Landed (4 page)

Owen whittled Y-shaped sticks himself, burned designs into the wood the way the old man did, with a heated nail held in a pair of pliers. One afternoon his grandfather, rooting about at the back of the workbench, found a small, spiralled ram's horn he must have once rejected. ‘Here,' he said, tossing it to his grandson. Owen caught it – rough, ancient, almost fossil-like in his hands – his heart weak with gratitude.

 

On the first day of the autumn term Grandpa drove Owen down to the valley road, from where he caught the school bus, and picked him up the same afternoon. After that he had to walk, three miles down, three miles back uphill. He sat on his
own on the bus, but others in his class got on at stops along the way and he found himself forced to explain his presence. ‘My Dad's sick,' he said. ‘I'm staying with family out of town.' Owen felt himself some kind of changeling, the texture of his self altering, transforming, from urban urchin to rural youth. Acquiring knowledge of the truth of life and death up on the hills, but becoming uncomfortable down in the valley, among men.

Walking uphill, Owen scrutinised the world around him: identified sounds deep in the rural silence, wildflowers in the bank at the side of the lane. Sometimes his attention zoned out, his mind seemed to empty and he walked in a trance – unaware of the direction he took, an unconscious compass guiding him home – a dopiness, a kind of rapture.

Grandma was happy he was up there with them – whether compensating for the failings of her son or glad of a child's presence once again, Owen wasn't sure. One evening he couldn't get to sleep and sat on the stairs, listened in on his grandparents in the room below. ‘He's shy,' Grandma said.

‘Nothing like his father,' Grandpa growled. ‘Doesn't talk nonsense.'

‘When he does speak, I like to listen,' Grandma said. ‘I'll bet you were just like him at that age.'

 

Carrying his junior shepherd's crook, fingers wrapped around the ram's horn, Owen accompanied his grandfather evenings and weekends. After autumn rain one Saturday morning in September, walking back for breakfast from early inspection of sheep, Grandpa pointed his crook at circular white eruptions from the grass. Field mushrooms. Owen scuttled from one to another, raised them gently with two fingers, slid his penknife
under and cut the stalks. Turned them over. The overnight perfection of their fine brown gills. He held them to his nose, inhaled the smell of earth made flesh. Grandpa took off his cap to carry them. Before they entered the cottage he passed it to Owen to give to his grandmother. She took the cap from the boy, smiling.

‘Beauties,' she said. ‘Early, though, isn't it?'

‘Had 'em earlier than this,' Grandpa replied.

In a moment she had cut them on her board and they were sizzling in her pan. The three of them relished the succulent flavour and texture.

‘Grandpa loves a fresh-picked mushroom with his bacon,' his wife announced. ‘Don't you, Gwyn?'

Owen turned to his grandfather. The old man said nothing, only ate greedily.

 

It was when she realised Owen was being taught to imitate the calls of certain birds that Grandma's mood turned. Grandpa would stop when they were walking, his hand across Owen's chest, and repeat the sound of a distant curlew, not its musical bubbling trill but the yelping alarm note. Owen understood he was to attempt the same. His early efforts provoked disdain but his grandfather persisted, obliging Owen to. Sometimes they paused and all they heard was an ambulance siren or a church bell carried on the wind, or the whine of an all-terrain vehicle, one of the Honda three-wheelers advancing across the hills. Grandpa spat – at their intrusion upon his silence, at their unstoppable encroachment.

‘Oil runs out,' he said. ‘Forgot how to walk, see. Who'll round up then?'

He gobbed into the wet grass and strode on, grimacing. He must have been feeling early twinges of the pain that would
see him and Grandma, less than five years and two hip replacements later, in a brick bungalow down in the valley, from where he'd gaze with grey eyes up to the tops. How many thousands of miles of walking over rough ground, of jumps off brick walls to sun-baked earth, of slipping in mud and off rocks in streams, of jarring collisions and juddering falls. But for now he suppressed the pain of grating bones.

 

‘What are you doing?' Grandma demanded. ‘Why are you teaching him calls?'

‘Nowt for you to fret,' he said.

‘You promised,' she said. ‘Not again. Not here.'

‘Keep out of it,' he said, his anger building.

Grandma turned her attention to Owen. ‘He knows he couldn't do it on his own.'

‘Leave the boy alone.'

‘Wouldn't consider it if you weren't here.'

Owen had no idea what they were talking about. In the evenings, sat outside, Grandpa would freeze, finger pointing into the dusk. Although whatever he heard was out of sight, his eyes moved around their sockets like the pupils were some essential part of his sonic radar. Owen listened. The ghostly quavering hoot of a tawny owl. Grandpa immediately imitating it, Owen following. He felt his grandfather's hand, ruffling his hair. The rough fingers cupped his face. ‘Good boy.' Owen hoped his grandpa couldn't see his grin: he couldn't hide his happiness, hoped the twilight might.

The two of them then performed a duet, one calling, the other answering, in open defiance of Grandma. ‘You stupid man,' she said. She went back inside, slamming the door on them. The leaves were turning.

Above, clouds scudded across the face of a hunters' moon. They walked over the upper fields. A packet of silver sheep parted for them. Owen trotted every few yards to keep up with his grandfather, whose stride was loose and eager. They skirted Corndon Hill. Wood pigeons had come at dusk to roost in the oaks by Fishpool. They passed beneath the orbit of a bat's insect-devouring circuit: once, twice, three times Owen saw its veering flight. The night was alive with movement. They walked fast. The surface of the earth – rough rolling pasture, streams flowing through sombre woods, heather, gorse, high bracken – prickled with the same excitement the boy had felt gathering in his grandfather for days. All hunting animals were on the prowl, their nervous prey ready to betray themselves. Men too tonight, Owen sensed, far around them, had slipped into the dark like guerillas, a countrywide uprising.

It was no revolution. Grandpa seethed at the fact of his position, not its injustice. He hated no one more than the man whose land he farmed, whose rent he paid, but had no thought to overthrow him. Desired only to get back at him, inflict a visceral measure of revenge.

They walked close by Nind, but no dogs barked, and entered the woods on Pellrhadley Hill. After that Owen lost track, his attention taken up with sticking to his grandfather in the darkness, pausing at every sound. He was in a state of ignorance, had no idea what they were doing, what could possibly happen. Grandpa should have had the twelve-bore, holding it high up the barrel, his arm held up, the gun resting horizontal on his shoulder, as it was yesterday when he carried it to the shed to oil it in preparation. But the gun was gone this morning. Grandma had taken it in the night and refused to say where she'd hidden it.

‘You tell me!' Grandpa snarled.

Grandma stood at the kitchen sink, her back to her husband, shaking her head.

Grandpa grew visibly hot with anger. His voice deepened into something grit-laden, nasty. ‘Tell me, woman.' Owen sat at the table, his breakfast growing cold, congealing on his plate. Something terrible about to happen. Insanity in the room. Which one of them was the more crazy? He didn't know. The brink of violence.

Grandpa turned and walked out of the cottage. They heard a clatter of metal. One of the dogs squealed. Grandma turned around, leaned back against the sink, exhausted. She shook her bowed head. ‘Too much to lose,' she said quietly, to herself.

And now Owen wondered what they were doing out here without a gun, his grandfather's stubborn madness, seeing his plan through. He felt the hand on his chest. ‘Down.' They knelt on damp pine cones. ‘Up ahead,' Grandpa whispered. ‘Need to walk around to the right. Out of the wood, skirt it a hundred yards, come in and walk slow straight back toward me. Send it my way, see. Can you do that?'

Owen felt the dead weight of his grandfather's hand on his shoulder. It was almost pitch-black here in the trees. ‘Send what, Grandpa?' he whispered.

His grandfather breathed deeply. ‘Fallow deer. Forty yard upwind of us.'

Owen walked in a trance. Unable to imagine how on earth he could possibly find his way in the darkness, he gave himself up to the instruction his grandfather had given him, believing it to be so absurd that it could hardly be his fault if he wandered round till dawn and found himself ten miles away. He went out of the wood, walked through heather in moonlight, re-entered
the trees, walked in a line, turned left towards his grandfather. Or so he envisioned.

With his arms held in front of him, Owen stumbled slowly through the darkness. In these woods were badgers, foxes, wild cats. There were snakes underfoot and likely hanging from the branches that scratched his face. He began to tremble, a terrified child blundering through a dark wood seething with beasts. A black panther escaped from a zoo. Wolves released from captivity. Owen realised that he was sobbing with fright, though he made no sound: shivering, tears slid from his eyes, he carried on blindly forward. The sudden sound of movement just ahead. He was convinced that whatever it was was rushing towards him. Owen began to weep, but then he became aware of another sound: the long, wailing cry of a deer in distress. It stopped abruptly. Owen aimed towards it.

When Owen found them, Grandpa had killed the doe with his knife and was already hauling it over his shoulders, holding two hooves in each hand, a great scarf of meat around his neck. The way that events had unravelled one into another seemed to the boy inconceivable: that he had taken the correct route, that the deer had bolted in this direction, that his old grandfather had fallen upon it. What kind of demonic explanation was there? They reached the edge of the wood.

‘Go first. Wait for me by the bridge. Anyone sees you, run. Catch you, say nothing. You see anyone: owl sound, remember?'

They made their way back in a leapfrog fashion, together under cover, separately in the open, Owen sent on ahead to warn his grandfather of other men loose in the night. After a while he began to get sleepy. He'd never stayed up anything
like as late as this. There were fewer clouds than when they set out, the open land was like moon fields, the earth had been abandoned, there were no people here nor anywhere else, Owen could relax in the silver land. All he had to do was sleepwalk home.

He was woken by voices, and dropped to the ground. Moments later two men walked by him. How could they not have seen him? One was tall, lean, the other broader, had a gun. He lay on his side and watched them amble towards the tree behind which his grandfather waited. Perhaps they wouldn't see him. He'd hear them, wouldn't he, and keep out of sight? Then he saw the dog, joining them from some exploration of its own off to the side. It would, he figured, smell the deer for sure. Owen stood up and made the hooting sound they'd practised often. He thought he did it pretty well. The men turned round.

‘Who the?' said one. ‘What are?' said the other, the tall one, and he started coming towards Owen, standing straight and clear in the moonlight. The boy hooted again. The tall man paused for a moment, spooked maybe by this eerie being, half owl, half child. ‘Stop,' he said, and began walking again. Beyond, the fat man called the dog to his side. ‘Stay where you are,' the lean man ordered. Owen turned and ran.

He sprinted. Panic-stricken. Only, though, for the first minute. Then, glancing back, he saw the tall man was further away than he had been, and struggling across the field after him. The man ran as if he'd been handicapped, hobbled because he was an adult, chasing a swift eleven-year-old boy. Owen was fast and in that moment knew it. His lungs seemed to bloom, become twice as large, so that he wanted to laugh as he ran, then realised that he was doing so, giggling to himself as he galloped clear, the distance widening between him and his pursuer.

With one hand on the top rung he hurdled a gate, cantered across another field, through a spinney. He was clear now, unless they set the dog loose. He trotted into a pasture where bullocks did double takes at his presence and scampered away. He jumped a fence and ran through a marshy piece of woodland. He didn't know where he was but he wasn't bothered. There was a large puddle ahead and he ran through it. He was halfway across when he realised it wasn't water but mud, or slurry, or quicksand, and it was over his knees. He staggered on and in two steps it was up to his waist. He tried to turn, and with a great effort managed to do so, but the swamp was up around his stomach. He reached out. There was nothing to get hold of except loose swilling mud. He tried to scrabble, to swim with his arms, but could get no traction. His feet were on some halfsolid ground that gave slowly beneath him. He was up to his chest now and sinking.