The Flying Goat Read online

  The trap wasn’t there, and the strong brown little cob that went with it. The women weren’t there. More important still, there was no sign of Shako and the men. There was no sign of life except the mare and the washing on the grass. Although he lay with his heart pumping madly into the grass, it was all as he had expected it, as he hoped it would be. He took the signs of suspicion and fused them by the heat of momentary excitement into a conviction of Shako’s guilt.

  He waited for a long time, the sun hot on his back and the back of his neck, for something to happen. But almost nothing moved in the hollow below him except the mare taking limping steps along the brook-side, working her way into a shade, and a solitary kingfisher swooping up the brook and then sometime afterwards down again, a blue electric message sparking in and out of the overhanging leaves.

  It was almost half an hour later when he slipped quietly down the short grass of the slope between the stunted bushes of seedling hawthorn and the ledges of overhanging rock, warm as new eggs on the palm of his hand as he rested his weight on them. He went cautiously and, though his whole body was beating excitement, with that air of indifferent innocence he had used back in the farm-yard. Down in the camp he saw that the fire, almost out now, must have been lighted hours before. He put his hand on an iron-grey shirt of Shako’s lying on the ground in the sun. It was so dry that it seemed to lie stiffly perched on the tops of the buttercup stems. Then he saw something else. It startled him so much that he felt his head rock faintly in the sun.

  On the grass, among many new prints of horses’ hoofs, lay odd lumps of grey-green hen dung. He turned one over with his dust-yellow boots. It was fresh and soft. Then suddenly he thought of something else: feathers. He began to walk about, his eyes searching the grass, his excitement and the heat in the sheltered hollow making him almost sick. He had hardly moved a dozen yards when he heard a shout. ‘Hi! Hi’yup!’ It came from the far bank of the brook and it came with a shrill unexpectedness that made his heart go off like a trap.

  He stood very still, scared, waiting. He saw the elder branches on the bank of the brook stir and shake apart. He felt a second of intense fear, then another of intense relief.

  Coming up from the brook was young Shako: the boy of his own age, in man’s cap and long trousers braced up with binder string, eyes deep and bright as blackberries in the sun, coal-coloured hair hanging in bobtail curls in his neck.

  ‘Hi! What you doin’?’ He had a flat osier basket of watercresses in his hand.

  ‘Looking for you,’ Alexander said. ‘Thought there was nobody here.’

  ‘Lookin’ for me?’

  Alexander’s fear seemed to evaporate through his mouth, leaving his tongue queer and dry. He and young Shako knew each other. Young Shako had often been up at the farm; once they had tried fishing for young silver trout no bigger than teaspoons in the upper reaches of the stream. Shako had seen Snowy too.

  ‘Yes,’ Alexander said. ‘When’re you coming for a ride with the cob and me and Snowy? You reckoned you’d come this week.’

  ‘Won’t be to-day,’ young Shako said. ‘The cob ain’ here.’

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Alexander said. ‘Where’s everybody?’

  ‘Old Gal’s hawkin’ down in Ferrers. Dad and Charley and Plum gone over to Huntingdon.’

  ‘Long way.’

  ‘Ain’t nothing,’ young Shako said. ‘Jis skipped over about some ducks.’

  ‘Ducks?’

  ‘Selling some ducks or summat.’

  Young Shako sat down on the grass, Alexander with him, careless, as though he knew nothing and nothing had happened. Ducks? Ducks was funny. He lay on the grass, some inner part of himself alert and listening. Ducks was very funny.

  ‘You said we’d have a race,’ he said. ‘You on the cob and me on Snowy.’

  ‘Cob’d eat ’im.’

  ‘Who would? What would?’ Alexander said. ‘Snowy’s been a race-horse.’

  ‘Well, so’s the cob. We bought ’im from a jockey-fella. Out at Newmarket. Jockey fella named Adams. Best jockey in England. You heard on ’im ain’ y?’

  ‘Yes, but what’s that? Snowy’s a real race-horse. You can see it. Some hunters came by the other day and he nearly went mad. He can smell the difference in horses. Besides, we know he’s been a race-horse. Ask Maxie. He’s got his pedigree.’

  ‘Pedigree? What the blarming oojah?’ Young Shako said. ‘That’s nothing. You know what a pedigree is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s what he is. What he’s been.’

  ‘What the blarming oojah?’ Shako said. ‘It’s summat wrong with ’is legs. Any fool knows that. Pedigree – any fool knows it’s summat wrong wi’ his legs.’

  Alexander sat silent, almost defeated, then coming back again.

  ‘You’re frightened to race, that’s all. Make out the cob’s gone to Huntingdon because you daren’t race.’

  ‘Frit?’ Shako said. ‘Who’s frit? I’ll race y’ any day. Any time.’

  ‘All right. To-morrow,’ Alexander said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘See. I told you. Daren’t.’

  ‘What the blarming oojah! They ain’t goin’ be back from Huntingdon till Friday.’

  Alexander stared at the sky, indifferent.

  ‘What time did they go?’ he said.

  ‘Middle o’ the night sometime,’ young Shako said. ‘They were gone when I got up.’

  They lay for a little while longer on the grass, talking, young Shako trying to talk of big two-pound trout seen farther downstream, in the still golden hollows of the backwater where the mill had been, but the mind of Alexander could not concentrate and he had eyes for nothing except the tiniest of sand-coloured hen feathers clinging like extra petals to the edges of flowers and grass, suddenly visible because he could see them horizontally, a hen’s-eye view – the same pale creamy-brown feathers that he sometimes found stuck by blood to the eggs that he collected morning and evening from the orange-boxes in the hen-roost at the farm. When he saw them, realizing fully what they meant, he lost track of what Shako was saying altogether. He got to his feet and made some excuse about going back to the farm. Shako got to his feet too, saying, ‘Yis, I gotta meet the old woman and hawk this cress’, his deep black eyes careless and tired and Spaniard-like in the full sun, his voice calling Alexander back from the dozen paces he had taken across the field.

  ‘You wanna race Friday I’ll race you if they’re back. If they ain’t back I’ll race you Saturday.’

  ‘All right.’ In that second Alexander came to his senses. ‘I’ll come down and see when they are back,’ he said.

  He made the climb back up the slope, over the warm projecting rocks and up through the spinney and into the warm security of the breast-high grasses beyond it in a state of such excitement that he could not think or speak to himself. He could only beat his hands like drumsticks on his brown bare knees in a tattoo of triumph and delight.

  3

  That night he knew that his uncle Bishop and Maxie sat up in the farm-yard with loaded guns, Maxie in the little corn-hovel, his Uncle under the cart-shed, from somewhere about midnight to the first colour of daylight about three o’clock, waiting for Shako. In the small back bedroom where in autumn and winter the long brown-papered trays of apples and pears would be laid out under his bed and over every inch of the cold linoleum of the floor, so that there was a good excuse for never kneeling to say his prayers, he kept awake for a long time, listening for something to happen, yet hoping and really knowing it wouldn’t happen, suddenly falling asleep in a moment when as it were he wasn’t looking, and waking an hour too late to fetch Snowy from the field.

  Of what had happened down at the brook with young Shako he did not say a word all that day, Thursday, and all the next. He heard more talk of two-legged foxes, talked to Maxie himself of the way the men had sat up listening and waiting and hearing nothing but the sound of Snowy kicking the fences over the dead
quiet fields. He saw the constable come into the yard again, making a pretence of taking measurements, arguing, really whiling away, as Maxie said, the bleedin’ government’s time and doing nothing. He knew that his Uncle and Maxie sat up that night again, waiting for a Shako that he alone knew would not come, and he let it happen partly out of a queer impulse of secrecy and partly because of a fear that no one would ever believe his simple and exciting piece of detective fantasy.

  It was Friday afternoon when he rode Snowy down the track by the spinney and out across the buttercup field and down to the edge of the quarry. He sat bare-back, the only way he knew how to ride, and the warm sweat of a canter in the hot sun across the shadeless field broke out on his legs and seemed to glue him to the pony. The delight of being alone, in the heat and silence of a midsummer afternoon that seemed to grow more and more intense as the ripe grasses deepened about the pony’s legs like dusty wheat, was something he loved and could hardly bear. The may-blossom was over now, like cream soured and gone in the sun, and elderberry had taken its place, sweet-sour itself, the summery vanilla odour putting the whole sheltered hollow to sleep. So that as he halted Snowy and called down to the camp to young Shako, who was lying alone in the grass by the side of the hobbled little brown cob, his voice was like the sudden cracking of a cup in the stillness.

  ‘Ready to race?’

  ‘Eh?’

  Young Shako turned sharply and rolled to his feet like a black untidy puppy, blinking in the sun.

  ‘Now?’ he called back.

  ‘It’s Friday!’ Alexander said. ‘You said Friday.’

  ‘Right-o! Wait’ll I git the cob.’

  Young Shako began to untie the rope hobbling the cob’s fore-legs, but Alexander was no longer looking at him. The camp was deserted again except for the cob and the boy, but down under the caravan Alexander could see suddenly a white-washed crate, an empty hen-crate. It startled and excited him so much that he hardly realised that Young Shako was ready and already calling his name.

  ‘Hiyup! You go along the top and I’ll go along the bottom and meet you!’

  ‘Right-o!’

  Alexander turned the white pony and almost simultaneously young Shako scrambled belly-wise on the cob’s back and turned him in the same direction along the brookside. They rode along together, hoofs making no noise in the thick grass, the excitement of silence beating deeply in the boy’s breast and throat. It seemed to him too that Snowy was excited, sensing something. His head seemed exceptionally high up, splendid in the sun, with a sort of alert nobility, his beauty and strength flowing out to the boy, so that he felt outlandishly proud and strong himself.

  Gradually the quarry-face shallowed down until the land was entirely on one level. Alexander halted Snowy and waited for young Shako to come up to him. The land had begun to be broken up by sedge and to Alexander it looked as though the cob, struggling between the stiff rushes on ground bubbled by ant-hills, was ugly and ordinary and short-winded. Until that moment the boys had not spoken again, but now Shako said where were they going to race? Up on the top field above the marsh? And Alexander said ‘Yes, up in the top field’, and they rode the horses away from the brook together, skirting the marsh where even the high spears of reed were dead still in the windless afternoon, blades of dark green steel sharp in the sun above the torches of lemon iris and islands of emerald grass among the fly-freckled pools.

  ‘So they got back from Huntingdon?’ Alexander said.

  ‘Yeh! Got back. Got back late last night.’

  ‘Gone somewhere to-day?’

  ‘Only down to the market. Be back any time now.’

  ‘How far are we going to race?’

  ‘Far as you like.’

  ‘Make it from the fence over to the first sycamore, shall we?’ Alexander said.

  ‘Ain’t very far.’

  ‘All right. Make it from the fence over to the feed-trough. That’s a good way.’

  ‘All right,’ Shako said. ‘Anybody who falls off loses.’

  The sun beat down on them strongly as they turned up the field to meet it. Snowy lifted his head and Alexander could feel in him a sudden excited vibration of strength. His own heart was beating with such deep sickness that as they reached the fences and turned the horses he could not speak. He sat tense and silent, his senses cancelled out by the suspense of excitement. In this moment the world too was cancelled out except for the dazzling blaze of buttercups and the poised chalk statue of Snowy’s head and the murmur of grasshoppers breaking and carrying away the silence on tremulous and infinite waves of sound.

  Another second and young Shako counted three and lifted his hand and dropped it and Alexander did not know anything except that something amazing and unearthly happened to Snowy. He became something tearing its way off the golden rim of the earth. He felt him to be like a great white hare bouncing madly into space. He leaned forward and clung to his neck, frightened of falling or being thrown. The sycamore trees sailed past like balloons broken adrift and five seconds later he saw the two stone feed-troughs flash past him like boats torn from their moorings too.

  Snowy did not come to a standstill until they reached the hedge and the end of the field. He stood for a moment fretting and panting deeply. It had been like a burst of majestic fury. It filled Alexander with a pride and astonishment that momentarily took his speech away, so that as he turned and saw young Shako and the cob clumsily pulling up at the troughs he could not speak.

  He walked Snowy slowly back. His pride was one with the pony’s, deep, quiet, almost dignified. It sprang out of the pony’s heart. It stirred him to a few seconds of such love for the horse that he suddenly dismounted and seized his warm dribbling head in his hands.

  ‘You see, I told you,’ he said to Shako at last. ‘He’s been a race-horse.’

  ‘Wadn’t much,’ Shako said. The deep Spaniard eyes were prouder in defeat than Alexander’s were in triumph. ‘Cob was just tired after that long journey from Huntingdon. Bet y’ I’d race you to-morrow and win y’ easy. What y’ goin’ be up to now? Going home?’

  Alexander remembered how Old Shako and his brothers Plum and Charley must be back from market soon, perhaps now, already.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll come back a bit with you. Cool Snowy off and perhaps give him a drink.’

  ‘Don’t wanna give him no drink while he’s so ragin’ hot.’

  ‘No, I know that. I’ll just walk steady back with you. I want a drink myself.’

  They walked back down the field towards the stream, not saying much. Snowy was oily with sweat and the heat caught Alexander in the nape of the neck like a blow as they came into the sheltered ground beyond the quarry.

  It was at that moment he saw that old Shako and Plum and Charley were back, one of the women with them. He saw the flare of the woman’s yellow blouse and the dark beet-red skirt. The men were gaunt, hungry as hawks, shifty, with untranslatable darkness behind the friendliness of their eyes.

  ‘Young Bish!’ Old Shako said. He grinned with white eager teeth. ‘Thass nice pony you got. Fus’ time I see him.’

  ‘Nice pony,’ Shako’s brothers said.

  The three men came round the horse, laying long dark hands on the white flanks.

  ‘Nice pony.’ Old Shako looked at Snowy’s mouth, and Alexander felt proud that Snowy stood so still and lovably dignified.

  ‘Nice pony. On’y thing is he’s gettin’ old,’ Shako said. ‘Been about awhile.’

  ‘Nice pony though,’ Charley said.

  ‘Yis. Nice pony,’ Shako said. ‘You wanna look after him. Be gettin’ ’im pinched else. Nice pony like that.’

  The dark hands were smoothed on the white flanks again, and it seemed suddenly to Alexander that they might be hands of possession. His fears were suddenly heightened by something Shako said. ‘Knew a man once, Cakey Smith, he had a white horse and got it pinched. Somebody painted it black. Right, aint’ it, Charley?’

  ‘Right,’ Charley said.

 
Alexander did not speak. He knew that they were kidding him. He saw sparks of lying winks flash out of Shako’s eyes, but he was suddenly frightened. He got hold of Snowy’s bridle and prepared to lead him away and all at once the woman’s voice came sing-songing from the caravan:

  ‘Oh! the boy’s lucky. Got a lucky face all right. Got a lucky face. Nobody’ll pinch nothing from him. A lucky nice face he’s got. Lucky. He’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well, so long,’ Alexander said.

  ‘So long,’ young Shako said. ‘Race y’ to-morrow if y’ want.’

  Suddenly Alexander’s wits came back. He remembered why he was here, what it was all about. He remembered what his wild plan had been.

  ‘I can’t come to-morrow,’ he said. ‘Not Saturday.’ He felt new sweat break and flush his face as he told the lie. ‘We’re going out. All of us. Over to Aunt Tilda’s for the night. Going to-morrow afternoon and not coming back till Sunday.’

  ‘Lucky boy,’ the woman said. ‘Oh! You’re a lucky boy.’

  He walked away with her voice following him calling him lucky, and feeling the sombre eyes of the men swivelling after him. Once up the slope and beyond the spinney he could not walk fast enough. He stopped Snowy by a fence and got on his back. He rode up the track under a deep impulse of excitement and an imagination flared by the behaviour of Snowy and the gipsies and all he had heard.

  He rode into the farmyard to put up the basking hens in a scared squawking clutter of brown and white wings. He leapt off the horse and felt the terrific excitement of a kind of heroism as he ran into the house, knowing that the time had come when he could keep things to himself no longer, knowing that he had to tell somebody now.

  4

  The following night, Saturday, Alexander lay in the little iron bedstead in the apple bedroom with his trousers on and his boots in readiness under the bed. ‘No!’ Aunt Bishop had said, ‘they ain’t goin’ to sit up for no fox and no nothing else, so there! And even if they was you’d get to bed and get your sleep just the same. So don’t whittle your belly about that!’