The Long Dry (5 page)

‘Mummy says she wasn’t strong enough to pull the calf out by herself and that’s why it died,’ she said. He looked at her. ‘No, love. This one wasn’t made properly – look, can you see? It hadn’t grown properly. It was dead already love, it just had to come out.’ It played on him that this was the second death like this today and he knew now that throwing the other calf down the well was a problem. A fault in the stock? He thought of his wife. She was still shouting, he could hear her. Inside he wondered if it was his fault – if he had been too long. She came from a rural town and she was used to farms but she was not born to be on a farm as he was. He felt his anger go, this time; it had died down and receded.

‘Go and tell Mum I need some soap and water and she might have to help me pull now. This one is a twin.’ Emmy ran off up the field. She ran very importantly.

He ate alone. Kate had not helped him with the cow. He was sad that he had hurt her by shouting at her; but not sad because the thing was bad, more sad in the way we are sad when we hurt a weaker animal. He was sad about having more strength than her.

Dylan was supposed to have taken the bread crates back but he hadn’t, so Gareth took the bread crates out of the van and hosed them down and enjoyed the cool water and left them against the wall to dry in the sun.

He came inside and soaped down his arm and the warm soft water felt good on him. He’d meant to get a gas bottle changed that week and there was a note on the cooker saying ‘no gas’ so he had bread and cheese. He’d tried to phone his son to ask him to collect more gas, but his mobile was switched off. So he left a message but knew he wouldn’t collect the gas. He should ask the vet about the two dead calves, because there might be a big problem.

His wife was upstairs with a headache. He didn’t know anymore whether he believed in these headaches or not. It was like she could switch them on and off, but he hated thinking this. He also thought that the violence of her anger nowadays could bring on these headaches. He thought: she is angry first, and it comes up as a headache, because there is nowhere for so much anger to go.

He tried to sip his coffee but it was filthy. Without the gas he couldn’t warm the pan so he’d tried to heat it up by adding hot water from the kettle but it made it thin and weak and it tasted wrong.

He threw the coffee in the sink. It’s not the headache making her angry, it’s her. Her emotions are triggers, they trigger chemicals and she gets ill. It could just be her eyes, he thinks. He knows bad eyes can lead to headaches. But she won’t have them checked. It could just be this constant heat. Her fair skin in the sun. He wondered whether he
should go and see her but he knows it is better not to. She was like a grenade when she was like this. Simply going to her could be like putting back the pin, would diffuse her anger. Or she might just explode. In the rare times she was angry, Emmy was like this too; but she was so scowling and tiny and compact that she even looked like a grenade and they joked about it. When she was angry she was very furious which made them love her very much.

She sits at the table, drawing in her sketchbook now. Zebra watches her, and she talks while she draws. When she draws it is not with the excessive gestures of a child her age but it is small; as if everything on the paper is vital. The drawing overflows with details, so much so that she always must explain things to people when she shows them; the different instruments and inhabitants of the worlds she creates, which are always progressing somewhere, always in story, never strange, isolated still lives. If you asked her about her picture she always answered in colour: ‘that’s a red mushroom, a bright green dress’; but she never coloured in. ‘I know what colours that they are,’ she would say. She draws only from memory, she won’t look and draw, as if the realness of a thing will destroy its place in her picture for it. She says she doesn’t have the right pencils for the colours she sees.

Once, Gareth asked her about the tiniest cloud of almost unseeable dots. ‘They’re a cloud of lacewings that we saw today’ she said, ‘only they’re so small you cannot see they’re lacewings.’ She always made distinctions between lacewings and fairies. There was no fooling her. When they had seen them that day, Gareth had said ‘look, fairies.’ ‘No, they’re insects,’ she said, ‘but I can see why a grown
up thinks they are fairies.’ To her, lacewings were just as magical as fairies anyway.

The first time they knew about her strangeness was when she came into their room one night and said, without being frightened, ‘Mummy there’s a man on the stairs.’ ‘You were dreaming,’ they said, and asked her into their bed. After a while, she said perfectly sensibly ‘there was a man, but he wasn’t nasty. I was playing with my dolls and he talked to me through the door. I think he knows the little boy I see.’ Since then they have learned to let her speak with these people. There is always a strange calmness to her, a sureness, as if she is listening always to an invisible music.

Now she’s drawing a world of frogs and fairies: fairies underwater (which they can be, she says), and frogs and tadpoles and half-frogs – her word for them. He remembered her making the word.

They’d taken frog spawn from the pond in April before the ducks got at them. When the house came alive with tortoiseshell butterflies waking up. Two weeks later, more or less, the tadpoles hatched in the old glass tank; but it was three months or so before they grew their legs. Emmy watched them every day, from the moment they collected the frogspawn in a jar. They were constantly incredible to her. The black dots turning to the shape of fish inside the funny jelly, then the tadpoles hatching; and when the legs grew she pretended to believe that they were little people
trapped inside fish. Gareth hadn’t told her what they were.

The big ones ate some of the small ones, which horrified her, and she watched them change. It seemed a long time, to her, before they started to look like frogs and she guessed that’s what they were, though they still had little tails.

They let them go in June. There was one though which had hardly changed yet from a tadpole, and which had not been eaten by the others. They thought it was simply a bad tadpole. But in June, perhaps July, it too began to change, but differently from the frogs, and when it took on the shape of a lizard Emmy was amazed. She thought it was a frog trying to become a prince.

Gareth remembers too the time he tried to explain to her about dandelions, which she loved – perhaps because of the magic of their changing too. Her love for things which weren’t what you thought they were. She loved to play with dandelion clocks ever since his mother had shown her how to tell the time with them, this spurious decision as to time complying with Emmy’s way of seeing the world.

She had spent a long time picking dandelion flowers one day and they were proudly laid out on her bedroom floor. When they hadn’t changed to clocks by the next morning she thought perhaps it was because she kept peeking and magic only happed when you didn’t look. Gareth tried to explain that they had to be alive to turn to clocks. ‘But they are dead when they are clocks,’ she said. ‘Well, they’ve changed’ he tried to say. ‘They have to be alive to change.

The flower has to die to change into seed. They die to make more dandelions.’ One dandelion dying makes a thousand new flowers. ‘People don’t do that, do they?’ she said. ‘No,’ said Gareth. ‘People don’t do that.’

Emmy had helped him with the cow – with bringing out the second calf which was a healthy brown calf. She had come back stumbling across the grass with a heavy mop bucket full of soapy water and a towel over her shoulder which kept slipping so she had to set down the bucket and pick it up. Then she’d heave up the bucket again with two hands and start again with the bucket knocking and spilling off her legs and over her wellies as she walked. She absolutely loved her wellies, even in this weather. She’d had the long important talk of children with her zebra and left him by the gate.

‘Mummy’s got a headache so I’m being her,’ she said.

He’d heard himself think ‘don’t ever be her’ and he knew underneath then that he would have to be careful now because the residue of his anger was still there and he didn’t want it to come out. If it came out it would be very bad.

He made the rubbing sound with his finger and tried to read the paper but just thought. He had thought that the other twin would be dead too but it wasn’t. While he was
feeling inside the cow he was almost begging for it to be alive, to bring something good from this, and if it was good he wanted Kate to be there to see it turn good. Emmy was bending over the mother cow, patting the rolled knots of hair above her eyes and copying her father, saying, ‘easy girl, okay girl.’ From far away they heard another farmer calling to his sheep – every farmer calls a different way and if you are not a farmer you cannot call to animals without thinking you are stupid.

The calf came out and it was big and strong and healthy and it lay out panting and full with breath as he brought it round to its mother’s snout so she could know it and clean her calf. Emmy still patted the cow’s soft head saying ‘good girl, good girl’ and looking strangely at the new calf. He thinks of her doing this now as he sits at the table with the paper in his hands, and he thinks of her running to get the warm water.

It feels like everything in my head is going to explode. If I move at all. Like if anything touches me I’ll smash up. There’s a sharp point of light coming in through a hole – a loose thread – in the curtain. It’s like that sharp point of light, this pain; all of me crowds in on it, as if my whole life is just what is around it, a dark curtain. I shouldn’t have shouted at Emmy.

I wish he would come up. I can hear him downstairs, laughing with Emmy. I wish he would come. I shouldn’t get so angry, but he should have been there, he dreams too much. I know he is angry with me, but I wish he would come.

She cares. She worries. She worries about him getting the land, and about her son in his car, and Emmy playing outside. She worries about Bill going mad and the gas bottle being too close to the cooker, and the calves that will die anyway and the sheep that fall sick.

She worries that one day they’ll be too old to farm and he knows she thinks sometimes of a bungalow, but it would break him, her husband, and she knows that too.

He wants the land because he knows this, and he knows his children will not take on the farm; but he cannot bear to leave the place. If they have the land and put houses there, then they can rent out some of the fields and stay in the farmhouse on the money they make and maybe just farm a few things. But Kate worries about this. And she worries about all the things she has no say over, and he knows it’s just her way of trying to feel that it isn’t just random, that she has some control. But some things you just don’t have any control of.

The cow went for a walk. She got up in the night and just walked and she was tired and slow by the time the sun came up, but a long way from the farm, for a cow. She just didn’t want to be in the barn.

When she came to something, she put her great weight against it, and just leant, and let her big body crush the thing down, or break or snap it. If it was a hedge, she went into the gap she could find and let her weight smash through the small sticks and thorns and the dead, dry trees; and if it was a gate she’d just lean and push, so the thing gave, because many of the gates were not hung properly, and hung off their loose posts with pink string. She didn’t do a lot of damage, as she didn’t have horns. They cut off the horns at birth. When things gave way under her she just felt droll and programmed and just bewildered like cows are, and she just kept on walking, getting tired and hot in the sun.

She was heavy with calf. This was not her first year, so she knew what was becoming of her and understood the calf, but she didn’t like the heat, or something, so she walked out of the barn. Her udder, gorgeous with milk, was scratched by thorns and the flies that followed her were landing on her warm hide and around her eyes, so she had to shake her head to move them.

For a while she stopped to eat, as cows do, just curling the long grass of a hedge into her mouth with her tongue. Her tongue was as big and pink as a baby’s leg. The grass here was more lush than the hay and the short grass of the fields. By then, the cow had no idea where she was.

The sun had kept coming up and got hotter and the heat even came out of the ground, which had been under the sun for so long. The cow got down on a bank and scratched herself in the dust and lay down for a while and, what seemed like miles away, was the sound of duck going into the pond. The cow was grey and covered with dust
now and warm in the sun by the bank. The birds played around her.

Later, the cow got too hot so she got onto her feet again and she could feel the calf moving inside her. She lifted her tail and let out a long wet pat. Then she went on. By now she was hanging her head when she walked and just ambling.

She walked into the bog, which is where all the cows seem to go, when they go, following their nose downhill, one foot in front of the other and other, wide hipped and plodding. When they get into the bog, they actually have to think. It wasn’t so bad now, because of the un-easing dry weather and the constant sun, but mostly there was still mud, dotted with green weed and the footprints of birds and it wasn’t the solid ground of the fields.

Thin willow and hazel was everywhere, so soon the cow started to crash and snap through it, but it confused her and took her strength. Underfoot, where it had dried, the bog was a funny shape and difficult to walk on. Going through the bog was very loud and sounded like twigs in a fire.

She walked into the bog for some time. Here and there a big oak tree had broken through the wicker of branches, and lifted up like a man standing on somebody’s shoulders. Most of the bog was bare, the actual mud of the bog, but there were carpets of bramble in places, and tough sedge.

The sedge had dried and paled in the sun and was warm and long and the cow curled round and round in the sedge until it was a nest, and there she lay down.

Gareth lifts the cloth absently from the old table and smoothes the smooth grain with his hand. Some people like brand new things and other people like the things they’ve had for a long time. It is nicely cool in the house. They brought the table to the farm from the old house when they moved here. It was a big thing, putting the important table in the house. He looks at the plate of crumbs and the unwrapped cheese, starting to look plastic. Before, the family ate in the kitchen on the smaller table and the big oak table was reserved for Sundays and special dinners and guests. Emmy’s drawing makes scratchy noises. When they moved to the farm, the family ate at this big table. He was thinking that it was not good that two calves had died, and there might be disease in the cattle. The cows were an indulgence, really. They grow just stock cattle now, which they raise and sell on to be grown up for beef, so it’s important to have good calves.

Gareth looks at his daughter drawing – such a ferocious little sleeper – how importantly she ran. He smiles gently. Nine days from now she will start to die.

Some of the bluebells will still be out.

Emmy will go into the woods with Zebra to play and she will find a beautiful white mushroom, come up after the
rain. It looks to her like the dove that came. She will sit Zebra down, with the fairies around her, and have lunch off the table of a fallen tree. This is a secret place of hers.

She will think that she should not eat the mushroom, but she loves mushrooms very much and it is white like the ones in the field. It will taste different though, sweet like it smells and bitter all at once, and she will stop eating the mushroom and feel bad for picking it, so she will hide it, because it was such a beautiful thing before she picked it, like spoiling a flower.

The mushroom will be as big as her hand across, and shaped like the floppy felt hat one of her dolls wears, but shiny – like waxed paper. Its stem will look sort of shaggy (she will think, like the skin by Daddy’s nails, peeling off), and there will be a big bulb at its base, as if it’s in a bag. The white gills and the pure white of the mushroom will be like an angel.

She will find the mushroom nine days from now. In the night, she will wake up and vomit violently, and will be very thirsty. Like she’s burning. She will call her mother and father. They will sit on her bed and pull up the covers round her and arrange her dolls and talk to Zebra while they touch her gentle head but she will not stop vomiting. Then the diarrhoea will start and she will mess the bed. The diarrhoea will come with great pain and it will feel to her as if someone is pulling her stomach with a huge, uncareful hand.

She will move into her mum and dad’s bed. She will start to sweat hard and in hours she will look pale and haggard. She will look dangerously ill and it will happen very quickly.

They will call a doctor who will come out and know it’s some sort of poisoning but will tell them that she is over the worst. That children’s bodies react violently to even the little things to keep them safe. That it looks alarming, but it will be okay. He will tell them to try and let her sleep.

The vomiting won’t stop and by the morning her hands and feet will go ice cold. She will be scared and anxious, like you are in fever, but she won’t tell anyone about the mushroom because it was so long ago.

In the hospital where they take her because she will not stop trying to be sick and her whole skin will look pellucid and unnatural they will try frantic tests. They will also put a pipe into her stomach through her mouth and pump out the contents of her stomach but by then the poison will be in the other places of her body. Gareth will be sick with worry for her, and will not go to the auction. Then, two days afterwards, she will seem okay.

They will take her home and she will seem okay and the doctor will say that he was right and that she was just reacting violently to something because she was so little. There’s all sorts of things on farms, he will say. It will seem strange and odd to them that she was so ill. Then violently and unquietly she will die.

Amanita virosa is deadly. It’s the amatoxins which kill you, like the Death Cap. The other poisons, called phallotoxins, do nothing serious. Amanita virosa is called Destroying Angel.

A-amaritin – which is one of the amatoxins – hits the nuclear RNA in the liver cells, causing protein synthesis to stop, so the cells start to die.

When the poison moves through the kidneys, they try to filter it, but it attacks the convoluted tubules and, instead of entering the urine, it goes back into the blood. So it attacks everything again and again, breaking it down repeatedly and mostly it is better to die then. The little boy she sees comes to talk with her while she is dying, but it is still very bad.