Sharon Gosling
The rain had been tilting at them all day. Above the motorway the wide sky was a slick bruise of cloud, dark in the middle and a sick grey-green at its distant edges. It reminded Reg of the weeks he’d spent on Kamchatka, so many moons ago, although those skies had spread wider still, and when it had rained it had felt as if it were the end of the world, probably because it very nearly was.
Donna was behind the wheel, peering through the slashing wipers of the Transit at the spray sent up from the tarmac by the surrounding traffic.
“I’ll drive, if you like,” he told her, not for the first time.
“It’s all right, Dad,” she said, voice somewhere between distraction and anxiety, not looking at him. “You just relax.”
Reg leaned back in his seat and studied his daughter’s profile. It seemed like only yesterday that he was scooping her off pavements and teaching her to ride a bike. Now here they were, on his last journey. Not that she’d appreciate hearing him call it that.
“It’s not the end of your adventures,” she’d said, as they’d pulled the door shut on the house that had kept him still for the past twenty years. “It’s just the start of a new one, that’s all.”
He turned his head toward the wet window and went back to Kamchatka. Wild green pastures full of vivid bursts of meadow flowers that stretched towards the climbing crags of snow-capped mountains, bears roaming the forests, beluga sinuous in the waters. He hadn’t been prepared for East Russia to be so beautiful, and all told, he’d ended up staying six weeks. Six weeks at the end of the world. He could have stayed longer. Perhaps he should have, but there was always a reason to move on.
A face floated to him, dark hair beneath a white headscarf, khaki shirt, sturdy boots, firm thighs, a figure lying back amid that lush pasture grass. He searched the years for a name and came up with Elise. He’d met her in Osaka, Reg remembered now, an American nurse with dark eyes and a beautiful smile, perfect white teeth. It had been a while since he’d had a companion and she’d declared herself open to adventure, but as usual it had turned out that Reg’s understanding of the word exceeded that of others.
He’d travelled on alone, at twenty-five the years stretching ahead of him like an endless road, the ones behind having already woven through a dozen countries. He’d boarded a cargo ship in Petropavlovsk and lumbered across the Bering Sea towards Alaska with winter closing in. Cold enough to freeze the proverbials off a mythical metal ape, but there wasn’t a single day he hadn’t gone up on deck. Now though, he thought, now I quake at the slightest drop in temperature, a weak old man perpetually wrapped in a blanket. Reg shifted in his seat, dispelling the bitterness. There was no sense in it, after all. Life was what it was and his had been a good one, no doubt about that.
He’d enjoyed that first time in Alaska, even in ice. The hugeness of it, the clear white cold, the secrets it must hold. He’d worked his way along the fishing routes, heading for Canada, restless and uncontained. Somewhere in the midst of it he’d met Natasha. The clarity of the name after all these years surprised him, but then he supposed their dalliance had lasted longer than others. Two years they had travelled together, criss-crossing the barest expanses of Canada and then down beneath the big skies of the American mid-West, traversing both Dakotas and on. They’d both been heading for Colorado until her eye had been caught by a cowboy somewhere just south of Broken Bow, Nebraska, and that had been the end of that. He’d found himself alone again, pausing to walk the central vertebrae of the Rockies before spending the next ten years moving ever farther south until he eventually dropped off the end of the continent.
After Natasha there had been many other faces, attached to less memorable names: beautiful, all of them, in their own ways, he was sure. Reg spent a few minutes trying to recall each, but faltered after the first two or three and wasn’t convinced that he’d remembered even those correctly. Some had barely lasted a night a handful of decades ago, so it was inevitable that the strength of his memories would wane, he supposed. Besides, it had never been about the company but about the journey. So much to see, so many places to visit. Why else would he have spent so long moving on, always moving on?
Reg glanced at Donna, wondering what she’d make of her father’s early exploits. Not that he felt guilty, exactly. That had been a different life, long before she’d been even the merest twinkle in her mother’s eye—long before, in fact, he’d had any notion that Agnes even existed. Donna had been a late addition to a late marriage, neither advent something he’d anticipated but had found himself welcoming nonetheless, a journey into a different type of country.
“I think I could do with a cup of tea,” Donna announced now, as through the wet afternoon gloom shone a sign that indicated civilization in the form of Harrogate. “Perhaps a bite to eat, too. What does the clock say? It must be past time for lunch, anyway.”
They were barely an hour from Doncaster, but Reg wasn’t going to argue. Anything to postpone the inevitable. He hadn’t been in this neck of the woods for years, but Donna had insisted that the best thing he could do now was move closer to her and Michael. “It’s time you came home, Dad,” is how she’d actually termed it, although she’d only grown up in Doncaster because her mother had been born there. Reg hadn’t had the heart to point out that it wasn’t home for him, aware that such a statement would probably hurt his daughter’s feelings. He didn’t want to rock the boat. Reg didn’t want to cause a bother at all—he would have been quite happy to fade away in his own small house, the one he’d bought in the Borders after Agnes had shuffled off. Donna had put that move down to grief, perhaps unwilling to acknowledge that her father was merely attempting some small return to a pattern of life that had predated her appearance, and that she only knew through half-told stories that must have seemed more like legend than history. The house had been miles up a dirt track in a forest so dense that he could be cut off for weeks over winter if the snows were bad. It reminded Reg of those weeks in Colorado and then New Mexico and, much later still, the Andes. If Britain had been that kind of country, it was where the bears would have been, and that suited Reg just fine. But of course, the reason he’d bought the place became the reason he was forced to leave it. What was manageable when one was knocking sixty became lethal when fast approaching eighty.
Donna pulled off the motorway. Reg expected her to head for the service station but instead she made for Harrogate itself.
“I’ve read about a great place a little further on,” she told him. “I’ve been meaning to visit it for ages. A salvage warehouse with a café and all sorts of interesting independent stalls. It sounds like just your sort of place, Dad. Let’s go there.”
Reg said nothing, but nodded. Behind them his accumulated possessions of years, many of them brought back from his overseas trips, sat in boxes along with the last of his furniture. Donna had nagged and nagged him to “minimize” on the basis that his room in the residential home would be too small for the majority of it. What he had saved had been by way of argument, cajoling and outright stubbornness, and was still deemed to be too much. Why she thought a warehouse housing bric-a-brac of the sort he would habitually gladly take home would be a good place to stop he had no idea.
The rain eased as they approached the town, a shaft of sunlight illuminating the Yorkshire sandstone of its oldest buildings. They did not head for the centre, but instead pulled down what seemed like a residential street.
“It’s hidden behind here somewhere,” Donna said, leaning over the steering wheel as the van crawled forward over speed humps. “There, look.”
A break in the houses heralded a narrow road that ran between two large rusty open gates. Donna turned in and through them. Beyond, the road widened into a yard with parking space at the near end, closed off at the other by a substantial old barn. The arched entrance, which would once have featured solid wooden doors, had been replaced by glass panels, through which Reg could see laden pitches stretching back into the dimly lit interior. A sign proclaimed that the café was somewhere to the rear.
“Come on,” Donna said, killing the engine and unbuckling her belt. “Let’s get inside before the rain starts again.” She opened her door and hopped from the driver’s seat, rounding the bonnet to help him as he clambered out of the passenger side. His hip protested as his feet hit the pocked tarmac and Reg cursed, just a little, under his breath.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” Donna said, one arm under his, as if to hold him up. “We should have stopped sooner.”
He extricated himself from her grip, trying not to show his annoyance at his own frailty. There was a time when he’d been the strongest man she knew.
They headed for the bathrooms first, situated just inside those big glass doors. As he left the men’s, Reg looked out into the grim grey daylight and saw Donna back out beside the Transit. She was talking to a large man in weathered black overalls, gesticulating as she explained something. Reg blinked, slowly, assimilating this new information. His daughter’s decision to bring him here suddenly made a lot more sense.
They saw him coming. Donna took a hurried step back, as if she’d been caught in a compromising position, which Reg supposed she had been, in a way. The man greeted Reg’s approach with an encouraging smile.
“Dad,” said Donna. “This is Adrian, he owns this place.”
Reg nodded at this new acquaintance. “I gather I’ve been the victim of a ruse, Adrian. I’ll have a word with my daughter alone, please, if I may.”
Adrian smiled again. “Of course. I’ll let you two come and find me in a bit. No rush.”
Reg watched him walk across the wet tarmac.
“Dad—” Donna began.
“Poor show, love,” Reg said, mildly. “Poor show.”
Donna sighed, half in sadness, half in exasperation. “Dad, you can’t keep everything. You just can’t. Your room at Wisteria Lodge—”
“Wisteria Lodge,” Reg repeated, bitterly. “Why don’t they just call it what it is? The Death Wagon.”
“Don’t,” Donna said. “I’m doing the best I can, Dad. There was no way you could carry on living on your own up there at the house. Look at you, you can barely walk ten paces. You know Mike and I would have you at ours if we could, but we can’t, there’s barely room for the two of us as it is. Wisteria Lodge is the best option close by, and we’ve got you the biggest room there that we could. Try to understand, why can’t you?”
“Understanding,” Reg said, “is not the problem. Acceptance, my dear, is the issue.”
They stood facing each other, and he realised, perhaps for the first time, that his daughter stood head and shoulders over him. The thought imbued Reg with a sense of hopelessness he’d hitherto held at bay.
“Adrian will take everything you don’t want,” she said.
“Fine. Get him out here. Let’s get this show on the road. Can’t keep Wisteria Lodge waiting.”
“Dad,” Donna said, softly, but he turned away.
When Adrian returned, he had a couple of younger men with him, also dressed in black overalls. As they rolled up the back of the Transit, Reg said, “You can take it all.”
There was a pause.
“Dad, that’s not necessary. You don’t have to get rid of everything. You just have to be a bit more selective.”
Reg, who thought he’d already been pretty damn selective back at the house, shook his head. “There’s only one thing I want to keep. Burn the rest, for all I care.”
He watched as the men went about their work, lifting down tables, chairs, curiosities from far and wide, pieces of art, even an old wooden globe set on its own legs.
“Don’t you want to keep the globe?” Donna asked, probably because she remembered it from her childhood. “There’s room for that, at least, I’m sure.”
“You have it, if you want it,” Reg told her, trying and failing not to let his voice slide into sullenness.
The single remaining object of his desire had been jammed unceremoniously between the carved oak legs of a large armchair. One of Adrian’s lads pulled it out, coughing slightly as a faint plume of dust flickered from the chair’s upholstery.
“There,” Reg said. “That’s it. Give it here, would you, son?”
“Oh, Dad,” Donna said. “You can’t be serious.”
Reg held the old rucksack up before him. He’d bought it from one of the American army boys he’d met in the Philippines when his first such companion had finally given out. He’d lost count of the years they’d passed through together since, this old pack and him. The straps were frayed and in places worn through entirely. There were patches of oil on the base where he’d set it down to crawl beneath that waste-of-money truck he’d rented in Namibia. A black pillow of duct tape signalled the spot where a good old-fashioned cutpurse had tried to slash through its base that time in Mozambique. There were the holes the families of mice had nibbled in it over the twenty-five years it had stood on the metal utility shelves in their garage in Doncaster, not fifty miles from this very spot.
“It’s falling apart, Dad,” Donna tried, again. “It’s full of dust and god knows what else. That can’t be the thing you want to take with you, not to your beautiful new room.”
“This is what I want,” Reg told her, stolidly, “so you’ll have to make a decision. Let me take it or leave me here with it and the rest of Adrian’s relics, because I’m not leaving without it.”
They didn’t stop for lunch in the end. Reg wandered around inside the barn while Adrian and his boys finished unloading the truck into the intermittent rain. Donna hovered nearby, apparently too uncomfortable to accompany him indoors. Reg didn’t feel the need to set her at ease. He was the one being asked to give everything up, after all.
He kept hold of the bag, just in case. When he put it over his shoulder, Reg found that it fitted there just the same as it always had. It struck him that he should have taken better care of it in those years after he’d abandoned his travels. It seemed now that it had always been the best home he’d never had.
Back on the motorway, he kept it between his feet, a familiar weight he’d all but forgotten.
“What’s so important about it?” Donna asked. “I can understand it went a lot of places with you, but surely all your photographs—they must be better memory keepers than that disgusting old thing.”
Reg looked out of the window at the looming bulk of Doncaster. He tried to remember the last strange city he’d arrived in and couldn’t. He knew the pack would have been with him, though, its bulk settled firmly against his back.
“It was there,” he said. “It was always there.”
Wisteria Lodge was a large Victorian building of red brick, standing in an adequate amount of greenery that had reached the end of its season. A gravel driveway led up to the large arched front porch. It might once have been impressive, but its wide steps had been augmented by a ramp with a handrail on one side and a wheelchair lift on the other, both of which had been installed with practicality in mind rather than any sense of aesthetics.
“Mr Sanderson!” squeaked the nurse who came out to greet them, in that tone caring types reserve for the very old or the very young. “I’m Nancy. How lovely to meet you. Your daughter’s told us all about you—we’re all excited to hear your stories about travelling. I hear you’ve been all over the world, not just once but many times! Can I call you Reg? I can, can’t I? Oh, good.”
Reg regarded her, close-lipped. Nancy was short and dumpy and looked as if wiping elderly arses was about as much exercise as she ever got. Not unattractive, though, at a push, especially if one only looked at her face.
“We’ve had a long journey,” Donna confided, as an apology for her father’s silence. “It’s been rather fraught.”
The nurse maintained her bright mask, still smiling as she ushered them inside. “Of course. We’ll get you settled, then you’ll feel much better. We’ve got the boxes you brought down earlier, Donna, with your father’s clothes and whatnot, they’re all unpacked and waiting for Reg in his room. It’s this way . . .”
She led them down a corridor carpeted in a thick, loud pile that might have been considered stylish for a week or so sometime in the late seventies. It smelled of old boiled food that had been liberally sprayed with air freshener. There were more handrails, this time on both walls. Reg felt the passageway closing in, threatening to squash him between its patchy papered walls. His hand tightened on the strap of his pack, wondering if together they could make a bolt for it—one final trip for two empty old sacks.
“There, you see,” Nancy gushed, as she pushed open the door to number 23, the siding into which the long train of Reg’s life had now been shunted once and for all. “It’s a lovely room, this one—looks right out over the rose garden. They’re not in bloom now, obviously, but in summer it’s beautiful. You’ll like that.”
Donna let him go ahead of her. Reg walked in and looked around. It was bright and airy, but there wasn’t much to take in. Single bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe, bookcase, and a small desk, which was bare apart from a tray bearing a kettle, a couple of mugs, and a bowl of PG Tips sachets alongside mini long-life milk cartons.
“It might feel a bit sparse at the moment,” Nancy agreed, to Reg’s silent assessment, “but we’ll get more of your own things around you and it’ll feel like home in no time, mark my words.”
Reg looked at Donna, whose cheeks coloured a little. Then he swung the pack from his back and dumped it on the bed. Flakes of dust hit the pristine white coverlet.
“I’d like to be alone now, please,” he said. “If that’s not too much to ask.”
He felt rather than saw the two women exchange glances.
“Supper is at six, Reg,” said Nancy. “I’ll pop back and get you then. It’ll be a good chance for you to meet the other residents.”
“I’ll leave you to it then, Dad,” said Donna. “Mike and I will come in and see you tomorrow. All right?”
Reg didn’t answer either of them. They made a quiet exit and he could hear them murmuring to each other beyond the blank white of the fire door that closed him off from the rest of the world. He hobbled to the window to look out over the garden. It was barely five o’clock but the light was already beginning to disintegrate. The faded roses, dead but with their heads still waving aimlessly on their stalks, seemed to him to be a particularly malicious joke. He turned away and pulled the curtains, returning to the bed.
“Just you and me now, kid,” he muttered, perching beside his old pack. “Just like the old days.”
Reg unzipped one of the small outside pockets, the one where he knew his trusty old Leatherman was waiting. It had saved his life many times, this piece of kit—literally as well as metaphorically. He pulled open the blade, which had stiffened during its long period of disuse. Then he turned the pack over and went to work on the duct tape. He took his time, worrying at the edges, pulling a little here, peeling a little there. He didn’t want to just rip it off. That might cause more damage. The pack was plenty threadbare in places already.
Reg worked carefully, the time slipping away as the light faded still further. He left Wisteria Lodge and Doncaster far behind, passing down the narrow lanes of time and memory as he worked. He’d just about freed enough of the tape to reach what was stored beneath it when there was a knock at the door.
“Reg? It’s Nancy again,” said the familiar voice. “It’s five to six. Are you ready for something to eat? Your daughter said you hadn’t stopped for lunch, so you must be starving.”
Reg didn’t answer. He was too busy coaxing out the string. It made him smile to see it after all these years. He’d just succeeded in freeing it completely when Nancy opened the door, knocking softly, as if doing so precluded the need for guilt at the intrusion.
“Reg, is everything all right? Are you—”
She stopped in the doorway. The light from the hall behind her spilled into number 23.
Reg slipped from the bed, still holding the string as he looked around for somewhere to hang it. He settled on the mirror of the dressing table, which had round wooden handles on either side so that it could be adjusted. He shuffled across the floor and hooked the old string over one of these knobs. The long line of yellowing molars clacked gently against the wood and one another as they settled themselves. As he looked at them Reg was satisfied to realise that more names were coming back to him. A little aide-mémoire, that’s all he needed, and he was right back amid the brightest of his days. He’d give them each a good clean later, he decided, treat himself to a real trip down memory lane.
Reg turned towards the nurse. She was still standing at the door. The expression on her face was uncertain. As he watched, she looked at the pack on the bed, then back towards his little souvenirs, then at the open knife still in his hand.
“You’re right,” Reg said, offering a pleasant smile. “It does feel better. Now—time for dinner, is it?”
Nancy backed away as he moved towards her, the uncertainty taking on a thin edge of fear. Reg moved past her with a lighter step than he’d managed in years, the smile still on his face. Beneath his feet, the turgid carpet seemed somehow less offensive, the smell receding to the periphery of his awareness. He could hear the hubbub of voices somewhere ahead of him. Behind him, Nancy’s feet began to move, albeit with a somewhat hesitant step.
Perhaps, he thought, life at Wisteria Lodge had the potential to be more fun than he’d anticipated. After all, life was what you made it, wasn’t it?