The Offing
Page 19
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘University.’ She raised a hand. ‘Now, hear me out. I remember what you said, clear as day: “People like me don’t go to places like that.” Robert, that ripped at my heart. The thought that you see yourself as somehow inferior to the toffs, tossers and bashers I grew up amongst is an unforgivable absurdity and, furthermore, one that must be addressed immediately. Nothing will change if it’s not changed from the inside, by which I mean if you were to go to university, you would not only be refining what is already a keen mind, but shifting the intake towards your people too. I know it’s only a small step: the barriers can’t all be broken at once. Who knows, though, perhaps one day when you’re a wild success you could repay the favour to someone equally as deserving.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘I’ll help you.’
‘What if I don’t have the correct qualifications?’
She shook her head. ‘There are ways,’ said Dulcie. ‘Trust me, there are ways. Special dispensations. There are scholarships. Also I recently read that there is talk of changing the entire further education system, and that there will soon be a new type of qualification that one will take in order to go up to university. They’re wiping the slate and levelling the playing field, if you’ll indulge me a double cliché. We could speed you through those, I’m sure. Approached with alacrity, a bright boy like you who has his eyes and ears open to experience can’t fail to find a place somewhere. Believe in yourself, Robert, that’s all it takes. Unless of course you don’t want to.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I want to. At least I think I do.’
She stood up and picked up the plates.
‘Mull it over while I fetch dessert. Take your time. You’re on holiday. But do give it some thought.’
‘I still don’t understand why you’re being so generous, Dulcie.’
‘I told you, it’s what I do. And maybe one day you will too.’
I lean back in my chair. My neck aches. The pain still throbs there, down one side, as it has for these past few months. I swallow painkillers like confectionery but they do little. I have bottles of pills but the one thing they cannot do is defeat death.
I remove my glasses, stand and stretch, then lean over to survey the words I have painstakingly typed, my wrists and knuckles aching. I am not as fast as I used to be. Old age has spun cobwebs in all my joints and the illness has slowed me right down in ways I could never have imagined, but at least my memory works. That muscle is still strong.
Though there is a chill in the air, the window is open wide and a stone from the beach keeps the pile of papers in place. The stone holds within it a fossil. An ammonite. To look at it makes me feel young again. All time is relative and on certain days when I am not moving and I close my eyes and tune in to nature’s frequency, I am sixteen again.
Every now and then a gentle gust lifts the pages to afford a glimpse of a sentence that takes me straight back to those moments I have documented upon which my entire life pivoted, and then changed direction entirely.
Because really the story started long ago, here in this shack that sits sagging in a wild meadow now. Perhaps you read about it in newspaper profiles or the documentary they made about me following the publication of a debut novel that the critics said heralded an angry new voice, and which sold unexpectedly well. They were wrong: I wasn’t angry. I just wrote what I knew. That was how I talked. That was how we all talked up north. And still do.
Time was on my side then. Youth had recently become a commodity to market and apparently I was one of the voices that captured it – a spokesperson for the young and disenfranchised, no less, they said. I just wrote what I saw and heard all around me, back in the village. I painted the people onto the page, that’s all. Nothing more. That those in London considered my novel and the many more that followed it to be strange and exotic only showed how far removed they were from the true working heartlands of an England in a state of change. When it was adapted for film, that chasm only widened. But I happily accepted the accolades, and cashed the cheques, and I never forgot Dulcie.
How could I?
Each summer I returned, even when married with children, even after Dulcie Piper was long gone, first to a luxurious split-level apartment overlooking the grassy parklands of The Stray in Harrogate, followed by several years in a nursing home on the fringes of York, and then finally to a few fading days in hospital. I visited her in each; she was lucid and witty and caustic to the end. She passed away while wearing oversized sunglasses, full of gin.
Regimes rose and fell and I kept coming back here, to the meadow, to write and read and think, to take grass baths in the moonlight and watch badgers at dawn. Divorces and deaths and grandchildren occurred and still I returned, always alone, until the stays became so prolonged that I never left, and my big old house – up against this place I could never call it a home – sat empty.
With Dulcie at my shoulder the words kept flowing. I hear her always, prodding and cajoling my every clumsy sentence, urging me onwards to always do better. And so the books kept coming, admittedly to a dwindling readership, but they always made it to the shelf. And that is what matters. I was living the life I wanted to live, and still am, despite this thing that eats away inside of me: a disease called time.
The sea air is good for me too. It gives me an appetite, and when one has an appetite the will to live is strong.
Dulcie is here now, in the room, standing behind me, uncorking a bottle as she looks out across to the meadow to the sea, to the offing, and the sun that sets behind it. Sometimes I walk up to the little graveyard and sit by her headstone, amongst those of the sailors and fishermen, and I know that soon enough I will lie down and join them. Perhaps we shall share our stories.
That way of life has changed, of course. The small-scale fishing industry barely exists and most of the houses down bay are second homes that fill up only during holidays. It doesn’t bother me. The rest of the year I get the beach to myself. I walked along it early this morning, and saw how much the coast had eroded since I enjoyed that first view of it. The sea has eaten away at it so that the country has shrunk by twenty or thirty feet just in my lifetime, and it will keep shrinking. It will diminish to a pebble, and then one day nothing, as we all do. It is a reminder that permanence is an impossibility. All is flux. And nature always wins.
I sit back down and type the final sentence of the story about lives led as freely as greater forces would permit.
These are my last words, and I leave them here for you.
Acknowledgements
With thanks gratitude to my agent, Jessica Woollard, and everyone at David Higham Associates: Alice Howe, Clare Israel and Penelope Killick. Thanks to my editor, Alexa von Hirschberg, who helped shape and refine this book, always with the lightest of touches. To all at Bloomsbury: Ros Ellis, Marigold Atkey, Philippa Cotton, Rachel Wilkie, Jasmine Horsey. Thank you also to Silvia Crompton for the copyediting, and Zaffar Kunial for his poetry input.
Writers rely on luck, and I have had a generous share. For their support and encouragement over the years I also wish to acknowledge Claire Malcolm and all at New Writing North. Kevin and Hetha Duffy at Bluemoose Books. Carol Gorner and everyone at the Gordon Burn Trust. Richard and Elizabeth Buccleuch and the Walter Scott Prize. Michael Curran at Tangerine Press. Jeff Barrett and all at Caught by the River. Sarah Crown and Arts Council England. The Society of Authors. The Royal Society of Literature. The Northern Fiction Alliance.
To my family and friends, and my wife, Adelle Stripe.
The bulk of The Offing was written in libraries by hand, using pen and paper. This book is dedicated to librarians everywhere, and to booksellers and teachers, and all who work towards sharing a passion for the power of the written word.
Note on the Author
Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. His novel The Gallows Pole received a Roger Deakin Award and won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Beastings
won the Portico Prize for Literature and Pig Iron won the Gordon Burn Prize, while Richard was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. He has also published poetry, crime novels, short fiction and the nature memoir Under the Rock, while his journalism has appeared in publications including, among others, the Guardian, New Statesman, Caught by the River and the Spectator.
He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.
Also available by Benjamin Myers
The Gallows Pole
Winner of the 2018 Walter Scott Prize and a Roger Deakin Award
From his remote moorland home, David Hartley assembles a gang of weavers and land-workers to embark upon a criminal enterprise that will capsize the economy and become the biggest fraud in British history. They are the Cragg Vale Coiners and their business is ‘clipping’ – the forging of coins, a treasonous offence punishable by death. When an excise officer vows to bring them down and with the industrial age set to change the face of England forever, Hartley’s empire begins to crumble. Forensically assembled, The Gallows Pole is a true story of resistance and a rarely told alternative history of the North.
‘One of my books of the year … It’s the best thing Myers has done’ Robert Macfarlane, Big Issue Books of the Year
‘A windswept, brutal tale of eighteenth-century Yorkshire told in starkly beautiful prose’ Guardian
‘A brutal tale told with an original, muscular voice’ The Times
https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/benjamin-myers-68131/
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Beastings
Winner of the Portico Prize for Literature and the Northern Writers’ Award
A girl and a baby. A priest and a poacher. A savage pursuit through the landscape of a changing rural England.
When a teenage girl leaves the workhouse and abducts a child placed in her care, the local priest is called upon to retrieve them. Chased through the Cumbrian mountains of a distant past, the girl fights starvation and the elements, encountering the hermits, farmers and hunters who occupy the remote hillside communities. An American Southern Gothic tale set against the violent beauty of Northern England, Beastings is a sparse and poetic novel about morality, motherhood and corruption.
‘Intimate and elemental … Myers has the potential to become a true tragedian of the fells’ Guardian
‘This bitter, alarming, occasionally visionary novel of the British wilderness is likely to linger in the mind for some time’ New Statesman
‘Myers is quite simply an excellent and already accomplished writer. His prose is taut, confident, professionally polished but at the same time maintaining a sense of rustic and unrefined authenticity, that which is truly hewn’ Sarah Hall
https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/benjamin-myers-68131/
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Pig Iron
Winner of the Gordon Burn Prize
John-John wants to escape his past. But the legacy of brutality left by his boxer father, King of the Gypsies, Mac Wisdom, overshadows his life. His new job as an ice cream man should offer freedom, but instead pulls him into the dark recesses of a northern town where his family name is mud. When he attempts to trade prejudice and parole officers for the solace of the rural landscape, Mac’s bloody downfall threatens John-John’s very survival.
‘Pig Iron is an important book because it tells a story that has shaped all contemporary Western humans, but is routinely, inexplicably overlooked – the great move from agricultural life to industrial life. The respect in which that shapes human culture and individual humans’ Deborah Orr
‘His poetic vernacular brims with that quality most sadly lost – humanity’ Guardian
‘One of my best reads this year ... A deeply rural story, a book full of passion for the English countryside and centred on the conflict between the travelling and the settled community. A very fine read indeed, it expresses a life view almost never examined in our narrow literary culture’ Melvin Burgess
https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/benjamin-myers-68131/
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First published in Great Britain, 2019
This electronic edition published in 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © Benjamin Myers, 2019
Benjamin Myers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-1131-4; TPB: 978-1-5266-1129-1; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-1127-7
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