The Hunger Trace (10 page)

She looked at the students, one of whom smiled. Christopher marched past her and got into the Land Rover. Maggie stepped closer to the group. ‘I don’t want to see you near him again,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? I would have thought you’d be delighted he had a few mates.’

The comeback tripped her. She was out of practice.

Another of them spoke up, his skinny jeans concertinaed about the knee, as though his legs were drinking straws. ‘To be honest, we’d be pretty grateful if you could keep him away from
us
.’

The rain fell like splinters through the light. She looked at Christopher in the Land Rover. He stared ahead, chewing his coffee cup. She turned back to the students. ‘Just be nice,’ she said. ‘Have a think about what it’s like for him, eh?’

‘It’s not somewhere I want to go,’ one of the students said. Maggie realised it was a girl, her fringe pushing through the hood, her face plush and full in the cold.

‘That’s what I mean,’ Maggie said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.’

The group moved away slowly, a wet sheen coming off their pleather jackets. Maggie walked back to the truck and sat next to Christopher. ‘Alright, kiddo?’ she said.

‘Erm. Yes. Can we get chips and fishcake with curry sauce on the way back?’

She saw a red wedge of coffee cup stuck between his brace and his teeth, but decided not to mention it. They drove on, collected chips, wound up the hill.

‘Did you go and see Louisa?’ she asked.

‘Who told you that?’

‘Nobody. I saw you walking over there. It’s absolutely fine. I’m pleased. Did you talk over what happened the other day?’

‘It’s, erm, classified information. What we talked about.’

‘I think she’s a good person to talk to. She knew your dad really well. Did you talk about your dad with her?’

‘Classified.’

‘Okay. Consider my memory wiped.’

‘It obviously is.’

Maggie looked at him. It seemed like a cruel snipe, but he may not have intended it. Sometimes Christopher, in trying to be disagreeable, stumbled upon something raw.

Louisa found a folded note in her letterbox:

The door of the weighing room was ajar, and Louisa entered to find striped bags of beef and quail neatly packed in her reclining freezer. Louisa sighed and read the post-script of the note, which explained that Foxton’s butcher’s had suffered a powercut.

Louisa thought of Maggie kneeling above her with the frozen coffee. Money was tight, and the extra food for her hawks was welcome. She regretted what she had said about shipping Christopher out to his mother.

And so, in late October, Louisa took Maggie lamping. She called at the big house around midnight, knowing that Maggie would be awake. This time she answered the door in a skirt and a silky white top, the straps radiating from a wooden circle above her breasts. Her nipples pressed at the surface as the night cold hit her. Louisa did not consider the details at that time. ‘Get your kit on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

Squinting into the headlights of the van, Maggie took a moment to make her decision. ‘Give me five minutes,’ she said.

Maggie brought the warm fragrances of garlic and a musky perfume into the van. She turned around and looked at the Harris hawk, boxed and secured in the back. ‘What are we up to, sweetie?’ she said with relish, the streetlight slipping over her jeans.

‘
No good
, hopefully,’ Louisa said.

They took the narrow off-road track, cut onto John Salt’s fields, stopped and got out. Maggie looked confused as Louisa took Fred from his box. The eyes of the bird popped with red flashes in the brake light. ‘Jesus, can he see in the dark now, too?’ Maggie said.

‘Only when you turn the light on,’ Louisa said, nodding at the lamp.

‘I get it,’ Maggie said, strapping the lamp battery round her waist and turning on the light. Fred tuned his vision to the end of the beam. Louisa taped his bell, for silence.

They walked out into the open together, the sky fringed with pallor from the villages, but moonless. Maggie revealed the world in silver arcs of lamplight. Louisa usually hunted alone, and had not prepared herself for the rush of feeling and the memories of that time she had gone hunting with David. Her legs began to shake. She tried to concentrate on the technical details of hawking.

‘You need to move over to the side,’ she whispered to Maggie. ‘So his wings don’t block the light. You see a rabbit, you keep the light on it, everywhere it goes. If he misses, cut the lamp. Fred’ll go to ground. Then turn the light on me, and he’ll come back to my fist.’

‘Okay. Jesus, this is some crazy shit.’

The first rabbit was too close to cover, but Fred gave good chase on the second – an old bunny who kept the hawk in a shaky line until the last second, when it switched direction, spinning out from under his elevated right wing.

Later, in the van, Maggie would say that the time just after the lamp went off was the strangest time, because it was so dark she could barely believe that the drama she had just witnessed had happened at all. And that was a strange time for Louisa, too. As she waited in the darkness she could hear the private shifting of the hawk in the field, and her own heartbeat, which seemed much louder now that she had human company. At first all she could see was the cooling bulb of the lamp across the way, but soon Maggie’s belt buckle and coat buttons started to gleam, followed by the rest of her appearing in violet as Louisa’s eyes adjusted, as though light was a falling formative powder.

Maggie shone the lamp on Louisa, blinding her. Louisa stuck out her meated glove and Maggie’s beam found it, as did Fred, who looked like a bleached, giant moth gliding out of the dark. ‘Your turn,’ Louisa said. They took a break before swapping, ate biscuits.

‘What do you think?’ Louisa said.

‘Strangest, most incredible thing I’ve ever done,’ Maggie said. ‘If you’d have told me, ten years ago, that I’d be out in a field in Derbyshire at two a.m., killing rabbits with a hawk . . .’

‘We haven’t bagged any yet. Some nice flights, though.’

‘He’s getting closer. How did you train him for this?’

‘I took two sequins off an old dress, and pinned them on the face of a rabbit lure. Sparkly eyes.’

‘Oh, now that’s wasteful,’ Maggie said. ‘I could have had that dress. I like sequins.’

‘I didn’t take them off the nipples; it’s still wearable. You might even grow into it one day.’

It took them a while to find another rabbit, and the first one they saw just froze. Maggie slipped Fred from her fist as the rabbit flung herself out towards the trees. Fred was up quickly into the funnel of light, the band above his tail glowing white, his wings banking at every turn the rabbit took. They almost reached the end of the beam and Louisa began to follow, running. Fred’s feet came out, and he checked, rose, kicked at the rump, which is usually a mistake but this time threw the rabbit off balance. The rabbit bashed into a thick clump of grass, flipped over, and came down skidding and rolling like tumbleweed. She kicked out in the air, but Fred was above her, his feet clenched around her face, the hind toe digging deep into the tender flesh at the base of the neck. The rabbit’s skull collapsed. Fred rode her until she stopped, and then mantled, his wings up and out. The rabbit had surrendered six inches from the thicket.

They jogged over, Maggie coming into the light and pulling meat from the bag, ready to take Fred off the kill. ‘Wait. Let him have a taste first,’ Louisa said.

‘Thought he’d lost her when he went for the rear,’ Maggie said.

Louisa took out the knife but there was no need for dispatch. The rabbit’s head, deeply depressed on one side, had been wrenched backwards, and was hanging on by gristle. Suddenly, in the wavering grey beam, Louisa saw a child’s face with punctured brown eyes. She caught her breath.

‘Okay. Take her off, take her off.’

Maggie crouched down with some meat, and Fred stepped up quickly to the glove. Louisa went to gather the rabbit, and both women saw the slick pink protrusion from the belly, the even black dots. ‘What’s that?’ Maggie said.

‘Pups,’ Louisa said. ‘Were going to be.’

‘Oh.’

Louisa cut the mass free, left it for the foxes, hauled the mother, and stood.

They loaded Fred and the equipment into the van by the light of the lamp. ‘Did Christopher come and talk to you?’ Maggie said.

‘He did. He came to apologise.’ Louisa dropped her lower lip to reveal the healing cut.

‘I’m glad. It’s a good thing for him, having you around.’

They fell silent for a while. Fred was still alert, peering beyond them into the field. ‘I’m sorry about what I said before,’ Louisa said eventually. ‘About his mother.’

Maggie nodded.

‘How has he been?’ Louisa said.

‘No better, really. I tried so hard to get him into the college, but the kids are being such
bastards
,’ Maggie said.

‘Is he being any kinder to you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Did he mention me, when you spoke?’

Louisa recalled their pact of mutual assured destruction. ‘No, not really.’

Maggie nodded. ‘He was so nice to me when I got here.’

Louisa knew. She had seen them, racing to the trough of frozen water on Christmas Day. Through the big window, she had seen Maggie on his shoulders, changing a light bulb in the dining room.

Maggie looked at Fred. ‘Did David like the birds?’ she asked.

Louisa frowned. ‘He liked to look at them. After a certain stage, hunting didn’t interest him anymore. He lost the blood lust.’

‘Oh yeah. He was a softie.’

‘So he never talked about my hawks to you, then?’ Louisa said.

‘No,’ said Maggie, then shook her head. ‘But he talked about
you
all the time.’

Louisa laughed immoderately. ‘I doubt that.’

‘He did,’ Maggie said. ‘He absolutely loved you.’

‘I doubt that,’ Louisa said, quieter.

Maggie began to laugh and then cry. Louisa thought it might only last a few seconds, but it didn’t. She rummaged in the van’s dark interior for something with which Maggie could wipe her eyes, but could find only towels smeared with blood and bird shit. Maggie did not wait; she wiped her nose on her sleeve, and then folded the cuff over, tutting. ‘I haven’t had a good cry in ages,’ she said. ‘You must think I’m a terrible baby,’ Maggie said.

‘You
are
young,’ Louisa said.

‘It’s just . . . This isn’t how I saw things working out.’

Louisa looked around and smiled in a tired way. ‘No. I’ll bet.’

‘I would give anything to make Christopher happy again,’ Maggie said.

‘Well. What does he want?’ Louisa said.

‘What does he
want
? I don’t know. A family? He talks about having a family a lot. Getting married and stuff. He’s just a kid.’

Louisa nodded, seeing the many barriers to that goal beyond Christopher’s youth.

‘I don’t think there’s much I can do to help him with that,’ Maggie said. ‘Short of getting him a mail-order bride, which, I believe, he has already looked into.’

Louisa smiled. Maggie put her arms out to the side. ‘I just don’t know what to do,’ she said.

‘You could do what I do,’ Louisa said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You take all the feelings, and you screw them into a big ball and bury them in the pit of your stomach.’

Maggie laughed and put her hands on Louisa’s face, one on each cheek. The left hand was still warm and damp from the glove, the other very cold. Louisa flinched.

Louisa’s hallucinations continued that night, but they weren’t all malevolent. Waking, she saw a fragment of Maggie picked out by the lamp: her arm, the buttons on her sleeve leading deep into the glove. Then, later, more white flashes of her.

That screwed up ball of feelings, buried in her stomach, had begun to unravel.

*    *    *

Over the next month their days took on a tentative rhythm. On the mornings when Louisa did not have a clearance job, Maggie helped her to weigh, feed and fly the hawks. Louisa had bought a female peregrine with the future intention of breeding Diamond, and she allowed Maggie to help train her. In homage to the 1980s naming style of Christopher, they called the bird Caroline.

In the afternoons, Louisa helped Maggie on the park, repairing fences, and feeding the animals. Louisa could see the relentlessness of Maggie’s desire, the need for work and the craving for exhaustion. It was invigorating to watch. Philip Cassidy occupied himself with other jobs in the enclosures, and kept his own company on the afternoons when Louisa helped out, but that was no surprise.