swooped up and burst over this ridge or that to reveal San Pedro, Licancabur or the Los Patos Pass beyond, then raced over flat and stony plains covered with strange tussocks of grass and fading into the purplish line of the volcanoes; or dwelt on the death of a guanaco foal beneath the Paine Towers. He blinked back tears at the sound of pan-pipes, because something in it brought the entire Andes to him like a scent on the wind. It was a kind of nostalgia, but for a place you have never been. Through the open window at night he heard not the funfair, though he could easily see its wheeling lights, but the wind lifting the soil off the stony terraces of the Inca Altiplano. He would tease the monkey gently with his forefinger, whispering to it, ‘We placed bolts in the Red Dierdre, the sandstone girdle, the exit ramps . . . The wooden box with the wireless set and microscope slides is missing . . . Today as we retreated from the ice bulge I felt so far away from home . . .’ Generally it was calmed by this, but sometimes instead it would be goaded into an infantile fury and race round the room screeching and chattering and tearing up his photographs.
Taking a film out of his OM– I at mid-day in August, he would be ambushed by memories of the Atacama he had never seen.
Punta Arenas lay in wait for him at the end of Morecambe pier.
Always just out of sight, the sixty-metre ice cliffs of the San Rafael Glacier glittered in the sun, calving into a green and milky sea. Slowly he realised it was not the real South America he loved but some continent of his own invention.
After Normal left High Adventure and moved to Huddersfield, where his wife had the offer of a local authority job that would support them both, there was nothing to keep me in Stalybridge. The work I was doing meant nothing to me. Normal got a house on an estate. Since he was the only person in the north I knew well, I thought I might as well go and rent a cheap cottage in one of the valleys that run down from the moors south and west of the town. I didn’t want to live on a housing estate.
By that time my cat had died, though not from eating the old man’s fishbones. It ran in from the street one morning with the left side of its lower jaw broken, and lay sprawled and panting on the mat. The eye on that side had been pushed in, causing it to turn and lift its head irritably every so often, as if it could see something through it that wasn’t there. A car had run it over I suppose. Sick cats often hide in the garden or crouch all day just out of reach under a cupboard: but they always know when a human being is their only chance. I kept it alive for two or three days, even though the vet recommended putting it down. In the end I had to give up. While I was trying to get it to drink something it looked up at me, with the broken jaw making a kind of fragile snarl, and purred. I didn’t know whether this was from pain – out of some desperate failure of vocabulary – or affection. Either way I remembered it butting its forehead against mine after it had eaten its dinner, and I couldn’t bear that.
When I left Stalybridge the old man was still going strong. Oddly enough he never seemed to understand that the cat was dead. For a long time afterwards I would hear him on the stairs in the evenings, calling ‘Puss! Puss!’, or in the mornings find a saucer of thin grey milk outside his door.
FOUR
Sankey’s View
After each thaw the view from the upstairs window became much bleaker. The snow retreated to the edge of the fields and lay there piled up against the low stone walls. Everything had a curiously unfinished look. Sheep picked their way over the steep fields in single file, unnerved by the re-emergence of this forgotten landscape. The old poached places reappeared at gates, black against the bruised grass. Nothing could yet be said to be green. It was less quiet. Starlings sat up in the house gutters and on the
Taking a film out of his OM– I at mid-day in August, he would be ambushed by memories of the Atacama he had never seen.
Punta Arenas lay in wait for him at the end of Morecambe pier.
Always just out of sight, the sixty-metre ice cliffs of the San Rafael Glacier glittered in the sun, calving into a green and milky sea. Slowly he realised it was not the real South America he loved but some continent of his own invention.
After Normal left High Adventure and moved to Huddersfield, where his wife had the offer of a local authority job that would support them both, there was nothing to keep me in Stalybridge. The work I was doing meant nothing to me. Normal got a house on an estate. Since he was the only person in the north I knew well, I thought I might as well go and rent a cheap cottage in one of the valleys that run down from the moors south and west of the town. I didn’t want to live on a housing estate.
By that time my cat had died, though not from eating the old man’s fishbones. It ran in from the street one morning with the left side of its lower jaw broken, and lay sprawled and panting on the mat. The eye on that side had been pushed in, causing it to turn and lift its head irritably every so often, as if it could see something through it that wasn’t there. A car had run it over I suppose. Sick cats often hide in the garden or crouch all day just out of reach under a cupboard: but they always know when a human being is their only chance. I kept it alive for two or three days, even though the vet recommended putting it down. In the end I had to give up. While I was trying to get it to drink something it looked up at me, with the broken jaw making a kind of fragile snarl, and purred. I didn’t know whether this was from pain – out of some desperate failure of vocabulary – or affection. Either way I remembered it butting its forehead against mine after it had eaten its dinner, and I couldn’t bear that.
When I left Stalybridge the old man was still going strong. Oddly enough he never seemed to understand that the cat was dead. For a long time afterwards I would hear him on the stairs in the evenings, calling ‘Puss! Puss!’, or in the mornings find a saucer of thin grey milk outside his door.
FOUR
Sankey’s View
After each thaw the view from the upstairs window became much bleaker. The snow retreated to the edge of the fields and lay there piled up against the low stone walls. Everything had a curiously unfinished look. Sheep picked their way over the steep fields in single file, unnerved by the re-emergence of this forgotten landscape. The old poached places reappeared at gates, black against the bruised grass. Nothing could yet be said to be green. It was less quiet. Starlings sat up in the house gutters and on the
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