Common Ground (12 page)

‘Jills know lay a' land,' he said. ‘Every rut, blade and furrow.' He dropped his dog-end and dug it into the earth with the heel of a boot. ‘Know it better than owt else. E'en old buggers like me.'

I'm thinking of his words as I again cross over into the edge-land. It's getting on for mid-afternoon but with the sun out for a full twelve hours each day now there's time enough to catch a hare. I've a notion of witnessing that moment again, that bubbling up from the earth. With thoughts of new life running through my mind, I want to see the myth made flesh, the old magic up close.

The windows of the houses along the old railway flash with light. A dog barks without break. There is the growl of traffic from the Ripon Road. Horns are unleashed and angry air brakes hiss at each other. Ringing through the housing estates' roads and cul-de-sacs is the twisted metallic melody of an ice-cream van, a sinister-sounding ‘You Are My Sunshine' in a tortured staccato. It's strange to think hares would tolerate this and remain on ground less than half a mile from the encroaching urban sprawl. But they do. This is their turf. Like the farmer said:
Every rut, blade and furrow.

Bilton Beck's wooded gully is clogged with farm sacks, branches and litter, but here the engine noise and Mr Whippy jingles become lost in the sound of partially obstructed water channels and air-blown beeches. Shadows of larch pitch over fallen walls now devoid of purpose, velveted with moss. This rift demarks another empire. Just east of its treeline, close to where I saw the hare on the equinox, I sit on the muddy edge of a field. It seems a good place. Here the ground curves away in rows of spring crops, neat green tramlines interspersed with sandy belts of earth. They ripple up to a long bank at the field's top where a scrappy hedge of hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel hides a stray gorse flecked with yellow, coconut-scented flowers. Up close, between my clay-clodded boots, the wheat looks like cosmetic hair plugs sprouting in the precise rows left by a mechanical seed dispenser. Each stem is barely ten centimetres tall. High enough, though, to hide a hare.

Actually there are two, fifty metres apart, hunkered either side of a telegraph pole. Each time the breeze riffles the crops I pick out what appear to be the tops of stones or mounds of earth turned by a plough. Through binoculars they resolve into haunches of folded leg or pelvic bone felted with a fur the colour of the underlying soil. Then they're gone again, into the green sea. It's what Freud termed
unheimliche
– uncanny – this sitting here watching the endless becoming and vanishing in the mud and shoots. Occasionally one of them – a Jack, I presume – lifts itself onto legs that are too gangly for walking. He turns in a small circle and drops back into his form. A hare's movement seems plagued by the flicks and judders of restrained energy, as if carrying an ache that can only be relieved by running. The rest of the time it's as though they're absorbing the earth's energy, tapped into a ley line, shivering with pent-up static.

At 5.20 p.m. exactly, the angles of the field and descending sun form lakes of light that spread across the land's surface. A secret message is communicated. On heat, the Jill releases pheromones, which act as a starting pistol for the Jack. He rises, periscopes his head and then whips towards her. Watch a hare run and you see how closely they resemble deer taking flight. An old English name,
stobhert
, means ‘stag of the stubble' and it is well earned. Ears folded back into the long cone of a speed-cyclist's helmet, their acceleration is extraordinary; hares can reach thirty-five miles per hour flat out but she is ready for him and rebuffs his advances. They roll wildly for a moment and then she is free. Somehow she materialises further up the field, covering a distance of twenty metres or so in a second. He catches her and they circle. This time they come together on hind legs in a flurry of boxing blows, punches and flailing paws. Soon it looks more dance than fight, like they're holding hands and spinning the other around, the way kids do in a playground. Tumbling and chasing they cover the width of the field three times, then just when I think she's tested his mettle enough, they both stop dead. Ears prick up. Eyes stare. Bulging, yellow, goat eyes. Sex is suddenly off the cards; threats take priority and there's trouble brewing. I can't discern the cause, but both are spooked by something and scatter north, sinking into the wheat sea, ears flat along their bodies, heads down in the earth. At the point they disappear they are ten metres apart. That's my guess anyway. With a hare you can never be sure.

I wait a while longer with the sun on my face but know they've already crawled back to their imprints, pushing their bodies into the soil, fusing with the land. A pair of buzzards circle over the holloway calling in shrill two-tone cries. A final whistle. Crows float up to mob them and I move too, heading back the way I came down the gully and along the trickling beck, turning east where it widens to meet the Nidd. Wild garlic grows in ranks of massed spears here and I fill my coat pockets with the stuff. Around the trees near the old weir a stronger smell drifts. Sharp and smoky. I know it before I see it. In the middle of the strewn foundations of the vanished mill a fresh campfire smoulders with half-burned green ash branches. There's no one about, but it's unsettling to discover it in the same place I found the fire remains at the beginning of the year, positioned specifically to look over the river. It suggests a more regular habitation. The Nidd splits over the weir like Brylcreem-parted black hair, then cascades onward noisily, cloaking all other sound. I couldn't hear if someone was returning until we stood face to face with each other. So I leave. Quickly. Amid a thick carpet of dog mercury, I step over plastic bags filled with tins of ravioli and vegetables. A threadbare rucksack is stashed by an alder. Squirming out of its top are the crumpled brown folds of a sleeping bag.

The smallest bedroom at the back of our house has been dark every morning since we moved here. Now with the sun up early in the east and high over the roofs by 7 a.m., the first thing I see en route to brewing coffee is a sunbeam illuminating the stairwell. Bleary-eyed, I push open the crack in the door and enter a room of light. Normally it wouldn't register but for two things: this is the room we're decorating to be the baby's nursery and on its wall is a foot-high sticker, a Beatrix Potter rabbit sitting side-on to face the rising sun. I don't see a rabbit today, though; I see a hare.

Early morning and dusk are the best times to be out. It's when they feed. I take the long way round, avoiding the wood and its incumbent, and set up a position under the grey of morning. My eyes are drawn to the treeline and an illusion of more campfire smoke, but it's just wisps of mist. Dew hangs off the dandelions. The haze slowly lifts. I take root and sense the air of loneliness that hangs over all modern arable land, the absence of people exaggerated by the remnants of unremembered existences, the broken bits of pottery and rusted horseshoe fragments poking from the soil. Away to the south the 9V-battery shape of Bilton's St John the Evangelist Church tolls its solitary bell. Stay quiet and still for long enough and in an animal's eyes you become field. Young rabbits bounce out from a hedge and run after each other in play, startling me. Two older does sit on the perimeter barely three metres away, fixing down everything in their motion-sensor vision.
Move and we'll be gone
. I keep my head still but angle my eyes to see they have taken up cooperative positions – one at a right angle to the other so they're covering every cardinal point. Every possible direction of approach falls into their beams. Neither is concerned when a line of red-legged partridge slides single-file past their noses to feed.

Ahead, where the wood extends along the river, scratched lines of silver birch and the reddish-brown puffs of trees shake loose their rooks onto the fields, making space for perfect new leaves. Briefly, I'm sure I see a human face in the shrubby ground foliage, a waist-height tangle of messy hair and earthy face staring out over the fields towards me. Somebody crouching. I feel the quickening thud of my heartbeat, blink and raise my binoculars, but it has already slunk back into the shrubs. The morning assumes a brown-yellow light, like opening your eyes underwater in the North Sea, and the rooks swarm upwards over the trees and away in clouds, bouncing, separating, fretting each other, beak to tail feather. Their calls are the harsh, chippy, shocked sound of a wooden peg being malleted into a wooden beam. When I look back again the rabbits have gone. A stoat running along the field edge searching for kits has worried the warren. It comes within a metre, its slick fur the colour of old engine oil. I lie down, eye-level with it, and imagine slipping with it between burrows, molehills and stems.

Sun and sky appear high, removed, as though behind a pane of glass. The hares grow out of the soil to nibble the wheat and mate along the limits of the field. I watch them long enough to lose all sense of time, and then make my mind up to get nearer. Sliding onto all fours I crawl along one of the margins between the crops. Immediately their alert, doggish faces turn and fix me. Twitch, twitch, twitch … then they disperse and go to ground. I cover ten, twenty, thirty metres. Soon I'm closer than I've ever been to a hare. Whispering distance. Hunter-close. The Jack is facing away from me, invisible but for the finest edge of fur amid the green; I'm almost upon him when I cross the invisible tolerance line and he springs and runs, swerving and banking but still moving fast enough to change shape.

I'll bet you've never seen a hare in Caffè Nero, have you? It's not what you expect when calling in for a morning coffee. Here I am, though, John Joseph Longthorne, born right here in Harrogate in 1945, sitting in the corner and taking an hour and a half over my large Americano sweetened with four sugars. People always stare.
What's he doing in here?
It's the same routine: a quick look, a quizzical frown, and then the embarrassed turn back to the low-fat blueberry muffins. All over in a second. I'm used to it. To be honest, it's not my face that draws attention so much nowadays, the beard hides my lip pretty good; it's more the state of my clothes. They worry I smell. The girls that work here are never too far behind me with the deodorising room spray, but I wash every day; my shirt, jumper and trousers get a good going-over once a week in fair weather, rubbed up with soapwort –
Saponaria officinalis
– and sun-dried in bushes. All right, I can never get them that bleached-bone clean my mother used to – some things you can't wash away – but it's better than the cancer chemicals people lather all over themselves these days. And I mean the men too. Vile narcissism. A sign of the times, I suppose.

Look at these two coming in covered in the gloop, these ladies backing in with pushchairs. They make a beeline for a nearby table before they see me, but then regret the decision. Not much choice today, though. A silent conference via tight-lipped expressions, the raised eyebrows and reluctant agreement. I smile and blow into my coffee. I could say something, but I don't. No point making them feel bad.

‘Love the hair, Lu, really nice,' says one as they park bums and set down extra-large caramel lattes. ‘You pleased with it?'

‘Be better if this weather wasn't so shit. It's messed it all up.' Lu jams a bottle into her baby's mouth as she talks, dragging her other hand through her fringe. The other unwraps hers from a muffler. It wakes and cries, all pink cheeks and wide, blue eyes.

‘I know. I thought spring were here when I woke. Sun shining, blue sky. Tanning time, I thought. Then this. Pissing down.' Another bottle appears from a bag straight into a mewing mouth. ‘Here y'ar, sweetie.'

‘Spring, my arse.'

‘But that's it, Lu, that's what I mean. Good as it gets. S'why I hate England. Bring on Australia. Three weeks and I'm out of here …'

Their voices are lost in the scented, cloudy, flouncing-in of a wealthy woman, all Clarins, camelhair coat and entitlement. I know her. Hers are the tips in the coffee-bean-filled cup by the till. Pound a day. Minimum. Always dropped in a stack of twenty-pence pieces. Probably keeps them in a change jar like some folks keep coppers. She throws me money sometimes too when I'm warming up in a doorway, but only if she's shopping with her friends. She shakes her head as she rounds the old couple asking what ‘pesto' is by a line of plastic-wrapped sandwiches.

‘Usual,' she says to the barista tending the almond croissants, sliding five twenty-pence pieces into the cup. ‘It's just a quick pick-me-up. Heading home soon … '

Maria, the smiley assistant from Andalusia, tries a reply in garbled Spanglish. The woman's eyes linger on her lip piercings as she listens.

‘Hay hom, ju say? No wor today, huh?'

‘Mmmm?' says the woman.

Maria has another go. ‘Ju hab no yorb? No yorb? Ju lucky,
si
?' Maria says
yorb
when she means job. She always asks me the same question.

‘Oh job.' The woman cottons on eventually. ‘No. I've too much on running the house. Shopping done for the week now, though, so … '