by Tim Pears
‘It were Josh,’ says Holly.
A rope hanging beside him swings slightly.
‘I didn’t know,’ he says.
‘Come on,’ Owen tells them. ‘Need to go. Right now.’ He turns to lead the way back out of the tower and stops: above the door, between the lintel and an arch above it are weird carved animals, upside down. One is a deer, a stag with antlers. Behind it is a net. Perhaps one of the other animals is a dog, a hunting hound. At the crown of the arch is a bearded figurehead. Owen stares at it for a moment. Like the animals, the head is crudely carved: this really must be old. Is it meant, he wonders, to be simply a grotesque figure, or Christ, reaper of souls?
‘Come on, Dad,’ Josh says.
Owen stirs. ‘Yes.’ They run through the church. The dog is waiting for them. They resume the path. Owen is sure every inhabitant of the village is watching them, these desecraters of their holy place. Holly is tired, slow, and once more he lifts her up and carries her.
‘Did you know when dinosaurs roamed the earth?’ Josh asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Over a hundred million years ago,’ he informs his travelling companions.
Owen has the sense that Holly is asleep on his shoulders. Her weight shifts floppily with each step he takes. ‘Did you learn that on TV?’ he asks.
‘No,’ Josh answers, apparently affronted.
‘You read a book?’
‘No.’ The same aggrieved tone. It’s as if Owen is accusing him of something underhand.
‘How do you know about them, then?’ Owen asks in a way he hopes is earnest enquiry, and does not sound as if he’s challenging the accuracy of what his son declared.
Josh shrugs. ‘I just do,’ he says.
They walk along a dismantled railway line. It runs straight through the rural landscape. There is nothing to indicate its former use. Now a farm track, as evidenced by tractor tyre marks, it has deep grass verges and a ribbon of sparser grass running down the middle. Along the two tyre tracks, black earth has pushed up between and over the railway pebbles. Along each side grow trees and shrubs, obscuring concrete posts and rusted wire. Only the strange directness of the track betrays its provenance. Josh cannot believe it’s not a Roman road. When Owen explains that trains once chugged to and fro across the countryside, and to cut costs a third of the track around Britain was ripped up just as he, Owen, was born, Josh refuses to accept it: his father is kidding him. So much traffic, so many cars, he argues, who would have stopped trains? There’s no convincing him. They walk on in silence. The path is clear, direct, and pulls them forward. Behind them, it leads back to where they’ve come from.
Although Owen feels a muscular pain in his right shin, and his left knee aches, he is able to absent both them and the weight of his daughter from his mind. His awareness of his body, and of their immediate surroundings, drifts. He is tired. But he has spent much time in these last years in such a state, has sought it. Unawareness. Stupor. It comes naturally now. Owen half ambles, half trudges along, Josh behind him, through the late afternoon, not quite knowing whether he is awake or asleep. Time passes, distance is covered.
‘I’m hungry,’ Holly says. She has woken up. They’re walking on a path that runs right at the edge of a wood. Owen knows they can do nothing if they don’t eat. The children will quickly falter without fuel. They must find food if the plan is to have any chance of success. The dog darts off into undergrowth and a few seconds later comes the throttled cry of a male pheasant, flying into the air between the branches of trees. They walk past piles of logs. Recently cut, the aromatic scent of pine resin floats on the early-evening air.
Owen looks around. A number of trees are conifers but deciduous ones. Larch. He walks to the nearest one. ‘Pull the needles off,’ he says to Holly above him. Dropping their bags behind him, securing her shin with his hook, Owen reaches up with his left hand and plucks handfuls of the needles himself. He puts two or three of them in his mouth, and chews. They are tender and not too tangy, he hopes, for a child’s palate.
Owen kneels on the ground and bends forward for Holly to step off his shoulders. From this position he sees yellow flowers and crawls forward: he plucks dandelion leaves and chews them. ‘Delicious,’ he proclaims. The children kneel down too and copy his foraging. ‘Only the leaves. But these, see,’ he says, picking now a primrose flower, ‘you can eat. But first do this.’
Josh and Holly watch their father put the tube of the flower in his mouth and suck. Owen feels the nectar come through, the sweet liquid falls on his tongue. They do the same. Then he takes a small handful of the flowers and stuffs them in his mouth, pretending to be mad with greed as he does so. This is no longterm solution, but perhaps it will tide them over until tomorrow.
‘How do you know about these plants?’ Josh asks once they resume, with larch needles in their pockets to chew on while walking.
Owen shrugs. ‘I just do,’ he says with a conspiratorial wink, which Josh acknowledges with a smile of his own, knowing he’s being teased.
Owen doesn’t realise, or notice, that dusk is falling until the path they’re on enters a wood and, leading downhill, cuts deep into black earth. Dark trees loom high above, arching towards each other in the air above this track. If their leaves were in full bloom this would be an even more gloomy tunnel than it is. There are long, thick creepers growing and hanging from the trees, some dangle in the path like church bell ropes.
After one or two hundred yards the path opens out, the slope levels off, the way a little lighter, but the ancient right of way gave in its gloom a warning, that night is falling. There is a mild, lemony smell in the air that must come from some daffodils they pass. There are no houses around as far as can be seen.
They head towards the setting sun. The dog trots in front and leads the way, jaunty, but then loses confidence and drops to the back and follows them. Or maybe it’s endlessly rounding them up. They need, Owen figures, to skirt every town, village, isolated farm: anyone could betray them. So he looks as far ahead as possible, sighting the route they shall take across this field, through that gate, avoiding as far as possible dropping down into valleys, so as not to come smack up against a settlement and be forced to make a wide diversion.
The dog chases the scent of animals off to one side, disappears, reappears in front of them. She has attached herself to them. Her body slithers, serpentine, as if moving not through air but through water.
At dusk they walk in the mysterious light after the sun has gone down and everything – trees, grass, hedgerows, Josh’s face – is illuminated, though by no direct source. Owen has been alert not just for sights but for sounds too, of a tractor, of voices, in their way. He is tired but figures he can relax now, people are ceasing their labours and heading indoors. Lights come on.
Holly has been on his back for hours. He can feel her head on his shoulder. Josh marches beside him. The boy seems to trust him. They climb a gentle slope. Each time they approach the top they find it is further on, another field, one more rise. Eventually, gasping, Owen stands on a hill. Holly, lifted and dropped by the bellows of her father’s lungs, wakes up, and he swings her round him and slides her to the ground. Leans from the waist, hand on hip, breathing hard.
They can see into the distance north and south, at each horizon there’s a creamy glow from the earth, enlarging the darkening sky above as they watch. Stourbridge and Kidderminster, Owen reckons, or rather hopes. He could be wrong. Worcester? Nearer, down in the valley below them, the lights of cars on twisting country lanes are like torches searching for something. For them, of course. They must keep off the roads. Night settles, the distinction between earth and sky is lost to their sight. The cars could be helicopters. Or submarines. No more than a hundred metres away a car wanders along a lane as if lost; the sound of its engine seems to come from a different direction. In far-off villages orange lights hang in clusters, electric fruit in the darkness.
‘I’m tired,’ Josh admits. Owen can hear in his son’s tone of voic
e that he’d rather not have had to say it. A shy, proud boy.
‘We’ll walk a little further,’ Owen says. ‘Till we find a place to shelter.’
‘How?’ Josh asks. ‘Can’t hardly see things.’
‘Moon’ll come up soon, see. Don’t worry.’
Owen lifts Holly, eases her back around him, and sets off.
‘What’s that?’ Josh asks. Owen turns to find his son gazing to their right, up around the escarpment they’d come down from. ‘Up there,’ Josh says, and without waiting for a reply he scrambles up the bank.
It’s hard to identify the place he’s aiming for: what seem to be rectangular shapes in brown rock. Owen and Holly watch him ascend, going on all fours where the slope is steep. The dog goes with him, tail wagging, guardian and adventurer both. When Josh reaches the strange shapes he disappears into them. In the moonlight what has happened does not make sense, it’s indecipherable. Josh has passed through something; or something has absorbed him, swallowed him.
Owen is on the verge of scrambling up there himself when they hear Josh call, ‘Dad! Holly!’ They can’t see him.
‘Come on,’ Owen says, taking Holly’s hand.
There’s no doubt about it: these are rooms, carved in the rock. There are doorways and window spaces that must have had wooden frames. Stone houses, once inhabited, there’s no other explanation. Dry leaves have blown in and provide a mattress. This is where they will spend the night.
Having made places to sleep, Josh insists they climb up to the top of the rock above the hollowed dwellings. They lie on a wide bare platform of stone and look up at the night sky. There are no clouds. It’s warm: heat should be escaping from the earth on so clear a night, surely, but the temperature is rising, that’s certain. The dog lies beside Holly. They gaze upward. Stars glitter in astonishing abundance in the infinite black above.
Owen recalls their one foreign, package holiday, on a Greek island. The stars were like this. Josh was still in nappies, Sara four. White skin, brown hair. After a fortnight on the beach their skin was brown, hair bleached, transformed into photographic negatives of themselves. Mel too, altered by the sun she otherwise distrusted, this one time allowing its dominion over her. Swimming, children, sunbathing. Mel’s skin first tanned and then was burnished. It shone. Touching her transmuted flesh was somehow more thrilling than if it were a different person, he thought, then. Back in England, weeks of rain, within a month Mel’s body was once more white.
Not since that holiday has Owen seen stars like these. In his ignorance he identifies only the Plough, the Milky Way, amongst hundreds, thousands, visible to the naked eye, receding into the deep black immensity of space.
‘Feel like I’m looking down on the stars,’ Josh says.
‘Yes,’ Holly concurs. ‘Me too.’
‘Dad.’ Josh chuckles. ‘Help. I’m going to fall off the ground.’
‘You hang on, boy,’ Owen says. ‘Don’t let go.’ He imagines them dropping, one after another, like parachutists, free-falling up into the night sky, holding hands as they plummet, the three of them, on, into the stratosphere, out of the earth’s orbit, freezing fast, painlessly, falling into space.
There’s still, Owen reckons, fifty or more crooked miles to the border. Can I order, cajole, carry my children undetected, find food along the way? I must honour the plan that came to me in my moment of awakening. We shall go to the hill in the west.
Inside the stone room Holly lies asleep on the leaves. The dog twitches beside her. Josh started talking a minute or two ago, and hasn’t yet stopped. He’s giving his father a report on his football team, recounting in pedantic detail special moments from recent matches. The boy explains certain laws of the game his father might be unfamiliar with. He begins rabbiting on about girls at school who sometimes try to play football with the boys at break. He speaks of girls with an eleven-year-old’s disdain.
‘No fun at all?’ Owen whispers.
‘You get to skill them up,’ Josh sighs. ‘It’s pips.’ He continues, in a whisper, with a tired intensity, almost raving. He lies, while Owen sits beside him, leaning against the wall of stone. He can see out.
‘I’m glad we called Mum,’ Josh says. ‘Even if we didn’t speak to her.’
‘No.’
‘She’ll know we’re all right.’
Owen wonders whether his marriage to Mel was withering before the accident, something he has not allowed himself ever to contemplate before. ‘You know,’ Owen says, ‘we make mistakes. Sometimes some things go wrong, see, and we don’t realise it’s in our power to make them right.’
He pauses then, and his son looks up at him, but Owen wishes to speak of things that have not to his knowledge been spoken of before. The words will not come, though he thought they did exist, for they’d begun to assume shape in the roof of his mind and the bottom of his throat. But they decline to emerge. He wanted to speak to his son of his own and his family’s weaknesses, tripping down the generations. The words will not come.
‘Dad,’ Josh asks. ‘Are you Welsh?’
‘A bit.’ Owen has forgotten how much. ‘My father was half Welsh. My mother was a quarter. So I’m, what? Three eighths?’
There’s a child’s calculating pause. Owen hears Josh yawn. ‘That means I’m three sixteenths.’ Disappointment enters the boy’s voice. ‘That’s not much.’
‘It’s enough for anyone.’
‘How long has Wales been a country?’ Josh asks.
‘Well,’ Owen says, racking his brains. ‘I don’t know about long, long ago, but after the Romans left Britain, the Welsh princes just fought amongst themselves, like, for centuries, until King Gruffydd defeated the English king Harold, in 1039. Which I have to admit I only know because the battle took place just outside Welshpool. And then Gruffydd formed the first independent kingdom of Wales.’
‘We did the Normans last term,’ Josh says, and yawns again. ‘William the Conqueror beat King Harold. Miss Selby didn’t say he’d already lost to a Welsh king.’
Owen wonders for the first time in his life whether these English king Harolds were one and the same man. He wonders whether he could work it out from the dates. Before he can say anything he realises that Josh’s breathing beside him has changed: the boy is sleeping. Owen lies down, rolls onto his side with a rustling of dry leaves, and waits for sleep himself. There is no pain in his phantom hand, but he doesn’t notice.
though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i will fear no evil
The sweet and musty smell of leaves, turning beneath to compost. Some of them work their way inside clothes: sticky, itchy skin. Owen wakes with both his children pressed against him. He remembers waking in the night, cold, realising they were shivering, and hugging them to him like animals in a lair. When he uncurls himself his limbs are stiff.
‘What are we going to eat?’ Josh wonders.
‘Is there nothing left?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ll search, won’t we?’ Owen says. He knows he’ll have to go to a shop, buy food, but it’s the last thing he wants to do. ‘We’ll forage.’
His eyes become accustomed to the dim light. On the other side of the stone roof above them a bird croaks. Holly laughs, so does Josh, Owen tries to. His head throbs, his throat is desperate for water.
On all fours, like an animal, he licks dew from the grass. He stands, damp blooms on the knees of his black trousers. His children watch. They do not copy.
The sky is blue and the sun warms the earth. A thick ribbon of mist winds through the valley below, shrouding from view and at the same time identifying a river beneath it. They begin walking. In a sheltered dip they come across an apple tree festooned with yellow fruit. Securing a branch with his hook, Owen plucks one and bites into it. It is sweet. He fills the rucksack with apples, not sure whether they are last year’s crop still hanging on the tree or this year’s come early, and he and the children munch as they walk along.
‘This is like the story
,’ Owen says, ‘of the man who sets out in search of the perfect place to live, he searches all around the world, see, but can’t find it anywhere. Nowhere’s perfect. The longer he spends travelling, the more he misses home. Eventually he returns, like, and wonders why he ever left. For home, after all, was heaven on earth.’
Josh smiles at his father. He shakes his head. ‘No, Dad,’ he says. ‘This is like the story of Adam and Eve, eating an apple in the Garden of Eden.’
‘I am Eve,’ says Holly. ‘We did do it in school. They was really hungry but they ate a poisoned apple.’
‘No,’ says Josh, ‘the snake made them eat it.’
‘Why?’ Holly demands. ‘I bet a snake don’t even like apples.’
‘He wanted them to leave.’
‘Who is the snake?’ Holly asks. ‘Daddy?’
‘Yeh,’ Josh says, with a gritty chuckle, leaning against his father’s side.
They walk on for an hour, two hours, effortlessly avoiding human contact. Owen checks his compass. The route west takes them across grazing fields and through parkland. Owen realises that Josh is watching him closely. He shows the boy how to line the needle up to north, how the needle obeys the earth’s magnetic field. ‘Keep it,’ he says. ‘You can be in charge of direction, see.’ Josh’s eyes widen, as his hands grasp the device.
‘Which way then?’ Owen asks him.
Eyebrows furrowed, Josh rotates the object in his hand. It seems difficult for him to believe that something without a battery or electronic screen can be trusted. He looks up, and nods forward. ‘That way,’ he says.