Evie Wyld - All the Birds, Singing

I feel hopeful here; even in those moments I’m searching the sky for an airplane, I think, can’t complain, because it’s been worse, much worse and the two of us laugh that night and drink a beer and Kelly sits outside in the dust, biting at her fleas. There is one last Holiday left in a packet I find stuffed into the pocket of my jeans, along with a book of matches. I hide it and think about it often, and wait for the moment when I need it most. It makes me feel better, just knowing it’s there.

The fence around Don’s lawn was decorated with more dead moles, some flapping in the wind, a few still moist enough to draw flies.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘a visit from the hermit crab. You look better. Had a kip? Was going to drop by you later today in fact — bloody stupid woman at the fishmonger’s keeps giving me fish. I hate the stuff — sort of rubbish your lot eat. She’s gone sweet on me, silly cow, can’t stop giving me her stinking flounder.’ He smiled at me. ‘Heard you made it down the pub the other week with your new fancy man.’

‘Samson came to see me the other night,’ I said, and Don’s face sagged a little.

‘Did he do anything?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘Come in. Come in and I’ll make you a coffee.’

Don’s kitchen was pine and chrome in a way that reminded me of hospitals. He turned on his electric kettle and made me watch as a light strip on its side turned from blue to purple to bright red.

‘Ever see one of those before?’ he asked.

‘No, never,’ I said.

‘Got that for nothing — came with the kitchen,’ he said and put a sachet of instant coffee in each mug. He added water and stirred. It was the kind of instant coffee that already had milk in it — it had a grey-looking head on it. ‘Seen that before?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’

‘Aye,’ said Don, looking proudly at his mug. ‘Aye, it is. They call it instantchino.’

We sipped the coffee and I nodded appreciatively. ‘It’s good,’ I said. It was not good. But Don looked pleased, and offered me one of his sweeteners from a tin that dropped them when you pressed a button. I took two to be polite and he nodded again.

‘Margaret would have a conniption fit.’

I smiled. The room was thick with the smell of our instantchinos.

Don sighed and said, ‘I’ll bet you didn’t know that Margaret was only forty-three when she died.’ His face had a look to it like he’d won a treasure hunt.

‘I don’t know anything about her,’ I said, though I had always thought of her as being Don’s age, I realised — a timely death, sad, but not unexpected. Don lifted himself up out of his chair and went over to a drawer in the kitchen. Out of it he pulled a colour photograph: Don, looking much the same as he did now, the oilskin coat the same, the boots. A different shade of shirt on underneath the oilskin and a thicker quality to the white hair at the side of his head, but that was all. The woman next to him could have been his daughter, her blonde hair in a ponytail, a long beaked nose and her mouth open, laughing. Her hand rested on the head of a small dark child, who held a fistful of her turquoise bomber jacket in his paw. The boy wore dungarees and had his hair parted to the side; he was maybe four years old, but I recognised the look, the deep frown and open mouth of Samson.

‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘When was this taken?’

Don propped the photo up against the jug in the centre of the table. ‘About fifteen years ago.’ He drained the last of his coffee and leant back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

‘See,’ he said, ‘I always thought I’d go long before Margaret. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said yes when she said she wanted the baby.’ Don’s eyes were closed, like he was picturing the event. I looked at my coffee and wondered if I’d be able to finish it. The silence lengthened.

‘I haven’t been a good father to him,’ Don said softly. ‘Didn’t know what to do in the first place. And that’s all fine if you’ve got a loving mother — don’t need the father so much then.’ He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘Just like my old man.’ He swept one of his arms from behind his head like he was gesturing at something. ‘He was no damn good at it — he went to work and came home and we stayed out of his way.’ He let his hand find its way back behind his head. ‘I wasn’t as bad as that — I wanted to be more than that to Samson, but I wasn’t good at it. Couldn’t do the baby talk, found it embarrassing. Margaret used to say to me, He’s not a short adult, he’s a child. But I never saw the difference. And then when he got older, there was trouble with his attention span or something. Teachers were no good. I was no good. But his mother — she was good.’ He dropped his hands down and laid them on the table, carefully. They were old hands, older than the rest of him. One of his index fingers had a scar all the way down it as if it had been split open, and the nails were yellow, thick and horny. The tips of his fingers pointed in strange directions.

‘When she died Samson was sixteen. Where I’m from, that meant you were a man. I didn’t know what to do with him — I don’t know if he knew what to do with me either. We didn’t know what to say to each other without her.’ Don bit his bottom lip and held it there. I listened to the sound of us breathing. ‘When he started with the fires, I thought he was punishing me, but I thought I’d done nothing wrong, so what was there to punish? I never brutalised him. Not once. Never did to him the things my father would’ve.’

My mouth was dry, but I couldn’t wet it with the instantchino which was lukewarm now and sickly.

‘What did he set fire to?’

‘Cars at first. Then a barn. Then he had a go at the cottage while I was in it, but I came down in the night and found him sitting over the table with his head in his hands. He’d made a little bonfire in the corner of the room, and I say, What are you up to? And he says he wants the place burnt. And so I called the police after that. On my own boy, on our boy.’

Don looked far away.

‘What did the police do?’ I thought of the sergeant, gentle-eyed and useless.

‘They said did I want to press charges, and even the fella whose barn Sam set alight — he hadn’t pressed charges once I paid him back for it — even he said, the boy’s just troubled after his mother. But I pressed charges, and the boy went to borstal.’

I picked up my mug and drank the bad coffee just to have another movement, another noise in the room.

‘I had it in my head the place’d do him some good, some rules, some toughening — Margaret was never big on those things. She thought we should nurture his dream to be a guitar player.’ Don laughed. ‘He was dreadful at that, purely dreadful. He’s my son, I said; he’ll be a farmer .’

Outside the sun came out from behind a cloud, so that it was like someone had opened a curtain in the room. I could see Midge through the window, resting her head on her paws, looking out towards my sheep. ‘And after he’d gone, when it was just me alone in the house without him to worry about, I began to see what he meant.’

‘What did he mean?’

‘He meant to burn down the house, and I saw why.’

I nodded, but all I could think of was the water in the tap over the sink, and how I’d like to pour away the coffee and take down large gulps.

‘Memories?’ I said.

Don looked up like he’d forgotten I was there. He smiled. ‘Woke up in the night with Midge howling outside, looked out the window and there she was, Margaret, in her dressing gown, the only clothes I took for her to the hospice. She had her back to the house, walking towards the woods, but I could see it was her.’