There was a narrow path of flattened grass beyond the bushes. After about fifty metres, even this petered out among bogs and fallen birches. Nothing here grew above a sapling’s height before it keeled over in the soft earth. The ground was so soft you could sink to your waist in it.
‘My feet hurt.’
‘Put your boots back on, then. We have to do this gradually. No point in getting cut.’
I found myself a seat – a damp cradle of tree roots – and wrestled damp socks over my wet feet. Balanced, comfortably barefoot, on a fallen log, Michel looked more strange than beautiful. I dithered, hoping he’d help me up. But as soon as he saw I was ready he moved off through the undergrowth, and suddenly a ridiculous fear took hold of me: that here, minutes away from school and everything familiar, Michel would abandon me and I would never find my way home.
We teetered on logs. We picked our way. Just under the surface of the mud were roots tough enough to sprain an ankle. Ferns towered over our heads. Even in this tiny corridor of untended green, even with the river to guide us, we sometimes lost our way. Nothing grew straight. Nothing held. Trees clung to life amid stands of nettle, oily-looking brambles and, at last, Michel’s centre of operations: a circle of abandoned refrigerators.
Michel drew a stick through the earth, sketching his ideas for me. Earthworks. Palisades. Curving paths that drew assaults ineluctably to one easily defended chokepoint. Here, where the fridges made a sarsen ring, he planned to dig down, roofing his redoubt with turf and leaf litter. The earthworks too he would camouflage, hiding them behind stands of blackthorn, its barbs as vicious as razor wire.
The river, swollen by recent rains, babbled against the trunks and roots of trees. ‘One stiff rain and you’ll be living in a mud-pool.’
Michel surveyed the ground – a golfer lining up for a putt. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Besides, all these defences – how are you going to come and go?’
He rehearsed for me the construction of his artful runs: traps he would safely crawl over, but which would stick an unwary intruder stone dead.
‘Just don’t mistake your entrance and your exit.’ What I meant was, ‘Don’t talk shit.’
Michel, deep in his dream of Millennium, missed the joke. ‘Now there’s the truth.’
‘I promise I’ll come visit you during the End Times.’
Michel laughed. ‘Come the End Times, it’ll be every man for himself.’
Cadet training at our school started when we were fifteen. The terms of the school’s foundation had gifted it military pretentions which it didn’t particularly deserve. Some came from service families and took being a cadet very seriously. Most of us regarded the whole carry-on as a tiresome cousin of our regular Wednesday afternoon games. There were trips here and there. Now and again you got to fire a gun. Most of the time you spent square-bashing or listening to well-meaning guest lectures. These revealed rather less of military life than the news bulletins and debate programmes to which we were already addicted.
There was a lot of fuss made over various military traditions, and slightly desperate attempts were made to foster a friendly rivalry between the services. There were rivalries, but they were local, accidental, and very short lived. They absolutely refused to take on an ideological aspect. Particular groups of friends joined particular services. Their preferences and animosities became the preferences and animosities of their service. Dress us as they would in scratchy serge and ill-fitting plastic boots, we were still schoolchildren, and our ordinary loyalties and friendships survived their every experiment.
It didn’t help, of course, that ‘they’ were our teachers. Uniform did not transform them, though some took it as a licence to behave less well towards us. In crabfat blue or khaki, they were no less themselves than we were. They looked ridiculous. The captain of the navy cadets was our school chaplain, a five-foot tall martinet whose crisp whites had to be ordered specially because the real service had no uniforms that small.
The cadet experience was entirely without glamour. There was an almost wilful shoddiness to it all. The air cadets played tug-o-war, heaving on their elastic rope. Once the rope was extended, a lever was let go, sending the school’s glider rolling across the sports fields. Sometimes it ended up in the long-jump pit. It never flew. Navy cadets kicked their heels indoors, staring at charts. Once a year they visited the coast and wetted and stained their heavy blue serge trousers in the sumps of a smelly, decommissioned frigate. I had imagined Michel, my closest friend, would join me in the army; they at least took us on night exercises every half-term.
I knew that Michel came from an Army family. He showed no interest in discussing the connection. He certainly wasn’t bound, through family loyalty, for a service career, as some were. All the same, it came as a surprise and a disappointment when he told me he wasn’t joining me in the Army cadets.
‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘Community service.’
I burst out laughing.
‘What?’
There were a handful of peaceniks and loners among us, and the school catered for these aberrant consciences by sending them off on shopping errands for the local elderly and infirm.
Michel was too much of a loner to suffer a parade ground – this I understood. But try as I might I couldn’t picture Michel helping the weak and needy. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s a way of getting to know people,’ Michel said – a prospector describing a geological expedition; there was no warmth in his vision. ‘It’s good to see how people manage.’
I imagined him casing every joint.
Our school cross-country route began with a circuit of the sports fields, then led us along a street lined with ostentatious wooden houses as far as the Margrave, its lead-roofed porch smothered in lilac. Here we turned down a bridleway – tarmac at the beginning, cinders at the end – that took us past an old mill. Though it had been converted long before to an ordinary dwelling, the millhouse was genuine. There was a pond and a race, and a pale scar of stonework in the brick wall marked where the axle of the wheel had spun. For me, the house marked the psychological boundary between town and country. Whenever I passed over the stile and crossed the plank bridge over water canalised between walls of aging, moss-felted brick, a weight lifted inside me. I felt free.
Michel was a runner. He represented the school in regional competitions. He won cups and shields. The rest of the time he wasted strength and athletic talent on muddy scrambles through farmers’ fields and break-neck, shit-strewn verges. The rumour was our games instructor was making our cross-country courses as unpleasant as possible so as to persuade Michel onto the playing field, where his speed was desperately needed. If this was true, he may as well not have bothered – Michel never had and never would see the point in team games.
Each Wednesday afternoon we left the other cross-country runners to their muddy zig-zag and slipped away to assault courses of Michel’s own devising. No one knew about this. At least, no one said anything. Hill, our games teacher, had his suspicions. He once asked me why I ‘of all people’ had signed up for cross-country in the summer term. ‘I was counting on you for the cricket.’
‘I’ll come to evening practice,’ I offered. ‘I want to do something to stretch my legs.’
Michel counted cadence as we worked through the exercises his father had taught him. Press-ups. Squat-thrusts. We pulled ourselves up on low-hanging branches. We climbed trees. Passing a patch of scrub, we set ourselves at the undergrowth. Sometimes the route was obvious and clean enough – a sheep run, a fox-scrape. Otherwise I sat this particular game out, waiting for Michel to pick and tear a path through to me, pace by pace, inch by inch, through thorns and briars. He emerged at last, scratched, bleeding, grinning, riding a strange, flagellant high.
Past Michel’s ‘redoubt’ of abandoned fridges the ground got easier, littered with tissues and condoms, crushed cans, charred fire circles. The bark-chip track, come upon so suddenly, the feel of it through my boots, was baffling. ‘But this is my way home.’
‘Yes.’
‘The hotel’s down that way.’
‘Yes. There you are. Jesus, Conrad, have you never tried to follow the river before?’
I looked back the way we had come. There was no sign of where we had emerged from the undergrowth. No path, no break, no clue.
I had gathered, in my usual vague way, that Michel’s father was an Army man and that he was no longer around. What I didn’t know was that, a few months before Michel had arrived at the school, his father had returned home, or most of him had, on a military plane.
I can’t remember who first told me the story. It wasn’t Michel. He assumed I already knew. How could I not have known? The kids haunting the streets where his father was ambushed had used his head as a football. The video had been pulled, but a couple of boys claimed to have seen it. (They never said so to Michel’s face.)
Michel’s dad’s death and repatriation occurred before he came to the school; they were, indeed,
why
he moved here, his education paid for by the pension the military gave his mother. Michel and I attended different classes, and it took a while for our orbits to cross. By then the gossip must already have stalled.
The point is, once I knew about his father, Michel came into focus for me. His loneliness. His cult of self-reliance. These were scabs over a psychological wound. I understood that he was hurt, and I imagined I might be able to help him. At the very least, I could keep him company as he healed. I wanted to do that for him. I wanted to be with him. The truth is, I wanted him, and it pleased me to couch my desire as care.
And all the while Michel went on preparing me for our civilisation’s collapse. The Fall, he called it. He was very convincing. It was just around the corner now, he said: the battle of all against all.
A
t full pelt – we can’t be doing more than thirty miles an hour – the train makes too much racket for Michel and me to talk. It is awkward to sit like this, pressed against a past I am afraid will swamp me. I smile, and with some dumb-show to acknowledge my awkwardness, I open the window and lean out to watch the fields skid by.
The road, fag-end of the famous north coast highway, tails off near here. Clogged with caravans and mobile homes, it turns wearily inland to feed holiday parks, resort camps, an army firing range, a summer water sports school, a private airfield and, off on an eerie shingle limb of its own, an old power station.
The carriage rocks across a set of points. The fields are planted with cereals. In front of them, in a broad, bright band coming right up to the edge of the rail bed, poppies tremble beneath a cloud of moths. The moths are tiny, white-winged, light as ashes from a bonfire. The gust of our passing catches them and choreographs them, and for a moment they abandon their zig-zag trajectories and give themselves up to the slipstream’s swirl.
Abruptly, the train is canalised again; it rushes along a weedy, rackety corridor made of fences, wickets, head-high breeze-block walls and here and there, in the more open stretches, flagpoles, greenhouses, gazebos, weathered trampolines and bleached-pink plastic pedal cars. To travel at speed between these back gardens is to glimpse the collective unconscious of the region – its lonely pride and thin hope.
‘We’re doing up a boat.’ Michel, weary of our silence, has decided to compete with the racket of the train. ‘Did I tell you?’ he bawls. ‘Hanna and me.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re doing up a boat.’
The train slows to running pace and we emerge from between back gardens, through weedy fields and bare gravel lots marked out by chicken-wire, into the apparent chaos of the coastal banks – a vast, near-barren shingle expanse that edges year by year, bizarre and unmappable, further into the sea. The train brakes again, easing its way over uncertain ground.
It dawns on me that we are still running through gardens. But these are big, barren gardens, without fences, without walls. To say that nothing grows on the shingle would be unfair. A few local specialists thrive among the pebbles. Their geometrically simple flowers and cactus-like leaves suggest an occupation of dry land by pioneering seaweeds.
A roll of rusted wire lies across the pebbles, as sculptural in its way as the column of a ruined temple. Even this is not right, because the mind should not have to strain so hard for its metaphors. Better to say that this abandoned concrete pill has shape and mass of its own; and that tar-paper shack embodies the theory of its own construction. Things here are themselves. They are too few to gather into categories.
Paint sticks arranged in a pretend flower bed. An arch made from the planks of an old boat. A rabbit skull perched on a rock. Rows of pebbles, set more or less upright. A half-buried tyre. Old fishing net, pooled in a perfect circle. Buoys. Rusted cans. I would lay odds that some of the subtler effects aren’t even deliberate, and what seem to be gardens are simply happy accidents: artefacts of the starved eye’s hankering for pattern. But this, I suppose, is the gardener’s art around here: to set the eye right to the landscape, so that, from the hulks of derelict fishing boats on the horizon to the cracked concrete kerbs marking the road to the railway station, everything comes into focus – one giant garden.
The railway runs unfenced over the shingle. At our current crawl, you could safely jump from the carriage and head off in any direction, towards any landmark. The tar-paper houses. The lighthouse. On the horizon, black hulks of old boats, upturned, make fishermen’s shelters.
‘We’re fixing up this boat,’ Michel says. It’s the third time he’s mentioned this in as many minutes, and already there is a pall of futility about the enterprise, especially here, where year by year, inch by inch, the shingle piles up on itself, making new land.
‘Hanna wants us to sail around the world.’
Here the land gathers itself and rises to meet your footfall. What need of boats, round here?
She looks like an urchin spilled from the chorus of an old musical. Hanna. A five-foot-nothing shit-eating grin above a threadbare green jumper and holed, varnish-spattered jeans.