Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (15 page)

Sleep? It was impossible. Home? I didn’t want to go home, so I went to see Spike. His friend had gone out for the day. We sat in plastic picnic chairs in the back garden, put our feet on a pile of logs and drank coffee. When I told him about being chased by the car and Sam in a coma and me in hospital and mending motorbikes with wire and biting pieces out of apples, he said he didn’t believe me, so I showed him my leg and told him that he was welcome to come to Taunton and stand with his face pressed against the glass of the intensive-care ward. “If you’ve got the balls,” I said. He put his hands up, and saying, “OK. You win,” lit a cigarette and sat back. “You win, I lose, everything’s fucked.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Well it is.”

“And it’s got nothing to do with winning.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Well. Whatever…”

I think Spike had gone beyond fear, and was now depressed. Depressed in the sort of way that could lead to a doctor’s surgery and a bottle of pills, and days in bed in a darkened room. He said he wished he could go back to work at the blackcurrant farm. “But I got the sack,” he said. “I’ll be lucky to get another job anywhere. Everything’s fucked.”

“You need to get a grip.”

“Thanks.”

“All you need to do is keep your head down for a couple more days. I’m getting you out of this mess.”

He took a long drag on his cigarette, slurped his coffee and said, “It’s a nightmare.”

“Tell me about it. Second thoughts – don’t. Don’t say another thing.”

“I’ve got nothing to say anyway.”

And that was how we left it. I did think about suggesting that when it was all over we could go away somewhere, take the van to Cornwall or something, pitch a tent in a campsite and spend a few days drinking, but I didn’t think he’d listen. All he wanted to do was make himself small, disappear into a hole, something like that. So when I’d finished my coffee I stood up and said, “Things to do, nightmares to sort. I’ll see you in a day or two.”

“Whatever,” he said.

“Spike…” I started, but then I shook my head. There was nothing more to say. “I’ll let myself out.” And I left him sitting in the garden with his face turned towards a hedge.

I suppose I’d always thought that one day Spike would be reduced to this, to staring at a hedge, admitting that everything was fucked, all plans gone, ambition dissolved. When I say I’d always thought this would happen, I should say that I might have thought it, but I never imagined it would actually come true. Spike had always been a wild schemer who never got round to putting his ideas into action, at least not until he saw that smoke in the hoop house. It was typical that the first scheme he ever got off the ground dropped him in it. “Typical,” I said to myself as I climbed on the bike and pointed it away from Wivey.

I rode around for a couple of hours, and when I got bored I went home and had a cup of tea. When Mum asked me about Sam, I just nodded and told her that she was the same. I didn’t tell her about throwing the apple away or seeing Spike, but I did say that I wouldn’t be in that night. “I’m going for a few beers,” I said, “so I’ll stay with some mates.”

“Mates?” she said. “Which mates?”

“Mates,” I said.

She knew I was lying, but I didn’t tell her which mates or which pub. I gave her a hug, left the bike by the back door and walked away.

I stopped at Heniton Hill, above the place where Spike had found the hoop house and the smoke, strolled to the top and sat down. The ground was hard and stony, and my head was buzzing. To the north, the Brendons climbed to Exmoor, and to the east the land dropped towards the Somerset levels, the Poldens and the Mendips. The fields were yellow and brown, the hedges lank, the wind nothing. High birds dipped, distant cows nudged the dust, the sun was prince and king. I smelt wool in the air, and meat, and I tasted metal. Everything was dry and fainting, blown into a fly’s mouth, chewed, thrown out again and left to turn to a crust. But when I turned, when I turned and focused and looked towards the purple crease of Dartmoor, something was changing. A fight was in the air. I didn’t notice it straight away, but when I did, I had to blink at the sight, remind myself that what I was seeing was real and blink again.

Clouds. Clouds were gathering in a thin line over the moor. There weren’t many, but they were real. And as the sun began to sink behind them, they turned to the look and colour of slashed wounds, red in the middle, pink at the sides, soft, weeping and livid. It would take time, but rain was coming. The clouds would build and climb and form themselves into thunderheads, and when they reached the height they needed they’d split and break, and the world would drink. Cows would run into sheep, sheep would prance, dogs would laugh, Ros and Dave and Don and Danny and their other friends would run into their garden and dance naked, and the rivers would sigh.

I watched the clouds for an hour. There was comfort in watching, comfort in the sight of the stream of rooks as they headed for their roosts, solace in the land as it gathered itself for the night. And as I walked away, I stopped at the rows of beech trees that grow on the hill, and ran my fingers over their trunks. I felt their strength and calm, and carried that calm away with me, held it tight and walked to Mr Evans’s farm to collect Spike’s van.

Night was falling fast. I walked quickly, and kept to the shadows and dips, and once, as a car appeared in the lane, I ducked out of its headlights and crouched behind a ruined churn stand. When I reached Stawley Mill, I stopped by the river to catch my breath and listen to the stars in their coursing. I heard them spin and flare, turn and light the way for their planets. The moon was still bright enough to see by, and the air was warm and close.

The ghost of a headless dog sometimes roams the lanes around Stawley Mill, lost and blind and hungry. It’s looking for the thing it’s lost, trying to remember what it was like to have eyes and ears and a mouth, following the sound of a disembodied bark that echoes through the trees of the wooded valleys and combes. Sometimes it waits in a hedge and jumps out at walkers, other times it wanders up and down the lane, marking gate posts with its scent, leaving drops of blood on the ground. There are people who say that if you see it you will be dead within the week, maddened to death by the sight of its gaping neck and the smell of its wounds. And others say that the person who finds its head and returns it to the dog will gain the power to conjure silver from rain. I wasn’t going to tempt fate or whatever power the animal wields, and I wasn’t going to make myself its victim. As I headed up towards the farm I hurried on, kept my head down and walked in the middle of the road.

I crossed the bottom field below the farm, kept an eye out for Mr Evans, followed the line of the hedges to the sunken lane that led to the kale field, and stopped every fifty yards to listen for noise. I heard nothing, saw no one, kept low, and when I reached the barn I checked the stick of straw was still stuck behind the bolt, slipped the door open and ducked inside.

The smell of smoke filled the place, and the splinters of moonlight that shone through cracks in the walls illuminated the old trailer, the harrows and the van. I pulled the tarp off its roof, opened the back and looked inside. Everything was exactly as we’d left it. The smoke was still in its sacks, and the sacks were stacked in their rows. I went back to the doors, hauled them open and rolled the trailer out. I folded and rolled the tarp and put it in a corner. Then I let the van’s handbrake off, took the steering wheel and put my back into pushing.

It took twenty minutes, but by the time I’d finished I had the van parked in the field, the trailer back in the barn and the harrows and other bits of machinery arranged exactly as they had been before. I closed the doors, wiped my hands on a ball of hay, climbed into the van, put the key in the ignition and took a deep breath. It started first time. I listened to the engine, let it idle for a moment, then accelerated, dropped out of the field, drove through the gate and down into the sunken lane. The high hedges shaded the moon, so I turned the headlights on and drove as carefully and quietly as the van would allow. Just before the bend that led to the front yard, I turned off the lights, floored the accelerator and shot past my caravan and the house. As I passed the front door, the porch light came on, and as I dropped into the track that led down to the road, I looked in my mirrors. Mr Evans appeared, and he was carrying his gun. He waved towards me, and then raised his arm. He put the gun to his shoulder. I heard a double crack, but then I was round the corner, the headlights were on again and I was skidding through the sharp left onto the road. Fifty yards, a sharp right, down the hill towards Stawley church and then back towards the mill and the lane of the headless dog. Up the hill towards Appley, fast as the van would go, over the cross, down to Greenham and onto the main road. I pulled in before the junction, stopped and sat in the dark with my hands on the steering wheel and listened to my heart beating like a bastard. It beat and thudded, and my forehead was covered in sweat. I wiped myself dry and waited five minutes. No one came out of the night, and no cars passed. The lights that lit the junction cast an orange light that gave the place a lost, lonely atmosphere. The ghosts of accidents, the scream of tyres, the broken bodies and the cry of pain. Nothing. Silence and quiet and lines of tarmac against the hedges. Still. I waited another five minutes, then turned onto the road and drove towards Taunton.

Driving with the smoke wasn’t easy, and the further I drove the more difficult it got. It was strong stuff, sweet and warm, and after a few miles it was getting deep inside my head, boring holes through my brain and into my neck, down to my heart and my lungs and my liver and all the other parts. Down and down and further down. Colouring me. Filling me. Twitching at me. Twitch, twitch, twitch. I opened the windows, let the fresh air in, but the smoke wouldn’t let me go. Bad smoke. Leave me alone. Let me do what I have to do. Stop that. Keep your hands to yourself. Leave it. But it didn’t listen. It rustled. The sacks rustled. My brain rustled, grabbed an edge of paranoia and told me to slow down.

Slow down.

Slow.

Stop that.

Stop now.

Forget.

Stop.

But it didn’t stop. It got worse. The fumes concentrated themselves, filled my head, burst out, broke back in and nailed themselves to my nose. The road twisted and changed. All the familiar places gave themselves new names. Pubs I had drunk in, garages I had filled up in, houses I wished I could live in, fields. A corner I had stood and thumbed a lift from. A roundabout I had slowed for. And all the way the glow of the sodium lights, beaming and shining and throwing short shadows on the road and verge.

The smoke sang to me. Songs. Psalms. Opera. German stuff. The slamming creep. The sudden lights of a car. The sudden lights of another car. A lorry. Two lorries. A bend in the road that used to be more of a bend. The cider place with wagons parked on the grass. The hill towards the Stonegallows pub and the old wonderings of what happened at that place before the pub was built and named.

The pub sign was a picture of a stone gallows. Solid and tall and built to hang two men at the same time, it cast a cloud over the clear night, spit spirits at the van, cries of grief and pain and end and loss. I flicked the windscreen wipers on. I don’t know why. I leant my head out of the window. I took a deep breath. Dropped a gear. Thought I saw a crowd of ghostly, baying faces lap around the van, felt my paranoia swell, smelt blood, tasted iron, stone, rope, light, tangerines, wool, smoke, wood, socks. I smelt these things all the way to the hospital, found a dark corner in the car park, fell out of the van, rolled over and lay on a patch of grass with my eyes wide open.

I’d smoked smoke and I’d eaten smoke, but I’d never been drenched and drowned in the stuff. I was turning with the world as the stars sang and spun over me. The grass twitched and clicked with movement and life, and when I turned my face towards the sounds, the sounds fingered my ears and whispered back at me. They were talking about their lives and my life, and said things I didn’t think they knew about me. And when I turned my face back to the sky, the stars told me that although the world was dark, the light was always ready to break through. It had a great power, the power to spark a revolution.

Revolution? Power? Whispers? I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t let nonsense fuck with my head. I had things to do. People to visit. I stood up, leant against the van and stared at the hospital. The windows shone. I could see nurses. A doctor. The ends of beds. Bright lights. They were too bright. I fell over.

As I lay in the grass again, I heard a new sound. Running water. I waited for five minutes, stood up again and took a deep breath. Fresh air. A cure.

The sound of water was coming from a fountain. I knelt at its side and dropped my head in. Cool. I pulled my head out, dropped it in again, pulled it out again, let the water dribble down the inside of my shirt to my waist. I looked back at the hospital. It was still shining. I was shining. I was shining hard like the stars and the ground and the water on my face and the smoke in my head and the van in the car park and the grass on the verge. I went over to the grass on the verge, lay down and closed my eyes. I didn’t plan to sleep, but I did, and my dreams were bright and wild and long, and when I woke up birds were singing in my ears.

Nine o’clock. I went to the hospital canteen and bought a cup of coffee and a bacon sandwich. As I waited at the till, I caught sight of myself in a mirror. I was a mess. My eyes were bloodshot, and my hair had a twig in it. I had grass on my shirt and mud smeared my cheeks. The woman behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, and when I said, “I had a rough night,” she said, “Haven’t we all?”

I didn’t know about that but I didn’t say anything else. I found a table in a corner where I was hidden from the nurses, doctors and other visitors. The coffee was strong and sweet, the bacon was salty and the lights were too bright. I ate slowly, and when I’d finished I found a toilet. I washed my face and hands and flattened my hair, then walked down to intensive care and sat with Sam for a while.

Her condition hadn’t changed. She was still plugged into the beeping machines, and as I held her hand and talked, her face gave nothing away. She could have been floating beneath the surface of a still lake, her skin paled by the dull water, her pain nibbled by fish. I watched her chest as she breathed, and I think I saw her eyeballs move beneath their lids, but I might have been mistaken. The teddy bear her parents had brought was propped at the bottom of the bed, staring blankly at her. When I left I squeezed her hand and said, “I’m going to sort everything out this morning, and when I come back all I’m going to do is help you get better.” And as I walked away, I told the nurse I’d be back in the afternoon.

“You look like you need some sleep,” she said.

“I do.”

“Then get some.”

“I’ll try.”

The transport café was twenty minutes from the hospital. I drove with all the windows open and my face leaning towards the fresh air, so by the time I’d reached the place, my head was almost clear. It was 10:15. There were a couple of lorries and a van in the car park, but otherwise it was empty. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel and stared at a hedge. A wren came hunting for insects, a little fat dart of terror and temper. High above me, two buzzards were soaring in widening circles, their primaries wide and their eyes bright for food. I heard the wren sing, and I heard the buzzards cry, and as the minutes ticked by, I felt my heart tighten. My palms sweated. The world ground its teeth. A sudden breeze picked up some dust and blew it at the van, then died down again. The clouds I had seen from Heniton Hill had been burnt and blown away. The temperature took a sudden leap, and suddenly it was very hot.

At twenty-past, a white Transit pulled into the car park. It slowed and pulled in opposite me, and I saw Pollock sitting in the passenger seat. He was wearing sunglasses, two days’ worth of a ginger beard and a woollen hat pulled down tight. Sweat was pouring off his face. I didn’t recognize the driver. Pollock saw me and put a finger to his lips. I looked away. I was patient. I kept my hands on the steering wheel. I listened to the breeze and the birds, watched clouds drift, smelt the scent of petrol and diesel. At half-past, another van arrived, drove slowly towards me and stopped. Inspector Smith was driving. He was wearing a black cap and sunglasses. He rolled his window down, looked at me and said, “Good morning, Elliot.”

“Hello.”

He pushed the glasses down his nose, winked, then pushed them back up. “You OK?”

“I will be.”

“Of course you will.” He smiled, a smile that lashed at his face like a little whip and quickly disappeared. “You’ve got something for me?”

“Might do.”

“Want to show me?”

“OK.”

I got out of my van, and he got out of his, and we walked to the back of mine. As I opened the doors, he whispered, “Act cool.”

“Sure…”

“And everything’ll go to plan.”

“OK,” I said, and he peered into the van, sniffed, whistled through his teeth and said, “That’s a lot of smoke.”

“It is,” I said, and he winked again. Smith was confident and strong, and this made my heart slow its pace. I felt OK. I felt safe. “A lot of good smoke,” I said, and he stepped back, straightened up and turned to walk back to the front of the van. As he did, I saw something swinging towards him. I ducked down, heard a crack, looked under the chassis and he was lying flat on the ground. Blood was pouring from his head and pooling in the dust. Someone in shiny black shoes stood over him. One of the shoes poked Smith’s side, then started walking around the van towards me. I stood up, turned around and Dickens said, “Elliot. We meet at last. At long fucking last.” His eyes were wide and glazed, his mad fucking mouth twitch was going like a train, and he was holding a baseball bat. He tapped its fat end in the palm of his hand.

I looked over my shoulder. I looked at the white Transit. I looked back at Dickens. Dickens looked at the white Transit. He smiled at it and smiled at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you think you were going to get out of this?”

“Well…”

“Think that someone was going to come running?”

I looked towards the Transit again and, as I did, two men came running from the café. They were carrying black canvas bags, and as they ran they pulled guns from the bags and pointed them at the Transit. Its back doors flew open and two more men jumped out. As soon as they saw the guns, they froze and put their hands up. Suddenly Pollock was there too, and we were all standing in the middle of the car park – men with guns, men with their hands in the air, Dickens laughing and me thinking that now was the time to piss myself.

Pollock was the first to say something. “This is fucking mad, Dickens. You any idea what’s going to happen when this is over? When they catch you?”

Dickens took a step towards Pollock and said, “Catch me? Even if they could, do you think I’d care?” His eyes were blinking, his mouth was out of control, he looked like lobsters were fighting in his brain. And if anyone was in any doubt, if men with guns or men with hands in the air or bleeding men were in any doubt, here was complete madness in a man. “The thing is,” he said, “it’s not about the smoke any more. Not that it ever really was. No.” He laughed at something. “No. It’s not about that at all…”

“Then what is it about?” said Pollock. “Apart from the other things we’ve got you on. The smack you picked up in Bridgwater last month. The speed that’s waiting for you at Avonmouth…”

“Well!” said Dickens. “Let me count the ways. Let me stick a dog up your arse and count the fucking ways. The way I’m going to teach you and everyone else who fucks with me.” And he pulled out a gun and shot one of the men from the Transit in the foot, and the man fell over, screaming.

“One,” he said, “and counting.”

“Dickens!” Pollock took a step forwards. Dickens pointed his gun at Pollock’s head.

“You want to be number two? Please say you want to be number two…”

“This is mad.”

“Mad? Oh yes, it is, isn’t it? Teaching people a lesson is quite crazy. Or should it be sending people a message? You know, I just don’t know any more. I’m feeling a little confused.” He turned towards me and grinned, and now I looked down the barrel of the gun. I surprised myself. I wasn’t scared. Instead, as I looked at that hole I thought about the very smooth way the metal folded around the barrel and the little ridges around the trigger guard. I watched the man’s finger and I saw a bead of sweat run down his cheek and disappear under his chin. Time stretched. A second was a minute. “You…” he said, his mouth moving slowly as he tongued the words, “are coming with us. You’re going to be the lesson everyone else is going to learn.” He dropped the gun to his side and wiped some spit from his lips. He pointed at a red van on the far side of the car park. “That’s your ride.” And he took my arm and started to walk me away. As he did, one of his heavies went over to Pollock’s van, pulled out a knife and stuck it in the tyres. The other went to Spike’s van and started the engine. He pulled away, and the last thing I saw before I was thrown into the back of Dickens’ van was Pollock, the shot man and the other man standing in the middle of the car park, scared faces pushed against the windows of the café, the huge blue sky and the sound of the buzzards’ cries as they circled higher and higher, almost out of sight now, almost gone.