The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  Andrew had dirt smeared on his face, his flat cap spilt backwards onto his shoulders, his huge jacket flapped around his knees and his head was twisted down and to the right, as if he was peering into his armpit. Several yards away, Tara was sitting on the chain, but she stood up almost as soon as Andrew appeared, moving carefully among the puddles until she could almost have reached out and touched him – when she stopped and crouched down slowly, smiling, talking in a voice that was lost in the thunder of the tractors.

  Beyond them, Philip had climbed back up into the cab of the Mercedes and was turning it around, joining the end of the line, where Adam and Bill attached the chain to the John Deere. As Adam paced around the Fordson, kicking mud from the encrusted tyres, Tara allowed one of her hands to hang forward, invitingly, and by the time that Robin looked back at them she was holding Andrew’s hand, walking him towards the patch of dry ground where he and the three other children were standing in an awkward cluster.

  “Andrew,” said Tara, as they arrived. “This is Klaus and this is Cloud…”

  Klaus looked wary, one hand fiddling with the collar of his velvet jacket, while Cloud sucked a bunch of her hair, kneading a rag which she took from the pocket of her rainbow-coloured coat.

  “And these are Robin and Martin,” Tara continued. She caught Robin’s eye, and held it for a moment. “Who you know already… I was thinking that perhaps you could all watch the tractors together. And maybe afterwards you could show Andrew what you’ve been doing with the puddles, boys?”

  “Okay, Tara,” said Robin, tortured with embarrassment.

  “Good boy,” said Tara.

  Andrew kept his head in the same, twisted position, but his eyes moved steadily, following Tara as she walked back through the mud and the puddles towards the old grey Ferguson, climbed back up onto the wet metal seat, pressed down the clutch and forced it into gear.

  Beside the Mercedes, the other, mud-spattered tractors looked tired, cheap and fragile. The mighty engine blew signals of black smoke from its chimney. Philip, Bill, Tara and Adam swapped signals, and then, with a bellow, the huge treads sank into the ground, the first chain began to lift and, spluttering, the John Deere rolled forwards. At the same time, the chain behind it was tightening and, in turn, the Ferguson was prised out with little more than a lurch. Half-buried in the marshy ground, the Fordson was a more difficult proposition, but its own chain to the Ferguson was pretty much tight already, and the Mercedes continued to move relentlessly forwards. A balloon of oily smoke rose from the chimney, the noise of the engine growing into a roar, and the Fordson popped suddenly from its hole, filthy, its limbs loose and frail like an old man’s.

  On their patch of dry ground, Klaus and Cloud had moved a little way away now, and were talking to one another too quietly for Robin to hear. From the gaggle of sheepdogs, a collie with a white face and a wolfish look about it came up to Andrew and prodded him firmly in the chest with its nose. His shoulders slumped forwards, his head still pressed towards his armpit, Andrew was peering almost directly into the dog’s tawny eyes, and he fell to stroking it at once, murmuring something, checking on Tara as she detached the chains from the front and the back of the Ferguson. Unsure what else to do, Robin ran his hands along the dog’s back, as did Martin, who was soon scratching the hair behind its ears until it was grumbling with pleasure.

  “No!” said Cloud, through the falling noise of the tractors. She put her hands to her mouth. “Not really?!”

  “Oh, yes!” said Klaus. “That’s a werewolf, alright! I’d know one anywhere!”

  * * *

  The pond at Werndunvan was at the bottom of the hill, between the fields and the forestry, the big dark hills to the west concealed here by the lines of the pines. It was raining again, but then it was always raining. The only difference was that there was no wind to speak of, so the rain fell straight, flattening the thin grass and running through the holes in Philip’s raincoat.

  There were, of course, circles on the pond, but Philip barely noticed them. He barely noticed the stench of his clothes, or even the heavy sack in his hands. He had, after all, known only these things for the past fifty years. He didn’t need to notice the bloody forestry, or that it was bloody raining again, as it was always bloody raining. On the farm, he knew everything important already. The pond was important because it gave the stock somewhere to drink, because the occasional idiot gave him money to fish there, because it was a back-up in the extremely unlikely event of the water supply running out. The forestry was beyond his fence, so it wasn’t his concern, except to filch a few Christmas trees once a year, to make a few quid.

  Back up in the yard, the dogs had started barking, which meant that the man from the Ministry had arrived to talk about the grant for Philip’s new shed – his smart new shed, with its arching metal roof, its tidy oak weather-boarding keeping out the snow in the winter and the rain all of the rest of the year.

  Philip secured the knot on the top of the sack, ignoring the squirming of the puppies inside, and threw it out firmly into the rain. He watched the splash, then hunched his coat up further around his neck. The circle it made was bigger than the others on the pond’s surface, but it was lost soon enough in the general turmoil.

  “One thing we don’t need”, he mumbled, as he turned back up the hill towards the yard, “is more fucking dogs.”

  By the time that he reached the yard, he had forgotten all about the puppies, and his attention was fixed on the pale green Vauxhall Cavalier parked against the barn, a couple of the dogs circling it suspiciously, barking in bursts, while Meg wandered anxiously through the mud a little way further up the hill, her teats swaying heavily beneath her. The windows of the car were steamed up, but Philip could just make out the shape of a man inside, decanting himself a cup of coffee from a Thermos flask.

  The thought crossed Philip’s mind of hammering on the window and seeing if he could get the man to scald himself, but he quickly thought better of it.

  “Ah!” The man scrambled from the car, pulling up the hood of his anorak. “You must be Mr Tolland?”

  Philip disliked him instantly, his tie and checked shirt and spotless wellingtons. He was the sort that normally he would expel without even allowing him to speak. But he was determined to keep himself under control today, so he contented himself with the involuntary wince that crossed the man’s face when he smelt him and the barns around them.

  “Ar,” said Philip, scowling through the rain.

  “My name’s Davies,” said the man, and smiled. “Dave Davies.”

  Philip continued to scowl at him.

  “I understand…” said the man, glancing up the yard at Andrew, who was on his hands and feet, worming through the rubbish piled against the barn walls. “I understand that you are interested in planning permission for a new shed… I’m from the Ministry of Agriculture, you see.”

  “S’right,” said Philip, and set off without warning towards the corner of the barn and the yard gate, allowing the man to hurry along behind him.

  “That your son there, is it?” said the man, trying to sound friendly.

  “Ar,” said Philip.

  “At the school down in the village, is he?” asked the man. “Nice little place, that. I had a niece there a few years back…”

  Philip stopped at the derelict area behind the barns, where there was a long, deep trough cut into the ground for a sheep-dip.

  “Well,” said the man, managing a smile. “At least there’s no doubt where you’d put the shed, eh!”

  Philip paused, cold water running down his neck, into the groove of his spine, down into the back of his trousers. He felt a wave of fury that he could scarcely control, and for a second or two it was all he could do not to turn round and throttle the man.

  Beyond the barns, through the noise of the pissing rain, he could hear Meg whimpering, the sound growing occasionally into barks – a second voice barking along, which irritated him more than ever.

  “No, no,
” said Philip, squeezing out the words. “This ain’t the place here.”

  “Well… Where then?”

  Hearing the incomprehension in the man’s voice, Philip felt immediately better, although it didn’t solve the problem of where he was now going to put the shed. He looked around him, at the present row of barns facing the house, the small shed at the bottom of the yard, then at the hillside sloping away beneath them towards the pond and the rain-scratched forestry.

  “Just down there,” he said. “Down on the slope there.”

  He pointed at the nearest field, with its streaming water and its cowering ewes.

  “What do you mean, ‘there’?” said the man, now thoroughly baffled. “Surely…”

  “No, no,” said Philip, warming to the idea. “That’s the place for him, on the slope there.”

  “But that’s twenty-five, thirty degrees!” said the man. “You’d have to dig out the whole hillside! You’d need bulldozers, earth-moving equipment, drainage… You’d be cutting into the bedrock!”

  “That’s the place,” repeated Philip belligerently.

  Beside him, the Ministry man looked deflated. Behind the barn, Meg and Andrew finally stopped their search for the missing puppies and joined their voices in a long, empty howl. The man produced a small pad of paper and, leaning forward to shield it from the rain, began to make a few notes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GROWLING AND WAILING

  That day Adam delivered seventeen lambs. Skinny creatures with umbilical cords trailing beneath them, they pulled themselves up onto trembling legs and stared around at the great dark shed, the couple of light bulbs on poles between the hurdles, the hulking figure of Adam beside them washing yellow slime from his arm in a plastic bucket. Then – or so you would have had to assume – they saw a second hulking form and forgot everything else that they’d just been witness to, subject to a sudden, fantastic urge to absorb its warmth, to suckle for as long as they were able to, then to lie down, close their eyes and return promptly to wherever they’d just come from.

  Turning off the tap, Adam rolled the sleeve of his shirt, then his jumper, back down, shivering in the draught that came beneath the big doors, between the weatherboards, and out through the old barns behind him. Around him, expectant ewes were gathered in groups, in alleys of pens, stirring and scrunching on hay. In the roof above the hayloft, bantams were dozing on beams fat with generations of bantam shit – revolting, hardy little creatures with more in common with dinosaurs than any other known breed of bird. They’d been known to attack rats as they scurried across the floor, hurling themselves onto their backs and pinning them down with their claws while they shredded them with their beaks, spreading the straw with gore, fur and broken bones.

  It had amazed Adam as much as anyone that winter when, without so much as a squawk, half a dozen of the bantams had expired from the cold and fallen to the ground with a thump. Even in winters when old women had frozen to death in their cottages, the bantams had always seemed indomitable, buried in their white or red-brown feathers, staring around them with needle-sharp eyes. Adam had almost been pleased to find that they, too, had a breaking point. It was the nakedness of hill farming that appealed to him – the ravages of the cold, the relentless rhythms and cycles that most people went out of their way to avoid.

  Adam pulled on his fake Barbour, his sou’wester and his plastic trousers, picked up the bucket and went to the big shed door, bracing himself for the blast of the wind and feeling his muscles swell as he dragged it closed behind him. Outside, it was dark and wild, raindrops chasing like swarming insects in front of the single light bulb on the shed wall. The light glimmered from the water that burst from the guttering, thundered against the drum of the roof, refilled the bucket as he held it beneath the drainpipe, not even bothering to go to the water-butt which was overflowing three and a half feet away.

  Pausing to look around him, Adam thought for a moment that he heard the howling of a dog. He frowned and looked towards the kennel at the top of the yard – listening through the sounds of the wind around the roofs and the chimneys – but even though he could hear nothing further, he put the bucket down and set off towards the faintly glowing windows of the house. When a single dead sheep meant wasting hours of back-breaking labour, you couldn’t just dismiss the possibility of a stray.

  He left the yard and followed the thin path around the back of the house, the wind in the ivy obscuring what sounded again like howling, although still he couldn’t be certain. He tramped on through the mud and the rain, peering into the darkness, wondering vaguely how many slates would come off the roof that night, whether they had sufficient spare for him to be able to replace them all in the morning.

  Pressed between the ground and the back door, there was some kind of shape: something twitching, dark and dog-sized. “Oh, fucking hell!” said Adam, flinching.

  Even in the light from the kitchen window, he couldn’t quite believe that it was a human being crumpled on the doorstep, covered in mud, whimpering and clawing at the wood with ripped, bloody fingernails.

  “Andrew?” he said. “Andrew… Are you alright?”

  He knelt down quickly on the ground and, gently as he could, put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder, rolling him onto his back. A short, strangled noise came from the boy’s mouth, and he curled himself up into a ball, shaking and whining, but Adam could still see his face – his eyes squeezed closed against the light and the streaming rain, blood in the filth on his cheeks and his forehead.

  “You’re okay now,” said Adam, speaking more softly. “You’re safe now, Andrew. Don’t worry. It’s okay. It’s okay…”

  He slid his arms beneath the boy’s legs and shoulders, and picked him up slowly, resting his head against his chest. Andrew’s trousers were torn, worn through at the knees where the calloused flesh was sticky with blood, his black hair matted, twigs and thorns in the tangle of his clothes.

  Shaking off his hat and his wellies, Adam opened the door to the boot-passage and carried Andrew through into the warmth of the kitchen, heading for the sink. He had done no more than turn on the hot tap – filling the blue plastic bowl – when there were footsteps on the stairs behind him and Tara came down through the living-room, a pen and her diary in one hand, dressed in her long white nightgown.

  “Adam?” she asked. “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “He…” Adam’s voice shook perceptibly. “He was lying on the doormat, and I… I thought he was a dog, Tara! I really thought he was a dog!”

  “Oh, Christ!” said Tara. She bent over him, then winced and hurried back upstairs, returning a few moments later with a sponge and a large white towel from the airing cupboard. By this stage, Adam had filled the sink with warm water and had extracted Andrew from his jacket and the too-big boots flapping around his feet. His legs were scratched, horny where the boots had rubbed him, as well as on his hands and knees. The stench beneath his clothes was the stench of dogs. There was filth ingrained into his skin, and when Tara finally managed to remove his cast-off shirt, which itself fell loose to his calves, his chest was thin and his stomach distended.

  Andrew was quiet now, his eyes unfocused, still trembling faintly – either from shock, or terror, or confusion. You could see the twitches passing over his body when he came back to himself, but these never transformed into an attempt to escape, and they vanished altogether whenever Tara was holding him, dipping the sponge into the steaming water and washing him as carefully as she could, the grease and grime soon floating around the bowl in clouds.

  “I think these are just scratches,” said Adam, quietly. “I mean, I think they’re from bushes and fences on the way over here. I don’t think they happened at home.”

  “Maybe not,” Tara allowed. “But we’ve got to find out what went on over there. I’m not letting him go back until we know.”

  Adam lifted Andrew from the edge of the sink and she wrapped him in the big white towel, holding him to her chest and rocking him
gently – so subsumed in the folds that he looked like a baby. “No,” Adam agreed. “We can’t send him back tonight.”

  “This time,” she said. “Adam, we have got to call the social services. I mean, he’s a child, for Christ’s sake! I don’t care if everyone else in the village thinks we’re meddling, we’ve got to do something!”

  “Yeah,” Adam rubbed his eyes with the balls of his thumbs. “Okay… Look, we’ll keep him here tonight, yeah? I’ll go back out and check the ewes. Then, if you can keep an eye on them for a bit, I’ll drive round to Werndunvan and have a word with Philip, let him know where he’s got to. Not that he’s probably even noticed. Tomorrow we’ll sit down and we’ll work out what to do. Okay?”

  * * *

  Two hours later, Tara arrived in the shed, still in her nightdress, but with a heavy green coat over the top of it and black wellington boots poking from the bottom. Adam was again washing his hands, in a separate part of the shed, three more lambs shivering in the straw beside him, their wide-eyed faces mirrored by their mother’s. On a nearby post, the radio was playing another tribute to John Lennon, its songs and interviews scattered by the wind and the shouts of the ewes.

  “He’s asleep at last,” she said, leaning at the edge of the pen. “So, how was Philip?”

  “Well…” Adam washed the last of the afterbirth from his arm, rolling down his sleeve. “To be honest, he really looked quite shaken. I mean, you know what Philip’s like. He kept on and on about this bloody shed he’s going to build, how he’ll be lambing in the dry next year. But he was soaking wet when I got there, and there was mud halfway up his trousers… I’m fairly sure he’d been out looking for him.”

  “Did you find out what happened?”

  “Yeah,” Adam sighed. “Well, I think so. He said he’d drowned some puppies this afternoon and that Andrew took it badly. Which, I suppose, adds up… From what I could gather, sometime this evening Dora went out to fetch him in for his tea, and when she couldn’t find him in the barn she freaked out completely and had to take her tablets… He must have run over here, in the dark.”