The Levels (8 page)

At Thorney Mills there is a silted old pool where teal and eel swim, sheltered by the old building. A cast iron wheel hangs on the wall beneath its eaves; the river Parret, a drain of a river, is a better place than any to catch eels. Like the poet Coleridge, we learnt about eels at school. Nobody knows why they travel over 3000 miles from a sea of weed in the Atlantic Ocean, after breeding with American cousins, to arrive in the Parret at Thorney's silted pool. There are many ways to cook and many ways to catch eel. Smoked, they are delicious, boiled, poached, baked? Nets, traps, line, rayballing? The river was thick, clotting, perfect weather, two days of sunshine turned muggy, then a series of thunderstorms. Rayballing weather. Eels, four or five years old, swimming in the pool. Their adult eyes, though not fully grown, and their long golden bodies, swivelling through the dark water, feeding before their stomachs wither and they swim, swollen with fat, away and against the currents to the weedy sea again, where they were born, to birth their eggs. In nine months they will be dead, far away. Cunning fish, to live so long and travel so far to somewhere so small without anyone knowing how.

‘Hello?'

‘Billy?'

‘Yes.'

‘I was wondering when you'd call. Happy?'

‘Yes.'

‘Going to ask me out again?'

‘When?'

‘Take me fishing. You know how?'

‘Rayballing?' I said.

‘Pardon?'

‘Don't you know what rayballing is?'

‘No. You going to tell me?'

‘I'll show you.'

We went rayballing one Saturday. The eels never knew we were coming. They swam in their pool, I took a tin bath off the workshop roof, and spent the morning digging.

‘You dig any more of them and there'll be none left,' my mother shouted. ‘Worm's good for it, the gardener's friend, you know?'

‘You want eel pie?' That shut her up.

When I had twenty worms, that was enough, little piles of earth round the garden, I put them in a honey barrel. The eels waited. Some of them were so old they had been rayballed before, and escaped; no other method of fishing reduces the odds so much. No daylight penetrated the pool. An eel could not see its own tail. It smelt for other fish, cruised at them with a fleshy purpose. I walked to Drove House. The van had been misfiring. I didn't blame it. I walked through the orchard, Muriel's mother was sat painting.

‘Morning!' I said. She jumped, and made an odd noise.

‘Hello Billy, making me jump!' she said.

‘Sorry,' I looked at the painting. The canvas was covered with thin lines of green and brown paint beneath a big washy block of blue.

‘The light's so good,' she said. I looked at it, it didn't seem different from any other. ‘Do you paint?' she asked. I didn't. ‘Oh it frees me! Out in the open, give me a paint box, clean canvas, my dear, a morning like this, I'm in my seventh—Listen.' She cocked an ear. ‘I wish I could capture it, in paint.' What? I didn't know what she was on about.

‘What are you two doing today?' she said, wiping the brushes on her smock.

‘I'm taking Muriel rayballing.'

‘What's that?'

‘Ah!' I tapped my nose. ‘That'd be telling.'

‘You!' she said, and punched my arm gently.

‘Morning!' cried Muriel, coming out of the house. ‘Mum's painting. Good?'

‘Very good.'

‘You're just saying that.'

‘I know.' I didn't understand pictures, but said they were good. I was just confused.

‘You walked?' asked Muriel.

‘Yes.'

‘Fantastic.'

Her mother turned to me, ‘She's got something to show you.'

‘You bet.'

We walked round the side of the house, she took my hand, past the lean-to, and parked in the yard was an old ambulance. It looked as if it had been driven off a battlefield. It was the first ambulance I'd seen that could have been called a danger to health. The indicator lights were missing, and where the blue light had flashed, tangled wires hung down. The words ‘Ambulance' and ‘Health Authority' had been painted over in a shade of paint slightly lighter than the rest. Inside a few metal rods and rolls of wire lay scattered about where ill people had once been laid. It smelt of toilets.

‘And goes like a bomb!'

‘Does it?' I said, ‘where?'

‘Anywhere you like.'

‘She's so proud of it,' her mother said, poking her head round the front. ‘I said, “You find yourself something to give you that little bit of independence.” Isn't she clever?'

I nodded.

‘I'll get my things,' said Muriel, and disappeared.

‘Do you mind?' I asked her mother, crawling underneath.

‘Be my guest, make yourself at home,' I stared up at the rotten chassis and the way the steering joints were cracked. The sump was leaking. The silencer was pitted with hundreds of tiny little holes. A birds nest of loose wires had been jammed into a cavity behind the gearbox supports. I was sorting them out when a voice called ‘What are you doing?' and
bang
! I sat up and smashed my head on the exhaust pipe. Pieces of rust flaked off and embedded themselves in my skull.

I said ‘Yeesh!' at the ambulance.

‘No need to be like that.'

‘I banged my nut!'

‘Why?'

‘You surprised me!'

‘I surprised you and that made you lie underneath my ambulance? You're crazy.'

‘No,' I said, standing, rubbing my head, waiting for her to say ‘My poor baby', ‘You didn't make me go under there, you surprised me after.'

‘After what?'

‘After I'd got underneath.'

‘Oh.'Pause. ‘But why?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why were you underneath it?'

‘I was looking.'

‘What for?'

‘Something I didn't find.'

Leaping in the driver's seat with a ‘Let's go!' and an optimistic wave at her mother, who waved in an equally optimistic way at me, we lurched out of the yard and into the quiet lanes of Somerset. Flocks of startled birds exploded out of trees and hedges as we thundered by, startled cows miscarried, sheep were driven insane with worry. From my position, high above the road, distant farms could be seen, and chickens, running for cover.

‘Where we going?' she said, ‘Fishing? Where's the tackle? You forgot, didn't you? Typical.' She took her hand off the wheel and pinched my cheek. ‘Typical man. Mum said, soon as you'd got me alone you'd forget everything like a typical man. I said no, he's different, something about him that's not like everyone else. I've got this feeling, and besides, he's handsome.'

Ha!

‘Blackwood,' I said, ‘then Thorney Mill pond.' We careered round a bend and the door beside me slid open. I watched the road come up to meet me, then we took a bend the other way, and the door closed, rapping the side of my face for having its head outside.

‘Urgh!'

‘Is my darling hurt again?'

‘Grr.'

‘What's rayballing?'

‘What?'

‘Sorry; I only asked.' She threw the ambulance into a swerve and drove into our yard, in a cloud of dust, inches from my mother's face. I waited.

‘Any more of your bloody friends put my hens off,' she screamed, ‘and I'll hold you personally responsible.'

‘Personally responsible?'

‘Don't fancy me!' We picked up the tackle.

The worms escaped the honey barrel on the way to Thorney pool. They were suffering travel sickness. Some of them were ill on the seats, another went into a coma on the floor. In a disused ambulance there was nothing I could do. It died in my hand, its body quivering gently as it went on, a look of peace passing over its face.

‘One of the worms has died,' I said.

‘I'll dig another for you! Make my day. What did you do today, Muriel? Oh, nothing much, went rayballing, dug a worm.'

Bob Wright has drying fences around the pool, and as a stack of dark cloud gathered in the west, was spreading withies along the wires. I unloaded the bath, and was tying the worms when he said, ‘Rayballing today?'

‘Reckon on it?'

‘Good enough weather,' he said.

But it wasn't. It started to rain. It came as I was floating the bath onto the pool, and Muriel was asking, ‘What are you doing?' It rained hard, and with the wind, cold. Bob sat in his van, Muriel sheltered in the Mill. I refused to stop rayballing, but when the worms went wild in the rain, and slipped the knot, I got what I could of them back in the barrel, closed the lid, and got out of the rain myself.

‘Muriel!' I cried through the deserted halls, ‘Where are you?'

‘Here! Find me! If you can!' Bellies of rain blew through smashed windows and open doors, rusted on their hinges. Broken machinery and mouldering bales of material, the gloom and smells of people dead who'd risked fingers and eyes at their work. The wind rattled some old looms.

‘Coo-ee!'

‘Muriel?'

I climbed open stairs to a loft and its loading doors, slid open to the weather. Broken glass and cardboard boxes lay strewn about the floor, but the view, over the moor, east, from this height, was beautiful. Out of the wind, it was almost sheltered by the open doors, seized pullies hanging over them, to a four storey drop.

‘Gotcha!' she shouted, and poked me, from behind, in the ribs.

‘Don't do that!' I yelled, reeling back and falling on the floor. ‘Give me a heart attack!'

‘So I'd be here,' she said, ‘to give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.'

‘Oh yes?'

‘Yes.'

She crouched down and pulled my body against hers. Tiny rivers of rain ran off her hair and dripped on her face. Kissing she had her eyes closed, I kept mine open, and watched her eyeballs moving beneath their lids, and the end of her nose tucked in by mine. I counted the freckles across her face, she moved her lips, and reached over my shoulders for my arms. She lifted them, with her eyes still closed, and put them round to where I could feel her back. She squeezed hard, so I did the same to her. I closed my eyes, as she let her body fall back, and I was pulled so the top half of my body was lying on her. She rubbed one of her legs against me, I opened my eyes, and she was looking. She had green eyes. They were glazed, and at the edges, watery in the fold of skin. I thought I'd squeeze again, she stopped kissing, and smiled at me. Where her bottom teeth met were tiny stains. She took an arm away and stroked my face with a finger, crooked, running down the skin beneath my cheekbone. She had done this before.

‘Done this before?' she said.

‘Course' I said, ‘I've done everything.'

‘Yes?'

‘Why not?'

‘Oh,' she said, ‘never mind,' and grabbed again, and kissed me. She pulled at my jacket, we rolled over so she was on top, and for a moment, sat up, with her legs astride me, and stretched. Beyond her, through the doors, the weather. She put her hands to the back of her neck, flicked her hair and closed her eyes.

‘What is it about it?' she said. I didn't know. ‘Grr,' she went, and kissed me again. I didn't feel cold. I reached an arm around and touched her face. One side of her head fitted inside my hand. When I curled a finger over the top of her ear and stroked, she moaned.

A car door slammed, I looked up, it had stopped raining. Bob was at his fences again. Muriel got up.

‘Come on, lover,' she said.

‘Anything.'

As soon as we got out, Bob dived into his van because it started raining again. We sat in the ambulance, I looked at the tin bath, floating on the pond. It was filling with water, not eels. The worms had managed to overbalance the honey barrel, force the lid, and escape. Bob said he wasn't hanging around any longer, banged on the window my side and said, ‘See your father next week.'

Muriel and I held hands and stared. The rain lashed against the ambulance and rocked it gently.

I said, ‘You've had lots of boyfriends.'

‘Have I?'

‘I don't know.'

‘One thing's certain.'

‘What?'

‘None of them took me rayballing.'

‘But I didn't.'

‘You tried.'

The ambulance behaved as we drove home, she took my hand and held it under hers, on the steering wheel. I could feel the engine straining through its pistons, up the steering column, and into the steering wheel itself. The rain muffled the exhaust, and the noise of the loose panels banging and rattling against each other. We didn't say much.

‘Me?' I said. She nodded. We were talking very quietly. ‘I don't know. I haven't had ...'

‘What?'

‘What?'

‘You haven't had what?'

‘I don't know.' She laughed.

‘I do,' she said. I blushed. ‘I love that blush,' she said.

‘You coming in?' I said, parked on the verge outside Blackwood.

‘Should I?'

‘If you want.' She sat with me and took my hand. ‘Have some tea?' It rained.

‘I think ... I'll go straight home. Have some with mum. Tell her about my day.' She winked.

‘You wouldn't.'

‘She wouldn't mind.'

‘I might.'

‘Why? Nothing wrong with two people off rayballing in the pouring rain. Everyone does. We do it all the time.' She laughed at me. I looked hurt. ‘I'm sorry,' she said. She put her arms around my neck and kissed me once, quickly, on the lips. I knew what to do.

I stood in the rain beside the ambulance and she said to me, ‘What is rayballing?'

‘Something close to what we did instead, only with eels.'

As my father walked down the market hall, he met Chedzoy. They were talking, someone else walked by carrying ten trays of eggs, my father stepped back and knocked them on the floor. I was outside. A man was trying to sell me a dodgy jacket.

‘You want it, go on, try it, yeah, there you go, see?' I didn't. ‘Go on. I can see you're a man of taste, look at it, sits on the shoulders perfect, ask anyone. Madam? Over here a moment please. Yes, see this? Does it, or does it not fit like a glove? What? To you my son, at the rock bottom, bottom of the rock price of forty nine pounds. My final offer. Couldn't go lower to save my life.'

I always stare at something in situations where I'm not going to be told what to do. I looked at the eye, neatly sown into the corner of the awning on the next stall. A length of rope held the canvas to its frame, and this strained against the eye in the gusting wind. Saturday. Taunton Market. Somerset were playing at home. The river bridge was crowded with people watching for free over the back of the new pavilion, though most were there for the fatstock. Light, medium and heavy heifers were all making a good price, some lights reaching 88.2p per kg. Simmental bulls were fetching poor money though, around £110, what you'd normally expect to pay for a Friesian. Twenty-nine barren cows averaged 64.3p per kg. I heard a commotion in the hall, and watched as my old man was thrown out of a side door.

‘Look,' I said, ‘I don't want it, do not want it.' I spelt the words for him, and handed the jacket back. ‘You think it fits?' I said to the woman. ‘You buy it.'

‘It wasn't me it fitted,' she said.

‘Doesn't matter. It never fitted me. You two always work together?'

‘What you on about?' the bloke said, at the moment my father appeared.

‘Got to go,' I said, and to the old man, ‘What happened to you?'

‘Someone said I owed them a hundred quid.'

‘What for?'

‘Some eggs.'

‘You didn't?'

‘Exactly.'

Light lambs made from 146 to 183, av. 157.2 per kg., heavy lambs 128 to 147, av. 134.6. Chedzoy sold a Friesian heifer for £450, the highest price paid all day.

The van hadn't had any work done on it. On the way home, it stalled outside Langport, so two policemen came up and tapped my father on the shoulder as he looked at the distributor.

‘Trouble sir?'

‘No problem,' he said, sanding the points with the side of a matchbox, ‘happens all the time. Only thing that does, mind, this bus's been going since you were fresh out of nappies.' The policeman looked at my father, then at his colleague, who paced around the van, poked the tyres with a boot, bent down at the back and shook his head.

‘Have you seen this?' he said.

‘What?'

‘If you wouldn't mind?'

The old man got sent out when he showed my mother the ticket.

‘You bloody fool!' she screamed. ‘You don't even need to go to market, it costs you money! Every week!' She slammed a saucepan on the draining board, ‘That's the last time, the very last.'

It was a beautiful day. I ached when I thought about Muriel. I let my parents fight it out in the yard, walked down to the orchard, past the chickens, and sat by the river. Their voices carried in the breeze, ‘You do this,' and ‘I'll do that.' A flock of lapwings moved through a dock patch, their white chests dipping in and out of the leaves. One darted from cover to peck at something in the grass, another followed, another. The sun beat down, some bees in the orchard hedge rhymed with the raised voices from the yard, a door slammed, the bees played alone. I heard my father crunch across to the workshop, shut the door. The river flowed away from the sea with the tide, a bulge of water cruising up the ocean from Argentina, tiring out near Blackwood, pulled by the moon, lived in by eel. A wood pigeon landed in an apple tree. My mother stormed down and shouted, ‘You want your message?'

‘My message?'

‘The girl told you to call!'

‘Muriel?'

‘That's her name.'

‘Why?'

‘How should I know?'

Thorney Mill. I could feel her turn me over, her soft hands pinning me down, lowering her face to mine. I felt the rain on my back as I stood by the ambulance and she said she wouldn't come in. It was warm rain, trickling down the inside of my shirt and over my eyes. I licked a drop off my lips and she said ‘You'll have to wait.' She smoothed the sleeve of her dress against her skin.

I walked across the fields to see her, with a stick of hazel I'd found in a hedge. I crossed the Isle at the bridge on South Moor, through dazzling light, slashing at some nettles by a rhine. I saw Anne painting on the slope of Burrow Hill; the view towards Langport and the hills far away. She had turned the house into dots of grey paint surrounded by blobs of green, brown and blue that was not at all like the sky.

‘That's not the colour of the sky,' I said.

‘It's not the sky.'

‘What is it?'

‘A picture,' she said.

I thought she'd heard this somewhere, the way it came out of her mouth, like a gun going off or a back, snapping.

‘It's what you make it; what's it say to you?'

‘Is it a talking picture?' I said.

I could see Muriel in the orchard. She was lying on her front with her legs bent up behind, her dress fallen into the angle they made, reading. She had kicked one shoe off, it lay in the grass beneath her feet, the other dangled on the end of her toes, hesitated, and dropped off. She squinted at us, but the sun was in her eyes, she shaded them with a hand, and waved. I waved back. ‘You go on,' her mother said. ‘Got to finish, it's strong today.'

A book called
Let's arrange things
, an empty bottle of lager and a plate of crumbs lay beside me on the grass. Muriel was throwing tiny apples from behind a tree. Insects buzzed over the June Drop, a thousand tiny apples shed from their branches by natural selection. I flipped them away with my hands.

‘Hey! Beautiful!' she cried.

‘What?'

‘Catch!' She ran off towards the house, in the front door, and as I caught up, disappeared upstairs. It was cool inside, with pictures on the walls; a field of wildflowers with purple mountains, and some fishermen, stood in a row along a pier. I heard her footsteps above me; a photograph of a Chinese boat, with a huge, ripped sail made from mattresses. A family crouched beneath a canvas covered hoop of cane, it was raining on the Chinese, a boy was stood in the weather, his hand on the rudder, steering downstream. Some other people were standing on the bank, holding fruits, waiting for the boat to tie up. These people were smiling, and behind them, in a hedge of evergreen trees, a troupe of monkeys was eating bananas. One of them was hanging by its tail from a branch. Muriel's head appeared.

‘You coming up?' She reached down to me. She looked beautiful. Her dress was white with blue stripes at the hem, neck and sleeves, tied by a cord of silk, printed with pictures of moths. The sun streamed in the window behind her, lighting the ends of her untidy hair. I took her hand as she led me into her mother's room, through the door I'd stood behind and my mother had opened and into her room, with a view over the lean-to, towards the pound house and the Blackdown Hills.

‘My room!' she said, and spread her arms. I looked at the bed and blushed. I couldn't help it. ‘Blusher!' she said.

‘I know; I can't help it ... I ...'

‘You don't have to,' she said. I didn't know what she meant. ‘I know,' she said, ‘you're lovely.'

There were photographs on her wall of a man, smoking a cigarette by a fence, and another, playing the violin. She sat on a cushion by the window. We talked about how I'd been bothered by a dodgy bloke selling jackets and she told me about a friend of hers who sold toothpicks and scraps of newspaper embedded in amber. He was someone for whom direction was meaningless and art pure paradox. I told her my father had knocked a lot of eggs onto the floor.

‘How'd he do it?'

I said, ‘He needed to walk down the aisle.'

We sat together. I didn't know she wore glasses to read. She picked up a magazine and tossed it onto the bed.

‘I'm going to London.' She wound a pair of socks around her head and threw them at a chest of drawers.

‘When?'

‘Day after tomorrow.'

She'd be sat in a room with the traffic roaring beneath, with a bloke saying, ‘Art,' pouring amber onto a scrap of paper printed with the words
AFTER
THE
STRIKE
WAS
HALTED
BY
, ‘is pure paradox'. I couldn't compete, looked at Muriel, but she was gazing out of the window; I didn't think of anything smart to say. The more I thought, the worse it got.

‘You mind?' she said.

‘Do I?'

‘Don't you?'

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I mind.' The beautiful weather never seemed so dull.

‘You jealous?' she asked, throwing a shoe at the door.

‘Jealous?'

‘You are?'

‘Me? What of? Can't be jealous of something when I don't know what it is.'

‘You don't know any of my friends.'

‘You don't know any of mine.'

‘No,' she said, ‘but mine ...' She stopped what she was saying. Her mother had packed her paints away and was walking down the hill towards us. As the sun dipped, the shadows raced, and it grew chill, she walked across the yard and in the door. I listened to her moving around downstairs and the sound of cups being rinsed and laid out.

‘Yours?'

‘Nothing,' she said.

I felt jealous. She was talking about them being different, but stretched across the floor to where I sat and took my hand. I looked into her eyes and watched the reflection of the sun move across them like a bug. She crooked the little finger of her other hand, ran it down the ridge of my nose, and squeezed. I leant towards her, she closed her eyes to let me kiss her lips. I felt her hand squeeze mine, she shifted her legs. Her mother called up the stairs to ask if I took sugar. I jumped, but Muriel said she didn't mind. I couldn't relax.

‘Relax,' she said. I couldn't.

‘I can't.'

‘Don't worry,' she said, ‘change the subject. You tell me something.' I was when Anne walked in.

‘Two teas, no sugar both; biscuit?' she said, bending down with a plate. ‘Feel free, plenty more in the cupboard.'

‘Thanks.'

‘I see your father's famous!' she said, passing a newspaper.

HUNT FOR RACOONKNAPPER CALLED OFF.

The hunt for a missing racoon was called off today after a local basketmaker found its body in the river Parret. A spokesman for the Ridgeway Safari Park said the animal escaped last Thursday and had probably been living off the land.

Muriel said she didn't think it had been buying takeaways. Nor did I.I wouldn't tell you about the tea. It tasted of antiperspirant, but I drank it, and imagined Muriel knew what it was.

‘Kiss me again,' she said. Her dress slipped off her shoulder and hung over her arm. While we kissed I didn't think about London, but did when we'd finished, stood up, and looked at the dusk from her window. If she could kiss me and ask me to kiss her, she'd be with him, pouting, getting him to put his pan of boiling amber to one side, his moulds and toothpicks, saying ‘kiss me'.

As my mother ladled a pile of damp cabbage onto my plate, she told my father that if he picked he'd get no pie. He picked, staring at his shoes, put by the back door.

‘Taunton Monday,' he said, ‘all done?'

‘I spent the whole morning on them. You know I did. Why'd you always ask questions you know the answer to? Why don't you shut up when there's nothing interesting to say?' I was upset. I'd been on my own all day, with my thoughts, in the workshop. I didn't care though, it wasn't my problem that Muriel had gone.

We went to Taunton. The old man sat in the van while I carried two dozen log baskets through the back door of a gardening shop, sneering at a queue of people waiting for a bus. He gave me a tenner, so when we got home, I sat in the van until he got out, then drove to Jackson's garage.

‘Dick there?' I whispered.

‘Dick?'

‘Who wants to know?'

‘Billy. You letting me in?' The door opened enough, and Dick shouted, ‘The wanderer returns!' I didn't know what any of the people I knew were saying anymore.

‘Left you?' he said. ‘Gone off with an old fancy man?'

‘You don't know anything about it.'

‘That's what you think!' He poured some cider. ‘Forget her,' he said. ‘Better off with a tart you know.' He smelt of rancid butter and in the gloom, picked at the dim outline of the line of fuzz on his top lip. The drink was bitter and did not satisfy my thirst. I sat on a bench listening to him talk about Hector.

‘Got told off, told him, I said “You chase cows like that and he'll have you”, but Hector, got a mind of his own, the boss gave him a thrashing, thought he'd killed him.'

I said, ‘I saw a dog stung to death by hornets.'

‘I'm telling you, he won't be doing that again in a hurry.' I said it was six hornets, six killed a sheep dog. Took three hours to die and two vets, writhed round the yard howling and howling, in the evening. They put him in a barn, but the howls echoed into the night like they were solid, like you could go out, grip one with your hand, cut a piece off. Chilling sound. Hornets got armour plating, built like tanks. Look like bombs. You can see their mouths moving, clicking back. They have slanty eyes set back on their heads. Though they have a deadly sting they use it reluctantly, so that dog must have really pissed them off.

I caught a length of jelly on my lips, no light filtered into that place. I felt the juice in my brain, and saw Muriel's lips embedded in amber, pouting at me as they flew by. I touched my knees with my head. Tiny explosions went off all around me, the garage door opened and shut, names called out across a space of darkness, and an odd thump thump on some stairs.