England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  He felt at once compelled to comply.

  ‘It’s over there.’ He actually lifted an arm. ‘You’re looking at it.’

  The man wrinkled his face as if he couldn’t see anything.

  ‘I is lookin’ for Ilfracombe, man.’ Then he pronounced the word at full-pitch and with declamatory slowness, as if it were a place in Africa.

  ‘Il-frah-coombe!’

  Then the voice broke up into little screechy, hissy laughs. He couldn’t tell if it was nervous laughter, panicky laughter or a sort of calculated laughter. Or just laughter. It was like a parrot. He couldn’t help the thought. It was like a parrot laughing.

  ‘Ilfracombe is over there.’ Again he felt the ridiculous need to raise an arm. ‘You’re in the right direction. You’ll need the thirty-nine, then the three-nine-nine. An hour, at this time of day.’

  The man peered, putting a visoring hand to his eyes. ‘I no see it, man. I no see no three-nine-nine. Ilfracombe, Deh-von. We in Deh-von, man?’

  ‘We’re in Somerset.’ (He almost said, ‘We in Somerset.’) It surely didn’t need saying, but he announced it, ‘This is Exmoor.’

  ‘Exmoor! Fookin’ ’ell. Ilkley Moor, that’s me. Ilkley Moor bar tat. Ilkley Moor bar fookin’ tat.’

  The voice had completely changed again. What was going on here? He was used—occupationally used—to the effects of shock and exposure. He was used to the phenomenon of disorientation. To gabble, hysteria, even, sometimes, to the effects of drug taking.

  He wanted to say a simple ‘Calm down’. He wanted to exert a restorative authority. But he felt that this man, stranded in what seemed to be, for him, the middle of nowhere and talking weirdly, somehow had the authority. He peered into the car’s interior. He saw that on the not unroomy back seat there was a grubby blanket and a pillow. It was five in the morning. He got the strong impression that this man, going about whatever could possibly be his business, used his car as at least an emergency place of overnight accommodation. Having just affirmed that he wasn’t one, he felt like a policeman. He felt out of his territory, though he couldn’t be more in it. He knew this road like the back of his hand. But he was a coastguard, not a policeman.

  The voice changed again. ‘I is in de right direction, man. But I is goin’ nowhere.’

  ‘No. I can see that. What happened?’

  ‘Fookin’ deer.’ It was the other man—the other other-man—again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fookin’ deer. Int’ middle of road. Joost standin’ there.’

  ‘You saw a deer?’

  ‘Int’ middle of road. Five fookin’ minutes ago.’

  He looked around, over the roof of the car. It was Exmoor. There were deer. You saw them sometimes from the road, especially in the early morning. But there was little cover for them here and he’d never, in over twenty years, come upon a deer just standing in the middle of the road. If they stepped on the road at all, they’d surely dart off again at even the distant sight of a vehicle. This man had come from—wherever he’d come from—to see something he’d never seen in decades.

  He had the feeling that the deer might be another symptom of disorientation. A hallucination, an invention. Yet the man (the other one again) spoke about it with beguiling precision.

  ‘A lee-tal baby deer, man. I couldn’t get by he. I couldn’t kill he. A lee-tal baby Bambee.’

  He looked over the roof of the car. Nothing moved in the greenish greyness. It was just plausible: a young stray deer, separated and inexperienced, in the dip, in a pocket of mist, near a source of drinking water. It was just plausible. He was a coastguard, not a deer warden. He asked himself: Would he have had any sceptical thoughts if this were just some unlucky farmer?

  ‘I see his lee-tal eyes in me headlights. I couldn’t kill he.’

  The man was behaving, it was true, as if he were being doubted, were under suspicion, as if this were a familiar situation.

  He saw, in his mind’s eye, a deer’s eyes in the headlights, the white dapples on its flank. A small trembling deer. It was a startling but magical vision. That alone, on this routine journey to work, would have been something special to talk about.

  He tried to give his best, friendly passer-by’s smile. ‘Of course you couldn’t kill it. You didn’t hit it?’

  ‘No. He hop it. I the one who end up in de shit, man.’

  It might shake you up a bit, nearly hitting a deer.

  The man changed voices yet again. ‘Fookin’ deer.’ Then he said, in the other voice, ‘I is a long way from Leeds.’

  So it was Yorkshire. He was from Leeds, but he was on the edge of Exmoor, at five in the morning. Which was even more bewildering perhaps than a deer in your headlights. He felt a moment’s protectiveness. He wasn’t sure if it was for the lost man, or the lost deer, the little Bambi. He’d helped to return many a lost child, over the years, to its distraught parents. It was one of the happier duties. Now was the peak time for it.

  ‘So. Let’s get you out of here. You’ve tried reversing?’

  ‘I’ve tried reversing.’ It was the northern voice, but with no manic exaggeration.

  He stepped round to the back of the car. Either he’d reversed clumsily and the back wheel had slipped into the gully or it had gone into the gully in the first place when he’d braked and swerved—for the phantom deer. He’d got stuck anyway. And what were the chances—they were remote, extraordinary and barely believable too—that in such circumstances help would come along, uniformed help, in a matter of minutes?

  The man got out to inspect the damage for himself. He didn’t look like a man who’d have regular roadside-assistance cover. He was shorter and slighter than he’d supposed. It was the hair, the two-inch hedge of it, that made him tall. But he had a strutting way of carrying himself. The gait of a cocky, belligerent Yorkshireman? No, not exactly.

  In the dampish dawn air—his own sidelights lighting up the gully—they assessed the situation. No harm done, just the misplaced wheels.

  ‘If we do it together,’ he said, ‘we could just lift her so the back wheel’s on the road again. Then you can reverse. I can push from the front if you spin. But you should be okay.’

  ‘You tell me, skipper.’

  This was no doubt a reference to the looped stripe on his sleeve. It was a perk of his job occasionally to be mistaken for a ship’s captain. But he’d said, and noticed it even as he said it, the nautical ‘lift her’.

  ‘We lift her arse, skipper, nice and easy.’ The man even crouched, ready to take the bumper, like a small sumo wrestler.

  ‘Wait.’

  He went round to the left-open driver’s door. He checked the position of the gear stick. Then he took off his jacket and, folding it, placed it on the passenger seat. He felt chilly without it, but he didn’t want to arrive on duty looking as if he’d been in an accident himself.

  The man watched him and said, ‘That’s righ’, man. We don’t wahnt you messin’ de natty tailorin’.’

  The man’s own clothes might have been natty once, long ago, in their own way. There was a faded sweater—purple and black horizontal stripes—over which there was a very old, perhaps once stylish full-length leather jacket. It hung about him like a droopy black second skin, which was an unfortunate way of thinking of it. The clothes looked anciently lived-in.

  He rolled up his own crisp white sleeves. He walked round to the gully. There were some convenient small stream-washed rocks and he jammed a few against the stricken front wheel. He surreptitiously checked, as if trained for it, the front of the car—for dents, for possible bits of deer. There were none. That is, there were many dents, but they were old.

  He walked back. He now felt, if it was only fleetingly, in charge, as if the man had become his appointed junior.

  ‘Okay.’ They crouched. ‘You have a hold? On “three” then.’

  ‘You give the word, skip.’

  The man seemed calmer, less disoriented—if that was the proper diagnosis—even appreci
ative and submissive. The mere fact of doing together what couldn’t have been done by one man alone seemed to have put everything into a complete and, if just for a moment, composed perspective. Around them was Exmoor being slowly unveiled by the dawn. Except for a few sparse, travelling lights in the distance on the main road up ahead, they were alone in the landscape. There was a tiny, seemingly stationary light in the further distance. It was the light of a ship in the Bristol Channel. It would be in the station’s log.

  ‘One—two—three!’

  It was simply achieved. A heave, an instinctive sideways thrust to the right. The back wheel was returned safely to the tarmac. The boot can’t have contained anything heavy. No dead deer, for example.

  ‘Fookin’ champion!’

  What was it about these voices—both of them? But the man seemed genuinely elated, as if wizardry had just occurred.

  ‘You have to reverse her out yet.’

  Again he’d said ‘her’. They both went to the front. While the man got in and turned the ignition, he continued to the nearside front wing. In another situation he might have said, ‘Reverse, and gently.’ Fortunately, his own car—engine off and lights on—was parked at a comfortable distance.

  There was no difficulty. There was a slight skittering, but the gully wasn’t deep and the back wheels hauled the car entirely onto the road again. His own bit of effort on the front bumper was almost superfluous. He looked at his watch. Five minutes had passed. The man cut his engine, yanking on the handbrake, and the sudden returning silence made the brief grinding of reverse gear seem almost like some effrontery.

  The man got out.

  ‘Fookin’ champion!’

  He came forward, hand extended. Like everything else about him, the extended hand was like an act, it was like something not quite as it should be. But he took it and shook it.

  ‘I’ve got a thermos inside, man. Black coffee. Want some?’ The voice was normal now—normal with its Yorkshire tones.

  He’d had coffee at home, minutes ago, and there’d be more at the station. But it seemed wrong not to accept the man’s gesture of gratitude. There had to be a gesture, a little ritual. Besides, he was curious.

  ‘Okay.’ He looked at his watch.

  ‘I know. You have to—clock on.’

  ‘Be on watch,’ he said, a little stiffly.

  ‘Aye aye.’

  He vaguely allowed for the fact that in Yorkshire, so he believed, they said ‘aye’ for ‘yes’. All the same.

  ‘A cup of coffee,’ the man said. ‘Tain’t every day, is it?’

  He had to agree, even give a yielding chuckle. ‘No, it’s not every day,’ he said, not really knowing exactly what the man meant. But, true, it wasn’t every day.

  The man groped inside the car, first graciously producing the folded jacket from the passenger seat, then a thermos. He shook it, judging the contents, close to his ear. He unscrewed a pair of cups, one inside the other.

  ‘Black coffee. While I’m driving, to keep me awake. Same as you, I suppose, when you’re—on watch.’

  Like the rest of the world, the man had a picture of a coastguard as a solitary figure, eyes glued to the horizon, telescope to hand, maintaining a sentry-like vigil. It wasn’t quite like that. It was a big station. A huddle of white buildings, with masts and dishes, beneath the tower of a decommissioned lighthouse. There was a rotating watch of staff. At any one time there’d be at least two on duty. There was an array of monitoring and communications equipment.

  Never mind. It was a coastguard station. It was an outstandingly beautiful, dramatic section of coast. People came at weekends and for holidays. He was there all the time. He was exceptionally lucky, in his work, in his life. Ruth, the job, the two kids who’d made him, twice over, a grandfather—though they were still kids in his mind. The only cloud, it seemed, was retirement. Having to stop it all one day. He was fifty-three. The man was—what? He sometimes seemed young, then not young at all.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Coffee helps.’

  ‘Black coffee,’ the man said. ‘I never know whether to make a joke. And I never know whether to make a joke out of the black or the coffee. See my face, man? Black or coffee?’

  He tried to look obtuse and passive. But there was something he genuinely didn’t understand.

  There was a pause while Exmoor reasserted its presence. Then the man cackled. It was the shoulder-shaking, oddly engaging parrot-laugh.

  ‘I’m a joker, man. My business. I’m a comedian.’

  That in itself seemed a possible joke, a possible trick. I met a strange man today, he was quite a comedian.

  ‘A co-me-di-ahn!’

  And now the man—or one of his personas—was back at full frantic tilt again, even while pouring not very warm-looking coffee. He had no choice, nor did Exmoor, but to listen.

  ‘Ah coom all the way from Yorkshire, from fookin’ West Ridin’, just to get rescued by a coastguard, a fookin’ coastguard, on Exmoor. Serious. Exmoor. What’s a coastguard doing on fookin’ Exmoor? Ilkley Moor, me. Ah never knew you ’ad moors down ’ere an’ all. Ilkley Moor bar tat. Ilkley Moor bar mitzvah! Ee but ah do luv Ilfracombe. Il-frah-combe. Ave ah said? Ah combe from Yorkshire. Ee bah goom! But ah tell yer what they do ’ave on Exmoor. Apart from coastguards. Fookin’ deer. Did yer know? ’Erds of fookin’ deer, and ’erds of fookin’ coastguards. Ave ah told yer me deer joke? It’s the one where ah tell it and yer all go, “Dear oh dear oh dear.”’

  It was astonishing. It was a performance, an unabashed performance—in the middle of nowhere. It was utterly disconcerting, but now, at least, he understood. And, actually, he was laughing, he couldn’t help it. A comedian.

  The man saw that he understood. He slowed down, became near-normal again. He grinned. He held out his hand once more, as if he had to introduce himself twice.

  ‘Johnny Dewhurst,’ he said. Then, grasping his coffee in one hand, he slipped the other inside his jacket and pulled out a card. It said ‘Johnny Dewhurst, Comedian and Wayfarer’. Underneath, in smaller print, were the words ‘All Engagements Gratefully Appreciated’. And to one side there was a picture of a clown, a standard circus clown—big feet, big nose, made-up face. The picture bore no resemblance to Johnny Dewhurst (if that was his actual name). On the other hand, you could see that, with the topiary of hair and mobility of face, not to say voice, he could play the clown if needed—if he wasn’t doing it already. And who knows what comic paraphernalia might be stored in the boot of his car?

  He laughed his parrot-laugh again. It seemed like a laugh of conspiracy, of complicity now, because his audience had laughed too.

  ‘Il-frah-coombe!’ The personas switched again. ‘Tonight I play Ilfracombe. Then I play Barnstaple. Baahrn-stable! I sleep in de barn or I sleep in de stable? Barnstable not very far, I tink. Then I play Plymouth. That far enough for Johnny. That like Land’s End. I next play Verona. No, that different gig. That Kiss Me Quick or someting. By Cole Porter. Wid name like that, he must be black man! Night before last I play Yeovil. Yo-Ville! I say, “Yo brother, this my kind of town, this where Johnny belong.” But they don’t understan’ me, they don’t clap very much. Then they send me on to Taunton. They send me to Tawny Town! I say, “This some kind of a joke? This some kind of a rayssiahl ting?”’

  He couldn’t help but laugh, whether or not he was meant to. But at the same time he felt that it didn’t matter whether he laughed or not, since he understood it now—it was rather like the worn-smooth wrinkled leather coat—the man was inured to the reactions of audiences, be they friendly, hostile, hard-to-please or indifferent. Or perhaps absent.

  But the man laughed too.

  ‘How you going to be my straight-man, man, you keep laughing like that? You have a name? You save my life, you haven’t told me your name.’

  ‘Ken,’ he said. Now he too held out his hand a second time, but with concealed caution. He desperately wanted to avoid giving his second name. It was Black. He was Kenneth Black. Lots of people
are called Black, but he shuddered to think of the comic repercussions.

  ‘Johnny Dewhurst and Kenny—Coastguard. I see it, man. I see it!’

  He hid his relief. ‘Is it your real name, “Johnny Dewhurst”?’

  ‘Hey, you tink I’s a liar, man? You tink I gives you joke name? I have a card made up with some joker’s name?’

  The shoulders shook, he hee-hawed and he was off again. It bubbled out of him. It was hard to see where the one thing stopped and the other thing began. He’d always supposed that comedians (was there truly a section of humanity called comedians?) were really hard-nosed crafty individuals. There was a gap between the act and the person. But with this man you couldn’t tell. There even seemed to be something wished-for in the confusion.

  ‘Johnny Dewhurst, it no joker’s name, it a butcher’s name. I say, “First Johnny tell de joke, then—he get butchered for it!”’

  He reached inside his jacket again, pulled out a folded slip of paper and handed it over. It was a flyer, a flyer for a tour—‘The Johnny Dewhurst Tour’. It was a list, a remarkably long one, of places and dates. The places criss-crossed and circumscribed England. The tour began—or had begun—in Scarborough, then had taken in several northern locations, then worked circuitously south. It had networked the Midlands, then struck south-west. It had touched Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Shrewsbury, Rugby . . . as well as towns he couldn’t exactly place. The first date was in late June and there was still over a month to go. It had still to track the length of the south coast and to reach such venues as Lowestoft and Skegness. It was a list of theatres, corn exchanges, seaside palaces and pavilions, and indeterminate halls. And it must be a very ambitious list, because he’d never heard of Johnny Dewhurst, though he’d met him now, and at many of these places, some of them even having a faint hint of glamour, Johnny Dewhurst must be very far from star billing—‘on tour’ as he was—he must be a very short spot a long way down the programme.

  And now he was stranded, or he was rescued, on Exmoor.

  ‘Johnny Dewhurst wish he were back in Leeds, man. Johnny Dewhurst wish he were back in Dewsbury.’