The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (20 page)

Perhaps you could write while I'm here. I love receiving letters. (Hint.)

Best wishes,

Elin

I drop the letter on my bed.

“Don't you know what you're flirting with?”

“Perhaps she does,” another voice says.

“Perhaps? How about a few fucking certainties?” I wipe the condensation from the window and stare up at the street railings.

“A few absolute truths?”

“Yeah.”

Silence from the other voice.

“What about Kate?”

No answer.

Using the edge of a tea towel, I polish the window harder and catch a reflection of myself peering back. The figure I see, though, has deflated cheeks, shadows instead of eyes and a hollow grimace.

“Fuck off!”

Next day, to escape the confusion, I walk. Traipsing slush-swamped streets, under railway bridges, past abandoned shopping arcades, through an ugly cemetery, across an industrial wasteland, I stop when I realise my socks are saturated and my toes are beyond that initial numbness. To my right stands the entrance for an estate of large, rectangular warehouses; unit after unit of drab grey breezeblock and corrugated iron, too uniformly spaced across a barren, concrete landscape of loading bays and lorry parks; each contained within a barrier of chain-linked fences, garlanded with razor wire and security cameras. Next to the entrance is a large job board, empty of vacancies except for one:
WAREHOUSEMAN – APPLY REGENCY
FOODS, UNIT 15.

I stamp my feet, then wait and listen. The sky is empty. I'm on my own.

The reception counter is unattended, but there's a bell to ring and it brings the depot manager out of an office. We talk for five minutes and he offers me the job, starting next day. That simple. Absurdly simple, given the unemployment rate. Simply absurd, given my philosophy.

That evening, I sit on my bed and write replies to the letters. First to Kate, and then to Elin.

“I'm glad you wrote,” Elin says.

We're sitting at a sticky table in the Hayward's cafeteria. Steam rises from two cups, spilt coffee has slopped into our saucers.

“Wasn't much of a letter.” Pushing a hand through my hair, I try catching a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. “I scribbled it in a hurry. Otherwise it would've arrived after you'd left.” Had a haircut before meeting Elin and nearly joined Jo with the punk look, but bailed at the last moment.

“Doesn't matter. A letter's a letter.” She folds a serviette and places it under her cup. “When I was little I'd send for holiday brochures – you know, all those coupons from
The TV Times
– just so I'd get wads of mail. It was probably because I grew up on a farm, without older brothers and sisters to play with. I created my own links with the world.”

“Holiday brochures, Elin? Tahiti, Morocco, Spain? That's a bloody exotic world.”

“Why not? Maybe I was compensating for the bleakness of the farm. Didn't you ever do that sort of thing?”

Placing my coffee cup on the table, out of the saucer, it leaves a wet ring. “I used to play at farms,” I tell her. And I imagine her standing on a Cornish cliff, with a raging, rock-pounding sea below and bleak moorland in front; dressed in baggy overalls and clod-hopper gumboots, but her blonde hair a crazy tangle in the wind, and laughing – Jo and Elin always seemed to be laughing. “I thought you liked Cornwall.”

“I do now. Now I've left. For years, I couldn't wait to get away. How about that? If I could get a teaching post in Cornwall I'd be delighted, but it won't happen.” Absentmindedly stirring another teaspoon of sugar into her coffee, she pauses and shrugs. “It's harder to get a job in the country than in the cities. Who knows where I'll end up?”

“Did you like the exhibition?”

“Yeah, loved the paintings, but I get bored with stuff in glass cabinets. Give me inter-active stuff any day; those big displays you walk through and press buttons – get the models to move and tell their stories instead of having to read long explanations. I'm just a big kid really.”

“You want to be involved?”

“Hands-on; too right. I was hoping to use something in my next teaching round. Get the kids to make those dot paintings of animals, weave baskets, cook damper – that sort of thing.”

“Sounds good,” I say, and imagine a full-scale diorama of two Neolithic men chipping flint against flint, with a toolkit of points and side-scrapers spread out. They'd be leaning against a tree, with a small fire in front and the odd billow of smoke from a smoke machine; there'd be the sound of wind blowing in trees, the guttural exclamations of an on-going Neolithic conversation, and an area with stones for visitors to try knapping points themselves.

As twilight descends, we cross the Thames and wander to Leicester Square. We go for a Wimpy and when we come out it's dark, except for the fluorescent glare of cinema hoardings feverishly pulsing half-a-dozen new Hollywood releases. Bud lights strung among the leafless trees imitate a galaxy of stars, but the night sky itself is displaced by the orange glow of the city – no Plough, no Pole Star, no Orion. There's a flow to the day and it draws us round the square, ignoring the drunks, down-and-outs and buskers, until we decide to buy tickets for a film.

And, after the film, we look even more like a couple among the thousands of other couples heading towards the Underground escalators of Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus or Charing Cross… all talking the same talk, all feeling to find a way into the moment, which will, of course, feel like a going forward, but which is often the same moment over and over again. Quite natural. There's nothing to tell us apart. Two by two by two by two.

There'll always be bodies arching and arcing in the night, like rainbows spanning dusk and dawn, solitude and companionship.

In the morning, for the second time, I wake up beside Elin, but this time our clothes are on the floor. She offers me breakfast, but I claim I'm not hungry, and bolt back to the bedsit to try outrunning whatever might happen next.

I spend one evening with Elin, one with Kate. Trail anxiety behind me both times, like the smell of something I've stepped in. Life's starting to resemble the sort of French farce I've never found funny – one hundred per cent cringe – diving in and out a series of wardrobe doors: in one with Elin, out another with Kate; in one with Kate, out yet another with Elin; Jo sitting on a settee, stage left, apparently oblivious to the opening and closing of doors. Maybe I should sit calmly alongside her until the next act, when I can tell Kate that I still want to be with her. Only her. I want to spend my life with her. Always had, always would.

All the same, I watch events unravel with the uncanny sense of having become detached. I'm a marionette, scripted to walk in one direction, but dragged the opposite way. I'm a spaceman drifting at the end of an umbilical cord, attached to nothing. I'm a child whose remote-controlled plane is flying by itself; up, down, flying around, looping the loop, playing the clown. Nothing happens the way it should and there's sweet Fanny Adams I can do. Sweet fuck all.

Kate says: “So, you're working in a warehouse, Tom? That'd be tiring, I imagine, but good to have a real wage.”

I can't believe I'm standing next to her again. Undoubtedly her face is thinner, her cheekbones more defined, but it suits her, and she's more reflective in the measure of her words. It's easier to see the woman she's becoming.

She'd suggested I come to her flat; thought we might stroll through a local park, get a takeaway meal. She'd be going out with friends later. So I cancelled a date with Elin, without explanation – unwilling to lie to her, unable to provide the truth (‘I'm meeting someone I can't fall out of love with') – and began rehearsing the evening.

“It's not much of a wage,” I tell her, “but at least I'm getting fitter again. Haven't been fit since I worked on the market… in Northampton. And it helps pass the time, even though it's mindless. But I'll be glad to get back to uni and start using my brain. What's left of it.”

“You plan on going back? When? This September? That's great.”

I nod. “How many years have you got left?”

She shows me her flat and the tree outside her bedroom window, and then we walk a maze of streets and follow a genteel path through the park, alongside a boating lake, and start hopscotching again from subject to subject. But it's all too stilted. Why can't we relax and start discussing the things that matter, the things we're passionate about? And there are questions we're not asking, truths we're not speaking; stuff that needs to be said, or at least acknowledged before we can move on, but that we're unsure how to broach. What is it that has to be done or said first?

There are ducks on the lake and young families throwing chunks of bread, but no swans – no moonlit garden of swans waiting to watch over us. And maybe that's the problem: London's too prosaic for us, and short on miracles and mysteries.

“I only deferred,” I tell her, returning to the subject, needing to reach out and hold her hand as we stroll towards the Chinese restaurant she knows. In the movies it would've been an easy gesture, that reaching across and brushing of fingertips, but there's too much at stake between us. “Come September, I reckon I'll be more than ready to give it another shot. It was all too wanky last year.”

Why can't I just blurt out: “I told you I'd always love you and I do”? And yet the reason's obvious: because if she doesn't want to hear it, she'll tell me goodbye – in the middle of the park, in the middle of the street, in the foyer of the restaurant – and it'll be the last I ever see of her. She'd say something like: “Oh, I thought I'd given you time to move beyond that. I thought we could be friends, Tom, but obviously I was wrong.”

Can't she see she's got to give the first sign?

Maybe I should ask her to dance, right here in the middle of the park. (‘Will you dance with me once more, that I might get to know you again? Will you breathe the life into me once more, but stay for all time?') We'd raise our arms and throw our heads back and pirouette until the sky washed us off our feet.

We pass a middle-aged couple sitting on a bench and she digs her hands into her pockets. “I've heard some Arts courses are a bit of a wank from beginning to end,” she says. “Won't you feel the same way once you're back?”

“Don't think so. My perspective's changed, Kate. I know what I want to do now, whereas I didn't have a clue before.”

“You do? What?”

“I want to put exhibitions together for museums. You know, interesting, hands-on stuff to replace the boring rows of glass cabinets. I want to design displays that people can walk through and press buttons and have exhibits talk to them – that sort of thing. Have stuff to eat and touch and smell.”

She smiles. “You were always into history, weren't you?”

“I guess I was.” And I remember the time we watched the mummers play together.

“You do like Chinese, don't you?”

Just before we start eating, she stretches and then tucks a strand of hair behind one ear with the fingers of her left hand. The linked gestures bring with them the memory of a bedroom and the sharp angle of an early morning sun slicing a blade of light across a shared pillow. I recall the yellow wallpaper with its faded pattern of roses, her calico curtains, the silhouettes of pot plants on the windowsill, and the scent of her. I recall the sensuousness of our shared nakedness and the way her hair fell across my shoulder – so that I never wanted to move from that time, but for that moment to lie there with us forever.

“This looks good.
Bon appétit
,” I say, but have lost my appetite.

When we finish our meal, she says, “I'm meeting some friends in forty-five minutes. We have a night together every couple of weeks or so.”

“That's nice.”

“I've enjoyed catching up with you, Tom.”

“Me too… with you.”

“Perhaps we could go to a concert sometime?”

“I'd like that,” I say. “When? What would you like to go to?”

She folds her aluminium meal container in half and drops it in the carrier bag. “It's a bit crazy at the moment. Mick and I are going through a rough patch.”

“Okay,” I say. “Fair enough.” And it's all I can do not to cheer.

“I'll write to you. We'll arrange something. I promise.”

“Good. I'd like that.” We're interrupted by a cacophony of sirens. The traffic pulls to one side of the road and a police car and two ambulances scream across the junction, and then the sirens fade into the distance again. Kate shudders and I say, “So much noise, so little time.”

She bites her bottom lip and nods.

“I'll walk you to where you're meeting your friends.”

“That's alright. Thanks, but it'll be easier for you to catch the tube from here.”

And we kiss each other's cheek and say goodnight.

*

More sirens. Sticky tyres on a wet road. Screaming. An ocean crashes, folds in upon itself and swells again, wave after wave after wave, until the rush of the ocean drowns all other sound into silence.

*

In search of simplicity, I try detaching myself from Elin, ready to wait again for Kate. Maybe, she'll split with Mick and let me know about it. It's a smart plan, until Elin knocks on my door one Sunday afternoon.

“I thought I'd surprise you,” she says. “You don't mind, do you? Such a beautiful day. Thought we might go for a walk on the Heath. What d'ya reckon?”

For a moment I say nothing, then let her in. “Hello, Elin.”

I concentrate on washing and drying yesterday's dirty dishes, but am aware of her movements behind me. She paces up and down twice, removes her blazer and lets it drop with a clink of keys and coins on the bed, and then sits down.