by Tim Pears
Owen’s observation becoming more methodical, he’d got his mother to bring a notebook with her. ‘Miss you, my lovely,’ she told him when she left. ‘Come back when school starts. Look after your mum.’
There was only a fortnight left, but he began to record what he saw. In daylight he found the remains of a hedgehog, all gone but the spines; a rabbit skinned inside out. While one or more members of the badger colony took two nights to devour a wasps’ nest: on the first night they took most of the grubs, but returned to finish off the rest and as many adult wasps as they could, presumably unaffected by the insects’ stings.
Then one night Owen watched one badger mount another, and though it chewed the other’s neck hair he realised this was not a fight, exactly. A boar copulating with a sow. He’d seen other animals mate, a process usually over in seconds. This pair of badgers remained coupled for an hour; he wondered whether humans could possibly take that long.
Owen returned to his mother and school in Welshpool at the beginning of September. His grandfather said nothing, but it was clear he was pained to see the boy go. There was talk of getting someone else up to help with the sheep, or cutting down on their number. In the evenings his mother drank slowly, steadily, to a good-natured slump.
It wasn’t until half-term, at the end of October – when by chance his grandfather was in Shrewsbury for his hip operation – that Owen went back. The ewes had been dipped, the wool around their tails clipped, and they had been tupped by the ram; wether lambs had been sold. Another farmer came along the track, over the top from Priestweston, to help out. Owen understood that since he’d gone his grandmother had been tramping that long winding hill.
On his second day the boy found time in the afternoon to visit the badgers’ sett. There was a light drizzle of rain on the green hills. When he saw the tyre marks on the wet grass, a Land Rover driven across his grandfather’s field, up to the fence before the trees, Owen ignored them. You saw all the evidence you needed, but you wouldn’t allow yourself to draw a conclusion.
In the wood, rain collected in the canopy of the trees and fell to earth in thin streams, or tiny puddles spilled from where they’d collected on leaves until overbalancing.
Owen knew by now of the world of terrier men: assisting lurchers after hares or deer; working their dogs against foxes, rabbits and rats. When a sett was dug, a badger would be baited by a young terrier – restrained or injured so that it didn’t kill the dog – or it might be put into a sack alive and taken to a secret pit, where men collected and cash was wagered. The boy knew that illegal activities were interrelated: not just badger but dog fighting, cock fighting, the selling of protected birds. So that he understood what it was he found.
It looked like the sett had been bombed. A scene from a First World War battlefield, trenches gouged by artillery. This destruction, though, had been wrought by hand, by men with pickaxes and shovels, and their dogs. The badgers’ tunnels in all their impressive excavation were laid bare. Owen could see the cul-de-sacs, winding corridors, spacious lairs, all exposed, and ruinous. He saw that the colony was destroyed. His badgers were almost certainly all dead. He turned and walked out of the wood, and back towards the cottage, perplexed with grief.
Fingers
Dr Macintyre referred me. I never asked her to. You know that, I suppose. I’ll tell you the truth: I wouldn’t touch drugs as such. The stuff I’ve took is all prescription, they was in the bathroom cabinet. Drink I give up when I had kids. Never missed it.
Doctor reckons I don’t need them. She may be right, all I need to do is talk. Says I need to see you before she’ll do me any more. I don’t mind talking, never have.
I worry. What bothers me is he’ll do something bad. I feel sick when I think what he might do. But what can be done about it? You tell me. I’d like to know. What can anyone do if a person makes up their mind?
You need to remember the good times. We met in 1987. There were this pub, the Red Lion, me mates and me used to go to for a change. A Friday night. I’d notice him, this bloke sat on his own in a corner. Spoke to no one. Dressed smart. Only ever wore a white shirt but it were fresh ironed. Black trousers pressed, black shoes shining. His hair wet still from a shower. A man with no sense of fashion but who took pride in his appearance.
On the table in front of him a pint of slow beer, tobacco pouch, packet of green Rizlas, yellow box of Swan Vesta matches, the red-tipped ones. Never had nothing to read or occupy his self, apart from the matches, which he played between his fingers. That’s when you noticed his hard-worked hands.
He’d placed himself in the corner, with a view of the whole bar, but he give the impression he had no interest in anyone. See a young bloke like that once in a while, ignoring everyone. Like he’s being rude on purpose to a roomful of strangers, waiting until someone better turns up.
Once or twice our eyes met, for one second our glances collided, but then he’d look past me, like I were in the way of something more interesting – the spirit bottles up behind the bar, or the lighting fixtures on the ceiling. The bloke hadn’t even registered my presence.
I can’t remember how did I get to talk to him? Might have been we met when he come to the bar. A word about the weather, the way you do. Or the music on the jukebox. The landlord were ten year older than his clientele and the day he stopped listening to new music were the day he reckoned everyone else should: the pub were one of few still had a jukebox, only every song on it were fifteen year old.
Yes, I remember now, short conversations while he were putting his money in, selecting a disc. Got as far as knowing each other’s name. ‘Mel.’ ‘Owen.’ Awkward. He made you feel like you was intruding, interrupting some important thought he were sharing with his self.
I didn’t even know, while I did it, why I were persisting. He give me no encouragement. It were like this secret mission I demanded of myself, whenever our gang stopped by the Red Lion. I kept an eye open, made our paths meet. Words was exchanged.
‘All right?’
A nod from him, ‘Not bad,’ and that were that. Mission accomplished. I’d persuade the girls to drop in early of a Friday evening, whatever else we was doing later. Then one of them realises what I’m up to, they mocked me rotten.
‘The weirdo in the corner?’ says Janice.
‘Mr Lonely?’ says another. ‘You, Mel Broughton?’
True, it weren’t like there were no shortage of men. I never had to work hard, never had to work at all, and most of the men was no good. I were nothing neither. Had no family but a brother in Dudley. I were twenty-two, worked in an egg-sorting factory. Half the gang were mothers, tiddlers back home with Grandma while we girls went on the razz. We’d all wagged it through school. If we wasn’t pretty, we was free. Let ourselves be blown about. Bints like me, and young mothers who hated the men what treated them like dirt.
I knew I wanted different, only I never knew what.
It were hopeless. I’d say a word to him, he’d mumble some reply, I’d talk a lot of nonsense and tootle back to me teasing mates.
I nearly give up, then I go there on me own. There he were, rolling his self a Golden Virginia fake at his table in the corner. What the heck’s I doing here, I thought, as I stood at the bar. To hell with him. I’ll have this half of cider, I’ll be off, I’ll not be here again. Without the girls I must have stood out, felt even more foolish than with them. Like everyone in that bar knows why I’m there, sniggering behind their drinks. Then I realised someone were standing beside me. I turned. It were him. He were only an inch or two taller than me.
‘You weren’t here last week,’ he says, so blank you couldn’t tell whether he were saying how disappointed he was or telling me off or just letting me know how brilliant was his powers of observation.
‘Gerrout,’ I says. ‘You must have missed me,’ I says, lightly, like how funny, what a joke that were.
He looks at me, Owen does. I look at him, and for the first time he holds my gaze. ‘Yes, I did,’ he says.<
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His hands was rough, a gardener’s hands, I liked the feel of them. They had scars. One was a bite off a ferret, so he said. Another he says, ‘I cut myself shaving.’ Owen learned how to make me laugh. Soil in his fingers like fingerprints, not with ink but earth. And he had home-made tattoos, little ones, across his knuckles. Letters and symbols: a cross, a yin and yang. I says I could tell him and his mates was pissed when they did them.
He says, ‘I did them myself.’
Owen were self-employed, he tended rich people’s gardens out in the suburbs. That was why he were spruced up on a Friday night: he had that look of a man relieved to change out of dirty working clothes and dress up, but also, although he’d been in Birmingham ten year near enough, he were still a country boy. He had that reserve. Did things deliberately. Took his time. There were something old-fashioned about him.
I told Owen that, that he were spruce. He called it a true compliment, being as it is the name of a conical evergreen tree, useful for timber and paper pulp, and the flavouring of beer.
Let me come along to watch him work. He were slight but made of wire, stronger than you’d think – he’d work for hours without a break. Takes confidence to work on your own. Every decision you make has to be made alone. You might not have thought such a quiet man would have it. He cut some old bush right back, I thought he’d killed it, but three month later, in the spring, it blossomed in this spray of vivid yellow. He pruned a knobbly apple tree with them rough hands with such precision, so delicate, it were like he were scared one wrong snip might sever an artery, sap come spurting out the wound.
In the garden of a large house off Sutton Park Owen planted an empty bed with one after another identical-looking, tiny green plants. Took me back there in July. You couldn’t believe what had grown in the blank space of brown soil: flowers of all shades of every colour, different sizes and shapes. The most beautiful thing you ever saw. A painting made of petals. It hadn’t never occurred to me how a person creates such a sight, but someone had, this quiet man. He planted something in me too.
He were hard work, were Owen Ithell, but once he relented he give his self to me without holding nothing back. That were when I realised I’d been waiting to do the same.
He got the thing for flowers from his grandma, Owen says, and the need for solitude from his Welsh grandad. He told me all about the two of them, like they was his family, brought him up, I were surprised when he says he spent odd weeks or months with them.
I know things is meant to skip a generation, I says, but what about your parents?
Owen told me he didn’t know whether his father was dead or alive and he didn’t care. No brothers or sisters. His mother lived east, over King’s Lynn way. He’d drive there to make sure she were all right, slip her some cash, drive back. Spoke of her like she were his responsibility. After his father had gone for good he went home from his grandparents’ place and spent the rest of his childhood looking after his mother. Taught his self to cook and clean.
I said once it were funny he were in Birmingham, the big city, between Wales where his heart was and his mother over in the Wash, and he said it weren’t funny at all, just an unfortunate coincidence and that was all there was to it.
Strange thing it were, watching my friends change their minds about Owen. He were reticent, polite to them. Janice says, in her mocking voice, ‘He worships the ground you walk on,’ like how sad were that, and got a lot of laughs. ‘Waits on you hand and foot.’ They saw how he were with me, began to think there might be some use in it. He affected a lot of us, not just me. Sounds silly, but a year after we got together I looked around one night, half me mates were with decent blokes.
He come gradually out of his self when it were just the two of us. Like it were a surprise to him that he could trust me. We laughed a lot in bed. He’d pretend to be other people. Pretended we was animals. Going to bed were an excuse to fool around. Mess about in there like kids we did.
He’d been an altar boy for a while, Owen had. Said how much he liked it, said it were somewhere to go. Mass on Sundays, helping out at weddings and funerals. An empty church. He loved being in there on his own. Priest were a nervous man, Owen says, needed a smoke before taking a service: people going in the front of the church, Father were out having a gasper round the back. Owen told me you don’t think you’re listening, you don’t think you’re taking it in, but then you catch the smell of incense or a snatch of a hymn and it all come back. It’s all in there.
We had our wedding in a barn on this hill in Wales. Owen organised it, drove over, asked the farmer what owned the land if we could borrow it for the day. Hired two coaches to take the gang over. We and a few mates went the day before and got this old barn decked out with balloons and streamers like Christmas. His mother come, my brother too. Owen’s grandad come up from his bungalow down below. I were expecting a giant, there were this miserable old widower hobbling about on two sticks, moaning about being dragged up on to the tops. He give Owen a bag of old tools, though – pliers, a kindling axe, a knife – and Owen were well chuffed.
A great party. We had music – generator and decks, big speakers – and dancing. Plenty of pills and drink. The little barn were full of our mates, townies every one apart from Owen, there in the middle of nowhere, it were what you’d call odd. But it worked. I’ll tell the kids about that.
Sara were born in 1990. Can’t imagine there were ever a prouder father. Nor better husband, let me say. Turn his hand to anything. Never claimed there’s a job a man shouldn’t do: he’d stay up late, ironing all of our clothes, ready for the morning. Polished shoes, laid them out in their pairs, in a row in the hallway of the flat. Then he’d sit in the corner of the living room, smoke his last fake of the day, wonder how his life were turning out so good.
When she were a toddler, Sara wouldn’t let me help her walk. She’d stumble, little mite, she’d bash herself, but push me away. If Owen were there, though, she’d hold on to one of his rough tattooed fingers, grasp it tight in her tiny hand. He’d walk behind her, bent right over, guide her along. The look on Sara’s face: happy, proud.
Sara seemed to have inherited self-confidence from each of us, Owen’s with the natural world and mine with people. We couldn’t see our weaknesses in her, like it were a miracle. Maybe they would have emerged in time. Or maybe not. You just don’t know.
After Sara we had Josh, who were just like his father. Born shy, my little prince. Hardly look his own mum in the eye, never mind other people. Deliberate like his dad. Hated to be rushed into anything. We moved from the flat to the house, with its own garden, a tip what Owen transformed into a jungle playground.
Soon as Sara were born I says to Owen we have to visit his mother. Owen cleaned out his car the night before, put his tools in the lock-up garage; I made sandwiches and put them in the fridge. We got up early in the morning and drove east. Liz lived in a block of flats on the outskirts of King’s Lynn. We took her out for the day, a picnic up around the coast.
Liz were all made up and waiting. She give us a big hug that smelled of sandalwood and Polo mints. She were in her mid-fifties, worked in a shop. She wore hippyish clothes, though when you looked closer often there were just one paisley-pattern blouse or orange Indian trousers. The rest were normal highstreet stuff had somehow adapted itself to her. She looked like a funky grandma, a little glamorous, a little doolally. After that we did it regular, three, four times a year. It’s spectacular over there, them great flat beaches and marshes and dunes, that high wide sky; though she lived so close it were as much a novelty for Liz as it were for us Brum dwellers.
She were great with the kids, nuzzled and nudged them, spoke baby language like she’d been relearning it at evening class, just for their visits. As they grew she’d sit in the back of the car between Sara and Josh, ask them questions, then lean back with a smile on her face and let them natter at her from either side.
After our picnic Owen would wander off with Sara. He’d found a telescope
in some charity shop, must have been about the only thing he ever bought for his self, and he’d keep one eye on Sara and watch birds with the other. Thousands of them on mudflats at Snettisham, pushed by high tides into the lagoons. Harriers flying low over reed beds at Titchwell Marsh.
While I fed Josh, Liz and I would talk. She told me how it had been with Owen’s dad, how hard she’d tried to cling on to him.
‘Nothing like Owen,’ was her words. You couldn’t quite tell which were the one she were most fond of. There was other men. One brung her to King’s Lynn, then drifted off and left her there.
Once or twice it were mizzly weather and we’d mooch about the town, more often it were glorious. One spring visit, Sara were six, end of March, we braved a trip to Holkham Bay. With the tide out all you can see is sand. Pine trees behind. Take you hours to walk from one side to the other. Can’t be a finer beach in the whole world, not that I’ve been. There were no wind that day, the sky was nothing but blue stretched over us.
She were sweet-natured like her son, were Liz. Owen always packed a bottle of white wine. I didn’t drink none, and the most he supped were one can of beer. Liz worked her way through the bottle, getting slightly more barmy, till she’d fall asleep on the rug. She were lovely with the children and they was fond of her, but you knew you wouldn’t leave them with her. She weren’t equipped to take care of people. I told myself to talk to Owen about getting her over to live with us.
Josh were snoozing on one side of me, my mother-in-law on the other. I thought, This is what a family can be like. I weren’t looking for a mother, but Owen had given me one. I could see Owen and Sara in the distance, the air were shimmering the way it does on a beach. They walked back across the sand, hand in hand. We’d just discovered I were pregnant with our third child. I thought, People come together, the born and the unborn, it’s a sort of survival unit. One scar, then another, begins to heal.