“I suppose men of guns always end in a bad way, and that’s how it was for him, only I didn’t know it then.”
It began with the dog.
John always said that it was a bad idea to get too close to anything that needed you, and I suppose when the dog arrived I had a choice, and I chose wrong, that’s all. I should have listened to him, but he was in prison by then, and I was alone and needed something that was just mine for once.
John was my dad’s name. He never liked me calling him Dad and didn’t call me son, not even when I was young and he was away in the desert making sure we were all safe and we’d only get to talk on the phone once a month. Him and Mam weren’t together then, but they hadn’t told anyone and certainly not me. People didn’t know until he came home and started living in the woods instead of in our house. Which is when Mam started to worry. At first, he just had a sleeping bag and the few tools he needed, and it could have been a hobby, a bit of fun. But later there was the caravan, and later still I moved in with him, and it wasn’t fun anymore.
I liked the caravan. In winter it smelled of mould and peat and oil from the heater, and in summer it smelled of sunlight and hot glass and wild garlic. We were next to the stream and after March the garlic choked the banks with white flowers so that the air was thick with it, sweet and heavy like nothing I’d smelled before. I didn’t know anything about garlic or burdock before I lived with him, couldn’t point to a nettle even. What I knew was streetlights and pavements and locked doors and no plants and no trees. There wasn’t any green on the estate. But in the woods, you learned quick, for no better reason than you had to. Sometimes it felt like a different world, away from the real things that happened, which is what John wanted, I think.
The caravan was small. It didn’t have carpet or furniture, but it had a narrow room with a bed in it and a fold-out cot in the front part, a stand-up kitchen but no electricity, a toilet but no plumbing. We did our business in the woods, and took water from the stream.
It would take me five long strides to reach the stream from the door of the caravan, and three for John. But once I swear I saw him with my own eyes jump clean out of the bedroom window, straight in, just to show off. Like a man leaping for his life from a fire, but smiling as he went, which is how I like to remember him.
I’d only ever known our house, of course, and the caravan wasn’t like the house, and it wasn’t clean. And when it was cold it was like sleeping in a sardine can that had been kept in a fridge overnight. One week it snowed so much the roof buckled with the weight, but I liked the noise the raindrops made on the tin sheet repair after. We were never told whose caravan it was, but we weren’t the first because John found lots of papers and things stuffed in bags under the kitchen sink that he said were written in Polish, and Polish was one of the languages he knew a bit of. ‘Itinerant workers,’ he’d say, nodding. ‘Pickers and diggers for Mr Derby. Good soldiers, too, the Poles,’ he told me. ‘Almost as good as Gurkhas.’
Like I say, I had no problems with the caravan, but people who weren’t there tell me now that that’s when it all started going wrong, with the caravan and the landowner called Mr Derby. And they say maybe if he’d only left us alone then things might not have ended like they did. But they don’t know that all the things that happened and all the things that will ever happen were put in place long before the council letters were pinned to the caravan door and the men in suits came to the woods. What happened was set out before I was born even, and before John and my mam met, and before the war, too. Before the beasts that lay quiet under that wood for thousands of years finally climbed up out of the soil. It was all set like a sleeping stone in the earth beneath our feet long before any of us were here, like the bones of bears and wolves and wild bulls that are there if you dig deep enough.
‘Things happen despite us not because of us,’ is what John would say, ‘and it’s pointless fighting it. There are better fights to be had,’ he’d tell me, squeezing my hand and looking at me real warm, like he thought just seeing his smile would let me know what he meant. Which it didn’t, not always.
He’d been arrested for burglary, but pleaded trespass, which meant he was banged up anyway, on account of his record. That was the story, but John always said ‘if the coppers wanted to, they could have you locked up for as long as they wanted, and that’s why you had to make sure you always had someone on your side with clout.’ Clout meaning power, meaning money, meaning back-up.
John knew villains, see. Men with flash cars who’d come and park up on the other side of the stream, and them and John would do business while I walked through the trees and tried not to listen too hard in case I heard something I didn’t like.
Some of them he got on with and some he didn’t, but he always told me ‘never turn down a chat with a bloke about a job, because you don’t know if it’ll bring you Gold And Stars.’ Gold And Stars were always big with him, cluttering his head, like they were real rather than just ideas – because of the things he’d heard out in that desert, I suppose, and the things he’d seen. Men turned to red dust in a gunflash and flames that spewed up from the black sand, straight like fountains. Up to the sky, black and orange and burning.
But I knew the difference.
When they took him down in the court in Leeds, he shouted over to me that he’d be gone no more than a month, and he was right. So I nodded, and I walked to the station with the rucksack the lawyer man had given me on the street, and I got the bus back to our place in the woods, and I never thought to doubt what he said, because John was always right when it came to the coppers and the courts. And I never looked in the rucksack, either, because I knew I’d find the gun there. And I didn’t want anything to do with that, because guns meant Pain And Blood And Death, and as far as I was concerned John had seen enough of that already for both of us. But there are some things you can’t avoid, no matter how hard you try, and I suppose men of guns always end in a bad way, and that’s how it was for him, only I didn’t know it then.