Paint. The art of scam. (31 page)

They say even the
birds went silent as Stitch climbed out of the river onto the bank and waited
for Jim tell him what to do next. Jim led Stitch over to the Squire and told
him to give Stitch a few hours alone in a mixed grass field with plenty of
clover. From that moment Jim became 'The Horseman' for miles around.

As a child Cyril had
practically lived there with his Grandfather. Cyril's father had been killed in
the war and so Jim naturally took over as a role model. Cyril had a good
relationship with all the other kids on the estate, except Edward that is. Sir
Thomas, who often dropped in on Jim for a glass of something, became attached
to Cyril and saw the passion he too had for the land. It was Sir Thomas that
had transferred the deeds to Jim's name. Such was the man.

Cyril looked
across at the shimmering sunlight playing on the river in front him. The chain
saws stopped. He could hear the gentle ripple of the water catching on stones
again: a sound that was always there in his life. He looked across at Roger.
Roger was looking at him, laying under the apple tree, his head held up, his
jowls flapping with his panting breath. Nudging his head up, he groaned a long,
deep guttural sound that ended in a woof. He stared at Cyril and waited.

Cyril nodded to
Roger. ‘Yup, maybe that's it Rog, just taking out a few dead trees, thin 'em
out a bit.’

Roger gave Cyril
one of his looks. Roger often made Cyril feel stupid. Then the sound of
splitting wood cracked through the air: a crashing fall, then a heavy thump,
then another.

‘We'll take a look
tonight Roger, wait till Barrington's gone to town.’

Seymour sat at
his favourite table in Rosey’s cafe and took a sip of his Cafe Loco. He’s been
going to Rosey’s a lot lately. Polly’s tense, dark mood, since the opening at
the gallery, was too powerful to tolerate: life at home had become unbearable.

Seymour’s success
had fizzled out like a damp firework. He had envisaged at least some kind of
honeymoon time to bathe in in his glory. But no. The night of the opening, they
had gone home in the taxi in silence, Polly’s eyes continually flashing in
every direction, but mainly to the rear window, as if she were looking for
someone or something. Seymour’s adrenalin was bursting at the seams and with an
erection the size of a large courgette, it was reasonable enough to expect her
to share the moment, surely. They always celebrated everything, that was a
major part of their relationship. She didn’t want to talk about it, she had
made that clear and as a consequence Seymour’s mind was making up its own explanation:
with the help of the now, daily hits of Cafe Loco.

Polly’s mood
swings since the robbery at Hogarth’s had been explainable. Her trauma had to
process itself and that would take time. He had been told that and it was true.
But as the show at Carva’s Gallery had slowly materialised, she had suddenly
got that spark back again. That spark was a major part of the Polly he had
fallen in love with.

Now something had
suddenly changed. Polly was like a walking icicle, completely disconnected from
everything, emotionally invisible. She couldn’t bear for Seymour to touch her
and that, to him, was devastating.

It had passed his
mind in the last few months, whilst Polly was attempting to find a gallery to
show his work, that she had been mixing in some, allegedly, interesting social
circles. Good looking, successful men for example. She had spoken about them
quite openly to him, but in a mocking way. As if they were all a joke. But then
she would, wouldn’t she.

Seymour knew only
too well what it was to live with someone you don’t truly love. You can pretend
for a while, some people do it for years, some their entire lives. But when you
meet someone else? It’s virtually impossible to hide it.

Harry seems
pretty close to her. Polly had said that she loved Harry. No, not Harry. Maybe
someone else that she hadn’t talked about. There were a lot of people at the
opening, she seemed chatty flirty with all of them, well the men anyway. Women
don’t seem to like Polly for some reason. And it was at the opening that things
had changed. Maybe that smooth, creepy bloke with the smart suit and ponytail.
No, surely not. Polly despised men with ponytails.

‘
Maybe it was then that she realized what a
prick I am,
’ thought Seymour. He hadn’t done it well. All that attention,
all that wine to calm him down had got him blind drunk. Seymour could remember
seeing her at one stage at the opening, standing away from the crowd, looking
at everyone. She had a look on her face that Seymour had never seen before. A
blank, unreadable expression. Half an hour before that she had been giggling
with Harry and Carva, zipped on champagne, continually coming up to him,
pecking him on the cheek, telling him how proud she was of him.

Seymour took
another healthy slug of his now cold Cafe Loco. His thoughts had taken him back
to how he had met Polly, when she was with Kevin. Maybe Polly is, after all, a
serial monogamist, bouncing from one man to another and his turn was now over.
The thought caused Seymour to shake his head and look up to the ceiling to disperse
it.

Seymour looked
across at Derek and Dave sat in the corner playing chess as usual. Both staring
intensely at the board, occasionally, discretely, looking at each other:
totally absorbed with trying to outwit each other. Old George was sat at his favourite
table in the other corner writing poems. He was always writing something down.
He had dropped a page on the floor, when he had left a few days ago and Seymour
had picked it up. It was hastily scrawled with angry one-liners that seemed to
have no relevance to each other: Seymour assumed that was poetry.

He had never
spoken to George, beyond a grunt of acknowledgement, but that was normal at
Rosey’s. You don’t go to Rosey’s to meet people and chat. It’s more like a
place to go to find some peace and quiet. A refuge for lost souls who are happy
to be lost.

‘How’s things?’

Seymour looked up
to see Rosey standing next to him carrying an empty tray.

‘Oh good, yeh
fine thanks.’

‘Hate to see you
on a bad day then.’ said Rosey bluntly.

Seymour suddenly
felt uncomfortable. It wasn’t so much Rosey’s abrupt manner, more the fact that
she had never really spoken to him before.

‘Went and saw
your work at the gallery yesterday.’ said Rosey.

Seymour nodded.
‘Oh?’

‘I like it, it’s
good. Don’t know why, but I was pleasantly surprised.’

With that Rosey
walked off back to the counter. Seymour watched her as she looked through her
record collection, slid out a well worn LP, carefully pulled out the vinyl
record, inspected it for dust and played Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells on the
radiogram. As the music started, Rosey stood behind the counter, looked at
Seymour and gave him a subtle pencil thin smile.

Seymour, looked
out of the window, puzzled, wondering if he had just imagined the last few
minutes. He looked back at the counter. Rosey had gone.

Seymour shook his
head again and looked at his hands. They were more colourful than usual. They
looked like ape hands, with squirming, pink, worm like shapes wriggling just
below the skin. It then occurred to him that it was time to get the hell out of
Rosey’s with some urgency. He had no idea how long he’d been there; things were
beginning to feel strange. His stomach felt like rope knot, his blood aerated,
his eyes fighting to make sense of light and shapes. He looked down at his
empty mug. It was clean. He must have scraped out the hashish residue with his
finger, although he couldn’t remember doing it. You should never do that, not
if you have things to do.

Seymour took a
deep breath and looked across at the door. It was a good 10 metres away. He
could make it in one go; if he concentrated. Once he was outside everything
would be fine: but that seemed a long way off at that moment. Maybe wait a few
minutes, let things calm down. Tubular Bells is not a good soundtrack to have
if you are trying to get out of Rosey’s. Seymour wasn’t sure exactly how long
that track was, or how long it had already been playing: was it side one or
side two? Either way they were over 20 minutes long each. He looked up at the
clock above the counter. It was three o’clock; but knowing that didn’t help.
Seymour’s lost train of thought, was suddenly snapped. It took a few moments
before he realised that the record had stuck. Everybody in Rosey’s looked at
each other in shock, then over to the radiogram: Rosey was nowhere to be seen.
That was it, Seymour had to get out now: it was a perfect opportunity. Even if
he tripped over or misjudged a chair or two on his way, he could get away with
it. He quickly looked around. Everybody was preoccupied with the cyclical
tubular bell whining like a fly swat in the wind. Taking in a huge slow breath,
he got to his feet and aimed himself at the door.

Seymour did it in
one go: straight out the door and into the street. Holding onto a lamppost he
drew another deep breath. The traffic was light and fast moving. He looked
across the street at the entrance to the park. If he could get over there, he
could spend an hour or so sitting by the lake, watching the ducks. That always
calmed him down and God did he needed calming down. Getting out of Rosey’s had
been a traumatic experience; his heart was pounding hard. His eyes flashed left
and right, on fire, looking for a chance to cross the road. He did it! He was
there. It had happened so fast. Blasting horns yelled out to him. Seymour waved
and slipped into the Park.

Cyril and Roger
waited until dark before they slipped out. All afternoon they had listened to
the chain saws starting and stopping, trees crashing: it stopped around five.
Chris and John never worked after five if they could help it, by six they would
be down The Barn Owl pub. There was a lot of beer to drink and fags to smoke.
Give them till nine and they would be completely smashed, as would everyone
else on the estate.

Both Cyril and
Roger were good silent walkers. Roger was half Spaniel and half Chocolate
Labrador, the result, a Short Haired Pointer, near enough, and could walk, at
Cyril's heel, without a sound through most terrain. Cyril picked up his silent
walking skills from his Grandfather along with many other useful tips for
surviving from the land.

They had to walk
nearly 3 miles around the estate's perimeter to get to Fingle Hill. There was
only a half moon, often blocked out by the puffy cumulous clouds sailing past,
making it harder than usual to navigate through.

When they got
there, Cyril's heart sank. Several large old trees lay where they had fallen,
branches sliced off, leaving stumps like amputated limbs. He couldn't see how
many there were, such was the mangled chaos of broken branches ripped off as
the grand old trees fell to their death. Squirrels hopped up and down on the
now horizontal trunks, as if they were trying to make sense of it all. Bats,
more than usual, swooped through the air, around and around, some dive-bombing
Cyril, as if to warn him off. Even Roger seemed in shock, as he sat there
staring, his tail motionless. Roger had spent a lot of time in those woods. As
if being drawn in, Cyril slowly stepped forward: into the woods. The rich grass
and ferns that usually flourished on the edge of the woods had now been crushed
and mangled by cruel tractor tyres and ripped by dragged branches. A huge
yellow bulldozer, with a sinister root grubber welded to the back, sat parked
on the other side of the track. In the tungsten light of the moon it looked
like it was alive; breathing out the stink of diesel blood.

Cyril went over
to the stump of the old oak. The light was catching the severed trunk,
amplifying the hundreds of beautiful fine rings, broken only by the large
crack. He knelt down, as if to comfort it. Nobody knew exactly how old that old
oak was: he could count the rings now. The thought pumped a blob of bile into
his throat.

The smell of
fresh oak resin was intoxicating, as he breathed it in: placing his hands flat
on the centre rings. He could feel a slight warmth from the sticky rings, that
had not seen the light of day for maybe three hundreds of years.

Cyril looked
around again at the carnage and spotted the old hemp rope. One end lay in the
branches of a surviving silver birch sapling, the other end was barely visible,
crushed and strangled into the mud by the bulldozer where it had been thrown.
Many a boy had tried to get that rope down over the years, including himself
when he was a lad.

He looked at the
stump again. He wondered why the hell they cut it down, it was useless to a
sawmill, the huge crack from the lightening strike had seen to that. Split the
trunk clean in two. Had it not been for the years of careful pruning and
chaining together of the crack it would never have survived. You could see the
necklace scar around the trunk, just above the first branches, where a chain
had been lashed and tightened by an old steam traction engine. It had worked
and one day, some fifty years or so later, the sheer force of the mighty oak's
growth had snapped the chain and thrown it to the ground.

Roger appeared
next to Cyril and licked at his hands. Cyril cupped Roger's head gently in his
hands and kissed his brow.