Before All Else Read online

  He has to hand it to him. He had made a massive difference to the flat, short of actually unpacking that is. Every corner is warm. Hot water billows on demand out of the tap. He’d even added a hook by the front door, “For the purpose of hanging your keys. Mate.”

  Mr Edge puts his tools and equipment back in the van and hovers at the doorway. He sniffs the air. “Funny smell, mate. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

  “Oh, I expect it’s alright. For another day, eh?” as Marcus sidles towards the lavatory door and closes it.

  “Right, well, I’ll be off then.”

  “OK. Fantastic job. Really pleased.”

  “Right, I’ll be off.”

  So, off you go then, Marcus internally prompts him, already priming himself for a quiet spot of supper beside the log-burner-lookalike gas fire in the sitting room, savouring the hopefully chilled, slightly acidic wine. Be gone.

  But Mr Edge seems disinclined to move from the doorstep.

  “Er…”

  “Yes?”

  “That’ll be…”

  Oh, Christ. The fellow wants paying. Marcus’s arm reaches round to his back pocket. Couldn’t the man just send him a bill or something?

  Mr Edge’s price brings a look of horror on Marcus’s face. “It’s the going rate. Mate.”

  The sense of bonhomie drains fast from Marcus’s soul.

  “Oh, very well.”

  Having counted out a large wad of notes into Mr Edge’s hand, Marcus closes the door behind him. To the sound of Mr Edge’s van spluttering its way into the night, Marcus pushes open the door to the downstairs loo, lowers the seat and pulls the chain. Pace Velda.

  Pouring a large tumbler of wine and taking the quiche into the sitting room with him, ready to eat straight from the paper wrapper, he sinks into a dusty armchair and falls slowly to the ground as the overtaxed webbing declines to hold his weight.

  Spring

  Epigraph

  Another millennium has ticked over and we are in the territory of the Civitas. Land clearance is now the engine of the marching army. Two thousand miles of stone and flint and gravel criss-cross Provincia Britannia linking the Saxon shore forts to the far-flung north.

  The Roman town founded at the confluence of the river and two roads, within a matter of less than ten generations, sinks lower and lower into obscurity. The hearths, the graves, the smelting ovens, the quarries, the latrines, the kilns, the animal pens, ditches all stuffed and muted by mounds of earth.

  And so sights are lowered; ambition reaches no more than two or three fields ahead. Wilderness trees, beech, oak, ash, birch take root among the tumbling walls; ploughs crosshatch arterial roads; a leafy canopy draws over an abandoned site; coins become baser, corrupted, post-Apocalyptic.

  M. Blatt

  4

  Marcus

  It is now a few weeks since Marcus moved to Bullenden. Is it seven? Ten? Who’s counting. All is coming along splendidly. Mr Edge returned to shelve out the alcoves. Most of the boxes are unpacked. Most of his possessions have settled in their allotted places although there is still no sign of the Clarice Cliff set that they’d argued so fulsomely over on their last night together. He has grown accustomed to cooking for himself – or at least reheating for himself. The days are lengthening and he can almost feel himself lengthening as recent cares and worries lift from his shoulders.

  *

  It is a relief that the rather forceful Madge is not on duty today. Instead he is served by a hangdog-looking chap whose eyes do not rise above the level of his hand, outstretched to receive Marcus’s coin.

  It had been an interesting walk. He wouldn’t mind betting that not everyone in Bullenden is aware that the raised pavement that runs for several hundred yards from the river meadow in through the northern boundary of the village was gifted by a local goodwoman and benefactor to allow churchgoers to attend Mass without getting their pattens wet. He had been about to offer this fascinating piece of information to a young woman gingerly descending a buggy’s back wheels down the sheer face of the granite edging tiles but something about the grim set of her face had deterred him. Obviously significant was the observation that the pavement widened and the road narrowed somewhat as they approached the church, thus allowing drovers and traders opportunity to slow down and offer obeisance to the Almighty as good business practice demanded.

  Perhaps this would be a good topic to offer up to the local History Society. He could offer them a short presentation on – well, all sorts of topics really. The Viking village. East Anglian watermills and fish ponds. Monastic land clearance. The view from the back lanes. Local brick kilns. Prehistoric tracks to turnpikes. If anybody is interested, that is.

  Maybe this is why he has settled in Bullenden. This sense that he can look around him and gain glimpses, paraphrasing Hoskins, of the last ten centuries in 100 acres. But really, man-made history reaches back much further than just 1000 years. For more than 6000 years it has been lurking just under the surface, waiting to break into the light of day. Still-sharp Neolithic adzes for working and smoothing wood shoulder their way to the surface. Pea-size shapes of porous ore, emptied of their lead content, tumble their way upwards from ruined Roman smelting works. Grassy banks split open in heavy rain to release the rubble of peasant farmsteads abandoned at scythe-point during the Black Death. So much that lies hidden beneath the accumulated layers of hummus and debris. The very thought thrills him. It occurs to him that the process of unpacking the discards of his marriage followed a similar process of rediscovery.

  Among the surprising things that Velda had packed for him is an album she must have created, entitled, ironically enough, Velda and Marcus, the Happy Years. He’d found it in amongst ‘Towels, Miscellaneous’ (not the best ones, he noted, but the ones he remembered for their seventies rust, orange and mustard hues) and ‘Cushion Covers, If Required’, which hailed from the same optically- and chromatically-challenged era, their early married life.

  He’d placed the album on the coffee table a while ago where it nestled under a growing pile of menus, receipts and old newspapers. Maybe he owes it to Velda to look through it. After all, it seems as if she had gone to some trouble. And, now, as time moves on, perhaps he could just bring himself to have a look. With a cup of coffee on the chair arm and his feet on the coffee table, he places the album on his knee and creaks open the pages.

  The album moves forward chronologically, a page or two devoted to each decade. Him and Velda with the babies in their arms. In the park, throwing snowballs with the teenagers. Grandparents. Holidays and, more recently, the touring photographs. Given the haphazard way the photos are positioned on the page and the creased and crumpled nature of the protective plastic sheets Marcus guesses that the images had been chosen and slapped in place at one of her late-night sessions, legs tucked under the coffee table, the terrier on her lap, wine rings spreading over the table like ripples in a pond.

  Those ‘nights’ of hers. Some of them solo, some of them with her chums from the Mindfulness Centre. He shudders as the memories come back to him.

  A common theme on such nights was ‘When I finally woke up and realised what had become of the man I married’. The sitting room would go quiet as all the tribe prepared to exercise their sisterly indignation. Sitting on the camp bed in the box room of the marital home, he could practically hear the bosoms within the kaftans gear up to heave in outrage.

  “For pity’s sake, Velda,” he would moan to himself, head lowered, tapping his feet in isolation, boredom and imminent humiliation.

  One night he actually shouted down, “Go on, Velda dearest. Tell them all our sordid little secrets. It’s not just me, you know.”

  The sitting room door closed loudly on the sound of clucking and outrage within.

  He would hear the cackling as Velda, building up to a crescendo, denied to him on that particular day, it had to be said,
told the assembly of how she wandered into the garage, in all innocence, looking for a spanner.

  “There I found him. Leaning against the wall. Bloody three o’clock in the afternoon. There he is…” and her voice would dip, as she mimed the scene.

  So, on that particular sad day, he had wandered into the garage and, having forgotten what he had gone in for, his eyes fell upon the poster ‘Melanie and her Honda CB400N Super Dream’. It had been on the wall of various properties he had lived in for the past thirty-five years, a fold-out from a magazine back when he had freedom of the road.

  During their post-discovery recriminations he could offer no real explanation of what had come over him.

  “What were you thinking of? What if someone had wandered in?”

  “Well, they did. You did.”

  “Don’t be so bloody facetious.” It occurred to him to defend a man’s right to euphemise in his own garage but knew that whatever defence he offered would wither under the effects of her scorn. As he, indeed, had at the time. “What did you think you were doing?”

  “I’d have thought that was pretty obvious,” was the best retort he could manage. He could offer no real explanation. Was it the poster? Was it pent-up desire? Was it, more likely, a simple need for comfort, the inner two-year-old putting their hand down their pants?

  Even those who had heard Velda relate the story many times added to the gasps and ooohs. He could hear her voice pick up again. “Not only was he, you know…” Here she was evidently waggling a downcast index finger to indicate the unaccustomed state of freedom of his member, “But he was also…” Marcus flung himself back on his bed, knowing, just knowing that now Velda would be miming the action. “Noooooo,” drifted up the stairs. “Yes!” she replied emphatically. “Although, perhaps I should say…” as she modified her actions to a much reduced length and girth. The cackles were positively fiendish.

  As the coffee cools beside him and the redness of remembered shame leaves his cheeks Marcus turns the pages of the album, each one a new discovery, a returning memory. Along with the pleasant rediscoveries comes the thought that there wasn’t just one single fissure that tore them asunder, it was more a crazed and cracked pattern that spread and multiplied till it undermined their entire foundations.

  Some of the photos were taken outside their caravan, bought as a joint project.

  “Be lovely. We can get out and about. Go places. See new things,” Velda’s tone largely persuading him that she had already made up her mind. “And you can take in a few of your beloved churches.” So, lovely it was to be, then. For a few years, mostly once the children had grown up, they trundled around together. And in the way people ham it up for the camera, the shots in the album did show a moderately happy couple, larking about. Velda hanging upside down on a horizontal pole. Marcus with a white, frothy moustache and a pint of real ale in his hand. Only an insider could see the line of tension in Marcus’s jaw, the look of sheer determination in Velda’s furrowed brow.

  He turns the pages one by one, a gathering sense of nostalgia and loss building in his chest. The sight of one photograph stops him. Nothing like being cooped up in a caravan on Whitstable sands on a blowy bank holiday for exposing the creaks and the cracks and the faults. He peers closely at the lopsided image. A figure in a blue windcheater walks crablike into the wind. A chip paper has flattened itself against the caravan wheel. He remembers sitting inside the caravan, powerless against the elemental forces outside.

  “For pity’s sake, Marcus.” He adjusted his gaze slowly from the back window – onto which the rain was throwing salt and sand like buckets of gravel – to his wife.

  “What?”

  “You need to do something.”

  “About what?”

  Velda drew breath and stretched out the fingers of one hand as if to enumerate the first five items at least of a comprehensive list.

  “Well, there’s the loo for a start. It stinks. Think it’s backing up. And then there’s the wind whistling through the window frame. You could patch it up.”

  Marcus turned his head in minute degrees to the source of the whistling sound. A green mould seemed to be insinuating itself under the glass and into the caravan. Maybe if he prevaricated for long enough, it would completely envelop the van. They would slowly suffocate and have to be chiselled out and put on display like the Pompeii people. Sludge Man and Gloop Woman caught in the final millennial moments of having a domestic meltdown.

  “Are you listening? You’re not listening, are you? Marcus!”

  “I’m listening, my precious turtledove.”

  “Hmmm. And while you’re at it, we need some more milk from the shop.”

  Marcus shrugged on his coat. Velda had already returned to her magazines, flicking the glossy pages with an irascible air. No cheery wave then. He turned up the collar of his coat against the raging wind and stepped outside. He could hear her rap on the window with her grotesque ring. Max, the ironically named Yorkshire terrier, yapped synchronistically. He ignored them both.

  He returned half an hour later pulling the roller barrel full of water behind him and a tube of mastic sticking out from his coat pocket. Revived by the bracing air and the success of his shopping trip, Marcus stood at the caravan door to shake the raindrops off his coat. “Brass monkeys out there.” He chattered on for a moment about the number of empty bays, the state of the tide, his surprise at finding a tube of mastic in the site shop.

  “Did you get the milk?”

  Velda closed her ears against the profanities that coloured the air blue and returned to her crossword puzzles while Marcus forced his arm back into a wet sleeve now stubbornly inside out. Striding back to the campsite shop, the bitter squalls outside matched the bitter squalls within his heart. A gull called out in the skies above. It seemed the most lonesome sound on the planet. It was singing just for him.

  Milk purchased and the wrapper of a consolatory chocolate bar stuffed in an inside pocket, he returned to the van. Velda’s head was tilted to one side, propped by a bent arm. She had fallen asleep against the window. Her face had slipped and he could see one eyeball skitter under an incompletely closed eyelid. He closed the door quietly and tenderly covered her and the mutt with a blanket.

  For the last five years of their marriage, the caravan had stood on the drive, gradually acquiring a greenish hue, the tyres slowly deflating. One of the kids had drawn a Banksy-esque cartoon of the two of them in profile at the window, Velda’s bouffant layers picked out in the dog’s own pelt. He’d slept in it on occasion, mostly when returning home drunk and finding the front door locked and barred. It was always cold and damp and seemed to be a required sojourn in purgatory before he was allowed back in the house.

  The arguments followed a well-worn groove, centred around defects in his personality, understanding and sensitivity, personal hygiene, ambition, DIY skills, drinking habits, ability to moderate his tone when angry and the volume on the hi-fi.

  The thing is, he can’t really find much to criticise Velda about. Okay, she isn’t quite the girl he had married, but one might expect that after twenty-seven years. Youthful peachiness had turned to voluptuousness had turned to a bit of embonpoint which had turned to middle-aged spread and thence, admittedly, to hints of gargantuanism. If she is partial to one custard cream over the eight, well, for goodness’ sake, let her. And if the old girl wants to dabble in a few interests – great! In the early years, it had been macramé. Twisted, knotted cords hung from every spare hook stuffed with motley plants, pasta packets, car keys. Yoga, Reiki, even paganism followed. Then animal rescue – that was a particularly taxing period, he would admit. Cages everywhere filled with small, furry, scurrying things as she made it known that she could provide a loving home to ferrets, weasels and stoats. Well, he could put up with that. No phase usually lasted more than a couple of years. Vegetarianism, veganism; he wouldn’t mind if he never saw another sp
routed mung bean again. But they lost weight, even if flatulence was then added to the list of his personal defects.

  The process of emptying him out of the house completely started about two years ago. All the objects that are now stowed on Mr Edge’s shelves, in the wardrobe and chest of drawers in his new bedroom, and those still in the box room, had begun their slow journey to this point all that time ago; a process, once started, seemingly impossible to halt. Maybe their irretrievable breakdown and subsequent divorce had been one of her ‘projects’ – how to declutter your life and rediscover your inner child. Decluttering began with transferring boxes of his possessions from the house to the caravan.

  Subsequent to each argument and night spent in the cold, more and more boxes found their way to the caravan, stuffed unkindly in the kitchen cupboards, piled randomly in the grimy shower, left in haphazard order under the bench seats. Boxes of defunct telephones, music cassettes, penknives, matchbox cars, wizards…

  At first, Marcus, once he had regained entry into the marital home, assumed the boxes had made their way into the caravan as a form of protest, a measure taken to make a point known and understood. Having fully taken on board the fact that he was personally defective and less than adequate as a husband and a constant disappointment, Marcus assumed that it would be perfectly in order to return said items to their rightful places in the house.

  “Where are you going with that?”

  “I’m putting it back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back in my office, where it’s always been.”

  “You can’t do that. I want to make your office into a snug.”

  “What for?”

  “We need the space.”

  “Space? There’s just the two of us in this house. What do we need more space for?”

  “So that I can…think of something.”

  “Why can’t you do that in the living room?”