It would be impossible to drive it down the few feet to the ford, let alone up either of the inclines which lead out of Wooton-Coney.
So be it. Sod’s law. But if Georgie is truly as helpless as she feels, she reminds herself that so is her evil protagonist. She will keep her door locked and chained. She will keep Lola in sight at all times.
She calls the dog to her side as she goes to free the chickens. Even this job proves difficult, because Mark’s intricate homemade lock has frozen up and she has to work hard to shift the tiny sliding door, wiping her face free of snow as she goes, and seeing the corn she so recently scattered disappearing under the thick white covers. It might be kinder to keep the fowls inside this morning, warm and comfortable on their perches. They, too, are uneasy, the unusual silence must have shocked them, she misses their contented clucking sounds.
It’s no good, dammit, she can’t shift the bloody door, so she takes off her gloves and works on the small flap window with frozen fingers. With a sudden snap it opens, and Georgie peers inside. Where are they? They should be roosting. Instead they are on the floor of the hut, but wait, there’s something horribly wrong. She brings her eye to the hole and stares in.
They don’t have heads any more.
That’s all. Do you understand what I’m saying? They have no heads. Just raw stumps with sticky red bones ending at the neck, and their beautiful russet feathers are clogged with blood. They lie, quite still, on the floor of the house in a neat, plump row, as if on a slab in a butcher’s shop. Placed there neatly. Where the slaughterer put them.
Last night all was hope, now there is nothing but horror. Now, for some desperate reason connected to keeping her sanity, she has to open the door, even if it means breaking the blasted thing down. She tramps determinedly through the snow, through the deep orchard grass, to the woodshed for a spade. She carries it back to the chicken house and bashes the spade against the flimsy construction again and again until it splinters and gives way. She flings down the spade and stares in breathless terror, thrusting her arm inside and pulling out bodies, one at a time, every one identical, every pretty head chopped off in exactly the same place. But there aren’t any heads to be seen, just bodies, and she lays them down in a row on the snow and regards them with dismay.
A total revulsion.
A wreath of scarlet carnations.
Where are the heads? Oh, dear God. What has he done with the heads? She starts searching.
While Georgie is out there dealing with death the wind begins to whine. It starts on a whistle of just two notes. The whine turns into a snarl, gusting the snow into her face and stinging her skin in a series of vicious slaps. It tears down the valley like a cartoon wind, a tatty grey streamer with evil intent. With its sharp teeth it is almost smiling.
Useless to question who or why. Georgie wants to be far away, she wants to nurse her frightened sickness, but inside her cottage is the furthest she can go. There is nothing can be done for the chickens, so she leaves them and the holes in their necks, red and searing in the snow. Whoever is doing this hates her, for some unknown reason this is the truth, although she can offer no explanation, she can’t apologize or make things right because she doesn’t know who he is, or what the hell he wants from her. But his perfect hatred drums in her ears and turns her blood to ice.
With a shuddering certainty Georgie knows that this is the work of the figure on the hill. And now she has seen the violence.
From her small cottage she watches, face white, staring and horrified, a prisoner held against her will, wanting to beat her head on the wall, longing to scream for help. But there is no-one. It is only Lola’s comforting presence that keeps her sane and steady. Perfectly still within her house she watches the snow accumulate, she sees the wind take it away and build shapes of a crazy structure, no rhyme, no reason, just madness all around her. Never before in her life has Georgie been closer to something so mindless or so completely wild. Now it whistles down the chimney, invading her sanctuary and cutting her off from the rest of the world. Her hands shake. Her body jerks. She can no longer see the rest of the hamlet and it is doubtful that anyone could make it from one house to the other. Even Donna, in her desperation, could not reach Georgie now, her own garden has disappeared. And inside the cottage it is dark, some endless night has descended. They have the firelight, they have the weak glow from the candles, and that is all.
Suddenly, without warning, the last vestige of security has been gutted around her and Georgie knows she is waiting, in a scene set by some hostile hand, and all she can do is wait like a puppet for destiny to unfold.
She eats. But does not remember eating. She remembers nothing for the rest of this endless day, it disappears in a haze of horror, and she comes out of her self-induced trance when she hears a frenzied knocking at her door.
Her fright leaps inside her. No-one has ever knocked there before.
It has to be Donna. Someone to talk to, thank God. Somehow the girl has made her escape, but she hasn’t been able to reach the back.
So now it has come to this. At first Georgie stares at the banging, unable to move in her terror. The whole cottage appears to shake. Menace is everywhere. Above the wind comes the voice of a man. ‘For God’s sake, Jesus, is there nobody in this fucking place?’ BANG. SLAM. BANG. SLAM. Lola cocks her ears, she walks to the door and sniffs underneath it. She wags her ridiculous tiny tail and looks back at Georgie expectantly.
Not Donna. Then who?
There is no chain for the front door. With its massive lock and its dungeonlike key it is too staunch to need one. Like a sacrifice attuned to her doom, Georgie steps forward mechanically and turns the key, and at her movement the candles flicker and dim. Once again she pauses to listen, licking her lips like a threatened beast, and she might well be snarling.
It is open a fraction when the body falls in with a whump. It must have been leaning against it. In a second her bulky visitor is back on his feet and shouting.
‘For God’s sake hurry up. The lad’s over there. The snow-plough went over his foot and this was the nearest place to get help. I’m going to have to carry him here, but I had to make sure there was someone…’
All the candles blow out in the wind. Georgie can smell their deadness. The stranger clutches her arm without really looking at her. Is this a trap? Does a grisly fate he in this man’s hands? Does he want Georgie out there so he can murder her? Cut off her head and lay her out on the snow, neatly, with the chickens?
But now she sees that his eyes are sincere, with nothing in them except concern. ‘Come on, he’s in agony. We’ve got to hurry, get him into the warm before…’
Something automatic takes over. ‘Just a sec, I’ll get the torch if someone’s injured.’ Can this be her own voice, coming from nowhere and sounding so firm, her old sensible, capable self emerging from the depths of her terror? She even has the presence of mind to shut Lola in the kitchen before she follows her agitated visitor out.
‘It’s going to take two, I can’t move him alone.’
They hang together in order to move. Speech is impossible, although he tries to mutter his explanations. Breathing is difficult enough. The wind howls like a banshee, there is nothing to see except snow. They move like blind men, one arm feeling in front and the other linked together. He seems to know where he’s going, his old tracks are just about visible. What is the time? It must be almost seven o’clock, back in her London life she might be having a drink after work, cooling off before an evening at the ballet, soaking in a perfumed bath.
Thank God it’s not far. No more than fifty yards. The great shape of the snowplough looms out of the greyness while, at the same time, the torchlight illuminates the ashen face of the man on the ground. ‘The bloody thing’s broken down on us. It slipped back on him while he was underneath.’
How bright the boy’s blond curls are, and what an odd thing to notice at a time like this. Nervously Georgie adjusts the beam and takes it down over his thick donkey j
acket, down his navy overalls towards the ankle that has been hurt. The older man is bent down already, reassuring, she supposes, trying to strengthen his friend in his pain.
‘Dave! Dave! Come on, wake up! We’re back now, we’ll soon have you inside and strapped up.’
But wait.
There is something else.
Something unspeakable. Dear God, no. Rigidly she keeps the torch directed in the same place. She does not move it because she can’t. That torch beam and Georgie’s arm are in such terrible communication, she feels they can never be parted.
If this young man has hurt his ankle, if the snowplough rolled over and crushed his ankle, then everything is all right now. She will touch his friend on the back in a moment, she will touch him on the back and show him. Everything’s fine. No need to worry. She feels her frozen face crack into a rictus smile. He does not have a foot any more. His foot has gone, you see. It is chopped off neatly right at the ankle, as if by an axe or a cutlass, and there is nothing but splintered bone.
TWENTY-FOUR
SHE HAS ALWAYS CRAVED for safety in life, for when she is safe she is loved.
Donna, of course, holds the opposite view.
But now poor Georgie has never felt more unsafe.
If the accident had been any further away they would not have made it back. But they manage. There is no alternative. They have to get Dave to safety. It’s just no good sobbing and trying not to look at the awful wound or the pulsing blood, the gore. Georgie tries, but fails, to lift the heavy shoulder end, so she takes the legs instead. Black blood pumps, they staunch it, they tie it, they shove a spare clean overall around it, which the man fetches down from the cab.
Wildly they fight their way back through the frenzied teeth of the gale, but this seems normal now, as if Georgie makes a habit of this, bent like this, muttering, slipping, cursing like this, not minding the warm feel of fresh blood as it slops through her gloves, her sleeves.
Back at the cottage she yells at Lola, ‘Get back! Get back!’ and doesn’t stop to figure out how the dog escaped from the kitchen. After their hurried departure she had left the front door open and now there’s a pile of snow in the hall, so that after they drag their burden inside Georgie has to use a shovel to lever the door closed again. They both feel, having seen the butchery, that it is essential to close the door. And lock it.
And now, still grunting and sweating, they cart the unconscious Dave to the sofa and lay him there. The blood pumps from his severed right leg and the exposed bone is bluey white, like a lamb bone fresh from the freezer.
The difficulty lies in facing the facts, and Georgie can’t bring herself to do that. ‘The lorry must have done this… it must have rolled back over his leg after you’d gone to fetch help…’
The dark weathered man glances back at Georgie, and his eyes are so full of knowledge that she wants to put out her hand and close them.
‘That must be what happened to your friend.’ Georgie can hardly force the words through her chattering teeth, and the words knock together like enamel. ‘The snowplough must have moved again somehow…’ Georgie sobs, knowing otherwise, ‘perhaps some sharp piece of metal…’
‘Don’t talk rot! Somebody has cut off his foot. When I left Dave his ankle was broken. Jesus Christ Almighty. The machine ran over his ankle, but now he has lost his whole sodding foot… God God God.’ There are tears of fury in his eyes and he looks at Georgie as if she’s not there, as if none of this can be real. ‘Build up the fire,’ he says ominously.
And she cries, fearing the worst, looking into his eyes for an answer, ‘Oh no, oh no, we can’t do that, not that…’
But he says, ‘Well, I don’t sodding know what else to do… we have to staunch the bleeding…’
‘But the shock, my God, it’ll kill him.’
‘Well, what the hell do you suggest?’
The fire is a hot one, having burned solidly for several weeks now. The ashes underneath are white hot, so hot you can’t get near them without stretching your arm and turning your face away. But Georgie banks it up just the same.
‘Or the cooker perhaps,’ says the tall, wide-shouldered man looking round, unaware, it would seem, of the darkness or the reason behind it.
‘The electric’s off.’
His eyes close with an awful weariness. ‘Of course. Shit, I knew that. No telephone either? Is there anyone else round here who might know what we should do?’
She thinks hard at first, Georgie has to concentrate to remember exactly where she is… who her neighbours are… reality is hard to pinpoint. Eventually she shakes her head, ‘No. Nobody. No-one at all.’
While she is building up the fire he is kneeling on the floor at the injured end of his dormant companion. ‘Can you find some newspaper for all this blood? And we ought to raise the leg up somehow. Should I relax this tourniquet now, isn’t that what they do, release it every so often… Jesus Christ, and he’s only eighteen.’
‘I don’t think we ought to relax it. We should keep it tight until we’ve… after all… we’re not worried about gangrene yet, gangrene wouldn’t happen that fast…’ For several seconds she thinks she might faint.
And the man looks as if he might cry when he groans, ‘I know fuck all about gangrene.’
All those courses she could have gone on, all that blasted basic first aid that you owe to yourself and others. Everyone should have some bloody idea about how to cope with an accident. Why stay dependent on others? But she’s never been on a first-aid course, she was never remotely interested.
But they seem to share the same lack of knowledge, God knows where it comes from… fiction, probably, mixed with the fag ends of life-saving programmes missed on TV. There is something reassuring in this. They do not argue over what they believe should be done.
He joins Georgie to search the kitchen. The only suitable knife, the knife she shows him, is stainless steel. The blade is wide, but wide enough?
‘We might have to sear it several times,’ he says, terribly drawn, his teeth gritted against the thought.
She mutters miserably, ‘You better get your coat off.’ Partly because his coat is wet and partly because she wants him to know that if anyone is going to cauterize anything round here, it’s him, not her. They return to the roaring fire, where Georgie thrusts the knife in the flames, willing herself to calmness while he watches anxiously over her shoulder. ‘I’d better get some towels, some sheets, I’d better look for some antiseptic.’
And all the while she dreads the chance that David might wake up, groan, show some signs of life which will make hurting him and the sealing of his wounds all the more ghastly. Because what they are planning to do is monstrously preposterous, there is no getting away from that.
She tries to distance herself, to be practical.
She stares at the boy’s deathlike face. ‘D’you think we should try some alcohol? Whisky?’
‘We might have to do that later, but I don’t think we should try that yet, and alcohol’s bad for shock, they say. Don’t they?’
‘But fluids! He has to have fluids!’
‘Yes, but not now. For Christ’s sake, not yet.’
When will the blade be hot enough and how will they tell? Georgie bustles about the cottage gathering armfuls of towels and sheets that her nervous companion rips up and neither of them really knows why. Perhaps this is a practical method of delaying the awful moment of truth. Her inadequate first-aid kit is discovered underneath the sink and the Dettol is on the top shelf in the kitchen. Dettol, surely, rather than the childlike Germoline in its silly little pot, enough for one scraped knee, not a massively serious injury. The finger-sized bandages laugh at her. The tin of Band Aid is a mirthless joke, ditto the eyepatch, the Dispirin, the Rennies and the half-squeezed tubes of God knows what. These, presumably, have had their day, but they are not going to save Georgie now.
‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘Oliver. And yours?’
‘Georgie
Jefferson. This is ludicrous. Here we are dealing in conventional introductions…’
‘Listen. Georgie, you’re going to have to hold the leg firmly in case Dave wakes up or tries to move, the knife mustn’t slip…’
‘Shit.’
Dave can’t be cold, that’s one blessing. Only his face and legs are exposed, the rest is under a duvet and blankets. Oliver begins to untie the laces on the one boot that is still here, but his hands are shaking badly.
‘Yes, I’ll hang on for dear life, I’ll try.’
‘The sodding snowplough broke down. We were on our way out. We knew it was a dead loss. We were on our way out when it broke down and Dave crawled underneath to see if the bugger was leaking again. That’s when it slid back. His fucking ankle was right there. I had to let the snowplough slip further before I could free him to pull him out. God, he was screaming blue murder…’ he shudders. ‘I’ll never forget those screams. Perhaps someone else’s phone is working?’
Georgie shakes her head hopelessly. There is no point in playing games, it is far too late for that. There is no outside help to be had. There’s only Georgie and Oliver. The man, Oliver, has crinkly black hair, he’s a medium-sized, stocky bloke who looks capable and serious. His face is pleasant, his hands are large, with no accent it isn’t possible to guess if he’s local or not.
He asks, ‘This is your house then?’
‘Yes, but not for much longer.’ They are trying to pass the awful minutes with safe, sane conversation. ‘In fact, I’d planned to leave this morning. I’ve had quite enough of Wooton-Coney.’
They need this kind of mindless talk that requires no concentration. Their eyes are riveted on Dave’s face, both terrified that the boy might wake and they’ll have to cope with his anguish. Georgie, holding her breath for long periods of time, allows it to shudder on its way out.
Unhallowed Ground Page 24