by Paul Burman
“You can always stay over at mine, you know, if there’s something on in Northampton and you can’t get home,” I tell her. “There’s a camp bed somewhere.”
“There you go, then. No problems. I want to see you again, Tom.”
“Me too.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course I do.”
The door from the street swings open again, someone peers in out of the night, then it slams shut once more. Too loud. The draft slaps us with its icy chill, and the light in the room appears to dull for a moment, but Kate smiles.
I’m a provincial boy hemmed in by short horizons, but Kate the beautiful introduces me to Mozart, Duke Ellington, Artemisia Gentileschi; she recites Leopardi’s poems and Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes to me; makes lasagna, ravioli and minestrone, and I eat it up and hunger for more and more… and more than I can give in return. We dance. She pinches me, makes me yawn and stretch beyond my meat and two-veg provincialism, to reach out for something cosmopolitan, to crave other places, other worlds and question my own. We dance. She dazzles me with her brightness, wakes me up with her exuberance, breathes life into me with her vivaciousness.
Breathe in.
Breathe out.
She has long, chestnut brown hair, and the widest eyes of glistening burnt umber that ever smiled. When she kisses me, her lips are fuller and glossier than polished olives, warmer than sun-baked terracotta at the end of day. And when she recites Leopardi’s poem to Silvia, I wish I could create such sounds for her.
Silvia, rimembri ancora
Quel tempo della tua vita mortale,
Quando beltà slendea
Negli occhi tuoi ridenti e fuggitivi,
E tu, lieta e pensosa, il limitare
Di gioventù salivi?
On a shelf among other books, next to a tin with two flint points, in a house I call my home, is a copy of Leopardi’s poems. (Some memories are impossible to live without, however tormenting they might be to keep alive.) To one side, in a brass frame, is a slightly blurred, black-and-white photo of a man carrying a child on his shoulders. It’s my only photo of my father.
It’s late-afternoon, I’ve just got home from school, and I’m phoning Kate. Before Mum and Brian get in.
“I’m so angry,” she cries.
“What’s the matter?” Maybe there’s been trouble at school, or an argument with her parents. Stuff from my world.
“The bloody council. Nothing but vandals. They butchered the trees in my street. Every single one.”
“Chopped them down?”
“Just about. Every year I watch the first buds shoot into leaf, but it won’t happen now. They’re a bunch of bastards, bureaucratic vandals. I do my homework in the front room so I can see the greenery and listen to the birds singing, and now it’s bare. It’ll be bare all summer and especially when I’m revising for exams. All I’ll see is the bloody factory opposite.”
It’s mid-March and a fortnight since the dance. We’ve met in Northampton to see a film – Picnic at Hanging Rock – and at a pub a few days later. Every couple of nights we speak on the phone, even though Brian’s getting toey about the bill, and even though I’ve told him I’ll bloody pay for each friggin’ call if he wants me to.
“And they’ve cut them all down?”
“They were just beginning to look like real trees again, after the last time. I was hoping they wouldn’t do it again. I guess I’d forgotten. It’s a few years back. And now those morons have cut all the branches off, right down to the trunks. Every tree in the street – but especially my tree.”
“Perhaps they’ve got Dutch Elm disease, Kate. Perhaps that’s why. Perhaps they’ve gotta take them down completely and then they’ll replant more.”
“Don’t say that. These trees are fine. I don’t think they’re elms. Limes or planes, I think. They do it every few years. Pollard them. Thinks it makes them look bleeding tidier, but they’re more like knobbly poles than trees now. Stumps. Oh, it makes me so angry. It’s the Council’s fault of course. They’re a bunch of knobs. The workmen are only doing what they’ve been told. I’ve a good mind to write a letter to the newspaper. I think I will. I’ll do it tonight.”
I’ve little to offer except what an elderly neighbour told me when I’d helped with her garden once. “If they haven’t been chopped back too far, they’ll probably sprout again pretty quick. Sometimes, when plants are cut back, they grow even faster. It sort of encourages them.” And instinctively I look out at Dad’s almond tree and our spruce.
“Do you think so? You probably think I’m being silly.”
“No. Not at all. Do you want me to come over? We could meet somewhere. Anywhere.”
“Would you? Would you really do that?”
“Of course I will. If you want me to.”
“I’d love you to, Tom, but not tonight. I’ve got an essay to finish and some reading to do, and I’m gonna write that letter.
Saturday though, eh? I’ll see you on Saturday?”
“Definitely,” I say, and decide to buy her a plant to keep on her windowsill; something with lots of leaves that won’t die in a hurry, like a rubber plant or a spider plant, or maybe a poinsettia.
On a night of icy frost, when spring has retreated against winter’s return, Kate teaches me the nature of my sex. On this brittle night, when the dark sky seems so bitten by cold it might snap in half and leave darkness floating across the world forever, she leads me through the rites of my first clumsy coupling on the wooden floor of a gazebo in someone’s back garden. One of her friends has turned eighteen, been allowed to throw a party; the house is crowded, but Kate finds a space for just the two of us.
I work Saturdays behind a fruit and veg stall on Market Square, and am moved to prepare for this consummation by the way her eyes beckoned the last time we met, the way she embraced me, the way she planted her hands in my pockets when we danced at the end of that evening. During my lunch break, I set out to buy condoms, and sidle up and down the aisles of three pharmacies, hoping to pluck up courage, but turn heel each time a shop assistant approaches.
“Just browsing,” I mumble and scuttle off.
It’s a fruitless effort and I spend the afternoon weighing potatoes, onions, Brussels sprouts and rhubarb, cursing my cowardice.
Jumping off the bus in Abetsby that evening, onto a pavement of black ice, I know what I’ve got to do.
I march into the backyard of The Duke of York, past the stacks of empty kegs and crates, and into the Gents toilets – a weakly-lit bunker of cracked tiles, damp cement, a leaking cistern and a stained, stainless steel urinal. Shovelling a fistful of coins into the condom vending machine, I grapple with the handle, pocket the packets and march out again.
The stench of mildew, naphthalene, urine and bad drains stays with me, so I spit into the gutter and take a deep breath of icy night. There’s stuff-all romantic about these preparations, nothing uplifting – I feel shrivelled by the process – and, to cap it all, the crappy bus service has made me late.
Kate’ll wonder where the hell I am, whether I’ve got lost or if I’ve stood her up. Too much can happen at a party in thirty minutes, and I’ve seen the way blokes look at her. So I clutch her scribbled map and run twenty paces, walk twenty, run twenty, walk twenty, until the stitch in my side makes me stop.
What really pisses me off is not that Abetsby’s bigger than I thought it was, but that there are so many new housing estates beyond the town centre it’s a bloody labyrinth. Street after street of identical suburban boxes, accommodating all-too-familiar ingredients: the same old beginnings and endings of never-never dreams and recriminations, TV programmes, mortgage statements, the burden of nine-to-five jobs, the stale defeat of drained love, the prospect of a holiday to Costa Brava in a year’s time and a retirement plan in ten or twenty or thirty – the cloned lives of Mum and Brian… from all of which I’m feeling remote because Kate’s begun to breathe a different sort of life into me. As long as I don’t
get lost, as long as I don’t lose her.
And then there’s the house. I hear the pounding of a bass rhythm from the end of the road, and notice the garish pulsing of yellow, blue and red lights through the drawn curtains of a front room. I knock at the door, but there’s no answer, so go to a window and bang on the glass.
“I was worried you’d missed the bus,” she says, skipping into my arms, her arms outstretched.
“It was late. Couldn’t find the house. Thought it was closer to the centre of town.”
“You’re here now, though.”
I touch the inside pocket of my jacket and nod.
“Yeah,” I say.
She leans closer, embraces me, pushes her hands into the back pockets of my jeans, speaks soft words next to my ear: “Tonight’s a good night, Major Tom.”
But I’m still wearing remnants of winter. “What for?”
“To fly me to the moon,” she laughs and plants a brief kiss on my neck.
It’s hard to thaw from the day’s anxieties and the long dash through the maze of this unfamiliar town, and my fingers are numb. “Pardon?” I say.
She lets go, stands back and smiles. “Perhaps later,” she suggests. “When you’ve warmed up.”
Clutching a plastic beaker of beer, I mumble silly jokes and know she’ll ditch me. Of course she will. I watch the other blokes mill around, sometimes laughing with her, and wonder who’ll make the first move.
“I suppose you know everyone?” I ask.
“Almost everyone,” she says, embracing me, her mouth close to my ear. “Only Em, Sue and Andy are close friends though, and you know Andy. Most of the guys are brain-dead pot-heads and acid-droppers, and you know what I think about that.”
“Hmm.”
Still I can’t get warm.
Eventually she hushes me, takes the cracked beaker and puts it down, makes me dance, embraces me again, takes my hand and leads me along the passage to the kitchen, through to the garage, to the frosty garden and the gazebo.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she says.
“Now?”
“Yes. I want to show you something.”
Unable to speak, I slide a hand towards my jacket pocket.
“It’s alright,” she says, “I’m on the pill. But thanks, Tom.”
In the darkness, we make the gazebo warmer than the house. For us. She thaws me. Somehow we avoid splinters, escape frostbite. Winter is defeated from this nest; it’s vanquished by the smell of two lovers, of patchouli oil and musk, by our rag-tag of garments half-off, by the singing of our giggling and panting in the dark and by the taste of Kate on my lips, the warmth of her thighs and the tenderness of her gently guiding hand, the deliciousness of being planted inside her, soft and moist… and her generous delight in that first clumsy fuck.
Before long she spends the weekend at Nenford. (Annette and Andrew are on school camp, so she’ll have a proper bed and there’ll be space to listen to records and be alone.) I meet her at the bus station in Northampton, but before heading home and introducing her to Mum and Brian we walk along the banks of the Nene, through Midsummer Meadow. It’s early April, and windy and cold – the month that arrives like a lion and leaves like a lamb. The trees are entering bud, the river’s swollen and muddy, and the sky’s pretty much the same as the river: a sepia brown sky reflecting the churned-up day. To keep her to myself, I’d walk forever if we could, hand-in-hand, arms swinging, our eyes smarting in the wind, following the river all the way to the coast. I don’t want to share her with anyone.
But she’s been studying Dario Fo on the bus – Morte Accidentale di un Anarchico – revising for an exam, and her mood is muddied too. She lights a cigarette, takes two long, deep drags, exhales and then pinches out the tip, before dropping it in a bin.
“What’s the matter?” I say.
“Nothing,” she says, walking ahead of me. Then she stops, turns, forces a smile. “No, that’s not true, Tom. I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s too many thoughts beating about in my head.
I’ve got so much revision to do, I’m not sure I can afford to take time off this weekend. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have come.”
She pauses, glances across the river and then at me. “I nearly phoned and called it off.”
“No,” I say. She’s come all the way from Abetsby to tell me it’s over and that I’ll be going home without her. “No, Kate.”
“Not us. Just the weekend.”
“Oh. I thought you meant…’
“Yeah.” She hesitates. “But I’ve been thinking about that too. At times. It’s fair you should know.”
“What? Why? Don’t do that.”
“Listen, Tom, I’d already decided to avoid any relationships for the next few months, to concentrate on schoolwork. I’ve worked too hard to throw it away. University means too much to me –”
“And how much do you think you mean to me?”
“ – but then you came along and, well, you’ve turned everything upside down. I’m not sure about anything anymore.” She kicks at a twig, but it snaps. “No one’s had this effect…’ She shrugs. “I’ve had two pretty serious relationships in the past, but not like this. I felt I had some sort of control over things before.”
That shuts me up and I catch sight of myself in a different light, and I know I mustn’t lose her.
“Why can’t you have both, Kate: a relationship and the time to study? Who knows, maybe you’ll do better in the exams because of us being together.”
“How? I’ve got to win a scholarship. I don’t have a choice. I can’t afford uni otherwise. My parents do what they can, but they’re not that well off.”
We’re still standing apart and she’s rubbing her hands together against the cold.
“Balance. Happiness. A person works better when they’re happy. Besides, I can help you with your revision. I’ll read with you, test you on those superlaxative adverbs, even help with Biology. I’ll help you, Kate. I will.”
“Superlative adverbs, you dill,” she says and the sky brightens.
“Whatever. Besides, not only am I a whiz in French, but my Italian’s getting there too.” And, in the worst Italian accent ever, I recite to Kate, to the river and to a crow sitting on a fence post: “Silvia, Silvia, alla luna. Alla luna, mama mia, questo spaghetti, macaroni! Pasta, pura, pasta.” A string of words knotted together with starch and nonsense, which forces her to laugh and grip my hand, and we start walking again.
“You don’t mind helping me revise this weekend?”
“I’d love to.”
“Really?”
“As long as I’m with you I don’t care what we’re doing.”
“You’re the best,” she says, and the crow opens its beak wide and agrees with her.
“So everything’s okay again?” I say.
“It’s better.”
“Better than okay?”
On the footpath on the other side of the river, a white swan stands sentry. Two boys with a dog are walking towards it, until it rears up, wings outspread, and begins hissing. The boys pull the dog back and give it a wide berth.
“Angry swan.”
“Might’ve been pestered by a dog in the past, or lost its mate to a dog attack,” Kate observes. “They mate for life, you know, and they’ll fight to the death to protect their partner and their young. I love that in them. And so graceful.”
“If you got hit with that wing, it’d break your leg,” I say.
“Isn’t it beautiful, magnificent? Even when it’s angry.”
She’s glowing again. It’s never buried too deep. The sight of a swan brings it out.
The river, which is flowing faster than I’ve seen it flow before, carries a branch past us, towards the bridge. It’s a large, forked branch, and snagged between its two arms is a white, plastic carrier bag, a lollipop stick, a few leaves. Caught in the current, it quickly overtakes our casual pace, and I’m about to point it out to Kate when I realise I’ve dreamt the scene before. Every bi
t of it. It leaves me uneasy.
“Déjà vu,” I announce.
“What is?”
“That,” I say, nodding at the branch. “This whole moment. Even me saying ‘déjà vu’.”
If I concentrate hard enough, maybe I can work out everything that’s going to happen next… and know that it’ll be okay, and stop anything that won’t be. If only. I look back and half-expect the boys to be lighting smoke bombs, but a pain shoots down my leg and I flinch.
“What’s the matter?” Kate says. “Are you alright?”
I’ve stopped to rub my leg, and the branch – the whole moment – is carried from view.
“A muscle spasm,” I say.
“Cramp,” she suggests.
“Yeah.”
Some memories are bones that should be buried and forgotten. Other memories are the sweetest of fruit, which are tasty in small measure but can leave you bloated and a mess of useless sentimentality if plucked and gorged upon too often. And some memories are like photos – snapshots – that hang in neat frames at the back of the mind. Sometimes they shake at night and rattle a train of images into our dreams.
And some dreams are so potent they haunt our waking and grow into memories… like slightly blurred photos, or very sweet fruit, or rotten bones.
The first time I visit Kate’s house, she’s waiting at the Abetsby bus stop for me. On one side of her street is a long, brick wall of an empty shoe factory – the name KETCHELL SHOES in faded white lettering taking up half the length – while on the other side, flanked by the row of pollarded trees lining the pavement, are the red-brick terraced houses built by Mr Ketchell for his workers. Between the pavement and entrance porch of each house is little more than a yard of fenced garden.
Knowing her parents are waiting to check me out, I count the houses and grip her hand too tight.
“You’re hurting,” she says and laughs. “Relax.”
I nod. I’ve been to other girls’ houses before, to call for them, but this is different.
“They’ll like you,” she tells me. “They do already. Mum loves the plant you gave me. She’s made a cake for you. She doesn’t often bake cakes. It’ll be alright.”
