The Hunger Trace Page 7

  Louisa sniffed and looked away.

  ‘Anyway, what about you, Smedley?’ David said, lightening the tone. ‘I see precious little of you these days.’

  ‘Well, it’s not like I go anywhere. You know where I am.’

  ‘You’re in my garden,’ he said. Louisa reddened, but David became serious. ‘If there’s ever anything I can do for you,’ he said.

  They looked at each other for a moment. The kitchen lights were off, but the twilight made the place orange, threw patches of furtive heat across them both. Steam slinked up from the coiled clay mugs. Louisa’s knuckles stung.

  Christopher hobbled into the room. ‘Daddy, I want to go home, now. This house smells funny.’

  ‘Christopher, for God’s sake.’

  The moment was gone. Louisa turned away, towards the sink, the pan handles thrusting forth from water gone tepid. No plates.

  ‘Louisa, he doesn’t mean that. He’s just tired.’

  ‘So am I,’ Louisa said.

  The next day, Louisa dropped the materials for the den at their house, but left them to it. So David, with help from Christopher, built the den into the bottom of the slope, not far from the brook. They could often be seen fishing for beer cans and old shoes. Later, when Christopher was older and hoarding God knows what secrets, Louisa would see him crawling into the tin shack alone, hiding from the world.

  Christopher’s policy of speaking the brutal truth had not abated. Had he not said something similar, about the state of the house, on his most recent visit? Louisa thought of his bright gums, of her own swollen mouth, and of the unquantifiable disfigurements of the animals her birds had killed. Faces peeled off, eyes speared, every kind of cave-in. Diamond had once slashed a partridge after a fulsome stoop, and when it hit the ground it split in two, from head to tail. She thought of David in that field, all those years ago. The horror of it. Louisa could not sleep, and when she heard Maggie calling her dog on the first round of the morning, she stood from a bed on which she had only sat.

  * * *

  The day after visiting Louisa, Christopher sat at the computer, wrapped in a blanket, and checked his profile on the dating website. His photograph was just a picture of his bright blue eye.

  I’m a big handsome Robin looking for a Marian to Sher the Wood with. Excellent family values absolutely crucial. Interest in motorsport optional. I won’t let you down, unlike certain others.

  Shivering, he laughed at his pun about Sherwood Forest. They could see that he had a GSOH, he thought, even if he didn’t have GCH. There was a message in his inbox from a girl named Carol-Ann.

  So it could have been a good day, but his nemesis on campus that afternoon was Mr Stephen Cullis, tutor and supervisor, who was intent on convincing Christopher that there were no decent grounds for the existence of a real, historical Robin Hood. Christopher believed that William Fitzooth, a twelfth century landowner, had been dispossessed by King John while accompanying Richard the Lionheart during the crusades. Such a catastrophe, it seemed to Christopher, would be enough to create the violent outlaw who inhabited the early Robin Hood ballads.

  Christopher had trapped Cullis in the corridor after class. He didn’t like the way Cullis nodded to the other students who passed slowly by, watching the scene. ‘This is an important, erm, historical issue,’ Christopher said.

  ‘Listen, Christopher. Can’t we talk about this some other time?’

  ‘It’s not very nice to be usurped,’ Christopher said. ‘I’ve had a similar experience myself. I know how Robin Hood must have felt.’

  ‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ said Cullis. It was not their first argument on the subject. ‘Robin Hood is always a product of his times. He tends to be most popular in eras of tyrannical leaders, unjust wars and revolution. People turn to a moral hero who pulls down the pants of the men in charge.’

  ‘Pulls down their pants?’

  ‘Figuratively,’ said Cullis, looking over his shoulder towards the staff-room.

  ‘Oh, right.’

  ‘Each Robin Hood is created in line with the society he comes from. You yourself have created a Hood with your own sense of . . . well, a man with your issues at heart. Injustice, and such like. An angry man.’

  ‘But what about the corpses?’ said Christopher. ‘What about the evidence?’

  Christopher reminded Cullis of the crossbow bolt, the skull, the rank of bodies. Cullis pushed his fingers under his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. He wore an overlarge denim shirt tucked into what Christopher would have called ‘school trousers’. The skin at his neck hung loose and smooth. ‘Nottingham’s got the worst per capita gun crime in the country, and every time a body turns up they blame it on Robin Hood,’ Cullis said.

  Christopher considered this. ‘Whose side are you on, exactly?’

  ‘Look. Your essay is shaping up well. You can analyse the texts. How does the psychotic vigilante of the ballads compare to the all-American code of Kevin Costner? It’s good stuff.’

  ‘He wasn’t psychotic. It’s understandable that he’d be, erm, erm, aggrieved. How would you like it if someone usurped you?’

  ‘Christopher, you’ve got to let go of him being real. He was a tree-sprite.’

  Christopher walked away at that point. He considered the ‘tree-sprite’ comment to be sacrilege. Figurative pants. But he knew, on some level, that it might be true.

  In the canteen he had lentil soup, nostalgic for his years of vegetarianism. His refusal to eat meat had come from his fear of the animals on the park, the fear of retribution. His father had talked him out of it. ‘Protein is the building bollocks of life,’ David had said. His father had a way of swearing which was different to other people. He made it sound kind and funny, like a hiccup. There was nobody to tell Christopher what was right and wrong now. Nobody to tell him what was true or mythical about Robin Hood, or anything else.

  When he listened to the stories of Maggie Green and the villagers, it was hard to hold on to the real memories of his father. Maggie Green sometimes tried to tell him that old story of how they met, in the deer enclosure in London. Christopher used to like that story, but now it just sounded like the tale of how she wangled her way onto the park. Anyway, why should he believe such a story? Where was her evidence? Everything was uncertain.

  His building bollocks of life, it seemed, had tumbled to the floor.

  As she drove to collect Christopher from college, Maggie remembered his fifteenth birthday, when they had set up a treasure hunt in the woods. Maggie and David had spent the day writing clues for Christopher, riddles about Madge and Harold from Neighbours, and Ayrton Senna. David found a tree with two protrusions at chest height and he tied a bikini on them, pasted a picture of Dannii Minogue’s face above. That night, in the beam of the lanterns, she had watched Christopher dry hump the tree while David told him to stop through his laughter. She could not remember ever having had so much fun.

  It was dark when she arrived at the campus, the only illumination coming from her headlights and a bulbous lamp placed in the path-side bushes. Christopher stood on the edge of the glow, shifting his weight awkwardly in the doorway and chewing the lip of his cardboard coffee cup. Three students taunted him. He tried to retaliate, but it only made them laugh.

  Maggie got out of the truck, felt the rain coming down the inside of her jacket, felt her endorphins firing up.

  ‘Erm. Why do you have to use such vulgar language?’ Christopher said. ‘Anyway, I haven’t got anything stuck in my, erm, brace.’

  ‘Your embrace? What are you talking about?’

  Maggie noted the pun, the voice with all regional traces squeezed out of it. She knew this sort of student from her days working in colleges. They were the worst kind – the children of the governors, who would bully a kid half to death, then breeze into the disciplinary meeting with a haircut and a suit.

  ‘Hi, Christopher,’ she said.

  He crumpled out of the light when he saw her. ‘Erm. What are you doing here
?’

  ‘Come to pick you up,’ she said, with an apologetic smile.

  ‘This your woman?’ one of the students asked.

  ‘No!’ shouted Christopher.

  ‘Go home, before I call your daddies to come and get you,’ Maggie said to the students.

  ‘Hey, steady on,’ one of them said. ‘You don’t know what happened here.’ The boy pointed to Christopher. ‘He said Mark had herpes.’

  ‘Christopher, that’s ridiculous,’ said Maggie. ‘Who’d shag him?’

  She looked at the students, one of whom smiled. Christopher marched past her and got into the Land Rover. Maggie stepped closer to the group. ‘I don’t want to see you near him again,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure? I would have thought you’d be delighted he had a few mates.’

  The comeback tripped her. She was out of practice.

  Another of them spoke up, his skinny jeans concertinaed about the knee, as though his legs were drinking straws. ‘To be honest, we’d be pretty grateful if you could keep him away from us.’

  The rain fell like splinters through the light. She looked at Christopher in the Land Rover. He stared ahead, chewing his coffee cup. She turned back to the students. ‘Just be nice,’ she said. ‘Have a think about what it’s like for him, eh?’

  ‘It’s not somewhere I want to go,’ one of the students said. Maggie realised it was a girl, her fringe pushing through the hood, her face plush and full in the cold.

  ‘That’s what I mean,’ Maggie said. ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.’

  The group moved away slowly, a wet sheen coming off their pleather jackets. Maggie walked back to the truck and sat next to Christopher. ‘Alright, kiddo?’ she said.

  ‘Erm. Yes. Can we get chips and fishcake with curry sauce on the way back?’

  She saw a red wedge of coffee cup stuck between his brace and his teeth, but decided not to mention it. They drove on, collected chips, wound up the hill.

  ‘Did you go and see Louisa?’ she asked.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Nobody. I saw you walking over there. It’s absolutely fine. I’m pleased. Did you talk over what happened the other day?’

  ‘It’s, erm, classified information. What we talked about.’

  ‘I think she’s a good person to talk to. She knew your dad really well. Did you talk about your dad with her?’

  ‘Classified.’

  ‘Okay. Consider my memory wiped.’

  ‘It obviously is.’

  Maggie looked at him. It seemed like a cruel snipe, but he may not have intended it. Sometimes Christopher, in trying to be disagreeable, stumbled upon something raw.

  SEVEN

  Louisa found a folded note in her letterbox:

  KNOCK-DOWN MEAT IN YOUR FREEZER, LOVE MAGS.

  The door of the weighing room was ajar, and Louisa entered to find striped bags of beef and quail neatly packed in her reclining freezer. Louisa sighed and read the post-script of the note, which explained that Foxton’s butcher’s had suffered a powercut.

  THE MEAT WAS GOING FAST OR GOING OFF. DIDN’T THINK YOU’D MIND

  ME BREAKING IN. XX

  Louisa thought of Maggie kneeling above her with the frozen coffee. Money was tight, and the extra food for her hawks was welcome. She regretted what she had said about shipping Christopher out to his mother.

  And so, in late October, Louisa took Maggie lamping. She called at the big house around midnight, knowing that Maggie would be awake. This time she answered the door in a skirt and a silky white top, the straps radiating from a wooden circle above her breasts. Her nipples pressed at the surface as the night cold hit her. Louisa did not consider the details at that time. ‘Get your kit on,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a job for you.’

  Squinting into the headlights of the van, Maggie took a moment to make her decision. ‘Give me five minutes,’ she said.

  Maggie brought the warm fragrances of garlic and a musky perfume into the van. She turned around and looked at the Harris hawk, boxed and secured in the back. ‘What are we up to, sweetie?’ she said with relish, the streetlight slipping over her jeans.

  ‘No good, hopefully,’ Louisa said.

  They took the narrow off-road track, cut onto John Salt’s fields, stopped and got out. Maggie looked confused as Louisa took Fred from his box. The eyes of the bird popped with red flashes in the brake light. ‘Jesus, can he see in the dark now, too?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Only when you turn the light on,’ Louisa said, nodding at the lamp.

  ‘I get it,’ Maggie said, strapping the lamp battery round her waist and turning on the light. Fred tuned his vision to the end of the beam. Louisa taped his bell, for silence.

  They walked out into the open together, the sky fringed with pallor from the villages, but moonless. Maggie revealed the world in silver arcs of lamplight. Louisa usually hunted alone, and had not prepared herself for the rush of feeling and the memories of that time she had gone hunting with David. Her legs began to shake. She tried to concentrate on the technical details of hawking.

  ‘You need to move over to the side,’ she whispered to Maggie. ‘So his wings don’t block the light. You see a rabbit, you keep the light on it, everywhere it goes. If he misses, cut the lamp. Fred’ll go to ground. Then turn the light on me, and he’ll come back to my fist.’

  ‘Okay. Jesus, this is some crazy shit.’

  The first rabbit was too close to cover, but Fred gave good chase on the second – an old bunny who kept the hawk in a shaky line until the last second, when it switched direction, spinning out from under his elevated right wing.

  Later, in the van, Maggie would say that the time just after the lamp went off was the strangest time, because it was so dark she could barely believe that the drama she had just witnessed had happened at all. And that was a strange time for Louisa, too. As she waited in the darkness she could hear the private shifting of the hawk in the field, and her own heartbeat, which seemed much louder now that she had human company. At first all she could see was the cooling bulb of the lamp across the way, but soon Maggie’s belt buckle and coat buttons started to gleam, followed by the rest of her appearing in violet as Louisa’s eyes adjusted, as though light was a falling formative powder.

  Maggie shone the lamp on Louisa, blinding her. Louisa stuck out her meated glove and Maggie’s beam found it, as did Fred, who looked like a bleached, giant moth gliding out of the dark. ‘Your turn,’ Louisa said. They took a break before swapping, ate biscuits.

  ‘What do you think?’ Louisa said.

  ‘Strangest, most incredible thing I’ve ever done,’ Maggie said. ‘If you’d have told me, ten years ago, that I’d be out in a field in Derbyshire at two a.m., killing rabbits with a hawk . . .’

  ‘We haven’t bagged any yet. Some nice flights, though.’

  ‘He’s getting closer. How did you train him for this?’

  ‘I took two sequins off an old dress, and pinned them on the face of a rabbit lure. Sparkly eyes.’

  ‘Oh, now that’s wasteful,’ Maggie said. ‘I could have had that dress. I like sequins.’

  ‘I didn’t take them off the nipples; it’s still wearable. You might even grow into it one day.’

  It took them a while to find another rabbit, and the first one they saw just froze. Maggie slipped Fred from her fist as the rabbit flung herself out towards the trees. Fred was up quickly into the funnel of light, the band above his tail glowing white, his wings banking at every turn the rabbit took. They almost reached the end of the beam and Louisa began to follow, running. Fred’s feet came out, and he checked, rose, kicked at the rump, which is usually a mistake but this time threw the rabbit off balance. The rabbit bashed into a thick clump of grass, flipped over, and came down skidding and rolling like tumbleweed. She kicked out in the air, but Fred was above her, his feet clenched around her face, the hind toe digging deep into the tender flesh at the base of the neck. The rabbit’s skull collapsed. Fred rode her until she s
topped, and then mantled, his wings up and out. The rabbit had surrendered six inches from the thicket.

  They jogged over, Maggie coming into the light and pulling meat from the bag, ready to take Fred off the kill. ‘Wait. Let him have a taste first,’ Louisa said.

  ‘Thought he’d lost her when he went for the rear,’ Maggie said.

  Louisa took out the knife but there was no need for dispatch. The rabbit’s head, deeply depressed on one side, had been wrenched backwards, and was hanging on by gristle. Suddenly, in the wavering grey beam, Louisa saw a child’s face with punctured brown eyes. She caught her breath.

  ‘Okay. Take her off, take her off.’

  Maggie crouched down with some meat, and Fred stepped up quickly to the glove. Louisa went to gather the rabbit, and both women saw the slick pink protrusion from the belly, the even black dots. ‘What’s that?’ Maggie said.

  ‘Pups,’ Louisa said. ‘Were going to be.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Louisa cut the mass free, left it for the foxes, hauled the mother, and stood.

  They loaded Fred and the equipment into the van by the light of the lamp. ‘Did Christopher come and talk to you?’ Maggie said.

  ‘He did. He came to apologise.’ Louisa dropped her lower lip to reveal the healing cut.

  ‘I’m glad. It’s a good thing for him, having you around.’

  They fell silent for a while. Fred was still alert, peering beyond them into the field. ‘I’m sorry about what I said before,’ Louisa said eventually. ‘About his mother.’

  Maggie nodded.

  ‘How has he been?’ Louisa said.

  ‘No better, really. I tried so hard to get him into the college, but the kids are being such bastards,’ Maggie said.

  ‘Is he being any kinder to you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Did he mention me, when you spoke?’

  Louisa recalled their pact of mutual assured destruction. ‘No, not really.’

  Maggie nodded. ‘He was so nice to me when I got here.’