Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (6 page)

“I don’t remember.”

“Try to.”

“I can’t.”

“Try!” The smile was gone now. He leant forwards and Brown leant forwards and I didn’t feel like drinking my coffee.

“I think he was with a man in a suit.”

“A man in a suit? Anything else?”

“He was bald.”

“A bald man in a suit…”

“Yes. He was small…”

“A small bald man in a suit.”

“Yes.”

“Well that narrows it down. What were they talking about?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”

“Anyone else with them?”

“No,” I said, and I slumped forwards until my head was touching the table.

“OK. OK.”

“I’m tired.”

“Of course you are. Maybe we’ll let you go home and get some sleep, Elliot, but we’ll need to speak to you again,” and now they stood up, and Pollock went to the door while Brown said something into the tape recorder and I stood up and felt my legs wobble like fuck in a breeze. “Thanks,” I said.

“No, thank you,” said Pollock, and now the smile was back and he reached out and touched me on the shoulder. “Next time we see you, try and remember everything. OK?”

“OK,” I said, and Brown opened the door and they showed me to the front desk. “We’ll get someone to drive you home,” said Pollock. “Wait over there,” and he pointed to a chair. I sat down. I did as I was told. I waited. And as I waited, I dozed. Five minutes? Ten minutes? Who knows how many minutes? Then I felt someone shaking my shoulder.

“Mr Jackson?”

I sat up. A policewoman was looking down at me.

“Yes.”

“I’m your lift.”

“Oh. Thanks,” I said, and I followed her out of the station.

“Over here,” she said, and as we crossed the car park, I stopped as a white car passed in front of us. It slowed, parked in a corner, and a moment later two men got out. The driver was in uniform, the passenger was not. The driver took his hat off. The passenger wasn’t wearing a hat. The driver had brown hair. The passenger was bald, completely bald, and had blue eyes and thin lips. He looked comfortable in the car park, but he wasn’t smiling. If he could have smoked from the top of his head he would have. His face was a picture of fury, as if a storm was raging beneath his skin and in his mouth and behind his eyes and ringing in his ears. He had a policeman’s badge clipped to the top pocket of his suit jacket, and as he walked to the station someone in a uniform said, “Morning, sir,” to him. He growled something, shook his head and looked at me. We snagged for a moment. His pale eyes narrowed, and I saw demons in them, real demons with their own red eyes and twitching tails and snorting nostrils, and I heard them flail and yell. The mad twitch flicked the corner of his mouth, another twitch caught his arms, and then the brown-haired man opened the door for him, and he was gone.

On the way back to the farm, I felt the first twang of panic, like I had strings in my stomach and something was playing a bad tune on them – a tune that made no sense or music, a frightening tune that would have dogs running for cover. For a second I thought about telling the driver to turn around and take me back to the station, but I stopped myself. She was a happy woman, proud of her uniform and her car and her work, and all she wanted to do was talk about the weather. All I wanted to do was sit in silence and think about what I could do. The bald man’s face, the way his lips twitched and his fingers fidgeted, and the threat in his eyes. I didn’t know if he knew who I was or why I was there or what I knew, but I thought his demons would tell him. They knew. They had all the knowledge he needed, and he would listen to them.

“When’s the weather going to break?”

I shook my head.

“It must be bad for you farmers.”

I nodded.

“How’s the hosepipe ban affect you?”

I shrugged. “It’s difficult.”

“I bet it is.”

When we got to Stawley I asked her to drop me at the bottom of the track and I walked the rest of the way to the farm. I walked slowly, picking my way carefully over the stones and ruts, and when I got back I found Mr Evans in the hay barn. He climbed down from the bales, slapped his hands together and said, “Sorry I didn’t believe you lad. That must have been a shock.”

“It’s OK,” I said.

“What did the police say?”

“They asked me questions. Too many questions. They didn’t stop. Gave me a headache.”

“They know who it was?”

“I think so.”

“Or who did it?”

I shrugged. “You been down there?” I nodded towards the woods and the river valley.

“They told me to keep away for a couple of days. I think they’ve got more investigating to do.”

“I suppose they have.”

“You look like you need some sleep.”

“I do.”

“Get all you need. I’ll do the milking later.”

“Thanks.”

“You need anything? Tea bags? A sandwich?”

I shook my head. “I think I’ve got everything,” I said, and I went to the caravan. I stood in the doorway and felt the heat, poured myself a glass of water, drank, lay down, closed my eyes and tried to sleep. I don’t know how long I waited for it to come, but when it did I think I slept long and hard, and when I woke up I’d been out for six hours. When I opened my eyes I had one of those moments when you’re disconnected from life, surroundings, feelings, memories and thought. Everything came back in a flash, and I sat up with a jolt. And the first thing I thought of was the bald man with the pale eyes, the policeman who’d come to look at the hoop house and the smoke. The policeman who knew the hanged man and looked straight ahead, neither left nor right. The one with the twitchy mouth and the slow way of talking.

This was getting too mad. Too mad by about a million times. Steal a plant from a hippy’s window sill and you might get a spanking, steal hundreds of plants from a bent policeman and a bent policeman’s friends who’ll hang someone they think has fucked them over and you’ll get a spanking, a kicking, a hammering and then you’ll be executed. It was simple.

I washed. I changed my clothes. I went to see Mr Evans. He was letting the last of the cows out of the parlour. “Did you sleep?”

“Yes thanks.”

“Feel better?”

“A bit.” I grabbed a broom and started to wash the floor.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said.

“It’s OK. I need to do something,” and as I brushed, the work lifted my mood. I felt the dread and panic drift away for a few moments and park itself away from my mind. The relief was sweet, like someone had put cool towels on me. But the moments passed and I was back. The world seemed closer to me than it had ever been, tighter and black. I finished sweeping, walked with Mr Evans and the herd down to the pasture, and after we’d seen them safe, I got on the bike and rode out to look for Spike.

I stopped at The Globe, but no one had seen him. I tried to make a quick exit, but the word was out and people wanted to hear about the hanging man. They wanted me to tell them what I’d seen, how his face had looked, was his neck broken, was he blindfolded, were his hands tied? The rumours were wild; someone said he’d been a heroin smuggler from Bristol, someone else had heard he was a London gangster who owed his boss a million pounds. The landlady said it didn’t matter who he was, the world was well rid of people like him, and it was a shame that people like me got caught up in things like that. “Here,” she said, and she poured me a glass of cider. “On the house, Elliot. You get that down and put all this nastiness behind you.”

So I stayed in the pub for half an hour, sipped my drink and listened to the rumours expand. By the time I left, the hanging man had been sacrificed to a blood god by a family of devil worshippers who lived in the woods. They’d been seen dancing naked around a fire, they’d been stealing sheep for months, they chanted songs in a language no one understood, everyone agreed that murder had been coming. As I left, someone suggested the regulars should pile into a Land Rover and hunt these bastards to the ground and dish out the sort of treatment they’d dished out to the hanging man. “String ’em up,” said a farmer from Kittisford, and his wife agreed.

It was getting dark as I climbed onto the bike and rode away from the pub. The drink had calmed me, smoothed the knots and ties, and as I headed towards Appley Cross and the turning to Spike’s place, I knew what I was going to tell him. I was going to sit him down in his kitchen. I was going to put my panic in a box and be steady and reasoned. I was going to tell him to clear the smoke out of his garage, dump it, take a few weeks off in a place where no one knew him. Forget it had ever existed. Explain what was likely to happen to him if he didn’t. Explain what was definitely going to happen to him if he didn’t. And if he didn’t listen, then I’d describe the look on the hanged man’s face. Easy.

He was sitting in his front room, drinking beer and smoking a spliff. He had the look of someone who’d been smoking for days. His eyes were watery, and his lips cracked, and a sick haze hung in the room.

“Yeah…” he said when he saw me.

“Spike…”

“Yeah. What’s happening?”

“Don’t you know?”

He shrugged. “No. You going to tell me?”

“Where have you been?”

“Here. I’ve been relaxing.”

“You seen anyone?”

“Not a soul.”

“So you don’t know about the guy in the woods?”

“What guy in the woods?”

“Shit, Spike. I found that bloke we saw up at the hoop house. He was dead. Someone hung him from a fucking tree.”

“Someone what?”

“Someone killed him, Spike. He was murdered.”

He dropped the spliff. “He was what?”

“Murdered, Spike.”

“You’re kidding. You’re fucking kidding…”

“I went to check the cows last night. Saw torches in the woods. There was screaming. I waited for them to go, and when they did I found him.”

He bent down and picked the spliff up, blew on the lit end and took a drag. “Shit.”

“Yes,” I said, “It is. He was growing a load of smoke for someone, and now he’s dead because you stole it…”

He took a long draw on the spliff, blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “You sure about that? You sure someone would kill him? Kill him for a few plants?”

“A few plants? It’s more than that. And this is probably about more than plants. That’s what I think, anyway.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, Spike. I do.”

“That’s a lot of shit to lay on me, El.”

“You laid it on yourself. You went out, took your stupid head with you and did what you always do.”

“Right…”

“Right? Is that all you can say?”

“No…”

“I told you, didn’t I? What did I tell you?”

He shrugged.

“When you said your ship had come in?”

“Dunno…”

“HMS Fuck-Up?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

He yawned and closed his eyes.

“You can’t avoid it, Spike. You have to face it.”

He shook his head.

“For the first time in your life, you have to face the consequences.”

He closed his eyes.

“Spike?”

Nothing.

“Hello?”

His head dropped to one side.

I looked at him. He was my friend. He was my oldest friend, the friend I’d been through things with. Small things, big things, things with spikes and things with feathers, things weighed down with lead, things that drowned in deep ponds. We’d climbed trees, fished rivers, swum lakes, chased girls, learnt to drink together, removed engines from old cars and put them back again. But now I didn’t know what to do. Whack him over the head, lock him in a shed, take the smoke myself and dump it in the river? That was the only thing I could think of doing, so I went to the kitchen and looked for something heavy.

The place was a mess. Dirty plates and saucepans filled the sink, half-eaten cans of beans and a spilt packet of cereal cluttered the table. Empty cans and bottles littered the floor, a smell of sour milk filled the place. A torn poster of somewhere tropical hung on the wall. I opened a cupboard and a broom fell out and smacked me in the face. I pushed the broom back in, closed the cupboard and went to the back door. I stepped outside and stood in Spike’s yard, looked around and found a spade. I carried it inside. It was heavy and crusted with earth. I went to the living room. Spike had fallen asleep. The spliff had dropped out of his hand and was smouldering in the ashtray. I stubbed it out. I looked at his head. I looked at the spade. It could do a lot of damage. It was impossible to predict how much damage. I could just wake him up. I could give him a bruise and a headache. I could leave him with a fractured skull. Or I could kill him. So many options and so little time, and so many mistakes that I could or could not make.

Three hours later I lay on my bed in the caravan. The night was close and heavy, and I lay in a pool of sweat and filth. I needed a bath, but I didn’t have the strength. I’d tried to read a book, but it was impossible to concentrate. The words wouldn’t keep still on the page, and the story made no sense, so I turned on the radio and listened to a woman talk about a holiday she’d spent in Italy. I thought I’d like to go to Italy. I’d like to see the beautiful buildings and drink the cold beer and learn about the way Romans lived. To have a peaceful week with happy people who smiled at simple things and ate good food. To sit at a pavement café and drink a glass of beer and watch the world slip by. Peace in a crowd. Scooters and women with brown legs. Olives. Tomatoes. Not havoc in noise, or the constant feeling of threat around the corner or over the ridge of a shadowed hill.

It was good to have the burble of a stranger’s voice in the dark. Comforting. Comfort is too easy to take for granted. Comfort is important. The woman was talking about Rome, and how the ancient buildings weep with blood and sorrow. Sometimes, she said, you can even hear them laugh, but mostly they scream. And when you walk the old pavements, the memories of the buried bones can amplify your own grief or pleasure or whatever emotion you might be experiencing. Yes, I thought, I understand that.

When the programme about Italy finished, it was midnight, and the news came on. I leant out of bed, turned the radio off, listened to the rustling silence and peeped through the curtains at the farmyard. Everything was still. Except for the shadows of moonlit branches in the breeze, nothing moved. And when I looked away from the shadows I could have been looking at a picture from a story book. Elves could have been hiding in the yard, plotting cruel deeds and bad tricks. Or a slavering dog could have been sitting behind the farmhouse wall, its tongue lolling and its head full of the idea of meat. It was the sort of night when anything could have been out there, but nothing was. I lay back down and closed my eyes.

I’d stood over Spike with the spade in my hand. I’d looked at the flat steel blade and I’d looked at his head. I have never been a violent man. I have never raised my fist in anger and never hit another person. But for a second I didn’t see any way out. Fright was confusing me, I saw that, but what else could I do? And then I thought I’d been infected. Infected by Spike’s disease. Lost in Spike’s madness. You could steal the smoke, I could find a hung man, he could fall asleep, I could kill him, I could try and disappear. Stupid Elliot. Stupid, stupid Elliot. Spend the rest of your life in regret? Or stand up to panic, tell it to get lost, sort yourself, move on? Wise boy. Good, wise boy. Almost. I took a deep breath, lowered the spade and put it back where I’d found it, then went inside and put my mouth to his ear, whispered, “Get rid of the smoke, Spike,” and left him where he was. There was no point trying to argue with him or reason with him, and as I rode back to the farm I rode slowly and carefully, as if the road was glass and I was a skater.

It was Saturday night. The hippy girls had asked me back to theirs for a drink. When I reached Appley crossroads I had a choice – right and home or straight on to Ashbrittle. I went straight on, and ten minutes later I was standing outside their cottage, knocking on the door.

Sam answered. She was holding a bottle of cider and smiled such a wide smile when she saw me. “If it isn’t Elliot!” she said. “Come in!” and she led me inside. “Cider?”

“Yes please.”

“Won’t be a sec,” she said, and we went through to the kitchen.

I sat at a plain wooden table. There were flower-filled jam jars on the window sill, and empty bottles with arrangements of leaves. Pretty pictures of the seaside hung on the wall, and the smell of baking filled the air. Now my fear was swept away and overwhelmed with a feeling of ease. Life could be like this. It didn’t have to twist so madly. Quiet. Relaxed times. Slow motions. The room felt like a sanctuary, and after the days I’d had, I felt as though I was being washed and looked after. Sam passed me a cider, we chinked bottles and she sat opposite me.

“So what you been up to?” Her voice was light and careful, as though it was stepping on slippery stones across a river.

I shook my head. “It’s been hell.”

“Hell? What’s happened?” She leant forwards and gently touched my knee. I felt her fingers. They were soft, like a cat’s paw.

I ran my hands through my hair. I really needed a bath. “Well…” I said, but I couldn’t go on.

“Tell me. Please. I’m a good listener…”

I looked at her. I believed her. I believed her, but I wondered. I didn’t want to get her involved, but maybe she already was. I didn’t know. Who could I trust? Could I trust anyone? I didn’t know. Maybe I was just paranoid. Maybe I was as stupid as Spike. Oh fuck it, I thought, and I said, “I found a body hanging in the woods…”

“Oh God, it was you who found him?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus…”

“It was a nightmare.”

“I’ll bet. Mind you, so was he.”

“You knew him?”

“Not very well, but we saw him a couple of times up the pub.”

“What was his name?”

“Fred.”

“Fred?”

“Though some people called him Ox.”

“Ox?”

“Yes.”

“Know anything else about him?”

“Only that he was from Bristol. He came down in the spring, moved into a farm under Heniton Hill. I think it was his brother’s place, though I’m not sure. I didn’t take much notice. All I know is it was a bit heavy.”

“Heavy?”

“You can’t be growing that amount of smoke without it being heavy.”

“I suppose not. You know what happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know… with the smoke…”

“I just heard some idiot nicked it.” She put her cider to her lips and sipped. “I wouldn’t like to be in their shoes. OK, so it wasn’t much, but people like that like to make examples of people. It’s the principle. I suppose they thought Fred had nicked it himself.”

“They?”

“Whoever he was growing it for.”

“And who are they?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to think about it. Do you?”

“Not really.”

“Good.”

“But it’s hard. I keep seeing his body…”

“That must be awful.”

“It is.”

“And when the police took me to the station, they talked to me like I had something to do with it.”

“That’s the police for you.”

“Like it was my fault the man was dead,” and then for a moment I thought about telling her. Telling her about Spike and telling her about the bald man and his eyes and how I couldn’t get the feeling of panic out of my bones. My thumping heart, my sweating skin, my dry mouth. I took a swig of cider, swilled it around and swallowed.

“Try and think about something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. What do you like?”

“What do I like?”

“What do you do when you’re not working?”

I thought. I thought carefully. “I read books sometimes.”

“So what are you reading at the moment?”

“It’s a bird book.”

“You like birds?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. I saw three buzzards the other day, all circling around each other…”

“That’ll be the parents teaching a chick,” I said, and for the next twenty minutes we talked about the birds we’d seen and how the drought had been so tough for them, but maybe next year would be different. God, we hoped so. And I told her stories I heard about buzzards, about how they carried the souls of dead farmers to a field in the sky, and sowed their souls in furrows of cloud. About how the way they held their wings in their soaring could be interpreted by people who knew the secret signs.

“Do you know the secret signs?” she said.

“I might do.”

“Tell me.”

“I said I might do.”

“You do, don’t you?”

“One or two…”

“Then tell me one.”

“If two buzzards circle in opposite directions, there’ll be a fire in the parish. That’s one of the signs. And you know what?”

“What?”

“It’s true,” I said, and she said, “I’m sure it is,” and I said, “Sometimes I think there are things going on that we know absolutely nothing about,” and she said, “I know there are,” and as we talked I felt a lightness come down and finger itself into my head and take away some of the madness. It pushed this madness into a basket of its own making, covered it with a cloth and let it lie in the dark, and I sat back and listened to Sam. She had a quiet, easy way of talking, and when she started telling me stories about how she’d ended up in Ashbrittle, a long route of working in one place and then another, of living in one place and then another, of drifting and finding, losing and stopping, starting and settling, I lost myself in her voice and her face.

She’d been born in Portsmouth. Her father had been in the navy, and she’d spent half her childhood moving around the country. “Plymouth, Chatham, back to Portsmouth, Faslane. When I left school I was going to be a nurse. I trained for a couple of years, but then I gave it up.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. I think I just got bored. And then other things happened. I went on holiday to Greece, spent most of the time drinking in a bar or lazing on the beach in the sun. I had a brilliant time. It was the first time I’d been on holiday on my own, and I just loved the place, the people, the whole Mediterranean thing. A couple of days before I was due to fly back, the owner of the bar asked me if I wanted a job. I didn’t have to think twice. The thought of going back to a dingy bedsit in Swindon, the wards, the boring lectures, the rain, sick people… you get the idea.”

“Oh yes.”

“I stayed in Greece for a couple of years, met some brilliant people, but then the bar changed hands and I didn’t have a job any more. When I got back, I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do next. I found a job in a bar in Bristol, but the place was a dive. One day, a friend told me she was going to visit some mates in this place in Somerset; turned out to be Ashbrittle. I stayed a couple of days, the couple of days turned into a week, the week into a month. That was last year.”

“I remember the first time I noticed you.”

“When was that?”

“Last autumn. You cycled past our place.”

“And what did you think?”

“I thought… I thought you looked very happy. Happy and free.”

She laughed. “I think I am. At least as happy and free as I can be.”

Her voice and her laugh and her face took me and held me quietly, and I was getting lost in cider and her eyes. I’d never seen eyes like them, not as brown and deep and knowing, as if they understood the things I said before I said them. They were old eyes, but they were fresh and instinctive, maybe like a cat’s eyes. Or a hawk’s. Waiting. Patient. Wanting. And I was thinking about telling her this, thinking about embarrassing myself and maybe leaning towards her and telling her something that I shouldn’t, when the other girl I’d met at the pub came back with three hippy blokes. They’d been at the Staple Cross pub and had ridden back on bicycles.

Sam said, “You remember Ros?”

“Of course,” I said, and Ros leant forwards and kissed my cheeks. She smelt of apples and fish.

“And these are the three Ds – Dave, Don and Danny,” she said. Hairy blokes with rough hands and watery eyes, they shook my hand and fetched some more cider from the kitchen. We went out and sat on the lawn outside the cottage.

Pump Court was made up of four cottages. They were called Milton’s, Parson’s, Galilee and Venture. The hippies rented them from a naval commander who lived in the Old Parsonage. There was a cobbled path that ran along the front of the houses, and everything – garden, cooking, shopping, cider, bicycles – was shared. When Dave wanted some peanuts, he fetched them from the kitchen in Parson’s even though he lived in Venture, and when Ros needed to use the loo she went to Galilee even though she lived in Milton’s with Sam. There was no running water in the cottages – they used outside taps and chemical toilets, and washed in zinc baths in front of open fires – but they didn’t care about that sort of thing. They cared about what was happening to the world, the way we were pouring shit into the sea and pumping crap into the air. I don’t think they’d worked out how we could make things better in a big way, but they were doing things in their own small way. Ros had written to the local MP and suggested the government give everyone in the country a bicycle, and Danny was working on a plan to supply everyone with free lettuce seeds. “You don’t need a garden,” he said. “All you need is a window box.”

“You’ve got to think,” said Dave.

“Think, plan, do,” said Don.

I couldn’t disagree, and I wanted to say something that made sense to them, but before anyone had the chance to ask me anything I said, “I’ve got to be up at six.”

“Six?” Don said.

“Milking,” I said.

“Oh, right. Yeah…”

“That’s early,” said Danny.

“That’s farming,” I said.

“Sure,” said Ros.

I went to the door, and Sam followed me, and as I was saying goodnight she leant forwards, put her arms around me and hugged me. She smelt of hay, and her body was warm and tight. Tight as a promise, warm as a toy in a child’s hand. “Good night, Elliot,” she said, and as we pulled away she kissed me once on the lips, a quick, light kiss. It felt like a bird had landed on my lips and left dust there. A house martin or a swallow or a swift. Something darty and quick. I said, “You want to see me again?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Good,” I said, and I almost asked her if she was sleeping with Dave, Don or Danny, or Dave and Don, or Danny and Dave, or Don, Dave and Danny, but I didn’t have to. I knew she wasn’t. Even I could see that. It was in her eyes, like a cat holds a bird in its mouth, plain and obvious and quiet, and as I turned and walked to my bike, I left her smiling and standing at the door to Milton’s cottage with her hand waving above her head.

I rode back to the farm, and fifteen minutes later I was lying on my bed in the caravan. I thought about Sam’s voice and the feel of her fingers on my knee, and I thought about how the simplest things can calm terror. I turned onto my side, switched on the radio and listened to some music. It was classical music, sad and slow, and when it was finished someone talked about Russia and how romantic it was to walk in the snow and watch a frozen river as it cracked. I thought about snow and ice. I wished for snow and ice. Then some different music started. This was faster and came from Germany. I tapped my fingers to it, and as I did I heard the sound of something moving underneath the caravan, a rat or a mouse, and the distant bark of a dog. The normal things. The easy things that leave no traces.