Cryers Hill (14 page)

I
F WALTER WANTED
a kiss before his eighteenth birthday he would have to take Mary to the orchards in April, when the cherry blossom was thick and the sweet smell made you gag. He took her in May as it turned out, just as the blossoms were falling in the orchards. They lay under the trees and watched the flowers as they came down until they were smothered, snowbound as two polar explorers.

'Give us a kiss then.'

'Not likely.'

Mary Hatt was not a formal girl, it was one of her charms. Walter couldn't understand which part of his approach was off the mark. If he spoke pretty words, she would just laugh.

'Give us a kiss. Just one. Go on.'

'Not on your nelly, Wally-Walt.'

'I think you may have a mean streak, Mary Ann Hatt.'

'Stick it in your pipe and smoke it. Ha ha ha.'

A ball of blossom landed in Walter's eye. He could not understand why anyone, William Shakespeare included, would write sonnets in praise of the female sex. They seemed to him a petty, single-minded lot, the two he knew at any rate. For his part, he decided, he would stick to nature and, when the chance came, travel. He thought if another war were to come along and if he were called upon to do his duty, she might live to regret her decision to leave him unkissed in the snow blossom. Perhaps one day she would weep at his grave, perhaps there, on her knees, she would beg his forgiveness, and perhaps she would never, ever forgive herself and die a lonely spinster.

'Give us a kiss or I'll spank you.'

'Spank me then.'

Walter came up on one elbow to decide.

'Well? Hurry up. I haven't got all day, Walter Wallflower, unlike some layabout buggas.'

'If I spank you, will you kiss me?'

'You shall have to wait and see.'

This was no good at all. Walter Brown had hoped Mary Hatt would love him ferociously. He had hoped she would be grateful for his attention and that she might throw her arms around his neck and kiss him and tell him what a clever and handsome feller he really was. He would love her back, naturally. He thought this kind of thing would probably be perfectly all right.

Mary Hatt had no plans of this type. Mary had pictured herself marrying a sturdy, wealthy man like the ones in her sister's magazines. Someone who would drive her to the racecourse in his long-nosed car. She liked the idea of servants and gardeners and how she would laugh at them. But Mary had miscalculated. She had not anticipated falling in love with Walter Brown, indeed she had reckoned him faintly ridiculous in some departments, namely the department of poop-poetry and fancy whatnottery. Words and more words, not as valuable as water or timber or land or the muck that did wonders for crops. You
don't know nothing about blood and muck, Walter Brown.
Fancy words did wonders for no one, not even the fancy-worder himself, as who would want a load of words? He ought to be falling in love with her and she ought to be laughing at him, not the other way round. How had it become the other ways about? It was too late now. Bugga the back of it. He thought a lot of himself too these days. His talk had got bigger and bigger until it hardly could fit inside his mouth. Lately he reckoned he was too good for this place and lately she had begun wondering if he was right. She kept something of his in her pocket, folded up. She thought it was rubbish but she had been reading it more and more frequently.

Here is a daisy chain for your hair,
Here is gingerbread I won you at the fair.
Apple blossom, cherry blossom, peach blossom, pear,
Come beside the water, find her swimming there.

Walter's fancy words; even she had become susceptible.

Walter had thought to visit George Osbourne, who lived in an ivy-wrapped red-brick house by the smithy's old forge. He would show him five of his poems and hope he might receive a positive response. George had had his poem 'Lepidoptera' published in the church magazine, and another, 'The Cinnabar', published in the
Bucks Gazette
Poets Corner. He was the only published poet Walter had ever met. Walter considered him an interesting personality. George was a collector of butterflies and moths, but also of birds' eggs and occasional lizards. He was keen on ballroom dancing, though had to borrow partners, as his wife had been fatally hit by a tram in her twenties, and consequently there were no children.

George retired early from his accountancy firm in High Wycombe due, it was said, to lung problems caused by the poison fumes he breathed when preparing the killing bottles for his entomology. Not to be put off, however, he continued signing for his cyanide at the chemist, and announced he would be grateful to be buried with his collections like an Egyptian. Nobody paid any attention to that.

He had recently acquired an unusual specimen, he claimed. The death's-head hawkmoth was the largest moth in Britain, a rare find indeed, and so Walter had two good reasons to visit.

On the inside George's house was neat and immaculately ordered, as though he had a pinafored woman tucked away in his collections too. On almost every wall hung the delicately framed corpses of winged insects. The butterflies in particular magnified the stillness in the house, their gaudy colours brightening the dull browns of the sitting room. The clock on the mantelpiece counted down the minutes with an ostentatious ticking, as if it were logging this living death for some important purpose. As if, Walter fancied, at some preordained moment the hour would chime and all the butterflies would simultaneously reanimate and burst from their glass cases to swarm in a blaze of colour. How he wished they would. How pitiful they looked, he decided, in their categorised rows; how unremarkable in such vast numbers.

'Cake, Walter?' George was an attentive host. No less than three types of sliced cake fanned in a pleasing spiral across the plate and the tea was strong and very hot. Walter found he could relax and let his thoughts drift. George never minded a pause or a dismal observation. If you preferred to be gloomy or distant, that was all right with him. He would continue to rush for your refill, scoop up your crumbs, and chuckle at your frailest swing at humour. He would proceed as though you were a credit to the afternoon, as though he were indeed fortunate to have you in his second armchair.

The moth was very large indeed, Walter noted, almost a shrew. It made him squeamish to look at it, pinned through the thorax, splayed and stretched. He thought, startlingly, of the Messiah in his agony. He stared at its furred face, the dusty wings, and found he could not meet George's eye for a moment.

He was almost sure, George was explaining, that it was a death's-head, but he was going to write to the Society to be certain. It required authenticating, he explained. Words bubbled out of his mouth in a froth of excitement. 'Walter,' he said, 'a young man like you should have a pastime. A hobby is an excellent way to organise your mind. Pick the right thing and you won't know yourself. You're only half a man without a passion, son.'

Walter thought of his father on his knees to his root vegetables, and of Sankey bowed before God. He pictured George piercing the hearts of lepidoptera with a pin, and staking down their wings. He smiled and, producing the poems from his jacket, said, 'I have brought these for you to see, George.'

George sat with the poems for some time. He read each one twice, sniffing irritably when he got to the end. Finally he handed them back to Walter without meeting his eye, and Walter's heart sank. George put his hand to his jaw and stared towards the window. Walter waited. He began to think bringing the poems had been a mistake.

'They're good,' said George, quietly.

'Oh?' replied Walter, unable to hide the bounce of excitement in his voice.

'Yes,' continued George. 'But they are unlikely to be published.'

'Oh.'

George turned towards Walter. He was smiling warmly now. 'They are, how shall I put it? They are good, Walter, you have talent, certainly. But.' George wrung his hands as though he must now express some complicated truth in such a way that a simple soul like Walter would understand. 'Talent is not enough, Walt.'

'It's not?'

'No, Walt. Talent is a beginning. You have purchased your first killing bottles and rudiments and now you must discover whether you can capture any decent specimens and, moreover, display them to Society standard. They possess pep, I accept. J
oie de vivre
let us call it. Also an attractive melancholy. Some pleasant rhymes. But they lack originality, technique, expertise. They are, in a word, amateur, Walt. There is work to be done.' George beamed. He had warmed himself up with this advice. He had quelled his fears, allayed his suspicions that his young friend possessed a superior gift. He had destroyed Walter's hopes. He felt buoyant, peckish.

'Thank you, George. I'm obliged.'

George swung an arm around Walter's shoulder and fixed him with a friendly grimace. 'Any time, Walt, any time.'

George's moth collection was kept in another room. Moths are nocturnal, he confided, his commiserating arm still curled up on Walt's shoulder.

The room containing the collection was north-facing, cool and grey and filled by a large oval dining table, covered partially by a cloth at one end, and laid with two places. For lunch there was beetroot and cress and steak-and-kidney pudding. George swooped down with his fork. Another clock ticked faintly, sporadically, as if it wasn't much bothered about the o'clock. George began to talk animatedly with his mouth full: 'A moth, you see, must be trapped at night with treacle. A tree trunk will do the job; daub your chosen tree, then use a torch to choose from the dozens that are stuck all over the bark. Many of the more common varieties you will already have in your collection, so it pays off to take your time, to inspect thoroughly; likewise you can miss a real treat if you're not careful.' Swoop.

The clock pinged the hour, though Walter saw it was already a quarter past by his watch. Ping ping ping. On it went like a child, insistent, inaccurate, ping ping, on and girlishly on. Walter thought of Mary.

Piri-iri-ig-dum, do-man-wee,
My love is a sailor on the sea.
Piri-iri-ig-dum, do-man-wee,
If he do not return, I'll marry thee.

'A moth,' George said conspiratorially, 'is distinguished from a butterfly by the absence of a knob on the end of the antennae.'

As though silenced by George's pronouncement, the clock stopped pinging.

'Fortunately,' he went on, 'there are somewhere in the region of one hundred thousand species, so there is plenty enough to keep you occupied for a lifetime.'

After lunch there were a few minutes remaining in which to look at the eggs. George's egg collection stretched back to his boyhood. They lay cold as stones in a glass display case. They too possessed a strange defiled stillness that left Walter feeling gloomy. As he looked at them, speckled, dappled, in creams and browns and blues – colours that remained as pretty as they had been before George got his hands on them – Walter wondered whether in fact the gulf between him and his friend was as great as he imagined.

Sensing Walter's attention wandering, George blew his nose abruptly. Did he think he might fancy eggs? As he folded away his handkerchief, he raised a finger. As with moths, there were rules with egg collecting. George explained them: 'Do not, Walter, take more than one egg from a nest. And do not take more than two eggs from one species – excepting, of course, for vermin. Moreover, an egg must be correctly blown – that is, have its contents removed.' George offered to lend Walter his own blow-pipes if he ever fancied a go at eggs in the future. Did he think he might fancy having a go in the future? Walter thought, yes, he probably, almost certainly, assuredly would have a go, yes. In the future.

George offered Walter his consoling arm again as he bid him goodbye at the door. 'Good luck with any future attempts!' was his parting commiseration. Walter had replaced the poems in the inside pocket of his jacket. George reached out and tapped them with his finger, three prods on Walter's heart.

Though he took the long way, Walter walked home quickly. He disliked himself thoroughly; he couldn't say why. It occurred to him he ought to be lying under glass with the eggs, inert, cold, his innards all sucked out. Was he ashamed? Probably. How could he have imagined he was a poet? Dead insects were simpler, that was evident, cheerier too, no doubt. Right balls-up. The truth of it, he suspected, was that there was no difference between George and himself, none. George with his moths and eggs, and he with his words, and the selfsame business of pinning them down for others to admire; it was all a vanity. Each man thought himself a god. Mary was right. It was a squirt of poop, all in all.

T
HE SOUND STARTS
as his head goes under. The lonely sound of the satellite ping bounces over the crackling static. Once he is fully submerged it fills his head, loud and clear. Now, even if they shout and bang on the door he will not hear them.

Delta zero mac. This is a good one. Delta one. The Eagle has landed.

Sean is rationed to one bath a week due to his habit of filling the bath to the very top, thereby emptying the hot-water tank, so he is resolved to make the most of it. He turns his head below the surface to adjust his soap-on-a-rope breathing apparatus. His helmet, recognisable to other members of the family as his mother's transparent shower cap, billows as it fills up.
Ping.
Bubbles blow from Sean's mouth.
I
have opened the hatch.
His hair floats inside his helmet. He submerges his blue breathing tube.
Ping. Receiving you. I am exiting lunar module, Columbia.

As he rotates, Sean uncoils the dressing-gown belt around his waist that attaches him to the lunar module, to avoid becoming entangled. The last bubbles escape from his mouth. He stares up. He has no air left. He places the blue tube in his mouth and breathes. The other end of it swings over the bath mat. He can breathe.
Ping.

He can open and close his eyes, he can smile, he can breathe, he can think and he can dream. Thunderbirds are go, you spaz. Perfect happiness. He can hang about like a gas, bothering no one, feeling nothing. If he had freeze-dried food he'd never have to leave the bathroom.

Delta Houston. This is an Al.
Sean is turning again. Slow slow. He is keen to watch the progress of a plastic soap dish as it floats by; here comes a toothbrush. He smiles, sending tiny bubbles from the tube. He looks up through the water at the shower head high up on the wall and raises his thumb to it. His breathing is loud in his ears. He is unaware of the slops of water escaping over the top of the bath, waterfalling on to the carpet.

That's one small step for man. Ping.
He rolls with his knees tucked up.
One giant. Ping. Leap for mankind. Delta one, we copy you.

Sean is unaware that a controller has begun his ascent, that even now he is approaching the lunar module and that Sean will be required to respond immediately to new commands from the control room. He is oblivious and weightless and orbiting. Unaware that ground control has issued a final warning. Unaware that he is about to suffer the consequences.
Ping.
He is aware at last. He suspects there may be a malfunction. There is an unidentified object visible through the porthole. He jerks up, sending more water into the atmosphere. I
copy you, Control. I copy you. Er, Houston, I think we may have a problem.

'Do
you want a leathering?'

'No.'

'Do you want a leathering?'

'No.'

'You're asking for a leathering, young man. Bloody well asking for it! You are a cretin. What are you?'

'A cretin.'

You are a stupid, stupid little boy. What are you?'

'Stupid.'

'Do you think I want to redecorate this house?'

Careful. A trick question.

'Well?'

'Um.'

'You dumb bloody kids. What if no one was here? What if you flooded the whole ruddy house?'

Whatif, whatif, whatif. The controller leaves quickly, too quickly. You get the bends at that pace. You cannot lose your temper in space, the doors will not slam. You cannot fling open the hatch and demand,
Whatif!
Space will give no answer. Space does not care about your whatifs. In space there is only So
what?

Sean has a great long stick. He is hitting the estate with it: the bricks, the houses, the almost-paths, the tyres of the lorries. It makes a loud cracking noise that makes you want to do it again. 'Oi! Little sod you!' A red builder with a roly-poly tummy and a square mouth, brick-shaped. He is burned all over, even his ears and his eyelids. He is coming for him. Sean thwacks his lorry with the stick one more time, gives him the V-sign and runs.

'I'll break your bloody little arms,' shouts Brick Man. Sticks and stones, sticks and stones, sticks and stones will break my bones.

Sean runs down the echo tunnel, flushing out a trio of wiry dogs, and out on to Shepherds Lane, where the residents have lush little lawns with pansy borders and nets up at the windows. Sean wonders why it is bones are white. Why not a dark colour? Like navy.

The houses look cheery here, stuffed with families and furniture and coyly veiled at the windows to discourage nosy parkers like Sean from peering in on their secret lives. He peers anyway. There is a solitary car parked in the street, a blue Ford Consul. The tarmac road curves proudly around it. Sean stops to look. He presses his face against the window, burning his nose, to see the shiny seats and wide Saturn ring of the steering wheel. He breathes in the rainwater smell of the glass and lets his fingers burn on the hot metal door. To drive your own car was a step up in the world, to park it in your own garage was another step. A house was a step. These were the steps you made until you hit your head on the ceiling of life, which meant you'd reached the top. The people who lived in Mary's Mead, outside Wycombe, had reached the top. They had double garages, big gardens and (it was rumoured) swimming pools, so they had definitely reached the top.

Top people. Rich people. Fatheads, Gor called them. You would have thought they should be called flatheads, but it wasn't prudent to challenge Gor.

At Fray Bentos there were men above Sean's dad. At work you were either over or under somebody. Gor worked under these superior Fray Bentos men. Sean pictured a kind of tower into which the men were stuffed, under, over, under, over, each in his own cubbyhole, each both above and below another. Everybody wanted to go up, even Gor, everybody wanted to become a fathead. The Fray Bentos fatheads received special treats like cars or cash, the same as cereal-box competition winners. Gor wanted treats too: cars, cash, holidays, the special fathead parking spot in the company car park, not to mention the executive fathead Christmas lunch. Not everyone attended the executive Christmas lunch; that was the idea, you had to be an executive. Executive perks. These were the words that tortured Gor. He spoke them nervously as if they might conjure something holy, or unholy. He spoke them wistfully too; they made his eyes widen and his mouth tighten. Even when separated, the words held their command over Sean's dad. 'Perk' or 'executive', singly, could produce the same effect.

Elvis, according to Ty, had thirty-two cars, mostly sedans and Corvettes. Sean had no idea how Ty knew that. Elvis had got to the top. He was, if you like, a fathead. He had gone through the ceiling of life and burst through the roof, but he still sang 'Heartbreak Hotel' as though nothing was going right at all.

Sean runs across Foxes Field. You are an executive runner, he tells himself; perky. When Sean is running he pulls the grass and the wind and the sky with him.
Top. Executive. Fathead. Perk.
You had to get the rhythm. When he is running, he is not afraid.

Ann is not dead. Sean is both relieved and disappointed. She says, 'Wotcha, Spaz,' as though everything is completely normal. Her knees are orange with brick dust and her hairband is dirty. Sean points these things out and she stares over his head. Women do this, his dad explained it. Not explained exactly, but he mentioned it. No one could explain it as a matter of fact, not even scientists. A woman's mind is a mysterious terrain, his dad said, not for mortal men to fathom. Even women themselves didn't understand their minds, so it was no good asking them. Sean wondered, if there was a woman scientist one day, would she understand her own mind? A rhetorical question as it turned out. 'Women and science don't mix,' his dad informed him.

So Ann doesn't care about dust and dirt today. She cared last Tuesday when she asked Sean to bury her in builder's sand and then violently changed her mind. She may well care tomorrow because tomorrow is another place, disconnected from today. Women like to change their minds and then change them back. This was something Sean could sympathise with, he required no explanation for the mind-changing part. Being a woman, Sean thought, probably wasn't so bad. There was only one drawback as he saw it: women weren't allowed in space. This was a major drawback and he pitied them on account of it.

Ann has finished staring over Sean's head and now she is walking determinedly away from him. She is heading for the brick mountain. It is infuriating, the way she just does things without discussing them first. He hurries after, watching his feet to see how quick they can go. Sometimes he watches his face in the hall mirror to see if he can catch it doing something. This is pointless, things don't happen while you look at them.
Watch the ball
is a good example. He reckons his face does all kinds of things behind his back. 'A watched pot never boils,' his dad said. His grandmother had said it before him. She was from Newport. Sean thinks that if someone had been watching in Gomms Wood that day, really looking hard, perhaps a child would not be dead. Things happen, he decides, when you take your eye off the ball.

Ann is standing at the foot of the brick mountain. The mysterious wind lifts her hair and presses her dress against her bones.

'You can look.' Sean hands her a thin blue letter. 'It's from mista waltr, see. I got them off Mrs Roys.'

Ann stares at the swirly blue words. 'This is rubbish. Put it in the dustbin.'

'It's not. I read it.'

You can't read, you nasty little liar!'

'She gave me a fizzy drink and a giant egg.'

'Liar liar liar liar.'

'She has got banana feet.'

'Yur a spaz liar, Sean Matthews.'

'It's true.'

'I wasn't born yesterday, was I?'

Sean pushes the letter into his pocket.
Women are controlled by the cycles of the moon, son. There's nothing we can do about it.

'Climb.'

Sean looks up at the cliff face of brick, the faraway summit touching the blue.

'P'sof.'

'Climb, Sean.'

'Climb yourself.'

The mysterious wind whips a piece of hair across Ann's face. She doesn't pull it away. Sean can see the stain on her neck from the day before and the bruise on her arm that won't go.

'Spaz spaz spaz. Horrible little liar spaz. Do as you're told.'

'P'sof.'

'I see.' And she is gone. Off on her rod legs. Good riddance. That's what she would have said. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Sean can't be bothered to say it. The wind is nice, it blows away the dust, the smell of cement. It blows away Ann. 'Goodbye.' She stops and turns to say it, her arms are folded. She has to shout. Her hair blows into her mouth. You won't see me again. Goodbye, Spaz. Good riddance to bad rubbish.' And she whirls round and takes off again.

'Bye.' Sean doesn't mind if she hears it or not.

There is a tune playing, not exactly a tune. It is the wind in the plumbing pipes, the same three notes really.

The brick mountains are strong, he realises. The wind presses against them, but the mountain is too strong for the wind. You have to admire the bricks, the way they hold together, their strength. Sean looks up again. The sky is swaying at the top; its blueness makes the bricks redder and their redness makes the sky bluer. Sean begins to climb.