Sarah Hall: The Beautiful Indifference: Stories

Maybe I’ll go down and see Kathleen,

A swallow comes and tells me of her dreams.

Soon I’m gonna see my sweet Kathleen.

Mostly when we went out it was around town, between the pubs, wherever Manda thought she might catch sight of a lad she was interested in. Sometimes, if one of her brothers didn’t mind us coming with him on a delivery or to a gig, we went to the city of Carlisle. It was always a mad trip up, with stupid steering and breakneck overtaking, because the lads loved speed. They loved it on horseback, motorbikes, skis; any vehicle they could make accelerate to flatten their brains against their skulls.

There were two main roads from town — the old toll road, and the Roman, which was nearly disused and cut past the wither of Lazonby Fell. And there was the M6. It was a deserted piece of motorway — the last run before Scotland, so it felt like everything was petering out.

I’d sit rammed up against the window, my cheek pressed coldly against it, holding the seatbelt tight across my chest. Manda fought for control of the radio dials while one of her brothers drove. Usually it was Aaron, who would shoot the cambers as if he was on a private racetrack. We crossed that hinterland as people still do now, and they always have done, and they likely always will, regardless of police traps and cameras — moving flat out, at reckless speeds, as if being pursued.

I hated all the passages up to the city; that eerie twenty-five-minute slew. Something always seemed to be at our backs along there. These were the original badlands you were taught in school, if you didn’t already know. You wouldn’t want to linger. You wouldn’t want to be caught alone, moving slow and obvious in the lowland. This was where the raiders met, coming south or north. This was burnt-farm, red-river, raping territory. A landscape of torn skirts and hacked throats, where roofs were oiled and fired, and haylofts were used to kipper children. And if you rolled down the window you could just about hear it — the alarms and crackling flames, women split open and screaming as their menfolk choked on sinew pushed down their gullets. The houses in the Borders, if they weren’t fortified, were temporary, made of spit and cattle shit and wattle, easy to dismantle, because when the reivers came you either held fast behind eight hewn feet of rock, or you packed up and ran.

The van leaned hard round chicanes, forcing my cheekbone harder to the glass, with Aaron singing away to the Roses. Manda seemed fearless on the ride. She seemed to trust the run of things. But I imagined terrible events — wrecks and busted spleens. Adrenalin cleaved my brain wide open, and the giversum old county clambered in. It was said by trainers that up here the gentlest horse could nostril the smoulder of years gone by, taste clinker and burnt skin on the haunted vaults, and it might rear and toss its rider. And for all the Roman straightness, cars would often overturn. There were countless places where wreaths were laid. Even my dad, usually sedate behind the wheel, leaned hard on the accelerator with his mucky welly through these stretches, not checking the rear-view mirror. He’d fail to indicate when moving lanes; swerve hard as the Land Rover was swiped by gusts from the Pennines. Long-distance drivers, returning home to London and Birmingham, Stafford and Manchester, would often find franked letters from the Cumbrian Police, with points for their licence and a hefty fine, and they couldn’t quite fathom why they were clocked going over ninety.

On several occasions Aaron Slessor almost killed us driving to Carlisle, and on every one I hated him a bit more. He kept the music loud and ignored us, except for the odd glance at my legs now and then. He went after hares on the tarmac, terrorised other motorists by sitting on their bumper until they moved out of his way. He’d take the back road along the moors, by the Caldew river, brackish as old copper, because it was straight and hummocked and he could try to get all four wheels of the van off the ground. He dropped me home late after each trip, where my dad would be asleep on the sofa with the telly turned low. Aaron didn’t complain about ferrying me to and fro, he seemed just to like the drive, the fords and hairpins through the villages. Once or twice he’d ask for a kiss as I was getting out and I’d shove him back and say get lost.

You’re pretty enough to lick out, he’d say. Stop being spooky.

At nineteen he was the youngest of the Slessor lads, and he’d an almighty chip on his shoulder about that, a desire to be the belted champion in the family. Geordie never got weak enough in his later years not to batter him. If anything he brayed him all the harder — the old family bull recognising his fighting days were close to over. That his youngest son took less interest in the horses than the others, while driving the Heltondales tighter on each racecourse’s slalom, riled him no end.

Gudfernobbut twat, he called his son. Runty mutt. You’ll amount to fuck all in this life, except laying rugs round fucking bogs.

Amateur brawlers from the town sought Aaron out, because it was said that to beat him in a fight was to take title over the town. He’d left school not a day after hitching sixteen, and started work at the carpet outlet. He was a looker, with the royal swagger of his old man. I’d seen him go to work on a lass. He had the ability to cut through what little pride she had, to strip her of common sense and condition her to waiting by the phone, waiting outside a pub in the rain, waiting for the characteristic bastard’s alba a few weeks later when he’d got bored — telling her she had a dry quim, old biddy skin, fat belly, or spots on her arse, and that’s why he no longer fancied her.

Nor was he discreet about his conquests. The details of them — the gasps, the games and sexual proclivities — were the chatter of the town for weeks after. How it had been in a horse-trailer and she’d knelt in fresh shit to suck him off. How he’d had her right after her sister in the same evening, a double-dipper. So that his circle of friends had the knowledge of any of his exes they needed before asking them out. And Aaron would occasionally revisit them, Friday nights, if something interested him enough in a bare leg or split skirt, a new look, a haircut. And they’d let him.

It wasn’t common that I stayed home. They liked company, the Slessors. They liked having noise and new faces about them. I never felt unwelcome. But the summer after I got to know Manda my father started to notice me being gone. And he said it was a shame, him losing my mam and now me. The guilt made me hang around for most of the holidays, even though he was out rounding and clipping all day, the house was too chill for the season and it made me fidgety. In the mornings I’d phone up Manda, or she’d phone me.

Oh bugger, Kathleen, can’t you come in? she’d say. I’m lonely. I’m going to get some new lippy. Fine, alright, ta-rah.

Then I’d go walking along a scrubby lonning in the village and up the Scar, knowing she’d soon be off into town, having a good time with someone else. From the summit I could see the beacon in the distance, trains dribbling down the main line, and the ponds of the trout fishery glimmering. On the way home I’d pass by a dilapidated farm, littered with rusting metal-seated tractors, derricks and machinery, tarpaulin strewn about in the yard. The owner of the place was a rare bastard. He could be heard in the evening yelling obscenities at his dogs and throwing their bowls at them. There’d be howls and yips and yelps. He had any number of hounds and collies, all rangy and greasy, and half-mad with the frustration you see in workers not put to the flocks.

The farm lay just past a dolt of brambles; I’d pass it after coming through the thorny lane, unsnagging my jeans with a twist of the hips every other step, my arms held overhead. It smelled of Swarfega and slurry, dirt and iron, and something sick, like industry and arable wrongly mixed. The man was known in our village for his bad treatment of animals, though he didn’t keep many past the dogs, a handful of bantams, and the occasional pony or scabby penned-in pig. No one reported him to the RSPCA, for doubtless then they’d have to look into their own barns.