Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

And, as it happened, he’d never been, in all his life, to the Isle of Wight. When he’d crossed the water, a strange, light-hearted mood had gripped him. Hardly appropriate. But he thought, not for the first time that day, as he strode back to his car, cap on again, shoulders square (he knew from experience that they still might be watching or that, once the door closed behind you and you’d straightened your back, all kinds of collapsing might be going on inside) that, had he not been in uniform, he might have taken the chance for a mooch around. A walk. A breath of sea air. His uniform was the bind. It was so mild and still, the sea, from here, like a sheet of polished steel.

What a marvellous spot. Lookout Cottage.

It would hardly have been right to say, on such a day, that he even felt a little envious. It certainly wasn’t typical, not typical at all, of the places he had to visit. Housing estates, military or otherwise. He wondered how someone from a farmhouse in Devon — that was the previous given address (and the man had spoken with a real Devon burr) — came to be living in a cottage in the Isle of Wight and running a caravan site. And what must that be like to do? Not bad at all, maybe. He’d looked again at those white oblongs.

No outbursts, anyway. The wife had looked pretty steady, in fact, even a little hard-eyed. Well, it wasn’t her boy, just a brother-in-law. No children, apparently. Just them. An odd couple perhaps, something not quite as one between them in the face of this news. But you saw all sorts of things.

As for him, Jack, the only relative, well yes, that was tough. Your only brother. Your younger brother — Major Richards had reckoned that the gap must be several years. And he’d noticed before he left (it was even why he’d left) something going on inside Jack Luxton, something deep and contained, that might need its outburst at some time. On the other hand he didn’t look like a man given to outbursts, or to much extravagant self-expression at all. He looked pretty hefty and — what was the word? — bovine. He looked — and judging from those photographs still in his wallet his brother had been just the same — like a big strong man.

QUICKER AND BETTER at just about everything. He would swing that gun, when it was still too big for him, swing it far too much, Jack would think, and fire as if the shot were like a rope that couldn’t help tighten on its target. Rabbit, crow, pigeon. Pigeons were the trickiest. Big, clumsy birds, sitting on the bare branches in Brinkley Wood, sitting ducks you’d think, but they knew when a gun was being pointed. Though not, apparently, when Tom was pointing it. A sniper. Two pigeons dangling by their necks on a string from Tom’s belt, wet with Luke’s saliva. None for himself. Three misses, in his case, all hitting the space where a pigeon had been. But he hadn’t minded. ‘That’s two between us,’ Tom would say, and mean it.

Walking back through the wood on a grey, hard January morning. Time off, after milking, on a Sunday morning. Time off to be just two brothers. Even Dad could recognise and concede it. Like Mum fighting for those two holidays. After a long, unyielding silence: ‘Well, off you go, then.’ An hour’s shooting on a Sunday morning. Dad wouldn’t come himself, though he was a decent shot. Perhaps he knew that Tom could already outshoot him. And he’d give the permission as if he, Jack, were just a kid too, needing permission, though he was turning twenty now and the idea, the concession, was that he was supposed to be Tom’s teacher. Tom didn’t need his father watching over him. Tom was old enough to learn to shoot and Jack was old enough to be his teacher. As if Tom needed any teaching.

Coming back through the wood. The crack of twigs. Luke snuffling through the dead leaves ahead of them. Tom was only twelve, thirteen. Mum was still alive. It wasn’t even a thought: that she might not always be. Mum had raised Luke herself, from a pup — the only one they’d kept from big old Bessie’s last litter.

Tom didn’t have his height yet and Jack would sometimes think that the difference in scale between him and Tom was like the difference in scale between Tom and Luke. But Tom had the two pigeons.

Through the trees and from all sides of the valley would come now and then the small, bouncy ‘pop-pop’ of other guns. Sunday-morning shooting. The farming fraternity would call it ‘going to church’. The wood, on a still, grey morning, with the pillars of trees, was not unlike a church. ‘The farming fraternity’: that was a phrase Dad would sometimes use, keeping a straight face, though you knew he thought it was a joke of a phrase.

Along the track to the gate, then up the steepening slope of Barton Field, past the big oak, breathing hard, their throats taking in the cold air and sending it out again as steam. Jack had the gun — it was heavy, for a boy, to carry up the hill — but Tom had the pigeons. And then at some point, before the farmhouse came into view above them, beyond the rise and swell of the field, they’d stop to draw breath, and Tom would untie one of the pigeons and give it to him. True to his word. ‘Here, Jack.’ The dead black eye of the pigeon in Jack’s hand would look at him as if to say, ‘And I won’t say a word either.’ Then they’d carry on up the hill, all the valley and the far hills opening up behind them as they climbed, they didn’t have to look behind to know it.

Pigeon pie that evening.

Pigeons. Sandcastles. And, it couldn’t be denied, girls too. Quicker and better. Too young then, at twelve. Probably. But he was already going to Abbot’s Green School, waiting every morning by the Jebb gate for the school bus to swing round the bend and scoop him up. Half a dozen or so already inside, two or three girls among them. Kathy Hawkes from Polstowe.

Once, five or six years before, the same bus with the same driver, Bill Spurell, would have picked up Jack and, a little further down the Marleston road, Ellie Merrick. But with that eight-year gap between them, Tom didn’t have any big brother around to cramp his before-and-after-school activities, and even perhaps by the time he was thirteen, by the time Mum had died, he would already have got started. Maybe saying to himself that, given the new situation, given that Mum wasn’t around and Dad wouldn’t waste a chance to haul him out of the classroom, he’d better make the most of his opportunity. He’d better make hay, while he could, with schoolgirls. What other kind of girl was there going? And maybe girls go for a boy who’s just lost his mum, they can’t help it. It’s a sure-fire recipe, and Tom knew it. Maybe that’s why he could crack those eggs so damn neatly.

He got through them anyhow, girls, while he could. It wasn’t for Tom like it was for him, Jack, with Ellie: the feeling that this one, the one that seemed to have been put there specially in front of him, was the one he should take, for keeps if he could. And he’d better not move on and see what else might be going, because he might end up having nothing. Her being his age, too, and just across that boundary hedge. Not just an after-school thing. The two of them down in Brinkley Wood sometimes, not shooting pigeons, or going to church exactly.

He’d always thought he should stick with Ellie. Generally speaking, Jack was a sticker, a settler. He didn’t have the moving-on instinct, or he never really thought he could move on. Whereas Tom, clearly, was a mover-on, in more ways than one. By the time he was eighteen, very clearly. A mover-on and leaver-behind. And no doubt as a soldier he’d have got his quota of passing female company, as soldiers do, no difficulty. And that would have suited him and was just as well, now. No sticking, nothing for keeps. Like pigeons.