by Ian Skewis
‘There’s no air out here,’ complained Caroline, looking up at the sky, which had begun to cloud over.
Something about her tone made him turn to face her. He saw that she had that troubled look again.
She touched his arm and said, ‘There’s something you should know. Me and Matthew are still friends, but that’s all we are. And I know today has been something of a shock to you, what with me being pregnant and all, but I love you.’ She looked at him with an expression of hope.
He looked into her eyes and thought to tell her about the car he had seen following them. But he knew there wasn’t much point. He had lost him, if it was him at all. ‘You look pale,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘You okay?’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ she replied. ‘I’m not going to faint again if that’s what you think.’
And they both laughed.
A short while later they were nearing the outskirts of Hobbs Brae. The wind was buffeting around them, whistling through the trees that towered on either side of the motorway. Nearly there, thought Alistair with relief.
Then Matthew’s car reappeared.
Alistair felt his stomach lurch. Where the hell did he come from? He thought back to his first sighting of Matthew outside the newsagent’s. He had recognised him then. It took a moment at first, but he recalled that Matthew had worked for his father a long time ago. Odd that their paths would cross again in Glasgow all these years later.
He stared intently at the Porsche that tailed in the background as the rain began to pelt against the windscreen.
‘Are you okay?’ Caroline asked, sensing his mood.
‘I think you were right about that storm,’ he said, and drove off into the encroaching darkness.
Chapter Eight
August 31st
Scott had been woken up at dawn, as usual, by the sun sliding in through his bedroom window – and the smell of burning pig.
He got out of bed and stretched. Heaving a sigh, he stood for a moment, gazing out at the fields and hedgerows, his palms resting on the bare windowsill, which already felt warm from the sun’s rays. He savoured the sensation of sleepiness and the inhibition of standing naked at the window. Seconds later the truth of his existence weighed heavily on him.
‘I’ve removed the curtains so that you won’t be late for your work in future,’ his father had said. Scott was 11 years old at the time.
His bedroom was positioned on the side of the farmhouse that caught the morning’s light. As Scott grew up, it dawned on him that this was no accident. It also became clear that the bacon his father prepared for breakfast each day was nothing more than a bribe – another method of enticing him downstairs and getting him ready for the day’s work. And then there was the hen coop that had been strategically placed below his window with the cockerel perched inside, ready to wake him up just in case.
‘See how thoughtful I am, boy?’ Jerome had said with a smirk when Scott had once dared to confront him about it.
Over the years Scott obeyed the rules that his father had laid down, but in time he began to quietly rebel. He made a point of getting up well before the cockerel each day. He took to making his own breakfast. He set to work before his father was up and about. And he always made sure he finished his work exactly 10 minutes after his father had finished his. Scott was successfully beginning to prove a point – that he was his own man now.
For, despite his 19 years, he was well able to work independently on the farm. The proof of his efforts was evident in his broad shoulders and in his complexion, which was tanned from toiling outside and in all climates. At the end of each working day he would sit and eat the dinner his father prepared, a necessary compromise, because he had been working so hard that his fingers were becoming calloused and he was barely able to lift his knife and fork, let alone prepare an evening meal. It was also down to a habit forged by Elspeth, who had cooked all their meals when she was in life, and who made them sit at the table as a family – regardless of how they felt about each other. There existed between Scott and his father a respect for her memory that was embodied in the silence that stood firm against every corner, every wall.
But between father and son lay a grudge that began when Elspeth died. Scott was just seven years old and her death left a huge gap in the family tree. With no brothers or sisters to fall back on, her responsibilities were passed directly to him. Under her tutelage he had learned the basic tasks of how to feed the pigs and collect the hens’ eggs, but he couldn’t do her paperwork or any of the other tasks of farm life. That required skill that could only be attained with years of training. Despite his father’s best efforts to teach him, Scott was simply too young to understand.
Jerome was blind to this and lacked his late wife’s patience. Scott would often get a beating from him because he could not learn quickly enough.
‘You’ll thank me for it, boy, one day,’ he had once said afterwards, still breathing heavily with the exertion of delivering his punishment.
Scott missed his mother.
He knew only too well that his father regarded him as a total disappointment, but in turn Scott regarded him in much the same way. He was no longer his dad – he was a dictator who seemed to grow more oppressive by the day.
‘You good-for-nothing layabout! What do you think you’re playing at? You left the barn doors open – the cows are all over the place!’
‘That wasn’t me, it was you,’ Scott replied timidly, shrinking back from the stench of whisky on his father’s breath.
Jerome took a step forward, and was now inches away from his son’s face. ‘Don’t you answer me back, boy,’ he warned, glowering at him.
‘It’s not my fault,’ Scott countered, his voice and knees quivering. ‘It’s yours. You got drunk and left the doors open, again.’
A split second and everything went black.
When he came to, his face hurt and he could taste blood in his mouth. After that Scott withdrew more and more from his father’s aggressive behaviour, while his confidence died a slow and painful death.
The years dragged by and the drinking and the violence escalated. Soon after Scott’s 18th birthday his father was once more spoiling for a fight.
‘You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing, boy? You think you can flout my authority by wandering off whenever you feel like it?’
‘I didn’t wander off,’ Scott explained quietly, his legs threatening to buckle under him.
‘Don’t answer me back!’ Jerome screamed, and he raised his fist.
Scott braced himself for the onslaught. But the blow never came. It took Scott a second to realise that he was holding his father by the wrist. A reflex action had kicked in from somewhere and he watched, a little amazed at his own sudden prowess, as Jerome tried to break free. Scott caught his other wrist and held him fast, and their eyes became locked in a mutual struggle of wills. But Scott began to push his weight forward until the balance of power finally shifted and his father lost his footing. The dictator was overthrown and fell backward into the mud.
He was howling in pain. At first Scott thought he was crying wolf but then he realised the disagreeable noise was genuine. He tried to lift him up but the rise in pitch and volume informed him that the pain was only being made worse, so he called for an ambulance. His father was taken to hospital. He did not go with him.
Instead, he stayed and looked after the farm and came to terms with the fact that his father was no longer his keeper. He could stand up to him now and this gave him confidence. He decided there and then that things would change. With his father gone, for the time being he could enjoy his freedom. Though he wished him no real harm, Scott couldn’t help but pray that he would not return for some considerable time.
He was back the following morning.
However, his father was somewhat sheepish. He was hobbling about on a walking stick and he didn’t say much.
Then the following day: ‘You think you’ve got the better of me, boy?’
Scott looked at him blankly. ‘Sorry, what?’
‘You heard. Your time will come, boy. Make no mistake about that.’
Scott retained a dignified silence even though he felt like punching his lights out. They both knew it was the last attempt by an ageing bully to get the upper hand. But Jerome’s threats were no longer effective. Scott was running the show now.
By the time Jerome was fully recovered, some three months later, the old accusations were in full flow. Even though he no longer needed it, the walking stick never left his side. Scott feared that the verbal abuse would degenerate into violence once more and that he was going to have to defend himself all over again. However, it soon became apparent that the stick was simply an excuse for his father to leave all the heavy work to him. Scott obliged, as he always had done – but only because he chose to. He was bigger and stronger than his father now and there were no consequences to fear anymore.
But there was little satisfaction in any of this and he began to wonder what life was like beyond the confines of the family business and his father’s rule of thumb. He hated himself for it, but his father still held a psychological control over him. Above all, he feared that in some small way Jerome was right about him. Scott had lost interest in the farm and as a result he no longer did much work. Now he seemed destined to become the person his father had always said he was – a layabout. He needed to escape. But where would I go? he wondered.
Scott remembered the fox that he had rescued from one of his father’s snares, and he imagined she was still out there somewhere. He knew how important it was to protect the hen coop from predators, but he had felt a compulsion to destroy not only that trap, but all of the traps that his father had laid. It seemed right somehow. A symbolic fantasy – breaking free of the constraints that his father had so tightly bound around him.
But I’ll never escape, he thought bleakly.
It was with that same bleak outlook that he welcomed the sun as it cast its warmth on his bare chest. Scott wondered what the day held for him. September was almost here again and autumn was coming. It was evident in the trees that were already beginning to change colour. But there was no dawn chorus – the birds were curiously silent today. He thought about his own silence. As dignified as it appeared, he knew that it was a warning that his father had won the long battle of wills between them. For all his desires had long since been beaten out of him and he was already exhausted by it all.
Chapter Nine
August 31st
Alice Smith was in the living room, reading her book, when she was startled by a loud thump from the hallway.
‘Good god, what was that?’ she exclaimed, throwing her volume on the sofa and stomping into the lobby to see what had happened. She looked around and saw nothing out of the ordinary. She opened the front door and stepped outside – nothing there either. It was warm and sunny but airless. And there was something else, something not quite right. She hummed nervously to herself as she padded around the exterior of the house, via the back garden and round to the front again. By the time she got to the garden gate she concluded that it would remain a mystery. Then she realised what was wrong.
It was as quiet as death.
She looked back at the house and her garden again, at the treetops and the bushes. No sign of life anywhere, save a few bees flitting in and out of her wilting carnations. She sighed, thinking that she should really get the place in order, use a watering can at least, if only she could find it. Mildly irritated, Alice turned her attention to the abandoned field below and the scarecrow that stood tilted at its centre. She decided to venture out a little further and opened the creaking gate. A short walk and she was near the edge of the steep hill, surrounded by yellow scented broom and looking out to the village and the sea beyond, which was calm, as blue as the sky above. Something caught her eye – a brief flash of light in the distance.
Someone opening a window and catching the sun, she thought.
She removed her cardigan, for the heat was prickly, uncomfortable. Eventually, she decided to go back indoors. She had just closed the gate, and was halfway up the garden path, when she saw something shaped like a paper fan lying on top of the flowerbeds, just in the shadow of the steps of the front door. She approached cautiously.
It was a dead seagull, its wings outstretched as if in parody of its own flight.
Alice groaned pityingly, and moved it with her slippered foot. She looked up to see blood and feathers smeared against the glass window above her front door. She thought back to the times when it had happened before. Living so high up and near the sea, it had become commonplace. She thought to bury it and turned to look for a good place to do so. It was then she noticed a mound of earth had already been dug out. There was something familiar about this, and the basket that lay beside it.
Another blackout, she thought, blinking confusedly, and went back indoors, wondering what she had done with that trowel.
Chapter Ten
September 1st
Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning…
Jerome could see the signs in the atmosphere. It was one of his late wife’s pet phrases, and one that reflected his foul mood, so it seemed particularly apt. His son was nowhere to be seen. Today of all days, he thought, his hands bunching into fists.
‘You throw me a gauntlet and you’ve got a fight on your hands, boy,’ he shouted.
Jerome felt sure it was no coincidence that the increase in hostilities happened to manifest itself on the first day of a new season, which they both knew meant more work. Exhaling heavily, he fished out a small bottle of whisky from his trouser pocket and gulped almost half of it down in one go. Coughing and hacking, he threw Scott’s uneaten breakfast into the bin, snatched his walking stick and hobbled out the back door, Bessie at his heel. It was already a close morning and this only accelerated his temper.
He looked around for any sign of his errant son. He bellowed his name and was answered with nothing but silence.
‘No change there then,’ he muttered, and spat on the ground before launching into his work: opening the barn to let the cows into the field, sweeping the floor and chopping firewood. He shepherded the sheep into their pen and pictured the look of defiance that was the cause of so much of his grief. Scott’s taciturnity seemed every bit as impenetrable as the reason behind it. Jerome sweated and toiled as the hours slowly passed and the sun reached its zenith. At the end of another laborious day he herded the cows back into the barn with his walking stick, Bessie doing her canine best to assist by circling round them and, with her master’s permission, barking out the occasional order of her own. He smiled sadly, wishing that he could inhabit her dog’s life for just a few moments – unclouded by grievance and ill temperament.
If only he could have been more like his late wife. Whenever he visualised their marriage it was almost always when they were having a heated debate about something – usually their son.
‘Moley? What kind of a name is that? Call him by his proper name for god’s sake,’ Jerome had snapped.
Elspeth looked up from her accounting, her buxom figure squeezed between the table and chair, watching him, reading glasses perched halfway down her nose.
‘Don’t you sit there and judge me,’ he warned.
‘He likes being called that,’ replied Elspeth calmly, and went back to her bookkeeping.
‘Well I don’t.’
‘It’s only a nickname. Hardly any worse than yours, Jerry.’
‘You know I won’t tolerate being called that,’ he barked, pointing his finger at her. ‘My proper name is Jerome. That’s French, after my father.’
‘He likes his nickname, Jerome. He invented it,’ she replied, eyes still fixed on her paperwork.
‘That’s what bothers me.’
‘It’s harmless. He likes digging for things. Like a wee mole, he is.’
Jerome snorted.
Elspeth stopped her work and removed her glasses. ‘Do you remember when he
came back with a fossil?’
‘That was no fossil.’
‘I know. But that’s not the point.’
Jerome raised his eyebrows expectantly.
‘Do you recall that he returned home all excited because he thought he’d found a rock with fossilised raindrops? Do you remember how excited he was?’
‘I do. Except it wasn’t fossilised bloody raindrops – it was a piece of concrete with holes in it.’
‘I know that,’ she said patiently, ‘but my point is that he was so enthusiastic about it. It was so sweet to see him like that, so happy.’
Jerome frowned in disapproval. ‘I feel you’re leading up to something here.’
Elspeth looked right at him and said, ‘He’s still a child, Jerome. Our child. Don’t work him so hard all the time. Give him some room to breathe.’
Jerome shook his head sadly. ‘That boy is in a world of his own. He doesn’t mix at school. Never seems interested in girls. Instead, he sits in the trees and watches birds. And he hides his thoughts with the expertise of a poker player.’
‘He gets that from us, Jerome. I mean, look at us. We live in the middle of nowhere. We’re all he’s got as role models.’
Maybe I’ve been too hard on him, Jerome thought as he shut the barn doors behind him and headed back home with Bessie. When Elspeth died I got it into my head that I needed to be twice the father. Maybe that’s the problem. I’ve pushed him too far, alienated him with my strict ways. Tact and diplomacy aren’t exactly my strong points and perhaps my temper has got the better of us both. He stopped and turned, gazing steadily into the forest. He knew Scott would be in there, idling his time away, while Jerome suffered.
The field isn’t going to be burned today, he thought bitterly, and took a long swig of whisky.