by Tom Bullough
* * *
The dogs were dozing in the shade as Tara and the children crossed the yard on the way to the kitchen to make lunch, their tails stirring up dust, which occasionally caused them to sneeze. Up on the beams of the hayloft, the farm cats were watching the world through half-closed eyes, while the bantams pecked busily at the dust outside the granary and this year’s swallows made their first clumsy flights from the eaves of the workshop.
All of the doors of the house were open, as were all of the windows, but the fusty smell of bleach and urine continued to linger in the kitchen. Cloud climbed miserably up onto the bench next to Martin and Robin, the air cool against the thick stone wall where the sunlight hadn’t penetrated since the days of George II, a wasp whining on the flypaper in the middle of the ceiling, and the three of them watched as Tara picked up the kettle from the Aga – still blazing away in its cavity – weighed it in her hand, then placed it on the hotplate. She took a scoop of Swarfega from the tub on the windowsill, rubbed it thoroughly into her hands, scrubbing at the grime with her fingernails, then she turned on the tap.
Somewhere deep inside the hill, among the labyrinthine passages, the communities of moles, rabbits, minotaurs and slumbering Welsh monarchs, there was a distant gurgling noise – very much like a monster clearing its throat – and, after a second, Tara sank forwards, wrapping her hands around the back of her neck regardless of the Swarfega, groaning faintly, until her head was almost in the washing-up bowl.
On the bench, the three of them continued to watch her, her white-blonde hair spread among the plates, a pair of smudged handprints on her hips, conscious that a crisis had now been reached and unsure what they could do about it.
“Isn’t there any water, Tara?” asked Martin.
Tara didn’t move and, for a moment, Robin remembered the big old room at Werndunvan, where the dust lay in waves on the floor, the dry rot pored through the beams and there were no concerns of any kind.
“No,” she said, eventually. “On top of everything else, there is now no fucking water.”
Tara headed back down the yard in silence, the children scuttling behind her, saying nothing, barely even looking at one another. Poking out from between the haystacks, the bonnet of the truck was streaked with dirt and bantam shit, and they could hear the spluttering of the bale elevator long before they arrived at the big, open doors, where its noise redoubled, booming inside the roof until it seemed to surround them.
Up in the hayloft, Adam had removed his shirt and was working now in a vest and a pair of shorts, while Owl loaded the bales from the trailer onto the patched wooden rungs of the elevator, which carried them haltingly into the air, and no matter how fast Owl put them onto the bottom Adam could still unload them even faster from the top, carrying them to the back wall and stacking them neatly, returning in time for the next.
Tara stood with the three children in the big metal doorway, and her face was hard and brittle-looking.
“Adam!” she called.
“That was quick!” said Owl, smiling, gathering another bale from the trailer.
Adam looked over the edge, then he signalled to Owl to stop the motor and the bantams seemed muted in the silence that came afterwards. He looked at them again, then he swung round the outside of the nearest pillar and shinned back down to the ground.
“What’s up?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
“The water’s run out.” Tara pulled her cheeks tight as if the rest of her face was smiling. Adam looked at her for a second or two, then – to Robin’s surprise – he put his arms around her shoulders, Tara tipped her head forwards against his neck, and for several seconds they just stood like that. You could smell Adam even from where Robin was standing – the oil, the dirt, the unwashed sweatiness of him.
“Don’t worry, my love,” Robin heard him murmur, when he finally looked at her again, his voice low and soothing. “We’ve been careful. It shouldn’t have run out yet. I’ll sort it out, okay? There’s got to be a reason…”
* * *
The ruined cottage was not particularly ruined any longer. It had acquired a smart new fence around the damsons, a roof of shiny Snowdonian slate, a front wall, doorways and window frames, even a swirling, colourful sign which was hanging on the gatepost – pretty well everything you could expect from a cottage.
As Adam, Tara and the children came through the gate from the field behind the house, a crowd of bullocks scattered from the trough in the boundary hedge, retreating a little way down the slope and watching them, flies around their eyes, tails flicking and their shadows on the field beneath them.
Adam stared, looking at the animals with disbelief.
“That fucking—” he growled. He hurried down the hill and turned a tap on the side of the trough. “I’d closed the valve! I’d closed the fucking valve! That fucking man must have put his fucking cattle—”
“What’s happened, Tara?” said Robin. “Tara?”
His fists clenched, Adam strode back up the hill towards the scar of the old track, scarcely distinct from the dead grass around it, and stopped at the concrete slab of the reservoir: a spot that a man from Abberton had dowsed for in the days after they had first bought the farm. Grabbing the handle, Adam lifted the lid with one hand, lowered it to the ground beside him and squinted down into the hole.
“Well, Robin,” said Tara, hesitantly. “I’m afraid that Philip might have moved his cattle from his pond to the trough on our reservoir. But, maybe it’s okay, maybe there’s still some water left…”
“Robbo,” said Adam, looking up, his voice once again measured. “Do you think you could do us a favour?”
“What, Adam?” asked Robin.
“I don’t think I’m going to fit down there, and we’re going to need someone to have a bit of a look. There’s just a few rungs in the wall on the side, there. It’s not very deep.”
The reservoir was the coldest place that Robin had been in several weeks, and even with the open lid its blackness seemed to have something of the labyrinth about it, something of the machinations of the inside of the hill. He descended the ladder slowly, feeling for the damp, rusty metal with his bare feet and standing squarely on each one before he felt for the next. Before long, he began to be able to see the walls to either side of him, and he saw that the reservoir really wasn’t very big, although glancing over his shoulder he could still see no trace of the back wall and thoughts in the corners of his brain continued to speak of tunnels, undiscovered recesses and caverns full of treasure.
With the final rung, Robin put his foot through a thin skin of water, then a layer of mud, and landed on solid concrete. He glanced back up at Adam, but the small round hole in the ceiling was as bright now as the sun, and not only could he not see Adam’s face, he couldn’t see anything around him, either.
“What’s down there, Robbo?” asked Adam.
“Lots of mud,” said Robin.
“Anything else? There should be a pipe sticking out of the wall next to the ladder. Can you see a pipe there?”
Robin bent down and, squinting through the afterimages, he saw that there was indeed a pipe sticking out of the wall beside him, and that on the pipe there was a fat frog, its head and back shining green in the startling sunlight, its eyes blinking periodically.
“There’s a frog,” said Robin. “Quite a fat one. Do you want me to catch him?”
“No, I shouldn’t worry,” said Adam.
* * *
By the time that Robin arrived back at the top of the ladder, Adam was walking away down the scar towards Penllan, and, while he was moving unhurriedly by anybody else’s standards, by Adam’s standards he was practically sprinting. Robin pulled himself back out of the dark hole and stood on the heat-shimmering hillside, shivering slightly, the flesh cold beneath his skin. On the bank in front of him, Tara had sat down and was staring towards the ponds with Martin hanging onto her leg and Cloud pressed beneath her arm. Robin scrambled over and curled himself up with them
as well, and Tara stroked his hair and told him that he was a good boy for going down into the reservoir, but even with his eyes closed and his head pressed against her side he could still feel the shakiness in her words, and he knew that she was starting to cry.
“It’s okay,” she was saying. “It’ll be fine. This is nothing to do with you kids, okay? Philip is a very strange man, that’s all, and sometimes he does things that are a bit difficult for other people to understand…”
Off down the hill, muted by the barns, there was the unmistakable roar of the big truck, punctuated by gear changes, coming and going with the buildings, the trees and the hedgerows, and Robin could see it as it crossed the open fields on the way down to the road – an elbow poking from the left-hand window and the dust rising and drifting over the flat, dry grass behind it.
* * *
Andrew was cradling Di in the hayloft when he heard the noise of Adam’s truck. Scrambling towards an arrow-slit, he knew that something was wrong just by the way that it stopped, the slew of dust that drifted onto the face of the barns. Beneath him, the dogs spilt out of the big, open doors, barking like they had never seen Adam before, and when they did see him they seemed to become confused, retreating in the manner of children, hurling abuse without any one of them stepping forwards to declare themselves the leader.
“Got a problem, is it?” said Philip.
He was fixing the trailer near the top of the yard, dressed as usual in his shirt and dirty brown jumper, and as the engine stopped he got to his feet, wiping his hands on his trousers.
“You listen to me,” Adam growled.
Right from the start, the two men seemed to know why he was there, and they faced up to one another with Philip’s face as defiant beneath his cap as it had ever been – even if Adam was taller and broader, his muscles daunting as they bulged from his vest.
“I don’t know why the fuck you put your cattle on our reservoir—” Adam started.
“My reservoir!” Philip interrupted. “It’s my reservoir, it’s my fucking field, and it’s my fucking business what I put in him!”
“I’m not here to argue with you,” said Adam, icily. “You put your cattle on our reservoir. And, I swear to God, if you do anything like that ever again – anything at all that upsets my family – then I’m going to come round here and I’m going to make you regret it for the rest of your fucking life!”
“Upsets my family!” Philip snorted and took a couple of paces forwards, pressing his red face towards him. “Upsets my family?! And how’s about my family, eh? Who sent them fuckers round bothering my boy? Eh? That your business, was it? Someone asked you to, did they?”
There was a moment before Adam replied, when even the dogs didn’t dare to make a sound. Up in the hayloft, Andrew moved a foot or two away from the arrow-slit, then he crawled back quickly to the heap of bales in the corner, pushed himself into a crack, curled himself around his shivering, bare-skinned puppy and moaned to try and stifle the noise.
“Your boy?!” Adam seemed to spit out the word. “You bastard, you twisted that poor kid till he was barking like a sheepdog…”
“And my cottage!” Philip exclaimed, his voice shaking with outrage. “How’s about my cottage?! Who fleeced us out of him, then? Eh? You tell us that!”
“I gave you exactly what you asked for that cottage!” Adam snarled. “You know that as well as I do! If you haven’t got the sense to do anything more constructive with your farm than bulldoze the fucking thing flat…”
“Calling me stupid, then, are you?!” Philip was almost shrieking now. “Calling me stupid! Think I don’t know what you’re up to?! Eh? Think I don’t know you’re selling up!” He paused and, when Adam said nothing, his voice seemed to swell with triumph. “Call yourself a fucking farmer! Fucking pussy, more like!”
Even with his eyes closed and his own voice whimpering in his ears, Andrew could see the two men standing in the bleached yard, between the frosted glass of the kitchen door and the slits in the walls of the barn. He could see Adam, his hands in fists, towering in his boots and his shorts. He could see his father, his face thrust forwards, his bared teeth yellow and broken, squinting in the devastating sunlight.
“Can’t take the work, can you?!” Philip taunted him. “Can’t take the snow! Can’t take the drought! One hard year and you’re running away! Fucking pussy! Or perhaps Radnorshire ain’t good enough for you?! Not good enough for you and your precious little boys!”
Through the rising sound of Philip’s voice, Andrew heard Adam as he turned and strode away back down the yard. His steps were hard, cutting through the hay and the stone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DARK REFLECTIONS
Andrew woke in the night, and he could feel the pressure of his parents’ bodies to either side of him – the rumble of his father’s open mouth, the wheezing of his mother. The bed was large but it sank in the centre, and even on these short, hot nights they still used the blankets that they used the whole year round, so that the sweat ran down into the mattress and Andrew’s breath became tight in his chest, the air thick and evil-smelling, yellow eyes staring back at him from the windowless walls.
Squeezing between the bars of the bed-end, Andrew slipped out onto the floor and felt for the wall with his hands. The wallpaper was dry and wrinkled. The floor-boards were cool through the holes in the ragged carpet. Even in the solid darkness, he liked these feelings, the way that his attention slid towards the ends of his fingers, his toes, his nose, his ears – away from his fading dreams, the wordless things that would surround him and leak into his awareness as the outside world would leak through the absent slates, the broken windows and the dribbling walls of the house.
Andrew dragged his feet as he walked down the passage, clearing the glass and the chippings that had fallen from his father’s boots, feeling for the low step up into the kitchen, where he came into a faint shifting orangeness – a light in which he could just make out the table, the chairs placed randomly across the floor, the rubble where the ceiling had come down in the corner, the flickering panes of the filthy window.
Standing in the yard, Andrew sniffed at the warm air flowing towards him. Across the valley, there were lines of fire on the big, dark hills – their movements as slow as the stars. Andrew watched them, fascinated, while the windows of the house shone darkly and an orange haze spilt upwards into the star-spotted sky. Now and then, he held a finger up to his eyes to blot it all out, the way that Mr Gwynne had shown them at school. But he could still feel the smoke in the back of his throat, and when he put out his hand for his little mirror he found instead that Meg was sitting beside him, silently, as though she had been there all along.
* * *
The shadow of Cold Winter still lay thick and dark across the cluster of the house and the barns when Philip called Andrew for school. Sitting cross-legged in the scattered hay, Andrew tried once more to feed Di from the bottle that they used for the lambs. He lifted her head so that her muzzle pointed upwards, her brown eyes staring towards him, her body cold and limp in his hands, and he murmured comforting noises as he squeezed the pink rubber teat and watched the milk spurt into her mouth, bubbling back up between her lips to make streams that ran between the scabs on her expressionless face. Then he lowered her gently to the floor, while the other dogs watched from the doorway – wary-looking, scarcely seeming to recognise this blotchy-skinned creature as one of their own.
The car bumped and swung as it rolled out of the yard. Andrew clung to his door handle so that he wouldn’t bounce onto the floor, and he looked past his father, who was scowling through the dusty windscreen, at the hills across the valley, where the smoke was still rising, drifting over ridges, rocks and the great black smears of the slopes.
“Was it… Was it fire, dad?” asked Andrew, pointing at the hills.
“Ar,” said Philip.
“Is it out now?”
“Looks like it, dunnit?” muttered Philip, his eyes on the bulldozed smoot
hness of the track.
There was still the odd small flower in the fields to either side of them – in the shadow of the hedgerows or in the hollows where there had always been a certain marshiness – but they were faded, and they gave Andrew no more comfort than the few high streaks of the clouds. For an instant, he thought about Di – about how she had stopped shivering, ignoring him when he had tried to talk to her, her eyes clouding over – and he filled his mind with the rainlessness, with Philip and Adam, and how he would soon get his mirror back. And beneath these things were his dreams of the previous night, when he had run through the lines of the pine plantation, when the wind had wheezed in the branches above him and he had vaulted the brambles that coiled from the dry, lifeless earth.
They turned out of the track and onto the lane, which led away down the hill, between the still-green hedges where the ladybirds crawled among the flowers and Andrew had only to reach out of the window to peel the seeds from the long grass. They passed the church and its yew trees, the red telephone box on the corner. They passed the pub, the post office, the bungalows with their neat, parched gardens, the turning to the road that ran behind Offa’s Bank to Abberton, and they arrived in the daily crush of cars with the road surface gleaming in the morning sunshine and the shadow of the hillside a sliver that was shrinking by the moment.
Outside of the spike-topped gates, Andrew stood among the legs and the other children, looking out for Robin. He looked anxiously at the big blue truck which was parked beside the road – a metal tank with rusty corners weighing down its back, so that the bonnet seemed to be snarling into the air. He clutched Robin’s rucksack, and he didn’t want to move in case Tara came out to him on the pavement, as she often did, and held him by the hand as she led him inside.