The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (18 page)

“Perhaps. I've always found it's important to listen and be open. Listening and wanting to understand – nothing's worth a damn without that.”

“But we did have good times together, Thomas. You mustn't forget that.”

I want to be generous here. “I remember when you baked cakes; you'd sometimes get me to help. It was always a treat to lick the bowl.”

“Did I? I thought that was Andrew.”

“It was probably all three of us.”

“Probably. Do you remember the picnics we used to go on, down by the river? Or how you always wanted me to play with those toy animals and soldiers you collected? We built a big farm once under the dining table. You insisted on having dinosaurs among the cows and sheep. It made me laugh. Do you remember?”

“Vaguely.”

“Like I said, you only remember –”

“That was stuff before Dad died. What about after?”

For once she doesn't purse her lips, but she stares at me and through me. Even though tiredness is weighing me down, I hold her gaze in a way I wouldn't have been able to once. The heaviness in my head makes it easier.

“I was sorry you emigrated to Australia,” she eventually says. “It would've been nice to see my grandchildren grow up.”

“We never saw one another much when we lived only a hundred miles away.”

“It was always possible though. We could have done. Being on the other side of the world though –”

“We could've done,” I point out, “but we never did.”

She leans awkwardly to one side and tugs at her pillow, and I move to help her but she waves me off. “I can manage,” she says. Then, once she's settled again: “I felt like I lost you when you emigrated.”

I want to say: you already had, years before. Instead I say: “You could always fly out and visit us. It's not that far. Not really. We'd collect you from the airport.”

“Too far. It felt like I lost you all over again.”

“Then it would've been nice if you'd said something.”

“Would you have changed your mind?”

“No, I doubt it, but it would've made a difference. It might've helped.”

“It was too late by then. Way too late.”

“It's never too late,” I say.

She huffs. “That's a lie. It's been too late for too long.”

I shake my head. I don't want any bite of her bitterness. She's welcome to it.

“Things have always been different with Annette and Andrew,” she continues.

“Very likely,” I say.

“Always. When they were born I realised what an odd little fellow you were. Quite the odd one out.” She stops and seems to be thinking of something else. “But we can't change the past, can we?”

“No.” I shake my head again, but my eyes are too heavy in this heat, and I hear the ocean slapping across the beach, or the traction of tyres on a wet road.

“You're not much company,” I hear her say.

Little has changed about the evening news on TV when I find myself sitting down in front of it. It's the usual stuff about unemployment, environmental disasters, car accidents, crime and terrorist threats. When the phone rings, I automatically look at my watch, and the hands are still sticking. Nine-twenty. It'd have to be about eight o'clock and, although I haven't eaten yet and can't remember the last time I ate – not properly, like a meal rather than fast food shit – I'm not hungry. I think I've forgotten the taste of food. There's a glass of whisky in my hand, but I don't recall pouring it or sipping from it. I move towards the phone, expecting it to be Elin, but then it stops.

A couple of minutes later, it begins ringing again and this time I pick it up.

“Hello,” I say, “Tom speaking.”

There's nothing at the other end. The line isn't dead, but whoever's there isn't saying anything.

And because it might be one of my mother's cronies ringing, I add: “Margaret Taylor's phone.”

Still no response.

I wait, and listen hard. Maybe Elspeth's phoned and has muted the microphone by mistake.

“Hello,” I say. “Elspeth?”

All I hear is the crackle and rustle of a distorted line. It's the flurry of dry leaves or the rolling of distant surf. Then the receiver's returned, ending the call, and the house is emptier because of it.

Perhaps it was Kate. Perhaps her parents phoned her, let her know I'd visited, and what I'd said. Maybe she'd decided to call, and then lost her nerve.

If it's Elin she'll phone again, but no one does.

ELEVEN

Someone's let off smoke bombs, the little buggers, and there's a gargoyle standing over me. His eyes are empty pits, his beak cranes forward, his teeth are shards of flint, his breath stinks.

Sleep. Let me sleep. Let me drift with the flow of a rising tide.

*

School's behind me and I shift to London to study History at uni. I move into Stoneyfields Halls of Residence and Old Lofty tags along as my roommate. He takes up fuck-all space and his presence is as reassuring as a dirty old habit.

In part, I'm in London to paddle after the memory of Kate. I know I am. I'm carried here on the notion that somehow, among seven million bobbing people, I'll drift into her at least once. When that happens, she'll haul me in and give me the kiss of life again, and I'll be able to give Lofty the flick. She'll save me from the worst of myself. She'll realise then, for all time, how such love conquers all things –
amor vincit omnia
. The vague hope that this might happen becomes my buoy, enabling me to bob up and down too, scanning the horizon, drifting further and further out.

“This place seems alright,” Mum says outside Stoneyfields – a maze of pathways and small lawns between brown brick buildings, each house containing twelve rooms in glorious breezeblock grey.

“It's fine,” I reply. Two cases and a couple of boxes sit in the middle of my room, along with the keys to this new beginning.

Andrew and Annette are back in the car and Brian's standing at the open driver's door, his hand on the steering wheel.

“You don't mind if we head home then? Leave you to get on with it?”

I shake my head. “There's nothing else you can do. I'll unpack, have a look around, get to know a few people.”

“Sounds like you'll have fun,” she says.

“We'll ring when we get home,” Brian calls and turns the ignition.

“I'm gonna shift your bed over,” Andrew shouts. “Mum said I could. It's my room now.”

“It's all yours. You can have it.” Then I lean through the open back window and whisper: “It's haunted anyway.”

But the ghosts are of my own making and I've brought them with me. We're a circus, my ghosts and I, and the ringmaster lives at my side.

All the same, I'm almost right about Kate and it's not long before I come close to finding her again.

In the week before Christmas, I catch the train into the city to spend an afternoon searching for affordable trinkets – a simple matter of stretching a thin overdraft until it snaps – and, having wandered up Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road (garlanded with bright and wonderfully gaudy decorations), I begin drifting down side streets, letting the current take me where it will. The billboards outside newsagents read:
IRA CLAIMS PADDINGTON LOCKER BOMB
and
UNEMPLOYMENT RISES
. It's festive stuff and has been defining this world for as long as I remember. Too foot-sore to walk anymore, I decide to catch a tube and head back to Stoneyfields, until I realise I'm opposite Kate's university.

Her place.

Whatever it was that first pulled us together now draws me to this spot, as it always will, and any moment Kate'll walk round the corner and everything'll be hunky-dory.

She'll be here somewhere, walking towards me. Somewhere close by. Ready to reach out if I can catch sight of her.

In fact there's someone who's just passed. I turn, but notice another girl across the road who might also be her. Twisting to look behind, in case she's part of another group walking by, then spinning round to peer ahead… and round again, like a dog chasing its tail. But what style of clothes might she wear these days, and what if she's cut her hair? And, even if she does pass by, will she recognise me? Would she want to?

I stop, close my eyes and stand still. Why am I really looking for her? Is it actually Kate I'm after or a replay of what we shared? Is this about keeping blind faith or am I looking for the person she helped me become?

This is stupid. Worse than stupid.

All the same, I cross the road to be closer to the university buildings, then wander down another side street because the name's familiar – her faculty site or her first year Halls address, perhaps – and come up against a tall, brick building, five storeys high. This must be it. I examine each row of windows for any sign whatsoever (a candle, an arrow, a beacon, a face, a wave), but find nothing… until a set of doors swings open and out steps the bearded Spaniard wearing a white lab coat.

Jesus! Alleluia. Amen.

This is it. A sign.

It
is
the bearded Spaniard, and then it isn't – I can't be sure. I head towards him, until another bearded Spaniard steps out behind him, and then another two. The doors clatter open again and remain open as a flood of bearded Spaniards in white lab coats wash out and down the street in one direction.

Any number from forty to five-thousand.

And Old Lofty squats on the kerb between two parked cars and cacks himself laughing. He slaps his bony hands across his knees and shakes, and I spit at him and turn on my heels and stalk away. Stuff the rest of the presents; I'll get myself a bottle of cheap whisky instead. I'll sell some books for a tab or two of the good stuff.

“Wait up!” he shouts.

“Fuck you!” I snarl.

The following June, at the end of first year, I tell Maureen Bonnard, my History tutor, I'm quitting the course. Maureen asks me into her office, offers me a seat, a mug of coffee and a biscuit, and tries talking me out of it, but it'd be a lie to continue studying when I can't see any point in it. The only thing it's taught me is how much I hate unanswered questions – why Dad killed himself, how I mightn't have lost Kate, what purpose there is to life – and that I need absolute truths. Studying History is all too wanky and academic.

“It's your decision,” she eventually tells me, as if I mightn't be sure, “and the faculty will respect that.” She clasps her hands round her cup of Maxwell Gold Blend, leans forward in her swivel chair. There's a framed print on the wall of Bosch's
The Garden of Earthly Delights
. “However, what I'd like you to do, if only to humour me, is to postpone Part Two rather than totally pulling the plug. Don't give up the course completely. Ask for a deferment, Tom.”

So much bullshit. She's okay, but this is bullshit. Where's the sense in always worrying whether you've got a safety line or not? Life's a slow drowning anyway. I'm sick of compromises and soft options – essay choices, negotiated extensions, interminable discussions and interpretations – and of justifying myself.

“I'll think about it,” I say. “I'll decide tomorrow.”

“Are you sure everything's alright, Tom? Would you like a referral to the counsellor? Someone you can talk things through with?”

“No, it's nothing like that. Everything's fine. Everything's hunky-dory.”

The phrase brings a smile to my lips, and she smiles back.

To begin, there's short-term casual work in a plastic foodware factory, and a squalid bedsit in Whittington, north London. And it's a release to focus solely on the present: eight-to-five with nothing either side, and the notion that this grittier existence is, if nothing else, honest. Boring and meaningless, but honest.

Then, when summer and seasonal work ends, I sign on the dole. Nothing else is available. There's no other choice. No choice at all, thank God. The cheque goes no further than paying the rent, buying a few groceries, the odd bottle of whisky, but it's still honest.

Summer. Autumn. Winter.

As seasons pass, I coil tighter. Spend months pulling the world in on myself. Become my own black hole, sucking the bright energy out of my most colourful dreams, spitting out nothing. Old Lofty's good disciple. And even the memory and hope of Kate begins to fade, which is the kindest loss of all, until (absurdly) she writes and I start coughing the world up again. Like a dog with a fur ball.

A cold, dirty, February drizzle has been smothering this unremarkable day, from the first scratches of a vague light through to the first itchings of darkness again. All that's survived is a grey, lingering twilight. The day was stillborn, and night's arriving prematurely. I'm trudging back from cashing my dole cheque, buying a few provisions, and the air tastes rank, of wet newspapers, while the parade of lost-hope shops and the houses and roads are shabbier than ever.

“We deserve this shit,” I mutter. “What else is there?”

Nothing, replies the silent voice of an invisible figure limping at my side, grinning with pride.

“Too right. Nothing.”

Nothing.

“Fuck all.”

I've discovered a world without real dialogue. Just one long soliloquy punctuated by silences and the occasional banalities of the supermarket, the Unemployment Office.

Turning from the main road into my street, I can't help but sneer: “Home, sweet home.”

The street might be called Albenry Park, but there's no tree or shrub in sight; only a few spindly weeds breaking through cracks in the concrete and clinging to the broken-backed channels of roof guttering. It's a long street of four-storey terraces set on a hill, but the houses stand derelict at the bottom of the hill, with sheets of corrugated iron nailed over doors and low windows. The iron is loose in places, where squatters and truanting children have broken through, and sometimes claps forlornly in the wind, applauding nothing. Almost every pane of glass in the upper windows is smashed, and out of one dangles a ragged curtain. Plastic bin bags and soggy, split, cardboard boxes, overflowing with empty cat food tins, ketchup bottles, cigarette ends and greasy hair trimmings, spill up from the basements. It's a rising tide, flowing up and spewing over. The beginning of a great flood.

“Dying world,” I mutter against the collar of my coat, the edge of my scarf, then remember the newsagent's billboards two hundred yards back:
BARCELONA BOMB HORROR
and
INFLATION RISES
.

Not a world worth keeping. Not worth keeping in the world for.

Is this why Dad hanged himself? Perhaps he discovered a world he couldn't live in. And maybe Gazza aimed himself at that tree, unbuckled his seatbelt and planted his foot on the accelerator, for the same reason.

Cold. So cold.

I imagine a pregnant woman pushing a pram onto a railway platform in Barcelona on a day of pressing heat and gun-clutching Guardia Civil. (Why bring children into this world?) She's a tanned figure among a mid-morning crowd, rocking her pram to and fro, to and fro. Madonna and child. The air shimmers like a sheet of molten glass. To one side of where she waits, the metal petals of an ornate rubbish bin unfurl in beautiful slow motion, blossoming into flower for only a second before sprouting a flurry of nails, bolts, shards of metal. Seeds spurting; exploding like a dandelion head. Only then comes the noise of explosion and the screams of a terror to tear the morning apart in that small slice of the world and stop the trains a while; to stop the Guardia Civil from slouching for a day or two. To make ears ring deaf and eyes vomit blind shadows. Not a politician or corporate executive in sight, but a headline or two for their newspapers. Nothing left of the pram or the child. The crumpled Madonna a headless mess of meat and sodden fabric. A bag of blood and bone.

BARCELONA BOMB HORROR
.

I wince, shrug, refuse to falter in my walking.

Pavement flagstones rock uneasily underfoot. Muddy water oozes out of others. My boots leak, my socks are saturated.

A church clock, two roads away, chimes nine. It's got to be somewhere between three and four o'clock. On the last chime, Old Lofty appears at my side, limping and half-striding along beside me, knees clicking, hunched shoulders scooping forward a bucketful of washed-out day with each stride. Stride, scoop, stride, scoop. And even through the cold, I can smell the stale sweat of his clothes, the spunky sweetness of damp stone, the acrid funk of his black powder breath.

He says nothing, but grins as he walks. Then he takes on the exaggerated gestures of a mime artist and pulls an invisible rope from the sleeve of his robe. Poking his tongue out one corner of his mouth in concentration, he takes an end of rope and fashions an invisible knot to make a noose. He slips it over his head, settles it around his neck, holds one arm aloft and pretends to hang himself. His head droops, his eyes bulge and he wets himself laughing.

“Now you,” he says, showing me one end of the rope. “It's your turn.”

“Piss off,” I say, and grin. “Fuck the hell out of here.”

And, after a moment's pause, he does.

The drizzle grows heavier and a sharp wind cuts through the streets and round the corners with the cold, keen edge of a skinhead's flick-knife. The sky is cast from granite – rock heavy, too low – almost grinding the houses into the ground. But I refuse to hurry up the steps to the front door.

Inside, the hallway is cold, musty and damp. Somewhere upstairs, in this warren of bedsits, a door bangs. Two chained bikes are propped against the wall behind the front door and a few foot-printed letters and circulars are scattered across the muddy linoleum.

There's no warning in any of this. Nothing to suggest Kate.

I flick twenty-odd letters with the toe of my wet boot, spreading them further apart, and pick up four.

The stairwell leading from the hall to the basement is dungeon-dark and stinks of cat piss and mildew. The timber in the bottom two steps springs down with a stifled groan, but there's no echo, and the sound is swallowed whole into some unfathomable depth.

Sometimes I wonder whether I've made this place, or if it's made me.

Dropping the groceries at my feet, I perch on the edge of the bed, rub at the carrier-bag handle marks chewed into my fingers, and watch Old Lofty stand by the sink and go through the pantomime of unpacking his own bag of provisions. One-by-one, he places each item on the draining board, and I know what he's got before they appear: his favourite length of rope, a packet of razor blades, a toy gun, a packet of sleeping tablets and a half-empty bottle of cheap whisky.