Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  ‘But you have to announce it,’ Xan said.

  ‘It’s a challenge,’ said Baz. ‘Even if it is a stupid one.’

  Mum took a deep breath and sighed loudly, alerting everyone around the table to pay attention. ‘We’ve been offered a challenge by these two and their parents, apparently: the Hampstead Cannons challenge the rest of the family to a game of football in the riding school this afternoon. Kick-off two-thirty.’

  I added up the likely members of their opposition, discounting only my grandparents.

  ‘It’s a ridiculous challenge,’ Baz told Sid. ‘Best to humour my brother, everyone. He’s got some kind of Tension Deficit Disorder.’

  Xan scanned us around the table, bug-eyed, leering with gritted teeth. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m very tense.’

  ‘Or not tense enough,’ Baz said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Xan agreed.

  ‘There are four of you and six of us,’ I told him.

  ‘Quality not quantity,’ Xan said.

  ‘Seven, actually,’ said Baz.

  ‘Theo forgot to count himself,’ said Xan.

  ‘He would,’ Baz reckoned.

  I stared from one to the other of the twins, forgetting for a moment that a dozen people were watching. ‘Are you ready to be merked?’ I asked.

  4

  My cousin Sidney had the ability like a burglar to enter or exit a room unseen. You never noticed her leave: one moment she was there, curled up on the sofa, the next time you looked she was gone, leaving behind only the indentation of her boney frame in the cushions and an opened, face-down book. Often you didn’t notice her absence, to be honest, so diffident and insubstantial was her presence, and you’d be mildly surprised to come across her in a different room curled up in a chair, with a different book, but always with the same empty, zombified expression.

  ‘Reminds me of myself,’ my father remarked, somehow approving and plaintive both at once. And with a regretful glance in my direction.

  Observing Sid gave one the impression that perhaps reading required a strange courage: that opening a book exposed you to some invisible substance within, lurking between the words, like radium, that sapped your vitality. All the reading Sid did exhausted her. Her only fear, she said, was that she’d not brought enough books with her and would run out before it was time to go back to London. I assured her that Grandpa’s library was extensive, but she didn’t appear to have visited it, and wasn’t convinced. ‘I’ve read most of the classics,’ she told me.

  Sid joined in the football match we played that Christmas Eve afternoon, however, as did everyone else. And though I may find it painful, I shall do my best to describe it.

  The day remained mild, and still, though the sky above the valley darkened a little, to a deeper grey. It was the kind of day when there’s rain in the air, but it falls so lightly that you have to concentrate to actually perceive its existence: the idea of rain seemed to present itself to one’s mind. I looked at my clothes and saw tiny beads of moisture, condensing out of the air, it appeared, rather than falling from the sky. Miniscule drops stained the paving stones as we crossed the patio.

  The opposition were already on the pitch. Baz had his hands in his trouser pockets, and was staring into space. Xan, playing keepy-uppy with a yellow and purple Premiership football, was dressed in a blue Chelsea kit, with DECO printed on the back. Aunt Lorna was in her black running gear. Our team shuffled across the yard dressed in our normal clothes. At least Uncle Jonny was in his usual jeans and open-necked shirt. ‘If he’s so rich,’ I asked Holly, ‘why does he wear cheap gear?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen the labels?’ she whispered back. ‘Prada. Roberto Cavalli. Those jeans cost a thousand squids.’

  ‘What could you have here?’ Aunt Lorna was asking Uncle Jonny. ‘A swimming pool?’ The square-shaped riding school had a sandy surface, which Xan claimed would suit his family’s total football, and he’d set goals using cones for posts in two opposite corners, explaining that otherwise the goals would be too close together. I agreed, and so the square riding school was transformed into a diamond-shaped football pitch.

  Xan was a neat and skilful player, with quick feet, fond of step-overs and dragbacks; his favoured trick was to see how long he could stand over a motionless ball, feinting one way or the other, pretending to kick it but holding back, before eventually looking in one direction and passing it in quite another. I had to admit that despite being smaller, and a year younger, he and I were equally matched.

  The funny thing was that his brother was useless. It must have been the only interest the twins didn’t share. Baz spent the entire match in goal, hiding inside a hooded anorak, shod in a pair of Grandpa’s wellies. Of the few shots we got on target he saved the ones that hit him, and failed to save any that, to Xan’s annoyance, rolled by on either side. Baz’s one useful contribution was, having climbed through the poles surrounding the school to retrieve a ball, to then boot it out of his hands – ignoring the legal requirements of a goal-kick or centre – and send it sailing towards the other end, the opposite diagonal, of the pitch, and the opposition goal, whose custodian was my mother: although generally as incompetent as Baz, if the ball came towards her she did at least make an effort to pick it up.

  Uncle Jonny played in defence for the London Cannons, Aunt Lorna up front, while Xan patrolled the middle. They had a spine to their team, and nothing else. We, on the other hand, were shapeless. I stuck close to Xan. The south London women – Gwen, Melony, Sid and Holly – wandered around the riding school according to impulses of their own, flitting in and out of the action. My father, though he had no idea how to play it, was a connoisseur of the beautiful game. He stood off to one side, an amused grin on his face, occasionally collecting a stray pass but chiefly issuing sardonic advice to all and sundry. Whenever Baz in goal readied himself to boot the ball upfield Dad pre-empted him, calling out, ‘Load it!’ Chuckling to himself. ‘Launch it!’

  * * *

  Our players were hopeless. Aunt Gwen peered through her large spectacles at the bodies revolving around her, apparently unable to make sense of their movement. Melony flattered to deceive: she was able to bring the ball under control, but couldn’t work out what to do with it next, dwelling on it until one of our opponents came and took it off her, or else, with Dad yelling ironically, ‘Get rid! Lump it!’ toe-poking it aimlessly forward.

  Holly was reasonably fit and limber. Sidney, on the other hand, although surprisingly energetic, prised from the stupor of her reading and into the fray, was utterly unco-ordinated. All four of her thin limbs, accustomed to being folded up in a chair, when let loose seemed to operate disconnected from each other; each one looked like it wanted to assist its owner to flap in a different direction from all the others. In addition, the perfectly round leather globe she was required to do something with was obviously for Sid a both startling and hilarious proposition. It was as if the ball were alive, and bounced in an unpredictable manner, because whenever it came towards Sidney she giggled, nervously and loudly, and tried to overcome her warring arms and legs and kick it, in any direction at all. Sid’s panic created an optical illusion: the ball did indeed look, around her, like one of those joke balls that bounce any and which way.

  ‘Put it in the mixer!’ Dad shouted.

  The trouble was that our opponents were not quite so hopeless. Uncle Jonny, though lacking finesse, was a battering ram who made no allowance for age, gender or size. He shoulder-barged Melony out of the way and blocked Holly with a tackle that sent her flying in the sand.

  Aunt Lorna was – unfortunately – a revelation. Not only did she not have to stop running to get her breath back, as all our players did, she was also fast. More than that, though, she knew how to play football: was able to anticipate the flight of the ball, or dummy and let the ball run past her marker so that she could carry on towards goal unimpeded. As Xan and I cancelled each other out in midfield I was obliged to witness the rest of the game unfold: Uncle Jonny bullied
our attackers out of the way; Baz punted the ball forward for his mother to outwit or outpace our defenders, and help herself to three goals, before Jonny strode forward and had a pop himself, booting the ball at our goal as hard as he could. It smacked Mum full in the face, and as we gathered around her, lying in the sand, someone announced, mercifully, ‘Half-time.’

  I rearranged things for the second half. With my mother sitting on the poles at the side of the school, one cheek all red, cheering us on, Auntie Gwen went in goal. Unable to make out clearly what was going on in front of her, she came out bravely and made some crucial, entirely fortuitous blocks. I persuaded my father to hang around in defence, along with Melony, and stuck Sid up front in the hope that she might distract Uncle Jonny enough to give Holly the opportunity of a shot or two. For myself, I would have liked nothing more than to man-mark my Aunt Lorna – sticking close as an Italian defender, a sly shadow, one hand tugging her shirt, the other gripping her arm – but I knew it would be a suicidal manoeuvre, that Xan would waltz around our other players and gorge himself on goals.

  I stuck to my role, and at first our tactics worked. From a goal-kick, Gwen gave the ball to Melony, who, under orders from Dad to ‘Hoof it!’, kicked it past Xan and myself, towards Sid, who tried desperately to bring this ungovernable missile under control, giggling and shrieking, even as it bobbled erratically around her shins. Uncle Jonny came steaming in, but was so confused by Sid’s chaotic dance that he missed her entirely and stumbled over himself, leaving Holly to get the ball and, for once, direct it between Baz’s immobile frame and the post.

  That was the extent of our good fortune. Our opponents scored twice more, once through Xan, who lost his marker – myself – tapped in at the far post and set off on a celebration that consisted of gliding and veering in between our team’s players with one arm outstretched like a bird’s wing and the other cupped to his ear, taunting us.

  At this point Dad consulted his watch and said, ‘It’s after three-thirty and getting dark. Next goal’s the winner.’

  You might have thought he’d declared Christmas to have been cancelled, and there would be no presents, specifically not for twins, such was Xan’s outrage.

  ‘That is so totally not fair,’ he screamed, tears in his eyes at the injustice of the proposal.

  ‘Quite so,’ Jonny agreed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Rod.’

  ‘It’s only a game,’ our blind but not deaf goalkeeper Auntie Gwen called out.

  ‘Precisely,’ Uncle Jonny responded. ‘Like life itself. Something you’ve never understood.’

  ‘You can’t win!’ Xan howled at me. ‘You’re four goals behind!’

  ‘Whatever,’ I shrugged, feeling my way towards a certain moral superiority. ‘I’m easy.’

  ‘We’re not bothered either way,’ Dad said.

  ‘You never bloody are,’ Jonny agreed.

  ‘Why don’t we call it a draw and go in for tea?’ Mum suggested from the sideline, which made our opponents even more furious.

  ‘You can’t stop now!’ Xan shrieked, turning purple with indignation.

  Even Aunt Lorna joined in, telling Melony with an elegant shrug of her shoulders, ‘If you play, you have to play to win.’

  In the end it was agreed that the next goal would be the last one, but that the score remained five-one. We couldn’t even salvage much pride. Our opponents needn’t have worried: we didn’t salvage any. We pressed forward briefly, and Holly kicked the ball weakly towards their goal. It came to rest at Baz’s feet. He bent down and picked it up.

  ‘Put some snow on it!’ Dad yelled, and Baz obliged with his longest punt of the day. The ball flew over everyone’s heads, coming to an eventual rest a few yards from our goal. Gwen peered blindly out. I called to her to step forward and pick it up, but she stayed rooted to her line.

  Aunt Lorna and our defenders meanwhile gave chase. It was no contest. I watched helplessly – Xan beside me saying under his breath, ‘Go on, Mum. Go on,’ – as she outstripped first my poor gasping father, then struggling Melony, who, to my and probably everyone else’s surprise, as Lorna drew away from her, threw out a hand to try and pull her back. She missed and, grabbing only air, floundered. Aunt Lorna reached the ball alone, calmly tapped it past Gwen, and with arms aloft turned to accept the congratulations of her teammates.

  ‘The winner!’ Xan exclaimed, as if he’d agreed to Dad’s proposal, and he and his father rushed to embrace Aunt Lorna. I watched them, filled with bitterness. How I would have liked to run over and embrace her, too.

  Baz wandered up behind me. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he said. ‘Who won, anyway?’

  As we strolled back across the yard – ‘to tea and hot buttered crumpets, I trust,’ said Mum – Uncle Jonny told Dad that his trouble was that he didn’t know the difference between art and sport. ‘You think that unless the game’s beautiful, it’s worthless.’

  The two adult brothers walked side by side. I flanked my father, Xan his. ‘Sport,’ Dad said, ‘is art, with the addition of competition.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Jonny. ‘You see, that’s where you’re completely wrong. Sport evolved from hunting, and tribal fighting. It’s war, without violence.’

  ‘Or in your case,’ Dad said, nodding towards Holly, limping ahead of us, ‘a modest level of violence.’

  ‘War without death,’ said Jonny. ‘That’s what sport is. And thanks to your warrior mother,’ he added, turning to Xan, ‘we won the bloody battle.’ At which father and son high-fived.

  5

  ‘Don’t take it too hard, old son.’ I’d descended to my grandfather’s study to escape Xan’s crowing, our women’s sympathy. He did his best to console me. ‘Sounds like you never had a chance.’ The dogs, too, offered their support. Leda had come to me, tail wagging, when I entered the room; Sel was more surreptitious, and I didn’t notice her until I realised that she must have sidled up and nuzzled against me, and that for some while now I’d been stroking her neck with my hand.

  ‘Xan issued that challenge as if it was daring and brave,’ I moaned. ‘When it was just a way of making sure he was on the winning team.’

  ‘People are rarely who or what they seem,’ Grandpa said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll need to be prepared for this sort of skulduggery.’

  It occurred to me then, with the force of revelation, that Xan, and his father, were Grandpa’s offspring just as much as Dad and I were. He’d made his fortune from nothing. Perhaps he was capable of skulduggery himself.

  ‘Treat people as you find them,’ my grandfather advised. ‘I’d never con a man,’ he assured me. ‘But I’m damned if I’ll let anyone con me.’

  Grandpa turned his attention back to the book he was reading, shifting his gaze from above to through the rims of his half-moon spectacles. He was sitting in a low, old armchair. It was covered in a rug which had slipped and rucked beneath his body, revealing threadbare patches on the upholstered arms. A column of books rose from the ground on either side of the chair; a further scattering on the coffee table in front of him. A large notebook lay open on his lap. On the walls behind and around him the bookshelves were crammed: any space between the tops of books and the shelf above was filled with books lying on their sides. My grandfather, as I indicated earlier, was not a tall man, and he looked even smaller in the comfortable armchair. It was easy to imagine that he was being gradually absorbed, swallowed up, by his library.

  My grandfather was working on a history of the border country between England and Wales, ‘this disputed land’, as he called it, quoting from one of his many sources. The resulting book would be ‘the definitive account’, his son, my father, reckoned – with almost as much filial affection in his voice, I detected, as his customary scepticism. After a career making money Grandpa had determined, upon retirement ten years earlier, to immerse himself in the history of the region. He assumed his book would be completed within a year or two. The reason it had taken so long, he explained to me, was that he kept digging further an
d further back in time, ever wider in place – deep into Wales, up and down Offa’s Dyke – and into an increasing variety of subjects, from geology to architecture; from archaeology to flora and fauna to military dress to climate change to animal husbandry to local government to … It was a dizzying project. ‘I’m like a toddler gathering sheep,’ my grandfather told me. He’d spend a morning with an old hill farmer, listening to memories of Edwardian grandparents, and the afternoon with members of the Friends of the Shropshire Archives discussing the Shropshire Enlightenment.

  ‘Now I can see,’ he’d memorably proclaimed, in the depth of his absorption, at the height of his frustration, ‘why academics restrict themselves to such stultifyingly limited areas of research.’

  ‘Thanks for that generous acknowledgement, Pa,’ my father had replied.

  While Grandpa read his latest textbook, occasionally taking a pencil from behind his ear like a carpenter – as if this were manual as much as intellectual labour – and scratching something in the margin, I walked over to the shelf where, in a metre-long space protected from encroachment by heavy wooden bookends, lay a jumble of artefacts my grandfather had collected in his research. Each artefact had an old luggage label attached to it with white cotton, on which was written a description in Grandpa’s spidery script.

  Before showing these items to Holly, I thought I’d better remind myself of their historical context. There was a pig of lead imprinted with the name of the Emperor Hadrian, which Grandpa had found near the Stiperstones; a Roman coin he’d dug from the hill camp on Nordy Bank; a shard of pottery from the ruins of Viroconium, near Shrewsbury, the fourth largest Roman city in Britain.

  After the final withdrawal of the Roman legions in the fifth century, marauding Saxons came in waves crashing on the eastern and southern shores: as they pushed west, so the British warriors withdrew to the Welsh mountains. Grandpa had a Saxon arrowhead, and the tip of a British guerrilla’s spear. Our grandfather had become an amateur historian, of a sort that academics like his son and daughter-in-law tended to regard with condescension, but it had engaged him, he said, in a way he’d never imagined, made him see the land around him as composed of layers of human lifetimes as well as of geology. He passed on this sense of engagement to me: I understood that we could experience this life as shallowly or as deeply as we wished. We walked on solid ground, in the company of ghostly companions; and furthermore that ground, this disputed land, might be taken from us as it was taken from others.