Pursuit Read online

  THE PART-TIME COUNTRYMAN

  Max Porter

  THIS train will be in reverse order, first class at the rear. There is no bicycle storage on this service, ladies and gentlemen, so if you are planning on taking a bicycle on this service we would ask you to wait for the delayed 08.23. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

  The part-time countryman is a self-pitying creature. He cannot get his ‘father’ mask to fit.

  Can’t be bothered with office drinks. I’ve missed the last six tho! They’ll take me off the email soon. See you in a bit. Xxx

  There aren’t any seat reservations, mate. You can sit anywhere.

  He tells himself that he is an actor moving between stage sets. Persons in the workplace are props to be slid on and off stage, bit parts in his lonely professional drama. Likewise, his family, at home in the countryside, strike him as nothing more than representations, barely credible simulacra loved-ones, cardboard cut-outs from a catalogue of fake homeliness. But of course every day he returns home to find his beloveds are flesh and blood, noisy and needy, hungry and angry. And of course he arrives in the office every morning to find corporeal colleagues, chatting, groaning, working. So, day after day he must come to terms – bravely – with the fact that these people are all embodied and it is he, shuttling back and forth between the twin tableaux of capitalism and domesticity, it is he who is a cut-out to be slid on and off stage. He is forever his own understudy. When he performs well in one drama, he is nothing but central absence in another. His not-there-ness is what he is performing, day in, day out. His presence is a mirage. His absence is the only real thing about him.

  Luke: Spare room from day one.

  Tom: Spare room on weeknights.

  Nitin: Ear-buds and eye mask.

  Ed: Never changed a nappy.

  So, you get my point sweetheart, I’m kind of a hero. You might need to compare the market a bit before losing your rag. So can I or can I not go to the pub after cricket? X

  There are no seat reservations, so it’s not your seat, but if you’re that stressed out I’ll move to one of the many free seats.

  The part-time countryman will forever be playing catch-up, and experiencing mild crises of identity. He should moisturise his face and hands regularly so that dry skin is never on his Worry List. Glycerine, shea and natural oils – well blended and over-priced – are the travelling man’s friend.

  My grandpa, on this train fifty years ago. My dad, on this train twenty-five years ago. I should’ve taken a gap year at least. I should’ve lived a bit more before settling down with Nicola.

  But I’m all set to get promoted to SCS in five years, and I got a table seat with a plug socket tonight, so actually I can’t complain.

  Win. Win. Win.

  Hi sweetheart, I missed the 18.30. On the 18.45. I’m really sorry about this morning. I was an idiot. You’re right, I was too cross with the kids. I left the house 100% livid I think I need to start cycling again. Anyway See you in a bit. I’m starving btw. X

  Keenly aware that his hands are filthy, he uses a lot of soap; he squeezes and squeezes and rubs the soap into the gaps between each finger, turns his hands over and does the backs of his hands, rubs his nails into his palms. He holds his hands under the tap but no water comes.

  He waves his hands under the tap. He bends and checks to see if the electronic sensor is where he thinks it is. It is. There is no water.

  He wipes the soap off with toilet paper. His hands are sticky.

  This is the fourth time this has happened since he bought his season ticket in May.

  The part-time countryman will need a sturdy briefcase, a bowler hat, a cane and a wry smile of matutinal solidarity for the milkman whom he will pass every morning. He will need wireless earphones and well-made socks. He should dismissively peruse the free paper and admire the lift and fall of Charlotte’s breasts as she sighs over Instagram. He should stop naming familiar commuters as if he knows them, but come on, it’s fun. He should stop looking at Charlotte’s breasts, but come on, she’s fit. He should peruse his emails – as if coolly unimpressed – but not reply to them. Shined shoes are not the integral sartorial component many mainstream gentlemen’s periodicals will insist they are, and New Balance are verboten as everyone knows.

  Like a baby in the womb, the part-time countryman should listen to classical music or language courses. If he develops a paunch, he must leave a little earlier, try a little harder to get a seat, and his briefcase will cover the bump.

  To be honest love, it feels like a pretty raw deal, working as hard as I do, coming back to this, night after night. Thankless task, to be honest. Anyway. I’m not angry, just fed up. X

  The part-time countryman must defecate in his countryside lavatory first thing in the morning and not in the metropolis. Never ever on the train. His colleagues in the city should imagine him dropping, as the sun creeps over the picturesque meadows, a healthier turd than theirs, a larger, better-built, half-country shit.

  . . . an assortment of hot and cold snacks, light refreshments and alcoholic beverages, but it is cash payments only this evening, ladies and gentlemen.

  The part-time countryman knows about pheasants, but he also knows about early mover premiums. He won the courgette category of the village show on his first attempt, but he also knows the best Japanese restaurant on Dean Street. He is a calibrated weapon of transition, of falsity and performance. The part-time countryman sees how business works, the arms and the heart and the daily stricken fleshy surface, and this is a burden. A well-cooked supper and some bracing expressions of gratitude can alleviate this burden. The part-time countryman plays knowingly at metrosexuality, but requires – and deserves – old-fashioned servicing.

  All good?

  All good, thanks mate.

  Kids?

  All good. Bit noisy for my liking. Your lot?

  All good. Chloe’s got a mobile phone.

  Ha, mental. So it begins.

  So it begins.

  Thing is, you can track them. The kids. With the mobiles.

  Yeah, I guess that’s true.

  Have a good one.

  You too, mate.

  The part-time countryman must remember that children are buoyant and respond to almost every imaginable psychological strain better than adults do, even well-paid and recently promoted adults with expensive shoes. Children must be steered to recognise and appreciate the kaleidoscopic duties of their parents, whilst also being shown tactics of adaptation and survival, and also being left to their own devices to hunt, or download apps. They will engage with livestock, they will adopt local superstitions and find their own paths to friendship and, later, romance. Children are intrepid in ways the part-time countryman will find startling and possibly threatening. He should anoint the hinges of his squeaky personality with the carefree natural oil of childhood curiosity. He will soon find his child’s easy manner is his own, and he will be liked for it. As a city chap he should be able to understand this: what is a child if not a verifiable asset?

  I don’t know what’s going on, love. I locked myself in the loos and cried. I mean I properly cried, bent double heaving. I think I might need to talk to someone. I’m not sure who I am. X

  All good?

  All good, mate. You?

  All good. Could do with a seat.

  Tell me about it.

  PS Sorry. Xxx

  The part-time countryman realises that generalisations about the character of country and city are useless for those slung halfway between. He bridles at the description of a businessman, and seeks to take his informed hammer to clichés of the rural community. He has a hidden sense of time, lacks pettiness and is painfully self-aware, but this makes him god-like in both his spheres, with a penchant for impersonation. He plays the village like a game on his phone. He can imitate the squeamish aversion of city folk to livestock with uncanny skill because he was once that nose-pinched newcomer. He can mock the misguided sentimentality of a city visitor’s m
isty-eyed appreciation of ‘beauty’ because he in fact daily feels the fresh amazement of the picturesque even as he has to shrug it off in order to belong. Cultivated and flexible duplicity, enriched with snobbery, is the part-time countryman’s sharpest weapon in the theatrical war of his own existence.

  Yes, I phoned the train company and asked them to cancel the 17.30 especially so I could miss dinner with your parents.

  There’s something about us all standing in the aisles waiting, while the train idles outside the station, waiting for a platform, all of us stood up, coats on, cases at the ready, little tuts and smiles and shrugs. There’s something about this that is the saddest thing in the world. The seventeen-year-old me, still seated, looking up at me like wow you really walked where the path doesn’t tread, didn’t you?

  I always look up at the exact same moment. Maybe it’s a ley line. Straight view through the valley, golden. No filter. I’m not big into the gazing out of the window, but I always look up at this same place, take it all in. Feel small.

  I’m so bored, babe. I’m just so bored. X

  The part-time countryman seeks, whether he knows it or not, one significant asset above all others, one permanent prize: respectability. He wishes most of all to be looked squarely in the eye by his neighbour in the country, to be seriously appreciated, to be heard on important issues. For if he is not respected he is silly. Silly fool, silly twat, silly billy. Silly covers every aberration from ill-advised clothing to genuine lunacy, and the village will unite behind the word silly and use it to banish into otherness the pitiful part-time countryman who could not be respected.

  I’m in trouble for saying Angie was shrill. You can’t say anything these days. Hashtag sorryforbreathing. Laters x

  Hi mate, me again, about the pool skimmer. Sorry to leave another message but we’re just hoping it’s turned up? It’s just Amazon said they definitely delivered it to our safe place, and Megs definitely saw your little fella in our shed, which is the safe place, and there’s the little rip section of the package on the floor, and obviously I’m not wanting to accuse him of anything, but it’s just a pool skimmer, so if there’s any way you could just sort of ask him again, that would be wicked, we’d be massively grateful, alright, nice one, speak soon, cheers.

  I’m on level 300 on Candy Crush. I’ve listened to every single Adam Buxton podcast. Can do the Killer Sudokus in five minutes. I’ve got a Kindle loaded up with Mark Billinghams. I’ll be all right.

  I told Henry Atkins that I regularly fantasised about throwing myself in front of the hi-speed, and now he avoids me on the platform. Don’t be scared, Henry, I won’t take you with me.

  Respect. This is what he thinks about as he slips into sleep, when his daytime worries have been set aside. Respected in the pub, respected in the field, respected in the bedroom. A proper modern man.

  Hi love. Missed the 18.30. Sorry I’m angry in the mornings. I’m not sure where I belong. I’ll man up, I promise. X

  STATE OF EMERGENCY

  Sara Collins

  WE loaded the car and drove into the hills. We packed the radio, because we needed it; and nappies, because we needed them, too. We took fifty US dollars per head, which the law allowed us, but not much else, because this is the story of the things we didn’t carry and, since it was Jamaica in 1977, we didn’t carry much. By this time the State of Emergency was already seven months old; there had been an outbreak of political violence in the lead up to the elections – the beginning of a long national nightmare – and my parents decided we had to leave.

  The prime minister, Michael Manley, had promised to smash capitalism ‘brick by brick’, and I guess you could say we were getting hit by all those flying bricks. We drove all night, until below us the place we’d come from was nothing but a black shadow sinking into the sea, caught in the first glaze of sunrise, and, even though we loved that old landscape and all its green undulations, we didn’t look back. We were ironing ourselves out of it, getting the hell away.

  I want to tell you how, after you’ve left a place this way, you may find yourself needing to write about it, keeping in your rearview a litany of things you don’t remember, with as much choice in these things as you might have about falling in love. How when you start writing, you’ll find yourself coming full circle to the same emergency. The same words leaping around you eager as dogs: curfew-gunman-garrison-gun. How I read books because those words were caught in my head like a line from a song.

  We flew to Grand Cayman: my parents, my three brothers and I. We got ourselves a room of our own. Two beds, two crocheted bedspreads, one bassinet. My Caymanian grandmother, whose house it was, had a habit of jabbing at my skin like it was something she forgot in the oven. ‘You caught the sun,’ she’d say, as we both surprised ourselves with the discovery that she’d have loved me better pale. My mother worked night shifts. During the day my brothers and I tried to prise her eyelids open while she slept. I stared at myself in the mirror with her nurse’s badge pinned to my T-shirt and her white cap perched on my afro, imagining what it would be like to be a woman who worked. One of our neigh-bours, a man named McDoom, who ran a bar called Club Inferno in a place called Hell, brought us gifts of food. Baskets of yams. Green bananas.

  Finally we could afford the rent on one half of a shared duplex, where one night we built a bonfire in our backyard and my brothers and I raced each other around it, thin and barefoot, singing: Run from Michael Manley! Run from Michael Manley! We were finding our feet (limping, yes, but standing), my father working again as a barrister, picking up the threads of his old life, so we could afford to fill an old barrel every couple of months. Packs of Jacob’s cream crackers scuttled like crabs under lace-edged underwear (the ‘good’ kind that wouldn’t shame you before the eyes of ambulance-drivers), Johnson & Johnson talc, bags of cornmeal, tins and tins of sardines. The barrel would stand in a corner of the kitchen filling up slowly until the lid sat snug on the final item – perhaps a navy-blue tin of Danish butter cookies – and then it would be dispatched to my Jamaican grandmother, who was one of the things we’d had to leave behind.

  You could spend too much time trying to understand what led to those hardscrabble years, but it boils down to the same story everywhere, doesn’t it? The machinations of men. I understood nothing at the time about what we were doing or why we were doing it. I was a child and these were not childish matters. The PNP and the JLP were at war and it turned out there wasn’t enough country for the both of them. It turned out there’s no such thing as an easy passage.

  In April 1978, there was a concert in Kingston – the One Love Peace Concert – an attempt to stitch the two sides together, would-be murderers with would-be murderees: Bob Marley on stage, joining the hands of the two reluctant leaders, the two pale kings – Manley and Seaga – buckra men in a country that had taught itself those were the best kind of men to be. Bob telling the people to come together. And maybe for a moment they all believed him, they believed in the possibility of peace, they left behind the light poles and dirt patches and bullet-wounded walls of the old garrisons. There was a frenzy of dancing; they seemed happy as cult members. Bob telling them that things would be all right. You could almost believe it, too, if you went and watched it now, if you didn’t already know the future, if you didn’t know that sometimes it seems the State of Emergency was the only thing that lasted. By the date of the peace concert, I was already gone, already watching the unfurling of a country that would never belong to me.

  Jamaica was the place that had caused all this. It was seven years before we could go back to visit. Summer. A break from school. All six of us in the rented car. Twisting this way and that for a backseat view of the things we had abandoned, noticing everywhere these quick currents of memory I couldn’t quite grasp. There were so many things around me I didn’t know that I’d forgotten. The car pushing inch by inch through street vendors, who cried out and waved bags of just-roasted peanuts, peppered shrimp, fried fish and bammies. Their hands slippe
d like fishes past the glass. I had never seen this kind of urgency to sell something before, this way of pushing the thing at you, so you had to take it or be hit with it.

  We started going uphill: urgent noises from the clutch and engine. After a time there seemed to be a bar or church every hundred yards; then women, straddling the roadside with children on their hips, who, when they heard the car, stopped and shifted to the side, without looking around. But sometimes there was no one for miles. Only the orange groves, or the small, ramshackle, apparently deserted buildings. Wood, zinc, sturdier houses sitting proudly beside concrete cisterns. Corner shops. Burglar grilles. Chain-link fence after chain-link fence.

  Then, finally, Lambsriver. My grandmother’s tiny flat-roofed house: the walls blue-green inside and out; the floor that thumped underfoot; the yellowing crocheted curtains; the smell of wood. She came out onto her porch, plaits battened down under a head-tie, and watched at arm’s length as we poured ourselves out of the car. We were shy of each other, but my brothers and I trailed her through her garden. Breadfruit and mango and banana. More trees than flowers. We followed her to the outside kitchen, leaving all our questions hanging. A pot of goat meat ticked away on the stove. She’d baked toto, and as usual with anything that delicious we gave each other the eye, the starting signal for our usual backwards race to be last to finish, and, after we had, we peeled mangoes with our teeth and threw the skins into a pile under the tree, raising up a cloud of flies. We took our long, brainless pleasure in the food. I liked the way this grandmother looked at me. As if I was something you could be proud of. Then we heard our mother calling out urgently from the house: ‘What is all this? What is all this?’ And when we rushed inside we found her standing dumbstruck before Grandma’s wide-open wardrobe, pulling out bars of unused Ivory soap, tins and tins of talcum powder. Cotton nighties unfolding like white birds. My grandmother watched my mother from the doorway and, when her smile came it came slowly, like something that had been waiting a long time to be seen.