Terroir (16 page)

I still have that photograph in a box of negatives and prints labelled with his name. He looks like a fallen knight, a sleeping warrior, one arm thrown across the bed, one across his chest. The light slanting into the room and onto his face. He's young there. Forever. I'm holding the image now, here in the future, my old hands bracketing his youth. I made an enlargement from the negative. It's soft
-
focus, but that gives it a tender quality, my brother sleeping, safe from all harm. His mouth curves into the dimpled shadow of a smile, as if he's glad to be home. One moment stopped from time's flow.

All that's a mystery, somehow. A paradox. An illusion. It'd take fifty of these images to capture even a whole second of the years we spent together, yet there are only seventeen images in the box labelled
Noel
. Seventeen fiftieths. A passage of time so small that it lies somewhere between the flicker of the second hand on my watch. It's a tremor, a measure of transition rather than time. The snap of the shutter. A serpent's eye blinking. The magician's sleight of hand. That man in the black suit we saw at Fred Karno's, closing his hand on a pigeon's egg, then opening it to show it had disappeared. When he took off his top hat to acknowledge our applause a pigeon flew up to the high wire and perched there. I never showed that picture of Noel to my mother.

When Noel woke up he drank the cold separated tea with a grimace, grinned and said
worse things happen at sea.
Then he took off his uniform and started opening drawers. For some reason he couldn't find his favourite shirt. Maybe our mother had washed it or was mending it. She loved to sit in the firelight with a piece of darning listening to the BBC.

­– Where's she put my stuff?

­– I don't know.

I tossed him a neatly ironed work shirt that mother had folded by my bed.

– Try this. It's clean.

– Ugh!

He pretended to smell it, but put it on anyway. He was wearing a vest and there were bruises down his arms. Later, over a drink, he told me about dragging cases of cannon shells into the magazine for the forward guns.
Bloody murder.
Everyone bawling at you to go faster, as if you gave a monkey's.
He told me about trying to sleep in his bunk with the U
-
boats slinking beneath them, hiding in the darkest fathoms of the sea.

Then he couldn't find his trousers or shoes. I don't know where we got the idea, but Noel decided to dress up in my clothes for a prank. Mother was due back from work at five
-
thirty, so we had a couple of hours to practise. He dropped his voice slightly to mimic mine. The master
-
stroke was borrowing my reading spectacles. I'll swear to God he looked more like me than I did. I had three shots left in my camera and I'd just bought a flashgun. The plan was to follow Noel downstairs and catch the happy reunion when our mother realised what had happened.

The afternoon passed in chatting and lounging in the bedroom. We went out for a quick one at the local pub, where there'd be a decent fire. I seem to remember that the Christmas decorations were up. But we were careful to get back in good time. Noel was never much of a drinker anyway. Back at the house we piled upstairs and waited. Just after five
-
thirty, then voices in the street outside as mother said goodbye to a neighbour who'd walked with her. Then the key turned in the lock and she was hanging up her coat in the hall.

– Lewis?

I looked at Noel and he signalled at me to answer.

– Hiya.

– Are you OK? Feeling better?

– Yes, fine.

– Come down for tea in a few minutes OK?

– OK.

Noel was smiling delightedly. He put his finger on his lips. It couldn't have worked out better. We heard her clinking about the kitchen, cutting bread and heating up the soup she'd made from ham shank and dried peas the day before. It smelled good, drifting up the stairs. Noel waited a few minutes, then picked up my copy of
Picture Post
and went downstairs. I heard him grunt at Mother, a pretty good imitation of me on a grumpy day. She asked him if I was better and he coughed, a little too theatrically. I crept downstairs in my stockinged feet with the camera and flashgun and sat on the bottom step waiting for the moment.

When nothing happened I realised that they must be eating. I could hear the clink of soup spoons, odd distracted words from my mother, short replies from Noel. She hadn't been looking for him and so she hadn't noticed he wasn't me. I retreated back up the stairs. After about fifteen minutes I heard the table being cleared and knew my mother would be in the kitchen, so I slipped into the front parlour and hunkered down behind the settee where I couldn't be seen. It was a strange feeling. A cold, hungry feeling, as if I'd died. Noel was pretending to be me and she hadn't noticed. Yet I knew she was thinking about him all the time, beside herself with worry every day. Beside myself was how I felt now, that odd expression making sense at last.

It wasn't quite cold enough to set a fire. In the war, there'd have to be ice on the mantelpiece for that. Mother came in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron, still wet from washing up. She picked up a bundle of knitting from the settee and began sorting through her needles. Noel came in and stood in the doorway for a moment. He was still wearing my striped pullover and reading glasses and the effect was uncanny. Even though we were used to being alike, had spent all our lives being mistaken for each other, we'd never taken it this far. It was like being out of my own body, like being a spirit and looking back at life from somewhere else. There was a look of bewilderment and pain on Noel's face. My mother was ignoring him and I realised that he didn't know what to do, didn't know how to break the spell.

I saw him move squeeze past the Christmas tree with its trembling tinsel streamers and sit down on the piano stool. He swung his legs under the keyboard and placed his hands above the keys. When I saw Noel's hands, they seemed to darken, like the severed hands King Leopold's men had taken to impose their rule on the Congo, stealing copper and mahogany, the iron, ivory and ebony that made an instrument. Noel nodded, as if swallowing something. When his hands fell to the keys he played the first few bars of ‘
O Tannenbaum'
, aka ‘The Red Flag'. At first my mother seemed paralysed. Her head rose up by degrees like a periscope. The look on her face was indescribable, but one I'll never forget. It flickered between emotions: love, joy, pain, loss, discovery. I rose up from behind the settee with the camera and pressed the shutter, but I'd forgotten to switch on the flash, so the photograph was almost black when I developed it. Just shadows. Ghosts. I think the shock of light might have killed her anyway. She dropped the knitting and stood up. Then, quick as a whip, she cracked Noel around the face and cracked me one too. A full tilt smack of the hand that sent me reeling and nearly knocked Noel from the piano stool. My mother had never hit us before and now she stood with her chest heaving and tears streaming down her face. A huge sob bubbled up in her chest. It was only then we realised how cruel we'd been, how unending her love was, how inconsolable. After that evening, we never spoke about what had happened. Not that we got much chance.

We were eighteen when Mosley came to Belle Vue and we'd got quietly drunk on the way home, taking a half in each pub on the way. Our mother had been listening to it on the news and she'd hugged us on the doorstep, even though we were half cut. She'd heard it all on the wireless. She was proud of us then and she knew we'd look out for each other. Or that Noel would look out for me. He was lost in the Baring Sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1942, part of a Russian supply convoy. Some of the crew were saved and there were weeks of waiting. They turned into years, yet our mother would never agree to a headstone. I always knew he was drowned, because I'd seen that in my head, felt the seawater in my own chest. I took to wearing his clothes, took to
being
him. Neighbours stared at me in the street, a kind of hope darting into their faces. But they passed on with nothing said. He'd made some shirts with Goldstein when he was starting out. Cotton poplin. They lasted me for years. And I had that photograph of him where he looked as if he'd already passed away, though he was only asleep.

They say life goes on, and it's true, but life is never the same. Nor should it be. I remember going to the seaside near Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast years later. The kids were playing with coal that had washed up on the beach, a long dark fan left by the tide with cuttlefish and bladderwrack and a woman's red shoe. I remember wondering if the coal had come from steamships sunk in the war. Everything is changed by such events. They reached out to hurt the quietest lives. To families all over Europe, then to Asia and Africa. And all because of hate.

After Noel left and never came home and for all the rest of the time I lived in Crumpsall, I hated that cold little front parlour. Whenever I was in there with my mother, especially just before Christmas when the days were short and we were supposed to be celebrating, she'd become cast down and watchful. Listening for the door, harkening to footsteps in the street. I had the feeling, even years afterwards when I had a wife and kids of my own, that she expected me at any moment to sit down at the piano and play.

ANGIE

He's walking over frost
-
stiffened grass, his shadow ahead of him, long
-
legged, stretched by the falling sun. The grass makes the sound of crunching gristle and Steve's shadow wears a brimmed hat. When he climbs a stile he sees his hands turning into his father's hands. Because things change like that, from one state to another, from one condition to the next. He's still weak from the flu, his legs heavy, his chest tight with infection. He has a three
-
week beard and it blows against his face, tickling him. Angie likes it. She says it makes him look nautical. It reminds him of days without shaving or washing, clothes salted with sweat. Watching a path zigzag though the bush. Hearing macaws shriek into a clearing where a bamboo hut is rotting under stray rays of light. Feeling the dust of a mountain trail sift through his fingers into a scorching breeze, shadows deepening in gullies, sky burnished to a blue dome. He rubs the long bristles with his fingers. Tomorrow he'll buy some clippers.

Angie always marvelled at his patience. However late she was, he'd be there, smoking a cigarette, chewing a stalk of grass, lying full length at the beach or their rendezvous under that giant Spanish chestnut by the river. She could never surprise him. Though he'd surprised her that time, outside McEnery's, where they'd arranged to meet under the canopy after work. Arriving so quietly, placing his hands over her eyes, then letting them slide to her hips, feeling her sag against him.
It's OK,
he said,
it's only the Grim Reaper.
And she'd laughed, her body warm against him, her eyes squinting as if he was still in the far distance of her life.
You're quiet,
she said, admiring him,
like a big cat, like a tiger or something
. He took his hands back.
A puma,
he said, they're really quiet,
I saw one in New Mexico.
They turned to see themselves reflected in plate glass, superimposed on streetlights and passing cars. The tailor's naked mannequins seemed to beckon them to their world of ghosts.
They look like dancers,
Angie said,
dancers
who've forgotten how to dance.
Then she'd pulled him away, linking arms.

When he steps from the stile to the crusted grass, it's soft with mud. He feels the tendons tighten behind his knees. Once he could run 10k without slackening, drop his pack, crouch, then put five rounds into the red at sixty paces. Now two Suffolk tups stare at him, their black ears hanging, their fleeces tight as barristers' wigs. Ahead of him, the land rises to a copse of sycamores. An abandoned rookery is falling from the branches, plundered by magpies and carrion crows. The track is faint, hardly trodden now. The red cattle have been taken into the shippen for the winter. His looks at his hands again, their close
-
trimmed nails, the split skin on his thumb, brown freckles over blue veins, wrinkles, swollen knuckles, dark hairs. His father had collapsed and died at a bus stop in the Black Country town where he'd been born, a carrier bag holding the weekly shop at each side of him.

The town was a nothing place by then. Boarded
-
up shops and shuttered takeaways. Empty pubs where you'd be hard put to it to find a fight on Friday nights. Factories and engineering works and potteries turned into mail
-
order warehouses or gyms. Or left to rot with To Let notices peeling in the rain. Years later, he'd been called home to find his mother in the old city hospital, dehydrated, feverish and rambling. She had sores on her legs from lying in wet sheets. She hadn't recognised Steve, her eyes glazed by fever.
Don't worry,
she kept saying,
don't look so worried
. This wasn't his mother. Whatever else, she'd always known who was who and what was what. Steve was white with anger when the doctors came, though he never raised his voice, watching the nurses put up a saline drip. He sat by her bed for three days, hardly moving, living on coffee and sandwiches from a vending machine.