Daddy listened to what Martha told him. He made no movement nor signal of recognition.
‘Well, that were when he were a lad. He spent most of his time away at boarding school, of course, being from family he’s from. But in summer months, during long holidays, he’d be back round here trying to pick fights with lads. He never had much time for us girls, mind. Not to chat to, anyway. I suppose most teenage boys are like that but him even more so. Sometimes he’d have friends from school come to stay. Never one or two, always a whole gang of them together, when his father was down in London or away elsewhere. They’d have manor to themselves. They were interested in girls then, when they were all together. And some of them were very charming, of course. Real posh boys, well-dressed, immaculately groomed, taught how to speak politely up at that school. And I knew of girls – common, ordinary girls from round here – that went up to manor with them. For a chat and some dinner, like. Well I heard rumours of what had gone on and after a while I stopped listening. Wandt the type of thing I liked to hear about. But I caught enough to know kind of boys they were. And boys like that don’t grow into decent men. Boys who get girls drunk and share them around like a cut of meat.’
‘Safer that way for some boys,’ said Ewart. ‘They can look searchingly into each others’ eyes rather than into terrified faces of girls they’re holding.’
Ewart placed his tea on the floor by his chair. Martha picked it up and placed a thin cork coaster beneath it.
‘So he’s been making more mischief, has he?’ said Ewart.
‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘John here would like to take man down.’
Ewart looked my Daddy up and down, from the bottom of his polished work boots to the top of his furrowed forehead.
‘Woundt we all,’ he replied. ‘But he’s not like you or I. He’s a different class. He could be taken down by one of his own and he probably has been. Or that’s his fear. Ever wondered why he bothers with all of us? Ever wondered why he doendt just take his money and muck about amongst his own sort? Well I have. It’s because he can’t. He’s afraid. So he interferes with our lives.’
They talked for hours about the Price business. Martha told stories that she had gathered from many years of listening. Stories from across the West Riding and beyond. Stories of evictions, disappearances, suspected corruption in the county council. They spoke of how it was to be resolved. Ewart talked about direct action. He spoke of the way things had been when people who lived together in the same communities also worked together, drank together, voted together and went on strike together.
I stopped listening after a while and I know that Cathy did as well. There was a dog-chewed tennis ball beneath the table and Cathy and I amused ourselves by softly kicking it to one another. The trick was to kick it with enough accuracy that it would hit Cathy’s feet but lightly enough that it would not bounce away. Then Cathy could retrieve it and roll it into the correct position with the soft sole of her foot and kick it back. Only once did I miss and the ball darted across the room and settled by the radiator beneath the window. Cathy got it back subtly though. The conversation had become so serious that only Daddy noticed the error and he shot his daughter a sly wink.
Revenge. They were speaking of revenge. Revenge against Mr Price and against everything that was invested in him. Lost money that really stood for lost time and lost children that really stood for a kind of immortality, just like Granny Morley had always said.
And then there was Ewart Royce, who had tossed and turned against the slow rot of the decades and against the new order that took him further and further from any kind of future for which he had hoped and imagined and prayed and fought.
When we lived by the coast, Granny Morley had taken us to an old war memorial. It was the sort fashioned in the style of an Anglo-Saxon stone cross with men’s names carved onto each of its four sides in order of military rank. Each time we saw the memorial she told us that millions of men had died dancing in the old style. I had not understood. I had puzzled over her meaning for years and only occasionally came to attach her words to some new and small piece of knowledge about human nature and the history of the world. Something about the thrall of performance and the retarded values of nations. Something about men who play out the same scenes again and again and who try to remedy all blunders and remove all errors in plot and description. Men who wrestle backwards through the acts.
I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.
Chapter Eleven
Spring came in earnest with clouds of pollen and dancing swifts. The little birds, back here to nest after a flight of a million miles, were buffeted by the wind, which blew hot then cold and clipped unripened catkins off the ash. The swifts were too light to charge at the gusts like gulls or crows, and through them I saw wind as sea. Thick, pillowy waves that rolled at earthen, wooded shores and threw tiny creatures at jutting rocks. The swifts surfed and dived and cut through the invisible mass, which to them must have roared and wailed as loudly as any ocean on earth, only to catch the air again on the updraft and rise to the crest. They were experts. They knew how it was done. And they brought the true Spring. Not the Spring that sent timid green shoots through compacted frost-bitten soil but the Spring that came with a rush of colour, a blanket of light, unfurling insects and absent, missed, prodigal birds on this prevailing sou’westerly.
When the heat was up, traveller lads from the caravan site down the way took off their tops and rode their 125cc dirt bikes round the lanes bare-chested. They bezzed up and down with boxes of ferrets clipped to the backs of their bikes and they looked for fields or verges with good networks of warrens. They popped the ferrets down the holes and out they would come again with wriggling rabbits for the lads’ suppers.
Cathy liked to watch them. She desired them. She itched to join in but we did not dare to ask. Instead we hid in ditches or behind hedges and scouted them. That became our game. We stalked the lads like they were our prey. We watched them wrestle with the ferrets then with the rabbits. None were as expert as Daddy with handling animals nor at dispatching them quickly and cleanly at the last. There was more blood than there should have been and more kicking and squealing. One of the lads was a big boy with thick ginger hair and a torso that freckled rather than tanned. He got bitten by one of the bunnies and how he howled. He had to let the rabbit go and the poor thing jumped and ducked left then right then back into its hole and out of sight. Blood splashed from its hind legs as it went and I knew it would not last long. It was a shame. It would have done better to have been got by Daddy and to have ended up in one of my pies, I thought, than to be half caught by a lad who has only half learnt how to catch you and then bleed to death slowly over the next few days or else lead a fox right to your warren with the scent of your blood and be devoured along with all your family.
Still, we watched these lads all the same. We watched the habit of their movement and the manner in which they held their bodies and the way they sat on their bikes, slouching easily while their bowed arms stretched to the handlebars and revved the bikes’ engines.
We saw other people so rarely we were fascinated by the news that did happen past, and though I loved watching birds and beetles, watching human beings was the thing I loved the best.
After catching the rabbits, the traveller lads got on their motorbikes and kicked back against the dirt then sped along the next lane and the next to find more of what they were after. We could follow the noise for a while but unless they stopped again nearby we could not follow to stalk them any longer and they were lost to us. We waited until the next time they came hunting or the next time they raced their bikes. In the meantime, there were always rabbits
to watch.
There was a night I could not sleep even though I had tired myself out working with Daddy in the copse all day. My back ached from swinging a large axe up and around and down onto the logs that Daddy had felled. My forearms ached from wrapping my slender hands around those logs and placing them onto the chopping block, and from thrusting the small hand-axe down onto them with my other hand time after time, to split the wood for burning in our stove. My thighs burnt from squatting and picking up bundles of the stuff though it was too heavy for me, and carrying it to Daddy’s store or up to the house. The ground in the copse was rough and strewn with branches and rocks and leaves that had fallen unevenly and rotted hard over seasons. Uneven earth cut apart by the growth and death of thick roots. My calves ached from a day of finding purchase on this unsteady ground, and the skin on my face was sore from the salty sweat that had trickled down from my hairline slowly for the last several hours.
My eyes, however, were as fresh as they had been that morning, and were filled with the dappled light that had shone through the quivering leaves all day, and with the colours of the wood and the image of my father stooping and rising as he felled branches for us to collect. Because my eyes were so bright and alive, my thoughts were too. Each time I reckoned I was falling off into sleep a colourful memory of the day returned and revived me. I skipped between waking and sleeping for the best part of two hours then peeled back the covers of my bed and pulled myself upright. I tucked my feet into my slippers and walked through the two doors to the kitchen.
There I found my sister stood at the window with her right hand raised in front of her face. She held back the curtain so as to look out into the night. The sky was dark but for a thin moon waxing and but for Venus forming a concentration of the sun’s rays above the horizon. She loomed larger than I had ever seen her.
A jug of home-made cider sat on the kitchen counter. Cathy had drunk perhaps half.
‘You’re up too, Danny.’ She only called me Danny sometimes. She had heard me step over the threshold and stop to look past her at the night sky.
I told her that I had been unable to sleep and that I guessed she was unable to sleep as well. I suggested that the both of us might just be too awake because of the day of working and because our bodies were tired but our thoughts awake.
‘I think I were too angry to sleep,’ she said.
Her statement shocked me. I asked her why she was angry.
‘I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?’
I told her that I was not. I told her that I was hardly ever angry and then she told me again that she felt angry all the time.
She told me that sometimes she felt like she was breaking apart. She told me that sometimes it was as if she was standing with two feet on the ground but at the very same time part of her was running headlong into a roaring fire.
I stayed up with her for a couple more hours until the jug of cider had gone and we had drunk another one besides.
When she agreed finally to go to bed, I returned to my room and fell asleep so quickly I almost forgot the events of the night. It was as if they had been a dream. A dream of fire. Indeed, in those days I thought that the most prolonged conflict in my life would be the one I faced every night against my dreams. Sometimes I thought I could sleep for ever. Sometimes, pulling myself out of a dream to be awake and alive in the world was like pulling myself out of my own skin and facing the wind and the rain in my own ripped-raw flesh.
Chapter Twelve
‘That bastard who won Lottery.’
‘Who?’
‘That bastard who won Lottery. Euromillions, I think it were. Not main prize, but enough. Already a millionaire and he wins Lottery.’
Cathy and I were in the car park down behind the back of the Working Men’s Club. The tarmac must have been forty years old. Winter frosts had cracked through its crust so many times there were more craters than ridges, and large gnarled clumps of the stuff, broken into rough, lithic formations, had been kicked to the sides of the rectangle like gargoyles in the rubble of a fallen cathedral. In patches, the artificial surface had cracked and crumbled so badly that only black earth remained, scorched by the tar. If the car park had once had white lines to mark its bays they had long since vanished. Chewing gum flecked its surface white and grey.
The morning mist hung around our knees. It would not be a cold day but it was cold now, just after dawn, cold and dim, the sun’s rays caught in clouds that were bobbing on the horizon.
‘Fucking Euromillions.’
This was where men met if they wanted work. There was little to be had around here. The jobs had gone twenty years ago or more. There was just a couple of warehouses where you could get work shifting boxes into vans. At Christmas-time there were more boxes and more vans but still not enough. There were jobs here and there for women: hairdressing jobs, nannying jobs, shop-assistant jobs, cleaning jobs, teaching-assistant jobs if you had an education. But if you were a man and you wanted odd jobs or seasonal farm work this was where you met. A truck came through and took you off to the fields or more usually to a barn nearby where a combine harvester dropped its load on the floor for sorting: sugar beet for sorting, turnips for sorting. And potatoes. Today it was potatoes and the men knew they would be taken up to Sunrise Farm to work for the bastard farmer who had won the Lottery.
‘At least he gives us time off we need to keep signed on,’ said one.
‘Drives us up there if we’re going to miss an appointment.’
‘He fucking has to, though. If he keeps us signed on he doendt have to pay us as much. He just slips us a tenner at end of day like it’s fucking pocket money.’
‘And he’ll go and dob you in if you cause a fuss. He’ll go and tell job centre you’ve been working for him and he’ll rustle up some bits of paper he says he’s been giving you all along. Payslips and legal stuff. Stuff you’ve never seen before in your life but then it’s suddenly there and it’s your own fault for claiming benefits and for not paying tax or summat, all in one go. Happened to Johnno.’
‘Happened to Tony.’
‘Happened to Chris, and all.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Wanker.’
The farmer was a bastard, then. Like most others, they all agreed, but this one particularly because he had won the Lottery when he was already a millionaire. He was a lucky bastard. Euromillions. Or a scratch card.
Cathy and I were like grey standing-stones at the border of their coven. They mainly ignored us. We stood at the edge of the car park, a little way away from their cluster in the middle but close enough to hear. We had brought a flask of hot coffee. I sipped it out of a white and blue enamel mug while Cathy drank from the lid.
Potato-sifting at Sunrise Farm. That was the job today and the van would be here soon to pick us up. Give us a lift. Drop us off. Pick us up again when the day was done. Drop us back here.
Cathy was nervous. I could tell from the way she gripped the flask lid. I could tell from the way her thin and translucent eyelids blinked against the cool air. Her eyes were sensitive like her skin and could not stand the cold. They were especially sensitive when she was scared. When something worried her she kept them wide against it, whatever it was, so as to see it coming at her then to see it off. Today, fear coursed through her like a hare through wheat stubble. I could tell. She bristled.
I was afraid, just the same. Sunrise was farmed by this millionaire lottery-winner and his name was Coxswain. It was the same Coxswain that Daddy had seen to for Peter’s money. The money he had been owed. It was Coxswain who Daddy had nearly killed outside the back-room betting shop. Coxswain was one of Price’s friends. It was Price’s land like all the land around here and Coxswain held it, ran the farm, worked the labourers hard for a tenner a day and dobbed them in to the dole office if they complained.
Cathy and I were here to see what was what. Those were the instructions Daddy had given us. It had been Ewart’s suggestion.
We had almost finished the flask of coffee when the van arrived. Cathy took my mug away and tossed the dregs aside. She put it into her bag with the flask and our lunchtime sandwiches.
A man with a clipboard and a spongy pewter moustache climbed out of the driver’s seat. The men and Cathy and I walked slowly towards him and huddled around. Hands were in pockets and jackets were zipped as far up as they could be zipped. The man made a note of each name before its owner climbed into the back of the van.
The foreman spotted my sister and me. ‘What’s this?’
Cathy stepped forward, prepared. ‘We’re here to work. Same as everyone else.’
‘How old are you?’
Cathy shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’ she said.
‘I asked, dindt I? How old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ she lied. ‘And he’s sixteen.’
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