Wish You Were Here

by Graham Swift

  He hadn’t said a word, but now he stared at Jack and Tom in a pausing-for-breath way, as if he might have had a statement prepared. But what came out was: ‘No, neither of you’s coming with me.’ Both brothers were looking hard at their father and both had perhaps stepped forward, perhaps more to restrain him than to join him, but this is how Michael chose to interpret the situation. Then something in Tom’s eyes, or something in his own thoughts, must have made Michael change his mind, because before he got back behind the wheel he said to Tom, and not to Jack, ‘Okay, if you must. Fetch another spade.’

  Maybe that was all it was. He was thinking it would be quicker work, and not so much that by then Luke had become Tom’s dog. But if so, he might just as well have picked Jack or told them both to go and grab spades.

  And then Michael, with Tom and Luke and the shotgun and two spades, had driven off.

  Later, though not all at once, Tom told Jack everything—or everything that he wanted to tell him—but the scene itself, from which Jack was excluded, has only ever, like some other scenes from which he was absent yet which were crucial to his life, played itself out in his imagination, seeming each time to be both real and unreal.

  But there’s no doubt that he heard the shot. His ears had been straining for it. And, later on, he saw the little mound of freshly patted-down earth. Luke had been too weak to raise his head above the side of the pick-up as it drove away, so that he and Jack could take a last look at each other, and Jack realised when it was too late that he hadn’t even been allowed the chance to say goodbye to him or give him a final stroke. His father had driven off fast, over-revving the engine, as if there were no time to lose or as if he were afraid of changing his mind.

  Then Jack was alone in the deserted yard, with the receding sound of the pick-up jolting its way down the hill. In the muggy air, a hatch of flying ants was buzzing round him. His mother, he knew, would have found where the nest was, then boiled the kettle. But Jack just stood, listening, in the yard.

  Tom said they’d driven down Barton Field, his father stamping on the brake, past the big oak, to the low, flat corner by the wood where the ground, even in summer, was nearly always soft. Then they’d stopped and Dad had gone round to gather up Luke, who must by then have formed his own conclusions. Tom didn’t say if anything had been spoken on the way down or if, at this point, there’d been any argument. You don’t have a tug-of-war with a sick animal. Dad had carried Luke a few yards from the pick-up and put him on the grass. Then he’d gone back for the gun. Tom said he hadn’t wanted to touch it himself, he hadn’t made any move in that direction.

  Dad had the cartridges in his pocket and while he stood and loaded the gun—both barrels, just in case—he told Tom to get the two spades from the back. Jack asked Tom how their father had spoken, and Tom had thought for a bit and said he’d spoken like he was giving orders. This wasn’t a nice thing for either of them (or for Luke) and there was no way of speaking about it nicely. All of which Jack could understand. Then Tom had added that his father had spoken like a complete bastard.

  Tom said that while Dad loaded the gun Luke had just sat there on the grass where he’d been put. It’s true, he couldn’t move much now anyway, but he’d just sat there like a good dog sits, front legs out before him, waiting for what’s next. Of course, he was perfectly familiar with that gun.

  Jack asked Tom (though he already knew the answer) if he thought that Luke knew, all along. Tom said, of course. Of course Luke knew. Luke was half blind and he hadn’t made a move, but Tom said he was sure Luke knew, even as they’d bumped down Barton Field. And Jack knew he hadn’t needed to ask.

  But Jack would never be sure about the next bit in Tom’s description. Though why should Tom have made it up? Tom might have just said that Dad had simply walked towards Luke, aimed and fired. But Tom said that, after loading the gun and snapping it shut, Dad had turned in Luke’s direction, paused for half a second, then turned again and held out the gun to him. He’d offered it—if offer was the right word—to Tom.

  Tom said that he couldn’t tell, even after thinking about it, if his father had only just got the idea then or if he’d had it in his mind all along, and that was why he’d wanted Tom—Tom specifically, for some reason—to be with him. He’d got the idea, perhaps, looking at them both in the yard, and he’d singled out Tom.

  Jack had thought (to be charitable) that it was possible Dad had held out the gun to Tom because he’d realised suddenly he couldn’t do it himself. But Tom had read Jack’s thought and said it wasn’t like that at all. There’d been a look in his father’s face, a tone in his voice. He’d said, ‘Here. You do it.’ It wasn’t an offer, it was another order. Then Tom said, ‘Like an even bigger bastard.’

  Tom couldn’t do it, anyway. He’d just stood in front of his father and shaken his head. He couldn’t put a finger on that gun. And maybe—though Tom didn’t say this, it was one of those things Jack’s imagination had to supply—Tom was never meant to. It was just a bluff, a game, to make Tom feel like a worm, to make him wish he could disappear into the ground.

  Several seconds passed anyway, Tom had said, while Luke sat there, not moving, and his father had still held out the gun.

  Then, according to Tom, Dad had said, ‘No? Can’t do it? But it needs to be done.’ And then he’d turned, taken a few quick strides forward and shot Luke between the eyes. One shot was enough.

  And up in the yard, in that still air, Jack had heard the shot clearly enough, like something hitting his own skull.

  Tom said—it was plainly difficult for him to give these details or even to remember them precisely, and Jack would come to know how he felt—that Luke had never turned away as Dad came towards him with the gun, though at the very last moment he might have lowered his head. He just might. He couldn’t be sure either if, just a fraction before he’d fired, Dad had said, ‘Goodbye, Luke.’ Or if it was a fraction afterwards. Or if he’d just imagined that Dad had said it. (Jack, listening to Tom, thought: Tom said it, Tom said it himself. He said it aloud or just inside, but Tom said it himself.)

  But after firing the shot, Tom said, Dad had turned and even as he broke open the gun and fished out the unspent cartridge, said, clearly enough, ‘And I hope one day, when it’s needed, someone will have the decency to do the same for me.’

  Dad had walked back to the pick-up to stow the gun. Then he’d grabbed the spades lying in the grass and held one out for Tom. Tom didn’t say if he held it out in the same way as he’d held out the gun, or if he’d said anything along the lines of: ‘I hope you can do this.’ But it seemed that from that point on there hadn’t been much conversation except for Dad saying, ‘Deeper.’ Then again, ‘Deeper.’

  Tom said it was a good, safe grave, it wouldn’t get disturbed by some fox coming out of the wood.

  Finally Dad had said, ‘Deep enough.’ Then he’d gone to pick up Luke, or what was left of him, and, kneeling and stretching, had lowered him in. Dad had done the shooting and Dad had done the burying. But he’d said to Tom, ‘Okay, now fill it in.’

  Then he’d gone to the bottom gate, into Brinkley Wood, where the little rill ran through the ditch at the edge of the trees, to clean himself up. Tom said there’d been a lot of blood and stuff left on the grass. The crows and buzzards and the weather would have to take care of that. Tom said it looked like where a ewe had dumped an afterbirth.

  They’d both patted down the last soil with their spades. If there was a question of a marker—a gravestone—it was never discussed. There’d be a little grown-over hump, anyway, in the corner of the field. They’d hardly forget the spot.

  Then they’d driven back to the house with the gun and the spades, and with the air—Jack could see this as they pulled into the yard—thick between them. He didn’t understand the thickness of it till Tom, and it took a little time, had given his full account.

  But the air (still busy with flying ants that had escaped that kettle) was thick and heavy anyway, heavy with th
e sultry August weather, but heavy with the strange, hollow weight of there being three of them now where once there’d been four. Just as once there’d been four of them where once there’d been five.

  18

  JACK DROVE OFF the ferry into the hurrying morning streets of Portsmouth. No one had detained him or regarded him with special interest, but he whipped his sunglasses from the dashboard not just against the glare of the low sun. His instinct was to hide his face. It was absurd to think of being recognised, but in his white shirt and black tie, even inside the car, he felt painfully conspicuous. He had safely got ashore, but at any point now, he felt, as he strove to navigate the currents of purposing traffic around him, he might be stopped and asked to explain his own particular purpose. And how would he do that?

  I am going to meet my brother.

  As the ferry docked, the ball of fear had tightened in his stomach. He told himself, for no clear reason, that the innocent have nothing to fear.

  He looked frantically for road signs—his instinct also being, on finding himself in the middle of a city, to get out of it fast. Portsmouth was not the biggest of cities, but it was more than big enough for Jack, who in all his years—save in appreciating that most of the Lookouters came from them—had rarely had to deal with cities. The word ‘city’ itself was foreign to him, as was the word ‘citizen’, though that second word, he somehow appreciated too, hung, almost like its explanation, over this journey.

  When, some eight years ago, in order to take a holiday in the Caribbean, Jack had acquired a passport, he’d understood that he was now a citizen. It said so. Not so long before, the very idea of possessing a passport would have seemed ridiculous. A farm was its own land, even its own law, unto itself. And as for being a ‘citizen’—citizens hardly lived on farms. Though, apparently, you didn’t need to live in a city to be a citizen. Or even require a passport. A passport merely confirmed something that came with you. Even little babies—even little babies born on farms—were citizens. It was a birthright.

  But it had still seemed strange to Jack to discover that he was a citizen and that in order to pass through Gatwick Airport he had to prove it. Gatwick Airport itself had seemed like some weird, forbidding city, though he hadn’t felt like a citizen, shuffling through and showing his clean new passport. He’d felt more like a cow at milking time.

  Yet he’d thought, very recently, how shaming it would have been if when Major Richards had said he should bring his passport he’d had to say: I don’t have one.

  He didn’t feel like a citizen today. Though today he knew, inescapably, he was one. It felt like some imposition or even incrimination when he knew it should be the opposite: a privilege, a protection, a guarantee. The fact that he was a citizen should be dissolving that primitive ball of fear in his stomach.

  If he were stopped, then he had his passport. Not only that: in his jacket pocket he had other papers (not all of which Major Richards had said he need bring with him). He had a letter from a Secretary of State, personally signed. Truly. He had a letter, and an invitation, from a Colonel of the Regiment. Who else in this flood of morning traffic around him was carrying better credentials, was better authorised to be going about their business?

  It ought to be the case, Jack told himself, that rather than being stopped, he should be waved through, with saluting respect. Lanes should be cleared for him.

  But he had to get out of this city.

  He looked at signs: London, Southampton, Winchester. He definitely didn’t want London. He briefly passed, on his left, the long, fortress-like walls of the Dockyard. Not just a city, but a navy base. And he was travelling to an airbase.

  The funnel of the M275 seemed to find him rather than he it, feeding him onto the westbound M27. The whole length of the M27 skirted a mainly urban sprawl: Southampton was a city too. He needed to be free of this region of thick habitation. On the motorway he put his foot down, but after a few miles took it off again, realising that he had no need, or wish, to hurry and that he risked, indeed, being absurdly early. All the same, the proximity of large populations—all of them citizens—oppressed him. On the fringes of Southampton he joined the M3 and only when, after passing Winchester, he left the motorway and was heading north across the broad downs of Hampshire did he begin to feel calmer, though this was not for long.

  Big, sunlit sweeps of land now faced him, but clouds were rapidly gathering. More to the point, this open country, with its unimpeded views of the road ahead, was only drawing him inexorably and all too rapidly closer to his destination. In preparing himself for the other immensities of this journey, he had over-allowed for its simple distance. In both miles and time his journey was already half done.

  He bypassed Newbury, then at a service station just short of the M4 intersection he stopped, to empty his bladder and simply kill a little time. It was not yet ten—though the mere reflex of looking at his watch, the noting of passing minutes, made him sweat. The tightness in his stomach reasserted itself and, as if to smother and quell it, he forced himself, in the cafeteria, to consume a large, sticky Danish pastry and drink a cup of coffee.

  Around him was the random sample of the nation (another word, like ‘citizen’, that had come in recent days to nag him) to be found in any service-station cafeteria on a weekday morning. The bland, communal atmosphere both soothed and troubled him. Jack didn’t like cities, but this wasn’t because he essentially minded people—or people removed from the context of cities. The caravanners had, unexpectedly, taught him that. The caravanners could comfort and beguile him—just as he saw it as his role to keep them contented.

  He thought now of the travellers who might stop here in the summer on their way south from cities like Birmingham or Nottingham, bound, perhaps for the first time, for the Lookout Caravan Park. Bound for a little off-shore island that, in their minds at least, was entirely set aside for the purpose of holidays. He felt a sudden tender pang for them.

  But this was November. Outside the sky was now mainly grey with a hint of rain. He no longer sensed that he might be liable to sudden arrest and interrogation, but he wondered if, in his black tie, he was being scrutinised by those around him. There would be an obvious conclusion (though it would fall some way short of the actual mark) about his purpose. Who was he? What did he do, with his big frame and big hands? Was it unseemly for a man wearing a black tie to be stuffing his face with a Danish pastry?

  He thought again of the hearse and of its separate journey: Devon to Oxfordshire. There were some strange tasks in the world, some strange purposes.

  But around him, in fact, was a majority of solitary, preoccupied men (though none in a black tie) doing just as he was doing: pushing something sticky into their mouths and chewing on it needily, but with no particular sign of pleasure. Were they all—though none of them, surely, could be on a journey, a mission like his today—nursing, feeding their own little balls of fear?

  This was peacetime in the middle of England. But there was a war on terror.

  He took out his mobile phone. It was something else these men were doing. But he merely stared at it and returned it to his pocket. The coffee or regathering fear, or simply the sensible precaution before he set off again, made him head for a second piss. In the hard white light he looked at himself, again, in the mirror. He didn’t look, he thought, like he’d looked, only hours ago, at the cottage. He should have got his hair cut, perhaps, specially. It was wispy at the neck and by his ears. He was going to meet the army. He tweaked at his tie, though it was fine already and it hardly mattered while he was driving. His heavy face, gazing straight back at him, seemed not to know him.

  Did he look like a citizen, a good citizen, in his white shirt and dark suit? No, he looked like a gangster.

  19

  WHEN DAD AND TOM had returned from disposing of Luke, a silence hung over the farmhouse as if some explosion had occurred much bigger than the small but significant one Jack had heard volleying up from Barton Field. Thick hot clouds fille
d the sky, but it was one of those times when the thunder doesn’t come. Jack didn’t get Tom’s full account till the following morning. He felt, after hearing it, and trying to put himself into Tom’s shoes, that though Tom had been unable to shoot Luke (and who could blame him?) it was perfectly possible that Tom might one day raise a gun to his own father. Such a thing seemed perfectly possible on their forlorn, milksop dairy farm in the deep, green hills.

  Tom was big and tall enough by then, but Jack still had the feeling, when it came to relations between his dad and Tom, that Dad should pick on someone his own size, and that it was up to him, Jack, to intervene accordingly. He wondered what he would have done if he’d been down there too, a witness, in Barton Field. Would he have snatched the gun Dad offered to Tom, and shot Luke himself? And would that have settled the question of how things stood at Jebb Farm for ever, of who now would rule the roost?

  He wondered how it would have been if it had been just Dad and him down there, not Dad and Tom.

  It was a long time—not till after Tom had left Jebb—before Jack told Ellie the full story that Tom had told him. He’d just told her at first that Dad had had to shoot Luke. It was tough, but necessary. No more Luke. Even when he’d told her the full story he’d hesitated to repeat those words which he’d remembered as clearly as Tom had seemed to remember them. ‘And someone, some day …’

  When Luke met his sudden end the cow disease and its consequences had been with them for some time. It had peaked, some said, but it still hung in the air like those sultry clouds, and perhaps it was then, on that morning when that shot rang out in Barton Field, that the madness had really set in.