Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (11 page)

“No…” Dickens said, and as he did, the ordinary man moaned and opened his eyes. He winced and put his hand to the wound in his thigh. “That bastard is…” he started, and then he looked up and saw Mr Evans and his gun.

“Which bastard?” said Mr Evans.

The ordinary man looked up at Dickens, then back at the gun. He looked totally confused, as if he’d woken from one bad dream only to discover he was in another. “Hurts…” he said. “That bastard is killing me.”

“I think,” Mr Evans said, and he lifted the gun and pointed with it as he spoke, “that you need to get in your car and go back to wherever you came from. I’ll let Elliot know you came calling, and if he wants to see you I’m sure he’ll get in touch.”

“Yes,” said Dickens. “That’s a good idea.”

“I’m full of them,” said Mr Evans.

“We’ll be off then.” And Dickens opened the passenger door, put his hands under the other man’s armpits and helped him into the car. Then he went to the driver’s side and slowly drove away. I watched until the car was out of sight, then stepped out of the parlour and went to see Mr Evans.

He was in his kitchen, washing at the sink. Three rabbits lay on the table. As I walked in he turned on me, wiped his hands on a towel, threw the towel at me and yelled, “What the bloody hell is going on?” His face was red with fury and his hair was sticking up like corn stubble. He picked up a gutting knife and planted it in the table. It made a twanging sound. I stared at it and shuddered.

“It’s complicated.”

“I don’t care how bloody complicated it is! This is my farm! My land! When I come back from an afternoon’s shooting I don’t expect to have to use my gun on a couple of thugs!”

“But you didn’t…”

He stepped towards me. His anger was growing. His eyes were flashing and spit flew from his mouth. I’d never thought he could get like this, so mad with rage. I’d always thought he was the calmest man in the parish. “I was ready to! The safety was off, my finger was on the trigger! If I’d have squeezed it you’d have had your answer!”

“What answer?”

“To the question you asked me the other day, Elliot. About the War. Remember?”

“Oh…”

“Yes. Oh.”

“So you’d better tell me what’s going on. Before I throw you off the farm and tell everyone else round here that you’re the worst damn worker I ever had!”

“But Mr Evans…”

He gripped the table. His knuckles turned white and the gutting knife wobbled on its tip. “No ‘but Mr Evans’, Elliot! Just bloody well tell me!”

What could I do? Where could I go? I couldn’t back out, couldn’t not tell him something, so I explained as much as I could. I told him that Spike had found the smoke and stolen it from the man I found hung in the woods, and that the men who’d just turned up had something to do with the smoke. I didn’t say that I’d hidden it in the kale field barn, and I didn’t say that one of the men was a bent policeman. I let those things go. I let them lie for later, or maybe not at all. And when I finished the story I let Mr Evans shout at me. “You idiot!” he yelled. “You and that Spike, you’re as bad as each other!”

“No we’re not. I…”

“Shut up! If I say you’re as bad as each other, then that’s what you are.”

“But…”

He put a finger to his lips, and when he did that it meant more than anything he could have said. There was threat in the action, even menace. “How long have you been working here?”

“A few weeks.”

“And you want to carry on working here?”

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Well, I’m not sure I want you to stay.”

“Shit.”

“You could say that. You could say it louder.”

“I’ve been trying to clear the mess up. I warned Spike. I told him…”

“Did you? Maybe you should have done more than just tell him. Maybe you should have shouted.”

“I think I did.”

“You think you did?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head and turned away from me. “I just don’t know…”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Yes.”

“You probably will be. I’m going into the other room now, and while you’re fetching the cows in I’m going to phone the relief. You can take a couple of days off – no pay mind you – and she’ll do the milking. While you’re away you can sort this mess out, and when you get back we’ll decide whether you’re going to stay here.”

“Thanks, Mr Evans.”

“I don’t know what you’re thanking me for.”

“For giving me a second chance.”

“I haven’t yet.” He took a step towards me and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. He clenched his fists and wheezed, narrowed his eyes and tapped the side of his head. Then he said, “You want to think about what you’re doing, Elliot,” and he stepped around me, left the kitchen, walked down the corridor, went into his front room and slammed the door. I stood and stared at the gutting knife in the table, reached out, touched its handle and closed my eyes. I saw spits of light in the dark, and heard the sound of distant birds calling from trees. At least I think they were birds, but they could have been the sounds my brain makes when it’s tired and wants to go somewhere else.

Milking was tough. I sweated, and my mouth was dry, and every time I let a cow out and a gate slammed shut I jumped. I didn’t know what Dickens would do next, but I did know he could do anything he wanted. As he’d left the farm he’d looked at Mr Evans’s gun, but there hadn’t been fear in his eye, just the look of someone who’d recognized a friend in a pub and wanted to say hello. “This is a gun; it can kill me, but it won’t. I could have it off the old man, but I won’t. I could come back any time, but I won’t. I’ll wait. I might be mad, but I’m patient. I’m as patient as the fucking hills and as patient as a fucking river. I’ll wait. I’ll wait some more. I’ve got all the time I need, and I love time…” These were the sort of things I imagined he thought as he drove away, but maybe he didn’t. Only he knew. And when Mr Evans suddenly appeared in the parlour and shouted, “Don’t forget the cat!” I almost pissed myself.

“I never forget the cat!”

The cat was sitting on a window sill.

“Good for you.”

He left me to it, and as I carried on, the fright and worry stayed with me like a itch in my eye. However hard I tried to push it away, it came back, tweaking my mind and whispering stuff I didn’t want to hear. “You’re dead… feel the pain… die in a heap… lose your head… the dogs will catch you… the dogs are mad… we’ve sharpened the dogs’ teeth… we’ll push you through a window… you’ll fall off a bridge… you’ll eat your own heart…”

“Shut up!” I yelled to the ceiling.

“We’ll snap your fingers one by one… we’ll stick pins in your eyes… we’ll stick pins in your tongue…”

“Quiet!” I yelled to the ceiling.

“We’ll have you swallow glass… you’ll bleed from the inside out… you’ll split like a plum…”

“No!”

The whispers didn’t quieten so I turned the radio on, loud music with a loud DJ, and I talked to the cows as I let them into the parlour. That almost did the trick and, by the time I’d finished, my head had almost returned to normal. When I say “normal” I don’t mean normal like it used to be, like it was before Spike stole the smoke, but the panic was nothing more than a light ache, and the whispers had stopped.

I packed some stuff into my rucksack, and as I was tying it onto the back of the bike Mr Evans came out. He’d calmed down, his face had lost its redness and he almost smiled. He said, “When you’ve sorted this mess out, give me a ring. You’re a good lad, and I don’t think you need to be this stupid.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“I never said you were.”

In all the excitement I think he had. But maybe he hadn’t. I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t contradict him. I just said, “Thanks, Mr Evans,” and rode to Ashbrittle. When I got to the top of the hill, I stopped and rested for a few minutes, and took some deep breaths. My hands were shaking and my heart was beating hard, and for a moment fright swam back to the surface and bared its teeth. “Oh fuck off,” I said to it, and I went home.

Mum was in the yard, collecting some washing from the line. When she’d unpegged everything, I carried her basket, followed her into the house, told her I’d been given a couple of days off and asked if I could stay in my room. She said, “Are you in trouble?”

“No.”

“You’re in trouble. Did you get the sack?”

“No.”

She took my chin in her hand and held it tight, and said, “When’s it going to end, Pet?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“That won’t be soon enough.”

“You can say that again,” I said, and I went to see Sam. She was on her knees in Pump Court’s kitchen garden, staring at some onions. She jumped up when she saw me, hopped across the vegetables and kissed me.

“The future is ripe,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Gardening.”

I nodded but I didn’t know what she was on about. “What have you and your mates been talking about?”

“Gardening’s the future,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it is.” I didn’t want to say that gardening was also the past and the present, and saying it was the future was the sort of thing I’d expect a hippy to say, but I didn’t want to upset her. Not that I think I could have upset her. She wasn’t the type. She took my hand and pulled me towards the onions. She knelt down and said, “I don’t know whether to leave them in the ground or pull them up. But I don’t suppose they’ll grow any more.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think they will,” so we started to pull them up.

It was satisfying work, and although the onions were small there were lots of them. The earth was grey and thirsty, and as we worked Sam hummed a little tune. I don’t know what it was, but it sounded like it had come from far away, maybe a country where farmers live in felt tents and herd goats and ponies across steppes. I’ve read about these people in
National Geographic
magazines and other books, and seen films about them on the telly. Their tents are called yurts, and their fields stretch for hundreds of miles. Their grass is coarse and brown, and when it sways it sounds like the ghosts of dead children have gathered and are whispering down a chimney. And as we worked and the tune swam around us, I had a moment of foresight, a clear thought that made me stop and take a breath. I don’t know if it was the sort of foresight Mum has, but I think it was. My body felt light and my fingers tingled, and I saw myself as an old man. A happy man, a contented man, a man with a wife and children and grandchildren, someone who could charm birds out of their nests and colour their feathers with stories about yurts and goats. When I say I saw myself, I didn’t have a vision – an apparition didn’t appear, clouds didn’t part or faces loom. I just felt something deep inside my body, a pinprick of warmth that started deep and swelled like a cake in an oven, and the flavour of this cake was the sight of myself in the future. I don’t think I’m explaining myself very well, but then it’s difficult to explain something so strange. I’d never expect Mum to explain the things she feels, and I know that if I asked her she’d tell me not to be so foolish.

I let the feeling fill me, I listened to Sam’s humming, I felt the sun on my back. And when we’d finished, we piled the onions into boxes and sat down with our backs against a wall and listened to the evening.

A wasp, drunk on flight or anger or both, surprised us, and an exhausted cockerel crowed in a garden beyond the green. A couple of crows flapped towards their roost, and somewhere out of sight a buzzard mewed its hunger at the sky. A dog barked. A car passed. My heart beat.

Sam took my hand, traced a circle on the back of it and said, “Happy?”

I nodded. I wanted to tell her about the afternoon, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment. There was plenty of time to spoil plenty of moments, and there was plenty of time to tell as many stories as I wanted. For now I was happy, and I didn’t want the feeling to go away. “You?” I said.

“Very.”

“Good.”

“Fancy a drink later?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I’ve got to see someone first.”

“Someone?”

“Yes.”

“Who’s someone?”

“A friend.”

“Are you being mysterious with me, Elliot?”

“No,” I said. “My best mate. Spike.”

“Where is he?”

“Wiveliscombe.” I stood up and brushed the backs of my trousers. “I won’t be long. He’s been having a bit of trouble. I just want to check he’s all right.”

“OK then.”

“I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

“Here?”

“Yes,” I said, and I kissed her. I kissed her on the lips and I kissed her cheek, and I smelt the onions on her fingers. I told her she smelt lovely, and I told her that when the drought broke we’d go swimming in the river. She asked me which river, and I said, “The Tone. I know a place. We can take a picnic.” And then I went back to the bike and rode away.

I love riding a bike through a warm summer’s evening. The brass glow of the land, the gathered smells of the dying day, the feeling of a night’s promise, the offering of that promise, the promise of the offering, the twist of words, the words that mean whatever you choose them to mean. And even though I carried the constant nagging of threat, it couldn’t kill my pleasure. Maybe threat was just a word, and what could a word do to me? I remember reading somewhere about how water was soft and rock was hard, but water was stronger than rock. It always found a way through it, always crumbled it, always left it mud. Maybe I read it in a
National Geographic
magazine, or maybe I heard it on the radio, but wherever it was I thought it made sense. And when I got to Wiveliscombe and knocked on the door of the house where Spike was staying, I was thinking “rock, water, water, rock, pebbles, sand, mud…” – and when the door was answered by a bloke with red eyes and a plaster on his face I looked straight at him, didn’t flinch, didn’t take a deep breath, didn’t do anything at all except say, “Is Spike in?”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“Try the pub.”

“Which one?”

“Dunno. Do I look like a mind reader?”

I stared at the bloke. He was stoned and drunk, and wearing a huge woolly hat. I don’t know what the plaster covered, but he needed to change it. It was curling at the edges and crusted blood was there. He put a spliff to his mouth and took a long drag. He was smoking ragged stuff, and when he stared at me I thought, for a moment, that his eyelids were going to fall off. But they didn’t, and when I told him that no, he didn’t look like a mind reader, he narrowed his eyes as he tried to make sense of what I had just said. Was I playing with him? Was I serious? He couldn’t tell, and I wasn’t going to get any sense out of him, so I said, “Thanks,” and rode back up the hill, parked the bike in the square and went to the first pub I found. As I walked in the door, ten heads turned towards me, stared for five seconds and turned back to their drinks. Owls, I thought. Or sheep. There was old, bad music playing, and someone in a leather jacket standing over a juke box. A waiting air of menace hung in the air, like the time was almost come to give someone a good kicking, and I might be that someone. I looked around, but didn’t see Spike, so I nodded to the barman, ducked out of the door and went to the second pub. This time six heads turned towards me. More owls. Or sheep. There was less of an air in this place, more of something that approached a welcome, so I walked down the bar, nodded to someone I didn’t know and saw him. He was sitting at a table in the corner with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The smoke was curling like hair around him, drifting in the air and settling in clots around the pictures of old Wiveliscombe that hung on the walls. He had a local paper opened in front of him. He was reading about the hung man. I fetched a pint, sat down and said, “Spike.”

He looked up and said, “El…”

“How you doing?”

He shook his head. “Fucking awful. You?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Are you going to?”

“What?”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Oh,” he said, and he took a drag on his cigarette and pointed at the paper. There was a picture of a corner of the wood where I’d found the hung man, and some stuff about who he was and what he might have been doing. His name was Fred Baxter, and a local was quoted as saying “He kept himself to himself. He moved into the area about six months ago, but we hardly saw him. There were rumours about what he was up to, but we never thought it would come to this.”

“I never thought it would come to this either,” said Spike, and he stared into his pint. He looked like he was trying to see something in it, the future maybe, or a way out of his mess. “I don’t know what to do. But I did have an idea,” he said. He didn’t look me in the eye, and I knew what that meant. It meant he knew it was a bad idea, and he was about to prove that he was a twat.

“What is it?”

“My mate down the road knows some people in London.”

“Good for him. He certainly looks like he’s got his wits about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just met him.”

“Right,” said Spike, and he squinted at me. “Anyway. He called them last night. They’ll buy the smoke. Reckons they’ll take everything I’ve got.”

“He told some people in London that you’ve got half a ton of smoke?”

“It’s not half a ton…”

“That’s not the point.”

“Then what is?”

“You just don’t get it, do you, Spike?”

“Get what?”

“It’s over. Finished. It’s not your smoke. You can’t sell it. All you have to do now is keep your head down, forget everything about what you did, take a deep breath and think about what you’re going to do next. This whole thing has gone way beyond you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think I’m going to tell you?”

“You’re my mate,” he said. He looked into my eyes, and his eyes were wide and pleading and watery, like he knew chances had slipped by and he was hanging on by his fingernails. “Please, El.”

“Please what?”

“Tell me you’re still my mate.”

“I wouldn’t have come out to see you if you weren’t,” I said, and I put my hand on his arm for a second, took it away, picked up my pint and drank. “I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“Because the heavies are still out there, Spike.”

“Still?”

“They came to the farm. Mr Evans had to chase them off with his gun. And they’re not going away in a hurry.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t suppose they are.”

“So forget all about thinking you’re going to sell the smoke. I’m going to sort it out. I’ll make everything go away.”

“How?”

“I’m not going to tell you. You’ll just have to trust me.”

He looked at me again. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Forget it, Spike. You just did what you always do.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said, “but you’re still my friend. My best friend.”

He took another drink and whispered, “Thanks.”

Friends are rare, I thought, but didn’t say it, friends you can stick with and who stick with you whatever happens. But what makes friendship? How does it work? What makes one person know that another person is a person you can rely on, call on, talk to? Is it understanding that whatever you say will be understood, or is it wanting for your friend what you want for yourself? I wanted Spike to have what I had, I wanted him to have a job he liked, a girlfriend with a beautiful back and beautiful eyes, and I wanted him to be free of stupid ideas. Being able to say anything to a friend is another good sign of having a real friend, and I suppose if that’s the truth then Spike wasn’t as real a friend as he could be. Because there were things I couldn’t say to him, deep things you might hear people say to each other in a book or a film. But I don’t think you should ever think that something you hear in a book or a film has anything to do with real life. Books and films are false things. They come from imagination, the air of a different planet. And once Spike had said, “Thanks…” there wasn’t much more to say. So we sat for ten minutes, talked about how The Globe was as good a pub as you could visit and how when we thought about it, school wasn’t as bad as we thought it was when we were there. Things we could agree about, things that could remind us that there was a good world out there, things that were straight and easy, and when we’d finished talking about these things, I stood up, put my hand on his shoulder, reminded him that I was going to make everything go away and he was to do nothing, left him at his table and rode back to Ashbrittle.