by Jill Dawson
The kestrel I saw the night of my surgery.
As I’m standing there a thought forms then like a blown seed. Helen. It’s not too late in the evening. The drive to London, straight down the M11. I could be there by – what, eight o’clock? There’s still time. Is there still time? She might have someone with her, a voice murmurs. Take the risk: she might not. I feel the need to shake something off, shake off the stupor, the sadness that the visit steeped me in. Rinse out all the tea in me. Let this thing, this new thing in me, if it exists, if Maureen is right, let it take shape. Spread out a bit. Get comfortable at last. Whichever way you look at it, I did – as I said back there – nearly die. Funny how I don’t think I’ve said that before. That I’ve been gifted some unexpected extra time when the game should have been over: I’ve gone into injury time.
Turning towards the A11, passing signs for Newmarket, I replay the conversation I just had. While she was talking, before the moment when she wanted to listen to her son’s heart, the title of a children’s story kept popping into my head. Something my mother used to read me: The Prince and the Pauper. And I think it was a film too, a Disney film I watched with Cushie. About these two boys who swap places. And the pauper gets the chance to be prince and all the courtiers are amazed by him; it’s clear he’s the one who is truly good: he’s compassionate, he makes all the right decisions. He’s the one with the real values, the true prince among men, or something. When things work out and the actual prince – the spoiled type who didn’t know his own luck – comes back, he has to eat humble pie and realise his own wrongness, change his ways. Anyway, that story kept knocking round my head in there. Like I’ve just swapped places, swapped my life with this strange Fen boy’s life in some way. Only I haven’t, that’s bloody ridiculous, he’s not a pauper; I’m not a prince! He’s a boy of sixteen who got expelled, who made some pretty crap decisions by the sound of things, so – that’s not right at all, what can a boy like that possibly have to teach me?
I muse over this, because the story won’t budge and the things Ruth Beamish had said about her son have stuck. The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Stubborn, she said. A positive spin on that might be: devoted, decisive. Fixed, faithful. Full-on. Constant – a constant heart. Passionate? Risking all. I turn on the radio in the car and a rich tenor consumes all the oxygen. I can’t breathe, I open the windows to let more in; coldness blasts my face. I fly past a speed camera. A curious sensation that I’m suddenly taking up too much room in my own car; that I’m growing bigger. Or that I might even have left the car, left that engine behind and be outside myself as I am so often in dreams: flying, sweeping along, watching, thinking, seeing everything.
And then I see. Look: there’s my lovely young daughter wheeling her bike, wet leaves stuck to the tyres. My son: a fat caterpillar in his sleeping bag, sliding his slim white body out like some kind of unearthly worm, like an unknown creature, a new insect forming. The animal aliveness of both of them. A heart beating in my chest, blood pumping through my veins. So many tiny cars: tyres on the road splashing up spray; a gathering violet dusk, birds, the blue dizzy smells of flowers. And maybe. Is it possible? Something unfinished with Helen.
Part Eight
So. The day of my sixteenth birthday I go after Jo.
It’s after school. About quarter to four. I know she’ll be home, she didn’t stay late for a meeting; her car’s in the drive. I’m carrying a bottle of rosé which I know girls go mad for and a Tesco carrier with three beers in it. I walk up, as game as Ned Kelly. Actually I’m quaking inside. I feel all hot and cold and hot again, with sweat trickling inside the arms of my grey hoodie. But never mind, she won’t see that. She’ll see me, all six foot four of me, holy bootiful as Dad would say. You’re holy beautiful, you are – awesome, it means. Ultimate.
So, I’m striding up, towards the back door, the one we always use and I see Jo in the window of her kitchen. And she glances up, and makes a darting movement, and I catch sight – a sort of sense really more than a sight – of someone with her. Fuck. Hadn’t reckoned on that. But here I am walking up to her kitchen door in bald daylight and I can’t back-pedal now, can I? It would look lame. It would look like I’m ashamed. It would look like the whole point – now I’m sixteen and no one here can say there’s anything wrong with this – isn’t true.
She answers the door before my knock. She looks worried. She looks holy beautiful herself. She’s wearing her glasses and her hair is a little longer and less curly and she has a sort of short wool dress that looks a bit like a long jumper. And woolly tights. And she’s standing on her kitchen tiles with no shoes. I stare at her feet. The shape of her toes all private and cute under the wool – God, they look so sweet I could cry. Her house smells just like she does, like she always did: that faint, tickling smell, feathery, and the smell of her dog, Pippa, a shaggy little terrier.
I can barely look at her face. I don’t know what I’ll see there. This isn’t going how I thought. I’m grinning and then I’m not grinning and my body doesn’t feel quite right, like my legs might not hold me much longer, and I want to jiggle about and I even want to say Hello, Miss and I know I mustn’t, that I’d blow it if I said that; that would be more daft, more lame, more stupid than I could ever dream. Instead I say: ‘Hi, Jo. It’s my birthday,’ and she glances over her shoulder as if someone is right behind her in her hallway and she says: ‘I’ve got a – visitor.’
She doesn’t invite me in. I stand there like a dickhead, drinking her in, and breathing in the smell of her and her house and the sight of her and all those nights I’ve waited for this, all those days and nights. I can’t wait for her to say come in. I step over. I close the door behind me. The dog – Pippa – whizzes over and licks and leaps at me in just exactly the way I hoped that Jo would do. I crouch down to ruffle her behind the ears.
‘Hello, baby, hello, Pippa, how you doing?’ and then I straighten up, watching Jo watch us. I’m squeezed between the fridge and the yapping Pippa and I reach for Jo. She leaps away as if I trod on her toe and puts her hands up to fend me off.
‘Let me – just a minute,’ she squeaks.
Her house is small, like ours. The distance between the kitchen and the front room, the only downstairs room, is tiny. Obviously this visitor is in the front room and she doesn’t want her – whoever – to hear us. I’m starting to lose my nerve because when I dreamed it, when I planned it, it wasn’t like this. Jo just fell into my arms.
I go, ‘Aren’t you gonna say something nice to me?’ I lean in. ‘Aren’t you gonna say: woah, Drew, you’ve grown . . .’
Now I can’t stop myself grinning and she does at last give a worried little smile back. I can see this is awkward. She’ll have to get rid of whoever she’s got in there and then come back to me. I can wait. I’ve waited this long. Pippa twirls between me and then the door and noses in her red bowl, finding one little bow-shaped snack, and then hurls herself at my legs again.
‘Shush, shush, Pippa.’ Jo clutches the dog by the ears and, opening the kitchen door, shoos her into the backyard. ‘Drew, can you close the gate, so she won’t get out?’
I do this for her and I have a sad and muddled thought all about how familiar her gate is; the way it closes, the latch fitting neatly over that silver knob, how masculine and manly and familiar of me now to do this, and for her to ask me. All sorts of weird thoughts. And then I come back.
‘Why so funny with me? Who you got in there? Can we go out? Didn’t you hear me – it’s my birthday. My sixteenth.’
‘That’s nice. Happy Birthday—’
‘And I’ve got wine. I’ve got – we can celebrate.’
The door to the front room opens. A man comes out from in there and into the kitchen. Mr Rutter. He looks at me, recognises me. Glances at Jo.
‘Should be going, I think . . .’
‘Oh, John, yes, here – where’s – didn’t you have a jacket?’
God, she’s awkward now. And I’m stunned.
I feel as if she hit me. Him. That twat. That tosser. That lame-o. Mr nervous pathetic Rutter. I can’t breathe. I can’t think straight. Him. My heart has just gone ballistic. I feel as if blood is pumping into my head. My eyes are black. Something is exploding. I can’t even think what I’m saying or doing, I just sort of push past both of them, maybe I slam the carrier bag down with the wine and beer in it, I don’t look back, I hear Jo say: ‘Drew, wait – come here, don’t be silly—’ and the dog, the mad-eyed bitch, is barking like crazy but I’m off, I’m back to our house, getting my motorbike out, I’ve never felt so fucking humiliated; my face is burning, Oh God, head to toe I’m just one big wash of shame, of embarrassment. I see her, but I don’t see her. I hear her and I have some kind of impression of him, too, and I’m in my own yard, my own shed, and dragging out the Ninja, starting her up and the gleaming red and the roar is taking over, at least there’s that at least there’s that – I just want to go, escape, let the cold wind blow through me, cool me down at last, sting my eyes.
All this time. It never occurred to me. I never thought.
‘Drew! Wait—’ Jo goes, in full view of the neighbourhood, standing at her back door, a pale shape, a ghost, with her mad Fen dog, and I’ve got the wrong idea, she says; she shouts it, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve got eyes in my head.
I set off over the fields and ride further than usual, I use the old track, follow the railway, out towards Martin’s barn. I don’t have my helmet, and I’m cold, I’m freezing now in fact, but I’ve got matches and fags in my hoodie pocket, when I can stop crying, when I can calm down, I’ll light one. I’m ill. My heart is pounding in my ears one minute, the next trying to scarper, right out of my chest. I’m shivering. I’m scared. And I’m sobbing, like I’ve never sobbed, and I know it’s not just about Jo, but about everything, all the things she meant to me and now I’ll never have. Who am I to think for one minute that someone beautiful and clever – a teacher – someone like Jo would want someone like me? I’m just some little shit with no future, no father, no education, no job, no hope. Is that what she thinks of me? Is that all anyone thinks, you know, your Asbo boys, your nobodies, the white working classes, the rural poor, the Permanently Excludeds, what are we – all of us boys – the dregs?
And, you see, it’s when I’m thinking like this that I get a bit blind-sided. I get so I don’t care; I can’t see straight. Strange things seem true. Mad things are reasonable. I leave the bike. I prop it against the side of the barn.
I take the matches out of my pocket and strike a flame and stare at it. I get close enough to feel the heat wafting onto my nose. To smell the sulphur. To stare at that glow until my eyes ache, until when I close them the flame is still there, on the black-pink inside of my eyelids. A barn full of haystacks. You know. All piled up, dead neat. Not covered in their black plastic, like wrapped-up giant Babybel cheeses. No, they smell warm and fresh and sweet. They scratch, when you climb on them. They smell like your father, like your childhood. They smell like all that’s gone and done and all that will never come again. They smell like fucking Farmer Martin and all his money and all the things he holds in his hand – the old ways, the power. But if you hold a lit match to them, it’s awesome. It’s instant – wow. Crackling. A stick of hay – black and done. Awesome.
I chuck the match on the floor. I light another piece of hay, crouching near the bottom of the bale. I watch as that goes up too, and the flames lick the base of the haystack, blackening it. Dirty flakes fall away on the barn floor: smell of sweet autumn green. I scuff them with my foot. The thing is. A barn is one thing. Hay is one thing. But outside in the field there’s much bigger bales. Straw, straw bales, stacked up ready for transport to the straw power station. It’s an awesome sight. We’ve got the largest straw-burning power station in the world out here in the Fens these days. Money should be good, should have been good, for people like my dad if German businesses hadn’t decided to buy out the company. If Farmer Martin hadn’t decided to say yes to their offer and lay off his loyal, long-term manager with the slightly dicky heart.
All those bales stacked up, ready to go. Mow, Dad used to call straw. Mow, or sometimes a rucking, as in rucking-stack. Mowfen was his name for any field that had straw bales in it. So many words he had, that no one else knew, and now they won’t ever know them, will they?
The sky over the Mowfen is turning pink. There’s a rushing, heady, crackling sound. Did I mean it? Am I just messing? What would I say if it had ever come to it, you know, if anyone asked? Andrew Beamish of Black Drove near Littleport in the Cambridgeshire Fens, did you deliberately and with intent cause damage to property via an act of arson and did you act recklessly without due regard as to whether you endangered the life of others . . .
Once, long ago, I’d have swung for it.
I don’t look back. I just get back on the Ninja, peel away. Can’t even remember what I’m thinking. Whether burning down Farmer Martin’s straw bales is enough. There’s smoke pinching the back of my throat, my nose; I can taste it. This is for you, Dad. Jo can wait. Because – I tell you this. I am alive. I am.
I didn’t mean anything more than that, I wasn’t thinking beyond that. I did a bad thing. I was proud, I mean, it was sweet, it had symmetry. Burning stacks as a way for farm labourers to avenge themselves – the Swing Riots: I did an essay on that too. Another history lesson.
I saw Dad one last time, that morning he took off for work. He had worked on that fucking farm his entire adult life. A week before the straw bale hit him, he had been given notice. The farm was being sold to a German buyer and Dad’s services as manager were no longer needed. He told us this, told Mum and me, calmly at breakfast, and when she burst into tears he just stood up, and put the kettle on. Mum’s crying washed over him: he paid no mind to it. He had a plan, he said, and said no more. The farm was huge by then, all that land owned now by one enormous conglomerate. Dad’s services no longer needed. I believed I knew what his plan was, rightly or wrongly, I was sure I understood. That morning, he went out the door in his usual way – clean-shaven, a peck on Mum’s cheek, docky in his bag, shirt tucked neatly round his spreading belly. I never saw him again.
But then I kept thinking, where is he? And I’d be walking into the kitchen, about to ask him for a fag, expecting to see his checked shoulders through the bars of the wooden chair, him there glancing up from where he’s eating his toast and dunking it in his tea and reading the Express at the same time and expecting to hear that creak of the chair as he looks up and to get told off for asking – fags at your age! – and maybe a clip round the ear and then I remember. Oh yeah. He’s dead. But it feels like he’s still here, so alive, so big and funny and familiar and so loudly talking to me, in my head. Where is he then? Not deep in that black ridged soil, slicked by the plough, not in the clouds.
By now I’m calming down. The black smoke appears, massing over the fields. I feel – scared. I try to think more clearly about Jo. What was it she said? I had the wrong idea. Maybe that Mr Rutter, he could have just been – like, discussing something. Some pupil referral problem. Nothing more than that. She was just embarrassed because I’d marched in, full of myself.
Weird but I’m thinking about Willie Beamish again. Not much older than me, losing his dad like me. Getting into trouble, sentenced to death, then at the very last minute – he escapes. Escapes! What have I done? Is it too late? I swing my leg over the bike. I turn her round, I’m rolling at a speed right away and running up the gears and the bike’s screaming like she’s doing a zillion miles per hour. Put distance between me and the barn. Head for home.
And then. What happens next. That’s just my return journey. Near our house. The tree, the smoky landscape hurtling towards my face, the speed of it. Yeah: sly all right, but not unseen. Didn’t I think of it once, get a hint, just for a second, in that class with old Rutter, not so long ago? That’s just my luck. Black Shuck catching up with me, having his little joke. You know who Black Shuck is, the dog you sometimes
see on a late-night foggy walk in the Fens – a black dog, an inky hound with red eyes, this is the third who walks always beside you, along the drove. Me, Dad and it. That means death. The end for you. And I never saw it, but now I come to think of it, the last thing I saw at Jo’s was that yapping little Pippa, shadowed small and black against the sky and yes, maybe, at a stretch you might have said it could have been the red glitter from a fag end. But there again. It could have been the red eye of Black Shuck, come to tell me: OK, Drew – calling you in. Come on, boy, this is all for you, your portion, your dole. Sorry, lad. Your time’s up.
And I thought: did I think? – I saw, rather than thought – I saw them. Down the road I looked, and there stood Jo. Blonde hair hanging in curls like little question marks at her chin, and she’s running and calling after me and trying to stop me; and there’s Dad, all warm and real and big and kind and the sound of his singing in the smoky fug of his tractor, drowning everything; and there’s a kestrel, hunting, right overhead, trembling on the wind; and there’s Mum, in the kitchen, an apron over her nurse’s uniform, and I want to call out to her and say, Mum, Mum, here I am I’m still here I’m sorry I didn’t mean it I tried to beat harder and stay, I tried, I tried – I really did – and I see what she’s doing now: she’s slotting candles into little plastic flower holders, for a birthday cake she’s made me. I have to tell you: you’d better hope this is your lot, your hour too. I’m not even complaining: when you come to think of it, isn’t it enough? Isn’t it holy beautiful, isn’t it fucking ultimate.