The Lie of the Land

by Amanda Craig

  Any news about the bloods?

  The line on his mobile takes for ever to stretch across the top of the screen, but eventually pings off. It’s a small mystery, but one that nags at him.

  He looks around at the big white room, with its flat neon now supplemented by the rising sun seeping through the corrugated plastic skylights. It’s depressing to think that all this will continue, hour after hour and day after day, long after he’s gone, the ingredients arriving, being turned into processed food, being boxed up and transported, all through the labour of people who are invisible and voiceless, who though often sick or even mad must somehow ensure the highest standards of hygiene for the lowest legal wage. He doesn’t think he’ll ever eat another pie again, though the truth is, he’ll probably forget.

  Deep in his pocket his mobile quivers. When he takes a toilet break and checks, it’s from Bron.

  Hypothyroidism.

  Typical of Bron. What does it mean? Xan tries to look it up on Google, but no matter how he tries to get a signal again, the factory is sunk in a dead spot. Still, it must mean that Dawn is ill, as suspected. He must tell her, and her mother. If they know what she’s sick with, she can be cured.

  At the end of his last shift Xan catches her eye, smiles and jerks his head towards the exit to indicate that he wants to talk to her. She nods, slowly. Without the blue hairnet he can see how thin and lank her hair is. If he can just tell her what Bron has found from her blood sample, then he will have discharged any responsibility. It’s impossible, though: by the time he’s out, she has been collected by her mother.

  ‘Dawn!’ he calls, waving after Janet’s grey, dirt-speckled car as it turns out of the factory gates.

  ‘Got your eye on that, have you?’

  Xan turns, and sees Rod. He’s grinning in a way that, even without his words, would have told him that his old persecutor is spoiling for a fight. A retort rises to his lips, but he turns away to unlock his bicycle.

  ‘What do you want with her?’

  ‘I wanted to tell her something.’

  ‘Don’t bother. She’s a lazy slag, our Dawnie.’

  ‘She’s ill,’ Xan says. It’s an effort not to show Rod how much he detests him. ‘She needs help.’

  Rod grabs the handlebars of the bike, and thrusts his face forwards into Xan’s. Most of the factory workers are hurrying home, or getting into their cars, but some stop to watch.

  ‘What the fuck do you know, smartarse?’

  ‘I know enough to be calling the police, if you don’t let go,’ Xan says, evenly.

  ‘Piss off, monkey. Keep your nose out of other people’s business.’

  Xan wrenches the handlebars out of Rod’s grip, and shoots off, pedalling and breathing hard. A few minutes later he finds his arms are shaking. He’s never got into a fight but has no doubt that he has come as close as he hopes he’ll ever be to either hitting or getting hit. It isn’t only the racism, and the stupidity. Something comes off Rod that is as poisonous as the mephitic breath.

  He slows and again tries googling hypothyroidism on his phone. The single most maddening thing about country life is its lack of connectivity – the mobile signals that waver and shrink, the Internet that has everyone on a laptop watching pages and images that freeze or shatter into fragments. The twenty-first century, just out of reach.

  He cycles back along the narrow twisting lanes. The sun is rising above the mists, and the long grasses are bent over, each head heavy with a single droplet. All along the road he can see flashes of falling dew, and spiderwebs bright as mirrors. The sky with its vast, radiant clouds expands, illimitably. He pumps his pedals, enjoying the glimpses of secrets over hedges: a doe and her fawn poised on their delicate feet, grazing; a hare lolloping across a meadow where new grass has grown through shorn stubble; a hawk, circumflexed over its prey. The warming air is rich with honeysuckle, hay, mud.

  At Home Farm, he falls into bed, and when he wakes, Quentin and his sisters are leaving for the beach.

  ‘Come along, if you like,’ Quentin says.

  ‘I’d start snoring on my bodyboard,’ he says. ‘See you later.’

  Alone in the house, he potters around, thinking about making himself some supper – or is it breakfast? The afternoon is one of those late-summer days so saturated with sunlight that it seems to drip from the trees like honey. Xan half-regrets not going surfing too; but then he hears the noise of a car outside. Wondering whether his family are already back, he looks out and sees Janet. It must be her day to come and clean.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ he says awkwardly.

  She nods at him, then starts up the Dyson. He gets on with his meal, then remembers to look up what the word Bron sent him meant. It makes sense, all of it – the listlessness, the hoarse voice, the loss of hair and worst of all, intelligence. There are old photographs of sufferers, who are the original cretins, stunted, bloated and without expression. It can be congenital, so that a child is born with it, or appear later on. Either way, it must be countered by a lifetime of medication.

  ‘Janet?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She switches off the machine. In the silence, he looks her full in the face and feels again the sense of disquiet. There’s something in her expression, a hardness. He pushes down his instinctive dislike, ashamed of it as a form of snobbery. His mother has done the same, he knows: they all bend over backwards to be nice to her because of their middle-class guilt.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you.’

  Stumblingly, he explains what he has discovered, and the symptoms he’s noticed. The only thing he doesn’t say, for reasons he doesn’t quite know, is that Dawn herself had asked him to look at her blood.

  ‘She’s ill, you see. It could be really serious if it goes untreated. But it can all be easily reversed with some pills called levothyroxine.’

  ‘I see.’ She doesn’t seem alarmed or upset by the news, but goes on wiping surfaces. ‘Did you work this out by yourself? Are you going to be a doctor?’

  ‘No. I just noticed … It was chance I looked into it,’ he says.

  ‘Very clever of you, I must say.’ She doesn’t sound altogether happy about it. ‘Well, you can be sure I’ll do something about it.’

  ‘I’m sure it could be sorted out, but you’ve got to get Dawn to a doctor, Janet.’

  ‘Oh yes, a doctor. We aren’t with one at the moment.’

  ‘But I’m sure there are good GPs here,’ says Xan. ‘What about Dr Viner in Trelorn? He’s been looking after my stepfather’s parents.’

  ‘I’ll make sure Dawnie’s safe, don’t you worry.’

  Reassured, Xan sits at the table. He feels very tired again. At least I can sleep through the night from now on instead of doing my shift, he thinks. And then I’ll be abroad with my friends.

  Janet has gone off to continue her work, but in a few minutes she returns.

  ‘That cat has got into the cellar somehow, and the door is stuck. I can hear it calling, and the door’s too heavy for me to force. Can you help? I know your mum doesn’t like it being in the house, seeing as you’re allergic.’

  ‘Sure,’ Xan says.

  He shambles off, followed by Janet, and hears McSquirter yowling for release.

  ‘Give it a big shove, it’s stuck,’ she says. ‘Must have swollen in the damp.’

  He puts his shoulder to the door, prepared for resistance, but it yields at once, so that he staggers in and crashes to the ground, painfully.

  ‘Ow!’

  For a moment, the pain blots out everything, but when he turns round, the door is closed. Xan picks himself off the floor, and rattles the knob.

  ‘Janet? Janet, the door has closed, and I can’t open it.’

  There’s no answer.

  He is locked in a small room with a cat.

  34

  Sour and Sweet

  For a farmer, and a farmer’s wife, there is no such thing as a summer holid
ay, any more than there is a weekend. Perhaps it’s just as well, given what Sally has to work out.

  The letter she had seen goes round and round in her head. Why had Peter lied? They were supposed to share everything, why hadn’t he trusted her with this? On Sunday afternoon, when he’d expected their usual fumbling tumble, she’d pleaded a headache.

  ‘Sorry, m’dear,’ he said, turned over, and fell asleep.

  Did he really think it would make her happy to continue like this? If he’d told her the truth twelve years ago, they’d have had no problem. But then, how often did men tell the truth?

  This week she’s been fielding a new mum who, apart from the usual trouble, has discovered her partner’s porn addiction on the house computer.

  ‘I just feel so terrible, Sally. I never knew he went in for that kind of thing.’

  ‘Were children involved?’

  ‘No, but it was gross. How can anyone look at that stuff? Does it mean he’s dangerous?’

  ‘You’d be surprised by how many couples have this issue,’ Sally told her. She doesn’t add that it disgusts her, too. Men, she thinks. Everything that’s wrong in the world is their fault.

  ‘And now he knows, he wants to try the things he’s seen when we do it,’ the mum said, bursting into tears. ‘He thinks that’s normal. How can he expect me to doll myself up, when I’ve had no sleep for a month and stitches halfway up my fanny?’

  Sally answered, ‘Just remember, you’ve had nine months of changes to your body to prepare you for being a mother, and he hasn’t. Maybe you could see it as his way of waiting until things get back to normal.’

  ‘Do they, ever?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Sally lies soothingly.

  From what she’s seen, women never get their old lives back again. What they have to accept is the start of a new one, in which they must always put someone else first. Only why is it always the women who have to do that?

  ‘He doesn’t understand what hard work it is, being there every second.’

  ‘You’ll be fine now the mastitis has gone.’

  She doesn’t tell her mums that their libidos are depressed for as long as they breast-feed, because the emphasis has to be on giving the baby the best start in life. Few women want to have more than two, even if they can afford it, unless they’re like her sister Anne. The toll is too great. Yet it’s one she’d pay willingly, herself.

  ‘It’s such a terrible time to have a baby. I don’t know how we’ll afford it.’

  ‘There’s never a good time for a baby. But you will find it all worthwhile. How are you feeling, in yourself? Do you think you might have a touch of the baby blues?’

  It’s hard to concentrate when she has her own problems. I must tell my sisters, Sally tells herself, only it’s too personal and painful. It exhausts her, giving to other people. Kindness is seen as a weak, watery thing – much like mother’s milk, which shocks people by not being yellow and creamy like a cow’s. If you are poor, or disappointed or depressed, as everyone is at some point in their lives, then being kind to someone else takes a lot out of you, and most of the time people don’t even realise it. But quite often she wants to go home and cry her eyes out. She’s still in mourning for her mum, and in mourning, really, for the marriage she thought she had but didn’t.

  It isn’t Peter’s fault he’s infertile: she should have guessed that, with his chaotic upbringing, he wouldn’t get inoculated against mumps as a child. What is wrong is his not telling her the truth, and allowing her to hope … Maybe he dreads a repetition of his own childhood, and of turning into his father, or maybe he doesn’t understand how love, unlike anything else, is not a finite thing to be rationed but grows and expands to embrace each new person. But she should have had a say in it, too.

  She can see the women jiggle their buggies, absent-mindedly, as one begins to wail. Are any of them the mother of the baby near Shipcott Manor? She doubts it. Twice, she’s stopped outside the gatehouse, and twice heard the same sobbing, trembling cry.

  Could it be that Janet is looking after a friend’s child? Possible, though unlikely: Janet doesn’t seem to have made any friends since moving here, unless you count Rod. There’s the Tores’ old gardener, but he doesn’t have any children or grandchildren that Sally knows. Altogether, the gatehouse reminds her of Hansel and Gretel in the story.

  Sally thinks, I might just pay a visit to that gatehouse. It’s on my way, and I can always say I’m collecting for something if there’s anyone there.

  On the back seat, Baggage settles down with a sigh. Sally tells herself she’s calm, but mashes the gear change turning up the hill. When she draws up under the estate walls, with an irritable squeak of brakes, she is sweating with anxiety. Behind her, Baggage whines softly.

  ‘Now you keep quiet, do you hear? I’ll be back soon.’

  Sally walks up to the gates. The granite posts on either side are topped with a kind of curved point, like helmets. The gates between them are all thorns and roses, cast in curling black iron. The lodge cottage has battlements, and tall chimneys decorated with twisting plaster ornaments that are supposed to make them look Tudor, and the narrow windows have points at the top, like staring eyes. It’s painted a gingery biscuit colour. The whole thing is absurd, yet oddly sinister. Strange to think of Tore as a boy, over sixty years ago, living here with his mother. She’s seen a photograph of him, startlingly handsome with the dark hair, narrow eyes and high cheekbones of a Romany, back in the days when music came on vinyl, and you saved for a year to buy a record-player. Her mum told her that he’d go to school wearing wellington boots because these were the only shoes he had. And now he owns the whole estate.

  At first glance, the gates look shut; only the snib hasn’t caught. It feels like fate not to have to ring the keypad. Sally pushes gently, then slips through the gap and walks briskly to the door. It’s painted the traditional bright, soft blue; there are red-and-white checked gingham curtains in the windows, and a pot filled with red geraniums. It looks clean, tidy, innocuous, respectable. She finds herself thinking, What am I doing here?

  Nobody answers when she knocks.

  ‘Hello?’ she calls softly. ‘Is anyone in?’

  There’s no reply. High up in the heavy boughs, the wood pigeons repeat their lulling call. Almost, almost, she turns back, and then something (she will never be sure what) makes her walk forwards.

  With a backwards glance at Baggage, who is poking her long anxious nose through the window, Sally goes round the side of the gatehouse. A high hedge lurches across it, and suddenly this is not at all like the homely, well-kept exterior facing onto the drive, but a narrow path, pitted and pocked and stinking of cat-piss. Brambles claw at her, and a spindly, red-tipped fuchsia sprawls out from below, like a creature fleeing for the light. Sally knows how to stand still, patiently unhooking the thorns from her hair, and clutches her bag. She pushes forwards, determined.

  At the back, the woods press against the house, and the long grass is rank, and waist-high. Once, presumably, it had been tended: there is the edge of a terracotta rope tile bordering the path, and the thin grassy mound of a vegetable patch where some kind of cabbage has bolted into a long etiolated neck with a tiny head on top. Sally is used to the neglect of farmyards, but the thicket of thorns and hogweed before her is the work of many years. An old table pokes through like a rotten tooth. She steps onto the porch and looks into the green gloom of the back.

  Even before her eyes adjust, she can smell something is wrong. It’s a smell both human and inhuman, sour and sweet, and it is so pungent that if Baggage were here she would be whining.

  There is a small rectangular mound on the porch floor. As her eyes adjust, she can see it is a dog’s cage, heaped over with rags that hang down in stained tatters. The stench is definitely coming from there. Gingerly, Sally breaks off a stick and shifts the rags aside, dreading a sudden explosion of barks and snarls. There is no movement, however. She kneels, and looks in.

  Curled on more rags
is a baby, dressed only in a nappy and T-shirt. The child’s eyes are shut, but as a little light and air reaches it, it whimpers. Horrified, Sally sees its mouth open to cry, only no sound comes out. It’s the size of a six-month-old, but it has all its milk teeth, the stomach swollen and the limbs thin to the point of emaciation. It’s lying in a pool of excrement. She gasps, her gorge rising, before she gets out her mobile.

  There is no signal, but her phone has a camera. Switching it to silent, she takes photograph after photograph, her fingers trembling. Every detail must be recorded, from every angle. The porch, the cage, the inside of the cage, the child. There is an empty bottle with a grubby teat which has contained either water or formula. She must feed it; it’s clearly dehydrated and hungry. She must take it out of its overflowing nappy. She must take it out, and away from this terrible place.

  She opens the cage, and gently lifts the child out, placing it on one of the cloths on the porch. It stirs. The face is so streaked with filth that it looks almost feral, but a few curls cling to the forehead. Sally takes a wet wipe from the emergency pack in her bag, and gently cleans the face, murmuring,

  ‘Hello. What are you doing here? There you are, that’s better.’

  Its nose, cheeks, chin appear like pearls in grime, and then, without uttering a sound, the child opens its eyes. They are enormous, pale blue, and crusted with dried tears. Sally gazes into them, and a rage boils up in her, so scalding that if the person responsible for this cruelty were to walk in, she would punch them. But there is nobody in the house.

  If she reports this, as she must, she knows what will happen. The child will be taken into care, and there will be a huge scandal, with prosecutions and people pontificating about parenting, and a concealed birth, and in the middle of it all the child will get lost, passed from foster care to the adoption service, when here she is aching with every fibre for a child. She has found it, when nobody else thought to look.