Terroir (29 page)

I fall asleep in the middle of the play and when I wake up I'm hungry. I cut a slice from the loaves I made yesterday. I've still got my mother's old Moulinex with the dough hook, so making bread is easy, once you've got a method. I mix the yeast with the flour, add olive oil, dissolve the salt in hot water and then set the whole thing going. The trick is to add water slowly as the dough gathers around the hook. When it's formed a beehive shape and cleans the bowl, it's ready, whatever the flour. When I let it fall from the mixing bowl to the bread board it makes a sound like wax coming out of an ear. I did a lot of syringing when I was at the practice, though I think it's frowned on now. I toasted the bread and coated it with peanut butter and marmite. Alex's favourite. That's what he asked for when he was in Helmand. Marmite. He told me the Americans couldn't understand it. He sent me a picture from his mobile phone holding the jar and grinning with his mates in the background.

There's a message on the answerphone, which is probably Jake.
Blink, blink.
You have one new message.
He travels a lot for his work. He's an advanced driving instructor and does those talks for drivers who get out of trouble by choosing a refresher course instead of a fine and points on their license. He always made me feel safe in a car, I'll say that. He taught Alex to drive and he passed first time. I hate driving at night now. Ever since I started wearing glasses for long
-
sightedness. The worst time is at dusk when the light's fading and everything seems to be in shades of grey. I'm terrified that I'll miss a child crossing the road or knock someone off their bike. And the dusk seems to whisper the way mist whispers or owls when they're really far away. I can hear them calling from telegraph poles across the valley when I'm out there in the dusk and Jake's watching TV. It's the sexiest sound, the sound of desire and distance.

Right now the brightest planet on the horizon is Jupiter. Alex got me one of those apps for my phone. You hold it up to the night sky and it tells you the names of the heavenly bodies. Jupiter's like an opal glowing on a silver chain of stars, as if the sky was a black velvet dress, or dark skin, the way some African people are dark. We had a Sudanese doctor for a time. Mohammed something. I mean
someone
. Blue
-
black skin. Black velvet, like the inside of my mother's jewel box in the bedside cabinet that smelt of cologne. I've got it somewhere in the attic, packed away with some of her wedding presents. The Sunday roast knives and a sharpener and the ivory serviette rings carved into curled elephant trunks.

At four o'clock I get the photographs out and search through them. I don't know what I'm looking for yet. Alex on his tricycle. Alex with Jake sailing a model yacht. Alex with that first girlfriend who never had anything to say.
Jenn
. Then I'm in his room pulling shirts from the hangers and smelling them. Smelling
him
. I get into his bed and sleep for an hour. When I wake up I could swear he'd just spoken to me, but I haven't quite caught the words. It's going dark outside and I should probably make some proper food, though Jake won't be home tonight. That's the message. It's why he ever leaves a message. I make the bed and tidy Alex's things and sweep a dead bluebottle into the bin. I'm drifting in the house now. It's really quiet like the sea, just those deep sounds of sea creatures bleeping far away below the foundations. Whales moving slowly through drifts of krill in fathoms of salt water. Shoals of jellyfish drifting by in their venomous veils. The house is old and that's what you get in an old house: the voices of the dead passing down through its layers of air or rising
like faint prophecies. Once when Alex was ill, I put the vaporizer on and set tea lights all round the bed on the floor and we pretended it was a ship at night.Sailing to Africa in the scent of eucalyptus as he sat up against the pillows with big feverish eyes.

The first inkling that something was wrong was just before Alex was due to finish his first tour. Until then he'd been in touch every few days. Texting. Skyping. He'd trained as a radio operator. So when they were on patrol he was the crucial link with the base, coordinating things. I watched that series on TV and it showed the soldiers – just children, under the helmets and body armour – filing out, looking for insurgents. It's provocation, really. When they get fired at, they call down the air force to drop bombs or fire missiles. It looks like a video game on TV, like that X Box things Alex used to have. But there are real people behind the dust. Real bodies and bowels and blood. We shouldn't have been there, but Alex never wanted to talk about that. It was a job. He kept saying that, he had a job to do and his mates relied upon him. That's how they weave the web that holds them: duty, obligation, like funnel spiders making their traps.

Jake said no way, it was all bullshit when we finally heard what was going on. About the charges. There'd been an IED and one of Alex's company had been hurt. He'd lost a leg and he had a wife and baby. They'd caught the Afghan men who did it or thought they had. They were wounded in an air strike and couldn't get away. What happened then would have been the end of it except one of the soldiers had used his mobile phone to record everything. It was all a jumble of radio static, helmets, desert fatigues, and faces behind orange goggles. There's one glimpse of Alex under the radio pack. Their voices all hyped up with adrenaline.
Still alive, sergeant.
Rustling. The scuffle of boots, clink of equipment.
And this one. Fuck, this!
Then a Scottish accent.
Oh, shall we or shan't we?
It's like they're playing a game. Then you can hear a voice crackling through Alex's radio, but you can't tell what it's saying. Then Alex acknowledging:
Roger that.
Then
… ucking rag head bastards
where the f has floated away from the obscenity. That's close up. Then a heavy breathing sound that makes you feel the heat. Someone's humming in the background with almost
-
words.
Pat a cake pat a cake.
The video's all jumbled up then. Sand and green foliage and a strip of canal and sky whirling.
It's a waste, lads.
Those are the words, if you really listen.

There's a pause then and the video goes black because the soldier's put the phone away, though it's still recording.
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Then there are two shots. Not very loud. Alex said they played the
digitally enhanced
loop over and over again at the court martial. I saw it on the news. It was all over the TV and then YouTube when they were acquitted because there was insufficient evidence of wrongdoing. It was all about
waste
. Whether that was a noun or a verb, whether it was a kind of code; an order or an observation. We used to sing that song whenever we made pastry together and there was a little bit left over. Whenever we made a pastry man Alex would bite the head off first. That's how I knew. Even though none of it was proven, even though he's still out there and a corporal now. I couldn't look at him when he walked free. Jake punched the air when he heard, like a footballer who'd hit the back of the net.
Oh yes,
he said,
oh yes!

They didn't find any weapons and the men's families said they were just farmers working in the fields. Tending to the goats and a crop of melons. They had wives, children. They had mothers. That wrung my heart out so that I wished it was made of stone. A heart of pumice instead of a heart of flesh and hot blood. Stone that's spurted from a volcano and gone cool and hard. Instead, it wakes me at night like something running wild. A creature hurling itself at a fence again and again as light thrums against the windows. I think of the sun rising in the east then, warming the dust on their cold graves.

I've got the matches from the kitchen drawer and I put on one of Jake's old donkey jackets and a scarf. It's almost dark, so I need a head torch in the shed to find the petrol can. That smell of soil and damp. Woodlice running for cover. There's still half a sack of last year's potatoes. Jake's tools all haphazard. The lops where I left them, smelling of sap. There's a stiff wind now, blowing steadily towards the fields, which is good. It'll carry the smoke away. I splash a cupful of petrol onto the base of the heap I've made. Then I fasten up the can and take it back to the shed so the flames can't leap back and make it explode. The petrol smells sharp, like the garage where my dad worked. In those days the pumps had a little twisty thing at the top and you could watch the petrol flowing to the hose. A bit like a barber's pole turning.

Next comes the tricky bit: tossing a match onto the fire without getting too close. The first two go out straight away. I manage it third time and the whole thing goes up with a
whumpf
, a blast of heat against my face, a column of orange flame where the vapour is trying to escape. The Christmas tree catches at once and then the wind sends a stream of sparks out towards the fields where the cattle are standing, afraid in the dark. I think of their cloven hooves pressing into mud, treading their own dung. There's no moon and Jupiter is there in the east, a luminous orb above the invisible line of hills. It's the same planet the Romans sacrificed white oxen to when they made a conquest here in the North. Setting up their shrines, making their way across the Pennines, afraid of what was out there, the wild tribes watching them from marshes and hilltops. They were the invaders with their new language and weapons and shining armour and all
-
powerful gods. It's strange to think they ruled for five hundred years and then went home to have everything they built here torn down to make barns and shippens.

Flames swirl and flare up as the wind catches them, like a beacon, lighting up my face for the neighbours to see. There's a fierce core fanned by the wind. A red core, like war. Everything will burn now. I'll stay as long as it takes to feed the cherry tree to the flames. When I go to bed my hair will smell of smoke. I'll lie there alone and listen to the empty house trying to tell me what I know. Maybe Jake will come home late. I never did check his message. He'll ask me what I've been up to all day, slipping in beside me with cold hands and feet, hoping I'll warm him. Maybe Alex will text me to send his love, a picture of himself in uniform with some of the local kids.

THE DIG

A Thistlethwaite, red
-
haired like all her clan. Long
-
shanked, full
-
breasted, tall. Freckled, grey
-
eyed, jug
-
eared, a crooked smile creasing into dimples. Climber of rock faces for hawk's eggs. Horse breeder, dog hater. Broad
-
shouldered, a fighter who'll take on her brothers and anyone else. Fey, man
-
shy, loyal. Fierce to the lie, quick to offence. Footsore now, limping from a bruised knee where the gelding took her into a dry stone boundary. Homeward bound, the moor's peat squelching underfoot, the heather springy, bog cotton in the hollows. Hungry and used to it.

The Land Rover lurches on the bridleway, loaded with wire ladders and lamps, yellow waterproofs, digging gear. The man's helmet lies beside him on the front seat. His hair is spiky grey, his hands badly scarred from a fire. The flesh has grown back in purple patches. He's got a blue thumbnail where a hammer missed. He wears a diver's watch with a black plastic wristband. Sun shows up the scratches on the spattered windscreen, tyres jog over stones and ruts and into mud puddles. The exhaust stinks in low gear. He's arranged to meet the others at the dig. This one's been on the go for months and you never knew who'd turn up.

She's a long hour from home after trading her grey horse in the next dale. There are coins in her purse but she's packed it tight with grass to stop them chinking. She rode the gelding bareback to the Sykes place, now she has the walk home. It was a good sale. The bridle and harness are tight under her jerkin. She's taken a short cut over a flank of moorland, crossing a corner of Abel Rintner's land, past his new peat cuttings where turves are piled. She's black to the ankles and there's a foul gas from the moss. She could have played it safe and detoured by the valley head, then down past the inn where there were other folk. There'd be drunken, groping bastards too. Fenmen and Dutchlanders draining the land for the monks, gabbling, fetching up phlegm and laughter. She can't bear that. No need if the light holds. Her feet catch in rushes. She can hear the calling of fat lambs. Soon they'd be cutting their throats for Eric's wedding.

There's a dirty Peugeot estate parked where the bridleways meet. Dark blue with a roof rack. Two other cavers are already climbing into their gear. A woman in her late thirties with pulled
-
back hair and acute blue eyes; a fifty
-
year
-
old man, bow
-
legged, short and bearded. He's coiling a climbing rope clarted in dried clay and she's fastening her overalls over rubber boots. Their greeting is a stubbing of cigarette butts, a faint smile, nods to the stile, the causeway they've laid across the marsh that leads to the dig. Another path goes up over the limestone edge, past the killing pit – a swallow
-
hole with almost sheer sides, twenty yards across and twelve deep. They'd help excavate that for an archaeological dig, uncovering broken animal bones and Mesolithic flints. Hand axes, arrow tips, flensing blades. The ancient people had hunted with dogs, driving red deer, elk, auroch, and wild boar over the edge then stoning them to death. They'd been proud of that dig, the way it made sense of things, of the past. The man with the scarred hands slams the Land Rover door and takes two yellow plastic trugs from the back. They pick up their lamps, two folding spades, a short
-
handled pick. The bearded man carries the rolled
-
up ladder and the woman with blue eyes lifts a coil of rope.