A Nice Place to Die Read Online Free PDF

leaving him behind. He wanted to have money in his pocket and know the feeling of simply spending it for fun. For him and his family, spending money was a painful process of juggling priorities and doing without. They spent on necessities, not for pleasure; just using money was a source of guilt.
    Most of his life Mark hadn’t questioned that he would work on the farm with his father and then take it over when his parents retired. Dad and Mum would move out of the farmhouse and live in a cottage nearby when Mark married and started a family of his own. They all took this process as preordained.
    But that was then, Mark thought. It was the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 which started it. Dad and Mum had kept the horrific details from their eleven-year-old son, but they could not hide what was happening on the farm itself.
    The precautions were bad enough, the restrictions on where they could go, the stinking black antiseptic dips for their gumboots wherever they went, the anxious night and morning checks on the cattle and sheep for the slightest sign of lameness or sore mouths.
    And then the government vets identified a case of the disease on a local farm.
    In those days Bert Pearson ran a mixed farm. Mainly cattle and sheep, with a few pigs; arable land to grow wheat for sale and maize as winter feed, and water meadows close to a small river for the stock.
    Mark came home from school one day to find Ministry vets in white protective clothing destroying the last of the pigs. All the cows and sheep were already dead. Mechanical excavators had uprooted a field of wheat to dig a vast pit where the carcasses were already piled high. A pall of smoke hung over the pyre, but this did not hide the open-eyed faces of lifeless animals Mark and his father had known as friends.
    That night was the first time Mark saw his father in tears.
    A few days later, they learned that the rush to destroy all the farm animals within the prescribed exclusion zone had been a false alarm. There had been no local outbreak of disease. The vets had made a mistake. No one even said sorry.
    That day, something inside Bert Pearson died. And Mark Pearson started to smoulder with anger against the smug ranks of outsiders who could not be called to account for the damage they did so carelessly.
    Bert and Mark restocked the farm; at least, they bought new cattle and a few pigs. The sheep were not replaced. Nor were these new animals any connection with the carefully line-bred stock that had been wiped out by the agents of panicky politicians. It sometimes felt to Mark as though that one incident alone destroyed everything his Dad was: a father, husband, friend, and citizen.
    Mark knew that since that time his laughing, lively Dad, rugby player, cricketer, the first to offer to mow the outfield on the pitch or provide a pig for the hog roast after the annual fete, had disappeared forever.
    Bert Pearson now haunted the farm like a spare grey ghost. Some days he did not leave his armchair in the kitchen, but sat there all day in silence staring at children’s programmes on the television. If he went out it was to walk, stiff and awkward, through the fields and down to the river. There he would stand without moving, staring at the water, taking no notice of the wildlife seething around him.
    He took to going to bed early in the evening, about seven o’clock usually, or soon after the children’s programmes on the TV gave way to the grown-up stuff. He didn’t want to watch that.
    Once in bed, he lay sleepless in the dark ignoring his wife and son, everything except the old sheepdog who padded after him to his bedroom and spent the night in there with him.
    It was all too much for Joyce. She tried to help him. She had forced him to go to the doctor, who diagnosed severe depression and prescribed pills that seemed to make Bert more zombie-like than ever. She tried to interest him in going out with her to the pub for a meal, or to a film. He shook his