Sweet Sorrow(9)

Most days I’d ride my bike, though not in the slick, modern style. I wore jeans, not Lycra, on an old racer with drop handlebars, a clattering rusted chain and a frame as heavy and unforgiving as welded scaffolding. Low on those handlebars, I’d patrol The Library and lazily circle the cul-de-sacs, Tennyson and Mary Shelley, Forster then Kipling, up Woolf and round Hardy. I’d check the swings and slides in the recreation ground for anyone I might know. I’d cycle down pedestrian alleyways, swoop from side to side on the wide, empty roads on the way to the shops.

What was I looking for? Though I couldn’t name it, I was looking for some great change; a quest, perhaps, an adventure with trials undergone and lessons learnt. But it’s awkward to embark on an adventure on your own, hard to find that kind of quest on the high street. Ours was a small town in the south-east, too far away from London to be a suburb, too large to be a village, too developed to count as countryside. We lacked the train station that might have turned it into a commuter hub and also the legendary prosperity associated with the region. Instead, the economy relied on the airport and the light-industrial business parks: photocopiers, double-glazing, computer components, aggregates – whatever they were. The high street – called High Street – had a few buildings that might have passed as quaint: a timber-framed tea room called the Cottage Loaf, a Georgian newsagents, a Tudor chemists, a mediaeval market cross for the cider drinkers, but they were blighted by the dust and fumes of the busy road that ran alongside narrow pavements, leaving shoppers pressed flat against the leaded windows. ‘Going up the shops’ was the town’s great pastime, and anyone looking to donate an overcoat to charity would have been giddy. But the cinema was now a carpet warehouse, trapped in the time-loop of an endless closing-down sale. Areas of outstanding natural beauty were a twenty-minute drive away, the Sussex coast a further thirty, the whole town contained within a ring road that encircled us like a perimeter fence.

Years later, when I heard friends speak sentimentally and lyrically about their place of birth, of how they’d been shaped by Northumberland or Glasgow, the Lakes or the Wirral, I’d find myself envying even the most hackneyed, stereotyped expressions of ‘belonging’. We had no sense of identity, no authentic accent, just a kind of cockney learnt from TV, applied over a slight country burr. I didn’t hate our town, but it was hard to feel lyrical or sentimental about the reservoir, the precinct, the scrappy woods where porn yellowed beneath the brambles. Our recreation ground was universally known as Dog Shit Park, the pine plantation Murder Wood; for all I knew those were their names on the Ordnance Survey map, and no one was ever going to write a sonnet about that.

And so I’d walk the high street, looking in windows, hoping to see someone I knew. I’d buy chewing gum in the newsagents and read the computer magazines until the newsagent’s glare drove me back onto my bike. I must have looked lonely, though I would have hated anyone to think this. Boredom was our natural state but loneliness was taboo and so I strained for the air of a loner, a maverick, unknowable and self-contained, riding with no hands. But a great effort is required not to appear lonely when you are alone, happy when you’re not. It’s like holding out a chair at arm’s length, and when I could no longer maintain the illusion of ease, I’d cycle out of town.

To reach anything that might pass as countryside it was necessary to cross the flyover, the motorway thundering alarmingly beneath like some mighty waterfall, then cycle across great prairies of yellow wheat and rape, past the corrugated plains of poly-tunnels that sheltered the supermarket strawberry crops, then crest the hills that encircled us. I was no great nature-lover, not a bird-watcher or angler or poet, I couldn’t name a tree if it fell on me and I had no favourite view or dappled glade, but solitude was less shaming out here, almost pleasurable, and each day I dared myself to travel further from home, expanding the circumference of places that I knew.

The first week, the second, then the third passed in this way until one Thursday morning when I found myself in the long grass of a wild meadow that overlooked our town.





The Meadow


I’d not been here before. Bored of the ascent, I’d dismounted and noticed a footpath to my right, shady and blessedly flat. I’d wheeled my bike through woodland that soon opened up onto a sloping pasture, overgrown to waist height, the brown and green spattered with the red of poppies and the blue of … something else. Willow-herb? Cornflowers? I’d no idea, but the meadow was irresistible and I heaved my bike over the wooden stile and ploughed on through the tall grass. A grand timbered mansion came into view above me, one that I’d noticed from the ring road, a formal garden bordering the meadow at its lower edge. I had a sudden sense of trespass and dropped my bike, then walked on until I found a natural hollow in which to sunbathe, smoke and read something violent.

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 have been 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 Slaughterhouse-Five, chosen because it had ‘slaughter’ in the title.