Elmet

by Mozley, Fiona

  ‘Done with dredging?’ asked Daddy.

  ‘Nope. I was interrupted.’

  I passed him the folder. He looked down at it and then up at me.

  ‘It’s from Price. He was here. He told me to tell you he wants to come to some kind of accord. He wants you to work for him, only not like you think. He said he’s got someone for you to fight. And then he’ll give us the land – he’ll sign it over to us. He said he’d do that.’

  ‘He said that? That he’d provide documents for the land.’

  ‘Yes. For us.’

  ‘For us all?’

  ‘For me. He said he’d sign the land over to me. I dindt fully understand. But it amounts to same thing. It’ll be ours on paper, and that means something.’

  Daddy looked again at the folder, and took the documents from within. He looked at them closely, placing the pages flat on the table and leaning over them. He traced his index finger on the words, one by one, mouthing them precisely as he read. After some minutes he pushed the paper aside.

  ‘Means nothing to me.’

  ‘I can help,’ I said tentatively.

  He shook his head. ‘No, lad, it’s not that. I can read well enough to understand what it says. It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper. That’s part which means nowt to me.’

  Daddy gathered the documents and shuffled them back into the folder. The heels of the chair-legs scraped as he stood. The large man slouched as he went to the front door.

  ‘I’ll think on it,’ he said as he left the house and made for the copse.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The note came early before we were up. Cathy found it in the hall. It had been slipped under the door. She made breakfast and placed the note on the kitchen table, a hatchet that cut its way between the glass milk jug and the enamel coffee pot.

  I woke with the smell of bacon in my nose. Daddy emerged from his bedroom too and followed the scent. He saw the note as I came through the open door into the kitchen. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger and lifted it. He saw that it was addressed to him, sliced the envelope with the breadknife and opened it.

  ‘Mr Price?’ Cathy asked. The coffee had stewed for too long and a dark brown, opaque liquid oozed from the spout.

  Daddy hocked his throat for the first time that morning and spat up the residue glued to his windpipe by the night’s humidity and a slow evening cigarette.

  ‘He’s called me out.’

  ‘A fight?’

  ‘Yes, more or less. He’s arranged it as if it’s nothing more than a matter of business. There’ll be prize money and men will be allowed to bet on it. But, of course, we know that it handt got owt to do with business this time. He wants me to fight for him. If I win, he’ll get a lot of money and he’ll sign this land over to you two. If I lose, well, I’m sure he’ll still get a lot of money. He manages to fix things that way.’

  It was to be held in the woods overlooking the racecourse. There was some precedent in that. For hundreds of years travellers had toured the racecourses, buying and selling horses, tackle, and entertainments when the racing was over and the nights fell. Then the course would be given over to travellers and their friends. Lights would be lit, meat roasted, and whisky drunk. And fights fought.

  These days, the woods behind the racecourse offered cover from the police and from passers-by. Dog-walkers rarely entered the woods, such was the reputation.

  Daddy trained in the copse to find his form. He lifted what he could find – logs, stones – until some people clubbed together to bring up some second-hand dumbbells. He lifted me up too, as if I weighed nothing at all, as if there had been no change in my weight since the day I was born and he had lifted me out of my mother’s arms.

  He ate more meat and fish, almost double what he had been eating before. And he walked and ran to improve his endurance. That was more important now, more than ever, he said. He knew how hard he could hit and how quickly his punches could find their mark but if his opponent was much younger he would run around him and tire him out then if Daddy made a mistake, he might fall.

  He told me one evening of his fears. He made sure that Cathy was out, as she often was, and he spoke to me unusually clearly. He said that he was worried he was too old. He said that there was no greater burden than success, that he had an unbeaten record and a reputation that extended well beyond the boundaries of England and Ireland. In the right circles, at any rate. But fighting while weighed down with that record, he said, would be more difficult than ever. And he worried, because this fight really meant something.

  In previous bouts that he fought for money he could go in without any expectation. Even though others might stake their savings on him to win, he did not have to care unless he wanted to. He could remain calm, almost casual, and he would win because he could afford to be reckless.

  Now there was more at stake. Much more than just money. And he was older. ‘Old muscle,’ he said, as he patted his biceps.

  I told him that if he lost it would not matter to me and that we would find another way to keep the house, and remove the Prices from our lives. And if we could not, then we could always move away, start again, and we would still be together.

  I walked down to Vivien’s house with the pups the evening before the fight. The mood in my house was tight; Daddy had gone to the copse and Cathy just sat on the step smoking. I wanted out. Blackbirds sung in the hedgerows as dusk settled. The dogs felt the twilight too. They were uneasy with the coming darkness.

  The light was bright in Vivien’s hall and as I crossed the threshold I caught the aroma of the evening primrose that surrounded the entrance.

  ‘I thought I’d see you this evening,’ she said. She hurried as she spoke, and looked over my shoulder as she ushered me inside. The dogs kept to my heel, unsure of the new scents.

  The house was colder than it had been outside. An upstairs window clattered in its frame. The sound of wood on wood, like a glockenspiel, bounced down the stairs. The net curtains rustled. Vivien hurried about, shutting everything up, pinning the latches, tucking in the material, closing velvet outer curtains, bolting shutters where there were shutters. She took Jess and Becky from me and bustled them into the kitchen, took off their leads and stored them in a drawer, took out bowls from the cupboard and filled them with water and the remains of her own beef stew from the casserole on the hob. She closed the door behind them. They did not try to follow her out but began to lap up water, tails wagging in easy delight.

  She moved towards me, gripped my elbow and pushed me into a chair. Serious, I thought, but when she spoke her voice held its regular sweet lilt.

  ‘I thought I’d see you this evening,’ she said again. ‘You’re going off to the fight tomorrow, aren’t you? Your father is set on it, then?’

  ‘I believe so. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I think it’s a risk,’ she said, bluntly. ‘I’ve seen the man he is facing and I think your father could lose.’

  I did not know what to say. Certainty had been running away from me for weeks.

  ‘Why will he lose?’

  ‘Because he’ll be fighting against a much younger man.’

  ‘A man who’s inexperienced, then. A man who’s not been tested.’

  ‘Oh, he’s certainly been tested, but not around here so your Daddy wouldn’t know him. He’s been brought over from Eastern Europe. Ukraine. I think you should urge him to pull out,’ she continued. ‘I’m worried about him. He won’t feel the shame of it, I know. For a man like him, who lives the life he leads, he’s remarkably unconcerned by shame.’

  ‘But he has to. He has to for others. And for house.’

  She was paler than she had been when we had first met. Clots of black mascara had smudged onto her eyelids.

  ‘So you
won’t?’

  I shook my head, and soon after got up to leave. She did not attempt to change my mind. She knew what we were all like, Daddy, Cathy and me. She hugged me on the way out, for a long time. I half thought she was going to kiss me on the cheek but she did not. She put her hand briefly through my hair and gave me a gentle nudge out the door.

  I ran back along the road with the dogs and up the hill as the evening settled in earnest. I saw swifts darting around catching the small flies that had just slipped from their chrysalises. Jess and Becky had grown tall and lean these last months, with all their power stored in their taut back legs. They chased around me and each other in huge loping circles as I stuck to the path.

  I returned to find that Daddy had gone to bed early. Cathy was still up in the kitchen, smoking. She was excited and awake and alive. The thought of Daddy losing had not flown through her. She was as bright as ever I had seen her.

  That night, I lay awake staring at the wall in the dim moonlight, at the creases and crevices left by my father’s rough plasterwork, at his thumb prints, finger prints, the curve of his pallet knife, the sweep of the plaster that matched the motion of his right arm.

  When I did sleep I dreamt of a long walk home beneath the calls of roosting starlings.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The dawn erupted from a bud of mauve half-light and bloomed bloody as I woke. My lips stretched to a wide yawn as I sucked into my warming lungs the cool breeze that threaded a path through the open window. My eyes were tired and I saw the room in rapid stills through flickering lashes. Condensed sweat adhered the frayed cotton bed sheets to my bare skin. I had glowed hot during the night, hot from fitful dreams and restless limbs, and now shivered in the comparative chill.

  I rose and wove cautious steps into the wet room. We had no shower but a stiff tap to release hot water. It gushed intermittently. The power came from a wood-burning boiler, lit each morning by whoever woke first. It heated sufficient water for three to pigeon wash, spilling the water into a bucket beneath the tap and onto the stone floor as we cast it under our armpits, our groins, our necks, faces and ears, our feet, and our legs, arms and torsos.

  I splashed the steaming water onto my sticky skin and stroked it lightly with a bar of soap. My hands puckered red and white but I held them still beneath the tap. I rinsed my body and dried it with a small square of towel then slipped myself into fresh and crinkled clothes.

  I stepped out into the hall and caught the sour scent of kippers poaching in milk. We ate them with white, buttered bread and fresh orange juice, a gift from the milkman.

  At 7 o’clock, we heard the sound of Ewart Royce’s Volvo estate on the coarse gravel outside. The wheels slowed and stopped before we heard the brakes. Two doors shunted open then clipped shut. A knock echoed from the door. Cathy opened it.

  ‘Your car.’ Ewart looked darker, older, more stern. Nerves treated people differently. Our anxieties were focussed on the same target but each from a different angle and with their own tints.

  Martha waited by the vehicle and opened the boot as we stepped out with the bags and the dogs. Daddy climbed into the front seat and Martha got in behind him. Ewart was to drive, Cathy took the right-hand back seat and I sat in the middle between my sister and Mrs Royce.

  We were bashed together as the car took the choppy track down our hill. The journey was hardly smoother on the open roads. In these parts they were puckered with potholes from icy winters and acid rain. On the worst roads the potholes were connected by cracks that had filled with sediment and organic material, compacted by passing cars before the weeds had managed to fully breach the tarmac. It made for a rough ride.

  We spoke very little. Martha issued a handful of directions to Ewart and Ewart spoke once to ask for the time. Otherwise we were quiet. Cathy gazed out the window with her nose pressed gently against the smeared glass. Daddy breathed deeply. He did not turn his head. The back of his neck was covered with a film of perspiration that sparkled so clearly it was as if it had frozen into minuscule crystals of ice.

  I glanced around at my companions, more interested in them than I ever could be by the world outside. After ten minutes of driving Martha reached over and gripped my left hand. Her palm was hot. I felt the steady pulse in her thumb and a warm band of gold on her ring finger. Her firm fingernails were set in acrylic.

  We arrived at the racecourse forty-five minutes after leaving our house. We took the track around the perimeter fence to the grove behind. We drove between the trees, ash and oak like in our own copse. Brittle, fallen twigs and branches snapped beneath our wheels. The track was too narrow. Brackens, ferns and wild garlic had overtaken its sides and pressed against the vehicle’s body.

  We came to a fork in the road. One route had been churned by previous cars, vans and four-by-fours. The other was strangely smooth, almost untouched. It was as if it had been flooded and the waters had soaked into the ground and evaporated into the air, leaving an even layer of sticky silt on that track and that track only, like a heavy toffee glaze.

  As the car turned into the right fork I craned my neck to look back to the unused path. It was barren, more a strip of diseased or salted earth than a walkway. It led into a clearing where grass could find sunshine and push through the compressed earth and netted moss.

  It slipped from view, obscured by the low-hanging branches of a particularly squat oak. I turned back in my seat and saw the cold sweat on Daddy’s neck.

  We rounded a corner into another clearing, this one muddy from rain and footfall. Vehicles were parked in a semi-circle around the edge, most with their boots open to the slight drizzle. Men, a few boys and girls, and a very few women, stood around the open boots, peering. The fair was a chance to buy and sell. For many that might have been the main event. There were pedigree puppies and assorted rare breeds of ornamental chickens. There was a large Land Rover in one corner that was flanked by men with shaved heads and bomber jackets and most people stayed well clear. Guns possibly. Or bombs or pornography.

  ‘Cathy, Danny, you two get out first,’ said Daddy. ‘Find somewhere quiet to stand.’

  I slid out behind Cathy and sank my boots into the mud. We trudged the outer rim. People stood around and swayed like the hulking trees that enveloped the gathering. They chatted and smoked and exhibited their animals, tools, weapons. Someone had set up a fire in an oil drum with a griddle to cook sausages and onions. Cathy and I shifted in the direction of the savoury smoke and spitting fat only to be turned away when we confessed we had no money.

  ‘What do you think this is? A food bank? Get out of it!’

  Instead we loitered around the back of a black transit van that was filled with barrels of live fish. Goldfish, catfish, carp, perch. All swimming in water. The barrels were labelled, along with the approximate ages of the fish and the prices. Angling was big business around here.

  Fighting, fishing and animals. That is where these people put their money.

  I took a chance and stepped up into the van to take a closer look at what was on offer. There they were, at the bottom of the barrel. Fish the length of my forearm, spiralling up and down and around one another. Making the best use of the space they had. A pipe pumped air into the bottom of the barrel and it burbled up and tickled their gills and loose scales as the fish passed through the stream, gulping for sustenance.

  ‘Here, get out of it,’ said a sharp voice from behind me. It was a skinny little ginger boy a head shorter than Cathy. His face was shaded by sandy freckles and acne scabs. He wore an indigo tracksuit and white trainers. There was a residue of masticated toast stuck between his front teeth. ‘You can’t go in there unless you’re serious about buying. And you two aren’t buying owt.’

  ‘Who’s going a buy live fish here anyway?’ said Cathy. ‘Who’d come see a fight an buy a couple of carp?’

  ‘Who asked you, you stupid bitch?’

  Any other day Cathy might have smacked him one. She spat through her teeth and her cheeks had filled w
ith colour.

  Her cheeks reddened readily, like mine. We both resented it. How I wished I could stay an icy pale when angry or excited.

  She stepped back and walked away quickly.

  I hurried after her, ignoring the sound of a heavy ball of mucus and saliva hitting the ground behind my feet as I turned.

  She was pacing quickly, right across to the other side of the clearing where the serious business was happening, where Mr Price was talking with Daddy. Talking terms, outcomes, rules of sorts. Where the other serious men were standing around, their hands in the pockets of their waxed jackets, or round the leads of vicious-looking dogs. ‘Dogs in the cars when the fight’s on,’ I heard someone say. I thought of Jess and Becky doing battle with a couple of these dogs, in defence of their respective masters. I thought about the power of a true dog bite, or the slash of a claw, so much worse than the playful nips a dog could give when jumping at your hand. I thought about blood and flesh mixed with a dog’s saliva, and the tartar from its unbrushed teeth like blood mixed with rusted, dirty metal out on a farm far from help.

  Daddy was unbuttoning his jacket, getting ready. I saw his opponent for the first time and felt acid in my throat.

  He could have been six foot ten. He could have been taller. And he was heavy. He was sitting on the back of Mr Price’s trailer with his feet planted firmly in the mud. His weight pitched the trailer, testing its suspension to the full such that its chassis almost touched the dirt.

  There he was, slouched like a dancing bear propped against a wall, rubbing his knuckles, bulbous and calcified like Daddy’s.

  He caught sight of me staring as I pursued Cathy and pulled his lips up to his gums to reveal a full set of gold teeth. I looked quickly ahead. Cathy was heading for the trees.

  I called after her like we were back at school. ‘Wait up. Wait up!’