Devil's Day Read online

  About halfway along the lane, Dadda slowed to a halt as smoke drifted out of the trees and he explained the real reason for his cough.

  ‘We had a fire here yesterday,’ he said. ‘Further in, next to the river.’

  ‘Jesus, Dadda. Why didn’t you tell me?’ I said.

  ‘What difference would it have made?’ he said. ‘You weren’t here, were you? Anyway, it’s out now.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it,’ I said, watching the smoke moving between the trunks.

  ‘It’s just smouldering,’ he said.

  ‘Was it a bad fire?’ said Kat.

  ‘I don’t think there’s ever a good one, is there?’ said Dadda.

  ‘I mean, was there much damage?’ Kat said.

  ‘Enough,’ Dadda replied, looking out of his window. ‘It took us most of the afternoon to dampen it down.’

  ‘You tackled it yourselves?’ said Kat. ‘Did no one call the fire brigade?’

  ‘The place would have been nowt but ash by the time they got all the way out here, love,’ said Dadda.

  ‘How did it start?’ I said.

  ‘Bill’s convinced it were the Sturzakers’ lad,’ said Dadda.

  ‘What, Vinny?’ I said. ‘Well, it wouldn’t surprise me.’

  Whenever I came back to the valley, I’d often see Vinny Sturzaker being yanked along New Row as he took one of his granddad’s huge mastiffs for a shit by the river. He was only ten but he could stare with contempt and derision as well as any of the teenagers that hung about Archangel Back. He was lightfingered, too, and whenever he went into the village shop Mrs Wigton guarded the front counter, while Mr Wigton straightened magazines and bags of washers or whatever was close to where Vinny was making a pretence of browsing.

  ‘A child wouldn’t do this,’ said Kat. ‘Surely they wouldn’t.’

  ‘If Vinny Sturzaker’s anything like his dad,’ I said, ‘then he’d have lit the match and not given it a second thought.’

  ‘You sound like Bill,’ said Dadda.

  ‘Well, who else would it have been?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Dadda. ‘It might not have been anybody at all.’

  ‘Has no one in the village said anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Betty Ward reckons she saw Vinny going into the Wood,’ said Dadda. ‘But that doesn’t mean owt. She reckons she sees a lot of things, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Maybe she was right this time,’ I said.

  ‘God knows,’ said Dadda. ‘Anyway, it’s over with now. I can’t waste any more time worrying about it when I’ve the sheep to gather.’

  A gust of wind sent spatters of rain and beechnuts punking down on to the roof of the Land-Rover and he set off again. Kat held my hand and didn’t let go until we were out of the trees.

  Here, the lane ran past the Dyers’ place, with its long barn of honking geese and moaning Ayrshires, and into rougher, open ground. Dadda had told me that it had been raining on and off here all week, sometimes in storms that lasted a day. The Endlands looked saturated. By the roadside, the brown ferns sagged and the reedbeds heaved, and beyond them the Briar was wide and brawling, almost touching the underside of the concrete bridge that led up to the Beasleys’ farm. It had already flooded the edge of the field where they’d once kept their horses—that trio of elderly stallions that they couldn’t bear to see go for glue or fertiliser. They’d belonged to Jim, rather than Angela, like all the decrepit animals he gave sanctuary to when he was alive. All through my childhood, the Beasleys’ place had been home to limping dogs and blinded donkeys, earless cats and, for a time, a scabby peacock that we could hear wailing from our side of the valley. The Beasleys. I use the plural out of habit. There was only Angela left with that name.

  The Pentecost farm was the last of the three smallholdings. A cream-coloured cottage, a lambing shed, an outhouse and a hay barn all clustered around the bye-field used for flushing and tupping. Everything dwarfed by the fells behind.

  For generations we’d kept sheep, just as the Dyers had always bred geese and dairy cows, and on the other side of the river the slope up to the Beasleys’ place had been named Swine Hill after the gingery Tamworth pigs that had nosed the mud there for as long as anyone could remember.

  After Dadda’s farm, the lane continued past two small hay fields and came to an end at a metal gate. Beyond that was Briardale Moss, a mile-wide stretch of reeds and marshes that led to Fiendsdale Clough and the path up to the moorland pastures.

  And that was the valley.

  ∾

  The turning to the farm was sharp and Dadda slowed to a crawl before he spun the wheel and crackled through the loose stones to the gate.

  ‘Get it open then,’ he said, and Kat and I stepped out into the rain.

  Dadda’s two dogs emerged barking and jumping, more teeth than terrible like all collies, and slunk through the bars. Musket he’d had for a number of years now—a good lad, sharp and obedient, quick to chastise the younger Fly, who the Gaffer had bought in the summer to replace old Tubs. But she was too immature, Dadda had told me on the phone the week before, happier to piss about than work. And in the background, I’d heard the Gaffer setting him straight. I think that would have been the last time I heard his voice. Two days later he was dead.

  Fly came sniffing at our ankles and Kat backed away with one hand on the wall, as if she were going to clamber up and perch on the top. She didn’t trust dogs. As a child, she’d been bitten by her aunt’s Alsatian at the Young Apostles Club and the scars were still there erotically high up on her inner thigh like scattered grains of rice.

  Kat had always hated the YAC (as it was billed on the poster pinned to the church notice-board) but had no choice about going every Wednesday night. It was Barbara’s pet project, to give herself something to do while the Reverend was chairing the roof restoration committee or leading the discussions at Share and Care. She’d formed the group with her elder sister, Ellen—twice married, off men, stuck on her own with a sickly dog that had to be taken everywhere she went and three boisterous sons that she hoped God would fill with quietude or combust with a lightning bolt: either would be fine. In all, a dozen children or so came to the vicarage each week and once they’d finished singing hymns or acting out Bible stories and they’d been sent off into the garden, the session generally devolved into an opportunity for Barbara to despair over her daughter’s oddities. There was the collection of dead flies she kept in a Tupperware box. The savage haircut she’d given herself the day of her nativity play (but at least she was a shepherd and not an angel and the mess could be hidden under a tea towel). The habit she had of playing the Reverend’s Mahler records at full volume whenever anyone important came round.

  Then, when she ought to have been searching the garden for signs of spring (and God’s love for the earth) with all the other children, she was down to her knickers in the greenhouse trying to dress Auntie Ellen’s dog in one of Daddy’s ties to play weddings. No wonder she’d been bitten.

  Of course, it wasn’t really the peculiarities themselves that upset Barbara—all children are eccentric in one way or another—but the fact that Kat wielded them so knowingly. The Reverend said that he’d told her time and again that the more fuss she made the more Kat would antagonise her, but this only made Barbara feel worse. She couldn’t understand what she’d done to deserve her little girl’s hostility. Why her daughter would plan, actually plan, to embarrass her in front of other people. And how could she so happily cut off her nose, or hair, to spite her face?

  ‘You know, I think Barbara was quite shocked,’ the Reverend said to me one afternoon as I helped him weed his allotment, ‘that Katherine turned out to be like her.’

  They tried their best to get on, Kat and Barbara, but like all people who are too similar to one another it didn’t take much for them to fall out. The evening we’d heard the news about the Gaffer, Kat had called her to let her know and ended up rowing on the phone. The living room door slammed shut and when Kat came h
eavy-footed up the stairs I knew better than to ask what had happened straight away. I let her have a bath, as she often did when she wanted to calm down, and then, rubbing her hair with a towel, she came into the study where I was marking a batch of Macbeth essays.

  ‘Mum doesn’t want me to go to the farm,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Why do you think?’ she said, looking down at her belly.

  ‘What, because you’re pregnant?’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t it ridiculous?’ said Kat. ‘What does she think’s going to happen, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘She’s just worried about you,’ I said. ‘First grandchild and all that.’

  ‘Don’t defend her, John,’ said Kat. ‘She’d have me quarantined from now until my due date if she had her way.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘She’s not that bad.’

  ‘I’m not exaggerating,’ said Kat, patting her chest dry. ‘I worry about her, the fuss she makes all the time. I wonder if she’s got some kind of disorder. Seriously.’

  From the sound of it, Barbara had imagined Dadda’s place to be permanently swathed in a pestilent vapour, one lungful of which would be enough to dissolve a foetus like a salted slug. It was an impression she’d formed after sitting next to him at the reception, I think. She hadn’t noticed me watching her, but whenever Dadda answered her questions about the farm, her eyes had flicked to his hands, intrigued by their potato colour and how he could be so unconcerned about eating with them. But they’d been perfectly clean. The muck was under the skin.

  Musket nosed at Kat’s hands and Fly barked and turned in a circle, excited by the smell of someone new.

  ‘Go on,’ said Kat, nudging her with her knee. ‘Go on.’

  Dadda leaned out of his window and shouted both the dogs away to their kennels. Kat stood back and I pushed the gate through its scale of squeals and moans until it came to rest against the Gaffer’s old Ford tractor, which was now more rust than metal.

  In fact, most things here were suffering from the corrosive urges of nature. Babylonian greenery hung from the gutters; a down-pipe had broken free of the twine that was holding it to the wall and shattered; the lean-to that Dadda and the Gaffer had built one summer had rotted out of all usefulness. It was exactly the same at the Dyers’ and the Beasleys’ too. Living on the farms was one endless round of maintenance. Nothing was ever finished. Nothing was ever settled. Nothing. Everyone here died in the midst of repairing something. Chores and damage were inherited.

  Kat watched as Dadda drove through the open gate and parked by the house. With the engine off, there was nothing to hear but the sounds of the river, the birds, the wind, the rain. As I closed the gate and we walked up the yard, the downpour turned heavier still, obscuring the valley we’d driven through and the ridges above. Between the cobblestones ran a delta of streams brown with straw and slurry. Water dribbled from the sills, discharged from spouts, swelled the drains, pounded up a mist that stank of dung. On the fellside above the farm, Gutter Clough lived up to its name and spilled past the house towards the river.

  Kat held her hand over her nose and stepped quickly around the puddles as Dadda came over from the Land-Rover. The three of us dripped in the porchway and Dadda closed the door on the rain.

  ‘Go in,’ he said. ‘It’s open.’

  No one ever locked up in the Endlands.

  The Gaffer had only been gone a few days, but the place already strained with his ghost. The hallway was steeped in the sharp cologne that he used to pat on to his stubble before he went to the pub and the tobacco he used to smoke—Old Holborn, usually, and sometimes a little sprinkle of whatever the teenagers had on them in Archangel Back.

  ‘I wouldn’t hang your coat there, love,’ said Dadda, nodding at the stand next to the telephone. ‘It’ll smell.’

  Kat unpegged her denim jacket and looked at me, wondering what she should do with it, and followed him into the kitchen.

  ‘Mind your step,’ he said, indicating the pool oozing out from under the sink. ‘I thought I’d fixed it but it’s still weeping from somewhere.’

  He put the hollowpoints on the dresser and threw down a couple of towels to soak up the water. Kat smiled as well as she could and looked around the kitchen at the cracked plaster and the dusty ornaments. The clothes steaming on a wooden rack. The piles of clutter. She was thinking about Mam, I could tell. A woman’s touch, she was thinking.

  ‘The beds are set up for you,’ said Dadda. ‘Take your things upstairs. The others will be here soon.’

  Whenever anyone from the farms died, everyone gathered together on the night before the funeral. Dadda wouldn’t have stopped them coming, of course, but hated to be fussed over, and once the first arrivals, the Dyers, had appeared, he absented himself and went to check on the ram.

  I could hear Bill and Laurel bickering as they came down the hallway, though they were all smiles by the time they got to the kitchen. With a brown paper bag in her hand, Laurel held the door open for her husband, who came in with a large tray of roast goose. They were both in their best clothes: she in a dress dotted with little rose heads, he in the green wool suit he’d sported at our wedding.

  No matter how long I was away from the Endlands, Bill never looked any different. Bearded and bear-like. Teeth rabbit-brown from the fags.

  ‘All right, John?’ he said, and went to put the goose down on the sideboard before shaking my hand. ‘I can’t believe the owd sod’s gone, can you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Mind you, eighty-six isn’t bad, is it?’ he said.

  ‘For here, it’s a bloody miracle,’ I said.

  ‘And he went while he were working,’ said Bill. ‘It’s how he would have wanted it.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said.

  The customary exchange of assumptions about the dead over with, he came to what he really wanted to talk about.

  ‘Your dad’s told you about the fire, I take it?’

  ‘He said you thought it was Vinny Sturzaker?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t think it were him,’ said Bill. ‘I know it were him, the little bastard.’

  ‘What will you do?’ I said. ‘Go and see him?’

  ‘If your owd man lets me off the chain, aye,’ he said, winking at Kat.

  ‘How are you, Bill?’ she said.

  He wiped his fingers on his jacket—the grease off the tin was all right for me but not her—and planted a kiss on her cheek.

  ‘You’re looking well, love,’ he said and kept hold of her shoulders until Laurel asked him to go and fetch the potatoes out of the truck.

  ‘You tell him to keep his hands to himself, Katherine, love,’ she said. ‘And how are you, John?’

  ‘Bearing up,’ I said. ‘It feels strange him not being here.’

  She held my arms and smiled. Since her Jeff had got out the month before, Dadda said she was happier than she’d been in a long time, but the years of worry had taken their toll and there was a gauntness about her that made her look much older than she was. Her sight was getting worse, too; the thick glasses she wore made much of the mole on her eyelid and emphasised the bags.

  ‘We’re all missing the Gaffer so much here,’ she said. ‘It’s like summat’s been torn out of the farm.’

  ‘It must have been a shock to you,’ said Kat. ‘Even though he was an old man.’

  ‘It were, love,’ said Laurel. ‘But at least he’ll have found some peace now.’

  She smiled at Kat and brought the little Christ she wore round her neck to her lips.

  Laurel was an oddity in the Endlands; no one but her had any interest in religion at all. The children of the three families might have been attending the Catholic primary in Underclough since it had been built, and gone through the Three-Cs of Confession, Communion and Confirmation, but only because it was easier than travelling miles to a different school. In the same way, a Christian burial was just a necessary bit of theatre that meant the dear departed c
ould stay in the valley.

  But I had to remind myself that this was all still quite new to her. Twelve months earlier, she’d been as godless as the rest of them in the Endlands. Her Damascene moment had come when Betty Ward had taken her to hear a talk at the town hall by an ex-convict who had been steered into a life of charitable deeds after a ghostly visitation in his cell. He had already donated a kidney to a man in Blackburn and now he was running a marathon to raise money for famine victims in Somalia.

  Prayer, he said; that was what had changed him. It had been the whispered wishes of the Christian world for men like him to be saved that had brought the spirit of Padre Pio to Strangeways. Prayer worked. He was the proof. And Laurel, for one, had been convinced. There was hope for her Jeff yet.

  With her new-found faith, Dadda had happily let her assume the responsibility of organising the Gaffer’s funeral. She had selected the readings and the hymns and typed up the Order of Service, which she was especially keen to show Kat, who, being a vicar’s daughter, would be able to validate the choices she’d made.

  ‘I thought we’d start with “Abide With Me”,’ said Laurel, smoothing out the crumpled sheet of paper. ‘And then “The Lord is My Shepherd”, after the reading from John. You know the one, I’m sure. “In my father’s house are many rooms”?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kat, ‘I know it.’

  ‘The bidding prayers I wrote myself,’ said Laurel. ‘I don’t know what you think.’

  She was fishing for compliments and Kat took the bait.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ she said, ‘really heartfelt,’ and Laurel smiled and blessed her and told her how pretty she was before being called to open the kitchen door by Bill.