Touch (5 page)

The light is pale. Sharp as newly sliced lemons. The cat sleeps in the dust under the sideboard. That smell of old apples, urine and mould; an earthy scent of geraniums. They've shed petals and brown leaves across the kitchen sink. There's a stain on the rag rug where he must have spilt something. He doesn't remember when or what that was. Daniel cups his chin, thinks about a shave. The bristles are white, sharp against his palms. His nails are broken, black at the rim. His fingers smell of bacon fat and diesel oil. He brushes crumbs from his lap. Light creeps in at the window. He stares at the ginger cat that never blinks.

Daniel rises from the chair. Its screech is brief across the tiled floor. The tiles glow in dawn light, rich and tawny as plums. The fire in the cast-iron grate has slumped again. He throws on another log, watching the bark curl from it as the flames begin. The black tissue of ash turns grey and then white. That tree came down in the bottom pasture. They'd played in it as children; now it's burning in his grate. He'd taken a chainsaw to the tree, dragging it in sections to the barn with the tractor before gapping up the wall. Then a day on the crosscut: sawing logs and stacking them. That way you get warm twice. It takes two years for pear or apple wood to season. Longer for hawthorn or elm. Now the chimney sucks at the ash. It flocks like ascending snow.

Last year the weather had been freezing after Christmas. A real cold snap. Sudden, but not startling here, where it was to be expected. Snow had harried them, coming down in dry flakes for days at a time. One afternoon, feeding his stock from the trailer up there on the fell he'd almost lost it. Let himself go. Things had seemed to sink away around him so that there were no passing moments, just a blur, a whiteout of time. He'd no idea how long he'd been up there, staring at the windscreen. It had filled with snow before he came to. He could have frozen to death. He wouldn't have been the first. It was said his father's great-grandfather had been lost that way. Up there was the place to forget yourself. To forget everything. Up there on the fell gathering sheep with the wind coming straight off the North Sea. A Russian wind, full of Siberian ice. Full of slaughtered stoicism. He'd always remember that winter.

Now another winter was about to pass, blowing away through the black buds on the ash trees, letting light and warmth in at last. He kicks the log into place with his stockinged foot and catches the smell of singed wool. Annie would have scolded him for that. For his daftness. Putting his feet in the fire. But he's burning the past, burning memories. And you had to be careful. Memories made memories – and some things were best left be.

He'd wept that day, alone on the moor. Dragging hay bales from the tailgate. Struggling with chains and pins clarted in frozen cow shit. It'd been sweet summer hay with grass and clover and buttercups all mixed in. Better than that stinking silage he wouldn't make. He'd wept then, crumpled up against the trailer, his shoulders shaking. Then crawling into the cab where no one could see him. Banging his head on the steering wheel, pumping the accelerator, making the wheels spin on the piss-stained crust of snow. Frightening the sheep in their draggled fleeces. And beyond the windscreen the wind had chased away the last flakes of winter towards a spring she'd never see.

That last night she'd asked for an oatmeal biscuit with warm milk. Whatever you fancy, love, he'd said, laying his hand beside her head on the pillow, noticing how broken it looked. How swollen and useless it had become. Then he'd lain down beside her, listening to her fluttered breaths. He'd fallen asleep. And so had she. When he woke, she was stiff beside him, her hands locked, her cheeks cold as a churn. She'd died easily in the end. She'd died at peace. In the morning the windows were covered in swirls of frost and the room was full of milky light. He'd pressed his thumb against the glass, melting a hole to look out to where sheep huddled against white fields. Then he'd got back in beside her for the last time.

 
Daniel rubs at his cheeks. The bristles prickle like iron filings against his fingers. Memories had to be watched. Watched in case they prised the lid off things. He takes his hand from the mantelpiece and sits down again. All that had started with a log burning there in the grate. Why should a log bring that back? It made no sense at the end of the day.

But it's the beginning of the day. He remembers that. Another day. The cat rises from its sleeping place. A show of static electricity flickers along its tail. The log settles in the grate. The cat hisses at the fire. The fire spits back, but the cat turns its back to lap at a saucer of milk, drinking the full moon that has turned blue in the night. Another month. Daniel reaches out a hand and the cat's spine arches, a purr rising in its throat. Like the crosscut buzzing against the grain of a beech bole, snowing dust over his boots. His hands guiding the timber through. Each season, each year's ring of grain bisected by steel. Today he saw the first celandines huddled in the hedgerow, their bright stamp of gold putting a seal on things.

Three more ewes to lamb and he'll be through. All that newness. The first time he's lambed alone. Last year the children had been home to help. Returning to their teenage roles. Now he makes up his own sandwich and thermos of coffee. Even with his hand inside the ewe, that hot tunnel of slime and blood, tugging at the lamb's tucked-in hooves, he wondered why he was still alive. What use was he to anyone? What use to the life that was in him? It ran on, obeying its own time; it couldn't be rushed. But there he was again, joining things up that weren't really joined. Though, in a way, everything was. Everything came together in the end. Everything meant something, though you couldn't often say what or why. That was the thing. You could hardly ever say why.

Daniel knuckles his eyes. He licks salt from his palm. Sunlight glitters on a flaw in the window glass. A spider is tying the clothes rack to the door. He has to squint to see its tightrope of silk. And now the kitchen clock is chiming, cracking open another hour, another day.
Whatever you fancy, love
. The pillow's drift of linen making her hair almost invisible. Like that spider web glistening and disappearing. Suddenly, everything is hard to see.

Daniel gets up to put his plate in the sink. He sweeps his hand across the crumbs on the table, sticks the cellophane cover back over the jam jar and fumbles the elastic band over it. When he replaces it in the pantry he sees her rows of preserves.
Damson, Plum, Strawberry, Greengage, Raspberry
. Then bitter orange marmalade and a line of pickles and conserves neatly labelled in her handwriting. He remembers what it was like to eat the last loaf she had made before she died. The last loaf from the freezer. Thawing it, knowing she'd never make another. It was as if he was eating
her
. Her body and blood. The bread had blessed and choked him.

The dogs are barking, yelping at the length of their chains. Maybe they've caught scent of the fox that's been creeping around since lambing started. He hadn't had the heart to take a gun to it. Not yet at any rate. Wasn't there room enough for every creature? Every creature in its place. People could make room. Let him do his job properly that was all. Let the fox take its chance. He didn't seem to have the heart for killing anymore. But that was wrong and he knew it. You couldn't go against nature for long without making a mess of things.

It's the postman's van the dogs have seen, toiling up the dips and curves of the track, which needs another load of quarry bottoms after last April's rain. It'd felt too much at the time. Too much like going on regardless. So he'd left it for another year. Annie had died in early December. And at home, not in the hospice. He was glad of that. He'd got her home and hadn't been too proud to ask for help like his own father would've been. Like his own father was when his mother had pressed a hand to her head and gone on working at the washtub, trying not to heed the pain. When she went raving that winter in '61 they'd tied her to an armchair with sheets and lashed it to the trailer. Then they'd towed her over snowdrifts to the doctor. She hadn't lasted long after that and neither had his father, dropping dead in the shippen with the feed pails in his hands. Annie and he had moved from their rented cottage to the farmhouse. Starting out for themselves.

That had been a time of hope. Hope mixed with the grey suds of fatigue. That few months before Peter was born seemed like the happiest of all now. But maybe that was just the way things were with hindsight. Looking back was easy like that. The kids had done well. They'd got out of farming. Peter was a teacher and Kate working part-time for the insurance people. The farm was no life for young folk any more. They'd never wanted their kids to go into the farm, unlike some. Like Daniel's father had, taking his belt to him that time when he'd wanted to stay on at school.
This'll be the
only school tha'll ever need, and I'll school thee!
And so it had been. The farm had been his education. So he'd not been sorry when his father dropped face-down in the muck. He'd been hard, bitter through and through, the way sloes are.

When Annie fell ill, Peter had come home with his wife, Sheila, whenever he could. Though they didn't like bringing the children towards the end. That was understandable. That smell for one thing. And by then Annie hardly knew them. There had been things to understand and they'd got through together, as a family. Kate had been able to leave her own kids and stay for a few days at the end. She was the image of her mother. He'd noticed her grey hairs as she bent over Annie to pull the draw-sheet from under her. It seemed odd to have children who were growing old. Like a wheel turning, gripping, then turning some more. Oh, it wasn't wrong. It's the way things are. To grow old, to die. But not alone, dear God, not alone. He'd never expected that.

 
Daniel's hand slips the door catch. He stamps his feet into his Wellingtons and goes out to meet the postman.

‘Morning Daniel. It's a cold un!'

‘It is! Owt fresh?'

‘My patch's still clear, touch wood! They've put disinfectant traps all along the main roads. Whether they'll do owt I don't know. It's a sad do.'

‘That's about time. I've not been out, mind.'

‘No.'

The postman is sorting mail on his lap. Daniel scratches his head, as if talking is a new thing.

‘Will you come in for a brew?'

The postman hesitates. He's a slight chap with a thick head of red hair and a coppery beard.

‘I'd best not. I'll have to disinfect. And there's still snow at Henby...'

‘Still? That's a rum do! It's way lower than here...'

The postman hands him a bundle of letters from the van, all junk mail. Then a small packet wrapped in brown paper and sealed with string in the old-fashioned way. Daniel doesn't know the writing. Pale blue. Should he know it?

Henry puts the van into gear, still talking over his shoulder.

‘It dun't get much sun over that south slope. Yesterday't track were still all drifted up, like.'

‘Have they lambed yet?'

‘Reckon so. Reckon they're about done. How about you?'

‘Just three more ewes, then I'm finished.'

‘Champion!'

The postman is turning the van, the engine puttering out a fantail of smoke.

‘See you tomorrow, Daniel.'

‘See you, Henry! Go easy at Henby, then.'

‘Aye, I will.'

And now he's just a vague face, a hand waving from behind the tinted glass of the post van which goes down the track crookedly, a bead of blood trickling across white skin.

 
Daniel glances again at the handful of junk mail and dumps everything but the packet into the bin.
Things
. Everyone seems obsessed with things these days. Loans, mobile phones, clothing, cars, furniture. But he needs nothing. He's well supplied. That's what he likes to say when those chattering sales folk ring him up.
Well supplied
. It has a kind of finality for him. He'd want for nothing, thank you. It was like a different language. A language from another world drifting into the headsets of the telesales centres. A few of them chat to him for the quaintness of his language, for the old-fashioned flavour of his voice, the taste of a world that lies somewhere beyond theirs. Above theirs, Daniel would say. Not just beyond. His world is up here where the Siberian wind comes to die in moorland grasses, between grouse butts and the harried fleeces of his sheep. He'll want for nothing.

At the kitchen table, Daniel takes up a knife. It's a thin, carbon-steel blade, sharpened a thousand times so that it curves inward. Annie's doing. Sharpening it with that flick of her wrist. The way she mixed a pudding or a cake. He cuts through the string and throws it into the fire, watching the sealing wax sweat, then melt and sputter into blue flames. That faint drift of incense. Now he tears away the paper and the Sellotape until he's holding a small envelope. There's something hard and round inside. It's wrapped in ridged cardboard, so it feels like he's rubbing his thumb across a kitten's ribs.

Inside is a letter from his sister in Filey. Effie. Effie who married a trawlerman when she was still only eighteen. She'd left home even before that, working in some nursing home on the east coast. Just a few words on a scrap of paper.
This is
mother's ring. I want you to have it
. And more about her illness, about bearing up. His mother's ring. Why had she done that, now? What does he want with a ring? Daniel sees Effie swinging from the farm gate in her pigtails, climbing the rope in the pear tree, her knees grazed and dirty. He sees her in a cream marriage gown, holding her husband's hand. The husband who had even less to say than Daniel. They'd stood awkwardly at the wedding, cupping pints of bitter in their fists, munching sausage rolls. Annie had been pregnant with Peter then. He'd felt proud. Substantial in his gifts. Wanting for nothing.