ROBBIE FELT Mags’s hand on his back again, urging him to get up, but this time they walked along the edge of the field, following it round until they got to the trees on the other side, and then they went down the path between them.
He asked, ‘Why didn’t we come up this way? It’s a lot easier.’
Mags laughed.
The moonlight spilled over everything, though more faintly, making the woodland look as if at any moment it might dissolve into a mist. A moon mist. Owls were hunting not far away; he could hear their mournful cries piercing the silvery air.
Mags was fishing about in the pocket of her jacket, then she was unlocking a door and turning on a torch and they were in some kind of hut.
Robbie felt a little shaky. In the torchlight Mags frowned slightly. She was looking for something.
‘Where’d she go?’ he asked, and of all the things he could have asked this felt right, because Mags stopped hunting through the boxes and half-empty tool kits and shone the torch in his face.
‘We don’t know,’ she said. ‘We never know. However hard we try.’
There was the scraping of a match and a little whoosh in the corner. She had lit a camping stove and was heating a kettle, and Robbie asked her if she had anything stronger, in case there was something hidden under a floorboard, but she shook her head.
So they both had instant black coffee in cups that looked as if they could have done with a wash.
‘How’s your dad? Did he get that job?’ Robbie asked after a while.
Mags shook her head again.
‘And your mum?’
‘Well, you know, she’s still cleaning, so that looks all right. Her new man likes her to work. He’s okay, though.’
‘Your dad doesn’t try very hard, does he? He’d be a lot better off with someone around the home, wouldn’t he? Just to get him out of it, maybe?’ This time Mags nodded. But it wasn’t going to be her tidying up after her dad and sorting out his mess. There wasn’t much in it, but she’d chosen to live with her mum, and that was that. At least she had one.
Anyway, Mags was crazy about animals and she was especially crazy about hares. He’d learned that much about her. She used to keep them as pets when she was younger, before her parents split up and they moved out of the house, and her mother ended up living on the other side of the village with someone who did the same kind of odd-jobbing for the farms that Mags’s dad did and who didn’t even look very different. Mags said she didn’t know why her mum bothered, and Robbie said perhaps she just wanted a change. Mags nodded slowly and blew out her cheeks and said maybe that was it. Now all her dad did was sit in front of his TV, drink too much and stick out his lower lip.
‘So what was that you said? “We don’t know where the hare goes.” Who’s we?’
Mags tensed and something came down sharply between them. ‘People,’ she said quietly to herself.
She was small, scrappy and lean. She was wearing a green cotton jacket with epaulettes and lots of pockets, skinny jeans tucked into Doc Marten boots and her favourite black belt with a silver skull buckle. Silver studs shone in her ears. A grey flat cap hid her hair, which was like honey, or the corn at the end of the summer, and which she wore tied up. Wisps always straggled down her neck, and despite being younger Robbie felt protective of her. He would never have dared show it though. She was much too proud for that sort of thing. She had a way of looking sideways with her large pale blue eyes, which seemed to change colour in different lights, then looking away again very quickly, a flicker of a look, checking you out, especially if she’d just met you. Which for Robbie was down by the bridge soon after they came to live in Somerset, when his dad and Sheila were busy doing up the new house.
The bridge – their bridge – wasn’t far from the house. It was a cattle bridge, really, the earth on either side pitted by hooves, and it crossed the river that ran through the village. It was a perfect place for a quiet smoke, leaning against the railings with the water sidling underneath and the trees crowding in from the banks.
She was sitting on one of the lower railings of the bridge the way she always liked to, with her arms folded on the top one and her legs dangling from the lower. Robbie wondered whether to say hi or just walk past. She glanced at him, then went back to contemplating the water and he thought she was going to ignore him. He’d just crossed over when he heard her voice.
‘Going to say hello?’
He turned.
‘Have we met?’
‘No, we haven’t. But I know who you are. And you can say hello to strangers. It’s polite.’
She raised her eyebrows and he found himself smiling.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I’m new here.’
She could have told him they were living in the house she’d lived in all her life. Her family had been tenants there, and it was a wreck. Peeling wallpaper, rotting window frames, an old caravan in the garden, corrugated iron everywhere. Now it was being transformed. All cosy with new carpets and stripped floorboards, spotlights in the ceiling and a steel-coloured oven and a steel-coloured fridge that made ice. The only old thing, apart from the yellow stones of the house itself, which glowed in the evening sun, was the grandfather clock on the landing that had been in his dad’s family for years.
She could have told him how much she had loved that house, just the way it had been. She could have made him feel guilty. But she didn’t. She watched him for a moment, in her green jacket and battered jeans and brown boots, which were like a kind of camouflage, as if she was blending into the dark leaves and the bank and the water below. Or maybe it was as though she was an element of everything around her, a pale blonde ghost caught between where she was and where she’d come from. She untied her hair – he could see she bit her nails – and tied it up again, balancing on the rail, eyes flickering, chewing him over.
As they talked he’d thought, she’s a bit weird, this one.
But then he wasn’t exactly normal, was he?
Robbie was clever, but he was trouble too, at least that’s what the judge had said. He knew the things he’d done were wrong and he didn’t want to go back there, but sometimes he wanted to explode and burn like he used to. Sometimes he didn’t know how he was holding it all in, home being the way it was. Nothing much had changed, he’d just swapped tarmac and high-rise for fields, and they didn’t make him any calmer. In fact, they terrified him.
So he was running away from home and running away from fields. Sometimes he thought he should run away properly, run away and not stop, and he would have done if it wasn’t for Mags. Being around her made him feel better, brought out his clever side, perhaps. He liked to be reminded that there was something good about himself.
He’d once asked Mags why she didn’t keep hares as pets any more, and she’d said she thought it was cruel.
‘But they used to do it,’ he said. ‘There was this poet who wrote about having one that played on his carpet and was called Puss. We read it in school once.’
Without looking at him she said, ‘You’re actually quite smart, aren’t you?’ And he liked that because he knew she meant it. Then she said that Puss was one of the names that hares had, and she told him some others too, chanting them slowly, like a spell.
‘The hare-ling, the frisky one,
Old Turpin, the fast traveller.’
They were standing near her house, waiting for her mum to get back. It was warm, and Mags’s eyes burned a kind of purple-blue. She was looking at a wood about a hundred metres away over a field that hadn’t had crops that year, just grazing.
‘The lurker in ditches, the filthy beast,
The one who doesn’t go straight home, the traitor,
The friendless one, the cat of the wood.’
Her words and the pictures they made flew round Robbie’s head, and the stillness in the air felt like a pulse beating.
‘The stag with the leathery horns,
The animal that dwells in the corn,
The animal that all men scorn,
The animal that no one dare name.’
The words flew on, round and round, and the pictures, until he thought they would go on forever. They tumbled through his thoughts. Hare-ling. Lurker. Cat of the wood. Leathery horns.
‘That’s an older poem than the one I know,’ Robbie said when she’d finished.
‘Yes, I think it is,’ she’d replied.
He thought of asking her to say it again, but he also thought, maybe that’s enough, maybe I am filled up enough with words and pictures. And, anyway, he sort of knew she wouldn’t.
She said, ‘They do box, you know.’ She smiled, because she could see he didn’t understand what she was talking about. ‘Boxing. Hares are famous for it. Lots of people say it’s untrue, but it’s not. I’ve seen it. They sit around in a circle, and now and then a pair of them leap at each other and stand up on their hind legs and box each other with their forepaws. They do it in the spring. I’ll show you.’
She looked at him thoughtfully.
‘They know they’re graceful, you can see it in their eyes.’
*
The light in the shed was dimming as the torch’s batteries began to fade. Mags had lots of haunts like this one, in old barns and even in holes in trees, where she kept things or laid low, when things used to get bad at home. She was a girl with a lot of hiding places.
She gave the cups a wipe with her finger, then started pulling at a big crate in the corner.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Help me.’ At first he didn’t understand what she was doing, then he saw the crate had handles at either end, so he grabbed one and hauled on it. As they carried it towards the door he saw it wasn’t a crate but a cage. Inside was something like a tablecloth, neatly folded and quite plain, though he couldn’t make out the colour in the torchlight or in the moonlight when they got outside. It was darker than when they’d arrived, the moon was closer to the horizon and the trees were black against it. They carried the cage along the path away from the village.
‘It’s for her,’ she said. ‘If I find her. To keep her safe.’ Then she murmured to herself, ‘If I can.’
When they got to where they were going, she made him swear not to tell anyone. He didn’t tell her that he was the last person she should be sharing secrets with, but he did say where are we, and how are we going to get back, and I’m going to be in loads of trouble, and are you going to tell me what this is about? He was feeling really tired, but most of all ignorant, and he didn’t like either.
Then he felt her take his hand in the darkness, and he pulled away, but she held on and said, ‘Don’t worry,’ and for once in his life he didn’t. That’s the way it was with Mags. She put out his fires.