Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (16 page)

When it comes to words, Mum picks them carefully. She never swears, never says any of the words for God and, most of all, most particularly, she never says the word “hare”. If she sees one, she’ll call it old turpin, the cat of the wood, the stag of the cabbages, the sitter on its form, the fellow in the dew and any one of a hundred other names, but she’ll never call it hare. It’s bad luck or it’s good luck, or it’s whatever luck you want to choose – and if you don’t believe in luck, then you have that choice too. I don’t know why Mum has this thing about the word, but I know that in the old days women like her could escape the ducking stool by turning into hares and heading for the woods, so maybe that’s the reason behind that secret.

I’ve seen hares boxing in the spring, up on their hind legs, a jill fending off a jack who’s coming on too strong at the wrong time. And I’ve seen hares in my dreams, curious animals who want to take me to their hollows and run rings around my head.

I dreamt of hares as I lay in the back of Dickens’s van. I’d smacked my head on the floor, and as I swam in and out of consciousness, a talking hare came to me and asked if I wanted to come with him to a place where dew ponds formed and trees dripped silver. I told him I wanted to stay where I was and rest. He was an easygoing animal, and wasn’t going to force me to do anything I didn’t want to do, so we sat together on a hillock and watched a horse nuzzle a gate post. Dew ponds, silver in trees, nuzzling horses – I know there are people who interpret dreams, but I’m with Mum when she says that a dream is simply your mind going to a party. A dream doesn’t foretell the future, it doesn’t indicate hidden loves or fears. Like clouds that shape themselves into the look of animals prancing or people talking, dreams mean nothing but the pictures they show you.

I don’t know how long I was out for, but when the dream hare gave up with me and I woke up, we were still moving. I was lying on the floor in the back of the van. My head was throbbing and my mouth was dry. I thought about moaning, but I kept quiet. My hands were knotted behind my back, and my ankles were tied. One of the heavies was driving, and Dickens was sitting in the passenger seat. I didn’t move. I opened my eyes for long enough to see what I saw, then closed them and listened.

Dickens was talking crazy, words tumbling out like rocks and stones rattling in a tin box, rambling about how they thought they’d heard the last of him, but they hadn’t, and the next time they heard from him they’d have to rewrite the book, and when they’d finished doing that they’d have to rewrite it again and remake the film, and when they’d done that they’d have to build a fucking statue in his fucking honour. The more he spoke, the crazier he sounded, and the more spit flew at the windscreen. The words he used reminded me of things I remembered from school and the Bible, words like redemption, tribulation, plague and wrath, so by the time I felt the van slowing down and we were pulling into a garage, my mind was curdled with pain and terror. As we jolted towards the pumps, I opened my eyes and lifted my head and moaned. Dickens turned and looked at me. “Fuck me…” he said, and he hit me on the top of my head with an Atlas.

“Ow…” I said.

The heavy stopped the van.

“Ahhh…” I said.

“What?” said Dickens.

“Naaa…”

“What the fuck’s your problem? Apart from the bleedin’ obvious…”

“Piss…” I said. “Need a piss…”

“Yeah,” said the heavy. “We all need one of those…”

I tried to sit up. “Can I?”

“Piss in your pants, fuckwit,” said Dickens.

“He isn’t pissing in my van,” said the heavy.

“He’ll piss where I say.”

“But not in my fucking van.”

“You wouldn’t have this fucking van if it wasn’t for me.”

“And you wouldn’t have your smoke back if it wasn’t for me. And you can do what you fucking like, but the last thing dead boy’s going to do is piss in my fucking van.”

Dickens looked at the heavy, and the heavy looked at Dickens, and something passed between them. I didn’t see it pass, but I felt it, like electricity.

“OK. Fill up and then take him to the fucking bog.”

The heavy stepped out of the van, walked to the pump and started to fill up. Dickens pulled a penknife out of his pocket, clicked the blade out, started to clean under his fingernails and said, “You know what? I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to something so much.” His head twitched. “Ever. I simply cannot wait.”

“What you talking about?”

“Oh you know, Elliot. The pleasure of pain. The pleasure of pain…” He clicked the knife shut and dropped it into a pocket. “I get goose bumps just thinking about it. It’s a real night-before-Christmas feeling.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh but you will, Elliot, you surely will.”

The heavy finished filling up, banged on the van roof, opened the back doors and grabbed my ankles. He undid the rope, pulled me so I could sit up, and said, “You try anything, even look the wrong fucking way and I’ll break your arms.” He clicked his fingers. “Got it?”

“Got it,” I said, and he reached around me, undid my hands and I stood up. As I did, I heard Spike’s van. I recognized the sound, and it was sounding rough and revving too high. Then I saw it. It was heading towards the pumps, but it was going very fast. Too fast. As it got closer, I saw the driver. His head was lolling against the door, his face was stoned white, a weird grin covered his face, and his shirt was streaked with sick. I knew exactly how he felt. I’d felt exactly what he felt. He was wanting water, but he didn’t know how much. He was hitting the green wall, and it was high and wide and very green. And as an innocent old person jumped out of the way and yelled something I didn’t catch, he sat up for a moment and tried to brake.

“Shit!” said the heavy.

Too late. The van caught a kerb, slewed sideways, bounced back and clipped a waste-paper bin. Dickens appeared. He shouted “What the fuck!” The heavy left me and started running towards the van. The waste-paper bin flew into the air, bounced down, spilt its rubbish and rolled away. The van caught the kerb again, and I heard a bang as one of its tyres punctured. It smashed into a lamp post, spun around, and I saw the driver slam his head on the steering wheel, whiplash back and put his hands to his eyes. Dickens and the heavy were fifty yards away and running, and now I turned. I turned, put my head down and ran.

I headed for a clump of trees and bushes that grew from a little hill beyond the petrol station. I dived into the undergrowth, rolled over and watched as Spike’s van slewed up a grassy bank and came to a steamy halt with its front wheels spinning over a gully. The driver’s door opened, and the driver appeared. He was laughing hysterically, waving at Dickens, shouting stuff I couldn’t hear. A couple of people came running from the shop. I heard a siren. Dickens stopped, turned, looked towards his van and swore. I kept my head down and inched backwards. The heavy had his arms around the other bloke, who was still laughing and yelling. Dickens stood still for a minute, then slowly started to walk towards his van. He tried to look as if he hadn’t noticed the mayhem, or didn’t care. When he reached the van, he climbed into the driver’s seat and slowly pulled away from the pumps. The heavy shouted after him, but Dickens didn’t stop. He stared ahead. His face was calm and clear, and as he pulled away and onto the road, I rolled down the little hill and watched him drive slowly back the way we’d come.

The sirens came closer, and I watched as a police car pulled onto the forecourt. The heavy tried to get away, but a random person stepped out of a car, ran towards him, rugby-tackled him and sent him tumbling into the side of a picnic bench. As he fell, I heard a nasty crack, like a branch snapping. He yelled with pain, grabbed his leg and the random person gave him a kick. He stopped yelling and went very still. The other heavy lay on the floor, now laughing hysterically, rolling backwards and forwards. His howling filled the air. A policeman stood over him, sat on him, handcuffed him and tried to pick him up. At this moment, he threw up again, a great heaving gush of vomit that sprayed in an arc. The policeman jumped sideways, shouted, “Fucking shit!” and tripped over. A moment later a fire engine appeared, flew up the slip road, took the bend at a rip and slewed onto the forecourt. It stopped with a squeal and smoking tyres, and as the firemen jumped out and ran to pull out hoses and crank their equipment, I stood up, walked away and started to stroll down the road.

I didn’t turn to look back at the mayhem. I looked straight ahead. I forced the sound of the sirens from my head. I refused to let anything stop me. I took steady, deliberate steps. My wrists and my ankles were bruised and sore, and my head was throbbing and bloodied, but I ignored the pain. I ignored everything but my steps. And my steps were steady and measured, and free.

After a mile or so, I came to a gate and a stile and a footpath that led through a field, so I left the road and followed my nose. The sun was high, and the shadows were short. I had no idea where I was, but when I reached a place where I could scan the horizon, I saw the clustered houses of a village. Behind me, the road I’d travelled snaked to the east, and to the north the sea shone like a distant eye. Cars glinted, a few high clouds blew, birds sang. I was a stranger here, and I felt it. If someone saw me they would have taken me for a tramp or a ghost, a lost soul at the edge of their sight. I didn’t want to be anyone’s ghost, and I didn’t want anyone to go running for the police. So I found a sheltered place beneath a hedge, and lay down to rest and catch my breath. I was shaking, and I could feel adrenaline racing through my muscles. I closed my eyes and let some peace come down and fold around me, and I dozed for a while. I say a while, but it might have been longer. When I woke up, I heard the sound of chewing and snuffling. Half a dozen heifers were standing over me. I sat up and they scattered. I stood up and they turned tail. I stayed where I was for a few minutes, scanned the horizon and the fields and hedges, and when I saw someone strolling along a lane below me, I ducked down and froze. But whoever it was, he wasn’t interested in me – he was just a farmer, or someone out with his dog. So I started walking again, and within the hour I was on the edge of the village. It was called Wedmore, a quiet place with pretty stone houses, a sleepy air and a dog napping in the middle of the road. A woman with a basket of shopping said, “Good afternoon.”

I asked her the time.

“Half-past three,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said.

I had a few quid in my pocket, so I went to a shop and bought a pie and a drink, and sat down by a bus stop. The sun was hot, and the pie was tasty, and when a bus came along I bought a ticket to Wells and sat at the back and watched the world pass in its safe way. And for a while the trouble of the smoke and Dickens faded away, and I could have been just a quiet man travelling through the country afternoon with a whistle on my lips and the sun at my back.

Wells is a small city with a big cathedral and lots of tourists to get lost with. I wandered the streets for half an hour, found a telephone box, called Taunton police station and asked to speak to Pollock. I heard clicks, four rings of a phone and a voice I didn’t recognize cleared his throat and said, “DI Pollock’s desk.”

“Is he there?”

“No.”

“Know when he’ll be back?”

“No. Who’s this?”

“Never mind,” I said, and I hung up.

I stood in the box for a couple of minutes, stared at the street, and then I called home. Dad answered and said, “Elliot! We’ve been worried. Mother’s had to go to bed. She’s not well.”

“What?” I’d never heard of her going to bed in the middle of the day. “What’s the matter with her?”

“She had a bit of a turn.”

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor thinks she’s been overdoing things. And so do I.”

“Oh God.”

“So he told her to get some rest. She was talking about you being in trouble. Are you in trouble?”

“I was,” I said, “but I’m getting out of it. Can I talk to her?”

“Best not, son. I think she’s asleep. Where are you?”

“Wells.”

“What the hell are you doing there?”

“I had to see some people. But I’m on my way home now…”

“OK. Well, call when you get back.”

“I will,” I said, and after I’d asked Dad to kiss Mum for me, I hung up and went to catch another bus. This took me away from Wells, through Glastonbury and Street towards Taunton. I dozed for a while, and when I woke up we were driving across the Somerset levels. Fields of willow, flocks of lapwings, drying fences and empty ditches. Little cottages beside the rivers, orchards and herds of cows, barking dogs and gasping sheep. Wide skies, flat land, reflecting fields. Even on still days the air carries the threat of wind, and on dry days rain etches its touch on the land.

When I was working for the tree surgeon, we did a job in the garden of a house at a village on the levels called Burrowbridge. The ruins of a church stand on top of a hill there, and a swollen, muddy drain of a river runs past the place where we worked. The river was the reason we were there: the roots of the three trees we worked on were growing into the bank, and the weight of the trees was pulling the bank into the river. It was our job to lop the branches, take the trunks down to stumps, drill the stumps and pour poison into the holes. “That’ll sort the buggers,” said my boss, and he knew what he was talking about.

I wasn’t sure. I didn’t like the idea of killing perfectly good trees, and I especially didn’t like the idea of pouring poison into holes, but the council had said we had to, and if we didn’t someone else would, so there we were with chainsaws in our hands and harnesses around our waists.

It was my job to climb while my boss waited on the ground and shouted instructions. When I reached the top of the first tree, I tied myself off and looked around. I think the looking around was the best thing about that job, and the view I enjoyed from that tree was wide and stretched for miles in every direction. Mirrored plates of water, lines of pollard willow, fields of withy, curls of smoke from chimneys, little groups of sheep grazing. I started sawing, dropping the branches carefully, watching the springy ones in case they snapped back, lowering myself to the next. The boss carried the cuttings to the back of the lorry, piled them high, shouted up that I should move to the right, and laughed when I said I needed a break.

“I’ll give you a fucking break!” he yelled.

He was a good bloke really, and always let me take some logs home for nothing.

As I stepped off my first perch to the one below, I took one last look around and thought that I would be the last person in the world to ever enjoy that view, so I gave myself a couple of minutes. And as I stared down at the river and the whirls and eddies on its surface, I thought that maybe I’d found a secret. Maybe I should treat everything as a last time and everything as a privilege, everything as if I was the only person in the world. I didn’t need to shout about it, but I did need to remember that I was a lucky man, someone who was given a present every day. And I remembered how my boss shouted at me to stop day-dreaming and get on with the job, which is what I did that day in Burrowbridge.

The bus passed through Burrowbridge, down a long straight road and past the site where King Alfred burned the cakes and was scolded by a peasant woman. We slowed down to avoid a pair of stray sheep. They stared up at me, and I stared back, and then they skipped away, leapt a fence and disappeared into a ditch. A couple of minutes later, we stopped to pick up a woman and her dog, and they sat opposite me. The dog had different-coloured eyes. One of them was light blue and the other was brown, and it had yellow teeth. I reached out to pat it, but the woman said, “I wouldn’t do that.”

“OK,” I said, and I sat back and watched as the flat lands rose up to meet the higher ground, and the bus rolled on through villages and little groups of houses, signs for Bed & Breakfast and free-range eggs, broken tractors in fields, and lay-bys where parked cars with steamed-up windows rocked against the afternoon.

When we reached Taunton I got off at a stop by the river bridge, walked up towards the High Street, found a telephone box, called Pollock again, and this time he answered. “What the fuck happened?” I said.

“He was ready for us.”

“He was going to kill me.”

“I’m sorry…”

“Sorry? You’re sorry? Did you hear what I said? He was going to kill me!”

“What can I say?” He sounded like a man who’d been stood against a wall and given a bollocking.

“Have you been given a bollocking?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” I said, and I said it again. “Good.”

“Elliot…”

“He chucked me in the back of a van like a bag of spuds. They had knives. The man’s a fucking psycho!”

“Tell me about it.”

“I just did. And I want to know…”

“What?”

“Why all this fucking madness over a few bags of smoke? I’m tired of it. Cos that’s all it is. A few bags of smoke. Why can’t he let it go?”

“I told you. He’s into all sorts, and he needs to make an example of you and your mate. You’re a warning to other people, Elliot.”

“That makes a lot of sense.”

“So where are you now?”

“Here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Taunton.”

“You gave Dickens the slip?”

“Yes. Somewhere on the road to Bristol…” and I started to tell him what had happened.

“I know,” he said. “We got the van and his heavies, but no sign of him.”

“Of course not. I saw him leave.”

“We found the van in Bridgwater.”

“So what? You want a fucking medal?”

“Look, Elliot.”

“Look what?”

“We’ll get him.”

“You’d better. He’s a scary bastard, and he knows where I live.”

“We’ve got people at his house.”

“But he’s not going to go back there, is he?”

“I doubt it.”

“So you got any other leads?”

“One or two.”

“He’s going to be after me.”

“I know. You want someone to come and meet you? Give you a bit of protection?”

I laughed. “Protection? After what happened this morning? I don’t think so. From now on, I’m going to look after myself.”

“That’s not a good idea, Elliot.”’

“And you’ve got a better one?” I said, and before he could say anything else I hung up, left the telephone box and spat on the pavement.

I was angry now, angry and fierce, like a fish with a hook in its eye. A bush on fire. The bird with a vole in its beak. I walked fast, head down, mad as hell. I crossed roads without looking, barged past old women with shopping trolleys, kicked at stones I saw in the gutter. Panic, fear, trouble – they’d gone. Rage was my brother now, and I carried him with me to the hospital. When I passed a pub, I stopped for a moment and stared at the door, smelt the stale beer and fags, and thought about having a drink. I don’t like whisky, but I thought that whisky would be a good thing to have, something to play with my fury and push it into the open. Fire in a glass. Burn me. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, stopped, stared at the three staring faces that turned to look at me and went to the bar.

The barman was fat, bald and sweaty. He looked at me, licked his lips and said, “Yes?”

I looked at the pumps. “Half of bitter,” I said, “and a Bells.”

“Double?”

“Why not.”

He pulled the beer, slammed it on a mat, turned to the optics, drew the whisky, slammed it next to the beer, and I fingered the cash into his hand. While he fetched my change, I took a slug of the beer, then went to sit at a table in the corner.

It was a grim pub. Sticky carpets, sticky tables, full ashtrays, a broken juke box and an old dog lying by the bar. I finished the beer and took a sip of the whisky, and as the drink hit the back of my throat, I gagged. Pollock’s words came back to me, the ones about looking after myself not being a good idea. And as I took another sip and my throat got used to the burn, I sat back and thought that he was as wrong as he could be. All I could be was myself, the man who took his mother’s gift and made it his own, the man who found a hung man creaking from a tree, the man who lived in a caravan and dreamt of hares, who watched a man take a pitchfork in his thigh and walk away. Someone with a friend and a girlfriend, a sister, a mother and a father, and a job.

I was wrong about the whisky. It didn’t push my fury into the open. It took it to one side, stroked its cheek, whispered in its ear and told it to be quiet. It sang a little tune to it, the sort of thing you’d hear on the classical radio, and then it went quiet for a moment. And when I drained the last of it, held it in my mouth and let it swill, I think I tasted the sea, mist, salt and tears. And as I stood up and said goodbye to the barman and left the pub, I felt something like relief, or release.

The hospital was ten minutes down the road, but I did it in twenty. Slow, steady, letting the whisky drift, the anger fade, the thoughts dim. And when I got to the hospital, a nurse met me outside the ward. Something had happened to Sam. She didn’t understand how, but it had happened anyway. She sat me down in a corridor and said, “She came out of her coma this morning.”

“She’s awake?”

“Yes.”

“And how is she?”

“It’s difficult to say. We’ll know more in a few more hours.”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course. She’s been asking for you.”

So I followed the nurse and sat by Sam’s bed and held her hand. She was asleep and cradling her teddy bear, but after half an hour she stirred and moved her head and opened her eyes. When she saw me, she stared at me as if she didn’t know who I was or where I’d come from, but then recognition spread across her face and she said, “Elliot?”

“Hi,” I said.

“I’m in hospital.”

“I know you are.”

“I’ve been asleep.”

“I know. For a couple of days. I came to see you. And your mum and dad were here too. The nurse made me talk to you…”

“What did you say?”

“A load of bollocks.”

She smiled and said, “I had a long dream.”

“What was it about?”

“Dogs.”

“Dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Was it a nice dream?”

“Yes,” she said. “It made me feel better.”

“What happened with the dogs?”

“They were my friends. They fed me biscuits and showed me how to dance a dog dance.”

I squeezed her hand. “You’re going to get better and better all the time.”

“I know,” she said, and we talked until she fell asleep again – the bakery in Ashbrittle, whether dogs were better than cats, our favourite films, our favourite colours, our favourite ways of spending a Sunday afternoon. When I left, I took a bus to Wellington, called Dad and asked him to pick me up from outside the town hall. I drank a quick pint in a pub and, as I sat and the evening came down, the day caught up with me and left me staring blankly at a wall. There was nothing else I could do, nothing but watch and wait and lose myself in the beer and the chatter of the people who had nothing to talk about but easy hours.