E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
Cox Everything Will Swallow You
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-592-5
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
From the Sunday Times-Bestselling Author
E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80075-592-5
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Tom Cox was born in Nottinghamshire in 1975 and now lives in Devon. His fifteen books include Villager, 1983, the Sunday Times top ten bestseller The Good, The Bad And The Furry, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted 21st-Century Yokel and Help The Witch, which won a Shirley Jackson Horror Writing award. You can subscribe to his Substack page at tomcox.substack.com
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The deer had been kicking the shit out of the hedgerows again. You could see their trail of destruction, curiously evenly spaced, all along the high ridge. ‘Bambi and the vegan diet are a clever bluff where deer are concerned,’ thought Eric. ‘They lull everyone into thinking they’re delicate peacenik flower children when in truth they’re punk anarchist mystics.’ This lot, here in west Dorset, would nut down fence-posts as if it were booting-out time on Friday night and the fence-posts had just called their sister a slag, sail through barbed wire like it was the mesh curtain over their gran’s back door and trash your delphiniums, never once pausing to tot up their fucks along the way. Over in the big field where the farmer particularly didn’t want them to go and a triangle of spidery dying elms looked like the marker posts of some oncoming dark ritual, they’d pop up from their hiding places in the cabbage in threes, gallop silently away, then freeze and stare back with a synchronicity that appeared choreographed.
‘They’re checking you out, pal,’ Eric told Carl. ‘Fellow oracles. Intimidated by your power.’
‘I was thinking we could try that new Indian in Axminster tonight,’ said Carl. ‘I fancy a break from cooking. I think I’m leaning towards a dhansak.’
‘Iggy Pop has deer energy, I reckon. Like one of those whatdcharmacall them, the little ones. Muntjac. The way he used to run around the stage. Or maybe he’s more like a bantam rooster, darting up to everyone with his chest puffed out, always legging it about in those little circles. Did I tell you about the one my neighbours had when I lived in Wales? Right little hooligan, he was. There was no hedge between the gardens so he’d be around a lot. The prick would come at me, claws flying all over the shop, every time I turned away from him. I’d be always walking about with all these cuts on the back of my legs.’
‘Dhansak is a curious one. The takeaways never seem to come to an agreement on the spice level. I’ve had some with quite a kick to them – nothing that I couldn’t handle, obviously, but the kind that would have someone of your inferior constitution blowing your nose every six seconds – but I’ve had some pitifully weedy ones, too. I see Iggy more as a centaur, myself. The bare chest and that feeling you get that he might have a couple of possible extra legs that he could whip out in moments of crisis. Hold on. Did you hear that? Over there. Was that a dog? It sounded a lot like a dog.’
The day, bracingly cold, chasing away weeks of pissant winds and concerningly lukewarm rain blasts, was one of those where a sun halfway up the sky will hold the landscape frozen in perfection for a number of hours, offering a bittersweet illusion of permanence. Dorset was a painting, balanced in the admiring hands of Horus. Where the busy little rivers had leaked, the ice, splintered by bootsteps, resembled the kind of glass you might find on the floor of an abandoned pub, but under the vandalised hedgerows it remained shadowed and solid. Soon it would begin to spread again and the Marshwood Vale would be drained of comfort, burping and groaning with the part-explicable sounds of the greedy January night. The transition was something Carl could already sniff on the ground directly in front of his nose. Looking at his only timepiece, which was now falling fast over the cliffs three miles to the south, it struck him that, as usual, they were going to be late. Eric had agreed to call at the Meat Tree’s house – which was around half an hour’s drive from where Eric had parked the van – to pick up the keys to the manor at five. The Meat Tree had emphasised that he had to go out by six at the absolute latest. It was now at least a quarter past four, and where was the van parked? Two miles away? More?
‘Here,’ Carl thought, ‘is one of the drawbacks of going out on walks with a collector.’ The impulse that made Eric feel the need to own nineteen Linda Ronstadt albums, including several from after the mid-seventies, when she began to go off the boil, was that same one which, half an hour before, had made him insist on following a footpath purely because it was one of the dwindling number in the Vale that he and Carl had not previously ticked off their list. It certainly could not be described as a bad footpath. Whether it was a necessary footpath, however, was highly debatable. And now here they were, a mile on from its source, ducking away from a potential Border Collie Situation through a hole in the hedge made by insurrectionary deer, onto an unmarked path beneath the steep brim of an Iron Age hill fort, in the direction of who knew what.
‘I’ve got a lot of trust in deer, me,’ said Eric. ‘What you’ve got to remember is that every place you walk, every one of these routes that some guy in an office decided to stick a sign on saying ‘Bridleway’ or ‘Public Footpath’, was originally made by deer, long ago. They know where they’re going and they know the best way to get there.’
‘I do completely see that,’ said Carl. ‘But at the same time we have no way of knowing where the particular pre-Christian deer who originally made this path were going. My guess is that it probably wasn’t a Victorian terrace on the outskirts of Sidmouth owned by a book dealer, nor a haphazardly parked van waiting to take them to it.’
‘Cheeky fucker. That was some top parking.’
‘You left it sticking half out into the lane, looking like a stolen vehicle somebody abandoned before fleeing into dense woodland to evade the police. I’ll be impressed if it’s even still drivable by the time we get back.’
What would you have thought, if you’d been relaxing in the grass behind a hedge – a dense one, as yet unwrecked by a nihilistic buck or doe – and heard the conversation of Eric and Carl, from their unseen position on the other side of the brown-green divide? Would you have pictured, in your mind’s eye, a long-married homosexual couple? Two rivalrous professors of philosophy or zoology out for a stroll: one unlikely, a rough and ready maverick motormouth, the other more housebroken and genteel? A man still assimilating after arriving from the extensive and unknowable lands of the north, and his well-spoken friend from . . . another country, somewhere that you couldn’t quite pinpoint? Had there been a space in the bottom of the hedge, and had you spied, through it, two booted feet accompanied by four furry ones, you might have wondered where along the path the missing biped was speaking from, or perhaps just thought, ‘Oh, that’s sweet: the talkative man and his erudite migrant lover have a pet whippet.’ Whatever the case, it is extremely unlikely that you would have correctly guessed what was there, hidden from you by the tightly knotted twigs and branches.
The union of Eric and Carl Inskip was one that would not have been easily anticipated by society but, like any couple who’d been cohabiting for close to two decades, they were not unprone to sarcastic bickering. If somebody had witnessed this bickering – which Eric and Carl took careful measures to ensure almost nobody ever did – they might have observed that, more often than not, it was Eric who played the role of bickeree. The ways in which Eric had infuriated Carl, in the almost nineteen years they had known each other, were so numerous as to be unlistable but, even at his most exasperated – even at the height of his infuriation with Eric’s tardiness, his forgetfulness, his sticky-handedness, his repeated failure to close the door while urinating in the downstairs toilet, his general way of progressing through life like a boulder pinballing down a tiered forest chasm – Carl repeatedly found disarmament in Eric’s endearing way of never speaking to him as someone outside his realm of being, never as a lesser or something other, but in the casual manner that you would speak to a close, trusted long-time friend. In short – and, as he thought this, he suspected that at least one ex-lover might refute it – if you ever happened to be mad at the guy, he somehow made it impossible for you to stay that way for a length of time that would significantly erode your relationship.
As they rounded the base of the hill fort, an abrasive choir of voices could be heard directly below them: a quacking conference, with no space for one authoritative voice to raise above the din and call for order. Through the gaps in the trees could be seen a sloping field where, on a large patch of ice, 200 or more ducks had gathered, apparently for no reason other than to discuss what was most pressingly on their minds.
‘Ah, man, I do not enjoy that,’ said Eric. ‘Why are all those ducks there, like that? There’s no reason for them to be there. There’s not even a pond or river. It’s just a field. I’m telling you, pal, I’m not happy about it. That’s far too many ducks.’
‘I love you,’ thought Carl. ‘You are a ridiculous human being, and I love you.’
As the path followed the curve of the earthworks, it pitchforked into two fading prongs then died away to lethargic winter-bramble mess and decomposing tree-trunk muddle. Above the two friends, the Iron Age fortification steepened. Did the deer who had originally formed this path – Norman? Roman? – lose heart and decide to throw in the towel at this point? Thinking about the dog, and the falling sun, Carl pressed on, thorns tearing at his...
