The Things I Know

by Amanda Prowse

  She thought about the shiny red shoes that lived in her mind and a wave of sadness threatened to engulf her. It was such a sweet and simple desire from a man who had worked so very hard yet was struggling to buy his wife this one simple thing.

  ‘I don’t need a new frock! Never go anywhere to wear a new frock!’ her mum offered affectionately, her eyes on the soup.

  ‘That’s not the point!’

  He spoke a little more forcefully than Thomasina was used to, and it jarred, reminding her that, however hard the whole idea of giving up the family farm might be for her and her brother, for her dad, it was a whole lot more painful. And her heart flexed for him.

  He continued, quieter now. ‘I want choices. I want a holiday! I want change.’ It didn’t seem like much to ask.

  Thomasina put her mug on the table. The theme of change seemed to be a recurring one, and she understood. ‘How much are they offering?’ She couldn’t believe they were getting down to the detail, making it real, and yet here they were.

  ‘Enough for us to sell the farmhouse and most of the land and to retain a couple of acres we can build a bungalow on.’

  ‘A bungalow?’ She tried to picture her mum and dad in a new house – well-nigh impossible when she’d always thought of them as part of the fabric of this old building. A bit like the legend of the ravens deserting the Tower of London foretelling doom and disaster, she wondered what might happen if the Waycotts left.

  ‘Yes,’ her mum said, picking up the thread. ‘A little place with straight walls, central heating, hot water on demand from an efficient boiler, new carpet, double-glazed windows that keep out the draughts and don’t rattle at the first breath of wind, and new furniture – things from Ikea!’

  ‘Ikea!’ Thomasina rubbed her face, trying to picture this compact, glossy, neat, square world her parents were trying to paint.

  ‘It means we can retire happy, safe and warm without worry. Can you imagine what that would feel like, not to have the worry?’ Again her father looked at his wife.

  Thomasina realised that they deserved this reward for all the hard physical labour over the years. But no matter that this was what she told herself, the thought of handing over the keys that had jangled in the pocket of her great-grandmother’s apron – and handing them over to the Buttermores, no less – was enough to bring a swirl of nausea to her gut. She pictured Tarran swinging a hammer on this rickety kitchen, radio blaring as he set to work replacing the worn wooden cupboard doors and ancient range with something sharp, modern and shiny. It was almost unthinkable, and yet it was on the verge of happening.

  ‘And I could get my own place . . .’ She spoke with a hard-summoned nod of enthusiasm that she did not feel.

  ‘A place of your own? You daft thing, you’d be with us, of course!’ her mum tutted, as if nothing else could be a possibility.

  ‘You know, I’d be all right on my own. I’ve just travelled to London and back and I managed just fine. I—’

  ‘But supposing you had a bad fall,’ her mum interrupted breathlessly, ‘like you did when you slipped on the top stair – that was terrible! I won’t ever forget the sight of you lying on the flagstones with your leg all bruised and your face bleeding!’

  ‘I was twelve, Mum!’

  ‘Or supposing you had another turn with your heart? I’m the one who has to give you your pills and keep an eye on you!’ She bit her lip.

  ‘But, Mum, I’m not a kid any more. You don’t need to keep an eye on me. I can take my own pills. I need to spread my wings . . . get my own bloody cake tins!’ A torrent of frustration and sadness flooded through her. Her dad might now regard her as a fully grown woman, but her mum clearly still had a little catching up to do.

  Her parents stared at her open-mouthed, as if she’d lost the plot.

  Thomasina tried to picture herself in a new house, away from her square room with the saggy mattress on the brass bed and the damp patch on the ceiling that in certain lights looked like a map of Australia. Her childhood bookshelves crammed with Anna Sewell, Enid Blyton and Joyce Lankester Brisley, each page glued together with dust – particles of her whole lifetime. The secret space behind the chest of drawers where she’d written I hate Jonathan, aged about six, and then tried to colour it over with red felt-tip. She smiled at the thought of her evil deed being revealed after all these years. And yes, it would mean walking away from her childhood home, her history, but this was a new chapter. She remembered the tractor pedal beneath her feet and the wide steering wheel in her hands when she was nine and that feeling, as if she could put her foot down and keep going, smashing through fences, fields and across rivers, just keep on going, in charge of her own destiny, free to go wherever the fancy took her . . .

  ‘I can’t lie – it breaks my heart, the thought of seeing another family, especially one like the Buttermores, living in our house, but I can see that it’s not worth it, not worth carrying on when you can have a different life, a better life for you now. You deserve a rest, Pops, you do. And you, Mum, you deserve a new frock.’

  Her dad nodded and took her hand in his across the table. ‘Thank you, Thomasina.’

  There was the unmistakable sound of sniffing from the range: her mum, showing a rare flash of emotion at this most emotive of subjects.

  ‘Who wants soup?’ she asked, a little more aggressively than was necessary, banging the ladle down on top of the range as if this might counteract the sentimental display.

  Thomasina finished up the vacuuming and stripped the bed in the guest room. She flopped down then on to the wide mattress, sinking into the springs and staring up at the ceiling, remembering how she had lain with Grayson on his narrow bed, and how it had felt safe, warm and secure to fall asleep with her head on his chest and his arms wrapped around her in a wonderful bubble of their own making. The conversation with her parents and the realisation that things were moving at pace left her feeling the very opposite: insecure and unsettled. It was the first time in her life she could not picture her immediate future. Where would she live, exactly, and what work would she find? She was still battling with her parents to be allowed to spread her wings, but now she exhorted herself to think – think of how to make things work, how to make things better.

  ‘What on earth is wrong with you, Thomasina?’ her mum shouted from the doorway. ‘I’m going to have to put a rocket up your backside if you’re not careful! Christ alive, with you wandering around all dreamy-eyed, everything’s going to take twice as long!’

  ‘I can’t help it, Mum. I can’t stop thinking.’

  ‘What you thinking about?’

  ‘The future, Grayson, lots of things.’

  ‘I reckon you’ve got it bad, my little ’un.’ Her mum looked at her with a knowing expression and a small smile of understanding lifted the corners of her mouth.

  ‘I have. I sort of feel that, if I’m with him, I can do anything. He makes me see myself differently.’ Thomasina jumped up off the mattress and gathered the dirty sheets from where she’d dumped them on the floor.

  ‘And you’re sure he feels the same? I don’t want you to get hurt, darlin’.’

  Thomasina nodded. ‘He does.’

  ‘Well, it might not be the bungalow for you then. It might be that you live all that way away in London with your tall man, his funny haircut and his proper handful of a mother!’

  Her words were a step in the right direction, confirmation that Thomasina would one day go, and she was grateful. ‘I don’t think so. I can’t imagine me living there, not at all, especially not with her. But then I can’t see me in the bungalow with you and Dad either.’

  ‘So where do you see yourself, my girl?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly, Mum. But I know that Austley Morton isn’t big enough to contain all the thoughts and dreams I have. I think I want to travel, try new things.’ She took a deep breath, a little embarrassed by her statement of intent and pre-empting her mum’s next question. ‘And I don’t know what “new things”, but s
omething completely different! And that thought doesn’t scare me – in fact, the opposite. I feel excited – alive! And yet a little afraid at the same time. I guess I always thought I could wander as far as I wanted but still have the farm to come home to: a base, a beacon to guide me back again . . .’

  ‘I understand that,’ her mum said with a sigh. ‘It’s not easy for any of us. My little girl is finding her feet.’

  The two stared at each other, Thomasina a little overcome by her mother’s acknowledgement.

  Seconds later her mother coughed and shifted on the spot. ‘Well, that all sounds very interesting, but right now you need to stop daydreaming. There are a dozen calves glad you’re not doing something completely different right now, as they’re waiting to have their shit picked up, so you’d best crack on!’ She winked at her.

  Thomasina fed the calves and mucked them out, scooping their waste into the wheelbarrow and carting it away before setting to on the cement floor with a hot-water pressure hose, detergent and a stiff brush, and finally topping it off with fresh bedding and straw. She didn’t mind the labour, thinking ahead now to a time when this might be someone else’s chore and how she would miss the interaction with these beautiful beasts. She remembered her gran saying to her once, “Be careful what you wish for!” It had always struck her as the oddest of phrases, but now, at the prospect of Waycott Farm passing into Buttermore hands, she understood it in a way. Countless were the times she’d wished to be anywhere but on the farm, bemoaning the work and the long, long hours and yet now, in the light of it all coming to an end, she could only look upon each task with sweet nostalgia and a worrying sense that she might be losing more than she would gain.

  ‘There we are, my darlings, a lovely clean house for you all!’ She felt a fine film of sweat across her brow and ran her hand over the smooth, hard back of Maisie-Moo. ‘Can’t imagine you in an Ikea bungalow, not at all.’ She liked the feel of the animal beneath her palm. ‘At least not until you learn to control that flow of shite and can aim it at a toilet!’

  As she and Buddy walked out towards the chicken coop, she checked her phone, hoping for a message from Grayson. There wasn’t one. A charge of disappointment exploded in her gut. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Thomasina. He works all day, and not how you work – he’s in an office on a computer. He can’t just whip out his phone and call you up for a chat any old time.’ She pictured the moment she’d left him, as he jumped on the bus with his long fringe flopped over his eyes and his satchel over his shoulder – a long, odd fringe, because Auntie Joan had never finished her hairdressing course, stopping to have a baby and get chucked out by her dad . . .

  ‘Call me any time,’ that’s what he’d said, ‘if ever you need anything, anything at all, and I will always, always, try to make your life the best it can be. If I can do anything to help you, then I will, because that’s what you deserve, Thomasina.’ The thought that there was someone thinking about her, there for her, no matter that he was all that way off in London, made her smile.

  But also she remembered that, no matter how grand his words or his intentions, he would still have to navigate his mother’s moods to make anything happen in actual fact. She wished things were different for her and for him, wished he would do the right thing and jump ship – and this thought brought her back to the very beginning: how she could so easily make the suggestion and yet struggle to act on it herself.

  ‘It’s complicated, Buddy boy! That’s what it is!’

  The hens enjoyed their afternoon corn and were perky, seemingly not missing Daphne a jot. In fact, if anything, Little Darling seemed to have found her voice and was walking around like queen of the coop now that the competition for prettiest hen had taken a step in her favour.

  Poor little Daphne . . . Thomasina felt guilty that her hen had had a rather crude burial in the back of the pub car park. Shelley had stood at her side, smoking a cigarette, as she laid Daphne in a shallow grave. It was hardly the fitting end she’d envisaged for the beautiful bird.

  Calmer but no less forgiving, she was relieved not to have seen Emery since she’d got back. He was apparently out with the tractor, cutting the hedgerows back on the lower fields. Thomasina walked back to Big Barn to get the dry bedding from the tumble dryer. As she looked up towards the yard she saw the unmistakable shine of Tarran Buttermore’s sleek new black Range Rover pull in through the gates. Ordinarily, she would have rushed to a mirror to fix her hair, splash her face and wash the animal shit from under her fingernails, but today she could only recall the way he and his moronic friends had heckled Grayson and didn’t think twice about what she might look like. He wasn’t the one who made her feel beautiful; he never had.

  Tarran jumped down from the car and walked in a determined stride with his hands on his hips, looking up at the farmhouse and then down over the field. His stance irritated her beyond belief. He didn’t own the bloody place, not yet.

  ‘Emery still not back?’

  As usual when sober, he addressed her in this businesslike, matter-of-fact manner, as if they were strangers or she were of no consequence. His cool delivery always made her feel grubby, turning their brief shared history into something even more sordid, if that were possible. Not that it mattered now; she’d found something so much better.

  She’d found Grayson Potts.

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘He’s borrowed our flail arm for cutting and we need it.’

  ‘As I said, he’s not back.’ She stood firm, taking in the confident, almost cocky swagger of the boy, who thought he was the bee’s knees, all because he was blessed with a pretty face, a pocketful of cash and drove a fancy car.

  ‘Anything else, Tarran? Or can we both get on?’

  He smiled at her, a crooked smile that managed to convey the fact that he was both insincere and irritated. ‘Tell Emery I’ll see him later.’

  She had no intention of playing messenger and said nothing. He looked her up and down.

  ‘Shelley told me you were freaking out over a hen. Is that right, Hitch?’ He laughed now. ‘Just wanted to say you should get your facts right. Lots of birds dropping down dead for no reason all over the county. The Reedleys have had to get rid of their whole brood of hens, and I don’t reckon your cousin is killing them all, do you?’

  ‘My name is Thomasina.’

  ‘What?’ He looked at her quizzically.

  ‘I said my name is Thomasina. I don’t want people to call me Hitch any more.’

  ‘Is that right?’ He shook his head, laughing to himself, and climbed up into the car, slamming the door before roaring off up the lane.

  ‘Arsehole!’ she called out as his licence plate disappeared from view.

  ‘Who’s an arsehole?’ her mum asked, head down, as she trotted by on her way to the compost with her little enamel bucket full of vegetable scraps.

  ‘Tarran Buttermore.’

  ‘Oh yes, he is,’ her mum said, heading off up the yard. ‘A proper arsehole.’

  The walk along the riverbank with Buddy restored her calm. It was not only beautiful, the sky clear and the water lively, but every step reminded her of being there with Grayson. She liked to think about his mannerisms, his scent and the way his hand felt in hers. She took her time on the flat rock, throwing stones out into the current.

  ‘I was just thinking that we can still come down here, Bud, whenever we want. It’s public land. We might not own the farm in the future, but nothing’s going to stop me coming down to the edge of the water and chucking in stones. I’ve been doing it since before I can remember. It’s our special place, isn’t it?’ She pictured herself and Grayson, holding each other close on the tartan rug.

  Buddy made a groaning sound.

  ‘It won’t be the same, I know, but the flat rock will still be here and no Buttermore dickhead can stop me coming to sit on it.’

  She checked her phone intermittently for a text message. Doubt crept up on her, loud and destructive over her thoughts. What if Grayson
didn’t call? What if he was just being kind when he said those things? What if his terrible mother had put her foot down again and he’d listened to her horrible words, like ‘floozy’? It was not going to be easy, this long-distance relationship, especially when one of them worked rigid hours in an office environment and the other lived on a farm with the crappiest phone signal in the whole wide world.

  With a swirl of resolve in her gut, Thomasina painted a picture in her mind of herself standing tall in a pair of sparkly red shoes. She was going to have to fasten her armour, determined that, even if things with Grayson did not turn out as she hoped, the wheels she’d set in motion would carry her forward to a different future, one in which she smashed through those fences and kept on going.

  ‘Dawtah . . . cworfee . . .’ she practised out loud.

  Buddy began to run in circles in and out of the shallows; he didn’t want to sit still. ‘You want to keep walking, boy? All right then.’ She jumped down from the flat rock and dusted off the seat of her jeans. The day was slipping away and she wanted to make the most of the light, suddenly troubled by the realisation that there would be paths and lanes barred to her once the farm was no longer Waycott property. The idea was almost unthinkable for a woman used to roaming so freely and brought a lump to her throat that sat like glass. She’d reluctantly envisaged the farmhouse changing hands, but this particular thought had not yet occurred to her: that she would not be free to wander the land on which her family had toiled for generations, that she would have to use the roads and byways like any other person and that she would have to go the long way around. Her foot ached at the prospect. She called Buddy to heel and, with her spirits a little sunken, made her way home.