Pig Iron
Pig Iron
by
Benjamin Myers
For Adelle Stripe
“Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees,
under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence
is a part of life.”
~ Francis Bacon
Part I
Beasts of the Field
The green cathedral sleeps. Soon it will throw open its doors and let the light in. Shades of amber will creep across the forest floor, the shadows will shrink away, and the daily service of life and growth and death and decay will go on.
For now the night is still fuzzy around the edges. Blurred. It’s not dark and it’s not light. The sun hasn’t risen. The sane world is sleeping. It’s that strange in-between stage that belongs to the creatures.
Beneath the stain-glass canopy the beasts and the creatures daren’t really nod off, for the closing of eyes can be fatal.
Unlike me they only intuitively understand that a fate awaits them, summat that’s a threat to them, and that life is but an attempt to prolong the whatsit. Aye. The inevitable.
The air is grainy and dream-like. It’s like watching an auld film. One of them silent ones. Not black and white, but a sort of washed-out brown. A silent brown film about the dawning of a new English summer’s day in this green cathedral of mine.
Mebbes one with a happy ending though.
There are shadows down there in the trees. They emerge for a moment, then disappear silently. The shadows are beasts and the beasts are shaped like humans.
Between me and them the grass is rustling and the daisies are stretching and yawning and the insects pupating and the rodents scurrying unseen. But it is happening. Life is happening all around us; it always does.
I feel like I always feel, an outsider. I’m laid out up here, flat on me belly at the top of this sort of quarried cliff face high up in the green cathedral of the great outdoors, me clothes wet with the dew from the long grass and me eyes trained to that gap in the trees where I last saw them. I’m used to it, mind. Being on the outside looking in. It’s funny though because just over a month ago, and for five year before that, I was on the inside looking out. Craning me neck to see half a tree or a patch of grass or the jackdaw coming in to roost on the roof. I’d have done owt for a few breaths of good clean fresh air, and now I’ve got bloody hods of it I still don’t feel free.
Some might say that’s whatsit. Aye. Ironic.
I’m gasping for a bine but I cannot spark one up. They might see the glow of it in this crooked pre-dawn light, or the smoke rising from this little quarry cliff top.
Summat’s digging into me thigh an all. It’s the eye in me pocket. The glass eye that I’ve carried around with us for five year. The unlucky charm. It takes some quiet tugging but I carefully pull it out and stick it in me zip-up side coat pocket instead. That’s better.
The woods are more like a dream now. Like it could all disappear at any minute.
I’ve not moved for ages. I daren’t even blink.
Me cammo army coat is sopping.
I swear down. I never asked for none of this.
I’ve been squinting at the same view for hours but only now is it becoming clearer.
I’m perched where the western moorlands give way to the woods that roll down to the flatter eastern plane, which then ripples all the way to the sea. I reckon I can just about see a fuzzy grey band of water where the sky meets the horizon however many miles away. Eight or ten mebbes. Probably more.
The land is laid out here before us. My land. The turf that birthed us. And it’d be picture bloody perfect if it wasn’t for the beasts that I know are down there, waiting. Them that’s after us. The shapes. Them that’s tucked in the trees like terriers round a rat hole. Just waiting for a movement, a moment.
Bloody pack animals, them lot. Beasts of the field. Povvy little gets.
I don’t want none of this shite. Alls I’ve ever wanted was to get me head down and crack on. It’s a load of bloody bollards, the lot of it. Alls I’ve ever wanted is to be left alone to work and wander and breathe the same air as everyone else.
But no. There’s always summat or someone sticking their nebby nose in. There’s always new enemies lining up left, right and bloody centre, and all for what. All for being born under a queer moon into the wrong family, that’s what. Cursed from birth and that. Shat out like a bloody turd and treated like one ever since.
I tell you what though. I’ll do what ever it takes to get out of the green cathedral alive because nee-one’s laying their hands on us again. I’ve had enough of all that. I’ll not stop at battering them either.
I’m sick of it all, me. Sick of running, sick of the guilt that’s like a hand round your throat in the night, when you’re all alone and exposed in the darkness, and there’s just you and the knowledge of what you’ve done.
You carry it inside you, this fear of your own dark potential. You carry it in your chest. And you carry it in your blood.
Mebbes it was always there, right from the beginning. From the moment circumstance grabbed us.
*
There was the sound of a grave crying in my ear that night, and that’s when I knew he wasn’t going to make it.
You took that ash-coloured poker and you raised it one more time and you brought it down right on his head again.
Metal on bone makes an awful noise and his skull cracked like an eggshell. You could see the skin split to show the squirming redness beneath it and I did go to scream but nowt came out save a backwards hiccup that stuck in me throat like half a wishbone. I’d not wish this on me worst cursed enemy.
His eyelids were fluttering then, and his right leg went dead straight like a mouse that’s just had its back flattened in a trap. It shot out, then it twitched and I knew that blow had him done for.
There was a dent in his head and in the bottom of the poker-shaped hollow I could see the brain inside him. It was pink and white and blue and brown and many other colours besides and I swear on the Virgin Mary’s name I could smell it an all. It was the one muscle that was never much use to him, bless him.
And the poker – it was in your hand. It was hanging there by your side, and there was blood everywhere. Little spots all over the van walls. Droplets. A thousand of them. In that moment I could see that death was crawling over him. Crawling all over my husband. And he was wrestling it, and he was losing. Losing the will, like. His body was a grey beach and the tide was going out, out, all the way out, never to return.
He was a twisted heap at your feet and his bones were all broke up and he was barely breathing. He was like a little bird that had fallen from his nest or summat. I’d not seen him so small. Such a big man when he was upright an all.
It might be that his insides were all ruptured and it might be that his head was tapped in like a scrap-heap kettle pot. It might be that his last breath was working its way up through his chest and all that anger and energy and violence and madness was working its way out of him like a poison that only death himsel can release and it might be that you’d flogged the life out of him. Bashed and battered him, as he had bashed and battered others with nowt but coiled fists swung like mallets.
Flesh and blood. You took that flesh and blood and you reduced it down to the dying gasps, the little bird, the sea-less beach.
And he was smiling. His top lip had curled back into a sneer. When he had the drink in him he had this look about him – you’d have recognized it no doubt, you more than most. It was like even in the death throes he was laughing at you. Even when you’d broke up his bones and caved his face in, he was grinning. The grin said that even in death he was winning.
I’ve seen nowt so grim as the way he looked in that mom
ent, his lip curled back and his gums turning blue like bits of horse meat going off in the knacker’s yard drain.
It was a queer moon that night an all. That’s the other thing I remember. Another odd moon, just like the one the night you were born. There’s only twice have I ever seen the sun block the moon in such a way, and both times it cast its strange light on you.
And you – you were just stood there with that poker in your hand, breathing heavy, with sweat on your brow and this sort of devilish glow about you. Like the moon had turned you strange.
It was like Satan himsel was in the room, like you were wearing his eyes, and I says to mesel, Oh Lord what is it that I have done to you to get dealt a hand like this? But the Lord didn’t answer because if He were watching down upon us He’d a struck you down there and then in the van. Smited you good and proper for the wicked thing what ye done that day. Or mebbe he’d have given me the strength to take that poker from your shaking hand and bash you senseless mesel.
But you’re flesh and blood an all, and where would that have got us. What would that have made me, then?
And the breath was rattling in his chest. Oh yes, I did hear it and so did you.
Him that could shift a ton of scrap in half a day or run a mile through the woodland in four minute flat or pull out fence posts four feet deep; him that even bulls a feart on account of his bare-handed yoking; him who carried the fighting crown for all them years, whose name was known on every site on this island of ours – he was finally slipping away. Bleeding like a river he was, from all his holes, and his head was turned at an angle something queer, like.
And all the while he were rattling and you were just stood there and it was only then I saw, for the very first time, that you had the look of your father about you, and that did chill my bones to icicles.
I had a mind to run and fetch one of the others, but it were too late for that. Time was running out as he lay there, his skin turning white and yellow and blue and a bubble of blood on his lips, and when that bubble did burst and the rattle did stop, his spirit lifted out of him – what was left of him anyway – off into the heavens, because when all is said and done, and even after all them beatings and cruelty and everything else that happened, he was after all a man, my man, and I believe that was where he was going.
And that was when I got the weakness on me and I did faint.
*
They reckon that elephants can detect the presence of a dead relative. Like they can tell if a random skull in the wild belongs to a brother, or a mother or summat.
I saw a programme on it inside. This camera crew tracked a herd of elephants for weeks and then one day they walked through the trees and into this clearing – a clearing a bit like this one, come to think of it – and suddenly all these great creatures slowed their pace and fell silent. They bowed their heads and this sense of quiet agitation fluttered through them. The camera crew knew summat was up because they’d followed them day and night, knew their eating habits and their toilet routines but they had never seen them acting like this before.
The gadgie talking over it all in this sort of hushed voice then telt us that the reason they were acting weird was because they knew the bones of one of their own were laid nearby.
And sure enough a minute or two later they came across the bleached-white remains of another elephant, its flesh long since rotted and removed by the scavengers of the savannah. Then the gadgie tells us the bones belonged to the mother of one of the calves in the herd, and she’d disappeared six month earlier during the early days of them making their fillum.
The elephants crowded round the skeleton, unsure at first. They started sniffing the bones, then pushing them about with their trunks. And as they did they had this look about them – all sad eyes and bowed heads and one or two of them letting out the odd gentle wail of pain. But they were graceful and all. Dignified. It was like they were all whatsit together. Aye – mourning.
They reckoned elephants are the only creatures that grieve like that, except mebbes for humans.
Well, even the maddest cold-blooded nutter would have felt summat watching them creatures like that.
Then one of the older elephants picked up the skull and carefully moved it a few metres away into this shaded part on the edge of the clearing. Somewhere more peaceful and secluded. Like it was laying its relative to rest.
“A common practice for the elephants is to move the skull of a loved one,” the gadgie whispered.
Me, I can relate to the lingering presence of the dead an all. Only I’m not mourning, just remembering and never forgetting. If I could dig up that skull I reckon I’d be inclined to boot it around in the dirt for a bit first because though I’ve got a heart, a beating heart, a git biggen, until I’ve got free of the past and free of this bloody town it’ll always ache in me chest summat rotten.
*
They never much cared for Mackie Wisdom, didn’t your Gran and Granda. Auld Cooper and Pearl Dunne. Even before they met him, even before he turned up that day with his whitest white shirt starched stiff across his chest and his free-range face scrubbed clean, their minds were made up.
Because betimes history does cast a shadow over everything and never before had these two particular bloodlines had cause to mingle.
They knew of the Wisdoms. Of course they did. Everyone did. Travellers and country folk alike. Some said they’d been cursed with the wickedness since the days of Cromwell.
Said it had made them all crooked and wiley, and they weren’t to be trusted. Said they had the violence running through those Wisdom generations like a coal seam in the northern soil. Toughest of the tough that lot.
Because we were good folk, the Dunnes. Good honest workers. Land people. Field people. You’d not hear a bad word breathed about us from any mouth. Because any Dunne would give any man his only mattress or his last morsel; it’s the way we are. The goodness was bred into us, just like that wickedness ran through the Wisdoms all the way back to days of wattle and daub.
It didn’t stop us from falling for the one they said was the rottenest of the lot though, did it. Mac Wisdom. Big Mac to all that knew and feart him. The oldest of seven boys; some born daft, some born sneaky, but all of them surly and tough as pig iron.
I never did think to find out what Mac stood for. Macdonald or Mackenzie, perhaps. Or mebbes MacHenry.
Too late to ask now.
So the day I fetched up with him your Gran and Granda Dunne’s eyes did tell their own tales. They saw a bully and a braggard, an uncouth youth who would spell no good for their little Vancy.
It was a condemnation of silent eyes and whispers though, for it was bad doings to be vocal about another family. That way vendettas started. The Wisdoms were not a brood to engage in a blood feud with, nor were the Dunnes the type to seek one out.
He was handsome alright, was your Dad, a good looking man, born swarthy, but my Ma and Da thought everything about the way he was put together was wrong for their Vancy, a snip of a child at barely fifteen year old. He was salt to my sugar, they said; overbearing and unwieldy, as if no room could contain him. Too big for his body, they said. Too big for anywhere but the outdoors, like.
He had meaty arms and large knotted hands, thick lips, a strong jaw and a landslide brow that cast his squinting black eyes into a permanent state of shadow. Where others saw menace I saw the face of a matinee idol.
My Da called him Desperate Dan on account of the black stubble that looked like he’d just rubbed mud into his cheeks instead of aftershave.
“Is Desperate Dan coming round with his face fungus?” he’d say because he knew how to wind us up like a spinning top, your Granda. “Shall your Ma get a cow pie on the go?”
“Why don’t you ask him, Dad?” I’d say, and that’d have him muttering because by the time Mac had turned twenty, all them years of smashing and lifting, wandering and fighting had built Mac Wisdom up into a straight six feet of muscle. Nature’s gymnasium – that’s what he called the great
outdoors that had shaped him; the outdoors through which he’d run as a feral creature of the fields and woods, the boy who couldn’t read or write but could tickle trout at ten, or poach a brace of pheasants or a branch of rabbits or take down an engine and put it back together again blindfolded.
There was no need for school and its book learning. And that’s where the Dunnes and Wisdoms were similar, you see. We all of us lived in caravans and proudly called oursels traveller folk and we all of us regarded them classrooms as prisons. But that’s where the similarities ended.
The Wisdom name whispered its way across the corn and the coalfields and round the villages long before your Dad ever even went on the cobbles.
Me Mam and Dad knew this. It’s every traveller’s business to know the way of the clans. What lines run where. Who’s married who. It’s the travelling way and the key to keeping the bloodline. Because once the bloodlines start getting too mixed up – or not mixed up enough – things start turning in on themsels and things get bent and then you do be getting bother.
And in the long run bother it was that came to our doorstep, right enough.
*
Fresh air. That’s all I was after. A bit of bloody fresh air and the freedom to walk without having to turn corners. A bit of sun an all, I thought. That’d do nicely. Aye. The sun on me face and mebbe a bit of a breeze blowing through me hair. Blue cloudless skies above and nowt but fields and trees and streams in all directions as far as the eye can see. That was all. It’s not that much to ask, is it.
And if it rained I’d not even be arsed. I’d still be bloody happy just to be out in it getting soaked to the skin. It could hoy it down and the sky could be alive with lightning and that and I’d still have a git big bloody grin on me face. I’d be out in it probably, running through the fields billy bollocks and laughing me mouth off.
Because I’d be free for the first time in five years. Free for the first time in me life actually, come to think of it. Nee-one pushing us there or pulling us here; nee-one prodding or piss-taking or wanting to have a go. Sweet relief. What I’d do for a bit of bloody peace and quiet.
Pig Iron Page 1