Extract from The Man of Little Sudden 

Daniel Redford

Homewalden lies a few miles north of Little Sudden in a small glen surrounded on three sides by steep hills. Thick oaks shoot up from the earth, higher and mightier than any of the trees that grew on the borders of Little Sudden, and the path from the festivities down to Homewalden is made of wooden steps sunk into the ground and gravelled over. In places, the moon shone bright through the canopy. Glistening, silver shards of light – fairy dust, as Eve called it – hung in the air like cobwebs. When the trees proved too thick for the light to penetrate, Eve and I were left in darkness to feel our way down the uneven steps, clinging to one another. In any other state than the one we found ourselves in, such a situation would have proven to be an exercise in stupidity, but, drunk on happiness and with a stomach full of warm food, this situation became a source of much merriment.

The noise from the party started to wither on the wind until it felt as if she and I were the only two humans still awake.

As the makeshift staircase started to flatten out, Eve stopped and rested her arms on the wooden railing.

‘Come see,’ she said, so I stood beside her. She leaned over the edge and looked down at the ground which sloped away from us. ‘Look all the way over.’ I did as I was told. ‘Now, close your eyes.’

‘What?’

‘Just do it. Close your eyes tight and then inhale as deep as you can.’

I started to speak but Eve shushed me and nodded towards the precipice.

‘Alright,’ I said.

Eve let the silence haunt the air for a few moments. She yawned, and then began to speak in a soft, almost reverential tone.

‘It all comes from the soil,’ she said in a half-whisper, as if she were afraid of waking the earth itself. ‘See how thick the trees are? That keeps this area from drying out and all the moisture remains in the soil. I’ve always loved that smell. It tastes hopeful. Raw. Natural. Life-giving and messy and no matter how many times I feel it or smell it, it is as precious as gold flakes.’ She spoke as if lamenting the loss of something intangible, just out of her reach despite being surrounded by it and stood upon it.

Eve continued, ‘Aunt Magdalene had a garden. I must have been six or seven. It was perfectly square, with hard corners that were filled with brambles. Her neighbours kept telling her to cut them away, but she liked them. She’d say that they had chosen to grow there, or that they were a reminder that you can’t have something beautiful without something ugly. Really, she just hated being told what to do so stubbornly kept a hold of them.’

I allowed myself a quick glance at Eve. Her head was bowed, her eyes shut beneath a mess of russet hair. Once I saw her start to raise her head, I lowered mine again.

‘I miss that garden,’ she continued. ‘The fence at the end of the garden was high, with a small, mostly dried river on the other side. The banks were overgrown with tall reeds and bulrush. Spiders made their webs between them in the summer. The river in winter seemed empty without them. The river in summer let off an earthy, pungent smell. It burnt in that exciting way, like a strong dram of whisky on a cold night. That way that makes you think that things could grow, that things will grow.’

She laughed and started to walk down the steps. I quickly moved to her side, where she took my arm in hers.

‘And there were dragonflies as big as I had ever seen them. They would soar over the fence between my garden and the river. I tried to be silent to hear the beating of the wings, but I could never know for sure if I found it. Maybe once or twice. But then they’d hear me breathing or moving or see me sit on the grass with my hands over my mouth and fly away. I’d be alone out there, so I’d roll onto my back and shuffle over to where the lawn met the plant beds, and I would reach out as far as I could into the plant bed to pick up a clump of soil. I’d sit there, tossing it gently from one hand to the other, watching as little flecks of it dropped off and landed on my dress. That summer it was a bright pink one, with a sunflower pattern Aunty Magdalene had sewn into it. Nora would sometimes visit, and she wouldn’t have approved of little Eve sitting out there on her own, getting her dress dirty. That wasn’t for nice girls. Aunty Magdalene said that it never did her any harm when they were growing up and she turned out alright, didn’t she?’

The question stained the air, as if Eve were trying to find the answer hanging somewhere in the darkness or feel it when she gripped my arm tighter.

‘She definitely wouldn’t have approved of little Eve tasting the soil. It wasn’t nice, and I’d spit it out, but every time I did it it tasted a tiny bit less disgusting. Now, it doesn’t bother me. Not that I go out of my way to do it, but you know what I mean.’

I let out a small grunt, careful that any words might pull her out of the memory.

‘Can I tell you something weird?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘The last time I did it,’ she said, her voice more serious, ‘I saw something. One of the slats on the fence at the end of the garden had broken. I think the wind had gotten to it, or maybe I broke it, I don’t remember. But through the gap where it was broken, I saw a man. He was wearing a long black coat, a black flat cap on his head, and he was standing about waist-high in the earth. He had dug a hole. He was swinging a shovel back and forth, piling the earth off to one side. Aunty Magdalene came up behind me with a glass of lemonade and sat down next to me. We both watched the man digging through the small crack in the fence. He’s a gravedigger, Aunty Magdalene said. Then she told me about death.’

No sooner than I could think of a response to such a sombre end to her story, Eve and I reached the bottom of the steps.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘As promised, you kept me safe from the wolves.’

I made a show of bowing to her.

‘It was a lovely night,’ she said, yawning.

‘I was just wondering,’ I said, stuttering before regaining my composure, ‘could I see you again some time?’

‘How about lunch in two days? In the field? I am sure Bartholomew will not have the pavilion taken down so soon.’

And that is how we left it, with her face lingering in my thoughts longer than my hand lingered in hers as we said goodbye. I watched as Eve was swallowed by the darkness of Homewalden.

Finding myself alone, I realised how unsteady my feet had become from the cider and the physical exertion. Walking from the ghostly silence of Homewalden back towards the ever-increasing noise and commotion of Bartholomew’s party, there came a feeling of thousands of eyes on my every movement. Now and then I swore I could see emerald eyes glaring down at me from the foliage on my left or bodies starting to slink their way up the incline to my right.

When that feeling of creeping, prying eyes and gnarled snarls became too much to bear I stopped and grabbed the flimsy railing lining the edge of the makeshift stairway. I looked for the eyes and found them about twenty metres below me. Dozens of beady, yellow, unblinking eyes stared back at me, fading in and out of one another.

You kept me safe from the wolves.

Their eyes grew larger beneath the thistles, glinting from the gloom. The dozens of pairs became singular. Two round eyes glared up at me through the undergrowth, like a lantern on its last drops of oil. All sound died, save for what sounded like the sharp, bestial whimpering of an injured animal. That soon faded, leaving just me and those eyes ablaze in the darkness. Time crept like moss in a crypt as those eyes seemed to bleed from yellow to gold to red, then shimmered into a slightly human form. The red irises turned white, the pupils dilated, and I could make out thin, broken veins in the corners of the eyes.

Then they shut.

Stillness. My breath forgot itself in my throat. The rough-sanded railing caught on the hairs of my forearms, and I became well aware of the ache in the backs of my legs, as if muscles tightened to breaking point. It wasn’t until a drunken couple came rambling down the staircase beside me that I snapped out of whatever trance I was in and felt the coldness in my bones.

It all comes from the soil.

I closed my eyes and let my nostrils breathe deep to taste the soil, just about perceptible in the night air. The laughs of the couple heading down the stairs broke the air into fine shards that danced around me.

How about lunch in two days' time?

Yet, as Eve’s face hung in front of my eyes, all I could think about was Bartholomew. There was something about him tonight, intoxicated on bliss and whisky, that was haunting. Something about the way he grasped my shoulders, leaned in close to my ear and spoke with his hot breath, wealthy and lonely, onto my collarbone. I knew he was waiting at the pinnacle of this staircase for me. I would be lying if I said that there was not a desire to breach this summit, throw my hand into his and feel the night air ooze over my skin as we walked, talked, side by side, morbid curiosity like coming across a gigantic shadow and waiting to see whether it would devour or entertain.

Lifting one foot in front of the other, feeling the wood-edged, dirt step beneath my gumshoes, a wave of intoxication began to well up that had once lurked just beneath the surface. My thoughts rushed back to Eve, mingled with the eyes in the undergrowth and the couple walking down the steps, and they fought each other for supremacy. As I felt the splinter-filled railing in my right hand I noticed, unannounced and unwanted, a tightness in my chest, a slight contraction from left to right, from my second rib on the left directly across to my right, just below my nipples. This was something I was used to, a sort of contraction that my mother said was a sign of ‘lethargy’, something accountable to pure slovenliness that would go away with a nice walk.

The ground started to rumble, slowly at first. Vibrations made their way up from the balls of my feet, along my soles, curled around my toes, and crept up my socks and calves and thighs. My knees twitched, buckled, and bent until I was knelt on the steps, supporting myself with one hand on the cold ground. The high-pitched whistling stabbed my ears. I sat down, wrapped my arms around myself, and dug my fingers into my neck and shoulders. That always worked when I was younger. After a minute or so my breathing slowed to a normal rate and the world stopped distorting itself.

‘Are you okay?’ a voice asked from the darkness.

I turned around to see an elderly couple coming down the stairs, arms linked, each of them holding a tiny candle in a glass. I got to my feet and stretched my legs.

‘I overestimated my energy levels,’ I lied.

‘On the way up, are you?’ the elderly man asked as he reached me.

‘That’s the plan,’ I said.

‘There’s still plenty of celebrating to be had up there,’ the elderly woman said, sounding somewhat intoxicated.

‘I have to get this one home,’ the man said.

The woman slapped her husband on the arm. ‘Cheeky bastard!’ she said through fits of laughter.

‘Safe travels,’ I said. They returned the well-wishes and carried on down the stairs. Side by side. Together.

I wondered where I would be and who I would be with if I got to be their age. When I was younger, I could not see myself leaving London behind. Even when my father was alive, and I must have been four or five, I had a feeling that the street I grew up on, the neighbourhood I played in, the parks I picnicked in, all of those would be the extent of my life. And I loved that idea. The idea of being in that area of London, roaming those familiar streets of Finsbury Park, from childhood to old age, was the limit of my hopes and dreams. I never would have thought life would work out the way it did. No one could have foreseen mass-produced death. And yet we lived through it. Now, we were even celebrating its end. At that moment the music and laughter and chatter encroached on the air once more and I realised I was about to walk onto the party grounds.

Bartholomew would be waiting for me. Unease and tiredness found its way into me and mixed itself with the alcohol, and with every small step I took towards the party I felt the weight of it all burrowing through me. As I crested the hill and found myself at the gaping mouth of the field, I could see the large pavilion. The band still played on, fewer in number than earlier but certainly not lacking in enthusiasm. The lamps and lanterns had been moved closer around the pavilion as the guests thinned out. The night air had taken a frosty turn and as I watched the crowds, still in high spirits on account of the spirits they consumed, I started to shiver. The flicker of the flames and the heat they promised seemed in that moment an oasis in the desert. It called to me like sirens on a rock, wanting me to trudge the long yards towards the pavilion and rejoin the celebrants. I could have walked around the field, traipsing a path through the woods in the vague direction of home and hearth. That thought only amplified itself the closer I got to the crowd, and before I knew it Bartholomew saw me through the bodies and came bounding over.

‘You have returned to us,’ he said, clapping me on the shoulder. ‘That’s truly wonderful.’ His eyes were wide, red in the corners, and his grip as he shook my hand felt vice-like. Despite this, he wore a gentle smile that revealed perfect teeth

‘I said I would,’ I said, unnerved by his rather wild look.

‘Did our lady get home safely?’

As I went to reply, he handed me one of his fine crystal glasses filled with whisky and bade me drink and introduced me to the people he had been conversing with, such as a retired doctor who used to do the rounds in Little Sudden before marrying and settling down in Chepsworth and a farmer from out past Homewalden who had thirty heads of bullock plus a few bulls for reproduction purposes he rents out to other farmers, and an elderly man who paints and the painter’s wife and daughter and grandchild, all talking with a north country drawl, and there were a few men in suits with burgundy ties and shoulder-length hair who would interject now and then with their deep baritone voices and unfamiliar accents either echoing Bartholomew’s words or contesting him, and the rest of us myself included could tell they were well educated probably somewhere on the continent or something and the whisky kept being topped up in our glasses by another gentleman with a large ornate decanter glistening from the light thrown by the flames of lanterns that surrounded us and as the crowd thinned out they got closer and the drinks kept coming and the band kept playing and the drinks kept coming and—

*

—I awoke to the sound of my front door slamming. The sun spilling in through the open curtains felt like daggers as a headache raged through my leaden head. I rolled over, away from the window, and fumbled for the small clock on my bedside stand. The face read midday. The realisation I had wasted the best hours of the day, missing the early-morning mist on the fields behind my house, hit me almost as hard as the ear-splitting headache. I kicked the covers off me and flung my tired legs over the side of the bed. The hardwood floor felt cool against the soles of my feet. I tried to stand, but a sharp pain shot through my leg from my left ankle. It was swollen, with thin cuts and scabbing scrapes. I tried again, less pressure on the injured ankle than before, and felt as if the room were revolving, as if I were still drunk from the night before. Drunk and definitely suffering.

A tall glass of water stood on my bedside table, a glass I had no recollection of pouring. I drank desperately, and eased myself off the bed, putting as much of my weight on my right side as I comfortably could, and shuffled towards the door.

The slip and slap of sweaty feet on wooden hallway floors grated at my ears as I inched along the hallway. I stopped when I noticed the door to the spare room left ajar.

I eased the door open with my good foot. The hinges creaked, as if woken from a fitful sleep. Envelopes were strewn about the floor, and my mother’s diaries were opened on the desk in the corner. A small stool, usually kept beneath the desk, stood in the centre of the room with the small pile of envelopes and their spilled contents resting around all ramshackle. I racked my brain to see if I had the faintest smear of a memory of being in this room last night, but the fog was too thick.

I limped out of the room, using the walls of the hallway as support and counted my blessings I did not live in a house with a staircase. I found my boots discarded at the far end of the hallway by the front door. About halfway down the hallway, the door on the right, the one that led to the living room, was also left ajar. I pushed it open with my fingertips, expecting something to jump out at me or make a noise trying to escape. Foxes and badgers managed to sneak their way in some mornings. This time, however, all was silent and still. Nothing in the room seemed to have been disturbed from how I left it – the windows were firmly shut, and the kitchen door was closed.

Seeing that all was well, I hobbled back into the hallway and to the front door. I kicked my discarded boots off to the side and opened the door. I knew this was not locked, as it was the slamming of it which woke me in the first place and knew that whatever had caused the door to slam – a person or the wind or something else entirely – would not be there waiting.

What was there, however, was a badger laying on its side, spread out across the welcome mat. Its tongue hung pendulous from the side of its mouth, and its eyes were wide and glazed over. As I knelt down and felt its breathlessness beneath soft, black fur, I remembered the whimpering I heard the previous night, and the way those brutish, bestial eyes flickered in the darkness. I started to inspect the corpse more closely, more attentively, looking for some clues as to how it died and, more curiously, how it ended up on my front step. Nothing. No claw or fang marks, no signs of broken bones or torn fur anywhere on its body.

I stood upright, hands on hips, dumbfounded. The midday sun was out in all of its glory, a cool breeze was stroking the hedgerows, and a dead badger was laying at my feet. Were it not for that last fact, one could almost have described the day as another picturesque afternoon on the outskirts of Little Sudden. The desire to retire to bed and tend to my painful ankle was outweighed by my sympathy for the badger, so I set about burying the poor thing. After wrapping its hind legs in an old tea towel, I struggled under its dead weight to drag it around the side of my house and rest it in the shade.

The next step was to dig a small hole in the garden. Under the hot July sky, with a head feeling like a bubble ready to burst, an ankle that felt it was getting worse with every scoop of dirt, and using a shovel with a wobbly handle I had been meaning to fix for five months, I was on the edge of exhaustion before I had even dug a foot deep. Curiously and yet mercifully, I heard Bartholomew calling my name from the front of the house.

‘I’m out here,’ I shouted back to him. A second later, he rounded the corner, and I saw his usual smiley disposition slip into confusion.

‘I don’t think that will grow,’ he said, gesturing to the badger. ‘Then again, I was never one for horticulture.’

‘It can’t hurt to try,’ I said between bouts of catching my breath. Seeing the sorry state I was in physically, Bartholomew started to undo the buttons on his thin, cotton waistcoat and extended his hand towards the shovel.

‘Pass that thing here. You need a rest,’ he said, a request I was more than happy to accept. ‘May I ask why we are burying a badger?’

‘It seemed the right thing to do.’

‘I didn’t even know you had a badger,’ he said, smirking. ‘You kept that one quiet.’

I shrugged. ‘I found him on my doorstep.’

‘Already dead?’

‘I gave him a quick inspection but couldn’t find anything.’

‘And it was just placed there? On your doorstep, I mean.’

I nodded and laughed. ‘It has been that type of day already.’

Bartholomew kneeled beside the badger and gently ruffled its fur, feeling up and down its body as if counting something. He moved his hand towards the animal’s neck.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Poor thing had its neck crushed,’ Bartholomew replied matter-of-factly. He retracted his hand from the animal and stood up. I noticed, as he was standing up, that he certainly sniffed his hand. What’s more, I could have sworn I saw him taste it as he turned away from me to retake the shovel.

‘Horrible way to go,’ he said, placing the end of the shovel into the dirt.

As he set about digging, I saw a smile etched on his face, which promptly disappeared as we made eye contact. There was something haunting in the way he looked at me, and even when he turned away I could not shake the feeling of being stared at, like the prey of a wolf in the dark, dark forest.