‘Where de co-ahst, man? Where de co-ahst? I is lookin’ for de co-ahst. You guard it, you tell me where it is.’
He felt at once compelled to comply.
‘It’s over there.’ He actually lifted an arm. ‘You’re looking at it.’
The man wrinkled his face as if he couldn’t see anything.
‘I is lookin’ for Ilfracombe, man.’ Then he pronounced the word at full-pitch and with declamatory slowness, as if it were a place in Africa.
‘Il-frah-coombe!’
Then the voice broke up into little screechy, hissy laughs. He couldn’t tell if it was nervous laughter, panicky laughter or a sort of calculated laughter. Or just laughter. It was like a parrot. He couldn’t help the thought. It was like a parrot laughing.
‘Ilfracombe is over there.’ Again he felt the ridiculous need to raise an arm. ‘You’re in the right direction. You’ll need the thirty-nine, then the three-nine-nine. An hour, at this time of day.’
The man peered, putting a visoring hand to his eyes. ‘I no see it, man. I no see no three-nine-nine. Ilfracombe, Deh-von. We in Deh-von, man?’
‘We’re in Somerset.’ (He almost said, ‘We in Somerset.’) It surely didn’t need saying, but he announced it, ‘This is Exmoor.’
‘Exmoor! Fookin’ ’ell. Ilkley Moor, that’s me. Ilkley Moor bar tat. Ilkley Moor bar fookin’ tat.’
The voice had completely changed again. What was going on here? He was used — occupationally used — to the effects of shock and exposure. He was used to the phenomenon of disorientation. To gabble, hysteria, even, sometimes, to the effects of drug taking.
He wanted to say a simple ‘Calm down’. He wanted to exert a restorative authority. But he felt that this man, stranded in what seemed to be, for him, the middle of nowhere and talking weirdly, somehow had the authority. He peered into the car’s interior. He saw that on the not unroomy back seat there was a grubby blanket and a pillow. It was five in the morning. He got the strong impression that this man, going about whatever could possibly be his business, used his car as at least an emergency place of overnight accommodation. Having just affirmed that he wasn’t one, he felt like a policeman. He felt out of his territory, though he couldn’t be more in it. He knew this road like the back of his hand. But he was a coastguard, not a policeman.
The voice changed again. ‘I is in de right direction, man. But I is goin’ nowhere.’
‘No. I can see that. What happened?’
‘Fookin’ deer.’ It was the other man — the other other-man — again.
‘What?’
‘Fookin’ deer. Int’ middle of road. Joost standin’ there.’
‘You saw a deer?’
‘Int’ middle of road. Five fookin’ minutes ago.’
He looked around, over the roof of the car. It was Exmoor. There were deer. You saw them sometimes from the road, especially in the early morning. But there was little cover for them here and he’d never, in over twenty years, come upon a deer just standing in the middle of the road. If they stepped on the road at all, they’d surely dart off again at even the distant sight of a vehicle. This man had come from — wherever he’d come from — to see something he’d never seen in decades.
He had the feeling that the deer might be another symptom of disorientation. A hallucination, an invention. Yet the man (the other one again) spoke about it with beguiling precision.
‘A lee-tal baby deer, man. I couldn’t get by he. I couldn’t kill he. A lee-tal baby Bambee.’
He looked over the roof of the car. Nothing moved in the greenish greyness. It was just plausible: a young stray deer, separated and inexperienced, in the dip, in a pocket of mist, near a source of drinking water. It was just plausible. He was a coastguard, not a deer warden. He asked himself: Would he have had any sceptical thoughts if this were just some unlucky farmer?
‘I see his lee-tal eyes in me headlights. I couldn’t kill he.’
The man was behaving, it was true, as if he were being doubted, were under suspicion, as if this were a familiar situation.
He saw, in his mind’s eye, a deer’s eyes in the headlights, the white dapples on its flank. A small trembling deer. It was a startling but magical vision. That alone, on this routine journey to work, would have been something special to talk about.
He tried to give his best, friendly passer-by’s smile. ‘Of course you couldn’t kill it. You didn’t hit it?’
‘No. He hop it. I the one who end up in de shit, man.’
It might shake you up a bit, nearly hitting a deer.
The man changed voices yet again. ‘Fookin’ deer.’ Then he said, in the other voice, ‘I is a long way from Leeds.’
So it was Yorkshire. He was from Leeds, but he was on the edge of Exmoor, at five in the morning. Which was even more bewildering perhaps than a deer in your headlights. He felt a moment’s protectiveness. He wasn’t sure if it was for the lost man, or the lost deer, the little Bambi. He’d helped to return many a lost child, over the years, to its distraught parents. It was one of the happier duties. Now was the peak time for it.
‘So. Let’s get you out of here. You’ve tried reversing?’
‘I’ve tried reversing.’ It was the northern voice, but with no manic exaggeration.
He stepped round to the back of the car. Either he’d reversed clumsily and the back wheel had slipped into the gully or it had gone into the gully in the first place when he’d braked and swerved — for the phantom deer. He’d got stuck anyway. And what were the chances — they were remote, extraordinary and barely believable too — that in such circumstances help would come along, uniformed help, in a matter of minutes?
The man got out to inspect the damage for himself. He didn’t look like a man who’d have regular roadside-assistance cover. He was shorter and slighter than he’d supposed. It was the hair, the two-inch hedge of it, that made him tall. But he had a strutting way of carrying himself. The gait of a cocky, belligerent Yorkshireman? No, not exactly.
In the dampish dawn air — his own sidelights lighting up the gully — they assessed the situation. No harm done, just the misplaced wheels.
‘If we do it together,’ he said, ‘we could just lift her so the back wheel’s on the road again. Then you can reverse. I can push from the front if you spin. But you should be okay.’
‘You tell me, skipper.’
This was no doubt a reference to the looped stripe on his sleeve. It was a perk of his job occasionally to be mistaken for a ship’s captain. But he’d said, and noticed it even as he said it, the nautical ‘lift her’.
‘We lift her arse, skipper, nice and easy.’ The man even crouched, ready to take the bumper, like a small sumo wrestler.
‘Wait.’
He went round to the left-open driver’s door. He checked the position of the gear stick. Then he took off his jacket and, folding it, placed it on the passenger seat. He felt chilly without it, but he didn’t want to arrive on duty looking as if he’d been in an accident himself.
The man watched him and said, ‘That’s righ’, man. We don’t wahnt you messin’ de natty tailorin’.’
The man’s own clothes might have been natty once, long ago, in their own way. There was a faded sweater — purple and black horizontal stripes — over which there was a very old, perhaps once stylish full-length leather jacket. It hung about him like a droopy black second skin, which was an unfortunate way of thinking of it. The clothes looked anciently lived-in.
He rolled up his own crisp white sleeves. He walked round to the gully. There were some convenient small stream-washed rocks and he jammed a few against the stricken front wheel. He surreptitiously checked, as if trained for it, the front of the car — for dents, for possible bits of deer. There were none. That is, there were many dents, but they were old.