by Max Porter
LANNY’S MUM
I was depressed, when we moved here. I’d been ill after Lanny was born and those feelings came back to me. Empty, shrunken, hunted. I had horrifying dreams. I felt watched the whole time, judged, and even when I walked out into the fields and woods I felt scrutinised. And then I cursed the naïvety of the Londoner moving to the country expecting to find there or in themselves ready-made tranquillity.
The first thing I discovered was that the village was noisy. Noisy birds, noisy school playground, noisy farm machinery, endless knocks on the door, all-hours banging and hammering. In the first months I used to go and sit on a bench overlooking the meadow, feeling frightened, and wait for Lanny to come out of school and show me how to live. And once or twice we had prank calls. Well, someone phoned me. When Robert was at work, always when I was alone in the house, the phone would ring and I’d answer and there’d be someone silently there. No heavy breathing or nasty words, but there was definitely someone there. There would be some rustling sometimes, movement, a sense of someone there not saying anything, but I was certain it was someone who knew I was alone in the house. I didn’t tell Robert because he was having a lot of midnight freak-outs, checking the doors and thinking that people were peering in at him. He was adjusting. It did occur to me that it might have been him, phoning from work, stalking his own wife from the carpeted hallways of the city. Anyway, it stopped. Perhaps I wasn’t playing scared housewife with enough aplomb.
One morning I heard a little scream. A pained noise. Animal rasping. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I didn’t know what to do. I felt I needed a rural life-advice number I could call: Hello, there is tiny screaming, there is small beast whining, and I am a depressed out-of-work actress and my husband is a city slicker who wouldn’t know a cow from a boar.
It was a hedgehog caught in the drain. I couldn’t understand how it had got in there. It was distressed. It was dying. I couldn’t see how to get the drain lid off. There was no way to get it out. I thought I should shoot it, to put it out of its misery, but of course I didn’t have a gun. I wondered about calling the RSPCA but I thought they’d laugh at me, for a trapped hedgehog, when there are stolen dogs and wounded hawks, when there are foxes being hunted on an industrial scale by frothing landowning maniacs around here, my top-echelon neighbours in jodhpurs. I thought perhaps I should put something poisonous in the drain, wait for it to die, then rot, then disappear, but what is a hedgehog poison? And how would I convince the yelping hedgehog to eat it? I sat in the loo and I cried. When I came out it had stopped screaming.
Some kind of lethal autopilot took over. I put on my rubber gloves and got a carving knife. I went out, knelt over the drain and stabbed the hedgehog several times in the body and head, trying not to look, attempting not to breathe too deeply. I kept on going. I stabbed and sawed through the gaps in the drain cover until the hedgehog was a pulpy mess of blood and spines, little bones and shiny bits of pink and white. I kept on going, I rhythmically chopped and poked at the hedgehog until it seemed likely that I could rinse it away. I put the knife and the gloves in the bin, boiled the kettle and poured the water in. I remembered passing the abattoir in the small town where I grew up, where blood-pink water would run down the street marbled with occasional shocking crimson. I rescued the knife from the bin and mashed the hedgehog a bit more, and then tried another kettle of water. It took two more kettles and ten more minutes jabbing through the drain to erase all trace of the thing. It was gone.
Now how do you feel? I asked myself.
I felt good.
I felt capable, competent and clear-minded. I bleached the sink, washed the knife and returned it to the drawer. You and I have a little secret now, I said to the blade.
DEAD PAPA TOOTHWORT
He was crouched in the septic tank watching this and he found it very pleasing. He saw in it an aspect of himself, of his part in things. He watched the boy’s mum mashing a hedgehog, turning panic-stricken animal into watery blood-spike soup, and he loved it very much, same as Mrs Larton stamping on a poisoned mouse to finish it off, same as John and Oliver shooting jackdaws at the tip, same as Jean drowning wasps in her jam-trap. One day as good as any in the human war against others. He loved the foot-and-mouth culls and spent those months slipping in and out of burning livestock; nothing new to Toothwort, veteran witness of the bovine burcs, the flus, the wonderful rinderpest, rain rot and sheep scab, the cycles of mange, mastitis and pox, he’s seen things die in thousands of ways,
He loves it when a lamb gets stuck being born, when man and ewe and lamb are all suspended, reckoning with the terrible joke of the flesh and the rubbery links between life and death,
Dead Papa Toothwort has seen monks executed on this land, seen witches drowned, seen industrial slaughter of animals, seen men beat each other senseless, seen bodies abused and violated, seen people hurt their closest, harm themselves, plot and worry or panic and rage, and the same can be said of the earth. He has seen the land itself cut apart, its top layer disembowelled, stripped and re-plundered, sliced into tinier pieces by wire, hedges and law. He has seen it poisoned by chemicals. He has seen it outlive its surgeons, worshippers and attackers. It holds firm and survives the village again and again and he loves it. He wouldn’t do well in a wilderness.
PETE
She asked if I could do her a favour. If I could pick him up after school from his mate Alfie’s house on Chalkpit Lane. Robert was away on business, trebling invisible fortunes or whatever it is he does.
Alfie’s mum Charlotte is one of those health and safety types and regards me as smelly and dangerous. She’s surely googled me and knows I was once famous for filling a gallery with painted wooden dicks. Her life insurance policy is probably more expensive due to the dangerous proximity of creativity to her neat detached house with underfloor heating and wipe-clean walls.
No offence intended, Peter, she said, not inviting me in, but I think I should just check with Lanny’s mother.
She’s in London meeting with her publisher, I said. I am instructed to feed Lanny and drop him home at bedtime when his father will be home.
I’m sure that’s right, Peter, but let’s check shall we?
Yes let’s, I said.
I shan’t lie, I developed a powerful dislike of Charlotte in the time it took for her to go and phone Lanny’s mum, and then bring Lanny to the door, coat/shoes/rucksack/see y’Alfie/see ya Lanny, not because of her security measures but because of the framed Renoir reproduction she had in the hallway.
I can usually see a way to understand terrible things; Satanic worship, decaffeinated coffee, cosmetic surgery, but Renoir’s portrait of Madame de Bonnières? No. It cannot be understood or forgiven. And framed in gold plastic and spot-lit from above? No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber of hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.
Later we are polishing off jacket spuds with cheese and beans, talking about trees. We agree, Lanny and I, on the beech. An English totem.
I’ve got a tree book, he says, and I looked up copper beech, Fagus sylvatica, and it said ‘Grossly overplanted.’
I think I know the book you’re talking about. The Collins glovebox thing with the snooty tone. Yup, I have that book. Ignore him. Highfalutin bollocks.
Highfalutin bollocks.
Best keep that to yourself, boy.
Pete?
Yes, sire.
Do you believe in Dead Papa Toothwort?
Eh?
Do you think he’s real?
Well, no. Well yes inasmuch as he’s real if people believe in him. So yes. Just as mermaids or Spring-heeled Jack or the Green Children of Woolpit are real if people have thought about them, told stories about them. He’s a part of this village and has been for hundreds of years, whether he’s real or not. You should ask old Peg, she’s the expert.
Yeah but Wilf’s brother Hugo says he’s seen him climbing over their garden fence. A man made entirely of ivy.
I’d take that
with a pinch of salt, Lanny.
He swings his legs and chants:
Say Your Prayers and Be Good Too, Or Dead Papa Toothwort Is Coming for You. He lives in the woods. I believe in him. I’ve seen him.
I change the subject.
I’ll tell you something interesting that you may already know from your reading. The bit of a tree that draws up nutrients, the most vital living part of a tree, is actually just under the surface. So a skin wound, a minor whack with an axe or an arrow or a chainsaw, can do a lot of damage to a tree, to its living operations. It grows around that damage.
I know what you’re going to say, replies Lanny.
You do, do you?
He stands up and stretches to the ceiling, ribs and tum, reaching like a sweet pea for the sun.
That humans are just the same.
LANNY’S MUM
I’m woken by sobbing outside the bedroom. Robert is splayed across the bed like a dead tennis player, drooling. I go out to find Lanny sitting cross-legged at the top of the stairs and he can hardly catch his breath he’s so upset.
I hold him and soothe him and he’s all warm bumps. Warm bump of an elbow, of a knee, hot little heels like pebbles warmed by their own internal sun.
He eventually tells me in gulping whispers that the little boy in the water charity leaflet will probably already be dead.
I’ve wasted so much water, in my baths, running it cold to drink, watering the garden.
But darling we’ve talked about this so often, you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own. You can’t get the water from our tap to that little boy in Africa.
He looks at me like I’ve said the most grotesque thing ever uttered. He climbs off my lap. His face is darkened with disdain.
Night, Mum.
In the morning he’s not in his bed, and there’s no sign that he has had one of his early breakfasts and dashed for the woods.
Lanny?
Lanny?
There’s a scuffling sound from my office. I find him hurriedly trying to close down my computer. Never has a child looked shiftier in the history of the world.
He turns to me and takes a deep breath. This will be interesting, I think, because Lanny is not a fibber.
I was reading your book.
Oh darling it’s absolutely not appropriate. That’s a very naughty thing to do. You are far, far too young to read that. It’s an adult crime book.
I know. I skipped over the first bit and then skipped … um …
Violent. It’s very violent.
I think I’m too young to understand it.
I think so.
Shall I read it when I’m a teenager?
Eighteen, I think.
Sorry Mum.
That’s OK. I’m sorry about what I said in the night, about the water leaflet boy.
That’s OK. I know what you mean.
I go over, kneel and hug him, and over his shoulder I read the terrible paragraphs of my unholy novel. I feel horrible that he has found it. It is not for him.
Mum?
Yes, love?
Because Dad’s parents are dead do you think he loves us more? Do you think he gives us the spare love he would normally give his mum and dad? Is there extra love for us?
No, I think.
Yes, I say. That’s exactly right.
LANNY’S DAD
A plan has been agreed on. Pete will take Lanny to London to see his exhibition being put up on Cork Street, have lunch, drop into the National Gallery, and be back in time for tea.
I am of course fine with it, and keep being reprimanded by her for speaking with artificial regularity about how fine I am with it. And I am. It’s fine. I trust Pete and I know Lanny will have fun and be well behaved, and his schoolteacher has already commented on the revolution in his work, the transformation in the way he expresses himself. So it’s all good. They asked to get a lift to the station with me but the timings don’t work. That’s fine too. The idea of Pete in my car somehow embarrasses me. My leather seats.
I don’t know who I have to please. I have to please the village but I can’t because the village is a place defined for me by its proximity to London and I am therefore part of the problem, cause and effect, my only right to be here is the right brokered for me by a mortgage lender in Canary Wharf so I cling to little victories, little roots and shoots of belonging, believing that my right to be here is Lanny, the well-liked eccentric, my right to be here is my offering to cut Mrs Larton’s wisteria, is Pete giving me a beer, is the brick-shithouse builder saying ‘cheers mate’ when I held open the pub door. I chat to Peggy at least twice a week and Peggy seems to like me, is that not official acceptance?
PETE
She dropped him down, which was unusual as he’d been coming whenever he fancied it, popping in and out. She sent him into the garden and sat down opposite me. She was stern. She asked if I could stop telling Lanny frightening things, ghost stories and such. She said, Robert asks, well, we ask, well, Robert asks. You know, he’s only little.
I said, I hate to break it to you, but Lanny’s the one telling me frightening things.
I know, she said. But the school tell us he’s been writing the strangest stories, dark stuff, and behaving a bit oddly, and a girl in year 5 complained he’d put a spell on her.
Ha!
It’s not funny, Pete.
I know, I’m sorry. But come on, Lanny’s good. Different, and bloody wonderful. If some stuck-up little cow thinks he’s a wizard, then so be it. She can give him a bad review on classmate dot com. Really though, a pox on every test and standard and criteria of normality that Lanny will flummox in his long and glorious lifetime. No?
She laughed and put her nice face in her hands.
Well, thanks a bunch for your help, Mad Pete, I’m glad we had this chat.
She got up, patted my shoulder and took her leave.
So that afternoon I strenuously avoided ghost stories and focused on teaching.
He took very well to watercolour painting. Very well indeed. I can’t much be arsed with watercolour but Lanny had a good feeling for it. Could guess at absorption and pigment’s unpredictability in ways that impressed me, knew without instruction how to use the brush for taking away as well as putting on. You can lick that, I said, if you’re in a hurry, suck it clean if you need to quickly undo, doesn’t taste bad. But not that lead white, that white’s poison.
He looked at the little tube.
How much white would you need to eat to die?
Not a question I can answer, Lanny. A shit ton. There’d be quicker ways to kill a person. Just don’t lick the brush when you’ve got white on it and we’ll all avoid prison. Good lad.
We wandered out to paint the lightning tree on the other side of Dogrose Common. He traipsed along, his backpack jangling with water pot, binoculars, snack bar and carton of Ribena. We chatted about football cards and the little plastic fighters he’s swapped with his mate and the general Lanny-esque stream of conversation flowed forth, philosophical mutterings and bits of tune all mixed up with standard child babble and suddenly I smelt spliff, sticky rich and green over the airwaves. Lovely smell. In the bus shelter as we passed there was the Henderson boy with Oscar whatsisname from Yew Tree Cottage and they were passing back and forth a joint as big as a church candle, a floppy, knuckled, badly-built thing, and my word it smelled nice. We nodded as we passed and I raised a hand in greeting.
WEIRDO coughed one of them, spluttering into giggles.
We walked on.
I was a little stuck for what to say and then Lanny asked, Do you think they were talking about me or you?
And I shrieked with laughter then, because for some reason I found that stupendously funny and Lanny was saying, What? What’s so funny?
We trampled down the dog-walk path towards Hatchett Wood and it was ever so beautiful. The thick wall of green between the common and the wood bursting with life, clematis clambering through and over it, a properly paintable riot,
the yarrow glowing a bit, the blackthorn and maple all hugged up together, foxgloves leaning out like thin beckoning arms and I was still wiping tears of laughter from my eyes and considering how surprising it was, me, an old man, tailend of a good career but a mainly lonely life, finding such a good friend in this little kid.