I can see everything from here.
The top of the tree swayed just so little beneath his weight. He could see clear in every direction. He was like a hawk on a telegraph pole, looking down. Sharp as a hawk, watching for movement below. There was his mother talking to Billy who was getting the lawnmower out. There was Mrs T coming on her bicycle up the drive. There was Jackson’s little grey tractor out in their fields where he was topping the field edges before harvest. The fields were still their fields though Jackson worked them. Now Billy was pulling at the cord of the mower. The mower was starting with a puff of blue smoke. His mother was walking towards the tree across the lawn. Mum. Look, Mum. See where I am. She didn’t hear him over the sound of the mower.
Later he took his father’s old binoculars and put a string on them and climbed up there again, on his own this time, and tied the binoculars to a small branch so that they would be there whenever he went to his perch.
I’m like a hawk, he said to his mother. I climb high up the tree.
She didn’t know how high he meant.
I see everything. I watch you from high up. I see Billy. I see Jackson. I see Jackson’s men. I see the people who come to visit. I see you talking to them, wherever you are.
He thought a lot about hawks. There were sparrowhawks along the roads and kestrels, and sometimes bigger birds, buzzards, and once he saw what he thought was a harrier off the marshes, identifying it later from a book. He watched them through the binoculars. He saw how still they could be, holding as still sometimes in the sky as on a pole. How quickly they swooped when they saw whatever it was they saw moving on the ground. How ruthless they were.
When Jackson’s men brought the combine out, he swooped down.
Mum, can we go and see?
Yes, if the men’ll have you.
But sometimes still he did not like to see Jackson on the fields. And nothing that Jackson did went on without his seeing, at least when he was home. Once he came home and saw that Jackson had changed the fields. He did not like it when Jackson did such things.
It was in the autumn and the winter that that sort of thing happened, when the fields were bare. It must have been when they came home for one autumn half-term or the Christmas holiday. The first thing that went wrong was that Billy had removed the rope. He found Billy working in the shed. He shouted at Billy. Billy, you shouldn’t have done that. An eleven- or maybe twelve-year-old scolding a man in his sixties; he would be in trouble for that later. Billy said that the rope was rotten, he took it away because it was dangerous. But you can’t do that, Billy. Daddy put it there.
He could climb the tree now anyway because he had grown tall and strong enough to jump up and grab the first branch and swing himself up. And he could get Jonny up first by letting him stand on his shoulders. They could get up without any rope. Jonny had got bigger too, and bolder, so they both climbed up high to where the tree swayed. There was the garden below, empty since Billy was in the shed and his mother was indoors, no one about to see them, though they were so high and though most of the leaves had gone from the tree. The only people to be seen were Jackson’s men, and the fields looked different. Crikey, no, they can’t do that! He held the binoculars to his eyes. What is it? Jonny said. Let me see. But already he had let the binoculars drop on their string and was heading down, swooping, branch to branch, even as Jonny took them up to see for himself.
Wait for me.
Jonny was behind, and slow. He was already down on the ground.
Wait. It’s too high. I can’t get down.
Jonny was scared. He had not climbed so high in the tree before.
Yes you can.
He was running, out from the gate and into the fields, across the stubble. Jackson’s men had a digger there to dig up the hedges, a huge digger of a kind he had never seen before, with caterpillar tracks. The digger was so big and noisy that they didn’t hear him shouting. They didn’t even see him until he picked up a stone and threw it. It was a sharp broken flint and he threw it hard. He was aiming at the machine not at the men but one of the men was hit. The man put up his hand to his head and there was blood. He turned and ran for home.
How could you let him do it? he shouted at his mother. She was in the kitchen as usual, and Jonny was in there, sitting at the table with a glass of milk. Jonny had got down almost OK, only when he got to the bottom branch he jumped wrong and landed badly, twisting his ankle. He was probably going too fast, panicking, that was like Jonny. Maybe it hurt a lot. Maybe it wasn’t really so bad. Maybe he would have pulled himself together and come after, if there had been any hope of catching up. Or maybe he didn’t want to be implicated. He could see Jonny had been crying. He didn’t cry. He was only angry. Angry and hard and sharp and dry-eyed like a hawk. Angry at Jackson and angry at his mother for letting Jackson do what he had done to their land, his father’s land. How could you let that happen?
It’s how things are, his mother said. He’s just a farmer doing his job. That’s what farmers do nowadays. Later she drove him
