Jez has no sense of time. She has little sense of anything, but she does have a wildly fulfilling relationship with the earth. She lives in West Wales because, according to her, Wales is a very ancient land. When she shared this with me I couldn’t help but suggest that all the earth was much the same age, which didn’t go down well.
She rang at about five to twelve on a Tuesday night from their local pub. It should have been closing time, only there was no such thing in that place in the back of beyond, where Jez and Steve stayed behind in the bar several nights a week until two or three in the morning. There was no great reason not to – it wasn’t as if either of them had jobs to go to, and the tepee didn’t take a lot of cleaning, especially as they rejected all cleaning preparations on ecological grounds, so that all Jez could do was wave a decaying duster at the mould. Steve didn’t help. His sense of social responsibility didn’t stretch to housework. Or tepee-work. Jez didn’t seem to mind.
“Can I bring my washing over this weekend?”
“Jez, if you truly believe that having a washing machine is wrong, doesn’t it seem a little hypocritical to cross the Severn to use your sister’s?”
“You can just say no. No need to get all superior on me. Anyway I’m coming over to a craft fair, so it’s a two birds with one stone thing, like.”
“I’m not going to say no. You know that. I’ve never said no. Do you want to stay the weekend?”
“Could I? That’d be great.”
Fine. Come on Friday. I’ll be home about six thirty. How’s Steve?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Cornwall, I think. Met some girl at Glastonbury and buggered off.”
“Oh, you poor thing! How are you holding up?”
”It’s cool. Things had been a bit tough for a while. We’re better off out of it. It was never supposed to be long-term anyway. Casual. You know.”
It had been casual for six years.
“You poor thing! How are you bearing up?”
“Ok. Yeah, fine. I’ve been doing lots of stuff. Pete paid me to decorate the pub and I’ve started making some wild jewellery.”
“Jewellery?”
“Yeah. Ethical. Reusing. Recycling – that’s the sort of thing. The feathers the hens leave around. I’m dying them and mixing them with clay beads. You’ll love them.”
“Great.”
“I’ve got a pair for you and one for Mum. Which she’ll never wear.”
“Well, feathers and beads. Not really her thing, is it?”
It wasn’t really mine, either.
When I told Simon she was coming for the weekend he groaned.
“Bloody vegan food for forty eight hours then.”
“You don’t have to. I’ll put some sausages in the back of the fridge for you. If you can handle the disapproval.”
“It’s not the disapproval so much as the forgiveness which I find so hard to handle. Being in the presence of goodness is difficult for lesser mortals like me.”
“No Steve though. He’s left her for another woman.”
“I didn’t know tepee dwellers did that sort of thing.”
“Well, this one did. Anyway, you never know. It might have been the tepee and not Jez he left. The other woman might have a cosy semi in Newquay.”
“She’s better off without him. She confuses being committed with being bright. God, wasn’t he the most boring man you’ve ever met? I always wondered what they talked about in the evenings. It wasn’t as if they could watch TV and ignore each other, was it?”
“You mean, like we do?”
“Exactly. Like all normal people do. They couldn’t even read books in winter. Enforced conversation.”
“They went to the pub, silly.”
“Not all night every night. They haven’t got the money. Anyway, I’m glad he’s out of the picture. She might find someone nice now. She might even do something with her life.”
Jez had brought Steve to stay with us on a number of occasions. He had surveyed the house with gloomy disapproval, self-consciously averting his eyes from the television when Simon watched the news, showing no interest in sport and questioning the provenance of every ingredient in our catering. He refused my carefully made lentil curry because I’d used commercial vegetable stock cubes which, he assured me solemnly, was almost certainly “contaminated”. He reluctantly accepted raw celery and carrots even though they weren’t organic, mainly because he would have starved otherwise. We didn’t think he’d ever actually used the bath or the shower when he had visited, and unlike Jez, he foreswore even the washing machine which he regarded as the devil’s invention.
The only time we visited them was for her thirtieth birthday. Anything less significant wouldn’t have merited an invitation. We were invited to bring sleeping bags and doss down on the floor of their tepee but Simon pleaded an old rugby injury and we stayed at the pub in a room with pink nylon flounces, a washbasin and sachets of coffee and tea.
The party at the tepee village was a gentle gathering. People sat around with plates of curried vegetables, children ran wild with snotty noses and joyous shrieks, an old dog slunk around the fire nuzzling in our laps for scraps before walking round itself three times and collapsing into a small circle. Their friends were pleasant and highly pierced, and I wondered what had possessed Jez to choose Steve when there were so many equally committed people with the humour and respect for other people’s lives which Steve so signally lacked. After quite a lot of cider brought by a kindred spirit in an ancient ambulance from an encampment in Somerset, people started playing folk music on recorders and guitars and the less self-conscious among the guests danced. Jez closed her eyes and allowed herself to drift on a cloud of music, cider and spliff. She had exchanged her habitual grey for something floaty and orange, and she wore earrings which jangled tinnily. Normally I count myself as quite an extrovert but here Simon and I were completely out of our depth. We enjoyed ourselves more than we expected to, though, despite the peeing uncomfortably in the woods with serried ranks of others so close that you could hear the hiss and see the steam rising from the earth. But we found the sense of shame of our materialistic lives overwhelming, and on the trip were wholly convinced of our personal responsibility for the ills of the planet. After a couple of days the feeling abated.
It hadn’t always been so. Jez at twenty-two had been quite ordinary, although she’d always held fairly ecologically sound views. Mum was surprised when she came home one day in 1975 and announced that she was vegetarian. Jez (or Jessica as she then was) ate cheese or eggs with her potatoes and veg for ages while we tucked into chops or sausages or mince. Then several years ago she decided that she was vegan and Mum muttered to herself that it was a good thing that Jez was moving out and how long would she keep this up when she had to fend for herself with these funny ideas. She was even a fruitarian for a couple of weeks once, but in the end even Jez wasn’t that committed.
Jez thinks she’s very mystical, although usually when she’s offers some proof of this she’s spectacularly wrong. On Friday night when he arrived Simon had already gone to bed. We sat down with cups of earl grey in the kitchen and she brushed a dirty fingernail over my cheek and said softly,
“You’re hurting, Toni. What about?”
“Nothing major,” I shrugged, “work problems, marital snits. You know. Normal stuff.”
Her face darkened with concern.
“Is he hitting you?”
“God, no! Why?” I looked at her with concern, “Steve didn’t hit you, did he?”
“No,” she shook her head, “Well, not seriously. He has a temper. Sometimes when we were pissed we’d end up having rows and thumping each other, but we were both as bad as each other.”
“My God! I thought you were gentle people!”
“Come on, it’s healthy! We didn’t bottle anything up.”
I watched as she reassured herself of this with a silent nod.
“I can’t imagine Steve showing any sort of emotion.”
“You didn’t like Steve, did you?”
“No, well, we didn’t really inhabit the same planet, did we?”
“You didn’t make it as obvious as Simon though.”
“You don’t exactly hide the fact that you’re not Simon’s greatest fan.”
Her face was a mask of resentment.
“Simon likes you. He just thinks you could do a great deal better than Steve. One of the many up-sides to Steve’s being off the scene is that Simon can get to know you a bit better.”
“Couldn’t be bothered to see me tonight, though, could he?”
“You arrived at eleven. He’s got to go in to the office early tomorrow. Give the man a break. You’ll see loads of him over the weekend when he gets back.”
She nodded, unconvinced and took another sip of tea. Brightening, she smiled at me.
“I can’t believe I haven’t seen you in such a long time!”
“Well, you haven’t been over regularly for ages. We guessed Steve wasn’t too keen on your coming over here.”
“I don’t know. He never really saw the point of leaving the village, except to go and get loaded at the pub. He hates cities. Too many people.”
For a moment she looked wistful, then she smiled.
“So where have you been on holiday since I last saw you? Don’t let me down; you’ve always been somewhere. Photos.”
“Prague, and I’m sure you’d love it. All sorts of Karma.”
She laughed and I went to the dresser to rummage in the drawer which held six years of photos which had never made it into albums. The Prague ones were lying on the top.
As we were flicking through them, she grabbed one and peered at it closely.
“Toni!” she shrieked, “Have you seen this?”
She shook the photo of the little girl on the bridge in front of my face.
“Look! Its whatsisname! The film guy. The one you should have married. What was his name?”
“Marc.” I said.
She peered again.
“It’s a sign.” She said.
“No, it’s not,” I said, “It’s a coincidence. Or, more likely, it’s someone who looks like Marc.”
“Bollocks! It’s him.”
She looked at me, all big mystic eyes.
“You must find him. It’s your destiny.”
As she gazed at me intently across the big solid kitchen table I was torn between a desire to laugh and an inclination to agree.
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