Harvest Georgina Harding (the gingerbread man read aloud .TXT) 📖

stood in this spot beside his father until he had grown cold, and his mind drifted so that the pigeons always surprised him when they came. But not his father. His father raised the gun and fired, one, two barrels. When a bird fell the pleasure of it warmed them.

One barrel only, it must have been. Here. Somewhere about here. The pigeons flying up, and the small birds out of the bushes, and the rooks from their colony high in the trees. Had the birds flown up in astonishment, at a man who shot at himself?

He could not understand why he had not thought it before. (Or no, he might have thought it but dismissed the thought. Who wants to dismiss a truth they have believed since the age of ten? Or a lie, rather.) The story as she told it fitted together. It was so much more likely, when you thought about it, than any accident. Here, it had happened; planned, executed, not any accidental incompetent cocked-gun tripping over some fence. A man out in the early morning, come for the purpose, dying here.

He shouted then. It was neither a word nor a scream but only a twisted cry. Damn. Damn that girl, damn them all. Was she too far off to hear it? The sound stretched and melded with that of the hundred rooks that he had set rising and cawing over the trees.

He looked up where the black birds whirled under the sky. Light up there. Sunlight, seeping down. The nettles a bright green where the light struck through them. He stumbled out where the girl had gone, not following, only going out into the light, away from this place.

The house was plain to see. He wasn’t going into the house. The Land Rover was in the yard. The keys hung on a hook in the barn. He got into it and drove. He drove past his fields, bare stubble open to that sky, out from the farm to the village, and through the village, and on, until he was on some road that he did not know – or perhaps he knew it but no longer recognised it because so much in him had changed – driving through land that was strange to him though the look of it was the same as the land he had left: wide flat land, acres of stubble interspersed with fields of glossy green beet. It was other men’s land, and it meant nothing to him. On some farms they were so far ahead that they were already burning the straw. On one he saw a tractor beginning to plough. There were others – and these were more – where there was still wheat left standing, or where the rain had hit particularly hard, harder than at home, and swathes of crop had been flattened to the ground. He thought these things automatically, and the thoughts dulled him. The Land Rover was slow, heavy to drive, its interior bare, nothing to muffle the noise of the diesel engine. It smelled of diesel. He wound down the window and rested his elbow on the edge of it as he drove. A low green car passed him, too fast and dangerously on the narrow road. A Sprite, but he barely noticed it. He wanted a cigarette. He didn’t have any cigarettes on him or money to buy them. Then he saw that the tank was low. If there was no money for cigarettes then there was no money for diesel. He stopped in a lay-by, scrabbled about the vehicle, amongst the clutter in the shelf beside the dashboard, on the floor and between the seats, for loose notes and coins, and found what amounted to a couple of pounds. The next petrol station he came to, he put in a meagre gallon, watching the dial. That’s all I’ve got, he said to the girl on the forecourt, counting the change out into her hand. He had held back enough for a packet of fags. He didn’t pass any shops after that, not until he got to the village. He stopped outside the post office and bought a packet of ten. Then he broke it open and sat in the stationary vehicle and smoked, looking down the street at the houses, the Green, the church beyond it, the few cars passing.

So everyone knew, did they? Jonathan knew. His mother knew. That girl had known, and she was no one, a stranger over the other side of the world. Perhaps he had always been aware that there was something that Jonny had seen that he wouldn’t tell. But that was Jonny’s way. Jonny always had that way of looking like he knew something you didn’t. Jonny hid things from you and sometimes he told you stories, and you knew you wouldn’t be able to tell when a thing was true and when it wasn’t.

He wasn’t like Jonny. He didn’t have anything hidden. He saw what he saw, a plain world, and that was what he knew, and if he didn’t see for himself then he believed what his mother said, even if he didn’t believe what Jonny said. Even when it was a lie.

They would be there at home waiting for him. What would the girl have told them? Most likely she hadn’t told them anything. They might think something had happened between him and the girl, but if they thought that then what they thought would be wrong – mostly at least. Sooner or later he would have to face them. He put the cigarette almost finished to his lips and held it there as he started the engine. Took a last hard drag and threw it out the window. No, he might stop at the churchyard first, just up there beyond the Green. Park before it, go in the wooden gate to where the grass had been freshly mown about the graves. See his father’s name there on the stone.

He didn’t know