In the Evil Day

73

…WALES…

Niemand got up early, left Jess asleep, innocent-faced, and went for a look around. They were high here, the farm buildings on a terrace cut into the hillside. Behind it, the slope was dotted with scrubby wind-whipped trees and then there were conifers, solid, dark.

Below the farm, the road twisted down the hill and crossed a small stone bridge over a stream. He couldn’t see water but the stream’s course was marked by dense vegetation. Low drystone walls flanked the road and all around on the slopes other walls marked out fields, nothing in them, no farm animals, no signs of tillage.

He could see where the road ended at a gate. From behind the barn, a track, deep wheel ruts, went around the side of the hill. There were no other buildings in sight, no power lines.

He went into the dark house and took the map off the corkboard in the kitchen, went outside and sat on an old bench beside the front door. It was large-scale, British Ordnance Survey, a decent map. He knew about maps, he had had maps beaten into him-reading them, memorising them, summoning them up on moonless nights in swampy tropical lowlands and high, hard, broken country.

Someone had marked the position of the farm in ballpoint. He traced the road they’d come on, the village, some long name full of ‘l’s and ‘m’s, the other roads around them. There weren’t many roads and most of them dead-ends. He studied the contours, the elevations, the beacons, the watercourses. A little peace began to fall on him. It would be hard for anyone to surprise them here.

‘You sneaked away.’

Jess, still in her nightdress, arms folded against the cold, no makeup. She looked like a teenager, he thought. Beautiful. He looked away, shy.

‘Nice country,’ Niemand said. ‘Looks like sheep country but no sheep.’

She came up behind the bench and kissed the back of his neck, put both hands on his forehead and pulled his head against her stomach. He felt the soft warmth of her and a lump rose in his throat.

Niemand made breakfast out of cans in the pantry: grilled tomatoes and pork sausages. There was mustard powder and he made some with water and a little dark fragrant vinegar.

‘Useful around the house then,’ she said when she came from the bathroom, shining clean, hair damp.

They ate.

‘Good this,’ she said. ‘Who says you need fresh food? I could live out of cans.’

They were almost finished when he realised that he hadn’t noticed her eating. His feeling about eating with other people seemed to have left him.

‘There are clothes here,’ she said. ‘But you’ll drown in them, he’s big and overweight. Fat, actually.’

Niemand knew he should do what he had said he would do. Go. He had a chance of finding the Irishman and they could get him out of the country. But his fears had abated. How could they find them here, so far from London? He thought he knew how they’d found him at Jess’s place. The motorbike. The registration. It was obvious. The man chasing him had got the number, they could bribe the owner’s address out of some clerk.

But now these people had nothing to go on. Jess had brought him to a remote farm owned by a sister of a friend and the friend was somewhere far away, Nepal, and the sister was in America.

These people didn’t have supernatural powers. They’d had luck, that was all. Just luck.

They washed up, she said, let me do it, she pushed him with a hip, he pushed back, they bumped and jostled, laughing, at the end she rested her head on his arm for a few seconds. He kissed her hair. She turned her head and he was kissing her lips, faintly salty.

He broke away. Something said, she’ll think that’s all you want.

‘Could we stay for a while?’ he said. As he said the word, he thought, we, who am I to say, we?

Jess nodded. ‘I’ve got nothing urgent.’

He showered and found clothes that hung on him. They went outside, walked down the track around the side of the hill, shoulders touching, hips touching. He found her hand, long fingers.

‘Tell me about your life,’ she said. ‘We’re like people who meet because they crash into each other.’

They walked in the wind, a sky to eternity, torn-tissue clouds. He talked, he told her. He had never told anyone. He couldn’t remember anyone ever asking, but he wouldn’t have told them.

‘When I was a kid, my dad wouldn’t come home for days. An alcoholic. Once my mother was in hospital and he wasn’t there and the welfare took me, put me in this place. The man there tried to make me…do things. He beat me with a belt, I was bleeding. The belt buckle. I remember later I could see the buckle on my legs. Anyway, I ran away, to the railway yards. My pants and my shirt stuck to me, the blood. I was there for weeks, hiding in the old carriages, the black men gave me food, the workers, they had nothing, they owed white people bugger all, they were treated like dirt, but they looked after me. That, I’ve never forgotten that. No. You end up with these pricks, they’d waste any black. Well, this white guard saw me one day, he chased me, he couldn’t catch me, and the police came with a dog and it sniffed me out. They took me home. My dad was sober and my mother came back, so that was okay for a while.’ He stopped. ‘You don’t want to hear this stuff.’

Jess swung their arms, bounced her right temple against his upper arm. ‘Yes. I want to hear it.’

They walked, the rutted track turning north-east, the land bare, never cultivated, small huddles of trees.

‘Anyway, he started drinking again, hitting my mom…next thing we were on Crete, me and my mom. I only had a bit of Greek but you learn quickly when you have to. I must’ve been ten, eleven. We were there for years, I kind of forgot about South Africa. When I thought about it, it was like something someone told me about, a story.’

The track ran out on the crest of the hill, just a circle where vehicles had turned, churned the thin topsoil, the far side in view, more of the same, farm buildings a long way away, perhaps five or six kilometres, it was difficult to judge, too much dead ground in between. Ahead was a low drystone wall. The farm boundary. They turned for home.

‘Did you go back?’

‘My mom had a fight with her family, I never worked it out, and my dad, he’d been writing to her about how he’d changed, how much money he had, that made her go back. So we went. It was all bullshit and we had no money to leave and she got sick again and she died.’

The landscape was spread before them-big fields, walls, far below the wandering, bushy line of the stream, the land rising again, another hill, this one bare and rocky.

‘I really loved her, you know,’ said Niemand. ‘She was such a brave person. She wouldn’t give up…’ ‘What about school?’ said Jess. ‘Didn’t you go to school?’

‘Always. I finished school, on the automatic pilot. I liked reading, that helped, the other kids read nothing, just comics, junk, and I finished and I joined the army.’

He felt a lightness. He wanted to go on talking about himself, but he knew he should stop.

‘I’ve never really talked about it, I’ve never met anyone…well, that’s my little story.’

‘And the army?’ she said.

‘I was happy there. I came from this life, nothing was certain, then I had…you knew what was expected of you. They tried to kill you, run you to death, weed out people, but they looked after you. If you could take it, you had value. I got into the parachute battalion. Then I found out what hard was like, the stuff before, that was nothing.’

‘It’s about killing people, isn’t it?’ she said, letting go his hand. ‘Being a soldier?’

How many people had he killed? He didn’t want to look at her, looked away, at the valley, the upland, there was cover up there, a fold in the hill, going up, you would go for that, jinking, east to west, back again, use the patches of vegetation.

‘Have you killed people?’

On the opposite slope, a long and bare slope running up to a wainy edge and a dull silver sky, halfway up a tree spat black specks, birds, a scattergun spit of birds, disturbed by something.

‘Have you?’

‘Yes,’ said Niemand.

They walked in silence. Apart. He looked at her quickly, he knew that he had lost her, she was a dream, he had never had her.

‘No pleasure in it,’ he said. ‘I’m not like that.’

She was far, far too good for anyone like him.

They walked for a distance. He could not look at her but he knew how far she was from him. To a tenth of a millimetre. Then she took his sleeve, his hand, she moved against him, rubbed her shoulder against him.

‘No,’ she said, ‘no, I don’t think you’re like that.’