Villager, page 1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fiction
Help the Witch
Non-fiction
Notebook
Ring the Hill
21st-Century Yokel
Nice Jumper
Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia
Under the Paw
Talk to the Tail
The Good, The Bad and The Furry
Close Encounters of the Furred Kind
For Ralph, my most psychedelic cat (2001–21)
‘The Queen o’ Faeries she caught me, in yon green hill to dwell’
‘Tam Lin’, eighteenth-century ballad
CONTENTS
By the Same Author
Dedication
Map of Underhill
ME (NOW)
GROUND UNDER REPAIR (1990)
DRIFTWOOD (1968)
STOPCOCK (2019)
ME (NOW)
PAPPS WEDGE (2043)
ME (NOW)
MESSAGE BOARD (2012)
REPORT OF DEBRIS (2014)
BILLYWITCH (1932)
SEARCH ENGINE (2099)
EPILOGUE: ME (NOW)
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Supporters
Copyright
ME (NOW)
It’s a heavy day, and it hangs all over me. I’m deep in it. I’m so far in it, I’m technically invisible, unless you’re extremely near to me, and very few people are. I doubt that will change today, but tomorrow could be different. Days like this – the ones that stay heavy from beginning to end – are rare here. Yesterday, for example, started heavy, but became very light and boldly colourful, then was just a tiny bit heavy for the final part, in spurts and streaks. During the light, boldly colourful middle part everything radiated cleanliness, was so thoroughly fresh and laundered that you wondered where all the bad stuff it had washed away had disappeared to, what vast drain or waste tank the world could possibly possess that could have so efficiently put it out of sight and smelling distance. Small creatures woke up in the freshness, and were hungry, in a ferocious way. ‘Hangry’ I believe it is called nowadays by the young folk. A man walked through a dark corridor cut diagonally across a field of high late summer barley and got seriously messed up by horseflies, to such an extent that he increased his speed to a trot and then a run through the last third of the corridor, waving his arms like a crazy person who believes he is being attacked from both flanks by ghosts, until he reached a shady, thistle-dotted copse, which he decided, incorrectly, might offer some respite. The small mercy for him in all this was his confident belief that he had remained unobserved. The belief was misguided. I saw him and, I have to admit, I did have a good old cackle.
There’s a painting which I very much admire. I think it’s obvious that it’s of, or very much inspired by, the village, but I doubt the person who now has it on their wall knows that, unless they have ever visited here, which I happen to know for a fact that they haven’t. I doubt they even know the name of the artist, which was a faint scrawl in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in the first place and became fainter when the second of the painting’s four owners carelessly left it directly opposite a large south-facing picture window in a bungalow overlooking the Derbyshire spa town of Matlock Bath. The painter’s name was Joyce Nicholas, and she lived here in Underhill between 1958, when she arrived in Devon from the north of England as a widow and retired teacher, and 1969, when her daughter Eva installed her in a retirement complex close to the stretch of coast known, jokingly by some and more seriously by others, as the English Riviera. She completed the painting in 1960 and, although she did sell one or two other similar expressionist works at that point via small local galleries and a short-lived bookshop owned by a friend, Joyce – always very hard on herself – decided it was not a success, and put it away in the loft. It did not leave her family until 1983 when, after his wife had fled from him and their legal union in a state of antimaterialist haste, Eva’s daughter Jane’s ex-husband Gerry gave it to the owner of a junk shop in Whitby, Yorkshire, free of charge. Gerry had hoped to receive a small sum for the painting but was hit with an uncharacteristic attack of guilt when, in examining a rug that Gerry was also hoping to rid himself of, the junk shop proprietor’s hand came into contact with some still quite damp excrement that had come out of the arse of Gerry’s bulldog The Fonz that morning, but which Gerry, in haste not dissimilar to Jane’s upon leaving him, had not spotted. The proprietor stared off into the middle distance of a deep back room full of broken clocks, grumbled inaudible quarter words and exhaled spouts of air from both corners of his mouth, and stated he wasn’t much interested in the painting. ‘The bottom has dropped right out of the market for this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a ton of it in my garage at home and can’t shift it for love nor money.’ He was, however, playing it cool, having quickly marked the painting out as something a little out of the ordinary and Gerry as an easily manipulated man whose main goal was to exit the building as quickly as possible. The proprietor had been the first to see any merit in Joyce’s landscape since a lodger who was living with Joyce, eight years after its creation. It now hangs above the stairway in a house in Edinburgh owned by two retired surgeons. Visitors remark on it more often than anything else in the house, apart from their cat, Villeneuve, who is white, fluffy and comically large.
I should probably pause to point out here, for those wondering, that I don’t know everything. I have big gaps, moments of doubt and humility, just like everyone else, just like Joyce. But I do know a hell of a lot.
I love Joyce’s use of colours in the painting. I suspect when she was mixing her palette she was thinking of a light day, or perhaps the light part of a day that had earlier been heavy, but certainly not an all-heavy day like today. The gradation of burnt umber to asparagus in the top left corner, then a suggestion of something darker, where the moor begins and stretches on for the next twenty miles or so. There’s a hint of something black and jagged here, some shapes that remind me of rusty barbed wire. And beyond, above this kaleidoscopic hillscape that could just as easily be California as Britain’s West Country, a swirling heaven or hell, a definite ‘beyond place’. Below that, I think I can make out the familiar valley, the way it funnels down into the village and the lane that becomes the steep high street. There’s no obvious sea or river in the painting but there is a suggestion that both are close. Houses? Joyce doesn’t paint anything as literal as houses, but there are shapes that we could decide are buildings where people live. There’s some interesting yellow and white blotching to the right, below that, which makes me believe Joyce was a big fan of the lichen you get on the rocks and older buildings – and even some of the newer ones – around here. The colours of the lichen are answered by the colour of the sun, in the top right-hand corner, or is it the moon… or is it some combination of both, some other unknown ethereal body representative of both day and night. Above this is what seems to me the most literal part of the painting of all: a patchwork quilt of what are surely farmers’ fields. What makes it less literal is the fact the patchwork is above the sunmoon, and I wonder if this is Joyce’s comment on the topsy-turvy nature of the region, the habit the hills have of disorientating you, the knack weather has here of frequently being below you, as well as, or even instead of, above you, or if Joyce was just feeling a bit like tearing down the walls and breaking the rules that day. I like this side to Joyce a lot, the hidden side that only the brushes and canvas saw, beneath the scrupulous account books, the perfectly plumped cushions, the always-mown-on-time grass. Joyce was a person with more layers than her family and neighbours realised, I think, and much wilder, toothier nightmares. In the middle top of the canvas, if you look into that greeny-black, celestial moorscape, you’ll see what you might interpret as a wide, beatific, somewhat hirsute face. This is the part of the painting that possibly interests me the most.
I never did get any of the several art critic jobs I applied for.
Where does the moor start? That’s a highly debatable question. Where does the true north start? Where do moths end and butterflies begin? Where is the border between ‘sometimes fancies members of the opposite sex but doesn’t actually want to touch their sexual organs’ and ‘is definitely gay’? Who decides what’s soulful funk and what’s funky soul? There’s always some hard-bitten unimpressable bastard who’ll tell you, when you’re on the moor, that you’re not on the proper moor, no matter how far into the moor you are. But let’s not piss about. This – whether or not it’s ‘technically’ on the moor, as the map defines it – is a moorland village. You know, very firmly, when you’re in it, that you’re not in London, or Kettering, or Ipswich. You’re in Underhill. As you pass from the high ground down that funnel, so exquisitely depicted by Joyce, the air of the uplands remains in your nostrils, the trees have beards, the lanes have ferny green sideburns, and your hair is made of rain. It’s the bloody moor, you pedantic bastards. I should know. I’ve been here long enough.
For many years, the first sign of life you’d see when you came down that funnel in Joyce’s painting was an old blacksmith’s cottage, but that fell into disrepair several decades ago, the more interesting parts of its structure gradually appropriated by passing opportunists in or around the building trade. The road bends sharply just at this point, with no warning, and once every couple of years you’ll see a mangled, abandoned bike, formerly owned by someone who got carried away with the gradient and didn’t quite judge the turn. The blacksmith’s cottage was replaced during the 1970s by the Molesting Station. Despi
It’s definitely not one of the most fashionable villages in the region, and it’s not quite the least. One of the results of this ‘middle of the table-ish’ standing is that we have an Indian restaurant, House of Spice, and it is a good Indian restaurant. I have observed that the better-known villages and small towns nearby, where house prices are highest, either don’t have Indian restaurants, or have Indian restaurants that make surprisingly substandard food. I don’t personally take my meals in the village, so this is just hearsay, but it’s widely recognised that House of Spice’s onion bhajis – judged, at least, by the standards of other onion bhajis made in rural England – are in a class of their own when it comes to taste, shape and accompanying chutney. For a long time, House of Spice was also celebrated for the closing line of its menu, which thanked diners for their costume – a spelling error, rather than a genuine expression of gratitude to those visiting on Halloween or another occasion inviting fancy dress. It took a whole twenty-five months before the printing of a replacement menu, which merely thanked people for their custom, and the length of that gap can no doubt be attributed to the fondness that had grown for the menu in the locality and the resulting reluctance of anybody to point out its imperfections. The story about another misprint on the House of Spice’s menu, offering a ‘15 per cent discocunt on orders over £20’ is, however, apocryphal.
The moor has moods, and because the village is so close to it, it is subject to them. When the sky above the moor is storm-tossed and wretched, you’ll hear more gossip and backbiting across the tables in the two cafés, especially the Green Warlock, where Jason and Celia, who are bored in their marriage, go on Fridays. When everything is heavy and damp, like today, you’ll notice that people don’t say thanks as much in the Co-op. Two almost-friends, who’d normally stop and chat on the street, will keep their eyes down and pretend they didn’t see each other. It’s something purely elemental, not personal, but it spreads. I don’t feel great today, and my not-greatness influences those around me. I made a buddleia visibly ill at ease this morning. The tile warehouse, I think, looks particularly lugubrious and in need of a hug, but who is going to give it one? Colin on Weathervane Avenue just poured a pan of boiling water over some ants on his patio then instantly felt terrible about it, although he tried to transfer his anger with himself in his emotionally unavailable way, instructing his wife Mel, when she arrived home from the supermarket, to not spend quite so recklessly on fruit. There’s a bad atmosphere in the dentist’s waiting room. But if we are honest it’s never had a great reputation as a dentist. It’s doubtful anybody would go there at all, if they knew that on the exact spot where Jill on reception currently sits, in September 1723, a farmer and his two sons murdered a man from Minehead following a drunken quarrel that got out of hand. An orchard was planted in the same place a century later, but didn’t take. It’s the other side of town where most of the apples grow: partially russeted Nancekuke, Pengelly, King Byerd. Old, old apples. Apples of the insurrectionary underground. Apples which would upset the apples in your local supermarket with their foul mouths and lack of foundation and mascara. Many of their sweet culinary gifts will be wasted next week in the annual Apple Rolling Festival on Fore Street: a ‘revived’ festival thought by many local historians to date back to as early as the 1600s (it doesn’t).
But it is not all folklore and bygone insular sword death. We have a post office! Jim Swardesley, the postmaster, is forty-five. He has his moods, like all of us. The dome of his head is entirely bald, but he says it’s been that way since he was twenty-two. His theory is that it was the result of a rugby squad induction ritual in his university days, where he was required to shave his entire scalp with an old, rusty razor and no shaving foam, from which his follicles never recovered. Now a resident of the village for over a decade, Jim’s arrival, with his young family, was part of the first wave of incomers to Underhill from more urban areas in the centre of the country: an influx that never fully took off as some expected and dreaded it would, and still happens in fits and starts, usually as a result of people finding that more fashionable villages nearby have become too expensive. Jim is now entrenched enough in local life to be slightly resistant to outsiders himself, if only for their repeated failure to queue for grocery products at the appropriate counter, despite his many handwritten signs encouraging them to. Two doors down from the post office is the granite cottage where Joyce painted her painting. The rusty wagon wheel that her predecessor dragged down the hill off the moor and into the garden is still there. Her deep red front door isn’t, replaced long ago by some now off-white UPVC. It is good that she can’t see this. There is a profusion of gravel that would be alien to her. The sports utility vehicle perched upon it would seem to her too big for any practical purpose, incongruous beside the building it belongs to.
Information comes back to me in isolated flurries, like cherry blossom on a strong breeze in spring, and then it’s gone if I don’t reach out and grab quickly, and grab well. You can never grab much. There’s only so much you can know at one time, even if you’re me; only so much room to store it. There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place. And I try to keep abreast of the universe beyond it too, if I can. I’m broad and cosmopolitan, despite what many assume.
But I am remembering a little now, from the day she began to paint the painting. I was not feeling fully at my best that day. Some men and their dogs had raced across part of me and ripped an innocent animal into many pieces and the pieces were stuck to me. The rain would not come and wash the pieces off for a while. It was a few years into the era when I first felt new chemicals soaking into me, changing everything. Yet over there was a meadow: corncockle, poppies, yellow rattle. I’d rarely seen so many butterflies in my life. I was confused. I felt I could go either way, emotionally. One of my wicked episodes could easily have happened. They have to happen, sometimes. It’s part of the balance. But in this instance I chose purity; namely, the quest to witness some of it. While I searched for the purity, a stallion and a mare began to mate on my back and I told them to piss off but then apologised, admitted that it was unfair of me, and assured them they were not the ultimate cause of my irritation.
