THE SITE

"Where are we, Dad? Where are we going, Dad? What's it going to be like when we get there, Dad?"

Once, the questions had been genuine, and required answers. Now, they were part of his "child-act". He wasn't quite sure why he put it on. Partly to amuse. The question was: whom? His parents? Or himself? Or was it just a way of saying something indirectly that he didn't really dare utter out loud: you're treating me like a child; I'm older than this, much older than this, and I'm going back to when I was eight years old to tell you so. Eight. Or maybe even seven. He couldn't be sure. Was his memory going already? That didn't bode well for the A-levels next summer. What was it? Lead in the petrol? Or the wrong breakfast cereal? He'd have to read the packets more carefully next time he went round the supermarket. Rosemary, that's for remembrance. But he didn't think they put herbs in cornflakes.

"Come on, Simon, tell the lad, how far's the site?"

She'd taken to calling him Simon now. Before, it had been Dad. Mum, and Dad, and Baby. Then Mum and Dad and Eggfroth, because he couldn't pronounce his own name properly. (And why should he have? Wasn't it enough to expect a two-year-old to communicate in words at all, let alone difficult ones, old ones, abdicated kings' ones - though he'd never actually asked why they called him that.) Later on, it was Ted. Sometimes his mother called him Edu, said he was an enigma, and laughed. His Dad called him Eddie, or Edison when he'd been struggling with General Science homework - thank goodness that was over and done with! - and at school he preferred plain Ed. It sounded vaguely transatlantic and just a little bit cool. Cooler than George, anyway, who was his best friend.

"Which site?" said his father, nosing the motor-home out a fraction on a dangerous bend, as if he meant to overtake. His wife gripped his arm, part in terror, to prevent it, part to inspire confidence if he went ahead. "The Site of Special Scientific Interest? The Archaeological Site? The Site for Sore Eyes?"

"The Caravan Site, Dad," said Eddie, stuck in the back, tossed from side to side, feeling sick, competing with the dogs for a decent place to sit. Josher growled at him when he got too near her bone, and Cosher just stuck to her position, like a cross between super-glue and Mahatma Gandhi on a non-violent protest.

She hated it when he started making puns. It was a sign that he'd switched into Superior Mode, which generally meant he was feeling insecure about something. And she'd gone to such trouble to make this a special holiday. After all, he was going to be fifty in October, and she wasn't quite sure how he was going to take it, or whether he'd feel resentful that she was only just entering her forties. The dogs had had to come, of course. They'd been left at home too often in earlier years, when the human part of the family had gone abroad for a skimped fortnight, driving like mad to the Dordogne or the Massif Central or even Provence, in a succession of clapped-out Saabs with a leaking tent screwed up in the boot. The only time in the year that he relaxed enough for proper love-making, and she had to share the sagging and smelly plastic domicile with their solitary offspring, sweet though he was. This, she had decided, was the last year he was coming with them, especially now she'd succeeded in getting the motor-home. She deserved a life as well. Edward, if he had known, would have agreed with her.

"Jan, look it up in the book." He'd decided to sound masterful. What a pain in the bum! Even if she loved him, she couldn't resist the sarcasm.

"Oooh, listen, Eddie, that's the reet Derby coming out, y'know yer Dad's from oop 'ere, don't tha?"

"Jan, I can't allow you to mislead the boy with that appalling imitation."

"Come on, Simon, you can't do the real thing any more, either - you deliberately suppressed it for good and all when you were doing teaching practice in Southall!"

"I have, it is true, accommodated my pronunciation to Southern Ways, as you would only expect from someone who was trained in Drama - "

"Give over - you're a sucking-up time-server, and you know it! Where are your flat a's? You'd talk about a clorth carp if you thought it'd get you a headship!"

She loved teasing him. It made him more real when he had to defend himself. Most of the time he had things too easy. It made him fat and slothful and self-contented, and he was better than that.

"Look, Jan, I did research on the dialects in this area, I interviewed people and I wrote down the folk-tales they told me - "

"Straight out of the Sunday People, I bet - you're telling me this lot have preserved any kind of independent rural culture?"

"Some - some - ghost stories mostly. Sometimes even fairies - "

"Not just the dead-granny-in-the-boot-of-the-stolen-car urban myth?"

"No - it tended to be stealing away young men - the discontented ones, anyway, the ones on the edge of puberty."

"Dad, what about the site?"

"Look it up, Jan, we must be getting close."

Something had changed, something in the light. The clouds were beginning to pile up, on top of a more substantial greyness dead ahead of them that must be the Peak District. It felt thundery. It felt mountainous. The Midland Plain was gone. Something wasn't quite right. Even the dogs were looking up from their bone and their grooming. Unless they just knew it was time for dinner.

"In the grounds of an old Manor House. There's a wood where we can walk the dogs."

The dogs looked up at the word walk. As the vehicle didn't slow or turn, they went back to their silent tasks.

"What about the people who lived in the Manor House, Dad, what became of them?"

"Away with the fairies," said his Mum, under her breath.

"I don't know, Eddie. They probably just became impoverished like us and had to sell up. It happened a lot. There wasn't the money in agriculture, unless you were a really big landowner. Even so, a lot of them gave up the struggle, too, and left the house to the National Trust."

Eddie knew the words. They meant boredom. Boredom and picture books they expected him to colour, and sheets of daft questions they expected him to find out the answers to, when nobody really cared and they were all written down in the guide-book anyway. If they'd let him slide down the bannisters of the Great Staircase (when he'd been younger, of course - much younger), that would have been another thing entirely. But there were ropes to stop you. Otherwise, there was only the smell of places that had been lived in once and weren't any more.

There was no trouble finding the place, Dad didn't clip the wing on the sharp turn in, and there was no row about where they should park. Eddie was glad about that. He hated rows. He was so grateful, that he offered to do dinner while they walked the dogs. He'd had enough of pulling Josher away from interesting smells and getting Cosher to move at all.

When they came back, there was a glint in his mother's eye that indicated he'd done the right thing. She urged him to go for a walk before the light went. She and Dad would do the washing-up. Why didn't he look in at the club-house and have a drink? No one would question his age - after all, he'd be eighteen at Christmas...

He took the hint. But the club-house was grim. He peered in through the window. They were all over sixty. The beers were really naff - nothing on hand-pump or out of a real barrel. And the more he listened, the more he suspected they were playing Bingo. Or it might have been a bizarre local form of karaoke.

The light hadn't quite gone, so he thought he'd have a look at the wood, walking carefully to avoid the piles of dog-poo - Josher was always particularly prolific. He hadn't gone far in, before he saw a girl beckoning to him. She must have been about his age. Total wish-fulfilment. He could see the whole outline of her body against the setting sun as it streamed in broken rays between the trees. Her breasts were high and tight. He thought he could see her nipples, hard little bumps against the smooth, thin cloth of her dress. She was even more exciting than the pictures in those magazines he hid at the back of his wardrobe. He was embarrassed, and hoped the growing darkness would hide his spontaneous response.

They chatted about the area, sitting there on brick steps leading up to a kind of shallow pond that looked like a baby swimming-pool. She told him about walks and climbs and caves that they could explore together. Then she offered him some food. It looked funny. He didn't know why, but it did. Seeds of some kind - too small and black for the sunflower seeds his Mum had eaten night and day when she was on the health-kick a couple of years ago - more like the kiwi seeds or the passion-fruit seeds that turned up in those exotic but disastrous recipes when she did the cooking-course - he said no thank-you, as politely as he knew how, and wondered if he'd ever get his hands on her. He knew the theory, of course, but he'd never had the chance to put it into practice. It was quite dark now, so he'd have to do it all by feel. Still, she didn't seem to be wearing a bra, so that should make it easier.

Then her mother chipped in. A bit of a shock, really, since he hadn't seen her before, and he wasn't sure she'd be in agreement with what he wanted to do to her daughter. But somehow she seemed even sexier, the way she leant over him, offering him fruit and some little round cakes she said she'd just baked. What was even more disturbing - she reminded him of his mother. Not anything precise, but the manner. And maybe the scent.

The cakes. The fruit. The seeds. Why did they want him to eat? He was wondering where she could have baked the cakes. Most vans only had a grill, not an oven. He asked them where they lived, and they pointed towards the manor house that he could see down the hill. It was dark. It didn't look lived in. Not for a long, long time. He didn't want to meet their gaze. That was why he looked into the water of the pond on whose edge he sat. That was where he saw their reflections. They were old, both of them. Wrinkled. Wizened. Shrivelled, like that orange from last Christmas he'd found under the settee. He couldn't have told them apart. He told them he had to go. They protested, and stretched out their arms to hold him. He turned his back, and then he couldn't feel them any more. Without looking round, he walked back to the motor-home.

The door was locked. He hadn't got a key. He could hear noises from inside. He sat on the step, pressing his hands over his ears, trying not to listen to the noises from inside or the voices he thought he could hear calling to him from the wood. When everything was still inside the van, he tapped quietly at the door. His mother opened it, her dressing-gown wrapped loosely round her. His father was snoring loudly.

"Don't worry," she said, "he's always like that afterwards, I've got used to it." Then she noticed that his teeth were chattering and his face was white. He was supposed to be sleeping in a sleeping-bag on the floor, while his parents had the ample bed at the back, six by six, if it was an inch. The dogs had already abandoned their allotted positions on the front seats to take advantage of the unwonted space.

"Tell me about it in the morning," she said, hugging him close to her. They lay down together, nudging the reluctant dogs out of the way. The stiffness and tension went out of him, and he began to sob quietly, but his mother still held him, to keep him warm, as she had when he was five, with pneumonia and a temperature of a hundred and four.

He woke up in that curious filtered light you get through the blinds in a motor-home. It was hard to tell the time, but the dogs were already awake and seeing to their morning toilette. He knew his duty. He slipped on his shoes, being otherwise fully-clothed, and summoned them with a quiet click of the fingers for their morning walk.

The grass was damp and beautiful as the individual drops of dew hung on it. He didn't mind if it was ruining his suede shoes. Josher and Cosher were drinking in the smells as if it were a wine-tasting. They came to the wood. This time, the sun was shining into it, revealing it, not shining through it and blinding him. He saw the brick steps where he'd sat the previous night. There was a tree growing out of them. Where the pond had been there was plain earth, scuffed by rabbits, with a couple of crisp packets and a crushed Coke can. Cosher splayed her rear legs and did a very careful and authoritatve piece of marking on one of the crisp packets, while Josher made repeated impressions of her dental pattern on the Coke can. The magic had gone.

Even before he reached the van, he smelt the coffee. Normally, they only had time for it at weekends. He knocked boldy, opened the door without waiting for an answer, and unleashed the dogs to put their damp footprints all over the bedding.

"Dad," he said, "we don't have to stay here tonight, do we?"

"Jan?" asked his father, proprietorially occupying the doorway.

His mother stood on tiptoe, to peep over his father's shoulder. "If that's what Edward wants, that's what we do - he's a paid-up member of the family, after all."

From somewhere inside, the dogs barked their agreement.

Mike Rogers

27.vii.98

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