Fallow Read online

  I must have been tired because when I woke it was light. I got myself up and hurried back to the house. I had enough time to get myself ready and make sure Mikey did the same. We stood around in the front garden to wait for Duncan. It had been another misty night and all around us was heavy whiteness and the sun bled out into the sky and the entire sky was the sun and the mist was so thick you could look right at the sun like a white penny.

  Mikey zipped his coat up to his chin. We’d tried to comb his hair back with some oil we’d found in the man’s toiletry cabinet. It didn’t make him look good exactly, but sufficiently different from the famous photographs of him.

  He rocked from side to side. ‘Where were you this morning?’

  I looked away. ‘Went out for a walk.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘Aye,’ I said.

  A clatter of engine noise began to rise from the mist. We stood beside the road and waited until the ancient camper broke through, white clouds sprawling round its bumper, like a shark breaking through the water’s surface. The engine sounded bad, much worse than yesterday. It chomped and stuttered at a ridiculous volume.

  I got in front and Mikey climbed into the back, into the van’s living area. Duncan drove us away and I craned over my shoulder to make sure Mikey was all right. He was sprawled on a couch, flung back by the van’s acceleration.

  ‘You’ll be Paul’s brother then?’ Duncan shouted back, over the sound of the engine.

  ‘Eh?’

  I leaned over. ‘He said you’ll be my brother then.’

  ‘Oh,’ shouted Mikey. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Duncan asked me.

  ‘He was just saying aye, he is my brother.’

  Duncan nodded, enthusiastic. ‘I’m sure he is a good worker.’

  ‘No. That he is my brother.’

  Mikey leaned into the gap between the front seats. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’m just saying to Duncan what you said.’

  ‘Eh?’

  I didn’t bother to answer him, shaking my head instead and pointing to the van’s dashboard as way of an explanation.

  ‘Eh?’ screamed Mikey.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I screamed back.

  ‘What happened,’ said Duncan, ‘was that I ran over a goose last night, after I dropped you off.’

  ‘A goose?’ I said.

  ‘All the feathers got sucked up in the air cooling system. It’s like a duvet down there.’

  ‘Did he say there’s a goose in the engine?’ shouted Mikey.

  ‘A goose’s feathers.’

  ‘Eh?’

  All three of us decided independently that conversation wasn’t worth the bother. We sat in silence and watched the oncoming road throw itself under the van in a constant stream. We came out of the hills and left the mist behind. All around us were fields and the green and lilac lines of hedge between each one. The raw new sun ran waves through the leaves and branches and the shapes of the hedge lines morphed as we drove towards and then past them.

  We skirted the long loch and the water made whitecaps, creamy veins in the black water, like fat marbling in meat. We came to the Mason Dew sign and turned onto the dirt track. ‘Nearly there,’ shouted Duncan.

  ‘Eh?’ shouted Mikey.

  Duncan parked the van by the cabins and stepped out and stretched. As I followed him out I thought to myself that the field looked quite empty. There had been a crowd of diggers there at this point yesterday. Duncan seemed to notice too. He scanned the field with his hand over his brow. ‘No sign of the lazy fucks,’ he said.

  I rolled myself a fag and the three of us wandered over to the cabins to wake up Sam. Mikey and Duncan introduced themselves to each other, now free of the van’s overwhelming noise.

  Duncan slapped Mikey on the shoulder blade. ‘Good to have you pal. Paul’s told us all about you.’

  Mikey and I shared a look.

  We came up to the cabins but before Duncan could even knock Sam exploded out of her bunk.

  ‘Have you heard, Duncan?’ she said. ‘Have you heard?’

  ‘Have I heard what?’

  She was holding onto too many objects. A small coffee cup and cigarette in one hand, a sheaf of documents in the other. I spied a newspaper rolled up beneath her oxter. ‘Pawel and Karol and the rest. They’ve been deported.’

  Duncan looked at Sam. He looked at me and Mikey. ‘Deported?’

  ‘They were illegals.’

  ‘Pawel was illegal?’

  Sam drank from the coffee cup and somehow managed to puff on her fag in the same motion. ‘That’s not all. The Toad’s on his way up.’

  Duncan put both hands on his head. ‘The Toad.’

  Mikey was behind me, his head close to my ear. ‘Who’s the Toad?’ he whispered into it.

  I shook my head.

  ‘The Toad,’ said Sam. She was moving side to side and back and forth with nervous energy. ‘Duncan,’ she said. ‘The Toad’s coming. Today. The same day the diggers have been shipped back to Fucksville, fucking Fucksylvania.’

  Duncan put his hands on his hips and sighed. He looked at the sky. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not all the diggers.’

  ‘Who’s the Toad?’ I asked.

  Sam turned, noticing Mikey and me for the first time. ‘Mr Raymond. I told you about Mr Raymond? That’s the Toad. He’s coming today.’

  Duncan clapped his hands together. ‘Right. Lads. How do you feel about some hard labour?’

  Mikey and I dug the ditches all morning. It was warm but between us we managed to finish my ditch from the day before and make a good start on a second. The sun stung our necks and Sam and Duncan and the rest of the archaeologists holed themselves up in the cabins. No one came out to tell us to have a break, so we took one for ourselves. I sat in the cool dirt of the ditch and rolled myself a fag.

  Mikey crouched down in front of me and checked over his shoulder to the cabins. ‘Paul,’ he said, shiftily. ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Aye it is that bad. Look,’ he held up his hand, ‘I’ve got all blisters on my fingers.’

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll bring some T-shirts or something from the house. You can wrap your hand up.’

  ‘I hate working,’ he moaned. ‘It’s the worst.’

  My main concern that morning had been the tube of newspaper jammed into Sam’s armpit. I wasn’t able to make out the title but if it was a tabloid then Mikey was almost certainly somewhere inside. That wasn’t to say she would come across the article or even recognise the photo. I looked along the ditch to my brother, his head slumped against the dirt we were yet to dig. He wore his sunglasses and his hair was stubbly and stuck up at the back, like a duckling.

  We would be fine. Probably. I reasoned that Sam would be too preoccupied with losing her staff to give the paper a thorough browse.

  ‘How come the rest of them aren’t helping?’ Mikey said, nodding backwards to the cabins.

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe they’ve got stuff needing done before this guy shows up. This Toad.’

  Mikey said, ‘Mm. Maybe we should just mess about until they come back up.’

  ‘Like, just lie here?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I thought about it. ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘All right.’

  I heard movement behind my closed eyes. It was so comfortable and warm in the ditch that it took me a few moments to summon the energy to open them. Sam and Duncan and the other two archaeologists were hammering across the field towards us, carrying bundles under their arms. I kicked Mikey awake and we both stood up in the ditch.

  Sam careered past us, a set of tools in her arms, a lit fag swinging from her lips. ‘Dig!’ she told us. ‘Dig!’

  The four of them took a ditch each and spread out their tools and Duncan set up a worktable and me and Mikey went down on our knees to dig.

  ‘Did they catch us?’ Mikey whispered to me.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t kno
w,’ I said.

  None of them was really working. They were kneeling by their ditch, watching the cabins and the dirt track.

  I called over to Duncan. ‘What’s going on?’

  He put the finger of one hand to his lips and pointed with the other. A silver car was coming up the track – a nice motor. It parked by the cabins and sat for a few minutes. They all held their breaths as Mikey and I scratched half-heartedly at the ditch walls. We all watched together as a figure manoeuvred itself out of the motor and trudged between the cabins, checking inside each one.

  Duncan took a few steps forward and shouted, ‘Hello.’

  The figure turned. It observed us. I could see it touch its face before getting back inside.

  ‘Watch this,’ Duncan said to us.

  The figure, the famous Toad, proceeded to clamber back into his nice silver motor. He performed a complicated turn beside the cabins and drove his motor right into the field, between the strings marking out the undug ditches.

  ‘Always the same,’ said Duncan. ‘Can’t bear to walk. Can’t suffer it. Listen.’ He looked at me and Mikey. ‘You keep your heads down and whatever you do don’t mention that you’re cash in hand.’

  The motor trundled over the earth until it came to a stop in front of Duncan’s ditch. The window whirred as it lowered. Inside was the face of an ugly man. He was wearing a bulbous leather cap and had an ice cream cone in his hand.

  ‘Get in,’ he told Duncan and Duncan got in. They reversed all the way back to the cabins. Every metre or so the Toad would mess up his steering and get too close to the string. He’d have to go forward again to right himself. We all put down our tools to watch the car as it idled by the cabins. You could tell Duncan was getting a serious talking to, even from that distance.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

  Sam coughed. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It’s just… How to put it? It’s just that we’ve been taking a long time to sign off on this site. It’s been ongoing for a good couple of weeks now.’

  One of the archaeologists I hadn’t been introduced to piped up, saying, ‘A good couple of months.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Sam. ‘Maybe. So obviously, for the Toad, for Mr Raymond, time is of the essence. He wants the field signed off ASAP so he can get the building started, get the cash rolling in.’

  ‘ASAP as fucking possible,’ agreed the unnamed archaeologist.

  ‘But say perhaps we aren’t signing off on the field as quickly as we technically – and it is a technicality – technically could. Perhaps we’re finding certain items of significance and the Toad, and anyone else from Mason Dew, doesn’t have the expertise to dispute these items’ authenticity.’

  Mikey scowled at her. He’d want this explaining later on.

  ‘And say perhaps the longer the dig goes on the more pissed off the Toad gets and the more money we make and the, like, funnier the whole thing gets,’ finished Sam with a smile.

  Eventually Duncan was expelled and the Toad roared off in a cloud of aggravated dust. I could make out Duncan waving to the motor as it disappeared down the track and then turning to us and clasping his hands together and waving them over his head like a champion.

  Mikey sat with his feet in the ditch and his arse in the field. He looked at each of us in turn and scowled.

  After Duncan returned the archaeologists packed up their tools and hid in the cabins for the remainder of the afternoon, leaving Mikey and me to toil in the field. No squash. No cereal bars. I was famished and I knew Mikey would be worse, being typically very greedy. We finished our second ditch and broke the earth on the third in preparation for the following day.

  It was around four when we decided we couldn’t dig any more. I rolled myself a fag between filthy fingers and we strolled back to the cabins.

  Mikey trudged in the dirt. ‘Man,’ he said. ‘Hard day.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘Hard.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Mikey asked when we reached Duncan’s van.

  ‘He gave me a run back yesterday,’ I said. ‘I’d better say to them. We’ll need to be paid as well.’

  I stepped up to Sam’s cabin and opened the door. Duncan was lying on Sam’s mat with Sam above him, the pair of them breathing and moving. They turned to me like deer in the woods at night. I thought about the fawn Mikey and I found on the mountainside. There was the paper, lying on the table by the door. I snatched it up and said, ‘Sorry.’

  Neither of them spoke but they scrabbled to cover themselves with what they had.

  ‘Why did you say sorry?’ Mikey asked as I closed the door.

  ‘They were, eh…’ I wondered how best to put it. We’d never spoken about anything like that. Never talked about the whole thing directly. ‘Y’know.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They were,’ I nodded, ‘you know.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Them two? Sarah and Dunc?’

  ‘It’s Sam, but aye. Them two.’

  ‘Wow. What was it like?’

  I told him to shut up and hurried over to the van. Behind the cabin was a copse of trees with a tiny shivering river running through it. I leafed through the paper and found Mikey’s page, shredding it and casting it off into the water. The paper saturated and disappeared in the grit and stones. Mikey’s face bled out and was gone.

  Duncan was waiting by the van. ‘Absolutely amazing,’ he was saying. ‘I’d thoroughly recommend it.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mikey.

  ‘Just saying to your brother,’ Duncan said, turning to me, ‘about Thailand. Bangkok. He was saying he’d never been.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he has.’

  Duncan’s hair was pulled back from his forehead as if he’d been given a shock. He was leaning against his van, cool as a cucumber. ‘I’ll give you a run home.’

  We were well on the way before he remembered something and slipped an envelope out the pocket of his shorts. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Another day’s pay.’

  I accepted it. ‘Same time tomorrow?’

  Duncan said, ‘Same time tomorrow,’ and the road pulled the van out of the fields and into the hills.

  The first thing I did when we were back inside the wee house was check the envelope’s contents. There was the cash for the pair of us and an extra fifty on top.

  It was a quiet evening that followed. We washed and ate and Mikey took Doris out into the wilds behind the house for a walk. I stayed behind. I didn’t care much for the dog, or dogs in general. They were too needy. Too keen.

  I tried watching television but I couldn’t settle. I would get involved with one channel and a moment later I’d be switching over, worried about what I might be missing. I got up and opened the curtains. There was the road and fields over the road and somewhere beyond that was our lonely tent. A car drove by. I didn’t recognise it. If they were going to come for us, that was how they’d do it. A squad of them camouflaged in the wild grass and trees that edged the road. A single bullet flying through the air, breaking the glass, entering my throat. I would feel a blast as the metal burrowed into me at the speed of sound. I closed the curtains.

  There was a telephone on the table by my armchair. I picked up the receiver and dialled our mother’s number. She answered within two rings.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  Her breath caught. ‘Mikey?’ she said. ‘Paul?’

  We had similar voices and when we were younger people would often mistake us for the other on the phone. Sometimes, when Mikey was inside, I would talk to our mother when her back was turned and she would spin around and there would be light inside her. Then she would realise it was me and remember and the light would vanish. It made me hate her.

  ‘It’s Paul,’ I said. ‘I’m just phoning to…’

  ‘Where are you son?’ she said. ‘You need to tell me where you’ve taken him.’

  ‘Where I’ve taken him? What do you mean where I’ve taken him?’

  She could sense the annoy
ance in my voice. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’ She paused. I heard her mind whirr. ‘How are you getting on son? How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Right. What’s going on back there? Anything I should be aware of?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’

  I didn’t say anything then. I had imagined her being more grateful. I thought she would be on our side.

  ‘So where are you then, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘I’m hardly going to tell you, am I?’ I scoffed. ‘They might be tracing the call.’

  She breathed through her nose and it distorted the line. ‘Paul,’ she said. ‘Son. Who’s they?’

  ‘They. The police. The press.’

  ‘You need to bring him back home. Please. If you bring him back, that’ll be the end of it,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the right way to go about things.’

  My blood had been kicking in all through the call and now it was all the way up. How dare she dictate to me what the right way to do things was? ‘I have to go,’ I told her.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is he OK? Is he safe?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said.

  I hung up the phone just as the back door closed. I heard Mikey creep through the hallway and looked up to see him lurking by the living room door. I asked him what was going on and he shrugged.

  ‘The dog caught a rabbit,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Aye. It was running around in those tunnel things out the back. Doris threw it in the air and broke its neck.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘Just left it.’

  ‘All right. Did you see where she put it?’

  ‘No. Why, like?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  The man had some decent clothes but they were fairly baggy on us. We had to pull the belts down to the tightest notch and roll the sleeves on the shirts up. After we got dressed we lay on the bed and waited for it to get dark. We put our hands on our chests and watched the square of sky through the bedroom window go lilac. We watched the colour drain out of it to let the blackness in. Once it was dark enough we put our jackets on and climbed down the Ramsay ladder.