Rupert Thomson: Dreams of Leaving

An endless source of fascination for George, those boundaries. Marked on the map, but invisible in real life. Invisible but concrete because people had believed in them for so long. He was overawed by the power beliefs could generate. He could even hear it. Like electric fences, the boundaries seemed to hum when he approached. He knew them off by heart, as he knew the names of the twenty-nine policemen who took turns to patrol them. The twenty-nine real policemen, that is. How many dummy policemen there were he had never been able to work out. They were always moving them around.

One of Peach’s inspirations, the dummy policemen. They were built out of straw, as scarecrows were, but instead of being dressed in rags they wore proper uniforms — helmets, truncheons, the lot. They stood in realistic positions throughout the village and the surrounding countryside. Their eyes always seemed to be staring at you. In poor light they looked as real as real policemen. It was an immensely cunning, uncanny and economical device.

They terrified Alice. She said they looked like dead bodies propped up. Whenever she saw one she had to poke or tickle it just to make sure it wasn’t alive. She was convinced that, sooner or later, one of them would begin to wriggle and giggle on the end of her finger. She dreaded the moment. She had another theory. She thought their faces resembled the faces of policemen in the village. ‘Look,’ she would cry, ‘here’s Peach.’ And George would tilt his head on one side, try to see the likeness. He wanted to believe her. She invented nicknames for them too. Peach she called ‘Melon’ because he was ‘much bigger than a peach’ or ‘Gooseberry’ on account of his short prickly hair. Marlpit was ‘The Waterfall’ because he dribbled so. Hazard she described as ‘the one with a face like a shovel’ so he became ‘Shovelhead’. But when she heard their heavy boots come crashing through the undergrowth she would flatten herself against the ground until it seemed the earth would open up and swallow her. Her eyes staring, her blonde head pressed sideways into the leaves, she would always whisper the same words:

The world is a dream

It will always be so –

It was the beginning of a nursery rhyme that every child in the village knew off by heart. It was what the boots meant.

*

By the time she was fifteen Alice was already moving out of reach, her mind a wild garden where only weeds grew. Their age-difference was beginning to count now. George tried with his own sharpening intelligence to cut through to her, to clear some ground, but no matter how hard he tried the jungle always grew back. Rain would fall overnight and in the morning he could no longer tell where he had been.

He remembered finding her once that year sitting in the tall grass on the hill behind the police station. He sat down beside her. She acknowledged his presence with a slow hydraulic turning of her head, so smooth and slow that, horrified, he thought of a machine.

‘Who are you?’ she asked him.

It wasn’t a joke, and he didn’t try to laugh it off.

The jungle always grew back.

It was during the same year that Tommy Dane made his famous escape attempt. Everybody knew about Tommy Dane. He was a phenomenon. So much so that a new word had been invented to describe him. Juvenile delinquent. George remembered thinking how complex, how grand, that sounded. Like a title or something. Tommy obviously thought so too. He certainly did his best to live up to it.

When he was seven years old he cut a rat’s throat during needlework class. A live rat. He used a pair of nail-scissors. The rat died theatrically on the scarred lid of his desk. When he was twelve he got a 22-year-old girl pregnant. The girl claimed that he had tied her to a tree with coat-hanger wire and then raped her. Tommy denied it, but people believed the girl. At sixteen he set fire to his parents’ house while they were asleep inside. They survived. The house burnt to the ground. Tommy decided it was time to leave home.

Rumour had it that he had staged a fake accident on the main road outside the village, using a stolen hayrick, his father’s bicycle and a gallon of fresh pigs’ blood. He arranged the hayrick and the bicycle so it looked as if the two had collided, then lay down on the tarmac with his head in a puddle of blood. He hijacked the first car that stopped for him. He climbed into the back seat and, brandishing a fiendish homemade bomb, shouted, ‘Get going, you bastards, or I’ll blow us all sky-high.’ Accounts of exactly what followed vary, but, somehow or other, the bomb exploded in Tommy’s face. The driver of the car (a spirited chap from the south coast, retired brigadier apparently) pulled into the side of the road, sprinted to a public phone-box, and called the nearest police station. Which just happened to be New Egypt.

George would never forget that afternoon. He was standing outside the post office with Alice when they brought Tommy in. It didn’t look like Tommy. Glossy yellow blisters, smooth as mushrooms, swelled on the left side of his face and the palms of his hands. One eye was a bloated purple slit. His hair must have caught fire at some point because it had shrivelled, coiled into a few black springs. He had no eyebrows any more. Invisible slings held both his arms stiff and crossed in front of his chest.

‘Where am I?’ he whimpered. Poor Tommy really didn’t seem to know.

Peach glanced round as if he too wasn’t quite sure, the sarcastic bastard. He took a deep breath and let the air out again in several tense instalments. By the time his answer came, it had acquired immense dramatic power. ‘New Egypt,’ he said.

Tommy Dane began to cry.

Peach put an arm round the boy’s shoulders, then looked up as if he expected cameras to be rolling. It was a historic moment, certainly. The rebel tamed, the system triumphant. The record intact. Nobody had ever succeeded in escaping from the village. And nobody ever would, Peach’s smile seemed to say. Later that day he threw a small drinks party at his house in Magnolia Close.

And Tommy? He went back to live with his parents in temporary accommodation, a pre-fab hut behind the vicarage. He died at the age of twenty-four. Some said he had committed suicide. According to the doctor (a more reliable source, perhaps), he simply lost the will to live. The events of that day closed a whole avenue of fantasy for George. If Tommy couldn’t leave the village, he reasoned, then nobody could. He was stuck there for life and he had better get used to the idea. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.

Two years later he asked Alice to marry him.

They were sitting by the river. Side by side, as usual. Nine years of rehearsal for this moment. The month was September, the sunset that evening almost Victorian in its coyness, layer on layer of respectable black and grey. Then, unexpectedly, just as he spoke, the sky lifted its huge gathering skirts to reveal an inch of pink flesh, the hint of a calf. His scandalous proposal. Embarrassed, he glanced across at her. But she was staring at the river, her eyes flicking left to right, left to right, trying, it seemed, to follow separate pieces of water as they floated downstream. He knew she had heard him. He gave her time, as he had always done. He waited. The sky’s lights dimmed, the darkness of a cinema then. Side by side, their elbows almost touching, their dim profiles silver-lined. And then, when he could no longer see her face, she whispered, simply, ‘Yes.’

Afterwards he never asked her why she had accepted him. He could only suppose that he had got closer to her than anybody else, so close that she had been able to show him how far away she was from most people. A curious basis for a marriage, perhaps, but not untypical of the village where they lived. In those days, of course, he had still believed that her darkness would lift, that some kind of wind would spring up inside her and blow it all away like so many clouds. He had never imagined that it would thicken until the air of their marriage became impossible to breathe, until it was suffocation for her to live in the same house with him.