The deer had been kicking the shit out of the hedgerows again. You could see their trail of destruction, curiously evenly spaced, all along the high ridge. Bambi and the vegan diet are a clever bluff where deer are concerned, thought Eric. They get everyone thinking they’re delicate peacenik flower children when in truth they’re punk anarchist mystics. This lot, here in west Dorset, would nut down fenceposts as if it was booting out time on Friday night and the fenceposts had just called their sister a slag, sail through barbed wire like it was the mesh curtain over your nan’s back door, trash your Delphiniums, never once pausing to tot up their fucks along the way. Over in the big field where the farmer particularly didn’t want to them to go and a triangle of spidery dying oaks looked like the marker posts of some oncoming dark ritual, you’d see them pop up from their hiding places in the cabbage in threes, gallop silently away, then freeze and stare back with a synchronicity that appeared choreographed.
'They’re checking you out, pal,' Eric told Karl. 'Fellow oracles. Intimidated by your power.'
'I was thinking we could try that new Indian in Axminster tonight,' said Karl. 'I fancy a break from cooking. I think I’m leaning towards a dhansak.'
'Iggy Pop has deer energy, don’t you reckon? Muntjac, I think. The way he used to run around the stage. Or maybe it’s more like a bantam rooster, darting up to everyone with his chest puffed out then retreating, always legging it about in those little confrontational circles. Did I tell you about the one me and Carol used to have? Right little hooligan, he was. The little wanker would come at me, claws flying all over the shop, every time I turned away from him. I’d be constantly walking about with all these cuts on the back of my legs.'
'Dhansak is a weird one. The takeaways never seem to come to an agreement on the spice level. I’ve had some with quite a kick to them – nothing that I couldn’t handle, obviously, but the kind that would have someone like you blowing your nose every thirty seconds – but I’ve had some pitifully weedy ones, too. I see Iggy more as a centaur, myself. The bare chest and that feeling you get that he might have a couple of possible extra legs that he could whip out in moments of crisis. Hold on. Did you hear that? Over there. Was it a dog? It sounded a lot like a dog.'
The day, bracingly cold, chasing away weeks of pissant winds and concerningly lukewarm rainblasts, was one of those where a sun halfway up the sky will hold the landscape frozen in perfection for a number of hours, offering a painful illusion of permanence. Dorset was a painting, balanced in the admiring hands of Horus. Where the busy little rivers had leaked, the ice, splintered by bootsteps, resembled the kind of glass you might find on the floor of an abandoned house, but under the vandalised hedgerows it remained shadowed and solid. Very soon it would begin to spread again and the Marshwood Vale would be drained of comfort, burping and groaning with the part-explicable sounds of the greedy January night. Looking at his only timepiece, which was now falling fast over the cliffs three miles to the south, Karl was hyper aware of this fact, and with it came the concomitant awareness that, as usual, they were going to be late. Eric had agreed to call at The Meat Tree’s house which was around half an hour’s drive from where Eric had parked the van – to pick up the keys to the Manor at five. The Meat Tree had emphasised that he had to go out by six at the absolute latest. It was now at least a quarter past four, and where was the van parked? Two miles away? More?
This was one of the drawbacks of going out walking with a collector, Karl thought. The impulse that made Eric feel the need to own, say, all of the first thirteen Linda Ronstadt albums, even the late seventies and eighties ones where she started to go off the boil a bit, was that same one which, half an hour before, had made him insist on following a footpath purely because it was one of the dwindling number in the Vale that he and Karl had not previously ticked off their list. It certainly could not be described as a bad footpath. Whether it was a necessary footpath, however, was highly debatable. And now here they were, a mile on from its source, ducking away from a potential Border Collie situation through a hole in the hedge made by some insurrectionary deer, onto an unmarked path beneath the steep brim of an Iron Age hill fort, in the direction of who knew what.
'I’ve got a lot of trust in deer, me,' said Eric. 'What you’ve got to remember is that every place you walk, every one of these routes that some guy in an office decided to stick a sign on saying "bridleway" or "public footpath", was originally made by deer, long ago. They know where they’re going and they know the best way to get there.'
'I completely get that,' said Karl. 'But at the same time we have no way of knowing where the particular pre-Christian deer who originally made this path were going. My guess is that it probably wasn’t a Victorian terrace on the outskirts of Sidmouth owned by a dealer in rare books, nor a haphazardly parked vehicle waiting to take them to it.'
'What are you on about, you cheeky fucker. That was some top parking.'
'You left it sticking half out into the lane, looking like a stolen vehicle somebody abandoned before fleeing into some dense woodland to evade the police. I’ll be impressed if it’s still drivable by the time we get back.'
What would you have thought, if you’d been relaxing in the grass behind a hedge – a dense one, as yet unwrecked by a nihilistic buck or doe – and heard the conversation of Eric and Karl, from their unseen position on the other side of the brown–green divide? Would you have pictured, in your mind’s eye, a long-married homosexual couple? Two rivalrous professors of philosophy or zoology out for a stroll: one a maverick, bit rough and ready, the other more genteel and housebroken? A mercurial man still assimilating after arriving from the extensive and unknowable lands of the north, and his well-spoken friend from… another country, somewhere that you couldn’t quite pinpoint? Had there been a space in the bottom of the hedge and had you spied, through it, two booted feet accompanied by four lightly furred ones, you might have wondered where along the path the missing biped was speaking from, or perhaps just thought, 'Oh, that’s sweet: the noisy gay man and his erudite migrant lover have a pet whippet.' Whatever the case, it is extremely unlikely that you would have correctly guessed what was there, hidden from you by the tightly knotted twigs and branches. As we will soon find out, the union of Eric and Karl was not one easily anticipated by society but, like any couple who’d been co-habiting for close to two decades, they were not unprone to sarcastic bickering. If somebody had witnessed this bickering – which Eric and Karl went to extreme measures to ensure almost nobody ever did – they might have observed that, more often than not, it was Eric who played the role of bickeree, not bickerer. The ways in which Eric had infuriated Karl, in the eighteen years they had known each other, were so numerous as to be unlistable within one mere book but, even at his most exasperated – even at the height of his infuriation with Eric’s tardiness, his forgetfulness, his sticky-handedness, his inability to remember to close the door while urinating in the downstairs toilet (which would have been fractionally more excusable if there had also been an upstairs toilet), his general way of progressing through life like a boulder pinballing down a tiered forest chasm – Karl repeatedly found disarmament in Eric’s endearing way of never speaking to him as someone outside his realm of being, never as a lesser or something other, but in the casual manner that you would speak to a close, trusted longtime friend. In short – and, as he thought this, he suspected that at least one ex-wife might refute it – if you ever happened to be mad at the guy, he somehow made it impossible for you to stay that way for a length of time that would significantly erode your relationship.
As they rounded the base of the hill fort, an abrasive choir of voices could be heard directly below them: a quacking conference, with no space for one authoritative voice to raise above the din and call for order. Through the gaps in the trees could be seen a sloping field where, on a large patch of ice, two hundred or more ducks had gathered, apparently for no reason other than to discuss what was most pressingly on their minds.
'Ah man, I do not enjoy that,' said Eric. 'Why are all those ducks there, like that? There’s no reason for them to be there. There’s not even a pond or river. It’s just a field. That’s bad ju-ju and I am not happy about it.'
I love you, thought Karl. You are a ridiculous human being, and I love you.
As the path followed the curve of the earthworks above, it pitchforked into two fading prongs then died away to lethargic winter bramble mess and decomposing tree trunk muddle. Above them, the hill fort steepened. Did the deer who had originally formed this path – Norman? Roman? – lose heart and decide to throw in the towel at this point? Thinking about the dog, and the falling sun, Karl pressed on, thorns tearing at his flanks, with Eric a few steps behind. Every time he dropped a gear, allowing his companion to catch up, he could hear a small whistling noise coming from Eric’s chest: alike, but in a slightly different register to, the other small whistling noise he had recently witnessed on car journeys, when Eric became visibly troubled by congested traffic or the senseless actions of his fellow drivers. Karl leapt a fallen tree and, seeing no easy way through directly ahead, began to scale the steep prelapsarian wall to his left. For this exercise, being quite sure there was no other human in sight besides Eric, he took his weight off all fours and rose to his full height, which was his preferred state, particularly where severe gradients were concerned.
Behind him, accommodating the change of direction less easily, Eric remonstrated with piked branches and vines, apparently believing them – not without reason – to be sentient.
'Ey, do one, you divvy.'
'Lay off, soft lad, or you’ll get what’s coming.'
'I paid thirty quid for these here keks, you fuckin’ binhead, and I’m not having the likes of you ruining them.'
'Everything ok, back there?' asked Karl.
'Sound, pal. You don’t worry about me.'
Dorset is the most deceptive of the West Country counties. Eric and Karl had put enough time in, deep within its creases and folds, to be well aware of that. It is the taller-than-average broad-shouldered gentleman you meet and think 'Oh my, look at his freshly cut, neatly parted hair and tailored clothes, he must be enormously civilised – maybe I will accept his invitation to dinner', whose house you then go to, only to find it is a hole in the ground containing half a chair, a corn dolly and the remnants of an old fire. Driving the top roads, eyes directly ahead, you’d never suspect a place like the one they found themselves in right now existed. Unfarmed, uncoppiced, unmanicured, unpollarded, unconserved, unmaintained, it was simultaneously toothy and halcyon. It was the place foliage came to truly live its best unfettered off-grid life, unafraid to be a cunt. It was a dark spunking of undergrowth where trees did their most clandestine bidding and badgers and foxes and rabbits hid from every soul in Christendom who’d ever wished them ill. 'Will this be the venue, then? The one where I will finally expire?' thought Eric, looking up into the latticework of the trees on the rim of the ancient tribal defence point from his position, on his back, on the rapidly crisping damp earth, where he’d been knocked for the third time in as many minutes. 'Here, in soft southern Tory Wessex? Me, who has lived in the L8 postcode of Liverpool, and the Peak District, and behind a tin mine in the Cornish interior, and in the bit of Nottingham people in Nottingham told you not to live in, and in the Pyrenees, and in the far north of Scotland, and on Dartmoor, and in Ilkeston, and – for one whole summer – under a canvas roof on a mountain in mid Wales?
'But - hold your horses, pal - what is this miracle, that is now saving me? Why am I now floating above the ground, free of the tawdry attentions of underscrub and sharp bristles? Is this my final ascent to the Good Place? And what will be the verdict when I am there? What will count against me, when all is added up: how many of my blunders and infractions?'
But it was just Karl, hoisting him from his damp place of despair towards the waiting sky.