Turning Blue

by Benjamin Myers

  It is spring.

  WHEN THEY COME early in the morning – and perhaps deep down Larry Lister always knew they would come and that yes perhaps half of the thrill of it all was the never-knowing; the sheer fucking thrill of getting away with it – it is not because of the business interests and the silent shareholdings in the old cinema or the parties or links to Mr Hood or Mr Skelton and their implication in disappearances and snuffed-out lives and subsequent disposals or the vast collection of celluloid relics – the torture tapes – and the photo albums and the very very niche DVDs he’s had brought in from Vietnam and Laos but an allegation from way back when. The early eighties. Just the one. By a girl – now a woman with a husband and a life and kids of her own – who he has no recollection of ever meeting. Which isn’t to say her allegation is bullshit. In fact it sounds convincingly accurate; not just her description of the brand of cigarettes he smoked during the ‘session of prolonged inappropriate touching’ (a quick internet search would reveal those; a detail that would never stand up in court) or aspects of the interior of his on-location Winnebago (a Minnie Winnie Premier with Californian-sunrise upholstering and walnut chevron design – he later bought it for his own use with cash from the corporation and left it in the grounds of a church in the Pennines where he was made an honorary warden in the late eighties) but her description of the three small brown moles on the underside of his cock-shaft which configure to form what the ‘victim’ describes as a triangle shape that she saw close up all those years ago.

  Other than remarking that the girl is clearly one of those particularly fixated fans who has crossed a boundary and blurred fantasy with reality and ill-judged fact with fiction (don’t worry he tells the arresting officers – it has happened several times before lads; that’s the power of television) no comment is the mantra he reverts to during the initial questioning.

  No comment repeated one hundred times or more until his solicitor arrives at which point Lovely Larry Lister beams back at his questioners and says with no small amount of confidence: now how about we all go for a nice big drink once this nonsense is over with? No hard feelings eh?

  THE NEWSPAPER IS spread across his desk. There is a picture of a man with red cheeks and wide wild eyes and a beaming smile. The headline says LARRY LISTER: DOWNFALL OF TV FAVE. And then beneath that it says SORDID SEX ALLEGATIONS OF THE MAN THEY CALLED ‘UNCLE’.

  Brindle looks out of the window across the sterile landscape whose car parks and always-empty bus stands and cultivated roundabouts and endless internal reflections are more familiar to him than the inside of his own flat.

  Ask him what colour his curtains are and he would struggle to provide an answer; ask him what the slogan bolted in metal onto fake marble beside the park’s – they actually call it a park – entrance half a mile away is and without missing a beat he will tell you: Innovation. Opportunity. Enterprise. One of those empty mantras gleefully unveiled by some long-forgotten perma-grinning mayor years ago under New Labour. His department moved in only two years ago. Before that it did not exist. In many ways it still does not officially exist. And that is its strength.

  The view of this surrounding space – quadrangles of grass; silent roads; twinkling windows – is soporific. All that glass and chrome and tarmac creates a false impression of the world: one of straight lines and right angles and mirrors reflecting one another in an endless visual echo that can feel either inspiring or imprisoning depending upon the viewer. So much so that Brindle now finds himself daydreaming of uneven carthorse tracks slick with algae and the smooth flagstones of an old market square. His winter week in the country.

  He closes the paper and leans back in his ergonomically customised chair.

  He closes his eyes and considers the chaos of nature; the way boulders have been scattered across valleys by icebergs tens of thousands of years ago. He thinks of houses built into hillsides that are slowly being reclaimed by nature – one fallen roof-slate or minuscule moss-spore at a time. He thinks of dead bracken and thick black mud and soft downy feathers that have fallen from way up in the sky and the sweet smell of pig shit being sprayed from a solitary muck-spreader whose engine sputters down the valley.

  He thinks of the valley. He thinks of town. He thinks of the hamlet.

  He thinks of the fixed faces of men.

  He thinks of the matrix of secrets – shocking and sordid and still buried – and his own failings. He thinks he can smell spring. He can sense it and he can taste it.

  AT THIRTEEN AT fourteen at fifteen. A boy becoming a young man and that young man learning to meld and mingle to sink into the scenery; to become a trunk a static entity able to modulate his movements with his surroundings. To make himself barely recognisable to the naked eye.

  Outside of school and his farm chores all he does is hunt and poach now. Lurk and linger. Walk the hills unheard.

  His legs carry him for miles in all directions until he knows every ancient pass and every cart track. He turns himself into a human statue or a scarecrow and there he stands unmoving as he watches the sky. Other times he climbs trees to sit and listen to the birdsong and the breeze. He scales crags and boulders or lowers himself down ravines. He explores dead forests and methane-stinking moor bogs. He goes to the places few other people go.

  He masters the art of stillness and silence of merging and blending and sinking.

  There is a girl. A classmate whose freckles made him feel dizzy. She is not the prettiest girl or the most popular girl or the cleverest but she is the nicest girl because once she let him hold her hand. For a few fleeting moments one break-time when no one is looking he makes a connection.

  She is a farm girl too. She is clumsy and grubby. She does not wear make-up or have friends and she has joined late from another school and perhaps this is why she lets him talk to her. She likes animals and she has dirt under her fingernails too and once she tells him that peacocks are her favourite birds because their feathers are so beautiful that they are almost unreal and to look at them is like looking at the sea from the top of a great cliff on a beautiful clear sunny day.

  He has only ever seen a peacock in the books that he has thumbed his way through at school when he should be learning mathematical formulas and silly poems and facts about oxbow lakes and dead kings from a long time ago but he never forgets the look in her eyes as she says this. He has never seen the sea either.

  On one occasion he is out wandering. He leaves the old stone houses of the hamlet behind him and he crosses the dale. Down and across and then up. It is summer. It is humid. It has been raining for two days but the rain has stopped and now the air is close. The air is clammy and the air is tightly tuned. More rainfall will come.

  The young man walks.

  He walks without direction purpose or intent. He is simply moving. An hour passes and he is two valleys over and then he is moving down a hill and through a densely wooded area. There is a stream running through it. He stops and stoops and drinks and it tastes beautiful. These woods are not like the woods around the hamlet or the copses up the top end of the dale. These woods have been tended to. Maintained. Through the marshy area a boardwalk has been laid and on top of the wooden boards there is chicken wire to stop people slipping and where the path has eroded it has been fixed with flagstones. There are signs to explain which plants and animals can be found in this dell. It is a nature reserve of some sort. There is nothing like this in his valley. Only sky and scree.

  The wood broadens out and takes him downhill and then he is leaving the trees behind and he is in a broad pasture full of buttercups with a track running through the centre of it and other tracks leading off to either side to large houses nestled in amongst trees.

  Here there is space and sunlight and the houses are large and many look new and come with their own land and their own driveways and their own landscaped gardens featuring ponds and summerhouses and polytunnels. They have actual lawns. These lawns are tended. Neat. The sunlight reflects off the large gleaming cars i
n their large driveways.

  He is three or four or five miles from home but he is in another world.

  Then he is by a big house and there is a screeching sound. The house is large. The house is huge. Even bigger than Muncy’s pile. It has a gravel forecourt and a curved driveway and outbuildings and a walled garden. There is a big wooden electronically controlled double gate out front and it is open.

  The screeching is coming from around the side of the house. He hears it again. A piercing noise. An urgent cawing. He takes some steps up the driveway and peers round the side of the house. He walks on aware of his feet crunching on the gravel. Around the side of the house he sees a large beautiful peacock. A few metres away perched on the corner part of the garage roof there is another one.

  He thinks of the girl and the look in her eyes and it makes his stomach flip.

  He recognises that the peacock on the ground is a male; this much he knows. The one on the garage is female.

  They are the most beautiful creatures he has ever seen especially the male whose long graceful neck fades from bottle green into cobalt blue and a thousand other shades in between. When the light catches it it seems like its feathers are shimmering like a new type of fire.

  He immediately knows what he needs to do.

  He walks towards them and the female – the peahen – screeches again. It is less stunning but he still wants to get closer to observe it.

  Though its neck has shades of blue in it too the bulk of its body is a dullish brown – charmless and flat like ditchwater. It is plumper also. Perhaps it is pregnant.

  Both birds have crests atop their heads. A row of ornate feathers that spread out into delicate blue fans at the tips.

  He treads carefully towards the male. He stops then squats to the bird’s level. It walks from side to side and then suddenly without warning it fans out its tail feathers into their full plumage.

  He gasps. He actually hears himself draw a tangible intake of breath that he holds in his centre.

  A wall of eyes stares back at him.

  The plumage is breathtaking. Literally breathtaking.

  The eyes are blue in the centre but it is the shade of green that encircles them to create a mock iris that he is dazzled by. It is electric. It is iridescent.

  How he wonders can such a colour be possible? How can nature create something so utterly beyond anything he has ever seen?

  The colour seems so at odds with the grey Yorkshire stone walls and the grey Yorkshire stone skies of the dales.

  He has to have one of those feathers. Just one for the girl to hang from her curtain rail so that the sun can catch it in the morning.

  He needs one of those feathers.

  Hunched he walks towards it but before he can get close the peacock closes its plumage and without grace flies up to the garage roof to join its mate.

  Its train of tail feathers hangs over the edge and he is amazed that such an impressive fan can fold away so neatly.

  The two peacocks survey him with suspicion from the garage roof as he first pulls gently at the plastic drainpipe to test its security and then begins to shin his way up it. He has had a lifetime of climbing up trees – fifty sixty seventy feet up sometimes. The drainpipe will be easy. One hand over the other.

  For one feather.

  Just to treasure. To study and touch.

  To give to the girl to make her love him.

  The birds strut across the garage roof when first the young man’s head and then his torso appear beside them. One of the peacocks is within reach. The stunning male. He slowly stretches out an arm and counts to three then he grabs it and he feels feathers in his hands and he holds on tight and he yanks but as he does the whole section of guttering and drainpipe comes away with a splintering crack.

  He tumbles backwards pulling the bird with him. It screeches. Both birds do. He holds on tight. With his free hand he snatches at blue sky.

  The dark form of the bird blocking out the sunlight before him – above him – is the last thing he sees before blackness. Blackness closing in and then nothing but silence.

  When he comes round the sun is a lot lower in the sky and he is surrounded by black piping and feathers. Lengths and shards of shattered plastic are scattered about and small pieces of gravel are embedded in his back and arms and face; his neck and head are pounding.

  There is something beside him. It is the male peacock. It is crooked and it is trying to stand but its feathers are jutting out at odd angles and it keeps keeling over. It can no longer tuck its plumage away and its eyes are wide with despair. It seems broken somehow.

  There is a low hum in his ears. The young man feels cold and nauseous and numb. He slowly sits upright. He can barely move his neck and his vision is blurring then focusing. Blurring then focusing. His jaw hangs loose. His jaw is in agony.

  He stands and the earth tilts. He takes a moment to regain his balance and then breathes deeply. He brings a hand to his lower lip and touches blood. He licks it with his tongue but it is tasteless so he brings a bloody finger to his nose and smells it. There is nothing.

  The bird is still flopping about on the ground in a heap. The other peacock is nowhere to be seen. He goes to it and it screeches for a moment and he looks at it for a moment then it falls silent as he stamps on its neck and he stamps and stamps and then when it has stopped moving he pulls out feathers – one two three – entire handfuls of feathers – until he hears a car crunching its way up the pitted track of the house. He turns to leave and cuts across a side lawn and climbs over a fence with his jaw aching his head aching and the entire world black and white except for the feathers in his hand that capture the white sun as he runs and runs.

  RUTTER WORKS HIS way through the melee muttering to himself.

  Crowds line the streets all the way along to the market square where there are stalls selling locally produced foods. Pies from Wharfedale and great slabs of Kit Calvert’s famous cheese from Wensleydale. Milk from shorthorns up in Weardale. Beer in casks from a new micro-brewery in Leyburn; apple juice pressed in the Wolds. There is chocolate that has come from a chocolatiers in Skipton. Biscuits and cakes and parkin from the valley. Lamb chops and pork cuts and spicy cured sausages too. Appleton beef Angus beef all types of beef. Poultry and game from an estate near York. Sweets drinks hot dogs candy floss.

  Winter would not give up the ghost. It clung on as long as it could. It clung and it clawed and clutched before it finally relinquished its grip on the landscape.

  And now it is the feast of winter’s end. Town is busy. It is the day of the Long Sword dance. The snowdrops have sprouted and the daffodils will soon be unfolding. Spring is in the post. It is a time for looking forward – for preparations and reparations; for rebirth and growth.

  The Long Sword is a town tradition and one of the only remarkable things about the place that has been recorded in books about folklore and tradition. Even Rutter heads east down the dale for it.

  He pauses this morning at a stall and picks up a vacuum-packed herb-fed free-range chicken. He looks at it plucked and pimpled. He brings it to his face for a closer look then prods the meat beneath the plastic then throws it down. He walks away with his hands jammed into his overall pockets.

  Later there will be a street play telling the history of the Mummers in the valley. They’ll start at the Golden Bough then work their way through town to the centre of the market square banging their drums and shaking their bells in The Magnet where Bull Mason will lay on a cold-meat feast.

  Rutter passes through the crowd. He edges his way between bodies. He feels exposed. Too visible.

  He sees familiar faces; the faces of farmers and their families and delivery men and labourers. Men he went to school with. He sees Wendell Smith he sees Andy Champion he sees Den Paget. He sees John Wade out with his wife. Ben Bennett and his girlfriend too. Knocked up again. He passes the Farleys – Duncan and Dan. The pair of them flushed and half-cut.

  He sees fat Roy Pinder and his even fat
ter wife but he keeps his head down. He steps on and off the pavement and is already regretting coming into town today. He only came to pick up some bits but all these bodies and voices and jostling puts him on edge. He cannot share their excitement. They are like children on days like this; the years slip away and they become hysterical over a few sweets some daft costumes and stupid dancing.

  Tapped he thinks.

  Mad he thinks.

  Mad – the lot of them.

  HE GAVE HER one of those feathers. The girl with the freckles. He was off school for a week with head pains and vomiting and his sense of smell never came back but when he returned he had three feathers for her but by now she had made some friends; she had been accepted into a circle of boys and girls who smoked together at lunchtime round the back of that substation building near the top yard and when he approached her with the feathers she laughed and said er thanks and then he just stood there for a moment turning the colour of a plum while everyone tried to stifle their laughs so he turned and left and as he walked away he heard them screaming with laughter and saying things like freak and fucking dickhead and dirty pig-fucker needs a wash and when he looked over his shoulder he saw one of the lads whipping the feathers against the chain-link fence until the fine coloured barbs tore away from the main spine and hung in the air for a moment catching the sunlight along with the smoke from the cigarettes that they passed round as if in some ancient ritual. The pieces of feather floated down into the dust and became part of the dust; became part of the architecture of his failings.

  THE LONG SWORD dance has started by the time he has looped round the other side of the square. The crowd is not moving and Rutter has to push through it. Voices tut as necks crane to get a view of the seven men skipping in a circle; the first reel of the year.

  Unable to move in any direction Rutter stops and watches. He has no choice.

  They dance to the sound of a fiddle played by the eighth man. They wear matching clothes of white shirt-sleeves white trousers with piping and thick clogs and they hold their cold metal swords by hilt and tip.