He came out of the canyon with his guitar at dawn, queried by the distant howl of coyotes. He was wearing a stranger’s shirt and had not been to sleep. The first truck he flagged down stopped and after one more ride, in a hoarse 1959 Buick LeSabre driven by a silent man who smelled of cigarettes and reminded him of his aunt in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, he reached the airport. Everyone there looked almost but not quite as tired as him. The dehydrated fur all over his brain amplified a paranoia in him, made each of his small actions feel observed. On the plane a stewardess brought him a nest of dry chicken with some lettuce so papery and devoid of moisture it seemed like fake lettuce, lettuce made solely for photo shoots of lettuce. She asked him if he was travelling on some sort of business and a cough-laugh escaped his throat. What on earth kind of business looked like this? He’d told himself he had done enough of going where everyone said you should go, and wanted to try the alternative approach of going just somewhere, roll the dice across a map, but it was a little more pre-meditated than that. ‘I’m going back where I come from,’ he told her.
As the coach moved sluggishly through the last outposts of the city, it rained, just like it did in the songs. Rain-grey town, known for its sound. None of the flamboyant outfits he’d heard about were in evidence. All of his fellow passengers were wearing clothes mimicking the colour of the sky. As the rain cleared, he saw toy cars, made to measure for the toy road system around them, and the toy driveways of the toy houses beyond that where the toy cars secured their prescribed eight hours’ sleep every night.
After a couple of hours, the bus passed over a ridge and the terrain became less populated, a light green moonscape. Big shaved-looking mounds that were more like dunes than hills. A place that looked like it hadn’t quite yet decided on its long-term plans. It segued gently into light forest, little stone houses, something more polite, something that was finally like the England he’d been picturing when he set out, the England he remembered, although he didn’t truly remember anything. He’d been four years old. Each of the only three people who connected him to this part of the world was at least 5,000 miles away. Yet many miles further on when the bus finally stopped and he got out, he realised a part of him had still been expecting a caretaker or guide to meet him at the station. A second, lost sister perhaps. A cousin. He discovered a new oneliness in the walk that followed, felt it in the centre of his ribcage.
Nearly all the streets in the city were steep, but they divided into two types: the grey ones that looked like they’d just been born from nothingness and the pastel ones that looked proud in a tired, touching way, like senior citizens still wearing their graduation gowns. He took a room on the top floor of a lanky old house that peered over the edge of a hill. He had his own sink in the corner of the room which he pissed into on lazier days because the bathroom was shared and the pipes clanged every time anyone turned on the hot tap, which hurt his head on the mornings after he’d drunk too much, which was quite a few of them. The previous occupant of the room had begun to paint a mural of a squashed face in two shades of orange on the wall next to a tall window where, until the beech trees across the road came into leaf, you could see a one-inch-high triangle of cobalt sea. He figured the docks were the obvious place to find work and it didn’t take him long to do so. On Saturdays, he busked, usually down by the coach station. It wasn’t much of a music city, but it was easy to score some weed down by the water at night, an area of much dereliction, both architectural and human. Near a warehouse with a tree growing out of it three women a few years his senior who were high or drunk or both stopped him and asked if he wanted to go to a club with them.
‘You’ll like it,’ one said. ‘There’s music playing.’
‘What kind of music?’ he asked.
‘Jazz, duuddde,’ she said, in a mock version of his accent.
He followed them four streets further into the injured concrete core of the city while they whispered conspiratorially and cackled about people and places he didn’t know, lagging back out of concern they might smell the odour of oysters that always now clung to his clothes, then finally allowing himself to blur back into the night for good. They did not appear to notice and as it faded their hard laughter mixed with the cries of gulls until he did not know which was one and which was the other. The next day he bought a small pot of liquorice-red house paint and finished the mural. The sea smells were a constant social concern, even though he did little socialising. Oyster, mussel, cockle, crab. He was convinced they never went away, even after he washed. On the roadsides, in the wet dust and weeds, yellow flowers with darker yellow centres were appearing. Down on the containers, they never called him Richard or Richie, only ‘Pencil’ or ‘Flower’. ‘Ere, Flower, you sure you can ’andle this?’ ‘Don’t give it to Pencil. It might ’urt ’is soft ’ands. Lovely ’ands, ’e got, like my missus. You seen ’em?’ At night, he dreamt he was on his back, with sealife cascading down on him out of a metal chute. If not that, he dreamt of Alison, the girl from Albany he’d met the previous summer, who, upon taking the least amount of drink, would immediately want to jab and prod everyone around her with no little violence, or jump on their backs. In the space of just one weekend, Alison, who at barely five foot was a whole sixteen inches shorter than him, had jumped on the back of Jim Morrison and the rhythm section of The Turtles. During the dreams, he was always crouched in a corner, watching helplessly as the jumping took place, knowing intervention was futile. In the apotheosis of the dreams, he crouched in the corner of a shipping container, his hands over his eyes, as haddock fell on his head and Alison leapt on the back of a giant dolphin who smiled nervously in the manner of someone who will pretend to have fun on the vague promise of sex. A fragile awareness was growing in him that his songwriting was coming on apace. In a temporarily clean new plaza in the main shopping district, he tried out two new numbers and took home the smallest amount of money in his guitar case to date.
When other, more rampant vegetation had swallowed the yellow flowers on the verges, he set out for the docks at the usual time, carrying all his possessions, but turned right, not his customary left, and soon reached the train station. One of the country’s diminishing branch lines took him to a village by the coast, where he and nobody else disembarked. At a post office, he bought bread, scissors, knobbly fruit and – with only an intrigued suspicion of what it might be – Marmite. It wasn’t just that the tunnelled lanes he walked along, with their floral specklings of pink and blue, merely seemed a simple, elemental contrast to the city he’d spent the last four months in; they appeared to have no topographical relationship to the small metropolis at all, to belong in a whole different country. He helped two men push a rust-caked pickup out of a ditch. Afterwards, they ran him a mile or two further down the road to their place and gave him a cold lager. They asked where he was going and, when he answered as honestly and specifically as he could, their only advice was to avoid Somerset because the people there weren’t right. The garden was full of retired machinery, fading gently into the earth. The younger of the two men pointed at two wooden structures on the hill above them that he’d taken for some kind of hutches. ‘Bees,’ the younger man said, rolling his eyes, but did not elaborate. The sun broke through the clouds after he left, drying him out for the third time that day. At a payphone, he inserted a coin and dialled a number beginning with an international prefix, but when a woody male voice answered he hung up. Further on, in a steep valley where everything hid strategically from the wind he appropriated three cucumbers from a garden and planted a kiss on the nose of a sceptical bullock.
As a result of trial and error, he found a zigzagging path down a landslip which spat him out onto a deserted cove by way of a rusty ladder which bridged the final gap between undercliff and shingle. Huts of varying types were dotted here and there on the cliffside, with flags and tall, tropical-looking plants outside. For the next thirteen days he slept on the beach, although he had concluded, at one point, that he would probably expire before seeing his first morning there, having come out of his initial salty self-baptism with purple digits and teeth that didn’t so much chatter as argue with themselves, then failed in his attempts to light a fire without the aid of matches. He had learned the cove’s first stark lesson, which was that it was not Malibu or Venice Beach. But by the third day he had grown acclimatised to the water, and, aided by driftwood and the fruits of a nine-mile hike to and from the village store, lit fires, and worked on verses of a song that he felt like he’d reached up and plucked out of the bright waxing gibbous moon above him. It had totally slipped his mind that it was his birthday. He was twenty-two years old.
The sea on his nude skin made him feel virile, and he wished he had a companion to swim with, but also slightly didn’t. The cliffs were red, redder than they looked further down the coast, and the sea tasted red too when he accidentally swallowed some of it. The cove was one that sucked in more flotsam than most. One morning he awoke to discover a small metal alarm clock twenty yards in front of his toes, on the tideline. The sea had a sense of humour but you’d probably be mistaken for taking that to mean it suffered fools gladly. Having finished both of the paperbacks in his rucksack, he began to collect driftwood, not having to use any huge amount of imagination to see faces in the knots and bends in it. He wedged it together to make animals, some real, some mythical. He forged further down the shore, looking for even more. One evening he ran back to his base camp with so much of it that he had to carry the biggest piece in his mouth. He realised he was grinning. ‘I am a dog,’ he thought.
‘And what,’ he wrote in his diary that evening, as a response to some points he’d put to himself a few days earlier, ‘is the benefit when you do get there? Is there a perfect midpoint between feeling the cold indifference of the world and losing freedom and judgement through commercial success and the people surrounding you who will no longer tell you the truth about what you are doing? (Not that I speak as someone facing a choice between the two at this exact juncture in my life.) Everything went so hazy today I lost sight of where the water ended and the sky began. In the quiet, a gull skimmed the water – or was it sky – and the tiny distance between its beak and the surface never wavered, as if measured by some highly evolved internal calculator. You could believe for a moment that this was all there was in the world: this watersky vapour, stretching for eternity, and this bird. Exquisite. I would like to bottle it somehow. I think this, in the end, is the great challenge, once you can write the tunes (which, really, anybody can, with time and effort): the bottling of something else. Something that’s not even yours but that’s not another person’s either. Something on loan from the earth.’
Closer to the weekend, people arrived and unlocked the doors of a couple of the huts on the cliffside. An old man, his face entirely ringed with coarse white hair, came down from one of the huts and swam naked, striding into the sea with all the confidence of someone reclaiming a swimming pool he had dug out with his own gnarled hands. Afterwards, the old man caught and cooked mackerel, the smell drifting down tantalisingly to where he sat scraping the last flecks of disillusioning Marmite from the jar. Later, he heard hammering from the old man’s hut, metallic and dauntless. While he listened to the old man hammer, he hacked into his hair with the scissors and threw the clumps into the tide, wondering when and how and where they would biodegrade.
The sea of his new home beach had innumerable moods. Rusty anger. Muscular calm. Pungent clarity. Weedy broth. Blue fog. Stubborn debris trickster. When did one sea clock off from its shift and the other sea come in and take its place? You never witnessed that moment because that was not permitted because if you did that would unlock everything: the big secret to it all. He knew the sea was irascible, not to be trusted but, as its resident, he inevitably began to get his feet further under the table, as residents do. One day, doing front crawl seventy yards out, he realised that his intended movement, back towards shore, was going the opposite of to plan and, worse, that he was on an inexorable downward trajectory. It was all very befuddling, because nothing around him looked particularly vigorous or wretched, and, in his disorientation, he only got the chance to cry out twice before he was completely submerged, garbled protests in a futile language spoken by only one man. His next close-to-conscious realisation was that he was in Heaven and God was looking down on him. Because Heaven would always customise itself aptly to the manner in which you’d died, Heaven in this instance was made of shingle and raucous white birds, but God had a beard, as God always had, no matter what the cause of your death was.
‘I thought you were a goner there, kiddo,’ said God, who he now realised was not God at all, but the old man from the hut.
*
‘You were in a riptide. The thing to do in a riptide is to swim parallel to the shore. You swam towards the shore, which is the worst thing you can do.’
They sat on old canvas chairs on the old man’s creaking, salty veranda and ate mackerel and potatoes, which the man salted liberally, in accordance with their environment. ‘How’s your head now?’ the old man asked.
‘Sore,’ he replied. He had hit the back of it on some rocks close to where he’d gone under, but in the end the impact had also saved his life since it was the sight of him bumping against the rocks that had alerted the old man to his plight, and allowed the old man to swim out quickly, and drag him clear, around the corner of the current, and back to shore.
‘I used to do it for the county. Swim. I was pretty good, could have been better, if I’d put the effort in. I had the chance to go to the Olympics. Belgium. I was too busy falling in love. I rarely have cause to swim like that any more, but I’ve watched six people die in my life and I didn’t much relish adding to that total.’
He slept on the floor of the old man’s hut that night, on top of a blanket. The head of a nail, knocked slightly loose from a floorboard, poked into the back of his knee, but he still managed to locate sleep with little trouble. He was a person who lost consciousness quickly: on train seats, on beds, on floors, in deep, chilly water. In the morning, he felt the lump on the back of his skull. It was located on a part of his skull he’d never liked, but had had little regular cause to think about, until now. In the light, he took in more of the cabin. On the shelf on the bed he saw a gardening trowel, a thick wool blanket and a bottle of aftershave. Above the Calor gas stove hung two framed photographs: one of a black poodle, and one of a smiling, elfin lady in a thick herringbone coat. The old man came in with a towel around his neck. ‘She’s dead now,’ said the old man, waving a hand towards the photographs. ‘And so is she.’
They swam later that morning, and in the afternoon he slept and played guitar while the old man vanished up the landslip to he did not know where. He stretched out on the skin of the water and listened to the shingle moving beneath him. In the evening by the fire he spoke a little about home but mostly the old man talked about his life and he listened.
‘I lost Eileen, she’s the one in the photo, when I was sixty-one. I was entirely unprepared for it. I always took for granted that we’d have a bit longer than that. Look out there. Seal. See it? I was not always a good man in my youth. I had my… errant moments. But I, we, got past it. People will give up more easily now. But we didn’t. We were OK. In the first year that I was alone, I kept coming back to an image, from years before. It was of Eileen, the first day I ever came here. Naked, in the water. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not talking about something erotic, although she was a beautiful woman. It wasn’t that which kept bringing me back to it. It was her face, the freedom and happiness in it. It wasn’t like her, to do that, permit herself to become naked in a place where she might be observed by strangers. I knew her to be a very cautious woman. She looked so different that day: like every muscle in her face had relaxed. That is a beautiful thing, to see a woman you love go naked into the sea for the first time. If you see it, don’t go on in the blithe assumption you might see it again. Anyhow, not long after that, I came down with the dog and built the cabin. I was totally certain I needed to do it, for her. The dog and I brought the wood around on the boat. It took seventeen months, in total. I’m here half the year, if I can be. My name is Robert Belltower. You play guitar very well. Her ashes are up there. Have you thought of trying to secure a recording contract?’
‘I had one. It wasn’t for me.’
‘Well, if it’s not for you, don’t do it,’ said Robert Belltower. ‘But make certain you’re certain first.’
Above the path on the undercliff, huge, never-tamed buddleia nurtured vast dynasties of bees and bee mimics. The sweet smell of the buddleia dominated the evenings, along with the very nearly as sweet smell of Robert Belltower. Upon retiring on the fifth night, Robert Belltower announced he would be gone for a short while, possibly to Lyme Regis, or the old smugglers’ village of Beer, he was not yet certain. Robert Belltower said he was welcome to use the cabin, so long as he didn’t burn it down, and left the key to the padlock under the third rock behind the flag. The song he wrote the following day, which he gave the working title ‘Sad Photograph of a Dog’, felt like an attempt of sorts to finish a conversation. He deemed it an inferior song and, after further appraisal, decided he was certain he was certain.
Storms were spinning in from the west. They vanquished his fires, stirred and steepened the shingle, drenched his diary, conditioned the furze of his hair. He imagined giant clenched fists pulling the black clouds in on a rope with big concerted tugs and little pauses in between. In the strange aggressive sunblast that followed, he became aware of how long it was since he had been touched by anybody except Robert Belltower. He poured cold water on that thought and reconstituted it as the simpler desire to play a song for a gathering of twenty or more people and hear them clap and possibly whoop. He left the four of the driftwood animals that had not blown away outside the hut, so they defined a path of sorts to the front door. The undercliff seemed steeper, twistier than before, as he made his way up it, but he was aware of something more coiled and taut in his calves as they propelled him up the still-damp path, shimmying to one side every dozen or so steps to make way for jaywalking oil beetles. He stopped and peeled one of Robert Belltower’s overripe bananas under a yew tree in a churchyard, ate it in three decisive bites. He threw the peel towards a gathering of wild rabbits then set out up a steep unmetalled road and through a latched gate weighted by an old rock. Cows looked up from their all-day meals, discussed the topic amongst themselves then made their way slowly, and then more quickly, towards him. The hillside shook under their hooves and he froze with his tanned arms spread wide, like some fibreglass cattle messiah, and the cows stopped in their tracks, looking up into his face, fascinated and confused, until, one by one, they returned to the more vital business of breakfast. His reverie was broken by a small, worrying question in his mind: Which rock had Robert Belltower said, and how far was it behind the flag?
He waved down the train at another small station, where there were no other passengers, and took it to a different city this time, less greyly rearranged by war, barely a city at all. He walked up a cobbled street to a cathedral and set up directly beneath a carving of a six-mouthed, six-nosed, five-eyed crowned head. All the office workers, even those of his age group, who bit into thin white sandwiches on the green in front of him had much shorter hair than him, even in his newly pollarded state. A woman holding a polythene bag overflowing with clothes stared sadly at him, then, after almost an hour, moved on, limping. Later, he realised a short man with a guitar was also staring at him, not as sadly, but intently, unwaveringly.
‘You’re in my spot, longshanks,’ barked the man, before he had quite finished the song.
‘Your spot?’
‘Yes. This is where I go. Has been for a long time. Everyone knows.’
‘I didn’t realise they were reserved.’
‘Well, this one is. Scram. Get lost.’
‘Well, what if I’m not so down with that, man? There’s a lot of space here. Enough for everyone.’
With that, the man transformed himself into a close approximation of a rhinoceros, bending and charging at his midriff with great speed, knocking all the wind from him. He fell back into the cathedral wall, the sore part of his head smacking against cold uneven stone. As he did, the rhinocerman kicked wildly at his guitar case, scattering coins onto grass and cobbles. He scrambled for his affairs and the lunchtime crowd on the green moved in, but nobody intervened or helped. As he flailed for coins and notes, he noticed the face of his watch, which his grandfather had given him, was cracked and the hands had stopped moving. All of the city’s noise had become a single muffled high note and he waded in his stooped shock to the other shore of the cathedral green, dragging his possessions with him in a slapdash collection of arms.
He walked for a number of hours that he could not quantify. After leaving behind the last of the nervous almost-villages that the city had coughed out and passing over several successively higher wooded rims, he descended, stopped at a clapper bridge, drank from a small river and slumped in a cradle of moss beneath a tree and rested his eyes. The water level was low, revealing a quasi-wall that could have been built by a person, long long ago, but could equally have been built by nature and time; it was hard to tell. When he awoke again it was dark. When he awoke the next time, the sun was rising, illuminating rougher, higher land ahead of him: the three-buttocked crest of a hill. His head remained sore but his vision had cleared. A sign matted with thick gaudy lichen told him that he was one and one quarter miles from Owl’s Gate, whatever that was. It was, factually speaking, very recently in his life that pretty much all of his goals featured people in some way, but now none did, and to him it was as if that had been the state of affairs for a long time. His goal now was to reach the middle, highest buttock of the three on that hill. Nothing was more important to him and nothing ever had been and nothing ever would be.
It took him longer than he thought. With its tough stalks and hard, half-raised root balls, the grass made him sway and stagger, like a drunk returning home from a regretful episode. Lambs scattered at his approach and clamped onto their mothers’ teats for solace, as if in the belief that if they closed their eyes and sucked long enough when they opened their eyes the Bad Man would no longer be there to frighten them. When he reached the top, the sun had turned around to get a better look at him. To the south, he could not see the sea but he could see the light blue space where more land would have been if the sea hadn’t been there. Everything was wild and bare and voluptuous in the other direction: buttocks upon buttocks, shadowed by buttocks, for as far as the eye could see. Yet down in the valleys everything was a darker green and there were more hiding places than you’d have ever imagined. A person could become this place, he suspected. On a sunken path with a leaf roof he passed remnant chunks of buildings that were barely distinguishable from the immeasurably older stones around them. An increasing dampness. Root and shale walls coated in bearded slime. As he crossed stepping stones in a brook, he was thinking about a summer day three years earlier when a photographer had taken him and the rest of the band deep into the canyon, down a dirt track, to a house that was falling down, and they’d goofed about, climbing on old refrigerators and sofas, then pulling themselves high into a magnolia tree in the backyard, all three of them, all looking down deep into the lens as if it was a future they wanted to undress and ravish, with Frank in the centre, and that had been the shot that was used. He’d ripped his military tunic jacket on the way down. Frank had been the one who noticed and told him.
The sunken path led him to a tiny lane, and another wooden sign told him to walk left, but the gate was padlocked and decorated with barbed wire. He climbed over it anyway, figuring there must have been some mistake, and he was soon in a meadow, high and sweet from months of reinventing itself. You couldn’t stand still. It didn’t work. Ask meadows. Below him in the valley he could see a village. He dipped below a neat line of beech, with foxgloves growing at their roots. An unseen horse coughed behind a hedge and two longer, thinner meadows later he saw buildings, barns, a house. He was regretting not drinking from the stream and was about to approach the house and ask for water when he saw a hole in its wall, which, because of the relative intactness of the rest of the building, conjured up the image of a small wrecking ball and an administrative error. He clambered through the hole, coughing away stone dust, and was momentarily dazzled by the darkness of the room. Dusty overalls were draped over a chair. A doorway led to a kitchen, with a sink containing dirty dishes and flies. On the counter was a half-full bottom of rum. He took a swig of the rum, which was warmer and thicker than rum he’d tasted before but not wholly unpleasant. He washed it down with a long blast of water from the tap and could not recall a time when water had tasted so good, so much like a drink that had been brewed and planned and fermented, rather than just like water. He found a small wooden door leading to an area of old stone sheds, which formed part of a high mossy wall that enclosed a rear garden on all sides. A huge wooden padlock hung on another door and an extra plank had been nailed across it. Up the stone staircase, the rooms were more bare, with no beds, but he found a bath and soap, and downstairs there were two large sofas. He found a ripped armchair and, discovering the back door to be locked, carried the armchair out through the hole and into the back garden. The grass was high and the air had a weight to it, as if for now it was holding everything in place.
‘Ida Richards,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She was my first. Her thirst grew in direct correlation with my uncertainty. I had wanted it so much, talked it up with my buddies, but when it came to it, I stalled, procrastinated. I hit upon new hobbies that would keep us out of her room. Eventually, she had to cajole, if not beg. She walked me through it, soft and kind. Afterwards, I was sore. Nobody had warned me about that. They’d told me that only happened to girls. Nobody was sweeter than Ida. We’d walk through the neighbourhood and she’d stop to kiss stranger’s dogs softly on the forehead. Sometimes, while I read, she would sit on the bed, staring at me, playing with her nails, examining invisible objects in the wool of her sweater. She deserved better. I imagine that one day I will realise, on some even deeper level, that, by chance, at sixteen I met a rare kind of angel, but how can you know that at sixteen? When I finally ended it she didn’t seem shocked. Her far greater disappointment always appeared to be that I never wrote a song for her, or about her. “But, Richie, why nnnnnot?” she would ask, sulking, shoving me, pouting in a joke-real way. “I thought I was special.” I never told her the real reason, which was that I feared it would be a let-down. Not because of the lack of love or feeling, but because it could not be enough. The feeling is still the same. That nothing is enough. It is there every time I put down my guitar. Will it ever be gone?’
Two mornings later, dizzy with hunger, he hiked to the bottom of the valley, reaching a row of stone cottages with neat gardens with sunflowers and hollyhocks and runner beans and windows decorated with elegant watchful cats. Clouds followed him down, gave him their brief appraisal then moved out to sea. He crossed the river and reached a main road. Around the bend, three cars were at a standstill on the tarmac. Another car passed them in the opposite direction, very cautiously, taking a diversion up a muddy bank. A large black-and-white heifer sat on the white line in the centre of the road. Beside the cow stood a fretting, long-haired girl in a baggy sweater flecked with hay. ‘She won’t move,’ said the girl. ‘She’s been here for over an hour now. She’s from where I live, the farm. Over the ridge. I would get my dad to come and get her but I don’t want to leave her.’
‘How far away is the farm?’ he asked.
‘Less than a mile, really not far at all. I just need to get my dad, and she’ll move.’
‘I’ll wait with her.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t know. Is that best?’
‘It’s fine.’
He crouched beside the cow, and put a hand gently on the animal’s back, and began to talk softly into her ear. As the girl hurried away from them, a couple more cars appeared and stopped, and the people inside them got out to look and laugh at the cow, and he whispered to the cow about the people from the cars and who they probably were, and told the cow his full name and a little about what had brought him here, and told the cow a little bit about the world, and some of the ups and downs it might contain for the cow in the future, but in a reassuring, philosophical way, not in a hard, cynical way which might potentially have upset the cow and made it even more reluctant to face that future. By the time the girl had started back down the hill with her father and a rope, he and the cow had made it almost all the way up the lane to the farm.
‘Well I’ll be a dog’s pudding,’ said the girl’s dad.
That night he ate with the girl and her family. They asked him where he was from and he told them California, first a part with lots of trees and fields and rivers, a little like here, but not as green, because he didn’t think he’d ever seen anything as green as here; then the city, and then a part that was somewhere in between. They appeared to be greatly amused and delighted by his existence alone, the unlikeliness and potted story of him, and asked him what had brought him here specifically, rather than another part of the UK, and he said he’d always been told to go west, if in doubt, and he’d once briefly lived here, because of his father’s job, a very long time ago, but he couldn’t remember it at all, and this apparently caused them to be even more amused and delighted. They began, soon, to talk about somebody called Dick, who lived down by the river, sold logs and had formerly kept pet ferrets, and had once been found asleep in the back of a stranger’s Land Rover, but only after the stranger had driven it many miles, and the girl’s father began to tell some ruder stories about Dick, but the girl’s mother told him to stop, as it wasn’t polite, and there were children present. After dinner, the girl’s little sister wrote an illustrated story in blue crayon on a sheet of paper and said it was for him. ‘People had faces but it was a long time ago before there were cars or toast,’ the girl’s sister had written. ‘A woman and a man and a bear built a house at the top of a tree but the tree fell down so they built another house in a better tree. One day another bear arrived as well. The tree still didn’t fall down. It only fell down when the sun drowned in the sea and all trees stopped growing.’ The girl’s mother said she’d heard there was an attic room in the village to rent in Burrow Cottage and her father cut in and said he thought that had gone now and her mother said she wasn’t actually sure if that was true, Grenville, but would try to find out for him tomorrow, and he could stay here tonight. Books were piled high and uneven on the window ledge of the room where he was to sleep. Their subjects were various but largely centred around hens and war but not both at the same time. As the girl, whose name was Maddie, made up his bed, he stole a look at her and thought about how her skin was different to skin he’d known before, something earthier, something sun but rain too. He remembered mirrors for the first time in a while and, finding one in the bathroom, saw something similar beginning in himself. He had altered, assimilated, was becoming the place. Tomorrow, he would look different again. He was not a photograph.
The village was called Underhill and Burrow Cottage was on a street that dug its nails into the edge of a steep slope that rose towards the north. Behind that was a far bigger hill, topped with rocks, underneath a sky that kept changing, over and over again, during his walk to the cottage, as if someone behind the sky kept closing and unclosing a heavy drape. He told the old lady who lived in the cottage that he would take her attic room for a month but wasn’t sure beyond that and she said that was fine. He’d been lucky: a locum doctor had wanted the room but changed his mind at the last minute, although she admitted she’d been relieved, as he seemed to be what she called a miserable so-and-so. ‘A very funereal, slightly cadaverous man. I wouldn’t have liked to have him examine me at all. I’d have felt like he was measuring me up for my coffin. You’re not a miserable so-and-so, are you?’ the old lady asked.
‘I have my bright days,’ he said.
He had to stoop to avoid hitting his head on the beams but there was a single brass bed that he could stretch out to very nearly his full length on and a wicker chair and a hand basin and a shower but if he needed the toilet he’d have to go out into the backyard and use the outside one. She assured him it was very clean, although ‘a bit cold on the bum in January’.
She gestured at a pile of canvases on the floor. ‘If these are in your way, just move them to somewhere they’re not. They’re just my nonsense. I’ll find another place for them eventually.’ A couple of nights later, Maddie arrived in a small curvaceous car with wooden window frames and drove him to a pub in a town a few miles closer to the sea where anyone who desired it was permitted to stand up and play two songs. He remained sitting down but two Fridays later, when they went again, he took his guitar and got up and sang ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and ‘Clapper Bridge’, a new song of his own whose chorus he had just about nailed down but whose verses were still a work in progress. This time, the crowd was scruffier, more bohemian. A group of long-hairs in the corner cheered loudly at the end of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and louder still at the end of ‘Clapper Bridge’ and called Maddie and him over. A drink and a half later a huge bearded man in a leather jacket entered the pub. ‘CHICKPEA!’ Maddie shouted, and the man enclosed her in a hug so enormous, she temporarily vanished. A girl to his left started talking about how she could predict the weather with her knees and asked him if he was at the college, too, or starting there soon. He said he didn’t know of any college and asked her if she knew Monterey and she said she didn’t and before he’d had the chance to explain why he’d even asked she’d begun talking to someone else. Afterwards, all eleven of them went back to a big white building with a central courtyard, where there were posters of bands, some of whom he’d met, although he didn’t say so. Somebody put on ‘Foxy Lady’ at such a volume that the speakers kept crackling and cutting out and he strived to pay full attention while a girl told him the pitfalls of communism, and he began to wonder where Maddie had got to. ‘You’ve not read Koestler,’ the girl said. ‘I can’t believe you’ve not read Koestler!’ He felt as stoned and as close to being home as he had since he got off the plane and fully expected, were he to return here the next morning, that the white building would have vanished and there would be only trees and other vegetation in its place. In between songs, someone squeezed a dog toy outside the window, and he wondered who would be both so baked out of their head and committed to take the time to do that between every one of well over a dozen songs, until he realised it was not a dog toy but the squeak of a female owl in a tree. ‘Time to go, Cowboy,’ said Maddie, grabbing his sleeve. Her hair was river wet and her eyes were tunnels of light.
‘Howsabout you then, Bob Dylan?’ she said, on the way home. ‘The Quiet American. Full of surprises.’ She drove even faster than earlier and the car squeaked against ferns and twigs, and bumped on rougher and rougher pebbles on the road until he realised it wasn’t a road at all, merely a wider-than-average footpath, a bridleway, perhaps, but you’d be pushing it to call it even that. ‘Shortcut,’ she said. ‘Trust me.’
And then days arrived when you wondered how much more moisture there was in the world. Days of incongruous chimney smoke, should-be-hot afternoons when clothes wouldn’t dry and even though the rain wasn’t in your house it was in your house, mornings when you looked up at the moor and realised it was the place where weather was made, the place where time ended, and that, beyond it, there was nothing comprehensible or civil, despite the lies that maps told you. He wrote his sister and wondered if she, always quietly perceptive to so much, would sense in the fourteen sentences on the page the changes in himself that he felt. He drank and read. He read and drank. He walked to a white pub in the rain and sat beneath an awning and polished off almost all of a paperback he’d borrowed from the old lady and realised when he got home that he’d left it there and the old lady told him off – ‘Richard, I do notice that your mind often seems to be elsewhere’ – but a few minutes later knocked on his door with a cup of tea. She noticed with surprise that he’d taken one of the canvases from the pile and balanced it facing out against the wall, on top of the tallboy. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I like it a lot.’ Under the painting, perched on the room’s one hard wooden chair with his guitar, he looked deep into the layers of swirling oil, layers suggesting destroyed sweetnesses. Within them, he thought he saw a face of green. He destroyed sweetnesses of his own, sang and strummed over them in big brushstrokes, left just tiny slivers of them showing, wished he had flutes and banjos and mandolins and pianos to work in the layers of gentle annihilation. The words were best when they came from somewhere exterior to him but connected to him by some invisible electric rod, somewhere very different to the place where you got words in a letter or a note or an essay you wrote at school or even a song you wrote expressly for somebody you knew who had the power to help it reach an audience, and when they did come from that exterior place they often frightened him and that was when it was best. When they didn’t come like that any more, he knew that there was only one thing to do and that was to go back to the house with the hole in the wall, even though that frightened him too, in a different way. The rain drummed on the skylight in the old lady’s attic room and through it the dark rocks on the tor showed through like an ominous growth on an X-ray of moist organs.
A garage a couple of miles away, near where the river levelled out and widened, had advertised for somebody to pump four star into people’s cars and he went to see the owner about the position but the owner took one look at him and said it had been taken, which he accepted without protest, and also accepted to be a lie. He took the long, high route back. Below him, red berries had appeared on the hillside. He stood aside to let the kerfuffle of a hiking family pass. ‘I stood in a hole and I think my foot is broken,’ said one of two medium-sized children. ‘Take your shoe off and rub it and it will be fine,’ replied a red-cheeked mum. He hooked back west and saw a sign reading ‘Job Vayckansie’ next to a pair of large wooden gates. ‘BEWARE OF THE DOGS (3)’ said another sign to the right of that. ‘DICK WARNER: SEASSONED LOGS’ said another, above that. He’d not noticed the place behind the gate before but realised, upon entering it, he’d smelled its aroma drifting on the breeze many times. He walked along a track of rubble and bark past high log piles and knocked on the half-open door of a squat building with a corrugated iron roof. Getting no response, he peered into the kitchen behind it. The floor was covered in breadcrumbs and wood chippings, a pan of water boiled on a stove in one corner of the room and in the other a dog-eared poster had been pinned to the wall exhibiting a naked, full-breasted woman holding a bowsaw and winking. He stepped back outside and saw a small elderly canine limping towards him, on three legs. The animal flopped down at his feet and revealed a belly of patchy fur, which he tickled. He wandered between log piles behind the building and was turning to leave when a compact man wearing thick gauntlet gloves hurtled past him, seemingly out of the logs themselves, saying, ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck bastard.’
The man in the gloves entered the kitchen and emerged holding the pan of boiling water, whose contents he sloshed haphazardly onto the paving slabs around him. ‘Ants,’ the gloved man said, nodding his head at the ground, and also shaking it, as if to fully wake himself. ‘Fell into a snooze. It happens. Come about the job?’ ‘Yeah, I…’ he said. ‘How are you with felling trees?’ said the gloved man, whose age he could have put at anywhere between thirty-five and fifty-five. He confessed it was not something he’d had previous experience with, although he had used an axe plenty of times. ‘Dunt matter,’ said the gloved man. ‘You won’t be doing that. How you feel about clearing that lot?’ He gestured towards a meadow: a vast unchecked space of brambles and gorse and poppy and waist-high grass and raging hypericum. ‘No great rush. How does three weeks sound? Enough? Come when you can. Seen you in the village. Living at the Nicholas place aren’t you. We can talk about money later. I’ve got tools coming out my arse so you won’t need to bring any of them.’ The gloved man was walking now, and he followed. After a few steps, the gloved man bent to pick up a small object from the woodchippings they were walking on, then hurled it far through the air, where it ricocheted off a silver birch into some undergrowth. ‘Vole,’ said the gloved man, shrugging and letting out an industrial fart.
Maddie came in the car to get him and he played guitar in town again. Wild angelica and maidenhair spleenwort grew against the walls of a small sunken network of alleys near the pub. A bearded man with a walking stick who appeared to be well into his eighth decade staggered up to the microphone and sang a folk song, unaccompanied, which he said he’d learned as a child growing up nearby, and introduced as ‘Little Meg’, although he said it was sometimes known by other titles. Afterwards the song lingered in his mind, especially something nebulous about its central subject. The next time, the old bearded man was there again, this time with his wife, and hand in hand they advanced slowly to the microphone and sang the song together. Everyone applauded, but before they did, the room was very silent for a beat. After last orders, he and Maddie walked down to the riverbank and he met a couple of new people from the college, and five or six people from it he’d met before, and willowy women in shawls and slight men in glasses talked animatedly at him and he nodded and Maddie sat with one arm around Chickpea and one arm around him but his mind was only a quarter there and the remaining portion was almost all trying to memorise the lyrics to the elderly couple’s song. When he got home, he scribbled what he could recollect down in his diary and began working some chords around it. ‘I feel like the year has turned over and I feel a turning in me too,’ he also wrote in the diary, below that. ‘Hooves and shouting outside. I can’t see why from the window. Room is full of moths.’ An encore of heat was hissing through the long grass outside, drying the glistening cobwebs. Between the long stalks and bracken, ticks were flexing their horrible legs. There had not been a better time to be a tick for a considerable period. After his shifts for Dick Warner, his gardening for a man without a garden, he picked the bloated, flailing bodies of the ticks out of his thighs, stomach and the soft unblemished underside of his arms. He learned to be careful when he mowed because sometimes there were beer and cider bottles in the grass. When the mower wasn’t on, sounds drifted over from Warner’s building, sometimes that of Warner’s buzzsaw and sometimes the commanding bass and tenor sounds of Elise, an insuppressible, wide-faced woman who ran the greengrocers in Bovey Tracey and would drive over twice a week to bounce on top of Warner. He soon realised the trick with the ticks was to tease them out a little with tweezers then give them one big decisive tug.
He thought about his old life and it seemed less that he’d abandoned it and more that it was still happening, concurrently; that there was another him still out there, still doing all that he might have done. Nobody had recognised him since he got off the plane, just as he had expected them not to. Some days, he felt like he had been asked to write a book and said no and given the money back, and instead chosen to write another book, finish it and abandon it in a ravine at night. By now his sister had written him back. She said she’d heard from Frank that he was in England and that she was disappointed he’d not told her but that she had decided that he must have had his reasons and forgave him. (He had never told Frank but he guessed word quickly got around in the Canyon.) ‘There’s a lot happening here,’ she wrote. ‘In the house, and everywhere, too. I feel like so much has changed in such a short time. I have to tell you that Daddy is sick. I know he would like to see you. I haven’t told him I’m writing this letter.’ One day he had heard one of Frank’s new songs on Maddie’s car radio. He was surprised how little impact it had on him. He thought it was a very well organised song and was sure it would continue to do well for the rest of the year. The second time they heard it, Maddie sang along. ‘You’re my rabbit,’ she shrieked. ‘And you’ve got me on the… rrrrrun.’ He said nothing. As if she’d somehow tapped into his thoughts, she said, ‘There’s a music studio at the college. I don’t know if it’s anything special. But I think Chickpea could get you some time in there, if you like?’ He said maybe and that might be cool but he wasn’t sure if he was quite there yet. ‘Of course you’re there, you silly sausage!’ she said. ‘You’re more than there. The only reason you’re not there is that you’ve gone past there and you need to reverse.’ It struck him that there were two Maddies he was getting to know: Farm Maddie and Artistic Friends Maddie. Today she was somehow both. He had never been called a silly sausage before and he discovered it was not displeasing. The window had jammed the last time she’d opened it and now remained permanently in a three-quarters-open position. He dangled an arm out and let his fingers flick against the bracken as it whizzed by, enjoying the sting. Six old plastic bags full of apples were on the back seat, ripening in the sun. Several had come loose and fallen onto the composty area beneath the seats, and, while Maddie pulled over to let other cars pass on the narrow lanes, wasps flew in to investigate. There was a time and place to be an insect and that time was now and that place was here.
Frank had always been the one to announce, ‘I’ve got something which I think is pretty special.’ He, by contrast, would say, ‘There’s something I have been playing around with’ or ‘This might work, I guess.’ It was, he had subsequently realised, the predominant reason why the writing ratio ended up 7/3 in favour of Frank. That, and Frank’s tendency to deal directly in the politics of romance, whereas his habit was, at most, to weave around the topic. One of the advantages of breaking away on your own was you didn’t write by committee and a song didn’t get automatically consigned to the garbage just because you didn’t bring it into the studio with its own ticker tape parade. ‘Chickpea says he thinks you’re very modest, and that you’re an old soul,’ Maddie said, after his second of three days in the music room, not really much of a studio at all, just a soft-walled black room with a reel-to-reel in the corner and Chickpea at the controls, damp and huge in the heat in the large established country of his beard and the leather jacket he never relinquished. Chickpea had left and he and Maddie were on the wide lawn behind the studio which spread out in the direction of a set of straggling medieval buildings. Opposite, two women in black leotards danced to silence and fenced with peacock feathers. Every few minutes, a girl would emerge from the medieval buildings and run screeching across the lawn to Maddie, hug her, and ask with great urgency if she’d heard about something desperately exciting that was happening the following week. Theatre, picnics, parties, music, art, other gatherings that were apparently a hybrid of all five. ‘Sorry to interrupt!’ the girls said afterwards, turning to him, appraising him with slow fascination, as if experiencing the pleased, lazy epiphany that he was not a tree. Almost all of them spoke very differently to the way Maddie did. Their voices were more precise and clean, more redolent of scrubbed residential streets and fussy gardens. It struck him as wild and impressive how effortlessly Maddie managed to be simultaneously of the college and very different to it. It struck him also as wild and impressive how effortlessly the college managed to be simultaneously of its geographical base and of a different planet: a place of geese, pottery and ballet, in equal measures. It was one of the most unlikely hillsides he’d ever stood on and he was here with this unlikely person all because of a cow. He noticed something unique in the curve of her chin in profile that he’d not noticed before. She had strong arms, arms that lifted many heavy objects, as different to her friends’ arms as her voice was to their voices. Her language was full of wild plants that, enraptured by the music of their names, he was compelled to note down in his diary: bog asphodel and penny marshwort – or was it marsh pennywort – and purple loosestrife and bog pimpernel. She liked practical jokes and grapefruit. When she told him she came here once a week to teach people how to look after chickens he’d thought she was having him on. She wasn’t. The previous weekend she had hidden his shoes in an oven. She would never find out, but she was the first girl he’d ever written a love song about.
After the third day of recording, which he grudgingly conceded was better, they ascended narrow lanes and crossed tiny humped bridges in the car, going higher and higher, parked, then walked to a stone circle. A scribble of rain had blown in through the gap in the window when they were in the car then gone and in its place there was more damp heat. She told him to place his palms against the stones in the circle and feel all the energy there.
‘Ah, I’m so excited,’ she said. ‘My boyfriend is coming back next week.’
‘Where is he right now?’
‘Spain. He’s been out there since May. He’s in the army.’
He gazed back across the rocks, trying to pick out the car. ‘I think most of it’s probably trash,’ he said. ‘But I dunno. I guess I’ll end up hanging on to the tape.’
But he was not a person entirely devoid of hubris. He had the complacency of many people who arrive in rural Britain from a country populated by bears, coyotes and mountain lions, and the sun massaged that complacency. He was still a newcomer to the moor and even oldcomers to it knew only a fraction of a fraction of what there was to know about it. One of the many things he didn’t yet know about it was that, in late August, in days of heat after heavy rain, on the stretches where it was still most fully permitted to be itself, it breathed and growled as profoundly as it did in the height of the harshest winter. Terrain you’d visited always compacted its scale in your mind afterwards and he had begun to learn that but, even so, the route back to the ruined house was surprisingly arduous. The river told him he was going the right way but it seemed further than before and something had happened in the dripping folds of earth above the banks: an angry awakening, a last wet sucking of life into the lungs before autumn’s dry death. Brown flies clung fiercely to his flesh. Huge tufts of grass shoved him from side to side, arguing over their custody of him. Blue and pink and yellow flowers spilled over the damp ground like ornate vomit. An old octopus of a tree reached down a rough tentacle and anointed his cheek with a bloody scratch. In his shoes, the soles of his feet sloshed about and blistered and began their transformation into a sore kind of paste. Every path became a whisper and then a lie. A stiff gate opened but led directly to a shrub of insanity. The song the old man and his wife had sung was in his head again and he hummed the song and then he barked it at the impassable bracken that stretched all the way up the valley walls and then he croaked it at the sky. An area of oxygen finally widened ahead but the ground beneath it drank his feet then low branches formed a roadblock and he crawled under them then lost most of his left leg in a peaty bubbling hole and had to use all his strength to retrieve it. He could not have been more wet if he was in the river itself up to his neck and the burnt moist state of him attracted more and more tiny winged life and he knew then that one day, once again, this would be the world. Not a car, not a sandwich, not an ambition, not sense, not a cow, not a horse, not love, not a song, not a girl. Just this sucking and gargling and burping thing beneath him. When the dizziness came, and the head pain, just before the light clicked off, it was a relief to submit, to just fall into the mouth of everything and not go on fighting any more. And then night fell smoothly in, and not thirteen yards away the river, which was not interested, continued to yell as it rushed over the rocks.
*
She was very good at keeping a straight face and she liked to take people on a journey. It was an addiction of hers but she viewed it as generally harmless. First there was usually the lie, which was thrilling in itself, but then there was the space of time after the lie, when the lie – and the imaginative invention that went with it – expanded, which was more thrilling still. It was like pulling an elastic band: if you pulled it back further you got more power, but you couldn’t go too far or it would snap. She liked to take it quite far, because then when you punctured the lie the look on the face of the person who’d believed it was that much more delicious. But she’d quickly had her misgivings after she talked about the soldier in Spain. She’d misjudged it. It made her wonder about herself. It was a five- or ten-minute lie, she thought as she set out for the cottage, not a one-day lie, and definitely not a three-day lie, and it was different to many of her other lies because it played with something important. When she knocked on the door, the old woman answered and said he was not there and she had not seen him since yesterday. ‘He does do his vanishing acts, Richard. He doesn’t tell me where he goes. You can wait for him if you want, but I don’t know when he’ll be back. It’s Madeleine, isn’t it?’ She resisted the other names that popped into her head on impulse – Jill and Rose and Sylvia and Thomasina – and the backstories she might invent for them, and instead replied that, yes, that was correct. ‘If you could say that I called round, I’d appreciate that,’ she said.
*
After he’d finished at the ruined house, he walked west for an entire morning, until he arrived at a pub. He ordered chips and sat on a bench outside and ate them, accompanied by a lone Muscovy duck. In a church foyer, farther up the lane the pub was on, he found a pile of free paperbacks, and put one in his rucksack. His feet ached and one of the soles had come loose from his left boot. On a bigger road, he waited for close to two hours, until a car pulling a caravan stopped for him. He sat in the back seat beside a child called Matthew with a bubble of snot in one nostril who stared at him the whole way, sucking a thumb. He got out within a mile of the village and went straight to Dick Warner’s woodyard, but there was no sign of him. Outside the door to the kitchen was a trail of cold baked beans and many of the beans were stuck to the door itself. Within a swift breeze that whipped around the logs there was the aroma of wood and crow and something dead but briefly revived and not quite identifiable. When he finally reached the cottage Mrs Nicholas was out. He found some tape in a drawer and applied it to his shoe, threw his remaining possessions into his rucksack, and left the paperback and the remaining rent he owed on the kitchen table.
He started out west again and walked until he joined the next river, then followed it until it branched and widened to create a calm subsidiary pool, which he swam in. He examined the peeling skin on his feet, neither of which ever seemed to have dried out from the day he walked back to the ruined house. A new area of purple-black on one of his heels. He walked some more, until he came to another river, with a viaduct over it. He reached a quay and dark buildings, below a Tudor mansion with great sprawling gardens and a domed dovecote. Boats and parts of boats were everywhere and even a mile later, parts of boats could still be seen in numerous gardens. He crossed a stream and sat on an abandoned tractor tyre above one of the gardens, on the opposite side of a small valley and, having seen no sign of life in or near it, picked apples from its trees, and took lettuce and an artichoke head from its beds. The garden thinned and snaked on into woodland until it ended at a rusty gate, and next to the rusty gate was a small orange bus on bricks. He managed to force one of the windows of the bus open and that night slept inside the bus, stretched out along its ripped back bench. He woke up and felt like somebody had performed origami on his face in his sleep. He climbed a hill and took a small train to the grey city where he’d worked on the docks then he changed and took another train east, guessing at when he might be level with the point where the cliffs began to turn red and getting off at the first station after that. Cars pulling caravans were struggling up the tall hills that broke away from the coast in threes and fours, and he walked against the flow, flattening himself against nettles and brambles to let the vehicles pass. In many of the fields there were huge rocks and corvids could often be seen on the rocks, making their withering assessments of the day. The land was thrown audaciously together, had no order or mathematics to it. ‘Dogs in field,’ said a sign on a gate. ‘Please keep your sheep on a lead.’ He penetrated a long crevice between cliffs to the sea, which turned out to be further away than it looked, and corkscrewed down a gorse-lined path to a beach where he waited until the tide had gone out, then hooked around a jutting rock and walked east along the shingle while the sun fell softly into the salt. The tape had long since come off his shoe, the sole barely hanging on now, and its loud flapping cut through everything like an embarrassment.
Robert Belltower was not at his cabin but the key was where he had left it, under the third rock. Inside, the framed photos and the Calor gas stove and the chair had gone but the bed remained, and two of his driftwood structures were still outside. He emptied his rucksack on the floor and slept for eleven uninterrupted hours and dreamt for the first time in a while about fish. In the dream, gulls hovered and chuckled at the fish then he awoke and realised the chuckling gulls were outside. In the following night’s dream the old man from the pub was by a campfire singing the folk song again, ‘Little Meg’, but when the old man spoke it was in his own young Californian voice. His beard was very long and he felt it to see where it ended and realised it was a vine and that it led into the hedgerows. As he felt along the beard into the hedgerows, the crowd around the campfire, who were young, and all in couples, pointed and laughed. When he woke up the song was very clearly in his head so that all he could do was pick up his guitar and sing it until it wasn’t there any more. Afterwards, he walked up the undercliff, but something had changed in his foot, and he didn’t get far. He swam, first under a setting sun that was like a lump of hot metal on the horizon, and then under a brighter moon, because when he swam the foot didn’t hurt as much, and he hoped that perhaps the salt water would heal it in the way it had with cuts and bites he’d sustained. He went much further under and slept dreamlessly that night but was brought back to the surface by the realisation he was being hit by a rolled-up magazine, wielded by a woman he had never met.
‘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.