by Lucy English
‘What were those songs?’ he asks me
‘They were the songs of the troubadours,’ I say and pick up my accordion.
‘I’m a troubadour,’ says the young man and smiles. ‘I’m a poet.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Friday 27th May. Morning
Very early morning and the sun is up. I’m not sleeping too well. Is it because it’s getting hotter and I’m changing to Mediterranean mode, get up early then sleep after lunch? Or is it because I’m thinking about Felix?
I was forty. I had grey hair. I had resigned myself to a quiet, solitary life up the canal, punctuated with small moments of bliss. Like when I listened to the water. Like when I made that first morning cup of coffee. Like when I sunbathed on the roof on my boat and ignored the cyclists, the hikers, the Bigbys and the other boat people.
High June and it was almost as hot as it is here. I was sitting on the roof. It was a Sunday afternoon, Stephen had invited me out for lunch with him and Judy to some smart place in town, but I didn’t want to be smart. I said I had to prepare coursework. The school was at its busiest in the summer. But I didn’t work. I was on the roof in my swimsuit.
Then a voice said, ‘Are Barney and Rosebud in?’
It was the young man. ‘They’ve gone to Solsbury Hill to see the protesters.’ They knew some of them apparently.
‘Fuck. I’ve just hitched from Bristol.’ The sun made him look dusty. He wore faded red trousers and a patched shirt, which flapped in the breeze like a flag.
‘They’ll be on the boat tonight,’ I said.
He didn’t move. ‘You’re not friendly,’ he said. ‘You like to be alone.’ He went to where the bonfire had been and lay down on the grass.
At six o’clock he was still there. I went to check up on him. He was asleep with his head on his arm. I shook him. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
We sat in the kitchen. It was warm in the boat even with the windows open. He put his hands around his cup of tea as if he were cold. He coughed, like an old man with a wheezy chest. ‘Fuck!’ he said. I was just about to start cooking. ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.
He piled up his plate as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. I was beginning to get worried he wasn’t just a stray dog he was a nutcase. He didn’t talk much and when he did it was pretty obscure.
‘… I heard they sprayed the protesters on Solsbury with CS gas. What do you think about that? … there’s more two-headed sheep being born … and the male fish are turning into female ones in Canada … sometimes I think I’m being followed … have you seen a white Cortina around here …?’
I wanted Barney and Rosebud to come back, quick.
‘So …’ I said, ‘I don’t know your name.’
‘I’m Felix.’
‘Felix the cat?’
He laughed. ‘I can be a cat. I can be an owl. I can be a snake. I can be an eagle. I can be a fish.’
‘And you’re a poet?’
‘Yes.’ He took a bit of paper out of his pocket and read something like this, not the exact words, I can’t remember them. I can’t remember any of his poetry. ‘… Crazy dream bird what vision of your gorgeous moment turn the fluff of sunlight into some luscious dream forest of your pinky bed sheets, white delirious underpants, take them off… That was for my last girlfriend. I was dead keen on her …’ He stood up and read the rest. When he read he was a different person, not lost but shining. I’ve seen that happen to people when they sing, insignificant mousy people burst open and fill the room, but he was doing it with words. My kitchen was filled with words like firework sparks.
‘Phew!’ says Felix and he’s laughing and laughing makes him cough so he’s coughing and laughing. He spins round the room in a little private dance and his bits of paper fall out of his pockets, but he’s still laughing. He’s as mad as a brush, but I’m not alarmed anymore. He’s being passionate, being in the moment and stretching it as far as he can. I know what it’s like and it’s wonderful. I’m laughing too because I haven’t spun any moments widdershins not since, not since, I can’t think, but it must be running round the château with Julian.
He sits down and becomes serious for a few seconds. The boat is rocking like it’s dancing.
‘I want to learn the troubadour songs … they travelled from castle to forest … they didn’t have a home …’
‘OK,’ I say, ‘if that’s what you want, but first I will tell you a story. Now you must be quiet and sit down … Once upon a time there was a troubadour called Avelard and a prince who lived in the grandest castle in the Maures …’
And I tell the story. He listens intently, his pondwater eyes fixed on me and one finger on his lips. He listens. It’s becoming dark and I light the candles. Barney and Rosebud might be back but we can’t hear them.
It’s early morning. I wake up and Felix is asleep on the floor in the kitchen. He’s hugging himself like a child does. I put a blanket over him and go back to bed. When I wake up again he’s gone. A few days later Barney and Rosebud say they saw him at Solsbury. He was dancing.
I’m getting to know Barney and Rosebud better. He was done for nicking a car and now finds it difficult to get work. Though who would employ a surly giant with black dreads I don’t know. Rosebud used to be a smack addict. She’s disarmingly disorganised. Their boat is full of mouldy food and car parts. The only sane one is Marigold, who’s two and a half. She helps herself to apples and clean socks. She’s going to look like her mother, all big eyes and lank blonde hair. I ask them where Felix lives, Rosebud says he doesn’t live anywhere, he just turns up. The Bigbys are treating me like I’m a traitor.
I’ve got used to Felix just turning up. Sometimes he’s OK but sometimes he’s low. He sits with his head on the table. He doesn’t change his clothes enough. He doesn’t eat enough. He doesn’t sleep enough. I don’t want to look after him but I don’t mind him being there. I say, ‘Think about a place you can go to in your mind, your best place, your special place and go there.’ I know this, I’ve been doing it for years. But he says, ‘I can’t. All I see is people’s floors.’ It was then that I told him about the Ferrou.
This is Felix’s story. His mother married late, an older man who died before Felix was born. He was brought up by his mother and her twin sister. His mother’s a headmistress at a girls’ school in Bristol and his aunt’s a probation officer. They’re a formidable pair. He’s a darling child, doted on and loved in a firm, stern way. Much is expected of him. But Felix is dreamy and solitary. Instead of his homework he writes stories and poems, which he hides from his increasingly baffled mother. He becomes a dreamy solitary adolescent and does badly in his exams. His mother sends him to a crammer. He finally gets to art school and leaves after two terms. His mother is furious. His auntie scolds him. He leaves home and stays with friends. His mother calls him a drop-out. He’s depressed, he can’t find work. He experiments with drugs, acid, speed, ecstasy. He’s spun-out on self-neglect and chemicals. He starts writing again, poetry, which he reads to his equally spun-out friends. They call him a genius. They say he’s remarkable and he knows he is. He knows that inside he is truly and genuinely remarkable. He has seen stranger places beyond the mind, beyond the heart. He’s a traveller, a quester, he doesn’t want to shut his eyes in case he misses something. The goddess has called him to be her messenger.
And that’s where I met him. He was twenty-one.
Why don’t parents understand their children? My mother, despairing of my lack of interest in clothes. Me, down on the canal bored to bits with Stephen’s new coffee machines and designer toasters and Felix’s mother disowning her odd son.
She should have had Stephen, with his company car and his chic girlfriend. We love our children but they are not like us, isn’t that what we have to learn? People who are like us are not our children, don’t we have to learn that too?
For me, Felix was a lost boy landed up in Never-Never Land because he had fallen out of his pram. I didn’t think of him in any other w
ay. I could see he was beautiful, like a Botticelli youth, but one with hollow eyes and a few days’ beard growth. He had the most sensitive hands. Long, bony fingers and pointed finger tips. He used to put one finger on his cheek when he was thinking. He talked with his hands. You could tell what he was feeling by his hands.
For me he was beautiful, like an opium poppy with the thinnest of petals.
We went to Solsbury Hill to see the protesters. Barney, Rosebud, Marigold, me and Felix. I hadn’t planned to go. I saw them when I came back from work, they were congregating outside Barney’s boat with bags of drink and food. ‘Come with us,’ said Rosebud. ‘Come and sing for the warriors.’ So I did. I took my accordion. We walked there, across the huge scrape of land that was going to be the by-pass. It was an eerie sight, great curls of earth and flat dry mud, not a blade of grass in sight. There hadn’t been any rain for weeks and it was like walking across a desert and we were those ragged people you see on the news from war-torn countries, walking to the nearest refugee camp with too much to carry and a crying baby.
‘The goddess is crying!’ said Felix. ‘I can hear her crying!’ and the seagulls above us did sound like that. ‘It’s monstrous,’ said Rosebud and she started crying too. By the time we got to Batheaston we were all emotional.
The protesters were in a clump of trees on the side of the hill, living in benders and makeshift tents. They were trying to stop the trees being cut down, but this was the third camp they had set up. What saddened me most was the futility of it. Their earnestness and defiance were nothing when pitted against government plans and the police force. They were a mixed crew. Old men with grey beards, young girls with dreads, men with dreads, women with shaved heads and somewhere in the middle of it local grannies with Barbour jackets and tweedy skirts. Thermos flasks of tea and gigantic spliffs. Green wellies and bare feet.
Barney’s friends were called Dog-ear and Paignton. Dog-ear wore a Peruvian hat. He had watery eyes and a goatee beard. He was a wasted old thing. Paignton was much younger, shaven-headed, coffee-coloured skin and the blank black eyes of somebody who had done too much, seen too much. They weren’t talkative.
Rosebud handed out the food: bread, cheese and apples, and Barney passed round the cider. For a moment he looked like the Ghost of Christmas Present, all smiles and munificence. Dog-ear rolled joints and Paignton said to Felix, ‘Give us some words, man.’
Felix stamped his feet, looked at the sky, then shouted out, ‘The goddess is here! The goddess is here! Even in the felled trees, even in the parched earth, do not forget the goddess!’ Paignton banged on Barney’s drum and it went on from there.
Nightfall and a summer sky full of dusty stars. Woodsmoke and the lights of people among the trees. Drumming, but this isn’t a celebration. This is a vigil because tomorrow the security men will come and move the protesters, and when they do the trees will be cut down. Big oaks, beech and hawthorn, they’ll turn this little grove into a graveyard of stumps. I’m playing my accordion, slowly like a dirge. Marigold and Rosebud are asleep in Dog-ear’s bender. Dog-ear and Barney are mindless on dope and Paignton is drumming like a wild thing. So is Felix. Wild, wild, they have wild eyes. Towards dawn I’ve had enough. I’ve got to go to work later. I don’t want to see the eviction. I’m sad and I want to be alone.
That evening Felix taps on my window. I let him in. He’s still wild, with twigs and leaves in his hair. I say, ‘I know, it was awful, don’t tell me.’
He shakes his hands as if there’s electricity coming out of them. ‘Paignton got arrested,’ he says.
I say, ‘I’m exhausted, I need to go to bed.’
He looks at me and says, ‘Can I stay here?’
I point to the spare room. As I shut my door it occurs to me he might have been asking for something else. As I fall asleep the idea seems more bizarre and incredible, but then Gregor and I shouldn’t have happened but it did.
It was early September and the beginning of my holidays. I hadn’t planned to go anywhere. I thought I might take the boat out. Stephen and Judy had gone to Seattle. They were going to hire a car and get up into the mountains. The Bigbys had returned from a trip to Oxford and had already had a row with Barney about rubbish on the tow-path. Paignton had been released without charge, but he was ‘shook up’ and was staying with Barney. Where Felix was nobody knew.
I took the boat up to Bradford-on-Avon. The weather was still dry and the summer felt old, a wrinkled old lady still in her party frock. But the Avon valley was beautiful, just turning yellow, and silent. Beyond the fields was a wood. I moored by the bank to listen to it, the sound of the countryside. I stayed there most of the day, on the roof playing my music.
Then to my utter amazement walking down out of the woods came Felix.
‘I thought it was your boat. I thought it was your music,’ he said.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve been in the woods.’
‘For three weeks?’
He didn’t answer, he wasn’t good at explanations, but he looked calm and radiant. He sat in the sun on the roof of my boat.
‘There’s a house for sale up there. It’s empty. I know where these places are.’
We stayed there all afternoon. I played my accordion. Felix read poems. Other boats passed us. In the sky the swallows circled lower and lower.
I made some food and we ate it on the roof. The sun fell gradually into the most spectacular sunset and we watched until it disappeared behind the trees.
‘I’m not going to make it to Bradford-on-Avon tonight,’ I said.
We sat inside and sang more songs and made more food and drank cup after cup of coffee and talked and giggled and it must have been well gone midnight.
‘Are you going back to your house in the woods?’ I asked.
‘No. People get suspicious. Was that an owl? Have you ever been to Tunisia?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Can I stay here?’ He traced his finger round the rim of the cup and then put it on his cheek. Our eyes met. Again it disarmed me that his eyes were the same colour as mine. Like looking in a mirror. We are two sides of the same person. He was lit up by the candle and it made his hair glow like a halo. Scruffy desolation angel. Crazy dreamchild.
When I was seventeen I had been much more bold.
‘Is that all you’re asking for?’ I asked.
He put his finger on his lips and smiled. ‘I want to sleep with you,’ he said.
In the dark my hair is no longer grey, it’s soft and black and you cannot see the fine lines around my eyes, but you can feel the bones on my face and you can feel my skin as soft as yours. You touch me lightly. Enjoy your body. Enjoy my body, but this time it’s minds and hearts as well, opening like the heart of a rose that sings with its scent.
We are young and old and wise and naive at the same time and I am as alive and vital as when I was seventeen and I ran along the canal to meet my lover.
In the dark an owl hoots and I think I’m at the Ferrou, you’re breathing like the wind in the pine trees and the creak of the boat like the creak of the branches.
Here I am at the Ferrou, sitting outside. The sun already creating puddles of warmth. Above me the branches creaking like my boat on the water.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I’m running out of food. I should have gone to the village today but I didn’t. I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to see Jeanette or Auxille or Odette or Madame Cabasson or any of them. I want to be alone. I wonder if I’m becoming like Old Man Henri. Perhaps that’s what the Ferrou does to you, it sucks you into its silence.
I have a bag of pasta, a bag of rice, some bits of cheese, olive oil and some dry bread. There are herbs everywhere and I have enough coffee. Surely I can last until Tuesday. Today a lizard ran into the hut, looked a bit surprised and then ran out again. A small brown lizard not more than six inches long. I think the heat brings them out. Today is the hottest day so far and so still. There’s no breeze at all,
it feels like the air is solid. I’m on the hammock in the shade and I’ve just been asleep. Days and nights, nights and days. I’m getting confused. Perhaps I’m becoming like Felix.
He stayed. I suppose he had nowhere else to go. We took the boat up beyond Devizes. He was a good companion. He liked to be quiet for hours on end and that suited me. He never got up until two but on a boat that doesn’t matter. It’s an odd life on the canal, chugging along, watching the fields, steering the boat, reading a book, listening to music, listening to nothing and then all the drama of getting through a lock. The locks at Devizes took for ever. Halfway through we just looked at each other and laughed as if we were going to spend the rest of our lives doing this. I liked that about Felix. He could tell what I was thinking. I felt transparent with him, it felt intimate and close. That was his gift. He understood people.
Felix, when you weren’t spun-out on chemicals you were a delight because there was no time, there was just now. Isn’t that what Gregor says the Baba is like, living in each moment and the Baba is supposed to be a spiritual being. Felix, you lived in a state of perpetual now. Imagination and feelings were more important to you than basic needs.
Barney, Rosebud, Dog-ear and Paignton, they were like that too. Totally inept at getting through the everyday, so defeated by form-filling, job-hunting, telephones, tax returns, bank accounts, the law and fast-moving, slick-talking modern life. Yet so passionate and committed to their ideal of community, so supportive of each other. I came to learn that for Felix it wasn’t what drugs he took, but why. Trying to escape to a safer place of brighter colours, intenser feeling.