Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  —

  THE BLOW TO his head did not hurt Oliver so much as confuse him, since his long blond wig fell over his eyes and he stumbled on a plant pot, into the trellis round the door of the hall. He righted himself with the prefab wall, which was flexing faintly with the fight inside, and growled, and looked into the white-striped road. His face, which he always kept clean shaven, was pallid with powder, picked out with his mother’s lipstick, mascara and blue eye-shadow. Beneath the waning moon and the streetlamp on the opposite pavement stood four big lads in jeans and boots—one still holding the neck of the bottle.

  With a sigh, he slipped off the sovereign rings he used strictly for display.

  “Well?” he said.

  “That’s Olly Funnon,” hissed the boy at the back.

  “And?” The one with the bottle was a Painscastle boy—perhaps a son for Archie Powell.

  “You never said it was Olly Funnon!”

  “It’s a fat old farmer in a fucking dress!”

  “A gown,” Oliver corrected him.

  “You fucking what?”

  “It’s a gown.” He ran a hand down the silver polyester, the panels he had stitched himself.

  “You, mate, put me in hospital for two fucking weeks! Do you remember that, do you?”

  “I cannot say as I do.”

  The road was broad and empty for the moment, although there were headlamps in the trees towards the bridge—the noise of the engine drowned by the pounding of the disco. The slope was just in Oliver’s favour. There was a line of cars beneath the houses in front of him, a telephone box, the wide plate window of Williams’ Store.

  “Are you sure it was him, are you?”

  “Are you going to shut the fuck up, Dicey?” The Powell boy dropped the remains of the bottle and locked his fists at either hip. He was short-armed, full-chested, his close eyes fierce in the light of the hall. “Well, mate,” he said, “you are going to learn it now. We’re going to teach you a lesson, we are. We’re going to grind your nose in the fucking road!”

  “You screwed up with the bottle, boy,” said Oliver, evenly.

  “How’s that, then?”

  As the headlamps appeared on the brow by the Wheelwrights, he came forwards suddenly, judging the space to the length of their arms. He feinted once to make the boy waste his right, then sent all of the anger and frustration of the day into a cut to his jaw, which pitched him clean into the lorry’s path. There were almost no rules in a four on one—fewer still when it was started with a bottle. Oliver was religious about these things. It was always the opponent who set the terms. Whatever goading he might have faced, he had never, or not since he was eleven years old, hit anyone who had not hit him first—although as the lorry swerved and sounded and a narrower, crop-headed lad arrived on his pavement, he allowed him merely to graze his arm before he drove his elbow into his ribs and left him retching by the crowd now massing on the step.

  There were men dressed as women, women dressed as men: the order of the world upturned. Erwood Show—it was ever the same. Faces peered greedily from waking bedrooms and the windscreen of a car, which slowed and stopped and closed the road. Oliver’s sequins shone in its headlamps. His shoulders thrust from the straps of his gown. Dicey, he had turned up only for the sake of appearance. Plump, mild-eyed, he stood sideways ridiculously, like he had once seen a picture of a sideshow boxer, and Oliver had only to show his broken teeth to send him scurrying behind a Daihatsu. The one lad left was exposed, uncertain. He shielded his eyes against the gathering cars. He was a log of a boy and hit him with strength, but no one with a brain above his neck would have aimed for Oliver’s hay-stuffed bra, and he left his face so easy a target that on another day Oliver might not even have bothered. As he crumpled backwards into the window of the store, the glass bowed momentarily around him—its image contracting almost to a halo.

  Blue lights were turning on the walls of the village. A siren rose above the thunder of the pop music. With the fighting that evening, it was hardly to be wondered at. By the door of the hall the Powell boy was upright, the neck of the bottle once more in his hand, although his jaw was hanging askew from his head and blood was dribbling from his mouth.

  Years had passed in which Oliver might have gone to Naomi. Her new baby might have been his. He might have lived with her, with Cefin, who could watch a six-inch trout with such eagerness that he felt eager, alive himself—and instead he was left only with this child who staggered towards him with his bottle and dreams of revenge.

  Oliver let him have a single cut, to feel its punishment, to see his own blood flooding from the tear in his gown. He did not look at the blinking police car. With the crowds and the shouting, he did not even notice the officer who seized his arms and clamped them at his back while a skinny little policewoman tried to move into the Powell boy’s way. If others had a mind to get involved he was long past caring who they were. Freeing his one hand, he revolved on the spot and, grasping the policeman by his belt and tie, threw him helmet-first through the windscreen of a Datsun Sunny. The policewoman backed away with her truncheon, shrieking into her spluttering radio as he stepped another attack from the Powell boy, seized his ragged hair and tripped him flat into the road. He told him his plans in a series of grunts, forcing his face into the jagged tarmac and working his nose across the stones. The boy was shouting, writhing and kicking. The cartilage folded beneath his weight. The thin bones splintered and gave. There were the hands of men round Oliver’s shoulders as the blood wove away down the shallow hill—purple when the blue light passed.

  IN THE NINE dead months that her son was away, Etty had fallen out of step with the electric, had come to find its light too hard, too unforgiving. That Friday night, in his chair in the kitchen, Oliver looked no more than the frame of himself—she could hardly believe he had become so thin—but still, in the tremulous glow of the oil lamp, he looked as much refined as reduced. She had never much liked the way he dyed his hair. The grizzled fuzz that covered his skull was sparse towards the temples but sat more naturally with the lines beginning to divide his cheeks, to swallow at least one of his scars. It was his eyes that alarmed her, fixed on the Rayburn like the flames were still visible—not so much weary or evasive as bereft.

  In the fields the ewes were calling continuously, their breaths concealed by the cries of the others.

  “Market today then, was it?” he asked.

  “Market,” said Etty.

  “How was that, then?”

  “Not so good, Olly, to be honest with you.”

  “Thirty-eight?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “Thirty-five…” He squeezed his cigarette against the lip of the coal scuttle and pulled the packet from the pocket of his jeans.

  “The two-year-olds did come a little better.”

  “And three fields gone to blasted Cwmpiban.”

  “At least we don’t have to worry about all that now. At least it’s legal, us and them…”

  The grandfather clock reached half past nine: another bar in another gate. Prising himself back onto his feet, Oliver stooped for the drooping mistletoe. His shadow shivered on the rough white wall. It had been so long since Etty had last hugged her son that at first she did not know what he was doing. She had never found her face against his chest, his grown-man smell in such proximity—strange without a whiff of animals, just cigarette smoke and some bitter soap and a trace of starch that made her think of hospitals. She winced at the pressure of his ribs on her hand. She turned her head one way and the other, as if looking for a way out, but then, haltingly, she allowed her ear to rest on his shirt, whose neck for once was open, spilling grey hairs, disentangled her arms and wrapped them round his waist. Even now she could only join the tips of her fingers. His stubble cagged in her tied-back hair, his shoulders were above her, but there was his old, familiar heat, the progress of his heart, the sigh in his nose as, at length, he inhaled and her fingers came briefly apart.

  —

/>   SETTING DOWN THE newspaper, removing his glasses, Oliver rolled his fists in his aching eyes and dragged his bare feet out from the covers and onto the bedside rug. The calls of the ewes had grown sporadic, hopeless. They afflicted him in a way he had not known since he was a child. The candle was playing on the flowers of the wallpaper. Perhaps, he thought, the three-day week had returned. Perhaps the farm had fallen into such straits that they could no longer afford the electric. But he had seen enough bulbs and strip lights to last him into the next millennium. He was glad for the flame as he trod across the floorboards—his disfigured hand in the tunnel of the stairwell, in the glass by the coat hooks and the windows around the front door.

  At last, it seemed, Oliver understood why his grandmother and his mother had each in her turn been drawn to the abandoned church, which was, after all, not old, not beautiful, not packed with their neighbours—the only compensation for their weekly condemnation in the chapel. In his long flannel nightshirt, the candle guttering, he stepped over the hurdle tied in the lychgate and climbed the rack among the stones for ancient Hamers, the sheep with their rabbit ears and large Greek noses grown quiet at his approach, as if he might be returning their lambs. High above the sycamores and the hard, wizened yew trees, the thin moon fled through the pell-wool clouds—a chip in its arch, which Idris had told him was a man sent in punishment for gathering firewood on the Sabbath. Its pallor lay along Llanbedr Hill, on the limb reaching down almost to Cwmpiban and the three good fields they had lost. Squat on the circular summit of the tump, the church had fared no better than himself in recent times. Brambles groped against its walls. The bell still hung from its bar in the belfry, but the ridgepole had folded almost in the middle; the roof was a valley of jumbled slates and pools of blackness that turned into stars as he passed through the porch and sat on the pew at the front.

  At times he had tried to explain to Naomi why he could not join her, why he could no more crawl out of this valley and live than he could have crawled out of his own skin. She had not understood and he did not blame her. Had she been here now, by some turn in events, he would doubtless have run to the usual excuses: the fern to be cut for the beasts up the Island, the ewes to be fed since the tup was journ and another year would need to begin. What he had not said; perhaps it could not have been said at all. He set down the candle on the rotten wood beside him and held his hands to his chin, watching the light on the nettles and saplings that were pushing through the broken slates. If it was the church, then the building itself was nothing more than a marker. The cross on the altar, black against its window, was as transitory a thing as the leaves. Perhaps it was the cold on the soles of his feet, bringing its memory of the ground underneath, the rocks and the dark little spring.

  All life, he thought, passed through this place: these closing rings of wall and trees within this hoop in the hills.

  —

  BEYOND THE YEWS, the headstones and the strange, ornamental trees of St. Mary’s Church, the morning wedding was beginning to convene: men with new haircuts and unfamiliar suits, women in dresses that bellied from their tight-calved legs. Oliver paused on his return from the police station, where he was obliged to report every day without fail, and leant his elbow on the sill of the Land Rover, waving past a couple of cars. Maureen came pattering over the seats and hopped from the gearstick onto the steering wheel. His mother was standing at the foot of the tower: a woman tight on seventy years old with grey hair parted and bound in a bun, nodding her greeting to the ushers and bridesmaids, where Nancy and the vicar shook hands. She entered the door with her fingers joined as if cradling a chick or some fragile artefact, and as Oliver checked his rear-view mirror, peered round the raven, and continued past the park, the Groe, he decided not to steer for the bridge and instead turned left into the municipal car park, where for once he put ten pence in the machine.

  Strand Electrics had not changed at all during the past year. Not that the town looked particularly different, but there were boys at the bus stop with jeans that made his own look tight and caps turned backwards, as if warding off fairies, and these, like the H-reg post vans on the corner, gave him a disquieting sense that this was not quite a place he knew. The shop, in any case, retained its sign and its blue-and-white awning, its windows packed with advertisements and boxes. The man he saw reflected in the glass of the door, pushing his bootlace tie between the collars of his shirt, was again black-haired, and if he was craggy he was at least no longer fat.

  “Good morning,” said the girl at the counter. Her fingers stopped then resumed on her calculator.

  Oliver nodded. After all this time the crack between her breasts, the shape described by her tight pink T-shirt, made him forget for a moment the purpose of his visit. He noticed the wheeze of the breath in his nose, but to breathe through his mouth might have looked like panting, so he looked away to the plugs and wires that were hanging from the pegs just behind her.

  “Washing machine,” he remembered as he came to the first of the large white boxes by the wall.

  “Pardon?” said the girl. She looked again at Maureen.

  “Washing machine,” he repeated.

  “Oh.” To judge by her accent she was not a local. “Well, the Hoover is an excellent machine. Twelve hundred spin. Four-point-five-kilogram load.”

  Oliver breathed through the gaps in his teeth. “How much you want for him, then?”

  “How…Oh.” The girl smiled briefly. “You’ll find the price on the top.”

  There was, indeed, a piece of cardboard folded on the lid of the machine. Oliver took a couple of steps backwards. He narrowed his eyes until its number became confused with his lashes, and then, since the girl had returned to her calculations, he turned to face the window and took his glasses out of his jacket. It had not occurred to him that one of these things could cost anything like five hundred pounds, which, with the dismal condition of the market, would have left him change from a dozen ewe lambs and all of their fodder for the winter. Slipping his glasses back into his pocket, he gave a thoughtful grunt and considered a cooker, a clock, a pair of headphones and something else made of plastic. He followed the wall to the last of the machines, which resembled the first but was a third of the price.

  “I said,” said the girl, “do you have any particular requirements?”

  “Oh?” Oliver frowned. He had been having trouble with his right ear.

  “We do offer a generous payment plan, if that’s of any concern to you?”

  “How much for cash?” he asked.

  “Cash?”

  “Cash.” He removed the breach of notes from his jeans, patting the lid of the cheapest machine.

  The girl hesitated. As she drew back her shoulders her cleavage bulged. “Actually,” she said, “that one is a dishwasher.”

  —

  THERE WAS REALLY no need for Nancy to come to every service at St. Mary’s. Etty herself was paid little enough to accompany the Eucharist each Sunday morning, and while the flat fees for weddings did add up over time, the cut received by the organist’s assistant must barely have covered their petrol. She sat in her place at the end of the bench, drew the stops and turned the page at Etty’s nod, but, with no bellows to work these days, otherwise she just followed the staves, listening to the wind of the great pipes above them—the wonder of an instrument able to possess these grand, pointed arches, this vaulted roof, this plain of an aisle, where the bride and her father were processing into the mirror.

  In truth, as ever, it was largely courtesy, or the simple fact that she liked her friend to be there, that made Etty use the music at all. She could have played “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba” blindfold. Her hands fled of themselves across the manuals, her left on the swell and her right on the great, the two of them together on the choir when she came to the fluting intervals. Her feet danced weightlessly over the pedals. The whole piece lasted only three and a half minutes—less if the bride reached her destination before her—and the hymns to com
e were no less familiar, with a full congregation to carry her along. With the two co-codamol she had taken in the car, she could still feel the abrasion in her wrists and knuckles, the muscles beginning to quiver in her forearms, but the pain for the time being seemed unimportant beside this stately tempo, these skeins of semiquavers.

  With the last, tailing note, the two women turned to face into the church: Nancy white-haired, high-shouldered, proper in pearls, Etty in her blouse and her long grey skirt, discreetly holding her hands in her lap. Unnoticed they might have been, as given as the place, but their bench was level almost with the pulpit. They looked down on the altar, on the stalls where choirs would join them on high days, on the two hundred people now watching the couple through the filigree screen, the pink hyacinths and yellow alstroemeria. The girls of Rhyscog all had jobs, of course. Bridget worked in her husband’s garage, Lucy managed the Station Café, Faith was in the office at Brightwells. But for women like them, who had seen it all different, who had known the weeks as a year-round cycle of washing and cleaning, churning and baking, with a few, fevered hours of conversation at the market and chapel, perhaps the thrill of such a position would never entirely pall.

  —

  AT A GLANCE the high Edw Valley was green, almost generous. A tractor was ploughing the straw stubble at the Vron, trailing seacrows and off-true furrows. A tup was busy in his harness by the river, mounting ewes, daubing them with his stark red raddle. On the Little Hill the gorse was burning. Its smoke rose over purpling heather, paler fields and darker hedgerows, tending away into the mottled clouds. It was only when he slowed the Land Rover to inspect a glat or climb a verge to make space for a car that Oliver saw no flowers but the odd meadow saffron or the fingers of honeysuckle, the leaves of the hazels grown yellow-fringed, lank.