By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
6) Julie Sitting
It takes Julie ten minutes to reach the green canal. That leaves her ten minutes to eat her lunch, ten minutes to get back.
Julie hasn't done this before. Nor, to her knowledge, has anyone else in the factory.
She thought she remembered a brown wooden seat here, two long name-scarred boards slotted through two iron uprights.
The canal here curves away from her. She can see no seat. Nor does she have time to go looking.
Perching herself on a bum-high wall of black brick Julie takes her plastic sandwich box out of her leather shoulderbag. She tries to remember where she saw the seat. Was it back towards the orderly docks with their black-painted bollards? Or down towards the overgrown orange brick bridge..?
Looking along the towpath of crumbled concrete, Julie decides that it was in that direction. Yes, she sat there once with Paul at dusk and looked over to the football ground's high clusters of mercury-bright lights.
Regaining her breath she bites into her warm cheese sandwich. On her hands is the sickly taint of the factory's over-scented soap.
She chews and she swallows.
Across from her industrial units are being built on the wasteland. Over to the left are the flats in which she had lived — far away and long ago — with little Michael.
She checks her watch. She has been here three minutes already and only eaten half a sandwich. This is not the image she'd had of herself — escaping from the hot and hissing racket of the day to relax briefly beside cool unmoving waters.
No water is visible. All is covered in the tiny green pads of floating duckweed. A few blades of iris stick like mini-excaliburs up through this level green fogbank. But no bead of water is visible, not even through the meandering trails that moorhen and coot have left, only paths of overturned duckweed.
At least here she can't hear the radio. At least here she doesn't have to breathe cigarette smoke. At least here she doesn't have to listen to the same old toing and froing conversations. She listens — only the stopping and starting traffic along Broadway's dual carriageway.
Julie lifts her factory-damp face to the sharp naked sun, lowers it to look at the digital time, reaches for another sandwich.
Chewing she studies the width and unevenness of the path. Paul wants the whole family to cycle along this towpath all the way into Taunton.
"No traffic," he has reassured/cajoled her. But Julie is worried about Michael on his bike. He doesn't always pay attention to what he is doing; and sometimes he deliberately does the stupidest of things.
"...to see what'd happen," he says. But one wobble... and splash! Below that duckweed the water can be deep.
Part of Julie wishes that she could adopt her sisters' attitude to their children, to view them as a noisome burden. Instead she worries for Michael and Alice and transmits that worry to them. So she, who is concerned for the well-being of her children, has two neurotic wrecks while Kevin and Sean and Polly are three happy little thugs.
In the sunlight, she sighs. Paul has already talked to Michael about the trip. Michael has already boasted to his schoolfriends and teachers that he's going to ride along the canal path all the way to Taunton.
She eats. Then there's little Alice riding up behind Paul. It'll be a bumpy ride for her. And what if Paul crashes and falls in the canal? Alice is strapped into her seat. The bike could get stuck upside down in the weeds.
Two minutes to go. The foil wrapping of her chocolate bar is tacky, needs to be licked. She scratches her ankle. A mallard and five brown ducklings come paddling out from under a clump of bushes and brambles on the far side. Julie wishes she'd kept some crusts.
The mother breasts the duckweed, which closes under her wagging tail. The ducklings appear to be almost walking on the duckweed. The five ducklings make coming here worth it, Julie tells herself.
Time to go.
She scratches her ankle. On the outside of her ankle are two big red bites with, beside them, chocolate smudges. Licking her finger she rubs away the chocolate. The two insect bites are hot.
Pressing the plastic lid back onto her lunch box, she hitches up her leather-sticky shoulderbag. She still has an apple to eat. Biting into it she starts back along the foot-wrenching path.
Will she now tell them about coming here, make a joke of the bites? No, she'll let them think she popped up the shops, mention the bites to Sue maybe later on ....
commentary .... This is a story with neither innocents nor heroes: Paul and Julie covertly made their own rules.
Paul had convinced Julie that she only had to pretend that she was intelligent for her to become intelligent,
"Idiocy is genetic. Stupidity is a voluntary state. Act intelligent," he had told her, "and the person becomes the pose, becomes the pretence. The outer becoming the inner. Think it, act it, become it; be it."
Trick was it worked. With him, Julie now talked in a different voice, used words she had only read before; and she went to books looking for facts to back her arguments, in so doing acting like someone intelligent. Now she even thought in big words.
The act, though, remained inside her own head, the display stayed within her own home. Coming back into Paul's company now she could feel her brain changing gear, preparing to engage him as an equal.
Outside of home, away from Paul, her acted intelligence manifested itself more in her actions than in her speech content. Her going to the canal, for instance, sprang from her secretly believing herself intelligent and therefore believing herself able to rebel against the remorseless jam factory routines, as well as being capable of appreciating the anticipated pleasure of sitting by still waters. That languishing by cool water, though, had not been itself simply for pleasure, for a moment's sensual gratification, because Julie had also believed that there was a heaven to be found, or made, somewhere in this earthly life.
Not that Julie had any conventional religious convictions. Rather — despite Paul's scathing cynicism — she lived in the subconscious expectation of perfection. Nor did she have any real concept of that idealised life to come, save that it would be tranquil and that she would be tranquil within it.
She knew that it would not come all of a piece, rather she would have to grab bits of heaven here and there. She was also, at that time, coming slowly of the conscious opinion that the bits of heaven here and there was all that there would be for her. Even so they would add up to a tidy store, in retrospect. Her future offered little else but hopes of a past.
Because Julie knew, no matter what Paul said and she agreed with, that things didn't, don't, change for the likes of them. Whatever else changed, the likes of her and Paul, who wanted to just get on with their own lives, would always lose out.
So she had gone breathlessly to sit briefly beside the canal; and there the dragonflies had whirred, flies had buzzed and ants had crawled into her moment's Eden. And she had worried too about her children, who hadn't, at that moment, been present, falling in....
Julie's whimsical expectations of brief heavens were counterbalanced by her certain knowledge that she lived on the edge of destruction. Her happiness, her family's well-being, was so fundamentally insecure that life itself appeared always tenuous. So many quick and accidental ways of dying. Thieves, cancers, cars, lay-offs, vandals .... all were a threat. In her council house she at least had security of tenure, could not be that easily evicted. Unlike many of the women she worked with, who put in all the hours they could and went in dread of losing their jobs and the building society repossessing their house.
Her mother, like Julie, did not have that worry. Her mother had her council house and didn't think much beyond keeping it clean.
True Stories
In October 1985, at the junction of Taunton Road and Broadway, a car driven by Councillor Trevor Donaldson, of Springfield Road, Bridgwater, was in collision with cyclist Paula Morse. Councillor Trevor Donaldson was reported as being unhurt. 16 year old Paula Morse was said to have received head injuries.
In April 1986 a burglar entered Graham Turner's house in Friarn Avenue, Bridgwater, and stole a £300 Hitachi video.
In July 1987 Gerber Foods Manufacturing Limited was fined £250 on two counts of allowing inadequately protected machinery to be used. A female employee, on reaching into a box-making machine to clear a blob of glue, received cuts to both her hands.
In Sainsbury's carpark, in March 1990, Mark John Edney, of Moorland Road, Bridgwater, accused a man of looking at him. The man locked himself inside his Ford Escort. 23 year old Mark John Edney then began kicking the Ford Escort, denting it and smashing a headlight.
