by Ajay Close
I was surprised it wasn’t all done by artificial insemination.
‘With pigs it is,’ Margo said. ‘With sheep and cattle, you can’t beat humping for results.’
Kit and I shared an expressionless glance.
When she bumped into a breeder she knew, we both took the chance to escape. I continued along the same row of stalls, while he veered down a cross-aisle. There must have been five hundred bulls, each attended by a team of cowhands wearing liveried overalls like pit-stop mechanics. Above each stall was pinned a chart bearing a name and a sequence of numbers.
‘Oh.’
We stopped just short of collision, faces centimetres apart. We had been walking in parallel down adjacent aisles, I’d turned left, he’d turned right. It wasn’t the first time this sort of thing had happened. There had been other near-misses, barging into the kitchen just as he was on his way out; rounding a blind corner of byre or barn; turning on my heel to find him just behind me. It was as if our bodies were navigating autonomously, like aircraft on intersecting flight paths.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Any time.’
I had been at the farm almost two weeks by then, long enough to have had my first impressions of Kit confirmed. He was a shoulder-roller and knuckle-cracker, a drinker of milk straight from the bottle, a yawner who opened his mouth a fraction too wide to show off his strong square teeth. A couple of days before, in the kitchen, I had watched him scribble a reminder on a sticky label and slap it to his denim-clad thigh. Had the boys I’d known in my twenties displayed like this to women twice their age? I made a mental note to ask Frankie when we talked on the phone that night.
The tiered seats around the auction ring were packed. We ended up among the overspill of buyers in the cattle hall, under the dead man’s stare of the Tic Tac boy, until he shocked into life with the spasm that signalled a bid. When the time came Margo would deal with the auctioneer, it was her son’s job to monitor the prices. I left him scribbling in his catalogue with a chewed pencil, while I made a circuit of the hall. The sawdust had been trodden to an orange paste, what with the buyers milling around, and the sellers queuing for the ring, and the cowhands criss-crossing through the crowd leading bulls inexorable as oncoming trains. I stared at the leathery faces and fashion-free haircuts, the acres of Barbour green and Harris tweed, trying to guess who was yeoman and who was gentry, then eavesdropping on their accents to find out if I was right.
‘Be easier if you could do it like this, eh—’
Kit had crept up behind me.
‘Go down to the market and pick up a stud?
I supposed we had to have the assisted conception conversation sometime.
‘That’s more or less how it works in some parts of Glasgow,’ I said.
‘But not round your way.’
‘No.’
A granite-faced farmer, eighty if he was a day, nodded at us on his way past. I was used to the old men I saw in Glasgow: seven-stone flotsam with appeasers’ smiles.
‘You don’t go for studs, then,’ Kit said. ‘You prefer the romantic type—?’
I gave him a discouraging look. He flashed his naughty-boy grin.
‘They need to do the business, but you want a bit of versatility. Like a Charolais: good for beef and dairy. I’d say Frankie’s more your Aberdeen Angus.’
I have to admit I laughed.
While they lunched on pie and chips in the café, Margo and Kit bickered over how much they should pay for which bull. I finished my bowl of tinned broth and left them to it, making my way to the narrow corridor used by the beasts on their return from the ring. It was a popular spot, with spectators lining one side of the passage and a few reckless individuals loitering in the path of the bulls. Whenever a newly sold lot was led through, these dare-devils would merge with the crowd along the wall. After a while Kit turned up, choosing to slot into a gap a few feet away rather than play chicken with the bulls. It was obvious somebody’s luck would run out sooner or later. The victim was an elderly farmer, standing chatting with his back to the ring. He had no inkling that the beast was behind him. I watched it happen, his little legs tripping in a futile attempt to keep up as he was dragged along between the bull and a stretch of breeze-block wall. The farmers around me found it hilarious.
I heard Kit ask, ‘What number was that last lot?’
Someone told him.
The auctioneer was moving the sale along at impressive speed. Forty lots had been despatched in little more than an hour and still he had time for jokes. Vesuvius drew the inevitable comment; Valentine, a pun about calf love. Only eight months old and already he had seven heifers in the family way.
‘I was the same at that age,’ said the farmer to my left.
Kit joined in the laughter.
‘Do I hear five thousand, gentlemen? Four? Three? Two? Fifteen hundred…’
Somewhere in the hall a finger was raised, or a catalogue twitched. With a bidder committed, the price began to climb.
‘…Sixteen. Eighteen. Two thousand. Two thousand two. Four. Six. Eight.’ The bidding stalled. ‘A fine bull, gentlemen, high on the saddle, seven cows in calf.’
‘Is he sedated?’ I wondered.
The man on my left turned towards me. He was as tall as Kit but much older, with a spade-shaped jaw and a checked cap pulled down low over his eyes. His waxed jacket gave off a smell that a fortnight before I would have described as ‘stables’ but was now able to identify as sheep.
I nodded at the bull in the ring. ‘He’s so placid.’
The sheep man looked doubtful. ‘You don’t want him too quiet, he’s got to give twenty-five heifers a good seeing-to. The more raised they are the better they are on the job.’
Kit called to me, ‘We’ve got him!’
I saw Margo slip out of her seat above the ring. The bull came towards us, a fur-covered sideboard on legs.
‘Is that Margo Oliphant’s laddie?’ my neighbour asked, when Kit had led it away.
‘That’s right.’
‘He’s the spit of his father.’
My imagination conjured an older version of Kit, a man I could flirt with and not feel like a cradle-snatcher. More suitable, if less desirable.
‘Bad business, that,’ he said, ‘hard on the laddie—’
I looked up, a proper look that took in the whiskers breaking through his weathered skin, the hair in his nostrils, those long flaccid ears, and in spite of all this, the impression of, not youth exactly, but some quality that closes off with age. He still wanted something from the world.
‘Harder on her, mind. He was just a bairn: they dinnae miss what they never had.’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ I said.
On the other side of the hall, Margo had taken possession of her prize. She saw me, and beckoned.
‘No?’ he said. ‘You think it’s marked him?’
‘I don’t know him well enough to say.’
‘But if it was you?’
All at once I was uneasy with the conversation. It had a peculiar tone, inconsequential and pointed at the same time. We seemed to have moved from the candour of strangers to a more personal exchange, the sort where I might choose not to be so candid. I glanced at his Tattersall shirt and high-waisted trousers. The body inside them was lean, spare even, but still somehow substantial, reminiscent of someone I couldn’t place. What was a sheep man doing at a bull sale, anyway?
‘Is the father still alive?’ I asked.
‘Last I heard.’
‘I don’t understand men like that,’ I said, ‘to have a son and never get in touch.’
‘Ach, the laddie’s doing all right for himself, from what I’ve seen.’
I know now that, in trying to put a normal social distance between us, I had stepped away from the wall, but I had no sense of it then. All I knew was that he was pulling me towards him. His strength was astonishing. No chance to resist: I was weightless in his grip. The next instant I felt myself crushed against his
chest by the heft of the bull at my back. And then the beast passed by, and he released me, and everything was the same as it had been ten seconds before, except that I felt unaccountably tearful.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Margo was beckoning me more emphatically now. I told him I had to go.
He nodded. ‘I’ll see you again.’
It was an odd thing to say but, who knew, perhaps he would, at some sheep dog trials or tractor rally.
I was halfway across the hall before the suspicion surfaced. It wasn’t only his eyes the cap had concealed: it was his hair, the flop of charcoal hair that had been so conspicuous in Edinburgh, and the long, bony insistence of his face that, with the cap pulled so low, had gained the illusion of breadth. The accent, too, was broader, with a rural quaver mid-throat. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that the man who smelled of sheep was my fraudulent interview candidate, Mr Smith. But by the time I looked round to double-check, he had melted into the crowd.
Bath
That Saturday, when I woke in my attic room, I streaked across the landing for a bath. The water pressure was so high that the hot tap ran cloudy, like seltzer, but the tank was small. The plastic tub creaked when I rolled onto my stomach, making the most of the six inches of water. Blue sky through the steamed-up window, jackdaws quarrelling on the roof above my head. I pulled the plug, wiped the fog from the mirror over the sink, and studied my reflection. Perhaps it was right, what they said about country air. There was a new bloom on my skin, a sparkle in my eyes. My breasts, slick with water, were white as a young girl’s. Unless it was just the hormone injections. Turning from the mirror, I noticed the water was still in the bath. Usually it drained quickly, with a rattling gurgle.
I found the plunger in the downstairs loo, and decided to have breakfast before going back up. The farmhands had milked the cows and gone and Margo would be out all morning. After the shadowy hall, the kitchen was dazzling. Sunlight blazed from the window over the sink. Lifting a hand to shield my eyes, I found a black shape in the afterburn on my retina.
Kit was sitting, elbows on the table, shovelling bacon into his mouth. At the sight of me in my towel he almost choked.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
I wanted to turn around and walk back out, but if there was one thing worse than showing my middle-aged flesh to a twenty-four-year-old, it was letting him see my embarrassment.
He sliced a corner off his fried bread and speared it to a strip of bacon.
‘I thought…’
‘I’m waiting…’
We began simultaneously. Broke off.
I saw him looking at the plunger.
‘The bath’s not draining.’
‘It should be.’
‘Yes, I’d worked that out for myself.’
He gave me the once-over, slowly, wet hair to toenail polish and back. ‘I thought you’d be in Glasgow.’
‘Frankie works most Saturdays.’
‘Watching football?’
‘That’s the one.’
The fork knocked against his teeth as he put the bacon in his mouth. ‘Is this your weekend look?’
‘I don’t take baths fully clothed.’ Neither of us smiled. ‘Does it bother you?’
‘Not at all.’
We held the moment: him at the table, overalled in the Aga’s heat, me underdressed and on my feet, the air between us with its perfect balance of levity and weight, and then it dawned on me. He was playing with me, or I was playing with him.
His cutlery clattered onto the plate. ‘I’d better have a swatch at that bath.’
He removed his boots at the bottom of the stairs and stood aside, letting me go first. The towel barely skimmed the tops of my thighs, but I climbed the staircase as carelessly as a teenager. Do a job for twenty-odd years and your career becomes your identity. I was always the responsible party, the one to cut through the flannel: let’s get real. But on Margo’s farm, the Transparency Unit felt about as real as another galaxy. Who was I, stripped of my bureaucratic status? I was only just beginning to find out. Today’s discovery: in a game of bluff, I wasn’t going to be the one to back down.
The bathroom was too small for two people. The mirror had misted over again. The bath seemed filled with lemon barley water, only it was soap scum, not lemon, floating on the surface, along with a couple of pubic hairs.
He dropped to his knees, shrugging out of the top half of his overalls. Underneath he was wearing one of his many tight jumpers, worn at the elbows where his skin glimmered through the fishnet of wool.
He pushed up the sleeves and immersed one arm in my dirty water. I had already checked: there was no nest of hairs blocking the drain. He replaced the plug, took out a penknife and began to unscrew the bath panel.
‘I’ll be sleeping here tonight.’ He raised his eyes to mine.
‘Margo didn’t mention it.’
‘Margo doesn’t know.’
‘Trouble at home?’
‘Ovary madness. An incontrollable urge to rip the dick off any man in a fifty-mile radius.’ He pocketed the loose screws. ‘Especially mine.’
‘It’s like being injected with plutonium,’ I said.
‘Yeah, yeah, and it’s not my body, and she’s not even twenty-one, and it’d be nice to have a bit of fun before she’s stuck pushing a buggy…’
‘She’s got a point.’
‘If you know what you want, why wait?’
The panel came away revealing the rough outer skin of the tub and, underneath, amid the dust-clogged cobwebs, the mummified body of a mouse.
‘Oh good,’ I said, ‘wildlife.’
In the cupboard concealing the hot-water tank was a plumber’s wrench and a blackened roasting pan shallow enough to ease under the pipes to catch any escaping water. He fitted the wrench around the copper joint, but the angle was awkward and the jaws kept slipping. Downstairs, Margo’s grandfather clock chimed the half hour, and then the three-quarters. The morning sun beat on the roof above us. When he took off his beanie, damp strands of hair were stuck to his forehead. He had a firm grip on the coupler by now, but it wouldn’t move. He tried a new technique, levering the wrench up and down. Abruptly he dropped it and took off his jumper. I blushed. It wasn’t the shock of exposed flesh, so much as the intimate act of undressing: the arm reaching over his head, the clumsy tug on the knitted collar, the same heedless gesture Frankie made night after night.
‘That’s better,’ he said, sitting back on his haunches.
Though I told myself not to look, some third eye saw the graceful lines of his body: the camber of his biceps, those long-muscled forearms, the narrowing from shoulders to waist. Lean as he was, every inch of him was sleek with youth’s cushioned flesh.
The jackdaws had fallen silent. I could hear the drone of a tractor in the field across the burn. Kit’s sweat was a faint tang on the roof of my mouth.
‘I’ll sleep next door, if it’s all right with you.’
A couple of seconds too late, I said, ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
He leaned in under the bath again. A grunt of effort and the metal surrendered.
‘Yes!’
But the job was not finished. He remained on the floor, his face hidden from me, his right hand working at something. After a while he took up the wrench again. Curiosity got the better of me. I hunkered down on the lino beside him.
He pulled the plug out and, with a violent sucking sound, the water started to drain. He handed me the roasting pan, half-filled with a sort of delta mud, fibred, rank-smelling. I set it down on the floor.
He saw my revulsion. Grinning, he scooped up a fistful of slops.
‘Forget it,’ I said.
He weighed it in his palm, deliberating.
‘I mean it.’
He brought it to his nose. ‘Mmm.’
‘Kit.’
‘What’s the matter? It’s just skin, scurf, hair,’ a mome
nt’s hesitation before he added, ‘spunk.’
I shoved his hand and the black slime splattered over his chin. It was worth it to see the amazement in his face. He caught my hand, the remains of the stuff squelching between our fingers. When he scooped up more with his free hand, I grabbed his wrist and fought him off like the giggling girl I hadn’t been for twenty years. And perhaps hadn’t been even then.
Downstairs the front door banged. A voice hallooed. Margo was back from her shopping.
Poker
At five years old I loved my mother infatuatedly. The oily-sweet smell of her lipstick, her blue-white cleavage in its square décolletage of cream chiffon Ossie Clark. I watch Ruth’s kids now, stroking their cheeks with the velvet curtain, cuddling the sausage-dog draught excluder when Mummy and Daddy go out, and I’m amazed my love survived so many separations, along with the constant change of fixtures and fittings, all those newly-stale sets of smells. It even survived each new Lilias, each time she took a new role.
She spoke beautiful RP, as all Scottish actresses must. Her tall, fine-boned body and sculpted face made her the obvious choice as Beatrice, Rosalind, Amanda (she was born to wear bias-cut satin and drawl Coward’s lines), various thigh-slapping principal boys, and Ibsen’s neurotic wives. The week rehearsals began she would throw a tea party, a jolly gathering around the gas fire, rolling joints and toasting crumpets. Before I circled the room with my plate of buttered bannock she would introduce me to the backstage staff, who could be relied on to amuse me with endless games of Pontoon and Stop the Bus should the other childminding options let her down. The only time I recall her touching me, apart from hand-holding on busy roads, was at those tea parties. It helped if the object of this affection were herself a little performer, and for a long time I obliged, but over the years I began to notice something. The delirious gaiety of the occasion, the sucking and blowing on burned fingers, the gleam of melted butter on chin, the clashing perfumes and tinkling bangles, the twinkle in the eyes of the rude mechanicals, the hoots of mirth… all this caused a hollow feeling in me.