Villager, page 5
‘I’m sorry. I fucking wish I’d known. I don’t go up there any more, if it’s any consolation. Haven’t in a long time.’
‘Bunch of wankers,’ interjected Christine, wanking off an invisible cock (small) with her hand.
‘It wasn’t all of them. Not even most. Some decent people play golf. We both know that. It happens everywhere, not just on golf courses. But it just so occurred that when I was having this revelation I was also having a revelation about golf itself, what it is, what it does to the environment. The amount of weedkiller that gets poured onto that course every month. The insects it kills. The waste it is of natural habitat for any number of creatures. All because some well-off people want to hit a ball around. A lot of them don’t seem to even enjoy it. Do you know how many golf courses there are just in England? Over two thousand. Do you know how many acres of wasted wild space that is?’
‘I see what you mean.’
‘Have you read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson? Read it. Drop anything you are reading now and read it instead. It’s your duty as a human being. She was dying of cancer when she wrote it but she cared so much about the planet she still went ahead and did it. She saw the future, and the destruction industrial farming was doing, the mindless greed of big businesses, and that was in 1962, and now it’s more than thirty years later and people are STILL not seeing the future. We are breaking the fine threads that bind life to life and the results are going to be pissing catastrophic.’ He was really gaining steam now and I was struggling to keep up, struggling to reshape him from what I had known him as; it wasn’t all that long ago that our primary topic of conversation was the escape shots Seve Ballesteros played when he was stuck behind a tree. ‘It all started getting bad in the Second World War. People experimented with new chemicals to make weapons and then we started using the same chemicals to blast tiny creatures to hell, just so we could grow even more wheat, expand the monoculture, make the countryside look even more uniform and dull. Look at the names they call these things. They make sure they’re long and hard to remember, because if they are people are less likely to address what they actually are and the terrible harm they do. Golf. Agribusiness. It’s all a part of the same giant disease. Waste and indulgence and humans acting like greedy, suppressive gods. What do you do with your plastic when you’re done with it?’
‘I put it in the bin in my kitchen.’
‘Of course you do. That’s what everyone does. But where do you think it’s all going? Do you think it just vanishes? I’ll tell you where it’s going. Out there.’ He pointed towards the waves, and the stone arch, and I pictured that apocryphal whale my dad had told me about, blasting through the stone then gobbling the container that had formerly held the takeaway sandwich I’d bought from the Newton Abbot branch of Boots on Monday. ‘What are you doing a week on Sunday?’
‘Nothing, I think.’
‘Good. Fancy coming to the Quantocks? We’re going to mess up one of the hunts up there. Stags, but probably foxes too. It’ll be different to today. More risky. People get hurt sometimes. But there’ll be more of us. The American will be there. Rory, too. I know some very excellent people. You’ll be fine.’
‘Er… OK.’
Unexpectedly, the light spaced-out drizzle had redoubled then retripled and become something more disparaging. In attempting to digest Mark’s rant, I’d been slow at eating my chips, and now a deferred queasiness was rising in me, and I opted to leave the remainder of them for the gulls to pick at. Undaunted by the weather, a caterpillar of tourist-owned cars was moving down the hill towards the beach café car park. I realised we had lost Christine and Old Boy but neither were far away, Christine throwing a stick for a dog she had met on the beach, and Old Boy beatifically examining the half-sunken slimy hull of an old boat beneath the causeway. Mark turned for the car and whistled and both of them appeared swiftly beside us.
The fact that this was the last time I saw Mark in person is something that I quickly became disappointed about and is a fact that has become a little sadder and starker every year since. That Saturday afternoon I phoned him at home. He was out but I asked Old Boy to pass on my apologies: I had forgotten that I was supposed to go to my aunt and uncle’s for Sunday lunch, I explained, and wouldn’t be able to make it to the Quantocks. This was a lie, pure cowardice on my part. I loathed hunting as sport but in the end I could not picture myself in a crowd, trying to disrupt it. The prospect scared me. And I think if I was nineteen again, I’d make the same decision, but I do sometimes drift off into a little reverie about what difference it might have made if I’d acted more boldly and adventurously that weekend, and what other path it might have sent my life down. I got the impression it was a one-chance situation, from Mark’s point of view, and sure enough I wasn’t asked again to accompany him – wasn’t asked to write profanities on a golf course, to help save wild animals being put through unnecessary suffering, or even to attend a party in some woodland with people who were a bit more exciting than the people I usually met. Did I call Mark again after that and invite him out to the pub? Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. I couldn’t say for sure. Let’s say I did, for argument’s sake. But, if I did, he was busy.
I did see Mark one further time but that was on a TV screen in 1996 during evening news coverage of the controversy over the Newbury bypass in Berkshire, when protesters camped out in the wild and, in an ultimately doomed attempt to prevent the destruction of 10,000 trees on the proposed route, chained themselves to trunks and branches (‘I wouldn’t like to be in the middle of that lot with a fully working nose,’ said my mum, who was watching with me). Several celebrities marched to stop the road being built, including the children’s television couple Maggie and Oliver Fox. During interviews with the Foxes and some of the other celebrities and protest organisers, I spotted what was unquestionably the left two thirds of Mark in the background, his aura and shine unmistakable, in clothes that he probably hadn’t taken off for three weeks. Of course, in the years since then, I’ve attempted to look him up online, but been able to find very little of substance. Mark seems to have become one of those rare people who have ducked the gaze of the search engine, his soul too tricky and deep to be googleable. His name comes up on a stag beetle survey I found printed by Natural England in 2004 and a list of organisers for an early Climate Change march in Oregon in 2009, and I heard a rumour that – after Old Boy died, fifteen years ago – Mark had fallen in love and moved to the US west coast, but other than that I know nothing. Did he forge a new identity? Change his name? It’s possible. Something in my gut makes me sure he is still alive.
Me? This isn’t the place to go too deeply into my story. I was still toying with the idea of university back in 1993, but it never happened, and I’ve done a lot of different jobs you could probably think of since then, and a lot you couldn’t. I no longer play golf: partly because I have long since lost the motivation, but partly because doing so would feel like a vote for a lot of what I am against politically. I painted houses. I delivered cakes. I half-completed a driving instructor training course. I acted as a dogsbody for a wealthy fleecer of the oppressed. I wanted to be a writer, and then a musician, and then an artist, but never really gave any of them a proper go. At a party on Millennium Eve I got talking to a girl called Rebecca who’d lived two roads from me for most of my childhood without either of us ever realising, and a year later we were married. We’ve had our hard times, like most couples I know, and even broke up for two whole years, when I was having a minor crisis about various small ways in which I’d decided I had spurned my life. In 2016 I was involved in quite a significant car crash, which I feel ecstatically lucky to have walked away from with a largely functioning body, and that year I sold the taxi I had been driving, Rebecca quit her job as deputy head of a coastal school with an insalubrious reputation and we opened a zero waste shop in the closest village to us, which we are never sure is going to survive for another year then does, just about, and hopefully will continue to do so. One Sunday every month we arrange a town litter pick, which has now got so popular that some of the regular attendees have started hosting their own subsidiary midweek litter pick. Life is… slightly fulfilling, fast, slow, small, comfortable, numb, scary. Rebecca and I are very similar in many ways and very not-similar in others. Rebecca likes whenever possible to see every event or incident in the present, purely as an isolated event or incident, whereas I cannot separate anything from the past and the queue of other incidents that influence it. We have learned ways to surmount this ideological disagreement, but it has taken time. We still live within a twenty-minute car ride of Underhill and when I see the tor as I drive by, I always think of Mark and wonder how he is doing. I think of how brilliant he was at striking the ball, where he could have taken that talent and the way he looked it straight in the face and rejected it. And I think of me, a person who has never been brilliant at anything, just a person who is sort of OK at a lot of things. And then I wonder if Mark going with that brilliance I witnessed in him, letting it play out to its natural conclusion, would have truly made him happy, and find myself wondering if being brilliant at something is perhaps a little overrated, as a way to live.
Memory is a sly magpie, a seasoned frequenter of thrift fairs and jumble sales, gradually sweeping the worthless tat aside to reveal the hidden treasure behind it. Like a magpie, it needs to be greeted and acknowledged once in a while, and like a magpie, if you try to get really close to it, it usually won’t let you. My own has undoubtedly done some rearranging during its downtime and I find that, amongst the nights of my youth that now seem important, it’s pushed that one with Mark up at the Hollow, by the campfire, to the fore, and, within the night itself, it’s probably shone a light on parts of proceedings that didn’t seem significant at the time and snuffed out others that did. I come back to the music a lot, the smell of the woodsmoke and the hot fermented apples. I come back to Fran’s hands in my hair. I come back to Mark, who will never know what an etched part of me he remains, and I come back to the girl in the long white blouse, standing back from everyone in the pocket of the woods that holds her, the intentness of her gaze towards the American as he played. It seemed like such a small part of the night at the time, but I have never forgotten her face or her holly-wreath hair, and I wonder if one of the reasons I come back to it was something that Michael, my chiropractor, said to me during my treatment after my car crash.
Michael – a man who always looks haunted himself, as if his skin is trying to retreat from any room he is in and hide further behind his bones – and I were talking about a very picturesque walk on the west side of the moor, where you follow a path along an old broken pipe from the clay mine. He said one time he was walking up there with an old schoolfriend, and he saw two ghosts, although it was all quite mundane and not at all what he’d grown up to expect seeing ghosts to be, as an experience. It was twenty minutes or so before sundown, he said, and the ghosts wore headtorches and were in the clothes of miners from a century earlier and had walked straight past his friend and him into the very thick and spidery copse further up the hill, without saying hello. Nothing else happened but he and his friend had both been very sure they had experienced something just out of the normal pattern of things, something not quite correct. About this they were in total agreement. I wonder increasingly if that was the way with my sighting of the girl in the blouse alone in the trees, whose face, when it has appeared in my dreams, has made me want to burst into song and has, in some way I can’t fully express, left me waking up steamrollered by a great and melancholic sense that my life has not peeled back the layers and found the magic that it should. It is probably all nonsense, of course. She was perhaps just a lonely girl, a quiet girl, a girl who had fallen out with someone, a girl who wanted some time alone, a girl who felt better on the perimeter of everything, a girl who just happened to have been wandering the woods and stumbled on a gathering that interested her. But sometimes when I am seeing that night in my mind’s eye, I feel like I am seeing it as her, as a separate bystander, but one with a greater knowledge about what is really going on, in time’s larger context: one who sees these people, some of whom are in the midst of the most thrilling twenty-four hours of their life, and sees their folly in not for a moment suspecting that it is the most thrilling twenty-four hours of their life, not seeing that this isn’t the beginning of many, many other equally thrilling twenty-four-hour periods, for many years to come.
As her, the girl with the holly-wreath hair, I stand back in the dark part of the place and I listen to the music blossom and expand and I smell the fragrant burning rings of the trees. And then in my floaty blouse I float up and look down on the lights in the clearing, with another ultra perspective, the perspective of the person directing the film. And I see how everything is informed by everything, because there is no way it cannot be. And then I wake up, and choose not to trouble my wife with any of it.
DRIFTWOOD (1968)
He came out of the canyon with his guitar at dawn, queried by the distant howl of coyotes. He was wearing a stranger’s shirt and had not been to sleep. The first truck he flagged down stopped and after one more ride, in a hoarse 1959 Buick LeSabre driven by a silent man who smelled of cigarettes and reminded him of his aunt in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, he reached the airport. Everyone there looked almost but not quite as tired as him. The dehydrated fur all over his brain amplified a paranoia in him, made each of his small actions feel observed. On the plane a stewardess brought him a nest of dry chicken with some lettuce so papery and devoid of moisture it seemed like fake lettuce, lettuce made solely for photo shoots of lettuce. She asked him if he was travelling on some sort of business and a cough-laugh escaped his throat. What on earth kind of business looked like this? He’d told himself he had done enough of going where everyone said you should go, and wanted to try the alternative approach of going just somewhere, roll the dice across a map, but it was a little more pre-meditated than that. ‘I’m going back where I come from,’ he told her.
As the coach moved sluggishly through the last outposts of the city, it rained, just like it did in the songs. Rain-grey town, known for its sound. None of the flamboyant outfits he’d heard about were in evidence. All of his fellow passengers were wearing clothes mimicking the colour of the sky. As the rain cleared, he saw toy cars, made to measure for the toy road system around them, and the toy driveways of the toy houses beyond that where the toy cars secured their prescribed eight hours’ sleep every night.
After a couple of hours, the bus passed over a ridge and the terrain became less populated, a light green moonscape. Big shaved-looking mounds that were more like dunes than hills. A place that looked like it hadn’t quite yet decided on its long-term plans. It segued gently into light forest, little stone houses, something more polite, something that was finally like the England he’d been picturing when he set out, the England he remembered, although he didn’t truly remember anything. He’d been four years old. Each of the only three people who connected him to this part of the world was at least 5,000 miles away. Yet many miles further on when the bus finally stopped and he got out, he realised a part of him had still been expecting a caretaker or guide to meet him at the station. A second, lost sister perhaps. A cousin. He discovered a new oneliness in the walk that followed, felt it in the centre of his ribcage.
Nearly all the streets in the city were steep, but they divided into two types: the grey ones that looked like they’d just been born from nothingness and the pastel ones that looked proud in a tired, touching way, like senior citizens still wearing their graduation gowns. He took a room on the top floor of a lanky old house that peered over the edge of a hill. He had his own sink in the corner of the room which he pissed into on lazier days because the bathroom was shared and the pipes clanged every time anyone turned on the hot tap, which hurt his head on the mornings after he’d drunk too much, which was quite a few of them. The previous occupant of the room had begun to paint a mural of a squashed face in two shades of orange on the wall next to a tall window where, until the beech trees across the road came into leaf, you could see a one-inch-high triangle of cobalt sea. He figured the docks were the obvious place to find work and it didn’t take him long to do so. On Saturdays, he busked, usually down by the coach station. It wasn’t much of a music city, but it was easy to score some weed down by the water at night, an area of much dereliction, both architectural and human. Near a warehouse with a tree growing out of it three women a few years his senior who were high or drunk or both stopped him and asked if he wanted to go to a club with them.
‘You’ll like it,’ one said. ‘There’s music playing.’
‘What kind of music?’ he asked.
‘Jazz, duuddde,’ she said, in a mock version of his accent.
He followed them four streets further into the injured concrete core of the city while they whispered conspiratorially and cackled about people and places he didn’t know, lagging back out of concern they might smell the odour of oysters that always now clung to his clothes, then finally allowing himself to blur back into the night for good. They did not appear to notice and as it faded their hard laughter mixed with the cries of gulls until he did not know which was one and which was the other. The next day he bought a small pot of liquorice-red house paint and finished the mural. The sea smells were a constant social concern, even though he did little socialising. Oyster, mussel, cockle, crab. He was convinced they never went away, even after he washed. On the roadsides, in the wet dust and weeds, yellow flowers with darker yellow centres were appearing. Down on the containers, they never called him Richard or Richie, only ‘Pencil’ or ‘Flower’. ‘Ere, Flower, you sure you can ’andle this?’ ‘Don’t give it to Pencil. It might ’urt ’is soft ’ands. Lovely ’ands, ’e got, like my missus. You seen ’em?’ At night, he dreamt he was on his back, with sealife cascading down on him out of a metal chute. If not that, he dreamt of Alison, the girl from Albany he’d met the previous summer, who, upon taking the least amount of drink, would immediately want to jab and prod everyone around her with no little violence, or jump on their backs. In the space of just one weekend, Alison, who at barely five foot was a whole sixteen inches shorter than him, had jumped on the back of Jim Morrison and the rhythm section of The Turtles. During the dreams, he was always crouched in a corner, watching helplessly as the jumping took place, knowing intervention was futile. In the apotheosis of the dreams, he crouched in the corner of a shipping container, his hands over his eyes, as haddock fell on his head and Alison leapt on the back of a giant dolphin who smiled nervously in the manner of someone who will pretend to have fun on the vague promise of sex. A fragile awareness was growing in him that his songwriting was coming on apace. In a temporarily clean new plaza in the main shopping district, he tried out two new numbers and took home the smallest amount of money in his guitar case to date.
