Picking at the Knot , livre ebook

PICKING AT THE KNOT









Sarah Hampton
















2QT Limited (Publishing)
First eBook edition published 2016 by

2QT Limited (Publishing)
Settle
North Yorkshire
BD24 9RH
United Kingdom


Copyright © Sarah Hampton 2016
The right of Sarah Hampton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988


All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that no part of this book is to be reproduced, in any shape or form. Or by way of trade, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser, without prior permission of the copyright holder.

Picking at the Knot is a work of fiction and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental

Cover Design: Hilary Pitt
Cover images: shutterstock.com

A paperback edition for this book is available
ISBN 978-1-910077-99-3

ePub ISBN 978-1-912014-58-3




I have longed to move away
From the hissing of the spent lie
And the old terrors’ continual cry
Growing more terrible as the day
Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
I have longed to move away
From the repetition of salutes,
For there are ghosts in the air
And ghostly echoes on paper,
And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the night air, leave me half-blind.
Neither by night’s ancient fear,
The parting of hat from hair,
Pursed lips at the receiver,
Shall I fall to death’s feather?
By these I would not wish to die,
Half convention and half lie.

Dylan Thomas – 1914‒1953


Cha pter 1
He lay spread-eagled. His left hand felt the unforgiving hardness of the concrete and he heard again his father’s voice shout, ‘You’ve been bloody useless from the day you were born.’
The pain had not been immediate. He lay on his back, the morning sky a wash of watery greys fusing into one another, threatening black to delicate silver, the morning pink of the sun already gone. Now its low yellow laser shaft was penetrating his eyes. He did not want to close them and curtain the beauty. He tried to move his head but it would not obey him.
An aircraft’s white vapour trail dissected the sun’s ray. He had never been in an aeroplane, never witnessed the other side. Never seen beyond the clouds, seen the beauty of nothingness, other than in his imagination.
He tried to move his right hand and felt the curled, frozen crispness of a leaf beneath it. He could see its beauty in his head, shell-shaped, silver cloaked in the night’s late spring frost.
Stillness engulfed him. Far away he heard the persistent get-out-of-my-way, get-out-of-my-way wail of an ambulance. His body was lifted, a kindly word was spoken, the prick of a needle.
An authoritarian voice, not his dead father’s: ‘Middle-aged male, multiple fractures, suspected spinal damage. Fell through a barn roof, answers to Matt.’ Then welcome oblivion, drifting back to a softer landing.
On his back in the newly cut hayfield, the breath knocked out of him, the familiar sweetness of the new-mown meadow hay in his nostrils. Beneath his small outstretched hand he felt a clover head which had escaped the cutter. Waiting for the bees to suck its nectar as he had been shown to do by his mother, recalling that minute sweetness between his lips.
On that day the sky was bright blue and cloudless, the sun blinding in its midday supremacy. He had been hanging on to the torn pocket of his father’s coat, the only security on offer. On the other side of father’s body, the warm pink hand of his three-year-old sister Carla, two years his junior, was being squeezed tightly. Father was looking down at her, smiling, chatting.
Something dislodged his grasp; he saw again his father’s elbow move forward then change direction with certainty and speed.
He got to his feet, panting, and fell in behind, frightened to go too close. He thought of returning to the house to seek solace from his mother but indoors the farmhouse was cold and dark; outside the sun gave him a warmth and comfort and he wanted to see the new-born calf. That was the reason they were crossing the field where his favourite cow had given birth to a bull calf.
Had his birth given his father any pleasure? He wished he could remember the day he was born. Were toasts drunk to a first-born son? Was there pride in his father’s eyes, someone to carry on the farm? But somehow it had gone wrong; he had become a disappointment but he didn’t know why.
No one in the family had been ready for him. By the time he understood the sly whisperings, shotgun marriage, wrong side of the blanket, he had become the product of resentment. Not from his mother, who was even-handed when dealing with him and his sister, who put herself out to protect him and by that act incurred her husband’s wrath.
‘Turning him into a bloody namby-pamby.’
Time hushed the whisperings but the scar they left had deepened. He had tried to ignore the buried rejection but it rose to the surface from time to time and enveloped him.
At Christmas time, when other families were jolly and he still had hope on his side, his mother had asked, ‘What would you like Santa Claus to bring you?’
‘A little paint box and a brush.’
His father heard and shouted, ‘Only pooftas want paint boxes.’
His sister’s request for a Barbie doll with its sickly-pink lifestyle had been granted. He had not understood, for things not understood are more easily accepted.
As the years passed he watched his sister’s contrived social climb. There she was, her picture in the paper: local woman gives her all for charity. That seeking after fame was encouraged by her being entered in a beauty competition at the local agricultural show by their father. At the age of six, Carla was Miss Dairy Queen, 1962.
Lying between the unfamiliar crispness of newly laundered white sheets, Matt wondered who had found him and reported the accident; he rarely had visitors and the postman infrequently left mail in the tin box at the bottom of the lane. Perhaps one of Matt’s neighbours had a drone; he had heard about such things on TV.
He had lain in clean white sheets once before on his honeymoon in an unfamiliar hotel, because that was what was expected of him. But on the return to the farm, reality had taken control once more and his wife had left. He wondered: if she heard that there had been an accident, would she come? Once upon a time they had loved; people said he had driven her away. They had married too young but he hadn’t felt that. He had been overwhelmed when that gentle soul said yes and then left within six months.
Had he been too rough with her, subjecting her innocence to farmhouse ways? But he remembered revering her butterfly-body, a wisp of soft deliciousness beneath his rough, gnarled hands grown large through necessity and evolution to become what was required of them. His physical longing and his strength were held back by respect for her.
When she left him, he should have left, gone to London, been a street artist. He had heard there was some guy called Banksy down there who painted on walls unseen in the night, slept rough, away from censure and ridicule, watching anonymously in the shadows as his work was acclaimed and gave pleasure to people. Matt would have enjoyed that and escaped the further ridicule of his father’s remarks: ‘Couldn’t even hold onto a woman.’
Instead, to try and prove himself in some way, Matt had hastily remarried ‒ and then he had left her.
He stayed on at the farm out of loyalty and duty to support his mother and help his father, for he had been taught nothing else. His mother’s death certificate said ‘pulmonary embolism’ but he knew she had died of a broken heart.
He lay between clean white sheets, smelling alien chemical smells in conflict with nature, manufactured to keep it at bay. His mother had loved the honest pungent smell of manure being spread on the crisp frozen earth, the muck spreader flinging its contents to replenish and enrich the soil. ‘Nature’s confetti,’ she called it. Now there were complaints from second-home owners and holidaymakers who didn’t like the smell.
Matt lay immobile, confused. A kind smiling face asked him how he was feeling then turned to a group of white-coated, eager young people with clipboards. They were being asked questions about him. He would have liked to join in, help them out, but that didn’t seem to be part of what was expected of him so he lay there listening.
‘X-rays reveal multiple old fractures behind the current ones, set by unqualified hands. The bones have strengthened themselves, readjusted without medical intervention to form strong misshapen joints.’
As the doctors and students left the ward, the bedside TVs were switched on again – patients trying to catch up with the real world which they had left outside. An obese middle-aged man in the bed opposite asked if anyone had seen last night’s episode of EastEnders ; he had missed it whilst he was having his stomach bypass operation. His TV flickered for a moment on the wrong channel; there was a glimpse of skeletal Somalian children, runny noses and eyes covered with flies, their ballooning bellies comp