Sharing an ear

There’s a photo of us together, in which we appear to be sharing an ear.  We were that close.  There’s me, a haircut to be regretted, my serious face cracked by a smile.  And there’s Felix, his comedic nature coming out in his stance, the folded arms and tipped back baseball cap, the backward lean, the badges on his black bomber jacket.  If I approached life like it was a novel, he approached it like it was a cartoon.  I needed his lightness, and he needed my gravity.  I was his foil, Eric to his Ernie.  And for two or three years we were more or less inseparable.  People thought we were gay.

One night we came back to Felix’s house after a party and found Tom and Dawn, two friends, in bed together.  Dawn lived with her much stricter parents a dozen houses down the street, and Felix let them use his room; his mother had become inured to the comings and goings and subsequently even welcomed them.  The couple remained in bed while we chatted.  Somehow we mischievously began to bet against the boy running naked to her house and back, in a kind of nudist knock-door-scarper.  This was right in the centre of town, mind, so no mean feat if he carried it off.  Tom agreed to take on the dare.  We all gathered in the alleyway by the front door, leading to the back, Tom with a blanket around him.  It was a cold winter night.  Having burst from the blanket and the alleyway, he had to pick his way down the street, for fear of Saturday night broken glass.  A car – sadly not police – came round the corner and for several moments the bare cheeks of his arse were gloriously illuminated.  The knock achieved, gingerly he came back up the incline of the street, his post-coital cock shrunken in the sub-zero temperature.  We applauded, may have even whooped, and went back inside to drink warming spirits.

The more or less of our inseparableness.  Felix’s girlfriend was Gina, and I loved her too, her impish smile and close-cropped dyed red hair, gamine waif cum quietly theorising student.  I loved being with the both of them, with him charming the both of us.  A ceaseless collapsing into laughter.  And Gina didn’t mind me having so much of their company, or not that she ever showed.  She was an artist, or at least she was going to be.  She was already way further along than I was.  She knew the work of land artists like Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy before anyone else, and for her final year show built herself a hut in the National Trust woodland behind her house, its walls packed with daub and moss and its insides turned out as an old Fenland wise woman’s might have been.  All that was missing was the still.  We all drank there one summer night, a moonlit hut-warming party fuelled by a fire at its entrance and ancient brews of scrumpy and gin and whisky.  Long after, I used to pass the woods occasionally, and each time I had the urge to go in and see if the creation was still there.  And once, finally, I did, and couldn’t find the hut, and it grieved me that I couldn’t, that memory had failed me, or that the National Trust had pulled it down.

This three-way love never divided us, not until the very end.  I moved to the city and shared a flat with the naked Tom, and Felix arrived shortly after.  He got a flat together with another girl from home, one whom I did not care for, having found her one morning coming out of Tom’s bedroom the week after his to my eyes much lovelier girlfriend had come to stay.  And the inevitable happened between Felix and his flatmate, and Gina was distraught, on visiting, and discovering, and slept not with Felix but instead cushioned on my floor and talked about Felix all through one night and all through the next, without a pause for daylight.  I don’t think I so much as held her hand in consolation; I knew she didn’t want me, and she knew that I might have seen even a hand as an encouragement.  It was then that I found out that I loved her more than Felix.  I was so mad at him for hurting her that I turned my back on him, an act of judgment and militancy entirely in keeping with my age and the times but one I have since regretted a thousand times over.  Because I lost them both.

Gina fled without telling anyone to somewhere in the far south of Italy; later there was word she was living in a remote part of Ireland.  Felix married his flatmate (and not many years later divorced her).  I wasn’t invited to the wedding.

He turned up on my doorstep two years later, crying, giving me a drunken bear hug by way of greeting.  He came inside and we talked, but I was stone cold sober and he was in pain, beyond sense, locked into repetition.  I wondered what I had seen in my old friend.  The distance was too great to bridge and the comedy was gone; and I realised I had to take my part of the blame for that.

The endless landscape

In the strictest sense of the word, it was of course bucolic, working on the farm.  But was it so in the poetic sense?  This was an arable farm in the flats of Lincolnshire, after all; west country cider taken with Rosie seemed to belong to another place and century.  But even at the time, even working fourteen hour days, I knew it to be so; that one day I would write about these moments as golden ones, that the scene I would paint would have the shimmering haze of a mirage, an illusion risen from the past to haunt me both with its promise of the future and all the lost opportunities I never claimed or seized.  Never was able to claim or seize.

Take the week I spent rooting out seed beet from the onion field.  Way off road, all day on my own, with only the stems of onions and the blue sky for company.  No screening from the sun, excepting a floppy fringe.  Shirt off, back bent only occasionally to pull from the baked earth the rogue growths of beet.  It was a big field, a cash crop; I seemed to be there for days and days to little effect except to go berry-brown.  But I delighted in being alone, because it was impossible to be so at home.  Perhaps it was there, in that onion field, that I began to love solitariness.

Yet I wasn’t entirely alone.  With me I had the unnatural, spherical blue of my transistor radio.  In the mornings, moving slowly from vector to vector of the field, I listened to Radio One, grimacing at ‘Our tune’ sloppiness and hoping for a song I actually liked.  As soon as the coverage from Wimbledon started, I switched over to Radio Two.  Vitas Gerulaitis defeated in five in the fourth round.  Connors, Lendl, McEnroe, all on course for the semis.  This I remember about the introverted Ivan Lendl: that once he crashed a sports car in his attempt to avoid hitting an animal in the road, and afterwards said, ‘I could replace the car; I couldn’t replace the squirrel’.  Or whichever animal it was.

The onion field was on the farm’s highest ground, not that this means much in Lincolnshire.  But there was enough of an incline for me to see across the endless landscape to our house.  It was one end of a terraced set of three homes, hard by the entrance to the farm.  A farm labourer’s cottage that now – after a period without one – housed a farm labourer.  Two, if you counted my brother, which I tried not to.  The terrace was entirely plain, and built of yellow-grey London stock brick.  The window frames, the bargeboard, the porch and front and back door were painted in a colour that wasn’t quite orange, but neither was it pink; the cheapest, nastiest signifier that those who lived inside had no say in how their house was presented to the world.  Every two or three years, in the quiet winter months, a labourer from the farm would be sent over to refresh the paintwork, always in the same colour.  At least I was never asked to paint my own house.

Inside, when I wasn’t working on the farm, I spent the summers listening to music, or watching tennis and cricket, and passive smoking.  And from an early age my brother and I had been more or less free to come and go as we pleased.  We would cycle to the farm’s secret off-road places, or to see our friend in his big pastel pink house, where we would liberally raid the impressive selection contained within the family biscuit barrel.  Then it was on to the village to hang around by bus shelters or the war memorial and discuss how we might engineer the purchase of alcohol.  Martini or Cinzano were our bottles of choice – cheap, sweetly drinkable to a teenager, packing a punch way beyond sour and watery beer.  On summer days it gave us a dreamy buzz, and we’d risk our lives against delayed reactions and overconfidence, as through pedal power alone we cajoled and bothered the still air into something resembling a breeze.

To drink the vermouth, we’d go down to the Grundle, a gully left behind by meltwater at the end of the Ice Age.  On the near side, a beech tree’s roots had created a range of possible cycle launch pads from which to descend into the ditch and up the other side, though a timid novice could elect simply to roll down the rootless path.  On the far side there was just enough room to stage your bike and shuffle it into a turn and return.  Overdo the ascent and you’d end up tangled in the barbed wire which fenced off a horse’s paddock.  Our rich friend had a Grifter; I forget what we had.  His was the bike we wanted, the one on which it was possible to make the longest, highest leap into the ditch.  Martini or none, riding the Grifter or not, we launched ourselves with abandon, believing ourselves invulnerable.

So this was the beginnings of the endless landscape – two wheel weekends, fourteen hour working days, the long weeks of summer, the wheat and barley flats of Lincolnshire hazed alternately by the sun and the wind, and – as idyllic as a Greek meltemi – sometimes both together; and the endless this-way, that-way tussle of a five set thriller from Wimbledon, broadcast to a field of onions.