Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke Read Free Page A

it.”
    “Forget it?”
    “Yeah.”
    This wasn’t the only time Spike had stepped in for me. There was the time at Appley Fair when someone said I was looking at his woman, and the time someone’s sister asked me if I liked parsnips and I said I hated them. If you asked me why he does it I suppose I’d have to say that we make some sort of partnership, like in a film about opposites walking across a desert to find hidden treasure. He’s the bloke who never quite gets it, and I’m the one who thinks before he does anything. He goes, I wait. He tells, I ask. He grinds his teeth, I brush mine. I ride a Honda 250, which is half-bike, half-horse. He drives a van with a loud tape deck and a steering wheel the size of a small dish. He meets girls, spends a weekend or two with them, tells them that he’s bored and finds another. I look at girls and wonder if I can open my mouth before I start dribbling. When I look at him I’m pleased he’s my mate and we’ve managed to get this far together.
    “Sometimes,” he said, “when I look at you I wonder if you’ve got any balls at all.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I fucking mean.”
    “No I don’t.”
    “And I was thinking…”
    “Thinking what?”
    “When do you want to do this?”
    “Do what?”
    “You know what. Find out what that bloke’s up to.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Tonight,” he said. “I’m going up there tonight.”
    “Tonight?” I said, and as the word dropped, I heard a distant croak, the call of a single raven. The big bird, the black bird, the one my mother tells me to watch for. He used to have white feathers, but he stole the sun, and that’s why his feathers are black. And when he flies he leaves scars in the clouds. “Beware,” I whispered. “Be careful.”
    “Of what?”
    “The raven.”
    “You fucking weirdo,” said Spike, and then, “you coming or you going to be a chicken for the rest of your life?”
    “OK,” I said, “but let’s be careful.”
    “Aren’t I always?”
    I said nothing.

‌ 2
    The summer had been mad. It had been like a badger caught in a tarred barrel, fed on chilli and forced to listen to chanting monks. Later, when the records were examined and weathermen met to drink glasses of lemonade and talk about their business, they would say that 1976 had been Britain’s longest, hottest summer ever. And they meant it. Day after day after day the sun shone in deep blue skies and baked the land dry. It was hot before it rose, and when it rose it laughed at the country. On the moors and heaths, fires broke out and frightened animals from their holes. Trees were burnt to sticks, lakes dried, bushes exploded, crops failed. In other places tarmac melted and birds failed in their flight. Hosepipes were banned, stand-pipes were used, wells and springs dried up. Politicians told us to share bath water. Ashbrittle wheezed and sweated, and in the middle of the day, dogs collapsed in the road and refused to move. The green browned and yellowed, and flowers withered. Cows lay in the shade of trees, horses panted, fish died and floated in rivers that turned to drains. Every day people would stand in their gardens and stare at their parched vegetables and search the sky for rain. Sometimes a single cloud would appear and float slowly over the village, but it was always a single cloud, white and fluffy – and nothing. And as it disappeared over the horizon, the people would shake their heads and go back inside and do whatever they had to do.
    One day I was out walking and found a dead rabbit in a field below the church. I don’t know why it had died, but there it was, dried to a crisp beneath a tree, flat as a postcard, lying in the cover of the exposed roots. I picked it up and held it in front of me. It didn’t bend and it didn’t smell, and I thought about taking it home and propping it against the wall outside the kitchen. There was a hole where one of its eyes had been, and its mouth had contorted