by Dave Wallis
Later they butchered up the kill and roasted some thin slices quickly. They drank icy well-water and the girls brought out a hidden loaf of bread from the back of the iron warming-oven. There was quite a party atmosphere in the lamplight with their stomachs full of bread and meat and it seemed very late when they paired off to lie among the smelly sheepskins, at half-past nine at night.
The moon rose, as predicted by Robert’s tables, and cast a cone of pale white light on the board floor. Outside the door the dogs still gnawed and growled and yelped over their bones.
“Your hair smells of bread,” said Ernie. Kathy turned her head away sharply. “No, I like it. Makes me hungry.” He gently bit her shoulder. She turned towards him and for a moment stretched her body against his.
“You smell too, if you want to know,” she whispered.
“What of?”
“Sheep,” she giggled. “And, well, you.”
“I washed down in the bucket. We need some more soap.”
“I know. There’s none left in that town or in any of the village shops at Gilling or Cawton or anywhere round here. I looked. There was a gang, looked more like graziers than hunters, and I had to run for it.”
“You never told me.”
“I got away easily.”
“That bread was good. Can you make some more?”
“If I can get the stuff.”
They went on whispering about such small matters, comfortably and slowly caressing each other the while. Ernie lay on his left side, still pretending absently to nibble at her bare shoulder. With his right hand he roved over the hills and valleys he knew and loved. He cupped and moulded her breasts and then strummed the hardening nipples with the backs of his fingers, lightly drew the tips of forefingers and thumb down her torso, narrowing them as if to mark out the magic triangle for the first time. Kathy sighed and wriggled against him and gently slid one knee over his tensing thigh and then modestly and mockingly withdrew it and closed her legs. It was all a rather cosy and friendly and familiar sort of one so far, so that they seemed quite unprepared for the tidal wave which now crashed down on their warm beach. Ernie felt a desire more terrible than he had ever known in his life. There was time only to rasp his roughened palms over her breasts as he grabbed and snatched at her firm treasures. He strove and strove to pierce her further and deeper and she to give and hold and embrace him with the warm secret folded core of her body. It was as if the thing they had done many times before was only now about to reveal its true meaning, as if they had somehow by their writhings and twistings to say something, to find out some new secret. When, at last, his climax spurted from him they both shuddered and clung, touching from toes to bared teeth.
The sheepskin coverings were flung about. His chest and shoulders were sticky with sweat and the tired aches of the afternoon’s hunt came back, even through the warmth of tenderness and relaxation. He gently slid down to her side. Her legs looked marble white with the triangle of hair, sweat and love dampened to a soft inky black in the moonlight.
“You’ll be cold,” said Kathy, fumbling about for the skins and trying to cover him where he lay still panting and trembling at her side.
“Did I bruise you, I mean with my knee?” he asked.
“Hush,” she said, “You have a rest.” She managed to cover them and they lay still and both thought, “You wouldn’t’ve believed it possible to feel closer than we did a minute ago, but now we do.”
They had to joke and pat it into shape a bit. “Whatever did you put in that bread?”
“Only yeast, it certainly made you rise.”
“Make some more sometime.”
After a while she whispered, “Ernie?”
“Um.”
“I think something happened.”
“How can you tell? We’ll have to wait.”
“I just think it did. I never felt it before.”
“Can’t say I ever felt anything quite like it before either.”
“Ernie,what happens if we can’t get any more sheep and the stock dies this winter because of snow or something?”
“Don’t be afraid, Kathy. We been through worse than this. What are you worried about?”
“I don’t know, really.”
He was soon sound asleep but she lay for some time alone with her fear, which was of a new kind she had never felt before.
13
By June they were into the Cheviot Hills. Two couples died of some variety of the plague, caught during a raid to Hawick. They were down to the six, Ernie and Kathy, Robert and Julia, Charlie and Estelle. There were four trained dogs, five head of cattle, including a cow in calf and a flock of about twenty sheep. They had now to build up the stock and find somewhere with a barn and pens where they could see out the next winter. That was still a good way off and in the meantime they hunted wild sheep, traded cured skins for boots with a group of kilted tribesmen who found it hard to believe that they were from the South, and followed the grazing herd and flock. Sometimes they slept wrapped in blankets in the open and at others in crofters’ stone huts, or lonely farms where foxes or even a Scottish wild cat dashed out of hanging doors at their approach.
The work was shared without talk. The heaviest and dirtiest of the butchery was done by the boys and most of the cooking by the girls, for the rest they worked and hunted and fed the flocks side by side. The three boys fell into the deepest and most casual of working friendships and whenever one was away the other two made jokes about him. Estelle got on with Kathy and Julia but Kathy and Julia detested one another and snarled or snapped and went for days in icy silence. The life they were living was very close and habits and tricks and mannerisms jarred and rasped, particularly at the end of a long day’s work. There could be no secrets among them. In the old days, as well, in the home cinema or at the castle, they had swopped bed partners out of curiosity and defiance. Now curiosity was long-slaked, there were only the elements to defy, and the comfort of habit came easiest at the end of a long day on the move.
One hot June afternoon Kathy had been left in a grey stone crofter’s hut stitching at a sheepskin jacket when Charlie appeared.
“Others are still hunting. We agreed I should come back and tell you not to worry if they’re late and then I’m going up to try and find those four damn sheep of ours that were missing last night. Point is, if they were stolen by some gang or attacked by foxes or a dog-pack we want to know. . . .”
He was lounging in the doorway. Being alone in the camp at this time felt strange, like having the flu in the old days and staying at home and watching the housewives shopping and gossiping when everyone else was at work.
“You can have a cup of milk while you’re here.”
“O.K., thanks.” He stood and drank it and then said, “Well, that’s it. Away on my mission.” He put on a tough imitation-American, private-eye voice. “If I’m not back in five hours you can open the safe-deposit box. There’s a message in there. Show it to the president, he’ll know what to do. Don’t talk to the papers, but you can tell the sheep if you like.”
Kathy laughed. “Wait,” she said. “I’ll walk with you to the top of the ridge, anyway. It’s a shame sitting here stitching on a day like this.”
“O.K.” They set out, leaving the path and scrambling through the gorse and heather.
The hot sun of the northern summer beat down on their shoulders. The grassland and wild flowers sent up a heady scent. “We’ll check right along the stream,” said Charlie. “The looby things sometimes drink too much water in the hot weather and then go to sleep among the bushes and then when they wake up and find the flock gone they panic and scamper all over the place.”
A small stream ran down and skirted the foot of the hill. Kathy led the way, bending under the overhanging thorns and spikes of wild brambles and raising her thin, brown arms to push aside the branches of young alders. It was now late afternoon. The first fussing birds whistled and chattered. Clouds of midges thickened the steamy air and as they sla
pped at them, formed a paste on their sticky cheeks. The stream had dried to a narrow band of water and they trod the bed which was caked in clay-grey mud, segmented and brittle like Easter-egg chocolate.
There was no sign of any sheep tracks. The bending briars tore at Charlie’s rolled shirt-sleeves and scratched at Kathy’s bare rounded shoulders, leaving red ledger rulings across the clean brown skin. The trench deepened and dampness climbed up its banks. The grass strove to strangle clumps of meadow sweet and creeping cinqfoil. The sweet Heartsease offered its balm to two not seeming to need its favours.
It became too hot and a waste of time in the ditch. Charlie scrambled up a less steep part of the bank and held out a hand to Kathy. “We’ll get our breath,” he said, “and then climb up and see if we can spot them. They won’t be farther down the stream, it turns to rocks soon.”
The earth here lay shallow over the old red sandstone crag where ferns and rock roses clawed a foothold.
They sat side by side, knees up to chins panting and getting their breath back slowly.
“We got the worst job today,” said Kathy. “I’d sooner be out hunting than this scramble. It’s pointless, too. We’ll never find them.”
Charlie just grunted. Kathy went on, “I get to feel a bit queer these days when I run too much.”
“What do you mean, ‘these days’?”
“Well, since you ask I’ll tell you. Everyone’s got to know soon. I’m in the family way, as they used to say.”
“Blimey! You sure?”
“Yes, quite sure. Only Ernie knows.”
“What does he say about it?”
“He’s worried but he’s pleased in a way. Trouble is it’ll be coming along in the depths of the bloody winter.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“Scared.”
“Nothing else?”
“Not yet anyway.”
“Do you or the girls know anything about how to do it all, I mean what you do when it starts?”
“Not that I know of. Julia might, she knows about most things, but I wouldn’t ask her!”
“Why not?”
“You know why not! That cow! How poor Robert stands it I don’t know. And the way she’s always experimenting different dried weeds to smoke and doping herself up so that she’s not fit to wash up even. I see she had you trying to smoke some junk the other day. She’d better not get Ernie on it or there’ll be trouble.”
“She’s all right. I don’t know what you’ve got against her.”
“Oh, all the boys are always for her. She’s like a wet dream come true to them.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m sorry! It’s so hot today and I’m really worried, about what I just told you.”
“Tell Ernie. We’ll find some medics to advise you. I heard from a sheep-stealer that there was a lot of students from Edinburgh medical school set up a kind of barter-clinic. You pay in eggs and meat and sheepskins and so on. They even do operations, he was saying. Don’t worry. Mostly they used to help girls lose them safely but more and more are having their babies now, he told me. Please don’t get worried.”
“It’s easy for you to talk, it’s not damn well growing inside you.”
“I didn’t put it there. Don’t blame me.”
“You might’ve done though. You might yet make one with Estelle.”
“True.”
“Charlie?”
“Well?”
“Why can I always talk to you about things, and not to Ernie?”
“I don’t know. It’s just like that.”
“Do you love Estelle?”
“She’s all right. We get on.”
“I asked if you loved her?”
“I don’t know what that word means. Half the oldies that were always using it didn’t know either.”
“Funny, nobody seems to talk about the oldies anymore. It might all’ve been a hundred years ago.”
“Just as well. The way I look at it everything that went wrong with us was because of things left over from the oldies: all that Windsor crowd of Kings, they were living up some war film, and the little things like that girl who did it at the market, Joan. She only thought she ought to do it because she’d read a lot of oldies’ crappy books about Love and Romance. She didn’t really feel like that.”
“I don’t think you’re right, there, Charlie.”
“Well, perhaps not about her, but about the other things I am.”
“That’s another thing about you, I couldn’t disagree with Ernie like that without him getting the hump. I can talk to you.”
“That’s only because we’re not together.”
“Sometimes I wish we were.”
“Well, we’re not.”
“Can you talk to Estelle?”
“What about?”
“About your ideas and so on.”
“Well, no.”
“I think you chose her because it flatters you being so much cleverer than your girl. You’d be afraid of a brighter one.”
“I’m not afraid of you. Besides, I didn’t choose her, she chose me.”
The sunlight was westering but still warm. Kathy stood up and strolled down the slope again to the shade of a young alder where there was a patch of turf. “Come here,” she said. Charlie walked down towards her. She sat down and then lay back, one knee raised. He dropped on his knees beside her and she closed her eyes, reached up and started to fumble at his belt.
“This is a fine way to look for sheep,” said Charlie. She had nothing on under her tattered skirt and it felt all cool at first and smooth like the pebbles on the bed of a mountain stream. He slid into her slowly and they both opened their eyes wide and stared one into the other’s. He thrust gently and almost calmly and she responded in a lazy and friendly fashion. It seemed to last longer than usual and the feeling of the end was all mixed up with the sunlight and the smell of the raw heather. It wasn’t cool any longer but all hot and sticky. He stirred quickly and she held him for a moment and sighed reproachfully. “Midges are biting my bottom,” he said and they both giggled.
They went and washed in the icy stream, standing, with their backs turned, a pace or two apart. Then they started on their climb and search as if nothing had happened. “What was all that about?” said Charlie.
“I don’t know. My last fling, I suppose.”
“Are you going to say anything?”
“No, are you?”
“No.”
“What’s it matter? That’s how the oldies used to carry on, keeping it all secret and then making out it was the end of the world when the other person found out.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“Well, it might hurt them when there’s no need.”
They reached the top of the ridge. Crag and fern and boulder-strewn heath stretched away ahead of them and, at last, it was cool, with an evening breeze from the South-East. The western sky had turned mauve and the distant mountain tips were bright gold like the towers of eastern churches.
“Charlie,” she turned to face him and then looked down and started to cry.
He put his arm round her shoulders. “I told you not to worry. There’s these medics in Edinburgh. I’ll talk it over with Ernie if you like and we can go and find out if it’s safe and what they charge and that . . .”
“It’s not that, at least it’s not only that.”
“What is it then? Don’t be unhappy, Kath dear, please, please stop, there’s a good girl.”
“It’s you, you blasted idiot,” she said. “You know it is, you’re just pretending, and why? what for? That’s what I can’t understand. Why?”
“Why have you been doing it then?”
“Well, yes I know. I’m partly to blame. Ernie needed me and I needed him in a way. And then I was still a silly little idiot and he was the leader and everything, and you, you just kept rabbiting around, one girl after another. Then we started this big trek North and you went with Estelle
all the time and she’s a good sort, a real good sort. I was just being nasty about her a little while ago. And then you never seemed to notice me anymore and you got so thick with Ernie – all that tough boys’ stuff hunting and fighting, it made me feel like a flighty female. You wouldn’t understand. Sometimes I hate boys. Anyway now it’s too late. Look at what just happened down there.”
“But that was lovely, Kath.”
“Yes but it was only our bodies really, in spite of me loving you and you loving me. It can’t sort of join up anymore. That’s what the last two years have done to us, see?”
He had dropped his arm from her shoulders and stood half turned towards her. “You’ve been going over and over it all in your mind and built it up into something bigger than it is.”
“Don’t try and lie to me, Charlie. I’m not your dopey little Estelle. Isn’t it all just as I’ve said?”
He looked down at the bare limestone and dried summer lichen. “Yes,” he said and stayed looking down at his feet. “What’s to do about it?”
“I told you! It’s too late. We just have to go on with it now. And I’ll have this baby and it won’t be yours. You’ll stick with Estelle. The way we all live these days I can even hear you making love to her sometimes.”
“You suppose it’s better for me? That I haven’t any ears?”
“I never knew you listened.”
He went red and then very pale and hissed, “Well, you know now.”
“Oh well, let’s look for the sheep. There’s only an hour or so of light now.” They turned and there, cropping the sparse grass a hundred yards away, were the lost four. It took a lot of patience and care to get them down in to the gully without a dog to help and twice they broke, scattered and panicked and had to be chased together again. They were both running with sweat and exhausted by the time they managed to drive them into the river bed. Once there and the sheep trotted along like a train on tracks, tossing their heads in mock terror. Safe in the home pasture they ran off like mad towards the bulk of the flock.
The others were already in and the meal was started. They all exchanged their news of the hunt and the sheep capture. Estelle was laying the table and Julia stirring some herb-scented mutton stew.