by Tom Cox
‘So I carry on filming and it’s like he’s miles away, he’s so into it that he’s not even noticed us or heard the splash when Dylan landed in the water. And then after about a minute I see him look round in our direction and shit himself and then he puts his dick back in his trousers and starts running.’
‘And you got all this on camera?’
‘Yep. Do you want to see?’
‘No. I’m not watching that.’
‘I’ll watch it.’
‘What was the goat doing?’
‘It was just eating grass or whatever, some stuff from the hedge. Just going about its business.’
‘You need to go and tell the people there. Someone should call the police or something.’
‘And tell them what? What could they do?’
‘Here, have a look, anyway. You can hear me shouting, “Wanker!” at him as he runs off at the end.’
Above the five friends, the sun is reaching its maximum intensity for the day. Its rays reach the new leaves at the top of the ravine, then separate, then begin to re-form into a solid shaft as they hit the water, turning the jagged rocks deep beneath the surface to gold. It does not warm the pool much, and all five of them shout in happy pain as their heads re-emerge after their first jump. Ella is the most energetic, jumping again and again as the others spread out on the rocks, and as Rach observes Ella’s height and her china-blue eyes and the neat way she stretches her arms above her as she leaps, she is reminded of the heron they disturbed earlier, further downstream: a creature with a touch of the spectre about it, something passing through dimensions, not supposed to be seen. When Ella hits the water she makes herself impossibly slight, and the impact is so quiet and smooth, it would not be a surprise if she did find another dimension down there to vanish into.
It is a delicious afternoon that will be rarer than any of them realise in future: a point where work is not intervening and they have the river to themselves. People pay vast sums of money to rent a lot less peace than this on a temporary basis. From here you can walk to the top of the ravine, then thrash through the new bracken for a mile, then reach a road, and if you did that right now, on this particular weekday afternoon, you would still not have seen another human. After that you could intercept the footpath running between the moor and the edge of town and you would still have not have found anyone. It would only be half a mile on from that that you would see the first other sign of two-legged life: a stooped man, fiftyish, hurrying back to his car, which he had parked in a diagonal, hurried way beside a clapper bridge. If you continued to follow him closely, you’d see him turn on the engine without fastening his seatbelt and the relief in his face as he pulled out and hit the tarmac, glad that he lived far away, glad in the knowledge that he would never be returning to these parts. But you’d see terrible fear too: of himself. He’d not been careful enough. Once before, he’d also not been careful enough, and he’d paid the price. The train line had been too close, and he hadn’t bargained for the signal failure. He’d been too lost in it all to realise he was being watched. The argument for the defence had not stood up in court. No, the jury had not found it believable that you could be urinating in a field and a medium-sized farm animal could just ‘happen’ to unexpectedly back in to you. He had not enjoyed prison, had emerged from it grey and hollow-cheeked. He had told himself he would never be that careless again. There would be no touching in future. He had stuck to that, even when temptation overwhelmed him. But, still, he had not been careful enough. He had been lucky today, he hoped. He would not return here.
They feel indestructible, lazing on the rock in this heavenly light: Ella, Dylan and Simon, but also Rach and Michael, to a lesser extent. But none of them know it, because they have now felt indestructible for a couple of years at least, and a couple of years is a long time when you’re young enough to feel indestructible. Ample time to get accustomed. Michael has waded across the river with the camcorder hoisted above his head and got some great footage of the other four in mid-flight. Dylan says he’s had enough of a rest now and that he’s going to go for the Big Daddy.
‘What on earth is the Big Daddy?’ says Rach, and he points to a small shelf of feldspar above them. ‘You’re not right, dude,’ she says, as he begins to climb, ascending with tough bendy simian feet over sharp niggling rocks and ferns and thorns to the upper platform, made by some ancient land gods, just for him.
‘Wait,’ says Michael. ‘I want to make sure I get this from the best angle.’ And he wades to the opposite side of the ravine again with the camcorder and commences his own climb, only slightly less daredevil.
‘OK,’ says Dylan. ‘Ready?’
‘Ready!’ says Michael, and he captures it all: the run-up, the leap through the shredded sunlight, the huge splash, the nervous wait for him to re-emerge.
‘FFFFFFuuuuuucccckkkk!’
‘Again?’
‘Again.’
And he goes again, and again, five more times in total, each time making himself feel more alive, more Dylan, Michael getting it all, but on the fifth time, maybe pushed by some small jealousy, wanting to be watched like Dylan is being watched, looking for a different angle, Michael steps a little far out and his foot slips. He grabs a root in the hillside as he falls, but to do so he must let go of the camera, which tumbles down the rocks. They all stare, somehow feeling that they can will it to catch on something and halt its descent, and the second and a half before it hits the water passes very slowly.
‘You twat.’
‘That cost four hundred quid.’
‘It will be OK. It’s waterproof anyway, right?’
Simon jumps into the water to look first, then Dylan, then Ella, then Simon again, then – scared, but pressed by guilt – Michael. But they have been particularly unlucky. In its descent, the camcorder has bumped down into a thin vertical corridor, too narrow for a human body, and wedged under an elbow of rock. It’s darker in this part of the water, so impossible to see the camcorder’s exact location from the point above, which appears to be the bottom of the pool. Above the ravine, the sun has moved around and no longer illuminates the river. It is evening, and spring is young, and the evenings have not yet lost their chill.
Nobody here knows it, but technology is on a historical precipice. In only two or three years, everyone will record everything. People will take devices much smaller than the one in the water to concerts and other live events and record experiences which, by doing so, they are simultaneously forgetting to have, then store them, never to be watched, on laptops and memory sticks. But right now making home recordings of your life is still a privilege, still feels a little special, and for Ella, Simon, Michael, Rach and Dylan, right now is the only context. The fact remains: there were some absolutely amazing jumps on there.
‘There is no way I am just leaving it there,’ says Simon. ‘I’m so fucking coming back to get it tomorrow.’
Some days the warmth of the air feels like it is little to do with the sun at all. Today is not one of them. As they walk back down the path, the heat has been sucked from the gorge. Rach wonders aloud if it might be an idea for them to go to the farm and tell them what they saw. Simon says he might do that, but later. As Rach talks, her voice is stuttery with cold. Simon gives her his cardigan, but she continues to shiver, not unpleasantly, inhaling the parts of his odour that have clung to the dampish wool. As they come to a jerk in the river’s knee, the sun performs an unexpected encore. Wood ants emerge and swarm in their thousands over dead bark at the side of the path, poised to squirt acid at anyone who makes the mistake of giving them any shit. A scarlet tiger-moth caterpillar basks on a dock leaf.
They turn up the bridleway towards the cars, along a bank of beech trees with mossy, exposed roots, and being in the dappled light under the new canopy feels like being in a bath of sorts. Bluebells are up. There is no sense of loss about the evening. Everyone will sleep deeply tonight, including a pygmy goat called Maxine who, in a field about half a mile away, is experiencing the most
difficult part of her day, as she mistakenly begins to chew on part of an old polythene grain sack caught a hedgerow, then attempts to spit it out. Nothing else about life has fazed her recently. Her owners, Bob and Doris, are often telling people what a sweetheart she is. She likes people, is rarely bolshy around them, although there is a general consensus that some of her immediate contemporaries can be right bastards, if you catch them on the wrong day.
Summer does not live up to the promise of late spring. In July, it rains for twenty-one days in a row. Slugs are out in force on the garden walls of the cottage at the bridge. Almost nobody makes the effort to swim in the pool. In August a lone canoeist turns off the river’s main artery and lets himself drift in lazy circles in the pool’s centre. He thinks about everything he regrets and whether it was a mistake to choose the side of his second wife, as opposed to his daughter, during their dispute. He wonders, for the first time in years, about an animal he hit on a road outside Shaftesbury on a business trip, and whether it was a fox, or somebody’s dog. Below him, the water is oil-black.
On one of the days that dance the line between summer and autumn, Lacey and Ray come to swim in the pool. They’re staying in one of a group of six guest cottages in some farmland half an hour south of here, but he doesn’t like the chlorine in the indoor pool there. He remembered an old college lecturer telling him about a dark, deep, tranquil space off the river and he is pleased to find it, using just an OS map and a decade-old memory. It’s breezy and the surface is covered in leaves and they shout with joy as they splash about. But on the way back up the hill they are silent. He is poised to tell her a couple of things but he stops, thinking she will not be interested. He is suddenly conscious of how much she sighs in his company. He realises it has all been gone for her since this time last year.
In the winters the pool almost never freezes, but in heavy rain torrents of spume race over the rocks, and because of the angles, a kind of riptide is formed. Swimmers still feel it in summer, when the current is less ferocious, the water buffeting you two ways at once. It’s like being inside a dizzy space where gravity has gone backwards and it gets a little more pronounced every year. There are injuries: sharp cuts on feet and ankles, mostly. Usually swimmers don’t notice them until later. One leaper feels a twinge in his calf and looks to see blood streaming down it and a scratch that could be perceived as a large double toothmark. Some of the swimmers take a shortcut back to their cars afterwards, up the gorge, fighting their way through drying bracken and heather. Their cuts and scratches from this mix with the cuts and scratches from the pool and they can’t any longer tell which are which. The bracken goes rust-coloured in autumn and in the strong winds of November the pool’s surface gets seasoned with dry oak leaves that become soggy and decompose in no time at all.
One biting January day, a line of large crows perch on the higher rock shelf, which the bravest swimmers like to leap from. It looks like they’re about to dive in formation but they don’t. Down below, despite the eddies and all the changes in temperature, the camcorder looks exactly the same and the memory card, were it to be retrieved, would still be watchable. It is all still there. Gadgets like this are more resilient than folks realise. Silt has built up around the camcorder, wedging it more firmly in place. If you looked at the people on the film last year, you’d have thought of them as people from now, but just this year, they have started to look like people from an era that has passed. That is because it has been a decade since the film was made, and a decade is the exact amount of time it takes for clothing styles and attitudes to become palpably old. It is part of the reason why decades were invented.
In March of the following year, Maxine the goat dies after an uncomfortable period suffering from yolk boils on the neck, which is a disease also sometimes known as cheese mouth among goat people. It is agreed by Bob and Doris that she has had a good life.
Thick-skinned, incurious people who walk the narrow footpath above the rock shelf or swim in the water don’t notice anything unique or ominous about the atmosphere in the pool, but a few more sensitive and intuitive souls remark on it. They see it like people who are able to see a quietness as an image. Something feels locked in, as if air has walls. But it’s still part of a much larger place people are drawn to because of lightness and beauty. Some of the atmosphere is dispersed and absorbed into that, like piss in the sea.
Jane and Moon and Anya live for a summer in their van up in a layby on the byroad and often come down here with books and picnics and, as autumn edges in, to hunt for mushrooms. Moon comes down on his own some mornings and meditates. It only lasts ten minutes, but he would not be the same person facing the day the same way without it. Some days he feels, with his eyes closed, that the river is becoming part of him, rushing through him, coldly but not malevolently. One day, though, something else goes through him. It is not watery. The top of it is hard, double-spiked, and it pushes through his chest. When he opens his eyes he is no longer sitting. He is on his side, on the rock, and the sky is tilted. He stays motionless for some time.
Bill and Ian walk along the footpath above the pool. They are both fifty-four now, but since university they have done this every September, gone away for a week of hiking and drinking together, with the exception of one year, when Bill was recovering from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The trip is a tradition, and whoever else is in their lives at the time had bloody well better deal with it. Bill once locked Ian in a cupboard at their halls of residence for seven hours and has always mocked Ian for various facets of his appearance and his lack of sense in the areas of money and women. It is perceived as part of the jocular dynamic of their relationship. As they pass above the pool, Bill jokes about Ian’s recent weight gain.
‘You know what, mate?’ says Ian. ‘You’re a cunt. Always have been, and always will be.’
They continue the walk in silence. When Ian, who knows how much Bill loves rare fungi, spots an octopus stinkhorn beginning to erupt from a suberumpent egg beside the footpath, he doesn’t say a word. Back at the B & B, they go straight to their rooms. They leave separately, early the next morning, without exchanging goodbyes.
Later in autumn, there are mists over the pool early in the morning, but nobody is there to appreciate them at their apex. The day’s smattering of walkers arrives a little later. Belinda produces a tub of assorted nuts from her backpack and offers them to Karen, who declines. Karen feels a rage percolating inside her. She is overwhelmed with how shitting annoying it is that Belinda always has these nuts, and that she never stops eating them. If it’s not nuts, it’s dried fruit or spicy peas. There’s always something. Karen suppresses bringing it up and making it an issue, but it takes all her energy. Her nails make deep red marks in her thighs, which will still be there tomorrow. By the time they have reached the knee bend in the river, she is calm. She asks Belinda about how Georgie is doing with her counselling. Karen tells Belinda she mustn’t blame herself in any way. In the early hours of the morning a stray cat stalks the bank, a once-adored Birman called Zara. After being driven out of her house by her owner’s new Great Dane pup, she has wandered for three days and ended up down here after chasing a rabbit along the open moor above the gorge. It is a surreal and absurd place to be a stray cat and, as if in realisation of this, Zara turns in the opposite direction, sensing her way towards the cottage at the bridge, stopping every so often to rub the scent glands on the inside of her lip on thick stalks of heather and the low branches of blackthorn.
There is a line where mist becomes fog and during the early days of December it is crossed. But it’s not during fog that what has been growing in the river breaks the surface and takes a look around. It’s on a clear night after a frosty day where sheer cold has made resilient leaves surrender and quiver to the ground. Moonlight illuminates the shape so its horned shadow flickers on the rock wall behind it. Its only large witness is a roe deer on the bank above, which scarpers through the bracken, away from the river. But the shape isn’t interested in deer and has
not yet grown eyes to see them. That moment when it broke from water to air might have resembled a birth of sorts, but it wasn’t really. It’s already been here for a while and there’s a long way to go yet: so much time, and all the strength that time gives. It’s back in the water in moments and the calls of owls and the rush of water over ancient rocks and the rest of the undersong of the river night play on. Soon the year will turn over and not all that long after that, the swimmers will come again. A few more this time, thanks to technology’s grapevine. They’ll film and photograph themselves jumping off the rocks and as they leave they’ll be keen to be home, feeling an excitement about the prospect of sharing the experiences and the ease with which they can do so. Take me back, they’ll write beneath their photographs, only hours later.
ROBOT
One day I was hiking through a sharp cleft in the woods when I met a robot walking towards me up the sunken green lane. This was a surprise, because I’d been told that this particular part of the woods, where the nearest building was a mile away and the light was gauzy and filled with the duplicitous shadows of newly denuded branches, was a place where you might find piskies or faeries or maybe huge liminal dogs, but at no point had anyone mentioned the possibility of robots.
I say the robot walked towards me, but that is technically incorrect; it was more that he slid, on something between skis and metal feet. He bumped slightly over the exposed roots of beech trees, but took it in his stride, never appeared in danger of falling, until he was a foot from my face. He said nothing from his wide oblong mouth, so I took it on myself to be the one to begin the conversation.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘The future,’ said the robot.
‘Which part?’ I asked.
‘A very distant part. Hard for you to imagine. Don’t even try.’
‘But are you not in danger of changing the course of history, now that you are here? You have already walked at least a hundred yards along this holloway. I know it’s autumn, but there are still beetles and other insects on the ground. You’ve probably killed some of them with your feet. Everyone knows that can do irreparable damage to future events.’