No Place Like Home

by Jane Renshaw

  ‘So,’ he narrated. ‘First day in Woodside and it’s time to pick some onions! Yep, Bram’s much-derided self-sufficiency drive is finally paying off. Let’s harvest those suckers! Let’s–’

  He stopped, looking from the screen of the phone to the actual ground.

  ‘Oh, no! No no no!’

  Where the veg patch should be there was just a rectangle of earth covered in shrivelled, dry, yellowing stalks and flopped-over leaves. Stupidly, he looked around for a moment, as if the real veg patch might be somewhere else, before dropping to his knees and examining the nearest plants, a row of Salad Bowl lettuces. They had been succulent lime green and deep purple last time he’d been here but were now a uniform gungy brown, the lower leaves stuck gummily to the soil, already half-decomposed.

  Bloody Nora, as Kirsty’s mum would say.

  Everything was dead.

  Okay so he’d not checked the veg for a few days – he’d been too distracted with the move – and they’d had a very sunny, dry spell. But this was Scotland. Surely it hadn’t been hot enough to kill them? He touched the soil. The top layer was crumbly, powdery between his thumb and forefinger, but when he poked his finger down a few centimetres he hit dampish earth.

  He stepped across the row of ex-lettuces to examine the other vegetables. The carrot shaws were withered and papery, but when he pulled up a carrot – a puny specimen at this time of year – it looked more or less okay. But if they’d been hit by some kind of blight, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to eat any of it.

  The onions were just starting to fill out, too, the bulbs that were peeping up from the soil fattening nicely. It would have been satisfying to have a few home-grown onions, no matter how small, for their first lunch in the new house.

  Oh, well. He supposed these things happened. He wasn’t exactly an expert gardener, but he had grown chillies and peppers and courgettes in their tiny London garden, successfully enough to generate a surplus which he’d proudly offered to the neighbours.

  He brushed the soil off his fingers and tapped his phone to start a new video, panning over the dead lettuces. ‘The question I should probably be asking myself is: am I a fit person to have custody of vegetables? I feel like some sort of ban should be slapped on me.’ He zoomed in on the pathetic carrot he’d left lying on the soil. ‘Prohibiting the growing of vegetables for, say, five or ten years.’

  He cut the video and pocketed his phone. At least the blog post tonight would be a bit more interesting than usual. A bit more entertaining. He lifted his face as the sun appeared from behind a fluffy white cloud.

  And at the exact same moment, somebody screamed.

  Phoebe!

  He was off and running before the echo from the trees had died away, past the terrace, round the house, and then he could see them, Phoebe and Max, and thank God, thank God, neither of them was hurt, they didn’t look hurt – Phoebe was running across the grass after Max, who was pelting towards the whirly drier, where something, a black cloth, was catching the breeze, flapping as the whirly turned –

  It wasn’t a black cloth.

  It was a bird.

  A crow. Tangled in the whirly, wings flapping.

  But before Max reached it, Bram could see that the wings were only flapping because the whirly was spinning round, that the bird was dead, the wind catching its wings, seeming to reanimate it.

  ‘Daaaad! He’s caught his feet!’ Phoebe wailed as he ran past her. ‘You have to help him!’

  Max had reached the whirly and stopped it with his hands. He stood staring at the bird, now hanging, obviously dead, wings spread in a cruel parody of flight.

  ‘Okay, Max,’ said Bram, gently pulling the boy away.

  His face was white. ‘I thought – I thought it was still alive. How did it get here?’

  ‘I don’t know. It must have become tangled–’ But Bram could see, now, the blue nylon twine around the bird’s legs, tying it to the cord.

  ‘Oh God, Dad, did someone – did they tie it on, while it was still alive?’

  ‘What?’ sobbed Phoebe, suddenly there, suddenly reaching past Max –

  ‘No no.’ Bram pulled her away, hugged her to his chest. ‘It must have already been dead.’

  Phoebe wriggled away from him and reached out a hand to the crow, gently touching one of its wings. ‘Are you sure?’ she wailed. ‘Are you sure he’s dead?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure. Come on, kleintje. Let’s go back inside.’

  ‘What happened to him, Dad?’

  He crouched in front of her, wiping the tears from her face. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have a look at him and then bury him, okay?’

  She gulped, wiping now at her own face. ‘A kind of post mortem? Do you think he was – murdered?’ She turned to look again at the crow, and of course that set her off again, her face collapsing on a sob.

  Bram half-carried her back inside, and took her on his knee for a while as she cried, sitting at the kitchen table while Max busied himself chopping up vegetables for his quiche. When Phoebe was calm again, she said, ‘You have to do the post mortem now, Dad, and bury him,’ and Max said, ‘Come on then, Phoebs, what about this abomination of a quiche filling you’re insisting on making?’

  ‘Why would someone do it?’ she whispered, looking at Bram as if he had the answers, as if he could explain it, as if he could tell her it was all a mistake and the crow was going to be fine.

  But he could only shake his head.

  Back out at the whirly, he shrinkingly studied the crow. Its eyes were filmed over and – ugh, yes, something was moving at its neck. Maggots. It must have been dead a while. Just as well he’d brought gloves. He held the dead bird around its middle as he gently untied the nylon twine, talking to it as he did so, ridiculously: ‘I’m sorry, mate. I’m sorry.’ There was dried blood on the feathers of its chest. It had been shot?

  He couldn’t get Phoebe’s question out of his head:

  Why would someone do it?

  Not so much shoot the crow – Bram wasn’t such a city slicker that he wasn’t aware of the war on wildlife waged by many farmers – but bring it here and tie it to their whirly drier?

  Why? Why would anyone do that?

  2

  David was manfully eating a large slice of Phoebe’s quiche, washed down with frequent gulps of beer, as if it were a bush tucker trial. ‘Are you a man or a mouse, Bram?’ he chuckled when Bram declined to sample it. Fraser was also shovelling it in, but Linda had surreptitiously fed her portion, against her own no feeding him at the table rules, to her guide dog Bertie – who, being a Labrador, had inhaled it gratefully, hardly able to believe his luck.

  Phoebe herself was sitting poking at the food on her plate, eyelids swollen and red from the bouts of crying she couldn’t seem to stop.

  ‘Aye,’ said David, sitting back on his chair. ‘Farmers hate crows. Shoot them on sight, and–’

  ‘Do you want another beer?’ Bram interrupted. He had told the other adults what had happened and explicitly asked them not to mention it in front of the kids.

  ‘If you insist, Bram, if you insist.’ David held out the empty bottle of Potholer as if Bram were a waiter. Bram took the bottle from him, dumped it by the sink and opened the fridge to get another.

  ‘Farmers hate crows with a passion,’ David continued. ‘You see them strung up on fences all over the place out here – the theory is that crows flying by will think Oh bloody hell, there’s been a massacre down there and move along to some other bastard’s crop.’

  ‘Dad,’ murmured Kirsty.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s right enough,’ Fraser put his oar in.

  Bram set the fresh bottle of beer at David’s place firmly, giving first David and then Fraser a repressive frown. Fraser was bigger and even more muscle-bound than David, but their features were spookily alike, down to the squashed boxer’s noses and shaved heads. They always reminded Bram of the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders, although he hadn’t shared that
little nugget with anyone.

  Genetics had gone rogue in the McKechnie family – Fraser seemed to have received all David’s genes and none of Linda’s, and Kirsty vice versa, although Kirsty would probably tell him that wasn’t possible.

  Both the kids, thank God, also favoured Linda. Her greying hair had once been as dark as theirs and her features were delicate, her sightless eyes a striking green, her nose rather long and very elegant, if a nose could ever be described as such. Linda had been a premature baby, and the extra oxygen she’d received in the incubator had resulted in the retinal blood vessels growing abnormally. Retinopathy of prematurity, her type of blindness was called. Bram thought she was pretty amazing, the way she lived a normal life and had brought up two kids despite not being able to see a thing, not even light and dark, although he’d never come out and said so in case it came across as patronising.

  ‘Phoebe and Max don’t want to hear this,’ Linda said now.

  ‘Local farmer probably thought he was doing you a favour,’ David continued regardless, pushing more quiche onto his fork. ‘Keeping them off your vegetables – let’s face it, you need all the help you can get.’

  Bram had shown them the withered vegetables. A mistake, maybe, but it had been a distraction, he’d thought, from the dead crow. Typical of David to use it now in an attempt to deflect the women’s ire. Attack was the best form of defence. But at least it was a change of topic.

  ‘That sort of help we can do without,’ said Kirsty, as Bram resumed his seat. ‘Bram’s green fingers are a bit rusty, that’s all.’

  Max smiled. ‘That’s some mixed metaphor, Mum.’

  ‘Mixed metaphor!’ David repeated in a silly high voice. ‘Someone swallowed a dictionary? That a metaphor too, is it?’

  It was pathetic, the way David made digs at Max for being a nerd, as if having a super-bright grandson was something to be ashamed of. Bram saw Kirsty tense, and Linda turned her head slightly towards her daughter in what Bram interpreted as a gesture of solidarity but also a plea for forbearance, as if to say Never mind your father, we all know what he’s like, just ignore the idiot. David pushed everyone’s buttons, but particularly Kirsty’s, and two months of close proximity seemed not to have done their relationship much good.

  Since Max had arrived last week, things had, inevitably, got worse, Max being something of a bone of contention between his parents and grandfather. Bram was only too well aware that David regarded him as a terrible role model for Max, and Bram returned the favour. He was fine with David teaching Max DIY skills and buying him weights for his birthday last month to improve his strength – ever since David had beaten his grandson in an arm-wrestling contest, he’d been going on about how Max had worse muscle tone than a pensioner. But he was less keen on David’s other efforts to get Max to ‘man up’ – his attempts to teach him martial arts and boxing, and his gifts of books about the SAS and violent video games for Christmas, although, to Bram and Kirsty’s satisfaction, Max hadn’t even taken the shrink-wrap off Call of Duty: Warzone.

  No wonder Kirsty had been so desperate to get them all moved out of her parents’ house and into Woodside. David was, let’s face it, a nightmare. Bram had made it crystal clear that they didn’t want to talk about the dead crow over lunch, so what did David do?

  Talk about the dead crow.

  Kirsty met Bram’s gaze with a grimace, and he gave her a reassuring smile. Kirsty was always apologising to him for David, as if David were a badly behaved child she’d failed to curb rather than her parent. Bram widened his smile, and did a mad eye-roll, and Kirsty’s face finally relaxed as she smiled back.

  Kirsty McKechnie had intrigued Bram before he’d even set eyes on her. The name spoke to him, somehow, the very first time he stepped out of his room in the halls of residence to explore his new surroundings, after Ma and Pap had left in a flurry of tearful hugs. There it was, on the nameplate of the door of the room next to his.

  ‘Kirsty McKechnie,’ he murmured to himself, and smiled.

  It was such a friendly name. ‘Kirsty McKechnie,’ he repeated, like a mantra, as he walked down that intimidatingly long corridor to the tiny common room-cum-kitchen. Each corridor in the halls had one of these little communal rooms, and it was full of chatter and laughter, full of other students who all seemed to know each other already, although he’d arrived only a couple of days late. Pap, Ma and Bram had delayed their return from Amsterdam because his grandmother had sprained her ankle and Ma had wanted to stay until she was mobile.

  But the other students welcomed him like a long-lost friend. ‘Hi, Bram!’ ‘Bram Hendriksen – is that Dutch?’ ‘Your English is amazing!’

  Bram laughed. ‘My parents are Dutch, but I was born and bred in London. My mates from school insist I say some words – like “bizarre” – with a Dutch accent, for some bizarre reason.’

  ‘You do! I think you do say it with an accent! Bizarre!’

  They all introduced themselves, but none of the girls was Kirsty McKechnie. When he asked about her, the girl called Steph exchanged a look with the boy called Jake. ‘Oh, right, the Weird Girl.’

  The Weird Girl who, Bram discovered over the next few days, never socialised, scuttling along the corridor to and from her room without making eye contact. When he said hello, she said it back, but if he tried to expand the conversation she just aimed a smile somewhere over his left shoulder and darted away, like a little wild animal he was unsuccessfully attempting to tame.

  ‘She’s just really, really shy,’ he said one morning when Steph started on again about her weirdness, as they were eating breakfast in the big canteen that catered for all the students in the halls.

  ‘No, she’s not.’ Steph turned in her seat and regarded Kirsty, who was eating toast at a table on her own, as usual. ‘There’s something sinister about her. I reckon she’s a member of a cult. Some sort of strange Highland religious sect, anyway. It’s probably against her religion to eat with other people.’

  ‘Don’t stare at her like that,’ Bram objected.

  Gary immediately turned in his seat to stare too. ‘She probably uses a mathematical formula to work out which table is furthest away from the other occupied ones.’

  ‘She’s doing maths?’

  ‘Yeah. Course she is.’

  The sun was streaming in through the big windows, striking chestnut highlights from Kirsty’s long, glossy dark hair. As Bram watched, she put a hand through it in a languid, graceful gesture, and he found his gaze lingering on her face, on those high cheekbones and straight brows.

  She had finished her toast and was looking out of the window.

  It must be horrible to feel people staring at you. He averted his gaze, looking past her to the lawn that surrounded the canteen on three sides. There were two blackbirds out there, pecking at the grass, and some other smaller birds Bram didn’t recognise. Siskins? As he idly watched them, one of the blackbirds decided to chase the other, which flew up onto a low wall topped with polished slate, slick after overnight rain. The first bird jumped up after it but misjudged his landing in the bird equivalent of a prat fall, slipping off the end of the wall and flapping onto the branch of a tree, as if that had been his intended perch all along.

  Bram smiled, and glanced again at Kirsty.

  She was looking out of the window and smiling too.

  Somehow it seemed hugely significant that the two of them, amidst the hubbub of the canteen, amidst all those people chatting away to each other, intent on their own concerns, had been the only ones to see that happen. To see it, and find it funny.

  Almost twenty-one years later, here he was, sitting opposite the Weird Girl at their own kitchen table. It blew his mind whenever he thought about it.

  ‘Crows are the farmer’s traditional enemy,’ David was ploughing on, talking around the quiche, bits of food visible in his mouth as he spoke. ‘Bam bam bam, problem solved!’ He chuckled, forking in salad after the quiche.

  Phoebe, sobbing, pushed herself up
from her chair and bolted across the room to the stairs. Kirsty, flashing a black look at her father, dropped her napkin by her place and went after her.

  David rolled his eyes at Fraser, who shrugged, grinning, and held out his empty glass to Bram for more Coke – Fraser was the designated driver. As he did so, his gaze fell on Max, who was sitting frowning down at the table. ‘Hey, Max!’ Fraser made his lower lip wobble. ‘Don’t wuh-way, the widdle cwow’s gone up to hea-ven!’

  But David, suddenly, was not amused. ‘For Christ’s sake, Max. You’re not a nine-year-old girl.’ But it was Bram he was looking at.

  ‘Piss off, Fraser,’ said Max, stabbing a piece of quiche crust.

  Bram laid down his knife and fork. ‘No one,’ he said, slowly and clearly, ‘no matter their age or gender, should ever feel ashamed of compassion for another living creature.’ He ignored the empty glass Fraser was waving at him.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Linda.

  When Kirsty and Phoebe eventually returned to the table, Phoebe subdued but at least not crying, Bram served the poached pears and yoghurt. When they’d all finished, the others moved with their coffee, or in Phoebe’s case home-made lemonade, to the living area of the Walton Room, while Bram made a start on clearing up in the kitchen, making a point of donning his frilly apron.

  ‘God almighty,’ spluttered David. ‘I hope you don’t wear that in public.’

  ‘You could hardly complain if I did, David. You gave it to me.’

  ‘As a bloody joke!’

  ‘I did once wear it to the shops. Forgot to take it off.’

  Phoebe giggled as David put his head in his hands in mock despair. Well, mock mock despair. Then he looked up at Bram. ‘I suppose in Islington no one turned a hair. Wear that to the shops in Grantown and see what happens.’