A characteristic, certainly, of all the traps was that they were built to detain and to maim but not to kill. Pa had no use for dead animals. Lizard traps made of fly-wire and thumb tacks, traps for feral cats made from a metal bucket hammered through with nails, great crippling spring-jawed traps so powerful that their teeth would thrust deep into the bones of the wild beasts that roamed the valley ridges and howled and barked and laughed in the night. Simple traps, too, briars of tangled wire and slicing glass, or a tin sheet with an asterisk cut into it lain across a ditch – or contraptions left baited and armed with a series of triggers that could not only spring terrible jaws, but also release nets, or trap-doors above pits filled with acid mixes, nettles, or rats.
Each morning Pa would load Mule with as many of the chattering black traps as the beast could carry and, having decided beforehand where he would set them, click his tongue against his palate and mumble ‘Gitch, Mule,’ as he led the beast away.
Set, the traps would all cry like babies.
By the time they returned home from checking the traps, with the sun just falling behind the hills, Mule would invariably be loaded with six or seven hessian sacks, some of which squirmed and whipped and kicked, some of which growled and hissed. Pa would hitch the mule to one of the stilts that supported the old disused water tank and then begin to climb the rickety ladder, carrying one by one the squirming sacks and emptying them into the tank that sat on the wooden platform at the very top. When all the sacks were emptied, having first checked that the chicken wire top was secure, he would climb on to a high stool which he had erected on the platform and gaze over the side of the tank.
Like some mad imperator Pa would perch on the edge of his rickety throne, twenny feet in the air, and peering into the rusty arena, gloat upon the massacre within.
But if one were a looker like me, one could see his hard little hands screwed white into fists, resting on the rim of the corrugated tank, and a tortured vein worming across his forehead, his keen little eyes bugged and popping and fluttering from side to side.
VIII
Her name was Cosey Mo.
She stood upon the threshold of the caravan doorway, slumped slightly.
She was twenty-six.
Dressed in a faded pink slip she shimmered, pinkly and damply glistening, and yonder a dragonfly alighted on Euchrid’s knee.
Her toenails, painted thick with countless coats of red lacquer, were badly chipped. Her thin white arms hung limply by her sides, swinging slightly as she rocked upon her heels.
Sitting at her feet, on one of the caravan steps, was an open vanity box. In it, on a bed of coloured cotton-balls, stood four minikin vials of Prussian-blue glass, each one containing a measure of scented water.
Euchrid was deathly still, breathing low and long the lavender air as Cosey pulled the crystal stopper from one of the vials and splashed her cheeks with the essence. She dabbed at her nape with a yellow cotton-ball.
The skin of her arms was faultless, save for where she stuck in needles to wilt those brittle bones and make her limbs hang weakly, to make her heavenly body rock, to and fro, inside her shivering silk skin. Her thin garment strained against all the languid life contained within.
There were ten pearl buttons down her front. Two at the top and two at the bottom were undone. Her hem flapped with each summer gust and her breathing was deep and deeply rose her breasts.
Her hair was long and yellow and worn loosely back, held with a bunch of coloured pins, and her upper lids hung heavy and her slack mouth moved around the words to some half-remembered song,
‘I’ll fear not the darkness
When my flame shall dim …”
As the sun slowly sank, a snatch or two of her song floated behind the bush and reached Euchrid, and he listened to the music of her breathing, caught back in little gasps, all to the rhythm of her sultry rocking.
Then, with a little push of her body, she moved down the steps and, hand shading her eyes, looked down the hillside road. Pursued by a coil of dust a pick-up roared up the slope toward her. Euchrid leaned back. His heart groaned.
Cosey Mo spun around on her heels and darted back into the caravan.
Euchrid watched the open doorway as the motor grew louder.
Positioned back in the doorway Cosey resumed her rocking, like before, only this time a little firmer, a little more deliberate, heel to toe, heel to toe, and Euchrid, frozen by her pulchritude, observed with the finnicky eye of the voyeur that there were three buttons undone up top.
He saw her mouth. Messy now, with a thick red slick of lipstick.
‘You will be ever there beside me …’
Euchrid slipped off, back down the way he had come, crouching behind a stump as the pick-up hurtled past him.
IX
Ah calculate thus:
That by the time the moon comes shining over the top of yonder trees – that is to say, in approximately sixty minutes – mah soul will have departed from, and in no way will have remained in, this here world. And mah body which for some time has been and at present continues to be, even as ah speak, under repossession, will have departed from this world and deeply sunken will its flesh and bones be.
Ah say sixty minutes with at least a pinch of authority for ah have calculated, using the sun as mah measure, that ah have lain upon this mire, bogged in reminiscence, for a full thirty minutes and ah am now nearly one third unner – that is, one third if one employs the popular notion that the human body is divided into three parts, each of reasonably equivalent mass and weight: the head, shoulders and arms, the torso, and the legs and loins. If one discounts the supposition that mah rate of sinkage will accelerate as the quag takes more weight beneath the surface and so has more body-mass upon which to draw, and one ignores, as ah have done on both counts, the proposition that the rate of consumption will decrease as the unconsumed weight drops in proportion to that which is consumed, one can’t, ah hope, fault mah calculations. But one cannot discount factors like those above and still expect to arrive at a reasonably accurate conclusion. So, being that these contentions, or at least the answers to these contentions, lie beyond the limits of mah estimations, mah calculations can only be viewed, at best, as hypothesis – or at worst, utter fallacy. Therefore, in the light of this, ah am not averse, necessarily, to the proposition that ‘It is a madman who tries to count the knell of his own passing’, mainly because ah’m not really sure, exactly, what the said proposition actually means.
Suffice to say, though, and say not at all unhappily, after long and probing ruminations and having drawn no hasty conclusions, that ah, Euchrid Eucrow, have a snowball’s chance in hell of seeing the sun come up tomorrow.
X
Once ah was watching the hobos squatting around a fire over by the north gorge. They numbered seven in all. They had moved from a sheltered spot close to mah home, and had begun to circle around the swampland, paddling the marsh but keeping their distance from the eerie island of vegetation until they reached the gorge where it was dry. Ma had managed to sell them a couple of pints of Stew and they sat drinking in silence, dressed in filthy green greatcoats that hung to the ground. They wore heavy boots and ridiculous felt hats.
Ah was hidden in a pot-hole about thirty yards away when a small roan mongrel trotted up and sat at the edge of the ditch where ah was lying, yapping and whining and pushing a beggar’s paw toward me. A single blind eye, sealed by a nacreous cataract, hovered beneath a fringe of matted hair.