She watched him unlock the door and was moved to start after him before he disappeared inside. She trotted up the short flight of steps, leaving Laura down on the concrete.
He heard the sound of her shoes on the stairs and turned around.
‘Father, for what it’s worth, I wanted to say I admire what you’re doing, you know, as a priest getting involved with the football team. I don’t see a lot of feel-good rehabilitation stories in my average week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it happens.’
‘So you believe in redemption?’
‘Some days that’s harder than others, but I try.’
‘You and me both, hen.’
She was walking back down the stairs when she heard him call after her.
‘By the way,’ he said, his foot keeping the door from closing. ‘I didnae join the team because I’m a priest.’
It took her a moment to suss what he meant, then it all fell into place.
‘What was that about?’ Laura asked.
‘That’s no shepherd,’ Catherine replied.
‘What?’
‘I’ll tell you another time.’
A Woman’s Work
She found herself at the chopping block once more upon another cool, clear morning, the first real frost of autumn underfoot. It was early November, hoar coating the edges of the brown leaves scattered untidily about the place, one more job nobody had time enough to do. They were piled up like snowdrifts against the wooden wall of the stables, its doors bolted and locked. Demetrius had been sold months back, another luxury they could no longer afford. The sacrifice was lessened by the fact that nobody liked going into the stables any more, and Lisa hadn’t ridden him after that horrible day.
She placed a short log on the block and hefted the axe two-handed, splitting the firewood with a practised stroke. She wore only a T-shirt despite the cold, knowing that it would be enough once she got swinging. It might be the warmest she felt all day, given the temperature inside the house, where the central heating remained steadfastly off, every drop of oil an extravagance. The wood she was chopping was for the living-room hearth, but that was only ever lit at dusk, leaving the house chilly all day.
It helped to be busy, keeping her hands occupied as a means of distracting her mind, and when that was impossible, at least it passed the time while she waited for news. She got into a rhythm: placing, swinging, splitting. Sometimes this kind of exertion helped work out her frustration. This morning she could feel it having the opposite effect, as though it was instead summoning up more anger as her arms unleashed harder and harder strokes until she felt tears run down her cheeks. She stopped to wipe them away and blow her nose, looking back towards the empty house.
Dad had been doing three people’s jobs since he was forced to lay off Donald and Michael, no longer able to pay them due to a sharp recent increase in overheads. They weren’t the only farm to have this problem, they knew. There had been whispers and allusions in certain circles: that was why on that first day her parents had grasped so quickly what it was all about. There were rumours and stories, yes, but nobody admitted that it had happened to them. Money was tight, they just said. These were hard times. Fear and shame kept it secret. They seldom even gave it a name. When it was referred to at all between farmers, it was done so obliquely and briskly, like they were hurrying past a road accident, and there was no question whatsoever of it being mentioned to anyone outside of their own four walls.
The first Saturday of each month, he would come by to collect: the cadaverous grey man in the BMW. The younger man in the polo-neck had only returned once, replaced after that by a squirrelly looking wee guy always dressed in a tracksuit top above a pair of jeans with a tartan-effect pattern through them. They had been trendy for a few months about two years before, but had by then reached the final, irredeemable phase of the fashion cycle whereby they were practically the uniform of the style-oblivious. He was restless and fidgety, constantly sniffing and flipping his too-long greasy side-shed away from his right eye. She reckoned he might as well have the words ‘SNEAK THIEF’ embroidered on his tracksuit top, instead of FILA. Any plain-clothes store detective who didn’t stick to this chancer from the second he entered their shop should be sacked for negligence.
He didn’t just collect, though. On each visit Cadaver would announce an increase in the rate for their ‘protection’. He was bleeding them dry as ruthlessly and rapidly as a beheaded chicken over a bucket.
Through a combination of wounded pride and desperate bloody-mindedness, Dad was nonetheless determined that the girls continue their education, despite their demands to be allowed to find full-time work or to just stay home to help him run the farm. Lisa had gone on to university, as planned, but remained living at home while she attended Glasgow. Lisa maintained that it was all the same to her, but she still kept her acceptance for Cambridge in her bedside drawer, a memento of the other life she could – and should – have had.
There was no vet school and no Laurel Row any more, school fees being out of the question. She had failed to get the grades she needed in her Highers, though she did fare better than she initially feared given the state she was in around the time she sat the exams.
Now she was in sixth year back at Calderburn High. The UCCA guide showed that there were some vet schools down south that would take her if she got an A in her Higher physics re-sit and at least a B for SYS chemistry, but how could she realistically think about going away to uni when Lisa hadn’t been able to? How, in fact, could she think about the long-term future at all? There didn’t seem to be a long-term future any more, only an on-going struggle to make payments that went up every time the grey man visited. She knew they couldn’t go on like this, yet she kept asking herself where it would end.
An unmistakable pointer towards the answer presented itself when Dad collapsed while cleaning out a feed-trough. He had looked very pale the previous morning, having worked through a very heavy cold during the week, in the face of constant entreaties from Mum that he should be in his bed. She winced to think how long he may have lain out there – and in what condition he would ultimately have been found – had it not been for the vet, Harriet Chambers, who spotted him from where she was working in the dairy shed.
They endured an aeon of not knowing in some grotty hospital waiting area, purgatory with plastic chairs, and when they did finally get to see him he was behind glass, a tube in his mouth. His eyes were open but glazed, unfocused. This was due to sedation, a doctor assured them. His signs were stable, they were getting fluid into him and would maintain observations overnight. It was a polite and well-intentioned invitation for them to go home and get some rest.
She barely slept, though more than Mum, no doubt. Everyone was awake before dawn, even the normally unrousable Lisa, all impatient for information. There had been no phone calls in the night, at least; she understood that no news was good news, or at least not extremely bad news.
Despite her aching need to see him, to be there to hear whatever the doctors had to say, she also knew she had a duty – a very important duty – to remain behind.
‘There’s a thousand things needing done,’ she told her mum.
Mum knew she was right. Nothing stopped because Dad was in hospital. In fact, the workload had just multiplied.
‘We’ll go in shifts,’ she said. ‘Lisa can drive home later to spell me and I can go up in the afternoon. I’ve got my licence now, remember.’
‘Of course,’ Mum nodded. She had passed her test over a month ago: teaching her to drive being yet one more task her dad had taken upon himself rather than fork out for a third party. It was no doting indulgence, though; it was imperative that all of them were able to fetch supplies, and even taking the tractor to the top fields required a stretch along the open road and therefore a licence to do so.
Satisfied that she had enough for tonight’s fire, she was carrying the wood inside to the living room when the phone rang.
It was Harriet Chambers
, phoning to ask if there was any news and to say that in her hurry yesterday she had left a bag in the dairy shed recess. She told Harriet the situation and said she’d keep her posted. She offered to drive the bag over later, but Harriet said it wasn’t urgent; she’d come by on Monday morning to pick it up.
She tramped back outside feeling deflated, trying to block out a pessimistic thought that this had been merely a precursor to a far worse instance of getting her hopes up only to be let down. However, the phone rang again before she had got halfway back to the dairy shed, and this time it was Mum.
‘It wasn’t a heart attack,’ she said, able to name that fear for both of them now it could be discounted.
‘But how is he?’
‘He’s asleep just now. The tube’s out. He’s on the mend. Well, the staff say it’ll take a while, but . . .’
‘What was wrong?’
‘Exhaustion, the doctor said. He’s got a viral infection which brought matters to a head, but it’s mainly just, you know . . .’
‘Overwork,’ she said, her relief that it wasn’t a coronary already fading. An infection had precipitated his breakdown, but there were no antibiotics for his true ailment.
‘The doctor says he needs rest. Weeks, he’s talking about.’
‘He’ll need to write a prescription for battleship chains.’
Mum gave a quiet little laugh, but they both knew it was no joke. He needed to rest, but he couldn’t and he wouldn’t.
‘Oh, God: there’s something else. I forgot, with all that’s going on; just remembered when I was talking to the doctor.’
‘It’s okay, Mum. I know. First Saturday of the month. That’s why I volunteered to stay behind.’
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘Because I knew you would wait around here when you needed to be up there by his side.’
‘Your father never wanted either of you to have anything to do with—’
‘I know. But we’re big girls, Mum.’
She heard a crackle on the line as her mum sighed in resignation.
‘The envelope is—’
‘In the drawer in the kitchen, the one next to the cutlery. I know. Lisa and I both know.’
‘You girls know so many things you shouldn’t have to.’
There was an insistent beep on the line.
‘My money’s running out. I’m about to get cut off. When he turns up, don’t let him in the house. Just hand over the envelope.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum.’
‘Lisa will be coming home after and you can come u—’
The line went dead, a click and a moment’s silence followed by the dialling tone.
She went back out to the dairy shed to resume her cleaning-out, feeling like she just wanted to lie down somewhere. She decided she’d best retrieve Harriet’s bag while she remembered. The lack of sleep and the efforts she had already exerted that morning were starting to sap her muscles, the thought of the second milking around teatime enough to make her want to cry. There was just so much to do. Even if by some Herculean effort they could hold things together while Dad recuperated for a few weeks, they’d just return to the start of the cycle, and what then?
You’ll work yourself into an early grave. Mum used to say that to Dad all the time, back when it was just an expression. She hadn’t said it for months, though. Too close to the bone.
The bag was on a shelf in the recess, as Harriet had said. It was sitting open, a pair of rubber gloves beside it. The vet hadn’t even begun her first examination when she saw Dad collapse outside.
She reached inside and took hold of a pair of ear-marking pliers, the first instruments that came to hand. She held them up to the light through the translucent plastic windows, balancing them delicately in her fingers, and thought about where she was supposed to be by now, where they were all supposed to be. Plans and ambitions truncated, shorn off brutally and without warning, the wound still raw. Everything taken away by low-life parasites.
She felt the pain of her dad’s impotence. He couldn’t stand up to them because they had zeroed in on his biggest vulnerability. If he stepped out of line, they wouldn’t go after him, but hurt him through his daughters. She didn’t doubt it either. She had seen what they did to Lysander, and knew that anyone capable of that was capable of anything.
Parasites.
Animals.
She felt the rage boiling up inside her again, threatening to turn to tears. She had to stay in control. She would not let any of these scum see her cry.
She placed the pliers back inside the bag, which was when she noticed the tranquiliser gun, along with a flat grey plastic case full of darts.
She took out the pistol and held it in her right hand, cocking it with her left against surprising resistance. Pointing it at the far wall, she found herself wondering whether it might change the picture if it turned out those daughters weren’t as vulnerable as everyone assumed.
She pulled the trigger, feeling the spring drive the bolt back home with a force that trembled right up her arm.
Yes, it just might.
Parallax Perspective
Jasmine had her left eye closed, and through her right she could only see the target: grey and white concentric circles staring back like some mesmerised eyeball, a watery unreality about the image as it was refracted through the optics. She watched the crosshair drift in front and concentrated on her breathing, relaxing into a rhythm, gradually becoming accustomed to the motion. She was using the gas rifle, so she prepared her body not to brace itself for the kick.
It had taken her a long time to realise she was doing it, and not just at those times after she had recently been using the spring-powered gun. Going right back to that first experience at the hotel in the Borders, some part of her was always waiting for the recoil. It could affect her breathing, her posture, even her trigger action, all in the tiniest way, but this was entirely about tiny margins, hugely magnified at the other end.
The gas rifle didn’t kick. The only movement she’d feel was the trigger slipping through the hammer release as she squeezed it. Everything had to be smooth, everything had to be fluid.
She could hear the air issues and the impact plinks of other shooters; hear them and yet not hear them. She could block them out, turn them into white noise, like the wind or the drumming of rain. Somewhere nearby she could hear someone’s mobile phone ringing. She blocked that too.
She had talked to Fallan about it once. He seemed to know a lot about the subject. He told her he had learned in the army, but didn’t elaborate.
‘If you need quiet to shoot, you’re useless,’ he told her. ‘Because you won’t get quiet to shoot. You need to create your own quiet, and learn to inhabit your own silent place where noise can’t reach you, even sudden, unexpected sounds. You have to crawl into that place and stay there. Doesn’t matter if it’s seconds or hours: you don’t leave until you’ve taken the shot.’
The mobile was outside her place, as though it was ringing behind thick glass. She could hear a voice too, just as muted, just as detached. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘Haw, Jasmine, for fuck’s sake, you gaunny answer that or whit?’
It was Eric, one of the other regulars at the range. He was pointing to her shoulder bag, where the mobile was still ringing.
‘You might be in the zone, hen, but it’s doing every other bugger’s heid in.’
‘Sorry,’ she said fishing for it in her bag, though by the time she had located it among all the junk she kept meaning to ‘rationalise’, the caller had rung off.
She hadn’t realised it was her own phone because the ringtone was unfamiliar. She had this crappy wee thing as a substitute while her handset was out of commission, and still wasn’t sufficiently familiar with the sound for it to have established a Pavlovian discipline.
The morning after discovering that Ned Untrusty had performed a secret sim transplant, she had gone to a shop and got her provider to issue her a new car
d, one that would restore her old number. She installed it in a cheap handset, the other one now quarantined.
She asked the guy behind the counter to take a look at the foreign sim, though he clearly thought she was mental when she explained that he wasn’t allowed to remove it from the clear plastic pouch she had brought it in. He identified it as a pay–as-you-go sim, and when he scanned it into his system it came up as holding ten pounds of credit. This was so she didn’t notice the switch due to a sudden inability to make phone calls.
If it had been another provider, as soon as she looked at the screen she’d have noticed that the network name was wrong. This meant that either Ned had got lucky, or he had turned up with a stack of sims, all bearing credit. He hadn’t looked the type to be regarding such expenses as the cost of doing business. This was a steal-to-order job.
She had taken the phone apart wearing disposable latex gloves, still having a box of them left from one of Fallan’s visits. They had been talking about guns, Fallan explaining how no amount of technical instruction or practise on the range would necessarily empower you to shoot the enemy, as armies worldwide had discovered over the past century.
He told her about the phenomenon of non-firing combatants: how a tiny percentage of individuals had been responsible for shooting fatalities in the Second World War; how in Vietnam it was estimated that millions of rounds had been fired per actual hit; how in the First World War most of the trench warfare kills had been the result of ordnance. Soldiers found it easier to throw a grenade into a hole full of men they couldn’t see than to look a fellow human in the eye and pull the trigger. That was why sniper kills were the easiest, he explained. The further away you got, the less you were confronted by the reality of your actions.
Up close, that was where you found out if you really were a killer.
A little later he went out to the shops, returning with two pumpkins and the box of latex gloves. At the time, she didn’t realise she was under instruction: she thought they were cooking. He cut a number of small circles out of the pumpkin’s skin, then got her to thrust her thumb inside, directing her to twist it upwards then back and forth, pulping the flesh and carving out a channel.
Bred in the Bone Page 23