Elmet Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  II

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  III

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  IV

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  V

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  VI

  Acknowledgements

  This is the third year of JM Originals,

  a list from John Murray.

  It is a home for fresh and distinctive new writing;

  for books that provoke and entertain.

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by JM Originals

  An imprint of John Murray (Publishers)

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Fiona Mozley 2017

  The right of Fiona Mozley to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-47366-055-7

  John Murray (Publishers)

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.johnmurray.co.uk

  For Megan

  ‘Elmet was the last independent Celtic kingdom in England and originally stretched out over the vale of York … But even into the seventeenth century this narrow cleft and its side-gunnels, under the glaciated moors, were still a ‘badlands’, a sanctuary for refugees from the law’

  Remains of Elmet

  Ted Hughes

  I

  I cast no shadow. Smoke rests behind me and daylight is stifled. I count sleepers and the numbers rush. I count rivets and bolts. I walk north. My first two steps are slow, languid. I am unsure of the direction but in that initial choice I am pinned. I have passed through the turnstile and the gate is locked.

  I still smell embers. The charred outline of a sinuous wreck. I hear those voices again: the men, and the girl. The rage. The fear. The resolve. Then those ruinous vibrations coursing through wood. And the lick of the flames. The hot, dry spit. The sister with blood on her skin and that land put to waste.

  I keep to the railway tracks. I hear an engine far off in the distance and duck behind a hawthorn. There are no passengers; only freight. Steel wagons emblazoned with rogue emblems: the heraldry of youth long grown old. Rust and grit and decades of smog.

  Rain comes then stops. The weeds are drenched. The soles of my shoes squeak against the grasses. If my muscles begin to ache I do not reckon with them. I run. I walk. I run some more. I drag my feet. I rest. I drink from alcoves into which the rainwater has pooled. I rise. I walk.

  There is always doubt. If she turned south when she came to the railway there is no use. She will never be found. I can walk or I can jog or I can sprint or I can just stop in the middle of the tracks and lie down and wait for a train to cut through me; it would make no odds. If she turned south she is lost.

  But I chose the way north so that is the way I will go.

  I break all bonds. I step through the margins of fields. I scale barbed-wire fences and locked gates. I cut through industrial estates and private gardens. I pay no mind to the lines of counties and boroughs and parishes. I walk, whether paddock or pasture or park.

  The tracks take me between hills. The trains glide below peaks with dales underneath. I spend an evening laid out on a moor, watching the wind, the crows, the distant vehicles; caught in memories of this same land, further south; earlier, another time; then likewise caught in memories of home, of family, of the shifts and turns in fortune, of beginnings and endings, of causes and consequences.

  The next morning I continue on my way. The remains of Elmet lie beneath my feet.

  Chapter One

  We arrived in summer when the landscape was in full bloom and the days were long and hot and the light was soft. I roamed shirtless and sweated cleanly and enjoyed the hug of the thick air. In those months I picked up freckles on my bony shoulders and the sun set slowly and the evenings were pewter before they were black, before the mornings seeped through again. Rabbits gambolled in the fields and when we were lucky, when the wind was still and a veil settled on the hills, we saw a hare.

  Farmers shot vermin and we trapped rabbits for food. But not the hare. Not my hare. A dam, she lived with her drove in a nest in the shadow of the tracks. She was hardened to the passing of the trains and when I saw her I saw her alone as if she had crept out of the nest unseen and unheard. It was a rare thing for creatures of her kind to leave their young in summer and run through the fields. She was searching. Searching for food or for a mate. She searched as if she were a hunting animal, as if she were a hare who had thought again and decided not to be prey but rather to run and to hunt, as if she were a hare who found herself chased one day by a fox and stopped suddenly and turned and chased back.

  Whatever the reason, she was unlike any other. When she darted I could barely see her but when she stopped for a moment she was the stillest thing for miles around. Stiller than the oaks and pines. Stiller even than the rocks and pylons. Stiller than the railway tracks. It was as if she had grabbed hold of the earth and pinned it down with her at its centre, and even the quietest, most benign landmarks spun outrageously around, while all of it, the whole scene, was suckered in by her exaggerated, globular, amber eye.

  And if the hare was made of myths then so too was the land at which she scratched. Now pocked with clutches of trees, once the whole county had been woodland and the ghosts of the ancient forest could be marked when the wind blew. The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives. Tales of green men peering from thickets with foliate faces and legs of gnarled timber. The calls of half-starved hounds rushing and panting as they snatched at charging quarry. Robyn Hode and his pack of scrawny vagrants, whistling and wrestling and feasting as freely as the birds whose plumes they stole. An ancient forest ran in a grand strip from north to south. Boars and bears and wolves. Does, harts, stags. Miles of underground fungi. Snowdrops, bluebells, primroses. The trees had long since given way to crops and pasture and roads and houses and railway tracks and little copses, like ours, were all that was left.

  Daddy and Cathy and I lived in a small house that Daddy built with materials from the land here about. He chose for us a small ash copse two fields from the east coast main line, far enough not to be seen, close enough to know the trains well. We heard them often enough: the hum and ring of the passenger trains, the choke and gulp of the freight, passing by with their cargo tucked behind in painted metal tanks. They had timetables and intervals of their own, drawing growth rings around our house with each journey, ringing past us like prayer chimes. The long, indigo Adelantes and Pendolinos that
streaked from London to Edinburgh. The smaller trains that bore more years, with rust on their rattling pantographs. Old carthorse-trains chugging up to the knacker, they moved too slowly for the younger tracks and slipped on the hot-rolled steel like old men on ice.

  On the day we arrived an old squaddy drove up the hill in an articulated lorry filled with cracked and discarded stone from an abandoned builders’ yard. The squaddy let Daddy do most of the unloading while he sat on a freshly cut log and smoked cigarette after cigarette that Cathy rolled from her own tobacco and papers. He watched her closely as she spun them with her fingers and tipped tongue over teeth to lick the seal. He looked at her right thigh as she rested the tobacco pouch upon it and more than once leaned over to pick it up, brushing his hand against her as he did so, then pretending to read the text on the packet. He offered to light her cigarettes for her each time. He held out the flame eagerly and took offence, like a child, when she continued to light them herself. He could not see that she was scowling the whole time and frowning at her hands as she did his work. He was not a man who could look and see and understand faces well enough to tell. He was not one of those who know what eyes and lips mean or who can imagine that a pretty face might not be closed around pretty thoughts.

  The squaddy talked all afternoon about the army and the fighting he had done in Iraq and in Bosnia and how he had seen boys as young as me slashed open with knives, their innards a passing blue. There was little darkness in him when he told us this. Daddy worked on the house during the day and in the evening the two grown men went down the hill to drink some of the cider the squaddy had brought in a plastic pop bottle. Daddy did not stay long. He did not like drinking much and he did not like company save for me and my sister.

  When Daddy came back he told us that he had an argument with the squaddy. He had clouted the squaddy about the head with his left fist and now had a bloody nick in his skin just by the thumb knuckle.

  I asked him what had started the argument.

  ‘He were a bastard, Daniel,’ Daddy said to me. ‘He were a bastard.’

  Cathy and I thought that was fair enough.

  Our house was laid out like any bungalow or park home on the outskirts of any smallish city where old people and poor families live. Daddy was no architect but he could follow a grey and white schematic rustled from the local council offices.

  Our house was stronger than others of its type though. It was built with better bricks, better mortar, better stones and timber. I knew it would last many dozen seasons longer than those houses we saw on the roads into town. And it was more beautiful. The green mosses and ivies from the wood were more eager to grip at its sides, more ready to pull it back into the landscape. Every season the house looked older than it was and the longer it looked to have been there the longer we knew it would last. Like all real houses and all those that call them home.

  As soon as the external walls were up I planted seeds and bulbs. The earth was still open from the foundations Daddy dug. I extended the troughs and filled them with compost and fresh manure we got from a stable eight miles down the way where little girls in fawn jodhpurs and shining leather boots rode ponies around a floodlit gymkhana. I planted pansies and daffodils and roses of all different colours and a cutting taken from a white-flowering climbing plant I found spewing out of an old drystone wall. It was the wrong time of year to plant but some shoots came up and more came the following year. Waiting is what a true house is about. Making it ours, making it settle, pinning it and us to the seasons, to the months and to the years.

  We came there soon before my fourteenth birthday when Cathy had just turned fifteen. It was early summer, which gave Daddy the time to build. He knew we would be finished well before winter and there was enough of a structure to live in by the middle of September. Before then we made our home from two decommissioned army vans that Daddy had bought from a thief in Doncaster and driven to the site down back roads and tracks. We hooked them together with steel rope and tarpaulin was stretched over the top, expertly and securely, to give us shelter beneath. Daddy slept in one van and Cathy and I in the other. Under the tarpaulin there were weathered, plastic garden chairs and after some time a sunken blue sofa. We used that as our living room. We used upturned boxes to rest our mugs and plates above the ground and to rest our feet too, on warm summer evenings when there was nothing to do but sit and talk and sing.

  On the clearest evenings we stayed out until morning. We clicked on the radios from both vans and Cathy and I danced on the leafy earth to our woodland stereo, safe in the knowledge any neighbour was too far to hear. Sometimes we sat and sang without the radios. Years ago, Daddy had bought me a wooden recorder and Cathy a violin. We had had free lessons when we were still at school. We were not experts but made a decent sound because of the instruments we played. Daddy had chosen well. He knew nothing of music but a great deal about fine objects. He could pick out craft and quality by the woods and the glues and the smell of the varnish and the smoothness of the edges. We had driven all the way to Leeds for them.

  He knew about different woods, you see. He got to know the trees that lived in our copse early on and showed them to me. Almost all were between saplings and fifty years old as the copse had been coppiced well since long before we had moved there, for hundreds of years, even, Daddy thought. In the centre, right at the heart, there were older trees and one was the oldest of them all. The mother, Daddy said, from which all the others had come. She had been there for over two hundred years and her bark was set hard like scraped kauri gum.

  There were hazel trees too and some of those dropped nuts. Daddy cut branches away from the trunks and showed me how to work the greenwood with a sharp folding knife. I spent days trying to fashion a thin flute from fresh greenwood, whittling the soft bark away from the sinew and gouging out the fleshy innards. I worked precisely to make the outside as smooth as I could, curved like a finger. But the flute did not sound and after that I moved towards making things that were useful, objects that required less skill, or rather, things that were able to exist even if they were not precisely so. As long as a bowl holds its charge it is easy to define even if it is ugly and rough. But if a flute does not make a musical note it cannot be called a flute.

  Our home in the woods had a kitchen and a large oak table. When we still camped, Daddy cooked on a barbecue he had made from pieces of corrugated iron and charcoal that he had baked in two oil drums in the heart of the copse near the old mother tree.

  We ate too much meat in those days. We followed Daddy’s diet so ate the food he had cooked for himself before we had come to live with him permanently. This was mainly the meat he hunted. He did not care for fruit or vegetables. He hunted wood pigeon, rock dove, collared dove, pheasant and woodcock, if he caught them in the evenings coming out of cover. There were muntjac around too and when there was too little to hunt or when he had cash in his pocket or when he just fancied a change he went into the village and bargained for joints of beef, lamb or pork sausages. In the right season there was smaller game for breakfast. A man in the village had a merlin and with it he caught too many skylarks to eat alone so gave them to us in exchange for birds that were too big for the merlin to steal. We ate the skylarks on toast, almost whole, with mugs of hot, milky tea.

  Once Daddy went away with the travellers for four days and returned with a hessian sack of plucked ducks and five crates of live chickens. He constructed a coop for the chickens near where the back door of the house was going to be. We ate eggs after that but still hardly any vegetables or fruit except berries from the sides of the roads.

  It was later, when the house was built, that I planted apple and plum trees and asked Daddy to bring sacks of carrots and parsnips from the village when he went down there for business. I prepared what he brought on the scrubbed kitchen table with knives my Daddy had sharpened.

  Before the house was built, in those few hot, dry months when we camped and sang, Daddy talked to us properly. He used few words but we h
eard much more. He spoke of the men he had fought and the men he had killed, in the peat fields of Ireland or that black mud of Lincolnshire that clings to the hands and feet like forensic ink. Daddy boxed for money with bare knuckles far from gymnasiums or auditoriums but the money could be big and men whose cash came from nowhere arrived from across the country to lay their bets on him to win. Anyone was a fool not to back my Daddy. He could knock a man out with just one punch and if it lasted longer it was because he wanted a full fight.

  The bouts were arranged by travellers or rough men from around who desired the chance to test themselves and earn a slice of cash. The travellers had fought in this way for centuries. ‘Prize Fights’ or ‘Fair Fights’ they called them. They wore no padded gloves nor did they divide the bouts into rounds with breaks. These men would not fight for the splitting peace-toll of the bell but until one surrendered or was bludgeoned cold. Sometimes the fights rested disputes between warring clans. As often as not they were for money. Tens of thousands of pounds could be settled and Daddy made a decent living from it.

  There was a feud that had run for decades, Daddy told us, between the Joyces and the Quinn-McDonaghs. Every three years or so they would send their young men out against each other in one-on-one bare-knuckle matches that were moderated by older men from neutral families. In cases like these the families themselves could not be present in case a brawl broke out between one clan and the other, old and young, men and women, and a whole portion of the travelling community was wiped out or arrested by the police and packed into vans and taken off to jail.

  There was much to gain. These feud fights were not divorced from high stakes. The Joyces and Quinn-McDonaghs competed on how much cash they were willing to front. Sometimes as much as £50,000 each and the winner would take it all back to their caravan and treat the whole clan to an evening of whisky. Daddy said they wanted the fights. He said that after all this time the quarrel between the families meant little but each time one of the top men was short of money they would like as not start something up in the hope of gaining. It was more than pride; it was prize money.