Lie of the Land (22 page)

He fell again. This time he wasn't so lucky, and smacked his forehead off a rock. He curled up on the sodden grass, nursing the point of impact and the percussive quiver inside his skull, tasting his own blood along with cold rain. After a few seconds, he lay back on the ground, the heavy drops cascading onto his face, into his open mouth.

Maybe he should wait until dawn. It couldn't be more than a few hours away. He could rest here.

Howard.

He shivered, teeth rattling. Was he going up the slope or down? Whimpering, he bit down on fear, head still ringing from the fall against the rock. He stood up again, edged forward into the black miles of steep hills and hidden streams, hands outstretched, feeling their blind way into the void.

Alec John found him seven hours later, barely conscious and huddled in a bank of heather, the groundwork for double pneumonia deep in his lungs.

December

24

At night he could hear the stags roaring out their challenges to other males. Procreation was everything, or at least insemination was, the urge that sprung open like a time lock every November. At this time of year, so Alec John had said, there was nothing but the urge. Stags were slaves to it. Everything, from fat deposits to the thickness of neck manes, was geared to besting their rivals and gathering as many females as they could.

Standing in the hotel garden, on a windless night, Carl could hear the snap of branches as they barged their way through the trees and bushes on the lower slopes of the hill. Brute power had the horn, and was looking for as many places to insert it as possible. But before that, there was the fear of violence to sow first. The urge to fuck was preceded by the urge to dominate. They were indivisible.

Out in the dark garden Carl shivered in the breeze. He zipped his fleece up and jammed his hands in the pockets. It had been a warm enough day, in the sun, but the breath of winter commanded the night air. His new room, number 7, was cold now, most of the time, as winter gales thundered in from the south-west, one charging storm front after another. Tonight there was a lull, and the few constellations that were now familiar to him stood out from the dense infinity of lesser stars.

Carl sat on the bench at the bottom of the garden, the smell of damp decay thickening the dark, until it got too cold to stay outside any longer. There was still a faint glow in the west, and it
was amazing how people learned to cope in darkness that could no longer be banished with the flick of a switch.

He was getting used to moving around at night, sensing his way and what lay in the deepest shadows. Extra care was required on the stairs, however: that's where Isaac was in the habit of leaving bits of Lego, or worse, toy cars.

Carl stepped deftly up to the first-floor landing, where the moon waned behind the stained-glass window. In the room he set match to candle, took another swig of Hendrik's home-brew, and rolled himself up in the duvet. He lay, staring at the candle flame, in absolute silence, and thought about the day, and the days to come. Today, out on the hill, they'd crept up to this sleeping stag; its eyes were closed, jaws munching on cud and a thread of drool hung from its mouth.

‘You can see how thin he is,' Alec John had whispered. ‘He's run out – exhausted after all that shagging and squaring up to the others.'

They crawled through the heather for a while longer, elbows in the spongy moss, making sure to keep their arses down, until Alec John stopped. They were at the edge of a peat bank. Down below, and easily within reach, was their dozing target.

Alec John reached into his pocket, took out a coin and flicked it into the burn. The coin pinged off a rock before it hit the water, but the beast didn't move a muscle in response.

‘Years ago,' said Alec John, raising his voice a little, ‘in a different part of the estate, I saw one like that, fast asleep. He was a fourteen-pointer, and it turned out to be his last year as top dog.' He chuckled. ‘I could've walked over to him and put the fucking barrel in his ear if I'd wanted to.'

He passed the rifle to Carl. ‘Now's your chance. You won't get a better one. The rut's almost finished.'

Carl took the gun. He'd fired dozens of practice shots and now, maybe as close as he would ever get, here was the real thing.

‘Remember,' whispered Alec John. ‘Breathe easy, find the mark,
and squeeze through it. Brace yourself, but stay relaxed.' He smiled. ‘You know, I used to get a lot of Germans up on shooting trips. They're a hunting nation, the Germans, but there aren't enough animals in their own country to shoot. A lot of them were members of clubs and they all had medals, but they had never actually shot an animal. It was a big moment for them, to shoot a deer, and they were shaking.' Alec John chuckled. ‘Half of them were so nervous they missed – more than once.' He considered the sleeping animal. ‘So take your time, and relax. Regulate your breathing.'

Lifting his binoculars, Carl could see the saliva glistening on the stag's chin, long eyelashes glinting in the weak sun, closed eyelids, and the jaw muscles flexing, working, as the animal chewed. If Alec John was right, maybe he could walk down there, press the barrel of the .308 against the base of the stag's neck, and pull the trigger. Easy meat. His first kill. Protein for the committee to allocate, according to their affiliations. One squeeze of his finger would do it.

But it didn't seem right. The animal was asleep in the sun after getting its hole for the umpteenth time. If the beast had been active, alert, then he could do it easily, maybe, from this distance, though he wasn't entirely sure about that either.

He sighed. ‘It doesn't seem fair,' Carl whispered. He squinted at Alec John. ‘D'you know what I mean?' He shook his head, took in a breath of cool, clean air, his hands gripping the Ruger's walnut stock.

‘That's just what I was thinking,' said Alec John, smiling. ‘The time before, the one I just told you about, I didn't think it was right then, him just sitting there. He deserved a better death, I reckoned.'

‘But we need the meat.'

‘Well,' said Alec John, ‘if we really needed the meat I'd say go for it. But the freezers are full enough and we'll need to save bullets.' He shrugged. ‘Take him if you want. He's an easy target.'

Carl engaged the safety on the rifle. ‘A fair fight, and all that.'

Alec John nodded. ‘Come on then, let's go.'

Both men crept back the way they had come. The stag would sleep, recover his strength, and wake up none the wiser. There was still another season's peak performance ahead of him and enough strength to keep rivals at bay, this time. Then he'd be a target, sleeping or not, for a stronger power.

25

They had this game, the kids. Well, they weren't exactly kids. The guys were fifteen, sixteen, and one of them must have been six-two if he was an inch. The girls, one or two of them, looked like women. There was no beating about the bush where that was concerned; they looked older, though he could tell when speaking to them, the words they used, their awkwardness, and their concerns, that they were in transition. Gemma was fifteen. He knew that. He didn't know how old the other one was, but he guessed they were all about the same age. Terry could play the worldly-wise man and make them all laugh, and the boys, smart enough in their sullen way, were no real match for him in the one-liner department.

So, anyway, they had this game, the kids.

Terry had seen them come back down the road one evening. They'd pitched a tent down between the dunes, where they smoked his weed and messed about. He'd heard one of the guys snarking about not getting his blow job. It was their own private spot, their refuge, when they weren't required to work or account for themselves. Deprivation was making adults of them, drawing them into dutiful necessity and away from childhood. In their den, they could just chill out.

One evening they were coming back from their den and Terry was heading home on his bike, out of the saddle, desperate for the headland incline not to beat him in front of Gemma and her watching crew. They gave the old man a ribbing as he struggled
up the road towards them. Thigh muscles burning, Terry stopped trying to turn the pedals, doing his best to act like he wasn't completely shagged out. As he got his breath back, he noticed one guy's white T-shirt had a splatter of red down the front.

‘Is that your first shave, Hector?' he said, gesturing to the stain. ‘You'll get the hang of it eventually, as long as you don't cut your throat first.'

‘Hector got the flag record off Tony,' said Gemma brightly. At that, Hector started proclaiming his pre-eminence loudly. He'd clearly enjoyed a celebratory home-brew or two along with his smoke; his eyes were red and his voice hoarse. If he'd started to beat his chest and roar in triumph Terry wouldn't have been too surprised.

‘Flag record?'

‘In the redzone,' said Gemma, as Hector was thumped on the upper arm by one of his mates. ‘He did a hundred and twelve metres before he had to turn back.'

Terry frowned, confused.

‘He doesn't know,' said Gemma to her mates. ‘Come and we'll show Terry the flag.'

At the roadblock on the south road they stopped, microwaves buzzing and clicking in their heads. Down the straight, level road – out in the redzone – fluttered a small yellow flag. ‘Yellow's a positive colour,' said Gemma. ‘Like in Buddhist countries they wear yellow. Red's so negative, you know?'

‘So,' said Terry, mock-thoughtfully, ‘the barrier isn't really a barrier, and by the power of positive thinking you'll make the redzone disappear?'

‘No,' chirped the other girl, Annie. ‘We're not fucking saying that.'

Terry looked down the road in disbelief. ‘Let me get this straight: you run into the redzone, down the road, with the yellow flag. And how d'you get it back?'

Hector piped up. ‘The challenger has to get it back.'

‘You can have a rest though,' said one of the other guys. ‘Before you try and beat the record. You need to have a rest cos of the nosebleeds.'

Some things that Terry had done in his life were inadvisable, to say the least. But running towards an excruciating head-bursting noise that would eventually kill you was not one of them.

Gemma brandished a wrist-phone. ‘We get the distance from this. There's a pedometer on it. The flag's in a wee sack of sand so the wind doesn't blow it away.'

‘Well, kids,' said Terry, trying to look impressed, ‘that's certainly an inventive game you have there.'

‘It's not a game,' spat Hector. The rest agreed.

‘It's an ingenious challenge,' said Annie.

Terry smiled. ‘With death the prize for the winner. If human ingenuity can get a man on the moon, then there's no telling what challenge we can meet, or where we can plant our poxy little flags of positivity.'

Gemma glared at him. ‘Fuck you,' she said. She pointed down the road. ‘You run out to that flag and tell us all about human ingenuity, with the blood pishing out of your nose because of SCOPE, or whatever it's called. What a brilliant invention.'

‘Go, Gemma,' encouraged Hector.

At that, she quietened, uncomfortable with her power. There was a pause, as they all considered the little yellow flag, fluttering 112.56 metres down the single-track road.

There was an obvious question, so daft Hector asked it. ‘Want a shot?'

For a second, the thought of taking off in pursuit of the course record actually crossed Terry's mind. It was soon put to bed. ‘Nah,' he said. ‘I've been known to try and swim across the bay when I'm fucking pished, but I don't fancy that, guys.'

‘Pussy,' snapped Hector.

Terry glanced down the road again, unable to catch Gemma's eye.
He turned back to the boy. ‘Maybe so, but you'll still be kissing my arse and saying sorry when you want a smoke.'

The group laughed, and Terry made his getaway while he could, his bravado intact. He found Carl in the caravan, stuffing a pipe with some dry leaf.

‘You not out with Alec John?'

Carl lit the pipe with a taper, sucked in the smoke. ‘He's not feeling too good, so we finished early.'

Terry poured some home-brew. Hendrik was confident, this time, that the demijohns had been cleaned properly, and that this batch would be less purgative than the last.

A couple of hours later it was dark, the wind on the move, surging and swishing around the caravan. The conversation turned to Howard, and the world before, and Carl's mood had soured. The same line kept running through his head: the machine gave us everything, then it took it all away. He wished he could stop thinking. Too much booze. Too much weed.

The wind-lamp brightened as the roof-mounted turbine whirled furiously in a gust, but the far end of the room, the tiny partitioned bedroom, a jumble of clothes and books, was in darkness. Carl felt tired, dead-beat, and talking about the past made him want to curl up, alone.

‘I'm off,' he said.

Terry stayed sitting on a beanbag near the stove. ‘Don't be daft, kip on the couch. What do you have to go back for?'

‘I don't know.' He shrugged. ‘Call it a homing instinct for somewhere that isn't home. Territorial urge.'

Carl shuddered at the thought of walking back to the hotel, groping along the road, afraid of where his next footstep was going to take him. The last time that had happened it had almost killed him, and his urge to leave the tiny caravan was stronger than the fear that it might. Carl stood, unsteady on his feet, and zipped up his jacket. It was black outside the window and he felt
the wind give the caravan another shove. Maybe he should stay right where he was. He couldn't face feeling his way through total darkness, and if his wind-up torch packed in that's what he'd have to do.

‘Right,' said Carl, his hand on the door. With light, he'd find his way. Opening the door, a fresh nor'westerly came diving in, fluttering curtains and paper, with the tide on its breath. The torch worked fine, its beam showing wind-tossed rhododendron and willow.