They will have had their supper by now. They will be sitting by the fire talking about what he could be doing, speculating on his unreliability. Susan, tutting–‘He’ll just be in the pub.’ Danny–‘Maybe aliens have abducted him. De-de-de-de.’ Lydia–quiet and smiling. Or they will be in bed, warm, snug, and he will simply be a vacancy, a hole in the cottage fabric. Meanwhile here he is, wringing wet, unfed, unhappy as hell. His stomach gurgles, and a sour belch makes its way up his pipes. Hungry. They will have had their supper. What was on tonight’s menu? Did Lydia mention it this morning? Fish pie. Oh yeah, fish pie. With buttery carrots and peas. He could murder a great enormous dollop of that. With crispy brown potato topping, dill sauce, and salmon and mackerel filling. He’d even eat it off that rock he pissed on a few hours ago, bent over the mound, grunting and snorking like an animal in its byre.
Though the rain must have washed the surface clean by now.
It has stopped falling, more or less. The floor of the ravine is splashing and trickling, like the bed of a river, far below him. He can hear nature getting along just fine, going about its business, regardless of his pitiful arrest. He is hungry and thirsty-the rain he sucked from his palms was only enough to dampen his throat, and the slugs that he can feel sliming up the sides of the rock are not appealing enough to consider eating. Not yet anyway. His clothes are sticking to him: when he pulls his shirt it slurps off his skin. He’s wrapped himself up as best he can, arms tucked inside against his sides, but heat is still escaping into the vast draw of night. He can feel the chill making its way into the meat of him. And the foot. Well, that’s the most disturbing thing. He can’t really feel it any more-not even when he concentrates on that spot, trying to locate the injury. There’s nothing. Not a stinging lesion or a swollen outline. Not even a final protesting nerve. There is no pain.
This is not a good sign. Surely it indicates some hideous and irreversible medical condition, which can’t be fixed by vascular surgery, grafts, or wires and pins. Fantastic blood loss, necrosis, gangrene. Bye-bye useful, well-loved appendage-and off to the glue factory with you. What if rats have smelled the wound and crept along the gulleys to the ripe offering? They could be starting in on his toes with their rotten yellow teeth, infecting him with disease, and he wouldn’t even know. Here’s the ridiculous thing: after all the begging, the litigating with God (no longer is he agnostic, no longer atheist), and the mortgaging of years from his old age in exchange for the stopping of the pain, now that it’s gone he wants it back, absurdly. Fuck morphine. Fuck blissful analgesics. Fuck compassionate relief. He wants the registry of suffering again. He wants a good old belt of it, a reiteration of his vital signs, even if it means biting off his own tongue and roaring again at the horizon. At least he could call that an affirmation. At least then he could say: I am this war.
Because, what if this is it? What if everything unravels now? What if it is all about to be taken away from him?
It’s a terrible thought, the thought of erasure, of hopelessness, the thought of losing himself, his family, his tomorrow. He feels like he is falling though the massive blackness above, spinning and spinning away, even while he is caught in this precise spot, pinned like a fragile butterfly, staked like a stupid scarecrow among the potatoes. It feels like there will be no end to the cold, the wet, the weightless rushing air, this stone crucifixion. Fate it’s called. He begins to breathe shallowly and urgently. Ah, the dark epiphany has arrived. He absolutely does not want to be here, here in this rigid, unfair place, in this awful, invalid body, in this bastard providence. He does not want to be this man trapped in the wilderness. He does not want to be Peter. Peter. The name is awful. The name is prison. He doesn’t want to be here. ‘I don’t want to be here!’
He puts his head in his hands. This is it. This is despair. This is the bitter, unalterable heart of the situation. There’s nothing he can do. There’s no way out. He is choiceless. He is condemned.
The ravine continues to trickle. There is scuttling, like the scuttling of rats. He yells down at the ground. ‘Get away!’ He peers hard, but there is nothing to see in the blackness. His eyes can’t pull out the shapes of the boulders or the top of the cliff. They can’t detect any little movements through the tunnels of rock, as if scavengers are gathering. He can’t discern his own hands or his body or his damned limb. Perhaps he is no longer there. Peter. Where are you, Peter?
Home. In another dimension, if he had never come here today, if he had not decided to climb down into the bottom of the deep Gelt gorge, or he had taken a different route back across the boulders, he would be home now. He would be where he should be. With them.
There’s comfort in thinking about that. The cottage, with its hewn walls full of mice and straw, its warm fireplaces. His brood, his clan. What will they have been up to in his absence? The usual antics. Danny will have arrived home covered in grass stains and mud, saying he rolled all the way from town and can he have another bath. He’s home because she’s home. Susan will have thrown buckets of water over him outside while Lydia cheered, and he’ll have loved the attention. What a plonker. That pie will have been a beauty, as always. There’ll be a portion of it saved, tucked into a compartment in the kitchen range, just in case. They’ll have sat at the table after dinner and spoken to each other, in a lower tone than when he’s there, naturally. Mr Volume; Mr Have-Another-Glass-of-Homebrew. They’ve always managed conversation, his family. They’ve never been stuck over a stuffy platter of English beef, while the mantle clock ticked and the fire crackled. It is not a house of excruciation and repression, where the scrape of cutlery on plates and the dreadful chomping of jaws are the only sounds during meals. There’s always something interesting to talk about, a book, a meeting, the news. And they can always fall back on their common currency. ‘F’art’, the kids call it, doing their buck-toothed posh impression.
There are almost as many of their pictures about the place as his these days. Susan’s photographs. A few of her early studies, which she tried to throw out but he ‘rescued’ from the bin. Danny’s benders–those weird snares of junk he’s concocted with a welder between one of his many bases, which will find a place on a chest or table, or be strung up from the curtain rails on fishing line by his ma, so the bright blades rotate like a turbine after an apocalypse.
Lydia will have taken a bath, her hair piled up on top of her head in that mad-dame coiffure. He always finds a reason to go into the bathroom while she’s in there. ‘Oh, I’m just looking for that thing I left, love…Oh, I just need a whizz…’ The transparency. The lovesick folly. She’s aged, through motherhood, northern weather, the menopause. Her hair has begun to lose a little of its chestnut gleam, her waist’s a little thicker, and there are little blue knots on her outer thighs, which she points out to him occasionally, with a frown. He doesn’t mind, doesn’t see gun-flaws in her the way he does in canvas. Parts of her still find their way into his compositions. Maybe a rock in a sea pool will be modelled on that beautiful bottom. She is Lydia, the woman who can balance the whole sky on her nose. She is the calm, the anti-cyclone, the eye of his storm. Where would he be without her?
He’ll catch her watching the twins sometimes, when they’re bickering or play-fighting (in their twenties now, but the same games and provocations still apply), prodding each other with the little mackerel bones from the pie and yelling, ‘Wilse, tell him,’ ‘Wilse, tell her.’ A soft, intrigued look on her face. He wonders what she’s thinking, what her take on these two pod-dwellers is. She’s so good at being internal, his wife. She will not often issue judgement, nor will she declaim. Not like him; Mr Big-Mouth, Mr Well-Here’s-What-I-Bloody-Think!
What she likes about his work he’s gleaned from the paintings she has chosen to hang in the cottage, and her few light observations about clarity and prophecy, landscapes stripped of former inhabitants, the next Mesolithic age. She likes his human figures frilled and sutured, like ammonites. She hung the paintings the day they moved into the ramshackle Border cottage, while the roof gaped open at one end, and the crows dropped cobs of mud in like a dirty hex upon the new occupants.
There are none of the severe mountain ridges in the house, though. Those are the ones that have fetched big money in America and Canada, that have complicated tax years for them, while enabling the underpinning of the house at its north-west corner. Those are the paintings that have provided funds to travel, to visit collections in the national galleries of the world and spend six months in Italy, finally. That was a good trip–they pulled the kids out of school, much to the disapproval of Headmaster Pokerarse-and spent the time visiting museums like Victorian gentry. Rome: shabby and vandalised, but extraordinary, busted seat of the colossal empire. Green-lipped Venice. Florence, where they couldn’t turn around without tripping over a masterpiece. Perseus with the head of the Medusa. The church in Umbria, hung with a thousand tiles depicting a thousand local tragedies. He made those little pilgrimages he had wanted to make for years. Picked up some great souvenirs (and one particularly meaningful ‘find’, undeclared at customs, naturally). They made a fuss of him at the British Academy; he was on the radar by then, beginning to command respect, beginning to sell expensively.
Now wealthy climbers collect his mountains faithfully-the Rolex-Gore-tex brigade, Lydia calls them. They’ll travel upcountry when over on business, not only to scale famous peaks in the Lakeland, but to locate his little hub of industry and tell him under his front-door lintel that if it weren’t for the detail on the side of such and such a composition, grandly positioned in their study, office or corporate lobby, they never would have found a new route up the crags to the summit. ‘Super, I can charge you double for cartography then,’ he’ll say.
Never mind that fish pie; he could murder a toke. That would take the edge off all this madness. That would give him some reprieve from the existential mind-fuck. Except the pouch is in the bloody car. Why is it never to hand when he needs it? Why does he always have to go and fetch it from the glove box, the kitchen table, the bottom of the laundry hamper? Senility, probably. Welcome to your dotty dotage, laddo. If he could just have a smoke he could clear the cobwebs from his brain and he’d be able to sort this mess out. Come up with a plan to save the perishing foot, and get home, or to the hospital. Instead he’s sitting here under the rain clouds, dreaming of a tobacco miracle. He’s exhausting himself with nihilism, and expending his energy on imaginary rodents.
What time is it now? Must be late. After midnight. After heart attacks and cancers. After love and lost lovers, after he’s been born. Neville Caldicutt will be getting up in a few hours, throwing leaves into the tin teapot, squeaking his bedsprings. ‘Mind you keep reading books, Petie. Mind you work hard. There’s a whole world out there.’ There is a world. But he is tired. He is spent. And the dark is as dark as it is behind his eyes, when he closes them, just for a second.