Drowned Lives

1

It was all about family in the end. That’s how it began, and that was how it finished, too.

There are some families that seem to last forever, perpetuating themselves in infinite generations, son after son marching through the centuries, fecund and proud. They branch off and flourish in great clumps like wild flowers seeding themselves on the wind, until their teeming progeny populate vast swathes of the countryside. But other families are destined to die out, to fade and vanish into history. They wither on the branch like blighted fruit, until just one shrivelled apple is left. Such a family are the Buckleys.

The deaths of my mother and father, coming so close together, should have been a catharsis, a cleansing. When the stonemason added my father’s name to the headstone in the graveyard at St Chad’s, it was a symbolic act that swept the board clean, giving me a chance to start life afresh. Instead, it felt more as though an emptiness had fallen on me, a heavy blanket through which I could barely remember my former life.

It also left me with no family that carried the Buckley name. I had no brothers or sisters, no broods of nephews and nieces. There weren’t any uncles or aunts on my father’s side, and no cousins. And, of course, I had no wife or children of my own to inherit the house, or the carriage clock.

So there was just me. Christopher Buckley, thirty-two years old, single and always likely to be. A man who was about to be made redundant from his position as an Information Officer with Staffordshire County Council. I was the last shrivelled apple, waiting for the next stiff breeze to knock me off the branch. And trying my best to avoid the wasps.

True, there were many friends and acquaintances I’d made over the years in the newspaper, magazine and PR businesses — some former colleagues at the Lichfield Echo, fellow freelancers, councillors, all the contacts I’d cultivated. And recently there were some members of the Waterway Recovery Group I’d come to know through visits to their sites, and asking a lot of questions about a subject that had sparked my interest.

But how many of these people would waste a day coming to my funeral, as my father’s old work colleagues had? Precious few of them. There would always be something better to do. An urgent meeting, the kids to pick up from school, some unmissable daytime TV game show. But it wouldn’t matter to me by then, would it? A dead man needs no friends.

There was one person who would certainly come to my funeral. She’d make a point of sobbing into a handkerchief during the service, nodding sorrowfully at the platitudes of a vicar who didn’t even know me. And she’d be weeping buckets as they carried my coffin out to ‘The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves’ from Verdi’s Nabucco — a piece of music I’ve chosen specifically because I want to make them all cry. No laughing at my funeral, thanks very much.

My next-door neighbour, Rachel Morgan, was divorced and lived alone, like me, in a house much too big for her in a neighbourhood she knew little about and cared for less. Even I could work out from her frequent appearances on my doorstep, on one pretext or another, that she wanted friendship, maybe more. Yes, Rachel would come to my funeral. She would come out of the fellow feeling that one lonely person has for another, but she’d believe she was there as something more.

It was Rachel who happened to be raking dead leaves from her front lawn that cold February morning when I left the house to look for updates on my current stories. I write a few theatre and book reviews for the local papers, but they barely bring in a few pounds. Feature articles for some of the glossy magazines had become my current interest, mainly because they pay well. All I needed was an angle, and a few good photos. Now and then, it was possible to hit lucky.

‘Good morning, number six.’

Rachel had tied her red hair back off her face in a yellow ribbon and was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater.

‘Morning, number four,’ I responded automatically.

‘Off taking more pictures then, Chris?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, patting the camera bag stupidly, as if she hadn’t already spotted it.

Our houses are a pair of Victorian brick-built semis, like many others in the Gaia Lane area of Lichfield. Some of the houses have little wooden balustrades on their upper storeys, as if they were trying to hint at the existence of proper balconies like those of their larger neighbours round the corner. Each pair has a plaque built into the brickwork between the bedroom windows, recording a date in the first decade of the twentieth century and a romantically rustic Victorian name — The Hawthorns, Oaklands, Rosemount. Our pair are Maybank, 1910. It must have been Rachel who started the ridiculous habit of addressing me by the number of my house, but it seemed churlish not to respond the same way.

‘Where are you off to today then?’ she said.

‘Oh, the usual.’

‘Hilton, is it? Cyril the Squirrel and his friends in their tree houses?’

There were only two on-going stories I could rely on, and they were loosely related. One was the efforts of the restoration group to re-create the abandoned Ogley and Huddlesford Canal that had once run through Lichfield — a huge task that seemed about to become impossible in the face of plans for the country’s first toll-paying motorway. The South Staffordshire Link Road would cut right across the line of the canal.

The other story was a series of protest camps set up near Hilton by environmental campaigners determined to save countryside threatened by the road. Bit by bit, the Under Sheriff of Staffordshire was clearing them from their tunnels and tree houses with the help of armies of bailiffs and police. But every time they had to retreat from a site, the protestors set up camp somewhere else and defied the law to do its worst. The game had gone on throughout January and February.

Rachel was interested in the link road protest. In a way, she was typical of the readers I aimed my articles at.

‘Trees and the environment versus the road builders,’ she said. ‘Whose side are you on, Chris?’

‘I don’t have to be on anybody’s side. A journalist makes it his business to see both sides.’

‘Oh, yes?’

She tossed a rakeful of dead leaves into a wheelbarrow with a dismissive gesture, condemning the limp and useless mass to the compost heap. I took this to mean she didn’t think much of my trite remarks.

‘Look, the protestors have a point, obviously,’ I said. ‘We’ve lost enough of our environment already, and somebody has to take a stand. And why on earth do we need yet more roads, when they’ll only create more traffic?’

Rachel looked up at me then, her eyes expectant, using the prongs of her rake to turn over some decaying beech foliage. The leaves were an attractive chestnut brown on top, but when she turned them over, their rotting black undersides were exposed and tiny slugs and insects fell away, wriggling to escape the light.

‘But at the same time,’ I said, ‘if you’ve ever seen the cars and lorries crawling through places like Brownhills and Walsall, you’ll see why a new motorway is needed. It’s a nightmare for people living in those places. There are two opposite viewpoints, both with justification. So there’s bound to be conflict. And that’s what I’m reporting.’

She smiled at me, nodding encouragingly. I knew I’d done exactly what she wanted, and allowed her to provoke me into conversation, pushing me to express an opinion and show my feelings. I could never figure out how she did it, or why.

‘You shouldn’t take your job too seriously,’ she said. ‘People want some entertainment with their news.’

‘Even in the Lichfield Echo?’

‘We all need a bit of fun.’

‘I’ll look for a pile of leaves to kick,’ I said.

Rachel frowned at me, concern forming little creases around her eyes. She’d been giving me that look a lot since my father’s funeral.

‘I know it’s been hard,’ she said. ‘But it’s been three months, Chris. You need something. Your friends—’

‘I have to go now,’ I said. ‘Work to do.’

She sighed. ‘All right, then. Have a good day.’

I walked towards the little car port at the side of my house. The Escort isn’t fond of cold mornings, and it took three or four attempts to start. It was already ten years old and rarely serviced, and I hardly dared to look at how many miles were on the clock. But replacing it wasn’t a possibility right now.

Rachel waved to me as I pulled onto the road, and I raised a hand in acknowledgement. I suppose I could have had worse neighbours than her. It might have been a house full of screaming children next door, or students smoking weed every night with the stereo turned up full blast. Or it might even have been a couple with a patio barbecue and an urge for midnight DIY, just like the neighbours I’d left behind in Stafford two years ago. But if there’d been anybody like that in the other semi at Stowe Pool Lane, I wouldn’t have stayed in the house when my father died.

Rachel had been divorced for five years. She’d worked as a librarian until the cuts began, and now she was a part-time receptionist at a vet’s surgery. I gathered she also put some hours in at a charity shop for cancer relief. At weekends, she went with a couple of girlfriends to folk concerts at the Guildhall to hear Bellowhead or The Albion Band. The previous November she’d roped me in to see Pirates of Penzance staged by Erdington Operatic Society at the Civic Hall. How she’d managed to persuade me, I couldn’t remember. But somehow I ended up humming ‘I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ for weeks afterwards. I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical. From Marathon to Waterloo in order categorical over and over again. Well, I say ‘singing’, but no one would want to hear me sing.

That fateful morning, I’d decided to make the canal restoration my first stop. The day was turning out clear, with a pale blue sky and a bright February sun. The weekends had been constantly wet for weeks, and I hadn’t managed an opportunity to photograph the latest stage of the work. Reinstatement of a buried lock was now being extended to the site of the old Fosseway Wharf, where vast expanses of undergrowth had to be cleared.

There was a work party from the Waterway Recovery Group on site all week, and I knew a hired JCB had begun to haul the soil and assorted debris from the canal basin. Thousands of tons would have to be shifted before the structural condition of the abandoned wharf could be assessed. It seemed a good chance to capture the first sections of brickwork being exposed.

The WRG were all volunteers. They were many things in their ordinary lives — teachers, solicitors, bus drivers or factory workers. All they had in common was a willingness to give up their spare time to labour in the mud for no reward other than knowing they’d made a small contribution towards a bigger scheme.

Canals seem to hold a fascination for many people. As more of the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal emerged from its premature grave, dozens of volunteers were coming forward to help, organisations were finding funds to support the project and businesses were showing an interest. Not long ago, the whole subject of inland waterways had been a mystery to me, but I was beginning to grasp the appeal.

I’d already recorded the progress on the restoration of the lock. The early stages had been the most fascinating, as digging parties moved onto a completely filled-in site. Trenches had been dug to locate the wing walls of the lock, and one trench had hit a soft spot which turned out to be the paddle frame and drop shaft a couple of feet below ground. A trial hole on the land boundary exposed the distinctive orange brickwork of the arch above the approach ramp to the old bridge.

Restoration had suffered a setback when plans in the British Waterways archives revealed a three-foot-wide land drain had been cut through the head walls and inverts of all three locks in the Fosseway flight. The drain had caused damage to the head walls, and the floors of the lock had been partially cut away. A survey showed that just over three feet of masonry had been taken off the walls of the lock, creating yet more work for the volunteers.

By now, things were different. The lock had been fully excavated and repaired, including the weir and by-wash. Thanks to the land drain, it even contained water. A stile and picnic table were being erected, and work was under way to re-establish the towpath.

If you’re trying to be a freelance journalist, it helps if you can take your own pictures. Part of my inheritance had gone on a good Nikon 35-millimetre SLR camera. Since my photographic skills were self-taught, I’d adopted a technique explained to me once by an old newspaper staff photographer. If you shoot off enough exposures, one or two of them are bound to come out all right, he said. So I keep shooting whenever the conditions are right and the opportunity arises. And occasionally they do come out okay.

I set up my tripod and took pictures of the lock site for a few minutes without taking much notice of the activity. There were twenty or thirty people around, most of them anonymous in overalls or thick sweaters and jeans, and all wearing white hard hats. There were a few vehicles coming and going, and a dumper truck reversing on the lockside. It was only when I’d finished off a film and was packing my camera away that I became aware of Andrew Hadfield. He was a recent recruit to the restoration team. An architect by profession, he’d proved a valuable addition. Today, he was taking an interest in the visiting volunteer work party.

Andrew waved to me from the head of the lock, where he stood with an old man at his side. If only I’d taken that gesture as a warning instead of an invitation, things might have been different.

‘This is Chris,’ Andrew was telling the old man as we squelched towards each other. ‘He’s our resident reporter and chronicler. He gets us in the news now and then, when he can spare the time from his other work. Theatre and book reviews he does as well. He’s a cultured chap, you see.’

There was something in the tone of Andrew’s voice that told me I ought to have gone back to my book reviews right then and let my brain wallow in the familiar words and sentences. Books and plays are a series of worlds in which to escape, where reality is kept at bay, at least for a while.

The old man was stepping forward, his shoulders stiff inside his overcoat. He picked his way carefully over the mud, tapping his stick on the broken bricks. The sound was like the ticking of a watch, slow and relentless, like the old carriage clock back at Stowe Pool Lane.

‘You don’t know me — do you, Christopher?’ he said.

‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’

I hadn’t been called Christopher for a long time, not since my father had died three months before. It wasn’t a name used by friends or workmates, and certainly not by strangers who’d just been introduced. It was a name used only by family, and a family was something I no longer had.

Andrew laughed in delight at my expression, and took my arm to pull me closer to the old man.

‘I’ve got a surprise for you, Chris. This gentleman is Mr Longden. He’s an old friend of the family.’

‘Really? A friend of my family?’

I looked at the old man again. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about him, nothing that should have given me that strange, uncomfortable feeling when I first saw him. Despite a slight stoop, he was as tall as Andrew, over six feet. He wore an old coat, buttoned up tight against the chill, and leaned on a strong stick with a well-worn ivory handle in the shape of a ram’s head. His white hair was thinning on top but he’d allowed it to grow thick round his ears and on the back of his neck. A woollen scarf worn inside his overcoat didn’t hide the fact that his shirt collar was too loose on the sagging skin.

‘Yes, my name is Samuel Longden,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of me?’

The question seemed important to him. But it didn’t take much thought before I answered.

‘Not at all.’

A mixture of reactions passed across his face. Pain, disappointment, resignation — and some other powerful emotion I couldn’t name, but which made him thrust his body forward, so that he could grasp my hand in his cold, dry fingers. I stared at him in amazement as the old man leaned in and spoke with a sudden intensity.

‘Christopher,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what it means to me to meet you at last. Because there’s only you left now, you see. Only you.’