I moved forward.
This time there was nothing. Perhaps it was too dark here for the soldier’s vest to respond to my movements.
I climbed off the footbridge. I strained my ears. If he were moving, then I would surely hear him, vest or no vest. I could see the pattern of bushes and trees now, the river bank, the fence line – enough to know I was alone here. Unless, of course, he was hiding from me.
I clambered along the edge of the race, clinging to the stiff woody stems of the rhododendron bushes, and hurried bent-backed along the river bank, hiding from shadows. Away from the sound of the millrace there was nothing to hear, unless you counted, just at the threshold of hearing, the low arterial thrum of the bypass on the other side of the valley.
I ran along the river bank, all the way to Michel’s circle of fridges. Try as I might, I saw no pale shape – no white-haired soldier; and no pale body either, spinning in the river’s dark. I had in the end to abandon my search for her. All the way home, along the track the soldiers used sometimes, I slouched, defending myself against a blow, an assault, a confrontation. It never came.
I had not imagined the sound. In the end, though, I had to concede that the sound was not proof of anyone’s presence, let alone the presence of a blindsighted soldier. Heard over the sound of the millrace, well, that ‘click-clack’ sound could have been anything. The catch of a gate rattling in the wind.
More strange – though I had no room to deal with it at the time – was the disappearance of Mum’s body.
T
he opening passages to
The Shaman
, Michel’s first novel, go something like this.
A subtle current bears Cole inland, over flooded levels, past the comically bloated corpses of drowned cattle. Rushes grow up to tickle the branches of dying trees. The new coastline rises incrementally above this shallow sea: an unreliable medium, a waterland where men and livestock founder and blue lights flicker mysteriously in the hours before morning. Inland, axes ring out as the locals, obeying a long-suppressed folk-memory, chop wood for boats of shallow draught and, salivating, eye the skies for teal, widgeon and wintering geese.
Cole is an old man now, perhaps the oldest in the village, his long life earned through guile and a fertile imagination, but he has grown weary of the land, weary of the tales he tells and all the claims which he exerts there. Discontented, he makes for the open ocean, seeking renewal, perhaps – or extinction. But he is, after all, just a dotty old man, the genius of his own place but a fool beyond it, and the sea wall, long since submerged by the rise of the world’s oceans, presents an absolute barrier to his ambitions. No way can his keel-less and homemade raft negotiate the surf that wall kicks up.
So the urge to flee dies in him, as it has died so many times before, and Cole contents himself with a wet and exhilarating attempt to explore the ruins there. The waves will not allow him to get close, and every so often the foamy break threatens to overturn his craft, but Cole persists (it is his chief quality), filling in with his imagination what will not reveal itself to his eye.
Of the houses that were ranged along the sea wall, only stumps of masonry remain to cut the surface at ebb tide. Under the sea’s merciless action, these stumps are falling away very fast – faster than the seaweed and the limpets can colonise them. There is something proud about their ruin, as though they would sooner be extinguished than be subsumed into an age to which they do not belong.
Time is getting on. Cole steers away from the wall, toward lagoon-smooth inner waters and his first acts of daily ritual. Adaptability is his great strength; his only virtue. The old world dies. The old man lives.
Away from the churn thrown up by the submerged wall, Cole throws out his primitive sea anchor – a wicker dog basket, attached by its handle to a length of plastic clothes line – and waits patiently for the bell to sound. Cole understands, better than most, the flow of waters round these parts, and comes to this spot once, sometimes twice a day to hear the church bell in its squat and flooded tower not far beneath the waves. The changing tide sets it ringing, three times, sometimes four. Once, at full moon he heard it sound a dozen times, and trembled, expecting a marvel. A big wave. A flood. A great bubble of marsh-gas. Nothing very surprising happened. The tide was higher than usual, flooding his nephew’s pig pen. In the next village, a two-headed calf was born. But that’s foreigners for you.
The church beneath his rough-hewn craft stands beside an old canal. The route of the canal is marked by makeshift floats, soda bottles and plastic canteens, treasured, irreplaceable.
And here, as he predicted, come the lobstermen – if you can call them men. No men of Cole’s age round here could do what these boys do. Diving from a coracle into that muddy murk, armed only with a nose plug and a scrap of sack-cloth, is work for strapping youths, whose lungs have not yet succumbed, as their elders’ lungs have succumbed, to the region’s vapours. Here they come, not one of them over fifteen, their heavy shoulders rippling as they ply their ash paddles, naked but for their loincloths, and these they strip away before they dive.
Lobster pots are useless here, where the rotten brickwork of the canal offers the local crustacea unmatched shelter and plentiful grazing. No, they cannot be tempted out – they must be manhandled, dragged from their crevices. The boys, saluting Cole with upraised oars, prepare to dive. Each manoeuvres his unstable reed craft about his float, then stands and strips, squeezes the wooden peg over his nose, and wraps his hand in sacking as a glove, protecting his fingers from his quarry’s pincers and its fierce fight for life.
Cole dresses. He shrugs on his leather coat, winds strings of beads around both wrists, and slips the knuckle-bone necklace around his neck. A folded cloth protects his head from the sharp edge of the broken porpoise skull he now proceeds to tie around his head.
Cole sings.
He sings for the fertility of the canal, to this great, dark, weed-furred slot that brings increase and plenty to the people of his village.
He sings words of comfort to the mother lobsters, heavy with eggs, honouring the sons they’ll lose today. Cooked and eaten, their children will be transmogrified into the sons of the village above the water, and Cole sings of this alchemical pact between sea and land, between heaven and earth.
Much of his song is lost on the boys, who spend a minute, even two minutes at a time deep under the waves, hunting their vicious and spiny catch. This old man’s not some mere entertainer. He’s not singing to them. He’s singing to the lobsters. He’s singing to the spirits of the sea, propitiating them, so that the harvest might go smoothly, and no diver lose a thumb. He’s singing –
for
– them. When the boys are done they gather round him, pull the biggest and best lobster from their scuttling catch, and two young, smooth-loined boys board his craft. One pins the creature to the boards. Its tentacles quiver, its claws creak open and snap shut convulsively, it legs scrabble like an old man’s fingers upon the deck. The other raises a knife and stabs it expertly, and with a show of great violence, through the caudal nerve at the back of its head.
The shout goes up – ‘Ai-eh!’
Now that supper’s sorted, it is time for Cole to steer for dry land. There is much he must arrange for tonight’s ceremony.
Cole’s hold over the village depends in part upon his independence from it. Shamans do not live among the people. They inhabit and embody the wilderness, weaving nets of meaning that bind the human to the other. They are, at best, half-beast. To keep the villagers balanced on the edge between fear and yearning has been his life’s project, and, to his dismay, this balancing act is only going to get harder as he ages. As a young man, he always fancied himself some hermit of the hills – a man wise in council, modest in his demands, yet living well enough off the gifts of a grateful people.
But hermits die by the dozen round here – men and women who have been too proud or too stupid or too stubborn to learn the skills of a fast-degenerating world. The countryside is amok with toothless old skeletons who, for a crust of bread or a sliver of widgeon, will bore you into the ground with fairytales of the great past: of hollow metal birds that crossed whole oceans, and tablets of great worldly wisdom that you could slip into your pocket, of pills to cure fatigue and blight, and heroic feats of observational comedy, and images of copulation everywhere. But these hasbeens are no advertisement for the lost age. They sleep under the boles of trees, set traps for mice and hedgehogs, shit on footpaths, spread disease. The young go killing them for sport sometimes, hating these revenants, these senile, sniggering idiots who, in their distant youth, enjoyed a world these boys will never know.
Cole punts as far up the river as he can (a little less each year, he acknowledges; this world’s built for the strong, not the ‘spry’) and ties up the raft to the stump of a streetlight. He walks the rest of the way, feeling more than seeing how the road bed curves and bends..
The cemetery is reached by a narrow track across ground so soft the trees here cannot reach their full height before they succumb to their own weight. They do not die, but, falling, sprout from their topmost side, forming natural hedges, barricades and nooks. Here wild dogs made their nests, till Cole flushed them out with fire and made his home here, fellow with the dead.
Which is to say, Cole lives within the dry-stone bounds of the village cemetery. Villagers are not permitted to explore the hallowed ground itself, on pain of instant execution. Exactly what form this formalised murder would take, how public the event would be, and even how Cole, an old man now, would accomplish it against a young man fighting for his life, are questions Cole has never needed to resolve. The taboo has never been tested, nor is it likely to be. What, aside from an overwhelming urge to desecrate, would convince a marked, already mutilated felon to risk capital punishment, just so that he can say he’s wandered around a few abandoned white goods dumped in a swamp?
For this, to the bemusement of outsiders (whose scepticism, if they are fools enough to express it, is quickly and permanently silenced) is the site Cole has chosen for the town to bury its dead. A flytip full of fridges.
He ties a kilt of stoat-fur round his withers with a cord woven of virgins’ hair (on and on and on, over half a million words of this shit and counting, the literary equivalent of diarrhoea – once begun, why stop?) and brushes fallen leaves from his white-goods’ lids with a mop made of strips of rabbit fur and on and on and on.
P
oppy is afraid to leave her home unattended over the holidays, so Michel and Hanna have arranged to celebrate Christmas early.
I arrive just a couple of hours before Poppy is due. Michel’s mood darkens as we wait for his mother to arrive. ‘The thing about Mum is she’s never here on any proper day. Flag Day, Christmas, birthdays, she’s always a couple of days early or a couple of days late and it’s always by special bloody appointment. Everything becomes about
her
.’
Michel turns over his resentments like a child sorting through a box of toy cars. Meanwhile Hanna runs after Agnes, trying to contain the whirlwind of the girl’s ‘tidying’. ‘Agnes! Agnes, for God’s sake, I just put that
away
.’ At the door of the kitchen she turns. ‘Please, Mick, not in front of her.
Agnes
!’ She swings the door shut, but her voice is hardly muffled. ‘Agnes, what did I just
say
?’
Michel casts around as though he has mislaid something. Losing one half of his audience has thrown him out of his stride. ‘Fancy an espresso?’
Succumbing to convenience at last, they have bought themselves one of those machines that make thimblefuls of rocket fuel out of pre-packaged coffee cartridges.
Since he embarked on an original film script with Bryon Vaux – they must be on their twentieth rewrite by now – Michel has developed a cast-iron ritual. It’s the only way he can meet his obligations to both Bryon and his publishers, who are still expecting a book a year from him. He writes, long-hand, in the garden or the summerhouse every day. Poppy’s Christmas visit is breaking the habit of many months and he’s as jittery as a chainsmoker attempting a cold-turkey withdrawal.
I’d like to say something to distract him, to take his mind off work, but the first thing that comes out of my mouth is, ‘How’s the film?’
‘Christ.’
‘That good?’
‘We’re gearing up for production.’
(I hide a smile at Michel’s use of the royal ‘we’. Once the cameras start humming, Michel’s involvement will surely be at an end.)
‘You must be excited.’
‘I’m up and down into town, with Bryon Vaux yelling in my ear, typing on-the-fly revisions on the train. It’s a bloody hopeless way of working.’
‘But you must be nearly done if you’re shooting in January.’
‘Are you kidding? Do you know we actually had an executive production meeting the other day about how immersive entertainments should be set out on the page? We’re going to be rewriting this bastard all the way into April’s edit suite.’
The doorbell rings, saving me from any more of Michel’s unbrookable enthusiasm. ‘I’ll get it.’
Poppy is about a foot shorter than I remember, and her skull has retreated from the surface of her skin, her face a mass of lines. I give her a hug. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She pats my back, a bird beating its broken wing, spastic and frightened.
I sit her down in the living room. Michel’s vanished. Hanna tries to usher little Agnes in to say hello. Having chattered non-stop about Grandma’s visit for days, Agnes hesitates, half-hidden behind the living-room door, her smile a
moue
of shyness. It doesn’t take her long to thaw. A few minutes later she is badgering Hanna to assemble her puppet theatre so she can give Grandma a show.
‘I’ll do it,’ I offer. How hard can it be?
‘No!’ Agnes scolds me. ‘Not that there. That doesn’t go—Not like that! That’s the wrong way round!
No
!’