by Andrew Cowan
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgements
Also by Andrew Cowan
Copyright
Lynne
ONE
December and one foot of snow. The thaw in the towns is becoming contagious now, spreading out by these roads to the coast. People are working. I saw a man beating the tyres of his tractor, clumps of ice falling. A boy with a shovel tramped into a barn. The farm-truck ahead is piled with beets. I suppose they are beets. I raise a finger from the wheel and glance in the rear-view to find you. Sugar beets, I say. Can you see?
But you wouldn’t be interested. You’d be watching these fields, kneeling out of your strap like you mustn’t, and your breath would be misting the window. I’d scold you of course, and you’d offer this view, the black-bordered whiteness, as though for me too it was some kind of gift. See the snow, Daddy! you’d say. After which we would argue. You’d whine and I’d shout. Even today I would shout – because I don’t want you falling, because I’ve told you before … Ach.
I sneeze and switch on the radio and tune it to nothing. White noise seeps into the car. Cold air from the coast rushes the windscreen. The land here is so flat, the snow covers everything. It’s forgetful and simplifying, though I know that somewhere beneath there are seeds and tubers and stalks, tediously waiting – only sleeping – and soon enough there’ll be too much again. These days there is always too much.
I ease down on the accelerator. The wheels of the farm-truck slick through the wet on the road. A solitary beet stirs from the pile then tumbles. In another few yards we’ll be bumper-to-tail – the bolts on the drop-gate are rattling – and when at last I pull out to pass I glance again in the mirror and for a moment there’s no one behind me, and nothing ahead, but even that emptiness crowds me and again I am breaking, I am crying, and it seems there’s no point in continuing. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I am doing. The car slews and steadies and I bring it to a halt in the verge. Beads of meltwater roll down the windscreen; the farm-truck grows small in the distance. I turn off the engine. I clear my nose. In the ticking silence that follows I take out my tobacco, I whisper your name. Are you listening, Euan? I say. Can you hear me? I remember the cold hard press of your bedframe, the sunburn on your shoulders. Shall I tell you a story? I say. Euan? Is that what I should be doing now?
TWO
It begins with Ruth and December and one foot of snow. This is twelve years ago. We were art students then, not yet twenty, and hundreds of miles from home. Ruth came to my flat-warming with a tin of white gloss. She was the only guest I’d invited and she stayed for five days. She stayed, in a way, for twelve years.
The college was small, red-brick and provincial. Its only advantage was to be so close to the seaside. When finally I told my father – the sculptor, your grandpa – that this was where I’d be going he thought I was joking, or foolish. He doubted my seriousness. With his name, and his contacts, he could have helped me find better. He said this with a frown, uselessly prowling his studio, touching things, moving things, not daring to face me. Strands of smoke curled in the sunshine. He lit a second cigarette, the first still burning in the bowl he used as an ashtray. The bowl was a gallery piece, a gift from the potter, but my father was always brutal about potters’ pretensions: a bowl was a bowl. And this school, he exhaled, was only good for ceramics; they would turn me into a potter; or worse, a pottery teacher. And then, for the first time, grinding out both cigarettes, he shrugged and told me I had talent. I could take my pick, anywhere would have me. But of course I didn’t believe him; I doubted his honesty. I thought he was embarrassed to have suggested using his influence and would rather praise me than allow that to stand. So when suddenly his eyes flared out at me, his sculptor’s eyes, as if I too were a piece of metal he could twist into shape, I let myself slouch back on the wall and gazed idly past him. He gave a tight shake of his head. He had nothing more to say to me.
I didn’t send him my new address. He never wrote anyway and wouldn’t have used it. The flat was in an attic, six flights of steep narrow steps to reach it. The stairs had no carpets, and neither did my two rooms. I moved in the day our first term ended, impatient to be free of my lodgings and the scrutiny of my landlady, her constant fussing around me. Now I paid rent to an agency, and could wash my own clothes, cook my own meals. I had no need of mothering. I had no need, I’d decided, of anything much. Before Ruth arrived that first evening I took down the curtains and threw out the lampshades. Whatever couldn’t be hidden – packed into cupboards or pushed under the bed – went downstairs to the bins. Then I began on the painting. I wanted everything white – the skirting, ceiling, doors, walls and window-frames; all of it white. Ruth said it would look like a prison cell, which wasn’t what I intended. More the opposite, I said.
The smaller of my two rooms was the bathroom. On our first morning we woke to find whorls of fern-frost on the inside of the windows, thin platelets of ice in the toilet, three inches of water in the bathtub. It had seeped up through the plughole. When later I heated the boiler, the pressure on the hot tap was so low, and the enamel in the bath already so cold, that the water barely rose above tepid. The tub was anyway too small to submerge in, and not nearly big enough to share, so we washed instead from a plastic bowl in front of the living-room fire, and shivered even there.
My kitchen – a sink, drainer and Baby Belling cooker – was built into a recess to the left of the chimney-breast, a slatted partition to hide it. The pillow end of the bed occupied the alcove to the right, a wall-mounted cupboard above it, a foldaway table and chairs underneath, and each morning for five days I dragged out this table and set it next to the window, then cooked up some breakfast and coaxed Ruth from the bed with a blue-hooped mug of black coffee. She sat wrapped in a blanket, her head just touching the slope of the ceiling, and smiled as I served her. The sea was grey in the distance, the snow softly falling, and afterwards we made love until lunchtime.
In the afternoons we decorated, and as we worked we listened to music. Ruth had brought a bundle of tapes in her rucksack, their plastic cases discarded. It was classical stuff mostly, and cinema soundtracks, and very old jazz; nothing I liked much. She’d made the recordings at home, with a microphone propped to the solitary speaker of her record player, and I could hear her feet as she crossed her bedroom, the door opening and closing, he
r footsteps returning. Sometimes there were voices, buses passing under her window, small shufflings and knocks, and always the hum of the speaker. It was this background noise that I listened to, as if pressing my ear to a wall, attentive to a life I couldn’t see, trying to imagine. Then came the fumble and click at the end of each tape, when the Ruth at my side would lay down her brush and say, Fag-break, and we’d sit facing each other in front of the fire, our fingers spattered with paint, her tobacco and papers between us. She was teaching me how to roll cigarettes. We placed them on the hearth in two separate lines, hers smooth and regular, mine too fat or too thin, always lumpy or conical. The work was absorbing, compulsive, and we didn’t say much. We didn’t smoke, either. Smoking for me was secondary to learning to make them, whilst Ruth rarely lit hers till the evening, when we’d sit up on the mattress, our backs to the wall of the alcove, and talk.
There was a television. It stood on a trolley at the foot of the bed, the dull grey of its screen showing our reflection, a faint furring of dust on the glass. The set was dead, and eventually I’d wheel it out to the landing, but for those first few evenings we gazed at it anyway, and gossiped, and told funny stories, and compared our likes and dislikes, and nosed into each other’s childhood. Ruth was reticent, but I learned of a mother she said she disliked, and a guiltily indulgent father she seemed to despise. He had left them for another woman when Ruth was thirteen, and was now, for a second time, unhappily married. She had no brothers or sisters, and neither of her parents, she implied, was interesting to her; she yawned when I pressed her, or became flippant, or changed the subject to me.
She had a way of asking me questions. Her eyes were huge, the blue-green of the irises almost entirely encircled by white. With the arch of her eyebrows, she often looked startled, or dazzled. But when she focused her gaze, as she had done the first time we spoke in the college canteen, the effect was unnerving – too keenly interested, too brightly attentive, and although this was flattering, and arousing, it also made me self-conscious. I stumbled over the simplest words. And yet, as she pried her way into my past on that bed, Ruth lowered her gaze, lowered her eyelids, and concentrated instead on her cigarette, the flecks of paint on her overalls, the weave of the bedspread beneath us. She doodled absently with a fingernail on my thigh, my arm, the back of my hand. Sometimes she took both my hands in hers and stroked them. She laid her head on my shoulder. And her voice was tentative, small, gently guiding me to say more than I intended, more than I thought I remembered. She wasn’t the first girl I had slept with, but she was the first I’d described myself to in such detail.
We were discussing my mother – speculating, supposing – when finally I smoked my first cigarette. I asked Ruth to light one, and she casually passed me her own, then lit up another. But I couldn’t decide how to hold it, and in my awkwardness I recalled something more: an argument and the slam of a door, the chill of our staircase as I descended, and my mother standing alone in our kitchen, trembling, one arm poised as though lifting a glass, tilting her chin as if something might spill, but this time not drinking. She was smoking a cigarette, one of my father’s, and it seemed misplaced in her fingers. She inhaled sharply, defiantly, three or four draws, then stubbed out what remained with an agitated flap of her hand, dispersing the smoke as she hurried towards me. Her eyes were raw – she was starting to cry – but I wasn’t to worry; she cupped her hands round my face and said I wasn’t to worry. I must have been five – no older than five – and I wouldn’t see her smoking again.
As I told this to Ruth I felt my forehead and chest prickling with sweat. My heart, I realised, was racing, and suddenly in that white room the light was too bright, there was too much to see. I lay flat on the bed and closed my eyes. I thought I was going to be sick and when I got to my feet the giddiness made me lurch sideways. Ruth took the cigarette from my hand and followed me through to the bathroom. She sat on the rim of the tub. Nicotine, she explained; it’s a poison. But you’ll get used to it. Which I did, soon enough.
Ruth had no interest in reading, but in her rucksack she carried a tattered collection of crosswords and sometimes, when we tired of talking, she would pore over these whilst I sketched her. I began from her eyes, or her nose, or her mouth, but rarely got further. I offered her fragments, so closely detailed she looked twenty years older. Then she’d draw me as rapidly as the artists who worked the seafront in summer. With one of her roll-ups between my lips I said I felt like someone other than myself, and she told me I looked unlike myself too, which wasn’t unpleasant. Later we took photographs – of ourselves and the flat. Ruth had a camera on loan from the college, and would develop the film in the following term, her first time in a darkroom. The prints have steadily faded – she got the chemicals wrong – but the shots we took of each other were never meant to be likenesses. With half a film still remaining we stood before the cracked bathroom mirror and altered our faces with Sellotape. A long length flattened my nose. Another pulled hers upwards. I was trying to make her look ugly, I said, but couldn’t. She tacked my eyes open wide, fixed my mouth to a snarl that she said was a smile, and then we photographed our reflections, the crack in the glass disfiguring us further.
What was left of the decorating we did the next morning. Then to celebrate we went out in a blizzard, tramping through snow that came to our knees, until we found a shop selling mince-pies. We helped ourselves to a bottle of milk on a doorstep. The cream was frozen, the silvered top perched on a column of flakes. Solid tubes of ice descended from drainpipes, glassy spikes hung down from the gutterings, the bus shelters and railings, and we saw no other people. Back at my flat the fire had gone out. We pumped our last coins in the meter and switched on the boiler, draped our wet clothes on the tank and climbed into bed. We made love in a litter of pie crumbs, and Ruth fell asleep in my arms. I learned then how she snored. Outside the snowfall was dwindling, the sun almost shining.
It was mid-afternoon when we packed. The coach station was less than a mile away, and we left in no hurry, our rucksacks bulky with laundry, weighted with presents. Ruth was going to stay at her mother’s; my holiday would be spent with my grandmother. We walked along roads emptied of traffic, vacant hotels on each side of us, and I remember the leathery creak of our boot-treads, snow piled at the kerbsides, and Ruth’s gloved hand in mine. We spoke very little. A woman passed in the opposite lane, tugging a small girl on a sleigh, her face pinked with the cold, and when she smiled hello we didn’t think to respond. We turned instead down a side-street and descended a hill to a park – the municipal gardens – where we dumped our bags on a bench and sat for a while looking out at the boating lake. The water was frozen, a fresh felting of snow on its surface. A few children played round the edge. Their parents walked on, paused and called and walked on. Dusk crept in from the sea, and I watched as a couple of boys skimmed a football across the width of the lake, kicking it backwards and forwards between them, streaking the snow, until finally it bobbled and spun to a halt in the centre. I fumbled under my cuff for my watch. It was time to move on and I hooked one arm through the straps of my rucksack, then heard someone shouting, a woman urgently running, and looked up to see a small boy on a tricycle. He was pedalling out to recapture the ball, already yards from the bank, and as I stood from our bench, half resolved to run down, I heard the click of Ruth’s camera. It’s the final shot on the film, and the boy is still there, a line of frost-shocked trees behind him, a sheet of thin ice beneath, and the ball forever a few yards away. That, too, was the twenty-second of December – three days before Christmas, your birthday – and no harm could ever come to him.
THREE
You sometimes return in the night. I sleep thinly. I hardly know myself to be dreaming. Hours pass. There’s the flat, predictable flow of my thoughts, the sluggish recall of another day in your absence. All is routine, nothing uncanny. I hear a phone ringing but don’t answer it. The kettle boils and I watch it. A bus pulls towards me and I make no move to get on. And t
hen you are there. You make yourself visible. The numbness of my waiting dissolves and suddenly I know more than one expression, more than one emotion. There is joy, and the ache of wanting to hold you, but you keep your distance, your separateness from me. This is as much as you will offer, and yet still I cannot stop smiling. I peer at you closely, trying to absorb – to remember – every detail of your appearance. But even as my gaze touches your face, it blurs and you fade, your likeness eludes me. I click my tongue; I concentrate harder. I focus perhaps on your mouth, or your fringe, or your nose. I ask you to help me; I joke and cajole. But I know I am losing you. And then you are gone. My legs give way beneath me, a blanketing weight falls over me. There is panic, and the puncturing pain of my longing. Fragments of light glint near my eyes, silica-fine and piercing, and my body shakes uncontrollably, my blood becomes turbulent. I hear the sea crashing, receding, windbreaks flapping. Voices are calling, viciously whispering. A dog barks. Electrical connections fizz loose in the fairground; a single note blares from the carousel organ. I try to shout for someone to help me, but I’m suffocating – can’t make any sound – and I twist and arch to escape, then realise that I’ve been here before. I know I am dreaming, but the agitation is real and will surely kill me; I shall die before I open my eyes. I grab for Ruth’s arm, dig my nails in to rouse her, dig deeply, and keep digging until my nails break, until I remember it’s already too late, that there’s no point in continuing.
When I wake my body is heavy on the bed, the sheets undisturbed, everything quiet. I haven’t moved, Ruth isn’t beside me, and my breathing is steady. But something of the disturbance remains, and I know that whatever I now look at is likely to move, become animate, unpredictable. I don’t fear it. I stare into the shadows and corners, all the low spaces. I will your image to form, I wait for you to appear, but I see only what I wish to forget. I get up and wander the house, switching on lights as I move from one room to the next, and I feel your presence then, more real than dreaming. You are in the passages, the doorways, all the in-between places. You evade me, slip away as I approach. But I know you are there, and I talk to you, I talk to you endlessly.
