Sacred Country (45 page)

Walter has bought a car. It’s a second-hand blue Chevvy with patched leather upholstery.

He folds the roof down and drives around in the sunshine with his rhinestone elbow leaning out into the breeze. Sky sits
beside him with a chiffon scarf tied round her hair. When the fall comes, they’re going to go on a trip in search of Sky’s husband. They say: ‘We want to be married before the cold weather blows in.’

Their record is out. TMS Records gave a little party for them. Everyone drank and danced. I thought it was going to be an LP containing all the songs Walter’s been writing since the beginning of time, but it isn’t. It’s a single. And it isn’t often played anywhere. But no one is downhearted. Walter and Skippy Jean and Bentwater all say: ‘That was just a start. A single is a toe in the lake.’ The lake they’re dreaming of is where the sword Excalibur lies, jammed into a rock.

They live on what Sky earns as a backup singer and on Walter’s yard work. The last gift he had from one of his women employers was a baseball bat.

Sometimes, he sings for tips at Fay May’s. He’s earned more than two hundred dollars in tips and he tells me: ‘I’m sending these to Pete. I’ve told him to save for an engine to put in the bus. Then he can drive it away. He can convert it into a proper motor home. He could go somewhere where he can get electricity in through the window.’

One Sunday, Walter and Sky and I drive out to Opryland. Sky says: ‘This isn’t just a concert hall, it’s a complex. When they finish it, it’s gonna be like a village. That’s why they call it Opry
land
. You could live here and not move and have everything you need.’

It has the biggest parking lot in the world.

The blue Chevvy is the only car on it. We sit and stare at all the fiat space round us.

Bentwater is with us. He’s showing no sign of betraying Walter. Sometimes, what the world predicts doesn’t occur. He looks at the enormous car park and says: ‘This moves me somehow. Hell knows why.’

And then something beautiful happens …

Sky has brought her roller skates. She tells us these are the same skates she’s had since she was thirteen. She puts them on.
She hitches up her skirt and unties her scarf and climbs out of the Chevvy. She clomps a few yards and then turns round and smiles at us.

‘Go on,’ says Walter. ‘Let’s see you!’

So she starts skating. With the thin legs she has, the skates look enormous. I expect her to fall and bruise herself. But she doesn’t fall. She lifts her arms like a dancer and glides cleanly away. She does circles and figures. Her hair flies out as she goes faster. She’s as graceful as a swallow. We sit absolutely still, with the sun burning down on us, gazing at her.

A girl on a parking lot roller skating. You wouldn’t necessarily have thought of that as a wonderful thing.

‘Darn
me
!’ says Bent.

Walter hears nothing, sees nothing, except Sky. He gets slowly out of the car and walks towards her. He takes off his rhinestone jacket and lets it drop. He holds out his arms.

I have bought a Roach Motel. Now, in the bright nights, there’s no sign of my cockroaches. They’ve waltzed into the motel and died. Les Ches had Roach Motels on his brain, along with his leatherette lounger and his lost wife.

Our minds are like women at a jumble sale, sifting and searching, moving things around.

Mine still moves one piece of the past around:

Estelle. My mother. Est.

Sometimes – most of the time – she’s with Cord at Gresham Tears. Sometimes, she’s at Mountview. She’s never with Timmy and Pearl. Sometimes, she’s walking along, in no place that I recognise.

Wherever I move her, she is beautiful. Even when she’s knitting a grey square. Her skin is white and clear and she’s wearing her old beautiful smile.

Sometimes she’s at a window. It might be a window at Gresham Tears, or it might not. All I see is that the window is half-open and that there is sunlight falling onto my mother who stands there, waiting.

A new decade.

But.

These days, you have to put ‘but’ after everything. ‘I am alive. But.’

Too much has happened to me. These happenings crowded together so densely in my mind that I had to find some rest here, at Mountview.

But.

Mountview is closing down.

This is what they tell us. They say: ‘It is new government policy.’

I never used to notice what governments did. I should have paid closer attention.

It’s going to become a hotel. There’s going to be a swimming pool, underground. I say to them: ‘That’s perfectly all right. I’ll stay on and become a hotel resident. I’ll buy a swimming costume.’ They say: ‘Stop turning things into jokes, Estelle. Concentrate on getting well.’ I say: ‘In the old days, if you made a joke here, it was considered as a sign of recovery.’ They say: ‘The staff are more adequately trained in this modern day and age.’

These new, more adequately trained staff believe they can make you well by asking you questions. I have my own personal questioner. She is called Linda. She’s young enough
to be my daughter. I go to what is called a Counselling Room and sit opposite Linda and she interrogates me. She smiles as I come in and then she always says the same thing. She says: ‘Right, Estelle. Where
were
we?’

Where were we?

I don’t know.

That’s why I came here. To remember whereabouts I was in my life.

But Linda’s in a hurry. She has six weeks in which to cure me. Then we all have to walk out of here, carrying our overnight bags.

I say to Linda: ‘The government has overlooked a simple thing: you cannot mime tap dancing.’

The things that overcrowded my mind were deaths.

Sonny’s. I forget when.

Then after that there was a period of respite when I lived with Cord at Gresham Tears. He said: ‘What’s happened to your cooking, Est? It’s gone off.’

So I started to make the old kind of food. I made oxtail stews and shepherds’ pies and Summer Pudding. And Cord and I began to thrive and get fat. In the mornings I’d hear him whistling in his room. In the afternoons we went for walks. He said: ‘It’s good to see you well again.’ I made a wild-flower collection and bought a flower press. We spent some of our evenings making greeting cards.

But then the other deaths came.

Pete Loomis died in a hospital in Ipswich. No one went to see him except me. The cancer he’d had in his nose reappeared in his lung. He told me the turkeys were the cause. He said: ‘If I were a younger man, I’d sue.’

I said: ‘Listen, Pete, when you get out of here, come and stay with me and Cord. It’s quiet there.’

He never got out of the hospital.

We buried him in Swaithey churchyard.

Grace Loomis said: ‘If ever there was a wasted life, Estelle, this was it.’

I said: ‘Your son wouldn’t agree,’ and I walked away from her.

Walter sent a guitar-shaped wreath made of carnations.

Pete left me his wind-up gramophone and his record collection.

Cord said: ‘The things we treasure, honestly!’

The trolley bus was removed by the council, on Grace’s orders. She said it was a health hazard.

We went on with our life at G. Tears, as Cord often called it. It was during that time that Cord said: ‘There’s something I want to tell you before I go, Stelle.’

‘Go where?’ I said.

‘Pay attention,’ said Cord. ‘Listen, for once.’

I said: ‘I’m listening. This is all I ever do: listen out for clues to the meaning of the world.’

We sat in deckchairs in the garden. We were getting so fat, the chairs creaked.

Cord said: ‘Remember Mary?’

I said: ‘It’s history. It became history years and years ago.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘It’s history. But you might as well get the history right. We’ve all protected you from it – Irene, Pearl, Timmy, me – but it’s time you knew.’

So he told me the story of Martin.

When he’d finished, I had to go in search of something sweet to sustain me. I opened a packet of Cadbury’s Orange Creams. I brought it out to the garden and put it near me, under my deckchair, in the shade.

I didn’t speak. Cord was never like Linda. He didn’t make you talk when you didn’t want to.

I sat there, eating chocolate biscuits. After a long time, I said: ‘Were we the cause? Sonny and me?’

Cord shook his head. He said: ‘You, of all people, know that certain things appear to have no cause. They just
are
and that’s it. And the answer’s blowing in the wind.’

Where was I?

Where were we?

‘Talking about your father’s death,’ says Linda.

‘Was I?’ I say.

‘Yes,’ says Linda.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’

And I don’t. It was the saddest death of all.

It was after that that I had to come here because all I was doing was eating and staring out of the window. There was no room in my mind for anything except those two activities. I ate and looked out at the garden and when the darkness covered everything, I looked at that.

I say to Linda: ‘One can endure it when certain things are in the past, but when almost everything is in the past, the present is too lonely.’

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Let’s talk about the present. Who is in the present?’

‘I am,’ I say. ‘But not for long. I’m being closed down. I’m not allowed to buy a swimming costume …’

‘Estelle,’ she says, ‘we’re not talking about this.’

‘Why not?’ I say. ‘We should be. Where will I go when I leave here?’

‘That’s what I’m asking you. Who is there? Who is still part of your life?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I have no idea. I can’t think of anyone.’

‘Timmy?’ she says.

‘Tim?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘the part of my life that he’s in takes place in Shropshire, but I hardly go there at all.’

‘Why not?’ she says.

I don’t know how anyone can imagine this kind of interrogation can make a person well. My mother used to say: ‘Try not to
quiz
people, Estelle. It’s very rude, darling.’

‘Why not?’ says Linda again.

I say: ‘Well, Shropshire’s a long way from Suffolk. But that’s not the point. The point is, in the old days here at Mountview,
we were just allowed to
be
. We watched football. We played panel games. We walked in the gardens …’

‘These are not the “old days”,’ she says.

‘I know,’ I say, ‘but what
are
they? What kind of days are they?’

She looks confused for a moment, like some participants look on
Question Time
. Then she says: ‘This is a new decade.’

I’m trying to remember all the new things.

There is going to be a new President of the USA. He was once married to Jane Wyman, friend of Ava Gardner.

There is a new kind of murderer in Yorkshire, in the area round Leeds.

There has been a new earthquake in Algeria.

We have a new Olympic gold medallist. He is a swimmer, younger than Timmy.

Japan has been given a new panda by China. Its name is Wong-Wong. Someone tells us that pandas encourage better relations between nations. Japanese children sing a song of welcome: ‘Oh Wong-Wong, we’ve been waiting for you so long,/Let’s play together amicably …’

Japanese songs do not have to rhyme.

In my next interrogation session, I say to Linda: ‘What else is new?’

She says: ‘There’s going to be a new postage stamp, in honour of the Queen Mother’s eightieth birthday.’

I say: ‘I remember when her husband died. King George VI. On the day of the funeral we stood in a potato field, trying to have a silence.’

‘Yes?’ says Linda. ‘Tell me about that. Who was there?’

‘Well,’ I say, ‘the four of us. Sonny and me. Timmy and …’

‘And who?’

‘And Martin,’ I say.

‘I don’t know anything about Martin. Who is Martin?’

‘My other child,’ I say. ‘He lives in America. He’s not in my life. I haven’t seen him for twenty years.’

‘Why?’ says Linda.

I say, ‘God, you’re tiring us out with all this questioning. We won’t be able to stand, let alone walk out of here and back into the community.’

‘When you’ve answered this, you can go,’ she says.

‘I don’t
know
the answer,’ I say.

‘Then we have to find it,’ she says, ‘don’t we, Estelle?’

When a questioner says ‘we’, he or she means ‘you’.

How can anyone amass all the knowledge we need to stay alive in the world?

I get up out of my chair and lie down on the floor of the Counselling Room.

Linda orders me to get up. She says I am one of the most obstructive people she has ever met.

When she says ‘met’, she means ‘questioned’.

She is tired of me.

I am tired of everything.

But she lets me go to my room. It’s the same room I’ve always had here, and I’ve grown attached to it.

It’s like a train compartment. When I’m in it, I’m always trying to travel somewhere in my mind.

It’s not time for supper. I think I will go down and watch the new earthquake on television. Except that now that I’m up in my room alone I start wishing I was back with Linda.

I lied when I said that all I could see out of the window after my father died was the garden and then the night. I saw Mary in the garden. When the night came, I still saw her there. She stared back at me. She threw a tennis ball at the glass.

I would like to tell Linda this.

I
have
to tell her.

I go running down the corridor. I hate running. I’ve never liked it.

I push my way past a man on the stairs. He’s an out-and-out lunatic. He sings, ‘Goodnight, Campers,’ all day long. His vocal chords are breaking.

I go rushing to the Counselling Room, calling Linda’s name. I open the door. There’s another woman in there, being interrogated. I say: ‘Linda, there’s something I have to say!’

‘You’ve had your hour, Estelle,’ she says.

‘I know,’ I say, ‘but I have to tell you this one thing. Please!’

‘No,’ she says. ‘This is Marjorie’s hour. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

Tomorrow was the word I kept using.