by Peter Benson
It was Saturday night. The hippy girls had asked me back to theirs for a drink. When I reached Appley crossroads I had a choice – right and home or straight on to Ashbrittle. I went straight on, and ten minutes later I was standing outside their cottage, knocking on the door.
Sam answered. She was holding a bottle of cider and smiled such a wide smile when she saw me. “If it isn’t Elliot!” she said. “Come in!” and she led me inside. “Cider?”
“Yes please.”
“Won’t be a sec,” she said, and we went through to the kitchen.
I sat at a plain wooden table. There were flower-filled jam jars on the window sill, and empty bottles with arrangements of leaves. Pretty pictures of the seaside hung on the wall, and the smell of baking filled the air. Now my fear was swept away and overwhelmed with a feeling of ease. Life could be like this. It didn’t have to twist so madly. Quiet. Relaxed times. Slow motions. The room felt like a sanctuary, and after the days I’d had, I felt as though I was being washed and looked after. Sam passed me a cider, we chinked bottles and she sat opposite me.
“So what you been up to?” Her voice was light and careful, as though it was stepping on slippery stones across a river.
I shook my head. “It’s been hell.”
“Hell? What’s happened?” She leant forwards and gently touched my knee. I felt her fingers. They were soft, like a cat’s paw.
I ran my hands through my hair. I really needed a bath. “Well…” I said, but I couldn’t go on.
“Tell me. Please. I’m a good listener…”
I looked at her. I believed her. I believed her, but I wondered. I didn’t want to get her involved, but maybe she already was. I didn’t know. Who could I trust? Could I trust anyone? I didn’t know. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe I was as stupid as Spike. Oh fuck it, I thought, and I said, “I found a body hanging in the woods…”
“Oh God, it was you who found him?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus…”
“It was a nightmare.”
“I’ll bet. Mind you, so was he.”
“You knew him?”
“Not very well, but we saw him a couple of times up the pub.”
“What was his name?”
“Fred.”
“Fred?”
“Though some people called him Ox.”
“Ox?”
“Yes.”
“Know anything else about him?”
“Only that he was from Bristol. He came down in the spring, moved into a farm under Heniton Hill. I think it was his brother’s place, though I’m not sure. I didn’t take much notice. All I know is it was a bit heavy.”
“Heavy?”
“You can’t be growing that amount of smoke without it being heavy.”
“I suppose not. You know what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know… with the smoke…”
“I just heard some idiot nicked it.” She put her cider to her lips and sipped. “I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes. OK, so it wasn’t much, but people like that like to make examples of people. It’s the principle. I suppose they thought Fred had nicked it himself.”
“They?”
“Whoever he was growing it for.”
“And who are they?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it. Do you?”
“Not really.”
“Good.”
“But it’s hard. I keep seeing his body…”
“That must be awful.”
“It is.”
“And when the police took me to the station, they talked to me like I had something to do with it.”
“That’s the police for you.”
“Like it was my fault the man was dead,” and then for a moment I thought about telling her. Telling her about Spike and telling her about the bald man and his eyes and how I couldn’t get the feeling of panic out of my bones. My thumping heart, my sweating skin, my dry mouth. I took a swig of cider, swilled it around and swallowed.
“Try and think about something else.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. What do you like?”
“What do I like?”
“What do you do when you’re not working?”
I thought. I thought carefully. “I read books sometimes.”
“So what are you reading at the moment?”
“It’s a bird book.”
“You like birds?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. I saw three buzzards the other day, all circling around each other…”
“That’ll be the parents teaching a chick,” I said, and for the next twenty minutes we talked about the birds we’d seen and how the drought had been so tough for them, but maybe next year would be different. God, we hoped so. And I told her stories I heard about buzzards, about how they carried the souls of dead farmers to a field in the sky, and sowed their souls in furrows of cloud. About how the way they held their wings in their soaring could be interpreted by people who knew the secret signs.
“Do you know the secret signs?” she said.
“I might do.”
“Tell me.”
“I said I might do.”
“You do, don’t you?”
“One or two…”
“Then tell me one.”
“If two buzzards circle in opposite directions, there’ll be a fire in the parish. That’s one of the signs. And you know what?”
“What?”
“It’s true,” I said, and she said, “I’m sure it is,” and I said, “Sometimes I think there are things going on that we know absolutely nothing about,” and she said, “I know there are,” and as we talked I felt a lightness come down and finger itself into my head and take away some of the madness. It pushed this madness into a basket of its own making, covered it with a cloth and let it lie in the dark, and I sat back and listened to Sam. She had a quiet, easy way of talking, and when she started telling me stories about how she’d ended up in Ashbrittle, a long route of working in one place and then another, of living in one place and then another, of drifting and finding, losing and stopping, starting and settling, I lost myself in her voice and her face.
She’d been born in Portsmouth. Her father had been in the navy, and she’d spent half her childhood moving around the country. “Plymouth, Chatham, back to Portsmouth, Faslane. When I left school I was going to be a nurse. I trained for a couple of years, but then I gave it up.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure. I think I just got bored. And then other things happened. I went on holiday to Greece, spent most of the time drinking in a bar or lazing on the beach in the sun. I had a brilliant time. It was the first time I’d been on holiday on my own, and I just loved the place, the people, the whole Mediterranean thing. A couple of days before I was due to fly back, the owner of the bar asked me if I wanted a job. I didn’t have to think twice. The thought of going back to a dingy bedsit in Swindon, the wards, the boring lectures, the rain, sick people… you get the idea.”
“Oh yes.”
“I stayed in Greece for a couple of years, met some brilliant people, but then the bar changed hands and I didn’t have a job any more. When I got back, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do next. I found a job in a bar in Bristol, but the place was a dive. One day, a friend told me she was going to visit some mates in this place in Somerset; turned out to be Ashbrittle. I stayed a couple of days, the couple of days turned into a week, the week into a month. That was last year.”
“I remember the first time I noticed you.”
“When was that?”
“Last autumn. You cycled past our place.”
“And what did you think?”
“I thought… I thought you looked very happy. Happy and free.”
She laughed. “I think I am. At least as happy and free as I can be.”
Her voice and her laugh and her face took me and held me quietly, a
nd I was getting lost in cider and her eyes. I’d never seen eyes like them, not as brown and deep and knowing, as if they understood the things I said before I said them. They were old eyes, but they were fresh and instinctive, maybe like a cat’s eyes. Or a hawk’s. Waiting. Patient. Wanting. And I was thinking about telling her this, thinking about embarrassing myself and maybe leaning towards her and telling her something that I shouldn’t, when the other girl I’d met at the pub came back with three hippy blokes. They’d been at the Staple Cross pub and had ridden back on bicycles.
Sam said, “You remember Ros?”
“Of course,” I said, and Ros leant forwards and kissed my cheeks. She smelt of apples and fish.
“And these are the three Ds – Dave, Don and Danny,” she said. Hairy blokes with rough hands and watery eyes, they shook my hand and fetched some more cider from the kitchen. We went out and sat on the lawn outside the cottage.
Pump Court was made up of four cottages. They were called Milton’s, Parson’s, Galilee and Venture. The hippies rented them from a naval commander who lived in the Old Parsonage. There was a cobbled path that ran along the front of the houses, and everything – garden, cooking, shopping, cider, bicycles – was shared. When Dave wanted some peanuts, he fetched them from the kitchen in Parson’s even though he lived in Venture, and when Ros needed to use the loo she went to Galilee even though she lived in Milton’s with Sam. There was no running water in the cottages – they used outside taps and chemical toilets, and washed in zinc baths in front of open fires – but they didn’t care about that sort of thing. They cared about what was happening to the world, the way we were pouring shit into the sea and pumping crap into the air. I don’t think they’d worked out how we could make things better in a big way, but they were doing things in their own small way. Ros had written to the local MP and suggested the government give everyone in the country a bicycle, and Danny was working on a plan to supply everyone with free lettuce seeds. “You don’t need a garden,” he said. “All you need is a window box.”
“You’ve got to think,” said Dave.
“Think, plan, do,” said Don.
I couldn’t disagree, and I wanted to say something that made sense to them, but before anyone had the chance to ask me anything I said, “I’ve got to be up at six.”
“Six?” Don said.
“Milking,” I said.
“Oh, right. Yeah…”
“That’s early,” said Danny.
“That’s farming,” I said.
“Sure,” said Ros.
I went to the door, and Sam followed me, and as I was saying goodnight she leant forwards, put her arms around me and hugged me. She smelt of hay, and her body was warm and tight. Tight as a promise, warm as a toy in a child’s hand. “Good night, Elliot,” she said, and as we pulled away she kissed me once on the lips, a quick, light kiss. It felt like a bird had landed on my lips and left dust there. A house martin or a swallow or a swift. Something darty and quick. I said, “You want to see me again?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Good,” I said, and I almost asked her if she was sleeping with Dave, Don or Danny, or Dave and Don, or Danny and Dave, or Don, Dave and Danny, but I didn’t have to. I knew she wasn’t. Even I could see that. It was in her eyes, like a cat holds a bird in its mouth, plain and obvious and quiet, and as I turned and walked to my bike, I left her smiling and standing at the door to Milton’s cottage with her hand waving above her head.
I rode back to the farm, and fifteen minutes later I was lying on my bed in the caravan. I thought about Sam’s voice and the feel of her fingers on my knee, and I thought about how the simplest things can calm terror. I turned onto my side, switched on the radio and listened to some music. It was classical music, sad and slow, and when it was finished someone talked about Russia and how romantic it was to walk in the snow and watch a frozen river as it cracked. I thought about snow and ice. I wished for snow and ice. Then some different music started. This was faster and came from Germany. I tapped my fingers to it, and as I did I heard the sound of something moving underneath the caravan, a rat or a mouse, and the distant bark of a dog. The normal things. The easy things that leave no traces.
When the programme about music finished it was midnight, and the news came on. I leant out of bed, turned the radio off, listened to my beating heart and closed my eyes. I saw things in the dark and heard things there, but I let them pass. They weren’t going to spook me. I was stronger than imagination, stronger than fright and stronger than the idea that trouble was permanent. It wasn’t. Not even life was permanent. And as the comfort of that thought found a warm place to settle, I began to drift away like a bird on a thermal, and watched myself dip and swoop towards the west.
11
Sunday. I milked, mucked out, swept the yard and left the farm for the day. I didn’t milk on Sunday evening, Mr Evans got a relief in, so I told him I’d see him in the morning and went to see Mum, Dad and Grace. We always have Sunday lunch together, and as I sat in the kitchen and told them about the hung man and the police they listened with their mouths open and their heads nodding.
“The world’s gone mad,” said Dad.
“I know,” I said.
“And are you all right?”
“Not really. I’m having nightmares.”
“Maybe you should see the doctor.”
“Why?”
“He’ll give you something to help you sleep.”
“I don’t want that. I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning.”
Grace had learnt a new way to cook a chicken, and after she’d sat and listened for five minutes, she went to fuss in the kitchen and make some gravy. When I’d finished the story, Mum said she wanted to talk to me in the garden, so we walked down to the shed where Dad keeps his tools, stood by the door and she said, “That poor man in the woods; it’s got something to do with whatever Spike’s up to. Hasn’t it?”
“Yes. But I don’t know how.”
“I knew it. Have you seen him?”
“Yes.”
“So tell me. What’s going on? What, exactly, is going on?”
“Mum…”
“You’d better tell me.”
“I can’t. I promised. And I’m afraid that if I tell you, you’ll get caught up in it.”
“I’m already caught up in it. I wake up every morning with the stench of it in my nose and the taste of it in my mouth. Everywhere I go I can smell it, and I can feel it in the wind. And every time I think of you, I see shadows where there shouldn’t be any, and they follow me around until I stop thinking about you.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means danger, Pet. More danger than you can imagine.”
I didn’t know what to say. What could I say? Sometimes I think Mum makes this stuff up to scare me, and that she hasn’t the powers she thinks she has. Sometimes I think Spike is right and it is all mumbo-jumbo, but then I stop because however hard I try to turn away from the things she says, her words won’t let me. They pull me in, suck me in, they make me believe.
“I think,” she said, “that it’s time you started listening to your heart. Really listen to what it says. And recognize the signs.”
“What signs?”
“You know what I mean, Pet. My signs, your signs. Our signs. The old signs. They’re everywhere, and you know it.”
I looked at her face. Lines were appearing where lines hadn’t been before, and her hair was turning white around its grey edges. She was smaller than me, but didn’t feel it. Sometimes I thought she was taller and sometimes when she talked I thought she might be able to stop a train with her voice. Most of the time it was like a moth in flight, a flutter, a touch of powder against a night window, but then it could turn. Now it turned, and her face hardened. “Do what you’re told,” she said. “Because if you don’t, you’ll meet more than trouble.”
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but was saved by Grace, who opened the kitchen windo
w and called us into lunch, but as we walked to the house Mum said, “If you don’t do it for yourself, do it for me.”
“Do what?”
“You know,” she said, and there was no doubting it.
When we sat down to eat, Mum said she didn’t want any talk of “bad things”, so Dad told us about a job he’d been doing for a retired army Major in Kittisford. The man had fought in the War, and once captured a German tank armed with only a pistol and a hand grenade. His family had been the biggest landowners in the area, hundreds of acres of the best land, farmhouses, cottages and barns, flocks of sheep, herds of cows and fast horses. Over the years the estate had dwindled, a pocket sold here, another there, and now he lived in a coach house with his library and his war pistol beside his bed. He smoked a pipe that bubbled with spit and moist tobacco, and although he had an appalling back and put up with constant pain, he was a keen trout fisherman. Which is where Dad’s story began.
“He’s got a small lake – more of a pond really. Lots of nice goldfish swimming about, minding their own business. So what does he do? Buys a dozen trout, sticks them in the pond and tells me he’s going to fish them out in a couple of months. Good practice for when he’s fishing properly, he says.”
“Is that the pond you can see from the road?” said Mum.
“Yes. So the trout have been in for a couple of days, and he sends me down there to clear some smoke from the bank. Filthy job, stinking mud, and I’ve been working for a couple of minutes when I see these fat, bloated fish floating on the surface. It’s the trout. I put the tools down and go up to find the Major. He fetches a net and we go down there and started collecting them. Twelve fish, they’re all dead, and when we walk round the pond to look for the goldfish, we only see a couple. It’s a mystery.”
“Lovely chicken…” said Mum.
“So when we get back to the house, the Major goes to the kitchen, pulls out his sharpest knife and starts gutting the trout. And guess what?”
“Tell us, father,” said Mum.
“Every single trout is stuffed full of goldfish. They’ve eaten themselves to death.”
“What a way to go.”
“That’s exactly what I said. And when he’d finished gutting, he put them in a bag and told me to bury them at the bottom of the garden. It was disgusting.”