The Long Dry Read online

  The calf came out and it was big and strong and healthy and it lay out panting and full with breath as he brought it round to its mother’s snout so she could know it and clean her calf. Emmy still patted the cow’s soft head saying ‘good girl, good girl’ and looking strangely at the new calf. He thinks of her doing this now as he sits at the table with the paper in his hands, and he thinks of her running to get the warm water.

  *

  Chapter Six

  It feels like everything in my head is going to explode. If I move at all. Like if anything touches me I’ll smash up. There’s a sharp point of light coming in through a hole – a loose thread – in the curtain. It’s like that sharp point of light, this pain; all of me crowds in on it, as if my whole life is just what is around it, a dark curtain. I shouldn’t have shouted at Emmy.

  I wish he would come up. I can hear him downstairs, laughing with Emmy. I wish he would come. I shouldn’t get so angry, but he should have been there, he dreams too much. I know he is angry with me, but I wish he would come.

  __

  the Land Above the Road

  She cares. She worries. She worries about him getting the land, and about her son in his car, and Emmy playing outside. She worries about Bill going mad and the gas bottle being too close to the cooker, and the calves that will die anyway and the sheep that fall sick.

  She worries that one day they’ll be too old to farm and he knows she thinks sometimes of a bungalow, but it would break him, her husband, and she knows that too.

  He wants the land because he knows this, and he knows his children will not take on the farm; but he cannot bear to leave the place. If they have the land and put houses there, then they can rent out some of the fields and stay in the farmhouse on the money they make and maybe just farm a few things. But Kate worries about this. And she worries about all the things she has no say over, and he knows it’s just her way of trying to feel that it isn’t just random, that she has some control. But some things you just don’t have any control of.

  __

  the Sedge

  The cow went for a walk. She got up in the night and just walked and she was tired and slow by the time the sun came up, but a long way from the farm, for a cow. She just didn’t want to be in the barn.

  When she came to something, she put her great weight against it, and just leant, and let her big body crush the thing down, or break or snap it. If it was a hedge, she went into the gap she could find and let her weight smash through the small sticks and thorns and the dead, dry trees; and if it was a gate she’d just lean and push, so the thing gave, because many of the gates were not hung properly, and hung off their loose posts with pink string. She didn’t do a lot of damage, as she didn’t have horns. They cut off the horns at birth. When things gave way under her she just felt droll and programmed and just bewildered like cows are, and she just kept on walking, getting tired and hot in the sun.

  She was heavy with calf. This was not her first year, so she knew what was becoming of her and understood the calf, but she didn’t like the heat, or something, so she walked out of the barn. Her udder, gorgeous with milk, was scratched by thorns and the flies that followed her were landing on her warm hide and around her eyes, so she had to shake her head to move them.

  For a while she stopped to eat, as cows do, just curling the long grass of a hedge into her mouth with her tongue. Her tongue was as big and pink as a baby’s leg. The grass here was more lush than the hay and the short grass of the fields. By then, the cow had no idea where she was.

  The sun had kept coming up and got hotter and the heat even came out of the ground, which had been under the sun for so long. The cow got down on a bank and scratched herself in the dust and lay down for a while and, what seemed like miles away, was the sound of duck going into the pond. The cow was grey and covered with dust now and warm in the sun by the bank. The birds played around her.

  Later, the cow got too hot so she got onto her feet again and she could feel the calf moving inside her. She lifted her tail and let out a long wet pat. Then she went on. By now she was hanging her head when she walked and just ambling.

  She walked into the bog, which is where all the cows seem to go, when they go, following their nose downhill, one foot in front of the other and other, wide hipped and plodding. When they get into the bog, they actually have to think. It wasn’t so bad now, because of the un-easing dry weather and the constant sun, but mostly there was still mud, dotted with green weed and the footprints of birds and it wasn’t the solid ground of the fields.

  Thin willow and hazel was everywhere, so soon the cow started to crash and snap through it, but it confused her and took her strength. Underfoot, where it had dried, the bog was a funny shape and difficult to walk on. Going through the bog was very loud and sounded like twigs in a fire.

  She walked into the bog for some time. Here and there a big oak tree had broken through the wicker of branches, and lifted up like a man standing on somebody’s shoulders. Most of the bog was bare, the actual mud of the bog, but there were carpets of bramble in places, and tough sedge.

  The sedge had dried and paled in the sun and was warm and long and the cow curled round and round in the sedge until it was a nest, and there she lay down.

  * * *

  Gareth lifts the cloth absently from the old table and smoothes the smooth grain with his hand. Some people like brand new things and other people like the things they’ve had for a long time. It is nicely cool in the house. They brought the table to the farm from the old house when they moved here. It was a big thing, putting the important table in the house. He looks at the plate of crumbs and the unwrapped cheese, starting to look plastic. Before, the family ate in the kitchen on the smaller table and the big oak table was reserved for Sundays and special dinners and guests. Emmy’s drawing makes scratchy noises. When they moved to the farm, the family ate at this big table. He was thinking that it was not good that two calves had died, and there might be disease in the cattle. The cows were an indulgence, really. They grow just stock cattle now, which they raise and sell on to be grown up for beef, so it’s important to have good calves.

  Gareth looks at his daughter drawing – such a ferocious little sleeper – how importantly she ran. He smiles gently. Nine days from now she will start to die.

  __

  the Mushroom

  Some of the bluebells will still be out.

  Emmy will go into the woods with Zebra to play and she will find a beautiful white mushroom, come up after the rain. It looks to her like the dove that came. She will sit Zebra down, with the fairies around her, and have lunch off the table of a fallen tree. This is a secret place of hers.

  She will think that she should not eat the mushroom, but she loves mushrooms very much and it is white like the ones in the field. It will taste different though, sweet like it smells and bitter all at once, and she will stop eating the mushroom and feel bad for picking it, so she will hide it, because it was such a beautiful thing before she picked it, like spoiling a flower.

  The mushroom will be as big as her hand across, and shaped like the floppy felt hat one of her dolls wears, but shiny – like waxed paper. Its stem will look sort of shaggy (she will think, like the skin by Daddy’s nails, peeling off), and there will be a big bulb at its base, as if it’s in a bag. The white gills and the pure white of the mushroom will be like an angel.

  She will find the mushroom nine days from now. In the night, she will wake up and vomit violently, and will be very thirsty. Like she’s burning. She will call her mother and father. They will sit on her bed and pull up the covers round her and arrange her dolls and talk to Zebra while they touch her gentle head but she will not stop vomiting. Then the diarrhoea will start and she will mess the bed. The diarrhoea will come with great pain and it will feel to her as if someone is pulling her stomach with a huge, uncareful hand.

  She will move into her mum and dad’s bed. She will start to sweat hard and in hours she will look pale and haggard. She
will look dangerously ill and it will happen very quickly.

  They will call a doctor who will come out and know it’s some sort of poisoning but will tell them that she is over the worst. That children’s bodies react violently to even the little things to keep them safe. That it looks alarming, but it will be okay. He will tell them to try and let her sleep.

  The vomiting won’t stop and by the morning her hands and feet will go ice cold. She will be scared and anxious, like you are in fever, but she won’t tell anyone about the mushroom because it was so long ago.

  In the hospital where they take her because she will not stop trying to be sick and her whole skin will look pellucid and unnatural they will try frantic tests. They will also put a pipe into her stomach through her mouth and pump out the contents of her stomach but by then the poison will be in the other places of her body. Gareth will be sick with worry for her, and will not go to the auction. Then, two days afterwards, she will seem okay.

  They will take her home and she will seem okay and the doctor will say that he was right and that she was just reacting violently to something because she was so little. There’s all sorts of things on farms, he will say. It will seem strange and odd to them that she was so ill. Then violently and unquietly she will die.

  __

  Amanita virosa is deadly. It’s the amatoxins which kill you, like the Death Cap. The other poisons, called phallotoxins, do nothing serious. Amanita virosa is called Destroying Angel.

  A-amaritin – which is one of the amatoxins – hits the nuclear RNA in the liver cells, causing protein synthesis to stop, so the cells start to die.

  When the poison moves through the kidneys, they try to filter it, but it attacks the convoluted tubules and, instead of entering the urine, it goes back into the blood. So it attacks everything again and again, breaking it down repeatedly and mostly it is better to die then. The little boy she sees comes to talk with her while she is dying, but it is still very bad.

  *

  Chapter Seven

  There is an electric sound of birds.

  The cow slept for a while, or slumbered, chewing the cud of the Timothy grass it had taken from the hedge, at the edge of the field. When she woke she was spooked. Birds hopped and snipped around her. She felt watched. She was very warm from the sun and she slumbered for some time. Then she got up and moved on. She clattered on, breaking back through the thick dry growth.

  From the mud, like a broken machine, a cage of bleached white bones stood up. Many a cow had died in the bog, stuck and having to be shot where they struggled. You couldn’t tell if the cow thought of her own death when she saw the bones. She left another long green pat as she walked; and for no reason, in no particular way, went on over the fields.

  __

  Gareth walked down to the bog. The heat is crazy. Everything seems subdued. Walking out after lunch was like walking into a wall of heat, and he couldn’t see very much for a while, until his eyes accepted the light. He said: ‘if the vet comes, you have to get Mummy.’

  He went the way he thought the cow had gone, across the fields. He didn’t know if the cow was in the bog, but the last time a cow did this she was in the bog. She’d made a nest and bedded down and had her calf quietly there.

  From the road, above the land, he hears a dog barking, his neighbour’s vicious shouts. The anger that is in him turns on them – the anger that is really because of the cow, and the rabbit, and his hurt ankle. He tries to put it on his neighbours. They are fat vicious people who don’t know very much and don’t like anything and it shows in their dogs. They came here some time ago, to Bill’s farm, with the idea of using the land. But they did nothing, and let it ruin. He had tried to like his neighbours, but they were just not people you could like, in the end. He was sure one of their dogs had taken the cat.

  They had lost the cat last summer and had said that she must have been taken by tourists. They thought this because there was always a chance the family that took her was a good family. A lot of tourists come here every year. Most of them are from cities and they don’t understand the country – it is like a park to them. They see a cat and they think it is a stray because it isn’t very close to a house.

  So they coax it away, feeling sorry for it; worse than that, because they don’t understand the way of things, the cat gets in the car. Like a kidnap. He imagines the cat suddenly in the city and being totally afraid, but he knows the neighbours’ dogs had had it.

  Once, one of the dogs – they are Alsatians and untrained and nasty – had come down the lane and was in the yard where Emmy was. It barked at her and ran at her and she stood stock still and it barked right into her face but she didn’t cry or move. And Curly came out, old as he was even then, and tried to bark the other dog down but it just growled at him and inside Curly knew that the other dog could kill him. Then his son had come out and bravely ran at the dog which fled back up the lane, though it hesitated horrifically for a moment. They will be in the fields with the lambs one day, and Gareth will take a gun to them, and he will kill them. He will take the dead dogs back to his neighbours and if they say anything he will open all his anger on them because he is a very strong thing when he is angry.

  When the neighbours got their dogs they argued about naming them. Their first ridiculous idea was to give them Welsh names which they could not say properly. They could not agree on names and in the end named one each, defiantly. So the dogs became tools they used against each other, like everything else about them. She named the bitch, with whom she shared some features, Cher, after the pop star; he gave his dog a lordship’s name, which, in his voice which sounds like a chicken, he shouts across the fields because it’s always escaping. The dogs fight constantly, too. Dogs are always a distillation of what their owners are. They learn by observing, not by being broken.

  Sometimes, when he checks the stock at night, when he wants the night’s long space, Gareth hears them fight, their angry voices tearing out over the fields and the dogs barking, like now, and it angers him, because it is a blasphemy to the easy quiet of this place.

  __

  the Monster

  They used to say the bog was haunted, to keep the kids away. It was easy to believe, sometimes. Even now, in this dry world it had become, there was a presence to it, a sense of watching, a sense that it was waiting.

  Gareth had found the pat, already drying, where the cow had rested by the bank. Bright orange flies crowded on it, preying on other flies on the dung, and laying larvae in it. He knew then she had headed to the bog.

  He found the hoof marks in the soft mud that would usually be up to his waist, and impossible. The cow had crashed through, and for a while it was easy to follow the broken trail of her body. The ground looked starved. Gareth thought of the thing he had seen in a newspaper, long ago, of a three-year-old boy who had followed fallen-down trees and gone missing. He had followed the trees because he believed they’d been knocked over by a dinosaur, and he wanted to speak to the dinosaur. Gareth imagines him following the fallen-down trees, torn up on their sides from the ground. The boy was Scottish, he remembers that much. Sixteen hours later, they found him safe.

  It’s strange for Gareth to think of his father so far away, in Scotland during the war. He’d never really talked truly of the war and reading the memories it was odd to know he was posted to Wick and Dundee and Orkney, and Brighton and the Essex Marshes and Carlisle. He smiles at the thought of his father writing – ‘when Hitler was doing all the evil and all the devilry a devil of his sort could do.’ It sounded lovelier in Welsh – a Hitler yn gwneud pob drwg a phob diawledigrwydd a allai cythraul o’r fath ei wneud. He imagines his father saying it. He thinks how it must have been for him, posted to Wick, further than he’d ever thought to go, where he was made Chauffeur and Batman to the regimental Chaplain. Then, high in Scotland, the happiest three months of his war passed, driving round the locale with the Chaplain. He speaks of the time he was taken to see the Chaplain’s ninety year old aunt, who sp
oke only Gaelic, which the Chaplain translated.

  She wanted him to sing to her in Welsh. Gareth had only heard his father sing once or twice, and he imagined it must have moved her very much.

  He stops for a while to rest his ankle, using it to loosely kick some old bones that lie like a cage, half buried in the firm mud. He desperately wants a coffee, now. ‘Damn this cow,’ he thinks to himself. He reaches down and pulls up a dandelion root and goes into his pocket for his knife so he can clean it, so the bitter juice will take his mind off wanting a coffee. It’s such an automatic thing, reaching into his pocket, that he has to realise the Leatherman is not there all over again. He snaps the root, and uses his nail to scrape off the dirt.

  Chewing the foul root he remembers the taste from his childhood – their rations – when his brothers and he played in the drainage ditches here by the bog. He’d passed the ditches earlier, dry and clear now and parched, like the inside of a shoe. The memory comes to him very strongly with the very strong taste, coming up clearly from inside him. It is like feeling, this. Memory and real care sit under the surface, like still reservoirs waiting to be drawn from.

  It is easy, he knows, to take from the surface of these things, like dipping a bucket into water self-consciously: you can call up these things. But when it comes up un-beckoned, without self control, set off by some scent in the air, or fear, you can be shocked by its depth, which you hold in you all the time.