by Cynan Jones
Just inside the space under the bath was a row of various pots and dishes filled with sharp-smelling raw detergent that he had put there to curtain any scent the police dogs might find and he moved them to one side. There was something almost comic in the way the big man had to be careful and delicate to do this, to not spill them.
Then he lay on his shoulder in the aspect of some big mechanic and reached under the bathtub and brought out the sack from where it was tucked up the other side.
He unwrapped the gun and looked at it and then he wrapped up the gun again. He put the sack down in the bath and with the awareness saw the dog hairs in the bath and the strange brown stain under the taps from the long time it had not been used.
He put the bath panel back on and took the gun outside and went down to the boundary fence where the machinery was crashed and growing in amongst the trees and then he wrapped the gun in a second plastic sack and put it in amongst the machines as if it was just debris. Somewhere far off he could hear a woodpecker trat on a tree.
Let them come now, he thought to himself. They can search the house.
For a moment sunlight had come tipping in through the slats of the barn again but it was gone now and the golden pool with it and Daniel traveled the length of the troughs with armfuls of hay as the ewes hefted round him to feed; and it was then, as he unfolded the hay, that he found her cloth.
It was just a thing she had, like a comfort thing—a bright piece of pink patterned cloth that was variously a hair tie, a headscarf or bandana, or was worn about her neck to stop the dust and grime tracking down her collar. It was as much a thing of her as the Stanley knife she always carried for snipping the bale bindings or a hundred other purposes. It was a difference between them that she always carried a few specific things—her cloth, the uncomplicated Stanley knife, an old strapless wristwatch —to meet the simple repeated questions of their daily processes while he relied on brute strength, guesswork, or the availability of some thing he could make use of. He felt it important that there were solid differences between them, whether, as he knew, she was right in some things or not.
They were haymaking and she was wearing the cloth as a headscarf against the beating heat inside the tractor cab.
They were in the new field at the top which they had acquired that year and that had been historically part of the farm before his parents had sold it off. For a few years it had been grazed by a handful of sheep the hobby farmer put there, and on and off Welsh Cobs had come and gone, cropping the grass to a baize turf. But for a long while the field had been untended and had gone feral.
Over the winter they took off some of the bramble that balled chaotically about the field, and tore up the sentinel blackthorn and gorse that advanced off the hedgerows, burning the cut stuff down into two or three impossibly small piles and there was a childlike enjoyment in the way the various thorn crackled and flamed so ferociously.
Later, they took a scarifier over the grass to scrape out the dead, yellowed stuff and let the new growth come and they let the field become meadow.
In the way things gather names, the field came to be called cae piws, the pink field, as cleared of its wild growth it burst into a display of red clover and tufted vetch, with sprawling beds of fumitory. The field then seemed to stick to its scheme as ragged robin appeared and isolated cuckoo flowers, and shyly, in the damper corner a rarity of orchids. Into this they even let the thistles come, their stiff, pinnate leaves turning brittle in the sun as they cut them down before their buzz-cut pink crowns turned to seed.
Naturally, as the months wore on, the grass outgrew the flowers and it was into September before they cut the hay, when she lost the piece of cloth, as if the field had taken back this piece of pinkness into itself in return for what was cut. And there it was, as if she had only just dropped it, stiffened and bleached with hay dust, as if she had left it on the radiator as she always did and it had slipped quietly down.
For a while he could not touch it. The sheep pushed in against his legs and he braced them, like being in a strong current, and held on to the bar of the trough. It was impossible that she was dead because his feelings for her had not diminished at all. It is the ability of a person to bring a reaction in us that gives us a relationship with them, and for the time they do that they have a livingness to them.
He remembered the sight of her in the cab of the tractor while she drove along the rows of bales and he stacked them on the trailer as the boys threw them up. He remembered the sweat and the itch of seed, the burn of the baling twine inside his fingers, the bales grazing his knuckles, the diesel air about the tractor. He remembered her with the bright splash of color of the cloth worn on her head, how they had joked that she looked girlish and Alpine. Heidi they had called her that day, and how he had wanted her in the rich way we can want a woman we physically work with, and how he was glad it was his wife he wanted this way.
How many reminders will there be? he asked. How many times will this happen to me? There is so much of her about. He was on the verge of anger, but then he had this sad, hopeless glow of warmth for her. I can hold on to her, he thought. I can hold on to her inside.
chapter two
THE BIG MAN drove off his place just before dark. In the back of the van he’d built a kind of keep with the straw bales and palettes and the badger was hidden amongst it. From the outside it looked like the van was filled with bales. The policeman had unnerved him and he could not shake the thought that they would come back as they had last time.
He had the six-month-old Staffy in for the ride. He needed a more stubborn dog and the Staffies were a good breed for that and were powerfully strong and he hoped to make a good tool of her to pull out the badgers and foxes. He thought about crossing the Staffy with something more mobile. Like Messie. He wanted to begin a breed of very sought-after and envied dogs.
He took it steady. The road was relatively easy, and he was pleased to be going south, the other carriageway filling and thickening with weekend traffic coming out to the second homes and caravans on the coast.
Two hours down the road he pulled into the lay-by they’d told him about and a while later another car pulled up.
It flashed its lights twice, turned in the lay-by and he followed. After a while, they turned off the main road.
The track seemed unnaturally wide for just a farm track and you could tell it had been tarmacked a long time ago and then it widened out further into a concrete road which met the yard. A number of cars were parked.
Where you would expect a farmhouse and outbuildings there was just yard and to one side a huge tin barn more like a hangar. You could see all this in the floodlights that lit the place off the big barn.
He got out of the van and could see two old buses to the side of the barn, their windows gone and the bonnets off and in the silver light that caught them there was something about them as of gutted big fish. He left the pup in the seat. He could see the faded paint of a sign that said Daycross Buses over the doors of the barn and understood the big parking yard now. The other guy got out of his jeep and came over and as he did there were the sounds of other men from the barn strangely muffled.
They opened the van and took out the palettes and then unbuilt the keep of straw.
He dragged out the badger in the sack and put it on the ground. He emphasized the effort.
Boar, he said. It’s heavy.
The other man rolled the sack with his foot testing it and the sack seemed to react shapelessly as if it were a collapsed drunk. He had old army boots on. He was ratty and bald and pinched and extruded, the opposite of the big and gruff man. Let’s take him in, he said.
There was a side door in the barn and they went through that and there was an explosion of light and noise. Around the walls were bales four or five deep to hold the noise the way a big crowd would. In the center of the depot was a mechanic’s pit for working on the buses. Around this the men had built stands to watch from.
The pit was lit with i
nspection lights and was a well of brightness and the noise of the twenty or so men in there was like before an amateur boxing match.
The door shut and some turned round and there were cheers, seeing the sack. A dog barked as if it could scent the badger.
At one end of the pit they had set up a trestle table and the man behind it was obviously the boss. He had the money tin in front of him.
The big man took the sack over and dumped it on the table which shook the badger into life so it scuffed on the table and rocked it. A can of beer went over to laughter as they held the table steady and then he punched the badger and it seemed to go still and there was a sense of immediate respect and dislike for him. It’s a big, heavy boar, he said. Then they tipped the badger into the pit.
There were extra patches of black on the badger from the coal.
It fell awkwardly like a thing of weight and quickly righted itself and shuffled to each wall then backed itself into the corner in the blind light.
It lifted its head and scented the air, smelt the dogs that were setting off in the contagious excitement. The badger looked somehow unreal in the direct white light of the floods, its snout making little small circles. Any first bets? the man shouted.
A guy had come up and held a dog to the stand and the dog was frothing through its muzzle and was bright-eyed and you could see the movement of its heart quickly in its chest.
There were men leaning on the stands and weighing up the badger and some waiting to lay down bets until they’d seen a dog go in. Other men were bringing dogs around. Most were lurchers, but there were also other big dogs.
The badger moved in the pit and stood up on its hind legs against the wall like a bear and jogged about and tried to dig and the dogs frenzied and this seemed to transfer to the men. Then they put in a dog and it went at the badger.
The dog was a terrier and they put it in just to assess the badger before the big dogs started. He heard one man say that to another, and it was as if they were explaining it to him.
The terrier yapped and nipped and the badger put down its head into its front legs and relied on the thick hide and tough skin to take the nips and the men booed and hissed and the big man felt inside this anger at the badger and cursed him to fight.
A man hovered by with the tongs and prodded the badger as the dog darted in and the badger lifted and snapped back at the dog to a great cheer and the dog dived out of the way of the snap which had been like lightning.
The terrier bounced in and out at the badger, yelping and banging at him and trying to get in a nip and every now and then the badger uncoiled and snapped back to a great cheer. Then the badger stretched itself up and went at the dog with great ferocious energy and immediately caught the dog under the chin and tore open the side of the dog with its paw before the tongs smashed down on its neck and it let go of the dog which was whining and bleeding and dragging itself pathetically hurt around the floor of the pit. And there was a crazed sound from the men then.
First dog, called the man. Any bets?
The tongs had been welded for the job and were seven or eight feet long and they dragged out the badger and held it. While the bets went down they tore out its front claws. Then they held up its head and held its jaw open with a jemmy and smashed the front teeth. The badger was bloodied and struggling and the whole forty pounds of it trying to resist but the three or four men held it down while they did this and then they put it back in the pit.
The dogs were incensed now and in that deafening noise and light the big man looked down at the badger with a slow glee. One of the men had knelt on its back while they stretched out its legs and used the fencing pliers to tear out the claws and some of the claws had splintered and split rather than come free.
The man on its back had knelt hard on it while it struggled and grunted and humphed underneath him and he seemed to get something carnal and delicious from that. There was a steady buzz. There was a bloody smell in the room now.
He felt a well of company. The group’s hungry cruelty seemed familial and safe to him and he felt for a moment his desires were not outlawed amongst them. He made their shouts internally, through his clenched teeth.
And then something changed. It came back at him.
The dogs were in cages at the far wall and the barred cages were in a row. People’s skin under the brutal white light looked unnatural.
It was the gangness of it and the group of men and his outsideness of it; and he remembered the jail. There, staring into the pit, a brief dizziness came.
It’s that police, he said. There was a holding to the way he talked to himself.
After an hour or so the men were drunk and baying as a pack. The badger could hardly fight anymore. Its chest heaved. It lay stupidly in the pit. A beer can was thrown in for encouragement, then another.
When finally it stirred, they put the dogs in again.
PART FOUR
The Sea
chapter one
DANIEL SAT IN the pickup in the car park looking out over the sea and he couldn’t bring himself to open the door. He had meant to park in town but had driven through the sheer activity of cars and people with an alienated numbness and had gone on to the beach car park. The school was out on lunch and there were kids everywhere in the small town and it was all too much for him. He sat there staring out over the gray, heavy water.
He had realized that morning that there was no more toilet paper and could hardly believe that this would be the thing to drive him out.
People were walking their dogs along the seafront. They looked red faced, braced against the tide somehow with the gulls lifting and dropping over the water behind them. Cars were parked around him and people sat in them drinking from flasks and watching the waves, the windows misting with condensation, and it was visible to him the quiet companionship of the old couples there, their simple togetherness act of getting out of the house to go for a drive and watch the waves awhile. They seemed to have the same comfortable look together as he had felt with her in the shed when it rained. He felt the great missingness of her then, watching the sea.
He’d had nothing substantial to eat for days. He was becoming conscious of his cheeks, as if they were somehow sucked in like they are in the cold, and there was a continual hollow sickness in his stomach. His teeth had begun to hurt.
There was a much greater breeze here than inland, and flecks of froth came off the waves into the wind. He thought about walking into the waves until he disappeared. It was the picture of himself old and alone. He felt he would be about as substantial as those flecks. When she asked him if he loved her, he had often said and said sincerely that he could not imagine being old without her. This was a constant, however tense things got between them now and then. It seemed to be a sign how much he knew of her that he could imagine her old as well as he could recall her as a child, as if he could see her at both ends of her life, see her completely. But he could not imagine her dead.
He had shut the door of the bedroom. He understood that at some point the scent of her would dissipate and go.
Beside him there was a boy in a car and he was looking only at his phone and he could see the boy’s face lit up by the glow and not looking at the great, dramatic sea.
He wound down the window and turned on the engine and drove out of the car park to the garage on the outskirt of town.
He pulled the pickup over away from the fuel pumps and walked over the forecourt and into the garage and loaded his arms with the toilet roll he needed and took a four liter of milk from the fridge shelf. There was a truck driver there, pulling a coffee from the vending machine, but no one he knew.
He walked down the shelves and heard the truck driver go out and turned to watch and saw him bite into a hot roll as he left, briefly feeling hungry but pushing it down from habit, as if hunger was a memory rather than a call. Things on the shelves registered strangely to him, but each item seemed like it would demand something of him if he took it home: washing-up liquid, fire
lighters, a newspaper. Something urged him on to take these things and to get back to normality, but when he felt this swell of hope that the energy might be there for this, he reached out to touch it and it faded, and he just took the toilet roll and milk to the counter.
How are you keeping? said the garage owner. It was kind of balanced, how he asked it.
Yeah, said Daniel.
The garage owner nodded once. He totaled up the two items on the till.
You want me to book those? he asked. The two men had known each other a while now and they had only ever had conversations like this.
Daniel seemed momentarily confused at the question. Uh. Yes, he said.
Are you okay? asked the garage owner. He knew about his wife, like everyone. He didn’t want to say anything too direct, but he liked the man. But he was trying not to show how he felt, seeing Daniel, which was the way you feel when you stop for an animal hit on the road.
Uh-huh, Daniel said. The garage owner looked at him, pushed his lips together in acceptance and nodded an O.K.
You want anything else? he asked.
No.
Anything to eat? There was a counter of hot food on display, cheese and ham pastries, a few pasties, some strips of bacon bedewed with fat under the hot light.
