Terroir (20 page)

That was a story about destiny. Destiny was a thing to dream about. Sometimes Annie went to the marsh and sat for hours, watching dragonflies and damsel flies flicker over orange water that let out bubbles of gas. There were sticklebacks and newts and tadpoles in spring. Mr Nidrie, their biology teacher, told them about the damsel flies, how they mated on the wing. He'd give a small smile at his own daring, pulling at his tie, blushing a little. He had short dark hair and dimples and some of the girls had a crush on him.
Damsels in distress
. She'd seen the gas
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flame
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blue insects stuck together, still hovering, coordinating their wing beats in a blur of passion. He told them about the mayfly, how it lived for one short summer's day; how in that day it had to find all the happiness and freedom that life could offer it as light faded and air turned cold and dusk came and the end of everything came.

Mr Monroli lived in the top end of the village, up the long hill where the houses were detached and looked down to the church and along to the open countryside. He had dark eyebrows that joined in the middle and a huge St Bernard dog with white fur and a crooked brown stripe on its head. Mr Monroli's dog was called Mortimer and he'd let them ride on its back when they were children. He drove the fruit and veg van that called in at all the villages and towns that lay at the foot of that line of hills. Somehow he'd come into money.
Not by graftin' for it like the rest of us
, her father said. Her dad wanted a bigger house with a wide garden and gravel drive to park a car on and that's why he worked so hard in the butcher's shop.

Once she'd seen the dog chained outside her father's shop and her father and Mr Monroli chatting inside, behind rain clouds caught in the window glass. Mortimer peed up against the drainpipe and then his thing came out like a red dagger and he'd walked towards her until the leash dragged him back. Her father had seen all that and said something to Mr Monroli and they laughed, her father jerking his head in a certain way. She'd carried on walking to Jodie's, but she wished he hadn't laughed. She wished she hadn't seen the dog, its dark blank eyes under the dense bone of its brow. It made her flush for all the times she'd stroked it and climbed onto its back, feeling its fur silky and hot. She thought of her father feeding it scraps of liver and laughing.

Sometimes, when she helped her father on Saturdays, she climbed inside the big fridge in the back room of the shop and almost – but never quite – closed the door so that the electric light went out and there was just a crack of daylight. The chill began to enter her as she stood with the gutted carcases of pigs and lambs hanging next to her. You could see where their spinal cords had been, where their skulls had been split, their eyes and brains taken out. Once her father had caught her in there and he'd been upset and explained to her very quietly how dangerous it was. He'd hugged her and told her how if the door ever clicked shut on her and he didn't know where she was, she'd never be able to get out. That eventually she'd suffocate from lack of air or freeze to death. Annie knew that, had always known it. And so she did do it again, feeling the big rubber seal of the door almost touch, the heavy chrome catch click against its sneck, the light extinguishing, the cold from dead animals chilling her.

Years later, following a memory to its source, she did it after her father had a stroke and couldn't work any more and the shop was being emptied to be converted into an estate agent's office. She'd been called home from university because he'd started to mix up his words, and then collapsed.
Went down like an ox,
her mother said. By the time he left hospital, he couldn't walk or talk, but sat in a special chair with furious blue eyes and curled fingers. He lost two stone in weight and his hands felt like the dried skin on the back of the fur she'd played with as a child. Annie found the scraps as she wandered the house, still stuffed into the metal trunk in the attic, asking her mother the old questions and getting the same vague, impatient answers. She stepped into the fridge in the tiled back room of the shop, one last time. The electricity was disconnected and warm instead of cold, smelling of old blood from the sheep and pigs and cattle that had hung there on steel hooks. Annie felt that lovely touch of darkness as the chink of light narrowed and the metal catch touched and clicked and swung ajar again. She pushed it open with both hands, walking free. She'd taken a year off from her studies to help her mum get things straight. It should have been her study abroad year, teaching at a primary school in Barcelona. But it could wait. She wondered what had happened to Jodie in the years that had swirled between them.

The day after they buried her father, Annie went on a walk that passed through all her childhood places, a stream of moment and memory. She thought of her father, his tread on the stairs, the dark mass of him touching her as he settled on the bed to read to her. Thank God he hadn't lasted. She thought of the boiler there in the basement, its light like the thwarted blue in her father's eyes.

On that thin November day she found the shrunken fragments of childhood that had stayed in her dreams. The frayed noose of rope; the tangled roots of the sycamore; the built bungalows, their red brick still livid; the iron bridge with its fading graffiti; the water of the canal shivering under the heft of a train, brightly lit and heading away to the cities that burned up the night to horizons where hours would harden into years. She thought about what had happened, what hadn't, about what she'd imagined and hoped. The hazel bushes and alders and willow trees were bare in the little swamp and a cold wind was starting from the east. A few flakes of snow had come down onto the turned earth of the kirkyard, but had ceased upon the final prayer. There was a thin skim of ice between the reeds and a stand of bulrushes still erect, their cylinders of brown velvet firm and smooth and exact.

She thought of a child in Egypt hidden in a fisherman's creel. She thought about destiny. When she breathed, moisture puffed and faded, her body heat dissipating. She was seeing a boy who was studying medicine, in his third year now.
Gavin
. He had cold hands so that she laughed and flinched and squirmed away when they made love. Annie said she pitied his patients, remembering her father's hands under the kitchen tap. Sometimes she had to shut that out, feeling him yelp and come in a little splutter of breath, then withdrawing gently, bending his head to kiss her belly button.

Annie wondered where he was now. Maybe thinking about her. Maybe not. She'd think about him on the train tomorrow, all the way to the city. He'd be a doctor one day, saving lives; she'd teach children to speak in foreign tongues, reshaping the world through the mouth's small sounds. She let go of the velvety heads. They rustled against dried reeds, swayed to a standstill. In the summer there'd be maiden flies and dragonflies and damsel flies; the rusty water would teem with sticklebacks and tadpoles and newts. Even if the rest of the world was annihilated, life could start again here, evolving over a million, million years. Maybe human beings or something close to them would emerge again to touch each other, to make love and language, to name everything again. Ice splintered underfoot as she shivered and turned to leave, brushing dried willow leaves from the branches. A stiff easterly deadened her cheeks as she walked towards tomorrow, towards home where her mother was sorting through her father's things. Three white cooling towers stood at the horizon, extinct.

JENNY BROWN'S POINT

Col settled his hands on the wheel. They were red from hot water. One wing mirror was broken and the black electrical tape he'd used to mend it fluttered from the shattered glass. The windscreen wipers were smearing spray from a lorry. He switched on the radio. There was a local station up here now.
96.9 FM.
A woman's voice sang it to a corny tune. Jason was strapped into the child seat behind. Col had access every other weekend, but this morning Janine had been a real cow about it.
You've got to make your mind up, Col. We can't plan anything like this.

Like what? He'd missed a couple of weekends because of work, so things had got a bit out of sync. She'd had another kid – Kaylie – after he left, after shacking up with Simon who'd moved into the house. Simon who still had acne and did fuck
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all in the scheme of things. They were supposed to be going to a kids' party together, Jason and Kaylie who was three now. Janine said it wasn't fair, expecting Jason to give that up. Col almost told her to fuck off but he bit his tongue because she'd be on the phone to her solicitor slagging him off if he didn't behave.

So he'd spoken to her quietly and she'd asked Jason and, yes, he wanted to go with his dad. Simon kept out of the way. Just as well. He needed chinning, the soft twat. They'd painted the front door dark blue since last time. You could see the brush marks, like a kid had done it. The kitchen was just as he'd left it when he moved out. Everything fitted tight as a glove, scribed, mitred and joined to perfection, the beech wood surfaces oiled to a deep sheen. He didn't begrudge Janine that; it was a bit of himself, a reminder.

They set off with rain hitting the windscreen. Kaylie cried on the doorstep as Col pulled away. All well and good, except it was November and grim as hell. Saturday, so the traffic in town wasn't bad. Twenty minutes to the motorway. He had the radio on and kept turning round on the M6 to see if Jason was OK. Thumbs up. The music was cool, old soul hits. He'd played bass in a band for a bit when he was a teenager, but they'd never done anything. A few village hall gigs with silly haircuts. But that's why Janine had looked across at him in English. She had shiny brown hair that she hadn't dyed blonde. Her eyes were grey, green, brown. He'd never figured it out. She wasn't tarty like the other girls. She wore flat
-
heeled shoes. Sensible. There was something calm and sure about her. Even his mum liked her.

They'd done this trip when he was a kid in their old Fiesta. Col, his mum and dad, his sister Becky. Following behind, his dad's brother Pete and auntie Edith. They had no kids themselves. They had a blue Datsun estate with loads of room in it, so Col and Becky got to ride in the back. Sometimes it was Southport or Blackpool, but they'd settled on Morecambe as he and Becky got older. They'd tried the east coast once, but that had been a nightmare.
Bloody Siberia in swimming trunks
. His dad and Pete worked together at the Post Office. They spent most of that week in the pub, coming back half
-
pissed for their tea at the self
-
catering place they'd hired, farting and laughing like teenagers. His granddad had been a postman, too.

Back then they never had much money, but they had jobs and people stayed together. Stayed together and fought. There in the tight terraced streets, shouting over the noise of the TV, over the screams of the baby, and no way out. For Col's parents marriage meant just trying to out
-
manoeuvre each other. Like that game: paper, stone, scissors. A form of attrition. A woman in Col's street had drowned herself in the reservoir one New Year's Eve. He remembered her husband's blotchy eyes, the hearse coming down the street, stretching their faces in its shiny coachwork. He thought of the dark hole they'd bury her in. Col wanted more than that. He wanted life, he wanted whatever love was, whatever it meant.

Col pulled in at Forton services to get a bottle of water and some ciggies. He'd just about got enough petrol. He bought a bottle of pop for Jason, a comic and some crisps. Jason looked as pleased as punch. He was good like that. A great kid. It didn't take much. He looked cute in his blue puffer jacket and trainers that lit up with red LEDs when he stamped his feet. Col was working shifts in a hotel restaurant as a kitchen porter, which wasn't ideal. He'd trained as a joiner. What he loved was building things. Fitting roofing timbers, architraves, skirting boards so they mitred snugly. He'd been taught to write on wood and gave a poem to Janine written on a length of tongue and groove. She thought it was cute. He'd fitted out the bathroom and kitchen when he and Janine moved into the end terrace.

All that had gone tits
-
up in the recession. The building trade fell on its arse and he'd been laid off
.
He'd got a shit job now and
most of the wages went into rent and heating. He got housing benefit, but he wasn't going on the social. He'd still got his carpentry tools. His chisels and power drills and handsaws, the router and folding bench. He knew other blokes who trained with him who'd sold theirs. You were fucked once you did that. You went under and stayed there. He'd seen older guys sitting in the pub over halves of lager staring at the racing on TV. Not him. Fuck that. He got the odd carpentry job, moonlighting between shifts with a cash advance for materials. The rest of the money went on Jason.

He'd got Janine pregnant when she was seventeen and she was still at school. He was an apprentice and she was in the sixth form, thinking about Uni. He thought he'd loved her. Told her he loved her when they'd bunked off school and college to sneak back into her house, taking off her clothes, breathless in her bedroom with her Pop Idol posters and CDs everywhere. The teddy
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bear pyjamas he found so sexy, making her put them on so he could take them off again, putting his tongue against her small breasts, wetting them, feeling her through the thin cotton of her pants. His mum had gone mad when she found out. They got married and never stopped arguing after that. All through her pregnancy, then when Jason was waking them up all night to feed. Things had got better for a bit, when he settled down, but then they'd slipped back into it again, struggling to make ends meet, blaming each other for things. Scissors and paper. Paper and stone. Whatever. Then the firm let him go and that was the beginning of the end.