Dot came out. She was carrying a plate, on it a used paper doily she must have scrounged from a great house, and on the doily, some fingers of yellow cheese of varying thickness and length.
‘They say,’ she said, ‘if you eat somethin’ fatty …’
She returned inside. The baby was by now in tongue to split the shack’s buckled boards.
‘There!’ the mother shouted. ‘You’ve waked ’er! I knew you would. Bringin’ back mates. You don’t ’ave no consideration, Denny.’ She choked on that.
Denny was smiling, lips a glutinous mauve, the sunset glinting on spectacles mended with string as grimy-greasy as the wool on a sheep’s back.
‘Wot’s wrong with my choo-choo?’ he called back. ‘My little choo-choo!’
He went inside, and returned with the screaming, congested infant.
Denny sat on the edge of the veranda dandling a tantrum. ‘Choo choo choo!’ At one point his love dribbled down from the violet lips in a slender thread of saliva, while the baby thrashed around, revealing that her nappy was out to dry.
She was a sharp-featured child, as sharp as her mother, but the little scalp already showed a drift of golden down.
Dot had emerged preparing some fresh outburst, only to find the baby laughing up, parrying the last traces of saliva, her tender, gummy smile related at the other end of time to Peggy Tyrrell’s toughened grin.
Dot stood looking down on Denny, on the black, cockerel’s feathers plastered by sweat to a balding skull. ‘He’s good with the baby,’ she conceded. ‘Denny’s good,’ she murmured.
Her person might have trailed after her voice, withdrawing into everyday life from a moment of revelation which was almost inadmissible, if there hadn’t been an intrustion, an active violation of grace.
Eddie was the first to notice the approach of Dick Norton the rabbiter, mounted on his skeletal nag, the rabble of his mongrel pack at heel.
Dot was not long after in spotting her dad. ‘You keep off!’ she shrieked. ‘We only want peace in this place. Fuck off, dirty old man!’
Though into high summer, the rabbiter was dressed in a cardy the colour of split peas and a cap with ear-flaps in fake fur.
‘I’m yer father, ain’t I?’
‘Yeah, Dadda, we know!’
‘I’d of thought everyone knew about everythink. You’re no saint yerself, Dot.’
‘We try, don’t we?’ Dot screeched. ‘Anyways, from time to time. An’ we’ve got Mr Twyborn ’ere — on wot was a social visit till you showed up.’
Purple in the face, the baby had been handed back by Denny to the mother.
He had risen, very dignified, his head trembling, with its wisps of damp black cockerel’s feathers. ‘Yes,’ he golloped, ‘you fuck orf — fuckun old Dick!’ the spittle flying in all directions.
He whipped inside the shack, returned with a gun, and fired a couple of shots at what was by now practically darkness.
There arose a yelping of dogs, the whinge of a spurred horse. ‘ ’Oo’d want a social visit with a bunch of bastards like youse?’
The baby shrieked worse than ever. Again Denny let off the gun.
There were sounds of retreat. If it hadn’t been for the baby’s screams, silence would have descended on a landscape reduced to formlessness except where the last embers smouldered on a distant ridge.
‘There! There!’ the mother coaxed in a burnt-out voice.
‘Choo choo choo?’ Denny giggled, still exhilarated by his masterful initiative.
Dot sighed. ‘What will Mr Twyborn think?’
She didn’t stop to consider for long. The Aliens were going inside to their overdue meal of boiled mutton and cabbage, or breast.
As Eddie Twyborn untethered his horse and rode away, he wondered whether he wasn’t leaving the best of all possible worlds.
Peggy Tyrrell was waiting for Eddie. ‘You’ve upset ’im,’ she said.
‘Upset who?’
‘Prowse,’ she said. ‘I never seen ’im so upset. Couldn’ eat ’is tea. Went to bed. Thought you must ’uv been throwed again. Or went for a swim and drownded.’
‘It’s not all that late. I stopped off for a beer with Denny.’
‘But you was expected. Mr Prowse is the manager, and responsible for those under ’im.’
Mrs Tyrrell sounded unusually prim. She was on Prowse’s side all right, perhaps with some axe of her own to grind, or perhaps it was only self-righteousness raising its head.
He ate his stuffed mutton flap and would have gone to bed while she scraped the dishes if he hadn’t heard a sighing, a groaning, a jingling of the bedstead, from the manager’s darkened room.
He paused in the doorway before entering his own. ‘What’s wrong, Don? Not sick, are you?’
There was a prolonged silence meant to impress. ‘There’s nothing wrong—Eddie. We were only wonderin’ about you — those who have yer interests at heart.’ A pause, a cough, then the sharp hissing. ‘Cripes, I got a pain in me guts!’
‘What about a tot of bi-carb if I bring it?’
‘Thanks, Ed, it can’t be indigestion. Didn’t eat me tea. Didn’t feel up to stuffed flaps.’ Again a groan, and a jingling of the bed. ‘I never talk about it, but Dad’s old man died of cancer, Eddie.’
Eddie said, ‘See you in the morning, Don.’
‘Don’t think I’m fishing for sympathy,’ the manager called after him. ‘But I can’t say we weren’t worrying about yer.’
As he undressed he could hear a listening. He could almost hear sandy eyelashes thrashing the silences, then after he had put out his lamp, Prowse rising through a jingle before going out to pee off the veranda. He could hear him listening, barefoot on the brown lino, after returning.
When sleep fell on Eddie Twyborn, a penful of wethers milling round him, Marcia was possibly there. Yes. Though in what capacity he could not remember when he awoke to a pale sky and dwindling stars the morning of the crutching.
In the next room the manager must have been lying on his back, while in the kitchen Mother Tyrrell was raking the stove and calling on Our Lady to rid her of her aches.
It was a long day at the shed. At noon Jim the Father brought in a mob of ewes when yesterday’s wethers were barely accounted for.
‘ ’Ow’s yer back doin’, Ed?’ Denny Allen called to his mate.
The manager came and went, more often absent than present, though when there, he would muck in with the men in short ostentatious bursts, impressively muscular in a singlet. ‘Better to get it over — even if it buggers us,’ he advised his team.
Prowse chose the cleaner sheep, Eddie noticed, himself drawn, it appeared, to the daggier ones. It was an aspect of his own condition he had always known about, but it amused him to recognise it afresh while snipping at the dags of shit, laying bare the urine-sodden wrinkles with their spoil of seething maggots, round a sheep’s arse.
At one stage he found he had picked a ewe who must have detached herself from her own mob and joined the wethers. Before becoming fully aware of the difference in sex of the sheep he was handling, he had cut off the tip of the vulva. Nobody noticed his clumsiness or distress. As the day lengthened and the men grew tired, the blood flowed copiously from under the most professional hand. Lacerated beasts were sometimes dismissed with kicks and curses.
At least the sound of snipping soothed, and the smell of tar rising from wounded, blown crotches. Some of the sheep raised their muzzles, baring their teeth in ecstasy or agony at the treatment they were receiving.
From squirming on the greasy slats, they regained a precarious balance as Eddie Twyborn straightened a fastidious masochist’s back. He must have been grinning like a skull. His blisters had burst and become raw patches from manipulating the hand-shears.