Wish You Were Here

5

ELLIE SITS IN the wind-rocked, rain-lashed Cherokee, in the lay-by on the coast road at Holn Cliffs, thinking of her mother.

The car is pointing in the direction of Holn itself and so in what, on any day till now, she might have called the direction of home. And on a clear day it would be perfectly possible to see from where she sits not just the fine sweep of the coastline, but, on the hillside running up from the Head, the distant white speck of Lookout Cottage. It had been built there, after all, with a now-vanished lighthouse above it, because of the prominent position. And on a clear day, a fine summer’s day say, it would be equally possible to see from Lookout Cottage the distant glint and twinkle of cars — with perhaps an ice-cream van or two — lined up in the lay-by at Holn Cliffs while their occupants admired the view.

Today there is no view. Even Holn Head is just a vague, jutting mass of darker greyness amid the general greyness, and Ellie can only squintingly imagine that at a certain point, through the murk beyond her windscreen, she can see the pin-prick gleam of the lit-up windows of the cottage.

The wipers are on, though to little effect. Thirty yards along the lay-by, barely visible, is another parked car, a silver hatchback, doing what Ellie is apparently doing, and Ellie feels, along with an instinctive solidarity, a stab of envy. Only to be sitting out the storm.

How could Jack have said what he said?

Ellie hasn’t seen her mother for over twenty years — and can never see her again — so that to think of her at all is like seeing distant glimmers through a blur. Yet right now, as if time has performed some astounding, marooning loop, thoughts of her mother — and of her father — have never been so real to her.

How could Jack have said it?

Ellie’s mother disappeared, one fine late-September day, from Westcott Farm, Devon, abandoning her husband, Jimmy, and her only child, Ellie, when Ellie was barely sixteen, and though she would never see her again, Ellie would come to know — familiarly and gratefully — where her mother had eventually made her home. Ellie’s mother once lived in that cottage whose lights Ellie can only imagine she sees, and had she not done so, Ellie and Jack could never have made it their home as well.

Though now Ellie wonders if it is any sort of home at all.

The exact cause of her mother’s sudden flight all those years ago Ellie would never know, but it had to do with a figure whom Ellie, back then, would sometimes call, when in intimate conversation with Jack Luxton, her mother’s ‘mystery man’—using that phrase not so much with scorn but with a teasing fascination, as if she would quite like a mystery man of her own.

Her father must have had some clue who the man was and even communicated indirectly with his runaway wife on the subject, if only to become an officially divorced man and get back the sole title to Westcott Farm. But his lips remained sealed and, anyway, not long before her father’s death, Ellie was to discover that her mother had replaced that original mystery man with someone else and had lived with him on the Isle of Wight.

A few miles along the coast road behind her, in a cemetery in Shanklin, Ellie’s mother — or her ashes — lies buried, under a memorial slab placed there by her then husband, whom Ellie would one day refer to as ‘Uncle Tony’. Ellie has lived now for over ten years in her mother’s and Uncle Tony’s former home, but has never been to see her mother’s nearby resting-place, and until recently this would only have expressed her mixed feelings about her once renegade mum: blame, tempered with unexpected gratitude and — ever since that September day years ago — an odd, grudging admiration. She hadn’t quite condemned, but she hadn’t quite forgiven either, and she wasn’t going to go standing by any graves.

And until recently this would only have expressed Ellie’s position generally. The past is the past, and the dead are the dead.

But two mornings ago when Jack had departed, all by himself, on an extraordinary journey whose ultimate destination was a graveside, Ellie had felt rise up within her, like a counterweight, the sudden urge to pay her long-withheld respects. She’d even had the thought: As for Jack and his brother, so for me and my mum. The only trouble was that she didn’t have the car, Jack had it, and she’d baulked at the idea of getting the bus. But she has the car now — she has unilaterally commandeered it — and, only within the last desperate hour, Ellie has attempted that aborted journey once again. And failed.

She’d driven blindly hither and thither at first, sometimes literally blindly, given the assaults of the rain, and because much of the time her eyes were swimming with tears. How could Jack have said that? But then how could she have said what she’d said, and how could she possibly, actually act upon it? Then the thought of her mother had loomed, even more powerfully, once more. Shanklin. Forget Newport. Forget Newport police station. That had just been a terrible, crazy piece of blather. Shanklin. And now, after all, might really be the time.

Hello Mum, here I am at last, and look what a mess I’m in. Any advice? What now? What next?

And if no answer were forthcoming, then at least she might say: Thank you, Mum, thank you anyway. I’m here at least to say that. Thank you for deserting me and Dad all those years ago. Thank you for leaving me to him, and to the cows. And the cow disease. Thank you for being a cow yourself, but for coming right in the end, even if you never knew it. Thank you for giving me and Jack — remember him, Jack Luxton? — these last ten years. Which now look like they’re coming to an end.

And thank you, if it comes to it, for offering me your example.

Rolled up in the back of the car is one of the oversized umbrellas they’d had made for use around the site and to sell in the shop. Yellow-gold segments alternating with black ones displaying a white lighthouse logo — meant to represent the vanished beacon — and the word LOOKOUT at the rim. The umbrellas matched the T-shirts and the baseball caps and the car stickers — all things that (like the name ‘Lookout’ itself) had been her ideas.

It would have gone with Jack, she realised, on his journey. She suddenly hoped it hadn’t rained on him. What a fool he’d have looked putting it up at a funeral. Let alone at a military parade. But driving madly just minutes ago through the blinding rain, Ellie had seen herself clutching that same wind-tugged Lookout umbrella as she stood by her mother’s rain-soaked remains.

Hello Mum. What a day for it, eh?

But what a fool she’d look. And what a miserable exercise it would be. Picking her way through some wretched cemetery, through the puddles and mud. In these shoes. All to find some little, drenched square of marble, while a seaside brolly tried to yank her into the air. Jesus Christ.

And as for that advice, that example, did she really need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future — rainy — day. She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice. Skedaddle, Ellie. Just skedaddle, like I did. Cut loose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. With just the clothes you’re in and what’s in your handbag. Now or never. Cut loose.

Somewhere near Ventnor, with a strange little yelp at herself, she’d turned round and driven back along the coast road, into the teeth of the oncoming gale, only to find herself immobilised now, fifty yards — across a sodden verge, a wind-rippled hedge and a strip of field — from the edge of Holn Cliffs.

Everyone has their limits, Ellie thinks, and her mother must have reached hers, for her to have left a husband and a daughter who’d only just turned sixteen — even with a mystery man on hand. And her own limits must have outstretched her mother’s — but then she hadn’t had a mystery man, she had Jack — for her to have stuck it out with her dad for another twelve years. To have stuck it out with him, as it happened, to the very end. Even being with him, holding and squeezing his hand, in that hospital in Barnstaple just a few hours before he died. And she’d have been with him at the end, if she’d known and if it hadn’t been at two in the morning.

How could Jack have said what he said?

Everyone has their limits, and it seems to Ellie that she might have reached her limits now with Jack — or whoever that man was up there in that invisible cottage. She might be about to turn her back on him, as she’d never, in fact, turned her back on her father. Or, before now, on Jack.

But here she sits, pulled up in this lay-by, not going anywhere, within a mile and (on any normal day) within sight of home. And it wasn’t the perilous weather that had made her stop, or even the pursuing ghost of her unvisited mother, but the sudden, clear, looming ghost of herself, driving madly once before, through the still, golden sunshine of a late-September afternoon.

*

Barely sixteen, but she knew how to handle a Land Rover. Even if she wasn’t allowed and was even forbidden by law to drive it on the road. Nonetheless, on the third day after her mother’s departure and while her father seemed to have taken resolutely to the bottle for the day, Ellie had gone out with the keys to the ancient vehicle in the Westcott yard, got in and driven it, for the first time in her life, right up the Westcott track to the gate and the road, and beyond. With no real intention of returning.

It wasn’t a planned escape. She’d taken nothing with her, but it had evolved, in the very fact of motion, in the familiar quirks of the gear stick beside her and the mud-plastered pedals beneath her, into a frantic bid for freedom. In any case, there was the sudden sheer, wild glee of taking the thing out onto the road and seeing what it could do. Swerving to miss traffic, taking arbitrary turns, and, in the narrow lanes, finding out that she was entirely adept, even aggressive, in dealing with an oncoming vehicle in that one-to-one situation when either they or you have to find the passing-spot. If she could manage this Land Rover in a muddy field, do natty reverse-work in the yard or buck along a rutted track, she could do all this on a solid road now.

The early-autumn sun had filled the air and drenched the berried hedges. The window was down, her hair flew. There was petrol in the tank. Ellie can see, now, her bare teenage knees as she pumped the pedals, her little smoky-blue, thick-corduroy skirt, no more than a band of ribbed fabric — this was 1983.

She began to laugh, to sing — selections from Duran Duran. Was her face also shiny with tears? Had this old Land Rover ever been given such a ride? As she drove, a sort of plan, a purpose had come to her. Wherever she was going (if she was going anywhere) she couldn’t go there alone. Or she couldn’t leave her mates behind without letting them at least know she was on the run and offering them the option too. There was room in the back.

She thought of going to get Linda Fairchild and Susie Mitchelmore in Marleston itself, Jackie White in Polstowe and Michelle Hannaford at Leke Hill. Liberating them all. A skidding halt, a loud blast on the horn. Quick! It’s me, Ellie! Come on! She thought of going to that bus shelter near Abbot’s Green, where much was thought of and discussed and giggled over but not so much done, and scrawling a last, filthy, farewell message on its wall. She thought of scooping up the whole Abbot’s Green School bunch and saying, ‘Right! Here we go!’ The chances of a police car round here were a hundred to one. And, to hell with it, she could even go and pick up Bob Ireton’s mopy sister Gillian — Bob who was set on becoming a cop.

All this was like some glorious net — a freeing net — flung out from her racing mind. She’d scoop up anyone who was game for it. Boys too, yes, any boys. But at some point in the great rush of her thoughts — she was actually swooping down Polstowe Hill — she calmed down (relatively) and knew what she had to do.

Could it really be anything else? And it wouldn’t be just an act of liberation. It would be a test. A test of herself. Could she? Would she? She stopped and reversed, swiftly, with a pleasing belch of exhaust smoke, at a farm gate. All the farm gates, all the bloody farm gates. Someone blared a horn at her. She blared back. She raced again through Polstowe. People couldn’t have helped noticing by now. This was at least the third time. That was Jimmy Merrick’s Land Rover, wasn’t it? But that wasn’t Jimmy, surely, at the wheel.

She sped back towards Marleston. Could she really do it? She certainly saw herself doing it. She sees herself doing it now, as if there’s still somehow a need. She sees herself stopping by the Jebb gate and opening it. Sees herself driving through and not bothering to do any closing. My God, this is a first. She sees herself roaring into the Jebb yard and lurching to a halt, hand slammed on the horn. No guessing where Jack might be on the farm at this time of day, but in the scene in her head Jack is somewhere conveniently near the yard. And he’s heard this meteor coming down the track.

She sees the family turning out to confront her amazing arrival. Michael. Vera. There’s a difficulty there, she knows it — to tear Jack from his mum. And standing beside Vera is little Tom, aged seven. A difficulty there too — and there always will be. There’s a difficulty now. But it’s only Jack she cares about. My Jack.

And there he is. She looks at him and he looks at her, astonishment denting his not often dentable face. A test for her. A test for him. But she’s already passed hers, by being there — it was always like this, her making the first move — and by sticking her head now out of the window and yelling, ‘Come on, Jacko! Now or never. Quick! Jump in!’

But she doesn’t go through the Jebb gate. She doesn’t even stop by it. And Jack will never know that he was once part of that never-enacted scene. She thinks of her dad who, even now, in his sozzled state, is perhaps unaware of her flight. How can she do it? Ensure that in the course of three days the only two women in his life will have deserted him, and stolen his Land Rover. She thinks of her abandoned dad who, when he hears her driving back down the Westcott track, will surely think, in his half-stupor, that it must be his wife coming home. Coming back! Allie and Ellie and Jimmy, all together at Westcott again.

She drives along the Marleston road. There’s a straight, clear stretch after the Jebb bend, but she’s lost now all the thrill of speed. In any case, she slows for the Westcott gate. She can see the square tower of Marleston church poking up ahead. She gives a strange, pained cry (she gave the same cry again, exactly the same, today) and runs a forearm over her slippery face. She stops, gets out to close the gate dutifully behind her — having left it defiantly open on her way out. She hears its familiar clang.

The twin hedges take her in their grasp, the golden sunshine mocks her. She drives on down, along the dry ruts, to her father who, indeed, since he’s been seeking oblivion anyway, will never know, any more than Jack will, what Ellie has done today. The things we never know. She drives back into Westcott Farm, to her mother’s absence, to her sleeping father (who when she wakes him with a mug of tea, doesn’t want to be woken) and to the mooing, snorting, pissing, shitting fact of cows to be milked.