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.