The Claude Glass

by Tom Bullough

  After about a hundred yards, the track stopped. An immense yellow machine was working its way towards him, its tracks churning around it, the blade on its front cutting beneath the old hawthorn trees and tearing them from the ground, throwing them away down the slope where their roots and their twigs twitched hopelessly in the wind.

  * * *

  If the wind was strong on the ground, so Adam had always said, then that was nothing to how strong it would be up in the clouds. Up in the clouds – the fields of grey, white and black where you could make out anything from tractors to dragons – the forces were so powerful that sails would have burst, windmills would have been shattered, and no man could have stood upright even if there had been somewhere for him to put his feet. And this was the place where the buzzards would fly out of choice! You wouldn’t see them fluttering around the flowers with the bees and the butterflies. No, they were right up there in the gales, in the regions as cold as the Arctic, circling calmly above the blue-green spaces of the earth!

  Robin came flying down the track, beneath the chestnut tree, heading for the woodshed where Adam was turning a sheep’s skull in his hands, explaining the plates of the cranium while Martin prodded at the traces of nerves and blood vessels, the cavities of the eyes, asking questions with an expression that suggested he understood every word of what he was hearing.

  Martin managed to assume this expression almost every time that he was being taught anything. A few months earlier, he had even convinced their grandfather that he knew how to read – selecting only books that he knew by heart, speaking with absolute conviction – and it had only been when he failed to turn a page at quite the right time that their grandfather had realised he was being duped.

  “Adam!” called Robin, almost hysterically, scrambling over the gate. “Adam! Philip’s bulldozing the track! He’s killing all the hawthorns! He’s going to bulldoze the cottage, and the damsons!”

  Adam stood upright, replaced the skull in its position on the wall, removed his cap and scraped the other hand through the peak of hair at the top of his forehead.

  “It is starting to look that way,” he said.

  “But—” said Robin. “But, he can’t just bulldoze everything like that! It’s not right!”

  “I agree.” Adam put his hat back on his head. “But I’m afraid it is his farm. Look, I’ll tell you what. I was just on my way to have a word with him, so why don’t the two of you come along? Let’s see if we can’t do anything to save the cottage. What do you think?”

  The three of them returned beneath the chestnut tree, crossed the narrow field beyond it, and Robin and Martin slid with the dogs between the two bottom bars of the gate while Adam swung himself over the top, frowning at the great yellow bulldozer which was working its way steadily down the hill, tearing at the ruts and the roots, its blade close to the lid of the Penllan reservoir, whose spring rose on Werndunvan land.

  To the left, the ruined cottage consisted of a pair of gables and a simple back wall, its face open to the fields, a couple of beams and half of the old upper floor drooping forwards, as if revealing themselves to passers-by.

  As they started up the untouched stretch of track that led away from the gate, past the three damson trees, Philip stopped the engine and, with a shudder, the mighty machine fell silent. Climbing stiffly from his seat, he called out something to Andrew, who turned and looked down the slope towards them, sitting against one of the unearthed hawthorns, cradling what appeared to be a puppy, rolling and writhing in his lap.

  “Philip.” Adam nodded, his voice once again in its Radnorshire slur, the dogs swarming between them. “Another fine machine you got there!”

  “Ar,” said Philip, climbing down, pulling his pipe from his pocket. He glanced back at Andrew. “She’s a beauty, alright.”

  “New puppy and all,” said Adam.

  “New puppy, ar.” Philip tapped the pipe against the tracks beside him. “Di, her name is, after that Lady Di. Come from Bill’s litter, she did… Come on, Andy, let Mr Adam and the boys have a look at her now!”

  Andrew was bunched between the broken branches of the hawthorn, his head held down so that his eyes and nose were concealed beneath the peak of his cap, and it was only with the greatest reluctance that he got to his feet and allowed Di to bound towards them, following her with hesitant steps and stopping a few yards away.

  “The way I figures it,” said Philip, as Robin and Martin crowded around the puppy, running their hands through her clean, soft fur, “I’ve got a dog, the boy should have a dog… If he wants one, look.”

  “Sounds right enough to me,” agreed Adam, his face impassive.

  “Andy!” said Philip, speaking with sudden authority. “Tell Mr Adam what you said to the long-hair man!”

  Andrew shrank back a couple of paces, lowering his head still further until his mouth disappeared entirely, his hand twitching noticeably in the pocket of his enormous jacket.

  “Andy!” said Philip again.

  “Fuck off!” squeaked Andrew abruptly. “Fuck off!”

  Robin looked at him, astonished. Coming from the mouth of someone very nearly his own age, such a grown-up thing to say seemed about as impressive and remarkable as if he had just lit a pipe, or driven away on a tractor.

  “Did you really say that, Andy?” said Adam, looking directly at him.

  “Answer Mr Adam,” Philip instructed.

  Andrew squirmed a bit and then peeped out quickly from beneath the peak of his cap, glancing from them to his puppy, who was busily attacking Martin’s wellies.

  “Ar,” he said, almost silently.

  “Well,” said Adam. His face was hidden as he rooted in his pockets. He lit his pipe, then he held out the match for Philip to light his own. “So what’s the plan with the track, then, Philip?”

  “Opening up the field up, I am,” said Philip, through the smoke. “Them fucking hawthorns been getting in my way long as I can remember.”

  Adam nodded, his pipe between his teeth.

  “And what about the old cottage there?” he asked. “What you thinking about him?”

  Robin picked up Andrew’s puppy, rubbing his nose in her coat. His thoughts were full of the dead hawthorns, the clumps of earth clinging to their roots and the bright white cuts where the bulldozer had pulled them from their home beneath the ground. But Adam was here, and he sounded – as usual – so composed that a tidal wave might have crashed over Cold Winter, carrying trees, sheep and neighbours, and he would scarcely have lifted an eyebrow.

  “Tell you what, boys,” said Adam, pausing in his conversation with Philip. “Why don’t you three go off and play for a bit? Just while me and Philip chew these few things over.”

  “Good idea,” said Philip. “Off you go now, Andy. You go off and play with the boys now.”

  * * *

  Andrew kept checking behind him as the three of them set off back down the hill towards the ruined cottage, his movements so reluctant that Robin wanted to keep checking behind himself, as well – afraid that there was something there even more terrible than the huge, sleeping dragon of the bulldozer, the slew of mud and slaughtered hawthorns spread across the hillside. Looking ahead of them, you could almost have thought that the field was completely unchanged. The trees were budding as happily as ever, and the cottage sat square against the hedgerow, surrounded by the same scattered stones and sheep-chewed weeds.

  Andrew walked with an oddly lolloping motion, bending down regularly to stroke Di as she bounded around them, his left hand rarely swinging in time with his legs, while his right hand stayed thrust into the pocket of his jacket, working more and more furiously the further away they became from Philip and Adam. He was a similar kind of height to Robin, but because his head was hanging forward he seemed a good bit shorter. Most of the time, you could see nothing beneath the peak of his cap, except for his mouth, which remained open constantly – catching flies, as their grandfather would have put it – his tongue pressed against his bottom l
ip like he was panting.

  “Have you ever been spinning, Andrew?” asked Robin finally, when the boundary gate was ominously close. “It’s really good fun!”

  “Yeah, let’s go spinning!” said Martin.

  Robin climbed the bank to their left and stood between a pair of hawthorns, their twigs shivering and waving in the air above him. He looked down the slope, towards the thicker greens and patches of grey sky reflected in the bog, the woods and the string of the three ponds – which soon became a stream, following the dingle the length of the valley until it merged with the brook in the village, where the older boys liked to go fishing after school.

  “Spinning’s easy,” Robin explained. He turned around a couple of times. “All you have to do is spin round and round and go down the hill. You’ve got to try and stay upright for as long as you can, and you’ve got to keep your hands out of your pockets or else you might hurt yourself when you fall over. Okay?”

  He lined the three of them between the two hawthorns, and when he glanced at Andrew he had removed his hand from his jacket pocket and was watching him warily, his pale eyes hovering beneath the brim of his flat cap.

  “Are you ready, then?” he said. “We’ll go when I say three. Okay? One… two… three!”

  Spinning was compulsive once you started to do it – a bit like running in the wind and the rain, except that it made the world become detached altogether. There was no way of soaring when the ground was pitching and wheeling around you, like it was vanishing down some enormous plughole, when your feet were stumbling uncontrollably through thistles and molehills, when your mind was full of a sickening elation and the earth was switching roles with the sky.

  Lying in a quivering heap on the hillside, the ground still heaving and keeling beneath him, his legs and his arms strewn in every direction, Robin could hear an extraordinary noise coming from somewhere nearby and he tried to lift his head to see what on earth it could be. The noise was chattering and hysterical, like some kind of bird, and when Robin did finally manage to look up he realised that Andrew was lying face-down a little way on down the hill, giggling into the grass, and he could feel the specks of the drizzle landing gently on his left cheek although everything else in his body seemed to be revolving at a terrible rate.

  Andrew had lost his cap a good way back up towards the track, past even Martin, who had fallen over after only a few seconds and was now wrestling with Di, blowing into her ear so that she jumped and growled around him. There were other things strewn down the slope where Andrew had been spinning – a few scraps of paper which the wind was carrying away towards the hedge, a length of orange baler twine, some straw, stones, nails and, not a foot or two from Robin’s head, a funny little black leather case with a hook-and-eye clasp on its front.

  Robin pushed himself upright, checked to see if Andrew was watching him, then picked up the case and wiped it on the sleeve of his mackintosh, inspecting it carefully. The case looked old – its leather was peeling at the corners, and the wood peering through from underneath was riddled with tiny holes. Robin turned it over in his hands several times before he opened the catch, and revealed a rectangle of black velvet on one side and on the other a small black mirror surrounded by a gold-painted frame. It was curved towards him, Robin realised, and when he held it close to his face his reflection was like looking in the back of a spoon, his nose grown huge, while his ears, his hair and his chin were tiny and comical around the edges.

  But then there was the frame and, turning the mirror away from him slightly, Robin found Offa’s Bank lying neatly within it – its sweeping shape pressed low by a grey-black sky, the detail of its trees and its hedges lost among the dark, mysterious colours. It was a portable picture that Andrew was carrying around with him! A funny little mirror, which could turn their valley into something foreign and far away!

  CHAPTER SIX

  BUT THEN FACE TO FACE

  Andrew sat with Di in the hayloft, back in the corner at the top of the bale elevator, as far as he could get from the winds that crowded through the door and made long sad notes in the slits in the thick stone walls. It was cold again, one of those days that had never quite been convinced of itself and was now limping off as fast as possible. The light outside was drab and watery. The light bulb next to the kitchen window was weak in its little glass shell, the puddle of green mould at its bottom one of the few definite colours. Once in a while, one of the people at the front door pressed themselves to the window, side-lit, but even their colourful clothing scarcely stood out amongst the browns and greys.

  In his mind, Andrew kept spinning. He spun from the bare ground where there had once been a track to Penllan, he spun down the smoothed-out fields on the side of Cold Winter, he spun down the bank beneath the yard. For unknown periods of time, he stayed in the big, clean house across the hill, sleeping in the bed with the colourful spinning shapes above his head, eating in the warm red kitchen, where Tara would smile at him and tell him what to do in every moment – the mere idea of which made him feel light, like he felt when the lambs were born, when the trees began to bud, when the smells in the air ceased to be merely the smells of damp, cold and decay and became the smells of growth and sunshine as well.

  In the yard, the man and the woman had given up knocking on the front door and had retreated a few paces, whispering to one another between the brightening light bulb and the elongated, shadowy figures that lay across the puddles and the half-chewed mud. Andrew lifted Di gently from his lap and laid her on the bales, stroking her for a moment, trying not to wake her. He crawled a few feet closer to the nearest slit, and looked down at the man with the hair like a woman’s, the woman whose own hair grew outwards in a giant mass, glowing at the edges when she walked in front of the light bulb.

  Andrew knew already that it was going to thunder. He had known for some time – in the same way that he knew when he was hungry, or when he needed to go to sleep. The thunder grew in him, as it grew in the air and the wind around them. It scared him in ways that he couldn’t hold in his mind. It was the animal at the door with the yellow eyes, the face that had gawped at him in the room with the pattern for a floor, these people in the yard, calling his name periodically, hunting him down to his den.

  Once, when they were still in one piece, Philip had closed the doors to the barn every night. The doors were oak, an inch and a half thick, tall as a combine harvester, hanging from enormous iron hinges. During thunderstorms, in the darkness, the lightning had surrounded them as if the house itself had exploded and the barn was about to fall in on the clustered, shivering animals inside. The dogs hated thunderstorms, they hated them so much that they would howl at the leaking roof, at the damp stone walls, and Meg would throw herself at the doors in a frenzy, tearing at them with her claws, until one night she had finally broken her way through and had run off, howling, searching for Philip – not that Philip could have known – and the nights had become colder once there was no good reason to close the barn any more.

  With the first trundling of the thunder, the rain began to fall in heavy drops, and when Andrew next looked at the slit, the people in the yard were pushing an envelope beneath the kitchen door, covering their heads with their coats, running back towards the track. Beside him, Di’s eyes were open. She was shivering as she crawled towards him, whining, curling back up in his lap.

  The lightning made the barn seem cavernous. In the moments of the flash, the walls appeared to spread until the roof was the size of the sky. The rain grew stronger. The drops falling between the dislodged slates became streams, and Andrew and Di were driven into a hole at the back of the stack where they huddled together, whimpering and waiting. Away along the hillside, in the lambing shed, Andrew could see the four dogs, curled in a mass, as close to his father as they could get without being sent away. Across the yard, in the kitchen, his mother was bent over the Rayburn, rocking as ever, waiting for the knocking to resume, and Andrew started to rock himself, at the thought of her, his eyes cl
osed, a certain comfort in this thing that remained under his control.

  Andrew knew about howling. He could tell a howl of loneliness from a howl of hunger, a howl to the moon from a howl in the face of a storm. It was the storm that howled, that was one thing. You yourself were just blank – as staring at circles in puddles was blank, or spinning down hillsides was blank – as the best and the greatest things in Andrew’s life were always blank, and Andrew had even crawled blankly the whole way over the hill, where he had woken to find sheep that span in the air, where there were colours and lightness, where people had liked his father’s tractor, where people had even liked the mirror that his hand was clamped to so tight in his pocket that you’d have had to have broken his fingers to take it away from him.

  * * *

  The morning after the thunderstorm was Easter Sunday, and the world woke clean and shiny – seemingly amazed that it had made it through this cataclysm of fire and water, only to emerge on a more or less normal day. Across Penllan, the grass had become fluorescent, as had the small yellow flowers that glowed amongst it, as had the primroses in the hedges and the full-blown leaves of the chestnut trees. It was as if everything was revealing more of itself on mornings like these – whether from shock, or relief, or exaltation – or as if you were yourself able to see a little wider, to glimpse in this sudden beauty something of the world’s subliminal extent.

  In the barns, coloured eggs appeared beneath the bantams, and Robin and Martin set out before breakfast to comb through the haylofts, searching the spaces between bales, the holes in the walls, the places in the rusted-up workings of ancient machinery. They scrambled up pillars, shouting as they spotted a speck of blue amongst a mass of brooding feathers, a flower-shaped arrangement of eggs on the top of the highest stack. They waved their arms to drive off the hens, gathering their eggs in a hay-lined basket while the cocks crowed and preened and ignored them along the beams.