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.
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.
August: the most spiritually dark month that doesn’t happen in winter. Everything is scruffy and angry and moist, waiting for September and October to come in to crisp it up and prettify it again. Chunks of crumbling wood in the lanes. A tree has come down on my route home from work so I’m having to go the long way around for now, which isn’t such a great hardship as it gives me a better view of the tor, or at least it would, if it wasn’t still raining for 70 per cent of each day. It feels like all this rain and wind is coppicing the countryside, knocking the excess wood off it. I detect a pinch of autumn in the air already and it is not too warm for a night-time fire. I gather kindling from up the lane. There’s plenty. I avoid the stuff on the ground, favouring the bits caught high up in fences and branches, which is always drier. Today, in the middle of all the sogginess, we had three hours of brilliant sunshine, and I took advantage by doing some tidying in the garden and digging out a new bed. At least I have no trouble getting a spade in now. As I go down through the earth I feel like I am burrowing through tiers of history. Rabbit skulls, shards of pottery and thin old hand-forged nails turn up, and some bigger stuff, which I do my best to upcycle, such as a baffling rusty bracket, about two feet in length, with another baffling chain attached to it. I jammed this into one of the endless crevices in the wall and hung a bird feeder on it. Some primal instinct kicks in as I dig further and get more dirty and scratched up, some innate understanding of compost, something there in me from birth, always just waiting to be unleashed. Time stops being conventionally measured. Through the open window I heard Reka talking on speakerphone to one of her sisters in Budapest, which – possibly in part because of all the extra letters in the Hungarian alphabet – always sounds more like seven people having a conversation than two. Later, I hear her singing. Folk songs from her home country. I have loaned her the old acoustic guitar I inherited from Mum. I called it a loan, but she can keep it, as I doubt it will be any use to me ever again.
More rain. The damp in Reka’s room is worse. Some of the wall seems to be coming away. I offered to sleep downstairs in the living room and let her have my bed for a while. She waved the suggestion away, explaining that until she was sixteen she, her dad and her two sisters all slept in one room, in a tiny flat with no central heating. ‘Summer is warm in Hungary but our winters, pffff, they make yours look like a beach holiday,’ she said. She showed me a Dansette record player she found yesterday in a pile of electrical equipment at the tip. Remarkably, it works, albeit at a slightly slower speed than intended, and means she can play the nine 45s she brought with her from Hungary. These all formerly belonged to her dad, and were recorded by Hungarian acts in the late sixties and early seventies, with the exception of one by a British artist I’d never heard of called RJ McKendree: a distorted, fuzzy rock version of a folk song I’ve heard played in a couple of pubs here in Devon, quite a haunting tune. Reka tells me that, bizarrely, the record only came out in Hungary, and is worth over £400 now. She put it on and, despite the reduced power of the Dansette, bopped around the room to its nagging, oddly sexual beat. ‘I don’t know how they allowed this during communism!’ she said, hurling herself onto the bed, and, for the first time, I was very aware that I wished to kiss her.
What would we do without weather? Where would we be without the sideways rain of this morning and the sun that burned it off then made the remaining clouds curl above the tor like smoke from seven symmetrical bonfires, all smouldering at the same rate? How bland would the planet be? The fallen tree on the lane has still not been removed. I am enjoying driving the other route, along the ridge, and seeing the changes in the sky above the tor: the varying colours from day to day, and sometimes hour to hour, above those rocks at the summit that always remind me of piled pony poo. I pulled into a gate gap this morning on the opposite side of the valley and lingered a while to take it in and made myself ten minutes late for work. A queue of first years were already lined up at the desk, waiting for me to sign off their new library cards. Awkward, shy kids, vague about their own futures, who, when typing into their phones and laptops, find their bold and opinionated superhero alter egos. I am half-invisible to them, even the ones in their twenties and thirties. The young will always to some extent view ageing as a matter of taste, as if the fact you do not appear to be young any more is a decision you’ve made, like selecting a certain type of carpet or paint for your house. I remember back in spring, listening to a youth who was chatting with his friend about his discovery of old-school rap music, near reception while waiting for an appointment with the college counsellor. He mentioned Public Enemy. Not looking up from my screen, I offered the opinion that It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, from 1988, was their strongest album. Both boys went silent and turned in my direction with a look on their faces that suggested they’d just seen a goat driving a bus. But I feel for them, and their problems, and would not want to be young today, with all the added pressures of our new digital age. Reka is eight or nine years older than most of these kids but she seems at least a decade further from them than that, and from some less materialistic era. There is something generally, permeatingly vintage about her. Even her teddy bear – a rare reminder of how recent her childhood was – is ancient and tattered.
A week: that’s how long it took the cabbage whites to decimate my kale. I leave them to it and don’t begrudge them their meals. I grew far too much anyway and was beginning to tire of kale curries. After the caterpillars finished their business, they moved towards the house and appear to have earmarked it as an excellent place to pupate. I counted more than eighty chrysalises on the back wall and at least a dozen more have made it indoors. Today, I found an earwig in my lentil and tomato soup. Yesterday I watched an enormous spider stealthily lowering itself from the lampshade onto my pillow on a gossamer homemade rope. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’ I shouted, and it stopped, as if in embarrassment. The mason bees are turning up in the house more and more often, dopey or deceased. It’s an insect’s world here; Reka and I just live in it. I wonder if the introduction of sheep and cattle into the field across the lane is also contributing to the ever-larger number of flies in the house. Or perhaps a pigeon has got into the loft and died. I cannot check because the landlady, who lives in the Maldives, padlocked the hatch and did not leave a key.
When I arrived home today I noticed someone has cut the hedges quite brutally, without clearing up, and, as a result, one of the sheep had got a bit of blackthorn caught up its bottom. I climbed over the fence and tried to get close enough to the sheep to dislodge the blackthorn but it was too fast for me. After about five minutes of this, Reka arrived home and joined me, but being chased by two people caused even greater panic in the sheep and its companions, and several sheep all bumped into each other as we chased them. In the melee, the blackthorn branch was thankfully dislodged from the unfortunate sheep’s bottom.
Flood in the kitchen this morning, after many days of suspicious smells. Water pouring through the ceiling from the bathroom. I put a bucket under it, switched the stopcock off and left a phone message for the landlady but after seven hours had received nothing back other than an email saying she would ‘send my guy over’, so I called an emergency drain company. Immediately, they identified the problem as backed-up water from a blocked septic tank, but I had been told by the landlady that there was no septic tank at the house. I managed to finally get her on the phone – the first time I’d actually heard her voice. She’s very well spoken, called Flora, and I don’t think I’m paranoid in thinking that as soon as she heard my accent, she identified me – in that way many privileged people do – as someone she could push around. She remained adamant that the drainage at the house had always ‘worked solely on a soakaway’ and, when I questioned this and pointed out that a soakaway always has to work in tandem with either a septic tank or reed bed and waste does not just ‘vanish’, she got very defensive and began to tell me how loved the house – which her parents once lived in – was and how many people had ‘had a very wonderful time there’. She also said I had been rash in calling out the drain company and would have to pay the bill myself. ‘So you reckon I’d have been more sensible to wait for however many days until your guy came out, sitting in a house without a working toilet or running water?’ I asked, getting a bit pissed off now, and she put the phone down on me, but not before she’d announced, ‘Nice speaking to you!’ What followed, after the drain men’s discovery of a totally blocked pipe, was a treasure hunt, with the significant catch that unlike most treasure hunts the reward at the end of it would not be treasure, but shit. Finally, the drain experts uncovered a rusty grate deeply submerged amongst many years of foliage. The chamber was full. Had been for who knows how many aeons. That, combined with tree roots growing into the waste pipe leading from the house, had been the cause of the kitchen flood. The drain guys were bloody brilliant. Not many people make it their life’s ambition to work with drains but what you find is that those who do end up in that area often take a lot of pride in their work. They are rarely of an apathetic or indifferent demeanour. The work of the drain men was more like surgery than repair or maintenance, their camera tunnelling deep into the house’s stomach and telling them what was amiss. I wasn’t here afterwards, when the septic tank man came to empty it, but the note he left, detailing the ‘dangerous condition’ of the tank, is a small, dark, poetic masterpiece of some bygone English I never knew existed. After reading it, it is hard not to picture a man of ancient years and hawkish appearance who upon putting an ear close to the ground can actually hear sludge speak to him. One of the last of his breed. Perhaps the last. What had he seen, in his time? I suspect this house, empty and in a state of disrepair for a few years before my occupancy, and backed up with waste of olden times, was child’s play to him. Anyway, the overall result, many hours later, is that the situation is fixed, temporarily, and I am more than £700 out of pocket. Reka and I played Scrabble later. She is getting better, very quickly, and I am sure will be beating me within a month or two.
Over at Underhill churchyard today, whose kissing gate Jim Boyland and I volunteered to rebuild a little while back. The church is in an exposed spot and we were soaked and dried and soaked again numerous times during the course of our work. It was a very satisfying day, although Jim brought his dog with him, who is extremely boring. As the dog – a smallish one, of I don’t know what breed, which never makes a noise and puts me in mind of a bereaved aunt from a drabber Britain – watched us with its sad eyes, Jim showed me how to hammer iron wedges into the grooves we’d made in the granite. As I hit the rock with the hammer, I noticed the sound it made change as I moved down the line. It made me think of the stories stone has to tell us, all the voices inside it. How many voices are inside the wall that surrounds my garden, and what could they tell me? I feel privileged to live within its shelter, like the humans and cats and dogs and horses who have gone before me, and am glad to be able to add a tiny new chapter to its story. I look into its crevices and grooves and clefts and observe its changing hues and I know where I am, who I am, and what I am doing: I am just passing through. Reka was cleaning the house when I got home. I told her she really didn’t need to do that. She told me it is almost her time of the month and she feels very hyper and cleaning always helps. ‘I was very lazy when I was young,’ she explained. ‘My grandma used to say to me, “If laziness hurt, you would be screaming.”’ As I write this I can hear the little stream across the lane raging, and rain tumbling off the roof, and I am a bit worried about the weather forecast for next week, and what it might do to this place, but maybe I am painting the devil on the wall here.
More rain. Coffee with James Boyland’s wife, Edith, at the abbey tea rooms. She entered the building alone, without the dog, and as she did I noticed a relief in myself. Water pouring down the lanes. Hart’s-tongue fern lapping at it from the verges. The last remnants of summer’s ambition are fading. Someone has yet to take down the sign advertising the tug of war in Marybridge, which has caused much local amusement, due to the extra ‘f’ the sign’s writer mistakenly added to ‘of’. I took the car in for its MOT at Phil Spring’s and was surprised that, with a couple of small improvements, it passed. I suppose it looks worse than it is. Typical Devon car: not bad on the right-hand side, dented and scratched to buggery on the left, with the wing mirror held on with tape. These lanes on the edge of the moor were not dug out with any cars in mind, and particularly not the huge fortified people-carriers of today. Curiously it’s the individuals negotiating them in more modestly sized vehicles who often drive more apologetically. The countryside looks on, bemused at the way it’s been outgrown, bludgeoned, smoothed over, suppressed, raped, waiting for the revenge it will surely enjoy when we are gone. I reverse into my drive in my smaller than medium car, only just squeezing through the small gap in the wall, imagining the Morris Minor or Triumph Dolemite it once more practically housed and the people who probably never conceived that anybody could possibly need anything grander. You can let yourself go into a gentle, cuckoo-soundtracked fantasy about life here in the unclaustrophobic 1950s but it’s worth bearing in mind, as you do, that that’s when we really started getting on the bad road we are on, environmentally speaking, and when some of the most irreversible damage was already being done.
Finishing touches to the kissing gate today. Jim – whose family have been associated with the church for centuries – and I posed next to our work, and Clive, Underhill’s new vicar, snapped a couple of photos of us. Clive speaks very softly and has long slender fingers, which he often uses to gently tickle the palms of his own hands as he listens to you speak. I have heard that some in the village have not taken to him, finding his gentle and sensitive nature suspicious, but I like him. He does seem a little bored, though, and apparently the job leaves him a lot of time to work on his macrame skills. He offered to do some for me and I accepted, as I need a place for my spider plant to live. He and Jim also showed me what they call ‘The Bird Lady’: a very mysterious carving in the church that I suspect will linger in my mind for a long time. I took a long route back, just to glory in the beginning of the changing colours on the hillside, but my goal proved futile as the journey coincided with the fifth or sixth cloudburst of the day. As I came cautiously down Riddlefoot Lane, which is barely wider than an average car, a hooded figure in a red anorak pressed itself up against the foliage to let me pass, and as I pulled level, I recognised the figure as Reka. I opened the door and she got in. She could not have been wetter. ‘Rain has been a big fuck today!’ she said. When we arrived home I rushed into the living room to light a fire and Reka, having dispensed of most of her wet clothing, went straight upstairs to run a bath. Seconds later, I heard a shout of ‘Jézus Krisztus!’, dropped the log I was holding and ran in her direction, to find her standing in her room amidst a pile of stone and plaster, with water puddling all around her. She’d been so wet, it took me a couple of seconds to realise the water had mostly come from the wall and not her. I went to the airing cupboard and grabbed as many towels as I could carry, gave one to Reka to wrap around herself, and began spreading them on the floor, then left a voice message for Flora Prissypants. When I returned to the bedroom, Reka had found the dustpan and brush and was attempting to sweep some of the rubble into the corner. I told her to leave it, and that I would be sleeping downstairs this evening, she could have my room, and I would not hear any protests to the contrary. She finally went for her bath and while she did I put more towels down and, as I did, I froze. What appeared to be a tiny, dusty foot was sticking up out of the rubble. Tentatively I poked it, and was relieved to find it was merely an empty shoe: a very old one, designed for a tiny child. On further investigation, just to the left of it I discovered an arm sticking up from the mess, pulled it, and found myself holding a small doll: not a hard, plastic doll, of the type common over the last three quarters of a century, but one made out of fabric and stuffing, and missing an eye. ‘Jézus Krisztus,’ I muttered to myself, letting it fall from my hand, as you might an object you’d picked up and not realised was molten hot.
‘It happens in Hungary, too,’ said Reka. We were sitting in front of the fire, with Rafael Perera stretched out on the rug in front of us. Reka’s face was the colour of a good pomegranate. She had chosen to dry her hair naturally and I could see that five or six drips still remained on her neck. ‘My grandmother lives in the countryside near a place called Kaposhomok. You would not have heard of it. People haven’t. She took down a wall in her cottage and found, how do you say it, when a shoe is harder?’
‘A clog?’ I asked.
‘Yes, exactly this. A clog. It is sometimes a charm to ward off evil but also when one of someone’s children has died young and they want to keep the spirit with them, in the building.’
When I asked Reka what had made her walk over near the tor, she told me she’d just needed time to think. ‘Man trouble,’ she said. ‘I think people think they have too many options and that is one of the problems of the world of right now.’
I had already brought my duvet and pillow down and felt extremely relaxed, right there, with my lovely housemate and my cat, despite the troubling events of the day. I’d managed to soak up most of the moisture in the spare bedroom and fortunately none of it had come through the ceiling. I could not help but notice the way the firelight enhanced the extreme natural beauty of her face and, as I let my eyes close, I permitted myself to imagine what it might feel like if she reached out a hand, just six or seven inches from where it was now, and gently held the toes of my right foot.
Flora Prissypants still refusing to pay me back for the drain company’s bill. I am seeking legal advice. I am not feeling well. Last night I went to bed with a band of tingling, slightly burning pain stretching around from my navel to my lower back. I am sure it is nothing. There is usually something and usually it doesn’t last long and becomes nothing. That’s what it’s like, having a body. Or at least having a body after a certain, not particularly old, age. Of course, before that there’s a period that might convince you that having a body can mean going for long stretches of time where there’s nothing much wrong at all, but that’s in fact a very brief period, in the grand arrangement of life. ‘You look tired,’ said Kath, when she arrived to relieve me of my shift. ‘Are you OK?’ This means absolutely nothing, since approximately four times out of every nine she sees me, Kath, whom I jobshare with, says to me, ‘You look tired. Are you OK?’ In part to spite her, I took advantage of the beautiful late afternoon weather, nipped home to get my bathing suit, and drove to the beach, then let myself float on the water, watching skeins of geese fly above me towards France as the most golden of suns dropped its blessing on the hills. I did not feel tired, and was OK. Perhaps it was not the most sensible course of action, and I have started to feel a bit peculiar since then, but I have an enormous faith in the healing power of salt water and fear we might not get a day this perfect and unseasonably warm for a long time. I did text Reka and ask her if she wanted to join me but she said she had another date. I heard her come in, obviously not alone, at around twelve, then could hear her playing her guitar and singing – the melody seemed familiar, and I realised it was the Hungarian record she had shown me, the one by the American singer, albeit a much softer rendition of the song than his. The builders are coming soon to sort the wall and I shall be extremely glad to have my own bed again.
I have lived in the south west of the country for a long time now, long enough to consider it my home, but, as a transplanted northerner, one thing I do often miss about where I come from is people’s unsugarcoated habit of, on the whole, but with some exceptions, saying what they actually mean. Today on the way to the car park after buying a cauliflower and some strawberries from the farm shop I bumped into Sheila from the arts college, and said hello. They’re a bit weird there, all into their yoga, which is great by me, but it’s never simple yoga, always got to be yoga with some extra element, yoga and darts, yoga done while wearing nothing but an anorak, or something like that. Toni, who works with Sheila, had asked me if I wanted to teach on their stonemasonry course a couple of months back and I hadn’t been able to make it to any of the two dates Toni had proposed to chat about it, and – though I’m not bothered – I never heard anything more. Anyway, it transpires, from a couple of things Sheila said, that I had my chance, and because I wasn’t able to jump at the opportunity, I’ve been replaced. I didn’t fully realise this until after I’d left the farm shop, due to a habit Sheila has – just like quite a few people you meet connected with the art college – of making a piece of negative information sound like a positive one. ‘It’s a very exciting time up there!’ she told me. ‘There are a lot of ideas being floated around.’ This after I’d gleaned from some other convoluted pseudo-enthusiastic things she’d said that the course would now not be co-taught by Grant Hope and me, but by Grant and Judith Sitwell, from Topsham, instead. ‘You should talk to Toni,’ she said. ‘It’s a very exciting time. I know she’s aware of you.’ Fuck that, I thought, but didn’t say it; I just politely said goodbye and wished her a nice weekend – which makes me wonder, now I think about it: am I now also a person who doesn’t say what she actually means?
I sometimes think about the small culture shocks I still feel living in this part of the country, after close to a decade, and wonder about the bigger ones Reka has had to deal with. She says she finds it hard to get used to the politeness of British people, finds it overdone, and was shocked at the levels of gossip when she first arrived in the UK. ‘I hear so many conversations where people seem to be talking about a woman they know, in a disapproving way,’ she told me. ‘It’s always “she” something, something she did, they are mentioning.’ Ever since she told me this, I’ve become more aware of it myself – especially in the staff room and refectory at work. Today we talked about Christmas, which I plan to do approximately nothing for. Reka said Christmas is different in Hungary anyway, as it’s the Baby Jesus, not Santa Claus, who brings the presents. ‘But we also have Santa Claus Day, where we leave our shoes near the window.’ She seems quieter at the moment. Maybe it is the distraction of the new man. He is called Greg and works at a garage in Exeter. I feel more ill, a bit like an animal with sharp teeth is eating my insides.
The builders didn’t come to sort the wall but Nick, Flora’s guy, did. I don’t know how good a job he did but I have my suspicions it’s of a temporary nature. Nobody came over to look at any of the other damp issues in the house. Before Nick arrived, Reka and I packed the shoe and the doll back inside the brickwork and covered them up. I am not superstitious, but I think some people who once lived in this house interred them in the wall for a reason, and I think it’s best that we respect that. I don’t know if Nick saw them when he repaired the wall. I certainly haven’t mentioned any of it to Flora. I am still attempting to get the money back from her for the work by the drainage company. Still ill, and none of this is helping.
It turns out I have shingles. I remember at various points in my life people talking in a tone of great pity and sympathy about other people who had shingles but I don’t think I’d ever properly considered what it was. Now I know. What happens is a furious stoat somehow gets inside one half of your body without you noticing and gradually begins to chew all your flesh and nerve endings. You never see the stoat, but after a while the scars from its interior work begin to show on the outside, then begin to blister. At night, it’s a little different to that: you wake up at 2 a.m. feeling like you and the stoat have been involved in a fire at a biochemical factory. I’ve got quite a high pain threshold but, even so, I’m finding it all surprisingly nasty – particularly the bit where the stoat bought some hot chilli sauce as a dressing then ate my bellybutton from within. What is also startling is that shingles is actually a little bit of chickenpox that’s been sitting dormant in your body, waiting patiently to come back and get you. My chickenpox was a bastard in 1977, when I was seventeen. Like me, they look less punk rock than they did back then, but they’re still a bastard and have become more bitter and cynical with age. I will still walk, though. This afternoon, five miles. Everything is gold and green and brown down the deep lanes, with the one exception of the bright new red berries on the rowan. Every day, the sun thins a little more. Reka and I haven’t played Scrabble for ages. We must. It’s Scrabble weather. I heard Reka singing the song again, late at night, and then I thought I heard it again, at about 3 p.m., but it might have been just my half-dream state. I’m that kind of ill where songs spin in your head as you try to sleep. Hallucination, I suppose. Last night my pillow was a rock I tried to carve but a hand kept stopping me. I looked up and the hand belonged to Kath on reception. ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’
Something nice happened today, then something not nice happened, and something else, also not nice. I was walking down the hill – staggering a bit, if I’m honest, holding my side, which is beginning to look like I’ve been in a fire – and I smelt that lovely smell you get when woodsmoke cuts through the cold misty late afternoon air at this time of year, then realised that the woodsmoke was coming from my own chimney. What a delight! I opened the gate and as I did a man – broad, bearded – charged past me, clutching his face, which had a line of blood running down it. It took a moment before I realised it was Reka’s current boyfriend, Greg. He looked scared. I found Reka in the living room, tending the fire, and said hello, but she didn’t seem to notice me at first.
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.
‘Everything is fine,’ she said. The way she said it, there was something different, a bit slower, and she wasn’t looking at me. It was as if something in the fire was very important, and I was a distraction.
‘We have been experimenting,’ she said, continuing to look at the flames.
I was really feeling like I needed a lie down so I opted not to press the matter further, and I heard her leave for work an hour or so later. The dishwasher needed to go on so I popped around the house, looking for half-full glasses of water. I found two in Reka’s room and was just leaving when something on her bed caught my eye, sitting next to her ancient teddy bear. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes! It was the doll from the wall. I’m sure it’s the same one – all dusty and dirty with one of its eyes missing. After all, where else would you get a doll like that? I can only think she took it back out of the wall before Nick came to repair it. She’ll be back soon but I won’t ask her about it until tomorrow. Maybe I won’t at all. I suppose it’s her own business.
I love the rainy, sometimes sunny climate of the moor and its border villages: the pockets of weather that can vary so radically from valley to valley, the clouds that sink into vases of deep green land, do their work to help maintain that greenness then tumble on to their next appointment. I like walking in the rain here and I like seeing what it does to the plants in my garden. I like the way footpaths and streams are often interchangeable. Water was a very decisive factor in my decision to live here: the deafening rush of the stream, the taste of what came out of the tap, so immeasurably more flavoursome and soft and refreshing than what I used to drink in Oxford when I lived with Mike. ‘Yep, that’s it,’ I thought, the first time I drank it. ‘That’s what’s been missing.’ You go and get some chips in a nearby town. You walk along the street in the town with your bag of rain and, strangely, you don’t mind it, because you’re very hungry after a long walk along the high shouting river, and there are some chips in there too right at the bottom of the bag, just a few, beneath all the rain, and they taste good, because everything tastes good after a long walk in the rain. Water is in your entire being here, altering it, influencing the taste of everything. I so often have rain and sea and river in my hair and damp pebbles in my shoes and cuts across my stomach and chest from when I scraped them against rocks when I leapt off other rocks into water. You feel it all even more after a summer that some other British people told you was dry and hot, not realising that the South West Peninsula is not really in Britain, and that weather is different here: cooler and damper in summer, warmer and damper in winter, rainier almost all of the time, especially recently. If you can’t see the moor, it’s raining. If you can see the moor, it means it’s about to rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Water. Water. Water. It’s so much the theme of my life. I even used it to kill Mike. I didn’t say? I killed Mike. I didn’t. But I did. I told Reka I found the doll today. She said it was OK, that she knew I knew, and that we could all be friends: me, her and the doll.
Ah fuck. Rain. The song again. Such a nice tune. She has got really good at it. I’ll explain it all better when I’m well.
Oh so ill. I didn’t kill Mike. Didn’t stab him or shoot him or put arsenic in his favourite leek and potato soup or chop his nomadic penis and testicles off. Don’t think that. But maybe I did kill him. It feels better now I write it. It was yonks ago now, and yonks after we broke up. I didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after it happened, from Beth. She was all that was left by then, our only connection. She was the one who told me not to go out with him, then she ended up closer friends with him than she was with me. She thought I should know, in case I heard elsewhere. There was nothing about it in the newspapers but I might have found out online anyhow, she said. It was in Scotland. The top left bit. A boat. A storm. Him and his mates, fishing. Only one of the four of them survived. It didn’t touch me for a while but I tracked it back and the dates matched up. That was the night: the night I wished him dead. But I don’t really wish anyone dead. Resentment. They say it’s like drinking poison then waiting for someone else to die. Only in this case it worked. I was angry: Mum was close to the end then, things were bad, I was in some other reality without hope, was thinking back to where it went wrong, held him responsible, but I didn’t mean it. But that was the night I did it. Down in the cottage, the place before here, right in the village, sleeping in the loft room, with the view of the tor, and the pony poo on top. This rain is reminding me. That was the exact night he must have died. Maybe the exact moment. I worked it out. It was raining then too. Next day without any idea of what I’d done I walked up to the pool – the deep one. Seven miles there, seven miles back. I let myself jump. I hit the surface and let the momentum take me as far under as it needed to. I was under for barely any time at all but while I was I felt I was somewhere else: somewhere where nothing was anything any more. Somewhere darker than any night, any dream. I came up into the sunlight and the sunlight felt like something you could suddenly eat and I ate it, gulped it down without chewing it the prescribed seventy-two times, or even chewing it one time. I swam against the current, my front crawl just strong enough to defeat it and get back to the rocks on the bank. I didn’t jump again. This rain is reminding me. It’s so… everything. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so fierce if the house was double glazed. There are eight reservoirs on the moor, all built between 1867 and 1972 as the expanding villages and towns below them demanded cleaner water. When the water is low, you see the remains of sunken farmsteads and clapper bridges and Bronze Age villages. When they made one, they drowned an entire farm. How could you do that? Did cows and sheep die? I hope cows and sheep didn’t die. But more cows have died since then. Ever such a bloody lot of cows. Have I ever thought about that. Oh god, the water, the drips. Is the wall going to come down again? I know what’s happening outside, all the rivers, filling up. They’re all getting high. One is being a thug out back of the Co-op, hissing and swearing at the locals. Down under the bridge, near the dual carriageway, another is taking some drugs it found floating in a bag. All the water is coming, and this is the end point. It’s rushing down the lane, right at me. The rain couldn’t be louder if I was in a tent. The power in the house is going on and off every two minutes. I can hear Reka. The song. I didn’t even know she was in. She’s playing the song. The wind is up – I think it’s coming through a gap in the wall – and it’s harmonising with her. I remember now. I heard it up there, before. On the moor. There was the house that was high off the lane, with a door in the garden wall. I think I heard it once, behind the door. I don’t know. It might have just been a dream. Everything’s mixed up now and my stomach is burning. I want it to dry out. Everything is wet. It won’t dry out. The walls won’t dry out. My skin won’t dry out. There’s a folk tale from there, near that bit of the moor. The pixy – an ugly tiny man – comes to the nurse’s house and asks her to deliver his wife’s baby. They go on a horse, very fast, to his wife, who is very beautiful, and when the baby is born, he asks the nurse to put ointment on its eyes. When the pixies are not looking, she tries some of her ointment on one of her own eyes. Suddenly the pixy and his children are even uglier than before, but the wife is even more beautiful. The next week, at the market, she sees him stealing things, and asks how his wife and baby is. ‘You can see me?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but only with this eye.’ And he strikes her in the eye and blinds her with his sharp fingernails. I am lucky the shingles aren’t in my eye. Edith Boyland and her boring dog told me her aunt Agnes got them on the left side of her face and lost her sight in that eye. But, Jézus Krisztus, it hurts, especially at night, and I don’t know what is a dream. Last night I dreamt Reka stood over me with the doll and didn’t say anything and I asked her to come and be beside me but she just stood, staring. When I am better, we can leave here, me and Reka. We will go somewhere dry. We will bring the bees, we can even bring the doll if she wants. But what if the bees can’t come. What about the spiders. Will they be OK after we have gone. And what about the cows, everywhere. We can go and have our own cow, at least be nice to our own cow; selfish but that’s all you can do, be nice to your own cow, because if you think about all the cows you go crazy. It will sit down when it’s about to rain. That’s what they do, they’re always sitting down here. I like the noise of them when they move slowly and heavily through grass on a hot day. It’s a lovely calming sound, unique to them, impossible to replicate by anything that isn’t a cow. That will happen again. It will be spring again, and it will be dry again, this skin will be dry again, after the Baby Jesus has brought our presents and it is a new year and everything turns over. I just have to be patient. But right now, I admit it, Kath. I am tired, and I am not OK. Are you happy now, Kath? Can you finally shut the fuck up? The power is going on and off, every two minutes.
My name is John and I don’t know why I’m writing this because nobody will probably ever see it or maybe they will but I reckon that will be long after my time. I’m the builder. One of them. Colin is the other one. We are the ones working on the house. Not that guy Nick. He’s gone. We’ve been here two weeks now. The place was a right tip when we started and we had to shift a load of stuff to the real tip before we could even start knocking through and sanding down and working on the pargeting so we’re only just getting started, but that’s not my problem. The owner of the house doesn’t even live in this country and she’s paying. We’ll be here another month, I reckon, but it would be two at the absolute minimum if she’d told us to go ahead and do all the stuff I said needed doing. I suppose she’s going to sell the place and just wants it looking smart to the untrained eye so she can get shot of it. Like I said, that’s all her business, not mine. I wouldn’t want to live here myself, it’s all a bit too wet and far away from everything. Anyway, it was a right mess and we found loads of stuff we didn’t know what to do with and I didn’t like throwing it away. I talked to the next-door neighbour and she said there were two women living here and one of them died – septicaemia, which I think is some kind of blood poisoning, but as you know now anyway if you’ve read this far she’d been ill in another way before that. There were old socks and this weird doll and loads of smashed plates and when we were shifting this mattress with a big dip in the middle and a spring coming out of it I found this diary under it and when Colin was over at the wholesalers getting emulsion I started reading it and then I just carried on because it was interesting and then I read it again. I didn’t understand all of what it was talking about and why should I when it’s just something someone has written for herself about her life, but it made me sad and it made want to read books, which I always want to but don’t. Anyway, I haven’t really got any more to say because it’s all in here anyway, but I thought I should say something because I don’t like thinking about what happened and the neighbour told me the woman didn’t really have any family to speak of and she seemed nice in what she wrote and I feel like somebody needs to write or do something because if nobody did that’s fucking awful and everything just isn’t there any more. We’re going to put the wall back up tomorrow and I’m going to put it in there, in a gap between the stones, before we make good. I’m not telling Colin. He wouldn’t be interested anyhow.