Sacred Country (34 page)

In the afternoon, they went to Victoria Station and watched cartoons. They seemed to have run out of things to say. It was easier to sit in the dark and look at pigs dancing and mice scheming with human cunning.

When they came out to get the number 11 bus to Liverpool Street, Irene said: ‘I’ve always liked it when they write “That’s All Folks” in a circle. It’s more friendly than “The End”, isn’t it?’

After I’d received Miss McRae’s £1,000, it was much easier to behave like a man.

I bought a suit and a kipper tie. I had my shoes shined. I gave tips to people.

I went into bars and bought drinks for young women and sometimes put my hand on their silky legs or touched the top of their breasts.

They expected to come home with me, but this wasn’t possible except in my mind. My body had to stay inside its suit, hidden from view.

I told Sterns how much I wanted to make love to these women. He said: ‘Yes. Naturally, you do. But don’t run ahead of yourself. There is a long way to go yet.’

I thought, perhaps my life is like my old tennis ball I used to hurl in an arc and try to catch up with: it will always be ahead of me and never in my hand.

At least people sometimes called me ‘Sir’. Barmen. Waiters. Shop assistants. I liked this. I would sit at a bar counter, smiling. But I never felt the same stupid bliss I’d experienced by the Serpentine when the boat attendant called me ‘lad’. There is something about the unexpected that moves us. As if the whole of existence is paid for in some way, except for that one moment, which is free.

An unexpected thing happened to me in December.

I was at Tottenham Court Road tube station when I heard the song ‘Galveston’ echoing down the tunnels.

Since buying my suit, I always give a coin to the tube singers. I think of them as being between lives, like me, because to sing in the Underground couldn’t be a life’s goal. Sometimes you see the police asking them to move on and they look perplexed, as if they couldn’t think where to move to. Pearl had said to me, eating her kebab mountain: ‘Life needs a map, Mary.’ I often
think about this – the only little bit of wisdom to come out of Pearl in the twenty years of her existence. You can tell the tube buskers have never possessed a map or, if they once did, that it flew away in the Underground winds.

The singer of ‘Galveston’ was dressed as a cowboy. He had a cowboy hat on the ground, with a few pennies in it. I got out sixpence to throw to him and then I recognised him: he was Walter Loomis.

I stood a little way from him and stared at him and listened. His voice sounded beautiful to me. I thought, he must have taken a day off from the shop and started at dawn, to come and sing ‘Galveston’ on the Central Line. People born in Swaithey do the most unusual things.

When he finished the song, I went up to him. I said: ‘You won’t recognise me, Walter, but underneath everything you see, I’m Mary Ward.’

He has this heavy head that droops. It looks like it could one day fall off and roll away out of sight.

He stared at me, perplexed, as though I’d ordered him to move on.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘I’m Mary Ward. What are you doing in London, Walter?’

‘Singing,’ he said after a moment. ‘Trying to stay alive with singing. You’re right, I wouldn’t have recognised you.’

I made him write down his address on the back of the copy of
Liberty
I was carrying. Its lead article was about the slow death from heartbreak of Lyndon Johnson on his Texas ranch. Walter said: ‘It’s an awful address. It’s right under the power station at Battersea, but it’s only till I move on.’

‘Move on where?’ I asked.

‘America,’ said Walter. ‘Nashville. That’s where my life’s going to end up.’

I went to see him late one night, after the tube had closed down.

I walked over Battersea Bridge. There was a high wind and things were swirling about in the orange London sky, dead leaves and old pamphlets.

He lived in a basement in a row of little houses that were disintegrating one by one. Above the row was the power station, blotting out the moon and stars. Before he’d got up to answer the door, he’d been sitting on a hard chair, strumming. There was nothing in his room except this one chair and a bed with no cover and a juke box. Walter said: ‘It works. It plays two songs, “Only You” and “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling”.’

I sat down on Walter’s bed. The room smelled of unwashed clothes. He said: ‘There’s a kitchen as well.’

I wasn’t wearing my suit. I was wearing jeans and a leather jacket. Walter said I looked more recognisable in these. He was still dressed as a cowboy. His boots had metal studs on them. His hat was hanging on the back of the door. He said there was a Country and Western Society that met once a week in a pub in the Latchmere Road and that he’d ordered these clothes from them. ‘They’re made in Tennessee,’ he said, ‘they’re the genuine thing.’

He offered me some whisky. It’s a drink I’ve tried to like and failed, but it was all Walter had, so I accepted it. When he handed me the glass, he said: ‘No one else in the world knows where I am, except Pete.’

It wasn’t warm in the room. Walter said he didn’t mind. He was acclimatising himself. He said it fell to seventeen below in a Tennessee winter, that the trees looked as if they were made of glass.

I said: ‘How will you pay to get there, Walter?’ and his look became confused.

He said: ‘Pete sends me dollars when he finds them. He hid them away in the bus years ago and now he can’t remember where. But they turn up from time to time. I hope they’re still valid. Sometimes he turns up a twenty.’

He didn’t seem very interested in what or who I was becoming. His mind was on himself, on staying alive in London and getting to Nashville. I asked him whether he knew anybody there.

He said: ‘You don’t need to. I read this in the memoirs of a
Grand Ole Opry star. If you can sing and play, you just start doing it and someone hears you sooner or later.’

I asked: ‘Where do you do it, Walter?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘there are some names of bars I’ve got. You go in there and hang around. People are kinder there.’

‘Why?’

‘Why are they kinder? Because they’re country people.’

‘Swaithey people are “country people”.’

‘It’s not the same. Swaithey people think they know things. They think they’ve got everything mapped out. Country Music isn’t about knowing things, it’s about knowing nothing and discovering everything for the first time and then writing about it. Jimmie Rodgers, who was the first hillbilly singer I heard, used to have a thing he said to his audience. He used to say: “Hey, hey, it won’t be long now,” and no one really knew what he meant by that, but I know. He was talking about how he felt in his soul – that one day he’d find the answer to everything and that day wouldn’t be long in coming, but at the same time it might never come, so the best thing to do while waiting was to write songs and sing them.’

‘Is that how you feel, Walter?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I’m thirty-five. I should know a lot by now and I don’t, but I think the day’s coming when I will. And at least I knew enough not to stay.’

‘In Swaithey?’

‘Yes. Except now I think of her, every morning. Getting up at five. Making tea. Going down to open the shop. It kills me. Here.’

He hit the area of his heart. It was protected by the suede fringes of his jacket.

‘That’s no use, Walter,’ I said.

‘I know. And I couldn’t have stayed on. I couldn’t have. I’d be dead by now.’

‘I never think back,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Walter.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s true. Never.’

He asked me then what had happened to make me look like a
youth that was small for his age. I thought, poor old Walter will believe anything, he hasn’t got a clue about what is possible and what is not, so I said: ‘This is a thing that happens to a minute percentage of people. They cross from one gender to another. It’s in the Talmud. In the Bible, even. It’s been known since time began. In certain African tribes such people are venerated as possessing wisdom. In the mountains of Tibet many men have ended their lives as women and they think, there, that it may have something to do with the brightness of the air.’

Walter drank his whisky. In the unshaded light of the room, I noticed a shiny bald spot on his head. I thought, he’s too old to be trying to get to America.

He said: ‘You expected this to happen then, did you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Always.’

I told him about the two-minute silence. I had retold this moment so many times now – to Sterns, to Edward Harker, to Pearl – that I could see it and feel it and hear it perfectly, as if it had occurred yesterday. At the same time, I found myself thinking, did it occur at all or did I invent it?

Walter seemed quite affected by this. He said: ‘I wish I’d had one moment like that. When I knew what I was.’

‘You’re a singer, Walter,’ I said.

‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘That or nothing.’ Then he said: ‘D’you know Hank Williams?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t know any Country Music.’

He picked up his guitar. He began to sing a song called ‘Alone and Forsaken’. It was one in the morning. He had no thought for all the other people asleep in the shadow of the power station. In the middle of the song, he stopped and said: ‘This was the first song I found with the word “whippoorwill” in it. Nobody English even knows it’s a bird.’

He resumed his singing. I’d always thought of Walter Loomis as a person who would never be good at anything and here he was singing like Glen Campbell.

The grass in the valley is starting to die,

And out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry.

From the Battersea darkness, a man yelled at him to shut the fuck up. He laid his guitar down with a sigh.

‘London’s a terrible place,’ he said. ‘In Tennessee, it isn’t like this.’

‘What
is
it like?’ I said.

Walter said he didn’t really know except there was a shine on everything. He started reciting the names of Tennessee trees: Live Oak, Hickory, Red-Bud, Slash Pine, Magnolia, Pecan …

If I’d been Rob or Tony, I would have reminded him about all the years of black slavery and segregation in the South, about freedom marchers who were killed in the middle of the road. But this was pointless. If you live in Swaithey for thirty-five years, as Walter had done, you come to believe that every bit of bad news from the rest of the world is over by the time it reaches you and so you don’t have to think about it unless you’re interested in History. All that concerns you is the state of your own earth: the good in it or the stones.

I asked Walter where he would live when he got to Nashville. He said he didn’t know and didn’t care. He said he could only imagine a small space, like a boxcar.

‘This is 1971, Walter,’ I said. ‘The age of boxcar living is over, isn’t it?’

He ignored this. He said: ‘I’d like to own a dog and have it with me.’

I thought, as I left and walked back across the bridge, he hasn’t got one clue about anything except his singing. He’s going to an imaginary place and he’ll die there.

I felt very tired. I barely knew Walter Loomis, but now he had added his name to the list of people I had to try to protect from harm.

Edward Harker was inspecting wood with his illuminated magnifier. He was standing under the
Harker’s Bats
sign.

Another cricket season was about to start. There was spring sunshine in the street. Upstairs, he could hear Irene hoovering. He remembered the day he’d tried to sack her while eating a Battenberg cake, and how, on his solitary holiday in France, he had thought of nothing but her.

He looked round the cellar. He wondered, without self-pity, what Irene would do with it when he’d gone. He decided that she would tidy it up a little and then leave it as it was and in time it would resemble a museum. Irene would come down the steps, once in a while, and stand at the door with her arms folded and look at it and think of him. Then she would go back up the stairs and put kettle on or water her cactus, and that would be all. Except that by then she would be growing old.

He resumed his inspection of wood grain. He thought, in my life as a nun, I used to stare at wood – at the back of a pew, at the door of the confessional box – in a concentrated way.

Pearl was sitting in a classroom at college, listening to a lecture entitled ‘Caries and Civilisation’. The room was almost empty. There didn’t seem to be a queue of people in the world wanting to be dental nurses.

Pearl made notes all the way through lectures because it
wasn’t always possible to know during a lecture what was vital and what wasn’t. You only discovered the vitalness of something later on. She thought that wars might be like this for the people fighting them. They learned afterwards which battles were important and then gave the battle a name. The Americans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, for instance. They didn’t know that was what they were doing. No general came and said to them: ‘Now, men, this is the Battle of the Bulge and it is going to be vital.’ They just fought and died or fought and survived and later the name ‘Bulge’ was given to what they’d done and the word ‘vital’ attached to it.

This was the last lesson of the day. Pearl wrote: ‘To summarise – in primitive or so-called “uncivilised” diets only raw and natural foods eaten, needing considerable amount of mastication. Mastication = secondary function = cleaning the teeth (e.g. raw carrot, a hard apple). Primitive societies = little or no food debris left on teeth. Incidence of caries is less than in civilised world.’

Pearl got on her train back to Saxmundham and thought about the word ‘civilisation’. She stared at the pale green fields and the finches and sparrows flying up from them as the train passed. The thing that preoccupied her was what her contribution to civilisation was going to be. She wondered whether being a dental nurse and helping to maintain calm and order in the surgery was going to be enough, or whether something else was waiting for her. Something more vital.