M ~ Toes, in two parts. Part One.

This is a parable, and I will deviate, I warn you, because I am a
flying deviant. What's the difference between a flying deviant and a
deviant? It is like the difference between a flying buttress and a
buttress. One leans against the wall, unaware of its purpose - the
other supports a lot more on its back, knowing as it does the
responsibilities of being a buttress.

I was born and buried alive in muck-whipped, clay-shack city Derby,
and I still consider the Peak District a kind of spirit-chal home,
though it's probably true to say that I love any number of familiar
places just as much, all in England. Why the Sons of Churchill can't
talk of England. They hate England, the fat, hairy old hyenas. I have
been in discussion with the Sons of Churchill of late; they promise
revolution and say they are out to get the ghost army of the Liberal
Elite - a covert group of tight-knit feminists and anarchists busy
brainwashing your children. Rather them than the Sons of Churchill.
They are taxidermists - they want to gut me and fill me with fluff, so
I get munched by moths on a small shelf. But ah, well.

Sometimes I live in Hartington, which is a very small touristy village
in the hills, near the border of the county. It is where Prince
Obelensky took his wife and son when he fled the Russian revolution in
1920 - they stayed in Beresford Manor, and later befriended my great
uncle Ron and auntie Eileen, who still have a photograph of the
princess in maple and sepia. She looks very elegant, she does,
unscarred by revolutionary weapons, dressed up in cool cream jewels and
gowned in burnished peachskin. The jewels were smuggled past Bolshevik
guards in buckets of slop. 'Bolshevik' means majority, although the
Bolshevik party of Russia never represented the majority of Russians.
Goddamn Bolsheviks. I believe there'd be less dribbling bared teeth if
you could fool everyone into thinking they were hopelessly outnumbered.
Animals skulk off when they envisage defeat - they skulk off and put
their energy into books.

Alex, the Obelensky son, became an England rugby player and was later
killed in the Battle or Britain. Some luck. But ah! Well!

In Hartington, where I sometimes live for a week or so, in Woodyard
House - the garden backs onto sloping fields full of cows and sheep. I
knocked down part of a limestone wall once, when I went walking along
it - the stones have no mortar holding them in place. So I knelt down
to turn the miniature landslide back into solid wall, and all the cows
crowded round me while I did so, staring very moodily, like a pack of
disapproving Bolsheviks. I can't remember how I escaped, but Ah!
Well!

In the lounge, in Woodyard House, in Hartington, in Derbyshire, the
hearth fire snapped and my auntie Paula asked, "Is anyone coming to
collect sheep-turds with me?"

Naturally, we southern brickheads were disgusted at her rusticity - me
and my brother, and my sister, with our gorgeous mongrel accents.

"Ugh!" said my brother, action gamer Mike. "Why would you want to do
that?"

"We need them to fertilize the garden," she replied. "Nothing works
better than sheep-turds."

Paula has an elegant, crisp voice that my reported dialogue does no
justice to. I agreed to go with her and uncle Darren, and I rolled
myself up like a snowball, inside coats and jumpers and scarves and
gloves and boots, til I was very fat, and I squeezed out the backdoor
into my grandparent's blazing garden verge, hopped up stone slab steps,
over the mud-rott slats all nailed to the edge of the fence, into the
raised weals of iced slurry. I waited for Darren and Paula to catch up,
then we went off up the frozen fields toward the sheep patch, I kicking
through mohican tufts of grass and leaping over the rock-cake cowcrap.
The air rasped at our ears, and the distant hills came up into the milk
sky as we climbed.

Paula and Darren had a clutch of clear plastic bags with them, which
they began to fill with onyx pebbles. I held the bags open for Paula as
we squatted and probed, squatted and probed, loading ourselves up with
quality shit. When we had enough, we extended our walk by making for
the river Dove, which marks the border between Derbyshire and
Staffordshire. We passed over the stile where, years earlier, a crucial
transaction had taken place. I was waist-deep in the hell and spit of
puberty back then, and had got up uncharacteristically early in the
morning to draw a picture of Mileena, the blade-hurling wench from some
action game, naked but for her boots and sai blades. I sketched it in
with pencil, inked it in with a 0.3mm Rotring pen and coloured it with
colouring pencils. I used a lot of beige and scrubbed hard with the
pink, especially around the breasts, until she was sore as a
honeysuckle rim. Fairly pleased with the result, I folded the paper up
and put it in a green envelope. Then I fetched one of Mike's magazines
and flicked through with a thumb, til I got to the letters page, where
they publish readers' art. I copied the address down onto my envelope,
hoping my Mileena would serve them as well as she'd served me. I meant
to go straight t the post office, but couldn't think of a good enough
excuse, so I stowed the envelope away for later. Our friend Nick came
round in the afternoon - now his parents ran the post office. I
pondered and plotted, at last suggesting that we three - Mike, Nick and
myself - tear ourselves away from the games console and go for a walk.
When I'd got them outside and safely past the first row of fields, I
produced the envelope and showed them nude Mileena, telling them my
plan. They were mildly impressed, mostly at my colours - the very raw
and lovely pink.

"Why's she wearing boots?" Mike asked, and I confessed that I couldn't
draw feet. It's the toes, I said - the high wire act required of an
artist in order to balance them between stacked doughballs and a mass
of inscrutable lines.

"Besides, boots are?well, you know. Tan Ta Lie Zing."

We went to the stile mentioned earlier, and climbed over it, into a
narrow pathway that wormed back towards the village. Some girls came
upon us there - I'm not sure if we saw them coming or if they just
appeared, but Nick knew them - they were local girls, Hartington girls,
girls of the dales. Nick introduced us. That is, he may have. I could
neither name nor recognise them if I saw them now. And after
salutations, the picture came up immediately, which was distracting.
With a little more reluctance then before, I opened the envelope and
unfolded Mileena. They took her and fingered her flesh, the paper
crackling like fireworks in my ear. I tried to take her back, but they
drew her further into them. One said, "I'll give you three pound for
'er."

"Uh," I said, taken aback and, I think, going pink myself, "Alright
then."

I can't go through the stile there now without recalling that rushed
series of events - the giddy embarrassment of it all. Every time I
thump the path behind the stile and hear the crickle of my bootheels on
loose gravel, I think the girls are going to be there, beside me, still
inspecting my naked woman, running a fingertip along her absurdly high
and firm bosom, or the needle-tip of her sai blade.

They never are, of course, and definitely not when I went over with
Paula and Darren, swinging out clear plastic bags of cack. We went up
the stile on the other side of the footpath, and into more mountainous
fields. We walked toward the river, to the wands of steam that rose up
from its face and bowed onto the frost-smothered banks. The footpath
followed its course and crossed it twice, walled in by steep slopes on
both sides. Paula stopped us before the first bridge, where we used to
play poohsticks, and pointed up the slope, past a broken stone arch and
wooden door, both crowned and robed in ivy and other creeping
plants.

"Let me show you this," she said. "Up there used to be the manor and
its garden. The river goes right around it on three sides. It were out
of bounds to me when I were your age, but I couldn't help myself. I
went up there to see what were inside, and it were all stone animals,
of all different kinds - all birds and beasts and whatever. I tell you,
it were dead frightening."

"What kind of animals?" I asked.

"All kinds. I can't remember anything specific, coz it were such a
long time ago, but it's a right rum place, I can tell you."

"I bet!" I said.

Well I couldn't help myself either. I went back the very next
day?

?tre continue!