As we passed through the porch I noticed that the small African wooden head that usually lived there had fallen to the ground. I had always been nervous around the wooden head, which my mum had purchased from a car boot sale a few years previously. I picked it up and returned it to its perch in the manner of someone holding a segment of something very recently deceased.
I enjoy going to car boot sales with my mum, but because I don’t have her amazing vision, my experience at them often ends up tarred by the brush of anticlimax. When I arrive at a boot sale, full of foolish hope, what I inevitably see is an impenetrable wall of 1990s computer parts and grubby children’s toys. When my mum looks at the same scene, she is able to home in instantly on the one exotic and interesting artefact amid the worthless garbage. ‘I got this for you,’ she said a couple of summers ago, fresh from a boot sale in Lincolnshire, handing me a sharp-ended varnished stick about a foot in length. ‘I don’t like it, but I know you’re quite into weird stuff like that so I thought you might.’
I inspected the stick more closely and realised it was a letter opener, probably made in the early-to-mid-part of the last century. On the blunt end a double-sided Devil’s head had been carved. To be totally honest, I wasn’t sure I liked it either, but it intrigued me all the same, and I thanked my mum and carted it back home to Devon.
Over the next few months I tried to find a comfortable place for the Devil’s head letter opener, but wherever I put it never seemed quite right. I certainly didn’t want it staring at me from on top of the chest of drawers in my bedroom at night as I slept, and when I placed it near my work desk it seemed to send negative messages from its screwed-up wooden eyes. Like all writers, I already have at least one invisible demon telling me that what I do is a load of crud, and I certainly didn’t need a corporeal one joining in and doing the same. By the following year I’d realised that the letter opener had crossed the line separating ‘occult artefact you keep purely due to historical interest’ from ‘seriously freaks me out and needs to leave’. Also, I could argue that its influence had not been a positive one: in the twelve months since I’d got it, I’d contracted a lengthy illness and broken up with my partner. I didn’t think of myself as a particularly superstitious person but whatever move I made next with the letter opener now seemed crucial to my future. However, the process of getting rid of the letter opener wasn’t as easy as you might think. I’m very careful about recycling and I certainly wasn’t just going to shove it in the kitchen bin, while the idea of throwing it into the flames of the fire in my living room gave me visions of vaporous ghouls materialising out of the smoke. I could have just gone and placed it in a field, but what if the crops caught fire the following day, the flames subsequently licking their way up to the associated farmhouse and reducing it to cinders? Lives would be wrecked and I would feel responsible.
Next to my mum’s wooden head though, even the Satanic letter opener seemed of a fairly frivolous and easy-going nature. The wooden head had a monobrow frown that made the countenances of its larger spiritual ancestors on Easter Island look like those of Blue Peter presenters pumped on a home-crafting adrenaline rush. ‘Like’ does not sum up my mum’s initial feelings towards it; she bought it because she found it intriguing and is interested in sculpture and the different historical approaches to it around the globe. For years the head’s home was a crevice between the branches of a willow in the garden, and it lived there for some time in an apparently innocuous and peace-loving way, but in late 2009 my dad fell out of a eucalyptus tree opposite the willow and broke his spine. Upon her return home from the hospital, where the future of my dad as an independently mobile person hung in the balance, my mum noticed that the head’s dark gaze was directed at the exact spot from which he’d fallen.
The years 2008 and 2009 were especially energetic for my dad. In late 2007, after over two decades of doing almost no exercise of a conventionally athletic or sporting nature, he’d made the surprise announcement that he would run in the London Marathon the following spring, dressed in the costume of a superhero directly from his own imagination. He began to train hard, doing circuits around the village cricket pitch, first in a pair of gym shoes three sizes too big for him that he had bought me for school PE eighteen years earlier from the Nottingham footwear seconds shop Jonathan James, then – after a bout of cajoling from my mum and me – in proper modern running shoes that wrapped themselves snugly around his feet. For motivation, he listened to Zairean and Senegalese pop music from the 1960s and Deliverance, the 2003 album by the redneck rapper Bubba Sparxxx. ‘DO YOU WANT TO COME AND WATCH ME RUN ROUND THE FIELD?’ he asked when I visited, standing at the door to the kitchen in tracksuit bottoms and a running shirt stained with brinjal pickle. Not quite sure what I would do to show support as I watched – Clap? Cheer? Fashion a makeshift pompom from some nearby meadow grass? – and feeling a little awkward about it, I declined but later regretted it. The only times I’d seen him run or even been aware of him running since the 1980s
