The Restraint of Beasts

by Magnus Mills

  “This is where we stood,” he said. He took out a pencil and wrote WE STOOD on the map. Then he swept his hand across the bottom corner.

  “This land here’s ours,” he said. “And it needs a new boundary fence. Perkins says it’s our responsibility. The lads did some the other day, but they’ve gone off now.”

  He didn’t explain why or where they’d gone. He folded the map and pushed it towards me.

  “You’ll have to do the rest,” he said.

  “Does Mr Perkins know you’ve approached us?” I asked.

  “None of his business,” he replied.

  I made one more attempt to hold out. “Our boss won’t like it,” I said.

  He raised his voice. “What’s the matter with you? You’re getting beer, grubbage and cash in hand. What more could you want?”

  A couple of people at the bar were now looking in our direction.

  I turned to Tam and Richie. “Alright?”

  They both nodded.

  “Alright then,” I said to Mr Hall. He grunted and ordered more drinks. So there I was, committed. Which meant we were going to be at Upper Bowland for even longer. I don’t think Tam and Richie had thought about this part of the equation. All they were interested in was the cash Mr Hall was going to pay us. As soon as he’d dropped us off at the caravan they began talking as if we were going to land a windfall. They seemed to forget all the extra work we would have to do. Mr Hall was their benefactor, and after all the beer he’d bought them they would not have a word spoken against him.

  “We’ll be in trouble if Donald finds out,” I said.

  “We won’t tell him, will we?” replied Tam.

  I supposed not. I had to admit the idea of a bit of extra cash in hand was attractive, and if we got stuck in over the weekend we could easily get the work done by Monday.

  Even so, I had the usual trouble dragging them out of bed the following morning. We were supposed to meet Mr Hall’s brother David along the road at eight o’clock. We needed to get going before that though because the first thing we had to do was go up onto the hill and get our tools. We got to the roadside meeting place on time, and the brother turned up at ten past eight in a small flatbed lorry loaded with posts and wire. He was like a slightly deflated version of John Hall, only much more cheerful. In fact he seemed to have a constant line of banter.

  “Hoo hoo!” he chimed through the cab window as he pulled up. “Beer and skittles, eh lads? Ha ha!”

  Tam and Richie took to him instantly, even though he declined the offer of a fag. Personally I thought he went on a bit too much. He kept making jokes about fencing which involved parrying with an imaginary sword and shouting en garde every few minutes. As far as our sort of fencing was concerned, I was unable to picture him swinging a post hammer or digging holes. However, he was a pleasant enough bloke, and obliged us by driving the lorry slowly along the proposed fence line while Tam and Richie threw the posts off the back.

  The fence itself looked like a straightforward enough piece of work. After David Hall had gone Tam went marching about chanting “Easy! Easy!” at the top of his voice. He was right, it was easy. But it was also going to be a boring slog. We were used to building fences over sloping land and difficult terrain.

  That was our speciality after all. This fence, though, just went on and on along the edge of the Hall Brothers’ land. It was all flat. There were also a hell of a lot of posts to put in. Unlike the high-tensile fence we were building on the hill, this was a conventional wire-netting job. The posts had to be two yards apart to support the net, which meant there were four hundred of them! By the middle of the afternoon, knocking in post after post after post, the monotony was getting to us. Tam had taken to counting how many posts were already in, and how many were left to do. This seemed to make matters worse.

  “That’s one hundred and forty seven,” he would announce, as another post was completed. “Three more and it’s a hundred and fifty.”

  And so on. I began to wonder if all this was really worth it. The only advantage I could see was that Tam would be solvent again when Mr Hall paid us on Monday. Which would take the pressure off me to keep providing subs, especially as now Richie was running short too, having himself lent so much to Tam. It suddenly struck me that we were expecting to get paid as soon as we finished the work. What if Mr Hall held out for a while before settling up? We hadn’t thought of that. I didn’t mention the possibility to Tam and Richie in case it affected their workrate. I didn’t want them to lose their momentum so that we ended up with two uncompleted jobs on our hands. My suspicions deepened that evening when David Hall came by with several pounds of sausages for us. I hoped the Hall Brothers were not going to try to fob us off by paying us in kind. Tam and Richie, on the other hand, saw the sausages as a bonus, and when we got back to the caravan they began frying them for our tea.

  “Did you have to cook the whole lot?” I said, as Tam attended to a fully laden frying pan. He was stabbing the sausages one by one with a fork.

  “Yah,” he said. “There’s plenty more where these came from.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. From now on it’s gonna be beer and skittles for us.”

  “You mean cakes and ale.”

  Tam looked at me. “I know what I fucking mean.”

  It took us a while to recover from all those sausages, and the hard day’s work, but we eventually made it to the Queen’s Head, where the landlord stood us our first round of drinks and told us to call him Ron. It was as if our dealings with Mr Hall had bestowed on us some sort of special status. During the evening Tam and Richie were invited to make up the pub darts team, despite their having shown no previous interest in the game. I was left out, but I tried not to take this as a personal snub. When Tam rolled up his sleeves to play, I again looked at the words ‘I mascot’ tattoed on his arm. It came as no surprise that Tam’s throwing was fairly accurate, while Richie’s shots tended to be consistently wayward. It was a passable evening, but when we got home that night it was obvious that I was now the only one with any money left. And it was Saturday tomorrow.

  ♦

  I was wondering why Richie was taking such a long time to come back. This seemed to happen whenever I sent him off to do something. He was supposed to be working alone at the other end of Mr Hall’s fence, stapling the wire netting onto the new line of posts, and should have finished the job ages ago. Eventually, I walked back to see what was going on, and found him knocking the staples in with a large stone. I observed this primitive scene for a moment, and then asked him where his hammer was.

  He nodded towards the hill. “Up there.”

  “But we went up yesterday morning to get our tools,” I said.

  “I didn’t think I needed my hammer,” he replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Just didn’t.” He stood holding the stone.

  “Why didn’t you borrow Tam’s?” I asked.

  “He lost his last week. He’s been using mine ever since.”

  “He lost his hammer?”

  “Yep.”

  I took my own hammer from my belt and handed it to Richie.

  “Well, why didn’t you ask me?” I said.

  “I didn’t think you’d lend me yours. You wouldn’t let us borrow your can opener, would you?”

  “That was different.”

  In silence I walked back to where Tam was getting the next straining post dug in. He began working extra hard as I approached, and only stopped when I got right up to him.

  “Any chance of a sub tonight?” he said, straightening up.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Well, the usual, I suppose,” he replied.

  “It’s a loan, not a sub,” I said.

  Tam nodded. “That’s OK.”

  I was not particularly flush myself by now. Donald was being a bit tardy about getting the wages sent down. Still, I was doing all the business with Mr Hall, so as long as he paid up on time, I’d be able to reco
ver my money from Tam. I therefore agreed to a further loan.

  “Rich needs some as well,” he said.

  “Have you lost your hammer?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “How did you know that?” he said.

  “I just guessed,” I replied.

  There was a pause.

  “Are you going to give Rich a sub then?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “Right, I’ll go and tell him.” Next thing he was marching off along the fence line. I watched as Tam and Richie met up in the distance. There was a moment’s delay, and then Richie reached for something in his shirt pocket. A few seconds later a small cloud of smoke appeared above their heads.

  Each section of Mr Hall’s fence had to be finished off with a strand of barbed wire running along the top. Barbed wire was one of the worst materials I ever had to work with. It had a habit of curling off in its own direction if unrestrained, or of attaching itself to you like a spiky snake when you were trying to get it sorted out. It came in heavy coils that wouldn’t fit on the unwinder. Instead they had to be rolled out along the ground before the wire could be tightened and fastened. All very awkward. The first section of netting was complete, so I asked Tam to start rolling out some barb. He selected a coil and began to examine it closely, looking for the end of the wire. When I looked across a minute later he was still there, peering intently at the coil and slowly turning it round. I stopped what I was doing and watched him. At last he called me over.

  “This roll hasn’t got an end,” he announced.

  “It must have,” I replied.

  “Show me then.” He stood back and I took over the examination. Somewhere, hidden in all those multiple layers of wire, had to be an end. After several minutes I had to admit that I couldn’t find it either. This was ridiculous. All of us had started off any number of rolls of barbed wire, and had never had this trouble before. Yet this particular one was, apparently, without an end. Just then Richie came walking along the fence.

  “Got a fag, Rich?” said Tam.

  “Not now!” I snapped. “Let’s get this coil started first.”

  Richie said he would have a go, and began to study the coil. When he looked up from the puzzle and saw me and Tam watching him intently he got agitated and said he couldn’t do it with us there. So we went off and worked on the next section. After a few minutes we saw Richie rolling the coil out along the fence line.

  “You found it then?” I said.

  “Of course,” he replied. “Just needed a bit of perseverance, that’s all.”

  ♦

  Later that afternoon we came to a part of the boundary that ran along a dense hedgerow. Tam and Richie were supposed to have laid all the pointed posts out when they were throwing them off the back of David Hall’s lorry, but there was no sign of any along this section. I asked them where they were.

  “They’re over the other side of the hedge,” said Richie.

  “What are they doing there?” I asked.

  “We didn’t know which side the fence was going.”

  “Well, why didn’t you ask?”

  He shrugged. “Couldn’t be bothered.”

  I sent them off to bring the posts back round to this side. In the meantime I began to set out a straight line for us to work along.

  Tam and Richie had only been gone a few minutes when an irate voice spoke behind me.

  “What’s going on?”

  ∨ The Restraint of Beasts ∧

  Nine

  I turned towards the newcomer. “Pardon?”

  “I said what’s going on?” The man’s face, I noticed, was pink. His voice seemed familiar.

  “Mr Perkins?”

  “You know it’s Mr Perkins!” He appeared to be very angry about something.

  “Anything wrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t give me that!” he said. “You’re supposed to be working on my hill! I’ve just been up there and you’ve abandoned the job! It’s like the Retreat from Moscow!”

  “Well,” I said. “It’s not quite like that.”

  “Don’t tell me what it’s not quite like!!” he bellowed, taking a step towards me.

  At that moment a post came flying over the hedge and struck him on the back of the head. He made a further step forward and fell into my arms. At the same time another post, and then another, came hurtling over.

  “Who threw that?” I shouted.

  “Me, Rich!” came the reply.

  “Well, you’d better stop! You’ve just hit Mr Perkins!”

  The posts stopped coming over. I looked at Mr Perkins. He’d gone very quiet. In fact, he wasn’t just quiet, he was dead. I leaned him upright against the hedge, and he sank slowly back into the foliage. After a while Tam and Richie appeared, both carrying pointed posts on their shoulders.

  “We thought it would be quicker to throw them over,” said Tam.

  “It probably is,” I replied. “But you should be more careful. Look what Rich’s done.”

  Neither Tam nor Richie seemed to have noticed Mr Perkins standing in the hedgerow. When I nodded towards him they put down their posts and had a closer look.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” said Richie.

  “I know you didn’t,” I said.

  “What was he doing here?”

  “He’d come to complain about something.”

  All four of us stood there for a few moments.

  “What are we going to do with him?” asked Tam.

  “We’ll have to bury him, I suppose.”

  “But on his own land, not here,” suggested Richie.

  “Good point,” I replied. “We could put him under one of the new gateposts by the hill.” (Strictly speaking, we weren’t quite ready to hang any gates yet, but under the circumstances it was probably worth bringing the work forward.)

  “I could collect my hammer at the same time,” said Richie.

  We decided to sit Mr Perkins in the front of the truck between me and Richie, with Tam riding in the back. However, when we came to move him we found he wouldn’t bend into the correct position. So we put him in the back and drove him round to the bottom of the hill. All the proposed gateways had been marked out when Donald originally surveyed the job, so we chose the one we thought would be the most suitable for Mr Perkins and dug the post holes. After a short discussion we all agreed it was best to put him under the slamming post, rather than the hanging post, although none of us could come up with a particular reason why this should be so. Mr Perkins’s gateway looked quite nice when it was finished, even though it wouldn’t actually lead anywhere until the surrounding fences were complete.

  As we put the gear back in the truck a thought occurred to me.

  “He was dead, wasn’t he?”

  “I’m sure he was,” said Tam.

  “What about his sheep?”

  “They’ll be alright.”

  For some reason the conversation then came round to Mr McCrindle.

  “I wonder what Donald’s done about his account not being settled,” I said.

  “He’ll probably allow him three months’ grace,” said Richie. “That’s what usually happens.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “I live on a farm don’t I? They never pay their bills on time.”

  We considered what might happen in Mr Perkins’s case, and all agreed that his account would most likely be sent to his home address, and was therefore nothing to do with us.

  All this put us a bit behind with Mr Hall’s fence, so as soon as Richie had collected his hammer from up the slope, we went back down to the lower fields to get as much work done as possible before dark.

  Later on, when we were back in the caravan, Tam said to me, “Are you seeing your woman tonight, then?”

  “No, don’t think so,” I replied.

  “Too much for you, was she?”

  “Yeah. Too many hormones.”

  “We’ll go to the Queen’s Head then?”

&nb
sp; “Alright.” I didn’t particularly want to run into Marina again, nice girl as she was. Neither was I in the mood for long debates about where we were going to spend Saturday night. So the Queen’s Head suited me OK.

  “How much money have we got left?” Tam went on.

  “We?” I said.

  He was beginning to regard me as some kind of bank. I took some notes from my back pocket.

  “That’s all there is until Mr Hall pays up,” I said.

  “Bet you’ve got some more stashed away,” said Richie.

  “That’s got nothing to do with it,” I replied. “This is all the cash I’ve got.”

  “Third each,” said Tam.

  “Well, that’s it. After that, nothing, so don’t come running to me.” I counted out a third each for Tam and Richie, and pocketed the remainder. “Don’t forget we’ve nearly run out of food too,” I added.

  “Yah, we’ll get something,” was all Tam had to say. I noticed there was no mention of skittles and beer.

  All the same, we spent a moderate night in the pub. It seemed the message was finally getting through to Tam and Richie that the cupboard was bare. There was no free beer from any quarter this evening, and while the locals swilled at a rate appropriate for a Saturday night, Tam, Richie and me were forced to make each beer last an hour. Given the right conditions, this can be a very pleasant pastime. There is a certain art in allowing a newly poured pint of beer the correct amount of time to settle, and then savour every drop by drinking at a gentle pace. But this is only an enjoyable process when you can afford to buy another pint as soon as the previous one runs out. When it’s forced upon you by economic necessity it can become a grim affair. Tam and Richie certainly didn’t look as if they were enjoying their Saturday night much. It seemed a poor reward for all the work we’d done. Still, with a bit of luck, Mr Hall would come up with the money as soon as we finished his job. I suppose the alternative would have been just to drink at the normal rate until the cash ran out, and then go home. This would have meant going to bed about half past nine, which seemed a bit early. Instead, we eked out the evening as best we could, and hoped we would be able to summon the energy to finish off Mr Hall the next day.