Halstock

When I was in my mid teens, a few mates and I would sometimes earn a bit of holiday money doing odd jobs on a farm near Halstock. The farmer, a guy called Blakely, was always pleased to get some extra help stacking up bails of hay or picking a few rows of potatoes, and he'd pay us a couple of quid for every hour we worked which seemed like a lot of money to us ten years ago.

This story is about something that happened at Halstock when I was eighteen. It was October half term and it must have been the last time I worked at the farm: by the following Spring I was far too immersed in my A-Level revision to think about earning extra money and the following Autumn I went of to university.

Only two of us were there: me and a guy I knew from my Physics class called William. He was a tall, scrawny lad - not the kind of guy you'd normally expect to find helping out on a farm - and I think he only turned up because his mum was a friend of Blakely's wife and she'd pressurized him into it.

William was definitely a William: you just couldn't make yourself call him Will or Bill. He seemed perfectly matched to his full name's length and angularity, being long and pretty angular himself, and obviously enjoyed the slight air of formality occasioned by its use. That's not to say the guy was stuffy or boring: I guess he was pretty cool in his own way. He was just a little different: a guy who followed his own ideas and who was comfortable with his own style.

He turned up that first morning listening to some heavy metal band or other through his Walkman headphones, staring blankly into thin air as his head bobbed almost imperceptibly to the tinny rhythm.

Blakely walked straight up to him, sharply yanked off his headphones and started taking the piss out of him, ridiculing the name of the band on his black tee-shirt and the newness of his Doc Martin boots. William just stood there, shrugging and sneering. Eventually, when Blakely had finished, William replied, "This is called style, mate... I wouldn't expect a farmer to be able to appreciate its finer nuances..."

At that, Blakely had howled with laughter and the two of them, whether despite or because of the unpromisingly direct start, seemed to hit it off.

I noticed straightaway, even on that first morning, the dramatic impact William's presence had on Blakely. He was normally a no-nonsense kind of guy - a graduate agriculturalist in his early thirties with clear ideas about how a farm should be run - who'd tell us, as soon as we started slacking off, that he had a wife and young daughter to support and didn't have money to waste on freeloaders. "You don't come onto my land just to piss around making jokes about combined harvesters," he'd shouted at one of my mates before telling him to sling his hook. No work, no pay: that was his oft-repeated motto.

But as soon as William appeared that all seemed to dry up. William could stand and chat with him all morning - in fact, that's pretty much all he did - and Blakely just lapped it up. The most he managed was to mutter, "Hey, we better get on, mate..." But then, five minutes later, the two of them would be at it again. Meanwhile, yours truly was hosing out the manure skip and disinfecting the milking cups. Nice.

While we were eating our packed lunches on that first day and Blakely had gone off to get us some mugs of tea - another first - William said, "Rob's pretty cool..."

I swallowed my mouthful too hastily and spluttered, "Rob?"

He nodded. "Yeah. Blakely. That's his first name."

"No-one ever calls his Rob," I coughed, clearing my throat. "I didn't even know that was his name. He's always Blakely. Always has been."

William shrugged and muttered, dismissively, "Well apparently he isn't. He's called Rob. At least, that's what he said I should call him."

Blakely reappeared with the tea and I said, "Thanks, Rob."

He did a double- take and through me look as if to say, "Who gave you that right?" But he couldn't exactly say anything about it, after he'd been so buddy-buddy with William on the first day of meeting him, and so after that he became known as Rob.

It suited him more, actually. The name Blakely made him sound like he might be a cantankerous old fart - probably because that's what his dad, the notorious "Old Mr Blakely" had been - but calling him Rob made him sound a little more human. Which, for all his faults and foibles, he definitely was.

It was on the second or third day that the first thing happened between the two of them. It was pretty much nothing, in itself, but it stands as the first indication of what was about to develop between the two of them. The first hint that the no-nonsense, family-orientated farmer might actually have a bit of thing for eighteen year old lads.

I'd been rubbing a veterinary ointment onto a couple of cows while William did fuck all as usual. Rob was cleaning out the milking stalls while William chatted to him, the two of them giggling at odd intervals like conspiratorial schoolgirls. Occasionally Rob would ask William to fetch him a fresh carton of disinfectant or a bucket or something, but I think he did that entirely for my benefit - just to show that William was supposedly earning his money.

I must admit I was starting to get a bit pissed off by this stage.

I remember feeling like calling over to them, "Hey, William, why don't we do a swap, mate? You rub the mite lotion around these cows' arses and I'll flirt with the farmer. Since we're both getting two quid an hour, that seems pretty fair to me!" But I held back. I kind of knew something was happening, but I didn't really think it was a sexual, or even emotional, thing. I just thought Rob was being nice to William because of the friendship between his wife and William's mum.

But then Rob started going on about William having a 'ginger bush'. It was true that William did have ginger hair, or at least brown hair with a distinct copper-coloured hue to it, so I guess it was reasonable to expect his pubic hair to be of a similar colour. The fact that it might hadn't really occurred to me as an issue, but it seemed to have made a big impact on Rob.

He went on about it, joking that he'd always been a big fan of ginger nuts and other comments like that, while William giggled away.

It would die down and then Rob would start it up again. He tried to draw me into it but I just got on with sorting out the cows' arses. I was pleased I hadn't actually suggested a swap: this was getting a little too heavy.

Eventually Rob said the thing I knew he'd say: "Come on, then, mate. Let's see it. I've got to see how weird it looks..."

It had just been a matter of time.

William laughed, "I'm not showing you my bits... well, not for free..."

Rob grinned. "I'll give you a bonus!" Then he saw the look I threw him from behind the cows and added, quickly, "No, that's just a joke... but you could show us your ginger pubes without getting your dick out if you'd be embarrassed... I've just never seen red hair down there... it seems weird..."

William shrugged. "It's not weird. If I've got red hair on my head, it's obvious I'm gonna have red hair down there..."

Rob kept on. "Yeah, I know. But I've never seen it... I can't imagine how it looks."

I emerged from behind the cow, pulling my rubber glove off.

Rob tried to draw me again, saying, "Have you ever seen a ginger bush, Ollie? You want to see it too, don't ya?"

I shrugged. "Whatever..."

William laughed again. He was loving this. "Come on guys, I'm not gonna put on a peep show..."

I muttered, without being able to stop myself, "Yeah... we can't expect you to actually move to earn your wage, can we?"

William glared over at me while Rob just smiled, perhaps too carried away with the idea of seeing William's pubic hair to realise I was being catty.