‘Your car.’ Ewart looked darker, older, more stern. Nerves treated people differently. Our anxieties were focussed on the same target but each from a different angle and with their own tints.
Martha waited by the vehicle and opened the boot as we stepped out with the bags and the dogs. Daddy climbed into the front seat and Martha got in behind him. Ewart was to drive, Cathy took the right-hand back seat and I sat in the middle between my sister and Mrs Royce.
We were bashed together as the car took the choppy track down our hill. The journey was hardly smoother on the open roads. In these parts they were puckered with potholes from icy winters and acid rain. On the worst roads the potholes were connected by cracks that had filled with sediment and organic material, compacted by passing cars before the weeds had managed to fully breach the tarmac. It made for a rough ride.
We spoke very little. Martha issued a handful of directions to Ewart and Ewart spoke once to ask for the time. Otherwise we were quiet. Cathy gazed out the window with her nose pressed gently against the smeared glass. Daddy breathed deeply. He did not turn his head. The back of his neck was covered with a film of perspiration that sparkled so clearly it was as if it had frozen into minuscule crystals of ice.
I glanced around at my companions, more interested in them than I ever could be by the world outside. After ten minutes of driving Martha reached over and gripped my left hand. Her palm was hot. I felt the steady pulse in her thumb and a warm band of gold on her ring finger. Her firm fingernails were set in acrylic.
We arrived at the racecourse forty-five minutes after leaving our house. We took the track around the perimeter fence to the grove behind. We drove between the trees, ash and oak like in our own copse. Brittle, fallen twigs and branches snapped beneath our wheels. The track was too narrow. Brackens, ferns and wild garlic had overtaken its sides and pressed against the vehicle’s body.
We came to a fork in the road. One route had been churned by previous cars, vans and four-by-fours. The other was strangely smooth, almost untouched. It was as if it had been flooded and the waters had soaked into the ground and evaporated into the air, leaving an even layer of sticky silt on that track and that track only, like a heavy toffee glaze.
As the car turned into the right fork I craned my neck to look back to the unused path. It was barren, more a strip of diseased or salted earth than a walkway. It led into a clearing where grass could find sunshine and push through the compressed earth and netted moss.
It slipped from view, obscured by the low-hanging branches of a particularly squat oak. I turned back in my seat and saw the cold sweat on Daddy’s neck.
We rounded a corner into another clearing, this one muddy from rain and footfall. Vehicles were parked in a semi-circle around the edge, most with their boots open to the slight drizzle. Men, a few boys and girls, and a very few women, stood around the open boots, peering. The fair was a chance to buy and sell. For many that might have been the main event. There were pedigree puppies and assorted rare breeds of ornamental chickens. There was a large Land Rover in one corner that was flanked by men with shaved heads and bomber jackets and most people stayed well clear. Guns possibly. Or bombs or pornography.
‘Cathy, Danny, you two get out first,’ said Daddy. ‘Find somewhere quiet to stand.’
I slid out behind Cathy and sank my boots into the mud. We trudged the outer rim. People stood around and swayed like the hulking trees that enveloped the gathering. They chatted and smoked and exhibited their animals, tools, weapons. Someone had set up a fire in an oil drum with a griddle to cook sausages and onions. Cathy and I shifted in the direction of the savoury smoke and spitting fat only to be turned away when we confessed we had no money.
‘What do you think this is? A food bank? Get out of it!’
Instead we loitered around the back of a black transit van that was filled with barrels of live fish. Goldfish, catfish, carp, perch. All swimming in water. The barrels were labelled, along with the approximate ages of the fish and the prices. Angling was big business around here.
Fighting, fishing and animals. That is where these people put their money.
I took a chance and stepped up into the van to take a closer look at what was on offer. There they were, at the bottom of the barrel. Fish the length of my forearm, spiralling up and down and around one another. Making the best use of the space they had. A pipe pumped air into the bottom of the barrel and it burbled up and tickled their gills and loose scales as the fish passed through the stream, gulping for sustenance.
‘Here, get out of it,’ said a sharp voice from behind me. It was a skinny little ginger boy a head shorter than Cathy. His face was shaded by sandy freckles and acne scabs. He wore an indigo tracksuit and white trainers. There was a residue of masticated toast stuck between his front teeth. ‘You can’t go in there unless you’re serious about buying. And you two aren’t buying owt.’
‘Who’s going a buy live fish here anyway?’ said Cathy. ‘Who’d come see a fight an buy a couple of carp?’
‘Who asked you, you stupid bitch?’
Any other day Cathy might have smacked him one. She spat through her teeth and her cheeks had filled with colour.
Her cheeks reddened readily, like mine. We both resented it. How I wished I could stay an icy pale when angry or excited.
She stepped back and walked away quickly.
I hurried after her, ignoring the sound of a heavy ball of mucus and saliva hitting the ground behind my feet as I turned.
She was pacing quickly, right across to the other side of the clearing where the serious business was happening, where Mr Price was talking with Daddy. Talking terms, outcomes, rules of sorts. Where the other serious men were standing around, their hands in the pockets of their waxed jackets, or round the leads of vicious-looking dogs. ‘Dogs in the cars when the fight’s on,’ I heard someone say. I thought of Jess and Becky doing battle with a couple of these dogs, in defence of their respective masters. I thought about the power of a true dog bite, or the slash of a claw, so much worse than the playful nips a dog could give when jumping at your hand. I thought about blood and flesh mixed with a dog’s saliva, and the tartar from its unbrushed teeth like blood mixed with rusted, dirty metal out on a farm far from help.
Daddy was unbuttoning his jacket, getting ready. I saw his opponent for the first time and felt acid in my throat.
He could have been six foot ten. He could have been taller. And he was heavy. He was sitting on the back of Mr Price’s trailer with his feet planted firmly in the mud. His weight pitched the trailer, testing its suspension to the full such that its chassis almost touched the dirt.
There he was, slouched like a dancing bear propped against a wall, rubbing his knuckles, bulbous and calcified like Daddy’s.
He caught sight of me staring as I pursued Cathy and pulled his lips up to his gums to reveal a full set of gold teeth. I looked quickly ahead. Cathy was heading for the trees.
I called after her like we were back at school. ‘Wait up. Wait up!’
Another couple of steps and I could reach her shoulder. ‘Wait up,’ I said. ‘Where you going? Fight’s about to start.’
Cathy turned and looked over my shoulder to where the serious men were puffing and panting and moving around each other in ever decreasing circles. The crowd was beginning to swell. A slack loop was forming and the gaps were filling with men, like doves flying into the niches of their cote. Their shoulders locking. The abstract sound of the chatter had been administrative but was now hoarse with a kind of giddy terror.