Fresh Fields (11 page)

He was sitting in the kitchen, eating, when Mr. Coles came bursting in.

“What the hell have you been doing to those pigs?” he yelled. “You've cut the beggars to pieces!”

The youth was too surprised and frightened to speak. He just sat with his mouth half-full and looked up blankly.

“I'm calling the police!” Mr. Coles continued. “Don't think I won't!”

The old lady came in and asked what on earth the matter was.

“He's mutilated those pigs!”

“What do you mean by ‘mutilated' them?”

“He's cut them to pieces! I'm getting the police in!”

“You're not doing any such thing until we know what on earth has happened,” the old lady said firmly. She turned to the youth. “Do you know what Mr. Coles is talking about?”

“No,” he said, gulping the lump of food down.

“What!” snapped Mr. Coles. “You sit there and say that? Come with me!”

He took the youth by the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him from the chair and out of the kitchen. He flicked the torch on and began to march him down towards the pigs. The youth could hear the old lady calling to Mr. Coles not to go off the handle and to listen to what the boy had to say.

The pigs came grunting and snuffling to the fence and Mr. Coles shone his torch on them. The youth half-expected to see animals with legs and tails and ears lopped off and blood everywhere. But there was nothing visibly wrong.

“Look at that!” Mr. Coles barked, shining the torch onto the back of one of the pigs. The youth leant forward and looked. There was a pattern of little cuts across the skin of the back. He realised what they were. They were cuts made by the edge of the trowel when he whacked the pigs away from the trough to give himself a space to pour the mush. “Is that your doing, or isn't it?”

“Yes,” the youth muttered.

“And you've done the same to all of them? All their backs are cut to pieces? Do you admit that fact?”

“Yes,” the youth muttered.

“What did you do it with?”

“The trowel.”

“And what the hell possessed you? Do you mutilate dumb animals for fun?”

The youth was wondering how he could have failed to notice the cuts before.

“I asked you a blasted question!” Mr. Coles yelled.

The youth was feeling so shaky that he could hardly keep upright on his legs. But the question offended him. Of course he didn't mutilate animals for fun! What did Mr. Coles take him for? There'd been a reason for whacking those pigs. It might have been the wrong thing to do—it was the wrong thing to do, he saw that now—but it wasn't fair to ask him if he mutilated animals for fun.

“I was just trying to keep them back from the trough,” he said, in what he thought was a reasonable explanation.

“What!”

“When I was feeding them.”

“What!”

“I didn't know the trowel was cutting them.”

“You're a bloody maniac!” Mr. Coles shouted. “You're sacked! I want you off the place first thing in the morning! Be ready to leave at seven o'clock.”

He walked away waving the torch and then called back: “I haven't decided yet whether I'll bring the police into it. I'm going to check all the other animals in the morning, to see if you've been harming them, then I'll decide. But if I decide not to call the police you can consider yourself bloody lucky!”

The youth stood there, still shaking, with the pigs grunting and snuffling horribly in the dark beside him.

He wasn't able to sleep that night and at first light he saw Mr. Coles going around looking at the horses and cows and dogs and chooks. At seven o'clock Mr. Coles was waiting beside the ute. The youth got in and sat with his bag across his knees. The old lady came to the back door and waved and called out: “Never mind! Never mind! We all make mistakes! You'll kick on!”

As they pulled away from the house, the youth saw one of the curtains move and Mrs. Coles's face there for a moment.

Mr. Coles stopped the ute in the main street of Balinga. He handed the youth an envelope.

“That's what you're owed,” he said. “To the penny.”

The youth got out and the ute drove off.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The youth returned to the city early next morning. He was tired and hungry and had almost no money left after the train fare. He took a bus to Bankington to see his mother and tell her he'd been sacked and didn't know what to do. He approached the Miami Guesthouse cautiously, not wanting to run into Mr. Stavros. After watching from across the street, he went into the lobby. Mrs. Stott was there.

“Well, hello,” she said. “What brings you here?”

He replied he just needed to see his mother for a minute.

“She doesn't work here anymore,” Mrs. Stott told him. “She left a week ago. Actually Mr. Stavros thought she'd be happier elsewhere. Didn't she let you know?”

Even in his confusion the youth registered that his mother had got the sack.

“Where did she go?” he asked.

“We've no idea, actually. She said she'd phone and let me know a forwarding address, but she hasn't so far.”

He stood completely at a loss.

“Didn't you go to the bush to work?”

“Yes.”

“And now you're back?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if your mother gets in touch, I'll let her know you were here. Where are you staying?”

“I'm not sure yet.”

“Well, phone me in a day or two and I'll let you know if she's called.”

Mr. Stavros was getting out of his car in the front courtyard. The youth hurried through the back of the lobby and along the passage to the backyard and into the lane. He ran to the end and turned the corner. He imagined Mr. Stavros behind him, angry-faced.

When he was a couple of blocks away from the Miami he came to a park with a duck pond and some benches. He sat down to rest his shaking legs, glancing over his shoulder every few moments to reassure himself that he was in the clear. He looked at the water of the duck pond reflecting the clouds, at the grass, the trees, the paths, the rubbish bins, the bits of litter on the ground. Traffic passed.

It was all strangely distant and horribly close and real at the same time. The youth would have gone into the Diestl mood to make himself impervious to everything, but the Diestl mood was all used up for the moment. It was like an inner battery that needed time to recharge. He wished he could just go to sleep and not wake up until the battery was full again.

He counted his money. He had enough for a couple of meals. He thought he should maybe eat something now to keep himself going. He went across to a shop and bought a sausage roll with tomato sauce. As he came out of the shop a bus went past and he suddenly thought that he'd need bus fares, so had better be even more careful about what he spent. Then he wondered where he would need to go by bus and realised there was nowhere. He went back to the bench and ate the sausage roll and spilled sauce down the front of his shirt. Then he began to walk in the direction of the city centre.

The shop windows interested him as always and he mused to himself about a dozen and one things—an ornate lamp in an antique shop, a big photo display of a Bavarian beer festival at a travel agency, rockmelons piled up in a pyramid, ladies' fashions, kittens for sale. You could have a lovely time, walking for miles past shop windows, thinking your own thoughts. It was people who spoiled it, all the people walking in the opposite direction and giving you the Oncoming Look. The youth wished there were one-way footpaths, like one-way streets, with everyone going the same way and nobody having to look anyone else in the face.

He got to the downtown area and stood on a street corner for a long time unable to decide which direction to take. He thought he should probably go back to the main railway terminal. There was no reason to go there, except that the atmosphere was always tinged with human distress and your own distress didn't seem quite so pressing. He decided to walk in the opposite direction.

He wandered into the business area. There were big old-fashioned sandstone buildings with heavy timber doors and brass plates, and there were ultra-modern ones with glass fronts that let you see right into the lobbies. There were banks and insurance companies and government departments. They had an air of weight and importance. The youth wondered what went on inside them. The people in the street were the kind of people who worked in those places, confident-looking men in nice suits and well-groomed young women who left a whiff of perfume behind in the air when they walked past. There were posh cafes where those kinds of people sat having lunch. The youth stood outside one of the cafes—it was called a bistro—and watched some of them through the glass. At a corner table just inside the window sat an elegant blonde woman and a middle-aged man. The woman had a tiny bowl of lettuce in front of her and was picking at it with a fork, using the fork to make graceful motions in the air as she spoke. The youth had noticed her because she had a slight look of Grace Kelly. He watched them talking and wondered what it would be like to be one of those people. He tried to imagine himself going in and sitting down and ordering something. If he was invisible he would go in and stand next to the blonde woman and the man and listen to their conversation. He often thought about what he'd do if he was invisible. Sometimes he imagined the sex things he could do, like perving at girls in the shower, but mostly he thought how being invisible would mean you could learn about the world and the way things were. You could go unseen into these big important buildings, for instance, and learn how the world operates and the secrets of everything.

The youth realised the couple was staring at him through the glass. They looked annoyed. The man made a sharp gesture with his hand and said something. He said it with very clear lip movements, the way you would if speaking to a deaf person. It was “Get away!” The youth hurried off, feeling shaken. He thought he was watching them from the corner of his eye in a manner they wouldn't notice. It was shocking to find out that people were aware of you when you didn't think they were. It made you feel completely unsafe.

After a while he came to an intersection. On one corner was an imposing building with a row of columns along its front and the words
STATE
LIBRARY
carved on it. The youth suddenly thought of King Harold and the Anglo-Saxons. The library would have lots of books about that. Here was the chance to get the whole story! He crossed the intersection and went up a grand flight of steps to the columns and then to a set of huge bronze doors that stood open.

There was a lobby with marble floors and a high elaborate ceiling and a wide staircase. The youth normally would have been intimidated by the grandness of it, but thinking of King Harold had given him courage. He went through the lobby into a reading room and stood amazed at the size of it. There were four levels of bookcases running right around the walls and the top three levels had balconies with quaint narrow stairs leading to them. There were about twenty long, heavy, polished tables where people sat reading or writing or just leaning back with their hands behind their heads. Big skylights in the roof made the light almost like daylight, except beautifully softened and quietened. And there was a strong aroma of the paper and ink and binding of so many books, and of so much old polished wood. He went to a chair at one of the emptiest of the big tables and sat down and looked around for a few minutes taking note of how people were behaving. Everyone was quiet and minding their own business. The only talking was an occasional low murmur from the people at the central counter. The youth began to relax. He left his bag on the chair and went to the nearest shelf and scanned the spines of the books. It was the Botany section. He went along the shelves, looking for History. He climbed one of the quaint sets of stairs and wandered along the balcony and looked out over the wide expanse of the room and breathed in the calm air and the good aroma.

He turned to the shelf behind him and saw a set of identical blue-covered books. They were the complete works of Charles Dickens. The youth had never read any Dickens, but like most people he knew about a few of the famous characters. There was Oliver Twist, for example, who asked for more. And there was Mr. Scrooge who hated Christmas and got visited by ghosts. He took one of the books out and opened it at random and read a bit:

 

I was so young and childish, and so little qualified—how could it be otherwise?—to undertake the whole charge of my own existence, that often, in going to Murdstone and Grinby's of a morning, I could not resist the stale pastries put out for sale at half price at the pastry cook's doors, and spent in that the money I should have kept for my dinner. Then I went without my dinner . . .

The youth leant more comfortably on the balcony rail and adjusted the pages to the light and read more.

 

. . . two pudding shops, between which I was divided, according to my finances. One was in a court close to St Martin's church—at the back of the church—which is now removed altogether. The pudding at that shop was made of currants, and was a rather special pudding; but it was dear, twopennyworth not being larger than a pennyworth of more ordinary pudding. A good shop for the latter was in the Strand, somewhere in that part which has been re-built since. It was a stout pale pudding, heavy and flabby, and with great flat raisins in it, stuck in whole at wide distances apart . . .

 

He stayed on the balcony reading random passages from
David Copperfield
until his legs became tired from standing, and then he took the book back to his seat and read for another long while. He'd never been so held by any book before. It was so real, so true, so fully understandable. It was understandable even when you didn't quite know the meaning of some things, like what the “Strand” was exactly. There was so much that was funny and cosy and quaint, and yet there was this awful bleakness all through it too. You could feel the cold of that world and the pinch of misery in its guts.