Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

The Cloud’s jumping, and evening accelerates in a blur of full glasses and empty ones as I manoeuvre between chairs and elbows and hands and fingers, swaggering and staggering bodies, sweaty paper coasters piled with wet change. It’s stripper night and tips are fantastic. Outside, shadows purple. I need a smoke so bad I’m ready to light my finger and suck that, but I settle for a draught on the house. Bottoms up for a job well done. The bartender slips me a bottle under the table for Mary, and I remember ice.

  On the drive home I figure out money. How much for the California jar, how much for my get-away. I think of Patrick back in Rocky Mountain House, try to recall his features. Wavy hair, longish, dirty blond. He had a habit of tucking it behind his ears when he bent over the drink orders. A space between his front teeth. Whiskers. A blue enamel fleur-de-lis that hung from his neck on a silk cord. Blue eyes? Yes. That was a nice town.

  The fire’s low at the campsite. She must be asleep. I kick off my shoes, pour ice in the cooler.

  In the tent, I can’t make out her face, but her grey form curls foetal around the darker lump of her sleeping bag. Her knees are drawn up close to her abdomen.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  ‘I couldn’t find my pills.’ She moans in the dark.

  ‘Oh.’

  This is so like her. My hands frisk clothes and blankets, magazines and dirty socks and damp paper cups and I come away empty-handed. I feel along the edges where plastic bags are stuffed in failing seams along the canvas floor. I pull bags out from their holes and rifle their insides and throw them down. I pluck bags from the walls and bags from the ceiling, squinting my eyes at myriad shafts of moonlight. I can see her more clearly now: her mouth twists meanly and her hair splays damp across her face, black as crow feathers. She’s kicked off her shorts and her underwear gleams white in the weird, streaming light.

  ‘How could you lose them? You know what happens!’ The words sound harsh against her stifled cry.

  I throw wood on the fire and find the smoke-black pot on a stump half-full of tomato soup from a day not this one, and fling the soup in the grass. Under a lopsided moon the creek runs molten. I dip the pot; the water burns my skin. I carry water to the fire and set it on the grate, shove clothes around the Malibu until the hot-water bottle reveals itself and when the water boils, I fill the bottle and wrap it in my sweater and take it in to her. But she doesn’t want it.

  I remember a nameless store in a nameless town, the shapeless woman with frizzled hair, her green apron smeared with fine powder like dust on a chalkboard. She sold dried cures. Mary and I saw nothing we knew or wanted and were about to leave when the woman said: ‘Raspberry leaves are good for the female complaint.’ Mary pulled me by my jacket strings on to the bright sidewalk where we laughed like drunks down the street past the fiddle player on the corner, Mary throwing our last coins at his old shoes.

  Moonlight glistens off a meaningless calligraphy penned in slime by the bellies of monstrous, horned slugs that criss-cross the outhouse path. I beat back wild rhubarb, its giant frills like prehistoric lizards. The child curls salamandrine in my womb, dreams of blue eyes and curly hair, opposable thumbs, frontal lobes, a name. Patrick or Patricia. I rummage among the raspberry in utter inadequacy, fingers pricked and clumsy, slow as sloth and Mary waiting.

  The leaves steep until they smell like swamp. I drain the brew into a mug and blow on it and carry it to her with both hands. ‘Can you drink this?’ But she’s rocking her knees and she says she wants ice.

  ‘Come by the fire then. I have to see to do it.’

  She brings her sleeping bag and lies by the fire, shivering in her underwear. I pull the waistband low and put the ice on her belly. The tea sits by, turning cold with the night, the settling dew. Ice skates under my fingers, gliding in figure eights, crossing where I think her womb might lie, circling her ovaries on either side.

  ‘Keep doing that,’ she says.

  I push the ice over her skin and watch it melt and fill her navel and roll down her waist, spreading like a dark map across her sleeping bag. Firelight gilds her torso. She closes her eyes and seems to be concentrating, then she opens them and looks right at me, and I can’t look back because there’s a plastic bag of money in the trunk that’s going to save me.

  She lifts one hand as if to touch my face and all I can say is, ‘Hush now, baby,’ as I move the ice on her belly. She draws her knees up hard, then pushes them down and takes a sharp breath. I smooth the ice to numb her, and wonder about all those words my mother didn’t say.

  I remember one day Mary and I had gone up the creek to the warm, shallow pools and stripped out of our bathing suits, not quite believing that the world wasn’t ours alone, and we were playing there, splashing each other and laughing at everything and nothing, watching the sun catch and hold the water’s light, water filling our hands with a light that overflowed, when I saw a man and a boy fishing, making their way downstream in our direction. They were watching us with calm amazement, and I shouted a warning to Mary. We crashed shrieking through the water to crouch behind the boulders where we’d left our suits, and we wrestled them over our thighs, Mary and I, laughing, always laughing, spandex pinching our skin. But the quietness of the boy’s gaze and the man’s careful movements with his rod stilled me for a moment and it was like we all held our breath, a single unified breath, and the muddy waters of the creek opened before us. Look, it was saying. Look, what is here. And for that one moment I could almost see.

  She’s breathing deep and regular now, her body slack. She closes her eyes as if she might sleep. Then she rolls gingerly on to her side and pushes herself up. Her dark hair falls over her face and she smooths it back the way she likes it. ‘Anything to eat?’

  I fumble for the can opener, a can. She disappears down to the creek and comes back, flicking pearls from her fingers.

  When our soup’s ready we huddle over it, spoons dipping, and talk of California beaches and grass-skirted margarita stands. Moonlight spills over the tent; plastic bags take on a glow like pale hands punching through. The sky’s a deep blue bowl filled with stars. The fire tosses orange sparks into it – they fall back cold to the touch, cold as coming snow. Mary opens the fresh bottle and pours.

  School Run – Kate Marsh

  I meet my future husband when I’m five years old. He’s my brother’s best friend and we give him a lift to school every day. I develop a crush on him while he’s teaching me to read by spelling out the shop names on the awnings we pass each morning. He sings in the school choir and has perfect pitch; he can recite from memory every line of the Goon Show’s Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler, doing all the voices. Whenever we bump into his parents my mother insists, in the same tone with which she praises the artwork I bring home from school, how much she enjoys his early morning performances. Yes, sometimes it would be nice to listen to the Today programme on the car radio, but it’s a pleasure to be reminded of these favourites from her own childhood. How unusual that a schoolboy in this day and age would appreciate them. But then Magnus is a very unusual boy.

  As I enter my teens I realise that my friends seem to fall in love for reasons I haven’t considered. Can he drive? they ask. Is he cute? Does he have any cute friends? My answers to these questions don’t sound right. He rides a bicycle. He has trouble pronouncing his Rs which I find endearing in someone older and cleverer than me; he’s friends with my brother who I don’t think you would call cute. At sixteen none of my friends are impressed with the skill of Magnus’s card tricks or his promise never to saw a woman in half; their expressions tell me that they do not consider leather elbow patches to be a sign of sophistication, or even of scholarship. They ask if I have ever tried going out with normal boys: the kind of boys we meet at parties, who gel their hair and save up for motorbikes.

  He goes away to university and sends me letters every week or so, always set out as neatly as a lab report. Sometimes with diagrams, and often a bibliography. I feel there is something supremely trustworthy about a man w
ho has never given an unattributed reference. But I struggle to glean particles of news from our correspondence to pass on to my family and friends. ‘Do you ever think about matter?’ he writes, in the washable blue ink I have persuaded him to use after an accident with blue-black over the car upholstery. ‘How matter can never be created or destroyed, but only altered? I would think that would be comforting to religious people. I don’t know why they seem to think science is cold.’

  ‘He’s enjoying his philosophy classes,’ I tell my mother. ‘He’s thinking about joining the choir.’

  My friends, as they prepare for another Saturday night, say: ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea to try to keep the relationship going while he’s away? What if he’s met someone new and doesn’t know how to tell you? What if you meet someone?’ They ask, ‘Doesn’t he ever invite you up there to parties and stuff? Maybe we could all go one weekend. Have you met his friends? Are they cute?’

  He writes to me, ‘A group of us is going to Bletchley to see the Enigma machine. Do you want to come? It’s got 10114 possible combinations.’

  After I leave university and get my first job, he goes on to study for his postgraduate degree. My friends say to me, ‘What happens when he finishes this degree – is that the highest you can get? Will he stop then?’

  He says to me, ‘I was going to buy you an engagement ring but I wasn’t sure whether we should buy it together or if I should choose one and surprise you. There appear to be two schools of thought.’

  I tell him that my mother has put aside my grandmother’s ring for me and he inspects my face for clues as to how I feel about that.

  ‘I underestimated the variables,’ he says sadly. ‘I should have done more research.’

  My mother seems to feel responsible for my marrying a man who wears corduroy year-round and who thinks that Scotch eggs are canapés.

  ‘Who was that other boy who used to sing in the choir too?’ she asks. ‘The one who got that very high-powered job in the City. I remember how excited you were when he joined the school run and his father’s chauffeur drove you in a Rolls-Royce.’

  ‘Nicky Mott. He takes cocaine and picks up women in nightclubs. The son-in-law you’ve always dreamed of.’

  Her face falls. ‘Oh no, really? He had such a lovely singing voice. Or that boy who won the art prize and went to study in Italy. You always liked him.’

  ‘George Stefanidis.’

  ‘That’s right, George. Do you remember how he could never get up in the morning? Half the time we’d have to leave without him. I suppose he must have taken the bus.’

  I ask her, ‘Are you wondering if I would be engaged to George Stefanidis if we had only driven him to school more often?’

  We decide to wait until he has finished his thesis and I ask my friends if they would like to be bridesmaids. The reception will be small and simple – which they understand to mean that they should bring dates as they will be unlikely to meet attractive men there. They ask me with genuine concern if Magnus is going to ride to church on his bicycle and arrive with one leg of his suit trousers tucked into his sock. They worry that I will have to carry a plastic bouquet to avoid triggering his pollen allergies.

  At the birth of each of my sons my mother comes to stay to help out for a while. She bites her tongue when Magnus takes a calculator to the lavatory with him in the morning instead of the newspaper like a normal person. She averts her eyes from the double-helix-shaped mobiles hanging over the baby’s cot. She makes tea in the kitchen for my girlfriends, sharing their disappointment at having to find presents for boys. Chunky wooden puzzles, clock-work trains and pull-along toys are not as much fun as pink accessories, fairy wings and miniature baking sets.

  ‘You hated all that stuff when I was growing up,’ I remind her. ‘If anyone gave me a Barbie you would accuse them of gender-role stereotyping.’

  ‘I know,’ she agrees with a sigh. ‘You couldn’t just be a recreational feminist in those days. You had to go the whole hog. I’m sorry now that I didn’t wear a bra more often. I’m sorry I missed out on all those bonding mother-and-daughter activities. I’d hoped to relive them through your children.’

  She tries to make up for it by buying toddler-sized football strips, which make Magnus anxious. He has trouble with the responses at football matches, as poor attendees do at church. He is never sure when to sit down and when to stand up. He checks with me that I am not expecting him to take them, in baby sling and pushchair, to Stamford Bridge while their Chelsea all-in-ones still fit.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I tell him. ‘She’ll just keep buying them new ones when they grow out of them. You’ll have plenty of time.’

  Around the time the boys start secondary school I notice a change. Not in us, but in the world around us. Recently I have begun to see young men from my husband’s department, and on the train and on television, wearing sneakers with their suits with varying degrees of nonchalance. Magnus has, for fifteen years, worn Dunlop Green Flash with his corduroy and tweed, winter and summer. I often have to cut the laces out, like a surgeon snipping stitches, because he is fond of tying complex knots and then can’t untie them. In a post-breakfast panic, he has been known to lace them with garden twine, the twist-ties from freezer bags or birthday ribbon from my gift-wrappings drawer. Our older son tries to interest him in Velcro fastenings, opening and closing the straps on his own trainers. Look, how easy.

  Wherever I look, the contact lenses that my contemporaries thought as necessary for adulthood as a driving licence are being replaced with black, square-framed spectacles. At friends’ parties and at drinks with neighbours, the opinions of Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are being passed around with the crostini and the wasabi peanuts. Debates about the Large Hadron Collider break out at summer barbecues and copies of A Brief History of Time and The God Delusion have begun to appear in the bags of jumble I collect for the PTA.

  Astronomers and physicists are no longer paunchy stand-bys, late-night TV fodder for insomniacs and Open University students. My husband occasionally appears on television-panel shows these days, when unthreatening displays of erudition are called for and Stephen Fry is unavailable. He answers the questions with the same unforced patience with which he once taught me that the letters on the butcher’s window spelled Purveyor of Fine Meats, and the same serious attention to detail with which he has answered the boys’ questions over the years about the weather on Mars and the relative merits of different dinosaurs.

  When my friends ring up I can hear the embarrassment in their voices as they flip through my family news and wait for me to pause so that they can get to the true reason for their call: a child’s essay on electromagnetism; a glitch in the latest Microsoft upgrade; a charity quiz night in need of a host. When I look over at Magnus he’ll be snoozing in his chair. He has always been able to sleep bolt upright, silently; a gift which has carried him through various religious and sporting events, and every single movie I have taken him to see. He relies on his glasses to hide his closed eyelids, not knowing that the softening of his mouth, the gentle rise and fall of his lamb’s-wool chest, give him away to anyone who really knows him. I wave the boys aside when they go to wake him and tell my friend on the phone that it’s been good to catch up with her and that I’ll be sure to give him the message.

  A Sense of Perspective – Penelope Macdonald

  It’s a game we play, testing each other. One has to arrange the journey – that’s usually George, he likes doing business on the phone. Sometimes he mentions to the coach company that we’re blind – sometimes he thinks it will be more amusing to keep them in the dark about this detail. After all we are experienced travellers. There’s not much we haven’t faced before.

  We’ve been friends a long time, since school. We were there seven years. You get a lower sentence for GBH, George always says – and you don’t get sent there when you’re eleven. Still, that’s how it was then, and that’s where we met. Not much we don’t know about each other by n
ow.

  George likes his little jokes; he likes to land us in it sometimes, to see how we manage, and we always do manage somehow. As for me – I’ve always been up for it. It’s an adventure, living on the wrong planet, trying to understand the natives; I might even marry one of them one day. Then there’s Pete – he’s special. He was born one of them, joined us a little late – some obscure disease of the retina the GP failed to spot. But it gives him a different perspective: well, it gives him the memory of perspective. It makes a difference to our outings when Pete comes along.

  So there we were in the coach on our way to Coventry. George had been enjoying some mothering from the woman behind us. It’s one of his cast of characters – The Inadequate. He began as soon as we got on.

  ‘I got no lunch. I forgot my sandwiches.’ That happens often enough – but it was the voice he used, the little hurt voice, so I knew what to do. I ignored him. Sat across the aisle with Pete and we waited to see who he’d catch.

  She was a nice woman, Irene. She introduced herself right away from the seat behind him. She was an older woman, her voice oozing concern. One of those who thought we shouldn’t be allowed out alone, so I had no worries about him taking her for a ride. Best way to educate them – to take advantage.