At Hawthorn Time
Authors: Melissa Harrison
‘I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien.’
– Sergei Rachmaninov
CONTENTS
Here’s where it all ends: a long, straight road between fields. Four thirty on a May morning, the black fading to blue, dawn gathering somewhere below the treeline in the east.
Imagine a Roman road. No, go back further: imagine a broad track, in use for centuries by the tribes who lived and fought and died on these islands, and whose blood lives on in us. When the Romans came they paved it, and for a short while it was busy with their armies and trade. After they left it decayed, though it wasn’t forgotten; it came to mark the line beyond which the Vikings lived by their intractable Danish creed. Later it became a drovers’ road, trodden by sheep and cattle; then a turnpike, taking travellers, and mail, to Wales and beyond. Now, though, it is simply an A-road, known around these parts as the Boundway but marked on maps with letters and numbers alone.
Imagine driving that ancient road. The light is rising behind you, the dim fields, on either side, are asleep. Soon you will pass a sign for the village of Lodeshill, a turn-off you note each time you come this way, but never take. But before you can reach it you see something blocking the carriageway half a mile or so ahead, something you can’t yet make out – though part of you already knows, because what else would it be? The straight road points to it like an arrow, and as you draw closer, as you slow and stop, it moves from the realm of the dreamlike to the disbelieved to the real.
You switch off the engine, and as it dies you realise what every day of your life so far has led you to: two cars, spent and ravished, violence gathered about them in the silent air. One wheel, upturned, still spins.
Hands shaking, you make a call. You fight down panic and open your car door, stepping out onto a million tiny fragments of glass. Reluctantly your legs carry you into the scene. Who else will do it, if not you?
I see it all from where I am: the tyre marks, the crumpled metal, the coins and compact discs spilled across the road. The smaller car, with its huge spoiler and brash paint job, rests on its roof, displaying its brutal undercarriage to the sky; the other, a big Audi, has one door half open, and I can see the mundane, private cargo of the door pocket: tissues, a Thermos, a Simon & Garfunkel CD.
I can smell the sharp grass of the churned-up verge, and I can see what it is that awaits you: a young lad in the custom car, upside down and veiled in blood; a slumped figure in the Audi, perfectly still; and beside its open door, a third body, face down, on the road.
Seven slow minutes have passed since the crash. The sky lightens; the spinning wheel slows and halts; birds, one by one, are returning to the hawthorn hedges and shaking down the heavy blossom – although they do not sing. Life struggles and hangs; different futures intrude and unfold. The fact of the accident insists on itself.
I watch as you move from one person to the next, from the injured to the dead. You hold a hand, gently, and it almost pulls me back. I linger as the sirens come, as we are all tended to, even you. At last I become part of the siren’s wail, part of the shimmer of air over the ambulance’s hood: neither earthbound nor quite free.
Later, you will recall the things you saw only in fragments. And I will recall nothing at all.
Cherry blossom over, daffs turning. Hawthorn bud-burst.
It was a mild, damp night in April when he escaped the city, though the forecast predicted fairer weather to come. It had rained a little, earlier in the day, and the moist night air had called out snails in their thousands to dot the grimy London pavements in ill-fated hordes.
He put on his ancient army coat, took his pack from behind the door of his room and filled a plastic bottle of water from the tap in the communal kitchen. The pack contained seventeen tatty notebooks, some cooking things, a pup tent and an old brown sleeping bag. His bedroll was strapped to the outside, and the pack itself was studded with badges and pins; a few bits of cloth hung from the straps like prayer flags.
He left the hostel and pushed the keys back in through the letter box; then he began to walk north. At least there was no ankle tag this time, and he knew himself to be invisible to the mobile phone masts he passed and unwatched by satellites overhead. The feeling of walking, after three months locked up, was like when a plane’s wheels break contact with the tarmac and it lifts up and away from the ground.
You could dig out cuttings on Jack, if you wished. He was there in the very early days of Greenham Common, before the women drove him away; he gave a brief quote to a local radio reporter at Newbury and his grainy image – if you know what you’re looking for – can just be discerned in footage of the poll tax riots. The travellers talked of him at Dale Farm, too, though that could have been someone else.
Mostly self-educated, once a haunter of libraries, Jack walked the lost ways from town to town, keeping clear old paths that no one used, avoiding company for the most part and living off the land when he could. Picked up again and again for breaching bail conditions, or vagrancy, or selling pot, he had done short stretches inside everywhere from Brixton to Northumberland, acquiring prison tattoos and learning the advantages of a Bic-shaved skull and a cocksure posture. When at liberty he mostly worked on farms, picking fruit and helping with the harvest; he avoided towns, slept rough, and slowly, over time, forgot that he had once been a protester – or, perhaps, came to embody his protest more absolutely. Born, so he said, in Canterbury, his life before he took to the road was obscure.
Growing ever more unloosed from what seems to sustain the rest of us, more stubborn with every arrest and stranger and more elliptical in his thinking, Jack became, with the passing of decades, less like a modern man and more like the fugitive spirit of English rural rebellion. Or – to some, at least – mad.
Not long after the turn of the millennium a sympathetic journalist tracked him down to a wood near Otmoor; but Jack, by then, had little he wanted to say – certainly not the grand narrative of protest and exclusion that the writer had in mind. He spent two days with Jack, broken by a night at a Premier Inn where he was much disturbed by drunken wedding guests, but his piece, when it came out, barely mentioned Jack at all.
Away from the main arteries the night-time streets were quiet: the odd dog walker, a few revellers, foxes, cabs. Here and there flowers nodded dimly to Jack from front gardens as he passed, blanched by the sodium lights to a uniform paleness: irises, tulips, early peonies dropping their petals over the walls.
He crossed Vauxhall Bridge on foot, stopping for a moment to look down at the black water below, full of ship’s nails and clay pipes and broken bottles and bones. Briefly, he wished for the keys back so he could cast them in, a kind of offering or parting gift – though they would have been swallowed up by darkness long before he could have seen the river take them, and he was far too high up to hear them fall. Where these arcane impulses came from it was impossible to say.
Finding his way through the centre of town was easy enough. Pimlico was quiet; he skirted busy Victoria before pushing on, Green Park invisible behind a high wall to his right. How was it that the names seemed so much more than mere streets, or confluences of streets? Belgravia, Park Lane, Marble Arch, Marylebone: you would not think that such places could be so easily abandoned, yet one by one they fell behind him.
He stopped at a petrol station in Hendon in the small hours, walking across the floodlit forecourt to the little window and handing up coins to a Bangladeshi man who seemed all the more vulnerable for the bulletproof glass between them. Two boys and a girl were hunched on the kerb at the edge of the forecourt, pupils dilated, talking quickly and disjointedly among themselves. The girl had glitter on her temples; one of the boys kept clenching his jaw.
Jack ate the crisps and chocolate he had bought and walked on. For a long while there was hardly anyone around: shift workers, cabbies, bin men. He kept to the same road northbound, crossing side street after side street, all untaken.
By the time it began to be light he knew he was leaving the city behind. Later, inured, almost, to the rush-hour traffic, he passed superstores, car plants, playing fields, a golf course, wasteland; then, with the roar of the M1 somewhere ahead, the straight road broke north-west between fields.
It was enough. He pushed his way off the tarmac through a belt of trees and tangled undergrowth where years of sun-faded litter had blown and caught: beer cans, dog shit in bags, crisp packets, hubcaps. Twenty-odd paces through the wood he emerged into a tussocky field from which two rabbits fled, their white scuts bobbing away into some trees on the far side. He let his pack fall from his shoulder and sat down with his back to an oak.
Listening to the traffic behind him he felt the breeze play on the hairs on his arms and watched the sun rise slowly from a distant reef of cloud. Looking at it made a bluish bruise on his field of vision that jumped and twitched, and he shook his head like a horse trying to shake off a fly, finally squeezing his eyes shut and waiting for the insult to his retina to subside. When he opened his eyes again the horizon swam briefly and the light seemed very bright.
Just to be able to go where I like
, he thought.
Just to live how I see fit. I don’t do any harm, God knows; and there are plenty out there that do. So let me go now, please; just leave me be.
After a while a blackcap sang from the scrubby field margin and the morning sun began to dry the dew from the grass. Jack picked up his pack and began to look around him for somewhere to sleep.
The field itself was almost entirely without distinction, a nondescript trapezium bordered by overgrown hedges. It had not been grazed or mowed for a long time, and pioneer saplings – scrub oak, sycamore, ash – were stealing a slow march on the grass. There were no paths through it, unless you counted those made by rabbits and foxes, and it harboured no species of special distinction, no orchids or rare butterflies. Yet in summer its edges foamed with meadowsweet, and in autumn it bore clutches of mushrooms like pale golden eggs.
Jack chose a spot in the shade of the far hedge and rolled out his mat. He took a sandwich and a can of Coke from his rucksack, the last of his shop-bought food, and with his back to the city he sat down to eat.