No sooner had I done this than I started to lose interest in the whole subject.
On the other hand, it was around this time I started to take an interest in how much people weighed. Though this quickly narrowed down to deciding to anchor my own weight as close as possible to one hundred kilos, a goal and limit I have stuck to ever since, even if it does sometimes mean that I have to eat a little more than I really want (a problem that seems to be easing, it has to be said).
‘So you think you’ve recorded over it?’ Paul asks.
‘Might have,’ Guy says.
‘That’s not exactly the impression you gave on the phone, when we were talking about arranging this weekend, earlier in the year.’
‘Things change, mate,’ Guy tells him. ‘Circumstances, recollections, situations; all sorts of things. They all fucking change.’
Paul makes a sort of clucking noise. ‘Oh well, you got us here, I suppose.’ He shrugs. ‘Really, Guy? Did you think we wouldn’t have come otherwise?’
Guy looks at him. ‘Seems to be a very embarrassing thing, even quite distressing and upsetting for people, being around somebody dying, coming to visit them. Specially when they can practically see an old mucker shrivelling away in front of them, like he’s letting the side down by doing something none of us is supposed to do for another forty years or whatever, and they hear what sounds like little individual tumours rattling around in their chest every time they cough, like nutty fucking slack.’
‘Christ,’ Pris says, looking up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. ‘Guy; please.’
‘Sorry, Priscilla, love,’ Guy says. ‘Didn’t mean to offend you, petal. Just trying to make the point that most of us don’t like being around very sick or very dying people. We don’t know how to react to them, how to treat them, how to maintain the usual isn’t-everything-marvellous and aren’t-we-all-on-the-up-up-up bullshit like we usually do. So people find excuses not to visit, or put a visit off until some time after you’re safely dead – I’ve noticed the funeral seems to be a popular point when people can suddenly find the time they couldn’t spare when you were actually alive and might have benefited from the attention—’
He breaks off to cough, once. It’s just a single cough but it has a hard edge to it like the sound of splintering wood. I see Hol wince.
‘Or people decide for you that you’d rather not see old pals,’ Guy continues, ‘because it might remind you too much of the old days and you might break down in tears and then they really won’t know what to do or where to put their face.’ He takes as deep a breath as he can, wheezing. ‘Or they’re worried the contrast between their so-fucking-wonderful lives and your own sad, pathetic, wasting-away terminal state will be too much to bear and only make it worse for you. So, anyway, yeah,’ Guy says, breathing hard now and looking round at them, ‘thank you all for coming.’
Pris gets up and goes over to Guy and kneels at the front of his chair and hugs him carefully, gently. ‘Oh, Guy,’ she says, and it sounds like she’s crying. ‘Oh, God, oh, Guy.’
Guy seems to shrink under her embrace. He looks awkward, angular, unsure what to do. Then he reaches round and puts one arm around her, patting her back.
‘All contributions welcome,’ he says, wheezing. He pats her back some more, then strokes the silvery fabric. ‘Oh; no bra, that’s thoughtful, love. You’ve made a prematurely old man very happy. Give us a jiggle.’
‘You!’ Pris says, pushing away from him then getting up and going back to sit on the couch, hitching her top back up to her shoulder from where it’s slipped down her arm. She dries her eyes with the sides of her hands. Guy wheezes with laughter, or at least amusement.
‘So, are we going to look for this tape or not?’ Alison says.
‘I think I need to sober up some more,’ Paul tells her. ‘Feeling a bit sleepy, to be honest.’
‘Yeah, calm down,’ Rob tells Alison, who glares at him. ‘There’s time. Wait till we’re all a bit closer to the top of our game, not post big-boozy-lunch.’
Alison stares at Rob for a little longer, then takes out her iPad and snaps the screen open, stabbing at the touchscreen.
A little later, after more wine and much more tea – ‘We are definitely getting older; we never used to be this sensible,’ Rob says – it’s decided we can’t stick around the house all afternoon drinking or playing games (a game of Trivial Pursuit or even Risk has been suggested, for old times’ sake, or maybe poker or some other card game, only they can’t agree on what they want to play).
The day has, remarkably, brightened a little and the rain eased almost to nothing, with suggestions of gauzy blue sky off to the west, where the weather’s coming from, so an expedition to Yarlsthwaite Tower is suggested and agreed upon.
‘We sure?’ Paul asks. ‘It’s nearly five. There’s only an hour of daylight left.’
‘Half an hour there, same back,’ Hol says. ‘You’d struggle to spend thirty minutes at the place itself – it’s just a bloody tower.’
‘Might even be a nice sunset,’ Pris says.
‘I can take another two in the Prius,’ Alison says. She has declared herself sober. ‘Who’s risking their lives in the Volvo with Kit?’
Volvos are very safe cars, I want to say, but don’t.
‘Kit could drive Paul’s Audi,’ Haze suggests. ‘There’s more room, eh, don’t you fink?’ I’m sure Haze says ‘fink’, not ‘think’. It’s like he’s taken on something of Rick’s accent, though, come to think of it, I’m not sure I heard Rick say ‘fink’ or anything like it at any point.
‘Um,’ Paul says, pressing his lips together and frowning.
‘Actually, I’d best stay back with Dad,’ I tell them as they start getting up from their seats.
Guy looks at me. ‘You’ll be staying home by yourself then, lad. I’m going too.’
‘Oh,’ I say, thrown. I was sure he’d need a snooze and I was looking forward to going tape-searching in some of the other rooms. ‘We’ll need the wheelchair.’ Guy has been very reluctant to use his wheelchair.
‘Throw it in the back of the Vulva,’ Guy says. This is what he calls the Volvo estate when he’s being childish. ‘I could use some fresh air.’
I bet you get there and smoke, I think of saying. Instead I say, ‘Okay. I’ll fetch the chair.’ I get up, hesitate. ‘You sure you won’t be too tired?’
‘I’m fine!’
‘Well … Maybe loo first, yeah?’
‘Will you just stop fucking fussing and fetch me my fucking cripple-chariot?’
‘Yeah, she just sat there staring at the screen after the final fade-out and said, “Hmm. More Citizen Smith than Citizen Kane,” cheeky bint,’ Guy says.
‘Sounds like me,’ Hol agrees. She and Haze have joined us in the Volvo. ‘May even have been my first proper bit of criticism.’
‘Surely fucking not,’ Guy says. He has the front passenger seat, as is usual since he stopped driving. We are heading through the country lanes, swishing along the wet tarmac, thrumming through puddles and larger stretches of standing water, and rattling over broad fans of gravel and small stones washed out of the surrounding fields.
‘First bit of passing-for-properly-thought-out film criticism, then,’ Hol says. ‘I tried developing that theme, but “More Vegas than Degas” really only works on the page, and, frankly, barely even there. What was it even about, this film? Which one was it?’
‘Un Chien On Da Loo, I think, wasn’t it?’ Haze says, then adds, ‘Oh, yeah; terrible.’
‘I vaguely remember,’ Hol says. ‘Some pretentious piece of black-and-white bollocks.’
‘I was proud of that little film,’ Guy says. ‘It was a fucking heartfelt homage, you cow. Just because you—’
Hol starts laughing.
‘What?’ Haze says.
‘It was cheesy,’ she says. ‘More like fromage. Ha ha ha.’ Her laughter turns to hiccups and then she starts crying with laughter and sniffing as well.
‘Buggering fuck
,’ Guy mutters, though it sounds like he’s smiling. He looks at me. ‘We nearly fucking there yet?’
‘Bugger. I need a pee,’ Guy announces when we’re about five minutes from Yarlsthwaite.
‘They installed any loos at the tower car park?’ Hol asks.
‘No,’ I’m saying as Guy says,
‘I need a pee now!’
I pull over into a field entrance, between high hedges. The road is narrow but I think there’s about enough room for the others in the Audi to squeeze past the Volvo; they’re somewhere behind us but Alison was taking it very easy in the big, wide Audi and I kind of lost patience.
‘Sorry, obviously,’ Guy is saying as Hol and I help him out of the car and fit the forearm crutch to his right hand.
‘Leave you to it,’ Hol says as we get Guy to the side of the hedgerow. He makes a sort of tripod of his legs and the crutch and begins undoing his zip with his free hand.
Guy’s barely begun peeing when there’s the noise of a big engine from behind us and I think at first it’s the Audi, but it isn’t; it’s an enormous green tractor with an orange flashing light on top. It’s towing an even bigger, high-sided trailer and it’s signalling to come into the field.
‘What’s that?’ Guy asks, trying to look behind him.
‘Nothing,’ I tell him, watching his thin dribble of wee falling into the tussocky grass. Guy’s no better than most men at peeing when there’s any pressure.
Hol appears on the other side of Guy. ‘You shift the car,’ she tells me.
‘But—’ I begin.
‘Yeah,’ Guy says, his wee-stream drying up completely. ‘But.’
‘I’m not touching the car,’ she tells me. ‘Still drunk. With my luck, tractor-driver Seth here will turn out to be a special constable or something with a thing about even the most cursory drink-driving and a chip on his shoulder about sexy, middle-aged, metropolitan film critics. You shift it. I’ll get the gate. You okay for a moment, Guy?’
‘Oh, fuck, yeah,’ Guy says. ‘Never fucking better.’
He’s not, though; I think his legs must be giving out because I can see him wobbling. I need to help him but I’m supposed to open the gate and I need to move the car as well and the tractor engine sounds like it’s throbbing or even being gunned, but probably the most important thing is helping Guy and I just don’t know what to do first or in what order, and so I hesitate. I can feel myself hesitate; in fact I can feel myself starting to panic. I glance back at the car but it looks like Haze has gone to sleep.
‘Actually, I’m sort of struggling here,’ Guy admits. Even his voice sounds shaky.
‘Shit,’ Hol says, then moves in to Guy’s left side. He puts his left arm round her shoulders, letting her take a lot of his weight. I think his legs have almost given way and he’s mostly supporting himself on Hol and the crutch on his right arm. ‘How’s that?’ Hol asks. To me she says, ‘Get the gate first, Kit. Then move the car.’
‘Brilliant,’ Guy says. ‘But now I’m going to wet me trousers.’
‘Here,’ Hol says, leaning in with her free hand and taking his penis in her fingers, directing the just-resumed stream of pee away from his legs. His cock looks very small and pale, in the cold late-evening light, like a soft little worm in her hand.
Guy clears his throat. ‘Didn’t know you cared, Hol.’
‘Nothing I haven’t handled before. And fuck off.’ She looks at me, eyes flashing. ‘Kit; the gate!’
I fumble the gate open, push it creaking back and latch it to a metal post, then jump into the Volvo, reverse it half a metre and then drive on up the lane a couple of car lengths.
‘Oh,’ Haze says from the back seat, stretching his arms and then wiping his face. ‘Blimey. Yeah. Must have nodded off there. Is there some sort of problem?’
The tractor honks its horn then trundles, slowly, carefully, engine roaring, into the field past Guy and Hol. The giant trailer is very clanky.
Hol smiles wanly at the driver. I think he shouts something at her and she nods once and does a thumbs-up. The tractor and trailer bustle up the field towards the skyline.
‘All under control,’ I tell Haze.
‘Oh, good,’ he says, folding his arms and closing his eyes again as his head tips back against the headrest.
Hol is shaking Guy’s penis as I reverse back down the lane, and just zipping his trousers up as I get out to help him back into the car.
‘What about the gate?’ I ask Hol.
‘We’ve to leave it open,’ she says.
As I’m putting Guy’s crutch into the back of the car – Haze is doing his just-waking-up thing again and peering woozily at Guy – I see Hol stoop and dig her hands into some rain-wet grass on the other side of the gateway, then wipe them against each other.
Paul’s Audi drives up and Paul leans out of the front passenger’s window. ‘Lost already?’ he asks Hol.
‘Shut up and follow this car,’ she tells him, slapping the roof twice and swinging back in, slamming the door.
Yarlsthwaite Tower sits on the brink of the tallest cliff of Utley Edge, a ridge running north-east to south-west along the Pennines. Local lore has it that if you pronounce ‘Utley’ to chime with ‘ugly’, you’re not local. If you pronounce it ‘Ootley’, you’re an outsider pretending to be a local, and if you pronounce it somewhere in-between so it sounds more like ‘Oatly’ (though not exactly like that) then you can, tentatively, provisionally, on sufferance, be accepted as, probably, being one of God’s own people; i.e., a local.
The tower is triangular, built of millstone grit – one of the local rocks – and is four tall storeys in height, with gothic battlements. It was built in the 1840s as a folly, to improve the view from Cherncrake Hall, hereditary seat of the Spilesteynes, to this day one of the area’s biggest landowners. Even from the base of the folly you can see the square towers of the house peeping over its sheltering screen of trees. Guy and I took the tour round the place six years ago; he still grumbles over the cost of the tickets – no discount for local people – though the main thing I remember is the intricately tessellated floor of the orangery; the lord of the manor who had it built was into mathematics.
It occurred to me some years ago that if my mother is two-hundredth or whatever in line to the throne, and I am the illegitimate son of Guy and a local gentry woman, she might have been from Cherncrake Hall. I’ve done a bit of research via Wikipedia, Google and so on, but from what I can see there was no female Spilesteyne the right age at the time I was born to fit Dad’s (probably completely made-up) description.
‘It’s a fucking quagmire,’ Paul says at the gate from the car park leading onto the path for the tower.
‘I’m up for it,’ Guy says, gripping the wheels of his wheelchair hard and staring at the muddy, puddled surface of the path to the tower, fifty metres away.
‘Yeah, good for you,’ Paul says. ‘You don’t have to carry you.’ He’s wearing the same white parka-style jacket he wore to lunch.
‘We can do it,’ I tell everybody.
I’m wearing an old green wax jacket of Guy’s and a pair of ancient black wellington boots that I had to patch with a bicycle repair kit last year. The jacket is so worn it has pale green crease marks all over the dark green. It’s supposed to be waterproof but it isn’t any more. I found a pair of green and white ski gloves in the jacket’s pockets; they fit fine. They say Killy on them, a brand I’ve never heard of.
‘Really sorry,’ Haze is saying, ‘but my back will be out for months if I … It’s a real pain. I mean, like, literally, too, you know? A real pain.’
‘Yes, you are,’ Hol mutters, not quite loud enough for Haze to hear, I think. ‘Rob? Take the other front corner?’
‘On it,’ Rob tells her.
‘Together?’ Hol says, squatting by Guy’s knee and gripping the chair’s metalwork near the small front wheel on the right. Rob is at the other front corner, Paul and I at the rear. We agree we’re ready. A watery sunset is spreading pinks
and reds across the western sky; the wind is dry, almost mild. Ours are the only two vehicles in the car park.
‘Tell you what; I’ll bring the brolly,’ Haze says. ‘Just in case.’
Haze is wearing an old Bewford University hoodie and has borrowed another of Guy’s worn-looking huntin’-shootin’-’n’-fishin’ jackets. I slipped an even older cycle cape over Guy before we left the house. It’s the easiest way to keep him dry; the more layers he has on, the more painful it is for him to move his arms to get jackets and coats on and off.
‘One, two, three – hup!’ Hol says, and – only a little alarmingly, as Hol and Rob raise the front of the wheelchair higher than Paul and I can raise the rear at first – Guy is elevated to hip height.
‘Sure we’re all sober enough for this?’ Guy says, holding even tighter to the chair’s wheels as Paul and I adjust our grip and get him level.
Hol laughs. ‘We’re exactly drunk enough, I reckon,’ she tells him as we start forward. ‘Whoops!’ she says, staggering. Guy is thrown to one side.
‘Christ!’ he says.
‘Oh, fucking marvellous,’ Paul mutters, looking down at where the wheel of the chair has left a dark mark on his white jacket. ‘Oh well; had this at least a week.’
‘Puddle deeper than anticipated,’ Hol says. ‘No problem.’
We set off again.
‘How you doing there, Kit?’ Paul asks.
‘I’m doing fine, thanks,’ I tell him.
‘Yeah,’ he sighs, ‘you always are, aren’t you?’
Alison and Pris are walking on the heather to the side of the path while Haze brings up the rear.
‘Nice wellies, Hol,’ Pris says. ‘Those Barbours?’
Hol shrugs as best she can. ‘Something like that.’
Alison glances down. One eyebrow rises. ‘They’re Le Chameau,’ she tells Pris. ‘Bit posh for you, Hol. Doc Martens not run to wellies?’
‘They’re from an ex,’ Hol tells her. ‘I got custody of the footwear. Were his; I need three pairs of socks and an insole not to walk out of them.’