Blackmoor by Edward Hogan

Author:Edward Hogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849830041
Publisher: Pocket

FIFTEEN

George had asked her once about the ‘eye thing’, as she came to call it. They were fifteen.

‘Why do you look sideways like that?’

‘Stops my eyes from moving. So I can see. Doctor says it’s called a zero point.’

‘Doesn’t it bother you? The eye thing?’

‘Well, I think about it all the time. Especially when I’m nervous or talking to new people.’

‘Not so many new folk around here,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘No. Anyway, I don’t think I’d ever like to be completely still.’

He had liked that answer.

She had gone on to tell him of her first day at school. The teacher had done birthdays. Each child took a paper cake and fixed it to the appropriate date on a giant calendar. It was 1961 so there was no 29 February. When Beth mentioned the missing number, the teacher took some cruel pleasure in announcing to the class, ‘Beth doesn’t have a birthday.’

That evening she had cried to her mother. ‘Nobody can help when they’re born,’ her mother had said. ‘Or where.’

He looks outside at his Church Eaton garden now, his son kneeling on the top level, setting morsels of raw turkey in the grass in an attempt to lure a barn owl he has seen in the adjacent field. The redundant washing tree, barnacled with rust, fingers of grass reaching up the pole, creaks one inch in a circle that will take a year to complete. He imagines her there, draped with damp linen.

Behind the pavilion he had said, all garrulous bravado, ‘I’m gonna get out of here.’

‘How?’ she had asked.

‘Don’t know. I expect I’ll design warships or become an actor,’ he had said, with droll resignation. ‘Nah. Numbers. I’m going to go to college, get me a teaching certificate or sommat. For maths.’

He said it spontaneously, to impress her. He had never considered such a possibility, and didn’t really believe his words.

‘There is an easier way,’ she said.

‘Oh aye? What’s that?’

‘Bus,’ she had said, and set off for the main road to catch the 10.48 to Derby.

He should have taken her away from that place. It would have been easy.

Animals that die that spring:

All of Vincent’s tropical fish.

A squirrel, messily, under the wheels of Mr Downing’s 4x4.

Countless and untold young rabbits, in the jaws of the fox.

A generation of slugs, despite a young man’s best efforts.

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