Page 19 of Little Wing
‘You shouldn’t be here, Florence. She’ll kill you if she sees you. You have to get back to Harry’s.’
Dougie
‘Long way to come for a bit of rope.’
As greetings went, this wasn’t the warmest that Dougie had encountered on his recent travels, but he was being paid to do a job, not make friends, so he followed Mrs Selwyn to the new barn behind the old stone farmhouse.
‘That there’s for cattle, that there’s for sheep.’
In the barn, there were two trestle tables on which cream and white rope in fractionally different diameters and various lengths were laid out.
‘And that there – that’s horse whispering.’ Mrs Selwyn motioned to an industrial-looking coat stand on which hung ropes in different lengths and colours.
Dougie went to inspect. ‘Different colours for – different levels of whispering? Like karate? Or for different decibel levels?’
Mrs Selwyn broke into a deep and dirty chuckle. ‘Summat like that. We just knot them and fix on the snappers and clasps. Sell like hot cakes. Different colour for every day of the week plus Sunday best, I reckon. You know what they’re like with their horses.’
Dougie didn’t. He thought it all looked like giant fresh pasta left out to dry.
‘You’ll want a cup of tea?’
‘Please,’ said Dougie, starting to unpack his equipment. He’d had nothing since setting off first thing. It was windy outside; the steel sides of the barn juddered with the gusts and the cold slithered under the doors and snaked its way up his back.
‘Kettle’s over there,’ she said, still laughing as she left.
The previous two days had been three different locations in and around Peterborough. Today Dougie was at a farm in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. Tomorrow he would be in an industrial area of Carlisle where the joys of photographing drum pumps, hygiene and bio security awaited. Today, though, it seemed Dougie was being given enough rope to hang himself. And yet, before long, he warmed up and found there was something oddly gentle about the ropes and halters; everything today tactile and uncomplicated after all the galvanized items of the last few days, those containers and grilles and steel contraptions that looked like things of torture. It was soothing working methodically and completely on his own, and there was something strangely contemplative about deciphering the Selwyns’ spidery handwriting on the scraps of paper under all this rope.
He worked swiftly and efficiently and was finished by early afternoon but decided not to head straight for Carlisle and the Travelodge. Instead, he took to the hills beyond the village and walked. God it felt good to be buffeted by squally weather, to have rain and wind lash his face and to have so much space and solitude. He’d brought his camera; a sudden longing to capture ephemera and land and sky, to photograph outwards and expansively for the first time in God knows. He walked hard and fast up to beyond the tree-line, to where the landscape was no longer plotted and pieced, where the earth was wet and uneven beneath his feet, where he felt just that little bit closer to the sky. There, with the wind wild enough to catch his breath and the rain soaking his lops of hair into steely fingers which harsh-flicked against his face and into his eyes, Dougie felt he could exhale. Anchoring himself, facing north, finding stability amidst all of this. He’d leave Hope behind having rediscovered something else. All points north. Soon he would be closer to Harris than to Camden.
Joan wept.
But I had to tell someone about you. I was starting to feel frightened. What my body was doing, what my head was telling me. Oh, hells bells – what was I to do? It was getting a bit too much.
I count fourteen weeks. It’s March now.
Little you.
Still making me sick as a dog.
Sometimes, just sometimes – in the moments before I fall asleep, in the dark of my room and the silence of the house and the blanketing aloneness of my bed – just sometimes I’d think it would be better if you didn’t make it.
I have prayed for blood.
I have prayed for pain to say you’ve gone, to say you’ve said goodbye.
I have pushed my hands against my belly and pushed hard – down and away.
Tears streaming as I have prayed go away go away go away.
So I told Joan.
She cried and cried.
This isn’t helping, I told her, crying too.
That bloody bloody bastard! she said.
That didn’t help.
