Story in Three Fonts

“I’m beginning to think this holiday was a big mistake.”

He made no attempt to hide the irritation in his voice. He reached out for his torch, switched it on and looked at the time on his watch.

“Half past bloody two. I’ve been lying here for over an hour. I still can’t sleep. I’m too hot.”          

Too hot when he was lying next to her, he’d almost winced with pain whenever their bodies touched, and, when he could bear it no longer, he’d moved petulantly to another bunk on the other side of the cabin. This would be the first time they’d slept apart since he’d moved into her flat all those years ago. He wondered how significantly it would register on the scale of their present difficulties.

Switching off the torch, he stared across the cabin and waited for his eyes to adjust to the faint moonlight that filtered through the flimsy curtains like a luminous gas. She was lying with her back towards him. He felt it was a rejection he could not ignore.

“Are you asleep?” he whispered, just loud enough to wake her if she was, while pretending he was trying not to. “I’m sorry, but I was burning up with that mattress, the way it dips in the middle. It kept tipping us into each other.”

“Can’t you be quiet? I was nearly asleep!” she hissed, unforgivingly.

The brochure didn’t mention the heat. Two weeks on the Shropshire Union Canal. On a barge. Experience life on one of Britain’s oldest manmade waterways, the way it was over two centuries ago. Something different, they both agreed, and made the booking.

Definitely different: no electricity meant no fans, no air conditioning, he thought bitterly, easing himself onto a momentarily cooler part of his bunk, and trying to get to sleep. Perhaps he could sleep if he didn’t try so hard, if he didn’t force it.

But it was too quiet. A canal was not like a road. And it ran though open country. Flat. Not enough trees for the wind to blow through. No sound of wind, at all. No lapping of water. Just crickets in the distance, like noise-repellent sound-proofing, wrapped around the cabin. To his way of thinking, it was an oppressive, almost total, silence. He was missing the comforting accompaniment of rumbling traffic that blanked out the noise in his ears. Tinnitus. The more he tried to pick out any sound that might dispel the quiet, the more quiet it became, the louder the noise in his ears became, and the more he felt panic would soon take control of him like nausea welling up from an unperceived pain. Then came a sound, her breathing, becoming audible, heavier, deeper. Damn! He always had to be the one to fall asleep first - it was an unspoken understanding - but this time she’d beaten him to it. There was no hope of sleep now.

It was cooler on deck, and very dark. The sort of darkness that makes you dizzy. The moon had disappeared behind a cloud and they were too far from any city for there to be any glow in the sky. He pulled his dressing-gown around him more tightly and felt his way along the side of the cabin roof, holding onto the rail. Gradually, he began to feel cooler and could start to reason with himself, to talk himself back down below, to lie still and wait patiently for sleep.

Outside, the chirping of crickets, too, was bringing relief from the fetid silence down below; but it was masking another sound coming from lower down the canal, allowing it to get close, so close that, when he realised what it was, it was already too late. It was the sound of two oars striking and leaving the water, creaking in the rowlocks as they were lowered again, repeating the process until the rowing-boat they were propelling collided with the barge, bounced off it, and then was gently steered alongside. By the time he had worked his way back down below, fumbled for his torch in the dark and had half climbed, half fallen back up the steps, two figures were hauling themselves onto the barge and were staggering, exhausted, across the deck, heading to where he stood, his hand shaking as he pointed the torch at their faces.

 

“Endless. The possibilities are endless.” I like it. In fact, I tell my wife. She claims she noticed it first. We’ll never agree. Our son and his new partner join in as well. Soon all the visitors on the fifth floor of Tate Modern are joining in. If you stare at an exhibit for long enough, other people think you’ve cracked it and have worked out the conundrum, and feel obliged to join in, to avoid looking stupid. For example, the one hundred and twenty house-bricks arranged two-deep five by twenty in a rectangle on the floor, with don’t-touch lines around them. But much more fun is to get everyone stooping and genuflecting at the four three-foot high cubes with mirrors on all the visible sides. If you stand in front of each cube and peer over the top into the one opposite, you can see the two cubes reflecting each other down what appears to be a tunnel, endlessly. Even more fascinating is the fact that, as you change from one cube to other, the curvature of each tunnel is different from the next. The fun doesn’t end there, because if you look sideways into the cubes rather than over the top, you get another set of reflected cubes, but this time they curve to the side, and don’t go down a tunnel.

Now there are so many visitors peering at the cubes that eventually we move away and stand back, admiring our handiwork. All the new visitors to this room are wondering what is going on and are approaching the cubes. The Indian attendant is jubilant, he has never seen so many people interested in this exhibit before. “You have made me very busy,” he says. “I am usually very bored, but now I am having to be very watchful to make sure people don’t cross the line.”  It is my son he speaks to and I feel slighted, as I reckon I started the whole thing off. Not according to my wife.

One thing worries me - was this the artist’s intention? Someone will say it doesn’t matter. Modern art is modern art. Is the first creative bit what the artist does? Perhaps the next creative bit is what you make of it. Rather like the flattering captions on the wall which say more about the exhibit, you suspect, than the artist intended.

‘Endless’ might be a convenient link between an unfinished canal story and the possibilities of art at Tate Modern, but is there a link between our Bank Holiday outing on the South bank and a story waiting for the author to get his act together? It would be ‘creative’ to the point of dishonesty to say that we talked about holidays on canals over our meal in ‘Strada’, before moving on to the second-hand bookstalls we browsed at without deciding to buy anything. The link is ‘the possibilities’, of course.

 

         The possibilities were endless. These two people who had just hauled themselves on board might be dangerous, they might be armed. They might be fugitives from a crime scene or from an institution. They might be lost, after a night out. They might be drunk. But he didn’t have time to think of all the possibilities. An instant reaction was called for.

“Can I help you?” seemed the most human response, as he put one foot on the steps down to the cabin and, attempting to disguise the panic in his voice, called to his partner, “Carrie! We have visitors. Can you come up?”

He continued to make his way downstairs, pointing his torch at Carrie, hastily slipping into her dressing gown. “I’ll light some lamps, Tom.”

The two visitors were now making their way down the steps into the cabin and were anxiously looking around as Carrie lit the lamps. Tom switched off his torch. He could see they were a man and a woman in their late twenties, looking far too tired to be a threat. 

“Sleep,” said the woman, a trace of foreign accent in her voice. Tom and Carrie both motioned towards two spare bunk beds. In less than two minutes, the visitors were asleep, fully clothed.

 

          “All is not what it seems,” I almost remark to nobody in particular, as I run my finger along the backs of the second-hand books. Therefore, the manner in which I run my finger along the backs of the books will be interpreted in different ways by nobody in particular who happens to be looking in my direction or visualising the scene if reading this. Or it will go unremarked, like the thought that preceded the movement of the finger, or the brushstroke, the laying of the bricks, the simile.

 

Carrie had no difficulty interpreting Tom’s discreet hand signals, as he turned his back to the visitors and affected a normality he wanted her to imitate. She would blow out the lamps one by one and leave one burning on low, so it could be quickly turned back up if necessary. She could go back to sleep if she wanted; he was not likely to get to sleep, anyway, so he would keep watch. The gestures for only two or three hours left before dawn and then they could start clattering about and making breakfast were not easy to make. Besides, Carrie could not see him clearly any longer, the remaining lamp being so dim. She settled down on her bunk, facing Tom, and with her eyes straining in the gloom to focus on the other end of the cabin. Allowing herself an ironic smile, she noted that Tom, who never slept, had begun to make his irritating snoring noise. Soon afterwards, she, too, was asleep.

 

         ‘Confluence.’ Running my finger over the backs of the books, I have time to savour this word that comes from nowhere, now, like the theme of a story, under Waterloo Bridge, in the sunshine, before my wife returns with coffee from the National Film Theatre opposite; this word which insinuates its way into a narrative, bringing lives together like books on a stall, in all weathers and all seasons: the word itself relishing its own metaphorical magnificence as it mingles the merging waters before discharging them mercilessly into a mighty ocean of possibilities.

 

It was possibly the noise, or rather, the chorus of birds, or it may have been the change in the light, which woke Carrie up. Bright sunshine was streaming into the cabin, and a patch of blue sky could be seen through the cabin door, which had been left open. 

“They’ve gone,” she whispered, noticing the empty bunk beds, and gently waking Tom. “I thought you were going to keep watch.” There was no malice in her voice.

“Has anything gone missing?” he asked, and began looking round.

“You can’t assume they’re thieves.”

“I’m not. I don’t know what to make of them.”

Satisfied nothing had been taken, they took a look on deck. The rowing-boat had gone, without a trace; there were no tell-tale streaks on the canal’s tarnished mirror.

Changing into their clothes and taking what they needed for a shower, they locked the cabin door, stepped down onto the tow-path and headed towards the campsite for an early breakfast, holding hands. Perhaps it was going to be a good holiday, after all.

 

Second hand books on a bookstall, mercilessly thrown together into a mass grave of writers’ inspiration. Do we grieve for the thought that precedes a simile, is it somehow a mere nuga compared with that which precedes the dab of a brush or the laying of one hundred and twenty bricks? Isn’t a Moby Dick worth a Fighting Téméraire or a Madame Bovary worth a Rodin’s Kiss? Yes, we all say in unison, but we’re glad they’re knowingly undersold.

 

There was no mass grave for the chickens, the diseased and the injured, the ones with the torn off beaks and broken legs that couldn’t be repaired - they were to be removed every morning and incinerated, before the eggs were collected.

 

Not for Carrie …. No eggs, of any sort.  She would not be having a cooked breakfast

            Tom agreed with her: it had been re-invigorating to have a shower after their hot, clammy night. As they strolled across from the shower block to the cafeteria, the gravel path emitted an agreeable crunching noise underfoot. They took deep breaths of the early morning air as if it was a cure for every illness ever known; it was fresh and cool, sweet with the exhalations of mulch and the verdant perfumery of trees and shrubs waking and stretching in the warming sunshine. Here and there, they saw a blackbird or two descend and forage briefly for a worm in the dewy grass, before scuttling away and flying off to a safe look-out.         

If this was a snapshot of a happy moment just when Carrie and Tom needed one, it was to be irretrievably lost the moment they reached the steps leading into the cafeteria.

         With rusty bolts holding together its prefabricated panels, it looked as though it had done time on a sixties’ motorway construction site before being transported to its final resting place and precariously perched on bricks like a car robbed of its wheels. Once the door was closed, the interior felt and smelt like a sealed unit with air that never changed but simply moved about, half-heartedly dodging the weary blades of aging ceiling fans on half speed. Like pollen on a bee’s legs, globules of grease clung to the particles of dust which floated in the rods of rancid sunlight directed like spotlights on the twenty or so blue plastic tablecloths. It was a cafeteria-cum-mini-supermarket-cum-camping-gear-shop complete with a gaseous mélange of stale culinary odours. 

To Carrie, it was bearable inside only because, apart from the campsite owner who was cooking and serving, it was empty of people at that early hour in the morning. Unlike Tom, she was not yet ready for other people. It grieved her that he could be like that - ready for other people, though she recognised it was a strength she could draw on. Her eyes followed his tall, angular frame as he brought bowls of cereals and milk over to their table. His short, almost spiky fair hair was nearly dry and was resuming its usual shape. Without thinking, she felt her own hair; it was still wet and resisted her attempts to fluff it out.

          “They could at least have had a hair drier.”

“I wonder if they do evening meals,” said Tom, thinking a change of subject might avert another of Carrie’s descents in darkness. Otherwise, he was in for a wretched day.

          “You won’t catch me coming here again!”

          “Our best plan is to finish here quickly and to get away from here. We can go up the canal and explore a bit.”

         “Don’t patronise me!”

         “I wasn’t. I was only trying…..” He was distracted by a sudden look of alarm on Carrie’s face. She was staring in the direction of the door. A couple had just entered with a small child. Aged about three and carrying a floppy-haired doll, she ran over to the table next to Tom and Carrie’s.

“This is Flopsy,” she said, holding up her doll for them to see. Her parents were now at the table and were sitting down.

“Hello, Flopsy, nice to meet you.” Tom could have added more but he was aware of Carrie’s unease and, taking another sip of his coffee, said, “We have to be going now, bye.” Within seconds, Carrie had pushed back her chair and had started walking towards the door. Tom followed and placed his arm round her shoulders as they headed back to the barge.

 

Escape was out of the question. For the first few weeks, at least. They needed to give the impression they were happy to be in their new country and that they were content with the jobs they had been given.

 

‘Strada’….la strada….strata....street….my life’s like a faraway street I can’t remember: I walk down it and afterwards I can’t remember what it was like, how the buildings were arranged, what the buildings looked liked, who passed me, anything that happened. My wife can remember everything. If I want to know, I ask her. She remembers. If I wanted to know what I ate at ‘Strada’, she would remember. Moya described growing up in Belfast during ‘The Troubles.’ That much I can remember of our visit to ‘Strada’, but not the shape of the tables, not the waiter’s face nor if he had beads of sweat on his nose; not the time it took to get the bill; if it was the same waiter who brought it or another; if the toilets were memorable in any way. These might be the sort of things you remember, but not me.

 

          She thought of them as ‘episodes’ and this was one she was having now. She didn’t know where she’d got this word from but she felt it suited her. Her episodes did, after all, have a definite start, a defining moment, and a conclusion, of sorts. But conclusions were less precise. It wasn’t possible to pinpoint the exact moment when she felt better each time. It would take a while for her to notice that the dark clouds had gone and that the sun was shining.

         There was something different about this episode. For a start, she had been beginning to think she was free of them. It had been several weeks since the last, and after this holiday she would be back at work. Of course she’d refused medication - she felt it would dull her mind - make her forget - that, she would not allow herself to do. And she’d shunned counselling. She was afraid she’d lose the pain. She could not allow anyone to take away her pain.

The barge was moving now and Carrie was lying on her bunk. Tom was taking them somewhere nice, he said. Nice. Tom and his f*****g well ordered life! 

          Perhaps that was why this episode felt different. Tom, and her pain. Had she been deliberately waiting for a trigger, something to set her off again, like putting on a film she knew would make her cry? Had she been losing her grip on her pain, the way Tom seemed to have done?

         “It hurts to be happy.” A pupil of hers had written that in her homework. Where had it come from, she wondered. It was true; she had allowed herself to be happy and the pain which followed her everywhere like a numinous presence was fading, to be replaced insidiously by another, the pain of forgetting. What could she do about it? Tom? What could Tom do? What could anyone do? Eventually, she would go up on deck. Once she’d got her face right. But she wanted to do some remembering first. While she still could.

 

They would always remember that place. There was no doubt about it. The men slept in separate huts from the women. Couples were split up until their term of service was completed, the length of which was never revealed. It looked as though it had once been an army base or a prisoner of war camp. That was certainly how it was run. They had paid good money to be smuggled into Britain and had been promised work. And after a while they would be able to stay permanently if they wanted. But why had their passports been confiscated and why were they not permitted to leave the site? They were allowed to receive letters from home - they were brought in from a town they had never heard of. They soon realised their families did not know where they were. Letters were censored. They were allowed to write home but could only say they were well, enjoying the work and making lots of money. Any protests were met with threats. Their mobile phones had been confiscated as soon as they arrived at the camp. To outsiders and inspectors, the place looked like a poultry farm, which it was.

 

It is the Spring Bank Holiday. It seems to bring them out: singletons secretly scribbling in notebooks. It is the ‘strada effect’ -  they mustn’t miss a thing; they mustn’t let their lives get away from them; they mustn’t forget a thing: the drama of the setting, the whole South Bank thing, the National Theatre, the National Film Theatre, Tate Modern, the book stalls, the Thames. They all seem to be young. They are tucked away in corners, huddled behind walls, squatting on grass verges, cradled in the arms of statues, pretending to be out of sight; the writers of our great future, keeping diaries, making notes, getting it all down on paper. Hopefuls, carpediemists.  How I envy them!

                                   

          If it was only envy ……. Leaning against the side of the cabin with her back turned away from Tom, Carrie stared down at the water, watching as the blunt edge of the prow nudged clumsily through the Vs of unpredictable furrows. She was trying her hardest to appear interested the way she expected her bored pupils to. Nothing more. She had come up on deck without meeting Tom’s eyes. She sensed they were on her now, waiting for her to turn. With her happy face. That was not going to happen. Like a child hoping for a way out of a good sulk, she had to wait. She had done enough; she had done her part, by coming on deck. But she could not look up; the beauty of the scenery would break her heart. In time, Tom would make the right move.

 

Ieva had finished her early morning shift in hen-house number 6 and would clean out another six after her ten minute break. Barely enough time for her eyes to recover from the acrid fumes emitted by the dung, which stung her nostrils and kept her on the verge of nausea. Barely enough time to see if Stefan, her overseer, was holding a letter from home. He would be pretending he wasn’t. If letters came for anyone, it was the women who had to collect them. But first they had to beg. With his slicked back, greasy hair and appearance they had likened to that of a slug, he had learnt the value of each letter and could exact the appropriate price. A letter from a lover was worth the most. But how could they say not to write so often, without arousing mistrust, suspicion?

A queue of young women waited nervously outside Stefan’s office. They knew by now the order in which to wait. Ieva was one of the first to be called in. It was a letter from her mother, handed over with the customary close attention to avuncular care against which Ieva had little or no defence. At least, she knew how to affect an off-putting coldness, which so far had kept his hands at bay.   

                                             

Tom kept his hands on the wheel. He did not make the right move. He did not make any move. He had to steer the barge, at least for the time being. It was the one part of the test he felt he could cope with. But as the minutes passed, and with Carrie remaining motionless in her need, the more his anxiety increased and the more powerless and worthless he felt. There had to be an intervention, he thought; some sort of f*****g deus ex machina was what he needed. He viewed the scenery longing to see a wharf, a campsite, an inn, but only perceived the monotony of trees and fields, unremitting in their disregard, and the silent slick of the canal, as sluggish and scornful as a brown river-god.

             

          Perhaps these scribblers, too, will have their day and finally end up on the second hand bookstalls, where they will undoubtedly be content to settle for temporary immortality, it being better than none.

 

She did not get past the first few words of the letter. She did not read the rest. If Ieva ever, later in her life, tried to describe the pain she felt at that moment, she would never succeed. Nor would she remember how she managed to find her way back to the chicken shed. How she managed not to stumble, not to cry out until she had closed the door behind her and let herself fall to the floor. Then she could let out the bellow of agony that was contorting her stomach, and grip her sides so tightly as if to hold her violently shaking body together.                                               

          Section supervisors were under strict orders to ignore malingerers with sob stories but this one was different. Seeing the distress Ieva was in, she soon got word to Arturas who would have to risk losing a week’s pay for stopping work. He was out of breath from running the long route which he had to take round the outside of the outhouses to avoid detection. Smoke from the incinerator still clung to his overalls when he entered the chicken shed and found Ieva in a corner, her sides heaving with long sobs, her eyes staring at a small, slightly crumpled photograph of their child.     

                     

          It was not stubbornness which made Tom hold out so long; it was fear. Longer than he’d ever held out before. Fear of getting it wrong. Of saying the wrong thing. He’d not seen this rigidity before, the rigidity with which Carrie was hanging onto the cabin rail and staring down at the canal. This was alarming. He switched off the engine and let the barge slow down. Another few minutes passed before the barge had slowed down enough for him to steer it to rest gently against the canal wall.

 

The four of us have come to the end of a pleasant afternoon. Before parting, we pause again at the bookstalls, exchange words about books we have read or mean to. I am recommended an author whose name I immediately forget.

 

          It was no longer possible for them to stay. To make their escape, they met again under cover of dark at the incineration section, where Arturas knew he could easily force open a gap in the fence. Carrying their small backpacks with the few clothes and little money and food they had, they skirted the edges of several fields, picking out paths and climbing over stiles by moonlight. They were greatly relieved when at last they reached a canal as they would have a better chance of travelling along a towpath undetected than if they attempted to follow a road. And a canal also could take them to a big city.

          With no sense of which way to go, but propelled by an urgency to find a town as soon as possible, Ieva and Arturas proceeded as best they could along the towpath. The going was not easy, the path being draped in almost complete darkness where the ill-maintained hedgerows obscured the moonlight, and it was hazardous underfoot where years of neglect had left it uneven and treacherously overgrown. Like a spasmodic flash from an ailing lighthouse, only the occasional sombre glint from the canal’s brooding surface permitted them some tentative sense of direction.          

          After a while, they reached a clearing where the hedgerow came to an end and they entered an open area. Dimly making out an assortment of boats, barges, rudders and engine parts which lay over a large area, they reckoned they had come into a repairer’s yard, possibly long abandoned, and moving cautiously between various large and jagged objects in disrepair and dismemberment, looked, or felt, for somewhere to sit for a while and rest, and found an upturned rowing-boat. It wasn’t ideal for sitting on, more for leaning against, as they ate a few of their biscuits and shared their bottle of water.

          There was a slipway leading down to the canal to which they dragged the rowing-boat, having found a pair of oars underneath.

 

         Tom placed himself quietly next to Carrie, and like her, stood leaning against the side of the cabin and stared down into the dark pit of water.

          It seemed like an enormous task, to find the right words, to make the right move. But there were no words; no coherent thoughts were forming, only the sensation of his mind turning over, reeling as if intoxicated. Suddenly the sensation hit him like a kick to the stomach and he found himself sobbing uncontrollably from depths he’d never known before. Carrie turned and held him in her arms, like a child. At last.

 

The barge seemed deserted when Arturas and Ieva climbed on board. They were very relieved when the couple kindly let them stay. As soon as it was dawn, they decided they should get as far away as their strength would allow with the rowing-boat, then try to hide it in case it gave them away. They took turns to row but finally they stopped when they found their way blocked by lock-gates. These they used to hold onto and haul themselves out of the boat and back onto the towpath. They tried pulling on the bow-rope but the boat proved too heavy to lift. By now they were desperately tired and hungry, and there was no sign ahead of a town where they might find help. Perhaps those two people could help them again. They would hide behind some hedges and wait, leaving the boat where it was.

 

One last desultory glance at the books and I am astonished to come across a copy of ‘Elegies’ by Douglas Dunn, the poems he wrote following the death of his wife.

“What on earth is this doing here? How can people part with books like this? It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1985!”

“Probably a house clearance,” James remarks, “a job lot.”

The slender volume flicks open at ‘Reading Pascal in the Lowlands’. My eyes fall once again on the lines:

           ‘It is discourteous to ask about

            Accidents, or of the sick, the unfortunate.

            I do not need to, for he says “Leukaemia”.

            We look at the river, his son holding a rod,

            The line going downstream in a cloud of flies.’

 

Tom and Carrie resumed their journey, intending to stop somewhere for lunch. As they approached the first lock-gates of the day, they saw two people frantically waving at them from the tow path and recognised them as the foreign couple who had spent the night on their barge. Once on board, Ieva and Arturas explained their story and why they urgently needed to get back to their country.

“We will help you get back home,” said Carrie.

 

Ieva showed Carrie and Tom the photograph of their daughter.

 

Carrie gave Ieva a hug. It was the right move. Tom would make his. In time.

 

Somewhere, a young doctor is making his way down a hospital corridor to speak to the parents of a child. His white coat is flapping as he walks. He is carrying a file with the results of a test. As he draws closer, he changes direction abruptly and comes back a few minutes later, having got his face right. To give bad news.         

I snap out of my reverie and replace the book. Our day out has ended.  We say goodbye and return to our homes.