‘I thought I’d see you this evening,’ she said again. ‘You’re going off to the fight tomorrow, aren’t you? Your father is set on it, then?’
‘I believe so. Why do you ask?’
‘Because I think it’s a risk,’ she said, bluntly. ‘I’ve seen the man he is facing and I think your father could lose.’
I did not know what to say. Certainty had been running away from me for weeks.
‘Why will he lose?’
‘Because he’ll be fighting against a much younger man.’
‘A man who’s inexperienced, then. A man who’s not been tested.’
‘Oh, he’s certainly been tested, but not around here so your Daddy wouldn’t know him. He’s been brought over from Eastern Europe. Ukraine. I think you should urge him to pull out,’ she continued. ‘I’m worried about him. He won’t feel the shame of it, I know. For a man like him, who lives the life he leads, he’s remarkably unconcerned by shame.’
‘But he has to. He has to for others. And for house.’
She was paler than she had been when we had first met. Clots of black mascara had smudged onto her eyelids.
‘So you won’t?’
I shook my head, and soon after got up to leave. She did not attempt to change my mind. She knew what we were all like, Daddy, Cathy and me. She hugged me on the way out, for a long time. I half thought she was going to kiss me on the cheek but she did not. She put her hand briefly through my hair and gave me a gentle nudge out the door.
I ran back along the road with the dogs and up the hill as the evening settled in earnest. I saw swifts darting around catching the small flies that had just slipped from their chrysalises. Jess and Becky had grown tall and lean these last months, with all their power stored in their taut back legs. They chased around me and each other in huge loping circles as I stuck to the path.
I returned to find that Daddy had gone to bed early. Cathy was still up in the kitchen, smoking. She was excited and awake and alive. The thought of Daddy losing had not flown through her. She was as bright as ever I had seen her.
That night, I lay awake staring at the wall in the dim moonlight, at the creases and crevices left by my father’s rough plasterwork, at his thumb prints, finger prints, the curve of his pallet knife, the sweep of the plaster that matched the motion of his right arm.
When I did sleep I dreamt of a long walk home beneath the calls of roosting starlings.
Chapter Seventeen
The dawn erupted from a bud of mauve half-light and bloomed bloody as I woke. My lips stretched to a wide yawn as I sucked into my warming lungs the cool breeze that threaded a path through the open window. My eyes were tired and I saw the room in rapid stills through flickering lashes. Condensed sweat adhered the frayed cotton bed sheets to my bare skin. I had glowed hot during the night, hot from fitful dreams and restless limbs, and now shivered in the comparative chill.
I rose and wove cautious steps into the wet room. We had no shower but a stiff tap to release hot water. It gushed intermittently. The power came from a wood-burning boiler, lit each morning by whoever woke first. It heated sufficient water for three to pigeon wash, spilling the water into a bucket beneath the tap and onto the stone floor as we cast it under our armpits, our groins, our necks, faces and ears, our feet, and our legs, arms and torsos.
I splashed the steaming water onto my sticky skin and stroked it lightly with a bar of soap. My hands puckered red and white but I held them still beneath the tap. I rinsed my body and dried it with a small square of towel then slipped myself into fresh and crinkled clothes.
I stepped out into the hall and caught the sour scent of kippers poaching in milk. We ate them with white, buttered bread and fresh orange juice, a gift from the milkman.
At 7 o’clock, we heard the sound of Ewart Royce’s Volvo estate on the coarse gravel outside. The wheels slowed and stopped before we heard the brakes. Two doors shunted open then clipped shut. A knock echoed from the door. Cathy opened it.
‘Your car.’ Ewart looked darker, older, more stern. Nerves treated people differently. Our anxieties were focussed on the same target but each from a different angle and with their own tints.
Martha waited by the vehicle and opened the boot as we stepped out with the bags and the dogs. Daddy climbed into the front seat and Martha got in behind him. Ewart was to drive, Cathy took the right-hand back seat and I sat in the middle between my sister and Mrs Royce.
We were bashed together as the car took the choppy track down our hill. The journey was hardly smoother on the open roads. In these parts they were puckered with potholes from icy winters and acid rain. On the worst roads the potholes were connected by cracks that had filled with sediment and organic material, compacted by passing cars before the weeds had managed to fully breach the tarmac. It made for a rough ride.
We spoke very little. Martha issued a handful of directions to Ewart and Ewart spoke once to ask for the time. Otherwise we were quiet. Cathy gazed out the window with her nose pressed gently against the smeared glass. Daddy breathed deeply. He did not turn his head. The back of his neck was covered with a film of perspiration that sparkled so clearly it was as if it had frozen into minuscule crystals of ice.
I glanced around at my companions, more interested in them than I ever could be by the world outside. After ten minutes of driving Martha reached over and gripped my left hand. Her palm was hot. I felt the steady pulse in her thumb and a warm band of gold on her ring finger. Her firm fingernails were set in acrylic.
We arrived at the racecourse forty-five minutes after leaving our house. We took the track around the perimeter fence to the grove behind. We drove between the trees, ash and oak like in our own copse. Brittle, fallen twigs and branches snapped beneath our wheels. The track was too narrow. Brackens, ferns and wild garlic had overtaken its sides and pressed against the vehicle’s body.
We came to a fork in the road. One route had been churned by previous cars, vans and four-by-fours. The other was strangely smooth, almost untouched. It was as if it had been flooded and the waters had soaked into the ground and evaporated into the air, leaving an even layer of sticky silt on that track and that track only, like a heavy toffee glaze.
As the car turned into the right fork I craned my neck to look back to the unused path. It was barren, more a strip of diseased or salted earth than a walkway. It led into a clearing where grass could find sunshine and push through the compressed earth and netted moss.