The Restraint of Beasts

by Magnus Mills

  We continued work on the cross fence as best we could while the rain showed no sign of letting up. By mid-afternoon, however, discussions about posts and wire began to be interrupted by talk of ‘tonight’, even though I for one was still feeling the after-effects of the night before. Richie had taken over the post hammer again, and this time I was his assistant while Tam did the fetching and carrying. I asked Richie how his hangover was.

  He looked at me. “What hangover?”

  “Haven’t you got one then?” I said. I could tell by his expression that he had no idea what I was talking about, so I abandoned the conversation.

  On one of Tam’s trips he seemed to take longer than usual to return, and we began to wonder what had happened to him. Finally, coming up the slope carrying a load of posts, we spotted what appeared to be a fertilizer sack on legs. It laid the posts out along the fence, ignoring us completely, and retreated down the hill again. Shortly afterwards the figure returned with another load. By this time Richie and I were having difficulty concentrating on what we were doing. Tam had evidently got fed up with being soaked through and decided to make himself a waterproof out of a heavy duty plastic fertilizer sack he’d found under a seat in the truck. He’d cut holes for his arms and head, while his legs protruded out of the open end. He had made the neck hole as small as possible to prevent water getting in, and then forced his head through without bothering to untrap his hair, so that it resembled a medieval helmet.

  In this guise Tam marched up to where me and Richie stood looking.

  “Something funny?” he said.

  “No, no,” replied Richie.

  “Well get on with your work then,” he snapped.

  We obeyed, and he set off down the hill again. Shortly after this incident Richie lost control of the post hammer during a particularly violent swing, and I decided it was time to swap jobs.

  And so we slogged on, spending our Saturday afternoon working on a drenched hillside, until we had had enough. Then we followed the line of posts to the bottom of the hill, and walked round to where the truck was waiting. The three of us sat in the cab for a few minutes while Tam and Richie had their first ‘dry’ fag for several hours, and then I started the engine and we trundled slowly back down the track towards the caravan. We were just about to turn into the farmyard when our eyes fell on something that hadn’t been there this morning. Along the side of the track, from the farmyard to the front gate, someone had built a brand new fence. It was strong and straight, and the wires gleamed in the half light of dusk.

  “Where the fuck did that come from?” said Richie.

  Tam stamped his feet. “The Hall Brothers have been here!” he announced.

  “You don’t know that for sure,” I replied, but I suspected he was right.

  “Bet it was them,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

  We got out of the truck and examined the mystery fence. It was a smart, classy job. The style was different to ours: they’d used mild steel netting instead of high-tensile wires. Also, the posts were round in cross-section, whereas we always worked with square ones. But we could not fault the fence itself. It was perfectly straight, the wire was tight, and the posts were firm in the ground.

  “Look at this,” said Richie.

  He had come across a silver tag attached to one of the posts, indented with some lettering: HALL BROS.

  So now we knew.

  ∨ The Restraint of Beasts ∧

  Six

  “Told you it was them!” shouted Tam. He was practically dancing around.

  “There must be four of them,” said Richie.

  Yes, I thought, there must indeed be four of them. How else could they have got the job done so quickly? Not only had they built this new fence, but they had also demolished the old ruined one that was there beforehand, and taken away all the scrap timber and wire. What was most disconcerting though, was that they had been here while we’d been working away up on that hill, and we had never even known. All that rain had meant the cloudbase was very low and we’d been more or less cut off from the rest of the world all day. Furthermore, this was the first time we hadn’t come down off the hill for lunch. Usually we trooped back at midday for a rest, even though it went against Donald’s Code of Practice (he said it was an inefficient waste of time). Today, however, because we started late, we took sandwiches with us. (If you could call them sandwiches, that is. Richie made them. Pieces of bread separated by cheese would be a better description.) We’d loaded up the truck with enough posts and wire for a day’s work, and hadn’t returned since. That was, what? Seven hours. And now here was a shiny new fence, built out of the blue while our backs were turned. The confounded cheek of these people! The Hall Brothers had acted as if they owned the place. What if we’d come back and caught them at it? They must have known we were around: there was a huge stack of timber and stuff right nearby in the farmyard. And what was Mr Perkins doing hiring two sets of contractors to work on one farm? Playing the field? I suppose the Hall Brothers had as much right to be there as we did, but even so, it was three distracted fencers who sat brooding in the caravan that evening. It seemed to have affected Tam a great deal, and he was full of speculation.

  “Do you think they get paid more, or less, than us because there’s four of them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “Because if they divide the money up four ways there’ll be less each, but they can get more done at a time, so there’s more to divide.”

  “We don’t even know if there are four,” I said.

  “Oh, it’ll be four alright. Four brothers.”

  “You certain about that?”

  “They always come in fours,” he said. “With a year between them.”

  “It could be three brothers and their father,” I suggested.

  “No,” he replied. “That would be Hall and Sons.”

  Now Richie joined in. “How come Donald can afford to send us all the way down here and still make a profit, when people like the Hall Brothers are around?”

  “It’s all a question of scale,” I explained. “We’re doing a big project fencing off the whole of that hill. The Hall Brothers’ fence is only a short little thing, isn’t it?”

  Nods of approval.

  “They probably don’t even know how to do high-tensile fencing,” I went on. “We’re supposed to be specialists, after all.”

  This seemed to satisfy Tam and Richie. Following all that questioning, it was a relief when the conversation reverted to the usual talk of going out, and Tam asked me when I was getting ready. I decided it would be a good idea to avoid the Queen’s Head tonight. Besides which, Tam and Richie had been making it clear they’d like to go back to that last town we passed through on the way down. Donald didn’t really like us to go too far afield in the truck, but I thought, “How will he know?”

  Anyway, we could easily stick a couple of extra gallons of diesel in the truck to cover the mileage. So I pre-empted them and suggested going into town. As long as Richie drove. Again he showed not the slightest objection, so it was agreed. Tam had by now removed his fertilizer bag, so we put the pan on to boil and repeated last night’s performance with the bucket, one after the other, until we were all ready to go out. As we left the farm we tried to splatter some mud on the Hall Brothers’ new fence.

  We found a few good pubs that night, but unfortunately Tam and Richie didn’t have the patience to remain in any of them more than the length of time it took to drink one pint. On this occasion they forgot to mention that the beer was weak, even though it came from the same brewery as the Queen’s Head. The whole population of the town seemed to be on the move. Just the same as any other English small town on a Saturday night. There were crowds of people herding from one pub to another like wildebeest in the rainy season. With us three following them. After a few hours in this town we almost knew our way round. We’d also found out that the ‘big deal’ here was a night club called Carmens (Saturdays and Wednesda
ys). There were flyers advertising it all over the place, and we also heard it mentioned in various pubs.

  “That’s where we’ll go,” said Tam, as we sat in the Six Bells.

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “Why not?” Tam and Richie both looked at me in disbelief.

  “Cos we’ve got to work tomorrow,” I replied.

  “Fuck work,” said Tam.

  “We’ll come Wednesday,” I heard myself say, and they accepted the offer. Shortly after that we managed to lose Richie. I’m not sure how it happened, but one minute he was trailing along behind me and Tam, then suddenly he was gone. I suspect he dodged up a side alley for a slash without saying anything, and it had taken longer than he expected to get mobile again, by which time he’d lost us. Tam was most agitated when we discovered that Richie was missing, and wanted to trace our steps back to every pub we’d visited during the evening. I pointed out that it would make just as much sense looking in all the pubs we hadn’t tried yet. No, I argued, it would be better staying put in one pub until he found us. We tried this for a while, but Tam went to the doorway and looked out so many times that in the end I got fed up and agreed to go in search of Richie.

  “Maybe he’s gone to Carmens,” I suggested.

  Tam looked at me. “On his own?” he said.

  I thought about this. “No, I suppose not,” I conceded.

  Eventually we found him sitting in the truck, on his own, in the dark.

  “I’ve been here an hour,” he complained.

  I had hoped that the reunion would have the necessary calming effect on Tam, but both he and Richie were so bothered at having lost all that valuable drinking time that I knew there would be no peace until we got to another pub. We just made it as normal drinking hours came to an end, in a pub that was obviously on the wildebeest circuit, judging by the press of excited bodies. Everybody in town, apparently, was going to Carmens. As usual Tam and Richie did nothing to make contact with any women in the vicinity and merely sat side by side on a bench holding their pints.

  Before we could go home Tam insisted on getting fish and chips. By the time he’d queued and got served the beer had begun to affect his judgement, so he ordered all the extras and came out of the shop with enough chips for several men.

  We stood outside on the pavement, swaying on that Saturday night in a bleak and windy small town street. Opposite the chippie was a parade of other shops, all with their shutters pulled down. The shop we all noticed was the one with the big sign across the front: HALL BROTHERS QUALITY MEATS.

  “For fuck sake, they’re fucking butchers as well!” yelled Tam, hurling his spare chips across the street.

  ♦

  Getting up for work on Sunday morning was even worse than Saturday. The rain had eased up into a drizzle, which meant never being sure whether it was worth wearing waterproofs or not. If you did wear them, you sweated so much that you still ended up wet through anyway. This was a problem only for me, of course. Richie’s work jeans were still wet from yesterday because he’d forgotten to dry them over the gas fire. He went ahead and wore them all the same, and sat eating his cornflakes with steam slowly rising from his legs. Tam opted for the fertilizer bag again. We were sitting in the caravan trying not to think about going out in the wet. The carpet was damp since there was nowhere to put our boots outside the door, so we’d started wearing them inside as well. The fire was flickering because Tam had lit his fags off it so many times that the gauze was burnt through and didn’t glow evenly. As soon as we went outside we knew we’d have water trickling down our necks for the rest of the day. And we still had the biggest part of the job ahead of us. The cross-fence would be finished sometime today, once we got all the wires pulled out and tightened up. After that we had to build a long fence encircling the foot of the hill, to close off the four quarters we’d made. There were also a number of gates to hang, so that stock could be moved between the different areas. I decided to complete the cross-fence, and then work our way round the foot of the hill, section by section. It was about ten before we got going properly, which I suppose was not bad for a Sunday morning. But we all seemed to be running out of energy. I stood by the unwinder and watched it as Tam towed yet another wire up the hill. Slowly and sporadically it turned as he made his way up and over the summit. It stopped. Then it continued a few turns. Then it stopped again. I waited. I guessed that Tam must have met Richie, who was working back the other way fixing the previous wire onto the posts. I wondered how long I should give them to exchange greetings. After a minute I grabbed the wire and gave it a jerk. The unwinder started to turn again. Then it stopped. I came to the conclusion that they must be having a fag. It was at such times that I seriously considered taking up smoking myself, just to pass the time.

  In this haphazard way we progressed into the afternoon, and started work on the long encircling fence.

  Which is when Richie managed, inevitably I suppose, to break the post hammer. My fault again. I should have insisted Tam did all the post driving. After all, as I said before, he was best at it. Specialization would have been more efficient: Richie digging, Tam hammering, and me supervising (and doing joinery). But somehow Richie had got hold of the post hammer again, and begun to get over-confident. I watched in slow motion as he brought the shaft down full whack on top of a post, so that the head broke off with a loud crack.

  “Fuck,” he said, but I think he was more concerned about what Tam would say than about the damage to the hammer itself. That was my problem. We still had quite a few posts to knock in along this section before it could be wired up. Now I was going to have to find Tam and Richie other things to do while I went and got the hammer repaired. This involved seeking out a joiner’s shop (there wouldn’t be one open until Monday), leaving the hammer for repair, and then going back for it. Yes, I know we should have had a spare hammer with us, but you can’t cover every contingency. Mending it ourselves was out of the question. The shaft had to fit perfectly, and I’d seen for myself many times before the consequences of working with a badly repaired post hammer. No. The job had to be done by a proper joiner who knew what he was doing.

  Just then Tam came walking along the fence line. He took one look at the broken hammer and said, “Ha. Call yourself a fencer?”

  “Don’t look at me,” I replied.

  Tam glanced at Richie, who was reaching for something in his shirt pocket, and said no more about it.

  ∨ The Restraint of Beasts ∧

  Seven

  An air of gloom hung over our camp when we returned that evening. I could really have done without this. While the post hammer was broken we would have to spend all our time digging holes for straining posts. This meant Tam and Richie having to work separately, and I’d already found that they coped much better when they were in sight of each other. (Even though they stopped for a fag break every time their paths crossed.) There was the possibility of having them work two-to-a-hole, but this was another practice which Donald had banned as inefficient. I could see there was a danger of work grinding to a halt unless I could get the post hammer repaired quickly. The weather wasn’t helping matters either. It had now settled into what I call mizzle, and it was getting dark slightly earlier every day.

  The thing I wasn’t in the mood for was a discussion about what we were doing tonight, and Tam and Richie seemed to sense this. We sat in our three corners of the caravan, serenaded by Richie’s stretching tape. All around me was encroaching squalor. Fortunately, much of it was hidden because the gas lights were so dim. Which is why, presumably, Richie had now abandoned An Early Bath for Thompson. Night after night he’d struggled with it, holding the book in all manner of positions under his lamp as he tried to have a read. Finally he gave up and shoved it back in the cupboard where it came from.

  “What a fucking way to spend a Sunday night,” he said.

  All this set the pattern for the next few days. Having given Tam and Richie some very specific tasks I went off the following morning in s
earch of a joiner. All I had for guidance was Donald’s photocopied road map. I was reluctant to go all the way back into town, so I set off in the other direction, hoping to come across somewhere suitable. Yes, not far along the road I would find a workshop, a busy efficient place where there would just happen to be a craftsman at a loose end who could fix the post hammer right away. Some hope. I drove for miles and found nothing. Eventually, after a bit of asking round, I was directed to some lock-up premises at one end of a converted bakery. Apparently they were let to a joiner who did most of his work elsewhere, but I might catch him if I was lucky. I wasn’t. A sign on the door said he would be back later. I put a note through the letterbox saying I’d left a broken post hammer behind the dustbin and could he fix it please? I didn’t have time to do anything else. On the way back I stopped at the general store to get some more food and stuff, and then returned to find Tam and Richie sitting in the caravan. They’d taken an early lunch.

  “I’d have thought you’d want to get the job done as soon as possible so we can get home,” I said.

  “Why should we do all the work while you go riding round in the truck?” said Tam.

  “I had to get the post hammer fixed,” I pointed out.

  “That’s not work,” he replied.