The Sun Road

MARTIN & PAUL

Leicester 1969 They are two small boys walking down the street. One would come up to your waist and the other up to your thighs. In slow, tired moments the littler of the two might reach and place a hand on your leg for support, as if you were a tree. The heat and light pressure of his small palm would work through your trousers and you would probably reach down to ruffle a head, your hand covering from the front to the back of their scalp, like some everyday priest. The two of them feel warm and wriggly--their faces are still pudgy--and on your lap, in your arms, they squirm like animals flattening grass or treading down earth, making a cave out of your embrace.

When undressed they are smooth and grabbable, their flesh moulded around soft developing bones. Sometimes their mother thinks their limbs could be snapped, that Paul's thin wrist could easily be bended to a wrong angle and splintered inside, like a bird's wing.

Martin is older and a little taller. He walks with purpose while Paul still seems to be dawdling in childhood, paddling his hands through the air of a stirring, chaotic world.

They are only little, and dressed in brightly coloured clothes. Martin chattering, on their way to the swimming pool, Paul stumble-walking, with one hand stretched out ahead, as ever, high and far to an adult. It's a wonder one arm isn't longer than the other. Paul has dark hair in a pudding-bowl cut, browner skin than his brother, a stubby nose and glistening eyes, and as he is pulled along almost side-ways on, he registers passers-by with an oblique stare. He doesn't much like swimming, so he is in no hurry.

Martin is in a hurry, though. He is fairer and prone to allergies, eczema and agitation. He doesn't sleep very well and sometimes he wets the bed. He doesn't know why, only that it's inappropriate. He is a big boy now and yet he is constantly assuaged by some urgent desire, to pee, to cough, to itch, to cry. He tries to dodge them, to pre-empt the urges; leaving the table before he's finished his tea, checking out the shallow end of the pool for bombers, climbing in carefully before anyone teases him to dive. Bombing is not allowed, but like so many things (swearing, spitting, shouting, stealing) people do it anyway. Is it not allowed because so many people are doing it already? So many that the ones like him, who are bound to do as they are told, must be bound to good behaviour. Someone must behave, he supposes.

They reach the local baths, which have only been open since the start of the year. Their Dad, Gavin, holds the door open for the two of them, ushering them with grand movements through the arch beneath his right arm. As if he had just marched a whole orphanage of the things over from China, thinks the woman behind the counter. Gavin likes being a Dad. He likes the noise and value of it, and he loves their trust and their big clear eyes. In them he can go back to the beginning again and create friendly worlds of talking animals and happy planets.

"One adult and two children," he says, pulling a small leather purse for change out of his summer jacket pocket.

"Five bob altogether," she says and he counts out the coins in front of her. She slides them noisily off the counter, long red nails scraping the surface and, when she's done, looks under her fringe at the half-moon face and curled hands sitting on top of her counter. She winks at Paul and his eyelids lift in surprise, as if he'd just seen a shooting star.





Gavin herds them through the reception into the men's changing rooms. Unlike the swimming pools of his youth, you don't change in curtained cubicles round the edges of the pool--unpeeling your pants below the strip of material, like some bawdy seaside postcard. Here you have silver lockers with keys, and wooden cubicles with doors, as well as a central changing area for schools and groups--and families.

But Martin has other ideas. He likes the privacy of the stained teak cubicles, it's warm and cosy, possibly even a little smelly, but it feels like a very safe place to get undressed in. It even has a lock.

"You don't want to go in there, Martin," says his father. "We'll be ready in two tics. Come on, son." He reaches out for Martin's shoulder but the boy flinches away and locks himself in the teak cabinet. Gavin sighs and sees himself as a big fat man in a changing room with a scared son who'd rather not be near him. He looks at Paul slowly undoing his laces. He is concentrating very hard. "Sometimes," Paul says, in a considered way, as his father takes over, "I think things are harder to un-do than do-up." His sensible brown lace-ups are very scuffed, gone beige and bulbous at the toe. They used to seem ever so long, great flappy things at the end of his feet, but now they are tight and grubby like Chinese bandages. His mother would have put him in his new summer sandals, which are two bands of sharp-edged pale blue leather, but Gavin thinks they make the boy look like a girl.