booksnew/source/Bane/Bane05.doc

CHAPTER FIVE
Jimmy Allison insisted on me joining him along at the Chandler on
the west side of the harbour. As he pulled on his overcoat, he asked
me how the work was going.
‘I just can’t get into it,’ I explained as we strode along the road. A
slight smirr of rain, more a heavy mist, was blowing in from the
firth, and we bent our heads to keep it out of our eyes. The night
was still warm as the day had been, so the fine spray was not
unpleasant on our faces. ‘I just can’t seem to get a start on it. I’ll
have to go into Levenford for a stack more paper. 'I`here’s enough
crumpled in the basket to start a bonfire?
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. Any author will tell you that books
have a hard time being born.’
‘It’s the conception, not the birth, I’m having difficulty with.
Coitus is interruptus, you might say.’
‘You’ll make it. Give yourself some time.’
The Chandler is not like Holly’s bar. It’s more modern for a
start, at least inside, although the building is easily as old as the
Arden Inn. It’s been a sailors’ bar for decades, since the days when
the deep-bellied fishing boats used to go out on the firth and up by
the Mull of Kintyre after the herring. Now the sailors were the
weekend sort, and the Chandler did a roaring trade in the summer.
The bar was where the local boys, the men who worked on the
boats and helped repair and refit the small craft, came to do their
drinking. This was where my grandfather had spent a lot of the
time when he was home from the sea, although to tell you the
truth, he did a power of drinking at Holly’s bar as well. I imagine he
got round most of the bars in the area, and everybody who was
anybody in Arden knew old Nick Westford.
The major was a short man with a moon face and sharp blue eyes
and a thick head of iron—grey hair that was cut short and neatly
parted.
When I was introduced to him he shook my hand strongly and
warmly and told me he’d heard a lot about me.
‘All good, I assume,’ I said, trying to return his grip just as firmly
and probably failing.
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‘Well, I suppose so,’ he said, in a deep, lilting island accent, that
pleasant slow speech that makes everybody think that the people
of the islands are just as slow as they sound. Most of them find out
too late. ‘I suppose so, if you can believe a word of anything this old
storyteller says, which none of us do, at all.’
I laughed along with Jimmy, and stuck up a round for the three
of us. Both men had a taste for the dark malts, and I stuck to half
pints.
‘You’re not a whisky man yourself‘?’ the major asked.
‘No, I don’t really like it. Just at weddings and funerals. That’s
my stretch}
‘Oh, it’s a pity that. I wouldn’t myself like to be drinking that
stuff,’ he said, indicating my beer, ‘it’s just like cold tea.’
The major was one of these slow—moving, slow—talking men who
give an outward appearance of being placid, and maybe a bit soft.
But he was as hard as nails. I discovered he’d been to Oxford
University, then Aldershot and then almost every trouble zone
you care to mention. According to Jimmy he’d a list of decorations
as long as your arm. Another thing I discovered later was that his
rank was really brigadier, but he’d been in one of the special
regiments which nobody really knows anything about and was
quite content with the rank everybody else seemed to think he had.
‘I’ve been telling the lad he should think about writing a book
about this place,’ Jimmy told him.
‘Maybe he should at that,’ the major mused. ‘Then again,
nobody would believe a word of it.’
‘You mean the history?’ I asked.
‘Aye, the history. ’ He nodded. ‘It’s as strange as anywhere. You
know, my people came from here. I should have been born in
Arden, but my father moved up to the islands when the fishing
went bad, and that’s where I was born. But I’ve always thought of
this place as home. When they pensioned me off, this is where I
wanted to stay. But as Jimmy will tell you, it’s a strange place,’
‘Donald’s been helping me with the Gaelic,’ Jimmy said. ‘It’s the
one language I never picked up.’
‘Aye, and it’s a beautiful tongue for the singing, the Gaelic. I’ll
be going up to the islands in a week or so in the boat. Maybe you
would like to come along with me and hear the singing for
yourself? I’ve a nephew who’s getting married, and you know what
the weddings are like. Probably last most of the week, I shouldn’t
wonder}
I told him I’d love to come. The idea of a sail up through the
Crinan Canal and across the Hebrides sounded pretty good to me,
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and I reckoned I’d enjoy sailing with the major. He and I took to
each other at first sight.
It must have been after midnight when the smart-looking owner
of the Chandler — an Englishman, but none the worse for that —
called time and we had to leave. We all went back to ]immy’s
where he and the major polished off the bottle of malt the old man
had broached before, and I had a can of beer.
` Sometime in the early hours of the morning the major went
home, walking steady as a rock despite what to me would have
been enough to have me talking to the vitreous china again. I slept
fully clothed on top of the spare bed and didn’t dream. In the
morning I had no hangover and felt good. Jimmy woke me with a
cup of tea and toast which went down a treat. He looked worse for
wear. He had coffee. Thick and black.
From the Kirkland Herald: 1906.
Mystery of Missing Trawler
Arden fishermen and the tugboat association from Greenock
have discontinued their week—long search for the crew ofthe Herring
Gull which went missing off Ardhmor Point last Tuesday.
The Herring Gull, a Clyde-built trawler, disappeared in thick fog
while netting for herring in the jirth with two other Arden boats, the
Sea Spray and Otter, all three owned by the Arden Fishermen ’s
Association.
The mystery of the Herring Gull ’s disappearance is unexplained,
the captains of both boats maintained that the three boats were
fishing in calm water only three miles out from the home harbour in
an unseasonal, but welcome shoal, when the Herring Gull drifted
into a fog-bank.
Such was the success of the catch that the absence of the Herring
Gull was not noted by the other boats for more than an hour, and
due to the calmness of the jirth, the alarm was not raised until six
hours later when the boat failed to arrive to unload in Arden.
Boatmen from north and south of the jfrth have spent many hours
dragging the coves around Ardhmor, but no trace of survivors or
their boats have been found.
Association Chairman Mr Walter Wood, having taken advice
from Sergeant Maclntyre of Levenford Station, has allowed his
boats to discontinue the search.
Mr Wood said he was unable to explain the mystery. He told the
Post: ‘Captain Mellow and his crew have fished these waters for two
decades without incident. .
‘I can only assume that their vessel became lost in the fog and
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drifted on the firth into open water. 1 have no doubt whatsoever that
it will be recovered in due course. The absence of wreckage gives us
all hope that the captain and the seven members of the crew are safe
and well. ’
The Clyde Pilot, Mr]. J. Thomas, said that to his knowledge the
I Herring Gull had neither been sighted, nor put into any of the
western ports.
‘And it never did show up,’ Jimmy Allison said as he took the old
newspaper clipping out of my hand. ‘I heard an old story that
months later they found bits and pieces of that boat all over the
rock, hundreds of yards from the high-tide line. But there was
nothing in the papers about that. There was too much going on
here by then.’
‘So when is this supposed to have happened?’
‘Not supposed to. Did. In 1906, a vintage year for Arden. I was
thinking about it last week when you were telling me about the
sugar boat. I knew I remembered something similar}
‘It’s hardly the same, though, is it? I mean, the Cassandra went
down in a storm. Even then, it didn’t sink, just rolled over on a
sandbank. And half the crew were none the worse for wear except
a couple of cracked skulls,’ I said.
‘For all we know, the crew of the fishing boat just took off for
new fishing grounds. They were part of the Arden Association,
weren’t they?’ Jimmy nodded and I went on. ‘So there was nothing
to stop them taking off and starting somewhere else where they
would get a full share of the catch.’
‘That’s true enough. But there would have been word of it.
Some rumour even. But they weren’t even sighted by anyone, and
you know what a clannish lot those old fishermen were. Everybody
knew everybody else’s business from the Minch down to the Irish
Sea.
‘That’s not the point,’ he continued. ‘The point is that they went
missing off Ardhmor, and they were never seen again. That boat
from the Cassandra went missing off Ardhmor, and that hasn’t
been seen since, either.’
‘But it’s only been a week.’
‘Come off it, Nick,’ Jimmy said, putting the clipping down on a
substantial pile of papers and old notes. ‘You know as well as I do
that if a boat goes down anywhere on the firth there’s always some
trace. I mean, it’s not the open sea with a clear run straight out into
the Atlantic, is it? That boat disappeared. And I tell you it’s gone
for good.’
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‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because it’s too like the first time. Or even that might not have
been the first time for all I know. But it’s the same, and remember
what I told you — it was 1906 and that was a bad year. The
disappearance of the Herring Gull was just the first in a whole
series of strange happenings in and around this town.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ll tell you like what . . . next week, when I’ve got the whole lot
looked out from this mess. Listen. I’ll do a deal with you. If they
don’t find anything down at that rock by the weekend, which they
won’t, you can buy me another bottle of malt and read all the notes
I’ve got.’
Somehow I knew he was going to win. On the following Sunday,
I would have my nose buried in a mass of old and yellowing paper,
culled from the old Post, the Herald and the big broadsheets from
Glasgow.
But it wasn’t just the fact that the boat from the Cassandra never
turned up. Not a stick of the lifeboat was ever found. But there
were one or two things that happened in the following days that
made me think Jimmy Allison might have a point. I was just at the
prologue to a story, and it wasn’t any fairy story either. I was just at
the ‘once upon a time’ stage, not really interested, and not really
interesting. It had to get to the big bad wolf bit before I would sit up
and take a bit of notice.
I was slowly sinking into a dream, the kind of fuzzy dream that
was going to take a little hitch somewhere along the line and the
rules to get bent right out of shape before I was going to plunge
down into a black nightmare. You know the kind of dream I mean,
where things just begin to change a little and you keep right on
dreaming because it’s only a dream, and while things do look a
little bit strange, it’s not yet time to wake up because you can
handle it. So hey ho, on we go. At this stage, I reckon I didn’t even
know the story had started, but it had, and I was in it and even then
things were beginning to take their sideways hitch out of true, but
only Jimmy Allison knew more than me. He’d been around longer.
He’d been places and seen things. And right soon, I was going to be
seeing some of those things. And worse.
I didn’t give much of a thought to what had happened to the men
on that old fishing boat that disappeared into the fog way back
when my grandad was just a boy. Nor did I concern myself over
much about the fate of the men from the lifeboat. At that time, it
wasn’t a mystery. A tragedy, maybe, in newspaper terms, and .
certainly a tragedy for the families of those men who were not
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coming back.
The reason I wasn’t dwelling on that- and my agreement with
Jimmy — was that on the afternoon that I’d read the old clipping,
the sun came out from behind a cloud and beamed down on me.
Life took an upward flip and I was looking good, feeling jine.
And the reason for that was that I met a girl.
Not any old girl. A very special one.
And in meeting her, all the prime characters were in place to get
this story out of the prologue and into the main tract. In some ways
it might have been better if I’d never met her, but I reckon it had to
be. It was meant.
She was standing at the side of the supermarket where the sun
bounced off the yellow brick wall. Her arms were tanned brown
and smooth and moving quickly as she threw the two rubber balls
down to bounce them on the concrete and catch them on the
upward rebound from the wall. I could hear the rhythmic child-j ive
nonsense chanted in time to the sound of the bouncing balls. I was
passing by the girl and had edged away just enough to avoid getting
in her way when she mis-caught one of the balls and it bounced
high over her head. I was just in the right place to reach out and
snatch it out of the air.
‘Good catch, mister,’ she said, in a high voice which had more
than a hint of an East Coast American accent. She was maybe
seven years old.
‘No, it was a great catch,’ I said, turning away from the sun which
was right in my eyes, to look at her.
When I looked down, my heart gave a jolt, and suddenly I was a
boy again. It was like walking into a time—warp, a memory so vivid
that you can hear it and smell it.
Barbara Foster squinted up at me, the hand with the ball
shielding her eyes from the glare, and the other one outstretched
for its companion. She was standing hip-shot in the same pair of
faded jeans and white tee—shirt, wearing the same big smile and
those pretty freckles over her snub nose.
I had last seen her like that more than twenty years before, and
there she was, ever the tomboy, my best pal in the whole world,
and she’d stayed just the same.
‘Barbara‘?’ I blurted out without thinking. If I had thought, I
would have known it was utterly impossible, but just seeing her had
thrown me right off balance.
‘No, I’m Paddy,’ she said, smiling brightly. ‘Can I get my ball
back mister?’ V
I looked at the ball in my hand. It was just the same as the balls
64
you could buy in the ironmongers for sixpence then. Soft and
spongy, a good bouncer, just made for small agile hands to juggle. I
squeezed it in my hand, feeling the familiar give.
‘Please?’ the girl said.
‘Oh, sure, here,’ I said, and handed it over. She reached up and
grasped it and threw it up in the air in a quick juggling motion. I’d
seen her do that before too, except it hadn’t been her.
‘You called me Barbara,’ she said, still grinning.
‘Well, you look very much like somebody I used to know. She
was called Barbara,’ I said, and smiled back at her. The
resemblance, as they say in all books, good and bad, was uncanny.
‘What did you say your name is?’
‘Paddy. It’s for Patricia, but I hate that. It’s a cissie name.’
‘Nothing wrong with Patricia,’ I said, ‘but Paddy’s nice. It suits
you.’
I bent down and extended my hand. ‘I’m Nicholas. But I hate
that. It’s a cissie name too. I like Nick, but my friends call me
Nicky.’
The little girl smiled. We had something in common. She
transferred the ball into the other hand which now held two of the
sixpenny bouncers and took mine, shaking it manfully.
‘Pleased to meetcha, Nicky.’
I was still taken aback with her appearance. The resemblance
was striking, and I was about to say something else when I heard a
shout from behind one of the cars in the park.
‘Paddy! Patricia. Come here at once,’ a woman’s voice came
loud and sharp. I heard the click, click of heels on the concrete and
turned to see a tall, fair-haired woman striding towards me.
‘Paddy. What are you doing‘?’ she demanded, but she was
looking at me, not the child. Her eyes were Hashing angrily.
‘Nothing mummy. I was just saying hello.’
The mother threw me another stinker of a look, and right then I
felt at a loss for words. I could see how it looked. A strange man
talking to a little pretty girl behind the supermarket.
‘What have you been told about speaking to strangers,’ her
mother said, grabbing her roughly by the arm and preparing to
haul her off.
‘I’m sorry. It was my fault entirely,’ I started to say.
‘You bet, buster,’ she grated, and prepared to turn away.
‘He called me Barbara, mummy. He said I looked like his
friend}
‘I’ll bet he did,’ the woman said in a stage whisper that made me
feel about two inches high. Then she stopped in mid-stride. ‘He
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called you what?’ she asked, and started to turn round, and in that
moment everything fell right into place.
Barbara Foster, the real Barbara Foster, turned her blue eyes on
me, the hostility battling with uncertainty. She stared at my face in
that intent way of someone with a glimmer of recognition, trying to
I bring it into focus.
‘I’m sorry Babs, it wasn’t Paddy’s fault. I made all the running. ’ I
grinned, and even as I did so I realised how stupid that would look.
‘For a minute, I kind of thought she was y0u.’
‘Do I know you, mister?’ Her eyes weren’t so frosty now, but she
wasn’t yet ready to be nice to the stranger who’d buttonholed her
daughter.
‘His name’s Nicholas, but he hates that,’ the little girl piped up.
‘His friends call him Nicky,’ she said, matter of factly.
‘Nicky.’ A statement.
‘Nicky Ryan,’ I offered. ‘I know it’s been a long time, but I
thought at least you would have rememberedf
‘Nicky Ryan?’ A question. Then: ‘Nicky Ryan. Dear God,
Nicky Ryan. I don’t believe it.’
‘The one and only,’ I said. ‘The original one and only.’
‘Only the lonely one and only,’ she said, and started to laugh,
then stopped to think of what had come tripping off her tongue,
our chant from way back then. She laughed again.
‘It really is you, Nicky. Oh dear, it must be .... ’
‘At least twenty years,’ I completed for her. She was still staring
at my face, trying to see where the boy had gone.
‘Well how are you?’ I said, offering my hand, which she took
with a cool, firm one of her own and shook warmly.
‘Great, just great. You’ve changed.’
‘Now there’s a surprise. I was four feet tall the last time you saw
me.’
‘No, I mean, you’re not how I thought you’d be. God, I can’t
believe meeting you after all these years. I didn’t think you lived
here any more.’
‘I don’t. Well, I do now. I mean I’ve just moved back again}
‘Me too. Last week.’
‘That’s a coincidence. So did I.’
I looked her over. She was tall and slim and well shaped,
obviously a woman who kept herself Ht. Her honey—blonde hair fell
in waves to her shoulders, and her deep blue eyes sparkled in a face
that was heart-shaped with a well—chiselled nose and a strong,
feminine chin.
‘You’ve changed too,’ I said, then looked at the girl. ‘But she’s
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still the same. She’s exactly like you when you were her age. It gave
me a jolt when I turned round the corner and saw her. I thought I’d
gone back in time.’
‘Well, I can’t deny maternity there,’ Barbara said, and ruffled
her daughter’s tousled hair.
I stepped back for a real look, at both of them. Barbara had
changed indeed, as could only be expected in two decades, but
there was still something of the girl I knew — the third one and only
—— that brought a series of pictures right into my head, like fast-
forward re—runs of old movies. The tomboy had evolved into a
head-turner, and the new version was a clone of her mother.
We both started to say something, and stopped to allow the
other verbal right of way. Barbara laughed and I said: ‘Let’s go for
a coffee}
‘Coffee would be just great. There are one or two things I’ve got
to pick up, but they can wait. Is there somewhere around here that
does anything decent‘?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Remember I’m the new boy
here, but I reckon Mary Baker’s tearoom is still going strong. Let’s
try there.’
It wasn’t far along the main street and we walked in the
sunshine, a little awkwardly asking questions of each other,
framing them politely like two strangers — which in a sense we
were. But there was a feeling of unreality about that because,
despite the fact that Barbara and I had not set eyes on each other
for nearly twenty years, there was a feeling between us that’s hard
to explain. She and I and the other one and only had been as close
as any three kids could be until something happened that blew it all
apart.
In Mary Baker’s back pantry, as the tearoom had been known
since anybody could remember, the coffee was thick and strong,
and the cream even thicker. Paddy ignored her mother’s warnings
over the sugar on the pastry, then Barbara ignored them too and
demolished one in a few big bites.
‘Mmm, they’re delicious,’ she said, or at least that’s a fair
translation of how it sounded through a mouthful of light Danish
pastry. ‘I’l1 put on p0unds,’ she added when she had washed it
down with the coffee. ‘I haven’t tasted one of these since God
knows when, and they’re still exactly the same.’ Over several cups
of coffee, we exchanged bits and pieces of life history, while Paddy
worked her way through a mountain of calories and listened
intently to every word we said. .
‘You’re that Nick Ryan? I must have read about you a million
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j times.’
‘None other,’ I said.
‘The name never clicked. I mean I must have seen you on TV
and all, but I never thought for a minute.’
‘I wasn’t looking my best,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what about you?
What have you been up to for most of my life‘?’
I discovered that Barbara had grown up near Boston, in between
bouts of schooling in England which had helps; d merge the Scottish
and English accents into a well-rounded, pleasant one. She had
married at twenty, had had Paddy within a year and something
went wrong with her tubes and she couldn’t have any more —
another one and only, she said, nodding in her daughter’s
direction. Her husband, a doctor called Hartford, had been killed
in a car crash five years ago and when her father, who had been the
surgeon at Levenford General, retired, and decided to come back
to Arden, Barbara had followed him home.
‘I felt it was the best thing for Paddy. I mean, Arden’s a better
place for a girl than anywhere in the States. It was OK for me then,
but things have changed, and they’re getting worse.’
‘So what do you plan to do?’ I asked.
‘There’s no rush. John’s insurance — that’s my husband — his
insurance was pretty comprehensive, so everything’s OK there. I
was a qualified physiotherapist in the States, so I might go back to
that if the papers are worth anything here.’
Barbara told me her father had bought back the old family house
in Upper Arden and spent most of his time re—planning the
extensive gardens. Barbara had spent the past week just settling
into the old town. Paddy had fallen in love with the place
immediately, and her mother felt she had made a good move.
Sitting in Mary Baker’s tearoom brought back a whole stack of
memories one after another, that just came slotting into place like
records in a juke-box. The way she looked, the way she turned her
head, and even the way she sat would trigger off another far-off
hazy memory that would come zooming into focus like a delicious
aftertaste. We stayed there for almost two hours, until we couldn’t
face another coffee, and Paddy had got past the stage of being
interested in the pastries. Barbara said she would bring her
daughter down to visit me, and I agreed I’d go up to Upper Arden
and say hello to her father. He had never been that keen on me as a
youngster, but I expected him to have mellowed. We parted in the
car park, standing once again in the bright sunlight, and instead of
shaking my hand Barbara gave me a feather soft kiss on the cheek. V
As I walked away, I heard the little girl ask: ‘What’s a one and
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only?’
I was feeling warm and light-hearted after my chance meeting
with Barbara. It didn’t last. While we’d been in the tearoom, an
ambulance had shot past on the main street, siren ululating
urgently. Just as I was heading towards the jeep, the town’s police
car screeched to a halt beside me. Murdo Morrison leaned out of
the open window, his big face red and sweaty looking.
‘Has that thing got a tow-bar?’ he asked, pointing at my wheels.
‘ said that it had and Murdo just said: ‘Right. Follow me. I need
you.’ He drove off and turned right at the car park entrance. I was
puzzled, but I jumped in the jeep right away and the engine roared
at the first turn of the key. I took off after him, along Main Street,
heading west, and right again half-way to Milligs. We got to the
end of the row of houses on Elm Street and Murdo, his blue light
still flashing wanly in the bright sunlight, took a left down a
tarmacked single track. We had gone about a quarter of a mile
when he stopped at a five-bar gate that gave on to a large pasture.
The ambulance was parked just outside the gate, and I could see
why. At the corner, where two hedgerows met at right angles, the
ground had been churned into mud by the cattle. From the tracks, I
could see that the ambulance had tried to get through it and failed.
Murdo leapt from his Panda and swung open the gate, his trousers
were slick with brown mud up to the knees, and he jammed the
heavy wooden spars against the hedge. He came dashing back and
opened the passenger door and hauled himself in.
‘Right through, Nick. It’s Andy Gillon. He’s under a tree, by
God. He’s in a terrible way, and the fire engine’s been called out to
Levenford.’
We hared across the field, scattering browsing cows to the corner
where the dark green of reeds showed that the land was marshy.
The four—wheel drive took me through that as easily as it had gone
through the mud at the gate, and as we neared the end of the field, I
could see why they needed my jeep.
A big oak tree had snapped off about three feet up from the
base, and underneath it, pinned into the mud, I could see a pair of
boots twitching and jerking. I hauled the Subaru into a tight turn
and Murdo and I got out. There were a couple of other men, one of
them kneeling beside the farmhand who was caught under the
deadfall, and an ambulanceman was holding a distraught woman
in the way that men do when they think that whatever the woman
wants to see is something she had better not.
Andy Gillon was conscious when I got there, but he was stuck V
fast under a ton of oak which had squished him into the mud.
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Further along the edge of the field, I saw his bright red Leyland
tractor angled against the ground. It looked like the axle had
snapped.
Murdo started bellowing orders and organised a team to rig the
rope on to the jeep while he fixed up an ingenious lever and
fulcrum of logs, wedging them under the fallen oak. He lashed the
tow rope on to the biggest log and told me to take it away when he
gave me the call. The other farmhands and the ambulanceman
started putting their weight against their levers as I inched forward.
I had to hand it to Murdo. That big tree groaned and lifted, and
coupled with the pull of my wheels and the leverage of the straining
backs, it came up into the air, moved in an arc and crashed back to
earth a clear six feet away. I stopped the engine and hopped out of
the cab. The ambulanceman holding Andy Gillon’s wife let her go
and she came running over to where Doctor Brant was kneeling
over the still twitching man.
Then she let out a scream like I’d never heard before. It started
off high and went soaring upwards until it sounded like an
overheated jet engine. Then it just cut out and the woman toppled
straight back and fell on the marshy ground. She was out of it in a
dead faint. When I got up to where the doctor knelt, I almost
joined her. Andy Gillon was still alive, still conscious then. But the
look on his face showed that he knew it wasn’t going to be long.
He should have been alive. Maybe bruised and battered. Maybe
a couple of cracked ribs or even a strained spine. That’s what
should have happened when that old oak had come crashing down
and pinned him in the mud. Except that where Andy Gillon had
fallen, it wasn’t just mud. He’d been downed on to the only spot in
that whole acre of marshy land where a rock had been dumped.
And Andy had come between the rock and the tree. When that old
oak had been rolled away, half of Andy Gillon’s guts had come
away with it. The rest of them were like mashed meat, like the
drums of offal you see down at the slaughterhouse on a Tuesday
afternoon.
There was nothing left of him from the navel to his groin.
Nothing that hadn’t been put through a blender and scraped all
over the reeds he lay in.
I was nearly sick, with horror and disgust. I could feel the coffee
and pastries trying to make a bolt for it. I wanted to make a bolt for
1t.
You know what it’s like when you come across something that
shocks you rigid. Everything seems to go in slow motion. I .
remember clearly looking down at Mrs Gillon, who was lying there
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in the marsh, all by herself, her eyes wide open but only showing
i the whites. Doc Brant turned away from the mess. His face had
gone the colour of putty. Murdo Morrison’s face was still red from
exhaustion. He stood like a statue, then, strangely, for the good
Presbyterian that he was, he brought his hand up and crossed
himself like a devout Catholic. A bunch of dung flies buzzed up in a
cloud from a still-steaming cowpat, and half a field away a cow was
lowing loudly. There was a buzzing in my ears that I think was just
internal pressure. Like everything had been stretched way beyond
its elasticity inside me. Then I looked down at Andy Gillon as he
lay there, his head facing right up, and his legs still twitching in
their boots although there was nothing much more than strips of
mashed rags holding them on to the rest of him. His eyes locked on
to mine, great wide, terror-filled dark eyes, rimmed with watery
blood that ran down each side of his face, and I looked into hell.
Andy Gillon’s gaze held on to mine and didn’t let go. We stared
into each other’s eyes, both of us in horror and fear. I didn’t know,
and I still don’t know, how much pain he was in, but there was no
mistaking that he knew what the score was. I could read it in his
eyes. His chest was working up and down in short, quick motions,
and it rasped in his throat and the movement made little gurgling
noises down where his belly had popped open and the glistening,
torn ropes were pulsing out blood and bile and God knows what
else. A white, jagged piece of bone, probably from his pulverised
pelvis, shone whitely through the red at his hips. And between
where his hipbones should have been there was nothing but a pulp.
The old oak trunk had been punctuated with bumps and burrs and
one of them had been in the right place at the wrong time and had
smashed everything that Andy Gillon had had between his legs
into an obscenity.
The crushed man seemed to look at me for ever, his eyes staring
right through me, right into the back of my head, as if there was
something important, some meaning, something that would
explain how he’d come to be lying with his guts draining into the
sphagnum and duckweed on a sunny day like today. His mouth was
moving and there was a sound coming out of those swollen lips
along with the trickle of blood. I moved in close to where Doc
Brant, the young resident at the Hermitage Cottage Hospital,
knelt beside him. His face was grey.
The doctor pulled his bag closer towards him and snapped open
the catch with a click and pulled out a little cylindrical bottle. He
jammed it into a silver syringe which he adroitly jabbed right into a ‘
vein in the man’s neck. The doctor looked sick.
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I don’t know what I expected from that injection, but it didn’t
work quickly enough for me. Andy Gillon was still conscious and
as I hunched down closer to the doctor — I don’t even know why I
did that — I could hear the burbling whisper.
‘Jumped.’ The breath bubbled and rattled deep in his throat.
‘Jumped on me. Tree jumped.’ Like a hoarse, catching litany. He
was telling me. His eyes were bright and shockingly sane.
‘What did you give him?’ I said to the doctor. I
‘Morphine.’
‘Give him some more, will you?’
‘I gave him a lot. It should be working now.’
But the dying man, who knew he was dying, still locked me with
those terrible eyes that glittered in the sun.
‘Please, doc,’ I said, ‘ give him anything. Just put him out of this.’
The young man turned to me. There was a great streak of
bloodstained mud down the side of his face, and his expression was
torture.
‘I’ve given him enough. Do you understand'?
Gillon still stared at me and still dribbled the words out along
with the rest of the goo that was trickling out of both corners of his
mouth.
‘Tree. Jumped. Jumped.’
‘It’s not working,’ I said, and grabbed the doctor’s tweed lapel.
‘Put him out of it, will you? Please?’
‘There’s nothing else I can do. Nothing.’
‘Well I can,’ I told him and got to my feet and scrambled to the
bole of the tree where a tangle of broken branches was strewn. I
dragged out a heavy bough about {ive feet long and strode back,
squelching through the wet. I locked eyes with Andy Gillon again.
He was dying there in his field right in front of me. His insides were
squashed into the mud and his eyes were on mine and he was
asking me to do something. It was a plea I understood instinctively
and I agreed. I hefted the heavy branch right up over my head and
braced myself to swing it down with all my strength and Murdo
Morrison reached up and yanked it right out of my hand. He shook
his head slowly, then chucked my death—giver over the hedge.
Afterwards he never said a thing about it, and never charged me
with attempted murder or anything like that. Then he just looked
away, away from me , from the doctor, and the woman still out for a
very long count, and away from the man whose life was packing up
and moving out only two yards away.
I couldn’t not look. It was like a compulsion. I didn’t even know ,
the man. As far as I knew, I had never set eyes on him in my life
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before. But here I was, attending at his death, and he was looking
at me as if I was the most important thing in his universe. He was
holding on to me for that big crossover, and his litany was for me.
The mumbling stopped suddenly, and the man gave a grunt. He
put his elbows down beside him and, still staring into my eyes, he
levered himself up a few inches, his body making a slight sucking
sound. With the movement, a whole gobbet of intestine blurped I
out of the mush below his ribs.
‘Jumped. It . . . jumped.’ Then a gout of thick blood mixed in
with anything else he was going to say and he slumped back. The
light went out of his eyes, and he was dead.
His dead eyes continued to stare at me for a long time until I
turned away.
Murdo got the ambulancemen over with their stretcher and one
of them vomited quickly and efficiently into the reeds when he saw
the mess, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and
carried on. They covered the body with a grey blanket and put it on
the green canvas of their stretcher while the doctor attended to the
still-unconscious woman.
Murdo Morrison came over to me, still shaking his head. He was
a big, tough man, but there was a glint of tears at the corner of his
eyes.
‘Terrible thing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Terrible.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Murdo. I don’t know why I did that. I
think I .... ’
‘I know,’ Murdo interrupted. ‘I know what you mean. But it’s
best to leave these things to the medical men.’ He clapped his big
hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way.
‘He said the tree jumped}
‘Oh, was that what it was‘?’ Murdo turned round and looked at
the bole of the old dead oak which stood on a mound of grass, the
result of centuries of old hedgerow. He and I looked back at where
the old tractor was down on its haunches forty yards away.
Through the grass you could see the still-flattened parallel lines
where its big treads had run. And there was another line, the last
passage of Andy Gillon where he had walked through the reeds
towards the place where his life had been squashed out of him. The
track followed a roughly straight, faint line, for the reeds were
already beginning to straighten into their original positions, but
you could make out his track, following the hedge, about twenty
feet away from the close cut bushes.
Murdo and I looked at each other, and back at the tracks. Then
simultaneously we looked at the spot where Andy Gillon had been
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splattered.
The oak tree had broken off about two or three feet from the
ground. The rest of the massive trunk must have been twenty feet
long, knobbled and gnarled. Its outline was clearly imprinted on
the soft marsh where it had fallen. The outline started about five
yards from the base ofthe tree and continued out, past the red and
green and purple patch that looked like the bottom of a wine-
treader’s vat, and out a few yards more, pointing to the centre of
the Held where the brown and white cows were browsing
unconcernedly.
Murdo stared at that indentation for a long time, then he looked
back at me.
‘That’s strange,’ he said, through his teeth. ‘That’s very strange.
And there’s not a breath of wind.’
In my mind I could hear the dying man’s mumbled chant. ‘It
jumped. The tree jumped.’
There wasn’t a breath of wind, as Murdo said. Not there. Not in
that sunny field. But a cold breath went right through me , right into
my bones. Murdo’s face looked bleak.
And in Arden, a very bad summer began to happen.
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