The Hunger Trace (5 page)

She had first met Christopher on a carefully arranged visit to Derbyshire, and it was David who had been more nervous in the moments before. ‘Christopher has been briefed,’ David said as they sat waiting in the neutrality of the White Hart. ‘In many ways, he’s excited to meet you.’ She looked at her fiancé with abject alarm.

Christopher walked in. He froze when he first saw her, arms by his sides. She rose from her seat, identifying him immediately, and approached.

‘Erm. Who’s that?’ Christopher said, looking at David, pointing at Maggie. The regulars did not need him to single her out – they were already looking.

‘Christopher, come on,’ David said. ‘You know who it is.’

Maggie stopped between them.

‘Erm. You’re telling me that
this
is your new woman?’

‘This is Maggie, yes.’

Maggie smiled, and allowed herself to be examined.

‘Wowsers,’ said Christopher. ‘Erm. When was she born, yesterday? She’s an absolute oil painting.’

‘Nice to meet you,’ Maggie said. ‘You’re not so bad yourself.’

He kissed her hand. ‘What are you doing with this, erm, old coot?’ he said.

Now, in the bathroom, the newspaper sagged under the weight of the liquid, which turned it brown – aged it in seconds. Maggie lifted the soggy paper and saw that the wood had already absorbed much of the aftershave. She imagined it soaking through the floor and dripping from the ceiling in the rooms below.

She sat for a moment, feeling the alcohol penetrate the cuts on her hands. And she was aroused. She felt the feeling rattle down her chest. She picked up the electric toothbrush and took it to bed. Her eyes remained open; there were no fantasies. Afterwards she lay still and stared at the ceiling. Such desires had gripped her occasionally and forcefully since David had died. She did not know what she was supposed to feel, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t this.

*    *    *

Louisa kept her indoor lighting low, and rarely drew the curtains, so she saw Maggie coming from some way off. She wore a big red padded jacket. Louisa waited for her to knock and left it a moment before rising from her chair. When she opened the door, she saw that Maggie’s hair was wet. Her eyes were wet, too, and a little wild. She looked, to Louisa, disproportionately pleased to be on her neighbour’s doorstep. Perhaps she was drunk.

‘Hiya, Lou. Did you get my note?’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ She pulled the cheque from her back pocket and returned it to Maggie. ‘I don’t need this.’

‘Oh, come on. I wrecked your van. I insist.’ Maggie pushed the cheque back but Louisa shook her head.

‘I don’t need it. I know a man who will do it cheap.’

‘Right.’ Maggie looked over Louisa’s shoulder into the house. ‘It’s cold tonight.’

‘You should wear a hat,’ Louisa said.

‘Yeah.’ Maggie looked down at the cheque. ‘Let’s go and spend this,’ she said.

‘What?’ Louisa said.

‘It’s quiz night at the White Hart.’

Louisa gave a derisive sniff. The irony of looking for answers in that place was crushing.

‘Do you fancy coming down?’ Maggie said. The wind flexed as she spoke, so that she had to shout, sounding more urgent than she probably intended. Louisa looked around. The moon was big and close, and the trees gave a crisp hiss.

‘Can’t really,’ Louisa said.

‘You busy, eh?’

‘It’s not so much that.’

‘No. Me neither. I’m pretty busy in the day. Night-time? Not so very busy, I must say.’

Louisa did not speak.

‘Come on. Christopher’s out. Two hours. An hour. I’m buying. We need to get off this hill.’

‘I just bathed.’

‘And I just had a shower. Perfect. Sisters looking hot.’

Louisa found that remark distasteful, in many ways. ‘No. Thank you. Anyway, I’d have thought you’d be staying at home in the evenings, after those break-ins.’

Maggie nodded, squeezed her eyes shut. ‘Are you okay?’ she said.

‘Me? I’m fine,’ Louisa said.

‘Oh, that’s good. I’m not fine, to be honest. And I don’t much want to go down into the village and drink with those old buggers, but I quite fancied a drink with
you
.’

Louisa had no time for emotional blackmail. ‘Listen. I don’t expect you’ve ever been turned down. I’ll put it down to inexperience, but you have this knack of only turning up here when you want something, so I can’t help feeling like the bottom of the barrel. It’s not a pleasant sensation, being scraped. I told your husband the same.’

Maggie shook her head and choked back some tears. She pointed to her house. ‘I am in that . . .
fucking
place on my jacks, waiting to be broken into. And I don’t think my company is so poor that
I’d
be the only one to gain from us having a chat. And I know exactly what you told my husband. I just wonder what you tell your fucking self.’

She walked away. Louisa made sure she slammed the door quickly. The bloodrush made her giddy. She shut the lights off and watched Maggie through the window. Sixty paces from the house she was nothing more than that red coat lit by the moon. Headless, legless. It was about then that Maggie screamed, ‘For fuck’s sake!’ She didn’t hold back on the volume.

Sleep proved difficult that night. Apart from the adrenal pump of the argument, Louisa panicked over what David had told Maggie. Had he told her about the second day of their hunting challenge, back when they were teenagers? Their silent, breathless walk through the glades and fields? It was the last day of February, and the last moment of pure beauty that Louisa could remember experiencing with another human. It was more likely he had told her of the moments following the walk, their lives split in two like rotten wood. She thought of David stumbling away from the hedgerow. She drifted off, and woke to find the moon so strong she thought it was afternoon.

At that moment, Louisa was truly aware of the exposed location of her cottage. And she could feel Maggie’s presence, too. The walls of their houses seemed irrelevant, flimsy. She thought of Maggie trembling on the doorstep. It had been a long time since Louisa had provoked anger in another person, a long time since she had elicited emotion of any kind.

*    *    *

Training a falcon is unlike training a dog because a falcon does not – and will never – care for its owner. That was always the first thing Louisa said at falconry displays. The falcon comes from a world beyond society or hierarchy, and depends upon nobody. When she first received a falcon, Louisa would watch it bate from the glove, so sickened by her proximity that it would rather die than look at her. In practice, this mentality rendered punishment and censure utterly useless as training tools. The only way to proceed was to reduce the weight of the bird until it relented to the falconer as a source of food. Louisa had seen overweight hawks take off, even after several seasons, never to return.

People at the displays often asked Louisa what was in it for her. Falcons are so ungiving, they said. It’s a one-way relationship. She replied that they worked together. When they went out on the moor, and her dog was on point, and Diamond rose to his pitch – even if Louisa could not see him through the cloud or the glare – they
knew
each other. She gave the signal, the grouse were flushed, and there he was, head over feet, plummeting. It was a privilege.

Diamond would come off the kill for her, and if that was because she was holding meat, then so what? If the respect was grudging, then it was earned. If you think human relationships aren’t based on power, Louisa told the doubters, then maybe it’s you who wants your head looking at. At least a falcon doesn’t lie about it.

That week she received and trained a new lanner. On the Friday she looked down at the table in her kitchen, the needles and coping tools, the green stars of shit, the towels for swaddling, and the immature falcon. She realised she had not given the bird a name. There had been no need, for they were the only two beings in the house. If she was not talking to the lanner, she was talking to herself. Excepting those commands made to her dogs and birds, she had spoken perhaps forty words since the argument with Maggie on the doorstep almost a week ago. She read Maggie’s postcard again, and thought of the ibex’s neck, hot against her face. She picked up the phone and dialled.

‘I want to invite you and Christopher over for a short display. No, no trouble. It won’t be anything special. He’ll be fine. Can’t be any crazier than me.’

At that time of year, nature blended the boundaries. Leaves from the hilltop churchyard blew across the animal enclosures and onto Louisa’s land. Wasps crawled drunk from grounded apples in the acidic fizz of afternoon light.

Louisa stood on the weathering lawn and watched Christopher and Maggie crossing the field towards her. Christopher wore a long waxed jacket which may have been his father’s, and marched with his usual forward lean. Maggie looked small, steadying herself against him in the mud. Her voice carried in shards. Louisa had arranged Diamond and the new lanner, hooded, on Arab perches on the lawn, and put the Harris hawks, Fred and Harold, out of the way on bow perches. The hawks turned their heads, one after the other, to watch Maggie and Christopher approach.

‘Well, hello there,’ Maggie said to the birds, before smiling at Louisa without a hint of animosity. Louisa had braced herself for tension after the other night’s rant, but there was none. Christopher sipped from a can of Fanta and eyed the hawks suspiciously.

‘I need your help with this one, Christopher,’ Louisa said, pointing to the lanner.

‘I’m not touching it,’ said Christopher.

‘You don’t have to. He doesn’t have a name, that’s all. I wondered if you could help me name him.’

Christopher looked at the bird for a moment, and then at his feet. ‘Steve,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ said Louisa. ‘Steve it is.’

Maggie laughed, and Christopher scowled at her until she stopped. ‘So what do you think of them?’ Maggie said.

‘Erm. They seem daemonic,’ he said.

‘Christopher!’ Maggie said. ‘Sorry, Louisa. He says that about everything at the moment.’

‘That’s okay. I’ve called them worse.’

Christopher impersonated his stepmother: ‘It’s daemonic this, erm, daemonic that.’

Louisa took Diamond on her fist, removed his hood and began her standard lecture. She saw no reason to personalise the display. ‘This is Diamond, a peregrine falcon,’ she said. ‘He’s male. Males are known as tiercels, because they are a third of the size of females.’

Maggie nudged Christopher, who tutted.

Louisa continued. ‘The world comes to Diamond differently. He sees polarised light. He sees ultraviolet. Most people know that a falcon’s vision is long-range and acute, but what they don’t know is that a peregrine sees the world
slowed down.
’

Maggie raised her eyebrows and nodded. Louisa put her face close to Diamond, who looked away. ‘The rate of signals from his eye to his brain is many times higher than that of a human. If Diamond watched TV, he’d just see a collection of static images constantly turning from dark to light.’

An insect buzzed around Christopher’s drink.

‘The wasp that just flew past your face in a blur,’ Louisa said to Christopher, ‘would not be a blur to Diamond. He would see it slowly passing by in perfect detail. He’d be able to see each beat of its little wings.’

Christopher batted at the persistent wasp, and then looked up at Louisa. ‘So how fast is the wasp
really
, erm, going?’ he said.

‘What?’ Louisa said.

‘Well, if the wasp is going fast for me, and it’s going slow for the bird, how fast is it
really
going?’

Louisa frowned. This is what happens when you ad-lib, she thought. She turned to Maggie, who was trying to suppress a smile. ‘Maggie, do you know anything about the nature of time as an entity independent of human perception?’

Maggie laughed. ‘Afraid not.’

‘Life must be, erm, boring for them,’ Christopher said. ‘Even F1 would seem slow.’

Louisa had forgotten about his obsession with motor racing. Perhaps she could use it. ‘Do you know anything about G-force, Christopher?’

His eyes widened and he began to stammer. ‘Yes. Erm. Nigel Mansell sometimes underwent the force of up to two G during, erm, Grand Prix racing,’ he said. He put down his drink and pulled his skin taut across his face.

‘Pretty impressive,’ Louisa said. ‘How much G-force can a human stand, do you know?’

Christopher was delighted. ‘Erm. That’s easy. Six G.’

‘God, well done you,’ said Maggie, slapping Christopher’s back.

‘That’s quite a lot, isn’t it?’ Louisa said.

‘Six G is called, erm, G-LOC. The blood starts to drain from the eyes and consciousness is lost. It’s not at all promising.’

Louisa nodded. ‘You want to know how many Gs Diamond can take?’

Christopher stared at Diamond, who adjusted his feet on the glove. ‘How many?’ Christopher said.

‘About twenty-eight G,’ Louisa said.

‘Horseshit!’