for an instant, behind all their masks, the same woman’s face. No one I recognized…it certainly wasn’t Pam or Mum. Then she’d chuck the parchment-like folds under Jacob’s chin as he, nuzzling, gave out his full polyphonal hum. Then she’d kiss me – long and deep – and I’d tell her my secret lover’s name: nothing occult or sentimental, just what was on my birth certificate, but unshortened, undiminished.
Jacob’s particular favourite was Marianne: hair sun-bleached to white, I think he took her for some goddess or perhaps just another sheep. He let her ride him round the field: I wanted so much to, there and then, couple with her, like the incestuous Phrixus and Helle on the back of their magic golden ram…There was Jan the artist who put in her contact lenses to study him: she said that his fleece reminded her of some Manzoni achromes in the Herning Kunstmuseum. She clapped her hands with joy to see nature so sedulously imitating art: that night, the same transformative enthusiasm was able to perceive my scanty, rufous pubic hair as Titianesque…And there was Janine, who took the best photo of Jacob – just-sheared to designer stubble, in my homburg and shades: she said he looked like Bruce Willis and that she fancied him more than me…The only one who wouldn’t touch him was Helen, who walked the winter mountains bare-midriffed, with lacy halter-top, leopard-print stretch leggings and open-toed silver sandals: but who still beat me to the summit…Jane fed him mangetout peas, posing like Louise De Kerouaille – decollété, her raw nipples burning white-hot…Caro spent hours plaiting his wool into dreadlocks and epigonic hippie Sara decked him in fantastical garlands, like Bottom…‘It’s like in Genesis,’ said Bernie, lapsed Catholic and mild masochist. ‘If you’re wrestling with Jacob then you must be an angel.’ Which was the exact opposite of what she was calling me a mere seventeen days later.
Within a month they all lost their various illusions: no longer wanting to explore or hide, seek or find, make love or fuck – at least not with me – they went their separate ways. They tired of me at about the same moment that I tired of them, but the farewell messages left on my answerphone or scrawled in Alma-Tadema greetings cards were oddly bitter. In what way had I been using them? – I’d never once mentioned the future or, indeed, the past…Whenever I turned up alone Jacob didn’t want to wrestle. He’d shake his head, wobbling his overshot jaw: ‘I can get you women OK,’ that look said, ‘But you just can’t keep them’. I told him how I only wanted to keep that first smile, first kiss, first night…how I wanted someone I’d never get used to, that intimacy would render yet more and more unfathomable and who would, finally, make me a stranger – ever stranger – to myself. Jacob just sighed and returned to his cropping. He didn’t get it, but then in certain matters he was still very much a sheep.
That final winter was the best time of all. Everything thrilled me: I’d sleep three hours a night but arise full of energy. I had life taped: I felt as if, after thirty-four years, I’d at last got up the courage to be young. Being on the fells was like an acid trip: I was really seeing things – not just the sweeps of peak and scarp but also every insect, every tiny blade of grass and flower beneath my feet…all the details, but God, not The Devil, seemed to be in them. Everything kept going pointilliste, as if my gaze was penetrating through to that dust from which Khnum had created the world. I wondered if I’d somehow learnt this from Jacob: was it a mystical vision or just a sheep’s-eye view? I was worried about him: some days he wouldn’t come out at all – from the shadows of his cabin I could sense a baleful stare. Perhaps while I’d contracted his blitheness he’d been taking on my fears and guilts?
I no longer endured work but actively enjoyed it. The houses seemed to vanish into their components – a whirl of bricks and mortar, of glass, scaffolding and rances gleaming in the January sun. Vista View and the Parthenon were both ultimately just piles of stones. As Sally the macrobioticist told me: ‘Everything is edible if you chop it up small enough.’ My relationships were getting shorter and shorter, as if my lovers were also perfectly content with intensity and evanescence: although I was slightly perturbed when the two I liked best both sat down the instant they got home – after the first, unforgettable night – to write that they never wanted to see me again. Both ended with the same phrase: ‘I’m sorry I can’t share your feelings’. I didn’t understand what this meant: maybe there were husbands or other lovers in the picture? I hoped that I hadn’t somehow made them afraid of me.
One Sunday the traffic was heavier than usual. We crawled up the valley: Easter. A charity fun run was assembling. Every car was full of nuns and spacemen, ballerinas and demons. The sheep fled in panic from pantomime cows and horses. My companion was annoying me. She said her name was Miki – ‘Short for what?’ I asked – ’Short for nothing,’ she replied. Thirteen years younger than me – a third-year music student at York – she didn’t seem to realize that I was supposed to be telling her things. I’d never heard of her favourite writer – Broch – or her favourite composer – Barraqué. She talked about performing the latter’s setting of the former’s Death Of Virgil, in which, apparently, the dying Nolan, embittered, contemplates destroying ‘The Aeneid’. I suspected a trap: perhaps she’d made them both up so that I’d either feel ignorant or – if I did claim some distant familiarity – run the risk of revealing myself to be a fake? She started singing: ‘Il sera possible de traverser la porte corne de la terreur pour atteindre a l‘existence’…To enter being through the horned gates of terror: I thought of the waiting Jacob’s baroque crown and smiled…
As we passed the farm he still hadn’t appeared: I could only see, at the bottom of the field, a motionless human figure. It appeared to be contemplating, in the lee of the wall, a last remaining snowdrift. The summoning shout died in my throat: by the time its echoes had finished rolling round the cliffs I had almost reached him. The farmer, looking up, scissored his dangling arms across his thighs, like a cricket umpire signalling dead ball. He’d taken off his cap, holding it folded and crushed in his fist: his scarlet scalp was dappled with greenish patches of hair, like moss. Two long creases had appeared in his face, conduiting the tears past his pillar box mouth to drop off his chin and on to the still mound of Jacob, lying collapsed on his stomach. The legs seemed to have disappeared, as if the dust had already begun to consume the god that had moulded it. I knelt and touched him: he was stiff, immovably heavy – harder and colder than the Badger Stone, as if he’d never been alive. A chill wind had begun stripping his fleece like a dandelion clock. I looked up and met Miki’s eyes – uncomprehending, hard, young…as she watched two middle-aged men sobbing inexplicably over a pile of dirty wool. And I knew that now Jacob – metasheep, laughing wrestler, Lord Of The House Of Sweet Life – was gone, no one – not for a few days or hours, not even for a second – was ever going to love me again.
In This Block There Lives A Slag…
In those days I could really sleep. I’d never have woken up at all if it hadn’t been for the clocks. It was bad sleep though – I never remembered my dreams but I knew that they must have been nightmares. I had these three clocks set at thirty second intervals: first the bedside radio alarm that I’d tuned to a frequency of ghostly static, then, on the floor, the second, hooting like a robot owl, and finally, on the window ledge behind the curtain, the biggest – a great copper thing bearing a face with long-lashed eyes and a lipsticked mouth that smiled while, with twin hammers, it tried to beat its own brains out. I had to get over to it before, in detonating, it destroyed the world.
That morning, as usual, I wrenched the curtain off the end of the rail and down on top of me. For weeks I’d been chanting ‘baulk screws, baulk screws’ under my breath like a mantra but I never remembered to buy them. I even wrote the words on my hand but either they rubbed off or I forgot to look. The sunlight was dazzling me, reflecting off a fourth-floor window of the adjacent block: it looked as if The Yellow Man was hiding out in a Bradford Council flat. I was out of bread and milk so I breakfasted on a leftover half samosa and the dregs of six cans of Skol, crushing
