by David Almond
Then there’s shouting nearby. It comes from just across the ridge. A man’s voice, crying out.
“Get off, you stupid thing!”
There’s a touch on Davie’s shoulder.
“I’d better go now,” comes Dad’s whisper.
Davie looks around, but there’s nothing.
“Goodbye, son,” comes Dad’s whisper.
“Goodbye, Dad,” whispers his son.
And he listens, but there’s no more, just the raucous voice again.
“Begone, you stupid thing!”
Davie walks across the ridge.
It’s Wilf Pew. How the hell did he get here? He’s hopping about and doing something with his legs. The long coat’s swirling about him.
He sees Davie.
“Stop just standing there,” he says. “Do something useful and give us a hand with this damn leg, will you?”
He topples over into the grass under a hawthorn tree.
“How did you get here?” says Davie.
“What? How did I get here?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of question’s that? I came out of me mammy’s tummy, just like you.”
“No. I mean how did you get up the hill?”
“I flew. I grew wings and took flight. How do you think I got here? I walked. While you were dreaming down by Cooper’s Hole, I belted past you.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“So now you only believe in things you can see for yourself?”
“No. So you saw me?”
“Of course I blimmin’ saw you.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“What do you mean, did I see anything else? Of course I did. I saw the whole wide blimmin’ world. Or mebbe you think there’s only you in it and nothing else.”
“I don’t.”
“Good! So can you see this leg? Good! Now get over here and give us a hand with it.”
He wriggles and squirms and grunts. He starts shoving the top of his trousers down. He’s doing something with buckles and belts inside the trousers.
“Stupid thing!” he says. “Supposed to liberate us but it just gets in the bliddy way. Pull that foot, lad.”
“Eh?”
“Pull that foot.” He points to his right foot. “What’s wrong with you lot these days? Get hold of that foot and pull.”
So Davie kneels down and grabs Wilf’s foot in both hands. There’s a thick leather shoe on it. The dog’s staring at the foot and drooling.
“Now!” says Wilf. “Pull the thing!”
Davie tugs the foot. Nothing happens.
“Where’s your strength?” says Wilf. “Pull the bugger.”
Davie leans back. He pulls hard and the foot starts to slide out of the trousers. There’s a hard bright-pink leg coming out with it. Davie has to stop. He can’t go on. When he was a kid, he used to wonder what Wilf’s leg was like. Now he doesn’t want to know. It’s like being in a horror movie.
“Go on,” says Wilf. “It won’t bite you. Pull!”
Davie pulls again. The foot and the leg keep on sliding out of the trousers. It gets tighter and slower as the leg gets thicker at the thigh.
“Pull!” says Wilf. “Yo-o, heave ho!”
Davie pulls, and with a final jerk, the whole leg comes out of the trousers and he falls back into the grass with the foot still in his hands.
“Good lad!” says Wilf. “I knew you had it in you.”
He puffs and blows and groans.
“That is bliddy heaven,” he sighs.
He rubs his hip.
Davie sits up and dares to look. The leg’s horrible. Long and pink and stiff with leather straps and buckles at the top of it. It’s gleaming in the light.
“Just look at that blimmin’ monstrosity,” says Wilf. “How’d you like one of them to get about on, lad?”
“I wouldn’t, Mr. Pew.”
“Too damn right, you wouldn’t!”
The dog starts licking the leg and dribbling drool on it. Davie thinks he’s going to be sick.
“Get off me leg, ye daft dog!” says Wilf.
He kicks at it with his good leg.
“What the hell is Foulmouth doing with you?” he says.
“Foulmouth? Who’s Foulmouth?”
“That damn dog, of course! He’s been pestering me for days and now he’s got the two of us.”
“Why’s he called Foulmouth?”
“What kind of question’s that? Have you not caught a whiff of his gob? Gerroff, you stupid dog!”
The dog backs off.
“Anyway,” says Wilf, “we’re getting sorted out, aren’t we? Next thing is, you got any food in that sack of yours?”
Davie thinks about the bara brith from this morning. He doesn’t really want to share it with Wilf Pew.
“No,” he says.
He suddenly realizes how hungry he is. He should have gotten three pies, not just two.
“I had some pies,” he says. “But I ate them.”
“Typical! Never mind. There’s still a gummy or two. And we’ll pick up something as we wend our way onward.”
Davie says nothing. Wend their way to where? And does Wilf mean they’ll be wending their way together? And how the hell will he do any wending at all on a single leg?
He must know what Davie’s thinking. He reaches into the long grass and lifts up a branch that’s lying under the tree. He strips the leaves from it. He snaps off the thorns. It’s nearly as long as he is. There’s a V-shaped joint at the top of it.
“This is all a bloke needs,” he says. “Help us up, lad.”
He reaches out toward Davie.
Davie doesn’t move.
“You’re not very quick, are you?” he says. “I asked you to help us up.”
So Davie gets up and takes Wilf’s hand. It feels really strong and really cold. Wilf levers his way up till he’s standing on one foot.
“Now the branch,” he says.
So Davie gets the branch and Wilf takes it and leans on it, resting his armpit in the V-shaped joint. He stands there grinning, half-silhouetted against the western sky.
“See?” he says. “Nature will provide.”
The empty trouser leg flaps gently in the breeze.
“This is the life!” he says. “Put that leg in the tree so we know where to pick it up on the way back.”
He just looks at Davie and waits when the boy doesn’t move.
So Davie pushes the dog aside and lifts the leg. It’s heavy and horrible. It’s hollow. He reaches right up and shoves it down thigh-first over a hawthorn branch, and the leg hangs there, horizontal, with the belt and buckles dangling and with the black shoe pointing toward the sky, like some weird new branch in a weird old tale.
“Beautiful!” says Wilf.
And when Davie steps back to look at it properly, he has to think the same.
“Onward!” says Wilf.
“Where to?”
“To wherever you want to go!” he says. “To find whatever it is you’re looking for!”
“I don’t know where I want to go. I don’t know what I’m looking for.”
“Kids today!” he says.
“Blokes today!” Davie snaps back at him.
Wilf does a little jig on the branch and his single leg.
“Good lad!” He laughs. “Well said! Bliddy blokes today!”
Davie groans. He wants to stop right here. He wants to just head home again.
“Follow me!” says Wilf.
“What? Where to?”
“How the hell should I know?”
He limps and lollops away.
And Davie finds himself following Wilf Pew and the dog, over the hill and into a land he’s seen a hundred times before.
“It’s somewhere down below,” says Wilf.
“What is?”
“What do you mean, what is? Me leg, of course. What else do you think we’re talking about?”
“Dunno. I didn’t think we were talking ab
out anything.”
“Well, no, but you must have been wondering. Everybody gets to wondering. Were you not?”
“Not really, Mr. Pew.”
“Have you got no curiosity, lad?”
Davie says nothing. There’s nothing to say to that.
“Obviously not,” he says. “But I’ll tell you, anyway. It’s down below. A long way down below.”
“Ah,” says Davie.
What the hell am I doing here? he wonders.
Foulmouth slobbers, maybe wondering the same thing.
“Aye,” says Wilf. “I was a pitman, you see, a long way down below, and the roof came crashing in on me one day. On me leg, anyway.”
“Ah,” says Davie.
“Aye. I thought I was a goner and me pals thought I was a goner, but once the dust had settled the doc came and sawed it off right there and then. You ever had a leg sawed off right there and then?”
Davie sighs and shakes his head.
“Thought not. But you can imagine it, can’t you? Can’t you? He chopped it off and they brung me up to the light again. I’d given up and then I’m brung back up all safe and sound. It was like rising up to Heaven, son. It was like they’d given us a pair of wings.”
“That’s good.”
“Good? It was blimmin’ . . . transcendental, son!”
“I thought you must have lost it in the war.”
“See? You have been wondering! Aye, there’s many a one that thinks it was war till they’re telt about the happenings deep down below. You sure you’ve got no grub? I’m clamming.”
“No,” Davie lies.
“OK. You any good at killing rabbits? We could cook it on a fire.”
“No.”
“Typical! Anyway, it liberated us.”
“What did?”
“Getting me leg chopped off, of course! It was the end of the pit for me. It was the end of going deep down below. I was footloose and free, the world me oyster.”
“Did you get another job?”
“Aye. I became an Olympic sprinter.”
Davie sighs.
“We could eat the dog, I suppose,” says Wilf.
Davie looks at the dog. He tries hard not to imagine eating it.
“You ever eaten a dog?” says Wilf.
Davie says nothing.
“Take no notice,” Wilf says. “I’m rambling. The more important question is, what’s the point of it all?”
“The point of it all?”
“Aye. What we doing? Where we going? Why are we here?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Pew.”
“Nor do I, son. Nor do I. I’ve lived a thousand years and I’m none the wiser.”
He groans deeply.
“Ah, well,” he mutters. “The least we can do is wander on toward the setting of the sun.”
The land slopes away before them. Paddocks and fields and hedges and copses. The metallic river stretching westward between its banks toward dark moors. The towns on the banks, the places he knows, Blaydon, Newburn, Wylam. Other settlements far away. The city to the north, Newcastle, the arch of its bridge, its rooftops and steeples and office blocks and apartment blocks. And then the northward-stretching land, the great plain of Northumberland and the bulges of the dark Cheviots.
Wilf Pew lunges onward.
Davie walks at his side.
The dog lopes, gasping.
Davie is parched again. He relives the moments of drinking at Cooper’s Hole and his body yearns for water.
He’s seen this land a hundred times before, but it’s never looked like this. Here beyond the crest there is no breeze at all. The yellow sun is on its way toward the west and still pours down its light and heat. Davie’s skin is hot. Everything is baked. Everything is scorched to stillness.
Apart from Davie, Wilf and Foulmouth, nothing seems to move. Only the bees that drone from bloom to bloom in the hedges and the grass to dip into the sweetness there. Only the flies, the silent butterflies. Only the singing larks and the buzzards high up that elegantly wheel across the blue.
Davie sees that the blue of the sky is the blue of a bird’s egg.
For a moment he sees the world as an egg, the sky as the shell.
Everything inside the shell is gloopy, changing, growing.
Wings will be forming, he thinks. Then a beak will chip at the shell, making an exit to an undiscovered, unimagined world beyond.
He stares at the sky.
What is the undiscovered, unimagined world beyond the sky?
“I went there!” Wilf Pew suddenly announces.
Davie draws his attention back to his companion.
He tries to lick his lips.
“Where?” he says.
Wilf balances on his one leg and points northward with his hawthorn crutch.
“There!” he says. “The blimmin’ Cheviots and then beyond. I was liberated by the chopped-off leg. I could do owt in the world I wanted to. So I slung a sack on me back and I left me hearth and home and headed north.”
He lowers the crutch and leans on it.
“That’s where Edinburgh is,” he says. “Past them distant mountains.”
“Aye,” says Davie. “I know.”
“You been there?”
“Where?”
“Edinburgh.”
“No.”
“Then how do you know it’s there at all?”
Davie sighs.
“I just do,” he says. “I’ve read about it. I’ve seen it on the telly.”
“On the telly! What kind of knowing’s that? I come back home and they said, ‘Where ye been, Wilf?’ And I said, ‘I walked to Edinburgh.’ And they said, ‘But, Wilf, you’ve only got one blimmin’ leg.’ And I said, ‘What’s that got to do with the price of fish?’ It was nice, Edinburgh. You should get yourself there. With your young legs it’d only take a week or so to walk.”
Davie wonders about such a walk. He can imagine the pleasure of walking through the fields, alongside the rivers and over the hills and into the city. He wonders about the best routes, but he doesn’t ask Wilf about them. He doesn’t want to encourage him.
“You could,” says Wilf. “It’s just a matter of getting started and keeping on. Like most things are. And folk were kind. They gave us milk and pies. Horses eat grass.”
“What?”
“And they look fit enough,” says Wilf. “You ever tried it?”
“No.”
Wilf swivels on the crutch and drops to the ground. He rips up some blades of grass from the side of the path. He shoves them into his mouth and starts to chew. He chews for a while, then spits it all out again.
“It’s canny,” he says to Davie. “You should try it, son.”
Davie sees the green juice at the corners of Wilf’s mouth. He sees the green stains on his teeth.
Davie’s so tired. Again, he has thoughts of turning back, going home. And his mind is turning to knickerbocker specials, Molly Myers’s pies, football with the lads, and to Shona Doonan’s face.
“Stop dreaming,” Wilf says. “Do something useful and help us up.”
Davie doesn’t move.
He wants to lie down. He wants to go back. He imagines he can hear Shona and Gosh.
“Davie! Davie! Come back, Davie!”
“Do it,” says Wilf. He reaches out to Davie. “Please!”
So Davie reaches out. Wilf grasps his hand and swivels up to stand again. He groans.
Suddenly, Wilf looks ancient. He sighs deeply. His eyes are clouded. His head hangs forward. He grits his teeth and grimaces as he leans upon the hawthorn crutch.
“Mebbe I should turn it to a ladder,” he says.
“Turn what to a ladder?”
Wilf groans and grimaces again. He shuts his eyes. There’s sweat on his brow.
“This crutch, son,” he says. “I’m tired. Mebbe I should turn it to a ladder and climb me way to Heaven at last.”
“I think I should . . .” starts Davie. “I think it’s time . . .”
“Aye,” says Wilf. “I know, son. It soon gets late.”
He reaches out and cups Davie’s chin in his hand and stares into his eyes.
“You’ll be all right, lad,” he says. “I walked to blimmin’ Edinburgh and back. The least you can do is wend a little further with Wilf Pew.”
He sighs.
“Please, lad,” he says.
“I’m no danger to you, you know,” he says.
Davie turns his eyes from Wilf, looks into the world again. Soon, everything will change. New shades will seep into the single intense blue of the sky. Reds and oranges, yellows and grays. It’ll just be the turning of the day again, the coming on of dusk and night again. Davie’s seen it a thousand times, but there’s never been a day like this before.
Wilf taps Davie’s shoulder, gently.
“Don’t worry, lad,” he says. “We’ll get you there and back again before the night comes on.”
“Get me where?” says Davie.
“Don’t ask me. But it looks like Foulmouth knows. Maybe we’re already here.”
Davie hesitates.
Wilf digs into his pocket. He holds out the fluffy packet of gummies.
Davie takes one, a red one.
He lifts it up to the sun to see the red brilliance of it, then puts it into his mouth.
“Good lad,” says Wilf. “That’ll keep you going for a little bit.”
It’s so sweet and delicious on the tongue. Davie sighs. And Foulmouth lopes a little further, along a lane where the grass is scorched, across a rough paddock with a black-and-white pony in it, through a scant hedgerow, then another where the birds are singing brightly, across a drift of buttercups and forget-me-nots, and leads them to where the land rises to its highest point, toward an intensity of yellow, as if the earth is burning, shining, offering light back to the blazing sun.
It’s a great sloping patch of yellow gorse. The air above is yellow, yellow as the earth below. There’s a pathway through the gorse. Wilf Pew comes to a halt before it, leaning on his crutch. The dog sits down on the pathway. Davie passes them both and goes deeper into the yellow heat. The shrubs are higher than Davie’s head. He sways to keep his body away from the vicious spelks and spines. He hears pops and crackles, small explosions. He sees that the dark seedpods of the gorse are bursting in the heat. The black and tiny seeds are scattered through the yellow air. He sees a hundred thousand black-and-yellow bees that dip into yellow flower after yellow flower. He hears their buzz, their drone, their whine. The ground is dry and dusty, carpeted with fallen petals, seeds and spines. In here the day is even brighter, even stiller, even hotter. The yellow air is thick. Davie breathes the yellowness of gorse into himself. There is a yellow smell of coconut. All alone, he gasps for yellow breath. He reels with exhaustion, thirst, the heat.