Starve Acre Read online

  ‘They’ve gone then?’ she said, taking the place that Mrs Forde had occupied and looking suspiciously at the two candles. ‘What did they say?’

  Juliette didn’t respond, but watched the light playing over her hands.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ said Harrie.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Richard said. ‘She won’t say.’

  ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? You were there, weren’t you?’

  ‘I think she just needs some time to herself.’

  ‘Is she drunk?’ said Harrie. ‘Is that what they did, get her drunk? Jules? Did they give you something?’

  She moved closer to Juliette, shaking her arm, trying to rouse her from her bliss.

  Richard left them in the kitchen and went up to the study. It had been just as he’d imagined it: noth- ing more than a grandiose parlour trick. A cut above the fishing wire puppets and phosphorous oils of the Victorian spiritualists, but theatre nonetheless. Especially Mrs Forde’s sudden onset of nausea. The only reason Juliette couldn’t see the smoke and mirrors was because she didn’t want to.

  And they would be back. He knew that. Juliette’s state of rapture wouldn’t last and then she’d call the Beacons here again. She would become reliant on their performances.

  New snow was falling outside, dusting the tent, restarting the process of burial. It might have been the first day of winter, Richard thought, not a few days shy of March.

  He wanted thrushes and cuckoos and the green woodpecker in his blood-red bonnet. He wanted catkins, bluebells, brimstones, helleborines. He wanted to see hares on the run, hares on the hunt for does, drunk with the scent of them.

  That was how his hare ought to be, not as bones in a box.

  Yet, when he removed the sheet of newspaper from the skeleton he could see straight away that some alteration had taken place.

  The vertebrae were now connected by little pads of cartilage and the finest webs of sinew held each bone in place.

  He tried to recall if some of the joints had been coupled in this way when he’d lifted the remains from the field but he was certain that he would have noticed.

  In the drawer, he found the tweezers he’d used when he’d first assembled the skeleton and, gripping one of the shin bones, he pulled gently until the leg was extended. The knee held firm and the ball at the top of the femur was locked tight in the cup of the pelvis.

  The candle that the Beacons had left burned through the night and was still alight the following morning. And as Juliette went about with a beatific smile and Harrie tried to wheedle out of her what had happened, the hare continued to change.

  When Richard looked inside the box he found that as well as the leg joints being connected, now each piece of the backbone was cushioned by plum-coloured discs that yielded spongily to the end of his pencil.

  He saw too that something string-like, as thin as cotton, had started to thread its way through the tunnel of the vertebrae, and angling the beam of the desk lamp through the eye socket he traced it back to the skull. At the rear of the cavity, the string protruded like a single white hair and at its tip grew a grey polyp that under the magnifying glass seemed to be crimped and folded into a tiny brain.

  He wanted to bring Juliette into the study and show her. If she wished to put her faith in something, then this was it. But it felt as though all this was for him alone to see. And Juliette was too absorbed in her own thoughts anyway.

  Though what she was thinking about was hard to guess. She looked disorientated but at the same time full of a peculiar equanimity. She no longer shut herself away but that didn’t mean she wanted to speak to anyone either. Eventually, even Harrie gave up trying and left her to her quiet contemplation.

  She still ate very little and that evening she went to sleep in Ewan’s room as she had for the last six months but she no longer read stories to thin air or cried out in the night.

  The next morning, Richard found the hare’s limbs fastened by thicker bands of tendon and the skull strapped with the taut cords that swivelled the eyes and moved the jaw. The hind quarters were packed with heavy fillets of muscle that were cold and moist to the touch. Instead of laying down newspaper over the animal, Richard went to the linen cupboard on the landing and rooted out an old blanket. After carefully wrapping the hare, he laid it back in the cardboard box and set it down next to the radiator.

  Incubated by the heat from the ticking pipes, the remains (if they could still be called so) began to give off a sickly smell, like that of a butcher’s block, and when Richard looked again later in the day, fat had appeared, gelatinous and yellow, as though the animal had been buttered.

  At the next inspection, the upper layer of this jelly had become dry and smooth; and at the next, skin had started to form on the back legs. By midnight, the process was complete and the hare wore a pale jacket that, bald and wrinkled, gave it the look of a creature just born.

  Richard spent a restless night on the sofa by the bookshelves and when he came out of the study in the dark of the early morning he found that Juliette had left his portable recorder by the door along with the tapes she’d made.

  All that day, she moved about the house with purpose, tidying the front room or cleaning in the kitchen. Still distrustful at the sudden change, Harrie questioned Richard again about what the Beacons had said and done but he had no idea what to tell her. In any case, he didn’t think that the difference in Juliette was anything to do with Mrs Forde, but the presence of the hare.

  Every time he removed the lid and unpeeled the swaddling there was something new to see. But if he waited for these transformations to occur before his eyes, nothing happened at all and he came to understand that the hare needed the privacy of its cardboard pupa.

  While he worked, the animal began to consume his thoughts entirely. As he knelt by the ditch in the tent and felt his thighs aching, he pictured the hare’s muscular haunches. As he drew his fingers through the mud and caked his nails with filth, so the hare acquired its claws. They curled out from between the velvety pads of its toes, sharp and black. Not just for scrabbling in the earth but for fighting too, and Richard imagined the hare up on its hind legs in the springtime sparring, its opponent slashed and defeated.

  By the evening, the fur of peach-fuzz had thickened to a rich pelt the colour of dry earth.

  Whiskers pronged from the snout.

  Genitals swelled like little tubers.

  The ears unfurled from buds of gristle into tall ragged lugs.

  Seeking an explanation for it all seemed ungrateful. A great kindness was at work here and he felt that by questioning the restoration he might jeopardise its fulfilment. He didn’t feel confused. He had witnessed what had happened and there it was. He wasn’t being asked to wonder, only observe and be awake to what he was being shown. The spring was coming. Soon, there would only be newness.

  At dawn the next morning – four days now since Mrs Forde and the Beacons had been – a thrush was whistling just outside the window and its sudden scatter of notes seemed to accelerate the changes in the hare. It troubled Richard that he was finally witness to a process of reconstruction that, until now, had been so confidential, but yet he couldn’t look away.

  As he sat down to watch, something bubbled up inside one of the eye sockets and, using the magnifying glass again, he saw tiny white beads growing like mould on the optic nerve. They engorged and merged and, as a pearl forms around a speck of grit, an eye grew milky white. For a time the hare looked blind, but after a while there came a gradual bleeding of colour and the blank sclera turned first yellow, then orange before deepening to a dark shade of honey wax. Then, as if a spot of ink had been dropped on to the cornea, the black of the pupil widened and widened until the hare was staring at him.

  Richard sat for some time before laying his hand on the animal’s flank. It was still cold under the fur. There was no beat of life inside its chest. If he were to lift up the hare it would hang limply. But touching the pelt seemed suddenly l
ike defilement and he took his hand away, hoping that he hadn’t brought the hare’s revival to a premature end. It seemed prudent to leave it alone for a while longer yet and he gently tucked the blanket around the animal before setting the box down by the radiator again. With some reluctance, he closed the door and went out to the field.

  For the rest of the day, as he hunkered inside the tent and worked the trowel into the soil, there was an overwhelming sense of imminence, of things brimming on the cusp.

  And when the candle in the kitchen finally went out, everything overflowed.

  Coming back to the house late in the afternoon, cold and tired, Richard found the hare’s blanket empty on the floor of the study.

  The sensation of being watched was as strong as the odour of urine and musty fur and as Richard closed the door behind him the hare emerged from under the desk, as large and lithe as a cat.

  He moved slowly but the animal darted across the rug to the radiator and doubled back, only to scut away when it caught sight of him again.

  Seeking the darkest place it could find, it wedged itself between the end of the bookcase and the filing cabinet, its wet eyes fixed on his, its back legs cocked like a trigger. Richard felt his pulse quickening and his nerves electrified with the anticipation of the hare making a sudden dash towards him out of panic or defence. And so it was with quiet, gradual movements that he crouched down and let his eyes adjust to the gloom.

  The hare had not been reborn in a pristine state of health but at the age it must have been when it died. Around the muzzle there was a greyness to the fur and it had the lean face of an animal hardened by the northern seasons. And by loneliness too. A buck hare never had a tribe to rule, he had no dark warren full of family. He lived by his own wits and in doing so acquired a deep wisdom of the world. He knew what men were, what men did.

  Dipping its head, but keeping Richard in its gaze, it nibbled at some ancient crumbs on the floor. It was famished. Of course it was.

  Downstairs, Richard foraged in the pantry bin for the vegetable scraps left over from the last meal Harrie had made and collected a bowlful of carrot peelings and cabbage leaves. From the shelf where the cereals were kept, he brought down a glass jar of oats.

  The hare was where he had left it, still watching, still primed to run. Without getting too close, Richard scattered the food on to the floor. Even though it must have been hungry, the animal wouldn’t move and so he sat at the desk and read quietly, hoping that the silence might encourage it out to feed. Some ten or fifteen minutes later, the hare crept forward, crouching low to the rug, its ears flat over its back.

  Some of its nervousness had dissipated but it was still twitchy and Richard gave it a reverential berth as he went to watch it from the sofa. He’d sat here with Ewan so many times that the boy was easily conjured up by the sour smell of the leather. But that evening he was muffled and indistinct.

  For the last few months Richard had felt as if his mind were constantly falling like water through rocks, split into many streams, each one clattering and ricocheting down and down until he was exhausted. Now there was peace.

  He stared into the hare’s peeled, polished eye until he fell asleep.

  When he woke again, still on the couch, it was to full daylight and the sound of the hare’s claws against the window. It raked and scratched, clouding the glass with its breath as it pined after the field and the wood.

  Outside, the first true warmth of the year was starting to melt the snow in the front garden. The ash trees dripped and the roofs of the cars on the driveway gave off wisps of evaporating moisture. In the sunlight, wood and stone were polished. It was almost blinding to look along the lane. But it was the birds, thought Richard. The astonishment of them. Down in the wood, they were loud with delight but also shock, as if after the long winter they had found their songs too big for their mouths and could not prevent them from spilling out across the field.

  The hare gazed through the window, its eyes following every movement of the world outside. Richard had known since it skinked out from under the desk that it could not stay here long. To keep it locked up in the study would be cruel. The poor creature didn’t know that it had been a parable. It just wanted to eat.

  But it would have to wait until dusk. To take it back to the field weak from undernourishment and in broad daylight would make it easy prey for the vixen or the rooks. Though the question of how he would get it there was difficult. He didn’t think that it would allow itself to be picked up and the box in which it had slept had been torn open in its awakening.

  In the shed, behind a stack of fence panels that he had been meaning to break up for the woodstove, Richard found some of the fruit boxes that Juliette used to pick up from Cannon’s to use as kindling. Two of them sandwiched together would make a temporary cage and keep the hare contained while he removed it from the house. Yet it was a powerful animal and would be stronger still when it was full of fear and adrenalin. Unless the lid was secured in some way it would easily burst free, so he cut some lengths of wire that he could use to lash the two crates together once the hare was inside. And to get it inside in the first place would not be easy. Harsh though it might be, he would have to make the creature go hungry for a few hours more so that it could be lured by food later.

  The thaw continued for the rest of the day, calving thick wedges of snow from the roof and sending them tumbling past the windows. In the field, the sun’s transit was marked by a wide tract of exposed mud that, by the evening, had a bright sheen of water, making the tent look like an overturned boat. It was six o’clock and the sun was starting to go down. The hare had been restless for hours and now it went to the door again and clawed at the wood. It had waited long enough.

  Richard set the crates on their side in the shape of a pincer and laid down a trail of cabbage in order to lead the hare inside. He switched off the desk lamp and the hare lolloped over and sniffed at the leaves, eating as it would in the wild, called back to vigilance every other second, staring, chewing, staring again. In time, it came closer to the crates and sneaked between them to get at the oats. Richard waited until it had bent down for another mouthful and then moved quickly from his chair to close the two boxes together.

  Realising that it was caught, the hare panicked, kicking and battering with its back feet. As Richard twisted the wires tight, it began to make a guttural sound and thrust its snout through the holes, its nos-trils flaring, its teeth gnawing at the wood. They were sharp enough to make peels and splinters straight away and mindful that his fingers might be next, Richard wrapped the makeshift cage in the hare’s blanket before lifting it up.

  The animal was even heavier than he had anticipated, and he had to readjust his grip and balance several times as he negotiated the stairs.

  Harrie was in the kitchen and, hearing him coming down awkwardly, called, ‘Jules? Is that you?’ But before she could see him and start asking questions, Richard had opened the front door with his elbow and closed it with his foot.

  Compared to the fleeting oxblood sunsets that they’d had all winter, that evening was slow to fade. Over the fells, the moon was still pale and the ridges still tinted by the sun. The air was raw but invigorating and filled the lungs with a purgative coldness.

  Richard tried to step around the puddles on the lane but a particularly wide pool was unavoidable and he came to the gate with wet feet. On the other side, the earth had been softened by the melting snow and he had to slow his pace so that he didn’t slip. It became impossible to take a straight line and he was made to zigzag down to more even ground, holding the cage close to his chest and trying to keep it level.

  Near the tent, he stopped and set the crates down, taking care not to injure the animal. Although its heart was a piston, and it coursed with hot blood, its revival had been dependent on so many intricate miracles that it still seemed fragile.

  But now that the hare had sensed its freedom it clawed hard at the wood, making Richard work quicker to undo the wires. A
s soon as there was a gap, it nosed its way out and headed for the first clear line of sight it could find, which was back towards the house. Before it could get too far, Richard clapped his hands and the hare turned around and sprinted off towards Croften Wood, opening its long lean body into full flight.

  Richard watched it for as long as he could before it disappeared into the trees.

  He doubted that he’d see much of it again. There was nothing for it to eat out here in the field. It would find a dark den in the hogweed and the brambles, then if it had any sense it would cross the beck and go up to the Westburys’ hayfield. Come the summer, the rye-grass and cat’s tail would grow around it as thick as a forest.

  For a few minutes more, he looked to catch a last glimpse of the animal, but it had become one of the itinerant shadows that moved as the wind caught the trees. It had returned to patterns of living that were impossible to understand: where every movement and every sound meant something and nothing could be ignored; not the twitch of a leaf or the odour of earth or the sound of birds conversing across the wood. But Richard wondered if the hare in some way felt as he did that spring was always bestowed. That it was an invitation to come and watch the world moving and be among its tremors. Here in the field, those first shocks of the season were starting now. He could feel them and hear them. Beneath the trills and whistles of the blackbirds he became aware of a rushing sound. It was the beck flowing again, released from its rictus of ice.

  Over the winter, he’d been able to walk a good half a mile along its length without once hearing it creak or crack. It was the same every year. Ewan had always thought it quite a thrill to stand in the middle of the stream and feel it concrete-hard under his feet. But by the end of his first term at school, he didn’t want to do anything like that any more. At home he was distant; in class, sullen and lethargic, and – his teacher complained – completely unwilling to participate in the rehearsals for the nativity play.