1993 - In the Place of Fallen Leaves (20 page)

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I was woken violently, my head jerked forward, spewing water. I was lying on my front, and felt a weight roll off my back. Then my eyes were closed as I retched again, coughing more water out of my stomach, as well as the food I’d eaten for breakfast. I was sick until I knew my stomach to be empty, and then my body tried to be sick some more. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I opened them I’d faint, waiting for the nausea to subside. Gradually I was able to take deeper breaths, until I felt normality return to my chest and limbs. Then, like a blind woman groping through her darkness, I felt around for the person I’d sensed kneeling silently beside me. I found his wet clothes and pulled myself towards him, and I cried a long time in his arms, trembling, and whimpering.

I got dressed without saying anything, and neither did he. What had happened was too big for us. We didn’t know how to deal with such an event: it had thrust itself into our lives, like an earthquake, and now we were dumbstruck, going through the motions of breathing and moving and seeing, while its shockwaves reverberated through and around us.

I could only think of doing what I’d planned to do anyway, which was to show Johnathan our house. I’d not recovered the inclination to talk, so I took his hand, and he followed me without question.

We didn’t go straight back up the stream but followed the old railway line a way and then cut up to circle around behind the village. We didn’t see another human being: the whine of distant tractors came in and out of earshot, and we could see one, crawling like a fly across a quilt, turning the soil in a field over towards Ashton. From the crest of the hill up behind our farm we turned and looked back along the Valley, at the other villages set, like ours, in its sides. I spoke for the first time: “Think yourself invisible.”

We dropped down the steep fields, jumping and springing, and reached the back of our house, panting for breath. We had no back door, so I went in round the front and opened a window in the kitchen for Johnathan to climb through.

I peeked into the sitting-room: grandmother was dozing in her chair.

“She’s asleep, but we better whisper just in case,” I told Johnathan. I took him upstairs and into the bedrooms: my parents’, with the great wooden bed Daddy had made for their wedding night, putting it together in the room itself because it was far too big to get through the door; Ian’s, dominated by his insomniac’s desk, every inch of it covered with receipts, bank statements and balance sheets of the farm’s accounts, by his chess board, the pieces arranged in the middle of some problem he pondered in the small hours, and by half a dozen empty tea mugs and an overflowing ashtray; Pam’s, less a bedroom than a boudoir, as she called it, a piece of purple material draped over the lampshade, scented with jasmine oil, and a brightly dyed African tablecloth pinned to the wall beside her bed, which was itself covered with a sheet of similar material and cushions, too, to make the bed look like a divan; Tom’s, neat and bare as a hotel room, showing no signs of being inhabited except for the spare pair of heavy workman’s boots in the middle of the floor and a strong smell of dirty socks; our grandparents’, darker than any of the other rooms in the house, with its heavy furniture and muddy wallpaper.

“This is my room,” I said lastly. “You can look around if you want.” I lay on the bed, while Johnathan inspected the contents of my room: a miniature desk on which sat pencil case and rubbers and the unread textbooks that the headmaster had brought; various toys and knick-knacks on the shelf and window-sill: a plastic monkey from a Christmas cracker, a fluffy duck from a slot machine on Teignmouth pier, a long grey feather the widowman heron had let drop on his rock, half of a clay pipe I’d found in a field. There were a few books beside my bed, which was covered with a floral duvet. On top of the wardrobe sat a row of smiling teddy bears and empty-headed dolls, while blu-tacked to the walls were posters of a black galloping horse and a sunset in the Mediterranean that I’d bought for myself in Newton Abbot market.

Those objects adorning my room, the only place in the world that was mine, where I could do exactly as I wished, suddenly appeared alien to me, and I realized why: they were the possessions of a child. As relics of childhood I might have felt affection for them, but as they were now they remained evidence of my own childishness. I wanted to tear the posters off the walls and sweep the things off the window-sill: they embarrassed me.

The only people outside the family who came into my room had been my friends in the village. Jane had stayed countless nights, and Susan May too: every time one of them had come into our house I felt a sense of superiority, because apart from the rectory, which didn’t count, ours was the biggest house in the village, and none of my friends’ families each had their own rooms like we did.

Now, though, I was seeing everything with new eyes, those of Johnathan, who was inspecting my room with his hands behind his back, like some member of royalty on television being shown round a flower show, unconsciously condescending. All the walls of our house moved in, compressing the rooms, and the furniture became the miserable wooden stock of peasants or the cheap plastic of people brought up without taste, because although Johnathan no longer lived in the old estate it was where he came from, the carefree whims of its occupants over the centuries still ran in his blood and the dimensions of its architecture were implanted in his mind. I realized, as I watched him from my bed, that all he felt now was pity, however well he might disguise it, and for the first time in my life I felt its correlative: shame. I felt it swelling through my body and burning my cheeks.

“Come on,” I said, swinging my legs off the bed, “let’s get something to drink.”

As we reached the bottom of the stairs grandmother’s voice called out: “Who’s that? Is that you, maid?” I gestured to Johnathan to go on into the kitchen, and went to see her.

“It sounds like you’s slopping around in your shoes again, Alison. ‘Tis a lazy habit, I’ve told you that before. Tie ‘em up proper.” Her milky eyes gazed vaguely in my direction.

“Yes, grandma.”

“And another thing: they says talking to yourself is the first sign of madness.”

“But you does it all the time, grandma,” I replied, unable to stop myself.

Her face cracked open in a wide grin. “Ooh,” she said, “you’s a wicked girl. If I’d talked back to my elders like that I’d have been sent straight to my room. Anyway, ‘tis different for me: I’m discussing things with my memories. When you’re my age, they come back to life to help you see things straight.”

“I won’t do it no more,” I promised. “Do you want a cup of tea or something?”

“No thank you, girl. You git on.”

Johnathan was sitting at the kitchen table. I poured us each a glass of milk, and joined him. We sipped it silently. Then Johnathan frowned, and looked at me.

“Where do you keep all your books?” he whispered. “I didn’t see them, apart from a couple in your room.”

All our conversations came colliding into my mind, all the times I tried to bluff my way through ignorance. The feeling of shame that I’d tried to leave behind upstairs rushed back in an instant over me, but with it too came anger.

“We ‘aven’t got a library,
actually
, Johnathan. My family’s not spent its lazy hours reading the great writers of the world, it’s been too busy working, and making things, and sewing clothes and cooking and digging the garden and that.” The more words came out the more furious I got. “They might have done a lot of reading, and playing of music, and a little painting of pictures of an afternoon, if they hadn’t been too busy workin’ the land what you lot used to own.”

Johnathan had gone a little pale, and shrank back in his chair.

“I’ll tell you what us’ve got instead, and that’s memories. My grandmother’s the one what keeps them. And she’s passing them on to me. See this ‘ere table? Grandfather had his tonsils taken out on it; that little stain in the middle there’s his blood. He was eight year old. See that bit of rock on the floor, holding the door open? ‘Tis granite. Grandfather brought it home from the old quarry, your great-grandfather’s quarry, before he got the sack for knockin’ out the bastard foreman’s teeth. It only flooded a couple or three months later. That’s what we got, see, memories; ‘tis better than stupid books.”

I got up from the table. “Give me your glass. You don’t know nothin’, that’s your trouble.” I rinsed the glasses in the sink, and glanced back at Johnathan. He had his look of a frightened rabbit, as if he was about to burst into tears. It made me feel mean and horrible but also made me want to slap him, to shock some colour and strength back into his pale cheeks.

“You an’t got no fight in you, have you?” I said. Johnathan didn’t even breathe. “I never seen that in no one before.”

Just then I heard a cough, and became aware of grandmother, whom I’d entirely forgotten. With her dog-like hearing she must have heard every word I said. But before I had time to consider this, another familiar sound came from the yard: mother’s car turning in from the lane. I rushed over to the window: she was turning the car round, to reverse it up to the front door; Daddy was sat beside her.

“Come on, quick,” I said to Johnathan, ushering him to the back window.

§

We ran across the fields. Grandmother once told me that the way I walked it looked like I’d rather be running. That’s how I felt; it’s how your body’s meant to move. When the barefoot African schoolgirl, Zola Budd, almost shocked the world in the Olympics earlier in the summer Ian had said: “Blimey, Alison, if you cut all your ‘air off I could say that were you, near’s dammit, runnin’ over with our sandwiches.”

“And was ‘alf as ugly as you is,” Tom added stupidly for good measure, without a smile.

§

Now Johnathan and I ran along away from the village, laughing as we ran. There was nothing funny, it was just the relief of outside and the air in our lungs made us laugh. Then we scrambled back up the ridge and over the other side, and across a sloping, charred field whose stubble I’d helped Ian to burn.

The back lane to Ashton passed only a couple of fields away, but you wouldn’t have guessed. It was hardly used. We found some elderberries and a few blackberries in a hedge. Johnathan reached his arm right in, and then withdrew it.

“Look at this,” he said. In his purple-stained fingers he held a tiny, black-speckled bird’s egg. “What do you think it is?” he asked me.

“Put it back,” I told him.

“What sort is it?”

“I don’t know. Put it back quick, or the mother’ll smell you, and push it out of the nest.”

In the corner of the field there was an old barn, recently filled with hay from the harvest; it was just a wooden shell, and that was all it was ever used for.

“Let’s go in and get some shade,” I suggested.

The door creaked open, and the musty-sweet smell of hay filled our nostrils. I’d never seen so little there, just after harvest: it was stacked high in the middle of the barn, but the sides were bare.

“What about rats?” Johnathan asked, frowning.

“Don’t be such a scaredy-cat,” I told him.

“I’m not really very fond of them,” he admitted.

“They don’t bite humans,” I assured him. He stepped inside. “Well, not girls anyhow,” I added. He looked startled. “Only joking. Get on.”

We clambered up onto the top of the hay, into a dim space below uneven rafters, and lay down. Sunlight poked in through holes and cracks in the walls but the roof was the old earth-covered type, from which grass grew on the outside, and it was dark up there.

We didn’t talk, we just lay there, tired, thinking our own thoughts. Johnathan’s breathing was barely audible beside me. After a while my neck and arms started getting itchy, and I sat up.

“Empty your pockets,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Just to see.” It was a game I played with Daddy; something I couldn’t understand was how boys’ pockets were always full of things whereas girls’ were mostly empty, but then we grew up and suddenly needed whole handbags to carry all our stuff.

He laid a dirty handkerchief out on the hay, and put onto it a referee’s whistle, a box of matches, a penknife, some string, the stub of a candle and a small plastic box.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

He looked a bit sheepish. “My c-c-contact lenses, actually.”

“I didn’t know you wore them.”

“Only for reading. I don’t have to, but I’m supposed to.”

“That makes a lot of sense. What’s the candle for?”

“I don’t know. Anything. I just took it out of the candlestick on the dinner table to put a new one in.”

“Let’s light it,” I suggested.

“In here? You must be joking, Alison.”

“We won’t do anything.”

“It’s dangerous; it’d be m-m-mad in here.”

I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “You’s scared of everything, aren’t you? We’re not going to drop it, you know. Just hold it, and blow it out when we’ve finished.”

He looked at me a moment, his eyes both mistrustful and defiant. Then he picked up the candle, and handed me the matches. “Go on, then.”

As I opened the box and picked out a match, I realized how foolish an act it was. The whole barn changed from a place where hay was being stored into a dark cavern of inflammable material.

I struck the match, and lit the candle. The wick was almost buried: we had to melt a little wax until there was enough string showing through to take flame. Drops of melted wax dripped into the hay. Our faces lit up yellow.

Perhaps I wanted to show Johnathan I wasn’t going to be grateful to him for saving my life. Perhaps I’d lost all sense of caution after coming so close to drowning. I don’t know.

There must have been a wispy strand of hay sticking out from a bale, hanging out into space. The flame caught the end and ran along it. Within a second or two the side of the bale was crackling orange fire. We leapt up and started beating it with our shoes, but that just sprayed sparks everywhere. Until you’ve been in a fire, you can’t believe how quickly it spreads.

“We’ve got to get water,” cried Johnathan. He hopped down the bales to the ground and I tumbled after him. He ran outside, and dashed one way and then another, running to and fro, looking for what he knew wasn’t there. It was like he had the energy and the clear head to deal with a crisis, except that this one had no solution, and that confused him. Then he stopped and looked back at the barn, and did the strangest thing: smoke was drifting out of the doorway; there were no flames visible outside, only a fierce crackling noise; Johnathan ran over and firmly closed both the doors of the barn. The crackling was reduced to a distant roar. My skin prickled but inside I felt nothing. I was empty. Johnathan ran over to me.