So Many Ways to Begin
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Authors: Jon McGregor
so many
ways to
begin
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
If Nobody Speaks
of Remarkable Things
so many
ways to
begin
jon
mcgregor
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2006 by Jon McGregor
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McGregor, Jon, 1976-
So many ways to begin : a novel / Jon McGregor.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59691-222-9
ISBN-10: 1-59691-222-7
I. Title.
PR6113.C48S6 2006
823'.92—dc22
2006005323
First published in the UK by Bloomsbury in 2006
First U.S. Edition 2007
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
The paper this book is printed on is certified by the © 1996 Forest Stewardship Council A.C. (FSC). It is ancient-forest friendly. The printer holds FSC chain of custody SGS-COC-2061
To Alice
They came in the morning, early, walking with the others along
tracks and lanes and roads, across fields, down the long low hills
which led to the slow pull of the river, down to the open gateways
in the city walk, the hours and days of walking showing in the
slow shift of their bodies, their breath steaming above them in the
cold morning air as the night fell away at their backs. They came
quietly, the swish of dew-wet grasses brushing against their
ankles, the pat and splash of the muddy ground beneath their
feet, the coughs and murmurs of rising conversation as the same
few phrases were passed back along the lines. Here we are now.
Nearly there. Just to the bottom of the hill and then we'll sit down.
Cigarettes were lit, hundreds of cigarettes, thin leathery fingers
expertly rolling a pinch of tobacco into a lick of paper without
losing a step. Cigarettes were cadged, offered, shared, passed
down to nervous young hands eager for that first acrid taste of
adulthood, cupping a mouthful of it in the windshield of their open
fists in imitation of fathers and uncles and older brothers, coughing
as it burnt down into their untested young lungs, the spluttered-out
smoke twisting upwards and mingling with their cold clouded
breath as they made their way between flowering hawthorn
hedges and cowslip-heavy banks, down towards the city walk.
They wore suits, of a kind, all of them: woollen waistcoats and
well knotted neckerchiefs, thick tweed jackets with worn elbows
and cuffs, moleskin trousers with frayed seams tucked into the tops
of their boots. The younger ones carried bundles of clothes, brown
paper parcels fastened with string, slung across their shoulders or
clasped to their chests, held tightly in their damp nervous hands as
they started to gather pace, pulled down the hill by the sight of the
city, by their eagerness to be first and by the impatience of the men
and the boys pressing in from behind; still foggy from sleep, still
aching from the long walk the day before, but forgetting all that as
they came to their journey's end.
From the top of the hill, where others were only now beginning
that last long downward traipse, the city looked quiet and still,
wrapped in a pale May morning mist, weighted with the same
brooding promise that cities have always held when glimpsed from
a distance like this, the same magnetic pull of hopes and
opportunities.
But as those first men and boys came into the city, their
boots beginning to stamp and echo across the cobbled ground,
windows were opened and curtains pulled back, and the city
began to wake. Sleepy children peered from low upstairs windows,
the hushed chatter and the rumbling of feet signalling the start of
the day they'd been looking forward to, calling to each other and
pulling faces at the children in the houses across the street.
Landlords opened the doors and shutters of their bars, sweeping
the floors and standing in their doorways with brooms in their
hands to watch their customers arrive. Stallholders finished
preparing their pitches around the edges of the square, keeping
an eye on the small group of guards by the steps of the new town
hall. And from each end of the long square, from the road leading
in from the bridge to the east, from the gateway under the lodge to
the west, from the road winding out along the river to the south,
the army of workers appeared, hurrying on with the growing
excitement of arrival, calling greetings to friends not seen for the
past six months, looking around for others yet to arrive, asking
after health, and families, and wives. And the crowd of people in
the square grew bigger, and noisier, and fathers began to lay
hands on the shoulders of their youngest sons, keeping them close,
wary of letting them drift away too soon, listening to the snatches
of conversation echo back and forth, looking out for the farmers
and foremen to start to appear, waiting for the business of the day
to begin.
Mary Friel stood with her father and brothers, watching, her
youngest brother Tommy clutching her hand. You okay there
Tommy? she whispered down to him. He looked up at her,
nodding, a look of annoyance on his young face, and pulled his
hand away.
Soon, as if at some unseen signal, deals began to be made all
over the square. You looking for work son? the smartly dressed
men would say, glancing down. How much you after? And the
older boys, the ones who knew their price, or the ones who could
say they were experienced, stronger, would get more work done,
tried their luck with eight, nine, ten pounds, while the younger
ones, who knew no better or could ask no more, said seven or six as
they'd been told. Deals were made with a terse nod and a handing
over of the brown paper packages, an instruction to meet back
there in the afternoon, sometimes with a shilling or two to keep the
boy busy for the day, sometimes not; sometimes the father taken
for drinks to smooth over the awkwardness of the scene, sometimes
not.
This was the first time Mary had been to town for the hiring
fair. She'd only ever watched her father setting off with her
brothers before; stood in the low doorway to wave them goodbye,
her sister Cathy beside her, Tommy holding on to both their
hands, their mother turning away before the boys got out of sight
and saying no time to be standing around all day now. She'd had
an idea of what it would be like from hearing her father those
evenings he came back home alone; she and Cathy lying in bed
listening while he talked in a low voice to their mother by the last
few turfs of the fading fire. But she hadn't been expecting quite so
many people, or so much noise, or the way her father would stare
sternly straight ahead when a gentleman approached him and
said your boy looking for a job?
They left the square as soon as the price had been agreed, telling
Tommy to be good, to work hard and to do what the man said,
and to meet them back here at the next fair day in six months'
time. They walked through the town towards the river, Mary, her
father, her two older brothers who were past the age of hiring now,
out to the docks to catch the boat across to England. She listened to
her brothers talking to her father as they sat waiting for the boat,
talking and joking about their time as hired boys, the threshing
and weeding and picking of stones, the early mornings and the
endless thoughts of food. She sat slightly apart from them, looking
up into the hills on the other side of the river, feeling the imprint of
her young brother's hand across the palm of her own. Other men
joined them, walking over from the square, lighting up cigarettes,
sitting on sacks of grain and crates of wool, talking about where
they'd heard the work was that year. Following the harvests from
Lancashire up to Berwick and all the way on to Fife. Waterworks
round Birmingham way. Munitions in Glasgow, Manchester,
Coventry, Leeds. Talking of the best ways to get there, the cheapest
places to stay, the names to mention to stand a better chance of
work at the end of the trip. Some of the men looked across at Mary,
curiously, wondering what she might have been doing there,
wondering who she was with, until their gaze was interrupted
by her father's hard glare.
They were going over the water early this year. The weather had
changed sooner than usual, and the field was dug and planted, the
turf cut, before fair day came. Work had been arranged for Mary,
in London, and so their father had announced that they would all
make the journey together. It's a long way for a girl to go on her
own, is it not? he'd said, and her mother could only agree, making
up slices of cake for their journey, taking out the brown paper from
its place beneath the bed.
On the boat, the four of them found a place in a quiet corner
and settled themselves in, the two brothers on either side, Mary
resting her head on her father's shoulder, his heavy coat laid over
them both. It smelt of damp soil and turf smoke and the cold clean
air of their two days' walking. It smelt of him and she concentrated
on the smell as she drifted into an uncomfortable sleep, broken by
the tip and slide of the boat, by the shouts of other men, by the
hard wooden deck beneath the both.
In the morning, in Liverpool, they put her on a train down to
London. They stood on the platform for a few moments to be sure
she'd got a seat, watching her put her bundle up on the luggage
rack, watching her smooth out her skirt as she sat down by the
window. Her brother William opened the door and jumped up on
to the step, leaning in to wish her a good journey, telling her to say
hello to Cousin Jenny and the rest of that shower, telling her to tear
up London town, laughing as he ran his hand across the top of her
hair and pulled it out of its carefully pinned place. She reached out
to catch him a clip round the ear but he leant away, jumping down
and slamming the door shut as she said goodbye and the guard
blew the whistle with his flag raised high. Her father and her other
brother had already turned away.
She spoke to no one on the journey, as she'd been told, and
waited under the clock at Euston station for her cousin, who came
running up to meet her a half hour after the train had arrived.
Sorry I'm late, she said, out of breath and a little red in the face.
The bus depot was bombed last night and I had to walk all the
way. You had a good crossing?
The house was in Hampstead, close enough to the Heath to see the
tops of the trees from an upstairs window, its large front door
reached by a broad flight of stone steps she was never allowed to
use. Her room was at the top of the house, squeezed in under the
rafters at the back somewhere, overlooking wash-yards and
alleyways
and gutters. The room was just big enough for a bed, and for
a fireplace that was never lit, and for a small chest under the bed
where she kept her clothes and a biscuit tin for her wages, ready to
be taken home the next summer. But the size of the room was
unimportant because all she ever did was sleep in there. If you
were awake you were working, she said when she told someone
much later what it was like. Cleaning out fireplaces, scrubbing
pots and pans and boots and steps, washing and drying and
ironing the clothes, lighting the fires in the family's rooms. On her
first day off she stayed in her room, counting the bruises on her
knees and shins and the angry red chilblains on her fingers,
sleeping, looking out of the small window and wondering where
she would go if she dared to leave the house.
She lived in the attic and she worked in the basement, and part
of her job was to get from one to the other without being observed.
You want to be neither seen nor heard, Cousin Jenny had told her,
standing at the wide stone basin scrubbing potatoes and carrots
that first evening. And you want to not see or hear anything
neither. Mary nodded, pushing her paper-white cap back where it
kept falling down over her eyes. She learnt how to time her trips
through the finely panelled rooms and corridors of the main house,
going downstairs before the family had risen, waiting for their
mealtimes before going back up, or for the evenings when they sat
together in the drawing room. She learnt how to tip her head a
little if she ever did meet someone, to say Sir or Ma'am before
quickly walking away.
The thing was to make yourself invisible, she said, many years
later, so that everyone could pretend you weren't even there. You
would do whatever piece of work you had to do and just slip away
out of the room. Eyes down, ears closed, mouth shut. That was the
thing to do, she said. So if you went in to light a fire one morning
and your man was getting dressed, it wouldn 't matter because you
were invisible, and he wouldn't even know you were there. And if
he asked you your name you 'd tell him, and if he asked you to
come closer you'd go, but you could pretend you hadn't because
really you didn't hear or see him and he didn't hear or see you. It
wouldn't matter at all. I was a pretty child though, she said. It
wasn't always easy to be so invisible. I tended to catch people's
eye, you know?
She would speak these words softly, eventually, but she would
speak them.
Jenny took her out on their days off, showing her round London,
walking through the parks if the weather was good, hiding in a
picture house if the weather was bad, walking right up to the West
End to look in through taped shop windows and watch out for
boys. They talked about what they would do when they went back
home, whether they would go back home at all, and they talked
about marrying, about children, make-believing extravagant
farmhouses to go with the size of the families they imagined into
life. Sometimes they finished those days off in a pub in Kilburn or
Camden or King's Cross, and there were so many cousins and
young aunts crowded into their corner of the bar that Mary could
half close her eyes and think they were all squeezed into the lounge
bar at Joe's, with her parent's house only a few minutes' moonlit
walk away. She saw people she hadn't seen since she was young,
and others she 'd seen only at Christmas for the last few years, and
they all asked for news of Fanad. She told them about Cathy's
wedding, and about the new priest, and about how her brother
Tommy had gone off to work that year.