Come, fertilise me, in your thousands, man and beast. Give me your sheep shit, your rotten berries, your own good piss. Do not be shy and hold it in for the public lavatories on Fore Street. Squat in my bushes, stand proud above my ravines, or shake your fluffy tail in my face – whatever is the most convenient method for you, I don’t mind – and let it out. Do not industrially monostraddle me with your insane lust for profit. Rid me of this relentless chemical run-off. Farm me, by all means, but farm me with tact, kindness, sympathy. Farm me gently. Farm me slowly. Take it easy. Don’t you know, that I have never been farmed like this before. At least not since some time in the mid-1800s, or during that short-lived organic project by that couple last decade, which sadly didn’t come off due to funding issues.
A full moon bleached the sky white-blue last night. It shone in through the bedroom skylight on Jim Swardesley from the post office and he dreamt that he was a large bear, on all fours, running through an icy stream, with dripping bear legs, and one of the big bear grunts he did in the dream as he ran woke him up. He turned and pressed his 93.5 per cent erect penis into the bottom of Gillian, his wife. ‘Mmmtired,’ she mumbled, batting him away. ‘Go to the workroom and calm yourself down.’ Downstairs, the Swardesleys’ son, Julian, sat on the back garden decking, smoking, unable to sleep, his mind rewired to a frenetic, fizzing, popping speed by the hundreds of messages he’d exchanged with girls on a dating app on his smartphone over the last week, all of which he knew would come to nothing, and all of which was some way to attempt redemption for the trip he’d made to Cardiff the previous week to meet someone from the same dating app, who had not only stood him up but subsequently vanished from the face of the online globe: a redemption that was ultimately less about his romantic life and more an attempt to convince himself that humans weren’t ultimately cruel and heartless. Behind him, in the downstairs bedroom, his older sister Phoebe, who had passed through a similar phase in her life eighteen months ago and now used her phone in the most minimal way, slept soundly. In her dream, on the idyllic farm of her future, a group of demanding animals, including sheep, chickens, three goats and a needy open-mouthed frog, followed her around the edge of a pond, in whose unrealistically clear water she had just been washing three peasant blouses and her long blonde hair. She turned, startled for just a moment, at the gentle yet solid touch of a large slab of human skin on her bare shoulder, which she happily realised was the hand of her future husband, the co-owner of the farm, who also bore a striking resemblance to the square-jawed lead from her favourite American TV series. ‘So tell me, dear wife,’ he asked her, in his square-jawed American voice, his hair not moving a fraction in the afternoon breeze. ‘Shall we ride Antonio and Bess to the beach this afternoon, or head to the mountain and meditate?’
I dreamt very vividly too, as if that white-blue light of the moon was shining down through my layers and illuminating my past, penetrating parts of my crust that no run-of-the-mill night, not even a run-of-the-mill full moon night, could normally penetrate. I was back right in the meat of a night not unlike this, a long long time ago. I thought I was old at the time, but I was not. This is how ageing works, again, and again, and again, until you die. OMG, can you believe I’m actually twenty-one? I’m so old! OMG, can you believe I’m actually forty? OMG, can you believe I’m actually 900? I’m so old! OMG, can you believe I’m actually 5,807? I’m so old! As I dreamt about the night, I refelt so much of the fear I felt on it, and was scared by the fear, but I also refelt how alive I felt, and I was more scared still by that. Men were killing each other on my flanks and my knee and my left knuckle and all six of my bums and my eyebrow and my clitoris and my bollocks – although not my bullocks, who had all fled to low ground – and the men had been killing each other for two days and even though it was the deepest part of the night they were still killing each other and the fierce light of the moon was making it easier for them to kill each other and it seemed, although at first some of them had been killing each other slightly reluctantly, more out of a sense of duty than anything, now those same men were taking more pleasure in killing each other. One group of men had originally ambushed and cornered another group of men near a thick, impenetrable stand of trees on my aorta. The group of men who had ambushed the other group of men had less refined accents than the other group of men, more odorous hair and beards, but that was not so noticeable as it initially had been, and no longer seemed to matter; they were all just men, with urine-splashed trousers and swollen bloody eyes and half-legs and three-quarter arms and strewn intestines and a lust for power disguised as a lust to stay alive and a lust for staying alive disguised as a lust for power and women at home they wished were holding and caressing them and nobody really knew who was who any more and what it was all for. I was terrified, watching these men. And now dreaming about that night I felt that terror again and I felt that aliveness and I felt what I felt in the weeks following it, when all the men had died or fled or dragged themselves off to expire elsewhere, when the liquid from their bodies seeped into me, which was a different kind of aliveness, and an amazing kind of rejuvenation and energy and, yes, virility. Startling, startling virility. And then I felt momentarily ashamed but then I thought: Why? I am not hurting anyone; I am not even pressing myself into someone and being told to go to a workroom and calm myself down. I was just feeling what I felt.
Look, I’m not the Cerne Abbas Giant, if that’s what you think. You’re way out geographically, for a start. I have never been chalked, I am barely in any guidebooks, and I am not a renowned site of pilgrimage and ritual, or at least have not been for so long that to even talk about that would involve talking in an entirely different language which, even if it was translated into twenty-first-century English, would make little sense. Also – and I don’t mean this in a snide or judgemental way – some of us don’t feel the need to show off graphically and publicly about what we’ve got and prefer instead to occupy a position of quiet confidence about it. Each to their own, though. I hear he’s OK, the Giant. I certainly don’t have any personal beef with him, and am not attempting to start a feud. There is enough aggro and unrest in the world as it is. Especially on a moonlit night such as the one that has just passed.
Because the moon scrubbed the sky so clear, it was actually pretty cold in the early hours. But now the sun has burned off a light mist, all the world’s clouds are elsewhere, and we’re getting the flipside: the most perfect blue afternoon, hot without being stifling, a five-days-a-year perfect day. From my vantage point I can see vividly all the way to the coast, fourteen miles away, and that does not happen often. I have just watched five young friends edge their way down a deep crevice in the cliffs. Max is the leader. He has no shoes and has been walking with no shoes for so long that his feet feel nothing of the burrs and thistles and rocks and gorse needles beneath them. Then come Jemima and Annie: surfing, kayaking almost-hippie girls who talk with that laidback drawl common to all the kids around here whose parents have money and moved over from the south east a couple of decades ago. Hollie and Joe, both twenty-two, bring up the rear. They get on well, in a not deeply emotional way with Hollie doing most of the talking, and are in the middle of a lengthy discussion whose theme was originally graphic novels but has moved on to cheese. Hollie is still annoyed with herself for a grammatical slip-up in a message she sent last night, in reply to a sequence of persistent, politely complimentary and slightly poetic missives from an anonymous male, in which she wrote, ‘Hey, dude, I’m sorry but I have a boyfriend and I’m comfortable with the amount you are messaging me.’ The reason she wrote ‘comfortable’, instead of ‘uncomfortable’ – the word she intended to write – was that she had just burned her hand on the door of her mum’s wood burner. What she doesn’t know is that the sender of the anonymous messages was Joe.
But now they are on the shingle, and there is not a hint of Internet or phone reception and that other universe in which those messages were exchanged feels even more like one totally separate to this, with very few of the same rules or beliefs or social guidelines. The Internet is still two full years away from arriving at the beach so everyone is being a person. Nine people are asleep and, of those, seven will remember this sleep, with the sound of the waves in the background, as their most delicious sleep of the summer. Near the cliffs, someone has left a packet of chalk sticks, and on the rocks somebody has chalked the message ‘PHUCK “SOCIETY” MAKE YOUR OWN RULES’. Just left of that somebody else has chalked a naked male body from the shoulders down. The naked male body’s penis is standing to attention. If we are talking purely in terms of how it relates to the body it is attached to, the penis is slightly bigger than the Cerne Abbas Giant’s. In front of it a woman called Sue is praising a Schnauzer for leaving a crab to just get on and exist as a crab. But it is not a beach day without problems. Three men have just arrived on jet skis, bludgeoning every pleasant noise the day had to offer, and are riding closer and closer to the people in the water. Jennifer Tomasovich, an occupational therapist from Lostwithiel, has been watching the jet skiers and has now marched down to the shore and is shouting at them and trying to wave them away from the beach but they can’t hear her and, if they do see her hand gestures, it only seems to encourage them to continue to get closer and closer to the shore, buzzing in show-off circles on these machines that they have convinced themselves are their Cerne Abbas Giant-sized cocks (or maybe the cock of some other land form which is slightly bigger but doesn’t feel the need to be outlined in chalk). David Ludgate, who retired from running the big corporate optician in Exeter last year, has strolled down with his son Sam to join Jennifer, whom neither of them has ever met, on the tideline. ‘Go away!’ he shouts at the jet ski pricks.
‘Fuck off!’ Sam adds. ‘Nobody wants you here and nobody likes you.’
Now a bigger crowd is gathering, thirteen or fourteen people, most of whom have never previously met, all united by this common four-cylinder enemy. Three or four of them begin to throw pebbles in the direction of the jet skiers. The jet skiers stop, about twenty yards out from the shore, and switch off their engines.
‘What’s your problem?’ says their leader. Bald, pointy-faced, fifty-fiveish, he – the people on the shore realise – is the father of the other two jet skiers. He has brought them with him on his jet ski replacement-penis journey, taught them from an early age how to use a jet ski as a replacement for their own penises, passed on all the jet ski penis-replacement wisdom he has learned to them, as they will in time to their own male children.
‘Our problem is that what you’re doing is DANGEROUS,’ shouts Jennifer Tomasovich the occupational therapist. ‘There are people swimming here. You are being massively antisocial.’
‘Oh, get a life, woman,’ shouts the self-appointed jet ski replacement-penis chieftain, whose name is Andrew Bannister and – even though it seems almost too depressingly predictable to be true – took early retirement last year from his job as a big city banker and still regularly snorts cocaine.
‘You mean like your life?’ shouts Jennifer Tomasovich the occupational therapist. ‘Why would anyone with any sense want that? You’re demonstrating right now that it’s obviously totally fucking soulless and self-centred.’ At this, chuckles and cheers ring out from the shore, and an energy that has been building around the strangers standing there solidifies into a powerful, vibrating bar: a warm, formidable thing. Even though the strangers have not locked hands or begun singing a song of purity and strength out to the ocean, it feels like they are doing both. It is too much for Andrew Bannister, who opens his mouth to tell them why his life is actually the best, searches down in his dry throat for the words, then further, right inside his drier heart, but cannot find those words anywhere. ‘Come on! What even are the words?’ his throat asks his heart but his heart says nothing. And while he falters, as if in response to this – almost as if the machine is part of his body after all, just as he believes – his jet ski falters too. It stalls, to the great entertainment of everyone on the beach watching.
Fin and Reuben, Andrew’s sons, look nervously now to him for the strong guidance he has always given them, in terms of what to do when you are sitting on a replacement penis. But none comes. A pebble pings off Reuben’s replacement penis.
‘What a trio of prize tools!’ shouts Sam Ludgate.
But it’s OK! Andrew has got the engine going again! He presses the accelerator and does a victory lap of the water, followed by Fin and Reuben, getting even more dangerously close to the beach than before. Because as long as he tells himself that’s what it is, it’s real, in his head, victory. That mouthy woman and her hippie friends haven’t won. He has. Because here he is showing them the way to live: that sitting on a beach reading a book, or doing your stupid yoga, or eating your stupid organic packed lunch, is for losers. Life is about making money and using it to find a penis that is more powerful than your own. And he is sure – even though his throat, and all the bits of his body it leads down to, are even drier now – everyone will know that, and be in no doubt of his victory, as he motors away to another cove, followed by those he has spawned, and passed on his wisdom and prowess to.
The calm that redescends after that is powerful. At the other end of the beach, Hollie resumes thwacking a tennis ball back and forth with Annie, and Joe resumes watching her, and wondering why she didn’t like the poem his anonymous Internet self sent her. People slip back into their delicious salty sleeps. Swimmers swim in a less nervous way. Dogs are congratulated for further minor acts of restraint. There is a slight sense that Jennifer Tomasovich the occupational therapist has given the beach the therapy it needed.
But I am not satisfied.
You will have noticed I sided with the peace-loving fraternity in this situation. The ‘hippies’ as Andrew Bannister thought of them, even though that description would only truly fit a few of them. The people not forcing their lives on anyone else. I generally do take that side. I am on the side of the land (well, obviously), the side of freedom, the side of unpolluted sound of waves and spiteless laughter. But am I a hippie myself? No. I resist such simple boxes. But more than that, I am too angry. You cannot be me, and see all I have seen, feel all I have felt, and not be.
‘Oh, so you’re a nihilist then, are you?’ is what you’re thinking. And you’d be wrong there too. I am not a nihilist, a communist, a socialist, an anarchist, a libertarian, a liberal, a conservative, an anything. I am me, with all of what has made me, with all of what has soaked me, and with all of that you cannot be a label.
Let me tell you this: I happen to know something else about Andrew. Eight years ago, he was driving across my ribs in one of his other replacement metal penises – an SUV retailing at over £70,000 – and hit a young pony, while breaking the speed limit by a total of 34 mph. He very forcefully felt the impact of the pony, which broke the SUV’s radiator grill and bumper and smashed its left headlight, and, though it was dark, saw the animal’s descent over a ridge at the side of the road, to some rocks directly beneath, where the pony died, not quickly, but ninety-four full long minutes later, watched by three other ponies, who stood directly above it. But Alan decided to drive on, and to this day has still never told another soul about the incident. He was on his own in his SUV at the time, but even so, he still spoke aloud, directly after the impact, as if justifying himself to a friend. The words he spoke were, ‘Ah sod it, it’s just a bloody wild pony. Nobody even owns it.’ He then drove over my hips, which nobody owns, and my knee, which nobody owns, to one of the houses which he bought with his wife, who nobody owns, where he was meeting his mistress, who nobody owns, where he would later take some cocaine, which was once owned by a man called Jake, who lived in London’s Holland Park.
I know quite a bit more – but by no means everything – about what Andrew has done in his life, but this is the bit I take most personally.
So, no, when those pebbles were landing in the water near Andrew’s jet ski, I was not just hoping he, trailed by Fin and Reuben, would piss off and leave the swimmers and sunbathers on the beach in peace. I was hoping that one of the pebbles would connect with his temple, and knock him into the water. Harsh? Maybe. But perhaps you are ascribing values to me that are not relevant to my kind. You have been lulled by my chatter and my jokes and the familiar names I call my constituent parts, lulled into forgetting that I am not a man or a woman or anything close. Also, I haven’t done anything to hurt anyone (on this occasion); I am just feeling what I feel.
I desire love. I want to see it thrive. But I also want blood. I want it to seep into me and do its work. I want a balance redressed.