‘They’d untied the dogs ...?’
A
spark jumps up out of the fire, a damp patch of wood sizzling, and there’s a faint smell of burning on the sacking now. Something catches in my throat. Some old memory. Of the sound of the dogs barking, of how they were always let loose to roam around the farm-yard once dusk fell. But a lot of people have dogs around here don’t they?
A lot of people have guard dogs. I swallow.
‘He didn’t intend to go into that barn,’ she says. Her fingers pull at the little bits of foil and then suddenly she lets them all go, all the little scraps of bright paper, they come fluttering down like a meteor shower across the Milky Way and under my breath, I make a sudden fervent wish. A silent wish, because there are many barns around here. There are many dogs that roam loose after sunset. Rose sits up. She turns to look back at me and her face is a perfect heart-shape, her mouth the perfect mouth. I wait.
‘Someone attacked my dad, Lawrence. He left him really hurt. We never found out who. Our neighbour Rob Macrae denied all knowledge and nobody was ever brought to book for it.’ As she says my father’s name I can feel the edges of my mouth trembling.
We ...
are her neighbours?
I feel a sudden lurch, like a mule kicking me right in the stomach.
‘I thought your dad was sick,’ I say stupidly. ‘You never mentioned before that he was injured, Rose, that
anyone beat him up
.’ I stare at her and she looks at me strangely.
‘They did,’ she swallows. ‘He wasn’t expecting any trouble, but what happened that night changed his life. He was attacked, brutally, and without warning,
for no reason
, Lawrence.’
I have no breath at all in my lungs right now. I double over, holding the pain in my stomach inside, trying for her not to see. I have no words in my mouth. I edge myself back a little, make like I’m adjusting my position because I can’t sit here and hold her anymore. She sees my eyes open wider, feels my shock. Maybe she assumes it’s because of what she’s telling me?
It is, but not for the reason that she thinks.
Somehow I get to my feet. My stomach is cramping though there’s precious little in it other than bile. I feel shocked right now, dazed and confused.
That man I attacked the night I left Macrae Farm, that man I thought was my father... she cannot be his daughter. Not Rose.
Not Rose!
‘Hey,’ she calls out, alarmed, scrambling up even as I do. ‘You okay, Lawrence?’
‘I’ve got to be ... sick
.
’
M
y throat is full of bile, my mouth and eyes acid, as I stagger outside. She follows me, her eyes large and concerned and I hear her taking in deep breaths, suddenly distressed, not knowing what to say, only watching me, and then I am sick all over the soft white snow.
‘
Lawrence
,’ Rose says. I can feel her, wringing her hands. She’s stopped some way behind me, out on the path. Somehow I have staggered to the end of the wall. I cannot be with her now. I cannot be with anyone. I lift my eyes up. Morning has broken. A red streak lies flat on the distant horizon, an old wound spreading out over the day. The man I injured the night I ran from this place - he was her father.
He was Rose’s father.
I put my hands out on the icy wall to steady myself and my hands feel like someone else’s hands this morning. The wall looks like a different wall. I brace myself against it, for a while gulping down pure cold air in the hope that something inside me will stutter to life again; in the hope that I can reconnect with some kind of reality that makes sense to me.
I can still feel her, hesitating some way behind me, I can feel her distress. But she must go away now. I have to make her go away.
‘You go back in, Rose,’ my voice sounds surprisingly calm. ‘I need a bit of... air. I’ll be fine.’ How normal I sound. How composed. But the effort that takes pushes me into a different place, an old familiar place. I know how to play this one;
I’m fine, I’m okay, everything’s fine
.
You keep face. You don’t let anyone outside the family know that everything is not all as it should be. You practice the lie. You live it, in careful, well-rehearsed phrases and movements, your whole life a symphony that’s playing the right music. I’m okay, everything’s okay, and all the while your body language, every pore of you is signalling the message loud and clear;
I don’t want to talk about this; go away
. Behind my back, Rose picks up the message. I hear her footsteps crunching softly down the path. I hear the door scrape open against the ice. I hear it shut. Then there is only me, my head spinning again, my temples throbbing in a deep, un-easable pain, my stomach raw and turned inside out; and the pain of the ice on the wall against my hands. And the faint blue above the red streak in the morning sky. And the cold winter air sliding like water into my open mouth, firing my lungs with pain as if I had been running.
He is her father, how could that be
?
I know I have to go back there. I have to let myself remember what happened that terrible night, because there is so much I do not remember, so much I have never wanted to recall. I lean my head over the wall. Below me, several feet down, a blank canvas of snow winks up. It is empty and white, gives nothing away, tells no tales
. Everything is buried,
I think.
Everything is smoothed away, covered over.
But I have to remember. Even though there feels like there is no way that I can. I have to pull it all up, draw it all back to me like a fisherman trawls up his nets from the deep.
It starts with a small thing. A speck of black dust that lands on my white hand. A piece of lint from my coat, maybe? It lands on my hand like one of those thunder bugs that kept appearing from nowhere that August. I remember there were a whole lot of them around that particular day. I can feel the sweat starting up, a thin line of perspiration on my brow. The air was hot that day, close. It was close and my shirt was sticking to my back. I rub my temples with my thumbs, easing out the pain, willing myself to remember.
My shirt was sticking to my back because it was hot and I had been digging. I’d been digging a grave in the earth so I could bury Kahn. Something catches in the back of my throat and I turn my head to spit forcefully
o
nto the icy ground. I clench at the wall in front of me, my knuckles white, my jaw tensing. Then I go on. Remembering.
I’d dug him a grave. I’d stacked a whole load of stones on top of it so the wild animals wouldn’t come later and get him.
All the while I was doing it, a little clock was ticking in my brain, a little time-piece calculating how long it’d take my father to get back to the house in his jeep; how long it would take him before he dug out my mother from wherever she was at. Or to ferret out my brother and rattle him till his bones shook, or whatever it was my father would have to do before one of them gave up the game.
Pilgrim knew nothing, of course. But Mum - my heart constricted - she was always so crap at keeping secrets. She was always so weak. He’d get to her, I knew that. She’d confess. And then ... what would he do to my mother and my brother when he found out I’d persuaded her to leave with me?
What would my father be prepared to do?
The place where he’d left me that day was a couple of miles from the house. I knew it was going to take me a good long while to walk back. My feet and my body had felt like lead, I remember that now. Finding Kahn like that and burying him had taken every last ounce of strength from me. Knowing that my father had discovered our plans for escape had sapped me of all hope. We weren’t going anywhere. We’d be trapped there for life, all of us.
For life
.
And my father was very capable of taking a life, wasn’t he? I’d seen him do it, once before. He’d shot a man, at point blank range, right in the chest. I remember the sound of the gun going off, the loudness of it. I remember putting my hands over my ears. I’d have been - what, two years old at the time? - before Pilgrim was born, anyway. The memory is surrounded in black. I closed it down long ago. I only remember the noise. I remember the gun my father used had a little picture of a horse on it.
I remember that he was perfectly capable of taking another man’s life.
Some people said that those men who’d ‘hung themselves’ up on Dead Men’s Copse had been victims of his, too. Marco told me that when I was twelve. I know that’s what was going through my mind as I walked back home that dusty day, the temperatures soaring to the mid-thirties, the electrical charge of an imminent thunderstorm in the air. I’d had nothing to drink all day. I remember my mouth was parched, full of dirt. I remember licking the sweat off my top lip and it tasted salty. I stopped to drink some water from the brook which was green and brown, full of algae, full of buzzing flies and water boatmen. The sky had rumbled, a deep, close-by sound. I’d longed for rain but the air stayed still, charged. No rain came.
By the brook, I must have fallen asleep for a while, racked and exhausted. Scared. I do not know how many hours I slept for. I only know that by the time I opened my eyes again, groggy, my stomach feeling full of bile, the afternoon was already drawing into evening. The skin on my arms felt puckered, cold. I had to get back home, I knew that. I was also scared witless at what I might find when I got there. I did not want to go home. The palms of my hands felt sore, cracked, and it brought back that earlier on I had buried my friend, my
only
true friend, who my father had killed. He’d killed him to spite me. Would he have been prepared to do the same thing to the rest of the family? He was
capable
of it, sure.
But had he done it?
All the while I walked back home my mind was feeling numbed to the point of insensibility with fear but when I got there something strange happened. As I rounded the yard, in sight of Macrae Farm I saw his jeep, with the great big dent at the back of it that had been caused by someone who’d reversed carelessly, ramming their car into his. He never found out who did it, but it reminded me that he was not indestructible. That Rob Macrae, too, could be hurt. He could be stopped.
I went into the farmhouse first. I think my mind had been on getting something to eat before anything else. I wasn’t making plans as such, but I knew - whatever happened - I wasn’t going to be sticking around. I didn’t know where my next meal would come from once I left. I had some idea of taking something, sticking it in my pocket.
Mum and Pilgrim had been sitting at the farmhouse table when I got in. It must have been getting on for eleven o’clock, and I remember being surprised - relieved - to see them there. Mum had a black eye but apart from that they seemed intact. My brother’s eyes, wide and scared, had taken me in unhappily as I’d walked through the back door. They’d been waiting up for me, I sensed that much but ... they had hoped I would not come?
‘Lawrence,’ my mother’s voice, a mere apologetic croak, had told me all I needed to know. He’d got to them. He’d scared the hell out of them. To even speak to me now was to be a collaborator. I was the new official enemy.
‘Lawrence, you need to get out of here ...’
‘Get out and go where?’ How surprisingly calm I had sounded. Feelings were an unnecessary luxury, I saw it so clearly at that point. I took a glass from the draining board and filled it up to the top with tap water. I remember it tasting faintly of squash because my little brother never properly rinsed out his glass. He only pretended to, and then stuck it on the draining board. I remember how that had amused me for some reason, that faint taste of orange squash in my mouth that evening. It was like a private joke between me and me; the me that knew the truth about the way things were, and the me who knew that all our lives we’d been pretending they were different. I drank the water down. Strangely, I was no longer feeling hungry.
I’d looked at the clock.
‘He told us we had to wait up for you,’ my mother answered my unspoken question. There were grey lines around her eyes I saw now. We should have been speaking about what he had done to them,
about what he had done to my dog,
debriefing, filling each other in on all that had happened since I’d last gone out but somehow we weren’t. Because somehow, I was now on the wrong side of a line that had been drawn down the middle of my family.
‘He told you to wait up?’ I’d looked from her to my brother and there seemed to be no breath in the room, no light, just a greyness that hung around all the corners, filled up the spaces under their eyes ...
He’d told them a whole lot more than that, hadn’t he?
Like what he was going to do to me when I got back.
What he was going to do to them?
‘Where is he?’ I’d looked at Mum. How did she look, I think, the last time I laid eyes on her? I hadn’t taken her in so well. I’d regretted that, after. That I hadn’t marked her well enough and I’d been left with no real memory of the last time I saw my mum. I’d been feeling angry at her too, I suppose, for being as weak as she was. For not being strong enough to stand by my side so we could have defeated him.
He was somewhere around the farmhouse, I could sense him. I could smell it as clear as the fear that came off them that he was somewhere in the vicinity. Wherever he was, I was going to find him.
Mum had muttered something beneath her breath then, something that I could have taken to be anything, but I thought I heard;
‘
He’s in the barn
.’
Did I really go over and tousle my brother’s spiky ginger hair, hug him briefly, or did I only imagine that, afterwards? I know I never said another word to Mum.
‘Lawrence,’ she’d said, the plea in her voice - it was a mother’s plea, I know that now but at the time all I heard was a down-trodden helplessness in her voice that made me feel even madder. It made me feel even more determined to go out and smash something.
It made me even more determined to smash
him
.
‘It’s late,’ that voice came again. ‘Don’t go out there, Lawrence, He’ll do for you. He’s sworn it.’
I went, though.
I had no weapon on me. Strange as it seems now, my hands, cracked and blistered as they were from the afternoon’s digging, felt as strong as a wrestler’s hands. They felt powerful and capable of doing anything I wanted them to do. Just then, I didn’t have the full measure of my father’s strength calibrated right in my mind. The rage I was feeling inside made me the powerful one. It made me feel able to do things I would not normally be able - or want - to do. The barn door was closed by the time I got down there, but it was not locked. I stepped inside. I remember I could hear someone stumbling around in there. I assumed he must have been drinking. That would fit the profile all right. It was pretty dark. His light must have gone out. Pitch and Ranger, two of the Rotties
had
followed close at my heels as I strode out to the barn. Chip and Slash, the Pitbulls, were already there, waiting outside, growling unhappily at the door.