Villager, page 8
Maddie came in the car to get him and he played guitar in town again. Wild angelica and maidenhair spleenwort grew against the walls of a small sunken network of alleys near the pub. A bearded man with a walking stick who appeared to be well into his eighth decade staggered up to the microphone and sang a folk song, unaccompanied, which he said he’d learned as a child growing up nearby, and introduced as ‘Little Meg’, although he said it was sometimes known by other titles. Afterwards the song lingered in his mind, especially something nebulous about its central subject. The next time, the old bearded man was there again, this time with his wife, and hand in hand they advanced slowly to the microphone and sang the song together. Everyone applauded, but before they did, the room was very silent for a beat. After last orders, he and Maddie walked down to the riverbank and he met a couple of new people from the college, and five or six people from it he’d met before, and willowy women in shawls and slight men in glasses talked animatedly at him and he nodded and Maddie sat with one arm around Chickpea and one arm around him but his mind was only a quarter there and the remaining portion was almost all trying to memorise the lyrics to the elderly couple’s song. When he got home, he scribbled what he could recollect down in his diary and began working some chords around it. ‘I feel like the year has turned over and I feel a turning in me too,’ he also wrote in the diary, below that. ‘Hooves and shouting outside. I can’t see why from the window. Room is full of moths.’ An encore of heat was hissing through the long grass outside, drying the glistening cobwebs. Between the long stalks and bracken, ticks were flexing their horrible legs. There had not been a better time to be a tick for a considerable period. After his shifts for Dick Warner, his gardening for a man without a garden, he picked the bloated, flailing bodies of the ticks out of his thighs, stomach and the soft unblemished underside of his arms. He learned to be careful when he mowed because sometimes there were beer and cider bottles in the grass. When the mower wasn’t on, sounds drifted over from Warner’s building, sometimes that of Warner’s buzzsaw and sometimes the commanding bass and tenor sounds of Elise, an insuppressible, wide-faced woman who ran the greengrocers in Bovey Tracey and would drive over twice a week to bounce on top of Warner. He soon realised the trick with the ticks was to tease them out a little with tweezers then give them one big decisive tug.
He thought about his old life and it seemed less that he’d abandoned it and more that it was still happening, concurrently; that there was another him still out there, still doing all that he might have done. Nobody had recognised him since he got off the plane, just as he had expected them not to. Some days, he felt like he had been asked to write a book and said no and given the money back, and instead chosen to write another book, finish it and abandon it in a ravine at night. By now his sister had written him back. She said she’d heard from Frank that he was in England and that she was disappointed he’d not told her but that she had decided that he must have had his reasons and forgave him. (He had never told Frank but he guessed word quickly got around in the Canyon.) ‘There’s a lot happening here,’ she wrote. ‘In the house, and everywhere, too. I feel like so much has changed in such a short time. I have to tell you that Daddy is sick. I know he would like to see you. I haven’t told him I’m writing this letter.’ One day he had heard one of Frank’s new songs on Maddie’s car radio. He was surprised how little impact it had on him. He thought it was a very well organised song and was sure it would continue to do well for the rest of the year. The second time they heard it, Maddie sang along. ‘You’re my rabbit,’ she shrieked. ‘And you’ve got me on the… rrrrrun.’ He said nothing. As if she’d somehow tapped into his thoughts, she said, ‘There’s a music studio at the college. I don’t know if it’s anything special. But I think Chickpea could get you some time in there, if you like?’ He said maybe and that might be cool but he wasn’t sure if he was quite there yet. ‘Of course you’re there, you silly sausage!’ she said. ‘You’re more than there. The only reason you’re not there is that you’ve gone past there and you need to reverse.’ It struck him that there were two Maddies he was getting to know: Farm Maddie and Artistic Friends Maddie. Today she was somehow both. He had never been called a silly sausage before and he discovered it was not displeasing. The window had jammed the last time she’d opened it and now remained permanently in a three-quarters-open position. He dangled an arm out and let his fingers flick against the bracken as it whizzed by, enjoying the sting. Six old plastic bags full of apples were on the back seat, ripening in the sun. Several had come loose and fallen onto the composty area beneath the seats, and, while Maddie pulled over to let other cars pass on the narrow lanes, wasps flew in to investigate. There was a time and place to be an insect and that time was now and that place was here.
Frank had always been the one to announce, ‘I’ve got something which I think is pretty special.’ He, by contrast, would say, ‘There’s something I have been playing around with’ or ‘This might work, I guess.’ It was, he had subsequently realised, the predominant reason why the writing ratio ended up 7/3 in favour of Frank. That, and Frank’s tendency to deal directly in the politics of romance, whereas his habit was, at most, to weave around the topic. One of the advantages of breaking away on your own was you didn’t write by committee and a song didn’t get automatically consigned to the garbage just because you didn’t bring it into the studio with its own ticker tape parade. ‘Chickpea says he thinks you’re very modest, and that you’re an old soul,’ Maddie said, after his second of three days in the music room, not really much of a studio at all, just a soft-walled black room with a reel-to-reel in the corner and Chickpea at the controls, damp and huge in the heat in the large established country of his beard and the leather jacket he never relinquished. Chickpea had left and he and Maddie were on the wide lawn behind the studio which spread out in the direction of a set of straggling medieval buildings. Opposite, two women in black leotards danced to silence and fenced with peacock feathers. Every few minutes, a girl would emerge from the medieval buildings and run screeching across the lawn to Maddie, hug her, and ask with great urgency if she’d heard about something desperately exciting that was happening the following week. Theatre, picnics, parties, music, art, other gatherings that were apparently a hybrid of all five. ‘Sorry to interrupt!’ the girls said afterwards, turning to him, appraising him with slow fascination, as if experiencing the pleased, lazy epiphany that he was not a tree. Almost all of them spoke very differently to the way Maddie did. Their voices were more precise and clean, more redolent of scrubbed residential streets and fussy gardens. It struck him as wild and impressive how effortlessly Maddie managed to be simultaneously of the college and very different to it. It struck him also as wild and impressive how effortlessly the college managed to be simultaneously of its geographical base and of a different planet: a place of geese, pottery and ballet, in equal measures. It was one of the most unlikely hillsides he’d ever stood on and he was here with this unlikely person all because of a cow. He noticed something unique in the curve of her chin in profile that he’d not noticed before. She had strong arms, arms that lifted many heavy objects, as different to her friends’ arms as her voice was to their voices. Her language was full of wild plants that, enraptured by the music of their names, he was compelled to note down in his diary: bog asphodel and penny marshwort – or was it marsh pennywort – and purple loosestrife and bog pimpernel. She liked practical jokes and grapefruit. When she told him she came here once a week to teach people how to look after chickens he’d thought she was having him on. She wasn’t. The previous weekend she had hidden his shoes in an oven. She would never find out, but she was the first girl he’d ever written a love song about.
After the third day of recording, which he grudgingly conceded was better, they ascended narrow lanes and crossed tiny humped bridges in the car, going higher and higher, parked, then walked to a stone circle. A scribble of rain had blown in through the gap in the window when they were in the car then gone and in its place there was more damp heat. She told him to place his palms against the stones in the circle and feel all the energy there.
‘Ah, I’m so excited,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend is coming back next week.’
‘Where is he right now?’
‘Spain. He’s been out there since May. He’s in the army.’
He gazed back across the rocks, trying to pick out the car. ‘I think most of it’s probably trash,’ he said. ‘But I dunno. I guess I’ll end up hanging on to the tape.’
But he was not a person entirely devoid of hubris. He had the complacency of many people who arrive in rural Britain from a country populated by bears, coyotes and mountain lions, and the sun massaged that complacency. He was still a newcomer to the moor and even oldcomers to it knew only a fraction of a fraction of what there was to know about it. One of the many things he didn’t yet know about it was that, in late August, in days of heat after heavy rain, on the stretches where it was still most fully permitted to be itself, it breathed and growled as profoundly as it did in the height of the harshest winter. Terrain you’d visited always compacted its scale in your mind afterwards and he had begun to learn that but, even so, the route back to the ruined house was surprisingly arduous. The river told him he was going the right way but it seemed further than before and something had happened in the dripping folds of earth above the banks: an angry awakening, a last wet sucking of life into the lungs before autumn’s dry death. Brown flies clung fiercely to his flesh. Huge tufts of grass shoved him from side to side, arguing over their custody of him. Blue and pink and yellow flowers spilled over the damp ground like ornate vomit. An old octopus of a tree reached down a rough tentacle and anointed his cheek with a bloody scratch. In his shoes, the soles of his feet sloshed about and blistered and began their transformation into a sore kind of paste. Every path became a whisper and then a lie. A stiff gate opened but led directly to a shrub of insanity. The song the old man and his wife had sung was in his head again and he hummed the song and then he barked it at the impassable bracken that stretched all the way up the valley walls and then he croaked it at the sky. An area of oxygen finally widened ahead but the ground beneath it drank his feet then low branches formed a roadblock and he crawled under them then lost most of his left leg in a peaty bubbling hole and had to use all his strength to retrieve it. He could not have been more wet if he was in the river itself up to his neck and the burnt moist state of him attracted more and more tiny winged life and he knew then that one day, once again, this would be the world. Not a car, not a sandwich, not an ambition, not sense, not a cow, not a horse, not love, not a song, not a girl. Just this sucking and gargling and burping thing beneath him. When the dizziness came, and the head pain, just before the light clicked off, it was a relief to submit, to just fall into the mouth of everything and not go on fighting any more. And then night fell smoothly in, and not thirteen yards away the river, which was not interested, continued to yell as it rushed over the rocks.
*
She was very good at keeping a straight face and she liked to take people on a journey. It was an addiction of hers but she viewed it as generally harmless. First there was usually the lie, which was thrilling in itself, but then there was the space of time after the lie, when the lie – and the imaginative invention that went with it – expanded, which was more thrilling still. It was like pulling an elastic band: if you pulled it back further you got more power, but you couldn’t go too far or it would snap. She liked to take it quite far, because then when you punctured the lie the look on the face of the person who’d believed it was that much more delicious. But she’d quickly had her misgivings after she talked about the soldier in Spain. She’d misjudged it. It made her wonder about herself. It was a five- or ten-minute lie, she thought as she set out for the cottage, not a one-day lie, and definitely not a three-day lie, and it was different to many of her other lies because it played with something important. When she knocked on the door, the old woman answered and said he was not there and she had not seen him since yesterday. ‘He does do his vanishing acts, Richard. He doesn’t tell me where he goes. You can wait for him if you want, but I don’t know when he’ll be back. It’s Madeleine, isn’t it?’ She resisted the other names that popped into her head on impulse – Jill and Rose and Sylvia and Thomasina – and the backstories she might invent for them, and instead replied that, yes, that was correct. ‘If you could say that I called round, I’d appreciate that,’ she said.
*
After he’d finished at the ruined house, he walked west for an entire morning, until he arrived at a pub. He ordered chips and sat on a bench outside and ate them, accompanied by a lone Muscovy duck. In a church foyer, farther up the lane the pub was on, he found a pile of free paperbacks, and put one in his rucksack. His feet ached and one of the soles had come loose from his left boot. On a bigger road, he waited for close to two hours, until a car pulling a caravan stopped for him. He sat in the back seat beside a child called Matthew with a bubble of snot in one nostril who stared at him the whole way, sucking a thumb. He got out within a mile of the village and went straight to Dick Warner’s woodyard, but there was no sign of him. Outside the door to the kitchen was a trail of cold baked beans and many of the beans were stuck to the door itself. Within a swift breeze that whipped around the logs there was the aroma of wood and crow and something dead but briefly revived and not quite identifiable. When he finally reached the cottage Mrs Nicholas was out. He found some tape in a drawer and applied it to his shoe, threw his remaining possessions into his rucksack, and left the paperback and the remaining rent he owed on the kitchen table.
He started out west again and walked until he joined the next river, then followed it until it branched and widened to create a calm subsidiary pool, which he swam in. He examined the peeling skin on his feet, neither of which ever seemed to have dried out from the day he walked back to the ruined house. A new area of purple-black on one of his heels. He walked some more, until he came to another river, with a viaduct over it. He reached a quay and dark buildings, below a Tudor mansion with great sprawling gardens and a domed dovecote. Boats and parts of boats were everywhere and even a mile later, parts of boats could still be seen in numerous gardens. He crossed a stream and sat on an abandoned tractor tyre above one of the gardens, on the opposite side of a small valley and, having seen no sign of life in or near it, picked apples from its trees, and took lettuce and an artichoke head from its beds. The garden thinned and snaked on into woodland until it ended at a rusty gate, and next to the rusty gate was a small orange bus on bricks. He managed to force one of the windows of the bus open and that night slept inside the bus, stretched out along its ripped back bench. He woke up and felt like somebody had performed origami on his face in his sleep. He climbed a hill and took a small train to the grey city where he’d worked on the docks then he changed and took another train east, guessing at when he might be level with the point where the cliffs began to turn red and getting off at the first station after that. Cars pulling caravans were struggling up the tall hills that broke away from the coast in threes and fours, and he walked against the flow, flattening himself against nettles and brambles to let the vehicles pass. In many of the fields there were huge rocks and corvids could often be seen on the rocks, making their withering assessments of the day. The land was thrown audaciously together, had no order or mathematics to it. ‘Dogs in field,’ said a sign on a gate. ‘Please keep your sheep on a lead.’ He penetrated a long crevice between cliffs to the sea, which turned out to be further away than it looked, and corkscrewed down a gorse-lined path to a beach where he waited until the tide had gone out, then hooked around a jutting rock and walked east along the shingle while the sun fell softly into the salt. The tape had long since come off his shoe, the sole barely hanging on now, and its loud flapping cut through everything like an embarrassment.
Robert Belltower was not at his cabin but the key was where he had left it, under the third rock. Inside, the framed photos and the Calor gas stove and the chair had gone but the bed remained, and two of his driftwood structures were still outside. He emptied his rucksack on the floor and slept for eleven uninterrupted hours and dreamt for the first time in a while about fish. In the dream, gulls hovered and chuckled at the fish then he awoke and realised the chuckling gulls were outside. In the following night’s dream the old man from the pub was by a campfire singing the folk song again, ‘Little Meg’, but when the old man spoke it was in his own young Californian voice. His beard was very long and he felt it to see where it ended and realised it was a vine and that it led into the hedgerows. As he felt along the beard into the hedgerows, the crowd around the campfire, who were young, and all in couples, pointed and laughed. When he woke up the song was very clearly in his head so that all he could do was pick up his guitar and sing it until it wasn’t there any more. Afterwards, he walked up the undercliff, but something had changed in his foot, and he didn’t get far. He swam, first under a setting sun that was like a lump of hot metal on the horizon, and then under a brighter moon, because when he swam the foot didn’t hurt as much, and he hoped that perhaps the salt water would heal it in the way it had with cuts and bites he’d sustained. He went much further under and slept dreamlessly that night but was brought back to the surface by the realisation he was being hit by a rolled-up magazine, wielded by a woman he had never met.
