Survival of Thomas Ford, The (23 page)

Jack felt tears in his own eyes suddenly. He realised he should probably not have spoken, not until he was finished burying the girl.

“I think my boy’s dying, Ford. Someone put a knife in him tonight.”

Jack swallowed.

“But there’s nothing I can do. I’ve got my hands full here eh? With this. I don’t think it’s fair. I worked my whole life.”

Jack shook his head.

“There’s people who…” Jack started to say.

He sniffed.

“I don’t know Ford eh? It’s a hard world right enough.”

Jack felt weak suddenly, at the knees. He let his legs bend until he sat on the shelf of earth that was the edge of the girl’s grave. He looked down at the shovel in his hands. He tilted the handle until the soil ran off the blade in a dry cascade.

Thomas Ford looked up when he heard the grains sprinkle on the earth that already covered the girl. Both his eyes hurt. The one he could still see out of hurt the most. He watched Jack McCallum sitting slumped on the edge of the grave. He felt some sensation, a tingling warmth, come back into his hands which had been numb, as he watched McCallum.

“I do work with my hands,” said Ford. “I draw.”

There was a rustling in the trees nearby. A cat screeched. Jack grinned. He looked up at Ford.

“I knew they were still here,” he said. “The cats. Little bastards eh? Must be hard as nails, living up here. Just shows you.”

Jack looked down again, at the empty shovel blade.

“If I’d known it would all end like this,” said Jack, “I don’t think I’d have ever bothered starting. No, not just for this. I must have gone wrong somewhere along the way. Or maybe right at the start.”

The leaves rustled again and Lanski stepped out into the moonlit clearing. He saw the open grave and McCallum sitting perched on its edge. He saw Thomas Ford crouched naked on the earth, like a long bird, not far from the grave. In the silver light, Thomas Ford looked to Lanski like a terrible, deformed angel that had had its wings ripped away.

McCallum raised his eyes from the shovel blade, turned his head and saw his foreman standing there. He looked to Lanski’s side, and then stared at the area behind Lanski, the border of the trees. He waited for his son to appear in the clearing. He licked his lips and looked at Lanski’s long face. He saw Lanski’s moonlit eyes and looked down quickly, back at the empty shovel blade.

“Did you leave Jimmy at the car?” said Jack.

“I left him at the caravan,” said Lanski.

Jack looked up, not at Lanski but at Ford.

“This is the man I trusted most in the world,” said Jack. “This is my foreman, Lanski. I trusted him with all my houses and with the future. I trusted him with my family and tonight I trusted him with my boy. You’ve got to trust somebody. That’s what I thought.”

Somewhere in the trees a cat hissed.

“I thought…” said Jack.

He looked all round the moonlit clearing, as though at the spaces in between Ford and Lanski. He seemed to look everywhere now except at the two men who were with him.

“It can’t all have been for nothing,” said Jack.

He gave out an odd, short, barking laugh that echo-ed among the trees.

“That wouldn’t make any sense,” said Jack.

He stared hard at Ford now, as though willing him to disagree.

“Would it?” growled Jack.

Lanski had his eyes on the layer of earth in the grave.

“Where is the girl?” he said.

Jack spun his head to look at Lanski sharply.

“Where is my
son
?” he shouted.

Lanski blinked.

“I told you. I left him at the caravan. You should go to him.”

Ford’s single eye was a frozen sphere in the moonlight. He rose from his crouch, stood straight, and walked across the clearing to the edge of the girl’s grave. McCallum glared up at Ford’s ruined face and naked, filthy chest. Lanski saw that McCallum’s fists were tight and swollen where they gripped the wooden shovel handle. He could have been about to swing it at one of Ford’s legs and bring him down like a tree. Jack’s erect hairstyle looked like white grass in the moonlight. His eyes were loose and lost, already half of him had faded away now that he believed the future had been finally cancelled.

He turned to look at Lanski, as though to assure himself that Lanski was still there. A scream came from the grave, through the blankets and the earth. It filled the clearing. In the trees, cats jumped their whole bodies off the forest floor as though electrocuted, their paws twitching. Their fur stood stiff and hackled on their flesh at the sound. Jack looked down at the grave, his mouth quivering.

He stood quickly and raised the shovel high above his head. He screamed back at the grave, louder than the girl. Before he could bring the shovel down on her, Ford threw himself across the grave and grabbed McCallum around the chest. They landed together on the earth, as though in an embrace. McCallum’s scream had ended, but the girl’s continued. Lanski looked away from the entwined shape on the silver leaves that was Ford and McCallum. He went to the grave and kneeled at its edge. He leaned over and grabbed handfuls of earth, scooping away the ground that covered the girl. He threw them behind himself where they pelted against Thomas Ford’s bare back and Jack McCallum’s gaping mouth. Soon Lanski had exposed the shifting blankets. The girl’s screams were louder now. Lanski got down into the grave with her. He picked away at the earth around the sides of the blankets. He tried to find an opening in the folds of cloth but the girl was sealed in. He moved more earth away from the blanket edges until he could get an arm down and underneath the girl’s whole shape. He pulled up hard but there was still too much earth packing her in. He turned to look at McCallum and Ford. They seemed hardly to be moving. Lanski got his fists and clawed fingers dug further now into the soil around the far end of the blankets. He got both arms far under the girl and lifted her up and out of the earth. He laid her gently at the edge of the grave but she writhed and fought under the blankets.

“No!” shouted Lanski. “No, still girl! Still! You will fall yourself back in there! Still! It is alright now.”

He tried to find a place to start unravelling her from. The cloth was thick and tangled.

“That bitch is the one did all this!”
Lanski heard Jack McCallum scream.

McCallum let out a wail that cut across the clearing and into the ears of all the listening cats in the trees.

Lanski’s long fingers had teased an opening in the blankets. He saw the girl’s huge, bare breasts. He pulled at the material that surrounded her face until he saw wild, moonlit eyes staring back at him. The girl screamed again when she saw the Pole’s face above her. Lanski nodded.

“You alright,” he said. “Not worry. It’s safe now.”

The girl’s face and mouth were covered in snot and saliva, mixed with her tears and blood. Lanski knew she was recognising him as one of the men who had come into the house at Cromwell Drive and taken her away. She glared and pulled back from him, shuffling her blankets across the dead leaves. Lanski nodded and tried to put a smile on his face. He wanted to tell her that he understood she had been in the Valley of the Shadow alone for a long time and that he knew it would be very hard for her to return fully, perhaps ever. But even in Polish he would not have been able to say the words.

Jack McCallum screamed again into the night. Lanski stood and turned away from the girl. He walked towards the amalgamation of bare limbs and clothing that represented Thomas Ford and Jack McCallum’s union on the earth. Thomas Ford seemed to have the builder and entrepreneur under control.

Lanski shouted,

“
It’s over
!”

Jack McCallum howled on the dead leaves. He lay with his cheek against the earth, Thomas Ford’s weight pressing him there. He had meant to build a house and home for his family on this hill. Instead, all he had done was fill the ground with bodies. He had made the place barren except for gas emissions, butterflies and feral cats. Now the future was cancelled and his son was stabbed. Cathy would never forgive him. It was very likely he would never forgive himself. The Pole was right. McCallum Homes was over.

Lanski was never sure, later, if he knew the girl was coming from behind him or not. It might have been that he did know, somehow, that she was coming, but he allowed it to happen anyway. He certainly felt the wind off her as she came past his shoulder, naked, the shovel blade raised high. The blade came down and cut halfway through Jack McCallum’s neck. Thomas Ford’s single, glowing eye was blinded with a jet of silver blood. The girl gave forth a muted, shuddering groan when she saw what she had done. Lanski looked at her and saw that she wasn’t going to move again. He walked to her side and put his hand around her hand. He took the shovel from her and looked down at his employer. McCallum was still trying to live on the leaves. The main thing Lanski and McCallum had always agreed on during their association on the city’s sites was never to leave a job badly done or unfinished. They had an unspoken agreement that this was bad luck, bad karma, and simply bad business. Lanski blinked and raised the shovel. When he brought it down, Jack McCallum’s white-haired head parted completely and cleanly from the rest of what he had been.

Lanski had put the pieces of Jack McCallum into the grave McCallum had meant for the girl. He was filling in the hole now, steadily. In the trees, the cats seemed to be moaning more regularly. Thomas Ford and Lorna were huddled together, sheltering from the wind, beneath the blankets that had been intended as her shroud.

Lorna listened to the shovel bite into the piled up soil. She watched the tall grave-digger working in the moonlight. She was trying to understand how she could have gone from visiting Jack McCallum’s office this morning to blackmail him, to cutting his head off with that shovel the tall man was now using to fill in the grave. She turned to look at Thomas Ford’s ruined face. His single eye seemed sightless as she looked at it.

“My grandmother’s village had an old white wolf like this,” said Lanski suddenly as he tilted the shovel to drop more ground on his employer. “For years it took the sheep and hens, the little that the people there had. When they kill it, my grandmother say they cut off the head and bury it in one place, and they bury the body in another place.”

Lanski sniffed and pushed the shovel blade against the packed soil. He rested his weight on it and looked at Lorna and Thomas Ford over his long nose.

“So that the spirit wouldn’t come back again,” said Lanski. “In another wolf. You understand? It was only a superstition.”

Lanski shrugged.

“But I not think of it when I bury him. Not worth digging him up again just for superstition. Let him lie whole.”

“He was a fucking psycho,” said Lorna, her voice shaking.

Lanski nodded.

“Yes. But he was a strong man, a big man, very big. In a country like this, and even in my own country now, these men are of the past, not needed. But there was great need for men like this, always before, even if they were crazy.”

Lanski looked down at the grave.

“A man like he was, in another time,” said Lanski, “he would be a great man. Here he could only make money and go mad I think.”

Lanski raised the shovel again. He stepped out of the grave. He began to use the shovel to pat and slap at the earth. He scraped the ground with the metal edge, from east to west, from north to south. He picked up handfuls of leaves and twigs and scattered them across the site of Jack McCallum’s grave. Soon there was no sign that anything had been done to the earth.

“There is still the boy at the caravan,” said Lanski.

“Your head is bad,” he said to Ford. “I take you to the hospital when I take the boy there.”

“I’m not going back to hospital,” said Thomas.

“You have to Thomas. Your eye…” said Lorna.

“I take you to the house or the hospital,” said Lanski.

“Who is at the caravan? Is it the driver?” said Thomas.

“Aye, it’s Jimmy,” said Lorna.

She looked at the Pole.

“Just leave him here,” she said. “Just get rid.”

“Get rid?” said Lanski.

“Aye. Get rid of him.”

They walked down the hillside in the darkness between the trees. They could only see each other as shapes. They passed the pack of cats without knowing. Thomas Ford and Lorna supported each other’s waists with their arms as they walked. Twigs and rough leaves scratched at the flesh of Lorna’s bare, broken foot. For Lanski it was like being back in the forest near his grandmother’s house, lost, at night, too frightened of what might be in the woods around him to shout for help from his grandmother at the house. Too frightened in case Ixor the cat might be at his shoulder waiting to steal the breath from his mouth if he dared to call out for help.

“I turned the generator off,” said Lanski, “so I could hear where you were.”

“Do you know which way we’re going?” said Lorna.

Lanski sniffed.

“One of us will see the caravan,” he said.

It was Lorna who saw its huge shadowed shape. As they got closer to the structure, Lanski saw that Jimmy’s moonlit form was still there, leaning against the metal shell of the caravan.

Thomas Ford stared at the figure. He walked closer until he recognised the bird-like features that had filled his soul since the moment he had seen that face above the red bonnet of the Volvo by the loch, just before the crash.

Thomas Ford saw Jimmy’s eyes blink weakly.

“Dad,” said Jimmy. “That you, dad? I got them man. I got them eh? Robert, and his mum. They’ll no tell anyone anything eh. Dad?”

Jimmy tried to focus his eyes on Thomas Ford’s moonlit head.

“You alright dad?”

Jimmy realised there were other people standing over him. Even through the blanket he recognised Lorna’s thick thighs.

“You fucking bitch! What were you doing holding his hand eh?
Eh?
Grass.”

Jimmy looked away from her and back to Thomas Ford.

“You’re no my dad. Who are you?”

Jimmy turned to look at Lanski. He recognised the Pole’s tall silhouette.

“Where’s my dad eh Lanski? What’s going on man?”

“Your father’s dead boy,” said Lanski.

Jimmy shook his head.

“Uh uh,” he said. “There’s none of yous could kill my dad eh. Lorna eh? Help me eh?”

Lorna shook her head and looked down. Jimmy turned his eyes on Ford again.

“What kind of fucking scarecrow’s this eh?” hissed Jimmy. “What are you doing sharing a blanket with the cunt eh?”

Jimmy’s eyes seemed to harden in the moonlight. There was something familiar about the broken face and head poking over the top of the thick blanket. Jimmy shook his head slowly as he stared at the single silver-glistened eye that was watching him from above.

“Ford? No fucking way,” said Jimmy. “Get your paws off her man eh? Fuck’s sake, your own wife’s in the loch no? So get your hands off my woman eh?”

Lorna watched as blood oozed suddenly and thinly from the edge of Jimmy’s mouth. Jimmy seemed to gulp and hiccup. His face looked surprised for a second, before hate twisted his features again.

“Get your hands off her!” Jimmy screamed.

He pushed his head back against the side of the caravan and tried to lever his body from the earth. There was no power left in him. He looked up to the sky and screamed, “
Dad
!”

Then Jimmy was silent and looked down suddenly, his gaze seemed to take in all of them, his witnesses.

He looked directly into Thomas Ford’s eye.

“It was just an accident man. Atoms. Atoms and that. Chaos eh?”

Jimmy started to laugh on the forest floor. The wind blended with the boy’s laughter and amplified it. The trees bent toward the boy’s laughter, gathered it to themselves and echo-ed it. The listening cats quivered and twitched.

Thomas Ford felt a wet surge at the centre of himself as he looked down at the boy and the laughter rang in his mind like an acid bell. That black-eyed, laughing bird head. The head that had haunted him and changed the course of his life. Thomas Ford collapsed suddenly on the forest floor, kneeling near Jimmy’s feet.

“Thomas!” cried Lorna.

The pain came into Thomas Ford’s chest, the great beast chewing there. Thomas Ford let himself lie on the leaves, waves of pain coursing from his head to his chest, back and forth. Lorna crouched beside him and held his shoulder and neck in her hands. Lanski stood and waited, his eyes on their long shadow-shapes.

“Thomas,” Lorna said again.

She turned to look at Lanski.

“I think it’s the thing that happened to him at the house today. He gets pain in his chest. I don’t think it’s his heart. The doctors said it’s in his head. I don’t know. I waited today and he got better.”

Lanski said nothing. He was thinking he could have had his passport and debit card and been on his way home by now. But then this girl would have been in his head for the rest of his life as a ghost. Better to only have her and the man as an inconvenience a while longer than have ghosts. Lanski was already thinking of the new problem that would come now. McCallum gone, and then Lanski gone. They would blame him. They would look for him. He had better take his wife and children far into the forests of his childhood when he did get home, and stay lost there forever. He could get hens and goats perhaps. Some people still lived like that and seemed alright. It would not be the life he had worked for or his mother had dreamed of for him, but it could still be alright. Especially after seeing, through the builder McCallum, the rich man’s life up close.

Ford’s breathing was beginning to steady on the forest floor. The regulation of the man’s breath gave Lanski fresh hope. If this man Ford could survive, then so could he.

“It will be alright,” said Lanski.

“He’s better now,” said Lorna.

Thomas Ford’s dark shape sat up on the thick leaves.

“I’m alright,” he said.

Thomas Ford looked at Jimmy’s head again.

It was strange to see the head without the red car bonnet beneath it and the square-jawed passenger’s head beside it.

They all turned to look at Jimmy’s head as they realised his laughter had stopped.

They saw that the boy was dead.

To Thomas Ford, it seemed Jimmy’s sightless eyes and frozen, grinning face regarded the moon as though in appreciation of some great joke.

Lanski started walking away immediately, on his way to get the shovel.

Thomas Ford and Lorna held each others hands tightly, as a cold wind found its way up the hill, through the trees, and into their ears.

The wind shrieked like a roaming spirit, suddenly returned home to find these intruders on its peace.

After Lanski had buried Jimmy by the caravan’s brick base, he drove Thomas Ford and Lorna down the hill in the Subaru. When they passed the corner where Lea had gone into the loch, Thomas Ford’s single eye lingered on the surface of the rippling water as the moonlight sparkled.

Soon the Subaru had taken them all back to the city and the hill was only a ghost, full of its own ghosts. It couldn’t reach them or hurt them any more.

Lorna turned to look at Thomas Ford.

His single eye glowed orange from the rays of a traffic light overhead.

Lanski let his foot up off the clutch and the Subaru spurted forward into the bands of traffic that girdled the city from the surrounding darkness.

Later that night, the cats came out of the forest and arranged themselves on Jack McCallum’s grave like long-lost, abandoned rags.

They slept and purred through the night, a thick blanket of fur and flesh insulating Jack McCallum from the cold wind that whistled above.

The next morning a golden sun shone down on the hill, making the caravan’s blue-and-white aluminium shell glisten.

Just beside the caravan’s brick base, a white butterfly danced over the ground.

It soared and plummeted, dived and swerved, moving into, out of and around the shimmering, hallucinatory haze of strange gas that rose from the earth where Jimmy was buried.

The butterfly hovered briefly, dipped once, became absolutely still for a long moment, then veered off fast to the east, a fluid blur of whiteness that vanished suddenly against the sun.

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