Terroir (17 page)

That first time with Angie, he was wound tight with anticipation. She'd promised to meet him on the beach at dusk, making her way from the town centre by bus after work. He got there early and waited, hearing faint hurdy
-
gurdy music from the merry
-
go
-
round, seeing its smudged carousel of lights. The air was still warm. Steve sat on a rock surrounded by a ribbon of water, not far from where waves hissed and retreated towards the sunset. It burned like a drowning foundry or evaporating wine, staining sea and clouds. To wait like that was to live inside another kind of time, because something good was about to happen. That was something he'd never thought until now. Then she was greeting him with a half wave of her hand, swaying as she walked, her hair tied up into a bunch that fell down over her collar.

It had been a four
-
way conversation: him, Angie, herring gulls and the sea. A faint scent of fish and chips came from the town, its curving row of shops and cafés, the statue of Prince Albert stranded in a lost century. A bottle of Chardonnay was lodged against the rock in the pool. He pushed in the cork and the wine spurted over his fingers. He washed them in the sea and she'd laughed, gulping the wine so it ran down her chin onto her blouse. He kissed her, very gently, and she'd felt extraordinary. The scent and taste of her, the softness of skin and silk as scarf and hair got tangled in the kiss. He thought afterwards about what it was like. It was as if a new room had been built in his life and he'd entered it at last.

When Steve turns onto the farm track, workmen are busy at the converted barn that sits on a small mound across the way. With its long views it's like a small fort. When he was at school,
they'd visited an iron
-
age stockade, standing on the ramparts, looking at lines of solifluction, imagining the minds of another people for whom war was total: women taken for breeding stock, men and boys put to the sword. The archaeologists had excavated burned fencing stakes, a midden full of the bones of children. For a while that's what he wanted to, be: an archaeologist, uncovering the past. Something had knocked that out of him. Steve looks to the hilltop again: at the new build there's a haze of arc lights, bright as a spray of powdered ice. The builders' vans are parked at an angle to each other, the concrete mixer churning a slurry of lime and stone, the same question and answer going round and round. A line of breezeblocks flushes pink as the low light of the sun finds it.

There is something about the lie of the land here that reminds him. The way the hills fold into each other. That stray phrase, with a fist at its heart:
hand in glove.
They'd been waiting for a courier, a
foreigner
, whatever that meant. What made sense then sounded like bullshit now. But that's all they knew or wanted to, kicking their heels for three days on a wedge of deserted farmland. It'd been a bit like this place. The empty farmhouse on a slight rise, its windows dusty and webbed with winter light. The outbuildings straggling away from the farm. Just him and Len, their second job together.

They'd walked in from the drop by night, hunkering down in one of the old milking sheds that looked out on the path. At dawn, light grew from behind a copse of bare trees. Moles had been busy and the fields were thistled over, bringing gangs of goldfinches for the seeds. They had a converted L42 with a scope and ten rounds in the magazine.
Untraceable
, the armourer said with a laugh,
a real bastard's bastard
, tearing up the chitty they'd signed. They carried it in a canvas case like a shotgun, as if they were after partridge or pheasants. They wore civvies. Their wallets held creased family photographs that could have been anybody, that must have been somebody. The families they'd probably never have. No radio. They spent that first day not talking, watching magpies come and go. Pissing in the corner, staying away from the windows, keeping all movement to a minimum. When the job was done they'd walk out to a pick
-
up point that was checked by a patrol every three hours. It was cold, bone
-
piercingly cold, even with gloves and caps and tweed jackets.

Steve crosses the path, stopping to wipe mud and sheep shit from his boots against the grass verge. He feels a little crunch in his knee. That's never going to get any better now. The air is fine and cold and he tries to draw it into his lungs, but they are still solid with infection. He coughs hard and deep, hawks phlegm over the fence. The sheep stare at him stoically. Texels with stupid faces and yellow eyes. A tractor starts in the farmyard behind him. There's a slurry pit with aluminium sides gleaming in the half
-
light. The tractor rolls forward, spikes a round bale of hay and reverses towards the track. The parents will move out from the farmhouse to the converted barn they don't need for hay or beasts anymore, leaving their son behind in the old house to find a wife.

That time in the swamplands, in the south, they'd waited in reed beds. It'd been a long day with mosquitos torturing them, black beetles scurrying at their boots. Their bodies and elytra had a green sheen, like home
-
cured bacon. They smelled cigarette smoke before they saw them: a father and two sons, pushing bicycles with packages strapped to the back, chatting as if they were bringing figs to the market. That'd been a mess. Automatic fire, the rounds chinging and sparking off the bicycle frames. When they turned over the bodies, one of them was a girl and still alive.

The moon is on the rise now, huge and yellow as it floats above the line of hills that still carry traces of snow. That's an illusion. His mind is making the moon bigger than it really is. It's simply the way a round object appears when close to a horizontal line. But when he stares at it, the hair on his nape tingles with something like fear. A primordial apprehension tugging at his guts.

That last tour he'd worked in the mountains near the Kurdish border. They'd found a cleft in ancient rock, a vantage point above a narrow track that the sun crept above early in the morning. There were almond groves below, walled fields with scattered goats and women bending over a green crop. The dust was like fine rust sifting through his hands, staining them. That had been a long wait and nothing to think about but a name.
Hassan.
No name was better. He'd thought about nothing else. Hassan the child, following his father around the smallholding. Hassan taking out vegetable scraps to the donkey. Hassan courting a dark
-
eyed woman who wore a blue hijab and lived in the next village, a cousin's cousin. Hassan asking her father to marry her, then the wedding, then making love together in the cool white
-
walled room of their house. Hassan teaching school children from the Koran, writing the lesson on a blackboard in Arabic script.

Steve had been dozing, dreaming of Angie, thinking of the girls, thinking this would be his last tour. Then, late in the afternoon, after three o'clock prayers had drifted up from the village, the mobile phone had vibrated in his pocket. Then a figure in white robes had appeared. A man kicking up a low veil of dust. Older than he'd looked in the photograph, walking with a slight limp, using a walking stick – the kind made from aluminium sections that screw together. Through the scope he'd looked kindly, a patriarch with deep eyes that seemed to rest upon things then move with care to the next. He was walking through Steve's breath, thick and slow in his chest.

They'd use a drone now. That was a different kind of watching, staying awake in front of a plasma screen, its pixels drifting like sand. He'd made his way out thinking of Angie in the draper's shop, her neat hands tying a ribbon or cashing up the till at the end of the day. He thought of the brown mole near her belly button that showed when she tied up her blouse on the beach. He was counting the days, trying not to. He'd flown home three weeks later and the girls had raced each other to meet him at the station. This time, he was coming back for good. When they got home, he burned his kit and dropped his service medals in the bin.

In the beginning, that first week, they met every night at the same place. He'd jump off the rock when he saw her coming down the beach, shoes in one hand, his feet splashing in rings of water. Angie seemed to hover or sway across the sand, footprints stretching behind her. She'd put her hand on his arm and say something. He'd lean in to kiss her cheek, the dimple on her chin, her hair always in the way. Then, on day three, she caught his face in her hands and given him a real kiss; a deep kiss that melted him, her tongue slow and hot. He felt the way her hips curved into her waist and it made him lose his breath. She was wearing lipstick, faint cologne, a silk scarf above a green cardigan, a thin skirt that blew against her legs. She took off her sandals and laughed and ran to the sea shouting for him to follow. Every night they'd planned so see a film, but they never made it to the cinema.

Steve takes the incline slowly, feeling his breath crinkle. There is a line of tree stumps where the farmer has taken down some rotten ash trees. He runs his finger over their growth rings. His father had a woodturning workshop in the garden where he made fruit bowls and candlestick holders from spelted elm and oak. He ended up giving most of them away. It wasn't about making money, but making things, making them as well as you could. Making them beautiful. His father loved to take them and pour in linseed oil, working it into the grain with his hands. You had to wear a mask as you turned the wood or you breathed in the fungus that caused the patterns in the wood. It could grow in your lungs, there in your own warmth and darkness and moisture. White bristles stood out on his father's face as he lay covered with a sheet in the morgue. He'd looked tiny then.

A flock of fieldfare thrums from the field to his left. They whirl in the sky, parting then joining as a single flock. When his mother had finally slipped away, the staff had fussed round him. Guilty, because he'd complained about her care a few days before. The Patient Charter was hooked over the bottom of the bed. More bullshit. Steve was used to crap like that. Saying one thing and doing another had been the way of things. His mother looked like a husk, her forehead shiny, her hands folded, the plain gold wedding ring embedded in her finger. He'd whispered to her, a reproach because she'd died. Then kissed her on the forehead where the skin was tight and cold.

Now he's walking to the house where Angie is waiting for him, watching the TV, wrapping Christmas presents. Lights are coming on in the village, in the scattered farms that resist the dark. He thinks of Christ, the mess of birth, of red cattle treading their own muck in the barns. He's walking home to her, the past turning in his head, drawing close then retreating like a tide. He always imagines it as dark blue, the past.

After two days of waiting, Len's jaw was dark with stubble. His grey eyes seemed to change colour as dawn light peeled from the windows and they sat up in their sleeping bags. Steve had a .38 tucked into his boot. If anyone came upon them, a bolt
-
action rifle wouldn't be much good. No light, no soap, no toothpaste. Nothing that could give them away. They shat at the back of the barn at night where the farmhouse hid them and buried it. And there was little to say in case their voices carried. Just the glances they exchanged, staring at farmland
,
imagining a man stepping into view. A man they almost knew because he was all they had to think about. They were
acting on information
, and that went round in their minds, too. But they never spoke ill of the dead; the
about-to-be-deceased
. The Enfield stood against the wall in its canvas case, its metal parts cold, smelling faintly of oil. They had no idea who the courier was or what he was carrying or how.
Two shots,
ideally
, the lieutenant had said. He'd tapped his lapel and Len had almost smiled.

Steve was on leave the first time he met Angie, avoiding going home. He'd drifted to a B&B on the Devon coast, wasting a few days. He wanted to get something for his mother and was staring at silk scarves. He must have looked conspicuous. Angie asked him if she could help, pushing back a strand of hair, turning her face up to him. Those grey eyes with wide pupils that seemed to lock onto his. He got confused and dropped the scarf and she laughed, showing little creases around the mouth. Neat teeth. Everything about her was neat, from her shoulder
-
length hair to her tight calves, to the straps on her black leather shoes. Except there was something unruly about her smile, as if it was escaping from somewhere else, as if things delighted her. He tried to check her fingers for a ring, but didn't want to stare as she wrapped the parcel in deft little movements, adding a ribbon, which she teased into a bow. She had a tiny black mole on one ear.
There, your girlfriend will love it,
she said.
Mother
, he said,
it's for
my mother
. And he asked her for a date right there and then because she might have been fishing for that, because one thing you mightn't have was time.

Fuck this now, Steve.
It was dawn on the fourth day and they began to pack the gear. They could be at the pick
-
up in an hour, making their way through the fields before anyone was about. It was a no show. Another dud. They crushed their sleeping bags into the rucksack. It was cold. Cobwebs whitened the windows and there was the old smell of cattle and dried dung. They hadn't left a trace except for piss stains and drag marks in the dust and faint hollows in the hay they'd bunked down on. They scuffed it up with their boots and stepped through the door.