Sweet Sorrow

The Meadow

The great expanse of empty hours meant that, for the first time in my life, I’d resorted to reading. I’d begun with thrillers and horror novels from Dad’s collection, dog-eared pages waffled from bath or beach, in which sex alternated with violence at an accelerating pace. Initially, books had felt like second best – reading about sex and violence was like listening to football on the radio – but soon I was tearing through a novel every day, forgetting them almost instantly except for The Silence of the Lambs and Stephen King. Before too long, I’d graduated to Dad’s smaller, slightly intimidating ‘sci-fi’ section: scuffed copies of Asimov, Ballard and Philip K Dick. Though I couldn’t say how it was achieved, I could tell that these books were written in a different register to the ones about giant rats, and the novel that I carried daily in my bag began to feel like protection against boredom, an alibi for loneliness. There was still something furtive about it – reading in front of my mates would be like taking up the flute or country dancing – but no one would see me here, and so on this day I took out my copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive, chosen because it had ‘slaughter’ in the title.

If I rolled a little from side to side, I could make a sort of military dugout, invisible from the house above or the town below. Straining for soulfulness, I took in the view, a model-railway kind of landscape with everything too close together: plantations rather than woodland, reservoirs not lakes, stables and catteries and dog kennels rather than dairy farms and roaming sheep. Birdsong competed with the grumble of the motorway and the tinnitus buzzing of the pylons above, but from this distance, it didn’t seem such a bad place. From this distance.

I took off my top and lay back, practised my smoking with the day’s cigarette, then, using the book to shield my eyes, I began to read, pausing now and then to brush ash from my chest. High above, holiday jets from Spain and Italy, Turkey and Greece, circled in a holding pattern, impatient for a runway. I closed my eyes and watched the fibres drifting against the screen of my eyelids, trying to follow them to the edge of my vision as they darted away like fish in a stream.

When I awoke, the sun was at its height and I felt thick-headed and momentarily panicked by the sound of whoops and shouts and hunting cries from the hill above: a posse. Were they out to get me? No, I heard the swish of grass and the panicked gasps of their quarry, running down the hill in my direction. I peered through the high grass. The girl wore a yellow T-shirt and a short blue denim skirt that hindered her running, and I saw her hoist it higher with both hands, then look behind her and crouch down to catch her breath, forehead pressed to her scuffed knees. I couldn’t see her expression, but had a sudden, excited notion that the house was some sinister institution, an asylum or a secret lab, and that I might help her escape. More shouts and jeers, and she glanced back, then straightened, twisted her skirt further up her pale legs and began to run directly at me. I crouched again, but not before I saw her look back one more time and suddenly pitch forward and crash face first into the ground.

I’m ashamed to say I laughed, clapping my hand to my mouth. A moment’s silence, then I heard her groaning and giggling at the same time. ‘Ow! Ow-ow-ow, you idiot! Owwwwww!’ She was perhaps three or four metres away now, her panting broken by her own pained laughter, and I was suddenly aware of my skinny bare chest as pink as tinned salmon, and the syrupy sweat and cigarette ash that had pooled in my sternum. I began the contortions required to get dressed while remaining flat on the ground.

From the house on the hill, a jeering voice – ‘Hey! We give up! You win! Come back and join us!’ – and I thought, it’s a trap, don’t believe them.

The girl groaned to herself. ‘Hold on!’

Another voice, female. ‘You did very well! Lunchtime! Come back!’

‘I can’t!’ she said, sitting now.

I took off my top and lay back, practised my smoking with the day’s cigarette, then, using the book to shield my eyes, I began to read, pausing now and then to brush ash from my chest.

‘Ow! Bloody hell!’ I pressed myself further into the ground as she attempted to stand, testing her ankle and yelping at the pain. I would have to reveal myself, but there seemed no casual way to leap out on someone in a meadow. I licked my lips, and in a stranger’s voice called, ‘Helloo!’

She gasped, pivoted on her good leg and fell backwards all at once, disappearing into the grass. ‘Listen, don’t freak out but–’ ‘Who said that?!’

‘Just so you know I’m here–’ ‘Who? Where?’

‘Over here. In the long grass.’ ‘But who the f**k are you? Where are you?’

I pulled my T-shirt down quickly, stood and, in a low crouch as if under fire, crossed to where she lay.

‘I was trying not to scare you.’ ‘Well, you failed, you weirdo!’ ‘Hey, I was here first!’ ‘What are you doing here anyway?’

‘Nothing! Reading! Why are they after you?’

She looked at me sideways. ‘Who?’

‘Those people, why are they chasing you?’

‘You’re not in the company?’ ‘What company?’

‘The Company, you’re not part of it?’

The Company sounded sinister and I wondered if I might help her after all. Come with me if you want to live. ‘No, I–’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Nothing, I was just, I went for a bike ride and–’

‘Where’s your bike?’

‘Over there. I was reading and I fell asleep and I wanted to let you know I was here without frightening you.’

She’d returned to examining her ankle. ‘Well, that worked out.’

‘Actually, it is a public footpath. I’ve got as much right to be here–’

‘Fine, but I have an actual reason.’

‘So why were they chasing you?’ ‘What? Oh. Stupid game. Don’t ask.’ She tested the bones of her ankle with her thumbs. ‘Ow!’ ‘Does it hurt?’

‘Yes, it f**king hurts! Running through meadows, it’s a f**king death-trap. I put my foot right in a rabbit hole, and fell on my face.’ ‘Yeah, I saw that.’

‘Did you? Well, thank you for not laughing.’

‘I did laugh.’

She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘So – can I help?’ I said, to make amends.

She looked me up and down, literally up then down again, an appraisal, so that I found myself trying to jam my fingertips into my pockets. ‘Tell me again, why are you here, perving about?’

‘I’m just… Look, I’m reading!’ I scrambled back to my foxhole to retrieve the paperback and hold it out. She examined the cover, checking it against my face as if it were a passport. Satisfied, she tried to get to her feet, winced and collapsed back down. I wondered if I ought to offer my hand, like a handshake, but the gesture seemed absurd and instead I knelt at her feet and, scarcely less absurd, took her foot as if trying on a glass slipper: Adidas shell-tops with blue stripes, no socks, a pale, mottled shin. I felt the prickle of new stubble, black like iron filings.

‘You all right down there?’ she said, eyes fixed on the sky.

‘Yes, just wondering if–’ I’d assumed a surgeon’s air, probing with skilled thumbs.

‘Ow!’

‘Sorry!’

‘Tell me, Doctor, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘I’m looking for the bit that hurts, then I’m prodding it. Basically, I’m seeing if there’s bone sticking out through flesh.’

‘Is there?’

‘No, you’re fine. It’s a sprain.’ ‘And will I ever dance again?’ ‘You will,’ I said, ‘but only if you really want it.’

She laughed up at the sky and I felt so debonair and pleased with myself that I laughed too. ‘Serves me right for wearing this,’ she said, tugging the denim skirt towards her knees. ‘Vanity. What an idiot. I’d better get back. You can let go of my foot now.’ Too abruptly, I dropped it and stood by stupidly while she attempted to haul herself into an upright position.

‘Any chance that you could… ?’ ‘’Course!’ I hauled her to her feet and held her hand as she tested the ground with her pointed toe, winced again, tested again, and I tried to take her in while looking the other way. She was a little shorter than me but not much, her skin pale, her hair black and short but with a longer fringe that she now stowed away behind her ear, and which was carefully shaved at the nape of her neck in a way that exaggerated the curve of her skull, so that it was somehow austere and glamorous at the same time. Joan of Arc just leaving the salon. I don’t think I’d ever noticed the back of someone’s head before. Tiny black

studs in each ear, with two extra holes for special occasions. Because I was sixteen, I let my eyes slip out of focus to disguise the fact that I was looking at her breasts, confident that no girl had spotted this trick before. Adidas, they said, on a bright yellow T-shirt with very short sleeves so that, in the soft flesh at the top of her arm, I could make out her BCG scar, dimpled like the markings on a Roman coin.

‘Hello? I’m going to need your help.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘I can hop, but that’s not going to work.’

‘D’you want a piggy-back?’ I said, regretting ‘piggy-back’. There had to be a tougher term. ‘Or a, you know, fireman’s lift?’ She looked at me and I stood a little straighter.

‘Are you a fireman?’

‘I’m taller than you!’

‘But I’m…’ She tugged her skirt down. ‘… denser. Can you lift your own weight?’

‘Sure!’ I said, and turned and offered up my sweaty back with a hitchhiker’s flick of the thumb.

‘No. No, that would be really weird. But if you don’t mind me leaning on you…’

In a further gesture that

I’ve never made before or since, I cocked my elbow to the side and sort of nodded towards it, hand on hip like a country dancer.

‘Why, thank ’ee,’ she said, and we began to walk.

The swish of the long grass seemed unreasonably loud and searching for a clear path meant there were few opportunities to turn and look at her, though it now felt like a compulsion. She walked with her fringe obscuring her face, her eyes fixed on the ground, but in flashes I could see they were blue, a ridiculous blue – had I noticed the colour of anyone’s eyes quite so acutely before? – and the skin around them had a bluish tinge too, like the remnants of last night’s make-up, creased with laughter lines, or a wince as– ‘Ow! Ow, ow, ow.’

‘Are you sure I can’t carry you?’ ‘You are really keen to carry someone.’

There were a few spots on her forehead and one on her chin, picked or worried at, and her mouth seemed very wide and red against the pale skin, with a small raised seam in her lower lip, a fold, as if there’d been some repair, the mouth held in tension as if she was about to laugh, or swear, or both, as she did now, her ankle folding sideways like a hinge.

‘I really could carry you.’ ‘I believe you.’ Soon the gate to the formal garden was in sight, the absurd house now grander and more intimidating, and I wondered: ‘Do you live here?’

‘Here?’ She laughed with her whole face, unselfconsciously. One of my smaller prejudices was a suspicion and resentment of people with very good teeth; all that health and vigour seemed like a kind of showing-off. This girl’s teeth, I noticed, were saved from perfection by a chip on her left front tooth, like the folded corner of a page.

‘No, I don’t live here.’

‘I thought they were your family, the people chasing you.’

‘Yeah, they do that a lot, me and Mum and Dad, whenever we see a field–’

‘Well, I don’t know…’

‘It was a silly game. It’s a long story.’ Changing the subject: ‘What were you doing here again?’

‘Reading. Just a nice spot to read.’

She nodded, sceptical. ‘Nature boy.’

I shrugged. ‘It’s not home.’ ‘And how’s Slaughterhouse-Five?’ ‘S’okay. Not enough slaughter.’ She laughed, though I was only half joking. ‘I’ve heard of it but not read it. I don’t want to generalise but I always thought it was a boys’ book. Is it?’

I shrugged again…

‘I mean, compared to Atwood or Le Guin.’

… because if she was going to talk about literature, then I may as well push her into a bush and run. ‘So. What’s it about?’ Charlie, can you tell the class something about the author’s intentions in this passage? Your own words, please.

‘It’s about this man, this war veteran, who has been kidnapped by aliens and he’s in an alien zoo, but he keeps flashing back to scenes in the war, where he’s a prisoner…’

Yes, that’s what happens, but what’s it about? Keep going, Charlie, please.

‘But it’s also about war, and the bombing of Dresden, and a sort of fatality – not fatality, um fatalism? – about whether life matters or free will is a delusion, illusion, delusion; it’s sort of horrible, about death and war, but it’s funny too.’

‘O-kay. Does sound a bit like a boys’ book.’

Use better words. ‘Surreal! That’s what it is. And really good.’ Thank you, Charlie, sit down please.

Because I was sixteen, I let my eyes slip out of focus to disguise the fact that I was looking at her breasts, confident that no girl had spotted this trick before.