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The phone-box door was heavy but the hinges didn’t creak. The windows of the houses set back from the road were still curtained and dark and the curtains didn’t move. The ringing of the phone echoed loudly inside the box and the ringing would not stop. The door was opened. The phone was lifted. First: there was a low humming silence. Then: the wet click of a mouth being opened to speak. Then there was a voice which spoke. Two planes came low across the sky in silence towards the sea, and the sound which followed was like the sound of improvised explosive devices in a culvert very close by.
The sheep scattered blindly across the field towards the dead wood beneath the poplar trees. The heavy door of the phone-box banged shut. The sounds all faded away.
Song
Grimsby
Chinese restaurants, launderettes, baked-potato vans.
These are a few of my favourite extractor-fans.
I’ll Buy You A Shovel
Marshchapel
We’d been sat there all evening listening to the music and the laughter come over across the fields and we’d run out of drink about when the sun went down. Ray kept looking over in the direction of the Stewart place and I knew what he was thinking but I wasn’t about to say it for him. The two of us sat there looking into the fire and the pallet-wood kept cracking and spitting and we were waving off midges and all these shrieks of laughter kept coming across the fields.
Fuck it, he says, in the end. Let’s go, he says.
I went off and got the car started.
Just let me do the talking, he says.
*
We knew about the set-up they had over there. We’d been watching them bring it in all week. The marquee and the catering tent. The bar. The sound system and the dance-floor. The flowers and balloons and candles and drapes and linens and fancy chairs. Old man Stewart had been keeping himself busy driving around all week, off to town and back and who knows where else. Directing operations, was what he was probably calling it. The roads were hardly big enough for some of the stuff they’d been bringing in. On Thursday a furniture lorry had come past and stopped at the end of the road by the dead-end sign and spent about ten minutes trying to turn round. We sat outside the caravan and watched. Weren’t enough room to turn a lorry round. The reversing alarm k
ept going on and off and the lorry kept edging backwards and forwards, trying to keep out of the ditch. They could probably have heard that reversing alarm as far down as the Sands. Jackie came down from her house to watch. It was a nice day. Hot, but with a bit of a breeze coming in off the sea. I offered Jackie my seat but she said not to bother. She asked how the ditch was going. Ray told her the ditch was going fine and did she want a smoke. Jackie looked up towards the hay meadow at the top end of the site and round at the fishing lake and back down at us and just sort of didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. We’d been there the best part of a month and we’d dug about six foot short of fuck-all. Ray did one of his sighs and stood up and told her again it was going fine. He said we were just waiting to get some advice on the soil hydrology and then we’d crack on. She looked at him. He looked at her right back. The reversing alarm from the furniture lorry chimed out across the fields. A Tornado went over and dropped a bomb on the Sands and vanished over the horizon in silence.
Jackie started speaking just as the noise of it caught up so neither of us heard a word she said. She turned and walked back to the house and looked up at the hay meadow again on her way. Waddled is more of the word. Not to put too fine a point on it. She’s not what you’d call petite. She holds her weight like that. Ungainly, is a word you could use. We watched her go. I asked Ray what was he talking about soil hydrology, and he said to keep out of it. He went back in the caravan and shut the door and turned the radio on in there. The furniture lorry finally got turned round and came back along the road and stopped. The driver called down to ask if I knew where the Stewart place was and said something about bloody satnav. I climbed up the bank and pointed him back to the end of the road and told him it was down that way. Weren’t a dead-end like the sign said, I told him, you can go through the farmyard and out the other side and the Stewart place is the second on the left. The look on his face. Thanks for letting me know, he said. I said not to mention it, and I went off and mucked about with stakes and string until I didn’t think Jackie was looking out of the kitchen window of her house on the other side of the lake there any more. Pond is more like the word, with the size of it. But they’re not going to get any customers for a fishing pond, so they’re calling it a lake. The furniture lorry drove past again and turned left through the farmyard at the end. Another Tornado went over and dropped a bomb on the Sands. The stakes and the string made a pretty nice line coming down from the hay meadow to the edge of the lake. Made it look like the job was near-enough halfway done.
Ray came out of the caravan. We took the short way across the fields to the Stewart place and watched the lorry driver unloading the chairs and tables and linens, and when old man Stewart came out of the house to sign for everything we cleared off back to the caravan again.
The fishing lake was old man Stewart’s. The lake and the land around it and the house where Jackie lived and the hay meadow and the three fields between here and the Stewart place. Also the pine plantation between the Stewart place and the Sands. Also possibly the caravan, although not even Jackie was sure about that and anyway it didn’t seem like something he’d want to argue over. It had just always been there she’d told us, when we first moved in, and always seemed like about the right word. We were supposedly on-site security and maintenance, was the idea. We were there to provide a presence. Also to undertake certain unspecified maintenance tasks. Such as for the only example so far digging the ditch to provide drainage from the hay meadow into the lake. There wasn’t really any money involved, but the situation suited us and I think it suited Jackie as well in terms of some kind of company and not having to be on her own all the time. But she said old man Stewart had started getting on the phone and asking what was he hearing about these new people on the site, meaning Ray and me. Jackie said it was he was unhappy about the progress but it was also probably due to he knew certain things about certain things which had occurred a great many years previous, certain things which Jackie also had a fair idea about but which she appeared to be putting in the category of now we deserved a second chance but which old man Stewart was apparently placing into quite a different category. Some people have very much longer memories than other people, is what it came down to.
The night before the wedding Jackie was sitting outside the caravan and telling us what she knew about the rest of the Stewarts. Most of the family had arrived that afternoon and most of them had needed to ask for directions, shouting something about bloody satnav down from the road and waving their phones around to try and get a signal. The family were all down south now, was what Jackie was telling us. Hadn’t been up this way for years. Most of the crowd tomorrow will be from London, she said. That’s where the groom’s from. They’re talking about it’ll be near enough two hundred of them there. One of Jackie’s cleaning jobs was at the Stewart place, was how come she knew all this. She started off naming names, like who was who in the Stewart clan, the ex-wife and the sons and the half-brothers and the nephews and nieces, but we weren’t really listening. I was breaking up another pallet for the fire and Ray was either looking at the stars or else his head was back like that because he was asleep. We could hear most of the Stewarts out the back of their place, shouting and laughing. I asked Jackie how come with all these relations old man Stewart lived on his own and most of them couldn’t even find their own way to the house. Ray said something about therein lay the tale. Without lifting up his head. He actually said therein. Me and Jackie just sort of looked at him, and tried not to laugh, and Ray sat up and rolled a smoke without offering one to anyone. Therein. Jackie asked me had I got the pallet from behind the caravan and I told her yes. She said she’d been planning on using those to make the fishing jetties with. She said she’d told us that. Wasn’t much I could say to that, with my foot halfway through the pallet and the fire spitting away like it was. I didn’t know much about fishing lakes but I thought it would probably take something better than pallets to build the jetties with. I told her well I was sorry about that but I was sure we could get some more. Ray lit his smoke and said we’d definitely get her some more no need to worry about that.
It wasn’t like me or Ray knew enough about fishing to build a fishing lake. We were just there to do a few jobs. I’d never been fishing in my life but I could see this pond wasn’t up to much. It was full of green algae or something like that. She’d told us it needed cleaning up and some oxygenating plants putting in and we’d nodded like we knew what she was talking about. She’d said she was going to mainly stock it with roach and carp but she wanted it all fixed up first before she placed any orders. I couldn’t see how that overgrown drainage ditch was ever going to support a living creature but I kept my mouth shut. Ray had said something about using barley-straw to freshen up the water and she’d looked impressed. Don’t know where he got that. Could have picked it up from all the reading he’d done when he was working in the library.
When she said goodnight and set off walking back to her house on the other side of the lake Ray watched her and asked me if I would. I said he was joking I would. He shrugged. He said he might do only it would depend on the situation. He said something about gravity and big women and then he went off in the caravan and shut the door and turned the radio on in there.
I sat there with the moon shining off the water and the bats twatting silently about and the noise of all those Stewarts barking out across the fields like each of them was trying to be the last to stop laughing. The groom was probably sat outside another back door somewhere now, smoking a last cigarette and listening to all that and wondering what he was letting himself in for.
A Tornado went over and dropped a bomb on the Sands. First time they’d done it in the dark that I knew of. I felt the shadow of it first and like the weight of the heat of it, and then the noise came dragging behind like it always did but it seemed much louder in the dark and I covered my head with my arms until it had passed. I heard shrieking from the Stewart place, and men laughing, and I got up and pissed on the back wheel of Ray’s car and went to bed.
Ray was a Muslim at one time. He converted when we were inside. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. He never had the beard or the hat or anything but he took it very seriously. He changed his name to Abdul Wahid and went to the prayer-room five times a day with the other brothers and took down all the graven images from his cell. I asked him what he was going to do with them. He said it wasn’t permitted for any man to make images of the human form which Allah has created or something, so I bought them off him for a SIM card and a pack of tobacco. They were pretty fucking graven. I asked him how come he’d turned Muslim all of a sudden and he said he’d heard the voice of Allah calling to him. I asked him was it just like that out of nowhere and he told me it was out of the blue. He’d been up all night doing press-ups and reading a translation of the Koran he’d got hold of from working in the library and he’d been fasting for three days just to see what it was like, but yes basically he had totally out of the blue heard the voice of Allah. Calling him by name, he said. I didn’t ask whether the voice had called him Abdul Wahid or Ray. Turns out the voice of Allah didn’t have much else to say so he just kept calling whichever name it was. Ray said it was like nothing else he’d ever heard. He said it was like a light going on inside his head. He said it was like being called home. Which I didn’t think was something he would have been hankering after particularly but I didn’t say as much. Maybe that’s not what he meant. He told me the whole experience had left him feeling blessed. He said it about three times and I believed him even though right then we were standing in line waiting to slop out. But you could see it in his face, the way he felt about it. He asked me how I’d be able to resist if I’d heard the voice of Allah calling me home. I told him that’s fair enough Ray, and good luck and all that. He said it wasn’t Ray it was Abdul Wahid.
I’m not too sure how things worked out with the whole Muslim thing after that. He spent most of his time in the prayer-room or with the other brothers and I didn’t really see him. There was word went round that he’d only converted because someone had been rinsing his gravy-boat and the best protection around was getting in with the brothers, but I don’t know if that was true or what. I’ve never asked him. I got transferred a long while before either of us got out, and we lost touch after that. This was years ago we’re talking. And when I saw him again at the start of the summer it seemed like he’d gone back to calling himself Ray. I wasn’t sure, but he didn’t look like he was feeling too blessed. He certainly weren
’t forswearing alcohol. Could be he was still a Muslim but he’d toned it down a bit. Could be that was what he was up to when he kept going back in the caravan and turning the radio on in there.
Someone at the Stewart place tested out the sound system first thing on the Saturday morning. Nine am on the dot, like they’d purposely waited for what they thought was a respectable time. Didn’t seem like a respectable time to me. Ray near enough punched a hole in the caravan wall. They played a few tunes and then they started talking on the microphone. Seemed like they didn’t really know how loud it was or at least how far sound can travel around here. This was some of the younger Stewarts, it seemed like. Old man Stewart was probably already out somewhere, like straightening the cushions on the church pews or something. They said a few things they obviously thought wouldn’t carry as far as the church, and then there was a howl of feedback and a noise like the wrong plug being pulled out and it went quiet again. Ray got up and went outside and I heard him pissing against the wheel of his car. He came back and got two cans of Guinness from the bag by the door and asked if I wanted some breakfast.
We sat by the lake and drank the cans and threw stones into the water. We could see a few cars pulled up outside the church already, three fields to the north. Old man Stewart’s Range Rover was there. I asked Ray what he thought about the line I’d staked out for the ditch. He said it was the finest line of stakes he’d ever seen but I needn’t think he was about to start digging anything at the weekend when we didn’t even have the right tools anyway. I threw some more stones into the water. They made holes in the green algae and then the holes closed up. It happened pretty quickly and then it was like nothing had happened. I wasn’t sure how Jackie thought she was going to get all that cleared up. A car pulled out from the farmyard at the end of the road and stopped. A woman got out and tied a sign and some balloons to a telegraph pole. We watched her. She got back in the car and drove along the road and stopped at the top of the bank and got out and tied some more balloons to the telegraph pole there. She looked about the right age to be the bride’s mother, dressed in presumably her wedding outfit already. We waved but she didn’t see us. Ray shouted hello and waved again and she looked down to where we were sitting. Ray asked if the balloons were to help people find their way to the wedding and she said they were. She was wearing a big wedding hat, and holding on to it like there was a wind blowing a gale. Ray told her that was a good idea, that it was easy to get lost round here even with the bloody satnav. She nodded and smiled and got back in the car and drove off. She drove along and stopped and got out and tied balloons to every telegraph pole between us and the church.
The weather was clear and still and already warm. It was a good day for a wedding, if you liked that sort of thing. I finished my Guinness and threw the can with the others in the ditch at the bottom of the bank and went and had a look around the lake. Ray asked was I going for some kind of leisurely stroll and I gave him the finger. I was wondering how many fishing jetties would fit around the lake and how close you’d put them and how you’d get them to float. I was starting to think we might as well get on and do some of the jobs Jackie had talked about. Since we were here anyway. Might be good to feel like we were getting something done. She’d need some more pallets though.
A couple of vans drove past. They looked like they were from the catering company. Ray waved as they passed but I didn’t see anyone waving back. He got up and went in the caravan and came out with another couple of cans. Another van came past, from the off-licence in town. We didn’t bother waving.
