Almost didn't make the deadline for this week's Friday Flash. The idea came to me in a dream, as many of my best stories have, on Sunday night but I've struggled to make it work. Changing from a first person to third person narrative helped greatly; sometimes when writing more personal stories, the temptation is always to write first person. I've found that can make these kinds of stories a little too close for comfort though.
The truth is, I'm always more comfortable writing stories with an element of the incredible. Horror, sci-fi, magical realism... I rarely have any misgivings. When I leave those devices alone and write something straight instead, it's always harder to know whether it works.
Let me know what you think.
There was a man in the barn.
It was the beginning of October, just after Ben had gone back to Afghanistan, and Joe was up early because he couldn’t sleep. This was the pattern now, no matter how tired he was or what time he went to bed, he always woke around four, five at the latest, and nothing could make him go back to sleep. He’d get up and write for a while, then go for a walk just before dawn, which broke about seven, seven thirty this time of year. He always set out in the dark, but he took his maglite with him. Besides, he knew those paths blindfold. He’d been walking them all his life.
Usually he’d go up past White Reaps then follow the path alongside the catchwater to the reservoir. By the time he got up there the dark was usually breaking and on a good day the sky would be turning a hundred different shades with the dawn. It’d been a dry autumn after another wet summer. Dad purposely left the haymaking late this year. Ben came home for it, to help bring the bales in. Dad still refused to buy one of those new machines that made huge, round, plastic-wrapped bales you could only lift with a tractor fork. There was nothing wrong with that old Fergie square baler he’d been using since Joe and Ben were kids. Well, nothing except every summer it took him and Ben ever longer to get that old wreck working again, and most years it broke down midway through the first field so Ben had to crawl underneath with his shirt off and tie something together, or reach into the guts while the tines were still moving and twist something back into place. Watching him do that, Joe always worried Ben was going to lose a hand or something. You heard about that sort of thing all the time, but Ben laughed it off. He said if he could handle being mortared by the Taliban, he could handle a few whirling spikes and spinning pistons.
“If I’m gonna lose an arm, Joey, it won’t be on Dad’s farm.”
“You pipe down now, Benjamin Cartwright,” Dad would tell him if he heard that, “no son of mine’s gonna lose anything anywhere anyhow. My boys are indestructible – we all are now, haven’t I told you that before? I made a deal with the bloke upstairs when we lost your mother. You just remember that. Nothing’s gonna hurt my lads while I’m still drawing breath, and I plan on doing that for a good time to come. Long as I can still lift one of these bales in each hand… now crack on, I want these in the barn before dark.”
Joe didn’t know if Dad really believed they were indestructible, or if that was just what he told himself to stop going after god with that old shotgun he kept in the cupboard by the electric meter. Maybe Ben believed it, but for Ben it was probably true. He’d walked away from that car bomb in Kabul with barely a scratch and when his helicopter was shot down outside Sangin he survived not only that, but three days walking alone through the desert as well.
Of the three of them, Joe was the one who felt the least indestructible. There was no question about that. Even at 27, he was still the one who went up on the trailer and stacked while Dad and Ben threw the bales up. Sometimes he had to ask them to hold up, slow down a bit so he could get them all in place before they threw any more up. If you didn’t stack them right, they’d fall off the trailer as soon as you started back to the barn.
“There’s an art to stacking a trailer,” he told them, “it’s not about brute force.”
“Good job,” said Ben, which made Dad laugh. But not in a nasty way. It’s not like he was comparing them.
“I’m proud of both my boys for what they’ve achieved.” Dad often told him. “Benny as a soldier, Joey as a scholar. You went out and used your brains, son. Got yourself a university degree, and one day you’ll be a great writer with it. I’m looking forward to strolling into Waterstones one Saturday afternoon and taking my son’s novel down off the shelf. Now I know what you’re gonna say, it’s not an easy thing getting published…” Dad knew this because Joe told him every time the subject came up. Every time another year went by with nothing to show for his writing but a rent-free room in his mate Andy’s attic and too much time spent fabricating ever more inventive excuses for why he couldn’t get a job. “But if anyone can do it, it’s my boy the university graduate.” It was only a 2:2, but that didn’t matter to the old man. It really didn’t.
Joe thought about this a lot on his early morning walks. That was the best time to think, when most everybody else was asleep. It’s like how you could get a clearer radio signal when there were no competing stations, or how the internet was always faster when everyone wasn’t on there downloading porn. Joe thought about Ben, so many thousand miles away in a foreign country that might as well have been an alien planet. It looked like Tatooine in the pictures. He’d sit on the reservoir wall and watch the underwater colours the sky turned just before daybreak and waited while the light spread slowly across the valley, colouring it in and rubbing out the shadows. Finally he’d set off back down, taking the other path this time, the one that took him right through Dad’s land. This was still home, even though he didn’t live here anymore. Most mornings he’d call in for a coffee, ask if Dad needed any help with anything. The answer was always the same.
“I’ll be fine, lad. More important things for you to be doing, I’m sure. Write another thousand for me!”
Joe had told him once how that was his goal. A thousand words a day. If he managed that, eventually he’d write so many that some of them would have to be readable.
This particular day in October, the sky was completely clear as Joe crossed the fields towards the farm. The woods were turning brown but the early sunlight cast them gold. There was a thick dew on the grass, but still no frost. A hare the size of a small dog broke from the bulrushes and sprinted towards the lane. Joe jumped at the suddenness of it, his heart thumping. What an idiot!
He climbed the gate that kept the cows out of the yard and crossed towards the house. The hen hut was still locked, as was the night ark where the ducks slept. Dad obviously hadn’t been out yet. The bathroom light was on and Ben could see the shadow in the window as Dad leaned over the sink shaving. If Dad knew Joe was here, he’d start rushing round making me coffee, asking if he wanted toast or eggs, the usual fuss. Let him finish, Joe thought, and walked instead over to the barn. He wanted to smell the hay. There wasn’t anything like the smell of hay. Warm and comforting, better than fresh baked bread. It was easy to understand why cows liked it so much. Maybe they weren’t as dumb as they looked.
There were two entrances to the barn: the huge, arched doors Ben reversed the tractor trailer through in late summer and a smaller side door which led either to the barn itself or the cow shed in the back. Neither were locked, but it was much easier to use the smaller door. Getting the big doors open involved hauling down on a rusty chain that squealed worse than a stuck pig. That would have woken up half the hillside. The side door was just one click. Barely enough to rouse a field mouse. Certainly not enough to wake the man in the barn.
The barn had three sections. At the front was a huge stack where Dad piled the loose hay he collected from the fields once baling was done. There was always loads left over that the baler didn’t pick up. You could get a good two weeks’ feed out of that if you could be bothered raking. Beyond that the bales began, piled high and crisscrossed together to hold them in place. You never stacked bales one on top of another. You locked them together – second layer at right angles to the first. There was an art to it, an art Joe knew. He may not be able to root out insurrectionists in a Helmand mosque, but he knew how to stack bales in a barn so they wouldn’t fall over halfway through the winter. He wasn’t completely useless.
Finally there was the loft. Set back from the rest of the barn, it was built over the cow shed for extra storage. The bales in there were first in, last out. Sometimes there’d be some left over from the previous year and they’d have to move them down before fetching the new ones in. Up in the loft: that was where the man was sleeping. There were no windows and Joe hadn’t turned on the light, but he knew the man was there. He could hear him snoring.
His heart was in his chest again. He’d thought he was alone. For a second, he felt like he should back out quietly so as not to wake the man. Then it hit him, like angry indigestion, the man shouldn’t be there. This wasn’t his barn, it wasn’t his land. He had no right!
It had happened occasionally while Joe and Ben were growing up. You’d get tramps every now and then, stopping off and using Dad’s barn as a hotel for the night. Dad told of finding empty bottles or crisp packets, of eggs stolen from the hen hut, maybe even a pint missing from where the milkman left it down the lane. The only time Dad got really angry was when he found the cigarette butts. Carelessly dropped, they might have burnt down the whole barn, maybe taken the rest of the farm with it. Joe remembered one time when Ben was 15, maybe 16, he’d caught some bloke in a scarecrow coat sneaking in there with a fag in his hand late one night. Ben had gone ballistic. Grabbed that guy by the lapels, dragged him all the way down the lane, threw him out onto the road. Really tore a strip off him. Joe was watching through the bedroom window when Ben came back up to the house.
“Good lad,” said Dad, laying a rare hand on Ben’s shoulder.
But Joe wasn’t his brother. This bloke sleeping in the loft now, he might have a knife or anything. If Joe went up there… Dad didn’t even know he was here. If he got stabbed and this guy just left him for dead, he could be lying there weeks before Dad even found his body. There was no reason for Dad to come in here till he brought the cows in for winter. No reason to go up in the loft till all the bales had been cleared from down on the floor.
So Joe backed out of the barn and pulled the door shut behind him. Slammed it shut, much louder than was needed. If he was smart, the man in the barn would be gone by the time they got back. That’d be best for everybody.
Joe crossed the yard to the kitchen. The back door was open and the dogs were racing round the yard. Brando and Eastwood, those two crazy border collies Dad was still trying to train. Five years and he’d just about got them to come back when he whistled. ‘Sit’ and ‘heel’ were way beyond them. Soon as he saw Joe, Brando tore across the yard, almost knocked him back on his arse. Eastwood followed and Joe took a few moments to fuss them both. He could see Dad through the kitchen window, filling the kettle from the tap. Dad waved and mouthed “coffee?” and Joe nodded back, steeling himself for what was ahead. He didn’t know why he was suddenly so nervous, it wasn’t his fault there was a man in the barn.
Then Brando’s ears pricked up. Eastwood’s followed suit and both animals lost all interest in Joe, running, barking, towards the barn. Joe turned to see the side door opening and the man stepping out into the yard He was blinking in the sunlight.
He wore a shabby grey suit that had seen better days (days not spent sleeping in barns) and there was hay in his hair. He ran a hand up his chin, scratching three days’ stubble, noticed Joe and dropped his eyes to the ground. He mumbled something Joe didn’t hear because the dogs were still barking. They kept their distance though. All bark, no bite, those dogs. If the man had made a sudden move or a loud boo, they’d have been back in the kitchen, hiding under the table. But the man didn’t know that, so he kept his distance, edging away along the front of the barn. Away from the dogs. Away from Joe. Out of the corner of his eye Joe could see Dad crossing the kitchen to find out what all the noise was about. Joev realised it was now or never.
“Oy!” he shouted, stepping forward and pointing an aggressive finger. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Sorry, mate—“ The man started, but Joe wasn’t about to give him the chance.
“This is private property!” Louder, feistier. He knew Dad was watching now. “You can’t just—“
“Listen,” the man said, raising his palms, but still backing away. “I don’t want—“
“No, you listen to me.” Oh yeah, Joe was on one now. He was the man. “You are trespassing - on private property - and we are well within our rights… there’s a shotgun in that house, and we’d be more than justified—“
“Please, mate, I don’t want no trouble—“
“Then you’ve got ten seconds to get off this land or I am calling the police.”
“You don’t need to--”
“I am calling. The. Police.”
“Please, if you’ll just let me—“
“Ten - nine…” This was great. Joe felt so good right now. Better than in months.
“My wife, she—“
“Five – four...” Oh, yeah, skip those numbers. He’d seen that trick in a Bruce Willis movie. Bruce Willis didn’t take no shit, why should Joe?
“OK, OK, I’m going, I’m sorry—“
“Two – one…”
The man started running and the dogs went after him, all the way down the lane and out onto the road. Dad had to whistle them back so they didn’t get run over.
Joe was buzzing now. He was glowing. They could have dropped him into Afghanistan and he’d have sorted the whole Middle East problem by teatime. He really was indestructible.
“Well,” said Dad, as the dogs came slowly back. “I’m not sure you need any coffee.”
Then he went back in the house, and they didn’t say another word about it.
Two nights later, Dad’s barn burned to the ground. The old man tried to stop it spreading to the house, but by the time the fire brigade arrived that was pretty much gutted too. Joe was awake when it happened. Soon as he saw the lights from the fire engines go past the attic window, he knew… he knew exactly what had happened.
At least Dad was OK. They took him to hospital with smoke inhalation and Joe had to find someone to look after the dogs before catching the bus across town to visit him. Andy said they could stay in the kitchen, but Joe knew that wouldn’t last. Andy was allergic to dog hair.
He sat at the side of Dad’s bed and waited while the nurse gave him more oxygen to breathe from a mask. When finally she let him take it off, Dad shrugged and tried a smile.
“I spoke to Benny,” was the first thing he said. “He’s coming home for… he’s taking his early leave or summat. I told him he didn’t have to, but…”
He went quiet as the first tear dripped off Joe’s chin. Joe ran a hand up his face to try and stop them.
“Come on, lad. It’s all right. I’m all right, you’re all right, none of the animals were hurt… I told you we were indestructible!”
“It’s my fault, Dad. It’s all my fault.”
“Don’t be daft,” Dad replied. He sat forward and laid a rare hand on Joe’s shoulder. That’s when Joe really started crying.
