by Tom Bullough
—
THERE WERE FIRES on the hills: sparks at an untellable distance. That one perhaps was on Radnor Forest, somewhere out for Kinnerton or up on the Creigiau. That one must have been on the Epynt, where nobody knew the names anymore. The only one Oliver could place for sure was the peat fire on Gwaunceste Hill, which had been burning for days: a necklace for the hilltop with sudden adornments of gorse or scrub and even an oak, whose low-hanging branches wore flames like candles.
“The oak tree blossoms on Midsummer’s Eve,” Oliver remarked. “Albert did tell me that one time. Ups and blossoms and wilts and falls, and all of it over by sunrise.”
“Is that an oak, then?” asked Naomi.
“I expect.”
“Olly, it’s about five miles away.”
“Well, I know him, don’t I?”
His arms were like an armoured corset: a thing of warmth and leather and metal. His hands were large enough to cover her breasts. He stood with his chin just touching her hair, his half-rigid penis a stripe of heat against her back and her buttocks. They were breathing together—a tint of smoke in the night-time air, the fern moving softly on their legs.
“I cannot believe,” he said, “you have got me up here unhackled.”
“I let you wear your boots, didn’t I?”
“If Llanowen was to see me…”
“Right, you can warm my front now.” Naomi revolved, put an arm round his waist and arranged his penis between her legs. “OK. That’s nice.”
“So,” Oliver asked. “What you going to do then, girl?”
“I shall stop right here until my back gets cold.”
“I mean, in life, like?”
“In life?” She could see the firelight faintly on his face, a shade apart from the surrounding clouds. “You won’t laugh?”
“I won’t laugh.”
“I’m going to be a poet.”
“Why would I laugh at that?”
“I don’t know. It just seems—”
“Good place to write poems here, I imagine.”
“Well, that’s one reason I came.”
“Going to write one about me, are you?”
Naomi smiled invisibly, returning her head to his neck. “I might have written one or two already.”
“Only one or two?”
“You really are the vainest man I ever met.”
“Things to be vain about, see? Do you know they write poems about me?”
“Limericks, I heard.”
“Bloody epics, look. Heroic exploits, that manner of thing.”
It was the first time Oliver had ever been on Cefn Wylfre at night. The shapes and smells of the sheep on its slopes, these all belonged to Llanowen and Llwyntudor, and even on those moonlit evenings when some activity or punishment had kept him back at primary school he would never have dreamt of coming up-over. The fairies and the corpse candles, well, Albert had always told his tales a little slantwise, but the tales of the chapel—their undying worms and unquenchable fire—still they remained, after all this time. He put a hand gently through Naomi’s hair, felt her belly, her thighs, their indivisible warmth. He could have expressed no more plainly his thoughts in the bedroom—that he found something abiding in her beauty, unlike the likes of Angie or Annette, whose appeal had been vernal, precisely in the fact that it would fade. There had really only ever been Amy to compare, and she had belonged to a separate lifetime.
“I never did think I would become a farmer,” he said, finally.
“How could you not have done?”
“I was aiming to be a vet. Or a doctor. I did get the grades at O-level, like. No thanks to old Idris. It might have happened. Or a boxer. I could have been a boxer. Good, I was. Three Counties Champion.”
“I saw the picture in your grandmother’s house.”
“There you are, see?”
“Do you still do that stuff, Olly, do you?”
“What stuff’s that, then?”
“Fighting.”
Away to the north, the fire had found a few higher branches of the drought-seared oak at Cwmtwrch. It was threatening to turn into a candle of its own.
“I never did think I would become a farmer,” he repeated.
“I’m warm now,” said Naomi. “Let’s keep going!”
The fires extinguished as she led him down the slope, her wellies flapping against her calves. In a bowl of grass, a moth was floating: a glitch in the darkness. Sheep hurried away from them, hollow on the dry ground. Naomi picked her way among the ragged trees—sudden shapes against the reddish clouds—following her spare hand, testing the space. The first few nights she had spent at the Welfrey she had listened to the void of this hill. In the moments when she was falling asleep she had seemed to be floating with nothing more than the creaks of the house to remind her where she was—and these might equally have been the sounds of some intruder who knew she was alone with no way to raise the alarm and with nothing to defend herself besides the wine bottles her father used for his cider. She would never have come up here without Oliver. She would not so much as walked about the house in her underwear had it not been for him, so pleasingly scandalized by their nakedness—his hand like an anchor in the night.
“Mawn pools, girl,” he said, in a murmur.
They were working their way across a level in the hilltop where the grass had risen into tussocks or reeds and, as she peered ahead of them, Naomi seemed to see a glaze to the ground and a flickering movement—perhaps a sheep, perhaps the invention of a joint.
“What have they got to mourn about?” she asked.
“Mawn, not mourn. It’s an old word for peat, it is.”
“Oh, mawn.”
“Best not to go too close. Deep they are.”
“No swimming, then?”
“No swimming.” As she took another step, Oliver caught the faintest light, a blueness in the path beneath her boots, and he touched his chest although she was holding his hand.
“Can we go between them?” she asked.
“I’ll show you in the day, how about that?”
“I don’t know what it is about you, Olly. You tell me to do one thing and I feel a powerful urge to do the opposite.”
“You’re trouble, that’s why.”
“It’s only with you. I’m quite good normally.”
Oliver smelt the damp in the soil here, a wealth of age and decomposition he had almost forgotten these past few weeks. He felt the thirst in the hills and the fields. He drew the girl towards him, the sensation almost painful as her breasts pressed cool against his ribs. For a moment again there was light where she had been standing. There was a paleness too, close to the water, which must have been sheep, although it was no more than an hour till dawn—the hour that Albert gave to the fairies. Then, out of the blackness, a line unfurled between the half-seen pools, growing rapidly as the sheep fled away from them, brightening into a soft, pure blue.
“What…” Naomi breathed. “Is that luminescence?”
“That’s your path, girl,” said Oliver.
THE CRY WAS a fracture in the midsummer night: a new note in the music of the party, which sounded to Oliver less like songs than some machine wanting oil. He glanced across the cramped little sitting room, past the young men sprawling in the armchairs with leather sandals and skeiny beards, the women in T-shirts, draped on the men’s laps or cross-legged on the blim-pocked carpet. Had he known that Naomi’s friends would look like this, he would have thought twice before polishing his shoes, combing in his Brylcreem and choosing his waistcoat with the prancing deer on the left-hand panel. He would have thought twice about coming at all. The gabbling woman, or rather the girl, who had him pinned against a sheet-covered wall was wearing a deep-cut, velvet dress, but to her it seemed to be some kind of joke. Leather boots showed under its hem. Her face was made up almost like a clown.
“You…got to excuse me,” said Oliver, trying not to spit, since the ceiling forced him to lean above her. “I have a baby, see? Upstairs he is.�
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“That waistcoat!” she exclaimed again.
Oliver was always able to hear Cefin. He could wake him with the slightest noise. Once, when Naomi had gone to see about her next year’s studies, taking the boy with her, Oliver had still woken regularly throughout the night and would have bet money that his son had woken too, in his basket, wherever he was.
He grappled his way towards the door, stepping over people and ashtrays, avoiding the light in its spherical shade, but he could not remember, he realized, how to get to the hall and arrived instead in the thin, dirty kitchen, where bodies were crowded on the lino and the sideboards and Naomi was leaning on the fridge, talking to a man in yellow-lensed glasses who might have been an old boyfriend for all that Oliver knew. She smiled when she saw him—her eyes black-rimmed, her jacket tight to contain her belly and make the most of her milk-heavy breasts—but he turned and then caught his head on the lintel, so that the people around him looked and winced.
The hall seemed narrower than he had remembered, although perhaps it was just these numberless people. It was a wonder that there was air enough to breathe. They sat in lines against either wall, their legs interlocked, their knees in ridges—some of them surely not half of his age. At least here he was able to stand upright, and with the staircase slanting high to his left he held onto the banisters as he stretched for each space, muttering apologies, awkward, conspicuous. One man looked up and caught his eye: a lecturer possibly, his hair run with grey. By the front door stood two men in leather, one with a ring in his nose like a bull, and a black man with long hair fashioned into snakes, who grunted a greeting as he passed.
There was a couple having sex in the bedroom, moulded half-dressed over the bed so that at first Oliver mistook them for the bedclothes. Their noises joined the lamb-like wail of his son. He tried not to look as he took the basket and hurried back onto the miniature landing, into the women who were waiting for the toilet.
“Oh! What’s her name?” They gaggled round him, putting out their fingers.
“Cefin.” He wrapped him in his arms, held him to his chest like some part of himself restored. “He’s called Cefin. Like…Well, like Kevin.”
“Hello, little Cefin!”
“I like your accent. Where are you from?”
The front door now stood open to the street, giving a glimpse of space beyond. Lying the baby on his forearm, his small legs working, his dark, angry face enclosed by his fingers, Oliver picked up the basket, the nappy bag and the bottle of milk that Naomi had pumped before they left her mother’s house that evening. He hardly noticed if he trod on anyone as he clambered back down the stairs. The air outside did seem to bring Cefin some measure of calm, although the street was no better than a strip of tarmac between terraced houses like great, dead hedgerows. There was a weed or two curling out of the pavement, but there was not one tree, not one patch of grass. The houses were distinguished only by pebble-dash, the colours of the doors and the way that the light fell from the craning streetlamps. At either end were yet more houses. As Oliver stood, rocking backwards and forwards, he looked up, through radiating telegraph wires and the television aerials on the chimneys, into the slice of tainted sky, down at his Land Rover in the line of cars.
“Olly!” Naomi appeared in the door behind him, fighting her way through the crush on the step. “Olly, where are you going?”
“Home,” said Oliver.
“No,” she said. “No, no, you’re not.”
“Naomi, he was screaming, he was. There was two people fucking half on top of him! You think that’s all right, do you? I don’t think that’s fucking all right!”
“Olly, I didn’t know. I didn’t hear him. I only checked on him ten minutes ago! We’ll…What are you even thinking, anyway? You can’t leave me here. Can I have him? Please?”
“I do not want him going back in there. I shall fetch him home and you when you’re done.”
“Olly, I’m…He’s two months old! I’m breast feeding, for God’s sake!”
“It will be dawn in half an hour or so. I have got the bottle. I shall pick him up some of that powder.”
Cefin was starting to cry again, his voice dividing the lifeless street.
“Olly…” Naomi stood before him, her lips almost quivering, a line slicing into her forehead. “Love, come on. Please. It’s all right. We’re both of us exhausted. He’s hungry, that’s all. Please. I need to feed him. We’ll…We’ll go to my mum’s house—”
“And what? September, he comes back to this, does he?”
“It’s a party, Oliver! For Christ’s sake, I’ve not been to a party in a year! You don’t live in the bloody pub, do you? I’m sorry this is hard for you—really I am—but you do have to make a bit of an effort, you know? This is where I come from! It’s not like I’ve ever had you come here before, and I’ve bent over backwards to fit into your place, haven’t I?”
“Well,” said Oliver. “I’m here, in’t I?”
Naomi took the baby with a noise like a whimper and at once the pain subsided in her face. She tugged at her jacket, pulled the scarf from her hips to hang over her shoulder and put him to her breast, his cry a mewl as he smelt her milk. The two of them became a single entity: a thing self-sufficient in the unnatural light, in the music still spewing from the too-small house, by the mud-striped Land Rover where Maureen was watching them, hunched and black on the steering wheel.
—
BY THE TIME that the sun scored the clouds to the east, Oliver had already crossed the Beacons. The mountains were black and crested to the south—where they should have been—above knitted hedgerows, stirring creatures and the sky-framed trees on the ridges of the hills. He must, he thought, have made choices in his life, but for the life of him he could not remember any. He had asked Naomi to marry him but she did not, she said, agree with marriage. She had suggested that he sell the Funnon, or suggested it was something they had to consider, since no place was more important than a child having parents and she was damned if she was going to abandon her degree. But even if he could have consigned his mother to some bungalow in Aberedw or Builth Wells he did not have the deeds, whatever his name. With half of the farm gone to Ivor or Mervyn, and with the mortgage paid, he would have been left with barely a pocket full of change. Perhaps, in the end, that was his choice: nothing the one way and nothing the other.
“What do you think, girl?” he asked Maureen, quietly.
The raven clicked her sharp black beak.
“It’s not so bad, is it, eh? They’re only stopping at her mother’s for a spell. And we always knew she’d go back to university. It’s not like that’s any news…We done all right. We’ve had her to ourselves all year.”
Blank as he was, with the passing of the city and those long valleys choking with houses, Oliver felt the strength returning to his body—to his hand as he flipped down the visor on the windscreen and pushed his sunglasses onto his nose, to his arms and his legs as he dropped through the gears and turned by the Griffin, into Llyswen. There were no other cars on the Wye Valley road. The sunlight surrounded the Radnorshire hilltops, picking out the ditches of Twyn y Garth, striping the high Ty Isaf fields with the shadows of oaks and hawthorns. Coming out of Erwood the ground rose slightly and the light poured into the window beside him, turning Maureen from black to a welter of colours, like oil on water, while beyond the bridge, the shelving rocks of the urgent river and the picnic tables of his grandmother’s café, the fern was green around the long, dark head of Llanbedr Hill.
THE 4600 HAD no shadow at all on the level ground at the foot of the Bottom Field, or none at least that Oliver could see. It grew again only as he climbed and crossed the slope—the front-end loader, the bonnet and the chimney flowing across the tedded grass, the buttercups, yellow rattle, self-heal and globe flower, their colours as muted as the pressings in his mother’s books. He stopped periodically when the baler turned shrill and a bale arrived like a monstrous egg. Through the oil and smoke he smelt t
he churning hay and, with nothing to do but to follow its spiral like water vanishing down a plughole, he thought about Amy perched on a hayrick, about Albert with his scythe—his Isaac—keening the blade on the long leather rhip with a pinch of sand from a pocket of his old sleeved waistcoat. In the days of the boss, haymaking had seemed to go on forever—mowing and raking, rowing and cocking. Once or twice they had not finished until October. Hard it had been, and hot as hell, with the sun on your neck and the hayseeds itching, clinging to your skin, but if nothing else it had never been lonely. Even with the baler they had bought that summer after Idris’s death, which had had no sledge and left square bales at random on the lattermath, they had still been working with the Pant or Llanedw. Now it was not so much the sweat he remembered as eating his bait in the whilcar’s shadow, a gang of them descending on the wash-pool by the yellow light of a low, round moon.
He was cutting the lines at the heart of the spiral when Etty appeared on the Fordson in the Banky Piece. She drove inchingly as usual, her narrowed eyes spreading shadows to her temples, steering two-handed as she brought the trailer side-on to the hill and killed the engine—not, as Oliver knew, to save diesel but because the brake had given once in the Top Field and she always felt more confident in gear. Oliver paused for a bale, then finished the field with the baler still short of capacity. He knew she was watching as he pwned the valve to lower the drawbar and climbed stiffly to the ground to uncouple the PTO, unscrew the hydraulics and roll the concrete weight into place. They did not speak. There was nothing to say. They moved around each other here like they always moved, like those spangled dancers he would see sometimes on the telly in the Awlman’s Arms—certain of their purpose, their place in the space, following the music of the year.
Once the trailer was loaded, Etty lugged the bales back through the Banky Piece, which Oliver had mown in part in the week, since neither of them would have started the baling on a Saturday. She pulled into the yard between nettles and foxgloves, moving so slowly that it seemed the weight might defeat the old tractor, but at last she passed the barn and the sapling sallies and stopped again by the fence for the Plock, where Devil and Hanoch came over to greet her—twitching their ears and puckering their skin against the horseflies.