At Hawthorn Time (4 page)

As he passed under, and then away from, the big jets’ flight paths far overhead he filed his knowledge of them somewhere beyond explaining, along with the invisible lines of lost causeways or underground streams. Once, there had been none at all for more than three days, and it had troubled him so much that he had taken refuge in a derelict lock-keeper’s hut by a canal as still as glass until the aeroplanes had appeared again.

Now he tried to prospect his way ahead for a path he knew had once been there. To walk its lost route would be to slog across a vast ploughed field in which a distant tractor dragged a disc harrow back and forth, its clanking roar borne to him intermittently as the breeze shifted. He would be exposed; but not to honour it felt to him a betrayal, even here.

Deep down the earth was still heavy with moisture, but a few days’ sun had dried the surface to a friable crust so that it gave softly underfoot like half-baked sponge. Jack set out, crossing the shallow ridges at an angle that made stepping from one to another something he had to concentrate on, the gap between them not quite long enough for his loping stride. In the warm soil around him flints gleamed dully or glowed like bone. He knew of field edges, elsewhere, that were piled high with them, the necessary harvest of generations of children and women. And yet still the earth sent them up.

Above Jack red kites wheeled and tumbled into sudden dogfights, and somewhere to his right the sun flashed off the windscreens of the traffic on the Roman road. A cuckoo called, and Jack froze, scalp prickling, until the soft note came again, settling lazily over the field like a pair of falling feathers.
Summer’s coming in
, he thought, turning a coin over in his pocket and grinning to himself. It felt like a good omen. He would write it in his notebook later on.

In a small copse stinking of ramsons he stopped to eat. He’d netted a rabbit the night before and there was a late cabbage in his pack he’d filched from a back garden in one of the dormitory towns he’d passed through; it was a shame he had no onion, but with the wild garlic it was enough for a simple stew.

Rabbits were easy to catch, mostly because of their curiosity: if he sat very still at dusk, downwind of a warren, and made the sound of a crying kit he could often make the does take notice. If he kept it up they’d creep closer, eyes wide, ears twitching. His net was made from knotted string; years back he’d been taught how to make them by an old poacher with pockets full of wriggling ferrets. Now he was never without one. Flung fast enough, with a flick of the wrist, he could entangle a coney into a knot of kicking feet and cord. He felt no compunction about taking what he needed to survive, though when he came across an animal in a snare he’d always free it, if he thought it might live; and he’d bend the snare into uselessness and leave it where he’d found it, a lesson to whoever might come.

Coneys were easy, and he could take squirrels, too. But he wouldn’t touch hares. They were wise and unearthly, and he felt sure that they knew something about him, something that he didn’t even know himself.

Early one morning in a meadow somewhere – Stinsford, was it, or Selborne? It was hard to remember now – he’d been sitting quietly with his legs stretched out as the world slowly grew light, watching an orange sliver of sun needle, then dazzle, through a silhouette of far trees. Next, the sound of thundering feet – and before he’d had a chance even to look round a brown hare had cleared him in one leap and disappeared. A half-second later another hare appeared in pursuit, but this one braked hard and came to a stop just short of him. Jack flinched, froze; and for a long moment they regarded one another, the hare’s tall ears swivelling, its beautiful, gold-flecked eye taking his measure. And then, quite calmly, it seemed, it had left, and Jack had let out the breath he hadn’t known he was holding.

After he had eaten the stew he took his clothes off and dunked them in a metal cattle trough fed by a hose and ball tap. He dunked his head, too, opening his eyes underwater to see the mosquito larva twisting in the bubbles and shafts of sun. The water was icy cold and smelled faintly of iron, and reminded him, for some reason, of the milking shed at Culverkeys Farm in Lodeshill: the patient cows in the clanging stalls, the plastic teat cups tight on the udders, the warm, white milk filling up the steel tank.

Perhaps, if he got to Lodeshill and the asparagus wasn’t ready, one of the farms would need a relief milker. Fieldwork was what he wanted, but dairy work was OK – just as long as he could keep moving around, as long as he didn’t have to stay in one place for too long.

He wrapped himself in his sleeping bag and spread his clothes out to dry in the afternoon sun. Then he took a plastic razor from his pack and began to drag it roughly over his scalp, feeling it catch here and there on old nicks and scars. Just before he began on his beard, he stopped and rinsed the razor out in the trough. Perhaps he’d let it grow a while this time.

4

Ribwort plantain, common bugle, bird’s foot trefoil.

This was Jamie’s earliest memory: a magnet drawn dripping from black water on a rope. His grandfather’s strong hand prising a bright blade from it; the red drops hanging from his fingertips. And then, as he shook it off, the old man’s blood landing warm on Jamie’s lips and streaking the back of his hand when he tried to wipe it away.

They had called it dipping, and looking back it seemed as though they had done it every weekend – although of course he knew it couldn’t have been so. The magnet was huge, like a drum; God only knew where his grandfather had got it from. They’d lower it into the water together, see what it brought up: coins, keys, rusty sections of iron wheels, and once a broken knife, what was left of the blade notched and vicious still. Sometimes the magnet would catch on something really big – too big to be recovered. Then, his grandfather would let him hold the rope, let him feel the weight at its end as it shifted, sending bubbles up to the surface: the only sign of something long lost that they would ever see.

The old man, of course, had thrown everything back. ‘She’d go spare,’ he’d say, shaking his head ruefully; but even as a very small boy Jamie had known that his nanna Edith had died giving birth to his mum.

They did all the rivers around Lodeshill and Ardleton, and a couple of canals; they did the lake that had at one time been part of the grounds of the Manor House, and the old tin workings on the slopes of Babb Hill. He fell in there, once; he could still remember the shock of the icy water and how his flung arm made desperate contact with the rough, wet rope that held the magnet, how his grandfather hauled him from the pond like a fish onto the muddy bank. It hadn’t put him off; in fact, there was something about how little it had mattered, how unconcerned his grandfather had been about his skinned knee and wet clothes, that had comforted him. It felt as though, when the old man was there, nothing could go wrong; not really.

Jamie never asked his granddad why he did it, why he dredged the water for finds and then threw them back. He just liked going out with him, and it was enough. The little boy holding tight to the crossbar; his grandfather behind him, pedalling. His strong arms around him on either side.

Jamie was a Lodeshill boy; he’d been born nineteen years before in the overheated bedroom of a 1950s bungalow whose scrappy garden bordered Culverkeys Farm. He had begun to arrive at the Queen Elizabeth one still and bone-cold November day, then had seemed to change his mind; his parents were sent home, told to come back once the contractions were more regular. He waited, so the family story went, to be born in Lodeshill, like his grandfather before him, and back at the bungalow had slipped out quickly and silently onto the duvet cover as his mother wept and next door’s cows sympathised in the byre.

His father worked at a landfill site a few miles out of the village; his mother was a dinner lady at the local primary and also cleaned at the Green Man, and at the village hall and sometimes the Bricklayer’s Arms in Crowmere. But a lot of the time she didn’t work at all, because she didn’t want to see anyone; then she just sat on the settee ordering things off QVC that she would return a few days later, or going on eBay for her doll collection.

Five of the dolls sat on the windowsill in the lounge, while two – his mum’s favourites – sat on a pouffe in the corner of his parents’ bedroom; there were more in a box in the loft. Jamie had more or less stopped seeing them, though when he was younger it had been part of why he didn’t ask any kids from school over to play. ‘It’s just a hobby, son,’ his dad said.

Even when she was OK, which she mostly was at the minute, she wasn’t like other people’s mothers. It wasn’t just her weight; you had to be careful not to upset her, you had to think about what to say so you didn’t set her off. It had got easier as he got older, it was more or less second nature now; he could tell how she was feeling by a million different things: what she put on in the morning, the way she spoke, how long it took before she replied. But it was hard to explain to people outside the family, and even he and his dad didn’t really mention it. When things were OK he preferred not to think about it, and when they weren’t he didn’t want to bring it up.

For a long while, though, he’d felt part of another family as well as his own. Until they were both thirteen Alex Harland had lived next door, on Culverkeys, and they had been inseparable. The farmhouse was so different to home: always bright, busy, and full of voices. Alex had a little sister, Laura, whom he would alternately tease and ignore; Mr and Mrs Harland talked about things loudly while they were having their tea, like what was on the news and the price of cattle feed, and during the day a string of farmhands came and went. To Jamie their family life seemed loud and exciting and uncareful; he never stopped feeling wary of its unpredictable ebb and flow, but at the same time, it was as though something in him loosened when he was there. For instance, once he’d dropped a mug in their kitchen and the handle had broken off, and he’d turned and held up the pieces to Alex and his mum and said, ‘I can’t get a handle on it,’ just like that, and everyone had laughed. He could never have done that at home.

Culverkeys Farm itself – the fields and woods, the stream, the barns and tracks and dew pond – had been a shared territory, something he and Alex had possessed completely and with all the thoughtless complacency of childhood. And then, when Jamie was thirteen, Alex and Laura had been taken away, and everything –
everything
– had changed.

He had always struggled a bit at school, but without Alex to keep up with things went downhill. It bored him, it was stupid; there was no point to half the stuff they made you do. The teachers just said he just wasn’t very academic, whatever that meant, and when he left, at sixteen, it wasn’t with many qualifications to his name.

By that time he had a Saturday job in a bakery but no real idea of what came next. He’d spent that first summer kicking about the bungalow, playing computer games in his room while flies buzzed against the window, and watching TV with his mum. The meadows around the village were mown and the hay baled or wrapped for silage; other families went away on holiday and came back tanned; a new school term began. The gap in the hawthorn hedge he’d once used as a short cut to the farmhouse filled in and grew over; meanwhile Jamie felt stranded, becalmed, as though his limbs were weakening or the air around him growing clotted and slow. When he locked himself in the bungalow’s tiny bathroom and made himself come into the handbasin there was no excitement in it, or even desire. He put work into not catching sight of himself in the mirror.

His dad just wanted him to get work, any work, but although he made a CV and looked at the job websites every morning there wasn’t much to be had. Eventually someone had tipped him off about Mytton Park, a huge distribution centre just off the motorway. The next day Jamie had put on his school trousers and a shirt and rode his 125cc trail bike there, puttering in amid the fumes from articulated lorries and following what felt like several miles of signs to the site office where a sour-faced personnel woman had him fill out several forms before telling him, to his absolute and lasting surprise, that his first shift would be in two days.

The scale of Mytton Park had been a shock. All his life he’d lived less than a dozen miles away, yet in the seven years since it had been built he had never known it was there. Its blank, windowless sheds covered, so the site map said, nearly four hundred acres, yet its low, grey mass was hidden from the motorway by trees, and while lorries may have served it like worker ants, at ground level – at deer and boy and village level – the countryside in which it squatted seemed almost to have absorbed the affront, to have agreed not to speak of it. Almost.