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.

Chapter Twenty Nine

29


The fox hunter

Gabriel had a lot of friends in the North of England; she had friends in cities – Durham, Newcastle, Middlesbrough, Leeds; towns – Darlington, Northallerton, Hustwickgate, Harrogate, Pickering, Kirbymoorside; and villages – Skipton-le-Beans, Hutton-le-Hole, Morton-on-Swale, Ainderby Steeple and Harome. Friends who had spread far and wide across the north east, a few down to London, one as far as France. She kept in touch with all these people religiously; visited them when she was supposed to be hawking kitchenware; talked to them incessantly when she wasn’t talking to me, Kurt or Courtney. Friends she was set to systematically introduce me to in a pressure cooker of meet and greets; some coming to us, some us going to them, some, the more distant ones, meeting somewhere in-between. I was all for this – moulding a new and intrinsically English social group around whatever Gabriel thrust in front of me.

Then some halfwit posted a bunch of letters from Southampton.

After that I made it very hard for Gabriel to introduce me to anybody. Duncan and Archie needlessly died and suddenly I desperately needed to get out of the house. She suggested the Tickle Toby, supposedly one of the more lively pubs in Hustwickgate. She also suggested involving a friend because she was scared I’d brood into my beer and make for an intensely boring night unless forced to impress a stranger. She knew me well.

The stranger she chose to ease me back in after the trauma of Chicken Gate, Danby the still imprisoned dog and Duncan and Archie was Penny James. A sadistically injudicious choice at best…

‘I don’t do a lot really,’ Penny said with a self-mocking chuckle and her little pug face took to fighting off embarrassment. ‘I taught English for nearly a year. Senior school.’

‘She had an affair with one of her pupils!’ said Gabriel who was now well on the way, as small people tend to be when they can pay someone else to reach the top shelf. ‘And it was a girl’s school! She licks the stamp on both sides, does our Pen.’

Penny seemed only mildly put out. ‘Thank you, Gabby,’ she said with mock disdain. She turned to me adjusting her hindquarters and resting forequarters on the table in a neat tepee of jewellery-free hands. ‘I don’t do much at the moment to be honest. But for six months of the year, through autumn and winter, I look after horses. That’s all.’

‘Oh right,’ I said, warming to her. ‘What? Race horses?’

‘No, ahm…’

I shot a glance at Gabriel. ‘What?’

A curious little exchange of mouthed words had just taken place between Penny and Gabriel, with Gabriel the instigator.

Gabriel flashed me an oversweet smile. ‘Nothing, monkey face. Why don’t you go and get us a drink.’ She sculled the remains of her glass, slid it across to me.

‘What was all that mouthing?’ I asked looking from her to Penny.

‘Nothing," Gabriel said curtly. 'I just remembered something I needed to tell Penny. Alone. Girl’s stuff, monkey. Period pain. Off you trot.’

Off I trotted with many a look back. At the bar, I surmised I’d had six pints. I certainly felt like I’d had six pints. A pasty razor cut man in a black, short sleeved shirt flicked his eyebrows at me.

‘Hi,’ I said cheerfully.’ Have you got any light beers?’

He leaned in frowning. ‘You what?’

‘Light beers. You know, as in low alcohol.’ He regarded me like I’d asked for smack. ‘Preferably tap if you’ve got it.’ I peered at the logos adorning the row of ceramic and brass taps.

‘We’ve got Tetleys,’ he said.

I sucked through my teeth. ‘Nooo. That’s about four per cent, isn’t it? I was thinking more like three.’ I scanned the row again. ‘What’s John Smiths?’

‘Beer,’ he said.

A portly gent in a black short sleeved shirt had noticed the pale faced man struggling to process my order. ‘What’s he after?’ he asked rubbing an ash tray with a cloth.

‘He wants light beer,’ said the pale faced man to the portly man.

The portly man stopped rubbing his ash tray. ‘He wants what?’

‘Light beer. As in low alcohol,’ I said helpfully and all too aware of my accent.

They both eyed me like I had three heads, exchanged a ‘What have we got here?’ smile, and then the portly man said, ‘Aye, marn. We’ve got light beer. It’s called lemonade and it comes in a pint like this,’ – he held up a beer pint – ‘and it’s got a little smiley face on t’side and training wheels.’

The sniggering was appalling and unprofessional. But such was the pub culture in England; the concept of a light beer was indeed laughable. It wasn’t about stamina, it wasn’t about decorum; it was about drinking full strength beers that got you as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. They didn’t call 5.4% alcohol Stella Artois ‘Wife beater’ for nothing. Satisfied I had already made enough enemies in England, I merely shrugged, forced a laugh and asked for a Tetleys. Armed with this, Gabriel’s double vodka, lime and lemonade and Penny’s double gin and tonic, I returned to the table where the demeanour of both girls was now strangely stilted

‘Right Penny,’ I said. ‘Where were we?’

‘I told you,’ she said with a strangely nervous chuckle. ‘I look after horses. Groom them, train them.’ She shrugged. ‘What more can I say?’

I gazed between the two overtly innocent faces. ‘Well, by the looks of both of you, plenty. What’s with these horses you’re not telling me?’

Gabriel took the reins. ‘If we tell you, do you promise to behave?’

I gaped at her. ‘I’ve had six pints! I can’t promise anything!’

The conspirators exchanged a ‘Will we? Won’t we?’ glance, Gabriel’s head cocked in the manner of the reticent mole-to-be. ‘He’s going to find out eventually,’ she said to Penny as if I was in a sound-proof booth.

‘Find out what?’ I asked.

Gabriel’s resigned gaze shifted from Penny to me, picking up a decent stack of steel as it went. ‘You promise me now you won’t make a scene.’

I shrugged, smirked, promised.

‘Penny hunts foxes, monkey.’

I gasped, glared at Penny. ‘You don’t?’

‘I do.’

‘Uuuuh, God!’ I said throwing my hands in the air. ‘And you seemed so nice!’ I swivelled in my seat, glared around the bar. ‘Does everybody round here kill things?’

‘Told you,’ Gabriel said to Penny.

I lit a cigarette and sat back heavily in my chair. ‘You’re a fox hunter? Who’d have thought?’ I sucked hard on my fag, cursed and glowered around the bar. ‘Who’d have bloody thought?

‘Monkey, can we not do this tonight?’

‘Gabriel! Can you not call me monkey in public for the umpteenth time?’

She groaned and flopped back in her chair, shot a forlorn glance at Penny. ‘See? I knew this would happen.’

***

Given my intake of beer and given my proximity to a very recently exposed murderer, Gabriel was very brave to give me licence to interrogate Penny James. ‘So long,’ she said, ‘as you can do it quietly, rationally, and without attacking her with broken glass.’ Penny winced. ‘It’s all right, Penny! Choose your words carefully, you’ll be fine.’

‘Right, fire away,’ I said giving her a free shot at defending herself before I poked her in her sadly unseeing eyes.

‘Like I said,’ she began with a nervous smile, eyes all over the place – at Gabriel, at the ceiling, at the nearest source of escape. ‘I groom horses. Arm, basically I look after them, I get them absolutely, you know, in top condition. I get them extra fit in the autumn so they’re ready to give a full day’s hunting. Or a half day anyway. They’ve got to be out for five hours with the Master’s but most Masters do second horses.’

‘They do which?’

‘Second horses. They hunt on one horse, then the staffer from their yard will bring them another horse and they swap over horses to go onto the second part of the day, say til half three or four. While the nights are longer, it will be half four or five.’

‘God, so it’s all day?’

‘It’s all day, yeah.’

‘Really? You’re terrorizing foxes that long?’ I was determined to treat this like a cool, calm fact seeking Parkinson-type interview for Gabriel’s sake. So long as Penny didn’t turn out to be as flaky and evasive as Meg Ryan, we’d be fine.

‘Tell me honestly, Penny, and I ask this as a New Zealander who’s only seen fox hunting from afar and found it a hundred per cent disgusting…Do you think it’s cruel?’

‘How can it be cruel anymore?' she said with another nervous chuckle. 'We don’t hunt. We just shoot them.’

I knew this, of course. I had cheered as loud as Prince Charles had groaned when the ban took effect. ‘Which of course makes it fine.’

She failed to grasp my sarcasm. ‘Yeah. But me personally? I’m only in it for the chase. Most of us are just in it for the chase.’

I scoffed. ‘Then why don’t you forget the foxes and just ride around really fast?’

Her orange visage almost reddened with indignation. ‘There wouldn’t be the dogs then, would there?’

‘But you just said the dogs had been taken out of the equation.’

She rolled her eyes. ‘The dogs still follow a scent. Before the hunt, they lay a trail for them to follow.’

‘Is that someone dragging a dead fox through the countryside behind a horse?’

She sniggered. ‘It’s quite sad when you put it like that. It can just be a rag with blood on it.’

‘Far more civilised.' I sipped my beer, eyes about the bar. 'And whose job is it to shoot them?’

‘Some of the huntsmen have guns but they—’

‘If the chase is why you’re there,' I interjected with a withering glare, 'why is it still necessary to shoot them?’

‘Because it’s still fox control,' she fired back. 'The farmers still want to get rid of the foxes.’

‘Right,’ I said shooting a glance at Gabriel, who sat opposite, tense, drinking and smoking, taking in every word, ready to hurl herself across the table as the world’s smallest human shield.

‘So you guys are just glorified pest controllers?’

She laughed. ‘Yep. You might say that.’

‘Rentokil Mounted Division. Why fuck around with messy baits and traps? We can be there within hours with a hundred horses and dogs. Sort of Rent-an-Overkill really, isn’t it? Can you imagine the rat man turning up with a hundred cats?’

She laughed again, as did the world’s smallest human shield, which annoyed me – I was trying to be scathing.

‘The humane reason we hunt,' Penny continued with a slurp on her drink, 'is to get rid of the old and sick ones.’ She laughed, inappropriately I thought until it became clear she had been reminiscing. ‘I watched this fox once. It was before the ban and it could hardly run across the field. It came straight out of a hole and it sort of looked. Like, if you were a fox and you saw a load of dogs charging at you, you’d run surely. It didn’t. It was that old and that sick, it sort of lumbered across this field. It had no energy, it had nothing. It didn’t even run from these dogs, it just stopped and stood there.’

‘What did the dogs do?’ I didn’t want to know.

She shrugged. ‘The first one there killed it.’ Then with the instinct of the hunted, she whipped out the company line. ‘They go straight for the throat. That’s their instinct and it’s instant death.’

‘No pack of dogs tearing at it while it’s still alive?’ I said with patent sarcasm.

‘That doesn’t tend to happen, no,' she said with patent sincerity.

‘Because, of course, the first dog outsprinted the others by such a margin…’ More sarcasm.

‘Unless they’ve been on a scent for a while, the whole pack doesn’t chase.' More sincerity. 'Normally it’s one dog that’ll find the scent and that will be the first one there.’

‘Unless they’ve been on a scent,’ said Gabriel into her drink.

Penny railed on her. ‘If you threw a massive bit of meat into a kennel full of dogs, they would tear it to bits. Bloodhounds of any kind, their instinct is to kill instantly.’

And so it went on, round in circles and back again. Much like a hunt, I imagine. Thrust and counterthrust until something small and furry became too tired to fight. I attempted to lighten the mood as Penny exhibited signs of becoming too tired to fight, such as sticking her cigarettes in her handbag.

‘Does the fox get a respectable burial somewhere with a headstone?’ I asked trying to lighten the tone.

‘Absolutely!’ she beamed. ‘Haven’t you seen the little fox cemeteries dotted about the countryside? The hunt masters go in and put flowers on the graves every week.’

‘How lovely! So the foxes aren’t just taken off and burned or something?’

‘Yeah, they are actually.’

‘Nice.’

She sighed. ‘We’re just doing a job. Getting rid of sick foxes and the ones bothering the farmers on their land.’

I emitted an incredulous laugh. ‘What’s humane about setting dogs on an old, sick fox? If your grandmother was old and sick and piddling in the aisles of buses, would you set hounds on her?’

She shot a glance at Gabriel who shrugged and reached for her drink.

‘We’re putting them out of their misery,’ she said none too convincingly.

‘Couldn’t a vet do that?’

‘A vet would never catch them.’

‘You just said they were old and sick!’

‘Gabriel. I might go.’

‘What’s the problem, Penny?’ I said. ‘You’re not doubting your own hobby!’

My mobile rang. ‘Excuse me, Penny. Got a call coming in. Yes, Gabriel?’ I shot her a glance.

‘If you can’t be nice about it,’ she said into her phone, ‘talk about something else, please? Penny didn’t come here to be torn to pieces. I’ll rephrase that—’

‘Actually, Gabriel, I think Penny’s probably quite used to this, aren’t you, Penny?’

‘Arm, yes and no,’ she said as we replaced our mobiles on the table. ‘There’s definitely a lot more antis around now.’

‘A lot more which?’ That was me.

‘Antis. Anti-fox hunting people. In the last few years especially, loads of city people have moved into the towns and villages, so our lives certainly aren’t any easier than they were.’

‘You poor things.’

She leant in, tapped the table in my personal space. ‘See, Bailey, what you have to understand is it’s a country tradition.' Her tone was now pleading and passionate. 'As a child I never understood the ins and outs, but I used to go hunting because it was a good thing. It was a tradition. It was a countryside sport. We were encouraged to do it for the riding and whatever, so we went. It was good fun! As a kid that was all you did! It didn’t bother you at all.’

‘You were just being brainwashed.’

‘Not at all! It was fun! It was so you could get blooded.’

I screwed up my nose. ‘You what?’

‘Blooded. The tradition was you used to get blooded, the first time you went out on a hunt. When they caught the fox, you’d get blood.’

‘From the fox?’

‘From the fox.’ She moved her fingers around her forehead and cheeks. ‘You’d wipe it on your face.’

‘That’s fucking appalling! That’s Lord of the Flies!’

She laughed. ‘Nah, it’s a tradition. Last year I took my old boss’s children out. They were…six and eight? And they loved it, they loved hunting. I mean literally. One of them hung off the leader and the other I led off my horse. And ahm, we caught this fox and they couldn’t wait to be blooded. They were absolutely ecstatic about the whole situation. They were straight there. The Hunt Master got off his horse, dipped his hands in the dead fox…’

I gaped at an equally disgusted Gabriel. ‘Penny, excuse me, but doesn’t that strike you as even slightly peculiar behaviour for civilised human beings?’

She laughed. ‘I can see how it might look.’

‘What? To anyone with eyes?’

Penny sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Have you ever owned livestock, Bailey?’

‘Do dogs count?’

She ignored this. ‘There is nothing worse than raising animals, hens, lambs, whatever. Like, you might breed a prize hen – People show hens in this country, very weird. Anyway, you’ve got this hen and it’s won lots of competitions and things and then in comes Mr. Foxy and just murders it. And they leave them. They don’t, you know, take what they want and eat it. They will kill a whole shed of chickens, maybe take one and leave the rest. Now, that’s killing for sport. Foxes kill for sport.’

‘And so do you!' I cried. 'Difference is you have the cognitive abilities to know it’s wrong!’

‘Foxes are predatory creatures, Penny.’ This was Gabriel.

‘Whatever!’ cried Penny. ‘Anyway, I’m not saying any more. We’re not really supposed to talk about it any more, I mean, the nuts and bolts of it. Not as individuals. The Masters are meant to do that.’

‘Why?’

‘Just because they know what’s going on. They’re trained to deal with this sort of thing.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘This!’

‘You mean they’re trained to say the right thing.’

‘I don’t know! They just prefer to speak for the hunt.’

‘Mmm, because that’s not suspicious! If there was nothing to hide…Are the little kiddies with blood on their faces sworn to secrecy as well?’

‘You’ll have to ask them. Anyway guys,’ – she looked at her watch – ‘I have an early start.’

‘Don’t go, Penny,’ said Gabriel. ‘Bailey was about to shut up.’

‘No, I wasn’t!’

‘It’s okay, Gabby,' Penny said finishing her drink. 'I don’t want to discuss it any more.’

‘Why not?’ I asked belligerently.

‘Because I don’t know who you are.’

‘I’m your friend’s fiancé!’

‘Yes, I know you are.’

‘Well, she’d know, wouldn’t she, Penny?' nodding at Gabriel. 'She’d know if I was some militant activist about to sabotage your hunt.’

Penny laughed darkly and gave me a cold stare. ‘No. She wouldn’t. I can assure you, she wouldn’t.’ She gazed from Gabriel to me in a way I didn’t like. Then suddenly she stood. ‘Nice meeting you, Bailey,’ she said, this aimed rather strangely at Gabriel. ‘Ta for the invite,’ she added and left.

***

‘And another one’s gone, and another one’s gone, and another one bites the dust!’

Midnight post Tickle Toby and Gabriel was flat on her back very much on her side of the bed singing in the dark. I normally liked Gabriel’s singing – tuneful, high and sweet in the manner of an un-American Cindi Lauper. Yet tonight, singing Freddy Mercury’s 1980s classic, the original meaning of which has been lost in an endless procession of dismissed cricket batsmen, her meaning was patently clear.

‘Another one?’ I said to the dark. ‘I had nothing to do with the first one!’

“There’s a definite trend though, monkey. I’ve introduced you to family and one friend. They’ve all abandoned me.’

‘She hasn’t abandoned you.’

‘You saw her.’

‘Yes, and you know her. She’s a good friend. She won’t let what happened tonight come between you.’

‘You’ve come between us!’

It was as if the blackness had grasped her by the throat. I chose my words as carefully as a man as drunk as she was could.

‘Fuck you,’ I said.

‘Fuck you too,’ she said.

And that seemed to do it for while. She seemed to be falling asleep. I seemed to be fully awake, lying as still as I could. Hoping she was falling asleep. She wasn’t.

‘Take away the fox hunting,’ she suddenly said in the dark, ‘Penny’s a nice girl.’

‘Take away the exterminations, Hitler was a nice man!’

‘No, he wasn’t!’

‘Exactly! And neither’s she!’

‘Penny’s not a man.’

‘Don’t try to confuse me!’

‘You can’t judge people on one aspect of their life, monkey!’ I felt and saw a silhouette of her angry little person turning her back to me. ‘You know, I just love your selective morality.’

‘What selective morality?’

‘It’s not just ads, Bailey. You do it with everything.’

I laughed. ‘I do what?’

‘You did it with Penny tonight! You played Indignant Animal Man with her!’

‘Of course!’

‘So why did you tell Dave Land you wanted Duncan and Archie for their meat?’

I gasped as quietly as I could in the dark. Turned my head her way. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Dave Land told me.’

‘When?’

‘Today. He dropped by with some new potatoes while you were getting the papers. Why didn’t you tell him the truth?’

‘For obvious reasons!’

‘Were you embarrassed to come clean with Dave Land, him being a big, gruff manly farmer and all?’

‘No!’

‘So why didn’t you tell him the truth?’ She giggled in the dark. ‘That you were going to keep his bullocks as pets! Tie little bows round their heads.’

I managed a chuckle, said nothing.

‘Honestly though,’ she said settling on her back again. ‘It does bother me a lot. You’ve got these double standards all the time. It is like a selective morality. To put it really bluntly, it’s like, if there’s something in it for you, like an award or if you don’t think speaking your mind will work for you, you shelve your beliefs. It’s like you just don’t feel strongly enough about anything to believe it all the time and stand by it. You’re not honest with yourself and you’re not honest with other people.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is fucking true! I’ve seen it time and time again! Be proud of who you are, Bailey!’

‘I am proud!’

‘Prove it. Because I don’t think you can! Actually,’ she sprang from the bed. ‘I don’t think I even want to sleep in this fucking room!’

The bedroom door slammed so hard the wall shook. And so did I. Yet again, Gabriel’s propensity to fly suddenly and violently off the handle over next to nothing had caught me unawares. The temptation was there to run after her to the spare room and suggest she sort out her own relationship threatening defects before railing on mine. I resisted. It would only lead to more shouting and I hated the shouting. Two furry forms snuggled up on their beds by the kitchen radiator didn’t like it much either. Gabriel would probably call that selective morality as well. I just called it keeping the peace. And sometimes peace was a far safer option than progress.

Chapter Twenty Eight

28


Bring out your dead

Friday, October 7

The following Friday night Gabriel arranged an evening out at the Tickle Toby Inn, Hustwickgate in an attempt to cheer me up. She invited a friend along no doubt surmising this would force me to be civil. Clever thinking. However, her choice of friend could not have been more misguided. Civility was indeed beyond me – what, with the plague and weeks dealing with alleged demons and a bona fide one masquerading as an art director.

Fergus Blaine was now gone, his stay at Hartley Castle House cut abruptly short by a short person with a sharp temper and a keen eye for the disgusting. The ‘disgusting’ came in the form of a white towel, a towel Gabriel had draped neatly over the radiator in the guest bathroom for Fergus Blaine’s personal use. A towel Fergus Blaine duly used post-shower the next morning. A towel he then placed just as neatly back over the radiator. With a dark brown stain on it.

Asking Fergus Blaine to leave was left to me as Gabriel had left me in no doubt there would be nothing left of Fergus Blaine if left to her. I left it until after she left, then left Fergus Blaine in no doubt that Gabriel’s sudden family bereavement would not have required him to leave had it been left to me. He understood. Left. We saw out the week where we should have begun it – in the windowless bowels of Creative Solutions occasionally venturing outside to exercise two large, furry work experience creatures.

I was relieved Blaine’s stay had been cut short, seriously concerned as the reason I had invited him there in the first place. To show off. To parade him past everything that wasn’t me yet somehow, sadly, pathetically, completed me. Yet again wrapping the real Bailey Harland in silver paper and tinsel in a feeble attempt to impress. Just like I’d done with Gabriel in my ongoing charade of wealth. It was as though I didn’t love myself enough to be real. To realise that, when revealing the real me totally and wholeheartedly, the material was immaterial.

This was, of course, rubbish. I could be the nicest, most charmingly transparent bloke in the world, loving myself and living within my means. But where would that have got me? Certainly not into the arms of a top shelf girl like Gabriel. I did love myself. I just loved Gabriel more. From the moment I set eyes on her. First impressions count. All I did was embellish mine slightly. Dug myself a bit of a hole in the process, but still…What was done was done. Now it wasn’t so much about the hole, but what I did with the dirt.

With Kurt and Courtney happily ensconced watching Top Gear on the living room television, we caught a cab which duly deposited us onto the street outside Lloyds TSB at about the tailbone of the Hustwickgate High Street spine. There, with a polar wind whistling me through an impromptu jig, I withdrew a hundred pounds from an ATM, thirty pounds of which immediately disappeared in the hands of our cab driver.

‘Sixty pounds, Gabriel,’ I said having done the return fare math. ‘Sixty fucking pounds and not a pint’s been pulled!’

Bent into the wind like a couple of rugby props hitting a ruck, we battled our way up the high street to the Tickle Toby Inn and threw ourselves at the door. The door responded well, opening inwards in a well-oiled, hinged sort of way and we were suddenly inside, which was good because it was extremely warm. Two roaring fires at opposite ends of the long wood panelled room were quietly toasting thirty or so patrons in-between who were liberally basting themselves in beer from a central bar currently well stocked with elbows and proffered notes. While Gabriel went looking for her friend, I squeezed in with a coat-covered elbow of my own and realised I was sweating. Not badly – just a few underdone beads on my forehead but sweat nonetheless. Either the head down battle up the hill into an icy headwind had been more strenuous than I thought, or the hothouse Tickle Toby had caught me wearing a few too many layers of clothing. And/or I was running a stress-induced temperature at the prospect of meeting one of Gabriel’s closest mates. A girl I needed to like for Gabriel’s sake: So far everyone she’d introduced me to had abandoned her.

‘Penny? This is my fiancé, Bailey. Bailey? Penny.’

Penny James stood and shook my hand. Her palm was surprisingly coarse attached as it was to a not unattractive, fresh faced girl about Gabriel’s age. That said, Penny James bore just a hint of pug. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way, there was just the merest suggestion of cute, flat-faced puppy about her orange visage – dark, prominent, globular eyes – soft and solicitous – and a short, blunt muzzle, square, but not up faced. Her chest was small and pert; her hindquarters taut and muscular; coat newly shaven and fake tanned. Her only distinguishable markings were a mole above her top lip and a tattooed sun around her navel. Penny, it would transpire, had an even temperament, although she was of a playful and outgoing disposition. She was twenty four in human years, sandy haired and scantily dressed. To this casual observer she was as I’d imagined a girlfriend of Gabriel’s to be – cute, carefree and taller than she was. I was relieved to find her both sweet and amiable. The signs for the evening were good.

We sat – me beside Penny, Gabriel opposite – and even the chairs were to my satisfaction, wide, round and well cushioned. I sipped my beer. It was cold. It was quenching. I took in the boisterous pub patrons – a lot of young sour-faced boys with Paul Gascoigne haircuts and Tourette’s, a lot of trainee soccer players’ wives, but they didn’t bother me either. Nor did the music – a suitably English mix of Robbie Williams, Oasis and Robbie Williams.

I was in good shape. I was in even better shape after two pints, five cigarettes and an hour of largely smiling about and listening to my fiancé and her friend chat in the sure, bright and breezy anecdote-laced manner of true mates, never leaving me out, but never quite letting me in either. I didn’t mind – I had friends like that myself, friends I abandoned for a lonely, persecuted life on the other side of the globe. I was also pleased and relieved to surreptiously derive from this hour of amusing chit chat that Penny was none the wiser as to our/my plight. In a conversation spanning the four corners of their worlds, not the merest nod to our current status with Chicken Colditz, not the vaguest hint Penny was abreast of my inner torment for Duncan and Archie.

If it was possible, I loved Gabriel even more for this show of considerate restraint. She must have been bursting to tell Penny the whole story. It was a good one after all; no offence to the tales that had shot back and forth across the table thus far, they were good too. But the ‘girl from battery hen farming family meets animal-loving boy, brings him to England, family suddenly under attack, lives in tatters’ was a far funnier one if you omitted the doomed handout bit. Yet she’d resisted. Remember, Gabriel was only twenty three. I couldn’t even resist a fat girl at that age.

Then came the conversational pause that began it all. Quite a long pause. Long enough for my drinking buddies to giggle and dab at their eyes with tissues spirited from handbags in that ‘look away’ manner girls were able to spirit anything from the mobile jumble sales that are woman’s handbags. I had no idea how they did this. Equally I had no idea what they were giggling about, busy as I was basking in the glow of my feisty but faithful fiancé.

‘Sorry monkey,’ Gabriel said, sniffing and dabbing her eyes. ‘We kind of forgot you were there for a minute.’

I smiled and raised placating palms. ‘I’m perfectly fine.’ I gripped my pint. ‘I’ve got a beer. I’ve got…Robbie Williams. You go right ahead.’

The girls exchanged a glance – Gabriel’s had looked better on her. ‘I think we’re pretty much finished for now,’ said Penny, whose decidedly Upstairs diction made Gabriel sound emphatically Downstairs.

‘I think we are too,’ said Gabriel grinning my way. ‘Do you think we should, you know, involve him a bit more?’

Penny considered me a moment. ‘Weeeell,’ she said. ‘He seems nice enough.’ She looked at her glass, twirled it. ‘What do you actually do, Bailey? For a living. Gabriel hasn’t told me much.’

A brief job descriptor would have sat comfortably within the limits of a proud if cautious overview between friends. ‘I’m a writer.’

‘Really?’ she said, clearly impressed. ‘Wow. I’ve never met a writer before. What’s your forte – fiction or non-fiction?’

‘Ads.’

There may as well have been an ‘i’ in it such was her nodding, politely pursed response. ‘Oh,’ she said.

I wasn’t fazed. Every adman encountered them once in a while: the blinkered soul not fascinated by what we did. Not wheeling out a list of their favourite television ads. Or asking if I’d done any ads they’d know. Most considered themselves experts. Fair enough: whether subconsciously or consciously, the average person was exposed to about two thousand advertising messages a day. They couldn’t help but have an opinion.

Gabriel ill-advisedly grabbed the baton. ‘Bailey works for an agency in York—’

‘No, I don’t!’ I interjected before she could utter the damning words “Creative Solutions.” ‘I freelance for them, Gabriel.’ I turned to Penny. ‘Bit of a stop gap. I’m in the process of getting established with quite a big multi-national in Leeds.’

‘No, you’re not! They fired you before you even started!’

So much for considerate restraint.

Mood around the table now suddenly edgy, I opted to turn the spotlight back on Penny. I chose the same inane, socially redundant question she’d asked me, confident ‘Ads’ would stack up rather well against whatever a girl residing in a small town at the edge of the North York Moors could offer in rebuttal.

‘Enough about me,’ I said, tone artificially bright. ‘What do you do, Penny?’

Chapter Twenty Seven

27


The bucolic plague

Symptoms: Guilt, depression and recurrent nightmares over bovine animals, caged dogs and hens. A sudden disinterest in meat.

Diagnosis: Bucolic Plague. A dangerous, debilitating condition afflicting sensitive city folk when exposed to the harsh realities of the country.

Treatment: If diagnosed early, treatment is straightforward and can be dealt with in one of two ways. Depending on the severity of the symptoms, the subject can simply be prescribed a thicker skin and told to get on with it. Such treatment is only advisable in mild cases where further exposure to country life is unlikely to have long lasting and damaging effects. In worst cases where symptoms are extreme, bucolic plague is incurable, further exposure to harsh country stimuli likely to result in more and more withdrawn and/or erratic behaviour. While complete remission is unlikely, shipping the subject back to the safety of the suburbs can prevent further deterioration. While susceptibility to bucolic plague varies from person to person, some subjects simply have no immunity and are therefore advised to avoid the country at all costs or become an embarrassment.

Chapter Twenty Six

26


Dave Land drives past on a tractor


It didn’t occur to me until my stomach rumbled mid-afternoon that I were duty bound to make Fergus Blaine lunch. I led him downstairs to the fridge and tempted him with homemade organic vegetable soup and organic wholemeal toast, which he turned his nose up at. I let him stick that nose in the fridge. And in the pantry. I duly gave him directions to the Cragmoor Grocers, Sweet Merchants, Post Office and Tea Rooms for a mince pasty. When I heard his little Toyota sewing machine red line out the drive I sagged into a chair. Baring major catastrophe in the slippery mud, pheasant and rabbit-filled gullies between here and Cragmoor, I estimated I had a good forty minutes of solitude; to take deep breaths, think positive, eat in peace and ensure I did not secrete any knives about my person in his absence.

No sooner had I sat and savoured the prospects for this deliciously unencumbered time than Dave Land drove past on a tractor. I couldn’t get outside fast enough.

Fortunately this was plenty fast enough to cut him off at the pass. He opened a tractor door from on high and leant out. ‘Hi, Bailey.’

‘Hi, Dave,' I said craning my neck up at him. 'Hey, look, how much would it cost to rent the side paddock?’ I pointed at it.

‘That paddock?’

‘Yes, that paddock! How many paddocks am I pointing at?’

He grinned. ‘Just the one.’

‘And how much would it cost to rent?’

‘That depends how long you want to rent it for.’

‘Indefinitely. I want to rent it ongoing.’

‘Right,' he said. 'Well then, that would be a hundred pounds a year.’

I nearly wet myself with delight. ‘Is that all?’

‘Is that too cheap? I could make it more if you’d like.’

‘No! That’s absolutely fine.’ I set myself. ‘Okay. I want to rent that side paddock indefinitely. And I want to buy the two bullocks. The lame ones.’

He gave me a puzzled sideways glance from head to toe. ‘What for?’

The words formed like healing sores on my lips. I had nothing to hide from Dave Land. Not after the gate, and the wheelbarrow, and the ‘charging’ bullocks. Something was stirring in me – something rich and pure – the need to be me, the need to be honest with myself no matter how ridiculous that honesty came across to a butchery-hardened North Yorkshire beef farmer. I had to ‘come out’ as a proud animal loving city boy making good in the country…I had to.

‘I’m…going to… you know, b-butcher them for our own use.’

He chuckled. ‘Tesco steak not good enough for you? What are you going to do with two great big animals like that?’

I swallowed hard. ‘Freeze them.’

He laughed. ‘You’ll need a bloody big freezer! Anyway, you can’t butcher cattle like that anymore. Not since foot and mouth. They still have to go t’abattoir.’

‘That’s fine. They can go when I’m ready to, you know…send them.’

‘Right,’ he said, grinning and sucking through his teeth. He settled back in his seat, sighed. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’re a bit late, lad. For those two anyway. I sent them this morning.’

Something akin to an electric shock zapped me from my tailbone to the top of my neck. ‘What?’ It came out overtly plaintive.

‘I sent them. To auction mart. Before you were even awake. Made about five quid for the pair of them for six months work. But that’s the way it goes. They’ll be well on their way to abattoir by now.’

‘No. You’ve got to stop them!’

‘I can’t, lad! I don’t even know where they’ve gone! They could be on their way to France for all I know.’ He saw my face, which I suspect conveyed far more anguish than would be expected of someone who’d just missed out on some bulk meat. ‘Sorry, Bailey. I’ll see if I can find you a couple more.’

Then off he drove.

I stood and stared at the ground where his tractor had been, paralysed, brain struggling to process the mixed signals of disbelief, despair and self loathing I was sending it into a coherent response I could act upon. When I added denial to the mix, we settled on blind hope.

I ran down to the paddock where Duncan and Archie had spent their slow unsteady days, threw myself at that gate and peered about. The paddock was empty. Just long grass and drystone walls and my pile of clippings, flattened and decomposing like a manure pizza with extra flies. I went into the paddock and wandered aimlessly, knelt beside cow pats and stared at them like framed photos plucked from the remnants of a house fire. I was gutted.

By nightfall so would Duncan and Archie be.

Unless they were on a truck to France. Crammed in like Jews, eyes that had grown to trust mine staring through slats, maybe a bobby calf running a hoof across its throat a mile out of their final destination. I felt sick. I felt more than sick. I rang Gabriel on her mobile, had a howl and felt ever so slightly better. Whatever I did about Fergus Blaine, she was on her way home.

Chapter Twenty Five

25


The Blaine visitation

Tuesday, October 4

It was meant to be a good deed. An act of kindness towards Kurt and Courtney. A puff of humanitarianism to push our boat that little bit further from catastrophe. I didn’t know it would turn out to be a load of hot air.

It had seemed a brilliant idea to invite Fergus Blaine to work with me at Hartley Castle House – the best idea I’d had so far – and I’d been genuinely excited about it. In truth I’d been genuinely excited about the first five minutes – Blaine’s arrival, the look on his face when he saw my cars, my house, my beautiful fiancé, my beautiful dogs; my beautiful world. That, I confess, was an undeniable motivation for inviting Blaine to Hartley Castle House. That first five minutes of immense gloating pride.

What I hadn’t given due consideration to was all the hours of post-immense-gloating-pride-Fergus Blaine I would have to endure. Hours made all the more excruciating by what actually happened in those first five minutes.

‘Hi Bailey,’ he called as I strode purposefully from the house head down towards the outbuildings. I had no business at the outbuildings; they just got me out of the house and striding purposefully at a time to coincide with his arrival. Saying something like ‘Ah!’ as I turned and greeted him. Soaking up his awed expression as he scanned the ruins and the house and the grounds. Him saying something like ‘Wow! You live here?’ while he petted the dogs. Guiding him inside to Gabriel…

He needn’t know I’d been at the Court Room windows watching the top road for his arrival for half an hour. He needn’t know I’d run downstairs and hid behind the front door until he was parked before ‘coincidently’ striding purposefully from the house in the direction of the outbuildings. Gabriel needn’t know either. I’d fretted that she would be gone before Blaine arrived, ruining my coup de grace. I wasn’t convinced it was sound behaviour.

But it was done. Out I strode, purposefully, head down towards the outbuildings listening for the slam of a car door, his ‘Hi Bailey,’ pre-empting this but achieving the same result. I spun, looked surprised, said ‘Ah!’ Looked at my watch. ‘Is it that time already?’

I bounced over as he extracted himself from a small, silver hatchback – definitely not European – and collected a couple of A3 pads and black marker pens from the passenger seat.

‘How bought this then, eh, Bailey?’ he said head down in the car.

‘I know,’ I said hands on hips gazing about. ‘It’s not bad.’

He backed out of the car, shot me a glance. ‘Not bad? Don’t you know anything about cars? This is a 2002 Toyota Yaris VVT-I. I literally picked it up yesterday. This is the first proper run it’s had. And you know what?’ He shot me one of those nasty little painfully sincere looks of his, teeth poking into gums.

‘What?’ I said, leaning so he could see past me to the house.

‘It is by far the best car I’ve ever owned. How are you, Bailey?’

‘Fine,' I said flatly.

He took in my sleek, brown Volvo XC70. ‘Is that your car?’

Finally a semblance of jealousy. ‘Certainly is.’

‘Really? That surprises me, Bailey. I thought you’d have a bit more class.' He took in Gabriel's car. 'Is that an Audi? Dime a dozen now, aren’t they? Is my car okay there?’

‘Actually,’ – I pointed down past the ruins – ‘if you could just park it over there with the handbrake off…’

‘That’s very funny. These your dogs?’ Kurt and Courtney were sniffing at Blaine’s crotch as he walked pads under an arm. Interestingly he made no attempt to pet either of them with his free arm.

‘They are. Just don’t look them in the eye. You should be fine. Anyway, so this is where I live.’

‘This pile of bricks or that one?’ he gestured towards the castle.

I would have rung his scrawny neck if I didn’t need an art director. Still, the killer blow still waited inside. I led him in...

‘Fergus?’ I said arm proudly outstretched towards Gabriel who stood behind the kitchen table tinkering with her leather briefcase. ‘I’d like you to meet Gabriel.’

He shot her a dismissive glance. ‘Hi, Gabriel. Don’t get up. So where are we going to be working, Bailey? I think I’ve got a couple of really good ideas for Bingham Court already. Not properly formed ideas, I’m sure you’ll understand, but certainly worth consideration, baring in mind you might have a few ideas yourself, Bailey, I can’t wait to see them if you have, I truly can’t. Can I just get my bag from the car?’

I said he could.

‘What the hell was that?’ Gabriel said with externalised distaste after he’d ducked outside.

‘I told you, it’s not from our world.’

‘It’s not from any world! Thank God I’m going out! Will it be gone by the time I get back?’

Blaine was back before I had a chance to say ‘I hope so.’ He was carrying a scruffy brown leather bag.

‘Where should I put this?’ he asked.

‘What is it?’

‘Just clothes and toiletries. Shall I put it straight in my room?’

***

‘I didn’t invite him to stay, Gabriel. I promise,’ I said trailing her bustling, fuming little form to the Audi.

‘I don’t care!' she hissed back at me. 'I don’t want that thing sleeping in my house! I don’t want that thing anywhere near my sheets!’

‘We can burn the sheets!' I overtook and ran backwards. 'It’s my fault. I invited him. And fair enough. It’s a long way to drive.’

‘If he can drive here, he can drive home,' she said pushing past and flicking the remote at the Audi. 'You invited him to work. Not to move in! Jesus! He’s going to be around at meal times!’

‘It’s all right. I’ve eaten with him,' I said holding the door open as she threw herself behind the wheel. 'Just don’t look. You can shut it out.’

‘I’ll fucking shut it out all right!’ she said starting and revving the Audi a little unnecessarily. ‘It can sleep outside!’

She slammed her door, which must have jolted my memory.

‘Gabriel, wait!’ I said banging on her window. ‘I need to tell you something!’

She lowered the window and peered up disdainfully.

‘I’ve made a decision!’ I said.

‘You’re going to send him home?’

‘No! I’m going to buy the lame bulls!’

‘Bullocks.’

‘No, I am! I know what you said about us moving on at some point and chances are, we probably will. But let’s make that my problem, okay? Let me face that when it comes. In the meantime, I can rent that field they’re in now and I’m going to ask Dave if we can knock the back wall out of one of the stables so they’ve got some proper shelter. Either that or we can fence off a bit of the yard so they can get around this side. And I’m going to get a vet to sort out their legs.’

‘That’s all very nice, Bailey. But what do you want a couple of dirty great bullocks for?’

‘I’m going to keep them!’ I said, then, and it even sounded stupid to me: ‘As pets!’

She laughed. ‘They’re bullocks, monkey, not budgies. You can’t teach them tricks, you know.’

‘Doesn’t matter! It’s not for me!’ I knelt so she could not only hear but see how important this was to me. ‘I don’t care. I have to do this. I need to do something positive! I need to save those two bullocks from the slaughterhouse.’

She smiled. ‘Duncan and Archie.’

I smiled back. ‘Exactly. Duncan and Archie.’

She stuck her hand out the window and I took it. ‘If you were seeking my approval, monkey, thank you. I appreciate it.’ She smiled. ‘Approval granted.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘Now,’ she said. ‘You get back in there and make sure that thing is gone by the time I get home.’

‘That’s not fair. I can’t do that.’

‘You’d better! I’m not coming home till you do!’

‘Then I guess you’re not coming home.’

‘No, I’m fucking not!’

And with that she was off in a shower of gravel…In just the frame of mind to charm record apple corer sales out of regional North Yorkshire…In just the frame of mind to fast track her next accident.

So ended what could have been one of those treasured collaborative moments couples share and savour, were it not sandwiched between great mouldy, unpalatable slabs of Fergus Blaine. I stood in the courtyard and looked up at the house. I didn’t want to go back inside. To the man currently on the first floor unpacking (soiled?) smalls into a guest room drawer. To Blaine. Surely the most frightening apparition ever to walk those three hundred year old corridors.

At that moment I’m almost certain I saw a three legged lamb leap baying and bleating from an upstairs window, roll and keep running for the castle ruins.