Scar Hill

by Alan Temperley

  It had been a successful outing. Back at Scar Hill, Peter returned Buster to his run and gave him a piece of meat as a reward, then hung the rabbits, head down, on a barbed-wire fence and retreated indoors. Shivering, he piled peats on the fire and sat close, waiting for a blaze. The clock struck twelve-thirty. He put two slices of pizza in the microwave and made a mug of hot chocolate.

  Ben ate a handful of treats on his day bed then crossed to Peter and stretched out before the fire. In moments he was asleep. His paws twitched as he chased rabbits across the hillsides of his dreams.

  Peter shut his eyes but sleep wouldn’t come, so he switched on a cop film. It wasn’t very good but it would pass the time until his dad came home from the hill.

  At about two o’clock, just as the story was getting into its stride, he was distracted by a sound from the yard, a soft whine and scratching at the front door. At once Ben scrambled to his feet. He gave an answering bark and trotted directly into the hall. Peter was sitting on the settee, his legs drawn up beneath him. Barefoot he followed and pulled the door wide.

  Meg stood on the threshold. She was distressed. Peter looked round the yard. There was no sign of his dad.

  15

  Late Afternoon, Saturday, 7th December

  THE VAN WAS parked in the turning place where Jim always left it when he went to the hill. Peter swung the tractor alongside and switched off the engine. As he jumped down, his boot caught behind the brake pedals and he stumbled to the ground. It was a jolt but he wasn’t hurt. Scrubbing his hands on his jeans, he crossed to the van. The door was unlocked. There was no sign of his dad.

  The keys hung in the ignition. He slid behind the wheel and turned the engine. It coughed into life. He reversed a few metres and drove back again. Nothing wrong with the van.

  Where was his dad? The dogs stood waiting, not trotting around and marking the fence posts as usual. Meg never left his father’s side but this time she had come home by herself. What had happened? Had his dad taken a bad turn? Had he had an accident? Ben knew that something was wrong. So did Peter.

  He opened the gate beyond the wooden sheep fanks and followed the dogs along the path his dad always took through the bog. In places, where the reeds got no direct sunlight, they were still white with frost.

  Soon they reached the rising ground. ‘Which way, girl?’ he said to Meg.

  She looked up anxiously, unsure what was being asked of her.

  Most of the flock were in lamb at that time of year and had been taken down to the lower pasture. Only the fifty or so eight-month-old lambs they were keeping and a few ewes which were not in lamb remained on the hill. Peter knew roughly where they would be grazing and which route his dad would have taken across the moor to reach them. ‘All right,’ he said to Meg, reassuring her. ‘Come on then.’

  He set off, climbing diagonally across the hillside towards the foot of Blae Fell. Meg trotted ahead eagerly, turning her head to see that he was following.

  Peter’s chest was tight. Long before he would normally have needed a breather he stopped, wheezing, and straightened up. His collar was wet with a cold sweat. His shirt had crawled from the waistband of his trousers. He loosened his belt to tuck it in and shivered as the icy wind struck his skin.

  Meg stood waiting a dozen paces ahead. Peter shouted: ‘Dad! … Dad!’ A grouse erupted from the heather and circled away. Silence returned.

  He had crossed the hillside many times. Today, following Meg, he was lower than back in October when he and Jim had treated the sheep for maggots and footrot. A stranger might easily have lost his way in that great wilderness but Peter knew precisely where he was. Looking up, he recognised rocky outcrops and the rolling ridges of the moor. Yet everything was different. Now he was alone, his head spun with the effort of walking, and he was scared. The miles of russet bracken and red autumn grasses no longer welcomed him, were no longer beautiful. The whole landscape, from the rocks at his feet to the distant mountains and clear sky overhead, already in the mid-afternoon turning purple towards dusk, felt hostile and implacable. What happened to animals or people out there was irrelevant. Peter zipped the neck of his jacket as high as it would go and set off again.

  Three-quarters of an hour after leaving the tractor he stood low on the southern slope of Blae Fell. Time and again he scanned the hillside and shaded his eyes from the westering sun to view the land beneath. In all that immensity of moorland, unchanged for thousands of years, where was his father?

  Meg, zigzagging through the long heather, turned uphill towards a ragged cliff. Had his dad fallen? Had he broken his leg? Peter halted again, hands on his knees, and looked in the direction she was heading. ‘Dad!’ His voice rang out, shockingly loud in his own ears. There was no reply. The endless wind whispered through the grasses.

  When he had got his breath back, Peter climbed to the low crest where Meg stood waiting. As he reached her she looked up, trying to tell him something with her eyes. He patted her. She whined. ‘Good girl, yes.’

  A new stretch of hillside had come into view. He surveyed it and saw nothing. ‘Da-a-ad!’

  Ben joined them and touched noses with Meg. His sharp eyes spotted something. Peter followed his gaze and saw only heather and a few protruding rocks. Ben took a few paces and gave a soft ‘wuff’. Peter’s skin prickled. Still he saw nothing.

  Meg set off again, heading slightly downhill, Ben at her tail. Peter followed. After a hundred metres he saw that what he had taken to be a flat stone wasn’t a stone at all.

  ‘Dad!’ Headlong he ran past the dogs.

  Jim lay on his back, his head half-hidden by a clump of heather. His eyes were open. He was quite dead.

  Peter had never seen a dead person before but from his first glance there was no doubt. His dad lay unmoving. His mouth was open, as if he had died struggling for breath. His dark eyes looked into the afternoon sky and saw nothing. Two fingers tugged at the neck of his jersey. The other hand, curled loosely around his pill bottle, was outflung in the heather. There had been a few spots of rain because his hair and the topmost folds of his jacket were wet. A scatter of pills lay on his chest and trousers, swollen with the damp and starting to fall apart.

  ‘Dad,’ Peter whispered. A terrible bumping was in his chest. He knelt close, frightened to touch him.

  Delicately the dogs smelled Jim’s clothes and fingers. After a while Peter touched the back of his hand. It was icy. His brow, too, was cold as a stone. The olive-green parka was half unzipped. Peter slipped a hand inside and felt a little warmth.

  It was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. What should he do? There was no one to ask. ‘Dad.’ Something in his chest tore apart and he began to weep, terrible open-mouthed sobs that he could not control, did not try to control. It was a long time, years, since Peter had wept at all, and never like that.

  Ben, distressed by his behaviour, raked at his arm with a wet paw.

  The tears ran their course. He sat back on his heels, gulping air and scrubbing his eyes with his hand. What, he wondered again, was he to do?

  There was only one answer, for there was little he could do right there. He had to get back home and telephone for help.

  But although Peter had never seen a dead man before, he was well acquainted with death. Just a few hours earlier he had killed two rabbits, one with his hand, the other with a stick. When they were out in the boat they killed fish, sometimes big fish. Dead seals and seabirds washed up on the tide, and once a school of pilot whales, twenty feet long, had swum ashore and died slowly. He had seen his dad shoot sick and injured sheep; they came upon dead sheep on the hill. The first thing that happened was that birds – crows and gulls and ravens – flew in from afar and pecked out their eyes with cruel beaks. Sometimes they blinded lambs as they were being born. This must not happen to his dad.

  He looked for something to cover Jim’s head while he went for help. It seemed terrible to leave him lying on the open moor but there was nothing else he could do. Perhaps he
could pull off his dad’s jacket and cover him with that. But when he moved Jim’s outflung arm, he found it growing stiff and had to pull quite hard. The thought of rolling his dad’s heavy body around while he tugged at his clothes was too awful to contemplate. He looked in the rucksack, hoping there might be a scarf but there was not, nothing but shepherding gear and his dad’s lunch in a red and white supermarket bag. There seemed only his own clothes and already he was shivering. It didn’t matter, his dad’s face had to be protected. Peter peeled off his jersey. The December wind bit through his polo shirt. Quickly he pulled his jacket back on and zipped it to the throat.

  With the tip of a finger he closed his dad’s brown eyes. They half opened again. He held them till they stayed shut. Then he lifted Jim’s head to wrap the jersey around it. It was awkward and heavier than he had expected but at last the job was done. It was a small relief to think of his dad’s face protected by the warm wool of his jersey. It was a fisherman’s jersey, dark blue. Unaccountably he remembered buying it at the ships’ chandler’s in Clashbay and his dad paying the young assistant. Who could have guessed it would be put to such a use?

  Peter brushed off the crumbling pills and fastened his dad’s jacket across the chest. He shivered again and coughed. There would be hot tea in the thermos but somehow he did not want it.

  How could he remember the spot? Had it not been for the dogs, he might have spent days searching. He looked all round. A group of sheep stood watching from a safe distance. Directly above them, halfway up the fell, was a little cliff with a crack running down it. Closer at hand and directly in line, a tumble of boulders emerged from the heather. Peter thought for a moment. If he weighted down the rucksack with peat or some small stones and stood it on the boulders, he should be able to find the place easily enough. If he tied the bright supermarket bag to the top that would make it easy to spot.

  He looked down, finding it hard to come away. ‘You’ll be all right, Dad,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can.’ He hesitated. What was the proper thing to do? ‘God bless you.’ The words were embarrassing. What a queer thing to say to his dad, they never spoke like that. He went on his knees in the heather: ‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ He said the prayer to the end and when he had finished went on, ‘Please, God, look after my dad wherever he’s gone. He was a good man and it’s not fair everything that’s happened to him – my mum and the army and his health and everything. And keep him safe here and away from the foxes and birds and everything until I come back. And the insects.’ He pressed his hands together and squeezed his eyes tight, trying to force God to listen. Then he said, ‘Amen,’ and a while later rose to his feet.

  Time and again, as he walked away, Peter looked back. It was past four o’clock, the last daylight was fading. Jim’s body was soon hidden by the heather, but Peter knew where he lay and the bright poly bag fluttered in the breeze. Meg touched his hand with her nose and he stooped to comfort her. Then the hillside intervened and his dad was gone.

  A scatter of raindrops hit him in the face. Peter coughed and spat into the heather. Heavily he trudged back across the moor. By the time he reached the van and the cold, exposed tractor it was dark. Despite the walking, he was frozen. He let the dogs into the van – Ben in the back and Meg in the passenger seat as usual – then got in himself. The driver’s seat was pushed back for Jim. Never again would his dad sit there, Peter realised, never hold the steering wheel in his thin brown hands as Peter was doing now. His presence was everywhere: an empty packet of tobacco, throat lozenges, a crumpled woollen hat, fingermarks, an empty half-bottle of Red Label, a letter from the income tax. Peter tightened his lips and slid the seat forward.

  As he drove home his headlights picked out a small group of red deer. Elegantly they leaped over the ditch that ran alongside the track and disappeared into the dark moor. It was a sight that always gave him pleasure. Today he barely registered it.

  A few minutes brought him to the house. The yard felt different. In three hours everything had changed.

  The cold had got into his bones. His stomach cramped. The fire was almost out. He stirred it into life and threw on some broken black peats from the bucket. Then he filled the kettle, set a mug on the kitchen table and went to the phone in the hallway.

  The Tarridale Police Station, which was also the constable’s home, stood in a row of council houses with a rarely-used cell in the garden. Peter knew Constable Taylor, he was a kind man with three children. The oldest, a twin boy and girl, were in the year behind Peter at school. He found the number in the telephone directory and dialled. There was no reply. That afternoon Mrs Taylor had taken the children to their gran’s for tea, and Constable Taylor, who was off duty, was drinking a can of lager and watching the end of a rugby match on TV. He couldn’t be bothered answering the phone.

  Peter replaced the receiver. He was taken aback, he had imagined there would always be someone on call at a police station. Who else could he ring? There were several people: his class teacher, the minister, Bunny Mason and one or two others. But somehow he did not want to tell any of them. Apart from Constable Taylor, whose job it was, the only person he would have liked to come to the house was Billy Josh. He liked Billy. He was a friend of his dad. Peter flipped through the directory and found his number.

  Again there was no reply. That morning Billy had taken his children, aged five, four and two, to Santa’s grotto in Clashbay, then on to have lunch and spend the afternoon with his mother. The voice mail invited Peter to leave a message. He didn’t want to leave a message, he wanted to speak to Billy.

  At least he had thought he wanted to speak to Billy but in a way it was a relief that Billy wasn’t there. For as Peter returned across the moor, a frightening thought had stopped him in his tracks. His dad was dead, nothing could be worse than that – but what about himself? What would become of him now? He couldn’t stay on at Scar Hill, not alone, people wouldn’t let him. He would be sent away – but where to? And what about Ben and Meg? And the croft? It was the only home they all knew.

  Peter put the phone down.

  His hands were red and shook with the cold. He sneezed and coughed. Coughed and coughed.

  The kettle had boiled but he needed more heat than could be provided by a cup of tea. Instead he went upstairs, switched on the bathroom heater and ran a scalding bath.

  Slowly the ice left his bones. But with comfort came the full realisation of what he had lost. It was unbearable. For the second time that day, with the water sloshing about his chest, Peter’s heart broke and he gave way to tears.

  16

  The Body in Denmark

  PETER DIDN’T PHONE again that evening, not Constable Taylor or Billy Josh or any of the other kind people in the village who might have helped. After a long soak in the bath he went to the drying cupboard and pulled on clean underwear, jeans and a warm jersey, as if by a change of clothes he could distance himself from what had happened.

  He fed the dogs and wondered about dinner. The Cumberland sausage Jim had intended to cook that evening lay on a shelf in the fridge. Peter looked at it until his eyes started to prick then pushed it to the back of the shelf and shut the fridge door. But that seemed like getting rid of his dad, so he returned it to the front. Cooking it was beyond him, so he took a chicken pie from the deep freeze and put it in the oven. Without considering if he would eat them, he peeled potatoes and carrots and set them to boil, then sat down by the fire with a cup of tea.

  As he waited for his meal to cook the benefits of the hot bath ebbed away, and by the time savoury aromas reached him from the kitchen, what little appetite he had was gone. The thought of sitting down to a steaming plateful made him feel sick. He switched off the oven, tipped the vegetables into a sieve and left the golden-brown pie congealing beside the sink.

  The dogs ate in the shed but usually spent the evening in the house. Needing their company, Peter went to fetch them. As he crossed the lamplit yard his eye was caught by the rabbi
ts. Heads down and dry blood at their mouths, they hung from the fence. While he was ferreting – the thought kept recurring – his dad had been struggling for life out there on the moor. He hadn’t known, there was nothing he could have done in any case, but that didn’t take away the distress. As for the dead rabbits – he felt sorry for them, wished he had not killed them, could not think of cleaning them. Maybe a fox would discover them, he hoped so. At least they would not have died in vain.

  The dogs stretched out by the fire, Peter on the settee, all close together. He switched on the TV. They didn’t have satellite television, Jim couldn’t afford it, and reception was often poor. Peter surfed the channels, one to four and back again: a game show, a soap, a cookery programme, the local news. Nothing held his interest. He switched off the sound and shut his eyes.

  It was Ben who woke him, raking at his knee with a big paw. He wanted out. Peter blinked. The fire was low, the clock showed twenty to nine. His head throbbed. He let the dogs into the yard and returned to the settee. An old Inspector Morse had started and he switched on the sound. Familiar music and comfortable voices filled the silence. Morse’s maroon Jaguar purred to a halt. He descended to a riverbank. Police let him through. A body lay in the shallows. Morse took a look and turned away; the chief inspector didn’t like bodies. Normally Peter loved them. Not today. It wasn’t the dead victim he saw but the body of his dad on the hillside. Like a film on a loop, the events of the afternoon played over and over in his thoughts.

  As he let the dogs in again, a bright moon lit the yard and the roofs of the outbuildings. The same hard moon looked down on his father. His jacket and trousers would be crusted with frost. Were rats or beetles burrowing beneath?

  Peter returned to the living room. What was he to do? Phone Constable Taylor and seal his fate? Ensure by doing so that he could no longer live at Scar Hill? Be sent to a foster home or children’s home, maybe in some rundown area like the flat they had all hated on the outskirts of Manchester? Abandon Ben and Meg?