Hempe
It is very probable the male avoids the female for no other reason than that of nourishment, and the female the male because it is like the hop in being a gross feeder.
‘He’s gone.’ My mother stared into space out of her one good eye. She always stared into space, for she was afraid of people, afraid that they would pick her words to pieces and make her feel foolish.
‘What do you mean – gone?’ I stood opposite her, ducking and weaving, trying to place my face in her eyeline. Her hand wandered up to her eyepatch – whereupon I stepped back hastily and let her look where she wished. It was a strategy she used that if any got too close, then her hand would go to the eyepatch and lift it. You did not want to see what lay under the eyepatch.
‘He went away the day before yesterday.’ Her hand stopped in mid-air and slowly sank back to her lap.
‘Aye, he did,’ her brother Robert called from the table. I turned to face him, though it was an even more disgusting sight than my mother’s ravaged eye. He sat at the table with his stomach hanging naked out of his torn shirt. Grease dripped from his chin and pieces of half-chewed pork flew across the room towards where he spoke. At the moment he was speaking to me.
I sidled around the room to position myself behind a giant pig carcass. The head sat in a dish on the table in front of Robert’s right elbow. Its lazy eyes followed me about the room as I walked. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Don’t know,’ Robert wiped his sleeve across his mouth, then sneezed. I will not describe one of Robert’s sneezes in detail, nor the consequences of it. This place was a disgusting and dirty hovel, populated by imbeciles and Whoballs. It was the country. My mother slowly turned her head towards me, her good eye momentarily making contact with mine before slipping away again to regard the earthy floor. I remembered who had done that to her eye and how. It was a recollection that still froze my thoughts.
‘He went with two men.’ Robert wiped a palm across his hair so that strands of it stood on end.
My disgust for this place was suddenly forgotten. In the context of events to date, his words made the hairs on my neck prickle. ‘What two men?’
Robert picked up a rib and stabbed it at me. He was offering me it to eat. I declined. Shrugging, he started to chew at it himself, making sure he had a mouth full of meat before replying.
‘One was the same man what came a week or so ago and helped him write that letter. The second man I have never seen before.’ Sticking out his bottom lip and furrowing his brow, he looked to my mother. ‘I think they were friends of his from London, wasn’t they?’
‘I don’t know.’ My mother shook her head slowly. ‘He didn’t say nothing to me.’
‘What were their names?’
‘Din’t say.’
I regarded them both with critical eye. My mother sat calm with her hands on her lap, peering at something on the ceiling. Robert drew a pork rib across the edge of his front teeth in an attempt to clean it of every speck of meat that still clung to it. Neither was worried in the least – yet he had left the day before yesterday?
‘Tell me what they looked like.’
‘They were dressed like city folk, Harry!’ Robert screwed up his face and talked to me like I was the idiot. ‘They was dressed like you.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Don’t know. He din’t tell us, did he?’ Robert belched and noticed his stomach was uncovered. He fiddled with the edges of his shirt then cast an eye in my mother’s direction. I hoped she washed it before she attempted to mend it.
‘You have no idea where he went?’
‘He’ll be back,’ Robert declared confidently.
‘None round here know where he went?’
‘You could ask.’
I could stand it no longer. I found that I had stopped breathing, holding my breath that I would not say something that I would later feel ashamed of. I looked to my mother.
‘One of the men came here and wrote a letter. Tell me about that.’
Upon seeing that I spoke to my mother Robert stretched his arms wide, swivelled his beady eyes about his head a few times, then stood up with a mighty grunt. He shuffled out the door in the direction of his shed and was gone.
We were left there, my mother and I, in sad silence. I let the question sit, knowing that she would answer it once she was sure that the words she planned were the best she could think of. I sat myself on the other side of the room with my hands between my knees and looked away.
Finally she spoke. ‘They wrote it in here, at the table.’
I looked at the table.
‘He told me to leave them alone,’ she said quietly, nodding her head in the direction of the back room. ‘I went in there.’
I looked towards the back room. My grandmother lay in there with her eyes closed, breathing quietly.
That was it. My mother said no more.
I asked everyone in Cocksmouth if they had seen my father, or could tell me in what direction he had gone with the two men. All that I established was that they had headed south, on the main road to London. I stopped at Byddle and Haremear, the next two villages along the road, but learnt nothing new. Since my face was not known in those parts it was optimistic to expect that I would be told anything – if indeed there was anything to tell.
Fact was – my father was missing.