Landed

by Tim Pears

  They reach the cover of a thicket of scrub and saplings. Holly flops. They kneel. Owen crawls back and looks across the field. He can just see a man with a dog. He’s standing still, facing towards the service station, which itself is out of sight from here. It’s suddenly apparent that the man is listening to someone, someone is addressing him. A moment later he shakes his head, shrugs. He points away, to the far side of the field, towards the silver birch trees, as if to say, Maybe over there? Then police officers come into view, they cross the field at a trot. No dogs of their own, thank God, not yet at least.

  Owen crawls back to the others. ‘Let’s move,’ he says, taking Holly’s hand. They walk through the scrubland towards the roaring sound. ‘We’re on the wrong side of the motorway,’ Owen explains. ‘We need to cross it, see, to the west.’ The road is raised up high – they lose sight of the vehicles upon it. As they climb the bank it would be easy to imagine they’re approaching a waterfall. When they reach the barrier and see the speed and the unremitting volume of cars and lorries hurtling across in front of them it’s immediately obvious that any attempt to dash over between vehicles is out of the question.

  They walk south beside the motorway. Josh yells, ‘I’ll have a look,’ and runs ahead. The boy seems in the excitement to have let go of his misgivings, for the moment at least. For half a mile they scramble over fences, up the bank then down again into a field. Josh comes running back, shouting something it’s impossible to make out above the noise. He beckons them, and they scamper after him, until he stops, peering towards the bank in front of him, then looking back at them, then looking at the bank. When they reach him they see a tunnel underneath the motorway. Sitting at the round mouth of the tunnel is a dog.

  ‘We can go through,’ Josh says.

  ‘Wait,’ Owen answers.

  The dog has brown hair, and looks like some kind of cross, between a collie and maybe a Labrador. A mongrel. It seems to be staring calmly back at them. Then it turns and walks away into the darkness of the tunnel.

  ‘Be careful,’ Owen says, advancing, holding his arms in front of each of the children. He wonders whether the mongrel is alone, or one of a pack of wild dogs. As they reach the mouth of the tunnel they can see the dog in silhouette, sauntering away from them. They follow. It’s oddly quiet here, underneath the motorway. Owen yells, ‘Waaa!’ and the sound resonates around them. The children copy, uttering their own loud syllables which echo off the concrete walls. The ground has a little dry mud on it, perhaps this is a storm drain of some kind, for the passage of water rather than animals.

  When they reach the far side the dog is a further twenty metres away. It’s stopped and seems to be waiting for them.

  ‘Where’s its owner?’ Holly asks.

  Owen shakes his head. ‘Don’t know.’ When they walk on, the dog resumes its own journey. It too heads west, so that they can hardly help but follow it. After a while they enter a highsided track, an ancient right of way. Josh opens his rucksack and produces three green apples.

  ‘You bought these?’ Owen asks. ‘Back there?’

  ‘He took them, Daddy,’ Holly explains. ‘When the lady wasn’t looking.’

  Owen bites into an apple. His mouth floods with saliva. The sweetness. Teeth crunching skin and pulp, sweet juice and saliva. How strange it is to be alive.

  They follow paths where possible, or tramp along lanes. Owen aims to keep away from roads. There is a thrill in walking out of and away from a great urban conurbation, an escape. They enter a wood, follow a rabbits’ path then find themselves on a tarmacadam road laid in a straight line between the quiet trees. There’s nothing to explain the road in this deserted place.

  Soon they begin to climb. They sit and eat their last scraps of food that Owen had filched from the motorway service station, other people’s leftovers: rolls, butter; grapes, a banana; biscuits. Water and juice from half-drunk plastic bottles. Then set off again, climbing easily. The dog is still with them, and sits a few yards away.

  After a while Josh says, ‘How do you know which way to go, Owen?’ He has a suspicious expression. ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘The sun sets in the west,’ Owen tells him. ‘We head for the setting sun. And if the sun is hidden, I’ve got a compass.’

  Josh is suddenly excited. ‘We’re going camping,’ he says, turning to his sister. ‘That’s the surprise.’

  Above them, the sky is grey and thick as oil paint. Black birds swoop across like cinders shot from an underground fire. From the top of the Clent Hills they look back at the sprawl of the great city. Owen cannot see east beyond it; it spreads north and south. He turns and looks west, to Wales, surely, the far horizon. The thick grey canvas cannot stretch all across the wide sky: above the line of land or sea or mountains there are pale interludes, pools of light blue.

  Holly tugs on Owen’s right arm. ‘Carry,’ she says. Awkwardly, gripping her leg with his hook, he hoists her onto his shoulders.

  The sky is opening up. The sun, getting lower, illuminates more. It seems to be enticing them towards it, out of sight but reaching towards them, laying a path of gold across the patchwork landscape of hedges and fields. The girl on her father’s shoulders, the boy with a stick from a hedge that is a gun, a sword, a lance. The mongrel loping ahead of them.

  The pub is at the edge of a village, and they sit in its garden, surrounded by other families. The building appears sick: what look like three huge sticking plasters have been attached to the outside wall. Braces, skewered through the infrastructure, holding it together. Across a fence sheep graze. Children try to entice the animals to come to the fence. The sheep decline and after a while the children run off, but then some other child, watching, goes to the fence. Men and women sit at the picnic tables drinking gloomily, wrapping layers of clothes or their bare arms around them while their children run about, from climbing frame to fence to table, strangers communicating with each other by this criss-crossing of their random paths.

  Food comes. Sausage, egg and chips. After this first day, Owen decides, from now on, they’ll prepare their own food. As they eat, tiredly, Owen gazes out across the field. The dark seems to come in from the distance, so that against the gloom, trees and sheep and people in the foreground appear lighter than before, each object standing apart from those around it, which isn’t really possible though it seems so and makes them magical, totemic, so that he peers at one and the next in the hope that it might deliver its significance, which most of the time remains hidden.

  But then the dark has gone over them and twilight is silent and uniform across their portion of the earth. Night is falling, unarguable, finite. At the end, though, at the end of the dying day, as his daughter dozes against him and his son gazes from beneath lazy eyelids at some insect crawling across his shirt, only then does the sun, long hidden, skit between the clouds and the long horizon. The whole of it emerges in a moment, grey then white then yellow, like a single all-powerful film lamp, lighting up the garden. The world is rendered cinematic. He can see that people see themselves on a film set, spectators and participants simultaneously. It is like a secret brief performance, an occult drama in which the inhabitants of the garden collude.

  Josh looks up at his father, and they exchange smiles. We sense it is at the same thing, Owen thinks. Maybe we’re wrong. His son leans into him. Owen raises his face to the sky and closes his eyes, and as he does so he becomes airborne, aerial: he flies as if surfing the setting sun, so to see this darkening moment across the country, skimming over fields, above woods, into suburban streets. Urban allotments and tenement gardens. Waste-disposal sites and reclamation yards. Schools, municipal playing fields. He sees the yellow light dying in private swimming pools with their air of desertion. He climbs out of the shadow of hills and up to their blazing peak, from where the sun spills yellow grey liquid across the Irish Sea.

  Owen carries Holly into the wood. Josh unties the groundsheets from his father’s rucksack and spreads the smaller one on the
ground. Owen lays his daughter upon it. In the moonlight he breaks branches and spreads the larger groundsheet over a crosspiece, constructing a simple bivouac. Josh ties down the corners, to bits of wood that Owen, grasping them in his hook, quickly whittles into pegs. Then they spread leafy branches across the triangular opening behind Holly’s head, to inhibit a draught through the shelter. Owen leaves the front open.

  ‘We’ll light a fire in the morning,’ he says.

  Josh seems to be accepting surprises in his stride now. He lies down dreamily, across the groundsheet from his sister. Owen squeezes between them. They lie in silence for a minute, maybe two. Owen becomes aware of a particular, ominous sensation, like something approaching from a distance, outside him, though it is coming from deep inside: he can feel his right hand, his phantom limb, throbbing. Beside him, Josh’s breathing is inaudible. Owen assumes he is asleep, so is surprised when he hears his son say, in a hoarse whisper, ‘We’re not going to see Nana, are we?’

  ‘No,’ Owen tells him. ‘She’s not sick. I had to tell the school that so that they’d let you come with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Josh asks.

  ‘I’m going to show you where I come from,’ Owen says.

  Owen waits for the next question, but none comes. Josh was satisfied with his answer. Or more likely exhausted. Owen knows that he himself is too, but there is no way that he could sleep. His right hand is there, though he knows it’s not, throbbing at the end of his arm. Phantom limb pain comes at night, always. The sensation alters: now it feels as if it is being shredded by some unseen sadistic device. The pain in his non-existent hand causes him to visualise it: it’s all mangled and crushed, as it was in the accident, broken and bleeding, severed nerves exposed, veins, sinews, bone. And still being subjected to further stress. That’s what it feels like, now as every evening of his life.

  Owen crawls out of the shelter. In his rucksack is a bottle of wine. He bought it from the pub, along with white bread rolls and sausages for the morning. There’s a corkscrew on his multi-tool. Holding the neck of the bottle in his hook, squeezing the bottle between his knees, he pulls the cork. He lifts the mouth of the bottle to his lips, and drinks, willing the alcohol to travel swiftly to the end of his right arm. To still the pain.

  Owen sits on the ground, a few yards from the shelter. The children are safe. He drinks steadily. In time, when the bottle is empty, he will unstrap his hook, take off his shoes and crawl in between them. He’s blearily aware that the dog is in there too, curled up beside Holly.

  take thy plague away from me

  Owen wakes, shivering. He is alone in the shelter, the children no longer warming him. In the floor of his skull there is a sediment, of wine dregs, in its roof something pulsates. And there’s an odd aroma in his nostrils. Groggy, he sits up. The children are squatting outside, watching him.

  Owen blinks slowly, squeezing his eyes shut, then open again. ‘Was I talking in my sleep?’

  Josh looks away. ‘Not much,’ he says.

  Holly crawls back in beside Owen. He opens his arm. ‘I was awake first,’ she says proudly.

  ‘Look,’ says Josh, moving aside so that Owen can see. The boy has built a campfire. Of course: the smell of woodsmoke. He must have found the lighter in his father’s rucksack, not to mention dry grass, kindling, larger dry pieces of wood: the base of the fire is an amber glow. Now Owen can feel the heat of it.

  ‘I’ve done the same you did that time,’ Josh says.

  ‘You’ve done it well,’ Owen says.

  ‘And sausages,’ Holly prompts.

  Josh holds up long twigs, each with a sausage skewered on its end. ‘Now you’re awake we can cook these,’ Josh explains. ‘Place your order, Owen.’

  ‘Don’t call him Owen.’ Holly scowls at her brother. ‘Call him sir,’ she says, and turns to her father. ‘What would you like for breakfast, sir?’ she asks in a sing-song voice. ‘Hot dog?’

  ‘We’ve got no ketchup,’ Josh says.

  ‘Guess what?’ Owen says. ‘I picked up a few sachets at the services, didn’t I? Look in the side pockets of the rucksack.’

  When Owen stumbles through the trees, he realises it’s not just his throbbing head that hurts. His legs ache, muscles that had lain dormant inside his skin were thrown into reluctant action yesterday, and now complain to him in the only language they know, that of pain. How far did the three of them walk? His knees and hips, his back and shoulders, ache too. What was it Ziggy, who used to help Owen with large garden jobs, told him? ‘In Poland we say, After the age of thirty, if you wake up and nothing hurts, this means you’re dead.’ The children walked as far as he did but seem not to be suffering, not even five-year-old Holly. Owen pees onto the forest floor, damp grass, dry leaves. The sound he can hear repeated deeper into the wood; by a stream, presumably, down the slope ahead of him. Pissing outside is entirely different from using a toilet, seeing one’s evacuation drain into the earth. In his clients’ gardens Owen preferred to find a secluded spot, behind shrubs, a tree, to discreetly pee, rather than ask to go indoors.

  The smell of sausages, roasting. Holly holds one skewer, Josh two, each turning the sausages towards themselves, checking them every few seconds. Owen, bare-chested, straps on his hook. Josh glances round. ‘You could put a holster on one of those straps,’ he suggests. ‘He could carry a gun,’ he tells his sister.

  ‘Cool,’ says Holly.

  ‘The name’s Bond,’ her brother says in a transatlantic grown-up voice. ‘Josh Bond.’

  ‘My tooth is wobbly, Daddy,’ Holly says. With the tips of the fingers of her free hand she grips the tiny front tooth. It shifts this way and that. Owen winces. ‘My first one,’ she says.

  They eat three hot dogs each, and feed the dog two as well. Owen boils water in his small pan and brews tea, adding more sugar than he’d like until it’s sweet enough for Josh to drink a little. Holly prefers juice. The three of them lie on the groundsheet, replete. Stilled. After this breakfast, Owen fancies, he will need no more food. Only the children need eat from now on.

  ‘I want to talk to Mummy,’ Josh says.

  ‘Me too,’ says Holly.

  ‘She’ll be worried.’ The boy’s eyes cloud. ‘I think I’m getting worried about her.’

  ‘We’ll call her,’ Owen says. ‘I promise. We’ll pass a phone box.’ The words come out of his mouth. ‘We’re bound to.’

  ‘Good,’ says Holly.

  Josh is unsure. His eyes are momentarily bright then darken beneath his frown. The weather in his head. ‘Okay,’ he says.

  While Josh helps Owen take down the shelter and roll and tie up the groundsheets, Holly looks around, trailed by the dog. She returns holding a length of black plastic piping, some six or seven feet long. ‘It’s my telescope,’ Holly says. ‘Can you carry it for me?’

  Owen takes it from her. ‘Maybe it’s a didgeridoo, see,’ he says, and blows into it. No sound emerges from the other end. ‘Stay there a minute,’ he tells the children. ‘I just want to check something.’ Turning, Owen runs into the wood, carrying the tube like a rifle, disappearing down the slope, until the top of his head vanishes.

  ‘Maybe it’s a blowpipe,’ Josh tells his sister. ‘We could make poisoned darts.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It is mine,’ she reminds him, to establish the fact.

  The children hear a shout, and look at each other. Josh picks up Owen’s rucksack, and they walk in the direction of the call. The slope soon becomes a steep bank. Holly calls out, ‘Dad,’ Owen replies, they adjust their direction. He is nearby. They find their father in a stream, just above a stretch that plunges downhill so steeply it’s practically a waterfall. He has placed one end of the pipe in the stream; the other is propped up on a long, Y-shaped piece of branch Owen has found, like a thumb stick. Water trickles out onto the ground a foot or two away from the stream, at a height of about five feet.

  ‘Want to take a shower?’ Owen asks. The children frown and shake their heads. ‘
Please yourselves, like,’ he says. Rummaging through the rucksack he finds a small plastic bottle of shampoo. He removes his clothes, unstraps his hook and steps, bending, beneath the trickle of water. It’s freezing cold. He is determined to bear it, and after a minute or two the biting cold is no longer painful, but stimulating. A deep hot bath would be better, and this alfresco shower possesses a puny flow, but still the water is slowly therapeutic to aching flesh. Owen puts shampoo in his hair. He becomes dimly aware of movement, childish commotion, before closing his eyes again, relishing the cold aquatic restoration of his body. Bending his head beneath the water, he lets it rinse the shampoo out. The next thing he knows there is the sound of giggling, and he opens his eyes to find Josh and Holly, naked, have joined him.

  He suspects it was at Holly’s prompting. She is shrieking as she hops around, not only from the cold, a bedraggled pixie. Josh, circumspect, enjoys himself in a more reticent manner. The boy’s a skinny-ribs, all bony joints, sinewy limb. Holly is more fleshy. She must eat more than her brother.

  Owen moves aside so that the children can receive the flow of water upon them. He reaches for the plastic bottle of shampoo and, making them promise to keep their eyes closed, washes the children’s hair. He massages the shampoo into their scalps with his fingers. Josh’s hair is short, and dry and wiry, and the shampoo lathers readily; Owen cleans his neck and ears as well. He has to empty the bottle into Holly’s long blonde hair. It hangs untidily, knotted and sticking to her skin, a heavy rope of hair.