Desire Path

This is my entry for the Guardian short-story competition. The theme is "a journey". It has to be under two thousand words and it is well under that amount though originally it was much longer. Writing is whittling. I quite like it and it is one of the first things I've written without attempting to be funny.


Desire Path


It took a while for folks round here to notice him. Drifters often passed this way looking for a hand-out or a bite to eat. You never see them again. But our boy…Every month he comes, along a pathway beaten by his feet alone. It’s been the same these past fifteen years, they say. He is patched together, head down and silent. There is some thing that is burning inside of him; that binds him to this lonely road.

He is big, bigger still in his Frankenstein coat. He jogs like a tortoise, a ridged carapace over his back; almost round. His wide shoulders swing; his short legs bend under the weight of the corrugated leather. His face is a half moon, the skin pale under his wide-brimmed hat, his chin eaten away by a dark beard. His eyes bulge, inexpressive as eggs. You see them coming first: whites that are perfectly white, the dark iris and black pupil like bites taken from their milky flesh.

The wind rises, whips through the trees. The flowering dog-wood, white as a new bride; hooped hem worn high over the knee, the shyer big-tooth aspens; spreading their leaves like hands over a naked body; the quaking aspens, arms outstretched, tinselled for winter, shivering like blue-skinned dancers. Here he comes, through the pignut and shagbark hickories, through the American hornbeams, Old Leathery, bouncing, as flat and awkward as a punctured football along his mystery trail.

In every town he has his favourites: the McCrachans in Branchville, Oviatts in Mount Kisco; Pettibones in Trumbull. In Peekskill he returns to the Muzzys; Floyd Muzzy in the drugstore always has a piece to eat for Old Leathery, though Floyd himself is over sixty and must be the older man. There is something ancient about the Leatherman, something elemental in his stillness and silence. He’s like a Death Valley sailing stone; scoring tracks through the parched earth, pushed by the wind over the flat desert basin. Though what compels Leathery on his journey along the banks of the Hudson he alone knows.

I spoke to him once.

He smells of the earth and clay and pine; his coat is mud smeared and curls away from the crude stitches that run down it. Rain and snow have turned up the torn seams so his back has a spine of ragged horns. As he walks, head low like a buffalo, he watches the path ahead of him and watches the circles cut into the soft earth by his stick. He carries a large patch-work bag over one shoulder but it looks empty, it bends as he moves, flapping in the breeze that ripples the water, as though it had nothing to anchor it. But his pocket, the big square-cut pocket on his shell of a coat, that’s different; it bulges. There’s something heavy in there.


“I don’t ask him,” said Floyd Muzzy, over the counter. I was in my second year at a miserable military academy and had the idea to spend as little time as possible on the school’s grounds. The drugstore was a welcome distraction from being “toughened up” for my parent’s sake. My uniform was stiff and disinclined to bend but I was a determined sloucher and had spread over the counter as if spilled. I quizzed Muzzy on Old Leathery; he had, after all, spoken to him, fed him and on a few occasions even shared a beer with him. He was the nearest thing to an expert on the subject that I knew of and I asked him what he knew about the man’s past.

“You know Albert Beebe, over in Naugatuck?”

I didn’t.

“Well you’ve no need to,” said Muzzy, “Has a store over there and it’s on the Leatherman’s route. Leathery used to drop by; sometimes he’d have money, and that’s a mystery in itself, but mostly he didn’t. Albert would always give him something either way. One time, it was just before Christmas and bitter cold, Albert gives him a gill of brandy and has a glass himself, to be neighbourly. They set to jawing, and, as the brandy’s beginning to loosen him up, Albert straight up asks the man; why are you walking that big old circle year after year, rain or shine? Without a word Leathery gets up, walks out of the store and never comes back.”

I sucked noisily on my milkshake, the paper straw melting between my lips.

“But you’ve spoken to him, Mr. Muzzy,” I said, “whatever did you talk about?”

“He’s a gentle soul,” said Muzzy, “has a couple of gardens that he tends on his way round so we talked about that sometimes. In the winter-time he stays in the caves over by Watertown; heats the stones and drinks brandy when the weather gets bad. That’s about it. He’s none too talkative anyways, on account of him not speaking too much English and me not speaking too much French.”

This was news. “He’s French?”

“Canadian, most likely,” said Muzzy, “but could be French, could be. That would be one of the things that I wouldn’t ask about,”

I left the drugstore reeling. This was heady and exciting news: Old Leathery was a foreigner! This would explain his outlandish behaviour, his inscrutable actions. If my French were better I felt I could crack the mystery of the Leatherman and his long, seeming pointless journey. I determined to meet him, to speak to him. Back at the school I found a French phrasebook.


A full moon sat low and white in the sky that night, just out of reach of the blackened tips of the trees. I sat on the edge of my bunk looking out through the half shuttered windows. The fluttering breathing of the sleeping boys synchronised with the thin black clouds that striped the moon like peeling paint. Old Leathery was due in Peekskill tomorrow and I intended to talk to him.

He came out of the shivering trees, walking with his usual purpose. In the distance his bobbing head, short legs and patchwork leather coat lent him the likeness of some monstrous bipedal cow. I leaned against a gate in my stiff grey uniform, twin military tram-lines running to my waist. I was as neat and smooth as he was shaggy and unkempt. Never-the-less he tipped his cap at me as he moved past. I froze. I watched him walk by me; the awkward gait, his great corrugated coat hanging down one side, weighted.

“Monsieur,” I shouted. He kept on walking, an arm rising up and waving over his shoulder.

“Monsieur,” I shouted again, “Qu’est que tu…vous ave…dans…Monsieur, please; what do you have in your pocket?”

He stopped and turned, slowly and deliberately. I had the impression that he had not previously turned back on his journey. He made his way down the pathway with an incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of me. I backed away, unnerved by his scent, like mushrooms, his giant thatched head under the leather cap; those too white eyes; black specks on a hen’s eggs.

“Ma poche?” he said, “Dans ma poche?”

He stood in front of me and I could see the cracks and veins running over that coat, the discoloured patches, the mould and rot. One shoulder was frayed where the bag-strap had gouged a narrow channel through the leather and there was heavily latticed stitching on the pocket into which he now thrust his fat brown hand. The smell of him was overwhelming and the babyish softness of his face was perverse beaming out of that battered upholstery. His white eyes were smiling. He pulled from his the pocket a thick and rusted iron “U” and held it out for my inspection. It looked like an old horse-shoe but as I studied it closely I could see no sign of human manufacture; there were no sharp edges, no maker’s mark. At the two prongs the metal seemed even more impacted and misshapen and was tinged with a dry earthy red. He pushed the object still closer to my face.

“L’aiment de l’amour,” he said, “pour la chance!”

I looked up helplessly. “I don’t understand,” I said.

He wrapped his fingers around the lump of metal and pushed it back into his pocket, and, turning with surprising grace on the ball of one elephant’s foot, he carried on down the path, his head low and invisible behind his collars.

“Je suis l’aiment d’amour,” he shouted, “C’est pour ca que chacun m’aime!”

He turned where the river naturally bent and ducked behind a shaggy hill, long wild grass devouring him like thin green flames. And that was the only time I saw him.

My parents removed me from the school and took me back to Pennsylvania. They never attempted to instil manly virtues in me again and I later attained an acceptable degree of manliness under my own steam. Old Leathery carried on his journey for another fifteen years or so until they found his body in a cave up by Saw Mills on a beautiful spring day. The Connecticut Humane Society had previously had him arrested and admitted to hospital; he was sick from the constant chewing of tobacco, they said. He ran away, of course, back to the path: back to his life. A search party was formed on the first day that he missed his schedule. He was always so punctual and always so well loved.

Punk Girls

To be a young man living in Basingstoke in the eighties was to be in awe of Punk Girls. They offered excitement and the gift of promise and they never, ever delivered: that was their secret. Beneath the peroxide and the visible bra-straps they were just ordinary country girls who just happened to work in Our Price or weekends as bar-maids in a country pub. But what they mean't was an erotic otherness; the possibility new and exotic worlds: under-arm hair, merrydown cider and brightly coloured under-wear. The headiest of cocktails and utterly intoxicating.




It was summer in Basingstoke and Ian, Robin, Dietch and I were lying in the long pale grass outside the Caribbean Club, drinking the rice-wine that Ian had stolen from his father’s cellar. Our usual tipple was Southern Comfort, swigged from the bottle; the burning sensation rising in our chests like we’d had a day at the beach drunk on ozone. The burnt orange syrup was never pleasant but Dietch had a singular talent for producing these bottles so it became our tipple of, if not choice, then certainly necessity. Today he had come up dry so we were on the home-made rice-wine.

There was rice in the wine. Grains of rice bobbed up and down past the green glass of the bottle, behind the handwritten label displaying its recent vintage. This called into question Ian’s dad’s efficacy as a vintner: I didn’t know much about the wine making process but I knew it shouldn’t have bits of rice floating about in it. It was a Saturday night and seismic bass notes were emanating from the Caribbean Club. This meant two things: the Red Stripe, sold in cans, would be prohibitively expensive so we would have to take care of intoxication before hand. And there would be punk girls in attendance.

Basingstoke had a scant Afro-Caribbean community in the 80s. Beyond the proprietors of the Club and a local punk called (helpfully) Black Eddie, owner of the very first afro-mohawk I had ever seen, it was difficult to see who the natural patrons of the Caribbean Club would be. In fact it seemed at the time there were more “UK Gladiators” living in the town than black people (we had two: Falcon, the woman with the god-awful mullet and one of the blander men: Hunter? Trawler? Ostler? ).

So The Caribbean became the town’s premier indie venue. We had them all in there: The Flatmates, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Bark Psychosis: a veritable “Who’s who” of the mid-eighties indie scene; if you were to drop a “who”. Its biggest coup had been booking The House of Love to play on the Saturday after their first NME cover. Predictably nobody was there. They finished with a cover of “I want to be your dog” which I, in my youthful naivety, thought was a total rip- off “Elves” by the Fall; an a opinion I trumpeted to all and sundry to surprisingly little derision. There were no punk girls in that night. But we lived in hope.

The rice wine was taking hold. It was astonishingly unpleasant; evaporating on the tongue with an aftertaste of Vosene. But after a few short swigs, spitting out the rice like worms from tequila, we were starting to get a buzz. In those days I hardly ever drank beer. When it was party-time my mother would dutifully buy me a six-pack of Tesco’s own-brand beer, which was called “Norseman”. I would do my level best to ditch said six- pack behind the sofa on arrival, helping myself to a real drink as soon as possible, safe in the knowledge that when that ran out I still had a six-pack of “Placebo-brau” tucked away. But I was spotted too many times earning myself the nick-name “Norseman” for years to come. My name in Gaelic means “Norseman”. Though I suspect that had little to do with the branded lager my forebears were drinking. They were probably on the Harp.

None of it’s there now. The Caribbean Club was demolished to make way for custard-yellow flats that stand empty to this day. Ian, Robin, Dietch and I have gone our separate ways and I haven’t had rice wine since. Especially not rice wine with rice in it.