Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

  The sun was coming out at last and making the long silver trailer dazzle. Will wondered whether seabirds high overhead ever mistook it for water and dived to sudden deaths. A thick crusting of guano gave evidence of their visits. He came inside just as Roly was pulling a paint-spattered rugger shirt over his head, and glimpsed the discreet zip mark of an appendectomy scar before looking modestly away.

  “Sorry,” Roly said, “it isn’t designed for visitors and I live like a pig.”

  True, there was clutter everywhere, discarded clothes, paint, glue, woodshavings, an unmade bed spilling on to the floor. Smells of man and cooked breakfasts mingled with heady scents of adhesive and acetone. Mum’s sculpture stood in pride of place. He must have been working on it this morning or late last night. Where the drive of a small electric motor once turned its mechanism, a belt now hung loose for connection to a small wind vane made of beautifully planed and sanded wood, a work of art itself. “I tried it out earlier to test the balance but I can show you again, if you like,” Roly said, picking the two components up.

  “No, that’s fine. I’m sure it’s all perfect. Just show me how it joins up.”

  Roly pointed with a much-scarred finger and Will smelled that his breath was sour from coffee and lack of recent toothpaste. “That belt stretches over that drive bar and you leave the nut on the end of the bar to stop the belt working itself off.”

  “And she can put it outside all right?”

  “Of course. That’s what it’s for. It’s all treated with ten-year preservative. Just give the moving parts a squirt of oil now and then but use a light one. I guarantee it for five years, too, because I can never be sure of the materials seeing as it’s all recycled stuff.”

  “Right.” Will took the sculpture and wind vane from him. “Thanks. And, er,” he paused, “does it have a name? In case she asks. Rook-Scarer 56 or whatever,” he added.

  Roly scratched his head and frowned, staring at the mechanism. “Not really,” he said. “I just make them. I used to give things names when I was younger and ambitious. Galleries expected it. Now I mainly sell through Bronwen and, well, I just make them and she sells them. But no. Not a rook-scarer. I call them Skimmington pieces.”

  “As in The Mayor of Casterbridge?” Will could see this had pleased him; nobody normally got this allusion. No doubt he rarely dared make it. Roly smiled fleetingly.

  “That’s right. You read.”

  “I run a bookshop. I do little else. Tell me more.”

  “Country people used to put on protests outside the houses of people whose sex lives displeased them. Not just adulterers and seducers but dirty old men who’d taken girl brides or men who beat their wives. Gay people too, probably, though the books are too coy to say. Sometimes they’d make puppets of the people, like they do in Hardy for the Skimmington ride, but they always made a big noise, not just with instruments but pots and pans, stones, spades, buckets of horseshoes. The noisier the better. The weird thing is it’s a phenomenon you find all over Europe and America, only with different names. Charivari. Rough music. Loo-belling. Riding the Stang. Sorry.” He scowled again, looked down at his hands. “You’re getting me all enthusiastic. I don’t talk about it much. Art critics don’t exactly fight for Bronwen’s invitations. And now you are surprised.”

  “How so?”

  “Not only is the drop-out your landlord and a sculptor manqué but he’s pretentious with it.”

  “Well don’t take it out on me. You do cultivate that look.”

  “Only because it’s cheaper this way,” Roly said, pushing dreadlocks out of his face.

  “Don’t you get into trouble? Putting shampoo in the sea, I mean.”

  “It’s eco soap.” Roly grinned. “They make it with seaweed and sea salt. It stinks but it works and one bar lasts all summer. Razor blades are my only real expense.”

  “You could grow a beard.”

  “I could wear sandals with camel-colored socks …” Again that tic of wiping away his smile as soon as it surfaced. But they seemed to have passed some barrier because he was loosening up, becoming nervous if anything, restless where he had been stiffly aloof. “Look. Do you want a drink? Not a drink drink but I’ve got milk and mint tea and elderflower cordial.”

  “That sounds great.” Will was about to avoid sitting on the unmade bed then remembered this man was straight so it didn’t matter. Then he sat and heard Harriet saying that was never a problem before. But by then it was too late. He carefully put the sculpture on the sandy floor. “So these are people-scarers,” he said.

  “I think of them as early warning devices. To stop you getting complacent. To remember how illiberal people are. I mean not … It’s just a joke, really.” He sounded deadly serious. “Most people will use them as bird-scarers,” he mumbled, in verbal retreat.

  Will watched him splashing cloudy liquid into two glasses from an old milk container then topping them up from a water drum that took up half the fridge. Roly passed a glass over and flopped on the chair opposite that was actually just a half-inflated beach Lilo bent in two. Will sipped dubiously; there were actually some old, discolored elderflower petals floating in it. But it was delicious, like tasting a summer evening, heady and sweet. “Mmm,” he said. “Good. What are the stars in aid of?”

  There were small, yellow, star-shaped stickers dotted around the narrow space. He had not seen them at first but once he spotted one, on the kettle, he began to see them all over the place. By the light switch. On the tabletop. On the grimy windowpane above the bed. Even stenciled on the battered surfboard.

  “You ask a lot of questions for a stranger.”

  “Sorry. Don’t answer. But actually it’s easier asking questions with strangers. Haven’t you noticed that? When you get to know someone better you suddenly go beyond a question-asking stage. They tell you things or you tell them stuff but you stop, you know, digging because if you know them well then you’re meant to know all about them and understand them already.” He ran out of words.

  Roly had fixed him with eyes all the icier for his face being so weathered. “But that’s crap,” he said gently.

  “Is it? Maybe.”

  “You’ve never been married, have you? I mean, never lived with someone, even?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Apart from the fact that you come on holiday with your mother at, what, thirty-five?”

  “Thereabouts.” How had they got this earnest this quickly? Which of them had performed the necessary sleight of hand?

  “Yes,” Roly said with another fleeting smile. “It is obvious. But in a nice way.”

  “Oh. Well. Sorry. It’s all crap then, what I said. And I ask too many questions. But tell me anyway.”

  “I did a course. On happiness. I went through a bad patch. I was drinking, I wasn’t getting any work done, I was obsessed with money worries.” He paused. “I had depression, I suppose. I still do. It’s like being alcoholic. Once you’ve been there, felt it in you, it’s never safe to turn your back.” He stopped again.

  Will thought of the evening they had pulled him from the sea and the unmistakable smell, then, of wine about him.

  “The lady in the gallery told me about your wife dying,” Will said, thinking this might make it easier for him to talk.

  Roly laughed grimly. “Was that how she put it?”

  “Well, she called her your other half.”

  “My other half. How quaint. I like that.” He stared down at his untouched glass of cordial then put it on the floor as if suddenly thinking better of drinking it.

  “Look, you don’t have to talk about this, you know,” Will began nervously.

  “I know,” Roly said, “But I want to tell you.” And he pinned him in place with those eyes again.

  Oh Christ, Will thought. Now I’m stuck in a lonely caravan with a psycho.

  “So I went on this course someone in my therapy group had talked about. She was sneering at it but I thought it sounded interesting so I went.
And it was very simple. This man believes that happiness and unhappiness are only superficially to do with outside phenomena. Obviously you get cancer or your child dies, you’re sad, you win the lottery, you’re happy. But on a day-to-day level he believes that people who are basically happy have simply learned to think in a different way from people who are basically depressed. And he aims to undo the damaging way of thinking. It takes months, sometimes years, but the basic system is so simple that it’s easy to keep up. You make a list of the things that make you happy. Sunlight. The smell of jasmine. Your father’s smile. The thumping of your lover’s heart.”

  Against all logic, Will felt his own heart knock against his ribs.

  “Then you go over that list, refining it, questioning everything on it until you’re absolutely sure of the things and can remember each of them. Really remember them, though, recall the smell or sight and that sensation of happiness that goes with it, not just remember the words describing it. And then the stars. Well, they don’t have to be stars. That’s just me. You put them on things you see or use every day, in your house and wherever you work, in your car. Then whenever your eyes catch sight of one you have to pause and summon up one of the things on your list. And that’s it.”

  “And it works? It sounds a bit like counting your blessings.”

  Roly shrugged and looked away at where sunlight was now falling in an intense band through the open door. “It helps. I think about good things more often than I did. And I left London—which took courage—and made the move back down here.”

  “I thought you came from Scotland. Your accent—”

  “I did. Originally. My other half had inherited a place here and left it to me. I sold it to my sister-in-law. I couldn’t stand living there with all those useless memories but I loved the area and the sea and I was known here by a few people so that made it easier. And it’s cheap. Very, very cheap. Which helps.”

  “The lady in the gallery—Bronwen—said you’d changed your working methods too.”

  “Yes, well, Bronwen’s spiteful and disappointed and she says a lot, most of it opinionated, ignorant and harmful.” His tone changed so abruptly it pulled Will up short. The temperature was rising fast. In so confined a space, humid after rain, his aggression was a bulky third presence.

  Will stood. “I should go.”

  Roly did not move or look up. “Maybe you should.”

  Will gathered up the two parts of the sculpture. “This is great. She’ll be so pleased. There’s nothing more to pay you, is there?”

  “No,” Roly said, suddenly weary. “Nothing more to pay.”

  Will could not fit the two pieces through the door at once so he carried the main part down the rickety steps first, then turned to reach in for the wind vane. But suddenly Roly was there, on his feet, holding on to it. “Look,” he said. “What exactly do you want?”

  “I’m sorry,” Will said.

  “You’ve been hanging around like a puppy.”

  “You asked me to stay.”

  “I mean generally. You’ve been watching me. I’ve seen you watching me, hanging around, pretending to swim.”

  “I was swimming!”

  Roly jumped out of the caravan so fast that Will flinched, thinking he was going to hit him, but Roly just stood there, so close Will could feel his angry breath on his face. The dog barked, sensing excitement.

  “What?” Will said.

  Sandy would arrive tomorrow and they would have to find ways of dodging both parents and children. The last thing he needed was a further complication. And he was too old for this. He might be sleeping with a married man on a regular basis but forty was too old to go fluffing up straight men’s egos. Roly was standing so close their knees were brushing, however, close enough for Will to see the few tips of stubble his razor had missed. Some were pure white. There was a trace of a smirk on his lips.

  “This is such a tired routine,” Will said. “Making the fairy do all the work so you have someone to blame afterward. I have my pride. And incidentally I think this apology for a sculpture is a piece of tourist-rip-off tat.”

  Or he would have said it had he not been kissing so hard that Roly stumbled back against the steps. His body was not as godlike as novelty and mystery had at first made it seem. For all his swimming and nouveau-feral lifestyle, there was a slight thickness about his waist and softness to his ass that was both reassuring and exciting. But he was unyielding in Will’s embrace. “You’re not kissing back,” Will muttered, sniffing the bonfire odors of his hair and neck.

  “Sorry,” Roly said. “I’m not very … Maybe if we went back inside?”

  This really was an old routine. Harriet was mistaken in her too-pat analysis. This was not like Finn at all. Instead, it was taking Will straight back to the frantic, joyless encounters between boys at school. Roly would put on a coy, undone footman act, the better to distance his manly pride afterward from what had passed between them. Will would have to make all the moves. It would all be over in a clumsy rush, leaving unspeakable awkwardness in its wake and they would have to spend the next week avoiding one another on the beach. And Sandy was coming tomorrow. Will could save this pressure-cooked horniness for the devil he knew.

  “Look, I don’t want you to do anything you might regret,” he said. “We could just pretend this never happened.”

  Two hours later, the trailer had not exactly rocked but one of the piles of Art Forum International supporting the bed had given way, and he was sitting up in a sea of none-too-clean bedding feeling stretched and nicely bruised and tasted all over. He knew his hair was standing on end and he didn’t care. Still naked, a smear of butter on his upper thigh, Roly handed him a plate of marigold-yellow, scrambled bantam eggs with a piece of sliced buttered bread and a fork. He fetched his share then clambered in at the opposite end of the lopsided bed so that his legs slid up on either side of Will’s.

  He grinned, immediately wiped the grin off his face and fell to eating but Will scratched at him with a big toe. “You’re good at that,” he said. “Considering.”

  “The plumbing’s the same,” Roly said with his mouth full, then swallowed. “It’s just pointing in different directions most of the time. You want more pepper?”

  “No, no. This is great.”

  They ate on in ravenous silence, communicating only through occasional movements of their feet. Then Roly slung his plate on the draining board behind him and the movements of his feet became more specifically intimate. “I have to go to Saint Just in half an hour,” he said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Other end of the county, near Land’s End. I’ve got to deliver some pieces to a gallery there. There’s an opening tonight. Drinks and stuff. You could come too. It might be fun.”

  Will gave it serious thought. Possibly Harriet’s analysis had not been mistaken. Now that the mystery was dispelled, however, and the stranger known, Roly was nothing like Finn. The similarities had been superficial and this coming together was all too reminiscent of the numerous, depressing, pointless encounters that had spotted his years since Finn left. Will imagined the teasing hours of wanting to get each other’s clothes off again without being able to, the clumsy, standardized, this-isn’t-really-my-thing brush-off at the evening’s end. “My parents get back in a bit. I ought to be here for them. And my brother-in-law and his kids arrive tomorrow. We have to get beds made and so on. Sorry.”

  Roly had the good grace to make a convincing display of disappointment but there was a give-away air of relief about the way he jumped up and started to dress that made Will wish he had agreed after all, with galling eagerness, and played a lovesick dead-weight for the rest of the day for the simple pleasure of punishing him.

  “So do you live with your parents still?”

  “Certainly not! A fortnight’s holiday is quite long enough. No. They live on the other side of town. We’re from Barrowcester.”

  “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, Ah?”

&nbs
p; Roly shrugged. “Nothing. It’s pretty there, isn’t it?”

  “So? It’s pretty here.”

  “Not in the winter. In the winter it’s stunning. You should see it.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “Come and stay.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Will, charmed enough but not believing him for a moment.

  “Shutters bolted against the howling wind. Fire roaring in the stove. The house feels like a log cabin. It’s great.”

  “I’m tied to the bookshop.” Will explained about his business, the café, the readings and, modestly, the building success of the thing. He assumed he had sounded enthusiastic but when he was through Roly startled him by saying it sounded like a kind of imprisonment.

  “You should be careful,” he said. “If your mum’s as sick as you think, you’ll get trapped.”

  “But I like it there. It’s home.”

  “Oh, well, in that case …” Roly shrugged again, finished tying his shoes. “Better head off,” he said. “Help yourself to whatever. The door doesn’t lock. Just slam it when you go.” And he ruffled Will’s hair and left.

  With him no longer charging it with his presence, his trailer’s interior became a filthy, inhospitable mess once more. The bed was itchy. Lousy too, perhaps. The air was stale and unpleasantly musky. Will waited until he heard the dog jump into the van with her master and the van’s engine gun uncertainly then he hurried to dress again and be off. He slammed the door as instructed, picked up the two parts of the sculpture and helped himself to two lengths of blue nylon rope from the salvage pile.

  Two hours of sunshine had been enough to draw out the holidaymakers who had been hiding from the rain and the beach had filled already. The tide was rising so he had to pick his way through family encampments as he crossed the dune to the house and imagined inquisitive stares upon him. As soon as he was back on the veranda, he secured the wind vane to a wooden upright and twisted it until it caught the breeze, then he used the other length of rope to fix up the sculpture beside it. He stretched the drive belt into place and waited.