by Tim Pears
Owen decides that probably he is glad to be without the hook, but he wonders whether he’ll be able to accomplish one-handed what he still has to do. There is only himself left. The blade, in his jacket pocket, is sharp.
What makes Owen stop and turn to look behind him, he doesn’t know. There, twenty metres away, is the dog. Realising that he has stopped, she pauses. She glances at him with her grey eyes. There is fleeting eye contact before she gazes off to the side.
‘What are you doing here?’ Owen demands. ‘You stupid dog. Why aren’t you with Holly? Or with Edward and Anna? They’d be glad of you.’
She won’t look at him. His grandfather told him how you could tell from a collie’s eyes whether or not they’d make a sheepdog. Dogs with light eyes were often the sort who would get mesmerised by a sheep: would lie down and refuse to get up and on with the job, whatever the shepherd said. Stuck, he called it. Dark-eyed dogs on the other hand could be too meek, the kind to turn away from confrontation with a ram or cussed ewe.
‘Go back!’ Owen commands. ‘Shoo!’ Adopting the guttural tone he remembers. ‘Get on, get on, scat!’ Advancing towards her. Shyly she rises and retreats. But when he turns and resumes walking away, the dog, after some seconds, once more follows.
You’ve not grown up, she said. We’ve grown apart. I want different things than I did. You’ve not moved. Stuck in a rut. Pulled me down. I have new friends. I’m ashamed to be with you, to be seen with you, in your grubby clothes, your out-of-date haircut, the hand-made tattoos on the fingers of your one hand. Look at you. Think you’re still nineteen? I’ll show you. Yes. Wait.
She went next door, scrabbled around in a shoebox, came back with their oldest photo, their first together.
Look, she said, pointing at the snap a pal had taken of the two of them, sitting at a white plastic table outside the Red Lion. They leaned together and grinned at the camera, desiring to imprint upon the celluloid a statement in chemical colour: we have found each other.
You’re the same as in that picture, see? Mel said. The same, just older. But me. She shook her head. I’m a different person, I’m not the same person.
It was true, there was no denying it: the photo offered irrefutable proof.
Can’t stand it no more, don’t you see? She said, despairing. She began to cry. Been trying for years. So fucking stubborn. Can’t take it no more.
Mel was right, Owen understood that. He’d imagined that it didn’t matter, that they’d support each other through continuity or change, but what he hadn’t appreciated was that if you changed, then your perspective altered too. That things looked different from where Mel had moved to. He’d not considered that.
The temperature has dropped. The sky darkens. It is as if the slate-grey cloud above is the belly of something far greater, a looming threatening presence. What happens next takes Owen some seconds to assimilate. The sense of dread of the sky, and look, here, something is falling. But what is falling does not seem to be harmful. Nothing injurious would fall so slowly, in this mesmerising slow motion, nor in such gentle profusion. No single one of these countless falling objects – if that is not too strong a word, an exaggeration, for such insubstantial entities, they are more like notions than things – no single one could be assured of hurting what it alighted upon, for one could step out of its way. Only, it is true, into the path of more of them, but there is no pain to their contact.
Owen’s mind leaps towards comprehension. It is spring. A breeze has whipped up ahead, above, blustered through an orchard, blown here this shower of apple blossom.
The white petals land on grass, Owen’s clothes, his skin. They dissolve. How extraordinary. No sooner has the blossom fallen than the earth absorbs it, spring turning to summer in a moment of burning cold.
Owen’s mind trips once more: not petals but snowflakes melting on his skin. On the ground they are beginning to settle already, a pale wash on the green grass, becoming gradually thicker. He walks into the gentle storm.
If she changed, it wasn’t her fault. She’d not done it on purpose, to confuse or to hurt him. If it hadn’t been for what happened to Sara.
You. You were driving the car.
Mel’s voice became someone else’s, her face metamorphosed, the very odour of her body changed. Two people in love becoming strangers to each other. She had borne his children. He could not be responsible for Mel’s feelings or opinion, but his own, now and forever, he would take hold of.
The world is white, but is a blur, for the snow is falling thickly, an abundance, a multitude of large flakes. Owen can feel them on his hair, a cap of ice crystals forming itself upon his head. The air is still, there’s no wind to swirl the snow around: it’s not a blizzard but a benign cascade. It comes back to Owen from a school lesson how at a certain temperature water vapour in the atmosphere high above him has frozen into these crystals, to drift down to the earth. Physics of such hypnotic beauty seems outrageous, really.
He is thirsty. Having no water, his rucksack another thing he realises he left behind, Owen stands with his face upturned, mouth open. Snowflakes melt on his tongue. He feels them land on his closed eyelids, their weight accumulates like coins.
There is no sound. It is as if the very silence of the falling snow has not merely dampened sound but neutralised the auditory realm. Owen reaches the road that runs along the other side of the valley and turns left along it. A car overtakes him, headlights on, being driven extremely slowly, as if the driver wishes to study the snowflakes as they fall in the twin beams of yellowish light. Owen cannot make out occupants, only the outline of the vehicle drifting past him, its engine no more than a murmur.
The signpost to Hurdley is white. The mind supposes that the snow has covered up only the black lettering. Owen knows his way from here, and heads up the lane before climbing a stile to cross the ascending slope of a field. He marches with his head down across a lush carpet of snow. It settles dry on the ground, his feet are not wet or cold inside his shoes, which crunch and squeak on the impacting snow. Each step indents itself. Owen stops and turns around and for a minute or two watches the footsteps being filled up, obliterated. The dog is only four or five metres behind him now, the dark patches of her coat covered in white, as if she has suddenly aged.
Owen walks on. There comes into the mesmerising silence a sound: intermittent, every two or three or four seconds, something that is difficult to identify. It could be a series of identical objects, machines, passing by with metronomic regularity. They seem to be up ahead, but then Owen realises he’s passing them, off to his left; or else they have veered off course. Surely he is walking in a straight line. The sound recedes, but before it has entirely disappeared behind him it reappears in front. He is in a scene from a film, with stereo sound fading out on one side, in on the other.
As he comes closer than he was before to the source of the sound it occurs to Owen that the whooshing is like the wings of a great white owl, flying in front of or around him. Actually, high above him now. He trips on something, staggers almost headlong into a wide metal post. A tower. Too thick to put his arms around. Looking up, the tower disappears into the blurring snow, but Owen knows now what these are. Windmills. Wind turbines. He stumbles away, disorientated.
They weren’t there before, of course. But he was trying to skirt the first hill, not climb it, and they must be situated on the hummocky plateau across its top. He must have ascended without realising.
The snow falls, ever more heavily. Owen’s skull is a compass, his mind the needle thrown out of alignment, no longer able to tell whether he is walking north or south, east or west. Uphill or downhill. In a straight or crooked line or round in figures of eight, in curlicues of confusion. In random, circuitous scrawls across the arctic surface of the earth. He is lost. The snow has obscured the world around him and Owen is lost inside himself.
It is a matter of chance that he notices what happens next. He does not see clearly but registers, it feels like he guesses, the white
shape that overtakes him. The dog looks like a white husky. She trots along without looking back. He follows.
When Holly was a baby, Owen was unable to bathe her one-handed. You didn’t want to get your hook wet, not if you could help it, so he’d take it off. He just had to have someone there to help. Mel refused. ‘I’ll do it myself,’ she said. ‘No need for you to.’ He knew that she couldn’t bear his stump and the tiny baby in conjunction. So he got Josh to help him. The three of them in the bath, father and son with the baby in between them. Floating in warm water. The boy took on the responsibility: his hands around his baby sister, in case his father let slip his grip on her soapy skin.
The second time, Mel came back earlier than he’d expected. Into the bathroom. Her fury, making out she’d walked in on an imminent disaster. Leaned in and scooped Holly up as if saving her. It was the last time he tried it.
Owen stops. The dog continues ahead of him. He watches her disappear, dissolve into the slowly falling cascade of snow. After a few moments she reappears. It’s her black snout he sees first. She returns to him, and turns round once more, waiting to lead him on. Owen starts walking, and so does she in front of him.
What is it, he wonders, that hovers just outside our senses, beyond our understanding? We are given glimpses. In the silvery darkness a badger lumbers through the trees. You are kissed on the lips by a woman, she is opening herself to you. A child grasps your finger as she totters forward. Some vast reality of which we perceive a tiny part. It evades the vigilant eye, our yearning.
In some way, Owen suspects, his thirst was not just a retreat from pain but a response to the pull that has always been there – was there in childhood – into a dopey oblivion, an unknowing rapture.
When the snow stops falling it’s almost as inexplicable, as magical, as when it started. The sky lightens, from dark to light grey, from grey to white, from white to blue, with every moment the world around them becoming ever more visible. Hills, fields, hedges, copses of trees. Apart from the four, five, windmills up on the hill behind them, the landscape is familiar, little changed since his childhood. They are climbing the hill on a path cut into the rocky face, during the days when miners dug their tunnels here, for lead and barites.
The sun comes out and in a moment the air is warm. The snow melts almost before Owen’s eyes, from the tops of hills, nearest to the sun, downwards, the landscape elegantly divesting itself of its cloak of snow. The grass is bright and greener than it was before, as if minerals in the snow have vivified it. No. Owen’s eyesight has been cleansed. And the oxygen demanded by his lungs for climbing is in his brain, refreshing his perception, seeing the grass as it really is.
The stone path ends at a flat area shaped like a shoe, its front end against the hill, like a footstep, as if it was made by a giant’s toecap as he strode over this island. There is a single metal pole sticking out of the ground beside a slight groove in the ground that runs straight out to the edge of the terrace. Owen surmises there was once a rail to carry small trucks for the miners.
Above the terrace the climb is steeper. The dog pads beside him, her tongue lolling. Already the grass from here on up has been dried by the sun. It could be summer. The ground is hard, the grass rough. Sheep pellets are scattered. Sweat lubricates Owen’s skin. He takes off his jacket, wraps the arms around his waist; a clumsy, awkward operation that takes longer than it would if he had his hook. He looks around. The rolling patchwork of fields in the valleys to the west and the south, back across to the hills up around the Kerry Ridgeway. It’s not a mountain he’s climbing, it’s only a hill, it must be less than five hundred metres high, but every now and then Owen stops, not just to get his breath back but to take in the view below and around him, which has both broadened and shifted in perspective.
The air in his head. He understands how much he loves this landscape – those episodes of boyhood and youth – the experience of it was mapped upon his mind, an interior topography which he has ignored ever since. A life wasted in the buildings, the paved streets of a city; some of it at least in its gardens. How he wanted to bring the children here.
He resumes climbing the west face of the hill. The wind makes his eyes water. Tears dry on his cheeks.
Flies bother the dog, and Owen too. There is a sound, a bird’s call, a grating chack-chack. Owen looks around. He sees wheatear, with their white rumps, bowing and bobbing off the ground, making brief bouncing flights as they chase after flies.
They cross an old path or foundation of a wall, the remains of an Iron Age hill fort like a chain looped over the shoulders of the summit of the hill. From here the ascent flattens into a small landscape of undulations and slopes. Off to the southern side of this habitat is a steep rise to the peak.
It is upon coming up into this area that Owen sees them. Mel is standing with her back to him, gazing north. Holly is wandering off to the left, peering over the lip of this plateau, calling in a voice that starts high on the first syllable, and drops on the second. ‘Ro-sie. Ro-sie.’
Josh does not seem to be here. But then Owen glimpses his sandy-coloured hair up at the top, and presently more of his son emerges as he comes across and runs down towards the others. ‘A falcon,’ he cries. ‘Mum. Mum. Look.’ She turns as he approaches. ‘Peregrine falcon.’ He reaches her and promptly turns around. They both scan the sky and Josh points. ‘There!’
Owen shifts his gaze to the bird, a female, almost as large as a buzzard, with its long pointed wings, its short tail. Its wings beat fast then it glides a short way, before beating its wings again. As if acknowledging its audience below, it lets out its falcon call, kek-kek-kek-kek.
‘She’s got a nest in the cliff,’ Owen hears Josh tell his mother. He turns his gaze back to them. Mel has her arm round Josh’s shoulder. Holly walks over to join them. Perhaps this Rosie was an imaginary friend.
The three of them stand together. The shifting corners of their triangle brought to one point. They face away from Owen. It’s Mel’s turn to point now, and though he cannot see it from where he stands below them, Owen knows she is pointing across to the old barn or perhaps the ruins of the barn in which they’d celebrated their wedding. It is she who has brought them here.
Owen knows they cannot see him. He takes a few heavy steps in their direction but the gaze of each one of them has passed across the place where he stands. If he were visible they would have responded to him.
What feels more strange, for some reason, is that they are talking to each other but he can no longer hear what they’re saying. Perhaps it is because they issue their words into the air away from him. A breeze takes the breath from their mouths and disperses it into blustering wind. Instead he hears the plaintive squeaky cries of a meadow pipit, and turns to his left to spot it and watch. It flies up from the grass, dips and veers, and goes back to the ground again. It sings a tinkling trill in flight, starting as it leaves the ground and reaching the end just as it lands, each time.
Something is happening to Owen’s hearing. He cannot hear the meadow pipit when he looks at it. He returns his gaze to Mel and the children and then he hears the bird. As if a person’s auditory ability was purely mechanical, microphones are facing the wrong way or something; some dial is in need of adjustment.
He can hear other things far away, he reckons. The whine of a chainsaw. The tolling of a church bell.
Mel has an arm across each of her children’s shoulders. Then Holly turns inward, towards her mother’s body, and slips backwards out of the embrace. She looks towards Owen and breaks into a smile. ‘Rosie,’ she says, bending forward. ‘Rosie.’ The brown mongrel dog walks fast towards her with a sort of shy shuffle, wagging its tail. She kneels down, and when the dog reaches her she hugs it, talking quietly.
Once again Owen cannot hear, though this time he cannot hear anything else either. Nothing at all. His ears are filled up with silence. He cannot hear them, they cannot see him, he is observation, he is mind.
Mel kneels on the ground in a spot
where a rock and a hillock shelter her. She has opened a cardboard box, and opens a transparent plastic bag within the box, unfurling the bag over the outside. She lifts the box, tilts it and pours a grainy grey-white powder onto the grass. She stops, moves the box to one side, and pours again, making a second pile. The children watch, scrutinising the accuracy, the fairness, of the operation. As the box empties, Mel pours with increasing care to make each pile the same size.
When the box is empty Mel pulls apart the flaps that make up the bottom, and folds its sides together so that it is flat. She puts the cardboard into a bag that was lying in the grass, and pulls out a sheet of paper.
How is it possible to love a woman, to make children together, and let her fall out of love with you? To fall out of love with her? It is possible, it happened. It seems like insanity now.
Owen would give anything to watch his children. Just a little longer. He has nothing to give. They will live their lives unseen by him.
Will he see Sara now? He does not believe so. Of course not. But he is such a stupid man, he has been so ignorant, he knows nothing, nothing at all.
Mel is reading from the sheet of paper words Owen cannot hear. First Josh, then Holly, pick up a handful of the powder. Josh says something to his sister as he turns his back towards the wind, and she copies him. Josh hurls the handful of ash up high into the air. It swirls away from him.