In This Block There Lives a Slag…
And other Yorkshire fables
Bill Broady
To Jane Metcalfe
‘There are angels!
There are angels!
Dwelling within and without the city.
Guarding and watching.
Permitting and limiting
Powers, principalities and thrones’
– Sun Ra, ‘The Magic City’
Table of Contents
In This Block There Lives A Slag…
Mr Personality in the Fields of Poses
The Tale of the Golden Bath-Taps
‘…For we wrestle not against flesh and blood,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.’ I don’t know whether the Ephesians paid any attention to such exhortations but the only thing I ever wrestled with was Jacob.
I remember the pains and pleasures of our strivings…How the ground seemed to buck like a ship’s deck beneath my planted feet, while a pressure built in my chest as if a second, internal adversary was trying to force his way out through my sternum…How I tried to stifle my gasps for fear of having to acknowledge some repressed sexual imperative…How my head reeled from my opponent’s mephitic breath, with his flaring nostrils suggesting that he found mine equally repulsive…I remember the soft rustling and sudden stench as he chose, mid-combat, to void his bladder and bowels, and the dead clack of horn against bone, as if there was no mediation of flesh or fleece…
To wrestle spiritual wickedness, principalities and powers would, I imagine, seem a breeze after freestyle grappling with a Swaledale ram.
When I first met Jacob he was about nine months old – a wether hogg, running with the yard-dogs. A wall-eyed liver-and-white collie, a fulminating black hellhound and a grey-masked sheep: they looked so frightening that you knew they just had to be safe. He’d copy their leaps and bounds, trampolining on his front legs with an Elvis-style snarl, simulating a tail-wag by withershins rotation of his white stub and even managing a feeble bark – like my college tutor clearing his throat before demolishing my drug-addled thesis on ‘Beauty and The Sublime’.
His mother had died nameless in a snowdrift: his sister, Jessica, nannygoat-fostered, had long since slipped meekly back into the flock. It had been unusual to house-rear and bottle-feed a ram – ’But there was always something special about him,’ said the farmer’s wife, vigorously scratching Jacob – his eyes shuttering in ecstasy – behind the ears. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation?’ she asked. ‘He sometimes reminds me of my granddad.’ She struck me as unusually sentimental for a farmer’s wife. Her tabby cats had evidently taught Jacob to bury his own shit and to spittle his inner forelegs to wipe-wash his face. He could climb, too – regularly breaking his kennel chain and scrambling back through the pantry window. ‘He misses the telly,’ she told me, ‘But you can’t house-train a sheep. Mind you, we can’t even house-train the kids.’ With a pitted slab of toad-grey tongue Jacob licked her hand. ‘He’s unusually loving,’ she said, giving me a sharp, sideways look. ‘Especially for a male.’
On those late summer evenings I’d leave work sick with shame – as if this latest Exclusive Estate was something we’d half-demolished, rather than half-built – and I’d drive like the devil up the valley towards the fells. How I hated those silent, roofless houses, like emptied cereal packets, each supposedly ‘individuated by their unique window shapes and dispositions’ – insane shufflings of portholes, dormers and bays. I didn’t like to think of the lives people were going to have in them: I lived – unindividuated – in one myself. Exclusive, like Auschwitz: I was having those silly concentration camp dreams again. Only when I’d climbed to the heather line could I breathe properly: my mind stopped racing and I accepted that my dad was dead and Pam would never come back, that my novel was rubbish and that all my aches and ailments were psychosomatic and all my railings against the world mere self-pity.
Beyond the farm, up the beckside, along the crinkled ridges then, in the gloom, back down the steepest of the disused smelters’ tracks: I never tired of this habitual walk. The light, the wind, the shadows were always different: angles and distances seemed to change – landmarks shifted position so that one day I’d be unable to locate a familiar cup-marked rock but the next would go straight to it. The dogs soon stopped barking and ignored me but Jacob always greeted me with obvious delight. He’d launch himself, legs extending sideways to control and accelerate his progress down the shifting scree, like double sculls over water…then my hand would cup his chilly muzzle – he’d picked up purring from the cats but was able to simultaneously sound up to four discrete trills and rattles. I’d given up on even the possibility of affection from any source, so this enthusiasm meant a lot to me. I’d long suspected that while we only ever see in other people that which we desire or fear, animals can calmly scan and judge – from aura to essence – the whole of us.
That winter they moved Jacob to the big field, building him a stone-flagged log shelter, wired and tarpaulined to keep out the rain: I wondered if there was a television in there. He’d sit on his threshold, as if fronting the essentials of life, like Thoreau