Touch (6 page)

But he'd hardly seen his sister since, and anyway, she was an old woman now, not the girl he'd chased across the shaven meadows at hay time. The plain gold ring had worn thin from his mother's work, then thinner from the years of his sister's life. It sits snug on his little finger, tight above the swollen knuckle that he's snagged on gates and walling stone and fencing wire. His little sister, grown old now. Poor Effie. The thought is like a gasp of pain, like the memory of Annie when she was young. A thought he couldn't bear now. The smell of her hair which he'd slept and breathed in. The taste of sun on her skin when they'd put the farm to rest for the night and made love in the bed his parents had shared.

Daniel places the ring on the table with the crumpled letter, staring out to the orchard. The sun is touching the branches of damson and apple trees. Making them glow, making them exist. It's the light of a new day.

 
Daniel leaves the house and walks to the shippen. He pours out feed for his cattle, checking their feet for sores, their mouths for blisters. He brings logs to the house, washes down the tractor and goes out into the fields to check the sheep. One of the ewes has lambed in the night. A single, sickly little tup that staggers awkwardly, trailing its thread of umbilical cord, bleating after its mother. Daniel steadies the wriggling little thing between his knees, rapping it sharply between the eyes with his fist. When it connects, he feels the lamb shrink back into his hand. Then something seems to clear and it finds its legs, scuttling under its mother to drag at her teats. His father had shown him that trick, though the vet might have something to say about it these days. The unlambed ewes are swollen and clumsy on the fell. All around him the fields are loud with new life. The sun is looming above the horizon, behind clouds tinged with orange and apricot.

By afternoon the wind is strengthening from the east. This is the wind of knives. The Russian wind that flays flesh from bone. He's already listened to the weather forecast over a corned-beef sandwich with pickles and a mug of tea at lunchtime. There'll be worse to come. And there'd been another foot-and-mouth cluster near Longtown. It's getting closer. Like in the sixties when they'd closed down the farm. The disease had spared them that time. You'd think this time the Ministry would stamp it out. But these days all sorts of rubbish went into the feed. Cattle and sheep were being carted from one end of the country to another to be sold or slaughtered. Mostly they were worth nothing, or next to it.

Now he's out again, wrapped up in a trench coat and balaclava, making sure that ice is broken on the water tubs, checking the sheep licks, watching the ewes. When he gets back to the Land Rover, it's almost dark. He doesn't know where the day has gone. But he's kept busy. Kept on top of things. He starts the engine and lets it grumble for a moment, staring at the dim fascia. Then he drives back to the farmhouse, silencing the dogs with a yell of mock anger at the gate. With a little grunt of surprise, he finds the house empty, the fire almost out.

 

Daniel rouses the embers, banking up the fire with coal. He throws on a log and presses it home. The smell of sulphur stings his nostrils. The chimney needs sweeping. He opens a tin of cat food and shakes it into a dish. The golden jelly is appetising and the cat nuzzles his hand. Stripping off his overalls, Daniel washes himself at the kitchen sink. Then he opens a tinned meat pie and puts it in the Aga, boiling a few potatoes and brewing a pot of tea to see it down. The wind rushes up to the windows and turns away in little shrieks and howls. The wind's company for a lonely man. That was the saying. Daniel picks up an old
Farmer's Weekly
, meaning to catch up on an article about feed supplements. But he's mislaid his reading glasses and can't be bothered to find them. What the farm will yield hardly concerns him now. It's like hay and silage: he'll do what serves
him
best, not the bank manager.

He sits, watching the fire rouse itself, gazing towards the blank television screen, waiting until it's time for the news. News of the world beyond this world. It's hardly real, all that, but it's there. And he's part of it, somewhere. This farm a tiny bleb on the turning world. Indiscernible in all the blackness of space. A needlepoint of light to be swallowed up in time. A part of everything and nothing. Daniel dozes off, then wakes with a jerk. Again that little grunt of astonishment. Opposite him is Annie's empty chair. Apart from the sleeping cat, apart from the wind, he's alone. The dogs are restless again, yapping at the night. He dozes, letting the bluster of wind fade.

 
What wakes him is the full-blooded baying of the dogs. Beyond that, the bleating of sheep. It's an agitated tumult, a sound beyond the usual call and answer of ewe to lamb. The cat is prowling at the windowsill, its tail flicking, fur brindled all the way down its spine. Daniel rubs his forehead. The skin of his hands is dry; his nails are chipped and roughly cut. He rises from the chair and struggles into his overcoat. The longer he sits these days the stiffer he gets. His knees are cold despite the fire. It's a draughty old place, the doors sagging on their hinges to let in the freezing air. He puts his feet into his Wellington boots and feels the cold gulp at them. Unlocking the gun cabinet, he takes out the twelve-bore and a handful of cartridges. He buttons his coat, breaks the gun, loads both barrels then drapes it over his arm, just as his father taught him.

When he steps from the house, the wind has dropped. There's a brilliant crescent moon, as if the full moon was pressed against a horn-shaped slit in the sky. He passes the dogs straining at their chains. He doesn't speak or comfort them. The fox knows they are chained, that he is free and they are slaves. And the dogs know it too, savage in their servility.

Daniel clumps off down the path towards the field where he's been lambing. He tries to put his numbed feet down lightly. The air is searingly cold. Patches of wool are scattered on the grass. All around him, the clamour of lambs calling to their mothers, the peremptory
baa
of mothers calling back. Wind gusts towards the house from the field, taking his scent away from where he's sure the fox must be. If he was a fox, he'd work the bottom end of the field where it dips away down the fell. Here a stray lamb is easier to pick off, unsteady as it struggles up the slope. He'd found their bodies there in the past, their throats gored, intestines dragged out. It was a waste – and that's one thing he could never bear.

Daniel treads downhill, keeping the wall between him and the field. A footpath crosses his land a little lower down. When he reaches the stile, he climbs over into the field and sits on the bottom step, facing the commotion of bleating ghosts. Gently, he closes up the gun and lays it across his knees. The click of the catch is satisfying. He strains to see into the gloom, where he knows the fox must be moving. The merest rumour of a shadow. Rippling close to the wall. Slipping through the history of its race. Its purpose to kill, that's all. To kill and then to die. Maybe to find a vixen then leave her to rear his cubs. It could know nothing more. Lurking at the edge of human affairs, to take what it could find. Winning a life from the flock, then dissolving back into the dark, the taste and lust of blood in its jaws.

Daniel must have dozed off, despite the cold. What wakes him is a snowflake drifting into his face. He opens his eyes to find the moon gone, the temperature a few degrees higher, snow thickening the night around him. The sheep are quieter now, recognising the deeper, wholesale threat of snow. A fox is a fox, but snow is a wolf pack. They have that memory in them, behind their vacant, urine-coloured eyes. Now they stumble into a rough line against the far wall of the field, marshalling their lambs. The pregnant ewes stumble awkwardly, shaking their tails, falling to their knees.

Snow has made the fox bold. From the corner of his eye, Daniel sees it haunching across the middle of the field. It moves belly-low like a dog rounding up its flock. There is snow on the gun. Daniel wipes it away with his cuff and raises the twin barrels slowly. The fox is twenty yards away. It hasn't scented him yet. Fire, sweat, soap and gun oil: the stink of man. But the wind is taking the message away, shredding it over the fell. The stock nudges Daniel's shoulder. He lines up the bead. The fox turns. It has heard something. Perhaps the swish of the gun against his coat. It sweeps its brush beside its legs then points its face towards the man on the stile. Now that stare: frozen across the centuries, the fox's eyes hewn from ice.

Snow comes down between them in small, rapid flakes. Twenty yards of snow between man and fox. Daniel thinks of the dogs in the yard, easily quelled by his voice. This fox is beautiful and still free. A rebel, a refugee, a doomed renegade at winter's frontier with spring.

The fields are turning white. Snow falls like sifted flour, faintly reflecting the moonlight that is stifled now behind clouds. In that moment Daniel sees the uncut pear tree, the rope swing tossed aside. Effie laughing with her front teeth not yet grown back. Then white sheets. Annie's imprint on the bed when they took her away from a room with frosted windows.

The gun barks and snaps into his shoulder. The fox is leaping in the snow, lashing the whole length of its body as if pinned to the ground by its tail. The shot has torn open its shoulder to the bone. The flock sets up a tremendous bleating, scattering from the shelter of the wall. The second shot takes the fox full in the face and it lies down, its paws threshing snow.

Daniel walks to where it lies, almost slipping down the slope as he goes. Snow creaks under his rubber boots. He picks the creature up by its brush. It's a dog fox and its body is surprisingly heavy. Then that smell of fox, rank and sharp and feral. Bloody foam has already spread across its muzzle. Its eyes are dim, glaucous in death. Daniel climbs back over the stile awkwardly, the gun in one hand, the fox dangling from the other. He trails the corpse as he goes. Snow is driving strongly now. He can only just make out the farmhouse lights. A trail of blood falls into his footprints. They'll freeze overnight and he'll find his own trail in the morning, strewn with smudged scarlet flowers.

At the yard gate, the dogs go wild at the scent of fox. Daniel ignores their row. He takes the corpse into the kitchen. The cat hisses under his feet and flees. Daniel stands the shotgun in a corner and, with one hand, spreads an old newspaper on the armchair opposite his. He lays the fox in it. Its ruined face, its rictus snarl looking towards the door as if expecting a visitor.

The fire has burned low. Daniel drops on another log and sparks shoot towards the hearth. He slips off his Wellingtons and stands them at the back door, in readiness. Two ewes have still to lamb. He puts his hands into his coat pocket to find the unfired cartridges, weighing them in his hand. They're dry and papery, their brass percussion caps cold to the touch. That touch of ice, numbing everything. There is something perfect about their weight and proportion. He empties the breech and throws the spent casings on the fire. Then he locks the gun and the spare cartridges away. They shan't tempt him again.

Only then does he ease himself into his own armchair opposite the fox. The room is warm after the fells. The fire is catching. Daniel takes his mother's ring from the table and slips it onto his swollen finger. His cheeks burn. He needs that shave. Tomorrow, maybe. He's tired now. His eyelids droop towards sleep.

 
The meadows are shorn of hay, burned to bronze stubble. A rope pulls taut on the pear tree under a girl's weight. Effie's hair is haloed in the sun of a summer fifty years gone by. The lightning bolt has not yet split the tree. Sap rises in its leaves each spring to make them green. To make the tree blossom and bear a few half-ripe pears. That's what Annie's breasts had reminded him of the first time he'd covered them with his hands. There'd been no honeymoon. Just an afternoon's work. Then entering the bedroom, tired and expectant. Pine boards creaking under his heels. His arms glowing from sun and a cold-water wash. Annie watching him from her pillow, smiling with dark eyes.

Now Annie turns the colour of smoke. Her white hair flows through his fingers. Snowflakes slide down the window. Darkness presses against the electric light inside. The dogs are silent, though sheep still bleat from the fells. The fox gazes towards the door.

When Daniel wakes, he holds up his hand to stare at Effie's ring. Wind is sucking at the chimney. It stirs up ash, kindling a glow from the hollowed log. The fox's blood has dried across his knuckles. He leans forward to touch its coat, stifling a yawn.

Lucy's mother was working at the kitchen table, pulling the bad leaves from a lettuce. From where she sat in the living room Lucy could see her standing in a pool of sunlight. Her strong brown calves and ankles stood up firmly from open-toed sandals. Lucy looked down at her own slender, white legs. Her mother went brown so easily. It was vexing. Like the way she so deftly pulled the leaves from the lettuce and shouted over her shoulder.

‘Do we really need the television on in this weather? Can't you play outside?'

Lucy glanced at the screen. The television was on and she'd drawn down the blinds so that the colours showed up better. But she wasn't really watching. It was a children's programme anyway, one she felt too old for. She leaned forwards to switch it off and then went to open the blinds.

The light struck at her eyes, cascading across the surface of the boating lake. They lived very close to the park and she was used to seeing couples sprawling on the grass with transistor radios, joggers with Walkmans, or solitary men walking their dogs. Lucy whispered the words of the television commercial. So silly that it was mesmerising.

Now you know there's a better way to feed your dog!

She looked through into the kitchen again, frowning at her mother's calves.

A young starling flew down in front of the lounge window and startled her for a second by clawing at the glass.

‘Wouldn't you like to go round to Anna's or something?'

Her mother's voice came over the sound of the lettuce being sluiced in the sink. Everything had to be brisk, smart, efficient. Like her little Ford Fiesta that she went health visiting in, parked right there in the driveway.

‘Anna's on holiday, remember?'

‘Oh yes, where did you say she'd gone?'

Lucy knew very well that her mother hadn't forgotten.

‘I told you, Russia.'

‘Ah, yes.'

Her mother sounded disapproving and bored at the same time. She always managed to turn the tables on you somehow.

‘So what are you going to do today?'

An edge of annoyance was creeping in to sharpen her voice. Lucy wandered into the kitchen and took a cherry from the fruit bowl, biting it around the stone.

‘Uhm, I don't know.'

Her mother put down the colander with a sharp rap.

‘For heaven's sake, Lucy, you're fourteen years old! Why on earth can't you occupy yourself with something?'

‘What's the matter?'

‘The matter? Nothing's the matter, it's just that you're so... languid.'

‘Languid?'

Lucy was at her most provocative. Her mother snatched up a knife and began slicing it through the stems of rhubarb that lay on the chopping board. There was silence between them for a few seconds, just the rap, rap, rap of the knife and the little scrunch as her mother pressed on, sliding the blade to sever the fibrous skin. Everything about her was brisk and organised.

 
Lucy took another cherry, slowly and deliberately.

‘When's Daddy coming home?'

Rap, rap, rap went the knife.

‘When's Daddy coming home?'

She repeated it slowly as if her mother was deaf. She watched her stop chopping and straighten up.

‘I don't know, tomorrow sometime.'

‘Tomorrow?'

Lucy said the word as if she'd never heard it before. She knew by the way that her mother turned back to the board and crunched the knife through the rhubarb stems that she'd touched her on the raw.

‘Where's he gone?'

‘Where's who gone, dear?'

Lucy opened the pedal bin with her foot and spat the cherry stone in.

‘Daddy, of course!'

‘Oh, he's at a conference. About allergies.'

Her mother lifted the rhubarb into another colander – it matched the one that held the lettuce – and rinsed it under the tap. For a moment the water coming through was stained pink from the skins. Lucy's father was Dr Ainsley and they lived in a large house near the park. Her mother was the health visitor at the local Health Centre. The household was run with medical precision.

 
Lucy ran her finger across the working surface. She was bored. Her mother began to untie her kitchen apron and put on a housecoat. Lucy moved towards the door, anticipating a request for help. She was too late.

‘Would you like to dust the lounge?'

‘I was just going out.'

‘Were you? It didn't look like it to me. Come on, it won't take you long.'

Lucy refused to put on an apron just to dust the lounge. She flicked the duster over the cocktail cabinet, her father's cricket trophies, the ghastly wedding photograph and the one she hated of herself in school uniform. She flicked three dead flies off the windowsill and onto the thick pile carpet. It gave her a secret pleasure to do the job badly, knowing how her mother wouldn't settle until she had personally dusted the whole room again.

She threw the duster onto the kitchen table and shouted up the stairs where her mother was busy in the bathroom.

‘I'm going out now.'

‘That was quick!'

Lucy didn't answer. She loved the insolence in her own silence.

‘Ok, have a nice time!'

Her mother's voice was bright with relief. Lucy slammed the front door, slouching down the driveway to annoy her, just in case she might be watching from an upstairs window.

 
It was much hotter outside the house. Lucy undid another button of her blouse. When she looked down she could see where her small breasts were gathering into the bra. They were coming on. Her mother, of course, had firm, full breasts that jutted out smartly from her uniform.

Lucy crossed the busy main road that separated the house from the park and went through a gap in the green metal railings. The lake looked cool and peaceful. She picked her way through the couples on the grass. Snatches of dance music wavered in the steamy air. There was a path all the way round the lake, leading through thick stands of rhododendrons. Lucy walked slowly, feeling the sun on her hair and neck. She wondered what Russia would be like and envied Anna. Would it be summer there or winter? She couldn't remember. She decided that it would be summer and swel-teringly hot and Anna would be in a troika galloping through the dust of the steppes.

Lucy stopped in a little arbour of rhododendrons that sheltered her from view. She went down to the edge of the lake and crouched down, idly flicking a handful of dust and gravel into the water. A family of mallards, one duck and five ducklings, sailed out from under the overhanging branches to investigate. They pecked at the dust on the water.

‘Stupid things!'

Lucy threw another handful of dust and the ducks gathered around it in a flurry, darting and pecking. In the sunlight the ducklings looked like golden catkins dusted with brown pollen. There was a little beach at the water's edge and she threw down a handful of tiny stones there. The mother duck kept her distance but two of the ducklings came closer. Lucy watched them. It was fascinating, the way they had such trust. It might be possible to lure one of the ducklings from the water. She began to trail dust and gravel from her hands, pretending that it was food. The ducklings paddled closer. It was too easy. Soon one of them had ventured from the water and was pecking within a few inches of her hand. The down on its body was like stained fibres of cotton wool.

Lucy leaned forward, taking care that her shadow didn't fall on the duckling. Very slowly she moved her hand over it and made a little grab. She gathered it up, clumsy, struggling, folding the stubby little wings under her fingers. Beneath the fine plumage she could feel its bones, its weird heat. She held it firmly and rolled her hand over to examine it from all sides. It tried to break free and she had to keep pushing the useless wings back under her fingers. Its life throbbed in her hands, so different from her own, so inexplicable. It was a small machine of feather and muscle, its heart ticking away, its eyes flicking under a pale membrane.

Shuffling close to the edge of the water, Lucy placed the duckling's feet just below the surface. It struggled in her hand again: it was an odd feeling. She pushed her hand slowly under the water and pulled it out again. Water ran off the downy fur, globing into little droplets like mercury. The mother duck swam around, unconcerned, only a few feet away. Lucy pushed the duckling under the water, testing its buoyancy. She pulled it out and then gently pushed it under again, holding it there until its struggles weakened and it fell still in her hand. She brought it out and laid it on the beach.

Two thin rivulets of water ran out from the nostril holes in its beak. It twitched its webbed feet feebly a few times. The sun seemed to evaporate its remaining energy and it began to die, a milky film coagulating over each eye. Lucy watched it, engrossed, as its life ebbed away. Now that it was dead she was afraid to handle it. It had become taboo, an untouchable. She scuffled the little body with her feet so that it rolled over and picked up a coating of dust, pushing it back into the shadows of the rhododendrons.

Crouching under the low branches, Lucy scooped out a little grave from the gravel and decaying leaves and laid the duckling in it. She built a mound over it then fetched some pink blossoms of rhododendron which she laid across the grave. She wanted to cry, scared now, the dead duckling hidden in the earth below her feet. She felt a sudden outburst of love for the creature that only minutes before had been almost incandescent with life. Its mother swam around so stupidly, losing her children and not caring.

Lucy cried in stuttering sobs, swirling her fingertips in the dust in little panicky movements. Then, suddenly, she stopped. She flung the flowers away from the grave and stamped the earth flat so that there was no visible mound. Then she scuffed dust and leaves over it until it was almost indistinguishable from the surrounding earth.

Lucy went and washed her hands in the lake; her fingernails were black crescents, packed with soil. She took out a handkerchief and blew her nose thoroughly. No one must notice that she had been crying. Then she set off for home, threading her way through the people who still lay on the grass, unconcerned. She felt slightly breathless, her heart beating close to the surface of her chest. What if they all knew what she had done? She imagined a secret observer. Someone who had watched her drown and then bury the duckling. She even thought up a story in her defence: how she had found the duckling and realised it was sick and had tried to revive it in the water. It was no good. She had drowned it, killed it, kidnapped it from its mother and shut off its life.

 
When she got back to the house everything was spotless, every cushion plumped and tidied, no trace of dust on the glass-topped coffee table. There was a note from her mother to say that she had gone shopping and would be back by one o'clock. Lucy glanced at her watch. A whole hour to go. She searched inside her head for something to do, something that would please her mother. But the house was hermetic, organised, sealed up in itself.

Sitting in the lounge, Lucy watched thousands of dust motes glitter in a shaft of sunlight. They turned just as planets turned in the emptiness of space. The tight feeling was there again in her chest. She got up, drew the blinds to keep the sun off the Indian rug, then went into the kitchen to set the table. The telephone rang but she was afraid to answer it. She let it ring, on and on, rapping down the knives and forks to shut out the noise. At last she could bear it no longer and picked up the handset just in time to hear the other receiver being replaced. The line clicked. A steady buzzing set in like tinnitus. Lucy stood there for a long time, holding the telephone, waiting, imagining her father's voice.