A Sudden Silence

The top strand of the barbed-wire fence was rusty and rough, sharp to the touch. She shortened her arm inside the sleeve of her anorak, an old pink thing of her daughter’s, adequate enough for the quick nip this walk was supposed to have been when she’d set off. Pulling the knitted cuff down for a pad to protect her fingers, she pushed on the wire, rising as high as she could, willing her legs to be longer, longer, just a bit longer to let her step over. It was getting late. Dusk was coming. She needed this shortcut or goodness knows where she’d wind up. Her arm shot out of the sleeve. A twist of forked metal chewed her inner thigh and the fence catapulted her into the field. She fell, crashing into the sharp stubble of the newly cut field. Rubbing the fatty, soft flesh of her inner thigh, she noticed on the fence-wire a tuft of purple, like a little carnation, where the prongs had torn the fabric of her trousers; a saggy stretch-cotton-towelling-lycra mix, just the job for sopping up the water in the ditch. A small, painful bruise the same colour was coming up livid where the barbs had grabbed and twisted.

“Mummy?” Colin’s voice. She looked round but there was no one. The bruise smarted and she vented off a few curses at the ground.

“Bloody barbed bloody wire!” Colin’s voice came again, severe and three years old. “Bad boy wire. Bloody wire!” She laughed and rubbed her sore bit, sitting temporarily deflated on the cold, hardening mud, the seat of her trousers wet through. Her laugh didn’t echo in the wintry air.

She’d been walking non-stop since the telephone box, the branch of bridle way she had been following evidently not the one that wound round the back of her house. The path had narrowed to a trickle, merging with the bramble bushes so, wisely, she had thought, she had decided to step over the fence into the field. Step? The place where the wire had gnashed into her flesh was still throbbing but the sting of it was subsiding. She smiled to herself resignedly.

She stood. Her feet were heavy and clogged with a mix of bridle-path cinders and mud, as if clumps of rhubarb crumble had got clotted to her soles, cushioning her from contact with the ground. The ground in this field was not as flat or solidly impacted as the one behind her house. The earth was churned up, stony and uneven. She imagined, trying to plod across the middle of it in this rapidly disappearing light, she might easily turn an ankle and then where would she be? She looked into the trees and the bushes lining the pathway on the other side of the fence. Getting back over wasn’t an option. The ground was lower this side and the bottom wires had a criss-cross mesh strung across them. “Great!”

She cast an eye across the emptiness of the field stretching away behind her back. Darkness was rising from the ground up. It had been circling her quickening steps on the path but now it had caught up with her. It was seeping out of the mud. The trees looked crusty. Nothing had any depth or colour. She looked at her watch. She could hardly see the strap never mind the time.

Birds she couldn’t identify moved in the air above her and called over the fields. Three blunted shapes flapped without a sound. They were blacker than the sky which still held a bruise of greyish yellow in the west. At that moment, instinctively and involuntarily, as she stood wondering about how or in which direction to take the next step, in the still world of the gathering night, she allowed a door inside her to swing open.

Fear, a creature more used to staying quietly locked away, sat up inside her and blinked. She tried to shrug the thought of it away. It stood up.

It stretched its arms into hers, its legs into hers. It had a pulse and a cold brow and a prickling scalp. It looked out through her eyes. Rock still, she was another black thing, swaying slightly under the trees. Time was passing her by.

Yet close-by, minutes in the right direction, there was a roomful of people. It would take them a while but some time soon there would be a sudden silence and somebody would say, “Where’s Mum?” She pictured them and the fright inside her began to calm as she watched the scene.

The kitchen floor swimming in muck, the dog had left a stencil of himself in mud on the fresh woodchip by the door. There were wet palm prints on the naked plasterboard where a child, Colin, had steadied himself to pull off his boots and leave them for somebody to trip over. The family were all padding about in their socks. She watched, waiting for the silence and the “Where’s Mum?”

The T.V. was blaring in the lounge. Frank was gazing out of the window. Sarah was lying on the settee. Colin, the youngest, was crouched beside Bert the dog, the pair of them sucking up Sugarpuffs out of a plastic mixing bowl on the floor. “Frank! Don’t let Colin do that. He’ll choke!” And she laughed out loud at the silliness of crying out in the dark. She judged it was feeding time at home and Frank would be wondering what to do. She couldn’t remember if she’d taken the stew out of the freezer before she went out. If she didn’t hurry they’d start opening tins of beans and flicking dishtowels at one another. She’d get home and they’d have already started making some rubbishy hurried thing for dinner instead of the casserole she had planned.

Frank was in the kitchen. He was going to the fridge. No. He was opening the back door. He was going out. He had his jacket on. The kids were bickering and batting at each other on the settee in the lounge. Frank stood still at the back porch door, looking out into the garden. Odd spots of snow were spitting over the roof and sparkling in the spotlight above the yard. He stayed quite still and the light went off. With a closed mouth, he sighed and let the air out through his nostrils. The kids’ racket was muffled but growing. Bert pawed at the glass door of the kitchen and Frank opened it for him.

“Snowing, boy.” The dog made a sound like a squeaky toy and looked up at Frank as Sarah appeared behind him.

“Daddy?”

Frank held his arm out for Sarah to curl into. The two of them stood together looking at the snow. It was swarming down, gusts and eddies of air sending flakes of it rising and swirling as far as the light could reach. Further out across the fields and hedgerows it was dropping, dropping in the dark, a thin, fine dredging of icing sugar sifting down out of nowhere on to the earth’s hardening crust.

Under the trees the worst of it was being held back. Her daughter’s anorak was tight across her back but it had a hood and it almost fitted her. The wind was fingering her neck with little searching currents. When she pulled her scarf away from her face and breathed-in, the cold went right through her. She coughed and banged her hands together to bring some feeling back into them. The noise fell flat in the air. The seams of the anorak were letting in and her trouser legs were working like wicks, bringing the wet up from the elasticated cuffs at her ankles. Her feet had been warm for a time inside her soaking wet shoes but they were stiffening now and going numb.

When she’d started on her walk, striding along comfortably, there had been puddles. She had walked right through them. Frank had been teaching Colin to walk round puddles. “Big boys walk round, Colin.” But really, Frank had winked at her, little boys should wear Wellington boots and jump, splash! Squishing along, her feet hot with exertion inside her trainers, it had been such a good feeling. These bashed-up old pals on her feet were long past it and ready for the bin. She would chuck them as soon as she got home. For this last time out together, scuffing along, swishing the corn stalks of the stubble field with their rubber soles, it had been like paddling through the shallows, summer from the ankles down. And she had worked up a nice healthy sweat inside her cosy anorak and scarf too.

They had been a week in the new house. It was far and away the best decision of their lives to sell up and move up here. She was going to make a real go of things, get a proper grip on herself, her routine, her family. Yes! There was going to be less slouching around, less snacking, less mooching about. Bikes! They would get bicycles and … whooo … she had found herself puffing a bit. But no, half an hour a day, rain or shine. Soon they would all be coming with her. Nobody would be calling her lot a bunch of pasty faced city-dwellers with no idea about healthy living and country ways. It would be harder at first, to get the fitness habit but, she was feeling it already, heart pumping, muscles working, face burning and the sweat glands doing their thing, but the trick, she knew, was to keep moving. Keep moving or risk cooling down. She’d been doing well, till the fence.

Frank lit up as he and Sarah stood cuddled together in the back porch door, Bert beside them. Sarah turned her face away from the smell of the cigarette but said nothing.

“I know.” said Frank. “I found a packet in my drawer.”

“There’s no oven chips,” said Sarah. Frank slowly turned his head and exhaled.

“Are there potatoes?”

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

He sighed and took one long drag, throwing what was left of the fag into the night. Inside there was a noise of pan lids crashing to the floor.

“Sarah says the oil in the fat fryer’s too old. There’s no more in the cupboard. ” Andy was complaining at his father, heedless of Colin scraping a chair across the tiled kitchen floor towards the worktop.

“Oh, Frank,” she thought, “don’t let Colin touch the fat-fryer!” She had to get home. This was silly. Minutes away from home imagining all sorts! And there was that lovely casserole waiting to be defrosted on the worktop and nobody paying it a blind bit of notice. Left to their own devices they wouldn’t have the gumption to lift the lid and take a look. Even if they did they’d not be able to tell what it was. Not that it was just the kids who couldn’t work out what it was they were eating unless there was a picture of it on the packet. Even Frank couldn’t be trusted to tell prime-beef stewing steak from a bagful of frozen rhubarb.

Mind you, the pie she’d made when the mistake was discovered … mmmm …. she could still conjure up the smell of it and the cream melting in runnels over the pastry. That was some pie that was. Even Andy had slowed down in the middle of his second helping saying it was so good he was going to savour every bite. That was some compliment coming from him. His recent spurt of growth and yawning chasm of an appetite had made her wonder if the boy had hollow legs. She had dreams at night of standing over this long drainpipe of a thing, ladling in great slices of pudding and broth and pies and chips by the ton. But the more she ladled, the thinner he got and the more his Adam’s apple grew and squeaked for more. Oh, Andy, her precious first born, so delicate and so small. Now look at him, great lummox, all legs and elbows and size nine feet. And Sarah, picky and faddy in many ways about her food but the only one of the brood who didn’t think of vegetables as the enemy or sneak them off her plate to Bert the dog. No, left to him, Frank would cave in and buy them pizzas or a stack of ready-meals. With a freezer crammed to bursting, with home grown vegetables all cut and prepared, with wonders waiting simply to be transferred to an oven-proof dish and to the table, Frank would head off to the shops.

She looked into the darkness, now solidifying around her. She could no longer see her feet. She could no longer feel them really. But at least that was better than feeling cold. She wasn’t feeling terribly cold at all. It was just going to be a matter of remaining calm, thinking back and retracing her route in her mind. She’d figure out the general direction she needed to take. Either that or she would have to plump for a direction and head straight. That’s what you do in a wood, she remembered, if you get lost. You walk in a straight line and hope for the best. She’d always wondered about that advice but you listen to these things when you’re little and think, next time I’m in the middle of a forest, I’ll be sure to do that … and for some reason, though the nearest you’ll ever get to a forest will be standing at the bus stop under a dripping lime on a wet Wednesday in July, you do. You remember.

Feeling the snowflakes landing on her here and there, the odd one getting through the branches of the hawthorn windbreak at her back, she thought about the terrible tale of the man in the blizzard who walked all night for miles and miles, in a straight line or so he thought, wondering how much farther he would have to trudge before he reached the end of his long, long trek. The poor man did the one thing you must never, never do, no matter how exhausted and in need of a rest you get, but oh how he must have been glad to do it, curl up warm and cosy, in his bed of downy snow. They found him after a week, when the snow melted, in the middle of a field where he’d been walking, round and round, round and round, thinking he was walking in a straight line. She’d practised, her and her friends, nine years old and alarmed at the prospect of doing the same thing. They’d practised walking across the playground with eyes shut, arms out, marvelling at how hard it was to do it, how one leg was stronger than the other, how you veered off and did a banana within a few paces. They said they’d remember that the next time they were out in a blinding snow-storm. And they chattered about it to their grandmothers and their uncles, warning them gravely of the dangers of freezing fog and winter conditions, nudging each other in awe at the unfaltering progress of the blind man who lived in her street and his expert use of his sweeping white stick. That’s how he knows where he is, they surmised. And they practised until the teacher took their sticks off them, tutting at them for making fun.

But that was then and this was now and she was a grown up and just a few hundred yards, at most, away from her own fireside. If she went slowly, she’d be fine. There was nothing to fear, no bears, no predators, no sabre-tooth tigers … there was the quarry and a few dips and ditches but if she was careful, even if it took all night, she would get home. And a sorry sight she would look, walking in, she knew that. She sank to the ground with a sigh and found a hummock to perch on, to gather her thoughts. She had overdone it really, she knew that. She would be stiff in the morning. But it was good to be sitting, for a moment, with the weight off her feet.

In the trees overhead, she could hear a rise in the rustling of the leaves and, in the quiet that had settled all around, the fluttering of a rapidly beating heart, her own, beginning to slow. The fear that had started up so sharply inside her had subsided and it was good to rest. The sounds were soothing. She closed her eyes, knowing there was nothing to worry about. The house, her house, was just across the field. It was just a step. In a minute she would be back on her feet. In a minute. Reassuringly, through the trees somewhere, faintly, she seemed to hear the cough of an ignition starting up and the deep roar of an engine bursting into life.

The estate car, with Bert, Colin and Frank, sat for a while in the driveway, a great cloud of exhaust billowing up red as Frank switched on the lights and waited for things to heat up and the windscreen to clear. The temperature had taken a nose dive since lunchtime and the wind had swung to a northerly. He eased off the brake and moved off, slowing at every bend, lingering at every junction, watching all the way to the shop where they bought a chocolate ice-cream pudding with swirls in it, two packets of savoury rice, a jumbo tin of beans with meatballs and a sack of oven chips. A bell tinkled all through the transaction while Colin swung on the door.

“Colin, stop that!”

“It’s all right,” said the lady. She looked out at the parked car and the large grinning hairy dog inside. “He’s a nice dog. Has he got a name?”

“Yes,” said Colin, and he scraped his face down the door and slid outside. Frank talked over a handful of loose change.

“How much do I owe you?”

The shopkeeper looked at the Volvo. Bert was licking old jam off the inside of the car windows. Colin had jumped into the driver’s seat, his head bowed. Frank closed his eyes for a moment and then looked at the shop-keeper.

“Six pounds forty.”

She woke up with a whiplash of pain and with the moon shining in a clear sky. The field was silver-frosted and she had never seen this country before. She tried to move. Her legs and hands were hard with the cold. There was no feeling in them but she could see at the bottom of the field a gap in the wall and beyond it a snail’s trail going up the hill in the moonlight like a thread of silver light. The thread climbed over the hill and away. Her thoughts were slow. It was a gate and a road in the moonlight. It was the way home. There, far off. How funny. It was the way home . The light of the sailing moon streamed down, setting the white fields alight with an icy fire. She was content that the danger was past. There was no need for speed or haste any more.

A faint metallic yodelling came out of the sky. She listened to the air as the sound got louder, nearing her, flying towards her. She gazed upwards, searching for the source of the magical noise. Invisible flocks of winged creatures, lines of them surely by their clamour, getting louder and louder, flew over her head as she sat trying to spy them as they passed. But not a star was disturbed by their flight. North-west they were going, geese, keeping tabs on each other in the dark with the rush of air on wing tips. They were making a high racket, like a crowd of kids running headlong to the sea on a sandy summer day. The notes of their strange vibrating call fell to earth and she, with her face upturned like a child in the rain, drank up the sound, listening, sweeping the sky for a glimpse of wing against moon. The clouds were a moving mass of dark jig-saw pieces. Soon they would be a solid picture of black.

The birds passed overhead, unseen, and she was still, smiling at the sky. The birds had pressed on and they would get there before her. She sat quite, quite still. The noise stopped, abrupt as a change of wind direction, and the wake of their passing fell into flat silence, sudden, calm and complete.

She was back home, dozing in the armchair beside her son Andy, her knees folded up and his great legs sprawled out where he was sitting with his feet up on the cushion covers. “Get those shoes off if you’re going to lounge around on my good sofa,” she mumbled, half-heartedly, but she was too comfortable to move or bother too much. Sarah, nearly as big as herself now, was slumped on the hearth rug beside the dying fire, staring at the unplugged television. In the kitchen, the same muddy marks by the door, the Wellingtons were standing neatly in a row. Half-eaten plates of beans and oven-chips were lying pushed aside on the table. The phone was ringing. Sarah made a grab for it, “Dad?” She listened quietly before nodding and replacing the receiver. She turned to Andy. “He’ll be back soon. He says we should go to bed if he’s not back by eleven.”

“Should we do anything about that meat thing in the kitchen?” asked Andy.

“It’s a pork casserole.”

“Whatever. Will it be all right?”

“What do you want to do with it?”

“Cook it?”

“We could microwave it.”

“Maybe we should bung it back in the freezer.”

“You can’t do that!”

It was Sarah who’d jumped in with that. Good. She was relieved to know Sarah had the gumption not to do that! She herself didn’t give a monkey’s what anybody did right now with the uneaten, half-defrosted, uncooked thing. She’d attend to it later. Colin appeared at the door, hanging on to the handle, his toes poking out of the feet of his sleeping suit. She stirred. “Bless him,” she thought. She would have to cut the feet off altogether if he was going to get any more wear out of it. She smiled at the sight of her little boy, growing so fast, too big for a sleeping suit really. Time he was in a proper pair of pyjamas. She stretched out her arms to him as he looked across the room at her.

“Where’s Mum?” he said.