These Demented Lands Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was way miles back in the last glen.’
    â€˜Oh Christ, what way was he headed?’
    â€˜To the coast and going like the clappers.’
    â€˜Damn him, he thinks he’s still on Mainland. Every Friday he’s on the dot at five, buggerlugs, he knows when to knock off so he just starts for home, won’t do a stroke of work after five. It was old Charlie got the train derailed back on Mainland: got stuck at the level-crossing with a load of logs behind him, train came along, crashed over the logs and off the track, old Charlie just walked on home to his stables easy as you like.’
    â€˜What is it that’s going on here; all those . . . bonfires right up the river?’
    â€˜We’re contract loggers, thirty men clearing the wood up above the big house; those fires you see, it’s the rock outcrops along the river. With all the sneddings and wastewood we burn the rocks at night to break them up, then we dynamite in the morning and clear the stone; we’re trying to deepenthe river, so we can float the logs right out of the Interior and downriver towards The Drome to barge them away up Sound.’
    I came straight out with, ‘Got anything to eat?’
    â€˜Look, those guys here, theyre a bit girl-mad, you know, all they’re after right the now is a bit of Up the Klondike to Bangalore with a wee touch of ginger; an innings, a game set and match finished off with a full flavoured robusta . . . y’know what I mean?’
    â€˜Aye.’ I goes.
    â€˜I just don’t think you should go marching in.’
    He paused then he goes, ‘Let’s see you closer up. You from The Island?’
    â€˜Nut.’
    â€˜Why you headed Brotherhood’s way? That mother won’t let us pick up the logs at the river mouth by The Aerodrome there . . . he wants a cut o’ the money.’
    â€˜Why shouldn’t I be? Why’s everyone so scared of Brotherhood, he’s no the bogeyman is he?’
    â€˜He’s killed people, in Africa and two young girls from just the next glen here.’
    â€˜How do you know he’s killed people? He’d be locked up.’
    â€˜He didn’t axe them or anything, but he might as well have.’
    â€˜What happened?’
    â€˜What’s your name?’
    â€˜My name?’ I tried to decide. Lynniata, or Serenella Cerano Berniez or other of the names that I’d used to amuseme. In the end it was my own name I spoke out and that he spoke back, the vowels pushing from the end of his lips as he seemed to stand on tiptoe, face unseen.
    â€˜Food. Look around your feet———’ (and here he said my name) . . . ‘you’re in the land of milk and honey.’
    I looked down at the deep shadows by my boots, the splurge of his torch-light flittered around my toe-caps, then I picked out a scattering of shining, gold-coloured tins, flat ones with curvy edges; I cooried and picked one up.
    â€˜Rations, probably dumpling or, if youre lucky, boiled sweeties. Army rations nicked off the Territorials. This guy called Nam the Dam, sort of drunk who flies a helicopter, he’s doing the provisions drops every week but he’s some crazies on board that’re tipping out the boxes all over the hillside; we’re walking miles finding cans scattered all over the shop.’
    You opened the can with a key, like a Spam can and it was dumpling inside that I ate with the edge of the guy’s knife. We sat down against a tree trunk while the guy smoked a cigarette.
    â€˜Know how these hills were planted with forestry?’ he goes.
    In between chomps of the dumpling I goes, ‘Nut.’
    â€˜Old Bultitude had these cannon. Old gunpowder ones, back in the fifties he had them dragged up the glen here, then they spent days shooting canisters of spores and seedlings at the mountainsides.’
    I nodded, thought of Brotherhood’s story of