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Vietnam |
by Will Chadwick
His grandmother had always liked the colour green. Not particularly pretty greens, but anything that was green. No one else in the family really liked the colour green, probably because of her near tasteless devotion to it. She seemed indiscriminately to like things: furniture, curtains, bedspreads, tablecloths and seat covers that were an ugly sort of green.
Sitting cramped in the back of the 'bus, V realised that the countryside through which he was travelling was, essentially, green. It was, however, a foreign green sensation. The way the light lazily played through the trees and undergrowth and danced on the ground, as naked feet on hot sand, seemed somehow familiar. It wasn't green like his grandmother's house, but a kind of lush, dense green. Albeit there were unsightly little towns and houses and stalls everywhere—blots on the landscape, marring the natural beauty—but the countryside was green. He didn't know why this made him think of his grandmother, because the landscape was a likeable green: a beautiful, seemingly untamed green, unlike his grandmother's sown, man-made green.
Normally, this much green would have given V a headache, especially the way he was feeling. The idea of green reminded him of his grandmother's dimly-lit, sickly-green house: it was anathema to him, but the way the morning sunlight bounced off the bobbing branches combined with the playful guitar chords in his ears to create a hazy warm feeling. He was enjoying the fruits of his own forward thinking, squashed into the tiny seat on this 'bus. In the drunken haze in which he had awoken, he had struck upon the ingenious idea of bringing along his personal stereo for the 'bus ride (he had drunk too much the night before whilst playing pool with someone from Streatham). The song playing was called 'Sit Down' by a band called James. They had released a 'Best Of' album a few years back, but he had never bought it because he had never heard any of their other songs; none were ever nearly as well-known as 'Sit Down'.
He remembered, almost four years ago, running down the hill from his tent (it was a few minutes past 8 o'clock) listening to James perform the song live on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury Festival. The weather, which had deigned to make that festival's wettest year, had cleared up. It was a long way from tent to stage, and by the time he got there they were into their second or third number. Nothing, however, could have affected the unbridled joy he felt from being one day into his summer holidays and hearing one of his favourite songs being played live. Earlier on that day, he had stood in the pouring rain, along with at least 200,000 other people, singing 'Three Lions' along with the Lightning Seeds. England was playing Colombia in the World Cup and it was a make-or-break match. V didn't want to watch it in the rain, and his cousin felt ill, so they listened to it on the radio from the tent.
A year later, while his father was still living and working abroad, he asked V to make him a tape. American radio stations were awful, he said, and they only ever played country music, which was true. Finally, and after much deliberation, V recorded. It was decided that James' 'Sit Down' was too important a song to be excluded from the eclectic mix he had compiled onto his last blank tape. His father listened to it all the time in the car, and whenever V visited him. When the tape wound it way around to 'Sit Down', V's father would suddenly and without warning start singing along to the lyrics. He must by now, thought V, know the whole tape and all of its paltry twenty-five songs. But V's father only ever got excited about 'Sit Down'.
But now V was back in the dense jungle-like countryside, staring out of the window of an over-packed minibus: the song had changed to The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"
There had been a path leading away from the ruins they had been to visit. It had looked so inviting that V had been enticed into discovering where it led to – he had always had a penchant for exploration. It reminded him of Nabokov's 'Terra Incognita', in which the intrepid narrator is gradually swallowed up by both the nauseating jungle and his own fevered hallucinations. He reassured himself that his were only of an inebriated nature and he knew how to get back to the other travellers. V could see that the path led all the way to the base of the mountain, and probably up it too. He pursued it for as long as his fascination permitted. Then he caught himself. Wanting to go on, but knowing that with each step the possibility of being left behind in the middle of nowhere was increasing, he suddenly stopped. He stood there drinking in the dry, dusty path, the impenetrable green forest on either side of it and the near-tangible mountain, moving neither forward nor back. It seemed to be so close and so vivid: he felt he could just reach out one of his long legs and start climbing through its greenness, up and up towards the summit. He did not want to go back and he could not go on so, feeling a little like Joe Strummer, he remained indecisive for a few moments...
Will Chadwick has been writing poetry, stories, and more recently plays, since he was 11. He has written two full-length plays that have been performed in the UK, and will direct a short play of his in November's Marin Theater Festival in San Rafael. Now 26, he has just emigrated from London to San Francisco. He is passionate about theater, soccer, and English beer.
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