Life (40 page)

Inland Far

i

Anna and Jake had been working on the allotment. It was the end of March. Anna had been planting seeds: carrots, turnips, radishes, lettuces. She had hoed the over-wintered broad beans and earthed up the potatoes. Maybe the harvest would be better this year. Mr Frank N Furter—whom they had found still flourishing when Anna’s job prospects brought them back to Bournemouth—achieved results on his plot down in the valley, in shelter, that made Anna and Spence’s bumbling efforts look ridiculous. They were learning. Meantime, hunter-gatherer behavior, practiced in the Co-op supermarket on Saturday mornings, made up for the deficiencies of primitive agriculture.

She watered-in the seeds, unscrewed their tap from the standpipe by the track, and stowed everything in the buggy’s shopping tray: except the spade and hoe handles, which she hid. You couldn’t leave things up here. And this is called having it all, she thought, stretching to free her shoulders. Below her, coastal conurbation sprawled back from the gleaming meadows of the sea, Poole to the west and Christchurch to the east: furzy bare branches reaching up from swathes of public park and garden. With petty theft and the rottweiler tendency for neighbors, yes. Wouldn’t be the same if they were shut out.

Jake lay on the ground, where a rustling barrier of last year’s sweet corn sheltered him from the east wind, talking in a tiny voice and playing intently with two toy cars and a handful of weeds: a dandelion with a broken tap root, some Shepherd’s Purse, a few sprigs of that infuriating little pink and white convolvulus (the worm that dieth not). She stood over him unnoticed, feasting on the dream of mind’s emergence—

Behold the child among his new-born blisses, a six years’ Darling of pigmy size.

See, where –’mid the work of his own hand he lies… He’s four, not six, but he is the young philosopher, dreaming and making worlds.

“Time to go, Jake-boy.”

He sat up and stared at her, shocked. “But I haven’t had my snack!”

When you have a child, you soon learn how quickly practice becomes tradition, and how quickly tradition becomes WRITTEN IN STONE. “Okay, but we’d better get indoors. It’s going to rain.”

They retired inside the tumbledown shed, which smelled of spider webs and earth, and sat on an empty tin chest while Jake ate pita bread and slices of cheese. On his insistence she told him again the story of how Mummy and Daddy had once been pirates on the South China Seas. In the end they’d been shipwrecked on Bournemouth beach. They’d built this shed from the planks of their pirate ship (you could see the marks of cannonballs), and this was where they had lived until one day they found a treasure map that they’d forgotten about, recovered the gold, and used it to buy the house where Jake and Anna and Spence lived now.

“If we get very, very poor, will we go back to pirating?” asked the child, hopefully.

Anna picked fragments of horse dung and dead grass from his dark curls.

“We’re not poor. We have a house with a garden, lovely holidays, new clothes and shoes whenever we need them. How can we be poor?”

“I expect you have some more gold somewhere. For emergencies.”

“Ah maybe so! A pirate never divulges the hiding place of her last treasure.”

“Shere Khan has an island completely made of gold. She never tells anyone where it is.”

“Except for Jake. Eat your last bit of cheese.”

“Yes, she does tell Jake. And Nancy, but no one else. Remind me about the parrot.”

“The parrot. Well, he belonged—a parrot by the name of Bill, I seem to remember— to the wickedest ruffian in all our bad acquaintance. But I don’t know what became of him.”

Shere Khan was a female pirate captain who had emerged, somehow, from this story of the shed that used to be a pirate ship: with the name of the tiger lord from
The Jungle Book,
a dashing young mate called Jake, and a ship called The Royal Processor. It was Spence who maintained the annals, weaving ever more bizarre adventures for the wild, willful captain and her desperate crew: Jake the First Mate, Nancy the Knife and her brother Rafe, Black McGeer the pirate boffin, and all the rest. Anna wondered if he was aware of the touches of Ramone Holyrod that had crept into his characterization. Probably not. Spence had never liked Ramone much.

Looking back, he’d had a right. For a while after Sungai those
Suffer Birdone…
letters had been intensely important to Anna: dangerously important. Reckless acts, reckless deeds, wholesale shipwreck might have followed. The letters had stopped, the danger had passed, and the rabid one had vanished into her success: no contact with her for ages. She wrote flashy books, she was a feminist pundit… The squall arrived. Rain thundered on the shed’s patched roof and rattled in the folds of the plastic sack that was taped over a broken window. Jake leaned against her, finishing his cheese meticulously. Anna closed her eyes. She was working so hard, full-time employment, and
then
whatever lab and machine time she could scrounge for the great mission. She looked forward to the one day a week that she spent looking after Jake (giving Spence a chance to write) as a major treat: but any time she sat down, it was hard to stay awake.

Was there still a beach lodge at Pasir Pancang? In Sungai the forests were burning. Tough things were happening in that unlucky little country. Tough things were happening in the so-called “free world” too, as the old western powers slipped ever faster into decline; the twentieth century’s institutions and services vanishing into calamitous disrepair. And a clutch of grief at the heart any time you remembered the other casualties: ah, to know Jake would never hear a cuckoo’s song, ringing through the Hampshire woods. She lived in a frightening world that had lost its balance of power, scrabbling for stability and finding none; and the pirate treasure might yet turn out to be fool’s gold, or the expedition of the Hispaniola might founder for lack of funds. Next month might be the month when all the paychecks bounced and primitive strip-farming became her family’s only resource. Yet Anna was very happy, with her husband and her child, her frugal household arts and her dream, all sustaining each other. She was back on track: working hard, tasting the sweetness of life.

After the Sungai bomb mopping-up, Parentis had transferred them to Mexico, which was where Jake had been born just about a year later. Spence had believed he could never want a child again, but the moment he agreed they should give up contraception, he’d felt as if he’d sprouted wings. He’d known that she’d get pregnant easily, and she did. He’d known that the baby would be a boy, and that he must be called Jacob, in honor of Anna’s Spanish-Jew roots and of the first recorded attempt at genetic manipulation (the version in the bible obviously the muddled report of some dumb journalist), and that everything would be fine. And it was. Spence’s Mom came south to be with them, which was brave of her considering she must have known the risk that she would be faced with awkward revelations. The shade of the baby’s complexion had been distinct enough to raise comment as soon as he was born.

Spence, having acquired a black granddaddy and a big, perfect, coffee-colored son in the same hour, had only demanded “Why didn’t you
tell
me?” “It was for the best that you shouldn’t know,” Mom had pleaded. “I know Manankee County!” Anna couldn’t have cared less. “Look at this!” she said, laughing. “I am totally humiliated! Everyone who knows me is going to be convinced I bought the trait for a cool color scheme out of a vanity-parenting catalogue…”

He had not thought the trail would be so short, but he understood why his Mom had lied and concealed the evidence. Spence’s biological granddad, dead grandmother’s first husband—the mean one, who had been a drunk and walked out when Mom was a baby, and of whom there were no pictures—had conformed to a shameful stereotype. All the black people Spence had ever heard of from Mom were gifted, hardworking, good-looking, wonderful family people in steady employment…that she didn’t know particularly well. She liked to view the world through rose-colored countercultural lenses. Could he blame her? Nature or nurture, Spence was a little that way himself. After she’d flown back to Illinois (having Mom in the house for the first weeks of their child’s life was a cross Anna had borne with the patience of an autistic angel), he’d felt the new information bedding down into him, grounding him. He wasn’t going to get Roots fever, but it was good.

Actually, I
am
Spartacus.

So they went back to England, Anna resumed her doctoral studies and made ends meet with part-time lecturing, and Spence became a househusband, the way they’d always planned. They spent every penny of their foreign legion pile on a nice old house in Bournemouth, drawn to the place by old contacts and nostalgia, and settled down to live happily ever after, poor as church mice, decorating inventively with
papier mâché
and thumbtacks, cooking the food of the poor that they had picked up on their travels (nasi campur, ful mesdames, megadarra, mongo, gado-gado, anything tasty and cheap), entertaining their friends with world-music tales.

The winter that they moved into their own house, Jake was eight months old. There was a new flu speeding across the continent, but they were young, Jake was a splendidly healthy baby, and they were still in ex-pat mode, ignoring the news channels. They were blasé about the pandemic scare. Spence went down sick on one of his writing days. He got up, complained of a stiff neck and a headache, and seemed in no hurry to get to his desk. He came to the door to see Anna and Jake out, as they left to do some errands, said, “I feel weird,” and crumpled to the floor. It was lucky it was one of Anna’s Jake days, or he’d have been lying there when she came home from work. “I’d have managed,” he protested, as she put him to bed. “I’d have crawled through somehow—”

Anna went downstairs, having settled Jake for his nap with Werg the bear and his bottle. It was a pity Spence was ill, because she and Jake could have done some Christmas shopping. She phoned in sick for her evening’s employment (an adult access-to-HE course), switched on a lamp because the room seemed gloomy, and sat on the sofa, the good old folded-futon sofa from Leeds, with the satinized cotton cover in faded gold and sprigs of red—now dignified by a pine frame and three cushions for which Spence had machined the covers with his own hands. She thought about assembling materials for a Christmas decorations session. Glitter glue, poster paints, tissue paper, scissors…and sat looking at the pattern of the cushion nearest to her, until she gradually knew she’d been staring at it for a long time, that her head was aching, and she was very cold, cold deep inside. She had lost core temperature. Time was no longer passing in her brain, and her body had begun to shake, but she couldn’t move of her own volition. The pattern on the cushion cover absorbed all her attention, she fell into it. Oppressed by a burden that filled her mouth and weighed down her limbs, she entered a thick-walled, rubbery maze where the passages grew narrower and narrower, but she went on, squeezing her way into a tightly packed interminable darkness.