Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  ‘He don’t need you to tell him that,’ his wife said.

  Devlin almost laughed, and he slowly swung the rifle from the woman to her husband.

  Seeing this, Skelton shook his head and said, ‘Go on then, son, do us all a big favour and pull the trigger.’ He spread his arms, opening the front of his jacket.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t encourage him,’ his wife shouted.

  ‘He won’t fire,’ Skelton said. ‘He’s not got that in him, either. In fact, I doubt if he ever—’

  And before the man could say any more, Devlin raised the rifle a few inches and pulled the trigger and Skelton shouted and clutched the top of his arm.

  ‘The little bastard’s only gone and shot me,’ he said. He inspected the cloth of his jacket and shirt and then the palm of his hand for any sign of blood.

  ‘He drawn any blood?’ his wife said.

  ‘Not that I can see.’

  It seemed yet another insult to Devlin.

  ‘He still fired it. He still threatened you and then aimed it and fired it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Skelton shouted at her.

  There was a moment of silence.

  ‘What?’ the woman said eventually.

  Skelton pulled a finger from beneath his armpit. The faintest smear of red. ‘He did, he shot me. That’s a first.’

  ‘And there’ll be a hole. Two holes,’ the woman said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In your jacket, your shirt.’

  Skelton took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeve. The small-calibre bullet had grazed him. Nothing had entered his flesh.

  ‘I can feel it,’ he said. ‘The bullet. In my shirt. You stupid, vicious little bastard. You think the law are going to ignore something like this? I was giving you a chance up until this, but now you’ve got everything you deserve coming to you.’ He spat on his finger and wiped his small wound. Then he rolled down his sleeve and put on his jacket.

  The man and the woman went back to the lorry and climbed inside. Skelton shouted for his struggling wife to get a fucking move on.

  Beside the doorway, Devlin propped the rifle by his leg and raised his arm to wave at them. And he stood like that, still waving, until the lorry left the yard and turned back along the top of the embankment in the direction of the Spalding road.

  2

  HE CAME BACK to the abandoned tin chapel at the end of the Bystall Bank road. It was another hot day and he carried a sack. Sweat ran in circles beneath his eyes and in lines across his cheeks to his chin. He stopped at the first sight of the sea beyond the road. All around him boundaries were lost and the sea, land and sky were confused in a shimmer of heat haze.

  A distant figure stood at the chapel wall and Devlin dropped his sack and crouched behind a low bank of levelled thorn. It was unlikely that the man would have seen him from that distance. A few sheep grazed the open marsh on either side of the isolated building.

  Devlin lit a cigarette and lay back, careful not to let the smoke form above him.

  When he looked ten minutes later, the figure was gone. Devlin searched all around him, but saw nothing. The dry clay where he lay stained his clothing and he brushed at this, but to little effect.

  He waited a few minutes longer, then picked up the sack and continued towards the chapel. The disused path ended as he walked and the marsh grass felt soft beneath his boots. The sheep raised their heads to watch him, but none of them was alarmed by his sudden presence among them.

  He waited again at the toppled fencing which had once marked out a small graveyard and searched the open land beyond for whoever might have been there. The high sun was reflected in the remains of the chapel’s only window, most of which was broken and gone.

  The grass between where he stood and the chapel door had been recently cut. When he’d left the building six hours earlier, the stems had risen to his knees; now everything was flat and drying.

  He went to the seaward side of the building and pushed at a piece of loose sheeting to let himself inside. At the height of the day, the place was like an oven, and even now, late in the afternoon, it remained uncomfortably warm. Throughout the night, the tin walls and roof cracked and ticked as the flimsy structure cooled.

  He went to one of the few remaining benches and stretched out on this. A lidless drum full of water stood beside the simple pulpit. Devlin dipped a jar into the drum and poured the water over his face, repeating this several times before examining the jar and drinking from it.

  ‘I knew it would be somebody.’ The voice came from the door end of the chapel.

  Devlin froze, and then continued drinking. ‘It’s always somebody or other,’ he said. He turned slowly to see an old man holding a scythe, its blade on the floor between his feet.

  ‘I saw you coming along the sea road. You saw me at the grass and so you stopped. You waited and smoked. Then you thought I’d gone, so you come on.’ The man came to another of the benches and lowered himself on to it. ‘Old bones,’ he said. He propped the scythe against the wall.

  ‘Who are you, then?’ Devlin said. ‘Old Father Time?’

  ‘I’ve heard that said often enough. That or the Grim Reaper. Take your pick. I keep an eye on the place, that’s all.’

  ‘What for? Been deserted for as long as anybody can remember.’

  ‘Fourteen years, not that long. Nineteen forty. Wartime regulations. Cleared the congregation out to Friskney or Wrangle. Happy to go, most of them.’

  ‘So why bother now?’

  ‘My father used to preach here. My mother was treasurer for the Chapel Guild. She was baptized in the sea here. Name’s Samuel. I was supposed to inherit wisdom.’

  ‘I see,’ Devlin said. He didn’t, not really.

  The old man half raised his hand and then lowered it. Then he indicated the jar Devlin still held. ‘I wouldn’t mind a taste of that.’

  Devlin refilled the jar and went to him.

  ‘It’s warm,’ Samuel said.

  ‘What were you expecting?’

  Samuel shrugged and went on drinking, handing the jar back to Devlin to fill again. Water ran down his chin on to the vest he wore.

  ‘You got one of them fags going begging?’

  Devlin gave him one and lit another for himself.

  ‘Where you get your tobacco?’ Samuel said.

  ‘Scrounged, mostly.’

  ‘Tastes it.’

  Devlin shook his head at the remark.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Smith,’ Devlin said. He tapped his nose. ‘Keep that out.’

  ‘I had three brothers,’ Samuel said. ‘Solomon, Amos and Isaiah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just saying. How long you been sleeping here?’

  ‘Who says I’m sleeping here? Hardly a hotel, is it?’

  ‘That’s your blanket pushed up the back. The place is full of empty tins, bottles and ash. Somebody’s sleeping here, and I’m guessing by the state of you that it’s you.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Devlin said. He brushed again at the clay on his legs and arms. ‘It’s only a bit of mud.’

  ‘And the rest,’ Samuel said. ‘Don’t worry, son, I know when to keep it buttoned. You’re on hard times, that’s all, and we’ve all known them.’

  Devlin wanted to tell him that he’d got it all wrong. ‘Hard times all round,’ he said.

  Three weeks had passed since he’d left the Harrap place. And in all that time, no one had come looking for him. All of Skelton’s threats had evaporated into thin air.

  On the day he’d gone, he’d walked seven miles; the next, four. He’d considered following the Witham to Tattershall and landing at his sister’s place. But he hadn’t seen the woman for three years, and he doubted her husband hated him any less for all that passed time. Absence and the heart and all that. And so instead he’d turned at Boston and followed the signs for Wainfleet. At the end of the second day he’d fallen asleep in a sluice shed, and when he’d
woken he’d seen the chapel in the distance, remembered it from his solitary Sunday-school visit as a child, and had come to it as though it were a sign, a beckoning, comfortable home.

  The smoke from the cigarettes filled the warm air above the two men and was marbled in the dim light. In Devlin’s mind, he had left Harrap’s of his own free will. No one had followed him and no one was looking. The tie was severed and that was all that mattered. And every day that passed convinced him further of this. That bastard of a bailiff had said nothing to nobody. And certainly not about his scratched arm. And why hadn’t he said anything? Because he’d be a laughing-stock, that’s why; stood to reason. You could get injured worse than that any night of the week in any bar between Grantham and Lynn. And besides, he probably wasn’t even supposed to have had that fat tart of a wife in tow. Probably breaking half a dozen regulations just by having her stick her nose into the official proceedings.

  ‘Soldiers,’ the old man said unexpectedly, drawing Devlin back to him.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’ve had it harder than most. Do your bit, did you?’

  Devlin nodded.

  ‘You hardly look of an age.’

  ‘I’m twenty-nine,’ Devlin said, making his own quick calculation.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Germany. Crossing of the Rhine. You heard about that, I suppose?’

  ‘Heard about it all, one way or another. You settle to anything since?’

  Devlin leaned forward, his head low, his eyes on the floor. ‘You ask a lot of questions,’ he said.

  ‘I suppose I do. It’s not even as though I don’t already know the answers to most of them. I’m sixty-nine. If I don’t know it all by now, when will I? You’re here, aren’t you? As far as I can see, all you’ve got to show for the past nine years is a blanket, the clothes you’re stood up in and whatever else you’re humping around in that sack.’ He nodded at the sack still standing beside the loose panel.

  ‘Potatoes, mostly,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Be the size of peas this time of year.’

  ‘They are.’

  Neither man spoke for a moment.

  ‘I look after the sheep,’ Samuel said eventually. ‘Out on the marsh. Lambing time. Used to be a full-time job before the war came along. Now they only want me at lambing, and sometimes to help at the markets. There’s still every shortage you’d care to mention and yet the price of mutton is half what it was ten years ago. It makes no sense. Or if it does, then it makes no sense to me.’ He paused and looked away from Devlin. ‘You get any idea about touching one of them and I’d be obliged to bring the law to you.’

  ‘Everybody threatens the same.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I’m serious. There’s still a Police House in Wainfleet. They’d be here in the hour.’

  ‘But only once you’d spent three hours walking to get them,’ Devlin said.

  ‘There is that. What, and you’d be long gone by then?’

  ‘What do you think? Stop worrying. Killing a sheep – more trouble than it’s worth. Not at today’s prices.’

  It was a joke and Samuel smiled. ‘My daughter’s eldest was out there. Italy. Killed. You can’t begin to imagine the grief that landed on us all. Buried over there. She hasn’t so much as laid a bunch of flowers on his grave. Imagine that. Nineteen, he was. Same as you, probably, when you did your bit. Grief like you was living in a constant storm of wind and rain. A year to the day, she tried to kill herself. Cut her wrist. Boston hospital for two months. They wanted to move her to a place towards Gainsborough, but I told them I wasn’t having any of that. Been looking after her more or less ever since. Her husband – call him that – went off with a woman from Grantham way. Biggest waste of space I ever knew.’

  ‘You hear it a lot,’ Devlin said, as though he too had a tale as dark and as all-consuming waiting to be told.

  ‘I suppose you do,’ Samuel said. ‘I cut the grass over at Saint Margaret’s, and once a fortnight at Saint Mary’s. Summer work, mostly. The winters are long.’

  The names meant nothing to Devlin.

  ‘Keep yourself busy, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Not exactly the life and soul, are you?’

  ‘And you are?’

  Samuel laughed again. ‘No, I don’t suppose I am, come to think of it. Overrated, happiness.’ He handed the empty jar back to Devlin. ‘I wouldn’t mind another.’

  Devlin fetched him more water.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Do?’ Devlin said.

  ‘When you leave here. I don’t suppose you’re planning to live here for ever.’

  ‘I’m waiting to see what turns up,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Oh, that always happens. Good or ill, something always turns up. Good or ill, there’s always something coming along the road towards you. I suppose all your plans are gone. My daughter’s boy, he wanted to be an engineer. Studying for the work when he got his call-up. He said we had to build for the future. Every word he said, you could believe in. When he was killed, all that went with him. Her, me, everybody. Each time I go out, I tell her when I’ll be back, and then I have to make sure I get back to the house on the dot. Sometimes, when I’m early, I go and sit somewhere and wait. Speaking of which …’ He rose stiffly to his feet. ‘I ache in every joint,’ he said. ‘You can hear me creaking.’ He stood and flexed his shoulders, swinging his thin arms. ‘I suppose I should wish you luck, but the stuff’s in short supply these days, especially for the likes of you and me. And even when it does show its face, it rarely comes up to muster.’

  ‘You got that right,’ Devlin said.

  The old man walked to the chapel door. ‘You want to draw your water from beyond the Bystall pump. Cleaner. That stuff you’re drinking will sicken you in a week.’

  ‘I’ll be long gone by then,’ Devlin said.

  Samuel pushed open the chapel door and stood framed in the afternoon light. ‘I can’t even ask you back for a proper night’s sleep and some decent rations,’ he said. ‘The girl. Strangers, see?’

  Devlin said he understood.

  ‘We all have our cross to bear,’ Samuel said. He looked hard at Devlin for a moment, and then at the building around him. ‘You wouldn’t believe how full this place used to get on Chapel anniversaries, celebration days.’

  After that, he let himself out.

  When Devlin went to the doorway a few minutes later, the old man was a distant figure on the bank road, already half lost in the heat, and looking to Devlin as though he were legless, somehow floating above the lost course of his own path home.

  3

  DEVLIN WENT TO retrieve his rabbit gun. He hadn’t been thinking straight on the day he’d gone from Harrap’s, but straight enough to know that if either Harrap or Skelton had set the police on him, they would be easier to dodge without the actual weapon in his hand. He was a smarter man than most, and certainly smarter than either Skelton or Harrap would ever give him credit for.

  But approaching the Outmarsh Bank, he knew even from a mile away, from beyond the old brickworks, that everything was wrong, that everything had changed since he’d hidden the gun.

  A dozen pieces of earth-moving machinery – bulldozers, mostly, and a pair of bucket dredgers – were lined up across the top of the bank above the drain, and at least a hundred men either sat on these or worked across the nearby slope.

  He drew closer, until the noise of the machinery and shouting voices filled the air. He climbed the bank and watched the slow progress of the dredgers, their belts of buckets scooping the heavy grey clay from the water and laying it behind them in a saturated trail.

  He had hidden the rifle inside a pile of pipes beside a deserted brick-built store a hundred yards from the old pump. Now there were no pipes and no store and no pump. Everything had been flattened, churned to mud and then flattened again. The land for another hundred yards on all sides was criss-crossed with the pattern of the gia
nt tyres.

  He went closer to where the store had been. Not even its foundations remained. A convoy of lorries carried lengths of cast-concrete piping to the drain alongside him. The men sitting on these looked down at him where he stood, and Devlin watched them go by.

  A solitary man wearing a shirt and tie beneath his overalls and carrying a rolled chart walked a short distance behind the final lorry. He came to Devlin and stopped beside him.

  ‘Lost something?’

  ‘There used to be a shed here.’

  ‘Used to be.’ The man swung his chart from side to side.

  Devlin considered the distant men for a moment. ‘You’re widening the drain,’ he said.

  ‘Among other things. Should have been done decades ago. The flooding, see?’

  The flood had come last winter, covering a wide area, drowning livestock, ruining livelihoods, killing people.

  ‘What happened to the shed?’

  The man shrugged. ‘You looking for work?’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  The man nodded at the men now gathering by the lorries. ‘Labouring, mostly. The machinery does most of it these days and you won’t be let anywhere near any of that.’ He stamped his feet on the ground as though testing something. ‘Well?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ Devlin said. ‘For a few weeks. I could use the money.’

  ‘Everybody gets paid a week in arrears. You got your cards?’

  Devlin shook his head. ‘Lost everything in the flooding. I’m still waiting for them to come through.’ He surprised himself at the ease with which the lie came.

  ‘We’ve been told to take on casuals. Locals.’

  ‘That’s me,’ Devlin said. ‘Both counts.’ He held out his hand to the man.

  ‘You ever done this kind of work before?’

  ‘Worked all my life on the land. Apart from a bit of soldiering.’

  The last remark made the man look up at him. ‘We’ve all done a bit of that,’ he said. ‘One way or another.’ He leaned to one side and looked up and down the drain, sighting something along his outstretched arm. ‘See that man standing on the bonnet of that lorry? Foreman. Go and see him. Tell him Mister Tindall can vouch for you.’