Villager, page 15
Bob had never been sensible or strategic or cautious with money. He’d always known this fact about himself somewhere deep down but he knew it a whole lot more after she moved in. Although neither of their incomes had increased, a year after she came in on the mortgage, a year after they pooled their resources and she made some little adjustments to all the baggy parts of his administrative life, they suddenly felt better off. They had stopped seeing David Cavendish, or his sheep, in the field across the river by then. Bob knew how much she loved the field and, as a surprise, for her birthday the following year, he took out a loan and made David Cavendish an offer for the land, which, after some wrangling and vagueness, Cavendish agreed to sell for £68,000. Sally was furious at first when he told her, then a little happy, then furious again, when she found out that Bob had paid Cavendish for the field but not received any form of legally binding document as proof.
‘So you just… shook hands on it?’ she said. Her face had that heavy-lidded, burdened look it got sometimes. She’d just got back from a hammer recentring job and had been reaming flange bushings all afternoon. Tuning the piano they belonged to had then been made near impossible by three toddlers divebombing each other on a giant beanbag in the adjoining, doorless room in front of a blaring television. She had no idea if the piano was in tune when she left.
‘Well, essentially, yeah,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. I am sure he’s not going to diddle me. It’s different here on the moor. There’s an ancient code of honour. If somebody fucked somebody over in that way, everyone would know about it.’
‘You are insane, and you need to get in touch with a solicitor as soon as possible. Will you promise me you will do that?’
‘I promise.’
‘Next week?’
‘Yes. Well, soon.’
‘Next week.’
But next week had come and gone, then next month, then next year, and next decade, and he did not get in touch with a solicitor. The intention was there in his mind but also in his mind, every morning, was the question ‘What exactly do you want to do with this, your one precious life?’ and the answer to that question was never ‘Paperwork and time-consuming back-and-forths with a member of the legal profession.’ She continued to harangue him about his neglect of the matter for a short period but then she seemed to forget, and realising she’d forgotten was one of the outstanding reliefs of his recent life. He felt like a child who’d been forgiven for burning down a school. The field was effectively theirs anyway. They grew sweetcorn and carrots in it like it was theirs, sunbathed in it like it was theirs, grazed three Herdwicks – not for meat or wool but just for the sheer joy of letting them be Herdwicks – in it like it was theirs, erected a marquee in it for her fiftieth birthday like it was theirs. What difference did a piece of paper make? Every so often, Bob would bump into David Cavendish on the lane, and on approximately one in three of these occasions would ask him if he might be able to sort some official documentation, and Cavendish would promise to do so, but also somehow manage to convey that none of it really mattered, even the money itself didn’t even matter, even though it was now safely in one of his three savings accounts; what mattered was the sun and the air and the birds and the day, on which latter point Bob was definitely in agreement about. Sally said he was a feckless man and a royal bullshitter. She said she had become better at spotting those as she got older, and happier to confront them. Cavendish’s son, also called David, reared and shot pheasant, annihilated foxes for fun. Once on the lane when he almost drove into the side of her, she called him a cunt for it, and for his driving. Her argumentative streak – though rarely aimed at Bob – had grown in middle age. When she hit the menopause, her hair greyed and thinned, then stopped greying and got thicker, thicker than it had been since she was a teenager. She attributed this to her argumentative nature. She said it was her hair’s way of disagreeing with what biology had planned for it. It became the first way that people recognised her, made her bigger and more impressive in the eyes of people they knew, made them even more Sally and Bob, even less Bob and Sally.
*
The river changed colour again over the next two days: heavy cool spring rain turned it the colour of beer, foamed up its margins. He sat out at dawn hoping to catch sight of otters. More had been spotted over the last few years, especially a mile or so upstream where the combe’s steep walls of moss closed in and only allowed in secret sharp flashes of light. Two summers ago one of them had made off with a cod that Patrick and Mel at Russet Cottage had left exposed, marinating in honey and soy sauce on their kitchen table with the French windows open. He thought he saw one today but it was a false alarm: just a squirrel, skipping over the rocks, out of its element. He went inside and showered and put on his lone clean pair of trousers and ironed shirt. He resented himself slightly for doing it but decided it was wise not to add any element to his appearance that would put him at risk of being taken less seriously during the day’s central task. Before he left for the Cavendish place, he mopped up the water droplets from the bathroom floor: an old habit, not quite yet dying its hard death. Sally had been an alarmingly splashy bather and in two years he had still not got used to living with a largely dry bathroom. He had never quite worked out what she did to make the floor and walls so wet. When her hair got bigger, it only made the explosion of water more exuberant.
Out on the lane, the hedgerows were settling into their high spring colour scheme of white, pink and blue: greater stitchwort, red campion and bluebells. Two decades ago the lanes had become quite dicey to walk along due to a combination of angry drivers living in a pandemic, population growth, urban exodus and people texting at the wheel. It all felt like it had been leading to a kind of breaking point. The work of the second and third pandemics and the rise of self-driving vehicles had altered that. In a climb of just over a mile, he saw nobody. He took a left at the top of the hill, past a half-demolished stone barn with a corrugated iron roof reddened with rust, then turned up the track leading to the farm and pressed the intercom. He found David Cavendish – the second David Cavendish, or rather the fifth, and second most recent, David Cavendish, if you were looking at the entire timeline – on the porch, in the middle of an animated conversation with an unknown, invisible entity. Cavendish acknowledged Bob with something not totally unlike a smile, using the small part of his face that wasn’t absorbed in whatever was being fed to it through his visor. His head, though bald, looked smooth and youthful – certainly no older than his age, which Bob knew to be somewhere in his late thirties – but underneath it his body resembled eight or nine assorted pumpkins on the turn, stuffed into some cloth. Bob immediately felt mean for having this thought – after all, he’d let himself go a bit in middle age, too, before his exit from digital life – and it was up to individuals how they looked after their own bodies, and nobody else’s business, but he had heard the rumours about what these visors were doing to people, about the so-called ‘ultraworld’ they lived in, where the virtual body they modified had superseded the physical one they still put food and drink into and walked around in and shitted and pissed out of. When they had to live fully in their physical body on the government-ordained Switch Off Day, they were antsy and frustrated. It was said that many of them could no longer properly taste food. He heard rumours of something called ‘joyhacking’: people coming to their senses, hundreds of miles from their home, disorientated, after strangers had recoded the electronic systems connected to their brains and ridden them around for a period of days, just for fun. But Bob didn’t know if that was actually true, just as he didn’t know if a lot was true these days.
He waited patiently, standing seven or eight yards clear of Cavendish and staring at a tractor and an old motorised go-kart, both seasoned with moss and half-sunk into the earth on the far corner of the farmyard. It was a long time since any agricultural work had happened here.
‘Mr Turner,’ said Cavendish, finally. ‘What can I do for you on this perfect spring day?’
‘David,’ said Bob. ‘How is life treating you? How is your dad?’
‘Well, I have to be honest and say it is not looking good. I do not think there is very long left. It is a very sad thing to see for all of us.’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that, David.’
‘I imagine you are here to talk about what we talked about a little while back.’
‘Well…’
‘Did you know – and you will appreciate this, I’m sure, as a man who likes books – that the way the Crow Indian killed buffalo in the seventeenth century was rarely with arrows or tomahawks? What they did instead was drive them off cliffs, sometimes as many as 700 of them, far more than they could eat. They used songs. Can you believe that? Songs! At the time, the buffalo was the most common wild animal on the entire planet. Can you imagine it? Biting into some freshly cooked buffalo by a campfire? The taste sensation. Oh no, you are a lettuce muncher, aren’t you. But still. Delicious, don’t you think.’
‘No, I did not know any of that, David.’
‘I am a mine of facts these days. A mine, I tell you. It is driving Polly crazy. I won’t shut up. It’s ever since I opened up this new window on here,’ Cavendish tapped his visor, ‘that permits you to absorb an audiobook at six times the speed of the actual narration. It allows you to do so many other things at the same time. But don’t think I don’t envy you. I wish I had your life too, for sure. Living in the right here and now. Listening to the owls, without distraction. Firewriting on your coppiced hazel. See, the thing is, Bob, I spoke to Dad about the field a couple of times, and he couldn’t remember anything about what you said. And now, well, you can’t really talk to him at all. It’s just isolated words and dribble. Sometimes he’ll just say the word “anvil” or “lips” and a nurse will come in to mop up, and that will be it, for three days. Terribly sad for all of us. You know what he was like, Bob. He’s a generous man. To his own detriment, it could be said, at times. He could sometimes offer people things he shouldn’t. Maybe it was a flaw, but it’s one of the things we all miss about him. Because what he is now, in that bed in that home… it seems terrible to say it, but it’s not him. It’s very heartbreaking for all of us to see.’
‘I am sorry about that, David. It must be very difficult for you. But I do have a record of the payment on my bank statement: £68,000 transferred from my account to his.’
‘If that’s true, that’s true. But who is to say what the money was for? Is there a record of that? Perhaps it was for something else you owed him. Maybe it was a gambling debt? Ha! We are all getting older and facts get misremembered. Isn’t that the way with all of history? We think Indians killed buffalo with tomahawks but really they often didn’t. They killed them with cliffs and songs. No, but seriously, we could talk about this, and that is fine, but I think the best way would be for you to contact the people you need to contact, and for them to contact some people in another office who act on my behalf, and that way we can move forward, or not.’
‘I’ve noticed some posts in the field, and some string. Someone’s painted numbers on the ground.’
‘As I said, I think we could talk about this, and that is fine, but I think the best way would be for you to contact the people you need to contact, and for them to contact some people in another office who act on my behalf. I hope you have a nice afternoon in your house, Bob. That balcony must be a very nice place to sit and watch the world go by.’
On the way back down the track, as an act of defiance, Bob cut left through a gap in an attractive row of mossy-rooted beech, and across the Cavendish land, towards the river. As he did, he saw Cavendish’s eight-year-old son, the freshest and most up to date of all the David Cavendishes, on a chair in the middle of one of the back fields, also talking animatedly into his visor, in much the same way his dad had, and with a smaller version of the same body. It gave Bob a vision of an entire alternate version of human history, measured entirely in David Cavendishes, all getting gradually more feckless and avoidant and lardy and technology-obsessed, until finally you reached the last David Cavendish of all, who was just a small shiny circuit box sellotaped to the top of a large blob of congealed out-of-date butter.
You could hook down from here, as a trespasser, to one of the most attractive and clandestine stretches of the river: a place of plaited lichen and abrupt rocky declivities and deep plunge pools where he and Sally had often swum in spring and summer. One of the advantages of Cavendish’s fecklessness was that the fields down on this furthest section of the farm had reverted to meadows and now bled seamlessly into the wilder, beardier terrain beyond that was owned by only the water. Directly there, along this eastern bank of the river, was the route Sally had taken home on a day he’d never forget when he lost her up on the high moor. Half a mile further up the valley was an abandoned cottage, reachable down a steep track on the most resilient off-road vehicle but never boasting its own electricity and unoccupied for over fifty years, although it was said that a rich London banker now owned it and the land around it. It was marked on Bob’s Ordnance Survey map as ‘Megan’s House’. The top branches of an alder tree now poked out of its roof. Every time he walked past it, he remembered Sally talking about the terrible things that had happened to pianos during the middle of the last century, when they were elbowed out of the hallowed place they had traditionally occupied in middle-class homes by televisions; the way people had burned them and nihilistically taken axes to them. All that craftsmanship gone, just like that. It made her want to weep, she said. He forgot now how they’d got onto the subject; maybe it was just because they’d been speculating about when Megan’s House was last occupied and had decided it was probably around the time the first TVs started turning up in people’s homes. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all and was just the usual scattershot flow of conversation when they walked. Often, they’d follow the river all the way up to the bare, blasted moor at the top, and beyond. She was rarely without an observation and for every quirk of nature, every bit of wild growth he noticed, she noticed two more. Her mood seemed to rise with the moor itself. He’d always have a fold-away handsaw in his rucksack, in case he came across an old gate that had been thrown into a hedge. That’s what the farmers and the National Park authorities did when they replaced them: left them to rot. He’d find about one a month on average, on their walks, during that period. If he was lucky, he’d find a latch still attached to it and, if he was super lucky, it would be one over a century old, darkened and bruised by the decades.
He decided not to turn right up the valley today, and instead fought his way over and under fallen trees above the river, until he joined the wall on the far boundary of the field, his field. The wall arced around and became part of the old bridge, then continued to arc until it met the house. It was, in effect, a continuation of the house, although it had been here centuries longer. Perhaps the stone of the house looked incongruously smart and new next to the wall at first but now weather and time had done their work on it, the two co-existed happily, like a granddad and great-granddad whose generational divide had been bridged by their longevity. He noticed some clumps of hair trapped in the crevices of the wall, just beyond the bridge; badger, he assumed, or perhaps an intrepid moorland pony who’d wandered down from higher ground. There were a thousand kingdoms in the stone and, in each kingdom, a hundred cities, full of microscopic gardens. Who was to say what was in there was not the world? Who was to say where the world began and ended at all? Why stop at the planet’s biosphere? But, also, why go further than the end of the road? Who was to decide where anyone’s going concern began and ended? He remembered that period when it was all getting bigger and bigger, directly before the visor implants were approved by the government, when everything had seemed too enormous, too connected. You could talk to precisely as many people as you wanted to about any subject you wanted and because of that there was never nobody not discussing or arguing about anything and there was never not anything to check and everything you did check just gave you more to check. The acceleration had been overwhelming, as if, just when you thought it was already going too fast, technology had hit black ice. It spun, unstoppably. It nibbled away at minds. The future had arrived and it was not about outer space and fun, as he had been promised in his childhood, and Sally had been promised to a slightly lesser extent in hers; it was about gossip and meanness and the abolition of reasoned discourse. Addiction drove it and corporate greed drove the addiction. Neither Bob nor Sally had even been big users of social media but the space that opened out in their days when they disconnected, after the big changeover, left them gobsmacked. After the impulse to check gradually dissipated, because there was nothing to check any more, something else happened that they had not been expecting: they did not just regain their minds, they regained their bodies. They became more aware of their stomachs and hands and feet and sexual organs. They read a hundred pages of a book without moving from the place they sat. Their meals tasted better. Snow felt like snow again when it fell on their faces, like snow had felt when they were twelve. The universe became something you could roll around in the palm of your hand and feel the texture of again.
Sometimes they would go to towns and the city, or even to Underhill, and when they did they often saw people standing outside shops, standing in the road, standing in tram queues, screaming and ranting into their visors. Once such a thing would have been deemed deeply antisocial but everyone was used to it now. Sally and Bob kept their distance, because that was expected of them, as visorless people, and because they desired to. Each time they would think of these strangers ‘You are arguing with a person you will never meet about something that will never be resolved and this is your one time on earth’ and they would be glad, as hard as it had been, for the decision they’d made. And it had been hard: it made facts – facts about tomorrow’s weather, or a song they liked, or the date a monarch died – suddenly, frighteningly elusive, until they remembered there was a whole other way to come across facts and it did not make life worse. A dazzling daily sense of hope and possibility seemed to have been blown out like a candle, until they realised what it had always been was a facsimile of hope and possibility, a fast-food version of want that you kept wanting even though you always felt ill afterwards. She’d not lived as long as she should have but he could reassure himself that at least she had not spent the last decade of her life in some suspended attention-deficit simulacrum of existing.
