Villager, page 6
When other, more rampant vegetation had swallowed the yellow flowers on the verges, he set out for the docks at the usual time, carrying all his possessions, but turned right, not his customary left, and soon reached the train station. One of the country’s diminishing branch lines took him to a village by the coast, where he and nobody else disembarked. At a post office, he bought bread, scissors, knobbly fruit and – with only an intrigued suspicion of what it might be – Marmite. It wasn’t just that the tunnelled lanes he walked along, with their floral specklings of pink and blue, merely seemed a simple, elemental contrast to the city he’d spent the last four months in; they appeared to have no topographical relationship to the small metropolis at all, to belong in a whole different country. He helped two men push a rust-caked pickup out of a ditch. Afterwards, they ran him a mile or two further down the road to their place and gave him a cold lager. They asked where he was going and, when he answered as honestly and specifically as he could, their only advice was to avoid Somerset because the people there weren’t right. The garden was full of retired machinery, fading gently into the earth. The younger of the two men pointed at two wooden structures on the hill above them that he’d taken for some kind of hutches. ‘Bees,’ the younger man said, rolling his eyes, but did not elaborate. The sun broke through the clouds after he left, drying him out for the third time that day. At a payphone, he inserted a coin and dialled a number beginning with an international prefix, but when a woody male voice answered he hung up. Further on, in a steep valley where everything hid strategically from the wind he appropriated three cucumbers from a garden and planted a kiss on the nose of a sceptical bullock.
As a result of trial and error, he found a zigzagging path down a landslip which spat him out onto a deserted cove by way of a rusty ladder which bridged the final gap between undercliff and shingle. Huts of varying types were dotted here and there on the cliffside, with flags and tall, tropical-looking plants outside. For the next thirteen days he slept on the beach, although he had concluded, at one point, that he would probably expire before seeing his first morning there, having come out of his initial salty self-baptism with purple digits and teeth that didn’t so much chatter as argue with themselves, then failed in his attempts to light a fire without the aid of matches. He had learned the cove’s first stark lesson, which was that it was not Malibu or Venice Beach. But by the third day he had grown acclimatised to the water, and, aided by driftwood and the fruits of a nine-mile hike to and from the village store, lit fires, and worked on verses of a song that he felt like he’d reached up and plucked out of the bright waxing gibbous moon above him. It had totally slipped his mind that it was his birthday. He was twenty-two years old.
The sea on his nude skin made him feel virile, and he wished he had a companion to swim with, but also slightly didn’t. The cliffs were red, redder than they looked further down the coast, and the sea tasted red too when he accidentally swallowed some of it. The cove was one that sucked in more flotsam than most. One morning he awoke to discover a small metal alarm clock twenty yards in front of his toes, on the tideline. The sea had a sense of humour but you’d probably be mistaken for taking that to mean it suffered fools gladly. Having finished both of the paperbacks in his rucksack, he began to collect driftwood, not having to use any huge amount of imagination to see faces in the knots and bends in it. He wedged it together to make animals, some real, some mythical. He forged further down the shore, looking for even more. One evening he ran back to his base camp with so much of it that he had to carry the biggest piece in his mouth. He realised he was grinning. ‘I am a dog,’ he thought.
‘And what,’ he wrote in his diary that evening, as a response to some points he’d put to himself a few days earlier, ‘is the benefit when you do get there? Is there a perfect midpoint between feeling the cold indifference of the world and losing freedom and judgement through commercial success and the people surrounding you who will no longer tell you the truth about what you are doing? (Not that I speak as someone facing a choice between the two at this exact juncture in my life.) Everything went so hazy today I lost sight of where the water ended and the sky began. In the quiet, a gull skimmed the water – or was it sky – and the tiny distance between its beak and the surface never wavered, as if measured by some highly evolved internal calculator. You could believe for a moment that this was all there was in the world: this watersky vapour, stretching for eternity, and this bird. Exquisite. I would like to bottle it somehow. I think this, in the end, is the great challenge, once you can write the tunes (which, really, anybody can, with time and effort): the bottling of something else. Something that’s not even yours but that’s not another person’s either. Something on loan from the earth.’
Closer to the weekend, people arrived and unlocked the doors of a couple of the huts on the cliffside. An old man, his face entirely ringed with coarse white hair, came down from one of the huts and swam naked, striding into the sea with all the confidence of someone reclaiming a swimming pool he had dug out with his own gnarled hands. Afterwards, the old man caught and cooked mackerel, the smell drifting down tantalisingly to where he sat scraping the last flecks of disillusioning Marmite from the jar. Later, he heard hammering from the old man’s hut, metallic and dauntless. While he listened to the old man hammer, he hacked into his hair with the scissors and threw the clumps into the tide, wondering when and how and where they would biodegrade.
The sea of his new home beach had innumerable moods. Rusty anger. Muscular calm. Pungent clarity. Weedy broth. Blue fog. Stubborn debris trickster. When did one sea clock off from its shift and the other sea come in and take its place? You never witnessed that moment because that was not permitted because if you did that would unlock everything: the big secret to it all. He knew the sea was irascible, not to be trusted but, as its resident, he inevitably began to get his feet further under the table, as residents do. One day, doing front crawl seventy yards out, he realised that his intended movement, back towards shore, was going the opposite of to plan and, worse, that he was on an inexorable downward trajectory. It was all very befuddling, because nothing around him looked particularly vigorous or wretched, and, in his disorientation, he only got the chance to cry out twice before he was completely submerged, garbled protests in a futile language spoken by only one man. His next close-to-conscious realisation was that he was in Heaven and God was looking down on him. Because Heaven would always customise itself aptly to the manner in which you’d died, Heaven in this instance was made of shingle and raucous white birds, but God had a beard, as God always had, no matter what the cause of your death was.
‘I thought you were a goner there, kiddo,’ said God, who he now realised was not God at all, but the old man from the hut.
*
‘You were in a riptide. The thing to do in a riptide is to swim parallel to the shore. You swam towards the shore, which is the worst thing you can do.’
They sat on old canvas chairs on the old man’s creaking, salty veranda and ate mackerel and potatoes, which the man salted liberally, in accordance with their environment. ‘How’s your head now?’ the old man asked.
‘Sore,’ he replied. He had hit the back of it on some rocks close to where he’d gone under, but in the end the impact had also saved his life since it was the sight of him bumping against the rocks that had alerted the old man to his plight, and allowed the old man to swim out quickly, and drag him clear, around the corner of the current, and back to shore.
‘I used to do it for the county. Swim. I was pretty good, could have been better, if I’d put the effort in. I had the chance to go to the Olympics. Belgium. I was too busy falling in love. I rarely have cause to swim like that any more, but I’ve watched six people die in my life and I didn’t much relish adding to that total.’
He slept on the floor of the old man’s hut that night, on top of a blanket. The head of a nail, knocked slightly loose from a floorboard, poked into the back of his knee, but he still managed to locate sleep with little trouble. He was a person who lost consciousness quickly: on train seats, on beds, on floors, in deep, chilly water. In the morning, he felt the lump on the back of his skull. It was located on a part of his skull he’d never liked, but had had little regular cause to think about, until now. In the light, he took in more of the cabin. On the shelf on the bed he saw a gardening trowel, a thick wool blanket and a bottle of aftershave. Above the Calor gas stove hung two framed photographs: one of a black poodle, and one of a smiling, elfin lady in a thick herringbone coat. The old man came in with a towel around his neck. ‘She’s dead now,’ said the old man, waving a hand towards the photographs. ‘And so is she.’
They swam later that morning, and in the afternoon he slept and played guitar while the old man vanished up the landslip to he did not know where. He stretched out on the skin of the water and listened to the shingle moving beneath him. In the evening by the fire he spoke a little about home but mostly the old man talked about his life and he listened.
‘I lost Eileen, she’s the one in the photo, when I was sixty-one. I was entirely unprepared for it. I always took for granted that we’d have a bit longer than that. Look out there. Seal. See it? I was not always a good man in my youth. I had my… errant moments. But I, we, got past it. People will give up more easily now. But we didn’t. We were OK. In the first year that I was alone, I kept coming back to an image, from years before. It was of Eileen, the first day I ever came here. Naked, in the water. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about something erotic, although she was a beautiful woman. It wasn’t that which kept bringing me back to it. It was her face, the freedom and happiness in it. It wasn’t like her, to do that, permit herself to become naked in a place where she might be observed by strangers. I knew her to be a very cautious woman. She looked so different that day: like every muscle in her face had relaxed. That is a beautiful thing, to see a woman you love go naked into the sea for the first time. If you see it, don’t go on in the blithe assumption you might see it again. Anyhow, not long after that, I came down with the dog and built the cabin. I was totally certain I needed to do it, for her. The dog and I brought the wood around on the boat. It took seventeen months, in total. I’m here half the year, if I can be. My name is Robert Belltower. You play guitar very well. Her ashes are up there. Have you thought of trying to secure a recording contract?’
‘I had one. It wasn’t for me.’
‘Well, if it’s not for you, don’t do it,’ said Robert Belltower. ‘But make certain you’re certain first.’
Above the path on the undercliff, huge, never-tamed buddleia nurtured vast dynasties of bees and bee mimics. The sweet smell of the buddleia dominated the evenings, along with the very nearly as sweet smell of Robert Belltower. Upon retiring on the fifth night, Robert Belltower announced he would be gone for a short while, possibly to Lyme Regis, or the old smugglers’ village of Beer, he was not yet certain. Robert Belltower said he was welcome to use the cabin, so long as he didn’t burn it down, and left the key to the padlock under the third rock behind the flag. The song he wrote the following day, which he gave the working title ‘Sad Photograph of a Dog’, felt like an attempt of sorts to finish a conversation. He deemed it an inferior song and, after further appraisal, decided he was certain he was certain.
Storms were spinning in from the west. They vanquished his fires, stirred and steepened the shingle, drenched his diary, conditioned the furze of his hair. He imagined giant clenched fists pulling the black clouds in on a rope with big concerted tugs and little pauses in between. In the strange aggressive sunblast that followed, he became aware of how long it was since he had been touched by anybody except Robert Belltower. He poured cold water on that thought and reconstituted it as the simpler desire to play a song for a gathering of twenty or more people and hear them clap and possibly whoop. He left the four of the driftwood animals that had not blown away outside the hut, so they defined a path of sorts to the front door. The undercliff seemed steeper, twistier than before, as he made his way up it, but he was aware of something more coiled and taut in his calves as they propelled him up the still-damp path, shimmying to one side every dozen or so steps to make way for jaywalking oil beetles. He stopped and peeled one of Robert Belltower’s overripe bananas under a yew tree in a churchyard, ate it in three decisive bites. He threw the peel towards a gathering of wild rabbits then set out up a steep unmetalled road and through a latched gate weighted by an old rock. Cows looked up from their all-day meals, discussed the topic amongst themselves then made their way slowly, and then more quickly, towards him. The hillside shook under their hooves and he froze with his tanned arms spread wide, like some fibreglass cattle messiah, and the cows stopped in their tracks, looking up into his face, fascinated and confused, until, one by one, they returned to the more vital business of breakfast. His reverie was broken by a small, worrying question in his mind: Which rock had Robert Belltower said, and how far was it behind the flag?
He waved down the train at another small station, where there were no other passengers, and took it to a different city this time, less greyly rearranged by war, barely a city at all. He walked up a cobbled street to a cathedral and set up directly beneath a carving of a six-mouthed, six-nosed, five-eyed crowned head. All the office workers, even those of his age group, who bit into thin white sandwiches on the green in front of him had much shorter hair than him, even in his newly pollarded state. A woman holding a polythene bag overflowing with clothes stared sadly at him, then, after almost an hour, moved on, limping. Later, he realised a short man with a guitar was also staring at him, not as sadly, but intently, unwaveringly.
‘You’re in my spot, longshanks,’ barked the man, before he had quite finished the song.
‘Your spot?’
‘Yes. This is where I go. Has been for a long time. Everyone knows.’
‘I didn’t realise they were reserved.’
‘Well, this one is. Scram. Get lost.’
‘Well, what if I’m not so down with that, man? There’s a lot of space here. Enough for everyone.’
With that, the man transformed himself into a close approximation of a rhinoceros, bending and charging at his midriff with great speed, knocking all the wind from him. He fell back into the cathedral wall, the sore part of his head smacking against cold uneven stone. As he did, the rhinocerman kicked wildly at his guitar case, scattering coins onto grass and cobbles. He scrambled for his affairs and the lunchtime crowd on the green moved in, but nobody intervened or helped. As he flailed for coins and notes, he noticed the face of his watch, which his grandfather had given him, was cracked and the hands had stopped moving. All of the city’s noise had become a single muffled high note and he waded in his stooped shock to the other shore of the cathedral green, dragging his possessions with him in a slapdash collection of arms.
He walked for a number of hours that he could not quantify. After leaving behind the last of the nervous almost-villages that the city had coughed out and passing over several successively higher wooded rims, he descended, stopped at a clapper bridge, drank from a small river and slumped in a cradle of moss beneath a tree and rested his eyes. The water level was low, revealing a quasi-wall that could have been built by a person, long long ago, but could equally have been built by nature and time; it was hard to tell. When he awoke again it was dark. When he awoke the next time, the sun was rising, illuminating rougher, higher land ahead of him: the three-buttocked crest of a hill. His head remained sore but his vision had cleared. A sign matted with thick gaudy lichen told him that he was one and one quarter miles from Owl’s Gate, whatever that was. It was, factually speaking, very recently in his life that pretty much all of his goals featured people in some way, but now none did, and to him it was as if that had been the state of affairs for a long time. His goal now was to reach the middle, highest buttock of the three on that hill. Nothing was more important to him and nothing ever had been and nothing ever would be.
It took him longer than he thought. With its tough stalks and hard, half-raised root balls, the grass made him sway and stagger, like a drunk returning home from a regretful episode. Lambs scattered at his approach and clamped onto their mothers’ teats for solace, as if in the belief that if they closed their eyes and sucked long enough when they opened their eyes the Bad Man would no longer be there to frighten them. When he reached the top, the sun had turned around to get a better look at him. To the south, he could not see the sea but he could see the light blue space where more land would have been if the sea hadn’t been there. Everything was wild and bare and voluptuous in the other direction: buttocks upon buttocks, shadowed by buttocks, for as far as the eye could see. Yet down in the valleys everything was a darker green and there were more hiding places than you’d have ever imagined. A person could become this place, he suspected. On a sunken path with a leaf roof he passed remnant chunks of buildings that were barely distinguishable from the immeasurably older stones around them. An increasing dampness. Root and shale walls coated in bearded slime. As he crossed stepping stones in a brook, he was thinking about a summer day three years earlier when a photographer had taken him and the rest of the band deep into the canyon, down a dirt track, to a house that was falling down, and they’d goofed about, climbing on old refrigerators and sofas, then pulling themselves high into a magnolia tree in the backyard, all three of them, all looking down deep into the lens as if it was a future they wanted to undress and ravish, with Frank in the centre, and that had been the shot that was used. He’d ripped his military tunic jacket on the way down. Frank had been the one who noticed and told him.
