I thought of the time we took Matt to the fair, when he was eight. Joe was six, and all he wanted was to be with us and go on roundabouts. But Matt was to have his own money. ‘You can choose what you go on. But when the money’s gone, that’s it. No more.’ He had five pounds. He went over to the rifle range, where a flock of enormous fluffy toys hung above the targets, ready to drop ripely into the palm of a successful shooter. I saw his eyes fixed, brilliant, dazzled. It looked so easy. I let him spend the first pound. He got nothing, but he turned to me, his face passionate. ‘I know I’ll win if I get three more goes. I watched that boy. You have to shoot to one side first, then the other.’ And the second pound was spent. When I tried to stop him his eyes dilated with panic. ‘It’s my money, Mum! You said I could do what I wanted!’
I was stupid. I ought to have stopped it then. After the third pound, he was in too deep. He could not stop now, couldn’t admit that it was all a stupid con. The stall-keeper must have seen my anger, for when Matt’s fifth pound was gone he came over with a little fluffy mouse and said, There you are, sonny, well tried.’ Matt walked away, his face a rictus of distress, grinning. Later, in the car, I heard him say to Joe, ‘Here you are, Joe. I won this for you.’
The look on Matt’s face was with me as I turned the pages of the pack. I drank my tea, then I said, as gently as I could, ‘I’d be a bit cautious, Donald. It looks like pyramid selling to me.’ I could not bear to look at his face. A year ago he’d never even have noticed the advertisement. If he had, he’d have laughed at it. That was when I first knew what the loss of the partnership had brought him to. It had destroyed his faith in his judgment so completely that he had suspended it.
I look at Donald now, as he stands holding the tray of sandwiches for his children, his head bowed.
‘Let’s go out,’ I repeat. ‘They’ll be fine for an hour.’
But he won’t come. I walk into the clear, cool, autumn evening. As soon as I’m outside the house I hear the sea. I untie the orange baling twine from the gatepost, lift the gate, swing it open. This is the way down to the sea. The sheep stare, then shamble away from me and take up their task of eating again. They have cropped the grass close, and it is covered with sheep droppings, black and shiny as liquorice, and with smaller, drier rabbit droppings. In the mornings, when I come down to swim, the rabbits are thick on the fields. It doesn’t matter how many get shot, there are always more. A little wind makes the reeds ripple by the drainage ditches. I feel myself breathing deep for the first time that day, in the loneliness of the marsh that is like clear water.
I walk over the three fields to the sea-wall. It’s been piled up and repaired as long as people have lived here. Without the wall the land would be gone in two winters. A lot of money has been spent two miles farther down the coast, where a spring tide breached the sea-wall two winters ago. But here it has grown into the landscape, with its stone face turned to the sea and its bulky green shoulder to the land. Sheep get through the wire and climb it sometimes. You see their silhouettes on top of the wall, ruffled by the wind that always blows there. I climb the stile from the last field, and go up the wooden steps which take you on top of the wall.
I turn, and look back at our house. Donald said he wanted to go through the figures again, and draft a letter to the bank. I hold my hand up in front of my face, palm outwards. Now there’s no light, no house, no Donald, no boys. I move my hand sideways and the house appears, recreated. I think of all the people who have stood on this sea-wall.
Invaders landed here for centuries. It was a good spot. You could see the home fires from here, just as you can now, all the lights of the little settlements dotted along the coast.
They poured in, torching the thatch first. It would burn well at the end of summer. The flames would snap and lick and fire would jump from hut to hut. And then shouting and people plunging out of their huts with the dreams still in their heads and a waking nightmare of fire ready to swallow them. A woman dragged back by her hair because she got in their way. The bare pale throat gleaming with sweat and the knife jagging into it while the man who did it didn’t even watch her die. He was shouting over his shoulder to someone else.
You don’t even bother to look at death, you just make it happen. And you kick someone back to the ground after slitting her throat, even if she’s not dead, because you’ve got more than enough deaths to get done. The way she flops about on the ground is like someone taking up time that doesn’t belong to her, when you’ve got a busy day.
They carried what they could, and off they went, making a note of the bearings. They had an excellent sense of timing. They’d leave it for a bit, let people think they weren’t coming back. If you want to make the best use of people you’ve got to leave them a bit of hope. Otherwise they’re buggered, they’ll just go off, and all you’ll get next time are weeds and stray cats. You’ve got to judge it right. Come one year, then not the next, nor the next. Give them a couple of harvests. Let them think they’re doing all right, and work their guts out getting in the corn they won’t be eating.
The worst thing is when people fight back. That’s when it gets ugly, and there’s no need for it, if people have a bit of sense. That’s why you should never disturb a burglar. He’s so full of adrenaline, he might just kill you. He wouldn’t mean to, he wouldn’t know what he was doing. Or so they say. Those men coming inland, across the cleared ground, moving quietly in spite of their weight. Such things have always been happening. Sometimes they stop for a while, but they start up again before long. If you happen to be born in one of those happy times when nothing’s happening, then the change can be a real shock.
All I’ve ever wanted is to live in one of those times.
‘We registered for the draft’
I can still see those looks that pass between them, Calvin and Michael. I could never imagine what it felt like to be them. They’d grown up thinking life was a personal thing, then history hit them. They registered for the draft. They waited to see what numbers were drawn, while I lay on the floor in the safe backwash of television. But Michael told me I was a fighter, long before I knew it myself. You’d fight for your kids. It sounded like a cliché to me then. Children weren’t real to me before I had them. I could easily think of myself as gentle, and fighting was something other people did.
It’s different since I had the children. I plot for them; I plan ahead like an army general. I would do anything to protect them.
I’m thinking of a man who built a cellar under his house, with a secret room that no one else knew about. He made a nice job of it. There was even a toilet down there, put in by a plumber friend of his. The walls were painted white, they bought a couple of folding beds and a few other fixtures and fittings. When the door was shut you just wouldn’t know it was there.
Then he went out in his car and drove around the streets, just driving idly from one bus-stop to the next, past school entrances, past church halls where there are dancing classes after school. Lots of days like that, putting the finishing touches to the cellar and then driving, driving.
He saw them. Maybe there were two little girls who carried their dancing shoes and leotards in red attaché cases. It was November, a bit gloomy but not dark yet. Only half-past three. They had their hair combed back from their faces and fastened tight on top of their heads. That’s the way their ballet teacher liked it. No wisps hanging down. They had long, skinny legs ending in clumpy school shoes.
Two little girls, ten years old, and this is the first time they’ve been allowed to walk from school to ballet class on their own. Except they’re not alone, there are two of them so it’s all right. ‘You’ve got to let them have a little bit of independence,’ their mothers say, reassuring one another because it’s hard to let go even when you know it’s the right thing. ‘After all, next year they’ll be off to secondary school on the bus and they’ll have to be able to look after themselves then.’
Mothers are like that. Always fussing. The two little girls
laugh and dawdle along, chattering. Every so often they remember what their mothers said: ‘Go straight there! Don’t be hanging about on the street,’ and they put on a spurt, giggling more than ever.
They don’t notice the car coasting along the other side of the road towards them. Why should they? The man with his elbow on the edge of the open window. They do notice a bit when the car crosses the road onto their side and pulls in, engine running. But it’s got nothing to do with them. They’re on their way to dancing class, and after that they’re going to be met by Ann’s mother who is taking them both home for tea. More chattering, hours and hours of it, and pizza and Neighbours and music and taking the phone up to Ann’s room to phone their friends.
But look. There’s another man in the back of the car. He’s opening his door, very smoothly and quickly, and now he’s out and on the pavement behind them. And the driver’s out too, and he comes in front of them. And it’s funny, he hasn’t turned off the engine. And the children are lifted out of their lives.
There’s my house with the yellow lights coming on in the windows, one by one. My children moving from room to room. If I had binoculars I would see their shadows. It looks so safe. Shadows in the firelight, yellow electricity, the doors closed. The country dream that everybody wants. If I saw a car on the road now, just there between those trees, so far off that it seemed to be crawling towards the house, I would have nothing to fear.
But there is no car. It’s the evening wind that stirs the hair on my neck. I want to run, and I want to stay here. It’s stupid to let myself get this tired. I’m not thinking straight. I am only a judge, district judge. Maintenance is my territory, and insolvency, and disputes over contract. I don’t deal with murder. I judge. I have to make shapes. I make sense of things that don’t really make sense at all.
History hit you like a storm. Small for your age at twelve, and then you must have grown quickly. You’d have been able to get the little boy out of the basketball hoop.
You were lifted out of your lives, disgorged in bellyloads by planes that lumbered in looking too heavy to fly. As soon as you put your boot onto the soil it stuck. You were history now.
But you still had yourself. Your private smell buried in your armpits and your groin. The way your skin tanned, the way you always put on your left boot before the right one. Your thousand tastes and habits and instincts that you followed without even thinking about them.
I suppose that’s what armies do. They bury the private flesh in uniform, they make you put on your right boot first and bit by bit they teach you to walk away from your own history and into theirs.
It was a country of small people. They had low technology and none of the wall of resources that stood at your back. But on home ground they danced while you stood still.
‘It was so fucking boring most of the time you could have died. We’d even lay bets on how fast a shadow would move.
All the time you’d think you saw something move, but when you turned there’d be nothing.
‘There was this old woman, she had her hands on me, pulling and screaming. I thought, “Why don’t you take your hands off me? Why are you doing this to me?” I wasn’t doing anything to her. All through these times you don’t really know what’s going on. Later on you get told and it makes some kind of sense. You get told why it has to happen, and now you’re part of it, you’re not outside any more.
‘The girls would crowd around in the bars. You’d feel as if a whole sheet of butterflies was settling on you. They made us look like the pores of our skin were sandpaper. If you laid your two arms alongside, hers would look like silk.’
As you spoke I saw two arms on the bar counter. One was yours. It was dark, the windows blinded to keep out the sun. At your side her body twisted in its narrow sheath of silk. I knew what you were thinking of. Entering that girl, her smallness and her liquid softness which swallowed you. I could hear the sound of the money you gave her, passing from your hand. It would be soft and moist. A sound like suede on suede. It wouldn’t crackle.
‘I don’t remember her name,’ you said. I looked at you and I didn’t believe you. I didn’t say it, because it was your world, not mine. I only saw what you let me see. Then you laughed and said, ‘But that’s OK. I’ve got Calvin right here to remember it for me.’
The more you do, the more you can do. I’m trying to think about what you want to do now, and what is in your mind that you won’t yet allow me to see. You haven’t done much yet. A couple of letters, two phone calls that didn’t really say anything. I make you bigger than you are.
ELEVEN
I touch the phone as I go past it, up the stairs. And again. Two for joy. I could have unplugged it. I think for a second about unplugging, then it rings.
‘Hi.’ It’s his voice. A week ago I wouldn’t have recognized it, but I’ve learned it again. I turn, so my body shields the rest of the house from the phone.
‘Hi,’ I say back.
‘I’ve got you at last. First I get your husband, then I get your kid. He sounds like a nice kid.’
I don’t say anything. I make my listening attentive. I’ll pull him to me along the currents of air that carry voices. I’ll undo him with my listening.
‘Simone?’
‘I’m here.’
‘Aren’t you going to say anything?’
I wait again. A roar of TV laughter comes through the door. I hear Joe laugh, loudly, consciously, proud that he has got the TV joke. Between Michael and me the air sighs.
‘It’s been a bitch, finding you again.’
‘Has it?’ I say. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it’d be that difficult.’ I polish the base of the phone with my forefinger. I hear him breathe in. He’s waiting too, for someone who doesn’t exist any more. How I used to pour myself down the phone to him. All warm and spilling and eager. Hoping he would think me sexy.
‘Well, I made it at last,’ he says. ‘I’m talking to you.’
‘You know where I am.’
‘I can’t picture it. You could be anywhere.’
I say nothing again. I think he’s telling me that he’s going to come here. In this clutter of what isn’t being said I can pick out a few shapes. That’s my training, after all.
‘Did you cut your hair?’ he asks suddenly.
‘No. It’s still long.’
‘Matthew told me you were washing it, when I called.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I remember the way you used to wash your hair all the time. You told him anything about us? Does he know about you and me?’
He’s climbing into my life, hand over hand, like a burglar. There’s no you and me, I want to say, but this isn’t the moment. All those years in my office upstairs with the fire burning, I’ve learned a lot about making silences for other people to talk into. It’s what people don’t know they’re telling you that you need to hear.
‘Why would I do that?’ I ask. It leaps into my mind that he’s not alone. He’s got someone else in the room, standing close while he talks. Calvin.
‘Does Calvin want to say hello?’ I ask.
‘Calvin?’ His surprise sounds genuine.
‘Calvin. Isn’t he there with you?’
‘Calvin’s dead.’
I can check that, I think automatically.
‘He died in an accident in Illinois.’
‘Illinois?’
‘Yeah. Way back in ’86. Truck he hitched a ride in went off the highway. The trucker lived, he had a broken leg. He was fast asleep when they crashed.’
‘Who, Calvin?’
‘No, the trucker. He let Calvin drive. But that’s not what everyone else got told.’
I see the truck barrelling along the highway like a lit-up castle, all of Illinois ahead of it, Calvin behind the wheel. The light of oncoming headlights flares in his face, but I still can’t make out his features.
‘When did you say he died?’
‘April 26th. His birthday.’
‘What was h
e doing in Illinois?’
‘Jesus, Simone, how’m I supposed to know that? I’m not his keeper. He was restless, he was always travelling around. You know Calvin.’
The Calvin I knew stayed in one place, close to Michael. If Calvin’s gone, things are going to be a lot easier. I can’t think of anyone else who knew us well enough to remember much. Not after all this time. If Calvin really did drive that truck off the road more than ten years ago. Now that I have the date, I can find out. And I can’t feel a shred of sadness for him, not even that fellow feeling of bones and flesh for other bones crushed, other flesh torn and letting out life.
‘You think he did it on purpose?’ I ask.
Michael sighs. ‘I knew you’d ask me that,’ he says. He says it as if neither of us has changed at all. ‘I knew you’d want to know.’
‘Yes, I do.’
I’ve changed so much you won’t know me, I think, moving the phone to my left hand, hearing Joe laugh again. You think you know me, but you know nothing.
‘I’m sorry about Calvin,’ I say.
‘It’d been a while since I saw him.’
‘All the same.’
We are quiet for a while. The expensive silence ticks on.
‘You know, Simone, the way you went, it wrecked me. I was out of my mind. Do you believe that?’
I say nothing. I hear him swallow.
‘There was a storm two weeks after you left. I took off in the Susie Ann. By the time I got her round the point and hit the wind I knew I could be in trouble. The wind blew so hard it was cutting lumps of water off the top of the waves. They were hitting the boat like rocks.’ He is silent again. I see the boat buck, the water smashed into chaos by the wind fighting the tide.
‘But you got back.’
‘Yeah. No matter how much you think you don’t care what happens, you find yourself fighting. I couldn’t let her turn over and get broken up on the shore. You remember the Susie Ann.’
‘You know I do,’ I say into the mouthpiece, barely moving my lips. My heart annoys me, bumping as hard as this when I have nothing to be afraid of. And my hands are sweating. ‘I’m not sure where this conversation is taking us,’ I say, in a voice I know he’s never heard before. He is quiet for a bit, then I hear his voice again, bubbling through laughter.