Ross Raisin - Gods Own Country

We sat munching us sarnies in quiet, the rain pattering on to the leaves overhead. I needn’t have fussed about getting the wrong choice, I saw now, because she scranned down the prawn mayonnaise fair sharpish. I wished then that I’d took more, smuggled some in my bag as well, for we only had six between us and that wouldn’t last beyond tonight. She didn’t mawnge about it, though, just kept up her silence. I didn’t know what she was so bothered about. It was only a bracelet. It could probably be fixed and all. After we’d got back to the wood, I’d watched her as she unfastened the clasp and held it in front of her an age, fondling it round with her fingers to study where it was dented, demonstrating what a cruel bastard I was for mangling it. Then she’d opened up her bag and placed the bracelet on top for safe keeping. Once she’d done that she had nothing to show me what a bastard I was, so since then she’d spent the afternoon touching her wrist instead, finger-stroking where it had marked a band of red.

Who ever heard of a bracelet being so special as all that, was what I wanted to know? It looked cheap anyhow. Thin and tinny, faded, it was probably a present from the Cyclist. Then it hit me. It was him gave it to her. That was why she was so heart-sluffened I’d bent it. I watched her rubbing the wrist. She was only making it worse — it hadn’t been so red, firstly, it just needed leaving be was all, then the mark would quiet down. I stared at her, but she wouldn’t look over. She was lost with her thoughts. What’s Marsdyke ever given me, anyway? A prawn sandwich, anything else? No, that’s about the lot.

I’ll fix it for you, the bracelet, I said. I’ll take it in a shop, Whitby or someplace, have it fixed.

She carried on gawping ahead.

I don’t care about the bracelet.

Right you are, I thought, so why’ve you got a slapped arse of a face on you, then?

No, I’ll fix it, I told her. In Whitby or somewhere. We’re not too far away. I’ll show you when the rain stops, you can probably see it from one of the high parts, up on the Moors there.

We shut up a while, listening to the rain sile down. It’d be a time yet, before we got out the wood and I could show her that.

It’s only bent a little anyhow, I said.

I don’t care about the bracelet, I told you. It was from a Christmas cracker or something.

The set of her face didn’t even change when she said it, I marked, though she kept her gaze away from me. Christmas cracker, was it? What breed of nimrod did she think I was?

♦

She fell asleep toward the end the afternoon. All she’d had to eat was a couple of prawn sarnies and a palmful of nettle flowers, so I wasn’t much capped she was drained already. She lay on top her bag with her eyes open a while, glazed over staring at the roof of the wood, until she drowsied away. Her head was drooped backward, with nothing to prop up on, her neck stretched taut and white, tendons running lines under the skin. What did it matter I hadn’t gave her a bracelet myself? It was a band-end gift, probably cost him less than a pound, and anyhow, she’d not done a great lot to earn it off me, was the way I should’ve been thinking, it wasn’t me spending them afternoons by the fire with her.

I didn’t much feel like sleeping, so I went for a walk round the outside the wood, never mind it was teeming still. Maybe clean some of the muck off me. I took the empty water bottle to fill up, and soon as I stepped in the open, I was drenched with warm, claggy rain, and I wondered if maybe we were in for a thunderstorm. We’d be holed up in that wood for a while longer if one came, and I was itching to get on, specially now as she had a munk on. She’d be right, once we were going again, I knew. I strayed a way off from the wood toward a higher point from where I could view down across the plain, not fussing about the wet.

I reached the perch of land and scanned through the hagmist of rain, picking out what was visible below. Not Whitby, certain, or even the sea, the sky was that thick — mostly what I could see was the oilseed fields, not so bright and sparkly as earlier, dulled now, bleary, hugged around Garside, which was no doubting empty, all the folk retreated indoors with their beer bottles. Poor bald sod. He’d be mopping up floodwater until Christmas unless he’d got that window boarded up already.

A tiny drop of water was hanging off my eyelash. I blinked it off, trailing my view along the bank of hillside bordering the plain, and I marked a great sandy block sat halfway up, not far past the village — Garside Manor House. That was somewhere I’d not be taking her. I couldn’t even if I’d wanted, mind, for they didn’t let people in any more. When I was a sprog it used to be open for the public, they gave guided tours of the grounds and some of the rooms — herds of tourists gawking at tea sets and chandeliers with a hundred lights, and ropes stretched out to keep you from mucking the walls. Which poor bugger was it, had to replace the light bulbs each time they bust, was what I wanted to know? Not the family who owned the place, certain. They were too busy sat fuddled up in the private rooms, a giant coal-cob fire blazing as they blathered about the Glorious Twelfth and how much land they owned. Are you sure we don’t own the village? Are you really? Not even a part of it? How awful.

Before they stopped the tours, the family used to bunker up in them rooms while the goggle-eyes shuffled along other side the wall, staring at gold-framed paintings of the ancestors — a row of red-cheeked old bloaches with hair perms and grouse strung over their shoulders. All these stern faces sneering down. Well really, one of them is saying, his eyebrows snarled into crows’ nests, I certainly don’t approve of this — tourists trampling through the manor house. Quite so, pipes up Lord Lancaster the Second, from a painting further down the row, and have you seen? Chinese, some of them. Chinese, of all things.

Of all things, says Eyebrows.

It’s indecent, says Lord Lancaster.

You know, goes another bloach in the middle of the row, we did own the village once, back in the day. Eyebrows and Lord Lancaster lean in for a listen. Yes, he carries on, there was a time when you could look out from one of the south-facing windows, and as far as the eye would reach belonged to us.

The good old days, says Eyebrows.

The good old days, says Lord Lancaster.

♦

I turned back toward the wood to go dry off, the whole my body slathered with rainwater. They got their good old days returned, them bloaches. A government subsidy, not long back— Maintenance of Sites with Historic or Special Interest , it’d said in the newspaper, and they closed the place up afterward. The bloaches were fain pleased, that day. Father wasn’t. Where the fuck’s t’ sense in that, giving all that brass to them fuckers? Tha can’t eat a manor, eh?

She was sat up, awake, when I got back. Just been off on a wander, I told her, and it seemed she wasn’t mardy any more, for she gave a quick laugh when I said that, probably owing as I looked a champion sight, sogged through as a newborn lamb. You’d have to be proper daft to go on a wander while it was siling down like this. She was right, it was funny, I had to laugh and all. I sat down on my bag-buffit and shuftied myself comfortable, spying over when she wasn’t looking, tracing an eye over the shape of her. She had her chin rested on her palm, and I could see that the red swell on her wrist had near died away. I knew it wasn’t so bad as all that. It’d only seemed so bad because she’d pestered at it.

We ate the rest the sarnies, her looking up into the dusk above the trees. It’d stopped raining, I marked. I hadn’t noticed until then because there were still raindrops sputtering down aside us, but that was just water caught in the trees, gathering on the leaf-ends, dripping off.