Each Wednesday afternoon we left the other cross-country runners to their muddy zig-zag and slipped away to assault courses of Michel’s own devising. No one knew about this. At least, no one said anything. Hill, our games teacher, had his suspicions. He once asked me why I ‘of all people’ had signed up for cross-country in the summer term. ‘I was counting on you for the cricket.’
‘I’ll come to evening practice,’ I offered. ‘I want to do something to stretch my legs.’
Michel counted cadence as we worked through the exercises his father had taught him. Press-ups. Squat-thrusts. We pulled ourselves up on low-hanging branches. We climbed trees. Passing a patch of scrub, we set ourselves at the undergrowth. Sometimes the route was obvious and clean enough – a sheep run, a fox-scrape. Otherwise I sat this particular game out, waiting for Michel to pick and tear a path through to me, pace by pace, inch by inch, through thorns and briars. He emerged at last, scratched, bleeding, grinning, riding a strange, flagellant high.
Past Michel’s ‘redoubt’ of abandoned fridges the ground got easier, littered with tissues and condoms, crushed cans, charred fire circles. The bark-chip track, come upon so suddenly, the feel of it through my boots, was baffling. ‘But this is my way home.’
‘Yes.’
‘The hotel’s down that way.’
‘Yes. There you are. Jesus, Conrad, have you never tried to follow the river before?’
I looked back the way we had come. There was no sign of where we had emerged from the undergrowth. No path, no break, no clue.
I had gathered, in my usual vague way, that Michel’s father was an Army man and that he was no longer around. What I didn’t know was that, a few months before Michel had arrived at the school, his father had returned home, or most of him had, on a military plane.
I can’t remember who first told me the story. It wasn’t Michel. He assumed I already knew. How could I not have known? The kids haunting the streets where his father was ambushed had used his head as a football. The video had been pulled, but a couple of boys claimed to have seen it. (They never said so to Michel’s face.)
Michel’s dad’s death and repatriation occurred before he came to the school; they were, indeed, why he moved here, his education paid for by the pension the military gave his mother. Michel and I attended different classes, and it took a while for our orbits to cross. By then the gossip must already have stalled.
The point is, once I knew about his father, Michel came into focus for me. His loneliness. His cult of self-reliance. These were scabs over a psychological wound. I understood that he was hurt, and I imagined I might be able to help him. At the very least, I could keep him company as he healed. I wanted to do that for him. I wanted to be with him. The truth is, I wanted him, and it pleased me to couch my desire as care.
And all the while Michel went on preparing me for our civilisation’s collapse. The Fall, he called it. He was very convincing. It was just around the corner now, he said: the battle of all against all.
SIX
At full pelt – we can’t be doing more than thirty miles an hour – the train makes too much racket for Michel and me to talk. It is awkward to sit like this, pressed against a past I am afraid will swamp me. I smile, and with some dumb-show to acknowledge my awkwardness, I open the window and lean out to watch the fields skid by.
The road, fag-end of the famous north coast highway, tails off near here. Clogged with caravans and mobile homes, it turns wearily inland to feed holiday parks, resort camps, an army firing range, a summer water sports school, a private airfield and, off on an eerie shingle limb of its own, an old power station.
The carriage rocks across a set of points. The fields are planted with cereals. In front of them, in a broad, bright band coming right up to the edge of the rail bed, poppies tremble beneath a cloud of moths. The moths are tiny, white-winged, light as ashes from a bonfire. The gust of our passing catches them and choreographs them, and for a moment they abandon their zig-zag trajectories and give themselves up to the slipstream’s swirl.
Abruptly, the train is canalised again; it rushes along a weedy, rackety corridor made of fences, wickets, head-high breeze-block walls and here and there, in the more open stretches, flagpoles, greenhouses, gazebos, weathered trampolines and bleached-pink plastic pedal cars. To travel at speed between these back gardens is to glimpse the collective unconscious of the region – its lonely pride and thin hope.
‘We’re doing up a boat.’ Michel, weary of our silence, has decided to compete with the racket of the train. ‘Did I tell you?’ he bawls. ‘Hanna and me.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re doing up a boat.’
The train slows to running pace and we emerge from between back gardens, through weedy fields and bare gravel lots marked out by chicken-wire, into the apparent chaos of the coastal banks – a vast, near-barren shingle expanse that edges year by year, bizarre and unmappable, further into the sea. The train brakes again, easing its way over uncertain ground.
It dawns on me that we are still running through gardens. But these are big, barren gardens, without fences, without walls. To say that nothing grows on the shingle would be unfair. A few local specialists thrive among the pebbles. Their geometrically simple flowers and cactus-like leaves suggest an occupation of dry land by pioneering seaweeds.
A roll of rusted wire lies across the pebbles, as sculptural in its way as the column of a ruined temple. Even this is not right, because the mind should not have to strain so hard for its metaphors. Better to say that this abandoned concrete pill has shape and mass of its own; and that tar-paper shack embodies the theory of its own construction. Things here are themselves. They are too few to gather into categories.
Paint sticks arranged in a pretend flower bed. An arch made from the planks of an old boat. A rabbit skull perched on a rock. Rows of pebbles, set more or less upright. A half-buried tyre. Old fishing net, pooled in a perfect circle. Buoys. Rusted cans. I would lay odds that some of the subtler effects aren’t even deliberate, and what seem to be gardens are simply happy accidents: artefacts of the starved eye’s hankering for pattern. But this, I suppose, is the gardener’s art around here: to set the eye right to the landscape, so that, from the hulks of derelict fishing boats on the horizon to the cracked concrete kerbs marking the road to the railway station, everything comes into focus – one giant garden.
The railway runs unfenced over the shingle. At our current crawl, you could safely jump from the carriage and head off in any direction, towards any landmark. The tar-paper houses. The lighthouse. On the horizon, black hulks of old boats, upturned, make fishermen’s shelters.
‘We’re fixing up this boat,’ Michel says. It’s the third time he’s mentioned this in as many minutes, and already there is a pall of futility about the enterprise, especially here, where year by year, inch by inch, the shingle piles up on itself, making new land.
‘Hanna wants us to sail around the world.’
Here the land gathers itself and rises to meet your footfall. What need of boats, round here?
She looks like an urchin spilled from the chorus of an old musical. Hanna. A five-foot-nothing shit-eating grin above a threadbare green jumper and holed, varnish-spattered jeans.
These, she tells me, are the clothes she wears while she works on the boat. Already with the boat. No sooner are we out through the ticket-hall-cum-giftshop than she has her arm through mine, as though we are old friends, and she is telling me about the dryness of the summer and how her skin, rashed with glass dust spilling from the sander, has tightened across her bones.