Authors: Kate Thompson
He trotted across the bare vegetable patch and, reluctantly, I followed. I remembered his evasiveness the time I had tried to look into his eyes, and now I knew that there had been something he had been trying to hide. But I didn’t know what.
‘Are you planning on murdering someone?’ I hissed.
‘I might call it murder,’ he said. ‘But you wouldn’t. I’m going to get us a sheep.’
‘But we can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘Because they belong to the farmer!’ I said.
‘He has hundreds of them,’ said Oggy. ‘Would you die before you’d steal?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I wouldn’t. But I can’t kill something. I don’t know how!’
‘That’s OK,’ said Oggy. ‘I do.’
He hopped over the garden wall and I made a less dignified crossing behind him. I could just make out flat grey fields beyond, stretching to the horizon. My heart was doing somersaults as we walked over the first of them, but nothing moved. We crossed a second field, and then a third, and the blue-grey light leaked into the darkness around us. At the next wall, Oggy stood on his hind legs and peered over, then ducked back and waited for me to catch up.
‘Stay here,’ he said. ‘And whatever you do, don’t make a sound.’
There was a business-like tone to his voice that troubled me. He was normally so cooperative and eager to please that I had considered myself to be his superior. In our world, under our rules, perhaps I was. But that day, in the no-man’s time of dawn, there was no doubt about who was in command.
While I watched, he poured himself over the wall and slid along the edge of the field like a
shadow
. From where I stood I could see the sheep lying on the ground in the shelter of a tall hedge. Despite Oggy’s quiet approach, they spotted him early and rose to their feet to face him.
He stopped and, feigning indifference, sniffed the air and lifted his leg against the wall. Then he trotted off at an angle, as if he were heading for the opposite corner of the field. The sheep kept their eyes on him, turning their bodies instead of their heads, always face-on to the threat. Oggy went as far as the wall, then snuffled around some more and turned back. This time his trajectory brought him much closer to the anxious flock, and they began to shrink backwards away from him.
He stopped and sniffed the air again, looking languidly around at everything except the sheep. They peered out mistrustfully, and a ewe in the foreground stamped her front foot; a nervous tick disguised as a threat. Oggy trotted forward again, as though he couldn’t care less. And then, like lightning, he struck.
The startled sheep scattered explosively, but for one of them it was already too late. Oggy had her by the throat and nothing could make him let go. For a few yards she stayed on her feet, dragging Oggy along with her, his paws digging for purchase in the soft ground. Then he got it and, with a desperate bleat, the ewe went down.
Dogs barked in the distance, but my heart couldn’t beat any faster without bursting. The
sheep
was thrashing wildly, but Oggy dodged her feet and maintained his lethal grip. While her companions regrouped and looked on, her struggles diminished and then, with one final convulsion, they stopped.
I was glued to the spot, and I didn’t move until Oggy began dragging the heavy carcass over the ground towards me. I got over the wall, knocking down a few stones and setting the distant farm dogs barking again. Praying that their owner wouldn’t heed them, I ran across to help bring in the catch.
Oggy was bristling with pride.
‘See that, eh?’ he jabbered, still in top gear. ‘The speed of it, eh? She never knew what hit her.’
‘Where’s the blood?’ I asked, grabbing a fistful of warm fleece and hauling the limp carcass towards home.
‘I choked her,’ said Oggy. ‘Pick her up, will you? Carry her!’
I crouched down and fed the front legs over my shoulders, then lifted her up like a sack. She was heavy, but manageable.
The farm dogs were howling like wolves and Oggy raced nervously backwards and forwards between me and the wall.
‘Hurry up, Christie,’ he said. ‘If you get caught you might get a hefty fine. But if they catch me, there’s no trial, you know. Instant execution.’
We made it to the wall and tipped the sheep
over
. Oggy pounced on her as though he intended to kill her all over again.
‘Come on, come on,’ he said. ‘The sun will be up in a minute.’
I was fagged out by the time we dropped her over the garden wall, but the worst bit hadn’t begun, yet.
‘Dig a hole there where the ground is bare,’ said Oggy, still in the general’s role.
‘What for? Are we going to bury her now?’
‘Just the bits we don’t want,’ he said. ‘The evidence.’
I was weak as a kitten after the long days without food, but I used what strength I had economically and the ground was easy enough to dig. While I worked, Oggy dragged the ewe over and parked her beside the hole. When he considered it deep enough, he told me to get out the knife. I took it from my pocket and felt the edge. It was soft steel, sharpened like a razor.
‘Open her up,’ said Oggy.
My knees went weak. ‘Open her up?’ I said.
Oggy gave me a look, and in a tone that cut as deep as any knife, he said, ‘Welcome to the real world, Christie.’
I took a deep breath and got to work. As the guts spilt into the hole, Oggy snatched the liver and gobbled it down like a pelican. The darkness I had seen in him was in every one of his actions now. I felt that I hardly knew him.
I loosened the hide with the knife and Oggy hauled it clear of the muscle and bone beneath. He was still hyper, snapping and worrying at the
skin
as if it were alive. His aggression, his raw strength frightened me, and I knew that I would treat him with less fluff and more respect from now on.
We needed a hatchet to finish the job, and luckily there was one in the wood shed. Afterwards, I filled in the hole, washed the blood off my hands and Oggy’s coat, and went in to present the others with breakfast.
4
I DIDN’T REGRET
killing that sheep. How could I, when she kept us alive? There was no doubt in my mind that we would never have got to Bettyhill without the meat she provided for us.
But Oggy’s harsh words about the real world had hurt because they had hit upon a truth. I had never questioned the lumps of meat that appeared on my plate every dinner time at home. I thought that vegetarians were sissies and that butchers were smiling men in white coats and funny hats. And as for slaughterhouses, I never thought about them at all.
But now I did. As we cooked the ragged lumps of meat over the open fire I thought about more as well; about how almost all of the food that used to come into our house was processed and packaged and turned into something it hadn’t been before it started. I thought about all the machines and packaging plants that were needed to do all of that, and the fuel it took to run them. And then I wondered where all the madness had started and whether the new madness had brought about its end.
I turned my attention back to the pan. I wasn’t great shakes as a butcher. The meat was in big,
funny
-shaped chunks and they were sticking to the pan and giving off clouds of acrid smoke. When we came to eat it, it was black on the outside, red on the inside, and tough as old shoe leather. But it was food.
We decided to stay on for the rest of the day and make use of the fire. We ate all we could manage and cooked more over the fire for the journey. In the afternoon Tina found the electricity box, and switched on the power. For a while we used the oven instead, until a power cut turned us off again. By evening we had a good supply of cold, roast mutton, and the last of it we planned to carry raw, because Oggy said he preferred his that way. Danny and I were rooting around in the kitchen for something to wrap it all in, when suddenly the phone rang.
The phone. I hadn’t even seen it. Before I had worked out where it was, Tina had answered it.
‘Hello?’
There was a pause, and then she said, ‘Sorry. Wrong number.’
She put it down.
‘You idiot,’ I said. ‘Why did you answer it?’
‘Because it rang,’ said Tina.
‘But now someone knows we’re here.’
‘So what?’
‘So we shouldn’t be, that’s what!’
The phone started ringing again, and this time we left it, and it finally shut up. But Tina didn’t.
‘I’m sick to death of you, Mr Goody-Two-Shoes, always “should this” and “shouldn’t
that
”. I don’t know how I’m going to stand living with you if we ever get to this stupid place!’
She stood up and stormed out of the house. Oggy looked at me and, with a kind of canine shrug, he followed her.
Tina’s outburst was unsettling, but the presence of the phone was more so. I sat and looked at it for twenty minutes, while Danny amused himself by poking little twigs into the fire and watching them burn. How long was it since we had left? A week? A month? I couldn’t remember, and in any case, that kind of time had no meaning now that it was no longer tied to school hours and television listings.
‘Let’s phone home, Danny,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he said, guileless as ET. ‘Phone home.’
I reached for the handset and dialled.
‘Christie?’ said Mom.
‘Hi, Mom,’ I said, but her voice was still coming down the line. ‘If that’s you, please leave a message for us, will you? We’ve had to go out for a while, but we’ll be back, soon. Please phone again, Christie, won’t you?’
There was a click and a bleep, and then silence.
‘The answer-phone,’ I told Danny. I put it down, then rang it again, just to hear her voice. But I couldn’t bring myself to talk on to the tape, not the way I felt just then.
I threw a few logs on to the fire and watched the woodlice trying to escape, but I kept thinking about the answer-phone talking in the empty house, pouring out Mom’s sorrow, again and
again
and again. I wondered how long it had been there. Hours? Days? What if they had intended to come back and hadn’t made it? What if our town was like Inverness; hungry and dangerous?
I couldn’t bear my thoughts and, desperate for company, I went looking for Oggy and Tina. They weren’t far away. I found them in the tiny wood shed, sheltering from an icy shower. I squeezed into a corner and sat on an upturned bucket.
‘Get lost,’ said Tina. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
I didn’t have the energy to argue, but I wasn’t going to leave, either.
‘Come on, you two,’ said Darling. She was up in the narrow roof somewhere, invisible in the windowless gloom. ‘Kiss and make up.’
Tina picked up a small log and lobbed it up into the beams. Darling squawked like a chicken.
‘Sorry!’ she said. ‘It’s just something Mother says when people are scrapping.’
‘Do you know something?’ said Tina. ‘I’m sick of hearing about Mother. Mother this, Mother that. She sounds more like a Fairy Godmother, if you ask me.’
She tore a piece of bark from a block of firewood and, as she spoke, broke bits of it off and flicked them at the door.
‘You know what gets me about all this?’ she went on. ‘What kind of a woman abandons a baby of six months old and then wants him back
fifteen
years later? When someone else has done all the work and paid all the bills?’
‘Well,’ said Darling, defensively. ‘It’s just that Mother . . . well, Mother . . .’
‘Mother what?’ said Tina. ‘If my mother sent for me now I’d tell her to take a running jump, so I would.’
Oggy made the connection quicker than I did.
‘Did your mother leave you as well?’ he asked.
‘She did, as a matter of fact,’ said Tina. ‘Not that I care.’
But she clearly did. Oggy licked her chin and Darling made soft, sympathetic whistles.
‘We’re all in the same boat, so,’ I said. ‘My dad left me as well. How old were you?’
But Tina had said enough. ‘I’m not telling my life story, here. And I don’t want to hear yours, all right? I’m just telling you why I’m not thrilled about absent mothers, that’s all.’
‘I thought it was men you didn’t like,’ I said. ‘Sounds like you don’t like anybody.’
‘Oh, bog off, Christie,’ said Tina. She wrapped her arms round Oggy and held him tight.
5
THE MUTTON WAS
heavy in the borrowed bags, but it sustained us, and over the next couple of days we made good time. On the morning of the third day, we reached a little town called Altnaharra where, to our surprise, the door of the post office stood open. It gave me an idea and we went in.
An old lady was sitting at the counter, knitting. She displayed no surprise at our appearance, and finished the row she was on before giving me her attention.
‘Is the post still going?’ I asked.
‘It is and it isn’t,’ she replied. ‘Where are ye heading?’
‘Bettyhill,’ I said.
‘Well, then,’ she said. ‘The post is going to Bettyhill.’ She began rooting through a neat file of letters and pulled three of them out. ‘Are ye going by Tongue or by Syre and Skail?’
I thought they must be obscure Scottish forms of transport, and looked over to Tina for help. But the postmistress cleared up the matter.
‘Are ye on foot?’
‘We are,’ I said.
‘Then Syre and Skail is your best road.’ She
rummaged
again, found four more letters and a small parcel, then handed the lot over the counter to me. I looked at them in bewilderment, but Tina was ahead of me.
‘We have to deliver them, thicko,’ she said. ‘We’re Irish,’ she went on, as though it explained everything.
‘And you want to send a letter home, I’ll warrant,’ said the woman. ‘I can’t guarantee it, ye ken. But there are plenty of folk going south and I’ll get it as far as I can.’
She held out her hand for my letter.
‘I haven’t written it yet,’ I admitted, beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea after all.
‘Ah, bless you,’ she said. ‘I’ve plenty of paper and envelopes. Or would you rather a postcard? I have nice ones for sale.’
‘Just a letter, I think,’ I said.
While I chewed on the end of the pen and tried to get my thoughts in order, the postmistress chatted to Tina and Danny.