Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (19 page)

Spike sent me a postcard. It arrived in the morning of a late August day. He didn’t tell me where he was staying, but the picture was of a Welsh mountain, and the postmark read “Porthmadog”. He wrote:

EL. I TOLD YOU THAT I WOUD COME TO WALES AND HER I AM. BET YOU DIDNT BELIEVE ME BUT I GOT A JOB IN A FOREST AND CUTTING TREES WITH A CHAINSAW. ITS FUCKED. I COME BACK FOR SOME STUFF NEXT MUNTH AND SEE YOU THEN. SPIKE.

I imagined him sitting in a room somewhere, licking the end of a pencil, staring at the back of the card, staring out of the window and then staring at the card again. Wondering if he would ever see Somerset again, or if Wales would be home for the rest of his life. I missed him, missed his stupid laugh and the way his hair stuck up like a mistake. And, if I took myself to one side and had a quiet whisper in my own ear, I missed the idea that he could be round the corner, ready to lead me into trouble or adventure or just a simple mess.

I read the card again. “I come back for some stuff next munth…” But what stuff did he have left? A comb he’d left at his sister’s place? A baccy tin on a shelf somewhere? A hat on a hook at the blackberry farm? I didn’t know. I turned the card over and looked at the picture. There were sheep on the side of the mountain. They looked cold, wet and hungry. How long before Spike decided it would be a good idea to steal them and sell them to a butcher from Birmingham? A couple of weeks? I didn’t want to think about it.

I tucked the card into the corner of the mirror that hung by my bedroom door and went downstairs. Dad and I were going to work in a garden on the road to Staple Cross. He’d decided that I’d done enough sitting on boxes and walls, and it was time for me to start working again. And maybe, if I had any sense about me, I could learn something about gardening and work with him every day. “Maybe,” I said. “That’s what I said,” he said.

So we made some sandwiches, filled a thermos, climbed into the pick-up and drove out of the village, up the lane towards Heniton Hill, past the place where Spike had found the smoke, and along Burrow Lane. The pick-up was in a worse state than ever, and as we drove, the suspension made a noise that sounded like cats fighting a steel bird.

The garden was on a ridge above the place where the mad Professor had lived, and we went to work in a huge shrubbery. I didn’t know what the bushes were called, but they were leafy, wiry and covered in papery flowers. The old dear who owned the place wanted us to weed the bed, clear out some dead wood and trim the edges. Which is what we did.

We’d been working for a couple of hours, whistling and humming and sometimes being quiet when Dad went to his bag, pulled out the thermos, and we sat on a wall to drink a cup of coffee. The air was heavy and close, and as it moved, it grew thick with something we hadn’t felt for months. If this thing could have been a colour, it would have been purple, and if it had been a taste it would have been silver. The noise would have been the moaning chimes of bells sunk beneath the sea, but there was no noise. Not at first, anyway. Not for the first half-hour. But then, like a day dawning in a day that had already dawned, it started.

It was slow to begin with, a dark smudge above the distant western moors. A line like a child might crayon across a wall, fine at first, then smeared down and down towards the floor. It was slow and it was spreading, and then it grew and began to loom, and a whistling breeze blew through the bushes.

Dad nudged me, pointed and said, “Is that rain?”

“No,” I said.

“It is,” he said.

“No way,” I said. “It’s smoke.” But I was wrong.

We’d been working for about ten minutes when the first drops came. At first they were small and fine, blown like seeds against a window. And then, as the sky darkened and the clouds bloomed, a roll of thunder barrelled across the land from the moors.

“Yes!” he said. “It’s bloody rain!” And a minute later the skies opened like a cracked egg, and the world filled with water.

The drops were fat and warm, and I tipped my head back and let them fall on my face. Dad did the same, running his hands through his hair and around the back of his neck and under his chin. And as the rain fell, the land gave off a scent I hadn’t smelt for months, a sweet and generous scent that filled the air. Fresh and flowered and earthy, and full of promise. Another clap of thunder rolled towards us, and as it did, birds began to sing. They sang from the trees and bushes, and they sang from the roof of the house, and the telephone wires that stretched across the garden. They didn’t mind the rain, and nor did we, and although we were soaked to the skin after five minutes, we stayed outside and watched as puddles appeared in the lawn, and little streams of water began to run over the grass, through the shrubbery and into the fields beyond.

The old dear came from the house, stood on the veranda and called for us to come in, but Dad shouted, “We’re enjoying it!”

She laughed, and I laughed, and Dad laughed, and she shook her head and stood and watched as more thunder rolled over from the west, and the rain settled in.

It was still raining when we drove home, and it was still raining when we sat down to eat our tea, and when it was time to visit Sam, it was still raining. I took the road slowly, and avoided the worst of the floods that had appeared around the blocked storm drains. When I arrived at the hospital, there was a vaguely crazed atmosphere in the air, as if everyone had been told good news and they had to go for a large drink. Some nurses were gathered around the entrance, smoking cigarettes and laughing, and some patients were at the windows, pointing and staring as the gutters overflowed and the clouds flew by.

Sam was one of those patients. She was sitting on the window sill as the rain poured down the glass, drinking a cup of tea and smiling at the sky. “Amazing!” she said. “I thought it would never happen.”

“I know. Dad and I were working up near Staple Cross. It was so quick. The clouds came in over the moors. It was like the world was ending.”

“It must have been incredible.”

“It was. We got soaked, but we didn’t care.”

“I want to be out in it.”

“You will be,” I said, and I kissed her and she put her arm around my waist, and we stood and watched and listened as a squall whipped around the hospital and chucked the rain like a doll. And when a nurse came and asked her if she’d like shepherd’s pie for tea, she laughed and said she wanted the biggest helping of shepherd’s pie in the hospital, and a bowl of apple crumble with custard. And as I watched her laugh, and the nurse laughed and said something about diets, for the first time in months I felt trouble fade, and the clouds that lowered over Taunton lifted the clouds from my head and folded them into a parcel of smoke and whispers.

Landscapes print themselves on people’s minds. They start slowly and push themselves in gently, and they never stop. They become part of someone, like an arm or hair or an eye or a finger. Remove some people from a landscape, and they hurt as much as if you’d cut off their nose. Take the same people back to their landscape after they’ve been away for a while, and they fall in love and heal themselves of trouble and pain. I worked this out for myself after reading too many copies of the National Geographic magazine and watching too many documentaries on the telly. The landscape could be a Mongolian steppe, a housing estate in Leicester, an Arizona desert, an African jungle, a Cambodian jungle or the skyline of New York – it doesn’t matter where it is, but the place will have the same effect. The bowled hills and river valleys of the border country in the west of England are my landscape, and when I wake up in the morning and look out at the fields and woods and hedges, I know I am looking at the frame of my heart.

On the first real day of autumn, while the wind blew from the west and the trees bent with it, the nurses took the last bandages off Sam’s head. She had a scar on her brow, but they said it would heal, and by the end of the year she’d be as good as new. “She’s a lucky woman,” a doctor said to me. “It could have been far worse.”

“It was bad enough,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said.

She was discharged a couple of days later. I sat with her in the back of the hospital car and held her hand, and she smiled all the way back to Ashbrittle. When we reached the top of the hill, she asked the driver to stop and let us out, and we walked the rest of the way.

There was drizzle in the air, a wish of rain that drifted and spun around us, and filmed on our faces. We strolled across the village green and through the churchyard, and stopped at the yew. We stepped into its divided trunks, and stood there and put our arms around each other. The power was gentle and strong, and as we held each other, I felt it in my legs like little shocks of electricity. I stood still, and she trembled. “Feel it?” I said, and she nodded. “Yes,” she whispered, “I think I do,” and the tree quivered over us and fed us with its memories, its echoes and all the things it had seen.

I thought about telling her some of the old stories about the tree, of the singing children and their ribbons, of the slaughtered men and the laughing gods. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “When you were really ill, Mum taught me a charm. She thought it might help you get better.”

“What was it?”

“I had to bury a piece of apple in front of your house.”

“Why?”

“Because she told me to.”

“And did you?”

“Of course I did.” I said. “I always do as she says.”

We walked on around the corner from the churchyard and stood in front of Pump Court. I pointed at the little triangle of ground. “I buried it there.”

She stared at the spot and took my arm. “Thank you, Elliot.” she said. “Thank you for your charm.”

“I wanted to do more, but I’m not a doctor.”

“You did all you could.”

She went to the front door of her cottage, and I followed her inside. The others were out, and as we sat in the kitchen with a cup of tea and some biscuits, she said, “So what are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Of course.”

“Go on then.”

“You want to go upstairs?”

“Yes,” I said, and that’s what we did.

Her room was at the front of the house, with a sloping ceiling, crooked pictures on the walls and a high brass bed. There were old rugs on the floor, and the smell of something sweet in the air. She kicked her shoes off, lay on the bed, patted the covers and said, “Come on.” And as I lay down beside her, she took a book from the bedside table and passed it to me. I opened it and looked at the first page. It was called
Isabel’s Skin
.

“Some of it’s set in Ashbrittle,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Yeah. It’s about that mad scientist who kidnapped a woman and did crazy stuff to her skin.”

“Someone told me there was a book about that.” I turned the pages. They smelt of damp, and as I turned them they sounded like leaves cracking under dry shoes. “His name was Professor Hunt.”

“That’s the one,” she said. “Some of it reminds me of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Read it. You’ll see.” She reached over and touched the page I was looking at. “You could read to me. If you want.”

“Read to you?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“If you want.”

I didn’t know if I could, but I said, “OK,” and she folded her arms, rested her head back and closed her eyes.

“Which bit?”

“Any,” she said, her eyes still closed.

“OK. Shall I start at the beginning?”

“Good plan,” she said, so I did.

I liked the feeling behind the words I read. They were about losing something precious and finding it again, and I wanted to tell her that they were the things I felt. The emotion and the loss, the finding and the love. One of the sentences read: “I was not lost when I found you, but I had no idea where I was.” I wanted to say these words to her again, wanted to watch her as she listened, but she was asleep. So I put the book back on the table beside the bed, leant over her face and kissed the top of her head.

I lay back and I thought. I suppose I could have thought that I used to have a job working for a dairy farmer but managed to screw it up by refusing to tell my best friend to go fuck himself. Or I could have thought that birds are fat raindrops and pigs are the pink shadows of our souls, let loose in a world of trouble we have wished upon ourselves. Or I could have thought that next week I would pack a bag and walk away from Ashbrittle, and find a job in a place where no one knew me and the sun shone on people who failed. But I didn’t. I kissed Sam’s head again, touched the scar on her head and said, “Hello.” She didn’t wake up.

I sat up and looked outside. Beyond the bedroom window, the sun was bleeding though the clouds, and a blackbird was singing from a tree. He had the sweetest song, flutes in honey and water, angels in their houses, the promise of a warm evening. I looked beyond him, over the hedges and trees, and down the lane towards the village green. The world was full and ripe, a huge apple on a branch. I saw my dad come from our house. He stood in front of the pick-up and shook his head. There was something wrong with the carburettor, and he was going to try and fix it. Then I saw a dog, a scruffy thing that liked to chase leaves. It was called Rusty and only had one eye. It lived with some people who owned a cottage on the far side of the green. It barked at a pigeon, then lay down in the middle of the road. Another pigeon flew past, and a crow. A pigeon followed by a crow meant something, and it meant something important, but I couldn’t remember what. So I let the moment pass, and turned over and lay back, and let the sound of Sam’s dozing snuffles wash through the watery afternoon.