More Than This

A Willerby Short

I work from home, so I see Bill most days.

His hands in his pockets, he trudges past my office window, past the church opposite, then along the main street, dressed in his tweeds and flat cap.

He comes up from Hayrick Cottage in lower Willerby, where he lived his whole life. There from when he was born until the heart attack that killed him at eighty-one while picking plums from the best tree in the orchard at the back of the garden.

Mauve tells me he died in hospital in a concrete city and perhaps that’s why he can’t leave – that maybe a soul so rooted in our soil cannot find peace so far away.

“Impossible to know really, though,” she told me once, in the Green Man, when I asked about him. “Always kept to himself. Happy enough to pass the time of day while he was working his garden or allotment, but nobody ever got much more out of him.”

I follow him – in the cool of an early June morning – follow him and his wheelbarrow up the main street, past the paddocks and Sharp’s farm with its swallow-swarmed high barn, past the path that goes to the old railway cutting and the abandoned station, past sleeping Jack’s pool and past the swarm of dormant tumuli.

He stops at a crooked, rotting gate in an overgrown hedge and, because I know he is about to disappear through it and out of our world, I run to him, waving and shouting.

“Bill? You don’t know me, but I know you. Do you need anything? I’ll help if I can.”

He looks at me for a moment before grinning, his old grey face rearranging itself into a wrinkle-map of memory and time.

“What could I need more than this?” he says, gesturing around us at the blue sky, at the white morning moon hanging like a pearl in a summer sea. “I’m fine. Don’t worry. Leave me be.”