Dadda came to the end of the track and parked the Land-Rover by the pile of wooden stakes and rolls of mesh that were being used to fence off the lower reaches of the path, where Fiendsdale Clough ended and the Briar came into its own. It had always seemed like a miraculous birth, the river, conjured out of the fells high above, made of nothing but damp air and rain, yet suddenly here and loud. It never stops talking, either; always urging itself—flow, hurry, flow—to leave the valley and find the sea.
Like so many things in the Endlands, the job of fencing here required frequent repetition. The ground into which the uprights were hammered was often undermined by the surge of water, and high winds could easily tear the wire loose. Before he’d died, the Gaffer had been making repairs with the chickenwire left over from fox-proofing the Dyers’ hen coop and the sturdy wooden posts that he’d purloined from the side of the railway line near the town one night. He’d not quite finished, but he’d done enough to keep the sheep from straying during Gathering. Because of the soft grass at the edge of the river and their hesitancy about crossing the marshes, they tended to bottleneck here when we brought them down, and it was easy for one of them to end up being bumped into the water.
At this point, the river wasn’t especially deep but it was fast and could carry a sheep quickly out of the reach of our crooks and away into the stony flood plains. Sometimes they managed to scramble on to dry ground themselves but more often than not we’d have to wait for them to drift to the bridge by the Beasleys’ farm before we could fish them out. A summer-plump ewe with a sodden fleece took the strength of two men. Meanwhile, the rest of the flock might be scattered over the Moss or straying up the fellsides.
To be truthful, the whole of the path up to the moors needed fencing off, but it was too steep and narrow to get anything but a quad bike up there and so all the wood and wire would have to be carted up in a tag-along trailer a little at a time. Perhaps there was no point anyway. A fence wouldn’t last very long in a landslide. They happened pretty frequently too. They still do. It’s not unusual for slurries of mud and grass to block the path, and when the rain cuts deep into the upper slopes, the peat slips off the gritstone skull beneath and great wedges of the fellside end up in the clough. If I need to go up to the high pastures I tend to go on foot, just as Dadda used to do and the Gaffer and all those grandfathers whose boots were lined up in the scullery.
Back then, however, it was always on the walk up to the moors when I noticed all the years that I’d spent away from the valley. I fell quickly behind Dadda, sick in the stomach and stiff in the legs. But I’d get used to it again. I’d have to.
He hadn’t said anything about the conversation we’d had the night before, but I didn’t expect him to have changed his mind. He hadn’t spoken much that morning at all; not a word as we drank tea in the kitchen and only a few more as we sat in the LandRover. He was being careful not to say anything that might lead on to the subject of my coming back to the Endlands again. He wouldn’t have wanted to get into a debate about it. He wasn’t one for pondering over things. Like everyone here, the perimeters of what he believed or what he knew had been hardened by experience.
He was waiting for me up ahead beyond the cairns that he and the Gaffer had built to mark the edge of the path when the weather was low. They were more than necessary; it wouldn’t have taken much to slip down into the clough and be carried away by the water. The run-off from the days of rain fell fast and white down the broken steps of rock, raising a cold mist that beaded the ferns and grass. By the time I caught up with Dadda I was soaked.
‘You all right?’ he said, resettling the strap of the rifle on his shoulder.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘It’s just been a while.’
‘Go back down if you want.’
‘I said, I’m fine.’
‘We’ve further to go than the top of the path,’ he said.
‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘Give me a minute.’
He looked at his watch and waited for me to get my breath back.
We were high up now, two hundred feet or more, and the valley opened up all the way back to the village. A toy town of little houses and a tiny church and tiny jackdaws in the school field. And the river turned as a river should, as though a child had drawn its passage through the rocks and reeds towards Sullom Wood.
From up here, the full extent of the fire was clear. For a long stretch beside the river, the trees were as black and wiry as ripped umbrellas. What had once been overgrown was now exposed to the sky. The Greenhollow was gone.
∾
Since I’d stumbled across the place, I hadn’t stopped thinking about it and when Mrs Broad called my name in class it was to drag me away from the sound of the Falls and the bright darts of the kingfishers. Lennie and Sam and the others laughed when being the centre of attention made me go red in the face, but for the final week of the summer term, they were more interested in eking out the last few tears and tantrums from Davy Wigton and left me alone.
On the very last day, once Mr Cuddy, the headmaster, had finished his assembly and awarded all the prizes (For Reading and Writing, John Pentecost), I slipped out of the playground full of sobbing girls and lairy boys, released, walking backwards and watching the place getting smaller. When I came to the war memorial and Private Philip Pentecost, I turned and ran the rest of the way home.
I don’t think there’s any better time in a child’s life than the weeks between primary school and secondary. The one is over for good and the other waiting at the far side of August to be dealt with later. Those first few days of the summer I was peregrine, desperate to set out on the devotional trail to the Greenhollow as soon as I’d finished my chores around the farm. So far I’d been content to play in the trees and throw things into the river, but I knew that there was more to find down there, there was more that I would be shown.
One afternoon, when a warm wind was bending the thistles and the foxgloves by the river and sweeping dust from the gravel by the lane, I slipped away from the farm before Dadda could find me another job to do and walked past the Dyers’ place to the horse field. I sat on the top rung of the gate for a while, willing the two that were drinking from the stone trough to move to the other side so that I could get across to the Wood. But when they’d finished they were in no hurry to go and sauntered through the tall grass, flicking their tails, as they headed to the shade.
Once they were standing out of the sun, I jumped down into the hard-baked ruts and set off alongside the hedgerow. I knew that the wall-eyed horse wouldn’t bother me. He was lame in two of his legs and in all the time Jim had looked after him, I’d never seen him move from the far corner of the scrub. He could only watch as I climbed over the fence into the Wood.
On the other side, in the chapel-dark of the trees, it was airless and insecty. Rabbits skittered from bracken to bracken. Pheasants strutted and croaked like dandified guardsmen. The oaks and beeches were in their full green and the light fell as if through a roof of broken tiles.
Down by the Falls, it was cooler under the trees and there was a dampness in the air and on the rocks. I baby-stepped to the edge and looked down into the whorl of foam and form, tracing the thrust of the water away to the stillness of the riverbend, where midges burned like dust in the few rods of sunlight that had managed to find their way through the leaves.
Stepping back, I found a heavy stone and heaved it end over end, until I could push it off the top of the Falls and listen for the crack of it hitting rock underneath the water, but there was nothing. I tried it a second time, now lying with my ear turned to the river. Again, there was only a deep plunge and a crown as though a depth charge had gone off.
For a good half an hour I sat on the lip of the Falls stripped to my underwear, kicking my heels against the rock and watching the twist of white water being formed and formed and formed beneath me. Courage is something you think you have until it’s called upon.
In the end, I jumped and changed my mind in th
e same moment and tumbled in shoulder-first, reaching out for the edge I’d left behind. There was no sensation of breaking the surface, only of being swallowed up entirely and borne away in froth and mud. Floundering rather than swimming, my feet drubbed against the tree roots that caged the banks and my hands caught ribbons of weed, but as the momentum from the Falls diminished, the blizzard of sediment began to calm and I came into a glass-green underworld banded with sunlight. Fish appeared and dissolved again: foil-skinned gudgeon, a school of portly carp, a perch gulping and wriggling away into the forest of water-crowfoot.
The noise of the river was softened here and I would have stayed for longer if not for the strain in my chest and my heart’s muffled two-step beating in my ears. A pulsing that grew more insistent as I scissor-kicked to the surface and spat out a mouthful of rotty water. Back in the loud world of the air, I let the current take me under the trailing fingers of the willow trees and into the bend, where the river widened and the water was deep and slow.
The light here was of several different species, sparking in flints as the plapwater hit the edges, spotting the green fur of the moss-stones, webbing across the underside of the branches above me. In places, it hardly penetrated at all and the bank opposite was matted with stalks and seedheads that had become tightly entwined as they’d followed the wandering sunstreaks. Brambles grew in large spools and the ferns and nettles were loured over by trumpets of butterbur that seemed too monstrous for an English wood.
As the warm wind moved along the valley, the skirts of the willows were blown aside and sunlight fell all the way to the bed of pebbles where the sticklebacks gathered. Hundreds of them, spiny and staring.
I dived down and watched them dart from my fingertips to mass again beyond my reach. Every time, they’d do the same thing, quick as a thought. But if I lay still, floating like a corpse, they came back and taught me the ways of their world. How to become truly aware of the current, to weave with its weave, until it was impossible for the water to know who was in control. And so, the fish told me, they could bend whole rivers to their will.
How would it be, I asked them, if I were to live inside the Briar like them? Forever pulled at by the currents and swells; looking up at the rain ripples. And at night-time swimming through ink. Would I be a frog or a fish? No, an otter. An otter, with a spike of muscle for a tail. I tried to imagine how it would be when I changed. Whether it would be a gradual alteration or a sudden gifting of webs and whiskers. The latter, I hoped, and I pictured myself disrobing my old skin like a dressing gown and underneath there being a glistening sebaceous pelt.
And when I dived in, slick as oil, to go hunting in the jades and olives of the sunbright water, there would be plenty to eat. The hanging mobiles of fish. The little nuts of bladder snails glued to the reed stems on the banks. For variation, I’d wriggle downriver and find the estuary and the sea. Herd the lobsters. Worry the mackerel. Sharpen my teeth on cuttlefish. Break crab shells like meringue.
But the Greenhollow would always be my home. I’d know every tree and every bird call. I’d build my holt in the oldest roots and lay down a boundary of oily spraints to ward off rivals. Down in my hole, I’d hear the thudsteps of men well before they appeared with their fishing nets, just as I was able to hide myself away behind the hanging hairs of willow long before Lennie Sturzaker came wading through the undergrowth.
I watched him uproot some of the ferns and thrash a stick against a tree before he opened his jeans and pissed a yellow flume into the river. When he’d finished, he sat down on the bank with his feet dangling over the water and lit a cigarette, smoking it like his dad by pinching the filter between his thumb and index finger. He coughed and sniffed and took a few quick drags before spitting into his palm and dabbing out the butt end to save for another time. For a few minutes, he watched whatever floated down the river, his forearms on his knees, and then lay back in the grass. He didn’t move for a while and when the dragonflies and wasps that buzzed around him weren’t swatted away I knew he’d fallen asleep.
While I watched him, I was aware of movement on the other side of the river. The undergrowth cracked and a young stag emerged like a broken-off piece of the woodland and came down to the bank to drink.
He lifted his head, the river water a sopping beard, and when he saw me I expected him to sprint off and wake Lennie up. But when I looked again, I couldn’t be sure that it was a stag at all. The way it moved its head, or pawed at the mud, it wasn’t quite what it was pretending to be. That was how I could spot the Owd Feller, the Gaffer told me.
‘Look for an animal trying to be an animal, Johnny lad, and it’s probably him. He can’t always get it right. That’s why he likes to hide himself in a flock, so no one notices.’
The Devil stared at me and I looked away with the same feeling I had when Lennie spotted me from the far side of the playground and picked his way through the other children, assembling some sophisticated insult or devising some means of hurting me without the teacher seeing. But the Devil didn’t seem as if he wanted to do me any harm. He seemed more like one of the lonely boys who started at the school now and then and, shunned by everyone else in the yard, always gravitated towards me as a kindred spirit and stuck like a burr.
As the Devil watched me, the same question ran through my mind as incessantly as the river. Did I like stories? Did I like stories?
I answered yes.
And did I want to know another? Did I want to see one played out before my eyes? Not in a book, but here in the Wood.
I did, I said.
I could see a boy die down here, if I wanted to; the boy who was sleeping now in the butterbur. It couldn’t be prevented. Nothing could. All time had already run its course. All we ever saw were stories. But I should keep that to myself, along with the trick the sticklebacks had shown me.
The stag finally turned his head away and went up the bank between the willow trees, picking his way through the bracken, leaving the Devil with me, his voice closer to my ear now, speaking into it from the inside.
Come and see the boy who’s going to die here, John. Come and look at him.
In my bare feet, I moved along the banks and I stood over Lennie, my toes inches from his outstretched fingers. I watched his fat belly rising and falling under his striped T-shirt where the stolen packet of Players strained against the breast pocket. I watched his eyes moving under the lids as he dreamed, his mouth open and slack.
I’d spent seven years at school with him, but until then I hadn’t ever really looked at him so closely or for so long. I hadn’t ever noticed the spray of freckles across his nose or the subtle cleft in his chin, like a finger-dent in a lump of dough. His ears were unusually small and his eyelashes as fair as those of the Beasleys’ pigs.
He’d have fitted in well with the Tamworths, I thought. I could see him snaffling at the trough with them. Looking up with a dripping snout, wanting more swill.
I touched the bruise on my eyebrow, remembered the smell of his body close to my nose, his silent concentration as he hit me.
I could have dropped a rock on him quite easily. There were plenty by the river. Even a rock of modest size, I thought, would have stoved in his head as if it were as soft as a melon. But if I snuffed him out now, said the Devil, it would spoil the story.
∾
Before I’d found my strength again, Dadda had already set off, his hands in his pockets and the rifle across his back. At least now the path levelled out and I could keep pace with him.
For another half a mile it cut along the fellside, rising steadily beside the thundering of Fiendsdale Clough, which high up in this steeper, craggy country was strewn with rockfall and broken trees. In the final fifty yards, the ravine dog-legged to the left and the path carried on up to the peat-haggs that crenellated the ridge like battlements. Here, the sky opened and the wind found us as it came racing across the grass and heather.
Whenever I talked to Kat about the Endlands, I’d tried to describe the moorl
and to her, but it was impossible to find the right words. Lonely didn’t cut it. Nor did barren. It wasn’t either of those two things that I really noticed anyway. It was more that there was still so much unknown up there. So much of the old, anonymous earth so close. So much of what wasn’t ours, or anybody’s.
The moors had never really felt familiar to me and they still don’t now. They appear suddenly, too vast and wide to take in all at once, uncoupling from each ridge the eye comes to and drifting away. The land up there doesn’t roll so much as swell, like a sea frozen in its wildest uproar, full of deep troughs and dooming walls. If someone were to set off sailing, I say to Adam, they might be able to carry on for ever, the horizon continually replenished with another. But what does that mean to him? He’s never seen the sea. He can’t picture distance, not really. Even walking to the Moss feels like a long way for him. Imagine walking to the Moss and back fifty times, Adam, I say. A hundred times. Or all day long. That’s how far it is across the moors. But he still doesn’t understand.
A rabbit lifted its head out of the grass and after a moment of indecision it scuttled away, bursting a pair of red grouse from their hiding place in the heather. They went off low across the moor, rattling out their warning—goback goback goback—and as the silence resettled nothing else moved, only scraps of morning daylight raking over the brown horizon miles away.
Look at a map and it’s easy to see how far folk have ventured on to the moors. Farming hamlets like the Endlands are scattered all around the edges, but take your finger a little further and it seems that whatever has been named has been named from a distance: White Heath, Greystone Ridge, Blackmire Edge. And there are pools and bogs and hillocks out in the heart of all the nothingness that have no names at all. The farmers had never gone much further than the edge of the sheep pastures, which stretched almost a mile from where we stood at the top of the valley path to the Wall.
Devil's Day Page 14