This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You (5 page)
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Authors: Jon McGregor
That set us off laughing again. The state we were in, it didn’t take much? Plus Josh had this very high-pitched laugh that was pretty infectious, and once he’d got us all going it was just about impossible to stop? It just kept sort of growing, getting louder and louder, like something sort of swelling up until it filled the car and we couldn’t hardly breathe and the noise of it was making me dizzy and then Amanda said Josh will you slow down a bit and he turned round to ask her what she’d said so that must have been how come he never saw the corner?
Susworth
This is how his days begin. If you really want to know. Standing in his doorway in the cold, wet morning light and pissing on the stony ground. Waking up and getting out of bed and walking across the rough wooden floor. Opening the door and pulling down the front of his pyjamas and the weight of a whole night’s piss pouring out on to the stony ground and winding down to the river which flows out to the sea. The relief of it. The long, sighing relief of it. He has to hold on to the doorframe to keep his balance.
He looks at the swirl and churn of the river. Boats passing, driftwood and debris. A drowned animal turning slowly in the current. Sometimes the people in the boats wave, but he doesn’t wave back. He didn’t ask them to come sweeping past like that while he’s having his morning piss. In their shining white boats with the chrome guard-rails and the tinted windows and the little swim-decks on the stern. As if they’d ever swim in this river. They can come past if they like but they shouldn’t expect him to wave. Not when his hands are full.
Sometimes there’s a man fishing on the other side of the river. It’s too far to see his face, so it’s hard to tell whether the man can see what he’s doing. But if he could he wouldn’t be embarrassed. This is his house now, and there’s nothing to stop him pissing on his own ground when he wakes up each day.
The boats mainly come past in the summer months, but the fisherman is there all year round. He brings a lot of accessories with him. He’s got two or three different rods, and rests to set them in, and a big metal case that he sits on with all sorts of trays and drawers and compartments, and he keeps getting up to open all the drawers and trays. As if he’s looking for something. As if he hasn’t got any kind of an ordered storage system. He has this long net trailing in the water, with the open end pegged down on the bank. He uses it to keep the fish in once he’s caught them. It’s not clear why. Maybe he likes to count them. Or maybe he likes the way they look when he empties them back into the river, the silver flashes pouring through the air, the way they wriggle and flap for a second as though they were trying to fly. Or it could be for the company.
And he’s got this other net, a big square net on the end of a long pole. If he gets fed up with all the rods and reels and maggots and not being able to find what he’s looking for in those drawers, he could just sit on the edge of the bank and sweep it through the river until he comes up with something. Like a child at the seaside. Like a little boy with one of those coloured nets on the end of a bamboo cane.
Like a little boy whose dad was showing him how to use one of those nets, and lost it. At the seaside. When they were out on a jetty, and the boy’s dad was sweeping the net back and forth through the clear salt-water, and the boy was pulling at his arm to say: Let me try let me have a go, and the man dropped it in the water somehow. The little boy wanted him to jump in and get it, and his father had to say: I’m sorry I can’t. And the little boy wanted him to buy another one and the man had to say, again: I’m sorry I can’t. The boy started crying and there wasn’t much the man could do about it. He could have picked him up.
The way these things come into his head, sometimes. Standing there in the morning, looking at someone fishing, pissing on the stony ground that slopes down to the river, thinking about nothing much and then a man losing his little boy’s net pops into his head from years back. This really was some years back now. The way he couldn’t buy a new net to make it better. The little boy with his red hair.
He stands there each morning and he looks at the river, the fields, the sky. He tries to estimate what the weather will do for the rest of the day. He makes some decisions about the work he’s going to do on the treehouse or the raft. He thinks about making breakfast. He thinks about going to look for more wood.
It’s hard to understand why the people on the boats wave, sometimes. Perhaps they feel strange being out in the middle of the water like that. They feel vulnerable or lonely and it helps if they wave. Or they think it’s just what they’re supposed to do. Maybe they say ahoy! when they pass another boat. Who knows. The men on the commercial boats never wave. There’s one that goes by about once a week, a gravel-barge, and he’s never seen them waving the whole time he’s been here, not at him or the man fishing or at any of the other boats. When it goes upstream it sits high on the water, its tall panelled sides beaten like a steel drum. But coming back down, fully loaded, it looks like a different boat, sunk low in the water, steady and slow, a man in a flat blue cap walking the wave-lapped gunwales and washing them down with a long-handled mop. And he wonders, often, what would happen if the man fell in, if he would prove to be a good swimmer, if the driver of the boat would be able to stop and pull him back on board. Or if the man would drown and wash on to the shore where this small piece of stony ground slopes down to the water.
He’s not sure what he would do if that were to happen. If he would step down towards the man, and pick him up. Or at least drag him clear of the river. He’s not sure if he’d be able to do it. Physically. Mentally. Maybe the right thing would be to wait for the proper authorities. Maybe his part could be to walk out along the road to the phone-box by the yacht club and do the necessary informing. They might come along and say: Thank you sir, you did the right thing. It was the right thing not to touch the body, well done. And take photos: of the stony ground, the body, the feet still paddling in the edge of the river. And people with the appropriate experience and accessories would come and pick him up, out of the water, and take him away.
They’d need the right accessories.
The other man on the boat wouldn’t be able to help. It’s a really big boat, he couldn’t just steer it over to the bank and moor up and come running over shouting: Where is he, where is he, is he okay? It wouldn’t be like that. He would have to continue his passage, steer the boat on to the nearest available pontoon and moor the boat securely, single-handed, and then come back to this location. And it’s possible that by then the proper authorities would have been and gone, and taken his mop-dangling friend with them.
He imagines the skipper at the wheel of his heavy-laden barge, looking back at the spot in the river where his friend had slipped in. It would be difficult. Two men doing a job like that, every day, they could become very close. They could develop a close understanding of each other. Up and down the same stretch, loading and unloading, tying and untying, not saying much to each other because the noise of the engine would make it difficult to hear and because anyway what would there be to say. But understanding each other with a look and a nod, and a way of standing or a way of holding themselves, they could become very close, they would know each other better than perhaps they know anyone else. And then one of them slips from the wet gunwale into the water and his friend can only turn and look, the water closing over him as if nothing had happened and the long-handled mop floating down the river, out to sea.
He thinks about this a lot. But, who knows. It doesn’t seem worth dwelling on. It seems an unlikely thing to need to consider, the proper procedure in such an event. But it’s not an entirely unlikely occurrence. It happens. It has happened. People fall in the water, and they disappear, and they reappear drowned. It’s not impossible. It’s a thing that can happen.
Perhaps that’s why the men on the barges don’t wave. Because they’re concentrating. They know about the things that can happen. They take the river seriously.
He watches them, when they pass, the man in the flat blue cap with the mop and the man at the wheel, and he wonders if they see him. If they see the man fishing, when he’s there, which is quite often, or if they see anything besides the river and the current and the weather and each other.
He imagines they keep quite a close watch on the weather, the two of them. We’ve always got half an eye on it, they’d probably say, if someone asked them, if they came into the yacht club one evening and someone bought them a drink and talked to them about working that great boat up and down the river. It has quite an effect on our operation.
He keeps a close watch on the weather as well, from his place on the riverbank. It changes quite slowly. He can see it happening in the distance: a break in the clouds, a veil of rain rolling in across the fields. Sometimes he thinks it would be interesting to keep a chart of it. Windspeeds, temperatures, total rainfall, that type of thing. But it would need certain equipment, certain know-how and measuring equipment, and he’s not sure where someone would come by that type of thing. Probably it would mean going into town.
But sometimes it can really take his breath away, how different this place can look, with a change in the weather. He can stand in the doorway, first thing in the morning, and all the rain from the day before has vanished and there are no clouds and it looks like maybe there never were any clouds and there never will be again, the sky is that clear and clean and huge, and everything that was grey before is fresh and bright like newly sawn wood. And then other times he can stand here and see nothing, the thick mist lifting up off the river and nothing visible besides the trees around his house. The river just a muffled sound of water rushing over the stony banks. The opposite bank completely lost, and no clue as to whether the fisherman is there or not with his rods and his accessories. The fisherman doesn’t seem the sort to let a damp day put him off his fishing, but there’s no way of knowing.
It’s frustrating, not being able to know. He’s a man who likes to know these things. What’s happening in his immediate surroundings. The lie of the land. Sometimes he’s even thought about walking round to the man’s spot to find out, to make sure. But it’s a long walk, and there are things he has to do with his time. It would be about six miles altogether, out along the road past the yacht club, into the village, past the post office, out by the farm to the new road bridge and then all the way back along the other bank.
And what would he say to him when he got there anyway. It would be awkward.
People call it the new road bridge, but it must be twenty or thirty years old.
It’s not just the weather that changes. It’s surprising, how new a day can look, how different the view can be when he stands there each morning having a piss on the stony ground. The height of the water, the colour of the sky, the feel of the air against his skin, the direction of the smoke drifting out from the cooling towers along the horizon, the number of leaves on the trees, the footprints of birds and small animals in the soft mud at the water’s edge, the colour of the river running by.
The speed of the water changes, that’s something else, with the height of the river. If it’s been raining a lot. The river draws itself up, the water churning brown with all the mud washed in off the fields, and the river rises up and races towards the sea, sweeping round bends and rushing over rocks or trees or sunken boats that sit and rest in its way, anything that thinks it can just rest where it is, the river rushes over and picks it up and carries it along, like loose soil and stones on the banks of outside bends, or trees with fragile roots, or a stack of pallets left too close to the water’s edge, it all gets swept along, like people in a crowd, like what happens in a football ground if there are too many people in not enough space and something happens to make everyone rush, if they all start to run and then no one person can stop or avoid it, they all move together and then what can anyone expect if there’s a dam been put up against all that momentum, if there’s a fence and someone saying stand back don’t run there’s enough room for everyone if you could spread out and stand back and just stop pushing.