Chapter 14
Arthur
‘How can you possibly be this terrible?’ Beatrice stands over me with her arms folded as sweat pools in my hairline and dribbles its way through the dirt smeared on my face.
My hair hangs in damp clumps over my eyes and I have to push it away to see her clearly.
An amused smile tugs at the corners of her lips and she shakes her head teasingly.
‘It’s harder than it looks,’ I murmur, trying to clutch onto the sheep for long enough for her to do the proper farmer bit that she doesn’t trust me to do myself.
We’ve been at this same job for the past three days at least. It’s my job to catch the sheep and hold them for Beatrice to mark them.
Except sheep are slippery fuckers. And they’re bloody quick.
Boarding school rugby tournaments did absolutely nothing to prepare me for this.
Days in New York all seem to melt into one another.
We work from before the sun rises until the sun sets, my grandmother cooks a dinner that tastes exactly the same as the last one no matter what’s on the plate, and the pub is the only place I can escape to if I don’t want to watch Emmerdale for the third night on the trot.
The air feels different here though. The sea breeze is uninterrupted for miles on miles, flowing through the flatlands and marshes until it reaches us, still crisp, still fresh.
One deep breath of it can renew you, like a cold glass of water on a sweltering day.
It feels lighter, well, my chest doesn’t feel as heavy as it did before I left.
Though I have Battleaxe Beatrice barking orders all day, and I am positively horrendous at every task I am set, there’s a sense of peace that lingers over the place, as though there is no need to be concerned with the events of the wider world, as if the world stretches from here to the village hall and no further.
‘I know what the problem is …’ Beatrice has a worrying look on her face. ‘You’ve got far too much hair.’
Blowing it out of my face, still clinging to the sheep, I shake my head. ‘You have about three times my amount of hair.’ I use my head to gesture towards the pair of plaits that her throngs of dark hair are braided into and she tosses one over her shoulder.
‘I’m going to take you out.’ My grip slips on the animal and she scatters across the field. ‘Don’t get excited, not a date. Well not with me at least …’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I scramble to my feet as she begins to walk away.
‘Go and have a shower. I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes.’ Without any further explanation, she collects up her equipment, tosses it into the back of her truck and drives home across the field.
Navigating New York is getting slightly easier, with the absence of any landmarks bigger than the ‘rotten fence post at the corner of the east field’, and the fact that every field looks the same to my uneducated eyes; it’s still not easy, but at least I know my way back to my grandmother’s house without an hour’s detour.
When my wellies hit the yard of the family farm, my grandmother emerges from a barn with an armful of miscellaneous items. ‘Are you slacking off again?’ she asks as she unloads them into her car boot.
‘I don’t think so,’ I reply, still unsure as to what I’m actually doing. ‘I’m following orders.’
‘I think that Beatrice missed out on a successful career as a drill sergeant.’ My grandmother almost smiles.
‘Tell me about it.’ I release a nervous breath that is meant to sound like a laugh.
I still haven’t shared an entire conversation with my grandmother.
She prefers to eat in silence at mealtimes, and she asks for quiet whilst she watches the TV.
Sometimes the sound of my voice startles her, as though she’d forgotten I was home, or the sound of a different voice is something foreign.
Aside from the static hum of the old TV, or the simmering of the kettle, she seems to live her life embracing the silence of New York.
She must live so much of her life in her own head, reading her books, or pottering about the farmyard.
I wonder when the last time was that she actually had a chat, or had someone to tell her feelings to.
Beatrice is the farm’s only frequent visitor and though they share their fierceness, I can’t imagine my grandmother would loosen her scarves and uprightness enough to talk about anything but what is polite.
‘That lass’s wasted in this place.’ She shakes her head. ‘I still don’t know how she ended up back here. I can’t complain though, the farm would be a ruin without her.’
‘She left?’ I ask, intrigued. ‘I always assumed …’ I trail off. I’m not exactly sure what I presumed. That she had never gotten further than the A1? That she has lived every single day of her life in the exact same way for however many years?
My grandmother raises an eyebrow but doesn’t reply.
‘Isn’t there somewhere you need to be?’ she asks, and I check my watch.
The twenty minutes has turned into five and my stomach drops.
Rushing into the house, I kick off my wellies in the porch and race for a shower.
When I hear Beatrice’s truck pull down the driveway, I am desperately trying to tug my shirt over my wet mop of hair and end up squeezing a cold shot of bath water down my back, soaking the cotton in the process.
Bumbling back down the stairs, I just make it in time to meet her at the door. The slight twitch of her neck would imply that she’s surprised at my punctuality, despite the fact that I am sure I still have a bubble or two of body wash under my arm. But Beatrice doesn’t need to know that.
‘Now can you tell me where we’re going?’ I say, sliding into the passenger seat.
‘Where’s the fun in that?’ she replies, a smug look still etched onto her face.
‘Ah, yes, because kidnapping is far more exciting.’ I chuckle as she manoeuvres the truck back out of the farm and onto the open road.
‘Hey, you’re the one who willingly got in the car.’ Sending me a side glance, Beatrice flicks her brow in a teasing expression.
‘Yeah, well, only because I’m scared of you,’ I murmur like a child.
‘Scared of me?’ she parrots, the amusement still thick on her expression. ‘Or just scared of women?’
‘Scared of scary women who bully me and who can rugby-tackle grown sheep.’ I rub at the little stubble that has begun to sprout across my chin. ‘I’d say that’s quite a rational fear, wouldn’t you?’
Still focusing on the road, Beatrice’s smile becomes harder and harder for her to conceal. ‘Bully is a strong word,’ she says and I reply with a pointed look. Beatrice retaliates by punching me softly on the shoulder.
‘See what I mean?’ I tease and her cheeks flush.
‘Let’s call it character-building.’ She releases a hand from the steering wheel to crack her window.
‘If that will help you sleep at night.’
Beatrice shakes her head and flicks on the radio, probably in hopes that I’ll shut my mouth and give her face a chance to return to its natural colour.
The drive is short, and the fields of New York turn into the fields of another almost identical village until I have no idea what sort of distance we’ve travelled.
Soon, the fields begin to evolve into a housing estate and the boundaries to the land go from being marked out by hedges and drystone walls, to eight-foot fences topped with barbed wire.
‘I might be a terrible farmer, but prison is surely a bit overkill,’ I say, half joking, half afraid. Beatrice looks at the fence, then back at me with another bemused shake of her head.
‘I can tell you’re a little brother.’ Her eyes are bright when she looks at me. This is the first time she’s referred in any way to Lizzie since I told her about her. I sink into the chair a little deeper.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I raise an amused eyebrow, curious to know her reasoning.
‘I can just imagine you annoying your sister all hours of the day with all your silly comments that shouldn’t be funny but are, stupidly so.’ Again, she shakes her head. ‘You have all of the persistence of a little brother too. As if you cannot rest until you drive someone stir-crazy.’
‘You’ve got one of your own?’
‘No. I’m an only child.’ A little sadness overcomes her face. ‘My best friend was just like you though.’
Beatrice seems to follow the barbed wire the whole way around the perimeter until she finds its ending and slips the truck through the open gates of ‘RAF Coningsby’. ‘You’ve brought me on a date to an Air Force base?’ I ask, perplexed.
Sitting up straighter in her seat, Beatrice flushes almost instantly. ‘See what I mean? Irritating on a monumental scale.’ She shakes her head with a roll of her eyes.
Rolling down her window fully, she is greeted by a stone-faced gentleman and his rifle mounted high in his clutch. He doesn’t say anything, nor does his expression change, so Beatrice does the talking. ‘Hi, we’re here to see the Butcher. I’ve got him a new client.’
Beatrice sits back in her chair and allows the guard to take a long look at me. He assesses me then nods with as little movement as possible. ‘Go and fetch your passes.’
‘The Butcher?’ I say, a little nervously as Beatrice pulls into the layby beside us and turns off her engine.
‘Now I’m trying to be more open-minded about the countryside but I swear to God if this turns into some Hills Have Eyes bullshit, or you take me into a military base to let them do alien experiments on me I will not be happy. ’
‘God, do you ever stop talking?’ She laughs and clambers out of the truck. ‘Come on, you don’t want to keep the Butcher waiting …’ Beatrice lowers her chin and shoots me an unsettling stare. With a shiver, I do as I’m told, though I protest with each step towards the office.
With my photo taken and Beatrice’s pass already on file and printed out, we pass our security check and I trail behind her, still unsure as to what I’ve gotten myself into this time.
Walking through the dominion of RAF Coningsby is like stepping back in time.
A once grand hall overlooks a decommissioned Spitfire that rusts on the green of the roundabout.
With the absence of any other human life, the entire place feels abandoned, left unchanged from its 1940s prime, slowly decaying, fossilised at the peak of patriotism.
The ropes of an old obstacle course flap in the breeze thirty feet from the ground.
Brittle and frayed, they’re an accident waiting to happen when a few new recruits stumble home drunk, having left any common sense back on the sticky leather of the bar stools.
‘Ta-da!’ Beatrice’s voice startles me just as I begin to imagine phantom airmen lurking in the corners of hangars, or downed pilots haunting the officers’ mess.
She points to an old pre-fab building tucked away in the midst of a copse of trees.
Corrugated iron shrapnel litters the muddy plot it stands on; bits of old tank are dispersed in between wild flowers and weeds.
If she were to tell me that she had brought me to a bomb site, I would believe her.
But it’s the striped pole that clings to the asbestos walls that gives away its actual occupation.
The barber’s pole still stands proud by the door, polished and primed as though someone had fastened the king’s golden sceptre to the side of a skip.
The metallic red signage has bubbled and corroded from the weather.
It must have once read ‘Barber’s Shoppe’, but all that remains are a few rusted vowels that are losing the fight against acid rain.
‘The Butcher, is a … barber?’
Beatrice shoots me yet another perplexing smile that sends a shiver right through me before she tugs on the door and it swings open with the tinkle of an old bell. Ushering me inside, she whispers close to me, ‘Relax, you’ll be fine.’ Which makes me feel anything but ‘relaxed’.
I run a hand through my hair, feeling the way it tickles at the bottom of my neck, and sweeps rather close to my jugular. Against my better judgement, and in spite of all of my reservations telling me to run, I step inside and prepare myself to either leave missing an ear, or in a meaty pie.