by Morag Joss
Howard nodded and smiled, blinking his sore eyes, and I went to get dressed.
It was one of those warm, sparkling days that comes on Exmoor after a spell of rain; beautiful weather. Digger pulled some bales off the van and we carried them across the yard to the barn at the back. We set up the two holding pens inside and spread the straw ready for the sheep. As we left the yard I turned to wave to Howard, who I knew would be sitting at the window. He probably wouldn’t be able to see me, so far away and through glass, and even if he did he might not be able to tell it was me, but I waved anyway, in case he could detect the movement of my hand and interpret it as a sign he was not forgotten. But at that time of morning the light fell on the glass in such a way that I was gesturing at a mirror. I was blinded by the eclipse of my own body and its long shadow against the sun’s reflection on the window, sheer and dark as steel, and I couldn’t see Howard at all.
In silence Digger and I walked alongside the hedgebanks between the fields and on toward the flock on the moor, past pale, swaying weed stalks flickering with crickets and little enameled flying insects. It was a glorious day—I couldn’t help saying so and Digger allowed himself to agree, smiling momentarily as if I’d complimented him on something that was his. The dog loped on ahead of us toward the ridge until I couldn’t see him for the glimmering haze on the horizon. Away from the reedy, bright green patches where the bog seldom dried out, the moor was shriveled and dusty, and as we walked our feet sent up from the heather clouds of ragged brown moths like scraps of burnt paper. Once over the ridge, we wound separate ways among the rocks and clumps of gorse until we found and counted the lumbering, dowdy forms of the sheep, grazing in the shade of the combe.
“Eight. One less to bother us,” Digger said, and called, “Come bye!” to the dog, sending him to the back of the flock for the drive off the hill. We got them down in a loose bleating gaggle, through the field gates and into the pen in the barn. Digger looked at his watch.
“Half-eleven. Six hours’ll settle the gas in their stomachs,” he said, above the bleating. “I’ll be back at half-five.”
He must have noticed the way I glanced over at the house. “Got the day to fill, have you?” he said.
“I’m always busy,” I said. “There’s plenty to do.”
“And there’s plenty needs doing,” Digger said. “If it wasn’t for your situation I’d have more to say, I don’t mind telling you. State of the place.”
“Howard needs a lot of help.”
“Even so. Point is, the rent you’re paying. I could get that ten times over as a holiday let, a place like this. You want to think about that. Lease comes up again Christmastime, don’t it. You want to think about it.”
“It’s a protected tenancy, as you well know. We’re entitled to stay as long as we’re farming.”
“Call that lot farming?” Digger said, snorting in the direction of the sheep. “That ain’t farming. Want putting out of their misery. I’m telling you, clean hole through the head.”
“I’ll see you at half-past five,” I said, and then I thanked him again for the favor and returned to the house.
From: deborahstoneyridge@yahoo.com
To:
Sent on wed 20 july 2011 at 3.32 GMT
Hi darling
Hardly know how to keep up with you! They’re always sending you somewhere – you didn’t say where. It would be good to know, just so if I need to get hold of you on your mobile in between the Wednesday emails I have an idea of the time difference. But I suppose by the time you read this you won’t be there any more anyway! I think you said you can get emails on your phone, is that really true? I wish we got a mobile signal at stoneyridge.
And yes I know that’s not the same as the internet and I’m sure we’ll be able to get connected up with a computer and email pretty soon. Everyone keeps saying it’d be useful for the B&B bookings but I’m not sure I have time for much more B&B trade.
Anyway I hope you haven’t been worried – this is way past my usual time to email because I was busy with the sheep all morning. No village trip or stroke club for Dad today as a result. I’m just managing to sneak a bit of time in Bridgecombe while he has his nap after lunch, I needed to get some shopping etc as well as pop into library to write this. Have promised him a hair and beard trim later but may not get round to it today. My shoulder’s playing up a bit (nothing to worry about, just a bit of a bore), plus the shearing still to come and that’s pretty tiring too though Digger does the hard bit obviously. We got them all into the barn so you can imagine the racket! It goes on all day, do you remember? I don’t know how they don’t get hoarse – you just have to get used to it or go mad I suppose!
Your work sounds so busy, I’m glad you’re being appreciated! How long do you have to keep doing these visits all over the place? And where to next? Adam, is there any firm news yet about spending a few days here? You were going to let me know how long you could have off. I hope there isn’t a problem. I hope you have told them how much leave you’re owed, it must be weeks and weeks now! Looking at the diary, what would work really well would be if you could come on the Thursday, that’s the 25th August. You’d have plenty time to get over the jetlag before your birthday on Sunday 28th, which we are dying to celebrate!!! I was thinking, how long is it since we had a birthday picnic on the moor?!?
Weather permitting I thought between us if we could get Dad up there somehow, it’d do him such a lot of good. And after Sunday you stay as long as you like. Make it worthwhile coming all this way, make it a proper break and a rest in the country!
Of course if those dates don’t work, come whenever you can manage.
Well, todays busy, which of course is good, so I must get back or Dad will be feeling neglected.
Take care. Let me know where you are! And dates please – and we are HOPING you’ll be here for the big day.
Love, Mum xxxxxxxx
The sun beat down all day on the barn roof. When I went in at half-past five, the air was thick with the smell of warm hay and urine and vibrated with the cries of the ewes; I was sweating and feeling sick even before Digger arrived, late. He rigged up sacks for the fleeces and I unrolled the extension cable for the electric cutters across the yard to the socket in Howard’s old pottery shed. Digger had brought blowfly treatment and said we should dose the rest of the flock. He told me to get some gloves and then showed me how to work the spray. He set planks on the floor where he would do the work and started the generator; we had to shout above its drone and the bleating. As I went into the first holding pen I reminded Digger that since I broke my shoulder I could only work from one side, and he nodded, either bored or skeptical. He didn’t seem to remember it at all, my fall from the ladder, although at the time he’d been scathing about Howard letting his wife do a man’s work. Together, taking a horn each, we hauled the nearest ewe away from the others, got her out of the pen, and dragged her on her skidding hooves across the floor. Digger tipped her off-balance and held her down on her back, between his legs. The clippers began to buzz. He wasn’t an expert shearer—his father had stopped farming sheep when Digger was in his teens—and he struggled to keep her feet from kicking against the floor. By the time he had her done she was wild-eyed, and thick strings of spittle hung from her mouth. I already had the gloves on, and while he held her I sprayed her with the insecticide. She bucked at the feel of it on her newly exposed skin but I kept going until Digger, swearing and spitting, said it was enough. He swung her over and back on her feet; I got the gate of the second holding pen open and he shoved her in. She skittered around for a while as if startled to find herself suddenly skinny and white. It’s not true that shorn sheep look like the lambs they once were. She looked impossibly small, but old.
I did my best to roll and tie the tattered cloak of her fleece, hiding my disgust, while Digger watched. My hands shook, and they were greasy and stinking with the lanolin off the wool. The air was
sharp with insecticide. We brought out the next ewe from the others and went through the same procedure with her, and with the next two. After nearly an hour we were only half-way done, and I was drenched in sweat and my shoulder ached. I made Digger stop. I brought a jug of cold water from the house, and although he paused and drank, he made it clear he resented the delay. On the fifth sheep he found maggots. She was not nearly as badly infested as the sheep that died; it was nothing, he told me, that a good drenching wouldn’t deal with. I watched the maggots writhe faster under the shower of insecticide. They dropped off dead on to his feet, and I was almost sick.
It was after seven-thirty before we’d finished and driven the sheep back on to the moor. Digger returned to the shed to pack up the generator and clippers and other bits of equipment while I went on into the house. When I stepped into the kitchen I heard faint drifting voices from the television and through the glass panel of the door to the sitting room I could see the top of Howard’s head silhouetted against the screen. He didn’t turn round.
I didn’t want him to know I’d come in. The kitchen smelled almost pleasantly of summer damp, a sharp smell like milk curds or wet chalk, and my face and arms were prickling from the sudden coolness. My skin still crawled; I shivered, remembering the foamy jaws of the sheep and their jutting yellow teeth, the lousy fleeces. From the sitting room came the sound of a commercial break; jittery music gave way to an excited, high-pitched voice. Howard switched channels, slicing from the advert to fluttery studio laughter, and then he brought the volume down so that over it I could hear the kitchen clock tapping out the seconds in low, tinny pulses. The old freezer in the scullery across the passage at the back of the kitchen let out a tired, electrical grunt. It was the first time all day I’d had a moment to realize how close to tears I was, how completely I would give up and sob with self-pity if this patch of solitude were not so obviously finite, so frail against certain interruption. All I could do was guard it for as long as it lasted and use every moment of it to keep very still, the way a cat uses a square of sunlight on a stone floor. I stood motionless, my fingertips arched on the tabletop, and closed my eyes, afraid that my breathing would give away my whereabouts. I wondered if Adam had read my email yet. I hope you have told them how much leave you’re owed, it must be weeks and weeks now! However desperate that sounded to him it was far, far less desperate than I felt.
I opened my eyes at the sound of Digger scraping his feet over the threshold. I glanced at the sitting room; Howard hadn’t moved and was watching a cartoon now. Digger waited, chewing on a blister he’d got from the sheep clippers and watching me as I bent down to the fridge and brought out cans of beer. He drank one leaning against the sink, set it down empty, wiped his mouth, and said he’d be off. I didn’t try to persuade him to have another. For every one of his unkind remarks there seemed to be another that he turned into a look of disdain instead of speaking aloud, and I couldn’t bear his presence another moment. His contempt for us, the doomed, naïve, arrogant Londoners who thought they could make a go of it on Exmoor, he had once tried to hide; now that he believed he’d been proved right he extended to us—between threats about our tenancy—a kind of snide pity. After he left, all I wanted to do was get in a bath, wash off the whole filthy day, and sleep. Instead I loaded up a tray with Howard’s supper and took it into the sitting room.
He wasn’t watching the television at all. He was crying. His good hand, the fingers still crooked in the scissor handles, lay shaking in his lap, half-buried under drifts of his silky hair and darker curls from his beard. What was left of the hair on his head fell across his brow and stood up around his ears in chopped tufts, and the remains of his beard looked like torn patches of matting glued to his cheeks. He lifted his face, soaked in tears and sweat and now falling in folds to the papery-white, naked wattle under his chin. His weeping came more from his mouth than his eyes; his newly exposed lips were pink and quivering and the bottom one was cut and swollen. It struck me that I had never properly seen his mouth—indeed his face—before.
“For God’s sake, Howard, what have you done? What the hell have you done?” I said. Above the television my voice was hard and flat as if I were testing it for an echo against the walls of an empty room. I turned and switched off the television. And as I often did, I also flicked a switch in my mind. I began to imagine the amusing, valiant email I would try to write to Adam about what was happening, reaching for phrases that would convince him, and thereby myself, that we were coping all right. It was one of the ways I kept going, by summoning quite unreal and sudden surges of spirit and energy so that later I could report to my son another of my plucky little retaliations against circumstance.
“Really, Howard, what on earth did you think you were doing? Don’t cry. Never mind, it’ll grow back. For God’s sake, Howard, please don’t cry!”
He held out the scissors, mumbling something I didn’t understand. As he did so, some skeins of hair in his lap slipped to the floor. I picked them up in my hands and brought them to my face; his hair was warm, the cut ends like tiny needle pricks against my cheeks. It smelled of him.
But it was only hair. Howard stripped of nothing more important than hair, but humiliated and transformed, not so much denuded as defused—the charge dead, the power gone. The pity of it, the misery and foolishness in his eyes. I reminded myself that beneath his disguise of beard and hair, nothing had in fact altered for a very long time. I took the scissors and finished the job.
The heat was unbearable. Already the day was unbearable. He should not have been left alone with Digger and yet she’d gone, disappeared upstairs. He glared at him but must have failed to convey anger, because Digger shook his head and murmured, “You poor old bugger,” and wandered back outside.
And because the breakfast routine was upset, all that followed was upset. When she came back downstairs dressed she didn’t help him to his usual chair in the sitting room. Hadn’t time, she told him, and he was supposed to walk by himself with the frame as much as he could, that’s what they said at Stroke Club. She forgot about his tablets and he had to mouth at her and point at the cupboard where they were kept. Digger was loitering at the open door, the dog jumping and barking behind him. She rattled the tablets on to his plate next to his cup of milk and he lifted them one by one to his mouth; as soon as he had taken the last and brought the cup down from his lips, she pulled it away. Then she left, telling him she wouldn’t be long and he’d be fine.
She didn’t tell him to finish the milk or wipe his mouth. She didn’t wait to see that he’d managed to swallow the pills. When the dog’s barking at last grew faint, Howard emptied the bitter, chalky spittle into his hand and wiped it down his thigh. He ate the last piece of banana on his plate and finished the milk: children’s food. In the quiet of the kitchen, the empty space of the morning ahead opened up, wide and uncrossable. He heaved himself up to his walking frame and pushed it along toward the sitting room. Behind him, the clock spat out a tick between each shuffling step. Between each step he stopped and waited, longer each time; with every tick and every step, he wanted to be dead.
When she came in later she stank of sheep. He wouldn’t look at her and wouldn’t eat the sandwich she made for his lunch, because it also stank of sheep. She told him he was tired and helped him to bed. He could tell she was excited about something; there was life in her, maybe because today she was doing what she liked doing, keeping away from him. More and more, she wanted to keep away from him. He lay awake on his bed while the sun’s blaze filtered through the drawn curtains and his lips worked in silence, forming unsayable words of pleading. A memory of his own voice droned in the warm air over his head. A little later when she looked in on him he pretended to be asleep, and after a while he heard the back door shutting and the van starting up in the yard.
There must have been a time that afternoon when he did fall asleep, and there was a time when she came back and got him up and fretted around him and made him another sandwich, which he
ate. He couldn’t be sure of the order of those times or how long any of them took. Later, he was back in his chair in the sitting room, that much he knew; also that she switched on the television and went out again.
The room was stifling and dark. Noise, color, and also, it seemed to him, heat radiated from the television. Since the bedroom partition had gone up there was only one window in the sitting room and he’d wanted it opened but hadn’t been able to say so. Why hadn’t she opened it before she left? She knew he couldn’t do it; it took two good arms to lift the sash. He could die in here like a dog in a car. She was trying to kill him. If he could hurl a shoe far enough to break the glass, he would. He’d enjoy the sound of shattering glass. He remembered that she’d promised that morning to trim his hair; that, too, she had forgotten. It was simple fury that gave him the strength to grasp hold of his frame and go to the kitchen drawer where the scissors were kept.
Deborah always cut his hair in the kitchen, so he would not; besides, he didn’t want her or Digger barging in on him before he’d finished. For no reason but to hear the words aloud, he tried, and managed, to call out “Cut hair!” and then his voice cracked with laughter. “Too hot, cut off!” he cried, but on the ff he bit down on the moist flap of bottom lip that was caught between his teeth and drew blood.
Sucking on his mouth, he shuffled back to his chair in the sitting room. He turned up the volume on the television—it was necessary to create a distraction of some kind, he felt, from his act of self-sabotage—and began to cut.
The first snip of the scissors loosed and let fall a shockingly large amount of hair. He lifted out another handful from his head and snipped again; the dry whisper of the blades right next to his ear was beautiful. He began to cry, and went on cutting, and cutting.
