Beastings

by Benjamin Myers

  Gasps filled her ears and her chest was thumping. Sweat patched on sore skin and the afternoon moon looked misshapen. Crooked. She could go no further.

  The fold was empty. Dirty white wool matted its corners and the trodden ground was littered with the familiar scatterings of compressed dung pellets. But there were no sheep to be seen. It was summer and the days were long – they would be higher up the fell. They only used the folds when they had to.

  The girl slumped down against the wall with the baby still cradled in her arms her organs aching dry stone dehydration. Constipated. Disoriented. Tongue stuck and mute trapped.

  She slept.

  INTERESTING WHAT THAT tramp said about the death of God said the Poacher.

  When the Priest didn’t respond he continued: like I was just thinking how maybe it won’t always be that you Godly folk are the ones that are running things and how they say that science will one day replace religion.

  Do they.

  What do you reckon to that though?

  Do I look like a man who places stock in science as a philosophical construct said the Priest. As something to evince faith in its followers? Do I strike you as a Darwinist?

  Too many long words there Father.

  There’s no point talking to you.

  A man shouldn’t be a book learner to have an opinion though. My father taught me that.

  Remind me what your father does.

  Same as me.

  A thief.

  No – not a thief. A hunter. A farmer of sorts.

  You’re no more a farmer than the foxes you hunt.

  Don’t hunt foxes unless I’m paid to sniffed the Poacher. Might be that a farmer’s sick of having his hens got and might be that he wants my help with that. But foxes are no use to my pot. Ever tried eating fox meat? I wouldn’t recommend that. I’d sooner eat a flank of Perses than try that again. No. Plant-eating creatures make for the best meat. Everyone knows that.

  That wasn’t my point.

  See me and some of the boys were having a blether about this not but two or three days gone.

  This will be good.

  And a lad called Hughie reckons that damn near everything that is written in the great Book about like the beginnings of man and Adam and Eve and all of that has now been like disproved by scientists and college men and dinosaur bones and fossils.

  The Priest snorted at this. Said nothing. They walked on.

  Old Hughie reckoned on those dinosaurs being some fifty thousand years old or maybe more but in the great book they reckon it says God made everything only like a few thousand years ago. Now how do you account for that? Seems to me that someone somewhere along the way is wrong so it got me thinking about how it all comes to choice in opinion. Do we believe in the thigh bone of a creature the size of a house or some words on a page that most of us don’t much have the time or inclination to read?

  When you say inclination you mean ability says the Priest. Because if more of you learned to read then you might have picked up Darwin’s Origin of Species which covers exactly these matters at fatuous and blasphemous length and after whose reading any sane man of faith would agree that this current fashion for God-denial is exactly that: a fashion.

  So how do you explain bones older than the great book?

  I wouldn’t usually waste my words but since you ask I can explain it easily said the Priest: they are God’s test.

  How’s that like?

  Because everything on this planet was created by God. Every speck of dirt every towering mountain every idiot poacher.

  That’s your opinion –

  Shut up I’m talking now. Everything – every thing – was made by His hand. This is a fact. An old bone means nothing except that we cannot possibly understand all His ways because His will is far greater than we can ever imagine. It’s really very simple: the bone is a test. Do we let our faith crumble the moment we cannot explain everything we see and hear and smell – the moment we first have doubts – or do we strengthen our resolve and accept him fully and totally into our hearts?

  The Poacher shook his head.

  I don’t know Father. Hughie reckoned –

  Hughie is – I do not doubt – a faithless idiot an illiterate and a drunk. Charles Darwin meanwhile has readily and publicly denied the existence of God so how on earth do you suppose we are to believe a single word he writes. Of course on his deathbed he will repent and see sense. He’ll come back to God – you’ll see. And this absurd trend will pass. I will however concede one point and one point only to Mr Darwin: the strong will indeed survive. On this point I agree but with the addendum that only those strong in faith will survive. Faith and will and dedication to a higher purpose are all that matters. Now – come on – I’ve wasted enough energy on this.

  8.

  IT WAS A miniscule dot to begin with. An orange apparition suspended in the night.

  Her first sleepy thought: this is it. They have found me. They have come with torches.

  But it was something else – something alive – and it was moving and it felt wrong so she rose and walked towards it propelled by instinct and nullified by the tightening anxiety that had woken her in the first place.

  The girl moved towards the apparition. She stumbled many times but she never fell.

  There was movement around the glow – shapes were shooting upwards and wafted by an upended flapping flag of rising fire. Then she heard the noises and quickened her pace. The golden phoenix of flames was hissing and roaring in baritone. Cutting through the crackle and bluster of the heat were other sounds: a panicked bray followed by something guttural and desperate. The sound of metamorphosis.

  She was running now. The baby bouncing and crying.

  There was an opacity to the flames but when the girl stepped down between some boulders and over the scattered remnants of a tumbledown wall she saw through the flickers a smallholding building painted cadmium orange by heat.

  A barn was burning. A barn and everything in it.

  Chaos clattered against its wavering walls as she slowed first to a jog then a standstill. There was a fuss of clicking hooves and heads and limbs banging and barging in an attempt at a forced exit. Desperate movements. Futile.

  The braying and screaming cut right through her and turned her cold as the contents of the barn struggled to get out. Then the roof took hold and the fire was amplified. She clasped the baby to her chest.

  Embers danced on the updrafts. Tiny gobbets; moths taking flight.

  Inside the horses howled and the barn began to cave in on itself as burning beams drew terracotta tangents against the blackness of the hill. Diagonal sweeping lines traced slow-motion crescents. She was surprised at the speed at which it fell and how the noises from the animals seemed to carry on long into the night even after they had ceased to make them.

  Whatever was in there was no longer animate.

  The baby screamed.

  Then there were voices: one high and hysterical the other low and acute. Figures beyond the fire. The girl stepped backwards in fear that the diminishing flames might in their final illuminations offer her up as a culprit to these people.

  For wickedness burneth as the fire: it shall devour the briers and thorns and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest and they shall mount up like the lifting up of smoke.

  The people who arrived were much too late and they knew it. Their hurried movements slowed and the buckets in their hands fell by their sides and then they just stood there and the girl was glad that they hadn’t heard what she had heard – that tortured cry of the horses as they hissed and charred with their manes ablaze their tails already gone and caruncles burning bright across their backs. Then in those final moments before they had fallen: the sounds of skin scorching and eyeballs popping pain giving way to resolution; their instincts not programmed to wonder why this was h
appening.

  COOKED MEAT. CHARRED and blackened. Great lumps of it.

  The burnt horses were still smouldering at dawn when the girl returned to take another look. She saw their cremains in amongst the fallen beams and the rubble of collapsed masonry. They were barely recognisable now as creatures once capable of great feats of endurance and stamina and loyalty.

  What was left of their limbs looked like roots burnt out. One creature was on its back with its gnarled legs reaching for the sky and its trunk shattered and exposed like an exploded safe. Its pelt had burnt away and beneath it the flesh was seared. The mane and tail long gone but the skull intact. Teeth still strong and white remained set in its jaw-bone.

  All eye sockets were empty. Hooves were molten and sticky. Fetlocks contorted.

  The smell hung in the air. All that meat. Sweet and nauseating. Hunks and flanks of it. Hocks and shanks. Sides still smoking.

  Yet as the girl surveyed this field of death sculptures – this open sepulchre on the smouldering hillside – she found her mouth watering at the scent on the breeze. Her body craved the protein. She felt drunk with hunger.

  She shifted the baby from one hip to another. She looked at the horses solidified by flame and doused by buckets of water scooped from trough and dub. She smelled the air one final time.

  No.

  Could she?

  She couldn’t.

  She couldn’t do it.

  She turned and began to walk.

  THIS GIRL SAID the Poacher. She must be pretty special.

  She’s not special replied the Priest. She’s not special at all.

  Days we’ve been out here and you tell me she’s not special said the Poacher.

  That’s what I said.

  I don’t understand Father.

  You’re not meant to understand – just guide.

  It just seems like you’re going to a lot of trouble that’s all. You don’t strike me as the outdoor type.

  What said the Priest. Because I’m not malodorous in oilskins like you.

  So why the big fuss?

  No big fuss.

  No big fuss he says. Me I can bivvy out for weeks at a time. It’s no sweat off my back. The sky’s the only blanket I need. But you – you I suspect have got other things you can be doing. I’ve seen them churches. Right luxurious they are. Hot meals cooked for you and your washing done. Nice little income too I’d wager. No traipsing through mud and middens to do a hard day’s work for your lot Father.

  I don’t recall seeing you at service on Sunday said the Priest. Or any day.

  I’ve told you Father: not my thing.

  And as far as I’m aware a hard day’s work is about as familiar to you as the works of Aeschylus.

  What’s Aeschylus?

  My point is stealing animals from landowners is not exactly virtuous. The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat. Thessalonians 3:10.

  But that’s where your Bible is wrong isn’t it said the Poacher. I don’t go hungry. Me or mine.

  Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labour. Ephesian 4:28.

  Sometimes you talk like you don’t have a mind of your own Father. It’s like you’re scared of saying something un-Godly.

  I’m not scared spat the Priest. Scared is the last thing that I am.

  THE OLD CART horse track kept the girl high on the fell side. For a while she walked upstream in parallel with a river that ran the length of the valley bottom then coiled and bent through a series of silted oxbow turns made shallow by banks of grainy sediment before splaying out into the lake end. The widening fan of pebbles and rocks washed down from the waterfalls of the fells was visible from high up above.

  But the lake with its walkers and day trippers was long behind her now as she headed deeper into the mountains. What lay beyond was a magnet drawing her on.

  It was a mild day and the breeze kept her cool. She stopped to rest by the trackside and unfolded the potato skin from her pocket. It was creased and lined like an old parchment. The girl gnawed on it and pulped the dry skin as best she could then gave it to the baby. She only swallowed two small lumps for herself.

  Then when it was gone the girl undid her top and took out a tit and let the baby suckle. She was sore and arid and it took many minutes of the baby chewing and tugging before a small amount of watery milk trickled out. That which the baby didn’t take she caught with a finger then ran it back up her breast and into its mouth. The baby suckled long after the milk had ended. Its gums clicking on her swollen gland.

  She felt too exposed on the fell side like this. The grass was trimmed short from a summer’s grazing and anyone could see her from a mile away. The girl preferred the cover of thicket or spinney. Any terrain into which she could merge and move. She left the track and began to head down hill with her feet sliding on the sheep-shorn grass.

  SO THIS GIRL.

  Yes.

  She came from St. Mary’s. She was orphaned – is that right?

  More or less.

  And you and the Sisters raised her.

  With God’s guidance yes.

  For her entire life.

  For most of her life.

  And then you turned her out.

  No. We didn’t turn her out. She came of age and we found a place for her in a good home in the town. Church people. The Hinckleys. We had her doing honest work for honest pay – something you wouldn’t understand.

  Looking after this bairn.

  Amongst other things – yes.

  And then she ran off and took Hinckley’s bairn with her.

  We’ve been through all this.

  And here we are hot-footing it after her.

  Yes.

  And she’s a dummy.

  Yes.

  She doesn’t speak.

  So they say.

  So they say Father?

  Yes. So they say.

  But she hears alright doesn’t she? said the Poacher.

  What point are you trying to make?

  There’s plenty of others that could go after her Father.

  Others?

  Police. Or them in power. The authorities.

  And the Church does not occupy a position of power? countered the Priest. She was in my care.

  I thought you said she was with the Hinckleys now.

  She is but –

  But you’re involved in other ways.

  Involved?

  I’m just speculating Father.

  It’s not your place to speculate.

  I mean it looks pretty odd from where I’m sitting. It’s almost as if you don’t want this lass going out in the world –

  She has abducted a child. A child. That is a crime.

  You don’t care about the child though Father said the Poacher. That’s not what this is about is it?

  Well what is it about then?

  I don’t know Father. Secrets?

  Secrets?

  Yes secrets said the Poacher. I think she is full of them. Your secrets.

  Is that right.

  Yes.

  Do you want to know what I think? said the Priest. I’ll tell you: I think you’re as thick as pig excrement and twice as smelly. I think you’re just an ignorant peasant who’s no better than the fox that sneaks in and kills the chickens at night.

  That right.

  That’s right. You have no idea what you are talking about.

  Funny how you’re getting upset though isn’t it Father smiled the Poacher unfazed. Like I said: this girl. She must be pretty special the way you’re chasing across the land like this and not getting them that’s in charge involved. The authorities and all that. Keeping it a secret. All hush-hush. It’s like she’s an escaped prisoner that’s got something of yours.

  No-one was forcin
g –

  The Poacher was emboldened now. He interrupted the Priest.

  Or maybe it’s her that’s yours. Maybe you feel she belongs to you to do with what you want. And maybe she’s not such a dummy. Maybe she’s got a tongue in her mouth and a headful of secrets to spill out. Secrets about things most un-Godly. Am I right?

  You have no idea.

  Am I right?

  This is a pointless conversation.

  I’m right though aren’t I Father?

  You know nothing of charity said the Priest. This girl has been given the best of the church’s charity. She has been given the fullest of care and attention and learning. And this is how she repays us.

  Sounds like you’re after revenge Father. Revenge or ownership of what’s yours. But what do I know I’m just an ignorant peasant.

  The thing about you is –

  I think I’ve had enough of the talking for now Father.

  You don’t just say these things and then –

  Think like maybe I need to go and catch me some more food like.

  The Poacher showed the Priest his broad back.

  TARGETS. SHE SET herself them. Attainable targets. Get to that crag that’s taller than the others and the reward will be a rest. Five minutes. Get to that sharp rock on the skyline. The hole in the wall. The bone-bare tree.

  And don’t look back. Because behind you is the past and that is fixed; that has happened that cannot be changed but in front is a future waiting to be shaped. Options were becoming conceivable for the first time.

  So she walked. To the sharp rock on the skyline. To the hole in the wall. To the tree stripped of its bark and now bone white like a sheep that’s gone down a gulley.

  Despite the fear and despite the fatigue and the thirst and the hunger she saw that to another person living another life these hills could be beautiful.

  Squinting in the afternoon sun it was as if she saw the countryside for the first time as until now all she had known was walls and dorms and beds and darkness. Repetition and restriction and exploitation. The outdoors had been beyond her reach.

  And as she passed through the wild landscape the girl felt the landscape passing through her. She was the filter for it. Every pebble every bracken patch. Every fallen tree or fold. It passed through her as much as she passed through it. And it fed her. Energised her. Kept her going. In these fleeting moments she felt nature working as an ally and this gave her hope.