Jim was not happy though. He said, “I see you’re using both hands.” He was worried, in part, and almost resentful.
“Ami?”
“Yes.”
Ronny looked down at his fingers, grinning. “Jim,” he said, “we should both eat something.”
“I’m not hungry.” Jim was petulant.
“Even so,” Ronny brushed this off, “let’s go indoors. Can I give you a hand?”
Before he could answer, Ronny had slung Jim’s left arm over his shoulder, then put his own right arm around Jim’s back, supporting him, firmly, under his armpit. Jim didn’t resist. In fact he buckled. He gave way. He caved in. He felt like Jesus, brought down from the cross. Strung out. Aching. Woozy and all fuzzed up. It was a beautiful feeling.
♦
Connie found herself thinking the most inappropriate thoughts, and she wanted to stop herself, but she seemed to have no control over what it was that entered her brain, what she could digest and what she could encompass. One second she was thinking Fuckl The next, Father! Then, and stupidest of all, Cauliflower!
Her hands smelled of cauliflower. There was a basket of them on the kitchen table. Yellow ones. She’d touched them on first entering the house and now her hands stank of them. Her fingers were covering both her nose and her mouth. Only this simple, fleshy restraint stopped her from screaming.
It was just panic. Panic. Her letters were gone. And suddenly, in the midst of all her breathlessness and shuddering and fury, she found herself thinking about a conversation she’d had the previous night with Sara, over dinner, concerning, of all subjects, the common hare. The common hare? Yes. Hares don’t dig burrows, like rabbits do, Sara had said. No. They were altogether a different kind of creature.
Hares remained above ground, chiefly, and when they produced young, they dotted them, individually, over fairly wide sections of terrain, in little solo nests, so that if one baby hare was discovered by a predator and killed, the others would have a much greater chance of survival.
I should have learned from the hare, Connie kept thinking. I should have been cautious. I should have been canny. But I was spoiled and dumb. I left myself wide open.
And now it was too late to regret anything. The letters were gone. They were gone. They were gone. And nobody was home for Connie to take her rage out on. Not Lily, not Sara. So she walked around the house, befuddled. She kept returning to her room, unpacking her case on to the bed, then packing it up again and fastening the buckles, the clasps, like she was intending to leave, straight away, climb into her car and go.
On her third unpacking she noticed the cheque. And her purse, and her car keys. She was disgusted at herself. She’d been so fractured and irresponsible and vague. There really was no excusing it. She took a deep breath. Now what? And who? And why?
She barged into Lily’s room. The bed, on top of it, under it. The dresser. The chest of drawers. Underwear, T-shirts, socks, a rabbit pelt, little skulls, feathers, a lipstick, a knife. Her bookshelf. On the shelf? Between the books? Inside them? Nothing, nothing, nothing.
She went downstairs and sat on a small milking stool stationed between the front door and the phone. She struggled to control her breathing. When the phone rang she pounced on it.
“Hello?”
“Hi. It’s me. I’m going to be late back. Tell Mum, will you?”
Lily’s voice. Utterly unrepentant.
Connie exploded.
“You stole my letters, didn’t you? I want them back, Lily. I want them right back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lily sounded sincerely confounded.
“It’s theft!” Connie was almost yelling, virtually hysterical. “And they were my father’s letters. They were his letters. They were his.”
“You’re weird. Go fuck yourself.”
Dialling tone.
“Whose letters?”
Connie looked up, startled. Sara was standing in the doorway. She looked pale and her hair was scuffed up wildly, like two rooks fighting over her moon of a face. She turned and slammed the door behind her. There was grass stuck in the knit of her jumper.
Connie still held the receiver in her hand. For some reason she felt guilty. She placed it down, gently, as though it were a string of pearls she’d just considered stealing. “Uh…,” she cleared her throat, “that was Lily. She said she’d be late home…”
“Good,” Sara smiled, somewhat lopsidedly, then she frowned, “or is it good?”
Her speech was slurred. She looked around her, beetle-browed and scowling, then located the light switch on the wall and flicked it up. The hallway was suddenly brightly illuminated. She blinked. “It wasn’t dark yet, was it?” she asked bemusedly, then bent down and peered through the letterbox.
“It’s probably just rain clouds,” Connie said, standing, “making everything seem grey.”
Sara straightened up and then slouched against the wall, letting her one shoulder support her body weight. “You smell of straw,” Connie muttered, trying vainly to establish herself again.
Sara nodded. “Hops. Beer and teacakes. Yeast. I’m allergic so my body tries really hard at first to expel it. I break out in a sweat and then end up stinking like a bale of hay.”
“You’ve been drinking?” Connie asked.
“Stay there,” Sara mumbled, distractedly, not answering Connie’s enquiry, “and don’t move.”
She pushed herself away from the wall and staggered off into the sitting room. She was gone for several minutes. Connie remained where she was, somewhat perplexed, until Sara re-emerged clutching a shotgun and a fistful of bullets. She propped herself up against the door frame while she laboriously loaded one into the other.
Connie watched, impassively. Sara kept the gun pointed at the floor.
“Safety precaution,” she muttered, half to herself.
Connie didn’t like the gun. “What’s this all about?” she asked, and her voice sounded strangely little.
Sara looked up. “Have you been out there lately?” she whispered, inclining her head towards the front door.
“Out where?”
“Out there.”
“Of course. Earlier.”
“And you didn’t notice anything?”
“No. Nothing in particular.”
Sara rubbed her fist against her forehead. “The thing is,” she said, her voice growing louder again, “I was seeing stuff too clearly. I was all smug and contented and hopeful. I mean this morning. Last night. Then everything went downhill, slightly, and I suddenly felt like I didn’t really want to see things clearly any more. So I went to the pub and had a few drinks. Self-pity. But it didn’t work. It never does…”
She inspected the gun. “Uh…” she sniffed.
“So what did you see,” Connie prompted, eventually, “outside?”
She was hoping for clues to her own small mystery, but stupidly.
Sara closed her eyes and spoke slowly. “On the road,” she said quietly, “close to the electric fence. A thing in the road. A little, dark thing…” She shuddered. She opened her eyes again. “Then I blinked and it was gone. But everything was so quiet, suddenly. No sounds. The hen coop was right close to where I was standing. And I’m so familiar with their chatter. But there was none. No chatter. So I went to the hens. I have hens…” she lost her drift and then found it again, “in a pen. That rhymes. And they were all dead. Ten hens. All dead. None were missing. No sign of a forced entry or a struggle. No feathers. But blood. Dark. A little river of it. Like a strange…a very ugly…like a kind of silent rebuke.”
Sara shook her head, rapidly, as though she had water in her ears and longed to expel it. “Afterwards I ran back towards the boar enclosures in a sort of panic. And the fence was down. And the electric wire too, inside it…”
She shuddered. “Oh God! The fence was down. It was down!”
Connie struggled not to be infected by Sara’s mood. “But you knew that already,” she said gently, “didn’t you? You went
out to get wire to fix it only yesterday.”
“Nope.” Sara shook her head. “That’s the whole point. I was with Luke yesterday. You saw me there. You did see me?”
“Yes.”
“And there was actually nothing wrong with the fence. I lied.”
Sara finished loading the gun. She took a deep breath. “The big male’s gone,” she said calmly. “He’ll probably be nearby, and he’s dangerous. So we’ll need this.” She held up the firearm.
“What will you do?”
“I’ll find him. I’ll shoot him. He couldn’t get back into the enclosure now even if he wanted to. I’ve had to put the electric wire back up again to stop the rest of them from scarpering.”
“Shall I come with you?”
“Yes. Once we’ve rung the police.”
Connie felt a moment’s unease. “The police?”
“They’ll need to contact the locals and warn them…”
Connie’s mind turned to Jim and to Ronny.
“But he can’t have gone all that far yet, can he?”
“No,” Sara hesitated, “you’re right. When they get out they just tend to panic. They’re actually very homely. Unless…” she paused, “unless he thinks he smells a female in the vicinity, or if he gets a whiff of what he takes to be a rival male…”
Sara walked to the front door and pulled it open. “You’ve got a point though,” she ruminated, “this whole mess does make me look like a total incompetent.”
“An hour,” Connie murmured, “we could give it an hour.”
Sara rolled her shoulders back. “But we’d have to prioritize. We’d need to take some positive action before dark.”
Connie peered over Sara’s shoulder, bleakly. The sky was huge and it was already darkening.
“Was it him, then?” she asked softly. “Who?”
“Was it him that killed the hens, him on the road?” Sara smiled, rubbing the palm of her hand against the butt of her gun with a weirdly regretful luxuriousness. “No,” she said finally. “No. It wasn’t him.”
∨ Wide Open ∧
Thirty-Six
Luke was pacing. He had a sheet of negatives in his hand which he kept holding up to the electric light on the living room ceiling and inspecting. He could see, uh, Sara’s arse, her elbow, but small and blotchy and muted. Even so, quite well taken. Encapsulated. He threw himself down on to the sofa.
“A real pornographer.”
He spoke out loud, too loudly, like an old-fashioned headmaster during school assembly. What did it mean? She’d said it like she approved of it. Well, almost. What did she mean? His fingers were twitching. He wanted a smoke. A drink. Old vices.
Total commitment? Fucked but not intimate? Lost?
Luke stared disconsolately, squinting slightly, at the small, dark negative of Sara’s favourite cup and its saucer. Isn’t this the same thing? he asked himself; exactly the same thing, in fact, as the dreaded dot-to-dots? Isn’t the single most significant element in this image the very one which is absent?
In the first instance, sex, plain and simple. In the second – here, with the cup and its saucer – it was the lips that drank, the hand that held. It was Sara. Missing. The whole. And if she really did, truly consider this image to contain, in some crazy way, a significant part of herself, then she was simply deluded.
I long to see the lips, Luke thought, and the tongue and the mouth and the throat and the tits, in the same way that I long to see the people in the dot-to-dots just fucking. Not merely numbers on the page waiting to be joined in a rough approximation. I want everything clear and clean and open. Not just bits and pieces. Is that wrong of me?
A real pornographer. What did it mean? All surface? Nothing under? Was that truly anything to be so ashamed of?
I have a big heart, Luke decided, and a small imagination. But women craved an imagination. They needed one. They wanted pretence and pseudo and phoney and rubbish. Women were after Polyfilla. They didn’t want the real thing, the solid wall, non-porous. They didn’t want your average fella. Not really.
I need a fag, Luke thought. I’m alive, for God’s sake. I’m all here and all now and all ready and all able. I’m alive! He walked to the door and threw it open. The sea, the sea. Grey and brown. It would rain soon. It was bleak out, bleaker, if possible, than it had ever seemed before.
What a view. Luke grimaced. What a bloody landscape! And then, straight after, Screw the landscape, I want more. He needed a smoke.
♦
Nathan tried to contact Margery at work, but she couldn’t be located so he decided, on a spur, since this was practically an emergency, to write her a note, stick it through her door and then borrow her car without asking. He possessed his own set of keys. It would be fine. Even so, he dwelled carefully over the note’s wording. But Lily was loitering. She was obtrusive. She kept butting in. She was dripping and mopping, in his small kitchen, while simultaneously preparing herself a sandwich. With endearing gusto she hunted down the various components in cupboard and drawer and fridge.
♦
Margery,
I’ve borrowed the car. An old friend turned up…
♦
“Where’s the bin? Is it hidden?”
“Pardon?”
“I need the bin.”
“There’s a kind of bag, in the cupboard, under the sink.”
“Oh. Right. Thanks.”
♦
and I wanted…
He crossed this bit out.
and he needed to get to…
Lily peered over Nathan’s shoulder while sipping on a glass of milk. He saw two dark drops of blood splash into its whiteness and then a brief, pale halo of strawberry appear in their wake.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a note. I’m borrowing someone’s car.”
“Well you’d better get a wriggle on or we’ll hit the rush hour.”
A wriggle? Nathan tried not to smile.
New piece of paper.
♦
Dear Margery,
I needed to borrow the car. It’s not a real crisis or anything.
Nathan.
♦
He folded the note in half. Lily was now devouring a honey sandwich.
“It was the runny stuff,” she said, “but all crystallized. I had to chip away at it. You should’ve chucked it out already.”
“I will.”
He moved the junk off the top of the box, piling it on to the floor close by. Then he bent over to pick it up, but Lily interrupted him.
“Let me,” she said, passing him her sandwich and squatting down to grab it herself.
“You’ll have to lug it a fair old distance,” Nathan observed, watching her strain at the unexpected weight of it.
“I’m great,” Lily managed, releasing a small milk and honey burp which sweetened the air in her immediate vicinity. Nathan carefully placed the rest of her sandwich into his shirt pocket and then felt around for his keys. He took nothing else with him except his art book, which he tucked under his right arm with as much gentle care as if it had been a precious but rather wriggly little pup.
♦
“What’s got into him?”
Luke spoke under his breath to Jim who was back at his old post on the sofa. He’d been sitting there for a while, all heavy and crushed up inside, struggling to remain upright.
“I don’t know. I think he’s just cheerful.”
But there was more to it than that. Jim knew. It wasn’t real cheer, but an approximation. It was an intricate emotion composed out of equivalent substances.
“Cheerful?” Luke scratched his breast.
Ronny was whistling tunelessly in the kitchen and clattering.
“What a strange man.”
Jim smiled quietly. Luke stared. “You look different.”
“Do I?”
“Bigger.”
Jim paused. “Can I do anything for you?”
Luke seemed sheepish. “I need a
cigarette.”
Jim shook his head. “Not a good idea.”
“Yes. I know. But I want one anyway.”
Luke slapped a rhythmical tattoo of expectant impatience out on to his wide belly. Jim watched, hypnotized by the sight of his brown skin juddering.
“Unfortunately,” Jim hesitated, feeling his smooth cheek with his right hand, “I threw them away.”
Luke stopped his tattoo. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. I thought it would be the best way of stopping you if your will collapsed.”
Luke tried to digest this information, nodding slowly. Jim half-expected him to charge off, to leap into his car and make a dash for civilization. But no. Instead he threw himself down on to the sofa.
“Of all my vices,” Luke declamed expansively, “I consider women my worst. Cigarettes come second. Then food. Then booze.”
Jim said nothing. Luke shifted. He reached down and removed Ronny’s cardigan from under him.
“My car’s still over at Sara’s farm, otherwise I’d be off in a flash to buy some. Hey!” He rubbed his thigh. “Something just poked into me.”
Luke turned the cardigan around by its neck. Protruding from the left pocket was the silver tip of a knife.
“Dear Lordy.”
He plucked the knife from the pocket. As he removed it, something else fell out too; a plastic sheet of tablets. The knife had a large non-retractable blade. It looked big, even inside his sizeable palm. Luke whistled. “Is this thing yours?”
Jim bent down to retrieve the tablets. He slid the half-empty packet into his pocket. Luke was still inspecting the knife. He hadn’t noticed.
“It’s not mine. It must be Ronny’s.” Jim’s skin prickled at the sight of the blade. “I don’t like knives.”
“That’s a proper hunting knife.”
“Yes.”
Luke continued to handle the knife. It seemed to be giving him pleasure. Eventually he said, “So what shall I do with it?”
Jim held out his right hand. “Give it here. I’ll put it somewhere safe.”
He took the knife and placed it underneath the sofa. Luke was still holding the cardigan. He gave it a further shake.
“What’s this?” He removed a letter from the other pocket.
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