Terroir

by Graham Mort

  We were eighteen when Mosley came to Belle Vue and we’d got quietly drunk on the way home, taking a half in each pub on the way. Our mother had been listening to it on the news and she’d hugged us on the doorstep, even though we were half cut. She’d heard it all on the wireless. She was proud of us then and she knew we’d look out for each other. Or that Noel would look out for me. He was lost in the Baring Sea when his ship was torpedoed in 1942, part of a Russian supply convoy. Some of the crew were saved and there were weeks of waiting. They turned into years, yet our mother would never agree to a headstone. I always knew he was drowned, because I’d seen that in my head, felt the seawater in my own chest. I took to wearing his clothes, took to being him. Neighbours stared at me in the street, a kind of hope darting into their faces. But they passed on with nothing said. He’d made some shirts with Goldstein when he was starting out. Cotton poplin. They lasted me for years. And I had that photograph of him where he looked as if he’d already passed away, though he was only asleep.

  They say life goes on, and it’s true, but life is never the same. Nor should it be. I remember going to the seaside near Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast years later. The kids were playing with coal that had washed up on the beach, a long dark fan left by the tide with cuttlefish and bladderwrack and a woman’s red shoe. I remember wondering if the coal had come from steamships sunk in the war. Everything is changed by such events. They reached out to hurt the quietest lives. To families all over Europe, then to Asia and Africa. And all because of hate.

  After Noel left and never came home and for all the rest of the time I lived in Crumpsall, I hated that cold little front parlour. Whenever I was in there with my mother, especially just before Christmas when the days were short and we were supposed to be celebrating, she’d become cast down and watchful. Listening for the door, harkening to footsteps in the street. I had the feeling, even years afterwards when I had a wife and kids of my own, that she expected me at any moment to sit down at the piano and play.

  ANGIE

  He’s walking over frost-stiffened grass, his shadow ahead of him, long-legged, stretched by the falling sun. The grass makes the sound of crunching gristle and Steve’s shadow wears a brimmed hat. When he climbs a stile he sees his hands turning into his father’s hands. Because things change like that, from one state to another, from one condition to the next. He’s still weak from the flu, his legs heavy, his chest tight with infection. He has a three-week beard and it blows against his face, tickling him. Angie likes it. She says it makes him look nautical. It reminds him of days without shaving or washing, clothes salted with sweat. Watching a path zigzag though the bush. Hearing macaws shriek into a clearing where a bamboo hut is rotting under stray rays of light. Feeling the dust of a mountain trail sift through his fingers into a scorching breeze, shadows deepening in gullies, sky burnished to a blue dome. He rubs the long bristles with his fingers. Tomorrow he’ll buy some clippers.

  Angie always marvelled at his patience. However late she was, he’d be there, smoking a cigarette, chewing a stalk of grass, lying full length at the beach or their rendezvous under that giant Spanish chestnut by the river. She could never surprise him. Though he’d surprised her that time, outside McEnery’s, where they’d arranged to meet under the canopy after work. Arriving so quietly, placing his hands over her eyes, then letting them slide to her hips, feeling her sag against him. It’s OK, he said, it’s only the Grim Reaper. And she’d laughed, her body warm against him, her eyes squinting as if he was still in the far distance of her life. You’re quiet, she said, admiring him, like a big cat, like a tiger or something. He took his hands back. A puma, he said, they’re really quiet, I saw one in New Mexico. They turned to see themselves reflected in plate glass, superimposed on streetlights and passing cars. The tailor’s naked mannequins seemed to beckon them to their world of ghosts. They look like dancers, Angie said, dancers who’ve forgotten how to dance. Then she’d pulled him away, linking arms.

  When he steps from the stile to the crusted grass, it’s soft with mud. He feels the tendons tighten behind his knees. Once he could run 10k without slackening, drop his pack, crouch, then put five rounds into the red at sixty paces. Now two Suffolk tups stare at him, their black ears hanging, their fleeces tight as barristers’ wigs. Ahead of him, the land rises to a copse of sycamores. An abandoned rookery is falling from the branches, plundered by magpies and carrion crows. The track is faint, hardly trodden now. The red cattle have been taken into the shippen for the winter. His looks at his hands again, their close-trimmed nails, the split skin on his thumb, brown freckles over blue veins, wrinkles, swollen knuckles, dark hairs. His father had collapsed and died at a bus stop in the Black Country town where he’d been born, a carrier bag holding the weekly shop at each side of him.

  The town was a nothing place by then. Boarded-up shops and shuttered takeaways. Empty pubs where you’d be hard put to it to find a fight on Friday nights. Factories and engineering works and potteries turned into mail-order warehouses or gyms. Or left to rot with To Let notices peeling in the rain. Years later, he’d been called home to find his mother in the old city hospital, dehydrated, feverish and rambling. She had sores on her legs from lying in wet sheets. She hadn’t recognised Steve, her eyes glazed by fever. Don’t worry, she kept saying, don’t look so worried. This wasn’t his mother. Whatever else, she’d always known who was who and what was what. Steve was white with anger when the doctors came, though he never raised his voice, watching the nurses put up a saline drip. He sat by her bed for three days, hardly moving, living on coffee and sandwiches from a vending machine.

  That first time with Angie, he was wound tight with anticipation. She’d promised to meet him on the beach at dusk, making her way from the town centre by bus after work. He got there early and waited, hearing faint hurdy-gurdy music from the merry-go-round, seeing its smudged carousel of lights. The air was still warm. Steve sat on a rock surrounded by a ribbon of water, not far from where waves hissed and retreated towards the sunset. It burned like a drowning foundry or evaporating wine, staining sea and clouds. To wait like that was to live inside another kind of time, because something good was about to happen. That was something he’d never thought until now. Then she was greeting him with a half wave of her hand, swaying as she walked, her hair tied up into a bunch that fell down over her collar.

  It had been a four-way conversation: him, Angie, herring gulls and the sea. A faint scent of fish and chips came from the town, its curving row of shops and cafés, the statue of Prince Albert stranded in a lost century. A bottle of Chardonnay was lodged against the rock in the pool. He pushed in the cork and the wine spurted over his fingers. He washed them in the sea and she’d laughed, gulping the wine so it ran down her chin onto her blouse. He kissed her, very gently, and she’d felt extraordinary. The scent and taste of her, the softness of skin and silk as scarf and hair got tangled in the kiss. He thought afterwards about what it was like. It was as if a new room had been built in his life and he’d entered it at last.

  When Steve turns onto the farm track, workmen are busy at the converted barn that sits on a small mound across the way. With its long views it’s like a small fort. When he was at school, they’d visited an iron-age stockade, standing on the ramparts, looking at lines of solifluction, imagining the minds of another people for whom war was total: women taken for breeding stock, men and boys put to the sword. The archaeologists had excavated burned fencing stakes, a midden full of the bones of children. For a while that’s what he wanted to, be: an archaeologist, uncovering the past. Something had knocked that out of him. Steve looks to the hilltop again: at the new build there’s a haze of arc lights, bright as a spray of powdered ice. The builders’ vans are parked at an angle to each other, the concrete mixer churning a slurry of lime and stone, the same question and answer going round and round. A line of breezeblocks flushes pink as the low light of the sun finds it.

  There is something about the lie of the land here that reminds
him. The way the hills fold into each other. That stray phrase, with a fist at its heart: hand in glove. They’d been waiting for a courier, a foreigner, whatever that meant. What made sense then sounded like bullshit now. But that’s all they knew or wanted to, kicking their heels for three days on a wedge of deserted farmland. It’d been a bit like this place. The empty farmhouse on a slight rise, its windows dusty and webbed with winter light. The outbuildings straggling away from the farm. Just him and Len, their second job together.

  They’d walked in from the drop by night, hunkering down in one of the old milking sheds that looked out on the path. At dawn, light grew from behind a copse of bare trees. Moles had been busy and the fields were thistled over, bringing gangs of goldfinches for the seeds. They had a converted L42 with a scope and ten rounds in the magazine. Untraceable, the armourer said with a laugh, a real bastard’s bastard, tearing up the chitty they’d signed. They carried it in a canvas case like a shotgun, as if they were after partridge or pheasants. They wore civvies. Their wallets held creased family photographs that could have been anybody, that must have been somebody. The families they’d probably never have. No radio. They spent that first day not talking, watching magpies come and go. Pissing in the corner, staying away from the windows, keeping all movement to a minimum. When the job was done they’d walk out to a pick-up point that was checked by a patrol every three hours. It was cold, bone-piercingly cold, even with gloves and caps and tweed jackets.

  Steve crosses the path, stopping to wipe mud and sheep shit from his boots against the grass verge. He feels a little crunch in his knee. That’s never going to get any better now. The air is fine and cold and he tries to draw it into his lungs, but they are still solid with infection. He coughs hard and deep, hawks phlegm over the fence. The sheep stare at him stoically. Texels with stupid faces and yellow eyes. A tractor starts in the farmyard behind him. There’s a slurry pit with aluminium sides gleaming in the half-light. The tractor rolls forward, spikes a round bale of hay and reverses towards the track. The parents will move out from the farmhouse to the converted barn they don’t need for hay or beasts anymore, leaving their son behind in the old house to find a wife.

  That time in the swamplands, in the south, they’d waited in reed beds. It’d been a long day with mosquitos torturing them, black beetles scurrying at their boots. Their bodies and elytra had a green sheen, like home-cured bacon. They smelled cigarette smoke before they saw them: a father and two sons, pushing bicycles with packages strapped to the back, chatting as if they were bringing figs to the market. That’d been a mess. Automatic fire, the rounds chinging and sparking off the bicycle frames. When they turned over the bodies, one of them was a girl and still alive.

  The moon is on the rise now, huge and yellow as it floats above the line of hills that still carry traces of snow. That’s an illusion. His mind is making the moon bigger than it really is. It’s simply the way a round object appears when close to a horizontal line. But when he stares at it, the hair on his nape tingles with something like fear. A primordial apprehension tugging at his guts.

  That last tour he’d worked in the mountains near the Kurdish border. They’d found a cleft in ancient rock, a vantage point above a narrow track that the sun crept above early in the morning. There were almond groves below, walled fields with scattered goats and women bending over a green crop. The dust was like fine rust sifting through his hands, staining them. That had been a long wait and nothing to think about but a name. Hassan. No name was better. He’d thought about nothing else. Hassan the child, following his father around the smallholding. Hassan taking out vegetable scraps to the donkey. Hassan courting a dark-eyed woman who wore a blue hijab and lived in the next village, a cousin’s cousin. Hassan asking her father to marry her, then the wedding, then making love together in the cool white-walled room of their house. Hassan teaching school children from the Koran, writing the lesson on a blackboard in Arabic script.

  Steve had been dozing, dreaming of Angie, thinking of the girls, thinking this would be his last tour. Then, late in the afternoon, after three o’clock prayers had drifted up from the village, the mobile phone had vibrated in his pocket. Then a figure in white robes had appeared. A man kicking up a low veil of dust. Older than he’d looked in the photograph, walking with a slight limp, using a walking stick – the kind made from aluminium sections that screw together. Through the scope he’d looked kindly, a patriarch with deep eyes that seemed to rest upon things then move with care to the next. He was walking through Steve’s breath, thick and slow in his chest.

  They’d use a drone now. That was a different kind of watching, staying awake in front of a plasma screen, its pixels drifting like sand. He’d made his way out thinking of Angie in the draper’s shop, her neat hands tying a ribbon or cashing up the till at the end of the day. He thought of the brown mole near her belly button that showed when she tied up her blouse on the beach. He was counting the days, trying not to. He’d flown home three weeks later and the girls had raced each other to meet him at the station. This time, he was coming back for good. When they got home, he burned his kit and dropped his service medals in the bin.

  In the beginning, that first week, they met every night at the same place. He’d jump off the rock when he saw her coming down the beach, shoes in one hand, his feet splashing in rings of water. Angie seemed to hover or sway across the sand, footprints stretching behind her. She’d put her hand on his arm and say something. He’d lean in to kiss her cheek, the dimple on her chin, her hair always in the way. Then, on day three, she caught his face in her hands and given him a real kiss; a deep kiss that melted him, her tongue slow and hot. He felt the way her hips curved into her waist and it made him lose his breath. She was wearing lipstick, faint cologne, a silk scarf above a green cardigan, a thin skirt that blew against her legs. She took off her sandals and laughed and ran to the sea shouting for him to follow. Every night they’d planned so see a film, but they never made it to the cinema.

  Steve takes the incline slowly, feeling his breath crinkle. There is a line of tree stumps where the farmer has taken down some rotten ash trees. He runs his finger over their growth rings. His father had a woodturning workshop in the garden where he made fruit bowls and candlestick holders from spelted elm and oak. He ended up giving most of them away. It wasn’t about making money, but making things, making them as well as you could. Making them beautiful. His father loved to take them and pour in linseed oil, working it into the grain with his hands. You had to wear a mask as you turned the wood or you breathed in the fungus that caused the patterns in the wood. It could grow in your lungs, there in your own warmth and darkness and moisture. White bristles stood out on his father’s face as he lay covered with a sheet in the morgue. He’d looked tiny then.

  A flock of fieldfare thrums from the field to his left. They whirl in the sky, parting then joining as a single flock. When his mother had finally slipped away, the staff had fussed round him. Guilty, because he’d complained about her care a few days before. The Patient Charter was hooked over the bottom of the bed. More bullshit. Steve was used to crap like that. Saying one thing and doing another had been the way of things. His mother looked like a husk, her forehead shiny, her hands folded, the plain gold wedding ring embedded in her finger. He’d whispered to her, a reproach because she’d died. Then kissed her on the forehead where the skin was tight and cold.

  Now he’s walking to the house where Angie is waiting for him, watching the TV, wrapping Christmas presents. Lights are coming on in the village, in the scattered farms that resist the dark. He thinks of Christ, the mess of birth, of red cattle treading their own muck in the barns. He’s walking home to her, the past turning in his head, drawing close then retreating like a tide. He always imagines it as dark blue, the past.

  After two days of waiting, Len’s jaw was dark with stubble. His grey eyes seemed to change colour as dawn light peeled from the windows and they sat up in their sleeping bags. Steve had a .38 tucked into h
is boot. If anyone came upon them, a bolt-action rifle wouldn’t be much good. No light, no soap, no toothpaste. Nothing that could give them away. They shat at the back of the barn at night where the farmhouse hid them and buried it. And there was little to say in case their voices carried. Just the glances they exchanged, staring at farmland, imagining a man stepping into view. A man they almost knew because he was all they had to think about. They were acting on information, and that went round in their minds, too. But they never spoke ill of the dead; the about-to-be-deceased. The Enfield stood against the wall in its canvas case, its metal parts cold, smelling faintly of oil. They had no idea who the courier was or what he was carrying or how. Two shots, ideally, the lieutenant had said. He’d tapped his lapel and Len had almost smiled.