The Long Dry Page 4

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  the Mole

  Four days ago Kate found a mole. The cats had brought it dead into the kitchen. They never eat them, because the taste is bad to cats, but they bring them in as gifts. It always amazed her how clean moles were, with the velvet fur which can brush either way. She was angry at the cats for killing something beautiful and blind but they didn’t understand. If they caught a rat they got a plate of milk.

  Kate threw the mole behind the barn and the flies found it. The green flies which feed on the wounds of sheep and lay their eggs in them this time of year, so the sheep have to be dosed all the time. They laid eggs on the mole as it began to stink. The skin on its face and hands dried up and stretched and beetles took it so half of the face was bone now and you could see the teeth. The eyes go first. Sexton beetle larvae broke down the meat and guts and the things inside and soon there was a hole in the side of the mole and the flies buzzed round it constantly. Even small birds came and took maggots that were feeding on the mole to feed their chicks, and took fur as well, to line their nests.

  The beetles too ate the fly maggots and dug a shaft below the mole and dragged it some way down, rolling off the skin so some of the mole was in the ground and was above too. It was too big for the beetles to use totally. They laid eggs close by and fed the hatched larvae with partially digested bits of mole. Later, the beetles bit an entry hole in the rotting carcass and helped the growing larvae in. They fed themselves.

  When much of the goodness of the mole was gone and the bigger insects went the ants came, cleaning the bones and the lining from the skin, and taking the weak maggots. They worked beautifully, with blind obedience, blind as a mole until all the mole was gone with them into the ground again, and only some parts of bone would be left if you found it now.

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  the Cats

  She sees the cat cut slyly across the lawn. The cat had long been tormented by the gentle terrorisms of the children. In defence, he had adopted a placid, somewhat bourgeois cynicism; he also smouldered with the simple fury of having had his balls cut off and in defiance of his emasculation paced about the place with the slow steps of a tiger: it’s a threatening ability in nature to look like you can put down great weight gently.

  The other cat, whom Emmy had insisted on naming ridiculously, used different tactics, she being a she. She was beautiful – a tortoiseshell with teardrop eyes and the inbuilt mischief anything with lovely eyes has naturally. She loved Gareth, and seduced him every chance she got. She was frivolous as only the beautiful can be. She was the hunter.

  The other cat brought bigger things in, like baby rabbits and once, remarkably, a seagull, as if to say ‘if I wanted to I could’. But the constant offering of small rodents and slow birds were brought by her.

  There had been a third cat, a sister, but she was gone. She was weaker from the start and, as she would, Kate loved her the most. She went missing at hay-making and no one wanted to believe that she had gone under the machine, so they decided to accept that she must have been kidnapped by holidayers, as happens. Gareth was convinced the dogs next door had taken her.

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  Fire

  Gareth comes back along the road in case the cow has broken through the hedge, but he knows she has not. There is no sign of her. In the hedge, bordering the piece of land he wants to buy – he sees the houses in his mind – is the dead black ash of old fire. All summer there have been little fires in the hedges where people have thrown cigarette ends from their cars. They throw out the cigarette and drive on, as the flame curls and starts and rips up the very dry grass of the bank into the brittle hedge. It takes nothing, this year.

  He wonders if the vet will come. Curly now is very old. He’s had him since he was a pup.

  When Emmy was very small she used to drag the dog round by his ear, as if she were using him to help her walk. They joke that the dog taught her to walk, not them. Now he is very old and can’t clean himself properly and has developed a painful lump the size of half a football on his side. Yesterday he was bitten by a rat, so the vet has to come now. It is time.

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  He goes over the style that joins the footpath cutting through their land – the strange, ambiguous green arrow – and as he lands he turns his ankle. It hurts sharply for a moment, and he suddenly feels tired and angry. He can’t stop thinking of the dog. Often, the ground here is crossed with tracks – foxes and cats, walking boots and strayed sheep. Now there is nothing – no sign of movement; just the deep shape here and there of a horse’s hoof made long ago, when the mud was wet. The immoveable fact that the cow is missing begins to anger him as he follows the footpath, the shock of his ankle slowing to a dull pain. He must be very careful with his anger because it is very big when it comes.

  The footpath runs between two hedges for a while before breaking out into open land, following a line of blackthorn down towards the river to the beach, still some miles away. The view is stunning, with the land going gently away and the sea before you, silk and blue above a line of thick gorse, bursting into yellow. In this weather, in this heat, the gorse sometimes smells of coconut and honey, and you can hear the seed pods exploding in the sun with sharp snaps.

  The scent comes to him and he hears far away the ducks in the water, and the Transit cutting back, he guesses, into the farmyard. Looking out over the sea he thinks of his son; he does not want to farm, but he’ll know one day what a wonderful place this is.

  A pheasant lifts in front of him, a claxon call – the call they always make, just twice, before thunder. He’s losing his hunger to shoot now. Before, he would trace the line of the gun at his shoulder and imagine the shot and the pheasant falling. It’s incredible how beautiful a pheasant is.

  He sees, some way in front of him, a strange thing, something dead and crushed. He finds it is a rabbit, crushed and broken under the weight of broken bits of concrete. He stares, looking at it, thinking of the dog, hollow for a while. It infuriates him that men are capable of such articulate cruelty.

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  the Rabbit

  The two boys had come along and found the rabbit dying by the bank. The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still; and the rabbit was wet and matted like a cloth, like a dog when it gets wet. At first they thought it was dead. It had the shapelessness of meat.

  The boy saw it lain in the short grass by the bank, by the dry droppings and the scuff marks of other rabbits and the thick hard blackthorn above, coming into fruit.

  ‘Hey, look,’ said the boy. He didn’t want his brother to see it, but he knew now the other boy would see it anyway so he said it.

  The other boy stood away from the rabbit for a moment then edged to it and peered over it and neither of them were sad because the rabbit was dead.

  The eyes were open and they did not move. Around them the breeze was going warmly through the blackthorn and the ticking sound of a tractor working came to them across the fields. Then the rabbit’s eye moved.

  The smaller boy went to prod it with his toe because he needed to understand better. He screwed up his face when he stretched out his foot. The eye moved slowly, just half-closing but not quite: as if it were willing itself just to close.

  ‘Don’t prod it, it’s still alive,’ said the other boy. The tractor ticked and chugged far away. They were both of them sad then but they did not want the other to see it. They stood around and nearly walked off and they knew it wasn’t a right thing.

  ‘I’m going to finish it off,’ said the older boy. It was simple and brave, what he said.

  When he said it the rabbit kicked but could not get up so it just combed round in a half-circle and it was like the rabbit was helping the boy to do what he said. Like it was trying to tell him with his desperation that it was the right thing. And they knew they had to kill the rabbit then because it was dying.

  They looked around and there were some old stones by a wall and the younger boy picked up the biggest stone he
could in both hands and looked at the older boy bravely because he was hurt when he saw the rabbit kicking and was confused and would do it himself.

  The younger boy loved the older boy and would do it because of the way the older boy had said so quietly and straight that it had to be done and he knew that the older boy felt very sad inside, perhaps sadder than him.

  ‘It might not die properly,’ said the older boy. ‘I’ll try and not hurt it and just do it quick.’ It made the younger boy feel sick when he knew he didn’t have to kill the rabbit.

  The older boy picked up one or two stones and they didn’t feel right and then he found one which sat in his hand and thought it would be okay. The stone was warm and flat in the older boy’s hand.

  He always told the younger boy to do the things he didn’t want to but this time he didn’t; so the younger boy knew it was a very big thing they were doing.

  The rabbit was twisted and all the wrong shape since trying to move and the boy knelt down close by it. He didn’t want to touch the rabbit with his hands.

  ‘Don’t touch it with your hands,’ he said, ‘because it might be poisoned and we can’t wash our hands.’ He wanted to touch the rabbit with his hands so he could calm it so it could die gently.

  He’d heard about this disease; how his mother’s brothers when they were younger would have to go out around the farmland and would come back with bags full of rabbits that they had shot. They had to burn them. And he knew that the disease still happened, but not so bad.

  He put his foot on the rabbit’s shoulder to hold it down where he thought he should hit it on the neck and the rabbit’s deep and sad eye opened at him and was deep and very beautiful. And the boy didn’t show anything but inside he asked the rabbit if it was alright to do this and the rabbit’s eye just half-closed in defeat, very slowly.

  He hit the rabbit with the edge of the stone. He hit it as hard as he thought but he couldn’t bring himself to want to hurt the rabbit, which was necessary, so the rabbit jerked under his foot and its back legs stretched and kicked. He hit it again in the neck where he had hit it before and there was a lot of muscle there and now the mouth was open and the tiny teeth showed, and the eye looked at him black and flashing with fear. Then he knew he had to hurt the rabbit and in him was the horrible slow panic of knowing something like this. He put the edge of the stone hard into the neck and just pushed and turned and tried to crush. He wanted the rabbit to die very much now and there was a click and the eye flashed and he knew it was done. The tiny mouth was gritted with strain and the teeth looked very sharp and white.

  The younger boy was holding the big rock in both his hands up by his cheek and when he saw from his brother’s face that it was done he dropped it away and it landed on the dry ground with a deep thud.

  They didn’t feel good about the rabbit dying but it was better. They took some old concrete from around the dry wall and took it over to the rabbit. When they went back to the rabbit it looked quiet and peaceful. The younger boy felt sorry for his brother and looked at him to see if he was okay and he was. The older boy told him about how another thing might take the rabbit and then take the poison; so they covered it up with the pads of concrete.

  The younger boy put the concrete over the rabbit’s head and wanted to walk away very quickly because his hand, for a moment, had brushed the fur; the older boy put the cement down on the rest of the rabbit and it wouldn’t balance so he turned it over and rested it down. When he rested it down, the back leg moved.

  When they walked away he did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved and told himself a lot that things moved after they were dead for a while because the nerves jumped. He’d seen his father skin an eel and even without a head it had jumped and twitched. He wished that he knew he’d killed the rabbit. He did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved because he knew that this knowing – the rabbit not dead perhaps and dying still under the heavy concrete – was only his; and he thought: ‘if I had touched it with my hands I would have known for sure.’ He knew then that people must be very strong.

  The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still; and the two boys left the track and walked quickly over the low, green field, and the younger boy rubbed his hand where it had touched the rabbit’s fur.

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  Chapter Five

  the Tractor Wheel

  Kate was not from here and she didn’t grow up to be on a farm. When, years later, they found that Gareth had chlamydia – had caught it from the sheep – and this was why she’d lost the babies, Gareth was relieved. It fell on him. It was not a failure of her body and he hoped that Kate would not blame herself then. But it remained impossible for her to accept that some things die. After losing the babies, she felt every death.

  She was checking the cows in the barn and she knew then that one had lost its calf and she was very angry with Gareth for not telling her. He had cleared up the bloodied hay but she knew there was a cow who should have a calf that did not have a calf after counting twice, after seeing the cow empty. She heard Dylan go off in the car.

  You could hear cows placidly flicking flies away with their tails. The old wheel of the tractor was in the barn and she could almost feel the hard treads in her back. The sun was coming down on the corrugated barn roof and it was very hot inside, like in a greenhouse, and outside the sparrows were crazy loud, picking and fighting at the hay seed and dust-bathing fatly. But she was just very angry.

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  Gareth thought of her now. He doubled back up a dry track that was wide enough to take a tractor and had deep track marks so it was awkward to walk with his painful ankle. The sun had really come up now.

  ‘I must never forget how perfectly built she is,’ he thought loudly to himself. ‘She is changing now, but it does not matter.’ He’d meant simply to search the top fields, to rule them out, hoping for the vet to come then, and then return on the quad bike to the house; but he was walking, and it was as if he needed to walk.

  He feels himself open his shoulders and hold his head up against the irritations of the missing cow, and the violence of the rabbit; he feels his body brace itself and challenge these things. ‘It does not matter, she will change,’ he thinks. And he knows that he must help her feel this for her to be well again. His body still demands hers, the familiarity of the map of her. The places of her that give softly when he holds her; that have changed and grown and shifted through the years, as if lilting with the changes of his own flesh, to be in tune still; as if he was the hard land and she the water that would always know it, however it changed. The things of her still fascinate him. It is true, he knows, that his man’s chemistry will always want the tight trap of younger women, or the exoticness of a different skin – something other than he had; but he knew they would not have the smaller skills to satisfy him; would be over-aware, like strangers, be too full of thought to properly trick his body to the places he had reached with his wife. It is easy for him now to indulge his visual need for women – his son’s magazines, the television, the magazines he has shyly for himself – but he never believed that they would, any of them, feel as good to him as her. He cannot imagine his body against the body of another girl. They had grown to each other and she had only ever been with him so he thought it was like she was only his shape inside.

  He thinks of her perfect feet – how for years after they’d met she’d still kick off her shoes at every opportunity, to be barefoot. When did she stop doing this, he thinks. He did not notice. It gives him a strange guilt.

  He thinks of his daughter’s bare feet, and of the painted wellies she refuses to take off. He wonders how she will be, his daughter with strange green eyes from somewhere in their background, one or the other of them. Will she love like her mother? With belligerent decision. It scares him slightly. He knows his fear for her will grow as she gets older in a way it did not with his son, and he hopes he will not hurt her because of his fear for her.


  But fear is rarely in context. In his father’s memories it tells how he lost his first wife. The loss had a lot to do with his leaving the bank. He wanted to be on the land and see things live, and grow. His second wife was much younger and he cared for her greatly.

  His father, every day, apart from the few months when he broke his leg, would cross the cows across the small road that ran between two pastures. It was when he was an old man, about eighty. He was crossing the cows one day when a police car brought his second wife back. She had been driving through the village and had put the car into the corner of a parked delivery lorry. She did not brake until the lorry came through the windscreen and the bonnet had been opened like a tin. When they checked her eyes they found that she had lost peripheral vision and was living as if she was in a tunnel. They found the tumour on her pituitary gland months later and took her miles away to hospital to die, though they tried to operate. Incredibly, because she’d always seemed so delicate to everyone, she lived. A few months later his father contracted bowel cancer and died in hospital after only three days, which meant he must have been in pain for a very long time. Gareth knew that he had died because he couldn’t bear the thought of out-living the second woman that he loved.