Elmet

I cast no shadow. Smoke rests behind me and daylight is stifled. I count sleepers and the numbers rush. I count rivets and bolts. I walk north. My first two steps are slow, languid. I am unsure of the direction but in that initial choice I am pinned. I have passed through the turnstile and the gate is locked.

I still smell embers. The charred outline of a sinuous wreck. I hear those voices again: the men, and the girl. The rage. The fear. The resolve. Then those ruinous vibrations coursing through wood. And the lick of the flames. The hot, dry spit. The sister with blood on her skin and that land put to waste.

I keep to the railway tracks. I hear an engine far off in the distance and duck behind a hawthorn. There are no passengers; only freight. Steel wagons emblazoned with rogue emblems: the heraldry of youth long grown old. Rust and grit and decades of smog.

Rain comes then stops. The weeds are drenched. The soles of my shoes squeak against the grasses. If my muscles begin to ache I do not reckon with them. I run. I walk. I run some more. I drag my feet. I rest. I drink from alcoves into which the rainwater has pooled. I rise. I walk.

There is always doubt. If she turned south when she came to the railway there is no use. She will never be found. I can walk or I can jog or I can sprint or I can just stop in the middle of the tracks and lie down and wait for a train to cut through me; it would make no odds. If she turned south she is lost.

But I chose the way north so that is the way I will go.

I break all bonds. I step through the margins of fields. I scale barbed-wire fences and locked gates. I cut through industrial estates and private gardens. I pay no mind to the lines of counties and boroughs and parishes. I walk, whether paddock or pasture or park.

The tracks take me between hills. The trains glide below peaks with dales underneath. I spend an evening laid out on a moor, watching the wind, the crows, the distant vehicles; caught in memories of this same land, further south; earlier, another time; then likewise caught in memories of home, of family, of the shifts and turns in fortune, of beginnings and endings, of causes and consequences.

The next morning I continue on my way. The remains of Elmet lie beneath my feet.

Chapter One

We arrived in summer when the landscape was in full bloom and the days were long and hot and the light was soft. I roamed shirtless and sweated cleanly and enjoyed the hug of the thick air. In those months I picked up freckles on my bony shoulders and the sun set slowly and the evenings were pewter before they were black, before the mornings seeped through again. Rabbits gambolled in the fields and when we were lucky, when the wind was still and a veil settled on the hills, we saw a hare.

Farmers shot vermin and we trapped rabbits for food. But not the hare. Not my hare. A dam, she lived with her drove in a nest in the shadow of the tracks. She was hardened to the passing of the trains and when I saw her I saw her alone as if she had crept out of the nest unseen and unheard. It was a rare thing for creatures of her kind to leave their young in summer and run through the fields. She was searching. Searching for food or for a mate. She searched as if she were a hunting animal, as if she were a hare who had thought again and decided not to be prey but rather to run and to hunt, as if she were a hare who found herself chased one day by a fox and stopped suddenly and turned and chased back.

Whatever the reason, she was unlike any other. When she darted I could barely see her but when she stopped for a moment she was the stillest thing for miles around. Stiller than the oaks and pines. Stiller even than the rocks and pylons. Stiller than the railway tracks. It was as if she had grabbed hold of the earth and pinned it down with her at its centre, and even the quietest, most benign landmarks spun outrageously around, while all of it, the whole scene, was suckered in by her exaggerated, globular, amber eye.

And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched. Now pocked with clutches of trees, once the whole county had been woodland and the ghosts of the ancient forest could be marked when the wind blew. The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives. Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of gnarled timber. The calls of half-starved hounds rushing and panting as they snatched at charging quarry. Robyn Hode and his pack of scrawny vagrants, whistling and wrestling and feasting as freely as the birds whose plumes they stole. An ancient forest ran in a grand strip from north to south. Boars and bears and wolves. Does, harts, stags. Miles of underground fungi. Snowdrops, bluebells, primroses. The trees had long since given way to crops and pasture and roads and houses and railway tracks and little copses, like ours, were all that was left.

Daddy and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land here about. He chose for us a small ash copse two fields from the east coast main line, far enough not to be seen, close enough to know the trains well. We heard them often enough: the hum and ring of the passenger trains, the choke and gulp of the freight, passing by with their cargo tucked behind in painted metal tanks. They had timetables and intervals of their own, drawing growth rings around our house with each journey, ringing past us like prayer chimes. The long, indigo Adelantes and Pendolinos that streaked from London to Edinburgh. The smaller trains that bore more years, with rust on their rattling pantographs. Old carthorse-trains chugging up to the knacker, they moved too slowly for the younger tracks and slipped on the hot-rolled steel like old men on ice.

On the day we arrived an old squaddy drove up the hill in an articulated lorry filled with cracked and discarded stone from an abandoned builders’ yard. The squaddy let Daddy do most of the unloading while he sat on a freshly cut log and smoked cigarette after cigarette that Cathy rolled from her own tobacco and papers. He watched her closely as she spun them with her fingers and tipped tongue over teeth to lick the seal. He looked at her right thigh as she rested the tobacco pouch upon it and more than once leaned over to pick it up, brushing his hand against her as he did so, then pretending to read the text on the packet. He offered to light her cigarettes for her each time. He held out the flame eagerly and took offence, like a child, when she continued to light them herself. He could not see that she was scowling the whole time and frowning at her hands as she did his work. He was not a man who could look and see and understand faces well enough to tell. He was not one of those who know what eyes and lips mean or who can imagine that a pretty face might not be closed around pretty thoughts.

The squaddy talked all afternoon about the army and the fighting he had done in Iraq and in Bosnia and how he had seen boys as young as me slashed open with knives, their innards a passing blue. There was little darkness in him when he told us this. Daddy worked on the house during the day and in the evening the two grown men went down the hill to drink some of the cider the squaddy had brought in a plastic pop bottle. Daddy did not stay long. He did not like drinking much and he did not like company save for me and my sister.

When Daddy came back he told us that he had an argument with the squaddy. He had clouted the squaddy about the head with his left fist and now had a bloody nick in his skin just by the thumb knuckle.

I asked him what had started the argument.

‘He were a bastard, Daniel,’ Daddy said to me. ‘He were a bastard.’

Cathy and I thought that was fair enough.

Our house was laid out like any bungalow or park home on the outskirts of any smallish city where old people and poor families live. Daddy was no architect but he could follow a grey and white schematic rustled from the local council offices.

Our house was stronger than others of its type though. It was built with better bricks, better mortar, better stones and timber. I knew it would last many dozen seasons longer than those houses we saw on the roads into town. And it was more beautiful. The green mosses and ivies from the wood were more eager to grip at its sides, more ready to pull it back into the landscape. Every season the house looked older than it was and the longer it looked to have been there the longer we knew it would last. Like all real houses and all those that call them home.

As soon as the external walls were up I planted seeds and bulbs. The earth was still open from the foundations Daddy dug. I extended the troughs and filled them with compost and fresh manure we got from a stable eight miles down the way where little girls in fawn jodhpurs and shining leather boots rode ponies around a floodlit gymkhana. I planted pansies and daffodils and roses of all different colours and a cutting taken from a white-flowering climbing plant I found spewing out of an old drystone wall. It was the wrong time of year to plant but some shoots came up and more came the following year. Waiting is what a true house is about. Making it ours, making it settle, pinning it and us to the seasons, to the months and to the years.

We came there soon before my fourteenth birthday when Cathy had just turned fifteen. It was early summer, which gave Daddy the time to build. He knew we would be finished well before winter and there was enough of a structure to live in by the middle of September. Before then we made our home from two decommissioned army vans that Daddy had bought from a thief in Doncaster and driven to the site down back roads and tracks. We hooked them together with steel rope and tarpaulin was stretched over the top, expertly and securely, to give us shelter beneath. Daddy slept in one van and Cathy and I in the other. Under the tarpaulin there were weathered, plastic garden chairs and after some time a sunken blue sofa. We used that as our living room. We used upturned boxes to rest our mugs and plates above the ground and to rest our feet too, on warm summer evenings when there was nothing to do but sit and talk and sing.

On the clearest evenings we stayed out until morning. We clicked on the radios from both vans and Cathy and I danced on the leafy earth to our woodland stereo, safe in the knowledge any neighbour was too far to hear. Sometimes we sat and sang without the radios. Years ago, Daddy had bought me a wooden recorder and Cathy a violin. We had had free lessons when we were still at school. We were not experts but made a decent sound because of the instruments we played. Daddy had chosen well. He knew nothing of music but a great deal about fine objects. He could pick out craft and quality by the woods and the glues and the smell of the varnish and the smoothness of the edges. We had driven all the way to Leeds for them.

He knew about different woods, you see. He got to know the trees that lived in our copse early on and showed them to me. Almost all were between saplings and fifty years old as the copse had been coppiced well since long before we had moved there, for hundreds of years, even, Daddy thought. In the centre, right at the heart, there were older trees and one was the oldest of them all. The mother, Daddy said, from which all the others had come. She had been there for over two hundred years and her bark was set hard like scraped kauri gum.

There were hazel trees too and some of those dropped nuts. Daddy cut branches away from the trunks and showed me how to work the greenwood with a sharp folding knife. I spent days trying to fashion a thin flute from fresh greenwood, whittling the soft bark away from the sinew and gouging out the fleshy innards. I worked precisely to make the outside as smooth as I could, curved like a finger. But the flute did not sound and after that I moved towards making things that were useful, objects that required less skill, or rather, things that were able to exist even if they were not precisely so. As long as a bowl holds its charge it is easy to define even if it is ugly and rough. But if a flute does not make a musical note it cannot be called a flute.

Our home in the woods had a kitchen and a large oak table. When we still camped, Daddy cooked on a barbecue he had made from pieces of corrugated iron and charcoal that he had baked in two oil drums in the heart of the copse near the old mother tree.

We ate too much meat in those days. We followed Daddy’s diet so ate the food he had cooked for himself before we had come to live with him permanently. This was mainly the meat he hunted. He did not care for fruit or vegetables. He hunted wood pigeon, rock dove, collared dove, pheasant and woodcock, if he caught them in the evenings coming out of cover. There were muntjac around too and when there was too little to hunt or when he had cash in his pocket or when he just fancied a change he went into the village and bargained for joints of beef, lamb or pork sausages. In the right season there was smaller game for breakfast. A man in the village had a merlin and with it he caught too many skylarks to eat alone so gave them to us in exchange for birds that were too big for the merlin to steal. We ate the skylarks on toast, almost whole, with mugs of hot, milky tea.

Once Daddy went away with the travellers for four days and returned with a hessian sack of plucked ducks and five crates of live chickens. He constructed a coop for the chickens near where the back door of the house was going to be. We ate eggs after that but still hardly any vegetables or fruit except berries from the sides of the roads.

It was later, when the house was built, that I planted apple and plum trees and asked Daddy to bring sacks of carrots and parsnips from the village when he went down there for business. I prepared what he brought on the scrubbed kitchen table with knives my Daddy had sharpened.

Before the house was built, in those few hot, dry months when we camped and sang, Daddy talked to us properly. He used few words but we heard much more. He spoke of the men he had fought and the men he had killed, in the peat fields of Ireland or that black mud of Lincolnshire that clings to the hands and feet like forensic ink. Daddy boxed for money with bare knuckles far from gymnasiums or auditoriums but the money could be big and men whose cash came from nowhere arrived from across the country to lay their bets on him to win. Anyone was a fool not to back my Daddy. He could knock a man out with just one punch and if it lasted longer it was because he wanted a full fight.

The bouts were arranged by travellers or rough men from around who desired the chance to test themselves and earn a slice of cash. The travellers had fought in this way for centuries. ‘Prize Fights’ or ‘Fair Fights’ they called them. They wore no padded gloves nor did they divide the bouts into rounds with breaks. These men would not fight for the splitting peace-toll of the bell but until one surrendered or was bludgeoned cold. Sometimes the fights rested disputes between warring clans. As often as not they were for money. Tens of thousands of pounds could be settled and Daddy made a decent living from it.

There was a feud that had run for decades, Daddy told us, between the Joyces and the Quinn-McDonaghs. Every three years or so they would send their young men out against each other in one-on-one bare-knuckle matches that were moderated by older men from neutral families. In cases like these the families themselves could not be present in case a brawl broke out between one clan and the other, old and young, men and women, and a whole portion of the travelling community was wiped out or arrested by the police and packed into vans and taken off to jail.

There was much to gain. These feud fights were not divorced from high stakes. The Joyces and Quinn-McDonaghs competed on how much cash they were willing to front. Sometimes as much as £50,000 each and the winner would take it all back to their caravan and treat the whole clan to an evening of whisky. Daddy said they wanted the fights. He said that after all this time the quarrel between the families meant little but each time one of the top men was short of money they would like as not start something up in the hope of gaining. It was more than pride; it was prize money.

This is what it was about for Daddy too, of course. We were not travellers so the feuds meant nothing to us. He fought at bouts that were arranged for money, where travellers or gypsies, rough farmers, criminals from the towns, owners of underground nightclubs and bars, drug dealers and thugs, or just men who saw their worth resting in their fists, met together and brought their money in the hope of winning more. Daddy arrived in a pair of blue jeans and a buttoned-up bomber jacket. He was given the time and place over the phone by a fixer or else just picked up by the travellers or by someone else. He waited quietly among his admirers. Daddy rarely talked more than he could help. He allowed very few men to meet his eyes. He turned away and paced calmly by himself while the men made their bargains and agreed their rates.

Daddy started the fight. He peeled off his jacket and jumper and stood in a white vest, revealing not the lean, stratiform muscles of an athlete but the kind of biceps that could be soft tight pillows if they were not made from long chains of snap-rubber. There was little hair on his arms. Surprisingly little. Black hair reached up his back and stomach to his chest and the back of his neck and head to meet a full black beard and head of hair, but his arms were bare. He stepped towards the appointed ground and the other man fell into place. Daddy saw his opponent for the first time. He was unmoved. He did not hate this man. He walked towards him and boxed him and when it was over he heard measured applause and was taken over to a blue Peugeot behind the crowds and given from its boot a zipped duffle bag full of dirty cash.

Those men must have been satisfied by something they saw there. The gambling obscured the real pleasure. The cash had to be present, of course, to make it safe. To make it about business. To underpin the spectacle with something serious. To justify the performance. But if it was money they wanted there were other ways to get it and if it were a matter of business the fight would not have been with bare hands.

Yes, it was during this summer in the woods, before the new house was built, that Daddy told us these stories, confided in us, and Cathy and I listened like we were receiving precious heirlooms. Daddy’s eyes became wide when he spoke to us, flecked, light blue, like worn denim, and he would lean in and open them generously then pinch them closed ever so slightly when he reached for a memory that was not quite clear. He sat forward in his chair with his long, thick legs apart, his elbows resting above his knees and his cavernous chest bearing broad, weighted shoulders.

I supposed that was how we made our money. From Daddy’s fighting. But for months there would be no fights and Daddy would find other work. He mentioned this other work but there were fewer stories. The men he worked with on these jobs were sometimes travellers but more often they were from further away.

On one Thursday evening in our first September Cathy and I were sitting alone in our kitchen in the new home. It had been a windy afternoon and it was a windier evening. The foundations and joints of the house were tested for the first time and they creaked and groaned as they do in any building that has not yet set. The house was finding its position in the landscape, sitting down and relaxing into its trough, and we felt it sigh and moan for hours.

Daddy had been away since the afternoon before and we had not expected to see him again for days. We were surprised, then, when he came home that next morning just after dawn, while we were playing cards and drinking mugs of tea. We heard his car arrive outside, rolling then braking gently atop the leaf litter, and his familiar footsteps coming to us. I ran out to the hall to open the door for him, unbolting it at the top and bottom then turning the key. I pulled it in and stood aside to let my Daddy past. He walked to the kitchen table, alert but exhausted, and sat on one of the three wooden chairs that bent under his weight.

He pressed Cathy for a cup of tea and she got up and shifted the kettle back onto the stove. Daddy stretched his legs under the table then pulled them back in towards himself to make a start on tightly knotted bootlaces. Cathy rolled him a cigarette while waiting on the water and when she handed it to him I saw that her face was suddenly awake, like his, like he had brought something bright and alive home for us to devour. This night, as at other times, I saw that she was truly his daughter.

He had been called up by a lad, he said. Somebody he knew from here and there. Peter had lived in the village since he was nine or ten when his mother had moved from Doncaster to work at the chip shop, taking the customers’ money then wrapping up the fish that the men fried. Peter had asked, through a friend of course, if Daddy could go over there to see him. He had heard that we had moved in nearby. That is to say, he had heard of Daddy’s reputation. Amongst certain types in the Yorkshire ridings and in Lincolnshire and in the counties around there were few who had not.

Peter had worked as a labourer on and off for the building companies in the area. Most had pulled back their work now and if it was not entirely dead then it was at least tethered. For two or more years Peter did not have much, Daddy told us. He had come through though. He had started to work for himself, privately, hiring himself out to anyone around who still had money. He built extensions, saw to bits of plumbing and knocked through sash windows. That sort of thing. Work that Daddy could have done but chose not to. Peter had been good at it, Daddy said. He had known how to manage his time and his money, which is half of anything. People spoke to their friends about him and he got more than enough work. For a time he did more than just live. There was pride, or something like it, and that was an almost-forgotten feeling in these parts. There became such things as futures and pasts and Peter began to take his place between them.

Two winters ago, he had taken a job at one of the big farms. He was building an extension to one of the outhouses when a fat dairy cow with two calves in her belly pulled her teats from the mechanical milking vice, kicked herself free from her trusses and galloped out the barn door. She knocked the ladder from beneath Peter’s feet and he fell down beneath her hooves. She felt her grounding change as a hind leg found the soft lower back of the fallen man and she struck out against the outhouse wall then against Peter’s head and neck. He was knocked out and lay bleeding on the filthy, wet cement.

Farms can be lonely places. They can be lonely places to have skin torn and bones crushed. They can be lonely places to die. But not for Peter that day. One of the permanent hands found him and his broken body and wrapped him in his coat and took him to Doncaster hospital in the back of a horse box.

Peter no longer had use of his legs. He had to spend most of his time in a wheelchair. He could no longer work. He stopped going to the pub of an evening. He stayed in his house, waiting for visitors. Old friends still dropped by but he had disappeared from view so all but the best began to forget him. The council did a bit and so did the church. Peter had an elderly neighbour who helped him with the garden. She cut branches from the trees and bushes at the right times of year and swept the fallen petals and the fallen leaves and made sure the water was able to run down the drains after it rained. He had an aunt that he had come to know since his mother died and she brought cakes and newspapers and changed his bed sheets every other Sunday.

Things were all right but they could have been better. After his accident, Peter had had to call in the money he was owed for jobs from the previous year and for materials he had supplied. He had not needed immediate payment before because things were good for him. His situation was steady. He had trusted that he would be paid like he trusted his own body and resolve. He had not considered that he might be cheated because he had never understood weakness. Our world was about muscle, Daddy always said, and for the first time in his life Peter did not have it. He had called round and half had paid straight away or had begun to pay in instalments. He had called again and half of the rest had come through too. The remaining debtors paid up with a bit of persistence and some harsh words from other men, from friends of Peter’s from his childhood or working life. One debtor remained. He was a greasy bastard, said Daddy, from one of the big detached houses in the nicer part of Doncaster that had windows on both sides of the front door and a drive laid over with stones not concrete. He was not a good man, Daddy told us, and though he had got his money in plain sight of the law, he had not won it cleanly, nor had he worn it well. Not fairly nor honestly. He had not earned it by himself and with his wits and graft but with a league of other men, conspiring together to squeeze the remaining blood from their home town. This man had bought and sold other men’s labour and owned dark clubs down dark alleys where women took off their clothes and danced. His money came from other people’s bodies, Daddy told us, men’s muscles and women’s skin.

Peter had built a conservatory for him. It was a beautiful thing, by all accounts. It had taken weeks and cost a fortune and Peter was still owed nearly five thousand pounds and a set of precision power tools he had left on site. He had called and written and shouted from the street but the man had felt no need to respond. And so, after months, and after the rapid onset of poverty, Peter had asked around, and a friend of a friend of a friend had told him about the bearded giant that lived in the woods with his little son and hawkish daughter.

‘I went up to see him yesterday afternoon,’ said Daddy. ‘He still lives in his mother’s house, which I knew from years back when I used to live round there and mowed all lawns on that street. He told me all this. Gave me details. Put forward his case, so to speak. Well, he put it in such a way I were persuaded. You two know better than any I don’t fight for nowt. And I’m not talking about money or prizes here. With this sort of fight there has to be a reason, and Pete had one. This Mr Coxswain owed him properly, and you know I don’t like to see it. A man in Pete’s position taken advantage of like that, brought lower when he’s already low. I’m not a thug, I won’t have you thinking that but by God it makes me angry. Pete told me where Coxswain would be and when. Most nights he drinks and plays cards at a back-room casino on edge of town. It’s owned by an old colleague of his and pair of them set place up to make money for their lot. Coxswain takes home thousands some nights from desperate fools who don’t understand they’re fated to lose. I went then, on that same night when I knew he’d be there because I knew he’d have money on him. There’d be no point in going and doing all that I needed to do and at end of it coming away without Pete’s cash. It’s only half justice, you see. Other half is living. Getting done what needs to be done.’

Daddy had drunk his tea before it had cooled.

‘So I borrowed Pete’s car. He said to do that and he were right to. If car was seen it would be linked to him but nobody would think he could have done owt like what I were about to do. Pete can’t even drive it any more, poor man. But nobody were going to see anyway. I parked ten minutes away and went to casino near two o’clock that morning and waited until after four, until after most of men had left, careful not to be seen, standing in cover of some plane trees. Well, Coxswain were one of last to leave. Tired but not drunk. Too alert for that. And too set on winning game. He came out to his car, which were parked near me. I’d have liked to have said I planned it that way — I should have — but I admit I were lucky. I were slow though. He opened boot and put his bag inside and I only got to him as he were closing it. He of course turned round, of course wondering who I were, guessing rightly that I were trouble for him, but not understanding why. Not then. He squared up but I started with a question first. Asked him if he were who I thought he were. He should have said no but he said that he were. Brave. A small amount of respect crept in. But then he messed up. Showed his true self. I asked for money he owed Pete. I asked for exact amount — I’m no thief. I said I’d take it to him. Made it clear I’d be taking it that evening and that I knew he had money on him. At first I thought he were doing all right. He said he were getting it from boot, and he went to open it. Men other than me might have been more suspicious, but I don’t have time for that. I don’t need to be suspicious. Suspicion comes from fear, see. If he’d pulled out a gun or knife I’d have known how to handle it. I’m not fussed. He opened up boot as if to get his bag of cash, but instead brought out a golf club. He lifted it. He tried to take it to me, but …’

Daddy looked down at the scrubbed oak table. A slight smile shifted his wet lips. Then he raised his blue eyes to Cathy. She had listened to the story but seemed unmoved. Her expression was mute, her eyes were clear.

‘Well. It dindt matter,’ he said. Cathy’s irises widened then narrowed like the bobbing designs on an old spinning top.

Daddy told us what he had done next. He recounted how he had put up his arm to catch the club. How he had bent it in half with his two bare hands. How Mr Coxswain had ended up sprawled and choking on the tarmac, beaten so badly he should have been unconscious. But Daddy was expert in the consequences of time. He knew how to lengthen an engagement. He knew how to make a man suffer.

He detailed it all. Told us everything. Until it seemed like tears were coming to my eyes.

Then he stopped. Stopped suddenly. He rose from his chair and wrapped me in his arms, said he was sorry and that he should not have told us anything.

‘You got Peter’s money, then?’ Cathy asked.

He turned back to her and sat down, still gripping my hand.

‘I did,’ he said. ‘I did and I gave it back to him. All of it. And I’ll show you what he gave me in return.’

Daddy raised himself onto his feet and slipped through the front door. He returned cradling two black puppies in his huge, bloodied hands. Two lurchers. Greyhounds crossed with border collies. We named them Jess and Becky that morning and made a snug den for them in the hallway. No floor had yet been laid in that room so it would be like outside and inside at the same time. Daddy said that would suit them.

Chapter Two

Daddy let us drink and smoke and after the shell of the house was built we spent long evenings sipping mugs of warm cider and puffing on the cigarettes that Cathy rolled. We listened to the radio and read to Daddy. Cathy in particular, in her deep steady voice that picked out the words and sentences that most needed hearing. When we were younger we had begged him for a television but Daddy said we were better off without it.

That was before we moved to the wood. It was before that summer of camping and before the new house was built. We lived further to the north, then, on the outskirts of a small town on the North Sea coast in a house that had been built amongst others of its kind in the 1930s. It was a semi-detached, of sorts. It could have been a row of back-to-back terraces in any other town but these houses were built like suburban three-beds, only smaller and with little care given to the gardens. Our older neighbours had planted purple and yellow pansies in thin borders between their lawns and the paths and privet hedges that cut them up, but most of the gardens on our street were patchy and muddy, held in place by dandelions and thistles.

Garden furniture was scarce but children’s toys littered the ground every few houses along. I remember well a small plastic dolly with blonde curls lying face down in the mud of the front garden of the house on the corner, her pink cotton frock hitched up around her ears. I remember her lying there, untouched, for years while the rain and soil stained her body.

Some of the houses were coated in pebble-dash. Cathy and I liked these. We used to reach out and pick the sharp little stones from the cement as we scraped past, down the alley in between two houses and out into the fields beyond. The pock marks on the walls accumulated but most people did not look to see them and Cathy and I never concentrated on a single patch but released stones from here and there, careful not to form patterns with our picking. Our house in this estate was not covered with pebble-dash. You could see the bricks from which it was made, those dark bloody-brown bricks. Our garden was neither untidy nor decorated. The grass was longer than the grass on other lawns and a darker green, but it was not wild. The concrete path led to a concrete step then the door, which was at first painted a royal blue then later a royal green which then, in turn, began to chip and reveal the blue, once more, beneath.

The hall presented a dark red carpet whose faded gold design took the eye from right to left, creeping over the worn middle to the plump edges and back again. It was like a vine or a climbing plant, its roots just outside the front door, had crept inside and up the stairs. When I was very small I pretended the pattern was a network of roads and I would trace my finger along it.

After the stairs, at the far end of the hall, the springy red carpet gave way to linoleum and a chipped MDF kitchen. We cooked with gas then, and Daddy used to light his cigarettes from the blue hissing flame and take them out into the back garden to finish. Off the hall also came a single living room that stretched the length of the house and there were three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

In all, I lived there for fourteen years.

Back then, Daddy was with us sometimes but at other times he was not. We lived with Granny Morley. She loved us well, cooked for us and washed our clothes. There were always two varieties of vegetable with our dinner and she used enough washing powder to make our clothes clean but not so much that it clung to the cotton and made us itch. While we were at school she hoovered the carpets and dusted the shelves and went down to the high street to Mr Evans’ butcher shop, the Costcutter, the greengrocer’s and Margaret’s Hair Salon, where she met her friends every Thursday afternoon.

On the weekends or after school Granny Morley made sure we played outside in the garden or in the fields behind the house. Sometimes we went down to the beach and played in the caves and rock pools. She was a loving woman, our Granny, but she was distant. Sometimes she looked right through us. Sometimes she seemed to catch onto sounds in the next room or outside when we tried to speak to her, like she could hear something we could not. She raised her head and tilted it and as she did she lifted a hand to the arm of her chair or the sofa.

When we were small Granny Morley walked us to school, holding one of each of our hands in each of hers. Our school was in the town itself on the other side of an area of parkland where seagulls the size of small dogs pulled scraps from bins. We went through there to school in the mornings in our uniforms. Red sweatshirts, white polo shirts and grey flannel trousers or pleated skirts for Cathy and black leather shoes that we polished every Sunday evening.

The main part of the school was in an old red-brick Victorian building and there was a bell tower at one end. The bell was too rusty to chime and nobody ever thought to fix it. Instead there were red bells like fire alarms attached to the walls of the classrooms inside and those told us when to go out to play and when to come back inside. Some of the corridors had bright pictures stuck to the wall with tac and some did not. The whole place smelt of OXO cubes and sugar paper.

I kept myself to myself in the early years. I walked around and around the playground pretending to scale great mountain ranges or horizontal marshlands. In the summer months I sat beneath a sycamore tree on the edge of the school field. I collected insects in my hands only to release them at the end of playtime or lunch hour. Daddy asked me if I wanted an insect collecting set for my birthday or some jars to put them in to and take them home but I said I did not. I liked having them in my hands for that certain amount of time then letting them go off again into the undergrowth, back to their homes and to their lives. I would think about them living those lives while I sat back in my chair in the classroom and gazed blankly at times-tables.

Cathy organised games and I joined in with those. When I was about six and she was eight she got into a barney with three of the lads in her year. Adam Hardcastle, Callum Gray and Gregory Smowton. Possibly it was the kind of event that only seems important to those involved but even then I wondered whether the others spent as much time thinking on it as I have. Over the years I must have spent whole days with this memory in my mind, closing my eyes and trying to walk into different parts of the scene, trying to gauge where each person was in each moment, trying to hear how fast each of their hearts was beating. I must have spent minutes squinting into the distance of it, trying to see this boy’s face when he knew he could not hold on any more, trying to catch onto the exact words my sister had used when she described the bits I had not seen.

I wondered if she thought about it too. Or if the boys did. Or if any of the other small people at the far reaches of my recollection spent the time that I had thinking about the bits in which they played a part. It seems to me that so much of everything came from this, and that if anyone thought about moments like this enough, the future would be done before it had even started, and I mean that in a good way.

She was tall for her age, Cathy, and strong and fit. She had cropped black hair that she tucked behind her ears and blue eyes like Daddy’s. Adam, Callum and Gregory all came from the row of tall terraced houses near the school, with pointed roofs and protruding windows. They wore a new pair of brightly coloured trainers each term. They all supported Manchester United even though we lived in Yorkshire, and they had the team kits to prove it. They always had the widest range of football stickers or pogs and their pretty mothers collected them from the school gates on time every day and dropped them off the next morning with a pack-up of sandwiches, jammy dodgers and sweet cartons of apple juice that got sweeter with the heat from the classroom and the morning sun.

I suppose it is normal for little boys to tell little girls that they are not allowed to play with them but I suppose most little girls know what the answer will be from the start and do not bother to ask. Cathy, of course, did ask, and was told. She asked again and she was told again. She said it was not fair but was told by Gregory Smowton that it was his ball so he could choose who played and who did not. She tried to play anyway. She placed herself on the field in what seemed like the right position and when the ball came near she ran for it. She got it. But then what happened next was more difficult. She was not on either of the teams and so had no idea which direction to take, to whom to pass, nor which goal to run for. I remember her just standing there with the ball and the boys standing too, not knowing too whether to tackle her or to ask for a pass, and her looking startled then suddenly realising that she did not want it anyway.

Part of me still wishes that she had run with it somewhere, ducked and dived round all the lads and kicked it straight past the goalie between the rucksack posts. In my mind she would have been a footballing sensation. But in the event nobody ever saw her play. She stood there by the ball then she walked away. Walked away over to the other side of the field. She told me later when I asked her that she knew it would always be their game. Even if she played, and even if she played well, it would always be their game.

She had caught their attention though. She had riled them. For the rest of that term they sought her when she was alone. They took her aside and punched and kicked her and sometimes strangled her and she ran away or resisted quietly. She pushed their hands off or blocked their blows when they came at her. But she did nothing decisive. Nothing that would end it. And because the boys had no ultimate reason to stop, and because it was fun and made them feel better, they continued. Several weeks passed and they would still chase her behind the bins and beat her or find her in the park between the school and our house or sometimes down at the beach where she and I would wade about in the rock-pools.

There was a trigger though. Something shifted in her mind. I do not know whether it was the particular action or whether it was that I was involved, but it was something.

It was a Friday. It was the Friday before Good Friday. School had broken up for the Easter holidays the day before. The first day we had to ourselves was dry but there was such a strong wind coming in off the North Sea that the air was wet with salty water. It whipped our faces so that they were near red raw and the salt combed our hair and dug under our fingernails.

We went down to the beach to look for hermit crabs. We picked up shells and tried to see if there was one inside. When there was we looked for a moment and placed it back then looked again, creating a map in our minds so as not to disturb the same creature twice.

We both saw the boys coming from a long way off. They made no attempt to disguise themselves. They stretched out their bodies and swung their arms as they walked. I could tell Gregory from his red hat. One of the others had a football. He kicked it hard and the ball scuffed over the sand and stopped twenty metres away for him to lazily walk after it and meet it. It splashed through shallow saltwater puddles and tossed dark wet sand this way and that.

Cathy saw them too but she did not stop. She picked out a beautiful little shell and asked me with a steady voice if I had seen it before. I told her that I had not and she turned it over to look inside. There was nothing there. The animal that had grown the shell was long dead and no little crab had crawled into its grave. She bent down and placed it back amongst the seaweed.

The salty gusts were hitting hard from over the North Sea. Cathy’s hair, black as Whitby jet, whipped about her as she stood up to face the boys. The toggles of her coat beat against each other, sounding the sweet wooden pulse of a marimba being struck by the wind. I watched her the whole time. I could not take my eyes off her. I was ever her witness.

Adam Hardcastle ran in and knocked her to the wet sand. She put her arms back to break her fall but did not make to get up and he soon had her held down. Callum and Gregory walked over, casually.

None of them seemed to notice me though I had been standing right beside my sister. I was younger and small for my age so I knew I could not have done anything except get help. I turned and started running across the sands. Daddy was not in town but I could tell Granny Morley and she could get word to him or else to other people she knew, other people who were a bit like Daddy.

I had not gone twenty metres before Callum caught on to the neck of my sweatshirt and pulled me back. Gregory had begun slapping my sister gently across the face. He then reached down to the bottom of her polo shirt and pulled it up and placed his left hand on the right side of her chest, on her nipple. She was just a girl and there was nothing there but bone and muscle but perhaps he thought this would bother her. He held his hand there and she just stared at him. There was no reason to her why this was worse or different from what had gone on before. She had no idea that Gregory was acting out a kind of play, taking his cues from things he had either seen or heard, doing something that he thought would be worse for her — the worst thing of all. But she did not know. She had not been told yet. She was not in on the game. All she felt was a cold wet hand on her skin that was no worse than a kick in the teeth.

Gregory challenged her on it. ‘Aren’t you bothered?’ He could not understand why she remained unmoved. ‘Slut,’ he said. She stared at him. ‘You should be bothered by me touching you here,’ he said.

It was not working. He turned to me. I was hanging limply in Callum’s arms.

‘Dunk his head in that pond,’ said Gregory. Callum laughed cruelly and dragged me over to a rock pool.

The first time he pushed my head into the cold water I saw a single sea anemone clinging desperately to the side of the jagged crevice, infringed upon on each side by a colony of chipped barnacles.

The second time I saw two distinct types of seaweed and what I thought was a razor clam.

I remember these things. These were the things I promised myself I would remember.

The third time my head did not reach the water. Behind me, my sister had risen up from the sand kicking and screaming my name and their names and her name. She had fought them all and won and they were now legging it back to town with their football left behind. She pulled me up and told me to run all the way home. She told me to run home and stay there and to tell Granny Morley that she would not be long but that it might be a good idea to get Daddy. She wanted Daddy. She left me there and ran off behind the boys. She chased them down and I knew she would catch them all. Her legs were longer and stronger than theirs in those days. I turned and ran home and did what she said.

The boys were fine. After she was finished with them they were bruised and tender but they were not seriously hurt. She did not know how to cause too much damage to a human body and their wounds healed quickly. In school for the weeks that followed they kept themselves away from Cathy and for some time they kept away from everybody. When the new term came they were more or less as they had been before, in the way they walked and the way they spoke to people. If there was any more humility than before or any more regard for other people, it was hidden.

In the immediate aftermath of the fight one of the boys told his mother about what had happened. Or part of what had happened. He told his mother that he and Adam and Gregory had been set upon by that feral girl with the strange, absent father. His mother had gone into the school to tell the headmistress.

The following day, Daddy was summoned to go in and speak with the headmistress. He had come back within two hours of Granny Morley’s call and sat me on his knee as we waited for Cathy. Granny Morley asked him if he was going to go out looking for her but he said that he had already seen her out on the beach. He said she was sitting on her own and would come home when she was ready.

Cathy was ready at around six o’clock in the evening. She had been out on the beach all night and all day. Her hands and forearms were covered in a thin layer of sand and there was a small amount of blood on her knuckles. The sand together with the blood looked like the thin lines of grimy oil that wash up on North Sea beaches and mark the high tide.

Daddy got up and took hold of one of her hands. He led Cathy to the seat next to his. He asked her what happened.

She looked at him and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. They were hardly there at all, having not yet pooled into salty droplets, but I could tell the difference. Like the difference between lit and unlit black or between a dead thing and an alive thing.

At first she did not respond. She sat in silence. We all did. Daddy did not ask her again and neither did Granny Morley nor I say anything.

After almost a minute her chest began to convulse. I thought that she was hiccoughing but the heaving became more rapid and then the tone changed and she let the tears come all at once. A deluge.

She sobbed. Her breathing was like waves building up then dropping suddenly over a sea wall. She exhaled as if through an harmonica.

As she cried she spoke: ‘I felt so helpless, Daddy. I felt as if there wandt owt I could do that would change them. Or hurt them. Not really hurt them like they were hurting me. I could hit them all I liked but it woundt change a thing. They were so nasty to me, Daddy. Not the pain, Daddy, I dindt mind that, but the way they made me feel inside. No matter what I do, I can never win.’

‘You did though. You fought them and beat them. You protected your little brother. What more could you do?’

Daddy ran his hands through his hair and then his beard as if searching for an answer there.

‘I mean it doendt matter, does it? I mean that things will always be as they are now. I mean that there will always be more fights and it will just get harder and harder. I feel like I’ll never just be left alone.’

Daddy continued to stroke his hair. He looked more concerned than I had ever seen him. ‘Did you think to tell the teacher?’ he asked. ‘Did you think to tell teacher what these boys were doing?’

‘I did,’ Cathy replied, ‘but she told me they were nice boys.’

It was because of this, I think, that Daddy took us all into the headmistress’s office together. He led Cathy and I by our hands through the narrow corridors of our school. The ceilings were low and lit by halogen strip bulbs that flickered and shone the same colour as the magnolia paint on the walls, making it appear as if the light were emanating from the plaster. The only windows were long and thin and tucked just beneath the ceiling, well above the heads of the children who walked up and down these corridors so that when they looked up and out into the world beyond all they could see was the sky. On that day the sky was a mesh of criss-crossed grey and white cords being ripped and tugged and frayed by colliding winds.

To get to Mrs Randell’s office we walked to the end of the corridor and up a flight of stairs. They were the only stairs in the single-storey school and opened onto a landing holding doors to her office, the staffroom and the administrative office where we collected our lunch tokens each week and handed in consent forms for us to go on school trips.

Daddy knocked. It was a heavy fire door painted dark blue with a small, square window made from thick glass with a network of thin, black wires running through it to hold the shards together in case of breakage. His fat knuckles made a dull thump against the wood, a sound that was echoed by Mrs Randell’s dampened voice from inside the room, instructing us to enter.

Her voice or the instructions she issued sharpened as Daddy opened the door and she told us to sit down. She sat in a high-backed chair behind a large pine veneer desk and there were three chairs set opposite her, made from moulded plastic with a thin, course cushion glued to each seat. I sat on the right, Cathy sat on the left and Daddy was in the middle.

Mrs Randell looked comfortable. She looked as if she led a comfortable life. She wore a peach linen suit and her hair was both blonde and brown. Or blonde overlaid onto brown. It descended just below her ears and flicked out to the sides.

She seemed good enough (as good as could be expected) but she had only known comfort. And she looked troubled by us. Perhaps she would have preferred it if Cathy had never beaten those boys or if Callum’s mother had not told her about it so she would not have to be sitting there on a Friday afternoon having a conversation about violence.

It was cool outside but her office was hot. The central heating was on and the windows shut. There were piles of heavily typed documents on her desk and the sideboard and walls bore the varied compositions of sundry children in oversized scrawls and motley hues. There was a row of rubber stamps stained with carmine ink. Each sported a slogan of adulation and acclaim.

‘I hope you know that your daughter’s behaviour was unacceptable. The attack was unprovoked. Those poor boys just wanted to play football on the beach and they asked Cathy if she and Daniel wanted to join in. I mean, I know Daniel and Cathy might not have had quite the same opportunities in life as Gregory, Adam and Callum but that’s no excuse for behaviour such as hers. Gregory had bruises all up his legs and Callum’s mother said the boys had even been kicked in their private parts. She must be told that it’s not acceptable to kick little boys there.’

Mrs Randell went on like this and Daddy said nothing much in response. Neither did Cathy. A viscous silence had settled on Daddy and Cathy and me and although Mrs Randell spoke in fluid phrases that rippled against and sporadically punctured the gummed ambience, drab quiet was the primary mood and her dry utterances did little to refine that mood. Later, Daddy told us that after he had heard the teacher’s comments on the conduct of the boys he saw that there would be no real use in responding with his true thoughts. Mrs Randell’s assessment was simply the way people saw things, he told us. It was the way the world was and we just had to find methods of our own to work against it and to strengthen ourselves however we could.

Outwardly, Daddy agreed with Mrs Randell’s recommendations and offered an apology on behalf of his daughter. He proffered assurances that it would not happen again. He insisted that discipline would be enforced at home and that Cathy would find a way to appease the boys.

Daddy walked us back home through the darkening suburbs to Granny Morley’s house. He told us that he would be staying for at least a month and that we should come home from school on time every day so that we could all spend time together. He told Cathy that she had done everything correctly. He only wished she had acted sooner.

Granny Morley died on a Tuesday afternoon. Cathy found her in her usual chair in the sitting room and closed all the curtains and all the doors and forbade my entrance. We had no way of contacting Daddy so we just kept that room shut and the curtains closed and lived upstairs in near-silent vigil. Cathy snuck down for food from the cupboards. We lived off biscuits and bananas and crisps until Daddy happened to come home a week and a half later and we ran to him and wept for the first time and he told us that he would never, not ever, leave us again.