Dreams of Leaving Read online

  An endless source of fascination for George, those boundaries. Marked on the map, but invisible in real life. Invisible but concrete because people had believed in them for so long. He was overawed by the power beliefs could generate. He could even hear it. Like electric fences, the boundaries seemed to hum when he approached. He knew them off by heart, as he knew the names of the twenty-nine policemen who took turns to patrol them. The twenty-nine real policemen, that is. How many dummy policemen there were he had never been able to work out. They were always moving them around.

  One of Peach’s inspirations, the dummy policemen. They were built out of straw, as scarecrows were, but instead of being dressed in rags they wore proper uniforms – helmets, truncheons, the lot. They stood in realistic positions throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Their eyes always seemed to be staring at you. In poor light they looked as real as real policemen. It was an immensely cunning, uncanny and economical device.

  They terrified Alice. She said they looked like dead bodies propped up. Whenever she saw one she had to poke or tickle it just to make sure it wasn’t alive. She was convinced that, sooner or later, one of them would begin to wriggle and giggle on the end of her finger. She dreaded the moment. She had another theory. She thought their faces resembled the faces of policemen in the village. ‘Look,’ she would cry, ‘here’s Peach.’ And George would tilt his head on one side, try to see the likeness. He wanted to believe her. She invented nicknames for them too. Peach she called ‘Melon’ because he was ‘much bigger than a peach’ or ‘Gooseberry’ on account of his short prickly hair. Marlpit was ‘The Waterfall’ because he dribbled so. Hazard she described as ‘the one with a face like a shovel’ so he became ‘Shovelhead’. But when she heard their heavy boots come crashing through the undergrowth she would flatten herself against the ground until it seemed the earth would open up and swallow her. Her eyes staring, her blonde head pressed sideways into the leaves, she would always whisper the same words:

  The world is a dream

  It will always be so –

  It was the beginning of a nursery rhyme that every child in the village knew off by heart. It was what the boots meant.

  *

  By the time she was fifteen Alice was already moving out of reach, her mind a wild garden where only weeds grew. Their age-difference was beginning to count now. George tried with his own sharpening intelligence to cut through to her, to clear some ground, but no matter how hard he tried the jungle always grew back. Rain would fall overnight and in the morning he could no longer tell where he had been.

  He remembered finding her once that year sitting in the tall grass on the hill behind the police station. He sat down beside her. She acknowledged his presence with a slow hydraulic turning of her head, so smooth and slow that, horrified, he thought of a machine.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

  It wasn’t a joke, and he didn’t try to laugh it off.

  The jungle always grew back.

  It was during the same year that Tommy Dane made his famous escape attempt. Everybody knew about Tommy Dane. He was a phenomenon. So much so that a new word had been invented to describe him. Juvenile delinquent. George remembered thinking how complex, how grand, that sounded. Like a title or something. Tommy obviously thought so too. He certainly did his best to live up to it.

  When he was seven years old he cut a rat’s throat during needlework class. A live rat. He used a pair of nail-scissors. The rat died theatrically on the scarred lid of his desk. When he was twelve he got a 22-year-old girl pregnant. The girl claimed that he had tied her to a tree with coat-hanger wire and then raped her. Tommy denied it, but people believed the girl. At sixteen he set fire to his parents’ house while they were asleep inside. They survived. The house burnt to the ground. Tommy decided it was time to leave home.

  Rumour had it that he had staged a fake accident on the main road outside the village, using a stolen hayrick, his father’s bicycle and a gallon of fresh pigs’ blood. He arranged the hayrick and the bicycle so it looked as if the two had collided, then lay down on the tarmac with his head in a puddle of blood. He hijacked the first car that stopped for him. He climbed into the back seat and, brandishing a fiendish homemade bomb, shouted, ‘Get going, you bastards, or I’ll blow us all sky-high.’ Accounts of exactly what followed vary, but, somehow or other, the bomb exploded in Tommy’s face. The driver of the car (a spirited chap from the south coast, retired brigadier apparently) pulled into the side of the road, sprinted to a public phone-box, and called the nearest police station. Which just happened to be New Egypt.

  George would never forget that afternoon. He was standing outside the post office with Alice when they brought Tommy in. It didn’t look like Tommy. Glossy yellow blisters, smooth as mushrooms, swelled on the left side of his face and the palms of his hands. One eye was a bloated purple slit. His hair must have caught fire at some point because it had shrivelled, coiled into a few black springs. He had no eyebrows any more. Invisible slings held both his arms stiff and crossed in front of his chest.

  ‘Where am I?’ he whimpered. Poor Tommy really didn’t seem to know.

  Peach glanced round as if he too wasn’t quite sure, the sarcastic bastard. He took a deep breath and let the air out again in several tense instalments. By the time his answer came, it had acquired immense dramatic power. ‘New Egypt,’ he said.

  Tommy Dane began to cry.

  Peach put an arm round the boy’s shoulders, then looked up as if he expected cameras to be rolling. It was a historic moment, certainly. The rebel tamed, the system triumphant. The record intact. Nobody had ever succeeded in escaping from the village. And nobody ever would, Peach’s smile seemed to say. Later that day he threw a small drinks party at his house in Magnolia Close.

  And Tommy? He went back to live with his parents in temporary accommodation, a pre-fab hut behind the vicarage. He died at the age of twenty-four. Some said he had committed suicide. According to the doctor (a more reliable source, perhaps), he simply lost the will to live. The events of that day closed a whole avenue of fantasy for George. If Tommy couldn’t leave the village, he reasoned, then nobody could. He was stuck there for life and he had better get used to the idea. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

  Two years later he asked Alice to marry him.

  They were sitting by the river. Side by side, as usual. Nine years of rehearsal for this moment. The month was September, the sunset that evening almost Victorian in its coyness, layer on layer of respectable black and grey. Then, unexpectedly, just as he spoke, the sky lifted its huge gathering skirts to reveal an inch of pink flesh, the hint of a calf. His scandalous proposal. Embarrassed, he glanced across at her. But she was staring at the river, her eyes flicking left to right, left to right, trying, it seemed, to follow separate pieces of water as they floated downstream. He knew she had heard him. He gave her time, as he had always done. He waited. The sky’s lights dimmed, the darkness of a cinema then. Side by side, their elbows almost touching, their dim profiles silver-lined. And then, when he could no longer see her face, she whispered, simply, ‘Yes.’

  Afterwards he never asked her why she had accepted him. He could only suppose that he had got closer to her than anybody else, so close that she had been able to show him how far away she was from most people. A curious basis for a marriage, perhaps, but not untypical of the village where they lived. In those days, of course, he had still believed that her darkness would lift, that some kind of wind would spring up inside her and blow it all away like so many clouds. He had never imagined that it would thicken until the air of their marriage became impossible to breathe, until it was suffocation for her to live in the same house with him.

  In bed she froze before he even touched her. Her body locked, keys turned in all her muscles. He could find no way to open her. He talked to her, but there were no magic words.

  One night, months after the wedding, she called out. ‘Help me.’

  H
e thought she was talking in her sleep and lay still.

  ‘Help me,’ came her voice again. ‘Please.’

  He climbed out of his bed and into hers. He put his arms around her, but he could no more bend her than he could have bent a plank of wood. She would snap first. He held her, tried to still the trembling beneath her rigid surfaces. He held her until dawn came, watched the grey light wash into the shallow trough of her forehead, felt her nearest leg twitch under her nightgown, twitch again, then slowly begin to thaw, to stretch and flex until, curled into a foetal ball, she slept.

  Aching and exhausted, he dropped away into a deep well of sleep, daylight a silver hole the size of a coin somewhere far above. He woke three hours later. Rose up through many layers of sleep in one breathless second. This sudden consciousness felt like vertigo. The bed was empty on Alice’s side, moulded but cold. Brushing the covers aside, he stood up, stumbled on to the landing.

  ‘Alice?’ His voice came to him as if through undergrowth.

  He tried again. ‘Alice? Alice?’

  Her face floated, bland and round, into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs. ‘What is it, George? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. I just thought – ’

  ‘I was in the kitchen. Making breakfast. I wanted to surprise you.’ She smiled up at him.

  Sometimes he wondered which one of them would go mad first.

  *

  After eight years of marriage Alice became pregnant. They couldn’t believe it. They had long since resigned themselves to a life barren of children. And given the village they lived in, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. It was no place for children, they told themselves. In fact, it could be seen as selfish, cruel even, if not actually criminal, to want to bring a child into their bleak doomed world.

  But when Alice’s tests proved positive those layers of justification fell away like scaffolding no longer needed. Their marriage rose into the air, sheets of glass and gleaming steel, founded in rock, challenging the sky. They were giddy for days.

  And Alice changed. It was like the simple tilt of a Venetian blind: she suddenly afforded views into herself that he had never known (or even guessed) existed. She sang in the mornings, she came down to breakfast naked, she altered her hairstyle. A new woman. Was it because there was now somebody inside her beside herself to think about? He didn’t know – and, superstitious where Alice was concerned, didn’t ask either. He remained astonished and grateful. They both felt rewarded. They made all kinds of plans.

  ‘We’ll plant roses in the garden,’ George said. He hated gardening.

  ‘We’ll paint the house,’ Alice said. She hated decorating.

  ‘We’ll shoot Peach,’ George said. They both hated Peach.

  They began to laugh.

  ‘We’ll shoot the whole bloody lot of them,’ George said.

  ‘We’ll go away,’ Alice said.

  Neither of them noticed the transition.

  ‘We’ll buy a caravan,’ George said.

  ‘A gypsy caravan.’

  ‘We’ll travel all over the country. Like gypsies.’

  ‘We’ll go everywhere. We’ll see things.’

  ‘We’ll get married again.’

  ‘A gypsy wedding.’

  ‘Jump over a fire hand in hand.’

  ‘You playing a Spanish guitar.’

  George laughed. ‘You in one of those big whirly skirts.’

  ‘We’ll live happily ever after,’ Alice said. ‘Like in fairy stories.’

  Roses were planted and the house was painted, but they skilfully ignored the point at which their fantasies failed to face reality. Happiness had turned them into children. The mood of innocence lasted, swept them into 1955.

  On May 22nd, almost two weeks late, Alice went into labour. After thirteen hours she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. He weighed 11 Ibs 3ozs (a local record) and he had a widow’s peak which, according to George, signified a life of great good fortune. Otherwise there was nothing particularly unusual about him. Because both George and Alice had always liked the story about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea – in their eyes, of course, the pharaoh was a policeman – they decided to call their son Moses. There was hope in a name like that.

  Alice returned home.

  Two weeks later George found her in the scullery cupboard. She was vomiting. On the floor beside her stood an empty tin of baking yeast.

  ‘I wanted to rise,’ she whispered, when she could speak again. ‘I wanted to rise out of this place.’

  He could almost have laughed, but a weight descended, crushing all humour, however bitter, crushing all thought. In the squalid darkness, squatting among hoes and rakes, smells of compost and turpentine, jamjars of nails, his wife’s face gave off the palest light. He knelt beside her, took her awkwardly in his arms. It wasn’t resistance that he encountered then, it was fear, stealing like a numbness through her flesh, stiffening her limbs. He heard the distant jangle of keys.

  After that he would often hear her sobbing behind locked doors or see her crouching by the hedge at the end of the garden, the sun pouring its harsh light on her like scorn. She was sliding backwards and he couldn’t get a grip on her. She had lost interest in everything, Moses included. His size frightened her. His demands made her feel powerless: he was so strong. She wished, she told George once (her face caged in her hands, tears trickling through the bars of her fingers), that she had never had him. George could only gaze at her. It was such a brutal transformation.

  When Moses was six weeks old, Alice drew the curtains and went to bed. In desperation George consulted the village doctor, a fussy bald man with a moustache like Stalin’s. The doctor used reassuring phrases – nothing to worry about, it’s only post-natal depression, perfectly normal – and prescribed a course of iron pills. ‘Time,’ he said to George. ‘Give her time.’ But time had always been difficult for Alice, and George wasn’t reassured. Meanwhile Moses was growing, changing, almost oblivious, as if his life had an uninterruptable momentum of its own. He slept the whole night through without waking and, for the first two months, slept in the mornings too. Once he had mastered the art of sitting up, he seemed content to spend the day on the floor, one hand on his stomach, thumb in his mouth, smiling. He had one solemn expression which he put on rather deliberately, like a cap. He seldom cried and seldom moved. In retrospect, then, a most unusual baby.

  George had to learn motherhood. He sterilised bottles, changed nappies, wheeled Moses around in his new maroon pram. He even knitted Moses a simple romper-suit. He told Moses stories about New Egypt, and Moses often looked as if he was listening. Piece by piece, an extraordinary idea occurred to George. The picture, when he had assembled it, shocked him, shook him with its implications, but as the months went by it tightened its hold. First it became possible, then logical, and finally the only alternative. He realised that regardless of, because of Alice’s condition, he would have to share it with her.

  ‘Alice,’ he said one evening after a dinner that he had cooked and she hadn’t touched, ‘there’s something I’ve got to say.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘We have to let Moses go.’

  Her eyes flickered, widened, but she said, ‘Yes.’

  George’s patience had been fraying for days. Now it tore. ‘Jesus Christ, Alice,’ he shouted. ‘Don’t just say yes. Say what you mean.’

  She sat motionless. Then she began to shiver. The wave of his anger subsided. Shame flowed into the spaces it had left.

  ‘Listen to me,’ gently now. ‘We have to get Moses out of this village. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve got a plan.’

  Alice said nothing.

  ‘I know there’s only an outside chance, but it’s the only chance he’s got. It’s worth it, for him. For us too, in a way.’

  ‘In what way?’ Her voice was so soft that the silence bullied it.

  ‘We’d be thinking about something other than ourselves. Maybe that would bring us together again. Maybe it would – �
�� but he broke off, aware that he was walking into fantastic territory. ‘We have to do it. We have to try and give him what we never had. We owe it to him.’

  ‘I don’t know – ’

  ‘We owe it to him. What have we got to lose? Fuck all.’

  His language had coarsened recently. The frustration, he told himself. The sheer bloody frustration of it all. He looked across at Alice. Her unwashed hair hung in limp greenish strands. Her centre-parting had the pinkness of a scar. She avoided his eyes.

  ‘You hate me,’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘Alice, you know that’s not true.’

  ‘You’re bored with me. You hate me.’ Her voice had grown hard, serrated, but when she lifted her eyes to his the water in them warped and trembled like the air above a fire.

  ‘No.’ He reached across the table and took one of her hands. ‘I love you, Alice. I always have. You know that.’

  She looked down again. Tears began to splash on to her skirt. Because he couldn’t see them falling from her eyes, they seemed to have nothing to do with her. This tyrant sadness had invaded her, was running her. She lacked the strength to fight it.

  ‘I love you,’ he repeated. ‘We only have each other. What else do we have?’

  Her mouth tightened, shrank. ‘You want to take my child.’

  George climbed to his feet. He paced round the kitchen. He let his eyes travel over things: the chipped spout on the teapot; the cobwebs slung between the cooker and the fridge; the lino floor curling at the corners as if stale; cracks, like black hairs, on the cups and plates; the window a tiny dribbling pane of glass. He felt as if he was walking on the ocean bed. If he opened his mouth to scream, he would drown.

  ‘Look at us,’ and he was still circling the room, ‘just look at us. We’re pitiful. Absolutely bloody pitiful. What can we do? Nothing. Not a damn bloody thing, Alice.’ He rested one hand on the back of a chair, pinched his eyes with the other. ‘But Moses – ’ and, using the boy’s name, his voice lifted as if in prayer. He sensed a change in the quality of his wife’s silence. He took it as approval. Or, if not approval, acquiescence at least.