The Things I Know Read online

  ‘Well, say something!’ he prompted.

  ‘America?’ she managed. ‘It’s a long way away.’

  ‘Yep, it’s a long way away. The good ole U S of A!’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  He nodded.

  ‘But . . . but what will you do over there?’

  He threw his head back and laughed. ‘What do you think I’ll do? I have farming in my blood. I’m a farmer! And Carter has told me all about some of the farms out there, Hitch – they sound amazing! Acres and acres of glorious wheat, farms as big as our whole county, and big, blue skies! And neat ranches with horses so beautiful they’d take your breath away.’

  ‘I’m sure they would.’ She tried to picture them but could only see the fat ponies belonging to the little girls who lived further along the lane who, led by their mum, trotted along the road with their horses in a slow clip-clop that to her sounded a lot like boredom.

  ‘How long are you going for, do you think?’ she whispered, thinking ahead to the farming year and trying to suppress the image of a silent Christmas, eight months away, an empty chair at the dining table and one pair of hands short for cracker-pulling. Her parents snoozing in front of the fire, and her without her backgammon partner and no one to lob sweets at across the room . . .

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, shrugging and turning his palms up, ‘but that’s what’s so exciting.’

  For you, maybe . . .

  With a heavy heart she pictured the copy of the Gazette, currently folded over and pushed under her bed, with adverts for flat-shares and rooms to let within a five-mile radius of the farm ringed around in red felt-tip. Hitch had chosen them carefully – places that offered her the freedom she craved but were close enough that she would be able to commute comfortably to work each day on the farm. She’d been trying to come up with a plan, not wanting to admit to herself that it was little more than a pipe dream – her wages might just be adequate to cover a small rent, but there would be zero left for food, petrol or anything else, for that matter. Plus, she was pretty certain her parents would veto the idea, hinting again at the woeful, unimaginable events that might bring her harm, were she to flee from under the wing of their protection.

  In truth, she’d been aware over the last couple of years that her parents had been treading water, as if everything were on hold, all of them silently waiting for the day Jonathan finished his course and came home for good – meaning also that she could finally, finally, hand over the supporting reins to him and start to live a little. It would be a relief to keep more regulated hours, letting him help out with the early starts, the late finishes and any emergencies, but if he wasn’t going to be there, how on earth would her parents manage?

  They’ll manage because you will help, Hitch, just like you always have . . .

  She looked again at her brother, taking in his happy expression. It was, she realised, almost as if his dream came at the expense of hers. She squashed the thought before it really took root.

  ‘Well, say you’re pleased for me, excited at least!’ His words shook her from her musings. ‘This is my great adventure!’

  ‘I’m pleased for you, it’s just not what I expected. I’ll miss you – we all will.’ She winced, seeing her opportunity for a little independence fade away before it had even started.

  ‘You’ll be okay,’ he offered unconvincingly.

  Hitch stared ahead at the dark lane before starting the engine. Fatigue now bit, falling over her like a heavy curtain under which she felt crushed. With his revelation, all the joy of the evening was sucked from the cab of the pickup and thrown out of the window, wrapped in the two words from her brother that had changed absolutely everything: I’m leaving . . .

  I know that I shall miss my brother.

  I know that my mum and dad will be shattered that he’s going.

  I also know they will try to hide it.

  I know he won’t think of us half as often as we think of him.

  I know life is NOT BLOODY FAIR!

  TWO

  Twelve months later

  Hitch wiggled her stockinged feet on the flagstone floor and rested her bottom on the ancient huge range, letting the gentle heat permeate through her jeans and into her bones. It eased the ache from her left foot and ankle. If there was any sensation half as nice as leaning against the toasty range early on a cold, cold morning, then she was yet to experience it. In fact, the mere thought of it was often enough incentive to pull her out from under her duvet and the soft dip in the ancient mattress in the bedroom, where her breath cut through the chilly air like a knife through butter.

  Buddy came over and pushed his muzzle into her palm. She crouched down and lifted his handsome face in her cupped hands.

  ‘Hello, you. Good morning, beautiful boy.’

  She placed her head alongside that of the black-and-white collie cross and they shared the moment, just as they did every morning. ‘Another busy day, eh?’ She loved the scent of him, something akin to warm biscuits.

  She stood at the sound of the wooden treads creaking overhead on one of the two staircases in Waycott Farm, the West Country farmhouse in which she had been born. This smaller staircase led straight off the kitchen to the rooms one flight up. On this side of the house each of the bedrooms was strung with sturdy beams that a taller person needed to duck to avoid. Small windows peeped out from the ancient, moss-ridden, sloping red pantile roof, and the whole place seemed to list to the left as if it might tumble, not that anyone seemed too worried by the prospect. The original parts of the building had stood since the late sixteen hundreds. Old sepia photos of her great-grandparents, the upright Walter Waycott and his ferocious wife, Mimi, standing by the front door nearly a century ago, showed the building in a very similar state, and everyone figured that if it was going to collapse into a heap of rubble, it would have done so by now.

  Lined with dark wood, the landing and hallways had a feel and smell all their own. Legend had it that the timber had been hewn more than two hundred years ago from boats whose sailing days were done. She sometimes ran her hand over the gnarled, knotty wood around which the house had been built and, closing her eyes, could hear the tales they whispered of journeys over rough and unconquered seas. She could almost smell the salt-tinged breeze through which they cut and feel the slight beat of a heart that pulsed in longing for the life on the ocean waves it had left behind. And she knew how this felt, to be anchored to this place and this building.

  The heavy footfall above told her it was the lofty Emery who was up and about. Gathering her long, dark hair over her shoulder, she nimbly twisted a hasty braid and fastened it with a band of red elastic she kept on her wrist before walking to the back door and pulling on her sturdy boots. They were comfortingly heavy, with a thick sole and a sheepskin inner. At two years old and encrusted with mud and the shit of several different animals, they fitted her perfectly, as if hand-made to her exact measurements. In truth, she was so used to wearing them in all weathers that she walked better in them than without. They were familiar, warm and comfortable all at once, and certainly helped correct her awkward, leaning gait, caused by that one damn foot that arched upwards, insisting she walk on tiptoe. She yawned and looked at the clock above the Belfast sink. It was nearly five a.m., time she got out and started gathering before beginning the morning feeds. She heard her cousin’s feet quicken their pace on the stairs before he burst into the room. As was his habit, Emery banged his flat fingertips in double time on the beam at the bottom of the stairs and swung into the large, square kitchen, landing with a solid thud on the flagstones.

  ‘Morning, ugly dog. Morning, Buddy!’

  She sighed at his pathetic idea of humour and looked down, lacing her boots before reaching for her battered khaki Barbour, as he stood at the sink and sniffed and hawked while running a glass of water. It mattered little that he did this every day. Each morning it made her stomach shrink in revulsion and caused bile to rise in her throat, as if it were the very firs
t time she had heard it. It was yet another way he was so very different from Jonathan and her beloved Pops.

  ‘Do you have to make that noise?’

  ‘What noise?’ he said, laughing.

  She ignored him, finding his predictable ribbing no more than an annoyance. Emery had been around for over a year, arriving shortly after Jonathan had left for his glorious U S of A, where farms could be as big as this whole county. A quick phone call from Pops and his sister, Auntie Lynne, who’d married an electrician and now lived in the West Midlands, had sent the wayward Emery to help out. Her cousin provided much-needed labour, and here he was, sleeping in Jonathan’s bed and turning up for work each day, while never missing a chance to have a verbal dig at her, as if it were his sport or hobby. It had always been this way, ever since he’d first come to stay as a small boy and all the summers since.

  Twelve months might have passed, but her cousin was still yet to grasp the fact that his words and jibes slid from her skin like butter off a Teflon pan. There was nothing he could say that was new or inventive, nothing more hurtful than those words that had been spoken since the night she was born.

  The story of Hitch’s rather hasty arrival one snowy night twenty-five years ago, the first child to a couple in their forties who had long since given up the dream of parenthood, had been told so many times she knew it by heart. It was her mum’s party piece.

  ‘Oh my word! She was no more than an itty-bitty scrap of a thing, no bigger than a little pup, and with so many problems the doctor told me to get her christened quick as! And so we did. Shook the moths from the family christening gown stored in the attic and got the job done with barely enough time to pick a name or make a cake. Grandma Elsie poked her head in the crib and said, “Lord above! What’s wrong with that babber?” And I stared her down and said, “Where d’you want me to start? A little bit of her mouth missing, a weak heart, guts that don’t quite work proper, a twist to her toes and a couple of bent-up fingers. We’ll be lucky if we still have her here for Christmas!” And then I burst into tears, I did, couldn’t quite take it in. But she showed them, that girl of mine! She might be a bit patched up here and there, she won’t get any certificate of learning and she won’t win any races, but she’s a little fighter and no mistake! And we shall treat her like a little lamb whose mum has gone on. We shall hand-feed her and keep her close, out of harm’s way! And we have. And we always will, grateful to the Lord above she’s still here!’

  And this was exactly how she’d always been treated, like a little lamb who needed hand-feeding, a child who was never going to get a certificate of learning or win a race.

  Even if she felt like she could.

  She’d done her very best to keep up in school, but in the rural environment in which they lived, where class sizes were small, she found herself lumped in with the speedy readers and extroverts, and her lack of confidence meant it was often easier to keep quiet and stay hidden.

  And in fairness, the limitations her parents and teachers had placed on her in her early years had made her feel safe. When the other kids at school hadn’t wanted to play with her, she didn’t blame them, not really, no matter how much it hurt. She could fall back on the knowledge that she was a little bit different, and took comfort from it. There was nothing she liked more than being at home, operating within the boundaries constructed by love and a desire to protect, knowing she would not come to harm. But now those boundaries often felt a lot like prison walls, and the fierce love threatened to suffocate her. She felt the need to stretch her wings, no matter how damaged, wanted to see how far she could wander.

  Hitch had always sat in the background, watching life go by and wondering if her thoughts were the right level of thoughts, curious, for example, if arriving in the world as an itty-bitty scrap with a list of things that were wonky was the reason she got so easily distracted. Hitch overheard her grandma say she was no doubt a ‘bit soft in the head’, a curious phrase and one that interested her enough to try to find out just how soft her head was. Because the truth was there were times when it didn’t feel soft at all, in fact, quite the opposite – it felt as if it contained all the dreaming of the universe. If wishes were fuel, she was certain she’d have powered herself to the moon and back and grabbed herself a boyfriend on the way.

  Rather than ask the thousand questions that battered her skull, she stayed quiet, close to the farm and to her family, going about the business of keeping things ticking over. And all the while she took the comments, the jibes, the teasing of Emery and his horrible friends, and the supposition of those close to her that most things were a little beyond her, and fashioned them into an armour of sorts.

  Teflon . . .

  ‘Come on, Buddy.’

  She tapped her thigh and stepped out into the cold, dark morning. The chill air cut her lungs and made her cough. She breathed through her nose, loving the autumnal aroma of earth, the slightly sweet perfume of rotting fruit and fallen leaves, mixed in with the scent of real fires, since folk in this sleepy farming hamlet burned wood, oil, coal – anything to keep the bite of cold out and the warmth in.

  Hitch made her way across the garden with her unsteady walk, stamping on the frostbitten soil and stepping nimbly in the dark around the raised planting beds in which, when the seasons allowed, her mum grew beans, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, sweet peas and various herbs. With Buddy at her heel, she walked over to the low row of outbuildings which had been converted over the years and now provided a potting shed, a tool shed, a workshop, a tractor shed and a large concrete-floored, metal-roofed building known as Big Barn. She heaved open the barn door with her chilly fingers, sliding it along the wide runner before reaching up for her twin-handled straw pannier, which hung on a hook by the door. She patted Buddy on the flank and shut him inside. He knew the drill by now and made his way to the comfy, battered sofa along the back wall, knowing with certainty that she’d be back before too long.

  ‘Good boy.’ She smiled at her beloved companion and headed out to the chicken coop, glancing at the duck pond, where the two Muscovies, Bonnie and Clyde, huddled together. ‘I know. It’s cold, right? Maybe we should get you sweaters.’

  Accessing the henhouse was a complex procedure. In an effort to prevent attack, Pops had raised the coop off the ground so Mr Fox couldn’t dig underneath. He had then fashioned a double layer of chicken wire over a wooden frame, and to get in she had to roll one gate away in one direction and the next gate in the other. It was a pain, no doubt, but she had to confess that, despite Mr Fox’s best efforts, they hadn’t lost a single hen to him or any of his wily contemporaries this last year. She briefly pictured the scene of blood, feathers and carnage that had greeted her last November when Daisy Duke, Mrs Cluck and her friends Daphne, Helga and Little Darling had provided a sumptuous feathery supper for the sneaky fox. It had been a mess and she’d cried great, gulping tears as she scooped up feathers, lumps of bloodied pale pink flesh and the discarded entrails from the remains of his feast. Little Darling and Daphne were intact, perfect in fact, but still dead. This made her dislike Mr Fox even more. To kill because he was hungry and programmed to do so was one thing – she was no stranger to rural life and closer to understanding the food chain than most – but to kill for the sake of it, for sport, was quite another.

  ‘Morning, girls! Hello, lovely ladies, how are we all this morning?’ She spoke softly, cooing to them, as she always did, and paused as if waiting for their response. From their quiet acceptance of her presence she assumed that Daisy Duke IV, Mrs Cluck VI, Daphne II, Helga III and Little Darling II were all pleased to see her. They didn’t seem too aggrieved that she arrived each day to reach into one of two nesting boxes at the sides of the coop to collect their eggs. She, however, still felt a tiny flash of guilt that after all their hard work, twenty-six hours of making an egg, here she was, ready to snaffle it away with her cold hand and into her straw-lined basket.

  ‘Clever, clever Mrs Cluck!’ she would call if the old girl
had managed to produce. She’d gone down from four eggs a week to two – not that Hitch would pass this information on to her mum. She remembered the last time she had tittle-tattled on a hen whose egg production had all but halted. Within days, Marion, as she was called, had disappeared, and Marion II had taken her spot quicker than you could say, ‘Scrambled or boiled?’ Sadly, Marion II had died of natural causes only a month later.

  Hitch believed that the more grateful she was for the eggs, the more inclined the gang would be to lay for her. ‘Good morning, Helga – no egg today? Don’t you worry, my lovely. I’m sure you’ll make up for it tomorrow or the day after that. No rush.’

  She felt her way around the bedding layer, a mixture of white wood shavings with the sawdust removed and a thin topping of straw. Daphne liked to lay in the small hours, and so Hitch always approached with caution, using her flashlight to scan the ground for the bird before taking a step. It was this kind of attention to detail that the girls really appreciated – respecting them and showing them love. Reaching in, she felt a warm egg and gathered it into her palm.

  ‘Oh, look at this lovely egg – thank you, ladies! That’s a beauty. Thank you so much. You have all done so well and I’m grateful. I hope you have a wonderful day and I shall see you all later.’

  She winked at Daphne. She knew it was wrong to have favourites, but Daphne, with her fine speckled plume and soft-feathered neck, was so pretty it was hard not to love her a little bit more than the others.