Terroir

by Graham Mort

  Steve was on leave the first time he met Angie, avoiding going home. He’d drifted to a B&B on the Devon coast, wasting a few days. He wanted to get something for his mother and was staring at silk scarves. He must have looked conspicuous. Angie asked him if she could help, pushing back a strand of hair, turning her face up to him. Those grey eyes with wide pupils that seemed to lock onto his. He got confused and dropped the scarf and she laughed, showing little creases around the mouth. Neat teeth. Everything about her was neat, from her shoulder-length hair to her tight calves, to the straps on her black leather shoes. Except there was something unruly about her smile, as if it was escaping from somewhere else, as if things delighted her. He tried to check her fingers for a ring, but didn’t want to stare as she wrapped the parcel in deft little movements, adding a ribbon, which she teased into a bow. She had a tiny black mole on one ear. There, your girlfriend will love it, she said. Mother, he said, it’s for my mother. And he asked her for a date right there and then because she might have been fishing for that, because one thing you mightn’t have was time.

  Fuck this now, Steve. It was dawn on the fourth day and they began to pack the gear. They could be at the pick-up in an hour, making their way through the fields before anyone was about. It was a no show. Another dud. They crushed their sleeping bags into the rucksack. It was cold. Cobwebs whitened the windows and there was the old smell of cattle and dried dung. They hadn’t left a trace except for piss stains and drag marks in the dust and faint hollows in the hay they’d bunked down on. They scuffed it up with their boots and stepped through the door.

  They were tired and stiff, maybe a little careless. Len slung the rifle over his shoulder and was checking his watch. Almost 7.15. It was light outside. There were clumps of snowdrops and crocus beside the path. The days were lengthening again. Every morning they’d been woken by jackdaws squabbling. They hadn’t seen a soul in three days. The first snowflakes were beginning to blow. Steve was blinking them away, stooping into his own smoking breath to pick up the rucksack when there was a flash of light from the copse three hundred yards away – that rotten pelt clinging to the horizon. He saw it from the corner of his eye, a stray flicker. Like someone lighting a cigarette. Like those stars that appear then disappear when you look at them. Then a wet thwack and the side of Len’s neck spurted into red mist, the crack of the shot bouncing from the outbuildings, colliding with its own echo.

  He’d asked her out, the way soldiers do, the way they take advantage of circumstance, because you never know. And she said, Yes, OK, I’d like that. She said, Alright, but it’s just a date, don’t get any ideas. And he’d laughed, Me? Ideas? But he’d known something in the shop, something he felt again when he jumped from the rock that night, feeling the seawater cold against his feet. When he’d put his arm around her and felt her hips, her waist, kissing her lightly on the cheek. That’s forward! she said, but with a smile, laying her hand on his arm. Whatever has to happen between people had already happened. Maybe had happened back there in the shop as she wrapped the parcel for him and handed him his change in small coins.

  They met every night for five nights and on the fifth night she took him home to the crooked little terraced house she rented and they made love. He’d woken with her snoring against the pillow and slipped his arms around her to feel her skin, almost unbearably soft, the roughness of his hands against its smooth flow. He got up and made coffee and scrambled eggs and called up the stairs and she came down in her nightie and cardigan. She held her coffee cup in both hands and smiled across to him through the steam, her eyes amazing him again. Then it was just a question of detail. He’d already decided to leave the army as soon as he could. That had taken longer than he’d hoped, like jumping from a moving train.

  It‘s darker now and Steve loops back towards their house along a bridleway laced with frozen puddles that goes over the flank of another hill. The land fades into dusk, a legend of the failing light. Angie had lost half of the sight in one eye in a freak accident in the shop, walking into a dress hanger as she locked up with the lights turned off. There’d been some compensation and they’d bought this place, nearer to his work, further out from the town. He loved her with her scarred eye, just as he had before, maybe more. He’d got through his army service without a wound and then that. It just goes to show.

  Except that it didn’t. The round that had killed Len had been meant for Len, he knew that. Someone had been waiting for them all the time they were waiting for someone else. Maybe it was a set-up. It didn’t matter. He’d had a choice when they appeared from the barn. Luck had nothing to do with it, good or bad. He’d seen two men and made a decision, aiming and squeezing off the round. A good shot. A professional. Steve caught Len as he lurched sideways and lowered him to the ground. Not a sound except breath bubbling through his windpipe. The round had blown out a big hole that welled with blood. It ran onto the faded grass, bright as life.

  Two fields to go and he’ll be home. Whenever he goes uphill his chest feels tight again. That’s the flu. It doesn’t want to let go of him. He’s got a couple more years to go at work and then he can sack it all. He’d retire as district manager. He never saw anyone from the old firm. Some of them ended up in gaol, others turned to Jesus. He’d heard that. But what they’d done couldn’t be revoked. They’d known the deepest, most secret thing. To have someone in your sights, in the caught moment of your breath and heartbeat, then to squeeze the trigger. That was a feeling you couldn’t describe and it never left you. He could remember every kill. Len’s throat spouting as the impact spun him to the ground. He’d walked calmly to the drop with the rifle slung, the pistol in his pocket, ready for anyone who got in his way. A cock pheasant had been calling as he watched for the patrol. Ops like that, you were never more alive, never more alone. Until the guys were pulling you into the APC. Man down, he’d said, jerking his thumb back to where Len lay with darkness filling him. Man down.

  He could see the roof of the house now, the black tips of the birch trees he’d planted to shield their view but not block it. The kitchen light was on. Once, when Angie was pregnant with Tricia, their first child, she was sick into the kitchen sink. It was before the accident. She got up from the breakfast table and he saw her trying to hold it back, then vomit was glistening on the back of her hand. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she kept saying, but he wasn’t sorry. He knew then, of all their moments together, that he couldn’t stop loving her. He’d stuck it out at his office job for the security firm, went on courses, got promoted. They’d brought up the girls who’d left home now. They were like Angie, not him, thank God. Both had gone into language teaching – EFL and Spanish – and Alison was not long married. Tricia had a girlfriend, though she hadn’t said as much. But none of that was a problem. There was plenty of time for all that. When you loved somebody it came out of the blue, out of the instant, and you just knew. He’d known it again that morning, watching sick spill from her mouth without embarrassment or shame. If he felt shame it was for something else. He’d wondered about tracing Len’s family, but what was the point? What would he have told them? That they were waiting for someone? How do you know you’ve got the right guy? he asked the firearms instructor when he was training. Because he’s dead and you aren’t.

  Once, two years ago, he’d slipped and knocked himself unconscious on their garden path, salting the ice. He’d been out cold for a couple of minutes until Angie got to him. You silly sod, Steve, she said when he came-to and told her he was OK, you silly sod. Tell me you love me, he said, and she had right then, kneeling on the snow. What had bothered him was the fact he could have died – could have been dead – and not known it. Why would you want to know? Angie said, as he sat in a chair, trying to join it all together. She was holding a cloth soaked in witch hazel to his head, one eye milky now, as if a snowflake had landed on it.

  Steve clicks open the last gate and sees the house with its bright windows. Beyond it, the orange lights from the town cast an aura, closing off
the stars. The huge moon has pulled clear of the hills to the east. In the west a planet is rising, its winking opal slung above the horizon. He takes off his hat and lets cool air to his scalp. Then he walks again until he’s in the field above their back gate. There’s a fallen log where a thorn tree has come down, cut into sections by the farmer but not taken away. He sits on one of those, where the land falls away to their house. Angie would be wrapping Christmas presents in the living room where he’s put up the tree, or maybe talking to one of the girls on the phone. As he watches, she comes into the kitchen in her brown cardigan, backlit, filling the kettle and pulling the teapot from the shelf. He’d said he’d be half an hour, so she’s making tea for them both. She stands with her back to the window. Eighty metres. No wind.

  He wonders if all that waiting had been a kind of love. He’d told her that he worked in signals. He’d told her that there was a lot he couldn’t tell her. And one morning, lying with his hand on her belly as their first child was filling her, he’d cried. For his parents, he said, all they never had. For the past that was lost, for the unspoken love he’d learned to speak with her. A love that should have been lost to him because he should have died unburied for what he was. He’d thought about nothing else for three days but that stranger coming through the fields. He’d have taken the rifle and wasted him, snow drifting down over his cooling body and draining thoughts. But Len was dead instead. All that was dark blue now.

  Steve skirts the frozen puddle inside the garden gate. Jock, their new Jack Russell, pads across the lawn to greet him. Steve thinks of spores growing in the rich sponge of a man’s lung, spreading upwards though the alveoli to the throat. The dog loses interest and pees in the laurel bush, one leg trembling. Steve coughs and the cough goes on, wrenching at his chest. When he pushes open the kitchen door the light is harsh, making him blink. Angie’s been baking shortbread and its spicy, sweet smell fills the rooms. When he slings the heavy overcoat and takes off his hat, she’s holding a cup of tea in one hand, the telephone in the other. It’s Alison, she says, with that smile she still sometimes has, she’s got some news.

  BULRUSHES

  There was a sycamore tree near the village with a rope swing hanging from a branch. Down the lane and over the burn, past fields overgrown with thistle and sorrel. You could climb into a fork of the tree where a little puddle of water gathered and then catch the noose with your foot to swing out. The bark was flaking away from the trunk and if you prised a bit off with your fingers there were tiny insects that ran for cover. Everything turned then as you swooped and span. The sky and its streaky clouds, fields with ponies grazing, the dark smudges of towns and villages blurring far out. The cooling towers tilted with the horizon and as the swing slowed down everything came back into focus and the fizzing and the fear stopped in your head. In autumn, sycamore seeds spiralled down, covering bare earth beaten by the feet of the village children. When you looked upwards into the canopy they swirled and fell like specks of snow. In deep winter the sycamore stood in the landscape, a tree made of iron, stark against the light bulb glow of the sky.

  The earth had washed away from the roots and if you lay down and peered inside it was a secret place. You could imagine living there, sheltered from rain and snow, the tree roots making a room, only a chink of light from the outside world. Cosy and safe, a world where the scale of everything was changed and you could live under the earth, under the tree’s protection. Annie had imagined that with Jodie, lying full length on the ground to peer into the roots, then turning to lean against the tree to watch men and tractors in the fields, far away like figures in a painting. Jodie got bored quickly and wanted to move on or find where the boys were playing.

  Annie was an only child and her father was a butcher. His cutting bench was made of sycamore. Her mother couldn’t work in the shop. The smell made her feel sick. But she did the accounts on the computer from the big oak desk at home. It had been her grandfather’s desk and built to last. They’d started to supply mail-order venison and rare breed pork and prize-winning sausages. Annie’s mother handled all that from the website. The meat was sent out vacuum packed in special polystyrene boxes. It had all been her idea, to diversify when the high street started to die and Oxfam and Age Concern crept in to recycle cast-offs and the clothes of dead people. Everything in those shops smelt faintly of old age. There’s a wee smell of wee, Jodie would whisper and they’d laugh hysterically, taking to the street under the scowls of the lady volunteers who ran the shops. Annie’s father worked with the meat suppliers and the customers who came to the shop. He stayed late to make up the orders, scrubbing the sycamore chopping block clean of blood and fat each night. The old black bicycle he’d made deliveries on as a boy had rusted in the backyard until he had it repainted and mounted above the window to show the family tradition. He gave Annie spending money when she helped him make sausage at the weekend, adding herbs and pepper into the mixing machine, watching the clear sausage skin stiffen with pink meat from the mincer.

  The three white cooling towers on the horizon were fed by a conveyor belt from the pit. Annie’s uncle Ned worked there as a foreman. Three clouds of steam turned to orange and apricot at sunset. The sun seemed to gurgle and drown at the edges of the world as the lights of the village came on. Her grandfather had told her that when the houses first got electricity, light bulbs were precious. His own mother had travelled thirty miles to the town to buy them. They’d been wrapped in newspaper and had been broken somehow in the bus on the way home. Some old gentleman pushing past, afraid to miss his stop. Or one of those broad-beamed country women anxious to relieve their aching feet had smashed them with her arse. That had meant waiting another week for market day. The next time she’d brought them home in egg boxes, specially cut with kitchen scissors to hold them safe. Annie’s grandfather had told her that when the lights came on in the church on Sunday all the lights in the houses went down and glowed as sullen cherry-red filaments. She thought of that as God alighting.

  Her grandfather had been a butcher, too. Their shop stood in the main street of the town with a low slate roof and a hand-painted sign showing a jolly fat man in a white apron, festooned in sausages. McClavertys’. That apostrophe bothered her for years, all the way through secondary school. Then she came to like it. It seemed right for it to be there in the wrong place, like so many things. Her grandfather had been a hard man her mother said, hard on her father and his brothers who’d all gone away as soon as they could.

  At the top of their three-storey house was the attic. In the long room – all bare bulbs and floorboards and peeling wallpaper – was a cupboard with folding doors that took up the narrowest wall. The doors got stuck if you wrenched them too hard because the runners were shot. There was a thick grey skylight, the glass covered in pigeon lime. If you peeled the wallpaper away crystals of white appeared behind where the salt was leaching from the plaster. In the cupboard was an old trunk full of scraps of animal fur. The fur was red like fox fur, or dark brown with pale stripes. There was dried skin on the back, real skin from when the animal had been alive. Annie didn’t know where they’d come from, though perhaps her grandmother or great grandmother had used them to trim clothing. If you climbed into the cupboard and slid the doors shut, you could hear big birds pattering on the roof. The fur was soft against your cheek. It smelt faintly of perfume, of the forest where a woman was being drawn through the snow on a sledge, cracking her whip over a team of dogs that strained in their harnesses. Behind her in the forest the eyes of wolves glared yellow between tree trunks. Their tongues glowed like molten lava as darkness fell and stars sprinkled the sky. If you clenched your fingers hard, you could feel the woman’s heart there, afraid, beating like a fisted bird.

  After school Annie’s mum used to picked her up from the playground, waiting with the other mothers with their prams and pushchairs, sharing the latest gossip or inventing it. Sometimes Annie was the last to leave the school, lingering over her painting, which had not quite dried,
volunteering to tidy away the toys in the nursery classroom. Once she worked for Miss Sanderson, using a blob of Blu-Tack to get all the stray bits of Blu-Tack from the wall where things had been stuck. You had to press hard with your fingers and roll a fresh ball over the old stuff until it gradually came away. Copydex smelt like hot rubber and you could wipe that away with a damp cloth until everything was clean. She liked the smell of paper glue too, though someone had told her it was made from old horses, rendered down. Her mother had been cross that time, because she’d waited ages and Annie hadn’t appeared until Mr Carstairs was locking up the school. Couldn’t Annie understand how worried she was? Annie thought about that, about the kind of worry it might be. After all, she was safe in school, helping the teacher.

  In summer you could hide in the long grass in the field, or in the patch of fennel that had been slung out of the gardens and gone wild. The stems had a minty smell and the dry seeds tasted wild and hot. In winter, Annie and Jodie roamed the lanes with torches, pressing themselves into the hawthorn hedges and signalling to each other by flashing the beam. When there was a fog or heavy mist it was like a horror story. The streetlamps shone with yellow haloes and vampires could emerge from alleyways and from around street corners to pierce your neck with their fangs and suck your blood and carry you off to be undead. Sometime they played at being zombies, stumbling forward with their eyes half closed and their hands held out, sleepwalking. Fear made your laughter spurt and bubble out.

  In winter, flights of geese went over the low hills to the estuary where water gleamed and froze. They flew in a wide vee, sometimes in double formation, finding their way behind their leader. She’d seen in a nature programme on television about how the geese took turns at being leader, then dropped back. Her father had a special metal cabinet in the house where he kept a gun locked away. It had a long black barrel and a polished walnut stock and there were boxes of red cartridges with brass ends. Annie wasn’t allowed to touch the gun and the key to the cabinet was on the bunch of keys chained to his belt. Sometimes he went with other men from the village in his waxed jacket and Wellingtons and cap to shoot rabbits that infested the meadows leading down to the river. She’d seen him pulling the skin from a dead one, the pink flesh appearing like melted pink plastic. Like when they’d burnt her old dolls because she was getting to be a big girl. Sometimes a policeman came to look at the cabinet and make sure it was safe and he and Annie’s father stood chatting in the front room. They’d done that one time when the Christmas decorations were up and the tinsel had almost touched the policeman’s hat with its silver badge and chequered band. Annie had giggled at that, covering her mouth up with her hand. At Christmas time, her father sold turkeys and geese and the shop window was filled with their pale plump breasts and thighs. There was a row of coloured lights that blinked on and off and her father moved in tangled reflections and shadows in his blue striped apron.