Graham Swift - England and Other Stories

The voice changed again. ‘I is in de right direction, man. But I is goin’ nowhere.’

‘No. I can see that. What happened?’

‘Fookin’ deer.’ It was the other man — the other other-man — again.

‘What?’

‘Fookin’ deer. Int’ middle of road. Joost standin’ there.’

‘You saw a deer?’

‘Int’ middle of road. Five fookin’ minutes ago.’

He looked around, over the roof of the car. It was Exmoor. There were deer. You saw them sometimes from the road, especially in the early morning. But there was little cover for them here and he’d never, in over twenty years, come upon a deer just standing in the middle of the road. If they stepped on the road at all, they’d surely dart off again at even the distant sight of a vehicle. This man had come from — wherever he’d come from — to see something he’d never seen in decades.

He had the feeling that the deer might be another symptom of disorientation. A hallucination, an invention. Yet the man (the other one again) spoke about it with beguiling precision.

‘A lee-tal baby deer, man. I couldn’t get by he. I couldn’t kill he. A lee-tal baby Bambee.’

He looked over the roof of the car. Nothing moved in the greenish greyness. It was just plausible: a young stray deer, separated and inexperienced, in the dip, in a pocket of mist, near a source of drinking water. It was just plausible. He was a coastguard, not a deer warden. He asked himself: Would he have had any sceptical thoughts if this were just some unlucky farmer?

‘I see his lee-tal eyes in me headlights. I couldn’t kill he.’

The man was behaving, it was true, as if he were being doubted, were under suspicion, as if this were a familiar situation.

He saw, in his mind’s eye, a deer’s eyes in the headlights, the white dapples on its flank. A small trembling deer. It was a startling but magical vision. That alone, on this routine journey to work, would have been something special to talk about.

He tried to give his best, friendly passer-by’s smile. ‘Of course you couldn’t kill it. You didn’t hit it?’

‘No. He hop it. I the one who end up in de shit, man.’

It might shake you up a bit, nearly hitting a deer.

The man changed voices yet again. ‘Fookin’ deer.’ Then he said, in the other voice, ‘I is a long way from Leeds.’

So it was Yorkshire. He was from Leeds, but he was on the edge of Exmoor, at five in the morning. Which was even more bewildering perhaps than a deer in your headlights. He felt a moment’s protectiveness. He wasn’t sure if it was for the lost man, or the lost deer, the little Bambi. He’d helped to return many a lost child, over the years, to its distraught parents. It was one of the happier duties. Now was the peak time for it.

‘So. Let’s get you out of here. You’ve tried reversing?’

‘I’ve tried reversing.’ It was the northern voice, but with no manic exaggeration.

He stepped round to the back of the car. Either he’d reversed clumsily and the back wheel had slipped into the gully or it had gone into the gully in the first place when he’d braked and swerved — for the phantom deer. He’d got stuck anyway. And what were the chances — they were remote, extraordinary and barely believable too — that in such circumstances help would come along, uniformed help, in a matter of minutes?

The man got out to inspect the damage for himself. He didn’t look like a man who’d have regular roadside-assistance cover. He was shorter and slighter than he’d supposed. It was the hair, the two-inch hedge of it, that made him tall. But he had a strutting way of carrying himself. The gait of a cocky, belligerent Yorkshireman? No, not exactly.

In the dampish dawn air — his own sidelights lighting up the gully — they assessed the situation. No harm done, just the misplaced wheels.

‘If we do it together,’ he said, ‘we could just lift her so the back wheel’s on the road again. Then you can reverse. I can push from the front if you spin. But you should be okay.’

‘You tell me, skipper.’

This was no doubt a reference to the looped stripe on his sleeve. It was a perk of his job occasionally to be mistaken for a ship’s captain. But he’d said, and noticed it even as he said it, the nautical ‘lift her’.

‘We lift her arse, skipper, nice and easy.’ The man even crouched, ready to take the bumper, like a small sumo wrestler.

‘Wait.’

He went round to the left-open driver’s door. He checked the position of the gear stick. Then he took off his jacket and, folding it, placed it on the passenger seat. He felt chilly without it, but he didn’t want to arrive on duty looking as if he’d been in an accident himself.

The man watched him and said, ‘That’s righ’, man. We don’t wahnt you messin’ de natty tailorin’.’

The man’s own clothes might have been natty once, long ago, in their own way. There was a faded sweater — purple and black horizontal stripes — over which there was a very old, perhaps once stylish full-length leather jacket. It hung about him like a droopy black second skin, which was an unfortunate way of thinking of it. The clothes looked anciently lived-in.

He rolled up his own crisp white sleeves. He walked round to the gully. There were some convenient small stream-washed rocks and he jammed a few against the stricken front wheel. He surreptitiously checked, as if trained for it, the front of the car — for dents, for possible bits of deer. There were none. That is, there were many dents, but they were old.

He walked back. He now felt, if it was only fleetingly, in charge, as if the man had become his appointed junior.

‘Okay.’ They crouched. ‘You have a hold? On “three” then.’

‘You give the word, skip.’

The man seemed calmer, less disoriented — if that was the proper diagnosis — even appreciative and submissive. The mere fact of doing together what couldn’t have been done by one man alone seemed to have put everything into a complete and, if just for a moment, composed perspective. Around them was Exmoor being slowly unveiled by the dawn. Except for a few sparse, travelling lights in the distance on the main road up ahead, they were alone in the landscape. There was a tiny, seemingly stationary light in the further distance. It was the light of a ship in the Bristol Channel. It would be in the station’s log.

‘One — two— three !’

It was simply achieved. A heave, an instinctive sideways thrust to the right. The back wheel was returned safely to the tarmac. The boot can’t have contained anything heavy. No dead deer, for example.

‘Fookin’ champion!’

What was it about these voices — both of them? But the man seemed genuinely elated, as if wizardry had just occurred.

‘You have to reverse her out yet.’

Again he’d said ‘her’. They both went to the front. While the man got in and turned the ignition, he continued to the nearside front wing. In another situation he might have said, ‘ Reverse , and gently.’ Fortunately, his own car — engine off and lights on — was parked at a comfortable distance.

There was no difficulty. There was a slight skittering, but the gully wasn’t deep and the back wheels hauled the car entirely onto the road again. His own bit of effort on the front bumper was almost superfluous. He looked at his watch. Five minutes had passed. The man cut his engine, yanking on the handbrake, and the sudden returning silence made the brief grinding of reverse gear seem almost like some effrontery.

The man got out.

‘Fookin’ champion!’

He came forward, hand extended. Like everything else about him, the extended hand was like an act, it was like something not quite as it should be. But he took it and shook it.