Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke

by Peter Benson

  “Maybe.”

  Brown leant towards me. He rubbed his eyes, but it didn’t make them any better. He smelt of coffee and cigarettes and damp wool. “Elliot, Elliot. Maybe… maybe not. Definitely, definitely not. You need to tell me the truth.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “So are we.”

  “Would you like a coffee?” said Pollock. I wasn’t sure if he meant it, but I said, “Yes please.”

  “Sugar?”

  “One big one.”

  “Coming up…”

  Brown leant forwards and said, “Interview suspended 11:16, 17th August 1976,” and clicked the tape recorder off. Pollock came back with the coffee, put it on the table and said, “Smoke?” I shook my head. “Mind if we do?” I shook my head again, and for the next ten minutes we sat in silence in a growing cloud of smoke, and I felt the world lighten and haze and fade. A buzzing started in my ears, and my eyes watered. When they finished their cigarettes and turned the recorder on again, I was swimming in a world of half-remembered stuff that swirled between the first site of the plants in the hoop house, the sound of the dead man’s voice, the sight of the dead man’s eyes, the hanging plants in the garage, the hanging man in the wood, the creak of the rope, the sleeping cows, my sleeping eyes, the smell of my caravan, the hippies in the pub, Mr Evans in his vest. “Elliot?”

  “Elliot?”

  “Elliot?”

  I snapped back. “Sorry. I was gone.”

  “Interview resumed 11:31, 17th August 1976,” said Brown.

  “All you have to do is tell us the truth and you’ll be gone,” said Pollock, and for a moment his smile slipped and I saw his teeth. They were small and polished-white, like mints.

  “I have,” I said.

  “But you maybe saw the victim in the pub. Which pub?”

  “The Globe. The Globe in Appley.”

  “And was he with anyone?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Try to.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Try!” The smile was gone now. He leant forwards and Brown leant forwards and I didn’t feel like drinking my coffee.

  “I think he was with a man in a suit.”

  “A man in a suit? Anything else?”

  “He was bald.”

  “A bald man in a suit…”

  “Yes. He was small…”

  “A small bald man in a suit.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well that narrows it down. What were they talking about?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”

  “Anyone else with them?”

  “No,” I said, and I slumped forwards until my head was touching the table.

  “OK. OK.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Of course you are. Maybe we’ll let you go home and get some sleep, Elliot, but we’ll need to speak to you again,” and now they stood up, and Pollock went to the door while Brown said something into the tape recorder and I stood up and felt my legs wobble like fuck in a breeze. “Thanks,” I said.

  “No, thank you,” said Pollock, and now the smile was back and he reached out and touched me on the shoulder. “Next time we see you, try and remember everything. OK?”

  “OK,” I said, and Brown opened the door and they showed me to the front desk. “We’ll get someone to drive you home,” said Pollock. “Wait over there,” and he pointed to a chair. I sat down. I did as I was told. I waited. And as I waited, I dozed. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Who knows how many minutes? Then I felt someone shaking my shoulder.

  “Mr Jackson?”

  I sat up. A policewoman was looking down at me.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m your lift.”

  “Oh. Thanks,” I said, and I followed her out of the station.

  “Over here,” she said, and as we crossed the car park, I stopped as a white car passed in front of us. It slowed, parked in a corner, and a moment later two men got out. The driver was in uniform, the passenger was not. The driver took his hat off. The passenger wasn’t wearing a hat. The driver had brown hair. The passenger was bald, completely bald, and had blue eyes and thin lips. He looked comfortable in the car park, but he wasn’t smiling. If he could have smoked from the top of his head he would have. His face was a picture of fury, as if a storm was raging beneath his skin and in his mouth and behind his eyes and ringing in his ears. He had a policeman’s badge clipped to the top pocket of his suit jacket, and as he walked to the station someone in a uniform said, “Morning, sir,” to him. He growled something, shook his head and looked at me. We snagged for a moment. His pale eyes narrowed, and I saw demons in them, real demons with their own red eyes and twitching tails and snorting nostrils, and I heard them flail and yell. The mad twitch flicked the corner of his mouth, another twitch caught his arms, and then the brown-haired man opened the door for him, and he was gone.

  ‌9

  On the way back to the farm, I felt the first twang of panic, like I had strings in my stomach and something was playing a bad tune on them – a tune that made no sense or music, a frightening tune that would have dogs running for cover. For a second I thought about telling the driver to turn around and take me back to the station, but I stopped myself. She was a happy woman, proud of her uniform and her car and her work, and all she wanted to do was talk about the weather. All I wanted to do was sit in silence and think about what I could do. The bald man’s face, the way his lips twitched and his fingers fidgeted, and the threat in his eyes. I didn’t know if he knew who I was or why I was there or what I knew, but I thought his demons would tell him. They knew. They had all the knowledge he needed, and he would listen to them.

  “When’s the weather going to break?”

  I shook my head.

  “It must be bad for you farmers.”

  I nodded.

  “How’s the hosepipe ban affect you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s difficult.”

  “I bet it is.”

  When we got to Stawley I asked her to drop me at the bottom of the track and I walked the rest of the way to the farm. I walked slowly, picking my way carefully over the stones and ruts, and when I got back I found Mr Evans in the hay barn. He climbed down from the bales, slapped his hands together and said, “Sorry I didn’t believe you lad. That must have been a shock.”

  “It’s OK,” I said.

  “What did the police say?”

  “They asked me questions. Too many questions. They didn’t stop. Gave me a headache.”

  “They know who it was?”

  “I think so.”

  “Or who did it?”

  I shrugged. “You been down there?” I nodded towards the woods and the river valley.

  “They told me to keep away for a couple of days. I think they’ve got more investigating to do.”

  “I suppose they have.”

  “You look like you need some sleep.”

  “I do.”

  “Get all you need. I’ll do the milking later.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You need anything? Tea bags? A sandwich?”

  I shook my head. “I think I’ve got everything,” I said, and I went to the caravan. I stood in the doorway and felt the heat, poured myself a glass of water, drank, lay down, closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I don’t know how long I waited for it to come, but when it did I think I slept long and hard, and when I woke up I’d been out for six hours. When I opened my eyes I had one of those moments when you’re disconnected from life, surroundings, feelings, memories and thought. Everything came back in a flash, and I sat up with a jolt. And the first thing I thought of was the bald man with the pale eyes, the policeman who’d come to look at the hoop house and the smoke. The policeman who knew the hanged man and looked straight ahead, neither left nor right. The one with the twitchy mouth and the slow way of talking.

  This was getting too mad. Too mad by about a million times. Steal a plant from a hippy’s window sill and you might get a spanking, steal hundreds o
f plants from a bent policeman and a bent policeman’s friends who’ll hang someone they think has fucked them over and you’ll get a spanking, a kicking, a hammering and then you’ll be executed. It was simple.

  I washed. I changed my clothes. I went to see Mr Evans. He was letting the last of the cows out of the parlour. “Did you sleep?”

  “Yes thanks.”

  “Feel better?”

  “A bit.” I grabbed a broom and started to wash the floor.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

  “It’s OK. I need to do something,” and as I brushed, the work lifted my mood. I felt the dread and panic drift away for a few moments and park itself away from my mind. The relief was sweet, like someone had put cool towels on me. But the moments passed and I was back. The world seemed closer to me than it had ever been, tighter and black. I finished sweeping, walked with Mr Evans and the herd down to the pasture, and after we’d seen them safe, I got on the bike and rode out to look for Spike.

  I stopped at The Globe, but no one had seen him. I tried to make a quick exit, but the word was out and people wanted to hear about the hanging man. They wanted me to tell them what I’d seen, how his face had looked, was his neck broken, was he blindfolded, were his hands tied? The rumours were wild; someone said he’d been a heroin smuggler from Bristol, someone else had heard he was a London gangster who owed his boss a million pounds. The landlady said it didn’t matter who he was, the world was well rid of people like him, and it was a shame that people like me got caught up in things like that. “Here,” she said, and she poured me a glass of cider. “On the house, Elliot. You get that down and put all this nastiness behind you.”

  So I stayed in the pub for half an hour, sipped my drink and listened to the rumours expand. By the time I left, the hanging man had been sacrificed to a blood god by a family of devil worshippers who lived in the woods. They’d been seen dancing naked around a fire, they’d been stealing sheep for months, they chanted songs in a language no one understood, everyone agreed that murder had been coming. As I left, someone suggested the regulars should pile into a Land Rover and hunt these bastards to the ground and dish out the sort of treatment they’d dished out to the hanging man. “String ’em up,” said a farmer from Kittisford, and his wife agreed.

  It was getting dark as I climbed onto the bike and rode away from the pub. The drink had calmed me, smoothed the knots and ties, and as I headed towards Appley Cross and the turning to Spike’s place, I knew what I was going to tell him. I was going to sit him down in his kitchen. I was going to put my panic in a box and be steady and reasoned. I was going to tell him to clear the smoke out of his garage, dump it, take a few weeks off in a place where no one knew him. Forget it had ever existed. Explain what was likely to happen to him if he didn’t. Explain what was definitely going to happen to him if he didn’t. And if he didn’t listen, then I’d describe the look on the hanged man’s face. Easy.

  He was sitting in his front room, drinking beer and smoking a spliff. He had the look of someone who’d been smoking for days. His eyes were watery, and his lips cracked, and a sick haze hung in the room.

  “Yeah…” he said when he saw me.

  “Spike…”

  “Yeah. What’s happening?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He shrugged. “No. You going to tell me?”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Here. I’ve been relaxing.”

  “You seen anyone?”

  “Not a soul.”

  “So you don’t know about the guy in the woods?”

  “What guy in the woods?”

  “Shit, Spike. I found that bloke we saw up at the hoop house. He was dead. Someone hung him from a fucking tree.”

  “Someone what?”

  “Someone killed him, Spike. He was murdered.”

  He dropped the spliff. “He was what?”

  “Murdered, Spike.”

  “You’re kidding. You’re fucking kidding…”

  “I went to check the cows last night. Saw torches in the woods. There was screaming. I waited for them to go, and when they did I found him.”

  He bent down and picked the spliff up, blew on the lit end and took a drag. “Shit.”

  “Yes,” I said, “It is. He was growing a load of smoke for someone, and now he’s dead because you stole it…”

  He took a long draw on the spliff, blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “You sure about that? You sure someone would kill him? Kill him for a few plants?”

  “A few plants? It’s more than that. And this is probably about more than plants. That’s what I think, anyway.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, Spike. I do.”

  “That’s a lot of shit to lay on me, El.”

  “You laid it on yourself. You went out, took your stupid head with you and did what you always do.”

  “Right…”

  “Right? Is that all you can say?”

  “No…”

  “I told you, didn’t I? What did I tell you?”

  He shrugged.

  “When you said your ship had come in?”

  “Dunno…”

  “HMS Fuck-Up?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  He yawned and closed his eyes.

  “You can’t avoid it, Spike. You have to face it.”

  He shook his head.

  “For the first time in your life, you have to face the consequences.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Spike?”

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  His head dropped to one side.

  I looked at him. He was my friend. He was my oldest friend, the friend I’d been through things with. Small things, big things, things with spikes and things with feathers, things weighed down with lead, things that drowned in deep ponds. We’d climbed trees, fished rivers, swum lakes, chased girls, learnt to drink together, removed engines from old cars and put them back again. But now I didn’t know what to do. Whack him over the head, lock him in a shed, take the smoke myself and dump it in the river? That was the only thing I could think of doing, so I went to the kitchen and looked for something heavy.

  The place was a mess. Dirty plates and saucepans filled the sink, half-eaten cans of beans and a spilt packet of cereal cluttered the table. Empty cans and bottles littered the floor, a smell of sour milk filled the place. A torn poster of somewhere tropical hung on the wall. I opened a cupboard and a broom fell out and smacked me in the face. I pushed the broom back in, closed the cupboard and went to the back door. I stepped outside and stood in Spike’s yard, looked around and found a spade. I carried it inside. It was heavy and crusted with earth. I went to the living room. Spike had fallen asleep. The spliff had dropped out of his hand and was smouldering in the ashtray. I stubbed it out. I looked at his head. I looked at the spade. It could do a lot of damage. It was impossible to predict how much damage. I could just wake him up. I could give him a bruise and a headache. I could leave him with a fractured skull. Or I could kill him. So many options and so little time, and so many mistakes that I could or could not make.

  ‌10

  Three hours later I lay on my bed in the caravan. The night was close and heavy, and I lay in a pool of sweat and filth. I needed a bath, but I didn’t have the strength. I’d tried to read a book, but it was impossible to concentrate. The words wouldn’t keep still on the page, and the story made no sense, so I turned on the radio and listened to a woman talk about a holiday she’d spent in Italy. I thought I’d like to go to Italy. I’d like to see the beautiful buildings and drink the cold beer and learn about the way Romans lived. To have a peaceful week with happy people who smiled at simple things and ate good food. To sit at a pavement café and drink a glass of beer and watch the world slip by. Peace in a crowd. Scooters and women with brown legs. Olives. Tomatoes. Not havoc in noise, or the constant feeling of threat around the
corner or over the ridge of a shadowed hill.

  It was good to have the burble of a stranger’s voice in the dark. Comforting. Comfort is too easy to take for granted. Comfort is important. The woman was talking about Rome, and how the ancient buildings weep with blood and sorrow. Sometimes, she said, you can even hear them laugh, but mostly they scream. And when you walk the old pavements, the memories of the buried bones can amplify your own grief or pleasure or whatever emotion you might be experiencing. Yes, I thought, I understand that.

  When the programme about Italy finished, it was midnight, and the news came on. I leant out of bed, turned the radio off, listened to the rustling silence and peeped through the curtains at the farmyard. Everything was still. Except for the shadows of moonlit branches in the breeze, nothing moved. And when I looked away from the shadows I could have been looking at a picture from a story book. Elves could have been hiding in the yard, plotting cruel deeds and bad tricks. Or a slavering dog could have been sitting behind the farmhouse wall, its tongue lolling and its head full of the idea of meat. It was the sort of night when anything could have been out there, but nothing was. I lay back down and closed my eyes.

  I’d stood over Spike with the spade in my hand. I’d looked at the flat steel blade and I’d looked at his head. I have never been a violent man. I have never raised my fist in anger and never hit another person. But for a second I didn’t see any way out. Fright was confusing me, I saw that, but what else could I do? And then I thought I’d been infected. Infected by Spike’s disease. Lost in Spike’s madness. You could steal the smoke, I could find a hung man, he could fall asleep, I could kill him, I could try and disappear. Stupid Elliot. Stupid, stupid Elliot. Spend the rest of your life in regret? Or stand up to panic, tell it to get lost, sort yourself, move on? Wise boy. Good, wise boy. Almost. I took a deep breath, lowered the spade and put it back where I’d found it, then went inside and put my mouth to his ear, whispered, “Get rid of the smoke, Spike,” and left him where he was. There was no point trying to argue with him or reason with him, and as I rode back to the farm I rode slowly and carefully, as if the road was glass and I was a skater.