Addlands

by Tom Bullough

  “I found him.”

  “Slaughterman, is he?”

  “Farmer. Out for Brecon…Culled a few days back, his place was.”

  “How much did he want for that?”

  “Grand…The credit card’s done.”

  “Call it a fresh start, boy.”

  “I dunno, Mam…”

  Besides the sheep, the only sound was the rain in the gutters, its roar on the corrugated roof. Turning to the door, Etty swung her torch from the brake lights of the Land Rover to the glistening ear of the satellite dish on the house. There were headlamps climbing the track to the Welfrey, but only the rain was moving in the yard, so she extracted the jar from Oliver’s fingers, took the torch between her teeth and used her knees and her hands to open the lid. He did not speak; he did not stop her. She waited only to touch her chest before she cast the infected rag into the darkness.

  —

  THE RAIN WAS fierce on the long, dark windows of the bus station. With the bubble-like lights that ran along the ceiling, Cefin could see little more than a streaming reflection of himself and his notepad, the empty run of plastic seats and the sign for the toilet—although, now and then, a bus arrived and appeared as it blinked, its passengers pouring through the automatic door with a gulp of the cold night air. He brought his head down into his coat, hunching his narrow shoulders, sealing the space between the collar and his itchy woollen hat. Somehow he had not thought beyond this point. There was Adrian, of course, but he had checked his emails back in Dunkirk and knew that his mother was off on a reading; besides, it must have been twelve by now. His sisters would surely be asleep. He searched his mind for some other number, some friendly sofa where he could collapse, but three years lay between them and himself. He couldn’t think of anyone at all.

  Twenty pixels, he decided. That would do for the left-hand margin, with ten pixels for the top. He scribbled the numbers and considered the paper. With the header symmetrical, he could set the text in a left-hand column and give the bulk of the space to his African photographs, which would weight the page agreeably to the right. He sketched two pictures to the approximate size, then noted down the CSS code in a few, half-intelligible lines. This was the part of design that he loved. The mathematics he could have worked out in his sleep—he had been programming in Maputo for two and a half years, and here for most of a year before that—and while there was a certain music to its patterns, ultimately it was right or wrong. The layout was different. The balance of font and content and whiteness, that was a million different possibilities—or rather the thrill when he got it right.

  The rain. Cefin looked again at the windows. He focused his eyes past the scratches in his glasses, past the image of the cleaner who was sweeping the concourse and the droplets running and mingling on the panes, and saw beyond the stands a single streetlamp, orange over a shut-up shop. The rain was pouring from its shivering shade. In the cone of light it was drifting, furious. It did not merely fall but attacked from the side, spun, returned and vanished away into the darkness. Sometimes it did not fall at all, but rose and seemed to collide with the bulb. For several moments he watched it, frozen: that little patch of wildness, alone in the orange-tinged night.

  —

  THERE WAS A guelder rose by the looping wall of the abandoned churchyard: a straggling plant maybe seven foot in height, red with berries and thick, turning leaves. Had Martin not bent to put a lead on Cavall, his Labrador, he would never have noticed among its stalks, beneath a railway tie and wrapped in a length of rusting fence, the stone that had intrigued him when he first came to Rhyscog—although, as a bridge, it had been so caked in mud that it might equally have been a slab of concrete. He parted the branches, peered at the visible corner of the stone, then, with a low exclamation, looked past the hurdle where there had been a lychgate at the long-shadowed headstones and the sun in the brilliant clouds.

  A tractor was working in the yard at the Funnon—its roar redoubling as it entered the big zinc shed. Loud as Martin called, it was not until Oliver had crossed the muddy slope, deposited a wedge of manure on the mixen, reversed and lowered the tines on his loader that he seemed to notice him, hurrying past the swollen stream, beneath the green-gold leaves of Pentre Wood, dragging his dog and gesturing with his stick.

  “Morning, Prof.” The cab door opened.

  “Oliver!”

  “We did think we saw your car last night.”

  “Last night, yes…Oliver, could I borrow you, please?”

  Etty was playing Brahms in the parlour—her organ hesitant above the noise of the Ford 4000 and the dozens of sheep that were crowded round the wheel wash at the gate.

  “Well,” said Oliver. He drummed his rings on the handle of the door. “I cannot see why not. There is bugger all else to do.”

  Martin thought for a moment that the farmer was being sarcastic, although as he clambered down the metal steps, wincing, closing his right arm slowly at the elbow, he could see no trace of it in his movements. Oliver was not, it was true, a man he would have chosen to sire his only grandson—the news, when it came, had appalled him the more for the strength of his own reaction—but to Martin, at least, he had always been generous, his teasing always shading into deference. He followed him back up the yard—taller-seeming now that Martin himself was beginning to stoop, the black hair sweeping back from his forehead both thick and sparse in a way that reminded him distantly of a warthog. Jealousy, that was a feeling he had identified once the initial shock had abated. Jonathan, whose bitchiness did contain an occasional insight, had suggested that this was some part of Naomi’s agenda, and perhaps he was right. Martin had never got far in fathoming his daughter. It was not that Oliver had ever been his type—even at his most regal he was too plainly straight—but, still, he had once been his own discovery, his personal area of expertise.

  “Heard from the boy, have you?” Oliver asked.

  “I had an email from…France.” Martin crouched at the guelder rose. “Dunkirk, I believe it was.”

  “He did write Mother from France.”

  “There!” he said. “There! Do you see?”

  Latin, thought Martin. Latin unquestionably. And if those notches in the near corner were not Ogham, then he would revoke his emeritus status himself. As Oliver returned from the yard with the tractor, roped the long, thin stone to the tines and hoisted it into the open air, the coil of fencing slipped to the ground. The shapes of its mesh were eaten from the grey-green lichen. The stone swung wildly as the tractor pulled forwards. It sank and settled in the darkening mosaic of the leaves by the track.

  The letters cut into its upturned surface were crude but decipherable, vertical in the Celtic tradition. That was an S, and that a G—albeit inscribed back to front.

  “SAGROMNI?” said Martin, uncertainly.

  “What’s that mean, then?” asked Oliver, arriving beside him, muted-seeming, now that Martin came to notice it—his black eyes dull in the shadow of his brow.

  “Well, there’s clearly more. I’ll have to clean off the rest of the lichen and probably make a tracing to read it properly, but, well, it’s a name. Sagrom. More of a representative than an actual name, I’d say. It stands for an eminent chief or warrior…Where on earth did it come from?”

  “Idris found him, on Llanbedr Hill. So, what, it’s a gravestone, is it?”

  “Well.” Martin gave a slight laugh. “In a sense, yes, but it’s no ordinary memorial. I mean, these marks here.” He ran his fingers up the corner, across a stretch rubbed almost illegible by animals. “These are letters in the Goidelic language. It’s an alphabet called Ogham developed in Ireland around 400 A.D., probably because Primitive Irish didn’t transcribe well in the Roman system. The letters look a little like runes, you see? Each one is made out of a group of incisions. The stone is bilingual, basically. The Latin, here—you see these letters? They’re what you’d call uncial. That’s to say, rounded. It’s a style that evolved in the Hellenistic East and was first employe
d in Roman North Africa around 300 A.D. So, the Latin would have been for the benefit of locals, and possibly posterity, and the Ogham would have been for the benefit of Goidelic speakers: the Irish tribes who arrived here in the wake of the Roman withdrawal. Latin inscriptions are not so unusual, of course. There are nearly three thousand British examples, to my knowledge. But Ogham inscriptions—there are fewer than four hundred all told, and the vast majority of those are in Ireland. With the exception of Silchester this must, I think, be the easternmost example, at least in the south. It dates the stone quite precisely, you see, to the fifth or early sixth centuries—right to the dawn of the Christian era.”

  Oliver growled at one of his sheepdogs, which was harrying Cavall, sniffing her bottom. He glanced at a shower approaching down the valley, darkening the half-bare trees around the stream, obscuring the long-horn cattle at Cwmpiban.

  “A gravestone,” he repeated. “It bloody would be.”

  —

  ACROSS THE THREADBARE valley the Funnon was overrun with men, or figures at least—all of them dressed in the same white suits with the hoods pulled up to conceal their faces. They were busy with lorries whose gates already lay open in the mud, unloading rifles from a blacked-out Hilux, plumbing pumps into barrels of disinfectant. Oliver could not believe how quickly this had happened. Not six days had passed since his mother’s decision to sacrifice the animals, not twelve hours since he had found a blister on a ewe’s tongue, and here, the farm was out of their hands.

  The sheep understood; they were clever like that. In spite of the wind and his failing ears, he could hear the two-year-olds in the Banky Piece and the wild, discordant yearlings in the shed. The beasts at the Island were not so smart. They stood around him in the trampled fields, chavelling on a bale of silage. He was almost glad when the lorry arrived, lumbering off the tarmacked lane and bumping towards him down the grass-striped track—the slaughtermen spaced among the clouds on the windscreen.

  “Is it just these, is it?” the first of them asked.

  Oliver nodded. He weighed the half-full bottle in his hand and dropped his cigarette hissing in a puddle.

  “Fifteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “I suggest…” The man was smoking himself. He waved a tractor onto the verge. “I suggest, Mr. Hamer, that you go in the cottage, or go somewhere else. You really do not want to see this.”

  For months now there had been saplings on the abandoned hills, rising from the fern, the heather and the feg, with leaves like flags—declaring their species while still not an inch in height. There were wittans and hawthorns, but there were ash trees too, and oaks and hazels. They might have been lurking since the days of the forest, waiting for the sheep at last to depart before, tentatively, they began to remake the wilderness. The television reported that farming was dying, that it had ceased to be an industry and had become instead a life-support system, in which these Less Favoured Areas were an intolerable expense. For those who were looking for the root of things, well, here it was: these scrawny trees on Llanbedr Hill, riffling as far as Oliver could see, divesting the last of their withered leaves in their first successful autumn for five thousand years.

  Somebody had to defend the margins, to keep the past in its place.

  The shots from the Island came quickly behind him. The shots from the Funnon rang again from the flank of Cefn Wylfre, as if he were witness to a battle. In the Banky Piece there could not have been more than two score animals left and, as the rifles continued, a wall of men closed round them with sticks, driving them through the gate by the pond until the field contained nothing but their old muck spreader: a roll of wire in its open side. A second string of lorries was stopped along the valley, pressed between the hedgerows, stretching almost from the Pant to the track for Cwmpiban, which appeared to have been blocked by Mervyn’s tractor. There were people in the gateways, a couple more crossing a corner of the Long Field, skirting the shaggy, fern-red beasts, heading for the closed-curtained farmhouse.

  “You…have no ram, Mr. Hamer?” asked the slaughterman, arriving where Oliver stood.

  The killing at the Island, it seemed, had finished.

  “No tup, no.”

  “The records say a Bluefaced Leicester.” The man had folded down his hood to reveal a small, balding head, a chin, unshaven, which tapered back into his neck.

  Oliver shrugged and offered the whisky.

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “I’ve not so much as eaten all week.”

  “We did have a Blueface. A while back now. That’ll be him, I expect.”

  “Records.”

  “Records.”

  “Well. All I can say is thank God you’ve only got the one neighbour.”

  Oliver did not reply.

  A cloud of fieldfares wheeled out of Quebec and settled in the Sideland Field. A hare crossed the lane not twenty feet distant and crept long-legged into the collapsing fern. The men turned back to the holiday cottage, the yellowing larches and the three weepy fields that Oliver had leased almost from the day they were sold, where the others were washing down his quad and the tractor—their cigarettes alone exposed. In the back of the lorry his herd was reduced to a lumpish mass—Charolais cream and Hereford red beneath a polythene sheet.

  —

  AT LEAST IN the kitchen Etty had her map, which, for all of its pink expanses, showed every country in the entire world. Since the restrictions closed the little church in Llanbadarn-y-Garreg, where she still made a fist of the occasional services, she had found herself here more often than ever—following the wandering, ripple-fringed coastlines and the mysterious trains of the hills. It was the imagining she liked, the building in her mind, from Cefin’s descriptions, of the ruinous fortress on Mozambique Island or the libraries of Timbuktu. The names themselves were laden with images: Xai-xai, Chimanimani, the Skeleton Coast. To think that her grandson had seen these things, had felt the sand of an actual desert, had landed on an island where three thousand people bore the same surname and behaved to one another like members of the same household.

  These were the experiences that the labels recorded, although perhaps not even Cefin could have understood them all. They gave the names of places, people and sometimes animals, so that “Elephant” meant a baby walking under its mother, “Ibo” meant yet another unmarked island where the only two cars had somehow collided, and “Cape Town” meant a Christmas spent with Naomi, Adrian and the girls. As the rifles cracked in the hollow of the shed and their female flock became a few keening voices, and then one, and then no more than the rumble of the digger, Etty remained at the larder door, tracing her grandson’s slow, northwards progress. “Banjul” was a horde of purple tourists. “Choum” was a train nearly three miles long.

  The sheep. There had, in her life, been so many times like this when she had felt herself age, pass from one stage of life to the next, in which her hope, her will, her capacity for joy were minutely, irrevocably less. It was a prickling sensation, like her tissues were crumpling, like her cells were imploding in turn. When she reached the label that read “Dunkirk,” which she might almost have seen from her bedroom, she clung to her stick and returned to her chair as if she had made the journey herself.

  —

  WITH THE CLOSING evenings, the yard had long been deserted by the slaughtermen when the security light tripped on the corner of the barn. Oliver did not move at first, although its brightness was plain in the kitchen window—the aerial white beyond the chimney breast, the orchard casting its skeletal shadows. Perhaps, he thought, a fox was looking for a bantam; after all the day’s killing it hardly seemed to matter. Perhaps someone had left a phone or a bag, but he had seen no headlamps nor heard an engine, and in the end it was the yelping of the dogs that made him set down his glass of whisky, tear his eyes from the television and haul himself past his sleeping mother, down the hall to the door.

  Already the dogs had become sporadic, their calls divided by the silence of the farm. The light, whic
h required little more than the movement of a finger, had switched itself off, and Oliver peered for some moments into the hooded night before he saw a shape just short of the gate—black against the distant redness in the clouds.

  “I know what you done,” said Mervyn quietly.

  “What’s that?” said Oliver.

  “I seen your tup was gone from the Plock.”

  “Every fucking creature is gone.”

  “Not back on the weekend they wasn’t. Got him tucked up somewhere nice and safe, have you?”

  As Oliver left the bridge for the yard, the light returned suddenly and the two men were facing one another on the tyre-cut slope, between the grey and white cliffs of the barn and the house. There was the carcass of a baler among the blackened nettles by the silage bales. The sallies were yellow round the leaf-strewn pond, whose sluices were rotting and boodged with stones.

  “Do you know how long I was breeding them beasts?” Mervyn demanded. “Thirty fucking years! Thirty fucking years, and you—”

  “I what?”

  “You, you cuckoo bastard!”

  Rough as it was, this was Oliver’s territory—familiar in its every contour. There was no obstacle within thirty feet. He joined his hands above his swelling chest, pulling the rings from his long, gnarled fingers, his eyes alert to his neighbour’s scowl, the spread of his wellies, the set of his monstrous shoulders.

  “And even if I had,” he said. “Well. Tit for tat, in’t it?”

  Mervyn inhaled and his big arms lifted.

  “You want square, that’s fucking square!”

  The ancient anger flickered in Oliver’s stomach, ignited, whisky-fuelled, and fanned its way along his limbs, easing the daunting pain in his elbow, taking the weight from his heavy leather boots, whose heels rose out of the mud. This was not arm wrestling. He had the height. He had the reach. He charted the lines in his neighbour’s cheeks, the riven jowls spilling over his collar, the glint of his eyes in their cavernous sockets, but then again the light went off and he was left in the darkness with the halogen bulb repeating when he blinked—his breath coming quickly in his nose.