It’s the fifth day of stifling heat in succession, Mandy says she’s tired of the beach and what she calls “the feeling of saltwater seeping into my inner workings” so instead we go to the supermarket to cool down. We opt for Sainsbury’s because its cool aisle is set at a dependably lower temperature than those of rival supermarkets. While approximately parallel to the houmous and antipasti we run into Louise and Louis.
“Oh my god, what the hell are you guys doing here?” we chime.
“We came here to cool down,” they chime. “We don’t even need any food!”
“Oh my god, same!” we chime.
Soon we are chatting about what feels like every topic under the ferocious sun, while genuine customers reach awkwardly around us to grab artichokes, Kalamata olives and the new thistle-flavoured tahini that Sainsbury’s, clearly strapped for ideas, have rolled out for the summer. It goes well, or at least significantly better than last time the four of us got together, when I got tipsy and called Louise “Louis” and Louis “Louise” by mistake. Louis suggests that a fun activity might be to go off in different pairs for the remainder of the day. From a trouser pocket he produces an intricately folded piece of paper which, curiously, has one of our names pre-written on each of its four compartments. He twists this contraption, which he calls a “Fortune Teller”, in his hands, pulling the face of a confident Edwardian magician, and it is subsequently decided by the Fortune Teller, and by Louis, that I will spend the afternoon with Louise and he will spend the afternoon with Mandy.
In the car park, Louise tells me she knows an oxbow in the river where the current slows and the water deepens, which is just perfect for diving and swimming. “Unfortunately,” she adds, “it’s 1197 miles away on the Austria-Slovenia border.” But she says she knows another one, about forty minutes’ drive, which, due to its altitude and general emotional disposition, is cool and refreshing even on the hottest of days. As I steer, she sits in the passenger seat and fiddles with a smooth pebble, about the size of her hand. I notice that its centre has been eroded by the sea into an almost perfect circle. “What’s that?” I ask her.
“It’s a hagstone,” she tells me. “They’re historically associated with witches. Some people say that if you stare through them you can see a living being’s true form. I’m one of the some people who say that. Hey, let me check you out.”
She raises the stone to her left eye, like some venerable old cave banshee with a prehistoric magnifying glass, and peers at me. Unnerved, I veer marginally off the road, almost mowing down Mr Willerclough, who once tried and failed to guide me smoothly through my Applied Xenophobia GCSE to a grade of C or above, and is now older and out for one of what will turn out to be the last 54 walks of his life.
“No, we are all good,” says Louise. “You’re just Robert.”
“I’m glad,” I say. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve never felt like much else aside from a Robert.”
“I tried it on our cat last week,” says Louise. “When I looked at her through the stone she yelled at me and became the leader of a Saxon tribe.”
“Were there any telltale signs that made you think the tribe was specifically Saxon?”
But, Louise, already tiring of this line of conversation, is busy examining her hands. “I’ve always had small hands and tiny fingers and thumbs,” she says. “Hamsters love it because when I hold them it makes them feel like they are taking a brief holiday in the more swashbuckling persona of rats. Once at art school everyone was asked to do a charcoal drawing of their own hands and when the teacher came over to look at my drawing he said, ‘I think you’ve got the proportions a bit wrong there.’ Then he looked at my actual hands and said ‘No, in fact, you’ve got it just right. Excellent work. Carry on!’.”
The walk from the car to the river is leisurely, mostly because every time we see a bird or someone’s dog, Louise insists on stopping to look at them through the hagstone to find out if they are bullshitting about being birds and dogs. I find myself wondering about Mandy and Louis and hoping they are having just as pleasant an afternoon as we are. When we arrive at the oxbow in the river, it’s wholly idyllic and mercifully empty of loud irritating teenagers, unlike most such places at this time of year, but we discover we have neglected to pack our swimming costumes. Instead we swim in our clothes: Louise in her goth jumpsuit, clogs and straw hat and me in the old drainpipe jeans and Sigue Sigue Sputnik tour hoodie that I wear just to spite those cynics who persist in claiming neither garment suits me. Our progress is not what you might call dynamic but after two hours of front crawl we reach the waterfall fifteen yards away. We feel anointed by its spray and we laugh, coming to the realisation that we are laughing at nothing but being there and alive, then laughing all the more for the idiocy of that realisation.
“It’s hard to even imagine winter on a morning like this, isn’t it?” says Louise. It’s 6.21 pm, but, being ideologically against cruelty, I refrain from correcting her. After our drive home, she insists on giving me the hagstone as a gift to remember our day by. I say goodbye, and, upon reaching my front garden, immediately use the hagstone to scrutinise next door’s tortoise, who to me has always seemed somewhat shifty. It instantly seems different. Still a tortoise. But marginally more green.
“Wow,” I think. “Maybe this thing does actually work.”
Mandy arrives home about two hours later and discovers me in the kitchen on my laptop, using the “street view” function on a house listing on RightMove to take a discursive tour of the lanes of rural Shropshire. By the time she arrives I have already travelled from Shrewsbury to Ludlow, taking picturesque detours through the villages of Pulverbatch, Hope Bowdler and Wall Under Heywood. I’m on the tantalising cusp of seeing Ashford Carbonel for the first time when she tells me she has an important announcement to make.
She says she is head over heels in love with Louis and the two of them are going to live in the Scottish Highlands together. This doesn’t come as of much of a surprise as it might. I’d always suspected she was lying when she said she despised grouse moors and there’d been a lingering question about her and Louis in my mind for a while, particularly since last year when, during the party to celebrate my promotion in the History faculty of the university where we all work, he stopped the music and, to her obvious pleasure, took both of her breasts out of her dress and drew benevolent faces on them. She starts to talk about “new starts”, feeling that she has “outgrown the whole situation of, like, Us” and other cliches but I’m not fully listening because by this time I have picked up the hagstone and am looking at her through it and have discovered that she’s not a human woman at all, but a deluxe American fridge. I’m no expert but I’m going to guess probably the kind that carries a price tag of over two thousand pounds. She even has two ridiculous extra drawers just for the storage of pizzas and one of those fancy ice makers on the side. I notice the ice maker boasts of something called “no-frost technology”.
I surprise myself by being fine with the Louis stuff, even when Mandy confesses she has been sleeping with him for the last fifteen months: at least she’s come clean, instead of continuing to operate behind my back, stringing the situation out and making it worse for everyone. The fridge situation is harder to stomach. Six years: it seems a long time not to notice, even as the unobservant person I am. “How could you?” I ask. “I distinctly remember you claiming you were struggling to cool down this morning, before we went to the supermarket in an attempt rectify that, and now it transpires your claim was patently untrue.” But she says nothing, just takes her stuff and leaves. “So that’s what they mean by no-frost techology!” I refrain from shouting as she walks out the door, since I am at root a bigger person than that. In time, I get over it, and find much about being alone soothing, including the realisation that the industrial rattling noise I used to hear in the middle of the night was not a ghost, like I’d thought, but merely Mandy efficiently refreshing her ice department. As for the hagstone, I still have it, and put it to use frequently. It’s shown me some surprising things, some dark things and some strange things (finding out that my postman was not a postman at all but actually another hagstone was a notable highlight). But I am reassured to consistently discover that lies and subterfuge are in the minority and most living beings in our topsy-turvy world are in fact broadly what they purport to be.
You can order a signed first edition hardback of my new novel Everything Will Swallow You here, from the fabulous 146-year-old UK bookshop Blackwell’s, with FREE international delivery. You can also read an extract of the book here if you want to try to gauge whether or not you think you’re going to hate it.
I collect hagstones (also sometimes known as “adderstones”). I’m not totally sure why, but they’re cheaper than rare vinyl and can be stunningly attractive and diverse. The day before yesterday, I found three great ones on the beach (see photo below). At 6am today, while admiring them, I told myself, ‘Here’s a challenge: write a silly story of less than 2000 words about a hagstone.” I had no idea what else it would be about but it turned out to be great fun to write. I then agonised about whether to put it behind a paywall. Substack has changed quite a bit for me (and possibly many others) in recent weeks: my subscriber figures - both free and paid - have plummeted dramatically and I can’t claim it isn’t a cause of worry. I’m working no less hard than before, and feel no less proud of the writing I’m putting on here, but I can also see that site is getting more crowded, more celebrity-driven, people are feeling more overwhelmed with the number of things to read in their inbox, the algorithm is more of a dictator than ever (a dictator, moreover, whose main concern is, more than ever, the zeitgeist and swift, brief, noisy responses to it), and decisions are, more than ever, shaped by the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. But ultimately I want my work to be read by the people who want to read it, including those who are not in a position to support it financially via Substack. So I’ve made Hagstone free for everyone to read. I’ve included a link for new paid subscriptions above but if you can’t afford that but would still like to support my work at a price of your choice, I’m including this link to my website for one-off “buy me a coffee” donations or smaller subscriptions (these also have the bonus of me not having to pay a percentage of the fee to Substack on top of the one I already pay to Stripe). It all helps keep me writing which, as this morning has reminded me, is what I love to do more than pretty much anything in the entire world.
Thank you for sharing Hagstone with us, Tom. I thoroughly enjoyed it. In fact, I have a hagstone of my own and am now off to look through it at the cows in the field opposite my house. They have been behaving oddly over the last few days and I suspect they are not cows at all.
Got the mad giggles upon reading:
"...efficiently refreshing her ice department."