20. Jun, 2020

'Fire Blight'

There was no doubt that going out had seemed like a great idea.  It carried with it a delicious frisson of the illicit, like a breeze in your hair.  It was rank beneath, though, a weedy tangle of rebellion seeded by thistledown whispers, randomly growing because it could.  Dale and his friends were responsible young people.  They had a social conscience, supported Extinction Rebellion, bent the knee and argued in favour of the toppling of politically incorrect statues with a suitably iconoclastic fervour.  They did shopping for other people.  They lived at home anyway because, economically, they had to but by now it was becoming a stifling enforcement.  Why shouldn’t they go out?

“Come on, mate!” Alex had urged Dale over their mobiles.  “It’s all organised stuff.  Outdoors, away from anywhere.  Bring a guitar if you’ve got one and booze if you’ve got that.  It’s not like it’s a rave or anything.  Solstice and sandwiches.” 

He laughed at how tame and harmless it would be.  The boys had tutted alongside their parents at the recent gatherings which had put a wrecking ball through some local beauty spots.  ‘Idiots’, ‘Wicked and reckless’, they had all agreed.

“When is it, then?” Dale demurred.

“This afternoon.  It’s even in the daytime, see?”

“Hang on,” said Dale.  “I’ll ring you back in a minute.”

Outside his room, Dale could hear some clanking about on the landing.  Putting his head out, he saw his mother putting up the step ladder on a dust sheet she had spread out.  A can of paint and a brush were standing ready beside it.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“Sssh!” she hushed fiercely.  “Keep your voice down!  I’m going to paint that damp stain out on the ceiling where it rained in two years ago.  It’s doing my head in looking at it,”

“Dad’s going to do that, Mum,” he remonstrated warningly.

“Yes, but as we both know, your Dad’s got four time scales - this year, next year, some time and never.   We’re already at some time.  I’m not waiting for never.  He’s having a long lie in so I’m doing it while he’s asleep.   He’ll never notice when it’s done anyway.”

“Do you want me to help?” asked Dale in the kind of feeble tone which made it clear he didn’t want to.

“No!” his mother whispered back hotly.  “You needn’t bother!  There’s the living room still to do as well, though, don’t forget.”

The prospect that Alex had just dangled enticingly before him now seemed even brighter to Dale.  His mother would definitely try to involve him in doing that wallpapering later today because if his Dad came in to find that Dale had got started, he’d feel obliged to get on with it too.  The living room project had not yet been balked by the floating debris of stalled promises, which made even mentioning it somehow a criticism of personal shortcomings.  Many home improvements had foundered before in such stagnant waters. 

“I can’t today,” Dale whispered quickly.  “I’ve got deliveries on.”

This altered matters, he knew.  Dale was doing home deliveries of food packs, on a voluntary basis, from the local community centre, to people who were having to shelter completely in lockdown.  It was not the first time he had used the activity as a moveable feast, either because, although he wasn’t supposed to be meeting up with his friends, they sometimes all had done, in the guise of doing exercise together in the park, or, as today, to get out of doing something at home he didn’t want to help with.  His mother just nodded approvingly given that this was the case, as he had known she would, so he knew he wouldn’t be under any cloud of work avoiding selfishness there.  Besides, this going out would only be like an extension of meeting up in the park, he told himself.

Back in his room with the door shut, he rang Alex back.

“I’m in,” he said.  “I’m getting out of here now before Mum gets me to do her decorating.”

“Cool.” Alex laughed complicitly.  “Who needs that?  Let’s go get some beers and stuff to take up.  I’ll meet you at big Aldi.  Can you get the van from Wings?  Drive us up there?”

(The community centre boasted a ‘white van man’ vehicle of ancient pedigree, donated by a retired builder for transport needs). Dale considered it.  Nobody was really on the delivery rota until tomorrow because they were waiting on the wholesaler’s donation of dry goods again.

“I reckon I can blag it,” he said grandly.  “I’ll nip down now.  They won’t be doing a lot there today.”

Making his way past his mother, by now up the ladder painting, after silently mouthing  ‘see you laters’ to avoid rousing his Dad, Dale went to the old church building, where he let himself in.

Since the rooms were closed to their usual busy activities, he didn’t have to explain himself to anybody, picked up the keys of the van from the desk drawer they were kept in, got it from the yard at the back and drove out to go to the supermarket.  Alex was waiting and inside, on a small rollercoaster of excitement, they picked up beers, snacks and, on impulse, a disposable barbecue Dale spotted and some veggie burgers to cook on it.

“We can share them with more people if we buy veggie,” Alex said, making it seem like a nobly communal effort and so they added some corn on the cob on sticks as well.

“So who else is coming that we might know?” asked Dale.

“Us lot, the usual, then Emma and Kristin, some of their friends.  Ye-es, now you’re interested!”

Dale was.  He liked Kristin and if it weren’t for lockdown, by now their relationship would have progressed beyond lengthy half humorous mobile chats and more heated texting, he reckoned.  An opportunity to get together in person was not to be easily passed up on.

“O.K!” he said appreciatively, as they loaded up the van with drinks and foodstuffs beside Alex’s battered guitar, which he’d been holding when Dale arrived.  “Do you still play that thing?” Dale asked, looking doubtfully at it.

“As much as I ever did,” grinned Alex.  “I carry it about for posing purposes.”

“Right,” laughed Dale, slamming the dodgy back doors on the van shut again as best he could.

They drove up the roads into wooded hillsides and then up to the bare bones of the moors and the get together meeting place.  People sat about in a midgy sunshine -  drinking, talking, playing music either themselves or through phones and shared headphones -  no noise pollution encouraged by this crowd.  Dale and Kristin indulged in some smouldering smooching among the heathery rocks.  They had walked aside to where the countryside’s sounds resumed and listened to skylarks rising into the high, quiet blue air, watched swifts skimming over the grasses for insects and laughed at a sheep’s startled face, bounding past them with her fat, grown lambs as Dale and Kristin walked by hand in hand, ambling in their slow daze of attraction.  They forgot about joining in for the shared food and laughed to find they had missed it.  At last it was time to leave.  Dale, Alex and some of the others collected tins, bottles and discarded wrappers in the bin bags they had brought because they were not despoilers of places they had shared the space of.  Dale’s lips still tingled from Kristin’s kisses.  She had left with her own friends by now but they would talk again for hours later, he knew.

He dropped Alex off and returned the van to the community centre.

“Hello, Dale!” called a voice.  “Where’ve you been today, then?”   It was Debbie, matronly plump in her elasticated jeans, one of the project’s volunteer managers.

A momentary guilt passed through him.

“Oh, just doing a bit of stuff.  You know,” he answered vaguely.

“Good lad!” she smiled at him because upbeat praise was always the way at the community centre.  “See you later, then!”

She continued to go inside and Dale left to walk home.  His mother seemed to have got away with seizing the initiative as far as the landing ceiling was concerned.  No mention of it was made over their evening meal, anyway, nor, he was glad to find, of decorating the living room.  Dale was hoping that he and Kristin would be trying to meet up outside next, and often, for which he would like to have his time free.

He sat down with his parents as usual for a cup of tea after they had eaten, to watch the news together, which pottered on for some time in the background through their bits of conversation until it got to the local section.  At first, Dale didn’t pay much attention to an item about a moorland wildfire which had taken hold drastically in a conservation area over the last few hours, having got well established before its smoke was spotted and already spread widely underground, burning through peat with catastrophic consequences following the recent prolonged dry spells.

Firefighters were grim and a naturalist spokesperson was talking of devastation to rare nesting birds, who had only just begun returning to the restored habitat, now destroyed along with their young.  A disposable barbecue, which had not been properly put out, was thought to be the cause.

“It’s not StoneHenge, or Glastonbury, or a place for a mass picnic with all the risk of spreading Covid 19 that brings with it,” the naturalist was saying.  “This is an utter tragedy in an area which was thousands of years in the making and was just getting its right balance back.”

Dale’s ears were singing with shock and the sound of the skylarks he and Kristin had listened to earlier rang in his head too.  He and Alex had taken up the barbecue.  He, Dale, had been the one to take it from the shelf and suggest it.  This was all his fault!  He felt terrible.  No, surely this was somewhere else?  People like them couldn’t possibly have caused all this, could they?  They’d picked all their rubbish up, not like those raver people!  He stared at the television, scanning the scorched and smoking landscape. This just had to be happening somewhere else!  But it wasn’t.  He had leaned back on the very sign the presenter was standing by now, he and Kristin having stopped  there to kiss again.

‘Welcome to the National Park.  Cherish your countryside’, it said gladly.

“Whoever came here,” the presenter, pointing at it, was intoning, “did not cherish their countryside.  Instead, they’ve killed it.  Police will be doing their utmost to identify culprits and are currently talking to witnesses.”

In his mind’s eye, Dale saw the little workman’s van travelling so visibly on the near empty roads, its brightly recognisable slogan and logo painted on it, ‘Wing and a Prayer’ with an image of gilded angel wings unfolded alongside.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit Christian?” he randomly recalled Debbie demurring when the committee had agreed on it.

“No, it’s just a saying and a symbol really for us, isn’t it?  Anyway, this was a church once, don’t forget,” somebody else had said and so the slogan and the logo became the food campaign’s banner.

Debbie!  His heart sank.  Debbie, who had seen him returning the van.  His words to her seemed even more mendacious now, laying claim to doing good somewhere when he’d been up to no good at all.  If he got found out, he suddenly realised, he’d be arrested!  Then what?

“Are you all right, Dale?” his father asked curiously.  “I know how much you disapprove of people doing that kind of thing but you look like you’re about to blow a gasket!”  He laughed and glanced across at Dale’s mother.   “How did he ever get to be so right on?  I blame you for giving in to Linda McCartney sausages when he was at a formative age!”

Dale’s mother laughed back.  They were always accusing him of being primmer than a Sunday School.  Dale wished he could find the presence of mind to join in with the habitual teasing but he just couldn’t.

“Yeah, fine, Dad,” he said lamely.  “I’m off back upstairs for a bit.”

“All right, son,” said his Dad, seeing nothing out of the way about this normal turn of events in the evenings.

Dale returned to his bedroom, all thoughts of romantic conversation to come with Kristin vanished.  There was nothing for him to feel right on about now, was there, and it was only a matter of time before everyone else found that out too, wasn’t it?  His whole day, apart from the time with Kristin, had rested on white lies, or, as he admitted to himself now self castigatingly, real lies.  He spent a little while fretting resentfully about being made responsible for a terrible thing and then he thought  light had dawned for him.  He and Kristin had not partaken of the forbidden fruits, had they?  He had not lit the barbecue nor been responsible for tending it.  So it wasn’t his fault. Not his fault at all.  He rang Alex first and they agreed together to deny all knowledge of the barbecue kit if any proverbial chickens, vegetarian or otherwise, came home to roost.  Lighting an incense cone, he found the receipt for their purchases and burnt it alongside as if in some ritual recompense for the moor fire.  Then he rang Kristin and they were indignant together about the folly which was somebody else’s criminal carelessness, Dale admitting nothing of his own part in it.  He began to feel a whole lot better about himself.  Darkness had fallen briefly over the midsummer night.  He might stay up and watch the sunrise, he thought.  Do a bit of cleansing meditation, which he occasionally went in for, and in a superstitious way, he felt that this occasion called for it.  The doorbell rang below and he wondered who it was.

“Dale?”  he heard his father calling up the stairs for him a few minutes later, sounding uncharacteristically stern.  “It’s the police.  They’d like a word with you.”