Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (18 page)

Spike didn’t need ten minutes. He was out of my caravan before Mr Evans had crossed the front yard. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m out of here.” He grabbed his moped, pushed it off its stand, freewheeled across the yard, jump-started it, and rode down the lane without looking back. “Where are you going?” I yelled, but my words were grabbed by nothing and lost in the dark. I didn’t even see them leave – they were just gone. I was left standing by the hole in the caravan window, the vague smell of smoke still in the air, and the sound of a distant dog barking at the night. “Spike!”

Nothing.

“Come back!”

Like he would. He didn’t stop.

Mr Evans stood on his doorstep, cradled his gun, clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“He was my friend,” I said. “He might be an idiot, but he’s not bad. Not really.”

“And that’s what you think, is it?”

“Yes.”

“And after all this, all this nonsense, you think your opinion is worth anything?”

“I do.”

He shook his head. “If I hadn’t put a bullet through the back of that bastard’s car, I’d be calling the police. And I’d make sure they threw the bloody book at you.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Why don’t I what?”

“Call the fucking police?”

He looked at me as if I’d hit him. “You…” he hissed. “And I thought you were a good lad. I thought I could trust you. I thought I could rely on you. I thought…”

“But…”

“Don’t ‘but’ me, Elliot. Never do that…” He looked at his watch. He tapped his watch. “I make it fifty-five minutes,” he said, and then he turned around, disappeared into the farmhouse and slammed the door behind him.

I stared at the door. It needed a coat of paint. One day, I could have painted that door. I would have taken a pot of gloss and a brush and spent an afternoon giving it a good lick. But now it was too late. The time had slipped away. The time was an eel on a mirror, and all I had left was an empty trap.

It didn’t take long to collect up my stuff and pack it into a bag, and when I’d finished, I took one final look around the caravan. The bed Sam and I had shared was crumpled and dead, the little table where I’d eaten lunch was broken. The spliff Spike had been smoking was burnt to its roach. I picked it up, licked my fingers, squeezed its tip and flicked it out of the shattered window. Then I picked up my bag, carried it to my bike and tied it to the pillion. The light from Mr Evans’s television was flickering across the yard, and for a moment I saw his shadow move against the wall of his front room. His face appeared at the window, his hands cupped around his eyes. I know he saw me, and maybe he wanted to say one last thing to me, but he didn’t look in my direction. He turned away, and I was left to climb onto my bike without a goodbye or a thank you or even a nod. What I deserved, I suppose, but as I rode away I thought that was it. I couldn’t hold down a job for longer than a few months. Mr Evans’s farm had joined the list of failures. I was a lost fuck in a fuckery of stupidity. And that thought stayed in my head like the rest of the things that swilled in there. The regrets and loss and leaving, and the thought that Sam was still lying in her bed, her head lost like a boat that had dropped a snapped mooring. The rope trailing in the water, the current taking it slowly at first, then getting quicker, the little waves cresting around the hull, the wind pushing it one way and then another. And as I rode through Stawley and took the turning to the mill and the hill to Ashbrittle, I cursed that wind and shouted her name. I shouted and I cried and I shouted again, and took the bridge by the mill too fast. I almost came off, but I caught the skid in time, slowed, stopped, dropped the bike on the verge, leant against the bridge and stared at the water.

The river was low and black, a drain in the night, and as I stared at it my thoughts turned from Sam to Dickens. If Mr Evans had winged him, if the man was out there with a hole in his shoulder and blood in his lap, where was he? And how was he?

What does a wounded animal do? Where does he hide? What are his instincts? What are the questions he asks himself, and how do the answers come? Do they come by air or are they picked from the trees? Are the trees tall or are they small? Is the air sulphured or is it clear? Is the hole the wounded animal finds a deep hole or a simple hollow? Do his eyes see straight? Does his nose smell danger, or does it fool itself into thinking danger is a false thing? Does he curl in a ball or wait to pounce? So many questions, but I didn’t know the answers. I didn’t want to know the answers. They were too dim, too faint and grey.

I looked up at the tops of the trees that grew along the river bank and sniffed the air. I whispered my mother’s name and called for my Gran’s spirit. I didn’t expect to hear anything, didn’t expect an answer, but as I stood there, I heard a noise.

When I say it was a noise, I’d say it was less than that. I’d say it was a faint rustle, the sound of leaves rubbing against a breeze, the moon diving into its own reflection and swimming towards an edge of the light. And as I turned towards that diving, it stopped, waited and took a breath.

I focused on a place where the river had carved a hollow into the bank, and as I did, I felt a cold draught in the air. It came like the loving dust of someone blowing on your cheek, and then it was fading and gone. And a moment later I saw something slink across the hollow, disappear behind a fallen branch and appear again. At first I thought it was shadow, then I thought it was solid, then a shadow again. I took a step. I looked at my feet. I took another step. And as I did, I smelt something so rank and bad that I almost gagged. Rotten, putrid, dead – you choose the word, but it wouldn’t have been strong enough. It caught the back of my throat like coal smoke on a heavy day. I coughed. The shape froze. I froze. The night took a deep and heaving breath and held the smell tight to its chest.

I don’t know how long I watched the shadow until it shifted again, but when it did, it moved fast, away from the hollow and out of sight. It rustled through the wood, came closer, and although it was difficult to imagine how, the smell came stronger. Now it was almost solid, as if I could reach for my penknife, take it out, click it open, cut a slice from the air and put it in my pocket. And a moment later, a few yards ahead of me, I heard a dull thump and saw something moving in the verge, something low and squat and dark. I suppose I’d been expecting to see Dickens, a hole in his shoulder and his face twisted in sweat and pain, but as the shape moved down the lane, I realized I was looking at a dog. But not a dog. This was the bad dog. And the people who talked about it were right. It was the dog with no head. No bark. No smell. No sight. And as it stumbled towards me, I found myself frozen. I tried to move, but I was rooted. My legs wouldn’t budge, and my arms were cold and weighted. I forced myself to whisper “Go…” but I could not. I tried to turn my head to look at my bike, but I was stuck. And as the dog loped towards me, I shut my eyes and refused the sight, told myself it wasn’t possible, wasn’t happening, and I was alone in the night. But when I opened them again the dog was still coming to me, and I saw that one of its back legs was lame. It walked with a dragging limp, veered towards the ditch that ran along the side of the lane, and lowered its neck as if the head that wasn’t there was smelling for something. And as it did this, I was overcome with a feeling of deep, inconsolable sadness. This feeling came from nowhere, and for a moment I felt blinded and lost. I reached out to hold on to something. I staggered. I found a branch. I wrapped my hand around it. It was hot. The branch was hot. The sadness deepened and swelled, staggered through my veins and leant against the chambers of my heart. I closed my eyes against it, screwed them tight, listened to my breathing and waited.

And as I waited, a tunnel appeared before me, a dark mouth in the lane. I was drawn into it, and it folded around me like a blanket folds around a weeping child. I began to move along its length, and the spidery feeling I’d felt earlier came back. It stroked me and rubbed my face, and its haired legs wrapped themselves around my face. And as this happened, I saw scenes from my life and scenes from the lives of people I knew. I wasn’t afraid or surprised, and I wasn’t astonished. I just felt expected and ready. For here I was at school with a cheese sandwich in my hand, and here I was standing by a stream with a fishing rod. There was Dad, his head under the bonnet of a knackered van, there was Mum staring at a flight of crows. Grace, her arms covered in flour, Spike coming up behind me and pushing me and my fishing rod into the river. Spike, laughing and falling off a log and banging his head so it bled. The man from the pig farm showing me his gun, the view from the top of a tree on the Somerset levels. And beyond these scenes, feelings. Feelings of longing and trouble, feelings that I was arriving somewhere, at a place where I was expected. A place I recognized from a dream or something my mother had told me. It was sweet and calm, and then it was bitter. It was quiet and then it was too loud, and it tasted of salt. It took my senses and swirled them, and the scenes of the people swirled, and I heard the sound of bells ringing from far away. And I saw a light, came to the end of the tunnel, and I was standing at the place where I’d begun.

I stood for a moment, and when the strength came back to my legs, I opened my eyes, let go of the branch, took a step back and another to the side. The dog was still in the lane, and I watched as it moved past me. I heard its paws padding, saw its tail hanging down, watched its broken leg drag along. The feeling of sadness was fading quickly, but the smell was burning now, fierce and hot.

Something – the dregs of the sadness, the need for touch? – made me want to reach out and stroke its matted coat. But as this thought came, so the dog reached the end of the ditch and turned the corner and left my sight, and I was left standing where I was, alone and silent in the long dark of the night.

I waited for a while, but the dog didn’t return. I didn’t want it to come back, but I did want it to come back, and this confusion made my head ache. And then all I could do was turn, walk back to my bike and ride home.

Mum was sitting in the kitchen. She couldn’t have known I was coming, but she knew what had happened. I dumped my bag on the floor, sat at the kitchen table and leant my head in my hands. Should I tell her about the dog and the tunnel? Did she know already? Had she ever seen the dog? And what about the tunnel? Was this the thing you had to experience before you passed through the gate to the place where signs and portents are more than the simple things they appear to be? I looked up at her. She was staring at me. I opened my mouth. She put a finger to her lips and shook her head. I nodded and said, “I got the boot.”

“Of course you did,” she said. “I’ve been expecting it.”

“I know you have,” I said.

I didn’t tell her that Dickens had tried to shoot Spike or that he thought Spike was me, but I did say, “It was messy.”

She stood up, put the kettle on and said, “I think we need a cup of tea.”

“I think I need something stronger.” And as I took a beer from the fridge, Dad appeared from the garden. He was carrying a cabbage. He put it on the draining board, noticed my bag on the floor and said, “Does that mean what I think it means?”

I nodded.

“Elliot… Elliot…” he said.

“Want one?” I held up a bottle of beer.

“I think I do.”

So we sat around the kitchen table, and I tried to tell them that I hadn’t wanted this to happen, that Mr Evans thought I was a good worker, but Spike was my friend and what could I do?

“You should have dumped him years ago. He was always a bad one.”

“But he’s my friend.”

“I know. But sometimes you have to put yourself first…”

“And sometimes you have to stand by your friends.”

They couldn’t deny that, and I sat back, took a long pull on my beer and opened my mouth to tell them about the bad dog, but stopped before anything came out. They’d listened to enough for one night, and I didn’t want them to think I was losing it. So I finished my beer, picked up my bag and went upstairs. As I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Mum and Dad tidy up the kitchen, I closed my eyes and let the day fade into the dark. The house clicked, the cat padded across the landing outside my room, the bed squeaked. And as the world crept to its own sleep, I heard my blood rush and fade, and the quiet came down like leaves.

I remember what happened next. My memory is clear. I could look into it and see through the swirls and eddies to the bottom. I could see fish swimming in my mind and smoke flowing in the current of my thoughts. Yes, this is exactly how it felt, the smoke snagging a thought and curling its way around, choking it and leaving me speechless.

The day after I left the farm and Spike left for wherever he was going, I phoned Pollock. I told him what had happened, and he told me I should have called him earlier. I told him that calling him earlier wouldn’t have made any difference, and everything he’d done so far had been shit, so what good would calling him earlier have done? I think he understood what I was saying, but it was difficult to tell. He sounded beaten, and when I asked him if he knew where Dickens was, he said, “We found his car in Bristol. Hole in the back window and blood on the front seat, but he was gone.”

“Well done, Sherlock,” I said. “Another result.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said.

“And why the fuck shouldn’t I worry? I’m shitting myself.”

“He’s gone.”

“Yes,” I said. “You already told me that. But where?”

“Spain.”

“Spain? What are you talking about?”

“He had friends over there, and we know he had a couple of false passports.” He made a wheezing sound, as if he’d just been punctured.

“You’re sure he’s in Spain?”

“99% sure,” he said.

“So there’s a 1% chance that he’s going to turn up tonight and stab me in the neck with a fucking pitchfork.”

“I think you can rest easy, Elliot. We’re watching the ports, the airports, anywhere he might try to use to get out of the country.”

“But you said you’re 99% sure he’s already left the country.”

“Sure. But we think…”

“I think,” I said, “it’s what he thinks that counts. And as far as I can tell, what you think hasn’t been your strong point. But then what has been?”

“Look,” he said, and he took a deep, weary breath. I heard it leave his body and drift away. It was a breath that gave up on him. “You’ve got my number. If you see him, even if you think you’ve seen him, call me.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I will.” And I stared at the phone for a moment, wondered if I should say anything else, turned back on myself, put the receiver down and went to make a pot of tea.

I made lots of pots of tea. I got very good at making pots of tea. I’d warm the pot, pour freshly boiled water on the leaves, and leave it to brew for four and a half minutes. Fresh milk, clean cups, sugar if you wanted it. Easy when you know how. And when I wasn’t making pots of tea or staring at the ceiling or talking to the cat, I rode into Taunton and sat with Sam in the hospital, and I watched as she took pain and turned it into something good. Sometimes Ros was there, sometimes Dave, Don and Danny were there too, and we’d sit on plastic chairs and talk about the vegetable garden, if it was ever going to rain again, the heath fires that were burning Exmoor black, and the cost of brown rice. But mostly it was me, a bowl of fruit and my dirty face, and my nonsense talk about making pots of tea or nothing in particular.

Two weeks after she’d woken from her coma, she was walking again. Her first steps were from her bed to the door and back again, but by the end of the following week she was walking to the bathroom, and the doctors said she could move from intensive care. The day she was moved I met her parents for the first time. I was nervous and expected them to shout at me, but before I could say something her mother took me to one side and said, “Samantha told us what happened. We want you to know that we don’t blame you for anything. In fact, we’re very pleased to meet you. She says you’ve been very attentive.”

I didn’t know what to say apart from “Thank you”.

Her father looked at me over the top of his glasses. He reminded me of a teacher I used to have at school, and I’m not sure if he agreed with the things his wife had said, but he didn’t say anything to me. He nodded and said he had to go and check the parking ticket on his car and, as he left, her mother said, “Don’t mind him, Elliot. He’s always a bit off with new people. He’ll come round to you one day.”

Sam was given her own room with a view of a garden and hills and trees, and a couple of days after she’d moved in she asked for a pad of paper and some crayons, and started doing pictures of landscapes. Fields full of sheep. Trees without leaves. Waves rolling onto a beach. Farmhouses on hills. She did one of a herd of cows grazing in a water meadow and gave it to me. “I’ll put it on the wall,” I said, and when I got home that’s what I did.

I taped it to the wall over my bed. I looked at it and saw myself standing in my boots in the middle of the meadow, and I saw birds crying and dipping over my head. I heard music, piano music, slow and careful music, played by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. Dipping through the sad notes, leaning towards the sound. Waiting like a groom at a plain altar.

And when I wasn’t sitting with Sam or staring at her picture, Dad made me go with him to work. Once I tried to tell him that I was too tired, but he told me that I had no choice, that I wasn’t to sit and brood, so what could I do? I behaved like a good son, and did as I was told. One day I went to one of his jobs in Bathealton, a big old house with a derelict tennis court, a ruined greenhouse and an overgrown walled vegetable garden. The place was owned by a pair of sisters who’d inherited it from their father. They were old-style women who wore jodhpurs, tweed coats and scarves on their heads. One of them had been something important in the War, and the other was a sculptor. They fought a constant battle to keep their world intact, and after they’d said hello to me and shown Dad what they wanted him to do that day – “We’d like you to dig some potatoes and tidy up the ground. And after that, maybe trim the hedges along the drive…” – I sat on a box in a shady corner and watched him work.

I don’t think I’d ever watched him work before, not for hours at a time anyway. He was methodical and slow, and as he dug the spuds, he handled them like eggs, carefully rubbing the earth off their skins and placing them in a basket. He looked like he was part of the garden, a man in his world. A couple of times he stood up to stretch and feel his back, then went back to the job. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to help him, and I think if I’d offered he would have told me to stay where I was. Kind and weathered, I know he was worried about me, but I think he used his work to take that worry and turn it into something good. His power and magic wasn’t like Mum’s, but it was still real, still offered and given. And when he stopped and poured two cups of tea from his thermos, he said, “When I was your age, things were different. I never had your sort of trouble.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s had my sort of trouble.”

“Nor do I.”

The tea was weak and tasted of tin, and as I drank he took a deep breath, and I waited for him to say something else, but then he shook his head and the words didn’t come out.

“Dad?”

“Yes son?”

“I’m sorry.”

“We know,” he said. “And you don’t have to say anything else. Just promise me one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That the next time you see trouble coming, you’ll walk away from it.”

“I’ll do more than promise,” I said. “I swear it.”

“A promise is enough,” he said, and he smiled, patted my shoulder, leant his back against the warm wall of the garden, closed his eyes and let the sun shine on his face.