IN THIS WORLD HAS GOT A STORY TO IT. GENGHIS KHAN DIED OF A NOSEBLEED ON HIS WEDDING NIGHT. NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THAT. SOME PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED IN OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES AND SOME PEOPLE AREN’T.’
‘Yeah, that reminds me. I was going to the—’
‘NOW LISTEN CAREFULLY, YOU, BECAUSE THIS LEADS ON TO SOMETHING ELSE. BUT I’VE FORGOTTEN IT NOW BECAUSE YOU’VE TALKED SO MUCH. I’LL HAVE A THINK AND COME BACK TO IT IN A MINUTE.’
My mum and I stepped back outside into the garden. The day had started wet, but now a fuzzy blanket of transparent warmth hung over my mum’s plants. Everything seemed four times as fragrant as it had a few hours ago. The light had almost completely faded, but the stoned bees still clung to the giant scabious in cuddly gangs. Below it were three pots of lager: my mum and dad’s attempt to control the garden’s current slug population. My dad had offered me some of the same lager – which, bought in bulk, worked out at around 20p a can from Asda – and I’d declined. I asked my mum if my dad was still shouting in his sleep.
‘Not as much. But he did wake me up by saying, “A FORTY-HOUR WEEK AT FOUR POUNDS AN HOUR? WHAT’S THAT?” the other night.’
George bounded up behind my mum and me, then cut in front and thwacked his strong tail possessively against our shins. I spotted a metal grass roller, passed down first to my granddad and then my dad, that my great-granddad had made – when? During the 1920s? Thirties? I’d never given it much thought before and now I felt like a short-sighted ingrate for never having done so since clearly this was one of the most amazing and precious things on my life’s periphery. A few yards from it I spotted a familiar steel dish with a duckling pattern moulded into the outside. In it were a few chunks of leftover cat food.
‘I remember that dish!’ I told my mum. ‘Didn’t you used to feed the cat from it when I was a kid?’
‘It was actually your baby dish,’ she said. ‘I use it to feed the hedgehogs cat food now.’
I’d gone through a brief phase a few years earlier when I wanted to get rid of all my possessions and live an entirely unencumbered life. That had changed and, even before it had, I’m not sure I was ever fully down with the idea of getting rid of my books and LPs. I still understand the whole ‘You can’t take it with you’ philosophy but I’m not quite as emphatic about the way I subscribe to it. I know you can’t take it with you but I still wouldn’t mind having a small amount of it, for a bit. I can see how stuff can be a burden, but I like some stuff: stuff that doesn’t boast of its intention to alter your life, but then proceeds to do so in small ways. I’d found a horseshoe on Dartmoor and attached it to my house late the previous year. It’s just an old rusty horseshoe, but I’d be miffed if somebody nicked it. Originally, out of pure unthinking laziness, I hung the horseshoe upside down, and shortly after I fixed it to the large granite bricks on my house a few bad things had happened to me. I’d turned it the other way up a few months ago, and nothing quite as bad had happened to me since. I’m sure the events of my life are not directly connected to a horseshoe from near the village of Didworthy, but there is no way in a million years I’m turning it back the other way up. I related these thoughts to my mum as we strolled around the garden.
‘Your nan used to say that if you hang horseshoes upside down your luck falls out the bottom, but I think it’s nonsense,’ my mum said as, once again, we walked past the wooden African head that my mum did not like but would not part with for fear it would unleash terror on anyone who owned it.
Although we’d only been outside for ten minutes, I felt refreshed. Every time I see my dad, he tells me dozens of great new stories – about Nottinghamshire, about history, about who he is, about who I am – but the narrative is of such a loud and experimental-jazz nature that I get easily tired. The theory has been put forward before by those close to him that my dad does not speak words; he haemorrhages them. I don’t need a long breather from his lectures, but small breaks help, as they would anyone listening to someone holding six conversations at the same time, all on their own. Now, after clearing my head, I was ready again. I sat down in the perfect place to absorb the next part of his story, which would no doubt lead to another, and another. I was keen to find out what else he had to tell me about his new possession.
‘OK, I’m all ears,’ I told him. ‘Go for it.’
But he did not reply, and when I looked more closely at him spread out lengthways on the sofa, I noticed he was fast asleep. He wasn’t speaking or snoring or singing. For the first time that day, he looked totally serene. Beside him on the arm of the sofa was the novel he’d been reading, its spine bent back on itself, like every book he enjoys. Held tight in his arms, like a favourite teddy bear, was the chunk of medieval limestone.
3
TWO OTTERS, SEVEN BEAVERS, TWO RIVERS AND A LYNX
There was an escaped lynx on Dartmoor so I went up to Dartmoor, alone and unarmed, to try to find the escaped lynx. I took with me a map, an old book about ghosts, a bottle of water, a packet of crisps and some past-their-best walking boots. In packing for the trip, I had given arguably less thought than I should to the lynx’s needs, but I was carrying a rucksack with a long piece of elastic attached to it that I could forcibly remove and coax the lynx to chase, in the event that the lynx turned out to be playful. The elastic – which formed part of an exterior compartment intended for the carrying of drinks or maps – hung off the rucksack in a perilous way and had been irritating me recently so it would be a relief to remove it anyway. The previous week I had been walking down the high street in town in the sun feeling fairly decent about myself when the elastic had caught on a pedestrian bollard, twanging me back up the high street four or five feet in the direction from which I had come, like a small allegory for the experience of being human.
Dartmoor Zoo, to which the lynx had been exported from Kent immediately prior to its escape, has a fairly infamous history, having been the scene of a few other animal escapes, including that of a jaguar in 2006 and a Canadian timber wolf called Parker in 2007, which was recaptured outside the pub in the local village and further emasculated by being described by the zoo’s owner Benjamin Mee as ‘a big girl’s blouse’. A marginally limp film was made about Mee and his zoo by the mostly excellent director Cameron Crowe in 2011. The film was set in California, but Dartmoor Zoo is not in California; it is on the edge of Sparkwell, a few minutes’ drive from the twenty-four-hour Tesco at Lee Mill.
In attempting to locate a Carpathian lynx on a 65,000-acre high-altitude moor, the most important thing to do is to try to think like a Carpathian lynx. Using my new lynx brain, my firm instinct was that the lynx, whose name was Flaviu, would head north from Sparkwell, away from Tesco and towards Burrator Reservoir, which was a good place for Flaviu to have a nice big drink. Flaviu, following his instinct, would then head to the very highest part of the moor, approaching Okehampton, where there would be snow later in the year, enabling him to put the large pads on his feet to use in a way that he probably couldn’t in a zoo. En route he might well pass Raddick Hill, where a distraction could occur in the form of a sizeable population of sheep and a few wild ponies and cows. It was here that I planned to intercept Flaviu.
I parked in Princetown, a settlement architecturally anomalous to most of Dartmoor and Devon, where the greyness of the pebbledash houses and a sky colour that often matches them can make me forget I am not on a journey from Mansfield to Worksop in 1986 with my dad to buy some Swarfega and gravel. Here, like some part of industrial Yorkshire that went off on a downcast inward-looking wander and never came back, looms Dartmoor prison,
