The gulls hover high above him as he loses first blood and then consciousness.
The boy couldn’t miss any more school so he rose early, quietly drank milk from the bottle and then took one of his father’s Capstans. The birds were singing when he left the house, and the day was just a tiny torn streak across the hem of the darkened sky.
The oiled trap was wrapped up in an old rag that was tucked into the pit of his arm. A bread roll was in his pocket. He walked down empty streets and he whistled as the sun unfolded itself across the sky and the day was born as if for the very first time.
To rid the tip of rats would be doing the town a favour, he thought. One or two a day was a lot of rats, whichever way up you looked at it.
He climbed a fence and dropped into the still and silent wood.
As the boy approached the old tip, the air was heavy with a fugue-like haze and the trees were as tall as church spires.
He unwrapped the gin trap and crouched, hooking his thumb through the spring eye and then squeezing the sprung bar down. It took one foot to hold the device in place and all his strength to prise open the jaws. He used a rock to wedge it while he slotted the catch. Without taking his eye off the contraption he felt around for a stick, and when he found one the boy gently tapped the rusted base plate and – snap. He jumped as the jaws slammed shut and the stick sheared in two. The teeth locked tightly together.
The ferocity of the device’s violence was alarming and thrilling. He wanted to see it in action again immediately so he did one more test run and then carefully baited it with bread and walked backwards in case his movements set it off a third time.
He sat back on a damp mattress and took out the cigarette. From here you could see through the trees to the patchwork of fields that his father worked further down the valley. The cigarette was bent but not broken. The boy lit it and inhaled. Coughed. He was still learning how to smoke and preferred to do it alone. Also it made him feel sick and dizzy. He smoked it halfway and then he carefully ground it out and pocketed what was left.
The boy watched the trap for a little longer. The wood was quiet and still, and though he wanted to lie back and stay here forever, he stood and stretched and reluctantly began the walk to school.
The man wakes to silence and the sun on his face. The sun blinding him. There are no birds and his legs are ruined up to the thigh. They are shattered and matted and dripping.
Time becomes a new thing to consider now. It has been recalibrated to an abstract configuration based upon pain.
The man is shaking uncontrollably and he is cold and he feels stupid here, propped upright in the machine, like a piece of bread stuck in a toaster or an old bank statement fed into an office shredder. He hates himself for allowing this to happen. For manufacturing his own indignity.
Once, there would have been other men here. Labourers and pieceworkers. There would have been a team but now there is only a machine and the machine is controlling him and there is no one to hear his muted moans and dry heaves.
The man feels the thousand acres of English soil begin to rotate around him. He is the epicentre of a centrifugal force that is driving the landscape and driving the planet as the soil circles. He retches as something bitter splashes at the back of his throat. He tries to spit, but drools on his chin instead. Something wet hangs there for a moment before falling on to his work shirt.
To move an eyelid is to increase his suffering and to breathe is to plumb the depths of this wellspring of pain. But breathe he must, so this is what he focuses on: inhaling and then exhaling. It is the most complicated thing he has had to do in his life. Inhaling and then exhaling. Each breath is a century of pain but it does not hurt as much as the realisation that he may never be found; that the sun will move across the sky and day will become night and night will become day again, and there will be no one around to miss him and eventually he will rot and the machine will still be standing here in the middle of the field for decades, rusting into stasis, a relic for future days.
The gulls that seemed to disappear have now returned. The man can hear them behind him, first as they argue over worms and then more loudly when they are disturbed by a bullish crow that arrives amongst them like a black napkin blown in on the breeze.
The engine ticks over.
Dusk had settled over the wood like a curtain falling.
The insistent reedy rattle of a far-off woodpecker tapped out a rhythm to echo up through the columns as the boy crossed the tip towards the trap.
The evening was perfectly still until something rounded appeared to rise before him, an ungainly thing ten yards away from where he had set the trap. It was a badger with its teeth bared.
The boy stopped and held his breath and then he found a stick and slowly walked towards it. The creature cowered and balled up. Its front right leg was caught between the jaws of the gin trap, close to its knee joint.
As he got closer the badger snittered. It was a diabolical sound of pure and concentrated fear.
There was blood around its maw. It was matted there. Tufted. With eyes open wide the badger tried to flee, but the trap anchored it to the soil and it could only awkwardly drag it. The boy saw a further trail of blood across the surface of the tip.
Only then did he notice the ragged wound below the teeth of the trap – much further down towards its foot. It could not have been caused by the trap. The boy looked again and he saw the blood and the sharp teeth and the badger’s eyes and then he understood.
This wound was of its own making. In its desperation, the creature was trying to chew off its own paw. Deep in the hot wet redness of the self-inflicted wound that was the beginnings of an amputation, the boy could see bone.
He turned and ran and he kept running.
The sun has climbed the ladder of the sky and the man can feel his head burning under its glare. The itchiness of his scalp now bothers him more than his extirpated lower limbs.
He calculates it to be as close to midday as you can register without a watch.
Perhaps sensing a better feeding ground elsewhere – the man imagines a rising shoal of herring speckling the surface of the North Sea silver – the gulls have left him again and the field is silent.
He has not yet dared to look down but when he finally forces himself to he sees his waist is as normal, but beneath it through the gaps in the metal machinery there is a tattered dangling mess. He can see strings and blood and ribbons and no feet, and only then does the man remember the badger of his childhood.
Only then does he remember the look in the creature’s eyes all those years ago, as it flapped and flailed in the dirt of the tip. And the noise it made: the howl of a cornered and fearful thing.
He hears it again as he opens up his lungs and the same howl rises high above him. Hears it trapped in the amber of the moment.
The father beat the boy and when the boy had stopped crying they took torches and walked in silence up to the road and then on to the back track. At night the wood wore a different mask; it was a haunted place alive with creaks and groans and the warning calls of beasts. Once, something loud exploded from the branches above them but it was gone before their beams could frame it. Later the boy thought he felt something brush lightly across his shins as he walked but he did not dare mention it.
He led his father down the slopes to the tip and when he reached it he pointed with his torch and right up until this last moment he still held hope that the creature would not be there – that it had managed to free itself or, better still, someone had freed it for them – and for a second it seemed like it had gone, but then the boy saw that it had dragged the trap back to where he had originally set it.
The badger was tired. The fight within it was fading, but their arrival galvanised it into one final flurry of panic as it slunk in retreat and made a piercing noise. It was a howl of terror accompanied by a frantic scratching at the earth.
Two metallic-blue eyes stared into the source of the light as his father put a hand fir
mly on the boy’s chest and said: ‘Wait here – and keep that beam on it.’
The boy did as he was told until his father raised the wrench high above his head and then he dropped the torch, and everything was darkness.
The Folk Song Singer
The sky is stretched tight across the city. It has a strange hue and there is a charge to the air. It is storm season and the clouds are moiling.
He arrives uncharacteristically early and takes a seat so that he can look down the street and watch her walk, can observe her without the pretence of the interview situation. He sits for a minute before deciding that perhaps she might not like being on display like that, like meat in a butcher’s window, so he moves to a table further back, in the darker corner of the cafe.
He has crossed seven postcodes and one river to be here in West London. Unfamiliar territory.
The cafe was her publicist’s suggestion. He had said it was just around the corner from her house and that she would feel at ease there. She did not do many interviews these days. She was, the publicist had said, nervous. Reticent was another word that was used.
The writer checks his notepad, checks his tape recorder. He orders coffee and a glass of water. He opens a packet of strong mints and tips one into his mouth but finds himself chewing it straight away and the sharp sugary chunks stick in his throat. He is coughing when the folk song singer arrives. He is swallowing water when she walks towards him.
She glides.
She is smaller in real life. In his experience they usually are – almost every pop star he has ever interviewed.
They shake hands awkwardly – he squeezing too hard and she flinching, retracting and then wordlessly retreating to the counter to order coffee.
She looks older than in those photographs so familiar to him. He should not be surprised – she has been out of the public eye for years. There have been no TV appearances and only the odd magazine retrospective around the time of a rare new release, usually a reformatted album reissue. But her famed bone structure is still striking and her cobalt eyes the bluest he has seen. So chillingly blue he finds it hard to look directly at her.
She is wearing a nutmeg-coloured blouse and is swathed in silk scarves despite the mugginess of the August afternoon.
She is an attractive woman.
The writer wonders if she is attractive because it is her, the folk song singer whose music he has grown up on, whose voice defined an era, and whether that attraction comes merely from recognition and admiration in the same way that he once had a slightly unexpected crush on Germaine Greer after seeing her absent-mindedly tearing at a croissant in Brixton Market. Or is it simply because ageing can never fully wither a strong frame and good cheekbones – that it can crack the paint but not the canvas?
She rattles with bangles as she sits. The coffee follows her and she thanks the waiter by his first name. For a fleeting moment the writer experiences that disconnected sense of being faced with someone so utterly familiar yet completely unknown: an intimate stranger. For most of his life she has been a voice in a spiralling groove on old vinyl, and a half-dozen iconic promotional photos. An Old Grey Whistle Test clip on YouTube. Their relationship has been a one-way street – him consuming her – and now that strange sensation is creeping towards anxiety. It feels like fingers tapping at the underside of his sternum; a sharpening of the senses, yet a disarming mental blankness too.
The folk song singer puts on her glasses and looks at him, seeing him for the first time. Her expression is neutral and her earrings are a miniature set of peacock feathers. One on each side.
An extra set of eyes observing him.
‘Congratulations on your new album,’ he says, because he has to say something. His job is, of course, to initiate. ‘I like it a lot.’
‘Thank you. But you really don’t have to say that.’
‘No, I genuinely like it.’
She nods. ‘You sound surprised at this discovery?’
‘No, it’s just that some old – ’
He catches himself.
‘I mean, when you’ve had as long a career as you – ’
‘It’s not that long. Most of it is crammed into a little over a ten-year period.’
‘The seventies?’
‘More or less. Starting at the fag-end of the sixties and on into the early eighties.’
‘It’s interesting you say that because I was going to ask about when you wrote – ’
‘Let me just stop you there for a second because I think I know what comes next.’
‘You do?’
‘Yes. Do you know how many recorded songs I’ve sung on?’
‘No. A lot, I imagine.’
‘My publisher does. He tells me that it’s two hundred and twenty-four. That includes singles, album tracks, other people’s songs, backing vocals, jingles. Everything that warrants a mechanical royalty.’
‘That’s substantial.’
‘It is substantial, yes. And do you know how many of those I get asked about?’
He demurs. ‘Point taken.’
‘One,’ she continues. ‘One song. “We Walk Through the Woodlands”. That’s what you were going to ask about, wasn’t it? “We Walk Through the bloody Woodlands”.’
He pauses for a moment to regroup his thoughts.
‘Don’t you think it’s natural to want to ask about that song, though? It’s practically the national anthem of the folk world; people will still be singing that in a hundred years’ time. There are very few other songs I could say that about.’
‘Well. Neither of us will ever know.’
‘It must have been kind to you.’
‘You mean financially?’
‘Well, yes. Partly.’
‘Possibly not as kind as you might think. I only have a co-credit.’
‘But you’ve never had to – ’
Again she interrupts him. ‘Work? Well, I’ve never had a proper job like criticising people’s music, if that’s what you mean.’
They never change, she thinks. Not really. They are always male, for starters. Always. And of a certain disposition. Nervy and earnest. Keen to impress, yes, but their conversation always undercut with a streak of almost confrontational pedantry. They know facts and dates and session musicians and chart positions – the mental clutter of a patchwork career – that she has simply never bothered to memorise.
They still don’t know how to dress themselves either. In a small concession towards formality she sees that the writer has put a shirt on, but it is creased and ill-fitting, fresh off a dismal studio-flat floor in a high-number postcode.
They live in their own worlds too, these jeans-and-T-shirt men. Music is their everything. And if not music, they would surely fixate on something else with the same obsessive devotion to completism and cataloguing. Fishing, cars, football. Pornography, perhaps. In her experience, all music journalists have shared a sense of fastidiousness.
They were like this back in the early seventies. Then, she endured a seemingly endless parade of them. They all smoked, they all grew out their beards and they were all of the left – as was she, but hopefully not to the point of caricature. The musicians were no different from the writers then either. They railed against greed and breadheads but sold one another out as soon as a cheque was dangled in front of them. They spoke out against homophobia and racism and oppression, then backhanded any women – their women, as ownership was always asserted and claims staked – that did them wrong. They trod all over them. Trampled them. But, of course, when the espadrille was on the other foot they were allowed to sleep with whichever ingénue was close at hand.
She was soft then. She was young and open and excited and naive.
But they hardened her, these men with their questions and their snide reviews. Their prodding and probing. Cajoling. They all tried to sleep with her and they all turned bitter when she rebuked them. Every single one of them. The other musicians, the soundmen, the roadies. The label guys.
As wa
s well documented at the time, it was a fist and a cracked tooth at a residential studio somewhere in deepest Cornwall that brought about the dissolution of one of the most successful male-female duos of the era. This was the early eighties and by then she had grown a tough hide to protect herself. It felt like the world had grown hard too.
She drove straight back to London on the B-roads that night and never sang with Simon Healy again. She couldn’t write for years afterwards because there are no more love songs to be written when all you feel is hate – and her hatred struggled to find a melody to sustain it.
Soon enough – perhaps inevitably – the journalists came knocking after the initial press release had been issued to the weeklies. More men with more questions. She ignored them all and they wrote what they wanted anyway: that she was the bitch who broke Healy’s heart; that the sensitive and fragile songwriter-of-a-generation had been left licking his wounds with only a guitar for company.
In the months that followed she saw history slowly being revised before her very eyes. Suddenly their songs were his songs. Their stories his stories. The new folk network and the industry types all took his side and in time her songs – songs written by her or for her – were being sung by younger, prettier versions of herself, stripped of all meaning on the lips of doe-eyed careerists.
He dined on heartache for the next decade, did Simon. He experimented with synthesisers. He got three studio albums out of their split.
She left him to it, left them all to it, remained tight-lipped. She retreated into children, divorce and domesticity. She slept around. She enjoyed the company of uncomplicated women. She lived. Breathed. Repaired.
Male Tears Page 2