Читать книгу How to Catch a Mole - Marc Hamer - Страница 9

Daybreak

AS I SIT here writing at my kitchen table, a ladybird is crawling on my leg. I accidentally bring a lot of wildlife home from work. Beetles and spiders, the occasional grasshopper under my collar, ants in the creases of my work trousers or fallen into my boots.

The ladybird on my knee is trying to unfurl her wings. The red wing cases hinge open and the black, fly-like wings come out – but the right one is broken, bent back, and will not unfold. She tries three, four times, slowly folding it away and then trying to open it again. She wants to leave. Perhaps I damaged her, I don’t know. It is easy to damage the quiet fragile things carelessly, to break and maim without even noticing.

Yesterday I was clearing away fallen leaves; a robin hopping behind me was eating the beetles and the worms that I exposed. I uncovered them; they were eaten; the robin ate. Things break, things scar, and scars are healed, but they twinge from time to time. Every small step we take on this earth has consequences and each evening when I get home I scrub out from under my nails the messy business of birth and sex and death and decay and I try to wash it all away.

IT IS EASIER not to think.

I get my hands dirty every day nurturing seeds and pulling up weeds. Playing with chaos, tuning it up slightly to make it a bit more exciting; planting a red garden or a white one; sometimes embracing chaos because we think it is beautiful, and sometimes destroying it because we decide that it is messy. Destroying moles and their apparent chaos is one of the seasonal jobs that comes around every year in a predictable way.

There are intertwining rhythmic cycles that thump along: a weekly mowing of the grass; a yearly pruning of roses; trimming the wisteria three times a year; the annual laurel hedge cut in August; picking apples in the autumn when they tell me they are ready; waiting for the frost before I prune the fruit trees; digging up and storing dahlias after two frosts, then replanting them when the risk of frost has passed. Making compost, planning flower beds, choosing plants and buying seeds in the winter. Planting, weeding and clearing, managing annuals, biennials and perennials, and trapping moles in the winter and the early spring.

The year is marked and celebrated in quarters at the solstices and the equinoxes, and these points mark out the year for anybody involved with nature. They are the beginning points of the seasons. Rhythms, long cycles and short ones, interweave, driven by the ever-changing weather, the duration of daylight and the temperature. Every point is the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next. Each autumn I rake the red leaves from beneath the same maple tree and put them on the same compost heap. Except, of course, they are not quite, not exactly the same leaves, the same tree or the same compost heap as they were last year. The moles I catch in the same tunnels are not the same moles that I caught last year.

These overlapping and intertwined cycles cannot help but take me inside myself to whatever is there on any given day. All I can do is reflect. My wife, Peggy, goes away for her work often, my children are grown and living their independent lives in homes of their own, and I regularly spend days without seeing another human being – two, three, four days in a row sometimes – and am unable to use my words aloud. I have my cat.

I AM COLD like a spider this morning. It is still very dark. Perhaps I’m too old for this kind of early, but sleep’s no longer my lover. I have lost her for ever. She rejects old people like me. The internet says it is because chemical poisons in the environment have calcified my pineal gland. That’s how it goes, it says. Mercury, calcium, fluoride. It says I need to eat more chemicals to detoxify. It prescribes yet more turmeric.

My incomplete dreams break into my half-waking life, I’m lost in tunnels alone and chased, I lie there as cold as a frog. I struggle with blocked nostrils (I’m allergic to something indoors), and I watch for a long time while the dark decreases, and seems from blackness to break into fragments, microscopic dots of grey floating, ungraspable, before the dawn, before the sun rises. My muscles hurt and lack strength – I worked all day yesterday and last night I drank whisky. I ponder lifting the covers. I pull myself down into the warmth for just a moment, just a tiny moment. My slow eye transitions from monochrome to colour vision. I think I can see it happen. There is no colour in the world until the daylight comes.

A touch of pink in the grey air and I start to think about coffee, and the thought drives me from my bed. While the coffee hisses into the jug I pick up my cat, who mewls for attention, and we share warmth as I look for a radio station that will give me neither unbearable news nor offensively chirpy music. I’ve lived through the lives of many cats; I haven’t been without one for over thirty years, since Peggy and I have been together. We became a couple and we got a cat. This one, Mimi, is fat and sensuous; she writhes on my lap while I stroke her.

My coffee nearly gone, I feel a little sick; perhaps I am allergic to coffee too. A comedy on Radio 4 Extra about the troubles of a family who have never known fear or hunger.

It is almost properly light now. The dark lasts longer than the light, it is cold, it is December. The breeze is rattling the crisping leaves. I could light a fire and stay inside with Peggy and the cat and watch the day, but I am drawn out as always. I’m not for the indoors, and there is work to do: traps to set, traps to check.

4 a.m.

I woke in a cold dark room

unable to breathe from a bad dream

in which I couldn’t breathe

with distance between us

feeling homeless and full of flight

my head beached on the white pillow

like a sand-clogged conch

breath’s tide flows in and out

noisily

working through the blocked chambers

drowning

In 2 hours the heating will click on

In 4 hours the sun will start to rise

In 5 hours Peggy will wake up

I look out over the thin winter wood

where buried things will remain buried

until the land is full

and the houses come

and I feel like I am drowning

With a click then a boom

the heating comes on

two quick dark hours gone already

I’ve been watching the stars

cold and distant yet always there

did I sleep again?

I’m not sure

from a clear starry night the unwanted dawn

crawls across the Rookwood

and beneath the handful of frosted rooftops

in the bare branched wood

the people are waking

and scraping their cars

the rooks perch

and wait for the warming sun

and I struggle to breathe

Peggy stirs

and her head rolls onto my shoulder

heavy and warm

while the scraping continues

and the crows crowd a bare ash

the beetles beetle

and the crows start to crow

and the nearby river

not yet frozen still runs in its flow

while Peggy’s stale morning breath

steady and deep

keeps me anchored

with comfort to blanket and pillow

and flow, I think about the flow

and try not to drown

light comes in blinking

and Peggy opens her sticky eyes

and in from chasing woodmice

across the frosted grass

my icy cat curls her cold fur

against my bare feet.