Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  “I didna mean to say no harm, mister,” one of them said.

  “Mister, can we come up there, can we?”

  “Let ’em be, Jimmy,” called Joshua, the harried-looking foreman, appearing next to the train on the bridge-end. “I’ll keep an eye on ’em.”

  “They’re all right, boy,” said Oliver. “Just getting in on a bit of the action.”

  “Well…” Jimmy shrugged. He always preferred not to make the decisions. “It is your manor, I suppose.”

  “On we go, then.” Oliver lit the acetylene with his cigarette, flicked away the butt and turned to the brace, waiting for the edge of the steel to melt before he hit the oxygen and started to cut.

  Boys had been pothering them for six months now: birds to their plough as they worked their way south, following the last down-train from Moat Lane, through Llanidloes and Pant-y-Dwr, fitting the braking chains to hoist up the rails, tossing the ties about like matchsticks. They were a famous team, or so they had heard: Scotch and Paddies, work-bitten Midlanders and hard-raised farm boys who had never seen such money in their lives; £4–10 a day they were earning, with time and a half Saturdays, and double time Sundays, and all the cash they could count for the ties they sold to the farmers for gateposts. They had bought themselves beer and suits and jewellery. They had fitted the snowplough and worked through the winter, with a pair of ghosters every week—Monday to Tuesday, Wednesday to Thursday—and each of those was thirty-four hours, with no more rest than the odd cup of tea.

  The river lay straight beyond the meander, narrowing away between flower-shaded oaks towards the dark, falling nose of the Twmpa. The clouds were divided by the new electric cables, which had appeared almost everywhere over the past year and, to judge by the angler near Boughrood Vicarage, had not as yet upset the salmon—whatever the calamitous predictions. Across the valley the blossom of the pears and cherries shone in the muted sunlight. Buds like candle flames coloured the beech trees. A swallow fled beneath the bridge with insect movements as Oliver’s torch left the second brace and the steel cross fell the height of a train to chime and leap on the beams.

  —

  THERE WAS STILL a drab of snow on the lane up to Painscastle, and with Oliver, Joseph and Granville on the bench and the four Hay lassies shrieking in the back, Jimmy had to back up twice and gun the little A40 van to make the pitch by the track to Trevyrlod. With the clutch in the air and the chassis shaking like a half-drowned dog, they crept across the cattle grid—the headlamps grazing the few Clun lambs in the Ffermwen fields and the cars and tractors spread along the verges. They dawdled, looking for somewhere to park, then found a space by the telephone box, where the engine expired into the night.

  “I lost my shoe!” called Angie.

  “All right, lad, you can get off me now.”

  “I dunna think he wants to, Gran.”

  “Where’s that bloody hipflask?”

  “Olly, open the bloody door, would you? We cannot breathe in here!”

  She was a tidy piece, was Angie Lloyd—not pretty, perhaps, with her keening nose and that fold of flesh beneath her chin, but high-hipped and big-breasted in a way that mattered. She was not shy either, or so went the rumours. If boys wore raddle the same as tups, she might have been bright red from her head to her feet. She clung to Oliver’s arm as the eight of them paraded down the lane, pressing her rigid sweater to his side, and in the lee of the castle, in the cigarette-spotted darkness, with the deep notes thumping in the village hall and the week’s pay fat in the pocket of his trousers, he laughed and locked an arm around her shoulders.

  Painscastle always gave the wildest dances. Tony Brown would drag his black leather jacket, his record player and tractor batteries to every hall from Gwenddwr to Gladestry, but most of these places had some inclination to order. In Painscastle, there was barely a farmer not locked into some ancestral war. To have assembled any kind of peacekeeping force could have taken a lifetime of negotiations, and since the entire dance had been known to turn against them, even the police could be coaxed out of Hay by nothing less than a riot. Beneath the ball of mirrors whose shafts of light fanned through the smoke, boys were gathered in groups, by village, with cigarettes and pints from the pub—eyeing one another, eyeing the girls in their Saturday skirts who had come with their brothers and kept to the back in villages of their own. There was a story probably all of them knew, if they couldn’t have given the names or the details. Years before, some girl from the Skreen had been taking a dip in the lake at Llanbwchllyn when the lord from Painscastle came by on his horse and decided he liked what he saw. He had locked her away up here in the castle, which must have been good stone back then, not merely a mound with a sheep-haunted ditch, and when the word got out every man with an axe or a hay knife had come charging up the valleys from Llanshiver and Court Evan Gwynne, and the castles at Clifford and Hay. For several weeks they had laid the place siege until, in the end, an army showed up and put the whole lot of them to the sword. Three thousand men were supposed to have died. The Bachawy had run crimson and the blood would not mingle, even with the Wye, so the news of the battle passed all the way to the sea.

  Hell, thought Oliver, as he bent for the door, but those boys had wound things up.

  —

  ETTY REMOVED HER spectacles, rubbed her aching eyes with hard-tipped fingers and began to assemble the accounts and the tax forms, the bank statements and her own financial projections, and return them to their neatly marked files. She stacked them in turn at the end of the kitchen table, where the teapot shivered on the cloth.

  “Idris,” she said. “They will not have one more penny on the mortgage.”

  “He shall not have the Welfrey!” Idris repeated.

  “Then lease it, at least! We had it for a song—”

  “Now, look you here, woman—”

  Etty hit the table and her fountain pen jumped.

  “Idris,” she said. “You can attack me all you like and it will make no blasted difference. I am telling you the numbers, do you understand? There are forty-four lambs. There is no money in the bank. We made the payment this year only because Oliver has work. If it weren’t for him the two of us would be stuck in a council house, and that’s if we were lucky! He shall keep on working down to Three Cocks, which will pay us to restock, but it will not scratch the mortgage and it will not buy us a tractor and that old horse will not go another year. I shall ask the vet to see Panda in the morning, but God help us if the foul has reached the other beasts…”

  Idris stood above her, his long face sheer, his short breaths groaning deep in his chest. For once he said nothing, watching her take up the pile of files as if she might suddenly remember some forgotten balance sheet, some overlooked grant form he had only to sign and return. He looked, as she left them in the bread-and-cheese cupboard, as dry, as wizened as the mistletoe drooping from its thick black beam. The oil lamp failed to find his eyes. It traced the white-grey hairs that stretched between his ears—glimpses of scalp where they had slipped out of place.

  It was so thick with shadows, the Funnon. The walls of the station, as Etty recalled them, had all been smooth: the rooms one level of orderly rectangles. Here there were corners and crevices everywhere; the walls bulged and cupped beneath the discoloured whitewash. No wonder the house was such a devil to keep clean. At the overlapping chimes of half past nine, she wound both clocks and blew out the lamp—the flame that remained on the mantelpiece casting long shapes over the flagstones. Her hand was huge on her husband’s back as they climbed the stairs, as they would every night, and in the bedroom she set down the candle on the dressing table, whose mirrors threw rhomboids of light across the wallpaper, the moralizing samplers and the patch of the ceiling where the rain would drip and pop in the ewer. In six years Etty had not seen her mother. She did not see her son for weeks at a stretch. As usual, she and Idris undressed back to back, pulling on a nightdress and a nightshirt respectively: stiff, white garments that fell onto their uptur
ned feet as they knelt together at the side of the bed. Beside them, in the floorboards, were the marks of knees where Oliver was not.

  A fox barked its loneliness high on Cefn Wylfre.

  —

  ANGIE LED OLIVER to a tree by a vein of a stream where the blue lights blinked in the thin, fanning branches and willow gullies dusted his spilling hair. With the sogginess of the ground, her heels kept sinking so that her eyes came barely to the neck of his waistcoat, and as she took a step towards him she stumbled and laughed and grabbed for his hands—looking up at his broad, dark face, the swelling in his cheek that made him seem to smile, his teeth repeating the white of the moon that lay above the tump of the castle.

  There were the ghosts of sheep in the fields around them. There was shouting in the village, the roar of a tractor. She allowed her breasts to compress on his belly, lifted her lips and, closing her eyes, saw distant, fluttering colours in the blackness. His smell was a musk, a rich allure. His heat was such that his clothes might have hidden a fire. She felt a pressure in the tightness of his trousers and touched its shape with her long, sharp nails.

  “You’re going to have to kiss me first, you are,” she said.

  Well, he was younger than she was, even if she had misled him on that little matter and her friends and her girdle would not tell him different. He was a boy from the hills, however exotic his appearance. At least he bent when she reached for his neck and brought his face towards her own, his hot breath coming almost every second. His tongue met hers and circled its tip. His hand left her shoulder and gathered her breast, which he almost contained in the splay of his fingers. Before he got any other ideas she worked on his belt and dug in his trousers until his penis was projecting towards her. She crouched unsteadily, holding his leg, balancing on her toes, and brought its stale-smelling head between her lips. And yet, when she looked back up at his face, it seemed to her that he had barely noticed—his eyes turned up to the net of the branches and the stars among the moon-framed clouds.

  —

  THERE WERE NO other horses in the stable at the chapel, although the place stank as ever of urine and hay—smells that Idris had always found soothing and held in his lungs before he climbed from the trap. He tethered Duke in his regular bay, unhackled the shafts and laid them on the ground. He collected his stick, then turned to the door, where Ethel was waiting among the few cars and tractors, in the dress she had worn these ten years gone—its blackness subsided like the colour of her hair, which now recalled sand more than fire. She had powdered her nose to conceal its redness. She had painted over the scoring round her eyes, but with the bones of her shoulders and the spareness of her waist he would not have taken her back to Watkins, the expensive tailor down in Builth Wells—even if he could have met the bill.

  “Boss,” said Albert, who was standing on the path by the war memorial.

  “I likes your scarf, Mrs. Hamer,” said his wife.

  “Thank you, Dorothy.” Ethel twisted its corner. “Purse stitch, it is.”

  “Purse stitch!”

  Albert sighed and ran his eyes down the names.

  Clouds were closing on the blueness of the dawn. Between the listing stones, the daffodils were the only note of colour: brilliant yellow or white with orange mouths. Swinging his stick with his shorter leg, Idris joined the line of worshippers who fed into the chapel, passed beneath the gallery and dispersed onto the pews and benches with long wooden gulfs and entire rows remaining empty. At the big seat he stood in his polished leather shoes and looked across the pew where he had once sat with his brothers to Ethel, to Ruth and the girls who were his great-nieces, and Philip’s son, Griffin—his shoulders bowed and his face worn thin by five months of humping hay to their top fields. Despite urgent meetings of the chapel committee, everybody else in the place had hair that was grey at the least.

  There is a fountain filled with blood

  Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

  And sinners plunged beneath that flood

  Lose all their guilty stains.

  Incrementally, over the past few years, Ethel had begun to depart from her organ scores. Idris had spoken to her about it, even made threats, but still, when the first verse of the first hymn was over, she allowed her right hand to trace out alternatives, her feet to draw phrases of such sudden complexity that he faltered, glancing at her upright back. Beside her, Nancy kept pumping the bellows. The congregation sang doggedly as ever. His wife seemed to think she could play what she liked. She seemed to think they were accompanying her. On his raised step beneath the tall windows, Idris stood as erect as he could manage, his hands at his sides since it helped with projection and he knew the whole hymn-book by heart. The trouble was, there was an invention to her deviations; they were by no means as arbitrary as he sometimes chose to think. Despite himself, he could not help listening, nor stifle his occasional replies. He hung onto notes until his breath almost failed him. He met her harmonies with harmonies of his own. For a full two lines in the final verse he was barely a precentor at all, but once again a soloist, facing his audience—performing a hymn composed as it left his lips.

  —

  “YOU BOYS, I’M telling you!” laughed Jimmy, who was sat across the bridge in his parka and his woollen hat. “You don’t just go to a dance, do you?”

  “Well,” said Oliver. “There’s dancing and dancing.”

  “Ever try the Twist, lad?”

  It was a dull, cold Sunday. They had been working at Boughrood a full week now and most of the top run of braces was gone. The bridge lay open: a roofless skeleton with the wire rope spooling back towards the crane, hauling yet another cross-piece. Besides themselves, Granville and Joseph were cutting at the north end, weary, hunched above their work. The foreman was abusing the same pair of teenaged boys who had claimed their place midway across the span, pitching stones into the deep, fleet water, the brown foam tangling with the currents.

  “Fucking kids!”

  “They’re all right, gaffer.”

  “Enough is enough! I told their bloody mothers…”

  Oliver shivered. Even with his gloves and his thick tweed coat, the breeze kept finding its way to his skin and he was glad for once for the acetylene torch, which bloomed white behind his sunglasses. On the entire length of the railway line, in the snow and the darkness, this was the only part of the job that he had resented. It was a beautiful construction, Boughrood Bridge: all Herculean spars, diamonds of air and rivets as big as his fist. It was a hundred years old to the month, or so Joshua had told him; three hundred and twenty tons of steel. It could surely have been saved for some other purpose—if nothing else, to cut a mile out of the journey to the tack.

  The crack was so loud and the fall so sudden that Oliver did not so much as cry out. He was propelled from his seat by a terrible force, the blaze of the torch passing over his legs as his back and his head collided with a girder that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. He spun, and his belly met some other shelf, which drove the air clean out of his chest. For a second he fell, and then another, and then the river exploded around him and he was freezing, blinded, wildly alert. He threw out his hands and found some sort of beam, but his fingers were rigid from the previous night and his gloves began to slide across the rust. There was the height of the hills in the force of the water. He flailed his arms, attempting to swim. He felt himself turning and remembered his mother, then his back hit a rock and, swallowing, choking, he crawled across stones onto an island of stick-woven sallies.

  Perhaps not even a minute had passed. On the bank, beyond an eddy running gently westwards, the angler from the vicarage had dropped his rod. Oliver managed to roll in the saplings. The bridge, he realized, had folded in half, buckled like a thing made out of wire, so that the sides splayed sideways and most of the bed had collapsed into the river. Jimmy was somehow clinging to his girder, his swinging torch still spouting fire. The foreman was gaping, frozen, by the crane. Among the blacks and silvers of the water, Oliv
er caught sight of a clump of hair and he blundered towards it, splashing and shouting, and grabbed Jerry Miles by another clutch of islands. He fought his way back into the shallows, where the angler took the boy from his arms.

  Half of the village was already on the bridge-end. People were scrambling down the twisted beams, calling out to Jimmy and Granville and calling for Edward Hughes. Oliver waded through the starving eddy and climbed through the flotsam onto the path, but at the gieland the ground seemed to slide from his boots and he lay without struggling beneath a fern-sprouting willow, with the pink-white faces of lady’s smock bobbing and settling around him. When he wiped his face his glove streamed blood. Above him, in the tree, he could see what must have been small birds: one with a caterpillar, another warbling flurries of notes among the buds and the yellow-furred flowers.

  —

  FOR ALL THE times he had seen him in the fields, it must have been eleven years since Idris had last been face to face with his nephew. Albert had called him the spit of his mother—a heavy-timbered Cregrina girl Idris had eyed in passing when he was a lumper—but as he stood with his father in the door of the stable, the geese by the pond still acclaiming the gander and the sheepdogs joined in fury in the kennel, he looked to Idris like nothing so much as Ivor plucked and inflated to hideous dimensions. He had the same louring eyebrows, the quick-shifting eyes. He had a chest so broad that his arms were at angles and a neck like the neck of a beast.

  He murmured to calm the cob and himself, running the curry-comb from his shoulder to his belly, working in circles to rise the dirt.

  “How do, Idris?” said Ivor.

  “Ivor.”

  “You was singing very sweetly this morning, I do hear.”