|
COLD BLOWS THE WIND
A RURAL NARRATIVE ON A MANUFRACTURED LANDSCAPE
HE...
We were married in the spring, her fair hair held up in pale ribbons.
She wore a simple white cotton dress, a testament to beauty and grace.
No honeymoon, no need. The dreaming was already there in the fields around us. They were good days, clear days, the best days.
It happened that everything in this life and the life that had flourished for so long around here changed...
The authority men in yon shiny protective clothing, wielding their ticker tape, closing the whole area off, shutting us natives out.
And then the blame and counter blame, the fears for our future, and that wait, the waiting...
She left me a note saying she had to get away, that she had lived with the silence too long, that the quiet was killing her.
It was nothing to do with me, the note said, just this rural existence, where boredoms were mapped out already...
...mapped out in endless horizons of nothings and nowheres, there was something else, someplace other she was hankering for,
I ran to fetch her back, to reassure the lass, and tell her that no, this is the place, this heaven on earth, this future, our future. It was no good...
I struggled through the winter. There was many a broken fence needed mending, walls that wanted fortifying. Some-days my heart wasn't in it, but...
...I just got on with it and buckled down to the rhythm of the surrounding fells. Tried my best to let time take care of everything else.
Streams overflow, thickets need cutting back, stock needs seeing to, the sun, the wind, the rain driving all and everything before me...
Life is too much of a force to be denied.
I was growing accustomed to my solitude, enjoying it even. There were a lot of times lately I had to think hard to remind myself just what she looked like.
Hair dyed pitch black, red nails to tear, a tattoo of barbed wire and wild roses encircling her wrist, looking like trouble was a shroud she was born to wear...
This unannounced arrival. Stood there in the kitchen, brazen and provocative.
At first I didn't recognise her as the woman I married, but it was she alright, unbidden things inside me jumped.
She said she needed space...
'To sort some shit out for a while' is how she put it...
She sparked up a cigarette then punched a text message into her phone, cursed me out when she couldn't get a signal.
I just stared at her, confused, this vision...
She had brought a faint sour smell of irritant chemical trash with her and then the sudden scrape of tyres abusing the gravel outside.
Black bodywork, inscrutable windows. A shadowy four by four vehicle stood in front of the gate. It had the brash shine of the dirty city about it.
Harsh laughter and rude smoke filled my kitchen. Wrappers from a fast food takeaway littered the table, a smell of stale meat and cold grease hung in the air.
I followed her out the room when she went to use the bathroom. Who were these strangers? Why did she bring them here?
Look she said, we're in a bit of a jam that's all, they're cool guys, don't worry about it, there'll be something in it for you.
When I returned to the kitchen there was a gun on the table. The chemical tang had intensified, it began to nauseate.
One of the strangers pulled a couple of bags up off the floor and emptied their contents out on the tables. Denominations of notes poured out, more money than I had ever seen before.
The stranger could see I was staring dumb at all this and told me to keep looking hard, that I was a witness to the counting, and if I behaved right I'd be seen well enough at the end of it all.
The biggest of these aliens lumbered across the room to where a crate of lagers had been dumped on the bench of the sink. Ungainly and bullish and clumsy and, no...
I knew something bad like this was going to happen...
...he...
...stood on one of the chicks.
I had brought four of them indoors earlier that day, knowing a perishing freeze was setting in.
There was a shriek and a kind of squirt, a brittle mess of bone and sorry feather. A faint trace of blood on the slate floor.
I could not help but register my hurt and disapproval for the stranger's deadly stupidity.
He shrugged. His indifference floored me. They told me they would be killing my wife next and what did I think of that? I looked at her for a response but the face, her face, was a blank.
I left the room. I went to the bathroom and vomited. I just kept bringing up the bile and flushing the toilet, over and over... I was confused, and...
Somewhere in the distance I thought I heard a muffled bang.
And then a sharp sudden pain as I was knocked into unconsciousness.
I eventually stumbled back to the kitchen to find it empty, the door wide open, a bitter cold wind blowing in hard, I ran up the fell, they were coming down, these ugly strangers, spades in their hand, no sign of she, no sign of she at all...
The biggest one pushed me and I slid over on my back, he went to kick me and I turned over, pushed my burning face hard into the cold snow, there was no contact, only the same harsh guttural laugh that died on the air.
They got into their vehicle, one of them waved a dismissive hand, the car skidded a few times, but soon it caught a grip... they were gone...
SHE...
I crashed out in the back of the jeep whilst the guys went up on the fell to dispose of all that waste.
They wanted to just dump it in the city river but we'd been paid good money by proper people to get rid of it so I wanted the job done thorough.
Nah, better out the way up on Alan's hill, where the worst it could do was poison a few sheep. Then it was straight back to the city, back to the good time I was chasing...
I didn't care about anything but myself. I walked that pavement like I owned it, aware of the overhead cameras trained on me like robot paparazzi... and now I felt like someone, something else again... ...like I had stolen a new identity, that I was someone else at last, and I wanted every moment shot for the record. I was off to meet the guys, they still had my share of the proceedings, it was time to be weighed in.
They looked so at home bathed in sodium light. I ran up and asked for my share. They laughed at some private joke and began closing in on me.
Later the officer made me sit through the footage.
I watched as the kicks reigned in on my body.
I motioned to the officer to switch off the screen as the first of the men begin to rape me.
I pleaded with my eyes, but the officer misread me, or ignored me, and I screwed my eyes shut so I didn't have to sit through the whole ugly motion, relive my own brutal endurance.
I never saw the footage of the man throwing the bleach onto the gaping wound between my legs, I felt the shadow of it though, a shadow of the pain I felt then.
Despite the close circuit evidence the men were never traced, there was no justice, all that remained as testament was the wound that was my walking self.
I started out in this world with so much dreaming and so many good intentions. I got a taste for for something beyond myself, entered my own secret world. I started using at seventeen, a few month later I was on the game, I was digging my own burial hole.
Tania Gemma Anneli Paula Annette Drugged and fucked whilst incapacitated Their naked bodies dumped in the woods around the town Twisted and posed in sick cruciform
Every night I go to the same place those girls were, the night those girls got killed
Every night, I see it all
Every night now I pull tricks and I look into the faces of the punters and I see them all. Wright Dixie
Huntley
Norris
Bellfield
These monsters...
Is this our country today?
Are these the scenes we play out under cameras, night after night?
Is this is our fairytale?
By the ghosts of the children of Jersey La Guerre...
Is there some kind of wicked spell hanging over this land?
Does anyone here know how to break it?
The ground is contaminated with my bitter ruinous tears
The land is stained with my blood
The air is an echo of a siren that answers all my fears
The seeds I have sown are no good I don't know, I just don't know, I just feel sick with stuck, that you're sick with stuck too I only know one thing...
We need a crazy wind, to blast away the null spell of this stuck age.
Bring a fire to rage, with blistering sparks and golden cane.
Steer an incendiary boat with black hull and dark sails, another rude turn of the wheel
an abrupt shifting of the planets,
Yeah, a regular explosion in the stars.
I wore a simple white cotton dress, a testament to what you thought was beauty and grace.
We were married in the spring, my fair hair held up in pale ribbons. The countryside was beautiful then but all that is gone now. Can we ever return? |