Shelter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “That’s the first thing. The second thing is, Max is very, very sick. John did his best, but there’s infection and I don’t have anything to treat it with.”

  Rose stared at her. Faye was a stout woman in her late sixties, untidy and permanently grumpy. Her family had originally been vets, treating farm animals in the area, passing their knowledge down generation by generation, learning how to treat people as well as they went. She was the closest thing the community had to a doctor.

  “It’s peritonitis,” she said. “Do you know what that is?”

  Rose nodded.

  “I can operate – and I’m going to as soon as humanly possible, Rose – but I need antibiotics too.”

  Rose shook her head.

  Faye sighed. “Rose. Listen. Max is going to die. I don’t know what problem you have with the Coghlans, but they can help.”

  Rose shook her head again.

  Faye thumped her fist down on the table, making Rose and the cup and saucer in front of her jump. “Fucking hell, Rose!” She stood, pushed her chair back from the table hard enough to topple it backwards, and went out into the yard, where John Race was standing smoking his pipe and looking miserable.

  “She’s in shock,” he told her.

  “Yes, I can see that, John. Thank you for pointing that out to me.” Faye rubbed her eyes. “What has she got against the Coghlans?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know. She just doesn’t want any help from anybody.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking stupid. Why didn’t you come and get me as soon as Max was wounded? Oh, don’t tell me. Rose didn’t want you to.”

  John shrugged.

  “You poor fucking excuse for a man, John.” She backhanded him across the chest. “You send somebody to Blandings this minute or I’m leaving here and never coming back.”

  “She said...”

  “Are you not listening, John? I don’t care what she said. I need antibiotics. Tetracyline, cephalosporin, ampicillin, I’ll write it all down for you. I’m not interested in what’s going on in Rose’s head, we’ll deal with that later.”

  “I’ll go,” he said.

  “Don’t be so fucking noble, John. This place needs you. Send one of the hands. If we’re lucky, Betty will have what I need in stock. If not, we’re going to have to wait a few days.”

  “Can Max wait that long?”

  “I’ll do what I can, but you’d better get a move on.” She felt the anger drain out of her all of a sudden. “Max was the first baby I delivered. You remember the old Taylor place?”

  John nodded. The old Taylor farm, a few miles away, had been absorbed by another holding when Max took over here. Max hadn’t been sorry to see it go.

  “Ramshackle fucking wreck of a farm; his dad couldn’t farm to save his life. The house wasn’t much better. Buckets all round the bed to catch water dripping through the ceiling, and my dad standing behind me the whole time, biting his lip to stop himself giving me advice about what to do. My hands were shaking so much, I cut the cord and dropped Max on the floor.” She reached out again, and this time squeezed his upper arm. “I won’t let him die, if it’s within my powers, John. But you have to help me. You have to help Rose.”

  John looked at the house. “Fucking mess,” he muttered.

  “Let’s all do our best for Max, eh? That way we’re helping Rose too. And everybody here.”

  “Right,” he said. And he set his shoulders and strode off across the yard to find someone to send to Blandings.

  THERE WAS A graveyard, just beyond the original wall of the house, where the Lyalls buried their dead. Almost two hundred headstones now, which Harry didn’t think was so bad for a century of hard lives, although some years had been far worse than others. His own immediate family were here, his father, mother and two brothers, all carried off together by an infection old Doc Ogden hadn’t even been able to identify, let alone treat. Alice was here and beside their children – two of them stillborn, three dead of various accidents and illnesses. Alice had liked to come out here, when the weather allowed, and talk to them, chatting cheerfully about inconsequential things: something she’d seen that day, or something someone had told her. She said it helped keep her close to them, stopped her forgetting.

  And now there was a new grave. Harry tried to picture himself talking to it.

  The service done, three of the hands started to shovel earth into the grave, covering Rob’s cloth-wrapped body. Harry thought he would be hearing the sound in his dreams for the rest of his life. The hands and other families who had attended the funeral – the graveyard was packed – started to drift towards the gate which led into the compound. Harry turned away and, James and Alan at his side, plodded slowly after them.

  In the yard, a couple of the hands who hadn’t attended the service were standing talking in an animated fashion. In Harry’s experience this was never a good thing, and instead of heading over to the house, he wandered over.

  “Now then, lads,” he said.

  Faced with their boss, the two hands – neither was much more than sixteen – became quiet and awkward, unwilling to say anything. Harry struggled to remember their names.

  “Something up?” Harry asked, not ungently.

  “There’s a thing, guv’nor,” said one. William?

  “A thing, is there?” Harry said. “What kind of a thing?”

  “One of the henhouses,” said the other. “Something got in.”

  Harry sighed. Life went on. Except when it didn’t. “You’d better show me then, hadn’t you.” He turned to his sons. “You go in the house and make sure everyone’s fed and watered. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Dad?” said James.

  “Go on, son. I won’t be long.” He looked at the two farmhands. “Shall we?”

  Down the years, the Lyalls had appropriated a lot of building materials from half-deserted housing estates in the general area, demolishing houses bit by bit for brick and wood and glass, building up and reinforcing the wall that ran around the house, constructing outhouses and sheds and sties. There were four big henhouses on the other side of the estate. Too large to fit inside the compound, which had grown cluttered with various outbuildings and storage sheds and extensions to the house over the years, they were surrounded by high brick walls to keep out foxes and feral dogs and cats and the occasional wolf. Mostly, the walls worked well enough, although one had constantly to make sure nothing had burrowed under them, but now and again something got in and carried away some stock. Last time it had been some monstrous bird of prey. They’d roofed the run over with chicken wire, but the fucking thing had torn several holes in it. Nobody ever saw it, and eventually it had stopped attacking the runs. Rob said it was a golden eagle. Rob had always been keen on birds.

  None of this was surprising, then. But Harry wasn’t prepared for what he saw when one of the hands opened the door to the run.

  “Fuck me,” he said quietly.

  The run seemed to be carpeted in bloody feathers. In places, the wind had piled them into soggy drifts inches thick in corners and against the base of the wall. Here and there, among the fluffy carnage, lay a mutilated corpse.

  “All dead,” said the hand. Walter. That was it. Walter.

  Harry put his hands in his pockets and stood, just inside the doorway, gazing across the run. They’d had forty hens in here, and a couple of very feisty cockerels. “All of them?” he said.

  Walter nodded miserably.

  Harry squatted down and brushed the covering of feathers away from the earth, hoping to find pawprints, but there was nothing. He looked at the wall, which kept out everything but the most determined predators. He stood up and walked out into the run, toeing feathers aside. Coming upon a dead chicken, he stooped and picked it up by one leg and looked at its wounds. He tossed the corpse aside and looked at the wall again. Looked up at the wire netting. They’d repaired the holes the bird of prey, whatever the hell it had been, had torn in the mesh, but something had forced its way t
hrough, leaving a big hole. Harry walked over and looked up, but he couldn’t see any fur caught on the jagged broken ends of wire. Some of the ends seemed to have been carefully bent inward so as not to catch or snag or prevent whatever had forced its way in from leaving again. He thought about that for a while, then went back to the door of the run.

  Outside, Walter and the other boy – Harry didn’t have the first idea what his name was – followed him as he paced the wall, head down, scanning the ground. A couple of times, he squatted down again and examined places where the grass at the base of the wall had been trodden down by something, or possibly several somethings.

  When he’d finished, he dusted his hands off and scratched his head. “Wolf,” he said. “Must’ve been a big bugger, to get over the wall.”

  “This weren’t no wolf, guv’nor,” Walter said.

  “Yes, it was, young Walter,” he told the boy.

  “But guv’nor...”

  “It was a wolf,” Harry said, gently but firmly. “I want the runs patrolled properly, day and night. If we get lucky, we’ll catch the fucker in the act.”

  The two boys exchanged a glance. “Yes, guv’nor.”

  “All right,” he said. “You lads get into the house. Tell Mrs Carter I’ve said you can have some beer and a sandwich.”

  The prospect of a beer obviously overwhelmed any doubts the hands might have had about whatever had killed the chickens, and they took off towards the house at a trot. Harry waited until they were out of sight and then squatted down and parted some of the long grass and spent a while looking at the deep bootprint in the soil beneath.

  He brushed the grass back upright until it concealed the print and with a sigh he stood up, put his hands in his pockets again, and trudged away to his son’s wake.

  AN HOUR OR so later, James came out of the main house and walked across the compound to the gate. He asked one of the hands to let him through, and the hand swung the gate open far enough for him to slip out. His father had told everyone to stay near the farm for the next few days but James had no intention of obeying him.

  The truth was, James hadn’t even liked his brother very much. Rob could be a bully, self-centred and manipulative, and if he’d got himself killed doing some fucking stupid thing that was really all he deserved. What did hurt James was how his father was taking it. He seemed hollow, uncertain, distant, almost broken, and that made James angry. It made him angry at Rob, and it made him angry at whoever had killed him. Alan, who was only ten, was uncomplicatedly distraught, and Charlie, the youngest, was too young to understand, upset by the atmosphere in the house more than anything else. Four Lyall boys, and now there were three.

  He walked along the side of the compound until he reached the henhouses, looked in through the open door of the one which had been attacked. Looked at the broken wire netting. He too swept his toe back and forth in the layer of sodden bloody feathers on the ground, and this time he saw a deep bootprint. He went back to the door. It only locked from the outside; there was a simple latch on the inside to let yourself out after you’d collected the eggs or fed the chickens or whatever. He’d used it himself hundreds of times without noticing.

  Back in the house, his father and some of the family and people from the neighbouring farms were in the lounge, drinking beer and eating sandwiches. James went down the hall unnoticed. At the far end was the family’s gun room, a locked windowless room that had once been an airing cupboard. James popped into his father’s office for the key and opened the door, stood looking at the racks of shotguns and rifles and crossbows. He stood there for quite a long time, thinking, listening to the quiet conversation from the lounge, and no one ever noticed he was there.

  Chapter Ten

  “NEVER HEARD OF it,” Seth said, turning the book over and over in his hands in a way which suggested that he, in common with almost all of Thanet’s population, could not read.

  “It’s about ships,” Adam said. “And a whale.”

  “Yes, well, I can see that,” Seth told him, looking at the cover. He handed it back. “And he makes you read it to him?”

  “Don’t spread that around,” Adam said. “I don’t think Frank wants people to know.”

  Seth made a rude noise. “As if thinking he can read would make people hate the wanky little cunt any less.”

  They were sitting in the lounge of Seth’s house. There was a fire in the grate and the curtains were drawn against the rainy night. There was a curfew in Margate, but it was fairly straightforward to break it if you were careful and confident. The enforcers were keen but there were not enough of them to be everywhere. The house was small and neat but shabby, the furniture worn and stained and mismatched, as if it had come from two or three different houses. Seth had half a bottle of whisky, which was illegal in Margate unless you were an enforcer or someone Frank considered a special friend. Adam presumed reading to him didn’t qualify, because no alcohol had come his way yet.

  “Why doesn’t everybody just leave?” he said.

  “Where would they go?”

  We can’t take in every raggedy Bob and tattered Brenda. Adam drank some whisky. It wasn’t very good whisky, but it was at least whisky. Seth wouldn’t say where it had come from. If someone here was running a black market in things like whisky and tobacco, they were playing a dangerous game. They might, Adam thought, be worth getting to know, because it was the first real sign of resistance he had seen here.

  “A lot of people don’t have anywhere to go,” Seth said. “Back out into the countryside to starve or be killed by bandits or dogs. At least here they’re safe.”

  “They’re really not.”

  Seth looked at him. “What are you doing here, son? You’re a smart lad. Too smart to fall for Albie Dodd’s bullshit, anyway.”

  Adam thought about it. “There was a girl, back home. Eleanor.”

  Seth nodded sympathetically. “Dumped you, did she?”

  Adam blinked at him. “No. No, she came here. To work.”

  “Oh. Right. Eleanor, you say?” He shook his head. “Don’t know the name.”

  “I’ve been keeping an eye open, but I haven’t seen her. Thought maybe she might be out at the Glasshouses.”

  “Why’d she come here? Have a row?”

  Adam found himself unable to come up with anything better, so he nodded sadly.

  “Well, if she’s in the Glasshouses, you’ll not see her,” Seth mused. “They don’t get around town much; Albie’s boys take them to and from their dormitory to work, don’t let them out of their sight.”

  “I know. Any way I can get out there? Have a look for her?”

  Seth shook his head. “They don’t like us mixing. You could get in a lot of trouble doing that.” He sighed. “What on earth were you thinking? Find your girl and leg it back home with her?”

  Adam shrugged. “How hard can it be?”

  Seth gave him a long hard stare, shook his head again. “They’ll notice you’re gone, you and your girl, and they’ll come looking for you and they’ll make an example of you.”

  “They’ll have to find us first.”

  “They’re good at that.” Seth drained his glass. “What does this Eleanor look like? Have you got a picture or something?”

  “Not with me, no.” Adam gave him a quick recital of the description he’d been given before he left Guz. “But don’t ask about; I don’t want to attract people’s attention to her. Just keep an eye open. Please.”

  The old man sighed. “Word to the wise, son. Love will fuck you up every time. You’re better off without it.”

  HE WAS STARTING to go native, he realised. There had been one morning, not so long ago, when he’d woken in his room at The Sands and Guz had seemed unreal, a distant land over the rainbow. His life here was real, the days of hard labour in the wind and the rain, the evenings sitting by the fire in Frank’s study reading to him. It was a dangerous feeling; he’d had it before, and he needed to watch out that it didn’t overwhelm him.


  He was also becoming aware, through continued close proximity, just how dangerous Frank was. Frank was a living demonstration of the corruptive nature of power, a man who literally had the power of life and death over everyone in his world. It came off him like a bad smell, and it infected everyone around him. As if the town was slowly revealing itself to him, Adam started to see enforcers beating workers more and more often. Usually a quick slap with a baton was enough, but more than once he saw someone lose control and start to rain blows down on their cowering victim. Not out of anger, but because they could. One afternoon, walking from one job to the next through the never-ending drizzle, he looked down a side street just in time to see Albie Dodd flooring someone with a single punch.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Albie said.

  Adam glanced at him sitting in the front seat of the cart with the reins dangling easily from his big meaty hands. “Tired,” he said.

  “Well, you’d better buck your ideas up for Frank.”

  Adam nodded. “Yes. I will.”

  At Frank’s house, the door was answered by Rhoda, the worn-out, pinch-faced girl Frank used as a maidservant and cook, and, rumour had it, much else besides. There was supposed to be a Mrs Frank, but so far Adam had not seen her and he hadn’t been able to find anyone else who had.

  Frank came out of the study, all rubicund bonhomie, wearing cord trousers and a smoking jacket. “Adam, my friend,” he said, smiling broadly. “Come on in. Rhoda, make us some tea, there’s a good girl.”

  Like everything else in Margate, Frank’s family had simply walked in and taken this house as their own because there was nobody there to stop them, and their presence seemed to have frozen it in time. The original wallpaper – a discreet pattern of roses climbing a vertical trellis – was still on the walls, and much of what appeared to be the original furniture was still here. It was always warm in here, and it did not smell of damp. It was as if the previous owners had just popped out for a walk and would come back through the door at any moment. Although if they had, Albie would have beaten them and thrown them in the Shell Grotto until they stopped being bad.