The Hunger Trace (6 page)

‘Absolutely true.’

‘That thing?’

‘This very thing.’

Louisa looked at Diamond. ‘He’s pretty mean in character, but there’s no way that Diamond could kill a grouse, which is almost three times his size, in a
straight fight
. So he pitches himself way up high – about a thousand feet – and then folds into this vertical dive, called a stoop. It’s just about the finest, most ingenious thing you can witness. You can actually hear it. In the stoop, Diamond has a peak speed of two hundred miles an hour, increasing his killing weight from two pounds to sixty.’

‘Jumping Jehosaphat,’ said Christopher. He did some calculations and turned to Maggie. ‘That’s like thirty of me landing on you,’ he said to her. ‘Imagine that.’

‘I’d rather not,’ said Maggie.

‘You’d be flattened,’ said Christopher, clapping his hands together.

Louisa hooded Diamond, placed him back on his perch, and moved on to the Harris hawks. Fred was slightly larger, but they were both nearly chicken-sized, with big necks and chocolate feathers broken by rusty tones. Their feet and beaks were a strong yellow from the egg yolk she fed them. ‘We’re not going to fly Diamond today,’ she said, ‘We’ll fly these two. Harris hawks don’t mind people so much. You can bring them into your house, introduce them to the kids, sit them down at the dinner table, watch TV with them, or whatever it is you do of an evening . . .’ Louisa said, struggling a little for ideas.

‘I like family values,’ said Christopher.

‘Diamond would go crazy if I tried that shit with him,’ Louisa said. Maggie laughed again.

Louisa took Fred from the bow perch onto her glove, and then cast him into the trees surrounding the garden. He watched everything: the movement of Maggie’s hand as she scratched her neck, the stone that Louisa kicked, the leaves. Louisa took out the rabbit lure – a strip of raw beef tied to a toy bunny, fixed to a length of string. She buried the lure in the undergrowth, and then whipped it out and ran with it. Fred descended from a nearby tree, gave a short chase, and crushed the toy. Maggie applauded, while Christopher tilted his head uneasily to watch Fred feed.

‘Anybody fancy a go?’ Louisa asked.

Christopher remained silent, and eventually Maggie stepped up. Fred flew to the high branches of a beech, and Louisa took off her glove, which steamed a little. She passed it over Maggie’s long fingers and pulled it down. ‘Almost fits,’ Maggie said, squeezing a fist.

‘It’ll do,’ Louisa said.

Louisa arranged Maggie’s body so that the younger woman stood side-on to the bird, her head turned and her left arm extended. Louisa took a day-old chick from the bag and popped the yolk sac, placed it in Maggie’s gloved hand, the blood and yolk darkening the worn leather. ‘Call him,’ Louisa said.

‘Fred. Come on, sweetie,’ Maggie said.

The bird leaned forward, stopped, and came. The silence was heavy as the wings beat and then held, the bird coming lower, inches from the ground before rising to the glove. Louisa looked at Maggie, because it was her first time. Maggie stayed still and kept her eyes on the hawk. She did not flinch. Louisa felt a slight disappointment, although she could not have articulated the source.

‘Good boy,’ whispered Maggie. Louisa could see the shock of it in her, a woman who worked with animals but was nevertheless excited by the level of control, and the simultaneous lack of it. Fred picked at the flesh, and Maggie released a little more of the chick’s body.

‘Okay, let him go,’ Louisa said. Maggie cast Fred back into the air. He flew to the nearest tree and licked his feet.

‘Will you give it a try, Christopher?’ asked Maggie.

‘No,’ said Christopher. ‘There’s no point, now you’ve done it.’

‘Come on,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s another string to your bow.’

Christopher considered the phrase carefully. It was one of his favourites. ‘Erm. Okay,’ he said. ‘One go.’

Louisa set him up. She had not been so close to the boy for some time. She found the blue lenses strange, but more troubling was his silhouette, dark against the dropping light behind him. It was almost the same as David’s, the paunch already thick, the legs strong, the shoulders sloping down. He was a little older than David had been when he and Louisa had gone hunting together that day.

Louisa placed another chick on the glove. ‘Gross,’ said Christopher. He bobbed the dead head against his fist. ‘Call him in,’ said Louisa.

‘You do it,’ said Christopher. Louisa tapped Christopher’s glove and called out for Fred, who had the taste and required no second ask. He dropped from the tree.

Christopher’s frown appeared to be inquisitive, nothing more, but when the hawk rose up through the last metre, Christopher screamed and hit the ground, flinging the chick away in a spinning spray of yolk and blood. Fred rose steeply and flew over to the roof of the old aviary, where he bristled. Louisa stood back and looked at Christopher.

‘Bloody thing tried to kill me,’ Christopher shouted, still on the ground, his arms over his head.

‘Hey, what happened, sweetie?’ said Maggie, walking over.

‘Don’t you come anywhere near me!’ Christopher said, peering out from behind his hands. Maggie froze. ‘And don’t call me sweetie. I hate it. This is all your doing. You forced me to come here.’ He was almost crying.

‘Christopher, it’s okay. It’s a perfectly natural reaction,’ said Maggie.

Louisa wasn’t listening. She looked over at Fred, who seemed undisturbed, now, although he would make her pay later, for letting that boy snatch his food away. She took a guess at what a normal person would do. She crouched down to check on Christopher, who was still curled up in a ball. ‘You’re okay,’ she said. She took him by the elbow, which he ripped around sharply into her face, knocking her over. She would later confess – though only to herself – to a feeling of exhilaration as she lay there on the grass.

‘Jesus, Christopher, what are you doing?’ said Maggie, running to Louisa.

‘You can shut up,’ Christopher said, standing. ‘That bloody thing tried to, erm, kill me.’

‘You can’t just fucking hit people,’ Maggie said.

‘I’m fine,’ Louisa said quietly, sitting up.

‘It’s your doing,’ said Christopher again, pointing his big crooked finger at Maggie, dirt in the wrinkles. ‘I never wanted to come here, and I never asked for you.’

He made a gesture of contrite protest to Louisa. ‘I’m alright,’ she said. ‘Just taking five.’ But he was quickly on his way, head down, shaking the glove onto the ground.

‘I’m going to get completely inebriated,’ he called back.

Maggie looked distraught. ‘Well, he can make a good decision when he tries,’ she said. She offered her arm to Louisa, who said she felt happy sitting down for a while. Maggie’s eyes, swirling and opaque like a stick-stirred brook, gradually took their focus on Louisa, and then widened. ‘He’s cut you,’ she said. Louisa dabbed at her lip, saw fresh blood on her fingers. ‘Nah, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘It was just the shock that knocked me over.’

‘That and the sixteen stone he weighs,’ said Maggie.

After a few minutes, Louisa got to her feet, still shaky. She called Fred down from the roof, put the hawks in the weatherings, and knew she was done for the day.

Maggie took disinfectants and medical equipment from the weighing room, and ignored Louisa’s insistence that she would treat herself. She made her go into the cottage and lie on the sofa. Louisa was secretly pleased, because she felt suddenly shattered.

She knew from her touch that Maggie was getting used to working with animals. The securing grip on the neck gave it away. Maggie washed the wound and stemmed the blood flow with cotton wool and petroleum jelly.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Maggie said.

‘Forget it.’

‘I’m sorry you had to witness that domestic scene, too.’

‘Sounded pretty hurtful.’

‘I’m used to it.’

Louisa thought back to how disagreeable she herself had been when Maggie first moved in.

‘I appreciate what you did today,’ Maggie said. ‘I thought it was outstanding. When I called that hawk out of the tree, it felt like the first clear space I’ve had in my head for months. Does that make sense?’

‘Big old beak and talons headed for you – tends to focus the mind.’

‘I loved it.’

‘I know you did.’

‘I’d like to do it again,’ Maggie said.

‘I’m pretty busy.’

‘So am I.’

‘Which is also a problem. Too many people these days want to fly a hawk for a day, go back and tell their friends they touched the wilderness. I don’t see shit burning any holes in their clothes. If you want to do this, it’s got to be every minute.’

‘I do know a little about the care of animals,’ said Maggie.

Louisa managed half a nod of acknowledgment. The problem was the look on Maggie’s face as Fred had risen to her fist. She looked him right in the eye, did not twitch. Louisa had spent most of her life fiercely guarding the secrets of her daily life with the hawks. She did not want people to know exactly what she did; she only wanted them to know that they could not do it themselves. And here was someone who perhaps could.

Christopher was still trembling when he arrived in the White Hart. The place smelled of blocked drains. He approached the bar. ‘What do you want?’ David Wickes asked.

‘I want to settle down with a faithful woman and have some progeny, far away from this hell-hole,’ Christopher said.

‘I meant to drink.’

‘Oh, right. Erm. A double Drambuie and a white wine, erm, spritzer.’

Wickes sighed. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, turning away to make the drinks. ‘But your father didn’t think Detton was such a hell-hole.’

‘What do you know?’ Christopher said, under his breath.

He was tired of the way people talked about his father in this pub. Before he died, they used to say, ‘Your dad is a legend, youth.’ Christopher would reply, ‘Erm, incorrect. A legend must be, erm, deceased. It’s part of the definition.’

Such definitions now contributed to his logic for the existence of a real historical Robin Hood. To be a legend, you have to die. To die, you must have lived. Therefore, it followed that Robin Hood had really lived. It also meant, he realised, that the men in the pub were now free to call his father a legend.

The problem, as with all legends, was that the stories the men told of his father changed and slipped. The details turned upside down, or were forgotten. The regulars never talked of how his father would take him garbage fishing in the brook; they never mentioned the pedal cart races around the enclosures. They spoke only of naked dancing at the big house on Drum Hill (strange), and of women and more women and better women (too much information). It was worrying to hear them get the facts wrong. When people got the facts wrong once, they rarely corrected them, in Christopher’s experience. You ended up with an Australian Robin Hood and a father you didn’t recognise.

Christopher took his Drambuie in a couple of gulps and started on the spritzer. Tim Nettles sat on a stool at the end of the bar, and nodded. ‘Hello, lad. Any luck with that online dating malarkey?’

‘That’s classified,’ Christopher said. He’d only just set up his profile, and couldn’t remember talking to Nettles about it.

‘Plenty of nice young ladies up on that hill, I’d have thought,’ Nettles said.

‘Erm, plenty of lunatics. With their idiot birds.’

‘I can’t think who you might be referring to,’ Nettles said. Wickes smiled.

‘I’ll find my Marian,’ Christopher said. He looked up at Wickes. ‘Same, erm, again, please bartender.’

It was his father who had told him the stories of Robin Hood. It had been part of their nightly routine: they would watch Marx Brothers films, and then his father would tell him tales in which Robin was a lithe, skinny child who used his cunning and slight stature to crawl through the legs of the sheriff. In David’s stories, Robin could disguise himself as tumbleweed, or a green bouncy ball. Christopher had never resembled that ingenious boy, but he had loved the tales.

Since his father had died, Christopher had felt angry about those made-up, babyish yarns. Anyone could create such stories and what was the use of that? Christopher wanted something real. He had read widely about the historical figure of Robin Hood. In the old ballads, Robin massacred fourteen foresters because they forbade him to hunt on the king’s land. Christopher was sure this was true because he had seen empirical evidence: there was a skull in a museum in Nottingham alongside a crossbow bolt they’d found rattling around inside. They had dug up thirteen bodies in a row. Pretty conclusive, Christopher thought. This Robin was no spry youngster; he was vengeful and he stalked through the woods like Christopher did, slighted and furious.

Christopher necked his drinks and took another round before he left. ‘I need the alcohol to face, erm, going home again,’ he told the regulars. Many of them could relate to that sentiment.

As he walked up the hill, he prepared himself for a clash with the Turncoat Maggie Green. So he’d elbowed someone in the face. That was nothing compared to Maggie’s betrayals. He tried to list them: she rarely talked about his father, and when she did, it annoyed him; he suspected that she had not invited his real mother to his father’s funeral, even though it would have been an ideal opportunity for a reunion; she made him go to the ridiculous bird display. The list went on.