Villager, p.11
Villager, page 11
‘A clog?’ I asked.
‘Yes, exactly this. A clog. It is sometimes a charm to ward off evil but also when one of someone’s children has died young and they want to keep the spirit with them, in the building.’
When I asked Reka what had made her walk over near the tor, she told me she’d just needed time to think. ‘Man trouble,’ she said. ‘I think people think they have too many options and that is one of the problems of the world of right now.’
I had already brought my duvet and pillow down and felt extremely relaxed, right there, with my lovely housemate and my cat, despite the troubling events of the day. I’d managed to soak up most of the moisture in the spare bedroom and fortunately none of it had come through the ceiling. I could not help but notice the way the firelight enhanced the extreme natural beauty of her face and, as I let my eyes close, I permitted myself to imagine what it might feel like if she reached out a hand, just six or seven inches from where it was now, and gently held the toes of my right foot.
OCTOBER
Flora Prissypants still refusing to pay me back for the drain company’s bill. I am seeking legal advice. I am not feeling well. Last night I went to bed with a band of tingling, slightly burning pain stretching around from my navel to my lower back. I am sure it is nothing. There is usually something and usually it doesn’t last long and becomes nothing. That’s what it’s like, having a body. Or at least having a body after a certain, not particularly old, age. Of course, before that there’s a period that might convince you that having a body can mean going for long stretches of time where there’s nothing much wrong at all, but that’s in fact a very brief period, in the grand arrangement of life. ‘You look tired,’ said Kath, when she arrived to relieve me of my shift. ‘Are you OK?’ This means absolutely nothing, since approximately four times out of every nine she sees me, Kath, whom I jobshare with, says to me, ‘You look tired. Are you OK?’ In part to spite her, I took advantage of the beautiful late afternoon weather, nipped home to get my bathing suit, and drove to the beach, then let myself float on the water, watching skeins of geese fly above me towards France as the most golden of suns dropped its blessing on the hills. I did not feel tired, and was OK. Perhaps it was not the most sensible course of action, and I have started to feel a bit peculiar since then, but I have an enormous faith in the healing power of salt water and fear we might not get a day this perfect and unseasonably warm for a long time. I did text Reka and ask her if she wanted to join me but she said she had another date. I heard her come in, obviously not alone, at around twelve, then could hear her playing her guitar and singing – the melody seemed familiar, and I realised it was the Hungarian record she had shown me, the one by the American singer, albeit a much softer rendition of the song than his. The builders are coming soon to sort the wall and I shall be extremely glad to have my own bed again.
I have lived in the south west of the country for a long time now, long enough to consider it my home, but, as a transplanted northerner, one thing I do often miss about where I come from is people’s unsugarcoated habit of, on the whole, but with some exceptions, saying what they actually mean. Today on the way to the car park after buying a cauliflower and some strawberries from the farm shop I bumped into Sheila from the arts college, and said hello. They’re a bit weird there, all into their yoga, which is great by me, but it’s never simple yoga, always got to be yoga with some extra element, yoga and darts, yoga done while wearing nothing but an anorak, or something like that. Toni, who works with Sheila, had asked me if I wanted to teach on their stonemasonry course a couple of months back and I hadn’t been able to make it to any of the two dates Toni had proposed to chat about it, and – though I’m not bothered – I never heard anything more. Anyway, it transpires, from a couple of things Sheila said, that I had my chance, and because I wasn’t able to jump at the opportunity, I’ve been replaced. I didn’t fully realise this until after I’d left the farm shop, due to a habit Sheila has – just like quite a few people you meet connected with the art college – of making a piece of negative information sound like a positive one. ‘It’s a very exciting time up there!’ she told me. ‘There are a lot of ideas being floated around.’ This after I’d gleaned from some other convoluted pseudo-enthusiastic things she’d said that the course would now not be co-taught by Grant Hope and me, but by Grant and Judith Sitwell, from Topsham, instead. ‘You should talk to Toni,’ she said. ‘It’s a very exciting time. I know she’s aware of you.’ Fuck that, I thought, but didn’t say it; I just politely said goodbye and wished her a nice weekend – which makes me wonder, now I think about it: am I now also a person who doesn’t say what she actually means?
I sometimes think about the small culture shocks I still feel living in this part of the country, after close to a decade, and wonder about the bigger ones Reka has had to deal with. She says she finds it hard to get used to the politeness of British people, finds it overdone, and was shocked at the levels of gossip when she first arrived in the UK. ‘I hear so many conversations where people seem to be talking about a woman they know, in a disapproving way,’ she told me. ‘It’s always “she” something, something she did, they are mentioning.’ Ever since she told me this, I’ve become more aware of it myself – especially in the staff room and refectory at work. Today we talked about Christmas, which I plan to do approximately nothing for. Reka said Christmas is different in Hungary anyway, as it’s the Baby Jesus, not Santa Claus, who brings the presents. ‘But we also have Santa Claus Day, where we leave our shoes near the window.’ She seems quieter at the moment. Maybe it is the distraction of the new man. He is called Greg and works at a garage in Exeter. I feel more ill, a bit like an animal with sharp teeth is eating my insides.
The builders didn’t come to sort the wall but Nick, Flora’s guy, did. I don’t know how good a job he did but I have my suspicions it’s of a temporary nature. Nobody came over to look at any of the other damp issues in the house. Before Nick arrived, Reka and I packed the shoe and the doll back inside the brickwork and covered them up. I am not superstitious, but I think some people who once lived in this house interred them in the wall for a reason, and I think it’s best that we respect that. I don’t know if Nick saw them when he repaired the wall. I certainly haven’t mentioned any of it to Flora. I am still attempting to get the money back from her for the work by the drainage company. Still ill, and none of this is helping.
NOVEMBER
It turns out I have shingles. I remember at various points in my life people talking in a tone of great pity and sympathy about other people who had shingles but I don’t think I’d ever properly considered what it was. Now I know. What happens is a furious stoat somehow gets inside one half of your body without you noticing and gradually begins to chew all your flesh and nerve endings. You never see the stoat, but after a while the scars from its interior work begin to show on the outside, then begin to blister. At night, it’s a little different to that: you wake up at 2 a.m. feeling like you and the stoat have been involved in a fire at a biochemical factory. I’ve got quite a high pain threshold but, even so, I’m finding it all surprisingly nasty – particularly the bit where the stoat bought some hot chilli sauce as a dressing then ate my bellybutton from within. What is also startling is that shingles is actually a little bit of chickenpox that’s been sitting dormant in your body, waiting patiently to come back and get you. My chickenpox was a bastard in 1977, when I was seventeen. Like me, they look less punk rock than they did back then, but they’re still a bastard and have become more bitter and cynical with age. I will still walk, though. This afternoon, five miles. Everything is gold and green and brown down the deep lanes, with the one exception of the bright new red berries on the rowan. Every day, the sun thins a little more. Reka and I haven’t played Scrabble for ages. We must. It’s Scrabble weather. I heard Reka singing the song again, late at night, and then I thought I heard it again, at about 3 p.m., but it might have been just my half-dream state. I’m that kind of ill where songs spin in your head as you try to sleep. Hallucination, I suppose. Last night my pillow was a rock I tried to carve but a hand kept stopping me. I looked up and the hand belonged to Kath on reception. ‘You look tired,’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’
Something nice happened today, then something not nice happened, and something else, also not nice. I was walking down the hill – staggering a bit, if I’m honest, holding my side, which is beginning to look like I’ve been in a fire – and I smelt that lovely smell you get when woodsmoke cuts through the cold misty late afternoon air at this time of year, then realised that the woodsmoke was coming from my own chimney. What a delight! I opened the gate and as I did a man – broad, bearded – charged past me, clutching his face, which had a line of blood running down it. It took a moment before I realised it was Reka’s current boyfriend, Greg. He looked scared. I found Reka in the living room, tending the fire, and said hello, but she didn’t seem to notice me at first.
‘Is everything OK?’ I asked.
‘Everything is fine,’ she said. The way she said it, there was something different, a bit slower, and she wasn’t looking at me. It was as if something in the fire was very important, and I was a distraction.
‘We have been experimenting,’ she said, continuing to look at the flames.
I was really feeling like I needed a lie down so I opted not to press the matter further, and I heard her leave for work an hour or so later. The dishwasher needed to go on so I popped around the house, looking for half-full glasses of water. I found two in Reka’s room and was just leaving when something on her bed caught my eye, sitting next to her ancient teddy bear. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes! It was the doll from the wall. I’m sure it’s the same one – all dusty and dirty with one of its eyes missing. After all, where else would you get a doll like that? I can only think she took it back out of the wall before Nick came to repair it. She’ll be back soon but I won’t ask her about it until tomorrow. Maybe I won’t at all. I suppose it’s her own business.
I love the rainy, sometimes sunny climate of the moor and its border villages: the pockets of weather that can vary so radically from valley to valley, the clouds that sink into vases of deep green land, do their work to help maintain that greenness then tumble on to their next appointment. I like walking in the rain here and I like seeing what it does to the plants in my garden. I like the way footpaths and streams are often interchangeable. Water was a very decisive factor in my decision to live here: the deafening rush of the stream, the taste of what came out of the tap, so immeasurably more flavoursome and soft and refreshing than what I used to drink in Oxford when I lived with Mike. ‘Yep, that’s it,’ I thought, the first time I drank it. ‘That’s what’s been missing.’ You go and get some chips in a nearby town. You walk along the street in the town with your bag of rain and, strangely, you don’t mind it, because you’re very hungry after a long walk along the high shouting river, and there are some chips in there too right at the bottom of the bag, just a few, beneath all the rain, and they taste good, because everything tastes good after a long walk in the rain. Water is in your entire being here, altering it, influencing the taste of everything. I so often have rain and sea and river in my hair and damp pebbles in my shoes and cuts across my stomach and chest from when I scraped them against rocks when I leapt off other rocks into water. You feel it all even more after a summer that some other British people told you was dry and hot, not realising that the South West Peninsula is not really in Britain, and that weather is different here: cooler and damper in summer, warmer and damper in winter, rainier almost all of the time, especially recently. If you can’t see the moor, it’s raining. If you can see the moor, it means it’s about to rain. Rain. Rain. Rain. Water. Water. Water. It’s so much the theme of my life. I even used it to kill Mike. I didn’t say? I killed Mike. I didn’t. But I did. I told Reka I found the doll today. She said it was OK, that she knew I knew, and that we could all be friends: me, her and the doll.
Ah fuck. Rain. The song again. Such a nice tune. She has got really good at it. I’ll explain it all better when I’m well.
DECEMBER
Oh so ill. I didn’t kill Mike. Didn’t stab him or shoot him or put arsenic in his favourite leek and potato soup or chop his nomadic penis and testicles off. Don’t think that. But maybe I did kill him. It feels better now I write it. It was yonks ago now, and yonks after we broke up. I didn’t find out until a couple of weeks after it happened, from Beth. She was all that was left by then, our only connection. She was the one who told me not to go out with him, then she ended up closer friends with him than she was with me. She thought I should know, in case I heard elsewhere. There was nothing about it in the newspapers but I might have found out online anyhow, she said. It was in Scotland. The top left bit. A boat. A storm. Him and his mates, fishing. Only one of the four of them survived. It didn’t touch me for a while but I tracked it back and the dates matched up. That was the night: the night I wished him dead. But I don’t really wish anyone dead. Resentment. They say it’s like drinking poison then waiting for someone else to die. Only in this case it worked. I was angry: Mum was close to the end then, things were bad, I was in some other reality without hope, was thinking back to where it went wrong, held him responsible, but I didn’t mean it. But that was the night I did it. Down in the cottage, the place before here, right in the village, sleeping in the loft room, with the view of the tor, and the pony poo on top. This rain is reminding me. That was the exact night he must have died. Maybe the exact moment. I worked it out. It was raining then too. Next day without any idea of what I’d done I walked up to the pool – the deep one. Seven miles there, seven miles back. I let myself jump. I hit the surface and let the momentum take me as far under as it needed to. I was under for barely any time at all but while I was I felt I was somewhere else: somewhere where nothing was anything any more. Somewhere darker than any night, any dream. I came up into the sunlight and the sunlight felt like something you could suddenly eat and I ate it, gulped it down without chewing it the prescribed seventy-two times, or even chewing it one time. I swam against the current, my front crawl just strong enough to defeat it and get back to the rocks on the bank. I didn’t jump again. This rain is reminding me. It’s so… everything. Maybe it wouldn’t seem so fierce if the house was double glazed. There are eight reservoirs on the moor, all built between 1867 and 1972 as the expanding villages and towns below them demanded cleaner water. When the water is low, you see the remains of sunken farmsteads and clapper bridges and Bronze Age villages. When they made one, they drowned an entire farm. How could you do that? Did cows and sheep die? I hope cows and sheep didn’t die. But more cows have died since then. Ever such a bloody lot of cows. Have I ever thought about that. Oh god, the water, the drips. Is the wall going to come down again? I know what’s happening outside, all the rivers, filling up. They’re all getting high. One is being a thug out back of the Co-op, hissing and swearing at the locals. Down under the bridge, near the dual carriageway, another is taking some drugs it found floating in a bag. All the water is coming, and this is the end point. It’s rushing down the lane, right at me. The rain couldn’t be louder if I was in a tent. The power in the house is going on and off every two minutes. I can hear Reka. The song. I didn’t even know she was in. She’s playing the song. The wind is up – I think it’s coming through a gap in the wall – and it’s harmonising with her. I remember now. I heard it up there, before. On the moor. There was the house that was high off the lane, with a door in the garden wall. I think I heard it once, behind the door. I don’t know. It might have just been a dream. Everything’s mixed up now and my stomach is burning. I want it to dry out. Everything is wet. It won’t dry out. The walls won’t dry out. My skin won’t dry out. There’s a folk tale from there, near that bit of the moor. The pixy – an ugly tiny man – comes to the nurse’s house and asks her to deliver his wife’s baby. They go on a horse, very fast, to his wife, who is very beautiful, and when the baby is born, he asks the nurse to put ointment on its eyes. When the pixies are not looking, she tries some of her ointment on one of her own eyes. Suddenly the pixy and his children are even uglier than before, but the wife is even more beautiful. The next week, at the market, she sees him stealing things, and asks how his wife and baby is. ‘You can see me?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but only with this eye.’ And he strikes her in the eye and blinds her with his sharp fingernails. I am lucky the shingles aren’t in my eye. Edith Boyland and her boring dog told me her aunt Agnes got them on the left side of her face and lost her sight in that eye. But, Jézus Krisztus, it hurts, especially at night, and I don’t know what is a dream. Last night I dreamt Reka stood over me with the doll and didn’t say anything and I asked her to come and be beside me but she just stood, staring. When I am better, we can leave here, me and Reka. We will go somewhere dry. We will bring the bees, we can even bring the doll if she wants. But what if the bees can’t come. What about the spiders. Will they be OK after we have gone. And what about the cows, everywhere. We can go and have our own cow, at least be nice to our own cow; selfish but that’s all you can do, be nice to your own cow, because if you think about all the cows you go crazy. It will sit down when it’s about to rain. That’s what they do, they’re always sitting down here. I like the noise of them when they move slowly and heavily through grass on a hot day. It’s a lovely calming sound, unique to them, impossible to replicate by anything that isn’t a cow. That will happen again. It will be spring again, and it will be dry again, this skin will be dry again, after the Baby Jesus has brought our presents and it is a new year and everything turns over. I just have to be patient. But right now, I admit it, Kath. I am tired, and I am not OK. Are you happy now, Kath? Can you finally shut the fuck up? The power is going on and off, every two minutes.
