‘Wouldn’t he rather it took the ram than us?’
‘It’s not going to go for us,’ I said.
‘It’s starving,’ said Kat over the dog’s barks. ‘Look at it.’
A brush sat against the wall and even though I wouldn’t be able to beat away a dog that size with it I thought the noise of the handle on the metal gate might send it packing. But it only made the dog’s voice louder and it chased the wooden pole until it was tight in its jaws.
‘You’re just provoking it,’ said Kat. ‘Let go.’
The dog pulled the broom out of my hands and thrashed it against the wall of the ram’s pen before turning its attention to Grace. There was something about her that it didn’t like. A smell of threat. The same smell that Kat had noticed, perhaps.
Grace waved the dirk of mirror in front of her but the dog caught her forearm in its teeth, puncturing the skin as Kat and I tried to push it away. Skinny as it was, the dog was strong and even a kick to its ribs didn’t stop it clamping down. Grace screamed and cried for Jeff. She shouted for Kat to help her. And as she called out, the dog’s voice began to change. The deep growl in its throat was replaced by a whining noise and then it finally let go and backed away, its eyes closed and its mouth wide open as if it were gagging on something. Kat put herself between the dog and Grace, hurriedly untangling the scarf she’d been wearing to wrap the bleeding holes. But she heard it, I know she did, because she looked at me and wanted me to tell her that it wasn’t true.
The dog was crying just like Grace was crying.
It was sobbing like a child.
The door to the shed opened and Bill, Angela and Liz appeared, followed by Dadda who came in loading his shotgun. In a voice more accurate now, the dog turned and growled at them, stretching its mouth wide when it barked. Dadda took a few steps further inside as he closed up the shotgun and waited until the dog was closer, almost by his feet, before he fired.
The dog’s noise shut off and it lay against the breeze block wall with its tongue hanging and its head spilling like a cracked pomegranate. Dadda looked at it and then stepped over the body and went into the pen to calm the ram. Liz pulled Grace away from Kat and unravelled the scarf to look at the wounds.
‘Jesus,’ she said.
‘Bring her into the house,’ said Angela. ‘Tom has some iodine.’
‘She needs to go to the hospital, Mam,’ said Liz.
‘The doctor’s on his way,’ said Angela. ‘Let him look at her first.’
Having heard the gunshot, Laurel came in and Angela caught her arm before she could stumble into the dog.
‘Good God,’ she said, crossing herself. ‘Are you all right, Grace, love?’
Liz showed her what the dog had done.
‘Was it after the ram?’ said Laurel.
‘I think so,’ said Dadda.
‘It must have come down off the moors,’ said Angela.
‘And not for the first time,’ said Bill.
‘Is this it?’ said Laurel. ‘Is this what killed our Douglas?’
‘It must have been,’ said Bill and took hold of the dog’s back legs and began to drag it out into the snow.
‘Come on,’ said Liz, pressing her fingers to Grace’s back. ‘Inside.’
‘Quick,’ said Angela.
‘They’ll get infected,’ said Laurel.
Before the three of them could take her away, Grace held Kat’s wrist. ‘Stay,’ she said.
And she did. She stayed for Grace. At first, at least. She was worried about her. She wanted her to know that she was there. But then she stayed for me. She stayed for Adam. She stayed for everyone else here. She could have left if she’d wanted to but she didn’t. It was her decision. An instinct was uncovered that she didn’t know was there. Then there was nothing else to discuss. Like the sheep coming down at Gathering, she knew where she needed to be.
But more than that—after the glimpse she’d had of him grinning like a pig, after the voice on the moors that had led her astray, after what she’d seen in the ram’s pen—she’d come to understand what I meant when I said that the Devil was real. Not the soppy Owd Feller in the songs, or the thing Gideon Denning and his friends thought they’d woken at Far Lodge. There was nothing to wake anyway. The Devil has been here since before anyone came, passing endlessly from one thing to another. He’s in the rain and the gales and the wild river. He’s in the trees of the Wood. He’s the unexpected fire and the biter of dogs. He’s the disease that can ruin a whole farm and the blizzard that buries a whole village. But at least here we can see him at work. He’d jumped from the stag into me and from me into the jackdaws. From a wall-eyed horse into poor Jim Beasley. From the Gaffer into Grace when his heart packed in. From Grace to a stray dog off the moors.
Where he went after that, we didn’t know. But then Adam was born. A blind kitten that stayed blind. But Kat didn’t run. She didn’t scoop him up and take him away. She realised that what we pass on in the Endlands isn’t only the privilege of living here, but the privilege of living itself. Seeking out the struggle, I mean, rather than hiding from it. Inoculating ourselves with fear.
Little doses and we find courage.
Adam looks as though he’s staring at me from the top of the Falls. He shivers again and wedges his hands under his armpits.
Can you still hear me? I call to him and he nods. You know the pearl-fishers? I say. Remember what I read to you the other night? They’re not frightened of the water, are they?
He’s at that age when boys are ravenous for superlatives. The fastest this, the heaviest that, the tallest, the longest. Not that any of it means much to him but the numbers sound impressive enough in comparison: the greyhound is fast—ah, but the cheetah.
The pearl-fishers dive a hundred feet or more on a single breath, don’t they? I say.
A hundred and fifty, he says.
If a fathom is six feet, what’s that in fathoms? I say, giving his brain something else to think about other than falling and drowning and Lennie Sturzaker.
Down here, away from the breeze, there is a little warmth in the air, and, with my shirt folded, I can feel it on my back. Good for that ache in my shoulder that the ointment hasn’t touched.
Twenty-five, says Adam.
That’s twenty-five of me, I say. Fifty of you.
He considers himself from head to toe and tries to imagine dropping his own height time after time down into the ocean. I unbuckle my belt and thumb open the fly-buttons on the jeans that have seen better days.
Do you remember? I say. That there’s a point where they don’t have to swim any more? They don’t have to do anything. Gravity takes them down and it’s like they’re flying underwater. Do you remember that? I say, and he nods.
My jeans with the shirt and my socks rolled into my boots, I hold the hand of a willow branch and step down into the shallows of the river, one foot and then the other finding the weedy stones. The water is still winter cold, but I keep my cries to myself. I don’t want to scare Adam any more than he already is. I wade out until I’m up to my waist and then call to him.
Adam, I say, I’m in the river now. I’m down below you. When you jump, I’ll be here, you’ll feel my hand before you know it.
He stands absolutely still and says nothing.
I won’t let the river take you away, I tell him. I’ll catch you. I won’t let you drown. But you have to make sure that you jump away from the edge, I say. Don’t fall off, but jump.
And for a moment I have to ask myself if I’ve ever seen him jump. I don’t think I have. But perhaps only because he’s scared of landing awkwardly on the ground. Leaping into open water, it doesn’t matter, the surface yields and the river cradles.
You’ll have to bend your legs, I say. You’ll have to think you’re a frog. You have to crouch and spring, Adam. Move a bit closer, I say, and of course he can’t. Slide your feet forward until you can touch the edge with your toes, I tell him. Take your time. There’s no rush. Although I can’t
feel my legs any more and the lapping water has sent my balls retreating to my stomach. Use your arms to balance, I say. The rock’s flat, you won’t trip.
Daddy, he says.
You’re almost there, I say. Another step.
His whole body lurches to the side as he moves but he keeps himself upright and first one foot and then the other comes to the rim of the Falls.
Can you feel the edge now? I say.
He nods and keeps his arms out by his sides. Even without being able to see, he senses the great open space in front of him.
Now bend your knees, I say, bend your knees and lean over. And when you feel yourself falling, you push yourself as far out as you can and I’ll be here in the water waiting for you, I’ll catch you. Don’t be scared of this place. This is your valley. Can you hear me? I’ve not gone anywhere. I’ve not left you. I’m here.
And he jumps.
My boy jumps.
And he comes down through the green light.
My boy jumps and my daughter kicks in the womb.
The wind comes and stirs the willows and the silver birch. It shakes the holly and rowan on the fells, rising and rising to the edges of the moors.
There is a rightness to the valley at this time of year. After the long winter, it has found itself again in the baritone of the ewes and the treble of the lambs; in the infectious restlessness of the chiff-chaff and the wren.
The lapwings are in the hay fields chasing off the jackdaws. Dozens of them rolling and falling in this time of territories. And their cries are full of joy, as though at every turn they come upon their own endless freedoms afresh.
Promise, it all says. Promise.
Like every spring.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to all the wonderful folk at John Murray for all their hard work and support. You’ve enabled me to write for a living. I couldn’t have asked for more than that.
Many thanks to Sara Marafini for designing another iconic book cover. To Becky Walsh, Caroline Westmore and Morag Lyall for their help in editing the final draft and to Amanda Jones for managing the production. To Joanna Kaliszewska for selling the novel abroad.
Thanks to my publicist, Yassine Belkacemi, for keeping me busy around the country and promoting the novel with such passion and commitment. To my agent, Lucy Luck, who is always there to help in every way—from astute editorial advice to various life crises. And to my editor, Mark Richards, for all his patience on the long road and his constant faith in my writing.
Lastly, thanks to Ben and Tom: you kept me going even if you didn’t know it. And to Jo, not only for her unwavering encouragement throughout but for often seeing the light more clearly than I was able to.
1
It had certainly been a wild end to the autumn. On the Heath a gale stripped the glorious blaze of colour from Kenwood to Parliament Hill in a matter of hours, leaving several old oaks and beeches dead. Mist and silence followed and then, after a few days, there was only the smell of rotting and bonfires.
I spent so long there with my notebook one afternoon noting down all that had fallen that I missed my session with Doctor Baxter. He told me not to worry. About the appointment or the trees. Both he and Nature would recover. Things were never as bad as they seemed.
I suppose he was right in a way. We’d been let off lightly. In the north, train lines had been submerged and whole villages swamped by brown river water. There had been pictures of folk bailing out their living rooms, dead cattle floating down an A road. Then, latterly, the news about the sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the baby they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs.
Coldbarrow. There was a name I hadn’t heard for a long time. Not for thirty years. No one I knew mentioned it any more and I’d tried very hard to forget it myself. But I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to.
I lay down on my bed and thought about calling Hanny, wondering if he too had seen the news and whether it meant anything to him. I’d never really asked him what he remembered about the place. But what I would say, where I would begin, I didn’t know. And in any case he was a difficult man to get hold of. The church kept him so busy that he was always out ministering to the old and infirm or fulfilling his duties to one committee or another. I could hardly leave a message, not about this.
His book was on the shelf with the old paperbacks I’d been meaning to donate to the charity shop for years. I took it down and ran my finger over the embossed lettering of the title and then looked at the back cover. Hanny and Caroline in matching white shirts and the two boys, Michael and Peter, grinning and freckled, enclosed in their parents’ arms. The happy family of Pastor Andrew Smith.
The book had been published almost a decade ago now and the boys had grown up—Michael was starting in the upper sixth at Cardinal Hume and Peter was in his final year at Corpus Christi—but Hanny and Caroline looked much the same then as they did now. Youthful, settled, in love.
I went to put the book back on the shelf and noticed that there were some newspaper cuttings inside the dust jacket. Hanny visiting a hospice in Guildford. A review of his book in the Evening Standard. The Guardian interview that had really thrust him into the limelight. And the clipping from an American evangelical magazine when he’d gone over to do the Southern university circuit.
The success of My Second Life with God had taken everyone by surprise, not least Hanny himself. It was one of those books that—how did they put it in the paper?—captured the imagination, summed up the zeitgeist. That kind of thing. I suppose there must have been something in it that people liked. It had bounced around the top twenty of the bestsellers list for months and made his publisher a small fortune.
Everyone had heard of Pastor Smith even if they hadn’t read his book. And now, with the news from Coldbarrow, it seemed likely that they would be hearing of him again unless I got everything down on paper and struck the first blow, so to speak.
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About the Author
Andrew Michael Hurley lives in Lancashire, England, where he teaches English literature and creative writing. His first novel, The Loney, won the Costa First Novel Award, was named Book of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards, was short-listed for the James Herbert Award, and has been published in over twenty territories.
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