The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore

by Paul Burman

  “Sounds like you’ll have fun,” she says.

  “We’ll ring when we get home,” Brian calls and turns the ignition.

  “I’m gonna shift your bed over,” Andrew shouts. “Mum said I could. It’s my room now.”

  “It’s all yours. You can have it.” Then I lean through the open back window and whisper: “It’s haunted anyway.”

  But the ghosts are of my own making and I’ve brought them with me. We’re a circus, my ghosts and I, and the ringmaster lives at my side.

  All the same, I’m almost right about Kate and it’s not long before I come close to finding her again.

  In the week before Christmas, I catch the train into the city to spend an afternoon searching for affordable trinkets – a simple matter of stretching a thin overdraft until it snaps – and, having wandered up Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road (garlanded with bright and wonderfully gaudy decorations), I begin drifting down side streets, letting the current take me where it will. The billboards outside newsagents read: IRA CLAIMS PADDINGTON LOCKER BOMB and UNEMPLOYMENT RISES. It’s festive stuff and has been defining this world for as long as I remember. Too foot-sore to walk anymore, I decide to catch a tube and head back to Stoneyfields, until I realise I’m opposite Kate’s university.

  Her place.

  Whatever it was that first pulled us together now draws me to this spot, as it always will, and any moment Kate’ll walk round the corner and everything’ll be hunky-dory.

  She’ll be here somewhere, walking towards me. Somewhere close by. Ready to reach out if I can catch sight of her.

  In fact there’s someone who’s just passed. I turn, but notice another girl across the road who might also be her. Twisting to look behind, in case she’s part of another group walking by, then spinning round to peer ahead… and round again, like a dog chasing its tail. But what style of clothes might she wear these days, and what if she’s cut her hair? And, even if she does pass by, will she recognise me? Would she want to?

  I stop, close my eyes and stand still. Why am I really looking for her? Is it actually Kate I’m after or a replay of what we shared? Is this about keeping blind faith or am I looking for the person she helped me become?

  This is stupid. Worse than stupid.

  All the same, I cross the road to be closer to the university buildings, then wander down another side street because the name’s familiar – her faculty site or her first year Halls address, perhaps – and come up against a tall, brick building, five storeys high. This must be it. I examine each row of windows for any sign whatsoever (a candle, an arrow, a beacon, a face, a wave), but find nothing… until a set of doors swings open and out steps the bearded Spaniard wearing a white lab coat.

  Jesus! Alleluia. Amen.

  This is it. A sign.

  It is the bearded Spaniard, and then it isn’t – I can’t be sure. I head towards him, until another bearded Spaniard steps out behind him, and then another two. The doors clatter open again and remain open as a flood of bearded Spaniards in white lab coats wash out and down the street in one direction.

  Any number from forty to five-thousand.

  And Old Lofty squats on the kerb between two parked cars and cacks himself laughing. He slaps his bony hands across his knees and shakes, and I spit at him and turn on my heels and stalk away. Stuff the rest of the presents; I’ll get myself a bottle of cheap whisky instead. I’ll sell some books for a tab or two of the good stuff.

  “Wait up!” he shouts.

  “Fuck you!” I snarl.

  The following June, at the end of first year, I tell Maureen Bonnard, my History tutor, I’m quitting the course. Maureen asks me into her office, offers me a seat, a mug of coffee and a biscuit, and tries talking me out of it, but it’d be a lie to continue studying when I can’t see any point in it. The only thing it’s taught me is how much I hate unanswered questions – why Dad killed himself, how I mightn’t have lost Kate, what purpose there is to life – and that I need absolute truths. Studying History is all too wanky and academic.

  “It’s your decision,” she eventually tells me, as if I mightn’t be sure, “and the faculty will respect that.” She clasps her hands round her cup of Maxwell Gold Blend, leans forward in her swivel chair. There’s a framed print on the wall of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. “However, what I’d like you to do, if only to humour me, is to postpone Part Two rather than totally pulling the plug. Don’t give up the course completely. Ask for a deferment, Tom.”

  So much bullshit. She’s okay, but this is bullshit. Where’s the sense in always worrying whether you’ve got a safety line or not? Life’s a slow drowning anyway. I’m sick of compromises and soft options – essay choices, negotiated extensions, interminable discussions and interpretations – and of justifying myself.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say. “I’ll decide tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure everything’s alright, Tom? Would you like a referral to the counsellor? Someone you can talk things through with?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. Everything’s fine. Everything’s hunky-dory.”

  The phrase brings a smile to my lips, and she smiles back.

  To begin, there’s short-term casual work in a plastic foodware factory, and a squalid bedsit in Whittington, north London. And it’s a release to focus solely on the present: eight-to-five with nothing either side, and the notion that this grittier existence is, if nothing else, honest. Boring and meaningless, but honest.

  Then, when summer and seasonal work ends, I sign on the dole. Nothing else is available. There’s no other choice. No choice at all, thank God. The cheque goes no further than paying the rent, buying a few groceries, the odd bottle of whisky, but it’s still honest.

  Summer. Autumn. Winter.

  As seasons pass, I coil tighter. Spend months pulling the world in on myself. Become my own black hole, sucking the bright energy out of my most colourful dreams, spitting out nothing. Old Lofty’s good disciple. And even the memory and hope of Kate begins to fade, which is the kindest loss of all, until (absurdly) she writes and I start coughing the world up again. Like a dog with a fur ball.

  A cold, dirty, February drizzle has been smothering this unremarkable day, from the first scratches of a vague light through to the first itchings of darkness again. All that’s survived is a grey, lingering twilight. The day was stillborn, and night’s arriving prematurely. I’m trudging back from cashing my dole cheque, buying a few provisions, and the air tastes rank, of wet newspapers, while the parade of lost-hope shops and the houses and roads are shabbier than ever.

  “We deserve this shit,” I mutter. “What else is there?”

  Nothing, replies the silent voice of an invisible figure limping at my side, grinning with pride.

  “Too right. Nothing.”

  Nothing.

  “Fuck all.”

  I’ve discovered a world without real dialogue. Just one long soliloquy punctuated by silences and the occasional banalities of the supermarket, the Unemployment Office.

  Turning from the main road into my street, I can’t help but sneer: “Home, sweet home.”

  The street might be called Albenry Park, but there’s no tree or shrub in sight; only a few spindly weeds breaking through cracks in the concrete and clinging to the broken-backed channels of roof guttering. It’s a long street of four-storey terraces set on a hill, but the houses stand derelict at the bottom of the hill, with sheets of corrugated iron nailed over doors and low windows. The iron is loose in places, where squatters and truanting children have broken through, and sometimes claps forlornly in the wind, applauding nothing. Almost every pane of glass in the upper windows is smashed, and out of one dangles a ragged curtain. Plastic bin bags and soggy, split, cardboard boxes, overflowing with empty cat food tins, ketchup bottles, cigarette ends and greasy hair trimmings, spill up from the basements. It’s a rising tide, flowing up and spewing over. The beginning of a great flood.

  “Dying world,” I mutter again
st the collar of my coat, the edge of my scarf, then remember the newsagent’s billboards two hundred yards back: BARCELONA BOMB HORROR and INFLATION RISES.

  Not a world worth keeping. Not worth keeping in the world for.

  Is this why Dad hanged himself? Perhaps he discovered a world he couldn’t live in. And maybe Gazza aimed himself at that tree, unbuckled his seatbelt and planted his foot on the accelerator, for the same reason.

  Cold. So cold.

  I imagine a pregnant woman pushing a pram onto a railway platform in Barcelona on a day of pressing heat and gun-clutching Guardia Civil. (Why bring children into this world?) She’s a tanned figure among a mid-morning crowd, rocking her pram to and fro, to and fro. Madonna and child. The air shimmers like a sheet of molten glass. To one side of where she waits, the metal petals of an ornate rubbish bin unfurl in beautiful slow motion, blossoming into flower for only a second before sprouting a flurry of nails, bolts, shards of metal. Seeds spurting; exploding like a dandelion head. Only then comes the noise of explosion and the screams of a terror to tear the morning apart in that small slice of the world and stop the trains a while; to stop the Guardia Civil from slouching for a day or two. To make ears ring deaf and eyes vomit blind shadows. Not a politician or corporate executive in sight, but a headline or two for their newspapers. Nothing left of the pram or the child. The crumpled Madonna a headless mess of meat and sodden fabric. A bag of blood and bone.

  BARCELONA BOMB HORROR.

  I wince, shrug, refuse to falter in my walking.

  Pavement flagstones rock uneasily underfoot. Muddy water oozes out of others. My boots leak, my socks are saturated.

  A church clock, two roads away, chimes nine. It’s got to be somewhere between three and four o’clock. On the last chime, Old Lofty appears at my side, limping and half-striding along beside me, knees clicking, hunched shoulders scooping forward a bucketful of washed-out day with each stride. Stride, scoop, stride, scoop. And even through the cold, I can smell the stale sweat of his clothes, the spunky sweetness of damp stone, the acrid funk of his black powder breath.

  He says nothing, but grins as he walks. Then he takes on the exaggerated gestures of a mime artist and pulls an invisible rope from the sleeve of his robe. Poking his tongue out one corner of his mouth in concentration, he takes an end of rope and fashions an invisible knot to make a noose. He slips it over his head, settles it around his neck, holds one arm aloft and pretends to hang himself. His head droops, his eyes bulge and he wets himself laughing.

  “Now you,” he says, showing me one end of the rope. “It’s your turn.”

  “Piss off,” I say, and grin. “Fuck the hell out of here.”

  And, after a moment’s pause, he does.

  The drizzle grows heavier and a sharp wind cuts through the streets and round the corners with the cold, keen edge of a skinhead’s flick-knife. The sky is cast from granite – rock heavy, too low – almost grinding the houses into the ground. But I refuse to hurry up the steps to the front door.

  Inside, the hallway is cold, musty and damp. Somewhere upstairs, in this warren of bedsits, a door bangs. Two chained bikes are propped against the wall behind the front door and a few foot-printed letters and circulars are scattered across the muddy linoleum.

  There’s no warning in any of this. Nothing to suggest Kate.

  I flick twenty-odd letters with the toe of my wet boot, spreading them further apart, and pick up four.

  The stairwell leading from the hall to the basement is dungeon-dark and stinks of cat piss and mildew. The timber in the bottom two steps springs down with a stifled groan, but there’s no echo, and the sound is swallowed whole into some unfathomable depth.

  Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve made this place, or if it’s made me.

  Dropping the groceries at my feet, I perch on the edge of the bed, rub at the carrier-bag handle marks chewed into my fingers, and watch Old Lofty stand by the sink and go through the pantomime of unpacking his own bag of provisions. One-by-one, he places each item on the draining board, and I know what he’s got before they appear: his favourite length of rope, a packet of razor blades, a toy gun, a packet of sleeping tablets and a half-empty bottle of cheap whisky.

  Is the bottle always half-empty these days?

  “Sod off,” I say, and turn on the table lamp to banish the bastard, then glance at the soggy envelopes. Without opening them, I guess what they are: a bank statement, an invitation to apply for a credit card, a letter from Reader’s Digest advising me that I, Thomas Passmore of 67 Albenry Park, Whittington, London, have successfully completed the first two stages towards becoming a millionaire and might like to consider how I’d prefer receiving my prize. The fourth envelope is hand-addressed, in writing I vaguely remember; redirected by my mother.

  Dear Tom,

  Thanks for your cards and letters of some while ago, and apologies for not replying sooner, but I’m not an over-keen writer of letters these days, as you’ve probably guessed. In fact, my friends tell me I’m the world’s worst correspondent.

  Anyway, I’m shortly moving out of the house I’ve been living in for the last eighteen months (the landlord is selling), and we’re having a house-cooling party in a couple of weeks.

  I was thinking it would be nice to meet up again, as you suggested once, and thought this party would be a good opportunity, so please come along if you’re able and feel free to bring a friend or two.

  The nearest tube is Ealing Broadway and the house is about ten minutes walk away. It’s in theA-Z. (Details are on the reverse.)

  Perhaps I’ll see you soon.

  Best wishes,

  Kate

  I sit down, read the letter again, focus on the bars outside the window, but don’t know what to do next. Eventually, I stand, take off my wet trench coat, sit down and read it again.

  “Well, fuckety-fuck,” Lofty says.

  How will she ever recognise me? I’ve become a ghost.

  “She won’t,” he tells me. “Forget it. Screw it up and dump it in the bin.” And he pokes a ‘V’ of two bony fingers in the air and claws them up and down, up and down at her letter.

  “You did exist,” an alter ego reminds me.

  “A long time ago,” I say to the room.

  The night isn’t icy cold. The moisture in my exhaled breath doesn’t produce small funnels of fog. There’s no ice forming on damp pavements. Instead, it’s mild and more like a spring night than winter. And yet my fingers are numb, my teeth chatter.

  Crossing the road into Kate’s street, I walk past the house once before pausing, turning back and heading down the small front path. There’s nothing more to lose. Nothing at all.

  “I’m looking for Kate,” I tell the three people who answer the door together. Behind them a houseful of strangers are milling about: chit-chat, chit-chat, chit-chat. It’s the first time I’ve spoken to real people in months. Music is bouncing forward from the back of the house.

  “Kate? Anyone know where Kate is?”

  “Still packing.”

  “Try her room. Upstairs, far end of the landing.” And they point to the staircase.

  On the landing I take a deep breath and knock lightly, but the door’s ajar and moves to my touch. Straightaway, the murmur of conversation within stops and the door’s opened by a girl I don’t recognise.

  This is a mistake.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Must have the wrong room.”

  “Who are you looking for?”

  Another figure stands and steps towards me.

  “Tom.”

  “Hello, Kate.”

  She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. “You made it. Come in, have a seat. I’ll move these clothes out the way. Sorry about the mess. I shouldn’t have started packing until after the party.” She places a hand on her friend’s arm. “Tom, this is Wendy; Wendy, this is Tom – an old friend. Did you bring anyone with you?”

  I shake my head, open my mouth, shut it again and sit down. One corner of her ro
om is cramped with boxes, strewn with skirts, coats, t-shirts; several precarious stacks of books rise from the floorboards, waiting for an excuse to topple; other books have already collapsed across half-empty shelves; framed prints lean lazily against a wall; a stereo system spills out of a large box advertising Kellogg’s Rice Crispies x 24. They’re the furnishings and accoutrements of a Kate I’ve never known, and so I look for something I might point to and say, “I remember this,” but there’s nothing recognisable to cling to.

  “No, I came by myself,” I say.

  “You could’ve. Wendy’s invited a thousand friends, haven’t you?” And she seats herself on a trunk opposite me, but not so close that we could reach out and touch.

  Wendy smiles and shakes her head. “Well, I’d better go and start being sociable, I guess. I’ll give a shout when Mick arrives.”

  “Okay. Ta.” The door clicks shut. “Mick’s my boyfriend. I don’t know what time he’ll get here. He hasn’t been over before.” She shifts her position on the trunk, tucks her hands behind her knees, looks at me and waits.

  Her hair is the same lustrous brown, although a couple of inches shorter perhaps, and she’s still undeniably Kate, even though her face is a tad thinner. But she’s more guarded than I’d hoped. Maybe this is a test.

  “It’s not a difficult street to find,” I say. “He won’t get lost. I didn’t.”

  “Care to put money on that? He’s got a terrible sense of direction.” She smiles then, and presses her teeth against her bottom lip and shrugs – a gesture I remember – and relaxes. “Well, how are you, Tom? It’s been ages. Too long. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Fine. Never better. You look well. I was worried…”

  “That you wouldn’t recognise me? I haven’t changed that much, have I?”

  “No, I meant that you wouldn’t recognise me.”

  She shakes her head and dismisses the idea. “I’m glad you came, and I am sorry it’s taken so long to get in touch. I never imagined life would be so hectic. And as for this year, it’s been crazy – good, but crazy. How’s your course, Tom?”