Gregory Norminton - The Devil’s Highway

‘It’s your house.’

‘Technically it’s not.’

Aitch fiddles with his shemagh, drapes it across his shoulder. ‘Reckon I’ll go see Bekah,’ he says.

‘Is that wise?’

‘Stu’s at work. Then maybe I’ll go for a run.’

‘Okey-doke,’ says Rachel. She drains her mug, gets up and puts it in the sink. Job done, parishioners to see. ‘Will you be going through the heath?’

‘Eh?’

‘To your sister’s?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s just the ground’s very dry. We’re supposed to take care not to drop cigarettes.’

‘“Don’t burn everything, Aitch!”’

Rachel hiccups a laugh. ‘I don’t mean that.’

‘Cross my heart, Rev, hope to die, I promise I will not burn down the heath.’

Locking the front door, she tastes the air. Nothing but the exhalation of flowers and, fainter, diesel fumes from a ride-on mower. She walks to the junction with College Ride. Putting Bagshot behind her, she follows the holly hedge as far as Pennyhill Park Hotel and its pungent hinterland of skips. At the crest of the hill she turns right, scaling a low bank of gravel shored up by oil drums. She pushes through holly and laurel, looking out for dog mess underfoot or bagged and hung from branches.

In the wood the footpath is obstructed with logging debris. Someone has been grubbing up rhododendron, leaving the wrack snagged in trees as if deposited by a great flood. She walks among roots and torn branches. Machines have carved deep ruts in the mud.

She drags a stick through the skeletons of last year’s bracken, knocking tentacles of new growth. Everywhere the understorey is in leaf – rowans with their stems nibbled by deer, birches spangled with sunlight. A blackbird, threshing leaves in search of springtails, flies scolding at her approach. Birds seem to call from every corner – chaffinch, robin, wren – and she imagines their song as silver threads tying up the wood. Above the trees the sky is raw with the rasp of jet engines.

Bobbie enters the beech plantation. Her father has shown her the damage done to it by deer and squirrels. Inattentive, she treads in a rare puddle and tiny insects rise like vapour about her ankles.

Has she ever known the woods this dry this early? She thinks about the fire on the ranges. They were in the Vauxhall at the time, taking more of Grandpa’s stuff to the dump. ‘That’s smoke,’ her father said. The air flashed blue and they bumped onto the verge to let a fire engine pass.

‘Could be a bonfire,’ said Bobbie, seeing the expression on her father’s face.

‘It’s not a bonfire.’

After that, he swerved as he drove because he was fiddling with the car radio to find a local news station. He swore at Dolly Parton, he swore at travel updates.

When they got back to Grandpa’s house, he left Bobbie in the hallway and ran to fetch his iPad. The heath in Pirbright was in flames. Sparks, they reckoned, from ordnance or a soldier’s cooking fire. Her father was scrolling in a sweat. ‘Says here a thousand acres.’

‘Is that a lot?’

‘That’s the lot. Jesus.’

It was because of drought, he said, and the winter dieback. Spring is the worst time of year for it – nestlings in the heather eaten by flames, lizards cooked on the blackened soil. Bobbie listened but she failed to make the necessary noises. It made her father sullen all evening.

She picks at shreds of bark torn from a beech by a gnawing squirrel. He reckons she doesn’t care about the land, but that’s not true. Didn’t they come here every summer, and every autumn half-term, to endure Grannie’s cooking and Grandpa’s lectures? And weren’t things easiest on those visits when all together they took off on long hikes, picking blackberries in August and mushrooms in October? Sometimes they found Sparassis , or brains as Bobbie calls it, spongy growths from pine stumps that you bake in casseroles or use to flavour omelettes. Deep amid the trees, they found boletus mushrooms with slimy caps. Best of all were the cep, so mild and nutty, filling her grandparents’ house with the smell of autumn woods.

Those were among the few occasions when her grandfather, who considered the kitchen to be his wife’s domain, commandeered the means of production and banished the family to the sitting room, summoning them with a crier’s voice to grzybowa or mushroom soup, with poppy seedcake that he’d ordered from a Polish shop in Hounslow. That soup, Bobbie thinks, is lost to them now. Her father never learned how to make it – he’s tetchy about picking mushrooms for ecological reasons – and Grandpa was not one to write his recipes down.

She sits on a stump among sweet chestnuts. The chestnuts are warped and dying, their flanks blackened by fire. Bobbie drinks from her water bottle and the cold makes her teeth ache. She lowers herself into stillness as her father taught her, trying to expand her peripheral vision – casting a web of attention to see what lands in it. She hears aircraft noise, traffic on Nine Mile Ride and the A30. Nearer, fainter, there is the shaken bell of a robin, the breeze in the pines. She tries to give herself to this moment, to stake a claim in it, but there are human voices at the edge of hearing and her wide-eyed stare contracts. She perceives, so dimly it might be a twinge of gristle in her jaw, the squeak of bicycle brakes. She stows the water in her rucksack and touches as she does so the patterned stone in its inner pocket.

She retrieves the stone. It soothes her to roll the familiar shape in her palm.

Her father found it twenty years ago – long before she existed – on a dig at Silchester. She imagines him with a full head of hair, on padded knees in a trench, scraping off the dirt with his thumbnail. The stone is shaped like a withered pear and carved with ribs and pockmarks. It was never knapped to kill or cut – its markings are odd, with hatchings like decoration about what Bobbie thinks of as its waist and neck. It’s impossible to guess its age – it might have been carved by a schoolboy on a field trip, or a soldier resting on manoeuvres. Bobbie likes to claim it’s prehistoric. No roads back then. No England. Only foraging and hunting, small groups of people your only shelter and hope of survival. When he presented her with the stone, her father had been circumspect. ‘I can’t guarantee that it’s of archaeological interest.’ Even so, it matters that the stone is hers, that it came into her keeping. In the first hand that held it, it would have felt the same as it does in hers.

She puts the stone in her left trouser pocket and picks up the footpath towards Surrey Hill.

Here he is, slouching behind the sports hall of the country park hotel. There’s gash everywhere: smashed beer bottles, cans of Red Bull, plastic bags with dogshit inside. It’s a relief to get under the trees. In the beech wood there’s a girl, or maybe a boy, of ten or so, thrashing old bracken with a stick. He doesn’t often see kids here, mostly dog walkers and lads from the estate on their way to the pub.

This path was one of his favourites on the Yamaha, taking turns with Donnie to punish their guts on its roots and stones. On foot, the gradient is starting to cost him. How can he be short of breath already? He’s seriously out of shape. Not that the weather helps. Never known an April like it. Still, chilly after Helmand.

Ten litres a day he got through at first, the water warm and tasting of bottle plastic. Sweating like a pig out in the ulu. His arse-crack like a river. Mid-summer it got so hot his brain went numb. He only wanted to sit and breathe, and even that was like sucking the air inside an oven. But there were duties to perform, orders to keep them knocking about while the heat squeezed the sweat out of him and even the flipflops were sitting it out in their hovels, waiting for nightfall.