Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  Here was Penarth Mount, where he would walk with Amy Whittal in the days when he was more than a middle-aged farmer on early release, when she was less than an anaesthetist in Cardiff or Birmingham or some city of that sort. Here was the barn where he had never persuaded her to remove her knickers. Here was Penarth Wood, where, it was said, the last wolf had been killed in the reign of the Tudors, its four paws nailed to the door of Cregrina Church. With the cost of white diesel, he would never normally have thought about coming this way. But he felt a need to see these hills, to recall how they billowed from this rising lane, how the trees parted on the bank for Llwyntudor to reveal his own corner of a valley: the tumbling fern of Cefn Wylfre, the near-bald head of Llanfraith Hill. There was the Old School: now a house for some retired teacher, grey above the keeling posts and browsing ewes of the football pitch, which would still get used from time to time. There was Llanedw, half-farm, half-garage, where Bridget was working in her oil-smeared overalls—a torch in her teeth beneath the hydraulic ramp, among the masses of waiting cars.

  Even hung with clematis, divided by a floor, the windows of the chapel seemed tall and forbidding as ever.

  At first Oliver did not recognize the boy: the gangrel with a rucksack who was picking his way over the stones in Cwmberllan Ford. He put his boot on the brake only so as not to splash him, dropping into second with a roar from the engine. His wheels were already parting the water when he noticed the black hair beneath the boy’s woollen hat, the tan of his skin as he turned to look back at him across the bonnet patterned with the tunnelling trees.

  He hesitated, then pulled on the handbrake and leant across the seats to the passenger door.

  “Good God,” he said.

  “Hello, Dad,” said Cefin.

  “Can you…Can you fit them things by your feet, can you?”

  “I’ll hold onto them.”

  Oliver nodded. He put the Land Rover back into gear.

  “I like your hair,” said the boy. “It’s better short.”

  “I shall tell Vidal.”

  “You’re…back in one piece, then?”

  “Well,” said Oliver. His voice was level but his hands were trembling. “To be honest with you, boy, I’ve not had the time of my life just lately.”

  “Is it true you threw a policeman through a windscreen?”

  He gave his grunt. “Who told you that?”

  “I heard Mum talking to Adrian.”

  “It is a lot of noise over nothing, boy. Why do you think they wear them stupid helmets, anyway?”

  There were Limousin cattle in the Crooked Slang: healthy, full-square, pedigree animals. Mervyn was ploughing the last of the Long Field, coming to the addlands, his furrows swaying slightly behind him—although no one seemed to bother so much about the line anymore. Quantity not quality, that’s what they said. At least he had not grubbed up the hedgerows. Oliver stopped in the yard at the Funnon, unwound the twine that kept his door closed and greeted the dogs, whose noses pressed hard into his legs. He stroked their heads, buying a few moments to compose himself, then he opened the gate at the back of the Land Rover and pulled the machine through the straw and scraps of wool.

  “Lend us a hand with this, would you, boy?” he asked. “She is no weight, just a bit of a lump.”

  With Oliver reversing and Cefin holding the pipes and cables, they shuffled over the mud-striped bridge, up the steps and into the smells of dust and stone, coal smoke and discarded gumboots. The wireless was singing to itself in the kitchen. There was a space beside the fridge in the larder, in the corner under the white-speckled mirror, so they stood the machine there on its four thin legs—twisting the nuts until its surface was level—then stepped back to consider its alien whiteness, its mysterious buttons and controls.

  “So…” asked Oliver. “Are you stopping here, then, are you?”

  “Dad?” said Cefin.

  “Boy.”

  “What do you need a dishwasher for?”

  Oliver pushed the one hose onto the tap and hung the other on the edge of the sink, as the girl had shown him in the shop. He put the plug in the socket by the door, piled the shirts and underwear in the laundry basket on the white wire shelves and then turned sideways, putting a hand on the breezeblock wall around the toilet. It was the self-same boy, stretched perhaps and gruffer in the voice—there were the bones of a man in his chin and his cheeks—but there, that inimitable tangle of Naomi and himself—all doubtful shoulders and blue, watchful eyes.

  “Do us a favour, boy,” he said. “Keep that under the tail of your coat.”

  —

  IN THE PAST twelve months of his mother grown laborious, then the baby like a siren at every hour of the day and night, these falling fields and red-tinged hills had come once again to seem like things imagined. Once, as a child, Cefin had tried to dig a tunnel from their garden to the Funnon—he had been waist-deep before his spade met the rock—but even then he had never quite believed that it was possible simply to travel here, at least without his mother or his grandfather, whatever strange powers a grown-up possessed. The idea there was a bus that went all the way to Erwood, to a stop across the bridge from his great-grandmother’s bungalow, still seemed improbable—although he had taken it himself. He looked on every detail of the Bog Field, on these reeds, these puddles, this pile of logs by the scruffy little wood in its camouflage of blackberries and tooth-fringed leaves, with a sort of astonishment. He remembered a teacher who had one day told his class about love, which meant, she said, wanting always to be with somebody, thinking about them all of the time.

  “Philip, he has not done bad, to be fair to him,” Oliver remarked.

  “Ada’s brother, Philip?”

  “He’s been minding things, he has, with thanks to your great-grandmother. It was him cut the bruns, see? I was afeared we’d be burning green all winter…”

  Cefin’s father was thinner than he had been. His jeans were hanging from his old leather belt, and his buttoned-up shirt was loose on his chest. His hair was thinner too, if black as ever. As he climbed from the cab of the Ford 4000, found them each a pair of gloves and began to wrench out the brambles from the woodpile, he moved with his usual, steady conviction, but still, Cefin had grown several inches since the previous summer. His father seemed less vast, less absolute.

  “Are these…rowan, are they?” Cefin asked.

  “You dunna cut the wittan, boy.”

  He picked up a log and looked at the leaflets, wizened, clinging to a twig. “What are they, then? Ash?”

  The long lines deepened round Oliver’s eyes. He produced a pair of glasses, which he used with the arms still folded, then shook his head and set down the log for a block.

  “Rowan,” he agreed. “Fair play to you…Bloody Griffin. What he has been teaching that lad I do not know.”

  Oliver swung his axe as if it were weightless, his hands together at the end of the handle as the blade met the grain and the logs came apart. Now and then one of them would refuse to split and he would spin the blade round and drop it on its head so that the log seemed to burst of its own accord. The halves went bounding away across the grass. In his best black jeans and zip-up top Cefin hurried after them, trying to keep up, stacking them in the box on the back of the tractor. He had almost finished the first of their loads when he heard somebody in the scrubby wood beside them, the Rhos as it was called: the sucking of wellies, the crack of a branch. He glanced at his father, who did not seem to have noticed. He looked through the feather-like leaves of the ash trees and the willow leaves with their tapering tips and among them saw an approaching man: a great, fleshy figure with a hairless head that at another age he might have thought an ogre.

  Following the eyes of his son, Oliver straightened and pushed back his shoulders.

  “Not happy with my fields then, is it?” he demanded. “You after my fucking wood and all?”

  “My wood,” said the man. His voice was sharp but not unfriendly.

  “Yo
u think so, do you?”

  “My wood. Your hedge. You have a look at the papers.” He turned to the trunk of the willow beside him. “You can rise your bruns, like. I shall not bother about that.”

  “You hearken to me, you.” Oliver’s voice had sunk into a growl. “That wood is mine. Them fields is mine. You can think what you wants to think, but I never signed them bloody papers. So far as I’m concerned I shall be using them to light the bloody chats. I tell you now, if you so much as touches that wood. If you tries to fell him or you tries to drain him—”

  “Flycatchers,” the man interrupted.

  “What?”

  “Flycatchers.” He opened the neck of the sack on his shoulder and nailed up a bird box with quick, chiming blows. “Three of these things you wants for them, really. The great tit will be taking one of them for sure, but he’ll be out and patrolling and keeping the rest of the tits away, so the pied flycatchers shall get the other two. They needs them, God knows. It’s been awkward as hell on them these past few years.”

  Cefin stood with a log in his arms, his muscles already beginning to ache. The man, he supposed, was the neighbour, Cwmpiban; he knew nothing else about him at all—although he could not mistake his father’s look as he took a step towards the hedge, as if coming between them, the axe in his one hand, his chin held high, a certain grey beneath his skin. For a moment the two men were facing one another, then Cefin took a step forwards himself and arrived at Oliver’s side.

  The man looked back at them with sunken eyes.

  “You has the Funnon, boy,” he said, finally, “and fields enough. They drives a deal, your mother and your grandmother. It in’t as I’d have chosen it, but there we are. It’s over, it is.”

  “YOU’LL MIND THE headstones now?”

  “We’ll do what we can, Mrs. Hamer.” John Watson sipped his tea with a pensive nod. “We have had a few of them up, like—we couldn’t get ourselves up there otherwise—but Ken here, he did mark them. We’ll have them back the minute we’re done.”

  His son stood silent by the gigantic truck, the smoke draining half-seen from his cigarette.

  “It is a shame, like,” John continued. “If it was up to me, like, I’d be all for fixing her up, but you know how it is. That roof. If it were to fall on some poor bugger, well…Something must be done, like, and she can’t have seen a service in, what—”

  “Not in my lifetime,” said Etty.

  “Not in thirty years!” His big red face recovered its grin.

  The mist was thinning a little with the morning, shading to blue as Etty looked upwards. She watched the digger crawl through the cavity at the top of the yard, through the hole where there had been a lychgate, its tyres slipping then biting the slope. The bucket rose, its weight coming backwards. John was shouting through the riot of the engines. As he reached the level ground on the top of the mound, two metal legs descended from slots. He leant from his cab to beckon to the boy, who reversed the bleeping truck between the limbs of the yellowing sycamores.

  The bell chimed once with the swing of the backhoe, and again, more dully, in the grass. A second swat removed the remainder of the belfry. The digger’s claw reached into the roof and scooped up a skeleton of rafters and ridgepole, the last slates falling like leaves. High above the yard, the church perhaps was in the open sunlight. It appeared to grow brighter where the rest of the world was opaque. Etty had thought somehow that this would all have been more difficult, that it would, at least, require another visit. The idea that the building could fit in a lorry, whatever its size, made her brain seem to press against her skull. She watched the gables wobble and fall. She watched the porch go the way of the roof, the windows implode, the altar itself, which even Oliver had refused to touch, rise through that unreal light and tumble into the still-hollow back of the truck until, suddenly, the church was gone and the mound was crowned with rubble alone.

  It was funny, almost, that it had come down to bats. Had the colony survived, so the Church Council woman had told her, they would have had no choice except to rebuild. The Greater Horseshoe was endangered, apparently. Neither of them had spoken of God, nor had Etty said that something ought to mark this place whose yews, according to the professor, were probably two thousand years old. She knew well enough how she would have sounded. There was nothing to be gained from a sympathetic nod or some observation on the sorriness of the times. As the engines continued, she made her way slowly past the pillars of the lambing shed and followed the flem up the side of the house, dipping her head for the old wireless aerial, which appeared abruptly in the pearly air. In the orchard by the nailed-shut privy, she found her market basket and dragged the wooden ladder from the garden shed—moving uncertainly from rung to rung when she propped it against the first of the apple trees.

  —

  ON GARREG LWYD, where he always stopped, Oliver killed the engine of the quad and looked back across the hollows and sidelands—the bank for Penbedw and the gieland spilling towards Cwmoel. Llanbedr Hill was an island this morning. The shallow light lay over its back, measuring each lift and fold in the heather, turning silver its dew-heavy cobwebs. The ocean around him might have been the light condensed; it boiled and broke on the distant mountains, curling away into the east, where there was, they said, no hill worth the name before Siberia. In his own valley, the churchyard provided a solitary islet: a nub of ground on the brink of the shadow, its trees like reeds, its summit marked only by John Watson’s JCB.

  “Get away off out!” he called to the dogs.

  The Island itself sat alone above the mist: a dim little cell with tattered plastic windows and a stench of beasts that a day with the pressure washer had done almost nothing to dispel. It had silenced Oliver, to discover its value. How that rascal of a cottage could be worth fifty grand when the cattle in its fields would lose him three or more was more than he was able to fathom. With occasional whistles, he watched Dee couse beneath the far-off beech trees, the bronze of their leaves conferring to the grass. He watched Meg vanish and appear in the quarries, driving the usual couple of dodgers, then run out wide round Llyn y March until every yearling on the whole long hilltop was hurrying towards him—startling a flock of plovers, which sheered together across the rust-coloured fern, the berry-spilling wittans and the snag of a cliff where he sat.

  He rejoined the track as the sheep crowded by and followed them west towards the grave for Twm Tobacco: a roadster, or so he had been told, who had been carrying tobacco in the days when smoking was bad, like drugs today, and had been killed for his wares in this desolate place. Nowhere in this archipelago of hills could he see another person, or a house, or even so much as a mountain pony. A skylark in the radiant sky poured its frantic song across the common. Coming to the crossroads, he put his hand to his chest and took a stone from his pocket for the pile in the grass. With a word he brought the dogs in yawping, dividing the two flocks so that the sheep marked OH scattered into the heather and the sheep marked MH fled away to the north—spilling into the lapping mist like the pool, the Henllyn, down to their right, which had, it was said, one noon dark as midnight, disgorged itself of its water and fishes to form Llanbwchllyn Lake.

  —

  THE SUNLIGHT LEAKING from the bare stone tiles streaked the dust disturbed by Etty’s feet. It made bright little patches on the sagging tunnels of ancient cobwebs, the various pieces of the four-poster bed, a grouse in a case, the toys, the tools, and the apples she had already arranged across the sheets of last week’s newspaper. A hand on a joist, she knelt down carefully on the floorboards of the attic. Two floors beneath her, the washing machine was making ineffectual noises; it astonished her the things had ever caught on. In the yard the two men were talking, dragging the gates back across the mouth of the Bryngwyn track.

  They had not, of course, replaced the gateposts.

  “Teachers may flush drugs.”

  “Gay voters could determine the next MP.”

  “Many believe telematics will provi
de the biggest opportunity for pro-active development in rural areas since the agricultural revolution four hundred years ago.”

  “Mrs. Hamer!” There was a pwning at the door. “Mrs. Hamer, we’re heading off now.”

  The world, it seemed, had moved on without her—if she had ever been aboard in the first place. Etty had never even heard of telematics. She had not, to her knowledge, seen a drug in her life. She took the apples from her basket and laid them out in the remaining space, keeping them upright, neatly apart, then she sat down to wait in a prolapsed armchair, leafing through the paintings in the box beside her: the trees in which Idris had found his consolation. She had thought at times about getting some framed. He had been right; they were not bad at all. Here was a birch tree naked with winter, half-silver, half-shadow, with twigs that shrank and divided the sky. Here was a wittan on the open hill, its trunk and branches twisted left, as if reaching for something past the edge of the paper. Here was an oak in the fullness of summer: a tangle of limbs clothed in emerald leaves.

  “Mrs. Hamer!”

  “It’s pushing two, it is, Dad…”

  “I’ll scribble a note, look. She’s a good old girl.”

  When, at last, the truck began to move, its engine bellowed; its brakes hissed and howled. Etty felt its weight in the bones of the house. The apples were trembling. A couple of glasses were toasting one another in a cupboard. Following the wire from the satellite dish, a squirrel appeared suddenly from the eaves but stopped when it saw her—its small eyes black, its fur the same white-grey as her hair. For several moments they watched each other, neither of them so much as twitching, then the vehicles reached the smoothness of the tarmac track and the squirrel whisked its tail back outside.