‘Oh wow! Here comes the judge.’
And that tells me all I need to know. He has really done his homework, and for a reason. And I remember the two of us watching Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, Calvin didn’t like the show. My bare feet tucked in Michael’s lap, and the taste of beer from the bottle his lips had touched before mine. Sometimes I would see the bubble of his saliva and put my lips to it slowly, for the shiver of pleasure it drove through my body.
‘I’ve got to go now,’ I say.
‘But we only just got started. You don’t need to worry about the cost of the call. I’ve got plenty of money.’
He hasn’t, of course he hasn’t. But it’s money that’s in his mind all right. The thought of money was waiting there all the time, just behind his tongue. And now it’s slipped out.
‘All I want is to talk to you,’ says Michael, and it sounds like the truth. He comes into my mind, all of him. His shirt off and his shoulders glistening. The plume of water pouring from the dipper, spilling onto his skin. The loose drops kicking onto the dust and dirt of the yard. And his eyes closed, his face peaceful. All of him there for once and offered to me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘You don’t know how long it took to find you.’
‘I can’t believe it took so long. It’s easy enough to trace people if you want to.’
‘Have you ever tried?’
‘No. No, I’ve never tried.’
‘You didn’t need to.’
‘Listen, Michael –’
‘Simone, would you have recognized my voice?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I wanted to talk to you, Simone. Just talk. That’s all I want.’
And then we’re both silent. Silent for a long time, until the phone clicks. I hold it, hearing the echo of Michael’s voice die to nothing. The voice is the most physical thing. It carries the grain of the man. His weight, the depth of his lungs, the tightness of his throat. His mouth wet, or dry. It wasn’t true what I told Michael. I would have known it. Memory spreads over my senses like a film of oil, brilliant and treacherous.
Donald is out in the woodshed, piling wood by the light of a battery lantern. There are two big piles, and a heap of fresh white kindling. He’s been splitting logs.
‘Davey Berryman’s going to let me have another load at the end of the week, so I thought I’d better clear this place a bit.’
‘Donald.’
‘Yes? Don’t stand in my light, Simone, I can’t see what I’m doing.’
The chopper goes up, its shadow beating on the wall, huge. It cracks down and the wood cleaves.
‘Wood’s still a bit green.’
There are chips of pale, sweet-smelling wood all over the floor. I pick up a handful and smell them.
‘What’s this?’
‘Apple wood. There’ll be mainly apple in the new load, too, where they’re clearing the orchard.’
‘Nice. Listen, Donald –’
Again the shadows leap. It’s late. The children should be in bed.
‘I’m going to have my hair cut short,’ I say.
He straightens, looks at me. ‘You’re always saying that.’
‘No, I’ve made up my mind.’
He smiles. He doesn’t believe I will.
I look around the woodshed. It’s not one of the stone outbuildings, it’s a proper wooden shed, well-made, of smooth pine planks, with a pine floor. Joe wants to live in it. It has one square small window, so it’s always dusky and sweet-smelling in here. Now it’s full of warm light and shadows, the rough edges of wood, the scent of resin. Joe wants to have a rabbit and keep it in here. He says rabbits love apple wood. Splitting wood is one of the things Donald could already do, when we came here. If he finds a fallen branch when he’s out walking he’ll drag it home and leave it outside the shed under a tarpaulin until it’s ready for chopping.
Donald balances a thick log on the chopping board. He stands back, swings up the chopper, brings it down. The wood opens, white. I go forward, and touch the cut surface. It feels moist.
‘For God’s sake, Simone, get out of the way. You’ll get hurt.’
‘Let me smell it.’ I bend down, smell the tang of the wood. It does smell of apple.
‘I want this shed full before the winter. It’s worth putting in the time now, if it saves buying coal,’ says Donald. He turns and wedges two more logs into the biggest pile along the wall. In the soft light of the lantern the shed looks like a cave. Donald is building up a safe wall of wood that won’t collapse when we take out logs in the winter. He has the chopper, the logs to be tested, split and piled. I think he might be happy. The bandage on his hand is filthy, but I’m not going to say anything.
‘Did that chap ever ring back?’
‘Oh – yes. Just now.’
‘What was it all about?’
‘He was ringing up about someone else really. Someone I knew when I was a student. He’s been killed in a car crash. But we hadn’t been in touch for a long time.’
‘Oh, I see. Nice of him to go to all that trouble.’
‘Yes.’
TWELVE
If it’s money Michael wants, that’s one thing. I can deal with that, though it’ll be tough until I can convince him I haven’t got any.
But I don’t believe it’s money. Michael never cared about money. It wasn’t in his nature. He could have made plenty if he’d wanted, with the boats and the summer people. The Susie Ann was his own, and he could have been taking people out all season long, around the bay on fishing trips, or to the harbour bar to see the wreck which was just visible through the thick green water at low tide. That was the way other people worked, dawn to dusk for the bright, greedy weeks of the summer season. Michael worked enough to keep himself in food and drink and grass, and that was all. But he loved boats. To Michael a boat was an end in itself, not a means to make money. If he didn’t like a man, he wouldn’t work for him, no matter how good the pay was. That summer he spent whole days working for nothing, helping someone he’d met to build a catamaran.
‘Listen, the guy’s got no money. How’s he ever going to get that thing into the water unless somebody helps him?’
It was a good design, he said. The guy knew what he was doing, except when it came to money. We quarrelled because Michael spent the whole of a fine Sunday working on the catamaran when I wanted to drive up to the apple festival. I picked up his clean jeans and threw them into the sea. If you won’t go with me, then don’t go anywhere. He waded after them and put them on wet, and went off anyway. I don’t even remember the name of the man who was building the boat. I thought he fancied Michael. That’s what I was like, on edge about everyone who came near us, and too young to hide it. And whenever I felt at ease, there was Calvin.
We did go to the apple festival, another day. I remember the smell of the apples, heaped up by the barns and on trestle tables, sharp and winy in the cold air. When you bit into them, the juice spurted and ran down your chin. They were mostly red apples, Macintoshes. Dark, shiny red, like the apple in Snow-White. There were pumpkins too, waiting for Hallowe’en. I had never seen pumpkins like that before, big and round and golden orange, some smooth-skinned, some rough. I’d never tasted pumpkin pie. American pie was too sweet for me: I’d tried it a couple of times then given up. I had never bought butternut squash or onion squash. I didn’t even know that pumpkins grew on vines. I saw red barn, blue sky, yellow pumpkin. The largeness and brilliance of everything took my breath away. We wandered round the side of the barn and watched a pickup truck slam to a stop in a wave of late-summer dust. It was a girl driving, my age or a year more. She swung her legs down on what I was just beginning not to think of as the wrong side. Then she kicked off her shoes, lit a cigarette, and stood there with her eyes closed, resting, while her toes clenched and unclenched in the silk of the dust. I thought she was beautiful. I don’t suppose she was, but she was what I wanted to be, at that moment. And I saw Michael look at her.
Some of the pumpkins were so big it took two men to carry them. I saw two men in overalls hunker down and lift an orange pumpkin and carry it to a trailer. They made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a laugh as they took the weight. I can still see the red barn walls, the clear blue sky, the round, ripe pumpkins, though when Michael told me that Calvin was dead I couldn’t remember Calvin’s mouth or his eyes.
We’d got up early and driven a hundred and seventy miles through a pale, cold morning. Just Michael and I. The leaves were beginning to change colour a little. A lick of colour here and there, like a mistake. Michael told me how the roads would be crawling with cars once the foliage season started. People came up from New York and all over, just to see the fall colours. I’d have liked to come up and see the trees red and orange, blazing mile after mile, but I didn’t say so. I could tell it wasn’t cool to crawl round Vermont gaping at maples.
Some of the apples were exhibits, some were for sale. Michael and I picked out a basketful, laying them in as gently as eggs. It was a big flat basket and we put it in the back of the car, wedged in so the fruit wouldn’t spill. You could fill your basket for a dollar. Some people were piling their baskets so high the apples spilled and rolled, but we didn’t do that. Michael always had a sense of grace about such things.
Michael looked them over, picked out the best one, rubbed it on his shirt-sleeve, and held it for me to bite. It’s hard to bite an apple when someone else is holding it, and my teeth slipped on the tough, shiny skin. I had to grapple it in my mouth to get a grip. There’s something humiliating about being fed like a baby, but it was sexy too. The guys who’d lifted the pumpkin were looking at us and smiling a bit, and I thought how their teeth were like dog’s teeth, bared, and I was glad Michael was there to shield me from them. The girl from the pickup knew them. She’d gone over to talk to them. They looked at her quite differently from the way they looked at me.
I took one bite from his hand, then I held the apple myself. The woman on the stall told us she’d picked the apples the night before. She had a barn full of them, best season she’d had for years. But the price she got in the city didn’t even pay for the gas.
She told us we should go walking in the woods. It was her land, no problem. There was a logging track right up the hill. I couldn’t believe the way people had land up there. They’d point at a hill and say, ‘That’s mine.’
Most of it wasn’t farming land. It was trees and scrub, the soil thin over the rock where trees clung. She had her farmstead, her orchard in the valley, a few fields. I thought how good it must feel to look out from the farmhouse window and see the hill, and know it was your own, curled around to protect you. It had light on it up there long after the sun had left the valley, she said. I’d grown up with a strip of garden twenty feet wide and thirty feet long, a sandpit where Jenny and I scuffled in the summer, and a back gate which opened onto an asphalt lane. I must have told Michael about that house, but he kept on believing that my soft English voice meant a soft upbringing. He’d never been to England. He had no idea of the kind of smallness I was used to. Or maybe I didn’t really tell him. At that time my aim was to rinse the smallness off my eyes. To be like the girl in the pickup truck.
‘You. want to try a winter here?’ the woman asked me, laughing. She could see the city in me.
Michael may have changed. People say they don’t care about money when they’re young. They believe that the grown-ups will keep on painting the window-frames and replacing the tiles on the roof so the rain doesn’t come in. Or else they don’t even notice that window-frames have paint on them, and that it doesn’t last for ever. Maybe Michael wants a house now, and window-frames, and a pay-cheque for everything he’s ever done. Even the debt no one’s ever going to pay: the innocence he won’t ever be able to get back again. The politicians and the generals who sent him to Vietnam have Alzheimer’s now. Their voices slur and their feet shuffle. Without their wives they’d be left out on their lawns in their wheelchairs, with leaves falling on them. These are the same men who jumped out of helicopters on the White House lawn, ducked under the churning rotors and ran boyishly across the grass. These were the men reporters chased with microphones. Flashlights were always exploding in their faces like tiny imitations of the wars they started.
For years I watched them on black-and-white television. These were the men who backed Mayor Daly when he let his cops run wild. The whole world’s watching, the kids outside the hall chanted, as the batons thrashed down on them and the dogs were let loose. The whole world’s watching. I remember hearing that. I was a child and I still believed the upraised arms would fall to the cops’ sides, shamed, and the hall of the Democratic convention would fall silent too, and a new world would begin. It was a long time ago, before a different generation grew up to channel-surf its way past war and famine with a bag of popcorn in its lap.
Now I remember. The guy whose boat Michael helped build used to walk the streets at night too. After Michael told me about that, something suddenly came to me and I said, ‘Don’t you ever meet men – guys – who think you’re out there for something else?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean, if you were a girl out that late, men would think you were a prostitute. Do men ever think that about other men?’
The naïveté of it takes my breath now. That I thought it, and that I said it too, looking at Michael through the V of my hair, there in the room with the wind outside beating up the sea. If he doesn’t want money, what does he want? And Michael looked at me and said, ‘A guy did once.’
‘What? You mean he thought you were – ’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Michael shrugged. ‘I told him it’d be twenty dollars.’
I remained silent. This was the type of situation in which I so often said the wrong thing.
‘If he wanted to fuck my ass, that is,’ Michael continued. ‘Fifteen dollars to suck him off.’
I said nothing and Michael was quiet. I stole a glance at his face and it was calm, as if telling me these things eased him. He had his hand twined around mine. For a while I watched blobs of foam fly off the waves. It was so restful. I felt like an invalid who has been pushed out to the edge of the sea to watch the water, to recover.
‘Why not,’ said Michael at last, as if to himself. Why wouldn’t I. He was just a guy.’
I wipe Joe’s face with baby-wipes, so as not to get water on his bandage. He shuts his eyes, to let me. The shape of his eyelid is perfect, like something cut in wax. I can feel his breathing on me, light and quick. He says that Matt says his hair smells. I say we won’t be able to wash his hair for a while, but I can’t smell anything at all.
‘Matt says I smell of blood.’
‘No. There’s no blood there. It’s all healing up. Soon you’ll have a little white scar and then your hair will grow over again.’
He believes me and subsides in his bed, content. It’s a good, calm bedtime. Even Matt allows me to hold him close for a moment before he wriggles away to read his book. Goodnight, goodnight.
I remember what it was like to know that my parents were moving about downstairs, eating cake, talking. I’d listen to my father whistling. The pipes gagged and I turned over and smoothed the wall with my forefinger until I fell asleep. I always tried to fall asleep before my father went out, leaving my mother alone. If I was still awake I’d hear her walk from one small room into the other, drawing curtains, flicking the lights on. The TV would blare, then fade. She always turned it right down, as if there might be other sounds beneath its noise, and she didn’t want to miss them.
Although the front door was shut and locked a draught seemed to blow through the house all the time he was away. Every week he bought her a box of chocolates and she ate them alone, at night while he was away, rustling down to the bottom layer for cracknels and almond whirls. In the daytime the chocolates stayed on a high shelf. Once I balanced a chair on a box and hooked them dow
n, but the box fell, the paper cases and chocolates spilled over the floor. I crammed everything back, and pushed the box up on the shelf again, my heart banging. I didn’t eat a single one, but she knew it was me. She stood me in front of her, between her knees, and said, ‘I don’t ask much, Simone.’
My sister Jenny knew more than I did.
‘He shouldn’t go out every night. We haven’t got enough money.’
I thought of my mother’s fingers on the clasp of her handbag, as it shut and opened with a fat click. She had all the money, as far as I knew.
It’s true that she didn’t ask much, and she didn’t get much, either. She didn’t expect much more for her daughters. We were clever, people said. We passed exams, but that might lead to more problems than it solved. We were safe as long as we were going through the hoops of school, but the empty, rangy territory that lay beyond frightened my mother. She could not see us making our way in it.
She managed to be glad when I went to America, telling herself it was safe. A job in a summer camp, organized and timed by others, would let me combine travel with doing what I was told. And I would be getting experience of responsibility for young people, which was valuable for someone who was about to drift into teaching. I told myself this was true. But I was waiting. I must have been waiting all the time, keeping dead still so no one could tell what was me and what was the light and the leaf-shadows moving over me. At home, at school, I dissembled my own personality and hid the force that Michael was the first to see.
I met Michael. When I came back I wasn’t returning to my mother’s plans. I dumped the idea of a teacher training course, and set myself up to go to university to study law, which men studied. It wasn’t going to be any good, ever, to wait for love to come along and solve my life. It had come and had solved nothing. Love was something in itself, I thought. It didn’t come with arrows on it pointing out destinations. Michael in the gloom of the backyard, printed with shadows, the grain of his flesh nearer to me than the whorls on the ends of my fingers. I played those moments over and over and I knew they led nowhere but back to themselves.