When We Used to Chase Their Car

When we were children and our cousins left after a stay at our grandparents' house, we used to chase their car off the yard and along the road, shouting and waving as they waved back at us from the rear window - until they turned onto Red Road and the car got away from us on the hill, and we would stagger to a halt, panting with our hands on our knees, under the mottled shadows of the overarching trees, and they would be gone, and everything would be silent, and it would be time to walk back to the house, all excitement and joy and fun gone from the world. For the rest of the day, I would feel depressed. A heavy feeling of loss would hang over me: the return of school would usually be looming tomorrow or the next day, as the afternoon lengthened into evening my dad would iron our school shirts and my mum would prepare the Sunday roast, and the last-minute games me and my cousins had played hours earlier would seem to belong to a long-faded, happier world. Then that day would pass and life would return to normal. I would forget my depression, or get used to it; I would adjust myself to the drabber existence that was mine for most of the time, and I would rarely think of my cousins until the next holidays came, they arrived to stay at my grandparents' house again, and the process repeated itself.

            At some point, we stopped chasing their car when they left. Instead, we would just wave them off, as the grown-ups did, and when they pulled out of the drive, we would stand a little self-consciously as the ghost-memory that would always remain of our old habit played out in front of us. But though we no longer chased them off along Red Road - perhaps because there was no longer any part of us that believed or could pretend that to do so would prolong our contact, that we might chase their car indefinitely, all the way out of the Staffordshire Moorlands and onto the motorway and back to their house two hundred miles away in Lincolnshire, where the fun times could continue forever - though we no longer chased them, I would still feel the same deep melancholy for the rest of that day, the same miserable sense of loss, as the crueler and less innocent world of school loomed over me, with its increasing talk of sex and its demand to be cool, which only meant to be the same as all your friends.

            As the years passed, our relationship changed. My cousins were girls and me and my brother were boys: this fact now divided us, meant we could only be so friendly to each other, made it neccessary to pretend not to notice each other most of the time. There were visits when we hardly spoke, our interactions almost exclusively being reserved, diagonal sniggers at the embarrassing things the grown-ups said and did. Gone forever were the days of playing hide-and-seek or tig in the garden, of water-fights on the stableyard, of going exploring together in our grandad's overgrown fields, of breathlessly setting up pop groups together, of putting on plays for the grown-ups and rehearsing all day outside the summer house; gone was all of that, along with the old tradition of chasing them down the road when they left - and we weren't sad that those days were gone, we preferred not to think of them. If I still felt a twinge of the old sadness when they left, I acknowledged it less now. The pull of school had become irresistible: there was no point in feeling sad; I needed to go back there, to where my friends were, to where life was lived, to where it counted.

            The forces of school and everyday life did their work on us and changed us; it was there, away from each other, that we grew up. We reached the latter part of our schooling and one-by-one took the important exams that would determine our futures. For years there was someone taking GCSEs or A-Levels, and sometimes one of us would have to miss a reunion in order to revise, or spend Boxing Day writing an essay. Then came university: we scattered ourselves throughout the country, and over the next few years, as adult life began almost unnoticed, we started our first serious relationships, and now we came in twos: Molly and Will, Jack and Rachel. Around this time there came a new and mildly surprising stage in our relationship: we were friends again, we found we had a shared history and sense of humour, and though we didn't play any of the old games again, there were new games now, like drinking alcohol, and Scrabble, and the sharing of funny memories. We weren't embarrassed anymore, and didn't care to remember the years when we had been. Now we talked to each other as adults do: asked how the job was going, and what we thought of this news story. When they were leaving, and we were standing out on the yard, someone would invariably bring up the days when we used to chase their car, and we would laugh about it, and once we even chased them again for a few yards as a joke, and for a fleeting moment burst through the membrane of irony that coats every adult action and remembered what it was like to be young and brimful of uncomplicated joy as we chased our cousins down the lane.

            But, like the tender afterglow of a happy dream that fades as the morning passes, the feeling couldn't last. Time had done its work on us and we were transformed: we found our former selves funny and cute, but we had forgotten what it had really been like then, and if for a moment we remembered, life always pulled us back soon after.

            Our grandparents had aged: though they had always seemed old to us, now they really were old, where at the start they had only been late-middle-aged. Cancer came for them both in quick succession; they both fought it off, but it was a warning, a reminder if one was needed that things wouldn't always be the same. Meanwhile, we made our moves in the careers we seemed to at some point have chosen, and in a succession of years like the exam years, we entered the next stage of life: first houses were bought, there were marriages, babies were born, promotions received - and as well as these sproutings, there were witherings, too: first our grandad died, seven stubborn years after the doctor gave him one year to live, and then our gran, who couldn't run the farm alone, was forced to sell it and move somewhere more practical for an elderly widow who could hardly walk, we now saw, and who sometimes forgot who we were.

            Time had sped up. In those early days, the days of chasing the car down the mottled archway of Red Road, the cousin-less months that had stretched out ahead of us every time they left had seemed intolerably long - too long to really believe that we would ever see them again - but now such time-spans were nothing to us, they would pass and we would be no different, still dealing with the same problems at work and considering the same DIY job we'd been putting off and off. The months and years sped past undistinguished, and now we could see how it had been for the grown-ups and would be for us, too: how a person gets old, how the days add up to a lifetime.

            We had our own children: the baby years came just as the A-level years and the marriage years had come before them; and the centre of gravity that had kept us all together our whole lives began to weaken, like a magnet losing its charge. Now, instead of being the offshoots of a single branch, we were each of us growing into branches in our own right, and our reunions became less frequent. There were other sides of families to visit now, there was overtime to work. Our grandparents’ house was finally sold: we could still meet at our parents’ houses, or at the modest first houses we had in recent years moved into, but the scene of all our family memories had vanished, and with it one of the last things keeping us together.

            It happens, it’s common. There was little sadness to any of these losses, because they were normal losses, and meanwhile life was speeding up even more: nurseries, promotions, weight gain, mortgages, recession, hair loss. Now our children were the ages we had been then, and they too played the games we had played, only in other gardens, down other lanes, far away from our grandparents’ house – until they, too, grew out of them, and everyone had moved up a place in the queue of life.

            We lost touch. Now we saw each other only rarely, on special occasions like weddings, and the details of our lives were murky to one another, each knowing only the vague contours of what the others did: what city, was industry, what happinesses and misfortunes. Everything I had assumed made us special - the farm, with the horses; the vague sense that people liked us; the fact we lived near a theme park that gave us free tickets; our annual Easter treasure hunt - all these realities were revealed to have been the fleeting results of an accident of time, fated to evaporate and be replaced by other realities that would never seem as natural and right.

            Does paradise exist after all, only instead of coming at the end of life, it comes at the beginning? There were benefits to being a grown-up: there was alcohol and there was women, there was art and there was nature; there was the freedom to do whatever I wanted within the laws of my country - but nothing held the same perfect uncomplicated happiness as those early years with my cousins. No one had told us, then, that life isn't the same all the way through: that it continually speeds up the longer it goes on; that the more you see of it, the less you notice it, and that the less you notice it, the less friction it holds for you and the faster you hurtle through it down the long waterslide to happiness.

            The twigs that grew from the branch of our family flowered and became branches themselves; meanwhile, the old branch withered and died. We separated, spread out, and here was life, demanding to be lived: Maddie became a solicitor in Sheffield, I went into PR in London, Molly had three kids in four years. There was nothing to do but live life as it came: mortgages, redecorations, redundancies, anniversaries - all the smallnesses that life insists we focus on - and meanwhile the strings that had tied us to the world one-by-one began to weaken and snap: our celebrities died, our bands disbanded; the whole mini-universe that had once been, with the lawn and the summer house, the stables and the horse-walker; with my grandad whistling as he carried feed bags to the stableyard, my gran ghostly in the kitchen window as she washed dishes - the whole mini-universe floated up and drifted away, existing now only in the heads of me and my cousins and destined, before too long, to be lost to the world for eternity.

            There were still reunions: we would see each other at weddings, funerals, anniversaries; but now there had come another stage in our relationship: for the first time we were half-strangers, and had to be polite to each other, and only sometimes, after drinks, did we remenisce about the old times. The time Tristan as a toddler jumped into the River Churnet and, as the current dragged him under, was pulled out in the nick of time by Auntie Sarah, who’d heard a splash. The evening football matches everyone used to join in with on the lawn, when gran as a goalkeeper would wear her gardening gloves, and grandad in his wellies would lift us up and spin us around in order to steal the ball. The summer we put on a Star Wars play for the grown-ups: how when Uncle Nick’s family pulled into the drive, signalling that the performance could soon begin, Maddie, always the perfectionist, put her hands to her head and wailed, ‘But we haven’t finished rehearsing!’

            The strange force that had already started working on us when we stopped chasing their car along the road had finished working on us and we were changed, completely; the war between those simple carefree days and the outside world as represented then by school had been won, and the winner was the outside world. We were changed so thoroughly that we hardly even knew to mourn what we had lost. We just continued to live life as if came, except for those rare fleeting moments in far away places, prompted by similarly sun-mottled roads, or snatches of remembered music, or the smell of foxgloves on a summer's day, or something one of our kids said, when we would come across the ghosts of our former selves, and in that instant would remember - before the rude insistency of life pulled us back - what it had been like to be nine and bursting with joy as we chased our cousins' car along the lane and up Red Road.