Landed (18 page)

 

Owen carries Holly into the wood. Josh unties the groundsheets from his father's rucksack and spreads the smaller one on the ground. Owen lays his daughter upon it. In the moonlight he breaks branches and spreads the larger groundsheet over a crosspiece, constructing a simple bivouac. Josh ties down the corners, to bits of wood that Owen, grasping them in his hook, quickly whittles into pegs. Then they spread leafy branches across the triangular opening behind Holly's head, to inhibit a draught through the shelter. Owen leaves the front open.

‘We'll light a fire in the morning,' he says.

Josh seems to be accepting surprises in his stride now. He lies down dreamily, across the groundsheet from his sister. Owen squeezes between them. They lie in silence for a minute, maybe two. Owen becomes aware of a particular, ominous sensation, like something approaching from a distance, outside him, though it is coming from deep inside: he can feel his right hand, his phantom limb, throbbing. Beside him, Josh's breathing is inaudible. Owen assumes he is asleep, so is surprised when he hears his son say, in a hoarse whisper, ‘We're not going to see Nana, are we?'

‘No,' Owen tells him. ‘She's not sick. I had to tell the school that so that they'd let you come with me.'

‘Where are we going?' Josh asks.

‘I'm going to show you where I come from,' Owen says.

Owen waits for the next question, but none comes. Josh was satisfied with his answer. Or more likely exhausted. Owen knows that he himself is too, but there is no way that he could sleep. His right hand is there, though he knows it's not, throbbing at the end of his arm. Phantom limb pain comes at night, always. The sensation alters: now it feels as if it is being shredded by some unseen sadistic device. The pain in his non-existent hand causes him to visualise it: it's all mangled and crushed, as it was in the accident, broken and bleeding, severed nerves exposed, veins, sinews, bone. And still being subjected to further stress. That's what it feels like, now as every evening of his life.

Owen crawls out of the shelter. In his rucksack is a bottle of wine. He bought it from the pub, along with white bread rolls and sausages for the morning. There's a corkscrew on his multi-tool. Holding the neck of the bottle in his hook, squeezing the bottle between his knees, he pulls the cork. He lifts the mouth of the bottle to his lips, and drinks, willing the alcohol to travel swiftly to the end of his right arm. To still the pain.

Owen sits on the ground, a few yards from the shelter. The children are safe. He drinks steadily. In time, when the bottle is empty, he will unstrap his hook, take off his shoes and crawl in between them. He's blearily aware that the dog is in there too, curled up beside Holly.

O
wen wakes, shivering. He is alone in the shelter, the children no longer warming him. In the floor of his skull there is a sediment, of wine dregs, in its roof something pulsates. And there's an odd aroma in his nostrils. Groggy, he sits up. The children are squatting outside, watching him.

Owen blinks slowly, squeezing his eyes shut, then open again. ‘Was I talking in my sleep?'

Josh looks away. ‘Not much,' he says.

Holly crawls back in beside Owen. He opens his arm. ‘I was awake first,' she says proudly.

‘Look,' says Josh, moving aside so that Owen can see. The boy has built a campfire. Of course: the smell of woodsmoke. He must have found the lighter in his father's rucksack, not to mention dry grass, kindling, larger dry pieces of wood: the base of the fire is an amber glow. Now Owen can feel the heat of it.

‘I've done the same you did that time,' Josh says.

‘You've done it well,' Owen says.

‘And sausages,' Holly prompts.

Josh holds up long twigs, each with a sausage skewered on its end. ‘Now you're awake we can cook these,' Josh explains. ‘Place your order, Owen.'

‘Don't call him Owen.' Holly scowls at her brother. ‘Call him sir,' she says, and turns to her father. ‘What would you like for breakfast, sir?' she asks in a sing-song voice. ‘Hot dog?'

‘We've got no ketchup,' Josh says.

‘Guess what?' Owen says. ‘I picked up a few sachets at the services, didn't I? Look in the side pockets of the rucksack.'

 

When Owen stumbles through the trees, he realises it's not just his throbbing head that hurts. His legs ache, muscles that had lain dormant inside his skin were thrown into reluctant action yesterday, and now complain to him in the only language they know, that of pain. How far did the three of them walk? His knees and hips, his back and shoulders, ache too. What was it Ziggy, who used to help Owen with large garden jobs, told him? ‘In Poland we say, After the age of thirty, if you wake up and nothing hurts, this means you're dead.' The children walked as far as he did but seem not to be suffering, not even five-year-old Holly. Owen pees onto the forest floor, damp grass, dry leaves. The sound he can hear repeated deeper into the wood; by a stream, presumably, down the slope ahead of him. Pissing outside is entirely different from using a toilet, seeing one's evacuation drain into the earth. In his clients' gardens Owen preferred to find a secluded spot, behind shrubs, a tree, to discreetly pee, rather than ask to go indoors.

The smell of sausages, roasting. Holly holds one skewer, Josh two, each turning the sausages towards themselves, checking them every few seconds. Owen, bare-chested, straps on his hook. Josh glances round. ‘You could put a holster on one of those straps,' he suggests. ‘He could carry a gun,' he tells his sister.

‘Cool,' says Holly.

‘The name's Bond,' her brother says in a transatlantic grown-up voice. ‘Josh Bond.'

‘My tooth is wobbly, Daddy,' Holly says. With the tips of
the fingers of her free hand she grips the tiny front tooth. It shifts this way and that. Owen winces. ‘My first one,' she says.

 

They eat three hot dogs each, and feed the dog two as well. Owen boils water in his small pan and brews tea, adding more sugar than he'd like until it's sweet enough for Josh to drink a little. Holly prefers juice. The three of them lie on the groundsheet, replete. Stilled. After this breakfast, Owen fancies, he will need no more food. Only the children need eat from now on.

‘I want to talk to Mummy,' Josh says.

‘Me too,' says Holly.

‘She'll be worried.' The boy's eyes cloud. ‘I think I'm getting worried about her.'

‘We'll call her,' Owen says. ‘I promise. We'll pass a phone box.' The words come out of his mouth. ‘We're bound to.'

‘Good,' says Holly.

Josh is unsure. His eyes are momentarily bright then darken beneath his frown. The weather in his head. ‘Okay,' he says.

 

While Josh helps Owen take down the shelter and roll and tie up the groundsheets, Holly looks around, trailed by the dog. She returns holding a length of black plastic piping, some six or seven feet long. ‘It's my telescope,' Holly says. ‘Can you carry it for me?'

Owen takes it from her. ‘Maybe it's a didgeridoo, see,' he says, and blows into it. No sound emerges from the other end. ‘Stay there a minute,' he tells the children. ‘I just want to check something.' Turning, Owen runs into the wood, carrying the tube like a rifle, disappearing down the slope, until the top of his head vanishes.

‘Maybe it's a blowpipe,' Josh tells his sister. ‘We could make poisoned darts.'

‘Yes,' she says. ‘It is mine,' she reminds him, to establish the fact.

The children hear a shout, and look at each other. Josh picks up Owen's rucksack, and they walk in the direction of the call. The slope soon becomes a steep bank. Holly calls out, ‘Dad,' Owen replies, they adjust their direction. He is nearby. They find their father in a stream, just above a stretch that plunges downhill so steeply it's practically a waterfall. He has placed one end of the pipe in the stream; the other is propped up on a long, Y-shaped piece of branch Owen has found, like a thumb stick. Water trickles out onto the ground a foot or two away from the stream, at a height of about five feet.

‘Want to take a shower?' Owen asks. The children frown and shake their heads. ‘Please yourselves, like,' he says. Rummaging through the rucksack he finds a small plastic bottle of shampoo. He removes his clothes, unstraps his hook and steps, bending, beneath the trickle of water. It's freezing cold. He is determined to bear it, and after a minute or two the biting cold is no longer painful, but stimulating. A deep hot bath would be better, and this alfresco shower possesses a puny flow, but still the water is slowly therapeutic to aching flesh. Owen puts shampoo in his hair. He becomes dimly aware of movement, childish commotion, before closing his eyes again, relishing the cold aquatic restoration of his body. Bending his head beneath the water, he lets it rinse the shampoo out. The next thing he knows there is the sound of giggling, and he opens his eyes to find Josh and Holly, naked, have joined him.

He suspects it was at Holly's prompting. She is shrieking as she hops around, not only from the cold, a bedraggled pixie. Josh, circumspect, enjoys himself in a more reticent manner.
The boy's a skinny-ribs, all bony joints, sinewy limb. Holly is more fleshy. She must eat more than her brother.

Owen moves aside so that the children can receive the flow of water upon them. He reaches for the plastic bottle of shampoo and, making them promise to keep their eyes closed, washes the children's hair. He massages the shampoo into their scalps with his fingers. Josh's hair is short, and dry and wiry, and the shampoo lathers readily; Owen cleans his neck and ears as well. He has to empty the bottle into Holly's long blonde hair. It hangs untidily, knotted and sticking to her skin, a heavy rope of hair.

The weak shower slowly rinses the shampoo off; it slides down their pink pale bodies, long rivulets of foam.

Owen dries off Holly first, then Josh. By the time he gets a turn to use their only towel it's wet through. When he pulls on his clothes they stick to his damp, shivering skin. He realises Josh is looking at him, smiling. He stops dressing, looks at the boy, expecting a sardonic observation.

‘You're really clever, Dad,' Josh tells him.

 

They walk out of the wood, skirt a village. On either side of the road there are birds on the aerials of houses, nattering as if to each other across the street. It is spring. A car passes at speed, a thump of music like the vehicle's angry pulse. Then they head off away from the road along a footpath. The brown mongrel dog trails a yard or two behind whoever's at the back.

The sky is grey, and brown. Colours appear to have been drained from the earth. The one vibrant plant is holly. Its red berries are gone now but the deep rich green is visible from a distance – in a hedge, across a field – it renders all the hibernating plants around it pallid by comparison, feeble. Other conifers are dull. All else is dormant. But as they walk Owen
begins to see snowdrops, then yellow and pink primroses, and yellow flowers in a ground-spreading plant. Aconites. It's far too late for them. He looks closer at the trees they pass, sees on the branches of hazel, elder, sycamore, leaves emerging from the wood of branches wrapped up in tight little bunches, like sushi. The new buds. It's as if the whole of spring is showing itself in a moment.

From a large white house in a wood full of daffodils comes an anxious, imperious cry. When Holly asks what the sound is, Josh says, ‘A peacock, of course.' Owen wonders how he knows, when or where he might have seen one. On TV probably.

The path passes through a grove of slender beech. Every trunk is wrapped around by ivy. Owen feels sorry for the trees, knowing what is happening to them. A creeping strangulation.

At times the path becomes pure sand. ‘It's like being at the seaside,' Holly says. A long narrow beach threading its way through a wood.

Another time the path widens, on the ground are large pebbles, rounded stones, as if they're walking along a dry riverbed. On either side are the straggly remnants of last year's bracken and brambles.

The children walk in silence. Holly seems lost in her own thoughts. Josh is more watchful.

Sometimes the path is cut deep between banks, it's old, much older than the houses and roads, the pastures and arable fields around it. Old paths through the forest. At times they leave the path and walk along a lane a while before finding a new path westward, reconnecting to a network that Owen begins to visualise criss-crossing this island, behind, underneath, intersecting yet apart from all the monuments and machinery of civilisation. He wonders whether his brain, in constructing the image, does so with a similar network of pathways and
connections. The image is a liberating one. A person might choose to be a wandering soul and be able to manage it, here, on these ancient paths. Kept open by whom? Owen wonders. An army of council workers and volunteers placing bridges over streams and stiles over fences, replacing gates and putting up signposts pointing the way here, and there. What a job, he thinks. That's what he should have done if only he could have taken orders; surely he'd have been happy to, directed to a stretch of path with a map, and a trailer full of fence posts and wooden planks, wire and tools.

‘I'm hungry,' Holly says, and Owen is surprised to see from his watch that it's after noon already. They sit on a fallen tree trunk looking out and up across a steeply rising field. The children drink orange juice, eat apples. It must have been the perfect temperature for walking: now that they've stopped Owen sees goose pimples appear on Holly's bared arms; Josh shivers. They pull on their jackets. In the field in front of them a large brown horse appears. It raises its head and lifts its tail and there, right ahead and above them, prances along the high ridge. It wishes to show them that this is precisely how a thoroughbred trots, with just this much dignity and poise.