Our Saturdays

My brother Andrew chased rogue commas for a living from his studio flat in Hackney. In the winter, he complained about the cold; in the summer, he was locked in a bitter row with the heat. The autumn was too wet. He sometimes found the spring bearable.

No one ever saw him on a weekday – weekdays were for work. I imagined that he spent the day torturing manuscripts, punishing their authors over missing prepositions, and thoroughly enjoying that business with the em dashes.

Each Saturday morning, we’d meet for coffee at a Nero on the edge of Victoria Park.

“You know, James, the dew point today might break a fifty-year record for January,” he said on one especially muggy occasion, raising his voice against the clatter of North London’s early-morning caffeine rush.

“Yeah, sure,” I replied while checking my phone. Helen had just gone on maternity leave at thirty-five weeks, and we were going back and forth on whether ‘Beth’ or ‘Lizzy’ would be a better diminutive for the baby.

Andrew said something about the coast.

“Yeah, sure,” I said again.

Or maybe it was something about coasting along.

“I’ll be glad to have you over, of course,” Andrew said.

“Huh?” The work WhatsApp group was buzzing over some impending merger.

“I’ve resigned from my position at Perkins and Perkins,” he repeated, “and I’m moving to Great Barnham.”

“Where on earth is that? And when?”

“Tomorrow. It’s on the south coast.”

I had many questions. Chief among them: why?

“Perkins and Perkins offered me a promotion,” he said, as if that explained anything aside from his lack of ambition.

Mum and Dad hadn’t been told: sudden life changes were best announced gradually. Nothing should ever remind them, no matter how slightly, of the time that Andrew had vanished into the New Forest on the eve of his wedding. The search party found him four days later. He was holed up near a brook where we counted tadpoles as children, largely fine if a bit peckish. When his long-suffering fiancée broke up with him that night, he was a picture of equanimity. Our parents, however, never shed their contagious fear of losing him for good. It was then that I started meeting Andrew more regularly.

It was also why, if he hadn’t told our parents that he’d quit his job, I wasn’t about to either. As it turns out, he’d only just broken the news to his landlord. Away from London, he planned to go freelance, which he assured me was less risky than it sounded. It was worth it, he said, to tune out the noise – or tune into the noise, I didn’t catch which.

“You’ll still visit, right?” he asked, now apprised of all my reservations. “It would be a real shame if you didn’t.”

“You’ll have to move farther than that if you want rid of me,” I said, prompting a smile.

The next day, he was off to Great Barnham, a parish near the town of Cramwell and a few miles beyond the coastal hamlets of Yondip and Newton.

⁂

We didn’t see each other for seven weeks. When I finally reached Great Barnham, I was hollowed out by merger madness at work, new-baby nights at home, and tube strikes in the middle.

His thatched-roof cottage was at one end of the village, separated from its neighbours by a farmer’s access track. It still said ‘To Let’. Inside, the dimly-lit interior smelled of dead plants even though none were in sight. Andrew’s coffee was cheap instant granules scalded by twice-boiled water, and mine came in the thinnest of mugs taken from a cardboard box labelled ‘Kitchen’. In his Hackney flat, the only piece of furniture that had been his was a small wooden desk. It was nowhere in sight, so we drank hunched over a badly scratched laminate worktop.

“I’ve joined the parish council,” he announced, blowing across the steam. “They have the most fascinating debates. Did you know that it really matters if the footpath to Newton is called the Barnham-to-Newton way or the Newton-to-Barnham way?”

I shook my head slowly, anticipating one of his digressions.

“The order tells you about the destination: you wouldn’t walk the Newton-to-Barnham way unless Barnham was worth the trouble. You can’t make a mistake about something like that.”

“Are you ever going to unpack?” I asked, stumbling over another box on the way to the empty living room. “Or buy furniture?”

“The thing is,” he continued, “if you were just out for a nice walk, you wouldn’t really care if you ended up in Newton or in Barnham. So I told them that we should call it something else altogether.”

There was another half-hour of this. When we were kids, I’d once locked him in a cupboard for lecturing me on medieval marginalia, and I felt a compulsion to do it again.

“Look, I’ve come a bloody long way to see you,” I said. “Is there anything to do in Barnham, or are we just going to stand in the dark and talk nonsense?”

He gave me one of his quizzical looks. “Grab your coat,” he said.

We climbed up to Newton along the Newton-to-Barnham Way (or Barnham-to-Newton Way). Of course, there was nothing to do in Newton: just the bracing gusts of early spring that buffeted us in places where dormant hedgerows parted to empty fields or lonely houses all rendered in white. We retraced our steps in silence.

In spite of that, I travelled to Great Barnham when the trains were running and Helen could get by without me, which now meant every other Saturday.

⁂

Andrew only lasted a month on the parish council: the naming debate was a one-off and their other activities were not quite so interesting. As a result, he couldn’t show his face at the pub for some time, but he didn’t seem to mind. After all, he said, he hadn’t enlisted for their company.

He bought a sofa. Our conversations were varied and one-sided.

“Do you know the difference between an English semicolon and a Greek upper dot?”

No, I did not.

“Mayflies have been around for three hundred million years. Mayflies! Can you imagine how many mayflies must have been born in three hundred million years?”

And so on. Once, I expressed boredom.

“Get your coat,” he said, standing up with purpose. “I’ve discovered this magnificent thing that you ought to see.”

We walked along the Wherever-to-Wherever Way for a mile or so. There, he found a gap in a hedge, and we passed through thistle and briar, shielding our faces with the sleeves of our coats. On the fallow side of a barley field, we traced a drystone wall, following its bulging meanders into the woods.

The route we cut through the undergrowth was arduous. I was glad for the shade of ancient elms and a brisk spring breeze. Eventually, we reached a small glade furnished with dense mats of bluebells. At its center, there was a ruined stone shell of a building: a former barn or grain store of which only three drystone walls remained. Where the fourth should have been, a scraggy beech rose up, young and askew.

“Isn’t that just magnificent?” he said, beaming.

I was less enthused. “Isn’t trespassing a criminal offence?” I shouted after him.

Rather than answer my question, he planted himself next to the beech and stretched his hands upwards along its narrow trunk, still smiling. I wondered if this sort of scene was why he moved to Barnham in the first place, but there were plenty of ruined buildings about London, and it unsettled me that I didn’t understand his satisfaction.

⁂

In the months that followed, Andrew became his own barber. He received food deliveries at home and sold his car. The bike he bought to replace it remained chained to the same post, rusting. Scattered cardboard boxes were still his cupboards; even his walking shoes were kept in one by the front door.

Our conversations became increasingly mine. Andrew listened, gazing out the window, much like I used to do at Nero. I couldn’t help but think that, like me back then, he felt trapped by our commitment to spend our Saturdays together.

“Beth is teething again,” I said. “And Helen’s back at work, now.”

“How is she?”

“Hoping that she’ll still make partner after maternity leave. It’s tough to come back to that kind of career, you know.”

“Sure,” he replied absently. Then he gave me that quizzical look again. “Does she enjoy her work?”

“I suppose,” I answered. “We don’t talk about it much. When she’s a partner, it will be different, anyway.”

“What about you?”

“A job’s a job.”

“Do you get to spend enough time with Beth?”

“Never. She’s a different little person every day.”

He smiled at that.

As soon as I ran out of things to say, he’d take me someplace he’d uncovered in the midst of an errant ramble: most recently, the rusty carcass of an old school bus whose front grille had become a grassy, lilac patchwork of spring squills. Running his fingers over the drooping tepals that covered the top half of the license plate, he said the whole thing was like a kind of crossword puzzle. If it was, there weren’t any clues.

Without a doubt, his favourite discovery remained the ruined barn. Andrew delighted in telling me how, in the late afternoons, the sun shone through its small westerly window and projected a pink oblong onto the trunk of the beech tree. By the full light of day, if you looked hard enough, you could just about see where this had weathered and lightened the bark. It must have taken him a long time to notice that.

I found myself wanting to stretch out my time in Barnham to observe this phenomenon first-hand, which meant swapping my usual midday train for the evening service.

⁂

One Saturday night, as I waited in Cramwell for a connection to London, the departure board updated to a single row that read ‘cancelled’. As I soon discovered, there were no later trains. I’d be forced to overnight in Barnham with my reluctant host.

We ate microwave lasagne on the sofa in silence. His two-seater being far too short, Andrew then helped me assemble a mattress out of old coats and sofa cushions. He retired early, but I saw light filtering from under his bedroom door late into the night.

On this jury-rigged bed, far from the familiar drone of nighttime traffic, I slept only in short stretches. When the sun came up, my back reminded me that I was forty-four, and three unread text messages from Helen reminded me that I was wanted back home. We ate cereal in silence. The only time that Andrew smiled was when my taxi arrived.

The next Saturday, the trains did take me to Great Barnham, but he wasn’t home.

His front door was unlocked. Noticing that he’d left his phone on the kitchen counter, I helped myself to instant coffee and sipped it on the sofa, gazing out at a garden grown wild from the summer heat. Patches of nettles threatened to strangle untended, yellowed shrubs. Even the window had been colonised by a hairy branch of ivy that clung to its mullion. As I studied the underbelly of the ivy leaves, I saw that the smallest had only three lobes while the largest had five. That seemed like the sort of detail that Andrew would be delighted by.

My ears were just getting reacquainted with the stillness of Great Barnham when the honk of a car horn jolted me from this verdant trance. A taxi was here, waiting to return me to Cramwell. If I waited any longer, I’d have to spend the night again – no one wanted that.

Why wasn’t he there? When I finally made it back to our apartment in Camden, Helen guessed that he’d probably forgotten, but I knew him better than that. Andrew didn’t simply forget about commitments – he shed them like a fleece on a summer walk. I could never do that. Had I become a burden? Helen wanted to know what we did together, what we talked about. In the moment, all I could think of were the ivy leaves. She didn’t say anything, but I think she knew us well enough to understand.

⁂

When I returned two Saturdays later, there was still no sign of Andrew. Anticipating this possibility, I’d come equipped with an Ordnance Survey map on which I’d marked the probable location of the ruin with a red cross. The cardboard box where he kept his walking shoes was empty, so I set off with high hopes of finding him.

The midday sun was relentless and heat seemed to vent through every crack in the ground. Each bush concealed its own cloud of gnats and every one of these tiny grey dots seemed thirstier for my sweat than the last.

I had to retrace my steps twice to find the gap in the overgrown hedge. When I finally scraped myself through, regretting the choice of shorts over trousers, I lacerated the sides of my calves on outstretched hawthorns. One of the cuts bled freely. Having nothing to dress it with, I pressed the map onto it like gauze.

Creeping thistles, spear thistles, and yet more nettles filled the margins of the barley field. By the time I’d traversed its far side and fought my way into the woods, my lower legs were a mosaic of red patches, grazes, and abrasions.

Finally, among the gnarled trunks of the oaks and the ashes, the clearing appeared. As I approached the jagged outline of the barn and its slanted young beech, I surveyed the ruin for signs of Andrew. He was not there.

I called out for him as if he were a lost puppy. When that produced no result, I slumped down against the beech and my mind began to jump to all the unpleasant conclusions that I’d tried to repress. Then, it turned to what our parents would say. Had it been three or four weeks since I’d last seen him? Why hadn’t I tried to stop him from moving to Barnham? What else hadn’t I told them?

“James? What are you doing here?” said a familiar voice. In the westerly window of the barn, Andrew’s face appeared.

“You bloody idiot!” I yelled. Now that I knew he was fine, I just wanted to hurl my phone at him. “I thought something had happened to you.”

“Do you even know why you’re here? All you do is complain.”

In truth, I just wanted to sink into his sofa and quietly waste the afternoon away, alone. Maybe that was what he wanted, too.

“Do you know that the youngest ivy leaves on your window only have three lobes?” I asked by way of reply.

“Amazing, aren’t they?” He said and smiled. “It’s like they’re different little people every day.”