by Tom Bullough
Oliver climbed into the driver’s seat, put the key in the ignition but left it there.
“Alexander,” he said.
Etty felt a tremor in her eyelids.
“Was that him, was it?” He dug in his jacket and held up the dog tag on its broken lace.
“Alexander,” she repeated.
“What does that mean?”
“Olly…” She winced and turned to look at him: his scarce grey hair left wild by his hat, his face in lines of black and white. “Olly, what can I say? You found that thing, you know the most of it. I…It happened. I was ashamed. But you’re here. That’s all.”
The dog stirred briefly by her feet, her tall ears bent on the glove compartment. On the handbrake Maureen was standing in silence, and Etty realized that she could no longer remember if she had always been the same bird or if there had been several, given the same name out of convenience.
“Are you still ashamed, are you?” he asked.
“No, love,” she said. She touched his arm. “No.”
Beyond the snow on the bonnet and the few tracks striping the rising lane, an upstairs window shone at the Pant and vanished again as its curtains closed on these ghosts of fields, these impressions of hedgerows—these familiar things made dislocate, like themselves. They had, Oliver thought, done everything they could to be rid of the night. They had banished it from the house. They had reduced it to the shadows that fled from the torch or the simple foil for a blackened reflection, covered in the moment it was seen. They had usurped the stars as they had usurped the sidelands, deeming them useless, driving them back into the dwindling hills. He sat with his mother in the cab of the Navara and gradually, as their shoulders subsided, they became to one another again, as they had always been, almost transparent—like the sheer scraps of clouds or the vapour trails where the stars showed so clearly that they might not have been there at all. He knew that the shame had never quite been hers. She knew that he did not really care, not really, not so much as he had ever obliged her to speak. A plane was ploughing its rut through the sky—its three white lights a closer constellation, its blinking red the only colour they could see.
The days, they thought, would be drawing out tomorrow.
For Jenny and Will
I AM HUGELY grateful to everyone who spoke with me when I was working on this book: Finn Beales, Dr. Philip Cleland, Jeff Davies, Toby Eckley, Ieuan and Gwyneth Evans, Chris Havard, Robert and Llinos Jones, Alun Price, Matthew Price, Rose and Elwyn Price, Walter Price, John Pugh, Ernie Roberts and Robert Tyler.
And to everyone who read and commented on its various drafts: Charlotte Ward, Philip Gross, Clare Alexander, Will and Jenny Bullough, Richard Gwyn and Gerard Woodward. And, of course, Max Porter and Daphne Tagg at Granta, and Noah Eaker and Kathy Lord at Random House.
I would also like to thank (the great) Julian Broad, everyone at the Brecon and Radnor Express, Trefor Griffiths for the permission to quote W. H. Howse, and Christopher Meredith, whose poem “Borderland” (in the excellent Air Histories) was on my mind throughout.
For her work on the tree photographs, and for most other things, my thanks and love to Charlotte, as ever.
TOM BULLOUGH grew up on a hill farm in Wales, where he still lives. He has worked as a sawmiller, a music promoter in Zimbabwe, a tractor driver, and a contributor to various titles in the Rough Guides series. At present he is a Visiting Fellow at the University of South Wales. Addlands is his fourth novel, the first to be published in the United States.
tombullough.com
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