Villager E-Book

Tom Cox

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life. In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill and writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a cult following. Two decades later, some teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In 2019, a pair of lodgers discover a one-eyed rag doll hidden in the walls of their crumbling home. Connections are forged and broken across generations, but only the landscape itself can link them together. A landscape threatened by property development and speckled by the pylons whose feet have been buried across the moor. Tom Cox's masterful debut novel synthesises his passion for music, nature and folklore into a psychedelic and enthralling exploration of village life and the countryside that sustains it.

Leseprobe

Also by the author

FICTION

1983

Everything Will Swallow You

Help the Witch

NON-FICTION

Notebook

Ring the Hill

21st-Century Yokel

Close Encounters of the Furred Kind

The Good, the Bad and the Furry

Talk to the Tail

Under the Paw

Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia

Nice Jumper

For Ralph, my most psychedelic cat (2001–21)

‘The Queen o’ Faeries she caught me, in yon green hill to dwell’ ‘Tam Lin’, eighteenth-century ballad

CONTENTS

Map of Underhill

ME (NOW)

GROUND UNDER REPAIR (1990)

DRIFTWOOD (1968)

STOPCOCK (2019)

ME (NOW)

PAPPS WEDGE (2043)

ME (NOW)

MESSAGE BOARD (2012)

REPORT OF DEBRIS (2014) 209

BILLYWITCH (1932)

SEARCH ENGINE (2099)

EPILOGUE: ME (NOW)

Acknowledgements

ME (NOW)

It’s a heavy day, and it hangs all over me. I’m deep in it. I’m so far in it, I’m technically invisible, unless you’re extremely near to me, and very few people are. I doubt that will change today, but tomorrow could be different. Days like this – the ones that stay heavy from beginning to end – are rare here. Yesterday, for example, started heavy, but became very light and boldly colourful, then was just a tiny bit heavy for the final part, in spurts and streaks. During the light, boldly colourful middle part everything radiated cleanliness, was so thoroughly fresh and laundered that you wondered where all the bad stuff it had washed away had disappeared to, what vast drain or waste tank the world could possibly possess that could have so efficiently put it out of sight and smelling distance. Small creatures woke up in the freshness, and were hungry, in a ferocious way. ‘Hangry’ I believe it is called nowadays by the young folk. A man walked through a dark corridor cut diagonally across a field of high late summer barley and got seriously messed up by horseflies, to such an extent that he increased his speed to a trot and then a run through the last third of the corridor, waving his arms like a crazy person who believes he is being attacked from both flanks by ghosts, until he reached a shady, thistle-dotted copse, which he decided, incorrectly, might offer some respite. The small mercy for him in all this was his confident belief that he had remained unobserved. The belief was misguided. I saw him and, I have to admit, I did have a good old cackle.

There’s a painting which I very much admire. I think it’s obvious that it’s of, or very much inspired by, the village, but I doubt the person who now has it on their wall knows that, unless they have ever visited here, which I happen to know for a fact that they haven’t. I doubt they even know the name of the artist, which was a faint scrawl in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting in the first place and became fainter when the second of the painting’s four owners carelessly left it directly opposite a large south-facing picture window in a bungalow overlooking the Derbyshire spa town of Matlock Bath. The painter’s name was Joyce Nicholas, and she lived here in Underhill between 1958, when she arrived in Devon from the north of England as a widow and retired teacher, and 1969, when her daughter Eva installed her in a retirement complex close to the stretch of coast known, jokingly by some and more seriously by others, as the English Riviera. She completed the painting in 1960 and, although she did sell one or two other similar expressionist works at that point via small local galleries and a short-lived bookshop owned by a friend, Joyce – always very hard on herself – decided it was not a success, and put it away in the loft. It did not leave her family until 1983 when, after his wife had fled from him and their legal union in a state of antimaterialist haste, Eva’s daughter Jane’s exhusband Gerry gave it to the owner of a junk shop in Whitby, Yorkshire, free of charge. Gerry had hoped to receive a small sum for the painting but was hit with an uncharacteristic attack of guilt when, in examining a rug that Gerry was also hoping to rid himself of, the junk shop proprietor’s hand came into contact with some still quite damp excrement that had come out of the arse of Gerry’s bulldog The Fonz that morning, but which Gerry, in haste not dissimilar to Jane’s upon leaving him, had not spotted. The proprietor stared off into the middle distance of a deep back room full of broken clocks, grumbled inaudible quarter words and exhaled spouts of air from both corners of his mouth, and stated he wasn’t much interested in the painting. ‘The bottom has dropped right out of the market for this stuff,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a ton of it in my garage at home and can’t shift it for love nor money.’ He was, however, playing it cool, having quickly marked the painting out as something a little out of the ordinary and Gerry as an easily manipulated man whose main goal was to exit the building as quickly as possible. The proprietor had been the first to see any merit in Joyce’s landscape since a lodger who was living with Joyce, eight years after its creation. It now hangs above the stairway in a house in Edinburgh owned by two retired surgeons. Visitors remark on it more often than anything else in the house, apart from their cat, Villeneuve, who is white, fluffy and comically large.

I should probably pause to point out here, for those wondering, that I don’t know everything. I have big gaps, moments of doubt and humility, just like everyone else, just like Joyce. But I do know a hell of a lot.

I love Joyce’s use of colours in the painting. I suspect when she was mixing her palette she was thinking of a light day, or perhaps the light part of a day that had earlier been heavy, but certainly not an all-heavy day like today. The gradation of burnt umber to asparagus in the top left corner, then a suggestion of something darker, where the moor begins and stretches on for the next twenty miles or so. There’s a hint of something black and jagged here, some shapes that remind me of rusty barbed wire. And beyond, above this kaleidoscopic hillscape that could just as easily be California as Britain’s West Country, a swirling heaven or hell, a definite ‘beyond place’. Below that, I think I can make out the familiar valley, the way it funnels down into the village and the lane that becomes the steep high street. There’s no obvious sea or river in the painting but there is a suggestion that both are close. Houses? Joyce doesn’t paint anything as literal as houses, but there are shapes that we could decide are buildings where people live. There’s some interesting yellow and white blotching to the right, below that, which makes me believe Joyce was a big fan of the lichen you get on the rocks and older buildings – and even some of the newer ones – around here. The colours of the lichen are answered by the colour of the sun, in the top right-hand corner, or is it the moon… or is it some combination of both, some other unknown ethereal body representative of both day and night. Above this is what seems to me the most literal part of the painting of all: a patchwork quilt of what are surely farmers’ fields. What makes it less literal is the fact the patchwork is above the sunmoon, and I wonder if this is Joyce’s comment on the topsy-turvy nature of the region, the habit the hills have of disorientating you, the knack weather has here of frequently being below you, as well as, or even instead of, above you, or if Joyce was just feeling a bit like tearing down the walls and breaking the rules that day. I like this side to Joyce a lot, the hidden side that only the brushes and canvas saw, beneath the scrupulous account books, the perfectly plumped cushions, the always-mown-on-time grass. Joyce was a person with more layers than her family and neighbours realised, I think, and much wilder, toothier nightmares. In the middle top of the canvas, if you look into that greeny-black, celestial moorscape, you’ll see what you might interpret as a wide, beatific, somewhat hirsute face. This is the part of the painting that possibly interests me the most.

I never did get any of the several art critic jobs I applied for.

Where does the moor start? That’s a highly debatable question. Where does the true north start? Where do moths end and butterflies begin? Where is the border between ‘sometimes fancies members of the opposite sex but doesn’t actually want to touch their sexual organs’ and ‘is definitely gay’? Who decides what’s soulful funk and what’s funky soul? There’s always some hard-bitten unimpressable bastard who’ll tell you, when you’re on the moor, that you’re not on the proper moor, no matter how far into the moor you are. But let’s not piss about. This – whether or not it’s ‘technically’ on the moor, as the map defines it – is a moorland village. You know, very firmly, when you’re in it, that you’re not in London, or Kettering, or Ipswich. You’re in Underhill. As you pass from the high ground down that funnel, so exquisitely depicted by Joyce, the air of the uplands remains in your nostrils, the trees have beards, the lanes have ferny green sideburns, and your hair is made of rain. It’s the bloody moor, you pedantic bastards. I should know. I’ve been here long enough.

For many years, the first sign of life you’d see when you came down that funnel in Joyce’s painting was an old blacksmith’s cottage, but that fell into disrepair several decades ago, the more interesting parts of its structure gradually appropriated by passing opportunists in or around the building trade. The road bends sharply just at this point, with no warning, and once every couple of years you’ll see a mangled, abandoned bike, formerly owned by someone who got carried away with the gradient and didn’t quite judge the turn. The blacksmith’s cottage was replaced during the 1970s by the Molesting Station. Despite society’s disapproving eyes and the nature of its purpose being far less fashionable than it was during its outset, the Molesting Station isn’t shy about telling you what it is. It even announces it publicly. ‘MOLESTING STATION’ it says in big letters, on the front of the building. OK, I’m not giving you all the facts here. It’s actually a garage, owned by Phil Spring, who took it over when his father Brian Spring retired in 2013, and it in fact has ‘MOT TESTING STATION’ written outside. But as you approach from the north, the split trunk of a beech tree on the side of the road obscures the first ‘T’ and the roof of the second one, so it appears to say ‘MOLESTING STATION’. I’m surprised more people don’t comment on it. Whatever the case, the garage does good business, at competitive prices, and has a reputation for honesty. After Phil realised he overcharged Paul Pike recently for replacement brake pads and discs, when in fact his apprentice Alun had only replaced the discs, not the pads, he called Paul immediately and did a bank transfer for the difference plus a gesture of goodwill, which he suggested at ten pounds. ‘Call it twelve?’ said Paul. ‘OK,’ said Phil. I don’t have a car for reasons that will in time become clear, but if I did I would definitely take it here, instead of one of those supergarages, where you not only pay for your repairs but for the flatscreen TV in the foyer and the machine next to it that pisses out bad coffee you drink purely because you’re there and not sure what else to do with your hands, and the pointless little matching blazers of the employees milling all around you doing you’re not sure what. Beyond the Molesting Station is what is, for now, the village’s most northerly residential frontier: twenty-five hugely unimaginative terraces built in the 1990s, once going under the preposterous collective title of Otter’s Holt, a name now blessedly forgotten, apart from, evidently, by me. I dislike these houses but I like all but two of the families who currently live in them, which softens the architectural anguish a little.

It’s definitely not one of the most fashionable villages in the region, and it’s not quite the least. One of the results of this ‘middle of the table-ish’ standing is that we have an Indian restaurant, House of Spice, and it is a good Indian restaurant. I have observed that the better-known villages and small towns nearby, where house prices are highest, either don’t have Indian restaurants, or have Indian restaurants that make surprisingly substandard food. I don’t personally take my meals in the village, so this is just hearsay, but it’s widely recognised that House of Spice’s onion bhajis – judged, at least, by the standards of other onion bhajis made in rural England – are in a class of their own when it comes to taste, shape and accompanying chutney. For a long time, House of Spice was also celebrated for the closing line of its menu, which thanked diners for their costume – a spelling error, rather than a genuine expression of gratitude to those visiting on Halloween or another occasion inviting fancy dress. It took a whole twenty-five months before the printing of a replacement menu, which merely thanked people for their custom, and the length of that gap can no doubt be attributed to the fondness that had grown for the menu in the locality and the resulting reluctance of anybody to point out its imperfections. The story about another misprint on the House of Spice’s menu, offering a ‘15 per cent discocunt on orders over £20’ is, however, apocryphal.

The moor has moods, and because the village is so close to it, it is subject to them. When the sky above the moor is storm-tossed and wretched, you’ll hear more gossip and backbiting across the tables in the two cafés, especially the Green Warlock, where Jason and Celia, who are bored in their marriage, go on Fridays. When everything is heavy and damp, like today, you’ll notice that people don’t say thanks as much in the Co-op. Two almost-friends, who’d normally stop and chat on the street, will keep their eyes down and pretend they didn’t see each other. It’s something purely elemental, not personal, but it spreads. I don’t feel great today, and my not-greatness influences those around me. I made a buddleia visibly ill at ease this morning. The tile warehouse, I think, looks particularly lugubrious and in need of a hug, but who is going to give it one? Colin on Weathervane Avenue just poured a pan of boiling water over some ants on his patio then instantly felt terrible about it, although he tried to transfer his anger with himself in his emotionally unavailable way, instructing his wife Mel, when she arrived home from the supermarket, to not spend quite so recklessly on fruit. There’s a bad atmosphere in the dentist’s waiting room. But if we are honest it’s never had a great reputation as a dentist. It’s doubtful anybody would go there at all, if they knew that on the exact spot where Jill on reception currently sits, in September 1723, a farmer and his two sons murdered a man from Minehead following a drunken quarrel that got out of hand. An orchard was planted in the same place a century later, but didn’t take. It’s the other side of town where most of the apples grow: partially russeted Nancekuke, Pengelly, King Byerd. Old, old apples. Apples of the insurrectionary underground. Apples which would upset the apples in your local supermarket with their foul mouths and lack of foundation and mascara. Many of their sweet culinary gifts will be wasted next week in the annual Apple Rolling Festival on Fore Street: a ‘revived’ festival thought by many local historians to date back to as early as the 1600s (it doesn’t).

But it is not all folklore and bygone insular sword death. We have a post office! Jim Swardesley, the postmaster, is forty-five. He has his moods, like all of us. The dome of his head is entirely bald, but he says it’s been that way since he was twenty-two. His theory is that it was the result of a rugby squad induction ritual in his university days, where he was required to shave his entire scalp with an old, rusty razor and no shaving foam, from which his follicles never recovered. Now a resident of the village for over a decade, Jim’s arrival, with his young family, was part of the first wave of incomers to Underhill from more urban areas in the centre of the country: an influx that never fully took off as some expected and dreaded it would, and still happens in fits and starts, usually as a result of people finding that more fashionable villages nearby have become too expensive. Jim is now entrenched enough in local life to be slightly resistant to outsiders himself, if only for their repeated failure to queue for grocery products at the appropriate counter, despite his many handwritten signs encouraging them to. Two doors down from the post office is the granite cottage where Joyce painted her painting. The rusty wagon wheel that her predecessor dragged down the hill off the moor and into the garden is still there. Her deep red front door isn’t, replaced long ago by some now off-white UPVC. It is good that she can’t see this. There is a profusion of gravel that would be alien to her. The sports utility vehicle perched upon it would seem to her too big for any practical purpose, incongruous beside the building it belongs to.

Information comes back to me in isolated flurries, like cherry blossom on a strong breeze in spring, and then it’s gone if I don’t reach out and grab quickly, and grab well. You can never grab much. There’s only so much you can know at one time, even if you’re me; only so much room to store it. There’s so much to know. It will never end, I suspect, even when it does. So much in all these lives, so many stories, even in this small place. And I try to keep abreast of the universe beyond it too, if I can. I’m broad and cosmopolitan, despite what many assume.

But I am remembering a little now, from the day she began to paint the painting. I was not feeling fully at my best that day. Some men and their dogs had raced across part of me and ripped an innocent animal into many pieces and the pieces were stuck to me. The rain would not come and wash the pieces off for a while. It was a few years into the era when I first felt new chemicals soaking into me, changing everything. Yet over there was a meadow: corncockle, poppies, yellow rattle. I’d rarely seen so many butterflies in my life. I was confused. I felt I could go either way, emotionally. One of my wicked episodes could easily have happened. They have to happen, sometimes. It’s part of the balance. But in this instance I chose purity; namely, the quest to witness some of it. While I searched for the purity, a stallion and a mare began to mate on my back and I told them to piss off but then apologised, admitted that it was unfair of me, and assured them they were not the ultimate cause of my irritation.

She was in her kitchen, rescuing a moth from a spider’s web. (It died two minutes later but it’s the thought that counts.) Jazz was playing. That was not a surprise. The type of jazz, though, was. Definitely not grandma jazz, this. Not even 1950s hip grandma jazz. Modal. Louche. A little threatening. The back window was open, which, from where her easel was placed, gave her a good view of the tor and the rocks piled on top of it like a little crude stepstool to nowhere. The breeze was gently blowing in, flapping the net curtains, and a very old grey cat – a satchel of sharp bones, with some fur stuck to them in some places – snoozed on the table, next to a punnet of five strawberries that were on the turn. Joyce flailed a wrist, as if loosening up in preparation for an impressive bit of spin bowling, and in one final move, to achieve a state of ultimate looseness before she began, she lifted her blouse over her head and threw it flamboyantly to the floor. I got a bit shy then (I do!) before watching her go into her artistic trance. I’d never seen anybody paint my portrait before and I was very flattered. She had a glass of wine afterwards, and I can’t remember the last time I’ve wanted to join anyone in that particular activity so much. You’d have to go right back to… Actually, I’m not even going to tell you. Blissful scene to watch, though, even if you couldn’t be a part of it yourself. Oh, Joyce. How could you go from a day as carefree and wild as this to the retirement scene in Torquaydos, in less than a decade?

It was the following day when she had her misgivings and put the painting in the loft, with a little chunter to herself. She was being self-punishing, but perhaps she was only following the most sensible course of action. Ideally, we’d all put any art we created away for a while before we properly evaluated it. Two weeks? Probably not long enough. Let’s call it two years. OK, ten. That will do it. Scratch that. Just to be sure, let’s come back and discover our true worth as creators from the afterlife. ‘Hi, I’m dead now. What? Yes, fully. I even have the papers to confirm it. Can you finally tell me my true star rating, out of ten?’ Joyce, I think, were she able to pop south over the border between the dead and the living, then north over the other one, between England and Scotland, would be pleased at what she saw on the wall of Dr Micklewhite and Dr Micklewhite. But – and I’m not denigrating Joyce’s talent for one second here – are enigma and the passing of the years to be given some credit for that? Is it maybe just possible that time itself has changed Joyce’s painting? As if some spiritual lichen of its own has grown on and around it, deepening and enriching its texture? And, if so, what good does that do Joyce, now? What we need to do is get her trending online. Death: it’s when we decide if everyone is good or bad, right, decide which of the two boxes to put them in, as well as the wooden one they’re already in? Let’s get her a Wikipedia page, get the conversation going. ‘So sorry to hear Joyce Nicholas is no longer with us. I only met her once, for no more than nine seconds, but she was not stuck up at all, and even said hello to my dog.’ ‘I have always been a huge fan of Joyce, even when nobody was talking about her, and it was super uncool to like her.’ ‘Graham, can you remind me how much we paid for that picture above the spare bed?’ ‘£300, I think. It was quite a long time ago.’ ‘Well, I’ve just found out from this newspaper article that it’s worth £55,000 and by someone called Joyce Nicholas. She died in Devon in 1973.’ Oh, Joyce, if only you’d have known your artistic worth, been raised in a different generation, and put yourself out there. You could be an influencer now. But you wouldn’t have wanted that, you say? Why on earth not? Oh, because the very process itself was the important part of the matter for you? The feeling of being lost inside it, guided by invisible hands. The trance. The freedom. But what about the ‘likes’, what about the dopamine rush? How old-fashioned you are, Joyce. Don’t you realise that even the dead have an Instagram account these days? Don’t do yourself a disservice. Play the game. Everyone must.

I’m sorry; I’ve done something I said I wouldn’t and permitted myself to get flustered. It’s been one of those days. I think I spotted a couple of drones earlier, circling above the boulders. I have a pain in one of my toes and there’s a very unwell, publicity-shy and sensitive ash tree I’m on intimate terms with and this morning someone plastered photos of it all over social media accompanied by the hashtag ‘#sadtree’. I think the toe pain comes from the fact that a pile of old compost bags and a hubcap are caught on a rock just past where the river emerges on the other side of town, almost but not quite, under the Victorian railway viaduct. It’s bearable, not so painful, not even comparable to the time they found a dead owl down there, tangled up in a sky lantern. I should sleep. The forecast is better for tomorrow. I can see the bats powering over from their roosts. I heard that nineteen buzzards and a kestrel are flying up from Cornwall at dawn. But I will say this final thing, concerning the previous subject: Joyce isn’t the only one. There are a lot of lofts and drawers and cupboards out there. Most of them have stacks of utterly worthless shit in them. But just a few of those lofts and cupboards and drawers contain a piece of art that’s special and true and came from an honest, inspired place, didn’t get shouted about at the time, and it’s probably only going to get more special and true the longer it’s left there. We’re all getting older, and that has its pluses as well as its minuses. Over beyond the back wall of Joyce’s old garden, the river isn’t quite as diamond clear as it once was, and its dauntless song doesn’t always quite succeed in drowning out the dual carriageway, but the lichen and moss on the rocks have become richer in texture. Quality lichen and moss isn’t something you just cheat or shortcut or hack or hashtag your way to.

Here, in my big green hands, I hold some time. Consider it my gift to you. You will probably never receive a finer one.

I’m going to go now. A heavily pregnant ewe just did a very thick and powerful piss on my chin. But I’m OK. To be perfectly honest, I barely even felt it.

GROUND UNDER REPAIR (1990)

The summer Mark and I found the man in the woods, Mark was sixteen and I was a year younger. We’d been playing a lot of golf that year and nobody much admired us for it. After our rounds and long practice sessions were complete, we’d walk home along the lane that led back to the village, carrying our clubs, and the inhabitants of passing vehicles would beep their horns and shout profanities at us. Considering it was a quiet lane where you’d only see about twenty cars per hour, it occurred with startlingly regularity. One time someone hurled a half-full Fanta can from a passenger window and it hit me in the eye and drenched the front of my polo shirt. When my mum saw the bruise, she refused to believe I had not been fighting. After that, Mark and I started taking a different route, over the corner of the tor and down through the woods by the river. Some of the paths weren’t public but Mark worked out a shortcut and was fairly confident we wouldn’t get into trouble.

The golf course had two personalities, and no smooth segue between them was in evidence. It threw visitors off balance, left them hot and gorse-scratched and irritated. Many who had begun the day in a positive frame of mind declined to visit the clubhouse for a drink afterwards, instead hurling their clubs into their car boot, not even bothering to change out of their spiked shoes, blowing out of the car park in a plume of exhaust smoke and a loud scrape of metal against speed bump, like people who’d stolen their own cars. For the first nine holes, everything was very polite and neatly mown, a sculpted suppression of nature that, were you blindfolded and dropped into it, would have been hard to distinguish from the one that characterises a thousand other golf courses. But after the ninth green players followed a steep tunnelled path through a small city of gorse and skyscraper ferns and emerged into a primal, unwashed otherplace that they had to trust, going by what the map on the back of the scorecard told them, was the tenth tee. Quarter-sheared, mad-eyed sheep and horned cattle roamed the fairways and tees indiscriminately. Jangly-nerved salesmen and insurance brokers backed off their putts as large dark winged shapes wheeled overhead, mocking them with shrieking beaked laughter. Balls struck sweetly from tees ricocheted off assorted hidden rocks into tussocky bogs, never to be seen again. These balls soared unpredictably owing to the dung caking their surface and sudden corridors of diabolical wind coming down off the moor. It was not uncommon to see visitors holding up play by attempting to herd sheep, cattle and ponies out of their playing line. Regulars were more nonchalant and casually floated their drives over the animals’ heads, but even they were not exempt from pastoral strife. Believed to be assured of victory in the 1989 club championship as he strutted the mounds of the final fairway, Tom Bracewell threw away his advantage when a heifer sat on his ball and refused to move. A crowd soon gathered around the cow, the competitors who had been awaiting the result of the event in the clubhouse bar gradually filtering out to watch, until over a hundred of us stood staring at the animal. Christine Chagford, who before taking her job behind the bar at the club had spent a lot of time in close proximity to cattle, finally managed to sweet talk the cow into giving way and letting the group behind play through, but not before she’d planted a kiss on its forehead and posed for a photo which would later be framed and hung on the wall of the Men’s Bar. Rattled, Bracewell racked up a triple bogey seven, putting him in a sudden death playoff with Christine’s cousin Tony, which Bracewell subsequently lost. A year later, the general consensus was that he had still not recovered: a pallid, stooped figure, seen, if seen at all, staring forlornly at competition result boards and handicap tables in the back room of the clubhouse or down on the practice ground at sundown, scratching his chin and assessing the balls spread diversely in front of him, some or other mail order teaching contraption abandoned on the ground behind him.

Mark explained to me that he was on a mission, and that mission was to shag Christine before his seventeenth birthday. ‘I’m working up to it and slowly getting her interested until one day she just won’t be able to stop thinking about me,’ he said. ‘Is she not a bit old for you?’ I asked. ‘She’s sort of thirty or something, right?’ Mark waved the question away. ‘Twenty-six. I’m tired of the girls our age. I don’t want an immature idiot who writes the name of her favourite band on her pencil case then crosses it out next week when she changes her mind. I want a woman who knows who she is.’ I was often dehydrated by the time Mark and I had completed eighteen holes, especially in what had been a very hot summer, and would have liked to have gone directly from the final green into the Men’s Bar to order a pint of Coke with ice, but Mark always insisted that we followed protocol and visited the locker room to wash our hands and change into our soft shoes beforehand. I soon became aware that Mark, who was otherwise rarely guided by protocol, was driven by an ulterior motive on these occasions, which was to make sure his hair was adequately gelled before he saw Christine. ‘How do I look?’ he would ask me, after liberally applying the gel from one of the circular plastic tubs of it he worked his way through each week. ‘Really good,’ I would reply, more admiring Mark’s hair as a whole than specifically its gelled state. So far, if the gel was having an impact on Christine, she was keeping her cards very close to her chest. To date, the only sentence she’d said to Mark, besides ‘Thanks’, ‘What can I get you?’, ‘Pint or half’ and ‘With ice or without’ had been ‘Ooh, big shot!’ – this being in response to the time Mark paid for two pints of Coke with a fifty-pound note, which he’d got purposely from the bank that weekend, after exchanging it for his birthday money and a month’s wages from his paper round.

Mark’s other goal for his seventeenth birthday was to learn to drive and, when he had done so, very quickly purchase a car and drive it to school where, by which point, he would be attending the sixth form. The comic genius of this plan, we recognised, was that everyone knew that the small council house where Mark lived with his granddad was only seventy yards from the school car park. It was, in fact, the closest house of all to the school.

School was in town, six miles away, and I went there too, but Mark spent a lot of time at our place, in the village, and when he didn’t stay over in my mum and dad’s spare room, his granddad was always on hand to collect him with uncanny punctuality and obedience. Mark’s granddad’s name was Leonard, but Mark never called him that, or ‘Granddad’; what he called him was ‘Old Boy’. ‘Hey look! Here’s Old Boy!’ Mark would say, looking out of our living-room window and spotting Leonard waiting in his Datsun Cherry. Old Boy very rarely knocked on the door when he collected Mark, never seemed anything less than 100 per cent available, never stopped grinning, and always wore a brown tweed cap, which – along with the outmoded and modest nature of his transport – prompted me to think of him less as a grandfather and more as a particularly humble chauffeur. ‘It’s OK. I’ll get Old Boy to take us,’ Mark would say, if Mark and I had a plan for a trip where public transport was inconvenient, which, in Devon, on the brink of the nineties, was nearly all trips. When Mark and I went to Paignton, to play the slot machines, or to Exeter, to watch Iron Maiden in concert, Old Boy waited in the car, happily passing the time listening to the radio or reading a tattered paperback by Patrick O’Brian or CS Forester or another nautically inclined writer. ‘How’s tricks, Paulie, my boy?’ Old Boy would sometimes ask me. ‘Great!’ I would answer. ‘You just wait, you boys. It’s all going to happen for you,’ Old Boy would say. But apart from that, he largely just drove and grinned, with what struck me as the most relaxed of old faces. The Datsun was a car in which I never felt ill at ease, whose interior always smelt verdant and warm and earthy, like a greenhouse.

To my knowledge, Old Boy himself had no particular passion for golf, but it was well known that the clubs Mark used had come directly from Old Boy’s loft: an assorted collection of irons and woods dating from the 1960s, the 1950s and, in the case of one tiny, hickory-shafted nine iron Mark was particularly fond of, 1912. My clubs were considered out of date by many, being second-hand and all at least four years old, but when I played alongside Mark they made me feel decadent and spoilt. ‘You want to bin those sticks and get yourself some golf equipment, son,’ Mike, the car salesman Mark played against in the 1988 club matchplay semi-final, had sneeringly told Mark, prior to Mark casually dispatching him by the handsome total of seven and eight, less than two hours later. New juniors at the club came and went, invariably carrying hi-tech weapons that glinted in the moorland sun. It didn’t bother Mark a bit. A lanky bespectacled boy called Roger Glaister arrived, carrying a gold-shafted driver, hopping casually over the fence from a big house on the lane which his parents had recently purchased, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He spat a lot, in a very idiosyncratic way where the spit forked out into the air through his front teeth. Soon, several other kids at the club were spitting this way too, but not Mark. In their one and only match against each other, the score was quite close for the first nine holes, Glaister taunting Mark all the way with under-the-breath remarks about charity shop clothes, but on the final nine – always his favourite – Mark turned up the heat. By the sixteenth tee, that gold shaft had become two smaller crooked gold shafts, languishing in a wooden dustbin 500 yards distant, Glaister’s £50 Pringle shirt was damp from where his saliva had rebelled on him in a gust of wind, and his ankles were caked in cow dung. Mark beat him by eleven shots in the end. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he told Glaister, shaking his hand and taking a grudgingly proffered £20 note. ‘We must do it again some time.’

We had both improved considerably in the two years we’d been playing together, coaxing one another on, but for Mark the process was different: calm, creative, unfussy. A bad round never seemed to bother him. For me, it was increasingly a case of three steps forward, two steps back, sometimes with one extra step back just after that. I’d noticed golf had been much easier when I knew far less about how to play it. At this point, when I had become much more than just somebody who hit a ball and tried to get it into a little hole in as few strokes as possible, my mind became fascinated with the margins for error, with the allure of the countless potential negative outcomes, as opposed to the one simple potential positive outcome. I watched the pros at Augusta and Lytham and St Andrews and Troon on my mum and dad’s black-and-white TV, and, while there were a few inflamed exceptions – usually men from Spain or South America – the solidly successful ones often came across as robots in jumpers, pastel droids who might potentially sell you some insurance between shots. They did not appear to have exciting brains or, on the few occasions they did, they seemed to have the discipline to make those brains unexciting for the five or so hours they were on the course. They say golf is a game of the mind but that does not mean you actually require one to play it well. It could even be argued that possessing one is a distinct disadvantage. But Mark struck me as more akin to those rare pros who had a bit of swagger to them, who had plenty of intelligence but were able to somehow reduce it, control it, when they were over the ball. It had been me who’d first brought him up to the club, after I took a bag of balls down to the playing field in Underhill and found him already down there, with that prehistoric nine iron of his. I’d barely known him back then, only recognised him as a distant figure from breaktimes and the bus queue, but we’d instantly bonded, and I’d already been in awe of what he could do with just that one Edwardian club: fading it, drawing it, driving it low, more than 150 yards, into a strong breeze, then seconds later using it with great finesse for the featheriest of lobshots. I still had the authority at that point, though: it was me who told him how to grip the club properly, me who recommended his first pair of spiked shoes. I’d overcomplicated it for him, brought him into the universe of handicaps and etiquette and left-hand gloves and deconstructive video lessons and cruel bounces and lip outs and sucker-pin positions, when he could have just stayed happily thwacking balls all day, down behind the village. But, unlike me, he responded to the psychological torments of the game like a Buddha, appeared to sleepwalk through it all, even, shrugging, easy, that looseness in his swing that made him able to power his drives so effortlessly far being a greater looseness; a looseness of face, of eyes, of character, of mind.

That was what made Mark different to everyone else at the golf course: he just never appeared all that bothered. When I consider what would have been happening to him hormonally at this point in his life, this now strikes me as more remarkable still. Golf, so our schoolfriends told us, was a limp old man’s game, a bollockless sport devoid of fireworks or passion, but every week we saw it transform men three times our age hailing from supposedly respectable echelons of society into swearing, club-hurling cavemen, grey hooligans spinning in enraged circles halfway up a hill. You’d no more try to strike up a conversation with these directors of sales and funerals, these commodity traders, these spiritually beige number-crunchers while they were on a bad run of putting than you’d try to stroke a hyena who hadn’t eaten for a fortnight. One week, we bit into our sleeves to stifle our laughter as a retired headmaster greeted a triple bogey seven by taking off one of his shoes, marching several yards into the undergrowth and hurling the shoe into the roaring current of the river. The next, we bit harder still on the fabric as we witnessed an esteemed Plymouth solicitor lose the last of the twelve balls he’d started the day with, turn to a crowd of nearby sheep, and shout, ‘MOTHERFUCK EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU.’ We learned to play alongside those who made their living in outdoor professions if we could: the thatchers, the lumberyard proprietors, the deputy garden centre managers. They were a little less flappable. Still, like the others, many of them questioned why we spent so much time at the club, which was not in fact appreciably more time than the time any of them spent at the club. ‘Don’t you boys have homes to go to?’ the grey hooligans in their pleated slacks would ask, in what, for me, was an early lesson in the fact that, when somebody attacks you out of the blue for something you’re doing that isn’t hurting anyone else, they’re more than likely talking about a wrongness in their own lives. ‘Yes, sir, you are correct: it is strange, us spending our free time playing a sport, in our mid-teens. What must our wives think? Don’t we have livings to earn, mortgages to pay, kids to feed?’ It was as if we were briefly on some upside-down planet, where adults, not children, were expected to misbehave, and indulged for it. Being together on this planet united Mark and me, fortified the walls of our City of Two. And that’s really what we were. Other kids were often around, kids from more affluent families than ours, but they never stayed long, never challenged for competitions. In May, there was a proposal – thankfully quashed, in a rare moment of sanity – at a committee meeting to reduce the number of days junior members were permitted to play at the club. The proposal was talked about as if there were juniors everywhere, vast armies of them, running up the fairways every evening, farting on blackbirds and kicking over bins. But it was mostly just me and Mark. Then, after I broke my arm the following month, it was Mark, all alone, fending for himself amongst the grey yobs.

Up to this point, I’d not knowingly heard any genuinely offensive remarks directed towards Mark at the club. But, now he was winning more tournaments and shooting up in height, he was becoming more widely noticed, and I know his appearance would have been perceived as an extra threat by many of these men who nudged one another and muttered under their breath when they saw him take the prizes at their tournaments, this lanky mixed-race child from who knew where, with his untucked school shirt and hand-me-down equipment and that hair springing higher and higher above his head, towering above their combovers. Mark was good at saving the little money he earned from his paper round, and could no doubt have bought the standard kind of polo shirt most golfers wore, or even got his granddad or his mum to buy him one for his birthday or Christmas, but it would simply have never occurred to him as being important. Mark virtually never spoke to me about his parents. It had been close to a decade since he’d last lived with them. I knew from him only that his dad now resided in France. My parents, meanwhile, had told me that Mark’s mum was currently ‘living in Weston-super-Mare and having some difficulties’.

How did I break my arm? I think the official cause could be cited as ‘having shit for brains’. My cousins were down from Walsall for the weekend, we’d taken a dozen cans of cheap lager up to the rocks on top of Underhill tor, and I was showing off. I took a run up and attempted to vault the gap between the two tallest rocks, the top ones on the bit that looks like stairs, and didn’t quite make it. Truth is, I was lucky not to hurt myself a lot more severely, as it’s pretty high there, and in the crevices between the clitter the granite sticks out like broken crowns in an old mouth. Even with my arm in its cast, I continued to follow Mark up to the practice ground once every few evenings. That’s how pleasurable it was to watch him hit balls. That’s what we loved: hitting balls. Not the shoes or the handicap system or the cut glass or the silverware or the single leather gloves or the wood panelling or the tee pegs or the gold shafts or the handshakes or the reserved parking spaces or the Eric Finch Foursome Matchplay Bowl or the Garden Room or the Men’s Bar or the sixty-degree Tom Watson beryllium copper sand irons or the patriarchal badinage but the pure nirvana of metal cleanly strikingly rubber at high speed with minimum effort. I’d played tennis, and football, and squash, and badminton, and table tennis, but nothing quite compared, contact-wise. When you got it right, you felt like hitting golf balls – and here I mean hitting golf balls as a separate entity to the game of golf – was another preordained human need, like eating or breathing, something that was always meant to be here and always would be here. That was why Mark and I were here, at least four days out of seven, every week. That sensation, like sap rising up our arms, blossoming in our necks and shoulders, flowering in our brains like a million of the most vivid poppies all at once. I chased it in the way that later, in the mess of adult life, I’d chase the memory of my most transcendental orgasms. The elusive nature of the pure strike made it all the more appealing. It didn’t actually happen that often, for me. But with Mark, it occurred in long, sustained bursts. He hit a sweet zone of rhythmical calm. He was a great player on the course, but on the practice ground, without the distractions of competition, he was an ethereal one, an alchemist, a Zen wizard. I could have watched him forever.

One night in late June, after he’d hit balls until we no longer could see where they landed, we took our usual route home over the jutting, unimpressed elbow of the tor. The last purple streaks of the sun toasted the hilltops and owls made lewd suggestions to one another down in the woods by the river. Mark, however, had not been the last man swinging. That honour went to the Irish Doctors, whose trolleys could be seen very slowly approaching the seventeenth tee in the mauve half-light. At the club, nicknames stuck like dog hair to merino wool. A wiry, anxious weekend player called Phil who’d once missed a crucial putt when he was distracted by the call of a skein of Canada geese overhead was thereafter known to all as ‘Quack’. Carl Marchwell, who was infamous for telling all of his playing companions in great detail about his week and lacked the skill of self-editing, hadn’t been called ‘Carl’ by anybody at the club for years; he was always ‘Jackanory’. Ian Welcombe, who liked to bet big money on foursome matches but had never, to anybody’s knowledge, actually won, was ‘The Bank’. Jill, Ian’s wife – one of the few female members of the club who actually seemed to enjoy the game – was not ‘Jill’ but ‘Mrs Bank’. Recently I’d overheard people talking about somebody called ‘Jam Jar’ but I was yet to find out who that was. The Irish Doctors, however, were just the Irish Doctors. No nickname, collective or otherwise, could have been more definitive or catchy than their quintessential Irish Doctorness. There were six of them in all, although legend was that there had at one point been eight. Generally, playing in groups of more than four was severely frowned upon, but special, unspoken dispensation was given to the Irish Doctors, who always operated as a gang. This – and the fact that each of them was in his ninth decade – meant their pace of play was very slow and they spent a large amount of their round standing aside and letting other groups through. Mark and I liked the Irish Doctors, who were the jovial antithesis of the grey hooligans a generation or two beneath them, and we’d have both been happy to play alongside them, were it not for the fact that, not being Irish doctors ourselves, that would have been an affront to the natural rhythm of the earth, and would have made their progress even more excruciating. As was usually the case, today they would not hole their final putts before the light had totally vanished.

We passed through clouds of midges as we came down the back side of the tor and along the sunken track leading down to the river, watery rubble under our feet, the metal in Mark’s bag pounding out a clanking beat several yards ahead of me. We always carried our bags on our shoulders, never resorted to a trolley and, as with many child golfers, the spinal damage it caused would be evident in my posture later in life. I heard a distant cry of ‘Cracking shot, Seamus!’ and a faint, delayed thud of a ball being propelled a modest distance forward by frail hands, then I rounded a sharp bend and all was silent, beside the chorus of the water. I found Mark sitting on the old packhorse bridge, rolling a cigarette, and joined him.

‘Look at that,’ said Mark, pointing to the liquid beneath our dangling feet, rushing clear over the black rocks and coppery pebbles. ‘It’s magic, that is. That’s what it is. Think of all of what’s up on the moor every day: all the dead sheep bones, all the pony shit, and peat, all our pollution, being sucked up into the clouds then rained down back into the streams. But it still comes down here every day, looking like that. You know what I do, the first thing I do, every time I’ve been away from Devon? I rush straight to the tap and fill a glass. It always tastes so good.’

‘My dad said the water in London is full of women’s pills and cocaine,’ I said. ‘So every time you have a drink out of the tap there, you’re doing drugs and stopping yourself getting knocked up.’

‘You know it’s all bullshit, this? All wrong. Well, not this. Definitely not this. But that.’ He gestured back up the sunken track, in the vague direction of the course.

‘All what?’

‘Just because there are cows and sheep and ponies there, just because they didn’t get rid of some of the rocks. It doesn’t mean it’s real. If grass had a choice, it wouldn’t do what it’s doing up there. It was never meant to be like that.’

‘But if it was never meant to be like that, maybe this footbridge wasn’t meant to be like this, either?’

I had made a den close to here one time when I was little, a few hundred yards closer to the village, using an old mattress and a few other mouldy abandoned household bits and bobs I’d found. When I told my mum, she told me to avoid abandoned freezers because children climb into them then can’t get the door open again and die.

‘I dunno. There’s natural and there’s natural. You know the shit they pour onto that golf course. You know how many insects it kills? I’m just saying. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.’

‘I’ve got to have a piss.’

I was always careful where I had a wee when I was outdoors. It was one of those ways in which golf made me an adolescent with a little more decorum than most. An older playing partner had told me it was very important to choose a surreptitious spot, in case any lady members were nearby, and my habit of doing that carried over into any pissing that I did in the fresh air, even beyond golfing parameters. I mention this because, had I not been so careful about picking my spot, I might not have pissed on the stranger’s hand at all. I’d been pissing for several seconds before I heard him – or, as it seemed, the brambles and bracken in front of me – groan and as I did I leapt sideways, spraying urine on my left trouser leg and shoe in the process. ‘Mark! Fucking hell!’ I shouted, which in retrospect shows me just how much I looked up to my friend, viewed him as, in some way, my protector.

He rushed over and, careful not to touch the foliage that was still wet with my spray, parted the leaves and fronds to reveal a long male body, supine in the mulch below them. The body’s eyes were closed and, when Mark asked the face on the end of the body if it was OK, it grunted, as if in dreamy reassurance. In a way the face seemed a bit like the faces of lads just a few years older than us but the paperiness of its complexion and the colour of the stubble on it made me perplexed about how old its owner was. A camera, quite an old one, hung around the man’s neck by a strap. He did not look what I would have called healthy and seemed unable to open his eyes yet there was a sense that the reason he was not able to open them was that he was in a very delicious sort of sleep that he was reluctant to emerge from. Mark asked him some questions, including ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘How did you end up here?’, and when the stranger only answered with more oddly tranquil grunts and did not move, it was agreed that I would head into Underhill to get help. My arm, being still only half-healed, impeded my progress and it took me close to half an hour to reach the village.

My intention was to go home and call for an ambulance but part of me wondered if that would be time-wasting, as the man didn’t actually seem hurt in any way, and on my way past the Co-op I bumped into Steve Clayton, who’d narrowly beat me in the club matchplay last year and used to be in the army. Steve obviously noticed that I looked flustered and asked me what was wrong and I told him about the man and he said he’d come back down the path with me. Steve was strong and I decided that with the help of Mark and both of Mark’s working arms he could probably carry the man back to the village if it came to that. What had been confusing to me when I’d first met Steve was that, despite him being very muscly, Steve couldn’t hit his golf ball very far at all, and the strongest part of his game was his putting. But since then I’d found out that obvious physical strength counted for nothing in golf. It was all about rhythm and timing and you often got blokes who looked like Tarzan or He-Man who barely hit the ball anywhere and people like Mark who only weighed nine and a half stone but could lamp it into the next county. Steve’s massive arms were a moot point anyway, though, because when we arrived back at the spot where I’d done my wee neither Mark nor the stranger were anywhere to be seen. Now I was embarrassed and felt like Steve probably thought I was lying again, because last winter he’d asked me what kind of putter I’d used and it was a Wilson but I’d said it was a Spalding but only because I’d forgotten and when we played together he saw the putter and said, ‘I thought you had a Spalding?’ He was OK about being dragged out there, though; he just looked at me a bit queryingly, and said he had to get back to the shop and get some steaks for his missus to cook that night, and that it was dark and I should get home soon but that I should call him if anything else happened or I couldn’t find Mark and he would call his mate John who worked for the police. I didn’t walk back down the path with him because I felt like it might be weird and we might run out of things to talk about. Instead I went and stood by the packhorse bridge for a while, listening to the water and thinking about what Mark had said about it. I could hear a cuckoo up in the woods round the back of the tor, the first one of the year. My mum had said there had been loads when she was a kid. I walked back a different way, past a ruined barn above where my gran said they used to hold the old fayres, which always gave me the creeps, like something bad had happened there.

Something about the way Mark was, how thoroughly OK he always seemed to be, made me sure he’d be OK now, and I didn’t feel like there was anything very scary or threatening about the man on the ground, but I was still a trolley of nerves for the couple of hours after I arrived home, doing my best to hide that from my mum and dad while also trying Mark’s home number every ten minutes and getting no answer (Old Boy was clearly also out). Finally, just as I could hear the theme tune from the News at Ten coming from the telly downstairs, he picked up.

‘What happened? Where did you go?’ I asked, without even saying hello.

‘Nothing. Well, some stuff. But nothing bad. He was OK. He got up after we left. We went back to his house. Well, it’s not a house. It’s a tent. In the woods. He’s from California. We smoked some stuff he had. He plays guitar. He’s cool. He has a bad head, he says, and it makes him sleep in weird places. But he’s OK. It’s OK. He coughed a lot, though. I was about to call you.’

‘Steve Clayton might have told the police.’