by Peter Benson
There was a little curve of earth in front of her cottage, and I could duck down beneath the window and do my burying without being seen by anyone, so that’s what I did. I closed my eyes, concentrated my thoughts, brought them together in a little ball, made the ball even smaller and then dropped that ball into my heart. I let it settle, stood up, opened my eyes, tucked the rest of the apple into my shirt pocket and, as I did, one of the hippy boys came out of the side gate that lead to the other cottages. I think it was Don, but it could have been Danny. I didn’t know what to expect, and as he walked towards me I took a step back. “Hi…” he said. “You OK?”
I didn’t know what to say. “You heard about Sam?”
“The hospital phoned.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. It wasn’t your fault, was it?”
I shook my head.
“We’re going to see her later. Sounds like you had a lucky escape…”
I shrugged. “I feel terrible.”
He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “Fate, Elliot.” He looked up at the sky. “It’s a powerful thing. We can’t change it.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t suppose we can.”
“And Sam’s a strong woman.”
“I know.”
“She’ll pull through.”
We stood and stared at each other, and although I wanted to say something else, I didn’t know what. I think he was thinking the same. “Look,” he said. “Call in any time, you know that. Sam said nothing but good things about you. She’s got a real thing for you, you know?”
“Thanks.”
“No,” he said. “Thank you.” And he squeezed my shoulder and crossed the road to the garden. I watched him stroll down the path to the place where Sam and I had pulled the onions, and then I turned and walked home.
Mum was waiting for me in the kitchen. When I walked in, she said, “See if what you just did doesn’t help,” and then told me to go and see Dad. “He’s out the back, working on your bike.”
Dad’s got a talent for wheels, metal and mechanicals. I’ve seen him mend a water pump with a matchstick and candle wax, and once he fixed a lawnmower with a paper clip and the bottom of a broken light bulb. The only reason our fridge has worked for twenty years is because he knows more about condensers than the repairman, and the reason Grace’s hair drier could blow a dog into the next parish is because he turbocharged it one drunk Friday. He stared at my bike, said, “I’ll have this going for you,” and after an hour and twenty minutes with a screwdriver, an adjustable spanner and a roll of wire, he stood back, cleaned his hands with an oily cloth, tossed it over his shoulder and said, “It might be as good as new.”
“You’re a genius.”
“Don’t say that until you’ve tried it.”
I took it for a spin around the green, and it made a few odd noises it hadn’t made before, but there was no shake in the handlebars, the wheels were true and the lights worked. So I told him I’d take it for a proper ride, and before he or Mum could tell me to stay where I was and not be so stupid, I’d gunned it away from the village towards Taunton and Sam.
I rode fast and on the straights I overtook without thinking. Get back on the horse. Give fear the finger. Stare at the sun. Haul the walrus up the beach. Catch a fly in your mouth. All these things. And take those things, put them in a box, seal the box and send them to hell. It was almost easy.
She was still in intensive care, and the machines were still beeping. I was given a gown to wear, and the nurse said that this time I should try to talk to her properly. “Don’t just mumble. Talk to her. Pretend you’re having a conversation. She won’t answer, but fill in the gaps yourself.”
“It’s hard.”
“It’s harder for her.”
So I sat with her, watched the machines blink, listened to them beep, and I looked at her face. The tubes in her mouth and nose made little bubbling noises. Her eyes were closed and her lips were cracked, and the bandage on her head was clean and white. I felt as though my blood was pouring away like water down a drain. I held her hand, squeezed it, leant towards her and said, “Hello Sam. It’s me. Elliot.”
“I’m sorry. So sorry…”
“I never meant you to get caught up in all this.”
“It’s a mess, but it’s going to get better.”
“And you’re going to get better too.”
“And when you do, I think we should go away together.”
“Would you like that?”
“Have you ever been to Cornwall?”
“I haven’t, but I’d like to go. I think we could find a nice place by the sea. Somewhere where we could watch the fishing boats come in…”
“And go for a walk along the beach.”
“Buy ice creams.”
“Build a sandcastle. Would you like to build a sandcastle?”
“We could fly a kite.”
“Do the sort of things we did when we were kids. You know…”
“Eat fish and chips.”
“Take a trip around the bay.”
“Sit outside a pub and chat to the locals.”
“Whatever you want to do, Sam. We could even go back to Greece.”
“I mean you could go back to Greece. I haven’t been there before.”
“We could find the bar where you used to work. Have a drink. Eat some of that food they eat.”
A nurse came and took her pulse, marked something on a chart and said, “You’re doing a good job, dear.”
“I feel a bit of an idiot.”
“You’re not.”
“Talk about anything you want. Just hearing your voice is good for her.”
“OK.”
So I did.
“I spoke to Don. At least I think it was Don. It might have been Danny. Or maybe it was Dave…”
“Anyway. They’re coming in to see you later.”
“I was afraid he was going to have a go at me, but he was very kind. Very gentle. He said I could call in any time, but I don’t think I will. Not until you’re there.”
“It wouldn’t be the same without you.”
I squeezed her hand again, and watched as the machines made their squiggly blue lines. I looked towards the nurse. She gave me a thumbs up.
“My Dad fixed up the bike.”
“It’s as good as new.”
“But it’s making a few odd noises.”
“So I’ve been riding carefully.”
“I’m not going to crash again…”
“And my mum taught me a charm. She made me take a bite from an apple…”
“And bury it outside your cottage.”
“She said that if I had her talent…”
“That it would work for me.”
I touched my shirt pocket, felt the apple in there and said, “And there’s something else I have to do…”
Beeeeeeeee… and Sam twitched. I say she twitched, but maybe it was a spasm. Her mouth opened and she made a sound like a cat trapped in a piano. A second later three nurses burst into the room. One started pushing buttons while another pulled the bedclothes back and the third rolled a trolley from a corner to the bedside. “Sorry,” she said, “you’ll have to go…” And I was gone.
I stood behind the glass and watched as the nurses worked. They were fast, and they didn’t panic, but whatever they were doing was important and serious and careful. There was a machine on the trolley, but before I had the chance to see them use it, one of the nurses released a blind that came down and covered the window. I stared at the blind for a minute, then turned and walked away from the ward.
I found a drinks machine. I bought a cup of coffee and stood by a window. As I drank, nurses and doctors and cleaners and porters wandered by, lost in their work and lost in the day. I felt trapped and useless. Given a stolen present I couldn’t play with. I wanted to go to bed, pull the blankets to my face and sleep. I wanted the dark, and I wanted to feel safe again. Take me back to the past, I though
t, and give me the chance to see the flight of my own life again. Let me swim in my own choices, not the choices other people make and push at me. Let me go.
An hour later I went back to intensive care. Sam’s machines were beeping regularly again, and the nurses had left her bedside. One of them told me they thought she’d suffered a brain haemorrhage, but now it looked as if she’d had a small seizure. I was going to ask them what this meant, but when I opened my mouth to speak, the words I wanted to say collapsed inside me, and I felt the touch of something that rhymed with all my grief.
“Should I stay?” I said.
The nurse said, “I think you should go home and get some sleep. You look exhausted.”
“I am.”
“Then go.”
“OK.”
“We’ll be looking after her,” she said.
The sun shone through the hospital windows, flowers wilted on window sills, patients waited in their dressing gowns. And as I walked down the corridor to the exit, I saw Sam’s parents walking towards me: her mother was being supported by her father, who was carrying an old teddy bear under his arm. It was a faded white bear, missing one eye and with a sad arm dangling down, and as I got closer to them I almost stopped and spoke to them and told them who I was, but then I thought again. They looked worse than the first time I’d seen them, lost in fear and agony, hardly able to walk straight. So I put my head down and walked on like the coward I was, slipped out into the sunshine and ducked around the side of the hospital to my bike. Before I rode away, I thought of the sound Sam had made, the little cat scream. I felt in my pocket for the bit apple, took it out, looked at its browned flesh and tossed it into a bush. Then I was away before I had a second chance to think about what I’d done, out of the car park and back on the road.
21
Sleep? It was impossible. Home? I didn’t want to go home, so I went to see Spike. His friend had gone out for the day. We sat in plastic picnic chairs in the back garden, put our feet on a pile of logs and drank coffee. When I told him about being chased by the car and Sam in a coma and me in hospital and mending motorbikes with wire and biting pieces out of apples, he said he didn’t believe me, so I showed him my leg and told him that he was welcome to come to Taunton and stand with his face pressed against the glass of the intensive-care ward. “If you’ve got the balls,” I said. He put his hands up, and saying, “OK. You win,” lit a cigarette and sat back. “You win, I lose, everything’s fucked.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“Well it is.”
“And it’s got nothing to do with winning.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.”
“Well. Whatever…”
I think Spike had gone beyond fear, and was now depressed. Depressed in the sort of way that could lead to a doctor’s surgery and a bottle of pills, and days in bed in a darkened room. He said he wished he could go back to work at the blackcurrant farm. “But I got the sack,” he said. “I’ll be lucky to get another job anywhere. Everything’s fucked.”
“You need to get a grip.”
“Thanks.”
“All you need to do is keep your head down for a couple more days. I’m getting you out of this mess.”
He took a long drag on his cigarette, slurped his coffee and said, “It’s a nightmare.”
“Tell me about it. Second thoughts – don’t. Don’t say another thing.”
“I’ve got nothing to say anyway.”
And that was how we left it. I did think about suggesting that when it was all over we could go away somewhere, take the van to Cornwall or something, pitch a tent in a campsite and spend a few days drinking, but I didn’t think he’d listen. All he wanted to do was make himself small, disappear into a hole, something like that. So when I’d finished my coffee I stood up and said, “Things to do, nightmares to sort. I’ll see you in a day or two.”
“Whatever,” he said.
“Spike…” I started, but then I shook my head. There was nothing more to say. “I’ll let myself out.” And I left him sitting in the garden with his face turned towards a hedge.
I suppose I’d always thought that one day Spike would be reduced to this, to staring at a hedge, admitting that everything was fucked, all plans gone, ambition dissolved. When I say I’d always thought this would happen, I should say that I might have thought it, but I never imagined it would actually come true. Spike had always been a wild schemer who never got round to putting his ideas into action, at least not until he saw that smoke in the hoop house. It was typical that the first scheme he ever got off the ground dropped him in it. “Typical,” I said to myself as I climbed on the bike and pointed it away from Wivey.
I rode around for a couple of hours, and when I got bored I went home and had a cup of tea. When Mum asked me about Sam, I just nodded and told her that she was the same. I didn’t tell her about throwing the apple away or seeing Spike, but I did say that I wouldn’t be in that night. “I’m going for a few beers,” I said, “so I’ll stay with some mates.”
“Mates?” she said. “Which mates?”
“Mates,” I said.
She knew I was lying, but I didn’t tell her which mates or which pub. I gave her a hug, left the bike by the back door and walked away.
I stopped at Heniton Hill, above the place where Spike had found the hoop house and the smoke, strolled to the top and sat down. The ground was hard and stony, and my head was buzzing. To the north, the Brendons climbed to Exmoor, and to the east the land dropped towards the Somerset levels, the Poldens and the Mendips. The fields were yellow and brown, the hedges lank, the wind nothing. High birds dipped, distant cows nudged the dust, the sun was prince and king. I smelt wool in the air, and meat, and I tasted metal. Everything was dry and fainting, blown into a fly’s mouth, chewed, thrown out again and left to turn to a crust. But when I turned, when I turned and focused and looked towards the purple crease of Dartmoor, something was changing. A fight was in the air. I didn’t notice it straight away, but when I did, I had to blink at the sight, remind myself that what I was seeing was real and blink again.
Clouds. Clouds were gathering in a thin line over the moor. There weren’t many, but they were real. And as the sun began to sink behind them, they turned to the look and colour of slashed wounds, red in the middle, pink at the sides, soft, weeping and livid. It would take time, but rain was coming. The clouds would build and climb and form themselves into thunderheads, and when they reached the height they needed they’d split and break, and the world would drink. Cows would run into sheep, sheep would prance, dogs would laugh, Ros and Dave and Don and Danny and their other friends would run into their garden and dance naked, and the rivers would sigh.
I watched the clouds for an hour. There was comfort in watching, comfort in the sight of the stream of rooks as they headed for their roosts, solace in the land as it gathered itself for the night. And as I walked away, I stopped at the rows of beech trees that grow on the hill, and ran my fingers over their trunks. I felt their strength and calm, and carried that calm away with me, held it tight and walked to Mr Evans’s farm to collect Spike’s van.
Night was falling fast. I walked quickly, and kept to the shadows and dips, and once, as a car appeared in the lane, I ducked out of its headlights and crouched behind a ruined churn stand. When I reached Stawley Mill, I stopped by the river to catch my breath and listen to the stars in their coursing. I heard them spin and flare, turn and light the way for their planets. The moon was still bright enough to see by, and the air was warm and close.
The ghost of a headless dog sometimes roams the lanes around Stawley Mill, lost and blind and hungry. It’s looking for the thing it’s lost, trying to remember what it was like to have eyes and ears and a mouth, following the sound of a disembodied bark that echoes through the trees of the wooded valleys and combes. Sometimes it waits in a hedge and jumps out at walkers, other times it wanders up and down the lane, marking gate posts with its scent, leaving drops
of blood on the ground. There are people who say that if you see it you will be dead within the week, maddened to death by the sight of its gaping neck and the smell of its wounds. And others say that the person who finds its head and returns it to the dog will gain the power to conjure silver from rain. I wasn’t going to tempt fate or whatever power the animal wields, and I wasn’t going to make myself its victim. As I headed up towards the farm I hurried on, kept my head down and walked in the middle of the road.
I crossed the bottom field below the farm, kept an eye out for Mr Evans, followed the line of the hedges to the sunken lane that led to the kale field, and stopped every fifty yards to listen for noise. I heard nothing, saw no one, kept low, and when I reached the barn I checked the stick of straw was still stuck behind the bolt, slipped the door open and ducked inside.
The smell of smoke filled the place, and the splinters of moonlight that shone through cracks in the walls illuminated the old trailer, the harrows and the van. I pulled the tarp off its roof, opened the back and looked inside. Everything was exactly as we’d left it. The smoke was still in its sacks, and the sacks were stacked in their rows. I went back to the doors, hauled them open and rolled the trailer out. I folded and rolled the tarp and put it in a corner. Then I let the van’s handbrake off, took the steering wheel and put my back into pushing.
It took twenty minutes, but by the time I’d finished I had the van parked in the field, the trailer back in the barn and the harrows and other bits of machinery arranged exactly as they had been before. I closed the doors, wiped my hands on a ball of hay, climbed into the van, put the key in the ignition and took a deep breath. It started first time. I listened to the engine, let it idle for a moment, then accelerated, dropped out of the field, drove through the gate and down into the sunken lane. The high hedges shaded the moon, so I turned the headlights on and drove as carefully and quietly as the van would allow. Just before the bend that led to the front yard, I turned off the lights, floored the accelerator and shot past my caravan and the house. As I passed the front door, the porch light came on, and as I dropped into the track that led down to the road, I looked in my mirrors. Mr Evans appeared, and he was carrying his gun. He waved towards me, and then raised his arm. He put the gun to his shoulder. I heard a double crack, but then I was round the corner, the headlights were on again and I was skidding through the sharp left onto the road. Fifty yards, a sharp right, down the hill towards Stawley church and then back towards the mill and the lane of the headless dog. Up the hill towards Appley, fast as the van would go, over the cross, down to Greenham and onto the main road. I pulled in before the junction, stopped and sat in the dark with my hands on the steering wheel and listened to my heart beating like a bastard. It beat and thudded, and my forehead was covered in sweat. I wiped myself dry and waited five minutes. No one came out of the night, and no cars passed. The lights that lit the junction cast an orange light that gave the place a lost, lonely atmosphere. The ghosts of accidents, the scream of tyres, the broken bodies and the cry of pain. Nothing. Silence and quiet and lines of tarmac against the hedges. Still. I waited another five minutes, then turned onto the road and drove towards Taunton.