teachers, not even the headmaster – making everything happen. I pictured it: brown and leathery, half-cockroach, half-school satchel, lathered in sweat or spittle, dragging itself along the nocturnal classrooms and corridors, imposing by laid enchantments our scenario for the next day.
Now, parking, he ran the car’s nearside wheels into the ditch, leaving it looking stolen, used and dumped. Ignoring the stile as always, we vaulted the five-barred gate. Unseen from the road – through a curtain of aphids, past a rotting sheep carcass, beyond the sphagnum bogs and cotton-grass – was terra incognita. The forgotten south-west corner of Ilkley Moor, an expanse of thick purple heather, pathless except for the traces of our regular visits: in five months we hadn’t seen another soul. After ten minutes we entered the kingdom of the birds: hearing the peewit’s cry, like soaped hair rubbed, the plover’s resigned one-note whistle, the skylark’s scrabbling cadenza, the gabble of the red-polled grouse. The silent crows flocked with heavy emphasis from rock to rock. I realized that we were marching in step and that I’d begun to perceptibly ape his walk, like pushing through a succession of turnstiles.
It was here, the mid-point between our homes in Eldwick and Hawksworth, that we used to meet on Sundays, to sidefoot a dented football to and fro. We never talked about school – communicating mainly in the catchphrases of the various comic foreigners and sexual deviants from the radio show, ‘Round The Horne’, and the clipped, pained dialogue of its interminable ‘Brief Encounter’ parody. ‘I know’…‘I know you know’…‘I know you know I know’…‘I know you know I know you know’…‘Yes, I know’. Oblivious to the flora and fauna, we watched the progress of our divergent metamorphoses, as if we were the mirrors in which we could still glimpse ourselves as we really were.
At sixteen he took his anger and acne off to the army. I left two years later for the first of a busted flush of universities. On my Christmas visits to my parents I’d hear news or rumours: his three tours of Ulster, his dishonourable discharge, his mercenary wanderings followed by monstrous if shadowy criminality. I had no doppelgänger dreams or Corsican Brothers flashes, just the feeling that he could have been here and I could have been there. When I finally returned to the area, having got tenure at Leeds, I discovered that he was ‘away at the moor’ – not Ilkley but Broadmoor.
I met him again when I sprawled my bike and myself across the icy cobbles of Haworth Main Street. He burst out of The Fleece and lifted me up, straightened my handlebars and drew me inside. How had he known me, chubby and balding after these fifteen years? He hadn’t changed at all, apart from the acne – a gargantuan toddler, dented and striated. The fingers of his right hand were bandaged together in a complex cat’s cradle. There was a second pint of Ram Tam by the fire, as if I’d been expected.
He seemed to know everything that our contemporaries – whose names mostly meant nothing to me now – were doing, while giving the impression that he wasn’t particularly interested. He’d even heard about my upcoming book on the French sentimentalists. When I asked what he was up to he just smiled: ‘This and that, here and there, now and then.’
We’d thrown the bike in the back of his van and gunned over to the moor. As he led me across the frozen ground I discovered something new, his love of nature: ‘I get up here as often as I can. Watch the birds come and go, the heather change colour. Whatever it’s doing in the valley it never seems to rain on the tops’. Every time we followed this same four-mile circuit, always ending up in The Midland in Bingley, which had ‘Suspicious Minds’ on its jukebox.
He wouldn’t let on where he was living but finally, reluctantly, gave me a Keighley telephone number: ‘You might be able to leave a message for me there.’ In fact, the few times I used it he himself answered on the second ring. One night I saw him on Leeds Headrow with two floridly-dressed Asians: he didn’t speak, just looked straight through me. Whatever he did, I suspected that it wouldn’t have been any more interesting than our funding crises, inter-departmental feuds, sexual harassment tribunals.
We crossed the marshy bowl under the fell-head, breeding place for a dozen pairs of curlews. I’d never registered these birds before, how beautiful and ridiculous they were: the long beak, combining épée and sabre, depending from a tiny head, all eyes; the colour gradations from gold to brown to white; their glorious landing glide, ending in a desperate sprawl, before, refolding themselves, they moved off in a waddling hop. The approximations of the composers – Warlock, Britten or Messiaen – hadn’t prepared me for the sad sweetness of their cry, heard only in summer but the bleak essence of winter. At first they’d mimed broken wings, trying to decoy us away from their nests, but when they got used to us they’d meet us at the frontier of their territory and escort us through like a guard of honour, flying low over our heads. Their cries developed an increasingly interrogative note: were we looking for something? Could they help? When, eco-wardening, we pulled up by the roots a patch of leprous bracken that had started to choke the ling, they swooped around, whistling in encouragement or derision. And, later, after their unusually agitated flocking had led us to the rescue of a sheep tangled up in old fence wire, they landed nearby to watch us wrestling with it, rolling their bright satirical eyes, close enough for us to smell them – awful, a compound of rot and brown sauce. In time they displayed their fledgelings, moving around in synchronized peeping trios like Tamla Motown groups. Wary of anthropomorphism, I resisted My Friend’s attempts to give them names.
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