Alex
On the bus into town. The engine and the natterers in front drowning out the music. I should get some better headphones. We stop. The doors hiss and I wait for everyone to get out before sliding off the seat and saying cheers to the driver. Fresh air. The pavement speckled white. I can’t tell whether it’s meant to be like that or if it’s just chewing gum spat out and trampled down.
He’s there before I have time to change direction, right in front of me in his dirty sleeping bag. Back against the wall – paint peeling onto him like he’s a permanent fixture. Matted hair, scruffy dog. All I have to do is walk past. I could cross over but the bus is pulling out. He won’t speak to me. He won’t. He doesn’t. Doesn’t even look up and I walk past feeling like shit anyway.
Ned would know exactly how to handle these situations. I imagine him like me but better. Like me but with posture and muscles and social skills. He carries extra fags and energy bars and his pockets jingle with spare change. He can hand these things over and not be a dick about it. That’s why people want to be around him. That’s why Nan’s face changes when she realises I’m not him after all.
Town is heaving. If Mum hadn’t taken the car I’d be at the supermarket or the retail park. Anywhere else. There are too many people. Push my way through Marks and Spencer’s, past the fluffy dressing gowns and big knickers. Pick a card, any card. Pick something out of this line-up – something for less than a tenner. It’s all generic mum stuff. As though spawning another human being means you’re instantly drawn to knick-knacks and spotty tea towels, mugs with slogans so meaningless it makes me want to vom. Ned would know what to buy. He has excellent taste. He probably makes his own gifts.
Nan always used to sort this stuff out, buy me a card to sign, a present to wrap. Sometimes we went together. She’d peel five-pound notes from the wad she always had in her bank book and send me to the tills on my own. ‘Go on,’ she said, pushing me into the queue, ‘you’ve got to learn to do these things on your own.’ But it never gets easier. The small talk. The way the shop staff smile at you and pour change into your hand so the coins roll off and you have to bend over and balance the bag on your arm with everybody waiting behind.
There’s enough money left for lunch. Meat and potato pasties are two for a pound. It doesn’t make sense just to buy one. I grab a bottle of Coke and pay and find a bench near the war memorial even though it’s still too cold to be sitting outside. Smells like fags and fried onions and a little bit of spring. The pastry grease is seeping through the paper bag. Two kids in front of me chasing pigeons – running and stamping and sending small flocks into the air to sit and wait in the trees, on the railings. A group of women in long black dresses, faces covered – only a slit cut out for eyes. A choir singing gospel through a shitty sound system and handing out leaflets about the Good News.
The Coke bubbles sting the back of my nose. I eat too quickly. It burns on the way down. Swig the drink again, watch a girl walk past, dyed hair piled up high on her head. She’s wearing denim shorts with black tights underneath. From the back I can see everything, every crease and flex as she walks. She walks straight past the students with their little table and homemade posters, trying to collect signatures against the war in Iraq. She doesn’t even look at them.
I feel for the postcard in my pocket and wonder what Lorna’s doing at this very moment. I can’t help myself. Pull it out and the corners are all dog-eared, the paper splitting and curling over. I know it off by heart. Thomas Gainsborough, Cornard Wood. Murky trees in oil paint. I can just see her in the shop at the National Gallery picking it out. Her writing on the back, tiny and perfect, taking up every inch of space so there is almost no room for the stamp. The gathering of trees, it says, the poplars; the durmast oak; the soft lime-tree; the virgin sweet bay; laurel; the hazel, frail; the ash tree used for spears and on and on. It could mean anything. There’s no return address. Just like her to try and be mysterious. Quoting obscure lines from her set texts to feel clever. Sending me coded messages when she knows I was never good at reading between the lines. Today it feels like she’s taking the piss. The sweeping silver-fir; pleasant plane-tree; the many-coloured maple; with the river-haunting willow. She laughed when I told her how scared I used to be of the yew trees in graveyards, how I imagined they were so dark because they soaked up evil spirits. And I always stepped around them when Nan took me to Church on Sunday mornings.
‘Did you really believe it?’ Lorna asked once, eager for details, like I was the last survivor of a dying tribe. And I just shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain. Mostly it was boring. In Sunday school we made collages, filled shoeboxes for children in Romania, acted out scenes from the Bible. But sometimes – and I could never predict when – I felt this thing – this prickling in my face, my spine. Some kind of gut-twisting hope. Sort of like the Yorkshire caving trip in the last year before high school – fear of the dripping dark, sandwiched between people, hoping the fat kid in front wouldn’t get stuck. Keeping the panic down by pretending you were a Power Ranger or Indiana Jones and breathing in the thick damp air. Not enough of it. Wondering what the hell it was all for, the sharp rock digging into your ribs, and then the first sniff of sky and light and the push forward.
Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these ye have done it verily, verily, verily, unto me. It has power, even when you hear it in that robot-vicar drone. A hot hand melting into you, into your body, moving things around, pushing. For a moment you want to jump up and do something. And then it goes and you forget. You’re glad you didn’t say anything embarrassing. You wonder whether you’re turning into some kind of religious nut job.
Nan said faith is something that has to be fed and nurtured. ‘It’s a gift’, she said, ‘to hope for something more.’ The Bible she gave me for my eighth birthday still has the plastic cover on. Sometimes when Mum’s out I open it at random and try to find something familiar, something that might bring the feeling back.
I can’t think about any of it now. Not Lorna, or the others. Everyone I ever went to school with leaving town and spreading out across the country like arrows on a map. Invasion. Escape. I’m still hungry. I could eat the other pasty easily, but I don’t. I get up and start walking back towards the bus stop, past what used to be Pizza Hut and now doubles as a shitty Christmas shop and a temporary place to buy fireworks. Past the sports shop with trashy dance playlist – all drum machines and over-produced vocals. You have to wear branded tracksuit bottoms to be allowed in. It’s a legal requirement. Past the man who always sits on a stool outside BHS playing French love songs on the accordion.
I’m holding the bag so the grease doesn’t get all over the other stuff. The pasty’s going cold. I want rid of it. All I have to do is hand it over. Say Here you go mate, as though I do things like this every day – as if it means nothing. And not wait around to see his reaction, not look as though I’m waiting for gratitude. My palms are sweating. I feel shivery and wired, like I’m about to sit an exam. Maybe he’s not hungry. Maybe I should’ve bought him a drink as well. Nothing worse than being thirsty and the food sticking in your throat. Maybe he’s a fucking vegetarian.
I stop and breathe and look like I’m really interested in the nearest shop window, the cheap pyjamas and cushions shaped like cupcakes and chocolates wrapped in shiny pink cellophane. Don’t forget your Mum on Mother’s Day, and the date in big bold letters to really hammer it home. Time is running out, people, buy now, buy here!
We made a hamper together one Christmas. Nan knew the wife of a man who’d lost his job. They had nothing. So we went to town and chose fruit and nuts and biscuits and a box of Milk Tray and some children’s gloves from the market, some colouring pencils and big fat cheapo colouring books. And we wrapped the toys and arranged it all in a big cardboard box covered with Christmas paper. I bit off small strips of Sellotape and handed them over. It was heavy. They lived round the corner and I walked next to her while she carried it, stopping to steady herself against the houses. I could’ve sworn that all the curtains on the street were twitching. When we were near she handed it to me and I thought I might drop it for laughing. We peered round the side wall and saw a light on in the back of the house. ‘Go – now,’ she said and I shuffled as fast as I could and put it on the doorstep and the glass bottle of cordial clanked against the metal tin of Fox’s Family Assortment and I rang the doorbell and ran and she held my hand and we legged it back to her house.
A couple of weeks later, after church, a man I’d never seen before pushed his way through the crowd and spoke to Nan. He’d been trying to find out who did it, he said, and he knew it was her and while he was very grateful indeed for the thought there was no way he could accept it. And he pushed a ten-pound note into her hand and walked off. She just stood there for a while, we both did, and her cheeks were red, and then we went back for Sunday dinner, waiting for Mum to pick me up on her way home from work.
It fizzled out after that. She stopped taking me and I never said anything. I missed it but I didn’t miss it. We played board games while the roast was cooking, watched Songs of Praise after and sang along. I peed myself laughing at the congregations – their eager faces, so filled with spiritual fire that they couldn’t contain it.
The bus’ll be coming soon and there’s not another for half an hour. It’s now or never. I need to stop messing about and just do it. Put my headphones back in and walk, walk, walk to the beat of the song and feel like I can do anything. And I look up to the top of the buildings, some concrete and ugly and others towering over the shops with art deco cornices and long Georgian windows. Gargoyles on the old Bradford & Bingley. A whole hidden world above the sale signs and new season beachwear and stylised headless mannequins.
Cross the road, weaving through turning traffic and plastic carrier bags hanging off prams and I can see him sitting in the same place by the wall and I can hear a train pulling into the station and the sun is out now, breaking through the grey.
He’s not alone. There’s someone next to him bending over the dog, scratching its ears, a man in biker leathers with a grey ponytail and massive sideburns. They’re laughing at something and he nods and the man in leathers salutes him like he’s a washed up ship’s captain who just happened to land on a pavement outside a train station.
I could still do it. I could just drop it onto his sleeping bag and keep walking. And I’m right there and it’s now or never. Now, now, now.
Fuck it. I walk straight past him.
I’m not hungry anymore. I can’t eat it. So I leave the paper bag on the chopping board next to the toaster. I take Lorna’s postcard out of my pocket and screw it up in both hands. I hover next to the bin but can’t actually bring myself to do it. There might be something I haven’t spotted yet. A hidden message or even an apology. I take it upstairs and unfold it. The trees are criss-crossed with papery lines now. Some of the words are almost unreadable.
I slot it into the Bible and shove it under the bed. Turn on the computer and wait for it to boot up. Try not to look at the wreckage, the state of my bombs-dropped-pig-sty-hovel. Staring at the screen with the cursor blinking in the Google search box. The whole world at my fingertips and I can’t think of a single thing to type.
I hear the car pull into the drive and the door go. I count to twenty slowly. I hear Mum dropping bags in the hall, hanging up the keys, filling the kettle. Her feet on the stairs. By nineteen she’s knocking on the door and opening it just a bit, peering in like she’s testing the atmosphere, measuring hostility levels.
‘Alright?’ she says – she has this tone. I’m delicate. I might explode.
‘Fine.’
‘There’s a pasty in the kitchen.’
‘They were on offer ok – cheap as chips so I brought one back.’
‘For me?’
‘Who else?’
She’s still there. Why is she hovering around? She smiles. More than that – she bloody lights up.
‘How did you know? I’m starving. Just what I fancied.’
‘Don’t overdo it. It’s just a pie.’ She should save her enthusiasm. There’s some serious pastel Mother’s Day shit heading her way in only a matter of hours. She looks at me looking at the screen.
‘What’re you doing?’ she says, moving closer like she might actually sit on the bed, like she wants to connect.
‘Working on an application.’
‘What for?’
‘Just a job. At a restaurant. Something to tide me over.’
She wants to mention university now. I can feel it.
‘That’s something at least.’ She hovers. ‘Have you heard from Lorna lately?’
‘Mum!’
‘I’m just asking.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘I was thinking of getting a takeaway later and watching a film. What d’you think?’
‘Dunno. I’m pretty busy here.’
She retreats to the door. She’s almost gone.
‘If you change your mind…’ she says.
I nod, but it’s not going to happen and she knows it.
The door shuts. She’s gone and I can breathe, but I can’t breathe. I don’t know why it’s like this. I don’t know why I’m like this. I don’t know what I want. I don’t want anything.
Nan in the home, turning away or staring at my forehead when I try to talk to her, as if there’s always something more interesting going on behind me. As if she’s waiting for someone better. Waiting for Ned. And that girl comes in and she wakes up, she focuses. Not on me, on her. The girl with the dark hair. Her name is something exotic. Anita. Brigitte. Sinita. What does it matter? There’s no one. There’s nothing.
Push the chair back and climb into bed, right under the duvet so that I can’t see any light, so that I’m breathing in my own air, nails into the palms of my hands, elbows into my stomach. It starts in my head. The words: Verily I say unto you, even as I am. Come follow me. Come. Follow.
Then I whisper it: Please God, please God, please God, and outside a bird is singing and the light must be going and the air is getting hotter under here and please God I don’t know how I’ll ever move from this spot.