It was Friday, and still nobody had found Sally and had a long, gentle conversation with her, unreproachful, sympathetic, with hatred concealed behind every gentle word. Hatred for her because she wouldn’t fall into line, because she kept running away and because she didn’t listen to their soft, sympathetic, empathetic voices, but kept looking them in the eye, until the fake wall of professional niceness and warmth and understanding crumbled, and she could see the boredom and uninterest and hatred shining behind it.
It was Friday, and still nobody had found her.
She lay in bed in the bare room, which lacked all the things they always thought she needed to put her at her ease: there were no pastel colours and no tasteful pictures on the wall, no friendly wallpaper and no cuddly carpet that you always longed to puke over from the moment you first walked in. It was just a room with white limewashed walls; there was no carpet, there was only one chair, which wobbled a bit, and there were no curtains at the window. It was a room like clear water, and it felt good to lie there. Yesterday it had rained, and she’d stayed in the house almost all day. In the morning, she’d listened to the sounds that Liss made in the kitchen and the bathroom. She’d gone downstairs once it had gone quiet, and had found tea again, and the covered bowl of fruit. There was bread on the table too, and a saucer of butter. No challenge. Just an offer that looked as though Liss had seen the bowl of fruit untouched the day before and thought that maybe Sally preferred bread. Sally put the butter away in the fridge, which wasn’t in the kitchen but in the little pantry with its sloping ceiling, which followed the staircase above. She’d looked into the bowl to see if there was pear in there again, and she’d eaten every bit of it, plus two or three walnuts. She’d taken the tea upstairs with her and sat at the window, and spent the whole day looking at the yard, at the road outside the farm, and the bakery on the little village square across the road. She’d watched the people buying bread. Some stood outside the shop to chat, despite the rain. She’d watched the hens, which came down to the yard from the garden over the course of the day; there, they searched for earthworms in the narrow, uncobbled strip by the fence along the road. She’d watched Liss, who, wearing her yellow waterproofs, had driven her tractor into the yard around noon, and then vanished into the barn for hours and come out again with very dirty hands, without looking up at her even for a second. She’d drunk coffee with Liss, when she’d come to the door and called that there was coffee. They hadn’t talked. Then Liss had stood up again and walked out, and Sally had put the coffee pot on the stove and rinsed out the cups. Later she’d been upstairs again, had been on the bed, reading a book she’d found; after that she must have fallen asleep, even before it had got dark, because now it was Friday.
It was Friday, and nobody had found her.
She stood up and walked to the open window. It was still very early, but it was going to be sunny. After the rain yesterday, a fine mist hung over the farm.
The farm. Why did the woman live here all alone but then let people live with her? Images from films about psychos briefly flickered in her head. Lonely farm. Mist. Forest. A garden full of dead girls. She grinned the pictures away. The place she’d come from was full of dead girls, but they didn’t realise it, so they just kept moving. Zombies.
Anyway, the woman wasn’t like that. But what was she like? Not so easy to pin down, somehow … Maybe it was easier to say what she wasn’t: a witch. A psychopath. A social-worker-trust-me-bitch. There weren’t that many people who really trusted you. Without constantly saying so, to make them believe it themselves. Strange. She was definitely that. Strange. In a kind of cool way, but strange, all the same. Sally thought hard, but she really didn’t know anybody who actually lived alone. Let alone in such a big house.
There was a knock on the door. Sally turned, expecting the door to open before she’d said ‘come in’ because that’s how it always was. But Liss actually waited. Sally walked to the door and opened it.
‘Good morning,’ said Liss. She was wearing a blue linen headscarf, which framed her face in an odd way. Sally resisted finding it attractive.
‘I need to harvest potatoes today. Can you help me?’
‘Right now?’ she asked.
‘I can easily wait till you’re ready. There’s always plenty to do on the farm,’ Liss answered with that little smile that Sally had got to know by now.
‘I’ll come,’ she said.
This time, she sat with Liss on the tractor. There was a seat over each of the large back wheels; on one side you could sit on planks of wood, long worn smooth and polished to a shine, but on the other there was just the bare metal of the mudguard. Running around both seats was a steel tube that served as both backrest and handhold. Sally could feel every jolt. They drove through the village out onto the lane. The vineyards dropped away on their right. She could see far over the valley, where the morning mist still hung over the distant villages while it was already bright sunshine up here. To their left were fields up to the forest, perhaps a kilometre and a half away. They turned onto a side track. The thing Liss had hitched to the tractor jolted and clattered along behind them. A potato spinner, she’d explained as she’d pulled it out of the shed in the garden. Not that that explained much. The track led in a slight curve along a hedge, and then they suddenly stopped. To their right was a field. Liss took a jute sack from the pile under her seat and threw it onto the edge of the field. She gave Sally an iron basket. Then she climbed down onto the drawbar and released a lever. The spinner sank. It looked like a kind of plough, but behind it was a wheel with slightly curved prongs sticking out of it at intervals – a bit like the round broom on a street-sweeper truck.
‘How do you know when the potatoes are ready?’ asked Sally.
Liss jumped off the drawbar and pointed at the ridge.
‘Go on, dig one up.’
Sally crouched in the furrow and dug her finger into the soil under the potato plant. It was warm and still a little damp from yesterday’s rain. When was the last time she’d dug in the ground? When was the last time she’d had her hands in the earth? She couldn’t remember.
‘Here,’ she said, when she hit the potatoes and unearthed them. There were eight or nine tubers of varying sizes. She brushed off the earth and looked at them. They were pale, almost glowing in the September sun.
‘Give one a good rub,’ Liss commanded.
‘And?’ asked Sally, once she’d rubbed a potato completely clean.
‘If the skin doesn’t come off, they’re ready. Or you can dig some up and cook them to see if they’re OK, but that’ll take too long just now.’
Sally looked up in surprise. It was the first time Liss had made a joke.
‘Collect the potatoes in the basket first and then put them in the sacks,’ Liss said, already sitting in the seat again. ‘Don’t lug them any further once they get heavy, I’ll chuck the sacks down to you at intervals. And take your time.’
Then she put her foot down and the wheel started turning. Now Sally saw what the plough bit was for. It lifted the earth out of the ridge, the broom flung it aside, and the potatoes spun out with it. It looked a bit ridiculous, unprofessional, almost gawky. But as she slowly walked along the furrows behind the tractor, she could see that it worked. You just had to pick the potatoes up.
You just had to pick the potatoes up! After the first two hours, Sally’s back hurt so much that she wasn’t even bending anymore, just shuffling along on her haunches. Liss had long finished with the spinner and was gathering them up too. Sally watched her as she came up from the other end of the field, in the other furrow, moving like a machine. Bend. Gather. Shove the iron bucket along a metre. Bend. Gather. Empty the iron bucket into a sack. She was much faster than Sally; she noticed that because with every furrow, Liss met her further along. And they hadn’t even done a third of the field.
‘Stuff this!’ she screamed, suddenly furious. ‘Just stuff this.’
She hurled the potatoes she’d just picked up across the field, but her arms hurt so much it looked a little ridiculous. They only flew a few metres. Sally straightened up. What was this? Some kind of work as therapy? Did Liss think she’d fall for this shit? She was allowed to stay with her, so she had to play along and pick up potatoes to heal herself through healthy country labour? Was that it? She looked for Liss. She was about seventy metres further down. Bend. Pick. Potatoes in the basket.
‘No,’ said Sally angrily. ‘No. You can all do one. You can all do one, you arseholes.’
She walked to the nearest sack, almost full, and tried to push it over. That wasn’t so easy. It only fell slowly, and the potatoes barely rolled out. Sally bent and ripped the two bottom edges; grabbed a potato in each hand through the rough jute and bellowed wordlessly with rage, while tearing at the sack with all her strength, then suddenly fell over backwards as it emptied far too quickly. Panting, she lay there a few seconds before, still burning with rage, jumping up and running to the edge of the field, past the tractor that Liss had parked there and then sprinting, as fast as she could, for the forest.
Liss watched the girl go. Instinctively, she’d jumped up, wanting to call after her, but then she just stood and watched her go. You can’t run away from work, her father had told her coldly once, when she’d been meant to be raking up the scraps of hay behind the trailer. It was the most boring job in the world. The hay cart ahead of you in the field, always a step faster than you could rake. The monotonous, metallic sound of the scraper that pushed the hay back once the tines had caught it. All the sounds were monotonous, they wove a net of grey thread in which she was caught, in which she was dragged along behind the cart, having to rake up the ridiculous scraps of hay that hadn’t been gathered up. How much had it been, she thought, and for a moment the hatred rose up within her with its bitter taste; a wheelbarrow’s worth perhaps? Or two?
At some point she’d just stopped. The cart rolled on, and she’d stopped. How old had she been then? Thirteen? Fourteen? She couldn’t remember. She’d watched the rake tip over. The tines lay pointing up. Good. And then she’d gone into the wood. The sounds clung to her like threads. The chug of the motor. The excruciating little scraping sound of the iron crossbar on the floor of the cart. The dreadful, repetitive screech of metal on metal from the hay spindle beneath the truck. She’d walked into the forest until she couldn’t hear any of it anymore. When she’d come home hungry in the late afternoon, he’d locked up the kitchen. And the pantry. Even the cellar.
Those who don’t work, don’t eat.
Sometimes she’d have preferred it if he’d boxed her ears. Or shouted. But he didn’t do that. No shouting. No laughing. No nothing.
You can’t run away from work. Those who don’t work, don’t eat.
She’d found herself unripe apples. Tomatoes from the garden. She’d fought for two days, soundlessly, stubbornly. Locked kitchen. Locked pantry. Locked cellar. Where there weren’t invisible threads, there were locks. Eventually, she’d climbed on the tractor, thrown the wheelbarrow into the trailer and driven to the forest meadow to rake up the hay. And she’d imagined setting fire to it in the winter, the hay in the barn, and him standing down below and not noticing, and then the floor burning through and falling on him.
Liss took a deep breath.
Run, girl, she thought.
Then she bent down to the nearest potato.
It was dark by the time Sally came back. It was quiet in the village, but not silent. Now and then a car drove by. As she passed the sheds, the cows’ chains clanked. They couldn’t run away, Sally thought, they always stood there. Blue light flickered behind a lot of the windows. The people were watching TV, she thought with tired scorn, they were sitting in their cramped houses, really believing that they’d been transported far away, had escaped, when actually they were sitting in their living rooms, chained up, staring at a wall, just like their cows.
Her legs hurt. She’d walked a very long way, had kept forcing herself on until she’d got into the zone walking always brought. But it had worn off eventually, and now everything hurt. Her legs from walking. Her arms and back from picking potatoes. And something inside her that always hurt, yet which she didn’t always notice.
When she reached the farm, she stopped. There was still a light on in the kitchen. Had she chained herself up too? She was tired. And she felt hunger, which she could normally push away, but she was too tired even for that. The air was still warm. A cloud of midges buzzed around the lamppost outside the entrance. Sally leant against the fence and looked into the farmyard. The tractor stood there. The potato spinner had been swapped for the trailer, on which stood the sacks of potatoes. She could hear a quiet, sleepy clucking from the hen house. The patio door into the kitchen was open a crack. So what, she thought, so what. She shook herself and walked across the yard into the kitchen. There was a plate at her place. A saucer of butter. A little cup of salt. And a black enamelled pan. Sally stood by the table, too exhausted to resist. She lifted the lid off the pan. Potatoes. Boiled in their skins. They were still lukewarm. Sally stared at them. Then she took one out, broke it open and dipped one end cautiously in the salt. It tasted like coming home, and suddenly her eyes welled with tears. She ate another. With the skin and a tiny dab of butter. And then another, just with salt again. She put the lid quietly back on the pan, switched off the light and put the butter in the pantry. Then she went up to her room.