It pleases you to be fastening the cuffs on a shirt so new-looking, so apparently white. But are you not saddened, too, to find time rewinding so easily? You must look very much the same as when you stepped down off the train in the New Year: a returning, not-so-very-prodigal son. You thread your tie. Close your throat against the room’s cold. Think of your father’s face as you glimpsed it from the train that day in January: a face framed in the spray-can snow still adorning the station café window. On it was a loneliness you could not then begin to measure, but instantly reckoned with your own.
Bob is downstairs in the parlour now, raking out the fire. The almost-musical scrape of that tiny shovel in the grate. Robert Lanyon, third-generation lathe-man. He has proved too firmly rooted to ever leave this valley, as the rest of you have left, one after another.
Stella – your mother’s sister, ten years younger and a looker – was the first to leave Yorkshire, leading the family’s diaspora. No one was surprised to see her go, least of all the teachers at that miserable school you went to, slumping along in her footsteps. Your headmistress had been a probationary English teacher when Stella was at school, and imagined people admired the way she and her staff held to their original, dismal view of Sue (as she was back then), stiffly ignoring her subsequent successes on stage, in film and, most recently, in the Bund. It is an attitude that has only made the institution appear more petty.
The next emigrant? Uncle Michael, Bob’s older and reputedly much smarter brother. Michael upped sticks to Canada. Fleeing the bombs, he said. The rocketship yards and reactors. The radiological toll. The ‘greens’: government-issued radiogardase pills. ‘The whole country is committing slow suicide,’ he wrote, in the only letter he ever sent home: you found it years ago in the back of your dad’s clothes drawer. Whatever the reasons for his emigration (along with the stick of plutonium, there came the carrot of a sizeable tax break), the upshot is a whole slew of barely-heard-of relations are earning quick fortunes and hard knocks in the shale fields of Alberta.
Jim was next, your brother: straight from school into the army. You have no idea where his fascination with the Space Force began. At home, the nearest he ever got to rockets was the percussion caps he persuaded you to steal from a nearby quarry. The pair of you spent a whole summer blasting them, trying to reroute the course of the brook below Heptonstall. You were never caught; the police were baffled. Since joining the Force Jim has written to the family with decreasing frequency, his stories becoming ever more bland, their details more and more thoroughly redacted. Last month he recommended your dad buy government bonds. That had to have been dictated by somebody else.
Finally Betty, your mother. Three years go she moved in with Aunt Stella to attend outpatient chemotherapy appointments and, in so doing, took her first, fatal sips of Georgy Chernoy’s magic medicine.
Sue/Stella. Michael. Jim. Betty. All of them have been blown down the valley, one way or another, onto the rails and away. Bob alone remains.
Your jacket pockets are full of unnecessary things. You sort them out in the half-light. A penknife and a tube of mints. A scrip for ‘greens’ and a packet of them, half-gone but still more than enough to see you back to the city.
You pause for a second, the cold prickling you under your clothes. Below you, in the sitting room, you can hear your father cracking kindling.
You go to the mantelpiece and pick up the two objects you always take with you when you travel. Jim grins from out of his cheap brass-effect frame. On his army dress uniform are pinned the black, white and desaturated blue colours of the Space Force. (They didn’t have separate uniforms when he joined, only colours; the service is very new.)
Into one pocket goes the photograph. Into the other goes the dolly. It’s a chickie-made thing: a figurine of woven straw, faceless and shapeless; a frayed bundle of knotted stalks. You found it one day while walking the peat moors high above the town. It was lying, not even in the grass, but somehow on top of the grass, not hidden, not settled, but almost as if it were balancing on the tips of the grass blades, as an Indian sadhu might distribute the weight of his body harmlessly across a bed of nails. You were skirting a small, anomalous island of earth maybe a foot above the surrounding ground. Old peat workings, you assumed. Only later did you let your imagination run riot. That table of earth: might it have been an ancient altar?
Making up grandiose stories about your find became a kind of habit with you; a game you played with yourself. The stories enjoyed a bizarre resurgence when you went to architecture school. Chatting up young women in student bars on the banks of the Thames, you found it tempting, though wildly dishonest, to ascribe to this foundational moment the beginnings of your fascination with the built environment. (‘And there it was, this tip of a buried ziggurat, the whole plan of the place laid itself out before me, I found myself able to read the earth,’ and so on and so forth. Some well-inclined women will fall for this kind of thing.)
In truth, you did experience a kind of revelation that day. Though you knew there were chickies living in the hills above your town (why not there? There are chickies everywhere), the dolly in your trembling hand was solid evidence of their presence.
You showed it to Jim and he grunted and you said, ‘Is this a chickie thing?’ His shrug said, Whose else would it be? You wished his response had not been so casual, so unsurprised.
Clutching the abandoned dolly, not understanding it, or what there was about it that needed your understanding (was it a toy? A votive figure? A mislaid household god?), you felt suddenly at odds with everything, divorced from the whole accepting world. You hadn’t even seen a chickie in the flesh by that point. Only pictures.
Pockets full for no reason – Jim an awkward, sharp-cornered slab in one, the dolly a solid lump in the other – you work your way around that absurd child’s bed you still sleep in. As you leave the room, the loose board creaks as usual beneath the thin oatmeal rug.
You clatter down uncarpeted stairs to the parlour. It is darker down here. At street level the windows, lace-curtained, are shielded from the furnace light of the valley, and Bob is a shadow among shadows, a heavier-than-life blocking of the darkness. Bowls scrape and spoons rattle as he lays the table for breakfast. The blocks of him turn and swiveclass="underline" ‘Morning,’ the word less of a greeting than a statement of raw fact.
Back at him: ‘Morning.’ You feel your way into a chair. The blocks of your father move to the chimney breast, and in the light of the few flames there, shrink and slenderise and gather into human form. ‘Ready, then?’ He brings the tin jug from the hearth and, his hand gloved in a thin towel, pours the coffee. You sip at it; as always, it is watery and tannic. Bob goes back and forth, bringing each part of your breakfast out of the galley kitchen one item at a time: bacon, butter, bread, a tiresome ritual, something to do with love, and though it renders you a child – a little pasha perched upon his wooden throne, waiting to be fed – you know better than to spoil the moment by helping.
The salt and fat filling your mouth are a more effective alarm than any bell, any cold. Fully awake at last, you gaze around the room. Its sparse but heavy furniture – bureau, rocking chair and sideboard – float more than stand in the dark room, as if only habit and old expectation maintain them in this cramped space. Photographs in heavy frames on the walls contain dim but well-remembered scenes: holidays, school photographs, newspaper portraits of Jim. Jim is a celebrity now, the toast of the valley, first Yorkshireman in space, for all that (a local joke, this) he has only had to follow in the van of his valley’s own steel.