Brothers of the Head (8 page)

‘What she did was fine, really fine, nobody knows, though there are bastards about who tried all the time to finish it all. She's the best girl you could ever meet, a real life-giver, though she's gone now, more's the bloody pity. Oh, I'd have whitewashed the sky for her, believe me. Don't listen to any malice, we were the ones involved and we could tell you different if we was the kind to speak up, like those others.'

‘I see. Paul, is there any chance I can get in touch with Laura if my brothers want to see her again?'

He looked down at the concrete steps and shuffled his feet.

‘You ought to get her over if you can.'

‘Have you any idea where she might be now?'

‘She must be suffering, wherever she is. I only hope she can hold up. She always walked on a precipice. It was Chris Dervish, now dead, who did for her. He freaked her out on acid – maybe you've heard. Poor love, she tore all her clothes off of her. That lawyer guy Couling was down at Humbleden that weekend, and there was a gang-bang, with him involved and of course bloody Dervish, and most of the rest of the lads. Me too, yes, me too. She was so plastered. She was round the bend for a while after. I will say that I've never forgiven myself, and this time I have had my chance to make it up to her.'

‘Did Mr Bedderwick get to know about this?'

‘Couling went bananas after, paid us all to keep our traps shut. I really love Laura, Robbie, and would do anything for her, anything. It's not just guilt. She has a heart of gold, I mean I wrote all my best songs about her and that's about all I'm good for. I doubt if I shall ever write another song. I'm washed up. Maybe I can get myself together in the States.'

‘Why did you all break up like this?'

He stared bitterly across the marshes.

‘They was all against us. You can't imagine what the pressure's like. Success is a bastard. In the end she couldn't stand it. And Barry is cruel, full of rage against what he is. You know, it's his make-up, I don't
blame
him in any way.'

‘Barry's never cruel. It's just what he's suffered.'

Paul scratched his head and did not contradict. ‘Oh, he loved her same road as Tom and me did. You had to love Laura … Well … Anyhow, I thought I'd tell you so as you can understand. Hope you don't mind the grisly details.'

‘Where can I get in touch with Laura?'

He gave me a light kiss on the cheek.

‘If I knew that, d'you think I'd be hanging round here?'

A man came out of the station and pointed at a board we had not noticed. A sign on it announced that there would be no more trains that day. There was a one-day strike involving the footplate men of the region.

Paul would not come back to the Head with us. In the end, we left him standing in the sunshine. It was the last we saw of him.

That year was the very hot summer. The drought became so severe that wildlife began dying. All the windows of our house were open for weeks on end. Our poor old retriever Hope got a stroke from the heat and died; we buried him in the dunes. My brothers used to swim in the sea and the dykes every day. They took to going naked again, as when they were boys, despite my father's complaints, for we had many visitors to the bird sanctuary as summer advanced. The curse of silence had fallen on them.

A day came when Laura Ashworth showed up. She came over in Bert Stebbings' tourist boat from the Staithe just as if she was a tourist. First thing I knew, there was this woman tapping at the kitchen door. It was still funny not having Hope to bark at visitors. I dried my hands and went to see who it was.

She looked ever so old and smart at first, so I couldn't grasp who she might be. I'd expected a teenager, I don't know why, instead of this lady in her thirties, in a skirt and everything. I must have appeared a proper fool in my fluster.

She wore a tasselled suede jacket with a white blouse under, and a suede skirt and sandals to match the jacket. Her hair was brown and blonde in streaks, and her face also brown and slender, with pleasing light hazel eyes. She was willowy, with a nice breast and legs – very attractive, I would say, once you got used to the shock. She was what I would call a lady, and self-possessed, as ladies are.

So I gave her a cup of tea and told her that Tom and Barry were away over the marsh somewhere. I asked where she had been since she disappeared but there was no straight answer to that. All she said was that she had changed her lifestyle but that she wanted to see Tom and Barry again.

To that I gave her no straight answer, but kept my trap shut. She tried some general conversation, remarking how bleak and flat L'Estrange Head was.

‘Not when you get to know it, Miss Ashworth. There isn't a level space anywhere. We've got a lake and lots of little creeks, and in the more favoured spots elder and hawthorn grow – not to mention wild roses and blackberries. It's a very pretty place for them as likes it.'

She then asked me direct if I wished her to see Tom and Barry.

‘Are you sure you should see them, Miss Ashworth? I ask for your sake as much as theirs.'

Did they want to see her? she asked. Did I think she would be bad for them? Not in any attacking way, more like genuine questions.

I went into some rigmarole about how she had left them once and perhaps things ought to stay that way. I wanted her to interrupt but she listened very patiently, sitting on one of our old kitchen chairs, holding her mug of tea, and staring out at the ruin of the abbey beyond our window. Suddenly I saw that she was silently weeping. I was glad my father was over at the warden's hut.

‘I've no wish to be unkind, Miss Ashworth, but if everyone is going to get upset all over again, then perhaps it's better … I mean, did you consider enough before you came here?'

She dried her eyes and apologized. She drank her tea. ‘You see, I've nowhere else to go. This bloody age we live in, we're all outcasts and strangers – it isn't just your brothers, Miss Howe. All the old values have disappeared, been laughed out of court, and we've got nothing in their place.'

‘Still, that's not a very good reason for coming to L'Estrange Head.'

At that she laughed. ‘Oh, I daresay the rot's set in here, too.'

So I poured her some more tea, and I said to her straight, ‘Miss Ashworth, I don't see what you have to be upset about. If you loved my brothers and they loved you, then life was better for them than ever it was before. And we know such things don't last, alas. If you feel bad about letting them both make love to you at the same time, you don't need to do so. I don't see that's a disgrace. Forgive me for speaking frankly with you.

‘I told them years ago that if they ever had a girl it would have to be that way, they'd have to share. Else it would be unbearable for the one who was left out, isn't that so? I'm pleased that such a girl came along.'

‘Good God!' she said. She stared at me, then reached out and clutched my hand. ‘I'm so used to opposition that approval takes me aback …'

‘Well, I do approve, if it's any of my business, and I don't think you have any need to complain. Many a girl would think it was the peak of delight to have two good young chaps at the same time.'

Well, then she sort of laughed, and we both laughed, and she looked at me askance. She said she'd go along the beach and see how Tom and Barry were.

At the back door, she paused and said, ‘I suppose you think I'm here for more of the same thing?'

I smiled at her. You could not help it. ‘Probably,' I said.

An odd thing about our Head was that everyone remarked on how flat it was; yet it was not at all. There were endless places to hide, as Bert Stebbings and I could tell you. So I didn't see Laura or my brothers again until the long dusk had fallen, when they appeared at the back door, staggering, both with lips and noses bleeding. No sign of Laura.

‘You've been fighting again, you bloody fools,' cries my father, jumping up and flinging down his encyclopaedia. ‘One of these days, you'll kill yourselves.'

‘I'm putting up with him no longer,' cries Barry, making over to the draining-board, and seizing up the kitchen knife. Tom resists him, trying to trip him over. Both swear violently while they wrestle.

Barry makes as if to cut the two of them apart through the living flesh. They have nothing on, and sand falls from their sweating bodies as they abrade each other in the struggle. My father and I both jump up. I scream. My father, being powerful, finally manages to get the knife away from them. They both fall back against the sink, never able to get away from each other, the flesh that joins them stretched into bars.

When they have calmed down slightly, I ask where Laura is. It almost starts another fight.

Tom is in a kind of cold fury, his face very pale. ‘I can say or do nothing with this madman at my throat,' says he. ‘It is not possible to talk to her or touch her without his interference.'

‘He tries to monopolize her,' cries Barry. ‘So what do you expect? She's gone off on Bert's last boat to the mainland. I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead. Even more I wish this parasitic bastard were dead.'

The tendons and skin between them were contorted as they held themselves as far apart as possible, Barry knocking his head against his sleeping one in his longing to tear himself away from his brother.

‘Is she coming back?' I asked.

‘Why should she?' cried Tom. ‘Why should she, to be pestered and threatened by this bully.' He burst into angry tears. Always infuriated by such displays, my father shouted to him to stop.

As for me, I was greatly disappointed. I had hoped Laura would stay and help the boys be more normal. She would have been company for me. A feeling of desolation came over me, and I ordered them both up to bed.

Watching them fight their way upstairs, reflecting on their perpetual enmity and my father's general indifference, I wished that when they had left they had never come back. I wished Bert would marry me and take me away. I stood paralysed in the middle of the room, wishing myself a thousand miles off.

My father put the knife down, settled himself at the table and scanned the bird encyclopaedia again.

‘It's botulism, that's what it is, Robbie,' he said, ‘that's what's doing for the mallard.' He stroked the dead duck that lay by his hand.

‘I wish it would do for all of us!' I rushed out and ran away over the dunes.

After Laura's visit, the last stage of my brothers' struggle began. When I returned to the house and crept up to my bed, I could hear them arguing and shouting in their room. The noise got so furious at one stage that I went out and paused before their door. Of course my father slept through it all, dreaming peacefully of the mallard dying in the summer marshes, no doubt.

My brothers were having a vulgar old row, details of which I had best not repeat. Tom wanted them to go off and find Laura. Barry said he was being greedy and refused to leave the Head; they could rape women visitors who came to see the birds. They brought in other charges against each other, unresolved quarrels from the past. They had fuel enough.

I was about to creep back to my room when they started another fight. In no time Barry was shouting, ‘Come on, come on, I'll break your back for you, you gutless little git!' I heard the window swung wide, and a scuffle. I ran in – just in time to see the strange double-backed creature leap from the window.

Running to look out, I saw them pick themselves up from where they were sprawling. Punching, kicking, biting shoulders and jaws, they struggled away into the dark.

I called. They paid no heed. I returned to my bed.

Next day, that deadly antagonism was continued. They appeared mid-morning, fighting to eat and stop the other eating. They broke a chair and struck each other with bits of it. For the first time, I could not find it in my heart to be patient. They ran out, a mad animal fighting itself to death. After that, they did not intrude in the house again. They had become feral.

The heat wave continued, in perfect days and brazen nights. I swam last thing in Compton Water, when the visitors had left, relishing the calm last light in the western sky. Ducks continued to die, and not only ducks. My father doggedly piled up poisoned gulls, Canada geese, mute swans, snipe. Our little lagoons and ditches were sick, our lake choked; their waters had turned the colour of gherkins, thickened by algae. Dead fish, bream and the like, floated to the surface. Foul smells spread across the Head.

During the nights, I would wake, hearing my brothers scream and swear outside, sometimes near, sometimes far away. During the days, when the heat rose, I would occasionally see them running with that gait personal to them, across the dunes, in an endurance race of their own devising. I hardened my heart against them.

A conservation officer from the National Naturalists' Trust came and examined our dying wildlife. The drought had properly upset the balance of nature. A strain of bacteria causing botulism had bred in decaying ooze in the exposed beds of ponds and ditches drying under the sun. Their poison was attacking the birds' nervous systems. Every day, deaths mounted. My father dug trenches among the dunes and buried the victims, grebes, gulls and ducks.

The heat, the atmosphere of death, and the disappearance of my brothers brought a suspension to life. Everything waited.

The only punctuation to our days was the arrival of two men from the NNT to help us save some of the affected wildlife. Father and I worked with the men, day after day, pulling a hand-trailer across the undulating grass and marram. We worked all the way to Great Aster, the marsh terminating the Head to the east. We visited Norton Lake, our one stretch of fresh water, which was replenished through dykes and wooden sluices from Deepdale Marsh, inland. The eight-acre lake looked beautiful, with purple loosestrife in bloom along its banks. But it was sick. Dead fish floated belly up. When we stirred the bed of the lake, it gave off a reek of hydrogen sulphide. We collected two black-headed gulls, a great-crested grebe, and a cormorant too ill to dive and escape us. Botulism Type C had attacked all these birds. The cormorant's neck was so weak that it could not lift its head. Some of these poor creatures would recover when moved to uncontaminated water elsewhere.