Rowan meets her smile head on. He suddenly realises that he is going to let her pay for dinner, and possibly drive him home too. She seems a thoroughly modern woman and he’s no doubt she’ll appreciate the gesture.
“Tell me,” he says, getting comfortable. “Come on. Push yourself. Tell me your secrets..” Then, with a glint: “We’ve got all night.”
14
Sunday, October 26, 1988
Yem How Wood, Wast Water
8.06am
The morning mist clings to the ground, soft as cotton. It drapes a veil upon the face of the clustered mountains which glare down into the cold, black gloom of Wast Water. Only the weakest tawny light bleeds through from the cold, vein-blue firmament behind the clouds. It puddles into the shadows and scars of Great Gable; of Kirk Fell and Yewbarrow, of Scafell Pike and Lingmelclass="underline" casting tiny iridescent flecks of yellow and lilac into thick pelts of green and grey and dirty gold.
Gordon Shell doesn’t look up as he trudges long the broken path. The view is as familiar to him as his own face, and he has long since stopped thinking of that as something worthy of further study. He walks with both hands behind him, coupled at the wrist, as if wearing handcuffs. He stoops a little, but it’s the effect of habit rather than old age. He’s spent his life here, in this wet, quiet valley, secreted away between the mountains and the sea. It’s a panorama of ridges and peaty holes, harsh slopes, lethal drops. He has learned to watch where he puts his feet. He’s broken both ankles and one leg. Knows the shotgun crack of a femur broken clean in two. Once found a climber at the base of Nape’s Needle, his skin the colour of a duck egg and his waterproofs punctured with spears of bone.
Despite the easy familiarity of the path, there is something of a spring in the farmer’s step. He’s on his way to visit with his friend. He enjoys the old hippie’s company more than he enjoys anybody else’s. He’s not really one for friends, though he knows enough people to clutter his mantelpiece with unreciprocated cards each birthday. He has no shortage of associates; men he’s known all his life, hard-grafting Herdwick and Swaldedale men, fighting to keep their farms in profit, battling the weather, trying to live within nature and despite it. But Arthur is the first person in a long time to have actually qualified as a proper mate, like he used to have when he was at school.
He finds himself thinking about the first time he met the ragged little man, trying to ease the battered campervan through the narrowest of spaces on the little road that led up through Yem How Wood. Shell has stopped to help, once he’d explained his reason for being there. He was going to be working at the posh school – a caretaker of sorts. He’d been offered a room indoors but preferred the more familiar space of his cramped, sagging motorhome. Shell had talked him through the trees, gauging angles and throwing out gruff commands until the creaking old vehicle had negotiated the most unlikely of routes into a little clearing surrounded by larch and rhododendron. Anybody finding it would presume it had been there before the wood was even planted.
They’d celebrated the moment with a couple of tins of strong German lager and shared a roll-up or three by the fire. That was the first time since the Sixties that Shell had sampled marijuana. It greased the wheels of their friendship, though Shell had found himself a little maudlin on the walk back to his lonely, leaky farmstead on the fell. In the years since, they have come to enjoy one another’s company. Shell finds Sixpence fascinating. He didn’t used to be sure whether he believed all of the older man’s stories but that has never stopped him enjoying them. The story about body-paint and Diana Dors in a Yurt near Stevenage has woken him in fits of laughter on more than one occasion. But for all his skills as a raconteur, it’s his spirit that fascinated Shell. There’s something about him; some strange elemental peace. He can understand why the women in Gosforth, in Seascale, in Whitehaven and Workington, all fall over themselves to keep him warm and fed. There’s a charm to him, but it’s more than that. He gives out a warmth; a gentleness, a sense of peace. In a different time, Shell imagines that men would have followed him. Others, fuelled by fear, would have persecuted him. He still hasn’t made up his mind whether he thinks of him as a wizard or Jesus.
Shell pushes through the trees, following the familiar path. He watches where he places his feet. His grandfather was a youngster when Steadfast Hookson sunk his exploratory mining shafts into the land here, honeycombing the earth in search of copper and tin. He found nothing of any use; just a network of tunnels and caves that looked set to cave in if any of the geologists or black-faced miners did so much as sneeze. He’d filled in the holes and let the woods grow back, but there had been plenty of times over the past hundred years when the earth had given way and the older trees had sunk into the earth as if being devoured. He’d warned Sixpence about it as he manoeuvred his campervan through the trees.
“Riddled with it,” he’ said, nodding at the tangle of trees obscuring the gently sloping ground. “Kids used to come up here looking for the entrance to some of the old shafts. Cavers too. We had a load of posh boys from university stomping around trying to find holes to crawl into before your new boss bought the building. Never understood it myself. Hobby for a dog, isn’t it? Going scurrying about in holes…”
Sixpence had listened, head cocked, letting information sink into him like rain into soft earth. Then he’d spoken, softly, earnestly, his face half obscured by the thick exhalation of smoke.
“There’s a place in Siberia. They call it the White Shaman cave. It was the home of the Khakas people. Mongolian descent. Pagan, if such a word can be used. They practised animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. There are stalactites taller than a man, surrounding an altar on which there are still bones. That’s where the shamans of the past performed their rituals. Some people say that it has absorbed the energies of these ancient healers. That it has a dark power. I heard a story when I was in St Petersburg. A group of students decided to explore. 20 young men and women went beneath the ground. Two returned. One was completely insane. She spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric ward. The other was found nearby, her hair turned grey, holding a little stone figurine. She was dead within a month. Nobody’s been back. I’m rather tempted, if I’m honest with you. I’d like to feel those energies. I don’t believe they can be a force for darkness. All energy can be used for good. If you’d permit me, I’d be glad to journey with you. There are pieces of you missing, I can see that. There used to be pieces of me missing too. Then I found my path …,”
If anybody had told Shell that he would have listened to the little man’s story with anything other than scorn, he would have dismissed the notion. But there had been something about the way in which he spoke of his beliefs. Something that spoke of a knowledge of things that normal people could only dream of. Shell had listened. He had never allowed Sixpence to perform any of his healing techniques upon him, but he had enjoyed hearing about those who did. About the rich men and women who paid the bosses at the posh school for a chance to spend time in the woods with the strange little man as he banged his drum ad sang his songs and surfed on their energies like a a bird riding a thermal. He’s seen him in his full costume, a gift from medicine men in Peru who had shown him how to brew the potions that helped them to cross over. The mask was a thing of beauty and horror; a ragged leather patchwork of different shades of brown, stitched and twisted into something resembling a wild boar – yellowing tusks forming a portcullis around an open, snarling mouth. “Is it real pig-leather?” Shell had asked. Sixpence just smiled, and told him that some questions were best left unanswered.