Wish You Were Here (16 page)

Yet he’d thought, very recently, how shaming it would have been if when Major Richards had said he should bring his passport he’d had to say: I don’t have one.

He didn’t feel like a citizen today. Though today he knew, inescapably, he was one. It felt like some imposition or even incrimination when he knew it should be the opposite: a privilege, a protection, a guarantee. The fact that he was a citizen should be dissolving that primitive ball of fear in his stomach.

If he were stopped, then he had his passport. Not only that: in his jacket pocket he had other papers (not all of which Major Richards had said he need bring with him). He had a letter from a Secretary of State, personally signed. Truly. He had a letter, and an invitation, from a Colonel of the Regiment. Who else in this flood of morning traffic around him was carrying better credentials, was better authorised to be going about their business?

It ought to be the case, Jack told himself, that rather than being stopped, he should be waved through, with saluting respect. Lanes should be cleared for him.

But he had to get out of this city.

He looked at signs: London, Southampton, Winchester. He definitely didn’t want London. He briefly passed, on his left, the long, fortress-like walls of the Dockyard. Not just a city, but a navy base. And he was travelling to an airbase.

The funnel of the M275 seemed to find him rather than he it, feeding him onto the westbound M27. The whole length of the M27 skirted a mainly urban sprawl: Southampton was a city too. He needed to be free of this region of thick habitation. On the motorway he put his foot down, but after a few miles took it off again, realising that he had no need, or wish, to hurry and that he risked, indeed, being absurdly early. All the same, the proximity of large populations—all of them citizens—oppressed him. On the fringes of Southampton he joined the M3 and only when, after passing Winchester, he left
the motorway and was heading north across the broad downs of Hampshire did he begin to feel calmer, though this was not for long.

Big, sunlit sweeps of land now faced him, but clouds were rapidly gathering. More to the point, this open country, with its unimpeded views of the road ahead, was only drawing him inexorably and all too rapidly closer to his destination. In preparing himself for the other immensities of this journey, he had over-allowed for its simple distance. In both miles and time his journey was already half done.

He bypassed Newbury, then at a service station just short of the M4 intersection he stopped, to empty his bladder and simply kill a little time. It was not yet ten—though the mere reflex of looking at his watch, the noting of passing minutes, made him sweat. The tightness in his stomach reasserted itself and, as if to smother and quell it, he forced himself, in the cafeteria, to consume a large, sticky Danish pastry and drink a cup of coffee.

Around him was the random sample of the nation (another word, like ‘citizen’, that had come in recent days to nag him) to be found in any service-station cafeteria on a weekday morning. The bland, communal atmosphere both soothed and troubled him. Jack didn’t like cities, but this wasn’t because he essentially minded people—or people removed from the context of cities. The caravanners had, unexpectedly, taught him that. The caravanners could comfort and beguile him—just as he saw it as his role to keep them contented.

He thought now of the travellers who might stop here in the summer on their way south from cities like Birmingham or Nottingham, bound, perhaps for the first
time, for the Lookout Caravan Park. Bound for a little off-shore island that, in their minds at least, was entirely set aside for the purpose of holidays. He felt a sudden tender pang for them.

But this was November. Outside the sky was now mainly grey with a hint of rain. He no longer sensed that he might be liable to sudden arrest and interrogation, but he wondered if, in his black tie, he was being scrutinised by those around him. There would be an obvious conclusion (though it would fall some way short of the actual mark) about his purpose. Who was he? What did he do, with his big frame and big hands? Was it unseemly for a man wearing a black tie to be stuffing his face with a Danish pastry?

He thought again of the hearse and of its separate journey: Devon to Oxfordshire. There were some strange tasks in the world, some strange purposes.

But around him, in fact, was a majority of solitary, preoccupied men (though none in a black tie) doing just as he was doing: pushing something sticky into their mouths and chewing on it needily, but with no particular sign of pleasure. Were they all—though none of them, surely, could be on a journey, a mission like his today—nursing, feeding their own little balls of fear?

This was peacetime in the middle of England. But there was a war on terror.

He took out his mobile phone. It was something else these men were doing. But he merely stared at it and returned it to his pocket. The coffee or regathering fear, or simply the sensible precaution before he set off again, made him head for a second piss. In the hard white light he looked at himself, again, in the mirror. He didn’t look,
he thought, like he’d looked, only hours ago, at the cottage. He should have got his hair cut, perhaps, specially. It was wispy at the neck and by his ears. He was going to meet the army. He tweaked at his tie, though it was fine already and it hardly mattered while he was driving. His heavy face, gazing straight back at him, seemed not to know him.

Did he look like a citizen, a good citizen, in his white shirt and dark suit? No, he looked like a gangster.

W
HEN
D
AD AND
T
OM
had returned from disposing of Luke, a silence hung over the farmhouse as if some explosion had occurred much bigger than the small but significant one Jack had heard volleying up from Barton Field. Thick hot clouds filled the sky, but it was one of those times when the thunder doesn’t come. Jack didn’t get Tom’s full account till the following morning. He felt, after hearing it, and trying to put himself into Tom’s shoes, that though Tom had been unable to shoot Luke (and who could blame him?) it was perfectly possible that Tom might one day raise a gun to his own father. Such a thing seemed perfectly possible on their forlorn, milksop dairy farm in the deep, green hills.

Tom was big and tall enough by then, but Jack still had the feeling, when it came to relations between his dad and Tom, that Dad should pick on someone his own size, and that it was up to him, Jack, to intervene accordingly. He wondered what he would have done if he’d been down there too, a witness, in Barton Field. Would he have snatched the gun Dad offered to Tom, and shot Luke himself? And would that have settled the question of how
things stood at Jebb Farm for ever, of who now would rule the roost?

He wondered how it would have been if it had been just Dad and him down there, not Dad and Tom.

It was a long time—not till after Tom had left Jebb—before Jack told Ellie the full story that Tom had told him. He’d just told her at first that Dad had had to shoot Luke. It was tough, but necessary. No more Luke. Even when he’d told her the full story he’d hesitated to repeat those words which he’d remembered as clearly as Tom had seemed to remember them. ‘And someone, some day …’

When Luke met his sudden end the cow disease and its consequences had been with them for some time. It had peaked, some said, but it still hung in the air like those sultry clouds, and perhaps it was then, on that morning when that shot rang out in Barton Field, that the madness had really set in.

Yet what had saved the immediate mood, restrained and sobered them all and perhaps prevented some further explosion, was the simple fact of Luke’s death. His absence. It was only a dog’s death and, when all was said, it had been a mercy, but it left a more than dog-sized gap and there was that echo—though none of them dared say it—of the death of Vera.

Trying to put himself in his father’s shoes (and he was not so good at putting himself in anyone’s shoes), Jack felt that the way his dad had brought about Luke’s death must have had to do with the death of his wife. As if the sudden swift killing of an animal that was only getting sicker and sicker might have cured Michael of all the grief, anger and abandonment gnawing away inside him. But it
hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked for any of them. It just caused more sickness. On top of the cow disease.

When Tom and Dad got back from Barton Field, Luke’s old basket, with the rumpled tartan blanket—still bearing Luke’s scattered hairs, his smell and the dent of his body—remained in its corner in the kitchen. It remained there, untouched, for days, like a judgement on them all. Michael, who’d been able to blow Luke’s brains out, seemed barely able to look at it. No one knew what to do. There was, perhaps, the shared, unspoken thought that Luke should have been buried with his blanket. It would have been the right thing to do. Or at least Luke should have been carried down in comfort to Barton Field in his basket and blanket, instead of being snatched up from them and plonked down in the pick-up like a calf for the abattoir.

But in any case, Jack had thought, Luke would have had a pretty shrewd idea. And with his blanket under him, he’d have had an even shrewder idea. Dad had done the right thing, maybe. There was no nice way of doing some things. There’d been no nice way, when they’d finally got round to it, of carrying out a culling order.

And, anyway, Luke’s basket and blanket, still sitting there, were like a buffer, blurring and softening the difference between Luke’s presence and his absence. A judgement and a comfort, like Vera’s apron.

And it was Tom, again, who finally made the move, with a suddenness, Jack thought, that was just like his father’s when he’d bundled Luke out to the pick-up. No one dared stop or challenge Tom on this occasion either.
He was still laundry chief, and, so far as it went, the housekeeper and the mum of the family. And maybe Dad had never been able to abide it.

Tom gathered up Luke’s blanket, carried it out into the yard and shook it and slapped it. Then he proceeded to wash it, very thoroughly. There was an old zinc tub that suited the purpose. Hand-washing a dog blanket is quite a big and stinky job, but Tom did it very carefully. The stink was Luke’s stink. Only after several washings, rinsings and wringings did he hang the blanket—as he’d hang the bed sheets—on the line in the yard, where it began to dry soon enough in the August warmth. There was no odour of Luke left, just the soapy, airy smell of something that’s been well washed.

But Tom hadn’t finished. When the blanket was still just-damp, he unpegged it and actually took the iron to it, a wet tea towel spread on top, to smooth out the wrinkles. Then he folded it very neatly into a small oblong and, when it was dry, carried it upstairs on the tray of his arms to the Big Bedroom. It was in the Big Bedroom that Mum had made sure that all sorts of things were kept—like that wooden cradle—though they no longer had any use. And Dad couldn’t say, now, ‘I don’t want that, I don’t want that thing up there.’ And he didn’t. Tom put the blanket on the top shelf of the wardrobe, with other old spare blankets, where he knew Vera would have put it.

Then he carried Luke’s basket to the bonfire that regularly smouldered near the muckheap, and set light to it.

Whatever Dad thought about Tom’s actions, he certainly never removed the blanket from the bedroom. He
would even have had the option, on cold nights, of taking it from the wardrobe and spreading it over him. It was only a blanket, after all. In fact, Jack knows that there was one night, a cold, frosty one, when his father did do just this—the only instance that Jack was aware of. But he’s never told anyone.

What would people have thought if he’d tried to point out that he’d never seen it spread on that bed before and that, really, it was a dog’s blanket? If he’d come up with the whole dog story? Someone might even have thought he was only pointing it out because he’d put the blanket there himself. So he’d done the right thing at the time—which in most cases, in Jack’s experience, was to shut up or say very little.

It should be there right now, Jack thinks, on that bed behind him, under that gun. It would only be appropriate. But it was among all the other stuff (from farm machinery to teaspoons) that Ellie had ‘sorted out’—for auction, for sale, for ditching, for sending to charity (charity!), as part of what she called her clean sweep.

‘A clean sweep, Jacko, a clean sweep is what we need.’

Well, it hadn’t included that gun.

When Tom had finally let Jack in on his plan of making off from Jebb—only a few weeks before it was carried out—he’d said that it was on the day that he’d washed and ironed Luke’s blanket that he’d really made up his mind. It was the army for him—if he’d have to be patient for a while yet. The army could take him in. No more
Jebb. By the time he told Jack, he’d long since found out all about it and got the forms that would take effect when he was eighteen. One day, a couple of months after Luke was shot—November and Remembrance Day were coming up—Dad had given him time off and a handful of grudging twenties (it was meant to square things between them perhaps) and told him to go to Barnstaple and get himself a suit. He couldn’t turn up in his school blazer any more. But Tom had actually got the bus to Exeter, bought a suit in an Oxfam shop, kept the cash left over, and walked into a recruitment office.

So now he knew what he’d need to do.

Maybe the army likes a man who not only knows how to shoot, but who knows the value of a blanket, who takes good care of a blanket. Blankets go with the army. Whenever Jack remembered Tom ironing that blanket and folding it up so carefully and holding it, as if it might have been Luke himself, across his arms, there was something about it he could never place. But now he can. It was as if he was handling a flag.

I
T WASN’T LIKE
Gatwick Airport. It
was
like Gatwick Airport. It was even a little like a city—approached through its own ancillary town.

Lodged in Jack’s mind for some days had been the almost calming notion ‘airfield’, suggesting something grassy and forgotten, but this place, he realised at once, was anything but peripheral. This place in the centre of England was a hub, and—clearly—seriously and constantly busy. It had, he soon saw, its own terminal, check-in areas and car-rental facilities and the air had the blast and tang about it of ceaselessly refuelled, long-range activity. So that, though he’d never been anywhere like it before, he was reminded of nothing so much as that first passage, with Ellie, through Gatwick Airport.