Green Man

I wound down the window as I made my way home, and exhaled into the September air. The Devon countryside was dreaming to itself. Fieldfares churred sleepily from a thicket of Hawthorn. Marsh Frogs belched seductive platitudes. I dimmed the headlights as a post-van sped past, and then switched them off. Darkness fell into the car. In the night, moths engaged in silent dog-fights. One bat conducted a perfect Immelmann turn and snatched the shadow of a moth in front of the moon.

The moon was cast in copper. Moonset in September, sometimes, causes the scattering of light-particles in the atmosphere. As the moon dips below its zenith, it spreads the low-frequency particles along its azimuth angle - the low-proton blues and greens are shattered along a subtle beam, and the reds and yellows are drawn into the chlorophyll, to be processed into autumn sugars.

Frank used to swim in the Tavy River as a child, and he once told me that when he did the breaststroke, the algae that proliferated in the mid-august river used to turn his underwater limbs a tarnished gold, and sometimes, filtered through the sediment and ripples, he dreamt of being a frog.

I pulled into a lay-by, and heard the frogs and the chittering of bats.

II.

Frank’s funeral was on Tuesday. I had driven over from Bristol on Monday, to attend a wake in the company of Frank’s oldest friends, his partner, and – written into his will – a case of vintage elderberry wine, which Frank had bottled on a narcotic summer night in 1992, and which was to be consumed by the congregation at the earliest suitable occasion. Frank’s beautiful, scrawled writing was etched in India ink on each fawn-coloured label, and both his handwriting on the labels and the explicit ordering of his will was classically Frank – robust, earthy, hugely generous, and unconcernedly immortal. Frank was aware of death, in a distant, amused way, but I don’t think he ever really expected to die. No-one did. Frank was less a human being and more a force of nature on legs – a bouncing fox-cub given human form.

At sixty-three, he woke up at 6am in the summer, 7am in the winter, happily splashed himself clean in toffee-coloured water in a tin bath in June, amiably plunged his head into the freshly-broken ice of a water-butt in December. Two years ago, he told me how he had woken up on April 12th at 5am, shouldered a hatchet and flask of applejack, walked to Wiskit wood glugging the brandy contentedly, felled two yew saplings, and, packing the whippy greenwood in the back seat of his Reliant Scimitar – a vehicular version of himself; powerful, grumpy, forgiving, and with its advanced age, increasingly backfiring – drove towards Bristol.

I remember the confusion of that morning. I had been up since 6am, mostly sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the whorls and burls in the walnut grain and Crayola doodles of my daughter, Veronica, and silently vibrating with nerves. At 8am, after decimating a pack of Benson & Hedges silver and on my fourth consecutive cup of black coffee, I went upstairs to bathe, shave, prepare my suit and check for the umpteenth time that my parents arrived at the wedding at 11am sharp for the final rehearsal, my father’s memory being what it was.

As I rose from my chair – shaky with nerves, rehearsal exhaustion and caffeine - I saw a movement at the window, and a craggy and fissured, but somehow impish face hoved slowly into view, rounding the window-frame like a big autumn moon. Frank’s teeth, beige, tomb-stone things, leered happily back at me. I opened the French windows.

I asked him, in carefully measured, neutral tones, just why he was lurking in my garden at 8am on the morning of my wedding.
‘Ah, well, I broke in. I was going to knock, but I thought you’d be asleep, and I didn’t want to disturb you, so I vaulted the wall. Your gate was locked, y’see. Landed on Jane’s begonias, which broke my fall alright, although you want to have that blackthorn stump out, because’ – he peeled a few crushed petals off his jeans, and the scent of drowsy nectar filled the air for a moment - ‘I landed right on it.’ He grimaced, ‘With my arse, too’ he said gravely. ‘Got any secateurs? I wouldn’t say no to an egg’.

This was such a typical comment of Frank that I collapsed in weary hysterics, my racked chest heaving with momentary nuptial relief. Frank looked blankly at me, like a cow that’s been shown a card trick. I jokingly asked him if he wanted soldiers with the egg. He looked, if anything, even blanker.

‘No, I’ll have it fried ‘til it clangs and slapped between white bread, thanks. Lots of ketchup’ said Frank, rubbing his huge hands and peering interestedly around the kitchen. He picked up a sea-shell I had found near Derek Jarman’s driftwood garden, near Dungeness in Sussex, bleached white by the saline winds and deeply furrowed by boring sand-worms.

‘Nice little piece. Jarman’s, of course. That’s theft, that is’. Frank’s face creaked into a crafty grin. My mouth may have begun to open, in amazement or protest, I can’t remember which, but was stopped by Frank, who was now deep in the midst of a masters explanation.

‘He always artificially bleaches them, y’see. Couple of bags of salt, pan of boiling water. Change and replace three times, and Bob’s your proverbial uncle. Those grooves were made with a file, too. Look, he’s nicked a chip in it here, see?’

I glanced down to see an infinitesimal notch in the calcite deposits, which I would never have noticed, before he whisked it away, grabbed a pair of scissors on the sideboard, scrutinized the tasting blurb on a bottle of Londis wine, gruffly mumbled something negative about Chilian wine, and ambled out the door. Seconds later, his head loomed through the door-frame.

‘Coffee, Jake, and lots of it. Three teaspoons, same of sugar. Imagine you’re paving a road with tarmac. That sort of consistency. Think gravy, Jake, think gravy’. And he crashed off into the foliage.

III.

Frank Taylor was, in the nicest way, a rural throwback. While other people in his adopted village had installed central heating and double-glazing throughout, Frank cut sappy chestnut logs, cleaving them into kindling and drying them in sheaves for the winter. When his friends aged, they either conceded the steering wheel to arthritis and impaired vision, or bought new, mild-mannered cars to pop down to the shops in, Frank tinkered away on his ancient Scimatar until the engine bellowed like a rutting stag and clouds of blue Castrol exhaust smoke swamped the lanes around his house like the mist of Heathcliff. Frank called his car, “The Colonel”, allegedly because of its noble form and decisive military acceleration, but rather more accurately because of its resemblance to a puce-faced, hard-of-hearing distinguished old boy, roaring at everyone to speak up.