The Hunger Trace (2 page)

‘We’ll have to put ourselves in the way,’ Louisa said.

‘A toothpick in a canyon,’ Maggie said, biting her lip.

Louisa looked down at her waist. It was a long time since anyone had called her a toothpick. Maggie stepped out of the van. ‘Stay here,’ she said. Louisa fought to control the anger that rose up to meet that command. She pulled the door closed and watched Maggie gather grit from the border of the car park and march towards the herd, who stepped about, waiting. There was an echoing crackle of horns as two males rose up onto hind legs and dropped briefly into engagement. Maggie stopped ten metres from them and threw the grit. She shouted and the whole herd backed off and re-grouped.

The workers on the early shift had just put out the trolleys. Louisa could faintly hear the delivery trucks at the back of the supermarket, but there was nobody around. Floodlights made pockets of yellow in the blue. The wind against the van brought blankness, a sort of silence.

Maggie turned to Louisa, held up her palm for her to stay and ran over to the supermarket entrance. She took hold of the back of a long line of trolleys and began to push. The clang of metal startled the herd and initiated a race, the ibex heading for the grass bank and the danger beyond, Maggie pushing the trolleys towards the van to cut them off in a big ‘V’.

Louisa looked around, and saw that the gap between the van and the bank was too big. She slid into the warm driver’s seat, turned on the engine and began to reverse. Maggie thought she was trying to save her vehicle and shouted, ‘Wait’, but Louisa put the van into first, slammed on right lock and jack-knifed the trailer to create a better funnel. The jolt stirred Louisa’s blood. Everything began to converge on her: the noise of hooves and the skating wheels of the trolleys, the windows filling with the brown colour of the animals. Maggie arrowed the trolleys into the flank of the van to close the gap; the force of the blow knocked Louisa sideways. The ibex reared, bunched and bellowed, but could not turn out of the trap for the onrushing tail of their herd. Maggie got behind them, spread her arms at the base of the triangle. They were penned. Louisa watched for a moment, the ibex staring in at her, Maggie breathing hard behind them. Then she took the rope and got out.

Maggie whistled. ‘Great job,’ she said.

Louisa tried to control her racing heart. ‘Would have been easier with dogs,’ she said, looking at the trolleys against her crumpled bodywork.

The sky turned grey as they worked. The older ibex, compliant now, stepped up between them, all shine and steam. As they prepared to close the gate of the trailer, one of the kids broke for the bank. Louisa reacted first and gave chase. The kid was fast, and Louisa was not used to sprinting, but she began to gain on him. As she ran, she started to smile at the weirdness of it all: the ibex caught in the glow of the supermarket sign above them, the metallic ring of Maggie’s boots following behind. Louisa’s lungs felt raw, and Maggie overtook her as the kid reached the bank. Maggie scrambled up the incline on her hands and feet, snatched at the back legs of the ibex and knocked him off balance. He tumbled back down the bank. Louisa took him chest high and they both hit the ground, Louisa with her arm around the animal’s neck.

‘Bosh!’ shouted Maggie.

Louisa could feel the kid’s legs kicking against her own, and his underbelly rising and falling. She could hear the beat of his heart. His glassy eyes stayed wide open. Louisa coughed hard, as though she’d been resuscitated. Maggie got down on her knees beside her and secured the hooves until the kicking stopped.

‘He’s nice and warm, isn’t he?’ Maggie said.

Louisa could barely speak. ‘It’s a male?’

‘Yeah.’

Louisa pushed her nose into the bristly neck of the beast, stayed clear of the budding horns. ‘What will the neighbours say?’ she said.

‘What will
security
say?’ Maggie said, pointing to the CCTV cameras trained on them from the roof of the supermarket. Maggie took hold of the ibex’s fore-hoof and waved it, then turned back to Louisa. ‘Listen, you were amazing. Thank you. I’ll sort you out with some cash for the truck. For the damage.’

‘Dead right,’ Louisa said. The salty breath of the ibex kid mingled with her own coffee tang. She was suddenly exhausted, and could not let go of the animal.

Maggie was sweating. She began to unzip her coat, revealing bare skin beneath. Louisa saw this and flinched. Maggie looked down. ‘Oops,’ she said, and zipped up. ‘Shall we go?’ she asked.

‘Give me a minute,’ Louisa said.

‘You two take your time,’ Maggie said.

Maggie drove back, making phone calls as she did so, and talking about possible ways that the ibex might have escaped. The history of the park was punctuated by break-ins. Students and animal rights activists had been the most frequent offenders, but thieves had sometimes targeted the more expensive animals.

‘Did David ever tell you that story about the students who broke into the park in the early nineties?’ asked Maggie.

‘I was working there,’ said Louisa.

‘Course you were.’

David had chased them across the dark fields, caught one student scaling a fence, and sat on the kid until the police arrived with their torches to reveal the most beautiful nineteen-year-old girl David had ever seen. So he’d told Maggie that story. It irritated Louisa to think that David might have told Maggie stories about
her
. And she was not nineteen, and not beautiful. Although perhaps she had been, once.

Staff from the park were waiting for the trailer when the two women returned. They detached it immediately. Louisa looked at the cold, toad-skin stone of the house and saw the big blond head of David’s son, Christopher, appear in the window. Maggie waved up at him, but he moved away.

‘Can I get you some breakfast, Louisa?’ Maggie said.

‘No. I’ve got a busy morning. Slightly busier now.’

‘I’d like to say thank you.’

‘Taking me away from my work’s not going to do it.’

‘Okay,’ Maggie said. ‘I’ll drive you home.’

Louisa frowned with confusion. ‘Why don’t you just get out here? It’s my van.’

‘I’d like to talk to you,’ Maggie said, shrugging.

They drove the short distance back to the compact cottage on adjacent land. Louisa got out and inspected the dent in the panel. Maggie waited.

‘Like I said, I’ve got a lot to do,’ Louisa said after a few moments.

‘I don’t mind tagging along,’ Maggie said.

Louisa fetched her bag and gauntlet from the cottage. Maggie followed her silently around the back, past the various moulting sheds to a horseshoe of weatherings, the wood furred with frost. They walked across the lawn, by the bank of open-fronted structures, the hawks and falcons watching them, some hunched like men in raincoats waiting for buses, some perched in the shadows. The display hawks screamed when they saw Louisa, but she ignored them. At the end of the row stood a separate chamber, built on breeze-blocks, where Louisa kept Diamond, her old tiercel peregrine. She had barely opened the mesh door before the bird was on her glove, tugging with his beak at the strip of beef between Louisa’s fingers. Louisa curled the jesses through her fingers and rested her thumb against Diamond’s breast. He turned away with his typical disdain. She hooded him.

The two women took the pea-shingle path back to the cottage, Louisa carrying Diamond on the fist. Next to the kitchen was a weighing room with an outdoor entrance. Inside, the whitewashed walls and bathroom tiles cast a cold blue glow over the gloves and lures hanging from nails. A reclining freezer stood along one wall, plastered with the faded stickers of yesteryear’s lollies, but filled now with bags of quail, beef-shin, blast-frozen mice and day-old chicks.

Louisa put her finger under Diamond’s tail and reversed him onto cast-iron scales modified with a perch at one end. She could feel Maggie behind her, taking everything in. A mobile phone vibrated, but Maggie made no move to answer it. This was the one sound in the room while both women looked at Diamond. His figure was stark against the white tiles behind. The covert feathers were the grey of wet stone, his breast was striped with black bars, and the top-knot of his hood spiralled up. His feet were the major weapons – his size fifteens, Louisa called them: huge talons grew from gnarled toes and arced back into the wood of the perch. He was an old boy now, and one talon was missing.

‘He’s a knockout,’ Maggie whispered.

‘Yeah,’ said Louisa, writing his weight onto a large whiteboard covered with imperial figures in tiny squares. ‘My number one guy.’

‘You know, I met this falconer the other day, at the butchers. Guy called Mick?’

‘I know him,’ Louisa said. He was a leering psychobilly who had done time for hitting a neighbour with a sock full of batteries. But he loved his hawks.

‘Do you? He’s quite funny, isn’t he?’

‘If you like that sort of thing.’

‘Bit of a ruffian, you know. He was saying his birds increased his appeal with the ladies.’

‘He needs all the help he can get, I imagine,’ Louisa said.

‘Ha. Right. What was the phrase he used?
Bitch magnet.
That’s it. He said the hawks were a bitch magnet.’

‘Well. Here you are,’ Louisa said. She watched the smile on Maggie’s face fade as the insult registered. Maggie’s breath curled up from her slightly open mouth.

‘You didn’t come here to talk about Mick, I presume,’ Louisa said.

‘No. I’ve been having trouble with Christopher. He isn’t doing very well. He misses David, of course.’ Maggie looked down at her boots, their pointed tips darkly discoloured from the wet grass of the bank. ‘But he has his other issues, too.’

Louisa took Diamond back onto her fist by nudging his legs from behind, and they went back outside. She could not imagine why Maggie would want to talk to her about her family problems, but then she looked around to see no other houses within walking distance.

‘I’m running out of ideas. I’ve been trying to get him back into college, but when I ask him what he wants to do he just says, “Formula One”.’ Maggie smiled, but Louisa did not. ‘He used to love me, but nowadays I overhear him talking to the Samaritans and he calls me “The Traitor Maggie Green.”’

Louisa nodded.

‘The other day I saw him standing at the window watching you fly your hawks. You knew his father so well, and for a lot longer than I did,’ Maggie said.

‘Yep.’

‘And you probably know Christopher better, too, having lived here all this time.’

Louisa did not respond. She remembered when Christopher was born. His mother, Cynthia, at one time the face and body of a TV advert for cereal, had hated the park from the moment she arrived. She had moaned about the smell of the place, and the coarse hairs of the various animals, which clung to her clothes. It had quickly become clear that Christopher was wired differently, and – with a little help from Louisa – Cynthia had left soon after the boy’s third birthday.

‘I just thought you might be able to show him the birds,’ Maggie said. Her phone began to vibrate, and again she ignored it.

Louisa smiled and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I don’t mean teach him falconry or anything. If he really takes to it, I’ll send him on a course.’

‘It’s not that.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t even need to handle them. He could just watch,’ Maggie said.

‘He could do that from the window.’

‘He does.’ Maggie frowned. ‘I thought it might be nice for him to get closer. He seems interested in what you do.’

‘Can’t really let him near the birds.’

‘But I thought you did falconry days for the public. The birds are manned, aren’t they?’

Louisa noted the use of terminology. Maggie had clearly been reading up. ‘Obviously my display hawks are fully manned. If he wants to come to one of the demonstrations in the summer, he can stand behind the rope. But I’m very busy, and besides, I can’t have Christopher near the hawks. He’s too unpredictable.’

Maggie fell silent. Finally, she said, ‘Oh.’

Louisa saw Philip Cassidy, the head keeper at the Wildlife Park, approaching across the field. ‘It would be irresponsible of me. To the birds and to him. People seem to think you can just—’

Maggie raised her hand. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Okay.’

There was a moment of silence before Philip arrived. Maggie greeted him. When Philip spoke, Diamond turned his hooded head to the sound of the new voice. ‘I’ve been trying to get you on the phone,’ Philip said. ‘But I suppose you’ve been busy.’ He shot a look at Louisa. They had once been colleagues on the park.

‘What’s happening? Have you found anything?’ Maggie said.

‘It’s bad news, duck. One down on the ibex headcount,’ Philip said.

‘Oh no,’ Maggie said.

‘And there’s other animals missing. Four fences cut, and they broke into the medical centre.’

Maggie put one hand to her mouth and the other on Philip’s shoulder. Louisa watched her long fingers extend. ‘Jesus. I’ll come straight back,’ Maggie said. She turned to Louisa. ‘Thank you, again, for today.’

Louisa nodded. She wanted to say that she was sorry about the missing animals, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.