Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  —

  “I DREAMT LAST night I went to the moon,” said Oliver.

  “Was there any grass?” Griffin asked.

  “Aye, there was, and you’d bloody had it.” He leant past the line and cast his quoit, which floated through the steep light falling from the window of the pub and the shadows of its guidebook stickers, bounced from the peg and settled at the edge of the dish.

  “One.” Lewis marked up the board with the chalk. “You better come some shape sharpish, boy!”

  “I did lease some ground off Llanedw, as it goes,” said Griffin. “Too busy with the cars they are, see?”

  Oliver resumed his stool, dipping a chip in his pool of mayonnaise while Angie Lloyd flattened her cigarette—her face all paint, her hair in coils. She stood on the line in jeans so tight that her knickers showed plainly beneath the pockets, balanced, scowled and flicked her wrist.

  “And two.”

  There was a girl in the corner where there had been a Pac-Man machine, where Lewis had once pulled Oliver and Mervyn apart. She was a walker by the looks of her boots, a tourist in any case: not thirty years old, lean and smooth-skinned with yellow-white hair, her thin lips moving as she read her book and speared another mouthful of salad.

  “Come on, Panty!” Griffin gave the cockerel dip of his head.

  He threw his quoit, then crowed and made a lap among the people eating dinner, in the old brown sweater he wore year-round, his grey hair flapping on his ears.

  “And five!”

  Oliver peered at the cover of the book, which was leaning towards him so that it was hard to read more than a letter or two of the title. He peered at the girl. The only line anywhere on her face was a crescent of concentration between her faint, pale eyebrows. He wondered what path could have brought her to this place, which was surely no more than a stop on her way, to be remembered only for the quality of its lettuce, for some chance witticism from the fat old landlord or the way that the shadow cut the tightening valley. Perhaps she would continue by Cregrina, Glascwm and Colva and slip from his map somewhere beyond Lyonshall. Perhaps she would follow the route of the old railway and from Builth travel north by Rhayader and Llanidloes and disappear only when she passed Moat Lane.

  “Oy!” said Angie. She took one of his chips and put her elbows on the bar, her tan leather jacket pressing cool against his arm as her wire-bound breasts thrust into the smoky air.

  —

  THE TELEVISION WAS a wonder to Dilys. After twenty-two years of life in Aberedw, she had still not quite got used to the thing. If she was trapped here, in her bungalow, as she had once been trapped in a snowdrift at the Island, at least she had seen in this distended window the jungles and the oceans, the terror of earthquakes and buildings so tall as to shade a Scots pine. And if she tired of a programme she had merely to press another of the buttons in her lap to see a game of football or one of those nice old black-and-white films in which an hour and a half would disappear. And then there was the window itself: the sunlit lane and the squat little house for Angie Lloyd, her feeder for the tits and the piefinches in the garden, and the two fields banking to the yellow-red wood on the ridge.

  The bungalow was warm, that was the main thing. Dilys had sat here in tempests and felt no draught at all—and when, in its season, the winter came, she would just make the journey across the smooth brown carpet, between the sofa and the armchair where Dick’s narrow backside could still be seen for all of the nurse’s work on the cushion, to the lino squares in their chessboard pattern and the dial on the wall by the door to the kitchen.

  Angie Lloyd, well, brassy hardly covered it. Five children she had, all of them flown, and still she had no ring on her finger. Flicking the lever on the arm of her chair, Dilys reversed to watch her return, piert from her Saturday dinner at the Awlman’s, with that big-sorted scrat who called himself Hamer although he was black as a Jew or worse. She had seen the paper that week. She might not have been so good at her letters, but she knew her numbers well enough. Five hundred pounds he had paid for the Island, and all generosity when he’d had those men up fixing the roof. Even Dick might have had something to say about that, had he not been listening to the wnts—him and Idris and Ivor, and Albert, who had gone that year in his cottage in Llanbadarn-y-Garreg. Close on everyone she had ever known.

  Dilys had seen them once in an upstairs window, grimacing equally, Angie’s great dugs swinging like two bags of shopping. Dipping her spectacles, she watched the man call his dogs and tie them to the gatepost, with the woman beside him, clecking and laughing and all but unhackling her trousers. She sat in her chair with her lips wrought tight, but when the curtains closed she remembered the pain in her back and her feet, which were as bad today as they were in the nights. To the whirr of the motor she turned back to the screen to wait for the nurse, who would be coming at four to make her tea and run her bath.

  —

  A TREE HAD fallen clean across the track to the common—bowed and leafless, so strangled by ivy that Oliver could scarcely see the bark. It lay almost flush with a pair of old gateposts, one of which still bore the burn-mark of the Glanusk Estate. He might, he thought, have pulled it up by hand, but if he was taking no chances with a breathalyser on the lane he was not about to give himself a hernia. He stopped the quad and got to his feet, frowning into his well-scratched sunglasses while Meg and Dee hopped down from the back. There was pell wool in the twigs where sheep had passed, a honeybee or two on the ivy flowers that could have travelled all the way from the Welfrey, since you never saw the wild bees now. There was a slapping across the little field behind him and he turned to see a pigeon leave the green-gold hazels of the bank where some prince had hidden seven hundred years earlier, and then been betrayed by a man in Aberedw. Seven hundred years and the cries of “Traitors!” had still not left the village in peace.

  “Hello, there!” said the girl from the pub. She ducked out of the trees. “I’m sorry. I hope you don’t mind me crossing your field.”

  “Well,” said Oliver, and turned his left ear. “Since it’s not my field.”

  “I was just visiting Llywelyn’s Cave.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Not much of a stronghold is it, really?”

  “Standards has risen, I doubt.”

  The girl, he saw, was surprisingly tall, and scarcely wider than a telegraph pole. Her face was a startling shade of pink. Pleasantly depleted though he was, this being a Saturday afternoon, Oliver presented the dome of his waistcoat and allowed his eyes to fall behind his sunglasses, looking for breasts beneath her turquoise fleece and settling for her legs, which, if not shapely, were long enough for her to step clean over the fence.

  “My name’s Siriol,” she said. “I’m…afraid I have the advantage. I saw you in the Awlman’s Arms. You’re Oliver, aren’t you?”

  “I expect,” said Oliver.

  “I spoke to the barman. I mean, I guessed it had to be you, but he told me you would be coming this way…I’m working on a paper about Naomi Chance, you see? The poet.”

  “Well.” He paused, then nodded slowly. “I did think I recognized the book.”

  “You’ve read it, of course?”

  “I cannot say I have, to be honest.”

  The girl’s face was nearing the colour of the wittan berries. “I have to say,” she said. “Please don’t think me impertinent, but I really am excited to meet you.”

  “And why’s that, then?”

  “Well. You’re surely aware that you appear in her work? I mean, her Drought collection. That more or less started me writing myself…It’s one of the formative books in post-pastoral poetry.”

  “Post-pastoral? We in’t done yet, girl.”

  She rummaged in her pockets. “If I could ask you a couple of questions I would be so grateful.”

  Oliver looked at the sun on the ridge of the hill, at the shadows falling through Hendre Wood: this curious bank where fields were squeezed between shelves of rock and the scrub oaks
were red and gold and green where their tops met the angling light. He took the pliers from the box on the quad and turned to the rusty fence around the field. There had been no farmer at Pen-y-Garreg for ten years now, and the gatepost was so soft and riven that he could have prised out most of the staples with his fingers.

  “You met in…1976,” said the girl. “Is that right?”

  Oliver grunted noncommittally.

  “And your son. He lives with you?”

  “He in there as well, is he?”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “Did.” He breathed and pulled back the wire. “University…What was your name again? Cereal?”

  “Siriol.”

  “So we’re all of us in this book, are we, Siriol?”

  “Well.” The girl hesitated. “I mean, you are the major figure, really.”

  “Major figure,” said Oliver. “Well!”

  The Glanusk burn-marks were rare these days, with most of their gateposts replaced by railway ties, but still you could spot them, here and there, all the way back up to Hundred House. There had been a plan, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years earlier, to build a dam at Aberedw and turn the entire valley into a reservoir. That it had not happened was no thanks to Lord Glanusk, whoever he was, who had bought every farm that might have been flooded with an eye on a profit from the compensation. There were few things, Oliver thought, to be said for farming on shale. One was that you might as well try to dam a sieve. Another was that the ground was so close to worthless that, by and large, you were left well alone. He picked up a flake of stone, which he turned between his fingers then slipped into his pocket for Twm Tobacco. With a nod to the girl he whistled up the dogs and started the quad—pressing through the hole he had made in the fence, rolling over the half-eaten nettles and the thin, bare branches at the head of the fallen oak.

  —

  THE HILLS AND the valley were grey with the evening—the sun having gone, the stars having yet to arrive. The yard light was shining down at Cwmpiban. The quad was crossing the Middle Ddole, the grass showing green in the vee of its headlamps, between the shadows of the parting sheep. Its engine was a pair of notes—a deeper drone and a higher whine—which grew among the hedgerows and the contours of the hillside as Etty fetched the empty bucket back from the kennel and Oliver climbed out of the Banky Piece and appeared from the silage and the long-twigged sallies with a dead ewe lolling on the rack behind him: seventy-five pounds’ worth of good, healthy animal, as she had been that morning, which was no little money, what with the BSE epidemic and the export restrictions on the beasts.

  “I found her by the track,” he told her, as the quad fell silent. “She were sclemming, I doubt. That bloody Mervyn…”

  “It was Mervyn did this, then, was it?” said Etty.

  “I shall get him back, don’t worry.”

  “Did you see him, did you?”

  “Course I didn’t see him.”

  Etty stopped beside him and leant on her stick, peering at the ear tag and the hole in the skull of the sheep.

  “Olly,” she said. “Think with your head, would you? That’s what it’s there for.” She looked up into his dim, ruddy face and the bag of flesh hanging under his chin. “It could have been anybody, couldn’t it? It could have been the post van. It could have been John. Or Ken. God knows that truck would have taken some stopping.”

  “Mervyn,” said Oliver. “Bound to be.”

  “Why? You given him a reason, have you?”

  “No…”

  “Well. Do you want to know what I think, do you? I think that sheep’s dead because she got out, and I think she got out because the hedge for the Middle Ddole is more glats than growth. If you’d been hedging this afternoon, like we said, not buggering about, then it wouldn’t have happened. Simple as that.”

  “Dank me, I had to go to the tack, didn’t I?”

  “For eight blasted hours?”

  “Have you looked at her, Mam, have you? She’s been a goner for six at least!”

  Etty sighed and picked up the bucket. “All right, all right,” she said. “There is tea in the pot. We’ll dump her up the wood in the morning.”

  For a little while Etty had let herself believe that Cefin’s arrival was the change she had hoped for—as if farms still passed inevitably from father to son, as if farming remained an inalienable condition. Once, when she was young herself, a farmer might have been a natural athlete or a brilliant musician; it would have made no difference. He would still have been a farmer. Now the sons with other interests or ambitions would go their own way, and her grandson was no different. He had always had a flair for things like mathematics. She wondered if at least he might phone that day. He sometimes would on a Saturday evening.

  “You out tonight, Olly, are you?” she asked as they arrived in the kitchen, where the tap on the Rayburn had run almost dry and the swilling steam clung to her face and hands.

  “Not tonight, Mam.”

  “You want the bath first?”

  “No. No, you carry on.”

  Etty carried the tea tray over to the table, rose the cold-water pail from the sink then went to stand in the hearth’s enclosure, between the Rayburn and the old zinc bath. The steam was thick as the mist had been that morning. Even when the water was a reasonable temperature it boiled around her, striped by the light from the joins in the screen, whose top was almost level with her eyes. As she worked her way down the buttons of her cardigan, she watched her son return from the bookshelf, switch off the muted, blinking television, sit at the table and open his waistcoat—although he had stitched another panel in the back. His scalp shone through his trained-back hair. He wiped the condensation from his spectacles and began to turn the pages of Naomi’s book, which looked a delicate little thing among his fingers with their great, golden rings.

  A minute passed, or two.

  He frowned, inhaled and put a hand to his forehead.

  As a rule, Etty tried not to look at her naked body. Lowering herself quietly into the bath, she worked the flannel over her hands—their backs brown-speckled, like an egg. She scoured her feet, running the stiff brush under her toenails, but when she came to her slack-skinned arms, the gullies in her sides and her falling breasts, she kept her eyes on her bony knees, which jutted like islands from the gathering soap scum. Unpinning the bun on the back of her head, she unwound its coils to save them from tangling and reached for the shampoo bottle on the rug. The ends aside, she had not cut her hair in thirty years or more. When she brushed it in her bedroom, at her dressing table, it hung almost to the floor. It was white by her face, grey at her shoulders, red where it floated on the surface of the water.

  “IT WAS ABOUT 12:30 A.M. on Saturday morning when a giant digger appeared from the range and charged the Army check point, smashing vehicles and scattering protestors and police alike.”

  “MAFF and the army are standing by to launch a frenzy of killing beyond anything we have seen.”

  “Every contiguous farm has been classed as a cull zone.”

  “The minister reacted angrily to claims that farmers were infecting their own flocks so as to claim the compensation.”

  “Even before the foot-and-mouth crisis the annual income of the Less Favoured Areas fell to their lowest level ever last year, to an average of £2,700. How can anyone survive on such a low figure, let alone raise a family and invest for the future?”

  The newspaper, Etty realized, had slipped from her lap and fanned across the hearthrug onto the flagstones. There was a moment in which the rain remained the Wye, the Land Rover an approaching train; then the gearbox clacked and whined in reverse and the sunlight reverted to the glore of the Rayburn. She had this way of falling asleep. Once or twice she had sat down at two in the afternoon and failed to wake until the clock chimed three, and although now it was eleven at night she cursed herself and her upright chair, which, shaped as it was to her small, narrow body, had left her limbs so rigid that at first she could barely move at all
. She eased her head back onto her shoulders until she saw the mistletoe on the beam. She worked each leg, lifting her boots as high as she could manage, and when at last she hauled on the bar of the Rayburn she still stood bowed above the hobs—the shorter hairs around her ears lifting and tabbering on her cheeks.

  The rain came searching out of the valley, sending her forwards onto her ash plant, filling her skirt before her like a sail. The security light on the corner of the barn came blindingly alive. She climbed the yard through braiding prills, weaving round the puddles. She knew without looking that Oliver was watching her, hunched by the open door of the shed, where the gutter was flooding, boring a plunge pool in the mud.

  “There is no need to come out, Mam,” he said.

  “It is more business than farming, boy.”

  “It in’t farming, that’s for sure.”

  In spite of the wind, the stench of the yearlings was enough to make Etty’s eyes start. They had mexed the shed only four days earlier and already, as she came to the hurdles, her torch found their anxious, confined bodies lifted inches by the morass. If there was a choice then neither of them had thought of it. The last of the money from the Island was gone. The fields were naked, reducing to ruin. The commons had been emptied back in the summer. The tack was a D Zone—an infected area—and with the markets closed, without the Long Field and Rhos Meadow for silage, only the rent from the bungalow left in Molly’s will had kept the two of them from bankruptcy.

  “Tup get off all right, did he?” she asked.

  “Yes, I expect.”

  “What did Griffin say?”

  “Keen he was, if anything. You don’t want to think too much on that. He’ll keep him safe, don’t worry.” Oliver’s big face hung beneath his rain hat, the stump of a cigarette between his lips, the torchlight seeming to well in his eyes.

  There was a jar in the knot of his hand.

  “You found the man, then?” Etty asked, more softly.