By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
24) Sitting
Sweat is, in itself, a purgative. He sucks it off his upper lip, recycling his own impurities; and he pumps on up the hill.
From out of the trees a grey pigeon throws itself into the green air, angling skyward the instant it sees him. On the hillside opposite pink sheep crawl like plump maggots about a green carcass.
Paul sucks on his sweat. He has come up here past concrete farmyards deep in khaki shit and yellow straw. He has come up here between tatty and tangled hedgerows, guarded by sentry foxgloves. He has come up here past an ancient church, past a mildewed graveyard, with its tempting acre of stillness. And, with a great expenditure of punishing energy, he has come up here into this scrawny woodland. Having arrived, he drops off the road onto a gravelled track, passes through a red-dusty and deserted parking area and, watching out for stones and smooth roots, he pedals on up a black path to a heathland that is patched with purple heather and green bracken.
The peat and flinty path goes into a rutted track of hardened clay. Paul wobbles alongside a line of spreading beeches. The black rubber tyres crackle on the brittle beechnuts. He glimpses a hollow gray trunk split like a gigantic cunt. Then there is only the sweat hanging in his eyebrows and dripping off his nose, and all around the yellow sun.
When he can go no higher he swings his leg over the polished saddle and lays the red bike on its side. Lifting his face to the blue sky, unlocking his muscles from the machine, he breathes deep the harsh cool air. His lungs cannot hold it. He expels the air, takes another lungful. Now, with the toxics gone from his system, his mind is clear and awake. Now, up here in the blue sky, he knows that he is not wanted for murder. Now he knows that the man's body would have been found while he himself was still in bed, that the police would straightaway have been round to arrest him, that the man was just another drunk who got another hiding he didn't know he'd deserved.
Up here, breathing deep, he feels doubly free. His legs, though, tremble. Sitting on a low hummock he surveys the world.
Speckled Bridgwater lays over to his right, the flat sheen of Durleigh reservoir before it like a long sheet of polythene. Further away the silver Parret worms its way through flat fields to the Bristol Channel.
All on the land is cleanly lined and separate, the pale beech distinct from the dark conifer. A glinting white and glass car passes over a gleaming grey road. Paul watches a green tractor with an unseasonable plough, notes the driver's unconscious artistry in the interweaving of furrows. Likewise the pale fields where the silage has been mown in ever-decreasing squares.
Finger-scraping more sweat from his face Paul looks up from those geometric fields and away across the rippled surface of the melancholy sea and he thinks he can see the Black Mountains of Wales. Or so he's been told of that occasional horizon.
The Channel is made lilac-grey with silt. That same silt, in suspension, has floated back and forth with the tides, up and down the Bristol Channel, for the last thousand years and more. Fascinated by its enormous movement Paul has tried to find a symbolism in it, has tried to liken humanity to that twice daily drift of silt — that we are all but flecks of silicon settling slowly into the grey amorphous mud of time. But it isn't so. Humanity is more like a green duck-paddled pond, he decided elsewhere, with the rich and ambitious, like scum, floating on their own sour gases to its top.
Below, along the side of the hill, a couple of black rooks go flapping and floating by with graceless ease.
On a low green headland, sticking out into the grey sea, are the two square boxes of Hinkley Point power station. Now that he has brought himself to look upon them he studies their sheer blind sides. They remind him always of a wicked king's castle from a children's story. And, like those sinister castles, they hold the fascination of the forbidden unknown; and, because their dangers can't be seen, smelt, or touched, then they have too the magical malignancy of the superstitiously terrifying.
Another reactor is going to be built down there. Like a blister beside the other two. It will leak. Those leakages will cause more cancers. Paul wonders again if he should actually join those who campaign against nuclear power, if he should walk behind them in their street processions, stand in shopping precincts with petitions, save the world from fall-out and fools. He knows they won't succeed. Mindless money will do the talking. What's the point? he thinks before he starts thinking. The same for living midst an agriculture that kills.... The world is too big and its enemies too many. Impotent, powerless, Paul cannot do battle against the agricultural chemical industry. He knows the poisoned earth is ticking away like a cyanide clock, but he can see no point in his doing anything. His thinking is, after all, framed first in an industrial landscape. Living in philistine Sydenham, next to a chemical works, underneath an electric pylon, with an explosives factory up the road, what difference to his chances of life can yet one more nuclear reactor make?
Where is the selflessness, he asks of his indolent self, that sent past others off to fight dictators and lost causes? Not in Bridgwater today. Although even Bridgwater has its own war memorial, must once have contained simple idealists, people who loved their country and believed what they read in the papers. Where did that ingenuousness, those ideals and principles go? Life now is a mess, everyone walking around hating themselves and each other.
Up here he hates no-one. Here he feels aloof from his own life. Here the link between him and Bridgwater could be just a trick of memory, a dull story someone told him. He tries to see now the route that will take him down over the hills and between the hedges and the sheep-cropped grass to Bridgwater.
Looking down on the town, imagining himself higher, he thinks of drawing a map of his life in and around its buildings and streets. The map will have thick lines where he went back and forth to his two schools, then out to Puriton and his other jobs, with but faint lines for excursions that took him off the edges.... the map of a life in one place.
Now here he sits on a green hill on the edge of an arrogant little island in the North Atlantic. Directly below him, in the lee of two twisted hawthorns, is a dark boggy pond. On brown wings dragonflies with bodies like the insides of blue biros will be whirring around its swamp edges. Further down is Hawkridge reservoir. There the green water will be flowing in sheet metal curves around the massed concrete dam. Down there, visible now, three gulls fly high over the one dark ploughed field. Symbols of white purity are seagulls. Except that around Bridgwater the seagulls are rubbish tip scavengers and they die of botulism....
Down there, below this bald hill, are all the dark enclosed spaces of summer — the leaf-shadowed realm of trees, the cool glimmering underneath of bridges and tunnels, the deep bottom of fern-dark gullies, dense bushes where clumsy fledglings hide.... Down there too is a church which is the colour of dust and dry stone outside; within, the stained glass makes it like being inside a speckled jewel. Down there, and up here too, snakes wait out the hot day under cold stones.
Here, now, a white butterfly seems to bang at the air with its veined wings. It tilts, and drops to the brittle heather. The bright sun burns into the back of Paul's neck. He turns up his shirt collar. Down there, beside every village and town, are clusters of clay-coloured houses with clean new roofs. In his visits here Paul has watched the fields down there being taken over by those new small houses, gable end after gable end. He and Julie believe that, even during their own short lives, they have had the best of the countryside. Can't They see.... Can't They see.... that all these scattered little estates depend on cheap petrol? Few of those small householders work locally. All commute, and oil is a finite substance. At times Paul wants to bomb those little neat houses, convert them all to rubble, clear the rubbish away and get the land back to green.
He does not want to go down into that town, to be again in among buildings with their pretensions to solidity. He does not want to take ownership of his future. Whatever it may be. He wants to be here with the flitting swallows and the swifts slicing through the hot air. Flipping above and slipping below one another they seem suddenly as numinous as the gnats they are chasing. Paul wants to follow with them the contours of the hills, go skimming down over curly bracken fronds, zigzagging between the spiky tops of conifers, hurtling low over a wide flat beach....
He scratches. The sweat is cooling on him, his skin tightening under its salty astringency. In a moment he will unbend his back and his limbs and he will go to his bike. Eyes then only for the rutted track, he will cycle back to the bare parking area, then he will drop down and down and down the hills and into flat Bridgwater.
commentary.... Paul's was not the unprejudiced panorama of the traveller, no broad sweeps of vista for him. He had expectations of the scene below him, immediately avoiding, or seeking, landmarks — the two islands, Flat Holm and Steep Holm, floating in the misty channel; the river looping in towards the town; the square blocks of Hinkley Point power station.... His were the particulars, the miniatures, of the stationary.
The vision of the traveller and the stationary are incompatible. The one moves warily towards; the other confidently accepts what is moving towards him. The traveller can date a chance remark, slot it into a place, knows the memory to be his own. The stayput keeps it all with him, assumes it to be common knowledge. No yesterplaces for the stayput. All is before here to the traveller, a geography of mnemonics. And to the traveller the stayputs are insignificant, are but types seen from a train window. While to the stayputs the one stopover traveller, like Paul's father, can take on a lifetime's significance.
For a stayput like Paul, even from the top of that hill, from where Bridgwater looked like but a scattering of gravel chips, still the town had held Paul's mind. But, as in any high place, by any tranquil shore, for either traveller or stayput, there must come floating on the noiseless currents of air or water mind flotsam from turmoil elsewhere. Although we ourselves know the desperate truth of it, that such disturbance can take place in the same world at the same time seems inconceivable.
As in his ride out onto the levels Paul carried with him up into the hills the baggage of other rides there. He couldn't, for instance, cycle that day's route without remembering the bread-delivery man telling him that it was where he'd brought his bit on the side for 'a meat injection'. And, always on that same route, he remembered the evening he came upon a pastoral scene quintessentially English — a flamingo pink sunset silhouetting a church's slender spire.
Not that this ridge of heathland could be thought of as a dewy place of sprites and innocence. Here the sweating hounds went baying after exhausted deer. Paul then was passively opposed to that too. Not so much for the terror that the hunting inflicted on the animals so worn down, be they deer or fox, otter or hare, but for the barbaric effect the hue and cry had on the human beings doing the hunting.
Paul had become briefly caught up on his bike amid steam-panting hounds and iron-shod horses. And to extricate himself from the melee he had found himself smiling placatingly at the hard-faced horsemen and women.
Other riders he had seen singly at other times had been straight-backed women; and he had smiled at them too thinking of them with their stone faces and haughty eyes simultaneously satisfying two desires. Not only did those female riders have something large, warm and comforting between their outspread legs, and not only was that large and warm thing pressing rhythmically on their clitoris, they also had the fairground exhilaration of being perched perilously high. Small wonder they made their faces such rigid masks.
As with the levels Paul loved the Quantock Hills, delighted in his familiarity with them and their few remaining wild creatures. He would hate, though, through his avowed love of the land surrounding stinking Bridgwater, to be called a patriot. The word patriot, he believed, was only heard now when someone was trying to make their country the enemy of another country. Anyone who promoted division being inherently evil, the word had come to have connotations of dishonesty and dishonour. Paul therefore vehemently disclaimed any patriotism. But he did love these green bits of countryside with the consistence and persistence of life itself, which sent generation after generation of swallow and swift north and south.
Mostly, though, Paul then looked down with contempt upon Bridgwater and the surrounding countryside, looked down on a rip-off economy that produced nothing but despoilation, all awaiting the radio screech of a nuclear blast. He should, he told himself, he should have joined in the fight against Hinkley C. As he should also have been joining with others against the use of poisonous chemicals on the saturated land.
Only individuals can see into the future and warn of what they see. Corporations can't. Governments can't. So in England did there then exist, of necessity, a subculture of concern. An alternative lifestyle that was comprised of all classes, individual hotheads and idealists, faddists and prophets, artists and cranks.
Bureaucracies, institutions, societies, do not have foresight, only momentum. So did dormitory estates continue to get built out along the motorways, while the individuals living within those houses, and the individuals working for the building companies, knew that oil was a finite substance.
Paul's was a life controlled by those deadweight forces. Paul's was a life controlled primarily by the one deadening place. When the Parrett flooded again some would again find their homes untenable. When the Parrett froze over again they would cook another ox upon it. Future local history.
Paul stayed because he knew that his life was also controlled by events beyond that landscape. As in Roman times, still did civilisations depend on the price of corn. That price governed his life as much as the rise and fall of the river. As with the pesticides and nitrates on the levels, as with planes dropping out of the skies, as with leaking nuclear power stations, gas tankers exploding....
The powers-that-be might sometimes, when it suited their democratic purposes, let him think that he had his life under his control. Then some bastard out of sight would again pull the plug on him....
Of small consolation, on this trashed planet, is Darwin's assertion that a herd species is more likely to survive than are lone animals of prey. The human herd now outnumbers all but the rabbits, and humankind are killing them and themselves. There are just too many of us and all of us dissimilar. Sicknesses — viral, mental, social and spiritual — spread too quickly to be understood in this global overcrowding.
That's why Paul's then being alone on a hill was such a luxury. Alone on a hill he could be aloof from our species. And we have to be aloof, because every day we hear of a fresh slaughter, of a fresh genocide. But it is just another slaughter, just another genocide. We can't get righteously indignant about it anymore. Best too to keep it at a distance, because as soon as we become a part of it, a part of the process, our abhorrence will be used to justify the slaughter and the genocide of the perpetrators. Or of someone else. It won't matter who. Provided that those who do the killing can show that they were wronged in some manner first.
On this overcrowded planet, where the perpetuation of the species is putting the species in danger, what is the point of life if procreation is not desired? Answer me that, priest and philosopher.
True Stories
In March 1989 Michael John Martin, of Edinburgh Road, Bridgwater, was given a three month prison sentence for driving without insurance and for driving while disqualified.
In March 1989 Nichola Ann Roberts was fined £50 for stealing £20 from the newsagents in St John Street, Bridgwater, where she worked. Nichola Ann Roberts was 27 years old.
On 27th June 1989 the Ann Summers Roadshow came to the Rock Garden Cafe, St Mary Street, Bridgwater. Tickets were £3 a piece, and Diamond White was sold for 80p. The choreographed show had three female and two male models doing at least 50 costume changes to demonstrate the lingerie.
In June 1990 the Policy and Finance Committee of Sedgemoor District Council refused an application for charity rate relief for the Masonic Hall in King Square, Bridgwater. Councillor Michael Payne took exception to the Policy and Finance Committee's decision, "The Masons were founded in the late 17th century," he said, "and they are a charity. Their main aim is to seek the welfare and dignity of mankind."
Councillor Joe Ayres, however, said, "With respect, in my experience, I have never heard of any philanthropic actions to anyone but themselves."
