Tim Major
“Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ!”
Andy dropped to the ground on his knees before the wicker man, his arms outstretched in supplication.
“Oh my God! Christ! No, no, dear God! Christ!”
He registered a hand being placed on his shoulder. “You all right there, mate?”
Andy turned, frowning. He gestured at the wicker man. “I was doing the thing. The scene.”
“What scene, mate?”
“From The Wicker Man. You know, the film.”
Gavin peered at him through the too-small lenses of his glasses, appearing none the wiser.
A middle-aged woman emerged from the house with the scarecrow wicker man in its garden. She was dressed in a plain white flowing dress, a garland of colourful flowers around her neck and a wreath on her head. Her feet were bare. She skipped past the scarecrow Christopher Lee in its tweed jacket and yellow polo neck sweater, past the scarecrow Edward Woodward in its police uniform.
“What do you think?” she asked Andy, tilting her head and revealing that her long, blonde hair was a wig. For some reason, she adopted an American accent to add, “Can I depend on your vote?”
Andy rose to his feet and looked beyond her to the wicker man itself, which was not even twice as tall as Edward Woodward. But the proportions were about right and somebody had worked hard on the spindly twig fingers and the blocky, suggestively blank head.
“I suppose,” he said with a shrug.
The woman clapped her hands in delight. “Ed would be so proud.”
Andy glanced at the police scarecrow.
“I mean my husband,” the woman explained. “This was his favourite film. Had a real thing about Britt Ekland, his whole life. Hence my getup.”
“Actually,” Andy said, appraising her outfit again, “I don’t think you’re Britt Ekland. I think you’re the young girl, um… Rowan? The one who’s supposed to be the sacrifice but then isn’t. Britt Ekland was mostly naked, at least in my mind’s eye.”
The woman squinted up at him, her pursed lips trembling.
“I never saw the film myself,” she said. “I don’t like shocks. And this was supposed to be a tribute to my Ed. I’m supposed to be Britt Ekland.”
In response to a glare from Gavin, Andy said hurriedly, “Actually, I’m wrong. I’m wrong, okay? Now that I think of it, you look exactly like her. Like Britt Ekland. It’s uncanny. And… and the wicker man is really outstanding.” He forced a chuckle. “I hope you’ll actually burn it?”
The woman’s expression had been lightening, but now her eyebrows lowered again. “What? What the fuck did you just say?”
“Like in the…” Andy gulped. “Never mind. I say daft things sometimes.” He turned to Gavin. “Shall we head on?”
They moved along the road, passing a scarecrow Boris Johnson and a scarecrow Duggee. When Andy looked back, the woman was spinning in circles before the wicker man with her arms stretched wide, making a low hissing sound.
“Don’t mind her,” Gavin said. “She’s sensitive these days. It was pancreatic cancer that took Ed. Quite sudden.”
Andy nodded. He looked around at the immaculate cottages, the immaculate gardens each containing a scarecrow.
“I suppose this is a tight community, though. Supportive,” he said.
“Course. You probably think it’s a bit twee, a bit claustrophobic, living somewhere like this. But the villagers live simple and pure lives, and I’ve come to respect that.”
“Pure? Meaning pious?”
“Not in the religious sense. Just uncluttered, mentally. The people here believe in straightforward emotions, the purer the better.”
It sounded like nonsense to Andy. City life suited him just fine. There, he could be anonymous and unjudged. He had no desire to meditate, or to take up Zen gardening, or whatever people did here.
A few other people were examining the scarecrows. They pottered along on the narrow road – there were no cars other than those parked on the keystone driveways.
“Does it get super busy?” Andy asked.
“You’re asking does Roseberry Atherton get busy?”
“I mean today. On scarecrow festival day.”
“Why would it?”
“Tourists. Offcomers.”
Gavin shook his head. “It’s not about that. We don’t even promote it. It’s not for other people, it’s for us here in the village.”
“You invited me, though.”
“Yeah. Was your journey okay?”
“Sure. Long. Bumpy. It was an old bus.”
Gavin turned to face him. “So… how long’s it been, mate?”
Andy puffed out his cheeks. “Maybe twenty-five years?”
“Exactly twenty-five. Since we were last in school together, anyway.” Before Andy could respond to this odd qualification, Gavin continued, “I was surprised you could come, thought you’d have other commitments. Family, et cetera.”
Andy didn’t think he’d ever heard anybody say ‘et cetera’ out loud. Gavin hadn’t changed, not really. He’d always seemed from another era, always older than his years, reading the Economist instead of NME at secondary school, certain he was on course to become an accountant and a wealthy man. They’d bonded over nerdy SF shows, way back, and had continued to hang out sometimes during lunch breaks even after Andy’s heart was no longer in it.
“I don’t have kids,” Andy said.
“Wife? Girlfriend?”
“Not right now. I’ve never been married. Hey, I know I should know this, but your wife’s name is…”
“Flick.” When Andy swallowed hard and almost choked, he added, “It’s short for Felicity.”
“Of course,” Andy said, recovering himself, making a show of studying the scarecrow farmer in a nearby garden, whose straw hat was simply an extrusion of the straw of his head.
“She’s looking forward to meeting you, putting a face to the name.”
“Yeah?” Andy hesitated. “Look, I’m still surprised you invited me here. We haven’t spoken in a long time. And now you’re telling me that your wife knows me, that you’ve talked about me… To be honest, Gav, I haven’t thought about you much. Is that a shitty thing to say?”
Gavin exhaled thoughtfully. “Still, you came.”
“I didn’t have much on this weekend.”
“You’re footloose and fancy free.”
“That’s right. I can do what I want. That’s how I like it. Last September I just upped and went to Iceland for a fortnight. Didn’t tell anyone. And I’m freelance, so I just kept on trucking with work, keeping the wheels spinning.”
“No ties at all. I can barely imagine it.”
“Are you envious?”
“Just curious.” They moved along the road in silence before Gavin added, “It’s been twenty-seven years since the other thing, you know.”
Andy stopped walking. He’d wondered whether this would crop up.
“Look,” he said, “there’s no need to bring it up. It was a long time ago.”
“It was important. It is important.”
“I can’t even remember what the argument was about – can you?”
Gavin shrugged. “That’s not the important part.”
Andy had started it, he recalled, or at least he’d raised the stakes. Whatever it was they’d argued about as they ate their jacket potatoes in the school canteen, he’d been determined to have the last word. He’d finished his meal, then stood and, very calmly, tipped a glass of water over Gavin’s head before walking out of the room. But it was what had happened afterwards that was memorable. At lunch breaks they and their small group of friends played – or, more often, slumped against tree trunks and discussed canonical details of their favourite shows – in the small copse of trees between the tennis courts. That day, Andy had assumed Gavin wouldn’t show up, but he did. Red-faced and shaking. He’d snatched a thick fallen branch from the ground and, with a long shout drawn from the belly, he’d chased Andy down and struck him on the head with the limb of the tree. Five stitches and a weeklong suspension from school, respectively.
“You really don’t need to apologise,” Andy said, only now realising the fingers of his right hand were touching the slight bump of stitched flesh on the crown of his head. He pulled his hand away. “We were just kids, full of hormones and rage.”
Gavin watched him levelly for several seconds. Then he nodded and kept walking. Despite Andy’s insistence about no apology being needed, Gavin’s immediate acceptance struck him as callous.
A high-pitched sound attracted Andy’s attention. The garden of the cottage they were alongside contained a large scarecrow cat. It wasn’t well constructed – its body was wrapped in bin bags, presumably to hold the straw in place – but some effort had been put into its posture, bent forward with one of its paws resting upon a spherical bundle of straw meant to evoke a ball of wool. A young girl with short, dark hair, aged around seven, lay on the grass, stroking the front foot of the giant cat.
That same high-pitched mewl came again.
“Is that cat miaowing?” Andy asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, raising her dark eyes. Andy balked, his question having been rhetorical.
“It’s a clever idea,” he said. When the cat miaowed again, he added, “It sounds really real.”
“There’s a CD player stuck underneath its tummy,” the girl said. “And it is real. It’s really Captain Crumbs.”
“Captain Crumbs is your cat? Your real cat.”
“Captain Crumbs is gone now.” She stroked the scarecrow cat’s foot again. “We recorded his miaow before he went.”
There was something strange about that foot. Andy shifted to one side along the low garden fence, trying to make it out. The girl’s fingers were stroking something soft that seemed to have been pushed within the coarse straw.
“You made a scarecrow cat as a freaky tribute to your real, dead cat?” he asked.
“Mate,” Gavin said quietly. “She’s a kid.”
“Sorry.”
“Dad says not to feel sorry,” the girl said. “He says Captain Crumbs had to die.”
“You mean because everything dies.”
The girl gazed up at him impassively. She continued stroking the cat’s foot idly.
As she did so, something came free from within the straw. Andy leant over the fence to peer at the small, furred shape. It looked like nothing so much as the paw of a real, normal-sized cat, severed from its body.
Before he could say anything, Gavin ushered him along.
* * *
Within a few minutes, they stood before a cottage that was noticeably larger than the others in the village. In fact, it was only the thatched roof that defined it as a cottage in Andy’s mind. Alongside the house were outbuildings with doors all painted the same shade of eggshell blue. Offices, perhaps, or playrooms or guest quarters. In that instant, Andy told himself that he’d decline the invitation to stay over, that he would return home on the bus this evening, no matter the long journey. There was something eerie about the perfection of this village.
Alongside a driveway that contained a Range Rover and a Lexus was a perfect kidney-shaped lawn. A blonde woman stood on a stepladder held by a blond preteen boy. She was leaning over a bulbous scarecrow sculpture, weaving strands carefully. When she saw Gavin and Andy, she descended the ladder and hurried over to them, smoothing her smart green dress.
“Flick,” she said, her hand extended. Pure, unthinking confidence.
“Hi,” Andy said, taking her hand, which was far cooler than his own. “I’m Andy.”
“Of course you are. I’m so glad you could come. We weren’t sure you’d…” She laughed. “It hardly matters, does it? You’re here now.”
An awkward silence followed. Andy pointed behind her and said, “You’re cutting it fine, still working on your scarecrow.”
He tried to make out the shape of their creation. If he squinted, he could see a head, but it was oddly low on the body. Perhaps the part that Flick had been working on was a limb, raised above the head?
“It’s quite an unusual one,” he concluded weakly.
Flick smiled. “I wasn’t certain we’d make one this year. Like I say, we didn’t know for sure you were really coming.”
Andy froze. “What do you mean?”
“I mean—”
Gavin laughed. “Pop your bag down – young Vincent will take it. I bet you could use a drink right now, mate.”
Was that a deliberate jibe? No, Gavin couldn’t know about his problems of the past decade.
“It’s only early,” Andy replied.
“Still. Let’s head over to the fiesta.” Gavin pointed across the road to the village green, upon which was a collection of striped tents that Andy had noticed as they approached the cottage. “It’ll all be kicking off around now, and we’ll have to move fast if we’re to finish before the judgement.”
“Finish what?” Andy asked.
Gavin laughed and clapped his hand on Andy’s shoulder, in the same motion slipping his backpack from his shoulders. All of this camaraderie, the insistence of the use of the word ‘mate’, seemed entirely false. The two of them weren’t friends. Perhaps they never had been, really, even before the incident in the copse that had ended their childhood relationship so decisively. Why had he agreed to come here?
He allowed himself to be led towards the village green. Flick spoke to her blond son, who climbed the stepladder and resumed work on the scarecrow, then she scurried to join them, linking her arm around Andy’s so that he was flanked by the couple.
More scarecrows were positioned around the periphery of the green. An old woman carrying a large handbag, James Bond, a hamster, a pilot, a fish that might have been Nemo. They were all passable, but none seemed likely winners of the contest.
Deckchairs had been arranged before one of the tents. A few were already occupied by men wearing shorts and T-shirts, and women wearing summer dresses. Gavin gestured for Flick and Andy to sit amongst the group.
“Champagne?” he said in an affected tone like a nineteenth-century butler.
Flick giggled and nodded.
“Like I said—” Andy began.
“You don’t drink,” Gavin said. “Vimto?”
“Lemonade would be fine.”
One of the villagers, a man in his sixties with a perfectly white beard, leant forward in his deckchair. “How’re you liking the festival, Andrew?”
Andy blinked. “Do we know each other?”
“Gavin mentioned you were coming.”
“Are you his dad?”
“Ha! His dad.” Then, suddenly serious, “I’d be proud to be his dad. But no, just a nosy neighbour.”
Andy forced a laugh. “A stranger coming to the village is newsworthy, is it?”
The old man simply nodded.
The woman sitting next to the man patted his arm. “What Niall means is that it’s a pleasure to have somebody come and see us on our special day. It’s rare to see a new face. And yours is interesting. Quite difficult to capture, I’d have thought.”
“What do you—”
“I’m a photographer. Was, before I retired. I still dabble. Julia.”
She held out her hand for Andy to shake. Then her husband did the same, so that both of Andy’s hands were grasped and they performed an odd double-shake like the start of a complex country dance. He pulled his hands away and slipped them beneath himself on the sling of soft deckchair fabric.
He wanted nothing more than to leave this place. But there would be no bus for another two hours. Pretend you’re here to observe these nuts, he told himself. Pretend you’re Louis Theroux.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said, “but both of the people I’ve spoken to about their scarecrows said they’d created them as tributes.” When neither Julia nor Niall nor Flick responded, he added, “Tributes to dead people, or dead pets.”
“That’s natural, isn’t it?” Julia said calmly.
“Is it?”
“There’s a great tradition of sculptures to remember those that have passed.”
“Yes… but these are scarecrows. They’re more in a tradition of scaring birds away.”
“Two birds with one stone!” Niall roared, slapping his thighs.
Julia chuckled. “Yes, why can’t they perform both functions?”
No answer came to mind. Andy was relieved when Gavin returned holding three glasses. He handed one of the flutes of champagne to Flick, and a plastic beaker to Andy.
“They didn’t have lemonade,” Gavin said, “but I thought I ought to bring you something.”
Andy looked into the beaker to see that it was water. He raised it in an ironic cheers.
Gavin shuffled a deckchair to be positioned directly opposite Andy’s, so that their feet were almost touching. Andy made to move away, but Flick shook her head. Behind her, Andy noticed activity within one of the striped tents. A group of teenagers were arranging what looked like set dressings, two-dimensional boards reinforced to stand on their ends. The pieces Andy could make out were cartoonish green trees with cloudlike masses of leaves.
“Is there going to be a play later?” he asked.
“We’ll see,” Flick replied.
More villagers were arriving at the village green all the time. They collected drinks from the counter within the nearest tent, then gravitated to the deckchair area. They all seemed to assess Andy as they took their seats or, when the deckchairs were all occupied, stood behind them in a ring.
Andy turned his attention to Gavin sitting before him.
“What is all this?” he asked.
Gavin smiled. “You look a bit lost.”
“No, just weirded out, if I’m honest.”
“I don’t mean at this moment. I mean in general. You look like you’ve lost your way, mate.”
Andy lowered his voice, uncomfortable due to the attention of the people encircling them. “What gives you the right to say that? I’m my own person. I’ve made my own choices. And I’m not your mate, mate, okay?”
Gavin smiled. “I’m not much of a social media user, but I indulged in order to check up on you. Failed career, failed relationships. And reading between the lines, failure to pay your rent, failure to stop yourself from indulging in vices… Am I wrong about any of this?”
It took some effort to rise from the low deckchair. When he’d managed to do so, Andy realised the throng of villagers had grown tighter around him.
“What the actual fuck?” he said.
“I pity you,” Gavin said, gazing up at him implacably. “Not for those failures, but for the messiness in your head. If only you could find simplicity, purity.”
“Like here in Roseberry Atherton? Meaning I should be like all these other grinning robots with their strimmed borders and scrubbed kids?”
“I mean only that these people appreciate untainted emotions. Perhaps you found it, for a time, in drink. But you couldn’t allow yourself to feel it because even then the experience was tainted with fear.”
“Oh Christ,” Andy said wearily. “Then this is about religion after all? Are you trying to convert me?”
Faint laughter rippled around the crowd.
Gavin turned to look at the villagers. “It was twenty-seven years ago,” he announced, “that I chased this man in a small forest with a stick.”
Andy recalled the phone calls he was required to make as part of his own ten-step programme, the unreserved apologies he had been compelled to offer. That was what this was.
“I’ve already told you that you don’t need to apologise for it,” he said.
Gavin shook his head. “And I won’t.” Then, addressing the crowd again from his seated position, “Friends, it was the purest emotion I’ve ever experienced. Purer than the happiness of our wedding day. Purer than the joy of seeing Vincent for the first time when he was born. Purer, I suspect, than the grief that has informed your own scarecrow tributes. What I experienced was unadulterated rage. And it was beautiful.”
Amid the polite applause of the crowd, Andy stared down at him in disbelief.
“These fine people have created tributes,” Gavin said. “Grief is pure, and as I said, we all crave purity here. Sandra grieves for her husband Ed. Little Fi grieves for her cat, who was required to die in order to provide her with that necessary experience.” He leant forward to take his wife’s hand. “We have no knowledge of grief in our little family, more’s the pity. For that reason, we had no intention of creating a scarecrow, initially.”
I wasn’t certain we’d make one this year, Flick had said. We didn’t know for sure you were really coming.
Andy swallowed. His throat was dry. He glanced down at his right hand, which was still clutching the beaker of water.
Gavin was looking at it too. “It’s not for drinking,” he said. “Throw it over me.”
“What?” Andy said stupidly. His thoughts were a slow trickle.
“Tip the water over my head.”
“No. Why would I?”
“That’s how it starts.”
Flick rose from her deckchair. She put her hand on Andy’s right hand. Andy was able to withstand the pressure she applied without any trouble, but then Niall stood and added his own strength. Andy watched in impotent horror as his hand was forced forwards until the beaker was above Gavin’s head. Andy shook his own head and mumbled something that even he couldn’t decipher.
The beaker trembled, then upturned.
Gavin stared up at him, water dripping down his forehead, into his eyes, along his cheeks. His lips parted in a toothy grin.
He stood. He opened his arms wide.
“It’s returning to me,” he announced. “That same feeling.”
His eyes were gleaming. There was something very dangerous there.
“It’s time,” Gavin said.
The crowd behind Andy parted. Once again, Gavin and Flick stood on either side of him, guiding him, turning him around. Now Andy could see the centre of the village green, which had previously been empty, but no longer. The teenagers had left the tent containing the set dressings to arrange themselves in a circle in the centre of the green. Each of them supported a tall two-dimensional tree. Those trees on the far side were brightly and messily coloured, whereas Andy could see only the plain backs of those closer to him.
“Come, Andy,” Flick said. “It’s time to play your part.”
Andy tried to struggle, but they were stronger than him, or he was weaker than he had realised. Gavin and Flick led him into the clearing within the ring of flat trees. The villagers fanned out to take positions around the exterior of the imitation forest – the copse, Andy told himself.
When they reached the centre of the clearing, Flick stood on tiptoes to kiss Andy’s cheek. At this unexpected human touch, he burst into tears. Then she turned and skipped away to join her neighbours beyond the crayoned trees.
“I don’t understand,” Andy said.
“I think you do, deep down,” Gavin replied.
He reached down to the neatly mown grass to pick up the thick branch that lay there. Unlike the trees, it was real.
Andy spun, looking for gaps in the ring of villagers, but there were none.
Gavin raised the branch high.
Andy crouched, cowering, putting his hands above his head to protect it, his elbows forward, his fingers pressing against the healed wound on his crown. The fact that his posture was a precise echo of the scarecrow on the lawn of Gavin’s cottage only added to his certainty: his fate had been sealed the moment he arrived in the village.
He heard, rather than saw, the branch swing down.