Chapter Forty One

41


Parting instructions for a Piccardilly circus


‘Right then,’ I said at the door, overnight bag in hand, feeling strangely short of breath as I fumbled in trouser pockets for car keys. ‘If a really big, grey headed guy with a limp comes knocking on the door, you’re up to speed with what to say?’

‘Yes, Bailey,’ said Penny James stiffly, clearly not yet ready to be civil after our Tickle Toby tete-a-taint.

‘Good. And remember,’ I held up a finger attached to a hand now containing car keys, 'no horses in the house, no blooding ceremonies on the carpet and,' - I nodded at Kurt and Courtney, all but asleep by the lounge fire - 'they’re pets, not foxes.’

‘Ha ha,’ she said without humour.

I made to leave, stopped, turned. 'Oh, almost forgot. You might want to know where you're sleeping, or tossing and turning over questionable moralities as the case may be. Gabriel has allocated you the room next to ours up the main stairs behind you there. I can't vouch for the sheets, but your hounds might be able to tell if they've seen any action.' I made to leave again, stopped, turned. 'Shit, almost forgot. Dog meat's in the fridge, dry food's in the pantry, about half of each morning and night at seven sharp in portions no bigger than their heads, preferably smaller. In fact, if you base their portions on the head of a cocker spaniel, you won't go far wrong.'

'Not a fox's head then?' she asked populating her pretty pug face with what was clearly meant to be a cheeky grin.

I populated my own face with a sneer. 'Penny, what your tribe stick on sticks about your gardens is your business, just give them what's in the kitchen,' this, from the expression she now populated her pug face with, clearly an unpopular remark.

'Are you going now?' she said, one hand on my door, the other on her hip.

'Yes, I am,' I said proceeding to do just that.

'Because I could really use some privacy while I rummage through your personal things.'

I stopped ten paces out the door, turned and smiled sweetly back at her pug face now populated with mischievously unpopular intent. 'Well, I said. 'If I can save you some legwork, you'll find most of the scandal in the bottom drawer on Gabriel's side of the bed. Please look, but don't touch for obvious hygiene reasons. Must away.'

And with that, I left with a car key rattled wave over my shoulder, unaware and unconcerned by whatever daggers looks populated my wake. Penny James and any attempt at friendship for Gabriel's sake would keep. Gabriel and any attempt at marriage for my sake wouldn't.

Forty minutes later, I pulled in ten car spaces along from Gabriel’s Audi in the Hustwickgate Railway Station long stay car park. Less than an hour after that – Hustwickgate being on the main line south from both Edinburgh and Newcastle – I was on a GNER train to London.

During her brief, information-light phone call from her hotel room, Gabriel had imparted one reassuring fact – she loved me dearly. Not the sort of proclamation I would associate with a girl who had just slept with her elderly ex-boyfriend (not that I was jumping to conclusions). Due to my rigid embargo on juicy detail, any knowledge of Gabriel’s ex was scant. His name was Marcus Friend. He was in his mid-forties, a rather jaded, jaundiced and seemingly failed singer-songwriter who had latched onto the sixteen year old Gabriel in a London bar soon after she fled the family home. Clearly she was an innocent, impressionable and traumatised virgin who needed love and a home. Clearly he was a middle aged sexual predator. Gabriel was living with him by nightfall.

The ‘relationship’ lasted two years before Gabriel saw the light, realised Marcus Friend was going nowhere extremely slowly and ended it. After a brief period of reciprocal vitriol, they somehow concurred on the existence of some platonic bond and agreed to remain ‘buddies’. He had been emailing her ever since. Not lovelorn or newsy emails in the main – joke emails bulk forwarded to her amongst fifty or more recipients. Just the usual stuff circulating offices the world over. Joke emails Gabriel then found it necessary to forward on to me amongst another fifty or so recipients. While the bond between them was plainly technological and distant, I didn’t need daily reminders of a period in Gabriel’s life I wished to forget. The more I loved her, the harder it became to rationalise her past.’ Her stock standard response to my complaints – ‘Get over it! Who am I with now?’

Clearly though, if Marcus Friend had more than a passing involvement in the assault on Windy Dale Eggs, why was I on a train to London? Why wasn’t Marcus Friend on his way ‘downtown’ for a bit of slap and tickle interrogation and Gabriel on her way back to North Yorkshire? What possible value could there be in me coming all the way down here? Unless Gabriel was simply giving me the opportunity to hit Marcus Friend over the head with a chair before she called the authorities.

***

My train fare ran out of puff at Kings Cross Station. The frugal option would have been to go underground to Piccadilly Circus. But, right now, I was only interested in the fastest option. Which, as it turned out, would have been the underground. My London cabbie spent more time sitting in traffic jams with a pasty elbow out the window than actually driving anywhere. It had taken two-and-a-half hours to cover half the country. It took an hour to cover a few miles of London.

Gabriel’s accommodation of choice was the Shaftesbury Hotel, Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly, a few hundred yards from the famous neon sign of Piccadilly Circus and right in the thick of the West End theatres, bars and clubs.

‘Okay,’ Gabriel said having seated me on the couch in her four poster bed suite and sat opposite me on the edge of the bed, face fearful and downturned. A jacket lay on the bed, either recently removed or about to be put on and she wore 'going out' attire and 'going out' make up, though I was yet to find out if she had, in fact, gone out. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’

With no eyes to search, I searched the ceiling instead. ‘If I’m guessing correctly, there shouldn’t be any bad news.’

‘And what are you guessing?’

‘Same as I guessed, admittedly in jest, the day this fiasco started, Gabriel.’

‘That Marcus had something to do with it?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded at the floor and she'd clearly had a few.

I leaned in, tilted my head to catch her eye. ‘And does he?’

More nods at the floor, slow and forlorn. ‘He has everything to do with it.’

I knew it, but a bolt of adrenaline still shot up my breastplate. ‘Is that the good news or the bad news?’

‘That’s the good news.’

I sat back on the bed feeling ill. My eyes drove into hers and crashlanded in her knees. ‘What’s the bad news, Gabriel?’

She looked at me and I looked up at her aching face as the tears now leaked from the corners of bloodshot eyes and tracked south suggested that the bad news was going to be a little more than an excessive minibar bill.

'You're going to hate me,' she said with a succulent wet sniff and longing look skyward.

I crossed my legs, hung my head and rung my hands. 'Spill,' I said.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘I kind of…might have…asked Marcus to do it.’

Chapter Forty

40


London calling II: The midget phones back

Monday, January 16

I was beside myself all night. So violently did I thrash about, it would have taken a slow motion camera to confirm there was only one person in the bed. Up and about I was only slightly more in control of my limbs, forced as they were to lumber into a Gabriel-free kitchen, arms wanting to make green tea, legs wanting to carry it up the stairs, arms wanting to place the hot tea on a book for fear it burn the white paint on the bedside table, lips wanting to kiss her on the head and seek an approximation of my chances.

The phone rang in the hall at nine o’clock, precisely two hours after I had muttered at dogs and walls and windows and mirrors long enough to believe I was in no way equipped to take the call.

I got to it halfway through the first ring.

It was Gabriel.

She told me where she was. She told me to get on the next train to London and be there by tonight. She told me not to ask questions. She told me who was on her way to look after the dogs. She told me to be nice.

Chapter Thirty Nine

39


The writing on the wall

Dave Land’s largest John Deere tractor was parked in the forecourt of Hartley Castle House when we arrived home. Dave Land’s immense fist was banging on the front door. He heard the car, saw the car, turned and lurched across the yard to greet us brandishing a small rectangular piece of paper. Its size, shape and colour were unmistakably that of a cheque. Dave Land’s face was unmistakably that of an angry man.

My door was open before I could open it myself.

‘Mister Harland,’ he said looming large over my seated and seat-belted person. ‘I am not a violent man, I am a reasonable man. I trust you will be the same.’ He handed me the cheque. It was made out to me and was for eighteen thousand pounds. ‘I have calculated your rent up to the end of next week and refunded your advance rent accordingly. You have a week to clear the premises. I trust you will leave everything as you found it.’

God, news travels fast!

‘Dave,' I said fumbling at my seat belt while peering pleadingly up at him. 'This hasn’t got anything to do with you. It hasn’t even got anything to with me!’

He glowered down at me. Even then there was still a grin of sorts. The sort of grin I imagine Ted Bundy offered young girls asking for directions in the street. ‘Is that so?’ he said with palpable sarcasm.

‘Yes! Can I get out? This is—’

‘You stay where you are!’

Gabriel got out the other side and ran around to 'face' him. ‘Dave, we can explain. Bailey didn’t do any of it.’

‘Any of it?' he said frowning down at her. 'How many barns has this little vandal covered in graffiti?’

I thought it, Gabriel said it: 'Graffiti?'

***

‘I swear on my mother’s life. I didn’t do this.’

I’d been swearing on my mother’s life a lot lately. And there, standing next to one of two barns at the back of Dave Land’s house half a mile down the road from Hartley Castle House, I needed my mother like never before. Staring at the wall of that barn, I was confused, disorientated and angry. I was shaking and didn’t know what to do with my hands. Above all, I was scared.

Splashed across the wooden wall of Dave Land’s barn in great dollops of dripping red paint were the words: ‘U R DEAD MEAT U LAME BULL MURDERING CUNT!’

As you do in such situations, I went and hid in the castle for a while, knees pulled up to my chin, staring at walls and upwards at bits of ragged blue sky. Dave Land, after a heated two and fro had calmed down somewhat. I’d given him a brief précis of our trials with Gabriel’s family and Windy Dale Eggs, a story he had been keeping a quiet eye on in the papers. He hadn’t made the connection. He admitted he hadn’t committed Gabriel’s surname to memory.

Thankfully, my relating of this saga in exasperatedly plaintive terms gave him pause. I was either a good actor, liar and on the spot improviser of a bloody good story, or I was telling the truth. He gave me a week to provide proof I had not graffittied his barn wall with death threats. The chances of this happening were, of course, nil. I had no more idea who had defaced his barn than he did and he was now – after my pleading, placating speech – only ninety-nine percent sure it was me. I even suspected it was me. Why wouldn’t I? The graffiti had specifically referred to a very personal incident, an incident only he, Gabriel and I knew about. Gabriel, I should add, upon sighting the besmeared wall, had clutched her mouth, said ‘Oh my God, I’m going to be sick,’ and scurried off down the road.

Which I suppose was fair enough. It didn’t look good and, with all the evidence now available, even I was blaming me. And I knew I hadn’t done it.

Or did I? There’s an almost catatonic temporary insanity that befalls you in such circumstances. An all pervading sense of self doubt and mistrust of your own actions right down to questioning your own whereabouts for the last twenty four hours. Everyone and everything was ganging up on me and, right now, I was inclined to give myself the odd cuff as well, haul my own arm up my back and scream ‘Own up!’ My boundaries were blurred and so was my vision courtesy of the odd tear. Odd in the sense that I wasn’t normally a crier, mitigating in the sense that my world was now officially at war. The next phase in this mental process was self-destruction – the sudden, wallowing belief that the world really was against me and that my dream – whatever that dream was, it was hard to remember now – was never meant to be.

As if to reinforce this, I heard the Audi start up outside the castle walls and leave at great speed. Unlike the previous occasion Gabriel drove out of my life, I could muster neither the strength nor the angst to rush out and give her the finger. She was right to go. I knew how it looked.

Kurt appeared at my side moments later. This was good. It reminded me I wasn’t alone. After a bear hug that nearly broke his neck and would have added exponentially to my woes, I managed to raise myself off the damp grass – it was getting cold and I needed a jacket, beer and the iPod. If ever there was an occasion requiring a brooding soundtrack, this was it. Perhaps Prodigy, 'I’m a victim' on repeat.

Courtney was on her bed in the kitchen when I arrived inside, as usual more aware of the need for beauty sleep than family crisis. I knelt and kissed her on the head.

‘Hi ya, Courtney, love,’ I whispered. ‘Dad’s in a spot of bother.’

The coat I required was on the coat rack. The iPod was in the Court Room. The beer was in the fridge.

The note was on the table.

‘Dearest Monkey face,’ it said. ‘I hate to leave you like this, but if I told you where I was going you wouldn’t let me go. Trust me, we’ll be free of this by tomorrow! You’re innocent, monkey!’ There were four Xs and a heart.

There was a PS: ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

I called her today.

Her mobile rang six times and cut to message. I waited for the prompts. ‘Gabriel? I’m no rocket scientist, but I think I know where you’ve gone. I just want to put it on record that I’m stunned, but not entirely surprised. I did say so, didn’t I? Anyway, I just want you to know that I would have let you go. I trust you implicitly. Maybe now, you’ll trust me. Take care, little girl and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Keep your wrist locked and aim for a point a foot behind the face. Take care. I love you. Bye.’

I hung up, turned to the kitchen bench and watched Gabriel’s mobile. After a few seconds, it cheeped, signalling a new voice message. I was tempted to listen to my own message, check it for flaws, delete it and perhaps redo it until I had the sentiments just right. I didn’t. I just left it be, wondering why she hadn’t taken it with her. The rush of getting away before I emerged from the castle? The hassle of a fretful boyfriend calling every five minutes while she visited an ex? I was jumping to conclusions, of course, but if this jump wasn’t flagged green by all judges, I’d be having a long, hard look at the plasticine.

Chapter Thirty Eight

38


A right old Yorkshire pudding

Sunday, January 15

From a hundred yards across the Skipton-le-Beans village green on a Sunday morning in mid-winter, the Pig in Muck Inn looked its usual small, white, welcoming self, a few seasonally-redundant flower pots in the windows, a few black wooden shutters open, a few closed. You could imagine the wet feather in there mopping last night’s beer-soaked detritus off tables and vacuuming peanuts and cigarette ash off the smelly old carpets in readiness to do it all over again come lunchtime. Only, on this Sunday morning, the substance spilt all over the tables wasn’t beer – it was water, thousands of gallons of it. And even the most powerful industrial vacuum cleaner would be hard pressed to suck up this ash…

What we could see from the far end of the village green – but dared not approach – was a gutted carcass. Around midnight last night, an hour after the last drunken farmer had lurched off back to his wife, an incendiary device had been thrown through the window of the Pig in Muck Inn. The fire had raged unnoticed for ten minutes before a sleeping wet feather smelt smoke.

A mile down the road, Chicken Colditz HQ had faired rather better. Austin’s bedroom was a bit charred, but the fire had failed to take hold.

Ten miles away in Hustwickgate, Lloyds TSB had faired even better. But then the rock hurled through their window had been attached to nothing more inflammatory than a death threat.

And two miles down the hill from Lloyds TSB, the Hustwickgate RFC clubrooms had faired better still. They were, in fact, completely intact. The No 1 rugby field was, however, completely in tacks. Hundreds of them like little grey barbs in the frosty long grass, forcing the cancellation of all Sunday fixtures and forcing the Hustwickgate Seniors left wing – one Simon “Little Lomu” Hogg – into sad and sudden retirement.

Psychologically this set of calculated overnight raids hit the local community hard, occurring as it did just when they thought things were getting back to normal. It had been three-and-a-half tense, yet terrorism-free months since the malevolent mail drop.

It hit me pretty hard too. Particularly the raid on Chicken Colditz, occurring as it did while we had the entire clan conveniently stashed forty miles away. Coincidence? I no longer thought so (and neither did they). This was starting to feel personal and I was starting to feel strangely sick. I was, however, not yet ill.

But then the day was far from over.

Chapter Thirty Seven

37


Winter barbecue in the castle ruins

Saturday, January 14

It was meant to be a last minute decision. Check the sky early evening – prepare the dining room if it was iffy, prepare the barbecue if it wasn’t. As it was the day dawned so clear, still and dependable, I was titivating the Great Hall in the castle ruins by one. So much depended on this dinner. Sure, it would have been easier and less prone to sudden snow storms, frosts and hypothermia if we’d eaten inside. That would have been the easy thing to do; we had a perfectly nice dining room by anyone’s standards.

It would also have been the obvious thing to do. The safe thing. There would have been nothing new or different or stimulating about it. It would have been just another standard eight people eating and drinking around a standard wooden table in a standard artificially lit room, even if that artificial light was emitted by a fairly impressive chandelier.

It was just expected. Too expected.

Austin, Mariabella, Melissa, Attie and, to a much lesser extent, Simon expected to sit in a room, eat a meal prepared by a barely present Gabriel slaving in the kitchen while I sat like Lord Muck drinking wine and expounding my innocence like a defence lawyer.

That was what they expected. That was what would keep them safely locked away in their cocoons of indifference. The key to cracking them open (and it had taken some seriously smooth talking to convince Gabriel of this) was to do the unexpected. Surprise them. Titivate them. Make them laugh despite themselves. How better to do this than to lead them by torchlight towards flickering orange light spewing from your very own backyard castle?

***

Three sets of car headlights lit up the Hartley Castle House forecourt like a lamped rabbit at precisely 7pm, which was precisely when we’d asked them to arrive. My heart skipped a beat. Clearly these were people with no concept of fashionable lateness. It was a wakeup call. A timely reminder of the beast we were dealing with.

Compounding this scarily old fashioned punctuality, Gabriel and I had proceeded to be fashionably disorganised. The steaks were still a solid red blob on the kitchen bench because someone had forgotten to take them out of the freezer. The salad ingredients were still just a jam of plastic bags in the crisper draw yet to mix and mingle. And someone had left the wine and beer in the back of the Volvo…

Under normal Australian barbecue circumstances, this last oversight would have been a far worse disaster than the food. Fortunately for this particular barbecue, the outside temperature hadn’t risen above freezing all day so the wine and beer were colder than if they had been in the fridge.

As the assorted unsuspecting members of Family Hogg now gingerly dismounted their various vehicles onto a dimly lit ice rink of a forecourt and I stood at the door double-checking the torch, Gabriel suddenly appeared at my ear.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she said. ‘I forgot to tell them to bring warm clothes!’

I stiffened in a daytime telly way and took a sudden intense interest in the attire of Family Hogg as they now slid and slithered towards the front door in a shadowy mass of misty breath. There were warm clothes in abundance, which was a relief. Trouble was they were the sort of warm clothes you wore when exposure to the elements was fully encompassed within quick skips between cars and front doors. There were no head-to-toe coats, no beanies, no gloves; none of the things you might ask guests to wear to a barbecue in sub-zero temperatures

On the upside, they could all die of hypothermia. How many problems would that solve in an instant? How much easier would that make the will distribution? As it was, and despite my utter disdain, I could not wish death by winter barbecue on anyone and could only hope my four towering outdoor heaters did their job.

There were no welcomes at the door, no handshakes, and no hugs; just a standoff of sorts, ten feet separating them and me - the arrogant eyes of Attie Joubert next to the absent eyes of Melissa Joubert next to the conniving eyes of Mariabella Hogg next to the cadaverous eyes of Austin Hogg next to...well, next to poor old Simon Hogg and his ever plaintive eyes that seemed to say 'I'd shake your hand and maybe even give you a hug, but Dad would kill me.'

‘Thanks for coming,’ I said as respectfully as I could. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘A marn has tae eat,’ said Austin Hogg with an odd little glare up at wife and son either side of him. It would be the last thing he would say until precisely 10:31 pm.

‘Well, the first surprise I have for you tonight…’ I trained the torch onto the walls of Hartley Castle fifty yards to my left past the forecourt, the Volvo and the Audi also taking on a solid white sheen.’ We’ll be dining in there.’

Five sets of eyes followed the beam. There was a long pause as they stared at the crumbling, roofless mound of grey stones. I can only assume their expressions were a mixture of mortification and amusement as their heads had all but disappeared in a thick breath-induced fog. Finally someone spoke from within the miasma. I didn’t need to see the lips move or the eyes squint, the deep, snarling drawl was more than enough.

‘You have got to be bloody joking, son.’

***

As might be expected of a ruined castle untouched by other than weather, cannons and errant lorries for five hundred years, there was a dearth of power points. Light for the evening’s festivities was therefore provided by a dozen cheap and nasty bamboo flares stuck in the ground at intervals around the roofless room. The resultant flickering orange light was abysmal at best, the confused melee of shadows swarming about the Great Hall walls like a cave of startled bats. To these antipodean eyes starved of such Gothic delights, it had considerable Scooby Doo appeal. Gabriel thought it looked more like the set of Survivor Tribal Council than an expectant family reunion, adding that it was just as well we weren’t expecting any epileptics.

D size Batteries. There were eight of them in the Aiwa ghetto blaster bought especially for the occasion, with another sixteen batteries on twenty four hour standby. The ghetto blaster sat in the long freeze-dried grass at the eastern end of the Great Hall by the arch, the barbecue and the booze: all three where I could readily ply Family Hogg with food, alcohol and soothing classical tunes.

Strategically, the seating arrangements were crucial: I placed Austin Hogg at the head of the table facing the Great Arch and what would have been a spectacular view were it not mid-winter dark, the Great Arch just a great black hole. He was nevertheless in the grandest position. He was also furthest from me. Mariabella I positioned closest to the barbecue at the other end of the table. As official spokesperson for Chicken Colditz in every media release I had seen thus far, I assumed she would wish to maintain that role here, albeit with a skinful. Simon I tried to keep in something approximating a safe place, seating him right next to his father on the far side of the table. While his desire to discuss every Lions tour since 1980 in minute detail had been fine for seeing me through long nights at the Pig in Muck, rugby was off the agenda for tonight. Or at least until I had an emphatically unanimous retraction of my current terrorist status in the eyes of Family Hogg.

Oh, and Attie and Melissa Joubert were there too. I stuck them on the barbecue side of the table in the hope Attie’s neck would cramp from squinting sideways at me around his fat wife while I cooked their steaks. There were two empty places opposite them. One for Gabriel once she had defrosted the meat, prepared the salads and drunk enough vodka in the kitchen to hit the ground bombastic. One for me.

(On the subject of steaks – yes, I was still vegetarian; no, I wasn’t that bloody minded – or non-bloody minded – to inflict my diet on others.)

Everyone ‘settled’ in on wooden chairs I had personally de-iced with a stainless steel spatula and fitted with squabs warmed against radiators around the house. With warm bums below and hissing, roaring red hot furnaces above, they really had nothing to complain about. Yet they still did, packing in some genuine North Yorkshire country-style muttering and disgruntled bemusement while I knelt and put a little night music on the ghetto blaster – Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik no less, soaring Austrian strings giving the busy shadows something to dance to.

I turned to ensure everyone was safely out of their comfort zone. They were. Which had been the plan. Yet nothing was going quite as planned…

Normally – or as with normal, well adjusted, socially competent individuals – I could have expected some ribbing, a bit of gentle banter questioning my sanity, perhaps even complementing my lack of it, getting in the spirit of an outrageous event. There was none of that. Not even a tactless jibe. They hadn’t entered into the spirit at all. I should have known: Like a wasp had no concept of windows, Family Hogg had no concept of fun. I had spent a month in their joy-free care, a month they successfully made as cheerless as the life of one of their hens. Yet somehow I’d forgotten what bleak people they were, how completely and utterly chronically void.

Such was now the humourless and mildly menacing atmosphere inside the Great Hall, I felt like I’d just sat the Sopranos at the wrong table in their local Pizzeria, only without the yelling and summary executions. Just the brooding silences, familial glances, whispering and increasingly venomous glares as I martialled raw prawns onto a hotplate.

It didn’t help that I had completely lost the power of speech. I have no idea if Jamie Oliver ever froze while cooking in front of a studio audience, but up there with my raw prawns I was dying. My prospective family were engaged in a flagrant, seething shut out, insults being exchanged behind hands, the worst culprit, Attie Joubert, alternately whispering in his wife’s ear and craning around her for long lingering squints my way. I broke into a cold, lonely and unforgiving sweat I had no immediate facility to deal with it. It was a fucking nightmare. I couldn’t look at them. I couldn’t speak. Everything but my raw prawn-turning arm had frozen to the spot. All I could do was sweat, sniff and prod at prawns, doubly incapable of saying ‘This is ridiculous. Let’s go inside.’

They hadn’t expected this. Well, neither had I.

I prayed for Gabriel to save me with the premature delivery of a Greek salad or stack of brutally defrosted steaks. I prayed for rain so Mother Nature could make the decision for me. On the verge of very public panic, a voice finally rose above a whisper:

‘What’s going on here?’ Gabriel stood beneath the side door, plates and cutlery in hand casting stern eyes across her cosseted family and the barbecuing exile in the corner. To these immensely relieved eyes looking on from the far end of the Great Hall, she was five foot nothing of posh frocked super-hero, wide, fiery eyes flickering orange in the dancing torchlight.

‘You two have gone completely mad is what’s going on here, my girl,’ said Attie Joubert swivelling and going menacingly face to face with her from, it has to be said, a sitting position.

‘I wasn’t talking to you!’ Gabriel spat straight into his face, the visual equivalent of a foaming chihuahua biting at the heels of a bull mastiff. She stood on tip toes and glowered from unrepentant face to unrepentant face. ‘Why is no one talking to Bailey?’ Answer me! What is your fucking problem?’

‘This bloody barbecue’s the problem,’ Attie growled facing front and searching Hogg-tied faces for approval. They just stared blankly back.

‘Shut up, Attie!’ Gabriel yelled at his back. She homed in on her mother on the other side of the table. ‘Mum? You seem to be speaking for the family on everything these days. Have you got a problem with the barbecue?’

Mariabella smiled sadly at her daughter, lit a cigarette and titled her head apologetically. ‘I think we’ve all got a problem with the barbecue, Gabby,’

‘Good,' said Gabriel. 'Because you’re stuck with it. Either get a sense of humour or get takeaway on the way home.’

Attie Joubert leapt to his feet. ‘I don’t have to put up with this, I’m getting takeaway.’

‘Sit the fuck down, Attie!’ This was Gabriel.

Attie glowered over her. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, young lady!’

‘Sit the fuck down, Attie!’ This was Mariabella.

Attie winced. Attie glowered. Attie sat.

‘Right,’ said Gabriel. ‘I don’t care what you do in ten minutes time. You can all fuck off home for all I care. But for the next ten minutes,’ – she focussed wide angry eyes on her mother – ‘I want to hear you tell Bailey what you told me yesterday.’

My heart, leaden and languishing, leapt like a bull frog in my chest. And I'm sure my expression was that of a confused, but expectant puppy when Mariabella's eyes briefly met mine as she fought for words.

'Bailey must know—’

‘I haven’t told him.’ Gabriel interjected. She plonked the plates and cutlery on the table, crossed her arms and regarded her mother with a fixed, threatening glare. ‘I thought it should come from you, mum.’

Mariabella Hogg stared helplessly at Gabriel, then turned to the sunken eyes of her small, scowling husband for a very long time. As did I. As did Gabriel. As did everyone else. And whatever tacit communication was taking place between them, Austin Hogg was giving nothing away. He merely glared back, barrel chest rising and falling with each deep whistling nasal inhalation. I felt like a gladiator waiting for the emperor’s thumb.
Then an image that will remain embedded at the forefront of my memory bank until eternity. The image of Austin Hogg, sour, groper-like mouth as tight and downturned as it had been all night, slowly closing those hateful eyes of his and giving his wife a small, slow nod.

I know I gasped. And I know as a smoker that Mariabella did something similar - perhaps not a gasp, but whatever the sudden intake of air, she coughed herself stupid for a good minute while we all waited and said nothing.

‘Well,’ she said finally, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose and finding a sudden need for wine, about threequarters of a glass of it, which she downed in one throw of her head. She placed her glass back on the table and pushed it at me and I scurried in obediently and filled it, then scurried back to my position. Everyone waited while Mariabella drank another half a glass and lit a cigarette. 'Well,' she said again placing the glass back on the table and talking to it with regular sniffs and dabs at her nose, ‘it appears…’

‘Spit it out!’ spat Gabriel.

‘It appears…' - she cleared her throat - 'that we may have misjudged you, Bailey.’

Suddenly all my baggage had wheels. I gasped and covered my mouth. The prawns were forgotten.

‘And the rest,’ said Gabriel nudging her reticent mother towards a full disclosure.

‘Yes, it seems…it would appear…’

‘Mum?’ Gabriel said enticing her mother on with a hand rolled at the wrist and I imagined Mariabella being this reticent to divulge appropriate information at an AA meeting. Then, in a reluctantly repentant rush, it came – the full delicious disclosure - delivered entirely to the wine glass she twirled in veined, skeletal fingers on the table while lulled back rather diva-like in her chair, ever-present cigarette in the air - but the full delicious disclosure nevertheless.

‘All the information we have been given would suggest you had nothing to do with it. The police have completely cleared you of any involvement. Let me put it this way – it seems highly unlikely it was you. Gabriel has acquainted us with the anguish you have obviously felt and it’s been an extremely difficult time for us all. Not just us as a family, but everyone in Skipton-le-Beans and anyone who deals with us, comes into our lives on a daily basis. They have felt as threatened as we have. Yet they have been brilliant. We’re not very friendly people, Bailey. We don’t seek friends. We don’t want friends. But through this we’ve made…well, several. That’s by the by. What has become clear through our conversations with Gabriel is that you are as thrown by all this as we are. Just as importantly, you clearly love our daughter. We don’t have to like you. We are highly suspicious of you for obvious reasons. But common sense tells us where your priorities lie and they are not with ruining your fiancé’s family.’

I’d had the toast sorted, my beer poised, Gabriel clasped to me from about ‘We don’t seek friends.’ But like the respectful, daughter loving non-terrorist I was, I waited until Mariabella Hogg – the worst mother-in-law any man could wish for, but right now like a pickled Holy Grail in a jar – had finished her speech. Which, it seemed, she had.

A long groan emanated from a squirming, head shaking form at the table. ‘I don’t bloody buy it!’ Male. Fifty. Born in Bloemfontein. Fled to England the moment ‘Whites only’ signs disappeared from beaches. ‘I don’t buy this ridiculous barbecue stunt. I don’t buy all this talk of innocence.’ He gestured at me. ‘The man has a history, for God’s sake!’

‘Yes,’ Gabriel said. ‘And you have a history for coming on to sixteen year old girls!’

‘You lying little toad!’

‘You lecherous old shit!’

‘Children, children!’ Mariabella held her hands up for peace. ‘Enough!’

‘That bloody daughter of yours needs a bullet!’ growled Attie.

‘Shut up, Attie!’ Mariabella yelled.

‘Shut up yourself, you drunken old witch!’

‘Attie!’ cried Melissa.

‘Stay out of it, fat cow!’

‘Don’t call me a fat cow!’

‘You are a fat cow!’

‘He’s right, Melissa,’ said Mariabella. ‘You are a fat cow.’

‘And you’re a hopeless old alcoholic!’ screamed Melissa in her first and only contribution to the night, though spot on.

‘At least I’m a thin one, my dear,’ said Mariabella lighting a fag.

‘You’re an abomination,’ Attie chimed in with some spectacularly gnashed teeth and lethal squinting.

‘Fuck you,’ muttered Mariabella with some .

‘Fuck both of you,’ muttered Melissa and with that they lapsed into a bristling, twitching silence.

‘Right!’ said Gabriel brightly. ‘Who needs a drink?’

***

The night wore on in every sense of the word, settling into an uneasy atmosphere of sufferance and shallow conversation punctuated by bickering, drinking and eating. The sombrero-topped heaters did their job magnificently; I did mine admirably – prawns (slightly burnt), steaks, sausages and fish all receiving rave reviews or, in the case of Austin and Attie, no reviews at all, which was as good a review as any – and Gabriel did her job with customary brilliance – salads, baked potatoes, sauces and apple pie desserts all of restaurant quality.

It also transpired that I had been cleared by a group just as important as Family Hogg – the London Terrorist Investigation Unit. Not only had they run me through every Interpol version of Google and come up empty, they’d had me under occasional surveillance for months. I found this rather creepy. I’d never noticed anyone watching me intently. There had been no black multi-aerial vans parked outside the house for days on end. No mystery servicemen checking for gas leaks we hadn’t reported. Such was the nature of surveillance these days, I suppose. The point was not to be seen.
The fact was I was no longer a suspect. This was good. Life could return to normal – at least for us anyway.

The euphoria of this realisation lasted about two hours.

In chronological order, this is how our castle barbecue turned to ruins:

At eight thirty and moments after gorging on seven prawns, two rump steaks, four sausages, two baked potatoes and salad, and having seen off nine Boddingtons and a Tetleys, Simon gave me a hug and told me he loved me, which earned him a frighteningly violent slap across the chin from his father. 

At eight thirty-two, Simon excused himself and drove home in tears.

At ten o’clock, Simon phoned Mariabella’s mobile to tell her Danby the dog was missing.

At ten thirty, Simon phoned Mariabella again to tell her Chicken Colditz HQ was on fire.

At ten-thirty-one, Austin Hogg spoke for the first time since ‘A marn has tae eat,’ in a terrifying, spitting and incoherent tirade with enthusiastic backing vocals from Attie Joubert, the gist of which seemed to be that this dinner was a plot to clear his farm for activist invasion, the disappearance of Danby the dog most pointedly implicating me given recent outspoken grievances.

At ten forty,  I was right back where I started.

Chapter Thirty Six

36


JAS 360: LEEDS

JAS 360: LEEDS was founded in 1987 by John King, Antony Keegan-Phipps and Sepalika Kobalavithanage, three former high fliers of the McCarthy Ellison Empire who defected when they had built sufficient reputations to start their own agency. Sensibly they opted against the tried and true big sounding corporate acronym: With the trio of surnames available – King, Keegan-Phipps and Kobalavithanage – their only source of business would have been the American Deep South circa 1950 and that was neither practical nor legal. Most importantly it wasn’t viable: they were based in Leeds. Another option was the triple barrelled King Keegan-Phipps Kobalavithanage title much loved by advertising agencies the world over. But with creative director, Sepalika Kobalavithanage’s presence on the scene, telephonists would have been in danger of swallowing their own tongues. Hence John, Antony and Sepalika resorted to a memorable, if toilet cleaner-like compilation of their initials. 360 was merely added as a vague, artsy nod to their holistic approach to advertising.

I had been something of a JAS 360: LEEDS groupie ever since they won Clio Grand Prix in just their second year of operation. I’d sat riveted to lengthy interviews with John, Antony and Sepalika as their empire grew and I’d fallen in love with Sepalika Kobalavithanage, an expat Sri Lankan of such mesmerising beauty, grace and power with the pithy headline I melted in every pure white upward spreading of her mouth. She reminded me of Gabriel. Or maybe Gabriel reminded me of her.

***

There must have been twenty four people in the JAS 360: LEEDS boardroom that morning. There must have been because I’d counted them. One of these was Fergus Blaine looking resplendently uncomfortable in his linens, sleeves creased to the wrist from a failed attempt to enter the meeting with them rolled up to his elbows. One of them was me, hair freshly cut off the shoulders, moustache and flavour saver trimmed, as many earrings and bangles and leather straps as I could fit on my lobes and wrists, just a hint of green tat poking from a bright orange Kraft Macaroni and Cheese ‘The Cheesiest!’ t-shirt, itself poking from a brown waistcoat.

One of them was John King, JAS 360 CEO, looking like Grizzly Adams at a biker wedding with his wild man hair and beard and his fat man black suit. One of them was Antony Keegan-Phipps, Executive Account Director, looking like a Wall Street banker with his slick black hair and slick black suit. One of them was Sepalika Kobalavithanage. Aaaah, Sepalika! Like a little pot of fine Ceylon tea.

There were media people and accounts people and research people. The rest were the competition. Sixteen of them, eight resident teams of JAS 360 writers and art directors, the youngest of which were just off the tit, the oldest of which were just old tits. They were an interesting cross-section of English sub-cultures from hat wearing Pet Shop Boys to shaven headed thugs off East Enders. There were eleven men and five women, all of whom looked like they’d got their attitude from Vinnie Jones. My contempt for them was palpable. They stood between me and JAS 360 glory. They’d already made it. I hadn’t.

So to the brief. Here is all you need to know from that exhaustive two hour meeting. John King aka Grizzly Adams: ‘I don’t need to tell you how important this pitch is to us. But I’ll tell you anyway. This pitch is fucking important. We have to win it! You have to win it! And you will win it or I’ll sack the lot of you! Within these walls are the finest fucking creatives in England. You’ve proved that. You’re why Asok came to us. You’re why they will come to stay.’

Sepalika Kobalavithanage: ‘…I’d also like to welcome Bailey Harland and Fergus Blaine, a freelance team who will also be working on the pitch. Welcome gentlemen. We look forward to your ideas.’ Sixteen sets of eyes burned holes through our foreheads.

Antony Keegan-Phipps: ‘Asok Marauder football boots.’ An audio-visual of an orbiting soccer boot appeared on a large screen that had just slunk silently from the ceiling. ‘Newly designed for English football star, Andrew Sandham. The lightest, yet most powerful Asok football boot ever. And that’s saying something.' He scanned the room saying nothing. ‘Two inner soles,' he continued. 'One firm to allow more powerful shooting, the other soft for more fleet-footedness. Flatter profile. Glove-like fit. Asok patented technology so even the backyard hack can swerve it like Sandham. A claim best not scrutinised too thoroughly as there is also the small matter of technique to consider, a technique it has taken Sandham himself umpteen years to master, but this is by the by. Our job, of course, is not to sell the reality, but the dream.’

Keegan-Phipps picked up a sample off the table. ‘This is the best football boot in the world,' he said brandishing it around the room. 'Soon to be the most famous football boot in the world. At a hundred and thirty pounds a pair, it would need to be. We.' - he pointed the toe of the boot at faces around the room just to be sure we understood what he meant by we - 'are to launch this boot. Well, we hope and expect to launch this boot. First we have to win the business. For those of you who wish to know, we are pitching against five agencies. I am not privy as to who those agencies are, so don’t ask. This is what we have been asked to do.

He placed the boot on the table and went walkabout. ‘Andrew Sandham now plays his football for FC Barcelona as anyone familiar with the game will know, or anyone merely familiar with Andrew Sandham.’ Titters around the table. ‘Now,’ he paused for effect, ‘on the twentieth of March, FC Barcelona play Chelsea in a European Cup eliminator at Stamford Bridge. Asok and the Marauder brand wish to leverage off this event in their launch of the Marauder brand utilising media in the ground, around the ground, leading to the ground and, of course, Match of the Day television time on BBC1. Unfortunately due to the high demand for television time, this space has already been pre-booked by Asok’s incumbent agency meaning we are stuck with sixty second spots.’ Cheers from around the table. ‘Yes, I thought you’d like that bit. Now, let’s get on with it.’

And, finally, get on with it, he did.

Basically, the brief was as simple and concise as a brief could be. Utilising sixty second television spots and outdoor media around the field, stadium and along the main thoroughfares leading to the stadium, we were required to express the following: You too can swerve it like Sandham if you buy these boots.’ I can assure you briefs don’t get any more concise and single minded than that. Nor any more exciting than that.

The deadline for concepts was a luxurious three weeks away. I breathed a sigh of relief: we could work it around our Creative Solutions commitments. For now, Charlie Chabot had a stay of execution.

Moreover, it was a massively exciting opportunity. And it signalled a rather sudden change in fortunes…

***

Gabriel had been back on speaking terms with Chicken Colditz for a week now – not in a popping in for coffee sort of way, just a not hanging up when she phoned sort of way. She had used these brief but precious forums to further state my (our) case. Then, surprise of all surprises…a call from Mariabella. They were ready to meet.

We suggested dinner at Hartley Castle House on Saturday night. They agreed.

It felt like we’d won Lotto, such was the elation, the utter euphoria of the breakthrough. The Cold War was over. Now we had three days to prepare. Which was plenty. All we had to do was ensure Saturday night was a success. A simple, uncomplicated success.

That’s all we had to do.

Chapter Thirty Five

35


Straight eye for the crooked guy

‘Bailey. I’m truly sorry. I can’t do this!’

‘You can and you will.’

‘I won’t. It’s just not me.’

‘All the more reason to do it, I’d have thought.’

Fergus Blaine stood before a full length mirror in Leon, one of York’s trendier menswear stores in a brown leaf printed linen shirt hanging loose over light brown linen trousers. His feet were wrapped in hip brown sneakers, the perfect cool casual complement.

‘Bailey. Can I just say that I have worked for some of the world’s most prestigious agencies in my clothes,’ – he began counting off fingers on gnarled hands – ‘won three Clios, five New York and four D&AD in my clothes, been to any number of successful interviews in my clothes. What does that say to you?’

‘It says it’s about time you washed your clothes.’

‘That’s very funny. I didn’t mean the clothes I’m wearing today.’

‘I know you didn’t. I’ve seen you in sorts of abominations. But I don’t care. You’re not going anywhere near JAS 360 with me in any of your clothes.’ I nodded at him. ‘You’re going in those clothes.’

And if I may say so myself, it was a vast improvement. Not that it was actually physically possible to make him look worse. And there was a very low ceiling to any improvement with those eyes and that wonky overbite. This wasn’t mutton dressed as lamb. This was Gollum dressed as Brad Pitt. If only we could do something about that pallid skin.

***

‘For fuck’s sake, Fergus! Stand still!’

‘It tickles!’

‘Well, let it tickle! I’m not paying this lady twenty quid to spray tan the walls! And, I’m telling you now, you’re not wearing those nice new clothes over those disgusting y-fronts.’

‘Bailey. This isn’t funny anymore! Nobody’s going to see my underwear!’

‘I just did! And it never was funny. I’ve been mentally scarred from this experience.’

‘You know, I could really grow to dislike you, Bailey Harland, I truly could.’

***

‘Hello. I was wondering if you could help my ahm acquaintance here. He’s looking for some Calvin Klien briefs.’ I cupped my hands, sized up my acquaintance. ‘About a small mens?’

‘Excuse me! I’m a medium, thank you!’

***

‘Tell me honestly, Fergus. How does it feel?’

As a sort of enforced Hells Angels-style initiation to the world of fashion, I’d made Fergus wear his new clobber back to Creative Solutions.

‘To be truthful, Bailey,' he said standing pasty, petulant and imperfect before me, a clothes horse one catwalk away from dog food at best. 'It feels very foreign. I’m not comfortable in these clothes. I can’t be myself in these clothes.’

I lounged on a sofa by the pool table in a dim and dowdy back room and smiled: ‘Surely that’s got to be a good thing.’

‘That’s very funny, Bailey,' he said sitting as far away as possible. ' I just don’t see what gives you the right to tell me what to wear.’

'Hmm,' I said placing a melodramatic finger to my lips. ‘The distinct possibility turning up at JAS 360 with a smelly tramp will jeopardise my chances?' This,' I said holding the same finger in the air and throwing him my most witheringly sincere gaze, 'is the biggest opportunity of my life! It’s all right for you; you’ve worked for top agencies. I haven’t. A creative hot shop in Leeds might not be such a big deal to you. It is to me!’

I wasn’t about to tell Fergus Blaine just how big a deal: that such a lucrative and conspicuously prestigious job would solve a lot of problems. One, the precarious state of my charade of wealth would receive a sizable and welcome boost. Two, such a job and its inherent pay packet would dilute the impact of the Chicken Colditz debacle and its ultimate resolution – it would still hurt, just not as much. Three, maybe, just maybe, I’d find the sixteen hundred spare pounds necessary to buy those Charalais.

Charlie Chabot appeared in the pool room door.

‘Sorry. Not interrupting, am I?’ He spotted Fergus. ‘Well, well! What’s the occasion?’

It was an awful moment. There we were – the conspiring mutineers and the captain walks in. I hated lying to Charlie Chabot, one of the sweetest upper class twits I was ever likely to meet. Certainly I hope the sweetest upper class twit I would ever betray.

‘Nothing, Charlie,' I said wringing my hands and finding a sudden need to inspect the walls for mildew. 'We just thought it was time to sharpen Fergus up a bit.’

‘Lovely,’ said Charlie with an amiable smile. Well, you’ve done a splendid job, I must say!'

He dithered about as long as it took to realise neither of us was available for comment. 'Sorry, ahm, won’t keep you,' he said hesitantly as eyes failed to meet his. 'Just thought I’d pass on the good news. Appears we may be more than a little inundated over the next month or six weeks. Rather a lot of work coming in, I suspect. All of which will be written up on our splendidly newfangled briefing template!’ He grinned, sucked a laugh through his teeth, the audio equivalent of a bicycle pump.

‘Briefing template, Charlie?’ I felt sick.

He threw his head through a great swoop of a nod. ‘Aaah yup!Copied it off the Internet. Quite something it is too. Unique selling propositions and demographics and lots of other things I’ve never heard of. Once I’ve got the vaguest clue what I’m doing, I’m sure it will be quite something. Must appear to be keeping up with the whiz kid creatives!’

And with another sucked laugh, he was gone, leaving us to search each other’s faces; Blaine no doubt finding mine pensive, guilt-ridden and a little sad; me finding his strangely, sniggeringly amused in the manner of a naughty schoolboy caught flushing lab rats down the toilet. Well, at least one of us was sparing a thought for Charlie Chabot, the – if all went well – soon to be abandoned Charlie Chabot. Just when he’d settled us in, got us up to speed, believed he had a good thing going, we’d be off.

We hoped so anyway.

Chapter Thirty Four

34


They shoot bimbos, don’t they?

Monday, January 9

First day back at Creative Solutions after enforced pay-free holidays (holidays Charlie Chabot spent in Florida with a twenty-five year old former temp receptionist from Sheriff Hutton) began as ordinarily as every day at Creative Solutions did: with Fergus Blaine sniping at me for being late. This, however, was destined to be anything but an ordinary day.

The first departure from the script occurred at ten o’clock when Creative Solutions’ wood panelled box of a reception area began to creak under the weight of swimwear models, an ever-growing gaggle of tarted up, dumbed down, fake tanned girls all vying for a coveted place within the pages of our now approved Bingham Court ‘Heaven on Wheels’ brochure. While I am the first to acknowledge that brains and beauty can go together – Gabriel being an excellent case in point – here and now, casting my eye over the catty creatures corralled into that little wooden 1950’s doctor’s surgery of a reception area like footballer’s wives waiting for a pap smear, busts and bottoms had clearly got the better of these gene pools. Creative Solutions reception wasn’t the only thing dimly lit.

Charlie, who an hour earlier had been howling at the moon about an unassailable mountain of work, was suddenly and conspicuously idle and loitering with intent. ‘Rather good fun, don’t you think?’ he said wringing his hands and perving round the door of his office. ‘Makes one wish one had had the foresight to install peep holes in the ladies loo.’

This being winter and this being a rather conservative part of England, the swimwear models had not arrived in their swimsuits. Instead they had arrived in their street clothes; 'street' being the operative word as many appeared to have popped by between clients. Each had their most flattering and/or revealing bikinis secreted away in handbags.

Unlike Charlie, I could legitimately lay claim to having nothing to do. I’d written all the copy and subheads for the ‘Heaven on Wheels’ brochure already. Fergus Blaine was the art director, the man in charge of the brochure’s visual stimulants. So it was he who was herding the swimwear models off down the hall one by one like cattle through a worming race with what seemed simple enough instructions to slip into a bikini in the toilet, then go to the boardroom for test photos. And one by one they did, a revolving door of ample cleavages and empty heads tottering about unsupervised in the old corridors, intense, dumb eyes seeming to say ‘Toilet, toilet, toilet,’ or ‘Boardroom, boardroom, boardroom,’ an alarmingly high proportion of them ending up in the car park.

For want of something better to do, I hung around watching the waiting bimbos bicker and preen as if this was X Factor auditions, not casting for some two bit brochure destined to expose their ‘talent’ to nothing more than a few hundred crippled senior citizens. I stuck my head in the boardroom door from time to time where a digital camera-wielding Fergus Blaine was whining ‘Okay, for now you’ve just got to pretend there’s an old person in the wheelchair. Do you think you can do that?’ and ‘You know, I think you’ve got a really lovely face, I truly do,’ and ‘Just so you know, your motivation is old people in wheelchairs who want a really nice, hassle-free, exciting, nurse-filled life by the sea. You represent that lifestyle. You are the visual device personifying that lifestyle. The facilitator of that lifestyle. Do you understand what I’m saying? Okay. Then just push the wheelchair and smile.’

The more bikini-clad models I saw pushing wheelchairs, draped over wheelchairs and helping imaginary old people out of wheelchairs into baths, the more I thought we’d created a brochure appealing exclusively to Larry Flint. It had all been Fergus’s idea – the whole ‘Heaven on Wheels’ thing; the visual analogy of the swimwear models playing nurse to ram home the seaside delights of these Total Care waterfront apartments.

Suddenly it all felt totally wrong and crass. To be honest, it had always felt reasonably wrong and crass. Yet Fergus had convinced me of the enormous cut through.

‘There simply aren’t any other campaigns like this for old people’s homes, Bailey,’ he’d said. I wonder why. And even if there were enough swinging old people hooning about in wheelchairs out there to fill Bingham Court as a result of our work, I knew how literally people took advertising, especially old people. And there were going to be some very disappointed old people unless I wrote a very large disclaimer into the copy: ‘Swimwear models not included.’

As for Fergus Blaine, he was now a source of concern for entirely new reasons. I had tolerated his consis-tently derelict manifestations and ramshackle remonstrations because I believed I was dealing with a creative genius. I thought I might learn something. More, I hoped he might lead me by the hand into the realms of greatness from right here in the Kingdom of Ineptness, York. It had been done before. Great campaigns didn’t necessarily have to emanate from great agencies. Quite the contrary, some of the best ads of the last twenty years had risen to the top from very small beginnings in small agencies and/or small countries. Ads for gyms and gay bars and plumbers. You didn’t have to have the Nike account to win awards and sometimes it helped if you didn’t. Sometimes it helped to deal with little companies with little power echelons and, ideally, little grasp of what they were doing. Such companies were far easier to bully into running the sort of ads Clio judges went for than the big, stodgy, marketing graduate-heavy corporations who insisted on running everything through research, research being the bane of all creatives’ lives, proving, as it often did, that the ads we wanted to run didn’t work. The smaller the company, the less research and the more likely hopelessly irrelevant but brilliant ads would go to air and win us awards.

Such was my hope latching onto someone as awarded as Fergus Blaine somewhere as patently echelon, research and competence-free as Creative Solutions. Yet here we were five months in with nothing more startling to show for our endeavours than ‘Heaven on Wheels’ – Charlie Chabot’s propensity to apologise for everything would more than come in handy once that one hit the market.

This, while sad, still didn’t explain Fergus Blaine and the masterpiece portfolio he had unveiled to me that awful afternoon at Café Uno…

***

A week ago I visited the official websites of Clio, D&AD and New York Festival and scrolled through ten years of gold, silver and bronze winners. The name Fergus Blaine appeared twelve times. So far, so good.

I then did a Google image search for ‘Fergus Blaine’. There on page two of my search, grinning wonkily for the camera and clutching one of the aforementioned awards, was Fergus Blaine. Conclusion: He was who he said he was. He’d won what he said he’d won.

Which still didn’t explain his transparent lack of creative genius.

Well, actually, it did.

There in the photo posing alongside Fergus Blaine was a bespectacled copywriter. There in the award credits alongside the name Fergus Blaine were six or seven more copywriters. In each case the other half of a team of two, but the true source of Fergus Blaine’s genius. He hadn’t come up with the ideas. They had. All he’d done was colour them in and pass them off as his own. Not uncommon. Not even unethical in advertising circles. But altogether misleading if, like me, you were after an art director who could make you look good.

I felt ill. And naïve. And perhaps relieved. I didn’t need Fergus Blaine after all. I could move on without him.

The timing of the most important mobile phone call I will ever receive was, therefore, both perfect and appalling. I had just donned a jacket and carted my sorry soul onto the street outside Creative Solutions for some solitude and a cigarette. No sooner had I lit this than my mobile phone rang. I didn’t recognise the number.

‘Bailey Harland?’ I said.

‘Hello Bailey,’ said a heavily accented female voice. ‘It’s Sepalika Kobalavithanage from JAS 360 Leeds.’

‘I’m sorry?’ She’d lost me after ‘It’s…’

She repeated it more slowly. ‘It’s Sepalika Kobala…vithanage from—’

‘Sepalika! Sorry! Hi! How are you?’

‘I’m wery well indeed, thank you, Bailey,’ she said brightly, any doubt that it was, indeed, her nullified by her curious Sri Lankan propensity to pronounce anything starting with a 'v' with a 'w'.

‘I hadn’t expected to hear from you so soon.’

‘Well,' she said. 'I must be honest. I hadn’t expected to be calling you so soon, but there we are. I hope this is not a bad time for you.’

‘It’s a perfect time, Sepalika. Fire away.’

‘Well, Bailey. As I said to you at our most entertaining meeting a month or two ago, I thought your portfolio was wery competent, if perhaps lacking that spark that sets the truly great work aside. I could still see wersatility and potential and I thought your attitude was outstanding.’

‘Thank you.’

‘No, no, that’s fine. Anyway, I am calling you now to discuss a possibility that has arisen here at JAS 360 Leeds. Are you happy to discuss this over the phone or would you like to come in?’

‘Over the phone’s fine.’ If I was shaking with nervous anticipation now, my health couldn’t afford to wait.

‘Well, it is most exciting. We have made the pitch list for the Asok Marauder above the line brand work. Are you aware of Asok, Bailey?’ I could hear the smile in her sweet Sri Lankan voice.

I laughed. ‘The name rings a vague bell.’ Asok were the second largest sports footwear manufacturer in the world.’

‘Yes indeed. Well, we are pitching for this extremely large and exciting piece of business in approximately three weeks. Would you be interested in receiving a brief?’

‘Absolutely I would!’

‘Excellent. I can’t tell you anything else for now. Oh, you will of course be paid the going freelance rate for your work. Naturally, if you win us the business, we will be delighted to offer you a full time position. And there will be nine teams including yourselves working on the pitch.’

‘Nine teams?’ This was a bombshell from a number of perspectives. Nine teams was a hell of a lot of teams to compete against for the winning campaign. But I had enough self belief. I was capable. More worrying – considerably more worrying – was that word ‘team’.

‘You said you had an art director, didn’t you, Bailey?’

Yes, Sepalika. I did say I had an art director and I lied. I said I had an art director when I actually didn’t have an art director. Now I do have one and I wish I didn’t.

‘Bailey?’

Yes, Sepalika. I have an art director. His name is Fergus Blaine. He smells, has no social skills, no creative skills and is the last person I want banging away in my ear, day in, day out just to score The Dream Job.

‘Yes, Sepalika. I have an art director.’

Chapter Thirty Three

33


Asta la vista, Bailey

Wednesday, January 4

I have made much of Hartley Castle House’s commanding hilltop position and resultant expansive views across the Moors, a view encompassing any number of knolls, valleys, drystone walls, sheep, patches of forest sprouting from the hills like Mohawk haircuts and, it would seem, ringside seats to any local carnage.

Local carnage aside, this view was a significant part of the property’s appeal. I loved that view, thrived on it and I could stare at it for hours. Which was just as well as we were paying through the nose for it in our extortionate lease. Admittedly this lease did not spell it out as blatantly as “House x pounds, view y”, views were just y houses like this were so x-ey. My view was that the more I stared at that view, the better value for money we got.

Until today when without any notice from the realtors, our view was suddenly gone.

‘Where’s the lease, Gabriel?’ I said ripping open kitchen drawers. ‘I want to see what it says about fog.’

Of course the lease said nothing about fog. Especially this sort of fog, the kind of thick, seeping ice cold mist that fell on the land like a Kiss concert from a helicopter. Then, much like a Kiss concert, hung around for an eternity. If a rented hedge trimmer broke down, you got your money back. If a rented view broke down…

‘Think of it from the realtor’s point of view, monkey,’ my ever pragmatic partner said midafternoon as I paid for yet another hour of exorbitantly expensive pea soup. ‘If they added your so called Fog Clause into the lease – and I’m still not sure if you’re serious – what sort of precedent is that going to set?’

‘It would set a perfectly decent precedent, Gabriel. And to answer your question, yes, I am serious. Deadly serious. The ad for this place clearly said “Magnificent views”. It also said “farmhouse kitchen with authentic Aga oven.” If that Aga broke down through no fault of our own, they’d have to come and fix it. If the wallpaper peeled off our “newly refurbished” house, or the “new” carpet came up on the stairs through no fault of our own, they’d have to come and fix it. I want them to come and fix my magnificent view!’

After a long, all too thoughtful stare from my fiancé, I spat ‘What?’

She started and widened her eyes at me. ‘What? Oh.’ She shook her head as if to jettison a thought across the room as Dave Land drove past on a tractor. ‘Nothing, I was just trying to work out where that one sat on the Bailey weirdo meter,’ she said before spinning to the sink and fiddling with taps with her back to me.

Truth is I was joking. Kind of. Initially. Fog was fog and the notion of complaining about it to the realtors was, of course, absurd. But what had begun as merely odd behaviour became something else. Something more sinister. It wasn’t the fog as such I was riled about. The fog merely represented something else I had little or no control over and seemed to be losing more and more control over by the day.

My life.

Chapter Thirty Two

32


Sunday, bloody Sunday

Sunday, January 1st

At nine-fifteen on New Years Day, Gabriel was naked and bound at the ankles and wrists to our IKEA Kongsvik/Sultan Lade authentic four-poster bed glistening from head to toe in baby oil, when there was what sounded like gunshots from outside.

‘What was that?’ I asked my shiny little Anglo-Latin starfish, hands on trouser zip.

‘Gun shots,’ she said.

‘Bang goes the neighbourhood,’ I said.

‘They’ll be shooting pheasants or something,' she said wincing as she tried to settle her legs more comfortably. 'Can you loosen my ankles a bit?’

‘In a sec.’ I peered round a curtain. ‘I can’t see anything. Back in a mo.’

‘Bailey!’

Outside with dogs in tow, a polar wind bit at my face like ice cube-wielding mosquitoes. Leaden, grubby clouds had collapsed into the fields a mile out in all directions. Casting my eye across the patchwork of dark green fields to the north east, the first thing I saw was sheep running. An entire flock of them running as fast as sheep can run, which, from my experience – that being this experience – wasn’t very fast. They made Kurt look positively speedy.

The question was why were they running? And all in one direction? Probably goes without saying with sheep but I was intrigued nevertheless. I spotted the answer moments later. Men with guns, long guns – shotguns, I surmised – were standing fifty feet apart across the fields near the stream, butts in armpits, barrels parallel to the ground, looking skywards. A scatter of four wheel drive vehicles sat empty in the fields around them. There were dogs at their feet. Gun dogs I surmised, becoming a more and more cognisant country boy by the second.

Yet the city boy in me wasn’t happy. Nor was the animal lover in me. The city boy found gunfire outside his bedroom window a bit alarming. Just three months ago I’d have dialled 911 without hesitation. The animal lover in me was even more upset as guns were now fired in anger and birds dropped from the sky, crashing to earth, small, distant flapping packages quickly descended on by dogs.

‘Has Iraq invaded?’ a familiar voice called out. Dave Land lurched to my side from one of the outbuildings. He stuck out a hand. ‘Happy New Year to you, my lad.’

I took the hand. Rather the hand swallowed mine like a python would a quail egg. ‘Same,’ I said cheerlessly, turning my sights back on the fields. ‘They’re pheasants they’re shooting, right?’

‘Aye. Maybe the odd duck. They’ll be round these parts every Sunday til February now.’

‘What?’

‘They’d have been here a month ago if Bob hadn’t up and died on us. Bob from Fox and Hound normally organises it. But Bob died a month or two ago and it’s taken until now to get it organised.’ He nodded into the valley. ‘They’ll have a good shoot down there today. There’s pheasants everywhere down there. The woodland’s full of them.’

I winced as another two shots rang out and a fleeing bird fell to earth. More shots. More flights cut short. More birds from the same direction. Three of them. Dogs struggling to keep up. Felled birds on foot, flapping at the ground. I fought back revulsion.

‘See over there?’ Land said pointing at the woodland down in the valley to our left. ‘See that white flash in the trees?’

I said I did.

‘There’s beaters in there.’

‘What?’

‘Beaters.'He moved in close beside me and aimed an arm into the distance down my line of sight. 'See? There’s a bloke in there, he’s got a white plastic bag and he’s thrashing it about in the bushes to root out the pheasants. There’ll be a bunch of beaters in there. The shooters pay them thirty pounds a day to do that.’ He chuckled as more shots rang out, more birds plummeted and more dogs swooped on them. ‘It’s awful, really, isn’t it? They can’t actually even fly properly, pheasants. They’ll flap their wings madly for about ten seconds and that’ll be them, they’ll be utterly buggered and have to glide back to earth. You watch this one now coming out of the trees.’ Two shots rang out. ‘Well, he got about five of his ten seconds.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s carnage really.’

‘I’ve seen more even contests,’ I said. It was the closest I could get to an out and out expression of abhorrence and I hated myself for it. Fact was shooting pheasants required the marksmen skills of a child. This wasn’t sport. This was mass execution.

Land laughed. ‘Who’d be a pheasant, eh? They’re bred for this, you know, Bailey.’

I said I didn’t know.

‘They’re farmed birds what they’re shooting.’ He grinned lecherously. ‘Institutionalised game birds. Millions of them bred on farms to be released and shot in winter.’ A grim chuckle. ‘It’s quite awful when you think about it. They’re completely hopeless, pheasants. There’s gamekeepers have to come onto t’land down here, feed them, water them, set traps for foxes. They’re that bloody hopeless when they’re released. I mean they’ve basically reared like battery hens, it’s not very nice; they’re all crammed in and they put masks on them to stop them killing each other and then they come out…’ He chuckled as more birds arced to earth like feathered fireworks. ‘You see, Bailey, the trouble with these pheasant is they’re not like proper wild birds. They’ve been in a cage all their lives.’

Another chuckle. ‘It’s like releasing a budgie into the wild. They can’t even bloody feed themselves! I mean,’ he pointed towards Cragmoor, ‘you must have seen the road.’ I nodded a pinch-lipped, pinch-eyed nod. ‘It’s just alive with them! The road from here to Cragmoor is literally alive with half-witted pheasants scuttling about on the verges and running in front of cars! It’s like they’re trying to commit suicide! I lose count of the number of squashed ones! If a car doesn’t get em, these bloke’s will.’ He sighed. ‘To be honest with you, it’s not my idea of sport. But a man’s got to earn a living.’

‘They do that for a living?’

‘No. Me. They pay me to shoot on my farm on Sundays and for the gamekeeper to feed the birds meantime. Six hundred quid. Would have been a thousand if Bob hadn’t up and died on me. Every Sunday til February now. They’ll shoot most of t’day then go to t’pub.’

‘Do I get any say on whether I want people blasting away in my backyard all day?’ A carefully ambiguous step in the right direction.

He laughed. ‘No. Not really. This is the way of the country, my boy. Not much I can do about it.’

With that he patted me on the shoulder and lurched off.

And I watched him go. Step off the left, lurch off the right. Step off the left, lurch off the right. Step, lurch. Step, lurch…

‘Yes, there is!’ someone shouted after him. ‘You can stop these bastards shooting innocent birds in your fields!’

I froze bolt rigid and peered around. The step, lurch, step ground to a halt on a lurch – the visual equivalent of a silverback gorilla almost walking off a cliff. He buckled a bit on his bad leg, righted himself on his good one and hopped in a circle to face the perpetrator of those fighting words. A perpetrator who was still facing up to the fact that he’d actually said them. A perpetrator who now winced visibly in the naked light outside his closet.

Land turned his great head to the side and squinted warily into this light. ‘You’re not one of them city greenies, are you, Bailey?’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said fixing him with as steely a gaze as a five foot ten man with arty facial hair and glasses could muster. ‘I’m not a greenie. I’m…I’m…’ Suddenly I came over more than a little Simon Hogg, unsure what to do with my limbs. The magnitude of my intended outburst and its potential repercussions had strangled my resolve. I wanted Dave Land to like me, needed Dave Land to like me. Nobody else did. Then again, who was I asking Dave Land to like? Who did he appear to like? Not me. Not the warts and all me Gabriel was so adamant should become the constant me. The me Dave Land liked was the chameleon me adapting his true colours to please, to fit in. The slimy, boot licking lizard so soft of underbelly, so paranoid, so sycophantic any view would do so long as it was the consensus view.

Then again, what if Dave Land didn’t like my warts? What if the well intended, come clean exposure of my warts led to a close-quarters relationship of revulsion or, worse, derision? As sure as the sun would still rise behind clouds, Dave Land would still drive past on a tractor. What if he never stopped by? What if he refused to pop in and replace worn tap washers or drop off spontaneous gifts of freshly harvested potatoes? What if he deliberately sent my Charalais just to spite me? Was honesty really worth such potential cost?

No, it wasn’t.

In the moment or two it had taken my brain to process all this colliding information, my arms had been unsure what to do with my hands, my legs had been equally unsure where to place my feet. Everything had been on the go in the shufflingly unimpressive manner of the perpetually indecisive. Now, with a unanimous decision in, all limbs scurried into position for the reading of the verdict. Feet took a few steps forward, settled in the gravel Metal Lady-like. Hands went to hips. Head lolled to the side. Magnified eyes narrowed. Lips moved.

‘I’m…well, I’m potentially your worst nightmare, actually Dave. I’m…an animal sympathiser. I’m opposed to any form of animal cruelty. And that, down there,’ – Shots rang out right on cue – ‘is animal cruelty!’

Dave Land eyed me with palpable amusement. He coughed up a single chuckle that rocked his head. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Well, my lad, you’re going to just love it round here. You think that’s cruel. The hunt hasn’t been through yet.’ He eyed me some more, great head nodding in amused recognition. ‘You won’t have liked much I’ve told you about farming then.’

I said no.

‘You didn’t want those bulls for meat either, did you?’

I smiled sadly, blinked a slow blink at his chest. ‘No.’

More grinning, more slow nodding of his great head. ‘Good for you!’ he bellowed so suddenly I jumped. ‘Good for you! Why not? Stir us up a bit! Good luck to you, lad!’ He turned and hobbled rapidly off chuckling and shaking his head.

I watched him go, a strangely liberating wave of righteousness washing over me. I felt cleansed, pure and sanctified (in a non-religious way). The simpering conformist in me was finally under threat. As, perhaps, was my relationship with my landlord.

As was my marriage.

‘Shit!’ I hissed and dashed for the bedroom.

Gabriel was still strapped naked to the bed covered in baby oil. She was beside herself, almost frothing with rage and panic. She’d heard thuds downstairs, thuds which could have been the dish washer changing cycles or the boiler kicking in. Gabriel’s argument – that of a girl strapped naked to a four poster bed covered in baby oil while the dogs and I were somewhere outside – was that the thuds could easily have been something more sinister. Her argument was sound. Her hysteria understandable. A burglar, even the most innocent ‘take what you can and scarper’ sort of burglar, happening upon a naked glistening girl strapped starfish-style to a bed may just have been tempted to add a more serious vice to his repertoire.

I released her forthwith and was appropriately apologetic. She was inappropriately unsympathetic/apathetic when I related the mentally scarring nature of what I had just witnessed and done. We duly agreed to suspend sex on Sundays until further notice. I simply could not get in the spirit of fornication to a soundtrack of gunfire and frenzied pheasants being shot through their tiny heads.

Chapter Thirty One

31


Winter: a pit pony’s diary

England officially welcomed winter on December first, a somewhat tardy gesture as this most infamous of English seasons had been touring the country for months under the guise of autumn. Now that it was officially cold, locals could stop pretending it wasn’t and get on with saying it was. Which they were apt to do at the slightest invitation or usually without one.

I had looked forward to this notorious three month spell since arrival. Eight years I’d endured in Brisbane. Eight long seasonless years of sunshine and steamy heat. There were seasons, at least on the calendar anyway. But I for one couldn’t tell summer, autumn and spring apart. They looked the same, wore the same clothes, spoke the same shrill language of cicadas; a wall of white noise – nature’s sizzling, searing, ear piercing soundtrack to the heat. Sunshine gets boring and I longed for rain. When it came (which tended to be in a flustered, tardy rush), I’d find a sheltered spot outside, sit and marvel at it like it was a fireworks display.

I was all for seasons – all four of them. The changing of the seasons gave you a sense of the passing of time – a tri-monthly wake-up call. In Brisbane I could go nine months before I realised I’d been treading water. Here, with regular seasonal reminders that time was slipping by, I knew I was treading water. Actually, I was drowning.

I also quickly discovered that eight years in Brisbane had been the worst possible preparation for an English winter…

***

I’d thought Gabriel was just winding me up when she threw two police baton-sized cans of windscreen de-icer in a Tesco trolley. Then I woke to my first Volvo-shaped igloo…

Through November and December weekend trips to the Cragmoor Grocers, Sweet Merchants, Post Office and Tea Rooms became exercises in patient demisting and chattering teeth, exercises I generally failed, instead becoming quite competent at driving through a porthole, with chattering teeth.

Days didn’t so much shorten as become nondescript grey areas in the black. The landscape lost all its definition; edges blurred; hills, trees, drystone walls, buildings all became indistinct, as if viewed through frosted glass. Hartley Castle House and the castle ruins adopted an ominous hue. The sky just disappeared into a creamy mushroom soup miasma. Everything got damp and stayed damp. Puddles on potholed roads iced over, occasionally thawed, but never went away. All but the least attractive birds flew south. All but the woolliest animals went indoors. Grit trucks became another slow obstacle to get stuck behind. The Hustwickgate High Street became a treacherous, thirty degree ice rink full of foolhardy shoppers, all rugged up like Russian peasants, all drawn, pallid and tousled like they’d just seen a ghost on a most unpleasant log flume ride. Winter in the north of England was more drab and awful than I’d ever imagined. So utterly, colour sappingly, mind and extremity numbingly bitter, bleak and depressing. I felt like a pit pony trapped on the set of a Bella Lugosi movie, stumbling about the dark, dank, misty moors with the werewolves and lurching others.

I was in Heaven. And, of course, hell.

Any news of Chicken Colditz and its conscientious objectors was now provided exclusively by the dailies and the longer nothing exciting happened, the more that news got buried beneath a plethora of proper terrorism, philandering politicians and football. When the saga of Skipton-le-Beans did qualify for a few token column centimetres all it ever amounted to was media speculation as to the activists’ next move (if any) and media dramatisation of ‘an apprehensive community on tender hooks’. The spokesperson for Chicken Colditz, one Mariabella Hogg, had clearly been given legal counsel to avoid specifics, speaking of me only as ‘a certain suspect’ in bitter, woe betide sound bites of a simple, country family under siege.

Occasional drive-bys revealed that all but the hardiest of chicken fanciers had lost interest. The police presence was down to a single road cone lodged nose first in a hedge. The only indications as to the once intense media interest were indentations; deep, many and varied ruts in the grass verges.

Clearly everyone was now sitting back waiting for something to happen, resources better served elsewhere. There was only so long Her Majesty was going to tolerate her finest officers flouncing about outside a wall while parking infringements were going unpenalised. And there was only so long a young, ambitious journalist could stare at that very same wall before realising this wasn’t going to be his ‘Berlin’.

It was safe to assume the Terror Team were still analysing letters, stamps and envelopes from all angles over copious quantities of instant coffee in plastic cups somewhere in London. Security-wise however, the financial onus had been thrust back on the small round shoulders of Austin Hogg. Mid-December, a burly and rather forlorn skinhead guard in black trousers and black jacket was stationed at the gates to Chicken Colditz sucking up our inheritance in great dollops of ten pound an hour indifference.

The onset of winter also brought with it an indescribably awful day when Ping Ping and Yang Yang suddenly disappeared from their field. I came down as per usual in pre-dawn darkness (anytime up to nine o’clock), shone my torch into the middle of the field, shone it into the four corners of the field, jumped the gate and shone it into the blind bit around the corner…

Not to put too fine a point on it, I did not greet this discovery in a calm and dignified manner, my farm-wide search for Dave Land less grown man demanding to know the whereabouts of his stock, more wailing lost boy looking for his mummy at a county fair. It was just as well it was dark. It was just as well I was in a hooded coat. It was just as well I didn’t find Dave Land for nearly an hour…

Because yes, it was true I had not properly committed to buying Ping Ping and Yang Yang, as committing would have meant handing over the cash and I didn’t have that much disposable cash. And yes, Dave Land and his slatted trailer had got to them first. And yes, as anyone who knows anything about farming in an English winter, he’d merely moved them indoors.

Meanwhile Kurt and Courtney – the two happy souls who had remained loyal to us throughout – were now utterly at home in England. Plainly they preferred the English cold to the Brisbane heat. They were more energetic, rarely flagging on long challenging walks across the moors. We’d found an excellent one: through the main gate behind the castle ruins, down the bank, across the valley, across the footbridge over the stream, across the lane and onto the woodland track on the other side.

There we were officially off Dave Land’s farm and on what had been euphemistically called a ‘Public footpath.’ There was even a little wooden sign saying ‘Public footpath’ pointing in the direction the path went. But this was no public footpath. Not according to my definition. Where I came from public footpaths were things you walked down next to streets. They were made of concrete or tarseal and they had waste bins and shops on them and places to stop for a coffee. Public footpaths weren’t a foot wide and made of thick brown gloop. They didn’t (unless you lived in San Francisco) require the skills of a rock climber to ascend, those of an abseiler to descend. And they generally didn’t contain sopping foliage that slapped you in the face like a bouquet of wet pilchards when your partner forgot you were right behind her. Public meant public. It meant old people, people in wheelchairs, spastics and amputees. I’d like to see the quadriplegic who could negotiate this ‘public footpath’ in a two wheel drive.

That said, I was ecstatic that we, young, fit, not yet lung cancer-ridden specimens had such a wonderful, dog friendly, cross country facility at our back gate. Kurt and Courtney were equally ecstatic as any dogs in their right minds would be.

Courtney was the sporty, up and at em, running, jumping, ball chasing kind of dog, Kurt was more of a sniffer, a potterer, an intellectual. He didn’t see the value in running about aimlessly or hurtling after balls. Such haste did not promote the efficient evaluation of smells. Such haste was for young, gaga dogs like Courtney, who had not yet developed a connoisseur’s appreciation for the fine aromas of flowers, fence posts and six week old sheep shit.

The wedding refused to go away. Gabriel, despite pleas to the contrary, continued to trawl the Internet for outrageously expensive venues in New Zealand and North Yorkshire and run these past me; each and every one of them capable of burying us with one flick of my ailing debit card; each and every one of them perpetuating the now flagrant show of non-existent wealth as our fictitious wedding budget blew out without the slightest effort to reign it in. All I had was the flimsy stay of execution provided by events at Chicken Colditz, but each day the Cold War continued without resolution was one day closer to the day Gabriel insisted we gave Chicken Colditz the cold shoulder and went ahead without paternal consent, effectively cutting us from the will.

***

It snowed twice in December: On the eighteenth the entire country disappeared beneath a dozen hospital-white sheets. There was chaos on the Ms, the As and the Bs, but mostly the Ms and As, a lethal combination of snow, ice and people in cars leading to a spate of skidding accidents and blocked arterials. On the Bs, conditions were no less treacherous, many of the minor back lanes around the moors going ungritted, many of the more isolated residents – including us – snowed in for two days. What an adventure – us against the elements, stuck up there on our hill with nothing but a landline, two mobile phones and email to keep us in touch with the outside world; nothing but Sky television, Little Britain DVDs and my thousand song iPod music collection to keep us entertained. Forced to survive on two hundred quids worth of rations we’d bought at Tesco the day before.

If only it had snowed like that on the twenty fourth I could have experienced my first white Christmas. It did snow on the night of the twenty fourth, but when I pulled back the blinds on Christmas morning, it was a stretch to call it ‘white’. It was more of a ‘whipped cream mail bomb Christmas.’

It was also a somewhat sad, reflective Christmas, celebrated as it was away from both our families for apposite reasons. We communicated with mine via web cam, love and best wishes fired about with gay abandon across twelve time zones. We tried to communicate with Gabriel’s but they weren’t answering the phone. I enjoyed that Christmas Day, just me, Gabriel, Kurt and Courtney, far more than I would have had we spent it at Chicken Colditz amidst all their inherent humbug. But that’s not the point. We were shut out. Ostracised. We weren’t even given the chance to politely refuse an invitation.

Same with New Year. Which we celebrated four times: At 11am for New Zealand. At 1pm for Brisbane. At midnight for England. And at 3am for every backward North Yorkshire farmer. We had company in the form of Jimmy and Fiona Mason, newly weds from Morton-on-Swale who were perfectly nice, steady people utterly superfluous to ensuing events, so I won’t even bother describing them.

And as those who had lost control of their own destinies were want to do, we dismissed the year that was as an aberration and entrusted ourselves into the care of the year to come, blithely handing over the reins to the miracles of January 1st.

Surely things could only improve.

Chapter Thirty

30


Down on the farm

Saturday, October 15

In an endeavour to toughen myself up and/or drag me kicking and screaming from my authentic wood veneer IKEA closet, I spent a Saturday morning around the farm with Dave Land. It was Gabriel’s idea: ‘You’re completely ignorant of the facts,’ she’d said. ‘I mean, fine, turn veggie if you want. But you’re thirty five, Bailey and you’re a smart guy. People are going to want to know why. You can’t just say “Oh, cos Dave Land killed my pets!” ’

She was right. I needed to interrogate my vegetarianism more intensively. And to do this I needed to inter-rogate meat. Feeling about as apprehensive as a boy setting out on his first day at school, I set about doing just that. I spent all morning and part of the afternoon out and about with Dave Land who was clearly chuffed at my sudden interest. Crammed rather intimately in the cab of a John Deere tractor towing a slatted trailer, I saw and heard rather more than I would have liked.

Essentially our task for the morning was to move two hundred sheep from a valley field sinking beneath the overflow of a flooded river after two days of steady rain. With more rain predicted overnight, Dave Land didn’t fancy doing the same job at two in the morning or, worse, waking to a paddock full of drowned sheep.

I have to say it was boring, repetitive work, because it was. Not initially. It was quite invigorating herding our first twenty potentially doomed sheep into the slatted trailer in fine moor land mist. Delivering them to higher, drier ground ten plodding minutes of thirty mile an hour tractor journey away in a lush, leafy field high on the back road behind Hartley Castle House. A field with views that would inspire even the simplest sheep to do something more with their life; lead rather than follow – a recipe for disaster where sheep were concerned.

By the time we delivered sheep numbers sixty to eighty into this field of drown-free dreams, the saviour novelty was wearing off. By the time we delivered sheep numbers one-hundred-and-eighty to two hundred, we may as well have been delivering pizzas. I was almost thinking like a farmer and I hated myself for it.

We rested side by side on a drystone wall overlooking our woollen handiwork, job done for the day, drizzle momentarily fizzled, me having lit my first cigarette for hours. There was nothing left to do but ponder the merits of sheep.

‘Food and Safety make our lives hard work with e coli and all that,’ Dave Land said with one of those odd grins my way. ‘We have to clip all these sheep’s bellies before we sell them. I shouldn’t tell you this, but you know when it goes to the abattoir, right?’

I nodded like the whole-beast-for-my-freezer-buying bloke I was.

‘Stunned in the head, out cold, it’s hung up, stunned. Hung up on a hook and it goes along the line and a guy gets like a knife, razor sharp, slits its belly open, you see?' He grinned. 'But problem is, when sheep have been outside, like my sheep are outside now, what’s going to happen to their bellies when they’re lying down in the soil? They’re lying down in their own muck; all that wool on their bellies gets infected. He goes in with a knife, cuts through all that wool…’ He paused for effect, imaginary knife poised like a mugger. ‘It’s infected his knife, hasn’t it? Which in turn infects the meat.’

I tut tutted. ‘Really? People could die!’ I hoped my tone wasn’t too hopeful. Then, remembering why I was there: ‘How do they actually, you know…kill them?’

‘Well, like I say, the sheep walk along a little race and there’s a guy with a great bolt gun who stuns them, then they’re hung up and another guy slits them open and pulls all their guts out. They’re not dead, but they’re out cold. It’s like a general anaesthetic. They’re stuck on a hook and all their guts are pulled out. So you’re dead, aren’t you? You can’t survive.’

He caught my grizzled expression. Laughed. ‘It’s not very nice. It’s just a process so we can feed everybody. It has to be done.’

I squinted into the fields. ‘Paul McCartney once said that if all slaughterhouses had glass walls, none of us would eat meat.’ A step in the right direction – Gabriel would be proud.

He laughed again. ‘He’s probably right! It’s not very nice, the whole process. It’s just massive! All these animals coming through all day, every day. The guy with the gun. Another guy with an apron slitting the tummies. That’s all he does all day, all day he slits the tummies, pulls all the guts out into a big hopper, you know what I mean? There’s one down here by dual carriageway. An abattoir. You’ll see the conveyor belts loading wagons up, literally conveyor belts dripping with intestines loading big twenty five tonne muck bins. It’s utterly vile.’

And it was. I didn’t need to see it. I’d heard it and that was bad enough. I chose my words carefully. ‘So the animals you rear…I mean…they’re animals, but do you find yourself getting attached to them?’

Dave Land’s eyes narrowed as he stared proudly out over his land and his animals. He inhaled long and deep through his nostrils as if somehow sucking in the answer, rung great hands. ‘You never want to lose sight of the fact that sheep and cattle don’t have the same intelligence, nowhere near the intelligence we do.’ He nodded a slow, satisfied nod at the fields. ‘That’s what makes it humane. That’s what makes it okay.’

‘They’re still killed fairly brutally, aren’t they?’

‘They are.’ He thought about this, then his great head swivelled ten degrees my way. ‘Have you ever been fishing, Bailey?’

I said I had. I hadn’t.

‘You see on the telly all these fish being hauled onto a boat, all these fish flapping about suffocating to death. They don’t knock them on the head like I do when I go fishing, they just leave them to suffocate to death, you know? I mean what a cruel way to die. They’re drowning in air. I know fish aren’t very intelligent, but they must feel that they can’t breathe. They must. It must be awful! Then again I don’t know if fish or animals are intelligent enough to know they’re dying. We know.’ He laughed. ‘If someone clonks us on the head and we’re going, we know! I think we know we’re on the way out. I don’t think an animal has the intelligence to know that.’

I found this unbelievably arrogant. Almost said so. Did say: ‘I’m…not so sure.’

‘Well, I can tell ye, during foot and mouth outbreak we had here, blokes going round the farms shooting all the infected cattle, right? All these cattle are wandering about and their old mate, Jack gets shot in the head, just drops dead before them and they just stand there. They might have a little sniff – why’s Jack lying down? – but they don’t know what’s going on. Well, you wouldn’t think they do. That’s the intelligence, you see? That’s the good thing about it all. That’s what makes it humane. You can’t get too attached, you can’t get attached at all!

‘A sheep’s a sheep and a bullock’s a bullock,' he said with finality. 'They’re all the same really in my book.’

The Bible, the Koran or American Psycho? I thought.

‘I do feel sorry for the animals, I must admit,' he continued. 'I just try and do the best I can for them really, but at the end of the day you’ve got to survive. You’ve got to feed yourself, haven’t you? They have a short life, but I think they have a good life. They do on our farm anyway. Some farms aren’t good to their animals. Pigs and chickens and that sort of thing, I doan’t really know about them. But, you know, people say animals haven’t got the intelligence to know any different. I mean everything’s got nerve endings. You crush an ant,’ – he demonstrated by clomping a size eighteen work boot in the mud – ‘Cuuugsh! It’s going to have a momentary bout of pain, isn’t it? But it hasn’t got the intelligence, they rate it on intelligence, not pain and it just hasn’t got the intelligence. If they knew, if we thought for one minute they knew what was happening, we wouldn’t do it, would we? It wouldn’t be allowed!’

We both dwelled on this in our own, I’m sure, quite different ways.

‘By the way,’ he said at length, eyes on the fields. ‘I think I might have something for you.’ His head turned and his eyes were twinkling.

***

We were behind the castle ruins looking into the field where Duncan and Archie had ruminated and masticated their last, a field which had sat eerily empty ever since. It was no longer empty. Two great white bullocks ambled about in a tight, noticeably limp-free twosome.

‘Wow! What beautiful animals!’ I said. ‘What are they?’

‘Charolais,’ he said, leaning in and gazing admiringly at his latest mobile meat packs. ‘Bought them at market this morning. Fine beef bullocks both.’ He nodded at them. ‘Leave those other two for dead for quality and quantity, they do.’

Dead being the operative word. Yet I could see what he meant. Were I of a mind to slaughter and eat them, we would be gnawing for a millennium. The two Charalais bullocks made Duncan and Archie look like undernourished greyhounds; big, muscular, ‘beefy’ animals with coats like soiled white shagpile.

‘How much for both?’ I asked.

Dave Land gritted his teeth and sucked. ‘Well, I can’t honestly say. It depends. It depends how they fatten out and on t’market at the time. You see, you’ve got live weight, where you get a price per kilo for what they weigh when they’re alive. Or if you send them straight to the abattoir, which we do with nearly all our cattle, then it’s dead weight where they don’t weigh them until they’re a sliced up, carcass – they take the head off and get all the bad bits off and you get a nice confirmation carcass. It’s called a confirmation carcass and it gets a confirmation grade.’

‘Fascinating.’ I said shuffling impatiently. I wondered if there was a calculation for Pet Weight. ‘Just give me a price.’

‘Well, see,’ he said in no hurry to sell his bullocks down the road, ‘you’ve got a carcass hanging up on a hook and a man will come and he’ll look at the bullock’s ass, legs, he’ll look at the whole thing. You know when you look at a woman’s ass and think God, what a fantastic ass she’s got and you look at someone else and think fookin ‘ell, you know what I mean? It’s exactly the same. You’re grading her in your own mind, you’re thinking I’ll give her a three out of ten, but I’ll give her a nine! It’s the same thing and you’ll get paid more for a better confirmation of the carcass.’

‘How much, Dave?’

‘Where as live weight, you see, the butcher is literally taking his own judgement. He’s sat there looking at your bullock running around the ring and he’s got to take his own judgement as to how that bullock’s going to kill out. He’s doing the same job as the abattoir, but he has to do it while the bullock’s still alive, which is a bit more difficult.’

All of which was completely irrelevant to my live ‘die of old age’ pet bullocks to be. ‘Last time. How much for both?’

‘Well, I know what we paid for them, see, but I can only speculate as to what we’ll get.’

‘Then speculate.’

‘About eight hundred pounds each.’

***

I felt like dead weight for weeks, a pitched battle of heartfelt longings and mental arithmetic like psychological warfare to my already bombarded brain as I became utterly obsessed with the two Charolais; even more obsessed than I’d been with Duncan and Archie, leaning on the fence and petting them on a thrice daily basis, telling them I was going to find a way to save them from the slaughterman if it was the last thing I did. I even named them to raise the emotional attachment and ensure it was.

Ping Ping and Yang Yang.

That’s what I called them. Names based on what could only be described as their extremely tenuous re-semblance to polar bears, or more particularly two beleaguered polar bears incarcerated at the notoriously awful concrete, compassionless hell that was Beijing Zoo. More to the point, like their miserable namesakes, they were in dire need of Good Samaritan intervention.

‘If you do decide to buy them, young Bailey,’ Dave Land had said. ‘Make sure you kill them before they’re thirteen months old. A bullock goes past thirteen months of age, they’ve got a high BSE rate.’

‘A high what?’

‘BSE. Bovine…something rather. You know, the brain disease. BSE You must have heard of BSE, it’s been in the news.

‘Mad cow?’

‘Yeah, yeah, that one. When a bullock reaches a certain age, it’s high risk. High risk of getting it and passing it on. If you send those two bullocks t’abattoir over thirteen months old, they’ve got to take the brain out, they’ve got to take the spinal cord out, they’ve got to take all the nerve endings out. They’ve got to really dissect the bullock to make sure there’s no spinal cord or anything in that bullock. Whereas under thirteen months old, it’s classed as low risk and they take all that stuff, mash it all up in a meat grinder and serve it as burgers.’

‘Get out!’

‘Well, that’s what they do, in’t it? That’s what you get in burgers. You get the brains, the spinal chord. Like your cheap supermarket blue and white packet minced beef, low grade, will be brains, spinal chord and all the poor quality cuts off that bullock, like the calf and bits of the body they don’t want, ribs and all that. Next burger you eat, have a look at the meat and see if you can see any tiny little white bits. That’s spinal chord. It’s bone, it’s fat and it’s all crap.’ He chuckled at my revulsion. ‘You want some nice spotty burgers out of those two, make sure you kill them quick smart.’

‘Thanks,’ I said with a grimace at Ping Ping and Yang Yang. ‘That’s quite an incentive.’

But to be honest, with Dave Land and his slatted trailer forever on the prowl for animals ready for market, I had all the incentive I’d need.