Fallow

by Daniel Shand

  ‘I mean, like, they’re just funny. They look really similar. It creeps me out a bit.’

  ‘But they’re a good asset,’ I explained. ‘They’re foreigners so they won’t recognise you. Say we need messages or something and I’m busy. We just send them two in for us.’

  He said, ‘Hm,’ and jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  After they’d checked every stone they came back towards us, Lou ahead of Brett, upset.

  ‘I know,’ she was saying. ‘You don’t have to be an asshole about it.’

  ‘An asshole?’ said Brett, following his sister past us, out the graveyard. ‘An asshole? I’m being a realist, Louise. All I’m saying is what are the chances of finding one or two names in a whole island of dead fucking bodies?’

  ‘So it’s the ritual or nothing?’ she shouted, slamming the van door closed behind her.

  Brett stopped in the road when his sister used the word ‘ritual’. He turned to us, slowly. ‘Girls,’ he smiled.

  I felt Mikey gear himself up to ask the question we were both thinking, but I got in there first. ‘I think we need some food.’

  Further down the coast there was a van selling ice creams and hot dogs. It had stopped by the beach in one of the villages we went through. I sent Brett over with some cash to pick us up hot dogs and we ate them on the beach. Lou stood a few feet away from us. I watched as the man from the food van began to close his van up. He looked over to us from the harbour. He stared and then began walking over.

  Mikey was pushing the last of his mustard-soaked bun into his gob, oblivious to the man’s approach.

  ‘Let’s head back to the van,’ I said, calmly. ‘We’ll need to get going.’

  ‘I thought we could maybe take a walk,’ said Lou. ‘It’s a nice beach.

  ‘There’s no graves on the beach, Lou,’ said Brett.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘Mikey,’ I said. ‘Do you want to get into the van for me?’

  He looked over at me, puzzled, then he spotted the oncoming man behind my head. ‘Aye,’ he nodded. ‘All right.’

  The two of us headed away from the man and towards the van, pulling the Americans along. They were so angry with each other that they didn’t seem to care and didn’t even notice the man until we were driving off. He was standing on the beach, watching us drive away.

  ‘Hey,’ said Brett. ‘That’s weird. There’s the hot dog guy. Was he following us?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Brett.

  I stopped in at Marigold’s on the way back to the hostel and I bought a paper from the fresh-faced girl there. I’d dropped the van off with the rest of them at the hostel, so I walked back from the shop flicking through the paper.

  I found something bad.

  On page eight there was a sizeable spread on Duncan. I folded the paper over to display the half page he was featured on, skimming the article. The headline ran:

  Colleague makes emotional appeal for info on missing archaeologist.

  The gist of it was that Sam, who the paper called Samantha Swart, that sour bitch, had done a big look-at-me press conference asking for any information about her pal.

  My blood was kicking in big time and it was only going to get worse.

  I read the article’s final line. ‘Reports that recently released and wanted-for-parole-violations Michael ‘The Beast’ Buchanan was casually employed by the same company as Duncan Weddle are, as yet, unconfirmed.’

  I could read between the lines. Who else but Sam could have given the papers and the police and whoever else the info that Mikey was even involved? That fucken cunt, I thought, crumpling up the paper. The article mentioned that she’d said she would ‘stop at nothing to make sure those responsible would be met with justice’. The cunt.

  The hostel put on an evening meal for its guests. It was a bowl each of pink, quivering stovies. The four of us and most of the hostel piled into the dining room and paid our two pounds to the woman and wolfed down our food. I was still in a black mood from reading the paper. Mikey was the only one of us whose spirits remained high and he scraped his bowl clean.

  Lou and Brett excused themselves early, leaving most of their food behind.

  I told Mikey, in a whisper, about what I’d read. He nodded as I spoke. I waited for him to react. He didn’t.

  ‘Am I going mental?’ I asked. ‘Does that not worry you?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said.

  ‘How not? It’s there in black and white. We’re associated with him, in the paper. It’s there.’

  ‘I mean, aye, it’s bad. But what can we do about it? You shouldn’t worry about the shite you can’t change.’

  ‘Where did you hear that? On a fucken beer mat?’

  ‘I think someone told me that once,’ he said. ‘Inside.’

  ‘It’s bollocks,’ I said. ‘You can always change the shite.’

  The van was the main thing. Perhaps I couldn’t fix the exterior but I could certainly do a job on the inside. I stole a bin bag from the hostel’s kitchen and went to work, stripping off the remnants of Duncan’s travels. I tore off Estonian bumper stickers and decorative plates from Jordan. I untangled the beads from the rear view mirror and I threw the photo album down on top of all that tat inside the bin bag.

  Checking that no one at the hostel was observing, I stole down the gravel path to the road with the bag in my fist. Sam would not beat me. I would not allow it. She could try her very best but in the end she would find, like everyone did, that I would always come out on top. I stuffed the bag down deep inside the bin at the end of the path. I stood and rolled a fag. Try and calm down, I told myself. If you’re stressed and angry then that’s where the mistakes slip in.

  I held my nail of a fag between shaking fingers and looked across the bay, at the castle, at the mull and the black sloping hills beyond, falling forever into red water. There was a family of deer in the bay. They too were black against the sinking sun like ideas of animals, black shapes, like cave drawings. The old mind’s knowledge of what the deer looked like, black legs and black bodies and black antlers.

  I thought about the day where it all went wrong. I had let a mistake slip in then too. After Mr Pin had chased us from the bridge, after the mums had chased us from the swing park, we’d wandered. We’d been aimless. Full of the anger that you have at those ages – frustrated, aimless anger. Deep in the woods we’d found a pile of decaying bricks, arranged as if they’d once been a building. We took turns hurtling chunks of pink brick at the trunk of a vast tree. Our missiles had flown through the air, stinging the tree’s sides, nipping off a sliver of bark here, a chunk of fibrous wood there. We’d thrown bricks until we were exhausted, until it looked as if an animal had attacked the tree in a frenzy.

  Out in the bay one of the smaller deer approached the biggest one, the one with the largest antlers. It butted its side or perhaps just licked or smelled the old male. Something harmless. The old bastard put his head down low and used his antlers on the youngster, sending him packing with a wave of the gnarled head-bones. I threw the wizened butt of my fag into the trickle of water than ran down beside the gravel path.

  That day we ran ourselves out. We rampaged through the trees, yelling and screaming. More animal than child.

  Why were we so angry?

  The evening before, Mikey had come home in a strop. He wouldn’t tell our mother what the problem was but I got it out of him. I’d always had ways of getting things out of him. I’d pushed him up against the wall of our bedroom and threatened to spit in his face if he didn’t tell me what the problem was.

  I was a very curious teenager.

  He’d admitted he’d had a problem at school. He’d been in his English class at the end of the day. Mr MacPherson was one of the ones who took English. I’d never had him myself but there were myths of his brutality. You heard that he once denied a boy access to his asthma inhaler. You heard that he positioned short skirted-
girls in the very front row of his classroom.

  They’d been studying some book or another and Mikey had given a less than satisfactory answer. Mr MacPherson had demanded he stand at the front of the class. He’d told the room that this boy, this Michael Buchanan, was an example of a young person who would never amount to anything. The reason? Because people like this boy were too lazy, too bone idle to ever really try at anything.

  He told me all of that, then I let him go from our bedroom wall. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I said that we would take the next day off, that we’d just tick it. That would show them. That would show them all.

  The deer herd out in the bay had vanished while I’d been lost in my memories. The sky was warm and filled with misty fingers of cloud. I strolled up to the hostel, feeling better. I’d purged Duncan from the van and, in addition to that, I always felt better when I thought about that fateful day. It reminded me that, in the end, I always won.

  I found the Americans sitting on Brett’s bunk. The packet of grey powder rested on the duvet. They stopped talking mid-word and Brett’s hand covered the packet.

  ‘Hey Paul,’ said Lou. ‘Could you give us a moment?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  Brett smiled at me. ‘I’m not supposed to say.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ moaned Lou. ‘Why are you constantly so full of shit?’

  ‘In what way am I full of shit?’

  ‘All this, oh no, I can’t tell, my bitch sister won’t let me. You’re not a fucking martyr Brett.’

  Brett shrugged at me and said, in a nasty, sharp voice, ‘She says all that but ask her if I’m allowed to talk about it?’

  I rubbed my face. They were so young. I had little experience of the way people that age, twenty, twenty-one, could be. I’d missed Mikey’s late teenage years of course.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Tell me, don’t tell me. I could not give a shit.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Look. So. Brett’s got this batshit crazy idea in his head. About this powder. About a ritual.’

  ‘See Paul, that’s the best thing about my sister,’ he said, pointing to his temple. ‘She is so fucking open minded.’

  ‘Let me explain OK? So Brett here’s got it into his head he can use this mushroom stuff,’ she prodded the packet, ‘to get in touch or whatever, to communicate I suppose, with our ancestors.’

  ‘She’s talking as if I’ve done, like, zero research.’

  ‘You’ve gone on-fucking-line. Anybody can go online and find out whatever they like.’

  ‘Places have an energy, you’d agree with that Paul?’

  ‘I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘But where does that energy come from. Why does location A have energy X and location B have energy Y? What’s the reasoning? See? You can’t tell me.’

  ‘I suppose I can’t,’ I said, realising I would agree with whatever the boy said.

  ‘All I’m saying is we could use a little something extra to assist us in exploring that energy. Cultures all over the world do it, or used to. Indians, aboriginals. Even,’ he said, pointing out the window, ‘the Celtic Gaels.’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ asked Lou, at her wit’s end. ‘You understand this is crazy, Paul? This is not what I had in mind when I agreed to some light genealogical research.’

  ‘She would rather hang around in graveyards all day. So fucking morbid. At least I’m showing respect.’

  I ground my knuckles into my jaw. ‘I don’t think it’s a bad idea,’ I said, enjoying the scandalised look on Lou’s face, relishing the jubilant look on Brett’s.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Brett. ‘Tonight. I have a print off of this amazing-sounding Hopi ritual. It’s going to really be something.’

  Lou pushed herself off the bunk and stormed into the toilets. I took her place.

  ‘You shouldn’t listen to her,’ I told Brett. ‘I think she’s holding you back.’

  He curled a hair around his finger. ‘I sometimes think so too.’

  I picked up the packet of grey powder and turned it over in my hand. Something was itching at me. I couldn’t place it. An insistent worming-away at a certain area of my mind. It was like when you’ve left something at home, your wallet or your keys, and your brain’s screaming at you to remember and you can hear the commotion even before you pat your pocket and realise – it’s gone.

  And then, I had it. I put the packet down and looked around. ‘Brett,’ I said. ‘Have you seen Mikey?’

  10

  Brett explained the situation to me and I managed to stay calm. Just. To keep up appearances. Mikey had gone for a walk in the hills after tea, Brett told me, while I was out cleaning up the van. He’d wanted to stretch his legs.

  ‘That’s all?’ I asked. ‘Stretch his legs?’

  Brett laughed. ‘That’s all.’

  I said, ‘Hm,’ struggling to control my fingers as they writhed around themselves in my lap.

  ‘I mentioned that we’d maybe be joining him,’ Brett told me. ‘The ritual, you see.’

  I told myself over and over, as I got ready, that it was fine. It was all fine. I could trust Mikey. He’d just gone for a stroll. That was normal. It wasn’t ideal that he hadn’t let me know but I had been down on the path for a while. We’d go up into the hills and he’d be waiting for us.

  Aye, well, he would want to be, wouldn’t he?

  As I pulled on some thick socks and a heavy jumper I heard Lou sneak in from the bathroom. There was a constricted quality to her breathing that told me she was upset.

  ‘Everything OK?’ I asked her, facing the wall.

  She kept breathing. ‘You know it isn’t.’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘This is incredibly irresponsible,’ she said, and I turned to face her. Her eyes were pandaish with tear-diluted make up.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You don’t give a shit, do you?’ she cried. ‘Are you trying to fuck him? Is that it? He won’t do it, you know. He never does it.’

  I zipped up my coat to the chin. ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘You know he’s been kicked out of two colleges for this shit? For getting high, for getting spaced out every day. Two separate colleges.’

  ‘I’ll get you outside,’ I said, edging through the door and smiling at Lou.

  I kicked around the back of the hostel for some time, chain smoking rollies, waiting for the Americans. I kept a close eye on the hills to the south, looking for Mikey to come stumbling down the gradient.

  Eventually Brett came rushing from the hostel’s exit, a thermos jammed under his arm. He was high with excitement. Lou followed on his heel.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, pushing past me and leaping through the trees that ran around the car park.

  We followed him in silence, into the clear night, where the fat, watery moon made the hills as light as early morning. He told us location was important, that he would know the spot when he found it. That there were mystical magnetic fields radiating unseen in the world around us, that all it took was tuning in to these forces to completely revitalise your worldview.

  It was all bollocks of course, nearly as bad as Isaac’s stuff about Egyptian and aliens in the sky.

  We went across two hills and came to a stop on the crest of a third. Brett scurried around in the darkness, appearing to test the spot for various unknown qualities.

  ‘This is it,’ he said in the end. ‘Perfect.’

  Lou sniffed and dug her chin into the thick cowl of her scarf. ‘Just get it over with,’ she ordered.

  Brett asked us to sit around in a circle while he laid the thermos between us and pulled a stack of paper cups from his jacket pocket. The curvature of the hills around hid the dwindling lights of the village from us and it was easy to imagine away all of the far off structures of humanity. That you were a fresh species on a new earth, that the ground we kneeled on was being knelt on for the first time.

  Brett explained what w
e would do, his lips trembling with nerves.

  ‘You drink the tea,’ he said, ‘and then we all walk in our own direction. You keep walking and keep walking until you feel a tug. Apparently it feels a little like nausea, a little bit like homesickness. That’s when you come back, walk back the way you’ve come, to here. Only it won’t be here. It’ll be like here and also not.’

  He poured out three cupfuls of the mushroom tea. ‘Everyone got it?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye,’ I said.

  Lou said nothing.

  I watched as they raised their cups to their mouth, dark, dark hair glowing. I held mine to my mouth too and then let the tea pour out by my feet as I wiped my sleeve over my mouth. Lou and Brett screwed up their faces, saying how horrible the tea was, so I did the same. Then we hauled ourselves up.

  ‘Now go,’ said Brett, making legs of his fingers and walking them away.

  ‘This is insane,’ said Lou, backing off and down on the hill on the far side.

  ‘Just try it,’ said Brett, turning himself. ‘Good luck,’ he told me.

  I walked down the hill and away from the Americans, keeping Brett in the corner of my eye. He strode down the hill himself, arms swinging, head bobbing. Making sure he wasn’t watching, I altered my course so that I was coming up behind him. I was stealthy, I was sleek. My hair was long and strong and I was hidden in the bushes and the trees.

  I followed him for something like twenty minutes as he took a path into a plunging valley. A silver stream came tumbling down beside the way, the white noise it created masking the crunches beneath my feet. I followed him up the path and through the valley and it brought us out into higher, flatter ground. Brett’s movements grew more erratic. He would stop for long moments and stare at the sky. He would become distracted and inspect the ground at his feet for minutes on end. I let myself be absorbed by the land on those occasions, wary of him spinning around in a flurry of paranoia and spotting me.

  Off Brett went and I was on his tail. He traipsed through the marsh, through the bog. I skirted the edge of the damp land. His arms were going up and down at his sides, as if he was fighting off attacking birds. The drugs were kicking in. After another few minutes he ran into some trouble. The waterlogged land must have grown stickier because I found myself ahead of him and he wasn’t moving forward any more.