The Hunger Trace (7 page)

When he got inside the big house, Maggie came down the stairs, which seemed to be spinning. ‘Are you okay?’ Maggie said.

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Christopher said. ‘It was the bird’s fault.’

‘Why is David Wickes allowing you to drink so much?’

‘David, erm, Wickes is my friend.’

As Maggie helped him up the stairs, Christopher tried to think of some of Groucho Marx’s sayings about women, to insult her with.
A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is . . . something. Women should be . . . something.

It was difficult to remember the ones about women. When his father dropped him at school, he would say, ‘Go, and never darken my towels again.’ That was Christopher’s favourite; the last laugh of the day and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. Most afternoons, when his father collected him, Christopher would be upset or crying. His father would hold him in the car and whisper, ‘If I held you any closer, I’d be on the other side of you.’

Christopher had a funny taste in his mouth and he thought he might be sick. Maggie tried to stabilise him. Christopher retched and stumbled towards the bathroom, with Maggie in tow. After he’d vomited, he dredged up another old Groucho quote, the same one he’d spontaneously remembered at the end of his father’s funeral, the last time he was this drunk.

‘I’ve had. Erm. A wonderful evening. Erm, erm. But this wasn’t it.’

Louisa fell asleep for a long while, and when she opened her eyes Maggie was kneeling above her, dabbing a bag of frozen coffee below her lip. Louisa panicked and tried to get up, but Maggie pressed her down easily. ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Louisa, noticing that Maggie had changed her clothes, and showered. Her skin smelled clean, and her hair glistened. She was dressed up.

‘Couldn’t find any frozen peas at home, so it’s a middle-class substitute.’

‘All that’s in my freezer is dead mice.’

Maggie smiled. ‘Christopher came home. He did get inebriated.’

‘How long have I been asleep?’

‘Not all that long, actually. He must have hit it hard and fast. He threw his guts up in the bathroom.’

‘And there I was about to apologise for the mess in here,’ Louisa said, looking back at the soiled newspaper and feathers on the kitchen table. Maggie took the cold away, and Louisa’s face regained a little feeling. It was not welcome.

‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ Maggie said, quietly. ‘Christopher.’

Not many people sought Louisa’s advice on human concerns. David had occasionally asked her opinion about one of his girlfriends. He had never asked her about Maggie, though.

‘You could ask what’s-her-name,’ Louisa said.

‘His counsellor?’

‘No. His mother.’

Maggie looked away. ‘What could I ask her?’ she said.

‘Well. Couldn’t he go and live with her?’

‘That’s not the kind of solution I was looking for,’ Maggie said. She looked at her watch, bracelets jangling as she turned her wrist. Nothing more was said. Louisa was dragged again into sleep, and the re-treading of old fields.

Louisa had always been good on village folklore, and was familiar with Anna Cliff long before their lives collided so significantly. Oakley, where Louisa and David grew up, was gentrified, fashionable, conservative. It was still quaintly agricultural in the 1970s and had avoided the millhouse rows of nearby villages. But in towns like Oakley, there is always a little squalor, and even people with the best intentions fall down. Anna Cliff fell in a way which became local legend.

She lived near the canal, on a patch of land which had been cleared for development, but abandoned. It was rat-infested, damp, plagued by floods, the light obstructed by huge sycamores. The developers built one house and folded, so Anna got it cheap. The Oakley locals speculated unkindly on the currency with which Anna had paid. Such rumours followed her whatever she did.

Anna’s fiancé, Henry Morgan, had gone to war and never returned, but his name was not carved into the memorial on the local park. It was said that Henry, who had been a farm labourer in Oakley, had met a woman in France and fallen in love.

By the time Louisa was old enough to recognise her, walking the bridle path through the fields, Anna Cliff had a thick ring of scarred flesh at the base of her neck. The scar stood white against her dark – almost Mediterranean – skin. Louisa’s older brothers, both living away from home, would spend Sundays telling gruesome stories about how Anna got her scar. Her colouring was unusual for the region in those times, and as a child Louisa had been struck by the dark richness of Anna’s brown eyes. Without much care for historical accuracy, people called her Anne of Cleves when they saw the scar. They said she was a gypsy, or half-Indian. Louisa’s brothers said she was a Nazi.

Over the years, villagers counted off Anna Cliff’s four children, whose fathers were various. She tried to trap one man, a married farmer, into taking paternal responsibility, but the villagers rebuked her with such force, and from so many directions, that she never tried again. People like Louisa’s parents often took guesses at the identity of the fathers. It became a dinner party joke.
‘I saw the youngest Cliff child today. A real ringer for Tom Easter, it must be said.’

In truth, the three boys and one girl all looked a lot like their mother. They ducked in and out of care, in and out of school, and if Anna was guilty only of distracted neglect, the children suffered plenty of mistreatment at the hands of their sometime classmates. Louisa was never party to such cruelty because she did not attend the state school, but she heard about it. And she heard when the children were finally taken away from their mother, to be distributed to foster parents across the Midland cities.

Richard Smedley, Louisa’s father, was a social climber. He had worked hard in his job, and on his accent. He went shooting with the right people. Richard warned his young daughter that she would end up just like the Cliff woman if she kept on with her wild behaviour. Louisa figured that most Oakley girls had been told as much. It was one of her father’s less inventive insults.

*    *    *

Louisa first encountered a bird of prey when she was five years old.

She lay on the back seat of the car, watching the slow swipe of the roadside lights through the dusk. Her parents sat quietly, as they always did after one of her tantrums, her father’s retaliatory rage all spent, her mother exhausted by the confrontation.

Louisa’s tantrums had the effect of temporarily suppressing her functions and needs, and she often recovered to find herself hungry or in pain. This time she needed urgently to urinate. She moaned.

‘Louisa needs the toilet,’ her mother said.

‘There are none,’ her father said.

‘Richard, pull over, please.’

‘Let her sit in it.’

Her father was always the last to relent, if he did so at all, but on this occasion another louder moan was all it took. He feared for his upholstery and soon pulled in to a layby. As Louisa prepared to leave the car he turned around and said, ‘Who do you think you are?’

She often recalled that nasty remark in adulthood. What a thing to say to a child. She got him back in the end, she reasoned, simply by answering his question.

Louisa and her mother climbed the roadside bank, struggling against their skirts in a strong gale. Over the bank was a stubble field, and before that a tangle of bushes and weeds. Louisa squatted awkwardly with one hand on her dress and the other outstretched to her mother, for balance. She nearly passed out with relief.

The bird arrived as she was in mid-flow. She could not identify it. Now, when she thinks back, she sees an eagle but she knows that it was probably a buzzard, or a kite. The bird had perhaps been glanced by a car or attacked by crows, for it came down scared, and crashed into the bushes. The thrashing noise startled Mrs Smedley, who screamed and let go of her daughter’s hand. Louisa stumbled slightly, pissing on her shoes, but she did not fall. She was quite calm. The bird righted itself, and they watched each other. It looked so big, so outraged. Three seconds passed until it recovered and took off, Louisa watching it all the way over the trees.

‘Good God,’ Mrs Smedley said, with a hand to her chest. She looked at the damp patch on her daughter’s dress, but Louisa hadn’t noticed. Louisa had never heard of falconry, but at that moment she had a fair idea of what she wanted to do. It was all over bar the shouting, of which there was plenty.

Her father had assumed falconry to be a regal sport, but soon found that – apart from a few famous exceptions – the majority of modern practitioners were working men. As such, he hoped Louisa’s fascination would pass, but she flung away the picture-books about dancing, and he found her burying her pony figurine in the flowerbed, digging with her hands. Two summers later, she was still talking about hawks, and Richard saw a notice promoting a small summer fair given for the council housing residents in the back-end of Staffordshire. He thought he could scare it out of her.

It was a bare, rough place; the smell of yeast from the nearby Marmite factory and brewery competing with the bad meat and burnt sugar of the food stalls. The wind whipped gravel off the hill-top car park. Richard Smedley saw the bony, half-dressed slum-clearance youths throwing hoops and wondered if he’d gone too far, whether this might turn nasty. He looked nervously back at his car.

Louisa could see nothing but the six birds, tethered and fenced off, raising their legs one at a time as if attempting to free themselves from adhesive goop. She watched them, straight-faced, hands in the pockets of her unseasonal coat. She looked like a folded umbrella.

Roy Ogden stood on the pristine bowling green, the best patch of grass for ten miles in any direction. Forty yards away perched Banjo, an Indian eagle owl, his head turned to look at something in the firs behind. ‘Anybody up for a goo?’ Roy said.

Louisa pushed to the front, right hand still in her pocket, left hand out and bared. ‘I would like to.’ The small crowd noted the elocution, and looked at her father, who said, ‘That’s too big for you, dear.’

‘No it is not,’ Louisa said. ‘I can hold a two-pound bag of sugar. He’s not much more than that.’

Roy Ogden smiled. He’d been doing displays long enough to know the voice of a falconer, whatever the size of the person it came from. He lifted her over the dividing wall.

Banjo would not come when Ogden called, and Louisa’s top-lip whistle drew a laugh and an ‘oo, a say’ from the crowd. It also got the owl turning and dropping, the amber scorch of the eyes locked stone still within the nonsense of wings. Clambering into the upward arc, Banjo spread a shadow at the girl’s feet, hitting the big glove hard. Louisa gasped.

While Banjo fed from her first, Louisa – heart going crazy – walked towards her father at the dividing wall. As she approached, Banjo raised his big wings for balance and Richard Smedley took a step back. Louisa witnessed the act with fascination.

It was the falcons she really wanted to fly when she saw them dipping over the scout hut at a brutal pace. ‘Be a few years before you can handle one a them,’ Roy Ogden said.

‘That’s not so long,’ Louisa said.

Roy Ogden, black moustache on a thick face, and a way of biting the tip of his tongue when concentrating, fixed motorbikes in his own residential garage in Whatstandwell, working through the night to give himself daylight hours to fly falcons. He limped badly from the accident that had forced him to quit riding bikes, but his hawks moved with perfect grace and at his bidding.

Louisa’s apprenticeship was a constant pushing at the boundaries of pleasure, until not long after her thirteenth birthday when she taught her first peregrine, Jacko, to stoop from out of pure grey nothing towards the grouse flushed from cover. The clatter of the contact was audible, and the stunned grouse gave up feathers like a trail of puffed cigar smoke, made a soft noise as it came down in the yellow tussocks. That day was the culmination of months of training for the falcon, and years of training for the girl. ‘Nothing you can’t do, now,’ said Roy.

This was the seventies, before worldwide artificial breeding programmes, and the peregrine was teetering on the edge of oblivion. DDT pesticides had thinned the shells of peregrine eggs. Even obtaining such a bird was tricky and not always legal. There was a deathly zeal about hunting with a peregrine. The threat of imminent extinction was with them in the field.

The evening after Jacko’s stoop, Louisa’s brothers came for tea, but she felt unable to bear the presence of her family. It was a private feeling, this triumph – a lonely physical pleasure that she worried would show on her face. So she lay in the bath behind a locked door, turned up the radio and let the dirt drift off her arms. With her eyes closed she still felt tentacular, bound to her companions in the field, as though the dog was on point in the living room, Jacko was pitched hundreds of yards above the roof, and Roy Ogden was standing by the sink.

The hawking season coincided with the school term. There was no contest. The first couple of times she arrived at his house in the early morning, Roy drove Louisa the many miles back to school, but he eventually realised that he did not have the fuel money to win the war, and figured it was best to teach her well. She proved herself an asset in the field.