The couple exit an alley. They’re both mid-to-late forties; the wideness of her hips suggests more than one childbirth, he has the soft paunch and jowls of an office jockey. They almost make it look innocent, but the flush of their cheeks and the way she hitches underwear beneath her skirt is eloquent.
I head over, recorder rolling and a small smile on my lips. This could be too easy. “Excuse me, could I interview you?”
“Sure.” The woman brushes a loose strand from her face, damp with perspiration.
“Thanks. I’m Nick.”
“Carla. This is Richard. So, what do you want to ask?”
“Where’s your dream place to live?”
“What? Erm, The Bahamas? Or an Italian lake?”
“Lake Como?”
“If you say. Somewhere exotic.”
“With the money to enjoy it as well?”
“Oh yes. I’d want to be stinking rich.” Carla laughs. It is loud, unabashed, and contains a tinge of mockery. Her copper hair flashes in the streetlight
“What,” I ask, “would you pay to live a life like that?”
Carla and Richard look at each other, eyebrows raised.
“If you ask me,” Richard replies, “a life like that requires your whole soul. Sucks you dry so you don't know who your friends and family are anymore. It’s all about the money.”
“Sounds like you’ve considered it.” I smile. “If Carla here got rich, and moved to Italy, you wouldn’t go with her?”
“My wife’d be pissed off if I did,” Richard says.
What to say to that? I’m here because this Green Man Fête is reputed to be a bacchanal. Why am I surprised?
Carla laughs. “C’mon, Nick, you can tag along with us. Ask our friends your tricksy questions.”
She takes my arm, pressing a warm breast against me. With Richard on her other arm we stroll back to the main procession.
What follows is total immersion. My recorder and camera go unused.
There is noise. Music, and voices; bubbling, laughing, singing voices. The winter is banished in song, and shouts. Neighbors greet each other like long lost friends, their exuberance is contagious. Carla and Richard introduce me to people. I ask my questions, and attempt to remember names, but there are so many.
“Look, there’s my wife.” Richard points at two women kissing under a tree. One has her hand up the others top. “HEY, GINNY.” Richard grabs my arm. “C’mon, I’ll introduce you.”
We push through the crowd towards the women. The fondling continues. I look around, wondering how many encounters like this are occurring in the darkness.
A hand on my shoulder, I swing round
“So, this is Nick,” Richard says. “He’s doing an article on the fête, and is asking some questions. Nick this is Ginny, and Lucy.” He covers his mouth and in a mock whisper said, “She’s from the wrong end of the village but, y’know, Green Man and everything.”
Lucy hits him. “What do you want to ask?”
“What is it about the fête that is so freeing?”
She licks her lips. They glisten slightly from transferred lip gloss. “What’s not to be excited about? Everything’s returning to life. The days are longer, it’s still light when I finish work.” She laughs and turns to Ginny, but the brunette has moved a few steps away with her husband.
They’re in deep conversation and the way Ginny flicks a glance at me, I suspect I’m the topic. The desire to know what he’s telling her burns. I concentrate on Lucy to keep it down.
Carla joins us and kisses Lucy on each cheek. “Has Nick offered you unimaginable riches in exchange for your soul yet?”
“Ooh, not yet. I should tell Ginny she can’t have it after all.”
“Soul, dear. Not body.”
Lucy flutters her eyelashes at me. “My body could be available as well.”
Again, I’m left not knowing what to say and laughter is directed at my discomfort.
There is complete ease with any form of sexual interaction, no shyness or shame. I don’t know if it’s a cultural phenomenon particular to the area, or a construct formed around the Green Man Fête. Historically such festivals were revelries of licentiousness. Today they’re generally an excuse to get drunk, and for shy teenagers to hit on the object of their affection. But I get the feeling that, here, ancient practices are observed in full.
“Leave the poor man alone,” Richard says. “I could do with a beer. And, Nick, it’s about time we start getting painted.”
“I’m good. I have to drive later.”
More laughter at my expense.
“Can we keep him?” Lucy says.
“I’m sure we can,” Carla replies. She slips her arm through mine and squeezes. “Getting painted is part of the festival. We strip to the waist and have traditional designs painted on.”
“Why?”
“All to do with fertility and rebirth, or something like that.” She tilts her head nearer mine. “Mainly, you get to see lots of people topless.”
“Do I have to do it?”
“Of course not! But don’t you want the full experience for your article?”
It’s impossible not to acquiesce.
We reach the village green, a large one complete with a copse of trees at the middle. Food and drink are dispensed without charge from a range of booths and stalls. Jugglers and fire-breathers move between people who are dancing, playing instruments, singing. The whole area is a riotous cacophony and should be a kaleidoscope of confusion, yet somehow it works together.
My guides disperse to get food, or drink, or to speak to others. A few times I see fingers pointed in my direction, the subject of more unknown conversations. Left by myself, I revert to being an observer. It fractures the spell. Discordant sounds and sights assail me. Drums boom, off-key voices mingle in song, none of them matched by instruments. Alcohol and tobacco permeate the air. People around me have flushed cheeks and dilated pupils. There is a heady air of expectation, anticipation.
I assume it must be for the arrival of the Green Man. For all that this is his festival there is no sign of his presence.
Richard and Carla return and drag me to a booth where body painting is being done by a man sat on a low stool. He's naked apart from yellow and blue Bermuda shorts. A prodigious stomach rests on his thighs. His torso is covered in assorted brush marks, layered, with no design or order.
Carla says, “That’s my husband, George, he’s a genius with the brush.”
While the marks on his own torso were unremarkable, the ones he paints on a toned man in his twenties is amazing. With deft strokes he sketches out a pastoral scene, dipping into his palette again and again, each time adding a different colour. When he finishes, George sprays a clear lacquer over the work and says, “Go stand by a brazier for a few minutes, and you're good.”
“Thanks George.” The man pirouettes past us.
“This is him?” George asks.
“Yes,” Carla replies.
“What do you want painted?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “I’m not really sure.”
“Stand here and watch,” Carla says. “Then let him do his magic.”
She kisses my cheek, strips her top off, unclasps her bra, and flings her arms apart in front of her husband. “Ta daa!” Her breasts sway and slap.
“Seen ‘em before. Stand still and tell me what I’m painting.”
“A big house by a lake, and mountains.”
George pauses for a moment, staring blankly in contemplation. Then he starts painting. Water flows onto Carla’s belly, mountains rise around her breasts, a shoreline snakes round her side. George paints a magnificent roman villa on her back. It is real, stylish, and a parody. The whole perfectly uses the rolls and contours on Carla’s body, enhancing what beauty magazines would portray as flaws.
My turn. George and I lock eyes. It’s my last opportunity to back out but I’m already too invested. I nod.
His brushstrokes are deft and swift. The lighter ones tickle my skin, others are firmer, dragging paint on to me. When George has me turn I find a small crowd watching. They are silent, staring, shifting to gain a better view, bumping against each other. Their eyes remain locked on me. Some I recognise, I've met them. One or two wave and, apprehensively, I wave back.
“Why are they watching me?”
“Everyone wants to see the Green Man be painted,” Carla replies.
“What?”
I look down and my torso is wreathed in shades of green.
“Stand still!”
“How can I be the Green Man?”
“Because you were chosen,” Richard says. “Same as every year. Someone, somewhere, becomes the Green Man.”
“I’m not even from here.”
“The Green Man never is.”
George has me turn again, and thankfully I’m no longer staring into the crowd. There is a dawning feeling of being a patsy. I’ve been singled out for this, and now there will be no avoiding whatever ritual humiliation is to be enacted. I could break and run, sprint for the edge of the crowd and disappear into the night. I doubt I'd be allowed to make it. It's easier to resign myself to whatever puerile activities are lined up.
“Right, you’re nearly done, Green Man. I just need to do your arms, neck, and face.”
I lower my arms. They tingle, my legs also. “This stuff washes off easily?”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“So, do you paint for a living, George?”
“Oh, no. I’m a warehouse manager. Turn you arm over.”
“Ever tempted to do it professionally? You’ve got the skills.”
“Nope. Any chance you can stop shifting about?”
The tingle is now throughout me, like my whole body is restless. “Sorry. Look, is there any chance I could be allergic to your paint. I feel funny, tingly.”
George glances past me, to Carla and Richard.
“It’s hypo-allergenic paints, and natural fibre brushes,” he says. “I’m almost finished. If in a few minutes it’s still tingling, you can wash it off. Okay?”
I nod. George levers himself up and paints my neck and face.
“Finished,” he says. “Let the people see their Green Man.”
The crowd is bigger. George places a small stool before me and bids me stand on it. The crowd cheers, and surges forward. In panic I look at Carla.
“Just go with it,” she says. “You’re the Green Man. Without you there’s no guarantee spring will come.”
“So, I’m some kind of Punxsutawney Phil?”
The crowd hauls me into the air. My limbs are heavy. They bear me to the copse of trees. When they put me down I can’t move, nor feel my feet. Paralysis creeps up my body.
The crowd stands around me, cheering, chanting. “GREEN MAN, GREEN MAN, GREEN MAN.” It is elemental, atavistic, a direct vocal link to deep, dark places in the human psyche. To where human becomes something else, recalling what life was before splitting into this avenue of existence.
Carla and Richard stand before me, arms around each other.
“I can’t feel my legs,” I say.
“It’ll be over soon, Nick,” Richard says.
“What’s happening?”
“You know what gave it away, Nick?” Carla asks. “Your eyes. They’re so old, they’ve seen too much, know too much. Of course, all those little temptations were easy tells. You shouldn’t ever play poker.” She laughs. "Every couple of centuries you try. We catch you every time."
The paralysis crawls up my torso. I no longer feel breath, and my arms are stiffening.
I came here to tempt the easiest of sinners. To take them into debauchery which would forfeit their souls. Yet I’m the one caught. The primal magic they have wrought on me, from a time before I was imagined, is too powerful to escape. If I’d realised earlier there’d have been hope, if I'd remembered earlier attempts. Now all I can do is watch the crowd baying as I join the copse of trees on the village green, the sacrifice which is their harbinger of spring.
As legs twist together into a combined trunk, and arms split and twist, furcating over and over, sprouting leaf bearing branches which bud instantly, I'm left with the sight of Carla and Richard locked in a passionate kiss. One couple amongst a host of such embraces.
story by stuartcturnbull, picture by StockSnap via Pixabay
A version of this story was originally published under my pen-name Clive Tern in Calendark: An Infernal Almanac