At Hawthorn Time (5 page)

But two years on Mytton Park was so much a part of Jamie’s daily life that it was hard to remember a time when his world hadn’t included it. His official job title was Warehouse Operative, though at work he was called a picker and packer; he moved goods around from two in the afternoon to ten at night, five days a week, shifting boxes on and off wire-guided forklifts and conveyors, directed by recondite stock-control systems that made of him a minor component in a vast logistics superorganism that supplied goods to stores almost as they were being bought and fulfilled online orders overnight. Sometimes he tried to imagine the places the lorries took the stock away to, the shops and flats all over the country: people with different accents, different houses, different lives.

He’d bought his first car when he was still at school; what else was there to do? His dad put in a couple of hundred quid and made Jamie earn the rest; he’d used the money he got from the bakery, staying on there after he started at Mytton Park so as to save up for insurance and petrol. His mum had been against it, had said the bike was bad enough and that he’d get himself killed; but for once his dad had overruled her. He’d passed his test first time.

He’d kept the Clio on the drive next to his father’s old Ford Focus and tinkered with it with a boyish obsession everyone said he’d grow out of. But then, when he was just a few weeks’ past his seventeenth birthday, he’d surprised everyone by selling it at a profit to a boy who’d been in the year above and trading up to a Corsa he’d seen in the local paper. It didn’t look like much – in fact, his dad thought it was a bit of a wreck – but Jamie had been adamant that he wanted it. It was why he took every shift he could at Mytton Park – the tyres he wanted cost £500, and after that there were the alloys, the exhaust, the turbo, the audio system; the money he could spend on it, really, was limitless.

‘Are you putting something by?’ his dad had asked him once. ‘Course,’ he’d replied; but he wasn’t. What he didn’t give to his mum for housekeeping or spend on going out went on the Corsa. There was no use in saving up; it wasn’t as though he’d ever be able to afford his own place or anything – not that there was any affordable housing around there anyway, as his mum often pointed out. So it just seemed futile.

Underneath the tarp the car had been undergoing a slow transformation. He could see now that he’d come at it all wrong, of course, sending away for a cheap body kit that turned out to be all but useless bar the sills and bumpers, and spending too much time on a flashy instrument panel. He’d known to leave the custom stencils until last, but it was obvious now that he should have tackled the engine before anything else: one of the new sills was already cracked where he’d knocked the block and tackle onto it a few weeks back. But he was learning.

There were places you could go to show off a car like his. Not just shows and rallies, but service stations and car parks on certain nights. The cars would have the bonnets up, showing off the engine work; some might have their sound systems turned up loud, the whole car bouncing, engine revving, all the lights on and a police car parked up nearby in case of trouble. He’d never been to anything like that – not yet – but he’d heard about such things locally. He wanted to be part of it, though of course it seemed a bit intimidating from the outside. But once he was there the car would speak for him: people would come over and ask if it was his, if he’d done all the work himself, and he’d be able to say yes. He pictured it sometimes: an appreciative nod, a casual question about the exhausts, or the spoiler. ‘I’m James,’ he might say, offering his hand. ‘And what do you drive?’

On Saturdays he still rode the trail bike into nearby Connorville, leaving the village by deep lanes more familiar to him than his own body, and sold doughnuts and leek slices from nine to two. One day, though, he would live somewhere different – ‘somewhere real’ was how he described it to himself. Though how that would come about he couldn’t have said.

‘Dicko! Oi, Dicko!’ – that was Jamie’s line manager Dave, in the glass office in the corner of the vast hangar, swinging around fatly on his chair with a look on his face that usually meant he’d found some choice piece of Internet grot to shock him with – ‘Dicko! Get your arse over ’ere!’

He had been named after his grandfather, James Albert Hirons, yet Jamie Dixon had been Dicko all the way through school and was Dicko again now – although when he left school he had hoped to leave it behind.

‘Here, Dicko,’ said Dave again as Jamie stuck his head round the office door. ‘Look at this –’ and he gestured towards the desk where the local freesheet was spread out over the keyboard. Dave had been a forklift driver until a slipped disc had made of him, in his late forties, a transport clerk. Now he was growing fat, though to Jamie, still as scrawny as a calf, he seemed like a powerhouse of a man.

Jamie stood behind his swivel chair and looked down at the paper, glad at least to see that it wasn’t porn this time. At home, by himself, was one thing, but at work – around other people – it just made him uncomfortable.

‘Lodeshill, it says – ain’t that where you live?’

‘Yeah.’ Jamie reached down to the thin paper, smoothed it so the light from the computer screen hit it more directly:

Harford, Rogers & Sturt

FARM DISPERSAL SALE

Culverkeys Farm, Lodeshill, 7 May.
On behalf of P Harland (deceased)

Sale of 2 Case Tractors, Farm Machinery,
Livestock Equipment, Milking Parlour and Effects,
General Horticultural Equipment and Miscellanea
and Household Contents. Sale to commence
at 11 a.m. prompt.

‘Is that the farm where . . .?’ Dave turned to look up at him, one eyebrow raised.

‘Yeah.’

‘P Harland, it says here. Did you know him?’

‘I – I was friends with their son. Our house is right next to the farm.’

‘Poor kid. He OK?’

‘I don’t know. Him and his sister moved away with his mum six years ago. Nearly seven.’

‘So they’re selling off the farm. What about the land? That going to auction?’

Jamie shrugged. ‘Two months since he died and we’ve still not heard.’

‘Probably go to a developer: new houses and that. Or they might look for coal, or shale gas – you thought of that? Going on all over.’

‘Maybe Mrs Harland will come back and live there, maybe it’s hers now.’

‘Well, you don’t know, these days,’ said Dave, sitting back in the creaking chair. ‘Could be a lot of money in it. You’ll have to wait until the lawyers have finished with it all, I suppose.’

Riding home after his shift that night through the dark lanes, Babb Hill black and invisible to the east, Jamie thought about Culverkeys, about what might happen to it and what it would mean. The cows – seventy or so Holstein-Friesians, mostly milkers plus some calves and in-calf heifers and a Hereford stock bull – had been taken to market a few days after Philip Harland had died, and now the dispersal sale suggested that the farm would not be sold as a going concern; what wasn’t clear yet was what would happen to the land.

When he thought about Culverkeys he pictured the aerial photograph that hung in the hallway at home; a man had knocked on the door one day and told his mother there’d been a plane over, and it had come in the post a few weeks later. In it the village looked like a jumble of grey squares surrounded by green; you could see the main road through it, and the turn-off to Crowmere, and a bit of the Boundway in one corner. And you could see his house at the end of the little cul-de-sac, with its tiny rectangle of garden behind; and beyond that, Culverkeys stretching north and west as far as the big field called the Batch with the oak in it: the green squares with their ghostly crop marks, the clumps of dark trees and the dew pond reflecting the sun like a drop of mercury. It looked, from that height, as though the back gardens on the west side of the cul-de-sac had been carved out of Culverkeys land; and perhaps they had. Perhaps the earth in Jamie’s back garden had once belonged to it.

And he thought about Alex’s father, and the terrible way that he’d died. Jamie had come home after his shift one Friday night back in February to find all the lights on in the bungalow and both his parents in the lounge. The telly wasn’t on and they both stood up when he let himself in; he’d believed, for one heart-stopping second, that his grandfather had passed away.

What he first felt, when his dad told him, was that it was in some way his fault – as if the long, slow process of the Harland family’s unravelling, now concluded with Philip’s death, had been set in motion by Jamie many years ago, tracked to the happy farmhouse from the bungalow somehow like a virus in the treads of his shoes.

It was stupid, he knew. But the feeling had persisted. This wasn’t how things were supposed to have turned out; he and Alex were supposed to have been friends for ever, and the landscape into which they had both been born was something that should never have had to change.

And yet Jamie had never quite had Alex’s optimism, never quite trusted the future in the way that Alex, back then, had seemed to. ‘What will you do when you grow up?’ he’d asked Alex once, back in primary school. Alex had answered for them both: ‘That’s easy. We’ll live here, on Culverkeys. I’ll be the farmer, and you can be the herdsman.’

He’d wanted to believe it, but even then Jamie had known that life was more complicated than that.

5

Nettles, yellow archangel. Rabbits.

It took Jack a long time to cross the motorway.  The Roman road met it at a big junction up ahead but it frightened him, so he went back and tried a narrow turning signposted to a garden centre. Half a mile past the garden centre it became a lane leading to a white water tower of some kind, fenced off and monolithic behind a square yellow sign reading simply ‘A’. The structure bristled with aerials and masts; a Portakabin squatted beside it. Jack’s heart thumped irrationally as he passed.

Then, after a short rise up into the light, the lane leaped over the sudden, roaring river of the motorway. As he crossed it Jack was a brief silhouette to the cars beneath him, a glimpsed figure that left nothing behind but a single white petal blown from his coat that was caught briefly by a windscreen wiper far below him and then given up to the slipstream and the infinity of the wind.

On the other side of the motorway the lane ran alongside a ditch that looked as though it had recently held water, before rejoining the old road north. Behind a derelict pub, once clearly a drover’s inn, two old paddocks were now given over to a machinery and plant hire firm, and a makeshift footbridge made from plastic trench covers crossed the ditch to where an Alsatian barked repetitively at Jack through a steel gate. A brown rat darted to the shadows under the bridge, watched both by Jack and by a buzzard wheeling easily over the old Roman road, its primaries spread like fingers in the late-afternoon sun.

That evening Jack decided to walk on into the night. It wasn’t just about staying unseen, it was a way to immerse himself in a world that most people didn’t know existed. At dusk the countryside came alive, and it was then that Jack felt most at home, as though his true peers were the blunt-nosed badgers in their centuries-old setts, the owls hunting the field margins and the otters slipping quietly upstream. When he died, he sometimes thought, it would be at night. The sky would slowly lighten to dawn, the morning sun would creep up to touch his beard and the still, green folds of his coat, but he would be gone.

But not yet – never quite yet. Spring was advancing, warming the soil, and somewhere up ahead there would soon be asparagus to pick. He was probably a third of the way to Lodeshill at least, and he’d not been stopped so far; as he cut invisibly through the darkened car park of a Travelodge, he allowed himself to imagine, for the first time since leaving the hostel, that he was free.

Later that night, deep in a pine plantation, Jack found a forest ranger’s high seat and climbed up to sit a while. The wind was coming from the south-west and the branches moved around him, whispering, sighing. On the far horizon an electrical storm flickered silently, although the sky above was clearing.

He thought about the ranger he’d known, what, twenty years ago now? He must have been about the age that Jack was now, taciturn but with a feeling for wild places that had rivalled Jack’s own. He had understood the woods he managed like nobody else Jack had ever met, and when he shot deer, or magpies, or trapped grey squirrels, he had done it with a deep and absolute respect.