Fiona Mozley - Elmet

‘I would. I do. Please tell me.’

‘I just. I just knew that the only way I could regain any kind of control over it all — over myself, my body, the situation — was if that control was complete. My action had to outweigh anything he might do by such a long way that he woundt even have the chance to act. Because, with the way things were set up between us, he had many chances; I had one. So I took it. It was like everything inside me came together in one moment to a single point and that point was my clasped grip around his throat. I held him like that, tightly, for minutes and minutes. Long after he was dead. I had to make sure. Like I said, I had one chance.’

‘I didn’t even know he was there at the racecourse,’ I said. ‘Either of Mr Price’s sons. I handt thought on him much since all this, not since they came to see us that time, and I took them around the copse.’

‘I suppose you woundt. I dindt say anything about it and there’s been other things to think about. He’d been having a go for a while though. You know I dindt like staying at Vivien’s for her lessons so I used to go outside and go round about. I’d go for walks and sometimes just sit beneath a tree or whatever or I’d go and see if I could spot some birds. Just to occupy myself, you know. I were never much into what you and Vivien like. Reading and that. So that’s what I did. Although I’d find myself interrupted by those lads, Tom and Charlie. It happened once that they were out with their dogs and guns and the dogs found me lying on my stomach by a fox den, waiting to see the kits. I’d been going to that spot for a few days, after I’d seen where the den was and that the fox — the dog fox — was going back and forth with food, like it would if it was bringing it home for a suckling vixen. I’d been waiting there for the last few days for the chance of seeing something. And then I heard the hounds howling, coming towards me. I thought they’d got the scent of the foxes, maybe they had, they would have flushed it for the lads to shoot. But then they got my scent and came at me and I jumped up from the grass and Tom had his gun pointed in my direction. I thought he were going to shoot. Maybe that’s what he wanted me to think. And the dogs were all yapping and sniffing round me like it was my scent they’d been given all along. Tom lowered his gun and they came forward. They wanted a chat, they said. I gave them what they wanted, answered their stupid questions, laughed at their stupid jokes. Then I told them after a while that I had to get home and they seemed okay with that. Only they found me again a few days later. And then again.’

Cathy was hunched over her knees. She rested her chin on one and put her hands on her shoes to play with the laces. ‘And well,’ she said, ‘that’s how it went.’

‘Why dindt you say owt to Daddy?’

‘Because it were my thing. It were my problem to deal with. I can’t always go to Daddy whenever anything happens. I have to be able to deal with things by myself.’

‘But not this.’

‘Yes this. Yes this. This were my part of it. Daddy had other stuff to deal with. Daddy and Ewart and the others had to do what they were doing. The Prices were coming at us from all sides and this was my part. And Daddy won’t always be around. And even if he is, it is my life and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified by it all, all o’ the time. Because I am, Danny, I am. And I don’t want to be. I don’t want to feel afraid. All I kept thinking about was Jessica Harman, thrown into that canal, and all those other women on the TV, in newspapers, found naked, covered in mud, covered in blood, blue, twisted, found in the woods, found in ditches, never found. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about them. Sometimes I can’t stop thinking about how I’m turning into one of them. I’m older now and soon my body will be like theirs. I dindt want to end up in a ditch. I dindt want that any more than you want to be a fighting man like Daddy, or a labouring man, out sorting potatoes on a farm all day until your limbs get caught and broken and chopped in the dirty machinery, dirty iron and dirty steel. We all grow into our coffins, Danny. And I saw myself growing into mine.’

I took hold of my sister’s hand. The light seeping into our jail from the high windows darkened as she spoke, filtered by a sombre parade of ashen clouds. It had been hot for days. Hot and humid and dense and now the engulfing heavens were trapping the heat within like the stone lid over a sarcophagus.

We remained in the shed for at least a day, a night, and another day, but we slept for much of it, curled together like caterpillar and leaf. Food was brought. Bread and jam at breakfast, a couple of microwave pizzas in the evening. We had not eaten anything like it for months, not since school dinners. I was not used to so much white bread. My insides ached. And they were tight with nerves.

Neither of us recognised the men who brought the food. They were different each time. They shuffled in, placed the tray down, then they left. I looked behind them through the opened door to the outside on each occasion but noted nothing. Each vista was a quiet simulacrum of the last: duller, hazier, but no significant alterations. From these brief glimpses of outside I could gauge no movement, no changes to provoke either concern nor hope.

In the evening of the second day, three men came to the shed. The bolts were shunted open and the key turned in the lock. They waited outside.

‘You’re to come,’ said one. He stood in the middle, slightly forward of the other two.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Cathy.

‘You’re to come, that’s all. You’ll find out soon enough, young lady.’

Neither Cathy nor I moved.

‘You’ll be coming either way,’ said the man. He was trying to menace but it was clear he had no real power. Such things can easily be discerned from very little contact. The merest waver in a man’s voice, the smallest declination of the eyes to the floor, a look of minute sympathy. He said, ‘You’ll be coming the easy way or the hard way.’

‘Right. Yeah. Well. You could just tell us where we’re going then we’d probably come, woundt we?’

The man in the middle looked to either side for support. One of them shrugged. The other just stared at Cathy.

‘We’re taking you up to see Mr Price.’

‘Right then,’ said Cathy. ‘In that case, we’re definitely coming.’ She got up and I followed. ‘Was that the easy way?’ she asked as we stepped across the threshold.

He might have given her a clip round the ear but I could tell he was afraid. She was nothing to him in size, of course, but my sister always had a certain manner. There’s power in the truth. In saying what you really mean. In being direct.

We walked with the three men through the back garden. There were further outhouses, a network, for tools, for boots, for guns. We weaved through vegetable patches and greenhouses, other potting sheds. The men did not lead us into the house but around it, on a thin gravel path that skirted the outer wall. We came to the front of the house and to an oval forecourt that stood before the steps up to the grand double front doors. Seven or eight vehicles, of different sorts, were parked around. I recognised Mr Price’s Land Rover, and his Jaguar. There were the Transit vans, and also a pick-up truck with a dirty tarpaulin flung over something bulky in the back.

Another group of men, possibly fifteen, were huddled. Hands in the pockets of dark jackets, all. Mr Price was among them, centred, gazing out towards the perimeter of his property, where an emerald hedge stood high.

The doors of the van we had come down in were open. Its engine was choking. The air around was black with exhaust. The stench hit my nostrils.