The Loney (4 page)

‘This is The Loney, isn’t it?’ I said, surprised that he remembered it at all. It had been years since we’d been there and Hanny rarely drew anything that he couldn’t see right in front of him.

He touched the water and then moved his finger to the camel hump dunes, over which hung a great flock of birds. Hanny loved the birds. I taught him all about them. How you could tell if a gull was in its first, second or third winter by the mottle of its plumage and the differences between the calls of the hawks and terns and warblers. How, if you were very still, you could sit by the water and the knots would move around you in a swarm so close that you could feel the breeze from their wings on your skin.

I’d copy the cries of the curlews and the redshanks and the herring gulls for him, and we’d lie on our backs and watch the geese high up in a chevron and wonder what it would be like to part the air a mile above the earth with a beak as hard as bone.

Hanny smiled and tapped the figures on the painting.

‘That’s you,’ I said. ‘That’s Hanny.’

Hanny nodded and touched himself on the chest.

‘That’s me?’ I said, pointing to the smaller of the two and Hanny gripped my shoulder.

‘I’m glad you’re home,’ I said, and I meant it.

Pinelands didn’t do him much good. They didn’t know him. They didn’t care for him like I did. They never asked him what he needed. He was just the big lad in the tv lounge with his paints and crayons.

He held me close to his chest and stroked my hair. He was getting stronger. Every time I saw him he looked different. The puppy fat that had been there at Christmas had slipped from his face and he had no need to fake a moustache with a piece of burnt cork anymore like we used to do as children. It seemed unimaginable, but Hanny was becoming an adult.

I think he sensed the strangeness of it too, albeit dimly. The way one might feel there was something different about a room but not be able to say what. Was there a missing picture, say, or a book shelved in a different place?

Sometimes I caught him looking at the span of his hands, the nest of black hairs on his breastbone, his hard oval biceps, as though he couldn’t quite understand what he was doing inside this man’s body.

***

As we had always done in the past, we left for Moorings at first light on the Tuesday of Holy Week.

Once everyone had gathered at Saint Jude’s and stowed their bags on the minibus, Father Bernard went to get into the driver’s seat. But before he could start the engine, Mummer touched him on the arm.

‘Father Wilfred usually led us in prayer before we left,’ she said.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Father Bernard and he got down and started on the sign of the cross.

‘We tended to go around the corner, Father,’ said Mummer. ‘And pray with Our Lady.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Yes, of course.’

We gathered at the foot of the little Alpine rockery on which the Virgin stood and bowed our heads as Father Bernard made an impromptu prayer of intercession, asking her for a safe journey and a successful pilgrimage. After the Amen, we took it in turns to go to the railings, lean forward and kiss Mary’s feet.

Father Bernard made way for Mrs Belderboss, who lowered herself slowly to her knees and had Mr Belderboss hold her by the shoulders as she leant over. Once she had kissed the Holy Mother’s toes, she closed her eyes and began a whispered prayer that went on so long Father Bernard began to look at his watch.

I was to be the last to go up, but Father Bernard said, ‘Leave it, Tonto. Otherwise we’ll be sitting on the North Circular all day.’

He looked up at Mary with her expression of vacancy and grief. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind.’

‘If you say so, Father.’

‘I do,’ he said and jogged back to the minibus, making everyone laugh with a quip that I didn’t catch as he climbed up the steps to the driver’s seat.

I hadn’t seen them all so happy for months. I knew what they were thinking. That this time it would be different. That Hanny would be cured. That they were on the cusp of a wonderful victory.

***

We drove out of London, heading north through the East Midlands and across Yorkshire to Lancashire. I sat in the back with Monro wedged under my seat and slept on and off as a dozen counties went by. Every so often I woke up with the feeling that I was repeating parts of the journey. But then England is much the same all over, I suppose. A duplication of old farms, new estates, church spires, cooling towers, sewage works, railway lines, bridges, canals, and towns that are identical but for a few small differences in architecture and stone.

The sunlight that, as we left, had begun to creep over the London suburbs, disappeared the further north we went, returning only momentarily on the shoulder of a yellow hill miles away or picking out a distant reservoir in a second or two of magnesium brilliance.

The temperature dropped and the clouds darkened. The road steamed in driving rain. Shreds of mist hung over the cold lakes and woods. Moorland turned the colour of mould and becks coursed in spate down the peaty slopes, white and solid-looking from a distance, like seams of quartz.

No one had mentioned it—hoping presumably that it would go away of its own accord—but for the last few miles the minibus had been making an awful racket, as though something was loose in the engine. Every time Father Bernard changed gear there was a loud shuddering and grinding and eventually it refused to shift at all and he pulled in to the side of the road.

‘What is it, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘The clutch, I think,’ Father Bernard replied.

‘Oh, it’ll be the damp, it gets into everything up here,’ said Mr Belderboss and sat back satisfied with his assessment.

‘Can you fix it, Father?’ Mrs Belderboss said.

‘I certainly hope so, Mrs Belderboss.’ Father Bernard replied. ‘I get the impression that you have to rely on our own ingenuity out here.’

He smiled and got out. He was right, of course. In every direction there was nothing but deserted, muddy fields where seabirds were blown like old rags.

The rain battered onto the windscreen and ran down in waves as Father Bernard lifted the bonnet and propped it open.

‘Go and help him,’ Mummer said to Farther.

‘What do I know about cars?’ he replied, glancing up from the map he was studying.

‘You could still give him a hand.’

‘He knows what he’s doing, Esther. Too many cooks and all that.’

‘Well, I hope he does manage to get us going again,’ said Mummer, looking out of the window. ‘It’s only going to get colder.’

‘I’m sure we’ll survive,’ said Farther.

‘I was thinking of Mr and Mrs Belderboss,’ Mummer replied.

‘Oh, don’t worry about us,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘We’ve known cold, haven’t we, Mary?’

‘I should say so.’

They started to harp on about the war and having heard it all before I turned to Hanny who had been tugging at my sleeve for the last five minutes, desperate for me to share his View Master.

Hanny grinned and handed me the red binoculars that he’d had stuck to his face for most of the journey, clicking through the various reels he took out of his school satchel. It had been
Mountains of the World
until we stopped at Kettering for a toilet break, then
Strange Creatures of the Ocean
, and
Space Exploration
until Mummer had finally persuaded him onto
Scenes from The Old Testament
, which he now urged me to look through again. Eve with her private parts delicately blotted with foliage, Abraham’s knife poised over Isaac’s heart, Pharaoh’s charioteers tumbling in the Red Sea.

When I had finished I noticed that he had his hands jammed between his legs.

‘Do you need to go?’ I said.

Hanny rocked back and forth, kicking the side of his boot against the door.

‘Come on then.’

While Father Bernard was poking about in the engine, I took him outside and walked down the lane a little so no one else would see. He went over to a dry stone wall and unzipped his jeans while I waited in the rain and listened to it tapping on the hood of the parka Mummer had insisted I bring.

I looked back at the minibus and thought I could hear raised voices. Mummer. Farther. They had tried their best to hold onto the cheerfulness that had been there when we left Saint Jude’s, but it had been difficult not to feel despondent once the rain began pounding the roads and everything had been obscured by mist.

A stiff wind blew in across the fields bringing the smell of brine and rot as strong as an onion. It seemed that all our past pilgrimages were contained in that smell and I felt a tension start to grow in my stomach. We had been coming here for as long as I could remember, yet I’d never felt completely comfortable in this place. It was rather like my grandfather’s house. Glum, lifeless, mildly threatening. Not somewhere you wanted to linger for very long. I was always glad to see the back of it once our Easter pilgrimage was over and I’d breathed a private sigh of relief when Father Wilfred died and we stopped going altogether.

The rest of them kept up their spirits with hymns and prayers but at times it seemed as though they were, without knowing it perhaps, warding things off, rather than inviting God in.

Hanny finished and waved me over to where he was standing.

‘What is it?’ I said.

He pointed at the fence in front of him. A hare had been shot and skinned and its hide splayed on the barbed wire, along with several dozen rats. Trophies or deterrents, I suppose they were both.

‘Leave it alone, Hanny,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch it.’

He looked at me pleadingly.

‘We can’t save it now,’ I said.

He went to stroke it but withdrew his hand when I shook my head. The hare stared at us through a glassy brown eye.

We were starting to cross the road back to the minibus when I heard the sound of a car approaching. I grabbed Hanny’s sleeve and held him tightly as an expensive-looking Daimler went past us, throwing water into the ditches on either side. There was a young girl asleep in the back, her face against the window. The driver slowed at the corner where we were standing and turned his head briefly to look at me before he rounded the bend and was gone. I had never seen a car like that here before. There was little in the way of traffic at all around The Loney. Mostly hay-trucks and farm wagons and not always motorised either.

When Hanny and I got back to the minibus Father Bernard still had his hands deep in amongst the pipes and wires.

‘What’s wrong with it, Father?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Tonto,’ he said and wiped the rain out of his eyes with his sleeve. ‘It might be the fly wheel, but I’d have to take the whole thing apart to be sure.’

He closed the bonnet with some reluctance and followed me back on board.

‘Any luck?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘Not so far,’ Father Bernard replied, smoothing his sopping hair back over his head. ‘I think it’ll be a garage job to be honest.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘What a start.’

‘Well at least it got us this far,’ said Farther.

‘Aye, there’s that,’ said Father Bernard.

Monro was whining. Father Bernard shushed him and he shrank into a white eyed nervousness.

‘I think the best thing to do,’ he said, ‘will be for me to walk on to the village and see if there’s anyone there who can help us.’

‘In this weather, Father?’ said Mrs Belderboss. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

‘To be honest, the walk will do me good, Mrs Belderboss,’ he said. ‘I don’t do well sitting for so long.’

‘It’s a fair way, Father,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘It must be a good three or four miles.’

Father Bernard smiled dismissively and started to wind his scarf around his neck.

‘You’ll go with him, won’t you?’ Mummer said to me.

‘Ah, don’t worry yourself, Mrs Smith,’ said Father Bernard. ‘There’s no sense in two of us getting soaked.’

‘It’s no trouble, is it?’ Mummer nudged me.

‘No,’ I said.

The wind buffed around the minibus. Monro piped up again and Father Bernard leant down and scrubbed his neck to comfort him.

‘What’s the matter with him, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I don’t know,’ said Father Bernard. ‘Maybe it was that car going past.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Mr Belderboss. ‘He was going at a fair gallop. I didn’t think he was going to slow down for the bend.’

‘The girl was a pretty little thing, though wasn’t she?’ said Mrs Belderboss.

Mr Belderboss frowned. ‘What girl?’

‘The girl in the back.’

‘I didn’t see a girl.’

‘Well then you missed out, Reg.’

‘Oh come on now, Mary,’ he said. ‘You know I only have eyes for you.’

Mrs Belderboss leant over to Miss Bunce.

‘Make the most of David’s sincerity while it lasts,’ she said, but Miss Bunce was looking past her at Monro, who had crawled back under my seat and was shaking.

‘Come on, old feller,’ said Father Bernard. ‘You’re showing me up. What’s the matter?’

***

Three men were coming across the field towards us. They were dressed in filthy green wax jackets and rubber boots. None of them wore hats or had umbrellas. They were local men, either hardened to the weather or possessed of the knowledge that it would pass over in a few moments.

One of them carried a shotgun over his arm. Another had a white terrier on a chain. One of those ones with a long face and wide-set eyes. A dog drawn by a child. The third man was older than the other two and walked several yards behind, coughing into his fist. They stopped and looked at us for a few moments before carrying on towards the road.

‘Should we ask them for some help, Father?’ said Mr Belderboss.

‘I’d rather we didn’t,’ said Miss Bunce, looking at David, who reassured her by taking her hand.

‘Well, it’s either that or we spend the rest of the week sitting here,’ said Mummer.

Father Bernard got out and looked along the road before crossing. The men climbed over the stile and waited when Father Bernard called to them. The tallest of them, who was bald and had the build of a Charolais bull, held his shotgun over the crook of his arm and looked at Father Bernard while he explained about the clutch. The one with the dog held its snout tightly closed and alternated his interest between what Father Bernard was saying and the strangers on the minibus. His left arm seemed to hang more loosely and on that hand he wore a black mitten tied at the wrist with some string. The elder man coughed again and sat down on a broken bit of wall. He was a strange colour. The colour of nicotine or dried daffodils. The same colour my grandfather went when his liver packed in.