The Facts of Life and Death

15

THERE WERE TWO things Donald Moon hated above all – liberals and litterbugs. They were the same thing, really. Without liberals there would be no littering. Nor much crime at all, Donald figured, because without liberals, those found guilty of any crime would be locked up so fast that their feet would barely touch the ground.

And at the head of that queue, if Donald had his way, would be the litterbugs.

Donald had once owned seventy acres of clifftop along the coastal path, and had spent half his life picking up plastic bags and bottles so that his lambs wouldn’t choke on them, and the other half glaring through binoculars, hoping to catch someone red-handed in the act of dropping contraband. He never did – the stuff seemed to drop itself! – but he never gave up.

Donald and his wife Marion had kept a hundred endangered sheep until he’d finally had to admit that he had become that most endangered breed of all – a small farmer in a world where livestock was just another product, like cardboard or biscuits. Each year it got harder and harder, and when his income finally became an outcome, Donald sold sixty-five acres to a neighbour and ninety-seven sheep to other doomed enthusiasts. He turned his remaining five acres over to vegetables and fruit to save on the shopping bill, and used his last three Leicester Longwools to lever his way into a part-time job at The Big Sheep in Bideford. Tourists flocked there to watch sheep shows and sheep shearing and even sheep races, where sheep competed in the Sheep Grand National, with straw-bale jumps and little knitted jockeys on their backs – all as though sheep were exotic beasts in a woolly circus.

Once his sheep and his land were gone, there was nothing to stop litter becoming Donald’s primary focus. He would roust the stout Marion every weekend to traipse across North Devon armed with pointed sticks for spearing paper or hooking Tesco bags out of hedges. They wore matching Day-Glo vests for safety, and carried big green waste sacks for the cans and the plastic that people flung randomly around the countryside, and the disposable nappies laid carefully in lay-bys – as if they would soon be dealt with by some kind of state-funded poo patrol.

Donald was on his way home from work that Saturday when he saw the newspaper in the lay-by into Abbotsham.

Newspapers were Donald’s bête noire. An entire village could be ruined by a copy of the Sun and a stiff breeze. Lurid headlines flapping in gutters, flattened against hedges, fluttering up trees. Paper tits dissolving to porridge in the rain.

So, even though the light was almost gone from the sky, and even though it had rained all day and his overalls were damp against his thighs, Donald Moon did a U-turn and pulled over.

This newspaper was the Daily Mail, which was even thicker than the Sun and, therefore, potentially even worse. Already the Coffee Break insert had escaped and spread itself across a field gate twenty yards away.

Donald picked up the main section, then went after the rest. When he got to the gate, he could see in the dim light that Coffee Break had already come apart, and that several pale pages were now dotted about the wet grass of the field beyond.

There was nothing for it. Now he had seen it, he had to do some thing about it. Donald muttered under his breath and climbed the gate.

In the half-dark he dropped to the ground on the other side and landed on something that rolled under his boot. He slipped to one knee, while the other leg twisted away from him at an angle that made his eyes water.

Donald was not a swearer by nature, but he couldn’t help himself, and he was surprised to find that – contrary to what he’d always claimed in company – it actually did make him feel better.

Finally he got his breath back and blew tears out of his nose between his finger and thumb.

Then he peered down through the gloom to see what it was that he had trodden on.

It was a woman’s face.