Pulse (13 page)

‘This time?’

‘It’s in the bracken.’

‘You mean you can’t see it properly.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Well, yes, you do see it better at other times of the year. What I mean is that between August and October it’s inadvisable to walk in bracken. Or downwind of it, for that matter.’

‘You’re going to tell me why, aren’t you?’

‘Since you ask. If you walk in bracken for ten minutes, you’re liable to ingest anything up to fifty thousand spores. They’re too large to go into your lungs, so they go into your stomach. Tests have found them to be carcinogenic to animals.’

‘Lucky cows don’t smoke as well.’

‘There are also ticks that transmit Lyme disease, which …’

‘So?’

‘So if you have to walk in bracken, you tuck your trousers into your socks, roll your sleeves down, and wear a face mask.’

‘A face mask?’

‘Respro make one.’ Well, she’d asked, and she was getting the bloody answer. ‘It’s called the Respro Bandit face scarf.’

When she was sure he’d finished, she said, ‘Thank you. Now lend me your handkerchief.’

She tucked her trousers in, rolled her sleeves down, tied his hankie bandit-style around her face, and tramped off into the bracken. He waited upwind. Another thing you could do was get some Bug Proof, and put it on your trousers and socks. It killed the ticks on contact. Not that he’d tried it. Yet.

When she returned they set off in silence along the gritstone edge which was either called Froggatt Edge or Curbar Edge, or both, he didn’t care either way for the moment. The turf was springy up here, and reached right to the point where the ground dropped away sheer for what looked like several hundred feet. It was always a surprise: without any sense of having climbed much, you found yourself startlingly high, miles above the sunlit valley with its tiny villages. You didn’t need to be a bloody paraglider to get a view like this. There had been quarries around here, from which many of the country’s millstones came. But he didn’t tell her that.

He loved this spot. The first time he came here, he was looking down at the valley, no one visible for miles, and all of a sudden a helmeted face popped up at his feet, and a bearded climber was hauling himself from nowhere up on to the turf. Life was full of surprises, wasn’t it? Edge climbers, potholers, paragliders. People thought that if you were up in the air, you were as free as a bloody bird. Well, you weren’t. There were rules there too, like everywhere. Lynn, in his opinion, was standing too close to the edge.

Geoff didn’t say anything. He didn’t, for that matter, feel anything. Puzzled, of course, but that would pass. He set off again, unconcerned whether she was following or not. Another half-mile of this high upland, then a sharpish descent back to Calver. He had begun thinking about next week’s work when he heard her scream.

He ran back, his pack thumping, the water in his bottle audibly sloshing.

‘Christ, are you OK? Is it your foot? I should have told you about the rabbit holes.’

But she just looked at him, expressionlessly. In shock, probably.

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No.’

‘Did you twist your ankle?’

‘No.’

He looked down at her Brasher Supalites: bracken caught in the eyelets, and the morning’s shine gone from them. ‘Sorry – don’t understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you screamed.’

‘Because I felt like it.’

Ah, missing waymarks again. ‘And … why did you feel like it?’

‘Because I did.’

No, he must have misheard, or misunderstood, or something. ‘Look, sorry, maybe I walked you too hard –’

‘I’m fine, I said.’

‘Was it because –’

‘I told you, I felt like it.’

They walked away from the gritstone edge and then down, in silence, to where they’d left the car. As he began unlacing his boots, she lit a cigarette. Well, he was sorry, but he was going to get to the bottom of it.

‘Was it something to do with me?’

‘No, it was something to do with me. I’m the one who screamed.’

‘Do you feel like doing it again? Now?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, if you felt like screaming again, now, what would it feel like?’

‘Geoff, it would feel like wanting to scream again, now.’

‘And when do you think you’ll do it again?’

She didn’t answer that, and neither of them was surprised. She stamped out her Silk Cut beneath a Supalite, and began to undo the laces, flicking bits of bracken on to the tarmac.

‘4 hrs inc lunch Grouse,’ he wrote in his walking log. ‘Weather fine.’ He added a red L in the final column, beneath a constant vertical of red Ls. In bed, that night, he slept diagonally, and jolly good luck to him, he thought. The next morning, over breakfast, he leafed through a copy of
Country Walking
and filled out the application form to join the Ramblers. It said he could pay either by cheque or direct debit. He thought about this for a while, and chose direct debit.

At Phil & Joanna’s 4: One in Five

I
T WAS LATE
October, but Phil was determined to light a fire with some apple logs they’d brought back from the country. The chimney, rarely used, didn’t draw fully, and from time to time aromatic smoke drifted back into the room. We had talked yet again about bankers’ bonuses and Obama’s continuing troubles, and the fact that the Mayor of London didn’t seem to have decommissioned any bendy buses, so were almost relieved to get on to the subject of Joanna’s new maplewood work surface.

‘No, it’s good-looking and really hard-wearing.’

‘Like the rest of us.’

‘Do you have to oil it a lot?’

‘There’s a formula: once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year, and thereafter whenever you feel like it.’

‘Sounds like the formula for married sex.’

‘Dick, you beast.’

‘No wonder you got married so often, my friend.’

‘Which reminds me –’

‘Don’t you think those are the three most sinister words in the English language – “Which reminds me”?’

‘… are we going to report on the homework we were set last time?’

‘Homework?’

‘Whether you made the beast with two backs when you got home.’

‘Were we meant to? I don’t remember.’

‘Oh, let’s skip this.’

‘Yes, do you mind if we have a moratorium on sex-talk just for one evening?’

‘Only if you first answer the following question. Do you think – present company excepted – that people lie more about sex than about anything else?’

‘Is that supposed to be the case?’

‘There’s good anecdotal evidence, I’d say.’

‘And, I think, scientific evidence.’

‘You mean, people admitting to social surveys that they’d lied about sex in previous surveys?’

‘There’s no one else present, after all.’

‘Not unless you go dogging.’

‘Dogging?’

‘Don’t you have that in the States, Larry? A couple doing it in the car in a lay-by or somewhere public, so that other people can creep up and watch. It’s an old English custom, like morris dancing.’

‘Well, maybe in West Virginia …’

‘OK, that’s enough, boys.’

‘The wider point is, how would we know if they were telling the truth?’

‘How do we know anything’s true?’

‘Is that a high-philosophical question?’

‘More a low-practical one. In general. How do we know exactly? I remember some intellectual on the radio discussing the start of the Second World War, and coming to the conclusion that all you could say for certain was, “
Something
happened.” I was very struck by that.’

‘Oh, come on. We’ll be in Did Six Million Die? territory at this rate. Or, the moon-landing shots were faked because of that supposedly impossible shadow. Or, 9/11 was planned by the Bush administration.’

‘Well, only fascists question the first and only nutters believe the second.’

‘And the 9/11 attacks couldn’t have been planned by the Bush administration because they didn’t go wrong.’

‘Larry goes native – a joke, and a cynical one at that. Congratulations.’

‘When in Rome …’

‘No, what I’m talking about is why we, as non-fascist non-nutters, believe what we believe.’

‘Believe what?’

‘Anything from two plus two equals four to God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world.’

‘But we don’t believe all’s right with the world or that God’s in his heaven. On the contrary.’

‘Then why do we believe the contrary?’

‘Either because we’ve worked it out for ourselves or because experts tell us it’s the case.’

‘But why do we believe the experts we believe?’

‘Because we trust them.’

‘Why do we trust them?’

‘Well, I trust Galileo more than the Pope, so I believe the earth goes round the sun.’

‘But we don’t trust Galileo
himself
, for the simple reason that we’ve none of us read his proof. I’m assuming that’s the case. So who or what we’re trusting is a second level of experts.’

‘Who probably know even more than Galileo.’

‘Here’s a paradox. We all of us read a newspaper, and most of us believe most of what our newspaper tells us. But at the same time every survey says that journalists are generally regarded as untrustworthy. Down there at the bottom with estate agents.’

‘It’s other people’s newspapers that are untrustworthy. Ours are reliable.’

‘Some genius once wrote that any sentence beginning “One in five of us believes or thinks such-and-such” is automatically suspect. And the sentence that is least likely to be true is one beginning “Perhaps as many as one in five …”’

‘Who was this genius?’

‘A journalist.’

‘You know that thing about surveillance cameras? How Britain’s supposed to have more of them per head of population than anywhere else in the world? We all know that, don’t we? So, there was a rebuttal in the paper by a journalist who said it was all hooey and paranoia, and went on to prove it, or try to. But he didn’t prove it to me because he’s one of those journalists I always disagree with anyway. So I refused to believe he could be right about this. And then I wondered if I didn’t believe him because I
want
to live in a country with the largest amount of surveillance cameras. And then I couldn’t work out whether that was because it made me feel safer, or because I somehow rather enjoyed feeling paranoid.’

‘So where is the point or the line at which reasonable people stop assuming truth and start doubting it?’

‘Isn’t there usually an accumulation of evidence leading to doubt?’

‘Like, the husband is always the first to suspect and the last to know.’

‘Or the wife.’

‘Mutatis mutandis.’

‘In propria persona.’

‘That’s another thing about the British. Well, your kind of British. The Latin you speak.’

‘Do we?’

‘I guess we do.
Homo homini lupus
.’

‘Et tu, Brute.’

‘And in case you think we’re showing off our education, we aren’t. It’s more despair. We’re probably the last generation to have these phrases at our disposal. They don’t have classical references in the
Times
crossword any more. Or Shakespeare quotations. When we’re dead, no one will say things like “
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
” any more.’

‘And that’ll be a loss, will it?’

‘I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.’

‘Neither can I. ’

‘Who was that British general in some Indian war who captured the province of Sind and sent a one-word telegram back to HQ? It simply said: “
Peccavi
” … Ah, a few blank faces. Latin for “I have sinned.”’

‘Personally, I’m extremely glad those days are over.’

‘You’d probably prefer “mission accomplished” or whatever they say.’

‘No, I just hate imperialist jokes about killing people.’

‘Pardon my Latin.’

‘Right. So moving swiftly back to Galileo. The earth going round the sun is something that’s been proved as much as anything can be. But what about, say, climate change?’

‘Well, we all believe in that, don’t we?’

‘Do you remember when Reagan said trees gave off carbon emissions, and people hung signs round the trunks of redwoods saying “Sorry” and “It’s all my fault”?’

‘Or “
Peccavi
”.’

‘Indeed.’

‘But Reagan believed anything, didn’t he? Like, he’d liberated some concentration camp in the war when all he’d done was stay in Hollywood and make patriotic films.’

‘Mind you, Bush made Reagan look good – almost classy.’

‘Someone said of Reagan that he was simple but not simple-minded.’

‘That’s not bad.’

‘Yes it is. It’s sophistry, it’s a spin doctor’s formula. Hear it from me: simple
is
simple-minded.’

‘So we all believe in climate change?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sure.’

‘But do we, for instance, believe that there’s plenty of time for scientists to find a solution, or that we’ve reached a tipping point and in two, five or ten years it’ll be too late, or that we’ve already passed that tipping point and we’re going to hell in a handcart?’

‘The middle one, don’t we? That’s why we all try to reduce our carbon footprint, and insulate our houses better, and recycle.’

‘Is recycling to do with global warming?’

‘Need you ask?’

‘Well, I only ask because we’ve been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.’

‘I sometimes think, when we’re driving through central London in the evening and see all these office blocks with lights blazing away, that it’s a bit bloody pointless worrying about leaving the telly and the computer on standby.’

‘Every little makes a difference.’

‘But every big makes a bigger difference.’

‘Did you see that terrifying statistic the other month – that something like seventy per cent of passengers on flights in India were first-time fliers using budget airlines?’

‘As they have every right to. We did. We still do, most of us, don’t we?’

‘Are you saying that out of some sense of fair play we have to let everyone else become as filthy and polluting and carbon-emitting as we’ve been, and only then do we have the moral right to suggest they stop it?’