Elmet

I stop at a roadside cafe. The windows are thick with filth. Smog from the motorway has caught on the panes and spread like a fungus or a grimy frost. The road licks at the glass with an acid tongue. Plumes from a militant buddleia edge the car park and the cratered tarmac upon which the cars and lorries rest.

I push at the door. It sticks on the frayed linoleum but eases then opens. The sight of people is strange. I am filled with a kind of dread. But the scent of the oil and the frying meat and eggs and bread, and of steak and kidney puddings and mushy peas and chips cooking in dripping pulls me in.

I have not eaten well these last few weeks. Scraps from bins, berries from the verge, raw turnips from a farmer’s field. I ate a pizza that had been left out by the railway then spent the next day curled beneath a viaduct cramping and vomiting.

I have come to beg for hot food. I have come to beg for thick custard poured over apple cobbler. I want gravy over Yorkshire pudding. Bangers and mash.

People sit at tables. The sort with the chairs attached. Most are men and most are alone. Lorry drivers hunch over fry ups and magazines. An old lady in the corner is doing a word search puzzle. There is a family with small children at a table by the window. The children are picking at their baked beans and potato waffles. The mother and father grimace as they sip hot coffee. They are neat and tidy in appearance and delicate in their manners. They are out of place here and their eyes shift from each other to the people sitting about and to the servers behind the counter wiping greasy hands on greasy aprons.

‘What can I get you, love?’ The woman at the till has spotted me from the other side of the room. Her hair is wrapped in netting and a large part of her face is obscured by spectacles. She is wearing catering whites and her hands are placed firmly on the counter before her as if she is holding down the lid of a jack-in-the-box.

A couple of heads turn towards me. Most do not. I walk down the thin aisle between the tables. I want to be closer to the woman before I reply so I do not have to shout over the onlookers. I want to whisper.

It has been weeks since I have used my voice. I will be hoarse.

The woman smiles despite my filthy clothes and face. A good sign. She must get all sorts in here.

‘Hello,’ I say to her. ‘I wonder if I could have something hot to eat. Anything. I handt eaten owt hot in days. Only I’ve no money to pay. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be funny.’

She makes no sign of recognition. I said the words so quietly that I wonder if she has not heard.

She nods her head and her smile becomes that of sympathy. She turns to the girl behind her who cannot be more than seventeen and has blonde hair ripped into a tight bun. The woman speaks quietly to the girl so none of the customers hear. ‘Get this lad a plate of pie, yeah? Whichever we’ve got most of. And put a good helping of chips and veg on as well. I’m not putting it through till so you’ll have to go into kitchen and tell them.’

The girl looks me up and down then does as she is told.

The woman smiles sympathetically again. ‘Take a seat, love,’ she says. ‘I’ll bring you a pot of tea.’

The tea is well stewed. I mix in the milk and gulp it while it is still hot. The plate is brought. Meat and gravy pie with more gravy poured on the top. The peas and carrots are coated too. The plate steams and brings bitter evaporated Bisto granules to my nostrils. Chips on the side. I sprinkle salt and vinegar.

So much food.

The generosity of strangers.

Some strangers.

The out-of-place family get up to leave. They fumble for change and place some silver coins on the laminate table top. The little girl picks her nose. The boy takes hold of his mother’s hand. The door swings shut behind them.

I devour my meal. I look around to see if I am watched before licking the plate clean. I am brought hot apple crumble and custard and consume them as hastily as the pie. I lick the bowl. I take my plate and bowl and teapot and teacup and saucer and cutlery to the counter. I thank them all and thank them again and they smile and nod.

The kindness of strangers. The kindness of women. Women who share cakes with neighbours and volunteer their time with the local PTA. Women who listen. Women who talk.

I leave the cafe. The car park is bright and the surge of traffic is close and tight.

A lorry driver leans against his cab. He watches me then speaks.

‘Need a lift?’

Chapter Eight

Our mother lived with us back in the house with Granny Morley. At times. Now and then. She came and went. Like Daddy. Sometimes she would bring herself to our door, sometimes she would be brought. Sometimes we saw her before she went upstairs to her room. Sometimes we did not.

When she was at home she slept. It was as if she was a thousand years old and each of her days lasted a month. She would get up, get out of bed, and leave. Then she would return weeks later as if she were coming home from work or from a day out. Then she would sleep through her night while we came and went, got up and went to school, had lunches and dinners, went to bed.

When she arrived I washed her clothes. When she left I washed her sheets.

Her clothes she placed in a bag outside the door of her bedroom. Granny Morley would send me up to get it. I would bring it down to the utility room beyond the kitchen, which was always cold and damp. The cold and the damp rose from the worn linoleum floor and I would have to sit with my feet up against the gas fire for hours afterwards to feel dry again. The cold and damp soaked through my socks to my feet and up my legs to my body and head. So did the warmth when I sat at the fire.

I would empty my mother’s washing onto the floor, loosing the drawstring of the bag, turning it upside down and shaking it out with each bottom corner clasped between a thumb and forefinger. Tops, socks, knickers, bras, a pair of jeans. A small collection, carelessly strewn. There was carelessness too in the way the garments had been kept. The socks were well-worn at the heels and at the toes bobbles had appeared. Elastic had become detached from the small pairs of knickers, cut from synthetic fabric designed to imitate lace. There were more tallies than the lace-like fabric had intended and these were frayed. Whites were grey now and greys were lilac. Blacks that had been the colour of the night sky now had the smudged, matte finish of a rubbed chalkboard.

The jeans were worn at the knees and the crotch. Mainly polyester with elastane and a small amount of true, cotton denim, the jeans had stretched and retracted many times but now they had come to follow the contours of my mother’s legs and hips.

She was thin. Always so thin. The clothes had little definition but from them I knew her body. I knew the colour of her long hair, strands of which had fallen among the laundry. I knew the smell of her skin. I knew these things much better from the clothes than I ever did from seeing her, touching her, listening to her.

With Granny Morley I would sort the washing by type and put it into the machine in separate loads with the powder and the fabric softener. I would close the door and turn the dial and press buttons that commanded the water.

Granny Morley and I drank cups of tea while my mother slept upstairs, for as long as she needed to sleep.

At the ends of her visits, the bed sheets were left outside, then she left too. Wet with sweat, wet with blood. Always twisted and pulled, the evidence of a writhing body. And the smell of her. On the sheets and in the room when I went to clean it. Bitter smoke and salted sweat, and sour spit and the sweet iron of her blood. The scents reached out to me and lingered on the tip of my tongue and at the back of my nose and throat. The memory of smells and tastes and faint anguished bleats from behind the closed door of her room.

I once asked Granny Morley why we found my mother’s blood on the white sheets. She replied that my mother bled when she was broken.

The last time she came to the house there was no more fuss than on any of the other times. She said no more to us and we said no more to her. She behaved no differently. Daddy had been away too but he came back after a phone call from Granny Morley and lay in the bed by my mother for days, holding her, whispering to her gently. I heard them from outside the door, but caught none of the details. And I think Daddy was taken by surprise more than any of us when she left. She had seemed healthier, brighter, for the few days before but then slipped off, like she always did, with no goodbyes. Daddy was startled. Me and Cathy, we expected it, and Granny Morley too, I think. But Daddy was startled. He looked for her. But Granny Morley got a phone call and when she put down the receiver she turned to us and told us that our mother would not be coming back.

Chapter Nine

Mr Price returned to our house two weeks later. This time he brought his sons. Tom and Charlie Price were both tall and slender. They had long, thin legs and narrow torsos that gave way to wide shoulders so abruptly there was clear daylight between their ribcages and upper arms. Tom was older and had dark blonde hair, cut around his ears at the front and shorter at the back. Charlie had dark hair and darker eyes that were very unlike his father’s or brother’s, and although he was strikingly handsome there were greyish semi-circles bleeding from his lower eyelids. He had a hooked nose and skin that took on the colour of the day. This day was overcast so his skin was fragmentary and pale. They all wore green wellington boots and waxed jackets.

The Price men ascended the hill in their Land Rover. Cathy and I were sat a long way behind the house amongst the outlying trees. I was whittling green ash. I had stripped the tender bark from a piece the length of my hand span and was turning it and rounding it with a squat blade. Cathy held the corpse of a mallard between her knees and was pulling fistfuls of feathers from its dappled skin. A bowl of steaming water and a pile of wet rags lay at her feet for her to dip them then dab them, hot and sopping, onto the bird’s supple pores.

We did not see or hear them knock at the front door. Mr Price went into the kitchen to speak with Daddy. Tom and Charlie came to find us. They laughed candidly at private jokes as they walked through the still-green bluebell shoots.

These boys were just so handsome. They were so much more handsome than me and Daddy, we could not even be compared. We were almost distinct breeds, adapted to different environments, clinging to opposite sides of the cliff. It was as if Daddy and I had sprouted from a clot of mud and splintered roots and they had oozed from pure minerals in crystalline sequence.

They spoke and laughed with deep voices that were not like Daddy’s. They were smoother, though muted with vocal fry. The sound resonated against the cool air like a ball bouncing on wet grass.

‘Did you shoot that bird?’ Tom asked me. He was talking about the duck that Cathy was plucking but he addressed his question to me rather than my sister.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Daddy did.’

‘Daddy?’ He seemed amused by the word.

‘Yeah,’ I said, simply. ‘But it wandt on your land he shot it.’

I did not know why I had said it. Daddy might have shot it on Mr Price’s land or he might have shot it elsewhere. I had no idea but saying it meant Price’s son thought that we were guilty of something or else knew that it was something we sometimes did. I should have known better but because I had stumbled and because he had remained silent in response, I went on again: ‘He dindt shoot it anywhere near your land.’

‘Well if he shot it anywhere around here then he shot it near our land. He would have had to go very far away for it not to have been near our land.’ Tom paused to laugh at my absurd scrambling. ‘Do you hunt with him ever?’ Tom asked.

‘Only sometimes.’

‘He’s got a twelve-gauge shotgun, hasn’t he?’

Cathy looked up at Tom but neither of the boys turned to her.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He might have one but we’ve never seen it, and he doendt hunt with it.’

‘That’s odd that he’d have it and not shoot game with it. How does he hunt?’

I shrugged. Daddy had traps set up throughout our copse and in the fields around. They were not the sort that killed the animal they snared but those that kept it waiting until Daddy came to collect it and kill it himself. It was better that way. Traps that try to kill the animal usually fail and the poor thing lies there dying slowly until it is finished off. The traps that our Daddy used lured the animal with a trail of food then shut it away in a box. There was room enough in the box for comfort in its last hours and the animal had no sense of its fate. Daddy checked the traps regularly and if he found something he would take it in his hands as quietly as he could then snap its fragile neck. The little creatures never even knew they were dead.

Sometimes he fished. Daddy had rods and tackle but said that fishing with rods took too much time and that it was better to tickle the trout. He knew the places for that.

I told the lads that I had never known Daddy to use a shotgun but that he hunted game with his bow.

‘Rubbish,’ said Tom. ‘Nobody hunts with bows around here. I don’t believe that anyone’s ever been able to shoot a bird with one. Not a bird in flight.’

Cathy placed the half-plucked mallard on a cut section of tarpaulin on the ground by her feet and squeezed her hand into her right jeans pocket to pull out her leather tobacco pouch. She pinched at the dried fibres and placed what she pulled onto a folded paper. She stuck a filter at the tip before rolling it between her fingers and licking then sticking the seal. She lit the cigarette with a well-struck match then sucked on it such that the flame dimmed to glowing ash and smoke seeped from her nose and mouth. She watched the lads.

I shrugged again. ‘Daddy does. Sometimes Cathy does as well.’

‘Is that Cathy over there?’ asked Tom. She was sitting no more than five metres from him but he asked me about her without turning in her direction. For a moment, Cathy continued puffing on her rolly. Then she got up and walked over. She had grown in the last couple of months and had become ungainly in her gait, unused to the new lengths and angles of her limbs. She was upright in everything else that she did, though. She always had a certain direction.

‘I hunt too,’ she said. ‘I’ve shot birds like this bird with my bow.’

Tom turned to her and as he did he became angry. Surprisingly so, considering how small the disagreement should have been. Probably no one ever spoke back to him. Not his little brother nor anybody at his school nor the boys he played rugby and cricket with nor the men in his shooting club, not even his teachers. They were probably too taken with him. Him and his confidence. Him and his arrogance. That charm that he walked around in like a swarm of horseflies about his head. Nobody probably ever told him that he was wrong. Nor would they ever, it seemed. For his whole life. He would always get his way. Always be right. Always get to bat first. I doubted even his dad questioned him much, even his own father, Mr Price. And then on the occasions that he did they both knew that they were upholding the proper order of things. When his father asked him to explain himself, or rethink something, or when he questioned him or told him that he — Tom — was incorrect, it served to strengthen Tom’s position, as second only in the universe, to be first when the time came. In those moments his father was putting Tom Price in his place but that never constituted a slight.

But with Cathy talking back at him, when he had not even been talking to her in the first place, well, it must have been frustrating. I could see it in his face. He clenched his jaw and blinked rapidly, as if trying to blink her away or blink away the thoughts he was being forced to have now that his train of conversation had been minutely offset. ‘I just brought it up because it seems odd — counter-intuitive even — that your father hunts with bows and arrows when he could be hunting with a gun. Regardless of whether or not he does have a twelve-gauge shotgun lying around, he could just get one, couldn’t he? Or some other kind of gun? I don’t understand this predilection for old technology. What’s the point?’

‘Well what’s the point of any of this?’ said Cathy. ‘We could just live in a town and Daddy could get a job and we could buy all our food in a supermarket like everyone else does. And go to school and have friends, and that. I mean, you might ask why we don’t just do that?’

Tom laughed. And I knew it had been coming. ‘You’re right, I could just ask that. Why are you living here in the middle of our wood?’

Cathy had opened her mouth but the other son, Charlie, quiet until this point, stepped in. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘we don’t need to get into that. Don’t be an idiot.’

Tom looked startled at his brother’s intervention but said nothing to him and nothing more to Cathy. He again turned away from her and directed his comments to me. He asked about the copse. He asked about the trees within it, the types and the ages. He asked where we had lived before we came here. He asked why Daddy had chosen this spot. He asked how long it had taken Daddy to clear the land and to build the house. He asked about our mother. He asked whether we went to school. He asked how long we would be staying.

I did my best to evade the questions and, after a time, he became frustrated.

‘I’m just curious about your lives, that’s all. You must admit that it’s unusual, you lot living here. And in the way that you do.’

I looked about myself. Cathy had returned to the bird. She took it again in nimble hands, her plucking more resolute. She tore at the creature with the quiet fanaticism of a flagellant at his own skin but though her fists pulled at the downy fluff with pressing haste, she did not draw blood nor did she damage the flesh. She doused it with the water, though it had cooled, and wiped off the stubble and residue that marred the otherwise pristine carcass.

I answered the tall, smart lad as best I could. ‘Daddy thinks it’s important we learn to live with things we ourselves can make and find. That’s all. We just want to be left alone.’

‘You mean you don’t want to be friends with me and Charlie? Did you hear that, Charlie?’

Charlie appeared more reticent than his brother. More thoughtful, perhaps. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s a shame.’

Tom looked at his brother for a moment then over at Cathy then at me. He had become bored by the conversation and wanted to get moving. He suggested we return to the house where their father was speaking with our father. Tom and Charlie walked that way and I thought it best to follow. Cathy too. The plucked bird swung by her side: plump and bobbing.

We followed the tall lads into the kitchen. The inside heat was thick. Daddy and Mr Price sat facing each other on opposite sides of the scrubbed kitchen table. We hovered around the edge of the room but the men concluded their business and both pushed back their chairs with a searing scrape against the floor. They stood to their full heights. Daddy was a giant. He towered over Mr Price by at least a foot but the smaller man did not cower.

Mr Price held out his right hand. ‘I hope you will think about what I have said, John.’

At first Daddy held back, both arms fixed tightly to his sides, but then he released one to meet Mr Price’s. His expression remained blank.

The visitors directed themselves out of the house then down the slope towards their Land Rover. Daddy leaned against the murky kitchen window to see the vehicle leave. He watched it all the way down the track, round the corner and along the bottom road until it was out of sight.

He placed his right hand in his left and massaged his knuckles. They were rigid from fractures and calcification and there was barely any flexibility in the rough, taut skin that wrapped them let alone between the joints. He rubbed the thumb of his left hand across the many, composite scars, feeling almost nothing in either hand, his nerves having receded after repeated bruising. He performed the action for memory and motion rather than sensation.

We stared at the lost man, our father, partly blind to us as his body grasped itself and he slipped again into his own thoughts, alone in his motion.

He returned to us in due course. ‘Put another log in the stove, Daniel. I want for us to be warm again.’

I slid into the hall where the dogs were sat in their straw bed. They jumped up at the sight of me and sniffed and licked my hand as I lowered it to stroke them. I placed my palm on Becky’s head and she lifted her muzzle so as to catch me above my wrist and bring the hand down into the reach of her tongue. I wrapped my hand around the other side of her head and she lifted her muzzle again so my outstretched arm and her jaw danced round and around in circles.

I broke free and stepped over the dogs to get a log from the corner behind their bed. I returned to the kitchen with both pups at my heels and closed the door behind them. They leapt and sniffed at Daddy and Cathy and I busied myself at the stove while Daddy continued to talk.

‘Do you know why I built our house here?’ asked Daddy.

I looked at Cathy. She hesitated. ‘We thought you must have bought the land from the travellers or else won it in a fight.’

‘I dindt buy land,’ answered Daddy. ‘I dindt win it in a fight neither. As far as Price is concerned we don’t own it, not in the way he sees ownership, at any rate.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Your mother lived round here. When she fell on hard times, Price seized a lot of what she had. But when your Granny Morley died it seemed like the right place to come, to build a home, to live as a family. Because of your mother. And because I knew we would care for this land in a way Mr Price never could, and never would. Mr Price does nothing with these woods. He doendt work them. He doendt coppice them. He doendt know the trees. He doendt know the birds and animals that live here. Yet there is a piece of paper that says this land belongs to him.’

Daddy raised himself from the chair and paced over to the stove where I was finishing stoking the fire with the new log. I poked it and shunted the dead embers into the grate.

‘Does Mr Price want us to leave our home?’ asked Cathy.

‘He does and he doendt. He coundt give a stuff about these woods. But he’s taken us moving here as a hostile act. He thinks I’m trying to provoke him. Perhaps I am. But regardless, he’s made it clear he’ll cause as much bother for us as he can. There were once a time when I worked for that man. When he used my muscles to bully weak and poor, to make sure they paid their debts. I were useful to him, and he wants me to be useful to him again. But I won’t. I won’t work for any man ever again. My body is my own. It is all I own.’

Daddy took the poker from my hands and thrust it into the heart of the fire where it stuck into the fresh log which lay atop the flames but was barely touched by their flickering edges. He twisted the iron rod and rent apart the grain and split the log into two frayed sections whose frills caught easily and transmitted the fire to the wood proper. The glass door of the stove flashed as he shut it.

‘He’ll start by causing small nuisances for us that’ll build and build until they become unbearable. He’ll make sure people in villages begin to freeze us out. They’ll stop serving us in shops and stop speaking to us. That won’t matter much. We hardly buy owt and we hardly speak to anyone either but it’ll be an inconvenience. That’s how it begins. Then he might send people round when we’re out to silt up our well and we’d have to bore a new one. After that we’d always make sure that someone was here. We’d be afraid to leave. And so in that way he would have begun to control our movements. Then he’d have bricks and dead rats thrown through our windows, and dog shit left by our front door. Then they’d start picking on you two when you’re out alone.’

‘We’d be a match for them,’ Cathy interjected.

Daddy shook his head. ‘I’m sure you would be at first,’ he said. ‘When you have the advantage of surprise on your side. That’ll always be your advantage, Cathy. Nobody will ever expect you to fight back and certainly not in the way I know you can. But once they’ve realised you’re no pushover they’ll send more men and those men will be tougher and nastier and even you won’t be a match for them all.’

‘You would be though,’ said Cathy assuredly.

Daddy shook his head again. ‘I win fights because I am suited to the rules of those fights, Cathy. They’re a test of strength and speed and endurance and I am the strongest, fastest and toughest man in Britain and Ireland. But take away those rules and it’s anyone’s guess who’d win. If someone pulled a knife on me, or a gun, well I’ve dealt with those things before, I don’t mind telling you, but that doendt mean I could again. It all depends on circumstances. And if it’s one against many then, well, the odds are stacked. And that’s not to say I woundt try. You two know me well enough. But I have to be realistic.’

I took for myself a thick slice of brown bread from the board and scooped butter from the churn to slide across it. The dogs watched me with begging brown eyes and twitching black noses as I bit and tore and chewed. I pondered my father’s words. I watched my sister as she sat with that duck corpse on her lap and hunched her shoulders against the glum news. Daddy placed both his hands flat on the table, his bowed fingers and knuckles almost camouflaged against the likewise knotted, ecru oak.

I sat and turned towards the warm stove. ‘What shall we do?’

‘Price’s hope would be that I’d do his work or that we’d move away.’

‘This is our home,’ I said.

Daddy looked at me as if for the first time in weeks and he placed his right hand on my left shoulder. ‘My feelings are the same,’ he said.

We stayed together in the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. We drank mugs of hot, milky tea and at around four o’clock Cathy pulled a couple of bottles of cider from the cupboard. We discussed what Mr Price had said to Daddy and what could be done. Daddy told us again that Mr Price cared nothing for the copse. Daddy said that Mr Price just hated to feel the weight of helplessness. To interfere with the lives of others was to carve for himself a presence in the world. Mr Price detested that which he could not control. We lived here on his doorstep yet he had no access to our lives. We did not pay him rent, we did not work for him, we did not owe him any favours. And so he feared us. Daddy said that to Mr Price people were like wasps zipping around his head, ready to sting at any moment. He liked to know their movements. He liked to know their intentions. And when he knew those things he could catch them and put them in a breathless jar.

Daddy said that we should seek out his few friends in the village. There were a handful of people that he had helped in recent months and though Daddy was reticent in his favours, there were perhaps a couple he felt he could confide in. His friend Peter had less affection for Mr Price than we did and we resolved to pay him a visit.

Chapter Ten

We went the next evening. The morning we spent together on the rough, wet grass outside our wooden house. After an early start Daddy carried the kitchen table and chairs outside and set it up with a chequered cloth. I got the eggs and bacon on. Cathy brewed the tea and we took it all outside to eat in the cold bright sun. The bacon was from the butcher, Andrew, who was also one of Daddy’s few friends. It was well salted and he had cut it thickly but I made sure the rind was crisp before I lifted it from the skillet. The eggs fried quickly in the bacon fat and took on salt from the meat so their bottoms formed caramel crusts while the yolks remained golden. I warmed the plates first in the oven before serving up and afterwards finished them with a slice of fresh bread.

Eating a full breakfast outside with my Daddy and sister was always a joy but this morning more than ever. There were troubles, we knew. Our home was in danger. But right now, with a bright white sun shedding its light onto my pale, thin arms, and thick crispy bacon held between two slices of soft, warm bread, I could not have been happier.

A clutch of gulls cut through the eggshell sky, their bellies caught in dark shadow.

Breakfast and its lazy aftermath took most of the morning and the afternoon was spent in the copse or round about. We set and checked traps and Cathy and I called Daddy to make the kill if there was a catch. Otherwise we saw to the hens or cultivated the kitchen garden as it was needed.

Daddy contacted Peter in advance from a pay phone in the village. We walked down together as dusk fell and Cathy and I huddled outside while Daddy went into the box with a stack of ten pence pieces. The spot stank of piss.

It had been an old, red phone box but the paint was chipping and now it was little more than a rusted metal shell. The glass in its panes was cracked but not yet smashed. Daddy picked up the receiver and I heard an amplified crunch and its echo then a clear dial tone.

Cathy pulled out her smoking equipment and started to roll up. The ground was already strewn with cigarette butts of various ages like little brown slugs slithering in different directions through the ash-stained mud. She rolled a cigarette for me too and lit it with a match from a box in her top jacket pocket before turning the match to the end of the roll-up she was holding between her lips. I inhaled as deeply as was comfortable and blew my smoke in the direction of my sister and up into the night air.

Daddy’s voice sounded muffled from within the box. He spoke to Peter briefly and gave him a few details. When the conversation finished he pushed open the door, took the cigarette from my mouth, took a drag and replaced it.

‘Let’s go.’

It was half a mile walk but we hardly spoke along the way. The main street through the village was lit with amber streetlights. Security bulbs flashed on from the houses by the road as we passed. They darkened again almost as quickly. Some of the houses had televisions playing that could be seen flickering behind the closed curtains. We passed a house where a man and woman were shouting at each other and a baby was crying. Daddy slowed as we passed that house and listened hard but then walked on with us and the shouting and crying faded to nothing.

Peter’s house was on the outskirts of the village and had a long back garden that stretched way out amongst the fields. The house itself was not much bigger than ours. 1970s build. Pebble dash. The inside was sparsely decorated. A TV stand but no TV. CDs but no hi-fi. That sort of thing.

His bed had been moved into the back room so he no longer had to climb the stairs. The double doors through to there were partly open and revealed a jumble of sheets and pillows and a couple of green beer bottles and a box of tissues on the bedside table.

‘So Price wants you to work for him?’ said Peter as soon as Daddy, Cathy and I had sat down. ‘He’ll be getting you to kick me out of here, next.’

‘You’re his tenant?’ asked Daddy.

‘I am,’ said Peter. ‘At least I have been so far only I can’t afford the rent any more. He wants me out, faster than even law would get me out. I bet he’ll want you to do it. Break you in by getting you to shift a friend from his home. He’ll know you helped me that time. That time you saw to Coxswain in that car park.’

That evening we drank the best part of two bottles of whisky. Daddy said the day merited something hard and sent Cathy out with a well-used fifty pound note to get the best spirit stocked by the village shop. Daddy and Peter drank the lion’s share between them. They poured approximate double measures into their glasses then returned for more.

Cathy and I drank more slowly and mixed our whisky with drops of water. She smoked and I had a few too. We stayed in the men’s conversation for the most part but dipped out now and then.

‘Most people round here rent their houses from Mr Price,’ said Peter. ‘And if they don’t rent from Mr Price, their landlord is a friend of his. All the landlords round here go drinking and shooting up at manor. They all have dealings, as they say. They’ll have money invested together. Bubbling around in the same pot.’

‘Where’s pot?’

‘I don’t know, John. Don’t ask me. I don’t even have a bank account any more and when I did it’s not like I had cause to care much for interest rates and investments. But they all have fingers in the same pies. All landlords round here. All led by Price. They’ve all got investments in same businesses and give each other tips. Trading tips. Farming tips. Landlording tips. That sort of thing, I don’t know. But Price is top dog. Always that. So if he takes against someone, they’re out. And it means that — one way or another — Price owns county.’

‘A lot of his business is legal then?’

‘Most of it. Ninety per cent of what he does is above board. It’s just you see other ten per cent because that’s world you’re in, John.’ Peter let out a half-laugh. ‘Why? You thinking of following some kind of paper trail? Uncovering evidence? Going to police?’

Daddy looked at his huge, knotted hands. ‘No. No, you know I could never do owt like that.’ He almost blushed. ‘And you know I could never involve police, neither. As you say, what’s ten per cent of Price’s world is all of mine, as well you know. Nothing I have is based in any law.’ He looked over at Cathy and me, watching him gently. ‘Not land. Not cash under my bed. Not my profession. Not even them.’ He nodded at us. ‘Not even my children. I don’t know if any law or piece of paper could connect them to me. But they’re mine through and through, that’s plain to see.’ He looked back towards Peter and drained his glass. ‘And I woundt involve police anyway. They belong to Price around here too. Big ones anyway. Police chiefs and councillors that I’ve seen driving up to manor.’

Peter refilled Daddy’s glass and continued to speak. ‘I know of two families he’s put out on their arses in last year because they coundt meet rent increase. But don’t take my word for it. You’ll need to speak to others if you want to know more. Ewart Royce and his wife, Martha. Ewart’s the cleverest man for miles around and he still cares about area. He were a union man, back when the pit were still open. And he were a decent one. He’s well connected among the people who aren’t connected to Price. Ex-miners, sons of ex-miners, tenants, labourers and unemployed. He knows about the law too, though I know you don’t want that. But he’s part of your world too. He likes a bet. He likes a horse-race. He likes to watch a good fight and he trades with travellers and gypsies as well as working men. You want to know how to keep your house? You should talk to Ewart Royce.’

We stayed up for hours. Daddy and Peter drank all through the night and I fell asleep in the beanbag I had been sitting in with my head propped against a cushion that was in turn squashed between the radiator and a cabinet. I woke thirsty and when the first light came up on the horizon I went to the sink to fill my empty glass with water. I drained it and filled it for a second time to take back with me to my makeshift cot.

Peter was asleep in his bed and Daddy was there too, under a thin blanket, sprawled with his head at Peter’s feet. Cathy had made herself as comfortable as she could on the floor with cushions, a duvet and her head resting awkwardly on the other beanbag. I saw an empty glass by her left hand. I picked it up, rinsed it under the tap and filled it with water for when she woke up, parched like I had been, and needed a drink. She stirred when I placed the full glass on the floor but not enough to wake. I returned to my place by the radiator, shut my eyes and slept intermittently for the next two or three hours.

Daddy, Peter and Cathy woke only when the sun was so high in the sky it could not be ignored. It was nearly 10 o’clock and it was bright. Sharp rays had nudged the hems of the thin poly-mix curtains to the sides and filled the room with a precise light.

Daddy rolled to his side, woke, and was up. He headed straight to the bathroom. I heard the taps running and the sink filling with water and a few minutes later the sound of that cold water being displaced by his head as he plunged it beneath the surface. The door opened with his elbow against it, pushing. He had taken off his shirt and had washed his body too. The black hair on his chest was wet and soapy where he had not rinsed himself properly. He was rubbing his face dry with a tea towel but water dripped from his hair and beard onto his shoulders and onto the carpeted floor below. He roughly shook out his shirt and put it back on, fastening the buttons from bottom to top.

Peter stirred. He was slower to wake than Daddy. Cathy was lying on her back. Her position was the same as it had been when she slept but her eyes were now wide. She watched Daddy as he buttoned his shirt. I had been sitting up on my beanbag for some time, sipping water, unable to sleep but unsure of how to be awake.

We left the house soon after. A girl, a boy, two men. Hungover, half-asleep. We stopped for a quick breakfast at a bakery on the High Street. In the mornings it served bacon, sausage and egg sandwiches. I had bacon then asked Daddy if I could have an iced bun like a shy child with a sweet tooth. He paid 50p for three. For the road, he said.

The Royces lived in a nicer part of the village where the houses were well-spaced and the gardens greener. There were cars here, parked in driveways, washed and polished. The privet hedges were trimmed regularly and the well-mown front lawns that sat to the sides of the gravel drives were surrounded by planters, ready for the spring shoots. Net curtains obscured every window and most were so clean and clear it was as if the glass was hardly there.

The Royces lived in a house with double-glazed windows. They drove a dark blue Volvo. There was an undersized fountain in their front garden that was half-hidden by an overgrown buddleia. The water burbled from within a shard of limestone.

Cathy, Daddy and I waited by the gate while Peter offered himself to the front door. It was only fair to give them warning, Daddy had said. Like with Peter.

The wheels of Peter’s chair negotiated the gravel easily and he shifted himself with his strong arms onto the step to reach the bell. A woman came to the door first and looked down at Peter while he spoke to her in a voice I could not make out. She was smaller than me. Possibly 5′4″. Her hair still had some dark blonde but it might have been dyed. This made her look younger than fifty but something else told me she was older. It was not that her face looked old. It was not that her neck looked old, though it is the neck which tells the greater truths. She did not have wrinkles or rivets that I could see from my place by the gate and her skin neither drooped nor darkened in places where brown spots of age might come to appear. If these were there she had hidden them well. It was the way she held her body that told me she was in her late sixties. It was the way she planted her feet on the floor and the way she sat her hips and the way she held her shoulders. The woman wore baby pink tapered trousers that were fastened over a plump waist. She positioned a jumper fashioned in sweatshirt fabric covered with printed, photo-realistic flowers at the waistband. Cream, fluffy half-slippers covered her little feet. Gold rings adorned her hands and there was gold too at her ears and at her neck. She wore large, plastic, purple, oval glasses that covered her face from her cheeks to her eyebrows.

A man approached. He lifted his right arm up behind the woman to lean on the door frame. He wore olive-green trousers that were so dark they were almost brown and with a sharp crease down the front of each leg. He wore a white shirt under a maroon V-neck jumper but no tie. He spoke to Peter and listened to his wife then looked over at Daddy and then at me and at Cathy. He beckoned us inside.

The vestibule was cramped as we all gathered in it to take off our shoes and our jackets and to place them in the cupboard or hang them on the coat stand. The carpet was soft with a pink and gold baroque pattern like the pattern on the carpet in Granny Morley’s entrance hall years ago and miles away. The walls were cluttered with pictures in varnished wooden frames. Most were photographs of children in school uniforms against a cloudy lilac backdrop. The children appeared to have been grouped in sets of siblings, either two or three together. The same children had been photographed at different ages, their hair lengthened and shortened. At some point, each had been photographed with missing front teeth. There were too many children (and all given equal precedence) for these to belong to the Royces. They were nephews and nieces, godchildren, the children of friends and friendly neighbours.

Peter made the introductions briefly when we were in the vestibule but he had given a fuller account of whom we were while we had waited by the gate.

Martha invited us to come through to the lounge. She was primarily speaking to Cathy and me. Ewart was already leading Daddy through.

Martha asked us if we wanted tea or coffee. I asked for coffee. Martha left the hallway and bustled into the kitchen. I heard the kettle being lifted from its stand and filled with water. Cathy made for the sitting room and took one of a couple of chairs by a table in the corner. Daddy and Ewart sat on the large, satin armchairs that took pride of place in the room. Peter wheeled his chair around and back into a position between the two other men, to the side of the fireplace. There was an electric fire on the hearth that had not yet been lit that morning.

Martha returned from the kitchen with a tray of mugs, a bowl of sugar and a milk bottle. The liquid was hot and bitter and I poured in as much milk as the vessel would take and stirred it with three teaspoons of granulated sugar. It went down easily that way and the cup was soon half empty. I could drink coffee and tea when it was still piping hot unlike Cathy who always had to wait for the liquid to cool. It was the only thing I could best her at and so of course I turned it into a competition and made a show of it when I could. Once, years ago when we still lived with Granny Morley by the coast, she had become so angry at my skill that she had swallowed the whole cupful in great, scolding gulps, almost as soon as the water was out of the kettle. She had burnt her mouth and her tongue and even her throat and the blisters had lasted for over a week. She had done it to show me she could, but had soon learnt her lesson. Even I could not down hot drinks that quickly.

It was the same with the cold. I could bite hard into scooped ice-cream and I would bare my teeth to do it to show my sister that I could. I could swallow ice-cubes whole. In the winter I would take handfuls of snow and stuff it into my mouth or rub it onto my face or body in front of her. She would pour ice and snow down the back of my jacket, right under my jumper and shirt, and I would stand motionless like it had not affected me at all, like I could not even feel it. It would drive her mad. She would shiver even from the touch of the snow against her gloved hand as she picked it up to do the deed. She would shiver from even that and there I stood, still and smiling, like I was having my morning shower. It made her mad.

‘He’s a slimy toad,’ said Martha as she came back into the room with her own cup of tea and took a seat on the edge of a footstool. ‘He always has been, and I’ve known him for a while. Not well, mind — I’d be surprised if he even knew our names — but I’ve known him from a distance. Everyone around here has done, or those of us who’ve been around a while and still have our memories. As a young man he were always sloping around where he wandt wanted. He were a little thing, then. He’d suddenly turn up on his better-than-yours bike and start causing mischief. He’d make sure he’d get his own way and if he dindt that’s when the threats would start. His father had quite a force of labourers then, before everything was just one man and a tractor, and even then if any of these men wanted to keep their jobs — casual work it was — they’d better do what young Price told them. Farm labourers, day labourers, seasonal workers dindt have unions. Not like them lot in pit villages who went down mines. Like my Ewart. Farm workers had to do what they were told and they did. And I reckon there were some pride in it. Doing young Price’s bidding and beating up a couple of miners’ sons. There were a bit of rivalry there, you know.’

Daddy listened to what Martha told him. He made no movement nor signal of recognition.

‘Well, that were when he were a lad. He spent most of his time away at boarding school, of course, being from family he’s from. But in summer months, during long holidays, he’d be back round here trying to pick fights with lads. He never had much time for us girls, mind. Not to chat to, anyway. I suppose most teenage boys are like that but him even more so. Sometimes he’d have friends from school come to stay. Never one or two, always a whole gang of them together, when his father was down in London or away elsewhere. They’d have manor to themselves. They were interested in girls then, when they were all together. And some of them were very charming, of course. Real posh boys, well-dressed, immaculately groomed, taught how to speak politely up at that school. And I knew of girls — common, ordinary girls from round here — that went up to manor with them. For a chat and some dinner, like. Well I heard rumours of what had gone on and after a while I stopped listening. Wandt the type of thing I liked to hear about. But I caught enough to know kind of boys they were. And boys like that don’t grow into decent men. Boys who get girls drunk and share them around like a cut of meat.’

‘Safer that way for some boys,’ said Ewart. ‘They can look searchingly into each others’ eyes rather than into terrified faces of girls they’re holding.’

Ewart placed his tea on the floor by his chair. Martha picked it up and placed a thin cork coaster beneath it.

‘So he’s been making more mischief, has he?’ said Ewart.

‘That’s right,’ said Peter. ‘John here would like to take man down.’

Ewart looked my Daddy up and down, from the bottom of his polished work boots to the top of his furrowed forehead.

‘Woundt we all,’ he replied. ‘But he’s not like you or I. He’s a different class. He could be taken down by one of his own and he probably has been. Or that’s his fear. Ever wondered why he bothers with all of us? Ever wondered why he doendt just take his money and muck about amongst his own sort? Well I have. It’s because he can’t. He’s afraid. So he interferes with our lives.’

They talked for hours about the Price business. Martha told stories that she had gathered from many years of listening. Stories from across the West Riding and beyond. Stories of evictions, disappearances, suspected corruption in the county council. They spoke of how it was to be resolved. Ewart talked about direct action. He spoke of the way things had been when people who lived together in the same communities also worked together, drank together, voted together and went on strike together.

I stopped listening after a while and I know that Cathy did as well. There was a dog-chewed tennis ball beneath the table and Cathy and I amused ourselves by softly kicking it to one another. The trick was to kick it with enough accuracy that it would hit Cathy’s feet but lightly enough that it would not bounce away. Then Cathy could retrieve it and roll it into the correct position with the soft sole of her foot and kick it back. Only once did I miss and the ball darted across the room and settled by the radiator beneath the window. Cathy got it back subtly though. The conversation had become so serious that only Daddy noticed the error and he shot his daughter a sly wink.

Revenge. They were speaking of revenge. Revenge against Mr Price and against everything that was invested in him. Lost money that really stood for lost time and lost children that really stood for a kind of immortality, just like Granny Morley had always said.

And then there was Ewart Royce, who had tossed and turned against the slow rot of the decades and against the new order that took him further and further from any kind of future for which he had hoped and imagined and prayed and fought.

When we lived by the coast, Granny Morley had taken us to an old war memorial. It was the sort fashioned in the style of an Anglo-Saxon stone cross with men’s names carved onto each of its four sides in order of military rank. Each time we saw the memorial she told us that millions of men had died dancing in the old style. I had not understood. I had puzzled over her meaning for years and only occasionally came to attach her words to some new and small piece of knowledge about human nature and the history of the world. Something about the thrall of performance and the retarded values of nations. Something about men who play out the same scenes again and again and who try to remedy all blunders and remove all errors in plot and description. Men who wrestle backwards through the acts.

I half listened to the plans that were being made now in this lounge between my father and these new friends. I could not help but feel that they too were dancing in the old style and appealing to a kind of morality that had not truly existed since those tall stone crosses were placed in the ground, and even then only in dreams, fables and sagas. Only then in the morality of verse.

Chapter Eleven

Spring came in earnest with clouds of pollen and dancing swifts. The little birds, back here to nest after a flight of a million miles, were buffeted by the wind, which blew hot then cold and clipped unripened catkins off the ash. The swifts were too light to charge at the gusts like gulls or crows, and through them I saw wind as sea. Thick, pillowy waves that rolled at earthen, wooded shores and threw tiny creatures at jutting rocks. The swifts surfed and dived and cut through the invisible mass, which to them must have roared and wailed as loudly as any ocean on earth, only to catch the air again on the updraft and rise to the crest. They were experts. They knew how it was done. And they brought the true Spring. Not the Spring that sent timid green shoots through compacted frost-bitten soil but the Spring that came with a rush of colour, a blanket of light, unfurling insects and absent, missed, prodigal birds on this prevailing sou’westerly.

When the heat was up, traveller lads from the caravan site down the way took off their tops and rode their 125cc dirt bikes round the lanes bare-chested. They bezzed up and down with boxes of ferrets clipped to the backs of their bikes and they looked for fields or verges with good networks of warrens. They popped the ferrets down the holes and out they would come again with wriggling rabbits for the lads’ suppers.

Cathy liked to watch them. She desired them. She itched to join in but we did not dare to ask. Instead we hid in ditches or behind hedges and scouted them. That became our game. We stalked the lads like they were our prey. We watched them wrestle with the ferrets then with the rabbits. None were as expert as Daddy with handling animals nor at dispatching them quickly and cleanly at the last. There was more blood than there should have been and more kicking and squealing. One of the lads was a big boy with thick ginger hair and a torso that freckled rather than tanned. He got bitten by one of the bunnies and how he howled. He had to let the rabbit go and the poor thing jumped and ducked left then right then back into its hole and out of sight. Blood splashed from its hind legs as it went and I knew it would not last long. It was a shame. It would have done better to have been got by Daddy and to have ended up in one of my pies, I thought, than to be half caught by a lad who has only half learnt how to catch you and then bleed to death slowly over the next few days or else lead a fox right to your warren with the scent of your blood and be devoured along with all your family.

Still, we watched these lads all the same. We watched the habit of their movement and the manner in which they held their bodies and the way they sat on their bikes, slouching easily while their bowed arms stretched to the handlebars and revved the bikes’ engines.

We saw other people so rarely we were fascinated by the news that did happen past, and though I loved watching birds and beetles, watching human beings was the thing I loved the best.

After catching the rabbits, the traveller lads got on their motorbikes and kicked back against the dirt then sped along the next lane and the next to find more of what they were after. We could follow the noise for a while but unless they stopped again nearby we could not follow to stalk them any longer and they were lost to us. We waited until the next time they came hunting or the next time they raced their bikes. In the meantime, there were always rabbits to watch.

There was a night I could not sleep even though I had tired myself out working with Daddy in the copse all day. My back ached from swinging a large axe up and around and down onto the logs that Daddy had felled. My forearms ached from wrapping my slender hands around those logs and placing them onto the chopping block, and from thrusting the small hand-axe down onto them with my other hand time after time, to split the wood for burning in our stove. My thighs burnt from squatting and picking up bundles of the stuff though it was too heavy for me, and carrying it to Daddy’s store or up to the house. The ground in the copse was rough and strewn with branches and rocks and leaves that had fallen unevenly and rotted hard over seasons. Uneven earth cut apart by the growth and death of thick roots. My calves ached from a day of finding purchase on this unsteady ground, and the skin on my face was sore from the salty sweat that had trickled down from my hairline slowly for the last several hours.

My eyes, however, were as fresh as they had been that morning, and were filled with the dappled light that had shone through the quivering leaves all day, and with the colours of the wood and the image of my father stooping and rising as he felled branches for us to collect. Because my eyes were so bright and alive, my thoughts were too. Each time I reckoned I was falling off into sleep a colourful memory of the day returned and revived me. I skipped between waking and sleeping for the best part of two hours then peeled back the covers of my bed and pulled myself upright. I tucked my feet into my slippers and walked through the two doors to the kitchen.

There I found my sister stood at the window with her right hand raised in front of her face. She held back the curtain so as to look out into the night. The sky was dark but for a thin moon waxing and but for Venus forming a concentration of the sun’s rays above the horizon. She loomed larger than I had ever seen her.

A jug of home-made cider sat on the kitchen counter. Cathy had drunk perhaps half.

‘You’re up too, Danny.’ She only called me Danny sometimes. She had heard me step over the threshold and stop to look past her at the night sky.

I told her that I had been unable to sleep and that I guessed she was unable to sleep as well. I suggested that the both of us might just be too awake because of the day of working and because our bodies were tired but our thoughts awake.

‘I think I were too angry to sleep,’ she said.

Her statement shocked me. I asked her why she was angry.

‘I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?’

I told her that I was not. I told her that I was hardly ever angry and then she told me again that she felt angry all the time.

She told me that sometimes she felt like she was breaking apart. She told me that sometimes it was as if she was standing with two feet on the ground but at the very same time part of her was running headlong into a roaring fire.

I stayed up with her for a couple more hours until the jug of cider had gone and we had drunk another one besides.

When she agreed finally to go to bed, I returned to my room and fell asleep so quickly I almost forgot the events of the night. It was as if they had been a dream. A dream of fire. Indeed, in those days I thought that the most prolonged conflict in my life would be the one I faced every night against my dreams. Sometimes I thought I could sleep for ever. Sometimes, pulling myself out of a dream to be awake and alive in the world was like pulling myself out of my own skin and facing the wind and the rain in my own ripped-raw flesh.

Chapter Twelve

‘That bastard who won Lottery.’

‘Who?’

‘That bastard who won Lottery. Euromillions, I think it were. Not main prize, but enough. Already a millionaire and he wins Lottery.’

Cathy and I were in the car park down behind the back of the Working Men’s Club. The tarmac must have been forty years old. Winter frosts had cracked through its crust so many times there were more craters than ridges, and large gnarled clumps of the stuff, broken into rough, lithic formations, had been kicked to the sides of the rectangle like gargoyles in the rubble of a fallen cathedral. In patches, the artificial surface had cracked and crumbled so badly that only black earth remained, scorched by the tar. If the car park had once had white lines to mark its bays they had long since vanished. Chewing gum flecked its surface white and grey.

The morning mist hung around our knees. It would not be a cold day but it was cold now, just after dawn, cold and dim, the sun’s rays caught in clouds that were bobbing on the horizon.

‘Fucking Euromillions.’

This was where men met if they wanted work. There was little to be had around here. The jobs had gone twenty years ago or more. There was just a couple of warehouses where you could get work shifting boxes into vans. At Christmas-time there were more boxes and more vans but still not enough. There were jobs here and there for women: hairdressing jobs, nannying jobs, shop-assistant jobs, cleaning jobs, teaching-assistant jobs if you had an education. But if you were a man and you wanted odd jobs or seasonal farm work this was where you met. A truck came through and took you off to the fields or more usually to a barn nearby where a combine harvester dropped its load on the floor for sorting: sugar beet for sorting, turnips for sorting. And potatoes. Today it was potatoes and the men knew they would be taken up to Sunrise Farm to work for the bastard farmer who had won the Lottery.

‘At least he gives us time off we need to keep signed on,’ said one.

‘Drives us up there if we’re going to miss an appointment.’

‘He fucking has to, though. If he keeps us signed on he doendt have to pay us as much. He just slips us a tenner at end of day like it’s fucking pocket money.’

‘And he’ll go and dob you in if you cause a fuss. He’ll go and tell job centre you’ve been working for him and he’ll rustle up some bits of paper he says he’s been giving you all along. Payslips and legal stuff. Stuff you’ve never seen before in your life but then it’s suddenly there and it’s your own fault for claiming benefits and for not paying tax or summat, all in one go. Happened to Johnno.’

‘Happened to Tony.’

‘Happened to Chris, and all.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Bastard.’

‘Wanker.’

The farmer was a bastard, then. Like most others, they all agreed, but this one particularly because he had won the Lottery when he was already a millionaire. He was a lucky bastard. Euromillions. Or a scratch card.

Cathy and I were like grey standing-stones at the border of their coven. They mainly ignored us. We stood at the edge of the car park, a little way away from their cluster in the middle but close enough to hear. We had brought a flask of hot coffee. I sipped it out of a white and blue enamel mug while Cathy drank from the lid.

Potato-sifting at Sunrise Farm. That was the job today and the van would be here soon to pick us up. Give us a lift. Drop us off. Pick us up again when the day was done. Drop us back here.

Cathy was nervous. I could tell from the way she gripped the flask lid. I could tell from the way her thin and translucent eyelids blinked against the cool air. Her eyes were sensitive like her skin and could not stand the cold. They were especially sensitive when she was scared. When something worried her she kept them wide against it, whatever it was, so as to see it coming at her then to see it off. Today, fear coursed through her like a hare through wheat stubble. I could tell. She bristled.

I was afraid, just the same. Sunrise was farmed by this millionaire lottery-winner and his name was Coxswain. It was the same Coxswain that Daddy had seen to for Peter’s money. The money he had been owed. It was Coxswain who Daddy had nearly killed outside the back-room betting shop. Coxswain was one of Price’s friends. It was Price’s land like all the land around here and Coxswain held it, ran the farm, worked the labourers hard for a tenner a day and dobbed them in to the dole office if they complained.

Cathy and I were here to see what was what. Those were the instructions Daddy had given us. It had been Ewart’s suggestion.

We were to look at the farm and chat to some of the workers to find out what we could about Coxswain. If we could discover something about Mr Price, so much the better, though Daddy doubted there would be any chat about him. The men who worked on these farms did not know who owned the land or who managed the managers or what the turnover was like or what proportion of profit got translated into their wages. They sorted the potatoes, got paid and sometimes they went down to the pub or corner-shop and bought a packet of cigarettes.

We had almost finished the flask of coffee when the van arrived. Cathy took my mug away and tossed the dregs aside. She put it into her bag with the flask and our lunchtime sandwiches.

A man with a clipboard and a spongy pewter moustache climbed out of the driver’s seat. The men and Cathy and I walked slowly towards him and huddled around. Hands were in pockets and jackets were zipped as far up as they could be zipped. The man made a note of each name before its owner climbed into the back of the van.

The foreman spotted my sister and me. ‘What’s this?’

Cathy stepped forward, prepared. ‘We’re here to work. Same as everyone else.’

‘How old are you?’

Cathy shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’ she said.

‘I asked, dindt I? How old are you?’

‘Eighteen,’ she lied. ‘And he’s sixteen.’

‘He’s your little boyfriend, is he?’ said the man, obtusely.

‘Brother.’

‘How did you hear about meeting place?’

She shrugged again but the man did not seem too fussed by the rudeness. ‘Same as everyone,’ she said. ‘Someone told us. Someone said go down to WMC of a morning if you want to earn a bit of money. So that’s what we did.’

‘Who’s your dad?’

‘Sam Jones. Do you know him?’

It was a common enough name. I was not sure if it was someone she knew of or if she had pulled it from thin air there and then.

‘Never heard of him. Do you know any of this lot to vouch for you?’ He nodded at the men already sitting in the van and those still standing in the car park.

‘We heard you were short of hands this year so we thought we’d come down and try our luck.’

The foreman stopped to consider. He blinked a couple of times. His eyelashes were as grey and as coarse as his moustache. ‘That’s true enough. We do need some extra. Are you up to it?’

Cathy shrugged.

‘It’s hard work. Bending and lifting all—’

‘Not that hard,’ interrupted Cathy. ‘We’ve sorted potatoes before. And picked them. And carried great big sacks of them. It’s no problem. We worked on a farm near Grimsby where we did potatoes and sugar beets and all that.’

‘Grimsby? What the fuck were you doing over there then and being here now? You a pair of fucking gypos?’

‘Our nan lived over there. We used to live with her. Now we live with our dad.’

‘Your dad, Sam Jones?’

‘Aye.’

He did not believe us but he let us on the bus all the same.

The last of the men in the car park were marshalled onto the van and they found their places among those that were already inside. The seats were coated in a sticky fabric that was pretending to be leather. There were gashes in some and seat-padding was spilling out. Some gashes had been made deliberately. They had been cleanly slashed by a bored and frustrated labourer who had sunk the blade of his penknife into the soft cushion rather than into the taut muscles of his own thigh. Most of the holes were from wear.

The foreman had left the engine running and the radiator on. It was gorgeously warm. The windows had steamed up so the cold world outside looked like it was shrouded in a close fog. I made my mark with my finger. I traced a single line of about six inches across at the height of my eyes like the thin slit in a knight’s helmet. I looked out through my visor. My nose pressed on the glass made a further mark in the damp glaze.

The van was not half full and Cathy and I were the only two people sitting next to one another. All of the men had chosen a pair of seats for themselves so they could spread themselves out with an arm up on the neighbouring headrest or their coat or bag between them and the aisle. They all appeared to know each other quite well but they protected their individual space nevertheless.

A man sat in the row directly in front of us. He was wearing a black beanie hat and a bomber jacket that was more British racing green than military green. When the doors were shut and the driver had got going, the man took off his outer clothes. Beneath his hat he had a shaved head and on the back of his neck a tattoo of a word or phrase written in a gothic script so dense I could not make out the letters. Beneath his jacket he wore a white vest. He bore the signs of a thin man who had worked hard to build himself up. His muscles rested uneasily on his bones.

As he arranged himself in his seat he noticed me looking. He turned and used the window as his back-rest so that he could face us and talk.

‘Not seen you two before.’

‘Needed money,’ said Cathy.

‘Aye, don’t we all.’

He had brought an apple with him and began shining it on his trouser leg like a cricket ball. He then raised it to his mouth and took a bite, cleaving a quarter of the apple’s flesh with a loud crack. He chewed what he had bitten off and swallowed the mouthful before turning back to us.

‘You must have got desperate if you’ve come up to work with us lot,’ he pointed out.

‘Suppose so,’ said my sister.

‘Not seen either of you before, is all, and it’s shit work, this.’

‘Is it?’ said Cathy. ‘How shit?’

‘Shit.’ He lowered his voice, ‘And bosses are right bastards. Us lot only do this work because we’ve got no other choice.’

‘How come?’

‘Most of us are just out of prison, or else our working record is so bad we can’t get owt official. Dole-wallers, the lot of us. Only bosses encourage it. They drive us up to our probation office or job centre to get our money, and they know that way they can pay us less.’

‘How much?’

‘Twenty quid for a ten hour day. Cash in hand, mind. The days are getting longer, and all. Hardly anyone wants to do it any more — not even Lithuanians — it’s not worth it. It’s just us few who’ll put up with it. We fancy an extra bit of cash on top of our dole-money for a few pints and a packet of cigarettes.’

‘I roll my own.’

‘Do you? Clever girl. You got any for me?’

Cathy took out her tobacco and began rolling a cigarette for the man. When she had finished she passed the ivory stick between the headrests of the seats in front and he placed it behind his right ear. ‘Can’t smoke it now. Will save it for later.’

‘Who is boss?’ asked Cathy.

‘Coxswain today. He’s one of worst, but none are good.’

‘Who else do you work for?’

‘All sorts. All the landowners round here. Sorting potatoes and that, and doing odd jobs. There’s casual work in slaughterhouses too. Jim Corvine’s a boss. Dave Jeffreys. Price.’

‘Price?’

‘Aye, Price. He’s one who fucking terrifies me, but we don’t see him much in person. Too important, that one.’

‘Aye but when you do see him, what’s he like?’

The man shrugged. ‘Like I say, I’ve not had much contact with him. None of us have. Only I know not to mess with him. One of lads a couple of years back, maybe it’s five years now, got his leg badly mangled in some machinery up at Price’s farm. Don’t know what work he was doing for him but it was after dark and place wandt lit properly. Well Johnno — that’s name of lad — he got talking to some men down pub and next thing I knew he were trying to get some money out of Price. Some compensation for his injuries.’

‘Did he succeed?’

‘Did he fuck. He got half his family evicted from homes. Price owned lot. Not only was he evicted but also his poor little mum, his sister with her new baby who had a flat up in Donnie, and even a fucking cousin or summat, who lived in a house of Price’s right on other side of county. All of them turfed out as quick as you like. You don’t fuck with Price, no you do not. Oh yes, there’s many of us who’d like to take that man down a peg or two but there’s few who’d dare.’

‘Would anyone dare?’

The man shrugged and took another, similar sized, bite from his apple. The edges were turning golden brown.

‘Someone who’s got nowt to lose, I suppose.’

Cathy looked at me. I felt her thigh move closer to mine and we began, unconsciously, to breath in unison, knitting ourselves together in a common cause.

The van was drawing in to the farmyard. There were some shallow outhouses made from red bricks and corrugated iron and a block of stables in the distance. There were two large barns, one of which had been painted blue and the other of which had been painted white but so long ago that the colour was flecked and faded and both barns were now for the most part the colour of metal in rain. The tall doors of the barn had been cast wide open to give the men light in which to work.

The man’s name was Gary. He told us as we were getting out of the van to begin the day’s labour. We worked close by him for the next ten hours, maybe more. We stopped for a short while for cups of tea and Cathy and I snacked on the lunch we had brought. Gary introduced us to some of the other men and he told them what we had been whispering to him while we worked. He told them that we had a daddy who thought he could bring down Mr Price or at least stand up to him. Some laughed openly and others turned away to conceal their laughter. But not all of them. Some looked me and Cathy up and down as if trying to gauge the measure of our father by sizing up his offspring. If that is what they were doing they were likely to be surprised. I was still a little lad and though Cathy had that great and alarming strength about her, she was still just a girl in their eyes. Gary, at least, seemed convinced by us. He had spoken directly to my sister after all and Cathy was nothing if not compelling. Without fail, her eyes made contact with whomever she was speaking to. She stared, blinking only occasionally, and so quickly and faintly that it could almost be missed. She did not laugh nervously where others might. She committed to her story where others were prone to waiver, and she always believed everything she said — a kind of honesty to which few could admit. There was some hope in her words, I suppose, and Gary was pinned. Through him others were convinced too and Cathy spotted a good moment to invite them up to our house as Daddy had instructed us. They were to come and we would light a bonfire, drink beer and cider, and cook meat on the open flames. A few said they would come there and then and Gary said that he would bring more. Cathy urged him to remain quiet about our business. He assured us he would be canny and I believed him. That evening we passed their names to Ewart.

Chapter Thirteen

Caring for a wood means huge stacks of trimming get piled up around the place. In order to let new growth fight through, overhanging branches, crumbled bark and fallen trees must be cleared. Weeds in the undergrowth must be managed. The right shoots must be let through and the wrong ones discouraged. Hazel needs to be hacked back to the stem so that it sprouts forth again severally next season like the heads of Hydra.

The multiple, thin trunks that come from hazel are useful for building fences and baskets and they form the wattle of wattle and daub walls. Daddy, with our help, had been rebuilding and extending the chicken coop with wattle and daub and something like a thatched roof, though Daddy admitted a proper thatcher would be loath to give his approximation that name.

The new chicken coop was attached to our house. Its back wall was what had been the outside of our kitchen wall, by the stove. This meant the hens could enjoy the warmth that seeped through the wood and stones, such that it did. Daddy said that most people kept their chickens at the bottom of the garden far from the human house so that the human family need not be bothered by the clucking and scratching of the birds. Daddy said this was unkind and that he would rather live with the racket than think of the creatures left needlessly cold when there was a clear and direct remedy. So we built their house tucked up close against ours. Its wattle walls were curved and crinkled like a callous on the smooth, straight lines Daddy had constructed for our home the previous year. A grotesquely large wasps’ nest glued to the side of a silver birch.

With all that work for the chickens and all the continuing work to restrain and shape the copse, the piles of woodland debris grew and grew. We burnt much of it in our stove but every now and then we set a load ablaze in an outdoor bonfire. We picked clear evenings for these, even if the cold was biting, and we stood about and warmed ourselves against the baying flames and roasted cuts of meat or vegetables or else we toasted bread as we had when we first arrived and lived out of the two vans.

Now, we had much wood to burn and this time decided to bring others along to our bonfire. We invited Andrew the butcher and Peter and Ewart and Martha, and Gary and the other labourers that Cathy and I had made contact with. Ewart suggested an event to get to know people properly, to foment support or sound out the people and the possibilities that lay in our community. Martha said that we had been alone for too long.

Maybe so. The prospect of so many faces coming up the hill to see us felt strange, like we were to be stripped naked and paraded.

This said, there was excitement as well as fear. I busied myself with arrangements for the food we would serve. I calculated the amount we would need and saw that we got it in the days before. I picked spring vegetables from the patch and chopped them into chunks before setting them on skewers to char over the fire. I picked out some large potatoes from our store. The new potatoes in the ground were too little to disturb so I went to these hefty lates that we had kept dark in hessian sacks from last autumn. The store was running low but the ones I chose would be big enough and I wrapped them in tin foil so we could place them on the embers of the fire. That way they get all smoky as they cook and the skin becomes crisp while the white flesh on the inside melts like hot dollops of cream, not far in texture from the butter we would drizzle over the tops. Daddy sorted most of the meat but I ground offcuts and entrails and made little patties with barley and spice.

We invited Vivien too.

I met with her almost every day. Sometimes she would leave me with reading or work to finish in silence. On other occasions she would stay with me and chat. I cherished these conversations and when I could think of a good one I would ask her a question about what I was reading in the hope that her answer would be long and detailed and that it would lead us to other topics, further questions, new answers.

The thought that she would be coming up to our home excited me. I liked the idea of seeing her in a new place and showing her around the spaces I inhabited with Cathy and Daddy. I wanted to show her the trees in our copse and the chickens and my vegetable patch and the house itself. I wanted the chance to tell her things she might not know. This was my land and I could show it to her. If there was time I wanted to take her up to the railway tracks. There would certainly be trains passing while our guests were with us but I wanted to take Vivien, especially, up for a closer look.

The same old trains still ruffled on past, despite it all. I wondered what the train driver thought, and what the passengers thought, when they looked out the windows as dusk settled and saw our copse, and the crest, and the trail of thin black smoke coming from behind it.

It was set to be a mighty blaze. Daddy had rooted out all the dead wood he could find: dead brambles from the hedgerows, fallen branches from an oak that were obstructing a bridleway. A beech had been struck by lightning in a midsummer storm the year before. Its dead wood had hung limply ever since, festering in the formation in which it had once grown. Daddy pulled the worst of it down and carried it back to ours. In the days before, as I had been making my preparations, he had been breaking up all this wood and vegetation he had collected and going about the process of drying it as best he could. Under bits of it he lit little fires then packed the wet wood on top, as if he were making charcoal.

On the afternoon before the evening Cathy and I helped him move it all to the allotted location. Daddy insisted that we move it for the final time rather than burn it where it stood, in case any little animals had made their homes there. Sure enough, Daddy picked up a big old log and a little hedgehog blinked in amazement against the daylight before rolling itself up into a tight ball and presenting its bristles. Daddy picked up the creature carefully in his massive leathery hands and carried it to safety.

When we lit the construction it was clear there was still a good deal of water amongst the branches, twigs, leaves and logs. Steam came off it in sweeping flurries and it fizzed and popped like a boiling kettle. But the fire took hold and, with attention, soon the flames sent up wreaths of smoke rather than hot steam. The afternoon wind was busy and changeable, swirling one way and then another. This was good for the fire but bad for us. Cathy and I could not work out where to stand and on more than one occasion we ran back from the fire, having been sent into retreat by the billowing black smoke.

By the time the first of our guests arrived, the dancing amber flames reached deep into the dusk. Ewart and Martha Royce came up with a basket of teacakes for toasting and soon afterwards Gary and ten of the other men arrived, to be shortly followed by a dozen more who had also been given the address. A few of the men looked over at Cathy but with Daddy by her side nobody would ever give her any bother. Many had brought girlfriends or wives and a few had brought little babies and kids. Andrew came up from the village and so too did Peter and other people from the villages around whom Daddy had helped out or who had just heard what was going on. Most people brought drinks and some food to cook on the flames, so even though the food I had prepared soon ran low there was more. Nobody went hungry.

As the evening progressed, Ewart Royce gathered men and women close to him, one or two at a time, and spoke at length and directly to each one. He spoke about their livelihoods and their homes. He asked about the work they did and how they were payed. Who owned the house in which they lived. To whom did they pay rent. How much was that rent. Mostly, the men and women answered. When it came to relating the sins of their employers and landlords, most had no compunction. Who could blame them?

A woman in a fleece and jersey tracksuit came forward. Her long, dirty-blonde hair was held in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. She gripped a lit cigarette between the ring and middle fingers of her left hand and told Ewart about the man who owned her bungalow. ‘At least when I paid rent to council, I felt I could get things fixed. It were a slow process, always, but someone would come eventually and see to cooker, or whatever. I knew who to go to. I knew there were some kind of, what’s word, process, no matter how tricky. I gave my money to council and I kept place nicely and in return I got a decent place to live. Now it’s a private landlord and he doendt give two stuffs. I don’t have a fridge any more. The wires went last year and it handt been cold since. It’s just another cupboard. That’s how I use it, like a cupboard.’ Some others laughed. The woman encouraged it, laughing too with a warm guttural giggle. ‘Call me naive, but it were only really then I realised it were just land. It were as you were saying to me before, Ewart. The landlord wandt there to provide a service, as he saw it, or to offer owt in return for money I paid him. I were paying him money for land. For right to live on land. This might seem obvious to all of you, but it wandt to me, not when council was my landlord. Then I thought money was for upkeep of house. But, let me tell you, house could come down tomorrow and Jim Corvine would still come for that cash. It’s land. Only land. I’m paying to live on a piece of land that we, all of us, used to own together. And I’m working as hard as I ruddy can to get enough money to pay for that land that we, all of us, used to own together. And I can’t see reason for any of it, any more.’

There were murmurings of accord.

Later, I saw Ewart standing twenty metres or so from the fire by a table that carried the salads.

‘You got everything you need, Ewart?’

‘Oh aye. It’s a fine spread. You saw to this, did you?’

I nodded.

Ewart helped himself to a spoonful of coleslaw. He laid it on a floury bap and wrapped up a hunk of just-charred meat.

‘A good turn out, too,’ he noted. ‘You and your sister did well at farm. And Martha’s sister, Julie, did well at Post Office. She got word to those in village that pop in for cash pensions and benefits and like and those that draw cash for rents.’

‘It’s a good crowd,’ I agreed. ‘Do you think much will come of it?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ said Ewart. ‘I don’t know folk round here like I used to. I can’t tell how they feel any more, or how they think. Sometimes I think spirit’s dead and gone, but sometimes I think it’s still there, just resting its eyes. A lot of those here are sons and daughters of men that worked with me up at pit. So many passed away before their time. They drank too much and smoked too much and ate too much of this meat. We all did. But I do see something here of that old world. People are as poor now as they ever were, and as tired. And bringing people together of an evening is easier than keeping them apart. And by that same token, bringing a community back together is easier than setting people and families at odds. It’s just that that’s where all effort’s been this last ten years and more.’

Ewart took a bite of the burger and mayonnaise dribbled down his chin. I passed him a napkin from the table and he wiped his face. I saw that Vivien had been standing with us. She looked at Ewart uncertainly. I was not sure if they knew each other but before I made to introduce them, she spoke.

‘It wasn’t all that wonderful, all the time. Those men who would come together so naturally to support one another would go home drunk and beat their wives.’ Ewart was caught for a moment. Vivien continued, ‘There are dreams, Ewart, and there are memories. And there are memories of dreams.’

Ewart waited for a moment longer, and then, ‘Aye’. The old man nodded and smiled ruefully by way of departure. He walked towards the drinks table, where Martha was busying herself filling plastic cups with cider from a barrel.

‘Do you not think it will work, Vivien?’ I asked.

She simply shrugged.

Chapter Fourteen

I was at Vivien’s house the next day. She sat with me and talked for the best part of the morning but in the afternoon left me alone in front of the spitting fire and climbed the stairs. She had plans to meet a friend in town later that afternoon. She told me she would be staying there in the evening and going to a restaurant in Leeds then the theatre to see a play with this friend and she would stay over with her or him at her or his house. She did not say ‘him’ or ‘her’ at any point, though I listened hard for those words, and she did not mention her or his name, though I listened hard for that too. I asked questions that would ordinarily force use of a name or a ‘him’ or a ‘her’. She answered the questions politely, brusquely, but used none of those words.

I heard her moving around in the room above. The floorboards creaked and the heavy oak wardrobe door clicked open and shut. The rap of wire coat-hangers on a steel hanging rail carried clearly. Glass perfume bottles jangled against their neighbours as Vivien nudged the dressing table and pulled drawers from their tressels.

I heard because I listened closely.

I had been upstairs in Vivien’s house only once. The downstairs bathroom had been in repair and there had been wet paint on the walls.

My first thought, though I was ashamed to think it, was that upstairs was not quite as tidy as downstairs. Certainly it was not pristine. There were piles of books on chairs on the landing and an overflowing wastepaper basket. The tightly spun spider plants on the windowsill were tarnished at the tips and the soil in their pots was bone dry. The windows required a damp, soaped cloth on both sides. Greasy fingerprints marked the light switches and door handles.

The vinyl bathroom floor had been covered with a thick, browning rug, flecked with rose-scented talcum powder. I found a tub of this on the shelves behind the toilet. I knew the substance from our years with Granny Morley, when she would lift Cathy and I out of the bath, rub us almost dry with a towel, rub that soft talc like icing sugar onto our skin then help our little legs and arms step and slip into jersey pyjamas.

Above Vivien’s bathroom sink was a glass shelf beneath a mirror which held a couple of toothbrushes lying on their sides and a half-squeezed tube of toothpaste, its blue-specked gel oozing.

I had left the bathroom and meant to go straight back downstairs. Vivien had been in the kitchen pouring loose tea into a teapot. The kettle had been in full boil and masked any sounds she made down there or any sounds I made up here.

But the door to her bedroom had been ajar and, in all honesty, I could not help it. I was able to slip through the crack without pushing it any wider.

There was a pile of clothes on a chair in the corner and more on the bed, clean and dirty, and the wardrobe stood open.

First I had gone to the wardrobe and run my fingers down the arm of a silk blouse of dull ivory with fine violet embroidered petals and picked at its chipped mother-of-pearl buttons. Then I had taken a cotton dress on its hanger from the wardrobe and held it up. It was narrow at the waist and wider where the material hugged Vivien’s breasts and hips. When she wore dresses or buttoned-up blouses they often struggled to stretch over her breasts. And when she wore skirts they were tighter over her hips and sometimes quite baggy at her slim abdomen.

I was skinny all over. My sitting bones could be seen and felt through my slender, pale buttocks, and I was conscious of it. My chest was thin too. My muscles were underdeveloped and my rib-rack stretched my skin almost translucent, and the edges of the bones were outlined in shadows when light came at them from above.

I had moved to the unsorted laundry on the bed.

You have to appreciate that I never thought of myself as a man. I did not even think of myself as a boy. Of course, if you had asked me I would certainly have replied that that was what I was. It is not as if I had ever actively rejected that designation. I just never thought about it. I had no reason to think about it. I lived with my sister and my father and they were my whole world. I did not think of Cathy as a girl nor as a woman, I thought of her as Cathy. I did not think of Daddy as a man, though I knew that he was. I thought about him, likewise, as Daddy.

In the months I lived with Daddy and Cathy in the copse I let my hair grow long. It was long through inattention. I did not think to cut it. I did not think to ask Cathy or Daddy to cut it for me. They did not prompt me. So it grew long. The colour of beech bark. And matted, for want of a comb. And in places the hair was lank with oil for, though I washed it, I could not wash it regularly. My nails were long too. I do not remember ever using nail scissors. I do not know if we had them in the house. When they became too much I picked and bit at them, trimming them roughly in that way. But with the exception of this occasional, inattentive grooming, I allowed the nails to grow. Not absurdly long, but slightly longer than, I discovered later, was appropriate for a boy. Or for a man. I did not know then that it was girls not boys who grew their hair and their nails long. I did not think about it. Nor did I realise that the men and boys who lived nearby would never wear a T-shirt that did not reach their jeans, as I did. Partly, again, this was through inattention. I had grown taller without noticing but still wore the same T-shirts. But partly, I have to admit, I wore my clothes in this manner because I had seen my mother wearing her clothes in this manner. I wore those little T-shirts and those too-tight jeans and I left my midriff bare because I had seen my mother do this. And nobody corrected me. Or nobody noticed. Or it did not matter. Or I do not know what.

So when I picked up some of Vivien’s underwear that time and I went upstairs to use the bathroom, and I held it up and looked at the lace and examined the pale residue at the gusset, it was not like it would have been were I a grown man walking into a woman’s bedroom uninvited and doing those things. I assure you, it was not the same. I was not a threat. How could I have been?

I did not know about etiquette, nor about the correct and proper ways in which men and women should conduct themselves. Nor did I have any understanding that there were parts of the body that held a different worth, a different kind of value or category. And that those body parts were guarded with different kinds of clothing, and that some of the value or meaning of those body parts rubbed off on their prescribed clothes.

In short, I did not know what it was that I was doing.

And besides, my interest was not the same interest as the interests of real men.

So my actions cannot be categorised in the same way.

I heard Vivien upstairs again. She left her bedroom and went to the bathroom. She had put on the light. I could hear the breezy, oscillating hum of the extractor fan.

I got up out of my armchair and went over to the fireplace. I took the iron poker from its stand. Its handle had been too close to the flames and was hot to touch. I could only just hold it. I stabbed it into the heart of the glowing, fizzing coals. I held it there. I held it there for too long. The temperature of the iron was drawn from almost bearable to just unbearable and my grip instinctively loosed. The poker fell to the hearth and rang with a hollow harmony.

Vivien heard. ‘Is everything all right down there?’ she called.

I did not respond. Presumably, despite my silence, she was not concerned enough to repeat her enquiry nor to come down.

I thought about what I would need to do to get her to come rushing down. I covered my hand, still somewhat tender, with the sleeve of my pullover and reached down to grab the poker once again. I hesitated. It would be too much to use the poker to knock the coals onto the carpet. I was banking on the rug catching fire, or at least some strong charring, but knocking coals off the grate might do more damage than I could predict or control. All of Vivien’s furniture, paintings, books, could be incinerated. Then she would be forced to run down the stairs in her dressing gown or whatever.

I put the poker back in its stand and went into the kitchen. Vivien kept her best china plates on display on the upper shelves of an oak Welsh dresser. She had told me the maker once, and the age of the plates, and she had told me that they had been a wedding present to her great grandparents from a distant aunt.

They could all be ripped from their positions with one sweep of my arm. They would shatter on the counter surface of the lower cabinet, else cascade to the slate tiles and shatter there. The delicate, hand-limned indigo flowers and maroon leaves in disarticulated pieces on the floor. Vivien would hear the commotion from upstairs and come rushing down.

It would be thrilling, to be sure. But ultimately I knew that I would not be able to stand the censure. She would run down the stairs and see me standing among the shards of her family heirloom. My heartbeat would quicken, I am certain that it would. There would be a terrific excitement in it. But then the excitement would curdle. I would see her incredulity, her despair, her ire, and my guilt would first creep then rush to meet my elation, deep in the pit of my guts.

I took the kettle off its stand, filled it with water then placed it back and flicked the switch. At first the filament simply hummed but soon the water stirred. The gurgle of the water and the roar of the shooting steam were enough to mask the sound of my footsteps. I gently climbed the staircase.

Vivien’s bedroom was next to the bathroom and the door was half open. She stood in a bra and slip. The bra was black with lace trim. The slip was cream and silky. The thick tan waistband of her flesh-coloured tights was visible above the slip and it pinched her tummy. The place just below the thinnest part of her waist, where she would have kept her baby had she been pregnant, bulged against the cream satin. She had combed her hair and there was a slight, deliberate kink in it. The kink caught the incandescent light in her bedroom and turned it radiant gold.

She stood by the mirror and leaned as she applied mascara to her eyelashes.

She had not seen me. She had not heard me. The kettle sang. I backed away, back across the landing and down the stairs.

Half an hour or so later she came down in full dress. She was beautiful.