Dead Creatures
by Peter Holm Jensen
This text is excerpted from Peter Holm Jensen’s début novel, The Moment, available now from Splice.
Hardback: £14.99
Paperback: £9.99
It’s spring. S. seems to be settling in, though she sometimes misses the city. Today she asked T. to stop mowing the grass beside the dirt road that leads to his old farm so she could pick some wildflowers. He stopped, frowned, said she better do it quick. It was a joy to watch her move out there, snipping the stems with the kitchen scissors.
The other day she convinced T. not to kill the feral kittens born in his haybarn. She saw him on his way to the field with the kittens in a wooden box and a spade in his other hand. She ran to him and asked him to leave them until they’d been weaned. We’d take them in, she told him, keep one with us and give the rest away. He looked at her with his steady gaze. Senimenal girl, he said in that dry Norfolk tone. But she swayed him and he took the box back to the barn.
Sleepless at midnight. I’ve brought the laptop to the kitchen table, but I’m too tired to work. A mouse runs across the floor, stops and stares at me, twitches its nose and cocks an ear. I toy with the idea of opening a bottle but decide to go outside to smoke instead. A fox screeches under the moonlight. Or is it an owl? Does it matter?
Mistrust of writing, of words. Yet here I remain, laptop open, urged by something—what?—to write again after so long a silence. What do I want? The same as ever: to find words that can bring life closer, let it speak simply in me for once. But I start typing and watch lies roll across the screen. I’m in the way of myself. The words themselves, the ones I settle for, are in the way. In any case, didn’t I come out here to get away from these kinds of questions?
After daybreak I brought S. tea and fruit in bed. We lay there awhile, chatting and laughing. Then, a day like most others: we worked, walked to the Co-op, returned to Rook Lane and worked some more until evening. Now she’s making dinner.
In the evening we go to the Rose. Tricky to get there walking down the narrow road with cars roaring by. But worth it. The place is like a combination of all the good pubs I’ve been to. Mostly silence, broken only by some friendly local chatter. Clean wooden floors. No screens and no music, above all no music. We exchange some gossip with the landlord and I order my usual, the local farm cider: cool and crisp and dry. S. tries it for the first time. Go easy on this, I tell her, it’s not to be trifled with. You go easy, she says softly, sipping her half. After a couple of pints I get stupid. Look at this, I say, holding up the glass to the light. The distillation of applehood. This is what Adam and Eve drank in Eden. One day, I say, I’ll write a poem to this cider—an ode! An old boy at the bar turns to look at us. Can we go? S. asks sadly. I reluctantly agree.
I remember F., a real Norfolk old-timer. He was one of my drinking friends when I lived in Norwich and used to work in pubs on my laptop. He’d been a groundsman on a country estate before it was auctioned off to developers, luckily for him not before he could collect his pension. We’d nod to each other and sit at separate tables in the White Lion all afternoon, sometimes comment on the weather, whatever was in the headlines, or the plans for a national chain to take over the pub. He seemed neither happy nor unhappy, neither bored nor interested, and was never unnerved by silence. He just seemed to sit there living out his time. Only one subject could get him to talk at any length: the lives of the plants and insects in the garden of the old estate. After he’d given me a lesson to rival any naturalist, he’d sit back and sip his pint as my gaze began to blur and my unease faded. He knew not to bother talking to me in the evenings. I always wondered what he thought of me, the foreign boy with his laptop.
When I was younger I used to wonder how people so casually crossed the bridge between being alone to being in company, stepping forth from their own rooms to interact with others while apparently staying the same people they knew themselves to be. I wondered, for instance, how writers, at the literary events I sometimes went to, were able to talk to audiences about things they’d written in private as if real communication were taking place. I remember being impressed by a line from Cioran: If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot. Sometimes I daydreamed about sending an experimental version of myself out into the world so I could observe him as he lived.
Sleepless again. But now a surprise: when I flip open the laptop, for a moment it’s as if the words on the screen are someone else’s. It gives me a brief feeling of freedom, like I’m able to reshape them as I please from a neutral vantage point. But then, when I return to them after stepping outside to smoke, they get jumbled up with my uncertain intentions and escape my grasp. I can’t tell which are true and which are false, which are my own and which are not. Write for yourself, they say. For whom, exactly?
The double who stands beside me, watching on as I type, overseeing my work… I sometimes think, when I write, of what Gide had one of his characters say: I am constantly getting outside myself, and as I watch myself act I can’t understand how a person who acts is the same as the person who is watching him act, and who wonders in astonishment and doubt how he can be an actor and a watcher at the same moment.
On Friday S. and I go to London, where she has a meeting, to spend the weekend with her old university friends. We take the bus to Norwich station, then the train to Liverpool Street. We work on the way down. As we approach the centre we pass colourful billboards in absurd contrast to the scrapyards and sooty blocks of flats in that peculiar grey-brown of British cities. The gigantic Westfield mall on one side, the City on the other. The train screeches down the littered tracks. Crowds heave and shove through rush hour. The noise knocks you back after the peace of the countryside. I sit in a pub and play with my phone while S. is in her meeting. Later we go out with her friends, none of whom I know, and wander from one rammed pub to the next until closing time. Faces blur into masks shouting at each other. What was his name again? And hers? Does it matter? Now I’ve woken at dawn in a dirty flat I don’t know where, feeling porous and longing for tidy space, open air, silence.
Sunday. Tube, train, bus. A shower to wash off the grime, a nap, then a walk between the fields, through the woods, down to the river, while S. stays in the cottage and reads. It takes a long time to clear the sounds of rattling and clanking from my head. As I walk back, the clouds part before the setting sun. I sit on a log, roll a cigarette, and squint up at the sky.
A snippet of the day at last, I think, the day itself.
I look out over a long field of wheat. In the woods a pheasant hoots and claps his wings: it’s breeding season. The sun sinks behind a stand of ash trees on the hill, its last rays spreading across the land and glinting off the dew on hay bales wrapped in plastic.
What is the day? Surely not a day like today, split between departures and destinations. Maybe it does have something to do with time, I tell myself, but the Earth’s time. Planetary time. The flow of ocean currents, the drift of clouds, the shifting of seasons around the globe. Spend your time, they say. Make, allocate, invest time: as if time were ours to use as we please with no time left over. Meanwhile the day passes with no opinion of us.
Before heading home I stop at T.’s chicken coop. A bat flits out of the barn to feed on insects in the air. The sky is purple, ominous. I always contract a little at dawn and dusk, the blue hours, when you’re either supposed to plan your day or take account of it. Early on, a voice says: how will you spend your time today? Then, later: what have you done today that’s worth anything? I watch the hens peck at the ground behind the fence, joined by sparrows that haven’t yet gone to roost. What do they care about how they’ve spent their day? They’ll shuffle into their coop soon and sleep with ease. Will they dream, as they sit on their perches? They’ll dream of sweetcorn and warm straw, perhaps: their favourite things. Dreams as natural as the flow of a stream.
Back at the cottage I warm some stew from the freezer and make a salad. All this pretentious talk about the day, I think to myself, when what I really want is to escape its tedium, watch old boxing matches on YouTube while S. does her online quizzes.
S. goes outside with a tin of sweetcorn for the chickens. A minute later I hear excited clucking and smile. How we love animals!
L. and M. arrive from Cambridge to stay with us for a few days. We play ping-pong in the village hall. Much laughter when the resident cat jumps up on the table and tries to bat the ball away. There’s happiness in being with people.
But when L. and M. leave, life plods on as usual. S. does her remote work for a historical project and makes monthly trips to the university libraries in Norwich and Cambridge. I translate to the sound of cooing from pigeons on the eaves. The sound reminds me of endless afternoons in Denmark, growing up or waiting to. The evenings stretch out like clouds across the horizon…
Memories of last summer in Norwich, when it got bad. Before S. When for a long time I didn’t talk to anyone except the Asian man in the off-licence.
At first I tried to walk myself out of it. In the beginning I’d walk for an hour or two, to the outskirts of the city and back. I’d stop in pubs, drink a pint here and there, sit half-listening to the jokes of builders in paint-spattered trousers. Warm drafts. Afternoon sunshine through dirty windows. I watched the drops run down the side of my pint glass. Dipped my fingers into the little puddles that gathered on the table.
Later, when I didn’t have the energy to walk, I’d lie in bed thinking of ways to die. So this is what it’s come to, I said to myself. You must be ill. Something in you is ill, something’s grown in you, fed on you, and now look, you’re ill in a dark room. It was almost a relief, to have only one thought, one sincere wish. Almost easier to be cornered and taken out of all fakery. This is what it comes down to, I thought: it’s pure logic.
A hole. That was how it felt, like being in a hole, unable to look up. I’d wake at dawn, pulled suddenly out of a deep sleep, and start daydreaming of some fatal accident. A car crash, train wreck, meteor. Weeks went by like this.
But just as one has hidden weaknesses, one has hidden strengths. One day I drew a line that meant this stops here and stepped across it. I moved the line a little every day. It was simple: a simple question for once.
Sometimes a tiny shift of attention seemed to change everything, or rather illuminate what was already there, like a light turned on in a room of shadows. I started walking again, and now I could go further, out of the city, through woods, along lanes, into the country.
One day I came across a small medieval church. A chicken bobbed through the tall grass in the graveyard, which overlooked a rapeseed field. I walked down the path, opened the bird grille and the heavy wooden door, and stepped into the cool musty nave. It was empty. I sat for a long time on a pew where the light came in through a stained-glass window. I felt like a speck inside—what? I sensed an overfacing power that shook me out of myself: something wholly other. It withdrew, and left me with a strange hope.
The days are getting warmer. I’ve started exercising again. I work in the garden, ride to the farm shop. We cycle up to the north coast, chain our bikes to a tree and walk through the wood on a sandy path. S. stops here and there to open her wildlife book and identify some plant or insect. We chat without paying attention to our surroundings, emerge from the wood to find ourselves before a wide-open view: on one side the sea and the sky, a vast canvas of blues, whites, and greys; on the other, scrapes and grassy dunes spreading out inland.
It’s moments like these I want to write about. Moments when you’re stopped on your way and made to see where you are with new eyes. As when you work on a problem that seems unsolvable and all of a sudden the answer comes: it was there all along, why couldn’t I see it? Or when a situation makes you act in a way that confronts you with yourself, and it’s as though the past opens up: so that’s why I’ve always behaved like that, now I see. Or when, in novels, moments of insight arise from the events of the story to make the story seem almost redundant. I daydream of a book containing only such passages, something like Stephen Hero’s book of epiphanies, or a collection of Woolf’s little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.
I cycle, run, swim. To get in shape, to feel strength and confidence slowly build, find muscles reappearing, is a delight and a relief from all kinds of physical and mental ills. Trivial problems fall away and things lighten a little, become more endurable.
The pine grove at Wells-next-the-Sea. Its springy floor of brown needles is crossed by twisted grey roots. We stop to look at a stand of ragworts crawling with caterpillars. Cinnabars, says S., who knows more about these things than I do. We go down to the beach and make for the water, dry razor clams crunching under our feet. When we’re settled on our towels we watch the waders pick at the sand. S. points out how pretty the oystercatchers look in flight, their black wings flashing white Vs. She follows them with her binoculars. I run along the shoreline to Holkham beach, past dogwalkers and horse riders in jodhpurs. A tern folds its wings and plunges into the sea, emerging with a gleaming fish in its talons. I do some push-ups, brave the steely water, then run back to S. We return home to find a neat line of ants from the front door to the kitchen, up the cupboard and onto the counter, where our strawberries lie oozing in a bowl, covered in a feasting swarm.
On the way to the shops today I passed a blackbird lying on the pavement with a broken wing. It flailed about helplessly, trying to get up. I walked past it because I was hungry, thought better of it and went back to do the manly thing and put it out of its misery. As they say. I remembered my grandfather telling me stories about such mercies performed as a matter of course on his farm. It was worse than I thought, not at all a matter of course for me. The bird felt like a tiny broken umbrella as it thrashed in my grip. When I wrung its neck it squirted out a thin white stream of excrement. Its eyes turned glassy as it went limp and its beak opened up, unhinged. I put it in a bin and lost my appetite.
About the Author
Peter Holm Jensen grew up in Indonesia, Canada, and Denmark, and studied religion, art history and literature at King’s College London and the University of East Anglia. He lived in Norwich for twenty years, where he worked as a translator. The Moment is his first novel.