Runt (13 page)

An orange truck. Like the one that Arthur would drive when he wasn’t in his black one. Coming up the mountain pointed at the yard with only me and Arrn in it no flippin Drunkle what would we do what would me and Arrn do.

I shouted Arrn’s name not just in my head this time but with my throat too but he didn’t hear me cos of the noise of the truck so I sat down behind a bale of straw and looked. Arrn had stopped his noises and now his tail was going wag a bit which put a puzzlement on me cos he wouldn’t go wag for Arthur and my heart was going bang and the truck stopped at the gate and the door opened and Rhiannon got out of the truck and my heart then went bang some more, oh yes. She put her hand over the gate and patted Arrn on the head and he wagged even more and faster then she drove the truck through the gate and parked it at the bottom of Straw Hill and she got out again and then went over to close the gate and Arrn followed her wagging and by the time she’d closed the gate and turned round I had climbed down off the straw and was standing in the yard on one of the only clean bits among all the mucksome stuff. Bang went my chest.

And hot so hot I went when she smiled at me. Smiled like the sun smiled on me all warm and Good on my face.

—Bumped into your uncle in town, she said. —Said you were up here on your own so I’ve come to make you some dinner. Told you I would, didn’t I?

One of Them Questions. I just nodded and she sent her smile with her eyes up and down me from my boots to my head still wet from the shower and my eyes were pinned to her face like when you pin some string between the posts at the bottom of a door and hope that your NotDad will trip over it and smash his stupid head in but he sees it and kicks it away and then smacks you round the head, my eyes were pinned to her face like that string was pinned across that door. The shape she made in the bluesky air and the smell she made in my nose and Arrn was looking up at me not her and I looked down at him and he went wag but he looked a little bit worried too and the heat in me had settled in me like hot food does of a cold night-time-ness and Rhiannon fetched a bag from the truck and we walked across the mucksome yard towards the house and she was saying words to me but they just sounded like noises not Proper Words like the sound of water over stones or wind in the treeleaves lovely sounds but not Proper Words. And all I could feel was the hotness inside me and all I could smell was the skin that held Rhiannon in and all I could hear was the No Words Songs coming out of her mouth.

We went into the kitchen which still smelled of my breakfast toastness and I sat in the big old sink-inny chair by the fire which wasn’t lit cos of the blueness outside and Arrn sat by me and we both watched Rhiannon as she stood and took things out of her
bag
. There was boots on her and jeans like mine the colour of the sky and there was a shirt on her yellow-coloured like the sun or the yolk of a fried egg and of a thinness and the light coming in through the window behind her made it go kind of invisibley in parts which sent me hotter like the fire when it was lit which it wasn’t then but it didn’t need to be for me to go glow. Her hair was all around her face and down her back too and dark but with shining bits in it like the bits that go gleam on top of the mountain when the sun sits on it some days. She took her rings and bangley things off her wrists and fingers and went into her bag and took out a dead rabbit not long dead cos he was still all flopsome in her hands and I saw the wires and strings moving under the skin of her hands and arms and I thought of the blood in there and my heart went bang.

—Rabbit stew. Like rabbit stew?

I nodded my head cos I did.

—Caught him this morning with the dog.

I nodded again but didn’t know why I just felt my head going into a nodment. I liked to see the rabbits running up and down and across the hills and fields but I didn’t mind one dying and being chopped up and eaten this way cos it wasn’t like the chickens kept in wire shoeboxes in the big buildings at the end of the valley by Mr Powell, no. The rabbit had been rabbity and not in a cage and Rhiannon’s dog had hunted and killed him cos That’s What Dogs Do, like Arrn with the rats except we don’t eat
them
yick no but if the rabbit didn’t get eaten then he’d Die For No Reason and that is a terrible bad thing for
a
rabbit or in fact anything on the planet to do, oh yes.

Rhiannon took a big knife and a small knife too from one of the drawers. She laid Mr Rabbit flat on his back with his legs out and then she sawed off his tail and it lay there like a tiny little animal itself just a little furry ball all white. Scut, that’s what rabbits’ tails are called. Drunkle told me once.

—Cos you’re going to need building up if you’re going to take on Arthur, aren’t you?

She gave a Looking and a Smiling at me and I gave a smiling back to her. She sawed through the rabbit’s fur under his front legs then sawed in a circle around his neck but not so deep that his head fell off. Not much blood came out cos he’d probably already been cut in the neck to let the blood out cos that’s what you have to do when you’re going to eat a thing you’ve just killed. But there was
some
blood of course and it kind of jumped out and went across the backs of Rhiannon’s hands in red lines and one bit jumped up on to her arm and I looked at it all so red against her skin which wasn’t red but not really white either kind of the colour of the pollen that the bees carry in little bags on their legs on days like that day all in a bluesome brightness all over the place.

—Talk of the pub last night, you were. Everyone was going on and on about how brave you were, standing up to Arthur like that. Course,
he
went on and on about teaching you a lesson but we all just ignored him. He knocked you out, didn’t he? Grown man doing that to a kid, Christ. Coward. No one listened to a single word he said and he just went off
in
a strop round about midnight. Haven’t seen him since.

She gave me another Smiling and I saw the longness of her fingers and the shiny nails all the same sharpness and I watched them dig into the rabbit’s fur and dig in further into his neck. One hand grabbed his head to hold it still cos it was moving around even tho it wasn’t alive any more and the other hand that was in the neck grabbed tight hold of his fur and started to pull it down and off and it made a quiet kind of rippy noise all wet and sticky and as the fur came off I saw the stuff beneath all kind of shiny and purple and bulgesome. Rhiannon ripped the fur down more to Mr Rabbit’s back legs then she took up the small knife and made some cuts at them legs then pulled the fur down even more and then quickly it came off like a jumper, like jumpers I take off when days get bright and bluesome only not so bloody as Mr Rabbit’s clothes. It looked like Rhiannon was then wearing red gloves up to her elbows but not just of One Redness they were all kinds of a redness almost black even in parts and they went even more colours when she cut open Mr Rabbit’s belly and wiggled some of her fingers inside in their longness and she pulled out all tubes and bags and sacks all slimesome and smellbad and going all of a slobber as if they were alive too like worms or slugs or things you sometimes find at the edge of the sea, when you lift rocks and look under.

—Daft bastard’s convinced himself that your dog’s been killing his sheep. Won’t listen to reason that man. He gets an idea in his head and there’s nothing anyone can do to get it out of there.

She put the skin and tail into a Safeway bag and then tied that bag and put it in the bin and then she took the board with all the guts and stuff on it in a dripment and slobberment to the back door and tipped it all out into the yard and Arrn watched her then legged it out there to be with the guts. I looked at the rabbit all without his skin now and not like a rabbit any more really except for his head but Rhiannon then chopped that off too and put it in the bin as well and I thought of what Rhiannon might look like under her skin and if she had the shining purpleness and all them bags and tubes inside of her too and if I did as well but of course we did cos we were alive on the mountain as well as the rabbits and without them sliming things we wouldn’t be but then I thought that bees don’t have those things and they’re alive as much as I am so it’s not just them wet things that make people alive it’s something else that no one can see that fills our heads and our bodies with a lifeness. It comes out of the sky and the streams and it lets us be alive on the mountain and everywhere else too.

I could hardly see any of the skin on Rhiannon’s arms, so red they had become. I was still hot inside but the banging had gone but it came back a bit when I looked at Rhiannon’s arms and thought of her like a buzzard or a fox or a stoat cos they eat and chop up rabbits too only not with knives.

—It turned sour very quick with Arthur, Rhiannon said and it was as if she was talking not to me but to the dead and chopped-up rabbit. The big knife went up and then down and the dead rabbit started to go
into
chunks. Arrn came back into the kitchen with a redness all around his mouth and on his nose and he lay down by the fire there and he licked his paws which were a bit red too but not as much as his face. —He’s a bad man. A bad human being. He’s not right. I realised that soon after I married him but by then it was too late. Angharad was inside me.

She looked at me with her eyes all big as if I’d said something that put a surprise in her but no words had come out of my mouth.

—I’ve sent Angharad away, she said. —Packed her off to my sister’s in Swansea. She’ll be safe there. Arthur thinks she’s gone to stay with some friends over in England, not that he could give much of a shit anyway.

She turned to the sink and made some water fall and put her hands and arms into it and rubbed them together til the redness went and the proper colour of her skin came back. The water came off the mountain and through pipes and out of the taps and Rhiannon let it take the rabbitred off her hands and arms and when her hands and arms were skin-coloured again she took down a big pot from a hook on the beam above the fireplace and the pawlicky Arrn and she tipped all the rabbit bits off the board and into that pot and then she put some water into it and put it on the cooker and she made a small blue fire happen underneath it then she washed the rabbitred off the kitchen parts too and out of her bag she took some carrots and potatoes and leeks and onions and a swede like a rock and some of that stringy green plant that comes in bunches and looks like the ribs of foxes in the snow-times only green. She did things to the plants
with
the small knife then chopped them too and put them in the pot with the already-chopped rabbit parts then she took some bunches of leaves from the bag all of a deep green-ness like good, good grass and she chopped them too and potted them as well and then she opened some wine the colour that her arms had gone before when she took Mr Rabbit’s skin off and she poured some of that into the pot and then she put salt and pepper in and a lid on. Then she just stood for a bit and put a Looking on me then she picked up a wooden spoon and took the lid off the pot and stirred the stuff in it with that spoon.

—Christ, we make some mistakes. Bad, bad mistakes. But how can we do anything else? We only get one chance at this. Fuck up once and you fuck up for ever.

And it was like she said them words to the rabbit bits and the plant bits cos she was looking down into the pot at them as she spoke and then she put the lid back on the pot with a clang and she turned and put another Smiling on me and held her hands together at her tummy and I liked very much her Smiling and I liked very much her hands held together at her tummy like that and I liked very much her hair and her skin now not red and the drawy-inny way her eyes went then.

—Couple of hours and that’ll be ready, she said.—What shall we do til then?

I had a Big Thinking in my head of what we could do just me and Rhiannon til the stew was ready to eat and it was something that I hadn’t done before not in Real Life anyway only in my head altho that is part of Real Life too of course and it had to do
with
my hands going on parts of Rhiannon’s body and her hands going on parts of mine and bits of me going hot and hard and at that Big Thinking some bits of me
did
go hard and hot and I felt my face go red like Rhiannon’s hands and arms did with the blood before. Again she put a big Smiling on me and I went redder and hotter and harder and to make the pictures in my head go away I thought of the little bitey black-and-white kitten but it was not like I
meant
to think about him he just came into my head. So I told Rhiannon about him and she said why don’t you show him to me so I said yes and stood and Arrn looked at me just once then fell back into sleep again by the fire that wasn’t lit but maybe it was in his head and that was Good Enough for him.

Rhiannon took the bottle of wine with her and we went out into the muckiness of the yard and the bright blue aboveness and across the dirtsome yard and into the barn and up the strawbale hill and we sat down and looked into the hole and saw Charlesworth on her side with her babies sucking at her and she was going prrr, prrr and she looked at us with one green eye and made a kind of smiley face the way that cats do sometimes a bit like people even. My little black-and-white feller was in there sucking away and Rhiannon made nice noises at Charlesworth and her children and told her what a clever cat she was and how beautiful her babies were and we sat like that for a bit looking at Charlesworth and her babies and the Good Smell came off Rhiannon and into my nose and I liked it and my head had stopped its banging and my face had stopped its hotting and the hardness
in
my middle body had gone too and I was gladded by that cos I knew what that hardness would make happen after a while, how shakey my legs would go and the world would become nothing but the niceness in me when stuff would come out and that would be the Best Feeling Ever even better than just before My Times are about to happen. I still felt a bit fire-some Down There cos of Rhiannon’s nearness but the hardness had gone away and yes I was gladded by that in a way but had a bit of a sadness on me too cos it would’ve been nice if Rhiannon herself had made that hardness go and the Best Feeling Ever come.