Joe Treasure - The Book of Air

I watched him labouring to take this in. ‘You don’t know, Agnes.’ He shook his head bitterly and looked away over the canopy of trees. ‘There’s so much you don’t know.’

‘What, though? What don’t I know?’

‘I was a boy when Janet came to my bed.’ He met my eye, daring me to say otherwise. ‘A boy without parents to watch out for me. And Janet was the girl who’d held my hand and led me to the spring to wash and to the kitchen to pour me a cup of milk, and had settled me to sleep before walking home from the Hall each evening. I understood nothing, except that it was daybreak and she was doing what she had never done before, getting into bed beside me.’

‘Liar.’

‘She meant me to be the father of her child but her child already had a father.’

‘How could you know that? How could you be sure?’

‘Because when she made to kiss me I could tell she didn’t mean it, and she left off soon enough and turned away and I heard her sobbing. I understood none of this till later.’

‘Liar, liar.’

‘I never harmed her.’

‘Who then, if not you?’

‘Oh, Agnes.’ He looked at me fiercely. ‘Only your Uncle Morton is left alive to say what went on in that cottage.’

I hit him then, letting go of Gideon’s rope to swing at him with both fists as I would have swung an axe at a tree. He stepped backwards, caught his foot on a vine branch. He frowned at me as if I was a puzzling sentence in the Book of Windows. The branches swung apart to let him in and closed again behind him. If he had fallen dead in the pond, the green water would have closed over him just so, settling again as if it thought nothing of him and couldn’t tell the Reader from a dropped corn sack. I heard branches breaking and the movement of startled birds, and a grunt like the last breath pushed out of him. Then more cracking that might have been his neck or his limbs or the limbs of trees. I waited for the noises to stop. I forgot to breathe while I waited to see if he would cry in pain from the ground. But I heard nothing so I let out my own gasp of pain and went on my way.

Day has come and thunder with it and now rain enough to drown me and make a muddy river of the track. I take shelter under a sagging iron roof while I eat and write.

I would never have hit him if he hadn’t told such lies about my mother. If he hadn’t come so close to the edge of the road he would have come to no harm.

Soon I must ride again, drenched as I am. Ruins lie all around me in the forest. I start at every sound, thinking it’s the Monk, swinging by his tail to catch me, though I don’t believe in the Monk and have worse things to fear. There is nothing for me here but sadness and danger.

From up here on the roof I can see the world – the woods and fields our world has shrunk to. It was hairy getting up this high. Aleksy helped me lay some boards on the stable roof and we raised an extension ladder from there, roping it to a downpipe to give it some stability. I found a couple of claw hammers in the shed and a bag of roofing nails and we hauled up a stack of slates reclaimed from the old outhouse. The trees in the High Wood are our nearest neighbours and their branches wave at us and sing. The wind is strong up here, but the rain has held off and for now we’re safe inside the parapet.

When I helped Aleksy on to the roof, I asked him if it reminded him of his circus days.

He wasn’t amused. ‘I work with animals. Sometimes a strongman act with elephants. For one season, when I was fourteen, shot from a cannon. But the tightrope and trapeze I left to others. These are different skills, you understand Jason, like bricklayer or plasterer.’

He’s careless of his bandaged arm, but I can see it hurts him to use it. We’ve made a late start, after clearing a patch of thistles and digging it over to plant cabbages, but we’ve still got an hour or so of daylight. We’ve brought up a broom and a stiff brush. I set Aleksy sweeping up whatever’s blown into the valleys, checking to see where the lead might have buckled or split. There’s spleenwort sprouting from the brickwork round one of the chimneystacks and moss on some of the lower slates where the water is slow to drain. I clean out the drainage holes in the parapet walls and lean over to pull an old nest from a cast iron hopper head. I see where some of the slates have slipped and a couple with long cracks in them, and I begin patching.

After a while we hear the cattle clattering into the yard for their second milking – the Friesians and the Jerseys. I have a better sense of them now that Abigail has walked me through their field at sunset. Deirdre shouts a question and falls silent while Maud, I suppose, shows her what to do. There are footsteps below in the house, a window slides open and shut again, and I picture Abigail dusting and cleaning, a few strands of hair escaping her headscarf to fall across her work-smudged face. There’s a smell of smoke from the lawn and faintly in the distance a two-note call.

‘Listen, Aleksy.’

‘What is it?’

‘Can’t you hear the cuckoo?’

Aleksy laughs. ‘Too late for the cuckoo, old man. It’s September already, maybe October. Cuckoos all flew south three, four months ago.’

The smell of the bonfire gets sharper. They’re burning the dry thistle stalks. I lean over the parapet and see the orange glow and the grey smoke rising from it. And there’s Simon – the dark mop of his hair appearing from under the portico. He waddles towards the fire, his movement hampered by the weight of whatever he’s got in his basket. Perhaps Abigail has recruited him to help her clean the house. Approaching the flames, he pauses and shifts into a slow orbit, staying as close as the heat will allow, throwing things from his basket, little patches of darkness to scatter sparks and sink into the flames.

‘What do you think they’re burning down there?’

Aleksy looks up from his sweeping. ‘They’re cooking our dinner. Hot dogs maybe. Remember sausages?’

‘Remember bread rolls…’ I hear the cuckoo again. Something isn’t right. ‘Have you seen Django?’

‘Not since he took to his room.’

Simon’s basket is empty. He looks towards the house, raising his face to an upstairs window. He puts the basket down and picks up something else – a jug or vase. Holding it in both hands he hurls the contents towards the fire. There’s a belch of white flame which sends him staggering backwards. Then the sound reaches me – a whoop and a fluttering pressure in the gut.

‘Jesus Christ. It’s petrol.’

The noise has brought Aleksy to the edge of the roof. ‘Who got petrol?’

‘Help me down before that boy kills himself.’

Aleksy follows me around the edge of the roof. I stand for a moment looking down into the yard where the cows are still penned. The first step over the parapet is the worst, turning your back on the drop and feeling with a foot for the first rung. The stonework seems to tilt and I have a strange feeling that I’m suspended under it looking up. A shadow crosses my vision and I think I’m going to black out. Then the world rights itself and I’m clinging to the parapet with my feet on the ladder. And I’m able to make the descent.

In the yard, Maud looks up from her milking. I see the question in her eyes but don’t stop to answer.

When I reach the bonfire, Simon is sitting at its edge, rocking forward and back, muttering, the empty basket on one side of him, the jug on the other. Smoke and ash rise behind him and the trees at the lawn’s edge shimmer in the heat. ‘I won’t burn mmm…’ he says, and makes his carp face. ‘I won’t burn mmm…’ – lips pursed, neck bulging.

‘What is it, Si?’