Flat of the Land

Welcome to Stickford, Lincolnshire. You can find us by driving approximately ten miles north from Boston – our nearest ‘proper’ town – upon a road as unwaveringly straight and unforgiving as a Quaker. There are no corners in this part of the world and even if there were, it’s unlikely that you would find success around any of them. Our road heads humourlessly for the far horizon, a horizontal demarcation between cabbages and sky, uninterrupted by trees or hedgerows or copses or dells or nooks or dips or hills.

Just the cabbages; and the smell of them.
Companion by it’s side and lying in wait, runs an endless ‘Drain’, a Venus Flytrap for the booze befuddled farmhand, swatting at the windscreen of his Morris Minor as fog and dark descend.
Splish!
You see it a mile off, The Red Lion. The casual traveller, bowling like a tumbleweed up the road towards it will find me in here. No more spangly jacket, but at least I’m half way to pissed. Every one round here knows me, I’m the one who doesn’t fit in.
Slightly further up the road there’s a petrol station and on the right, a big dilapidated house. These three buildings, so startlingly grouped together, comprise Stickford, as comparatively exciting to the surrounding sea of cabbage as is Las Vegas to the Nevada desert.
The house is my house. So remote is it’s location that the RAF target it, screaming out of Coningsby eighteen miles away and ‘dive-bombing’ us moments later. To be out in the courtyard when the fighters come in low and hurtle across, too fast to see and too loud to hear, is to experience insanity. The world cracks open like an egg.

Pat and her mother Dorothy now live in armchairs, wearing sleeping bags. Only their noses show, and knuckles, clutching books. Pat is reading ‘Self Sufficiency’ by John Seymour, Dorothy ‘Carrie’ by Stephen King.
“Did you know Mum”, says Pat, by way of a peace offering, “that veal calves are kept in the dark so their meat turns white when you cook it?”
“Hmmm?”
“Or that pigs are bunged in farrowing crates to suckle their litter?”
It’s so cold, her words come in plumes, steaming the air.
“Dreadful”, replies Dorothy somewhat automatically.
“Just listen how the factory farmers kill chickens and turkeys.”
Dorothy dutifully sets down her book. She’s on the last few pages. After a moment of mutual glaring, Pat continues.
“They’re hung by one leg on a conveyor belt that takes them through to the stunner. But they’re swinging and every tenth or twelfth one gets missed! So they go through to the throat slitter and have to watch their own death. The really unlucky ones miss the stunner and the slitter and go through to the next bit fully conscious – being dipped in boiling water and plucked in mechanical plucking machines.”
Dorothy is riveted despite herself – this is better than Carrie.
“Shocking!”
“That’s why we’ve opted out. That’s why we’re rearing our own.”
“Yes,” muses Dorothy, mistress of the pregnant pause… “How does Hereward feel about killing his own meat?”
“He’ll be fine.”
“I mean, it’s not like playing the guitar.”

Outside all colour fades like hope from the face of the day. Light wanes into waxing darkness. Snow fields slide away, wan listless ghosts, yesterday’s already. My two North London sons shiver up a tree, trapped by geese. Turkeys, ducks and hens mill about crapping, waiting for me to get home from the pub and strangle one of them. They don’t know which yet and neither do I, but one of them.
Under the bruised sky I set off a kerfuffle of activity in the chicken run. I’d been leading up to this for weeks, months, years.
My first murder.
I moved into the enclosure and lunged about wildly, setting off a squabble of hen gossip as they evaded my clutches.
“Grab one by the foot!” called Pat from the open bedroom window, before ducking down to resume her cringe position beneath the parapet.
I feinted left and grabbed right. Gotcha! Sophia LeHen, can’t do that one. Playing God, I let her go and went for another instead, pouncing upon it’s scaly ankle just above the three nailed foot with the lethal fourth at the back, hauling it upside down high into the air above feather and din.
“Not that one, that’s Moby Duck!”
I set it down, bestowing the gift of life. It scorched off scandalised, to gabble with the rabble.
“Did you see what the bastard tried to do?”
“Oo, I say!”
“I’ve never liked him!”
They’d have found more dignity on a factory farm. I grabbed a third, Gregory Peck, and strode out of the arena like the winner of the Victor Ludorum, my inverted victim now curiously becalmed, as if coming to terms with the dreadful card that fate had dealt: the Grim Reaper.
I stalked sternly across the gravel toward the sweeping brush that leant like a layabout against the wall. Holding Gregory Peck high in the left hand, I grabbed the sweeping brush with my right and smashed it against the wall. The wood splintered and the head came away; perfect practice for the murder I was about to commit. Now I had just a long sweeping brush handle in my right hand and a philosophical chicken in my left. At that second the children charged round the corner and pulled up dead. Jody broke ranks first, running into the house and not stopping until he hit the attic, where he hid under the bed.

I found myself involuntarily looking round, sharing the moment as if it were my last moment too. The patchy gravel, puddles floating soiled straw, gunmetal March sky, phone ringing…..
I removed my foot from under the raised end and stamped down hard on the pole. With both hands I wrenched skywards. It’s neck elongated, stretched and stretched. It’s two wings beat a frantic tattoo against my legs. It refused to be killed, though I pulled and pulled.
Pat was calling.
Suddenly from nowhere, a mighty monstrous noise blackened the air, unhinging my mind, all orientation gone, beyond loud, ripping open the skies. For one dislocated moment I thought it was I who was dying. Then the two Bombers were gone, twisting away towards Mablethorpe and the sea.

“H!”
What the hell was she yelling about? Did she think I’d killed Moby Duck? I looked down at the hands that gripped a headless, twitching torso.
“Robert on the phone!”
Gregory Peck’s unblinking face lay upon the ground.
“H!”
It’s dangling miserable neck dripped like a loose hose, turning my trousers crimson.
“H!”
For fuck’s sake.
“No!” I screamed, “it’s not Moby Duck!”
“No!” she yelled, “it’s Moby Dick!”
“What?”
“Robert Longden on the phone!”
“What does he want?”
“He’s got a Musical for you in London, Moby Dick!”
I dropped the body down beside the dumb head on the ground and I ran.