The Long Dry (2 page)

She sweeps the tiled floor while she listens to the bacon snap.

The kitchen extension falls from the room where the food was originally made. They call this room the kitchen too, from habit, but everything happens here. Here is the settle
and the family table, and the big window which looks back at the rough, secret half of the farm. Here the post is opened and the meals are eaten and, when it is done, the homework is done. All the talking.

The tiles on the floor are different from the tiles in the new part, which are red and made of brick. Here the tiles are old flags of stone which she loves secretly because of the colours they become under the careful wet care of her mop. Sometimes she likes to think that only she sees this, because they only show their colours when they’re very wet, and they quickly dry while she moves across the floor. This childish energy is still in her, somewhere; a glee she hides.

Here and there are piles of dirt. Little crowds of dust and dropped things, like the foil from pill packets and pennies and hairbands bright with dust. It’s a process she has while she waits for things or she talks worriedly. She takes the brush and moves the dirt around the floor, leaving it gathered here and there. Later, she will take the dustpan and clear them up; or the cat will come and attack them and fight them furiously. Depending on her mood, she will either laugh or shout at the cat.

She leaves the brush by the doorway and takes the bacon out of the pan and puts it in the oven on the plate. The doorway goes out of the kitchen onto the back yard of the house and it’s where the family and good friends mainly come in and out, during the day. Below the units are sacks of potatoes and tubs and bowls of cleaning things stacked up. The front of the fridge is rusted and pocked but the fridge works. Old and out of place, a chest of drawers fits beside the fridge and holds knives and forks and things.

As she cuts the bread thickly to put in the pan she wishes for a new kitchen. A kitchen gleaming and clean; but mainly she wants cohesion. She is tired of mixed up things.

Behind the house, across the small back yard of broken concrete, the land slopes up. For a while there is bracken, dead and dry now from the long summer, and then the slope sharpens and the forest starts. The leaves are very heavy this year. To the side of the house, where the ground is even, more or less, there is a lawn of sorts and a small rockery made with stones from some of the out-buildings they never rebuilt. The lawn goes along the big edge of the barn and loses itself where the bramble starts before the forest. She opens the door to let the house breathe and looks out at the lawn.

Where the bracken is now, on the slope, they worked hard when they were younger to take this for themselves. First they cleared a break, so the fire could not spread into the trees, then they burned the bracken and bramble and the thin shoots of hazel that had come out of the forest. They did this at the end of summer. Then when the ash and the broken wood had been driven into the earth by the thick rains of Autumn, they began to dig the ground. They dug for a day, and hurt themselves. The next day he hired a rotovator and they cut up the half-acre patch of ground which was still tough work. The smell of the rotovator
reminded him of boat engines. The robins were the first to come and take the grubs and worms, and worked around them. Then, when they were inside taking a cup of tea and talking gently together, the bigger more cowardly birds came. The earth was full and hungry.

The frosts fell and nothing grew in the earth. Then, when the winter loosened, they dug the broken soil over to give it air and make it ready for the seeds.

They planted seed potatoes, and cabbages and long rows of onions and beetroot and radishes. They had carrots and parsnips, which needed to be thinned constantly and were a lot of trouble, and pea canes and lettuces. Even with the failures, they had a lot of vegetables. Too many for themselves. They also put in raspberries, still there now, but you had to fight your way to them. Then at some point, and she tries to think quite when, they didn’t plant things anymore and the woods took back the land. It was after the second miscarriage, but she does not remember that.

Inside she sets the table. The knives and forks and plates in piles on the vinyl cloth. She starts to read her catalogue of supplements; things she hopes will stop her ageing, help her hold less water, help her be less tired and make her want sex more. For her age, she is a very beautiful woman, but she does not see it. It is beginning to go from her. She knows it.

He comes in, scraping his feet on the metal grill outside the back door, not because he needs to, but from habit. Or perhaps it is his announcement – a signal they have always had but never spoken of. They had many of these when they were younger.

She rinses the cafetière and warms the cup with water from the kettle which she’s boiled several times while she has
waited
for him. She does not make the coffee. Some things she mustn’t do. She’s threatened by the coffee; about how strong to make it, how it tastes when it is made. He makes coffee every day, just for himself as no one else drinks it. He makes a strong pot full of coffee at this time of the morning and it does him for the day, warming up the cupfuls in a pan as they are needed – which makes them stronger as the day goes on. No one else touches the pan. She says it’s why he does not sleep. His first coffee each morning is the remnants of the night before because grinding the beans he does not want to wake the house, and the children sleep above the thin ceiling of the kitchen.

He sits at the table with a loose fist and runs his thumb over the first joint of his forefinger in the way he has, so it makes a quiet purring sound, like rubbing leather.

‘What about the dosing?’

‘It’ll have to wait,’ he says.

He rubs his finger. He does this always, at table, talking, or reading a paper, even with the handle of a cup held there, so that this part of his finger is smooth and shines. Whenever he’s at rest.

‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’ve checked the obvious places and she’s not there. She’s got her head down and gone.’ He does not tell her about the stillborn calf.

‘It’s typical. It has to be today,’ she says. ‘I should have got up to check.’

‘It would have gone anyway,’ he says quietly.

He looks down at the missing part of his little finger on his right hand and makes the sound against his thumb again. She still blames herself for this damage to him. He was trying to free the bailer from the new tractor and she had done something and the catch had just bit down. He takes a mouthful of coffee. It was a clean cut and it healed well and he could have lost his hand instead. That’s how he looked at it. In some ways he loves it.

She’d burned the toast so he’s gone quietly over and made some more while she tried to rescue the wrecked toast.

‘The vet phoned about Curly,’ she says.

‘Oh.’

‘He wants to come today.’

He knows the vet will put the old dog down. Not today, he thinks. It’s a hard thing to have to have today, if he has to find the cow too.

‘You should have some breakfast,’ he says to her. It’s odd how seriously we take the silly names of animals.

The door latch snaps and Emmy comes in still dressed in her pyjamas and her blanket tucked in her hand, thumb in her mouth. She shuffles over to the old settle and curls up with her green and purple zebra. She would come down when she heard her parents talking in the kitchen below in the morning.

‘Hello sweetie,’ says her mother.

She shines her eyes up at her mother, looks to her father quickly, shyly. Something secret passes between them and she smiles and settles. They stop talking of the cow.

He sits there rubbing his finger and looking at the stump of his little finger fondly.

‘It’s going to be hot again today,’ he says.

There had been much rain. In the early part of the year and through the Autumn before, the rain came down and the fields were loud with grass and the rivers full and fast.

Then at some point in the early morning of March 11
^th
something changed. The rain stopped; that day the sun came out hot and fast and deliberately. There had been a geomagnetic storm. Epileptics had fits, and people prone to strokes or with weak hearts were ill, some died. The electric things of our body went wrong in many people. The swallows came early, and that day a cloud of racing pigeons and one white dove landed at the farm. They came suddenly and curiously and were very lost. Emmy fell in love with the long white dove.

Nobody – not the ‘experts’ anyway, admitted any link between the storms and the sudden change of things; but storms like this could shut down warships and satellites, and the War Office was always watching out for them. In their records, it says the storm on March 11
^th
was a massive one.

Then it rained in May. He remembers the shearers – three men – moving methodically around the barn; the process: the unspoken movement of them all.

The rain came down on the tin roof and the shears buzzed slightly. It was very calm.

The three men – a father and two brothers – came only to shear the sheep. They made a living this time of year moving round the farms, taking the fleece off the sheep and taking the money per fleece. So they worked quickly. The fleeces came off and Emmy and Dylan and Kate gathered them and rolled them into bags, fastening the canvas with wooden pegs. Gareth caught the ewes, and Bill helped, while the shearers worked quickly. (His name was Gwilym, but they called him Bill.)

Now and then the men would stop to oil the shears, or, the sheep still held sitting comically against their legs, would reach languidly behind them for iodine so they could dress any cuts, if they had made them badly. They were quick but moved easily, as if their bodies were made only for this purpose. They might have been – a long line of sheep shearers. Genetic. When they stopped to eat there was no
talk. Pleasant thank yous, humble and clear, but no talk. They were men with no unnecessary thing.

He’d got in at three in the morning and he wasn’t happy about going to get the duck.

‘You’ll have to go and get the ducks,’ his mother had called up. ‘The cow’s gone and you’ll have to go and get the ducks.’

Dylan shouted and then swore at his mother because he knew his father was out in the fields – he’d heard him go out after breakfast again to find the cow. He’d sworn quietly at first so his mother had to shout up ‘what did you say?’ and then he’d repeated it at a scream because he knew it annoyed her more this way.

He was angry but it was mainly out of habit; and he was only angry because of getting out of bed not because of having to go and get the ducks.

Now he was in the Transit and he drove it quicker than he’d drive his own car down the busted lane and enjoyed the tuck and muffled rumping of the ducks in the bread crates in the back. With the windows down the smell was still bad but it was good to be in the Transit.

If you’ve never been in a Transit you don’t know. You sit up high like you’re in a dining chair and there’s even arm rests if you want them. And you see things you haven’t seen before or don’t see often. You can even see more of the road somehow, and because you’re up high you’re not so scared. You’re not scared when you drive a car maybe, but you know if you hit something it will more or less hit you at eye level and it will be like being shot out of a low pipe at the mess.

He was relaxed and happy in the Transit.

He drove the van past the barn and down the track and into the long field. The ground was so dry you could take the van in the fields. When he got out to open the gate into the long field he did it angrily in case he was seen. He thought he should be angry because he usually would be because he had to unload all of the duck on his own; but he wasn’t angry and driving the van was good and the heat of the day was already in him and quietly he loved being in this place despite the belt of the music and the white breasts of the club last night still hefting round his mind. He had to like the club and he had to want to go away from here.

He took the duck down to the pond.

Every year they put a hundred duck down on the pond. There are already moorhen on the pond, and coot. Other wild duck join them, and teal – small and dart-like things that are beautiful and fast and violent, not at all like ducks. They feed the ducks grain and cut down the reeds so the fox doesn’t get to them without them seeing, and they care for them deeply. Then they shoot as many of them as they can.

This is a good thing. Ducks can be a menace.

People are seduced by ducks; by their seeming placidity. They fall for the apparent imbecility of their smiles and their quietly lunatic quacking. But they are dangerous things which plot, like functioning addicts.

In the local town – a beautiful Georgian harbour town which is not lazy and which is very colourful – the ducks got out of hand.

The river comes in from the low valley, collapsing slowly over the old weirs, under the road bridge and into the harbour to the beach. There’s a place on one side of the road bridge where you can sometimes see the current going backwards when the tide comes in, and there are sometimes big crabs and mullet in the salt part of the water. And the ducks come down the river.

As part of a move to make a continent look better, money
was given to the small town to improve itself and they built a holding pool for the smaller boats and fishing boats that would still work in the winter when it was too rough to have expensive things like yachts still in the harbour. The holding pool filled with ducks and they shat everywhere. There were hundreds of ducks. Sometimes you had to stop your car to let them cross the road.

Given the way they have to have sex, it’s remarkable there are any ducks. More remarkable they have sex often. The male more or less drowns the female, who has to focus hard on staying afloat, and they both have to deal with wings and beaks and water and feathers and it looks nasty and they still have sex. So there were a great many ducks. And they all shat everywhere.

It became a problem for the tourists and the locals didn’t like it. People talked about the ducks in pubs; and if you stood in lines at the local shops you heard people talk about ducks. About the latest violence they had committed.

If you tried to drink a quiet pint on the harbour the ducks were there and they sat squatly and looked up at you and seemed to chuckle superciliously, which was off-putting. If you put your washing out, somehow the ducks knew, and by some defiance of physics managed to crap on it. And duck crap isn’t nice. It’s green like baby-shit. If you fed a baby on broccoli for a week.

The ducks were all over the expensive yachts and got in around the car wheels and even climbed into prams or anything that was comfortable and abandoned. Cats were scared of them and they wouldn’t run away from children
so children didn’t chase them. They even sat stoically through the frankly vicious din made by the local band who played hymns on the harbour every Sunday night. They seemed to be invincible. A committee was drawn up.

The reason why they shat so much thought some of the committee, was because ‘the people’ fed them chips, whoever ‘the people’ were. A duck should eat things from the water, that’s what they’re designed to do. But they were lazy and so hoovered up whatever people threw them, fighting off the seagulls and the errant starlings and the pigeons and, if they had to, fighting off each other too. This poor diet is making the poor ducks poo. That was one take. Answer: we should give them proper food. Genius. So they tried. It was not the answer. They ate the food put down and the fish and chips and had sex even more. Ducks’ arses were no tighter than they’d ever been. There were simply too much ducks.

Shoot them was another angle. Poison would kill every other thing, and the ducks would go on living, cunning as they were. So shooting was the only sure-fire way.

Now it’s legal, more or less, to shoot a duck yourself, provided it’s below the line of the low water. Or so the fable goes. It’s one of the many rules few people really know. At this point the duck belongs to the Queen – a spurious ownership anyway. Unless she’s there, the chances are she wouldn’t know or wouldn’t mind. However, no one’s ever done this and you wouldn’t want to be the first. If you walked around a quiet Georgian town blasting ducks you’d be quickly locked away.

And this was the chief qualm against the ‘shoot them’ plan. Shotguns are very noisy and would not be good for business. If you opted more subtly for a hunting rifle there’d be another problem: you’d simply be too close. A rifle is designed to counter a human’s lack of tact: it kills things far away. If you shot a duck from far too close with one of those machines you would obliterate it. Which would make as much mess as the poo, only harder to clean up.

So eventually they laced the food with rampant contraceptive. Looking around the town nowadays, it’s a shame they didn’t lace the chips.

Another case against the ducks – or some might say for – is simpler. The farm where he had picked the ducks up in the Transit is on a low hill overlooking the bay, constantly plagued by fighter jets. The Americans and lots of other people come to practise flying here and when they do, it sounds like they are tearing up the sky. Sometimes they are so low you feel them; and you can always tell when there is some trouble because they practise harder, and in the night you can hear the heavy hum of Hercules planes shifting things around.

When a jet goes over low at calving time sometimes a cow will drop its calf and it will be dead and unready. If you call for compensation, they ask you for the number of the plane and the exact time it passed over the cow. On average, the jets travel three times faster than sound.

A duck went through the windshield of one of them, macerating itself into the cockpit and the pilot ejected. The navigator flew the plane and landed it safely two-hundred
miles or so north. Bits of the cockpit were spread for miles around the hills and didn’t hit anyone and a team of Crash Investigators came. Again, ducks.

He backs the Transit up by the pond and it makes a sound just like the one he used to make when he was being a truck when he was a child. The crates are heavy full of duck and the stink is bad. It stinks like the insides of a fish and it’s been cooking slowly in the back of the van. He puts the crates down one by one by the edge of the pond then cuts the twine with a Leatherman he found in the van and makes the ducks go out. They’re not sure what the pond is.

They pat into the water one by one, confused and fik
fiking
. In the crates they were bunched in, bunched into
themselves
and had the stupid air of herd animals. When they get into the water they are confused and then they kick a little and feel themselves glide and feel all their clumsy weight turn easy. Then their necks lift and stretch and some of them flick their clipped wings and they turn into proper ducks; a real thing. It’s their first time in the water.

He watches them. Damselflies and strong white butterflies, delicate as hell, are everywhere around the pond, and machine-like dragonflies hit smaller insects in the air as they fly. The reeds are flowering with their strange crests and on the island in the middle of the pond the willowherb is starting to come to seed, and the thistles.

From now on in the evenings he’ll come down here, sometimes with his father, and whatever has happened in the day will be okay. They’ll try uselessly to count the ducks
and he’ll watch the light change and sink into the water – the white light of a lake. The evenings will shorten and the flowers turn to rough seed and the grass will stop growing, not that it’s grown much this dry year. Then, if there is rain, the mushrooms will come which his sister loves to eat because she believes in fairies, and they will take bags down to collect them and most will not get eaten and will sweat and go off in the plastic bags.

He lifts the bread crates back into the Transit; he’s old enough to sweat now and it’s very hot. Everyone is still bewildered by the heat.

He gets into the Transit and turns it on and likes the growl of the diesel engine. He presses down on the brick of the pedal, swings the van away from the pond and smacks the radio on loud to smash away the quiet place – the beat breaks out, bass line, moving up his spine. And his head fills up again with tight breasts and bare arms and small skirts and white skin bluing in the epileptic lights. He’s not little now, he knows, and he has to want to go away from here.

Gareth felt the cool wind the speed of the quad bike made as he rode to the top fields. He knew now that if he didn’t find the cow soon it would become a problem. I should ask Bill to help find the cow because he will like helping, thought Gareth.

He had seen the bank yesterday, and they had agreed in principle to his putting in a bid for the seven acres of land that skirted the road, close to the top of his farm, close by
this field. The auction was next week. Gareth thought about it a lot.

It was the other side of the road from his land and ran in a long strip about an acre deep. It was where the road was quite wide, and close to the village. He wanted it to build on. At least, he wanted to sell the land as plots. He knew it wouldn’t happen soon, and hoped the idea wasn’t thought of, or he’d be easily outbid. But if he could get the land, and then get planning, he could make a lot of money. The village would grow, and he knew physically that he could not farm forever.

Far away, he heard the duck go into the water. ‘If I can get that land,’ he thought, ‘when the village moves this way I’ll file for planning.’ (They’d already put in speed limits, as they do before allowing houses to be built, though they don’t admit it). ‘I can get planning and sell the plots, and it will be a few years from now and then I can rent out the top fields and some other land and keep the farm like an island, without having to work it all, because I won’t be able to; and the plots will bring us money, if I can get that land.’ He hoped very much that the agreement from the bank would be enough.

He thinks of his father’s memories that he reads at night to help himself sleep. To bring some sound into the stillness. How it is difficult and slow to understand sometimes; how the dictionary does not have the words he doesn’t know; how he must make bridges of meaning, here and there. As if he were walking on stones down a river. He prefers to call them memories, because memoirs sounds too grand, too fake.

Mopping his brow with the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt he thinks of the building land and how his father used to work for the bank he’s borrowed from, though the bank has globalized now. How, from reading his father’s memories, he is beginning to understand the reasons why he gave it all up – this good career – to bring his family here, to bring them up on the land. It’s unnaturally quiet up here, in this sun. Things are exhausted.

A story he read some nights ago comes back to him, strange against the heat now, crystalline in its difference. Its difference to everything else in his mind; clear images standing out, like a photograph in a white room.

He knew the place, even today, from visits to his father’s family years ago, where the water goes under what used to be a beautiful low stone bridge before it was rebuilt for no apparent reason. On the high side of the bridge, upstream, there is a constantly still pool, hollowed into the deep shale. The waterfall is usually quiet, unless there has been a great deal of rain washing from the fields, into the river, swelling the water. It falls only eight foot or so, into the pool. The other side of the bridge the water bubbles away over shallow, broken rock.

His father had been with the other children at Ysgol Sul, the Sunday School, in a small room by the chapel. It had a blackboard and a brand new gas heater which gave off a
thin hiss the very sound of which, ever since, would be enough to clothe his father with the illusion of warmth. It was a very hard January – the seasons then were more severe, or else his father’s memory had sharpened them. They wore shorts then, too, of course. His father was one of the oldest children there.