The Rye Man (10 page)

He looked at Reynolds' bare hand holding the secateurs with its raised tributary of veins, the spreading brown stipples, and the anger he felt inside melted into indifference and a desire to be gone. As he drove away his last view was of a stooped figure shovelling the husks of summer into a black polythene bag.

*

Crying softly, almost a whimper, so soft at first that he is not even sure if it's real or a trick of his imagination. Somewhere far off in a distance beyond time, somewhere inside the layered labyrinth of grainy light which crackles and spits like static. But it grows louder, more insistent, calling again and again, a rhythmic pleading which fastens to his brain and can't be shaken off. Now, shadowy, disconnected shapes drift in front of his eyes. He blinks, tries to push them aside to see more clearly but they re-form and block his way. What is the distance which separates them? Sometimes it changes – a long, unlit corridor of locked doors, a flight of bare stairs spiralling round a dark well, a laneway hemmed in by thorned hedges. But no matter how much he tries to force his way to the crying child the distance always remains the same. Opaque pulses of
light
flicker fiercely like a television screen trapped between stations. He tries to focus on the shifting source but stumbles blindly into the sleet of tears. They sting his face. He throws up his hands to protect his eyes. Now his myopic groping grows more desperate because the child calls to him by name. Louder, louder, calling from some amorphous world beyond his reach. Briars whiplash across his face but he stretches out his arms into the receding pool of greyness. If only he could reach its hands, grab hold of the tiny frightened fingers, he could pull it free, pull it into the light of the world. But the more he reaches out, the more the voice slips away into some swirling void. He staggers to its edge, calling out himself now in a quivering voice which skims across the surface of the darkness and then sinks like a stone. And then he, too, is falling, falling . . .

Into consciousness and Emma shouting at him and shaking him, pulling his head down to her and cradling him tightly. He was still trembling and he could feel the dampness of his sweat sticking to his skin. She was talking to him, calming him, but even as he regained control, began to feel foolish, he still clung to her. Then she was stroking his hair and when she asked him what it had been about, he made up a crazy story and pretended to laugh at his foolishness. But as he curled his body around the contours of hers and waited for sleep to come, he tried to shut away his secret, and as she slipped back into sleep he put his arm around her waist and buried his face in the small of her back.

*

On the Sunday morning he had the grass cut before Emma had surfaced. In the country you did not cut grass on a Sunday, but it was early and only a single car had gone past the house.
They
were not churchgoers and it seemed silly to pretend to observe others' pieties. There was still a dampness on the grass beading the blades and sometimes the mower sprinkled a tiny spray of water on his shoes. There was, too, a freshness in the morning air and a calm which softened the mechanical repetition, and he experienced the pleasure of concentrating on nothing but the work.

After breakfast he still felt the urge to be outside and Emma agreed to join him for a walk. The morning sky was seared with pink and the day felt as if it held the final moments of summer, giving him a desire to use it, to drain the last drops of warmth from it, and as they walked along the narrow roads between the thick wedges of hedgerow he felt almost happy. Sometimes a car passed and they would move into single file or stand safely on the verge. People going to church, their Sunday best making them sit stiffly in their seats, exchanging waves, a nod of the head. Two horses cantered to a gate and stuck their heads over the top bar, their eyes soft yolks of curiosity. Emma pulled grass from the bank and fed them, cautious of their champing teeth, and he teased her about her nervousness.

Further down the road they came to a bridge which crossed the old railway line and they slipped between the end of the stone parapet and hedge and clambered down the slope leading to the track. The steep banks on each side were a tangled scrub of bush and trees while at the top tall hedgerows disguised the line's very existence. There were no sleepers, no metal debris anywhere to mark the line of the track, only the raised ridges of grass stretching like steps into the distance. It was a sanctuary for wildlife, birds, and in the soft sandy slopes was sprinkled a maze of rabbit warrens. Probably the fox was there somewhere, too.

They walked along the line, skirting the marshy stretches
where
water seeped down the steep sides and soaked into pools of brackish water. In wet weather parts would be impassable. Whole sections had been almost reclaimed by the undergrowth and he had to push a way through, carefully holding branches open like a door so that they would not spring back into her face. Everywhere were secret covens of foxgloves fading into withered shadows of themselves, and festering blisters of toadstools. Sometimes they were startled by a sudden scurrying in the middle of some bush or a bird taking off from a branch overhead and then they had to stop and smile at each other to dispel their unease.

They walked along the line for about a mile, sometimes having to climb over rickety barriers erected by farmers who wished to discourage trespassers, and once they went under another bridge where the decaying innards of some discarded engine lay rusting under choking tendrils of ivy. When they came to a point where a solid barrier of barbed wire prevented further progress, they climbed the twisting ribbon of path which successive feet had worn to bare soil and emerged in a humped scrub of field.

They paused to regain their breath after the steepness of the climb and she pulled a burr from his hair. He was not sure where they were and it felt good, as if they were on some childhood adventure together. Walking to the top of the rise they looked about them to gain their bearings and she was talking to him, holding on to the sleeve of his jumper in mock exhaustion, but he was not listening, her words drifting through his senses. Down below, the copse of tall trees, the snake of stream beyond them. The angle where the hedgerows hit the curve of the road. A topography lodged in his memory. But it was the house, the house above all with its slate roof, squatting on the sweep of field under the shadow of the tree, whose pollarded branches clutched the sky like stumps of
fingers.
His eyes moved slowly from the line of the house to the stone barn and then away again. He crouched down almost as if he was frightened the house might see him, know that he had come back.

She was looking at him now, asking him what was wrong, her face searching for answers.

‘Maguire's place – that's it. That's where it happened.'

He stood up and stared at it, his memory and the present fusing in a fleeting pulse of fear. He felt her hand slip into his. There was a tightness in his stomach. He had always known that the return to his home ground would eventually bring him to this place but he had always thought he would choose the time, never thought of it happening like this – unprepared, suddenly thrust at him when he did not expect it.

The place held them both still and silent. She pulled his hand, inviting him to return the way they'd come but he did not move, did not take his eyes from the house below.

‘I want to look.'

‘Are you sure?'

He didn't reply, but started down the slope to where the farmhouse nestled in the hollow. Everything seemed smaller, less solid than he remembered it, the different parts which went to make it disconnected and insubstantial. There was no smoke now from the house. He remembered there had always been smoke from the chimney and with it the smell of peat, a tight funnel which spiralled back towards the trees and then seemed to hang motionless, trapped in some depression. They walked across the fields from which she had made a bare living by renting out the land for grazing, and from what vegetables grew in the stony patch to the side of the house.

By now they could see the house was derelict, thin cordons of ivy fanning across the slate roof and black squares in some
of
the window frames where the glass was missing. A ragged tumble of tall grass and weeds smothered the garden, reaching the top of the broken fence, and clumps of gorse had crept closer and closer to the house.

After she had been released she had moved away. People said she had gone to England but no one knew for sure. It had briefly passed into the hands of someone else and then he, too, was gone, the land sold and the house left to rot. The wooden door, still the dark red he remembered, sagged inwards, held now by a solitary rusted hinge. They paused at the brick path which led up to the house. It felt as though he was about to step into his past but there were none of the feelings that normally brought, only a powerful surge of emptiness, a kind of trembling inside him which made him nervous and uncertain. Emma moved closer but suddenly he wished she was not there, did not want her to see or be part of this moment, but it was too late now and he had to go on.

He stepped out with a boldness he did not feel and made towards one of the windows. The little paint left on the sill was blistered and bubbled, flaking away at his touch. Resting his arms on it, he shaded his eyes from the reflected light and peered into the room. Empty of furniture, a light fitting hung limply from the low ceiling and on the fireplace was a fantail of smoke-blackened bricks. He looked at the faded pattern of wallpaper, its corners flapping loose with years of damp, and the black-framed mirror whose silvered surface stared into a cracked emptiness. The mirror in which each day she would have brushed her hair and pinned up the coil of tresses, the mirror where her fingers would have traced the lattice of lines spreading slowly from the corners of her eyes as she searched for signs of approaching middle age. Where, too, her secret slept, waiting to rise up and meet her unbroken gaze.

He
climbed the tree carefully, selecting his hand- and footholds like an experienced climber while the scent of bark and sap swamped his senses and his hands felt sticky with resin. Once he reached the lower branches the hardest part was over and he sat in the fork and rested. His knees bore the crinkled print of bark and he tried to lick the resin off his hands. Above him the canopy of leaf and branch rustled in the breeze, light squinting through the moving mesh.

His eyes suddenly caught the scuffmarks on his sandals and he spat on them, then rubbed them with the cuff of his jumper. They were still new enough to merit regular inspections from his mother and he did not want to incur her wrath. He knew they had been expensive. They had gone the previous Saturday to Dawson's in Market Street in a kind of yearly ritual which marked the coming of summer, and Mr Dawson had measured his feet in the metal shoe with the sliding toes, then produced a green box from the steeply-tiered shelves. He had the habit of holding the box in his broad hand and removing the tissue with a flourish to reveal the shoes as if performing some conjuring trick.

When they were on his feet, Mr Dawson pinched the toes with his thumb and finger to assuage his mother's concern that there was growing room, and he had to parade the length of the shop, conscious of their eyes on his feet. A serious business buying shoes. He loved the smell of the new leather, the cleanness of the white spongy sole, but above all he loved the lightness on his feet. After the clumpy heaviness of his black winter shoes, it felt as if his feet had sprouted wings, like he was walking on air. It was difficult to resist the impulse to run but that would have to wait until he was on his own. Mr Dawson parcelled his old shoes in the green box. On Monday the tissue would wrap an apple he took to school and later the box would be used to store the newest recruits to his
model
army. On their way out his mother would give him the pennies from her change to drop into the collecting box held by the lifesize model of a boy with callipers on his legs, the boy with blue eyes and pleading face who stood sentinel in the shop doorway.

It had begun with shoes. It must have been the lightness of his step that carried him further that day. It was May and the lanes were white with cow parsley in the verges and hawthorn blossom in the hedgerows. White like a wedding cake. He was often alone as a boy but rarely lonely, and that Saturday he knew no other restriction but the extent of his own impulse, and on this day it carried him outside the normal parameters of his play. There was a feeling, a scent of summer which gave him a sense of freedom, a desire for newness in his wanderings and so he followed the stream, its soft voice where it lisped and splashed over stones his only companion. Followed it as it dawdled and curved round the reeded banks and pock-marked edges where cows had stood to drink. Clouds of midges trembled and sometimes a dragonfly skimmed its surface. He dropped a peeled stick into the water and followed its voyage but soon its pace was too slow and boredom made him leave it becalmed in still water. For a second he thought of stepping on stones along its shallow stretch but remembered his sandals and could not risk the telltale white marks.

Across the fields now which were new to him, and then he saw the copse. It was almost circular in shape, clumped on a slightly raised plateau, its circumference bound by a moat of bushes and a yellow flame of gorse so bright it hurt his eyes. With little effort his imagination fashioned it into a fort, a walled castle which invited exploration and so he followed the narrow path which wound its way into its heart. It was darker now and the dappled light filtering through the meshed vault of branches reminded him of the way light seeped through
the
coloured glass of church windows on Sunday morning. A secret world of sky and shadows, and he knew from the start that it would be a special place. He touched the trees as he walked, as if by touching them he gave them names and claimed them for his own.