Ross Raisin - Gods Own Country

Ikept to the Moors after that. Each afternoon, when I’d filled the troughs or whatever else Father had said, I’d fetch the whelps and go up. I felt peaceable there, once I reached the brow where the Moors lashed out, a million miles of heather and gorse and rock but not a person in sight. The whelps were small enough still I could take them up in the wheelbarrow, though I let Sal ride on my shoulder. She lay there, serious as a soldier, scanning over the land, until I set her down with the others and spriggets of heather towered over them like giant bloody oaks where they gadabouted round.

I could stay up there a stack of hours, lost with myself, nothing to bother me but the slap of wind on my chops — time slowly emptying all thought out my body till I was light as lambs’ wool. Except for her. Niggling at my senses. I kept playing the time outside the window when she’d said — who was the farmer, Dad? — only each time I heard her say it I got her voice mixed with a lass off some television programme about a school, even though her voice was nothing similar, far as I could remember. It was daft stewing on a girl like that. I tried to shove her to the back of my skull.

One of them moor days we wandered further out than normal, as far as the bridleway. There was a car parked up aside it. It was tottering in the wind. Likely it’d been junked — town lads sometimes goated about with thieved vehicles up here, because of the vast, and because they were bored off their backsides with canning lager and smashing up phone boxes. I left the whelps digging at the turf and nosed up to the car with my blood racing as I halfways expected a dead body inside. But when I glegged in, it was nothing dead, it was a pale, bare arse bobbing away. A pair of kids humping. I spied in, watching as he bred her, the car rocking with each shunt.

Fucking romantic, that, humping on a car seat in the middle of a moor. Hadn’t they beds enough down there, they had to come up here in secret? Probably his sister.

I hadn’t much of a view with him lying on top — all she had showing was a slop of hair and a shiny pair of knees — so I left them at it. I hadn’t much of a care for watching his pimply backside.

♦

You’re keeping to the tops a lot, these days, Mum said to me one night.

I am. I’m walking the pups.

You shouldn’t be getting too warm on them. They get plenty enough of that in the yard, and you know some’ll be for t’ bucket.

I didn’t quit my wanderings, though. The whelps ran themselves empty each of them afternoons until I brought them back, pow-fagged, to Jess. Bleeding heck, she’d look up at me, you’ve fair knackered them out, and she licked them all over with her big scratchy tongue. Don’t worry, old girl, I told her, I’m just training them up.

Mum hadn’t nothing to worry herself about, neither. There was no trouble for me to start on the Moors. As long as I was up there, I couldn’t be prowling about town or bothering the new family, so I didn’t know what she was riled for. When I was a bairn I’d kept on the Moors all the time. She’d never been fussed then. I was always up there, them days, messing about with dogs, and sometimes my friend from the school, making fires, rabbit-hunting. Them were good days. Even if I was pot-of-one, it didn’t matter — when you’re a bairn you can please yourself just digging a big hole in the turf until the water shows through the bottom — hello there, is that a worm? One for the collection — and you don’t have to worry about dead chickens, or girls niggling at your senses.

♦

Father told me he needed a stretch of fencing from the hardware store, so I had to forget the Moors one afternoon and take the tractor into town. It was looking like I’d be there a fair while and all, as I queued up behind old calf-head Jackie, listening to him moan on at Dennis Bennett other side the counter.

I’ll tell you one thing, and I’d tell t’ same to any as’d care to listen.

Go on, Jack, go on.

Well, I will. I’m telling you, I’ve supped my last in that establishment, for all I might be thirsty.

You do right, Jack, me an’all.

I rested my roll of fencing on the floor. A grand gesture, that was, Dennis Bennett refusing to sup in the Betty, seeing as he never went there anyhow, he drank in the Maypole.

Thirty-three year I’ve been drinking in that establishment, eh, said Jack. He paused, picturing up all the interesting things had happened during that time. And I wrote t’ same on that there petition.

I thought it were just a list of names, the petition?

It was, aye, but I took meself two lines.

Bloody hell.

These were dark days for the old boys in town, certain. The shadows of the cities were sneaking in both sides of the valley, and there was nothing any of them could do about it but for mawnging, specially now the shadows had met in the centre of town — the Fat Betty. It’d sold for a fair pocket, Father said, and old Jackie could moan and keep me waiting all he liked, he wasn’t going to stop them branding the Betty for a chain pub. The brewery already had a string of them down the valley — in Addleston, Lockby and Thorpe Head — the lot of them the same but with a distinguishing feature , like a family of inbreds.

Your father ne’er signed petition, eh, Marsdyke? Jack had bought his items and fixed his flappy old face on me.

He doesn’t drink in town, I said.

Well, ‘e should’ve signed, all t’ same.

He picked up his items — a bag of screws and a saucepan — and buggered out the door, griping quietly into his beard. Daft old sod. He was half asleep most times he was in the Betty. What difference was it to him if they changed the decorations? Likely he was worried the brewery might bring in some other old calf-head with the new carpets and the wine glasses, who’d take over his buffit in the corner, mumble into his pint in Jack’s place.

Doing some fencing, are you? Dennis Bennett eyed me down his nose. No, I’m making a bleeding cage, for to keep my victims in, what the hell did he think it was for?

I slung the fencing in the back the tractor and, as I didn’t much fancy getting home yet, I took a walk through town. There were plenty of folk about. I didn’t recognise many of them, though, as I went down the street, which was fine by me, until it hit me the family might be there and I stopped, looking around, only steadying up when I was sure they weren’t near. There were other new families, mind. They all trotted round similar, gawping at the pubs and the hills as if they’d never seen the like. Because they hadn’t, probably. Their places were different than this, places with jobs and wealth and land so flat you couldn’t hide a gatepost sideways.

Wait on, lad! Wait on!

It was Norman, blustering up behind me, a waxy new Barbour on.

I’m fain glad to see you, I am. I want to ask on yer father. How’s he keeping?

He’s middlin’.

Grand. Grand. He put a hand on my shoulder. Turnbull and yer father were tight as nuts, weren’t they?

They drank together, I said, inching back from the hand. He reeked of Saturday spray, tangling with his more natural reek of cattle-muck.

Get on! They were tighter than ale-partners, them pair. A pair of old rogues together, they were. His cheek bulged a slow wink over his eye. He wasn’t a bad type, old Norman. Send my greetings to him, will you, lad? And yer mother too.

I nodded, and watched him cross the street to get in a new motor. A proper fancy one. Why the bugger Norman was sat in it, I didn’t know. He was spending some fair brass, somehow, new coat, new car, Father wouldn’t be happy.

I was hungry, so I went up the butcher’s, my mouth juicing for a steak bake, but I’d forgot it’d been closed down a month since, and when I got there it wasn’t the butcher’s any more, it was The Green Pepper Deli. I took a look in the window. Last time I’d been here, there were rabbits strung up and bloody hunks ofbeef dripping on to the counter, but now it was all shiny jars on shelves and a tray of olives pricked with little sticks. Go on — try one. No, thanks, I’d rather get my jaw round a hot steak bake, do you have any of them in your jars? Do you bollocks.