Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  The door of the sanitaires creaked, and in walked the lost cat. He glanced around, and came to question Anna with a diffident mrrrow? She wiped her eyes. Of course I reacted as stupidly as possible. It was bitter to think how her loss had made her into even more of a woman. Waiting here, grooming herself for comfort, doing the domestic, while Spence went out in public to deal with the world. ‘I’ll be taking to the veil next,’ she told the cat gloomily. And indeed, there’d been times in the last months when she’d have been glad to hide her head, to retire under a big thick blanket and never come out.

  The yurt was too hot and the campsite was too empty. Neither of them offered any secure shelter. She took Ramone’s essays next door to the utility room, where their washing was still going round, and sat on the cool tiled floor to read. The Burmese Temple Cat came with her, but couldn’t settle. He paced and cried. ‘Poor thing,’ Anna sympathised. ‘Poor thing. They let you down, didn’t they. They abandoned you, and you haven’t an idea what you did wrong. Never mind, maybe we’ll find them.’

  But his grief disturbed her. It was too close to her own.

  Spence and Jake walked through the woods. Spence was wondering what the hell is the approved Academie Francaise term for “modem”, anyhow? For God’s sake, even the Vatican accepts “modem”. If it’s good enough for the Pope…He’d have to ask Anna. But he wasn’t sure there had been any misunderstanding at the Post Office. It was possible the postmistress really had been telling him, don’t hang around. He was still getting very strange vibes from that conversation with the gardienne. Maybe something final and terrible had happened at last. France and England had declared war on each other, and tourists were liable to be rounded up as undesirable aliens. He wasn’t sure that war between two states of the European Union was technically possible. It would have to be a civil war. No problem with that: a very popular global sport. In fact, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised. The only problem would be for the French and English governments to handle anything so organised. Have to get the telecoms to work again first…

  They had reached the dump. That smell surrounded them. Crowds of flies hummed and muttered, and the surface of the wide, garbage filled hollow drew Spence’s eyes. He was looking for something that he had seen last night in the twilight, seen and not quite registered. The flies buzzed. He had stopped walking. Jake was looking up at him, wrinkling his nose: puzzled that an adult could be so indifferent to the ripe stink.

  He handed over his laptop; Jake was already carrying the bread.

  ‘Go on back. I’ll be along in a minute. I want to check something.’

  ‘But I want to see what you find!’

  ‘I’m not going to find anything. I’m just going to take a leak.’

  ‘I want a wee too.’

  ‘No you don’t. Get going. Tell Anna I won’t be long.’

  Spence waited until he was sure the child wasn’t going to turn back. Then he went to investigate the buried wreckage. He found the remains of a caravan. It had been burned out, quite recently, having been stripped first (as far as he could tell) of any identification. He crouched on the flank of a big plastic drum that had once contained fertiliser, and pondered. Someone had rolled a wrecked mobile home into this landfill, having removed the plates; and covered it over. What did that prove? It didn’t prove anything, except that he was letting himself get spooked. ‘I’m overtired’ he said aloud, scowling. ‘Been on the road too long.’ But the garbage had shifted when he was clambering over it, and the dump refused to let him cling to his innocence. He climbed down from his perch, and discovered that the suggestive-looking bunch of twigs that he’d spotted really was a human hand.

  It had been a woman’s hand, and not young. It was filthy and the rats had been at it, but he could still see lumpy knuckles and the paler indentations left by her rings. He found a stick and pried at the surrounding layers of junk until he had uncovered her face. There wasn’t very much left of that. He squatted, looking down: remembering Father Moynihan in his coffin, like something carved out of yellow wax. His own father too, but he had no memory of that dead body. He’d been too young: not allowed to look.

  ‘What did you do ?’ he whispered. ‘Too rich, too funny-looking? Wrong kind of car? Did you support the wrong football team?’

  The flies buzzed. Around him, beyond the thin woodland, stretched the great emptiness, all the parched, desolate rural heartlands of Europe, where life was strained and desperate as in any foundering city. All the lost little towns starved of hope, where people turned into monsters without anything showing on the outside.

  Anna groped for potatoes in the sack in the back of the car, brought out another that was too green to eat and chucked it aside. He knows nothing. He hasn’t a clue about the backbiting, the betrayals, all the internal politics. Spence admires my work in a romantic way, but in the end it’s just something that keeps me away from home. Maybe he’s my wife. She felt the descant of male to female, the slipping and sliding between identities that had been natural and understood surely by most people, for years and years. It was Anna’s boss who was crazy. How could anyone be angry about an arrangement of chemicals? The sack was nearly empty. What’s happening to my french beans? The lettuces will all be shot. She was pining for her garden. It was so difficult to get hold of good fresh vegetables on the road. The prepacked stuff in the hypermarkets was an insult, but the farmers’ markets weren’t much better. Not when you were a stranger and didn’t know your way around. We’ll go home. I’ll pull myself together, start fighting my corner the way I should have done at the start. We’ll have to go back soon, she assured herself, knowing Spence’s silent resistance. Jake has to go to school. She saw him come out of the wood. He went straight to the sanitaires, vanished for several minutes and slowly came towards her. He sat on the rim of the hatchback. There were drops of water in his hair, and his hands were wet.

  ‘Where’s Jake?’

  ‘In the playground. What’s the matter? You look sick.’

  ‘I found a body in the dump.’

  They both stared at the distant figure of the child. He was climbing on the knotted rope, singing a song from a french tv commercial. Anna felt claws of shock dig into her spine, as if something expected but ridiculously forgotten had jumped out Boo! from behind a door.

  ‘You mean a human body?’

  ‘Yes. I could only find one, but I think there must be two.’ He imagined a couple, a middle-aged early-retirement couple, modestly well heeled, children if any long ago departed. Spending the summer en plein air, the way the French love to do: with their cat. ‘I covered it over again. I was afraid to root around, but there’s a caravan too. I’m not joking. It’s true.’

  ‘You’d better show me.’

  Spence gasped, and shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we can’t let Jake see that, and we can’t leave him alone.’

  Anna nodded. She went to the front of the car, and started searching under the seats and in the door pockets.’What are you looking for?’

  ‘The camera.’ She brought it out. ‘I’ll take pictures. Will it be easy for me to find?’

  It was about the same time of day as it had been when they arrived. Shortly, Jake noticed that his father had returned, and came running over. The Balinese Dancer ran along beside him. ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  ‘She’s gone to check something.’

  Jake’s eyes narrowed. ‘Her too?’ Spence had forgotten he’d used the exact same words at the dump, when he sent the kid on alone. ‘Is is something about my cat?’

  Balinese Dancer looked up. Spence had a terrible, irrational feeling that the cat knew. He knew what Spence had seen; and that there was no hope any more.

  ‘Don’t start getting ideas.’

  For most of the time that Anna was away it didn’t cross his mind that she was in danger. Then it did and he spent a very unhappy quarter of an hour, playing Scrabble with Jake while racking his brains to recover e
very word he’d spoken in that town, especially in his rash interview with the gardienne: praying to God he’d said nothing to rouse anyone’s suspicions. They washed the potatoes. Spence cut them up, chopped an onion and some garlic, opened a can of tomatoes and one of chickpeas. He put olives in a bowl and spread the picnic table-cloth. He didn’t light the stove until everything was ready, because they were running out of gas. At last Anna came out of that grisly wood.

  ‘Shall I start cooking?’

  ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ she said.

  While Anna put Jake to bed Spence did the washing up, and stored away the almost untouched potato stew. He checked the car over, and gathered a few stray belongings from the shriveled grass. Their camp was compact. One modest green hatchback, UK plates, anonymous middle class brand. One mushroom shaped tent dwelling. No bicycles, no surf-boards. No tv aerial dish, no patio furniture. The sky was overcast, blurred with moon silver in the east. How often had they camped like this beside some still and secret little town? That place in Italy on the hilltop, most certainly a haunt of vampires…The cat wove at his ankles, and followed him indoors. Inside, the yurt was a single conical space that could be divided by cunning foldaway partitions. It was furnished with nomad simplicity and comfort: their bed, rugs, books; small useful items of gear. There was no mere decoration, no more than if they’d been travelling on the steppes with Ghengis Khan. Spence set down the wine bottle, two glasses and the rest of the bread. Anna stepped out of Jake’s section and sealed it behind her. They sat on the floor with the lamp turned low, and looked at the pictures she had taken. She’d uncovered the body further and taken several shots of the head and torso, the hands and wrists; and then the whole ensemble, the wrecked caravan. She hadn’t looked for another corpse, but she thought Spence was right. It was probably there.

  ‘You think it was locals ?’ she asked.

  Spence told her about the postmistress, and the gardienne. A one street town wrapped in guilty silence: and the behaviour of the other campers, the ones who had left at dawn, so quickly and quietly. ‘I’m sure they know about it. Maybe someone had an accident. Someone ran into them and wrecked them, found they were dead and got scared…’

  ‘And took the woman’s rings. And gouged out her eyes. And tied her up.’

  Anna touched the preview screen, advancing from shot to shot until she found the woman’s face. She moved it into close-up, but their camera was not equal to this kind of work. The image blurred into a drab hallowe’en mask: crumpled plastic; black eye holes.’Well,’ said Spence, ‘It’s been all around us. We finally managed to run right into it. The town that eats tourists. Of course in the good old U S of A we’re cool about this kind of thing. Vampire towns, ghoul towns, whole counties run by serial-killer aliens. We take it for granted. Poor Balinese Dancer, I’m afraid your people definitely aren’t coming back.’

  ‘You can’t call him that,’ she said. ‘He’s not a Balinese. He’s a Burman. Don’t you believe me? Hook up the cd drive and we can look him up in Jake’s encyclopedia—’

  ‘I believe you. But why can’t I call him Balinese?’

  ‘Because you’re doing it to annoy me. And…we don’t need that.’

  In the direct look she gave him, the hostilities that had rumbled under their un-negotiated peace finally came to an end. Spence sighed. ‘Oh, okay. I won’t.’

  ‘Is there any wine left?’ asked Anna. He handed her the bottle. She poured some into their glasses, broke a chunk of bread and ate it.

  ‘So what are we going to do? Report our finds to the gendarmes?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Anna.

  ‘Not here, definitely not. But in Lyons maybe.’

  ‘They wouldn’t do anything. You know they wouldn’t. City flics don’t come looking for trouble in the deserte rural.’

  The rural desert. That was what the French called their prairie band. Mile upon mile of wheat and maize and sunflowers: all of it on death row as an economic activity, having lived just long enough to kill off most of the previous ecology. And destroy a lot of human lives.

  ‘Okay, then we could stick around here and do a little investigation for ourselves.’

  The cat was sitting diffidently outside the circle of lamplight, his eyes moving from face to face. Spence’s heart went out to him. ‘Try to find out who the cat’s folks were, where they came from, why this happened to them. Uncover some fetid tale or other, maybe get one or other of ourselves tortured and killed as well; or maybe Jake- ‘

  Anna grimaced wryly. ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Or we could do what they never do in the movies. Stop the thrilling plot before it starts. Walk on by.’

  She switched off the camera and stayed for a long time staring at the grey floor of the yurt, elbows on her knees and chin in her hands. She had turned the dead face from side to side, without flinching from her task. This is the truth. It must be examined, described. ‘Spence, I have a terrible feeling. It’s about my paper. I started thinking this when I was looking at her, when I was recording her death. Suppose…Suppose the tabloids aren’t loopy and my boss isn’t deranged. Suppose I really did do something appalling by publishing that. And while we’ve been away, while we’ve been cut off from all the news, the world has finally been going over the edge, because of what I did?’

  ‘The whole place was going mad before you published, kid. The end of the world as we know it started a long time ago.’

  ‘Yes, Spence dear. Exactly. That’s what my paper says.’

  Spence took a slug from the wine bottle, neglecting the glass that was poured for him. That sweet tone of invincible intellectual superiority, when it was friendly, always made him go weak at the knees.

  ‘Would you like to do sex ?’ he hazarded, across the tremulous lamplight.

  ‘Like plague victims,’ said Anna huskily. ‘Rutting in the streets, death all around.’

  ‘Okay, but would you?’

  Flash of white knickers in the twilight. Nothing’s sure. Every time could be the last.

  ‘Yes.’

  When they were both done, both satisfied, Spence managed to fall asleep. He dreamed he was clinging to the side of a runaway train, that was racing downhill in the dark. Anna was in his arms and Jake held between them. He knew he had to leap from this train before it smashed, holding his family in his arms. But he was too terrified to let go.

  They had pitched the yurt at dusk, in a service area campsite. The great road thundered by the scrubby expanse of red grit, where tents and trucks and vans stood cheek by jowl, without a tree or a blade of grass in sight. The clientele was mixed. There were gens de voyage, with their pitches staked out in the traditional, aggressive washing lines; colourful new age travellers trying to look like visitors from the stone age, respectable itinerant workers in their tidy camper vans; truckdrivers asleep in their cabs. Among them were quite a few people like Anna and Jake and Spence, turned back from the channel ports by the fishing-dispute blockade; who had wisely moved inland from the beaches.

  Spence was removing the cassette player from the car, so he could re-fit the broadband receiver that would give them access to the great big world again. The dusk was no problem, as this campsite was lit by enormous gangling floodlights, that seemed to have been bought second hand from a football stadium. But of course the player had turned obstinate. He was lying on his back, legs in the yard and face squished in the leg space under the dashboard, getting rusty metal dust in his eyes and struggling with some tiny recalcitrant screws. Chuck, ever fascinated and helpful when there was work going on, did his best to assist by sitting on the passenger seat and patting the screws that had come out into the crack at the back of the cushion. Something thumped near his head. He wriggled out. Anna had returned from her mission with a lumpy burlap sack.

  ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Potatoes, courgettes-I-mean-zuccini and string beans. But the beans are pure string.’

  ‘Still, that’s pretty good. What did you have t
o do?’

  The channel tunnel had been down, so to speak, for most of the summer. This new interruption of the ferry services had compounded everyone’s problems. Hypermarches along the coast had turned traitor, closing their doors to all but the local population. The more enterprising of the stranded travelers were resorting to barter.

  ‘Nothing too difficult. First aid. Dietary advice to an incipient diabetic, she needs an implant but diet will help; and I’m attending to a septic cut.’

  ‘This is weird. You can’t practice medicine. You’re a molecular biologist.’

  Anna rubbed her bare brown shoulder, where the sack had galled her; and shrugged. ‘Let me see. First do no harm. Well, I have no antibiotics, no antimalarials, genecarrier viruses or steroids, so that’s all right. I have aspirin, I know how to reduce a fracture, and I wash my hands a lot. What more can you ask?’

  ‘My God.’ He groped for the smaller screwdriver, which had escaped into camping-trip-morass. ‘Could you give me some assistance for a moment. Since you’re here?’

  ‘No, because I don’t want you to do that.’

  ‘But I’m doing it anyway.’

  ‘Good luck to you,’ she said, without rancour. ‘It’s mostly pure noise, in my opinion.’

  At bedtime Anna listened while Jake read to her the story of the Burmese Temple cat called Sinh, who was an oracle. He lived with a priest called Mun-Ha, and they were both very miserable because Burma was being invaded. When Mun-Ha died, the goddess Tsun-Kyankse transfused Mun-Ha’s spirit into Sinh. His eyes turned blue as sapphires, his nose and feet and tail turned dark as the sacred earth and the rest of him turned gold, except for the tips of his paws—which were touching Mun-Ha’s white hair at the moment the priest died. Then Sinh transfused his power into the rest of the priests, and they went and saved Burma.