The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (22 page)

“You're looking…” I begin, and don't know what to say.

“I'm looking my age. We both are. I'm not eighteen anymore and neither are you.”

“Seventeen,” I correct her. “I was seventeen when we first met. You were eighteen.”

“That's right. You were so young – too young – such a romantic. Are you still?”

“I don't know. I don't think so.”

“Would you be here if you weren't?”

“I don't know why I'm here.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Good. A person can know too much.” She attempts a smile, but it's more a puckered grimace. “You've been too hard on lots of things, Thomas: on yourself, on Britain, on me.

You always thought too much. I always said you did. Remember?” She pauses. It's as if we've fulfilled some prerequisite of our meeting, and now her gaze returns to the spread on the table. “So how have you spent the years?” she asks, achieving a different tone altogether.

“Surely you know already? You seem to. How much do you know?”

“You should tell me yourself. I'd prefer that. Indulge me.” Removing the teapot lid, she picks up a teaspoon and stirs the brew. “Real tea,” she croons. “No tea bag muck.”

“Is it really you, Kate, or am I just projecting part of myself at a You I imperfectly remember?”

“
Questo tè è buonissimo
,” she replies. “Or have you learnt to speak Italian too?”

The accent sounds impeccable. “No. Sorry.” All the same, I think I know what she's said and, if I do, then she's used Holiday Phrasebook Italian on me, and I could've looked this up myself.

Sliding the teapot to one side, she shrugs. “There's something missing. Sorry. I won't be a minute.” She stands and the chair scrapes once again, and she enters the building through a door I haven't noticed. As the door clicks shut, I lean back and peer through the glass, but still see nothing except a reflection of the sea. Within the minute she's sitting opposite again.

Real milk. So real it's yellow and thick with cream, fresh from the cow.

“I haven't seen milk like that since… our holiday in Yorkshire – that afternoon in Whitby.”

She claps her hands together, brings them to her chin. There's something out of place about the gesture. “How do you take your tea?” But her voice breaks into falsetto.

“White with one.”

She lifts the little jug and pours; reaches for the tea strainer, grips the handle of the teapot, juggles the tasks as if it's all she's ever done. She hands me a cup and saucer and says, “This moment's been waiting all your life. Just bobbing up and down.”

“All my life?” It makes no sense.

“Every day of it.” Pushing the plate of scones to one side, she reaches across the table. “Will you hold my hand?” she says.

“Why?”

“Because you can. Because it's time.”

Looking away, I see the sky is moving again. I'm not betraying Elin in being here; quite the opposite. I'm finally resolving the past and creating more room for Elin, I tell myself. The sea is still calm, but no longer syrup. I can smell the brine. Returning my cup to its saucer, I slip my hand over hers, but it's coarser and rougher than it should be, and I recoil. Both her hands are old, gnarled and masculine, beyond her years and femininity.

Instead of Kate, I'm sitting opposite Old Lofty in drag.

“You're not Kate, you bastard!”

“Hello, Thomas,” he strains out in his best Our Father voice.

“You're not Kate!”

“Indeed,” he says, pulling out the padding from the bodice of his dress: a silver goblet of red wine, a half-eaten loaf of bread, the stink of old fish. “But I could be.”

“You're not even real. You're just an image I conjured up – my bogeyman, my Angel of Death. You don't belong here; not now, not anymore.”

“I do! I'll always be with you!” he shouts, standing, slopping gobbets of wine across the lace tablecloth, tearing a limb of bread away with his teeth. “This is exactly where I belong!”

“No!” I shout back, but refuse to stand. My hand is shaking, but I lift my cup and sip tea nonetheless. Best china.

He sits again, leans forward and tries to suck me up with his hollow eyes. “Particularly here, particularly now,” he spits. “I'm more real than your precious Kate. Come with me, stay with me. If you want Kate, I can be Kate. I was doing a good job until you spoiled it. Come with me and I'll give you Kate.”

“Bollocks,” I say, wiping a fleck of sodden bread off my arm. “You're a figment of my imagination – a fiction. I created you.”

“You've made me real.” He stands, unravels his black cape from the shadows on the floor and clasps it around his shoulders.

“I'll unmake you,” I shout.

“Easier said than done.” He tucks the goblet of wine and chunk of bread inside his cape, then lifts his arms and flaps them back and forth, creating rushes of air across the verandah. “Death!” he announces.

And I laugh. Melodrama makes me laugh. I crease at the middle with laughter and have to hold my sides, wipe my eyes, and even the whale joins in with squeals and ribbons of clicks, streaming laughter from the boathouse. And the more I laugh the madder he gets, and the madder he gets the wilder he flaps.

“One way or another I'll have you,” he declares. “Sooner or later you
will
come to me.” He paces the verandah, flapping away – to and fro, to and fro – then turns and faces the sea.

“Never,” I say. “Never, never, never.”

“I'll be back, and then you'll be mine. Forever and ever.”

He spreads his arms out, flexes his knees, leans forward and dives into the water. There's a small splash and then nothing. Nothing but nothing.

The manner of his departure is a surprise. I'd have imagined the graceless flapping of a gloated vulture, skywards, not the nimbleness of a circus performer's swan dive. Old Lofty has hidden depths.

But all this drama is wearing on a hot day, and I lean closer to the wall where the shade is deeper. The sea is emerald green and clear again, and a five minute nap on this table will set me right.

Sleep. Let me sleep. Keep the blinding brightness out.

“Wake up, sir.”

It's too short a nap after such a journey, and the whale needs rest too.

“Wake up, sir.”

Wrenched from my table in the Boathouse Café, I open gritty eyes to see a flight attendant leaning over me, rows of seats, open baggage compartments, the backs of passengers crowding down the aisles, clutching coats, luggage, passports, pressing forward. Among them, the backs of three figures are vaguely familiar: a businessman in an Abercrombie, a young mother cradling a baby, and a man wearing bike-clips carrying a unicycle. The attendant smiles and her smile is anchored in lip-gloss and eyeliner.

“I'll go back to the beach soon,” I say.

“Pardon?”

I shake my head.

“We've landed,” she says. “Are you alright? Did you take something to make you sleep?”

“Where are we?”

“London, Heathrow. Journey's end.”

“Where from?” I say. “Where have I been?”

“Pardon?”

I've woken on a plane at Heathrow airport, at five-thirty on a winter's morning. Riding a whale to the Boathouse Café was more real than this.

“Would you like a hand with your luggage, sir?”

Poking out the side pocket of my flight bag is a white envelope with my name on it: Tom Passmore. “Christmas card,” I say to the attendant, and she nods as if this might explain everything.

From the cabin speakers comes a tinny rendition of some old tune, but I can't make it out. At the cabin door, the flight crew smile and thank me for flying with their airline. It's night-dark outside and a rush of cold air stabs at me. The sunken eyes and flinty smile of one of the pilots reminds me of someone – and it isn't good – but I'm dopey with sleep.

“Enjoy your stay,” the bastard says. “Night-night, sleep tight.”

I turn on him. “What did you say?”

He looks at me with his lop-sided grin and says: “Hope you had a good flight.”

In the Arrivals Hall, I dig into my pocket for my passport wallet, and a sharp edge of flint stabs the tender skin between my nail and index finger. Sucking on the graze, I pull out two flint points and, from the other pocket, a corn dolly. I show this collection of artefacts to the customs official who smiles reassuringly. I am Thomas Daniel Passmore. I am.

“I've been here before,” I say.

She nods, but says nothing.

“This must be a dream,” I say. “It can't be real.”

She reaches across and places a hand on my shoulder. “You can't sleep here.”

“What?”

She shakes me. “You can't sleep here.”

One side of my face is pressed flat against a table and I'm staring at a waitress. The moment she realises I'm looking at her, she steps back.

“If you don't wake up I'll call the police.”

I pull myself upright in the booth and try working out where I am.

“Sorry,” I say. “I keep falling asleep.” Looking past her, I recognise the style of French windows that form the street-facing wall of this long, narrow establishment and know that I'm inside Café Lyons. The place is empty, as far as I can tell, although it's difficult to see into some of the booths. I can't remember arriving here or having visited the British Museum. “Can I have a coffee please? A long black.” And I hand her a five-pound note. Then I glance at my watch. Shit, it's stopped! Nine-twenty. But above the counter there's a clock: eleven-thirty! Shit, shit, shit! “Wait,” I say to the waitress. “Please. Have you had any other customers in the last half-hour or so?”

She stops, hesitates. “The manager's out back.”

“I'm waiting for someone. I was supposed to meet them half-an-hour ago, but I'm jetlagged and keep falling asleep.”

“Jetlagged? Not on drugs?”

“I'm Australian,” I say. “I only flew in… a while ago.”

This reassures her and she steps closer again. “It's been busy most of the morning. This is the lull before the lunchtime rush.”

“A woman with long, dark hair?”

“No, not that I remember.”

“With short hair then? Or tied up?”

“I don't know. There was a woman by herself. She was sitting at that window table.” The waitress points to a table close to the door. “She wouldn't see you from there. Must have left with the rest of the crowd, about ten minutes ago. You just missed her.”

Why did I sit so far back, and in a booth of all things?

“Did she leave a message or anything?”

“No.”

“You didn't see which way she went?”

“Get real.”

I pull myself out the booth, but my left foot's numb – my whole side's numb – and I'm dragging it badly as I make my way out the door. How could I miss her? I'm losing Kate all over again.

“What about your coffee?” the waitress calls.

“Get real,” I try to say, but the words remain a whisper. I want to shake my head, but it's not as easy as it used to be. And there's something different about this London street. It's to do with the light and the cyclone fencing.

“Can you hear me?” she calls.

FOURTEEN

Grabbing a bottom corner of chain-link fence, I tug it up and away from the post, and here's Elin squatting next to me, ready to scrabble through the gap on her hands and knees.

It's the sleepiest of Sunday afternoons when Elin and I break into the building site, and the rest of the world has vanished.

“Through here,” I say. “Can you hear me okay?”

She nods and has almost crawled through when she stops and squints back at me and shakes her head instead. Except it's now Jo I see from this angle. She must have dyed her hair again: corn blonde. Until now I've never realised how similar they are, which makes me wonder whether they might've been the same person all along.

“It's alright,” I tell her, “no one'll stop us. It's been this way for years. No one lives here.”

About eight houses on one side of the road are complete, but the remaining seven aren't much more than foundations.

“Careful,” I say, as we teeter across a network of precarious planks bridging a maze of trenches. The number of trenches has increased since I was here with Gazza. Some are so deep I can't see the bottom, others are filled with an ocean of black water slopping backwards and forwards with the tug of an unusual current. “Wouldn't want to lose you again.”

I knock on the door to one of the houses. The garden's a mess of builders' rubble, but Brian's car is parked out front.

Turning to Jo as I reach for the handle, I say, “It's alright. I know whose house this is.” But she's no longer there. No one is.

The front door leads into the hallway at home. It becomes the home of my childhood, down to the pictures and carpets and wallpaper. However, although the house pretends to be empty of people, I sense someone waiting to jump out and wrestle bony fingers around my throat, or to charge down the stairs and push me over in order to get out – a burglar, perhaps. But nothing happens.

Whispers and muffled laughter come from the kitchen.

As long as I don't falter, the sound can belong to anyone I want in this dream. That's the power of the place. How lucky is that?

“Hello, Kate,” I call, and walk through.

But instead of Kate, there's a figure – a man – who fills the kitchen with the many folds of a long, black coat. The coat's so large and dark that it swamps the light from the room, and it takes a moment to realise he's got his back to me and is holding the back door open for an escape, urging Kate to run away. Of course it'll be Old Lofty.

“Bastard!” I say. “Ask her to come back. Why did you do that?”

He turns then, and it's my father. All this time Lofty and my dad have also been one and the same, and this revelation paralyses me. The kitchen door is open, Kate'll be scrabbling away beneath the hooked-back fence, and I can't move.

Though he stares in my direction, his expression never changes. He might be a statue or a photograph, frozen in time.

I want Kate back, but there's so much I need to ask him too. There's a question I have for both of them – Dad and Kate – and so I shout it as loud as I can. Maybe Kate'll return, maybe I'll unfreeze him.

“Why did you leave me?” I shout.

*

Andrew and Annette are still asleep when I ease my way downstairs. Each time I return ‘home', the house is smaller in every dimension, making me duck my head, squeezing me out, although I figure that won't matter much by the end of this visit. Sometimes it's hard to imagine how the place ever contained me.

Brian's in the lounge, engrossed by the morning news on his pride and joy: a brand new, large-screen TV. An outside broadcast shows a reporter and a policeman standing in front of a cordoned-off bungalow, where an eighty-one-year-old widow has been raped and murdered.

“Watching TV already?” I say.

He looks up from his chair, peering over his glasses. “I'm waiting for the weather. It's after the news round-up. Unless you can tell me what the three-day forecast is?”

I begin walking away, then step back, make a show of looking towards the open French windows and the brightness of the summer morning, and announce: “Rain, rain and more rain.”

In the kitchen, my mother enters through the open back door and she's carrying a colander of strawberries.

“You're up,” she says. “Did you sleep well?”

“Not bad.”

She holds the colander out for me to see the crop. “Thought I should pick these before the birds do.”

I reach out to take a couple, but she pulls them back.

“Not now. They're for later. You haven't even had breakfast yet.” And she begins rinsing them in the sink.

I make a mental note to buy two punnets of strawberries and a bottle of Asti spumante for Elin's birthday breakfast in a couple of weeks. We'll gorge ourselves in bed, not get up until midday, and enjoy every guiltless minute of it. And then I head out the back door.

“Where are you off to? Aren't you having breakfast?”

“In a minute. Thought I might have a walk round the garden first.”

But she'll know what I want to see. It was too late and dark when I pulled into the driveway last night.

Two weeks previously they phoned to wish us well in our new flat in Great Shentonbury.

“It's good,” I told Brian. “Only one bedroom, but it's big enough for us.”

“That reminds me,” he said. “Andrew needed more cupboard space, so we boxed up the last of your stuff and put it in the attic. There was only a couple of boxes – you might not even want it – it's been sitting in that cupboard for years, but you might want to go through it next time you're home. Old school books, reports, that sort of stuff.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “What else is news? Got your holiday booked?”

“Your mum said to tell you we've taken the old tree down – got some men to come and saw it down and take it away. You should have seen the mess. The garden looks twice the size now.”

“Which tree?”

“That big old pine thing. It was pushing the back fence down. I spent last weekend putting in new fence posts.”

“The spruce? My Christmas tree?”

“Well there was only one, so I guess so. But hardly your –”

“Shit!”

“What –”

“You might have told me beforehand.”

“Why? It had to come down. The neighbours were complaining. It's not as though you live here or ever pruned the damn thing.”

“Okay. Alright. It doesn't matter. Don't worry about it, Brian.”

“I wasn't.”

So I kneel beside the sawn-off stump and place my hand on the remaining bark, pick at a piece of resin bleeding from the cut, sniff it and roll it into a bead. In the corner of the garden, tucked under a bush, several long cones lie like fat cigars, and I pick these up, pull back some of the cardboard-like scales and shake them until I've gathered several seeds. These I drop in my pocket, along with the best three cones.

I'm perched on a kitchen stool, with a mug of tea and a bowl of muesli, when Andrew shuffles in. His hair sticks up, his pyjama top hangs off one shoulder, and he yawns.

“You look like you haven't woken up yet,” I say, and ruffle his hair.

“You talk in your sleep,” he replies. “You shouted one time. Woke me up.”

“You snore.”

“Don't.”

“Like a piglet,” I say. “Oink, squeal; oink, squeal.”

The kitchen door's still open, and Kate's drifted irrevocably away from me. I haven't seen her in two years, and know that two will become five and five will become ten. We're following separate currents and it seems we'll never meet again. In a fortnight, I'll start work with the Wiltshire Library and Museum Service, and Elin has a teaching position in a small primary school. She'll have returned from her literacy conference by the time I leave Nenford.

When I finish my muesli, I take a sip of tea and make the announcement: “Elin and I are getting married next March.”

There's a moment's stunned silence to savour.

“What? You're not? You're joking,” Mum says.

“Nup.”

“Congratulations,” says Brian.

“Really?” says Andrew.

“You're too young,” Mum tells me.

“Too young?”

“You've only just finished university.”

“I'm older than you were when you married Dad.”

“Things were different back then. We had to grow up quicker. Maybe we were too young as well.”

I stand up and push the stool against the wall. “We've lived together for two years. We're getting married next March.”

“I still think you're too young,” she says. “Twenty-two's nothing. You've seen nothing of the world – of life.”

“We'll see it together. Don't you like her?”

“She's lovely. But she's too young too.”

I begin rinsing my dishes in the sink and Mum pulls the colander of strawberries out of the way.

“The first week of the school Easter holidays,” I tell her. “Thought you might be pleased.”

She says nothing, but reaches for a tea towel to catch the drips from the strawberries.

“Thanks for your good wishes,” I say, and step past Brian and Andrew on my way upstairs to the bathroom.

Annette's on the landing.

“What's the fuss about?” she asks.

I shake my head, intend keeping quiet. “Nothing,” I say. Then: “The same old crap. Some things never bloody change.”

“Mum! Dad! Thomas swore!”

That afternoon, I take the stepladders and climb into the attic. It should be cluttered with boxes, old toys and junk maturing towards antique-hood, but it's practically empty.

Close to where I perch, my legs dangling into the hallway below, sit two cardboard boxes with my name daubed on each, and only a little further away, protected by a dust sheet, the family Christmas tree: a two-foot-tall, ready-decorated, green plastic job. Apart from a few Christmas cards clustered on the sideboard, this is Mum and Brian's annual concession to Christmas decorations. Each year he'd lift it down from the attic, remove the cover, sit it on top of the TV, plug in the lights, and there it'd be.

“Easy,” he'd probably say.

“Too easy by half,” I'd reply.

I haul my boxes down the ladders and sit on the bed to go through them. In the first, there's thirteen years of school reports, a biscuit tin full of badges, and several History exercise books with assignments written in fountain pen, using a careful script I no longer recognise. In the second box, there's a small, red tin containing two Neolithic flint points, a bag of marbles, a badly torn poster of The Stones, the black pretend-leather diary that Brian and Mum gave me one Christmas, and a wad of letters (green envelopes, green writing paper) tied together with a length of red cord.

Afterwards, I shovel everything into the boxes again and stack them next to my carry-all. Nothing will stay here; not even the stuff I'm gonna chuck out. And then I escape the house and walk a while. There's another, bigger argument looming and, having been bullied into avoiding the topic all my life, I need anger more than courage.

Walking past Gazza's old house, three streets away, I wonder what it'd be like to knock on the door and speak to his mum.

“You won't remember me,” I'd say, “but I was a friend of Gazza's, back at primary school. You showed us how to make doughnuts. You won't remember me, but I just wanted to say that I'm really sorry for your loss. It might be several years too late, but I am sorry. Really. I just didn't know it at the time when I read that he'd been killed, nor how to speak it. I just wanted to tell you this.”

And she'd look at me, with the front door half-open, and she'd either try to smile or she'd look blank, or stunned, or stung, or she'd begin crying and shut the door in my face. Or no one would answer the door in the first place. Or someone else would answer the door, like a young mother with a crying child on her hip, and I'd learn that Gazza's mum had moved away soon after her loss or that she'd died of a broken heart.

But I look at the house and the garden, at the peeling paint around the windows and at the uncut grass, and walk on. Too little has changed in some respects, too much in others, and the connection between yesterday and today is getting too thin to trace.

Two streets away, instead of crossing Northampton Road into Ald Lane, which once led to the River Nene, six lanes of ring road stop me. On my left, instead of a market garden, there's an enormous shopping centre, car park and petrol station. Further across, where fields once stretched to the horizon, stands three car dealerships, an electrical goods discount superstore, a carpet and flooring showroom, a McDonalds, KFC, Burger King and a cut-price furniture warehouse, surrounded by more car parks and another petrol station. A labyrinth of concrete and bitumen.

Close to the supermarket complex, a dark and fetid underpass leads to the other ‘superstores'. It takes me away from Ald Lane, but to a less frantic stretch of road, which I dash across, before following a fence line to where I wanted to be in the first place.

How can anybody walk to the river these days? Where do kids make their hideouts or roast the apples they've scrumped on dull Sunday afternoons? They're rhetorical questions, answered by the smell of piss in the underpass and the graffiti across every wall in sight.

Ald Lane is still an unsealed bridleway leading to a farmhouse, next to the old mill – originally built in the Middle Ages – but is nothing without the hedgerow of hawthorn, crab-apple, elder, ash, cow parsley, nettle and burdock that defined it for centuries. In its place is a wire fence, complete with snagged plastic bags, a couple of shopping trolleys, a tyre, plastic crates…

Beyond the mill race, I come to the main artery of the river; still a popular stretch for anglers, who perch among flattened reed beds despite the drone of traffic bustling across the landscape from roundabout to roundabout. But two minutes later, I freeze. Across the footpath, some gun-happy, moronic bastard has arranged a row of dead birds. There are ten, all lined up to face the same way, from smallest to largest: seven finches, two starlings and a blackbird. The act of a sicko. I step back, scan the fields for some cretin skulking with an air rifle, and wish I could bury each bird down the bastard's throat.