Listening in the Dusk (17 page)
Read Listening in the Dusk Online
Authors: Celia Fremlin
Or perhaps it didn’t matter to him any more, and never would? When he came out of prison, shrunken, brow-beaten, nearly fifty — thirty years away, a thousand years away from his terrible youth — how could he still care?
Oh, Alice, help me!
Do
something! These were the words ringing in her ears right now. This was the plea to which she must find an answer.
“Well, and so now you
have
read them, you
can
throw them away,” said Alice wearily, “if that’s what you want to do.” Her eyes were sore and aching (as Mary’s must be too) after all these hours of deciphering page after page, notebook after notebook, of hasty, impassioned handwriting. At one point they’d found themselves struggling over their task in semi-darkness, both of them having omitted to switch the light on, or even to notice that daylight was fading as missing lunch slowly merged into missing tea as well.
Twice, Hetty had made her way up the long flights of stairs to enquire if they were all right? So quiet it had been all day, like not a mouse stirring nor even hotting up a bit of something in a pan (not that mice do normally hot things up in pans, but they got Hetty’s point). She’d got a pot of tea on the go, as a matter of fact, wouldn’t they like to come down and join her, have a bit of a break, like?
No, truly they wouldn’t, not just now; and while Alice thanked her for the kind offer, Mary embarked on a hasty and quite unnecessary farrago of lies about what all these miscellaneous papers and newspaper cuttings were all about. Notes for a thesis, she babbled … sorting them, getting them back in order for the friend she’d borrowed them from, and who was in a hurry to have them back … Would be calling for them … Might be here any minute, really; you know, exams and things …
Hetty nodded uncomprehendingly, and then remarked on the sad aspect of Alice’s sofa with one of its most crucial supports removed, and would they like one of the cardboard boxes from Mr Singh’s room to replace it? Crammed up with papers his boxes were too, just like the ones here; Alice would never know the difference, once she’d got it in place. Nor would Mr Singh
know the difference; he wouldn’t mind
what
they did, poor man, because it didn’t look like he’d ever be coming back, did it? And if he
did
come back … Well, that’d mean that his troubles were a bit sorted out, wouldn’t it, the Home Office off his back, that sort of thing.
He’d
be so happy he wouldn’t care about a box or two, now would he?
No, no, and no. With due gratitude, but definite; and then they waited, as politely as possible, for her to go.
The light on this time, they returned to their joint task, Mary’s own memories at this point supplementing those recorded by her brother through that last sweet spring on Flittermouse Hill; one of the loveliest springs in living memory, so green was the reviving grass, so lush the hedgerows at the base of the hill, the elders and wayfarer trees bursting into bud, huge pale clusters among the new leaves, already scenting the warm air, but never, now, to burst into flower. For before the spring had burgeoned into summer, the bright air had become heavy with threat, with the thud and jangle of machinery and of huge lorries. And before long, angry, protesting voices were to be heard too, as the
hastily-daubed
SAVE FLITTERMOUSE HILL
banners tottered
amateurishly
against a blue incredible sky where, for just a little longer, the larks would be singing; before their nests, their eggs, their fledgelings were mashed into the yellowish slimy ruts being gouged out of the hillside by the giant wheels.
For there had been a protest, of course there had. Mary herself had been on it, she told Alice, for she’d been home for the Easter vacation just then. She and Julian had stood shoulder to shoulder with a few dozen other stalwarts from Medley Green and the surrounding villages; taking turns to link arms and stand defiantly in the path of the bulldozers and other vehicles of destruction, daring the great cumbersome lorries to mow them down.
Of course, the lorries didn’t. Of course, the police arrived, and the television cameras, and on the News that evening there was a twenty-second item showing the police breaking-up the feeble little concourse, their banners skewed and flapping, and three of them — no, four — being carried away bodily. Julian, Mary explained, was in fact one of these, but happened to be off-camera
at the moment, so his pluck — or obstinacy, or whatever — went unrecorded. Later in the evening, after the News, one of the protesters — a lady from the Medley Green Wild Flower Society — was given her say; but, inexperienced as she was in media-presentation, and not knowing that she was to have less than fifty seconds, she filled nearly all of it with a pre-amble consisting almost entirely of the correct botanical names of various species of wild flower that grow on chalk, and never got to her main point at all. The opposite point of view was presented, far more skilfully, by a Town Councillor who homed in at once on his two most telling points; the first, and most important one, concerning the number of jobs that would be created by this new development; the second (and in its way almost as important as the job-creation aspect), there was the actual need for such a development. Growing population … Industrial expansion … Medley Green bursting at the seams … Influx of car-owning commuters … Overcrowded roads … Inadequate car-parks … Need for a large new shopping centre … The inalienable right of every human being to a decent home with a garage, and central heating, and double-glazing, and constant hot water …
The speech was recorded in the local paper, and Julian had kept the cutting. It was one of the first to be pasted in, and underneath he had written:
‘They’ve done it. It’s happened. It’s happened
now,
in May, just when the elder flowers are beginning, and I’ve seen the first hover-fly. The man says all that hedge at the foot of the hill is to come down, and of course the ragwort will go with it, and so there will be no cinnabar moths this summer. Nor next, nor for ever. The silver birches are going too, he said — in fact the whole of the copse, including the big oaks with the owls. The barn owls
and
the tawny owls.
‘I wish the nuclear war would start, then the human race would be gone too. At least the cockroaches would be left, for they are more resistant to radioactivity than any other creature.
May
17th
. The same man was there, he’s working one of the diggers. He agreed with me, yes, it’s a bit of a shame to be cutting down the hawthorns just when they’re in bloom — a grand sight, he says, looks like snow-drifts as you come over the hill; but it’s the schedule, see, it can’t be helped. If we don’t keep to the schedule they’ll be taking on another contractor, and then where’ll we all be?
May
18th.
I got up very early this morning, I was at Flittermouse Hill before sunrise and had to wheel my bike over the ruts looking for somewhere to lean it. The handlebars were all wet with dawn, and the great oak I leaned it on was wet too, the bark was slippery with wet, and I noticed they’d already marked it where the saw-cuts are to go.
A bit further up, I stood very quietly and watched the rabbits while it was still grey, the grass, and sort of misty before sunrise. They are half way up the hill now, I think the burrows further down have mostly been destroyed, and they are scurrying around making new ones higher up, all ready to be destoyed in a week’s time. Or maybe two weeks, depending on the schedule.
What can we do? There must be
something.
The demo was useless. Too feeble. Too few. There must be
some
thing
,
though; we can’t just let it happen; we
can’t.
On the way down, I met Mrs Jakes, and told her about it … about the rabbits making new burrows. She’s one of the women who were on the demo, and so I assumed she’d sympathise, and help me try to think what we could do; but she just gave a little laugh:
“I’m afraid I can’t feel sorry for
rabbits
!”
she said. “They’re nasty, destructive creatures, you know. They damage the trees …”
Yes, that’s what she said: “they damage the trees”; and actually while she was saying it we could hear the
chainsaws
in the silver-birch wood, slicing down trees at the rate of seven an hour. That’s what the foreman told me: seven an hour.
Something must be done; and whatever it is, it must be
done by me. I can see that now. I stood there, and I made a vow: I am going to fight them. If necessary, to the death; and if necessary, alone.
May
23rd.
This morning, I stood all alone in front of one of the bulldozers; but of course I was overpowered. No TV cameras this time, they get bored if they have to spend more than half a morning on this sort of thing, and so there is no record of my solitary humiliation. Two of the men were laughing as they swung me out of the way. I raced them down the slope, and got in front again, and we had a repeat performance.
The third time they’d got a little bunch of police waiting for me, and so that was that.
They didn’t put me in a cell, by the way; they let me off with a warning.
A
warning
!!!
I would like to have warned
them,
but I couldn’t think how.
I shall, though, I shall.
June
2nd.
The oaks are down now. I watched the last one as they tore it to pieces, the mighty branches groaning and resisting, but giving in, one by one, in spite of their enormous strength. Each one in turn cracks at last, and bends, and then with a last frightful tearing sound it hangs loose for one juddering moment, and then crashes to the ground, where it lies, waiting to be set upon after the
tea-break
. The young green leaves don’t yet know that they are dead; they go on growing and unfurling themselves on the doomed twigs as if nothing had happened.
Of course, this is the end of the owls. In the early afternoon I saw a pair of tawnies flapping blindly in the sunlight, their nest of owlets somewhere down there among the shrieking saws.
June
3rd.
It looks like a battlefield; and of course that’s exactly what it is: part of the world-wide battle going on between human beings and every other living thing.
Last week it was the owls. This week it’s the bats; the little Mouse-Eared Bats that have hibernated in the chalk caves for thousands upon thousands of years, and who gave
the hill its name. Now their caves are to be filled in to strengthen the foundations of the new buildings. There is a bat society of some sort, I rang them up, but they didn’t think there is anything they could do, someone is on holiday, and anyway Mouse-Eared Bats are not an
endangered
species. “They’ll find somewhere else to settle,” the girl consoled me. “Barns, derelict sheds, that sort of thing. They’ll be all right.”
And perhaps they would have been. At this point in the diary, personal narrative was replaced for several pages by newspaper cuttings.
THE BATTY BATTLE-LINES ARE DRAWN
was the first, and predictable headline, and throughout the article which followed Julian and his little band of supporters were referred to as the “Batty Battalion”, people, that is, campaigning to prevent the bats being poisoned as well as dispersed. The problem, as set out in subsequent articles and correspondence in the local paper, was roughly as follows:
The bats, displaced from their ancestral caves, had indeed sought other homes, many of the females with their babies clinging to them as they flew around scouring the neighbourhood for suitable dwellings — barns, derelict sheds and so on, just as the society had predicted.
But it was in one of these derelict sheds that the trouble had started — a garden shed, as it happened, belonging to an elderly widow. Going into it one evening, for the first time in months, to look for a tin of paint she remembered storing there, she was greeted, as she opened the door into the dusty, dusky interior, by “A terrifying noise … like a great pair of scissors opening and shutting”, and while still in a state of shock from this fearful sound, “a dreadful creature flew right past my face, I thought it was attacking me, I thought my last hour had come …!” The unfortunate lady had had to go to hospital to be treated for shock, and no sooner had the outcry over this died down, than another woman, slightly younger but with bad nerves, had fallen down and broken her arm while fleeing in panic from what she thought was a vampire flying about in her disused garage.
“I thought it was going for my throat!” she explained to the reporter sent to interview her. “These horrible creatures — it shouldn’t be allowed!” and went on to say that she was thinking of suing the council for damages. “They should do something!” she demanded. “These evil creatures should be got rid of! We can’t go on like this!”
The council was worried, the argument swayed back and forth, and finally went against the bats. The general opinion was summed up by a letter in the local paper at the end of June:
“How anyone can plead for a creature that had already caused serious distress and injury to two helpless old women is beyond my understanding,” fulminated the writer. “Does there have to be an actual death before the authorities recognise their duty to get rid of these loathsome and dangerous creatures? How much longer will our old folk have to walk in dread after dusk has fallen, terrified to set foot even in their own gardens?”
Powerful stuff: the Pest Control Officer got to work, and a week later Julian himself encountered one of these evil and dangerous creatures dragging itself along the roadside in the moonlight.
Was its wing broken? Or was it dying from the effects of the poison?
I couldn’t tell, it was humping itself along in the moonlight, in this terrible tortured way, using its wings as a sort of crutch to drag itself along. So slow, only two or three yards a minute, moving in the direction of Flittermouse Hill: for all the world as if it was seeking its ancient haunts, struggling at this snail’s pace to cover the hopeless miles that lay between it and its true home, the place where it would somehow be well again, able to fly again, to swoop, to shout, to feast across the moonlit sky.
I don’t think this is all fantasy, I think, actually, it
was
trying to make for Flittermouse Hill, for bats do have a powerful homing instinct, and an unerring sense of
direction
. It would never get there, of course, long before it had covered the four or five miles it would be dead; but what purposeful effort it was putting into its utterly pointless
progress … such indomitable will to keep trying, to keep going, no matter how inevitable its doom.
I knew I should have killed it, put it out of its misery — but how? I dared not stamp on it, I was terrified that when I lifted my foot I would find it still alive.
Now, if I’d had a gun …
I’m going to get myself one. Must find out how.
