Villager, page 9
‘GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!’ she screamed at him.
He struggled for words, slurring his first attempt at them. ‘It’s OK! I’m his friend!’ he managed to shout back at her, but she continued to hit him as he stumbled and clung to the walls.
‘Who? Whose friend?’ she asked.
‘Him! The one who lives here! Robert!’ he spluttered, stuttered, between blows.
‘No you’re not. He doesn’t have any friends. He’s dead! DEAD!’
And it was then, as the light faded again and he let himself fall into it, that he finally knew he was insane, and was a man who made friends with ghosts.
*
After he’d come to, and they’d got their stories straight, she offered him a ride. It had happened about a month ago, she said. His heart. It wasn’t the first time he’d had problems with it. A fishing trawler had spotted the boat drifting about in the bay and called the coastguard. They reckoned he’d been in there for at least four days, his eyes looking at nothing but the wood they were pressed against. ‘He was a fucking bastard,’ she said. ‘Or used to be.’ She introduced herself as Helen. She reminded him a little of the Queen of England: something motionless about her hair. ‘He promised my mum the earth. She believed everything he said. She was Swiss and they met while he was working out there. Doing something with roofs. I am not totally sure. I know the Belltowers were a very grand family, but that he escaped from it all and did his best to make himself one of the people. Roofs were one of the ways he did it. But there was still a natural arrogance there. My mum, I think, found it very attractive. It wasn’t until later that she found out he was already married. By then, he’d vanished, and she had a couple of new things growing inside her. One was a permanent sense of mistrust. The other was me.’
‘He saved my life,’ he said.
‘I can see how that could happen. He wasn’t all bad. People aren’t. With exceptions. He was tough and if he liked you he liked you. Years later, he came to find me. I didn’t want to know. It took a long time for me to come round. I was working in Bishop’s Waltham. A lot of people would have given up but he didn’t. He didn’t have any other children. Or none he knew about, anyhow. He rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way and it was only if they stood the rubbing up that they stuck around and found out who he was. I was all he had, at the end. Me, and the cabin. He loved it out there on the beach because it was away from the world and his wife. Not his own wife – I believe he was quite nice to her, in the end, and enjoyed being with her. The world’s. It was something he always said. The world and his wife. From what I read in the newspapers they are currently in the process of getting divorced. Have you seen these donkeys here on the left? I just adore their noses. So anyway now it appears I have a cabin. Would you like a cabin? I am joking. I will probably keep it. I go up, clear some of it, then wonder what I’m doing, then come back, then wonder some more. Sugar! I’ve missed my turning because I’m talking so much. I am sorry about your head. Is it very bad?’
The road climbed into dense woodland and she parked on a sandy bulge just off the tarmac beside a sign with a picture of a bench on it. Through a gap in the trees, it was possible to glimpse the conurbation lit up in a hazy bowl at the bottom of the valley. ‘I would take you further,’ she said. ‘But I don’t drive in cities, as a rule.’ He said it was cool, he could walk, and thanked her. ‘Oh!’ she said, looking at his boots. ‘What size are you?’ He told her he was an eleven and she opened the back door and handed him a pair of brown loafers. ‘These were his,’ she said. ‘Nine and a half. It’s not ideal, I know, but it’s an improvement.’
A day later, in his window seat on the plane, he would find himself trying to pick out the exact hillside they’d been on, imagining the hole in the tree, somewhere down there, where he’d left his old boots, but it was no use: the altitude was too great by then. He could, however, still see the moor: a mass of fuzzy, raging green breaking up the politer patchwork around it. That was about an hour before he remembered the tape from the studio, saw it in his mind’s eye still sitting on the low shelf beside the bed in the cabin where he’d left it, but by then he was in the middle of a larger letting-go. He wrote a note in his diary about a finch he had seen on the landslip writhing on the ground when they’d climbed back up to the car, the deep sadness he had felt about it, and a question – ‘Does it get any easier?’ – underneath it, then rustled once more in the bottom of his rucksack, which was just small enough to count as hand luggage. He was surprised to find a magazine in there. It was the one she’d hit him around the head with, an issue of Homes & Gardens from May. One of the main articles had the headline ‘Buying Carpets’. He read it for a while but it failed to hold his attention.
STOPCOCK (2019)
JULY
Deep dark. Deeper than black, but not black. Red, and green, in a way. But so dark. Darker than any place I’ve lived. Nothing to corrupt it. Song of the stream behind the wall. Reka, my lodger, was out at work. Fumbling in my bag, I thought I had lost my key again, and would have to break in through the back window like last week, but the reason I could not find my key in my bag was because I was already holding my key. I have been walking until late on these long summer nights, making sure I have covered every footpath and small lane near the house. I usually get the timing wrong, and night is totally down when I arrive home. Bats are flitting about on top of the hill, gobbling up the day’s less fortunate moths. At the bottom of the valley, young owls shout their complaints to the last rechargeable glow of the sun as it sinks behind the moor. A powerful, sinewy, medium-sized dog hurtled towards me down one particularly quiet lane – one of those that don’t really lead anywhere and have a verdant central reservation of weeds – and I wondered when the dog’s owner would appear, breathlessly bringing up the rear and calling the dog back, and just as I realised the dog was a hare, not a dog, the hare also appeared to realise I was a human, not a shadow or a ghost, both of which would probably seem more likely on this lane at this time of the evening, and made a sudden, impressive reroute, ninety degrees to its right, as if responding to some internal satnav, not losing a fraction of pace or finesse in the process.
When you walk a lot in the countryside, you get a crystallised realisation that most animals are united by one factor: their conditioning, over the course of thousands of years of hard, regrettable evidence, to be shit scared of humans.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is dead birds. Insects too, and rodents. Actually, dead things in general, in the wild. I mean, obviously we see quite a few of them, while we’re out on walks, and even sometimes in our garden, but think how many are dying all the time, and just what a small percentage it is of those we do see. I mean, I know living wild things will swiftly move in to eat the dead wild things, and decomposition can happen very quickly, especially in summer, but there’s still something to be learned from this, and it’s probably that dead things often do their dying in secret places, known only to them.
Were there a fruit that grew in my garden throughout winter, I wonder if winters would seem a little less interminable. I watch the apples ripening on the tree out the back right now and it feels like I’m watching an hourglass containing the precious sand of summer. There’s so much to do all the time, so much I want to do. Nobody told me I’d feel that way at fifty-eight. Fifty-nine! Fifty-nine, not fifty-eight. It’s so easy to forget sometimes.
In Hungary, they don’t say ‘I don’t want to play devil’s advocate here.’ They say ‘I don’t want to paint the Devil on the wall here.’ I think I prefer their version. I learned it from Reka, who grew up there. I woke up to the sound of her coming home at around two last night. Her bar job means she’s often home late, but this time I suspect she’d been on a date. Couldn’t see the guy’s face properly but he was her usual type: all shoulders, leather and hair. Motorbike. Reka has told me she has no interest in what she calls ‘gamer boymen’ of around her age, and her dates all tend to be around fifteen years older. Men with strong jawlines and engine oil in the folds of their hands. She is very matter of fact about it when one of them proves unsuitable, just as she is matter of fact about almost everything. She is an individual who makes a decision about what she wants and does not swerve from it, no matter whether or not it is expected of her. She decided she wanted to make a life in Britain, and, three years ago, came to Britain, alone. She saw the moor on a TV nature documentary, decided she wanted to live here, as long as it was within a couple of miles of a bus route to the city, and answered the ad I put up in the post office. She said she would learn to drive, and did so, within not very many weeks, and found a functional car for less than a thousand pounds. She is a good housemate, but has a habit of leaving full glasses of water at various points around the building. If she has been home for any period above three hours, I’ll usually find at least four of them on tables, sideboards, sinks and the floor. When she leaves for work, they disappear, but she never comments on this, and I wonder if she thinks it happens by magic. Before I take them back to the kitchen to be emptied and washed, my cat, Rafael Perera, enjoys drinking from them. Reka was not a cat person when she moved in here, but has been converted, and Rafael Perera, who is named after a doctor who once saved my life, now sleeps on her bed as often as he sleeps on mine. She commented the other day that he was ‘wide asleep’ on there. I enjoyed this hugely and only reluctantly explained to her that it was a malapropism. Upon me then responding to her request to explain what a malapropism is, she told me that in Hungary malapropisms are referred to as ‘golden spit’. I told her I would like to learn Hungarian but she replied that I should not bother, as it is ‘crazy, a devil’s language’ and would take me at least twenty years of hard work to get the hang of.
Finding the right house is difficult. You have to be very on the ball, extremely assertive, and make sacrifices, because, if it’s any good, you can guarantee several other people will want it too, just as hard as you do. In the case of me and this house, I thought I’d jumped through every hoop possible, acted as quickly as I could under the circumstances, but when I arrived here, in March, I discovered I’d been too late: some bees had secured the tenancy before me. As I unlocked my front door for the first time, I gazed up at the bees, who were congregating in a large group around my bedroom window and talking in low voices. I could see they were quite at home and had already moved all of their stuff in, whereas all I had was an air bed, a kettle and a car full of houseplants and crockery. But the bees and I soon worked it out. Since they are the kind of bees whose primary interest is in masonry, it turns out they only need a couple of feet of wall and the cornice and gutter attached to it and are quite happy to let me use the rest of the building. Occasionally, one will lose his way and end up in the kitchen or living room and get a bit dopey, as so many of us do when trapped indoors for long periods, and I will gently usher him back outside. The bees are very busy in the middle of the day, but tend to go to sleep at night and when it is raining. When the window cleaner arrived the other day, I asked him to omit the bee window from his schedule, as I didn’t want them to get wet. This being the edge of the moor, the bees will already be well accustomed to moisture, but I reckon they wouldn’t welcome any more of it from an unanticipated source.
The inside of the house was clean when I moved in but I decided to get a window cleaner in quickly, as the back windows were all very dirty, with yellow streaks: a hint of the lichen and moss that builds up in a damp place like this when it’s unoccupied. This is also a small clue to the building’s recent history, along with the newspapers in the old wood basket I found in the garage, all of which date from around half a decade ago. The house was unoccupied for four years before I arrived, and in that time the garden had become the lawless domain of insects and birds. I sense, once you peel back a couple of its layers, the house could tell you some stories, but I am sure the garden and its wall could tell you many more. There’s the story of the fire remnants in the front yard, the wine glasses and melted plastic in the ashes, and, a layer deeper, the rusty items that were revealed when I began to chop back the brambles and expose more of the old garden wall: a rusty metal hook and mysterious, complex chain attached to it, a grass roller – quite possibly Edwardian, or even Victorian – with ‘Millhouse Stores, Underhill’ inscribed on it. What stories could you find deeper in the folds of this high, mildewy wall which surrounds the garden on all sides? What do the mossy steps – a little too grand for a building this small – know that nobody else still living does? As I peel the layers, it is my mission to tread lightly. I have thought a lot about what this garden might have looked like in 1991… in 1975… in 1948… in 1912, and further back, to however many years ago the wall was built. Two hundred? More? I don’t intend to oppress my new garden, and, although I do want to bring a little more light and colour into it, I want to make it just as attractive a space for bees and blue tits and blackbirds as it has been for at least a couple of centuries. Because we’re at the bottom of the valley, it’s an amphitheatre for birds. Beyond the crab apple and magnolia and mulberry in the garden, there are the other, bigger trees which hang off the walls of this steep combe. The space gives the dawn chorus a different sound to any I’ve heard before, even on the edge of the moor, and I am not just referring to the bird who sings the question ‘Have you eaten?’ in the voice of a concerned New York matriarch every morning. Part of me is tempted to identify this bird but the bigger part of me, which prefers to leave the answer to my overactive imagination, is at present still winning.
Above me where I sit propped up in bed I can see two large spiders on the ceiling, their limbs entwined. I am careful not to vacuum or disturb the spiders when I clean. I have already severely diminished their habitat merely by moving here. For four years before that, they had the whole run of the place. Back then, I would sometimes drive past this house, with not the remotest suspicion that I would ever move to it, and wonder what kind of ghosts lived in it. It is red now but back then it was white, or rather you could still just about see the memory of the white it had once been. The dirt and damp and peeling paint looked like the place was enfolded in six or seven layers of giant cobweb. Spiders must have loved it even more than they do now. It is still damp, and time is revealing that – in the refurbishment works undertaken by my landlady before I took up the tenancy – some problems were merely painted over, rather than properly attended to. A few feet left of where the two romantic spiders are embracing, there’s a deepening damp patch, on the side of the building past which the stream runs. The damp is slightly worse in Reka’s bedroom, next door, and I am keeping an eye on that. She has more spiders in her room. They do not scare her and, through the wall, I sometimes hear her talking to them. It is one of the many times I am glad that she, and not a more squeamish and precious kind of twentysomething, ended up answering my ad. Looking up at these two spiders above me now puts me in mind of one time many years ago when Mike and I had been arguing for so long, and so exhaustingly, that finally I kind of flopped on him in defeat, and we awoke seven and a half hours later in the same embrace, embarrassed and surprised. It is the only time I can ever remember waking up in his arms, in our two decades together. Which seems sad, but if you’re honest about it, how often do couples wake up in each other’s arms? Besides, there are far sadder things to be sad about in that relationship.
Actually, now I look at them again, I think the spiders might be dead.
AUGUST
Eleven days of rain in succession. It is not the soothing kind of rain that makes you feel cosy and glad you are indoors. It sounds like war repurposed as moisture. It gives me no comfort at night. As I hear it toppling from the broken drain above my window and gathering in puddles on the back yard, there is a growing picture in my mind that every droplet of water from the moor is hurtling down the hill and congregating here at the low four-way intersection of tiny lanes where the house stands: four virtual waterslides, coming together as one. I took my eye off the garden for a week and now I fear it’s escaped from me forever: a raging, dripping jungle. The damp patches on the bedroom walls are getting bigger. I had one of my funny spells coming up the stairs yesterday and reached for the wall for balance and the surface was so wet, my hand skidded across it, and I tumbled into a bookcase, bruising my hip. I messaged my landlady about the damp and she just said, ‘I’ll send my guy over.’ That was four days ago and since then I have heard nothing. Her ‘guy’ is Nick, a cheerful, charming odd-jobber who loves a chat but never returns phone calls. The last time he came over to look at the damp, after a similarly wet period at the end of May, he recommended a mildew-removing spray and advised that I put the heating on more often. We were standing in the garden at the time, and I resisted the urge to show him the thermometer hanging in the greenhouse a few paces away, which showed the temperature as 27 degrees.
How do you get here, at my age? How do you get to a rented cottage, with no more worldly possessions to your name than a distressed Edwardian sideboard, a nice collection of trowels and just under seven grand in the building society? I will give you the short version. You move from your northern birthplace to university, and when, not long before graduation, your sophisticated floppy-haired lecturer asks you out for a drink, you shyly say yes, then wait while he disentangles himself from his first marriage, then move to a too-expensive house just outside Oxford with him, then put your own larger plans on hold to work part time as a suburban librarian and part time as his second mother, then seventeen years later when you realise he is doing the same thing with one of his students that he did with you when you were her age, and probably has done with several students in the interim, you walk away from it all, stubbornly asking for nothing, and then just when you are back on your feet, your lone known parent goes into a nursing home, and you realise that being ill and dying are both expensive; then the years pass, and you escape for a while, to another part of the world, with no thought of what you are doing afterwards, which is wonderful, but temporary, and then not long after that it is the present day, and you are a year shy of sixty. But is this all that terrible a place to be in? And what standards are we judging this by? The standards of another university graduate from my generation, who has spent four decades firming up their financial security, living like life is solely preparation for retirement? Or the standards of being fairly healthy, and still alive, and living in a place with clean air and owls, with a job you tolerate most days and like on some? If I ever get lugubrious and start looking backwards in a self-pitying fashion towards a point in my life where I could have… solidified my future, Reka gives me perspective. It is unlikely she will ever be in a position to purchase her own house, no matter how hard she works at her job, and how hard she saves, and she saves hard. Last week, she told me, her entire food bill came to £18.47. She lives mostly on lentils and reduced price veg she finds at the end of the day in Aldi or Tesco. She buys herself no treats, with the arguable exception of the bicycle she found on Gumtree for £50, owns only two bras, spends at least an hour of every day singing, and seems far less unhappy than any of the young – or old – people I meet on the reception of the community college where I work three days a week.
