Vanessa Gebbie I. Roadkill He’s George ‘Sparks’ Faraday, eighty-something, old soldier. Sapper, mines, Military Cross. Still wears heavy boots, still tries to stand straight, still on parade. Hasn’t been a soldier for half a century, but he walks through minefields in his sleep. Leads his platoon through booby-trapped wastelands before breakfast. Lies in trenches, shells flying as close as that while he drinks coffee at The Legion, eats macaroons. Waves a foraging party off to their deaths as he lays one place for lunch. Machine-gun tinnitus stops him hearing voices clearly on the telephone. He picks up a boot from the site of a shell explosion just before peeling two spuds for tea, drops the boot fast when he sees tendons, sharp white bone, wet red meat. People won’t let him forget. Invite him to speak at dinners, made him Legion Chairman. He parades on Remembrance Sundays, his MC clinking against his campaign medals as he marches. He clears his throat, reads the names of the fallen, the words dropping into the silent November air like hailstones, like bullets, like clods of earth after an explosion. “They shall not grow old as we who are left…” Sparks only forgets when he’s with his animals. Injured badgers, foxes, squirrels, hedgehogs ( a calf, once) he finds in the busy lane outside his house, a rat-run between villages. He's done this since he retired; finds them by torchlight, mute and motionless on the tarmac or half on half off the verge where they’ve dragged themselves with broken legs, ribs, internal bleeding. Road kill often happens second hit; he tries to get there first. Sparks had a dog when he was a boy. When he was ten, his dog three, he stole a bar of chocolate. His father, normally a mild man, made him stuff the whole bar in his mouth, then thrashed him hard until he was sick. “You’ll not forget this in a hurry,” his father said when he’d finished. Sparks must have tried a smile. Next day the dog had gone. Been put down. “I said you’d not forget,” his father said. Sparks lives on the edge of the village. In his garden, behind an old brick wall, he’s built a shanty town of sheds, chicken wire runs, cages. Downwind, the musk stink of vixen, the heavier stink of dog fox, the sweetness of fresh straw and sawdust; at night the dusty shuffle of badgers, the staccato snuffle-panting of frightened animals, the occasional yelp, whimper. Sparks knows most things. Calls in the vet for some complicated stuff, otherwise he does it himself. He‘s got a locked cupboard in the shed where he keeps medical supplies, antiseptics, analgesics, splints, bandages, antibiotics, barbiturates for the ones that won’t get better. The majority don’t get better. Sparks says that’s no excuse not to try. It is a reason not to give them names, but there’s always an exception. Today there is one dog fox with a name. It is young, handsome, aggressive, with two broken hind legs, a fractured pelvis. It snarls, tries to bite; Sparks throws a sack loosely over its head before he tends it, ties twine round its jaws, draws the sacking back so the fox can see, fondles its ears, talks to it. He has called it Stanley. Sparks was married once, a long time ago, before he left for his War. Ada was little and dark; he carried the thought of her in his pocket, wrote home about how much he loved her, wrote about his plans for when it was all over, how he’d get a job as a surveyor when he got back, how they’d save up, buy that house near Norwich they’d always had their eye on, he’d grow vegetables, she’d keep chickens, he wouldn’t have to eat bully beef ever again. He never told her he missed her in bed. Never said that some nights, crouching stiff in the dark against the concrete supports of a bridge, waiting for first light, waiting to crawl on hands and knees along a river bank, searching out, sniffing out mines, making the banks safe for the men…the warmth of her in his head kept him sane. He never wrote to her about what it was like, his War. Kept things inside. Never sent her the nightmares he had while waking. Protected his lady. Came home on leave, unexpected, found her with a belly full of someone else’s child. He never married again. They still ask Sparks to talk about his war, in the village, but he’d rather talk about his animals. Sometimes he stops in the middle of sentences, listening, says “Where was I?” Sometimes he forgets to turn up at the Legion. He’s started falling over, loses his balance easily, but still walks to the shop for fresh vegetables. He meets friends at the shop, but he’s begun to ask if they’ve met before. Sparks tends Stanley the dog fox. Spends hours with him, sitting on straw, talking to him, stroking his head, breathing in the stink, fox stink, fox feces. Today he’s sitting with Stanley. Sparks fell in the kitchen, hit his head against a cupboard, stuck a plaster over. Came out to the cages, left the kitchen door wide. It’s getting dark. Stanley is weak. Sparks threw the sacking over Stanley’s head, bound his jaws with twine, and the dog fox lies unmoving, his yellow eyes fixed on Sparks. “You know,” Sparks says, “I knew another Stanley, once. Handsome lad, just like you. We were in Italy, one of the rivers. Stanley Wright was one of the new boys on the platoon. He’d been at a bloody art college or some such. We had a tradition… First Timer’s Luck, we called it. Always take a first timer out on a job, nothing could touch you.” The fox stretches out his neck, coughs, a half bark. His eyes are yellow, staring. Sparks runs his hands down the animal's neck, under its chin, over the sacking. The fox doesn't move. “OK, Chummy." Sparks unties the twine. The fox still doesn't move. Sparks pulls the sacking away from its muzzle. The fox’s jaws are relaxed, slightly apart. Sparks can see perfect white pointed teeth. He rests his hand on the animal's head. “I was saying, First Timer’s Luck. I took Stan Wright along with me, break him in, give me a bit of luck. We were checking out a road running along a riverbank, the fields below. There was a farmhouse, red tiled, ochre walls, peeling, a weathervane rusted and swinging. A high whine on the breeze, wind through the vane. I can hear it now. Like small boxes, now, anti-personnel mines. Well, some of them. Then, they were bigger, flatter, some, dug into the verges, grass grown up and over, you could still see the signs of digging if you knew what to look for. Easy to dig in these things. After about an hour, spotting the things, marking them, we stopped for a break. Stan stood by the roadside, looking at the bloody view as though this was a holiday. He was shading his eyes, weight on one foot, pointing out the layers of color fading into the distance, the farmhouses, the tall dark trees... shifting from one foot to the other on a patch we'd already cleared. He moved. His foot sank a half inch maybe a bit more into the soil, with a gob of tarmac lifting over his boot. I said, very quietly, "Don’t move, there's a lad." He went to turn with a smile, and I put my hand out flat, shook my head. There under his boot was a flat circle in the mud maybe ten inches across. We'd missed one. How? I'll never know. Maybe the lad was already standing close with the gear, I’d worked round him? He stood like Jesus, with this smile on his face. A gentle smile. Stretched out his hand. "It's OK," he said. "I'll be fine." He was standing…standing on the thing. Weight shifted. His weight on the mine. To release the pressure was the trigger. What must have gone through that smile? No legs? Guts spilt? Will it hurt? And he smiled, just stepped off...and... Nothing happened.” Sparks strokes the fox’s head. “See, Stanley? First Timer’s Luck. It bloody worked.” Sparks stands up stiffly, staggers a little, straightens up, goes out of the cage. The fox lies still, follows him with its eyes. Sparks goes to the cupboard, takes out a syringe, selects a box, fills the syringe. Then he puts handful of minced raw chicken in a metal bowl, carries bowl and syringe back into the fox’s cage, and sits down again, putting the bowl within reach of the fox. “Then we checked the field. Quartered it. There were furrows, and nearer the farm, someone had been digging pits, maybe for dumping a rotten crop, to dig it back in. I'm no farmer, I don't know. ‘S’ mines there were, in that field, near the farm. More anti-personnel. Little box with three metal prongs on top. You, they, buried the boxes, left the tips of the prongs above ground. Stan was nineteen, 'from Bethnal Green,' he was telling me as we walked up and down the furrows, spotting these little metal prongs like we were spotting sparrows, marking them for the men. We needed to clear right up to the farm buildings. ‘Yes, Bethnal Green,' he was saying. I can see him now; glasses glinting, fringe cropped short, a pale stripe round the back of his neck where the barber had had a go.” The fox is licking at the chicken. “Stan was chatting. 'Bethnal green is nice. The cinema is good. We go on Fridays, a big gang of us. Do you like films?' I was about to say no, I didn't have time for those things, when he slipped. He'd walked just to the side, round a rusty old piece of machinery, slipped. This pit, one the farmer had dug, had steep sides, just like a shell hole in soft earth. Stan had slid down, was sliding down, the soil damp, only five foot or so down but enough… and just where his foot was going, a ten inch circle, flat. It was sort of slow motion. He just slid down, stopped, and there was Stan, one foot on the circle. I didn’t move. ’Gosh, sorry,’ he said, not smiling this time, looking down at his boot, then up at me, the sun flashing on his glasses. Held out his hand to me. ’Don't move, son,’ I said. He looked up at me, holding his hand out over the edge of the pit. I took three steps back. ’It's OK,” he said. “I'll be fine.’ But I kept backing away…” Vanessa Gebbie is a journalist. She lives in the UK. She teaches Creative Writing at a drug rehabilitation faciilty. |