The fields were frozen again as night started to come down. He fastened up his coat, tugging his scarf into multiple knots. The coat was stolen from a room at the home. He checked the pockets for gloves and found some balled-up leather ones, and some rolling tobacco and papers. If he knew how to roll he might have had one, to warm the space of air around him. Instead he held the envelope to his nose and inhaled the scent of soft, brushy tobacco. When he started to walk again, he followed the ruts in the ploughed field, crunching through the ice. It was like thin spun sugar, cracking under his heavy shoes.
He made his way by the lights of Aycliffe, of the industrial estate, far ahead.
I’m not even from Newton Aycliffe, he thought, but he recognised it as a place that always drew him back. No one actually came from that town, except children born since the sixties. It was too young. It was a place that took people in and made them all the same. You all had to go to the same shops. It made no one better than any one else. It dulled the goodness out of people. It filled them with the same old concerns. It bored him.
In the free local paper he had seen an announcement. It had puzzled him, but it had summed something up.
Bill is seventy.
We have no time to stand and stare
to stand and stare beneath the boughs
to stand and stare like sheep and cows.
People were always making up rhymes for that paper. This one seemed to be about the way people in Aycliffe stood about doing nothing with their lives. When Tom was in the town precinct with Elsie, she stood about talking to just about anyone. Because she worked in that shop she knew loads of them. They stopped her and talked drivel. Standing and staring. Tom would feel like tearing out his hair. They went, “This is it” and “Uh-huh”, reassuring each other with their dullness.
She has made me feel my life is over. I have spent it waiting for the future to begin.
When Craig failed all but two of his GCSEs, there was a row. I made the mistake of saying, maybe it wasn’t so bad. I tried to hint tactfully that he wasn’t the brightest of lads. That maybe his skills weren’t the sort that showed up in exams. Elsie said that she wanted Craig to have all the chances in the world. She snapped at me, as if she thought it was me taking them away. She wanted someone to shout at. Craig just looked embarrassed. I said, of course he would have other chances. We always have other chances. Then she turned that back on herself, like she always does. “What other chances have I ever had?” she sneered. “I’m always stuck between these four walls. I don’t expect any better. But Craig should.”
“We can always expect to have another chance,” I said.
She blew up. “We don’t need anything else. Craig does. We’ve had all our chances. Our lives are over.”
I got angry. I said my life certainly wasn’t over.
“What else are you going to do with it?” She was practically laughing in my face.
I stared at her, and I couldn’t believe she was being so cruel, so certain. There wasn’t a flicker of doubt there. I was looking at someone who firmly believed that her life could never improve or go anywhere. In her forties she had accepted that she had seen and done everything she needed to. I was astonished and scared to be with her then. Craig left the room, aware that this was now a private row, and I got the blame for that, too.
When I looked at Elsie’s face she looked old, but also like someone resigned to being trapped in the past. She was speaking categorically and depressingly from a point of absolute certainty in the archaic past. And this is when I realised what I believe to be one of the great differences between the sexes.
Woman is always of the past, and Elsie is no exception. She is the mother, viewed always from the present and seeming somehow behindhand. This was never clearer than in that row. I suppose this was why sex always made me feel nostalgic. The hankering for the past. The man is always in the present moment. That is why I — he is forever thinking and moving and can reflect back on things and put them in perspective.
Between Man and Woman the future is made. But there was never to be a future from Elsie. She never wanted to have any more children. She was knocking on, she said, and her waterworks were problematic. And Craig might be jealous of a half-brother or sister. Any reason, any reason, she wouldn’t have a baby. Denying me this, she has trapped me in the present for ever.
The town seems no closer and it’s dark now. Is there a garage near here, so I can get chocolate and crisps? When I get to Newton Aycliffe, will I go home? It isn’t my home.
She has made me into a man-child. I will leave nothing behind me. I’ll be in the present for the rest of my time. Frozen, undead. She wanted me perfecting her house for ever.
TWELVE
Don’t let this be a grimace. As Craig talked to him, Andy was trying hard to look interested. They were working out together. Craig was explaining the benefits of
