The Rock - Short Story by M Graeme

The Rock

Michael Graeme

People often ask me about Tom these days which is odd because they never bothered about him much when he was alive.

"Was he right in the head?" they ask me. And: "Fancy just going off like that, I mean without a word to anyone."

Then they piece together all sorts of bizarre gossip and invent tangled tales of domestic intrigue reminiscent of one of those dreadful T.V. soap operas.

"I reckon his wife used to thump him," I once heard someone say. "Not that he ever complained, he was too quiet for his own good if you ask me."

Another theory was that his wife had threatened to leave him for the coal man. But then someone found out the coal man was gay, at least that's what they said, so it changed to the milkman and finally to the window cleaner. I suppose that was the only way people could rationalise it. After all, an old man doesn't just walk out of the house and kill himself for no reason does he? He has to be driven to it by something drastic, something awful.

But Tom was too humble and too quiet a man to justly attract scandal and the reasons for his demise were more complex. Whenever I think of him, I see him sitting alone, up on the moors near the little Lancashire village where he lived, on a big grit-stone boulder. In all the world, that was Tom's favourite place. It had been a magnet to him for most of his life - ever since the day he'd discovered it in fact as a plucky little seven year old during the long school Summer holiday.

To him, the moor had been a vast, unexplored wilderness in those days, full of mystery and romance and the boulder had been a castle in a far away kingdom, a castle he'd stormed and captured, armed with a wooden sword and only a bottle of ginger beer to sustain him.

The boulder was a solitary lump of alien texture in a sea of khaki tussock grass rolling on and on in every direction - except towards the west. That was where the hills fell away to all the villages and the smoky little towns far below. From the boulder it presented a fine panorama and on clear days, you could even make out the ocean, like a bright white line where the sky touched the earth.

There was more to it than that though. Often, when the clouds swept in and lingered over the high ground you had a job to see anything at all but still, the boulder commanded attention. There was something inescapable about it that drew your footsteps rather like the eye is always drawn to an ink spot on a clean white shirt. It was a point of reference, if you like, or in more metaphysical terms, a doorway to another world.

Tom would've laughed to hear me talk like this. "Romantic twaddle" he would have said, for he never thought much about things in that way.

The boulder wasn't Tom's personal spot, you understand; it was popular with lots of people, myself included. An informal path had been trampled down as countless feet had sought it out and its rough grey surface had been smoothed on top by the passing of a million bottoms. Mark and Sally had scratched their names on it in 1928 and JV had similarly declared undying love for AL in 1972.

There was a squashed beer can tucked away in a little hollow on its flank and, around the other side, there was a secret crevice my wife had found when we were courting. We hid a threepenny bit inside it and kept it there for the best part of twenty years. It was our secret; no one else knew about it, not even Tom.

It's not surprising then that occasionally, as Tom approached the boulder, he would see someone already sitting on it. This being the case he'd nod politely as he passed and then walk on as if making for the summit of a nearby hill. Then, after ten minutes or so, he'd double back to find he had the place to himself.

Once established, he would linger at his leisure. Even if other ramblers appeared, he found that they too would try to give the impression they weren't even remotely interested in such a boring place. But when they doubled back after ten minutes, they'd still find him sitting there. Then they'd nod politely and Tom would watch their bobble hats bobbing like brightly coloured corks as they headed home in defeat. He was immovable for at least an hour.

Sometimes he'd-wander up with a pair of binoculars. With those he could watch ships moving in and out of Liverpool and on fine summer evenings he would stay quite late. I sat with him once on such an evening while we watched the sun setting. I remember it changing from a ball of burning yellow, through many shades of smouldering orange as it sank, until the clouds too began to smoulder orange and red. Lower and lower it sank until it kissed the sea, turning it into a thin line of fire, two hundred miles long.

We sat so still that rabbits came out and hopped around us as if we had turned to stone ourselves. Then we made our way back in the dark, me with poetry filling my inarticulate heart to bursting point.

"That was grand." Tom had said, simply.

It wasn't that he felt things any less than I. He just seemed more able to accept the beauty of the world around him for what it was without the need to tear it apart with words all the time in search of a deeper meaning.

His wife never minded him coming back late to a burnt meal. She'd long since grown used to his eccentric ways.

"Better than coming home rolling drunk," she'd say with a loving smile.

He and Meg had been married for over forty years. They'd met in 1948. The moor had been out of bounds then. There'd been a terrible war and the army had taken it over for training soldiers. Old farm houses, deserted since the nineteen twenties, had become targets for mortar bombs, and old quarry buildings had been taken over as magazines and barracks.

No one can guess what fearful games were played over the purple heather during those dark days but I sometimes wonder if any of those brave young men ever took their ease by the boulder, perhaps to smoke a cigarette or to share a laugh with their comrades. And I wonder how many of them survived.

The barbed wire finally came down in the summer of 1949. That's when people started to go up again. Tom told me he hadn't been back off his honeymoon a week when he was setting off wearing a big grin and filled with anticipation at the prospect of finding the boulder again. He hadn't seen it since the September of 1939. It was a Sunday morning, he'd said, and the grass had been wet with dew licking his boots as he walked. The boulder must've seemed like an old friend then, not that he would have said so.

It had been a long war for Tom, culminating in his loosing an eye and three fingers of his left hand. I don't think he was unhappy; he'd just got married but all that was very new to him. The boulder had its roots in his earliest memory and he did admit it was what finally convinced him he'd come home.

"That was grand," he'd said with a little more emphasis than usual.

Now, the moor was owned by the Water Board who'd bought it off the aristocracy in Victorian times. The rain that fell upon it drained into their reservoirs and occasionally, gangs of men would go up with spades or mechanical diggers to clear out the water channels. I suppose then, like most of us, Tom had a vague notion that someone was taking care of the land in an unobtrusive way, but the question of actual ownership never entered our heads.

The truth of the matter was we'd all been trespassing, technically at least, for years. No one had ever bothered though - after all, trespassing was something you did in someone's back yard or on a railway line, not up on the moors.

The water board became a private company in 1989. Tom heard something about it on the television. It failed to make much of an impression upon him though and he continued with his often daily excursions, quite oblivious to the changes that were about to take place.

The moor was approachable on foot along paths that followed the line of several valleys which radiate from the shaggy bulk of the moor. Some of the valleys were desolate places with badly eroded slopes and sparse vegetation. Some were dramatic with waterfalls which after heavy rain provided a thundering spectacle. Others were gentler, their slopes being less steep and covered with deciduous woodland.

These gentler valleys were more easy of access and they'd been popular with walkers and families and courting couples for centuries. There was a little hut at the bottom of one, half hidden by a stand of ancient oaks. You could buy tea and biscuits there at the weekend which was just the job after a long hike over the tops.

One evening though, Tom came round to my house in some distress and told me he'd seen someone knocking the hut down. We went up the following weekend to see a much larger structure was taking shape in its place. Over the coming weeks, it grew into something resembling an alpine mountain hut. It was so big they had to hack all the oak trees down before they could finish it. Afterwards, they laid tar over the paths, creating a smooth driveway that linked the hut with the main road into town.

A spokesman for the council said this would make things easier for old age pensioners - no more struggling through all the mud and having to dodge the potholes. Tom was a bit put out at this because he'd been a pensioner now for over ten years and potholes and mud had never bothered him.

The little car park they'd built was soon filled to bursting with motor cars every weekend, so a bigger one had to be prepared, but before long that too became inadequate and people had to leave their cars on the grass by the road. A few of the cars had their windows broken and things like coats and handbags stolen. Nothing like that had ever happened in the district before and notices suddenly appeared warning people about car thieves.

The unfortunate thing about all this was that it lay on Tom's favourite approach to the moor. It was the one he'd explored as a child, the one that had first led him to the boulder all those years ago. Even now with all the noise and the bustle at the weekends, he was loathed to change.

I remember walking with him one Saturday afternoon when we passed by the Swiss Chalet as it had become known. You could get a lot more than tea and biscuits now. There was a proper restaurant and a craft shop as well where you could buy all sorts of weird things made from wood and dried flowers. There was a lot of noise, a lot of pop music and revving engines. Also a group of spotty youths jostled us and made fun of our walking breeches. I'm afraid that's when it died for me. It had lost its magic. Tom remained faithful though.

"After all," he'd say, "the moor's still there."

Then a firm of leisure consultants came up from London to take a look and shortly afterwards, planning permission was passed for a heritage centre. This took the shape of another large mountain hut next door to the Swiss Chalet. Both car parks were extended and there was a lot of advertising in the local paper. I remember taking the kids up to see what all the fuss was about.

So far as I could work out a load of old machinery had been collected from a weaving mill and laid out inside the hut, together with a display of enlarged photographs showing, in false sepia tones, poor wretches slaving over hot looms.

"The way we were," and "Our industrial heritage," read the captions.

The mill itself had belonged to a town about twenty miles away, and I struggled to find any connection between it and the moor. Nevertheless everybody seemed happy enough to pay their money and wander round.

Shortly afterwards, one afternoon, Tom told me he was sitting on the boulder as usual when a man strolled up to him. He was wearing a tweed jacket and knee breeches with a clean white shirt and a tie. He looked odd - a bit of a dandy Tom thought. He was carrying a shot gun too, which didn't strike Tom as being a very sensible thing to do.

"You are aware that you're trespassing aren't you?" said the man.

"Can't say I've ever thought about it before," said Tom, surprised at the officious tone.

The man went on: "I'll have to ask you to stay away from here in future. I'm the new game keeper and I'm trying to breed grouse in these hills. I can't do that with people trampling about."

But grouse had been breeding there for centuries and as far as Tom was concerned they didn't need any help. After all what could you do with a plague of grouse?

"Why, shoot them, of course," came the reply.

"But why shoot them?" said Tom. "Grouse don't do any harm."

"If we didn't shoot them," replied the game keeper, 'There'd be too many for the moor to support."

"Then why encourage them to breed?" said Tom.

The gamekeeper thought for a moment and then decided he wasn't to be made a fool of. Tom was warned that next time he'd be seen off with dogs.

After that, every evening for months and months Tom would sit in his armchair at home staring into the fire. Meg knew he was hurting somewhere deep inside but no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't reach him. Now, Tom had never done a wrong thing in his life. He was the kind of man who trapped creepie crawlies in the house and released them outside rather than squash them with his slipper. Suddenly though, he was a sneaking criminal. Worse,... he was a trespasser!

His age was against him now. His head was muddled at times and I'd noticed his breath was often short. It wasn't easy for him to accept change. He walked out of the house after Christmas that year and he wasn't seen again for days. The gamekeeper's dogs found him in the end. He was just sitting there as usual, staring out over all the towns and villages. He was dead, which no doubt irked the gamekeeper, since it's difficult to prosecute a corpse,... even if it is trespassing.

It's difficult to find the boulder these days. I'm not even sure if it's there any more, so everything it had ever meant to all of us who valued its presence in our lives might just as well never have been. The grouse shooting didn't work out you see, so they decided to plough the whole moor up with gigantic machines. There are little trees growing on it now, millions of them, and all the same, like little soldiers on parade.

We're told it'll look better that way.

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m_graeme@yahoo.co.uk