Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

Jackie started speaking just as the noise of it caught up so neither of us heard a word she said. She turned and walked back to the house and looked up at the hay meadow again on her way. Waddled is more of the word. Not to put too fine a point on it. She’s not what you’d call petite. She holds her weight like that. Ungainly, is a word you could use. We watched her go. I asked Ray what was he talking about soil hydrology, and he said to keep out of it. He went back in the caravan and shut the door and turned the radio on in there. The furniture lorry finally got turned round and came back along the road and stopped. The driver called down to ask if I knew where the Stewart place was and said something about bloody satnav. I climbed up the bank and pointed him back to the end of the road and told him it was down that way. Weren’t a dead-end like the sign said, I told him, you can go through the farmyard and out the other side and the Stewart place is the second on the left. The look on his face. Thanks for letting me know, he said. I said not to mention it, and I went off and mucked about with stakes and string until I didn’t think Jackie was looking out of the kitchen window of her house on the other side of the lake there any more. Pond is more like the word, with the size of it. But they’re not going to get any customers for a fishing pond, so they’re calling it a lake. The furniture lorry drove past again and turned left through the farmyard at the end. Another Tornado went over and dropped a bomb on the Sands. The stakes and the string made a pretty nice line coming down from the hay meadow to the edge of the lake. Made it look like the job was near-enough halfway done.

Ray came out of the caravan. We took the short way across the fields to the Stewart place and watched the lorry driver unloading the chairs and tables and linens, and when old man Stewart came out of the house to sign for everything we cleared off back to the caravan again.

The fishing lake was old man Stewart’s. The lake and the land around it and the house where Jackie lived and the hay meadow and the three fields between here and the Stewart place. Also the pine plantation between the Stewart place and the Sands. Also possibly the caravan, although not even Jackie was sure about that and anyway it didn’t seem like something he’d want to argue over. It had just always been there she’d told us, when we first moved in, and always seemed like about the right word. We were supposedly on-site security and maintenance, was the idea. We were there to provide a presence. Also to undertake certain unspecified maintenance tasks. Such as for the only example so far digging the ditch to provide drainage from the hay meadow into the lake. There wasn’t really any money involved, but the situation suited us and I think it suited Jackie as well in terms of some kind of company and not having to be on her own all the time. But she said old man Stewart had started getting on the phone and asking what was he hearing about these new people on the site, meaning Ray and me. Jackie said it was he was unhappy about the progress but it was also probably due to he knew certain things about certain things which had occurred a great many years previous, certain things which Jackie also had a fair idea about but which she appeared to be putting in the category of now we deserved a second chance but which old man Stewart was apparently placing into quite a different category. Some people have very much longer memories than other people, is what it came down to.

The night before the wedding Jackie was sitting outside the caravan and telling us what she knew about the rest of the Stewarts. Most of the family had arrived that afternoon and most of them had needed to ask for directions, shouting something about bloody satnav down from the road and waving their phones around to try and get a signal. The family were all down south now, was what Jackie was telling us. Hadn’t been up this way for years. Most of the crowd tomorrow will be from London, she said. That’s where the groom’s from. They’re talking about it’ll be near enough two hundred of them there. One of Jackie’s cleaning jobs was at the Stewart place, was how come she knew all this. She started off naming names, like who was who in the Stewart clan, the ex-wife and the sons and the half-brothers and the nephews and nieces, but we weren’t really listening. I was breaking up another pallet for the fire and Ray was either looking at the stars or else his head was back like that because he was asleep. We could hear most of the Stewarts out the back of their place, shouting and laughing. I asked Jackie how come with all these relations old man Stewart lived on his own and most of them couldn’t even find their own way to the house. Ray said something about therein lay the tale. Without lifting up his head. He actually said therein. Me and Jackie just sort of looked at him, and tried not to laugh, and Ray sat up and rolled a smoke without offering one to anyone. Therein. Jackie asked me had I got the pallet from behind the caravan and I told her yes. She said she’d been planning on using those to make the fishing jetties with. She said she’d told us that. Wasn’t much I could say to that, with my foot halfway through the pallet and the fire spitting away like it was. I didn’t know much about fishing lakes but I thought it would probably take something better than pallets to build the jetties with. I told her well I was sorry about that but I was sure we could get some more. Ray lit his smoke and said we’d definitely get her some more no need to worry about that.

It wasn’t like me or Ray knew enough about fishing to build a fishing lake. We were just there to do a few jobs. I’d never been fishing in my life but I could see this pond wasn’t up to much. It was full of green algae or something like that. She’d told us it needed cleaning up and some oxygenating plants putting in and we’d nodded like we knew what she was talking about. She’d said she was going to mainly stock it with roach and carp but she wanted it all fixed up first before she placed any orders. I couldn’t see how that overgrown drainage ditch was ever going to support a living creature but I kept my mouth shut. Ray had said something about using barley-straw to freshen up the water and she’d looked impressed. Don’t know where he got that. Could have picked it up from all the reading he’d done when he was working in the library.

When she said goodnight and set off walking back to her house on the other side of the lake Ray watched her and asked me if I would. I said he was joking I would. He shrugged. He said he might do only it would depend on the situation. He said something about gravity and big women and then he went off in the caravan and shut the door and turned the radio on in there.

I sat there with the moon shining off the water and the bats twatting silently about and the noise of all those Stewarts barking out across the fields like each of them was trying to be the last to stop laughing. The groom was probably sat outside another back door somewhere now, smoking a last cigarette and listening to all that and wondering what he was letting himself in for.

A Tornado went over and dropped a bomb on the Sands. First time they’d done it in the dark that I knew of. I felt the shadow of it first and like the weight of the heat of it, and then the noise came dragging behind like it always did but it seemed much louder in the dark and I covered my head with my arms until it had passed. I heard shrieking from the Stewart place, and men laughing, and I got up and pissed on the back wheel of Ray’s car and went to bed.

Ray was a Muslim at one time. He converted when we were inside. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him. He never had the beard or the hat or anything but he took it very seriously. He changed his name to Abdul Wahid and went to the prayer-room five times a day with the other brothers and took down all the graven images from his cell. I asked him what he was going to do with them. He said it wasn’t permitted for any man to make images of the human form which Allah has created or something, so I bought them off him for a SIM card and a pack of tobacco. They were pretty fucking graven. I asked him how come he’d turned Muslim all of a sudden and he said he’d heard the voice of Allah calling to him. I asked him was it just like that out of nowhere and he told me it was out of the blue. He’d been up all night doing press-ups and reading a translation of the Koran he’d got hold of from working in the library and he’d been fasting for three days just to see what it was like, but yes basically he had totally out of the blue heard the voice of Allah. Calling him by name, he said. I didn’t ask whether the voice had called him Abdul Wahid or Ray. Turns out the voice of Allah didn’t have much else to say so he just kept calling whichever name it was. Ray said it was like nothing else he’d ever heard. He said it was like a light going on inside his head. He said it was like being called home. Which I didn’t think was something he would have been hankering after particularly but I didn’t say as much. Maybe that’s not what he meant. He told me the whole experience had left him feeling blessed. He said it about three times and I believed him even though right then we were standing in line waiting to slop out. But you could see it in his face, the way he felt about it. He asked me how I’d be able to resist if I’d heard the voice of Allah calling me home. I told him that’s fair enough Ray, and good luck and all that. He said it wasn’t Ray it was Abdul Wahid.