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ing’s Mill i This is the then I stand in now: a map of Mansfield to Sutton far as Derbyshire pinned up on a wall. Here’s the A38, a three-mile missed-bus walk back from The Crown with its weed and coolest juke box (‘See Emily Play’, ‘Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man’). The lake on it is King’s Mill reservoir (of not-for-drinking water) which my friend sailed, and I swam in once, Moon River after the exams and before the results, six of us ignoring the signs – the splash and gasp of it still. Twenty years later I walked its grey midweek round with my brother (this very clearly like a dream) and back to his locked ward, a year into the breakdown after Vera died. In our family we stay married. That other King’s Mill, the hospital, is marked here too. I remember its corridors, vending machines, the other machines, and Mum, still herself, though sometimes her dad had just left; and later my sister, those foam sticks of water I brought to her lips that couldn’t keep her alive. They all lived here in time, another brother though only briefly, quite suddenly dying of pneumonia, the old man’s friend – when I arrived, breathless, the cousin I asked which ward told me with a smile the morgue, and I never thought to hit him till now, and still don’t really, dead these days as he is too. Map on a wall I take down, like moving home, clearing out. 13
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ii In its folds, Skegby to Hardwick, and on the back through Sherwood to Newstead. There’s Byron’s gaff with my dad in a home a mile from it next door. In one of those lucid moments (‘Should you go, Tony?’) he let himself be taken. I visited just once, with all the time in the world, though I ran past it through the forest all the time with Sutton Harriers. More than dad I remember the paths that follow under leaf sky, the days when I was good enough to make up the numbers on their cinder track, in that proud non-descript vest. A coincidence it was their social club for my sister’s Ruby wedding. How flat a map is, coming down, coming to this end, despite the contours, which flourish, which break out, pastoral or at any rate not built up. White desert of a colliery. And with it, what that’s come to mean, which once was the rumble of our Johnno delivering coal on the QT at eleven at night, the fire banked-up for Steve Davies on the telly, or the classmate met shocking in the precinct: me one year into college and him ten years older from the pit at Teversal. 14

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ing’s Mill i

This is the then I stand in now: a map of Mansfield to Sutton far as Derbyshire pinned up on a wall. Here’s the A38, a three-mile missed-bus walk back from The Crown with its weed and coolest juke box (‘See Emily Play’, ‘Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man’). The lake on it is King’s Mill reservoir (of not-for-drinking water) which my friend sailed, and I swam in once, Moon River after the exams and before the results, six of us ignoring the signs – the splash and gasp of it still. Twenty years later I walked its grey midweek round with my brother (this very clearly like a dream) and back to his locked ward, a year into the breakdown after Vera died. In our family we stay married. That other King’s Mill, the hospital, is marked here too. I remember its corridors, vending machines, the other machines, and Mum, still herself, though sometimes her dad had just left; and later my sister, those foam sticks of water I brought to her lips that couldn’t keep her alive. They all lived here in time, another brother though only briefly, quite suddenly dying of pneumonia, the old man’s friend – when I arrived, breathless, the cousin I asked which ward told me with a smile the morgue, and I never thought to hit him till now, and still don’t really, dead these days as he is too. Map on a wall I take down, like moving home, clearing out.

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