Bone Harvest

by James Brogden

  ‘Cow.’

  ‘Moo.’

  They grinned at each other, re-shouldered their bags and set off along the fence that ran perpendicular to the wall, uphill and into a copse of trees.

  It had been a last-minute decision to go out for a day’s ramble through the fields and down to Fradley Junction, where the Trent and Mersey Canal met the Coventry Canal. Suzie had gained an unexpected day off because some workmen renovating the offices next door had sliced through a power cable and cut the electricity to the whole building, and Kate’s planned trip with her on-off boyfriend Gethin had fallen through because of some football-related thing, so Kate had messaged her to say why don’t we do something – thinking an epic shopping spree – and Suzie had come back out of nowhere with it’s a sunny day why don’t we go for a walk in the countryside and to her own enormous surprise Kate had said sure, why not? Apparently Suzie had fond memories of a childhood holiday cruising the canal and had stopped at this place called the Laughing Goose Café, which sounded fun. So Kate had gone into the loft and dragged out the dusty old rucksack that she hadn’t used since failing her Bronze Duke of Edinburgh expedition at the age of fourteen, bought some sandwiches from the Co-op across the road and then it was now.

  According to the map this was called Drake’s Hill. There was no path following the fence and the grass was long and still wet from the rain, and pretty soon Kate’s jeggings were wet to the knee. ‘I’m getting soaked here,’ she complained.

  Suzie laughed. ‘Not that I’m trying to distract you in any way, but ooh look, babby lambs!’

  She pointed to the field on their left, on the other side of the fence, where sheep were grazing accompanied by the tiny white dots of very new lambs. The nearest she could see were feeding, with their heads butting their mother’s underside and their tails waggling voraciously.

  ‘Oh, that is so cute!’

  ‘Yeah, but imagine breastfeeding something that’s headbutting you in the tits all the time. Respect, mama sheep.’

  They carried on walking, and soon found themselves amongst the trees, having to step over roots and duck to avoid low-hanging branches that were just coming into leaf. The girls had to concentrate more on where they were putting their feet, so when Suzie stopped suddenly, Kate almost ran into her.

  ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You okay?’

  Suzie continued to stare straight ahead at whatever had made her stop, and slowly raised her hand to point with a shaking finger. ‘What’s that?’ she whispered.

  Kate moved to one side to get a better view. Further ahead of them, half-hidden by the swaying branches of a birch, was something that looked like a red and white coat draped over a fence post. Then a stronger breeze stirred the branches more, and they parted fully to reveal the severed head of a lamb impaled there, facing back into the field where its living cousins were feeding quite happily. Its tiny, eviscerated corpse hung on the barbed wire below, limbs spread-eagled above a glistening pile of intestines. Flies were crawling here and on the lamb’s staring eyeballs.

  Kate jammed her hands to her mouth to stifle the small noises that were trying to escape. If they escaped, they would become huge, and might not ever stop. Suzie was whimpering, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ over and over.

  ‘Who… what kind of sick fucker would do something like this?’ said Kate.

  Suzie swallowed thickly. ‘I don’t know. Let’s go. Let’s just go.’

  So they just went, skirting the scene of carnage and holding their breaths against the stench of blood and shit, but Suzie stopped again a few minutes later, moaning, ‘No, no, oh please God nooo…’

  There was another one. This one had some black colouration in its wool. Its tongue had also been cut out and hung below its throat. This time Kate and Suzie ran, and in a few moments they were out from the trees and downhill into the open field, following the straight line of the fence on their left towards the hedgerow where the path lay, the path that they should never have left, and they could see another butchered lamb, and then another, one every hundred yards or so, maybe a dozen of them, all with their dead eyes gazing at the pasture from which they’d been snatched. At the very bottom there was a man pulling the remains of one from the fence and throwing it into a trailer attached to a quad bike. There were already several small corpses in the trailer already. The farmer glanced at the girls as they ran past but didn’t stop them or say anything to them, obviously not caring that they were trespassing, and they saw that there were tears on his face too.

  Kate and Suzie threw themselves over the wall at the other end and onto the lane. They completed the rest of their walk in shocked and trembling silence, and found the canal junction colourful with boats and laughing families. They sat at a table outside the Laughing Goose with cups of tea going cold in front of them and ducks cackling around their ankles, but if there was a joke neither of them could see the funny side.

  * * *

  David got back late from the hospital, chucked a frozen lasagne into the microwave and then sat on the sofa, flicking through the TV channels and wondering why he wasn’t more tired. Alice had been transferred to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, an hour’s drive away, and he’d stayed until the end of visiting hours at seven, so he should have been exhausted.

  The oncologists on the Ward 18 had diagnosed an infection of staphylococcus aureus in Alice’s chemo port, which they removed, and put her on a week’s course of IV antibiotics. Yesterday they had replaced it with a new port and were planning to keep her in for another four days to monitor how her body accepted it. Nobody could tell Becky and David how the infection had got in there – it could have been a slip-up in the way her port was cleaned and her chemo administered, or it could have been a miniscule flaw in the device itself. Becky blamed herself for not looking after her little girl better, second-guessing every decision to take her outside or let her play with something that hadn’t been scrupulously disinfected first. David suspected that it was simply nature’s way of reminding them who was in charge and punishing them for having had things go so relatively smoothly with her treatment. As if any of this had been easy.

  To help keep her isolated, Alice had an en-suite cubicle which had space to let one parent stay overnight, sleeping in a chair which folded out into a narrow bed. David and Becky had been taking turns, and tonight it was hers. Both the print works and the police had been as generous as ever in letting him have the time off, but it meant that when he got home he had nothing to do but brood. He called Becky to let her know that he had got home okay, said goodnight and I-love-you to his brave baby girl, and then faffed around on his phone to keep himself distracted while the microwave worked its magic.

  There was an alert on the OWL about two young women who had reported that they’d seen mutilated farm animals while out walking, the day before yesterday. The regular police had gone out to check on the landowner concerned – a farmer called Turner – who told them that it had just been a fox that had taken two of his lambs, nothing had been mutilated. The incident was actually being flagged as a case of trespass; Turner didn’t want to press charges but the police put it up on OWL in case it happened again to anyone else who did. Lambing season was a sensitive time, and nobody wanted stroppy ramblers exercising their ‘right to roam’ and stressing their animals. It was done and signed off, nothing to see here folks, please move along.

  But something about it nagged him.

  It was the farmer’s name: Turner. He scrolled back through the last few weeks’ reports, and the name came up again. There had been a fight in the Golden Cross; Darren Turner and two of his mates had got seven colours of shit kicked out of them by Matthew Hewitson in an argument over a local girl called Lauren Jeffries. David hadn’t been volunteering that night so he hadn’t seen what happened, but he had seen the start of it at the barbecue two weeks before. Darren and his friends were no lightweights either, they were farmers’ sons and used to a lot of hard physical work, so how did Matt Hewitson go from getting seen off
by one of them to handing all three of them their arses in a fortnight? It was no surprise that they didn’t want to make a thing of it with the police. There had been no serious injuries, so the regular cops had written it up as a Friday-night scuffle, handed out cautions to all concerned and got on with worrying about more important things.

  Which was exactly what David himself should have been doing, he told himself. The microwave pinged and he went to collect his meal. He prodded the radioactive sludge around his plate before eventually abandoning it. It was tasteless and he had no appetite anyway. He took care of the ironing, vacuumed the house and then sat on the sofa again, feeling twitchy and restless. He scrolled through the OWL reports again.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he muttered, grabbed his jacket and his car keys, and went to have a word with Matthew Hewitson.

  * * *

  Matt wasn’t at home, but his mum was, and she wasn’t happy. David eventually managed to convince Shirley Hewitson that he wasn’t there to get her son into trouble with the police, but it didn’t improve her mood appreciably.

  ‘He’s off at that bloody farm again, I’ll bet,’ she complained. ‘Spends all his time there now. I hardly see him these days!’

  ‘What farm?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, the one owned by that bloody pair of millennials. You know she actually came here to help him collect his things? The woman, the one with the Welsh-sounding name. I said to her, he’s a legal adult and can make his own decisions but you’re taking advantage of him and it’s not right. And she says to me, she says that I don’t need to worry about him any more because he’s got a new family. Well I thought, that’s bloody cheeky, isn’t it? She says, “He’s got a new mother now,” looking all pleased with herself. So I says to her, love, you ain’t somebody’s mother until you’ve sat up with him vomiting all the night in hospital—’ Mrs Hewitson stopped and slapped her hand across her mouth. ‘Oh my God I am so sorry, I didn’t mean… how is your little one?’

  ‘She’s improving,’ he said. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about his daughter. ‘Tell me about this farm where he’s moved to.’

  2

  THE ABATTOIR SHRINE

  BY THE TIME DAVID ARRIVED AT FARROW FARM, FULL night had fallen; the sky was clear and dusted with stars. The first thing that he noticed when he pulled into the yard was how many other vehicles there were – and not farm vehicles. Ordinary cars. It wasn’t unusual to see yards like this full of rusting old motors, but these weren’t wrecks. It looked more like Mr Everett Clifton and Miss Ardwyn Hughes were hosting a bit of a get-together.

  That impression was strengthened when he got out of his car and approached the front door. There was bright light behind drawn curtains and from inside he could hear what sounded like a dinner party: laughter and chatter and the sounds of cutlery on plates. David had no intention of interrupting; however odd the couple might be, they were entitled to their social life, and if Matthew was here then now wasn’t the time to be asking him awkward questions. David would come back another time. He turned to go.

  The front door opened and Ardwyn was standing there with a tide of light and warmth and the noise of a boisterous dinner party flowing out from around her.

  ‘Why, David!’ She beamed. ‘What a pleasant surprise! Please, come in!’

  ‘Oh, no thank you, it’s fine. I don’t want to disturb. I’ll just—’

  ‘You’ll just nothing of the sort.’ She stepped to one side and beckoned with her head. ‘In.’

  It would have been rude to refuse.

  She led him along a cluttered hallway, past closed doors to left and right, and then into a high-ceilinged kitchen where a group of people were sitting around a heavy table chaotic with the remains of a large meal. Matthew Hewitson was in the process of swigging from a can of lager when he entered, and chatter stopped as they all turned to look at him. David recognised them as fellow tenants of Briar Hill Allotments; he saw Angie Robotham, Shane Harding and his partner Jason, ‘Big Ed’ Rimedzo, and Hugh Preston, who winked at him. There was something weird about Hugh’s face, but before he could look more closely, Everett was handing him a can of beer.

  ‘Drink?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, surprised. ‘No, thank you. I’m driving.’ Admittedly his own life had been somewhat hectic lately, but he was sure that he hadn’t seen Hugh since the day of the barbecue, which was another strange thing because Hugh’s allotment was his pride and joy and he would ordinarily have been working on it every day.

  ‘Well, we can’t have that,’ Everett replied. ‘You’d have to arrest yourself. Cup of tea it is, then.’

  Ardwyn resumed her seat at the head of the table and murmured something to Matthew, who replied, ‘Yes, Mother,’ and immediately got up and started clearing the dirty dishes. ‘Please,’ she said, indicating his now empty chair. ‘Have a seat.’

  David sat, looking around at the faces of his neighbours, seeing nothing but smiles and friendliness. For some reason it scared the shit out of him.

  ‘So, to what do we owe this honour?’ asked Ardwyn, smiling. ‘I mean, we would have invited you and Becky of course but we assumed that you were a bit preoccupied at the moment.’

  Everett returned from having put the kettle on, wiping his hands on a tea towel. ‘Yes, how goes the Pimblett Project?’ he asked. ‘How’s Alice doing? We heard, you know, jungle drums and all that.’ He shrugged.

  ‘She’s getting better, thanks. The infection’s mostly gone. She’s not out of the woods yet, but the doctors are optimistic.’

  ‘Doctors always are, until they aren’t!’ Hugh laughed.

  Angie winced slightly. ‘Hugh,’ she murmured.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, subsiding.

  When David had been a kid there had been a craze for those ‘Magic Eye’ pictures – those visual puzzles designed by computer, something to do with fractals, in which an image was hidden amongst the noise of a set of repeating patterns or shapes. He’d been terrible at them. ‘Couldn’t see the wood for the trees,’ his father had said, and it was true. David was very good at honing in on specific details but found it hard to widen his focus to see the big picture. It was what made him good at spotting flaws in a print run but atrocious at spelling. There was something about the big picture in front of him around the dining table that was subtly, ever so slightly wrong, and it lay in a detail that he’d missed, just like in a magic eye picture…

  ‘Hugh,’ he said, frowning, ‘is there something wrong with your eye?’

  ‘My eye?’ Hugh asked. ‘What, this one?’ He brought out of his pocket something that looked a bit like a marble and rolled it along the table towards him, and winked again, with the eye that used to be glass and moved sluggishly, if at all, but which now rolled in its socket as nimbly as its partner. An eye which, impossible as it was, had grown back. His old glass eye rolled to a stop against a cork, and peered blindly up at the ceiling.

  ‘Hugh, what the fuck?’ He turned on Ardwyn. ‘What’s going on here?’

  She spread her hands. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘His eye! It…’ He was not going to say It grew back, because that was impossible. He must be mistaken, obviously more fatigued than he’d thought. Prosthetic eyes could be very convincing, with veins and everything. The thing on the table must be a spare; this was obviously just one of Hugh’s tasteless jokes.

  Hugh got up from his chair and approached David. ‘Come on, David lad,’ he said gently. ‘Come and have a look. It’s real, I swear. Don’t be afraid. It’s not going to leap out of its socket and choke you.’

  Cautiously, David peered closer. He might have been able to dismiss it as a particularly realistic prosthesis, complete with hair-like blood vessels in the sclera, and the fact that it moved could have been put down to it fitting particularly snugly with the muscles in Hugh’s eye socket. But no prosthetic eye, however realistic, had an iris that expanded and shrank like this as Hugh turned his head to and fro. It was impossible, and yet it was literally staring him in
the face.

  ‘I know, lad, it’s a bit of a shock, but you get used to it.’ Hugh patted him on the shoulder and resumed his seat.

  He turned to Everett. ‘How…?’ he whispered.

  ‘Wrong question, chum. The question is who. Angie?’

  ‘I’ve had Type 1 diabetes all my life up until six weeks ago,’ she said. ‘Then it just disappeared overnight. Poof!’ She snapped her fingers.

  ‘Edihan?’

  ‘In 1997 I was in a car accident,’ said the Turkish barber. ‘They had to pin my spine back together.’ He tossed onto the table a handful of metal pins and screws that clinked and glinted.

  ‘Peanut allergy,’ said Shane Harding. ‘Put me in a coma when I was ten.’

  ‘Which is no excuse for polishing off the pecan pie!’ said Everett, and the others laughed.

  ‘Me?’ said Jason. ‘Oh, I’m just here because Shane’s here. But I did spit out all my fillings and found my teeth fixed. Nothing very dramatic, sorry.’

  ‘Miracles,’ said Ardwyn, ‘don’t have to be big and flashy and dramatic. They can be as small as a smile or a tooth filling, or they can be as huge as the ocean. Or your daughter’s leukaemia.’

  ‘Shut up!’ David shouted. ‘No! Just shut up! That’s not… that’s not…’

  Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia is very treatable and the survival rates are high, they’d been told. But you’re looking at two to three years of treatment – that’s chemotherapy which will feel worse than the disease itself, and very likely some painful surgical procedures. There’s no miracle cure and absolutely no shortcuts, and if one single cell escapes the treatment the whole circus could start up again. There is treatment, but nothing to stop it from happening again, and the sooner you accommodate yourself to that fact the better. Well, he and Becky had accommodated themselves to it, made all the concessions, taken Alice to all the treatments, held her hand while she cried with the pain of lumbar punctures and the nausea of chemo. To offer the hope of a cure after all of that – however impossible – was just unfair.