Gaudete (13 page)

Flashbulbs all that has happened.

With hardly a footfall sound

Moving like a thought

He reaches his car and his fingers grip at the key which is

                                                                    not there –

He ransacks every pocket reasoningly

With tightrope walker’s care

While the evening thrushes ring out uncontrollably and

                                                     the swifts flare past.

His memory jinks back through every chance

                                                              misplacement.

He stands beside his car, stunned by the momentum of

                                                                           time,

Like one wedged against the piling weight in mid-river at

                                                        his limit of depth.

Then the men come round the house-end.

They have heard all that Maud can tell them.

Estridge is struggling with the irrelevance of trying to

                                                             stay in control.

The murdered girl, the church basement full of naked, drugged wives, and ritualistic hocus pocus – all that is something for a full enquiry.

But his arguments are lost in mid-torrent.

Evans’ trajectory is direct.

Garten’s face is just a flag, for any prevailing gust.

Holroyd has been convinced and now intends to settle his

                                               private account publicly.

And a number of others

If there is to be any talking, intend to talk with boots

                                                                          first.

Lumb comes towards them.

He is considering means of playing for a pause and

                                      entangling everybody in words.

But Walsall’s Alsatian

Already the most visibly incensed member of the mob

Liberated

Magnifies suddenly, bouncing towards Lumb

Like a hurtling, runaway wheel off a truck.

Lumb

Has a long second to marvel

At the demented personal malignity

Distorting the mask of this perfect stranger

As it hangs in mid-leap, level with his face, in a halo of

                                                              black bristles.

Then he is knocked backwards.

He lies, clear-headed, while the dog’s jaws rave like a

                   blurring power-saw within inches of his eyes.

He grips its muscled forelegs.

With all his might he wrenches them apart

And the dog’s snarl splits to a damaged yell.

In one move Lumb is up and swinging the coal-sack body

                                                      through a full circle

Like a hammer-thrower

To fetch the dog’s spine crack against the stone-built

                                                       corner of the garage.

The Alsatian collapses, gets up and careers away twisting

And collapses, chewing its yells.

The men pause, startled by his expert success.

But Walsall

Jerks a garden fork from the edge of a flower-bed and

                                                  lobs it like a harpoon.

It thumps Lumb’s left shoulder, and hangs.

He tugs it out but his setback and the obvious wound are

                                                                 two signals.

Nobody hears Estridge’s restraining shouts about due

                                                              process of law.

But Lumb

Has moved again, and has halted Evans

With a soil-solid flowerpot shattered against his chest,

And is away through the hedge.

He is running in the field above Smayle’s garden.

He disappears.

Just as Westlake drives up behind the rectory and

                                scrambles out with his twelve bore.

The mob gallop after Lumb shouting varied strategies.

Westlake and Estridge huddle back into Westlake’s car.

And full out

With elbowing vigour to spare and confidence to spare

Lumb bounds away uphill.

He flings loose plans ahead of him,

Letting them settle over the whole region, shaping

                                           themselves to the contours,

The woods, the roads, the paths and copses.

But looking back from that first skyline tree-fringe

He sees Garten and Holroyd and Evans are losing no

                                                              ground at all.

These men too are hardy animals of the same landscape

And their shouts rake him like missiles.

He lopes out along a hogback

Through ungrazed grass

Toughened with buttercup and young thistles

Toward a hill-crown clump of beeches, black against the

                                                         broad glare of sky,

Summit of power in the past.

Beyond that point, he knows, many escapes fall away

                                          diversely into blue distance.

He hoists each stride, trying to be the earth and to toss

                                             himself along weightlessly.

He shutters his awareness from the unmanageably tilting

                               planes of landscape to right and left

But a big thistle ahead is no help.

His fuel is burning too fast and smokily.

His knees tangle with their chemical limits.

His lungs are suddenly not those of a wolf or even a fox.

He imagines the furious micro-energy and stamina of the

                                                                        blue-fly

But the idea takes no hold.

The miles of otherworld rootedness weigh in against him.

Static trees are a police of unmoving.

He flounders a little,

Seeming to crawl on the floor of his anxiety

Which is as wide and bare as the sucking space of the sky

                                                     now poring over him,

And inspecting him tinily

Through a microscope,

Noticing most of all the immensity and immovability of

                                                    the grass on all sides.

With jarring and clambering strides

He hauls himself up among the sheep-worn ramparts of

                                                                            roots

And under the twisted lichen-splotched, lichen-corroded

Torsos of the beeches

And the stirring leaf mass in its first tenderness.

In the draughty gap among trunks

He lets his stopped body, which he had forced to keep

                                                                        moving,

Loll and lean to a tree.

His lungs churn, his body flames,

He feels mangled

As if his blood had been pouring through rough iron

                                                                     channels.

He watches Garten and Evans, toiling on the near slope

                                                       like plough-horses,

And far down to the right Holroyd running across.

He sees the whole vista scattered with jogging figures.

And now embracing the tree he flattens himself closely

                                                                         into it.

With fixed imagination he sinks nerves into the current of

                                                             the powerline.

He gulps dense oxygen, recharging his trembling leg-

                                                                         muscles

Which already the strength no longer quite fits.

He feels his separateness, his healed-over smallness,

            among the loose stones and the hoof-printed dust.

These boles are bleak as ruins.

The leaf-towers are too lofty and sparse.

The empty sky looks in from every direction. He looks

                                                                     out at it,

And staring down into the too wide-open world he sees

                                                         suddenly no hope.

The bronze polished light of the lowering sun is without

                                                       illusion of any sort.

It brings him a poisonous thinness like the taste of

                                                                       pennies.

Its shadows are prisonlike and depressing,

Hard-cut as machinery.

Every grass-blade wears its affliction of shadow.

The blueing bowl of landscape

Is a migraine of inescapable fixities, like sunglare in an

                                                     empty concrete pool.

A frightening sadness closes on him, as if he were

                                                                      shrinking,

And a futility

Grabs at his heart-beat, but he has already started

                                                  running away from it.

Holroyd’s farm is below.

He vaults a wire, he runs downhill with long, jolting strides

Through a constellation of cows,

Statues of darkness in corollas of fire.

He registers aridity of corrugated iron, cruelty of old nails

Stifling walls of tarred wood,

Creosote grubbiness of old sleepers walling a silage clamp,

The sterility of bare, stony hoof-hammered earth, fringed

                                               with nettles and hemlock.

He climbs to the barn loft

Feeling like an early evening rat.

A minute’s hiding, a minute’s stolen relief

In the happy place, the nest among cornsacks

Where he can press his face into the fustiness.

His deep, scorching breaths suck in the lingering of her

                                                                      perfume.

He groans under the collision of moments and sprawls,

                                                             like a casualty,

And with new fervour clenches his hands,

Opening all his loosened fibres to the globe’s power

And releasing a flood of sweat.

He makes himself nothing, he empties his body of all its

                                                                        history,

For the inrush of renewals and instructions.

He almost sleeps, in a luxury

Of these shortening seconds

In which they cannot possibly touch him

Before those seconds arrive made of their feet, their

                                                         shouts, their eyes.

For a long fantasy he is lost

In details of a court defence

But suddenly shouts are stabbing everywhere around him,

                                                           like torchbeams.

He shrinks.

He sheds everything into hungry darkness, he yields into

                                                    a raw black fieriness.

He launches his whole being into whatever it is that is

                                                           waiting for him.

An impulse bends him, with alacrity and lightness,

At the cock-loft window

As voices and steps climb the ladder to the loft behind

                                                                            him.

He drops twelve feet

Grosses through the near-empty dutch barn,

And runs out across grass, under a halo of gnats.

And now every stride

Multiplies towards freedom.

And every second

Deepens the defences behind him.

A hare jumps out of the earth and scuds away ahead,

                                        ears up, leaning like a yacht,

Like a guide.

Then shouts catch and trip him, eyes have gripped him.

A landrover is bounding over turf, hands cling where they

                                                                             can.

Runners are bobbing, heels drive deep moons among the

                                                                 wolf-spiders.

A banked thorn hedge, a tatter wool gap, is behind him.

Barbed wire, padded with bullock’s hair, is beneath him.

A high rail is strong enough, he vaults over it.

Sheep pour this way and that.

Bullocks gallop off their shock of excitement,

While the air rips in his throat, like a dry piston,

And the blood crisps on his left hand

And all the time his shoulder

Gnaws as if the whole arm-load

Were a swinging iron trap.

Till he topples over the rusty rail

Into the young plantation which is Hagen’s boundary.

He looks back

Just in time to see the landrover misjudge a banked hedge

And keel over, flinging out figures.

Small cries come to him.

He does not stay to identify

Dunworth sitting with his head in his hands letting blood

                                                       drip into the grass,

Or Walsall twisted at the awkward angle

Of minimum pain, eyes closed from the pursuit,

Or Evans and Garten

Leading with pitchforks away from the capsized vehicle.

Lumb splashes through brambles among the sparse young

                                                                       conifers.

Well into the thick, he drops, panting and listening.

Now he concentrates each particular second, cramming it

                                                                with recovery.

Long horizontal rays

Finger through the wood, kindling the floss-winged

                                                                    ephemera.

Safely distant pheasants challenge.

He closes his eyes, trying to feel back to the sure root of

                                                                      guidance.

He feels his sinewy second wind clearing itself, and his

                                                             blood renewing.

He pushes on, foxy-cautious and alert

In a fierce haste, that lifts aside the brambles delicately

                                                        as setting a snare.

The low spare plantation is crisp and weary in the late sun.

A few butterflies hither and thither together aimlessly.

Specks with legs crawl glittering on stems, as if in a

                                                                  dusty sweat.

Wherever he looks down

Through the rafters of grass and weeds

Ants are racing from crisis to crisis.

Baffled shouts probe the plantation.

He flattens under brambles, in a drainage channel,

And watches Garten wading past, face glossed in the level

                                                                            sun,

The pitchfork glinting.

As the shouts go off

He sidles along low and comes to a rail and peers over

To reconnoitre forward.

He pulls himself erect.

A light electric shock touches him.

The landrover’s horribly familiar mass is there, ten yards

                                                                         away.

It emits a shout.

Lumb realises with nausea he has come in a circle, like a

                                                                  simple fool.

Simultaneously

An explosion encloses his head, like a sudden bag.

Shot slashes weak leaves.

A pain clubs his fingertip.

He drops, dragging backwards, and turns, and runs

In lit smoking of pollen and dust.

Another blind shot wounds the wood’s depth dully.

He leaps on different grounds.

And now in a roofless tumblestone linney, he props

                                                himself back in a corner.

Burdock, nettles, brambles mound over tile-heaps and

                                                              jags of beams.

He fights to quiet his breath forcibly and to repair his

                                                              shaking body.

The sweat melts on his face full in the facing hot-coin sun.

A crackling approaches, Lumb withers into his corner,

And Evans, pushing in over the debris, positions himself

                                                                      leisurely

And urinates ponderously on to a camp of nettles, with a

                                                                    hard sigh.

Turning, contemplative, he meets Lumb’s stare

Who even now feels he might slide aside from under this

                                                    confrontation unseen.

But Evans’ incredulous ‘Bloody Hell!’ splits with a bellow

                                                 to the whole landscape.

The gloating pitchfork, prongs downfanged, inches

                                                   gleaming toward Lumb

Slowly tightening this corner to certainty

While Evans’ face tightens, as if he were to splinter the

                                               levelled shaft in his grip.