A shadow fell across the dead rabbit and Dave looked up to find Fred Redmond standing there with a shotgun broken over his bare arm. 'You … did you?' Dave didn't want to sound like a townie bleeding heart. 'Nah.' Redmond was offhand. 'Cooduv bin a fox — feral cá eevun. Eyem nó in ve abbit uv dissembowlin em. Still,' he continued, guiding Dave to the far side of the field with his free arm, 'vare a bluddë menniss, vay ar, lookí ve way awl viss bank eer iz riddulled wiv vare burrös — vayl av ve ole pitch subsydin if we doan keep em dahn. U shúd cumaht lampin wiv me wun nyt — gimme an and.'
Dave wasn't keen on the idea at all. But Phyllis said, 'Why don't you? It's the company he's after — since his wife died he's been on his own a lot. Besides, he's been a good neighbour to me and Steve over the years — not like some of the others round here. He's come over and done bits and bobs in the cottage — it'd be good if we could do something for him in return.'
They waited for a moonless, overcast night. Fred had an old car foglamp mounted on the back of his pick-up. 'Awl U gotta do iz aim ve beem an Eyel andul ve shoota.' They lurched along green lanes and rutted farm tracks. Fred swerved the pick-up off the road into areas of heath, where the fire-frazzled stumps of furze bushes stuck up in defensive palisades. They stopped, got out, went round and clambered up. Dazzled by the spotlight, Dave looked away into the bruised pink flesh of after-images, blinked a few times, then saw the rabbits, mute and curious, come nosing into the killing cone.
It bothered him much less than he thought it would. It helped that Fred handled the weapon with studious, unflashy movements: aiming, firing, breaking, ejecting, reloading — a piece worker on a cat-food production line. The rabbits' eyes shone in the big wattage, the gun reported, the dust and cordite smoke cleared to reveal another brown bump. They packed it in close to three in the morning; the back of the pick-up was lumpy with little corpses. 'What'll you do with 'em?' Dave asked, hoping for utilitarian news, rabbit stew canned and exported to starving Africans. 'Lanfil,' Fred snapped. 'Up bì Arlo.'
'U shúd C ve playce,' he resumed half an hour later when they were back at the cottage and companionably gulping sweetly burning Jack Daniels. 'Iss lyke ve surfiss uv ve moon, Uje pyls uv rubbish, Uje mobs uv gulls cummin from ve C. Eye tellya, Dave,' Fred said, relighting his mouse turd of a roll-up and blowing a thin thread of smoke into the tassels of the lampshade, 'Eye sumtyms fink iss awl gon arsy-versy, yernowoteyemeen? Ve C az cumminta ve lan — ve lan az gon aht 2 C.'
The past has become our future and in the future lie all our yesterdays … Was it a stale aphorism freshly baked, or an ancient pop song dimly recalled? Dave could not have said.
They went out often after that — the old farmer, the reddish-brown hide on his neck creviced like sun-baked mud; and the ex-cabbie, potbelly and arm wattles melting off him in the sweat of their night-time exertions. Another unlikely duo — a dad in search of a lad, a lad wandering fields hazy blue with memories. Fred acquired his own tea mug at the cottage, his own chair and cap hook. They would sit up well past dawn — not exactly getting drunk, although certainly not staying sober. Phyllis didn't mind, Dave came to her in the dewy period before she arose to go to the city. Came to her lean and lovelorn, gently athletic.
One night in mid August they came back from the lamping and got fucking lashed. Dave was relieved Fred didn't become maudlin, only tight-lipped, little dribs of sadness escaping with his fag smoke. Yet they both exposed their mummy selves that night, Fred regretting the lack of understanding he had shown to his son: 'Eye wannid im on ve lan — vares bin Ridmuns eerabaht fer sentries,' while Dave regretted everything — and nothing — all at once, for surely it's only a tosser who says he regrets nothing at all — it means he remembers nothing … be-because to remember is to regret.
Too pissed to drive, Fred tottered off about six in the morning. Dave came out to see him on his way. The old farmer's boots left crushed swathes in the unmown grass, each with its own scattering of mashed flower heads — dandelions, buttercups and daisies — twisted like wreaths. Fred forgot his shotgun, which was leaned up against the bellying plaster by the front door — as commonplace as an umbrella. Seeing it when she came down at seven, Phyl went back upstairs and gently shook Dave awake. 'Fred's left his gun in the house,' she said. 'Do make sure he comes over and gets it, we don't want any bother.' Dave grunted, 'Yeah, yeah, no bother, love, I'll get on it.' She felt his cheek against hers — as pocky as a newly surfaced road. She inhaled his shitty whisky breath and tousled his sweaty tonsure. He flumped back into the bed — she turned, went downstairs and drank a cup of rosehip tea standing at the draining board. She fetched her handbag, looked at the shotgun once more, then shut the door carefully, listening for the latch to fall. She set off across the fields, on her way to catch the bus from Chipping Ongar to Epping.
As the Fairway bucketed northeast up the MII the two men inside were engaged in two different conversations. Rifak, who was driving, had his slick earpiece-and-mic combo inserted, and so was able to carry on his row with Janice while holding the rattling old cab steady in the slow lane. Mustafa, by contrast, lay almost prone on the back seat, one of his new Gucci loafers — of which he was inordinately proud — pressed against the window. Mustafa spoke in Turkish, Rifak in crumbly English. Both men were smoking, and their consonants cut like scimitars through the silky blue swags and furbelows.
'Ewer runnin abaht tahn givvinit larj!' Rifak spat. He was in thrall to this woman, who was — his colleague thought — nothing special, only another cockney whore who got her tits out in a pub on the Mile End Road every Sunday lunchtime, so she could pick up a few quid from the dissolute boozers. However, Rifak, having stuck his cock in her arse, her mouth and latterly her cunt, before slapping her about a bit, was now convinced that he possessed her more than he even possessed his wife. His wife was a similarly abused girl, flown in from Central Anatolia and confined to the hejab and a flat above an upholsterer on the Lower Clapton Road. Here she had endured two murderous pregnancies in rapid succession, stuffing her frightened face with honey cakes, while receiving the hushed sympathy of other mummies.
By contrast Mustafa's phone conversation was measured and — h e felt — subtle. Their boss, who lived behind redbrick walls in Cobham, liked to have situation reports — and Mustafa was happy to oblige. He held the razor-thin mobile so that it shaved his hairy ear, and spoke eloquently of how this account was being pursued while that one had been closed. His Knowledge was comprehensive, the entire conurbation — its grids of overpriced, semi-detached hutches, and sclerotic arteries clogged with superfluous travel agencies — resolved into sums owed and the dizzying interest rates charged on them. In Mustafa's inner eye, he saw the city laid out as a diorama, the mounting sums rising in fluorescent plumes of digits from unsuccessful beauty salons and the serviced apartments where Toyota Lexus drivers fiddled with Romanian tarts.
They pulled off at Junction 7 and had breakfast in the Little Chef. During his seventeen years in London Mustafa had acquired a taste for slopping up runny egg yolks and the juice of grilled tomatoes with a scoop of bread. While performing these expert manipulations, he lectured Rifak on what a fool he was making of himself. Of the job in hand there was nothing to be said. It was routine.