Ghost Mountain E-Book

Ronan Hession

• Herausgeber: Bluemoose Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 345

Beschreibung

Ghost Mountain is a mountain that appeared yesterday, changing the lives of the local people; the town drunk, a retired teacher and her dog, a young soul and his wife,an old soul. It is a story about all that is unmistably present yet never trul fathomable in our lives.

Leseprobe

Ghost Mountain

Rónán Hession

Praise

Praise for Leonard and Hungry Paul:

“It is spectacular and already feels like a cult classic. I was absolutely hooked.” – Donal Ryan, Man Booker and Costa listed author

“A beautiful work of art.” – Kit de Waal, winner of the Irish Novel of the Year

“This quietly brilliant book is as funny as it is wise, as tender as it is ground-breaking. Rónán Hession mines for gold in the modest lives and ordinary friendships that might appear unpromising to another writer, and my goodness, he finds it. It is also a happy book – and we need those.” – Diane Setterfield, New York Times No. 1 Bestseller

“A charming, luminous debut” – Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Something exceptional.” – The Guardian

“This funny, warm book will bring you sunshine even if the summer is a washout.” – The Irish Times

“A comforting and uplifting read that shows how small kindnesses can make a big difference.” – Irish Examiner

“Hession’s authorial voice is so distinctive and assured, his writing so effortlessly lyrical it makes the heart sing. I defy anyone not to fall in love with this book.” – Yorkshire Post

Praise for Panenka:

“Meticulously crafted and incisively observational” – The Irish Times

“So exquisitely crafted, each sentence is a pearl.” – Yorkshire Post

“Panenka’s rejection of the grim, in favour of small moments of grace, looks like a bold and successful choice.” – The Guardian

“I can’t think of another author who writes empathy as well as Rónán Hession” – The New European

“As simple and as accurate a description of what love is really like as you’re likely to read in this, or any other, year.” – Hot Press

“Savour this novel, because when you inevitably get to the final pages, you will feel a loss for the world of Panenka.” – The Publishing Post

Imprint

Copyright © Rónán Hession 2024

First published in 2024 byBluemoose Books Ltd25 Sackville StreetHebden BridgeWest YorkshireHX7 7DJ

www.bluemoosebooks.com

All rights reservedUnauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication dataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Hardback 978-1-91569-313-6

Printed and bound in the UK by Gomer

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my wife, Sinéad, with all my love, always.

BOOK 1

Ghost Mountain

It was, in the ordinary sense of the word, a mountain. Emerging from the surrounding unfamous landscape, it was higher than all around it, though not very high. Limpet-shaped, its crest was bare and rounded, like a knee. It faced in all directions without preference, as mountains do. It obstructed both light and wind, but so too did it bring out their personalities. Light, accommodating and peaceful, addressed the mountain with shade and contrast, whereas wind, which is never the same twice, often became exercised by it. From one aspect there appeared to be two hollows, sitting like sunken sockets about halfway up its slope. A third hollow lay between but below the first two, creating what looked like a haunted expression, though the mountain did not, strictly speaking, ever express itself. When the time came to give it a name, it would be called Ghost Mountain because of those hollows.

To say that the mountain was this or that. To ascribe it physical or metaphysical characteristics. To describe it in a way that separated it from everything that was not it – these are all habits of the human mind, and so, it could justifiably be said that all and any such remarks described the describer more than Ghost Mountain. Ghost Mountain had no mind. It did not describe itself. It had no self or self-view. Ghost Mountain was Ghost Mountain.

All we know is that it appeared yesterday.

Ocho

Ocho was looking at his wife. At that moment, it was unfathomable to him how truly separate another person was.

Her name was Ruth.

She was reading her phone and held it with both hands as though she were reading a book.

The soup she had made was on the table in front of them. Ocho had started his soup without waiting for her.

As he was looking at her, he thought about how she wasn’t thinking about him. About how this thought connected him to her and separated her from him. This mattered to him in a new and important way. Where exactly did it matter to him, bodily speaking? He checked inside himself. There was something in his gut, among the organs that were jammed in there. His thoughts and his gut seemed connected. The gut was a second brain, it was said, and had more neurons than a rat’s brain.

While he was thinking, the soup he had been holding in his mouth had cooled and felt slimy as it slid down his throat. All the way to his gut. All the way to those neurons. All the way to that rat’s brain.

Ruth

What had Ruth been reading about on her phone? Ruth had been reading about Ghost Mountain, though it was not yet known by that name. The article explained that a new mountain had appeared in a field not all that far from where Ruth and Ocho lived. The mountain had appeared. What did that mean, she wondered? Was it pre-existing but newly discovered? Had there been a tectonic event that forced the landscape to tent into a new peak? The article was unclear. She read it several times but was no wiser.

Ruth lifted her head to ask Ocho and found him staring at her. His face was serious and sincere. Ocho tended to overworry. It was because he was a young soul. This was a phrase her mother used to use. A young soul was different to a young person. A young soul was a soul that had lived only a few times or a few hundred times. It was still at odds with the world and found everything difficult. Everything was a problem for young souls. Their lives were full of conflict because the world was not how they would wish it to be. An old soul, on the other hand, was one that had lived many, many lives. Possibly an uncountable number of lives. It was a soul that had become attuned to the world. It had absorbed enough of the world that there was no longer a substantial difference between the world and it. This led to greater harmony. When she was a child, her mother had often said to her: “Do you know what you are, Ruth? You are an old soul.” That’s how Ruth heard all about young souls and old souls.

She had recently begun to ponder this dichotomy in relation to her marriage. Ocho was often difficult in small ways. He was pass-remarkable about unimportant things. He would criticise her about immaterial daily nothings. But once she understood that he had a young soul, unlike her old soul, she knew that their differences were inevitable and that it would take incalculable lifetimes to resolve them. Her acceptance of this, she thought, was a further sign that her soul was indeed old. The thought comforted her like the warm soup she swallowed, which settled in her calm stomach.

Discovery of Ghost Mountain

Ghost Mountain was discovered by a woman walking her dog. She had often taken her dog there, despite the landowner having vociferously insisted that there was no public right of way. The courts had agreed with him. The woman had argued otherwise and cited custom and practice, fair usage, common law, citizen’s arrest and other abstract legal principles of uncertain status, but the judge was unmoved.

In time, the landowner died and left his land to his estranged son, who had emigrated some years before. The land was a patchwork of unconnected, uncultivated fields. “What am I supposed to do with all that?” the estranged son had asked himself. “It’s a mess.” Being estranged, his father’s passing had left him with another mess in the form of unresolved feelings and so on. But after the argument that had led to the estrangement, the son had vowed that he would never again use metaphors, and so he refused to relate the patchwork of fields to his relationship with his father or his feelings after his father’s death. Instead, he decided he would ignore the inherited land and leave it to go wild, once again resisting any metaphorical import of doing so.

As a consequence, the woman walking her dog now enjoyed a de facto public right of way, if not a de jure one, and continued to let her dog loose across the fields where he would play and empty his bladder before bounding happily home.

She was halfway up Ghost Mountain – as it would later be called – before she noticed the exacting toll on her thighs and calves. She broke off her morning reflections to check her bearings. The field was not as it had always been and her first thought was that in her preoccupation she had taken a wrong turn. Pausing to look around, she could see the road and, further on, the roof of her own house, which was not usually visible from the field.

As she stood in thought, her dog approached but without his usual playful gait. His tail was not so much wagging as swaying drunkenly. His head was lowered and instead of the usual panting satisfaction there was an unnatural quiet about him. The tennis ball he had found in a ditch was stuck in his throat.

The woman tried to reach her fingers deep into her dog’s mouth but the ball was more than halfway lodged. There was no gap for her fingers to gain purchase and her initial attempts seemed to push it further down. She stood behind him and drew her clenched fists into his stomach to Heimlich the ball free, but to no effect. The dog became listless and could no longer hold himself up. In the end she sat beside him and stroked his flank as he lay there, unconscious. As a child she had lost several dogs. Her parents always told her the dogs had “gone to the country,” though she had never once seen a field of dogs. This was the first dog that had died in front of her.

She had great difficulty getting the dog back to her house. It was an endeavour without dignity. She lay him on the back seat of her small car and brought him to the vet where nothing could be done.

So, it is not hard to understand why, as she lay alone in bed on that particular night, she was not thinking about what would later become known as Ghost Mountain and had told no one about it.

Hee-Haw

Ocho and Ruth lay beside each other in bed. She wore loose pyjamas and he wore boxer shorts and a vest. They had just coupled or, as they often described it, they had had “Hee-Haw.”

When Ocho was a young boy, his mother had walked into his room while he was privately discovering himself. She bolted. He was left frozen in the pose she had found him in. It was one of those moments that had a feeling of repercussions about it. For some time, Ocho had been starting his day that way. It was his waking up routine. He had felt no shame about it but the incident with his mother stirred in him the understanding that shame was a question of the relationship between our own acts and other people. He was deeply ashamed over breakfast and again later when she emptied the laundry basket in his room. For her part, she feigned an imperturbable normality as a way of conveying to him that, as far as she was concerned, nothing had changed. Though she hadn’t fully appreciated it herself, she was actually schooling him in the adult concept of denial. This was different to a child’s concept of denial, which is about not confessing to an adult. Adult denial was about not confessing to yourself.

Later that evening, his father entered his room and sat on his bed.

“Have you been sleeping well?” he asked.

“Yes. Very well,” said Ocho.

Ocho was often mystified by his father, who dressed in army fatigues, even though he was not in the military. He worked in road maintenance and often smelled of tar. He operated the Stop/Go signs at the roadworks. The reason he wore army fatigues, he said, was because they were durable, comfortable clothes and they were cheap to buy at the army surplus shop. Even when he retired years later, he still wore them. He still smelled of tar.

Ocho’s father knocked on his bedroom door every evening for a few weeks to ask him if he was sleeping well. Ocho always answered that he was sleeping well but didn’t mention that this was partly because he had started to discover himself at bedtime also.

With no progress, his mother came into his room one morning, after knocking, and said that his father was bringing him out to learn about nature. This, it turned out, meant the open farm where Ocho’s class went every year for its school tour.

At the open farm, his father leaned his elbows on the fence at the donkey sanctuary. He had a philosophical look in his eyes.

“Donkey milk is much better than cow milk. Much higher in goodness and lower in fat. It is the most like human breast milk.” He turned to Ocho. “Do you know what I mean?”

Ocho, who didn’t know, said “Yes.”

They waited there for quite some time. Ocho asked if he could pull some of the long grass outside the enclosure and feed it to the donkeys through the fence but his father said, “Not yet.”

In time, one of the stallions mounted one of the Jennies and brayed in climax.

“You see?” said his father, mysteriously. “Hee-Haw.”

Ocho nodded. “Hee-Haw.”

His father said it was OK to feed the long grass to the donkey now.

Ocho told this story to Ruth after they had been dating for a while and their sex life had developed some regularity. She thought it was funny and it became part of their store of relationship in-jokes to the point where it became ordinary short hand.

That night, as Ocho and Ruth lay in bed after Hee-Haw, Ocho began to overworry again. Ruth was sleeping on her back. He lay on his back also. They had been holding each other’s hands but now that she was asleep, her grip had relaxed and so it was more true to say that he was holding her hand. He knew he couldn’t sleep like this but for some reason, he couldn’t pick the exact moment to let go. At each moment, the moment after it seemed easier. He tried counting the moments and then counting down the moments. He fell asleep like this, but his dreams were also full of overworry. When he awoke there was a mug of coffee beside his bed and Ruth was already in the shower. When she was drying her hair in the bedroom afterwards he asked whether they were holding hands when she woke up.

Ruth thought he was joking.

The New Mountain

The death of the woman’s dog left her with that feeling of displacement we call grief. She was used to the support of her neighbours on many practical matters, for example the borrowing of a ladder, but practical people can sometimes be found wanting when it comes to abstract feelings with many shades.

“I was unprepared for his absence,” she said to her neighbour, the farmer, about her dog.

The farmer had been breaking up an old oil tank but stopped to listen to her.

“You could get another dog. Or cats are good – you don’t have to bring them for walks.” He spoke as if they were substituting swedes for turnips in a stew.

From the way he was standing with the lump hammer in his oily hands, she could see that having solved her problem, he was now keen to return to work. When his own wife had died he had been back at work on the farm the same day.

At the butcher’s, she explained that she would not need a bag of liver this week or any future week and explained why. The butcher himself had two dogs and he was – either logically or counterintuitively – known throughout the town as an animal lover. He was sorry to hear that, he said, chopping a neck of pork. Not everyone understands the loss of a dog, he said, but it was always a bad loss. Sensing that she had finally found someone who understood her, she told the whole story to him as he wrapped and weighed her order and gave her the ticket so she could pay up at the front of the shop. The shop had strict rules about butchers handling meat or money but not both.

“I didn’t notice at first because I was distracted by the new mountain,” she said.

The butcher asked about the new mountain.

She explained and after several rounds of the butcher’s questions, she was advised to report the incident. It took a moment for her to appreciate that by “incident” he meant the new mountain and not the choking of her dog. She had once again been delivered back to the world of practical people. He had already moved on to weighing mince for the next customer.

The woman’s heart felt heavy, but nobody cared to weigh it.

Ocho wasn’t always like this

Ruth was painting her toenails. Ocho had said that he would go outside to sit on the wall while the sun went down, and there he sat, although facing east, with the sun behind him.

Ocho wasn’t always like this, thought Ruth.

She had first met him in the cinema. She had bought a ticket to see a European movie. It was a meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it. She arrived late into the dark cinema and felt around for a seat and sat down with her coat on. The opening scene of the movie was set at night, with a couple arriving at a remote cottage during a rainstorm. In the next scene, the couple were having breakfast on a sunny veranda in a way that suggested they had slept together. When the cinema lit up, Ruth could see that it was entirely empty except for the man who sat in the seat next to her. Neither acknowledged the other until after the movie. They went for coffee and she liked his confidence. He wasn’t confident in a confident way. It was more that she liked that he was the type of man to go to the cinema by himself during the day. It bespoke many other things she liked.

They were the same height and though people often said that she was tall they never said that he was tall. She was not attracted to him especially, but she had been on her own for several years and was starting to grow weary from the effort it took.

Their first few meetings involved meals and felt like dates rather than real life. She began to tire of them and perhaps also of him. She had expected he would ask her to the cinema during the daytime but he never did. He kept suggesting meals and would say things like, “I mean, we’re going to eat anyway, so why not eat together?”

She eventually took the initiative and asked him to come to the cinema to see another European meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it. Afterwards, they slept together in his small flat. He had confessed that he had been embarrassed because the flat was so small. It had a kitchen and bed and couch all in one room. He seemed to relax and feel accepted when Ruth said she didn’t mind about the flat. Once she accepted him, he started making jokes and offering spontaneous thoughts. He told her his ambitions even though he thought she would think they were stupid. She reassured him. It turned out that his ambitions were stupid but she didn’t tell him that.

Ocho also seemed insecure about Ruth meeting his parents. He said his father wore military clothes and his mother was unfathomable. Ruth met them and liked them. Afterwards, Ocho said he was glad about this but a little disappointed that they liked Ruth better than they liked him. She reassured him that parents always preferred their son’s girlfriends to their sons. It was how things were.

As she painted her toenails, she reflected that yes, there were many signs that Ocho had deep insecurities and that the quality of the Ocho you got depended on how secure he felt at that particular moment. There didn’t appear to be a reason for his insecurities. She had asked his mother whether he had ever been dropped on his head. Ocho’s mother laughed. Ocho’s father didn’t laugh. Then Ruth remembered about young souls and old souls. She remembered how it was the fate of old souls to find young souls.

Ocho came in from the garden and said he was a little blind after looking at the sun and that he was going upstairs to lie down on the bean bag.

“I’ll let my toes dry and then I’ll bring you up some of the soup that’s left. And some dipping bread,” she said.

“I like the colour. Is that flesh?”

“Coral,” she said.

“Is that a colour or a shade?”

“It’s just what’s printed on the bottle,” she said.

“They give each shade a name these days, but not all shades qualify as colours, you know?”

Ruth had noticed that Ocho was often pedantic about things he didn’t even care about.

“Maybe,” said Ruth, concentrating on the edge of her smallest toe.

There arose a void between them.

“I’m still a bit blind,” he said. “So…”

“I’ll bring you some soup,” she repeated without lifting up her eyes. “And some dipping bread.”

Ocho wasn’t always like this: II

Ocho had sat on the wall with the sun behind him, watching his shadow lengthen. He had his baseball cap on backwards so his neck didn’t burn. It was nothing to do with looking cool.

For the past few days he had been feeling like he was outside himself. Like he was looking at his thoughts or looking at himself instead of being himself. As usual his thoughts went round in the big empty tumble dryer of his head without meaning anything. Only these days, instead of being inside the thoughts, he felt like a spectator.

He sat on the wall and watched his thoughts come and go. Watched them peak then sink down into the rat’s brain in his gut. Watched the rat’s brain pump worry chemicals around the organs jammed in there. It felt like everything was too squashed. His organs had no room. His thoughts had no room. He was hoping he would be able to understand things just enough to explain them to Ruth. All he knew was that something had shifted in the world to make him doubt himself. The basic foundations of his personality had been compromised. There was no surface evidence, but he could feel within him a fissure that was filling with worry. Worry that would work away at the thin wall of confidence that held him together.

He turned and faced the sun. It’s unavoidable that a person would try and look at the sun, to see what it’s like. To see if people really went blind that way. His vision soon became spotted and his eyes got uncomfortable, but he held it longer than he thought would be possible. The colour of the sun jumped around as he looked at it. It went from being a liquid orange to white with patchy black circles. He tried to blink himself back to normal but his eyes were still dazzled. He wanted to wait and watch the sun go down. It had started to feel like a stand-off between the sun and him. In the end, his eyes were not strong enough to hold the sun until it disappeared all the way beneath the horizon. By the time he turned his cap around and headed inside, the sun was already dipping behind a silhouetted mountain that he had never noticed before.

Reporting the Incident

Nobody cares, thought the woman whose dog had choked.

She used to think she had true friends and neighbours, but not now. Now she thought that nobody cared. It could be because they truly didn’t care or that they didn’t know it was important to her or perhaps they did know but didn’t want to get dragged into anything. She said this to herself, aloud. She often talked to herself. She used to call it talking to the dog.

After the butcher’s, she went home and put the meat in the fridge for the next day and parcelled the rest up in freezer bags. There was so much more room in the freezer now. She opened a tin of soup for her supper and emptied it into her smallest pot. After rinsing the empty tin and putting it on the shelf for recycling, she said to her absent dog, “Andy Warhol would charge millions for that.” She boiled the soup and had a little cry as she did so. When it had cooled, she took a spoonful. It was salty and creamy, just how she liked it.

She thought about her options. Reporting the incident or not reporting the incident. Whenever she didn’t know what to do she always waited until after a good night’s sleep. As a dog person she was an early riser and so went to bed early too. It turns out the dog had trainedher, she said to no one. But it suited her to go to bed early. Evenings had become difficult and vast for her.

She slept with a pillow between her legs in a big bed. Her dreams were vivid but not relevant. When she awoke the next morning and first re-remembered everything, it was like her dog dying all over again. How long does this last, she wondered. She lay in bed until it was time to report the incident. She worried that the police would admonish her for being in the field, because of the court order and everything. They would see a woman in her fifties with short hair and a checked shirt and khaki chinos who no longer looked feminine or masculine and who lived alone and who had lost a court case and whose dog had choked. They would take note of her crazy story and snigger under their breath. The whole town would find out about the new mountain and for ever more she would be known by association with it. This pained her, as she resented the mountain because it reminded her of her dog choking.

In the end, with the benefit of a night’s sleep, she typed up the report herself on her computer in Times New Roman, 12 point, double spaced, and printed it on her slow inkjet printer before attaching it to a brick and throwing it through the police station window.

Town Drunk

The immediate and only suspect in the brick-throwing was the town drunk. For many months he had been throwing messages attached to bricks through the police station window. Some of the messages confessed to crimes that had or maybe hadn’t been committed. Others reported theories about the town or the world. Often the messages comprised ambiguous generic wisdom, much like fortune cookies. One or two made accusations about historical figures and their writings. And there was one which was simply a receipt for a pallet of bricks – this one was counted as blank and the inclusion of a receipt inadvertent.

These incidents were reported in the local paper and had become popular.

After each brick-throwing the police would call out to the town drunk’s house, which was small but immaculate. They would read him the charges as well as his rights over coffee. The town drunk would then accompany them ‘downtown’ which was a few streets away, where they would complete the necessary paperwork and, from time to time, lock him in a cell until the judge was ready to see him. The town drunk represented himself before the judge and seemed to like her. Some said he had a crush on her. The judge lamented that the town drunk had not made more of himself in life and usually let him off with a reprimand or a fine. Whenever given a fine, the town drunk would successfully argue that it should be paid in small amounts over a long period of time. He claimed that this was not for financial reasons, but so that he would have something to live for and so that each week when he paid the small amount, he would be reminded of his mistakes and the onus placed upon him to do better in future. The judge – who after all, had faith in human nature – acceded to these requests, for which the town drunk once thanked her by throwing a bunch of flowers attached to a brick through her office window.

On this particular morning, the town drunk had an assertive headache. He had drunk both in strength and volume the night before. He felt not only sick but weepy. It cheered him to see the police at his door. They showed him the brick and also the typed message. He set aside the message and immediately threw the brick all the way across the street where it smashed the rear windscreen of a Volvo estate belonging to the woman who lived opposite. He asked if they had another brick. They said no. He retrieved the brick and again threw it from his door all the way across the street through the Volvo window, where it landed on the parcel shelf, beside a box of tissues, now full of glass.

“Not one of my bricks,” he said as he went back inside to make the coffee. “It had a nice feel to it though.”

He looked at the message that had been attached, holding it with two hands as if he was reading a book. He read it all the way to the end and then went back to the bits that hadn’t made sense to him.

“Not one of mine either,” he repeated.

The police looked at one another. “Are you sure?” they asked.

The woman who owned the Volvo came across the street, still pulling the arm of her cardigan on. What she had to say was declarative and vituperative. The town drunk offered to pay for the Volvo window in small amounts over time, explaining what he would learn from this. He also clarified that it was not his brick though he did throw it.

The woman went back to her house, muttering oaths.

“You know, she used to peer through my front window whenever she passed by my house,” the town drunk said after she had left. “So, I decided to wait for her one time, and when she looked in, I was standing in my underpants waving out to her.”

After the police had left, he sat by himself and thought about what the note had said about a new mountain and how, on reading it, the weepy feeling in his stomach had melted away.

Carthage and Clare

Ocho and Ruth were invited to dinner at the house of Carthage and Clare. They had got to know Carthage and Clare through mutual friends they no longer saw. It used to be that the mutual friends, Ocho and Ruth, and Carthage and Clare would meet for dinner, but after the mutual friends had children, they started cancelling, so eventually the arrangement shrank to the two couples.

“You should make more of an effort to see your friends,” Ruth would say to Ocho.

“It’s important to keep in touch,” Clare would say to Carthage.

“But he’s not really my friend,” Ocho and Carthage would reply to their respective wives.

And so they kept meeting.

As they waited for the food, Carthage said things to Ocho like, “Who do you know in Company X? Do you know Mr Y in Company X? I’ve known Mr Y in Company X for ages. A good guy, a good guy ...”

Ocho didn’t like the way Carthage related to people as if they were at work. It was as though Ocho were a fridge magnet and Carthage was trying to work out whether to place him at eye level with the important magnets, or nearer the bottom with the other magnets you never looked at.

He also didn’t like the way things were between Carthage and Ruth. Because Ocho and Ruth were the same height, and she wore heels when they went out, she was taller than him, as was Carthage, who was in turn taller than Ruth. When it was the three of them together, Ocho, the shortest, felt like Carthage and Ruth were the father and mother and he was the child. From this, he had got the idea that there was something between Carthage and Ruth. Once the idea of there being something between them became established in Ocho’s mind, he saw confirmation in everything, no matter how innocent. If Carthage was looking at Ruth when he said, “So good to see you both again” or if he complimented them on the gifts they’d brought – which Ruth had chosen – Ocho would feel depressed.

Ocho left Ruth and Carthage chatting and followed Clare into the kitchen. He stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her as she stacked the dishwasher and laid out teacups and finger-sized cake slices on a tray. He asked himself how he would feel if this was his life and if Clare was doing this in a kitchen they shared together. Ocho offered to help and asked Clare how her job was going, though he couldn’t remember what she did. She smiled in an unrevealing way and said, “Usual schmusual.”

He was intimidated by her reservedness, which made her unfathomable to him.

She handed him the tray to bring into the other room and with the gentlest of pressure on his elbow, set him turning around and off back to the others. Could he spend his life with someone who would simply point him in a direction and set him off like that?

Ruth and Carthage were leaning forward in excited conversation as Ocho set down the tea things. He poured for them and passed them the fingers of cake. All this made him feel invisible, like a stagehand. Made him feel worthless, like a magnet at the bottom of the fridge door.

They were talking about what would become known as Ghost Mountain. The story had begun to obsess the whole town and had broken through to the national news cycle. Everyone was talking about how a new mountain had been discovered by the town drunk. The local newspaper that first broke the story knew the town drunk had been eliminated from inquiries, but all its most popular stories included him – for whatever reason people liked to know what he got up to – so they cast him in the lead role. From a newsworthiness point of view, it had worked well, as the appeal of the story was in something happening with the right balance of plausibility and implausibility. In other words, it was a story that gave people something to think about.

“It is clearly tectonic-related,” suggested Ruth. “I mean, nobody alive has ever witnessed the birth of any of the other mountains in the world, so we don’t know, experientially-speaking, how they arrive. We only have reasonable theories that must now be revisited.”

“Yes, that’s true. I hadn’t thought of that,” said Carthage.

Ocho saw this as another example of there being something between Carthage and Ruth. Carthage always liked to have the last word in arguments. There was no way he would agree with something so stupid unless he was in love, or at least thinking of Hee-Haw.

“The mountain was always there,” interrupted Ocho. “It’s small-town opportunism – drumming-up a novelty to generate tourism. Surely there are official sources that can establish the facts, but the town—”

“—You wouldn’t say that if this happened in a city,” interrupted Clare, as she joined them at the table. “Small towns are often the birthplace of great scientists and political leaders,” she continued, addressing Carthage and Ruth, but not Ocho, “whereas most criminals come from cities.”

“Very true, very true,” said Carthage and Ruth as they poured milk for each other.

Ocho had put the cake finger in his mouth without realizing that it still had its translucent baking paper casing. In the moment’s silence that followed Clare’s insight, he had to spit the paper into a cloth napkin with the others watching him.

He felt like he had disgusted everyone.

Ordnance Survey

The police had leaked the story about the new mountain to the local paper as a way of flushing out leads.

At that point they had not yet been authorized to visit the so-called new mountain. They had been instructed to refer to it as “so-called” until the facts were established. In the absence of a crime scene or an official charge, they were not minded to open a formal case file on the grounds of curiosity alone. In any event, with the estranged son, now landowner, overseas, the case would involve international cooperation with possible treaty implications. The paperwork alone would give rise to a second new mountain, said one officer. He repeated the line to his wife later that evening, making her proud.

The ordnance survey office had one desk with a computer, a phone, some stationery, a photocopier and a special storage cabinet full of maps. There was also just enough room for the man who worked there, known as the Clerk of Maps. The police arrived at his small office looking to establish, scientifically speaking, whether the mountain was new or not. Surely the definitive record of any pre-existing mountain would be held by the Clerk of Maps at the ordnance survey office.

The Clerk of Maps tried not to smile as he listened to the police. He couldn’t help them, he said, and then clarified that he wanted to help them but was unable to do so. He was leaning back in his chair with his fingers interlocked and his thumbs circling each other.

“Why not?” they asked.

“Well…”

The pause was so important. It was the culmination of his career frustrations and his stilted initiative and his stunted professional conscientiousness and his unheeded warnings.

“…the local maps don’t show elevation,” he said.

The Clerk of Maps had entered a career in ordnance survey because he liked the outdoors and was fascinated by the untold story of the landscape. After many years as a Junior Clerk of Maps, he was selected for a Government-sponsored ordnance survey scholarship programme during which he shook the hand of the Chief Surveyor who congratulated him on his fine draughtsmanship. He was later appointed Clerk of Maps on promotion, albeit in an acting capacity.

The promotion gave him the confidence to persuade his wife to transfer with him to a small town she had never heard of, where he promised they would build their future and make the babies she was so keen to bring into the world.

But his promotion was to be a disappointment. His main duty turned out to be making copies of local maps for people involved in boundary disputes. The job was well-paid and secure but he was unhappy because his skills were unused and the maps he had brought with him remained unpacked, as did his theodolite.

On his arrival, he had disparaged the level of detail on the local maps, which showed boundaries but not elevations. His first priority as new Acting Clerk of Maps, he told his superiors, would be to bring the local maps up to what he considered a baseline level of ordnance survey detail. Anything less would be tantamount to negligence and philistinism, he had said in his first report as Acting Clerk of Maps. He had wanted to reassure them that his arrival would restore the degraded dignity of their profession.

But his superiors’ reaction was concise and unambiguous: “Don’t make waves.”

After receiving their response, he returned home to his wife, where it took him a broken night’s sleep before he could explain to her what had happened. The more he discussed