Dreams of Leaving Read Free Page B

held both his arms stiff and crossed in front of his chest.
    â€˜Where am I?’ he whimpered. Poor Tommy really didn’t seem to know.
    Peach glanced round as if he too wasn’t quite sure, the sarcastic bastard. He took a deep breath and let the air out again in several tense instalments. By the time his answer came, it had acquired immense dramatic power. ‘New Egypt,’ he said.
    Tommy Dane began to cry.
    Peach put an arm round the boy’s shoulders, then looked up as if he expected cameras to be rolling. It was a historic moment, certainly. The rebel tamed, the system triumphant. The record intact. Nobody had ever succeeded in escaping from the village. And nobody ever would, Peach’s smile seemed to say. Later that day he threw a small drinks party at his house in Magnolia Close.
    And Tommy? He went back to live with his parents in temporary accommodation, a pre-fab hut behind the vicarage. He died at the age of twenty-four. Some said he had committed suicide. According to the doctor (a more reliable source, perhaps), he simply lost the will to live. The events of that day closed a whole avenue of fantasy for George. If Tommy couldn’t leave the village, he reasoned, then nobody could. He was stuck there for life and he had better get used to the idea. He had just celebrated his eighteenth birthday.
    Two years later he asked Alice to marry him.
    They were sitting by the river. Side by side, as usual. Nine years of rehearsal for this moment. The month was September, the sunset that evening almost Victorian in its coyness, layer on layer of respectable blackand grey. Then, unexpectedly, just as he spoke, the sky lifted its huge gathering skirts to reveal an inch of pink flesh, the hint of a calf. His scandalous proposal. Embarrassed, he glanced across at her. But she was staring at the river, her eyes flicking left to right, left to right, trying, it seemed, to follow separate pieces of water as they floated downstream. He knew she had heard him. He gave her time, as he had always done. He waited. The sky’s lights dimmed, the darkness of a cinema then. Side by side, their elbows almost touching, their dim profiles silver-lined. And then, when he could no longer see her face, she whispered, simply, ‘Yes.’
    Afterwards he never asked her why she had accepted him. He could only suppose that he had got closer to her than anybody else, so close that she had been able to show him how far away she was from most people. A curious basis for a marriage, perhaps, but not untypical of the village where they lived. In those days, of course, he had still believed that her darkness would lift, that some kind of wind would spring up inside her and blow it all away like so many clouds. He had never imagined that it would thicken until the air of their marriage became impossible to breathe, until it was suffocation for her to live in the same house with him.
    In bed she froze before he even touched her. Her body locked, keys turned in all her muscles. He could find no way to open her. He talked to her, but there were no magic words.
    One night, months after the wedding, she called out. ‘Help me.’
    He thought she was talking in her sleep and lay still.
    â€˜Help me,’ came her voice again. ‘Please.’
    He climbed out of his bed and into hers. He put his arms around her, but he could no more bend her than he could have bent a plank of wood. She would snap first. He held her, tried to still the trembling beneath her rigid surfaces. He held her until dawn came, watched the grey light wash into the shallow trough of her forehead, felt her nearest leg twitch under her nightgown, twitch again, then slowly begin to thaw, to stretch and flex until, curled into a foetal ball, she slept.
    Aching and exhausted, he dropped away into a deep well of sleep, daylight a silver hole the size of a coin somewhere far above. He woke three hours later. Rose up through many layers of sleep in one