Landed (17 page)

The service station seems to be filling up. Detritus builds up on abandoned tables. Owen becomes selective in his gleaning, picking portable items of food, slipping them into his rucksack. He glances at the computer room. It is empty. Owen's heart thumps in his chest, he looks around wildly. He sees Josh signalling to him, pointing outside, to a play area. Holly stands beside him. Owen nods and they trot out. He watches.

The play area is an adventure playground. Diminutive commandos, Josh and Holly climb netting, balance their way along a swinging, slatted bridge. Owen watches them, his heartbeat settling. Beyond, a man lets his dogs off their leads: two brown pointers run pell-mell across an ungrazed field towards a wood. A stand of silver birches.

 

Outside, the repetitive cars come and go, vacating spaces for one another, filled within moments.

In the playground Holly cruises down a slide. Josh leads an assault on a wooden turreted castle, spraying its defenders with imaginary bullets. Owen knows they must leave now, he no longer belongs, as if this station is becoming either more or less real than he himself, this transit area, where people are being sorted in some kind of selection process of which some are almost aware.

‘Forecast not so good,' Claire says.

Owen had forgotten her. ‘Maybe we'll stay in a hotel,' he says. ‘I have a backup plan,'

She sips her coffee. ‘What kind of plan?' she asks.

If I tell her the truth, Owen thinks, all will be lost. If I tell her a lie, she'll spot it. His mother once told him that his father, faced with a simple question requiring a straightforward
answer, would rather spin a yarn. Whereas she, at the first thought of falsehood, would feel her vocal cords constrict, and squeak. Her son is the same. He says nothing.

‘I had a plan once,' Claire says, and smiles at the memory, this gift from herself. She begins to tell him the story. It concerns her persuading a group of her teenage friends to do something none of them wanted to do. She had to change one person's mind after another. Owen is absorbed, though he doesn't follow the story. He's drawn into Claire's force field, her animated self.

It occurs to Owen that he and Claire are sitting slightly closer to one another than they were a minute ago, drawing towards each other by imperceptible degrees. He can feel her breath now, see the imperfections of her skin, blotches in each cheek. Variegations of colour, tone. She has become desirable, and he finds himself changing, his libido brought alive, a long-forgotten sensation. They speak, but it is in code, and even as he listens, or occasionally interjects, Owen cannot say whether or not it makes any sense, it is gobbledegook, nothing more than an excuse to watch her lips move, enticing, to look into her eyes looking into his.

Their fingers meet on the wiped-clean table, the fingers of her right and his left hand touch. Semi-independent from their owners' minds, the fingers stroke, caress, pinch each other, as their owners watch. Claire stops speaking. Her face is blushing. Beneath the table, Owen feels his knees push forward in search of hers: they meet as if underwater. Two bodies yearning towards fusion.

Suddenly, with his hook, Owen grabs his left forearm and yanks it aside. He stands up, looks outside. The children are still playing in the adventure playground.

Claire is embarrassed, irked. She looks at her watch, holds up her phone. ‘I need a top-up. Be a moment. Right back.' She
heads towards the newsagents. Owen watches her wide shoulders, her long legs. Her posture makes her look taller than she really is. It's a repeated visual surprise when slouching men pass her and prove to be an inch or two taller than her. She disappears behind magazine racks.

Strip lights on the ceiling. No shadows. Owen can't understand how there are no shadows on people's faces. The glare from the strip lights fall to the floor and bounce back, and off the tables and the walls, filling in where there should have been shadows.

 

‘He's hurt.'

Josh is holding his elbow and grimacing, struggling not to cry. As Owen embraces him, Josh's eyes fill with tears.

‘He fell off the log,' Holly explains.

‘It were slippery,' Josh says.

‘His arm hit the wood.'

Josh nods back over his shoulder. ‘Vikings was after me.'

‘Where does it hurt?' Owen strokes his son's elbow. Josh rests his head on his father's shoulder.

‘We done the law of gravity last week,' Josh whispers. ‘I hate it. It's too strict. Everything falls.' He's stopped crying, is absorbing himself in telling his father his idea. ‘Why can't things just float down to the earth sometimes? It hurts when you hit the ground.'

‘Where's that lady?' Holly asks.

Owen eases his son off his lap to the floor and stands up himself. His skin tingles.

The place is crowded, people make such slow progress it takes a while of observation to see that they are not stationary, as if in some jam-packed nightclub, but moving each in one direction or another. Countless negotiations every moment.
Owen glimpses Claire in the far distance across the mall, in the company of three or four men and women in white shirts, the black police epaulettes upon their shoulders, talking into radios attached to their chests.

‘Pick up your rucksacks,' Owen says. ‘Back to the playground.'

They walk through the cafeteria, Owen bent forward, he hopes undramatically. Doors swing open, the coolness of the day a shock to him after air-conditioned warmth. ‘Quick,' Owen says. He suspects he doesn't need to, that the children understand the urgency required. Holly is not dawdling as she naturally does. They follow him out of the play area and turn right, away from the service station, into the field where dogs are exercised. Owen is drawn to the silver birches, he can almost see the three of them half a minute hence dissolving into the wood. But the field is too wide, and in less than half a minute a police officer would be at a window and could spot them scarpering. He turns left instead, and they run along a hedge. One or two people are in the field, drivers stretching their legs, and Owen is conscious of a need to make their running look like fun, not flight, so alternates between leading and theatrically chasing his children.

They reach the cover of a thicket of scrub and saplings. Holly flops. They kneel. Owen crawls back and looks across the field. He can just see a man with a dog. He's standing still, facing towards the service station, which itself is out of sight from here. It's suddenly apparent that the man is listening to someone, someone is addressing him. A moment later he shakes his head, shrugs. He points away, to the far side of the field, towards the silver birch trees, as if to say, Maybe over there? Then police officers come into view, they cross the field at a trot. No dogs of their own, thank God, not yet at least.

Owen crawls back to the others. ‘Let's move,' he says, taking Holly's hand. They walk through the scrubland towards the roaring sound. ‘We're on the wrong side of the motorway,' Owen explains. ‘We need to cross it, see, to the west.' The road is raised up high – they lose sight of the vehicles upon it. As they climb the bank it would be easy to imagine they're approaching a waterfall. When they reach the barrier and see the speed and the unremitting volume of cars and lorries hurtling across in front of them it's immediately obvious that any attempt to dash over between vehicles is out of the question.

They walk south beside the motorway. Josh yells, ‘I'll have a look,' and runs ahead. The boy seems in the excitement to have let go of his misgivings, for the moment at least. For half a mile they scramble over fences, up the bank then down again into a field. Josh comes running back, shouting something it's impossible to make out above the noise. He beckons them, and they scamper after him, until he stops, peering towards the bank in front of him, then looking back at them, then looking at the bank. When they reach him they see a tunnel underneath the motorway. Sitting at the round mouth of the tunnel is a dog.

‘We can go through,' Josh says.

‘Wait,' Owen answers.

The dog has brown hair, and looks like some kind of cross, between a collie and maybe a Labrador. A mongrel. It seems to be staring calmly back at them. Then it turns and walks away into the darkness of the tunnel.

‘Be careful,' Owen says, advancing, holding his arms in front of each of the children. He wonders whether the mongrel is alone, or one of a pack of wild dogs. As they reach the mouth of the tunnel they can see the dog in silhouette, sauntering away from them. They follow. It's oddly quiet here, underneath the motorway. Owen yells, ‘Waaa!' and the sound resonates around
them. The children copy, uttering their own loud syllables which echo off the concrete walls. The ground has a little dry mud on it, perhaps this is a storm drain of some kind, for the passage of water rather than animals.

When they reach the far side the dog is a further twenty metres away. It's stopped and seems to be waiting for them.

‘Where's its owner?' Holly asks.

Owen shakes his head. ‘Don't know.' When they walk on, the dog resumes its own journey. It too heads west, so that they can hardly help but follow it. After a while they enter a highsided track, an ancient right of way. Josh opens his rucksack and produces three green apples.

‘You bought these?' Owen asks. ‘Back there?'

‘He took them, Daddy,' Holly explains. ‘When the lady wasn't looking.'

Owen bites into an apple. His mouth floods with saliva. The sweetness. Teeth crunching skin and pulp, sweet juice and saliva. How strange it is to be alive.

 

They follow paths where possible, or tramp along lanes. Owen aims to keep away from roads. There is a thrill in walking out of and away from a great urban conurbation, an escape. They enter a wood, follow a rabbits' path then find themselves on a tarmacadam road laid in a straight line between the quiet trees. There's nothing to explain the road in this deserted place.

Soon they begin to climb. They sit and eat their last scraps of food that Owen had filched from the motorway service station, other people's leftovers: rolls, butter; grapes, a banana; biscuits. Water and juice from half-drunk plastic bottles. Then set off again, climbing easily. The dog is still with them, and sits a few yards away.

After a while Josh says, ‘How do you know which way to
go, Owen?' He has a suspicious expression. ‘Have you been here before?'

‘The sun sets in the west,' Owen tells him. ‘We head for the setting sun. And if the sun is hidden, I've got a compass.'

Josh is suddenly excited. ‘We're going camping,' he says, turning to his sister. ‘That's the surprise.'

Above them, the sky is grey and thick as oil paint. Black birds swoop across like cinders shot from an underground fire. From the top of the Clent Hills they look back at the sprawl of the great city. Owen cannot see east beyond it; it spreads north and south. He turns and looks west, to Wales, surely, the far horizon. The thick grey canvas cannot stretch all across the wide sky: above the line of land or sea or mountains there are pale interludes, pools of light blue.

Holly tugs on Owen's right arm. ‘Carry,' she says. Awkwardly, gripping her leg with his hook, he hoists her onto his shoulders.

The sky is opening up. The sun, getting lower, illuminates more. It seems to be enticing them towards it, out of sight but reaching towards them, laying a path of gold across the patchwork landscape of hedges and fields. The girl on her father's shoulders, the boy with a stick from a hedge that is a gun, a sword, a lance. The mongrel loping ahead of them.

The pub is at the edge of a village, and they sit in its garden, surrounded by other families. The building appears sick: what look like three huge sticking plasters have been attached to the outside wall. Braces, skewered through the infrastructure, holding it together. Across a fence sheep graze. Children try to entice the animals to come to the fence. The sheep decline and after a while the children run off, but then some other child, watching, goes to the fence. Men and women sit at the picnic tables drinking gloomily, wrapping layers of clothes or their
bare arms around them while their children run about, from climbing frame to fence to table, strangers communicating with each other by this criss-crossing of their random paths.

Food comes. Sausage, egg and chips. After this first day, Owen decides, from now on, they'll prepare their own food. As they eat, tiredly, Owen gazes out across the field. The dark seems to come in from the distance, so that against the gloom, trees and sheep and people in the foreground appear lighter than before, each object standing apart from those around it, which isn't really possible though it seems so and makes them magical, totemic, so that he peers at one and the next in the hope that it might deliver its significance, which most of the time remains hidden.

But then the dark has gone over them and twilight is silent and uniform across their portion of the earth. Night is falling, unarguable, finite. At the end, though, at the end of the dying day, as his daughter dozes against him and his son gazes from beneath lazy eyelids at some insect crawling across his shirt, only then does the sun, long hidden, skit between the clouds and the long horizon. The whole of it emerges in a moment, grey then white then yellow, like a single all-powerful film lamp, lighting up the garden. The world is rendered cinematic. He can see that people see themselves on a film set, spectators and participants simultaneously. It is like a secret brief performance, an occult drama in which the inhabitants of the garden collude.

Josh looks up at his father, and they exchange smiles. We sense it is at the same thing, Owen thinks. Maybe we're wrong. His son leans into him. Owen raises his face to the sky and closes his eyes, and as he does so he becomes airborne, aerial: he flies as if surfing the setting sun, so to see this darkening moment across the country, skimming over fields, above
woods, into suburban streets. Urban allotments and tenement gardens. Waste-disposal sites and reclamation yards. Schools, municipal playing fields. He sees the yellow light dying in private swimming pools with their air of desertion. He climbs out of the shadow of hills and up to their blazing peak, from where the sun spills yellow grey liquid across the Irish Sea.