The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (2 page)

Danny had three guitars in his stone barn: two acoustics and a Les Paul. He’d sold his classic Strat last Christmas. Broke his heart, but they needed a new stove, and Greta had gone without too long. And Mike Oldfield was long gone now, and Danny was left sitting in his stone barn, riffing into the night and counting all them lost opportunities to get out of farming for ever.

‘No music, no,’ Jeremy said. ‘They was prob’ly laying low the first night.’

‘You reckon?’

In Danny’s experience, laying low wasn’t what they did.

‘It’s where the ole crow was hovering,’ Jeremy said. ‘Direc’ly over that van.’

Half-past six this morning, when the boy had phoned him.

‘Hippies,’ he’d said.

Not
Danny’s favourite word. There hadn’t been any hippies for over thirty years, but folks in this area loved to hang on to the obsolete. And it was what they’d always called Danny himself.
Danny Thomas? Bloody hippy. We all knows what he grows in Bryncot Dingle. If his ole man was alive it’d kill him dead
.

Danny had turned off the toaster, lowered the volume on Wishbone Ash and sought some clarification. To some of the old farmers, a hippy was anybody not wearing a tweed cap, wellies and green waterproof trousers.

‘Ole van,’ Jeremy said, ‘with little windows at the top. And a minibus, with one of them funny stars painted on the side.’

‘Pentagram?’

‘Sort of thing.’

‘Just the two vehicles?’

‘Far’s I can see. Could be more in the trees.’

‘You en’t been down to check?’

Jeremy had said nothing. He wouldn’t have gone near, not even after dark when he was known to move around among the sheep and the cattle looking like a poacher, but in fact a guardian. Jeremy never lost a lamb to the fox; it was like he and the fox had come to an agreement.

Greta had come into the kitchen then, flip-flopping across the stained lino. Had on the old pink dressing gown, and there was purple under her eyes, and Danny thought about the stove her’d never asked for and how it wasn’t enough.

He sighed and waited on the phone, until Jeremy coughed and said, real tentative, ‘Only, I thought as how you might... you know?’

‘Aye, I know,’ Danny said.

It had been flattering at one time. When the New Age travellers used to turn up in force, back in the eighties and nineties, the local farmers had felt threatened by the sheer numbers, and it took the police a long time to get the necessary court orders to move them on. Danny had come into his own, then – a farmer who looked like a traveller and was into their music and understood their ways. One summer night, he’d taken his Les Paul and his littlest generator and the Crate mini-amp up to this travellers’ camp by Forest Inn and hung out there jamming till dawn with a bloke called Judas, from Nuneaton. Biggest bloody audience Danny ever had. He’d donated a drum of diesel for the buses and off they’d all trundled next day, no bother.

The farmers were well pleased, even Sebbie Dacre, bigtime magistrate, who’d been about to have the invaders
dealt with
. Might be a raggedy-haired druggy, Danny Thomas, but he had his priorities right when it come down to it: Danny the negotiator, Danny the diplomat.
The hippy-whisperer
, some bugger said one night in the Eagle in New Radnor. Not imagining for one moment that when Danny Thomas was up there jamming with the travellers, he’d been screaming inside,
Take me with you! Please! Get me out of yere!

And things wasn’t all that bad, then. Nowadays, agriculture was a sick joke, gasping on the life-support of EC grants. Danny wasn’t hardly replacing stock, in the hope that something would come up. Prices were laughable, and he wasn’t even looking forward to the haymaking, which seemed pointless. He was letting the docks grow, and the thistles. He’d even started doing the National bloody Lottery, and that was
totally
despicable.

‘All right, give me quarter of an hour, boy.’ Danny turned to his wife. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Got travellers in his bottom field.’

‘You makes it sound like a disease,’ Gret said.

Danny smiled and went off to find his classic King Crimson T-shirt.

The problem was not that Jeremy was scared, just that he was plain shy and avoided the company of other men who were cynical about farming and treated their animals like a crop. Never had nothing to do with his neighbour, Sebbie Dacre, gentleman farmer and Master of the Middle Marches Hunt. Even after his mam left the farm, Jeremy ignored the pubs, and the livestock markets when he could. Everybody thought he was coming out of it when he hooked up with Mary Morson – nice-looking girl, solid farming family. Her and Jeremy, they’d go out together, into Kington, and they had the engagement ring from the jeweller’s there – Mary flashing it around, Jeremy proud as a peacock, if peacocks wore work shirts and baggy jeans.

The van was below them now, about seventy yards away, and Danny could see most of it – light blue, with bits of dark blue showing through on the roof. Hard to say what make it was – bit bigger than a Transit, sure to be. And quite old, so that would likely rule out foreign tourists who didn’t know no better than to camp on somebody’s ground. Foreign tourists had classy new camper vans and Winnebagos.

Jeremy was looking tense already, hunched up.

‘Tell you what,’ Danny said. ‘Why don’t I go down there, talk to the buggers on my own?’

It made sense. Jeremy looked grateful and his shoulders relaxed. Flag the dog, sensing a release of tension, lay down in the grass, panting, and Danny went down there on his own, into the dip where the bank was eroded. The stream at the bottom was almost dried up. The blossomy hedge hid the bypass, though not Stanner Rocks, and Danny could still see the faces on the rocks, and the dead giant. Way back, when he was doing acid, he’d once watched the giant’s head rotting into green slime. Jesus Christ, never again.

‘Hello there!’ Danny shouted.

Now he was close up, he could tell this wasn’t travellers in the New Age sense. The van might be old and have windows punched in the sides, but it was tidy, clean and looked-after, with nothing painted on it – no slogans, no pentagrams – and the windows had proper blinds. And it was the only vehicle here. Where was the minibus, then?

Danny stepped over a bunch of elder branches, neatly sawn and stacked and left to rot, on account of Jeremy never burned elder, which was the Devil’s wood and would bring you no luck.

‘Anybody about?’

He walked over to the van and peered inside the cab, remembering how, on his own farm one time, he’d found this car – posh car, BMW – tucked up against a field gate, with the engine running and a length of hose from the exhaust jammed in the window, and a man in a black suit in there, all pink-faced and well dead.

A wood pigeon came blundering out of the hedge, making as much racket as a bunch of yobs with baseball bats. Danny spun round, and saw that they were above him. Both of them.

A woman and a girl. They were standing on the bank, in full sun, and Danny Thomas could see them clearly, and they weren’t exactly what he’d been expecting.

‘How’re you?’ he said mildly. Was he a bit disappointed because they were so ordinary-looking, both in light-coloured tops and jeans and trainers? Because they wasn’t wild-haired creatures with tattoos and chains and rings in their lips?

‘Oh hell.’ The woman scrambled down. ‘I suppose we’re trespassing.’

Danny shrugged.

‘It was late,’ the woman said, ‘and we were exhausted. I’m sorry.’

Danny said, ‘Where’d the other one go?’

The woman blinked, shook out her dark brown hair. The girl came down and joined her, sticking close like Flag, the sheepdog, had with Jeremy. The girl looked about fourteen.

‘Minibus?’ Danny said. ‘Pentagram on the side?’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ The woman had an English accent. ‘They’ve gone. They left early. What happened, we met them last night – a girl and two guys. We both pulled into this garage forecourt, only it was closed, and we were nearly out of fuel and it was getting dark and I’m like, Oh Christ, what are we going to do if they’re
all
closed? I mean, obviously I don’t know this area too well, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to stop for the night. Then this girl in the bus says, “Oh, we’ve been round here loads of times, we can show you a good campsite.” And that’s how we...’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark and I— We didn’t light a fire or anything. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Is this your farm? Can I pay you?’

Danny became aware of Jeremy Berrows up on the bank.

Danny said. ‘It’s his farm, it is.’

‘Oh.’

He watched the woman approaching Jeremy. She was very thin and her bare arms were tanned. She was real sexy, in fact, in a more
managed
way, like a rock chick of the old school.

‘Hi, I’m, er... I’m Nat,’ she said. ‘Natalie. That’s Clancy.’

The girl nodded and said nothing.

Jeremy didn’t move at all, but he wasn’t still either. He was so much a part of this land that he seemed suspended in the air currents, and his sparse, fluffy hair was dusted by the sun. When the woman moved towards Jeremy, leaving the girl by the van, Danny would swear he saw a hell of a shiver go through the boy, as if there was a sudden stiff breeze, come out of nowhere, that no one else could feel.

Danny felt an apprehension.

For over a week, the blue van stayed in the bottom field.

Then it wasn’t there any more.

About a month after this, Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer and gossipy bastard from Hundred House, told Danny Thomas that he’d seen a blue van parked up in Jeremy Berrows’s yard, hidden behind the old dairy. Like it was
meant
to be hidden.

By September, people were starting to talk.

In October, Danny saw Jeremy Berrows one lunchtime in the Eagle at New Radnor, sitting at a table in the shadows with the woman with dark brown hair. Jeremy nodded and said, ‘How’re you?’ in a nervous kind of voice, and Danny didn’t push it. The woman smiled at Danny, and it was a nice smile, no question, and she was a lovely-looking woman, no question about that either, but her eyes were watchful. Danny supposed he could understand that, the way people were talking.

Next thing he heard about the van was that it had been sold – bit of irony here – to the naturalists working up at Stanner, to use as a mobile site HQ and for overnight accommodation. Serious burning of boats here, in Danny’s view. Then he hears the woman’s gone to work for the latest London fantasists to take over the ruinous Stanner Hall Hotel. Manager, no less.

A few days later, Greta said, when they were watching telly, during the adverts, ‘Rhoda Morson – you know, Mary’s mother? Well, I was talking to her, in the paper shop, see, and her says, “Oh, he’s just doing it to make Mary jealous.” ’

‘You what?’

‘
Her
. Well, Rhoda Morson was mad as hell, sure t’ be, when Mary blew it with Jeremy and lost the farm. Getting his own back now, that’s what she reckons. Rubbing it in.’

‘That’s what her reckons, is it?’ Danny said.
Lost the farm
. Bloody hell, it was all they ever thought about – bringing another bloody farm into the family. Where was love in the equation, or was that a sixties thing?

Greta looked at him, thoughtful. ‘You could find out.’

‘Eh?’

‘How permanent it is.’

‘Why’d I wanner do that? En’t my affair.’

‘Ah, but
is
it?’ Greta said. ‘Is it just
an affair
? Or has that tart got her big feet firmly under the table? The girl’s going to school over at Moorfield now, ’cording to Lynne in the hairdresser’s. Now
that’
s got the ring of permanent about it, isn’t it?’

Danny yawned and watched a car commercial he liked because it had a soundtrack of ‘Travellin’ in Style’ by Free. He’d never had an actual car, only second-hand trucks. He didn’t mention to Greta about the van being sold; if she hadn’t heard, he wasn’t going to give her more gossip to spread across the valley.

‘You knows Jeremy Berrows better than most,’ she said. ‘You could find out.’

‘I prob’ly could, Gret,’ Danny said. ‘If I gave a shit.’

And the matter was never raised again, because that was the night of the terrible fire that wrecked Gomer Parry’s plant-hire depot down the valley, killing Gomer’s nephew, Fat Nev. Bit of a shock for everybody in Radnor Valley, that was, and Danny spent a lot of time helping poor old Gomer salvage what could be salvaged and restore what could be restored. Rebuilding the perimeter fence to keep out the scavengers and dealing with the particular area of the site that he realized Gomer couldn’t bear to go near.

And out of the blackened ruins of Gomer’s business came the glimmering of a new future for Danny. It wasn’t, admittedly, the career in music he’d always dreamed of, but it would mean whole days out of the valley. New places, new people. And he was a good ole boy, Gomer Parry.

For a while, Danny Thomas was so excited that, like the great David Crosby, he almost cut his hair.

He never saw much of Jeremy Berrows again until the winter, when the trees were all rusty and the skulls of Stanner Rocks gleamed with damp like cold sweat, and the traditional stability of the border country was very much called into question.