Villager, page 16
They were both Taureans: him early, her late, just a day from being a Gemini. He never forgot her birthday, even now, but he had forgotten his own again, for the second time in three years. It had been last Friday. He had realised he’d forgotten because the following day while loading the stove he’d found a parcel left under the log store. It was from Sam. Inside was a dark brown latch, with a beautiful weathered curve to its ring. Bob dated it as late 1930s, maybe earlier. ‘To Bob,’ said the card inside. ‘Many gates still left to open! (Found up by the Trembling Hill Mine in January.) Love from Sam and Cami.’ In the post, which always arrived in late afternoon nowadays, another package arrived. The postmark on it was Hungarian, which made Bob think it was probably from Martin.
The rain seemed to be holding off so he’d decided to walk down the far end of the combe to thank Sam for the present and to take him a ninety-year-old book he’d found for him featuring a collection of intricate illustrations of moths. Cami, off work from the hospital today, had opened the door and as ever an ache – a complicated ache, with a hole in its centre – had creaked open in him when he saw her smile. She had wished Bob happy birthday for yesterday and said Sam was out, surveying a type of newt that had unexpectedly returned to a lagoon down near Torcross, but that he was welcome to come in for a cup of tea anyway. He’d thanked her but declined and said he’d stop by again at the weekend. Neither Sam nor Cami had ever been anything less than warm and accommodating to him, almost treating him like a second father at times, but he was also aware how magnetising he found their combined energy and how his loneliness made him more drawn to it. And because of that, when he was around them, or thinking of being around them, it was as if there was a little warden in his head, constantly checking he didn’t overstep the mark. His admiration for the way they lived – surviving resolutely visorless in two poorly paid jobs, knowing they would never buy their own house, reading, knitting, planting, making, learning – was so deep, it was important not to be seduced into believing he was part of it.
The rain had begun again on his walk back and, because he had known the patch of sky above him for a quarter of a century now, and the patterns of all its varying moods, instinct told him they were in for a few more of those heavy days when all the moisture came down and hit them at speed, when the river filled up and made its presence so rowdily, overwhelmingly felt that everything else was put to one side and life became a matter of waiting it out until the water decided to calm again. At the second of the humpback bridges, three men in visors and fluorescent jackets had been watching a white van, driven by science, attempt to manoeuvre itself through the narrow gap between the stones. Each had looked like he wanted to offer the van some advice. The taller of the three men – fox-faced, sixtyish – had seemed familiar to Bob but he couldn’t quite place him. That was nothing new these days, and the main worry that went with it – that the person would be someone who knew Bob well and would be offended by him not remembering them – was moot, since each of the men had ignored Bob, noticing him less than they would have if he was a minor gust of wind. He’d walked on, past an Edwardian post box in a cottage wall, repurposed as a plant pot. And, as he had, he’d remembered Sally talking about the story she had begun to write one day about an obsolete nineteenth-century post box where somebody posts a letter then gets a letter back from a person in that century, who becomes their penpal. She had got a third of the way through writing the story then abandoned it. She said she always had the ideas and the beginnings but lost interest in finding out how things ended. Her notebooks were a mirror of this, always two thirds blank, even the ones where she wrote down notes and reminders about her tuning jobs.
More and more, he found landscape and the landmarks within it sucking him back into past conversations, ghost feelings, old ambiences. It went beyond that, though. Even without the power of an evocative image as a trigger, he was able to spend whole hours – sometimes longer – swimming in a vanished event or afternoon. Perhaps this made him no more present and mindful than those who wore the visors but at least his mind was his own: nobody was dictating his memories to him and organising them into albums on a screen. Some of Jim’s hair he’d found trapped beneath the piano lid while cleaning it a couple of weeks ago – the hair still turned up in the oddest places, even all these months after the dog’s death – spun him off into an afternoon from two winters before, when he’d held Jim on his lap and gently cut knots of matted fur from his stomach, as Jim had lain there with a trusting look that broke his heart as it happened and rebroke it now as it rehappened. Maybe he misremembered much of what he lived through – timescales, sequences, the maths of it – but as he dipped into it via memory the feelings were refelt just as strongly, if not stronger.
He opened Martin’s package, which turned out to be an album he had put out via his new label over in Hungary. ‘I finally, fucking FINALLY, got this together!’ said the note. ‘Miss you, you hairy bastard. M. x’ The record was called Penny Marshwort: The Songs of RJ McKendree. Martin had been obsessed for years with the work of McKendree, an American singer songwriter who’d blown across the edge of the moor in the late sixties and written a set of haunting folk songs that were coated in the place and the time but also in something otherworldly, something a little like shattered glass, something you couldn’t quite piece together in your mind as you heard it. Martin, in a dogged fuck-the-naysayers Martin way, had been hugely instrumental in getting the late McKendree’s work to a wider audience, even half-written a book on him many years ago, and now, with the singer’s cult following growing, he’d managed to assemble an impressive group of neo-psychedelic songwriters and sensitive troubadours to pay tribute to his work. Amongst the covers of McKendree’s songs was even a version of the title track by the reclusive former pop sensation Taylor Swift, released under the pseudonym ‘Maddie Chagford’. Bob noticed that Martin’s musician partner Reka was featured on the record too and wondered if that might turn out to be a bit of jarring nepotism on the part of Martin, but her rendition of ‘Little Meg’ – a traditional local folk song already made unrecognisable in McKendree’s reworking of it, very different to the version Bob had heard Sally sing a couple of times – was utterly fantastic, and like nothing Bob had heard before: a half-chanted incantation that somehow managed to be simultaneously a brooding funk workout and sound like somebody inventing electricity in a moonlit recess in some rocks above a beach. Over the dirty dishes in the sink, as the record played, the identity of the fox-faced man on the bridge came to Bob. It had been Jac, his neighbour from the long house, all that time ago. But the fact meant little to Bob and he was mostly elsewhere in his mind. Something – he wasn’t sure precisely what – had taken him back to a night in the summer of 1999, maybe a year or so before Martin had introduced him to McKendree’s music. A club in Covent Garden, mostly full of tourists. Seventies-disco-themed. Martin, lit by booze and the city, trying to convince two Portuguese women that Bob had acted in porn. Bob, playing along, but wincing inside, feeling, at thirty, too old for it all, on the cusp of a form of cultural retirement. He’d lost his jumper – his favourite – at the end of the night. Forty-four years ago. The same gap separating his birth from the year Mussolini put Italy under a dictatorship. But from here, right now… an almost touchable time. Felt like the end of something, palpably. A deadened and toxic sensation in his oesophagus on the walk to the train station afterwards. A new resolve building out of that deadness. A Chinese restaurant. A wasted meal. Hard to eat when you’re that particular kind of drunk. Martin had an extra job, as well as the writing, talent scouting for a record label. That was it: they’d been to see a band he’d been tipped off about. ‘Rucksack full of wank,’ he’d said, turning to Bob after three songs. ‘The tedium compels me to go somewhere and dance.’ ‘Dance’ being Martin’s euphemism for fuck, but not always. Sometimes it meant fight, too. Always up for an argument with a stranger, Martin. A couple of times, chasing a woman, vanishing in the process, he’d left Bob stranded. Nowhere to stay. Five-hour gap until the morning train. Hash browns and a quarter kip on a cold metal bench. Bob forgave him. Always. Then one other night. A bit later. Martin on cocaine, wolf-eyed. Ripped Bob’s favourite shirt off after finding out he was moving far away, to Devon. Bob forgave him less for that. But still forgave him.
In the forty-eight minutes the record had lasted, the river had redoubled its cry. The pounding bass of the rain was no match for it. The ambience was all treble. It was being retuned by cloudfall. Bob took Martin’s note and put it in a drawer in his sideboard. Also in the drawer was the latch from Sam, a couple of other old notes and letters from friends, two eleven-year-old parking fines, Sally’s papps wedge, some pebbles and a sealed envelope with ‘IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH’ written on it, containing a letter instructing the house and all the possessions within it to be given to Sam and Cami. He found a browning floret of broccoli behind the kettle and tossed it into the river, which devoured it. Wavelets lashed at the bridge then sprinted under the balcony. The water had been higher than this but rarely faster, and he could hear the granite grinding. Fleur had once said that it was a good job the boulders were under water because with the force that they rubbed against each other they could probably start a fire.
In late August the new dwellings began to go up: A-frames, oak. The chainsaws took down Edna’s tree in minutes, making a mockery of all the years of its slow bittersweet decline. He’d been ready, having seen the sign on the lane at the top of the hill a few weeks earlier. ‘BLACK DOG PARK: A Moorland Experience’ the sign announced. Three acres of gorse bushes, tussocks, ferns, brambles – a bona fide galaxy of habitats for tiny creatures – were smoothed to a neat, levelled-off brownness. Men in hard hats with visors beneath the hard hats made offerings to the river of sandwich wrappers, drink cartons and urine. Jac sometimes milled amongst them, clipboarded, vulpine, pointy of face and hand. Bob considered taking him some of the manure he’d requested by text, with an apology that it was twenty-four years late. Maybe a couple of thousand tonnes of it. One evening at dusk after the men had all gone home, an actual fox, as if deeply offended to be so poorly imitated and misunderstood, wandered over, backed up and sprayed one of the half-completed lodges, and left. Fewer blue tits and dunnocks landed on Bob’s feeders now. The pair of merganser ducks he’d been encouraging onto the balcony for most of the year had vanished. Bob looked at the solicitor’s number he had written down in spring and did not use his still-functioning landline to call the solicitor’s number he had written down in spring. He merely decided to further reduce what he had decided his world was. It now ended at the river’s midpoint. Nothing else was his concern. There was enough to take care of here on the other side, anyway. He was still finding a lot of hair in the house. He began to wonder if after all some of it was his, not the dog’s. He threw the hair in the river and the river made it vanish. The water level had been higher than usual for most of the summer and, because it was always higher in winter, he looked at the bridge and wondered if this winter would be the one when it finally happened.
On the occasions when they’d climbed the valley to the high moor, on the opposite bank, on the unofficial path, they’d learned a lot about all the secret places where the water gathered its voices and power. It was a long, vertiginous, weaving stretch of ground: almost three miles to the very top. All the way, the moss got thicker, the dripping sounds heavier. Often, by the time you reached the top and emerged from the woodland, you were on a murky cloud planet. Black shapes hovered in front of you, not making their identity known until the last moment. Ponies, sheep, gorse, rheumatic witchering half-trees that had been brought to the edge of death by weather, again and again, without being quite taken over the line. Vegetation up here got flayed by the bronchial output of the sky and only the strongest and wiriest of it survived. In the woodland, before they reached the top, the pair of them stroked the moss. It felt and smelt cleaner than any carpet. Sally said the tree trunks looked like they were wearing welly socks. He suggested that maybe this was why her hair grew so fast and big: it benefited from all this rain, like the moss. He was joking but maybe there was some truth in it. His own hadn’t bounced back big and fierce like hers but its escape from his scalp had lost momentum since he moved here. They came back to the house with their clothes stuck to their bodies, their skin dripping, with many of the folds and creases they’d seen in the mirror first thing in the morning ironed out. But on the day he lost her up there it wasn’t that kind of day. It was a frostier, stiller day – rare here – when the river was low and the moisture in the air was motionless. They decided to walk all the way up past the reservoir to Trembling Hill, to the abandoned silver and lead mine. By the time they got there the mist had fallen down, sweeping across the mine’s deep black eye holes like a huge net curtain made heavy by years of cigarette smoke. They decided it was not wise to venture further and retraced their steps, past a pre-Bronze Age kistvaen that had been uncovered during the early part of the last century. Ancient trinkets and fancy evening wear buried deep in the peat. Visibility was reduced to almost nothing which meant he couldn’t see the bit of the hill which always reminded him of a vast mouth that had had its teeth knocked out with a hammer, but he estimated that’s where they were. The land began to tilt and the river, very faintly audible in the distance, was in the opposite direction to the one it should have been. His uncertainty made him press on more briskly, in an attempt to make the world make sense again, and it was his haste that caused him to lose her, although he didn’t realise it for – what? – seven minutes, eight. He called out behind him into the mist, or was it really mist at all, no, and not fog either, but that other thing, quick and speckled and particular to the moor, that could not quite be categorised as either. Fist? Mog? Mog. The dreaded mog. The mog ate sound, swallowed it without needing to chew. Hearing no reply to his calls, the central worry of the last half an hour of his existence – that he had been upended into a visionless ghost universe with no way out by mythical beings – was entirely usurped by his guilt of what he had done in bringing her here. She’d not felt well that morning; the rash she often got across her face from the lupus had been worse than it had been for a while. He’d pushed her too hard. They should have gone the other way, over the back and up the lane and up the old sunken track – people said it was more sunken because of the medieval packhorses that pressed the earth down deeper and deeper – to look at a latch over there that Sam had told him about that had been made from two old horseshoes. It was the first time since the visors came in that he’d really ached for his old smartphone. Even though there’d never been a whiff of reception up here, he’d still ached for it.
She was only gone for two hours but it was the longest two hours he had lived since he was a child. Two hours of terror and weighing outcomes and decisions and possibilities. Two hours containing a novel’s worth of small anxieties. He called and called for her then he listened hard for the river and found it and, even though it was not in the place it should have been, he followed it, tumbling and bumping back down the wild mossy valley as if pulled on a rope. Halfway down, he tripped on a tree root and landed on a gnarly outlying branch whose deep bloodwork on his left calf he would not notice until hours later. He could see only one thing and that was the telephone on the small table in the living room, and even though he couldn’t factually see it, could see it only in his mind, he stared at nothing else until he had it in his hand. It was after he’d reached it, and called the moorland rescue team, and the police, and turned himself inside out wondering what else he could do, wondering if he should have stayed up top looking for her after all, that, in desperation, not in hope but in the pure inability to stay still, he began to march back up the valley and saw her walking towards him. Her hair glistened with crusts of frost and she looked dejected and sapped but she greeted him calmly. She told him she’d done just the same thing he had: listened to the river, then followed it. But why had it taken so much longer for her to get back? And was she OK? She said she was fine, it was fine, it had all been very simple. She was here, and she was going to come into the house and lie down, and everything was going to be fine.
You didn’t live on the moor and not know the stories about hikers being piskie-led on the high ground, disorientated in the sparkly mists, spun around, locked in place, tricked into thinking a place was another place. Tiny high-pitched laughter had been heard to ring out from deep in the cloud. Its melodies moved in circles, through the moisture. The little people – pixies, they were more modernly called, but he preferred piskies, the pre-twentieth-century version – came out from their hiding places and led you astray and the only way to reverse the spell was to turn out your pockets; he knew the drill so well but he’d forgotten and hadn’t done it. It was just weather, nothing more, and the only reason it felt like dark magic was that weather itself was a form of dark magic, but he would never quite forget the stoned, tilted feeling he had up there that day, as if the landscape had spiked his drink. He knew it was just coincidence, that her health had been getting worse anyway for a long time, but it was after that day that the different period began for them. She had told him she loved him for the last time. She was withdrawn, more still, but not in a peaceful way. Her one remaining exuberance seemed to come out solely in the way she cleaned her body behind closed doors. It was as if the larger part of who she was had been cancelled. She worked less, which she’d said she’d wanted to do for a long time, but in the spaces that this opened up she didn’t do any of the things she’d told him she would. One day he found her on the balcony with his craft knife, hacking into her hair, letting loose strands of it blow into the water below her. Next to her on the planks he saw singed grey tresses, candle wax. It was the first in a series of clandestine burnings, more often than not featuring small household objects, which culminated, a few months later, in him clearing out the fireplace one morning and finding the iron remnants of one of his sculptures in the cooling ashes.
