by Tom Trott
Through the back of my head I was watching the man who was sitting alone at a reserved table, playing with his phone. It was ten o’clock Tuesday night.
‘Fuck,’ he ejaculated. Then he shot up, his chair screaming along the uneven floor. He had to stand next to me to tell the barmaid: ‘You can give my table away.’
‘She stand you up?’ I asked.
Unfazed, he replied: ‘If you can believe it,’ in passing, as he turned to leave.
‘Want a drink?’
‘No thanks,’ he said, stopping to type into his phone.
‘Got something better to do?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Then let me buy you one for the road.’
‘What for?’
‘Christ, do you normally take this much convincing for a free drink?’
He glanced at me for the first time, but didn’t say anything.
‘Go on, leave,’ I told him, ‘I was only trying to be friendly.’
He tucked his phone away, facing me now. ‘And why do you want to be friendly with me?’
‘I just moved here, I thought I should get to know some locals. But you can fuck off if you want.’ I smiled.
‘I’ll have a beer. Something in a bottle.’
The barmaid picked one out of the fridge.
‘No, no, from the back,’ he said, ‘I saw you put those ones in ten minutes ago.’
She knocked over a few getting to it, but he had an ice-cold one in his hand in under a minute.
‘Did she give a reason?’ I asked.
‘Family emergency.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Who cares.’
‘Are you going to meet her again?’
‘I hope so, she looked hot. But there’s plenty of others on there, it’s like Netflix for pussy.’
‘Tinder?’
He nodded. ‘I thought she was a sure thing, she messaged me.’
‘Problem is, you don’t know if people are who they say they are.’
‘Who is?’ he asked rhetorically. Then he took a long swig of his beer. ‘Where are you living then?’ he asked as he finally took a stool next to me. I’d expected him to leave one in between us but he didn’t, and as he asked the question he leaned even closer to me and didn’t blink.
He was a handsome man, or had been once. Maybe he still could be behind his mad beard. He was forty-something and his skin had been tanned a deep brown. His hair was short, golden, and curly at the ends. Grey eyes were sunken into their sockets beyond his age, and veins showed around his temples, his skin pulled too tightly across his skull. His body was tall and lean, his muscles not big, but toned; his body didn’t carry an ounce of fat or water. This was a man who had spent years walking long distances over long days under a hot sun.
‘I’ve just bought a little farmhouse over near Streat. Farm came with it too. How about you?’
‘I’m renting a little farmhouse myself,’ he answered, ‘for the present.’
‘I could have sworn you were a local,’ I lied. ‘You have the country look.’
‘Whatever the hell that is, I’m pretty sure I don’t have it.’
‘I suppose you don’t exactly blend in here.’
‘What, amongst these buffoons and transplanted city types like yourself? What a pity.’
‘You’re not enamoured to the country life then?’
‘This isn’t the country. In the real country they don’t have a Waitrose down the road. In the real country you can look to the horizon all around and not see a soul. That’s nature.’
‘It sounds barren. Not many amenities.’
‘It’s great if that’s the way you like it.’
‘Is that the way you like it?’
He didn’t answer straight away. ‘I can take it or leave it,’ he said.
He had almost finished his beer already so I bought him another. We talked about the pub, and Ditchling, and women, and other things divorced from who we were or what we were doing here. Whenever I asked him a straight question, his answers reminded me of what the SAS call “the grey man”. It’s part of their training to resist interrogation. Be the grey man. Be kind, but not helpful. Don’t anger them. Don’t interest them at all. Occasionally he swung out into territory where he expressed an opinion, but he always circled back to indifference. He was a tough one. Some people you can cleave in two, but I would have to pull him part with tweezers. The only way I could draw him out was on seemingly unimportant, abstract issues of philosophy; life, death, little issues like that, and even then his answers were a vague form of pessimism that I could easily get from myself.
Three bottles later I was speaking about my fictional school days, hoping he would reciprocate.
‘Where was that?’ he asked.
‘Westminster.’
‘Is that a private school?’
‘Very,’ I laughed. ‘How about you?’
‘Boarding school. Just like the gardener and the cook, my parents paid for the very best children.’
‘Where did you go? We might have met before.’
‘I doubt it.’
I held out a hand. ‘I’m Matthew, by the way.’
He shook it. ‘Me too, but people call me Matty.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Is it?’
‘Is that a South African twang I’ve been hearing?’
His eyes darted up from his beer. ‘You need to clean your ears out.’
‘I thought I heard something.’
‘No.’
‘There’s something there.’
‘Just me.’
I nodded, leaving it be. ‘Matty… Matty Ross?’
‘Yes.’ He put his bottle down.
‘I saw your listing on Gumtree today, you’re selling a load of farm equipment aren’t you?’
‘You’ve got a good memory.’
‘I remembered because I used to be called Matty at school.’
‘What’s your surname, Matthew?’
‘Granger, why?’
‘No reason.’ He picked up his bottle again and finished it. His fourth. ‘So you’re looking to buy farm equipment?’
‘Absolutely. I have bought a farm after all.’
‘Why is that?’
‘I think I’ll enjoy it.’
‘Farming?’
‘Absolutely.’
He snorted, he clearly didn’t think I was cut out for it. Then he gave me a sideways look.
‘I’m hoping to start a vineyard,’ I explained. ‘My father owns one in Klein Karoo, I’m planning to use some cuttings.’
‘Those varieties won’t grow here. The soil is completely different.’
‘Maybe I should employ you.’
‘I’m not interested.’
I finished my second glass. It tasted like vinegar, I’ve never understood the point of white wine. ‘Did the equipment come with the farmhouse?’
‘Yes it did.’
‘How come you’re allowed to sell it? If you don’t mind me asking; I thought you were renting the place.’
‘The owners aren’t interested in selling it off as a farm, they can make much more selling it to a developer. I offered to clear it out for them on the condition I keep any profit.’
‘They should have sold it to me.’
‘They should have.’
‘Well, I’ll pay what the stuff’s worth. I’d have to see it first though, you know, to check it’s not just rust.’
‘Good idea. What are you doing right now?’
He was too drunk to drive, and for some reason he trusted me, so five minutes later I found myself piloting his pickup truck along the dark country lanes.
The sun had set behind the downs long ago, and even the residual glow had faded from the sky. Just the rolling treadmill of tarmac; twenty feet that weaved this way and that, up and down like a carnival rollercoaster. And the dry stone walls, and black grass, and the rising tsunami of hills to my right that told me we were heading east. He had g
iven me the address before he went to sleep. He was asleep, I could swear, but maybe he wasn’t. I don’t know what to think, considering what happened that night.
Why did I say I had come by taxi? I didn’t think my Honda was in character, but I could have made it in character, I wrote the damn part. I could have loaded it onto the back of his pickup, and then I would have an escape route. But who could have predicted a pickup truck in this country?
I shouldn’t have been in his car. I shouldn’t have been driving into the darkness. But I had to see his farm. I just didn’t know why.
A rabbit bolted across the road, I slammed on the breaks. He jolted awake. We were at a crossroads.
‘Which way?’ I asked.
‘Left,’ he stated. Then lent back on the window.
We trundled along a bumpy, muddy, stony track up a shallow incline. Ahead I could make out pitched points silhouetted against the sky. Buildings of some kind. Then the feeble headlights finally reached them and revealed that it was in fact a farm. And a proper farm, not one you would draw, but the type you actually see; with open-sided buildings and steel gates and water butts, troughs, and coiled hose connecting taps tied to wooden posts. In the swinging headlights each item was illuminated separately as a characterful element waiting to be placed in a setting. A hedge. A hutch. A rusted sign that used to say “Eggs sold”. A discarded plough.
I nudged him awake. ‘Is this it?’
‘You can pull up anywhere.’
I parked up against a stone building, turned off the engine, and opened the door, leaving the lights on for now. The sound of cicadas was deafening. Another great thing about this heatwave: now we had tropical bugs.
‘There’s a torch in the glovebox.’
He told me this, but didn’t get it out from right in front of him. Instead I had to lean over and get it. I turned it on before I turned off the lights. Then I stepped out onto mud, wishing with all my heart I wasn’t wearing this costume.
‘You want a drink?’ he slurred.
‘No thanks, you help yourself. I better look at that stuff.’
‘Sure thing. I’ll let you in the store.’
He headed away from the main buildings and I had to follow. We started to wander the length of a field, torch light quivering out in front of us, tiny insects swirling in the beam. At its end I could see a small stone and corrugated steel shack.
So far as I could tell the farm consisted of a cluster of three buildings. A small stone cottage, an old wooden barn, and a steel open-sided barn. I don’t know if barn is the right word, but it was something you kept animals in. To the north was all green fields, leading almost a kilometre down toward the road we had left: just an empty, meaningless ribbon of slightly different darkness. To the east was a thicket of trees, how large I couldn’t tell. To the south were the downs, we were already on the base of them. And to the west, the way we were walking, other than the shack, was nothing but more fields. This one was nothing but dirt. And in the middle of it was a tired scarecrow, patiently defending the dirt.
The store didn’t have any lights, or paned windows, and “letting me in” consisted of drawing a bolt and peeling back a rusted corrugated sheet. Inside was a tangle of deep orange shapes, like the torture chamber in any film that has “chainsaw” in the title. I didn’t know what any of it was, except a tetanus shot waiting to happen.
‘Wow, I don’t know where to start,’ I said. Truthfully.
‘You’d better have a look through it.’
I nodded pretty unconvincingly and started to move toward the stuff. With the torch in my hand it was mostly spikey shadow puppets that danced across the roof.
‘Have you ever had a red espresso?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I’ll make us a couple,’ he said, and trudged off.
I watched him disappear toward the house until he was engulfed in darkness, and I turned back to the torture porn dungeon. Honestly, I didn’t know what any of this stuff was so it’s impossible to describe it, the only comforting thought was that my character wouldn’t know either. He’d get a man in to look it over. I’d tell him that. But first I better wait at least ten minutes to make it look like I tried.
The wind whistled through the gaps in the steel and the stone, and the tiny window smaller than a piece of paper. I thought about how many generations had farmed on this land, and how it only took one generation of fools to turn it into an early-retirement pad for some dick-swinging London arsehole and his second wife. They’d add a glass extension of course, because people love the idea of a cottage until they realise they’ve got nowhere to hang their aren’t-I-so-fucking-beautiful photos. It would become an occasional snug. Centuries of history reduced to character features. I thought the scarecrow should inherit the land, he’d worked it the longest.
Having spent my time constructively, I stepped out onto the field again, heading back toward the house, using the scarecrow as a guide in the blackout. Then the scarecrow did the strangest thing and I almost shat myself. He raised his hands up high, like the congregation at church, grasping toward the sky. I shone the torch at him. It was Redburn, of course. He hadn’t made it to the house, he was transfixed by the stars. Staring upwards, he didn’t register me. He didn’t even look at me when he spoke.
‘That’s all we are, you know. Stardust.’
I didn’t argue.
‘We’re just atoms held together. Temporarily. An alliance of matter that will decay and disperse. We’re two successful germs on a ball of dirt.’
I looked up at the sky. It was magnificent. Where the earth was shades of darkness, the sky was bejewelled with pure light on brushstrokes of blue and purple.
‘I was out on patrol,’ he continued, ‘long distance, wearing a pack as heavy as a corpse, sleeping under the stars, after the most significant event of my life. You look at them and you stare and you stare and suddenly you feel like you’re on the bottom of the world, underneath, and you’re not looking up you’re looking down at the lights, and you could fall off the earth and plummet head first into all of that.’
I didn’t say anything, not wanting to break the spell. Our heads were cranked upwards until there was nothing in our vision but the expanse. Unrooted, unanchored; we could be anywhere in the universe.
‘But I was greeted instead by the revelation that taking someone’s life is just fulfilling the law of entropy because there was never life there to begin with. Our consciousness, our hopes, our dreams, all our intelligence, and even the great big four letter word, love, is an emergent property. There’s no such thing as life; from a microbe to us to a cactus to coral, we’ve had to invent definitions to fit what we want to believe. There’s no life on earth, there’s no life anywhere in the galaxy. We’re all just an emergent property. A mirage in the eye of the universe.’
A steady light, maybe a satellite, too far away to be a plane, was sailing gently across the vastness as he continued: ‘Scientists used to believe that there were a hundred to two hundred billion galaxies in our universe, each containing a hundred billion stars. And just when you can wrap your head around how insignificant that makes us they discover they were wrong. There are ten times as many galaxies as they thought: two trillion. You are ten times as insignificant as you thought you were and you were already infinitely insignificant. And you’re never going to be anything more; no one cares about the most important germ in their toilet. And the only sane response is to take comfort in the fact that nothing you’ve done will ever matter.’
‘Everything we do matters,’ I whispered.
He scoffed. ‘On what scale?’
‘The one we live on.’
He smiled in the way you would smile to a witty child who’s wrong but doesn’t understand why.
‘I’ll sort out the tea,’ he said, and marched back into the darkness.
I followed a few feet behind and watched as he stepped into the cottage. I only had a couple of minutes to search the barns.
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nbsp; The first was the open-sided one, and there was nothing in there but a few pens where you would keep pigs or sheep when you need to keep them somewhere for some reason. There was nothing on the floor but wisps of hay. Nothing twinkled in the torchlight, I felt nothing beneath my feet. It hadn’t been a working farm for some time. Hanging off the steel gates to each pen were one or two meat hooks. They could just have been somewhere for the farmer to hang his tweed coat, but they didn’t half give me the creeps. They were ice cold to touch, and sharp. Occasionally they clanged in the wind.
I turned to the wooden barn. It was overgrown with weeds and vines that reached from the earth, wrapped around the sides, and gripped the roof like the tentacles of some subterranean kraken. I ripped them from the rotten doors, and they came away with ease. The vines were dead, the kraken having swallowed too big a prize. Still it took all my strength to open one door one foot. I had to claw my way inside.
Without the torch I couldn’t see a thing. Wind blew. Wood creaked. I clicked it on. My pale yellow light was met instantly with a red one. Shining at my face. I pointed the torch at the ground and the red light dimmed to a soft glow that helped light the barn. Against the walls I could see stacks of rotten logs, the type that crack open to reveal a million woodlice and one valiant centipede wriggling through the mass. But mostly I saw the ground had not been managed and the same tentacles that grasped the outside were everywhere inside. A dense, dead forest of skeletal hands.
The red glow was a reflector. A reflector from the back of a vehicle. A blue van. Not a Transit, mind. A Renault Trafic, eleven years old. It took up most of the barn and its presence was what had forced the tentacles into thickets.
It had windows in the back doors, I shone the torch in through the glass. It was empty. Entirely empty. Nothing but walls, floor, and wheel arches.
I clambered around to the front, pushing my way through thick woollen cobwebs, and shone the torch in through the windscreen. There was nothing here either. There was nothing to say the van had ever been driven.
Something slammed outside, a door or a gate, and I felt a sudden urge not to be caught finding this. Before squeezing through the door I took one last look at the thing. On the back windows, in the yellow glow, small, insignificant finger smudges glistened on the inside.