A Line Made by Walking Page 4

  I run.

  Like my sister is racing after me. Like she is only a few strides behind and I am in with a viable chance of winning a perfectly pointless round of Chase.

  But after another minute I’m losing puff. The weariness of adulthood nips at my heels. I notice how the sole of my right sneaker is flapping loose, how my hair is batting my eyeballs, how my cardigan has slipped from my shoulders to dangle annoyingly off my elbows, to sail in my wake as if it is a cape and I am trying to be a superhero.

  I never beat my sister at Chase. She was always taller than me, faster than me.

  Because my grandmother’s bungalow sits on the hill’s brow, every outing is always down on the outward journey, up on the way home. I turn around and begin to plod up the hill, limping slightly in order to accommodate my flapping sole. I remember that I hate running, that I can’t stand any form of exercise unless it has some purpose other than exercising, unless I have arrived somewhere by the time it is over.

  I remember that going back is always the hardest part.

  2

  Rabbit

  I see them. At the very bottom of my grandmother’s garden. The rabbits.

  In the grass beside the hedge between the redcurrant bushes, I see them sometimes during the day but most often when it is either early or late and the light is lustreless, on the brink of either coming or going. It surprises me to learn that rabbits are crepuscular. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail. Peter and Roger and Thumper and Bugs. I realise I know very little about how actual rabbits actually live. Do they hibernate? Mate for life? Eat insects in addition to greenery? And what is it about dusk and dawn? Are they able to tell when it’s light enough to see their way, yet dark enough that it’s difficult for others to see them?

  Whatever the rabbity logic, out they come from the hedge, nibbling, hopping. A family of brown splodges between the overlong grass and ragged shrubs. All except one, who is completely black. How does a wild rabbit in a cohort of brown rabbits come to be black? I think at once of Watership Down; I wonder is the black rabbit Death.

  ‘Bright eyes . . .’ Blah blah, something something.

  After the first time I saw it, I mentioned the extraordinary rabbit to my mother on the phone, and she told me it was not so extraordinary.

  ‘It will have escaped from a hutch,’ she said, ‘or it’ll be the descendant of a rabbit who escaped from a hutch, still carrying the old black gene.’

  My mother knows everything. I used to think all mothers did but in recent years I’ve come to realise it’s just mine. My mother alone knows that, in point of fact, nothing is extraordinary.

  When I was little I had a friend called Georgina who lived a quarter mile up the road. For her sixth birthday, she got a white rabbit and named it Snowball. For roughly a fortnight, Snowball lived in a pretty timber hutch on the back lawn, fortressed by a wire mesh run. Then one morning, Georgina went out to find a jagged hole in the mesh and the rabbit gone. Her mother told her this wasn’t the horrific tragedy it appeared; Snowball had simply made the decision to go and live in the fields with her wild friends instead. Georgina passed this story on to me in the playground, and I passed it on to my sister, and she laughed and declared it a load of crap.

  Now it seems she was wrong to be so cynical so young.

  I didn’t sleep in any of my grandmother’s beds last night. I returned to the living room sofa to see out The Late Late Show. Then I nodded off and when I woke again it was The Afternoon Show and I had to get up and peek out the curtain to check if it was actually afternoon. But outside the sky was still sable, the cows still huddled against the hedge, the turbine’s eyes still glowing. And it came as a revelation to me that daytime television is repeated at night; that you can live your whole waking life over again in the dark.

  Works about Bed, I test myself: Tracey Emin, 1998. My Bed, she called it, but Emin’s artwork was not simply the disarranged item of furniture upon which she slept, and it wasn’t simply about furniture or sleeping or even disarrangement. There were cigarette butts and besmirched knickers. Bunched-up tights and empty bottles of vodka. Moccasins and newspapers and a white toy poodle sitting obediently back on his haunches, regarding everything. It was about feeling shit first thing in the morning. About tossing beneath the covers, not wanting to get up and yet making everything worse by not getting up. It was about workaday despair.

  And yet people were so angry over that bed; they did not realise it was the easiest piece of art in the world with which to identify.

  The last night I spent in my city bedsit, I didn’t sleep on my colonised mattress with the parasite dust-mites. I didn’t sleep anywhere; I didn’t sleep.

  By the time I’d completed negotiations with my mother, the yearning to cry had passed. Having arrived at a starting decision, I felt calmed, encouraged. And so, I phoned my landlady and told her that an unforeseen emergency was forcing me to renege on my lease.

  I didn’t take any care in packing; I didn’t care. I wrenched my postcards and photos and clippings from the walls, wrapped my cacti in aluminium foil, bundled my clothes into a bin liner, boxed my books with the contents of my sock drawer, my shoes with the contents of my fridge. And once every garment and ornament and utensil had been wrapped and bundled and boxed from sight, I lugged it all out into the hallway.

  It was late when my phone rang. I don’t know how late but the street-lamp sensors had long since sensed it was time to light, my neighbouring bedsits long since fallen silent. It was Jess again, and because I still contained some calm and courage, I answered. I told her I did not feel so good, that my mum was coming for me in the morning, and in less than half an hour, Jess arrived on her bicycle with, in a red leather satchel strapped to her back carrier, two bottles of red wine and a box of Black Magic.

  Jess is my tall, blonde friend. Stylish and buxom with a crop of marvellously fine yellow hair. Outgoing and popular such that I never understood why she bothered hanging around with plain and shy and solitary, unpopular me. But Jess was only bright and boisterous in a crowd. Once it was just us, she’d contract and release her inner bleakness. She was on a low dose of antidepressant medication and wasn’t supposed to mix the pills with alcohol, though she often did. ‘If I can’t have a few drinks I’m only going to be depressed anyway,’ she’d say. It didn’t stop them from working; it only made her get drunk faster. And this was always fine by me because I get drunk fast on alcohol alone.

  ‘The pills are just a new sort of sadness,’ she’d say. ‘Softer, slyer.’

  On the last night I spent in my bedsit in the city, Jess and I did what we’d done many nights before in similar but less symbolic circumstances. We washed a box of Black Magic down with two bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. We confusedly attempted to put our chaotic world to rights. Raspberry parfait, orange sensation, caramel caress, and then at some godawful early hour, Jess remembered to ask me: ‘Have you told Ben you’re leaving?’ And with the last almond crunch and my ambling thumb I sent him a maudlin text message which I have long since deleted from my phone in disgust.

  Ben, Jess and I had worked together in the gallery, but because it was gallery policy never to extend more than a twelve-month contract to part-time staff, none of us did any more, and there was no reason for us to be friends, and I can’t remember exactly why it was that we were still trying to be.

  Ben replied fast. A casual message asking if I’d need a hand loading my mother’s car. I accepted. We arranged a time for the morning and bid one another a polite goodnight. I reported this back to Jess, but she only nodded and sipped. She only looked drunk and drugged and tired.

  After the wine and chocolate and rectification was all done, off she wobbled. My tall, blonde friend, home through the deserted streets on her retro bicycle. I stood in my gateway and watched her wheeling from pool of street-lamp light to pool of street-lamp light until she reached the corner and threw me a bockety wave.

  My last night in the city, I didn’t sleep.

  I vomited
up a bucket of burgundy sick. Rolled listlessly on the carpet for an hour. Got up to clean.

  Swept and scrubbed. Scraped blue spores from the windowsill and black ones from the wall behind the bedstead, combed a soft mountain of moulted hair from the amber carpet, knocked the cobwebs down and scratched my Blu-Tack from the peach paint with a blunt bread knife.

  At last the bedsit was as empty and clean as I found it. As characterless, as cold. And out in the hallway, the swaddled trappings of my independent life lay like dead bodies in the wake of a murderous typhoon.

  I see him now, the black one. This morning, I don’t bother showering or changing my clothes. I don’t even brush my teeth. People are too clean nowadays, I think. We are all too clean and take too many antibiotics and when the bird flu and swine flu and fruit bat flu arrive, it’ll serve us right. But not me, not any more. I tidy last night’s dinner plate and wine glass away. I make a coffee, carry it down to the sun room. And here he is at the end of the garden. The Death Rabbit all surrounded by his paler brethren.

  Works about Bed, I thought of another one: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991. In 1992, the same gigantic image appeared on twenty-four different billboards around the city of New York. A photograph of a double bed. Sheets dishevelled, pillows indented by an absent pair of heads. There was no accompanying text, no title, but I know from secondary sources that the absent heads were those of the artist and his partner who, in 1991 and 1996 respectively, died of AIDS.

  This is the best of conceptual art: by means of nominal material, vast feeling is evoked. A message enduring long after the posters have been replaced by car ads and clothes ads and Coke ads at Christmas.

  Its message: appreciate the people around you. Don’t re-plump their pillows until they return safely in the evening.

  My father comes to mow my grandmother’s lawn. It is Sunday. Only on a Sunday could he allow himself to fritter away the afternoon on somebody else’s overgrown grass.

  For my father, mowing is a leisure pursuit, as is axing up a week’s worth of kindling, rotavating the potato patch, replenishing the oil and wiper water in everybody’s car, and he saves all such leisurely jobs concerning gardens and family for Sundays. On Monday through Friday, my father works in a sand and gravel quarry. Operating heavy machinery, handling industrial explosives, transforming escarpments into rubble; that sort of thing.

  When I was a kid, I used to try and make his job sound more sophisticated in front of my friends, one little girl called Caitriona in particular, whose father had some sort of high-flying office-based occupation which required a tie and an arduous daily commute. ‘My dad works in the min-er-al-ex-tract-ion-in-dust-ree,’ I’d say, which was a far cry from his own explanation. ‘I make big rocks into small rocks,’ he’d say, and chuckle.

  I watch my father from the window.

  A man of sixty in a lumberjack shirt jouncing about atop a miniaturised tractor. Feet hitched up and perched on a narrow platform either side, moving unsettlingly fast for a front garden so small, so obstructed by flower beds. He draws perfectly parallel trails of new green as he goes, kicking up the cut blades in a grass-storm behind him. From here, it almost looks as if his hair is still brown. From here, even his bald patch is too small to notice. ‘Your father was blond when I first met him,’ my mother often says, ‘and you and your sister were both blonde too when you were little.’ My mother signed up for a family of angel-heads and look at us now: mine dyed black and my sister’s sienna, our father’s thin in places, grey in places, gone.

  He sees me at the window and I wave.

  He’s almost finished the front now and he said that once he’s finished the front he’ll come in for a cup of tea. I’ve bought a box of teabags in preparation, white sugar and full-fat milk. A packet of cream crackers I dress up in Marmite and grated Cheddar, a packet of chocolate fancies I arrange on a cake plate. Now I totter it all down to the sun room on one of my grandmother’s tin tea trays. The mower engine has ceased its whingeing, and so I return again to the kitchen, set the whistling kettle to boil.

  By the time I get back to the sun room, my father’s already on the sofa with a smattering of cracker crumbs across the chest of his shirt. He dusts them off and begins to give out about my grandmother’s overabundance of flower beds.

  ‘Remember the cosy?’ I interrupt as I pour, indicating the knitted cottage which covers the pot. ‘And the fancies?’ Sponge disc foundations topped by truffly brown blobs, coated with sprinkles. It’s years since I had a fancy. I used to nibble the sponge away first, save the blob until last. All my life I’ve eaten things in order of preference; whole dinner plates item by item, and individual items component by component.

  My father looks baffled so I prompt him. ‘It’s the old Sunday tea cosy,’ I say, ‘and Grannie always used to buy fancies, or sometimes baby Battenbergs or sometimes Viennese swirls.’ Dad harrumphs his agreement, grabs a cake with a grubby fist and devours it in a single bite, making them seem not so fancy after all.

  I should know that my father doesn’t pay attention to details such as these; I should know because for decades my mother and sister and I have played sneaky little games of let’s-see-how-long-it-takes-Dad-to-notice, and he never noticed, not once. The tongue piercing, the nose piercing, the lip.

  In the space of a sunnyish, warmish fortnight, the grass has blasted up and broken out in daisies. There are daisies around the redcurrant bushes, daisies in the strawberry patch, daisies beneath the hedge where my mother buried the curios. I’ve never seen so many white specks since the lawn of the last house my grandmother lived in, as if she brought them with her—the soles of her shoes stuffed with seeds which shook free with every stamp.

  It’s strange to have an afternoon tea I prepared myself with only my father for company. Usually it’s my mother who stacks the tray with coasters, saucers, shortbread, crustless sandwiches trickling bits of mashed, boiled egg, and my sister who steers the flow of cheerful chatter for the time it takes to empty two teapots, from obligatory savoury through to obligatory sweet. Now that it’s just Dad and I, the curmudgeonly ones, we don’t really know what to say to each other.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘How are you, then? Your mother’s woeful fucking worried.’

  My father doesn’t really want to talk about my feelings. That would be excruciating for both of us. He only wants me to tell him that I am okay, so he can return to my mother and tell her there’s no need to worry.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘There’s no need to worry.’

  My parents did not want me to come here to stay. They are, like everybody, fearful of being completely alone and suspicious of people who choose to be. They hesitate, like everybody, to understand how it could heal me, as I believe it can. I believe: I am less fearful of being alone than I am of not being able to be alone.

  But I say none of this. My father is not susceptible to philosophy.

  Instead I ask him about the salt flats in Australia.

  Because there was a time when he used to harvest salt in a place called Dampier. Now, in the sun room, my father talks about the piles he drove in the ocean, the cargo-ship jetty he raised. He talks about the aerodromes in Lincoln between which he laid underground pipes for refuelling Vulcan bombers during the Falklands War. ‘You were born then, during that war,’ he says and even though that was my sister, I don’t correct him, and I wonder whether all fathers do this: tell their children stories of the wide open life they led before we came along to confine it. My father owned a Land Rover and a caravan. He travelled from place to place, laying pipelines behind him as he went, frying rashers on the heat of his engine. My mother and sister travelled in the caravan with him until I was born. Then he bought a house, got a job as a quarry foreman. He put down roots. Tortuous, unyielding, necessary roots.

  And so my father has every right in the world to be disappointed by the dog’s dinner I am making of the last life he gave up his own for.

  But, of course, we don’t talk about th
is either.

  Now I see he’s drained the mug, the time has come to ask him the thing I want to ask him: I’ve always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wild flowers through which I can prance; within which I can lie down and disappear from sight. I suspect the longing can be traced back to the opening sequence of every episode of Little House on the Prairie.

  ‘No way,’ my father says, before I’ve even finished conjuring it. ‘This bungalow is on the bloody market, you know.’

  ‘But Dad! There’s about a hundred reasons why it won’t sell before you’ve even reached the back garden. Nobody’s seriously going to be put off by having to give the grass a trim. They’re going to have to trim it at some point anyway . . . and then there’s the turbine, and then there’s the dog smell . . .’

  ‘It does reek of dog,’ my father says.

  Jackpot.

  He finishes up in under an hour. He loads the tractor lawnmower back into the car trailer and ambles around the shrubbery for a while, carrying my grandmother’s shears and wheeling her barrow. Finally he knocks on the glass of the sun room to rouse my attention, bids me an abrupt farewell, and is gone.

  I go out to lock the gate. I can still hear the revving and rattling of his departure.

  I realise I no longer care whether or not my father is sophisticated. He has more effervescence—more sturdy grace—than any man who ever wore a tie to an office.

  Whenever I get very drunk at night, I always wake in the morning with a sonorous headache and a heightened sense of despair.