by Adam Thorpe
She nods rather dismissively, scribbling with great alacrity as her boyfriend sniffs about in my room. Not actually lifting things, but snooping all the same. I am digging a hole and stepping in it. One does, even when reporting a theft. I tell them exactly what happened – that after our little chat, really about nothing, I said goodnight and took a little stroll around my property. Checking the house. I-L-Y-T-H-I-A. Why did I ‘follow’ Mr Petty out of the pub? To say goodnight. That sounds so feeble that I blush. My hands are trembling. I’m sure she notes the trembling. They refuse to answer any of my questions (when did he go missing, who reported it?), and leave after ten minutes. I’m hungry.
Jessica has learnt from someone who has learnt from someone that foul play is suspected. I’ve forgotten it’s Monday, but she’s kindly rustling something up in the microwave. Roger comes in and says that someone has just been told by someone that Muck’s woolly hat has been found. Where? Cobblers Way. Never heard of it. A piss-smelling path connecting Bew’s Lane with the beginning of Crab-Apple Lane, Jessica explains. I see it now – never knew its real name: walled and dank, yes. No one’s quite sure when he went missing, exactly. A Mrs Stenton reported hearing something suspicious at midnight on Saturday. What’s defined as suspicious? We amuse ourselves with suggestions – blood-curdling screams, the rattle of a machine-gun, the dragging of chains. I want to know who reported him missing. Roger thinks it was his mate, John Wall. Ah yes, of course. Muck has no missus. I suggest dredging the pond, since Muck was four sheets to the wind on Saturday night.
‘Do you think he’s really dead, then?’ says Jessica.
‘No idea. But he could be, couldn’t he?’
Back in my room, I switch Ted’s lamp on and watch the waxy globs rise and fall, remaking themselves but never into anything recognisable. This is what the universe did for billions of years. Sheer tenacity. That’s all God is. My face looms in the glass cylinder, stretched out to a scream. Even the man in the moon can be screaming, at times. Have you noticed that, Mother?
Of course I dream about Muck. Who isn’t dreaming about him, in this blighted village?
The next morning, a scribbled note at breakfast. Elizabeth Pratt cancelling dinner. She says she’s sorry, but no reason given. This is the first crack in the wing.
‘Is Mrs Jennet still alive, Ted?’
‘Mrs Jennet up at the Jennets? The old farm? Oh yes. Just about.’
A headwind, full of wet but not raining. Buffeted, I’m feeling strangely jolly. Elated, yes. This is what grief does, before it drops you. Even the changes at the farm don’t wreck it: the humming metal hangars, the Belsen huts. Looks like one of my old aerodromes! A withered old thing greets me from her chair as if I have not been anywhere at all since 1940.
‘Mornin’, Master Arkwright,’ she says. ‘You sit down here, make yourself comfortable, then.’
Yes, the same nose, forehead, jaw. I hand over a W.I.-made sponge-cake, purchased at the shop, and she identifies it as one of her daughter-in-law’s.
‘Coals not just to Newcastle, but to the colliery,’ I joke.
Scuffed plastic-cushioned chairs around the same big table; worn lino hiding the brick floor; some crummy melamine kitchen units; a tomb-like freezer; a couple of trade calendars featuring farm machinery and topless girls; the usual bric-à-brac of electric gadgets and gew-gaws. These are the only material changes, Mother.
I went there more and more after you’d left us, you see. Mrs Jennet was a strapping young woman, then. She seemed to do everything herself. I gave her a hand bringing in the cows to be milked, a few times, enjoyed holding up the odd vehicle on the lane. I’m sure I swaggered, making clucking and whooping noises like her. She’d give me an apple pudding or a rhubarb pie to take home in a bowl; I’d treat it like my pay-packet, and eke it out. She was motherly, in her strapping way. Smelt of cows and hay. One evening I saw her with a baby at her breast, milking the cows at the same time. The milk spurting into the bucket and the milk dribbling from the baby’s mouth. ‘You’ll be swallowin’ flies in a bit, chit, stood there like that.’
I got to know her farmhand, too. Raymond lived in bachelor squalor in a tied cottage beyond the cruck barn. He was genial and a bit dim, with one buck tooth, but he taught me the essentials of farm life. I’d hold up a ladder on a hump-backed field when he was ploughing, so he could line up straight below the brow. Freezing and bored, I was – but the ladder towered up into the crisp air like the expectation of my life ahead. I saw the steam puffing up for ages before I saw the horses, then they broke tinkling over the crest and I’d cheer. Each time I would cheer, to myself.
She coughs and wheezes and taps the table with her corkscrewed fingers and tells me that Raymond died last year. Her sleeves are still rolled up, like yours would be, but her once-tight brawn flaps from each arm like a brown, fledgling wing. She’d pick up brimming churns as if they were full of air.
A woman with a bone-white hairdo comes in with four swollen Sainsbury’s bags and frowns uncertainly when she sees me. It’s the daughter. She was the infant dribbling the milk at the breast.
I identify myself and there is warmth enough, but of a diffident kind; the years between seem to flatten out. No scarps of achievement, no dark coombs of despair; just earth and lines and the upper rungs of a ladder over the brow, held rigidly. She asks me no questions, thank goodness. Does she even know of my fame, my success?
As she unloads box after box into the freezer, I pose the question about the cows’ health, and she screws her face up. There is only this ‘staggers’ business, a bit hush-hush. Nothing remarkable about the herd keeping away from the fence: they do all sorts of funny things, do cows. ‘Don’t they, Mum?’
Mum nods, and says that cows know more than we think. She wants to make me a cup of tea, but I refuse. My head’s floating again. I take her hand to say goodbye, and hold it for too long.
On my way out I pass the old concrete milking-parlour, with its tiny grates of windows; the frenzied gabble of a radio sounds over the odd thump of metal from inside. I don’t want to meet the sons: they’re responsible for the industrial look. About the only drolly original thing Nuncle ever did was write out choice extracts from Fream’s Elements of Agriculture and stick them on the wall next to relevant passages from various sacred or literary texts, for the delectation of visitors. The yellowing sheets were still there after the war. I recall none of the sacred or literary texts but their wicked doubles have embedded themselves quite firmly. My favourite was: Whereas the dairy cow is adapted to milk production the beef cow must be correspondingly adapted to the production of flesh. This must be laid on the skeleton in the correct places. The right-wingers laughed, the left-wingers didn’t. The flesh on my face feels incorrectly placed as I pause by the pig battery – its door’s open and a couple of dim light bulbs glow in the snuffling blackness. Surely there’s a moral drop between the old muddy pen full of black Berkshires and this hangar. Later, Jessica tells me that they slaughter the pregnant sow to have the piglets clean, as one pods beans.
Your loving son,
Hugh
I wish I was in Africa.
My dearest Ma,
Do you remember the Allenbury’s Diet? It provides a convenient and light nourishment for Motorists and Travellers. A cup of Allenbury’s Diet and a Biscuit relieves any feeling of Exhaustion.
It came with the tins, Joseph pinned it up. I close my eyes and I can see it, rippled next to the meat-safe. An open motor car paused in front of a whitewashed cottage on a Cornish cliff, the chauffeur in goggles like Father on the motorbike: A Light Repast. You liked Allenbury’s but you stayed Exhausted. Some beastie ate it up from the bottom.
I close my eyes and unfortunately I can see the other thing. The rather dreadful thing. They say I have to tell you, as you’d want to know. Can’t imagine why.
Here goes. There shall you find the wondrous ship wherein the spindles of King Solomon are laid. Please tell me where that comes from, when you have a moment.
I think it’s verse.
‘The local environment bod’s coming this morning, to check the wood, if you want to be there. Ten o’clock. They only told me ten minutes ago. Typical.’
Barry’s annoyed with me about Monday’s meeting. I put the phone down. The bar is empty but for Ted wiping tables. He keeps having to push his spectacles up. ‘No news,’ he says. I don’t know what he’s talking about for several moments.
I arrive a few minutes late on Aunt Joy’s bike, both of us wheezy. A blue Granada Ghia parked in front of the gate, with its door open. Inside, a dead body tipped right back with its stockinged feet on the dashboard, mouth wide open. ‘Hello?’ It gulps and gawps and climbs out, becomes Rob something – Garnett or Gardner, rumpled pin-striped shirt. Gardner, I think. He taps a badge on his tie: 1 AM 3. ‘Sorry about this. From the wife. I was thirty yesterday. Into the small hours, I’m afraid.’ Blinking as if he’s squeezing out tears. He changes into a pair of shiny green gumboots and white cotton gloves, like a surgeon going fishing. That’s it. No respirator, no oilskins. He has the usual array of portable contraptions, including a rod with a claw. One of them bleeps, of course. He stuffs them all into a haversack.
He has been told to expect gas, but not what type. ‘Mustard and lewisite,’ I say. He’s never heard of lewisite. ‘Arsenical, smelt like geraniums. Never actually used, thank God.’ He asks about the wildwood’s ‘history’. ‘My uncle reckoned it was a relic.’
‘A relic?’
‘Of the primordial forest.’
‘I was talking about modern times,’ he says, with a chortle. Do I look batty? Perhaps I do. A batty scruff. He’s heading for the beechwood. I have to correct him with a touch of the elbow.
‘Ever been Army?’ he asks. We’re peering into the tangle. John Wall’s cut stuff is now yellowing. I think he’s talking about me at first. I tell him that the Army set up camp during both wars on common land the other side of the wood. The gypsies had to remove themselves.
‘Then we might have us a lost depot,’ he says. ‘There were loads of them in the war. Both wars, in fact.’
‘How can you lose depots?’
‘Like you lose little girls on the beach,’ he grins. ‘Sheer carelessness. If this one’s mustard or the Carl Lewis, it’ll kick start the funding.’
He fiddles with one of his contraptions, making it whoop, tick and growl. ‘It’s not a lost Army depot,’ I say. He checks his massive watch. The thing whoops again. There’s a dim whoop from within the wood, like a mating call. He raises his eyebrows.
‘Only the elves,’ I murmur.
‘Lead on, sir.’
He follows me with the detector thingummy held out in front. I’m in walking boots and trousers and we make reasonable headway. ‘A badger track,’ I explain. ‘It’s always been here. Creatures of habit.’ He nods, studying the thingummy, murmuring figures to himself. Up on Mam Tor we had discs painted yellow dotted about on poles. If they turned red, we were being sprayed by blister gas. Otherwise it was just a matter of sniffing, like beasts. I tell him this but he’s not interested. Maybe I should talk model trains, or frogs.
We go further along the meagre path, through the broken ferns and on into hip-high nettles, holding our arms up as if we’re being body-searched. There’s the odd bird, this morning. The sky’s the whitewashed sort, very bright through holes in the canopy; each gust frays these bigger for a moment, then stitches them up. Leaves fall or sport about and hit our faces. We pass the spot where I caught Dominick and his friend. Then we step into a small clearing. This was where I had my picnic at the weekend. On my own. Strictly private. Lots of overgrown blown stuff, past its prime, finished for the year. Dank, an autumn dankness in a dark old wood. Not terribly prepossessing, even a bit derelict. Not a sunny glade, anyway.
No carpet of wild garlic, though the tangle of mould must be its remains.
Gardner looks as if he’s sleepwalking, with his detector thing held right out. He stumbles on a fallen branch.
And then, as if on a gust, the faintest hint of it.
Has he noticed? I don’t say anything, I just crouch down and all but bury my nose in the mould. Gardner’s a bit bemused.
‘Mustard? Lewisite?’
I rise stiffly. Just dankness, just sweet mould. And then the gust again, that dim hint. It’s teasing me. That’s what it’s doing!
‘Smell it?’
Gardner sniffs, holding his detector up. He’s standing right on the spot. I shouldn’t have brought him here. I shouldn’t have brought anyone here. And then, Mother, I have this rather odd thought. Less a thought and more a picture, like the pictures I had as a boy, which were real and not real. Not storybook pictures, or pictures of spirits like Herbert E. Standing, but pictures like memories. Knights, for instance. Knights passing like gusts, clattering and shouting. A danger about them, as if they were drunk. And I wasn’t me, but some lowlier person embedded in their time. Absolutely embedded, in all my squalor and filth. Not only knights, don’t get the wrong idea: anything, anywhere, but not of my time and I wasn’t always lowly. Just like gusts. And this picture I have is of Muck, Muck standing where Gardner’s stood, right on the spot. He’s tiptoeing about, like a clown would. But he’s not enjoying it. He’s looking at me and shaking all over, his face sweaty in the moonlight. I’m going to make him do this until he drops.
‘Can’t smell a thing untoward,’ he says. ‘And we’re not getting a register on the dial.’
That’s not Muck, that’s Gardner, in a mottle of daylight. He’s looking at me as if there’s something wrong with me. I find my skin is drawn back from the teeth.
Gardner goes over to a trunk and scratches it. Bits of dry silvery lichen break off. ‘Air pollution,’ he says. ‘General air pollution, that is. Lichen’s our canary down the mine shaft. It needs fresh air to live. The buzz word’s bio-remediation, by the way. Make your fortune by cleaning up the mess.’
The end gallops up before you’ve had time to adjust or get it right. Look at this wood. The wildness is frightening me. I much prefer lawns, these days.
‘Here, take this,’ Gardner says.
I look at him, puzzled. A mask dangles from his hand, a throwaway type with plastic eye-pieces. ‘Lachrymation,’ he says. ‘Something’s getting you in the eyes. I’m excited.’ His own eyes are blinking, a little red. But that’s the nervous tic and a night in his cups.
‘You’ve found something?’
He nods. I wipe away a tear and take the mask. He switches on the machine. A little red light flickers and it makes noises like a dreaming puppy.
‘We’re registering something untoward,’ he says. ‘Mask yourself up, if you would. We’re in a hazardous area – I’d be the one to get the rap.’
He kicks at the mould with his heel and claws out a soil sample with the rod. Now there’s a small black hole just where –
We leave the clearing, advance deeper in. Is it deeper? I’m not sure. I need one of Father’s coloured maps, names in whiteclay.
A bright pelt of moss on a log. ‘Moss is an ace absorber of poisons,’ he yells, peeling it off. His voice is now muffled by his mask. He looks like a deep-sea fish, white and ghastly in the gloom. I suppose I do too. He points to where the wood descends and the undergrowth is mainly the low, matty stuff of boggy ground, straddled by webs. A fallen log sprouts razor-strop fungi, and a something – a boot? a hoof? – has kicked a deathcap off its stem. Trees lean as if the ground is too soft for their roots.
‘What happens in that direction?’ he yells.
‘The freshet,’ I shout back. ‘A little sort of stream. Then a big field.’
His mask nods and a jabbing forefinger indicates we should go there. Then there’s another whoop, to our left. Our masks look at each other. And a panicky shout – but far-off shouts always do sound panicky. As we walk over the slubby ground, I try to picture the surveyor’s map shown in the meeting. My breath’s sour inside the mask, and rather loud. The freshet’s a trickle in a tunnel of
fern and brambles. I tell Gardner that it’s the venerable county boundary – described in a tenth-century document where it’s called a merfleot. I was with you, Mother, when Mr Fergusson showed us a copy of the document – and he died not long after I arrived. Yet I learnt it by heart, for some reason!
The boundary creek, hard by the wood known by the villagers as wulvesheafodwudu.
‘Come again?’
‘Wolf’s Head Wood, in old English. Maybe Ulverton used to be Ulvesdun. Wolf Town.’
He looks around him a little nervously. ‘It probably wasn’t full of wolves,’ I add, ‘but Anglo-Saxon robbers and murderers. Malefactors, anyway. No-gooders, on the run. That’s what someone like that was called then. A wolfs head.’
At that very moment a policeman appears out of the mist, out of the gloom. He’s approaching with some difficulty over the undergrowth next to the stream. Of course this is odd, but I mix him up with our own investigation. He hails us at a little distance. He’s got a stick. There’s a patch so boggy between us it’s pretty much a pool, with reeds sticking out of it and a few late gnats, the dark-green water covered in what looks like dust. I imagine his boots filling up. We slop over to him through a spongeous tract of dying hemp agrimony and browning meadowsweet. He has a short mac on, spotted with wet leaves and the remains of webs. A squirrel ripples up a tree trunk behind him, crashing through the branches overhead. Gardner pushes his mask up on to his forehead but is panting too much to get in first.
‘Morning, sirs,’ says the policeman. ‘You’re in the wrong place. We’re back there.’ He indicates upstream with a hitchhiker’s thumb. ‘And remember to look up,’ he adds. ‘Follow me, if you will, please.’
My companion looks at me as the policeman trudges back the way he’s come. I push my mask up and say, ‘They aren’t to do with you?’ He doesn’t think so, he thought maybe they were to do with me, with this thing about my uncle. I honestly have no idea what’s happening, Mother. None of this means anything. But I do have a vision of a sort of bunker full of rusting drums, and on each drum is painted a grinning death’s head. I never once thought about the other thing!
