The Blind Light
The
Blind
Light
STUART EVERS
Contents
Wildboarclough: 2019: Saturday 17 August
They were at . . .
Doom Town and the One: 1959: January
1
2
3
4
5
EARLY MORNING OPENING
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE BOMB
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
The Stars Shine Down from Heaven: 1962: Friday 26 – Sunday 28 October
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
THE MOOD FROM THE PICKETS
13
14
15
16
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
My Sweet Lord: 1971: February
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
JAMES CARTER
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
Can’t You Hear the Drums?: 1977: Saturday 17 – Sunday 18 September
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
SCHOOLBOY PAPERS
14
15
16
17
The Winter House: 1980: Friday 4 January
1
2
3
OPERATION MID-OFF
5
6
7
8
OPERATION MID-OFF
10
11
12
13
OPERATION MID-OFF
15
16
Woven in Fabric: 1984: Sunday 23 September
1
2
THREADS, SISTERHOOD AND THE BOMB
4
5
No Other Place: 1991: July – October
July
August
September
THE SECOND SUMMER OF LOVE
October
Seven and Seven: 2005: Thursday 7 July
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
FORTY YEARS OF FRUM
13
14
The Thirteenth B’ak’tun: 2012: Sunday 4 – Friday 9 March
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Tuesday, 6 March 2012
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
Friday, 9 March 2012
Wildboarclough: 2019: Sunday, 18 August
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
Acknowledgements
L.I.B, C.V.E, M.L.E
Wildboarclough
2019
Saturday 17 August
They were at their most together there, at their most together then. This he thought, or something like it, sitting in the field between the farmhouse and his neighbour’s property. It had been a seventies summer, one of the hot ones, and in much the same spot as he now sat, he and his elder sister had perched on a black plastic silo, sharing a pair of binoculars to spy on the Carters. It was the perfect vantage; the ideal elevation to see into their garden, their trampoline and fishpond, their rockery and patio. They did not comment on what they saw, there were no arguments as to how long they could hold the binoculars. They just sat and watched, Nate’s legs sticking to the plastic sheeting; his sister’s heels beating the compacted grass beneath.
He remembered what they’d seen. What he’d seen at least. The father smoke-blown at a tiny Hibachi grill; the mother carrying a large bowl of salad; the shirtless boy and summer-dressed girl, sun-blonde both, setting the table. Uncle Jim, Auntie Daph, Tommy and Tasha.
Busked by flies, they’d thought themselves secret agents, covert operatives watching the Carters conduct their foreign customs. Nate would have been about eight, so Anneka twelve or thirteen. Her in a brown dress, long hair like burned wheat, an elastic band on her wrist for luck; him with a scab on his knee, an imaginary island eroded through picking. He remembered this as he held the same pair of binoculars. The dress. The scab. The magnified garden, the magnified family. The coveting of Tommy’s Dunlop tennis racquet.
How tall the silo had felt, how high, and it was not so high, just that he was so small. Small then, and slight. Ha ha. To think that. So small and his father’s voice so big, so hoarse and so loud, shouting at them from the farmhouse.
‘Get down from up on there, you two!’ their father had shouted. ‘What have I told you about the silos?’
Nate had put down the binoculars and looked to his sister.
‘Hand them over,’ Anneka had said.
‘But Dad—’
‘Hand them over, Nate,’ she’d said.
And so he’d passed her the binoculars and later they’d both been in trouble. But at least they’d been in trouble together: equally miscreant, equally punished.
He held the same binoculars now; it was late in the day; the heat of the afternoon clinging still. He picked up the binoculars and focused them on the Carters’ garden. A recent interest, this: one started when the casual rentals began a few years before. On weekends and school holidays he watched families and friends, small children and teenagers, hen parties and stag dos, sometimes catching a furtive glimpse of breast or buttock. The Carters had installed a hot tub where the old patio had been and Nate liked to see the trunkless men and bikini-stripped women hopping in and out of the water, lamp-lit at night, sun-blushed in the day. Once he’d seen some sex. Some oral too. He’d meant to put down the binoculars, but hadn’t.
The garden was hoed and manicured, better appointed; a wood-burning oven where the Hibachi had once been; an eight-seater table on a grey slate patio; blue-matted sun-loungers stacked beside the hot tub. There were two cars parked out front, but no one in the garden. They’d come outside soon, though, before the sun downed, he was sure of that. He wanted to see Carter and Tommy first; wanted to see them before Anneka arrived. Brotherly, that.
He checked his phone and it was fully charged and fully barred; there were no missed calls and no messages. From the sack at his feet, he took a can of beer and offered it up in toast to the dusking sun.
‘I remember,’ Nate said, ‘when all this was nought but fields.’
It was Carter’s joke. Carter now, Uncle Jim then. His big hands on Nate’s slope shoulders; Carter’s laugh booming like a storybook giant. Nought but fields, ha!
Just two fields, in fact; the land divided by a dirt track and a parched hedge
of hawthorn and blackthorn. The Carters’ land on one side, his on the other. Down the hill, the grass on his side – thistle turf and clod, tinder dry – led to a tree-crowded dell. He’d not been down there in years. A check with the binoculars. Nothing. No car coming through the leaves. No sign of Anneka. Not there, nor by the cowsheds that huddled close to the farmhouse.
He drank from the can and the beer was cool. He checked the phone, replaced it in the cup-holder. Anneka had never called him, not once. He no longer knew her voice. When he called her number, it rang out until the call was caught by another woman’s voice, one owned by a telephone network. At first he left messages; later, he simply rang off as the once-real woman answered his call.
Hers was one of many voices he could no longer remember. In his head, when Anneka said, ‘Hand them over,’ he didn’t hear her voice, just something generically female, generically young. Same with lovers, school-friends, teachers: they all sounded underwater and muted. He remembered his father’s voice though. The dead have insistent voices; they cut and jab. His father’s especially.
He checked his phone, still fully barred, still fully charged, and picked up the binoculars. As though this a new idea; one just alighted upon.
There was no movement in the garden save for the drowse of the tarp on the hot tub, the shiver of olive tree fronds. Inside though, there was the suggestion of occupancy: shadows in the windows; figures behind the glass. He watched them gather, then the outside lights came on, casting bright over the patio, the French doors; the doors opened by a woman he didn’t recognize. The woman was followed outside by Tommy. Certainly Tommy. So close through the lenses he could spit and reach him.
They walked out onto the patio, Tommy pointing, the woman, his new wife, Nate assumed, following the line of his arm. Nate watched them sit at the table, drink from tumblers, talk, laugh, clasp hands, kiss. No one joined them. He watched Tommy and his wife stand and take in the view, loosely linked by arms, smiling, their tumblers abandoned on the table as they walked back inside.
The first time he remembered seeing the Carter house he was four or so. They’d driven for what had felt like the whole day and it was not quite dark, but all the windows burned bright, burned in golds and silvers. They pulled up outside the gabled facade, the date 1848 carved into a white stone surrounded by umber brickwork, the ground-floor windows framed with lush red velvet curtains; the bedroom windows sashed with blue gingham. The size of the door and its lionhead knocker; the smoothness of the parquet on entering; the size of the room he was to sleep in, the hugeness of the bath, the glitter of chandeliers as they ate, none of it he could quite believe existed.
‘Am I dreaming?’ he’d asked Anneka.
‘No,’ she’d said, ‘It’s real.’
A few years later, when his father told them they were moving north, Nate had assumed they would live with the Carters. That he would become part of the household, share Tommy’s toys, run riot through the garden. He’d tried not to look disappointed when they were shown to a stone cottage not much bigger than their house back home. It was cold and austere, a look of furious utilitarianism, but with a stout front door that seemed loaned from a medieval keep. When the lights were on, it would be fine. When the fire was lit, it would be home. And it was. Remained so.
He finished his can, crushed it under his shoe, folded up the chair. Dark had come, fleet as rabbits, and he used the phone’s torch to guide him up to the farmhouse, its kitchen window now unlit, though he knew he’d left the lights on. Bulb gone. Fuse blown, most likely. The electrics were shot and had been for years, another chore he’d left to fester.
In the bulb-blown kitchen he opened doors and cupboards looking for candles. In the third drawer down he found them, along with some matches. He lit one, let the wax drip onto a saucer and set it down. The light haloed, a golden caul. He went to light another candle and saw something reflected in the window. A glass half full, an open bottle of wine. He didn’t turn, but looked into the window, the glass and bottle in the candlelight, blurred and sketched in the pitch. He heard the sound of water from upstairs, the sound of feet on the stairs, saw the light of a phone dance through the open doors, then stop as it entered the kitchen.
‘Hello, Nate,’ she said.
What to say to that. How to speak, how to form words. Forty years or so, and her voice again. Her face again. What to say to that.
‘I assumed this was for my benefit –’ she pointed to the wine – ‘I know I should’ve waited, but it’s been such a long drive. And then the lights went out. Almost as soon as I poured it.’
A smile in the window pane. To turn now. First thing to do. To turn. And he turned, but pinned himself to the lip of the counter. Wanted to say hello but could not say anything. Fuses blown up and down the body.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Cows got your tongue?’
She laughed and it was her laugh, immediately her laugh. Same laugh at the same joke she used to make. A private joke. Something he’d said once, getting the idiom all wrong, and her never letting him forget it.
‘Sorry about the lights,’ he said. ‘I need to look at the fuses.’
‘I like the candles,’ she said. ‘Look at the fuses later.’
He nodded. She sat down and sipped the wine.
She looked changed and unchanged: the same thin nose and cleft chin, but sharper around the cheekbones, lined at her seaboard eyes. Hair the same muddy brown, but dusted with ash and tin, cut short and boyish; her hands blue-veined now, thin-skinned. The same sprung vigilance to her posture, though; like she was ready to dodge an oncoming hazard.
‘How did you get in?’ he said. ‘All the doors were locked.’
He remembered her shrug – Where’s my ball? Shrug. Have you seen my jacket? Shrug. When are you coming back? Shrug – a slight movement, little more; not quite disdain and not quite not.
‘The spare key,’ Anneka said, holding up a Yale. ‘All those years and you keep it in the same place. Lax security, Nate. Very lax.’
She wagged her finger, an old impersonation. Their father warning of something, a danger or a threat.
‘I didn’t see your car,’ he said.
‘I parked it around the back,’ she said. ‘Didn’t want to announce my presence too soon.’
The times he’d imagined it, this reunion: where it would happen, how. Sometimes hugging her in a house she owned; sometimes sitting beside her in a cafe or bar; sometimes here, in the kitchen, slapping her across the cheek. All the rehearsals, their drama and their intrigue, and her now here, in their childhood home, as he asked her about door keys and car parking.
Her face clenched, then softened, her eyes inching over his face, something invasive about it, as though forty years would be revealed in a few seconds’ staring.
‘Are you not going to hug me?’ she said, approaching him, her arms slightly splayed, inviting without encouragement. Nate held her limply, like he was transporting a body or an imbecile. Anneka kept her arms by her sides at first, then tightened them around him. She smelled of nothing. Not a thing. Like the scent of fresh water, the scent of cold.
‘You haven’t changed,’ he said, whispering into her ear. ‘Not at all.’
Anneka pulled back and put her hands on his biceps, kissed him on the cheek, faint lips grazing his beard.
‘I wouldn’t have recognized you,’ she said. ‘I could’ve walked past you a hundred times and I’d never have known it was you. Maybe I did once. Imagine that.’
She studied his face, seeking him out beneath the broken nose, the weather-etched skin, the sag beneath his jaw.
‘Time moves different when you’re up with the dawn,’ he said. ‘It beats at you. That’s what Dad always said.’
‘You don’t look like him,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d grow into him. I thought I’d open the door and see him here as clear as you are now.’
She left him by the sink and sat at table, taking their father’s seat. Straight to it without thinking. He w
ondered whether she remembered or not.
‘You don’t look like Mam either,’ she said, picking up her glass. ‘You ever consider you were adopted?’
They both laughed. Another old joke, one Nate had forgotten until then. She seemed to know exactly what to say, when to say it, when to run through the old routines.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, taking his own seat at the table, ‘I feel like I’m standing just like him. Saying the same things as him. The exact same things. Does that happen to you?’
She sipped her wine. Her face clenched again. The softness of the light, the gutter of the flame, softened nothing, cosied nothing.
‘Let’s not talk of him, Nate,’ she said. ‘Please let’s not.’
She looked to where the clock had once been, an old ticker that had given out years before, never to be replaced.
‘This house stinks, you know that?’ she said. ‘I noticed it as soon as I came through the door. The stink. Like something rotten.’
Her thin-skinned hands, the blue veins. Hands like their mother’s, delicately fingered, resting on the table as though ready to play piano.
‘I thought maybe you were dead. You know’ – she made a pistol with her right hand and put it to her temple – ‘bang, bang to the head. Farmers do that a lot, so I’ve heard. I read about it once. It’s an epidemic, apparently.’
‘It’s a farm,’ he said. ‘Things stink.’
She shook her head.
‘But that’s just it. It doesn’t smell of farm. I was prepared for the smell of shit, but this . . . this just stinks.’
‘It smells the same as it ever did,’ he said. ‘You’ve just forgotten.’
‘I haven’t forgotten anything, Nate,’ she said. ‘Not a thing.’
She looked back towards the missing clock.
‘Or maybe I have,’ she said.
Her eyes lit for a moment. Something suddenly recalled.
‘I remember spying on the Carters,’ she said. ‘You remember that? We’d take the binoculars and sit on the silos, thinking we were secret agents.’
She was smiling, encouraging a response, an engagement, something confederate in her eyes. It felt cruel. Why that of all things? No accident, no accident at all. Like she’d been snooping, like she could pluck his most recent thoughts from his head. He felt her there, kicking around, looking at junk, sifting through rubbish.
‘Secret agents?’ he said.
‘You must remember,’ she said. ‘We used to sit on the silos and watch the Carters eat dinner and play in the garden. You wanted their paddling pool and you wanted their tennis racquets even though you couldn’t play. You don’t remember?’