There's a message in the bottle

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Feb 23, 2008 

His house was a small one, right next door to ours. While ours was big and Victorian and set back from the road, his was a bungalow with just a small amount of front garden, gravelled over to make a space to park just one car. I remember the parking space especially because, a while before the man moved in, my younger sister found a three-penny piece on the pavement and picked it up and placed it on this car. And a really cross woman with fair hair and glasses immediately came storming out of the house and said, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" and we ran away, literally trembling.

Looking back, though, I wonder about this memory. First, I say a three-penny piece but it could in fact have been a 1p or 2p piece. I'm not sure how old we were at the time - 10 and eight? 12 and 10? - and whether this was before or after decimalisation. And, second, who exactly was the woman?

If she was our neighbour, then we must surely have known her. My parents must have known her. And if we knew her, then why would she come storming out like that? Why would she be so furious with us? In our village, the grown-ups were all good friends. Sometimes they went to the pub together and sometimes they had affairs or ran off with each other's wives - but that's another story and not the one I'm telling here.

I don't really wonder about why my sister put the coin on the car, though. That's simple. In those days, stuff like that was just what we did. At a loose end all summer long, we wandered the village in shorts and T-shirts and flip-flops, looking out for adventure, just waiting for something to happen. And if you saw something lying there, something that might belong to someone else, you picked it up and put it where they might find it. And, having found this coin glinting in front of our neighbour's house, well, the car seemed as good a place as any to put it.

She didn't leave it there. She only placed it for a quick second, the coin on the bonnet, her plump, little-girl fingers still hovering over it.

And we probably did giggle for a moment. But not because we meant any harm. Just - well, because. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Did she really swear at us or have I made that bit up?

Fury was all around us in that place. There was the farmer who waved a stick at us when he saw us on his land. The man in the tractor who yelled when we strayed off the footpath. The lady at the post office who was visibly annoyed when we counted out the candy shrimps and penny chews we bought with our pocket money, laboriously, by hand.

The bungalow was ugly and squat with a closed-up face, its blinds always drawn, its door shabby and in need of a lick of paint. But we didn't think this then. This is the adult me, looking back.

I don't know when the man moved in. It's possible, now I think of it, that he had something to do with the angry woman. Maybe they lived there together and then got divorced and he ended up there alone? Certainly I remember him as a single kind of man - grey-haired, balding, morose. I recall his name, too, but because of what happened to him I'm not going to write it here.

I remember going in the house once. He invited us. I remember his kitchen - some yellowish paper stuck to the cupboards, a lonely single man's sink with washing up piled in it. I remember standing there and having the feeling, as I glanced back at our big, warm, safe house, that I always got when I saw my own home from a strange new angle: unnerved, disorientated, swervy.

In my memory, I feel that the man offered us a drink of milk or juice or something and in my memory I see him drinking whisky. I see him chatting to us and either pouring it and drinking it in front of us or else I remember the familiar detritus of a whisky drinker. The bottle on the table, the empty glass from the night before.

But even now I'm doubting this memory. Because I know my own father's drink was whisky. And because I know he was weaving in and out of its clutches when, so many years after all this, he managed to kill himself. That could well be why I'm now conjuring it as the drink of this poor man.

Sitting here, trying to write the truth is difficult. Again and again I slip back into a gulf that contains nothing but the car, the coin, my giggling little sister and the angry lady. A summer's day long ago - long before the man even moved in, maybe?

I could tell you that the grey-haired man eventually shot himself and that I clearly remember the day it happened. But I'm not sure that would be true. I think it would be a lie. I know that he did - because I was told, because the fact is in my head - but I remember nothing really except what I've written here.