by Dai Smith
For a moment they could both ignore it and then neither of them could: a siren in the distance but homing in on them, threatening their brittle stasis. Samson heard it, stirred and twitched.
‘Shush-sh. I’m not going – if that’s the ambulance. I can’t leave him till…’
‘There’s a vet coming,’ he said pointlessly.
‘I know. Motorbike man said. Thanks.’
A police car, lights flashing but siren now off, drew up a respectful distance away. The policeman who approached was paunchy and near retirement age by the looks of him, sweating as though attending the scene on foot.
‘Oh dear.’
Alun stood up and met him on the road to keep between this new intruding figure and the horse. ‘She needs to go to hospital. Broken arm at least, I think – God, I don’t know, she could be really hurt. But she won’t go till someone’s dealt with the horse.’
The policeman glanced down at Samson and up again to Alun. What was the matter with the idiot? What didn’t he understand? Alun, his back to Mel, raised his index finger to his own temples. ‘OK?’
He nodded. ‘The other – I mean the vehicle involved in this, sir. Has it been driven off?’
‘Just round the corner. You’ll find it in front of my house. But stir up that bloody vet will you?’
They sat for what seemed another couple of hours easily, but was probably only minutes. At one point the policeman came back out of Tatten Lane, talking all the time to a distant agent, removed something from the police car that Alun couldn’t see and went back with it in the direction of Carousel. When a Landrover arrived from the opposite direction to that of the police car it was Mel who saw it.
‘Hello Peter. I was hoping it’d be you.’
‘Hello Mel. You um, hanging in there?’
‘Yep.’
Peter was tall and wiry and, dressed in a khaki boiler suit, could have passed for a mechanic, one of those we’ll-fix-you- by-the-road-types that Alun had been forced to rely on more than once. Feeling very much the spare part, Alun made space for the vet to kneel between the horse’s bent knee and its shrouded head. Peter seemed to ignore the terrible wound from which blood still leaked; he put his hand on the animal’s muzzle and pulled at the lower lip. ‘Membranes are a poor colour. He’s deeply in shock.’
‘I know,’ Mel said.
‘From just what I can see from here,’ Peter’s contortionist’s frame enabled a head-cocked, half-balanced peek into the hole in Samson, ‘it looks like lateral head of triceps damage – severe damage… huge amount of tissue loss in the area. Bone fragments might be from the sternum or the ulna or both.’ He rocked back and away on his heels but the squeak of rubber boots now failed to set off anything more than a long rattling exhalation from the horse.
‘Can you do it now, please?’
‘Yes. I think that’s the thing to do. Yes. Right, Mel. If you’re able to stay there, I’ll get my stuff.’
Alun might not have been present: this was to be accomplished by Mel, Peter and Samson, of course. Once Peter had shaved a patch on Samson’s neck to insert his lethal injection Alun, more out of curiosity than any distinct purpose, wandered back into Tatten Lane. What met him was an extraordinary scene: across from Carousel on the narrow grass strip it seemed a family picnic was in progress. A young woman sat on a travel-rug, a grizzling baby ignored in her lap while an older, white-haired woman bent to hand her – to hand her very shakily – a steaming plastic top from a thermos flask. The paunchy policeman stood talking to the seated woman whilst being pulled about and interrupted by a small boy who had him by the hand…
So Samson’s executioner: not male, as he’d been convinced for absolutely no reason, but one of these ashen-faced, miserable women trying to explain themselves, failing to care for that baby and that little boy who couldn’t be much more than Charlie’s age…
Who was Charlie!
‘Charlie! What are you doing out here?’
‘Policeman, Daddy! I had his hat!’
In confusion, the policeman turned a suspicious face to Alun, ‘So is this your car, sir?’
‘What? No! I live here. That’s my son – we live in this house and I know the girl. The girl who was hit,’ he finished for the benefit of the women.
Charlie’s cold little hand was passed across to him without a word.
‘I didn’t see the accident, just heard it from the garden – then when I went out, there was Mel in the road…’
‘That’s fine, then. Perhaps you’d like to take your little boy inside and I’ll have a word with you when I’m sorted here?’
‘I think I’ll go back and see how she’s doing if it’s all the same to you. The vet’s…’ he looked at the seated woman, who looked away. ‘Well, the vet’s putting the horse down now. Mel might need someone.’
He regretted it as soon as the words were out. Of course he couldn’t take Charlie with him back around that corner, where Samson was dying – or dead, by now – was nothing more than a giant shocking carcass beneath the inadequate cover of a Barbour jacket. But as the policeman was about to argue the point an ambulance, its blue light flashing to the further delight of Charlie, finally arrived. Alun picked the boy up and made to edge past the Merc still half-blocking Carousel’s gateway. He should, he knew, offer to take the women and the whimpering baby with him but he clutched the boy hard against his own chest and, ‘Come on, Charlie, let’s go and get you warmed up,’ he said.
‘Samson’s dead,’ Charlie told Holly. ‘Who?’
Charlie was curled against her in the chair. Holly’s eyes quizzed Alun above the bright, splayed pages of Billy Penny’s Pig.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘I was going to tell you about it – when he’s gone up, though.’
‘Oh?’
‘Something – not good.’
‘Did Charlie see it?’
‘Yes, Mummy! Samson’s all dead,’ Charlie chipped in. ‘No. Tell you later… What’s that you two are reading? What’s the story, Charlie?’
Billy Penny was displayed on the cover astride his flying pig and the advantages of being the owner of a pig that could fly thoroughly enlarged upon. Strangely, although the book had been about the house for over a year and he knew the story by rote, so often had it been a bedtime request, only now did Alun notice the name of the book’s author: Don Kellett. When he’d been first employed by Durward’s as a new graduate in marketing, the company had been run by a Don Kells. Pushing seventy, Don remembered when Durward’s had been a real leather company – when it had owned tanneries out in Cheshire and Wales, stench-lapped horror stories of workplaces, cosying up to the friendly neighbourhood abattoirs, that were also no more. It was Don who’d insisted Alun accompany him to the last Durward tannery just before it closed…
…down a scabby little sideroad, it was. The inhabitants of a just-visible council estate had left along its length offerings of mattresses, gaping fridges and carpet offcuts: fair exchange for the miasma in which they lived. By the time Don nosed the car into the tannery yard, Alun believed the stink of anything could not be more intense – it was overwhelming his ability to choose words, to think even – but it could. Inside. Inside the tannery building the atmosphere was laden to a level of pungency that was intolerable – and yet men stood about in it, men came forward and joked with Don about sammying and perching in it. Men said, ‘All right?’ in it to him when he was introduced.
Don Kells: ‘Tanning, it’s got to be the oldest profession bar one, lad. We were at this before farming.’
Don Kells: ‘Nothing like leather, nothing else like it – it’ll keep the water out and yet let the vapour through. Seems like it’s dead but it still breathes.’
Don Kells: ‘How long will it last? How long? Well it lasted the beast a lifetime, eh?’
That tannery-stink was back in his nostrils now and on it had risen Don Kells.
The old man would probably be dead. But Alun found he was reluctant to ask Holly
though she’d know. Instead he said, ‘Isn’t that book a bit babyish for Charlie now? He seems to have had it for ages. Shouldn’t he be moving on?’
‘But we love Billy Penny, don’t we Charlie? Mummy loves Billy Penny. And we do wish we had a flying pig.’
‘Did you notice, it’s a bloke’s written it?’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Don Kellett. Reminded me of old Don Kells.’ Holly had no answer it seemed.
‘Anyway, what sort of life is that for a bloke, writing baby books?’
‘So what happened?’
‘Just like Charlie said, I’m afraid. The horse – it belongs to, you know… Mel Gethin? I told you about her. She’s the girl always stops and lets Charlie feed the horse?’ Alun lied, not even sure why he was lying as he did it. ‘Well ’bout lunchtime some bitch in a big Merc decides she’s turning into the lane and the fact that Mel and this bloody great horse are in the way doesn’t slow her down one bit.’
‘Christ! Where were you? Is the girl all right?’
‘I was gardening with Himself. I heard the crunch. I knew it was going to be bad so I popped him in front of Postman Pat and went out. There’s the girl in the road – broken arm, I think but really banged about as well. There’s this stupid bloody woman – more worried about the car than anything else by the looks of it. And of course there’s this mangled horse. It was obvious they’d have to shoot it – half its chest was hanging out, broken leg – but not dead, that’s the bummer.’
‘Oh, yuk! So what about the driver?’
‘What d’you mean? Police breathalysed her but she hadn’t been drinking. Just a naturally rubbish driver.’
‘Was she hurt?’
‘No. Who cares? I was more into trying to clear up her mess.’
A long pause during which Holly got to her feet and began tidying away Charlie’s bright detritus into the pine chest, kept in the corner of the sitting room for just that purpose: somewhere in the series of actions there seemed like a reproach.
‘You should have seen it! Mel lying in the road – for a moment I thought she must’ve had it. Then there’s this horse, foaming at the mouth – terrible pain it must have been in. Blood, etc. everywhere… Sorry, is this too much detail or something?’
‘No. I was listening.’ She swept the light fringe from her forehead in a familiar gesture of fatigue. ‘I’m glad Charlie… I wondered what he meant about the policeman. He was chattering on about a policeman all the time he was in the bath… I’m just glad that you managed to keep Charlie out of it.’
‘Well I did.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you could take him out tomorrow? For a trip somewhere, just to take his mind off anything he might have…’
‘But I’ve said, he didn’t. Anyway I thought you wanted the path done, before the winter?’
‘I do – of course, I do. It’s just one day, though. And it’s Wednesday – I’ll be late tomorrow. I’ve got that bloke from Bolton coming in. I told you. He’s had two shipments from Pakistan he can’t use. Full grain for tooling, you see, but what he’s getting isn’t taking up the water…’
Alun realised something in his face had caused her to tail off.
In the morning the lane outside Carousel seemed untouched by Tuesday’s commotion: a solitary bit of broken hawthorn straggled out over the lane. Then he noticed a series of scrapes on the tarmac – marks that disappeared around the corner along the track of the collapsing Samson – and ghoulishly found he must follow them. A magpie flapped up from the spot on the grass where the horse had dropped and died. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy,’ he said out loud, as though he had Charlie by the hand and with him, instead of back in the kitchen, wide-eyed at Pingu the Penguin, missing his aim with the fingers of toast.
Managing to thorn his hand, he pulled off the broken branch and threw it into the stubble-field across from the house. Briefly he considered getting out the hose and washing away the gobbets of brown blood on the grass; at the tap he saw the impracticality of the plan. No amount of garden hose was going to stretch from the back door of the garage, across the lawn, through the orchard and all the way out into Wrexham Road.
He was unwilling to touch the flagstones or barrow. The only alternative seemed to be to back the VW out with extra care although, today, there wasn’t a single other road user in either direction. The uncomplaining Charlie was soon bundled into the back and they were off – but where?
They’d visit Mel – of course, it was the obvious thing to do – it was a five minute drive in the direction of the town centre and The Old Rectory was unmissable in its own little close next to the church… but when he drew up outside the high brick wall and stared up at five sash windows, most of them with pulled blinds, he failed to switch off the engine, made no move to get out.
‘What you think, Charlie? D’you think Mel’s there? Or in hospital?’
‘Where?’ Charlie demanded.
‘In there. That’s where Mel lives. Is she there?’
‘Yes!’ Charlie shrieked.
‘I don’t know – I think they’ll have kept her in. Her fath… her daddy’s a doctor. They’ll have kept her in.’ Checking his mirror, letting an elderly woman cross in front of him and gain the pavement and checking again, he drove away. ‘Let’s go to Pendinas,’ he said, ‘feed the ducks, eh, Charlie?’
It involved a U-turn on an A-road. Bad start.
Opening and dutifully closing the green gate, he drove up through the trees and stopped beneath a sign that read DEEP COLD WATER – STAY WELL BACK FROM EDGE. They were on an area of hard standing right next to the reservoir where only fishermen parked but there were no fishermen today though the air was bright and crisp. It had been a ‘white-over’ again he realised but the landscape had relaxed now under a low Autumn sun. Alun was glad for the emptiness. No old men or the work-shy, glaring at Charlie’s high-pitched yells. The water was smooth enough to show the pattern of the far, wooded shore in its depths and a pair of swans paddled across submerged treetops. Small islands had poked up through the reservoir’s surface since their last visit and gave it now the look of a real lake, a more pleasing place than he recalled. Close in, a handful of mallards gathered into a convoy and made straight for them.
‘Bread for ducks,’ pleaded Charlie. ‘Quick, daddy, quick!’ Of course he had nothing to give the child.
‘Bread!’
‘I’m sorry. Daddy’s forgotten it. Nothing for ducks today.’ ‘Yes, Daddy! Bread. Now.’
Alun walked parallel to the stone edge of the water letting the boy follow. ‘Bread, Daddy, bread-daddy, bread-daddy’ lessened into low-level whinging – but when he made the mistake of turning around and offering his attention, Charlie seized a piece of fir tree from the path and lunged at the ducks who had been keeping pace. Once sure of being watched he threw the stick at the bobbing birds. They in turn levered their bodies half out of the water to avoid it and scattered. The missile landed harmlessly but Alun’s fury came up like a dark malodorous bubble.
‘Don’t you do that!’ He towered over the child. ‘Don’t you ever do that! How would you like it, if I threw a stick at you?’
Charlie’s eyes grew huge. Any second now the trembling lips would part, the wailing-in-earnest begin.
In one bit of his mind he saw the ridiculousness of it, shouting at the child like that. As a boy, he’d done much the same and worse… and he’d have been older than Charlie – old enough to remember, old enough to know better. Ridiculous. But he didn’t reach down for the sobbing child, just taking his hand for a sullen stroll along the path of the earth dam.
There’s the place, Charlie, look – look through there and you can watch the water running under the bridge! Look between the sleepers! There it goes. Oh, don’t then if you don’t want to see…
He watched a long, thin branch – bleached heartwood, white as an arm – waving beneath the surface, seeming to cling to its chosen position, before being swept
down from sight. In a few minutes more they were back at the car.
Charlie picked at his lunch and went red-eyed to his nap.
That afternoon Alun had a surprise visitor. He was wheeling the last flagstone along the side of the house when he heard the gate open. By the time he’d lowered the barrow a short, linen-suited man was approaching him, one hand held out, offering to shake. ‘Alun, is it?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I’m Cliff Gethin, Mel’s father.’
‘Oh, right.’ Clifford Gethin’s hand was small but the grip very firm. ‘Nice to meet you. I was going to call to ask how she was but I don’t have your number. I was going to walk down to the stables when my son gets up – to ask there. How is she?’
‘She’s… OK.’ Mel’s father might be slim and neat and looking at him out of Mel’s dark eyes but there the resemblance ran out. He was completely bald, sunburnt and with a patch of peeling in progress above tinted glasses; the impression was of someone stopping by on his drive back from the airport. ‘She’s better physically than mentally.’ Very much the doctor, that tone, clipped and professional and a place or two higher up the class league than his daughter’s soft local burr. ‘The arm was a clean break, the rest’s just lacerations. Head’s fine because I’ve always made sure she had a damn good hat on it. But the horse, you know?’ Alun nodded. ‘I gather from Peter it was grim?’
‘Shocking.’
‘Exactly. Anyway, she said you were a big help and to say thanks.’
‘It wasn’t anything. You shouldn’t have bothered coming over…’
‘No bother. I’m just on my way to the stables. Good old Samson! In death, as in life, he left me with bills to settle.’
Brittany had the wife run off to? Hardly seemed far enough.
‘I was beginning to think you’d run off as well,’ he challenged Holly. It was nearly nine, freezing and black outside. The as well went unnoticed.
‘I rang. Had to take it easy – there’s fog between here and Chester… black ice.’
