He pressed again. ‘People used to hang them on doors, or put them in special places. They believed they were magic. Silly stuff like that.’
Lyla muttered as she turned the stone. ‘I find them all the time.’
The tension quickened inside him. ‘Where? Where do you find them?’
Another shrug. ‘Places.’
‘What places?’
The monosyllables turned to silence. Her eyes were averted. He knew she wouldn’t speak now. Not for a while, not for a day. Nothing to be done. Adam gazed out across the landscape as he drove the moorland road, as the sunlight and cloud-shadows chased each over the grey slopes, the wind sighing in the ferns and heathers. The frail winter sun always gave such a shifting light: one minute glittering on the silver sprays of birch trees, then gone again, thrusting all into darkness.
The silence was too much.
‘You know your granny collected those special stones?’ Lyla did not reply. Adam was talking to himself.
‘She knew all the legends and stories. You should have met her: she was a grand woman. My nan. Molly Redway. You’d’ve loved her, Lyla.’
Lyla did not reply. Adam drove on, he knew the road so well he could practically close his eyes and drive it blind. So he let himself drift into memories. He was seven. Granny Molly was telling him stories in her cosy little cottage near Doccombe, with Adam’s bike leaning against her garden gate. Sometimes he went to see her with his cousins, Jack and Harry and Neil, but usually he went alone.
Because Adam was the only one of the family who took a real interest in her stories. The stories were great: they distracted him from the unhappiness of home. So many stories. Stories about the Walla Brook, the stream of the strangers, stories of the voogas, the little caves used by miners near Lydford, where the pixies lived; stories about Amicombe Hill on the coldest winter nights. It was said that on those still winter nights, when the deep wells of moorwater gave back a reflection of the curving moon, you could hear the howls of the Devil and his witches. It was also said that the Devil once stopped at the Tavistock Inn on his way to Widecombe, and paid in money, which turned to dead leaves in a day.
On and on the tales went. A different one every evening. Stories of spells, of drownings and mires, stories of the River Dart as it took another life: Dart Dart, every year thou breakest a heart; and after that came all those endless winter stories of phantoms: ghostly highwaymen, ghostly hands, ghostsoldiers, ghost-trees, ghosts from Sheepstor to Lustleigh. After telling these stories Molly would laugh uproariously and make another cup of tea, and Adam would laugh too, feeling safe, because it was all a joke. Everyone knew the stories were silly fairytales: there weren’t any witches under Vixen Tor, not any more.
So Adam would laugh and eat his nan’s fruit cake, and feel happy and safe in her home, the same way he felt happy and safe in Uncle Eddie’s farm, the way he never felt safe in his own home with his mum crying quietly, a bottle of something in her hand, falling asleep on the sofa, drooling on to a cushion, his dad out all hours, and his older sister having left home to go work in Bristol.
And then, years later he’d told Molly’s stories to Kath’s mum, because she was always so curious about all that stuff. But Penny Kinnersley didn’t laugh, sitting there in the pub in Chagford. She ordered more expensive wine and listened earnestly to these tall Dartmoor tales as if she was learning something important. Penny Kinnersley, who liked to do astrology charts, and pray to the moon. Penny Kinnersley, who had her ashes scattered at Kitty Jay. Penny Kinnersley would have known all about hag stones. And Vixen Tor.
Briskly, Adam parked the car. His last chore of the day: paying in cash for the winter firewood. Everyone in Dartmoor liked to be paid in cash.
He turned to his little girl, strapped in the back of the Land Rover. She’d placed the hag stone on the seat, arrayed in a curving row with her pens and pencils and rubber. A pattern, of course. She was always making patterns. But this hag stone. This was new. Where had she got it?
‘Got to pop in this farmhouse. Won’t take a sec. You want to come?’
Lyla shook her head. Moving the hag stone to the left, perfecting the pattern.
Adam kicked open the door. The day was cold, bitter. He jogged to the door, rang the bell, but the Pritchards’ isolated farmhouse looked dark and empty so he shoved the envelope of cash through the letter box. The money he’d earned. Again the resentment churned, as he recalled Kath’s latest prosecution. You’re stalking me. What exactly did she expect? What was he meant to do, not watch out for her? Not check up on her?
So yes: he was following, checking, watching. He was doing his job, the farmyard task, the moorland chore. Shooting the dying sheep.
Processing the carcass. Protecting Kath from herself. Saving the family. Getting them through the bad times. Because he was a good husband, and a good father. And sometimes good men had to do bad jobs.
And sometimes men had to stay silent as they did these jobs, even when they knew they’d been wronged.
But his resentments still surged. Thaw-water from a moorland winter. And he couldn’t stop it. He wondered if this was the time to tell Kath what she had said when he came into the hospital, while she was still very woozy, before she fell asleep again. The words she had since conveniently forgotten.
The words he had never forgotten.
Adam, I’m sorry, the sex, I never wanted it. It was the eyes, they were such a memory, it was my fault.
But he still couldn’t say this, despite his jealousy. Because it might break her entirely. And Lyla needed a mother more than ever, because his daughter was behaving more strangely than ever. But who had Kath had sex with? And why had it made her drive into the water? Was it even related? Adam wondered about that old car. He was always checking it, it was always so close to being a wreck. But that week he was away.
The cold was biting, as he opened the door.
‘All right, Lyles?’
His daughter barely acknowledged him. She looked down at the hag stone.
Taking deep breaths, Adam started the engine and drove down narrow stone roads, past the sign saying Take Moor Care, raced over the rattlebone clatter of the next cattle grid, that noise which made Lyla put her hands over her ears. He drove on, eating up fast corners, checking the mirror. Lyla was staring out of the car window over the rainy emptiness towards Blackdown.
Following her gaze, Adam realized his daughter wasn’t gazing aimlessly. She was watching a moorland pony cantering across the wild grey grasses about half a mile away. He slowed the car and joined her reverie. Because he loved the ponies as much as she did. They’d been here so long, these creatures, longer than men probably. The hillies were a law unto themselves. Sometimes hundreds of hill-ponies would scatter, stampede, for no reason. Adam had seen it for himself. It was always such a sight, a great herd galloping away from something invisible, as if they had seen a ghost on the moor, something prehistoric, long gone, which only the hill-ponies could remember.
He shuddered inwardly, as a related memory returned with a sharpening pain. The ponies. That was the one job he’d found too much. The killing of the ponies.
It must have been fifteen years back, more, when they were all in their late teens. Adam and his uncle and his cousins – Neil, Alec, Jack, whoever was around – had all been recruited to shoot the hill-ponies. Because Natural England wanted it. They culled the half-breeds to preserve the real hillies, and to save the moor from overgrazing. It was grisly work and no one wanted to do it; but the Redways needed the cash. And this kind of bloody work was their business.
Jack was especially keen, he always needed money.
So his uncle and cousins and Adam had spent a week driving out to Kes Tor or Grimspound or the old quarry tracks south of Princetown, way off road, following the packs of ponies, cornering the terrified horses, mares and stallions, in dark quarries, rocky cul de sacs. And then he and his uncle and his cousins had climbed out, with their boltguns, to do the job.
Th
ere was a tried-and-tested technique. Cruel and grim.
First, you coaxed the horses with a mint, a Trebor mint on the flat of your palm, then you waited, and eventually one of the ponies would relax and come over, out of sight of the herd, and after that, when they stooped to eat the sweetie from your hand, you put the boltgun to the soft forehead, three inches above the eyes, under the hanging and beautiful forelock. That was the blind spot. The sweet spot. Bang.
They all wore their shittiest clothes, because the blood and brains went everywhere.
Sometimes you had to do this to foals, and the mares would run over and see the foals slump to the mud and sedge, and their desperate, urgent maternal whinnying was the worst: like a hideous wail, yet fiercer. Sometimes you had to kill the mothers, too. The sounds of suffering were too much to bear.
Adam stirred himself from this atrocious memory. The horse was gone now, and Lyla was no longer looking out of the window. Adam drove on, glancing at the mirror.
‘Lyla. I want to ask you a question.’ She grimaced but said nothing.
‘Why are you acting a bit, like, strangely with me, sweetheart?’
Lyla shook her head. ‘Mmmnot.’
‘Yes,’ Adam insisted. ‘Yes, you are. Ever since Christmas, and Mummy’s, um, accident. You behave differently. To me. As well as Mummy.’
As he changed gear, she said, ‘I don’t.’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘No.’
The pointlessness felt like wading through boggy ground. ‘Lyla, please. I only want to help. If something is worrying you, tell us, tell me. We love you, don’t want you to be anxious, you can tell us.’
She shook her head and looked quietly away, looked past him, at the vast draperies of distant winter rain; her averted face hiding the shine in her eyes. She looked even younger than her years. Soon she would be ten, soon it would be her tenth birthday, and Kath, against all his advice, was organizing a party. But who would come? Kath claimed she’d had verbal confirmation from a dozen parents already, that they’d attend, and Kath had told this to a surprised and then excited Lyla; but this initial enthusiasm, Adam reckoned, was just the parents feeling sorry for the strange little girl.
In time the kids themselves would object. We don’t play with her. And then the refusals, the mind-changes and apologies, would duly arrive. Hurting Lyla more.
He decided to have one more go.
‘Lyla, like I said, it helps if you tell things. That’s all.’
‘What?’
‘Tell us if you have any worries—’
‘No, Daddy. Please.’
‘What?’
‘Please stop asking things. You don’t want to know. You don’t want to know!’
He was at a loss. What did he not want to know? What did she know? He wondered if Lyla had witnessed whatever it was Kath had done that night? Perhaps she had witnessed that infidelity, the key to it all. His daughter appeared to know more than she was admitting. Maybe it was too awful for her to tell.
‘Lyla—’
‘No, Daddy. Stop it!’
He abandoned the questioning for now. It was clearly pointless, or actively counter-productive. And they were nearly home. The liquid sunset over Hexworthy was a wild and pretty sight. A violent orange bleeding into red and black. He parked the Land Rover and they squelched across the farmyard. Kath’s car was nowhere to be seen.
Lyla ran ahead. Such a fast runner now. He called out to his disappearing daughter, ‘Remember to change out of your uniform!’
She’d opened the front door and run inside. They never locked it. Adam went to the back of the car to take out the shopping in the last of the wintry twilight. As he hefted the Lidl bags he paused: he could hear his daughter singing in the kitchen. A distinct song. Lyla liked singing. She had a sweet voice, though she was usually too shy to let anyone hear it. She loved all the Seth Lakeman songs, especially: ‘The Streamers’, ‘Band of Gold’, and her favourite, ‘The Warning of a White Hare, her eyes burning bright’. He was glad she never sang the Kitty Jay song. The tune was too harsh, the words too much. Way too much.
But this wasn’t a song he recognized, anyway: these words were very different.
Weren’t they?
Adam hoisted as many bags as he could, trying to do this boring chore as quickly as possible, staggering to the door of the kitchen. He looked down. A dead rat was lying there in the yard, close to the front door, grinning fiendishly, as if it had died in severe pain. Poisoned, no doubt. But who had left it here? Right here, by the door?
His girl was still singing.
And now he realized what she was singing. And the liquid cold entered his fingers and his arms, and headed for his chilling heart.
O little blue light in the dead of the night,
O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep
Adam felt a rush of irrational fear. For the first time in his life, he was scared of something he could not comprehend, as if he was hearing his nan tell one of her silly ghost stories, and he actually believed it. First the hag stone, now this.
Lyla sang it again:
O little blue light in the dead of the night,
O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep
His heart pained him with its thumping. Because this was an old song Molly used to sing, just once or twice. An old Dartmoor tune. And he’d quite forgotten it, and the fact that his nan used to sing it. He was sure that no one else would have remembered it. He recalled Molly telling him the legend of the blue-flamed corpse-candles: floating blue lights that appeared at night at a window, presaging a death. You only sang this song if you thought someone was about to die. His nan had sung the song to him, the song of the blue light, in the dead of the night. He had been seven, or eight. And no one else had ever sung this song to him since that day. And Adam’s mother had died a few weeks later after Molly sang it. The death was from a sudden undiagnosed cancer, the kind that eats you up, in weeks, like you were never there. A candleflame snuffed between two casual fingers. And a few years later his dad had moved to Exeter, with some new woman, who he’d probably been seeing all along, and Adam had moved in with Uncle Eddie, and been glad to do so.
And in time Adam had forgotten this funny old song, and Molly’s singing of it, yet now he was being reminded. Now his nine-year-old daughter was singing this same song very wistfully, standing in the middle of the gloomy kitchen, staring out of the window at the last light of a dying winter’s day. Singing the song of a death rushing towards them.
O little blue light in the dead of the night,
O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep
Suppressing a shudder, Adam turned to shut the kitchen door. As the door closed, the dead rat grinned at him, its yellow teeth bared.
Hexworthy
Tuesday afternoon
I am watching, thoughtful, self-absorbed, as the dogs gallop ahead of us across the open moor. It’s a vigorous walk. Emma Spalding has come better dressed for this hike than me: Hunter wellies, green Barbour, a thick scarf. She looks a proper countrywoman, tall and stout, fifty-something, striding the moors confidently as if she owns them all, from Ashburton to Bridestow.
I’m in jeans and blistered walking boots that let in the water. We can’t afford new ones. But I don’t care. It’s good to get out of the house. I spent the whole of yesterday designing invitation cards for Lyla’s birthday party. I offered verbal invitations days ago, and got lots of interest, but I wanted to remind everyone, make it official. So I took hours and hours drawing little birds and fishes on my laptop, something Lyla-esque, trying to remind everyone that my daughter isn’t just the geeky, awkward girl no one likes, but that she is special, precious, funny, adorable, if you give her a chance. Then I put them all in envelopes, sealed them and stamped them and took them to the Princetown post office, said a little prayer as I popped them in the slot. I’ve invited practically everyone at her school, thirty or forty kids, in the hope that eight or nine will come, from the twelve mums and da
ds who initially agreed.
I look up. Emma is marching on. I race to catch up, striding over the rolling hills of fern and bracken. I can see the thatched roofs of Hexworthy village from here, the whitewash of the Forest Inn. Further in the distance I can see the heights of Buckland Beacon, with its Ten Commandment stones, the words of God, chiselled into granite by some mad landowner way back.
Thou Shalt Not Murder.
As we walk on, I gaze at the Beacon. Remembering the time when I went to church for a few years in my mid-teens. I think I did it solely to annoy my mother, as a feeble act of rebellion. Christianity! Abrahamic religions! Patriarchy! Mum had been suitably scandalized: she’d probably have preferred me to summon demons. Or dance naked around the stones of Scorhill, like her and her friends from Totnes.
But now the memories of that period, my churchgoing, my tambourine-bashing, return to haunt me. Because it reminds me that I am a mortal sinner. An attempted self-murderer.
Here it is to be noted, that the Order for the Burial of the Dead is not to be used for any that have laid violent hands upon themselves …
‘Kath? Are you with us, dear?’
I turn to Emma and force a smile. ‘Yes. Just wondering where the dogs have gone. Ah, wait, that’s Randal!’ I call for him but he ignores me and paces on, his ears pinned back. He is probably scenting a rabbit or a hare. Or some doggy memory of a scent, something long gone.
‘Minds of their own, your dogs,’ says Emma Spalding. ‘Except when they’re with Lyla, of course.’ She laughs robustly. ‘Your daughter commands them with a single word, like a fairy queen.’
I nod, glancing back. I do that these days. Glance across the moor, as if something is coming for us, something fast and determined. Right now it looks as if rain is coming: the black clouds form their winter regiments.
‘Thanks for the company, Emma, it’s not the nicest day.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ she says. ‘It’s great to get off the farm. I’ve been on the phone all morning, trying to get permission to swale. You don’t know how hard it is!’ She puts on a comically formal voice, mimicking some stiff civil servant: “Areas of bilberry exceeding twenty hectares can only be burned once every seventy-eight months.”’ She swats at some gorse with her walking stick. ‘They don’t understand. Commoners have been tending this moor for thousands of years. We made the moor, then Defra comes along and says it knows better? Pff! Look at all this ling: it has to be burned back.’ Emma pushes her greying hair out of her eyes as the breeze kicks up. ‘Sorry, Kath! Ranting again, hah! Farming on this moor is so damnably hard. But we love it. Don’t we?’
Just Before I Died Page 12