The Long Dry (4 page)

‘I’m going to finish it off,’ said the older boy. It was simple and brave, what he said.

When he said it the rabbit kicked but could not get up so it just combed round in a half-circle and it was like the rabbit was helping the boy to do what he said. Like it was trying to tell him with his desperation that it was the right thing. And they knew they had to kill the rabbit then because it was dying.

They looked around and there were some old stones by a wall and the younger boy picked up the biggest stone he could in both hands and looked at the older boy bravely because he was hurt when he saw the rabbit kicking and was confused and would do it himself.

The younger boy loved the older boy and would do it because of the way the older boy had said so quietly and straight that it had to be done and he knew that the older boy felt very sad inside, perhaps sadder than him.

‘It might not die properly,’ said the older boy. ‘I’ll try and not hurt it and just do it quick.’ It made the younger boy feel sick when he knew he didn’t have to kill the rabbit.

The older boy picked up one or two stones and they didn’t feel right and then he found one which sat in his hand and
thought it would be okay. The stone was warm and flat in the older boy’s hand.

He always told the younger boy to do the things he didn’t want to but this time he didn’t; so the younger boy knew it was a very big thing they were doing.

The rabbit was twisted and all the wrong shape since trying to move and the boy knelt down close by it. He didn’t want to touch the rabbit with his hands.

‘Don’t touch it with your hands,’ he said, ‘because it might be poisoned and we can’t wash our hands.’ He wanted to touch the rabbit with his hands so he could calm it so it could die gently.

He’d heard about this disease; how his mother’s brothers when they were younger would have to go out around the farmland and would come back with bags full of rabbits that they had shot. They had to burn them. And he knew that the disease still happened, but not so bad.

He put his foot on the rabbit’s shoulder to hold it down where he thought he should hit it on the neck and the rabbit’s deep and sad eye opened at him and was deep and very beautiful. And the boy didn’t show anything but inside he asked the rabbit if it was alright to do this and the rabbit’s eye just half-closed in defeat, very slowly.

He hit the rabbit with the edge of the stone. He hit it as hard as he thought but he couldn’t bring himself to want to hurt the rabbit, which was necessary, so the rabbit jerked under his foot and its back legs stretched and kicked. He hit it again
in the neck where he had hit it before and there was a lot of muscle there and now the mouth was open and the tiny teeth showed, and the eye looked at him black and
flashing
with fear. Then he knew he had to hurt the rabbit and in him was the horrible slow panic of knowing something like this. He put the edge of the stone hard into the neck and just pushed and turned and tried to crush. He wanted the rabbit to die very much now and there was a click and the eye flashed and he knew it was done. The tiny mouth was gritted with strain and the teeth looked very sharp and white.

The younger boy was holding the big rock in both his hands up by his cheek and when he saw from his brother’s face that it was done he dropped it away and it landed on the dry ground with a deep thud.

They didn’t feel good about the rabbit dying but it was better. They took some old concrete from around the dry wall and took it over to the rabbit. When they went back to the rabbit it looked quiet and peaceful. The younger boy felt sorry for his brother and looked at him to see if he was okay and he was. The older boy told him about how another thing might take the rabbit and then take the poison; so they covered it up with the pads of concrete.

The younger boy put the concrete over the rabbit’s head and wanted to walk away very quickly because his hand, for a moment, had brushed the fur; the older boy put the cement down on the rest of the rabbit and it wouldn’t balance so he turned it over and rested it down. When he rested it down, the back leg moved.

When they walked away he did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved and told himself a lot that things moved after they were dead for a while because the nerves jumped. He’d seen his father skin an eel and even without a head it had jumped and twitched. He wished that he knew he’d killed the rabbit. He did not tell the younger boy that the back leg had moved because he knew that this knowing – the rabbit not dead perhaps and dying still under the heavy concrete – was only his; and he thought: ‘if I had touched it with my hands I would have known for sure.’ He knew then that people must be very strong.

The breeze was up a little and it was nice because it had been dry for so long, and still; and the two boys left the track and walked quickly over the low, green field, and the younger boy rubbed his hand where it had touched the rabbit’s fur.

Kate was not from here and she didn’t grow up to be on a farm. When, years later, they found that Gareth had chlamydia – had caught it from the sheep – and this was why she’d lost the babies, Gareth was relieved. It fell on him. It was not a failure of her body and he hoped that Kate would not blame herself then. But it remained impossible for her to accept that some things die. After losing the babies, she felt every death.

She was checking the cows in the barn and she knew then that one had lost its calf and she was very angry with Gareth for not telling her. He had cleared up the bloodied hay but she knew there was a cow who should have a calf that did not have a calf after counting twice, after seeing
the cow empty. She heard Dylan go off in the car.

You could hear cows placidly flicking flies away with their tails. The old wheel of the tractor was in the barn and she could almost feel the hard treads in her back. The sun was coming down on the corrugated barn roof and it was very hot inside, like in a greenhouse, and outside the sparrows were crazy loud, picking and fighting at the hay seed and dust-bathing fatly. But she was just very angry.

Gareth thought of her now. He doubled back up a dry track that was wide enough to take a tractor and had deep track marks so it was awkward to walk with his painful ankle. The sun had really come up now.

‘I must never forget how perfectly built she is,’ he thought loudly to himself. ‘She is changing now, but it does not matter.’ He’d meant simply to search the top fields, to rule them out, hoping for the vet to come then, and then return on the quad bike to the house; but he was walking, and it was as if he needed to walk.

He feels himself open his shoulders and hold his head up against the irritations of the missing cow, and the violence of the rabbit; he feels his body brace itself and challenge these things. ‘It does not matter, she will change,’ he thinks. And he knows that he must help her feel this for her to be well again. His body still demands hers, the familiarity of the map of her. The places of her that give softly when he holds her; that have changed and grown
and shifted through the years, as if lilting with the changes of his own flesh, to be in tune still; as if he was the hard land and she the water that would always know it, however it changed. The things of her still fascinate him. It is true, he knows, that his man’s chemistry will always want the tight trap of younger women, or the exoticness of a different skin – something other than he had; but he knew they would not have the smaller skills to satisfy him; would be over-aware, like strangers, be too full of thought to properly trick his body to the places he had reached with his wife. It is easy for him now to indulge his visual need for women – his son’s magazines, the television, the magazines he has shyly for himself – but he never believed that they would, any of them, feel as good to him as her. He cannot imagine his body against the body of another girl. They had grown to each other and she had only ever been with him so he thought it was like she was only his shape inside.

He thinks of her perfect feet – how for years after they’d met she’d still kick off her shoes at every opportunity, to be barefoot. When did she stop doing this, he thinks. He did not notice. It gives him a strange guilt.

He thinks of his daughter’s bare feet, and of the painted wellies she refuses to take off. He wonders how she will be, his daughter with strange green eyes from somewhere in their background, one or the other of them. Will she love like her mother? With belligerent decision. It scares him slightly. He knows his fear for her will grow as she gets older in a way it did not with his son, and he hopes he will not hurt her because of his fear for her.

But fear is rarely in context. In his father’s memories it tells how he lost his first wife. The loss had a lot to do with his leaving the bank. He wanted to be on the land and see things live, and grow. His second wife was much younger and he cared for her greatly.

His father, every day, apart from the few months when he broke his leg, would cross the cows across the small road that ran between two pastures. It was when he was an old man, about eighty. He was crossing the cows one day when a police car brought his second wife back. She had been driving through the village and had put the car into the corner of a parked delivery lorry. She did not brake until the lorry came through the windscreen and the bonnet had been opened like a tin. When they checked her eyes they found that she had lost peripheral vision and was living as if she was in a tunnel. They found the tumour on her pituitary gland months later and took her miles away to hospital to die, though they tried to operate. Incredibly, because she’d always seemed so delicate to everyone, she lived. A few months later his father contracted bowel cancer and died in hospital after only three days, which meant he must have been in pain for a very long time. Gareth knew that he had died because he couldn’t bear the thought of out-living the second woman that he loved.

The car just slumbers, like an old building, being taken over day by day more, by the brambles and grass where it’s 
parked, which seems like an impossible place for a car to be anyway, as if it was dropped from the sky there.

The car, which has been everything from a spaceship to a tank, to the head of a large animal, still gleams though. Light bouncing, the white sheen of its runners and trim, even off the dusty windows. Because of the way the light comes off it, it seems as if it is moving, sometimes.

For years there were stories as to how the car got there, that far into an empty field. Even with brand new tyres, pumped to bursting, it was a mystery how the car drove past the hedges, over the marshy land. Dylan never remembered the tyres any other way than they were when he played in the car – dry, torn shards of rubber, like the bark that peels off an old tree around the wheel hubs that were rusting, so they looked like they were crumbling to the exotic earth you imagine in a desert.

There was the story of the burglars that had kidnapped Gareth’s mother and driven off wildly pursued, until they were gunned down by his irate father with an old army rifle (leading to the story he’d been an undercover sniper, not a doodlebug spotter in the war).

There was the story of the flood – how the whole family had to climb into the car one day as the heavens came down, to escape a Biblical flood which left the car, as the waters receded, there in the field, and that’s why the ground was still marshy.

There was also the story of the balloon. Which is the one they liked best, because of the photo. Of how
Gareth’s father, as he told them himself, had built an enormous balloon and tied it to the car to travel around the countryside, high above the landscape. Whenever this story was told, Gareth’s father would make a big thing of trying to find ‘the photograph’, looking here and there in drawers, until he unearthed an old postcard of a Zeppelin and, pointing to the carriage slung underneath, which was tiny in the photograph, would say: ‘there’s the car, you see’.

It never mattered to the children that the stories changed. They were equally true; they had their own theories anyway. The car was a playground.

Dylan hasn’t been to the car for a long while, but years from now he will remember it as he drives past a convoy of Morris Travellers on their way to a vintage rally somewhere. And like all memories, that sit below us, out of the glare of our awareness, in shadow, the memory of the car will rush up, devastatingly. The red leather interior, in places busted, spilling stuffing; the windscreen wipers, which you turned by hand; the plastic padded sun visors; its perforated roof – like a teabag; the hot smell of the car and the broken floor, the sticky feel of the seats in the sun; the windows, that slid open.

It does not matter whether he remembers it accurately or not, this is his memory of it; and this is how it will live.

Gareth passes the car where his son used to play so much. He has to go back and tell his wife he loves her. For a second
he sees the car as if it was new – the times they went for picnics in it – rising from the brambles, and only seconds later does his sense fill in the mouse droppings, and spiders, and the thick dust that is on the windows now.

He wants to walk back to Kate, and find her, and tell her very simply he wants her. He wants to love her with the clean love his father had for his wife. He knows she will be angry about the calf, which she will know about by now; and that she does not like her body, the way it has grown at the moment. But they have been through this before. After Dylan, when her body had changed and the pride of carrying was gone. She hated her body then, but to him she had grown more wonderful. Her ability to produce bewildered him, even though all his life he had been used to the processes of breeding. The things she hated most he loved. To him, her stretch marks looked like velvet brushed the wrong way, or wind across the grass. He wants her to be happy and to know that he does not want her to be any other thing but what she is; and she should walk barefoot again.

They should forget about the cow, and the children for a moment, and take off their shoes and go into the warm grass of the garden. He hopes very much that she is not going to be again like she was after the miscarriages, when she cut her hair all short and cut herself and would not speak to him for months. That was very hard. Thinking of it now it scares him that he won’t have the strength this time to live through it with her. He worries about his ability to fight for things, when he is tired like this – from not sleeping, and from being worried always about tiny things – his ability to navigate a tragedy, or news of an illness. The world, he thinks, is filled with such unbelievable
small heroisms which to him have always seemed far more remarkable than the huge heroisms of history. Somehow, we find the strength, he thinks.

He pushes this thought out of his mind, this suddenly subversive want for a tragedy to bring them back together, and he thinks of her walking in the fresh grass. He knows she will refuse at first and make ridiculous excuses of responsibilities: ‘I have to do the washing’, ‘what about the cow?’, ‘you did not tell me of the calf’ but he will persuade her, in this lovely sunshine, will pick her up and carry her if he has to so she laughs and he will put her down in the warm green grass without her shoes.

He crosses the yard. In the hay barn sparrows are collecting hayseed and bathing in the dust – like they do in the cow barn, so the dust lifts and catches the sunlight coming through the wooden slats, dancing up in gold spirals. The flies buzz and tick. With the day properly here now, the swallows are high in the sky. As he comes into the yard, the heat seeming to rise off it already, the lost flight of pigeons explode into the air and are gone, hard over the house.

Kate is in the first field. He sees her pacing quickly at the gate, her head down and he can tell she is speaking to herself, to the ground, her hair tied off her face; and she is
walking too quickly. He sees the problem as she looks up and meets his eyes, the blood on her arm.

‘Where have you been?’ It bursts out. ‘The bloody cow has thrown its calf. I can’t get it. I can’t get it out.’ She keeps on talking, cursing at him and the cow but he is already going to the cow.

The heavy brown cow was lying awkwardly back up against the bank. He ran to the shed to get the ropes and wished he had the bike to make things faster and to not hurt his ankle more and he knew she would be angry at him for not bringing the bike.

‘Where the hell have you been. I thought you were coming straight back,’ she was saying. He had the ropes now and was running over to the cow, wincing at the pain in his ankle. She stopped at the gate and did not come with him to help and he did not know why and he kept thinking about the blood running down her arm and the time she cut herself in the shower. She was still shouting.

The cow was a mess. The wet rod of the calf was half out, with one of its front legs twisted awkwardly still inside the cow. The calf seemed dead, but they often did and then they were alive when you got them out. He put his hand into the cow and tried to find the leg but it was all wrong and he knew the hoof had already cut the cow inside.

He had his eyes open but he was staring nowhere, trying to
visualise from what he could feel, the shape of the calf inside the cow. Kate was still screaming at him from the gate and he was trying to think. ‘Where the bloody hell were you, you said you’d check the damn cows an hour ago so that’s why I didn’t check them. You should have bloody told me you weren’t going to check the cows.’ He looked briefly at her and she scared him; she was coming apart. He felt his patience snap in his stomach, the adrenaline of it go through him. ‘Just go,’ he shouted. ‘Christ. Just go.’

The cow tried to lift herself as it sensed the things around her and he put his hand gently on the cow.

‘Easy, easy, easy,’ he was saying to her, his other arm on her haunch. ‘Easy, girl.’

He brought the leg round and laid it along the calf’s body inside its mother but he couldn’t get it round enough to bring it out. He looked up again and Kate was gone from the gate but Emmy stood there scared and bravely watching.

He took the pulling ropes and closed the noose around the one free leg then tried to fix the rest of the rope behind the other shoulder blade. The calf was limp and its tongue now was flopping from its mouth. He sat back and braced his feet and pulled on the ropes, trying to gauge his weight in time with the contractions of the cow. He missed the extra traction of his little finger. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things you lack. He could feel things give very slightly, a half inch won but brought back inside by the cow’s big body. Then it came all at once, and the long black calf came out with the speed and sound of liquid. It was dead. He smacked it a few times but he knew that it was dead. Blood
leaked thickly from the cow’s gaping uterus. She panted slowly with the shock of birth. From the mark they’d made on her back, he knew she carried twins. The other calf inside her might be already dead. Emmy was by him now, looking at the dead black calf. It looked to her like a patch of wet tarmac on a new road.