by Tom Bullough
Layla Fricker was Tara’s best friend from when she was at school – long before Robin and Martin were born, long before Tara and Adam had even met. Together they had gone on family holidays to the Côte d’Azur, almost been expelled and grown their hair until they could sit on it. They had been all the way to India on the back of a lorry with a group of German musicians, had played concerts in the desert there, learnt how to eat fire, and danced around with long, swirling bits of cloth. Some of these were still in the cupboard under the stairs, and Tara would drag them out from time to time, when they were having a party.
The Frickers shared a large, half-timbered farmhouse in Llanddewi-Brefi with a pair of other families whose names Robin didn’t know. So Klaus and Cloud, the Fricker children, lived with lots of other boys and girls, who were a bit like their brothers and sisters. Layla and Mike and the other parents had a special room in the barns across the yard that they used as a classroom, and they all took turns as teachers because they didn’t like the local school. They had three huge tepees in the garden and a vegetable patch so big that it supplied them all the whole year round. But Adam had once said that the only reason any of them had moved to Llanddewi-Brefi in the first place was because it had a pretty name.
“Tara?” said Robin finally, unable to bear the silence any longer. “Can we get down now? Please?”
Tara started and turned round. She went to arrange her hair, noticed that she was still wearing her rubber gloves and peeled them off.
“Yes,” she said. “Sorry, boys. Yes, of course… Sorry, I was miles away. We had a bit of a late night last night, I’m afraid.”
“Aren’t Klaus and Cloud awake yet?” asked Robin.
“No,” said Tara. “No, I think they’re still asleep.”
“Tara?” said Martin.
“Can I show them the ponds later on?” asked Robin.
“Yes, I expect so.”
“Can we go up Cold Winter?”
“Tara? Why are you wearing that funny coat?”
“Look,” said Tara. She looked so exhausted suddenly that both Robin and Martin fell instantly silent, terrified that she might shout at them. “I’ve got a lot of things to do in here, okay? So why don’t the two of you go outside and play for a bit? Okay? Go and play with the skulls or something.”
* * *
A few weeks earlier, Martin had found a sheep skull. At the time the boys and Tara were on the way to see Mrs Hughes – a very old lady who lived with her son Bill Llanoley across the valley, and who had recently taken to inviting Tara around every time that Bill left the farm. The skull was in a state of some decomposition, and something had been gnawing on it, but Martin became attached to it immediately and carried it all the way back to the farm, where he sat it on the wall beside the woodshed.
Over the following days, he located half a dozen other sheep skulls, as well as two intact chicken skulls, which the cats had been picking at in the straw on the floor of the barn. Then, while he and Robin were making dens in the hayloft, pushing over stacks of bales, they came across an entire nest of kittens, abandoned by the mother and containing seven complete skeletons with bits of skin and fur still clinging onto them. These Robin was all for leaving well alone, but Martin insisted on gathering them up, and arranged them in a group beside the skulls – the bank in front of them thick with snowdrops and the swollen yellow heads of daffodils.
A minute or two after the boys arrived outside, Adam appeared in the field below the larch wood, his cap pulled down firmly against the wind. The slope was gradual, so it was a few moments before they could see his whole face – his cheeks pale with stubble and the lines prominent around his eyes – then his tattered coat, his mud-spattered jeans and wellies and, finally, the dogs, who were padding along behind him, their eyes on the ground and their expressions distinctly nervous.
“Your mother inside?” Adam grunted, as he opened the gate. The two of them nodded and greeted the dogs, fussing over them while Adam approached the kitchen window, one of his wellies sucking wetly on his foot, cupping his hands against the reflections of the trees and the sky.
“Tara?” he said. “Could you help me a moment, please?”
“What’s happened?” she asked.
“The Fordson’s in the fucking bog,” he said. “I’ll need you to drive the other tractor.”
Tara sighed and lifted a sheet from the sink, twisting it so that water poured from the middle. She plumped it on the draining board and pulled her rubber gloves off again, rolling down the sleeves of her long, peculiar coat, which, from where Robin was standing, made her seem fuzzy round the edges.
“Those friends of yours up yet?” he said.
“It’s a Saturday morning,” said Tara. “What the fuck do you think?”
* * *
The Fordson Major had been on the farm since the Second World War. It was big and tough as an old dog, with none of the modern tractor fripperies like cabs or speedometers to complicate matters. It had a pulley on the side which you could connect to a saw or a swede-crusher, red wheels, blue bodywork, and headlights which stuck out from either side of its radiator like a pair of protruding eyes.
When Robin, Tara and Martin arrived among the winter-brown rushes at the edge of the bog, the Fordson’s back wheels were sunk most of the way to the axles in the sodden ground and its nose was lurching upwards like it was gasping for air. Adam stopped the smaller tractor – an old Ferguson – half a dozen yards from the Fordson, flipped away the throttle lever and fastened a chain to its back. Tara towed the heavy chain to the front of the Fordson, looking no more cheerful than she had done in the kitchen, then she removed her coat and hung it on the nearest hazel, where it swayed and fluttered among the catkins.
So far as Robin was aware, Adam had never got a tractor stuck before in his life. Adam was such a good driver that people from as far away as Crug and Bleddfa had phoned him to help them extract their machine from a pond, or to remove it from the edge of a dingle, where it was trapped in such a way that all four of its wheels were isolated from the ground.
“The ground’s completely waterlogged,” said Adam, as they conferred in the space between the two tractors. “If you could just take up the slack as gently as you can? I’ll disconnect the feeder… It’s worth a shot. You never know.”
“Stand right back, boys,” Tara called. “If the chain comes loose or anything, it can be very, very dangerous.” She twisted her hair up into a bun, pinning it in place with a pencil. “Okay?”
The two of them stood on adjacent tufts of reeds about halfway across the bog, Martin sucking his thumb, watching as the chain began to lift from the ground. Tara was looking over her shoulder, her eyes on the chain, her right hand working the throttle. Behind her, Adam was hunched on his cushion of fertiliser bags – his posture precisely as it was when he was playing the piano – his eyes shifting from the Fordson’s few instruments to the wheels beneath him, to the chain, to the Ferguson, his hands on the throttle lever and the steering wheel, his feet hovering beside the brakes and the clutch.
As the chain began to pull, the Fordson surged against the bank in front of it, roared, poured smoke from its chimney, rolled back and surged forwards again, an arc of mud spitting into the air behind it. For a moment, it was working so furiously that it seemed it would have to escape, but then Adam was signalling with his hand, falling back in his seat, and Tara reversed slowly until the chain was lying back on the ground.
“Adam!” she was saying as the boys came running up. “For Christ’s sake! We went over all this last night! Layla and Mike are leaving this afternoon! We were going to take this one morning off!”
“I’m sorry, Tara,” Adam shrugged. “What can I do? I mean, we can’t leave the damn thing here, can we?”
* * *
Left to themselves for half an hour, Robin and Martin discovered that the various pools and puddles in the bog were at different levels, and that with some careful footwork it was possible to channel one into a
nother. They built an impressive, semicircular dam between a pair of tussocks, then flooded an entire ocean behind it, complete with islands and cliffs, treacherous sandbanks and ports full of steep, winding streets and gloomy inns where pirates sat around plotting and brave young boys were abducted into lives at sea. They had just launched a pair of sticks by way of ships when they heard the sputter of another tractor in the field behind them and Bill Llanoley arrived in the gateway, stopping to greet Adam and Tara.
Bill was by far their friendliest neighbour. He talked to everyone with exactly the same wide-open grin, exposing teeth that were either smashed, black or missing altogether. The day that Tara returned from the hospital with Martin, he had been up on Offa’s Bank, looking for a missing ewe. He had walked nearly five miles to see the baby, giving them a four-leaved clover that he found on the way, before turning around and walking all the way back again.
“That’s a hell of a hole you got him in there, boys,” said Bill, grinning at Robin and Martin. “Much deeper, and that’s the last you’ll see of the old Fordson!”
The dogs were smelling one another’s bottoms.
“The ground’s completely waterlogged,” said Robin.
“Weather’s been bloody murder,” Bill agreed, shaking his head. “Mother’s sitting in a puddle in the kitchen at home, and she’s none too pleased about it, I’ll tell you that much!”
Martin giggled and Bill grinned back, revealing a mangled wisdom tooth, then he hoisted his trousers up through the baler twine round his waist, and set about connecting his John Deere to the front of the Ferguson.
By the time that the Frickers arrived, the Fordson had sunk as far as its back axle, and both the Ferguson and the John Deere were chained into a line – spattered with mud and stuck inextricably. On the downwind side of the John Deere, Bill and Adam were puffing on their pipes, trying to work out what to do next through the rumble of the engines and the clatter of the chimney-caps.
“You just got to put up with Philip Tolland,” Bill was saying, thoughtfully. “I tell you… We used to be mates when we was kids, and he was a miserly devil back then and all. Mother was mates with old Mrs Tolland, look. They was mates right up to the time she died, and that must have been ten years ago if it’s a day.”
“They say it was a tidy place, Werndunvan,” said Adam. “Once upon a time.”
“Once upon a time, ar,” Bill nodded. “When I was a kid, old Robert was still running things. They was still living in them same four rooms, but he ment all the holes in the hedges, and he’d got some lovely stock over there, he had. Got some Friesians. Got some ’erefords…” He whistled, shaking his head. “But even with the old girl scrattin’ on, there was still only me and John the Glyn who was talking to him, that’s how much he’d pissed us all off! Philip wouldn’t marry till his mother had gone, look! Didn’t care how old Dora got… Wouldn’t give her the bloody pleasure!”
In appearance, Bill and the Frickers could hardly have been more different. They could easily have belonged to different species. Where Bill wore a mud-grey jacket with matching boots and trousers, Mike had on a diaphanous shirt and velvet bell-bottoms – both in brilliant colours, regardless of whether he was about to get mud all over them – while Layla wore a bright red dress that reached the whole way down to the ground. Where Bill had short, neatly cropped hair beneath his cap, all of the Frickers had dark hair falling past their shoulders – and Layla and Cloud could both conceal their bottoms completely. They also had entire mouthfuls of teeth.
“Do you want to see our ocean?” Martin asked Klaus and Cloud, as the two groups met.
“What ocean?” said Klaus.
“The ocean we’re building…” Martin started.
“Let’s go and see the hollow tree!” said Robin, quickly. “There’s a hollow tree in the wood past the ponds, and you can get right into its middle!”
Klaus was a good couple of years older than Robin and several times more knowledgeable. Like his sister Cloud, he looked at the tractors in a way that suggested that he could have resolved the problem in a moment, if only someone had thought to ask him. He had an earring without looking like a girl, and because Layla was half-Egyptian he had a kind of piratical look about him, which Robin found both admirable and mysterious.
Sitting on the chain between the Ferguson and the Fordson, Tara and Layla were swinging and balancing with their arms. They were looking at their feet, talking in a thoughtful kind of way, and Tara seemed a good deal more relaxed than she had been over breakfast.
“I don’t know, Layl,” she was saying. She was wearing her hairy coat again. “I do still write the odd poem in my diary. But… I like to have something that’s just for me, do you know what I mean? Especially when everything’s public property, the way it is round here.”
“But they’re good!” Layla insisted. “You know they are! I mean, I could recite a couple of them just off the top of my head. They’re really vivid, you know… They’ve got a real sense of life.”
“Tara?” Robin asked nervously. “Can we go and see the hollow tree, please?”
“Oh, Robbo,” said Tara. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Doing what?” said Robin.
“Tara?” said Martin. “I’ve got water in my welly.”
“Tara!” called Adam above the noise of the tractors. “Me and Bill are going to have to go round Werndunvan, I’m afraid. See if we can’t get Philip over with that new tractor of his.”
Rain was spreading up the valley from the south – hissing in the hedgerows, throwing a pall across the house and the fields around it. At first, the circles were isolated in the pools of the bog, their little waves spreading away down the channels and the inlets of Robin and Martin’s miniature ocean. But then it was raining harder and the circles began to overlap, becoming teeming patterns, the raindrops leaping upwards from the surface as they fell, falling again to leave a second perfect ring inside the first.
“Well,” Tara swung Martin up onto her hip, removing his boot and emptying it into the grass. She sighed and turned to Adam. “It looks like I’m going to have to go and change Martin’s socks anyway, so I suppose I’d better come back up with you.”
* * *
Philip’s red Mercedes tractor turned off the track from Werndunvan just as the rain was beginning to ease. You could see the hawthorns clearly now on the hard, bare hillside and the huge machine rose up through a space between the trees and plunged down the slope with total confidence, a couple of dogs as outriders, running just to remain alongside.
Robin started running himself when he saw it, as did Klaus, Cloud and Martin, leaving the wood where they had been discussing the idea of a tree house with a drawbridge. They jumped the puddles of the bog, leaping from grass to reeds, moving so fast that it was impossible to think more than a step in front of them, mud spurting up from their wellies, following the strange, winding paths that the solid ground happened to present.
Adam was opening the gate into the bog-field when Robin, Cloud and Klaus arrived breathlessly beside him and the Mercedes made its grand entrance: the biggest talking point at school for the past week, the only tractor of its kind in the whole of Wales. It was twice the size of Adam’s blue truck, with no trace of rust on the whole of its body, and all four of its wheels were bigger and fatter than even the back wheels of the Fordson Major.
“Cool!” said Cloud.
Philip descended the steps with all the pomp of a king. He looked across the crowd at Bill and Adam, at Mike leaning against the Ferguson with his drooping black moustache and a long, thin cigarette hanging from his lips, at Tara, Layla and their gawping children, and for a moment he seemed to be about to make a speech. But there was little you could add to such a tractor that it didn’t say already – the great black bars across its radiator, the two-inch tread of the tyres, the scowling expression of the headlights – and Philip contented himself with a few grunts and nods.
“Adam,” he muttered. “Bill.” He surveyed t
he line of chained-up tractors. “Bit of a spot you got yourselves into here, eh?”
“Ar,” Adam nodded, his hands pushed firmly into the pockets of his jeans. “It is that. Good of you to come over, Philip. We were running out of ideas, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Well, here’s a few ideas for you, anyhow!” Philip chuckled, patting a giant tyre. “Six cylinder turbo, four-wheel drive… Only come over from Germany last fucking week, she did!”
He took his pipe from the pocket of his jacket, packed it with tobacco from a ragged-looking pouch and lit it with a few brisk puffs. Coughing thickly, he walked round to the back of the tractor, cursing the sheepdogs milling beneath his feet, and began to root through the fencing wire, hay bales, sledgehammers, sheep-lick and old fertiliser bags that he had already managed to assemble. He came back carrying a chain of huge proportions and propelling Andrew out onto the open grass, where he stood frozen for a moment, staring wildly at the waves of faces in front of him.
Up until a year earlier, Robin had been subject to seizures whenever he was startled. If a car horn went off unexpectedly, someone broke a plate or even knocked on the door, he would go rigid, his eyes would roll back into his head and he would wet himself and collapse. Afterwards, he could never remember anything about it, which sometimes made him think that it hadn’t really happened at all, but when he saw the look in Andrew’s eyes he remembered suddenly the sick, empty terror that had preceded the feeling of dizziness. It made him think of a night when someone had turned off the light on the landing and he had thought that he was blind, of a day when they had been to Jim Garraway’s down in the village, where the sheep had been waiting for slaughter – knowing their own deaths from the smells of fear and blood coming from the door in front of them.
“Who is that?” hissed Cloud.
“Andrew,” said Robin, faintly.
“He looks like an animal!” said Cloud.
“He looks like he stinks!” Klaus added.