Landed (22 page)

Owen hears a squeaking noise behind him, turns. Holly has found a wheelbarrow and is tottering towards him. Inside sits the dog, obedient to Holly's demands but tense, ready to leap if the barrow tilts to one side. Holly grins. Owen discovers a bottle full of old engine oil and lubricates the barrow's wheel. Its tyre is solid rubber.

 

Josh stands, looking back the way they came.

‘Come along,' Owen says. ‘What is it?'

‘There's someone following us.'

Owen stops. ‘You sure?' Alert. ‘I don't see anything.'

Josh frowns, shakes his head. ‘Someone. Dunno.' He turns and trots to catch up with his father.

 

The wheelbarrow handles present no problem to his hook. How much faster they move now, Owen pushing the wheelbarrow, Holly in a nest of outer garments, leaning against his rucksack, facing forward. ‘I'm
not
an African princess,' she said just now, and he had to use all his powers of persuasion to stop her climbing out. They pass into conifers, through an aromatic frontier of pine, sweet, resinous, and on into a dark and dank plantation. There is just room to walk one behind the other – Josh leading, Owen pushing Holly in the barrow, the dog at their back – between straight rows of identical trees, on a floor of pine needles. Nothing else grows. An earthy, thick odour. They shiver here, goose pimples on their bare arms. The lower branches have no green needles, up as high as Owen's head, as if each tree, growing straight as a rocket for the sun, is leaving itself behind.

They emerge from the cool perpendicular architecture of the fir plantations back into a still warmer forenoon. A tiny creature flees from wheel and tread. A vole? A shrew? There
are berries in a patch of heather. Bilberries. They stop to eat, crouch and pluck and cram them in their mouths. Sweet. Three months early. Stained fingers, lips.

Young ash trees, trunks smooth and slender, spry young trees amongst relatives of varying age, on some the bark dry and cracked along varicose ridges, on others it is gnarled, thrombotic.

 

They come into a sudden glade, a magic garden of dark green, short-cropped grass. Rabbit droppings betray the gardeners. The dog goes crazy, zigzagging after scented trails. Holly climbs out of the wheelbarrow, steps onto this perfect lawn the size of a large room, amazing here in the depths of this arboreal wilderness.

The dark shape on the ground on the far side of the clearing is a log, maybe. Or the stump of a tree. A mound of earth. A sound makes Owen stop and look up: a pigeon has taken off from a high branch, wings clapping, as if applauding its own successful attempt at flight.

Josh has walked on, towards the mound of soil, or dead wood, or whatever it is. ‘Daddy,' he says without turning around, continuing forward across the short grass, though more slowly now. ‘Daddy.' The dog, Owen realises, is not here. Chasing rabbits. He wishes it was. Holly holds his hand. They walk across the clearing and stand beside Josh, looking down on the man's body, which lies on its side, curled up, facing away from them.

Owen is glad they cannot see the face, tilted to the ground. Grey hair. Filthy black coat, cracked shoes. A heavily built man. A heavy body. It looks like it might sink into the ground, sink into its own self-creating grave. The corpse gives off an odour. Of unwashed clothes, stale sweat. Ammonia, tobacco. Bitter,
not the sweet stench of decomposition he would have expected. Confused, Owen concentrates on the bulk of the torso. Even as he notices a slight rising and falling, Josh says, ‘He's alive,' and walks around to look at the man's face. In doing so he blocks the sun, and perhaps this is enough to wake the man, for he rolls over onto his back and with his eyes closed he yawns and stretches his arms out wide. Owen and Holly on one side and Josh on the other skitter backwards out of reach.

A large head. Bulbous, knobbly nose. Skin dirty, florid here and there, livid patches across his cheeks yet an odd yellow paleness too. A man with a fluctuating heart. With his bloated torso he looks like he is beached upon the grass. Perhaps he simply cannot get up off the ground of his own free will, that is why he is here. Yawning again, he lifts a grimy hand and wipes it down over his face, slowly, from forehead to chin, squeezing his neck, then taking a deep breath and sighing as if to say to himself, Here we go again.

‘Hello,' Owen says.

The man opens his eyes. They are blue, paler than the sky. He turns his massive head to look at Owen and Holly, then at Josh, a silhouette against the sun. His eyes are wide open, terrified, then he squeezes them shut and widens his mouth as if about to cry but actually it's so he can make the enormous effort of turning over and pushing himself up off the grass.

They watch, fascinated, the man's slow-motion maneouvre of himself. He raises up his bulk by degrees, pausing between each precise exertion, rationing his energy. He kneels. He tucks one fat leg up. Kicks and pushes up, finally, in the climactic, most strenuous push like a weightlifter, staggering a little before finding his feet and balance.

The man gulps exhausted breaths, wipes his moist brow. Owen watches. He has his arm across Holly's chest as his
grandfather used to do to him, though not to stop her. To shield her.

‘Hello,' Owen says again, that the man might turn to him, which he does.

‘Help me,' the man says. ‘I'm lost. Been wandering this wood don't know how long.'

There's something about the man, Owen senses, that is not dangerous, exactly, but not trustworthy, either. A confidence trickster. ‘We've a compass, like,' Owen tells him. ‘We're heading west.'

‘Been going round in circles. Days. Weeks.'

‘What do you eat?' Josh asks, from behind him.

The man does not turn. He bows his head. Then raises it slowly. He looks both ashamed and pleased with himself, licks his lips. Unable to hide his natural greed. He stares disconcertingly at Holly, then at Owen, then back to the ground. ‘Food?' he says. ‘What is not food? A man'll eat anything. Find the food in the ground. Not a lot'll poison you before your body purges it.'

The man takes deep breaths through his nose. Owen visualises him scrabbling through black damp soil, shovelling it into his mouth, for some root or fungus buried there.

‘Come with us,' Owen says.

The man steals a glance over his shoulder at Josh, looks back at Owen. ‘I will.'

 

It's hard to believe anyone could walk so slowly. They have to keep stopping to let the man catch up, and when he does he stops too, leans against a tree, takes deep slow breaths. The dog drops back to walk behind the man, trying to quicken his pace. He is oblivious. The black coat in the heat of the day, his exertion, cause him to perspire freely. Owen offers him a
drink and the man empties a plastic bottle in one long greedy swallow.

The woods cannot go on forever. ‘Time for you to walk a while,' Owen tells his daughter, lifting the handles of the wheelbarrow so that she can slide out. The man staggers slowly up behind them. ‘In here,' Owen says.

The man needs no second invitation. He stands between the handlebars and lowers himself backwards into the barrow, Owen on one side, Josh on the other, steadying the weight. It's the only way to carry him, his bulk above the wheel, knees drawn up, feet inside the barrow. It means the man is facing Owen and soon engages him in conversation.

‘Good of you,' he says. ‘Take me only as far as a town.'

The man is so much heavier than Holly.

‘A village,' the man says. ‘Vulnerable out in the open.'

‘What to?' Owen asks.

‘I'd go round in circles again.'

The wood doesn't come to an end, exactly, there's no perimeter fence, but it thins out, there are clearings, and then they are on grazing land but clotted about with sparse clumps of small trees.

Josh says, ‘Look,' and they stop and watch a fox walk across the pasture no more than forty yards away. The fox stops, looks back at them watching him or her, turns and continues brisk but unflustered away.

Owen sees a white shape on the grass. After settling the barrow he kneels on one knee, slides his hook under the hood, grasps the stalk and twists until it snaps. He turns the mushroom over, drops it into the palm of his hand. Pale pink gills, the colour of wet plaster; he raises it to his nose, inhales the smell of earth made flesh.

The children do not like the taste of the raw mushrooms
and refuse them, despite their hunger. To save time Owen picks some for the man, who watches with rapt gluttonous attention from the barrow. As Owen pushes him along the man shovels the mushrooms into his mouth, munches them perfunctorily, swallows.

 

They walk through rolling country. The ground is hard, the wheelbarrow jiggles along. Even with the fat man's weight the barrow is wondrously efficient. Owen sweats, though the toil is not too arduous. He keeps up a steady speed. Josh walks in front, their scout, their tracker. He squints up at the sun, looks down at the compass in his hand, alters direction. Holly sometimes drops off the pace and has to trot to catch up, the dog accompanying her.

An undulating landscape of empty fields. Owen assumes that, in common with his grandfather, each farm tenant or labourer knows every hidden dip and sudden gradient of that crust of the earth which he tends, as he drives his tractor across a field hoeing, rolling, spreading muck or seed or fertiliser. No tractor can be seen or even heard today. Silence, except for isolated cries of buzzards. Owen glances up, watches them ride thermals in the sky above. Their presence, strangely, accentuates the absence of other living things.

 

Farmhouses set back from the road, situated at the end of drives, have their entrances sealed by cast-iron gates. The man does not trust even one of these self-protected farms, and when no one answers the bells or buttons they press he refuses to be left at one.

It is a long time since Owen last came out of the city. These gates are protecting the wealthy, from what, or whom? Are the poor already marauding around the countryside? Until they
met the man they'd seen hardly anyone today or the day before, and Owen had this sense that they were walking along unseen: slipping through a gap between yesterday and tomorrow, catching glimpses of both.

Now, walking at this funereal pace, once again they float between atomised, self-isolated homesteads. From one to the right a dog barks at their passing. The sound seems magnified, as if the dog is barking against metal doors. Their own companion ignores this fellow canine, pads silently beside them. When things fall apart, Owen wonders, will their wealth save them? The guard dog's barks fades into the distance.

 

Owen's hook is designed to mimic a hand's dexterity, not to bear weight. The right handle of the wheelbarrow drags on the straps of the hook on Owen's right arm. He feels the harness across his shoulders, the pull on his spine, the imbalance between what his body is being required to do there and the way his good arm is taking the weight on the left side, through wrist, and biceps.

 

They see sheep grazing on a wide hill, a vast flock spread across the green hillside in abundance.

‘I can hear them,' Holly calls forward.

Shaking his head, Josh dismisses her claim. ‘No, you can't.'

‘I could eat some lamb,' the fat man says, his voice so thick with greed Owen can imagine him eating one raw in his hands.

The hill of sheep is like a landscape painting on a huge canvas, so many sheep so motionless, except that as they get nearer Owen becomes aware of a restlessness in the painting. No single sheep is motionless for long but moves imperceptibly forward in the direction in which it happens to be facing, to bend and take another mouthful of grass then raise its head and munch for a minute before edging slightly forward once more.

They are walking towards the slope. Owen hears the sound too, and Josh must have, because he curses his sister under his breath and she says, ‘I
did
hear it.'

It is a pleading. Not one or ten but hundreds, maybe thousands of ewes and lambs bleating. It is a weird cacophony, dissonant and harsh upon the ears, yet in this multitude there seems to be some underlying musical tone trying to rise through the din. Plaintive lament for their sorry lot, these ungrateful animals living as wild as any husbanded beast may be permitted to, but it seems to Owen it is the sound of angels, choirs of angelic ruffed and white-wool surpliced animals singing into the valley, a comic anthem of misery and hope.

Owen understands in this moment why his grandfather hated music. The incessant bleating through each and every one of his days. What he craved was silence.

 

When Mel was breastfeeding her son, Owen remembers, she complained of sore nipples. She brought Josh home from a visit to the health visitor and announced that she was suffering from mastitis. Owen's first reaction was one of bewilderment. The word opened a trapdoor and he was lowered into that summer of his childhood: the smell of lanolin in sheep's wool; of chemically enticing organophosphates in the swilling dip through which they pushed five hundred ewes; the pungent tobacco, kept moist in the tin with a scrap of fruit peel, with which Owen was allowed to roll his grandfather's thick cigarettes. How, in Birmingham's urban sprawl, he wondered, could Mel have caught an infection from a sheep?

 

‘Some of the sheep is asleep,' Josh says, keen to assert the acuity of his eyesight, at least.

Now Owen can see that some lie on their backs or on their
sides, not sleeping, and others stand beside them, bleating like mourners. But others graze, pulling teethfuls of grass, moving some inches, working their way around the fresh carcasses of their brethren, some hearts still beating, and the grieving beasts.