A Bunch of Fives - Stories by James Roderick Burns (50)

Ted & Edward

TED & EDWARD

IT WAS A large house in a small village surrounded by fields.  The man and woman saved long and hard to buy it, money stretched tight as canvas, but they were happy, at least at first.

The man rode his bicycle to work.  The woman stayed at home with the children, a boy and girl, as was customary.  They would move when the boy neared eleven, the girl eight, but for now High Farm House and the village – its splintery fences and narrow lanes, hollow-ways winding away into the corn – encompassed them all.

*

From the second floor, the boy looked into the real farm next door.  It had a rutted yard, barns and slurry pits, an older stone farmhouse.  Two paddocks surrounded the buildings, a gravel track running between.  Avoiding his sister, he went to play with the boy next door.

‘Andrew’s!’ he said.

The boy slipped through the back door of the one outbuilding the properties shared.  Twenty feet of low, cobwebbed stone, broken harrows and unravelling rope was a portal to another world: ripe with cow-flop and hoarded corn; bales stretching to fifty-foot rafters, some with swing-ropes, some sparrows whistling through.  Other things rustled, unseen.

He stood with Andrew, feeding Ted and Edward.

‘They like it?’

He broke a disc of animal-feed, coarse and yellowy-brown as the urinal cake he chased down drumming tin.

‘Yeah,’ said Andrew.  A loose piece of straw itched in his hair.  The donkeys rested their chins on the fence, accepting offerings without question.  The boy reached out to touch, but drew back.

‘Here – like this.’

Andrew rubbed his palm over the donkey’s velvety, spiked muzzle, and the beast snorted with pleasure.  The boy touched the other donkey.  It felt like the shammy his father used to dry the car: thick and warm, studded with little nubbins.

‘Peculiar!’

‘You need to bring em something,’ Andrew said, turning away.  His grandmother was making sandwiches.  The boy lingered on but the donkeys soon lost interest and wandered away, so he went inside.

*

His mother was pounding flour in the kitchen.

‘I touched the donkeys!’

‘That’s nice, love.  Go on now.  It won’t be ready for a while.’

He took a book into the garden, where the Saturday before his father and the men had pulled down a great oak.  Its knobbly base stood up like a tangle of cane chairs.  He climbed up, settled into the crook of a branch.

He could see the donkeys when he turned the page.

*

Now and again, he and his sister stopped by the paddock.  Sometimes Ted and Edward cropped the bottom field, sometimes the top.  They ambled over for a look-see whenever anyone arrived.

‘It’s alright – you can touch em.’

His sister looked small, apprehensive, though Ted wasn’t that big and when you patted his side, it gave off the dust of ages.  ‘Andrew says you should bring them somethin.’

She pulled handfuls of grass, eyes glued on Ted.  He dropped his shaggy head over the wires.

‘Go on!’

The girl held some out.  Ted grasped the dry stalks with his brownish, peg-shaped teeth, began to grind.

'E’s smilin!’

She rubbed her palm over his nose, as the boy had told her.  A tiny, dimpled smile broke out.

*

At some point, house and village – its sloping playing-field and pub, small shop, rows of chestnuts lining the road – stopped being enough.  Things were happening, the boy understood –slamming doors, raised voices.  His sister in tears.  But what had all that to do with him?  He took his book to the playing-field, bombed his BMX through the ditches, rode the bus to school.

Now and again, the arguments propelled his sister into his world.

‘It’s alright,’ he said, though something told him that wasn’t true.  He made her stand outside while he raided the kitchen, beckoned from the mouth of the driveway.  They walked to the far end of the track, where Ted and Edward were mowing a patch of thistles.  Edward wandered over.

‘Better than grass, eh?’

He pulled a bag of carrots from his shirt.  Edward stuck his head between the wire and gummed the bag.

‘Oi, wait up!’

He handed over half a dozen knobbly carrots, strings still dangling, and took the same for himself.

‘You feed Edward, I’ll do Ted.’

‘Okay.’

Her voice was small, but there.  She rubbed a soggy sleeve across her nose, picked out a carrot.  Edward soon whiffled it down.  A cloud of dander blew into her eyes and she coughed, but managed to laugh.

Andrew would be proud.

*

It was quite successful, really: like the boy in the bubble in that song on the radio, he sealed himself off from everything.  It was not happening to him, he reasoned, but to them:  his sister, fingers perpetually stuffed in her mouth; mother weeping; father storming out and in.  The trials, new starts, departures took place behind a thick, bleary sheet of perspex.

There were a few real things, and he held fast to their solid, tactile shapes: the stiff, tacky rubber of the bike treads; the curve of a spine in his palm; the bitter cooking apples they fed the donkeys, that final time.

She took an apple from the string bag, held it out – bold, now, but shaking at other things.  Edward wrapped his gums around it, snapping the apple in two.  The boy called Ted from his contemplation of a thistle.

‘Here you go,’ he said.

The girl sniffed and rubbed the donkey’s nose.  Under her fingers, it bristled with small electric crackles.

‘Bye, Ted.  Bye Edward.’

They emptied the bag and trudged up the gravel lane, between moving vans and a knot of boiler-suited men.  A desultory wind came up, carrying the scent of dander and dust, old grass crushed under polished hooves.

He smells it still.

First published in To Say Nothing of the Dog: Flash Fiction (Cyberwit, 2023)

Next: The Hand of Glory