A Sweet Obscurity Read online

  He showered quickly then drove his Land Rover up the lane to Kelynack then over Carn Bosavern, then down through St Just towards Cape Cornwall and Molly’s cottage. There was a honk and she waved to him from a carful of women heading in the other direction. She flashed fingers at him to indicate eleven, meaning she’d be back by then, then headed on into Penzance while he continued towards the terrace where she lived now.

  It never ceased to surprise him that they had passed through the same childhood, rarely apart, yet somehow she had emerged with a cluster of friends she still saw while most of his old mates had moved away or were swallowed up in religion or marriage or a deadly combination of the two. Continuity played a part too; those of Molly’s friends who had gone on to study after school had mostly done it within the region – in Falmouth, Truro, Exeter or Plymouth. Those who had married had done so locally, finding men whose surnames would be familiar to their parents.

  Pearce had only been away two years but that brief interval had been long enough to sever ties he had in any case been neglecting. When he found himself unexpectedly back here, he fell between generations, then was drawn into the unsociable habits of agriculture.

  Molly had not divorced but her marriage to Morris had fallen apart and she now lived alone with Lucy. Far from sliding into self-pity or bitterness, she had simply taken up again with the friendships marriage had temporarily interrupted. Where their parents’ generation had used words like duty and obligation with reference to the community, Molly used them cheerfully of self. ‘I owe it to myself,’ she would say or, ‘You’ve a duty to yourself, Pearce.’

  Now that she was socialising again, she had begun to put pressure on Pearce to go out more. Whenever he plucked up courage to ask someone out or accepted an invitation, she would make encouraging noises the way one did when training a puppy, patiently affirming good behaviour. This would irritate him into taking things no further. Occasionally she had tried to set him up with one of her friends but it was hopeless. He knew too much about them and vice versa and they would spend most of a wretched evening or two talking about Molly for want of more interesting common ground. He was touched that Molly tried, however irritating he found it, but relieved when she called on him as a babysitter instead. It was all very well waxing nostalgic about their parents’ day, when farmers had met girls through chapel picnic or hunt ball but he suspected he would have fared no better in the Fifties than now.

  Lucy must have heard his car because she opened the front door as he was walking up the garden path. She was on the phone but she gave him what in her current manifestation passed for a smile. He left her to talk in the conservatory in peace and headed for the kitchen.

  Molly worried Lucy was eating nothing but junk. As well as making sure she spent long enough on Friday night’s unfinished homework, his job was to cook himself something wholesome and tempt her to join him.

  Lucy was ten and had been dressing as a boy most of her short life. One could blame it on nothing in particular; it had predated any trouble between her parents or her father losing his farm. It seemed to Pearce she had been a boy as soon as she had the ability to choose – her life a brief flourish of pinks and frills before a sturdy continuum of jeans and beanies. It saddened Molly, he suspected, because in unguarded sleep Lucy dropped her habitual scowl and became pretty, really pretty. Morris teased the girl about it, called her Tom or Jim-Me-Lad, which only made her more cussed and scowly. Pearce saw no harm in it. Jeans were more practical than skirts, especially for skateboarding which Lucy loved. He guessed Molly’s unspoken fear but could see no risk that the child was butch to the core. Beneath the gruff exterior, she adored boys and had simply found a way of retaining their company and respect beyond the age when football and instinct usually dictated a ruthless gender divide.

  And her life was not as protected as it would have been growing up on her father’s farm. For all its remoteness St Just was becoming a tough little town. Unemployment was high, as was illiteracy. Bored gangs of boys hung around the car park and pavements playing with skateboards or bikes beyond the age when it was cool to do so. Inevitably there were drugs, regular outbreaks of tedium-fuelled arson and, when the recycling bins weren’t being set on fire or the British Legion’s windows smashed, there were ugly vendettas against targets picked at random – rehoused problem families, foster children, asylum seekers. There were jokes about neighbouring communities, like Pendeen deemed more inbred, more problematic. Kids in Pendeen probably mocked the ones up the road in the hamlet of Morvah and so on. The bottom of the pecking order was probably someone’s pig up in Cripplesease.

  If dressing like a boy enabled Lucy to hold her head up among her peers and survive without becoming another teenage pregnancy statistic, so much the better for her. Pearce’s only worry, knowing how much pleasure and support Molly had always found in girlfriends, was that his niece would miss out. Male conversation was so limited and innutritious.

  ‘Lo,’ she said when her mumbled phone conversation was over at last. She had made a brave show on the phone of manly reluctance – ‘Yeah. Gotta go. No. My uncle’s here. Yeah.’ – but now they were without witnesses, she allowed herself a sweet smile and a little girlishness. This was the side of her Molly rarely saw.

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  ‘What you making?’

  ‘Fried chicken,’ he said, knowing this was a favourite of hers. ‘And fried bananas.’

  ‘Can we have corn fritters instead of the bananas?’

  ‘If you make them. Yeah. You have that pan and I’ll have this one.’

  He showed her how to soak the chicken in milk for a while first to keep it moist and ground up a mixture of stale bread, garlic and dried out cheddar to roll it in. Lucy then stirred together a can of creamed corn, an egg and a spoonful of flour as though this were the height of culinary sophistication. He set two pans to heat up, sloshed in olive oil and together they cooked, raising a cloud of greasy smoke.

  ‘What’s your homework?’

  ‘Photothingy. Synthetics. I should have done it on Friday as soon as I got in. I always do this. Hate it. It hangs over me and spoils Sunday night. I hate plants.’

  ‘It’s easy.’

  ‘No it’s not.’

  ‘What don’t you understand?’

  ‘I’ve got the green stuff, yeah? The chloro you know.’

  ‘Phyll.’

  ‘Yeah and I know that uses sunlight but then I get muddled.’

  ‘You need sunlight and what else?’

  ‘Water,’ she said.

  ‘Which is H2O which means what?’

  ‘Hydrogen twice and some oxygen.’

  ‘Good. Then anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Wrong. Water in its natural state has salts in it. Minerals from the soil, which the plant needs. What then?’

  ‘Then I don’t know.’

  ‘Okay. Do those need turning?’ He gestured to the darkening fritters with his spatula.

  ‘No. So what else?’

  ‘Carbon dioxide. Plants take in C02, keep the carbon and let the oxygen out again. Carbon’s the building block they use to make formaldehyde and simple sugars and from those they make starch. Carbohydrates. Sugar. Sugar beet. Potatoes. The sweetness in that sweetcorn. But the gas is important too because we keep each other going. Animals use oxygen and give out carbon dioxide but while plants are photosynthesising they take in carbon dioxide and give out oxygen. No waste.’

  ‘Provided there are enough plants.’

  ‘And not too many animals. That make sense?’

  ‘Not really. What happens at night?’

  ‘That’s when plants give out carbon dioxide like animals. It’s why nurses always used to take all the plants out of a patient’s room at night.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Look. We’ll eat. Then I’ll do you a drawing you can copy. And there’s a groovy experiment you can do with tin foil and a growing leaf. It takes a day or two but you could write down how to
do it.’

  ‘Yeah?’ She looked distinctly unconvinced. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Any time. How’s stuff otherwise? How’s school?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘How’s your dad?’

  ‘I dunno. How’s yours?’

  ‘Cheeky. Come on. Wash hands. Lay table.’

  ‘Can I have Coke?’

  ‘Will it help your homework?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do it then, and get me a beer.’

  After supper he talked her through the experiment to prove starch production in leaves, amazed that he could still remember the details of it. They set it up on one of the houseplants, wrapping a leaf in a piece of silver foil out of which LUCY had been carefully cut with kitchen scissors. Then he watched as she drew a few diagrams and a flow chart before leaving her at the kitchen table to write it up while he slipped upstairs to use her computer.

  It was a sad addiction but a harmless one. Like a lot of men, he suspected, married and single, his first weeks of being connected to the Internet had passed in a dazed frenzy of porn. Apart from a few dog-eared pictures passed around at school and college, he had little experience of smutty pictures in printed form, having never overcome his fear of handing a magazine across the counter or being caught leafing through one in Smith’s. The Internet was crammed with them, catering to every taste, from glossily professional to touchingly amateur. There were even live women, as it were, jerkily posing and shifting in front of cameras in their own homes.

  He wanted contact however. Before long he realised that the parade of unattainable, anonymous breasts and groins, lust-stupid, wet-lipped pouts and proffered parts and, worse, the plastic technology he needed to summon them, only emphasized that he was on his own. He still found that the odd flirty chat with one of the nice, well-informed girls in Cornwall Farmers gave him a more lasting fulfilment. Porn had such a limited repertoire and so few ingredients, which of course was why it could answer a specific need with such accuracy, but conversation excited because it was less predictable and left room for emotional as well as erotic fantasy.

  He had been wary of chat rooms at first, being half-ignorant of the technology involved and fearing they might require actual talking. Once he understood what they were, thanks to a remark by the diesel delivery man, there was no stopping him. He went online for two or more hours a night.

  There were as many chat rooms as there were topics for discussion, but it was amazing how many of the tapped-in conversations soon came down to sex. He had been to sites connected with farming, with history, with Cornwall, even suicide and in all of them, sooner or later, established that a person he was talking to was a woman and horny. There was a limit to what could be done with words but it was still wilder than mere pictures and he came away sensing he had been given a glimpse of someone’s deeper wishes. He had been left feeling not quite so alone.

  After a while he had given up pretending and headed straight for a chat room about love, in other words sex. It was called, with breathtaking originality, lonesometonight.co.uk. You gave yourself a name when you logged on and he enjoyed being different people. John the fireman with the big hose, Peter the carpenter with a woody, Jud the butcher who liked the feel of flesh beneath his hands, and so on.

  He had become a very fast two-finger typist.

  He had soon guessed that he was not the only one being someone he wasn’t, subtracting years, adding inches, changing job, name, hair colour with a few blithe key strokes. Few of the women could be the curvaceous, tanned, devil-may-care temptresses they said they were or they’d have too much of a social life to be spending an evening with a computer. Some would be plain. Some would be married. Some might be old enough to be his mother. Some might be scared of meeting people in the flesh. Some might not even be women. It did not matter. They would never meet and their words and fantasies combined to flatter and fulfil each other.

  Then one day a woman he had been chatting to, who had described herself as a size 8 and billed herself as Tina, a voracious, twenty-something brunette who liked two-on-ones and having her insteps licked by a man with a day’s growth of beard and hands with engine grime around the nails, broke through the glass barrier between them. Breaking all the unwritten rules, she had stopped halfway through telling him how she’d like it if he’d handle her just after stripping a truck engine and left grimy fingerprints all over her full but still pert breasts.

  Suddenly she typed, Oh sod it. My name’s Janet. I’m a size 12 and a mother of three under-8s. I’m 38, bored as fuck and living in Hayle.

  He had been so startled he typed back that he was Pearce, not a black mechanic from Detroit but a white farmer from West Penwith and just turned 40. She had asked him where he went to school and they had established that her clever younger brother had gone to Humphrey Davy too, but only after it had stopped being a grammar school. A cousin of his had taught RE at her school. A distant cousin. He had asked about her children. She had asked about his farm. He had found himself telling her about his dead parents, about Molly’s marriage and how her husband had been ruined by buying too many pigs and getting into debt during the BSE crisis, about how he loved children, how he was babysitting his niece as they typed.

  What about you? he had typed. What do you like doing?

  TV she had said, Lots of TV, which depressed him until he remembered she had small children. And I go dancing at The Barn when I get the chance, which is about once a year, but…it makes me feel ancient until I’ve had a few.

  38’s a very sexy age, he had typed back daringly. You know a thing or two. You know what you want.

  Yeah, she had responded. That’s easy for a 40-year-old to say. Sorry. Gotta go. C U.

  He had told her too much and scared her off. And she had regretted being so open and grown inhibited. He had logged onto the site punctiliously for the last ten days or so looking for Tina3Way among the usual suspects but she was never there. Either she had changed her moniker or she had given up and switched to a different chat room entirely, regretting her honesty. Try as he might, he suddenly found he could muster no interest in anyone else, in Lulu or Sabina or Greasemonkey or Hotlips and their predictable come-ons soon turned to surly defensiveness when he failed to respond. For all that they were sparing themselves, hiding behind false names and artificial language, the chat room now felt as bleak and humiliating as any singles night in a half-empty bar. Lonesome Tonight indeed.

  When he logged on this evening he meant only to check his e-mails. But one of these was from Billy Pender with a query about the next day’s cattle auction and how many lots Pearce was interested in. To answer it he had to stay online a little longer to visit the auctioneer’s website and online catalogue. He noted down the lot numbers, e-mailed Billy back the response then lingered just a little too long and found himself tapping in www.lonesometonight.co.uk.

  She was there.

  Janet? he typed. He guessed that by using her real name he could gauge immediately how she felt now about their early honesty.

  There was a pause. She had forgotten his name. Of course she had.

  Pearce? How RU?

  Fine. How RU, Janet?

  Never better. Hot. Wet. What RU wearing?

  He paused. So that was how it was going to be.

  Just got in from the garage, he typed. Oily overalls. Nothing much underneath.

  Buttons or zip?

  Buttons. Rubber buttons. Most of them are missing. U?

  Black negligee. Red lace knickers.

  Bra?

  No. 2 hot. That feels good. Cup me from behind. R your hands dirty?

  Filthy. I’m leaving fingerprints all over you and I don’t care. Janet?

  What? What are you doing now?

  Giving you my mobile number, he typed. And logging off. I hate this.

  He typed in the phone number before he had time for second thoughts, then logged off and switched off the computer before he had a chance to see if she logged off too or simply started chat
ting to someone else.

  He stepped out onto the landing to listen out for Lucy. He heard gunshots and the whinnying of frightened horses so knew her homework was finished. She was the only girl he had ever known who liked Westerns. It was not something she shared with mates – Westerns were not cool like horror films – but a private obsession. At ten she was already a connoisseur. She had acquired the taste off Morris who was a country-and-western fan, but had gone far beyond him. For Morris, cowboy culture was essentially a sentimental construct and a way to meet women. For his daughter, Westerns by John Ford or Howard Hawks were almost sacred texts, tough lessons in morality and honour undiluted by romance.

  Her uncle had taken up where her father left off. Pearce kept a little card in his wallet listing the films she had on video or DVD so he could know when to buy a rarity for her collection. He always approached the films with a slight feeling of dread, fearing that their limited, masculine stories would be as dry as their settings, then found himself surprised by the beauty of the cinematography or the archetypal power of the storylines. Red River remained a favourite of his because of the cattle-driving scenes but he occasionally had great heroic dreams in which he was riding into the sunset with a woman in a Quakerish Grace Kelly bridal gown.

  It took him a second or two to realise his mobile was ringing because its unfamiliar pop jingle tone was competing with the noise of the shootout from the TV. He had to run downstairs to the kitchen to snatch it from his denim jacket.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Pearce?’ she whispered.

  ‘Janet?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why are you whispering?’

  ‘Er…kids are asleep.’

  ‘Oh.’ He pictured her in an old-fashioned nursery with brass bedsteads and a rocking horse, an eroticised Mrs Darling. ‘Do you want me to call you back? This’ll be costing.’