In a Land of Plenty Read online

  ‘That’s not a fair swap,’ Gary bravely replied, his bottom lip quivering, less at James than at his younger brother looking over his shoulder.

  ‘You’d better take it,’ said James in as forceful a voice as he could muster.

  ‘What if I don’t?’ Gary asked.

  ‘If you don’t,’ James said, as calmly as he could, ‘we’ll beat you up.’

  Gary knew that the we meant he. He might be prepared to have a ruck with James, but not his surly brother. He could feel both lips tremble.

  ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Give us your cards.’

  James handed them over. ‘Don’t forget to tell Mr Beech,’ he added. He and Robert turned and walked away.

  ‘I didn’t even want to play anyway!’ Gary called after them, preparing to dash towards Miss Shufflebotham in the opposite corner of the yard should this defiant gesture provoke reaction. But Robert carried on walking away as if he hadn’t heard.

  The game was a disaster. They lost 13–0 – the official if possibly approximate score – against what turned out to be the other school’s third team, even though that school had much the same number of pupils: the difference, it transpired, was that a coach with the town’s professional football club came in once a week and gave them lessons, not in discipline and character so much as passing and movement. James and Lewis and their teammates spent the entire match running around in a shapeless, enthusiastic pack after the ball, as they did every week (with a slight hesitancy due to the fact that they kept expecting the whistle), while the opposition players kept by and large to their positions on the field and passed the ball from one unmarked player to another, unhindered, scoring at will in front of a hostile crowd that began the game in noisy support of James’ and Lewis’s side, but ended in philosophical silence.

  James and Lewis walked home with their muddy boots over their shoulders. James was in a state of bewilderment. He asked Lewis his opinion of what had befallen them but Lewis declined to answer: he just walked with his head down.

  ‘What’s the point of it all?’ James wailed. ‘What are we going to do now? Oh, God, what if my dad finds out? Or yours for that matter? They’re bound to. How did Eric let that tenth goal in? He dropped it.’

  But Lewis just walked with his head down. James had made sure he didn’t let slip that it had been his efforts that got Lewis into the team, but he was nevertheless exasperated by Lewis’s silence: he knew it didn’t make sense, and wasn’t fair, but he couldn’t help feeling Lewis was being somehow ungrateful. When Lewis failed to acknowledge him for the umpteenth time, James had had enough.

  ‘Bloody hell, Lew,’ he blurted out. ‘What the bloody hell are you so angry about now?’

  Lewis came out of his trance and looked down at James with a faraway, mystified expression. ‘I’m not angry, Jay,’ he told him calmly. ‘I’m thinking.’

  James was a gregarious child who loved to run and shout. Forced to sit still for too long (other than on the floor, secretly engrossed in a book, in his father’s library), his body began to squirm even before he himself realized he was bored. His face remained blank but his bottom shifted across the chair, his legs twisted around each other and bent themselves into awkward angles, his arms reached backwards over his shoulders as his fingers tried to scratch an impatience that was itching somewhere just beyond reach in the middle of his spine. They looked to his worried teachers like the symptoms of some slow-motion St Vitus’s Dance, until they recognized a more common condition, that of a child with an overactive brain.

  James was really only happy, it seemed, when he was on the move. If he was stuck in the same place he talked non-stop, because the energy inside had to come out somehow.

  He wore out clothes before he had time to outgrow them: his jumpers frayed at the elbows and trousers ripped at the knees; underwear sustained holes as if moth-eaten; socks were simply lost, leaving him with a drawerful of odd ones; while he kicked and scuffed his shoes until they fell apart on his feet.

  James didn’t progress from the adventure stories in his father’s library to more serious literature on other shelves, as might have been expected; he would stop browsing there once he went to the comprehensive school, the library’s only legacy a taste for solitude. And, having given up on her husband, Mary seemed to have given up on her children too, making little effort to bequeath them her own pleasure.

  By the time James left school he was, his cousin Zoe would despairingly tell him, practically illiterate. There was no doubt about where he got whatever aesthetic sensibility he possessed from; there was only one possible place: the Electra Cinema run by his great-aunt, Agatha Freeman, his cousin Zoe’s grandmother.

  Agatha had had the cinema built on Lambert Street, north of the town centre, at the end of the First World War. The ninety-nine-year lease on the site still had seventy-five years to run. By the time James and his brothers and sister began going to the children’s matinées on a Saturday afternoon, almost fifty years later, Agatha was a legend in the town. She ran the cinema almost single-handed, assisted by an unseen projectionist who’d been there nearly as long as she had and had never been known to take a day off, much less a holiday, other than Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. She chose the films, put up the posters, changed the lettering on the neon-lit façade, punched the tickets, sold ice-cream in the intermission and cleaned up in the mornings. Her severe expression had hardened over time and she was so stubborn that regular customers of all ages considered it their duty to try to force a smile from her. They never succeeded: she hadn’t been seen to smile in years. But often after a film had started she would lock the glass doors at the front of the cinema, creep into the auditorium and stand at the back to watch a film for the umpteenth time. And if it was a comedy, then the audience were likely to hear one person laugh louder than anyone else, old Agatha at the back, laughing like a drain, in the dark.

  Every Saturday there was a children’s matinée and Simon and James and Robert went to most of them, along with Lewis and, once they were old enough, Alice and Laura. They were joined in their row of seats by Zoe.

  ‘Matinée: it’s an interesting derivation,’ Zoe told James. ‘It means an afternoon performance; from the French matin, meaning “morning”. What a stupid language. I don’t see why I have to learn it at school. I’ll pick it up much better when I go travelling with Dad anyway.’

  No one knew who the father of Agatha’s son Harold was. She never told anyone, not even Harold himself. He grew up an only child in the tiny flat above the Electra, as would his daughter. Zoe was two years older than Simon. She would soon start accompanying her father on his travels, but back then she stayed with her grandmother above the cinema, and she saw every film that was screened. And Zoe had an added interest in those films they watched each Saturday: Harold had gained revenge on Agatha for not telling him who his father was by refusing to shed light on the identity of Zoe’s mother, having brought her home as a baby after two years’ working and travelling through the United States. The only detail he’d let slip was that she was some kind of actress, and Zoe came to conceive the notion that she might see her mother in one of those Saturday matinées. Maybe she knew it was an absurd illusion, a game she needed to play, but the others couldn’t be sure because she certainly appeared to take it seriously.

  Robert liked the monosyllabic gunfighters in Westerns, dressed in black, while Laura’s favourites were Walt Disney cartoons – especially 101 Dalmatians with Cruella de Vil – because, she claimed, they were the most realistic. Zoe preferred the epics – as did James and Lewis – because their women were the most noble and tragic, not to mention exotic, and therefore the most likely candidates for her parentage. Despite inheriting the dark hair and olive skin of her father’s line she became convinced that her mother was Russian after seeing the blonde Julie Christie as Lara in Doctor Zhivago. When The Vikings was shown (after which Robert wore a demonic scowl and an eye-patch for three weeks in imitation of Kirk Douglas, which made him look g
rimmer than ever) Zoe was certain that her mother was Danish and bore a close resemblance to Janet Leigh.

  Lewis liked the epics best because there was always a chance that Woody Strode would be in them: whether set among the gladiators of Rome, Barbary pirates or in Jerusalem at the time of Christ there was invariably a brave, bald black man in an important supporting role. He was sure to be killed, but at least he was equally sure to have a courageous life and a valiant death, and afterwards Lewis would torture himself trying to summon up similar courage and shave his hair off.

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ Laura volunteered.

  ‘My dad’ll kill me,’ Lewis worried, biting his nails.

  ‘We could keep your hair in a bag, and if he gets too cross we can stick it back on,’ James suggested, trying to be helpful. They never quite managed it, though they came closest after seeing Yul Brynner in Taras Bulba, when James impulsively suggested they could both shave their heads in a double pact of friendship, and share whatever punishment might come their way.

  ‘All right, then,’ Lewis agreed, biting his nails.

  ‘Actually,’ James ventured, after considering the idea a little longer, ‘I’m not sure. I think I preferred Tony Curtis really.’

  They saw a different film every week, emerging from the cinema with a new identity that lasted at least halfway home, by which time James and Laura had usually started arguing about some aspect of the film, since James was the one who loved the films most and Laura was the one who most enjoyed an argument. They nearly came to blows walking home from Cheyenne Autumn: James, profoundly moved by the injustice portrayed, was upset by Laura’s jeering ridicule of American actors made up with paint and wigs to look like Red Indians, and of anyone else stupid enough to be taken in by them.

  Sometimes they even began squabbling with each other while the film was still in progress, and then before they knew it their Great-aunt Agatha, making no allowances for kinship, would lean over them from behind, pinch their ears and frogmarch them outside as she had seen it done in a hundred silent comedies, and which clearly gave her an inordinate amount of pleasure.

  In actual fact, when James looked back, he recalled that Simon was as obdurate a philistine as their father. (‘Money,’ Charles told Mary when he cancelled the piano lessons after school she’d enrolled Simon in, ‘money, not music, is the international language.’) Simon didn’t like the cinema, and only ever went when he had nothing better to do. And Alice was only allowed to go when she was a hundred per cent healthy – she had first to pass a medical of glands felt and temperature taken – because on one thing their mother agreed with Robbie: that cinemas were horribly unhealthy places, all those children squeezed together, all those germs gestating in the dark just waiting for a frail little lassie like Alice.

  James was sure that there were just the five of them – Lewis and himself, Robert, Laura and Zoe – in their little group when they watched Helen of Troy, in which Zoe got her grandmother’s Greek ancestry mixed up with her unknown mother’s identity and convinced herself that she was the daughter of Rosanna Podesta, whose face launched a thousand ships and spellbound ten-year-old boys.

  What James couldn’t have imagined was that a shot of their hypnotized faces, in the watery light spilling from the screen, would make a crucial early image if there were ever a film made of his life, since he had no way of knowing that the five of them (plus a child whose birth was still a long way off) would turn out, despite a fifteen-year effort to leave his childhood and everything in it behind, to be the principal protagonists of his life’s story.

  Chapter 2

  GROWING PAINS

  THE HOUSE ON the hill was the centre of the Freeman children’s world. At ground level it was sealed by the garden’s surrounding wall, in a lagoon of privileged existence. A person rising through the house, though, could see the town spreading out below. And it was possible to ascend from the third floor to the roof: it was only a service ladder to give access for repairs, there was no roof garden or anything on top and the children were cautioned by Robbie never to go up there.

  ‘A high wind’ll sweep ye off,’ she told them, ‘and ye’ll be dashed to pieces on the ground below.’

  But sometimes, when she wasn’t around, they dared each other to creep up and, hugging the tiles, crawl along wooden struts on lead alleyways between the pitched sections of the roof. As they got older, and bolder, they ventured further, Robert at least as far as the edge, the stone balustrade that ran around the whole of the roof. James occasionally went up on his own: pulled by the vertiginous drop, he kept well back from the parapet, but he could still see everything. On the hill leading directly down to the canal (over its bridge the town centre beyond) was a large open public park, with runners and dogs, families kite-flying and solitary walkers. The slope on either side was more gradual and coiled with twisting cul-de-sacs and private lanes to detached houses in hedged gardens like satellites of the big house itself. The smells of hops fermenting in the brewery in town sometimes rose up from below.

  Behind the house the town stretched across a plateau through acres of housing, in which were studded the primary school, Lewis’s house, Mr Singh’s Post Office Stores and Newsagent, the town football ground. Beyond them his father’s factories were clustered by the ring road, around which sprawled the housing estate with its single tower block.

  It was best up on the roof at night. It felt more dangerous and forbidden, for one thing, but it felt also like not just the centre but the top of the world too, with sights and sounds more vivid in the dark: the discontented murmur of traffic, cars’ lights probing a way through congested streets; the brilliant floodlights of the football ground and the disembodied roar of the crowd that burst as if from some underground monster into the night sky; beyond, in the distance, the smoking chimneys and tiny fierce flames of the factory; down in the town centre the house and street lights, and the lit-up face of the main church, and people blurred dots of movement in and out of shadow.

  It was the top of the world and James could have stayed up there all night, if it wasn’t that he was soon cold and hungry. He descended, shivering, into its warm heart down on the ground floor, and asked Edna for a mug of hot chocolate – whipping it with a whisk as it heated, the way she always did, which made it taste so creamy.

  James added sugar. ‘Don’t stir with a knife, it’s sure to bring strife,’ Edna warned.

  One hot afternoon in the late summer of 1965 Mary burst bright-eyed into the school.

  ‘Death in the family,’ she told the teachers.

  ‘Oh. I’m so sorry,’ they sympathized.

  ‘No, don’t be,’ Mary assured them. ‘No one important.’ Mary rounded up James, Robert and Alice before remembering that Simon was at the comprehensive now. So she drove over there and dragged him out too. Zoe saw their car and jumped in.

  ‘This better be good, Mum,’ Simon warned her. ‘It’s different here.’

  ‘It will be,’ she exclaimed. ‘It is. Look!’

  They peered out of the car windows, and realized that their mother had brought them out of school just because warm showers were falling from a blue sky, and rainbows materialized on every horizon.

  ‘See? I couldn’t let you miss this,’ Mary said. She drove them out of the west side of town and parked in the gateway to a huge field, where the river flowed beyond it. They got out of the car and Mary said: ‘Race you to that cow over there. Winner gets a bar of chocolate.’

  They ran across the grass. James won the race but Mary turned out to have chocolate for everyone. Alice skipped off to one side, into a world of her own, and Simon went after her, held her by the wrists and twirled her round. She sang as she flew, and her voice sounded like a strange bird’s.

  Mary grabbed Robert’s hands and danced with him, and the others clamoured until she let them in and made a circle, and they spun till they were giddy, and collapsed on the wet, slippery grass.

  The rain was sparkling and James thought they might all
dissolve in it. They walked across the field till they were drenched. Robert gave Alice a piggy-back. Simon told some swans that he was a swan in another life and they hissed at him.

  ‘Hey, little man,’ Mary said, pulling James to her. He could feel her ribs through her sopping shirt.

  Mary had brought swimming costumes, towels, blankets and a picnic. The children swam in the river. Simon was a porpoise, pulling Alice with her red armbands. James jumped from the branch of a willow tree laughing, splashing whoever he could. Robert disappeared downriver: anxious voices called him; a dog barked back; Robert returned, ploughing upstream unperturbed.

  They swam across the river in the afternoon, and soft rain speckled the surface of the water, and then passed away across the fields.

  The sun went down. Zoe floated on her back in the middle of the river. Mary sat on the bank, gazing over the children’s heads, smoking; she held a cigarette like it was heavy. The town glowed orange across the horizon behind her. Then she called them out: sudden goose-pimpled flesh, trembling children peeling off tight wet swimmers, towels rubbing hair dry.

  They shared tartan blankets, sandwiches and chocolate, hot drinks, on a warm summer night, and Mary gathered them to her, tired, sleepy, drawing them round her, her children accretions for her comfort; and there, with Zoe too, all fell asleep.

  Zoe woke, shivering, in white clouds. She stood up, rose out of the mist and watched it forming from the water and rolling out across the fields. Her shoulders were above the mist, she couldn’t see the others any more asleep around her feet; could see only the disembodied tops of trees, the orange glow of the town and a million stars fixed in the blue-black summer sky; high alone above mist in the moonlight.

  Breakfast was the most chaotic meal in the kitchen, because everybody was always late. Charles would already be getting distracted by the phone, James had lingered under warm sheets dozing for too long, Robert was lost, Alice searched for her clothes and her satchel, having forgotten where she left them yesterday, Laura would be locked in the bathroom, Stanley be cleaning the grates, Robbie complaining: ‘Ah called ye all hours ago!’