The Dig (10 page)

He felt a well of company. The group's hungry cruelty seemed familial and safe to him and he felt for a moment his desires were not outlawed amongst them. He made their shouts internally, through his clenched teeth.

And then something changed. It came back at him.

The dogs were in cages at the far wall and the barred cages were in a row. People's skin under the brutal white light looked unnatural.

It was the gangness of it and the
group
of men and his outsideness of it; and he remembered the jail. There, staring into the pit, a brief dizziness came.

It's that police, he said. There was a holding to the way he talked to himself.

After an hour or so the men were drunk and baying as a pack. The badger could hardly fight anymore. Its chest heaved. It lay stupidly in the pit. A beer can was thrown in for encouragement, then another.

When finally it stirred, they put the dogs in again.

PART FOUR

The Sea

chapter one

D
ANIEL SAT IN
the pickup in the car park looking out over the sea and he couldn't bring himself to open the door. He had meant to park in town but had driven through the sheer activity of cars and people with an alienated numbness and had gone on to the beach car park. The school was out on lunch and there were kids everywhere in the small town and it was all too much for him. He sat there staring out over the gray, heavy water.

He had realized that morning that there was no more toilet paper and could hardly believe that this would be the thing to drive him out.

People were walking their dogs along the seafront. They looked red faced, braced against the tide somehow with the gulls lifting and dropping over the water behind them. Cars were parked around him and people sat in them drinking from flasks and watching the waves, the windows misting with condensation, and it was visible to him the quiet companionship of the old couples there, their simple togetherness act of getting out of the house to go for a drive and watch the waves awhile. They seemed
to have the same comfortable look together as he had felt with her in the shed when it rained. He felt the great missingness of her then, watching the sea.

He'd had nothing substantial to eat for days. He was becoming conscious of his cheeks, as if they were somehow sucked in like they are in the cold, and there was a continual hollow sickness in his stomach. His teeth had begun to hurt.

There was a much greater breeze here than inland, and flecks of froth came off the waves into the wind. He thought about walking into the waves until he disappeared. It was the picture of himself old and alone. He felt he would be about as substantial as those flecks. When she asked him if he loved her, he had often said and said sincerely that he could not imagine being old without her. This was a constant, however tense things got between them now and then. It seemed to be a sign how much he knew of her that he could imagine her old as well as he could recall her as a child, as if he could see her at both ends of her life, see her completely. But he could not imagine her dead.

He had shut the door of the bedroom. He understood that at some point the scent of her would dissipate and go.

Beside him there was a boy in a car and he was looking only at his phone and he could see the boy's face lit up by the glow and not looking at the great, dramatic sea.

He wound down the window and turned on the engine and drove out of the car park to the garage on the outskirt of town.

He pulled the pickup over away from the fuel pumps and walked over the forecourt and into the garage and loaded his arms with the toilet roll he needed and took a four liter of milk from the fridge shelf. There was a truck driver there, pulling a coffee from the vending machine, but no one he knew.

He walked down the shelves and heard the truck driver go out and turned to watch and saw him bite into a hot roll as he left, briefly feeling hungry but pushing it down from habit, as if hunger was a memory rather than a call. Things on the shelves registered strangely to him, but each item seemed like it would demand something of him if he took it home: washing-up liquid, firelighters, a newspaper. Something urged him on to take these things and to get back to normality, but when he felt this swell of hope that the energy might be there for this, he reached out to touch it and it faded, and he just took the toilet roll and milk to the counter.

How are you keeping? said the garage owner. It was kind of balanced, how he asked it.

Yeah, said Daniel.

The garage owner nodded once. He totaled up the two items on the till.

You want me to book those? he asked. The two men had known each other a while now and they had only ever had conversations like this.

Daniel seemed momentarily confused at the question. Uh. Yes, he said.

Are you okay? asked the garage owner. He knew about his wife, like everyone. He didn't want to say anything too direct, but he liked the man. But he was trying not to show how he felt, seeing Daniel, which was the way you feel when you stop for an animal hit on the road.

Uh-huh, Daniel said. The garage owner looked at him, pushed his lips together in acceptance and nodded an
O.K
.

You want anything else? he asked.

No.

Anything to eat? There was a counter of hot food on display, cheese and ham pastries, a few pasties, some strips of bacon bedewed with fat under the hot light.

There was a brief flash of wide hunger but it was like he'd forgotten how to register it and Daniel said automatically:
No, I'm okay. The garage owner was looking at him as if he'd just seen him take a blow to the head.

Okay then.

Daniel took the goods from the counter and went out. He turned and nodded at the garage owner and went over the empty forecourt looking at the rich Georgian houses across the road.

He got into the pickup and was about to drive off when the garage owner banged the door and passed a wrapped bacon roll through the open window. His guts immediately roiled. He looked at the roll in this hands and the garage owner just banged the sill of the door and walked away.

Driving home he saw the badger on the road. He slowed. It was prone on the road. There was a magpie pulling at it. As he neared, the bird took a final pull and the leg raised as if it waved. Then it dropped again and the magpie let go of the scrap he was trying to loose, hopped, and went over the bank.

He did not understand. He had lived all his life here and he had never come close to hitting a badger.

He kept thinking of impact. Of horrible impact.

chapter two

H
E SHIFTED THE
bunched carrier bags and the cleaning stuff and the shoe polish and dustpan and brush and box of nuts and hinges and screws and found an empty jar under the sink and opened it and smelled it and it had no smell and he smelled only the lanolin and straw and always the undertone of cattle on his hands.

There had been a snatch of cold weather again that seemed to slow the lambing down for a while, and now there was only a handful of ewes left to lamb, and there was a reticence to them.

He had not yet accepted her death as a fact. It was impossible.

Daniel looked at the faded label stuck to the jar, peeled and lifted a little from being washed. Blackberry. He remembers the warm sun on his neck, the soft presence of her a few yards away, the firm pop of the pulled fruits.

He put the jar into his pocket and walked out through the back door and through the distraught garden and
headed to the church, her piece of cloth crushed in his hand.

The church sat at the very top of the land, bordered with a wall and flanked on one side by dignified beeches. It was the church his mother and father were married in and the church where she was buried, right beside the land, as if she could stretch out in her sleep and feel it there. The day before her funeral, from the house, he had heard the slice of the spades digging the ground.

He knelt by the grave and took the jar and put in her piece of cloth inside its plastic bag and set the jar down for her, pushing it a little into the soft earth.

He cleared away the curled flowers and looked at the grave-marker. It looked plastic and new. It had no weight to it and no permanence. He read her name and put his hand in the dirt above her and he wanted to drag her from the earth again and have her there with him.

At the funeral he was in a daze, had the sure sense that she would be in the house when he returned there. He was at a distance from what was happening. There was the smell of opened soil like when they dug the garden together and he kept looking around for her. He had been driving once and two pigeons had come down on to the road and the car in front had failed to brake and hit one, mashing it to a paste with a dull thunk and brief change
in speed. He felt the people look at him then with faces like the one he imagined he wore at that moment. Like they were aware he was about to be flattened by some terrible great thing.

                  
…his days are like grass;

                     
he flourishes like a flower of the

                        
field;

                  
…it is

                        
gone,

                     
and its place knows it no more.