Landed (21 page)

‘Feel like I'm looking down on the stars,' Josh says.

‘Yes,' Holly concurs. ‘Me too.'

‘Dad.' Josh chuckles. ‘Help. I'm going to fall off the ground.'

‘You hang on, boy,' Owen says. ‘Don't let go.' He imagines them dropping, one after another, like parachutists, free-falling up into the night sky, holding hands as they plummet, the three of them, on, into the stratosphere, out of the earth's orbit, freezing fast, painlessly, falling into space.

 

There's still, Owen reckons, fifty or more crooked miles to the border. Can I order, cajole, carry my children undetected, find food along the way? I must honour the plan that came to me in my moment of awakening. We shall go to the hill in the west.

 

Inside the stone room Holly lies asleep on the leaves. The dog twitches beside her. Josh started talking a minute or two ago, and hasn't yet stopped. He's giving his father a report on his football team, recounting in pedantic detail special moments from recent matches. The boy explains certain laws of the game his father might be unfamiliar with. He begins rabbiting on
about girls at school who sometimes try to play football with the boys at break. He speaks of girls with an eleven-year-old's disdain.

‘No fun at all?' Owen whispers.

‘You get to skill them up,' Josh sighs. ‘It's pips.' He continues, in a whisper, with a tired intensity, almost raving. He lies, while Owen sits beside him, leaning against the wall of stone. He can see out.

‘I'm glad we called Mum,' Josh says. ‘Even if we didn't speak to her.'

‘No.'

‘She'll know we're all right.'

Owen wonders whether his marriage to Mel was withering before the accident, something he has not allowed himself ever to contemplate before. ‘You know,' Owen says, ‘we make mistakes. Sometimes some things go wrong, see, and we don't realise it's in our power to make them right.'

He pauses then, and his son looks up at him, but Owen wishes to speak of things that have not to his knowledge been spoken of before. The words will not come, though he thought they did exist, for they'd begun to assume shape in the roof of his mind and the bottom of his throat. But they decline to emerge. He wanted to speak to his son of his own and his family's weaknesses, tripping down the generations. The words will not come.

‘Dad,' Josh asks. ‘Are you Welsh?'

‘A bit.' Owen has forgotten how much. ‘My father was half Welsh. My mother was a quarter. So I'm, what? Three eighths?'

There's a child's calculating pause. Owen hears Josh yawn. ‘That means I'm three sixteenths.' Disappointment enters the boy's voice. ‘That's not much.'

‘It's enough for anyone.'

‘How long has Wales been a country?' Josh asks.

‘Well,' Owen says, racking his brains. ‘I don't know about long, long ago, but after the Romans left Britain, the Welsh princes just fought amongst themselves, like, for centuries, until King Gruffydd defeated the English king Harold, in 1039. Which I have to admit I only know because the battle took place just outside Welshpool. And then Gruffydd formed the first independent kingdom of Wales.'

‘We did the Normans last term,' Josh says, and yawns again. ‘William the Conqueror beat King Harold. Miss Selby didn't say he'd already lost to a Welsh king.'

Owen wonders for the first time in his life whether these English king Harolds were one and the same man. He wonders whether he could work it out from the dates. Before he can say anything he realises that Josh's breathing beside him has changed: the boy is sleeping. Owen lies down, rolls onto his side with a rustling of dry leaves, and waits for sleep himself. There is no pain in his phantom hand, but he doesn't notice.

T
he sweet and musty smell of leaves, turning beneath to compost. Some of them work their way inside clothes: sticky, itchy skin. Owen wakes with both his children pressed against him. He remembers waking in the night, cold, realising they were shivering, and hugging them to him like animals in a lair. When he uncurls himself his limbs are stiff.

 

‘What are we going to eat?' Josh wonders.

‘Is there nothing left?'

‘No.'

‘Then we'll search, won't we?' Owen says. He knows he'll have to go to a shop, buy food, but it's the last thing he wants to do. ‘We'll forage.'

His eyes become accustomed to the dim light. On the other side of the stone roof above them a bird croaks. Holly laughs, so does Josh, Owen tries to. His head throbs, his throat is desperate for water.

 

On all fours, like an animal, he licks dew from the grass. He stands, damp blooms on the knees of his black trousers. His children watch. They do not copy.

The sky is blue and the sun warms the earth. A thick ribbon of mist winds through the valley below, shrouding from view and at the same time identifying a river beneath it. They begin
walking. In a sheltered dip they come across an apple tree festooned with yellow fruit. Securing a branch with his hook, Owen plucks one and bites into it. It is sweet. He fills the rucksack with apples, not sure whether they are last year's crop still hanging on the tree or this year's come early, and he and the children munch as they walk along.

‘This is like the story,' Owen says, ‘of the man who sets out in search of the perfect place to live, he searches all around the world, see, but can't find it anywhere. Nowhere's perfect. The longer he spends travelling, the more he misses home. Eventually he returns, like, and wonders why he ever left. For home, after all, was heaven on earth.'

Josh smiles at his father. He shakes his head. ‘No, Dad,' he says. ‘This is like the story of Adam and Eve, eating an apple in the Garden of Eden.'

‘I am Eve,' says Holly. ‘We did do it in school. They was really hungry but they ate a poisoned apple.'

‘No,' says Josh, ‘the snake made them eat it.'

‘Why?' Holly demands. ‘I bet a snake don't even
like
apples.'

‘He wanted them to leave.'

‘Who is the snake?' Holly asks. ‘Daddy?'

‘Yeh,' Josh says, with a gritty chuckle, leaning against his father's side.

 

They walk on for an hour, two hours, effortlessly avoiding human contact. Owen checks his compass. The route west takes them across grazing fields and through parkland. Owen realises that Josh is watching him closely. He shows the boy how to line the needle up to north, how the needle obeys the earth's magnetic field. ‘Keep it,' he says. ‘You can be in charge of direction, see.' Josh's eyes widen, as his hands grasp the device.

‘Which way then?' Owen asks him.

Eyebrows furrowed, Josh rotates the object in his hand. It seems difficult for him to believe that something without a battery or electronic screen can be trusted. He looks up, and nods forward. ‘That way,' he says.

 

They see sheep lying under the parasol of an old oak tree's wide low branches, in a way that is pleasing to the eye. There is no need of shelter yet from the sun. It's as if posing for the visual effect offered to such passers-by as these gives the animals purpose. The dog shows no interest, but sticks close to the trio. It occurs to Owen for the first time that the dog may yet protect them.

They see pigs in fields with no grass, only flint and mud drying in the pale sun, and huts like army encampments, as if the pigs might be infantry in the re-enactment of some remote war of attrition.

They pass between monumental steel pylons, a cat's cradle of power lines that throb and buzz high above them. Two pieces of material – one a shirt perhaps, white, the other dark and shapeless – have blown here and each snagged themselves somehow on the same power line some yards apart. It's as if the wind has consciousness and, seeing how the electric cables are strung like washing lines across the wide fields, has used the items of fabric to make the analogy explicit.

The day is warming up. They cross a field of brown cows grazing. Each beast faces east, it looks like it's obeying at this moment of the day some solemn, ancient call to prayer.

They follow a path through deciduous trees. It is hot and sticky, flies buzz and bother them, this unsettled April. ‘The British Isles have no climate, like, only weather,' Owen quotes from somewhere. The children peel off layers of clothing. Some items Owen accepts, winding them around himself like
a cricket umpire, others he persuades them to wrap around their own waists. In the heights of tall ash trees starlings bicker in different languages, like the sound of an orchestra tuning up. Some leave, disgruntled, while others arrive, on their sharp triangular wings. A squirrel dashes across the path up ahead, an undulation of fir, running away from its own tail, and from the dog, which chases it, in vain, unable to follow the squirrel's sudden change of direction from horizontal to vertical.

The wood is composed of a variety of trees. Oak, ash, rowan, maple, many in full leaf already. A stand of beeches, a silver birch grove, but mostly mixed up by everchanging degrees, so that the undergrowth alters too. Bracken gives way to grass; scrub is followed by stony ground in which tiny flowers – red, blue, purple – cover the ground. In dips and shallows water collects in boggy areas, reedy clumps. Frogspawn in puddles. They pass shadows in which spiders' webs laid across heather have been made visible, their entire nocturnal intricacy, by the morning dew, a forensic feat of nature.

 

They hear the sound of an engine, hesitate, turn their heads, their ears, trying to locate the direction from which it comes. Josh tilts his head back. Owen and Holly follow his lead. Of course.

‘Quick,' Owen says. ‘Under the trees.'

From the shadows, through branches, they see the helicopter flutter like a dragonfly high overhead. ‘Stand still,' Owen says. The dog sits by their feet. Surely it cannot be looking for them? There is safety in the wood. If only the trees would continue, across all the hills and valleys, into Wales.

When it's been quiet for a minute or two Owen says, ‘Okay. Let's go.'

‘Wait,' Josh says. He's still listening.

‘What is it?' Owen whispers.

Josh frowns. ‘I don't know. Something. Someone.' He shrugs. They step back out onto the path.

‘We are Robin Hood's gang,' Holly says. ‘Me and Josh.'

‘What about me?' Owen asks. His daughter looks at him as they walk, comparing him perhaps to images she's acquired of the outlaws.

Holly shakes her head. ‘You are too old,' she says, with neither sympathy nor cruelty, nodding towards some aspect of his physiognomy. Receding hairline? Wrinkles? ‘You know,' she says.

‘Why are we hiding?' Josh asks.

‘They're after us, aren't they?' Owen says. ‘Bound to be.'

 

Every now and then, when the compass shows them veering north or south, they cut through the trees until they find a westward path. They drink and fill water bottles from a fast-running stream of cold clear water.

Eating an apple, Holly shrieks. Owen looks at her, sees a trickle of blood from her lips. She grins. Holds out her hand, the front tooth, tiny in her palm. She feels around the gum with her tongue, the taste of blood, the odd shape of the absence in her mouth. Owen takes the tooth, wraps it in a piece of tissue paper, puts it in the chest pocket of his jacket.

 

The morning grows ever warmer. The smell of spearmint. Then wild garlic. Horses' hoof marks in the mud. Blue sky above. Birds fly out of the trees. Little clouds of midges. Owen stops. ‘Can you hear that?' he asks. The children stand and look at him. Distant, high-pitched, sonorous. ‘A woman's voice.' Fragile, not a song as such, more a melodic wail. ‘Up ahead,' Owen says. ‘This way.' He walks on, towards, not away, from
contact, recognising how illogical this is, but her voice pulls him. The children follow warily, the dog between them.

The voice sounds experimental, the singer trying different notes, for varying degrees of duration. A note ends with a dying fall, or abruptly, or seems to hang in the air after its utterance has ceased. A vocal exercise? It 's hardly singing at all, or rather it's new, the woman is seeking, discovering, novel sounds the human voice can make. There is silence, then another note is sung, ethereal, ghostly in the wood. At moments Owen thinks it is not a woman but a child, the pure treble of a boy chorister, doodling in the air.

They walk until they are upon it, in a great scoop out of the hillside. Upon the singer, surely she is here, in this quarry, where trees grow sparsely. There is an undergrowth of shrub and bramble. Her voice sounds close at hand yet still somehow distant. They stand and look around, peer into the brush.

‘Car,' says Josh.

‘Tractor,' Holly says.

And now Owen sees all around them, hidden in long grass, rusting machinery. Vehicles, refrigerators, bicycles. Each of them peels off and investigates this rustic junkyard. An overgrown exhibition of farm machinery, plough, hoe, harrow, each with its attachment to the back of a tractor. Harvesters, trailers. Warming in the sun, sheets of metal bend and sigh, making these sounds like the voice of a woman singing.

An open-top Morris Minor sits on its wheel hubs, tyres taken or perished into the earth. Nettles grow up out of its interior as if cultivated there like bean sprouts. Josh sits behind the steering wheel of a Rover, turning it this way and that, leaning into the bend as he does so, making the sound of a racing car. The upholstery still gives off a pungent smell, of damp, of hot, old plastic.