Wish You Were Here

18

JACK DROVE OFF the ferry into the hurrying morning streets of Portsmouth. No one had detained him or regarded him with special interest, but he whipped his sunglasses from the dashboard not just against the glare of the low sun. His instinct was to hide his face. It was absurd to think of being recognised, but in his white shirt and black tie, even inside the car, he felt painfully conspicuous. He had safely got ashore, but at any point now, he felt, as he strove to navigate the currents of purposing traffic around him, he might be stopped and asked to explain his own particular purpose. And how would he do that?

I am going to meet my brother.

As the ferry docked, the ball of fear had tightened in his stomach. He told himself, for no clear reason, that the innocent have nothing to fear.

He looked frantically for road signs — his instinct also being, on finding himself in the middle of a city, to get out of it fast. Portsmouth was not the biggest of cities, but it was more than big enough for Jack, who in all his years — save in appreciating that most of the Lookouters came from them — had rarely had to deal with cities. The word ‘city’ itself was foreign to him, as was the word ‘citizen’, though that second word, he somehow appreciated too, hung, almost like its explanation, over this journey.

When, some eight years ago, in order to take a holiday in the Caribbean, Jack had acquired a passport, he’d understood that he was now a citizen. It said so. Not so long before, the very idea of possessing a passport would have seemed ridiculous. A farm was its own land, even its own law, unto itself. And as for being a ‘citizen’—citizens hardly lived on farms. Though, apparently, you didn’t need to live in a city to be a citizen. Or even require a passport. A passport merely confirmed something that came with you. Even little babies — even little babies born on farms — were citizens. It was a birthright.

But it had still seemed strange to Jack to discover that he was a citizen and that in order to pass through Gatwick Airport he had to prove it. Gatwick Airport itself had seemed like some weird, forbidding city, though he hadn’t felt like a citizen, shuffling through and showing his clean new passport. He’d felt more like a cow at milking time.

Yet he’d thought, very recently, how shaming it would have been if when Major Richards had said he should bring his passport he’d had to say: I don’t have one.

He didn’t feel like a citizen today. Though today he knew, inescapably, he was one. It felt like some imposition or even incrimination when he knew it should be the opposite: a privilege, a protection, a guarantee. The fact that he was a citizen should be dissolving that primitive ball of fear in his stomach.

If he were stopped, then he had his passport. Not only that: in his jacket pocket he had other papers (not all of which Major Richards had said he need bring with him). He had a letter from a Secretary of State, personally signed. Truly. He had a letter, and an invitation, from a Colonel of the Regiment. Who else in this flood of morning traffic around him was carrying better credentials, was better authorised to be going about their business?

It ought to be the case, Jack told himself, that rather than being stopped, he should be waved through, with saluting respect. Lanes should be cleared for him.

But he had to get out of this city.

He looked at signs: London, Southampton, Winchester. He definitely didn’t want London. He briefly passed, on his left, the long, fortress-like walls of the Dockyard. Not just a city, but a navy base. And he was travelling to an airbase.

The funnel of the M275 seemed to find him rather than he it, feeding him onto the westbound M27. The whole length of the M27 skirted a mainly urban sprawl: Southampton was a city too. He needed to be free of this region of thick habitation. On the motorway he put his foot down, but after a few miles took it off again, realising that he had no need, or wish, to hurry and that he risked, indeed, being absurdly early. All the same, the proximity of large populations — all of them citizens — oppressed him. On the fringes of Southampton he joined the M3 and only when, after passing Winchester, he left the motorway and was heading north across the broad downs of Hampshire did he begin to feel calmer, though this was not for long.

Big, sunlit sweeps of land now faced him, but clouds were rapidly gathering. More to the point, this open country, with its unimpeded views of the road ahead, was only drawing him inexorably and all too rapidly closer to his destination. In preparing himself for the other immensities of this journey, he had over-allowed for its simple distance. In both miles and time his journey was already half done.

He bypassed Newbury, then at a service station just short of the M4 intersection he stopped, to empty his bladder and simply kill a little time. It was not yet ten — though the mere reflex of looking at his watch, the noting of passing minutes, made him sweat. The tightness in his stomach reasserted itself and, as if to smother and quell it, he forced himself, in the cafeteria, to consume a large, sticky Danish pastry and drink a cup of coffee.

Around him was the random sample of the nation (another word, like ‘citizen’, that had come in recent days to nag him) to be found in any service-station cafeteria on a weekday morning. The bland, communal atmosphere both soothed and troubled him. Jack didn’t like cities, but this wasn’t because he essentially minded people — or people removed from the context of cities. The caravanners had, unexpectedly, taught him that. The caravanners could comfort and beguile him — just as he saw it as his role to keep them contented.

He thought now of the travellers who might stop here in the summer on their way south from cities like Birmingham or Nottingham, bound, perhaps for the first time, for the Lookout Caravan Park. Bound for a little off-shore island that, in their minds at least, was entirely set aside for the purpose of holidays. He felt a sudden tender pang for them.

But this was November. Outside the sky was now mainly grey with a hint of rain. He no longer sensed that he might be liable to sudden arrest and interrogation, but he wondered if, in his black tie, he was being scrutinised by those around him. There would be an obvious conclusion (though it would fall some way short of the actual mark) about his purpose. Who was he? What did he do, with his big frame and big hands? Was it unseemly for a man wearing a black tie to be stuffing his face with a Danish pastry?

He thought again of the hearse and of its separate journey: Devon to Oxfordshire. There were some strange tasks in the world, some strange purposes.

But around him, in fact, was a majority of solitary, preoccupied men (though none in a black tie) doing just as he was doing: pushing something sticky into their mouths and chewing on it needily, but with no particular sign of pleasure. Were they all — though none of them, surely, could be on a journey, a mission like his today — nursing, feeding their own little balls of fear?

This was peacetime in the middle of England. But there was a war on terror.

He took out his mobile phone. It was something else these men were doing. But he merely stared at it and returned it to his pocket. The coffee or regathering fear, or simply the sensible precaution before he set off again, made him head for a second piss. In the hard white light he looked at himself, again, in the mirror. He didn’t look, he thought, like he’d looked, only hours ago, at the cottage. He should have got his hair cut, perhaps, specially. It was wispy at the neck and by his ears. He was going to meet the army. He tweaked at his tie, though it was fine already and it hardly mattered while he was driving. His heavy face, gazing straight back at him, seemed not to know him.

Did he look like a citizen, a good citizen, in his white shirt and dark suit? No, he looked like a gangster.