21st-Century Yokel

by Tom Cox

  While my mum and I were waiting for my dad at the Embankment, I’d heard a woman standing to my rear who’d watched a lot of marathons talking about the state competitors get into afterwards. ‘You’d think they’d want to be quiet when they’re that tired,’ she said. ‘But they usually don’t. They talk and talk. They’re on such a high, they can’t stop.’ Sure enough, my dad talked a lot when he’d completed the marathon and, almost nine years later, has still not stopped. In the months directly after his run he discussed his intention of competing again the following year but, heeding my mum’s reservations, eventually decided against it. Nonetheless, he retained his fitness levels with a new zest for horticultural activity, both in his own garden and in the space that my parents’ next-door neighbour Edna had allowed him to use in her garden to grow vegetables. ‘TOM, CAN I HAVE A WORD?’ he said to me during one of my visits to Nottinghamshire. I followed him into the garden and he pointed to a large basket of potatoes he had grown. ‘SEE THESE? YOU’RE GOING TO NEED SOME OF YOUR OWN WHEN IT ALL FALLS TO BITS.’

  Benefiting from a new arrangement with the local farmer that allowed him and his friend Phillip to gather wood from much of the nearby land, my dad chopped vast amounts of logs, stacking them in artful circular Holzhaufen formations which allowed the logs at the centre of the pile to cure and dry. Towards the end of the following year, when a eucalyptus – a tree infamous for its rapid growth spurts – began to rocket towards the clouds in can-do fashion and block out the light in the house, my mum suggested that it might be wise to employ a tree surgeon to prune or remove it. ‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS,’ said my dad, fetching his bowsaw. ‘I’LL DO IT.’ My mum held the ladder as my dad climbed it then the tree itself in old loafers with very little grip to them. The sky filled with rain and my mum said that they should stop and seek shelter. She went back into the house but my dad stayed outside, busying himself with other tasks. ‘You won’t go back up the tree, will you?’ she asked him.

  ‘NO,’ said my dad.

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘OF COURSE I WON’T. WHY DON’T YOU BELIEVE ME? IT’S NOT FAIR. YOU’RE ALWAYS TELLING ME OFF.’

  Five minutes later my mum glanced out of the bedroom window and saw my dad back up the eucalyptus, balancing on its highest branches in the same smooth-soled loafers, saw in hand, rain streaking against his squinting, determined face. ‘And then I saw him go,’ she told me. ‘I knew it was bad from the moment he hit the ground.’

  My dad might have fallen on his front had it not been for the fact that during his descent he was trying to avoid the blade of the falling bowsaw. This caused him to flip over in the air and land hard on his spine. It was half an hour before the paramedics arrived, and during that period he and my mum made a major mistake. Due to the vast amount of pain he was in, he could not stand or crawl properly, but he tried to edge along the ground in tiny increments towards the back door, encouraged by my mum, in order to escape the rain. When you’ve fractured your vertebrae, as my dad had, the one thing you should not try to do is move, as this can sever the spinal column irreparably.

  ‘I was such an idiot,’ my mum told me. ‘But in my defence it’s very difficult to know when someone is really hurt when they’re as melodramatic as he is. When I give him a haircut and his bare skin touches the back of the chair he yells like he’s been stabbed.’

  The paramedics ticked my parents off for their error, loaded my dad into their ambulance then attempted to reverse the vehicle out of the house’s awkwardly shaped driveaway but got stuck. As the morphine the paramedics had given my dad began to kick in, he shouted instructions to the driver, who after several tense minutes got the vehicle pointing in the right direction and on the road to the hospital, several miles away, in Mansfield. Upon arriving and seeing a consultant, my dad was asked if he had any allergies. ‘YEAH, JEREMY CLARKSON,’ he replied.

  He would walk again, the doctor said, after my dad had been properly examined, but it was of paramount importance that he stay absolutely still in his hospital bed for a week after the surgery. Strapped to the mattress, he was attended by a very camp male nurse who, every time he caught my dad attempting to move, would slap my dad’s ankles and say, ‘Naughty!’ ‘I WAS OFF MY FACE ON MORPHINE AND THOUGHT KENNETH WILLIAMS AND HATTIE JACQUES WERE GOING TO WALK IN AT ANY MINUTE,’ my dad later recalled.

  After the week had elapsed he was told that he would be able to go home as soon as his body brace arrived. A day later the brace had not arrived. He amused himself by asking my mum to photograph him doing an I’m dying! face then instructing her to send the photograph to me. Three days later the brace still had not arrived. The consultant told my dad it would be here soon. ‘IS IT COMING FROM FAR AWAY?’ he asked. ‘LONDON? OR CASABLANCA?’ The consultant said no, that it was here in Mansfield, in a cupboard downstairs, but the man who was supposed to bring it up hadn’t got round to it yet. My dad asked the consultant how much it was setting back the NHS per day to keep him in this bed. The consultant put the figure at around eight hundred pounds. ‘SO YOU’RE SAYING BECAUSE A BLOKE CAN’T BE ARSED TO WALK UPSTAIRS WITH A BACK BRACE IT’S COST THE HOSPITAL TWO THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS?’ The consultant admitted that this was more or less the case. My dad asked for the phone number of the man who was supposed to bring the brace up and called him and said that if the brace didn’t arrive soon he would call the local newspaper and tell them about this fiasco. Four minutes later the man arrived in the room with the brace.

  Back home, wearing the brace and severely limited in his movements, my dad admitted that his injury had served as a wake-up call: he’d been trying to do too much for a man of his age. ‘So you’re going to stop chopping logs?’ I asked, when I visited. ‘YEP. NONE OF THAT ANY MORE,’ he replied. ‘CAN YOU GET ME A DRINK? I’M SIXTY. I USED TO DO EVERYTHING FOR MY DAD WHEN HE WAS SIXTY.’ My mum, meanwhile, moved the wooden head from the willow tree to the porch, directing its gaze away from the house and the offending tree, towards the garden hedge. ‘I can’t bring myself to get rid of it,’ she said. ‘I feel like something bad will happen if I do, either to me or somebody else. It’s all nonsense of course. I know I’m being silly.’

  My parents’ house is in a shallow, bright valley, and Sunnydale is what it says on the front door. My mum chose the name after talking my dad out of his first choice, Alien Sex Pit. They purchased the place in the uneasy final days of the last century, when people thought computers would set fire to the world. The house’s former owner had died in it on her hundredth birthday: a feat of very specific hanging-on and letting-go that, even though numbers are just numbers, seems a beautiful demonstration of personal willpower, even more so for the fact that it happened only a few weeks before the final curtain of an entire millennium. When my parents first viewed the house no object in it appeared to date from beyond 1958. The building is made from the small red Cafferata bricks synonymous with villages around Newark-on-Trent. The covered, open-sided oak porch is a much later addition by them, along with a third bedroom and the airy downstairs room where my mum paints, sews, prints and sketches. For the five years after my dad’s accident the head remained apparently content in its new home on the wall in the porch. On a wooden rack below it, toads moved in and out of my dad’s old loafers and running shoes, but the head never seemed swayed by their itinerant spirit. For me these five years passed more quickly than any before them: years of final fully entrenched adulthood, unshockable years of muddling along, caring a hell of a lot less about a few things I once did care about and a fair bit more about a lot of things I once didn’t. I imagine they passed more swiftly still for the wooden head, as years probably do when you’re a wooden head carved at an undetermined point in history and of a potentially haunted nature who has lived enough to be surprised by very little. In early 2014 my parents had to have a large part of the house rebuilt on their insurance after discovering that the long-term leaking of a shoddily fitted shower had caused serious structural damage and the roof was in danger of c
ollapsing. This was the latest in a long series of water-based mishaps in the house, including a cracked pipe in 2011 which resulted in a large stain on the living-room ceiling resembling a short but bulbous penis.

  ‘Do you think this looks rude?’ asked my mum.

  ‘Not at all,’ I replied.

  None of these events affected the wooden head. It continued to stare implacably away from them towards distant fields containing cattle, none of which were struck down during the same period with any significant or mysterious cases of murrain or cowpox. But after its fall from the porch during Christmas 2014 – the Christmas when I accompanied my dad to watch hunters set off to hunt a man dressed as a fox – the head began to get restless and embarked on several other excursions. None of these were very ambitious, usually ending with the head on the flagstones below and never straying beyond the porch’s threshold, but as 2014 became 2015 and 2015 wore on, the head’s tiny holidays became more frequent. My parents would replace it on its perch – always looking away from the house and the now-pollarded eucalyptus – but sometimes by the end of the day it would be back on the ground. A couple of times they found it inside the footwear on the rack below where it lived, including in one of the fateful loafers, which my dad still refused to throw away and continued to wear for lighter gardening tasks. More and more puzzled each time, my parents replaced the head again and again. Its tumbles to the ground were never witnessed by human eyes and occurred not just in high winds but in weather so still that the leaves on the trees in the garden barely vibrated.

  My dad’s exercise regime had slowed down by now, marginally. A month after coming out of his back brace he dusted down his axe and began to chop wood again. Then, after going to see the consultant at the hospital and being told that the condition of his fracture had regressed due to his chopping, he stopped. Then, a few weeks after that, he started again and never stopped. He did cease running around the village cricket field but began swimming at the local public pool, making new friends from eclectic walks of life: architects and retired miners and library assistants and bikers and archaeology lecturers and policemen and billboard salesmen. Sometimes while naked and wet my dad would talk to his new friends at such length in the changing room that one of them would bring their towel over and begin to dry him. Just as my phone conversations with my dad would invariably end with him instructing me to ‘WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES’ they would now tend to begin with ‘THIS WEEK AT SWIMMING…’ One week at swimming my dad was discussing a cashpoint in Nottingham which has the statistical reputation of being the scene of more muggings than any other cashpoint in the UK, and his policeman friend, also named Mick, told him that he had taken a statement from a student who’d been mugged down the road from the cashpoint. Not having any cash on him, the student had offered to pay the muggers by cheque. The muggers declined and escorted him back to his flat, stripping it of its most valuable contents. Another week at swimming my dad hid Malcolm’s shoes. Another week at swimming, in late summer that year, when the wooden head’s kamikaze dives from the porch wall were becoming even more frequent, my dad was getting unchanged and noticed that he had a black toenail. He showed the black toenail to Malcolm, who agreed that it was a black toenail.

  I winced when my dad showed me the black toenail, remembering the pain I’d experienced when the nail of my thumb turned black in 2008 after I slammed a car door on it. But my dad said he had experienced little to no pain from the black toenail. He couldn’t remember anything he had done to make it black and was told by his doctor not to worry about it and that the nail would fall off naturally when a new translucent one had finished growing beneath it. Presumably it was one of those minor injuries you sustain in the thick of strenuous exercise or physical labour and don’t notice at the time they occur. I get a lot of these myself and currently even had a very slightly bad toe of my own, probably sustained on a steep rocky crevice during a long walk in a thinly populated part of Devon. I have inherited my dad’s toes: long, thick and unintentionally violent. Because of this and the tiny unseen people who live in my house and steal socks in the dead of night, my sock drawer resembles a diverse but unsuccessful sock dating site: socks of every shape and colour, each of them alone, failing to find love. I stub my toes fairly regularly, and my dad stubs his a lot too, and toe length could quite feasibly be a factor in this regularity. Earlier in the year, many weeks before the black nail’s appearance, my dad had stubbed his toe on a table leg in his office then immediately replied to an unsolicited mass email from Boris Johnson with ‘FUCK OFF, BORIS.’ Afterwards he told my mum about the email and – although certainly no fan of Boris Johnson herself – she told him it hadn’t been a very nice thing to do. My dad immediately tramped back upstairs and sent a follow-up email: ‘SORRY ABOUT THAT, BORIS. I OVERREACTED. IT WAS BECAUSE I’D JUST STUBBED MY TOE.’

  There was quite a bit of speculation among my dad’s mates at swimming about when the black toenail would fall off. Looking at how precariously it was hanging there on everyone’s last swim before Christmas, Pat and Malcolm suggested that today could be the big day. ‘What if it comes off in the water?’ asked Pat. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’

  ‘NO, IT WOULDN’T,’ replied my dad. ‘ESPECIALLY IF SOMEONE IS DOING BREASTSTROKE AND HAPPENS TO BE OPENING THEIR MOUTH JUST AS IT FLOATS INTO THEIR PATH.’

  The nail, however, had been looking just as precarious for several weeks. I’d been getting little reports of it via text message from my mum. ‘Your dad’s black toenail is looking really bad now: I think it’s about to come off,’ she would tell me, but several days later there it would still be. My dad knew it would hold on for a bit longer still. He loves his early-morning swims and would, I am sure, have been reluctant to jeopardise his relationship with the authorities at the pool by defiling the water. Recently the pool had asked its regulars if they had any suggestions for things they’d like to change about the facilities. My dad came up with the following three:

  1. A trompe l’œil panoramic landscape on the bottom of the pool to keep people amused when they were swimming with their heads down.

  2. Mirrors on the ceiling, to enable swimmers doing backstroke to see where they were going and not crash into each other.

  3. All-over-body airblade dryers for the changing rooms.

  So far, there had been no response from the pool.

  My parents and I spent that Christmas of 2015 at my house in Devon, where I was playing nurse to one of my cats, who was recovering from two large life-saving operations, having been attacked by a dog. My dad filled their car with several bags of firewood, which he’d very kindly collected for me. I felt bad taking this from him, as he stacked it in such beautiful formations, and I felt even worse when my mum explained the lengths he’d gone to in order to get some of it. ‘He lost a big branch in the river again, like last year,’ she told me. ‘He walked back across the field and asked me to come over and hold his legs for him while he reached over and got it. I’m sixty-five.’ Only just over a month had passed since the last time my dad had fallen into a large body of natural water: a lake in Lincolnshire into which he was dipping a jar in order to get goodies for his new garden wildlife pond.

  ‘I should have known he would never be a proper grown-up when he asked me to go sledging on our first date,’ said my mum.

  After my dad and I had brought the logs in from the car, he went upstairs for a bath, taking the radio with him, and my mum and I attempted to catch up with each other over the booming sound of the Radio 4 News Quiz and my dad’s laughter. Half an hour later, I went upstairs to the toilet and found a trail of bubbles leading across the landing to the spare bedroom. ‘WATCH MY TOENAIL!’ my dad shouted, charging past me and down the stairs, barefoot. A few moments later he could be heard making loud quacking noises at my cats while throwing huge rolls of greasy cooked turkey at them: a treat he’d bought them from Asda the previous day. Afterwards, as he arrived in the living room, I noticed he’d taken his shirt off again. He loo
ked like a man who’d been unexpectedly invited to compete in a wrestling match in the last three minutes.

  ‘CAN YOU PUT ROLLING NEWS ON THE TELLY FOR ME?’ he asked, handing me the TV remote. I noticed the toenail was still not fully off. It really did look like it was about to detach now, but recent events had told me not to get too excited. It could be months yet.

  On the second morning of my parents’ stay I asked my dad if he wanted a cup of tea. My dad has not to my knowledge ever had a cup of tea, but I sometimes ask him if he wants one just to wind him up.

  ‘NO, I WANT A COFFEE,’ he said. ‘STRONG, WITH A BIT OF COLD WATER SO I DON’T BURN MY OESOPHAGUS. YOU’VE KNOWN ME THIRTY-EIGHT YEARS. YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT BY NOW.’

  ‘I’m forty,’ I said.

  ‘YEAH, BUT YOU DIDN’T REALLY KNOW ME FOR THE FIRST TWO YEARS.’

  Increasingly, my dad’s visits to my home are about recreating the rituals he enjoys in his own as assiduously as possible: the extravagantly bubbly baths, the loud radio, the bars of chocolate hidden under sofa cushions so – in his own words – ‘THEY ARE FUN TO FIND LATER.’ He also likes to go for an early-morning swim at the friendly local pool, which has an old-fashioned Speedo clock and doesn’t appear to have been redecorated since the seventies. Today being Boxing Day, though, the pool was closed. We’d only got out for a very short walk the previous day, and I knew it would be important to exercise my dad, in much the same way it’s important to exercise a German shepherd, so I suggested that he, my mum and I went for a walk along the seafront at Dawlish. I offered to drive, but he declined and said we’d go in his and my mum’s car. I told my dad that I could easily navigate us to Dawlish from my house, just thirty-five minutes away, but he insisted on using his satnav.

  After the female voice on the satnav had directed us down a farm track for the second time in ten minutes, my dad called her a bastard, told her to ‘FOOK OFF’ and permitted me to direct him the final quarter of the way. ‘THIS CAR’S GOT AUTOMATIC BRAKING ON IT,’ he said. ‘IT GIVES ME MORE CHANCE TO WATCH OUT FOR FOOKWITS AND LOONIES.’ As my dad drives, he tells stories from his life, slowing the car down dramatically as he gets to a climactic or highly descriptive point in the narrative, to the frustration of any drivers behind. On this occasion he told a story about an old man who recently went into a skid and flipped his Land Rover over on the main road not far from my parents’ village. A farmer had been first on the scene and, upon helping the old man out of his Land Rover, noticed that the old man’s dog was crushed beneath the vehicle, one floppy ear sticking out heartbreakingly from beneath the bodywork. After he pulled the old man to safety and discovered he was not seriously hurt, the farmer gave him the bad news. ‘I don’t have a dog,’ replied the old man. The farmer and the old man walked back to the Land Rover. ‘That’s just my fur-trapper hat,’ said the old man, pulling the floppy ear and releasing the remainder of the hat from beneath the wreck.