Still, we watched these lads all the same. We watched the habit of their movement and the manner in which they held their bodies and the way they sat on their bikes, slouching easily while their bowed arms stretched to the handlebars and revved the bikes’ engines.
We saw other people so rarely we were fascinated by the news that did happen past, and though I loved watching birds and beetles, watching human beings was the thing I loved the best.
After catching the rabbits, the traveller lads got on their motorbikes and kicked back against the dirt then sped along the next lane and the next to find more of what they were after. We could follow the noise for a while but unless they stopped again nearby we could not follow to stalk them any longer and they were lost to us. We waited until the next time they came hunting or the next time they raced their bikes. In the meantime, there were always rabbits to watch.
There was a night I could not sleep even though I had tired myself out working with Daddy in the copse all day. My back ached from swinging a large axe up and around and down onto the logs that Daddy had felled. My forearms ached from wrapping my slender hands around those logs and placing them onto the chopping block, and from thrusting the small hand-axe down onto them with my other hand time after time, to split the wood for burning in our stove. My thighs burnt from squatting and picking up bundles of the stuff though it was too heavy for me, and carrying it to Daddy’s store or up to the house. The ground in the copse was rough and strewn with branches and rocks and leaves that had fallen unevenly and rotted hard over seasons. Uneven earth cut apart by the growth and death of thick roots. My calves ached from a day of finding purchase on this unsteady ground, and the skin on my face was sore from the salty sweat that had trickled down from my hairline slowly for the last several hours.
My eyes, however, were as fresh as they had been that morning, and were filled with the dappled light that had shone through the quivering leaves all day, and with the colours of the wood and the image of my father stooping and rising as he felled branches for us to collect. Because my eyes were so bright and alive, my thoughts were too. Each time I reckoned I was falling off into sleep a colourful memory of the day returned and revived me. I skipped between waking and sleeping for the best part of two hours then peeled back the covers of my bed and pulled myself upright. I tucked my feet into my slippers and walked through the two doors to the kitchen.
There I found my sister stood at the window with her right hand raised in front of her face. She held back the curtain so as to look out into the night. The sky was dark but for a thin moon waxing and but for Venus forming a concentration of the sun’s rays above the horizon. She loomed larger than I had ever seen her.
A jug of home-made cider sat on the kitchen counter. Cathy had drunk perhaps half.
‘You’re up too, Danny.’ She only called me Danny sometimes. She had heard me step over the threshold and stop to look past her at the night sky.
I told her that I had been unable to sleep and that I guessed she was unable to sleep as well. I suggested that the both of us might just be too awake because of the day of working and because our bodies were tired but our thoughts awake.
‘I think I were too angry to sleep,’ she said.
Her statement shocked me. I asked her why she was angry.
‘I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?’
I told her that I was not. I told her that I was hardly ever angry and then she told me again that she felt angry all the time.
She told me that sometimes she felt like she was breaking apart. She told me that sometimes it was as if she was standing with two feet on the ground but at the very same time part of her was running headlong into a roaring fire.
I stayed up with her for a couple more hours until the jug of cider had gone and we had drunk another one besides.
When she agreed finally to go to bed, I returned to my room and fell asleep so quickly I almost forgot the events of the night. It was as if they had been a dream. A dream of fire. Indeed, in those days I thought that the most prolonged conflict in my life would be the one I faced every night against my dreams. Sometimes I thought I could sleep for ever. Sometimes, pulling myself out of a dream to be awake and alive in the world was like pulling myself out of my own skin and facing the wind and the rain in my own ripped-raw flesh.
Chapter Twelve
‘That bastard who won Lottery.’
‘Who?’
‘That bastard who won Lottery. Euromillions, I think it were. Not main prize, but enough. Already a millionaire and he wins Lottery.’
Cathy and I were in the car park down behind the back of the Working Men’s Club. The tarmac must have been forty years old. Winter frosts had cracked through its crust so many times there were more craters than ridges, and large gnarled clumps of the stuff, broken into rough, lithic formations, had been kicked to the sides of the rectangle like gargoyles in the rubble of a fallen cathedral. In patches, the artificial surface had cracked and crumbled so badly that only black earth remained, scorched by the tar. If the car park had once had white lines to mark its bays they had long since vanished. Chewing gum flecked its surface white and grey.
The morning mist hung around our knees. It would not be a cold day but it was cold now, just after dawn, cold and dim, the sun’s rays caught in clouds that were bobbing on the horizon.
‘Fucking Euromillions.’
This was where men met if they wanted work. There was little to be had around here. The jobs had gone twenty years ago or more. There was just a couple of warehouses where you could get work shifting boxes into vans. At Christmas-time there were more boxes and more vans but still not enough. There were jobs here and there for women: hairdressing jobs, nannying jobs, shop-assistant jobs, cleaning jobs, teaching-assistant jobs if you had an education. But if you were a man and you wanted odd jobs or seasonal farm work this was where you met. A truck came through and took you off to the fields or more usually to a barn nearby where a combine harvester dropped its load on the floor for sorting: sugar beet for sorting, turnips for sorting. And potatoes. Today it was potatoes and the men knew they would be taken up to Sunrise Farm to work for the bastard farmer who had won the Lottery.
‘At least he gives us time off we need to keep signed on,’ said one.
‘Drives us up there if we’re going to miss an appointment.’
‘He fucking has to, though. If he keeps us signed on he doendt have to pay us as much. He just slips us a tenner at end of day like it’s fucking pocket money.’
‘And he’ll go and dob you in if you cause a fuss. He’ll go and tell job centre you’ve been working for him and he’ll rustle up some bits of paper he says he’s been giving you all along. Payslips and legal stuff. Stuff you’ve never seen before in your life but then it’s suddenly there and it’s your own fault for claiming benefits and for not paying tax or summat, all in one go. Happened to Johnno.’