The World Was All Before Them Read online

  Passing by, 27 minutes later, Sue says to Philip: ‘He must’ve had to be cut out.’

  ‘One or two people touch their brakes, then everyone has to, then, bang, there is a traffic jam.’

  ‘It’s hard not to look. We were just looking. Well I was.’

  ‘There are three thousand five hundred deaths from crashes each year. Ten each day. Nobody cares. We all keep driving. Too fast. I keep driving too fast, that’s the weird thing. I’m completely aware it costs the NHS billions a year, think what we could do with that, think about the sport and good nutrition for young children we could fund with that. We’ve all decided it doesn’t matter. Society has decreed’ – Philip pressed on – ‘that a nought-point-something chance of getting killed by a car each year, that that’s OK. We’ve made that judgment. And yet still each time anyone sees one it’s like oh no what a tragedy.’

  But even as he protested, Philip’s thoughts were circling his image of the scene of the accident like swallows swooping and sighing, and then following his image of the ambulance as, its doors clammed shut, it eased into motion and trundled away, lights flashing carnivalesquely but making no noise. Inside, what would there be? Neck brace, blood pressure cuff, ECG, oxygen mask and fingertip oximeter and IV. The paramedic having raised a vein and gingerly slid in the needle and attached the tube. The paramedic now sitting beside the patient steadying his head and watching, watching for any signs of flagging life. Speedily but carefully the vehicle would drive along and up and round and here and there until they reached the DI, the high, square, tiled carriageway porch of A and E, the bright harsh light, the inevitable jolt and rattle as the stretcher trolley hits the ground and trundles up the slope and onto the pavement and over the ribbed mat at the entrance and then it is into the glide of the smooth polished concrete floors inside and is drawn along by the imperious rhythm of the hospital where, once it has found its bay, a staff-grade will sweep in to assess, with a nurse to assist. Pulse, pupillary reflex; focus on the head and neck, fingertips caressing, assess GCS, off for an X-ray,another ECG hooked up, consultant brought in to consult. Surgery? High risk of secondary injury. Control bleeding. What is the ICP? Craniotomy? But now the tense, bright, messy, high-tec scene is fading from Philip’s attention which is returning to the slow-motion rhythm of the road, the pulling out and tucking in, the passing and being overtaken. To the left the moon makes zigzag lines of quartz among the granite of the clouds.

  Through Sue’s mind, the lights of the road traverse, stretching her thoughts this way and that, pulling them apart from the moment of the disagreement. Ahead are pair after pair of red lights, all almost the same, dull as though resentful, except for the occasional different setup, a configuration of sparky LEDs, lozenges of glitter around empty eyes. Beside them are the diamond headlamps of the other carriageway streaming forward into their future but back into her past, following this journey she is taking with Philip in reverse, perhaps for a mile or two before branching off, perhaps for longer, perhaps even, one of them, all the way back, A34, M what was it, M something else, A this or that, another A, a B and then other roads, and others, not to mention the roundabouts and traffic lights and roadsigns and verges; not to mention the towns and villages and isolated houses; not to mention the fields and woods and copses and hedgerows, the barbed wire fences and electric pylons and telegraph wires, the contour lines and public footpaths and sites of special scientific interest. All that stuff would be the same for them, for whoever it was, in that car, taking the same road (only backwards); the same environment passed through. But some things would be different: the pedestrians, the other cars on the road. The weather would have shifted a little, and the light. Wind dropped, probably, as the evening enveloped what for her and Phil had been the afternoon. To be blunt about it, she thought, as she surveyed the ideas that had come into being in her mind, time would have passed, that’s all. No, because actually time had passed. Not ‘would have passed’: it had. Her mind felt stuck as she tried to merge the landscape she could remember into the landscape she was imagining, and to spread that imagining out onto the world behind. So time had passed, so what? Well, a person might have cut their finger. Or died. Or split up with someone. Whereas, on the other hand, that blade of grass was still that blade of grasss, unless it had been trodden on. That stone was still that stone. Though actually with many of the people too it would be much the same. With many of them nothing really would have changed at all.

  The car that she was following, in her mind, back the way that she had come, turned. It turned into streets whose names she maybe could remember. Black Rock Rise, then something else, then Ocean View. It turned, this small white hatchback, in at an open gateway on the right between jagged stone walls. But her mind travelled on, on to the next driveway which sloped down between amoeba-shaped patches of luminous green lawn and divided around a pond. She followed the rightward branch towards a burgundy front door and then – whoosh – she was in through the letter box and floating on in through the hallway corridor to the sitting room with its thick cream carpet and fuchsia suite, its several mahogany occasional tables with their glass surface-protectors upon which Betty’s collection of Russian dolls shone plumply; its frilly lamps, both table and standard, and its flesh-coloured walls crammed with gold-framed photographs of seabirds soaring and diving and perching and pecking and nestling and roosting, chubby, with their trademark look of shock. There was the picture window, beneath which the hillside sloped gently away until a sketchy fence marked the boundary of the garden; after which there was an area of tundra where the coast path passed; after which there was nothing except the cliff-edge and some air. From the cosy eyrie of old Mr and Mrs Newell you saw, if you did not look down, no land at all: an endlessness of gas and liquid; the sea, slate-dark, choppy, crisped with white, as Sue imagined it now, seeing herself sunk in the soft pink armchair nearest the window, looking out; and the sky a million swirling wisps and mists and accumulations of paleness and grey. With her legs folded up, she had been watching a thicker, blacker raggedy slab of cloud move towards her, darkening the air and sea beneath; but here was Betty, come through from the kitchen, picking up the two cups she must have left a moment earlier in the serving hatch, easing herself carefully forward, the cups held stiffly out ahead of her, one in each hand. She bent her knees to place the cups on the low table in front of the window and set about sitting down in a chair identical to Sue’s on the other side of it. She gripped the armrests; she leaned her whole body backwards; she bent at the hips and the knees, keeping her weight always on the hydraulic pillars of her arms, until she had lowered herself gently into the cushion.

  ‘Bloody back,’ she said. ‘It’s such a nuisance. But the best thing,’ she said, struggling to lean forward, ‘is to keep mobile.’

  Sue pushed Betty’s cup across the table.

  ‘Thank you dear. What I hate,’ she said frankly, lifting the cup, then pausing it beneath her lower lip, ‘is to think this is a taste of things to come.’

  Sue must have looked at her enquiringly.

  ‘Old age.’ She sighed the words.

  ‘Anyone can slip a disc,’ offered Sue.

  ‘Yes,’ said Betty, gratified. ‘Yes they can.’ And then: ‘Well, I’ve brought you a cup of tea.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No sugars, that’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  There was a pause. And then:

  ‘This is so amazing,’ said Sue.

  ‘Better than the pictures, I always say.’

  ‘You must spend, do you spend whole afternoons just sitting here? I could.’

  ‘Oh no, not whole afternoons! But it is’ – she carried on after a moment, making a concession – ‘nice to know it’s there. You know, you can just glance out and see it, see the weather coming in.’

  ‘Do you ever feel . . .’ Sue had said then, turning, reaching for her cup of tea, looking up, ‘that you’re sort of dissolving into it? Your spiri
t going out into it, and it comes into you, so that you sort of rise up out of yourself. Fade away?’

  There had been a pause.

  ‘That’s how I felt, a bit like that, just then,’ Sue had said, stubbornly.

  ‘Ken appreciates it for his photography. He lurks here, like a hunter. Twitchy’ – Betty’s voice was warm at the thought of him, of his energy. ‘That’s what they call them, you know, birdwatchers: twitchers. And he is, when he’s lying here in wait. The perfect hide, he says it is. That’s one he got from here’ – she says, turning carefully in the chair, angling her head, then her shoulders, then lifting up her arm to point – ‘a black-headed gull, though you can see it’s more of a brown head really. Mostly all the ones in flight he got from here. Not the ones on the cliffs, obviously, or the shoreline, because you can’t see them out of this window, can you? It’d be a miracle.’ She chuckled briskly, glancing into Sue’s eyes for an answering smile. ‘He goes down into town to get them developed. There’s a place there that does them properly, Dawton’s.’

  ‘He hasn’t gone digital?’

  ‘Doesn’t hold with it.’ Betty gulped the end of her tea and eased herself forward to plonk the cup on the edge of the table.

  Then she leaned back upright, stiff and straight, and looked at Sue out of her deeply lined grey face with her shining blue eyes.

  ‘I didn’t want to move up here yet. It was Ken’s idea. I liked it down in the town where Philip grew up . . . But, you know Ken a little bit now, don’t you? So you know he does always want to get things organised well in advance. This bungalow came on the market and he said: it’s ideal, we’ll be all set up. But for me it was a wrench. Because down there, in town, in those streets, that’s where our whole lives had been. I mean our whole lives as a family: I lived in Haston before that. But down in town’ – she smiled puckishly – ‘that’s where Philip learned to walk! We’d go out, toddle along. Do a bit of shopping. And then we’d be at the sea. He was fascinated by the pebbles. One of them would catch his eye. He’d be standing there, you know wobbling a bit, with his little arms stretched out as if he wanted to give the whole world a great big hug. Then he’d set off and I could see he’d be making for a particular pebble. One of those great round ones, you know how big they are. He would bend over, and lift, and lift, or try to lift, and then . . . whoops, over he tipped, and his face’d go into the beach and his nappy would be in the air. It was’ – there was that warm tone again in her voice, but she did not laugh – ‘so funny.’

  After a moment she went on: ‘So to tell the truth I don’t feel quite ready yet to just sit here and doze and fade away.’ She looked stern. ‘Give me a few years yet.’

  ‘A few decades,’ Sue had said emphatically, wincing as she realised the meaning Betty had taken from her words. But now, as she winces again at the recollection, it leaves her, and she sees that she and Philip in their VW Golf Bluemotion are nearing the end of their journey, nosing along Dartham Street where the shops are, then Turnpike Lane, then over the little bridge which marks the edge of the old town, then right, beside some ancient, patient willows. They passed along Helium Avenue with its meandering edges and its ornamental planting, of privet, beech, rhododendron and even the occasional palm, designed to screen the dedicated parking places that fronted each pastiche Victorian property. Then they were into the heart of The Willows, a signature brownfield development where every home boasted magnolia-painted walls, recessed down-lighting, half-height tiling to the ensuite, and a multi-point security system to the front door, together with all the high-spec energy-saving measures that today’s environmentally-conscious home-owners feel entitled to demand. In vehicular motion, Sue and Philip negotiated Elysium Crescent (Georgian) and traversed Parnassus Row (Tudorbethan) before turning into their own patch, Eden Grove, a terrace articulated around three sides of a rectangle to give the impression of converted stables in a country house, or perhaps an array of traditional paupers’ cottages. On the roof at the centre of this array was a little angular belfry from which no sound ever came. Philip parked in their allotted space in the central courtyard. Having unfolded themselves out of the vehicle, lifted the tailgate, shut it, and swung their bags over their shoulders, the pair of them were guided by low-level lighting towards the frontage of no. 12, the two-up-two-down individually designed quality residence which was their place (rented) for the circle of the year. The slammed car doors had left a silence in the air; above them, the cold stars shone.

  Indoors there was the usual hanging of coats in the hallway alcove and kicking-off of shoes. There was the clomping upstairs (this was Sue) so as to chuck knickers and T-shirts into the round wicker Habitat laundry basket in the corner of the bedroom, and to hang up her grey Diesel cargo pants and black Reiss zip-up top, and to lay Philip’s jersey and jeans on the slim blue ottoman at the end of the bed for him to damn well deal with; and there was the going-through to the open-plan sitting-room-kitchen-diner (this was Phil) and pulling open the clattery door of the fridge to extract a little bottle of Becks, and levering it open, and slumping with it on the shiny brown soft faux-leather sofa in front of the sharp-edged gleaming square pine occasional table, thumbing at his Desire to check the week ahead and monitor his Pocket Empire and scroll through the last few days of Pulse updates, statins safe to give to patients with abnormal LTFs, BMA to resist rationing role, even though in some cases, Philip thought, a bit of rationing probably wouldn’t go amiss. He could hear the tumble and splatter of water upstairs as Sue showered, and so kept pressing here and there on his touchscreen: plunging pass rates for CSA / echinacea ‘no use for colds’ – but hang on, when you looked into the figures there was a measurable advantage, so predictable the spin in the reporting / 27–floor home for Mumbai billionaire incorporating its own hanging gardens and multi-storey car park / Nobel Prize for Chinese dissident Liu Xiabao but he himself does not know it yet though his wife may be able to tell him tomorrow in prison, grubby tiled walls, pale blue cotton pyjamas, slop bucket, one hour of exercise, if that, metal cot, the slamming of the door / oh look Cher from yesterday already on YouTube and he watched again the marionette movements in rubik cube trousers and heard again smug Cowell saying: ‘I see the future here’ / defuse Taliban child – dumb bombs – flesh-ripping ball-bearings – a carnival of gore – as young as 11 – significant psychological damage – cured with volleyball and cricket – shrapnel – tearing epidermis dermis hypodermis releasing an inflammatory response which floods the damaged site with neutrophils which clear it of debris via phagocytosis except not the lump of metal itself obviously remove with tweezers disinfect debridement risk of tetanus: administer metronidazole followed by anti-tetanospasmin though what are the chances of sourcing that in the borderlands of Pakistan?

  Dr Adam Hibbert would know.

  Philip became aware once more of the room around him. The rumble of the fridge; the whirr of the Virgin box as it updated itself; the cough and sigh of the boiler; the whine of the extractor fan upstairs. Beyond all that, was there also the whispering of ash and elder in a breeze outside? He rose and plugged the phone into its wire on top of the microwave and moved to the room’s door where he turned and lingered, looking around before putting out the light. In the capsule hallway was the saffron gleam of streetlamps filtered through the milky panes of the front door. He double-locked that door and climbed the carpeted stairs, jogging lightly up them with a little skip halfway. Round the tight end of the landing; in through the bedroom door; and there she was; there was Sue, in the bed he too was going to sidle into. There was her pale face in profile on the pillow. There were her eyelashes. There were her delicate porcelain cheeks – no, soft . . . they were linen / no – silk / no – milk, no – . There she was with her body snug under the duvet and her face in the cosiness of the pillow, aware of him (was she aware of him?) but not looking up: that was trust; that was intimacy; the having her just lie there, knowing he was there; knowing he was there moving around the room, in his clothes, while s
he lay there warm, with nothing on (probably), with her mind drifting and her body just there gently lying. He lifted his jersey and T-shirt over his shoulders; T-shirt in the basket; jersey added to the pile on the chair. Belt unbuckled; trousers pushed down; socks drawn off in the same movement, his thumbs hooked under the rims of them. Socks in the basket; trousers on the pile. In his boxers he went back onto the landing and turned into the bathroom: smooth floor, chilly. Never liked the look of his face in close-up, the pores, the incipient stubble, the sebum gleam, the desquamation of the stratum corneum, perpetual attrition of the boundary of the body, softening, flaking, tumbling, floating; a continual disintegration into dust. Tap on; facewash; hot-water; splash; dab dry with a towel, don’t rub. Contacts: bin them. Toothpaste; buzz in the mouth dislodging colonising bacteria streptococcus mutans not in fact ultrasonic; rinses / spit / done. And then he breathes in deeply and out deeply and pads softly through to the bedroom once more where he sits on the side of the bed, lifts himself slightly to ease off his pants, turns, slides, is under the duvet, is wriggling into the warmth where Sue is, touching his chin to the back of her shoulder, his tummy to her bum, his tibia to her heel. She stirs and he stirs; and he shifts and she murmurs; and she reaches out for the light, clicks it off. In the intimate dark, with the front of his thighs against the back of her thighs, and his fingers on the giving flesh of her tummy, and the back of her skull pressing into the cartilage of his neck, his internal pudendal artery dilates and his corpus spongiosum and two corpora cavernosa begin to swell. But her body stays still and her hand moves over his hand, squeezing the tips of his fingers between the tips of hers and the springy lump of her thumb muscle; for her mind is anticipating the morning, the alarm, the getting up, the economical, almost-automatic movements, the leaving the house in the dusk, the three segments of the short walk to the station: the Willows; then the asphalt pathway between chicken-wire fencing held high by concrete pillars, with bright lights over as the daylight strengthens around; then / but in any case (he thinks) it is late; and he is tired after the being-with-his-parents and the long drive; and as, in his brain, the alpha waves slow and stretch and lose their regularity, so, in his mind, as the bumpy higgledy-piggledy theta waves take over, his thoughts slither and jump and he is with his father halfway up a verdant slope, his father’s wide body in its old waxed jacket, plodding ahead of him, jabbing the ground with a straight old shiny beech-branch stick, each foot in its thick scratchy sock in its old leather boot lifting and landing / while she is completing the third segment, the lane of old houses along the canal, and is into the driven atmosphere of the station at rush hour, the queue at AMT, four people before her; that’s 70, 140, 210, 280 seconds, more than four-and-a-half minutes! – the man in front of her, cheap pinstripe, shiny over the shoulderblades, looks round, catches her eyes, his skin is grey though he can only be thirties, his eye slides off towards the big wall clock in the distance, then he shifts from foot to foot and wriggles his shoulders as all around a tannoy announcement booms distortedly / while his father’s ash-coloured hair whips this way and that across his grooved forehead; the sparse eyelashes flutter and the narrowed eyes water in the wind. What is that on them? Xanthelasma? / while from the platform she steps up into the train, pushes her way determinedly to a seat, and the world starts to pass her by on either side, the station is behind her and the town is behind her and fields spread out on either side and a meandering river flows through them so cold and natural and smooth / while rib of beef, the cladding of juicy fat, the crisp skin; a nice bit of cheese with two or three glasses of red wine; trifle with custard and, whoosh, up goes the LDL, arteries claggy, look out for angina and/or leg pain during exercise, stifling the blood flow, a yellow lump breaks; and then / so cool and smooth with the summer light dappled through willows, soft squelch of the mud among her toes, the water up to the top of her thighs and she launches herself in / while Philip’s throat tightens as he slithers down the familiar clattering helter-skelter of panic into the blackness, howls echoing, spiders’ webs wrapping him, bats flapping in his face; but he wakes with a jolt and opens his eyes and can see the ceiling through the gloom; can discern the scratch of light outlining the blackout blind over the window. He breathes in, and holds; and out, and lets his muscles droop; and in, and holds; and out . . . here it is safe: he turns and presses his cheek against Sue’s back and lays his forearm over her waist and hip / while she now is into the quiescence of deep sleep, the heart heavy and slow; the breathing heavy and slow; the blood pressure low; her muscles baggy and slack, the body collapsed, each bit of it weighing down into the mattress / while here it is safe, and warm, and they are covered; they are breathing; all the delicate activity of life is going on here, the two of them side by side. He is able to see a little into the darkness. He is touching her and the sheet and the duvet-cover and the pillow-cover and the air. The molecules of their atmosphere, of sweat and farts and sperm and mucus and conditioner and body lotion and the remains of kedgeree and Becks and toothpaste on the breath can all dissolve into his olfactory epithelium and be understood. Here it is safe, and warm, and their skin is intact, for the 13.5 tog microfibre duvet will repel flesh-ripping ball-bearings; and he sees Sue walking towards him, once, in spring, not knowing he would be there: she is stepping speedily forward by the side of a busy road, her glance jumping hither and yon, until, like a grasshopper, it lands on him, on him. She is standing under a cherry tree blossoming in spring; and her face blossoms into a smile.