Travelling in a Strange Land Read online

  The young woman on the seat beside me asks if I’ll watch her bag while she gets something to eat. When she comes back with a sandwich and coffee I tell her that I’m going to Sunderland to bring my son home. I’ve already told the woman at the kiosk in the car park who checked my ticket. Maybe it makes me feel good, that I’m doing something mildly heroic, and as someone who spends his life taking photographs of things that don’t particularly interest him, there isn’t much opportunity to feel heroic. Because what I do is weddings mostly – photos but never a video no matter how much they pay – family portraits, special birthdays, school formals, sometimes a bit of corporate work if I’m lucky and whatever else comes my way.

  ‘He’s at Sunderland University and he’s not well,’ I tell her. ‘Airport’s closed. His mother has sent me to bring him home.’

  ‘What’s he do at uni?’ she asks in a Scottish accent.

  ‘Video and film production.’

  ‘I did something like that.’

  ‘In Sunderland?’

  ‘No, in Glasgow. That’s where I’m going home to. Hopefully the train’s still running.’

  ‘I’d give you a lift if I was going that way,’ I say, ‘but I’m going to Sunderland,’ and then feel as if I’m being too forward and she might think something bad about me. She answers a text and I pretend to look at my own phone.

  ‘What’s wrong with your son?’

  ‘We’re not sure exactly but it sounds like some kind of flu. Were you visiting Northern Ireland?’

  ‘I work on Game of Thrones.’

  ‘That sounds exciting,’ I say. I’ve never seen it but like everybody else know how popular it is even though somewhere lodged in my memory is someone’s description of it as ‘tits and dragons’.

  ‘It has its moments.’

  ‘My son watches it. Though probably illegally, I guess. Streams most everything.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘I laughed when I heard the council had painted white lines down the road with the Dark Hedges.’

  ‘They had to burn the paint off again but you can still see the marks.’

  ‘And what are the actors like?’ I ask.

  ‘Mostly pretty cool. Some can be a pain in the ass. Needing this, needing that. Never satisfied.’

  ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘I’m a production assistant,’ she says then looks at her phone again and I sense the conversation’s over so I don’t ask what that entails although meeting her will give me something to tell Luke about on the journey home. And it would be good if I could ask some questions about how she got started.

  The boat moves off and I start to watch our progress through the window. The sea is calm, seemingly indifferent to the weather’s dramatics, but the snow-covered shoreline that reaches out like two outstretched arms funnelling us to the open sea presents a vista I’ve never seen before and I think I shouldn’t have left the camera in the car. There are some safety announcements and then more of the piped Christmas music. I think of Lorna trying to refind warmth in our bed, of Lilly asleep under her film poster of The BFG, Luke far away and alone in an empty house. And suddenly everything feels intensely strange as the present slips into the silent place where memory and consciousness filter into each other to make something new. So for just a few seconds I’m mindful of all the other people who’ve made this same journey and the passengers around me are replaced by a silent collage of the blurred faces of those who have gone before, many of them looking for new lives in cities that they hoped offered a better future. Of all the women carrying sadness in their wombs forced to seek help far from family and home. I try to blink them away but just as I do I catch a glimpse of a young man on the other side of the lounge before he disappears and I think it’s Daniel.

  I’m not surprised he’s on the boat because I glimpse him in many places, always fleetingly and never long enough for me to raise my hand and call out to him.

  Sometimes he’s on the end of a line of groomsmen decked out in their hired suits and trying to look like they’ve stepped out of Reservoir Dogs. Other times I catch him in the corner of my eye when I’m driving, and sometimes just before sleep he’s there but always at a distance and I wonder should I get up and check the door is unbarred so, if he wants, he can come home. I think I probably see him on the line of groomsmen because when he was in school and they were getting one of those panoramic photographs done he and his mate Robbie ran from their places in the tiered ranks to join the other end and so appeared twice. The head wasn’t amused and he copped the first of his suspensions. Suspended for being a joker. Probably his best and least deserved one. There is the musical chink and whine of a slot machine. We’re slowly heading out to open sea.

  I doze a little – all that snow clearing and the early start. When I wake the young woman has gone and I hope to hell I wasn’t snoring in her ear or she thought I was trying to pick her up. The crossing will only take a couple of hours but my head already feels fogged and I know I need it clear if I’m going to make the drive so I go outside and up to the top deck, let the morning air shock me awake. A group of smokers, some of them with the hoods of their parkas pulled up, hunch over a railing in the designated smoking area. I see the young woman I was sitting beside. Wind streams her hair and she has to push it back from her face. The wake of the boat tumbles and froths in a V-shape almost like we’re churning snow, but the sea itself as it stretches out beyond seems almost stalled in a grey torpor. There isn’t a feature that would make a photograph even if I had my camera; however there are lots of people taking selfies, either on their own or as a couple. The camera phone and the unrelenting progress of technology and everything coming after it are what will kill off the jobs of people like me. Soon all social photography will be self-done in this way. It sometimes makes me feel like the last of a dying breed. Last of the Mohicans, taking pictures with an actual camera, and it makes it worse to know that however good the technology employed, these pictures of self are in my mind mostly worthless, devoid of whatever it is that makes a proper photograph – one that springs from thoughtful creative decisions and a particular way of seeing. So in my eyes they’re not much more than an indulgence, expressions of human vanity and devoid of the dignity that the right photograph can bestow. But if Lilly’s right, maybe I really am the ‘fun sponge’ she’s called me and I’m railing against something that’s just a bit of harmless pleasure.

  We’re walking round the cliff path in Portstewart. Tire the boys out even though it was cold then too, almost as cold as it is now. Luke in his constant question phase:

  ‘Why do they call it the seaside?’

  ‘Because we’re here at the side of the sea.’

  ‘But why do they call it the seaside?’

  ‘What do you mean, Luke?’

  ‘Why do they call it the side of the sea?’

  ‘What else would you call it?’

  ‘They call it the seaside but how do you know it’s the side of the sea and not the front or the back?’

  He looks up at me and there’s little smudges of brown in the corners of his mouth from where he had a chocolate ice cream in Morelli’s. I don’t know the answers any more to most of his questions so often I simply say, ‘I don’t know,’ or, ‘Just because they do.’ Fathers should know the answers to the questions their young sons ask but his come from a different planet so far out in space that it’s no longer part of the solar system. So as a distraction I say, ‘Look, there’s a man fishing.’ But the information contains no sense of revelation or enlightenment and so he ignores it and instead concentrates on kicking a stone on to the rocks below. ‘You’ll scuff your shoes,’ I tell him which allows us to feel like father and son again.

  I think of him in that strange house, a house with empty rooms, and how terrible that must seem to him. Everyone gone, all the normal sounds of student life collapsed into silence as if the falls of snow have smothered them and in their place only the building’s assertion of ownership, wit
h its inexplicable stretches and strains, of the snow pressing down on the roof. Pressing down like the cold weight of loneliness.

  Passing voices in the street. His mother’s phone calls. Constantly checking online with the airport to see if planes are flying. His packed bag at the foot of the bed. And everything stalled – his flight home, his health, whatever he wants for himself. What does he want for himself? Making films sounds like a careers pitch from Fantasy Island but maybe if he gets lucky he might find a role in some organisation that offers more than short-term contracts and menial tasks. We were just so pleased he wanted to go to university we didn’t try to interfere with his choice of course and excused ourselves by telling each other that it was important he studied something he was interested in.

  Gulls hover a short way from the boat, hanging weightless on the currents. And Luke never seemed to allow himself to be hobbled by anything, casual in his approach to everything, curiously indifferent to any form of pressure that the school or we might try to assert. But maybe that’s a good thing. Not to be intense, not to be single-mindedly in pursuit of anything particularly if that thing seems permanently just out of reach. Not to have a hole inside, some kind of void that needs to be filled. Healthy and happy, that’s all that matters, we’ve told ourselves and I still think that was right. I look at the gulls again. We’ve bought him a drone for Christmas – not one of those massively expensive ones but one that’s really not much more than a toy. Still, it has its own inbuilt camera so he’ll be able to film things. We’ve even bought extra batteries.

  I don’t notice her approach. Her hair is tousled and windblown. I can smell the smoke of her cigarette.

  ‘A bit stuffy inside,’ she says and for the first time I register she has eyes that are the grey-green colour of the sea.

  ‘It’s cold,’ I say.

  ‘When you’re a smoker you get used to it. We’re the new outcasts. The exiled. Sometimes if you’re lucky you get a patio heater.’

  ‘Not here, though.’

  ‘What’s Sunderland like?’

  ‘The truth?’

  She nods and shifts slightly on her feet as the boat momentarily seems to lurch a little for no obvious reason.

  ‘Some of it’s OK, other bits are like Belfast in a bad year on a bad day.’

  ‘I like Belfast. Mostly.’

  ‘I like it now too but the Belfast you like is not the same one as I knew growing up – which is a good thing. Didn’t one of those Game of Thrones executives slag it off?’

  ‘He said something like it wasn’t the most cosmopolitan city to spend half the year in.’ She laughs, then adds, ‘He had to do a bit of a grovelling apology.’

  ‘Never apologise for the truth,’ I tell her before I realise I’ve said it and it feels a bit like I’ve made myself her parent. There is a pause in which we both look out at the sea and then I say, ‘I was going to ask you about getting started in the business, advice for my son.’

  ‘The honest answer is that I would advise him to do something else. Something that will pay him a decent wage and offer him decent prospects.’

  ‘But you’ve done well for yourself, haven’t you?’

  ‘On Game of Thrones I’m only a runner.’

  ‘And what does a runner do?’

  ‘Run here, run there.’ It sounds like her standard explanation. ‘Run errands. Do everything that there’s no one else to do. And you make a lot of tea, carry a lot of things from A to B.’

  ‘But it’s a start,’ I tell her. ‘Perhaps opportunities will open up. And it must be exciting to see the actors and the …’ I struggle for the word and then say ‘action’.

  ‘Sometimes, but we’re not part of the inner circle and there’s a lot of rules and stuff you have to sign up to and if you break any of them the sky falls on you.’

  ‘Or you get fed to a dragon.’

  ‘That’s about it,’ she says and then wishes me good luck in bringing my son home and I haven’t said much more than thanks when she turns and walks away. I never see her again. And afterwards I think that if I knew her name I could have looked for it on the screen credits.

  Their presents are in the living room – we never trust putting them in their bedrooms or for them to sleep right through because they’d start the unwrapping without us and rob us of the pleasure of seeing the excitement on their faces and because Lorna expects me to take some photographs when the riot of tearing and squealing begins. But of course they wake early and they’re shouting in from their rooms asking is it time yet and we tell them no, to go back to sleep, but it’s always useless and so even before the first light we give up all ideas of our own sleep and call them into us. They clamber and bounce on the bed, reluctantly snuggle down, feeling their parents’ embraces like straitjackets. Then we play our traditional games, piping up a little duet.

  ‘Well, Mum, do you think Santa’s come?’

  ‘Did anyone hear anything during the night?’

  ‘I think I heard something on the roof,’ Luke says.

  ‘It was probably that pigeon that’s nesting somewhere close and which drives your mother mad with its early-morning cooing.’

  ‘If I had a gun I think I’d shoot it,’ Lorna says.

  ‘That would be cruel.’

  ‘Not as cruel as waking your mum and dad up at the crack of dawn.’

  ‘Can we go and look now? Please, please, please.’

  ‘Soon, very soon,’ I say as I put my hand lightly across his eyes. ‘Why don’t you both take a snooze so that you won’t be done in before the day’s over?’

  ‘No, no,’ they squeal and they’re squirming so much the duvet is sliding off the bed.

  ‘OK, OK. Take it easy. But first of all an important question. Have you both been good?’

  They answer yes without the slightest hesitation and I look at Lorna and ask her what she thinks. She ponders it for a moment, her finger across her lips in an exaggerated pose of thinking deeply, keeping them waiting.

  ‘Mostly I would say … mostly I would say yes! Now go to your rooms and put on your dressing gowns and slippers and then come back in here until your dad turns on some lights and the heating.’

  I put on my own dressing gown and slippers, lift the camera whose battery I’ve charged during the night and head to the kitchen where the smell of the preparations for the meal we are going to share still lingers. The heating kicks itself unenthusiastically into life and then I go into the living room, switch on the Christmas-tree lights and the picture ones so the light is soft. They have Christmas sacks under the tree that have the smaller stocking fillers – sweets, balsawood planes, card games, football socks, shin pads, chocolate money, tiny torches. Their main presents are arranged at opposite ends of the settee. Lorna’s good at wrapping and the piles look like little pyramids with the largest to the bottom.

  ‘Can we come in yet?’ they shout. ‘Can we come?’

  ‘Just one second more when I call you.’

  And each year I take the photograph of this perfect moment before it shatters.

  It feels like the start of a race. We’re all revving up and ready to go. There aren’t that many cars on board compared to the number of lorries. It’s just over a hundred miles to Carlisle so in normal conditions this part of the journey should take about two hours. I have made it three times. The first with Lorna when we delivered Luke as a fresher, the car packed to the gills with everything he might need to survive in student halls, the second time when I brought all his stuff home because after first year he had to move out of the halls, and then at the start of his second year took him and all of his belongings back again. So the route is reasonably familiar to me but when I leave the port the snow has rebranded everything changed and the places that linger in my memory are wiped clean.

  Turn right on to London Road. Stay on the A75. The road out of Stranraer is improved from how it used to be decades earlier. But now it’s narrowed with clunky piles of cleared snow pushed to each side and although the
surface seems mostly clear it still looks shiny with danger and I keep my speed down, hunker behind the wheel and try to shut out everything but the music and feel the reassuring familiarity of the mechanical, of what responds to anything I want it to do.

  It’s a woman’s voice giving the directions. I’m used to women’s voices. Sometimes they’re keen to talk. Maybe there’s stuff they need to say before they walk down the aisle.

  ‘I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing,’ she says as she holds her hands out for her nail polish to dry and she’s looking at me as if I’m the person who knows the answer.

  ‘Only you know that,’ I tell her because I’ve been here before and it seems like the best thing to say.

  The make-up girl has gone and there’s just the two of us. And more and more I’m there in situations like this because the fashion’s changed and no one wants a series of stiffly formal photographs any longer. They want these quirky, arty shots as well as the happy couple and in-laws. They’ve also started to want photos that aren’t taken on church steps or in hotel gardens. So now I have to be prepared to take shots on beaches, in the ruins of castles or in one case a stable. The last shot was her sitting on a horse, him holding the bridle, like the winning jockey being led in. Anywhere the happy couple wants. Anywhere they want. But now I’m not sure there is a happy couple.

  ‘You’re bound to be nervous,’ I tell her then take a picture of her footwear that she hasn’t put on yet, arrange the white sparkly shoes that look like they’ve been made from icing sugar and her hand-held posy of pink roses on a cushion for another shot. She’s sitting at her dressing table looking at herself in the mirror. If I can keep myself out of the photograph I can take a shot of her looking at her reflection. Her mother is calling her to get a move on. She faces herself in the mirror with her hands stretched out and I don’t know whether she’s inviting herself into what’s ahead or if she’s holding it off.