Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Smell it a mile away,’ Jimmy said. ‘Bay’s a fuckin star.’

  Phil came to the fireside with his leather jacket draped over his shoulders and sat on his haunches, gazing morosely at the flames. Jimmy went to his own bike. The dog sat staring at the meat. Phil unscrewed the bottle top, took a slug of liquor, and passed the bottle over to Ben.

  ‘Don’t know how people drink that stuff,’ Jimmy said. ‘Gives me the shakes, do whisky.’ Addressing Ben, he said, ‘Joe Cornish. Phil reckons he set us up.’

  Phil stared at the fire. ‘Told him us was goin a do somethin fore you two clears off. It was him suggested huntin, said he’d seen deer up here. Windin me up, wasn’t he? Be down the pub tonight laughin at us.’

  Jimmy took a cigarette, threw the packet across the fire to Ben. ‘Phil got off with his bird last year, see. I told him Joe knew.’

  Ben tossed the packet to Phil. Phil said nothing. He drew a twig from the fire, lit his cigarette with its glowing end.

  ‘Lucky you ain’t been give a kickin,’ Jimmy said. ‘Things you gets up to.’

  A rueful smile began slowly to materialise on Phil’s face. ‘Tell you what, though, bud, she was nice, was Hayley. Worth bein sent on any wild goose chase for.’

  ‘Worth it for you, maybe,’ Jimmy muttered. ‘Don’t know what us got out of it.’

  ‘Not much,’ Ben agreed.

  ‘Gives em that cheeky-little-boy smile of his, they falls over theirselves.’

  Dusk gathered in the trees. Ben turned the skewers. Fat dripped off the meat, fell hissing in the flames. ‘Wouldn’t mind some trick like that myself,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you worry, bud,’ Phil said. ‘That’s all they get up to at university, you lucky sod. Them brainy birds, be beggin for it. That there meat ready? Look at this.’ He held his soggy cigarette up for the others to see. ‘Salivatin so much my fag’s ruined.’ He dropped it in the fire.

  ‘Nearly done,’ Ben said. ‘But unless you’ve got some hidden compartment on the bikes, we’ve got nothing else.’

  ‘Like what?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘I thought it was agreed that one of you would bring bread. The other one utensils.’ Ben turned the meat again. ‘I brought coffee and tea, but we need a pan. Mugs.’

  ‘No one said nothin to me,’ Jimmy claimed. He turned to Phil. ‘Didn’t tell me nothin, bay.’ He took a swig of vodka.

  ‘This is almost ready,’ Ben said.

  ‘Don’t move,’ said Phil, looking past the other two. Like a man miming stealth he tiptoed to his bike and pulled the rifle from its scabbard.

  Jimmy and Ben turned gradually in the direction in which lay whatever Phil had seen. In the gloom, an obscure grey shape moved at the base of a tree.

  ‘Pheasant?’ Ben wondered.

  ‘Partridge, innit?’ Jimmy guessed.

  ‘Where’d it go?’ Phil asked. He yanked back the bolt of his rifle to load the bullet into the chamber, put his eye to the scope.

  ‘Same place.’

  ‘Got it.’ Phil pulled the trigger. The bullet hit something that caused a fluttering of splinters, and there was the sound, a quick abrupt explosion. Phil fired again, and a third time.

  ‘Must a hit it,’ Phil said. The three of them trotted over. There was no sign of a carcase, nor of feathers or blood. They each looked up and around, peering into the black depths of the forest.

  With Ben distracted by the phantom bird, the meat was charred, but Phil and Jimmy made no complaints. Ben had baked the rabbits’ entrails on a stone placed in the centre of the fire. The spaniel swallowed these in a flurry of greedy mouthfuls, then sat beside Jimmy, watching him with sorrowful eyes. Occasionally he cut a morsel of flesh and fed it to her with his fingers.

  Phil let out a long belch of appreciation, then set to rolling a roach: stuck three cigarette papers together, broke a No. 6 into it, then crumbled a little cannabis amongst the tobacco. He tore off an end of the Rizla cardboard and screwed it up for a filter, licked the papers. He twisted the far end before lighting up, took a lungful of smoke, and held it in while he passed the joint to Jimmy. ‘Well, bud,’ he said, exhaling. ‘This time next week you’ll be in uniform, all that fuckin hair cut off, standin on a parade ground. With some bastard yellin in your ear tellin you what a knob you is.’

  ‘Reckon I will,’ Jimmy agreed, passing on the sweet-smelling joint. Inhaling, Ben focused on not betraying his inexperience by coughing.

  ‘Rather you than me,’ Phil said. ‘Tell you what, if I had to go in the army, not that I would, like, but if we was invaded by Russkies, you know what I’d be?’

  ‘Quartermaster?’ Ben offered.

  ‘Sniper,’ Phil said. ‘Work alone. Behind enemy lines.’

  ‘Only trouble with that is,’ said Jimmy, ‘you’d need to be a good shot.’ He turned to Ben. ‘Ever see anyone put so many bullets to so little use?’

  Phil burped. ‘You got a point there, bud,’ he admitted.

  Phil drank whisky, Jimmy vodka. Each passed his bottle to Ben, who took a slug and passed it back. He’d not drunk like this before, spirit neat and plentiful. Phil broke open a fresh packet of No. 6, threw the cellophane and silver paper on the embers of the fire. He took out three cigarettes and passed one to each of the others, grunting with drunken effort as he raised himself up to reach them.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how you can stand the thought of goin back in a classroom for three year. Already done two more than I ever would.’

  ‘Where you goin again?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘Lancaster,’ Ben told him. ‘Plant biology.’

  ‘Take no notice of that pig-ignorant sod,’ Jimmy advised. ‘What you forget,’ he told Phil, ‘is tis all paid for.’

  Phil shook his head. ‘Not for me, that lark, bud.’

  ‘I’m the same as you,’ Jimmy said, turning back to Ben. ‘I’ll come out the army fully qualified mechanic. HGVs, motorbikes, the lot. All paid for.’

  Phil took a swig of whisky. ‘Couldn’t do it,’ he said. ‘Be one a the crowd. On the rifle range seven-fifteen. In the classroom eight forty-five. Eat at nine, shit at ten. Tell you when to wank, shouldn’t be surprised.’

  Jimmy stood up, turned round, took a couple of steps away from the campfire, and unzipped his flies.

  ‘I’ll be out in nine year,’ Jimmy said over his shoulder, in the background the sound of his piss falling on the dry undergrowth. ‘Open my own garage. You’ll still be stuck on that pig farm on a labourer’s fuckin wages. Meantime I’ll have been out a here, seen the world.’

  ‘Seen the streets a Belfast, more like,’ Phil said. ‘You can keep em, bud. Anyway, you’ll miss this place.’

  ‘Like fuck.’ Jimmy zipped his flies, returned to his spot, took a swig from his bottle.

  ‘No, I’m tellin you.’ Phil pointed a wavering finger at his friend. ‘Part a you’s planted in this here land. You’ll miss it.’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘As for Ben there, unlike us, he won’t never have to get his hands dirty.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Phil said. ‘Can’t be all bad in the army. I dunno. Unarmed combat should be a laugh.’

  Jimmy spluttered a mouthful of vodka at the fire. ‘Only unarmed combat you ever do’s with birds.’

  Jimmy was a well-known scrapper. At village discos, outside pubs, he loved to fight with guys small and belligerent as himself. If you looked closely you could see the damage all over his young head – missing tooth, broken nose, misshapen ear.

  ‘And I’ll give you a word of advice for when I’m gone, bay,’ Jimmy continued. ‘Saw you give my sister-in-law that smile a yours. Wouldn’t go anywhere near her. My brother’ll do more ’an play practical jokes on you. Meanest fucker I know, and that includes the old man.’

  The image of the young woman in Jimmy’s kitchen that morning swam into Ben’s blurry vision. ‘God, she’s pretty, though,’ he blurted out.

  Phil burst out laughing. ‘He’s the one you need a w
orry about, bud. Look: bay gone and fell in love at first sight.’

  ‘Don’t you go within ten fuckin mile a her,’ Jimmy advised.

  ‘Just think of they girls waitin for you in Manchester,’ Phil suggested.

  ‘Lancaster,’ Ben corrected him. He wanted the conversation to track backwards. ‘All I said was how pretty she is.’

  ‘Bah!’ Jimmy exclaimed. ‘What’s pretty got to do with it? You ever licked a quim, bay?’

  Ben did not reply.

  ‘You hear me?’ Jimmy said. ‘You never been down on a bird?’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Phil said.

  ‘Only askin,’ Jimmy said. ‘Just wonderin.’

  Ben imagined they could see him blush in the dying light of the fire. He suspected they were staring at him, but whenever he glanced in their direction, they’d just looked away.

  Ben pulled himself to his feet, and stumbled along the wide track by which they’d entered the forest. He fumbled through the gate and across the empty car park. Would his brain adapt to cannabis? Or would it always churn everything up? His sense of it was not of a dead weed but organic living matter: it infiltrated his brain cells and messed with their connections.

  Reaching the water’s edge, Ben peered across the long reservoir. Somewhere at that far end water overflowed, became the Teign river, heading for their own valley. Ben had always understood he had to leave this place. His life lay elsewhere. Whether or not, beyond holiday vacations, he would come back to his home county, he didn’t know. Or miss it, as Phil had claimed Jimmy would.

  The dope was wearing off. The reservoir, gunmetal grey, swallowed the last of the shadows of the trees. Darkness.

  As soon as he woke up, Ben felt dreadful, head throbbing. He unzipped his sleeping bag and staggered stiffly to his feet. A blood-filled drum pounded in his skull. Jimmy and Phil lay on the ground, their leather jackets draped over them. The dog, curled up beside Jimmy, watched Ben pass.

  Lurching along the path through the waist-high grass, Ben thought how much he’d like a large mug of tea and some rounds of crisp toast. The sky was speckled with cloud, the morning dewy and still. He remembered that he’d got up to empty his bladder and had already wandered for thirty yards. He found a space to one side. Peeing, he looked around. A little way along the path three pairs of limpid, alert eyes watched him.

  Ben kept as still as he could but maybe his excitement transmitted itself: the three does turned and cantered away, bodies undulating, breasting through the high grass; their rumps showed intermittently, white circles with a black stripe.

  He ran back to camp. ‘They’re here. I’ve seen them.’ Phil and Jimmy began to stir, groggily. ‘Get the guns. Quick.’

  Ben and Pete loaded their rifles. ‘Fuck,’ Jimmy muttered. ‘Forgot to loosen my bow.’

  They sprinted along the path through the grass, bending forward as they ran, each holding his weapon horizontal in his hand. Jimmy’s dog ran madly parallel, off in the trees. Ben studied the grass in the yards ahead. After two or three minutes’ running he stopped, holding up his hand.

  ‘See this,’ he said. The way before them was unbroken. ‘Reckon they must have headed into the trees here, up to our left. Phil, stay here. Jimmy, go fifty yards back along the path, I’ll go the same further on, then we advance in a line. Try and corral the deer between us. And if you can’t control the dog, tie her up, we’ll come back for her later.’

  Jimmy bent to his spaniel and secured her with his belt to the trunk of a sapling.

  They moved up through the trees at a swift and even pace, keeping each other in intermittent sight, scanning ahead for movement. Concentrating, Ben forgot his pounding brain. They’d been tracking for an hour when they saw a great white wall through the trees up ahead. They continued forward, and came to the edge of the fir plantation. Beyond the chest-high wire fence lay Dartmoor, under a thick white cloud of fog.

  Jimmy came in from the flank. ‘What happened to they deer, then?’ he demanded. ‘Slip past us?’

  Each of them peered out into the milky fog.

  ‘What you reckon?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘What we come for, innit?’

  ‘How the hell we goin a find anythin out there?’

  ‘Won’t ever know till we try,’ Ben suggested, climbing over the fence.

  As soon as they lost sight of one another they realised the danger, called each other’s names and reassembled. Thereafter they proceeded in a huddle, shivering.

  Streams flowed down from the high watersheds of the moor, creating blanket bogs. Ben wondered at the variety of plants. Cotton grass with white tufts, bright green sphagnum moss, purple moor grass. Vegetation grew like mats floating on a spongey lake. The boys stepped on something not entirely solid, the ground for yards around quaking, undulating.

  ‘Fuckin mental,’ Jimmy said. ‘Whoever heard a huntin in the summer anyhow? My brother was right. You hunts deer in the winter.’

  ‘Christ!’ Phil stopped with such abruptness that the other two jumped back. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Out there,’ Phil said, peering in front of him, pointing into the mirk. ‘I seen it.’

  ‘Didn’t see nothin,’ Jimmy whispered, gazing ahead, carefully loading an arrow into his bow and raising it in front of him. Ben and Phil each raised his rifle, put the scope to his eye, scanned the fog. They began to take wary steps forward.

  Whether the animal came towards them or the fog lifted just where it stood, the three men saw it at the same moment and let fly simultaneously. Ben’s pellet struck the animal’s side, Jimmy’s arrow entered its rear flank, and it gave a whinny of surprise and pain. They understood what it was, but Jimmy named it anyhow as it disappeared into the fog. ‘A pony. We shot a Dartmoor pony.’

  ‘What are we goin a do?’ Phil wailed. They all realised his bullet must have missed. ‘Christ almighty. What’ll we do now?’

  No one answered. The chances of finding the animal, wandering wounded in the fog, were negligible; and what on earth would they do if they came across it? Instead they turned and ran back down to the forest. They clambered over the fence, and scrambled down between lines of trees. Back on the path, Jimmy found his dog, while Ben and Phil made for the camp. Ben rolled up his sleeping bag while Phil packed the guns away.

  Panting, they loaded up, pulled the bikes out of the trees and rode along the path back to the main track out of the woods. There were three cars in the car park this Saturday mid-morning; they saw no one, though there was no guarantee that no one saw them. Once again they manoeuvred the bikes through the walkers’ gate. Ben climbed back on, and Phil and Jimmy accelerated out along the lane around the reservoir.

  Turning to his left, Ben perceived disturbance on the surface of the wide expanse of the reservoir. It took a moment to ascertain that a light rain pattered on the water.

  What had they left behind? he wondered. A pony stumbling around on the moor with an arrow and an airgun pellet embedded in its flesh. An empty whisky bottle. Motorcycle tyre marks in the forest floor. He figured Jimmy would burn the bow before he set off for the army. As for his own air rifle, he would wipe it of fingerprints, wrap it in oilcloth. He thought of a place he knew where he might bury it.

  Ben considered Phil, whose waist he clung on to as the rider opened up the throttle on these roads turning slippery with rain. He tried to anticipate the camber of the road, leaning together with Phil into the curves.

  He reckoned that Phil would gamble, take a chance that no one would ever find the bullet with which he’d missed the animal; would hold on to his rifle. And then Ben concentrated fully, as he realised that Phil had entered a left-curving bend too fast: the bike was getting too close to the ground, bringing their bodies with it, even as it edged too far out, across the white line in the middle of the road, into the path of anything that might come the other way around the bend. Ben focused only on that moment, that one curve in the road down to Moretonhampstead.

  His life was
elsewhere. It always had been. It lay far ahead of him now.

  Brothers at the Beach

  ‘I need to see you,’ I told my brother on the phone. ‘We need to meet.’

  ‘We do indeed, Si,’ he said. ‘I was about to call you. You’re psychic. What are you up to next week?’

  ‘We’ll be on holiday,’ I told him. ‘Buckets and spades. Mary’s got us a place right on the beach. Back in Devon. James, we need to talk.’

  ‘I’m free,’ James said. ‘We’ll join you there. I can’t wait for you to meet Delilah.’

  This was someone I’d not heard of. What had happened to the last one? Jenny? ‘I’ll ask Mary where it is, exactly. What, you’ll find a B&B?’

  ‘You’ll love her, Si. She’s unbelievable. We’ll come in her camper van, park outside.’

  ‘We’re staying in a tiny place,’ I protested. ‘A chalet.’

  ‘We’ll sleep in the van,’ James said. ‘I can’t wait to tell Delilah and Julian. You’re right, Si. It’s been far too long. A year? Two?’

  ‘Three and a half,’ I said, certain he remembered that Christmas as well as I did. And Julian, who the hell was he? I put the phone down, realising I now had to explain to Mary how the call I’d steeled myself to make to bring the bastard into line had somehow turned itself into an invitation to share our precious holiday. It was the kind of thing that happened, you saw it happening right there in front of you but you couldn’t stop it. It had occurred, and reoccurred, since the day that James was born.

  It was raining when we arrived. The children had squabbled inside the car; now they refused to get out.

  ‘I knew we should have gone somewhere hot,’ Mary said.

  ‘You’re the one figured we couldn’t afford it,’ I objected.

  ‘A cheap Greek package,’ Mary said wistfully. ‘I mean, look at this … shed. And we’ll probably be stuck inside all week.’

  I dragged our luggage into the sitting room. Mary had a point. This luxury chalet was partitioned into minute cubicles; a mini double bed wedged into one, a bunk bed squeezed into the other. My wife was the one with the full-time job: a social worker, she worked too hard; she needed a decent break.