.
“Women’s rags,” he tells me.
Later, it might seem an appropriate setting to learn about the scheme of things – birth, life, death, decay – and Gazza might’ve told me more, except I pretend I already know.
“Oh them,” I say. “Yeah.”
We’re blood-brothers for a year or two, Gazza and I, but will drift apart at the end of primary school. He’ll go to secondary school in Nenford and I’ll go to Northampton Grammar. At first we’ll nod when we see one another down the village shops, but we won’t talk. He’ll fall in with a group of older kids who’ll have nothing to do with the likes of me, not unless I’ve robbed the Post Office, tried burning down the school or stabbing some poor bugger.
Gazza dies when he’s seventeen. He’s tearing along in a stolen car, being chased by the police; lights flashing, sirens screaming.
Afterwards, it seemed it was bound to happen and I felt no surprise at the news. He was often in trouble with the cops, getting into places he shouldn’t have been,
doing things he shouldn’t have done, which maybe he did just for the kicks. Maybe he was the wrong type of smart for the world he’d found himself in and that was the only way he could push himself to meet new challenges. Perhaps, in his own way, he was chasing hunky-dory too.
Gazza says, “When you die your whole life flashes before your eyes. In the time it takes for your brain to shut down, you relive everything – the whole bloody deal.”
“Yeah. All the good times and all the bad times,” I reply. It’s a regular conversation piece. Almost everyone talks about this stuff at sometime. “Or perhaps you only see those parts you properly remember, or want to remember.” And I’m thinking about my dad, and I’m wondering whether you might relive all your best dreams too, or whether this curtain-closing flashback would be one sick nightmare.
“Faster than the bloody speed of light,” Gazza adds.
“That’s enough language, Gary Fletcher,” his mum tells him. “It’s not needed, thank you very much.”
We’re trying to make half-decent doughnuts; deep frying the dough, laughing as they swell to size, engorged with air; rolling them in sugar, sticking them in our gobs, burning our lips, our tongues. We experiment at piping a mess of jam into them, before cooking them, after cooking them, but it never properly works.
“It’s like when you dream,” he carries on. “How it seems that hours have passed, but really it’s only a few seconds.”
It’s a small kitchen and his mum hovers in the background, wandering through, peering over our shoulders, giving encouragement. She lets us get on with it, while making sure everything’s okay. Seems like a good mum to me.
Me: “Yeah.”
Gazza: “Time doesn’t always happen at the same speed. It’s been proven.”
I drop a ball of dough into the pan and the hot oil roils and spits like a crazy ocean in a crazy storm, spattering two splinters of heat across the back of my hand, and we laugh.
Me: “Jesus! Look at the size of that.”
“Fan-bloody-tastic,” he whispers.
“Hush now. Ssh,” his mother says. And the sea settles to a gentle slip-slap to focus upon. And my eyes grow heavy and lined with grit. Then she says, “Enough now. Hush now.”
And rather than Gazza’s talk of death, I listen to the sea instead, breathing in, breathing out. In, out. In, out. The shell to my ear.
TWO
Sheltered by a backbone of reef, the shallows are emerald green with the translucence of old glass. The beach is soft, white sand, free of seaweed and driftwood, and stretches in a broad, boomerang curve to define its bay. Fifty metres back from the lapping of a low tide, a fringe of dunes, sewn together with pigface and spinifex, rises and dips in a ribbon of peaks and troughs.
Slap, slap, slap.
Except for the patterns created by wind and recent rain, and the contoured tracking of this gentle, slapping tide, there isn’t another mark on this world. It’s unblemished. And there’s something delicious about kicking through the water, keeping pace with a shoal of minnows and their shadows (more shadow than substance), and planting my footprints, one after the other, across the wet sand, to watch them wash away again as if I’ve never been.
If I walk this beach forever, then I’ll be sculpted by the elements into a new pattern. I’ll be the driftwood sanded smooth.
I look back and see my trail erased, and all I am is what’s left standing here. To lie down and sleep – wouldn’t that be sweet?
The sky is a cerulean blue with fingers of cloud drifting in. Beyond the reef the waves are bigger, darker, and I strain to make out what might be fins from a pod of dolphins, or the tail of a whale breaking the surface. Not sharks.
A ripple of wind slides across the surface of the shallows, and then another and another. It whips a skittering of sand along the beach and I blink too late. Sand in my eyes, grit in my mouth. And, in this moment of half-blindness from a flurry of sand, I recollect the image of a man on a bicycle cartwheeling backwards through the air, feet pedalling furiously through a similarly sandy moment. The absurdity of the memory makes me smile, and I wish I could place it: circus performance, photograph, film scene, or dream.
Looking down, away from the wind, an abalone shell washes up and taps against my foot. Tap, tap, tap. The tapping becomes harder, more insistent, and the sand in the wind becomes glass… something solid… a window, vibrating against my head… against the chugging stink of a diesel engine. And I’m wrenched from the beach onto a train.
“Thomas! Thomas!” Her hand raps on the other side of the glass, and the jolt this and her voice gives me draws a brief crease of pain across the back of my eyes. “Get off! Quick! Wake up!”
“What?”
“I think you’ve gotta get off here, mister,” a passenger across the aisle is saying. “D’ya wanna hand with your bags? Else you might not get off in time, like.”
“What? Oh, yeah. Thanks.”
Dopey with sleep and suddenly nauseous, I’m hurried out of the rail carriage onto the platform, to the feigned disinterest of other passengers. I’m glad of this help, but here’s the thing: I’m stuffed if I remember transferring from the coach to the train at Watford. The last thing I remember is letting my head sink back against the seat as we left Heathrow. All the same, I know where I am and why I’m here.
Annette has stepped back on the platform, to the safe side of a yellow line. Her arms are folded now and she’s stamping her feet against the piercing cold. She wears a long, black overcoat, buttoned all the way, and a matching white scarf, hat and gloves. I smile even though I’m tired, but her smile freezes mid-way into a grimace. She looks like an impatient liquorice Allsort, which was never a favourite sweet of mine.
The air is cold, thin, sharp, like a frozen razor blade, but it clears my head, tightens my stomach, helps me recover. The nausea passes.
The brief hug she gives me is awkward and brittle. The last of the carriage doors slams shut, a whistle blows and the train pulls out in a series of jerks. We watch it leave. The frost across the sleepers hasn’t yet thawed.
“If I hadn’t woken you, you’d have gone on to Birmingham,” she complains.
“Wouldn’t be the end of the world,” I say. “Although on second thoughts – Birmingham – shit!”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
“And I’d be wasting my time, standing on a freezing platform, waiting for you.” She wraps her arms tighter around herself, and I’m frightened she might implode if we don’t move on.
“Hello, Annette,” I say. “It’s good to see you.”
She sighs and unwinds a little. “Hello, Thomas. I suppose you’re tired?”
“Beyond tired,” I say. “Well beyond tired.”
She looks down at my suitcase and flight bag, then back at me. “Does that mean you need to sleep before you see Mum… or what? Perhaps it’ll wake you up if you freshen up first, have a bath.”
“We’ll go see her first,” I say, picking up my luggage.
We make our way along the northbound platform, across the bridge, and down the southbound platform towards the entrance. It was a summer day when I waved Kate on her way to France. It was an autumn day when I waited for the train to take me to London to see her those few weeks later. I’ve hated Castle Station and Euston for two decades.
“I can take you to the hospital,” Annette tells me, “but I have to be at work this afternoon. I’ve taken too many days off recently. I can’t keep leaving them in the lurch. They’ll sack me.”
“That’s alright. You do what you have to do. I’ll catch a taxi to Nenford afterwards. Just give me a key.”
“You can stay at mine tonight if you want. It’s a bit cramped, but it’s closer to the hospital. Andrew did. He’s had to drive back to Scotland today. There’s only an old sofa bed and I might wake you up when I get ready for work in the morning and – “
“Thanks, but I was planning on going back to Nenford. For old time’s sake and all that�
��’
“If you’re sure.”
“I am.”
She loses more of her stiffness and takes car keys from her pocket, but makes no move to step into the gritty drabness of the car park. “Bitter weather for December,” she says. “We might even get snow before Christmas.”
“That’d be nice.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Aren’t you cold with your coat undone?”
“Numb,” I say. I’ve done something to my leg. Pinched a nerve or something. But she doesn’t appear to notice.
She looks at her watch and hesitates. “It’s not really visiting time, but I’m sure the nurses won’t mind if we explain…’
I look at my own watch and frown: nine-twenty. Didn’t I adjust it? Perhaps I didn’t. The second hand is still moving. And I jiggle my wrist to see if that’ll fix it. “What time is it, Annette?”
“It’s not visiting hours until –”
“Stuff visiting hours, Annette. I’ve just travelled ten-thousand miles to see my sick mother. Tell them that.” And I step towards the automatic doors.
“This isn’t Australia,” she says.
My mother’s asleep. And she looks a decade older than her sixty-three years. Her stick-arms poke from the blanket, and her head, with its thinning net of grey hair, barely makes an indentation on the pillow. In looking at this woman, who I feel I must love even though I’ve found her hard to like, I see a woman whose skin now hangs a size too big. She is less than she was, which surely means she can hurt me less than she has.
Also, under this harsh lighting, the starched whiteness of the hospital linen has leeched the colour and substance from her, so that her baggy skin has the sheen and texture of a wrinkled sheet of soft wax. Or maybe these are symptoms of her illness and its treatment. Observing her like this from the end of her bed, I’m reminded of a candle nearing the end of its wick, and I don’t know whether I sigh with relief or anxiety. Or both.
