Devil's Day Read online

  ‘I hope she’s not too upset,’ said Kat. ‘I did try to let her down gently.’

  ‘About what?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know why,’ said Kat, ‘but the poor thing seemed to think that we were going to be moving into your dad’s farm now that we’re married.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ I said.

  ‘That we’d go and visit her as soon as we could,’ said Kat. ‘What else could I say?’

  ‘She’ll hold you to that, you know.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Kat. ‘She’s lonely.’

  ‘From what I hear, she doesn’t exactly do herself any favours,’ I said. ‘She’s not good at keeping friends for very long.’

  ‘From what she told me, they pick on her at school,’ said Kat.

  ‘She gives as good as she gets.’

  ‘Don’t be mean, John. It happened to you,’ she said. ‘You know how horrible it can be.’

  She looked out of the back window and plucked her thumb against the teeth of the plastic comb Grace had given her. It was a present that newly married women always received in the Endlands. If Kat could keep her hair free of knots on her wedding night then she would be pregnant before the Harvest Moon.

  ‘I thought we were going to wait a while?’ I said, nodding at her hand.

  ‘I don’t think Grace will let us,’ Kat smiled. ‘She’s desperate for me to have a baby.’

  ‘Only so she’ll have something to play with whenever we see her.’

  Kat waved back one last time as the taxi rounded the corner. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that? She’s a sweetheart,’ she said. ‘I’m going to miss her.’

  And she had.

  She’d sent Grace a postcard from Spain and on the long, sweaty bus trip to Granada decided that when she next saw her she would give her the locket she’d worn on our wedding day—the something old her mother had presented her with before she took her seat in the Registry Office.

  But now she was carrying an even better present with her to the Endlands, and she was looking forward to giving Grace the news especially.

  Kat’s parents had been ecstatic, of course, particularly Barbara, but I’d warned her not to expect Dadda to react in the same way. He wouldn’t proffer names or start making plans to paint the spare room with jungle animals.

  ∾

  Here at the end of the line, the cloud was low on the hills that looked over the shops and terraces and a cold wind cut down the street. Clitheroe was the nearest town to the valley and in the summer folk came to look around the castle or walk along the river, but by this time of year, between the jangle of the ice-cream vans and the Christmas lights, there was a drabness about the place that was inescapable.

  Kat sat on a bench with her little blue going-away case between her feet and picked up the newspaper that was lying next to her. The headline was about two children who’d been attacked by dogs on a council estate in Burnley, the younger one only a year old. In the photograph that filled the front page, the little girl held her brother on her knee, her chin on top of his head as he played with a plastic dinosaur. From what I could gather, the police seemed to think that the dogs had been set on them deliberately.

  Without saying anything, Kat folded the paper and put it back where she’d found it. She looked down the street and touched her belly. Little by little, it was becoming real. At six weeks, he—Kat knew that it would be a boy—was no bigger than a split pea, but there were eyes of a sort; a spine; fleshy buds that would turn into arms and legs. A few months from now, she would sense the first flutterings inside her, and then it wouldn’t be long before the baby started to assert itself with heels and hands.

  We waited until the station clock passed the half hour and I was about to suggest we walk around to the bus stop and see if there was still a service out towards the valley when I heard Dadda’s Land-Rover coming up the road.

  A flash of the lights and he swung in behind a row of taxis, the engine trying to judder its way out from under the bonnet. He’d had the thing for years. It was older than I was, driven to within an inch of its life like one of those poor Spanish burros Kat and I had seen bearing overweight tourists up to the Alhambra. A cracked headlight was held together with sellotape and the blue livery that made me think of filing cabinets was blistering at the edges. Thrift had always been a stern mistress with Dadda, and while he could patch up his heap with parts from Abbot’s he wouldn’t replace it.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, when I opened the back door. ‘I’ve been at Halewood’s. You know what he’s like. You go in for one thing and he tries to sell you two of summat else. Is there enough room?’

  ‘Just about,’ I said, and wedged my duffle bag and Kat’s case in with the dented toolboxes, assorted boots and gloves, empty feed sacks, chains and ropes. Like an extra passenger, the straw-shit smell of the farm sat in with the junk as it always did and Kat pretended not to notice as she squeezed in next to me, closing the door on the third attempt.

  ‘How are you, Tom?’ she said, leaning across me and shaking Dadda’s hand.

  She knew him better than she made out; she knew that he’d have been embarrassed if she’d hugged him. She was good like that, Kat. Good at reading people, knowing how to make them feel comfortable.

  ‘I’ll be all right once the ram’s better,’ he replied.

  ‘He’s still not well, then?’ I said.

  ‘I think he’s on the mend,’ said Dadda. ‘But it’s hard to tell. Leith says to keep an eye on him.’

  And I had no doubt that that was exactly what he’d been doing; every hour, knowing Dadda.

  ‘Mum and Dad send their regards,’ said Kat. ‘They were so sorry to hear about the Gaffer. He really made our wedding day.’

  Only after he’d downed a few pints, mind, and given up sulking. Then there was no stopping him. He’d still had everyone singing at two in the morning while the bar staff cleared up around them. He was a real character, everyone had said. Someone they wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

  ‘Aye, well, folk go when it’s time,’ said Dadda. ‘That’s all there is to it.’

  He checked his mirror and then pulled away from the kerb and Kat looked at me. He was exactly as we’d both expected him to be and I was glad. If he’d been tearful and talkative, I wouldn’t have known what to do.

  ∾

  We crossed the Ribble at Edisford Bridge and headed out on the long straight road towards the valley. Autumn was well settled here and the hay meadows were full of crows and stubbled earth waiting to be turned. Sycamores and beeches crumbled a little more with each heft of wind. Standing water shivered. Every field had been stripped back to the first decisive touches of husbandry, and the corrugations of old ridge-and-furrow stretched away to hedgerows and coppice woods.

  This was the countryside that I thought about when I stood at the back of the classroom at Churchmeads and longed for the holidays to come. Before the Gaffer passed away, I’d been feeling restless for some time. I wasn’t particularly unhappy in what I was doing—the boys were generally pleasant and keen to learn—but I found myself thinking about the Endlands more than I used to. I’d left when I was barely older than my Upper Sixth-Formers, and overhearing them in the quad boasting about their imaginary conquests of girls from Queen Mary’s, or watching them picking at their acne in the debating club, it had begun to feel like a decision I’d made when I knew nothing about life at all. Like every teenager, I’d been itching to leave home at the earliest opportunity and hadn’t even thought that there might be a cost. But a young man has certain prerogatives, doesn’t he? Selfishness. Ignorance. Myopia.

  If Kat had ever had similar desires to beat her own path, she’d suppressed them better than me. She was well-rooted in Suffolk and her little square of Suffolk at that. Not that she was a native (she’d been born in Harrow when her father was the stand-in vicar at Holy Trinity), but she’d lived in Dunwick since she was eleven and thought of the fields and their Constable cumulus as home. She liked being ab
le to see, she said. Too much of England was hemmed in for its own good.

  Clarity was measured by the churches we could name from the bedroom window. When it rained, the Reverend’s place of business on the other side of the village was about all we could make out, but on good days we could cast our eyes as far as the flint tower of St Hubert’s, the horizon beyond it grey where level soil became level sea.

  Come the Flood, I said, we’ll be set adrift. But she’d already made plans to elevate the house on stilts, she said. Won’t make a difference, I said. Since the ice sheets melted, I told her, the country’s been tipping on a fulcrum somewhere near Derby, the north rising, the south sinking. Give it twenty years and I’ll be rowing to work, I said. We’d better migrate while we can.

  She could tell, I think, that the jokes were lids on deeper wells, though she never asked me if I was happy. Probably because she knew what the answer would be.

  Whenever we talked about the valley, Kat always thought of it as the setting for a part of my life that was well and truly over. Somewhere as peculiar and charming as the past. A place where she would always be a visitor and happily so. Not somewhere she thought she would ever actually live. But I was certain that when she saw the Endlands for the first time, she’d change her mind. She’d see that the place was as precious as the baby she’d be holding in her arms next Harvest.

  ∾

  On the quiet lane, Dadda put his foot down and pinked his wedding ring on the steering wheel.

  ‘See if you can find my lighter, John,’ he said, and in rummaging through the old receipts and carrier bags on the dashboard I came across the box of hollowpoints he’d bought from Halewood’s.

  ‘Christ, Dadda,’ I said. ‘What are you going to shoot with these?’

  ‘I’ve seen deer on the moors,’ he said.

  ‘Deer?’ I said. ‘Are you sure? I thought they were long gone.’

  I hadn’t seen deer since the summer I’d left the village school.

  ‘What’s wrong with having deer on the moors?’ said Kat. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘We can’t have them getting in with the sheep, love,’ said Dadda. ‘They bring disease with them. I’ve already one animal sick. I don’t need any more.’

  ‘So what do you do?’ said Kat. ‘Scare them off?’

  Dadda took the lighter from me when I found it under an old packet of eucalyptus cough sweets.

  ‘It has to be a bit more permanent than that I’m afraid, love,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you kill them?’ said Kat.

  ‘Aye,’ said Dadda. ‘We find that works best.’

  ‘Don’t they belong to someone?’ said Kat.

  ‘What if they do?’ said Dadda. ‘They still need getting rid of.’

  He changed gear and banged his fist against his sternum as he coughed. His lungs were back, then. Every year they returned at this time, like the Icelandic geese that congregated on Briardale Moss.

  ‘You’re not going up on to the moors with that chest, are you?’ I said.

  ‘It does sound nasty, Tom,’ said Kat.

  ‘I’ve had it worse and survived,’ said Dadda.

  ‘Even so,’ I said. ‘You’d better get yourself to the doctor’s. I’m sure you’d be able to make an appointment tomorrow morning before the funeral, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I’ve too much to do,’ he said.

  ‘Well, why doesn’t John ring?’ said Kat. ‘He could get the doctor to come to you instead.’

  He glanced at her and gave his head a little shake. He didn’t like doctors much. He never had. The only doctor that had set foot on the farm lately was the one that had pronounced the Gaffer dead.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said, and lit the roll-up that he kept behind his ear.

  His hair, his face, they’d always smelled of tobacco. Tobacco and straw and the sweetish brew of damp oilskin and sweat. The scent had soaked deep into him and even after scrubbing his hands and face with the block of carbolic soap at the kitchen sink it wasn’t long before it rose to the surface of his skin again. I liked to think that in a crowded room, I could have sniffed him out in a minute flat.

  The cab filled with smoke and he coughed himself hoarse before winding down the window. He always smoked too much anyway but seemed to have a roll-up permanently on the go at this time of year. October was the start of the breeding cycle and the future of the flock depended on so many things that were mostly beyond his control: the sheep had to have survived the spring and summer without falling into bogs or contracting diseases; the hay needed to have matured in the barn; the ram had to be keen and the ewe willing. Those problems he could eliminate—like the red deer—were dealt with as quickly as possible.

  He barked again and Kat nudged me. But it would have been pointless to try and change his mind about seeing someone. The valley made placid men stubborn, just as it made ageing men older. Especially in the autumn.

  I’ve noticed it myself these last few years at Devil’s Day and Gathering. Adam laughs at me when my shoulder creaks and calls me granddad. I worry about cartilage. I read the labels on tubes of ointment in the hope that they’ll live up to their promises. There are aches and pains that keep returning as if they want something from me. The Gaffer was just the same.

  When I was a child, the cold and damp sometimes used to stiffen his legs to the point of bedrest and I would be sent up with hot sweet tea that he medicated with a slug of scotch from the bottle under his pillow.

  ‘Give us your hand, Johnny lad,’ he said when he saw me looking for his injury and wedged his fag in the corner of his mouth as he untucked his shirt from his trousers.

  ‘Feel that,’ he said, and pressed my fingers against his hip. When he moved his leg, the ball and socket grated as if sand had got into the joint.

  ‘What happened?’ I said.

  ‘A ram broke it,’ he said, his fag jiggering as he spoke. ‘It had a skull like a fuckin’ wrecking ball. You make sure you always keep both your eyes on a ram, Johnny lad.’

  The Gaffer had been knocked about more than anyone else in the valley. Not necessarily through carelessness—although one or two scars were the results of loud nights at the Croppers’ Arms—but because he was of a generation that used their hands more than they used machines. He cut down the ash trees in the coppice with an axe. He used the hand-held shears that his father, Joe Pentecost, had once used, the blades still stiffly sprung after a hundred years. And not long after he’d been married he’d had to start wearing his wedding ring on his right hand after most of his holy finger, as he called it, was chewed off by one of the Beasleys’ cantankerous sows.

  The course of nature had eventually returned the ring (if not the knuckle bones), and he’d rinsed it under the yard tap and put it back on.

  ‘That’s horrible,’ I said.

  ‘Your grandma would have done worse than the pig if I hadn’t found it,’ he said.

  I’d never met Grandma Alice—she died long before I was born—but from what I’d heard she was the only one who’d been willing to try and keep the Gaffer on a short lead. A proper hill woman. Hard as horn.

  ‘You’ll have hands like this one day, Johnny lad,’ the Gaffer said. ‘You’ll be able to look at them and know that you’ve worked hard.’

  I wanted that more than anything. I wanted hands that were different to those of the kids down in the village. I wanted nail-less fingers, welts along my heart-line, a thumb that snapped like a cap-gun when I moved it, bones that told stories. By the time I went to grammar school I had three good scars: one between my finger and thumb, one above my brow from Lennie Sturzaker’s fist, and one on my elbow that I could only see in the mirror.

  Kat looked out of the window as she rubbed her thumb against the calluses. She’d always liked my hands. Soon after we first met, she’d looked them over inch by inch like a palmist, finding something in the pleats and wounds that assured her of a happy future.

  I suppose by today’s standards it would seem as though w
e’d got married pretty quickly: less than eighteen months from our first drunken meeting at Amanda Stewart’s thirtieth to the exchange of rings. But it didn’t feel rushed at the time, and if any of our friends thought otherwise then they didn’t say so. There just seemed no reason for us to wait. Another year or two wouldn’t have made us any more certain about what we wanted. Over the last couple of months, though, I’d started to notice the way Kat looked whenever we happened to pass a wedding. It was the same look she had now as we drove through the hamlet of Whitewell and she watched someone sweeping up confetti and leaves from the lych-gate of the church.

  ‘That’s pretty,’ she said.

  It was a note of regret she’d picked up from her mother, who’d spent the whole ceremony forcing herself to smile and thinking that Kat—a vicar’s daughter, for heaven’s sake—should have been walking down the aisle of St Leonard’s to the swell of the organ and the echo of old stone rather than giving herself to me in a council building next to the Co-op.

  Of course, she thought I’d been the corruptive influence in it all, and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see that she might have had a hand in it herself. As soon as we’d announced our engagement, Barbara had started directing the wedding day and, to wrest back some control, Kat told her one evening at the dinner table that she needn’t worry any more about deciding on the hymns or readings—we’d already been in touch with the registrar at the town hall and had a slot booked for June the fifth. A slot? The word stuck in Barbara’s throat. We’d booked a slot? It sounded like we were going to see a ski instructor rather than getting married.

  She’d cried all the way through the clafoutis she’d made for dessert and then on and off for the next six months until the taxi came to take her and the Reverend to the Registry Office. Outwardly, Kat asserted that this was what she wanted to the last, but as we sat on the leather benches waiting for our turn, I could tell that she wished she’d never started to plough that particular furrow. To be honest, I think she would have given anything to have been married in church. Lace, bells, a choir in ruffs. All that.