Male Tears

by Benjamin Myers

  At last I was in front of the painting, as close to it as I could be, front and centre, and the next thing I knew, I was in it. Breathing its still air and feeling the crunch of crusted snow underfoot, the pulse of my heart in my temples and wrists. I was looking out across the landscape, over the roofs of the houses and the bridge to the frozen ponds where the people of the village – my village – were skating, and the boughs of the winter trees were creaking, their spindly branches rattling, the sap frozen, black crows circling overhead, and in the distance mist was settling on the great rocky scarps that poked upwards, jutting accusations against the sky.

  My numb fingers curled around the long spear whose point was untainted by big game blood and I used it to steady myself through the final deep drifts before we split our formation, each turning towards home, in no hurry now, for the empty-handed hunter is never in a rush to return. My legs were soaked, limbs leaden. I was bone-cold and nearly beaten by the day.

  And there were the smells that drifted across the plain: woodsmoke from the fire where a pot was already boiling, ready to take the hair off a beast we had not caught. Somewhere unseen, broth. All around, decay, damp and midden stench too.

  I was right there, breathing the lowlands air, my muscles aching from the futile chase of nothingness. And it was all so beautiful, it was all so right.

  And it was all too much.

  The warmth and the crowds and the need for water were becoming overwhelming. This was not good. No. This was not good at all. With one foot in each era, in each world, I felt as if I were being torn asunder from somewhere deep inside. I was here and there, then and now, past and present, hot and cold, thirsty and hungry, exhilarated and anxious, exhausted and enlivened, all at the same time.

  The room was taking on strange new dimensions, a contortion of curved lines and fisheye perspectives.

  And where was my wife?

  A long time had passed since I had last seen her. I checked my phone to see if she had texted but all I got was a BBC News update that flights were still grounded and the police were no closer to finding out who had flown drones into the airspace. The words swirled before me. Why was no one here screaming? They all seemed so excited or happy or deep in conversation or preoccupied with their phones and their headsets. In the face of such beauty, why weren’t they running into the street, naked, jumping on parked cars? Overwhelmed by the existential horror of time and the turning of the planet, life and death, and the whole of it, why weren’t they pulling off windscreen wipers and hurling their own faeces and smashing their heads into the mirrored glass windows of the great shining buildings of this city, and all cities?

  How could they hold it all together?

  My head and stomach are empty jugs and my legs tremble. Food is all I think about as we trudge the hill and I see the watermill, the ponds. I know that Bernt and Elrick will be feeling the same and if they are not thinking of food then they are thinking about the shame of empty hands returning to the village. In the eyes of our people we are failures.

  Today we are lesser men.

  I’m found on the gallery floor, out cold. Several people are leaning over me and speaking in German. They all wear a look of concern, which I find highly embarrassing. Someone passes me a bottle of water, another helps me sit up. The tiled parquet floor is creaking around me.

  When I stand, my head and stomach are empty jugs and my legs tremble. My feet and legs are soaked up to the knees, but I can’t understand why. I’m still clutching my coat. I assure everyone that I am alright by forcing a smile and giving them a thumbs up, which just seems absurd given the location and the situation. I take a seat and they gradually drift away, one or two of them looking back at me, conferring, then carrying on into the next room.

  I take out my phone to find out where my wife is. The Gatwick story has reached a conclusion. Flights are now scheduled for take-off, though the huge backlog still means that there’s a great deal of confusion amongst travellers about when they might get to finally leave the airport and continue their onward journeys. Police have found no drones, or owners of drones. Maybe there were no drones at all.

  It is a late morning on a cold winter Thursday in the heart of Europe in the twenty-first century when a message arrives from my wife: Where are you??

  I reply: Been hunting. Lunch?

  Old Ginger

  Mind Old Ginger the gamekeeper. Myths abound where he’s concerned.

  Famous through the Border country, was Old Ginger; a legend to some, a purpling, heather-lurking menace to many more.

  Pheasants and pleasant folk stopping in their weekend homes feared him equally, as well they should have, for the wee man wasn’t entirely right. Too long on the moors alone with his traps had turned him. Sent his head west, they said.

  The man at the big house kept him on, though. He gave Old Ginger free rein and a good run of the estate, by all accounts. A job for life. So long as the birds were ripe for shooting come August when the red-faced brokers came yodelling through in search of fur, feather and fin, he kept the old boy in his employ. Left him to it.

  More than that, Old Ginger had worked for the man at the big house’s daddy, and his daddy had worked for his daddy before him, so sticking to the traditional ways of the laird and his gamekeeper ensured the old order was kept alive. Preserving continuity when all else on the island was in flux was important then. Still is, to some.

  Only the man at the big house wasn’t a laird as he liked to pretend: he had made his money first through inheritance and latterly by selling knock-down sports clobber through a pile-’em-high retail chain famed for its illegitimate working practices; he wouldn’t have known a title of the realm if it was pinned to his left nut by the Queen herself. And Old Ginger was less a gamekeeper and more of a sadist with a cudgel and a growing grudge against yomping outsiders.

  But still, the bossman had a family crest drawn up, and staff from down the town, and different cars for different days, and shooting parties that meant he could play the plastic laird, so he kept Old Ginger on, filling the feeders with grain, eyeballing the pine plantations and scouring the moors for prey of either the animal or the human variety.

  See, that was Old Ginger’s problem. Decades up here had him so entrenched in the landscape that he’d lost his ability to differentiate between man and beast; all was quarry for Ginger. His was a world of blood and snares, raptors and hares. His architecture was bog-bone and feather. Wind and rain. Grass and heather.

  Blade and gullet. Gun and bullet.

  It was his way or the straight-as-an arrow tarmac highway that the Romans had cut through the red upland sod two thousand years ago, the moors his fiefdom and pity any poor bastard in a rustling cagoule that crossed it unawares.

  You heard so many stories about Ginger that you just knew some of them had to be true, such as the one about him leaping out on lone folk and battering them senseless. Or the dogs he kept in cages and fed with a special mash dosed with speed to keep them tightly wound and radge for ratting round the grain feeders or, most likely, to drive away any nosy cunt that might be nebbing round his sad stone box of a house up on the moor edge.

  They said he had had a wife once, but she couldn’t hack it. Got sick of the magistrates’ court, the freezer full of animal parts and the blood under his nails as he pawed at her with his big fingers. Pelts in the airing cupboard. Offal in the pantry.

  You’d know Ginger’s face if you’d ever clocked him: wind-worn and a head half bald, the rest of it crowned by a frayed red mane. Cod-eyed too, was Ginger. One eyeball forever wandering to a place inside his little skull. Mind, he was short too. You’ll find that most moor men of a certain bloodline are. The best ones, anyway. They say the tall lads blow over like firs in a gale, but the stout boys just lean into it and plough on through. Legs like hams, had Old Ginger. The same circumference all the way down, they were shaped by the hills and made for walking, though his knees were shot from a lifetime of stumbling through rut and runnel, so in th
ose later years he took to riding roughshod on a quad bike instead.

  And then there was his uniform, unchanged as long as anyone had known him: steel-toed boots and the same fingerless gloves. No coat for him either, just layer upon layer of shirt and jumper, a few of each, all matted and wadded together into a fleecy shell of sweat and dirt and wool that he was said to sleep in, upright in his living room chair, banked fire glowing, logs popping.

  Pity anyone who tried to lift a brace of pheasant or snag a few hares from the estate with Old Ginger about. Broken bones were their reward and that was not the worst of it. One lad he tied up in the top wood and humiliated with pine cones in ways that don’t bear repeating.

  Pity the creatures of tooth and claw even more, though. Because Old Ginger had traps and snares set up well away from any prying eyes, a mile or two’s walk from any road or track, all the way up top, tucked into a fold of the moor or buried in a copse. Lagged to a stone wall, shoved into a stump. He was always trying out new methods and updating old techniques for the sheer thrill of it. Once, in cold vengeance against a fox that had been seen one too many times skulking the grounds with a pheasant in its mouth, he took a small piece of sprung steel and tied it up with some dissolvable catgut cord. Then he boiled up some meat parts with special herbs to attract the creature, and he shaped it into a fat ball around the steel and set it in a spot it was known to pass on its dawn rounds. The fox was not seen again, sure to have died a slow and diabolical death somewhere, all cut up from the trap that snapped deep in the poor thing’s stomach.

  And then there were Old Ginger’s cages: great big things, maybe six feet tall and fifteen feet across. Birds of prey were his target – the raptors that fed on the big man’s grouse and pheasant. Old Ginger wouldn’t stand for that. If the foxes hadn’t got at the eggs and they somehow made it through hatching, then it was likely they could end up snatched away skywards when they were still defenceless balls of down, so the gamekeeper liked to strike first, with no quarter.

  His cages had trapped hen harriers and peregrines. Buzzards, kestrels and sparrowhawks aplenty too. Enough owls to stuff a mattress. Red kites were especially fine catches, but you had to be careful because they’d been wing-tagged following reintroduction a few years back and even possessing the bones of a stripped red kite could spell time inside.

  Only once had he snared himself a golden eagle, its wingspan greater than the height of him, its beak like a sharpened shank. Talons like something from mythology. He dreamed of it for months afterwards. It haunted his sleep.

  And here’s the worst bit. Old Ginger’s preferred method was to live-bait the traps with crows, mainly. But a trapped blue-black bird wasn’t enough of a lure for him. No. He would get himself a crow or blackbird or any hoodlum nesting in the estate’s wide-ranging woodlands, and then he would heat a spike in the pit of a fire and press it into that poor thing’s eyes. First one, then the other. Blinded it. And the crow would be screeching and squirming, but Old Ginger just bound its beak with an elastic band and gripped it tighter until the job was done.

  Then he put it into the cage and left it there, and the bird would think it had died and gone to the next world, but a world where a cruel wind still blows in across the moor, whatever the season. There was a gap at the top of the cage, you see, and the raptor would clock the crow, swoop down, and then find itself stuck like a lobster in a Craster creel, too daft or disorientated to seek a way out. And then it was his: ownership passed from branch and eyrie and sky to Old Ginger. In his hands lay the bird’s fate.

  Old Ginger never took a drink. He never went down the town to sink a few with the boys, and that was his downfall. Because the boys will always turn a blind eye to a transgression and look after their own. They’re tight like that. Passing time and country tradition has made them that way. Ginger claimed he didn’t like the taste, but it was people that bothered him. Being around them, trapped in rooms with them. Their conversation. Their laughter. Still, maybe if he had taken a drink, he wouldn’t have crossed swords with Young Kipper.

  Now, Young Kipper ran a tight team of game boys. Poachers to a man. They did it for the sport, for the challenge, for the same reason their fathers’ fathers had. Hares, rabbits, pheasants, grouse – it didn’t matter what. Foxes and badgers. The occasional deer. Because they too liked to keep the old ways alive, to try out the techniques their grandads had taught them as soon as they could walk: the slipknots, the big lamp, the long net and all of that. They were grafters, Kipper’s crew. Workers by day and poachers by night. They sold their beasts on the sly to the outdoor markets or to butchers in far-flung towns, or else they kept what they caught for their own pots.

  One was known to cook up a rabbit cassoulet good enough to serve in a Parisian restaurant.

  And where Old Ginger was cruel, Young Kipper was mad. Next-level mad. The old boy never caught him at it but he knew what Kip’s boys were up to, and it galled him to see this new generation filching his best birds. Only once did he confront him, out on the moor, one on one, but the younger man just laughed and cited his right to roam and that was that. No square go, just festering resentment.

  So the gamekeeper took revenge. He plotted until he found a weak spot to exploit. Young Kipper had two ravens. Beautiful things. He’d raised them since day one, turned them into pets. He’d been on the telly with them; he was damn near famous for his ravens, was Young Kipper. Well, naturally, Old Ginger had to have one of them.

  And that’s exactly what he did, snatching it at night, though no one ever knew how, for Kipper kept them locked up good in his long garden at the end of town, so it seemed Old Ginger was the greatest gamekeeper turned poacher of the lot of them.

  Not long after Kipper found one of his beloved ravens vanished, a night raid on Old Ginger’s cages solved the mystery when it was found dead and blinded. Live bait gone wrong. He was inconsolable, and all of his boys knew this could only end one way. Retribution was as inevitable as the turning of the leaves. Calculated resolve took over; Young Kipper left it a week or two, then went out alone. He stalked the stalker. Put in the hours.

  It was in the gloaming of an October evening, when Ginger’s back was turned, that Young Kipper pounced, bundling him into one of Ginger’s own baited cages up beyond the reservoir, the most remote one there was. In that cage Young Kipper pulled out some pruning shears that he had sharpened up good with stone and oil, and he took a few bits of Old Ginger back for his remaining raven. An eyelid. A fingertip.

  An earlobe. A lower lip.

  He put them in his pocket and then he left the cage and walked out across the moor with only the waxy light of a hunter’s moon to guide him.

  Old Ginger made it back, just about, minus a few vitals. Six stints of surgery sorted some of the physical aspects, but by then his mind had gone, part of him forever in that cage: the blood from an eye and a hand and an ear and a mouth pooling in the blackening night, bird shit and feathers coating him as he writhed in the dirt, reaching out into the darkness.

  An Act of Erasure

  It was September, that month when the scent of smoke on the breeze signals the coming season of decay. The trees become suspended with skeletons and the writhing worms turn the soil below.

  My grandad had been unwell for some time.

  He had recently sold the grocer’s shop above which he and my gran had lived for all of their married life, nearly half a century, and moved into an end-terrace. One day he returned home with his brown trousers soaked to the waist.

  ‘You’re wet through, you daft beggar,’ said my gran, noticing that he would not meet her eye as he stripped down to his thin white bones.

  It transpired that he had waded out into the slate soup of the North Sea, but something had made him turn back.

  She kept finding a hammer in different parts of the house: in the bathroom, the kitchen, beneath the bed. When she asked him what it was for, Grandad admitted that he had intended to use it on himself. In his troubled state, there was a logic
to keeping a means of destruction close to hand.

  Then one morning when Gran popped to the corner shop to buy a newspaper and bacon, he tied a rope around his neck and jumped from the stairs, and for one still moment the noise of his life was silenced.

  When she returned she found his false teeth down on the carpet, beneath his swaying shadow.

  After the funeral and the flowers, the buffet and the visitors, after the obituary and the sedatives, but long before the nightmares faded into manageable nocturnal shapes, one day while tidying up my gran found in a drawer several tubes of denture glue, all of them unopened.

  The Bloody Bell

  With the wind at our backs we walked the wall.

  It was a whistling wind, one that shrieked like wild woodland creatures torn apart in the deepest pits of our childhood nightmares one moment, dropping to a low sonorous drone the next. Here the wind became hypnotic and malevolent, as if the stones themselves were groaning with pain as the bevelled-bladed breeze whipped at our cloaks, uncoiled our rags and tipped our hats tumbling away before us like mad birds.

  Even when we huddled into the short shadows of the raised bank along which the great stone serpent structure slithered off into the fog or hunkered low into the vallum ditch, the wind would not abate. Instead it toyed with us by changing direction and spitting like a cornered wildcat the first swirling whorl of snowflakes in our faces.

  There was a fury to its darkening mood, a foreshadowing of the journey to come.

  We had been but one night and two days out and already time was twisting and spiralling so that the low silver winter sun shifted across the sky in the blink of an eye, yet at other times mere moments could appear endless.