Chapter Forty-Two - Joe And
the Goats
The house was built
right alongside the road, facing a stream. Immediately
behind the building the ground rose to roughly the height of
the eaves. There were two small fields divided by a low
stone wall, and half a dozen pigsties which were used to
house goats. In fact the two fields were swarming with
goats, about fifteen of them. In the middle of one of the
fields was a caravan.Joe was
tall with fair hair and he spoke with an old fashioned
Oxford accent. He was walking through the end room of the
house, which at the time only consisted of a wall facing the
road, and some footings for the rest of the walls. I stood
on the grass in the field looking down at the concrete raft,
the blocks, and the cement, and the general grey mess of a
typical building site."Oh no,
don't say you're building a house as well."Joe looked
up at me, obviously puzzled. After all, why should a
complete stranger suddenly appear in his field and address
him like that?I jumped
down onto the concrete base and introduced myself. "Sorry to
charge in on you like this, but someone told me you were a
writer. If I'd known you were a builder I'd have kept well
away.""Why's
that?""I seem to
do nothing but building myself, and I'm sick of it.""Whoever
told you I was a writer?""Oh, some
guy I met in the village. There are so few about I just
wondered.....""Do you
write?""When I'm
not building.""What sort
of things do you write?"But of
course, it wasn't Joe the writer I met. And naturally he
wasn't interested in me as a writer, after all, what writer
is interested in another writer? There are things to write
about, and audiences to read those writings, other writers
are irrelevant.I met Joe
the builder, Joe the property developer, Joe the guy with
the herd of goats, and Joe the harassed father with a whole
family, the guy with a whole bundle of chaos at his back.Above me,
staring down at me with curious, sardonic looks, were the
goats. There is something about goats. They look at you with
that cynical smile, and pretend they find everything
amusing. They flick their ears back and forth in a
scissor-action, then suddenly leap away and play at butting
with another silly goat. They are mockers, jumping between
the reality of eating and staying alive, and the equally
important reality of assing about. There was
also a guy, a very serious guy, who appeared to care, who
appeared to be very sensitive, sitting now on a sofa in the
almost completed part of the house, discussing the ways of
the world in a serious manner, while around us there rushed
a hectic girl with long black hair tied back on her head,
dressed in a long hippy frock, shouting at two tiny
children, and ushering in chaos wherever she whirled like
some tiny hurricane.A kind of
hysterical fluster issued in billows from her clothes and
her wildly busy fingers as she distributed alarm and mayhem
in an unnerving series of trajectories from wherever she
happened to be.I stayed to
tea. * * * * *
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