Scar Hill

by Alan Temperley

  By this time he could put weight on his ankle and hobbled about the house with the aid of a walking stick that had belonged to Jim’s father. If the ankle was strapped tightly, he thought, he might be able to operate the foot brake on the tractor.

  Hogmanay, the last day of the old year, passed with lashing rain and the yard turned to a quagmire of slush. But New Year’s Day broke fair, and when Peter went out to release the dogs, he saw that three-quarters of the snow had vanished from the track. For ten metres at a stretch the dark earth showed through. The deep drift at the end of the byre had melted to a wet white strip.

  ‘Val.’ He tapped at his sister’s door and went in.

  Though Peter gave Daisy a bottle and changed her nappies as often as his sister, that night the baby had been restless and Valerie had had little sleep. As he drew back the curtains, admitting a dazzle of winter sunshine, and announced that the track was open again, all she could manage was a muffled, ‘Go away.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get up. The track’s passable I reckon. We can go into the village and phone the nurse. Knock up old Robbie and get him to sell us some bread and milk and stuff.’

  ‘You go.’

  ‘How can I go?’ he said. ‘I can’t drive on the road. They’ll want to know where dad is and everything. Come on, I’ll make you a coffee.’

  Daisy, whose blotchy skin was turning to roses and cream, was sound asleep in her carrycot. Peter brushed her cheek with his knuckles and headed downstairs.

  Although Daisy had been given a feed at five she had to be fed again and changed. Then Valerie took for ever getting ready so it was well after eleven before they could set off. Peter drove the van while Valerie, who had not yet bought a car seat for the baby, nursed Daisy at his side.

  Swollen by the melting snow the stream rushed alongside, spilling onto the track. The slush was treacherous. Progress was slow. Every metre of the way, Peter recalled his nightmarish crawl a few nights earlier. As the track wound through the Four Crowns the tractor came into view, cleared of snow by the heavy rain. He saw the rock he had hit, clearly visible now, with tall plumes of grass nodding above. The tractor stood as he had left it, snowplough buried in the thorny bank.

  He drew up. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Valerie. ‘Shall I see if it’ll start? Lead the way?’

  ‘And I drive the van you mean?’ she said. ‘What about the baby?’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ It hadn’t occurred to him.

  ‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘It’ll be there tomorrow. We’re doing fine, let’s get on into the village.’

  Two drifts brought them to a halt. Peter dug out the slush banked up beneath the wheels and in a few minutes they were on their way again. Slewing and slithering, they reached the road without further difficulty. As he got out to open the gate, Bunny Mason was leading Molly, her red and white cow, across the side of the hill.

  ‘Hello there, Peter. Happy New Year!’ She waved a cheery arm. ‘I’ve been wondering how you and your dad are coping out there on the moors. And your sister too, of course.’

  ‘OK,’ he shouted back. ‘The phone line’s been down. We’re just heading into the village.’

  ‘Yes, everyone this side’s been cut off. Hope to have us reconnected sometime tomorrow. Robbie’s had a delivery though and he’s staying open till four. Wouldn’t waste any time. The rate people are stocking up you’d think there was an ice age coming.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘How’s your dad keeping? Haven’t seen him around for a while.’

  ‘Busy with the sheep.’ His heart thudded. ‘Had to dig some of them out.’

  ‘No wonder after a blizzard like that. Poor things, did he lose any?’

  ‘One or two I think.’

  ‘Oh dear! Well tell him to look in for his New Year when he’s got the time. You too, of course. And your sister. What’s her name again?’

  ‘Valerie.’

  ‘Valerie, that’s right. How does she enjoy being back home?’

  ‘Not much. She’s had her baby though. Five days ago.’

  ‘What! In all that snow?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘By herself? Oh, my goodness! How is she?’

  ‘She’s all right.’

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘A little girl. She’s all right too. We’re just going to phone the nurse.’ He dragged the gate wide.

  ‘Just a minute. Don’t rush away.’ Bunny tied the cow to a strand of fence wire and trudged across the hillside. She wore thick trousers, a quilted green anorak and a bright knitted hat from which her grey hair escaped in disarray.

  Valerie wound down the window.

  ‘Hello, dear.’ Bunny leaned forward to see Daisy, sleeping quietly and wrapped in a chequered baby blanket. ‘Oh, what a beautiful little girl.’ She moved a fold to see better. ‘What are you calling her?’

  ‘Daisy,’ Valerie said. ‘Daisy May.’

  ‘Oh, she’s just lovely,’ Bunny said. ‘And you there all by yourself.’

  ‘Not quite. I had dad – and Peter of course.’

  ‘Well yes, I know. But it’s not the same as being in a hospital is it?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Valerie said briefly. ‘I’ve never had a baby before. We managed anyway.’

  ‘Just heroic if you ask me.’ Bunny smiled. ‘And you’re looking so well. How does your dad like being a grandfather?’

  ‘All right, I suppose. I never asked him.’ Though the woman was nice, Valerie did not appreciate so many questions.

  Bunny sensed it and stood back. ‘Well I think it’s just lovely, a new baby and the family all together. If there’s anything I can do to help, you out there with your dad so busy and your brother going back to school in a few days, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ve had three of my own and I know what it can be like.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Valerie and Peter swapped places.

  Bunny shut the gate as they drove off. ‘Happy New Year,’ she called again to the open window.

  ‘You too,’ Peter called back. ‘Happy New Year.’

  Snow was banked high at both sides of the Sandy Brae but the gritting lorries had been out and the road was clear.

  ‘Nosy old bat,’ Valerie said as she changed gear.

  ‘No she’s not, she’s nice.’ Peter made Daisy comfortable on his lap. ‘Asking us in for the New Year though. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Valerie said. ‘Forget it. If she asks again, say dad’s too busy or he’s in bed with bronchitis or something.’

  They went to the shop first. Peter stayed in the van with Daisy to avoid unwanted attention while Valerie crossed the road with her purse. A number of women noticed that she walked gingerly and was no longer pregnant but Valerie’s bold stare prevented them from asking questions. The bread was nearly finished but Mr McRobb, who didn’t like the Irwins much, let her have a couple of loaves, a two-litre carton of milk and a few other things to keep them going until the end of the holiday. As Valerie left, the tongues began wagging.

  She rang the district nurse from the red phone box up the road. After such severe weather the nurse was run off her feet but promised to look in that afternoon. Since she drove a Land Rover for her work, the track would be no problem. She would, she said, arrange for Valerie and Daisy to be examined at the post-natal department of the Royal Infirmary in Clashbay the following day.

  After lunch, leaving Daisy asleep in her carrycot for a few minutes, Valerie drove Peter to the Four Crowns to collect the tractor. Then, while she waited for the nurse, he drove to the lower pasture with a load of hay and sheep nuts to see how the ewes had fared in the bad weather. During the blizzard they had huddled in several groups in the lee of a drystone dyke and been covered over. Their breath and the warmth of their bodies had melted the snow around them so that they lay in a number of caves, the walls thin enough to provide oxygen. The thaw had released them.

  As Peter drove up the track, the snowplough clearing the last of the drifts a
nd the trailer bouncing behind, they gathered at the gate, clamouring for food. Ben and Meg stood watching as Peter forced the gate open and carried the first shoulder of hay to the racks. The sheep pressed around his legs, baaing loudly. The second he tossed in the hay and pulled some through the bars, they began tearing at it ravenously. The troughs were full of snow. He knocked it out and filled them to the brim with high-energy sheep nuts. There was no shortage of water; fifty metres away the burn gushed from the moor. The sheep were more in danger of being swept downstream than suffering from thirst.

  Five had not survived the blizzard. Peter dragged them from the remains of the drifts, their fleece sodden and yellow against the snow. It wasn’t possible to tow the trailer up the hillside, so he disengaged it and drove up on the tractor. It took all his strength to hoist the dead animals on top of the snowplough. One at a time he carried them down and loaded them aboard the trailer. Then he drove to a rocky outcrop well away from the pasture and dumped them in the open where crows and other scavengers would reduce them to fleece and bones, and what remained would rot away quickly.

  Five ewes, each carrying one or two lambs, meant a loss of about thirteen animals. It could have been worse, much worse, and as Peter drove home his mood was one of relief. His fears since the snowfall had been laid to rest and although his ankle hurt, it had not prevented him from driving the tractor. The sheep had been fed and he had dealt with the carcases. His dad, he thought, would have been proud of him.

  30

  Valerie Goes to a Dance

  THE NEW YEAR gathered pace.

  The blizzard was past and though hard frosts and more snow were yet to come, they were nothing compared with what had gone before.

  Valerie presented Daisy and herself at the maternity unit and both were found to be in excellent good health, although blood tests and nicotine-stained fingers revealed her smoking and drinking habits. ‘It’s not good for your baby, Valerie,’ the nurse told her. ‘I know, you’re quite right, I am trying to cut down,’ said Valerie, hoping they wouldn’t keep her much longer because she was desperate for a fag and due to meet Maureen Bates at the Stag and Hound in fifteen minutes.

  By the time school started on Monday, January the sixth, Peter’s ankle was so much recovered that with an effort he could walk without a limp, though running was mostly a matter of hopping, and football was out of the question. ‘I fell on the ice,’ he told friends and teachers. ‘It’s getting better.’

  Valerie ran into Bunny at a coffee shop in Clashbay. ‘Your dad’s all right, is he?’ Bunny said. ‘I don’t mean to be inquisitive, but I often used to see him at the gate, you know. I haven’t seen him for ages.’ Valerie, her hair freshly shampooed and set, explained that Jim had been called south again to visit his sick brother in Newcastle. Peter was looking after the sheep in the meantime. No, there was nothing they needed, thanks all the same. She wasn’t sure when her dad would be returning.

  Imperceptibly the days lengthened. In the third week of January, storm-force winds heaped the sea to a fury and blew spray high above the headlands. Valerie drove Peter to the harbour to check that the Audrey, turned upside down above the shingle, was safe from the tumult.

  A few days later, his sprain no more than an occasional twinge, he walked across the hill with the dogs to visit Jim’s grave. Some of the stalks with which he had covered it had blown away, the rest lay sodden on the peat. A few blades of grass, the first signs of healing, had sprouted round the edges. Now he was there Peter wondered what to do. For a while he stood remembering and trying not to think of his dad down there in the wet earth. Briefly he went on his knees but no words came and the ice-cold moss soaked through his jeans. So he stood and told Jim about Valerie, and Daisy, and the dead sheep, and his crawl through the snow. Then he asked God to look after his dad and all of them. The cross was lopsided. He straightened it and waited a few minutes longer then walked on to cast an eye over the hill-wintering sheep.

  Week by week, regular as clockwork, Jim’s Social Security benefits went into the bank. Valerie bought a car seat for the baby and filled her days by driving out to see friends. In other people’s kitchens and living rooms she drank coffee and wine, listened to their tales of clubs, bars and boyfriends, and moaned that because of Daisy her life wasn’t her own any more. Never again, she said, and bored them with tales of dirty nappies, milky vomit and sleepless nights. People cooed over the beautiful baby, kissed her curls and rocked her in sympathetic arms when she cried. Valerie was happy for them to do so. ‘Just for God’s sake keep taking the pill,’ she told her girlfriends, secretly hoping they might get caught out too. ‘I got careless and look where it landed me. Bloody men, what do they care?’ She was never unkind to Daisy but like her mother, who had been even younger when she was born, Valerie was resentful and longed for the day when she could leave the baby with Peter and go out for a night to enjoy herself.

  What she failed to tell her friends was that in the evenings and at weekends it was Peter as often as herself who bathed his little niece and made her bottle and nursed her when she was fretful. For whatever reason, perhaps her inner turmoil, when Valerie tried to quieten Daisy she was often unsuccessful, whilst there was something in Peter to which the tiny girl responded and within a few minutes her wailing subsided to hiccups and shortly afterwards contentment and sleep.

  It was strange. Before Valerie came home Peter had never given a thought to babies, no more than any boy who encountered them in shops or at a friend’s house and saw how annoying they could be with their crying and constant demand for attention. What was a baby to a boy whose days were crowded and all life’s excitements lay waiting to be explored? But now, when Peter sat on the settee with Daisy, he felt as he sometimes did with Ben, and as he had felt sitting there with his dad’s arm around him. It was a warm feeling, something deep inside. Ben was his best pal in all the world. With his dad he had felt safe and protected. And now, though Peter never thought about it that way, he wanted to do the same for the helpless little scrap on his knee.

  He took a twenty-pound note from the tin in the byre and bought an expensive book on baby care from the shop in Clashbay. Then he took a ten-pound note and bought a CD of nursery songs which he sang to Daisy in his cracked voice.

  Valerie saw how often the baby looked up into his face and gave her gummy smile. ‘What have you got that I haven’t?’ she said crossly. ‘You’re a boy, for God’s sake. You should be out playing football and getting into trouble, not nursing babies. You’re meant to find babies boring.’

  ‘Do you want me to stop then?’ he said.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s just not normal, that’s all.’

  Peter shrugged. ‘Who says?’ He rocked Daisy a little longer then set her down on her back and pulled the blanket to her chin. Ben put his head into the carrycot and sniffed briefly then looked up with tawny eyes. ‘Who’s my good boy!’ Peter patted him and took the dogs outside while he prepared the hay and sheep nuts for the next day.

  January slipped into February and one Friday, when Daisy was six weeks old, Valerie announced that if Peter would look after her for the evening, she would like to go with Maureen and some others to a dance in the nearby village of Brathy. There was to be a live band. She had got him some cans and crisps and a couple of videos from the library van.

  ‘What time will you be home?’ he said.

  ‘Not be that late, it finishes at midnight.’

  ‘So you’ll be back by one.’

  ‘Before that, I expect,’ she said. ‘Too cold to hang about.’

  Peter wasn’t going anywhere. He often looked after Daisy in the evening. ‘OK,’ he said, remembering the dance nights when Valerie was fifteen. ‘If you promise.’

  ‘I said so, didn’t I? Blimey, you’re getting as bad as dad.’

  At eight o’clock, bathed, perfumed, made-up and wearing – although her figure had not recovered yet – a clinging silver top and red matador pants, she pulled on Jim’s
warm overcoat and set off to meet the others in the lounge bar of the Tarridale before going on to the dance.

  It was the first dance she’d been to since she came home – in fact the first dance she’d been to for a couple of years. Her earrings swung. Beyond the mascara her eyes shone with excitement. Peter and Daisy went to the door to see her off. One of the rear lights on the van was broken. ‘Bye. Hope the videos are good. I’ll not be late.’ A hand with red and silver nails fluttered from the window. Toot-toot! She drove off towards the village.

  But Valerie was late. She wasn’t home by one o’clock. She wasn’t home by breakfast time. She wasn’t even home by midday.

  And when she did finally turn up at four o’clock in the afternoon, she wasn’t alone.

  31

  Matt

  HIS NAME WAS Matt and he was an HGV lorry driver. The previous day he had driven a load of fertiliser 250 miles from Glasgow and delivered it along the coast. It was dark by the time he finished so he had left his vehicle, an eighteen-wheel, forty-four ton articulated lorry, on a patch of ground the far side of Tarridale and gone to the pub for a drink. A couple of lads had invited him along to the dance at Brathy.

  Eighteen hours later, as the old white van swung into the yard that Saturday afternoon, it was Valerie who was driving. Peter could not see the man beside her, but as they stopped he pulled her close and gave her a kiss. Briefly she responded then pushed him away and looked towards the window where Peter stood watching.

  Daisy was awake, her carrycot on the settee. He was standing beside it as they came into the room.

  Valerie did not run to her baby, she introduced her friend. ‘Matt, this is my brother Peter I was telling you about. Peter, this is Matt. I met him at the dance.’

  Peter nodded watchfully. For a night and a day Valerie had abandoned him without a word. He was deeply angry. He did not like her bringing her boyfriend home, the boyfriend she’d so obviously spent the night with, not after they’d been going out for a while but straight after meeting him.