They unsettle me, the moors that surround my home town, that’s the truth of it. I always think that, walking to the office window, looking out at them. I feel the weight of history from those old trackways, the featherlight dust of the bones of a thousand dead Monmouth rebels, the more so driving across them. I don’t care for the low roads. I feel like I’m always looking over my shoulder, expecting the sea to come back, just to take a notion one day to crash through those paltry sea defences, or the river to suddenly breach, bursting through the banks that rise higher than the car roof, pouring down on top of me.
‘This place. It’s just so damn ancient, that’s the trouble,’ I said to Sophie one day, staring out through her cottage window. ‘I mean, when you think about it, prehistoric creatures once roamed those moors.’
‘Well, you should know,’ she said. ‘You went out with most of them.’
A word about Sophie now.
Sometimes people I haven’t seen for a long time or who don’t really know me will say, ‘Are you still friends with Sophie?’ and I won’t know what to say. It’s like the words don’t make sense to me. Like they’ve got their syntax wrong or they’re speaking a foreign language.
I mumble something usually. ‘Sure … yes … of course. Naturally …’
What I really want to say is: Am I still standing here? Am I still breathing?
Sophie Aitchison and I met over the old green baize desks in the newsroom of the Free Press, our local weekly newspaper. Until I left at twenty-two to travel – hence her knowledge of my prehistoric sex life – we also shared a flat together.
As with so many things in my life – jobs, affairs – I fell into journalism. I’m an aspiration-less bastard, if you want to know the truth of it. In addition I’m lazy, bone idle. I see myself as a sort of Friday afternoon person, juddering along that old Assembly Line of Life. Suddenly someone calls out and the Angel Assistant turns. And, hey presto, there I go, juddering on past and out into the world minus that vital component of ambition.
Unlike Cass, whose name, even to this day, is emblazoned in gold in the hall of the distinguished old girls’ grammar school we both attended, I failed miserably at everything, exiting with barely an O level. In the local careers office they went through a thick book of career options from nuclear physicist at the front (not enough O levels) to Stand and Tan assistant at the back. (I lie. Stand and Tan had yet to be invented.) They said, ‘Is there nothing you want to do?’ and I didn’t feel it was appropriate to say that was exactly it, that the only thing I really wanted to do was nothing. Luckily butterflies were even at that moment beating their wings. Not on the other side of the world either but slap-bang outside my father’s garage.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a man stuck with a daughter around the house who shows no sign of getting a job will grab the first opportunity to do something about it. George Gordon was no exception. He moved swiftly the day that old khaki Ford Pop puttered to a halt. He knew that car and more importantly he knew its owner. Head bent beneath that upraised bonnet that day, he gave the sort of horror-struck intake of breath that would have won him Best Actor from the Academy of Motor Engineers if only the judges had been there to hear it. Its owner, with four children to support and a too substantial mortgage, blanched at the sound and at the mournful shake of the head that accompanied it.
Thus it was that Harry Oates, editor of the Free Press, got his car mended for free and I got a job on this paper.
My current incarnation here is my second. It’s a nice irony, although not by any means an accident, that that same Sophie Aitchison is now my editor.
Sophie and I have now spent a considerable part of our lives working together. Not long after I left to travel, she also departed, to a down-table sub’s job on the Bristol evening paper. She was still there, although rising up the table, when I returned from my travels. No sooner had I set foot in my home town, than certain circumstances necessitated a flight from it (all will be explained), so that for a while – for the second time in our lives – we lived together. Her position with the paper meant she was able to put in a good word for me when a job came up and I subsequently spent the best part of seven years there in the end, first on news and then as a features writer. I left for what would prove to be an unhappy spell in freelance public relations, something which at least had the advantage of propelling me into that English degree at the university. It was here that I started to write, producing the first of the ‘Aunts’ books for which I am now (mildly) famous.
After some success I was able to give up the day job (I had moved the twenty-five miles back to my home town by then; bought this cottage). Over the years the media group that owned Sophie’s paper had acquired various weeklies, one of them being the Free Press. When the job of editor came up she applied for and got the position, which proved to be a godsend for me, since by this time my life, for various reasons, no one reason, had fallen into financial disrepair and I was in dire need of some extra income. Treating accusations of nepotism with the contempt they deserved, she offered me a job so that today my life has come full circle. I’m back where I started, something which no longer worries me.
Thus now I work three days a week at the Free Press (Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays should you wish to contact me). This helps cover the bills and at the same time leaves me plenty of time for my writing. Lest you should think I am the subject of any favouritism from my editor, given our previous association, I can assure you this is not the case. I get the same treatment, the same bum jobs as everyone else in the newsroom, something confirmed one Wednesday a couple of weeks after the Fleur episode when I found myself marked down to cover the latest example of New Age lunacy in my home town – the opening of Bad Ponytail Peter’s new phobia clinic.
OK: some facts about my home town. First off, I won’t be naming it because there’s a pair of genuine olde worlde sixteenth-century stocks at the bottom of our High Street and I don’t want find myself sitting in them.* And while I don’t believe in all this witchcraft crap, still, with a coven on every street corner (each with accompanying website) you can’t be too careful.
You see it’s Flake City, my home town, the Wacko Capital of the Kingdom. Other places have the Town Band, the Soroptomists, the Gardeners’ Club. We have the Tantric Drummers, the Wicca Society and Friday Night Channelling. Some people believe the ley lines conjoin in my home town. Some think we’ve been visited by aliens (something I give more credence to than most but only because of my mother). Some think that Joseph of Arimathea visited, that King Arthur is buried here.* What’s certain is that the myths are pressed down hard, layered like the peat in the moors, and that now we dig them up and shovel them out the same way in every New Age shop and emporium. It’s been this way since the mid-sixties when the first tepee went up, the first long-haired aristo clip-clopped in on his horse-drawn caravan.
Today, you can buy fifty-six different varieties of Tibetan Bell in the High Street of my home town along with every conceivable shape of crystal and candle.
The problem is you’re screwed if you want half a pound of tomatoes.
Bad Ponytail Peter’s already on the pavement outside the Avalon Alternative Health and Therapy Centre† when I arrive with Danny snapping away in front of him. Once approaching him from the back like this would have been the best way to observe the long straggle of greasy grey from which he got his name. But then one day, possibly because of that grey, he shaved it off.
‘Shocking,’ Danny said the first time we saw him without it. ‘The loss of a national treasure.’
It was more as a tribute than anything else that we decided to keep the name. Thus, shaven-headed as he is, he remains Bad Ponytail Peter, a.k.a. Peter Tarantine, Reiki Grand Master, author,* Thought Field Therapist, re-birther, channeller, chakra cleanser, aura diviner, director of the Wicca Academy …
‘He’s also a Grand Vizor …’
‘I’d never have known.’
Which is why Bad Ponytail
Peter will be conducting the ceremony at Magda’s wedding.
This being the Flake Date of the Month it’s no surprise that Magda’s here drinking her dandelion wine, biting into her lentil vol-au-vent, or that there are more aromatherapists, reflexologists, Indian head massagers, I Chingers, crystals healers and white witches that you could shake a stick at (shaking a stick somehow seeming an appropriate piece of imagery for this bunch with their assorted weird modus operandi).
‘So, you think there’s a demand?’ I asked Peter (my standard business start-up question). He gave me a pitying look through the new rimless glasses he’s adopted, probably to make him look more like a therapist.
‘My dear,’ this is in his smooth, creepy Aleister Crowley voice, ‘the world is awash with phobias.’
Now, before we go any further, I should like to point out that whereas I don’t have the first idea where my chakras are, I do know I’d have to be held down by a team of ten before I let Bad Ponytail Peter cleanse them, plus I wouldn’t let him near my aura.
‘Many people’s lives are ruined by phobias, not least because they don’t even realise they have them,’ he said, and I pretty much knew what was coming. ‘For instance, they may have problems with relationships.’
He pronounced the word in the manner of an accusation, so that I figured if I could open up his forehead, pull it down like a hatch I’d see the vision he has of himself, in Joy of Sex mode, leading some luckless female through an ecstatically gymnastically challenging position. He’s pitiless when it comes to sex, according to Magda, who had an deeper than usual channelling session with him one Friday night.
‘He’s just so serious,’ she said after one glass of wine too many. ‘He won’t give in. You just feel this terrible responsibility to have an orgasm.’
Meanwhile, it seems there’s no end of the weird things people can be scared of. The list on the leaflet I picked up from Peter was full of them – clowns, chickens, feathers, chins …
Chins?
‘I mean, how can you be scared of chins?’
But Danny’s looking sideways in the office mirror. ‘Easily.’ He slaps a hand at his throat. ‘Particularly when you think you might be getting another one.’
It’s tough life being a gay man, the way I hear it from Danny. He’s ten years younger than me but still he says, ‘On the scene, let me tell you, I’m past it.’ Not that he’s really interested in the scene. He only goes occasionally to clubs although he does do the odd personal ad and online dating.
I nag him sometimes. ‘You’re burying yourself down here in the country. You should get out more. Go up to town. Meet more people.’
He says, ‘Look who’s talking.’
He’s been pretty much single since he moved down here nine years ago, and this in part to start a new life without Doctor Jack, the big love of his life, who spent most of their time together turning him over emotionally before finally dumping him.
‘You’re getting too comfortable, too contented, that’s your trouble,’ I say to him sometimes. ‘Trust me. I know about these things. I’m a spinsta.’
Sometimes I’ll wave exotic job ads in front of him, and he’ll take them with a show of interest but somehow he never applies for them. More often than not he’ll use his parents as an excuse. ‘I like to be near them.’
Danny loves his parents, not least because of the way his father handled Danny’s coming out, which occurred with supremely bad timing at his sister’s wedding.
Danny got rather drunk at Ruth’s wedding, having not long been dumped by Jack. Thus when he was asked by an ancient aunt when he too would be getting married, he answered glumly that he couldn’t say, first because Jack had just dumped him, but more importantly because as yet it wasn’t legal. His mother, standing close by and overhearing this, thus had her worse suspicions confirmed. She promptly burst into tears, refusing to stop until Danny’s father shouted in exasperation, ‘For God’s sake, woman, stop your snivelling. The boy’s queer, not dead.’ Thus instead of pointing a quivering finger at the door and quoting Leviticus (a particularly useful Old Testament book, apparently, especially if you’re in two minds about how to sacrifice your bullock) he merely gave Danny a severe dressing-down for the way he’d broken the news to his mother.
‘Totally thoughtless.’
Which as a matter of fact, growing more penitent, not to say sober, by the minute, Danny agreed with.
Ten years later, Danny’s brother-in-law now being a high-flying academic and his sister all over the place (they’re currently en famille in America), Danny, the gay son (as is so often the case) is the mainstay of the family. Truth to tell, he plays the spinster daughter, visiting his parents once a week (they live in Bath) and accompanying them on their annual cultural trips to Europe (Italian painters, Echoes of Byzantium, etc., etc.). More often than not it’ll be some single attractive woman he makes friends with, and I can’t help imagining the disappointment they must feel with this handsome forty-two-year old, with his serious air and his cropped head and his rimless glasses. Because apart from the odd eye-rolling moment, he hates the whole campy thing and is undemonstrative in the main. A gay man would spot him, of course. Eye contact would do that. But for a straight woman … how sad.
‘Don’t worry,’ Danny says, patting my hand. ‘They soon get the picture when they realise we’re after the same waiter.’
Meanwhile there are fears from Arachnophobia to Zemmiphobia on Peter’s list. Zemmiphobia? Fear of the Great Rat?
‘Fear of the Great Rat?’ Danny shook his head, reading out from the list. ‘What the hell’s that about?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But I guess if I’d had it, I’d have been ready for Lennie.’
‘Deipnophobia? A fear of after-dinner conversations. Wooh, that’s weird too.’
‘Not at all. It’s the reason I don’t do personal ads and on-line dating.’
That was when I felt a tap on my arm and found Fleur standing beside me.
The phobia clinic opening was the last place I was expecting to see her. Turned out she’d given up the art course idea, and writing a children’s book (for this, much thanks). Instead she was thinking of signing up for a course in aromatherapy.
‘I have to think of ways of making a living,’ she said. ‘I’m on my own now.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ as I said later to Cass, ‘bearing in mind Martin’s renting the flat for her, and that Fraser family money.’
But Fleur was enjoying herself, I could see that. There was a definite air of nobility about her.
‘I married so young,’ she said, a hand on her chest now and faintly tragically.
‘What?’ as I said to Cass. ‘Like she’d been given in marriage at thirteen to some European crown head.’
‘Of course, I realise it’s going to be hard at first,’ Fleur said, ‘paying my own way and everything, strange too after all our years together.’ She gave me one of those flat-faced challenging looks, the sort you get from government ministers in unsound regimes when they’re shamelessly rewriting history for the cameras. ‘I’m just so looking forward to having time to myself,’ she said, ‘to being on my own.’
‘Un-bloody-believable,’ I said, reporting it. ‘This from the woman who used to shiver at the mere thought of it.’
‘I can’t tell you,’ Fleur said, ‘how much I’m looking forward to being single.’
‘How dare she?’ I said. ‘Calling herself single.’
‘Well, I suppose she is.’
‘Not at all. She’s just claiming the title.’
But the final outrage, as far as I was concerned, was still to come. I was crossing the road from the Avalon Centre, glad to be getting away from her, when suddenly there she was again, beside me.
‘I feel wonderful,’ she said, thrusting her arm chummily through mine, making me feel like I’d been caught by a stalker. She flung her head back, face to the sun in a grand flamboyant gesture. ‘Ah … freedom,’ she said, and there it was, th
e final insult, the ultimate profanity.
Freedom.
My lodestar. My guiding light. Appropriated by Fleur as part of her new-found persona.
There’s a name for fear of freedom. I found it on Peter’s list. It’s eleutherophobia. A fancy word for the fear of it, but no mention – mark you – of a term for the terror of losing it.
‘I just want to feel free,’ I said to Nathan one night, not long before the end.
He said, ‘It’s just a word, Riley.’
I said, ‘I just want to do what I want to do, that’s all … go where I want to go… live the life I want to live.’
In the silence the air conditioner clattered while somewhere in the distance, a mah-jong piece was slapped down heavily on a table.
He said, ‘I’m not trying to tie you down. That’s not what love’s about, Riley.’
I don’t know why I went travelling. All in all, I could have just stayed at home. Waited for all that bead-and-bangle hippy shit to come walking up the High Street.
Still the facts of the case are that in 1972 I did what it seemed at the time like half the country was doing, at least those of my age and inclinations. I bought a large orangey-red rucksack with a steel frame that bit into my back and rose up over my head like the beak of some giant bird, packed it full of toilet rolls and soap and shampoo and salt tablets, although not all the other weird stuff – mosquito netting and the malaria pills – which Tommy, with his war service in India, insisted I’d be needing.
Not Married, Not Bothered Page 6
