Me and You Versus the World

London, Paddington

Richard tried to ignore the dull ache that squeezed his legs like an iron fist as he sat waiting for the train to depart. He’d arrived early at the station that afternoon. Past experience had taught him how crowded the carriages could get, and he’d not wanted to risk having to stand for the first leg of the journey. Now that he’d secured a seat, he felt less nervous and tried to make himself as comfortable as he could within the confines of the small space. He stretched his legs out gingerly, wincing at the pain, whilst waiting for the guardsman’s whistle to blow.

Despite the air conditioning, the carriages were poorly-ventilated and the fat, greasy smell of burgers and sweat was wedged in the air. More passengers trickled in, slamming suitcases on the luggage racks and bringing with them a cacophony of different accents and attire.

Richard knew he’d been sensible to arrive early when a smartly dressed young man with a briefcase and a teenage girl with red hair raced each other from either side of the carriage for the last seat in the centre. When he’d been a lad it was the done thing for younger passengers to give up their seat for their elders, but that didn’t seem to be the case anymore. It was every man and woman for themselves.

He tried to catch the eye of the young man sat on seat next to him and share the joke. His efforts were in vain. The passenger was fully absorbed with whatever he was listening to in his headphones and looked straight ahead with a vacant expression on his face. What had Richard expected? This was London. You weren’t supposed to engage with people you didn’t know unless you wanted to be accused of trying to rob someone. Why had he moved here again?

Polly, of course. Polly had loved London – and the constant playground its labyrinth of alleys and streets offered. And he had loved Polly. It had been so much fun while it lasted. It was them against the world. Every weekend they’d visit a new gallery, restaurant or pub. When the children were born they’d switched the pubs for the parks. And then almost overnight, without warning, they grew old. Richard had never realised how many steps it was to walk from the tube train to the exit until every step started to feel like sharp nails digging into the flesh of his hips and crawling down his legs.

Relief washed over Richard when he heard the whistle blow and the doors whir firmly shut. There was something reassuringly final about the way the doors clicked closed, as though he couldn’t change his mind about leaving even if he wanted to. From that moment he was cut off from the city as the church spires and red tiled roofs whizzed past him through the dust smeared windows.

Reading

Richard was not sorry to see his companion with the headphones leave as the train emptied out at Reading. He lifted his rucksack on the floor on to the vacant seat next to him so it no longer cramped his leg space and resisted the urge to read the letter one more time. He knew what the letter said, reading it again would not change the contents or lighten the leaden weight of it in his pocket.

He missed Polly.

Jesus, when had he become such a mutt that he couldn‘t even take a train trip without her by his side. Alone with his thoughts, he mused back to the latest argument between the pair of them. That had been one beast of a row. If he was honest, they’d been quarrelling a lot more since his retirement. He knew they’d started to feel trapped by the crushing weight of the city along with the financial strain of paying for their daughter’s wedding last year. But it was more than that too, they were also frustrated by a growing awareness of the fragility of their own bodies. Richard knew he was often cranky with the crippling pain of arthritis and Polly was forever on alert in case the dreaded Cancer showed its malign face again. It had not always been easy.

‘Let’s move!’ Richard had said, during their last row. There was no doubt that the city had aged with them. The skyline was now a constant flux of new skyscrapers and cranes. Some of the poorer, ethnically diverse regions which they’d haunted in their youth had turned trendy almost overnight, becoming a magnet for flocks of vegan hipsters of the East End and losing a part of their soul in the process.

‘Move? Pah!’ Polly’s mouth crumpled in distaste. ‘You mean to the country? And what would we do for fun there?’

Richard knew his wife’s thoughts on rural areas. She painted them all with the same parochial narrow-minded brush.

‘You know I grew up in the country?’ Richard said with mild amusement.

‘I know,’ Polly said. ‘But you don’t count. You’re not one of those hillbilly types.’ They’d laugh for a bit and then sooner or later the arguments would start again.

Nevertheless with the dark days also came the golden ones, balmy summer nights and cosy tucked-up winters with Polly’s reassuring touch and the knowledge of her warm, musky skin next to his. He couldn’t imagine things being otherwise.

As the train rattled westwards, hurtling towards Richard’s past, a flood of memories continued to erupt within him. He saw the tears well up in Polly’s eyes when their youngest daughter broke the news she was expecting her first child. He felt the warm pressure of Polly’s hand as they watched their first-born walk down the aisle. His mind delved even further back and he relived the pride and anguish that came with fatherhood. He recalled the terror of holding a tiny human-being and knowing that he was responsible for steering it through this confused and messy world.

Finally, he conjured up an image of Polly at their own wedding, her white veil shimmering and fading into the air against her flawless coffee skin. Polly, so confident, strong and beautiful, had chosen him for her husband and her perfect, brown finger sparkled with a token of his eternal affection. He felt like the luckiest man alive.

Of course, if he reached back even deeper into the shadowy recesses of his memory, sooner or later he’d have to confront the fact that Polly wasn’t the only woman who’d shaped him into the man he was today.

A stab of nostalgia lurched somewhere deep within him but he pushed it away before it had time to propagate.

Forgetfulness heals everything.

Bath Spa

At some point in the journey, the grey, featureless buildings had been replaced with trees which chased each other like leafy phantoms, speeding past the window alongside the track. Just before the train pulled into the city, Richard pulled out the letter burning a hole in his pocket. The careless scrawl of handwriting with its flamboyant loops and round lettering was unmistakeable. Richard didn’t bother to read this contents again – he already knew what the letter said – but he did note the address in the top right hand corner. Pilgrim Cottage. Checking the address was a perfunctory gesture – he knew the address as well as he did his own. It was etched unforgettably in his memory.

Bath was the final stop and the past was knocking even more insistently on the locked doors of Richard’s memory banks. The city was full of dusty stone architecture which immersed itself in the hilly pocket of the green, undulating landscape. He’d studied, smoke and drank in this place. Stepping out of the station, he inhaled deeply and breathed in the sights and scents of Bath, anticipating the tickle of nostalgia. But the flames of sentimentality refused to ignite; the city had either changed beyond recognition or Richard had forgotten – probably a combination of both.

Richard wondered what she would look like now. Old, he guessed. Hell – he was old himself! He tried to summon an image of how she’d looked when he’d last saw her – cloudy blue eyes and a kind smile.

Whatever Richard’s flaws, she’d always forgiven him.

Apart from for Polly – she never forgave him for her.

Pilgrim Cottage

The door was lipstick red, a beacon of vivid colour amid the rustic landscape of his surroundings. The fence was rustier than before and there was a new housing development being erected on the other side of the field. Otherwise everything was the same as he remembered and the nostalgia which had eluded Richard at the station made his senses giddy as he walked towards the door.

The village was ten miles out of Bath, in the midst of the Mendip Hills, but it felt like he’d travelled backwards in time instead of distance. He could have been ten years old again, sniffing the perfumed scent of the garden in hazy spring sunshine, and listening to the sound of the cows lowing gently in the surrounding farmland.

Life before London. Before Polly.

Blackbirds chattered in the thicket of saplings nearby, but otherwise it was deathly quiet. A momentary fear seized Richard. What if there was no one home? Or worse, what if he was too late? He lifted the brass knocker and rapped it loudly shattering the late afternoon calm. There was a heavy silence.

Panic seized Richard again, but then he heard a faint shuffling and the door creaked open to reveal one half of a thin, white face.

‘Ricky?’ the woman asked hoarsely. ‘Is it you?’ She opened the door more fully to reveal a lined, frail face with skin so translucent the light seemed to shine right through it.

‘You grew old Ricky?’ the woman looked at Richard in disbelief, as though he was a phantom who might evaporate at any moment. ‘But, then, not as old as me’.

Richard stared into a pair of familiar blue eyes. He saw the same pair of eyes every day when he looked at himself in the mirror. They were identical to his own.

‘I came as soon as I received your letter,’ Richard said. ‘You should have told me.’ He could have guessed that the first words he’d speak to his mother would be riddled with accusation.

‘I didn’t know…’ she said, her eyes as wide as a doll’s. She cocked her head to one side in contemplation. ‘Although, perhaps I did know really. In some ways. After all, no one lives forever do they?’

‘How sick are you?’ Richard asked, unable to wipe the aggression from his voice.

‘Sick enough,’ she said with infuriating calmness. She smiled, and the corners of her eyes curved upwards as she did so. For a moment, she was almost radiant. ‘Let’s go for a walk Ricky. Up the hill like we used to. For old time’s sake.’

Too proud to mention the pain he suffered in his limbs, Richard threw his rucksack in the hallway and waited for his mother to put on her coat. They trudged up the hill in silence, the April wind clutching at their garments mercilessly.

When had Richard last walked up this hill? There was a time when he would come everyday after school, sometimes with friends and other times alone. It certainly hadn’t hurt so much to walk then. He wondered if he’d ever realised during his last walk that it would be for the last time – he couldn’t remember. But then you don’t usually realise it’s the last time until it’s much later on.

They reached the summit, the sun beating brightly down on their faces. Richard was relieved to have a breather and noticed with mild envy that his mother didn’t show any signs of fatigue from the climb despite her elderly frame and poor health. He gulped the fresh, brisk air as though drinking in its freshness.

The view was breathtaking – a majestic vista of verdant countryside spread out in front of him, miles and miles of pastures and peaks, and the Bristol channel glittered like a distant jewel in the haze of the horizon. How he had missed this place.

There were many reasons why the visits to his childhood home had come to an end. Richard thought of Polly, beautiful in a white dress and with a dazzling smile. His mother had not attended the wedding and had not bestowed any of her kindly smiles on his choice of partner. She’d said some unforgivable things, unable to relinquish the narrow minded views she’d grown up with. It had started out with a few offhand comments about the colour of Polly’s skin, but nothing that Richard couldn’t shrug off as merely an outdated and parochial mindset. But when his mother had realised how serious her son was about Polly the cutting remarks had intensified and her attitude had become hateful towards her future daughter-in-law.

Eventually, Richard had been compelled to choose one woman or the other.

He’d chosen Polly and never looked back.

‘How’s Paulina?’ his mother asked, as if reading his mind.

‘Good, thanks,’ he said stiffly. He had absolutely no intention of telling his mother about the frosty atmosphere which had recently developed between Polly and himself. Even so, his mother scrutinised Richard intently, recognising the same pride in his cloudy blues eyes that she saw in her own.

‘Relationships take work,’ she said. ‘You’ve been together for a long time. Things can’t always have been easy.’

Richard couldn’t help himself. All the resentment and emotion which had been brewing inside him since he’d received his mother’s letter started to boil over. 

‘You mean because Polly’s black, Mum?’

His mother flinched in shock and her eyes widened. ‘No…. that’s not what I meant at all.’ She paused as if struggling for the right words. ‘Although I see why you would think that.’

Richard was unmoved. ‘You’ve never had any time for Polly or the kids. And now because you’re sick you think it makes everything ok. Well it doesn’t ok? It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve not been there and that you’ll never understand what it means to love.’

He straight ahead as the words drifted through the air and were then lost in the wind. When he looked back at his mother, he noticed that tears were streaming down her fragile, parchment cheeks.

‘I was wrong. I know that now’. Her voice was heavy with emotion. ‘How old are the children? I’ll never know them. I’ve left it too late. I’m so sorry… I’m really, really am sorry.’

Her voice was broken, and there was no doubt that the woman was full of regret about the years that had been wasted through hatred.

‘You always think that you’ll have more time,’ she said. ‘And then suddenly you don’t.’

More than anything, Richard wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that it was never too late and that there was still time. But he knew that wasn’t true. There’s no way his mother could make amends for past wrongs and reclaim those lost years. Whatever people may say about time healing all wounds, sometimes life loses its way and can never be fixed. So much laughter and shared memories had been missed – and both knew that there would no longer be time to rekindle what had been lost.

‘The girls have grown up now too,’ was all Richard could think to say. ‘I’m a grandfather now.’ It sounded extraordinary even to his own ears.

Unbidden, a new memory, stirred in Richard – a very old memory that had been long forgotten until this moment on the hill.

The room was in darkness, and he was six years old shaking under the bed covers with tears streaming down his face. He thought he’d woken from a nightmare but when he heard his parents’ voices screaming, he realised that he’d been awake all this time. He was too scared to go downstairs and face his father. The last time he’d tried to protect his mother he’d ended up getting hurt too – even though he wanted to be brave.

The voices grew louder and shriller. There was a loud bang, the sound of someone hitting a wall perhaps. Then the door slammed and Richard heard a car engine outside roar to life. He mustered up the courage to peer out of the window and saw his father’s silhouette behind the steering wheel of the car before he drove out of his life forever. Richard could not ever remember his face.

But he did remember the way his mother looked standing in the bedroom doorway, her face bruised and tear-stained and her hair dishevelled. He scrambled out of bed and ran into her arms.

‘He’s left,’ she told him. ‘It’s just you and me now kiddo. Me and you versus the world.’

Richard held his mum’s hand tightly in his own tiny one, trying to explain in his own way that everything would be ok. ‘I’ll never leave you Mum.’

For a long time to come it would be just the two of them. His mum had worked day and night to put food on the table, and Richard was been her sole comfort during her loneliness. They loved each other fiercely, forging a bond so powerful that only hatred could come between them.

Sixty years later, mother and son stood on the hill, surveying the undulating landscape below. From their height they could have been the only people in the world. No one else could ever understand the pain they shared.

 ‘I was foolish,’ she said, her sclerotic eyes swimming with tears. ‘Everything you say is true.’ She longer had the energy to smile, but her eyes searched past the horizon into the unknown beyond.

‘Apart from one thing,’ she said. ‘I did know what it meant to love.’

Richard found his mother’s worn hand and squeezed it gently, trying to express everything he’d wanted to say and all the regret he carried for both their sakes.

They gazed at the sweeping expanse of green, enjoying the brief moment that they’d have together before everything disappeared.