The Long Dry Read online

  * * *

  the Car

  The car just slumbers, like an old building, being taken over day by day more, by the brambles and grass where it’s parked, which seems like an impossible place for a car to be anyway, as if it was dropped from the sky there.

  The car, which has been everything from a spaceship to a tank, to the head of a large animal, still gleams though. Light bouncing, the white sheen of its runners and trim, even off the dusty windows. Because of the way the light comes off it, it seems as if it is moving, sometimes.

  For years there were stories as to how the car got there, that far into an empty field. Even with brand new tyres, pumped to bursting, it was a mystery how the car drove past the hedges, over the marshy land. Dylan never remembered the tyres any other way than they were when he played in the car – dry, torn shards of rubber, like the bark that peels off an old tree around the wheel hubs that were rusting, so they looked like they were crumbling to the exotic earth you imagine in a desert.

  There was the story of the burglars that had kidnapped Gareth’s mother and driven off wildly pursued, until they were gunned down by his irate father with an old army rifle (leading to the story he’d been an undercover sniper, not a doodlebug spotter in the war).

  There was the story of the flood – how the whole family had to climb into the car one day as the heavens came down, to escape a Biblical flood which left the car, as the waters receded, there in the field, and that’s why the ground was still marshy.

  There was also the story of the balloon. Which is the one they liked best, because of the photo. Of how Gareth’s father, as he told them himself, had built an enormous balloon and tied it to the car to travel around the countryside, high above the landscape. Whenever this story was told, Gareth’s father would make a big thing of trying to find ‘the photograph’, looking here and there in drawers, until he unearthed an old postcard of a Zeppelin and, pointing to the carriage slung underneath, which was tiny in the photograph, would say: ‘there’s the car, you see’.

  It never mattered to the children that the stories changed. They were equally true; they had their own theories anyway. The car was a playground.

  Dylan hasn’t been to the car for a long while, but years from now he will remember it as he drives past a convoy of Morris Travellers on their way to a vintage rally somewhere. And like all memories, that sit below us, out of the glare of our awareness, in shadow, the memory of the car will rush up, devastatingly. The red leather interior, in places busted, spilling stuffing; the windscreen wipers, which you turned by hand; the plastic padded sun visors; its perforated roof – like a teabag; the hot smell of the car and the broken floor, the sticky feel of the seats in the sun; the windows, that slid open.

  It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.

  __

  Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a second he sees the car as if it was new – the times they went for picnics in it – rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.

  He wants to walk back to Kate, and find her, and tell her very simply he wants her. He wants to love her with the clean love his father had for his wife. He knows she will be angry about the calf, which she will know about by now; and that she does not like her body, the way it has grown at the moment. But they have been through this before. After Dylan, when her body had changed and the pride of carrying was gone. She hated her body then, but to him she had grown more wonderful. Her ability to produce bewildered him, even though all his life he had been used to the processes of breeding. The things she hated most he loved. To him, her stretch marks looked like velvet brushed the wrong way, or wind across the grass. He wants her to be happy and to know that he does not want her to be any other thing but what she is; and she should walk barefoot again.

  They should forget about the cow, and the children for a moment, and take off their shoes and go into the warm grass of the garden. He hopes very much that she is not going to be again like she was after the miscarriages, when she cut her hair all short and cut herself and would not speak to him for months. That was very hard. Thinking of it now it scares him that he won’t have the strength this time to live through it with her. He worries about his ability to fight for things, when he is tired like this – from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things – his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievable small heroisms which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.

  He pushes this thought out of his mind, this suddenly subversive want for a tragedy to bring them back together, and he thinks of her walking in the fresh grass. He knows she will refuse at first and make ridiculous excuses of responsibilities: ‘I have to do the washing’, ‘what about the cow?’, ‘you did not tell me of the calf’ but he will persuade her, in this lovely sunshine, will pick her up and carry her if he has to so she laughs and he will put her down in the warm green grass without her shoes.

  __

  the Other Calf

  He crosses the yard. In the hay barn sparrows are collecting hayseed and bathing in the dust – like they do in the cow barn, so the dust lifts and catches the sunlight coming through the wooden slats, dancing up in gold spirals. The flies buzz and tick. With the day properly here now, the swallows are high in the sky. As he comes into the yard, the heat seeming to rise off it already, the lost flight of pigeons explode into the air and are gone, hard over the house.

  Kate is in the first field. He sees her pacing quickly at the gate, her head down and he can tell she is speaking to herself, to the ground, her hair tied off her face; and she is walking too quickly. He sees the problem as she looks up and meets his eyes, the blood on her arm.

  ‘Where have you been?’ It bursts out. ‘The bloody cow has thrown its calf. I can’t get it. I can’t get it out.’ She keeps on talking, cursing at him and the cow but he is already going to the cow.

  __

  The heavy brown cow was lying awkwardly back up against the bank. He ran to the shed to get the ropes and wished he had the bike to make things faster and to not hurt his ankle more and he knew she would be angry at him for not bringing the bike.

  ‘Where the hell have you been. I thought you were coming straight back,’ she was saying. He had the ropes now and was running over to the cow, wincing at the pain in his ankle. She stopped at the gate and did not come with him to help and he did not know why and he kept thinking about the blood running down her arm and the time she cut herself in the shower. She was still shouting.

  The cow was a mess. The wet rod of the calf was half out, with one of its front legs twisted awkwardly still inside the cow. The calf seemed dead, but they often did and then they were alive when you got them out. He put his hand into the cow and tried to find the leg but it was all wrong and he knew the hoof had already cut the cow inside.

  He had his eyes open but he was staring nowhere, trying to visualise from what he could feel, the shape of the calf inside the cow. Kate was still screaming at him from the gate and he was trying to think. ‘Where the bloody hell were you, you said you’d check the damn cows an hour ago so that’s why I didn’t check them. You should have bloody told me you weren’t going to check the cows.’ He looked briefly at her and she scared him; she was coming apart. He felt his patience snap in his stomach, the adrenaline of it go through him. ‘Just go,’ he shouted. ‘Christ. Just go.’

  The cow tried to lift herself as it sensed the things around her and he put his hand gently on the cow.

  ‘Easy, easy, easy,’ he was saying to her, his other arm on her haunch. ‘Easy, girl.’

  He brought the leg round and laid it along the calf’s body inside its mother but he couldn’t get i
t round enough to bring it out. He looked up again and Kate was gone from the gate but Emmy stood there scared and bravely watching.

  He took the pulling ropes and closed the noose around the one free leg then tried to fix the rest of the rope behind the other shoulder blade. The calf was limp and its tongue now was flopping from its mouth. He sat back and braced his feet and pulled on the ropes, trying to gauge his weight in time with the contractions of the cow. He missed the extra traction of his little finger. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things you lack. He could feel things give very slightly, a half inch won but brought back inside by the cow’s big body. Then it came all at once, and the long black calf came out with the speed and sound of liquid. It was dead. He smacked it a few times but he knew that it was dead. Blood leaked thickly from the cow’s gaping uterus. She panted slowly with the shock of birth. From the mark they’d made on her back, he knew she carried twins. The other calf inside her might be already dead. Emmy was by him now, looking at the dead black calf. It looked to her like a patch of wet tarmac on a new road.

  ‘Mummy says she wasn’t strong enough to pull the calf out by herself and that’s why it died,’ she said. He looked at her. ‘No, love. This one wasn’t made properly – look, can you see? It hadn’t grown properly. It was dead already love, it just had to come out.’ It played on him that this was the second death like this today and he knew now that throwing the other calf down the well was a problem. A fault in the stock? He thought of his wife. She was still shouting, he could hear her. Inside he wondered if it was his fault – if he had been too long. She came from a rural town and she was used to farms but she was not born to be on a farm as he was. He felt his anger go, this time; it had died down and receded.

  ‘Go and tell Mum I need some soap and water and she might have to help me pull now. This one is a twin.’ Emmy ran off up the field. She ran very importantly.

  * * *

  He ate alone. Kate had not helped him with the cow. He was sad that he had hurt her by shouting at her; but not sad because the thing was bad, more sad in the way we are sad when we hurt a weaker animal. He was sad about having more strength than her.

  Dylan was supposed to have taken the bread crates back but he hadn’t, so Gareth took the bread crates out of the van and hosed them down and enjoyed the cool water and left them against the wall to dry in the sun.

  He came inside and soaped down his arm and the warm soft water felt good on him. He’d meant to get a gas bottle changed that week and there was a note on the cooker saying ‘no gas’ so he had bread and cheese. He’d tried to phone his son to ask him to collect more gas, but his mobile was switched off. So he left a message but knew he wouldn’t collect the gas. He should ask the vet about the two dead calves, because there might be a big problem.

  His wife was upstairs with a headache. He didn’t know anymore whether he believed in these headaches or not. It was like she could switch them on and off, but he hated thinking this. He also thought that the violence of her anger nowadays could bring on these headaches. He thought: she is angry first, and it comes up as a headache, because there is nowhere for so much anger to go.

  He tried to sip his coffee but it was filthy. Without the gas he couldn’t warm the pan so he’d tried to heat it up by adding hot water from the kettle but it made it thin and weak and it tasted wrong.

  He threw the coffee in the sink. It’s not the headache making her angry, it’s her. Her emotions are triggers, they trigger chemicals and she gets ill. It could just be her eyes, he thinks. He knows bad eyes can lead to headaches. But she won’t have them checked. It could just be this constant heat. Her fair skin in the sun. He wondered whether he should go and see her but he knows it is better not to. She was like a grenade when she was like this. Simply going to her could be like putting back the pin, would diffuse her anger. Or she might just explode. In the rare times she was angry, Emmy was like this too; but she was so scowling and tiny and compact that she even looked like a grenade and they joked about it. When she was angry she was very furious which made them love her very much.

  She sits at the table, drawing in her sketchbook now. Zebra watches her, and she talks while she draws. When she draws it is not with the excessive gestures of a child her age but it is small; as if everything on the paper is vital. The drawing overflows with details, so much so that she always must explain things to people when she shows them; the different instruments and inhabitants of the worlds she creates, which are always progressing somewhere, always in story, never strange, isolated still lives. If you asked her about her picture she always answered in colour: ‘that’s a red mushroom, a bright green dress’; but she never coloured in. ‘I know what colours that they are,’ she would say. She draws only from memory, she won’t look and draw, as if the realness of a thing will destroy its place in her picture for it. She says she doesn’t have the right pencils for the colours she sees.

  Once, Gareth asked her about the tiniest cloud of almost unseeable dots. ‘They’re a cloud of lacewings that we saw today’ she said, ‘only they’re so small you cannot see they’re lacewings.’ She always made distinctions between lacewings and fairies. There was no fooling her. When they had seen them that day, Gareth had said ‘look, fairies.’ ‘No, they’re insects,’ she said, ‘but I can see why a grown up thinks they are fairies.’ To her, lacewings were just as magical as fairies anyway.

  The first time they knew about her strangeness was when she came into their room one night and said, without being frightened, ‘Mummy there’s a man on the stairs.’ ‘You were dreaming,’ they said, and asked her into their bed. After a while, she said perfectly sensibly ‘there was a man, but he wasn’t nasty. I was playing with my dolls and he talked to me through the door. I think he knows the little boy I see.’ Since then they have learned to let her speak with these people. There is always a strange calmness to her, a sureness, as if she is listening always to an invisible music.

  Now she’s drawing a world of frogs and fairies: fairies underwater (which they can be, she says), and frogs and tadpoles and half-frogs – her word for them. He remembered her making the word.

  __

  the Frog Prince

  They’d taken frog spawn from the pond in April before the ducks got at them. When the house came alive with tortoiseshell butterflies waking up. Two weeks later, more or less, the tadpoles hatched in the old glass tank; but it was three months or so before they grew their legs. Emmy watched them every day, from the moment they collected the frogspawn in a jar. They were constantly incredible to her. The black dots turning to the shape of fish inside the funny jelly, then the tadpoles hatching; and when the legs grew she pretended to believe that they were little people trapped inside fish. Gareth hadn’t told her what they were.

  The big ones ate some of the small ones, which horrified her, and she watched them change. It seemed a long time, to her, before they started to look like frogs and she guessed that’s what they were, though they still had little tails.

  They let them go in June. There was one though which had hardly changed yet from a tadpole, and which had not been eaten by the others. They thought it was simply a bad tadpole. But in June, perhaps July, it too began to change, but differently from the frogs, and when it took on the shape of a lizard Emmy was amazed. She thought it was a frog trying to become a prince.

  Gareth remembers too the time he tried to explain to her about dandelions, which she loved – perhaps because of the magic of their changing too. Her love for things which weren’t what you thought they were. She loved to play with dandelion clocks ever since his mother had shown her how to tell the time with them, this spurious decision as to time complying with Emmy’s way of seeing the world.

  She had spent a long time picking dandelion flowers one day and they were proudly laid out on her bedroom floor. When they hadn’t changed to clocks by the next morning she thought perhaps it was because she kept peeking and magic only happed when you didn’t look. Gareth tried to explain that they had
to be alive to turn to clocks. ‘But they are dead when they are clocks,’ she said. ‘Well, they’ve changed’ he tried to say. ‘They have to be alive to change.

  The flower has to die to change into seed. They die to make more dandelions.’ One dandelion dying makes a thousand new flowers. ‘People don’t do that, do they?’ she said. ‘No,’ said Gareth. ‘People don’t do that.’

  __

  the Twin

  Emmy had helped him with the cow – with bringing out the second calf which was a healthy brown calf. She had come back stumbling across the grass with a heavy mop bucket full of soapy water and a towel over her shoulder which kept slipping so she had to set down the bucket and pick it up. Then she’d heave up the bucket again with two hands and start again with the bucket knocking and spilling off her legs and over her wellies as she walked. She absolutely loved her wellies, even in this weather. She’d had the long important talk of children with her zebra and left him by the gate.

  ‘Mummy’s got a headache so I’m being her,’ she said.

  He’d heard himself think ‘don’t ever be her’ and he knew underneath then that he would have to be careful now because the residue of his anger was still there and he didn’t want it to come out. If it came out it would be very bad.

  He made the rubbing sound with his finger and tried to read the paper but just thought. He had thought that the other twin would be dead too but it wasn’t. While he was feeling inside the cow he was almost begging for it to be alive, to bring something good from this, and if it was good he wanted Kate to be there to see it turn good. Emmy was bending over the mother cow, patting the rolled knots of hair above her eyes and copying her father, saying, ‘easy girl, okay girl.’ From far away they heard another farmer calling to his sheep – every farmer calls a different way and if you are not a farmer you cannot call to animals without thinking you are stupid.