The Hunger Trace Read online

‘I’d like to do it again,’ Maggie said.

  ‘I’m pretty busy.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Which is also a problem. Too many people these days want to fly a hawk for a day, go back and tell their friends they touched the wilderness. I don’t see shit burning any holes in their clothes. If you want to do this, it’s got to be every minute.’

  ‘I do know a little about the care of animals,’ said Maggie.

  Louisa managed half a nod of acknowledgment. The problem was the look on Maggie’s face as Fred had risen to her fist. She looked him right in the eye, did not twitch. Louisa had spent most of her life fiercely guarding the secrets of her daily life with the hawks. She did not want people to know exactly what she did; she only wanted them to know that they could not do it themselves. And here was someone who perhaps could.

  Christopher was still trembling when he arrived in the White Hart. The place smelled of blocked drains. He approached the bar. ‘What do you want?’ David Wickes asked.

  ‘I want to settle down with a faithful woman and have some progeny, far away from this hell-hole,’ Christopher said.

  ‘I meant to drink.’

  ‘Oh, right. Erm. A double Drambuie and a white wine, erm, spritzer.’

  Wickes sighed. ‘You’re the boss,’ he said, turning away to make the drinks. ‘But your father didn’t think Detton was such a hell-hole.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Christopher said, under his breath.

  He was tired of the way people talked about his father in this pub. Before he died, they used to say, ‘Your dad is a legend, youth.’ Christopher would reply, ‘Erm, incorrect. A legend must be, erm, deceased. It’s part of the definition.’

  Such definitions now contributed to his logic for the existence of a real historical Robin Hood. To be a legend, you have to die. To die, you must have lived. Therefore, it followed that Robin Hood had really lived. It also meant, he realised, that the men in the pub were now free to call his father a legend.

  The problem, as with all legends, was that the stories the men told of his father changed and slipped. The details turned upside down, or were forgotten. The regulars never talked of how his father would take him garbage fishing in the brook; they never mentioned the pedal cart races around the enclosures. They spoke only of naked dancing at the big house on Drum Hill (strange), and of women and more women and better women (too much information). It was worrying to hear them get the facts wrong. When people got the facts wrong once, they rarely corrected them, in Christopher’s experience. You ended up with an Australian Robin Hood and a father you didn’t recognise.

  Christopher took his Drambuie in a couple of gulps and started on the spritzer. Tim Nettles sat on a stool at the end of the bar, and nodded. ‘Hello, lad. Any luck with that online dating malarkey?’

  ‘That’s classified,’ Christopher said. He’d only just set up his profile, and couldn’t remember talking to Nettles about it.

  ‘Plenty of nice young ladies up on that hill, I’d have thought,’ Nettles said.

  ‘Erm, plenty of lunatics. With their idiot birds.’

  ‘I can’t think who you might be referring to,’ Nettles said. Wickes smiled.

  ‘I’ll find my Marian,’ Christopher said. He looked up at Wickes. ‘Same, erm, again, please bartender.’

  It was his father who had told him the stories of Robin Hood. It had been part of their nightly routine: they would watch Marx Brothers films, and then his father would tell him tales in which Robin was a lithe, skinny child who used his cunning and slight stature to crawl through the legs of the sheriff. In David’s stories, Robin could disguise himself as tumbleweed, or a green bouncy ball. Christopher had never resembled that ingenious boy, but he had loved the tales.

  Since his father had died, Christopher had felt angry about those made-up, babyish yarns. Anyone could create such stories and what was the use of that? Christopher wanted something real. He had read widely about the historical figure of Robin Hood. In the old ballads, Robin massacred fourteen foresters because they forbade him to hunt on the king’s land. Christopher was sure this was true because he had seen empirical evidence: there was a skull in a museum in Nottingham alongside a crossbow bolt they’d found rattling around inside. They had dug up thirteen bodies in a row. Pretty conclusive, Christopher thought. This Robin was no spry youngster; he was vengeful and he stalked through the woods like Christopher did, slighted and furious.

  Christopher necked his drinks and took another round before he left. ‘I need the alcohol to face, erm, going home again,’ he told the regulars. Many of them could relate to that sentiment.

  As he walked up the hill, he prepared himself for a clash with the Turncoat Maggie Green. So he’d elbowed someone in the face. That was nothing compared to Maggie’s betrayals. He tried to list them: she rarely talked about his father, and when she did, it annoyed him; he suspected that she had not invited his real mother to his father’s funeral, even though it would have been an ideal opportunity for a reunion; she made him go to the ridiculous bird display. The list went on.

  When he got inside the big house, Maggie came down the stairs, which seemed to be spinning. ‘Are you okay?’ Maggie said.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Christopher said. ‘It was the bird’s fault.’

  ‘Why is David Wickes allowing you to drink so much?’

  ‘David, erm, Wickes is my friend.’

  As Maggie helped him up the stairs, Christopher tried to think of some of Groucho Marx’s sayings about women, to insult her with. A woman is an occasional pleasure but a cigar is . . . something. Women should be . . . something.

  It was difficult to remember the ones about women. When his father dropped him at school, he would say, ‘Go, and never darken my towels again.’ That was Christopher’s favourite; the last laugh of the day and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. Most afternoons, when his father collected him, Christopher would be upset or crying. His father would hold him in the car and whisper, ‘If I held you any closer, I’d be on the other side of you.’

  Christopher had a funny taste in his mouth and he thought he might be sick. Maggie tried to stabilise him. Christopher retched and stumbled towards the bathroom, with Maggie in tow. After he’d vomited, he dredged up another old Groucho quote, the same one he’d spontaneously remembered at the end of his father’s funeral, the last time he was this drunk.

  ‘I’ve had. Erm. A wonderful evening. Erm, erm. But this wasn’t it.’

  Louisa fell asleep for a long while, and when she opened her eyes Maggie was kneeling above her, dabbing a bag of frozen coffee below her lip. Louisa panicked and tried to get up, but Maggie pressed her down easily. ‘It’s okay,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t need to do that,’ said Louisa, noticing that Maggie had changed her clothes, and showered. Her skin smelled clean, and her hair glistened. She was dressed up.

  ‘Couldn’t find any frozen peas at home, so it’s a middle-class substitute.’

  ‘All that’s in my freezer is dead mice.’

  Maggie smiled. ‘Christopher came home. He did get inebriated.’

  ‘How long have I been asleep?’

  ‘Not all that long, actually. He must have hit it hard and fast. He threw his guts up in the bathroom.’

  ‘And there I was about to apologise for the mess in here,’ Louisa said, looking back at the soiled newspaper and feathers on the kitchen table. Maggie took the cold away, and Louisa’s face regained a little feeling. It was not welcome.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with him,’ Maggie said, quietly. ‘Christopher.’

  Not many people sought Louisa’s advice on human concerns. David had occasionally asked her opinion about one of his girlfriends. He had never asked her about Maggie, though.

  ‘You could ask what’s-her-name,’ Louisa said.

  ‘His counsellor?’

  ‘No. His mother.’

  Maggie looked away. ‘What could I ask her?’ she said.

  ‘Well. Coul
dn’t he go and live with her?’

  ‘That’s not the kind of solution I was looking for,’ Maggie said. She looked at her watch, bracelets jangling as she turned her wrist. Nothing more was said. Louisa was dragged again into sleep, and the re-treading of old fields.

  FIVE

  Louisa had always been good on village folklore, and was familiar with Anna Cliff long before their lives collided so significantly. Oakley, where Louisa and David grew up, was gentrified, fashionable, conservative. It was still quaintly agricultural in the 1970s and had avoided the millhouse rows of nearby villages. But in towns like Oakley, there is always a little squalor, and even people with the best intentions fall down. Anna Cliff fell in a way which became local legend.

  She lived near the canal, on a patch of land which had been cleared for development, but abandoned. It was rat-infested, damp, plagued by floods, the light obstructed by huge sycamores. The developers built one house and folded, so Anna got it cheap. The Oakley locals speculated unkindly on the currency with which Anna had paid. Such rumours followed her whatever she did.

  Anna’s fiancé, Henry Morgan, had gone to war and never returned, but his name was not carved into the memorial on the local park. It was said that Henry, who had been a farm labourer in Oakley, had met a woman in France and fallen in love.

  By the time Louisa was old enough to recognise her, walking the bridle path through the fields, Anna Cliff had a thick ring of scarred flesh at the base of her neck. The scar stood white against her dark – almost Mediterranean – skin. Louisa’s older brothers, both living away from home, would spend Sundays telling gruesome stories about how Anna got her scar. Her colouring was unusual for the region in those times, and as a child Louisa had been struck by the dark richness of Anna’s brown eyes. Without much care for historical accuracy, people called her Anne of Cleves when they saw the scar. They said she was a gypsy, or half-Indian. Louisa’s brothers said she was a Nazi.

  Over the years, villagers counted off Anna Cliff’s four children, whose fathers were various. She tried to trap one man, a married farmer, into taking paternal responsibility, but the villagers rebuked her with such force, and from so many directions, that she never tried again. People like Louisa’s parents often took guesses at the identity of the fathers. It became a dinner party joke. ‘I saw the youngest Cliff child today. A real ringer for Tom Easter, it must be said.’

  In truth, the three boys and one girl all looked a lot like their mother. They ducked in and out of care, in and out of school, and if Anna was guilty only of distracted neglect, the children suffered plenty of mistreatment at the hands of their sometime classmates. Louisa was never party to such cruelty because she did not attend the state school, but she heard about it. And she heard when the children were finally taken away from their mother, to be distributed to foster parents across the Midland cities.

  Richard Smedley, Louisa’s father, was a social climber. He had worked hard in his job, and on his accent. He went shooting with the right people. Richard warned his young daughter that she would end up just like the Cliff woman if she kept on with her wild behaviour. Louisa figured that most Oakley girls had been told as much. It was one of her father’s less inventive insults.

  * * *

  Louisa first encountered a bird of prey when she was five years old.

  She lay on the back seat of the car, watching the slow swipe of the roadside lights through the dusk. Her parents sat quietly, as they always did after one of her tantrums, her father’s retaliatory rage all spent, her mother exhausted by the confrontation.

  Louisa’s tantrums had the effect of temporarily suppressing her functions and needs, and she often recovered to find herself hungry or in pain. This time she needed urgently to urinate. She moaned.

  ‘Louisa needs the toilet,’ her mother said.

  ‘There are none,’ her father said.

  ‘Richard, pull over, please.’

  ‘Let her sit in it.’

  Her father was always the last to relent, if he did so at all, but on this occasion another louder moan was all it took. He feared for his upholstery and soon pulled in to a layby. As Louisa prepared to leave the car he turned around and said, ‘Who do you think you are?’

  She often recalled that nasty remark in adulthood. What a thing to say to a child. She got him back in the end, she reasoned, simply by answering his question.

  Louisa and her mother climbed the roadside bank, struggling against their skirts in a strong gale. Over the bank was a stubble field, and before that a tangle of bushes and weeds. Louisa squatted awkwardly with one hand on her dress and the other outstretched to her mother, for balance. She nearly passed out with relief.

  The bird arrived as she was in mid-flow. She could not identify it. Now, when she thinks back, she sees an eagle but she knows that it was probably a buzzard, or a kite. The bird had perhaps been glanced by a car or attacked by crows, for it came down scared, and crashed into the bushes. The thrashing noise startled Mrs Smedley, who screamed and let go of her daughter’s hand. Louisa stumbled slightly, pissing on her shoes, but she did not fall. She was quite calm. The bird righted itself, and they watched each other. It looked so big, so outraged. Three seconds passed until it recovered and took off, Louisa watching it all the way over the trees.

  ‘Good God,’ Mrs Smedley said, with a hand to her chest. She looked at the damp patch on her daughter’s dress, but Louisa hadn’t noticed. Louisa had never heard of falconry, but at that moment she had a fair idea of what she wanted to do. It was all over bar the shouting, of which there was plenty.

  Her father had assumed falconry to be a regal sport, but soon found that – apart from a few famous exceptions – the majority of modern practitioners were working men. As such, he hoped Louisa’s fascination would pass, but she flung away the picture-books about dancing, and he found her burying her pony figurine in the flowerbed, digging with her hands. Two summers later, she was still talking about hawks, and Richard saw a notice promoting a small summer fair given for the council housing residents in the back-end of Staffordshire. He thought he could scare it out of her.

  It was a bare, rough place; the smell of yeast from the nearby Marmite factory and brewery competing with the bad meat and burnt sugar of the food stalls. The wind whipped gravel off the hill-top car park. Richard Smedley saw the bony, half-dressed slum-clearance youths throwing hoops and wondered if he’d gone too far, whether this might turn nasty. He looked nervously back at his car.

  Louisa could see nothing but the six birds, tethered and fenced off, raising their legs one at a time as if attempting to free themselves from adhesive goop. She watched them, straight-faced, hands in the pockets of her unseasonal coat. She looked like a folded umbrella.

  Roy Ogden stood on the pristine bowling green, the best patch of grass for ten miles in any direction. Forty yards away perched Banjo, an Indian eagle owl, his head turned to look at something in the firs behind. ‘Anybody up for a goo?’ Roy said.

  Louisa pushed to the front, right hand still in her pocket, left hand out and bared. ‘I would like to.’ The small crowd noted the elocution, and looked at her father, who said, ‘That’s too big for you, dear.’

  ‘No it is not,’ Louisa said. ‘I can hold a two-pound bag of sugar. He’s not much more than that.’

  Roy Ogden smiled. He’d been doing displays long enough to know the voice of a falconer, whatever the size of the person it came from. He lifted her over the dividing wall.

  Banjo would not come when Ogden called, and Louisa’s top-lip whistle drew a laugh and an ‘oo, a say’ from the crowd. It also got the owl turning and dropping, the amber scorch of the eyes locked stone still within the nonsense of wings. Clambering into the upward arc, Banjo spread a shadow at the girl’s feet, hitting the big glove hard. Louisa gasped.

  While Banjo fed from her first, Louisa – heart going crazy – walked towards her father at the dividing wall. As she approached, Banjo raised his big wings for balance and Richard Smedley too
k a step back. Louisa witnessed the act with fascination.

  It was the falcons she really wanted to fly when she saw them dipping over the scout hut at a brutal pace. ‘Be a few years before you can handle one a them,’ Roy Ogden said.

  ‘That’s not so long,’ Louisa said.

  Roy Ogden, black moustache on a thick face, and a way of biting the tip of his tongue when concentrating, fixed motorbikes in his own residential garage in Whatstandwell, working through the night to give himself daylight hours to fly falcons. He limped badly from the accident that had forced him to quit riding bikes, but his hawks moved with perfect grace and at his bidding.

  Louisa’s apprenticeship was a constant pushing at the boundaries of pleasure, until not long after her thirteenth birthday when she taught her first peregrine, Jacko, to stoop from out of pure grey nothing towards the grouse flushed from cover. The clatter of the contact was audible, and the stunned grouse gave up feathers like a trail of puffed cigar smoke, made a soft noise as it came down in the yellow tussocks. That day was the culmination of months of training for the falcon, and years of training for the girl. ‘Nothing you can’t do, now,’ said Roy.

  This was the seventies, before worldwide artificial breeding programmes, and the peregrine was teetering on the edge of oblivion. DDT pesticides had thinned the shells of peregrine eggs. Even obtaining such a bird was tricky and not always legal. There was a deathly zeal about hunting with a peregrine. The threat of imminent extinction was with them in the field.

  The evening after Jacko’s stoop, Louisa’s brothers came for tea, but she felt unable to bear the presence of her family. It was a private feeling, this triumph – a lonely physical pleasure that she worried would show on her face. So she lay in the bath behind a locked door, turned up the radio and let the dirt drift off her arms. With her eyes closed she still felt tentacular, bound to her companions in the field, as though the dog was on point in the living room, Jacko was pitched hundreds of yards above the roof, and Roy Ogden was standing by the sink.