Breaking Light

by Karin Altenberg

As he leant his forehead against the closed door, he could hear her footsteps departing on the gravel outside. He realised that she had been wearing a pair of very white trainers that looked as if they had just been taken out of their box. The whole thing unsettled him. Why had he thought it would be a good idea to have somebody come into his home to move around his things – bounce her large bum against his furniture? He imagined the soles of the white trainers squeaking on his parquet and winced. You stupid fool! Well, it was done now. He hadn’t even asked her name. He felt damp and his shirt was sticking to his back. He waited a little longer before walking into the drawing room, where he could watch the gravel drive and the lawns from behind the curtains. Grabbing at the worn folds of green velvet, he squinted at the light, which seemed suddenly to have turned against him. She was nowhere to be seen – but still he imagined her spying on him from the bushes by the road. What had she made of his face he wondered. Had she noticed that it was badly sewn? At once, he felt the urge to go for a walk.

  He stepped through to the kitchen and opened the back door on to the porch. His walking stick was leaning against the glass and his leather boots were caked in mud from their last outing. I wish I had a dog, he thought as he put on his boots, if only to feel the softness of its ears.

  As he walked through the fields and paddocks, the sun came out from behind the clouds and warmed his face. A few young lambs idled amongst daffodils while their mothers grazed matronly nearby. Somewhere above – too high to cast a shadow – a couple of ravens were soaring and carousing in a courting game, their wedge-tails stencilling cuneiform on to the spring skies. As soon as he left the enclosed land behind, a breeze rose from the high moor, eager to greet him with coils and twists. Further away, on the horizon towards the coast, its freshness had already been trapped by a flotilla of wind farms: giant scarecrows in a field of barley. Mr Askew hunched his shoulders against the challenge as he started climbing towards the summit of the tor. As he trudged on, the clitter scraped at the sheep’s dung which had stuck in the pattern of his rubber soles. He tugged at his cap in an effort to keep the wind out of his head but it would not let him alone. ‘It will ease once I reach the valley,’ he said to himself in order to clear his mind. From this high position, his eyes swam out across the expanse of land that was still untamed by plough and unbound by road or dyke. Man had come here for centuries but, although groups of settlers had tried to manifest themselves in the landscape, what remained were signs of struggle and submission rather than of conquest and triumph. Cairns and standing stones, chapels and stone crosses and other monuments to the living and their dead were deftly mirrored in grafts of peat digging and mining and small patches of ridge and furrow where somebody once tried to grow a crop.

  A cloud, which had rested over a small lake for some time, decided to move on, silently detaching itself and bringing with it its own shadow that was the exact shape of the lake. Mr Askew followed its drift with his eyes until his gaze could no longer avoid the small cottage in the valley below. Even from this distance he could see that the thatch was tidy and the stonework in the barn was new. The yard was paved with slate and, where Uncle Gerry’s henhouse had once stood, somebody had parked a four-wheel drive. The cottage looked very pretty where it nestled in the green valley – some would have called it picturesque and expected roses and honeysuckle to climb up to the eaves in summer. But Mr Askew, as if this had nothing to do with him, blinked and looked away, averting his mind from the hospitable smoke that once escaped from the chimney and from the proud rooster and his harem that used to fritter in the yard. He felt a bit tired and sat down with his back against a rock. In front of him were the remains of a cairn, which marked the summit of the tor. Every summer, ramblers would add to the pile, each one carrying a stone to the stack for luck, and every winter the storms would tear at the stones, scattering hope and fortune. And then he laughed, remembering Michael on the moor on a day of strong winds: ‘It can blow the flesh off your bones, if you let it. Honest, Gabe! So what you need to do is either open your mouth and let it blow right through you or, if it’s really bad, you must lie down and hold on to the grass with your hands and teeth – like this,’ and Michael had thrown himself on to his stomach, biting into the moor. Mr Askew laughed again and opened his mouth wide to let the wind blow through him and fill his lungs.

  *

  All through that first summer, their friendship stretched and tightened like a cat sunning itself on a stone wall. The end of the school year saw many of the other children returning to work on the farms and smallholdings, so that Gabriel, who had no such duties, was suddenly out of harm’s way. They no longer met at Oakstone but, every morning, whilst the tracks of snails spelled their silvery messages across the path, Gabriel would run under the trees, through lozenged sunlight, towards the moor gate – the last port before the open wash of grass and bracken. Red kites watched him with their yellow eyes and swifts raced like arrowheads through the high skies. A hare would stop in her tracks and listen to the threat of the thump, thump of his plimsolls on last year’s heather. Michael would meet him, breathless, at Hart Cross, one of the stone crosses that had marked the trails across the moor since the monks first walked into the wilderness. Each such morning brought new excitement as their uncurtailed curiosity widened their world – there was nothing and nowhere they would not explore. They would twirl like shamans across the heath and dance with the petrified maidens in a stone circle, rest for a while on grass beds in the remains of an ancient settlement, or take aim at each other across the muddy trenches left behind by tin miners.

  They followed a tin mining leat for hours until they reached its source. Here, they took their clothes off and jumped into the water. Holding on to a rock or digging their hands into the silt at the bottom of the stream, they would let the current hold them still as trout as they opened their eyes to the unparalleled beauty of an underwater world – a world that would inevitably disappear at the end of each breath. These tiny deaths would make them thoughtful and edgy for a while, irritated by each other and themselves because, by now, there was little to distinguish one from the other. Once, they watched a cow drown in a mine pit. Powerless and grief-stricken, they clung to each other as the terrible head roared in panic and the once-kind eyes dimmed and rolled back into the blood dark. At such times, Gabriel was comforted only by the warm-sand smell of Michael’s temples or the tanned skin at the back of his neck and the familiar crests of dirt under his fingernails. Sometimes, when they were tired and lay down to rest together, keeping each other warm, out of the wind, Gabriel could no longer tell to which body his head belonged or whose heartbeat was pulsing in his ears.

  Only hunger would drive the boys off the moor and into the valley where Uncle Gerry’s cottage sat, irreversibly, in the hillside. They would come tumbling down the slope behind the house or trudging wearily like crusaders along the road, their broken swords beating at hedgerows. On one occasion, they returned to see Uncle Gerry speaking to a tall man in the yard. Uncle Gerry was leaning on his shovel, so that it seemed as if the other man was looking down on him. The tweeds, too, made the stranger look important against the muck of the yard, although he did take off his hat in an effort to lower himself a little.

  ‘It’s my dad!’ Michael shouted and quickened his step.

  But Gabriel held back and pulled at his dirty fringe.

  ‘C’mon, Gabe,’ he called. ‘Let’s go and meet him.’

  Still he hesitated and stepped into the shadow under the hedge; the light out there was the warm gold of midsummer.

  ‘Don’t be such a drag.’ Michael, too, had stopped.

  Gabriel wanted to shout and stamp his foot in frustration, but only pulled at a twig of bramble. This was what he’d dreaded. ‘He won’t like it if he sees us playing together. You know we are not supposed to.’

  ‘My dad never said so …’ Michael insisted, but stepped into the shadow just the same, so that they were standing, hidden, a few feet apart when they saw the ma
n who was Michael’s father hand over a thick envelope to Uncle Gerry, who took it – but uncertainly.

  ‘What’s that?’ Gabriel hissed.

  ‘No idea. Do you think they’ve met before?’

  He did not reply, but stared in wonder at the two adults as they shook hands and smiled at each other before parting. The two boys watched in silence as Michael’s father strolled casually along the lane towards the main road. The sun shone off the brilliantine in his dark hair and, as he walked, he loosened the knot in his tie.

  ‘Perhaps Dad came to offer to help Uncle Gerry repair the old shed – he’s very strong, you know,’ Michael said, thoughtfully, and added, ‘Honest – he is.’

  Gabriel believed it and suddenly he hated his friend. Michael’s father was no longer the absent Mr Bradley but this dad who had come between them. The hedge stank of rank sweat, he noticed, and he started to itch where a nettle had stung his shin the previous day. It was hateful. ‘I don’t think he could build a shed,’ he lied. ‘His hands don’t look big enough.’ A weevil was crossing a patch of sunlight at his feet and he crushed it with his plimsoll. It made him feel better – but only briefly. His despair had not crumpled.

  ‘But they are!’ Michael protested desperately. ‘They’re as big as a bull’s hooves.’

  ‘Bulls’ hooves are sometimes quite small,’ he said brutally and laughed.

  The other boy looked at him incredulously. ‘You’re just being mean. Anyway, you don’t know what my dad’s hands are like – only I know that,’ he said, sulking.

  This was true, of course, and it only made it worse. ‘And you’re just stupid!’ he flared, to shield himself.

  Michael looked at him with dark eyes – and went away.

  ‘Yeah, just go away!’

  Gabriel remained for a moment, but trembled as a bumblebee bounced off a cluster of violets.

  *

  The shadows were longer and flies had gathered around the crushed beetle when Gabriel dared to venture out from under the shadow of the hedge. Michael was drawing on a piece of paper at Uncle Gerry’s oak table when he entered the cottage. He could see that Michael had been crying – there were dirty streaks on his cheeks – and this made him cautious, as if he had just entered a room where somebody lay sick in bed. Michael did not look up but continued to push his crayons hard into the paper, the grain of the oak showing up in the drawing where the boy had coloured in. Gabriel went over to the sideboard and fiddled with some fossils that were displayed there. Just then, Uncle Gerry entered from the yard.

  ‘All right, boys, let’s try to make up, shall we?’

  Neither boy looked up but Michael stabbed his drawing with a red crayon.

  ‘Come on, you two; I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding. Tell me what happened.’

  Still they kept their silence.

  Uncle Gerry sighed. ‘Well, whatever it is, you’d better get over it now. I need your help staking up the old shed for the chickens.’

  This offered a welcome distraction for the two boys, in whose minds the cause of the argument was already beginning to fade. But the hurt on the one part and the shame on the other lingered a little longer as they helped to dig supporting poles into the ground at the back of the shed. Until Michael suddenly remembered: ‘But wasn’t my dad going to help you build a new shed, Mr Askew?’

  ‘Mr Bradley? Whatever gave you that idea?’ He sounded genuinely perplexed.

  ‘Well …’ He hesitated. ‘It’s just that we saw you talk and shake hands.’

  Uncle Gerry laughed briefly but composed himself. ‘Two men shaking hands does not necessarily indicate that they will build a shed together.’

  ‘But why—?’

  ‘Your father was just out for a walk and greeted me in passing.’ The tone of his voice seemed to be closing the subject.

  This sounded logical enough and the boys dared to glance sidelong at each other. After all, they did not yet know what it takes to build a shed. But then Gabriel remembered: ‘But what was in the envelope?’

  ‘What envelope?’ This time he sounded less casual.

  ‘The envelope Mr Bradley gave you!’

  ‘He did not give me an envelope – you’re imagining things.’

  Gabriel stared in disbelief. ‘But I saw it. He did. He did!’ He was close to tears; everyone seemed to be against him today.

  ‘It’s true! I saw it too.’ Michael was just as agitated.

  Gabriel took a step closer to his friend and was rewarded with the sand smell of his skin.

  Uncle Gerry looked at them in a strange way. ‘Ah, bugger it,’ he swore and kicked at one of the poles. ‘All this secrecy – it’s ridiculous – idiotic!’

  The boys were silent and wide-eyed as the man put an arm over each of their shoulders and led them back into the house. He poured himself a drink from the Bell’s bottle and took a sip before clearing his throat. ‘Mr Bradley has very generously decided to fund an operation.’ There: it was said.

  ‘An operation? Are you sick, Uncle?’ Gabriel was suddenly scared.

  ‘No, Gabe, I’m fine …’ He took another sip. ‘Listen, my lad; ever since you were a little boy, your mother and I have been wanting … hoping … to mend your face. But it has not been easy; there was the war … We both lost a lot in the war and it has taken a while for us to get back on our feet. Your mother has been working very hard but there’s never enough to put aside … and I … I have been rather useless lately. Not particularly reliable.’ He laughed coarsely and drained his glass.

  Michael took Gabriel’s hand in his and the warmth of their palms protected them.

  The man would not look at them as he poured another drink. ‘Anyway, that’s of no consequence now that Mr Bradley has come back.’ He seemed to snarl the name, but Gabriel only noticed the last bit.

  ‘Come back? Has he been here before?’

  But Uncle Gerry ignored this question and continued: ‘The long and the short of it is that Mr Bradley has offered to pay for your operation. He came here to discuss the details … You will be taken to the hospital in Exeter at the end of the summer – and your face will be as good as new by Christmas.’

  ‘But why would my dad organise the operation? He has never even met Gabe.’

  ‘Your father is a rich man, Michael – and that explains a lot. He can afford that which we fail to offer.’

  But Gabriel, on his part, was not surprised. Hadn’t he always known that he was not in charge of his own life? That things relating to him could be passed around in brown envelopes? That he was the wrong one that needed mending? Even Michael’s dad knew it. And so Gabriel gravely accepted this telling of an operation, which he understood was offered as a form of kindness. And yet, at this hour of sunset, when the obscure light that fell through the window of the cottage was further dulled by the rose that climbed outside, Gabriel realised that there was another mystery to his life. Because, although his intuition told him that he was quite alone in the adult world, he knew that in a parallel existence, where he was expected to have a purpose, there were things that could be relied upon – insubstantial things, perhaps, but still reliable: the song of the river and the rustle of the trees, for instance, and the smoke of blossom through the hawthorn, the broken shadow of the standing stone and the watching eye of the red kite. And there was that other part which would make him whole. There was Michael.

  *

  Mr Askew found himself in Rowden’s, lost amongst bird feeders, scented Hello Kitty stickers and Barbour oilskins. The hardware store catered for the gentleman farmer, burnt-out banker and staycation tourist alike. With a rising sense of panic, he slogged past stacks of purple-glazed pottery, sheepskin slippers and New Age calendars, only to bump his foot on a sit-on lawnmower, conveniently parked at the end of an aisle. He whimpered damply but soldiered on until he reached the homeware section where he was faced with a dizzying array of cleaning products. Their names seemed negatively correlated to their chemical content, so that, on reading the l
abel, one would realise that ‘Spring Fresh’ was slightly more poisonous than ‘Fields of Lavender’, whereas ‘Footprint’ was not quite as filthy as it sounded. There was even a washing-up liquid dispenser shaped like a toy gun, called ‘Sani-girl’. Mr Askew looked anxiously along the shelves until, at last, he found the ‘Mr Muscle’ section. Quickly, he grabbed a few bright coloured bottles and looked around for some rubber gloves and sponges. Thus fully armed, he started the retreat towards the till. Apologising profusely, he squeezed past a couple of equestrian-looking women – who stepped aside, as if to let pass the great unwashed – and a Japanese tourist studying a doorstopper in the shape of a skimpily-dressed fairy bending over unnecessarily to smell a flower at her feet.

  The shop assistant had not yet grown out of her puppy fat, and her breasts bulged alarmingly out of a tight top, which read, ‘BRAIN FIRST, BODY SECOND’.

  ‘You get one of these half price with any purchase over ten quid,’ she said, as her text-trained fingers stamped the figures into an old-fashioned till.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She looked up at him then, but without interest, and gestured towards a rack of neon-coloured plastic key holders to one side. ‘You get to choose one of them with your name on it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Only half price – it’s a bargain – and they glow in the dark.’

  He looked in despair at the names on the plastic rectangles. Gabriel did not appear amongst the Beverleys, Olivias, Alfies, Mohammeds and Dylans. ‘That is –’ he hesitated – ‘most kind, but no thank you.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ She looked unaffectedly perplexed, one of her acrylic nails hovering uncertainly over the enter button.

  ‘Yes, yes, quite sure.’

  ‘Ah, well, you’re really missing a bargain.’ She was good at her job, and disappointed in him.

  *

  It had started to rain by the time he got out into the street and a mound of horse manure was disintegrating into the cobbles at his feet. He took a deep breath, holding the bag with his shopping tightly against his chest. He could no longer face going to the allotment today, and yet he could not stay at home – the new cleaning lady was expected at noon. How he wished that he had not let himself be inconvenienced in this manner. But this, he realised, like so many other things, was something that he would just have to endure. He started shuffling along Market Street, his mac flapping around his calves and his downturned gaze recognising every pebble, curb and dent along the worn-out route.