Sacred Country (31 page)

People are seldom too embarrassed to confide their misfortunes to me. It’s because they think mine are worse. They think Mountview is a revolving bin like the Rotor at Battersea Funfair. They think we go flying round in it, damaging our bones, saved from death only by centrifugal force.

I made the tea. I put some flapjacks on a green plate. Grace put her hands round her teacup. She said: ‘Walter’s gone. My Walter.’

She described the bomber jacket, the suitcase and the guitar. She described herself inside her glass booth. She said: ‘I forgot where I was with the accounts, Estelle. I had to do the accounts all again.’

She doesn’t know where he is. He refused to tell her. He said he wanted to be where no one could find him. I immediately thought of a wilderness and old Walter building himself a willow cabin in it. My immediate thoughts aren’t often the appropriate ones to be having at the time.

I said: ‘What are you going to do, Grace?’ She put her teacup down and picked up a flapjack and looked at it and then replaced it on the green plate. She said: ‘I’ve sent for Josephine.’

She left soon after. I watched her walk over the fields and out of sight. I have never liked her. I have disliked her without knowing it for almost twenty-five years and now, at this moment of her tragedy, I see it plainly.

I watched what she did.

She hired a new butcher from Bungay, a man with a constant smile. His hands are neat and fat. She went back inside her booth as if nothing had happened. The man is called Arthur.

I moved Walter around in my mind. I put him in Africa, under a thorn tree, singing. Then I moved him to Kansas. He and a gas station with one pump were the only upright features in the flat, yellow world.

Grace began to expand her egg empire. She built a new hen factory. She put in a thousand birds. One way of overcoming tragedy is to get rich.

Her sister Josephine moved in. Josephine kept the house. She drew the parlour curtains so that sunlight would not fade the velveteen upholstery. I met her in Cunningham’s. She was buying elastic. When I asked whether there was any word from Walter, she said: ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ward, but I simply do not discuss that subject!’

The hen houses remind me of concentration camp huts. I can see them from the window of my room. England was once a beautiful place. Long ago.

Pete Loomis knows where Walter is, but Walter swore him to secrecy.

I visited Pete in his trolley bus. The air inside it smells like an old flannel.

It was evening, not quite dark, but he had his Tilley lamp going. It sighs and whistles. He said: ‘Sounds can catch me off guard. Sometimes I think I’m back in Tennessee and the lamp is a lawn sprinkler.’

The wound on his face has healed. On one side, he has the profile of a monkey. He used to be large and now he seems diminished, as if he’s trying to embalm himself while still alive. His neck is creased. When he pours whisky for me, his hands tremble. He said, most unexpectedly: ‘You’re still a lovely woman, Estelle. Does anyone ever remind you of that?’

When you’ve been in a place for a while, you aren’t aware of the smell it had when you came in. I noticed this at Mountview. And I began to like being in the bus.

I decided to get drunk. It wasn’t an unreasonable decision, considering everything.

Pete took my hand, the one not holding my glass of whisky, and stroked it. He said: ‘Walter was a day-dreamer. A day- and night-dreamer. If you dream like he did, you have to get out and try things and take the consequences.’

I didn’t contradict him. I used to dream of arriving at the house of Bobby Moore. It had a bell-chime. He came to the door wearing a ruffled shirt and took me into his well-exercised arms. But it was all reverie. There were no consequences
except dreamed consequences of an erotic kind. And I regretted this.

Nothing happens in Swaithey.

I stayed in Pete Loomis’s bus for more than two hours. Everything turned a shade of amber. I felt surprised by what I saw and said and heard.

I rolled out the comedy of my life. I said: ‘We’re losing Timmy. We’re about to lose him. Just as Grace has lost Walter to the wilderness. We’re going to have to give Timmy away.’

‘To whom?’ said Pete.

‘To no one,’ I said. ‘To a vertical line.’

Pete didn’t believe me. He thought I had invented this vertical line with the mad part of my mind.

‘And Mary?’ he said.

I said nothing.

‘What’s become of her, Estelle?’

‘Pete,’ I said, ‘this isn’t the subject any more. Timmy is the subject.’

‘If you insist,’ he said. ‘But one day, Mary is going to come back. You know this, don’t you?’

I said: ‘All I know is that Sonny talks to nobody human now. Not to Timmy. Not to me. He talks to his dog, Wolf. He tells the dog what he wants for his supper. When he goes the toilet, the dog sits outside the door whining with agony.’

We laughed at that point and refilled our glasses. I said: ‘I told you it was comic, didn’t I?’

When I left, it was dark. There was nothing amber-coloured about it. It was the deepest, softest darkness I had ever seen.

Pete didn’t want me to go. He wanted to continue stroking my hand. I told him I would stay another thirty-five minutes if he told me where Walter was and then I would have to leave because it would be time for
The High Chaparral
on television. I said: ‘I never miss that. I love things set in America, far away, with guns and dust.’

He said: ‘Go, then. Leave an old man. I’m not breaking my promise to Walter. That’s sacred.’

I waded through the darkness. There were no stars.

Earth stuck to my shoes and weighed my limbs down. I made a noise like laughter.

When the house came into view, there was one light showing in an upstairs window. Timmy’s light. He sits at a desk he made out of chipboard, reading his way into a different life.

After that letter she wrote me, Pearl got ill. She had meningitis. She was ill for a long time. She lay in her green and white room and had morphine dreams. I wanted to go and visit her, but I don’t think the day will ever come when I can go back to Swaithey.

I sent her postcards of London and a record by Cat Stevens. Edward wrote me letters reporting on her progress. In one of these, he said: ‘I believe that in her previous life she may have been a creature of the air – a dragonfly or a lark, she is so fragile and light.’

I remembered the day when I took her to school. I’d nearly dropped her onto my desk she felt so huge and heavy in my arms. But of course she
is
light now. She has got lighter with time.

During that winter, I told Rob and Tony about my determination to become Martin. We were in Zorba’s, eating goat rissoles. They both took up their check napkins and wiped their mouths. They looked stunned. I said: ‘Have a sip of Retzina before you say anything.’

Rob was the first to speak. He said: ‘What’s wrong with being a woman, Mart?’

I said: ‘Nothing is wrong with being a woman. It’s only that I’m not one. I never have been.’

Tony said: ‘Heck, Mart. What a destiny! I’m flattened.’

But they grew acclimatised to it. When they did, they found
me more interesting than before, as though I’d become an honorary Abo. They raised my salary. They bought me my own coffee mug with the name Martin on it. They saw me as one of the dispossessed.

And it was Tony who promised to find me a new psychiatrist to replace Dr Beales. I said: ‘There is one condition: he must not live in Twickenham.’

Tony said: ‘Don’t be obstructive, Mart. Finding one anywhere isn’t going to be a holiday.’

The one he found lived in darkness like a coelacanth. His consulting room was off Ladbroke Grove. It was full of tropical fish. This was the only illumination in it, the light from the fish tanks. In one was an axolotl. The man said, out of the green darkness: ‘This is a slayer species.’

His name was Martin – a coincidence I didn’t like. His second name was Sterns. He said: ‘All my patients address me by my first name, but if you are uncomfortable with this, call me Sterns. It won’t disconcert me.’

He was small and bearded. He had a melodic voice. He walked about while I talked, staring at the fish. The sighing and whispering of the aeration reminded me of the sea. No particle of daylight ever entered the room where we worked. This was his word – ‘working’. He said: ‘Martin, we are going to work on memory, on lost things, on the past. It will be the hardest work you will ever do.’

It was difficult to lie to Sterns, even in the dark. He thought my case was so interesting, he agreed to treat me without asking for money. I told him the truth about Sonny and Estelle. I described the day when Sonny cut the crepe bandages off my breasts. I told him about my mother’s room at Mountview and her meaningless piece of knitting. I said: ‘I’m lost to them and they to me. For ever, perhaps. Except that I still have dreams of … when I’m Martin, putting on armour and rescuing Estelle like Sir Lancelot and having her with me and keeping her safe.’

‘And you know, of course,’ said Sterns, ‘that this is an unreasonable goal?’

I said: ‘I know it, but I don’t feel it.’

‘I will help you to learn to feel it. Now I want you to start again at the beginning. I want you to describe to me everything that you felt and everything that happened on that day of the silence for the King.’

I began with that, with the sleet falling, with my prayers for the postage stamp. It seemed far away, in another country. I thought: I’m twenty-four; my life is a short one, so the telling of it will be short. But weeks passed and then months. Some of the fish died and floated upwards. Sterns’s beard, lit by the aquaria, seemed to be going grey. And the repetition of my life went on and on and on. Then one day, Sterns said: ‘Very well, Martin. I think it’s time to take the first step. I think it is time to begin a monitored metamorphosis.’

‘The male hormone, testosterone, will, when ingested into a body that is female, effect certain changes over a period of time. The most significant of these will be:

A loss of body fat
A reduction in breast size
An enlargement of the clitoris
The gradual appearance of facial and body hair
Cessation of the menstrual cycle.’

This was my voice describing a clinical process to Rob and Tony. We were in the office, eating our lunch of cheese sandwiches. My voice was unrecognisable to me. It was summer again. The Comme il Faut hairdressers underneath us was playing ‘Pity the Poor Innocents’ by Richie Havens. Tony and Rob stared at me for signs of facial hair and saw none. I said: ‘It’ll grow in the dark, like the greying of Sterns’s beard.’

‘How long is it going to take, hey?’ asked Rob.

‘Months,’ I said. ‘Or a year.’

I was afraid. I didn’t tell Rob and Tony this. I was afraid that the things I had described to them so expertly wouldn’t happen, that I would wait and watch and my body would stay just as it was. Every night, I took off my clothes and looked at myself. I was Mary. Older than when I threw my skirts out into the London night. Older than when I slept in Georgia’s bed
from Heal’s. But still Mary: round face, rounded breasts, roundly hateful in her own eyes.

Yet on the very day of my first testosterone injection a letter from Cord had arrived. He had won the Battle of the Road.

‘Martin,’ he wrote. ‘Go out into the street! Embrace the onion seller or the road sweeper! Remind them that the voice of the small man (and the small woman, come to think of it) can still make itself heard in this country. Tell them that the residents of Gresham Tears would not be moved. And now our water-meadows are safe.’

I thought, this letter on this day is a sign. Cord has got his victory and that means that I will have mine.

I waited. My veins were fed a new substance. I thought, I must be nimble in my mind now, like the darting fish. I must be watchful and alert, but all I felt was an unreasoning terror.

Then came a day that I’d hoped for.

Pearl arrived in London. She brought a small case, so that she could stay one night with me. In the case were a white nightdress, a spongebag in the shape of a heart and a
Handbook for Dental Nurses
. She laid these things out on the floor. I said: ‘Pearl, I want you to sleep in my bed and I’m going to sleep on some cushions and we can talk about Australia and the night sky.’

She is eighteen. She is studying A-level Biology. She tints her eyelashes blue. She wears her hair in two bunches tied with ribbons. Her voice has a Suffolk lilt. She hugs me and I hug her back. When I hug her, I want to cry.

She has never been to London before. She says: ‘Mary, don’t let me get lost, will you?’

It is Saturday. The sun is shining on the litter of the Earl’s Court Road. We walk down the street arm in arm on our way to the Natural History Museum. Pearl looks all around her in wonder, as if she’d landed on the moon.

We go into the museum and stand by the plaster dinosaur skeleton,
Diplodocus carnegii
. Large things like this make me feel
solemn but Pearl says: ‘They were ridiculous, weren’t they? One theory is they were frozen out of existence.’

I’ve never been in the museum before and nor has Pearl of course, but it’s she who leads me around and points things out to me. There is Biology all around. Pearl’s little nose gets scarlet with excitement. Heaven, for Pearl, would be full of flying frogs and milkweed butterflies.

The things we learn in a single afternoon remind me that we live on the planet of the unexpected. I now know that a centipede can run faster than a cheetah. I know that in Peru there is a snake that milks cows. I know that the Giant Sequoia tree of California can live for fifteen hundred years. I know that the Natterjack toad and the lime tree appeared in England ten thousand years ago. I know that things believed to be extinct can suddenly reappear and that eminent biologists can die in their laboratories from surprise. I know that species can cross the world’s oceans hidden in crates of bananas or bales of rubber and that such a one is the treefrog from the rainforests of Honduras which has colonised a forest near Canterbury.

I say to Pearl: ‘It gives me hope, to realise all this.’