Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
1
THERE IS NO END TO MADNESS, Jack thinks, once it takes hold. Hadn’t those experts said it could take years before it flared up in human beings? So, it had flared up now in him and El ie.
Sixty-five head of healthy-seeming cattle that final y succumbed to the rushed-through cul ing order, leaving a silence and emptiness as hol ow as the morning Mum died, and the smal angry wisp of a thought floating in it: Wel , they’d better be right, those experts, it had better damn wel flare up some day or this wil have been a whole load of grief for nothing.
So then.
Healthy cattle. Sound of limb and udder and hoof—and mind. “Not one of them mad as far as I ever saw,” Dad had said, as if it was the start of one of his rare jokes and his face would crack into a smile to prove it. But his face had looked like simply cracking anyway and staying cracked, and the words he might have said, by way of a punchline, never left his lips, though Jack thinks now that he heard them. Or it was his own silent joke to himself. Or it’s the joke he’s only arrived at now: “We must be the mad ones.” And if ever there was a time when Jack’s dad might have put his two arms round his two sons, that was it. His arms were certainly long enough, even for his sons’ big shoulders
—both brothers out of the same large Luxton mould, though with al of eight years between them. Tom would have been fifteen then, but growing fast. And Jack, though it was a fact he sometimes wished to hide, even to reverse, already had a clear inch over his father.
The three of them had stood there, like the only life left, in the yard at Jebb Farm.
But Michael Luxton hadn’t put his arms round his two sons. He’d done what he’d begun to do, occasional y, only after his wife’s death. He’d looked hard at his feet, at the ground he was standing on, and spat.
AND JACK, who long ago took his last look at that yard, looks now from an upstairs window at a grey sea, at a sky ful of wind-driven rain, but sees for a moment only smoke and fire.
SIXTY-FIVE HEAD OF CATTLE . Or, to reckon it another way (and never mind the promised compensation): ruin. Ruin, at some point in the not-so-distant future, the ruin that had been creeping up on them anyway since Vera Luxton had died.
Cattle going mad al over England. Or being shoved by the hundred into incinerators for the fear and the risk of it.
Who would have imagined it? Who would have dreamed it?
But cattle aren’t people, that’s a fact. And when trouble comes your way, at least you might think, though it’s smal comfort and precious little help: Wel , we’ve had our turn now, our share.
But years later, right here in this seaside cottage, Jack had switched on the TV and said, “El ie, come and look at this. Come and look, quick.” It was the big pyre at Roak Moor, back in Devon. Thousands of stacked-up cattle, thousands more lying rotting in fields. The thing was burning day and night. The smoke would surely have been visible, over the far hil s, from Jebb. Not to mention the smel being carried on the wind. And someone on the TV—another of those experts—was saying that burning these cattle might stil release into the air significant amounts of the undetected agent of BSE. Though it was ten years on, and this time the burnings were for foot-and-mouth. Which people weren’t known to get. Yet.
