Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘What do you mean, Mark?’

  He grinned, most attractively. ‘What does a bog-preserved head feel like?

  ‘Actually, I have never felt one.’

  ‘A burst football. Kind of soft, like.’

  ‘I don’t know. Does it?’

  He nodded, and threw his head back to empty his glass and I saw the movement of the strong muscles in his throat.

  Jill was not like Mark; her father was a judge, her mother a top research chemist. Her northern accent was an assumed overlay.

  ‘She’s only took me on to show them she’s different,’ Mark snorted, watching the others giggling with her. ‘Her mummy and daddy looked at me down their snotty noses and I gave them a lecture on macrofossils and bleached vegetation layers.’

  I laughed. I offered him some more wine. I wanted him for myself.

  ‘This is my first time abroad,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen the cliffs of Mingulay from a fishing boat, walked the Pennine spine, stood on Ben Hutig in a March gale, but I’ve never been abroad. Jill wants to educate me. She wants to wean me off packet curries and freeze-dried beef stews. But a Vesta curry consumed on the edge of Barra in a salty headwind, after a good hike up and down Heaval, with a ’nana for pudding – that’s pure magic. It’s all context, is life. Like palaeobotany. Without context, nothing means a thing. Nothing is but what it’s removed from. I’m pissed. My skull’s a boiled turnip.’

  ‘Mark, I think you’re a very profound person.’

  I felt I had been preparing for this all my life.

  The next evening I cooked them homemade lasagne. I used their kitchen (it was bigger – Saul was no cook) and every available surface was covered in long strips of fresh wholemeal pasta, lightly floured.

  ‘’Ow do,’ said Mark, ‘so this is where Dr Mengele ended up.’

  ‘Do I look like Dr Mengele, Mark?’

  He studied me. Something happened in the space between our eyes.

  ‘Give or take a few years,’ he said.

  ‘Do you think of me as old, Mark?’

  ‘Any road, I reckon it’s better out of a packet from Tesco’s.’

  ‘You haven’t tasted it yet. You’ll be won over by the taste. Now you’re sitting on it.’

  ‘Bloody hell. What’s it doing on the chair?’

  ‘I can hardly put it on the floor, can I?’

  ‘What’s for pudding?’

  ‘Zabaglione.’

  ‘Sounds like someone throwing up in The Godfather.’

  ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Reading literature upstairs.’

  ‘Do you not appreciate literature, Mark?’

  ‘I don’t have a flash haircut.’

  ‘What has that got to do with it?’

  He leant against the door and folded his arms, watching me roll the last splat of pasta.

  ‘Jill said to me, just now, “Whatever you do, Mark, don’t ring your Auntie May from here.”’

  ‘And what did you say, Mark?’

  ‘I said: “I don’t need to, love; I’ve given her the number.”’

  ‘You’re a very witty young man, Mark. In fact, you are one of the funniest guys I have ever met.’

  ‘You think I’m an oik, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. Your wit comes completely naturally. It’s the same with certain dancers. They dance completely naturally. Training them is almost a shame.’

  ‘Are you a Yank, in fact?’

  ‘No, I just sound it, to the English. To the Americans I sound English. I’ve been over there now about fifteen years. San Francisco. I’d like to show you San Francisco, one day, Mark. Would you be so kind as to pass me that strip, without tearing it? Thank you. That’s very kind of you.’

  The farmhouse was near Lucca, a town I had never visited, although my friends said it was their ideal of what a town ought to be – unlike most towns in the US which had been taken over by barbarians and Macdonald’s. In those days I was not left-wing, but a libertarian with a mystical streak, and my choreography was thought to be inspired as much by Gurdjieff as Martha Graham. This was not altogether wrong, although I was drawn deeply to Tao Buddhism. I tried to think of the space a body occupied and the space it did not occupy at the same time; a little like an artist who defines a limb by shading in wherever the limb is not. I was also influenced by jazz and free expression, which was big in San Francisco then. I was experimenting a little with Native American music, too, although I got into trouble for that, later.

  I tried to explain this in the car to Jamie, who was impressed that I had heard of The Cure and Joy Division and that I had used some Brian Eno in my recent work (for New York).

  We located the supermarket just outside the city walls and had a lot of fun finding stuff. There was a pack of what looked like ordinary lawn grass under the cling-film and we laughed at it.

  ‘You could make a fortune out of this in the States,’ I said. ‘You could get the neighbour’s lawn clippings and label it Hand-Picked in Tuscany. I know places in San Francisco that do that!’

  I was going down rather well, despite being old enough to be their grandfather. Mark, however, did not like the supermarket. The bright lights seemed to diminish him.

  ‘Here’s the offal,’ he called out, at the meat counter.

  ‘Keep your voice down.’ Jill’s whisper had an edge of hardness.

  ‘Faggits and pays, faggits and pays,’ he chanted, laughing. I had realised by now that he was playing a very elaborate and ironic game.

  It was a Monday. Every interesting church was Chiuso. It was like the Stations of the Cross, I said. I liked the town, though. I could see what all my friends meant. Aromas – coffee, vanilla, parmigiano, prosciutto – passed us down the narrow streets like a reward for being alive. The shops looked as if they had not changed for a hundred years. Everyone was effortlessly glamorous, pale gold rings, tawny gold wristwatches against brown skin. Lucca’s charm was its medieval walls, their grassy breastwork where we walked for an hour. Sheer wealth had something to do with it, too. In spite of this wealth, they had knocked down very few old buildings. There was a sense of pride in the past.

  ‘On the other hand, I like Berlin,’ I said. ‘I lived there once. There is absolutely no nostalgia in Berlin. I have been to East Berlin recently, for a show we gave, and I can tell you that when the Wall comes down that city is going to be a place of very interesting energies.’

  ‘It might never come down,’ said Jamie.

  We looked at the great, fat medieval wall, with tufts growing from its brick.

  ‘One day for sure it will look like this, but not nearly so pretty,’ I said. ‘It’s a matter of patience.’

  ‘Then capitalism will flood into every crevice,’ said Jamie, the reflex socialist.

  ‘The Italians move so well, don’t they,’ I pointed out, to change the subject. ‘They are easy with themselves. The Anglo-Saxon race is awkward and aggressive when it moves. I am generalising, of course.’

  ‘I hope you are,’ said Mark. ‘Watch this, you lot!’

  He danced. There, on the wide grassy ramparts. The others found it embarrassing. Mark, imitating a ballet dancer! Stop showing off, Mark. Mark, you’re a total prat. Take him home, someone.

  An elderly German group stood watching as if he were part of the mystery and charm of Lucca.

  Which he was, of course. His large, bearish body moved through space much more interestingly than anyone else realised. He appeared captivated by his own performance; its jokiness spooled to an end but he carried on. Perhaps it went on for only a minute, but for me it stretched on into infinity. He had a charge in him that was astonishing – a slow heaviness that his fake effeminacy made gracious, despite everything.

  I was tired of taut, trembling professionals and their regimens and their tendon checks. This was something fresh. I had forgotten my camera, and tried to take mental snapshots to be transferred to paper the minute we got back.

  A boy loses his mother on
the moors. As a grown man, he dances her back – but she returns as the bog queen, as Lindow Woman, and drags him down into the wet and the dark, preserving him with her for ever.

  Jungian, mythic, earthy: I was very excited.

  We did a quick tour of the villa’s grounds that evening. I enjoyed their company and I believe they enjoyed mine. I was something novel to them, no doubt: a seventy-one-year-old in denim who did Tai Chi on the lawn each morning and whose leather jacket had a little pink badge that said: I Ride Tough. If the swimming pool had not been empty and it had been high summer I would have dived straight into it every morning.

  These were not people who had seen the world, unless it was through a smart hotel’s glass. I lie: Lucy had done a year’s voluntary work in Zimbabwe. She’d had a black boyfriend. But then, so had I – for a few months in 1962. It taught me nothing more, over and above the heartbreak when he left, than having a white boyfriend ever did. Karl was cute, that’s all, and thought the Black Panthers were the bottom of the heap.

  The swimming pool’s emptiness was depressing. Looking down at its bared concrete, Mark pointed out the fieldmice: one living, one dead. The living one was cuddling up to its squashed colleague in the deep end.

  ‘Maybe mother and child,’ said Mark.

  I watched his face, but it gave nothing away.

  He was making notes in the failing light. We descended some overgrown terraces, past old twisted olive trees, and came out in a wooded gorge full of twilight birdsong. The others were making a noise and Mark asked them to be quiet.

  ‘Look at Oliver’s knees,’ said Tamsin. ‘Goosebumps.’

  ‘Keep off my knees,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Shut yer gob,’ Mark ordered.

  ‘What are we listening for?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Mark.

  The house looked tiny up above. We went in and out of the trees, in and out of the pewter light. I asked Mark what the trees were.

  ‘Ash, oak, some false acacia. A few manly curved specimens of Pinus pinaster.’

  ‘Golly,’ I remarked, ‘that sounds enticing!’

  He smiled. I thought his glance at me was full of shared meaning, but it was twilight. He was collecting the Pinus cones, putting them in his knapsack. I envied him.

  Now and again he would stop and make little notes in his book. When we got back to the house, I asked to look at the page he had filled that day:

  Generous quantities of ragged robin, ivory-fruited hartwort, blue bugle. A flaming yellow scorpion senna on edge of coppiced beech-wood. Picked a mouse-ear hawkweed, a giant catsear, and a fat rough hawkbit for the squeeze-box.

  These were spread out on the table, ready for the press.

  ‘They are very beautiful names, Mark,’ I said. ‘This is a poem.’

  His writing was meticulous, and the other pages included very fine coloured sketches.

  Jamie said, prodding the flowers, ‘Surprised you’re interested in dandelions, Mark-o.’

  Mark went into the woods the next day, with a pair of binoculars that he called ‘m’twitch-can’. I offered to accompany him, and was hurt a little by his refusal.

  ‘No one ever stays still or shuts their gob for long enough in woods. It’s a good damp wood with lots of boggy bits in its rift where the stream runs, but woods always take ages to recover from a human being’s arrival.’

  ‘I see your point, Mark. Never mind.’

  I worked on the dance in the top room, but not in my usual way. Usually, I make sketches as the tape of the music runs, try to find the visual narrative, the negative spaces around the bodies, work out what forces are in play and where they are happening in the given area and only afterwards do I use dance notation. Really, I am giving my imagination a walk. This time, however, I found myself miming the narrative with my own body. I could not begin to fix it on paper before I had propelled myself through it physically and psychically, working with the Tao.

  Except that the Tao was not flowing. Something else was flowing, something much thicker, much thicker. Silt. I frightened myself, feeling this thick, dark stuff working its way up my body to my neck as I danced very slowly and clumsily, just as Mark had danced on the ramparts. I was not dancing: I was trying to find a way out. I was working out of my own labyrinth in which all the exits were closing. I felt deathly, actually. I shrank in the sticky cold bog waters.

  I sat there, afterwards, for about an hour, thinking.

  I was deeply in love. But there was absolutely no sign that Mark even knew about it. It never once occurred to me that he might find me in any way repellent, at my advanced age. He felt lonely, that’s all, and I firmly believed that I was the one to relieve his loneliness – maybe by unlocking the rest of him. You can be lonely to yourself because the rest of you – the interesting you – is locked away. There was a grace to my desire.

  He and Jill never touched. Jill was an irrelevance. Sweet, but an irrelevance. Mark needed to be liberated, just as I had liberated Alain and Hector and Kurt.

  All dead, now, of course.

  Jill’s Mini was still out of action. Oddly, I am rather good at mechanics – something to do with the mechanics of the body, with the way I dissect movement and then rebuild in my choreography – and I offered to take a look. None of the others – Mark included – had a clue. Mark was Green and went everywhere by bus or bicycle back home.

  The engine had a faulty connection to the battery. I made sure it stayed faulty, although a quick spurt of de-greaser would have solved it. It wasn’t quite sabotage, it was more passive than that.

  So we drove back into Lucca, and this time Mark rode with me. He rode in the back, and Jill rode in the front. He kept very quiet. Jill was fretting about the Mini. I told her we should wait until the handyman called Paulo, whom Saul and Ivor employed to keep the house and garden in trim, called round again. We could ask him to recommend a mechanic. You could not trust any old mechanic.

  We climbed the well-known tower with trees growing out of the top. Hundreds of steps, but I was first out onto the roof, closely followed by Mark. These youngsters were not fit, I can tell you.

  Tamsin popped breathlessly into view several moments later, but I had had time to ask Mark what type of trees these were.

  ‘Holm-oaks. Ilex to the Romans.’

  ‘I like that word, ilex. It occurs in poems.’

  ‘Do very well in drought. But now and again they need a good lot of rain, good heavy rain. A good soak.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why the holm-oak is a symbol of rebirth.’

  Mark looked at me. I get vertigo and was beginning to feel giddy up there. This is why I never went skiing with Hector in the mountains.

  ‘I thought you didn’t know what trees these were?’

  ‘I don’t, Mark. My knowledge of Mother Nature is strictly mythic.’

  Jamie was last up. Tamsin suddenly started having a panic attack by the low wall and clung to Mark’s arm, pressing it against her pretty breasts. Jamie took her round the waist and she let go of Mark’s arm and started to breathe normally again. Once, on the unwalled top of the Pont du Gard, I saw a strapping German youth reduced to tears and had to lead him gently back. We started a relationship that lasted nearly four years. I even moved out to Berlin, to the workers’ district called Wedding, living with him in a near-windowless basement flat about 500 yards from the Wall. I was very happy, despite the damp and cold and the couples screaming over the babies. But that was long ago. I never mastered German.

  ‘The trees looked bigger from below,’ said Oliver, as if he had been defrauded.

  ‘Most things do,’ I said.

  Mark pointed to a little red beetle on one of the oak-leaves.

  ‘A kerm,’ he said. ‘Made into an aphrodisiac by the Greeks.’

  He looked at me. I blushed.

  ‘You see, I’m not just a pretty face.’

  Tamsin, who had recovered well, laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Jamie, who rarely sm
iled below his expensive haircut.

  ‘Mark makes me laugh, actually,’ said Tamsin. ‘Nice to make people laugh, you know.’

  Jill had noticed. So had I. It was quite obvious to me that I now had two rivals for love.

  We were all shivering on the porch that evening when Tamsin said she had the gift of foresight and held Mark’s hand.

  ‘Gosh, there’s so much in there,’ she murmured.

  ‘And a ’nana spare for you, our kid,’ said Mark.

  Her bone structure in the candlelight was perfect, so like a dancer’s. It was very unfortunate.

  ‘Really an awful lot,’ Tamsin insisted.

  Jill said, ‘You do surprise me, Tamsin.’

  ‘Oh come on, Jilly, that’s not fair,’ said Oliver, completely seriously. I thought at first he had said ‘that’s not far’, on account of his accent. I began to dislike him, despite his youth.

  Tamsin released Mark’s hand, her eyes glittering with a perfect flame.

  ‘Gizzit back,’ Mark joked, lunging for her hand, accidentally touching a breast.

  The topic of conversation was work, during supper. Oliver and Jamie were trainee lawyers and Lucy worked for a charitable organisation for female prisoners. Tamsin worked in an interior design shop. The conversation turned to credit cards. Lucy had gone with her mother to Liberty’s and spent a fortune the previous week. Oliver said he was afraid to admit he got all his shirts in M & S. Everyone (except for Mark and myself) catcalled and whistled.

  ‘Lucky I was never faced with that problem up in Wolvo,’ Mark said. ‘No M & S.’

  Lucy looked surprised. ‘There’s no M & S in Wolverhampton?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mark, ‘but I know there are two D’s in Dudley.’

  I now guess that Mark had skilfully set up that well-known northern joke, but at the time I thought it utterly spontaneous. The others groaned politely.

  I steered Mark onto bog bodies and Lindow Man, for my own professional purposes. The body’s skull was pliable in the peat. Enzyme-induced degradation and microbial colonisation had resulted in the rapid and almost complete putrefaction of all his internal organs except the stomach. Jill chipped in now and again. Only Tamsin looked interested over the tagliatelle. I had the feeling that Mark was not going down so well with the others.