Fresh Fields (26 page)

Yes, she was all the beauty and thrillingness of the world, nothing would ever change that. Except that now that wasn't the whole story. Now there was another aspect.

The youth had seldom dreamt, or if he had he rarely remembered it. Now he was having a particularly vivid dream—or nightmare—that stayed with him. It took place in an amusement park. Sweetheart is operating the ticket booth of the Tunnel of Love. The youth is the customer and buys a ticket, not because he wants to take the ride, but to have an excuse to approach her and speak to her and have a moment of her attention. She seems to read his mind, and she tells him it is a serious offence to buy a Tunnel of Love ticket under false pretences. She will have to report him, she says. He reluctantly gets into one of the boats, which takes him into the tunnel. It is pretty and soothing at first, with the glimmer of fairy lights and the lapping of the water. Then the air becomes hot and oppressive and there's the reek of harsh perfume. The boat keeps turning up new tunnels until the youth fears he is hopelessly lost. The boat stops and he cannot make it go again. There is hardly any light. He knows that the water around him is dangerously hot and deep and he dares not leave the boat. Her voice comes from nearby:

“You're in a jam now, aren't you,” she says.

He replies that he is.

“Would you like me to help you?”

He replies that he would.

“Tell me how much you want my help.”

He replies that he wants it very much.

“Not good enough!” she snaps.

The youth begins to see a little better in the dark and makes out a cave or grotto near him.

A giant web extends out of it and is strung across the tunnel, and he sees that the prow of the boat is caught. He peers into the grotto and can almost make out a huge spider as big as a person. He realises that Sweetheart's voice came from the grotto. She is right where the spider is! He must warn her, save her. He senses that the spider is raising its huge fangs to strike. There comes a foul reek which he knows is the spider's breath as its mouth gapes for its prey. The youth tries to cry a warning but he cannot utter a sound. He tries to paddle the boat with his hands but the water is scalding hot. Then someone is coming up the tunnel behind him, wading knee-deep through the water. How can that be? The youth is mystified. He peers again into the grotto and makes out Sweetheart's face. She is very pale and anxious-looking and is trying to call him closer. Her face is right where the spider is. The fangs must be poised just inches away . . . Then he sees the person who has waded up to him. It is Diestl. The youth tries to tell Diestl that Sweetheart is there with the spider and in terrible danger.

“She isn't
with
it!” Diestl growls back. He grabs the youth by the arm and pulls him from the boat. The youth finds the water isn't hot at all and is only shallow. He and Diestl wade back along the tunnel until they see a chink of light in the roof. They climb up to it and break open a hole big enough to squirm through. They sit on the roof of the Tunnel of Love and look out over the amusement park. The youth is trying to fathom what Diestl meant by saying Sweetheart wasn't with the spider. He turns to ask him, but Diestl has vanished. The youth climbs down to the ground and thinks to return to the ticket booth, but an instinct warns him that if he does the whole horror will be repeated, that he will have no power to avoid it. Then he understands something. Only the top half of Sweetheart is visible in the ticket booth. The bottom half, unseen below the counter, has
spider's
feet. He hurries away from the amusement park, shrivelled with the horror of that knowledge.

There was something else. It was the truly haunting part, the part that made him wake up heartbroken. Even as the youth hurries from the amusement park, he knows that Sweetheart can be saved only if someone is brave enough to confront what she is. It's like the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast. If he returned to the booth with an axe and smashed it open to reveal the spider's feet, there would be a fearsome, inhuman shriek, then the spider's feet would scuttle away into the deeps of the tunnel and Sweetheart would be her sweet self again. But the youth is too afraid to venture back.

He wants to ask Diestl to return with him, but he knows that Diestl has no interest in saving Sweetheart, none at all, and that it comes down to an intolerable choice: he can have Diestl or Sweetheart in his life, but not both.

The youth understood that the dream wasn't Sweetheart's fault and that it shouldn't influence his feelings about her. And it didn't, really. It was merely that there was an extra dimension to those feelings now, a dark area at the back of them. You didn't need to take much notice of the other dimension, or of the dark, except of course when the dream was actually happening, or during that first minute or two after you'd woken and before the vividness faded.

You could speed that fading by getting the White Book out straightaway and gazing at “The Lonely Princess” or “The Sword Maiden.” Almost at once the dream or nightmare would seem quite far off and almost unconnected to you. If you were lucky you could go the whole day without a single thought or image of it coming to mind.

Yes, the mornings were okay, mostly, now that he had his private space. He could cope with the Tunnel of Love thing. What he could maybe not cope with was the Terror Waking thing, but it had only happened once. He'd woken in a panicked gesture of trying to shield his head with his arm because Long John had stumbled across and swung a tomahawk at him. Except it wasn't Long John on a gammy pin, but an inhuman scuttling thing that hissed in a voice like Long John's but higher pitched:
One time we would've split your head open before you saw it coming, but that was when a girl still had two good legs!

It was so nice to get out to the cotton rows and feel the sun and earth and air, to feel the solid weight of the hoe in your hands, and the action of your body as you worked. The youth had always lived most fully in his mind, but there were times now when he just wanted to exist in his physical self, like a tree or a bush, like a cotton plant having its leaves ruffled in the sunny, earth-smelling breeze, and not ever having to think.

 

THEY WERE
paid at the end of their first week. Rita came with a tray of brown envelopes and sat in front of the cook-shed with her white hat pushed back and gave each chipper his pay as he came up and signed for it. Rita looked after all the clerical matters of the camp and she and Denny both lived in Company quarters elsewhere. They were said to be on together. They did seem very suited. Someone reckoned that if they mated they'd have a baby hat.

There was some unpleasantness because one bloke claimed he'd been underpaid. He was getting stroppy with Rita when Denny came up and took him aside. Denny explained that you only got paid for the time you spent out on the rows with a hoe in your hand, and that the bloke had been absent the whole of Wednesday morning. The bloke replied that he'd had a toothache somethin' terrible and had gone to Weegun to look for a dentist. Who was Denny to say a man couldn't get a crook tooth seen to? Denny explained in a patient voice that, funnily enough, the Company employed cotton-chippers to chip cotton, not to go to the dentist.

The bloke began to bluster some more. Denny told him to please get his gear and leave the Company's property. The bloke yelled that Denny couldn't sack him just like that. Denny replied that he just had. The bloke was a lot bigger than Denny and seemed for a moment to want to fight. Denny didn't do anything other than take his hands out of his jeans pockets, but there was something in the way he did it. The bloke walked away swearing and a minute later was in his car, churning up dust as he headed for the front gate.

A lot of the men went into Weegun on the Saturday afternoon, to go to the pub. The youth could've got a lift with someone if he'd wanted to. There was a picture theatre in the town and he thought of going to see what was on at the matinee. But he was feeling unwell. His arm and shoulder had seemed at first to have recovered from the hurt they'd got when he was pinching the bike, but the first few days of cotton-chipping had brought back the throbbing ache. He had tried to ease the strain by varying his method, using different actions and postures, even hoeing left-handed at times, but none of that had helped. He was sore all over, really, from using muscles he didn't know he had, and felt headachy too. He lay on his bed till mid-afternoon, then decided to go for a walk.

He left the camp and headed towards the big machinery depot that he could see in the distance. After a few minutes of walking he felt less unwell. There were wisps of white cloud in the sky, very high up, and a gentle breeze came over the fields. The land stretched away in the green-and-brown pattern that was everywhere and that he was accustomed to now, the green of cotton leaves and the brown of the soil. He walked with his head back, letting the sense of the sky fill him. Then he walked with his head down and focused on the smallest pebbles or puffs of dust or the tiniest leaves of the cotton plants. Then he walked with his eyes closed, concentrating on the sound of his own steps on the dirt road, or trying to catch the faint whisper of the breeze coming along the rows and through the leaves. It was like being the only person in that whole enormous landscape and having every sense filled. Every sense except taste. He wanted to taste the landscape as well as see and hear and feel it. He bent and poked his finger into the soft rich soil beside the stem of a cotton plant and then touched his tongue with it. It wasn't a bad taste, apart from a hint of chemicals.

The machinery depot had high wire fences around it, and signs warning that the wire was electrified, and that you shouldn't touch it, and that Continental Cotton bore no liability if you did. The vehicles inside were like machines from some bigger-scale world. The youth assumed they were cotton harvesters. The tyres were taller than a man, and the control cabins were far up in the air. He walked slowly round the perimeter looking at the machines from various angles. Their size gave you a watery sensation in the stomach, as though there'd be nothing you could do to escape if they suddenly sprang to life and came after you.

A brick structure stood outside the compound and gave off a faint hum. Maybe it held the generator that sent the charge into the fence, the youth thought. It had no sign warning not to touch, so he gingerly put a fingertip on the brickwork. Nothing happened. He sat down with his back against it and opened the copy of
Family Realm
he'd brought with him. It had a piece in it that he liked, about sewing, with pictures of embroidered blouses that made him think of Russian peasant costumes.

He began to daydream about a summer afternoon on the Russian steppes, of being alone in that vast solitude. What would be over the horizon, he wondered, if this really was Russia? He imagined birch forests, and churches with onion-shaped domes of gold, and beautiful intense girls with names like Natasha. There was the fabled city of Samarkand. Or was that more in China? He had a vague notion of caravans of camels going to Samarkand. Did they have camels in Russia? Surely it was too cold for them there. How patchy his knowledge was. It was all bits and pieces, not a seamless cloth. That was the thing, to have a seamless cloth of understanding. That's what going to uni gave you, he supposed. It was what Simon and Patrick had. He felt bad that he had no deep knowledge about anything in particular, except maybe about 1066, having reread
Year of Decision
so many times. He told himself to read more books, to take stock of life and the world. He made a mental note: Take Stock.

Sitting upright against the brickwork made his arm and shoulder ache again and he was drawn to a bush a short way off beside the wire fence. It had dense foliage and made a pleasant patch of shade and the grass there was too short to hide snakes. He lay down in the shade and closed his eyes and listened to the leaves rustling. The magazine lay open beside him. He would rest his eyes for five minutes, then go back to those blouse designs with their Russian look. And while he rested his eyes he would think about a beautiful Natasha . . .

A voice was speaking to him. At first he thought he was dreaming it, but he realised his eyes were open and he was staring into the green of the bush. He went to sit up and scratched the side of his face on a prickle.

“Hi there. You okay?” A white utility was beside him, and a man was leaning out of the driver's side. “You seem to have drawn some blood,” the man said, pointing.

The youth felt his face.

“I'm alright,” he told the man.

The man was looking him up and down without being too impolite about it. “Do you know you're on private land here?” he asked.

The youth replied that he was from the chippers' camp and had come for a walk to see the giant machines.

“Ah, I see. Well, we don't normally encourage folks to mosey round the Company's property too much,” he said, not sounding angry or hostile, but just a bit wary.

“Sorry,” the youth said, getting to his feet and brushing himself off.

“It's not that we mean to be inhospitable.”

“No, I understand.”

“There's a dandy little first-aid kit here,” the man said, opening his glove-box. “Let's see if we have anything for that scratch of yours.” He handed the youth a sealed packet. “That's an antiseptic pad, I think.”

“Thanks,” the youth said and went to put it in his pocket.

“You tear the end off.”

The youth tore the end off and found a wet pad. He dabbed at the scratch. It stung.

“It smarts a little, I guess?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that probably means it's doin' some kinda good.”

“Yes, thanks for that.”

“I'm goin' your way—past the camp, I mean—if you'd like a ride.”

The youth felt awkward and would have answered that he was okay and didn't mind the walk, but he thought maybe this was the man's polite way of telling him to get straight back to where he belonged. He picked up his magazine and got into the vehicle. It had the logo of the three intertwined “C”s on the doors and was very shiny and new, and inside there was a pleasant smell.