Villager, page 2
She was in her kitchen, rescuing a moth from a spider’s web. (It died two minutes later but it’s the thought that counts.) Jazz was playing. That was not a surprise. The type of jazz, though, was. Definitely not grandma jazz, this. Not even 1950s hip grandma jazz. Modal. Louche. A little threatening. The back window was open, which, from where her easel was placed, gave her a good view of the tor and the rocks piled on top of it like a little crude stepstool to nowhere. The breeze was gently blowing in, flapping the net curtains, and a very old grey cat – a satchel of sharp bones, with some fur stuck to them in some places – snoozed on the table, next to a punnet of five strawberries that were on the turn. Joyce flailed a wrist, as if loosening up in preparation for an impressive bit of spin bowling, and in one final move, to achieve a state of ultimate looseness before she began, she lifted her blouse over her head and threw it flamboyantly to the floor. I got a bit shy then (I do!) before watching her go into her artistic trance. I’d never seen anybody paint my portrait before and I was very flattered. She had a glass of wine afterwards, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted to join anyone in that particular activity so much. You’d have to go right back to… Actually, I’m not even going to tell you. Blissful scene to watch, though, even if you couldn’t be a part of it yourself. Oh, Joyce. How could you go from a day as carefree and wild as this to the retirement scene in Torquaydos, in less than a decade?
It was the following day when she had her misgivings and put the painting in the loft, with a little chunter to herself. She was being self-punishing, but perhaps she was only following the most sensible course of action. Ideally, we’d all put any art we created away for a while before we properly evaluated it. Two weeks? Probably not long enough. Let’s call it two years. OK, ten. That will do it. Scratch that. Just to be sure, let’s come back and discover our true worth as creators from the afterlife. ‘Hi, I’m dead now. What? Yes, fully. I even have the papers to confirm it. Can you finally tell me my true star rating, out of ten?’ Joyce, I think, were she able to pop south over the border between the dead and the living, then north over the other one, between England and Scotland, would be pleased at what she saw on the wall of Dr Micklewhite and Dr Micklewhite. But – and I’m not denigrating Joyce’s talent for one second here – are enigma and the passing of the years to be given some credit for that? Is it maybe just possible that time itself has changed Joyce’s painting? As if some spiritual lichen of its own has grown on and around it, deepening and enriching its texture? And, if so, what good does that do Joyce, now? What we need to do is get her trending online. Death: it’s when we decide if everyone is good or bad, right, decide which of the two boxes to put them in, as well as the wooden one they’re already in? Let’s get her a Wikipedia page, get the conversation going. ‘So sorry to hear Joyce Nicholas is no longer with us. I only met her once, for no more than nine seconds, but she was not stuck up at all, and even said hello to my dog.’ ‘I have always been a huge fan of Joyce, even when nobody was talking about her, and it was super uncool to like her.’ ‘Graham, can you remind me how much we paid for that picture above the spare bed?’ ‘£300, I think. It was quite a long time ago.’ ‘Well, I’ve just found out from this newspaper article that it’s worth £55,000 and by someone called Joyce Nicholas. She died in Devon in 1973.’ Oh, Joyce, if only you’d have known your artistic worth, been raised in a different generation, and put yourself out there. You could be an influencer now. But you wouldn’t have wanted that, you say? Why on earth not? Oh, because the very process itself was the important part of the matter for you? The feeling of being lost inside it, guided by invisible hands. The trance. The freedom. But what about the ‘likes’, what about the dopamine rush? How old-fashioned you are, Joyce. Don’t you realise that even the dead have an Instagram account these days? Don’t do yourself a disservice. Play the game. Everyone must.
I’m sorry; I’ve done something I said I wouldn’t and permitted myself to get flustered. It’s been one of those days. I think I spotted a couple of drones earlier, circling above the boulders. I have a pain in one of my toes and there’s a very unwell, publicity-shy and sensitive ash tree I’m on intimate terms with and this morning someone plastered photos of it all over social media accompanied by the hashtag ‘#sadtree’. I think the toe pain comes from the fact that a pile of old compost bags and a hubcap are caught on a rock just past where the river emerges on the other side of town, almost but not quite, under the Victorian railway viaduct. It’s bearable, not so painful, not even comparable to the time they found a dead owl down there, tangled up in a sky lantern. I should sleep. The forecast is better for tomorrow. I can see the bats powering over from their roosts. I heard that nineteen buzzards and a kestrel are flying up from Cornwall at dawn. But I will say this final thing, concerning the previous subject: Joyce isn’t the only one. There are a lot of lofts and drawers and cupboards out there. Most of them have stacks of utterly worthless shit in them. But just a few of those lofts and cupboards and drawers contain a piece of art that’s special and true and came from an honest, inspired place, didn’t get shouted about at the time, and it’s probably only going to get more special and true the longer it’s left there. We’re all getting older, and that has its pluses as well as its minuses. Over beyond the back wall of Joyce’s old garden, the river isn’t quite as diamond clear as it once was, and its dauntless song doesn’t always quite succeed in drowning out the dual carriageway, but the lichen and moss on the rocks have become richer in texture. Quality lichen and moss isn’t something you just cheat or shortcut or hack or hashtag your way to.
Here, in my big green hands, I hold some time. Consider it my gift to you. You will probably never receive a finer one.
I’m going to go now. A heavily pregnant ewe just did a very thick and powerful piss on my chin. But I’m OK. To be perfectly honest, I barely even felt it.
GROUND UNDER REPAIR (1990)
The summer Mark and I found the man in the woods, Mark was sixteen and I was a year younger. We’d been playing a lot of golf that year and nobody much admired us for it. After our rounds and long practice sessions were complete, we’d walk home along the lane that led back to the village, carrying our clubs, and the inhabitants of passing vehicles would beep their horns and shout profanities at us. Considering it was a quiet lane where you’d only see about twenty cars per hour, it occurred with startlingly regularity. One time someone hurled a half-full Fanta can from a passenger window and it hit me in the eye and drenched the front of my polo shirt. When my mum saw the bruise, she refused to believe I had not been fighting. After that, Mark and I started taking a different route, over the corner of the tor and down through the woods by the river. Some of the paths weren’t public but Mark worked out a shortcut and was fairly confident we wouldn’t get into trouble.
The golf course had two personalities, and no smooth segue between them was in evidence. It threw visitors off balance, left them hot and gorse-scratched and irritated. Many who had begun the day in a positive frame of mind declined to visit the clubhouse for a drink afterwards, instead hurling their clubs into their car boot, not even bothering to change out of their spiked shoes, blowing out of the car park in a plume of exhaust smoke and a loud scrape of metal against speed bump, like people who’d stolen their own cars. For the first nine holes, everything was very polite and neatly mown, a sculpted suppression of nature that, were you blindfolded and dropped into it, would have been hard to distinguish from the one that characterises a thousand other golf courses. But after the ninth green players followed a steep tunnelled path through a small city of gorse and skyscraper ferns and emerged into a primal, unwashed otherplace that they had to trust, going by what the map on the back of the scorecard told them, was the tenth tee. Quarter-sheared, mad-eyed sheep and horned cattle roamed the fairways and tees indiscriminately. Jangly-nerved salesmen and insurance brokers backed off their putts as large dark winged shapes wheeled overhead, mocking them with shrieking beaked laughter. Balls struck sweetly from tees ricocheted off assorted hidden rocks into tussocky bogs, never to be seen again. These balls soared unpredictably owing to the dung caking their surface and sudden corridors of diabolical wind coming down off the moor. It was not uncommon to see visitors holding up play by attempting to herd sheep, cattle and ponies out of their playing line. Regulars were more nonchalant and casually floated their drives over the animals’ heads, but even they were not exempt from pastoral strife. Believed to be assured of victory in the 1989 club championship as he strutted the mounds of the final fairway, Tom Bracewell threw away his advantage when a heifer sat on his ball and refused to move. A crowd soon gathered around the cow, the competitors who had been awaiting the result of the event in the clubhouse bar gradually filtering out to watch, until over a hundred of us stood staring at the animal. Christine Chagford, who before taking her job behind the bar at the club had spent a lot of time in close proximity to cattle, finally managed to sweet talk the cow into giving way and letting the group behind play through, but not before she’d planted a kiss on its forehead and posed for a photo which would later be framed and hung on the wall of the Men’s Bar. Rattled, Bracewell racked up a triple bogey seven, putting him in a sudden death playoff with Christine’s cousin Tony, which Bracewell subsequently lost. A year later, the general consensus was that he had still not recovered: a pallid, stooped figure, seen, if seen at all, staring forlornly at competition result boards and handicap tables in the back room of the clubhouse or down on the practice ground at sundown, scratching his chin and assessing the balls spread diversely in front of him, some or other mail order teaching contraption abandoned on the ground behind him.
Mark explained to me that he was on a mission, and that mission was to shag Christine before his seventeenth birthday. ‘I’m working up to it and slowly getting her interested until one day she just won’t be able to stop thinking about me,’ he said. ‘Is she not a bit old for you?’ I asked. ‘She’s sort of thirty or something, right?’ Mark waved the question away. ‘Twenty-six. I’m tired of the girls our age. I don’t want an immature idiot who writes the name of her favourite band on her pencil case then crosses it out next week when she changes her mind. I want a woman who knows who she is.’ I was often dehydrated by the time Mark and I had completed eighteen holes, especially in what had been a very hot summer, and would have liked to have gone directly from the final green into the Men’s Bar to order a pint of Coke with ice, but Mark always insisted that we followed protocol and visited the locker room to wash our hands and change into our soft shoes beforehand. I soon became aware that Mark, who was otherwise rarely guided by protocol, was driven by an ulterior motive on these occasions, which was to make sure his hair was adequately gelled before he saw Christine. ‘How do I look?’ he would ask me, after liberally applying the gel from one of the circular plastic tubs of it he worked his way through each week. ‘Really good,’ I would reply, more admiring Mark’s hair as a whole than specifically its gelled state. So far, if the gel was having an impact on Christine, she was keeping her cards very close to her chest. To date, the only sentence she’d said to Mark, besides ‘Thanks’, ‘What can I get you?’, ‘Pint or half’ and ‘With ice or without’ had been ‘Ooh, big shot!’ – this being in response to the time Mark paid for two pints of Coke with a fifty-pound note, which he’d got purposely from the bank that weekend, after exchanging it for his birthday money and a month’s wages from his paper round.
Mark’s other goal for his seventeenth birthday was to learn to drive and, when he had done so, very quickly purchase a car and drive it to school where, by which point, he would be attending the sixth form. The comic genius of this plan, we recognised, was that everyone knew that the small council house where Mark lived with his granddad was only seventy yards from the school car park. It was, in fact, the closest house of all to the school.
School was in town, six miles away, and I went there too, but Mark spent a lot of time at our place, in the village, and when he didn’t stay over in my mum and dad’s spare room, his granddad was always on hand to collect him with uncanny punctuality and obedience. Mark’s granddad’s name was Leonard, but Mark never called him that, or ‘Granddad’; what he called him was ‘Old Boy’. ‘Hey look! Here’s Old Boy!’ Mark would say, looking out of our living-room window and spotting Leonard waiting in his Datsun Cherry. Old Boy very rarely knocked on the door when he collected Mark, never seemed anything less than 100 per cent available, never stopped grinning, and always wore a brown tweed cap, which – along with the outmoded and modest nature of his transport – prompted me to think of him less as a grandfather and more as a particularly humble chauffeur. ‘It’s OK. I’ll get Old Boy to take us,’ Mark would say, if Mark and I had a plan for a trip where public transport was inconvenient, which, in Devon, on the brink of the nineties, was nearly all trips. When Mark and I went to Paignton, to play the slot machines, or to Exeter, to watch Iron Maiden in concert, Old Boy waited in the car, happily passing the time listening to the radio or reading a tattered paperback by Patrick O’Brian or CS Forester or another nautically inclined writer. ‘How’s tricks, Paulie, my boy?’ Old Boy would sometimes ask me. ‘Great!’ I would answer. ‘You just wait, you boys. It’s all going to happen for you,’ Old Boy would say. But apart from that, he largely just drove and grinned, with what struck me as the most relaxed of old faces. The Datsun was a car in which I never felt ill at ease, whose interior always smelt verdant and warm and earthy, like a greenhouse.
To my knowledge, Old Boy himself had no particular passion for golf, but it was well known that the clubs Mark used had come directly from Old Boy’s loft: an assorted collection of irons and woods dating from the 1960s, the 1950s and, in the case of one tiny, hickory-shafted nine iron Mark was particularly fond of, 1912. My clubs were considered out of date by many, being second-hand and all at least four years old, but when I played alongside Mark they made me feel decadent and spoilt. ‘You want to bin those sticks and get yourself some golf equipment, son,’ Mike, the car salesman Mark played against in the 1988 club matchplay semi-final, had sneeringly told Mark, prior to Mark casually dispatching him by the handsome total of seven and eight, less than two hours later. New juniors at the club came and went, invariably carrying hi-tech weapons that glinted in the moorland sun. It didn’t bother Mark a bit. A lanky bespectacled boy called Roger Glaister arrived, carrying a gold-shafted driver, hopping casually over the fence from a big house on the lane which his parents had recently purchased, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He spat a lot, in a very idiosyncratic way where the spit forked out into the air through his front teeth. Soon, several other kids at the club were spitting this way too, but not Mark. In their one and only match against each other, the score was quite close for the first nine holes, Glaister taunting Mark all the way with under-the-breath remarks about charity shop clothes, but on the final nine – always his favourite – Mark turned up the heat. By the sixteenth tee, that gold shaft had become two smaller crooked gold shafts, languishing in a wooden dustbin 500 yards distant, Glaister’s £50 Pringle shirt was damp from where his saliva had rebelled on him in a gust of wind, and his ankles were caked in cow dung. Mark beat him by eleven shots in the end. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he told Glaister, shaking his hand and taking a grudgingly proffered £20 note. ‘We must do it again some time.’
We had both improved considerably in the two years we’d been playing together, coaxing one another on, but for Mark the process was different: calm, creative, unfussy. A bad round never seemed to bother him. For me, it was increasingly a case of three steps forward, two steps back, sometimes with one extra step back just after that. I’d noticed golf had been much easier when I knew far less about how to play it. At this point, when I had become much more than just somebody who hit a ball and tried to get it into a little hole in as few strokes as possible, my mind became fascinated with the margins for error, with the allure of the countless potential negative outcomes, as opposed to the one simple potential positive outcome. I watched the pros at Augusta and Lytham and St Andrews and Troon on my mum and dad’s black-and-white TV, and, while there were a few inflamed exceptions – usually men from Spain or South America – the solidly successful ones often came across as robots in jumpers, pastel droids who might potentially sell you some insurance between shots. They did not appear to have exciting brains or, on the few occasions they did, they seemed to have the discipline to make those brains unexciting for the five or so hours they were on the course. They say golf is a game of the mind but that does not mean you actually require one to play it well. It could even be argued that possessing one is a distinct disadvantage. But Mark struck me as more akin to those rare pros who had a bit of swagger to them, who had plenty of intelligence but were able to somehow reduce it, control it, when they were over the ball. It had been me who’d first brought him up to the club, after I took a bag of balls down to the playing field in Underhill and found him already down there, with that prehistoric nine iron of his. I’d barely known him back then, only recognised him as a distant figure from breaktimes and the bus queue, but we’d instantly bonded, and I’d already been in awe of what he could do with just that one Edwardian club: fading it, drawing it, driving it low, more than 150 yards, into a strong breeze, then seconds later using it with great finesse for the featheriest of lobshots. I still had the authority at that point, though: it was me who told him how to grip the club properly, me who recommended his first pair of spiked shoes. I’d overcomplicated it for him, brought him into the universe of handicaps and etiquette and left-hand gloves and deconstructive video lessons and cruel bounces and lip outs and sucker-pin positions, when he could have just stayed happily thwacking balls all day, down behind the village. But, unlike me, he responded to the psychological torments of the game like a Buddha, appeared to sleepwalk through it all, even, shrugging, easy, that looseness in his swing that made him able to power his drives so effortlessly far being a greater looseness; a looseness of face, of eyes, of character, of mind.
