Maureen used to wear a sprig of blossom or an autumn leaf in the buttonhole of her dress. It must have been just after they were married. Sometimes, if there wasn’t a button, she’d slide it over her ear, and the petals would fall into her hair. It was almost funny. He hadn’t thought of that in years.
A car slowed and drew to a halt. It was so close Harold had to crush his body into the nettles. The window lowered. There was loud music, but he couldn’t see the faces. “Off to see your girlfriend, Granddad?” Harold gave a thumbs-up, waiting for the stranger to pass. His skin fizzed where it had been stung.
On he went, one foot in front of the other. Now that he accepted the slowness of himself, he took pleasure in the distance he covered. Far ahead the horizon was no more than a blue brushstroke, pale as water, and unbroken by houses or trees, but sometimes it blurred as if the land and the sky had bled into one another and become matching halves of the same thing. He passed two vans, nose to nose, their drivers arguing over which of them should reverse to a passing point. His body ached for food. He thought of the breakfast he had not eaten and his stomach twisted.
At the California Cross junction, Harold stopped for an early pub lunch and chose two rounds of ready-made cheese sandwiches from a basket. Three men coated in plaster dust, like ghosts, were discussing a house they were renovating. A few other drinkers glanced up from their pints, but this had never been his patch, and thankfully he knew no one. Harold carried his lunch and lemonade to the door, blinking at the onslaught of light as he stepped out into the beer garden. Lifting the glass to his mouth, a swell of saliva pooled his tongue, and when he dug his teeth into the sandwiches, the nuttiness of the cheese and the sweetness of the bread exploded on to his taste buds with such vigour it was as if he had never eaten before.
As a boy, he tried to chew without noise. His father didn’t like to hear him masticate. Sometimes he said nothing, only held his ears and closed his eyes, as if the boy were a pain inside his head; other times he said Harold was a dirty beggar. “Takes one to know one,” his mother would answer, screwing out a cigarette. It was nerves, he heard a neighbour say. The war had made people funny. And sometimes as a boy he had wanted to touch his father; to stand close beside him and know the feeling of an adult arm around his shoulder. He had wanted to ask what happened before he was born, and why his father’s hands trembled when he reached for his glass.
“That boy’s staring at me,” said his father sometimes. His mother would swipe his knuckles, not hard but as if she were brushing off a fly, and say, “Leave off, sonny. Go and play outside.”