thunderstorm
1
It appears that every blade of grass could be counted if he wanted. They lie in a green rectangle. The boy feels the heat, the closeness press on him. The sun of the morning is giving way to stretches of grey. He puts his hand to his forehead and feels it sticky and wet.
His ears pick out sounds. Doves coo longingly into the gathering afternoon. Their song carries his eyes to the tall trees beyond the end of the garden. The still and dense shapes whisper to him of the coolness of shadows, of losing himself in a secret world.
He thinks of the stream in the tangle beyond the wall. He is running into the afternoon’s length, carelessly, feeling the scrape of dry earth on his knees. Until he is lying there his heart beating in his chest, his face pressed to the dry grass. Above him the sun is breaking the enveloping trees. The broken spaces, the endless blue are circumscribed only by the movement of clouds.
In the garden, half way down the lawn, his mother sits with the next-door neighbour. The light clink of china cups reaches him. On a low table is a plate with small cakes on it.
In the afternoon heat his mother’s flower-print dress stands out. The northern lilt of her accent drifts through the air. The next-door neighbour tilts her head to the side, her red hair falling from her freckled face. The flow of their laughter meanders up through the garden.
The boy walks toward his mother. He asks for a cake. Then reaches out to take one without waiting for a reply. He goes over to a football lying nearby. Swinging his foot, he kicks it against a bare patch of wall, moves to anticipate its return. He likes to watch its trajectory, the black and white diamonds spinning away from him, the thump as it strikes the pebble-dash. Its every movement, its every bounce, focuses his attention. And each shot is a dare, a challenge to his reflexes. With each shot he stretches possibilities, pushes himself, until a miss, something broken in his father’s flowerbed, a badly directed shot too close to a window, pulls his him back, pulls him back to his foot, to the relationship between eye and foot.
He aims a shot, strikes the ball and drives it with frustration. The heat delays his reaction. Diving, his fingers reach out, stretch, but miss. They grasp at empty air. With deceptive speed, the ball skids off the grass, spins away and rolls into the goal striking the picnic table and rattling the china cups. The roar of the crowd, the groan of disappointment, the commentator’s observations are all echoed in the sharpness of his mother’s voice. Asking him to be more careful.
The presence of the neighbour restrains her reprimand. ‘Has he nothing to do, nowhere else to play, no-one to play with?’ she asks.
Leaving the ball nestled in the corner of the goal, seeing himself as the goalkeeper, head hung after defeat in a close match, he walks toward the dressing room.
2
The kitchen is cool. He pours himself a glass of water. Drinking it quickly it runs over his chin and onto his green cotton t-shirt. His hands move across his mouth and he wipes it dry. Then he strolls into the living room.
The garden no longer has any interest for him. He feels restless and lethargic. Resting his head on the table he sighs. He gazes up at the rows of potted plants. They line the window-sill. Their shapes suggest to him giant trees in a make-believe world. His eyes wander over the various contours until they come to a large geranium. It has those delicate furry leaves and its flowers, a luminous red, are all the richer in the close afternoon.
He reaches his hand out and touches it. The movement releases its smell. That smell always evokes a conflict of sensations. It is neither sweet nor unpleasant. But it is a little too strong. It falls a little too heavy against the back of the throat.
Like all distinctive smells it evokes memory. Winter mornings on his way to school. The sun falling on the pavement as if weakened by its effort to penetrate the cold. He feels a hollowness in his stomach because he would rather remain at home. His father, coat buttoned, shoes polished, is waiting. calling out the car is started. They drive along the avenue, the exhaust hanging in the frosty air. And the boy is already anticipating the morning to come. He leans his leather school-bag against the back of the seat. In his head he tries to work out how many more days till the next holiday. His father talks brightly. But he, he is counting, watching each corner turned, each house passed.
Summer holidays are supposed to be fun. Today he does not know. The day is coming to him from a different level. There is a clarity, a sudden way in which objects strike him, as though he were seeing them for the first time. There is a sense of stepping over some line, a sense of time suddenly slowing into recognisable, graspable, units. The long summer holiday does not seem so long and perhaps the unendingly boring days of school in between also seem shorter. His fingers tap against the table. He moves them around in loose circles. Later a friend of his mother’s is coming to tea. He is curious. Who is it? Why is this man coming? His father will not be home till later. He is away on business.
He looks again to the sky. The clouds are growing in weight. They appear to be made from oily, torn pieces of paper. If only he could reach a little higher, he would touch them. He would dip his fingers into them, grab their heavy emptiness, drag them down to earth or push them back out into the unending sky.
The trees are motionless. He stares at the willow at the top of the garden. In the stillness, the occasional falling leaf, spins gently to the ground.
In the autumn these leaves turn bright yellow and litter the top of the garden. Like confetti at the sad marriage of summer and winter. He recalls with a shudder of excitement and fear that at the base of that tree each year, where the branches are bundled closely together, there is a concentration of wasps. He thinks of the jars that metamorphose into home made traps. Jam on the bottom, water on the top, a little more jam around the edges to lure the hovering bodies in and all hung conveniently with a piece of string from a nearby branch. Those small insects that fascinate and frighten. Their warning markings of yellow and black. The tail with a sting, the sudden way they fly at you, causing you, a creature so much more their size, to weave and run. Stories told in the playground at school. The friend on holiday who saw one three inches long. Another friend who in the mountains had to run from a swarm as big as a flock of birds. Wood-wasps that attack you in pairs. Killer wasps that live in the heart of the African jungle. Queen wasps that nest in the corner of your bedroom. Each storyteller topping the previous, secretly frightening each other, secretly knowing they only really felt easy with the layer of dead ones floating on the top of their jam-jars.
This afternoon there are no wasps. There is only the occasional bee in the buddleia tree. From a neighbour’s house comes the murmur of a radio. A door opens. Steps shuffle across a backyard.
A voice says something only half understandable. Then the afternoon is fleetingly full of the smell of baking bread.
The boy is back in his own world. The feeling returns. The feeling of something about to be uncovered. He sighs out loud, asks himself what it can be. Then he turns his head to the empty living room. The door to the hallway is open. He walks toward the open space.
3
Over the house the air becomes thicker. The avenue reaches back. It winds its way through rows of residential homes. There is a cluster of small shops and a railway station. Then there is the sea.
The house is situated on the outskirts of the city. It is linked by a two-laned tarmacadamed road. Wheels bite into this surface. The white lines, broken and unbroken, merge like the stroke of a brush in the corner of the eye.
The driver looks intently ahead. The curved road is reflected in the lens of his glasses. He grasps the steering wheel and wonders whether he should loosen his collar and tie. His jacket lies neatly on the back seat. There is a box of chocolates in paper wrapping.
Somewhere in an office someone is drawing lines across a map. Tightly bound circles, highs and lows, warm and cold fronts. The weather system is moving in off the ocean. It crosses the western seaboard, heading east. It moves over the relief of land, mountains and valleys, roads running like twisting, black lines into sudden endings, towns, cities. Two fronts about to collide. Cooler air meeting warm, static air. Friction; the release of energy; rain beating into the warm dry ground.
The driver presses on. He is nearly there. Soon he will see the sign indicating the turn left. He will find himself among the faces of tastefully painted brickwork and manicured lawns.
He glances at his watch. It is four-thirty. Leaning over to the wood panelled dashboard, he switches the radio on. A voice, almost sleepily, introduces another country-western song.
4
The light is diffused in the hallway. It comes through the six pebbled panes of glass. The boy sees the hall table. He leans against it. The fronds of a hanging plant tickle his ear. His gaze travels to the light at the door. There is the click of a car door closing. Footsteps sound on the driveway. A shadow looms, dark, undefined. A hand reaches for the bell.
Then it rings, cracking the silence open, splitting the afternoon. The boy takes off as if a starting gun had fired. He moves quickly past the glass of the door and onto the stairway. Taking the stairs lightly, two at a time, he reaches the top. Then he stops to catch his breath and listen.
He does not ask himself why he is doing this. Like a hare ready to spring he waits. The bell rings again, this time a little more insistently. His ears strain to hear the footsteps cross the living room and enter the hall. Then his name is being called out.
There is the swish of his mother’s dress as it passes the small table, the click of the catch being turned, the sound of the door opening and then a crescendo of greetings.
He peers carefully over the banister. His mother is being lightly kissed on the cheek by a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses. His hair is combed cleanly back off his forehead and his voice also has a northern lilt to it. He hands over the chocolates and mentions something about the children.
The boy waits until the steps recede down the hallway. Briefly he hears his mother mention his name but then the voices are swallowed by the living room. Again he moves. This time he springs onto the upstairs landing. He pushes the door of the guest room open. He steps toward the window and gently parts the slats of the Venetian blinds. Below is the front garden. His eyes run over the trimmed hedge to the front of the driveway.
It is grand. A family saloon, the same size as his father’s car. The wing design is flashier. It has more chrome along the side. In two shades of cream. There are wing mirrors near the front headlamps and a car radio aerial. Quickly running through all the names he knows, he settles on the appropriate one, turning it over and over in his mind.
The car stands silently, commandingly; and the Cypress trees form a guard of honour from the far side of the avenue.
Deftly the boy grabs the cord and pulls the blinds up a couple of centimetres. He stares for a long time, his nose pressed to the window, his arms underneath his chin.
The avenue is quite. The distant mountains appear also to be pressed down in the closeness. Their curving, blue shapes, their dark and light patches quiver, caress the eye, compact the space and suggest that their texture, their shapes are just within reach.
His attention is caught by the creaking of a bicycle. A postman cycles past. In the lined face with its large nose, its sour mouth, the eyes are fixed resignedly ahead. The foot instinctively moves as a dog begins to bark in a neighbouring driveway.
Again he feels restless, unquiet, as if expecting something to happen. His stomach muscles tighten, his mouth falls open, and yet, nothing happens. The afternoon continues. The postman passes by, the mountains remain where they are.
He pulls back. He feels irritated, empty, lost in the entire afternoon. The shooting fall of sounds, the compressing of distance, the emptiness of the house all mount upon his ten year old frame. He looks down at his scuffed knees, sees the tear in the side of his gym shoes, the grass stain along the side of his khaki shorts and he feels constricted, feels constricted by all his clothes, held in by them, as if they were nothing to do with him any longer. Suddenly he wants to take them off, to throw them up into the coming storm, into the rain he knows must fall.
He does not. For a moment he looks about him as if arrested on the brink of jumping. Does he just imagine he feels the floor spinning away from under him? Is it just a trick of the heavy July heat that causes the afternoon to slip from him?
He sways and grabs the wooden end of the bed. The scuffed knee is still there, the torn gym shoe, the grass-stained shorts. Taking a deep breath, he straightens up, waits, coming back in on the blend of heat and light that makes up the afternoon.
5
The finishing touches have just been put to the table. He sits down. Across from him the visitor looks on politely. His mother asks if he has washed his hands. Answering no, he is told to do so. His brother is talking to the visitor. He is telling a story about what he has being doing all afternoon. About a dog belonging to a friend. About how big it was and about how he and his friend took it for a walk on the avenue and it tried to run away. The visitor listens, commenting affably now and then. Over his shirt sleeves are metallic arm-bands. Across his tie is a shiny, gold pin. The blue of his eyes is all the more noticeable behind the frame of his glasses. The boy listens. Then his mind begins to wander, to wander back upstairs.
Now it has become another world; a secret. After leaving the guest room, he crept into his parent’s bedroom. There was a moment of hesitation. He knew he was stepping into private space. Finally he pushed the door.
Through the window he could see the garden. He saw his mother and the visitor, the next-door neighbour making excuses to leave. From above the green was sprinkled in white; small flowers. Beyond were the grounds of an estate, a convent. There was a field of ripening corn, a small chapel. To his right was a line of heavy horse-chestnut trees.
Again that feeling came over him. A burst of fire, a current moving through him. There was constraint and energy. It struck him, unsettling, and yet exciting. It dizzied him as if he were somehow about to fly, about to step into a new world.
Turning from the window, he heard his mother laugh lightly from the garden and was aware of her holding a china-cup, of her crossing one leg over the other. Finding himself reflected in the full length mirror of his father’s wardrobe, he halted. His own face stared back. Its eyes blue, the nose freckled, the body lean, the ears sticking-out, the hair loose and fair. He reached out and turned the key and slowly. Then he stopped. For a moment his heart clasped. His reflection was transformed. It was replaced by his father’s dark, blue suit. It hung there; mute. He could see his father in it. He could see the tall, angular body, the balding head, the shadow around the mouth.
Across his vision swam the blue-grey eyes that seemed always to stare into some unmarked distance. The boy stared at the suit just as he had stared at the car earlier. Yet this was different. There was no chrome, no red upholstery and no flashy wing mirrors. Just a dark, blue woollen suit.
It was the suit his father wore on Sundays; the suit of the church pew with the frail sunlight and long hymns. This was the suit of deference and ambition; the suit that marked a man from the disappointment of his childhood. It was the suit that bore a man’s aspirations and achievements. It was the suit in which a father was seen by his son at Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch with the family dressed in their best. The aunts and the cousins. The smell of the pot-roast. The mother of the father sitting silently. An older world. And the son of the son watching her watching him.
The boy felt a sudden sadness sweep over him. It rose and mixed with the fire, the current, became part of the constraint and energy. It pushed against the constraint as if sadness were now the only energy; though it was also the sadness that tightened, constrained. He closed the wardrobe door. He stopped. Through the room drifted the murmur of the voices below. The air had become heavier. It clung now. It was permeated with the heavy scent of flowers and grass. And he felt alone. He could not put it in words. It was an aloneness that spoke to him of mystery. It spoke of a riddle he could not quite solve.
His eyes moved around the room. There was his mother’s dressing table with her make-up and jewellery box. Suddenly he let himself drop into the aloneness.
He faced the mirror again. He became taller. Imagining a similar suit, but lighter, he saw himself the proud owner of a family-car. He envisaged the woman beside him. She was slender. She wore a loose dress and her hair was long. He could see the laughter in her eyes.
It felt strange, unknown, as if trying on something new. He was stepping into another part of himself. Then it was familiar. He had always known it but forgotten. He had mislaid it or simply never quite noticed it before. Not only was it something he felt in his body but it was like an exhalation of breath within his mind. The closeness, the heaviness emptied out of him. The constraint and sadness mixed again but then loosened their hold on him.
Impulsively he wanted to run. He wanted to jump, to move with the fire, to follow the energy that now penetrated the stillness of the summer afternoon.
He descended the stairs, crossed the living room and garden without so much as a word. He heard his mother call out to him as he scaled the wall and plunged beyond. He ran underneath the labyrinth of leaves. He tore through the long grass. He brushed the bramble bushes and the hedges. Then crossed the stony stream in a single leap. It was the field he needed to reach. The field of the estate in which he had never yet set foot. It was out of bounds. Today that did not deter him. The fire, the opening out within him, the image of himself as having crossed something, drove him all the more, made him feel all the more pulled by the space.
He dived then, let himself fall into the strands of ripening corn. He looked up. His head span and he laughed out under the quenching sky.
6
The boy comes back to the table to hear his sister speaking. His mother asks the visitor if he would like some fruit juice. The boy is looking at his plate. He is hungry. The visitor speaks to him, asks him something. He goes to answer but then stops.
`There will probably be a thunderstorm tonight', he announces.
7
The storm comes. When it breaks he is already in bed with only a sheet covering him because of the heat. He is woken by the first rolls of thunder, the first breaks of lightning. Stepping sleepily over scattered toys he crosses the floor and pulls back the curtain. The trees are motionless, merged in shadow. On the grass, an amber glow spills from the room below. Waiting and watching his eyes are rewarded with a sting and the sky splits in two with a searing, white light.
Then the rain begins to fall. It comes down abruptly with an intensity as if the sky were trying to drown the earth and the earth in turn was reaching up to receive it. The garden rises in a rich, earthy aroma.
Hearing voices from below he creeps to the top of the stairs. In the doorway, his father and mother are standing. His father’s white shirt is soaking wet. The visitor is waiting and they talk together. He sees his father reach out and shake the visitor’s hand. The visitor is now wearing a light sports jacket.
The boy overhears snatches of the conversation. He listens and watches, concentrating as his father takes off his glasses to dry them. For a moment he sees the face of a younger man; for a moment the middle-aged eyes are lit by a brighter hue.
Lightly, the boys mother stretches forward and kisses the visitor on the cheek. He hears her say to drive carefully. The door is open and the rain is coming in. Across the porch the lightening flickers and the thunder rumbles. Stepping onto the foot-wipe, the visitor turns and waves. Then there is the sound of footsteps as he quickly runs to his car.
8
The storm begins to ease. The lightning becomes less frequent and the thunder is quieter. The rain taps gently against the window. Outside the air is clearer.
The boy squats on the top stair. He puts his arms around his legs, his chin on his knees. Again he is thinking about the trees and the field behind the house. He tip-toes back to the bedroom and climbs into bed.
He is thinking only of tomorrow. Running again. Remembering his secret, his new found sense of self. And the white clouds sailing across the endless blue sky. Running his hand over his scuffed knee, he feels sleep begin to overtake him. It run along his back, up through his neck, reaches quietly over into his eyes. He pulls up a blanket and settles the pillow to his face.
9
The slip road left, the main road north is now in view. As the rain eases and the car steers its way deftly out of the city the man in the sports jacket leans over and turns on the radio. Now and then a halfhearted flash of lightning illuminates the inside of the car. On the back seat are a bunch of red roses and the evening newspaper, July 21, 1968.
On the map, the lines have changed, the fronts have altered. The weather system spiralling its way across the country is moving east. Tomorrow’s forecast is light showers with periods of sun, temperatures, no more than fifteen to sixteen celsius, winds light, west to northwest.
The man loosens his tie and fixes his gaze on the road in front of him. He has passed the city speed restriction and already the headlights are picking up the road rushing forward. The two shades of cream, the red upholstery, the lines of chrome, move sleekly through the wet, hidden countryside.
It will be after midnight before he is home. He yawns lightly, sits back in the seat. The arm stretches out, instinctively, to turn up the radio. To the steady beat of a drum, the slide of steel guitar, and the announcer's reassuring voice, the visitor settles in for the long drive home.
His ears pick out sounds. Doves coo longingly into the gathering afternoon. Their song carries his eyes to the tall trees beyond the end of the garden. The still and dense shapes whisper to him of the coolness of shadows, of losing himself in a secret world.
He thinks of the stream in the tangle beyond the wall. He is running into the afternoon’s length, carelessly, feeling the scrape of dry earth on his knees. Until he is lying there his heart beating in his chest, his face pressed to the dry grass. Above him the sun is breaking the enveloping trees. The broken spaces, the endless blue are circumscribed only by the movement of clouds.
In the garden, half way down the lawn, his mother sits with the next-door neighbour. The light clink of china cups reaches him. On a low table is a plate with small cakes on it.
In the afternoon heat his mother’s flower-print dress stands out. The northern lilt of her accent drifts through the air. The next-door neighbour tilts her head to the side, her red hair falling from her freckled face. The flow of their laughter meanders up through the garden.
The boy walks toward his mother. He asks for a cake. Then reaches out to take one without waiting for a reply. He goes over to a football lying nearby. Swinging his foot, he kicks it against a bare patch of wall, moves to anticipate its return. He likes to watch its trajectory, the black and white diamonds spinning away from him, the thump as it strikes the pebble-dash. Its every movement, its every bounce, focuses his attention. And each shot is a dare, a challenge to his reflexes. With each shot he stretches possibilities, pushes himself, until a miss, something broken in his father’s flowerbed, a badly directed shot too close to a window, pulls his him back, pulls him back to his foot, to the relationship between eye and foot.
He aims a shot, strikes the ball and drives it with frustration. The heat delays his reaction. Diving, his fingers reach out, stretch, but miss. They grasp at empty air. With deceptive speed, the ball skids off the grass, spins away and rolls into the goal striking the picnic table and rattling the china cups. The roar of the crowd, the groan of disappointment, the commentator’s observations are all echoed in the sharpness of his mother’s voice. Asking him to be more careful.
The presence of the neighbour restrains her reprimand. ‘Has he nothing to do, nowhere else to play, no-one to play with?’ she asks.
Leaving the ball nestled in the corner of the goal, seeing himself as the goalkeeper, head hung after defeat in a close match, he walks toward the dressing room.
2
The kitchen is cool. He pours himself a glass of water. Drinking it quickly it runs over his chin and onto his green cotton t-shirt. His hands move across his mouth and he wipes it dry. Then he strolls into the living room.
The garden no longer has any interest for him. He feels restless and lethargic. Resting his head on the table he sighs. He gazes up at the rows of potted plants. They line the window-sill. Their shapes suggest to him giant trees in a make-believe world. His eyes wander over the various contours until they come to a large geranium. It has those delicate furry leaves and its flowers, a luminous red, are all the richer in the close afternoon.
He reaches his hand out and touches it. The movement releases its smell. That smell always evokes a conflict of sensations. It is neither sweet nor unpleasant. But it is a little too strong. It falls a little too heavy against the back of the throat.
Like all distinctive smells it evokes memory. Winter mornings on his way to school. The sun falling on the pavement as if weakened by its effort to penetrate the cold. He feels a hollowness in his stomach because he would rather remain at home. His father, coat buttoned, shoes polished, is waiting. calling out the car is started. They drive along the avenue, the exhaust hanging in the frosty air. And the boy is already anticipating the morning to come. He leans his leather school-bag against the back of the seat. In his head he tries to work out how many more days till the next holiday. His father talks brightly. But he, he is counting, watching each corner turned, each house passed.
Summer holidays are supposed to be fun. Today he does not know. The day is coming to him from a different level. There is a clarity, a sudden way in which objects strike him, as though he were seeing them for the first time. There is a sense of stepping over some line, a sense of time suddenly slowing into recognisable, graspable, units. The long summer holiday does not seem so long and perhaps the unendingly boring days of school in between also seem shorter. His fingers tap against the table. He moves them around in loose circles. Later a friend of his mother’s is coming to tea. He is curious. Who is it? Why is this man coming? His father will not be home till later. He is away on business.
He looks again to the sky. The clouds are growing in weight. They appear to be made from oily, torn pieces of paper. If only he could reach a little higher, he would touch them. He would dip his fingers into them, grab their heavy emptiness, drag them down to earth or push them back out into the unending sky.
The trees are motionless. He stares at the willow at the top of the garden. In the stillness, the occasional falling leaf, spins gently to the ground.
In the autumn these leaves turn bright yellow and litter the top of the garden. Like confetti at the sad marriage of summer and winter. He recalls with a shudder of excitement and fear that at the base of that tree each year, where the branches are bundled closely together, there is a concentration of wasps. He thinks of the jars that metamorphose into home made traps. Jam on the bottom, water on the top, a little more jam around the edges to lure the hovering bodies in and all hung conveniently with a piece of string from a nearby branch. Those small insects that fascinate and frighten. Their warning markings of yellow and black. The tail with a sting, the sudden way they fly at you, causing you, a creature so much more their size, to weave and run. Stories told in the playground at school. The friend on holiday who saw one three inches long. Another friend who in the mountains had to run from a swarm as big as a flock of birds. Wood-wasps that attack you in pairs. Killer wasps that live in the heart of the African jungle. Queen wasps that nest in the corner of your bedroom. Each storyteller topping the previous, secretly frightening each other, secretly knowing they only really felt easy with the layer of dead ones floating on the top of their jam-jars.
This afternoon there are no wasps. There is only the occasional bee in the buddleia tree. From a neighbour’s house comes the murmur of a radio. A door opens. Steps shuffle across a backyard.
A voice says something only half understandable. Then the afternoon is fleetingly full of the smell of baking bread.
The boy is back in his own world. The feeling returns. The feeling of something about to be uncovered. He sighs out loud, asks himself what it can be. Then he turns his head to the empty living room. The door to the hallway is open. He walks toward the open space.
3
Over the house the air becomes thicker. The avenue reaches back. It winds its way through rows of residential homes. There is a cluster of small shops and a railway station. Then there is the sea.
The house is situated on the outskirts of the city. It is linked by a two-laned tarmacadamed road. Wheels bite into this surface. The white lines, broken and unbroken, merge like the stroke of a brush in the corner of the eye.
The driver looks intently ahead. The curved road is reflected in the lens of his glasses. He grasps the steering wheel and wonders whether he should loosen his collar and tie. His jacket lies neatly on the back seat. There is a box of chocolates in paper wrapping.
Somewhere in an office someone is drawing lines across a map. Tightly bound circles, highs and lows, warm and cold fronts. The weather system is moving in off the ocean. It crosses the western seaboard, heading east. It moves over the relief of land, mountains and valleys, roads running like twisting, black lines into sudden endings, towns, cities. Two fronts about to collide. Cooler air meeting warm, static air. Friction; the release of energy; rain beating into the warm dry ground.
The driver presses on. He is nearly there. Soon he will see the sign indicating the turn left. He will find himself among the faces of tastefully painted brickwork and manicured lawns.
He glances at his watch. It is four-thirty. Leaning over to the wood panelled dashboard, he switches the radio on. A voice, almost sleepily, introduces another country-western song.
4
The light is diffused in the hallway. It comes through the six pebbled panes of glass. The boy sees the hall table. He leans against it. The fronds of a hanging plant tickle his ear. His gaze travels to the light at the door. There is the click of a car door closing. Footsteps sound on the driveway. A shadow looms, dark, undefined. A hand reaches for the bell.
Then it rings, cracking the silence open, splitting the afternoon. The boy takes off as if a starting gun had fired. He moves quickly past the glass of the door and onto the stairway. Taking the stairs lightly, two at a time, he reaches the top. Then he stops to catch his breath and listen.
He does not ask himself why he is doing this. Like a hare ready to spring he waits. The bell rings again, this time a little more insistently. His ears strain to hear the footsteps cross the living room and enter the hall. Then his name is being called out.
There is the swish of his mother’s dress as it passes the small table, the click of the catch being turned, the sound of the door opening and then a crescendo of greetings.
He peers carefully over the banister. His mother is being lightly kissed on the cheek by a man wearing tortoiseshell glasses. His hair is combed cleanly back off his forehead and his voice also has a northern lilt to it. He hands over the chocolates and mentions something about the children.
The boy waits until the steps recede down the hallway. Briefly he hears his mother mention his name but then the voices are swallowed by the living room. Again he moves. This time he springs onto the upstairs landing. He pushes the door of the guest room open. He steps toward the window and gently parts the slats of the Venetian blinds. Below is the front garden. His eyes run over the trimmed hedge to the front of the driveway.
It is grand. A family saloon, the same size as his father’s car. The wing design is flashier. It has more chrome along the side. In two shades of cream. There are wing mirrors near the front headlamps and a car radio aerial. Quickly running through all the names he knows, he settles on the appropriate one, turning it over and over in his mind.
The car stands silently, commandingly; and the Cypress trees form a guard of honour from the far side of the avenue.
Deftly the boy grabs the cord and pulls the blinds up a couple of centimetres. He stares for a long time, his nose pressed to the window, his arms underneath his chin.
The avenue is quite. The distant mountains appear also to be pressed down in the closeness. Their curving, blue shapes, their dark and light patches quiver, caress the eye, compact the space and suggest that their texture, their shapes are just within reach.
His attention is caught by the creaking of a bicycle. A postman cycles past. In the lined face with its large nose, its sour mouth, the eyes are fixed resignedly ahead. The foot instinctively moves as a dog begins to bark in a neighbouring driveway.
Again he feels restless, unquiet, as if expecting something to happen. His stomach muscles tighten, his mouth falls open, and yet, nothing happens. The afternoon continues. The postman passes by, the mountains remain where they are.
He pulls back. He feels irritated, empty, lost in the entire afternoon. The shooting fall of sounds, the compressing of distance, the emptiness of the house all mount upon his ten year old frame. He looks down at his scuffed knees, sees the tear in the side of his gym shoes, the grass stain along the side of his khaki shorts and he feels constricted, feels constricted by all his clothes, held in by them, as if they were nothing to do with him any longer. Suddenly he wants to take them off, to throw them up into the coming storm, into the rain he knows must fall.
He does not. For a moment he looks about him as if arrested on the brink of jumping. Does he just imagine he feels the floor spinning away from under him? Is it just a trick of the heavy July heat that causes the afternoon to slip from him?
He sways and grabs the wooden end of the bed. The scuffed knee is still there, the torn gym shoe, the grass-stained shorts. Taking a deep breath, he straightens up, waits, coming back in on the blend of heat and light that makes up the afternoon.
5
The finishing touches have just been put to the table. He sits down. Across from him the visitor looks on politely. His mother asks if he has washed his hands. Answering no, he is told to do so. His brother is talking to the visitor. He is telling a story about what he has being doing all afternoon. About a dog belonging to a friend. About how big it was and about how he and his friend took it for a walk on the avenue and it tried to run away. The visitor listens, commenting affably now and then. Over his shirt sleeves are metallic arm-bands. Across his tie is a shiny, gold pin. The blue of his eyes is all the more noticeable behind the frame of his glasses. The boy listens. Then his mind begins to wander, to wander back upstairs.
Now it has become another world; a secret. After leaving the guest room, he crept into his parent’s bedroom. There was a moment of hesitation. He knew he was stepping into private space. Finally he pushed the door.
Through the window he could see the garden. He saw his mother and the visitor, the next-door neighbour making excuses to leave. From above the green was sprinkled in white; small flowers. Beyond were the grounds of an estate, a convent. There was a field of ripening corn, a small chapel. To his right was a line of heavy horse-chestnut trees.
Again that feeling came over him. A burst of fire, a current moving through him. There was constraint and energy. It struck him, unsettling, and yet exciting. It dizzied him as if he were somehow about to fly, about to step into a new world.
Turning from the window, he heard his mother laugh lightly from the garden and was aware of her holding a china-cup, of her crossing one leg over the other. Finding himself reflected in the full length mirror of his father’s wardrobe, he halted. His own face stared back. Its eyes blue, the nose freckled, the body lean, the ears sticking-out, the hair loose and fair. He reached out and turned the key and slowly. Then he stopped. For a moment his heart clasped. His reflection was transformed. It was replaced by his father’s dark, blue suit. It hung there; mute. He could see his father in it. He could see the tall, angular body, the balding head, the shadow around the mouth.
Across his vision swam the blue-grey eyes that seemed always to stare into some unmarked distance. The boy stared at the suit just as he had stared at the car earlier. Yet this was different. There was no chrome, no red upholstery and no flashy wing mirrors. Just a dark, blue woollen suit.
It was the suit his father wore on Sundays; the suit of the church pew with the frail sunlight and long hymns. This was the suit of deference and ambition; the suit that marked a man from the disappointment of his childhood. It was the suit that bore a man’s aspirations and achievements. It was the suit in which a father was seen by his son at Sunday lunch. Sunday lunch with the family dressed in their best. The aunts and the cousins. The smell of the pot-roast. The mother of the father sitting silently. An older world. And the son of the son watching her watching him.
The boy felt a sudden sadness sweep over him. It rose and mixed with the fire, the current, became part of the constraint and energy. It pushed against the constraint as if sadness were now the only energy; though it was also the sadness that tightened, constrained. He closed the wardrobe door. He stopped. Through the room drifted the murmur of the voices below. The air had become heavier. It clung now. It was permeated with the heavy scent of flowers and grass. And he felt alone. He could not put it in words. It was an aloneness that spoke to him of mystery. It spoke of a riddle he could not quite solve.
His eyes moved around the room. There was his mother’s dressing table with her make-up and jewellery box. Suddenly he let himself drop into the aloneness.
He faced the mirror again. He became taller. Imagining a similar suit, but lighter, he saw himself the proud owner of a family-car. He envisaged the woman beside him. She was slender. She wore a loose dress and her hair was long. He could see the laughter in her eyes.
It felt strange, unknown, as if trying on something new. He was stepping into another part of himself. Then it was familiar. He had always known it but forgotten. He had mislaid it or simply never quite noticed it before. Not only was it something he felt in his body but it was like an exhalation of breath within his mind. The closeness, the heaviness emptied out of him. The constraint and sadness mixed again but then loosened their hold on him.
Impulsively he wanted to run. He wanted to jump, to move with the fire, to follow the energy that now penetrated the stillness of the summer afternoon.
He descended the stairs, crossed the living room and garden without so much as a word. He heard his mother call out to him as he scaled the wall and plunged beyond. He ran underneath the labyrinth of leaves. He tore through the long grass. He brushed the bramble bushes and the hedges. Then crossed the stony stream in a single leap. It was the field he needed to reach. The field of the estate in which he had never yet set foot. It was out of bounds. Today that did not deter him. The fire, the opening out within him, the image of himself as having crossed something, drove him all the more, made him feel all the more pulled by the space.
He dived then, let himself fall into the strands of ripening corn. He looked up. His head span and he laughed out under the quenching sky.
6
The boy comes back to the table to hear his sister speaking. His mother asks the visitor if he would like some fruit juice. The boy is looking at his plate. He is hungry. The visitor speaks to him, asks him something. He goes to answer but then stops.
`There will probably be a thunderstorm tonight', he announces.
7
The storm comes. When it breaks he is already in bed with only a sheet covering him because of the heat. He is woken by the first rolls of thunder, the first breaks of lightning. Stepping sleepily over scattered toys he crosses the floor and pulls back the curtain. The trees are motionless, merged in shadow. On the grass, an amber glow spills from the room below. Waiting and watching his eyes are rewarded with a sting and the sky splits in two with a searing, white light.
Then the rain begins to fall. It comes down abruptly with an intensity as if the sky were trying to drown the earth and the earth in turn was reaching up to receive it. The garden rises in a rich, earthy aroma.
Hearing voices from below he creeps to the top of the stairs. In the doorway, his father and mother are standing. His father’s white shirt is soaking wet. The visitor is waiting and they talk together. He sees his father reach out and shake the visitor’s hand. The visitor is now wearing a light sports jacket.
The boy overhears snatches of the conversation. He listens and watches, concentrating as his father takes off his glasses to dry them. For a moment he sees the face of a younger man; for a moment the middle-aged eyes are lit by a brighter hue.
Lightly, the boys mother stretches forward and kisses the visitor on the cheek. He hears her say to drive carefully. The door is open and the rain is coming in. Across the porch the lightening flickers and the thunder rumbles. Stepping onto the foot-wipe, the visitor turns and waves. Then there is the sound of footsteps as he quickly runs to his car.
8
The storm begins to ease. The lightning becomes less frequent and the thunder is quieter. The rain taps gently against the window. Outside the air is clearer.
The boy squats on the top stair. He puts his arms around his legs, his chin on his knees. Again he is thinking about the trees and the field behind the house. He tip-toes back to the bedroom and climbs into bed.
He is thinking only of tomorrow. Running again. Remembering his secret, his new found sense of self. And the white clouds sailing across the endless blue sky. Running his hand over his scuffed knee, he feels sleep begin to overtake him. It run along his back, up through his neck, reaches quietly over into his eyes. He pulls up a blanket and settles the pillow to his face.
9
The slip road left, the main road north is now in view. As the rain eases and the car steers its way deftly out of the city the man in the sports jacket leans over and turns on the radio. Now and then a halfhearted flash of lightning illuminates the inside of the car. On the back seat are a bunch of red roses and the evening newspaper, July 21, 1968.
On the map, the lines have changed, the fronts have altered. The weather system spiralling its way across the country is moving east. Tomorrow’s forecast is light showers with periods of sun, temperatures, no more than fifteen to sixteen celsius, winds light, west to northwest.
The man loosens his tie and fixes his gaze on the road in front of him. He has passed the city speed restriction and already the headlights are picking up the road rushing forward. The two shades of cream, the red upholstery, the lines of chrome, move sleekly through the wet, hidden countryside.
It will be after midnight before he is home. He yawns lightly, sits back in the seat. The arm stretches out, instinctively, to turn up the radio. To the steady beat of a drum, the slide of steel guitar, and the announcer's reassuring voice, the visitor settles in for the long drive home.
Copyright (C) Peter Millington. Amsterdam. August 1994.
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