Some Rural Nirvana

by Mike Fox

‘As long as we stay on this track, we should be okay.’

Andy is staring at his phone, as if it’s a prophet.

The track is a long, curving hollow, thickly grassed and gently sloping on either side. Andy is sure it was once a railway line.

‘Some sort of building on our left in half a mile,’ he confides, glancing at me.

After ten minutes we pass a deserted station, its flaking green paint tattooed with graffiti, its sunken platform now a wildflower haven for bees and butterflies.

Andy nudges me.

‘That’s us mate, that’s how we are.’

I nod, though he could mean several things.

He pats my shoulder, the rough skin of his palm catching on my t-shirt.

‘However fast you go the world goes faster. Just in case you slip into thinking it can’t do without you, it goes and reminds you it can. It can do without any fucker.’

I nod again. Andy’s most recent ‘employment situation’, as he’s come to refer to such episodes, followed a pattern by starting well but ending in acrimony. Now he’s between jobs, and restless. In consequence, here we are on a damp Saturday morning in May, plodding towards some rural Nirvana that may exist only in his mind. He has been reading a book called England’s Hidden Places.

‘Until last year you wouldn’t be allowed near there, and even now not many people know about it. It will be amazing.’

I understand he means well, that in essence he’s a hopeful person. It’s just that, having sold me the prospect of a road movie, he seems to have come up with a field trip.

‘Should be a bridge round the corner,’ he tells me, flicking at his phone with a blunt finger.

Sure enough, as the track swerves round to our left, a bridge appears, serving no obvious function. When we pass beneath, I see that its curving brickwork is still blackened with ancient soot. Andy smiles at me, triumph in his eyes.

‘Look at that,’ he jerks his head upwards. ‘Steam trains.’

‘No doubt about it,’ I agree.

‘Beautiful things,’ he says, adjusting the straps of his rucksack. ‘Poetry in motion. My granddad was a signalman.’

Then his face darkens.

‘He lost his job over the fucking Beeching cuts. Never worked again. Happened all over the country.’

Until a fortnight ago, Andy taught building skills to adult males recovering from mental health problems. By his account, he quit after a grievance with his line manager escalated into a stand-up row.

‘My dad said that when he was a kid working the signals was every boy’s dream,’ I say, soothingly.

I think my father did say something like that once.

‘Too right.’

Andy’s brow smoothes, and we walk on in silence.

I remember visiting him at his workplace not long after he started there.

‘Come and have some lunch,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll show you what we’re doing.’

The workshop stood within the grounds of a former Victorian asylum. Andy explained it was once a laundry, serving the entire hospital in the days when patients could easily turn into inmates with a life sentence.

‘They’re in partnership with the NHS,’ he said, referring to the agency that had hired him. ‘They do research, they identify a need, then they put in for funding. Men in this area, men especially, are struggling to recover when they’ve had a setback. Seventy percent never work again. They wanted someone who could encourage them and teach them basic skills, help them get a foot on the ladder. I said I could do that.’

I looked around. What I saw was dispiriting: two huge, ancient radiators leaking rust, a concrete floor, pitted and uneven, a tiny shed of an office, and a series of high metal windows too heavily painted to close properly. Andy, though, seemed buoyant.

‘Got this lot in an auction.’ He pointed to four gnarled cabinet maker’s benches and a pile of sash cramps.

‘But wasn’t there any equipment here when you came?’

‘Nothing except a heap of junk that hadn’t been cleared. It’s my job to set the thing up.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The canteen’s open now – come on, I’ll explain more while we eat.’

We walked over to the main hospital, a recently refurbished designer job with stylised signage and rip-off franchised cafés. In comparison, the building we’d left seemed like a tourniqueted limb, withered, lifeless, and almost ready to sever.

Above the door of the canteen a large notice said Staff Only. We queued, chose our food, then sat down at a table by the window. Just as we’d begun to eat, a dignified man with greying hair, whose jacket and trousers didn’t quite fit, approached us. Andy smiled and rose to his feet.

‘Hi, Jimmy, how’re you doing?’

Jimmy stood looking at the table, as if he might be considering our food.

‘I was wondering when I can come,’ he said, eventually.

‘Should be opening within the next week – I’ll let you know as soon as we’re ready.’

‘That would be good,’ Jimmy said, almost to himself.

‘It will be good,’ Andy said. ‘I promise.’

There was another pause, then Jimmy made an oblique gesture with his thumb and forefinger.

‘Can I smoke there?’ he said.

‘Not in the workshop, but I’ll find a way for the people who want to.’

Jimmy nodded, then seemed to lapse into thought. Andy smiled and waited. There was a quietness about him I didn’t recognise.

‘See you, then,’ Jimmy said, at length.

‘See you, mate,’ Andy said.

Jimmy turned away – at no point had he quite made eye contact – and Andy sat down. Jimmy’s gait and posture were distinctive, and I watched as he shuffled over to a table on the far side of the canteen, almost directly behind Andy.

We started to eat, but just as Andy began to outline his vision of a democratic, healing workspace, I saw one of the canteen staff approach Jimmy. After an exchange that lasted perhaps thirty seconds, I saw Jimmy rise, look hesitantly over toward us, then set off with his wandering tread towards the door. Something told me not to bring this to Andy’s attention, but I was distracted for the rest of our time together.

‘Lost in your thoughts, mate?’

Andy is grinning at me, and I realise we’ve been walking silently for a few minutes. The air has brightened, and mild sunlight glistens on the dewy grass of our path.

‘Just a few memories,’ I smile towards him, but he’s looking straight ahead again.

‘Walking does that. You can find yourself alone sometimes – just you and your life.’

‘Or someone else’s,’ I think of saying, but don’t.

My breakdown taught me a number of things, but principally that this world can’t be transcended, only lived in. Andy, eight years my junior, has yet to learn this, and part of me hopes he never will. That word again – hope. The seed that must always seek light. Perhaps it’s just that Andy is better at hoping than I will ever be.

‘There should be a river to our right soon. We need to get across then follow it as it winds. We’ll be going north by north-east.’

The river, when we reach it, is a shallow, gentle thing, dotted with willows, and flowing quietly in the direction we’ll be walking. We cross it via stepping stones.

‘You wouldn’t believe this is a flood plain, would you?’ Andy says.

‘No, you wouldn’t.’ I look around at the flat landscape of untended fields and windbreak hedges. A flood, if it happened, would seem apocalyptic.

‘Like another reality.’ Andy looks round too, as though he’s picked up my thought.

Andy’s mind, I’ve noticed, is a fire that seems to light itself, even after being dowsed repeatedly with disappointment.

‘Can we stop a minute?’

Andy peels off his rucksack and then his sweater. He offers me a swig of water, takes one himself, then stows away the sweater and spends a moment stretching his back, before shouldering his rucksack and setting off again. The removal of his sweater has uncovered his right bicep, shrivelled from a childhood fire accident. Even now it looks painful, but he has refused cosmetic surgery.

‘Your body’s your history, mate,’ he said, the first time I saw it. ‘No point in pretending otherwise.’

Now he puts his phone away.

‘Don’t need this anymore. The river pretty much takes us there.’

We are due to spend a night camping at the ‘there’ in question, but I still don’t know where it is, or what I’ll find when we arrive. Andy said ‘trust me’, and the fact that I’m here suggests I did.

The river curves gradually to our left, and we keep to the path alongside. The willows grow thicker on the bank opposite, their sage green reflection shimmering in the water. Andy stops again.

‘I want to show you something, then this will start to make sense.’ He plunges his arm into his rucksack, and winks at me before pulling out an ordnance survey map.

‘This tells you a lot, but you have to really look.’ He spreads the map between us and smoothes the folds of paper before bending to trace our route with his forefinger.

‘So, this is where our path stops, where the river branches off.’ He glances up to ensure I’m following. ‘Then if you look across here, this path coming in from the coast stops, too. Then here, this little road running due west just fades away. And this track here, and this one, and this one. So, what you’re left with is a big gap. That’s where we’re going.’

‘You mean we’re going nowhere?’ I don’t try to disguise my irritation.

‘You could say that,’ Andy runs the tip of his finger in a circle on the map, ‘but it’s a special nowhere.’ He reads my face for a moment then adds, ‘Let’s have something to eat before we do the last part, and I’ll tell you as much as I know.’

He rummages in his rucksack again and produces two plastic containers and a flask of coffee. We sit cross-legged opposite one another, and he nudges a container towards me. I open it to discover it’s filled with home-made ham and salad sandwiches. Andy himself has been vegan for several years. He pours coffee then waits a moment while we both sip.

‘Basically, the area you saw on the map has been uninhabited for seventy years. It was a small village as far back as medieval times, but the Ministry of Defence requisitioned it during the war for military exercises and evicted the population. The people who lived there were promised they could go back, but that never happened. The place doesn’t even have a name anymore. It’s been fenced up all this time, even though the exercises finished decades ago.’

‘So, it’s a wasteland then?’

Andy bites a corner from his sandwich and chews before answering.

‘It’s pretty much what this country would look like if no-one lived in it. Can you imagine that?’

‘To be honest, no.’

‘Well soon you won’t have to. You can see it for yourself.’

As he says this, I realise something definitive about Andy, something I should have grasped long ago. For all his apparent certainty he’s a man who needs a witness. Today, as in the past, that role falls to me.

When we resume, the riverside path ends more quickly than I would have expected. Almost at once, the late spring grass thickens into gorse, broom, and heather. The landscape ahead is very flat, with a quiet entirely of its own.

‘There’s been no building or agriculture here since the Second World War.’ Andy says, following my gaze.

We begin to pick our way across the stubble. Rabbits scurry away in front of us, and a raptor circles on thermal currents overhead. Before long we come upon a group of mounds, earth-coloured but free of vegetation.

‘These would have been homes.’ Andy makes a sweeping gesture with his palm. ‘A lot of the original cottages were built from unfired clay sometime in the eighteen-hundreds. The book said that without anyone to look after them they more or less dissolved.’

I feel a shiver go through me.

‘I’ve never heard of a home dissolving.’

‘Not something you think of, is it?’

I scan around. There’s a heat haze undercut by coolness in the breeze, as if we’ve entered a micro-climate, and I can see the flickering image of a church in the far distance.

‘We’ll head for that,’ Andy says. ‘That’s where the main village would have been.’

The vegetation coarsens. Here and there, thick shrubbery protrudes above the bracken, tangled and unkempt. Almost hidden to our right, I’m startled to see a squat obelisk, brick-built and therefore surviving – a symbol of pointless endurance.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Better than I expected.’ Andy glances a smile towards me, his features almost euphoric.

‘I suppose,’ I mumble, but instead of a pastoral Eden I see only dereliction.

Soon walking becomes difficult, each step a decision. Andy, it’s obvious, relishes what lies ahead. He wants to share it. He can be a grating companion but, I freely admit, he has always been there for me – at least if simple proximity in times of need is ‘being there’.

‘The church won’t be as far as it looks.’ Andy reaches to squeeze my elbow encouragingly. ‘The book says distance can be deceptive in this terrain.’

It’s true that the image of the church is more stable now, less like a mirage and more like an afterthought in a painting, added to flesh out the background. But as the normal countryside recedes, I begin to feel hemmed in by loss, by the absence of human involvement, by a sense of all the things that have escaped me in life.

A hare suddenly bolts across our path, and I stumble and fall, the weight of my rucksack momentarily pinning me down.

‘Up you come, mate.’

Andy stoops above me and grips the frame of my rucksack, so that I’m freed to scramble into a kneeling position, and then to stand again. He carefully dusts twigs off my chest and knees.

‘All in one piece?’ He’s joking, but looks at me searchingly.

‘Seems like it.’ I make an effort to smile. ‘Thanks.’

‘No worries. Not much further now.’

We trudge forward. Andy stays closer, close enough to reach out and steady me if the need arises. We are both breathing heavily from the effort of lifting and placing our feet, and as the church draws near, I see that behind it to the left and right are fragments of broken buildings.

‘See those,’ Andy points, ‘they were using them to simulate a war zone. Real homes. The book said everything was blown to fuck.’

‘But not the church?’

‘No-one’s going to upset God in a war, are they?’

This proves untrue. The stone walls of the church are pitted and the windows roughly shuttered and bolted. Andy looks at them and brightens.

‘Should be no need to camp, I reckon I can get us in.’

‘But surely we oughtn’t to do that?’

‘It’ll be fine – it’s not as if we’re going to steal anything.’

He unzips a pocket in his rucksack, pulls out a small jemmy, and snaps open the padlock on the door as though it’s made of plastic. Inside, the church is empty – no altar, no pews, no stations of the cross. Only a plain stone pulpit stands alone and shadowless in the gloom.

‘Not really a church anymore.’

Andy surveys the walls and ceiling disappointedly.

‘Perhaps it was deconsecrated,’ I suggest. But the air is musty in a way I remember from churches of my childhood, and all around us I sense ghosts of a lost era.

‘Maybe.’ Andy scuffs his foot on the grimy floor. Now we’re here, with nothing obvious to do, he’s already restless again.

‘It’s a bit early for another meal. Let’s go out and take some photos.’

‘You go, Andy. I’ll stay here and rest up a bit.’ My hips, knees and ankles all ache, and I’ve had enough of being outside for a while.

‘No problem, mate. I’ll just do a little reccy then I’ll be back.’

He props his rucksack against the wall and walks off, full of purpose. I lie down nearby, using my own rucksack as a pillow, and close my eyes.

The noises come from all directions, penetrating the dense air around and above me. Explosions, the skid of bullets, the yells and screams of men in fear and danger. There is no safety, and no respite, and yet I see nothing but even, featureless scrubland, in the far distance merging with a still, unblemished sky. And then I hear wailing, the low concerted moan of the dispossessed, slowly fading until everything is silent, and nothing exists beyond the thoughts I’m left with. I become aware of my body, locked and inert like a sarcophagus from which I may never escape. I know that I don’t possess, and have never possessed, the wherewithal to bring about change of any sort. Then, I feel a fierce grip on my forearm.

‘Wake up, mate – you were screaming.’

Andy’s face is close to mine, huge, like a moon in a child’s drawing. As my eyes begin to focus, I read his concern and realise that the primal sobbing I can hear is coming from me. Suddenly my face is pressed into his ribs and I feel his callused hand stroking my head. His voice is soft and lulling.

‘It’s alright, mate. I’m going to get you home. Just be sure I’ll get you home.’

BIO: Mike Fox’s stories have been nominated for Best of Net and the Pushcart Prize, listed in Best British and Irish Flash Fiction (BIFFY50), and included in Best British Stories 2018 (Salt), His story, “The Violet Eye,” was published by Nightjar Press as a limited edition chapbook. His new collection, Things Grown Distant, featuring photographic illustrations by Nicholas Royle, is available for pre-order from Confingo Publishing www.polyscribe.co.uk