‘I hear you’re bringing in some white goods – our dishwasher could do with replacing. Oh, and some new DVDs. The ones we’ve got are all starting to skip. And a new laptop would be nice too, to play them on.’
Extortion. No other word for it. But he needed that fuel. ‘I’ll see what I can do, I can’t promise any …’
Dorcas interrupted him. Spight was too taken aback to do more than gape. ’Then I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to lay my hands on those jerry cans. You know my memory isn’t what it was, and I’ll need some encouragement to go looking for them.’
This was taking too long, and making him look weak in the eyes of a woman he needed onside, however much that might rankle.
‘Fine,’ he all but snarled. ‘Dishwasher, laptop.’
‘And DVDs.’
He didn’t dignify that with a response. ‘Bob will give you a lift back to the farm. He can help you look, and load up. BOB!’ No Bob appeared. Where was the man? ‘Fred will go with you. FRED!’
His son-in-law put his head out of the church door.
‘Sir?’
‘Take Dorcas back to the farm and load up all the fuel you can find.’ He sneered as he continued, ‘Including her secret stash. Take it to the boat. I’ll meet you there in two hours.’
‘Yes, Sir.’
a dense net of shadows
It was as though night had fallen early as they bumped and bounced their way up the heavily shaded and gloomy lanes in Fred’s ancient Land Rover, headlights cutting out periodically from fraying electrics. Once at the farm, Dorcas settled Fred in the kitchen with some biscuits and a cup of tea while she rounded up Agnes and dragged Ivy, still snotty from her cold, out of her bed. The three of them huddled in the laundry room, out of range of listening ears.
‘Right, Spight’s cocked up, but it’s going to do us some good. You get a new dishwasher out of it, my girl.’ She looked at Agnes expectantly. The girl seemed underwhelmed. In fact, she seemed positively agitated. Dorcas sighed with exasperation. ‘We’ve to give Fred all the fuel we have stashed, or at least what he can find. And we’ll have to ramp up production to make up for it. We might even need to make a contribution ourselves. It’ll be just like the good old days,’ she wheedled, referring to the fat drives. Those had been before Agnes and Ivy had been born and they didn’t look impressed by the idea. To be fair, both of them were too scrawny to be much good to her.
‘Once we’ve loaded up, I need you to check the weight gain charts, and it might be an idea to get everyone together, let them know what we’re expecting of them.’
‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ Agnes plucked at her apron.
‘Of course, that’s why I said it.’
‘Yes Ma’am. Of course, sorry.’ What was wrong with her? She wouldn’t meet Dorcas’s eyes. Oh, who cared? She had more important things to worry about. Like keeping back a few jerrycans from the eagle eyes of Fred. Who knew how valuable fuel might become while they were going through this little difficulty? And if the wood-fired boiler broke down they might need it themselves.
Fred had finished his tea and cleaned them out of biscuits. Dorcas put him to work hauling containers of human-derived biodiesel through what used to be the coal hole to the cellar, using a rope and pulley for the larger drums, with the help of Agnes and a sniffling Ivy. While he was busy, she hid a few cans in the back of what used to be the old garage and was now a store for tools, broken furniture awaiting fixing – her inmates were hard on springs – and old junk. When Fred was done with the recent harvest she led him to a small shed and showed him the half a dozen or so cans stashed there.
‘That’s it, and I’m happy to do my bit for Devon,’ she declared.
‘I’ll have a quick look around if you don’t mind, see if there are a few others you might have forgotten about.’ Fred’s tone was heavily ironic, and Dorcas resented it. How dare he take that tone with her? But if she refused it wouldn’t look good. She followed him around as he poked around in cupboards and under tarpaulins in all the outbuildings clustered around the main house. When he got to the garage she tried to distract him with chatter, but he ignored her and rootled about, moving towards the back in a methodical sweep, or as methodical as possible with all the junk littering the floor.
‘Aha, here we are,’ he declared triumphantly, holding aloft one can. ‘These will do nicely. I can see why you forgot about 'em, they were so well hidden you might think it were deliberate.’
‘Well done Fred, I’d quite forgotten about those.’ Inwardly she was seething as she signalled to Agnes to carry one to the Land Rover. Fred carried the other four, oblivious to their heavy weight. The back of the vehicle was now full. Spight would be happy.
Fred climbed up into the driver’s seat. ‘Right, I just got time to go meet him down the quayside. Ladies, a pleasure.’ He tipped an imaginary hat at them. Dorcas forced herself to smile as he started the engine and crunched gears.
‘Smug bastard,’ she hissed, as the Land Rover sped away, spitting gravel before braking hard to avoid hitting the first of the potholes at speed. It proceeded down the drive at a more sedate pace.
By now it was eight o’clock and supper was an hour overdue, which was hardly going to help them get everyone back up to a farmable weight. Dorcas sent Agnes to break out the chip pan and set Ivy to peeling potatoes. Half an hour of hard graft later and they were ready to start dishing out eggs, chips and beans, the best they could do at short notice. Never mind, Agnes had baked earlier and there were brownies for pudding, and the last of the fizzy pop. Besides, she knew about the secret stashes in bedside cabinets.
‘Why don’t you go and have a bit of a sit down, Ma’am?’ Agnes suggested as she sweated under a tray of plates with zinc covers, heading for the staircase. ‘You must be knackered.’
‘Don’t be daft girl, it’s all hands on deck until we get this lot fed. Surprised they haven’t rioted.’
Dorcas bustled up the stairs under her own heavy load, sending Ivy up to the top floor, while she started at the west end of the first-floor corridor and Agnes started at the east. She was met with gratitude and a limited range of jokes along the line of ‘You get lost?’ or ‘Was about to start eating my own hand!’ Two more trips to the kitchen and there were just two plates left, for Primrose and Alise. As she headed for their room she collided with Agnes, who somehow tripped over the hall carpet and knocked into her, sending both plates crashing to a carpet already tapestried with old stains.
‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I’ll clean it up in a minute …’ Somehow Agnes had two more plates at the ready. She made to slip past Dorcas, who blocked her, grabbed the plates and nudged the door open with her hip.
‘You best stop ordering me around, girly, and yes you will clean it up.’ She sailed into the room, deposited one plate in the outstretched hands of Alise, and turned towards Primrose’s bed. Which was empty.
‘Where’s Primrose? Bathroom?’
‘Nah, she split,’ Alise mumbled around a mouthful of egg and chips. Yolk dripped down her chin and into her cleavage.
For a moment Dorcas imagined Primrose literally splitting. Maybe before she was harvested that would have been possible. Then the real meaning hit home. She turned slowly, still holding the plate. Agnes was standing in the doorway, eyes wide, like a rabbit.
‘Yeah, she must’ve snuck out last night some time,’ Alise continued helpfully. ‘I was asleep. She were gone when I woke.’
‘How long have you known?’ Dorcas asked Agnes, her tone icy.
‘Oh, she’s known since breakfast.’ Alise popped another chip in her mouth and chewed noisily. ‘If that food’s going begging, I’ll eat it.’
But the plate was already sailing for Agnes’s head. She ducked and it smashed against the wall behind her, leaving long smears of yolk as it fell in pieces to the floor.
*
Fred found Mr Spight and Bob on the quayside on the outskirts of the nearest town, downhill and to the east of the village. Lo
ngmarsh lay only five miles away from Bodingleigh but was inaccessible to many of the village’s older inhabitants, the roads being all but impassable and the road so steep it was difficult to climb on foot. It had been this difficulty that had been used to justify the tithing of fat for fuel nearly twenty years before, when imports of petrol had become prohibitively expensive and a newly elected council leader, in the person of militia hero Captain Hector Spight, decried attempts to decarbonise their local economy as giving in to the ideological stranglehold from which they had chosen to devolve.
If they were to forge their own path and ‘Make Devon Great Again’, they needed oil, and it was up to everyone to do what they could to supply it, if only to show the rest of what had been the United Kingdom that Devon had what it took to go it alone. He had been first in the queue to donate at the inaugural tithe; Fred, in his twenties, newly promoted in the militia, worshipping both Councilman Spight and his daughter Flora, had been right behind him.
A year after becoming leader of the Council of Longmarsh and District, Mr Spight had become the elected Mayor of the whole of Devon and delivered on a pledge to convert all of the county’s generators and remaining diesel cars to run on biodiesel. Although outside of his own district his grip was looser, and he was forced to share power with the rest of the Council, its members were – largely – hand-picked by him and co-opted without the bother and expense of actual elections, as natural wastage and the occasional scandal created empty seats. Mayor Spight had held office without interruption and his re-appointment next May was expected by a populace made cynical by the politics of the early twenty-first century and happy to have someone decisive in charge.
The quay lay alongside an old boathouse, pre-Devolution headquarters for a ferry service catering to a thriving tourist industry before visitors stopped coming. Since then the river had silted up; the flat-bottomed skiff Bob was preparing – while Spight made calls on his satellite phone to agree a rendezvous with the skipper – had a shallow draught that could get them all the way to Dartmouth, so long as they waited for the high point of the tide.
All of which was irrelevant to Fred as he pulled up in the Land Rover, because as soon as he reached them Spight told him he wasn’t coming on this trip. He was to load up the fuel, stash what they couldn’t fit in the boat in the old ticket office and go home. Bob would be steering, so Spight could continue coordinating the transfer of goods and payment by phone.
‘Need to keep the boat light,’ he explained tersely when Fred questioned his decision. ‘Get on with it man, we need to be off.’
Fred had been looking forward to a trip on the water, a chance to feel significant in a town bigger than Longmarsh, and a possible quick fumble with a whore upstairs in the hotel while Spight was conducting business. It was only fitting that he, as the natural successor to the Mayor, should be the one to accompany him on important business. How come it was Bob – mousy, insignificant Bob – who was chosen to make the journey?
Fred’s good mood, brought about by Spight trusting him to retrieve the fuel from the fat farm, curdled. He stumped from the Land Rover to the boat, and then the Land Rover to the boathouse, ignored by his father-in-law and avoided by Bob, who busied himself with filling the boat’s fuel tank and stowing spare cans so they wouldn’t upset the balance of the skiff.
Eventually Spight declared them ready and directed Fred to untie the boat and push them away from the quay. The sound of Bob’s oars slapping the water mocked Fred, left alone on the waterside as the boat drifted off into the twilight. An owl hooted. Fred felt sure it was taking the piss.
His drive back to Bodingleigh was slow. There was no rush to return. His wife would be out do-gooding somewhere or bossing the Knockers around. He didn’t care where, or who she was with; he’d stopped asking years before, and she’d stopped telling him some years before that. The only things keeping them together were the conventions of a small village, the will of her father, and Fred’s ambitions to take over from him when the old man got too senile to carry on. Admittedly that still seemed some way off, but in the meantime there were, sometimes, perks to being Spight’s son-in-law.
He fought to remember that when he got home to the three-storey house they all shared, after leaving the Land Rover in the car park up by the village hall. He hadn’t had time to eat before the meeting, or after it, and there was no dinner left out for him, or plated up in the fridge they were privileged to be able to maintain. Mrs Spight had retired to her bedroom for the night and, as expected, there was no sign of his wife. Clearly the lazy cow had fucked off out without thinking to see to her husband’s needs.
He was making himself a ham and cheese sandwich at the kitchen counter when his son came into the room.
‘Where’s Grandpa?’ Hector Jr had been banned from the public meeting, as had everyone under the age of sixteen, and had no idea what it had been about, though he’d tried to wheedle information out of Fred earlier. His father had no intention of making the little snot-nose happy. The boy was cocky enough.
‘Out.’
‘Obviously. When’s he gonna be back?’
‘Dunno.’ Fred bit viciously into his sandwich. Taking the plate, he crossed to the table and sat heavily in a chair. He was tired from all the lugging of heavy containers and pissed off at being excluded from family business. It felt good to pass that on.
Hector drew out a chair and sat down opposite his father, who was astonished. Junior hadn’t willingly spent time with him in years. He must want something. Fred remained silent, ate his sandwich and waited to see what that might be.
‘I was up in the woods by the fat farm this morning, after telling everyone to go to the meeting, and I saw something.’
Fred grunted and stuffed in the last crust, leaned back and wondered if he wanted more to eat.
‘I was having a poke about, and I saw someone, and then they just disappeared.’
Nope, he wasn’t that hungry, but he could go a pint. Dismissing Junior’s prattling as irrelevant fantasy, Fred checked his watch. There was still time to go down the pub for a few pints of cider. It would probably be packed after the meeting, and someone would be bound to buy him a drink in the hope of getting some inside info. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have any. A few noncommittal grunts and a knowing look should get him at least a couple of pints. Maybe a chaser of poteen. He pushed his chair back from the table and stood, leaving the plate for one of the women to clear up.
‘Dad! Listen!’ Junior smacked the table, a right chip off old Grandpa’s block. Fred was so astonished he didn’t even act on his first impulse to smack him one. ‘This boy disappeared right in front of my eyes, so I poked around in the bushes where I’d seen him, and I found a door! There’s some secret place in the woods, and there’s people hiding in there.’
This was his moment to shine. With no Spight around to take control of the situation, Fred was free to take matters in hand and deal with what could turn out to be the worst crisis they’d had to face in years. He was delighted. After questioning his son closely, and with the help of an antique Ordnance Survey walker’s map, he pinpointed the area where Hector had seen the youth disappearing to within a few square feet, wrote notes of his son’s description of the spot in the margin, then called someone he could trust. It took a long time for the phone to be answered, and when it was he could hear pub noise in the background. Without giving details, in case this turned out to be a crock of shite, he arranged to meet Dug and Biff at the Land Rover in twenty minutes.
Junior was sent to bed, much to his disgust.
‘You need me there to help you find it,’ he pointed out.
‘I need you out of the way. If things go bad and something happens to you, I’ll cop it from your mum and granddad. Go to bed. I’ll tell you about it in the morning.’ Turning his back on his son, Fred started rummaging through kitchen drawers to find things he might need. A torch and spare batteries that had cost them a fortune in local produce, and a sock full of loose chan
ge that sometimes came in handy as a cosh. He didn’t have a key to the gun cupboard.
Behind him, he heard Junior stomping up the stairs to his room.
*
As soon as his dad had left for the car park, Hector Jr sneaked back downstairs, still fully dressed. His mum was out, and Grandma was asleep and snoring in her room, but he snuck around the house anyway as he found his coat and shoes, in an emotional state ricocheting between excitement and resentment at being left behind, when he was the one who had found the secret hideout and knew where it was.
His bike was by the back door where he’d left it, and he wheeled it quietly up the alley at the rear of the house. There was still a trace of light in the sky, but the village lay shrouded, and he took care to keep to the shadows between the few streetlights. As he passed the school, he saw the warden approaching, come to snuff the candles and turn the streets dark. It must be eleven, curfew time. He hid behind a wall, the knowledge he was now officially breaking the rules – as well as disobeying his father – giving him a massive buzz.
He didn’t want to get ahead of his dad and be caught, so he ducked into a derelict cul de sac above the village and crouched behind a grass bank, just in time to avoid being lit up by the headlights of the Land Rover as it swept out of the car park and turned left towards the lane. Now he’d have to peg it to catch up, or he’d miss all the action.
About half a mile from the fat farm driveway was a shortcut into the woods that he was sure his dad didn’t know about, and there he left the road, dragging his bike up through a gap in the dense hedge and leaving it leaning up against a trunk. From here the hill climbed steeply, a dense tangle of laurel and ivy, making the going slow. Hector climbed as fast as he could, trying to make as little noise as possible, only using his torch for short flashes to make sure he was heading in the right direction. It was hard work; he was hot and out of breath by the time he reached the top. By his reckoning he was about a hundred yards from where he had seen the mysterious smoker. He hadn’t told his dad about smelling the smoke, feeling it was unwise to admit he recognised the smell of weed, and thinking if he was lucky he might find the boy’s stash. Not to smoke, but he knew plenty of kids who’d pay for it in cash or favours.
To See the Light Return Page 9
