What the Rain Leaves Behind

Rain had been falling for three days straight on the small Cornish village of St Mawes; that thin, relentless drizzle that turns everything to mud and never quite admits to being real rain. On one side of the headland winter had gathered all its winds and was waiting to drive summer off the island. On the other side, though, summer still hadn’t left. It sat there like a slightly forlorn migrant under the lime tree on the stone bench, passport in hand, a bundle at its feet with three or five gold coins knotted in a cloth, wavering between staying and going.

On the island I was almost the only one still in love with this beautiful exile. Everyone else had long since begun to prepare for the seven-month winter, knitting jumpers, stacking peat, sealing up draughty windows. I, out of laziness and that old habit of mine of always chasing what is on its way out, had set off after summer.

I was sick as a dog. Three days of wandering in that drizzle had soaked my lungs; the cough had sunk from my throat into my chest, and there were streaks of blood in the phlegm. My fever was up; cold sweat on my forehead, my palms like ice. My knees shook, and with every step it felt as though a fist were slamming between my shoulder blades. My head swam, grey specks flitted before my eyes. Still, I couldn’t stop. The illness only made me more obstinate, as if the fever were burning away the last crumbs of summer inside me. My coat clung wetly to my shoulders, my nose ran constantly, my handkerchief was soaked through. When the coughing fits came I would sink down by the roadside, doubled over, as if I could cough my lungs out into the ditch. Even my dog kept his distance, glancing back now and then as if to say, This man is going to die, you know. And yet I refused to give up the chase for the last tatters of summer.

To be sick as a dog was exactly this: every cell of the body in revolt, and the will, ridiculous and stubborn, insisting on going a little further. The illness hadn’t just taken hold of my lungs; it had seeped into everything. I would wake after midnight, shivering in my bed, feeling that every breath had to be wrestled from something that wanted it back. My throat burned like a scorched pipe, every swallow was a knife. My muscles had thinned, my bones felt brittle; a single step could exhaust me as much as a whole day’s walk had done once. My eyelids grew heavy, yet sleep wouldn’t come; my mind, feverish and slick with half-formed images, turned and turned. The illness was like the island’s rain: seeping in finely, wetting everything, and never stopping. It had become part of my hunt for summer, as though the way the land was rotting down into winter and the way my body was failing were the same story told twice. In running after summer, I was really running after my own exhaustion.

I found summer in scraps, in little bundles. Sometimes it lay under a pine tree, motionless and sunless; a patch of stubborn green in the needles. Sometimes it hid at the edge of a clump of gorse, still just beginning, as though the season had only now arrived: a strip of grass that hadn’t yellowed yet, a single flower that hadn’t learnt the word “end”. I would stand there, breathless, coughing into my sleeve, and look at it as if it were something rare and almost indecent.

There wasn’t a single house on this western side of the island. Only a small country café, perched ten metres above a hollow of shingle, no bigger than an apartment terrace. When I reached it, I sat down on one of the wooden chairs, shaking. There were still ants walking across the tables, feeling their way along the damp grain, and flies circling the rims of abandoned coffee cups as if summer had forgotten to call them back. All sounds had fallen silent. From time to time a plane passed far overhead, heading down to Newquay or Exeter. Writing this, I realise now that the passengers inside would have been almost touching down by the time I finished a sentence. Planes had always passed overhead in the old days too, but it had never occurred to me that the people inside would have landed by the time I finished my thought.

The café-keeper, Mr Penrose, was an unpleasant, surly man; he looked more like a retired customs officer than a man who had freely chosen coffee. If his doctors hadn’t told him not to overexert himself, he would never have become a café-keeper, I am sure. As for me, I have never been able to run a café because I have never, in all my life, drunk a properly made coffee. A country café, three or five village regulars; a small deck of cards, the same stories repeated until they become true… I found myself thinking, between coughs, that a life of sixty or seventy years could hardly start and end more gently than this. The burning in my lungs grew worse with each breath; the fever tightened around my head like a vice. Even here the illness wouldn’t release me; my hands shook as I picked up the cup, and as the hot liquid slid down my throat a coughing fit seized me, bending me forward over the table. It was as if my own body, like a parasite feeding on the island’s last scraps of green, were poisoning every moment.

The washing strung between the trees would never dry in this damp. The black cat had jumped up on the table and was growling incessantly at my dog. On one of the chairs, a pair of wine-dark socks, riddled with holes, had been abandoned to the weather. The vine leaves were still vividly green; the ones in our own garden had long since shrivelled and dropped. The sea was moving slowly off towards Black Head, dragging its colour along with it. On the far side, that faint smear of land – was it Falmouth, perhaps? Why was there no sound? Another plane began to drone. The island must have lain directly under a major airway; the planes always went above my head or just to my left, unseen behind the grey.

The cat fell silent. My dog closed his eyes. The crows took over the air. Once upon a time, in October, redwings and fieldfares used to come here in their thousands, sweeping from tree to tree in a storm of wings. I haven’t seen them for two years. Perhaps they still come, and I simply don’t notice in this state. The fever burns my eyes, my vision blurs; perhaps they’ve been and gone already, and I never saw them. The illness has been stealing my senses too; sounds recede, colours fade. To be sick as a dog is not only to have the body falter, but to feel your grip on the world itself begin to loosen.

I remember how it was. At dawn the men and boys would set off up the hill path, carrying cages and limp sticks. The sticks were smeared with birdlime, the colour of filth. They would set a calling thrush under a thorny hawthorn tree, coat every branch with glue, then crouch down in the bushes fifty metres away. The free birds, deceived by the cries of their caged companion –its scream of loneliness, its promise of company and warmth– would drop from the sky in clusters. A few would escape and fly on into another trap, while the men crept slowly closer, gathering up the trembling little bodies, breaking their necks with their teeth, plucking them while they were still warm.

The worst of them all was Jonah Trevelyan. He had a small shipping agency in Penzance; thick wrists, a barrel chest, a nose blotched like a blackberry, hair that seemed to have burst out through torn skin. On weekdays he was polite, almost modest; he would trot off to the office in the morning and in the evening step off the Scillonian ferry with his shopping-bag, joking in his deep voice. No one would have guessed. But when the first flocks of thrushes appeared over the grey sea in autumn, his eyes would light up. On the ferry’s deck he would narrow his gaze, pick out the dark specks over the water, and say to the man beside him, “There come our pie-birds.” If the birds came close, he would imitate their calls through his teeth and thick lips; I saw again and again how they were fooled, how they wheeled once round the boat and then drifted away.

At the end of October, on those still, lead-coloured, faintly violet-scented days, he would find the loudest calling bird he could, round up the hungriest boys, and strip the hills of their birds.

The birds haven’t come for years. Or else I, half-delirious, simply can’t see them any more. As soon as I catch sight of one of those sweet autumn days from my window, I find myself calculating which slopes Jonah might be haunting and I set off in that direction. A single chitter of birds, and my blood runs cold. Between coughing fits, the harsh rattling in my chest sounds more and more like a trapped thing crying out. The illness and Jonah’s cruelty seem to have joined forces; both are busy gnawing at life.

And yet autumn, with its arbutus berries, its pale sun, its sea calming into a slow, heavy swell, its still-plentiful green –and, if there are birds, with their voices as well– makes a person dream of a world of peace, poetry, painting, music, a world without hunger or greed. Wherever you go, whoever steps out into the fields feels more or less the same thing; or used to feel it, let us say. Now Jonah’s shadow falls across that scene. The birds are already much diminished; now it is the greenery of the soil’s turn. My illness carries that same decay inside my body. To be sick as a dog is to feel the world’s exhaustion lodged under your ribs.

That is why, last week, I couldn’t bring myself to tread on the grass by the roadside; I chose the muddy track instead. My fever had flared up again, my knees would hardly carry me, but I stubbornly pressed on. It was a Jonah-kind of day; the sky was empty, not a single bird. When I left the house I had stuck a fig to the bars of my one-eyed linnet’s cage. He looked at me with his good eye, working away at the seed with his beak. I hung the cage on the nail beside the door and stepped out into the rain.

There were no birds, but there was still green. Then I saw it: some of the turf had been skinned away. Further on, four children in torn jumpers were lifting sods the size of paving stones and dropping them into a sack.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“None of your business.”

“But why are you pulling it up?”

“Mr Harris told us to.”

“What’s he going to do with it?”

“You know that man up in Tregenna, the one who made his money out of tinned fish?” one of them said. “They’re fixing up his garden.”

“He can buy his own soil,” I said. “Let him get his fancy turf from town.”

“This is different, mister. Proper grass grows on this. That’s what he said.”

I turned back in anger. I thought I was almost running to the village police station, but in truth I wasn’t running at all; I reached it shaking, coughing, having dropped to my knees twice at the roadside. The constable looked up and said only, “We’ll put a stop to it.” They didn’t. That night, in secret, the stripping of the grass went on. Not even a fine was issued to Mr Harris; it turned out that the municipal by-laws did not forbid the removal of roadside turf.

That night I tossed about in bed, burning with fever. In my dreams I saw Jonah standing on the raw earth, teeth sunk into the roots, tugging. The illness had seeped into my sleep as well; to be sick as a dog was to suffer waking and dreaming alike.

They strangled the birds, they tore up the grass, they left the roads a sea of mud.

What ebbs away now is not only the sound of wings or the colour of verges, but that old, almost naïve certainty that the world would go on offering itself in the same ways. Perhaps there will come an autumn when someone lifts their head to the sky and finds no dark specks moving there; another, when they look to the roadside and see only wet clay where the green once lay.

That is all I have to tell. It may not be autumn that is dwindling, after all, but I who am quietly withdrawing from this place. Illness is only one more name for it: we wear out like the land, seep away like the rain, and still we stubbornly keep searching for the last crumbs. To be sick as a dog is simply the price of that search.