Homeland Read Free

could see above the bed the same mysterious bulges in the rose-and-columbine-patterned wallpaper, and on the ceiling the same crusty rings erupting from the
whitewash like lichen blooms on rock. There was no getting rid of the damp down here by the moor, and it was only fools who tried. Its fusty fragrance filled the air and misted the wooden surfaces
and rotted the curtains. On the bed the starched linen had subsided limply onto the topography of the mattress. He guessed that Flor had made up the bed a long time ago, ready for his return. Well,
it was no good, he wouldn’t be staying. And the way Flor was now, she wouldn’t know enough to care.
    The unaccustomed silence kept him awake for some time. When he finally slept it was to be roused at least twice by the hooting of an owl, then, much later, by the banging shut of a door. He had
the impression of sleeping little, yet when he woke it was to full light.
    He lay back with a sense of indulgence. There’d been no staying in bed in the old days, no missing of the morning. The old man had been a stickler for getting to work sharp at six, winter
and summer. But this morning Stan wasn’t calling impatiently from the kitchen, ‘Let’s be seeing you!’, he was clumping about in the bedroom opposite, to the muted strains of
dance music. Billy shifted indolently on the pillow and watched the sunlight trickling in through the unwashed glass, casting hazy beams over the edge of the battered chest of drawers which had
housed all his worldly possessions, reflecting dimly in the wall mirror from whose crazed and mottled glass his uneasy adolescent frown had glared back at him each morning. The only visible remnant
of his four-year occupation was hanging on the back of the door, an ancient railwayman’s jacket that Aunt Flor had found for him that first winter, bartered from the crossing keeper for two
months’ supply of eggs. She hadn’t thought him worth the expense of a new one, not then.
    Getting up at last, he went to the chest and pulled open an upper drawer. His adolescent paraphernalia was still there: fishing hooks, string, cigarette cards, penknife, pencils. And in a lower
drawer his old working clothes, neatly folded and smelling of mothballs. He tried on a thick woollen shirt that had always been too big but now fitted quite well. The trousers, though, were tight
at the waist, and he had to leave the top button undone and use a belt. Down in the porch he found his old gumboots at the back of a shelf, covered in dust. The rubber was dry and cracked, but
there were no obvious holes.
    By the time he stepped outside it was almost eight. The yard was a sight. The mound of withies he’d almost tripped over in the darkness was all canker and rot, while the frame that
stretched the full length of the yard was stacked with bundle on bundle of withies, which, going by the coating of lichen on the weather side, had been put out to dry a long while back and not
touched since.
    In the woodshed, amidst another almighty jumble, Billy found a thick layer of coal dust, a scratching of coal nuggets, and some two dozen apple logs. The peg where the axe used to hang was bare.
He hunted high and low, shifting sacks, kegs, barrels and a wheelless barrow before unearthing the axe on the floor beside a paraffin drum. Even then it took a good five minutes with the whetstone
before the blade would split the wood the way he liked it, clean, in a single stroke.
    He rifled the mound of cankered withies for kindling, but gleaned only mulch. The porch offered better pickings: a brittle apple basket, the base frayed and sagging, and a clutch of spraggled
withies, ripe for burning.
    He was crouched in front of the range, nursing a meagre flame, when he heard Stan’s tread on the stairs.
    ‘You’re still here then,’ the old man said.
    They took a fresh gawp at one another.
    The light, slanting upwards from the window, revealed fresh crags and fissures in the hillocky landscape