Sacred Country (28 page)

Timmy wanted to laugh. He knew that somehow, unexpectedly, he had stumbled upon a source of hope.

Pete Loomis had said of his altering face: ‘It’s just my nose, doing what it’s doing.’

What it was doing was growing a cancer.

It grew the size of a fat strawberry, then the size of a lime. Pete had always thought cancers were internal things. He
thought they never showed. He thought anything that showed couldn’t be a cancer, but something else of no consequence.

He was taken to hospital in Ipswich. The hospital was on a hill and looked down on the ugly town. Pete stood at the window of his ward and thought, what if this is the last view I see?

To take out the huge cancer, the surgeons had to cut away half of Pete’s nose, including one nostril. They said that by doing this, they had ‘contained’ it. What remained of his nose was wrapped in a bag of bandages. He looked like a snowman with some white vegetable – a parsnip or a turnip – stuck into the middle of his face.

Walter and Grace came to visit him. Grace clasped her handbag on her knee. She had brought him some yellow chrysanthemums. She said: ‘When you get out of here, Pete, you’d better come and live with us over the shop for a bit, till you’ve got your strength back. You can have Josephine’s room.’

Pete didn’t want to do this. He knew Grace was a good woman but she was good in ways that he found wearisome.

He said: ‘That’s a kind offer. But it’s not as if I’d lost a leg, is it? I can manage in the bus.’

‘I think I shall insist,’ said Grace. ‘Won’t I, Walter?’

Walter had been very quiet. He had just stared sorrowfully at Pete. His eyes were wet.

‘You’d better come, Pete,’ he said now. ‘Only for a bit. It’s winter, remember.’

‘What’s winter?’ said Pete, grinning. ‘I could’ve woken up in my grave.’

‘Ssh,’ said Grace. ‘No more deaths, Pete. One in the family was sufficient.’

Pete looked at her. The bandage bag made an obstacle in the middle of his vision. He looked round the obstacle at her lined white face, like a dried lily, at her neat grey hair, at her hands holding the handbag bought at Cunningham’s. It’s that I find repulsive, he thought, the awful precision of her, a word like ‘sufficient’, her mouth closing so tidily after it.

The Ward Sister had said to them: ‘Don’t stay too long. He’s much weaker than he thinks he is.’ They didn’t talk about how Pete was going to look with half his nose missing. Grace talked about the battery hen house. She said bulk orders were starting to come in from lorry drivers’ Pull-Ins. She said she had begun to wonder whether a second hen house shouldn’t be built.

Walter said little. His bull’s head seemed to droop. But he said he’d finished his song, the one he’d been struggling with for so long.

‘Good,’ said Pete. ‘Want to sing it to cheer us all up?’

‘No,’ said Walter. ‘Not now.’

‘It wouldn’t cheer us up,’ said Grace. ‘Walter gave me a rendition. It’s a morbid song.’

‘Is it?’ said Pete. ‘Morbid, is it, Walt?’

‘Not really,’ said Walter, ‘not if you understand it.’

‘And I don’t, I suppose?’ said Grace.

‘No, you don’t,’ said Walter.

Then they left. Pete waved from his bed, but Walter followed Grace out and neither of them looked back.

While Pete was in hospital, Walter went to London. He took an early train. He told Grace that Gilbert Blakey had invited him there, to show him the Crown Jewels. He knew the Jewels would impress her. It was a Wednesday, half-day closing in the shop.

He got on a Sightseeing Bus. He sat on the top deck, in the open, with a drizzle coming down. He was given a little map of the route the bus was going to take. He saw that it passed down the King’s Road, near to which he knew Gilbert to be. Part of him prayed to see Gilbert and the other part prayed not to. He didn’t know which prayer was the truthful one.

He went to London because he had to get a glimpse of a new place. He had to remind himself that a world outside Swaithey existed. Swaithey had started to kill him. He knew that if he stayed there, working in the shop, living with his mother, he would one day pick up a filleting knife and stick it into his heart. He’d known this for a while. He’d tried to recover from
the loss of Gilbert by writing songs, but this hadn’t been enough. He was thirty-one. Either he had to find another destination for his life or end it. He chose London because of the dark colours it was in his mind – red and black.

With Walter on the top deck of the bus was a group of Canadian women, wearing rain hats. Everything amazed them. ‘My-oh-my!’ they said. ‘Will you look, girls!’

As the bus came down Whitehall, Walter decided that it was mainly the solidity of London that was so unfamiliar, so foreign. In Swaithey, when the October mists sat on the village and the tops of the hedgerows merged with the sky, you could imagine the whole place fading away in the dusk, never to reappear. But London felt eternal. It cast square shadows, black and wide. It felt like the capital of the world.

Walter began talking to the Canadians. The rain had stopped. They patted their permed hair. They told Walter they were from Medicine Hat, Alberta. They said Medicine Hat had no Tower and no Abbey; it had a good school and an ice rink. They told him their names: Mavis, Jane, Cecelia Ann, Beth, Nettie and April. They said: ‘This is our first trip, Walter. We didn’t want to delay it any longer.’

‘It’s my first trip, too,’ said Walter, ‘but I’m thinking of coming to live here for a while.’

‘You
are
?’ they said. They had a habit of saying the same thing in a kind of chorus. Walter thought, they could’ve been backing singers when they were young.

‘What’s your line of country?’ they asked.

Walter grinned. ‘Country it is,’ he said. ‘Country Music.’

‘My, that’s interesting!’ This was Nettie on her own. ‘I didn’t know English people sang Country Music.’

‘Not many do,’ said Walter.

‘You shouldn’t be coming to London, dear,’ said Nettie. ‘You should be going to Nashville, Tennessee. I have a cousin in Nashville. Married a Southern girl. They run a pharmacy. I could you give their name.’

The bus was travelling down Knightsbridge, past the Mary Quant shop, past Harrods. Walter imagined going into
Harrods and being swallowed up by an awful yearning and never coming out again. April and Jane said: ‘There it is, ladies. Lit up for Christmas. Wow!’ It was freezing cold on the open bus, but the fear and excitement of the Canadians kept them warm. Walter was glad he wasn’t alone, especially when they reached the King’s Road. He would have hated Gilbert to see the tourist bus go by and notice one lonely head sticking over the parapet: his.

He said to the Canadians: ‘I have a friend living not far from here.’

‘You do, Walter?’

‘He’s a dentist.’

‘Yes?’ said Beth. ‘Well now, that’s a thing I was once told in Medicine Hat, that the British don’t care for their teeth. Is there any truth in that?’

Walter smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I reckon.’

‘You don’t floss, is that it?’

‘We don’t what?’

‘You don’t floss?’

‘Make use of dental floss,’ said Nettie.

Walter remembered these were words Gilbert had once used. He shook his head. Then he turned away from Nettie and Beth and looked down at the street. It was noisy and bright with people. Walter’s heart began to thump. At any moment, one of them could turn into Gilbert. He might be wearing a bomber jacket or a fur. He would have changed, become more beautiful than ever. This happened in the romances his mother read: when the hero returned from his deeds on the Niger he was more handsome and irresistible than when he’d set out.

But the bus went on, past Flood Street and down towards the river and there was no sighting of Gilbert. Part of Walter felt as though he had suffered a cruel disappointment and the other part a deliverance. These feelings alternated, in waves. He held on to the seat in front of him. The sightseeing tour was nearly finished. Walter wondered whether he wouldn’t stay on the bus and do the tour all over again, like he used to sit in Leiston
cinema and see the feature film twice. But he knew that Nettie and Co. would be getting off and that, without them, he would feel lonely and foolish.

It was late when he got home to Swaithey. Walter expected Grace to be asleep but she was sitting in her armchair, waiting for him.

‘How were the Crown Jewels?’ she asked.

‘Fine,’ said Walter. ‘Shining.’

‘Did Mr Blakey show you a bit of London?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s nice. Now you’ve seen it.’

Walter sat down. He felt cold and exhausted. He wanted to say to his mother, there and then, I can’t go on here. I’ll kill myself if you make me. I want a life of my own. But Grace was watching him like a cat. Lately, she watched him this way from her booth in the shop, her eyes following his every movement. It was as if she knew what was in his mind.

Pete left the hospital in Ipswich. He’d grown attached to one of the nurses. He’d thought he was too old to have dreams of women, but he wasn’t. He thought, perhaps one is never too old. They could cut off your nose and ears and all your limbs and your stump would still go on dreaming.

He moved into Josephine’s room. He found an old Horlicks mug in the wardrobe. He looked out and saw the field with his bus in it, waiting for things to be as they were. He knew the wait was vain.

Grace fed him a lot of meat and gravy. She let him have a nip of whisky in the evening. He was in pain. He sat by the fire with his eyes closed. He thought, the only thing I’m looking forward to is hearing Walter’s new song.

Walter didn’t want to sing it again in front of Grace who’d called it morbid. He waited for an evening when she was out at a whist drive in the Girl Guide hut, now rebuilt in brick and used for Conservative fund-raising and meetings of the Parish Council. The story of how Mary Ward had spoiled a dancing
show by appearing in wellingtons was still sometimes remembered there. But it was laughed at now. It was no longer shocking. People said: ‘What a nerve that poor child always had!’

With Grace gone, Walter got his guitar and sat down in front of Pete. Before he began the song, he said: ‘I’ve got to tell you something: one of these days, one of these years, I’m leaving. I know I’m letting down generations of Loomises, but I can’t help it. I’m going to leave and that’s it. It’s final. I need to have a life before it’s over.’

Pete nodded. He looked round the tidy front room with its chintz curtains and its shiny wooden furniture. ‘I couldn’t live here,’ he said. ‘You’ve done all right to stay so long.’

‘I’m thirty-one,’ said Walter.

‘Sure,’ said Pete. ‘Thirty-one. Now sing.’

Walter tuned his guitar. He told Pete the song was called ‘Something Different’. He said: ‘I wrote it when I saw there was a lot of things I didn’t understand, even at my age.’

‘Your age is nothing,’ said Pete. ‘Now get on with it.’

Walter cleared his throat. He was proud of his song. He imagined future fans growing old and remembering it and saying: ‘Wow, that was a Walter Loomis classic!’ It had a wistful tune. It was in the key of B-Minor. This was how it went:

I tried to find the answer to the earth,

I dug deep down to see what I could find.

I dreamed some foolish dreams about its birth

And I woke up with its riddle in my mind.

I tried to find the answer to the sky,

I climbed a rainbow and looked all around,

Confusion was the thing that caught my eye

And mys-ter-y was what I really found.

Chorus
:
Well, there’s always something different hiding
There inside the something that you see!
The world is full of secrets
And I know that it won’t ever
Give the secret of its secrets up to me.

I tried to find the answer to my love,

I came to her and put the question, why?

She said: ‘Don’t ask for what I cannot give,’

She said: ‘Don’t touch me now, don’t even try.’

I tried to find the answer to my life,

I lay alone and lonely in my bed.

I tried to paint a picture of my life

But what I painted was my death instead.

Chorus
:
Well, there’s always something different hiding
There inside the something that you see!
The world is full of secrets
And I know that it won’t ever
Give the secret of its secrets up to me.
No, I know that it won’t ever
Give the secret of its secrets up to me.

Pete was moved by Walter’s song. He took a sip of whisky, then he said: ‘If my old friend, the Minister in Memphis, could’ve heard that, Walter, he might’ve cried.’

Walter shrugged. ‘Trouble is,’ he said, ‘my songs don’t change one single thing.’

Cord was writing a letter to the Ministry of Transport. The letter would have a hundred and eighty-nine signatories. It informed the Minister that he had ‘reckoned without the residents of Gresham Tears’.

They’d been told a new trunk road was planned that would slice through the water-meadows on which the villagers had gazed for four hundred and thirty-two years. The blacksmith’s forge and the Gresham Cattery would go flying into history. The air would fill with a relentless thunder.

Fighting the coming of the road had cured Cord of his palsy. It had vanished. What came to him instead was rhetoric. He formed the Residents of Gresham Tears Against the Road Action Group. Its slogan was
LEAVE GRESHAM ALONE, TAKE AWAY OUR TEARS.
He told the assembling villagers: ‘They think we’re of no account. We have to prove them wrong. We may be called upon to lie down in the path of a tar-spreader. I do not rule out the all-night vigil or the long march. I, for one, am willing to contemplate the ultimate sacrifice!’ The residents looked at him in alarm. They said they didn’t think that it would come to that. ‘This is England,’ they said, ‘not Hungary, Thomas.’

The campaign against the road was given, in Cord’s mind, a marvellous momentum by the events in Paris in May. He sat on his Yoga mat and talked silently to his long-dead Livia. He
said: ‘This is turning out to be a decade of protest and I wish you could see it. There’s hope in us now. I wish you could see that. The dispossessed and the about-to-be-dispossessed (we, in Gresham) have found a voice. We’re getting off our backsides. We’re saying things we thought we’d never hear ourselves say. And even in Suffolk – don’t laugh, Liv – we’ll man the barricades if the need arises. In the absence of Parisian cobblestones we’ll hurl sods …’