Male Tears Read online

  MALE TEARS

  ALSO BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  The Offing

  These Darkening Days

  The Gallows Pole

  Turning Blue

  Beastings

  Pig Iron

  Richard

  Non-fiction

  Under The Rock

  Contents

  A Thousand Acres of English Soil

  The Folk Song Singer

  The Museum of Extinct Animals

  An English Ending

  A River

  The Longest, Brightest Day

  Suburban Animals

  The Whip Hand

  The Last Apple Picker

  Saxophone Solos

  Vienna (The Hunters in the Snow)

  Old Ginger

  An Act of Erasure

  The Bloody Bell

  Ten Men

  The Astronaut

  Bomber

  Snorri & Frosti

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  The tragedy of machismo is that a man is never quite man enough.

  —Germaine Greer

  A Thousand Acres of English Soil

  The hare is on its haunches and sniffing the air when the man enters the middle field. It watches from a distance with its ears tilted to the breeze and then when the man stumbles on the rutted edge of soil it turns and runs away at half-speed.

  The man sees the white smudge of its rump bouncing over stubble. He has always thought it nature’s cruel irony to place a target on such a stealthy creature; a mark of imperfection to prevent it evolving beyond its capabilities.

  He pauses and watches as the hare takes long strides towards the safety of the hedgerow’s shadows at the far edge of the field, the taut sinews of its legs flexing.

  He has been raised to believe that the sighting of the season’s first hare is symbolic, though he cannot remember for certain whether it represents good or ill fortune. As a man of the soil and the woods and the holloways, his inclination is towards the latter. He reads the hare as a portent.

  The man walks the field’s perimeter and enjoys the low-slung sun on his face. He watches the lazy beginnings of its day-long arc across the field, and he feels glad for the first time this year that he can walk to work. Other farmers would think him odd to spend a single extra second outdoors, and often in autumn and winter he curses the mile-and-a-half walk that takes him along the old railway track, under the bridge and up on to the new cycle path, recently laid from a useless granular mix that holds puddles like a thirsty man cups cold water from a farmyard spigot on a hot harvesting day.

  On dark damp mornings when he needs a torch to avoid these sump pools, or in winter when the frost is stretched tight over the ground and a cruel wind cuts across the open field and gets beneath his layers, he would rather be anywhere else. But today he does not mind because like the hare he can smell the incoming season on the breeze.

  Walking this way connects him to the past. He is following a carved niche, a route – a tradition – that is centuries old.

  The dry spell means that the lane linking the middle field to the storage barns is hardened and the soil already webbed with a matrix of cracks. The deep furze that lines the lane briefly blocks the sun but then the ground is solid underfoot and he is walking across the yard to unlock the bolt. He takes a key and opens a padlock that secures the double doors of the larger of the two corrugated barns, then feeds a long thick chain through his cold hands.

  The man opens one sturdy door and turns on the light. He deactivates the alarm. He thinks he hears the light skittering of claws on concrete and the sound of something – the discarded metal lid of a tin of paint, perhaps – being nudged a fraction of an inch. A short, sharp scraping.

  The picker is parked half in darkness like a great sleeping beast, but when the man opens up the second door and the sun shines in to illuminate the full brilliance of its red paintwork, it is almost as if the beast stirs, as if it is coming alive with a sigh after a lengthy slumber. The machine makes him think of mythical creatures; lumbering monstrosities as seen in childhood books. Dragons and gryphons and phoenixes made mechanical.

  Every morning he feels dwarfed by its presence and quietly in awe of the ten thousand components that have gone into creating this piece of equipment more intricate and complex than a human skeleton.

  The man takes out his key fob and climbs into the cab. He starts the motor. He feels the automated vibrations rising through the core of him.

  The boy picked his way down the dirt bank using tiny sidesteps. Plastic. There was plastic everywhere: poking up through the soil like fresh shoots and tangled amongst ancient and complicated roots.

  He skidded but then corrected himself, and turned the other way like a skier traversing the lower slopes of the Eiger.

  He should have been at school but instead he was outdoors in the green cathedral of the old wood. Here was where he felt he was learning things, things that mattered about growth and life and the inevitability of death. Next to such a subject, the study of arithmetic and long-buried monarchs felt like a worthless distraction.

  The old town tip sat in a now-neglected clearing in the wooded hillside, where nature and man’s discarded items appeared to be locked in permanent battle. Refuse once dumped from flatbed trucks and skips, and pulled from boot and barrow to be flung into a vast pit two or three decades earlier then buried beneath a scattering of soil, was slowly rising to the surface. Decades of rain had washed away the loam to reveal a layer of lives once led: a legacy of household waste blooming like a grotesque bed of bouquets. Of broken china and old beer cans with branding now outdated, and glass bottles with stoppers instead of caps. The boy saw twists of tarpaulin sheeting and the occasional shoe.

  Other times it appeared as if the soil was swallowing everything, sucking it under like quicksand. Certainly the filled-in mineshafts that had been known to collapse here showed that the ground was capable of movement, that it was a porous and amorphous entity with a life of its own. That was why the wood was now deemed a danger and permanently fenced off to the public.

  This space belonged to the nettles and the ivy now. The woods belonged to the balsam and the ragwort and the animals.

  The boy had seen deer and foxes up in here. He had seen a pair of nesting ravens, owls, dozens of squirrels and rabbits, and once, at dusk, a badger. Most commonplace were the rats that nested in the fissures and hollows of the tip. First attracted by dumped vats of school kitchen fat and rotten butcher’s offal, they now thrived in a kingdom rarely visited by humans.

  There were still things to be found by those few who looked for them, artefacts from a changing world. Old clocks and jam jars and marbles, and pram wheels that the boy could use to build a bogie with, or clothes horses and rusted bike chains to wield as weapons, or tea trays for when it snowed. A box under his bed held his treasures. Coins and beads and a large penknife, its blade blunted and mottled green.

  The boy went down to the tip’s far corner. He used a stick to prod and turn the soil. He saw coiled springs and matted clothes with floral patterns and broken buttons. He saw more bottles, upended. They made him think of ostriches.

  He stepped between the plastic pieces of things once functional, now cracked and scattered, and a pile of newspapers wadded into a pulpy slab the size of a pillow, its colours rain-run and the words blurred into history. There were bags of ballast containing concrete hardened into strange sculptural contortions. Rubber Marigold gloves and roof slates. Twisted tyres. Spent aerosols. Cracked crockery and warped Tupperware tubs. A spool of police crime-scene tape. A skein of cable.

  Something about the shape of a dull and rusted piece of metal sticking from the soil drew the boy closer. When he pushed on it
with his foot it gave a little, but his pump came loose and he had to tie his lace. He levered it again and it gave some more. It appeared to be part of something greater; a component. But when he got both hands around it and hefted it from the soil as if he were pulling up carrots, it suddenly came loose and he had to take backward steps.

  The boy turned it over. He saw that it had jaws. The jaws had teeth and the teeth were locked into place, and the boy was glad. There was a pin hanging loose and a flat piece of metal beneath the jaws. It was all held together by a frame.

  There was something malevolent about the contraption. Years in the soil had not robbed it of its potential for violence. The boy felt in danger just holding it in his hands while alone there in the wood. But he felt excited too.

  A thousand acres surround the man and the picking is good. The potatoes come up easy and he sees that it is to be his season. A time of plenty. Blight destroyed the crop last year – turned it into an infected mush that he wouldn’t even put in a hog trough – but now the elements are working his way.

  Last week it was raining stair rods and just yesterday there were clouds scudding so low that the man was sure there was going to be another downpour so violent that it would leave the vast potato tracts sodden. But the sky held and now he sits atop the machine as it crawls spider-like across the field.

  The potato picker does the labour of eighteen men. That was how many were in the team when his father first worked these fields fifty years ago and would come home exhausted, falling asleep during his first roll-up. Now most potato farmers plough and till and harvest alone, working wordlessly like solitary sailors adrift on their expansive inland oceans of dirt.

  The man works the control panel, continually checking buttons and reading meters to make sure that his line stays true and remains flush with the edge of the field. Coordinates on a touchscreen GPS map guide him.

  The machine growls and purrs and whirs as mechanical side-fingers comb the earth like a plough on an ox’s yoke, but so much faster and neater and without blisters or strained muscles. Twin elevators scoop, sieve and separate the potatoes. A push of a button carries them up by rubber conveyor belt into the heart of the red metallic beast, rolling them out the back into a bunker with a six-tonne storage capacity. Pebbles and small stones and clods are filtered away through webs while the screen feeds the man statistics concerning his bounty. Storage capacity used. Net weight. Yield.

  Beneath him unseen threshing blades top the haulm.

  Once, a topper would have to be fixed on to the front of the tractor and pushed through the potato patches, but not any more. The big red beast does that too. And afterwards, when the work is done, the machine will fold its limbs away. The push of another button will see components retract and return, compactly stowed.

  The machine is worth more than the average family home.

  Seeing thousands of mud-pocked potatoes bobbing and rolling up the belt is hypnotic to him. Trance-inducing. He sees them as people. He sees them as heads. They make him think of airports and train platforms and London at rush hour.

  The sun is up now, and there is a bee trapped in his cab but it does not bother him so he does not bother it. He lets it idly bat against the glass and leans an elbow out of the window, watching the rolling potatoes and feeling the low sonorous rumble of the shifting of his harvest in the storage chamber, the sound of organic matter on metal. Today there is no better noise.

  The man reaches the end of row number three and takes the corner wide, sees the camber of the field sloping to his right and the sun climbing higher still, and he locks into the ritual of the centuries.

  The boy waited until later to ask his father what it was. He was sure he knew already, but he needed confirmation.

  After tea, with a brew and a burn-up blazing in the smoke-blackened fireplace, was the time to approach him.

  His father had been out in the fields all day and already his chin was sinking to his chest.

  ‘Dad. Do you know what this is?’

  His father looked up at him with eyes rimmed red from twelve hours in the billowing clouds of dusty chaff, and for a moment he just stared at his son as if he wasn’t there, and then he blinked and held out his hand.

  The boy passed him the locked lump of rust.

  His father took it and turned it. He scraped at the rust with the rounded end of his teaspoon handle.

  ‘That’s a gin trap, is that,’ he said.

  ‘Gin trap?’

  ‘That’s what they call them. Gin is short for engine.’

  The boy wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘They made them from forged steel,’ said his father. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From the tip.’

  ‘They’re illegal. And I told you not to go up there.’

  ‘Why are they illegal?’

  His father put his cigarette down. He ran his fingers over the metal teeth and then tried to prise the jaws apart.

  ‘Needs oiling.’

  ‘Why are they illegal, Dad?’

  ‘Changing attitudes,’ he said. ‘They weren’t always banned. Time was, all gamekeepers and farmers would have a brace of these about the place – those that wanted the rabbits kept out their patches, that is. The blacksmith would make them up. They used to be as common as turnips, did the old gin traps.’

  ‘Is that what they’re used for, then – bagging rabbits?’

  ‘Mainly, though they’d catch anything that cared to cross them. But then folk started keeping rabbits as pets. They got soft over them and began moaning about things they knew nothing about. You know what they’re like, the town folk and that lot in the new-builds. Them on the estates.’

  His father scowled as he said this. Any mention of the estates angered him and whenever the word came from his mouth he would tip his head towards the new houses that had been built half a mile away; a place the boy was being raised to view with suspicion, disdain and bitterness. The estates was a curse worse than any other.

  Because the new homes with their trimmed lawns and streets that went nowhere but back in on themselves surely signalled the slow death of agriculture. According to his father they were one more kick in the teeth for the farmers whose plots were being carved up and sold off to be buried beneath tarmac and asphalt.

  ‘How long since they were used?’

  His father picked up his cigarette and inhaled, then rested it back on the lip of the ashtray.

  ‘Ten or twenty years since, I reckon. The fifties.’

  ‘Is it worth anything?’ asked the boy.

  His father handed it back. ‘Probably about fifty per cent of nothing. Chuck it.’

  ‘Do you reckon we can get it working?’

  ‘You don’t want to be messing with that. You’ll get hurt.’

  ‘We could leave it on the estate,’ said the boy.

  His father reached for his cigarette and smiled at this. It was a thin, diluted smile, but a rare smile all the same. He sat back in his armchair.

  ‘Go and fetch us the oilcan and a rag from the shed,’ he said. ‘And bring my mallet.’

  Gulls follow the picker, dipping for worms. They hang suspended, jostling in the mid-air before taking it in turns to swoop down.

  Great elongated strands hang squirming from their beaks as they bank upwards and away, and then the next clustered phalanx of screeching birds descend.

  The sea is thirty miles away, yet still they come.

  The man does not notice them. He is watching his dials and smoking a roll-up that he holds between two yellowed fingers on his left hand. The other he dangles out the window. If the weather holds, by harvest end his arms will be berry-brown and covered in a down of hairs bleached blonde by the sun. A true farmer’s tan.

  He lets the beast do all the work as it greedily snatches and sorts the potatoes from the pitted clod. They are Maris Pipers: the best you can get. He will get top price for Pipers and in late September he will go somewhere far from here.

&nb
sp; After he clears the tenth turn the man allows himself the luxury of letting his mind wander. He pictures a restaurant terrace overlooking the sea. Waves are breaking gently on the shore. There is a glass of beer. It is so cold that beads of condensation cling to it. He raises it and takes a sip. Drains it. Signals to the waiter for another.

  The beast jolts and there is a noise that he implicitly knows is wrong. A judder then a coarse grinding that cuts through the low hum of the engine and the echoing rumble of the falling potatoes.

  The man halts the machine but leaves it running in order to keep the programmed settings on course. He throws his roll-up and then climbs down from the cab. He sees the trail of gulls and then something – he thinks it is perhaps a rock – that is obstructing the blades on the nearside edge. Protruding from the soil, it is a small boulder that is not yet fully jammed and is near enough to get to.

  The man crouches and then he lies down and draws his leg up. He kicks the rock and it shifts slightly. He bends at the knees and kicks harder this time but now it does not move. Looking up, he can see daylight through the machine. He can see a tranquil and clear blue sky shot through with a single vapour trail fattening and fading away into the distance.

  He climbs into his cab and he gets a pitchfork and then he gets down beneath the machine and pokes and prods but the rock won’t budge so he climbs around the side of the cab and on to the front of the machine. It is polished. Waxed pristine. The sun is glinting off it. The machine is beautiful. It purrs.

  The man sees the rock in the haulm topper. He inverts the fork and jams it down and he hits the rock and it budges but as it does he slips and his centre of gravity is a nebulous thing because then something is snatching at the hem of his trousers. It jerks and pulls and he feels his foot being crushed and rolled like the last curl of a tube of toothpaste. The pain takes him to another planet.

  Yet he is silent as he lifts his other leg and twists and turns in an attempt to free himself, but this just seems to pull him in deeper as the haulm-threshing blades eat up first one leg and then the other. The machine chews up his shins and thigh bones and the man is screaming now, and squirming too, and then a guard rail drops down and the blades slow to a half-speed and then they stop and his legs are an elongated pulpy mess of muscle, string and sinew extending several feet deep into the belly of the beast.