jake!

robert stone

Rice was still unsure of his modest intentions even as he left the house. He thought he would buy a ticket to Melton, the station beyond Woodbridge, then walk back to Woodbridge along the river and there visit the high street where he could buy books and CDs in the charity shops.

He would call in at Mick’s on the way to the station and get two flapjacks and a bag of mini-Cheddars for his lunch. He thought to eat these sitting by the river at Wilford Bridge in Melton and having a read but he knew he might eat them on the train. That had happened before. It was only a fifteen-minute journey.

The weather was cool but dry. He would be alright to read outside for an hour and his scarf was stuffed in his pocket. He crossed to Mick’s side of the road. Twenty minutes should be enough to shop, even if there were a queue, which there almost never was. Up ahead, however, walking quickly towards him, was a man, swearing uninventively into his mobile, ear phones plugged in, not attending apparently at all to his exact direction of travel and with a muscular dog on a long lead. An unruly-looking dog and similar man. Rice was not afraid of dogs but without hesitation he crossed back over the road to avoid the awkwardness of passing this man and his excitable animal on the narrow path. No Mick’s today. He would get something in Woodbridge, a spinach and feta roll.

He had his cards ready even before he entered the station lobby. That was an old man thing to do. He’d had a senior railcard for more than a year but it still gave him a miserly thrill to use it. A third off. Lovely. Melton was three short stops away so a third was not a great saving but he could buy a CD with that money. Greater Anglia’s gift to charity and to culture.

Rice had no one to answer to, which, naturally, was a burden to him and he changed his mind once again on the train. He was anxious, childishly so, to look in the shops and hungry for his lunch. He would get off at Woodbridge and walk on to Melton, otherwise he would have to wait until he had walked back to Woodbridge for that spinach and feta and he would have nothing to eat while he sat by the river. He should have taken the trouble to go to Mick’s.

There were more than half a dozen charity shops in the high street but Oxfam and the Queen Elizabeth Hospice were the best bets. Rice never thought of which charity a shop supported. He didn’t care, although he had avoided the ‘pro-life’ shop in Ipswich. That seemed, anyway, to specialise in baby clothes, nursery paraphernalia and wool from what he had seen through the window. More volunteers than customers. He didn’t know what he thought about abortion, not really.

He didn’t find a lot in the end. A couple of CDs of music he had never heard, might be alright, good labels, and The Mound People by PV Glob. He got that for fifty pence because the pages were falling out. He had read Glob’s The Bog People forty years ago. That seemed as remote a time to him now as the lifetimes of these executed and exhumed Danes. Rice did not know whether he was still the man who had read that book, or a stranger with the same name. Remarkable photographs, some of the most amazing photographs ever taken of human beings. The Mound People was not so good as The Bog People, the bodies not nearly so well preserved.

It occurred to Rice that mining the charity shops was akin to archaeology. Obviously, the death of the previous owner was not the only reason for a book turning up in Oxfam, but when you found, say, three books published by the Grove Press in one go, or four novels by Alexander Baron, what was the likelihood? These books had been collected. No one gives such things away. Scratch one serious reader. As sure as a headstone.

He bought his roll and walked down to the river by the tide mill. He didn’t know why Woodbridge was so called. There surely could never have been a bridge of any kind here. The river was too wide. Was it not? He began his walk, away from the sea.

The path was often busy on this side; takers of exercise, walkers of dogs, watchers of birds. It was pleasant. There was a lot of greenery and even the businesses were boatyards, carpenters, craftsmen making bespoke furniture, and that was interesting. The sewage plant stank but you passed it in a minute and it attracted birds. Rice had heard a nightingale there last spring. On the other side of the river, the Sutton Hoo side, there was no path.

It was hard to say how wide the river was here, hard for Rice to say, anyway. It could not be very deep although evidently navigable. It had islands on which birds sheltered at high tide. He could see a flock of avocets packed tight like a stratum of chalk just below a long thin strip of grass on a narrow island more than a hundred yards out. Or like bathroom tiles, black and white, all that is left of a ruined house. At low tide the birds got onto the mud beyond the islands and you could not see them. The river had its secret life.

He thought of the world under the water, the culverts, crevasses and gaping trenches of the bed. Those channels in which rivers ran under this river, the cold water there that took its own course. The objects lost and thrown away that would never be found. The rare plants that no one would ever see, the ridges, ranges and chasms that might be the homes of monstrous eels. And there you were looking at it, the chilly and indifferent flux.

Rice measured the distance with his eye in one hundred yard sprints. He could remember, long ago, running such a distance. How many hundred yard sprints was it to the Sutton Hoo side? Rice couldn't find a number that would mean anything to him. He lacked the mechanism necessary to calculate such things. How many furlongs, how many cricket pitches? The river was broader here than the Thames outside the Tate Gallery, but that gives the wrong impression because the Thames is a much mightier river than the Deben, its volume of water much greater. At low tide the Deben is little more than a stream and it narrows to a very crossable place at Melton’s Wilford Bridge, doubtless the river’s ancient ford. You could ride across easily and walk it if you didn’t mind getting very wet. Sitting there Rice had seen cobbles that might have been the road before the bridge was built and larger pieces of masonry that were likely parts of an earlier structure. It’s concrete and brick now.

The Thames is impossible without a bridge or a boat. The Deben is broad because it expands downstream from Melton into that field of mud around Flea Island, as someone, Adey, dead for years now, had told him it was called. It probably wasn’t really called anything. Why should it be? The tide is the thing. The river claims a lot at high tide that its low tide self wouldn’t dream of.

Along much of this walk a metal, probably steel, wall acts as a flood barrier. It hardly seems necessary, this is not an ambitious river, but Rice supposed it must be. People choose to sit on it despite the many benches. The metal gets hot in the summer but is much less inviting on a winter’s day. Children walk along it, often holding a parent’s hand, so it pleased Rice to see a black Labrador single-mindedly trot along the barrier and making all of those taking a rest and one hand-held child get out of its way. Rice thought dogs were a nuisance generally but this one was so rude and the idea of rudeness attributed to a dog amused him. Even the people ploughed out of the dog’s way thought it was funny. Woodbridge was a good-natured place. People seemed to like one another here.

It attracts tourists. You can get in the tide mill which is a museum and the river provides easy and attractive walking for miles, but Sutton Hoo is the main reason that people come. 625 AD is the date. Rice had looked it up several times and he remembered it now. The people of Woodbridge had dragged a Viking longship into the field alongside the riverbank and buried their king in it with his grave goods, including the splendid helmet that everyone has seen. There were already barrows in the field but these were ordinary tombs. The ship lay undisturbed until 1939 when Basil Brown’s excavation found it to be the only known ship burial in Britain.

People said that Redwald was the buried king because they couldn't do without a name, but no one really knew. Once everyone had known the king who was buried there and did not imagine a period when it might be forgotten. The simple passage of time had wrought that. The secret life of the world had ticked on. The secret that is no secret.

The Sutton Hoo site had been desecrated more than a thousand years ago. Christians had used it deliberately as a place of execution and criminals were buried there. Building the barrows must have been a great unifying endeavour. That might have been an important part of the point of them. Everyone would have helped, the community, perhaps been made to. Now we have charity shops, our communal resource.

Rice had once walked among the barrows after dark, looking for birds. It had not been quite dark, he remembered because a chiffchaff had called all the time that he had been there, persistent and monotonous, counting off all the million seconds. Chiff chaff. Chiff chaff. Like a metronome keeping the beat of things. He had had an eerie time of it.

He had his binoculars slung around his neck now as he approached Flea Island, the mud field all around it under water at this point. Binoculars are an invitation to strangers to talk to you, like walking a dog. Rice was ready for these two. He had seen them scanning the water through their own glasses and he knew that they had seen him and would speak to him. It was a woman and what was surely her son, a little boy under ten. An unusual combination. At no point in the ensuing exchange did the boy take his glasses from his face, or look away from the water or offer any indication that he heard anything that was said. Rice liked him. Children with binoculars tend to bring out the evangelist in most birdwatchers.

She said,

- These birds on the island, do you know, do you mind, can you tell us what they are?

Rice raised his binoculars. He was glad to be asked. A woman was talking to him which was nice, he was flattered and helping her wasn’t going to cost him anything. He paused so as not to give the impression that the answer to her question was really obvious, although it was. Rice hadn’t heard his own voice for several days.

- I think they’re black-tailed godwits.

- Black-tailed godwits, Simon.

She looked very pleased and grateful. Rice was equally so, to be included in her view of the world as a friendly, co-operative place. Simon might have been made of stone.

- Some of the birds still have a few russet feathers left over from the summer.

The three of them watched the godwits together. The birds did nothing. Occasionally one would lift its rather comical head and as rapidly tuck it away again. A wing would be stretched high. Rice hoped that the birds would fly, rise and circle and return to the exact same spot as though a poker-faced conjuror had thrown a deck of cards into the air in a black and white swirl and then caught them all again in one hand. But the birds did nothing.

- Have you seen anything else, she asked?

The standard question. He didn’t think that he had really, nothing that he didn’t usually see at this time of the year.

- There are a few avocets off the boatyard.

- Avocets, Simon. Where are they, how far back?

It was apparent that Simon and his mother had never seen an avocet. These birders were at the beginning of their journey. People think avocets must be rare because they are so beautiful. Rice told her where they could find the birds, which they would surely see so long as they were willing to walk that far. Always a pleasure to put someone onto a new bird. She was excited for her little boy. Mentioning the sewage works would have been a help in finding the right island but Rice didn’t like to bring it up, felt squeamish about it. He could have told her about the nightingales to be found there but that was almost projecting a friendship between them into the future and those birds were not there now.

He was soon at Melton, not that there was much to the place. He crossed the busy road that went over the Wilford Bridge, next to the pub of the same name, and walked down to the water’s edge where there was some flat ground suitable for sitting and reading. Even at high tide the river was narrow here. He had brought a book with him of course but he took out the Glob and had a look through that. The Mound People. These people had been buried in barrows too, in great oak coffins. The coffins had survived but water had gotten into them and some chemical in it had dissolved the bones of the corpses leaving only skin tanned like leather. The first finders of the coffins had thought they were empty but for a few rusty bits and pieces and had thrown away the boneless bodies without noticing them.

Rice became absorbed. He liked the descriptions of the modest things that were found...two small bronze discs with raised spikes. Such things often called ornaments as if that explained anything...two rows of bronze tubes, about one hundred and twenty-five of them in all.

He read on, arrested by the photographs, flicking through. Certain words caught his eye. A collection of objects that might once have belonged to a shaman, comprising a part of his equipment...a squirrel’s jaw, a falcon’s beak, the tail of a grass snake.

It was while reading this that he heard the train go by behind him. That was the train that he had hoped to catch back home. He cursed. He was cold. He decided to walk back to Woodbridge and get on the train there. He might see Simon’s mother again, but it was unlikely and he wasn’t thinking about that as he knotted his scarf around his neck.

The tide had hardly seemed to change, the water was still slack. He looked at an island on which there were three tall trees quite dead. They had grown twenty feet and then the water had killed them, the salt most probably. Cormorants roosted on them now and sometimes a little egret. Someone had told him that mere decades ago cormorants never roosted in trees, only on cliffs. They were changing and moving inland.

Rice didn’t meet Simon and his mother on the way back. He wondered if they had bothered to try for the avocets. What he did see was a man standing facing the water and shouting at it. Rice couldn't hear what he was shouting at first but it was the same word over and over. When he got closer he understood the man was shouting Jake! and he was shouting this at a black Labrador that was on the opposite riverbank however many yards away. Rice stopped and looked at the man, a little behind him. What was to be done? He looked with an interested curiosity, watched the man and waited.

It appeared that this had been going on for some time, judging by the man’s hoarse exasperation. Rice didn’t like to ask at this point. Jake’s owner was a beetle-browed Cro-Magnon-looking chap with hair rather like a dog’s fur, but red. Bristles almost. He was a tough, a roughneck. His face was like a fist that opened when he shouted and closed tight again when he was quiet. He was clearly upset.

Lots of dogs swim in the river as part of their walk. Their owners throw things for them to retrieve. Jake had, for reasons of his own, swum all that way to the Sutton Hoo side and now could not swim back, or chose not to, or did not understand that he had to. If this were a cat up a tree scenario you could phone the Fire Brigade or the RSPCA. Part of the problem was the absence of a path on the other side. Jake was on the edge of rough scrub that ended at the water. Even if you were over there it would not be at all clear that you could tell where the dog was and to cross the river from here and to find the right route through the fields where the barrows were was no small matter. The road ran some distance from the water.

Jake was so far away that Rice couldn't properly make out what he was doing. He looked at him through his binoculars. The dog had his mouth open in that simulacrum of an affable grin that Labradors have. He might have barked once or twice, but you couldn't hear him. Like a silent film of a dog, all the noise around them made quiet by that unheard barking. Maybe Jake could hear his owner, a dog’s senses being more acute. Rice thought that he could shout too, to increase the volume and perhaps excite Jake. The owner might think that he should mind his own business.

Could Jake island-hop back to the Woodbridge side? Or walk back through the mud at a lower tide? That would take many hours, the turning of the tide, it would definitely be dark by then. Rice wondered if Jake might have an almost genetic knowledge of tides and of the time of day, or know that there ought to be an easier crossing nearby. Could an animal know that? Really wild animals must know. They are not bamboozled by rivers, they don’t cross them just by luck, by trial and error, do they? But this was assuming that Jake wanted to come back.

Rice watched Jake through his glasses again, curious to see how he was spending this time. The dog paced a few yards of the shore, sniffing at the water, carelessly standing in it. Occasionally he raised his head and pricked up his ears as though he could hear his name being called but not sure from where. He lifted his leg a time or two. He sat on his haunches and watched the green water. He shook himself and perhaps turned the air around him silver, but you couldn’t see that, not from here. If he caught the scent of a rabbit he would be gone and that wilderness was alive with rabbits.

Rice dared to ask the man if he had a phone. He could have phoned a friend who would watch Jake and liaise with the owner as he made his way to Sutton Hoo and through the scrub. The owner had no phone. He looked ashamed not to have one and irritated with Rice for bringing it up, who didn’t have one either. Perhaps he felt tested. Rice suggested that it was a pity that no one could swim across, as Jake had done. This was a stupid thing to say, but the owner wasn’t angry. At least someone was talking to him, keeping him company. Everyone else walked by without comment, amused if anything. Still, the man could not see how Rice might help him and neither could Rice, but he needed only a very little encouragement to keep talking. Rice did think of simply walking on, catching his train, going home. It was an option and he was a man who considered options rather than one who felt urgent desires. It was cold and he only now remembered that he had not eaten his roll. It seemed callous to eat it in front of this man.

An obvious solution, Rice thought, would be for the man to walk away and forget the whole thing. Jake was only a dog. Get another dog. You wouldn’t do that with a child, but this situation exactly demonstrated the difference between a dog and a child. You can reason with children, who are often, in any case, relatively poor swimmers. It was within this man’s power to walk away and rescuing or retrieving his dog was not.

Rice admired Jake though. The Deben had been a Lethe to him, if not a Styx, once he had plunged in. All of a certain world forgotten. Only the need to swim to the other side remained. Forget your old and pathetic life. Had Redwald been laid to rest with a dog at his feet? He wasn’t sure he hadn’t got that from a film. Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis.

Rice considered Jake’s options. He had swum five hundred yards, perhaps, but also fifteen hundred years. A poet had said that time is inches and the heart’s changes. Jake had swum to the day when the ship was dragged from the river. Imagine the heart and lungs of that heroic animal, swimming the great night journey to the land of the dead. Where ought Jake to want to live? The Sutton Hoo side was death, or the ancient and better world. Or does he return to Woodbridge where he is only a pet, a daft dog? Better to be swept off to drown. The dog is wild at heart. It once ran alongside better men than these and it only takes a dip in the river and it remembers that unspoilt life. It clicks back into place like a dislocated bone. Jake was free now. His primeval body on its joyful escapade. How were we to lure Jake back from his wild and ancient life? With a biscuit?

A robin began to sing behind them. Rice had no need to turn around, he was sure of the song. Robin, he muttered under his breath, unable to help himself. He was getting tired of standing. He couldn't feel his toes, the only parts of his feet that did not ache.

He admired Jake’s owner too. It takes a certain kind of courage or desperation to stand on a riverbank and shout as Woodbridge files past behind you. You give yourself away. You tell everyone what it is you need. Rice thought he might not be able to bring himself to do that for the sake of a dog. It was a matter of self-defence. Admiration, pity, contempt. If Rice shouted too it would divide the shame of the thing and the owner ought to be ashamed because it was clear that his dog did not love him. It’s like he was standing in the street and shouting to his wife, Jacky! Jacky! Please don’t leave me. Come back, Jacky!

He didn’t shout all of the time, although he carried on shouting, perhaps in the hope that the 100th or 200th Jake! would unlock the dog’s obedience. Abracadabra. Little motor dinghies were pottering up and down the river all of the time, but they were here and gone in a moment and could not be made to understand what was required. A sailing boat was moored nearby and a metal clasp in its rigging chimed against its white mast with an unthinking constancy. Rice began to count the chimes. Every fifteen, the man shouted Jake! and Rice realised the man was counting too. Fifteen, his lucky number, perhaps. Unless he had been captured by that pitiless rhythm. He might have been afraid that his voice would break into a humiliating squeak.

Rice wondered what a dog’s name meant to it. Was this dog the one he had seen walking along the flood barrier? He thought not. There were a lot of black Labradors.

He pondered the irrelevant and foolish things he could say to this man. If he had named his dog Redwald he would now be standing here shouting Redwald! Redwald! at Sutton Hoo. He didn’t say this, he said something that surprised himself. He told the man he would go and get his dog for him. The man looked at Rice as though he expected to see him jump into the water there and then.

Rice knew that you don’t do the things you think about doing, only the things you do without thinking. Hearing the robin sing had made him remember that tomorrow was inevitable and the week and the month later. Times passes irresistibly. Life is a collection of disparate things, not a puzzle or a story. A resolution of all of this had looked impossible, but a resolution of some kind was actually impossible to evade.

Rice told the man to stay where he was and he would walk round to Sutton Hoo, over the Wilford Bridge, and find a path through the scrub to roughly where he thought Jake was now. He could take a bearing from the tide mill. The man should stay put in case the dog tried to cross the river again or in case the man’s disappearance should encourage Jake to wander off. Rice stressed to the man that this would take some time, two hours, certainly. He had to dampen the man’s gratitude at this point as he evidently thought that Rice was pleading for some.

- I’d better go straightaway, said Rice, or it will be dark before I get there.

He began to walk briskly back towards Melton. Almost immediately he regretted what he had promised. It’s only a dog, he told himself. When he got to the bridge, having scoffed his roll, finally, as he walked, he was also at the pub of the same name, The Wilford Bridge. It was already dark enough so that the light through the window shone a warm and yellow welcome. Rice decided to go in. He thought that something might turn up in the pub, as things sometimes did, if he got chatting to someone with a car, a dog lover.

When Rice had offered to go and get Jake, he had meant it. Not really out of generosity, more that he saw this as a possible answer. The only one, unless Jake decided to rescue himself. That of course might still happen, the animal would take a hint from the failing light and the falling tide.

Rice ordered his pint and stood reading what was chalked up on the specials board. Steak and ale pie. He looked around the pub. Quiet as yet. He considered that he had done no harm, that he might still go and look for Jake. If not today, then on another day. He might like to live with Jake in those hills, with all of nature by their side.