Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke

by Peter Benson

  “Of course…” And he said he’d parked in a lay-by and strolled down to where he’d seen the stranger in the trees. He had a story ready. Spike always has a story ready, and if anyone wanted to know what he was doing he was going to say something about a couple of ewes escaping from his boss’s field and ask, “Have you seen ’em? I saw them heading this way.”

  So he went into the trees, found the path the stranger had followed and walked for half a mile. He crossed a small stone bridge over a stream and came to a fork in the path. One way climbed towards a distant house, the other dropped further into the woods. “It was weird down there,” he said. “I didn’t hear any birds, no wind, no nothing. It was as quiet as the grave, you know. All I could hear was my breathing and my footsteps. The path got narrower and narrower. It looked like it was a secret, but still it was used a lot. I was just starting to think that I should turn around and go back when I heard something.”

  “What?”

  Spike put a finger to his lips and lowered his voice. “I crouched down and looked down the path. It finished in a clearing. The bloke I’d seen the day before was there, standing in front of a hoop house.”

  “A hoop house? Like a plastic greenhouse?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s he doing with a hoop house?”

  “Fuck knows,” said Spike, “but that’s what we’ve got to find out. He dived inside and I came back. I don’t know. I didn’t want to hang around on my own. He looked like he could be a bit useful.”

  “A bit useful?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And we’ve got to find out?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…”

  “We’ve got to find out what some ape is doing in a hoop house in the middle of the woods…”

  “I never said he was an ape.”

  “But you said he was useful.”

  “I can handle useful…”

  There’s no point in arguing with Spike when he’s in one of these moods. It’s best to let him go with it, so I sat back and listened while he told me that we were going to find out exactly what some bloke was doing in a hoop house in the middle of the woods.

  “We?”

  “You owe me, El.”

  This was true. Earlier in the year we’d been drinking in Wellington, and I’d told someone in the pub that he was talking crap about the beer I was drinking. He said it tasted like piss, and I said the thing about crap. Sometimes I do speak my mind, but Spike lets his fists speak his mind, which is, when it’s not planning some madness, usually idling in neutral. When the someone said, “You want to say that again?” I said, “OK,” and did. Spike was the other side of the bar, but he can sense trouble even if it’s taking a day off in Minehead. “You OK?” he said, suddenly next to me with an empty glass in one hand and the other in his pocket. He looked very relaxed.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “This your mate?” he said, and the bloke who thought my beer was piss took a step back.

  “We were just talking about beer…” I said.

  “And you can’t fight your own corner?” said the bloke.

  “Did you say fight?” said Spike, and before I could stop him he’d spun the bloke around and was pushing him towards the door. I didn’t see what happened next, but by the time I was outside the bloke was lying on the floor and Spike was rubbing his fist. “Want another?” he said.

  The bloke shook his head.

  “I’m ready.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Forget it?”

  “Yeah.”

  This wasn’t the only time Spike had stepped in for me. There was the time at Appley Fair when someone said I was looking at his woman, and the time someone’s sister asked me if I liked parsnips and I said I hated them. If you asked me why he does it I suppose I’d have to say that we make some sort of partnership, like in a film about opposites walking across a desert to find hidden treasure. He’s the bloke who never quite gets it, and I’m the one who thinks before he does anything. He goes, I wait. He tells, I ask. He grinds his teeth, I brush mine. I ride a Honda 250, which is half-bike, half-horse. He drives a van with a loud tape deck and a steering wheel the size of a small dish. He meets girls, spends a weekend or two with them, tells them that he’s bored and finds another. I look at girls and wonder if I can open my mouth before I start dribbling. When I look at him I’m pleased he’s my mate and we’ve managed to get this far together.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “when I look at you I wonder if you’ve got any balls at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I fucking mean.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “And I was thinking…”

  “Thinking what?”

  “When do you want to do this?”

  “Do what?”

  “You know what. Find out what that bloke’s up to.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Tonight,” he said. “I’m going up there tonight.”

  “Tonight?” I said, and as the word dropped, I heard a distant croak, the call of a single raven. The big bird, the black bird, the one my mother tells me to watch for. He used to have white feathers, but he stole the sun, and that’s why his feathers are black. And when he flies he leaves scars in the clouds. “Beware,” I whispered. “Be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “The raven.”

  “You fucking weirdo,” said Spike, and then, “you coming or you going to be a chicken for the rest of your life?”

  “OK,” I said, “but let’s be careful.”

  “Aren’t I always?”

  I said nothing.

  ‌2

  The summer had been mad. It had been like a badger caught in a tarred barrel, fed on chilli and forced to listen to chanting monks. Later, when the records were examined and weathermen met to drink glasses of lemonade and talk about their business, they would say that 1976 had been Britain’s longest, hottest summer ever. And they meant it. Day after day after day the sun shone in deep blue skies and baked the land dry. It was hot before it rose, and when it rose it laughed at the country. On the moors and heaths, fires broke out and frightened animals from their holes. Trees were burnt to sticks, lakes dried, bushes exploded, crops failed. In other places tarmac melted and birds failed in their flight. Hosepipes were banned, stand-pipes were used, wells and springs dried up. Politicians told us to share bath water. Ashbrittle wheezed and sweated, and in the middle of the day, dogs collapsed in the road and refused to move. The green browned and yellowed, and flowers withered. Cows lay in the shade of trees, horses panted, fish died and floated in rivers that turned to drains. Every day people would stand in their gardens and stare at their parched vegetables and search the sky for rain. Sometimes a single cloud would appear and float slowly over the village, but it was always a single cloud, white and fluffy – and nothing. And as it disappeared over the horizon, the people would shake their heads and go back inside and do whatever they had to do.

  One day I was out walking and found a dead rabbit in a field below the church. I don’t know why it had died, but there it was, dried to a crisp beneath a tree, flat as a postcard, lying in the cover of the exposed roots. I picked it up and held it in front of me. It didn’t bend and it didn’t smell, and I thought about taking it home and propping it against the wall outside the kitchen. There was a hole where one of its eyes had been, and its mouth had contorted into a manic grin. It would have confused the cat, so I didn’t take it home, but the thought was there, a dry thought that walked with the weather and sun.

  The days boiled, and at night the heat thickened and dripped. People lay naked under single sheets, windows open, curtains open. Sleep came in fits, and the dreams that followed the fits were filled with water and cool winds. Mr Evans’s caravan, my caravan, was hotter than a threat, and when I went to bed sweat crawled over my skin. It dribbled and gnashed and left its marks in my creases, and whispered fumes in
my ear. The walls and roof of the van squeaked and groaned, exhausted flies buzzed and banged against the windows, mosquitoes whined and bit.

  When Spike and I left the pub, we stood in the heat of the evening and wondered if the weather would ever change. I said that I thought it had stuck and we were stuck with it, and there was nothing we could do. Spike said I was talking bollocks. I told him that my bollocks was no more bollocks than his bollocks, and we arranged to meet at half-nine in the lay-by under Heniton Hill.

  I rode up to see Mum and Dad, taking the right at Appley school and into the wooded valley at Tracebridge. In the old days, a witch used to live in a wattle hut by the river bridge at Tracebridge and demand payment from passing travellers. She’d curse and rave and shake her clawed fists, and if they didn’t give her a coin they’d never get up the hill. Their legs would seize and their eyes would tear, or their horses would stop and refuse to go any further, or a wheel would fall off their cart, roll over the bridge and fall into the river. When she was bored and there were no passing travellers, she’d turn herself into a weasel and steal chickens from farms. Old and cruel and vindictive, she’d eat the chicken raw and hang its sucked bones around her neck. The witch is dead now, and her hut was burnt to the ground by relieved carters, but there’s the sense of something by the bridge, a waiting malevolence in the air that stops dogs and freezes rabbits. I rode by with my head down, didn’t glance in the direction of the place where the hut used to stand, accelerated for the long drag up the hill to Ashbrittle, and sat back on the bike when I reached the top.

  Mum was ironing shirts and Dad was dribbling washing-up water onto the lettuce in the garden. I stood at the front-room window and looked out. A hippy was standing on the green, her head tipped back, staring at the sky. She was wearing a spotted scarf on her head, baggy shorts, a tiny T-shirt and sandals. The hippies lived in the Pump Court cottages by the bakery. I call them hippies because everyone else does, but that’s the only reason. They could have been called something else, but they weren’t. I suppose it helps to give people names and put them in groups; it means you can feel safe and know where you and they stand. Sometimes Spike and I would go up and stand behind the hedge and watch them, but we never saw them do anything very interesting. They never took all their clothes off and rolled in mud. They never sat in circles and played guitars. They never walked out in the middle of the night and sang to the stars, and they never had crazed parties that lasted all night. They were quiet people and although we wished they would do shocking things they never did, so Spike and I would go and find something else to watch or do. Not that there’s a lot of something else to do in Ashbrittle. A vicar closed all the pubs down years ago, there’s no shop and no bus stop. There is a phone box, and anyone can spend half an hour in there, or you can read the notices for things on the noticeboard outside the village hall. These things are usually to do with coffee mornings or jumble sales or the mobile library, and although the village is famous for a few things, you never see them mentioned on the noticeboard.

  One thing Ashbrittle is famous for is the yew in the churchyard. The tree grows from a small burial mound, and some people say it’s the oldest living thing in the country. It was a thousand years old when Jesus was born, and it’s collected more memories and ideas than any living thing on earth. It’s broad and green and split, and its trunks are cracked. It’s been home to millions of insects and birds and squirrels, and the patch of ground beneath its branches is pale and soft. I know old men who bow to the yew, and women who touch the hems of their skirts as they pass. The old traditions might be dying and the old memories fade, but that’s all they do. They still echo in the air, like the ghosts of flags.

  Another thing the village is remembered for is the story of Professor Hunt and his skin experiments with a woman he kidnapped and kept in a run-down farmhouse beyond Marcombe Lake. The house is a ruin now, but the place has a haunted air to it, and when we were kids we’d dare each other to go down there and spend an hour alone in the shade of the broken walls. We imagined that they sighed and moaned at our passing, and held secrets we couldn’t even imagine. And when we were kids, imagination was fruit to us, sweet and juicy and ripe.

  If you haven’t heard of the yew or Professor Hunt, you might have heard of Lord Buff-Orpington. His family used to own almost all the houses in the village and most of the land, and although the estate has now been reduced to a few fields and Belmont Hall, older people still doff their hats to him and stand back to let him pass. I don’t know how old he is, maybe eighty, but he doesn’t look it, and he never acts the lord. There are rumours about him, rumours that he is a man of few morals and has even committed murder, but I don’t know if I believe them. Rumours are just that, and he’s always seemed OK to me. I’ve spoken to him a few times, and he always says hello first, asks if my work is going well and tells me to give his best to Mum and Dad. I don’t suppose it’s his fault that he’s a lord, and I think he’s always done his best for the village, but maybe he hasn’t. I don’t know. I can’t tell. That’s not my job.

  He once wrote a memoir, the story of his life and the story of his family. He called it a confession, and it was a best-selling book, a book of history, love, troubles and family, and when Mum borrowed it from the travelling library she finished it quickly and let me read it before she took it back. It was divided into chapters that didn’t appear to be related to each other, and these were given titles like ‘Gardeners’ ‘The Fondue’ and ‘The Village Fête’. There was a chapter entitled ‘Mother’ that stuck in my mind, and although it was tragic, it made me laugh. I suppose that might be one of the secrets of good writing; make sure it swings like a pendulum in a storm. So this chapter started like this:

  My mother, Lady Patricia Buff-Orpington, was born a Stafford-Heinz. Her father was a personal friend of Edward Elgar, and believed she had made a good match, but her mother threatened to shoot my father with her cousin’s revolver because he wasn’t from Worcestershire. My one regret is that I never met my maternal grandmother. She was killed in a freak heron-baiting incident five weeks before my birth, but if I’d had the pleasure, my pleasure would have been to stick a fork in her ear. By all accounts she was an objectionable snob of a woman, and deserved to die impaled on the beak of an angered ardea cinerea.

  So the mother the devil, the daughter the angel. My mother was a saint, a courtesan of the soul, the sort of person who made lover’s lane safe for lovers. I keep her picture by my bed, and when I look at it, this is what I see: she is sitting on a gilt chair beside my father. He is standing with his right hand tucked into his waistcoat and, although he cuts a handsome and distinguished figure, he’s a shadow beside her. The photograph was taken in 1932, and she stares with sharp lips and an intelligence that left half her suitors gibbering. The rest simply gave up, apart from Father, who was made of sterner stuff. He would not be put off. He determined to marry the most beautiful woman he had ever met, and after two and a half years of intense pursuit that involved both sidling and the use of landaus, he won her.

  There was a time when I thought I could go to university and become the sort of person who could write like this and talk about stuff on the radio, and although the time didn’t last long, it was real enough. The idea was born from reading National Geographic magazines, Haynes car manuals, atlases, bird-watching manuals, Grace’s cook books and novels from the travelling library. And when I read Lord Buff-Orpington’s memoir, I was inspired. Inspired to be more than who I was born to be, inspired to see the world, inspired to get my own place. I just never thought it would be a caravan in a farmyard.

  I think Mum was sad I’d moved out, and said she couldn’t believe a caravan in a farmyard would be more comfortable than my own room. And she said, “I smelt fire in the air this morning, but no one was burning anything.” She rubbed her eyes. “Be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “I couldn’t tell. But you know what smelling fire means.”

  “Of course,” I
said. In her world it means trouble, madness or danger. “And I’m always careful.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes Mum.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it,” and she kissed me and ruffled my hair and went back to her cooking. I went to sit on the wall and watch Dad work, and he said that he didn’t think the weather was going to break soon, and the way the birds were behaving told him they were in for a hungry autumn and a long winter. They weren’t singing as loudly as they usually did, and they weren’t flying as madly. He asked me if I was staying for tea, but I said I had to go back to the farm.

  “Everything going OK down there?”

  “Yes thanks.”

  “Evans treating you all right?”

  “Yes. He’s a good bloke. Doesn’t say a lot, but then I don’t suppose he has to.”

  “Good,” he said, and after I’d watched him for a little longer I headed off to meet Spike. I waited for ten minutes, and when he turned up he parked the van in the verge, said, “Ready?” and we headed into the trees.

  The path was exactly as he’d described it and, when we reached the bridge and the stream, he stopped and cocked his head at the sky. Nothing rustled, the wind was warm and still, the water tinkled like coins in a pocket. I stood behind him, listening to my breathing.

  “This way…” and we headed down, further into the woods. The path was narrow, but well used. Here and there, branches had been sawn off and thrown into the undergrowth. In the old days, when Spike and I were at school, we used to go on adventures all the time, exploring derelict houses and old barns, building dens out of branches and moss, and finding new ways to make weapons out of sticks and feathers. “Remember the time…” I started to say, but he stopped suddenly, put a finger to his lips and pointed through the trees. Twenty-five yards away, I could see the edge of a hoop house. “There,” he said, and we crouched down and waited. We waited and listened. A distant barking dog, another dog answering the first, the first answering the second. After five minutes, he stood up and beckoned me to follow. We placed our feet carefully, watched for dry sticks and crackling leaves and squeaky mice. When we reached the clearing, we scurried down the side of the hoop house to the far end, and waited again.