Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  “Quoits!” he declared.

  The mood of the farm had become comfortable, familial. The last of the ticks had been removed, the last hooves pared and the last ewes maggoted and marked with his initials to run again on Llanbedr Hill. They had finished two hours short of sunset. The prospect of sleep before the next dawn assignation had eased the lines around Nancy’s eyes, brought a wagging carelessness to the dogs at his heels and a swagger to both Harry and Griffin as they led the three horses to the puddle of the pond. Oliver rose the twenty-pound sledgehammer and drove a steel bar into the stony ground beside the mixen. He strode down the yard to the door of the barn, where his mother was cooing to Ada’s latest baby and Lucy and Faith were treading down the fleeces. Naomi was with them in one of the sacks, jumping with her shirt in a knot at her waist, which revealed her midriff, a hint of her hips.

  “Girls!” he called. He took down the horseshoes from their peg among the tarnished scythes.

  A wash of anger came over Naomi that must have shown in her cheeks. She tied back her hair and climbed from the bag, lifting the girls to the cobbled floor, barely remembering to return their smiles. As she entered the yard she did not look at Oliver, who was scraping out a line with his boot, who perhaps really did think of her as a girl, who, for all of her father’s effusions, really stood apart from the few people around him only by virtue of a few extra inches.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Panty,” said John.

  “You look and learn, Llanedw.” Griffin rubbed his hands in the dust, spread his legs and scowled towards the church. “Bloody master at work, I am!”

  He hurled his horseshoe, which drifted left and landed in the pile of manure.

  “You must be sure and give us a lesson sometime.”

  Griffin grimaced. “Kink in him, look…”

  “Come on then, John!” called Nancy. “Let’s be seeing you!”

  Again, it seemed, this was a pleasure for the men, who were cheerfully passing around cigarettes, bold with cider, which Naomi, of course, had not been offered. The women were sitting by the wall of the barn, on a long, flat stone half-buried in the grass, which seemed to be cut faintly with letters: an S perhaps, perhaps an A. The girls were crowding close to her feet, calling and gesturing to a place beside them. They cheered then sighed as John flung his horseshoe, but none showed any sign of playing herself. It was Etty, of all of them, who really surprised her: a woman of rather beautiful, cattish eyes, of red hair coiled among the grey in her bun, who was reticent, even awkward, but instructed the men in the handling and the prices of the wool as if it were she, not her son, who was really in charge. After three days working in the Station Café, Naomi had a far better sense of her mother, Molly, who might not have joined in the game, with the state of her hands, but would certainly have been smoking and most likely drinking as well.

  “Can I have a go, please?” she asked, calmly.

  Oliver was weighing a horseshoe in his hand, the low sun on his wool-greased skin, the golden rings he wore on his hands and the golden chain around his neck. He paused and turned with a grunt of amusement and gestured at the pile on the ground.

  “Come a bit closer if you like.”

  Naomi said nothing. She stood at the line, rotating her shoulder to loosen the muscles, then pitched the quoit overarm. It did not spin neatly like the others, turning side over side, but it bounced as it landed and continued to roll, bounding across the slope beyond the barn, keeping its course over the dusty ruts to stop within inches of the post.

  Despite herself, she stuck out her tongue.

  “Dad!” said Lucy. “I wanna go!”

  “And me!” said Faith.

  “Christ, boys,” said Griffin. “It is a bloody revolt.”

  —

  PALE AS THE grass in the Banky Piece had become, the moon daisies, the scabious, the cranesbill and birdsfoot trefoil made the hillside into a splendour of colour: whites and pinks, blues and yellows. Oliver led Naomi down the path by the Middle Ddole hedge, which, despite some trimming earlier that month, was itself festooned with flowers, bright with the songbirds hidden in its leaves. The curlew came over, singing no rain for the rest of the weekend. Towards Cwmpiban a snipe was winnowing—its strange vibration filling the warm evening air.

  “Oliver?”

  “Olly,” he corrected her. He drove a way round his old Escort van, flattening nettles with his boots. “Oliver is more for my mother in a mood.”

  “Olly?”

  “Yes, Naomi.”

  “Where did your father come from? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Idris? Funnon boy.”

  “No, I mean…”

  “Oh, you knows about that, do you?”

  “Dad did mention it.”

  “Oh. Well.” He checked over his shoulder. “To be honest with you, girl, I don’t rightly know where my father came from. I can’t say I know who he was.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “Well. Mother doesn’t much care for the subject, and I don’t much care to upset her. Some bugger who ought to have known better, I imagine.”

  “Dad never knew his father either,” said Naomi, after a moment. “Or his mother. Did you know that? He was found, as a baby. That’s where the surname comes from.”

  The air was cooler among the trees around the stream, which continued to leach, stone-paved, out of the bracken-rich hills and filled a pool where the banks came apart that seemed to have been dammed at some point long in the past. Oliver stopped on a thin pebble beach pitted with his own footprints. He pulled off his boots and his sweat-stinking socks and pushed his big, wrinkled feet into the water.

  “This here’s the wash-pool,” he said, with a sigh. “We’d use him for the sheep years ago. When Idris was about, like. We’d wash them for the shearing back then, see, and we’d dip them here and all—chuck in some horrible brown stuff as did for half the fish from here to the Wye, I doubt, though I cannot say as the crap we use now is much better. Any road, he’s clean enough. I’ll just have a splash then I’ll let you get on. No one wants their waitresses reeking of sheep.”

  Naomi sat against a nearby tree, unbuttoning her shirt from her tight white T-shirt, catching his glance as she dug out the pouch and the Rizlas from her pocket. “I’ve been after one of these all day,” she said.

  “Make us one, would you?”

  She hesitated.

  “Oh!” Oliver chuckled. “Joint, is it? Well, I’ll have a go on yours, then.”

  “You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Now, look here,” he said, “I am going in this pool, though I am not a sheep, and being as how I shall not be perving on you I would be grateful if you would look elsewhere.”

  He fought with his vest and exposed his chest, which was dark and defined between still-darker arms. His waist was taut and tapering, shaded with hair. A moment passed in which Naomi tried again to place him—to find his kind among the oceans of people back in the city, around the tall, terraced house on Neville Street where she had grown up. Then she smiled and shuffled round the tree, tearing a roach from the Rizla packet, watching the swallows, which could still see the sun—the bare sky sparkling where their wings caught the light.

  With a splash and a gasp, Oliver fell into the water.

  —

  SUCH WAS THE depth of the unearthed road that the sheep now climbing onto Llanbedr Hill appeared to Naomi to be no more than heads, like the ghosts of Roman soldiers in the stories. She stood on the bank in the rich green heather, and when the first of the animals arrived at the corner—bony-looking without their wool, the letters MH blue on their sides—she tried to count them as Albert had shown her: pairs on her left hand, tens on her right. A collie came coursing over the hilltop, veered between the digger and a mound of earth and sent the flock scrambling onto the track she had taken with Oliver the previous morning. Behind them a Land Rover slowed and stopped. A bald, hulking man jumped down to the stones, looked her over, nodded a greeting an
d then, with a boy of similar dimensions, followed them onto the common.

  Naomi regretted not changing her waitress skirt.

  “So,” said a second man, who remained in the passenger seat, his eyes on a level with her knees. “How many we got, then?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I can’t really work out how you do it.”

  The man was small and gaunt with age. Cropped white hair and a band of speckled skin surrounded his flat tweed cap. His face, whose lines the evening light could barely penetrate, appeared to move on the right side alone, giving him the impression of a grimace.

  “Me,” he said. “I counts their legs and divides by four.”

  He gave a gulp of a laugh so Naomi smiled in reply.

  “Actually,” she said, “I was really just looking at the old road…Did you know it was under there, did you?”

  “Well.” The man mopped some drool from the side of his mouth. “I’ll have said there was something. He would dry uncommon easy in the sun.”

  “Do you know anything about it?”

  “Well. He were a drovers’ road, like, back in the day, but there’s no news in that. He were a drover’s road even in my father’s time. Stop by the Rhosei, they would, for cueing the cattle.”

  “Cueing?”

  “Wore shoes, they did. Plates, like. Not so much like horseshoes. Cues they called them. You an…archaeologist, is it?”

  “No, no. It’s my father’s thing, really. He’d never forgive me if I didn’t come and look. Perhaps you know him? Martin Chance? He rents the Welfrey from the Hamers, at the Funnon.” She waited. “You know them, I suppose?”

  The old man blinked, his left lid drooping, then turned to the windscreen, the scooped-out banks with their lines of strata and the stone-paved road, which showed a little convex on the horizon, against the mountains in their habitual haze.

  “I knows who you mean,” he said.

  —

  THE SUNLIGHT FILLED the valley precisely. The greener north, the pallid south, the encircling bracken, all shone equally, all leant their shadows towards the pass between the hills. There were church bells ringing somewhere to the west. There were new-shorn sheep in the Funnon fields and, in the yard, the murmur of engines as a van and a tractor turned onto the track with a trail of glimmering dust. As Naomi continued back down the lane, heading for the car she had left by the phone box, she saw Etty fill a watering can in the pond, among the already-yellowing elm trees. She saw Oliver on his path to the brook—his bag and his raven on opposite shoulders—and, on a moment’s decision, she pushed through the bracken of the verge beside her, hopped a sagging fence and crossed the corner of a steep, bare field. Again she would have fared better in her jeans. The crop in the next field hid nettles and thistles—and brambles too, spilling out of the hedgerow, no less painful and surprisingly itchy for their cascades of pink-white flowers. Birds surrounded her here, more heard than seen: one so expressive that it might have been talking, another, a wren she spotted in the leaves, repeating streams of quick-fire notes. The ground was dry and run with cracks—it fell into powder beneath her sandals—but the sun had lost its daytime ferocity, become an easy pleasure on her back and her shoulders. Even with the stings and scratches on her legs she would, if she could, have kept the valley just like this.

  Oliver was lying on his back in the wash-pool, so that his ears were submerged and his golden head with its black, spilling hair appeared to be floating on the water. He was humming to himself, and although the song was far from tuneful, still Naomi found herself thinking of Orpheus, drifting downriver to the Aegean Sea. She sat by a tree that might have been an alder, her legs hanging bare among its exposed roots, and began to assemble the pieces of a joint while Maureen watched her from a nearby rock, clicking her fierce, curved beak.

  “Tea and cake, please,” Oliver said. He lowered his eyes along his nose.

  “And for you, madam?” asked Naomi.

  “The lady will have a dead mouse.”

  “How was it today, then?”

  “Hot.” He splashed his face and pushed back his hair, ripples spreading outwards to the banks, distorting his long and opaque body. “How this bit of water’s got the strength to run away I do not know. I tell you, girl, if it don’t rain soon…I’m finding crayfish dead already and we in’t even onto the dipping. Them organophosphates. You can spread them on the fields, do what you like, and they will get in the streams. What’ll come to the salmon I don’t care to think. October time, not ten years back, they’d run up the Edw like a bloody bore. Turn the whole river white, they would!”

  Naomi jotted a few lines in her notebook. She went to mention the old man on the hill, then decided against it.

  “Olly?” she said.

  “The pool’s all yours in a minute, if you want him. I do not mean to put you off.”

  “Your cob. Hanoch.”

  “Hanoch,” he agreed.

  “Would you mind if I rode him again sometime?”

  “Aiming to do some exploring, are you?”

  “Well, yeah. I thought I might…I can pay you, if you like?”

  The water again had become almost still, and since Oliver was looking into the near-circular leaves of the trees above them she glanced from his face to the dense, dark hair of his crotch.

  “When was you thinking?”

  “Well, I’m working for your grandmother again tomorrow.” She spun the lighter, held in the smoke and exhaled into the unmoving air. “Tuesday, perhaps? Or Wednesday?”

  “Hang on till Wednesday and I’ll come with you. We’ll be two days at Llanedw if the weather doesn’t break. I could do with a day off, in any case. If you ride up north, on from the Welfrey, like, well, there’s Glascwm and the road at Llanfihangel-nant-Melan, but elsewise you can go, what, fifteen, twenty miles? Open ground the entire way. Radnor Forest. There’s barely a farm once you get out there. The odd ruin, that’s it. Proper wilds, it is.”

  The smoke was working on Naomi’s mind, bringing her a slight, calm sense of elevation. She didn’t care if she had somehow offended the man on the hill. Oliver could say what he liked about the brook, but this was still no lifeless, concrete channel, no river of pilings and stinking mud. His voice was sonorous among the cloaking trees, whose leaves she saw on the surface of the water, cut from the piercing blue of the sky, containing his head still tilted backwards with his body hardly hidden beneath. Her eyes moved between these different fields and, in moments, slipped out of focus so that they became indivisible.

  —

  “WHAT’S THAT ONE, then?” Naomi asked.

  “That was a bullock, from what I recall.”

  “And that?”

  “Sod with a bottle.”

  “And…that?”

  “I couldn’t say, to be honest with you, girl.” Oliver shrugged. “I woke one morning and there it was.”

  She moved to his face, her nipples hardening as they brushed through the hair on his chest. There was a mark in his lip, near the incisor with the broken point. There was a brief, pale line in the day or two’s growth on his chin, like a comet, and a longer arch beneath the black hair tumbling on his forehead.

  “What happened there?” She touched it with a nail.

  “Fell off a bridge.”

  “Is it true you once threw a policeman off a bridge, in a sack?”

  Oliver gave his grunt of a laugh and put a hand on her hip, looking from the pink curve of her mouth to the white vest lines running over her collarbones and the cleft of her breasts just touching his chest. He inhaled deeply to see them swell, inspected her thin arms parted round the pillows. “What’s that?” he asked, with a nod.

  “Inoculation,” said Naomi. “I screamed, apparently.”

  She dropped to her elbows, her fine hair falling like curtains around them, and brought their lips together—her tongue sliding down between his teeth. His taste was rich, a distillation of leaves and earth, the hot summer air and the last cigarette he had sm
oked. She put her fingers in his armpit and pressed them to her nostrils. She had thought at first, when they shook hands, that his heat was an aberration, some factor of the sunlight, but here as well he might almost have been feverish. She found his hand and guided it past her navel and his slack, moist penis, between her legs, and as he moved his hard-tipped finger as she had shown him she shut her eyes then held it fiercely—closing around him with a groan.

  The stars were hidden by a sea of cloud. Beyond the candle flame on the warping glass, the only lights were deep in the valley: one at Cwmpiban, another at Gilfach. All day Oliver and Naomi had been here, in the bedroom at the Welfrey, venturing downstairs only to water the horses they had still yet to mount, to find another bottle of cider or whatever sustenance was provided by a tin of baked beans. The only sounds were the yelp of a fox, far away on Glascwm Hill, and a badger down in Turley Wood—its cry like a distressed child.

  Naomi slid over him, to the foot of the bed. She stood a little weakly, then tipped back her shoulders so that the shadows vanished beneath her breasts, which rose and shone as the ribs showed over her belly.

  “By Christ…” Oliver murmured.

  “Nice?”

  “Well.” He collected himself, dragging the pillow under his head. “Naked women are two a penny in these parts, of course. Panty saw eleven of them up the Bailey the other week—hippies, like. All of them starkers aside from their gumboots.”

  “Griffin,” she said, “is full of shit.” She pinched a pair of knickers between her thighs and took two cups from the bedside table, which was scattered with Rizlas, an ashtray, a notebook, a candlestick and a plastic ring of pills. “I’m going to make us some tea.”

  Oliver swung his legs onto the floorboards. He got to his feet, his head an inch or two shy of the beams, bunched his chest and turned to the candlelight, which picked out the muscles of his stomach.

  “Well?” he said.

  “You,” said Naomi, “have quite a high enough opinion of yourself as it is.”