By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
9) Paul Collecting
Alice is sitting in the striped buggy. Its black and shiny handles are like umbrella handles reversed. Paul rattles its small noisy twin wheels round the corner.... and sees the parents waiting.
At this distance familiarity tells him that they stand in isolation, none moving from their arrival positions. They might, self-consciously, step towards one another to converse, but only with the release of the children will they bend and commingle.
Paul, preferring the unstraitened company of children, slows.
Two pairs of sparrows hop in and out of a loose-twigged hedge. Paul points them out to Alice. The cocks have pretty caramel and chocolate markings. Their misfortune to be ignored, like the resplendent starling, because of their ubiquity. He knows men on Sydenham who are like starlings — fine swaggering braggarts when viewed in isolation, drab in the mass.
A green dented furniture van, its rusty rear open, is parked outside a house without curtains. Two men are carrying a glass-fronted wall unit out through the front door. Both men are bald and red-faced, their heads shining with sweat. Paul stops to let them cross the pavement.
In the back of the tall van are piled cardboard boxes of different sizes, with grey plastic bags jammed in crevices and ballooning backwards. In the centre of the cardboard and polythene mosaic is a white melanite wardrobe with bright gold-coloured handles. Atop and behind the white melanite wardrobe is a freckled green sofa. A fawn blanket is draped diagonally across the wardrobe. At the very rear of the van is a lopsided stack of folded blankets, some cream, one green, but mostly grey. Lengths of white webbing hang from buckled rails.
The two sweat-dripping men have slowed to manoeuvre between the iron gateposts.
"Look!" Alice points. She and Paul are reflected disjointedly in the dark glass panels of the moving unit. Behind them blocks of landscape move, the square houses and the straight road swapping places with the sky, and cut across by pylon cables. The two men grunt questions and queries at one another. Paul and Alice smile at the other's shifting reflections, and are then swung out of sight.
Further along, on one of the grass verges, sits a punctured white and black football. Each day he has seen it Paul has been tempted to abandon the buggy, take the first running steps off the pavement onto the sharp grass and give it a boot, send it rolling soggily through the air. Hasn't yet.
Inside and outside the school gates the parents stand in timid isolation, each in their cylinder of silence.
Casual conversation is dangerous here. On the estate couples exchange husbands and wives and houses; and here the scandal is relayed, the first signs of infidelity detected, the schism marked. Here most of the faces are of that age when the only new people they get to meet are the parents of their children's friends. So the children too are wary of who they introduce into their household.
When, here at the school gates, mothers ask Paul if Michael can come to play with their son, those young mothers blush. Those blushes know the inferences that the watching eyes might draw from the innocent exchange of words, from those telltale blushes. So, today, as usual, as he wheels Alice in through the school gates, Paul nods only to those few men he knows.
The men here, like him, are out of work or off shift. Or they are grandfathers acting as unpaid childminders. There's also a couple of professional childminders here, their pre-school charges piled into double-buggies. Two of their boys are running around the yard and around each other. Paul bends to unbuckle Alice. She stays in the buggy watching the two boisterous boys.
The parents all around, plus some older brothers and sisters, all stand, or lean, and wait. Only those like Paul with pre-school Alice can be released from their immobility, have an excuse to move their jaws, can safely and unselfconsciously chatter to their little chaperones. And be watched.
Paul's arrival, and his subsequent movements down to and up from Alice, has attracted eyes.
"How's it going?" a paunchy father steps towards him.
Paul sinkingly knows that the man, with whom he once worked, will now ask what he is doing these days, which — unless he's working shifts or won the pools — is pretty obvious. Then the man will mention names of people they both once worked with, of who else has left, been sacked; or where those names were last heard of, of places he himself has worked since....
This man has difficulty breathing with his mouth closed. Such a feat requires the simultaneous completion of two ideas.
Tired of this conversation even before it begins, Paul looks up out of Bridgwater to the hills lying way off above the roofs and tempting his mind with clean unpatterned greenness. To go walk and untroubled breathe there.... But this man, to Paul's surprise, has a new story to tell.
This being the man's first time on the dole, he decided not to sit around at home and moan, but to get out and go windowcleaning.
"Didn't you used to do that?" So off he went, with bucket and ladder, to find windows to clean. Knocking on doors down Durleigh way, he was asked to clean all the windows of a big house. He did the inside first, then the outside. Took him all afternoon. He wanted to make a good job of it, have the house as a regular call. And, as he washed and polished, he thought how he would spend the money. But, when he knocked on the door to be paid, the owner had disappeared and the house was locked. He'd heard about this sort of thing happening to people on the dole, customers refusing to pay them, knowing they couldn't make trouble. He wasn't going to have any of that.
Certain that the house's owner was hiding somewhere indoors, he shouted through the letterbox. Then he went around the house banging on the windows and doors. Finally, to bring the owner out of hiding, he broke one of the windowpanes that he had just cleaned and polished with such care. He had broken six panes in all when the owner came running back from the cashpoint.
Upright and quiet, Michael is the third boy to appear. Alice now decides to get out of the buggy. She goes up to Michael's thin brown legs, and turns with him to walk back to Paul. They do not touch. Michael stands still and erect before Paul, who waits for the man to finish telling how he is paying for the broken windows.
Michael shows no interest in the man's story. (The past is as incomprehensible to children as the future: both are places of the imagination.) Alice arranges herself into a similar posture to Michael's.
Paul turns to Michael, a legitimate exit,
"Good day?"
Michael shrugs. Paul tells Alice to get back in the buggy. Michael waits, the intolerable burden of the incomprehensible future on his thin shoulders.
"Gotta go," Paul tells the man.
Once through the school gates, and out of the crowd, Michael silently walks beside Paul and Alice. He is not sulking. Ahead of them a broad-hipped woman in grey tracksuit bottom leads a fat black labrador. The labrador walks with his back feet together like a mincing hippo. The woman's children have run on ahead to the next corner.
Paul tells Michael that he cycled out to the canal and found a starting place for the ride to Taunton.
"Think Mum can make it?"
"There's power in them little knees."
"Look!" Alice shouts.
Rising above the slanting roofs and into the blue sky is a red balloon. Paul and Michael lift their heads. The red balloon rapidly soars up above them. With their heads back, they all three laughing exclaim to see it so swiftly go. It becomes a black dot on a white wisp of a cloud. Gone.
commentary..... Unlike many of the men he had worked with, Paul took no satisfaction from the redundancies of others, even from those at the ordnance factory who had failed to defend him.
Although some of the men he had worked alongside — one place or another — had pronounced themselves, purely because of their daily working proximity, his friend, he did not regard any one of them as his friend.
Not trusting any man, Paul had not allowed himself to be drawn into those friendships. Besides which most friendships, Paul then knew, were better in retrospect. And the sooner the better.
Few of the men Paul had worked with had made his study of the commodity Time. So these men made the mistake of believing that the length of time one had worked someplace, or lived somewhere, meant that they knew it better than someone who had known it but briefly.
Paul then was of the opinion that it was, not the duration, but the intensity of the experience, like the leaping deer, that marked itself upon time. Paul knew too that it didn't matter to what great age we might live: what mattered to that whole life could happen in less than a minute. No matter how many years he might have known a neighbour, he wouldn't know him as well as the person who shared a frightening or ecstatic few minutes with him. And would they remember him? Paul knew too, at twenty one, that he couldn't build himself in the minds of others.
In some jobs Paul had felt the repetition of the years ahead weighing on the present. So he had jacked in the job while the present still had meaning and was not something done a thousand times before.
In some of those jobs Paul had felt surrounded, beset, at times by people who — to be able to carelessly turn aside from whatever ailed them — gratefully accepted the most convenient simplicity or the grandest sounding bullshit. Anything other than grapple with the convoluted complexities of cause and effect that comprised reality.
Paul did not want his life to be that small, to be ruled by that smallness of vision. With that smallness of vision a state of mind not peculiar to Bridgwater, Paul knew that moving from Bridgwater wouldn't make his life larger. Knowing would. The more he knew the larger would be his vision.
Paul wanted to become a man not strictly defined within his own mind; a man without edges, open to the Big Wide World. What Paul especially did not want was for his mind to become so closed in that it was occupied solely with thoughts of burglary. Such a mindset was common in Sydenham. A burglary mindset so acquired, he would get himself a dog, which would need taking for walks, leaving his home untenanted and unguarded. And, while taking the dog for walks, he would discover bodies. (Bodies are always discovered, either by children playing, or — more often — by men walking their dogs.) Or he would turn the hound loose to run in the Sydenham pack; and have that on his conscience.
Paul already had a conscience because he already had a larger vision; and because he had a larger vision he would not get a dog, certainly not out of fear of burglary. In his vision of himself Paul had to declare himself unafraid.
Most of the people Paul knew then were frightened — frightened of becoming anonymous. So they tried to assert their individuality through their mass-produced cars. They hung mass-produced mascots from their driving mirrors, stuck mass-produced slogans in their rear windows.... Same with their houses, with their individually designed brick boxes — they spent hours trying to distinguish their own little brick box from that of their neighbour. So they stuck mass-produced wallpaper on the walls, painted the woodwork this year's colour, layed mass-produced carpets on their floors, arranged mass-produced ornaments on their windowsills.... And for their every attempt to make their brick boxes look unique they succeeded only in making them all much of a muchness. Of a type. Tin boxes. Brick boxes. Paul had no time for either. There had to be more to life than that. Paul mended and rode and sold and bought a pushbike.
Some of the half-remembered people Paul worked with, who still worked in the same place, had no idea what he was talking about — even the everyday things — when he met them again. They could not comprehend the altered focus of his life, that he could happily coexist independently of them and their concerns. Nor did they have any idea of the kind of lives other unconnected people lived. To them the unknown rest of the world merely formed part of the background, faces on the pavement, drivers of cars, figures behind supermarket trolleys....
That is not to say that Paul had not become fond of some of the quirky people he had worked with. Albeit that that affection began usually in the week when he had decided for certain to leave that place of work. Then, no longer seeing the place as a day prison, no longer seeing his fellow workers as its wardens/inmates, then he had allowed himself to be briefly fond of the establishment and its residents. Wasn't now so bad a place, provided that it wasn't a prison.
Communities exist only ever in the mind. The end of the eighties saw the English becoming aware of their separateness. Thus there were times then when Paul thought of himself as the semi-invisible man, a being glimpsed by himself only in retrospect. 'I can't believe I used to do that....' 'I can't believe I let that be done to me....' He was semi-invisible too in his way of life then, in the bikes that he semi-legitimately sold, in the jobs he tried not to get, in trying not to be seen, not to be noticed. Self-effacement as a way of life. Invisibly inoffensive.
True Stories
In July 1985 Meare Heath farmer Melvin Sweet, of Chapel Farm, Blakeway, gave a pledge that he would not plough up the land that he owns at Tedham and Tedham Moors, Wedmore. The land is a designated site of Special Scientific Interest. Included in the site is a heronry and meadows of rare wild orchids.
After a betting shop win and a heavy drinking session, 20 year old Stephen Hughes, of Friarn Street, Bridgwater, returned to an open car he had seen at Friarn Lawn with a key in its dash. He decided to drive home to Scotland to see his mother. The police stopped him at the Knuttsford service station in Cheshire. In July 1985 Sedgemoor Magistrates fined Stephen Hughes £575, and he was disqualified from driving for eighteen months.
In the summer of 1989 John Barker, of Longstone Avenue, Sydenham, told what happened to his 10 year old son, Martin, on his way home from school,
"...He was grabbed by two teenagers. First he was thrown over their shoulders. Then they decided on the latest cruel prank the older boys on the estate do to the younger ones — they call it a leg and a wing. They held Martin by a leg and an arm, swung him high into the air, then let go. He landed on his back... An ambulance was called to take Martin to hospital... The doctor said that Martin had been very lucky, his spine having been dislodged and vertebrae damaged..."
On the night of Sunday February 11th 1990 the cooling systems of both nuclear reactors at Hinkley Point shut down for approximately 20 minutes. Nuclear Electric spokesman Julian Curtis said that, had the station chosen to, it could have continued with additional cooling had it been necessary.
