Fallow Read online

  ‘You think I’m not bored?’

  He shook me to make me open my eyes.

  ‘But Paul,’ he said. ‘I’m really bored. Could we maybe, like, I don’t know, go into town tonight?’

  ‘Go into town for what?’

  ‘Perhaps, like, the pub or something…’

  I closed my eyes again. ‘Forget it,’ I told him. ‘It’s not happening.’

  Mikey had been obsessed with the idea ever since we’d arrived. The bus had stopped in the village’s main square and he’d spied this lassie, standing outside the pub, smoking, her heel up on the wall.

  ‘Maybe we should stop in there,’ he’d said. ‘Get some directions and that.’

  I’d told him to forget it then as well.

  I panicked when I woke up and Mikey was gone. I checked in the tent for him, reasoning he’d maybe nodded off himself. Nothing though. He wasn’t down at the burn either. I found him on the far side of the hill, facing the road. The four-wheel drive was back, parked up in its passing place.

  ‘Look,’ he said when he heard me approach.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. ‘Stop fucken pointing at it,’ I hissed. ‘Wave.’

  ‘Eh?’

  I tightened my hold on his shoulder. ‘Wave,’ I repeated.

  The pair of us waved down at the motor until it pulled off and down the road. I turned on my heel and marched back up to the tent. Mikey was in hot pursuit.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked as I began to sort out the stuff for dinner. We were having rolls with cold meat.

  ‘You know fine well what’s wrong. Standing there gawking at the car like that. It’s like you want us to have to move on again.’

  ‘What’s that you’ve got? That ham, is it?’

  ‘Aye Mikey. It’s ham.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s always ham.’

  Our routine for the evenings was that we would have our rolls or whatever we were having for tea and then when the sun went down behind the mountain we would put our jumpers on. Mikey would get to work, winding up the torch and the radio and once the sky was completely black, then we would allow ourselves to crack open the lagers I’d bought in the morning.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mikey as he took his first swig.

  The beer was warm of course but it helped pass the days to have something to look forward to in the evening. Some nights we played cards, other times we had a go on the travel Monopoly board Mikey had brought along. It was important that I didn’t always beat him at Monopoly, as otherwise he’d become fractious and sour.

  Mikey rolled the tiny dice and moved his Scottie dog. He landed on one of the reds. ‘Your turn,’ he told me.

  ‘Don’t you want to buy that? It’s a good property.’

  ‘Nah. I’m saving up for the big tickets. Park Lane. Mayfair. Those are where the real money is.’

  I felt myself want to explain that he would have to get a bit of cash in his pocket if he was to have any chance of building on either of those properties, but I stopped myself. I would just end up upsetting him. He proceeded to go around the board five times without landing on either of the spaces he was waiting for.

  I looked down at my pile of property cards. ‘Shall we just pack this in?’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘OK then.’

  ‘You’re pissed,’ Mikey told me.

  It was late and he was right. You could hear the murmurs of night beyond us – the burn curdling, grasshoppers and swallows fizzing.

  ‘I am pissed.’

  ‘No, but you’re really pissed.’

  ‘I said I was, didn’t I?’

  Mikey was walking around in the darkness in front of the tent, kicking his legs out and squatting from drunkenness. I suppose he never got the opportunity to build up his tolerance during his teenage years.

  He giggled. ‘Whatever you say Paul. I know when you’re pissed, and you’re pissed. Here, how many cans have we got left?’

  I check the bag. ‘One each,’ I said and threw his last one out to him.

  ‘Cheers big ears. Did I ever tell you what we used to drink inside? At Polmont?’

  ‘No, you didn’t, but I don’t want to hear about it.’

  He wasn’t listening. He was balancing the can on the back of his hand and attempting to drink it like that. ‘The older lads used to put orange juice from the canteen in a bag and hide it in the cupboard.’

  I put my fingers on the tent’s zip. ‘If you’re going to talk about that then I’m going to sleep.’ I couldn’t bear it when Mikey talked about being on the inside. When he first came home and used to talk to Mum about it I would have to slip upstairs.

  ‘All right. Sorry. We can talk about something else instead.’

  ‘Like what?’

  He ran his hand over his fresh scalp. ‘What do you reckon’s on telly right now?’

  ‘I don’t know. What time’s it? Back of eleven. Maybe a film or something?’

  ‘I think it’ll be a documentary that’s on.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Something about Africa.’

  ‘Right.’

  We finished our final two cans and undressed inside the tent. Mikey wore an ancient Metallica T-shirt to bed. It was frayed to smithereens under the armpits. I just wore my pants. We crawled into our sleeping bags and I switched off the torch.

  ‘What’s the plan for tomorrow?’ Mikey yawned.

  ‘Same as always, mate.’

  ‘Mm. Maybe we could try walking up the mountain again.’

  The last time we’d tried climbing the mountain we had only walked for half an hour before Mikey started to complain about his feet hurting. ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  I was somewhere between dreaming and awake when I heard the footsteps outside the tent. Footsteps and ragged breathing. Mikey sat up and I put my hand over his mouth. Whoever was outside was messing around with the rubbish bag. They were opening it up and rustling its contents.

  ‘Shut it,’ I whispered, directly into Mikey’s ear.

  The shadow of whoever was outside fell over the sleeping area. It poked something into the gauze.

  ‘Hoi,’ they said. A man’s voice.

  I felt my brother lick his lips beneath my hand and I tightened my grip on his muzzle. He would want to answer back, I could tell.

  ‘I know you’re in there. There’s a pair of boots out here. I saw the two of you earlier on. Hello?’

  Mikey closed his eyes. I had him right up against my chest, smelling the heat of his scalp.

  ‘Fine. Well. This is my land. You can’t stay here, it’s not allowed. If you don’t clear off I’ll call the police.’ A long pause, and then, ‘It’s not allowed.’

  The voice trailed off and I let go of Mikey. Once I was sure the man had gone I slumped back onto my sleeping bag.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Mikey.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What’re we going to do?’

  What were we going to do? I couldn’t risk the man poking around again. What if he spotted Mikey? ‘We’ll maybe have to move on. Find a new spot.’

  ‘Really? But I like it here. We’ve got the burn and those sausages are dead nice.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘Maybe since we’re clearing off and you cut my hair and that, we could pop into the pub for a swift pint before we go?’

  I didn’t bother to answer him, just wound my neck up in the sleeping bag and forced myself to sleep.

  We woke up to a barrage of rain on the tent. I could tell Mikey was sitting up, awake, without having to open my eyes.

  I said, ‘Have you left your boots outside again?’

  ‘Aye,’ he sighed.

  We got dressed in silence and peered out of the tent’s opening. The sky was bruise coloured and water ran over our noses and into our beards. Mikey’s boots were lying in a puddle of caramel water, curled and wrinkled.

  ‘Have we got enough cash for another pair?’ he asked, streams of water distorting his features.

  �
�Don’t know,’ I said, bringing my head back inside to look for my own pair. ‘Maybe.’

  The ditch that ran alongside the road to town had become waterlogged. So had the handful of potholes I had to step round on my way down. I stopped outside the butcher’s shop, on the other side of the road. Rain fell on the hood of my anorak and through the swirling water that cascaded down the shop’s windowpane I could make him out, behind the counter. He to-ed-and-fro-ed, busying himself with joints and racks and sides. The odd flicker of redness through the smears of rain - that was blood.

  The butcher paused and looked through his window, right at me. Neither of us moved. He looked out for ten, fifteen seconds and then was away again, chopping and slicing.

  So that was how he was going to play it, was it?

  ‘All right,’ I said to myself and headed for the square.

  There was a shoe shop there. No one was on the till but they were open so I let myself in and made my way to the small display of men’s boots near the back. Mikey would want something cool, something motorbikey, but that was outside of our price range and the shop only seemed to stock hiking boots. I selected a pair that looked comfortable with good ankle support and took them over to the till, ringing the brass bell on the counter.

  It took the owner a long time to arrive. She was a wizened old thing, the sleeves of her cardigan stuffed with a lifetime of handkerchiefs. She looked me up and down.

  ‘What?’ she croaked.

  ‘I was looking to buy some shoes.’

  ‘We’re not open yet. Didn’t you read the sign?’

  I looked over my shoulder. There was no sign on the door. Before I could comment she went on. ‘But never mind. Never mind common courtesy. Pass them here.’

  She rang the boots up on the till and asked for the money. My stomach dropped when I checked my wallet and saw how much we had left. Mikey’s boots would eat up the lion’s share of the cash I’d taken from our mother.

  As I went out into the rain, pulling up my hood, the old woman muttered after me, ‘Some people.’

  What were we doing to do? The cash we had would barely last us another week. I would need to find some sort of work, that much was clear. Maybe I could get some part-time hours in one of the village shops. Maybe I could join the roster of teenage girls that the Spar seemed to work their way through so quickly.

  There was no chance I was going back to the butcher shop, so I ducked into the Spar again. It was quiet and I selected my produce in record time. I bumped into an old friend beside the meat chiller though. I was examining a pack of bacon, wondering whether we could fry it in our tiny pan, when a chubby, red-haired hand crept across my eye line.

  The butcher was loading himself up with pack after pack of sausages. It took him a moment to notice me.

  He said, ‘Oh.’

  I looked from his face to the basket of sausages. ‘Hello,’ I smiled.

  He looked at the sausages too. ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right…’ I started to say, but he interrupted me.

  ‘Had a bit of an issue with the fridges across the road. You’ll know about that better than most,’ he laughed.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said and watched him scurry away. He glanced back at the end of the aisle to give me a dirty look.

  I paid for the supplies and was getting ready to face the rain again when I spotted the classified adverts by the door. Handwritten postcards for people selling golf clubs and pedigree puppies and used wedding dresses. I scanned the board until one of them caught my eye.

  Strong young men wanted for tedious labour. Must be physically able and moderately conscientious. Minimum wage, no benefits. Contact Duncan Weddle on…

  I slipped the card into my pocket, not wanting every other fucker in the village with working legs applying and spoiling my chances. The rain eased up as I was coming out of town and I began to sweat buckets inside the anorak. The car was gone from outside the wee house so I took my chances and jumped the fence into the garden. From what I could make out through the back windows it was a nice enough place. A dog whined from somewhere inside and the garden had a view of the mountains. They were a patchwork of peat and stone, smears of moss and long steps of dead rock.

  I would let the owner make the next move. If he was so keen to move us on he would have to do it himself. He didn’t know who he was getting himself mixed up with.

  2

  When I made it back to the tent I showed Mikey the card. He nodded as he read it and I asked him what he thought.

  ‘It says minimum wage. That means not very much eh?’

  ‘It’ll be about six quid an hour or so.’

  ‘What are they wanting us to do? Like move rocks around and that?’

  I laid out the supplies and threw the bag with Mikey’s boots to him. ‘First, there’s no “us”. I’ll be the one working. And second, I doubt they’ll be wanting rocks moved about. It’ll just be gardening or something I’d say.’

  ‘OK,’ he said as he tried on his boots. ‘Here Paul. These are dead fucken comfy. Look at this.’ He squelched around the meadow like a soldier.

  I put the bacon on to fry. ‘That’s good, mate.’

  As I’d expected, the bacon didn’t fare too well in the tiny pan. There wasn’t enough space for it to crisp up, but we had it on floury morning rolls and Mikey seemed happy enough.

  After breakfast he was keen to try out his new boots, so we tidied the site and headed up the mountains for a stroll. We had to jump over the burn to reach the path that snaked up the valley, flanked on either side by heathery cliffs. There were dragonflies skirting around the burn as the path climbed.

  ‘Holy fuck,’ said Mikey when he spotted them. ‘Look at them fuckers.’

  ‘Amazing, eh?’

  ‘Are they like wasps or something?’

  I always forgot how much he’d missed out on. He’d had his thirteenth birthday on the outside and then every other one until his twenty-fourth on the inside. He probably got lessons in Polmont but how would he ever have found out what a dragonfly was?

  ‘Naw man,’ I told him. ‘They’re just their own thing. Dragonflies.’

  He shook his head and said he couldn’t believe it.

  The path took us right around the mountain in a helix until we were at the top. It wasn’t that high, the mountain. I’d read in a guidebook in the tourist information in town that it was about a thousand feet or so. We were able to look down at the valley floor and see the village and then our camp further up. I could just make out the home of the man who’d been hassling us, the one I’d spied on earlier that morning. My blood kicked in, but I didn’t mention it to Mikey.

  ‘Look at that view,’ he said.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘You can see everything from here.’ He pointed to a larger town on the horizon. It was pale and indistinct from its distance. ‘Is that Glasgow,’ he asked, ‘or Edinburgh?’

  I told him it was neither, that we weren’t particularly close to either one and that, besides, it was too small.

  ‘Amazing,’ he said.

  ‘How’re the boots?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine.’

  We bumped into a group of hikers on the way down and Mikey behaved impeccably. We nodded to each other and the hikers said, ‘Morning,’ and I said, ‘Nice day,’ to them and Mikey didn’t say a word. I was happy with him.

  So happy in fact that when he remade his case for going to the pub that evening – he’d had his hair cut, he would wear the sunglasses, etc. – I said, ‘We’ll see.’ I felt like I could trust him. The pub would be dark and we could find a table in the corner and I could take him out for the pint I should’ve been able to buy him on his eighteenth.

  He clicked his fingers and swaggered down the path, his gait made clumsy by the bulky hiking boots. He was so pleased with the news that he nearly fell into the deer that was lying in the path.

  It might even have been a fawn. Its fur was pale and its face immature, though that might have been do
wn to the tongue lolling from its snout. A dry gash was open on its side and a black-beaked bird was pecking at the bones. Mikey shooed it away. We looked at the deer for a few moments. I wondered if it had been the one to disturb our rubbish bag.

  ‘Was this the way we came up?’ Mikey asked, toeing one of the hooves.

  I looked around to try and place us, but I couldn’t be sure. The deer looked long dead, unlikely to have been killed in the short time we spent at the summit.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What should we do? Are you supposed to do something?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Maybe call, like, the park ranger?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s such a thing.’

  There was nothing else to do but step around the deer’s body and continue down the mountain. The hikers seemed like proper people. Proper countryside people. They’d know what to do if they came back down and ran into the deer. They would know the right thing to do. Mikey kept glancing back up the path as we walked, no longer excited about that evening’s entertainment.

  I thought about the bird I’d seen the other morning, the eagle or kestrel or whatever it was. The hikers would probably have been able to tell me. I thought about it coasting along the clouds and letting its wild animal brain lock onto the sniffing, wandering fawn. I thought about its wings billowing out as it plummeted and its golden talons sinking into the fawn’s plump side. I licked my lips.

  Mikey walked with his hands in his pockets and we didn’t speak until we were back at the tent. He’d always been sensitive, even when he was wee. I remembered how we would use a shovel to snip worms in two on the slabs of our mother’s driveway and afterwards he would try and push the two wriggling segments back together.

  We stayed at the camp for the rest of the day. I warmed us up some soup for lunch and then later we had cold meat rolls for tea. Once or twice in the afternoon I dug the classified card out of my pocket and read it over. I thought about the job, whatever it was. See, it was one thing taking Mikey to the pub, where I could… not control him, but make sure things didn’t get out of hand. If I was going to be gone all day working, could he be trusted to look after camp himself, say the right thing if anyone came calling?