by Tim Pears
§
Flies and delirious mosquitoes gathered at the back of the barn. The sun didn’t move. Mother picked weeds from cracks in the concrete.
Half the herd in the farmyard had been destroyed: a patch of blood where each animal fell had spread out. The barn was gradually being rilled with a curious odour that sat with a metallic taste on my tongue. I watched Douglas intently: at the back door of the barn, before we lowered each corpse into the trailer, he selected a bistoury from the set of surgical instruments given to him on his fourteenth birthday. With the razor-sharp blade Douglas spilled the last residue of life from the animal, blood splattering his apron. I was mesmerized: Douglas had never changed, his bovine bulk, carrying the functional fat of farmers, was ageless, his black curly hair peppered lightly grey. I’d never heard him utter a sentence of more than four words, and we children had always avoided him as much as he had us. But now, watching him handle those instruments in his ham-like hands with an unbelievable delicacy and precision, despatching a herd of unfortunate cows as if in reality he was making some subtle improvement to their lives, I felt the urge to take one of his scalpels myself and cut through the lengths of bailer twine that tightened his buttonless jacket, to lean into the sweat-suffused shirts and the delicacy of those enormous hands.
Meanwhile, we’d strung up another limp and rickety cow and pulled it along the track to the back door. Douglas pressed two fingers against its throat, then bent over his bag of instruments and picked out a catling. He pulled taut the end of a length of twine that tumbled from his pocket and checked the sharpness of the blade. I stepped round the hanging carcass to stand beside him as he lifted the neat tool, almost lost in his fleshy fingers, to the animal’s neck.
I inhaled deeply his sweat, run so deep into the fabric of his clothes that it had lost its ammoniacal tang and become a tantalizing sweet scent: I wanted to bury my face in his firm barrel of flesh. Douglas made a deep incision on one side of the animal’s neck and drew the catling in a graceful curve across to the other side, cleanly slicing through the animal’s flesh. Most of the purple blood gurgled onto Douglas’s filthy apron, but I felt drops of it sprinkle over my face and eyelids. The metallic taste on my tongue grew heavy and filled my mouth, and I felt myself suffocating in the heavy odours that had replaced all the air in the barn. I turned and ran through the dense cloud of death, ignoring Tom’s command to come back, and swung the barn doors open.
The ten remaining cattle had been standing motionless, in a state of resignation, but as the barn doors groaned on their hinges and, coming into the fierce sunlight, I tried to wipe the blood from my eyelids, the herd was hit by the malodorous promise of extinction. All at once they began turning and lowing, and pawing the ground.
“Close in on ‘em!” shouted Ian, but within seconds their shapes were lost in a vortex of dust. We were all forced back, choking. Tom came running out of the barn and up to Ian, who held a handkerchief over his mouth and was stepping indecisively back and forth.
“Drop back, drop back,” Tom told him. The dogs were already alert, and at his whistle they flew forward, round the whirlwind in the middle of the yard, and to his feet. He stationed the dogs and members of his family in a wide circle around the cows, and watched anxiously, as we waited for them to calm down.
§
Douglas took advantage of the respite to sharpen his instruments. The flurry of resistance outside didn’t bother him: he was a patient man. Usually he brought along his own animal, a spindly, ageless cow, to lead the others through, but he’d figured that the sun would have squeezed all courage from the cattle, or that even if they sensed the danger they might gladly relinquish their tormented existence. He’d reckoned without a lablolly girl.
He sharpened a bistoury with a tiny file, too small even for a woman’s nails. He rarely did such work nowadays, most farmers becoming fearful of the law and taking their animals to the shambles at Longdown. Sometimes, though, he’d set out his instruments on the kitchen table and bring up their edge, just for the pleasure of working them down along an infinite line of degrees of sharpness. “You wants to get the atoms on the edge dancin’ single-file,” his father had told him. Blunt knives he found infuriating and more than once, as a child, he’d grabbed one from his mother’s hand as she sliced vegetables or chopped meat, and taken it off to sharpen its blade.
Filing his scalpels by Mike Howard’s trailer, the carcasses giving off in the hot sun a faint, gamey aroma whilst a dark stain spread slowly out across the floor of the barn, Douglas felt himself, as he did every time, the executioner not just of these few cattle on our farm but of all the animals he’d ever slaughtered: his life arranged itself about those occasions, and concertinaed in upon them, accumulating them all in the present moment. He remembered the Sunday ferreting expeditions with his father, rabbits bounding from their holes and slamming up against an invisible wall as he pulled the trigger of his Mauser; he remembered all the Saturday mornings his mother had asked him to bring a chicken in, and how by the time he’d reached double figures he could break their scrawny necks with an imperceptible twist of two fingers, so that as he held them by their feet and they flapped a desperate farewell to existence other children already began to keep their distance; he remembered every unwanted litter of mongrels that the squeamish newcomers asked him to dispose of, and which he would take home in a feedbag over his shoulder, stun with one swing of a club and drop into a bucket of water; and finally, always last even though by now it had happened over twenty-five years before, he remembered that unconscionable winter when he was hired to slaughter the peacocks, on the 14th Viscount’s estate, that were eating up the hibernating vegetation. He remembered through his impenetrable silence the screeching uttered from their windpipes when he sliced off their necks, and he remembered, with a pain that squeezed his insides, Maria, the gypsy-like kitchen maid for whom he’d opened a gash on his hand, and who after love chattered to him in her native Portuguese and made him laugh.
At that moment Maria was standing on the rectory verandah, looking across the village at the spiral of dust rising from our farmyard: she’d stepped outside when she felt her eyes unaccountably moisten, and she was stung with pity for other people’s sons and daughters. She became aware of a metallic taste on her tongue and tried to spit it out, but it stayed. Then she saw the cyclone of dust lifting.
“What the ‘ell’s this?” cried Ian, as a gap appeared between the bottom of the swirling cloud and the ground.
“Buggered if I know,” said Tom.
The cloud continued to rise, until it was so far off the ground that the dogs ran across the yard beneath it, and Daddy bent forward and followed them.
Mother caught him on the other side just as the animals’ hooves appeared from the bottom of the cloud, and gradually more and more of their bodies came into view as they slowly floated back down to the ground. Above them the cloud continued to rise but, deprived of its bovine dynamo, it was losing its spiral shape and cohesion, the particles gradually scattering across the sky.
The cattle were drenched in a sticky sweat to which dust had adhered, and their eyes were once more dull and lifeless. Then Tom suddenly exclaimed: “But there’s only nine of the buggers!” We all looked up at the high, dispersing cloud, and each wondered whether we could really believe what we thought we saw in the chaotic atoms of dust: the faintest suggestion of the skeletal frame of one fleshless old cow. And although Ian swore us all to secrecy, for fear of incurring the ridicule of the other farming families, people would tell their children, years later, of the time when knots of toads spent all summer searching for their stolen ponds and a cow floated over the village.
§
Mother helped Tom with the rest of the herd. I sat on an overturned drum and leaned back against the wall of the barn, eyes closed. The blood on my face and clothes had coagulated, clotted by the dry sun into faint crimson splotches, and the confusion I’d felt prickle throughout my body was now breaking out through my skin
.
Ian still looked uncomfortable. He went into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later rolling a cigarette between his thumbs and forefingers. Daddy was there by the door: he fixed his gaze on the cigarette as Ian walked up to him, amazed that not a whisker of tobacco was dropped. Ian licked the sticky edge of the paper and rolled it tight.
“What’s the matter, Dad?” he asked.
Daddy thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he replied. Their voices carried across the farmyard as if across a room.
“Well, Dad, I tell you. I’ve just made the best, or the bloody worst, decision of my life,” said Ian, glad to be able to unburden his conscience to someone who’d then forget it. “I’ve ‘ad the most part of our ‘erd killed so’s us can plough up for grain and get they subsidies. If I’d left it another day grandfather would never have allowed it: cos this summer’s comin’ to an end. And I knew it. The air’s all heavy.”
He was right. What Ian had calculated through the long, dehydrated nights for weeks past, weighing up the endlessly variable permutations of livestock, bales of hay, acres of field, tonnes of grain and guaranteed money, of a grandfather’s conservatism, a mother’s sentiment, the envy of uncles and the likelihood of rain, calculated with the fearful analysis of a chess player who knows that despite his most thorough concentration and computation there always lies just beyond the extent of his reason, in the infinity of permutations, the move that will beat him; what Ian had calculated seemed to have come true with eerily perfect timing.
The desiccated air filled up with moisture like a sponge. Darkness fell. Daddy, sitting outside with the dogs, was making a fist with his hand, as if under the illusion that he’d be able to squeeze water out of the very air, when Mike Howard appeared out of the dusk. Ian and Tom came out to join him, and the three of them walked round the back of the barn. We heard the tractor splutter into life and the trailer bumping into the lane, but they didn’t use any headlights.
§
A single dry crackle of thunder ricocheted across the sky.
Mother took the sheets in off the line; dried up flowers opened their petals like mouths to catch the impending rain; it was so humid our clothes slid around our skins, the air was heavy and oppressive, and the sun set leaving trails of indigo and yellow along the horizon; the Honeywills put their donkey in the garage because it didn’t like lightning, and newcomers’ dogs hid under the sofas; the Rector set an old watering-can in the middle of the floor of the largest empty bedroom; deer whose thirst had brought them out into the open retreated back into the forest; Corporal Alcock called for ringers to meet in the belfry ready to peal the bells when the thunderstorm started; birds stopped singing and flies stopped buzzing and there was an eerie silence as the world held its breath.
Ian and Tom came home grinning and opened a bottle of Calvados, and they poured everyone a glass. It burned my throat. Then grandfather walked slowly into the yard, smoking his pipe, and we stopped laughing. He ignored us and went straight inside, but we heard him tell grandmother: “Howards’ cows is lying down in their field: ‘tis going to rain tonight,” before carrying on upstairs to bed.
That was enough for me. I ran off with Daddy so we could stand under the rain together when it came, any minute now, that was for sure, and we skipped up to the Brown, excited as everyone else in the village.
And we were all wrong.
TWENTY-FIVE
Dust
The certainty felt by people, plants and animals of the imminence of rain was no more than a dream, a nocturnal illusion caused by something we ate, perhaps the yoghurt that no one liked but mother made to use up the spoiled milk, or possibly the hens’ eggs that left an aftertaste of onions. Perhaps it was caused by the same piskies who in grandmother’s day brought heather honey down from the moor and spread it on the underside of bedsteads, just to make people’s mouths water as they slept. But it must have been an illusion, because we were woken as usual by the cockerel’s crowing and rushed to our windows, thrilled by the prospect of rain, only to be greeted by the same slow infusion of blue into the sky, the same tentative breath of dew on the newcomers’ lawns that vanished beneath one’s gaze, and the chickens in our farmyard pecking in the same dust.
§
The disappointment was palpable: everyone shared grandfather’s foul early morning mood, except that no amount of tea would dispel it. Ian was muttering about some dog that was chasing sheep, and that night a number of the hippies’ truck windows were shattered by stones that came out of the darkness. But it didn’t last long. People just began to lose hope, because they thought things would never change. The combe in which the village was set had become a cauldron, and like a dish stewed too long people’s feelings evaporated. Only Tom found any consolation, as he realized that Susanna had simply been the first to suffer and that her apathy towards him wasn’t personal after all. He no longer found it painful to watch her riding her pony endlessly across sad pastures as if lost, and he held her languid hand in his with patient pity. In a way he was happier and more in love than ever, as they spent the whole afternoon lost on the sofa, moving as if under water.
Animals were no better off than people: the dogs slunk along the sides of the buildings, staying in the shadows; the chickens started laying perfectly good eggs in semi-transparent, soft shells that were more like skin. I took one up to grandmother, who’d decided to stay in bed for the day, for her to feel too, but she said it made her uncomfortable, and I told her about the illness that was sapping people’s feelings. She wanted to know the symptoms.
“Do it begin with a sense of foreboding?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Do people feel a dead weight in the stomach?”
“Like a melon—”
I wasn’t able to get any further before grandmother interrupted me, alarmed, her milky eyes open wide.
“I knew it!” she exclaimed. “‘Tis the return of the sweating sickness. I knew it when I felt the dust in my nostrils.”
I suppose mother must have overheard. When I came out of grandmother’s room she’d already started sweeping up the cobwebby dust that settled on surfaces when no one was looking. She worked methodically through the house, sweeping the dust into a pan with a soft brush, moving quietly and slowly so as not to unsettle the dust before she could catch it, and filling three bin-liners. But the next morning there was a new layer covering the furniture in all the rooms, so she started again. This ridiculous activity was no defence against the indifference that had infiltrated the village, but at least it gave mother herself a few days’ respite, as the dust that settled invisibly as soon as she’d swept it away so infuriated her that her desire to outfight it became an implacable obsession, which soon spread to other aspects of cleanliness. She polished the windows so fervently that swallows stunned themselves against the shiny glass and one night a barn owl broke clean through a window pane. We noticed him at breakfast the next morning, sitting stock still on the clothes rail above the stove and scrutinizing us with melancholy eyes.
That seemed to puncture mother’s delusion, and she ceased caring about the indefatigable piskies of the dust. Pamela, too, succumbed. I drove with her to the clinic at Chudleigh to make sure she didn’t fall asleep at the wheel when she went to get a sick note. Dr Buckle said it was glandular fever and prepared an injection. As the needle sank into her arm and the useless medicine entered her blood Pamela simply smiled at him, and I knew that it was getting late.
It was then that the hippies left, not because they were intimidated, since people’s hostility had evaporated, but because they were worried that the indifference would confuse the effect of their Moroccan hashish. They almost left behind one of their number, a bearded giant of a man who had trodden softly across the farmyard to see if we could sell him some eggs for the journey and somehow ended up at grandmother’s bedside. He stayed for hours. I went to tell him his friends were leaving.
“That’s not a real aura, Nicholas,” she was tel
ling him, “‘tis only static.”
“No, man, that’s where you’re wrong,” he replied softly. “It’s the blue electric membrane.”
He stood up and bent over to kiss her goodbye before he left, dwarfing her. She looked like a precocious child because she still wore spectacles, more out of her old habit of trying to fool people that she could see than because they helped her focus. We’d had to tell her that they were steaming up, and Dr Buckle had diagnosed glaucoma: “If she doesn’t have this extremely minor operation,” he told grandfather, “there’ll be a build-up of pressure behind the eye until it pops.”
“What’s the use?” she complained. “‘Tis like cuttin’ the toenails of an amputated leg.” In the end she’d relented: the ophthalmologist made a slight incision, and fluid spurted out, and for days she’d had to hold cotton wool swabs to her eyes. We couldn’t work out where all the fluid was coming from.
§
Just as at first the exertion of love had kept Tom in bed in the mornings, so too did the languor of indifference, and it wasn’t long before Ian caught it off him, spending more and more of the day dozing in his room. He was able to keep a tenuous grip on reality only in the middle of the night, when the heat was just bearably stultifying, by exerting his ferocious concentration on endless games of chess against his computer. Pamela, on the other hand, wasn’t bothered about missed rehearsals, and strangers appeared in the farmyard on motorbikes and in Mini cars to ask after her. Daddy chatted to them until they became confused and drove away.