A Nice Place to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

head and slumped back in his chair, or turned the sound up on the television to drown her voice. Unable to face going to sleep with him in the bedroom where she was only too conscious of his lack of response to her, she moved into the spare room.
    At first she wept a lot. Then she decided that she must make some sort of life for herself. To do that, she told herself, she had to give up on Bert. She didn’t want to, but she was frightened that he would take her down with him into the misery he wallowed in. She couldn’t stop herself, she did think he wallowed in it. He didn’t even try to help himself.
    She told Mark, ‘He’s my husband, I married him for love. I know he’s ill, he can’t help it, but I’m only forty-eight, I can’t go on like this.’
    Mark didn’t understand. So when his mother started to go out socially in the evenings, he blamed her. She had a group of women friends with whom she enrolled in adult education classes, played bridge, sang in a choir, or went out regularly to play bingo in the community hall of a town not too far away from Old Catcombe. The house was crowded with chairs she upholstered, patchwork quilts she stitched, and stuffed toys she won at bridge.
    Mark, too, might have made a fresh start somewhere else. But he would have felt like a traitor to himself. The knowing eyes of the cattle when he came to check them in the afternoons, the jolly grins of the pigs as they scampered towards him when he brought their food, the sight of wheat turning gold before harvest, and the smell of cut grass at silage time; these things were part of him, as much a part as the beating of his heart or the pumping of his lungs. They gave him life. He knew this without sentimentality or poetic fancies. He rather wished he didn’t.
    One cold bright day after a long spell of dry weather, Mark heard a commotion in the field where the cattle had been let out at last after being shut in the stockyard during a long wet autumn. The farm dogs were barking as though repelling a small army. Mark shouted for his father, but Bert did not respond. Meanwhile the noise of motorbike engines being gunned sounded like several chain saws from the lane.
    Mark jumped on the farm quad bike and the dogs leaped up behind him, barking wildly. He sped out of the yard and down the lane towards the field where the cattle were.
    He had only gone a few hundred yards when he was met by an eye-catching young girl running up the lane towards him. At first sight she looked to him to have no clothes on, except for a pair of ridiculous high-heeled scarlet boots, but then he saw that she was wearing a skirt like an elastic band and a skimpy top several sizes too small for her rather large breasts. She looked terrified, her eyes wide with fear and her mouth open as she screamed for help. He couldn’t hear her screams over the sound of motorbike engines and the bellowing of the herd of bullocks which was stampeding up the road behind her.
    Mark’s first reaction was furious anger. This ridiculous girl with her stupid clothes and her purple hair was putting his animals in danger. She reached the quad bike and clung to him. Her over-tight clothes had split, and he caught a flash of her breasts. Part of the side-seam of her bright red skirt had burst open and he saw dark pubic hair. It was an extraordinary feast of female flesh for him to encounter so suddenly. But he didn’t have any time to enjoy it.
    â€˜Get behind the quad bike and keep still,’ he shouted at her.
    The cattle had slowed down at the sight of him and were milling in the narrow lane, the leaders lowering their heads to challenge the dogs, which had raced forward to confront them.
    â€˜Oh, my God,’ he heard the girl gasp, ‘they’re trying to kill me.’
    â€˜Shut up,’ Mark said. This time he said it quietly, almost hissing at her.
    He had got off the quad bike and was walking slowly towards the