Outside the shop the breeze was tacking to the west, and as Kitty emerged with her plastic bags the first fat drops of rain were flung across the car park as though flicked from a brush. She drove back with the windscreen wipers on as the sky darkened and the wind picked up. By the time she got home the weather had set in.
15
Borage, self-heal, first wild clematis flowers (old man’s beard, traveller’s joy)
All over the country the oilseed rape was in flower, turning fields into bright yellow squares and rectangles. Near Crowmere two farmers had planted some for biofuel and as a break crop, and as far away as Lodeshill the streets and back gardens were filled with its pungent aroma.
Some of the bees that were working the yellow fields came from farm hives, some were Crowmere bees, and some had travelled all the way from Bill Drew’s back garden in Lodeshill.
‘It’s a bugger,’ he told Jean after breakfast, looking at the hive with his hands on his hips. ‘I do wish they wouldn’t. You can’t spin the honey out when they’ve been at the rape, I don’t know why.’
‘Well, you can hardly stop them from going, can you, love?’ she said. ‘Anyway, I like it. Makes the fields look pretty.’
‘Never used to see it, though, did you? Rape. I don’t know.’
‘Things change, love. Even here.’
Walking to his first shift at Woodwater Farm Jack frowned at the brash yellow escapees that had sprung up by the side of the road. He liked to see wilding apples and damsons; why was this any different? Plants moved around all the time, and quite right too. Maybe it was just the name he didn’t like.
He was looking forward to getting out into the fields. Nothing felt truer than a day’s work out in the open air: the well-earned sense of tiredness, and the knowledge that you’d helped things grow, or survive, or be harvested. As he walked he wondered about the other pickers, what they’d be like. He hoped he wouldn’t have to speak to them too much; these days he was unused to conversation, its hidden rules and subtleties, and mostly found it a strain.
When he got to Woodwater he could see from the gate that a few pickers were already out on the beds. He went to the pack house to find Joanne, the sky flat and white overhead, the air close and still.
‘Morning, Jack,’ she said, handing him an asparagus knife. ‘Take three rows on the top field – you’ll see which ones. Mihail over there will come after with a crate and pick up. Then when we’ve finished I’ll want you in the pack house until about four. That OK?’
‘Thanks.’
Leaving the yard Jack passed through a gate, then began walking uphill towards the asparagus beds. They looked, from a distance, completely bare: the field brown and gently humped as though from years of ridge and furrow.
Woodwater’s sixteen acres of asparagus had originally been Mrs Gaster’s idea: something to occupy her once their two boys started at school, and perhaps bring in a few quid. At first they’d just had one two-acre field which she’d cut more or less by herself, selling the bundles at the farm gate for a pound each. But since then the market had taken off; TV chefs had gone all-out for seasonal produce, and asparagus really flew the flag for that kind of thing. So they had converted the old foxhound kennels into a pack house, and while they still sold some locally most of it went to a wholesaler. Now, Nigel wanted to put in even more beds and maybe invest in some harvesting buggies, but Joanne was reluctant: what came into fashion could go out of fashion, she reasoned, and there was a risk in turning over more land to it: once you’d prepared the soil, bought in new crowns from Holland and hired the equipment to plant them it still took each bed a few years to come into production. ‘It keeps us ticking over, Nige,’ she’d say to him. ‘Let’s just be thankful for that.’
Jack reached the top bed and looked down its length. Even from fairly close it was hard, at first, to see the asparagus shoots. Once you got your eye in, though, the fierce green spears were everywhere. He slung the bag over one shoulder and bent to the first shoot, slicing it at ground level with the knife in his right hand while the other held the bag open for it, his eyes already moving ahead for the next stalk. As soon as he began his muscles remembered the movement and his feet the pace. It was the same with scything: once you had learned it your body would always know the motion. It was nothing to do with thinking; it was deeper than that.
The shoots were breaking ground with astonishing energy. You could almost see them growing on a warm day like this: pulling the goodness out of the soil and driving upwards into the light. Jack felt the sun warm on the back of his neck, felt his knees and back begin to complain. ‘Ah, give over,’ he grumbled to himself happily, and worked on.
Jamie had spent the morning tinkering with the trail bike. The rear suspension had gone, suddenly and with no warning; it was rideable, but only just, and probably not for long – not without a trip to the scrapyard for a new shock.
Then, when he arrived for his shift at Mytton Park, he was told he was being moved to a different hangar.
‘How come?’
‘Don’t worry, you’re not the only one,’ said Megan, handing him his lanyard. ‘Lee’s going too. Not Dave, though.’
‘Why?’
‘They’ve already got a transport clerk. You’ll get training, don’t worry.’
‘No, I mean, why are we being moved?’
‘Just what happens. You work for the Park, not the client; they can put you in any shed they like. People are always being moved around. Just hasn’t happened to you yet.’
Jamie felt uneasy; it was like the first day of school or something, a new building, new people. And he hadn’t been expecting it, he’d just turned up for a normal shift. He wasn’t ready for a big change.
‘Is it because they lost a contract?’
‘Yeah, but it’ll probably pick up. You’re on a catalogue company now, 14B. Come on, I’ll show you.’
It was nice of Megan, Jamie thought as they left the site office and made their way around the outside of the huge, grey sheds, following coloured arrows set on short, neat posts by the walkways. He wondered what she was really like – when she was with her friends. He wondered what she thought of him. She probably thought he was thick, doing this job, and maybe she was right; she probably laughed at him when he wasn’t around. At least she didn’t call him Dicko, like the others did – although he couldn’t remember her calling him Jamie, either. He wondered what his hair was doing; sometimes it got a dent all the way around from his bike helmet. He felt the nape of his neck surreptitiously as they walked.
‘You coming out on Friday, then?’ he asked.
‘Yep. You?’
‘Yeah. Who else is going?’
‘Nick – d’you know Nick? From HR? And Andy. Lee, of course. Not sure who else.’
‘What’s the plan?’
‘Not sure really. Few drinks in town, then maybe the Vault if anyone’s up for it. Have you been before?’
Jamie considered lying, but there wasn’t really any point. ‘I haven’t, I – it’s not really my thing.’
‘And what is your thing?’ They were outside one of the hangars now, and she had stopped and turned to look at him, pushing her blonde hair away from her face with an easy, unselfconscious movement. This was clearly 14B.
Jamie felt himself flush. Fuck’s sake. ‘Oh, I like all sorts of things, you know, just . . .’ It was ridiculous; the only thing he could think of was the car, and she wasn’t going to be interested in that.
‘Well, you might like the Vault, you never know. Anyway, this is you. Ask for Andy, he’s the foreman. See you later –’ and she was gone.
Inside, 14B turned out to be almost completely identical to his previous shed, which somehow made it more disorientating. The shelving was laid out in the same way, with the same wire-guided forklifts making the same noises; the toilets were the same, the office was in the same place, but it wasn’t Dave in there, it was someone else. It was unnerving, like those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar,
but everything is slightly different.
As the foreman, Andy, took him through the stock-control system, Jamie’s mind drifted back to Megan. Did he actually fancy her or was it just because everyone did? Either way, it was ludicrous to think she’d ever be interested in him. He’d only ever got off with four people, after all.
The girls at school – getting anywhere with them had involved a sort of subterfuge; the sense, almost, that you had to trick them into it. Though that was probably just with him; he probably wasn’t doing it right. Maybe girls wanted it with everyone else; that was certainly how his friends made it sound. ‘She was gagging for it,’ they’d say after a party at someone’s house, and everyone would laugh – Jamie too. Which were real, he’d often wonder: the girls he knew, reluctant and intimidating, or the ones his friends described?
At secondary school it had become clear that girls fancied Alex. It was odd, seeing as he mostly ignored them– but then, that was probably why. Even girls like Melanie Abbott and Ciara Williams – Jamie could see what they were like around Alex, how they softened and tried to impress. To them he was invisible, and he knew that if he let himself he could start hating them for it.
His friendship with Alex, by then, had begun to change. They were in different classes for a lot of stuff, and Alex had a new group of friends who Jamie didn’t really know. He’d got a haircut, too, and didn’t look like a farm boy any more; he’d begun to talk about becoming an architect or a surveyor, instead of a farmer, when he grew up. And yet, outside of school they were still close: they described things for each other in a way they’d never had to before, and for Jamie at least, the new distance between them made Alex both less familiar and somehow more interesting.
They still did their homework together after school, more often by then at Jamie’s than at the farmhouse. His parents were used to Alex being over, and although they had never properly talked about what was wrong with his mum he’d always had the feeling that Alex knew and didn’t mind. The dolls, for example: there they were in the lounge, lined up on the windowsill in their baby clothes. But Alex had never said anything, and he’d been grateful for that.
It had taken him far too long to realise that other families might not be perfect either, that it wasn’t just his that was fucked up.
A couple of weeks before Alex had gone to live in Doncaster Jamie’s dad had come into his room at bedtime and sat on the bed, and Jamie had put down his magazine, warily.
‘Listen, son, I just wanted to ask you. Is Alex OK?’
‘Yeah – why?’
‘Just – I just wondered if things were all right for him at home, that’s all. Alex’s dad, he’s – well. I was just wondering. Your mum too, of course.’
‘I – I think so, he’s not said anything, I’ve not noticed anything bad.’
‘That’s good, son. As long as things are OK, that’s all that matters.’
And his dad had said goodnight, and left, switching off the bedroom light as he went; and Jamie had lain there, eyes wide in the dark, wondering why he suddenly felt so upset.
Bindweed was rampant in Mytton Park; it overran the far corners of the lorry parks, rioting along the fences when nobody was looking and carpeting unclaimed areas with heart-shaped leaves and white bells. The ground crew went round regularly with backpacks full of glyph and spray guns – like something out of Ghostbusters, as Lee often said – but there was no eradicating it, or the Japanese knotweed that sprang up in thickets each year behind the cafe. ‘Makes good pea-shooters, that,’ said Lee, watching them hack the hollow stems down once again. ‘We used to love it when we was kids.’
On his break Jamie went to watch the koi carp in the lake. They swam in lazy circles near the footbridge, overfed and complacent despite the scraggy heron that regularly stalked the shallows. They were too big for him to take, and they knew it.
He wondered whether Alex had expected to see him at his father’s funeral; whether it looked as though he had stayed away on purpose. Like everyone else in the village he’d assumed it would be held at St James’s. But it had been at the crematorium in Connorville and he wasn’t sure how that worked, whether you had to be invited. And so he hadn’t gone.
But there was more to it, too. The night Alex’s parents split up, all those years ago, he knew that he’d let Alex down. His mum was bad; she hadn’t washed for a few days and she was saying some weird stuff. His dad was on a late shift so it was just him and her, and he didn’t know what to do except make tea and change the channels on the telly when she got upset. So when Alex texted him he’d said not to come over.
‘PLEASE,’ Alex had texted back. ‘I know yr mum bad this time of year & I dont care. Dads going mental.’
What time of year? But Jamie couldn’t think about any of it just then, he just couldn’t. ‘Cant 2night,’ he’d replied, and switched his phone off.
He’d bunked off school the next day, had nicked four of his dad’s beers from the fridge and drunk them in the big oak in the Batch, his mind as blank as the sky overhead. He’d twisted the empty cans until they tore and hung the sheared halves on the branches around where he sat so that the sun bounced off them cruelly. Just after home-time he’d walked to the farmhouse, light-headed with hunger, his hands bleeding and sore. Mr Harland had opened the door, something about him, about his manner, making Jamie take an unsteady step back.
‘Well, if it isn’t young Dicko,’ he’d said, his face disordered somehow. ‘Now there’s a fucking surprise. I’ve often wondered, do you not have a home of your own?’
Jamie felt the blood drain from his face. He’d never been called Dicko at Culverkeys – at least, not within his hearing. Perhaps they said it all the time behind his back.
‘Oh, I do apologise,’ said Philip, ‘that was unfair. But anyway, you can’t see him.’
‘Why not?’ Jamie managed.
‘Because Alexander has gone, Dicko. They’ve all fucking gone.’
Jamie had just stared at him then until Philip had laughed and shut the door, and then he’d walked slowly to the copse where the goshawks nested. But when he arrived he’d found that someone – and surely it could only have been Alex? – had got there before him. The nest was on the ground, the two speckled eggs smashed and stamped on, the glutinous feathers amid the blood and broken shells more than he knew how to bear.
16
Brambles. Showers; wind from the south-east.
The next swap meet wasn’t for nearly a month, and Howard didn’t want to wait. He went online and posted a few messages, made some calls and arranged to meet a couple of other collectors at a restorer’s workshop in Harrow.
‘Why don’t you get a hotel in London for the night, meet up with the old crowd?’ Kitty had said, when he told her. ‘And I’m sure Chris would love to see you.’
‘Trying to get rid of me?’ he’d replied.
‘Oh, just get it out of your system.’
Howard wasn’t sure exactly what she’d meant, but she was right: it was a lot of travelling to do in one day. He booked a Holiday Inn and gave Geoff, his old general manager, a ring. Hopefully Geoff would get a couple of the others out; they could have a few beers, go for a curry – maybe Camden or somewhere. It would be good for him.
He’d known Kitty wouldn’t be interested in the radios themselves, but on the way back from Wales he’d made an anecdote of it in his head, how he’d been honest about the value of the three best sets and thrown the seller off the scent when it came to the rest.
‘So you cheated him, effectively?’ she’d said, when he got home.
‘No . . .’ he’d replied, bridling. ‘It’s business. He wanted them out of the way.’
‘But they were worth more than you paid him. His grandfather’s old radios.’
‘Not his grandfather’s; they were old returns and repairs, they were sat in the back room of his grandfather’s shop, collecting dust. I told him to take them to a car boot, but he couldn’t be bothered. Look, Kitty, why am I the bad guy
here?’ he’d called after her retreating back. ‘For God’s sake!’
It was like that, now. Not arguments – or rarely – but irritation. She didn’t think much of him, or that’s how it felt. Sometimes he wondered how long it had been like that, and found he couldn’t remember. Certainly when Jenny was still living with them things had been easier, and sometimes when he thought of their home in Finchley everything seemed so much lighter and . . . easier, somehow. Perhaps it was as simple as there being other people in the house. Or maybe things really had worsened between them.
They had always had their own interests, though; they had never been the kind of couple who were always in one another’s pockets. Kitty wasn’t a pub person, not really, and she had quickly stopped wanting to come out with him in the evenings. That was OK, though; she had her own life: evening classes, drinks with women friends, that kind of thing. Years back she’d even talked for a bit about doing a degree, although he’d never been able to see the point of that. Now, though, painting was her thing. And they were in the countryside, where she’d always wanted to be. Life hadn’t treated her too badly, when all was said and done. She didn’t have a lot to complain about. Not that she did complain – not exactly. It was more the constant sense Howard had these days that everything he did irritated her. Childishly, he found himself acting up to it. And so it went on.
‘So when are you off?’ she asked when he eventually got up for breakfast on Wednesday. She’d clearly been up for quite a while; she had that busy, virtuous look, and was doing something with vegetables. ‘I’m making soup for lunch, by the way. There’ll be enough if you want some.’
‘Thanks. After lunch.’
‘Better get a move on, then,’ she said, looking critically at him where he stood in the doorway in his dressing gown and boxers. And then, over the whine of the blender, ‘You know, I think there’s a tramp in the village. There’s a man been seen behaving oddly, and there are empty beer bottles all over Ocket Wood, according to Christine Hawton. She walks her dogs there.’
At Hawthorn Time Page 11