Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

Perhaps it would have been enough, then, if I had just gone straight out there and got busy with Father’s old saw. Who knows if some savage pruning would have been all that was needed. Then that would have been an end of it, and what happened later that day would not have happened, and life would have gone on in the same fashion for a lot longer. And do you know, weighing it up now, despite everything, I am glad it didn’t. I’m glad of the new and surprising turn things took. But eighteen years ago I did not have the knack of clarity that I have acquired here.

So it was here, on this February afternoon eighteen years on, as I looked down at those four buddleias, that it was suddenly obvious what had to be done this time. I found a saw, an axe and a crowbar, as well as Wellingtons, gloves and a waxed jacket in one of the outbuildings in the courtyard, and I got busy. Though pruning is not the word for what I did to those buddleias. It took all my strength. It was dark by the time I had finished and I got badly scratched and I pulled I don’t know how many muscles, and I don’t think I have ever been so tired, but I got all four of them out by their filthy brown roots.

No offence intended, nothing personal, but Steve of Corsham Breakdown refused to uncouple Michael’s van from the pickup until Michael paid him the hundred quid. Nothing personal, but Steve had formed the opinion after an hour’s drive with his silent, motionless passenger- silent but for short replies to Steve’s attempts at chat, and motionless but for the gripping and releasing of his fingers over the backpack on his lap- that the guy might be weird and/or broke, despite the clean, regular-looking clothes. It was a little before five o’clock when he pulled over, with difficulty, on the steep road leading up through the Snow Hill estate, and set out his terms. No offence, but I need to see your money, mate. It’s not me, it’s the boss, all right? Cashpoints still open, aren’t they? Time to get down there and get the cash, haven’t you?

Mr David closed at five thirty, sometimes earlier on a slack day. Michael set off with the backpack towards the London Road and Mr David’s shop in Walcot Street. Steve walked up the hill in the opposite direction to Fairfield Stores and bought a Sun, a pasty, a bag of crisps, a Galaxy and a Coke. It was on the way back to the cab to wait for Michael that he heard the banging from inside the van.

When Michael got back with the now flattened backpack over one shoulder, Steph was in the passenger seat of the pickup swigging at the Coke and having a laugh with Steve, for whom Michael’s weirdness was now confirmed.

‘Oi!’ he called as Michael approached the driver’s window, ‘you never said you got your flaming girlfriend in the back! She could have froze to death. Dangerous and all, illegal that is, I could have got done for that!’

Michael stared into the cab, too depleted by Mr David for anything like surprise. Steph looked back at him with a mixture of defiance and entreaty.

‘Needed a rest, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘In the van. Don’t mind, do you? He doesn’t mind,’ she added, nodding at Steve.

Steve patted her knee and said, ‘Got a bit warmed up now, have you, sweetheart?’ He turned to Michael. ‘You want to take better care. Got the cash?’ As Michael counted off the notes he went on, ‘You should have said. She should’ve gone up in front between us. There’s room for three. Even three and a half!’

Michael, wordless, stared at him. Steve looked again at Steph, reminding himself that it was none of his business. The girl seemed happy enough to be left with this guy, so maybe she was weird herself.

Steph laughed and handed back the Coke can. ‘I’ll give you three and a half! I told you, I was asleep. I’ll sleep anywhere, just at the moment. Thanks for the drink. And the warm-up.’ She slipped down from the cab more easily than would have seemed possible, for her size.

‘And the lift!’ She sauntered round to Michael. Steve shoved the notes into his jeans pocket and started the engine. ‘Van’s all yours,’ he said, nodding back over his shoulder. ‘Uncoupled it when I heard your friend banging to get out.’ With a faintly regretful wink at Steph, he drove off.

They watched the pickup truck stop at the bottom of the road, its light winking, then turn into the stream of cars heading out of the city. The sky behind the black twigs of the television aerials across Snow Hill had grown pink. Streetlights were already casting an orange gleam over satellite dishes and roof tiles. Above the noise of traffic from the London Road the shouts of a group of kids on bikes, wobbling home up Snow Hill along the gutter and trading their insults and goodbyes on the street corner, were faint. Twilight crushed the whites and reds and blues out of the clothes of girls with dogs and pushchairs as they passed by on the pavement below; it stole their colours and discarded them in the greying winter air of the afternoon.

Steph said, ‘I’m freezing. I’m going to freeze to death if I stay out here.’ She placed her hand in Michael’s. ‘See? I’m freezing.’ He nodded but did not tighten his fingers round her hand, nor let it go. People walked home, receding into shadows under walls. Across the estate, strip lights blinked on in kitchens where women dumped bags and made toast and put on kettles; the sick blue pulse of unwatched televisions in rooms with undrawn curtains winked a message to Michael and Steph on the cold pavement- a message about other people, not like the two of them standing there as the sky emptied its darkness into them, but of other people, people who had homes to go to. And when, a moment later, Michael turned without speaking and began to make his way up the hill to his own flat at the end of Maynard Terrace, Steph pulled her T-shirt over her stomach and went too, knowing that the frailty in his eyes and his failure to drop her hand were the nearest she would get to an invitation.

Michael opened the door of the flat and snapped on the bleak overhead light in the sitting room. Dropping the backpack, which sagged at his feet and then fell over, he sank onto a small and unreliable-looking sofa. It seemed to be made entirely of blocks of sponge covered in some brown material which, as he eased into them, shifted behind his defeated back like rectangular rocks in a soft earthquake. Apart from a low table on thin black legs that stood between the sofa and a square fireplace with a cold gas fire, there was not much other furniture: just two chairs, metal folding ones, standing at a small circular table in one corner and two low wicker stools, one with an empty candlestick and a box of matches, the other with a pale blue lamp, at each side of the sofa. Three shelves by the side of the fireplace held toppled-over books, newspapers, a dead plant in a plastic pot, some shoeboxes. On the lowest shelf were a group of small brasses, a stack of plates and jugs, and three or four unsuccessful and empty vases. The arrangement looked as if the things were being stored rather than displayed, as if the person who had placed them there had no faith in them as decorative objects.

Steph, to whom the look of things mattered, gazed for a while, wondering what it was that she recognised in this room. She had thought a great deal about rooms. She had planned rooms in the detailed way that some girls plan their weddings, and just as putative brides mentally arrange in ‘the perfect fairytale setting’ a full entourage of co-ordinated guests and attendants and bridegroom, but leave the faces blank, so Steph had dreamt up rooms beyond her means in houses that did not exist, where she would imagine living with a family she did not have. The only places where Steph actually had lived, since her mother had moved in with her boyfriend when Steph was fifteen, had been places which, no matter how long she stayed, remained other people’s. Even when she had had a bit of money from some job or other to spend on a rug or a picture or some cushions, gestures which she intended to at least legitimise if not cele-brate her presence, she found herself still inhabiting places whose surfaces she could not soften and whose depths would not admit her. She only half-recognised that it was a kind of belonging that she ached for, and only half-acknowledging the ache, she fell short of any belief that she deserved relief from it. She grew to believe that the shortcoming was hers, and that something more profound than a different paint colour or new cushions was called for, something beyond aspiration, outlay and some colour sense, beyond even the intensity of her need. Steph watched the man under the pitiless light, collapsed on the sofa, and understood why the room was familiar. His listless attempts at homemaking betrayed the same ache, and perhaps the same lack of conviction.