It was a Thursday morning. He had an hour. His dad was at work, of course, and Mafi would be having her hair done at Carrie Combe’s and then having a drink in the Windmill, as she did every Thursday. The cottage was cold and hollow. He listened to it creak and groan, surprised to discover that in the middle of the day it sounded like the dead of night. He went to his room and got what he needed. He took his matchbox as well, the one with his mum in it.
He looked out at the front garden and recalled his dad buying a Mountfield lawn mower the first summer here. The noise of the engine had startled Ellis. He remembered burning his forearm just above his wrist on the mower that same summer. He thought of the first time he cut the grass for his dad, when he was twelve. He could feel the weight of the machine as his undeveloped body struggled to heave it around. He saw his dad in a ragged gardening sweater, stooping beneath low-hanging branches as he cut the grass. You always started in the orchard, mowing crossways from the fence by the working men’s club downhill towards the cottage. Then you cut the small patches of lawn around the quince bushes and Mafi’s garage and round the back of the cottage beneath Mafi’s living room window. Then, up on to the side lawn, raising the height of the blade a notch so as to keep the grass lush and soft. You mowed the side lawn lengthways, up and down the slope. Then, to finish, the front garden, starting at the bottom, in the wet areas around the weeping willow, and finishing on the neatest part in front of the house. In the summer, Ellis liked to time it so that he was finishing the last lines of the front lawn as his dad returned from work. His dad’s face would break into a smile from behind the wheel.
“Wonderful, dear boy,” he’d exclaim, getting out of his car. “Thank you very much.”
One summer, they returned from a summer holiday and the grass was so long that Ellis had to march up and down a few yards in front of his dad, stomping down the grass for Denny to mow. Another time, it started to rain and Mafi came out with a bright red umbrella and held it over Denny as he mowed. Ellis took a picture. His dad is laughing.
He drank hot chocolate on the train because he felt weak. He felt weak because he had lingered too long in the cottage and, suddenly fearful that Mafi would walk in on him, had left in a hurry, agitated by the sensation of being chased. He had felt she was watching him for the three miles he walked across the fields to Hildenborough station.
The train window played a movie of hop fields and pasture. Ellis wondered whether the cottage had always been that desolate when everyone was out, or whether his leaving had created the void. Was it his fault, the hollowness that now prevailed in the rooms, the sense of something lost?
Nothing is ever motionless, he told himself. The day you arrive somewhere new is the day you start towards leaving that place. Time never stood still in the cottage for us to just be, to just exist. It was running out from the moment it began. Every day of your life is lying in wait for you.
I thought I would cut the grass for him for ever.
Jed left Mick’s employment and took Ellis with him. The green Triumph Herald with its home-made wooden roof rack laden with paint pots and ladders became a recognised sight in the town. By day, Ellis felt warmed by the adoring company of the old ladies whose houses Jed sent him to paint. By night, he haphazardly sought the company of young women, but when he found it there was rarely the affection he dreamed of. He escaped from these regrettable encounters to the beach where the winter winds were scorched by Scandinavian ice and the rains were horizontal.
As the year grew old, there were few days when the ibotenic acid of the fly agaric mushroom was not canoeing leisurely around Ellis’s system. The after-effects of alcohol, cannabis and amphetamine sulphate could all be diluted by retreating to the beach, unless the binge had been extreme enough to render Ellis unconscious or sick. His body always recovered, with a little time. Harder to treat was the
self-loathing
that overcame his psyche whilst his body bore the brunt of his prodigality. Even that, though, he’d forgive and forget when the high of recovery embraced him. This was usually on the second morning, when he would wake to find the sickness replaced by the head pains of dehydration. He would eat well, drink sweet tea and be filled by a feeling of profound love for everything and everyone around him, unaware that this feeling was there simply because yesterday he had felt so ill and today he did not.
On the evening he had a date with Shelley Neame, he got home from work sweaty and caked in dust, and went immediately to run a bath. The large house spider waiting beside the hot tap ruined his plans. He knew instantly from the once familiar ripples inside his stomach that he would not be able to reach towards the bath tap.
“Come on, Ellis,” he groaned, “this is baby stuff.”
But there wasn’t time to think about it. All that mattered was meeting Shelley Neame and there was no way he could do that without washing. It was the lowest of all possible tides. He walked for twenty minutes across the mudflats to the sea, wearing Jed’s bathrobe and a towel around his waist. He carried a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo and a tall wooden pole. When he reached the water, he planted the pole into the mud, hung the bathrobe and towel from it and hurried into the water until it was deep enough to bathe in and wash his hair. He arrived in the lounge bar of the Victoria pub in Victoria Street very clean, if a little salty, and very late. Twenty-five minutes late. Shelley Neame had been and gone.
He called her from the phone box on Harbour Street. She was prickly and offended at being stood up.
“Is it because I’m bisexual?” she asked.
“No. Not at all. I had no idea you were. I really want to see you. Do you mean you used to be a man?”
“No, dickhead! That’s not what it means.”
“Good. That’d be a bit freaky. What does it mean?”
“If you’re that wet behind the ears it’s probably best we’re not hooking up.”
She was gone and Ellis was pissed off. He really fancied her. She drank Guinness, and he found that indescribably attractive in a woman.
“Bollocks!”
He moped his way across Middle Wall and Island Wall to the pub on the beach, where he removed himself to the corner of the downstairs bar and drank. Really drank. For the first time in his life. He drank pint after pint and when he was drunk enough, he let the spiders know that he blamed them for his foul mood.
“I fancied her, as well you know!”
“You should be thanking us! We’ve saved you from an evening with a bisexual!”
They were taking the piss and he knew it. They just wanted him to admit he didn’t know what bisexual meant. He refused to discuss it with them any further and watched, with sullen detachment, the crowd of students, would-be artists, casual labourers and opt-outers that gathered here every night. He questioned whether, in their zeal not to conform, these people were merely embracing a different flavoured regime. How open-minded were they really, he wondered. If one of them had turned up this evening not wearing the clothes, body-language and politics agreed amongst them, would they have been welcome? They were in each other’s company constantly. When did they encounter something else? They talked about the same things every night. They slept with each other, gradually crossing off every permutation. They despised people with money and constantly bemoaned their lack of it. None of them seemed to go anywhere and yet they spoke of routine as if it were a disease they couldn’t catch.
Ellis’s evening became a blur of drink and unconvincing resolutions. He would look for farm work inland and discover a new heaven similar to Longspring. He would visit Tim Wickham. He would make it through a whole year before going back to his dad and would make something of himself before then. He would read some novels. He would write to his dad once he had a farm job. He would never get this drunk again.
He drank slowly and unremittingly until it was dark outside and he was more drunk than he could have imagined it possible to be. Unaware of the people he was falling into, he made his way out of the pub. The sea air seemed to free up his brain and the information he had been straining for earlier in the evening suddenly came to him. He hurried back and threw open the pub door to share his enlightenment.
“I’ve got it!” he shouted, silencing the downstairs bar. “A bisexual is a one who sleeps with men and women and women and men, right?”
Stumbling home along the sea wall, Ellis fell, and in a moment that was to make him, fleetingly, a local legend, he nose-dived through the driver’s window of a parked car and fell asleep with his face wedged against the handbrake and his legs sticking out of the window.
Longspring was pale and silent and perfect. The sea is never silent, Ellis told himself. He watched Tim emerge from the milking shed and walk down to Michael Finsey’s house. Chloe opened the door, stepped into the garden and took washing from the line. She waited for Tim to reach her and they walked inside together, without touching. Ellis watched this scene play out against the sound of crows in the treetops and shock in his heart. So, it had been Chloe he had seen stepping out of the herdsman’s house that evening. But it was no longer Michael Finsey’s house, it was Tim’s. It was Chloe’s and Tim’s. He was not, after all, to be met here today by the twelve-year-old Tim Wickham he had been missing.
“Why have you got two black eyes?”
“I fell into a car.”
“You look like shit.”
They walked up the track with their arms round each other. In the hay barn they handed each other a rollie.
“I’ve missed you,” Tim said lazily.
“Same here. Where’s Reardon?”
“Ireland. For a week.”
“What happened to Michael?” Ellis asked.
“Got Fincher’s herd at Rolvenden.”
“You’re young to have your own house,” Ellis said.
“Young to have my own herd,” Tim said, laughing under his breath. “It’s fucking excellent.”
Tim laid logs in the stove and they sat at the kitchen table. They opened a bottle of red wine at the end of the afternoon. Tim showed a brief interest in Ellis’s life on the coast before conversation settled on familiar details of the farm. Ellis stole glimpses of Chloe, who was subdued. She had grown heavier and filled out and was infinitely more attractive and feminine to Ellis than the pale, skinny fifteen year old he had once hoped might settle for him. She and Tim seemed to be playing at being adults. And they were not convincing, other than resembling a couple who had been together a long time.
“I haven’t learned how to cook, before you get your hopes up,” Chloe said.
“She’s not joking,” Tim said, pinching her waist and provoking a rare smile.
They got drunk over dinner, drunk enough for Ellis to tell Tim he’d help with the milking. Chloe went to the stove and, with her back turned, asked Ellis about his ‘love life’.
“There’s no one really …” Ellis said half-heartedly.
She opened the stove door and the three of them watched the flames.
“We’ll have to find you a good woman,” Chloe said, without meaning it.
She wrapped a coat around her shoulders and stepped outside. Through a doorway that seemed narrow and hunched, Ellis watched her sadness beam its distress signal silently into the night, before she wandered away to share her secrets with the horses.
It was the sound of a mug grazing the teak blanket chest beside his bed. Before he fully regained consciousness this sound breached the defences of his memory and unveiled ephemeral glimpses of mornings when his dad woke him before sunrise. Momentarily, he thought that they were heading to the Marsh. Love for his father and for those times seeped into his heart and he was sure that his dad’s fingers were stroking the hair off his forehead. He opened his eyes. Chloe was sitting on the bed. She smelled of sleep and her body emanated heat in a cold room.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” she whispered. “There’s a cup of tea for you.”
He felt the mattress rise as she left. It was pitch black outside.
Tim applauded Ellis as he sleepwalked into the kitchen. Ellis grunted and threw cold water over his face. He ran to join Tim on the track to the top field and together they brought in the herd.
The more tired Ellis became the more he felt that he was standing outside himself, watching the day pass. The times he had spent at Longspring seemed unclear and this saddened him. When they stopped for a break in the hay barn, he could have slept instantly.
“Your girlfriend is the only woman I’ve met in the last four months who doesn’t smell of joss sticks,” he said.
Tim smiled and handed the hip flask over. Then, after a silence that had almost stolen Ellis to sleep, Tim said, “My wife.”
Ellis sat up. “Come again.”
“Wife, not girlfriend.”
They were silent.
“I didn’t know how the fuck to find you, otherwise you’d have been my best man.”
“Fair enough,” Ellis muttered.
“There were nine guests. You’d have made it a good round number.”
“Who was your best man?”
“My dad, and Reardon gave Chloe away. Her parents wouldn’t show.”
They smiled warmly at each other, but Ellis felt shocked by the disappearance of the boy called Tim.
It was exactly the same. A faint, scraping ceramic sound. Followed again by the sensation of her weight on the side of the bed. Ellis woke beneath heavy, closed eyelids. He had slept deeply and his body tingled in the warm frailty of waking prematurely. He couldn’t feel where his back touched the mattress, so perfectly melted together were his body and the sheets. He opened his eyes. Her white nightdress was ghostly visible in the near dark. He could make out the contours of her face but not the expression. His left hand found her right hand and they held tight, pressing their fingertips into the other’s knuckles. He felt the weight on the mattress shift as she climbed across him. She pulled the blankets away and cold air brushed his legs. She unbuttoned the top of her nightdress and the hem settled across his chest. He touched her warm skin and the cotton brushed his knuckles as he stroked her ribs and allowed his thumbs to stray to her breasts. For the first time in his brief and woeful sex life so far, Ellis felt the body of a woman who was rounded and fleshy and whose movements of lovemaking were not clinical. She fumbled in removing his underwear, then drew the blankets up around them and lowered herself on to him. They kissed tenderly. She had seemed so tiny when they were growing up, and now she was upon him, the warmest, softest, most sensual woman he had touched, with breasts that made him want to kiss and suck and sleep. Her skin smelled of heat, as it had the previous morning. It brought him comfort and yearning in equal measure, as if they were feeding and stealing from each other. Only at the very end did their bodies become urgent and forceful and only then did her hands cease caressing his skin and instead grip it tight. Their kisses guarded each other’s mouth to ensure the near silence. For a few ecstatic moments afterwards, Ellis gazed at the faint details of her body in the tantalising half-darkness and felt enveloped by skin and the wetness of inside her. Then, on the brink of sleep, he felt her body lift away and a desperate longing came over him, like the desire for hope within grieving.