Occasionally in October picking time a few of the English workers might stay on to spend their days up rusty ladders in the old orchard snatching apples from the breeze before the worms moved in and the first frost hit, but that harvest was a shortening window and by then most had already moved on, to rented flats and seaside caravan parks, to estates and hostels and tower blocks. To malnourished children and mean-eyed women awaiting a summer’s wages already supped and spent.
Not Ray-Ray, though. Ray-Ray stayed. Uncle said he could stop in the static so long as he didn’t mind the cracked glass and the perishing cold, or expect work when the rutted furrows were under a rink of ice and the barn beasts were lowing, and there was little for a man to do after the milking except dream of the endless golden days of summer to come.
He fixed the place up good. He scrubbed off the mildew with a bucket of bleach and patched up that cracked window with cardboard and tape. There was a wood-burner in there that provided heat and space for one-pot cooking, and Uncle gave him cords of logs and kindling too.
Now and again Ray-Ray would let me into the van and once he gave me a tin of dimps to break down and rake out on a sheet of newspaper for re-rolling, the bitter twists of half-burned tobacco shredded and mixed and then shredded again, the recycled smoke turning my young tongue a mustard yellow.
I was eleven then and had already been nailing the tabs two years.
He said little but when I asked him why he was called Ray-Ray he told me he was named Raymond Raymond Robinson, after both his father, Raymond Robinson Jr, and his grandfather, also Raymond Robinson. That made him Ray-Ray Jr Jr and I think his mother must have liked the name because it stuck like a burr, but when I said as much he just shrugged and replied that it wasn’t the worst he’d had done to him.
He was also the first man I’d seen who had tattoos up his forearms – just his forearms, though – so that when he stripped shirtless in the sticky summer months he looked odd with his white biceps and hairless chest ink-free, his torso gradually browning as the shadows of the seasons stretched long, but his lower arms busy with swallows and skulls and names and dates on them, and strange sigils and insignias that I inherently understood represented nothing good.
One time I knocked on for him but Ray-Ray didn’t answer, so I banged harder and eventually the door swung open and he leaned there in the doorway, blocking it and squinting as if the sun was in his face even though it was a damp November morning with a fine mizzle falling, and when he said what is it that you’re wanting and I said nothing Ray-Ray, I saw a tinder spark of anger flash behind his eyes.
Go play round your own doors, then.
When he went back inside I thought I heard the voice of someone else in there but I couldn’t be sure because by then he had pinned old sheets to the insides of his windows, and something in his voice told me not to meddle.
A week or so after that it started snowing and it didn’t let up for two whole days and nights.
First the flakes fell straight down, fat and gentle, and then they blew in sideways, whipping across the fields to rattle the corrugated sheets of the barns and sheds and pelt the farmhouse windows, and it came in so dark you could barely see the dim light from the battery lamp that hung in Ray-Ray’s van across the yard.
In the morning I went to see him but there was no answer. I tried the door and when it opened of its own accord I was met by a slightly sour smell hanging in there. Clothes were scattered on the floor and dirty sauce-stained plates were stacked tilted in the tiny sink; Ray-Ray’s water came from an outside tap and plastic bottles of different sizes stood around the van.
I stepped inside.
I knew that I shouldn’t be in his private space; the thump of my heart in my eardrums told me so. I knew too that I was encroaching, and that could bring about trouble. He had once told me that in prison a man never walks into another’s cell without being invited because it is such rituals and considerations that maintain a semblance of order under cramped conditions. Every man needs his cave and to cross his threshold unasked brings trouble, Ray-Ray said, yet here I was wandering into his home.
A shaft of dull light crept in through a narrow gap where one of the sheets had come free and dust danced there. But still I didn’t leave.
The wardrobe door was ajar. I opened it with the tip of one finger.
In it there hung a pair of coveralls, a padded plaid work shirt and a dress.
I leaned into the darkness and touched the dress, then pressed my face to it, smelling the scent of Ray-Ray’s secret girlfriend in a cocktail of citrus-sharp perfume, smoke and the dried remnants of sticky drinks spilled in the after-hours hinterlands of bars and clubs, places I did not understand but knew existed out there beyond the barbed-wire fences and five-bar gates that were the limit of my life then.
The feminine odours were an intrusion amongst the rank stench of cow scat and rotting mulch piles that sat in the farm’s barns or trickled down its silage drains, this world of men, and in that moment deep within me was evoked a distant memory of a mother I had barely known, and whose face I could not recall. In that scent she came back to me, briefly reanimated.
As I tramped back to the house I felt exhilarated and glad of the fresh falling snow that would cover the guilty footprints of a bored and curious boy stuck out there in the remote pastures of the north country, searching for meaning on the blank canvas of winter.
Christmas came and Uncle slaughtered a suckling pig and roasted a few geese that he had been fattening with a grain mix that he liked to dash with cheap rum.
That night we were joined in the kitchen by a number of neighbours, many of whom had trudged across the fields to feast, and on Boxing Day we rose early to load up the truck with sacks of logs, plastic jugs of a home-brewed cider that Unc called Lightmeup and which he spiced himself with cloves and raisins soaked in spirits, and leftover cold cuts wrapped up in greaseproof paper, and we took them to the furthest-flung families of the valley, where fathers were out of work, injured, signed off, incarcerated or absent.
Ray-Ray rode with us, smoking out the window, and when we stopped he threw down supplies for me to take to the doors of these places of poverty and want, where families existed in isolation, who rarely saw a city. At each we were offered nips of whiskey or pouches of tobacco or jars of jam. Everyone knew Uncle; his name was good.
When he and Ray-Ray declined a drink the women pressed slices of fruit cake wrapped in thick marzipan or twists of paper containing nuts and raisins into my hands instead. At one house I was gifted a brand-new hand-knitted scarf.
On the morning of New Year’s Eve, I was up early to muck out the pigs and do all my usual chores when a man appeared in the yard. He nodded at me.
‘Looking for a lad by the name of Ray-Ray.’ When I didn’t reply he said: ‘Do you know him?’
Even then I understood that to be a man of the world was to say little and be discreet at all times. Sometimes a grunt or a look was enough. Always best to let others do the talking, Unc said.
I pointed to his van.
The man turned.
‘There, is he?’
I shrugged.
‘A friend, are you?’ I said.
‘We were inside as kids,’ he said. ‘Then later I celled with him in Durham. Is he here, then?’
I shrugged again.
‘Bloody hillbillies,’ he muttered, and then walked to the van.
The snow came down thicker that evening and I watched from my window as it silently settled on the hardened crust of ice. It sat on the power lines and blanketed the muddy morass of the yard.
Uncle let me stay up until after midnight, the two of us staring into the banked fire, flinching as the logs hissed and popped, until finally he stood and said well, that’s another one gone, and then climbed the creaking stairs to a bedroom I never saw.
I could not sleep. In the deepest part of night, when all was still and white, I heard a skein of migrating geese fly overhead and then just moments later
a cough followed by footsteps. I parted the curtain and saw two women tottering through the snow and into the yard.
They were drunk as owls and unsteady on the ice. They held their coats shut and clung to each other. Flakes of snow had settled into their styled hair. Their heels imprinted tiny dots in the fresh white carpet.
The two women went into Ray-Ray’s static caravan and shut the door behind them. Minutes passed as I watched the faint light flickering through the snow-thick night and it was like that of a lighthouse seen by a solitary lovesick sailor from far out at sea. I wondered if it was true that the architecture of each flake was unique.
The night was too alive and my mind too curious for sleep so I climbed out from under my blankets and pulled on my clothes. Downstairs, the fire was still glowing in the grate and the front room was so warm that I hesitated there for a moment. Then I opened the door and went into the yard.
The snow sat shin-deep and was still coming down, the flakes spinning silently, the light a strange shade of darkened purple, like a two-day bruise.
The snow came in over my boots. I was not wearing any socks.
As I crossed the yard to the van I heard the jostle and clatter of the cows in their shed, and the occasional snort.
Ray-Ray’s van sat low in the snow, as if the ground were consuming it slowly. I went to the window, taking quiet high steps through the drifts that had curled up to the side of it.
Gentle music came from within. Treading slowly and carefully, I looked through the tiny gap between the hung sheets and saw that the inside of the van was lit by candles in glass bottles, the wicks flickering as oily white wax dripped down their necks.
One of the women had her back to me and was obscuring my view. I held my breath so as not to steam the glass as she laughed and tipped her head back, and then stood, swaying slightly on muscular hairy legs.
I saw then sitting opposite her was Ray-Ray in the same dress that had been hanging in his wardrobe. A wig was on the table before him, splayed like the pelt of a skinned animal, his bare arms carrying the strength of ten men, those familiar tattoos telling the narrative of his life.
He too was laughing as he brought his lighter up to the stub of his cigarette, and around me the silent snow fell thicker still.
The Astronaut
After he had looked back at the earth from the surface of the moon, his entire perspective changed. Suddenly the little things in life – golf, haircuts, birthday parties – seemed to be robbed of all meaning.
Friends and family back home thought that space travel might have given him a greater appreciation for the minutiae of existence. Even the scientists, humbled by the magnitude of the successful mission, were prone to such sentimentality, but in fact the astronaut found he experienced quite the opposite. Now when he looked at his fellow humans he felt only a sense of deflation and disdain.
After the initial swell of publicity receded, he went into freefall. His world shrank. He drank. He went from being an astronaut to a former astronaut and he felt far more alone than he had while perilously floating 238,000 miles above all that he knew.
Everyone asked him the same thing: ‘What was it like,’ they wondered, ‘to walk on the moon?’ Everywhere he went. In restaurants, at petrol pumps, even at urinals. Unable to succinctly encapsulate this awesome spectacle against the banal backdrop of modern earthly life, especially while urinating, he took to hurrying away, mumbling, the front of his trousers spotted with unwanted droplets.
To millions he was a hero whose footprint was one of the first to grace the moon’s surface, but most mornings he couldn’t get out of bed. Everything was exhausting.
His wife left him for a granola salesman with a pug and a trike. He saw his children twice a month on Sundays.
Such trouble adjusting to normality is common among astronauts, for in their hearts there is a vortex as bottomless as a black hole and in their eyes the dying embers of fading stars.
Bomber
That final night Bomber had an argument with Karen in the pub. It was very vocal and involved much waving of limbs and wagging of digits, mainly on her part. Everyone heard it, and those who didn’t hear it saw it from the street as they skidded by on the frosted flagstones of the city’s old pavement, such was the ferocity of Karen’s gesticulations, accusations and all-round character assassination.
She was sick of his shit. Sick of his drinking and staying out all night; sick of the greasy bike parts in the front room and the unkept promise of taking her away somewhere nice like Cornwall or Greece.
After a minute or two of this, Bomber gave up on defending himself and stopped speaking entirely, affecting a studied air of nonchalance. Sitting on his usual stool at the bar and looking around the room with deliberate indifference, overly impervious to her litany of complaints, he casually raised his pint of heavy and drained it in two gulps.
To anyone who knew him it was just Bomber being Bomber. Unfazed. Cool as.
Only when he smirked and Karen tried to claw his face, and she had to be pulled back by Andy, Mad Neil and Rasputin, did he seem rattled.
After she had been bustled away into the snug and brought a double Midori to help calm her down, Bomber threaded his bare arms back into his leather jacket, jerked it into place and, though he was only four pints into what had otherwise been shaping up to be a promising Friday night, left.
He went straight home and painted himself black.
The decision wasn’t racially motivated; skin colour was never a consideration, and Bomber would have fervently argued his defence if anyone had thought otherwise. Midnight Black Gloss was simply the only tin of paint he had to hand, and to cover himself in it seemed like the perfect protest against Karen’s public humiliation of him in front of his friends and no short number of strangers. It was a bold declaration, a very visual statement of his daring and sheer fuck-offness, for which he believed himself to be widely admired.
Bomber slid a live Motörhead bootleg into the stereo and then went upstairs, took his clothes off, climbed into the bath and with a brush began to carefully baste himself in the thick paint, stopping now and again to take hearty glugs from a ten-glass bottle of whiskey that was left over from last Christmas.
He worked from the ankles up, covering the curves of his calves and his thick white thighs, his cock and balls. He liked the way the hairs on his body looked beneath the obsidian sheen of the paint. Bomber kept going and though the whiskey was cheap, it went down. A mixer would have been nice, he thought, but he was too far into his self-decoration to break the creative flow. Instead he added a little cold water to the bottle from the bath tap.
His arms and hands were harder to do as he had to keep switching the brush from left hand to right, and he only managed to paint his shoulders and part of his lower back so that a large section of it was untouched save for a few messy smears, but by that time he was very drunk, the fumes were making him feel slightly strange and his technique was becoming sloppy.
His chest felt tight.
A cigarette, he reasoned. A cigarette would mask the stench and clear the pipes.
Bomber painted his entire face quickly. From neck to chin, chin to retreating hairline. He even did his eyelids and ears, then threw the brush into the sink and on unsteady legs climbed out of the bath.
He looked in the mirror and was thrilled by his reflection. Proud of his inventiveness, his handiwork. He was a new man. A better man. He looked like a bloody Greek god or something.
He shouted for Karen, but then remembered that Karen wasn’t home yet, so he padded downstairs on the only parts of him except his arse cheeks that were still entirely white. It was cold so he turned the gas fire on, went to the kitchen and lit a cigarette from the hob, and then walked back into the front room.
Motörhead were still chugging away at great volume on the stereo. Between songs the crowd roared their approval.
‘Do you crazy motherfuckers want some more?’ Lemmy bellowed.
Yes, the crowd collectiv
ely responded. We are indeed crazy and we would very much like some more.
The bars of the electric fire created a soft, cosy light in the still winter darkness that only made Bomber’s new black coating appear more brilliant. He examined his arms and legs as if they belonged to someone else, and they glowed with a golden hue. He was a beautiful sculpture, a memorial to original thinking, and he would have a drink to celebrate. But the bottle was upstairs and now he was very dizzy. The cigarette didn’t seem to have helped with his breathing either – inhaling the smoke had only made him more aware of the narrowness of his gullet, the smallness of his lungs – and his whole body felt odd, as if a hundred tourniquets were being tied around him at once, and everything was tightening and hardening.
Pounding wildly, Bomber’s heart felt cornered in the cage of his chest like a trapped rat. He was feeling very dizzy indeed.
His legs crumpled then, but he managed to sit himself down in the chair in front of the fire. The music was too loud, and Lemmy’s engine-like bass guitar, a dirty gurgle that had consistently thrilled him for nearly thirty years, now sounded toxic, like an exhaust pipe was filling the room with sound. His body prickled all over, as if dirty needles were being jabbed into the drying crust of the Midnight Black Gloss.
Bomber wanted to turn the music off but found that he could not move. His body refused to follow the command of his mind and the music only added to the anxiety that was now engulfing him.
Lost within his own body, his breath was becoming thinner and thinner. He back-belched whiskey, and a little bit of sour vomit flooded his mouth. It took every effort to swallow it. The fire was hot. Too hot.
The music was loud. Too loud.
Bomber’s breath shrank to a hopeless rasp. He was in a prison of dry paint that had blocked all of his pores. He was suffocating in himself, his head throbbing with a noxious chemical fervour.
Male Tears Page 13