White Ravens

by Owen Sheers

  Whether it was Probert or not, Dewi’s suspicion soon spread to Sion, as infectious as the disease itself. Between them they spread the blame too, out into the whole world, until that’s where my brothers saw it lying – out there, in the hands of the world beyond our farm. They went cold, the two of them, because of what those men in their spacesuits had done to our flock, to our lives. That fire turned them to ice. Or at least, I hope that was the case. Otherwise what other excuse can I find for them, for what they did? What other reason could there be for them to have gone from tending sheep to stealing them, from being farmers to killers?

  Step, Stick. Step, Stick.

  Stop.

  I waited for him to walk on but, like I said, I knew he wouldn’t. I knew he was always heading for that bench, and for me.

  I carried on looking at the river sliding its way through the city. As he sat down I felt his shadow flick over me, then the flex of the bench under my thighs as it took his weight. I kept on looking ahead, shifting my gaze to the ravens now. They’d finished their feeding and were taking up positions on the railings and lawns around the castle. Waiting for the tourists to come I guess; waiting to be gawped at, photographed and no doubt, when the Beefeaters weren’t watching, fed again, slipped crusts of Costa Coffee sandwich and Starbucks muffin.

  ‘They say they can tell your future you know.’

  His voice caught me by surprise. There was no intake of breath, no shifting on the bench as he turned to me. Just suddenly his voice, clear and easy in the morning air. He didn’t have an accent as such, more what Mam would have called ‘educated’.

  I didn’t say anything, didn’t look at him. I’d heard about London and seen enough on TV to know you didn’t go talking to old blokes on benches. So I just kept looking at the ravens, running their big old beaks under their wings like they were sharpening them, then settling again to catch the day’s first heat in their midnight wings.

  ‘The ravens,’ he continued. ‘They say they can tell your future. Coracomancy they call it.’ I thought he’d stopped then, but he repeated the last word, slowly and more quietly, like he was still getting used to it himself. ‘Yes, coracomancy.’

  Now he’d spoken a bit more I could hear the age in his voice, like something in his throat had come loose, making the edges of his words watery. I couldn’t help sneaking a look at him then, just a quick sideways glimpse. When I did he was looking right back at me, bold as brass, so I snapped my head back round and stared down at the ravens in the Tower again. He carried on talking.

  ‘You know the sort of thing, cawing to the right means a journey will go well, picking up a stick or some other object... oh, yes, like that one there.’ As if on command one of the ravens hopped over the lawn and picked up a twig. It stood there, the twig unwieldy in its beak, like a stupid dog that doesn’t know what to do with a stick it’s been thrown. ‘Yes, well that,’ he continued, ‘that’s supposed to mean something will be found.’ He allowed himself a little chuckle then, like he’d said something right funny. ‘Can’t say I believe any of it myself. After all a man’s got to understand his past before he can get a look at his future hasn’t he?’ He paused then, like he was waiting for me to reply. I didn’t, and maybe that’s why when he spoke to me again it was in a lower, softer tone that made me turn back to look at him. ‘Or a woman of course,’ he said. ‘Or a woman.’

  This time I held his stare. His eyes were milky blue, his hair bright white. He was clean shaven so you could still make out a once-strong face under the loose skin drooping round his cheekbones and under his chin. Now, it isn’t like I haven’t seen men look at me before. Like I said, the few I’ve known well enough to undress in front of haven’t been able to hide a thing when they’ve got a proper sight of me. When I go into town for market too, I can walk down a street so as to collect men’s eyes like burrs if I want to, so that when I reach the end I’m covered in eyeballs from the street behind me. But the look of this old fella, well, it wasn’t like that. His look was just clear, honest I guess. Like he was drinking me in, but not in a seedy way. More like, well, like he was reading me.

  ‘So,’ he said, his voice still soft and low. ‘What brings you to the Tower on such a lovely morning miss? What winds have blown you here today?’

  And that was it. I don’t know how he did it, but that one question, with his eyes looking into mine and asked in that voice, well, it exploded in my head it did. Just went off and undid me, bringing my heart jumping back into my throat and the tears back into my eyes. And all I could think of was I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. What had brought me there? It was a bloody good question, the same one I’d been asking myself all morning, ever since I’d left my brothers covered in blood in the back of that lorry.

  After our flock was slaughtered, just like old Probert and everyone else, we got our compensation, fair and square. It was meant so as we could replace the flock. But my brothers had other ideas. After what had happened, and with them feeling hurt by the whole world, they had no interest in starting over again, in hauling their arses up the mountain three times a day to fetch back new sheep who had no sense of where they belonged bred into them. Well, I say they had other ideas, but the truth is it was Sion’s friend, Lloyd down at the Esso garage who brought them. He knew some men in Bristol who’d set up a network of contacts in Birmingham, Manchester, even London. These men had asked if Lloyd could find someone to run the Welsh arm of their operation. They’d got the Lake District and the Pennines covered. But not Wales. Yet. Lloyd came up one night and talked Dewi and Sion through it all, and by the time he’d walked back out the door, leaving the back of an envelope scrawled with more zeros than my brothers were ever used to seeing, they’d agreed to be that Welsh arm.

  To be honest, I didn’t believe any of it. I knew my brothers and I didn’t see how they were ever going to pull this one off. I thought it was a bit of bravado, a bit of pride-patching after the burning of our flock. But well, just goes to show doesn’t it? People can surprise you, even if you think you know them better than you do yourself. Because, believe me, my brothers didn’t just pull it off, they went for it wholesale: lock, stock.

  They spent our compensation on a large horse lorry which, with the help of Lloyd, they converted to their needs. First I knew of that bloody great thing was when it came lumbering up our track to block all the light into the house. And that’s where it stayed too, parked there for the next fortnight, casting a shadow over the farm as they hammered sheets of metal over its side windows, sound proofed its insides and put in a second, reinforced floor.

  While Sion and Lloyd worked on the lorry Dewi got himself a part-time job in the abattoir in town. On weekends and nights he’d pass on what he’d learnt to Sion and tell him what tools they needed to buy. Then one morning that September them towers came down in America and suddenly the whole world seemed to be shifting on its axis. Everything seemed darker, and yet somehow new too, so in a way what my brothers were doing began to feel in rhythm with the times. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  The next spring, just when the lowland lambs were being born, Lloyd at the Esso got his HGV licence and less than a year after those men in spacesuits, when the first buttercups and daisies were just starting to push through that old ash scar in the paddock, my brothers were ready to start.

  The plan was bold but simple, which is probably why, to start with, it all worked so well. The day before a job my brothers would sharpen their knives and take a good long nap. Lloyd would come up around ten and the three of them would leave the farm around eleven, Lloyd driving and my brothers riding shotgun with a couple of collies at their feet. Within a few hours they’d be at the field of some other farm, far enough away for them not to be known. Using the dogs they’d round up as many lambs and sheep as the lorry could take – around 100 in all – lock them in, and go. Lloyd would head for the nearest motorway and Dewi and Sion would get to work in the back, slaughtering the sheep.

  It was hard, bl
oody work, but they got right quick at it. A few hours later, at four or five in the morning, the lorry would pull up at the kitchen doors of restaurants, at the service lifts of hotels, and Lloyd would hand over prime cuts of Welsh lamb so fresh the customers could still feel the animal’s living heat pressing into their hands through the plastic it was wrapped in. In return Lloyd would leave each back door with a tidy sum of used notes in brown envelopes. If all went well Dewi and Sion, after they’d dropped Lloyd off, could be back home by eight or nine the next morning.

  The best job by far was London. Think about it. How much do you pay for a good bit of lamb in those smart hotel restaurants, or in one of those TV chef bistros? Thirty, forty quid for a shoulder? Well, a sheep’s got two of those hasn’t it? Hundred sheep at forty quid a shoulder, that’s 8,000 quid for a start. And that’s just the shoulders. Not that Dewi and Sion ever took home that much. After they’d undercut the local suppliers by more than half, paid Lloyd, given the men in Bristol their cut, taken in fuel costs and the rest, well, they might bring back between ten or fifteen grand from one job. Still, a bloody sight more than they’d ever got from farming their own stock. And those places in London? Well, they couldn’t get enough of the stuff. No one seemed to care where the meat came from, least of all the lucky bugger who got to eat it.

  And what about me? Well, I suppose I was happy to be as blind as those London diners. I’d take the money my brothers brought home, stick a chunk of it in a drawer and use the rest for that month’s shopping and bills. Then I’d try to forget about where it all came from, heading into the kitchen sharpish to cook up breakfast and get away from the sound of Sion hosing down the lorry. Hose it for hours he would until the gutters in the yard ran red all afternoon.

  God knows what we were going to do with the money. I had my own plans. Go to college, move to Cardiff; get some job in an office with big windows looking over the bay. Sion did, once, bring back some holiday brochures from town. He’d sat there at the kitchen table, flicking through all the bright skies, white beaches and women in bikinis while the rain hammered at the window and the wind got its fingers under the slates. All that brightness and gloss though, I think it seemed too impossible for him, sitting there in our dark kitchen, because he never picked up that brochure again. The next time I saw it, Dewi was using a page to light the fire; a woman’s head, all smiles against a palm tree, rumpled out the side of his fist as he shoved her under a log and lit a match to her blue, blue sky.

  It all went pretty smoothly though. They never did too many jobs, and never any too close together. So, again, maybe we’d have been alright, even after the spacesuit men. Maybe we’d have made it all work, if only Lloyd hadn’t gone and come down with the shits like he did, and if Dewi and Sion hadn’t come and asked me to drive them instead.

  ‘Who else we gonna ask?’ Dewi said that night, standing over me at the kitchen table. ‘There’s no one else, is there Rhi? No one else knows.’

  Sion didn’t say a thing, just skulked around the sink, looking out the window then went to tinker with the lorry and give the dogs some water. Dewi put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Please Rhi,’ he said softly, like he was talking down a nervous foal. ‘Jus’ this once?’

  ‘I’ve never driven that thing Dewi,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘An’ never driven to London at all.’

  ‘No, but that’s it, see?’ he said, excited as a kid at Christmas. He pulled up a chair beside me. ‘Lloyd’s put the whole job on this.’ He took out a chunky bit of plastic with a screen in it. ‘The route into London an’ all the drop-offs. All you gotta do is follow the arrows an’ listen to the voice. That’s it Rhi. We’ll be back by morning you know we will. Jus’ follow the voice, tha’s all.’

  I picked up the Sat Nav from the table and turned it over in my hand. I thought of all that cash in the drawer in the dresser. I thought of Mam, waking me up in the mornings – ‘how you ever going to get anywhere girl, if you don’t leave this place first?’ I thought of seeing London at dawn, of an office in the bay with floor-to-ceiling windows, of sitting in a lecture hall taking notes. I thought of meeting a man who’d know how to talk to me, how to hold me and touch me. I thought of that pyre, the men in spacesuits, the buttercups pushing through ash. I thought of all that and when I did, I said yes. I said yes, trying not to think about what would happen in the back of that old horse lorry, in just a few hours time, somewhere on a motorway between here and London.

  I’ll say this for my brothers, they’d got right quick at it I’m telling you. They worked those dogs better at night than my dad ever did by day. Not that I saw the actual rustling or anything. No, I stayed in the cab. I just felt it and heard it. Heard the clatter of hooves on the ramp; felt the shiver of their running weight down the length of the lorry. Heard the confused bleating, the stamping of their feet and saw in my mind’s eye their heads, stretching over each other’s rumps, their slit nostrils, flaring and panting, their eyes wide and their pink tongues showing with each tremulous baa. Then all of a sudden the passenger door was opening and the dogs were jumping in, their own tongues lolling out their mouths, right excited by it all. Then it was closing again and Dewi was banging on the side of the lorry, telling me to get on out of there. I shifted the gearstick to first and eased that bloody great thing out of the field, burning bright green on the Sat Nav stuck on the windshield. And then, as I trundled down the lane, lights off, she spoke to me. A right posh woman, like Joanna Lumley. ‘At the end of the road, turn right,’ she said. ‘Turn right.’ And that was it, we were on our way; Dick Whittington, off to London to see the queen.

  Picture it if you can. It’s 2am somewhere on the M4 between Swindon and Reading. The tarmac ahead is patched with smudges of light from the tallest streetlamps I’ve ever seen. The darkness beyond them is pricked with the tail-lights of other lorries still on the road at this hour. The steering wheel of mine feels strong and secure under my hands, the beams of its headlights eating up the road with weighty ease. I’ve got the radio on, full volume, not that the dogs seem to notice, flat out in the footwell. The embankments slide past me on either side, scattered with puny saplings planted in circles of plastic. Every thirty miles or so a services looms up out of the night, an oasis of light and menus, then fades away again in my wing mirrors. Eventually, in the distance, London begins to rise on the horizon. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen the city. At first it looks scrappy as hell, but as the towers get taller and the traffic flowing between them thicker, it begins to cast a spell on me. But even that does nothing to shake the cold sweat that’s been gripping me all the way. Because all this time, while I’ve been looking forward, I haven’t been able to block out what’s happening a few metres behind my head – my brothers, Dewi and Sion speed-slaughtering and butchering 100 head of stolen lambs and ewes.

  I try to focus on the city enveloping me, on this feeling of sliding smoothly along the thread of the road, deeper and deeper into its complicated knot. And I focus, too, on the disembodied voice of the woman, on Joanna’s plummy diction, guiding me into London, taking me further and further away from Wales, home and my usual bearings. ‘In 400 yards, turn left. Turn left.’

  I have to say, ‘listen to her’ because I did, but I had to question her priorities at times. ‘Attention, speed camera ahead,’ she’d whisper in my ear. ‘Fifty yards, 40, 30, 20…’ Speed camera? Christ love, I couldn’t help thinking, that’s the least of our worries right now. Try ‘Attention, illegal butchering of stolen stock’ for size. ‘Twenty, 30, 40, 50. At the next junction, turn yourself in. Turn yourself in.’ That would be more like it.

  But of course, we didn’t did we? No, we went ahead with it all just as planned and you know what? It went just as planned too, nice and smooth, just as Dewi had said it would. Until the very last drop-off. Which is when it all went very wrong indeed.

  Apart from me, it was clear everyone else had done this before. The chefs at the kitchen doors, the Polish dishwashers who lugged the meat from the lorry,
the pooled blood shape-shifting at the bottom of the plastic bags like clouds on a sped-up weather forecast. And of course my brothers, passing that meat out through the barely opened back door of the lorry. All I had to do was pull up where Joanna told me – ‘You have reached your second destination’ – and collect the money from the chef once he’d inspected the meat. After the first time I began to relax. By the fourth I was even beginning to enjoy it a little. I can’t lie; it all began to excite me. Sitting in the warm fug of the lorry’s cab, thumbing through wads of cash as London bruised up through an early morning lit in all the right places. A couple of thumps from Dewi on the side of the lorry and I’d start up and drive on again, waiting for Joanna to tell me where to go. ‘At the next junction turn right. Turn right.’

  We did the last drop-off exactly on schedule, at around 5am, just in time to leave the city before the traffic got heavy. And that should have been it. I should have just waited for Dewi’s thump on the side of the lorry, and driven on home. But I didn’t did I?

  I don’t know what it was, but having all that cash up front, having got through the night, got through London, having seen London, I wanted to share it all with Dewi and Sion. I wanted them to see the money, to hold it, to know the reward for their night’s labour. So instead of waiting for Dewi’s thump I went on round to the back of the lorry and gave the door a little tap of my own. It cracked open and there was Dewi’s eye, looking at me.

  ‘What is it Rhi? Everythin’ alright?’ He sounded tired, worn out, and I felt a sudden flood of tenderness towards him.

  ‘Yeah, everything’s fine Dew. Jus’ wanted to give you the cash in there. You know, so you can check it an’ all. Probably safer then me having it up front don’t you think?’