The Long Dry (7 page)

‘I don’t think we can mend him now,’ he said. ‘I think he’s very old.’

‘We should give him a good clean,’ she said.

The dog was by the vet and he stank very badly. The vet could see the wet and shallow bite of the rat on the dog’s foot, pussing and oily. It reminded him of the underneath of a tongue. The stink of the dog was bad. Because he was too weak to hold himself properly he’d messed on himself, and it hung in thick cords from his long fur.

‘We keep giving him a bath with the hose but he just gets dirty again,’ explained Emmy. ‘I think he needs a haircut.’

The dog looked benignly up at the vet, panting happily. Killing the dog would be more difficult for him to do because the dog had not accepted it was time now. He wished that Gareth was there. He respected these people. He respected that they had not asked him to come and kill the dog as soon as it begun to smell; as soon as the grotesque tumour had started to make them feel nauseous each time they saw the dog.

The vet looked down at the bee, which had settled on a dandelion. It had a bright, golden collar and yellow and white patches at the end of its body so it looked proud on the dandelion. If the vet looked more closely he would see it had more body than usual, seemed more armoured, had less of the thick soft fur. He knew they lived in colonies much smaller than honey bees, of around one-hundred and fifty. Drones and workers looked after the solitary queen in a nest under the ground in an old mouse hole, or
something like it. They take moss and grass inside it, and build wax cells for the honey and eggs.

If the vet looked more closely at the bee he’d notice it was un-busy, not collecting the bright pollen from the flower into sacks on its legs. It was a cuckoo bee. They look like another bee but they aren’t, and they go into the colony of the bee they look like and kill their queen. Emmy watches the bee a minute. When they lay their own eggs, the host workers look after the cuckoo bee, and because they all die in the winter it is futile. Only the cuckoo bees survive, hibernating through the winter and waking later than the bumblebee queens to give them time to make their nests. But the vet doesn’t notice so much, because he is thinking about the old dog.

‘I’m going to give Curly an injection that will make him sleep,’ he said.

‘Will he wake up?’ asked Emmy, already understanding.

‘No. He won’t wake up,’ said the vet. ‘Do you want to help?’ Curly huffed and snapped his mouth at the bee. When he was younger he used to love to chase bees.

They took the dog to the place where he normally slept in a part of the old milking parlour and lay him down. Curly had followed them and they walked slowly for him. It was excruciating, how full of hope he was. The dog had the look of a thing which loved things utterly and would be forever pleased. He settled down in the hay to sleep.

‘What’s in the injection?’ asked Emmy. He didn’t want to say. Brutally, he had a picture of the little girl leading the dog round by the ear, many years ago.

‘It’s a medicine that will make his heart go slower and slower; and then it will stop.’ He didn’t have to say that it wouldn’t hurt the dog because of the way he said this thing.

‘Like when it stops raining?’ she said. Nothing had ever moved him more in his life than the beautiful questions of children.

‘Yes. Like when it stops raining.’

Far away Gareth had heard the horn and knew the vet had come and he’d started straight away to walk back to the farm. Trying to move quickly through the bog, even though it was dry, was very hard. When he heard the vet’s old van grumble into life and the stretch of tyres over the loose grit in the yard he knew the dog had been put down. He looked up the slope towards the farmhouse and could see the dust rise off the lane where the old van threw it up. Then he turned back again, and went back towards the bog.

The cow walked lazily up the track between two rails of blackthorn. She’d heard the vet come and go. She hadn’t liked the bog, which for a long time had been full of
hide-behinds
,
which were brought across from the lumber camps of Wisconsin, and which Gareth’s father had learnt about from the American troops he served with. No matter how quickly you turned around, how hard you looked for them, these creatures always stayed behind you, so no one had ever described them. The cow had only sensed them. She was slightly demented now. She felt she should give the calf but her body wouldn’t. It was a strange feeling to the cow. Her breath was rasping, and she was puffing loudly through her nose.

She kept walking in the sun and grubbed the hedge here and there because now the flies were driving her silly, landing on her face all the time, and the cow was very thirsty. She was trying to find water now, and just walking.

They said there was a beast in the bog. There was a whole fauna created to keep the children away from the dangerous places, but they were told of with amusement, incredulously, so that the thing was a game, and the children could play the game of staying away from these places without being drawn to them, by being curious of fear. Gareth did not know that he could tell these stories until he told them, and it delighted him. But he had grown up here, and had been allowed always to make-believe, because the countryside does not refute pretend things in the brutal way a town does.

The beast in the bog was like a kangaroo, but with the feet of an elephant. It didn’t have the head of a kangaroo
though, the long, rabbit-like face. Its face was like a pug’s, smashed into a grimace, with its tiny eyes not telling you how it felt. Only its teeth could give away its emotion. Needless to say, the beast fed on children.

A snake lived in the slurry pit, except it wasn’t so much a snake, more a being of muck and skin that moved and bloated like a worm dropped in a puddle. It demanded feeding, all the time, and lived on a diet of poo from the cows. It’s why they kept the cows, they said, to make poo for the snake, so he didn’t consume the farm. So it was that Emmy came up with the theory that she knew which cows produced more poo than milk, from the black and white ratio of their bodies. You should never go near the pit, they said.

Gareth had fought with the beast from the bog and the beast had taken his finger. When they did go near the bog, Gareth showed his children the bones and the leftovers of animals so they knew the truth of the stories. It is hot now. It drips with heat. This damn cow, he thinks. A dry heat like holding your hand close to an iron.

He thought hard about the dog. He was sure he had not hoisted death on him, that it really was time. That they hadn’t had Curly put down because, though they tried not to admit it, he had begun to repulse them. Animals are put down for the sake of their owners. He did not believe that animals complicated pain in the way humans do. He’d also watched animals for long enough to know that they fight death violently, or else simply lie down and die. He
believed in dignity though, that this was a right in life not just human. He knew that having Curly put down was about dignity. He hoped that Emmy would not be too sad and was sure Kate would have explained things to her gently, while the vet was there.

But Kate slept. Sleep turned the pain for her. Awake, it was like a kettle of rolling water; sleep turned her pain to steam.

She thought of Gareth’s finger, shining like a healed blister. She thought of his shoulders and the cords of his arms, and the rough hair. Compared to her body, she loved his body, like she loved the exquisite smallness of her daughter, and the broadening shoulders of her son. She loved them physically, as objects; but she could not love her own.

As she lay asleep she thought of her son stretching into his long life and of her daughter growing and becoming more beautiful and complicated, like one of her pictures, as life added to her. She thought of the farm, turning. She felt the headache starting to clear.

Dylan had come back and couldn’t find Emmy and found his mother sleeping in bed. It was a while after the vet had
been but he didn’t know about the dog. He could not believe his father was still looking for the cow.

When he got back to the farm he turned on his mobile after driving and found that he should have got a gas bottle and figured there would be nothing nice for tea. His mother in bed and there being no gas it would just be cheese and leftovers and bread. He should go and get the gas but he thought – it’s too late to go and get gas now, on a Saturday. Because it was summer there were a lot of camp sites open and he would have got gas very easily, a small bottle at least. But he didn’t think of it because he didn’t want to go out and get gas.

On the lane he’d seen a family of stoats, playing in the dust. They were no longer than his hand, bounding loose and cantilevered along the track, now and then ambushing each other, lifting and watching, bouncing at the passing flies or overhanging heads of grass. Watching them, it was difficult to recognise they were capable of killing things twice their size.

He knew he should go and help find the cow, or find Emmy and play with her, but inside he felt not part of the day that had happened here. He had gone to see his friends all day and when he drove back into the farmyard the whole flight of pigeons had taken off from the yard at the sound of his car. He walked into the house and he could just tell it had been a day.

He picked up his car keys because he felt very far away all of a sudden, and he went again. In a few years he will want to be back on the farm, but for now he left a note saying ‘gone out, hope that’s ok’ on the table.

As he drove away the pigeons went up into the air again. The curious slowness of pigeons on land; their energy in the air: like two different animals with two different purposes. The white dove looked like a flower amongst them. The family wondered if the pigeons would ever go, would leave one day as strangely and as together as they’d arrived. They seemed to bounce and tilt in the light.

In a pigeon’s cells, somewhere in their head, tiny magnetic crystals survive, tiny pieces of iron ore called magnetite. Invisible lodestones, tinier than dust, creating a compass, sensing polarity, the inclination of magnetic fields around the earth.

The electronic particles in the crystal, moving between different ions in a structured path, turn the ore magnetic and tell the pigeons their way. They’ve also found this in the brains of bees.

They’ve found iron too in their otolith organs, in their inner ear – the things which give them a sense of where they are in the air, of the space they move through. If the earth’s geomagnetics are wrong, they get lost.

It makes you wonder what crystals run through us, what drops of salt? Because something in us gives us a sense of where we should be, too, if we listen.

On the walk back to the bog Gareth had tried to think of something else and not the dog, so he thought about the land he wanted, and how he himself would try to build, or just sell the plots. The finance was arranged well past the guide price, but he knew he shouldn’t be eager and carried away if the land got too much. He tried deliberately to think about the land, but he kept thinking of the heat, and Kate, and of the dog; thoughts that were like sounds. Of Kate’s white body. Time alters things, and it is right and good that things change and he accepts her body changing in the way he accepts the changing landscape around him. He is aware now that his care for her outweighs his want, and he knows she feels this as a lack of hunger. Maybe it is different for them, he thinks, different from a man. If you are hungry for a woman it is because you are hungry for women, but you can care for just one.

To buy land at auction you get the catalogue and a lot number and you carry out your searches and surveys. Gareth hadn’t had the land surveyed and had argued with Kate about this, saying ‘I know the land, it’s the same as ours, just a road between them.’ You must have all your finance, surveys and searches complete prior to the auction because at the fall of the gavel you enter into a binding contract to purchase that land. You should seek planning consent in principle first but Gareth has not, because he knows there will be no planning given yet, and he knows how easily ideas get around in this place, and he is hoping no one else will think of this purpose for the land.

While he waits for the time to come for planning, he will use the land to graze, with the extra room perhaps even increase the sheep, and it will pay for itself that way too. ‘It is a crazy idea,’ says Kate, and thinking of her saying this makes him scratchy again. Perhaps it is just a crazy idea, just a crazy idea, he thinks.

He should clear this scrub and use this land. He gets determined to do this whenever he’s down here. All the unfulfilled plans he had, like the plans we have with a lover that never come to anything. Take away the thin growth and the struggling plants and let the land dry out. It would be like writing memoirs, he thinks. Choosing what stays, and giving things space to grow again. The willow just comes up so quickly and the roots, which you would think would drink the water, don’t; they dam it in the ground, turning the ground to bog.

If you take down the trees, the land dries out, and the water starts to drain away. Now would be a good time to do this, with the bog so dry already. He could have four more fields a few years from now. The bog. The stink and dark and the effort of it. And we wouldn’t lose more cows, he thinks. He’s angry he missed the vet. This damn bog makes you lose any sense of where you are. I want Kate to want me, he is thinking, and suddenly, like light breaking the clearing, he knows what it is he must do. He knows it clearly and well. He should just walk. Just walk and keep walking, away from it all, and not stop.

He swallows his anger and says again to himself ‘this will be just a phase, it’s just a change, and I didn’t mean to wish those things I thought earlier’ and while he’s thinking
‘I didn’t mean what I just thought’ he finds the big comfortable place the cow has made. When the cow is not in there he knows inside he cannot look for her anymore. All I have to do is keep walking. ‘I could go. I could just go,’ he thinks.