The Hunger Trace Read online

The hawking season coincided with the school term. There was no contest. The first couple of times she arrived at his house in the early morning, Roy drove Louisa the many miles back to school, but he eventually realised that he did not have the fuel money to win the war, and figured it was best to teach her well. She proved herself an asset in the field.

  Mostly they took sandwiches, but they had occasional pub lunches where the landlords allowed children, and once stopped at a greasy spoon at the base of the Heights of Abraham, the cable cars swinging above them. These were Louisa’s first few mouthfuls of Derbyshire, and it was she who recommended Detton to David in later years.

  On the days she attended school, Louisa went straight from feeding the birds, blood streaked across her hands. This did little for her popularity, about which only her mother cared. Mrs Smedley sometimes took the liberty of inviting other girls to tea, but Louisa always managed to sneak them into the shed, where they commented in whispers on the smell of the birds, and how it ‘explained a few things.’ Sometimes they cried over a hawk’s messy consumption of a chick; one girl even vomited. Louisa assured her that the dog would clean it up.

  The transition to secondary school had been a failure, and her teens promised a lack of all healthy conventions. It was in this lowly social state that she came across David Bryant.

  Their schools were separated by gender, the icy hip of the A-road, and a field containing five magnificent Herefords, including a shaggy, horned bull. The lazy bulk of the cows made the trees and cars look small from where Louisa spent her lunchtimes – in the hilltop outwoods beyond the school fence.

  One morning in December, whilst playing truant, she saw a group of six boys approach the field in their dark green blazers. She recognised the blond boy as he ducked down below the wall. The others crowded around him, their heads rocking back a second before Louisa heard the squawk of their laughter. In a moment, the blond boy was up and over the wall, naked but for his pointed shoes and grey woollen socks pulled up to mid-calf.

  ‘Off you go, Bryant.’

  ‘Tell them to be gentle.’

  ‘With your arse.’

  ‘Tell them you want commitment before you do it.’

  David Bryant bounced from foot to foot, his hair shuddering. ‘That one looks like Thompson’s mother,’ he said, pointing at a cow with a thick ginger fringe, as he set off towards the group of supine beasts. His sprint was compact and muscular, his cock – made shy by the frosty air – bobbing as he changed direction. The cows were uninterested but for one, who startled from a doze and sprang away, causing David to leap and call out, to the delight of his friends. After he passed the bull, he continued to run hard for the fence, his body steaming, his breath visible. He stopped twenty metres below Louisa, and laughed to himself quietly. Louisa could make out the damp brightness of his face, and the spots on his shoulders. She slid behind a tree, her smile set deep within her.

  David did not see her. He turned to face his friends and raised his arms to acknowledge the applause and the shouts of bravo, while one of the boys tried to rouse the Herefords by throwing stones at them. Louisa looked at the hollows of his buttocks. The traffic slowed as it passed the scene.

  Louisa was unprepared for the calamity of her feelings, and the hopelessness of the reality which met them. She knew him – he was the son of her father’s friend – and now the mention even of stern, moustachioed Mr Lawrence Bryant made her reel. She despised such reactions in herself.

  It was easy to re-order her short past around the few sightings of him. She remembered accompanying her father to the Bryant house, and seeing David, seven years old, sliding down the carpeted stairs on his backside. She remembered seeing him one Christmas near the canal with his two black labs. This now seemed hugely significant to her, for she had been out with her hawks that day, despite the fact that hunting was illegal on Christmas Day. He had seen her the way she saw herself, as a falconer.

  When Mrs Smedley asked Louisa if she wanted to invite someone over for tea, Louisa, knowing her father was away on business, said Roy Ogden. Her mother relented, having long given up, generally, on what she had in mind. After tea, Louisa played her guitar loud enough so that her mother, washing dishes in the kitchen, could not hear her tell Oggie about David. He laughed gently and said, ‘You want to fit everything in before you’re fifteen, that’s your trouble. You’ll soon be ready to retire. Life is long, duck. Spread the butter thin.’

  Love made Louisa despise a social world which she had thus far simply ignored. Some of the girls she knew already spoke of having had more than two lovers, and even her parents seemed to find such talk fashionable when they heard it on the television. People swung, cheated, or just moved on. Louisa could not compete in such a world and did not want to. She became puritanical as a result. There would be David Bryant, and nobody else.

  She thought again about that Christmas morning: like Louisa, David had shunned the trivialities of celebration in favour of responsibility to his animals. He was the type of man who would understand.

  The problem with Louisa’s image of David Bryant was David Bryant himself. At fifteen he was a loud, drunk, happy, popular, rugby-playing nightmare. Unlike Louisa, whose politics had been broadened by Roy Ogden, David had no notion of life outside his class. He was pleased to be an integral part of the world she hated.

  A week before the Pony Club Ball in Nottingham, Louisa realised she would have to infiltrate this world in order to drag him out of it. Her mother, on her knees at the hem of the dress, looked down at Louisa’s wide, nicked feet spilling over the sharp edges of her small shoes, like rising white bread. ‘You know we can curl your hair if you like. Or straighten it. You can have more than one look,’ she said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Louisa said.

  Stepping backwards down the hall for a final appraisal, her mother fought the urge to wince. ‘You do have an excellent bust,’ she said.

  Louisa looked down at her breasts and tutted.

  She was so fired up by the time she reached the domed Council House that she feared a relapse into her childhood tantrums. She thought she might glass one of those groupie bitches who hung around the rugby team. The situation called for the same calm and responsive nature she had in the field. She had never really drunk, but thought it might help now. Sensibly, she by-passed the fruit punch, which was dangerously spiked, and walked over to where David stood with his friends, in his tuxedo. ‘Have you got any beer?’ she said.

  ‘Louisa, isn’t it? Our fathers know each other.’ He looked at her breasts; she thought of her mother. ‘Tommo has some vodka in his bag,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure I can smell beer coming off you,’ Louisa said.

  David sniffed his shirt. ‘It’s Davidoff,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘I’ll have a Davidoff then, please,’ she said, with genuine innocence.

  He said what he always said to girls – that he loved hunting. Banging on about the ritual of the kill had always done the trick, but he did not know what he was getting himself into. ‘These people who eat meat but object to where it comes from,’ he said. ‘It’s so hypocritical.’

  ‘You eat fox, then, do you?’ she said. She had no objections to killing vermin, only to the deceit, pomp, and phoniness of the aristocrats her father longed to be with.

  ‘Oh, of course. You’re the falconer. Actually, my family are into shooting, rather than fox-hunting, but I suppose you disapprove of that, too,’ he said.

  She was pleased to be ‘the falconer’.

  ‘I’m fine with shooting, actually. It preserves the grouse moors. Think of all that money the shooters pump into conservation, so they can have their pathetic little parties. It makes it possible for me to hunt with my falcons, which is a real art.’

  ‘Yes, but falconry is no better than a cock-fight, is it?’

  ‘A cock-fight? A cock-fight is fifteen toffs drinking rosé champagne in a field, talking about who has the biggest gun.’

  David had never met with s
uch provocation, and was intrigued. Louisa’s orchestration was perfect. By ten o’clock they had organised a play-off between the two sports; she would take him hawking, and he would take her shooting. Then they would see which was best.

  Later, the crowd spilled out into Nottingham Market Square in their dresses and suits – an easy target, Louisa thought, for the locals, but David did not seem to care. Somebody poured green dye and detergent into the water fountain, and Louisa watched from the outskirts as David danced in the eerie rising foam with his mates, the bib of his shirt stained with swampy streaks. She smiled at him. ‘I hate you,’ she whispered to herself.

  Louisa would soon learn that she was not the only one with access to the woods. David and his friends had climbed up there weeks before the ball, and looked down on the other side of the hill, at the girls’ sports field, where Louisa made heavy, asthmatic work of the sixty-yard dash. They called her ‘Wheezer’ Smedley behind her back. When one of the girls told her this, it disturbed her for only a moment, confirming as it did what she already knew: she was not pretty.

  What she never found out was that, for several weeks after the Pony Club Ball, David Bryant was attracted to her. He liked her strong limbs and the cold soft redness of her face when she walked out on the first leg of their hunting challenge. He liked to see her bend to her haunches – the whipping sound of her inseams, the stretch of denim across her thighs. She looked like she could swim. He would certainly never tell his friends. After that first hunt with the falcons, they questioned him about Wheezer, and he tried to dismiss her fairly as a ‘bloke with tits’, but even this gave too much away. On the day they walked through the field together, on the second leg of their challenge, he stopped abruptly and she bumped into his back. He felt the give of her breasts against his shoulder blades, and tried to convince himself that he was aroused only by the thrill of carrying a firearm.

  SIX

  ‘Do you know any Jason Donovan, at all?’ Christopher said.

  ‘I’m afraid I do not,’ Louisa said.

  She had just finished playing ‘Devil Got My Woman’. Christopher had come to her cottage to apologise for his ‘savage and brutal behaviour resulting in facial injury’ and then insisted that she play the guitar. She did not like to perform, but after a spell of silence, she thought it might make her forget he was in the room.

  ‘Jason Donovan played Scott in Neighbours. He was world famous.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘Jason’s a good name. I’ll probably call my progeny Jason,’ he said.

  ‘It’s nice,’ she said.

  Another silence. Christopher became serious. ‘Do you think Jason Donovan is, erm, gay, at all?’ he said.

  Louisa hesitated.

  ‘Do you think he is strange in that way?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know him.’

  After a little contemplation, they resumed negotiations about music, and settled on ‘Sealed with a Kiss’, Louisa playing the old Gary Lewis version while Christopher shouted ‘quicker, quicker’ and sang every third word. Louisa could feel the vibrations of his foot tapping from across the floor. When they finished he smiled greasily and slid down on the sofa. His brace shone, and Louisa noticed that one of his teeth originated from high on the gum.

  ‘We’re rocking around the music tree, now,’ he said.

  ‘Aren’t we just,’ Louisa said. She recalled the particular facial expression David wore when talking about Christopher. The sort of frozen, distant smile you affect when your horse comes a close third behind your mother-in-law’s.

  ‘This is a nice pad,’ he said, stretching his arm across the top of the button-backed sofa.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Could do with a clean,’ he said. Louisa sighed, looked at her watch.

  ‘Do you like Maggie Green?’ he asked.

  What a question. Louisa wondered if she had sent him.

  ‘You mean Maggie who lives with you?’ It was the first time she had heard her maiden name.

  ‘Yes, my father’s late wife.’

  ‘Your late father’s wife.’ She corrected him automatically.

  He looked at the floor. ‘They are no longer married in the eyes of the law,’ he said. ‘Erm. Do you like her?’

  ‘I really don’t know her.’

  ‘Do you think she’s, erm, erm, ugly, at all?’ He smiled.

  ‘She certainly isn’t that.’

  Louisa felt a degree of discomfort. She reasoned that it may have resulted from the pleasure she took in the conversation.

  ‘She’s not my mother, you know,’ Christopher said.

  ‘I know. I know your mother.’

  ‘Do you?’ he said, leaning forward.

  ‘I knew her. Before.’

  ‘Before she, erm, flew the roost.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Erm. Do you think Maggie Green is a gold-digger, at all?’

  ‘I don’t know her,’ Louisa said.

  ‘I think she is. It’s a bit of a, erm, coincidence, isn’t it? She moves in, the younger woman, and then . . . all hell breaks loose.’

  Christopher remained thoughtful. It was Sunday morning, and the light came through the window in great bars that reached over his legs. His face was in darkness beyond the dust motes.

  ‘Have you ever been to Eden, at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Eden?’

  ‘It’s a lap-dancing club in Derby.’

  ‘Well in that case, no. I have not been to Eden.’

  ‘It’s pretty distracting, I must say, when a woman is, erm, erm, gyrating her pelvis in your face.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. Although perhaps I’m not the person to talk to about such things.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ he said, lapsing into a silent reverie – probably flashing back to some private dance – of which Louisa was powerless to disapprove.

  Then he sat back slowly, raised both arms in the air and pointed both index fingers down at his crotch. He stared at Louisa through his blue lenses. She shook her head slowly and grasped the neck of the guitar, ready to swing it if he made a move. She knew the dog was outside. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  He leaned forward, still pointing downwards. ‘Toilet,’ he whispered.

  It took Louisa a moment to understand. ‘Jesus,’ she said, closing her eyes with relief. ‘Yes, yes, go. It’s upstairs.’

  Louisa put her hands over her face as he left the room. She had thought briefly of the irony of being sexually attacked by David’s son. She laughed to herself.

  He flushed twice before coming downstairs, still buckling up. ‘Erm, erm, I’ve had a whale of a time,’ he said as Louisa showed him to the door. ‘This could be the start of quite a friendship.’ Louisa smiled, and he carried on. ‘A friendship based on Mutual Assured Destruction.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you sensitive information. About Eden and the gold-digger,’ he said, touching his nose. ‘I hope you won’t betray me to Maggie Green.’

  ‘I will not.’

  Louisa let him go, thinking he had misunderstood the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction, until he turned and said, ‘And I won’t tell Maggie that you hang around the garden at night.’

  They’d been vying for control of the woods for years. Louisa remembered a time on Bryant’s land, back in the nineties, when, leaning against the fibreglass stegosaurus, she’d been shocked by a crashing sound behind her. She turned to see that David’s little boy had fallen from an ash tree. His leg was bleeding, and he was in shock from the fall. He was whimpering, and still held the branch that had broken in his hands. ‘You might want to, erm, help me instead of just standing there,’ he said.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘No. Get my, erm, daddy.’

  As something of an uninvited guest on his land, Louisa saw that as a last resort. ‘Who else is working on the park today?’ she asked. ‘Perhaps someone—’

  ‘Not someone. Daddy!’ he screamed. Some of the animals called back
.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Louisa said.

  As it happened, she came upon David first anyway, in his Stetson and long coat. They ran back to Christopher and carried him to Louisa’s cottage because it was nearer and she had a better medical kit. Louisa’s attempts to treat the boy met with kicking and screaming and the word ‘fiend’, so David took over, kneeling before the sofa on which Christopher lay.

  ‘Now Christopher,’ said David. ‘Look at me and tell me honestly: what were you doing up that tree?’ He applied the rag gently to the edge of the wound as he spoke. Christopher hissed, but answered the question.

  ‘Because Robin Hood has a tree house. You said, in your story. I was looking to see if there might be any, erm, ruins.’

  ‘Robin Hood?’ said David. ‘He didn’t live in a treehouse, you ninny, he lived in a cave. I mean . . . Not a cave. Cave’s too dangerous.’

  ‘A den,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Perfect! Yes, a den. He lived in a den,’ David said.

  Christopher narrowed his eyes and looked at them both in turn. ‘What are dens made of?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ll make you one, down by the brook, won’t we Louisa?’

  ‘I suppose. I just pulled down the old mews, so there’s a lot of wood and iron hanging around. We could use that. It’ll be like a treehouse, only on the ground,’ she said. David beamed. ‘A treehouse on the ground,’ he said, and then stopped smiling and addressed Christopher. ‘As long as you promise, no more trees,’ he said.

  ‘Erm, erm, as long as you promise a den,’ Christopher said, excited by the prospect of an infinite conversation.

  When his knees were wrapped in the gauze Louisa used to treat her hawks, they left Christopher to rest and went through to the kitchen. Louisa made tea. They stood by the sink. ‘You look well,’ Louisa said, with a hint of sadness.

  ‘I feel good,’ David said. ‘Better than I have for a long time. Since I was a kid, I suppose.’

  Louisa nodded slowly and sighed. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘It’s taken a long time. It was a terrible thing that happened to us. You saved me, you know. I wouldn’t have coped.’