My First Colouring Book (2 page)

Each of our meetings was basically the same, but also slightly different every time, and by the end I felt as though I'd been to a particular play over and over again, many times – rather like that woman who's so addicted to
The Sound of Music
she's seen it thousands of times. Finally, I realised that Mr Barker played this performance every single day of his life, from his rising in the morning till the final curtain at bedtime. He staged 365 performances of his one-man show every year, with a bonus every leap year. I watched them, alone in the auditorium, and clapped silently after all of them. I could picture him in his dressing room soon after dawn, putting on his costume, applying the greasepaint; preparing his props – the pork pie hat and the ever-brown tie, his fork and his spade and his hoe, his ridiculous trainers for comic effect. This was not the National Theatre of Brent staging a Shakespearean play in five minutes, nor an Alan Bennett
Talking Heads
monologue, but a full staging of
King Lear
, daughters and all, since he had two of his own and I'd become the third. It was unnerving.

Each play, I realised, was a 24-hour re-enactment of his whole life: ninety-odd years condensed into a span between sunrise and moonrise, and it had to be completed or he would die. That was the nub of the matter. If he faltered, if he cancelled one single performance, the show would collapse and the curtain would come down for ever.

I saw it in his eyes. And sometimes it was a struggle, I could see that too, since old men get ill and they get tired… the trick is to keep moving – however slowly, however wheezily. Sometimes he sat on the seat by my side and chatted amiably; sometimes he indicated with his hand that he was out of puff and needed to recover.

As the heat of the sun dwindled this year, and the autumn arrived slowly, I noticed a slight shift in him, to match the sun's diminution. I had to wait for him more and more often; his arrival on the seat, on his way home from the allotment, was getting a little later – and more laborious – every day, or so it seemed to me. And he'd still be sitting there, occasionally, when I returned from the botanical gardens. He made light of it, saying he enjoyed seeing the kids go past, watching the world go by, and what was the hurry anyway, supper wasn't for an hour and ‘the missus' didn't mind at all.

He talked about his wife in a cavalier ‘her indoors' sort of way, but he boasted her accomplishments proudly: her landscape paintings, her poems, her housecraft.

I thought he was stuttering to an end in October. The play was faltering; he was beginning to forget his lines. He was taking too long to get across the stage, into position. Even
The Mousetrap
had to end eventually, I thought. But although his recovery periods on the bench became longer and quieter, he continued without losing a single episode. The day he faltered would be his last. Mr Barker's motto was:
The show must go on
.

I really miss seeing him every day, meeting him on that bench. It was so inconsequential, yet so consoling – talking about the little things in life, while maintaining life's steady beat, seeing the pendulum swing to its final point and then falling back again. My part in the play ended in early November, with a strange dry cough and a sudden loss of weight. Things hadn't been right for quite some time, but it's so hard to tell, isn't it? After the blood tests there were a number of hospital visits, then the diagnosis. An unexpected twist to the plot; a tragic ending. There's no real point in having any further treatment, so I'm going to soldier on behind the counter, waiting for my body to harden inside, and then I'll join the ancient oakwood and the yews in the churchyard.

I got a card from him only the other day, slipped under the door of the shop, complete with a neat brown fingerprint smelling of radishes. He said he missed our meetings, there's no-one to talk to nowadays about the allotment. His handwriting's well educated, stylish. A flamboyant and sensual
f
, with a looping descender. Why should I be so surprised? But I won't reply. What could I say? Come up and see me sometime? Come to my shop and see a few old women being served in silence? Because none of them has said anything much after the first slow wave of hesitant sorries. They don't know what to say, not to my face, anyway. They look at my wig and they wonder, I can see it written all over their faces – they'll wash their hands carefully when they get home and wonder about the little white bus to Tesco's. At the moment they're still trying to be loyal. But then they all point at the mother ship and turn towards me afterwards… I can see from here that their teeth are stained with the story of my illness: their careful gossip has left a brown tea mark at the bottom of their cups.

The tealeaves have spoken. As for Mr Barker, I'll not see him again. He's a busy man – and the show must go on.

post office red

EVERY car accident has its own unique sounds, presumably. In the rock ‘n' roll of a road crash, every performance is a ‘classic' with amazing paradiddles from the drummer and great riffs from the bass player. Heavy metal. Crash bang wallop.

I was thinking this rather strange thought as I sat in the driving seat of my green VW Golf at about 3.30pm on Christmas Eve, 2007 – the time and date I noted later when I made an insurance claim. Fortunately, no-one was hurt since it was a minor accident and no other vehicle was involved. Even small reversals have their plus sides; there was that great feeling of being alive and unhurt after a potentially fatal misjudgement. The throb of my heart, the zing of the blood in my ears confirmed I was still on Planet Earth, still living the good life. I'm not religious so I didn't offer thanks to a god – but I nodded towards Blind Fate and gave an ironic smile of gratitude. I was forced, however, to stay right there in my seat until help came along because the car was wedged in a ditch with a muddy bank looming through the passenger side window and a small forest of blackthorns pressing against the window to my right. I was up against a hedge, and I could actually see an old blackbird's nest close by in the twisted branchlets. The car ticked and clanged for a while, then settled into a glum silence. So did I. Time travels so very slowly when you're going nowhere fast. Eventually someone came along and the curtain rose on an elaborate play, well-rehearsed in pretty well every human brain: here was an opportunity (at last) for a passer-by to be good and rather heroic as the mobile phone came out. As I sat there someone got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to dial 999 for real – and as he did so a whole heap of sensory experiences skidded into my brain: my eyes took in the cold muddy road, a wheel trim resting in a tree (and looking like one of those horrible torture wheels in medieval illustrations), globs of broken glass gleaming on the verge.

Police, lights, action. Firemen, lights, action. Out I came. Breathalysed. Negative.

You OK Mister?

Yes I'm fine.

But a passing doctor (yes, these things actually happen) expresses concern and insists I hop into his vehicle for a quick check-up. My eyes are a bit glazed, apparently. But that's my usual look, I joke…

His name is Jonathan and I make a faltering attempt at conversation while he looks into my eyes with his thingy. We sit there in his medical-smelling estate car: he says he'll take me to the nearest town once he's sure I'm not in shock. So we sit there in a lay-by, looking at the scene of the accident – a severe ninety degree bend in a country road, on a bit of a hill, overlooked by trees on our left and a house on our right. The house is tall and thin, rather gaunt and grey but in good condition, with clean windows offset by dark turquoise curtains. It's a farmhouse, I think, because it has a few tidy outbuildings with bright red doors and a small barn painted in the same bright Post Office red. There's a grassy yard in front of the house and an old Scots Pine, giant-bodied and gnarled, reminding me of an illustration in Grimm's fairy tales. There's a kennel but no dog. A cowshed but no cows. Pigpens but no pigs. I've seen this living postcard many hundreds of times, in fact it's embedded in my memory. I've even dreamt about it. Yes, this scene has a particular importance for me.

Nothing at all moves as we survey the scene. There is no evidence of life. Not even a dog-bark or a passing cat. Nothing. Not a dicky bird.

Maybe my gaze is a little too intense because Jonathan asks me if I'm OK.

Fine thanks. Really.

He wants to know what happened. I think he's playing for time, waiting for me to show any possible symptoms. Blood dribbling from my ear, whatever.

So I tell him.

I was looking at that house.

I sense his head turning to look at me.

Why? That's a nasty bend…

Yes, I should have been concentrating. But I was concentrating on the wrong thing.

Why the house… do you know the people there? he asks.

So I tell him the whole story.

Jonathan, I say, that house has been in my life forever and always. I passed it twice a day, as I went to and from school, for a decade. I've passed it hundreds of times since then too, and there has never been any change.

You mean it's always looked like that? he asks.

Yes, exactly the same. For the forty-odd years I've passed it, not a single thing has changed.

That's a bit peculiar, he says.The cars outside the place, haven't they changed?

I've never seen a single car parked outside the place.

But there's a garage…

Never seen the doors open, nor a car.

There's a washing line…

That's the first thing I look at, I say. That's what I was looking at when I lost control of the bloody car…

Children playing?

I've never seen one single sign of human life in that place, I say.

I don't know when I first started to look. It must have been during my teens.

There must have been a point in my life when my brain first registered this strangeness. A fulcrum in time when my young mind rang an alarm bell whenever I passed and told me to look at the place, to search it for any small signs of movement. Of course there must be hundreds or thousands of places I've passed during my life and I've not felt this imperative to stare: to look for a tweak of the curtains, or a dribble of smoke rising from the chimney. Even with holiday homes you eventually see
something
during a lifetime.

Jonathan breaks in on my thoughts abruptly.

I think I'll go and knock on the door…

He's also intrigued now.

I wouldn't bother, I say, if there was anybody inside the place they'd have come out when I crashed, surely.

Jonathan thinks about this.

Unless they were deaf, or old, or both perhaps.

I don't answer him, because my mind has gone off on a tangent. Do I actually want to see anyone move? Do I want to meet the perfectly ordinary human beings who may have lived in that house for x number of years, blissfully unaware of the storyline I've written for their home – or should that be
unwritten
? Because this thing I've got about the house is the exact opposite of a soap opera, isn't it? I'm making sure that nothing happens. I'm creating a non-story, an antithesis of
happening
.

Jonathan picks up on my thoughts.

Perhaps you don't actually want anyone to live there, or anything to happen, he says. And he adds a storyline of his own.

I went for a walk on the mountain behind my house last week, he tells me as a preamble to his anecdote. There's a seat halfway up so I had a bit of a sit-down to enjoy the view. While I was getting to my feet I noticed a scrap of cloth, about four inches by two, in the heather – light blue satin, I think, cut unevenly with scissors and frayed at the edges… I was about to throw it back on the ground when I noticed that someone had written something
on it in biro. Chinese characters, a message in Chinese on a hillside in Wales. I was really fascinated!

Why didn't you take it to the local Chinese restaurant, they'd have translated it for you, I say.

Yes, I thought about that. I put it in a frame and it's on the wall above my computer because it looks nice there. After a while I decided not to take it round to the Chinese because…

It's my turn to read his thought.

Because you didn't want to know what the message says?

He laughs loudly and healthily.

Yes. It could be a shopping list or something banal like that.

I agree with him. Best to leave it undeciphered. A little bit of mystery.

Maybe it was a message to a girlfriend, or something. A last farewell note. Perhaps she'd taken it up there to have a good cry.

Yeah, it could be anything. Don't want to know, he says. I've already made up lots of meanings for it as I work on my laptop – mostly romantic, to tell you the truth. That's the way our minds seem to work, isn't it?

I agreed, and we chatted away for some time before he decided I was OK and drove to the nearest town, Llanrwst, which is where I live. When he dropped me off at my home in George Street he took my phone number.