With the friends I’ve got, the people I’m meeting now, it’s all too often me listening, then going, “Oh yeah. Right. I knew that.” But I didn’t. I’m waiting to be told things. Even I know that walking up hills like this, so you can see the city stretched out, even I know this is good for you.
When I lived in Aycliffe I never walked anywhere. What else were the Road Ranger buses for? And where would you go, apart from down the precinct, the shops and the gym? There was nowhere. Aycliffe is surrounded for miles by farmland, fields and motorway. Fields yellow with rape, grey green with scrubby pasture, tarmac grey studded with the squashed purple carcasses of rabbits and starlings. In the middle of nowhere. There’s loads of space to walk in, but what do you look at? Where would you head to? I can’t see the point in walking with no object. I like to think there’s a shop or something at the other end of my journey. Something to view, to buy, to fetch back. That’s why I got sick of the gym. All that outlay and I wanted to see changes, changes, changes after every visit.
Up here there is so much to see.
The path goes up and up and it’s a ledge only a few yards wide. Rocks are scattered across it and there are posters warning that they drop easily. I am in peril. A man was killed quite recently, knocked and tumbled off this ledge. He plummeted into the wide, green flats of Holyrood Park far below.
Now there’s a thing. The palace is here, just below me, square, black and grey, fenced in with beautiful, tall iron gates. Eagles, lions. Only a matter of yards away are blocks of council flats, square and dark, 1970s. Who’d have thought they’d be so close? When she stays here and she pulls her bedroom curtains at night, can the Queen see into the lit windows of the flats? Can they look out of their flat windows and see what the royals have on their washing line?
I’m sitting for a rest on the bleached grass. Someone’s left a hooded top behind. It’s all right, doesn’t smell. I tie it round my waist, the way they all do now.
Then I see that Jep has crawled onto the narrow pathway. I’m about to yell, to pull him back, but something makes me pause and watch.
It’s so warm he’s naked, overheating in just his native plush. He squints into the sun and I think, He’s mine. His felted ears twitch. My own hands feel sore at the sight of his young footpads and fists on the rough ground.
I remember what Sandra told me in all her know-how. (But what does she know about bringing up babies? How would she know anything?) She said you aren’t to cosset them or pull them back from things. You aren’t to make them neurotic by fretting over their every move. She would say I have to let Jep set his own challenges, conquer his own apprehensions. Find his own way. So I hang back. Watch him on the yellow pathway, scratching in the dirt, then slowly hoist himself onto his hind legs. He staggers and swaggers and, with the same self-absorbed look he always has, he takes his first few steps alone. Up here, at this height, way above the city of his birth.
TWENTY-ONE
They told Jane to keep the music down. A nurse put her head round the door to Liz’s room and asked nicely. Jane felt foolish and quickly unplugged her tape player. She stashed it in her bag and flushed red as the nurse fussed around Liz, smiled and left.
Somewhere Jane had read that coma patients reacted to music. Jane had played Tina Turner’s ‘You’re Simply the Best’ six times, full blast, these past three visits. She thought it ought to be Liz’s favourite song, she thought she’d once heard it round Liz’s house. Now she felt she’d been doing it for nothing. Or that the nurses assumed she was playing music for her own entertainment. But she wasn’t — Jane was here out of the goodness of her heart. She had better things to do than sit in Bishop General. She had a journey to prepare for.
Her suitcases had been packed for a month. She kept taking things out, washing and ironing them again, folding them with calm precision. She kept thinking of other things she and Peter would need when they went to visit the desert. When she thought about it her heart would give a jump of thrilled fear inside her chest. She had to get passports. Fran helped her. The forms were quite complicated.
“I hate doing forms for anything,” she said, sitting in the photo cubicle in Red Spot supermarket. Flash!
“These aren’t too bad,” Fran told her, waiting outside the curtain. Flash!
“I hope I don’t look horrible in these pictures!” Jane tried to make herself laugh, to smile naturally. Flash!
“Everyone looks horrible in these little pictures.”
“Have you got a passport, Fran?”
“Never needed one.”
Flash!
In her photos Jane came out blurred. Too busy chatting away.
“You look animated. Full of life.”
“Like a gobby bitch. I look like when they blur out someone’s face on the news to protect them.”
They stood with the sticky strip of pictures held out between them.
“Look at these ones,” said Fran suddenly, reaching into her purse. It was her and Frank, ten years ago, squashed into an orange-curtained booth, grinning and red-faced.
“You look like little bairns!” Jane gasped.
“Did you and Peter’s dad ever have pictures like this together?”
Now they were in the queue for lottery
