Dad asked her, ‘What time is your train tomorrow?’
‘After eleven.’
‘After eleven?’
‘Quarter past eleven. Eleven twenty. Eleven twenty-one at the third beep.’
‘I can run you down in the car, but you’ll be waiting there a while.’
‘You can run me down in the car?’
‘I can run you over.’
‘You can run me over?’
‘Do you want me to give you a lift or not?’
‘No, Ben, it’s okay.’
‘You’ll have to make your own way to the station then. I need the car. I’ll be leaving around eight.’
I said to Michel, by way of explanation, ‘Mum’s off on a protest.’
‘Sara,’ Dad said, ‘is going to get herself cold, wet, scared, arrested and very probably beaten.’
‘Jesus Christ, Dad.’
‘Certainly kettled. Hosed. Maybe gassed.’
Mum joined in, mimicking him. ‘Blinded. Blown up.’
There was an awkward silence as Mum and Dad remembered, far too late, what I’d told them about Michel’s family.
Michel looked from me to Dad and back again. ‘What? You want me to say “beheaded”?’
‘Let’s all calm down,’ Dad said.
‘Let’s not,’ said Mum.
I said, ‘Let’s just eat the fucking fish I caught.’
‘Caught?’
‘Cooked. Let’s eat the fucking fish I cooked.’
‘Does this sort of thing run in the family?’ Michel asked Mum, trying to jolly things along, to give as good as he was getting, to join in.
Mum said, ‘You wouldn’t believe the things that run in this fucking family.’
‘Enjoy your tent that I paid for,’ Dad said.
‘I bloody will, Ben. Thanks.’
When he left (by the front entrance, off to the housing estate and his widowed mum’s bungalow) Michel said to me, with admiration, ‘She’s quite a character, your mum.’
The following morning I traipsed after Mum to the station, ‘helping her with her bags’, breathing in her second-hand smoke. She had no time for my preferred, round-about way into town. ‘I need to get going.’ She had us cut straight across the estate.
Our hotel used to have a view. I remember clover. Watercress. (Peppery – it made me sneeze.) Now even the water was gone: canalised, buried deep, a maze. I remember them lowering big concrete pipes into the ground. Diggers and pile-drivers and drills. Lakes of mud.
The housing estate was made of all the same shape of bungalow: small, square, with roofs of red tile. The roads were curved, generating fractional differences in the sizes of neighbouring gardens. Because the bungalows were all exactly alike, the people who lived in them had each tried to make their own bungalow stand out from all the others. The walls were clad in a smooth render, and each house was painted a different colour. Eggshell blue. Sand yellow. Moss green. The driveways were different. One had tarmac newly laid. There were marble chips in it. It looked like a cake. Others had laid various grades and kinds of gravel. Someone had laid bark chips. Each bungalow had a garage, and each garage had a different kind of door. Some were metal. Others were wood, with little windows. On and on like this, your head ended up full of this junk: how some verges were well-tended, as though for a game of miniature bowls, while others were overgrown, a mass of weeds, dandelions and clover, and still others were so bare and dusty they looked new-sown. On and on and on. Mum had told me that places like this matured; that new trees would grow. But here she was, going away again. For all her efforts the world had yet to be saved; and the estate looked as raw and as ugly as it always had.
On the railway platform, Mum stared down at her great, clod-hopping black boots. She was trying to find words. Something right for the moment. ‘I thought you were going to walk with me.’
‘I did walk with you.’
She ground out the butt of her cigarette. ‘You lagged behind.’
‘I wasn’t lagging behind, I was trying to catch up with you.’
‘We didn’t talk at all.’
‘You didn’t want to talk to me.’
‘I did.’
‘Well.’ I told myself I was not going to cry. I was bloody well not going to.
Mum stared at her feet, casting glances that never quite reached me. For one horrible moment I was sure she was going to try to apologise. ‘Christ, it’s cold,’ she said.
‘It’s going to be colder in the tent.’
‘Will you visit me?’
‘No.’
‘Give me a hug.’
Her head rolled against mine. Her newly shorn hair bristled against my cheek.
‘What?’
‘You feel like a man.’
‘I do?’
‘I’d better go,’ I said.
By the time I saw him, standing at the far end of the westbound platform in army drab and big black glasses, I was on the footbridge, crossing lines. Committed to departure. His hair, too long for regulation, made a white halo against the shredded sky. At his feet, a duffle bag almost as big as he was.
A grey mitten of cloud folded itself over the sun and the man’s hair went out, went grey, became unremarkable.
What could I have done? What could I have said? I couldn’t even be sure that this was the same man who had exposed himself to me. Mum waved, dismissing me, and I returned her wave automatically, a puppet strung on wire. Impossible, on such weak evidence, to break the conventions of farewell. So I left her there with him.
Normally I would have walked back along the river; instead I found myself heading for the estate, the way I had come with Mum. It didn’t matter anymore. The water meadows were gone and nothing would bring them back. Michel was wrong. If the world fell apart tomorrow and humanity vanished in a puff of smoke, the waters here, cracking free of their concrete prison, would never run as they used to run. They would find new courses. The old stream beds – ribbons of silt and sand that webbed this place, mystifying gardeners – would blear and vanish over time, a network of collapsed veins. Michel’s bleak, muscular view of collapse was no more than a boy’s romance. No one can say what will succeed our present dispensation but one thing is for certain: it will not resemble the past.
TEN
I am glad that I live within walking distance of the Middle. I need the air, after a day spent in an office chair, rolling from desk to desk in an open-plan office lit only by a narrow lightwell.
This city picks and scratches at itself like an animal kept in too small a cage, pining for its lost reflection. It obsesses over its own archaeology. In the shade of parking garages and electricity substations, stubs of classical brickwork, lacquered with a weatherproof resin, poke up through gravel beds and well-tended lawns. New buildings clad apologetically in glass contort themselves around the city’s ancient leavings. They hollow themselves out where they can; they arc above, they grope beneath. At its centre the city has begun to resemble the root system of a neglected houseplant. The Middle has packed itself around itself to the point where its surface has eroded away entirely. Inside its tangle of windowless malls and pedestrian bridges, its banks of stairs and escalators, its short-haul lifts and cantilevered walkways, no-one thinks about ‘ground level’, or even expects the numbers on the lifts to match up. There is something exhilarating about this – some atavistic hint of forest canopy.
I keep my glasses on for the walk home. I want to keep tabs on illusory light. It’s easy enough to find if you know where to look – spilling from this atelier or that; welling up through the stairwells of the more on-trend basement clubs. Augmented reality is still the preserve of the very few, the initiated, the early adopters. Geeks, frankly. More rarely you sometimes see its early, clumsy forays into the real world. A shop-front spills its frocks onto the sidewalk. They pick themselves up and spin away down the road. A traffic experiment – ghost barriers descend across a road held up anyway by red lights. Cutting through a mall, I see movie actors wandering through crowds who are queuing to see their latest releases. These avatars go largely unseen, though they’re swollen to more than life-size – seven-foot giants of the half-silvered screen. A few spectacled punters have spotted them, but they are already too sophisticated, too jaded, to want to interact with them. This is one of the difficulties with Augmented Reality. The bald idea has already worn thin. My half-silvered, AR-enabled spectacles are new (and expensive – the firm bought them for me). But Augmented Reality – the pasting of images over the real – is old: old as the ghost train and the distorting mirror.