The Travellers and Other Stories (9 page)

A short distance away from me Boot was lying by himself on the sand.

The tartan picnic rug was of course too good for Boot.

I knew that. I'd been told.

‘Give Boot an inch,' Ian reminded me nearly every day over breakfast, ‘and he'll take a mile.'

I watched him lying there, meek and quiet, scarcely flinching when the baby began sprinkling handfuls of cold pebbles on his back and trying to bury his tail in the wet sand. If he was aware of her, he gave no sign; he just lay on his side like a vegetable, gazing blankly out across the water.

What can I say?

Only that it killed me to see him like that. Only that I knew I liked him better the way he was before, that I preferred things the way they used to be, and that there had always been more than two options.

Ian was a while in the water.

I remember watching him come walking out through the shallow waves, the surf fizzing around his knees, then his ankles. I remember how he started jogging when he reached the dry sand, shouting when he was still quite a long way off.

‘What's happening Nicky? What's going on?' he was saying, a little breathlessly because he was running quite fast now, his head tilted to one side, his face scrunched up in an expression of bewildered concern, but by then Boot was already on the rug, half way through his Cornetto and I wasn't really listening.

SCOUTING FOR BOYS

I
'
D NEVER LIKED
Needham.

He was small and thin with hollow cheeks and a pointed chin, a mole like a film star near his cramped little mouth. His head was shaved and you could see the bone of his skull where it joined his neck. It made the shape of an
m
, the same shape young children draw to show a bird in the sky. In school I used to stare at it from my seat, directly behind him because my surname followed his, so close I could have reached out and run my finger along that ridge of bone there, along the seam of his head.

His eyes were grey and narrow and inscrutable, like the rest of his pale sharp face. You knew he'd never explain to you why there was just him and his grandmother at home, and a dark-skinned little girl who was supposed to be his sister but looked nothing like him. None of us knew his story, he kept it locked up inside himself, inside his closed-up little heart, inside the small, bony scaffold of his head.

I didn't like him. He had grime under his fingernails and a rude, aggressive manner, and on the one occasion I'd tried to do him a kindness, he'd shown no gratitude whatsoever. I'd found a book of his on the path on my way home one afternoon and, knowing where he lived, I took it to him.

I could see his place, a shabby little flat over somebody else's shop, from my house. I could see it in the distance on the other side of the park, beyond the high creosoted fence and the glittering screen of poplars there.

A short metal staircase led up to a concrete porch and a hollow wooden door with a straight handle. His grandmother answered when I knocked. She was small like Needham and had the same pinched angular features. She was dressed in a droopy flesh-coloured dressing gown with a man's striped tie for a belt. On her head, beneath a see-through lemon scarf, I could see a few wisps of white hair, soft and flyaway like a baby's. She looked me up and down, her eyes travelling slowly over my blue school coat, my brown shoes.

I gave her Needham's book. She took it without looking at it and carried on looking all over me, at my coat, my legs in their grey school trousers, my shoes. She moistened her lips, as if seeing me had made her hungry. She had the same hard look as Needham but her voice when it came was soft and slow and vague.

‘Are you going to wait for him?'

I had no intention of waiting, of going inside or staying, but she had already turned to lead me in. As I followed her, I could see through the gauzy scarf on her head and the sparse white fluff of her hair that she had the same ridge of bone at the base of her head as he did. Where it made him look stubborn, it made her look fragile, brittle. It looked like a fault, a fissure, a place you could tap and it would crack open and show you what was in there.

There was no hallway. The door opened immediately into a room which was part kitchen and part bedroom, there were three narrow beds spread with thin nylon sleeping bags against one wall. On the other side of the room stood a gas stove with two burners.

There was no wardrobe and there were no cupboards, the only place where anything could have been stored was in a little red suitcase which stood all by itself in one corner.

One door led off the room. Through it I could see a low yellow bath draped with a balding green hand towel, a pattern of glue on the wall behind where tiles had once been. There was no sign of Needham's dark-skinned little sister. There was a smell of fishpaste and digestive biscuits.

Without asking if I wanted it, Needham's grandmother made me a horrible cup of powdered coffee with dried milk. I drank it in silence, and then Needham came in through the door.

‘This boy brought your book back,' said his grandma in the same sweet dreamy voice as before. I wondered if she drank. She smiled at Needham as if she couldn't see what had happened to his pale face when he saw me in there, hadn't seen it turn even harder and tighter than usual. I'd never seen him look so mean.

Needham ignored her and didn't say a word when I handed him his book. He stood stiffly near the door and watched while I drank the horrible coffee. It tasted of chicory and sand and I wished I hadn't come. I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be away from this strange dirty boy, his odd family, his rude challenging stare. I drank as much of the foul coffee as I could and then I left.

Needham had never come with us to camp before that summer.

It was a shock to see him there that morning, waiting on the pavement in front of the park for the coach. It was a shock to see him coming with us, Needham who lived, not in a house, but in a shabby little flat over someone else's shop, whose sister looked nothing like him. Needham who wore on his feet black elasticated plimsoles instead of shoes. Needham who always wore the same stale pair of washed-out grey shorts, whose green scout's shirt looked like something he'd made himself, whose grandma drank and drifted about in an ancient dressing gown in the middle of the day.

The morning we left for the Lakes he was there before anyone, standing on his own waiting for the coach. He was wearing his usual clothes: the plimsoles, the washed-out shorts, his peculiar home-made scout's shirt. The thin navy mac he sometimes wore to school hung from his hand. The only thing that was different about him was that he looked, in an anxious sort of way, rather happy. He shifted about excitedly on the thin rubber soles of his plimsoles, craning his neck to see if the coach was coming yet.

He was smiling, and he had brought with him the most extraordinary bag.

It was the little red suitcase I had seen in the corner of his grandmother's flat, made out of molded plastic with a metal lock beneath a long handle. It was the most completely unsuitable thing, and drew attention to itself almost monstrously as it sat there upright on the pavement in the place where the rest of us had heaped our drab green and brown rucksacks.

His blue sleeping bag was all right. There was nothing really wrong with that, it was only rather thin and grubby. He'd tied it round with string and it did not really stand out from the others in the pile. I recognised it from my visit to his home.

But the suitcase shocked me. It was like a cheap version of something my mother might use, a coarse copy of the leather week-end case she used for short trips away with my father, the sort of case that had a shiny fabric lining and a ruched pocket for brushes and combs and an oblong mirror set into the lid. I'd watched my mother pack hers on several occasions. I'd watched her take her cosmetics out of the bathroom cabinet—her Helena Rubinstein Washing Grains, her Revlon moisturiser, the round cake of Roger & Gallet soap in its green opaque box. I'd watched her zip them into her sponge bag and put the bag in the suitcase with her nightie, her underwear, her Carmen rollers. I'd seen her turn the small, flat key in the lock beneath the handle, and carry it down to the car.

Some of the boys laughed openly at Needham's red suitcase.

‘Nice bag, Needham,' said Qualtrone.

But Needham raised his pointed chin and ignored him, he looked steadily at the approaching coach as if all he was thinking about were mountains and rivers and fires, and all the things we were going to be doing in the Lakes, all the things he'd heard us talk about over the years but had never yet experienced for himself. Mr. Persian arrived then and we loaded everything on, and the others seemed to forget about the little plastic case.

It disturbed me though, this woman's bag of Needham's, with its long handle and its lock, and its suggestion of lace and stockings and perfumed soap.

We all thought of Mr. Persian as an old man, but I see now, when I conjure again his broad open face, that he was young.

He had dark, almost black hair, which he wore smoothed with Brylcreem close to his scalp, and parted in a clean white line on the left side. He was short and powerful, always very smart and neat in his uniform.

A scout is clean.

He reminded us often of this and it had always been a mystery to me how he could tolerate someone as slovenly and ill-kempt as Needham when he was himself so careful about his appearance and ours. Only Mr. Persian's fingernails let him down—he was ashamed of them, I think—they were chewed to the quick and didn't belong to the rest of him. They were the hands of another man and he hid them away whenever he could in the pockets of his shorts.

We all liked him very much. We liked him better than our teachers, who were sarcastic and bored and didn't seem to enjoy being with us. Many of us, I think, liked him better than our fathers, I certainly liked him better than mine. I think I liked Mr. Persian, actually, at that time, more than anyone else in the world. I liked the fact that he seemed to enjoy being with us, that he talked to us. I liked the seriousness with which he went about everything we did together, as if all of it—a good star-shaped fire, the right knot, the difference on a map between a mixed wood and an orchard—were real life, as if it mattered much more than anything else we did in the rest of our lives, as if it were more real than school and the time we spent with our families, more real than whatever it was he did when he was not with us on Thursday evenings in the white hut on the Forest Road, and in our one week away together in the summer.

It was his custom to give us all a copy of the handbook when we joined. I still have mine, the green and red 1967 paperback edition, and while I can see now that it is, on the whole, a self-important, rather comical little book, both priggish and prurient, at the time I was very proud of it, wrote my name in ink on the flyleaf, and committed great chunks to memory. To this day I can remember that the span of my extended arms is almost equal to my height. I can remember that a line through the belt and head of Orion will give you the Pole Star.

That the best way to harden the feet is to soak them in a solution of water and alum.

That a poisonous snake carries its venom in a bag concealed within its mouth.

Every day that we were away it was warm and sunny except for the last one when we did our big climb and it rained. We did all the usual things during the week that summer, the same as any other: we hiked up to Grisedale Tarn, and took the ferry across Ullswater to Pooley Bridge. We took a bus into Penrith and visited Brougham castle.

Until the end, only one small incident marred everyone's enjoyment of the week—a nasty scuffle quite near the beginning between Qualtrone and Needham when Qualtrone made some remark about Needham's sister which Needham found offensive. The result was a short, scrappy fight during which Qualtrone had his cheeks viciously raked by Needham's fingernails. Mr. Persian broke them apart with his usual brisk composure, he didn't shout at them, he just sent them off in different directions to perform various chores and that was that.

Otherwise Needham looked very happy. I don't think any of it disappointed him. He kept up with Mr. Persian on our walks, half running all the time, like some lean and hairless dog, to keep up with the older man's smart pace. He seemed hungry to hear about everything there was to see. Whenever you looked, Needham was up there at the front of any group when Mr. Persian stopped to point something out. This is how it was all the time on our walks; it seemed to me he was always, always there, right at the front with Mr. Persian, almost beside himself with the pleasure of it all.

All through our walks Mr. Persian kept up a stream of observation as we went along. He prided himself on his sharp eyesight, on his ability to read the landscape spread out before us:
a scout is observant
, he liked to say.

He maintained this constant patter as we walked, holding up his short muscular arms from time to time as a sign for us to stop when he saw something he particularly wanted us to notice, to learn from. I can still picture him, striding out in front, the smooth unspooling of his commentary.
Trig Point. Oxbow Lake. U-shaped Valley. Mica Schist. Victorian Spruce Plantation. Limestone Pavement.

One day we found raspberries growing by the path and ate them with our sandwiches. Needham ate his sitting on the ground next to Mr. Persian. I can see them now, Needham is smiling, they both are, sitting there together, with Mr. Persian looking happy too, leaning back with his knees clasped in his hands, relaxing in the rare, new sunshine of Needham's smiles. From time to time Mr. Persian would say something that made Needham laugh and then you saw his pale unwholesome face open like a flower.

On another occasion—a hot afternoon later in the week—we went swimming in a deep hole at the foot of the mountain where we had set up our camp. The water was icy and clear. It ran from a wide stream, plunging between the shoulders of two rocks, all movement ceasing where it broke over the edge, falling calm and silent into the deep pool below. All of us boys swam except for Needham, who announced at breakfast that he had forgotten to bring his swimming trunks, and when we arrived at the swimming hole Mr. Persian told us all to go ahead, he would sit with Needham and keep him company and watch. We all dived in, and for an hour or more, I forgot them.