In the Place of Fallen Leaves

by Tim Pears

  She stood up to wash her hair under the shower attachment Ian had installed, although he’d never got round to fixing a plastic curtain rail around the bath, so that the water sprayed all over the floor. Pam stood under the jet of water with her eyes closed, her body foamy with shower gel, with a smile on her face. She always peed when she took a shower: she couldn’t help herself; relaxing under the water that coursed over her body, she let go of the water inside her.

  When she finally evacuated the bathroom, to the relief of her family, they found a scene of mayhem in which some natural disaster had occurred: water was dripping off the ceiling, the floor was flooded, towels had disappeared, soap was stuck to the bottom of the bath, the tops of the toothpaste tubes had vanished, and suddenly we were all out of toilet paper.

  It was the same in the kitchen: there was an unwritten rule that we ate our meals together at the same time every day, breakfast at seven-fifteen and dinner at six-thirty. But Pam took less and less notice: she swept downstairs only when she heard the newcomers who gave her a lift to Exeter beeping their horn in the lane, and she grabbed whatever was on the table as she passed. In the evenings she rarely came home till late, and mother gave up putting a plate in the oven for her, because it always ended up in the pigswill. Yet mother never reproached her. She knew she’d missed the opportunity, and exactly when it had arisen: one Saturday evening five years before, when she was fifteen years old, Pamela had asked to be excused from the supper table early, because she was going out. Mother assumed she’d be off to watch television in one of the other girls’ houses, or to play in one of their rooms, as she and her friends usually did. We were finishing dessert when she reappeared in the kitchen with mascaraed eyes and vermilion lips, a pair of black net gloves that went up to her elbows and matched her tights, a black lycra dress which hugged all the curves that showed she’d become a woman, and a certain perfume whose scent caused her older brother to stop breathing. The fact was she’d grown up overnight: her father didn’t recognize her, and mother was too astonished to say anything before Pam had walked across the kitchen and through the door, said ‘See you later’ over her shoulder, and got on to the back of a stranger’s motorbike revving up in the lane. And having missed her opportunity then, instead of pouring out her cold anger, burning her daughter’s precocious wardrobe and tying her down to a regime of punishment, as everyone expected, mother simply accepted the fact that Pamela lived according to different rules from the rest of us, and from then on treated her as an equal.

  I wanted to be like her, but I knew that I wasn’t. I wasn’t like any of them.

  Pamela had more friends outside the village than within; she’d done a secretarial course in Exeter and now had a job there, commuting with a carload of the outsiders who’d moved into the new houses on the steep slope below the church. She was brought home by young men who, if they stayed at all, would take a glass of sherry in the front room with a look of amused condescension they made no effort to conceal.

  Mother knew that one of these days Pamela would leave with one of them, carelessly, without a backward glance. No-one minded.

  Tom was Pamela’s opposite, bound to the land from birth. Long before puberty on his skin the scent of animals lingered and sometimes, doing up his tie or wiping a midge from his eye, mother caught the smell of new-mown hay on his breath. He inherited his grandfather’s shyness: as a child, mother feared he was retarded because he showed no sign of speaking, until she surprised him in the barn repeating to the pigs the same stories that she’d told him, and she realized that it was just talking to other human beings that made him feel uneasy. The things that more forward children were shy about as they got older, though, Tom was unaware of. He’d belch without warning and fart without shame, filling the kitchen with a first-thing-in-the-morning pestilential smell, oblivious to mother’s eyes raised to heaven in exasperation. Even if there was company he’d break wind with the sound of a trombone, without batting an eyelid. He blew his nose by pressing a finger against one nostril and blowing, then repeating it with the other, and he’d do it anywhere so long as it was out of doors. And if he wanted to pee, even if he was with other people, he’d turn around without saying a word, step forward a pace or two, unzip his fly, and water the grass. He didn’t see anything wrong with such behaviour, because he’d learned it from the animals. But if someone asked him a question that required an answer he’d blush just like grandfather from his hairline to his collar and fumble with the words, as if they were slippery things sliding around on his tongue.

  Ian was tall and stringy, with the wiry strength of his father and grandfather; Tom, on the other hand, had been given his body and his sluggish metabolism by the maternal line of our family. He was like an overgrown cherub, heavy-lidded and heavy-limbed, neither soft nor hard, neither fat nor muscular, but rather built of undefined muscle, or substantial fat, as solid and strong as a bull. Ian and Tom had never fought as youngsters: Tom wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so. He never contradicted his older brother, who did the accounts, decided crop rotation, ordered foodstuffs and conferred with the vet. But Tom knew things that could never be learned. During the lambing season he stayed out day and night, and when a tardy cow was brought into the barn it was he who extended his arm into its slippery womb and eased the birth of a calf.

  One Saturday back in May Ian had asked me to check the cows in the far pasture. Half the herd were heavy with calf, ponderous in their movement, passing through time itself at a different pace, appropriate to their weight and condition. I stood on the lower rung of the gate. The sun was slanting across the field and the cows had scattered themselves across it, grazing. I was about to leave when I realized that, without fuss or warning, no more than thirty feet from me a cow was giving birth: she stopped grazing and started to drop her calf, just like that, still chewing the cud. But it didn’t come out all at once: the top of its head appeared, and then a little more, and then all of its head up to the shoulders. There it stayed, its eyes closed, half in the world and half still in its mother’s womb, as if reluctant to wake up from the long sleep of gestation into the bright light of life. Its mother, too, looked unsure, not quite able to make up her mind whether or not to let go of the companion who’d shared her body.

  It was in case of just such an eventuality that Ian had sent me there, and I knew I should jump off the gate and run home to tell him it’d started, so they could bring them into the barn, and Tom could help them with his inborn skills of a midwife. I knew I should; but I was transfixed.

  It seemed like ages I stood there, gripping tighter the bars of the gate, silently urging the cow to push, mother, push it out of you, but nothing was happening, the calf was stuck and I was getting worried when quite suddenly it came sliding out all at once, afterbirth breaking up around it, tumbling into existence trailing its umbilical cord like a kite-string.

  What happened next I’d never seen or even heard of before: while the calf was being born none of the other cows took the slightest notice. Now, though, although neither mother nor calf had made a sound, one or two of the other cows lifted their heads and ambled over, and when they reached the calf they began to lick it. It wasn’t just the nearest ones that came first: they sensed what was happening quite separately from each other, and odd ones would stop grazing and make their way over from different parts of the field. Soon a circle had formed around the calf, not just licking it but even, it seemed, pushing it with their tongues. After ten or fifteen minutes it made its first attempt to stand up, as if only because it was being pestered to by the cows. It got just half-way up before its spindly legs gave way and it collapsed in a heap, confounded. But they wouldn’t leave it alone, instead urging it with their tongues to have another go: this time it nearly stood up straight before capitulating once more to the power of gravity.

  But it wasn’t to be defeated. The other cows began to leave it alone now, and it carried on between short rests. I wondered at the instinct embedded in its mind, new-born after n
ine months sleeping in its mother’s belly, that compelled it so soon to struggle through that ordeal and stand on its own four legs. At last like a weightlifter it locked its knees, but then staggered giddily and keeled over; it took another few attempts before it could stand up straight and strong, by which time the other cows had all drifted away to graze, leaving its mother to finish licking it clean.

  I told Ian the first calf was born, and that I’d seen how the other cows came round to welcome it into life and help it get used to reality.

  ‘That!’ said Tom, dismissing it with one syllable. ‘Cows always does that with the first one. They smells the placenta. Can’t resist its taste.’

  When she got to my photograph I don’t know what mother thought; she just stared at the picture. But after a few moments she turned the photos face down on the table. Three stubs had accumulated at the bottom of the teacup. Mother was motionless, unbreathing: the pulsating silence gathered around her.

  ‘Why, dear God, do it only get harder?’

  She walked to the door and shielded her eyes. Daddy was no longer at the loft. The stifling heat throbbed against her temples, and the memory of one damp autumn afternoon made her shudder.

  The sun squeezed the air out of the house. Invisible birds hovered in the shadows, their wings fluttering as they kept their balance. I ran past mother and out into the world.

  Chapter Eleven

  The Lonely Hunter

  During the week Ian dressed as scruffily, as practically, as any farmer, in tee-shirt, jeans and Wellington boots. His week’s work ended around midday on Saturday, in good time for football in the afternoon. It was his abiding worry that he’d be late for kick-off, because at the last minute some crisis always seemed to occur – a sheep was lost, the trailer needed emptying – and he’d come crashing into the kitchen crying: ‘Mother, where’s me shin-pads? Where’ve you put the first team strip? What did I do with my liniment?’ It was the one time of the week we saw Ian flustered, the lid blown off the top of his nervous stomach by the fear of missing his football. Mother and Pamela and grandmother and I, eating the last of our lunch, awaited his panic-stricken entrance every Saturday.

  ‘Should be here any minute,’ Pam would say, glancing at the clock, and we’d all giggle.

  ‘’Asn’t ’e got ’is kit ready again this week, silly bay?’ asked grandmother.

  When the door burst open we erupted into laughter, which only increased his alarm. ‘Don’t be stupid, mother,’ he wailed, ‘I’m late. Someone’s stolen my shorts. Help me, mother.’

  She would get up from the table slowly, with the smug assurance of a mother when she knows she’s indispensable.

  ‘Hurry up, will you,’ Ian cried, checking his watch and playing with his hair, ‘I’s late,’ as she proceeded with calm authority to collect his socks from off the drying-rack, his shirt from the linen cupboard, his jock-strap from the top drawer of his chest, his scuffed and wrinkled football boots from the corner of the hallway where he’d dropped them the week before, and his tie-ups from off the mantelpiece, because not only did she know where the piskies hid things but she also had a mother’s memory, constantly taking stock and readjusting, for the location of objects around the house.

  Ian scooped his kit from her arms and stuffed everything into a carrier bag, whose handles usually ripped open as he dashed out of the house, so that he wasted precious seconds retrieving a boot from the dust before throwing the bag into his yellow van and jumping in after it. He lifted the door on to its hinges even as he released the clutch, and bump-started the van as it rolled towards the lane.

  In the event, Ian was invariably the first to arrive at the pitch, with time to stick the corner flags in and put the nets up before anyone else appeared. He accepted those chores as a captain’s responsibility. He played for the Christow team, who ignored the sun and continued without a break throughout the year, organizing friendlies from May to September. Cricket wasn’t a game taken seriously in the Valley, and was played by a team of soft-bellied newcomers and one or two older farmers, in a field next to the pub at Ashton. Tom had no interest in either sport, but he lent a hand when it was Ian’s turn to mark out the pitch, and a couple of times a year they took the tractor over to drag the grasscutter or the roller across the ground. That summer more than ever before they should have left the pitch alone to recuperate from the battering it took in the winter and spring, but Ian promised the Christow Village Hall Committee he’d returf it in time for the Agricultural Show, and so they continued to play every week. By June the goalmouths were two dried-up craters, and the only green grass left on the pitch lay in thin strips along each flank. By July these too had disappeared, and the entire playing field had become a dusty desert, scattered with knee-scraping pebbles and grit. And although each match began with pristine white lines, they were scuffed off within minutes of the kick-off.

  Quite apart from the disastrous state of the pitch, it was madness to play football, of all things, in the fiery heat of those months. While everyone around them was adopting the continental habit of taking a nap in the early hours of the afternoon, and the whole Valley assumed a slumbering silence, Ian and his friends were dashing up and down the Christow playing field. They lost so much liquid they had to place bottles along the touchline and behind the goal, taking quick swigs whenever there was a lull in the action.

  Ian and the rest of his side gradually adjusted to the conditions. The teams who came into the Valley, though, from the Newton Abbot end or from Exeter direction, were unable to alter their tactics of English footballers: they still slid and rammed into bone-crunching tackles, the ball simply a cushion with which to legitimize their violence; and they still hurtled without pause up and down and across the pitch, the ball like the thread of an argument they could not quite follow. At half-time the Christow players calmly drank tea and sucked oranges, while their opponents, on the other side of the pitch, lay gasping like fish for air, their lungs on fire, bleeding from gashed knees and scraped shins and elbows.

  Ian’s team occasionally found themselves a goal or two behind at half-time, but they never once lost: the second half of every one of the friendlies they played during that summer became a clinical annihilation of the opposition, because they developed a new style of play, languid and skilful, based on accurate passing and control. They worked the ball in intricate patterns indirectly forward, and their opponents ran themselves into the ground chasing after the ball’s shadow, so that it was as if they were playing the game as it had been played during the days when it was first shown on television, as grandfather described, when there were never less than two balls on the pitch.

  It was Ian who masterminded their new approach from his position as sweeper, and every week he obtained more satisfaction from the game he loved, as a dream unfolded in reality before him. At the beginning of the summer they were watched by the usual handful of spectators: Gerry, their manager, with his bucket and sponge; two or three of the most loyal wives or girlfriends, sweltering in the heat; some younger lads who longed to grow big enough to get into the team, including Johnathan, the would-have-been 16th Viscount, who kicked his football across the fields to watch in silence, talking to no-one because he was scared they’d make fun of his undisguisable accent. He was the one who persuaded me to go along, and I did, not because I wanted to watch grown men thump a piece of leather round a field but because it was an opportunity to be with Johnathan without it being in secret, since no-one else from our village went to the matches. The only other spectator was a rusty-coloured dog from the bungalows opposite Christow village hall, who escaped out of its house to come belting over to the touch-line, where it bided its time before dashing on to the pitch and attempting to bite the ball.

  Gradually, though, people waking from their Devonian siestas began to trickle down through the village in time for the second half, and as the summer wore on the touchline became lined with spectators, and by then I was glad to be among them since I’d come to see that it
really was the beautiful game Ian had always claimed it to be. I in turn told the Rector, so that in the end he drove me over in his Triumph Vitesse, picking up Johnathan by the old Lodge gates.

  The following season, watched by a crowd of rarely less than a hundred supporters at every home game, Christow were to win Division Two of the Exeter and District League without losing a single match (though they were knocked out of the Cup by their arch-rivals in a game of unprecedented violence, that came to be known as the Mudbath of Teign Village); and when, some years later, the World Cup was illuminated by the beautiful football of the Africans, football followers in our part of the country were confused, because they recognized ‘the Christow style’.

  After the games, Ian never stayed to shower with his mates or swill lager with them in the Artichoke. He came straight home and ran a scalding bath so deep that when he lowered his body into it the water spilled over the rim of the tub. He lay there half an hour or more, the water restoring peace to his limbs, reliving the game in his mind’s eye and imagining further improvements to his team’s tactics, which he would suggest at the following Wednesday evening training session. From the moment he’d finished work Ian’s Saturdays adhered to an unchanging pattern. He finally climbed out of the bath, the fingers and toes of his wiry, tanned body all wrinkled, and wrapped a towel around his waist. He didn’t bother to dry himself, because in the heat of that summer drops of water evaporated on his skin and his hair shaped itself into loose brown curls, while he shaved.