The Long Dry Read online

  He knows that this is where his father got his quiet dignity, his ability to love so simply and so much. Through coming face to face with all this care in him. He thinks, if we have tragedy then we have to face care, like this taste makes me remember playing soldiers, and I can’t help it. We have to admit our massive love for people. If we don’t ever need to know its depth, we just feel the light on the surface.

  When his father was young he married a girl he’d met and they were blissfully happy. Two sons were born. The bank moved him again and they had to leave the lovely house by the sea, but they were still very happy. A few months later another son was born. The birth was a good one, but a day before she was due home, his wife, Thelma, had an embolism. They tried to save her, but she died. His world was shot to bits. Gareth had no doubt that this was where his father’s strength of care had come from, and his ability to be so happy at the very simple thing of a family.

  He tries not to follow the tunnel of thought that is opening up before him like a big mouth. That perhaps a crisis would cure them too – would push away the tiny problems that were damaging them like splinters. Not the cow, or dead calves, or a son leaving for college, or the land he wanted, or her body not being wanted anymore. A crisis, that would reiterate the importance of life and of reaping happily from it what you could. Sickly, he thinks his father was lucky to have this.

  Scenarios of disaster come to him, wash over him and he can’t stop them. They are like storm waves and like a man in the sea now he has to try and ride them. He says to himself to not believe in fate, or of being careful what you wish for. The words ‘I don’t mean this, these thoughts aren’t real’ are like caught breaths of air. But now he can’t stop the thoughts from hitting him. Perhaps, if it was brucellosis and it was in the herd, they would have to annihilate the animals and that would be the end of it and they could start again. The exhaustion of doing the same thing everyday would change. Or if something happened to just one of them that glued them all together – something they could survive. A car crash they walked away from, re-aware of the value of life. A quick pain; a quick, ready pain that reaffirmed the balances of want. Thoughts come to him violently, that it should be her to whom it happens, because the others have strength. The strength is needed in the people who stand by. Or else he wonders if an attack on himself would bring cohesion – make them realise what they could lose: a cancer he survives.

  But underneath he understands that if he thinks these things, it means there’s no strength there. And only if a tragedy occurred would he know if there was any left at all. How can one wish for cancer? In the coming weeks, it will all haunt him. A voice in him says: this is the simple cowardice that breaks us all eventually; a breaking of the surface strength. When you run out of the things that make you want. When you think of everything, of every other way to change a thing other than taking it head on. He just wishes Kate was better. That she would laugh, or walk unnecessarily in the sun, or simply love him back – which in the end amounts to tolerating what he feels for her. The idea of thirty more years with her… we live too long, he thinks. We’re expected to love too much and too long. He mustn’t be like this, he thinks, he mustn’t let this dark thing take him: this ever-hungry, very close big cloud of not caring anymore, and of not wanting. This is the enemy which must be fought until the end.

  __

  the Vet

  The vet came down the lane in his old van. It always amazed Gareth how such a quiet man could bear the rattling of that van; but then he understood the old vet had a tremendous respect for age. It was as if his still using it, and driving it, kept the van alive. He would not trade it in, and he would mend it when he could. Only when something massive went wrong with it would he give the van away completely. It gave Gareth a great faith in the quiet old vet.

  The vet knew what he was like and accepted it. He would have been a doctor, but he knew that eventually the constant questions of people, their need for reasons, would wear him down; he would have to articulate things and explain the things he did, where in reality most of what he did he did from instinct, and animals just accepted this. He blew two short blasts on his horn.

  Gwalch, the younger dog, barked and hopped at the vet when he got out of his van. Curly lifted himself heavily onto his feet and his tail wagged passively. A big, loud bee went around. The vet’s eyes settled on the old dog and he smiled at him sadly and fondly and said ‘hey, boy’ very quietly.

  The bee went around, and when it went close to the ground it drew up tiny little curls of dust. It was buzzing gently. ‘They think now that bumblebees tread air, like we tread water,’ thought the vet. It went round and round the small place by the door and if you could draw a line out behind it, it would look like a snake, with the same purposeful pattern of moving. ‘They look curious, but they are careful finders of things,’ he thought.

  He felt the smallest tickle of something on his skin and had a fleeting smell of soap. Emmy giggled and another roll of bubbles floated out from her wand and over to the old vet. Curly wagged his tail more when he saw Emmy, and started to walk to the vet.

  When Emmy heard the van coming down the lane she knew it was him and she had just put her head round the door and seen that her mother was asleep. So she went quietly back out.

  ‘Mummy is with her headache in bed,’ Emmy said. ‘Dad’s lost a cow.’

  ‘So you must be in charge,’ he said. And she gave a delighted nod. She thinks the bee looks like a helicopter.

  There was more to what she said than beautifully bad grammar. It belied her logic. Since she was very tiny she’d always thought the best thing to do with any pain or worry was to go to bed. Because the thing that hurt you had to go to sleep as well. Then all you had to do was wake up very quietly, so you didn’t wake the bad thing up. Then you got out of bed and left it sleeping, so it didn’t hurt you anymore. Her parents had no choice but to accept it often worked for her, so they didn’t question it too much, but they wished they could believe it too. One thing that had always fascinated Gareth was the way his children came up with things completely by themselves.

  ‘Have you come to mend Curly?’ she asked.

  This hurt the vet a bit and he stumbled for a moment around the different things he should say. Then looking at the girl he just knew he had to be brave with her.

  ‘I don’t think we can mend him now,’ he said. ‘I think he’s very old.’

  ‘We should give him a good clean,’ she said.

  The dog was by the vet and he stank very badly. The vet could see the wet and shallow bite of the rat on the dog’s foot, pussing and oily. It reminded him of the underneath of a tongue. The stink of the dog was bad. Because he was too weak to hold himself properly he’d messed on himself, and it hung in thick cords from his long fur.

  ‘We keep giving him a bath with the hose but he just gets dirty again,’ explained Emmy. ‘I think he needs a haircut.’

  The dog looked benignly up at the vet, panting happily. Killing the dog would be more difficult for him to do because the dog had not accepted it was time now. He wished that Gareth was there. He respected these people. He respected that they had not asked him to come and kill the dog as soon as it begun to smell; as soon as the grotesque tumour had started to make them feel nauseous each time they saw the dog.

  The vet looked down at the bee, which had settled on a dandelion. It had a bright, golden collar and yellow and white patches at the end of its body so it looked proud on the dandelion. If the vet looked more closely he would see it had more body than usual, seemed more armoured, had less of the thick soft fur. He knew they lived in colonies much smaller than honey bees, of around one-hundred and fifty. Drones and workers looked after the solitary queen in a nest under the ground in an old mouse hole, or something like it. They take moss and grass inside it, and build wax cells for the honey and eggs.

  If the vet looked more closely at the bee he’d notice it was un-busy, not collecting the bright pollen from the flower into sa
cks on its legs. It was a cuckoo bee. They look like another bee but they aren’t, and they go into the colony of the bee they look like and kill their queen. Emmy watches the bee a minute. When they lay their own eggs, the host workers look after the cuckoo bee, and because they all die in the winter it is futile. Only the cuckoo bees survive, hibernating through the winter and waking later than the bumblebee queens to give them time to make their nests. But the vet doesn’t notice so much, because he is thinking about the old dog.

  ‘I’m going to give Curly an injection that will make him sleep,’ he said.

  ‘Will he wake up?’ asked Emmy, already understanding.

  ‘No. He won’t wake up,’ said the vet. ‘Do you want to help?’ Curly huffed and snapped his mouth at the bee. When he was younger he used to love to chase bees.

  They took the dog to the place where he normally slept in a part of the old milking parlour and lay him down. Curly had followed them and they walked slowly for him. It was excruciating, how full of hope he was. The dog had the look of a thing which loved things utterly and would be forever pleased. He settled down in the hay to sleep.

  ‘What’s in the injection?’ asked Emmy. He didn’t want to say. Brutally, he had a picture of the little girl leading the dog round by the ear, many years ago.

  ‘It’s a medicine that will make his heart go slower and slower; and then it will stop.’ He didn’t have to say that it wouldn’t hurt the dog because of the way he said this thing.

  ‘Like when it stops raining?’ she said. Nothing had ever moved him more in his life than the beautiful questions of children.

  ‘Yes. Like when it stops raining.’

  Far away Gareth had heard the horn and knew the vet had come and he’d started straight away to walk back to the farm. Trying to move quickly through the bog, even though it was dry, was very hard. When he heard the vet’s old van grumble into life and the stretch of tyres over the loose grit in the yard he knew the dog had been put down. He looked up the slope towards the farmhouse and could see the dust rise off the lane where the old van threw it up. Then he turned back again, and went back towards the bog.

  * * *

  the Cow

  The cow walked lazily up the track between two rails of blackthorn. She’d heard the vet come and go. She hadn’t liked the bog, which for a long time had been full of hide-behinds, which were brought across from the lumber camps of Wisconsin, and which Gareth’s father had learnt about from the American troops he served with. No matter how quickly you turned around, how hard you looked for them, these creatures always stayed behind you, so no one had ever described them. The cow had only sensed them. She was slightly demented now. She felt she should give the calf but her body wouldn’t. It was a strange feeling to the cow. Her breath was rasping, and she was puffing loudly through her nose.

  She kept walking in the sun and grubbed the hedge here and there because now the flies were driving her silly, landing on her face all the time, and the cow was very thirsty. She was trying to find water now, and just walking.

  *

  Chapter Eight

  the Beast

  They said there was a beast in the bog. There was a whole fauna created to keep the children away from the dangerous places, but they were told of with amusement, incredulously, so that the thing was a game, and the children could play the game of staying away from these places without being drawn to them, by being curious of fear. Gareth did not know that he could tell these stories until he told them, and it delighted him. But he had grown up here, and had been allowed always to make-believe, because the countryside does not refute pretend things in the brutal way a town does.

  The beast in the bog was like a kangaroo, but with the feet of an elephant. It didn’t have the head of a kangaroo though, the long, rabbit-like face. Its face was like a pug’s, smashed into a grimace, with its tiny eyes not telling you how it felt. Only its teeth could give away its emotion. Needless to say, the beast fed on children.

  A snake lived in the slurry pit, except it wasn’t so much a snake, more a being of muck and skin that moved and bloated like a worm dropped in a puddle. It demanded feeding, all the time, and lived on a diet of poo from the cows. It’s why they kept the cows, they said, to make poo for the snake, so he didn’t consume the farm. So it was that Emmy came up with the theory that she knew which cows produced more poo than milk, from the black and white ratio of their bodies. You should never go near the pit, they said.

  Gareth had fought with the beast from the bog and the beast had taken his finger. When they did go near the bog, Gareth showed his children the bones and the leftovers of animals so they knew the truth of the stories. It is hot now. It drips with heat. This damn cow, he thinks. A dry heat like holding your hand close to an iron.

  __

  He thought hard about the dog. He was sure he had not hoisted death on him, that it really was time. That they hadn’t had Curly put down because, though they tried not to admit it, he had begun to repulse them. Animals are put down for the sake of their owners. He did not believe that animals complicated pain in the way humans do. He’d also watched animals for long enough to know that they fight death violently, or else simply lie down and die. He believed in dignity though, that this was a right in life not just human. He knew that having Curly put down was about dignity. He hoped that Emmy would not be too sad and was sure Kate would have explained things to her gently, while the vet was there.

  __

  But Kate slept. Sleep turned the pain for her. Awake, it was like a kettle of rolling water; sleep turned her pain to steam.

  She thought of Gareth’s finger, shining like a healed blister. She thought of his shoulders and the cords of his arms, and the rough hair. Compared to her body, she loved his body, like she loved the exquisite smallness of her daughter, and the broadening shoulders of her son. She loved them physically, as objects; but she could not love her own.

  As she lay asleep she thought of her son stretching into his long life and of her daughter growing and becoming more beautiful and complicated, like one of her pictures, as life added to her. She thought of the farm, turning. She felt the headache starting to clear.

  __

  Dylan

  Dylan had come back and couldn’t find Emmy and found his mother sleeping in bed. It was a while after the vet had been but he didn’t know about the dog. He could not believe his father was still looking for the cow.

  When he got back to the farm he turned on his mobile after driving and found that he should have got a gas bottle and figured there would be nothing nice for tea. His mother in bed and there being no gas it would just be cheese and leftovers and bread. He should go and get the gas but he thought – it’s too late to go and get gas now, on a Saturday. Because it was summer there were a lot of camp sites open and he would have got gas very easily, a small bottle at least. But he didn’t think of it because he didn’t want to go out and get gas.

  On the lane he’d seen a family of stoats, playing in the dust. They were no longer than his hand, bounding loose and cantilevered along the track, now and then ambushing each other, lifting and watching, bouncing at the passing flies or overhanging heads of grass. Watching them, it was difficult to recognise they were capable of killing things twice their size.

  He knew he should go and help find the cow, or find Emmy and play with her, but inside he felt not part of the day that had happened here. He had gone to see his friends all day and when he drove back into the farmyard the whole flight of pigeons had taken off from the yard at the sound of his car. He walked into the house and he could just tell it had been a day.

  He picked up his car keys because he felt very far away all of a sudden, and he went again. In a few years he will want to be back on the farm, but for now he left a note saying ‘gone out, hope that’s ok’ on the table.

  __

  the Pigeons

  As he drove away the pigeons went up into the air again. The curious slowness of pigeons on land; their energy in the
air: like two different animals with two different purposes. The white dove looked like a flower amongst them. The family wondered if the pigeons would ever go, would leave one day as strangely and as together as they’d arrived. They seemed to bounce and tilt in the light.

  In a pigeon’s cells, somewhere in their head, tiny magnetic crystals survive, tiny pieces of iron ore called magnetite. Invisible lodestones, tinier than dust, creating a compass, sensing polarity, the inclination of magnetic fields around the earth.

  The electronic particles in the crystal, moving between different ions in a structured path, turn the ore magnetic and tell the pigeons their way. They’ve also found this in the brains of bees.

  They’ve found iron too in their otolith organs, in their inner ear – the things which give them a sense of where they are in the air, of the space they move through. If the earth’s geomagnetics are wrong, they get lost.

  It makes you wonder what crystals run through us, what drops of salt? Because something in us gives us a sense of where we should be, too, if we listen.

  * * *

  the Nest

  On the walk back to the bog Gareth had tried to think of something else and not the dog, so he thought about the land he wanted, and how he himself would try to build, or just sell the plots. The finance was arranged well past the guide price, but he knew he shouldn’t be eager and carried away if the land got too much. He tried deliberately to think about the land, but he kept thinking of the heat, and Kate, and of the dog; thoughts that were like sounds. Of Kate’s white body. Time alters things, and it is right and good that things change and he accepts her body changing in the way he accepts the changing landscape around him. He is aware now that his care for her outweighs his want, and he knows she feels this as a lack of hunger. Maybe it is different for them, he thinks, different from a man. If you are hungry for a woman it is because you are hungry for women, but you can care for just one.