Elmet

I talk to Bill more than I should. I ramble. I distract him from the road. I talk to him about Cathy and about Daddy, about our house on the hill, about the woods and trees, about the food we ate and the cider we drank. I talk to him about the friends we made and the animals we kept. I tell him everything. Everything that happened that night.

I was tired of walking, and Bill was also travelling north. Meet her at the destination, he said to me. Find her at the end of the line.

I jumped up into his cab and we drove into the night.

I am his radio. I stutter and burble and fizz with the telling. And then I fall silent as I lose myself in thought.

It is rightly a two hour ride to Edinburgh, but this stranger weaves a crooked path. He takes back roads and diagonals and hops from town to town and village to village to deliver his cargo. I see more of the country than I had known was there. All the better to search for her, he said. You don’t know where she’s gone, he said. In that he might be right.

We pass over hills of heather in purple. We see the great rock illuminated from miles away and the ebb and surge of the grizzled North Sea.

Eyes blue like the North Sea, Daddy once said of my sister. Eyes blue like the North Sea.

Bill talks to me about the marks on his body. He once caught the wrong end of a lit soldering iron when he was still at school and the palm of his hand has melted like wax and stretched over the flexing bones. Part of his toe is missing on his left foot, lost to a mis-struck hammer. A jagged scar runs the length of his right thigh from when he fell while scaling a barbed fence. There are marks on his face from fights. Nothing proper, mind. Not like Daddy’s fights. Just scraps. There are peppered dots on his eyeballs from an infection when he was young. Otherwise the irises are the brown and grey of West Yorkshire sandstone, flecked likewise with the soot of industry.

I spot myself in the grimy rain-flecked wing- mirrors of Bill’s cab, leaning against the passenger’s window smeared with the grease from my cheeks and fingerprints and the grease and fingerprints of whoever has come before me. I am hollow. Distorted. Out of focus. Out of frame. The world rushes behind my image. Beside me Bill tells more tales. Issues with contractors. News from the world of haulage. People jumping out of the container when he opens up the back after a sea crossing. People even he did not know were there.

We stop on a back road somewhere in the Borders. We will continue in the morning. We settle for the night. He tells me that when he first saw me he thought I was a wee girl. A wee girl alone by the side of the road.

I turn out to face the window. There is mist on the pane. The street beyond is dark and damp and limned with a humble glow.

This man who is older than my Daddy takes my hand in his.

I hold my breath.

Chapter Fifteen

Mr Royce said the bonfire had galvanised the community. Cathy and I took this as a good thing. Now, he said, it was a case of turning that good will into action.

Mr Royce set about organising the farm labourers. They would demand better pay. The landowners round here had been holding them in check with the threat of shopping them for benefits fraud, but Mr Royce said if enough of them stuck together, with good evidence that the bosses were complicit in their activities, their threats would come to nothing. The landowners would try to hire work from elsewhere to fill the gaps. The potatoes needed sorting, the fruit needed picking, the summer months were here and harvest was approaching. The fields could not be left unworked.

They met in the mornings at the usual pick-up spots but instead of climbing into the vans, they handed their foreman a sheet of paper on which they had written their demands. Mr Royce had helped them with this. He had experience from the miners’ strikes, though this was a smaller group, and I heard Mr Royce admit quietly to Daddy one evening that it might be too small a group to make a difference and that the work they did was too easily replaced.

It was hoped that the withholding of rents would make more of a difference. More families could participate in this. People who lived in houses that the council had built and once owned but which Mr Price or his friends had since bought up. The rents were higher than most could afford and everyone in the neighbouring villages — old pit villages — had accrued debts with Price and the others. Debts that they feared could be called in at any time, in any number of ways.

Daddy went with Mr Royce to each house in turn. Many had been there with us for the bonfire and those that had not had heard of the plans through other avenues. Daddy and Mr Royce told each one that everyone was going to stop paying their rents, and instead the money they would usually give over to Mr Price or the other landlords would be collected into a central fund. This was to help people in times of need and Mr Royce said in private that it would be good for just in case. Just in case things did not go their way and in the end everyone had to pay up anyway. Again, he did not admit this to the group, just in discussion with Martha and Daddy, to which Cathy and I always listened in.

Daddy got drunk on cider one evening on the fat grass outside our house. He said to us or to himself or to the house or to the trees or to the birds in the branches that we were all fools. He said it was all just vanity, that it was Ewart’s vanity for thinking this sort of thing could still make a difference and that it was his vanity for thinking he could protect them all, while still keeping us safe, along with our house on the hill. These were old dreams, he said, and should have been left as just that.

The next morning, however, he got up early and made his usual rounds of the villages, to reassure people, to see if there had been any mischief, to make sure that these people knew this man was still on their side. He was gone for more than three hours but when he returned his mood was optimistic. ‘We might just be able to break bastards,’ he told us.

Mr Royce’s mood varied as well. Sometimes when he came up to visit us or we went down to him in the village he wore a glum demeanour, a deeply stifled terror. But usually he was hopeful about the operation and spoke at length about the positive responses he had had, and about how all the signs were, for the moment, positive.

News came that Gerald Castor had already raised the men’s wages. Mr Royce had gone along with the labourers to the pick-up point in the morning and argued the case with the foreman himself. Gerald Castor had come down from the farm to speak with them. ‘My arguments got better of him, dindt they?’ Mr Royce said. ‘He were unprepared and he got spooked when I started talking about law. That’s thing. You just have to seem official, seem like you know what you’re talking about — well I, as a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about, but unfortunately seeming like you do is often just as important — and, yes, then they don’t know what to do with themselves. That’s how it were. Castor were taken off-guard and said that if men come next day they’ll be paid what we agreed — what all landowners should be paying their workforce. These farmers and landlords have clubbed together, led by Price, but without him and each other they’re nothing. That’s what we must remember.’

We congratulated Mr Royce and had some of the men round to ours for a drink. It was a kind of celebration but it was also to make sure they connected this victory in their minds with our house, and the words that had been spoken here at the bonfire weeks before. It would be no use if they went back to work but forgot to remember the other people they were fighting with and the other people they were fighting against. Mr Price was the real enemy, Daddy always said, but perhaps that only really applied to us.

He did tell Cathy and me one evening that though he cared deeply about everyone else involved in this, he could not help but fixate exclusively on my and Cathy’s house. That’s how he sometimes referred to it, as Cathy’s and mine, like he did not truly inhabit it. It was like he forgot to say that it was ours, as a family, or like he forgot he could live in a home, like he forgot about his need to settle and live comfortably and be looked after by my sister and me.

He told us that was why he was really in on all of this. To protect us, to get our house for us, and to keep our lives within it safe forever. He said that this was very bad, and that we were not to let anyone know, but if it came down to it he would do anything to see us right. ‘The others be damned,’ he said once, very quietly.

The good news continued. A few days after the incident with Gerald Castor, Mr Royce came up to see us with news that another farmer had accepted their demands, Jeremy Higgins. And then a couple of days after that, there was another.

For that first couple of weeks it seemed too easy. The men were all asking each other why they had not done anything like this before. They had assumed their work was worth nothing. Many were just out of prison or else serially unemployed. They thought rough labour out on a farm for cursory, under-the-table payment was all they could get. And possibly they were right. But still the landlords needed them. It was not like they were doing these men a favour. Yet, what with the new wages, the employers could have gone and got other people to work for them, but they did not want the paperwork. Our lot still were not asking for contracts or anything like that, you see. It had been discussed by everyone, including Mr Royce, and everyone had decided against it. Nobody wanted to be on any kind of official radar, much. And that was not for tax reasons. It was just nobody wanted the authorities — least of all the police — to know anything about any of it. That held true for the farmers as much as for the workers. That was the pressure-point on which all of this seemed to operate. Both sides were trying to push each other but not so much as the police would get involved.

Given that, when the recriminations started, as Daddy warned they would, Mr Price’s men did not hold back as there was no fear that we or any of the others would report it. After at first agreeing to the demands, both Gerald Castor and Jeremy Higgins and any of the others who had initially conceded, then went back on their words. It was suspected, with good reason, that they had consulted with each other and then with Price, and — though cowed by the initial shock of the workers’ and Mr Royce’s activities — had then thought again, taken stock, composed some kind of plan.

Reports came that they were hiring work from elsewhere. Bussing people in. Standard practice, said Mr Royce, you just had to know how to handle it. We had to find out where they were getting them from and where they were being picked up and dropped off. I did not learn what the plan was after that.

The real fuss arrived when the end of the month came and went and no rents had been paid from any of the houses in the entire area. That was a bigger deal. Mr Royce said it would be. That was where the real money lay, he said, and up here it was a lot harder to get new tenants than new workers.

There were recriminations. Mr Price and some of the others employed men all year round to collect their rents and sort out their problems. They were big men, strong and mean. If a tenant got behind with his or her payments they would come round and see to it. They were full-time, private bailiffs. They would knock on the door. They would make threats. If still the money did not come they would knock down the door and take what was owed in kind. They were hard men, big and tough and ruthless. But they were nothing to Daddy.

Daddy was king. A foot taller than the tallest of these men, Daddy was gargantuan. Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus in a mother’s womb. These men did not move Daddy, and when they began prowling in earnest, he knew how to respond.

The bailiffs started knocking on doors. At first they would concentrate on a few houses in a certain area. This made it easy for Daddy. Gary, our man from the potato sorting, had use of his uncle’s car and as soon as he got a call from any of the tenants he would drive Daddy over as quickly as he could. Daddy would get out and make his hulking presence known. The bailiffs would leg it.

So the bailiffs started mixing up their routine. They would only go to one house in a neighbourhood and then get in their cars and drive away before Gary and Daddy could get there. But Daddy stepped it up as well. When he did catch up with a couple of them he dragged them down a snicket into a patch of overgrown grass, laced with wild flowers, cut off from view by high hawthorns. There, he broke ribs and fingers and sent them on their way.

Daddy did that a couple of times with a couple of different groups of them. The bailiffs began to lose interest. For them it was just a job, after all. They were only getting paid. And the landlords couldn’t pay them enough to make risking their necks worthwhile, not without paying out to bailiffs more than they would make back in rents.

It seemed as if we were winning. Morale was high. We met regularly, up at our house, to drink and chat and urge each other on. There was a real spirit behind it all, and people were excited.

But, of course, it could not last. And on a Tuesday, late on in the evening, but not so as it was yet dark, Mr Price drove up to our house.

I was scuffing up the path when Mr Price drove his Land Rover up the hill. There had been heavy summer rains this last fortnight and the torrents had run down the slope with half a tonne of mud, silt and rocks, and had pooled at the bottom of our path near where it met the bridleway. I had taken a rusted iron rake from the tool-shed and was shunting sediment back into a path shape. It was all clay up here. The claggy earth clung to the teeth of my rake as I scraped it into place, such that I could barely see the metal through the topsoil.

I heard Mr Price’s jeep coming up the bridleway. I knew of no one else with an engine that grand and smooth. He turned the corner onto our path and the front wheels of his vehicle sunk right far into the standing sludge. That deep engine revved and the wheels spun for a bit, kicking up muck and water that would have splattered me had I not seen it coming. He did not dare take the hill, so slowly reversed back out onto the bridleway and parked the jeep on the verge.

He opened the door and stepped out. If he was flustered and bothered behind those blacked-out windows he did not show it when he stepped into the outside, out in the evening light. He came towards me with a sinking sun at his back, illuminated. ‘You’re just the man,’ he said.

I stumbled. ‘I think I’ll just go and get my Daddy.’

‘No, no, no.’ He held out a hand to gather me back round, so as I would go with him out into the bridleway. His tone was sweet, generous. His face was kind.

I looked up at my house. The lights were being lit.

God, I was a coward sometimes.

Mr Price was still standing there, with his arm outstretched, waiting for me. It was a case of pleasing the person who was right there in front of me, you see.

I picked my way through the puddles and out into the lane. Mr Price took us to a place where we were hidden from the house by the honeysuckle.

He stood in front of me. He was wearing wellington boots, corduroy trousers, and in the warm summer evening just a chequered cotton shirt, unbuttoned at the top.

He put his left foot up on the banking and leaned on it with his left elbow so that his whole posture opened and dipped. Like this, he stood a few inches smaller than me, and he looked up at me with brindle eyes.

I noticed that I was fidgeting with my hands and feet, rubbing the soles of my shoes back and forth against the damp grass and winding my fingers in rings about themselves.

‘What’s your surname, lad?’

‘Oliver.’

‘Daniel Oliver?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Daniel and Catherine Oliver.’

‘Yeah. What of it?’

‘What’s your Daddy’s surname?’

‘Smythe.’

‘Smythe?’

‘Aye. You know that.’

Mr Price nodded. ‘I do know that. I just wanted to ask.’

He shifted his weight so that he was standing tall, but there was still warmth in his manner as far as I could discern.

‘You and your sister were given your mother’s surname.’

‘Aye. So what? That happens lots of times.’

‘I suppose it does.’ Mr Price paused and wetted his lips, looking at me the whole while. ‘You see, I’ve got a great deal more time for an Oliver than I do for a Smythe. It’s fortunate for you, then, that that is what you are.’

I shrugged. ‘I can’t say I knew my mother all that well. Daddy’s been both for us. Both mother and father. Daddy and our Granny Morley were, I mean. Before we came here. I might be an Oliver by name, but I’m a Smythe by nature.’

Mr Price considered these words for a moment and then shook his head, ever so slightly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t see that at all. You are not a bit like your father.’

An ounce of extra stubbornness shot through me with this declaration.

Mr Price continued: ‘I don’t suppose you’re enjoying the current state of affairs much. I shouldn’t think it would be in your nature to seek out or prolong proceedings such as these. The strike, I mean. This business about the rents for the properties I own. It’s all a bit silly, isn’t it? That’s my take on it, if you want to know. It should never have come to this. Why are your father and his friends approaching things in this way, I ask myself? Why not just come to me straight away to discuss their grievances?’

‘You threatened to kick us off our land, that’s why.’

‘Did I? You heard that, did you? You were there, were you?’

‘No, I wandt there. But Daddy said.’

‘Daddy said?’

‘Aye.’

Mr Price gathered himself, folded his arms on his lower chest. ‘I would give you this land tomorrow,’ he said. ‘This tiny copse with a handful of good trees and clay that’s running down into the Levels? I would give it up to you tomorrow. Not to your Daddy, but to you. Not a Smythe, but an Oliver. Your Daddy is a brute. You are your mother’s son. What do you say to that?’

‘I … I don’t really understand.’

‘I’m telling you I would give you the land, where your Daddy’s built that house, tomorrow. It would be yours, officially. I would sign over the papers. There would be no further problems.’

‘But I woundt want it by myself. I would still want to live with Daddy and Cathy.’

‘And I suppose that’s it, right there. The thought of handing over your mother’s land to your father doesn’t sit well with me. Never has. But he just placed himself on it, didn’t he? He’d been after it for years and then, one morning, he just turned up and started building. And the first I heard of it, he’d already got the best part of a house up. Does that sound right to you?’

I said nothing.

‘You knew it was your mother’s land, didn’t you? Your father told you that much, surely?’

Still I was silent.

‘You knew that she lived up here, all her life? She inherited the land from her parents. And when she fell on hard times — which you’ll know all about, being her son — she came to me for help. And so I bought this land off her for a very high price indeed, and she should, would have been able to put herself back together again, start afresh, if it wasn’t for your father. And although this land is rightfully mine, and even after all that your parents have put me through, both when your mother was alive, and now that it’s just your father left causing me bother, I would happily sign it over to you, Daniel Oliver. I would give it to you out of the affection I held for the girl she was. But instead, your father seized it. He seized it from me when he had no right.’

I shrugged again. ‘No one else was doing anything with land.’

‘Maybe so. But that’s not the way the world works. That’s not how good, decent people operate.’

‘We’re decent people. We needed somewhere to live, is all.’

Mr Price looked me up and down and then walked around me towards his Land Rover. I thought he was going to drive away. I was feeling just a little bit proud of myself, like I had seen him off, like I had done one for the family, but he was not leaving just yet. He opened the door of the front passenger seat and reached into the glove compartment. He emerged with a clear plastic folder, containing a thick pad of documents, most in white, others in pastels: pink, yellow, blue, green.

‘I have the documents here,’ he said. ‘I am willing to sign the land over, officially, to you, Daniel Oliver. Look, you’re the named party.’ He pointed to the wording on the opening page. I saw my name laid out in black block capitals. ‘But knowing, as I do, that you would want to live here with your father — you are still a minor, after all — I have certain conditions. I need to know that your father isn’t going to be as hostile a neighbour as he has shown himself to be in recent months. I don’t want someone living so close to me who is going to give me a hard time, who is going to threaten my business and my property. Who would want that? Nobody. So you must tell him, first of all, that if he wants to be sure of a home for you all, and he wants the land to be in his son’s name — because he can be sure it will never be in his name — he must call off this stupid business. He must get those scroungers back to work, and he must make sure those rents are paid. Now I’ve spoken to the local farmers, and we’ve all agreed to up the pay a little bit. That’s only fair. And there won’t be any increases in rent for the next two years, and then only in line with inflation. Do you know what that is? No, well never mind. I’ve laid it all out in here.’ He waved the folder. ‘Here’s a letter to be given to your father, along with copies of the documents that I will sign if he agrees. That way he can think on it. He can weigh up the situation and make his decision. And then that’ll be that. Done.’

I took the folder from him and tucked it under my arm. ‘Are those conditions? That Daddy calls it all off?’

‘Not entirely,’ said Mr Price. ‘Your Daddy must work for me, from time to time, as he always used to. He must return to the fold. I used to own that man’s muscles, and I owned his mind. I owned his fists and his feet; his eyes and his ears and his teeth. How do you think he met your mother?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

Mr Price made no answer. He folded his arms then unfolded them, and then placed them on his hips. ‘Just you get that message to your father,’ he said, pointing at my chest. ‘Tell him that’s all I want from him. I want to use him again. Him and that great, hulking body, the like of which I’ve never seen, not in this county, not in this country. Tell him I want to see those muscles tested, and those fists put to their proper use. Aye, I know he’ll never go round the houses for me, knocking about whoever I want him to knock about, like he might have done when he was a pup. But tell him I’ve got prouder work for him, if he’ll do it. Tell him I’ve found a man for him to fight.’

He turned his back on me and went back to his jeep. He drove away. Mud spat like shrapnel.

I had left my rake sticking straight up from the silt. It was the wrong tool for the job. I suckered it out of the ground, swung it over my right shoulder and bobbed up the hill to our house.

The front door was swinging, caught on a small, bouncing breeze with no particular direction. Cathy had left the door hanging so that this light, dewy wind could sweep the floors for us, and dance through the curtains, and the nooks in the walls, and leave our home with soft freshness and the smell of damp pollen and snapped greenwood.

‘Done with dredging?’ asked Daddy.

‘Nope. I was interrupted.’

I passed him the folder. He looked down at it and then up at me.

‘It’s from Price. He was here. He told me to tell you he wants to come to some kind of accord. He wants you to work for him, only not like you think. He said he’s got someone for you to fight. And then he’ll give us the land — he’ll sign it over to us. He said he’d do that.’

‘He said that? That he’d provide documents for the land.’

‘Yes. For us.’

‘For us all?’

‘For me. He said he’d sign the land over to me. I dindt fully understand. But it amounts to same thing. It’ll be ours on paper, and that means something.’

Daddy looked again at the folder, and took the documents from within. He looked at them closely, placing the pages flat on the table and leaning over them. He traced his index finger on the words, one by one, mouthing them precisely as he read. After some minutes he pushed the paper aside.

‘Means nothing to me.’

‘I can help,’ I said tentatively.

He shook his head. ‘No, lad, it’s not that. I can read well enough to understand what it says. It’s idea a person can write summat on a bit of paper about a piece of land that lives and breathes, and changes and quakes and floods and dries, and that that person can use it as he will, or not at all, and that he can keep others off it, all because of a piece of paper. That’s part which means nowt to me.’

Daddy gathered the documents and shuffled them back into the folder. The heels of the chair-legs scraped as he stood. The large man slouched as he went to the front door.

‘I’ll think on it,’ he said as he left the house and made for the copse.

Chapter Sixteen

The note came early before we were up. Cathy found it in the hall. It had been slipped under the door. She made breakfast and placed the note on the kitchen table, a hatchet that cut its way between the glass milk jug and the enamel coffee pot.

I woke with the smell of bacon in my nose. Daddy emerged from his bedroom too and followed the scent. He saw the note as I came through the open door into the kitchen. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger and lifted it. He saw that it was addressed to him, sliced the envelope with the breadknife and opened it.

‘Mr Price?’ Cathy asked. The coffee had stewed for too long and a dark brown, opaque liquid oozed from the spout.

Daddy hocked his throat for the first time that morning and spat up the residue glued to his windpipe by the night’s humidity and a slow evening cigarette.

‘He’s called me out.’

‘A fight?’

‘Yes, more or less. He’s arranged it as if it’s nothing more than a matter of business. There’ll be prize money and men will be allowed to bet on it. But, of course, we know that it handt got owt to do with business this time. He wants me to fight for him. If I win, he’ll get a lot of money and he’ll sign this land over to you two. If I lose, well, I’m sure he’ll still get a lot of money. He manages to fix things that way.’

It was to be held in the woods overlooking the racecourse. There was some precedent in that. For hundreds of years travellers had toured the racecourses, buying and selling horses, tackle, and entertainments when the racing was over and the nights fell. Then the course would be given over to travellers and their friends. Lights would be lit, meat roasted, and whisky drunk. And fights fought.

These days, the woods behind the racecourse offered cover from the police and from passers-by. Dog-walkers rarely entered the woods, such was the reputation.

Daddy trained in the copse to find his form. He lifted what he could find — logs, stones — until some people clubbed together to bring up some second-hand dumbbells. He lifted me up too, as if I weighed nothing at all, as if there had been no change in my weight since the day I was born and he had lifted me out of my mother’s arms.

He ate more meat and fish, almost double what he had been eating before. And he walked and ran to improve his endurance. That was more important now, more than ever, he said. He knew how hard he could hit and how quickly his punches could find their mark but if his opponent was much younger he would run around him and tire him out then if Daddy made a mistake, he might fall.

He told me one evening of his fears. He made sure that Cathy was out, as she often was, and he spoke to me unusually clearly. He said that he was worried he was too old. He said that there was no greater burden than success, that he had an unbeaten record and a reputation that extended well beyond the boundaries of England and Ireland. In the right circles, at any rate. But fighting while weighed down with that record, he said, would be more difficult than ever. And he worried, because this fight really meant something.

In previous bouts that he fought for money he could go in without any expectation. Even though others might stake their savings on him to win, he did not have to care unless he wanted to. He could remain calm, almost casual, and he would win because he could afford to be reckless.

Now there was more at stake. Much more than just money. And he was older. ‘Old muscle,’ he said, as he patted his biceps.

I told him that if he lost it would not matter to me and that we would find another way to keep the house, and remove the Prices from our lives. And if we could not, then we could always move away, start again, and we would still be together.

I walked down to Vivien’s house with the pups the evening before the fight. The mood in my house was tight; Daddy had gone to the copse and Cathy just sat on the step smoking. I wanted out. Blackbirds sung in the hedgerows as dusk settled. The dogs felt the twilight too. They were uneasy with the coming darkness.

The light was bright in Vivien’s hall and as I crossed the threshold I caught the aroma of the evening primrose that surrounded the entrance.

‘I thought I’d see you this evening,’ she said. She hurried as she spoke, and looked over my shoulder as she ushered me inside. The dogs kept to my heel, unsure of the new scents.

The house was colder than it had been outside. An upstairs window clattered in its frame. The sound of wood on wood, like a glockenspiel, bounced down the stairs. The net curtains rustled. Vivien hurried about, shutting everything up, pinning the latches, tucking in the material, closing velvet outer curtains, bolting shutters where there were shutters. She took Jess and Becky from me and bustled them into the kitchen, took off their leads and stored them in a drawer, took out bowls from the cupboard and filled them with water and the remains of her own beef stew from the casserole on the hob. She closed the door behind them. They did not try to follow her out but began to lap up water, tails wagging in easy delight.

She moved towards me, gripped my elbow and pushed me into a chair. Serious, I thought, but when she spoke her voice held its regular sweet lilt.

‘I thought I’d see you this evening,’ she said again. ‘You’re going off to the fight tomorrow, aren’t you? Your father is set on it, then?’

‘I believe so. Why do you ask?’

‘Because I think it’s a risk,’ she said, bluntly. ‘I’ve seen the man he is facing and I think your father could lose.’

I did not know what to say. Certainty had been running away from me for weeks.

‘Why will he lose?’

‘Because he’ll be fighting against a much younger man.’

‘A man who’s inexperienced, then. A man who’s not been tested.’

‘Oh, he’s certainly been tested, but not around here so your Daddy wouldn’t know him. He’s been brought over from Eastern Europe. Ukraine. I think you should urge him to pull out,’ she continued. ‘I’m worried about him. He won’t feel the shame of it, I know. For a man like him, who lives the life he leads, he’s remarkably unconcerned by shame.’

‘But he has to. He has to for others. And for house.’

She was paler than she had been when we had first met. Clots of black mascara had smudged onto her eyelids.

‘So you won’t?’

I shook my head, and soon after got up to leave. She did not attempt to change my mind. She knew what we were all like, Daddy, Cathy and me. She hugged me on the way out, for a long time. I half thought she was going to kiss me on the cheek but she did not. She put her hand briefly through my hair and gave me a gentle nudge out the door.

I ran back along the road with the dogs and up the hill as the evening settled in earnest. I saw swifts darting around catching the small flies that had just slipped from their chrysalises. Jess and Becky had grown tall and lean these last months, with all their power stored in their taut back legs. They chased around me and each other in huge loping circles as I stuck to the path.

I returned to find that Daddy had gone to bed early. Cathy was still up in the kitchen, smoking. She was excited and awake and alive. The thought of Daddy losing had not flown through her. She was as bright as ever I had seen her.

That night, I lay awake staring at the wall in the dim moonlight, at the creases and crevices left by my father’s rough plasterwork, at his thumb prints, finger prints, the curve of his pallet knife, the sweep of the plaster that matched the motion of his right arm.

When I did sleep I dreamt of a long walk home beneath the calls of roosting starlings.

Chapter Seventeen

The dawn erupted from a bud of mauve half-light and bloomed bloody as I woke. My lips stretched to a wide yawn as I sucked into my warming lungs the cool breeze that threaded a path through the open window. My eyes were tired and I saw the room in rapid stills through flickering lashes. Condensed sweat adhered the frayed cotton bed sheets to my bare skin. I had glowed hot during the night, hot from fitful dreams and restless limbs, and now shivered in the comparative chill.

I rose and wove cautious steps into the wet room. We had no shower but a stiff tap to release hot water. It gushed intermittently. The power came from a wood-burning boiler, lit each morning by whoever woke first. It heated sufficient water for three to pigeon wash, spilling the water into a bucket beneath the tap and onto the stone floor as we cast it under our armpits, our groins, our necks, faces and ears, our feet, and our legs, arms and torsos.

I splashed the steaming water onto my sticky skin and stroked it lightly with a bar of soap. My hands puckered red and white but I held them still beneath the tap. I rinsed my body and dried it with a small square of towel then slipped myself into fresh and crinkled clothes.

I stepped out into the hall and caught the sour scent of kippers poaching in milk. We ate them with white, buttered bread and fresh orange juice, a gift from the milkman.

At 7 o’clock, we heard the sound of Ewart Royce’s Volvo estate on the coarse gravel outside. The wheels slowed and stopped before we heard the brakes. Two doors shunted open then clipped shut. A knock echoed from the door. Cathy opened it.

‘Your car.’ Ewart looked darker, older, more stern. Nerves treated people differently. Our anxieties were focussed on the same target but each from a different angle and with their own tints.

Martha waited by the vehicle and opened the boot as we stepped out with the bags and the dogs. Daddy climbed into the front seat and Martha got in behind him. Ewart was to drive, Cathy took the right-hand back seat and I sat in the middle between my sister and Mrs Royce.

We were bashed together as the car took the choppy track down our hill. The journey was hardly smoother on the open roads. In these parts they were puckered with potholes from icy winters and acid rain. On the worst roads the potholes were connected by cracks that had filled with sediment and organic material, compacted by passing cars before the weeds had managed to fully breach the tarmac. It made for a rough ride.

We spoke very little. Martha issued a handful of directions to Ewart and Ewart spoke once to ask for the time. Otherwise we were quiet. Cathy gazed out the window with her nose pressed gently against the smeared glass. Daddy breathed deeply. He did not turn his head. The back of his neck was covered with a film of perspiration that sparkled so clearly it was as if it had frozen into minuscule crystals of ice.

I glanced around at my companions, more interested in them than I ever could be by the world outside. After ten minutes of driving Martha reached over and gripped my left hand. Her palm was hot. I felt the steady pulse in her thumb and a warm band of gold on her ring finger. Her firm fingernails were set in acrylic.

We arrived at the racecourse forty-five minutes after leaving our house. We took the track around the perimeter fence to the grove behind. We drove between the trees, ash and oak like in our own copse. Brittle, fallen twigs and branches snapped beneath our wheels. The track was too narrow. Brackens, ferns and wild garlic had overtaken its sides and pressed against the vehicle’s body.

We came to a fork in the road. One route had been churned by previous cars, vans and four-by-fours. The other was strangely smooth, almost untouched. It was as if it had been flooded and the waters had soaked into the ground and evaporated into the air, leaving an even layer of sticky silt on that track and that track only, like a heavy toffee glaze.

As the car turned into the right fork I craned my neck to look back to the unused path. It was barren, more a strip of diseased or salted earth than a walkway. It led into a clearing where grass could find sunshine and push through the compressed earth and netted moss.

It slipped from view, obscured by the low-hanging branches of a particularly squat oak. I turned back in my seat and saw the cold sweat on Daddy’s neck.

We rounded a corner into another clearing, this one muddy from rain and footfall. Vehicles were parked in a semi-circle around the edge, most with their boots open to the slight drizzle. Men, a few boys and girls, and a very few women, stood around the open boots, peering. The fair was a chance to buy and sell. For many that might have been the main event. There were pedigree puppies and assorted rare breeds of ornamental chickens. There was a large Land Rover in one corner that was flanked by men with shaved heads and bomber jackets and most people stayed well clear. Guns possibly. Or bombs or pornography.

‘Cathy, Danny, you two get out first,’ said Daddy. ‘Find somewhere quiet to stand.’

I slid out behind Cathy and sank my boots into the mud. We trudged the outer rim. People stood around and swayed like the hulking trees that enveloped the gathering. They chatted and smoked and exhibited their animals, tools, weapons. Someone had set up a fire in an oil drum with a griddle to cook sausages and onions. Cathy and I shifted in the direction of the savoury smoke and spitting fat only to be turned away when we confessed we had no money.

‘What do you think this is? A food bank? Get out of it!’

Instead we loitered around the back of a black transit van that was filled with barrels of live fish. Goldfish, catfish, carp, perch. All swimming in water. The barrels were labelled, along with the approximate ages of the fish and the prices. Angling was big business around here.

Fighting, fishing and animals. That is where these people put their money.

I took a chance and stepped up into the van to take a closer look at what was on offer. There they were, at the bottom of the barrel. Fish the length of my forearm, spiralling up and down and around one another. Making the best use of the space they had. A pipe pumped air into the bottom of the barrel and it burbled up and tickled their gills and loose scales as the fish passed through the stream, gulping for sustenance.

‘Here, get out of it,’ said a sharp voice from behind me. It was a skinny little ginger boy a head shorter than Cathy. His face was shaded by sandy freckles and acne scabs. He wore an indigo tracksuit and white trainers. There was a residue of masticated toast stuck between his front teeth. ‘You can’t go in there unless you’re serious about buying. And you two aren’t buying owt.’

‘Who’s going a buy live fish here anyway?’ said Cathy. ‘Who’d come see a fight an buy a couple of carp?’

‘Who asked you, you stupid bitch?’

Any other day Cathy might have smacked him one. She spat through her teeth and her cheeks had filled with colour.

Her cheeks reddened readily, like mine. We both resented it. How I wished I could stay an icy pale when angry or excited.

She stepped back and walked away quickly.

I hurried after her, ignoring the sound of a heavy ball of mucus and saliva hitting the ground behind my feet as I turned.

She was pacing quickly, right across to the other side of the clearing where the serious business was happening, where Mr Price was talking with Daddy. Talking terms, outcomes, rules of sorts. Where the other serious men were standing around, their hands in the pockets of their waxed jackets, or round the leads of vicious-looking dogs. ‘Dogs in the cars when the fight’s on,’ I heard someone say. I thought of Jess and Becky doing battle with a couple of these dogs, in defence of their respective masters. I thought about the power of a true dog bite, or the slash of a claw, so much worse than the playful nips a dog could give when jumping at your hand. I thought about blood and flesh mixed with a dog’s saliva, and the tartar from its unbrushed teeth like blood mixed with rusted, dirty metal out on a farm far from help.

Daddy was unbuttoning his jacket, getting ready. I saw his opponent for the first time and felt acid in my throat.

He could have been six foot ten. He could have been taller. And he was heavy. He was sitting on the back of Mr Price’s trailer with his feet planted firmly in the mud. His weight pitched the trailer, testing its suspension to the full such that its chassis almost touched the dirt.

There he was, slouched like a dancing bear propped against a wall, rubbing his knuckles, bulbous and calcified like Daddy’s.

He caught sight of me staring as I pursued Cathy and pulled his lips up to his gums to reveal a full set of gold teeth. I looked quickly ahead. Cathy was heading for the trees.

I called after her like we were back at school. ‘Wait up. Wait up!’

Another couple of steps and I could reach her shoulder. ‘Wait up,’ I said. ‘Where you going? Fight’s about to start.’

Cathy turned and looked over my shoulder to where the serious men were puffing and panting and moving around each other in ever decreasing circles. The crowd was beginning to swell. A slack loop was forming and the gaps were filling with men, like doves flying into the niches of their cote. Their shoulders locking. The abstract sound of the chatter had been administrative but was now hoarse with a kind of giddy terror.

‘I don’t want to watch it. I’m fed up. I’m fed up with the whole ruddy show.’

With that she stalked off into the trees. I saw her weaving a path between them until the cover of their trunks and branches tightened, slicing segments out of her torso until the screen became complete and she was out of sight.

I felt the men churning behind me. I did not want to return though knew simply that I should. There was a call to witness.

I turned my back on the woods and joined the other men. The lot of us trembled together.

The Bear was pacing and jumping to keep warm and stretching his muscles and shaking his bones. Daddy stood still. As still as a wolf. His eyes were glossier and bluer in the cold air and crisp grey light. They were fixed on his prey.

A referee came between the fighters and spoke intently to each man in turn then stepped back.

The Bear began to skip back and forth. His fists were raised. Daddy remained still, almost weary, despondent. He glanced over at me for the first time since we had arrived then raised his fists too. He made circles with them like an old Victorian pugilist whose motions were captured in stills. This is how he had learnt to fight, I remembered. He had told us once. He had learnt to fight at the hands of a very very old man who could barely stand but directed his movements from an armchair by the hearth.

The Bear scuffed his feet on the ground. Daddy rocked back and forth. The muscles in his thighs were tense and poised.

A blow from the Bear, which Daddy ducked. He was lighter on his feet now, suddenly geared into action, off his heels.

They were circling. The Bear tried again. He lunged with his right fist then followed with his left. Daddy avoided the first and then parried, raising his own left fist to go at his opponent’s chin. The Bear pulled back and Daddy missed. Some calls from the crowd then a sudden shiver of silence. Another miss from the Bear, then another. Daddy was saving his punches.

They skipped. A couple more goes at it then the Bear struck home. Not to Daddy’s head but to his chest. The crowd winced and jeered in equal measure. It must have winded him. I felt winded too. He was shuddering backwards, off balance. The Bear came at him again with a right hook. Daddy ducked but was clipped on the left side of his skull. Another knock.

Daddy peeled back. He heaved the breath back into his lungs and straightened his spine. The Bear bared his teeth — a flash of gold — and Daddy went for them. A sharp jab. Blood. He took a second jab at the teeth, trying to tease at the same place. He had spotted a weakness. The Bear flashing a set of gold teeth meant he had had to replace his own set of teeth, which meant his gums had been permanently weakened, which meant that he could lose more. Again for the teeth but Daddy was blocked then both men pulled back panting.

A dog barked from the back seat of a car and others joined the chorus.

The Bear caught Daddy hard on his left cheekbone with a blow that came from nowhere. A quiet crack like a splitting log and then there was blood around his eye and dripping down his cheek, pooling on his shoulder and chest, on his white cotton vest. Daddy was blowing clots of blood from his nostrils like a dragon breathing fire.

He could not use that eye any more. It was swelling and closing up his eyelid.

But he kept on.

The slap of shoes against the mud. Men stamping and rubbing their hands. Daddy and the Bear, their fists in guard. Barking dogs. Spitting men. A sticky wind. Ancient oaks arching their backs to cover the scene. The scent of diesel. Diesel, dirt, sweat, blood, burning meat, the sugars dripping from fried onions. A ring of men standing above rings of mushrooms, connected and hidden beneath the earth, and then rings of limestone.

The Bear had Daddy on the back foot, dragging his heels. I tried hard not to look but I could not help it. Daddy’s arms were dropping and his legs slipping. He was tired. He was tired and stooping.

Daddy gulped as if his breath was caught in his throat. The Bear came in for another punch. Daddy looked as though he barely had enough left in him to avoid the fist, but he did, for the most part. He was caught on his left shoulder, knuckle hit muscle.

But the Bear had overbalanced, and Daddy hooked round with his right fist. He moved his whole body behind the punch. He swung into it from his hips. He rose up on his haunches, almost up off his toes and off the ground. He was suddenly fresh again. A feint — perhaps it had been — a feint. His good eye was alert. He planted his fist on the other man’s jaw with every estimation of strength he had.

Again a sound like splitting wood but this time not one cut cleanly with an axe but ripped from the side of a tree by lightning and thunder and wind. Wood that was shattering into a hundred pieces. A torrent of red and gold. Blood bursting from the Bear’s unstoppered gums as his gold incisors, his gold canines, gold molars followed a long, slow arc to the sodden earth.

The Bear stumbled. I stumbled. I felt like I was going to pass out. Either pass out or piss myself. Oh no, oh please God no. There could be nowt worse. I rearranged my feet to steady myself and looked away, up at the sky, hoping that the cold breeze would catch my eyeballs and freshen me. Bring tears perhaps. Tears were better, tears from the cold, it could be. Oh god, please don’t let me faint. Please. My insides were moving too now. My bowels. Oh please, God, no.

The huge man was falling, following his teeth into the mud. His eyes had rolled back into his skull. He was knocked out. And as he fell I felt dizzier and dizzier, like I’d been sucked inside him and was feeling the same motion, like I was falling too.

The Bear was on the ground. His head had slapped and cracked again. The men around me were moving forwards and so was the ground. I was about to fall.

And then I was in Daddy’s arms. I had not seen him come for me. He had knocked out the Bear, he had won the fight, and almost in the same step come to me. He picked me up clean off the ground like I was his trophy. He raised me into the cold air. I felt the tears on my cheeks but no giddiness. I breathed deeply. No more sickness.

Our men were all around. And Peter, and Ewart and then Martha came over, carrying a zipped green bag, and she was opening it and taking out bandages and iodine and frozen peas.

From my vantage point in Daddy’s arms I looked down to see his adversary lying on the floor, men crowding round him, doing little to help. One had a bucket of water and some cloths.

And then I saw Price. He was looking up at me. Staring at me as calmly as he had watched the whole fight. Just staring.

But where was Cathy? Where was Cathy?

As Daddy brought me back down, I looked to the perimeter of the woods. Had she come back after all? Had she watched the fight from the cover of the trees? Had she heard it?

Martha was fussing. She was pulling Daddy over to the car. She had fully opened up the boot of the Volvo estate and laid out some towels. Jess and Becky came to greet us, yapping at Daddy. His feet were not dragging now. He was stepping brightly. He sat down in the back of the car boot and Ewart picked up his feet and propped them on a crate. He began to untie Daddy’s laces and pull his shoes off. His socks were wet and dirty and Ewart took those off as well and wrapped the exposed skin with a towel.

Martha had wrapped the frozen peas in a thin towel too and placed them over Daddy’s eye for him to hold. She dabbed iodine onto small fluffy pieces of cotton wool and cleaned up the other cuts. Daddy winced as she did this. Small, specific pain inflicted with care can be worse than any other kind.

‘Water,’ said Daddy. I pulled out a flask from the cool-box. He drank a little then put down the flask. With his good eye he looked at Ewart, who reached inside his coat and pulled out a hip flask. Daddy took it and swigged. He swilled the first mouthful around in his mouth then spat it on the ground. He swallowed the second.

Martha took the ice pack away from his eye and inspected the cuts. ‘It’ll need stitches. I’ll clean it before you put those peas back on.’

She did not use the iodine but a softer solution of salt and water.

I helped him take off his shirt and put one on clean. Then I wrapped a fleece round him and a blanket over that. He was sitting very still, sipping from the hip flask but mostly staring out into the trees beyond, smiling contentedly.

I thought about what Vivien had said that time. About how fighting made Daddy feel. About him needing it, body and mind both. He appeared satisfied now. If only she could see him. She had been wrong about the outcome. She had doubted him.

Cathy had not appeared but I was not too worried, then. I knew she would be safe, partly because she was tough and partly because she had walked into the woods, and her and I knew woods well. Ash and oak, like ours at home.

‘Anyone spoken to Price yet?’ asked Daddy.

‘Not yet. We wanted to get you fixed up first. That’s more important,’ said Martha.

‘Is he a man of his word?’ asked Daddy.

Ewart considered. ‘He’s a man of his word when he’s in public. He’ll set everything right here in front of others, and then — by that alone — he’ll be bound to it. And he’s cause to be happy. He’s won a huge amount of money here today. He’s bested those Russians. You weren’t the favourite today. For the first time ever, is that? Nah, Price should be thanking you.’

Daddy shook his head. ‘I’m not so sure.’ He looked up at me. ‘What do you think, Daniel?’

I had no idea, but I was hopeful. ‘I think you’ve won your prize,’ I said. ‘I think we’ll be going home and it really will be our home.’

He nodded, more trying to will my words into truth than out of agreement.

I got him a pair of boots and after putting them on he got up and walked over to a group of cars, one of which was pulling away carrying the Bear. Another man was picking the gold teeth out of the mud and putting them into a sealable plastic bag. Price was sitting in the driving seat of his Land Rover, speaking to a couple of men through the window. I could not read his expression.

He saw Daddy approaching and gestured for the other men to stand aside but remain close.

‘Well there it is,’ stated Price. The outcome, he meant. The conclusion.

Daddy nodded. ‘There it is.’

Daddy waited for a moment for Price to continue. He had an offer to complete. But Price let Daddy wait. He wanted Daddy to have to ask. In a final attempt at humiliating and subjugating him, he wanted Daddy to ask.

‘How about it then? How about the land? Can we tie it all up then? Make it official?’

‘We can,’ said Price. ‘Gavin has the signed documents.’ He nodded to one of the men he had been talking to. A dim-looking thug who pulled a black ring binder out of a briefcase he was carrying. From the ring binder he unclipped one of the plastic wallets and gave it to Daddy.

I could tell from the way he hesitated before taking it that he did not really understand the transaction. He did not know what the document meant but did not want to ask Price to explain it. He had no understanding of the way things worked in the real world and he had no experience with paper and the law.

Mr Price smirked. ‘Those are the deeds, which I had signed, that formally give you the land that you have built that house on.’

‘And the copse behind?’ asked Martha sharply from behind. ‘And with rights to access the road, I mean the track in front?’

Price considered for a moment. He would answer all our questions slowly, in his own time. ‘Yes. You can read it if you like, though I hope you trust that I am a man of my word. It’s all there.’

Martha took the plastic wallet out of Daddy’s hands and pulled out the sheets of paper, which had been stapled at the corner. She began to read.

Mr Price tapped his steering wheel in irritation.

‘We have to know what we’re getting, Price,’ said Martha without looking up at him. ‘I’ll have to read through all this, whether you like it or not, and you can’t leave until I do.’

‘Can’t?’

She continued to read, flicking back and forth through the papers when she came to a detail she needed to check.

Price did wait and after a minute or so commented idly to himself or perhaps to his men or possibly really to us, ‘Strange, isn’t it? An illegal fight to settle a legal dispute. Ending the day by signing papers after a spectacle that could have us all thrown in jail.’

Martha ignored him and continued to read, but Daddy looked up at him curiously, suspiciously. Ewart shuffled his feet, uneasily.

Martha finished reading. ‘I think you should sign it. I will witness,’ she said. They did so on the bonnet of Mr Price’s Land Rover.

He drove away soon after with that smooth heavy purr of the Land Rover rolling slowly over wet ground. The sun was coming out and the dampness was lifting from the clearing in a thin haze that seemed to pulse evenly upwards from the crest of the trees. Slices of sunlight came through the clouds, the shape of a blackbird’s singing beak.

Money was changing hands throughout the clearing. Every man there, it seemed, had placed a bet. The paper notes were shuffled, counted then folded hastily and placed into inside top pockets. The bookmakers’ assistants made marks in notebooks. The smell of onions again and the heat and sizzle that came off the stove as they were shifted around the pan with a wooden spoon. Men were clicking open cans of beer and popping the tops off bottles.

After the fight, it seemed, the crowd were going to make a day of it. Eat and drink and buy and sell. It was a fair, after all. Secret, free from taxation and rents and controls.

Men came over to Daddy and shook his hand. A man wearing a tweed jacket and a cloth cap slipped a fifty pound note into Daddy’s hand. ‘I’ve made a lot more from you today, I can tell you,’ he said. He handed Daddy a bottle of beer and toasted him.

Someone brought out a bottle of whisky and someone else an unmarked bottle containing vodka from their own distillery. ‘All above board, mind,’ he said as he poured out some of the vodka into a plastic glass. ‘And there’s more of this in my van,’ he said more loudly, so that others could hear. ‘I’m selling it for five pound a bottle, over there in the blue Astra.’

As well as the fifty pound note, Daddy was offered other gifts. Tributes. A crate of cigarettes, crates of spirits, a lamb’s carcass, skinned, wrapped and ready for Daddy to butcher. A box of vegetables. A box of kippers. Men had made money from Daddy today. I took the gifts and stowed them in the back of Ewart and Martha’s car. Men patted me on the back, too, and they ruffled my hair as if I were a token of luck. They asked me to take sips from their drinks before they drank themselves like they were toasting Daddy through me. There were arms flung around me, and rough, male kisses applied to my forehead.

Where was Cathy?

The man in the tweed jacket and flat cap who had slipped Daddy a fifty walked over to me. ‘You’re a funny lad, aren’t you?’ He reached up to my hair, like the others, and rubbed and gently pinched my right cheek for good measure.

‘Am I?’

‘Aye, you are that. You’re a funny little thing. A pretty little thing.’ The man looked me up and down. ‘Not built like your Daddy, are you?’ He chuckled to himself. ‘Are you going to be a boxer when you grow up?’

‘No. I’ve never boxed. Daddy’s never taught me.’

‘Never taught you, eh? Funny for a boxing father not to pass it on to his son. It’s a grand tradition, you know.’

He chewed on his lip and shuffled from side to side, then chuckled again.

I shrugged. ‘Daddy dindt want it for me.’

‘Is it that?’ said the man. ‘Or is it that you’re not big enough? You’ve got skinny little arms, handt you? Not sure what weight class you’d be in but you’ve not got the muscle, have you? Tallish, mind, but skinny. Worst combination for a boxer that. You carry your weight in your height not your muscles. Worst build for a boxer.’

‘Well it’s fine by me.’

‘Oh aye? Fine by you, is it? Well I woundt like sons who coundt hit back, that’s for sure, no matter how pretty they were. It’s true we can’t all be like your Daddy, but I thought his own son would be something along the way to him.’ He stopped for a moment. ‘Aye, though,’ he said. ‘You are a pretty one.’

I had never thought of myself as pretty.

I thought about Vivien stroking my hair and my face in the way this man had.

Where was Cathy?

The man chuckled again as I walked away. Daddy was still occupied with his admirers.

I walked into the woods. The trees’ trunks and enveloping foliage sheltered me from sounds of the fair, and I was left with my footsteps, the insects and the birds.

I walked in a straight line, following the rough path she had taken.

I had walked maybe 100 metres. Steps are slower in woodland.

‘Daniel.’ She was behind me with her back against a tree trunk. I had walked right past her without noticing. Her arms were crossed about her body.

‘What you doing?’

‘Nowt.’ She did not meet my eyes.

‘Daddy won.’

‘I know.’

‘Did you watch?’

‘No.’

‘Were you here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you hear from here?’

‘No.’

‘How then?’

‘Because I knew he’d win. Dindt you?’

‘Well yes, of course. I mean, of course. But I were nervous, I suppose.’

‘I wandt.’

‘Nothing is certain.’

‘Yes it is. He is.’

She turned and walked away from me, through the trees, back to the clearing where the men had watched the fight. Some were moving on now. Clearing up, going home. I followed her. Skipped after her. My legs were as long as hers now but I still struggled to keep the pace. I never went anywhere or did anything with as much urgency as Cathy did. Big sister, little brother. I wanted her to always lead the way, tell me what was what, carry me home.

Chapter Eighteen

I woke suddenly; it was the middle of the night.

Dogs barked.

Our dogs.

I could hear their claws scratching at the rough slate and their feet slipping as they tried to run. More than once they slapped their heads against my door as if searching for an open exit from a sinking ship. I could hear them throw themselves at the walls too. And at Cathy’s door.

Daddy was up. I could hear his voice and the raised voice of another man answering each other across the threshold of our house.

‘Bit funny indt it, don’t you think?’ the voice said. ‘Bit of a funny coincidence?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Daddy. He was not entirely calm.

‘But you don’t seem surprised. When you opened the door you seemed rather to have been expecting me.’

‘Not really. Not expecting you. Unexpected visitors aren’t unusual these days so I can’t say I’m shocked when they turn up, even so early.’

‘And you seemed to have been expecting this news.’

‘No.’

The dogs were still scrabbling and barking, crashing intermittently against the walls. I strained to hear Daddy and the stranger over the din. I needed to be nearer to the door. I climbed out from beneath my covers. Away from my bed the air was thin and fresh. I had slept naked that night and my skin pinched itself back against the cold.

‘Strangled, he was. His neck was so badly bruised we coundt tell if we’d cleaned off all the mud or not. My lad jus kept scrubbing away at him with soap and water to get all the marks off, like. I had to tell him to stop before he rubbed all his skin off too. And what I want to know is, who could do that? Who would have the strength? And who would want to? Motive, you see.’

‘I think I can smell your meaning but I want you to speak to me directly. Ask me.’

‘And it’s a strange thing. A strange way to kill a man, even a boy. Round these parts men are shot or stabbed, or beaten so badly they die of their wounds. Bleed slowly to death. They’re not strangled, like. First off, it would take strength, like I said. He wandt small. Tall, strong lad he was. Played all those posh-boy sports up at his school. Rugger and that. Squash and what have you. He woundt have gone down without a fight. Not unless the man who did for him was exceptionally strong. Second, there’s something so tender and sly about it. Why not keep your distance and clobber the man? Why not kick him when he’s down? Why not stick a knife in him, or cleaner still a bullet so as you don’t have to touch him at all. Why get up close and put your hands around his neck? Strange.’

The dogs were still moaning. Quieter now but keeping up the game. Setting each other off. Goading each other. Speaking to each other. Mimicking the conversation at the door.

‘Was it by your hands, John?’

‘You believe that it was.’

‘I’m asking you. Now answer.’

‘These hands did not throttle the boy.’

The dogs followed the silence of the men. I heard Daddy move to motion them out the front door then their paws pad and scrape on the slate then the gravel and earth, then fade as they followed his command and loped off down the hill.

‘Do you believe me?’

‘I do. But it don’t matter what I believe. Their blood is up, John. Price and his men. They’ve decided it were you, and they won’t hear owt different.’

‘What proof do they have?’

‘None. And they won’t get any. You know they won’t involve the police. There won’t be any kind of investigation. They’ll just decide.’

‘I know. I know the game. I know how it works around these parts.’

‘You do. And you know they have a convincing story. The story’s the thing.’

‘The fight was won. I won Cathy and Danny’s land for them. I had the paper in my hands. Signed by Price and me and the lawyer. It was witnessed. It was all secure. Why would I kill Price’s boy now? Why would I disrupt everything like that?’

‘Because—’

‘Because what? Because I can’t control myself? Because I’m little more than an animal?’

‘Because of your daughter, John. Because they were seen together. Because the lad had been sniffing around her for months.’

Daddy was mute. I could feel him recoil, shift his weight, step back gently in surprise.

‘What?’

‘Were you blind to it? Such an attentive father, John, in so many ways yet you dindt see that?’

‘What was there to see?’

‘Him and her. Him mainly. Coming over to talk to her whenever he could. But not in a friendly way. Not in a trying to get to know her kind of way. In a trying to get her away from the crowd kind of way. Sometimes his brother too. Him and his brother together. They were after her. Only she wandt keen, was she?’

‘Of course she wandt.’

‘No, no, she wandt.’

‘She’s too young.’

‘Aye. And he’s a creep. Both those lads are. Were, I should say. One’s dead.’

‘So they think I killed him for that?’

‘But you dindt?’

‘But I dindt.’

‘But you would’ve? For that, I mean. If the lad had hurt her.’

‘Of course.’

‘There, then.’

‘But I dindt.’

With no dogs to bark, when the men stopped speaking there was silence. I strained against the door frame, placing my ear canal exactly in line with the crack between the frame and the door, so as to hear them better should they start up again.

‘They found the boy in the early hours. It was dark but they had his dogs with them. A couple of scent hounds, I don’t know what sort, and they found him soon enough, darkness or no darkness. He was bundled up amongst the leaves with his coat laid over him like a shroud. Someone had laid it over his face, and I can see why: when we peeled it back his eyes were wide open, like they are sometimes, you know, on dead things. Animals, birds, people, the same. Wide open in astonishment; much wider than the eyelids could ever stretch in real life, like the lad wanted to capture all he could of the world, like he wanted to take a still image of that pretty little wood, the light coming through the trees, the little flowers beneath the ash and oaks, capture it and take it with him. Just that one still, wide-eyed picture. He used that last few seconds to fill his eyes with colour. But the colour from him had gone. And whatever shades he still held in his eyes, there were none in his skin. We knew he were dead right away. Wide, gaping eyes. Filthy, bruised and puckered neck. Scraps of brown leaves and moss in his mouth and stuck between his fine, white teeth. A dead man, no mistaking. Gorman was still there in the clearing. He’d stayed after the fight and the fair and after the carousing and after everyone else had left. He were sleeping overnight in the front of his van with the fish in their buckets and basins glugging around in the back. We lifted the lad between us. A long lanky thing, he was, but there were enough of us to manage. I took the middle part. I hoisted up his midriff while others took his head and feet. Damian wandt holding the lad’s head well enough. He had him more by the shoulders and his neck was bent back. I remember worrying that his bobbing head would snap his neck right through. Not that that can happen in that way but I remember worrying about it. And I were worried that that thick hair of his, longer now than when I last saw him, would get caught in the bracken as we cut a path for him back to the clearing. But we made it all right, and I reminded myself that dead things don’t mind about a bit of hair pulling like the living would. And dead things don’t worry like I do. Back in the clearing we found Gorman in his fish van and we rapped on the windows of the driving seat to wake him. Put him in the back of the van, we did. Back there with the barrels of living fish. Living, but all as cold as the dead boy. We laid him out in the centre with all the barrels of fish around him, like he was their dinner, laid out on a table in their midst for them to enjoy. I’ve seen a fully grown pike take a man’s finger in its mouth and draw blood. Vicious creatures. So there he was. And we cleaned him up a bit before driving him back to the manor and his father. All we had was cold water in a bucket and an old bar of soap but my lad did the best job he could, scrubbing and scouring at his skin. Skin softer than any of us working men, softer than any fighting man. A gentleman, in one sense. We got most of the dirt off him, and drove him to the manor with the fish slopping about in the back of the van. I can’t deny he looked like his usual pretty self once he was clean. And when he saw his boy it was like Price was falling in love with him all over again, like he was seeing his beautiful son for the first time. I never thought he was a tender man, or that he could love like that. Men surprise you.’

Daddy spoke. ‘He is a father like other fathers.’

‘Quite. But his tenderness turned to anger soon enough, I can tell you that. His sorrow curdled. And now it’s vengeance.’

‘Aye.’

‘Aye. He already has turned it on you. He already has his target. He was calling out your name like a baying buck. I believe you, John. You’re a man of your word and you have no reason to lie to the likes of me. But if you think Price is going to talk it out you’re mistaken. The only reason he’s not up here already is because his men handt arrived at the manor yet. His thugs, I mean. The ones who’ll be coming to collect you. He’s sent for them and they’ll come soon enough. Today, certainly. You’d be well advised not to be here. This is what I am trying to say to you, John. This is why I came up here. It was hard enough to slip away and Price will wonder where I’ve gone, but you’re a good man. You’re a good father and your children are sweet things. You must go. You and the kids must leave.’

‘This is our home. It is our house and it is their land.’

‘It doendt matter, John. Go. Go where he can’t find you. That’ll be far from here. What else can you do? You know very well that there’s nothing you can do. You’re the strongest man I have ever met. The strongest and the fastest and the cleverest man I have ever seen fight. But when ten men come here and point guns at your head your muscles don’t count for a damn thing. Neither do your wits. There’s nowt you can do at this point but run.’

Daddy made no answer. My breathing had quickened without me noticing and my heart was pounding in my chest. I was suddenly aware of the noises my body was making, of how loud my body had become. I wondered if the men could hear my heart and my lungs through the door of my room. I hoped not. They were too far away and too engrossed in their conversation and the wind they could hear outside would mask the sound of the air in me. But I felt like I could now hear the blood in my veins, coursing through the tiny channels like rushing white water in a gorge. I felt like I could hear it roiling inside of me, almost trying to cut new paths within me, larger channels to the sea outside. I had been prone to nosebleeds when I was a child. I put my right hand up to my face to check, almost instinctively. Usually I would smell the sweetness of the blood but there was nothing to smell or feel or taste. I was fine.

Daddy and the man at the door exchanged a few muffled words then the man left. A deep engine stumbled into life and hummed into the distance as the man drove away.

Daddy filled his own vast lungs with air then released it with a sound like the wind rushing between a pair of mountains.

‘Daniel?’ he said, quietly. Perhaps he had known I had been hiding there all along but he could not have been sure how much I had heard. I turned my door handle slowly, still trying to be quiet about it even though there was now no need. Daddy’s was a dark silhouette in the dim hall light. The sun was still low in the sky and the edges of the trees outside were illuminated with bright precision.

I moved towards my father. ‘Do you need to leave, Daddy?’

He shook his head. He took me in his arms for a moment and held me tight. He stooped to kiss my forehead and I felt for a moment his lips, so supple and surprisingly soft, and the bristles of his beard, at once silken and prickly. He took hold of my shoulders and turned me back towards my bedroom then placed a hand at the small of my back and gave me a little push.

‘Sleep well, Danny. I will see you in the morning.’