You cannot hear the Bundist aeroplane. There is the thumping syncopation of the mills to consider: not loud, but deep, arterial, the molten blood of the town stirring into slow life. Also the fact that Bundist planes make absolutely no sound.
At the bottom of the slope the buildings of the town rise around you, and darkness and silence make a final sally. Arm-in-arm, you pass shopfronts. A memorial of the Great War. The street gives onto a square, grey in the slow, thick light that comes before the dawn, and you let go of each other to cross hobble-footed over cobbles to an alley between warehouses.
Night-time folds itself away while you’re in the alley, and you come out among brick warehouses and wide, bruise-blue cobbled lanes as if into a foreign town that bears an uncanny but only surface similarity to home. The furnaces that appeared to be sitting directly ahead of you now belch far to your right, as though they had contrived to evade you.
The railway station is a series of low-slung brick buildings erected in the midst of a complex network of tracks, most of which are used to shunt heavy goods and fuel between the town’s furnaces and factories. Few passenger trains actually stop here. With practised caution, the two of you step over the rails. Stairs made of sleeper wood take you up onto the island platform and its shuttered tea house. You stand together under its portico and shelter from the day’s grey nothing.
Beyond the rails, a motor truck rolls past, its headlights on, and then another, and a handful of men pick their way across the ribboned steel to join you; they are here for the same train. Cheap smutted suits and hats; they look drowned in their clothes.
A light appears, far up the line, and you hear a squeal of wheels on curving rail.
‘Be well,’ says Bob.
You shake hands as the train takes form, bearing down upon you. The locomotive has the clean, swept-back lines and deep-green livery of the national service. It is as big as a steamship. The rolling stock it draws is tawdry by comparison. Matchwood.
Bob opens a door for you and you lumber into the carriage in your heavy boots, encumbered as a spaceman. Bob swings the door shut behind you. You pull down the window to talk to him: ‘Next week.’
‘No rush.’ There is a studied casualness to these words, as though to say, London has a claim on you no less than my own.
A great horn sounds pointlessly. The train does not move. Behind Bob, on the wall of the tea house, hangs a government poster: Hattie Jacques urges you to eat your ‘greens’.
You take a seat. Your father raises his hand and wanders off. The rail service is a law unto itself this early in the morning; heaven knows how long you will be sat here. You stand and push the window up, pull the coat around your throat, sit back in your seat and try to doze. Your feet in their heavy boots feel as though they have taken root in the ground, drawing you down into slumber, but there is something in your trouser pocket, the lining of your pocket has twisted around and made an uncomfortable ball at your groin, so that you have to stand and fish it out, whatever this is that has caught in the lining.
It is the dolly. It is even more misshapen now: a knotted handful of straw waste that once resembled a man.
The doll was in excellent nick when you first found it. It can’t have been lying on the ground for long.
There was a bulge for a head, legs shaped with clever little knots to suggest knee and ankle joints, and arms bound to the torso – part of the torso in fact, but extra knots created the illusion of arms pressed to the sides of the figure, lending it a faintly military cast: a straw soldier standing to attention. The corn stalks were dry and crisp and tied firmly in place, smooth when you ran your thumb along the grain, ridged and resistant when you ran your thumb crossways.
‘Hey!’ James’s voice came from a surprising distance away – he had just that moment noticed your absence.
‘Where are you?’
You looked up and could not see him. Hunkered down like this, examining the figure, the tall grass of the moors surrounded you.
‘Here.’ You waved, hoping that would suffice.
‘Where?’
You stood up.
Jim was more worried than you realised. He ran back to you. ‘For crying out loud, I thought you’d fallen down a hole.’
Yes, there are holes. Old mine-workings. Some of them are ancient: pre-Steam Age. And there are odd dips and ridges where the peat-diggers have been. There is no way at all to tell how old the peat-workings are. People have found flints near some of them, arrowheads, scrapers. And near others, Mars wrappers, the foil off Tunnock’s teacakes, prophylactics, wet filters from spent cigarettes.
You held the dolly out to him. But when he reached for it, you withdrew your hand. You did not want to let go of the dolly. Anyway, he was not particularly interested. You asked him: ‘Is it a chickie thing?’
Jim shrugged a yes to your question and walked away.
These moors, so barren, so deserted, just so much waste ground to play in: for the first time they became a populated place, and you wondered if you were, after all, welcome there. Across the tawny land before you, mile after mile of it, a thousand pairs of unseen eyes blinked at you.
You followed Jim, unsettled, wanting to be beside him, yet at the same time keeping your distance, a studied ten, twenty steps behind, clutching the dolly, jealous of it, guarding it. Jim paid it and you no mind. Every once in a while he would pause, head raised, the waxed paper kite rolled up in his fist, scenting the air. But it was hopeless. Even here the breezes lasted no more than a minute. They were idle things: God leaning out over his cloud and stirring the air like a girl trailing her fingers through the waters of a boating lake. You hugged the dolly to yourself and a warm-bread smell came from the hot straw. As you walked you felt, between your legs, a dampness, a swelling you didn’t know what to do with, and you had to adjust yourself. You felt clumsy and delicious at the same moment, and you knew you shouldn’t clutch yourself there, that you would only make it worse.
Jim walked. You hobbled behind. You entered a stand of thin trees, and the ground grew damp and green, the moors falling behind. There were rocks to catch the foot and sheep paths to follow, and Jim glanced back at you more often, as you came off the heights, to see that you were following. The path dropped down a narrow stone staircase and Jim was waiting for you at the bottom and he said, ‘Throw that thing away.’
You stared at him.
‘People will see,’ he said. You could tell from his eyes, and the contempt there, that he didn’t mean the dolly. He meant the other thing: what the dolly brought on. You scowled, hunching forward a little, inexpertly trying to hide the swell tenting your pants. You went ahead of him so he could not see. You held the dolly carefully in one hand, by your side, where you could not smell it, its bread smell, its milk smell; you wondered if it had been left there for you.
You entered woods, a clear path zigzagging down the side of the valley, and came at last to a road. You had overshot. You turned in the direction of town. By the time you got back to the house, Bob was already home and Betty had the fish he had caught gutted and floured. You ran upstairs, hid the dolly under your pillow, washed, came down again, and ate. Everything was normal. Everything was as it had been.