He’d no idea how long he’d been there, when the farmer found him: sitting with his back to the hedge, staring down the valley at the sunlight over the church tower. Sitting there up against the hedge like a bloody old tramp, with his eyes wet and his wet pants sticking to his arse.
Conceding afterwards that perhaps it was just as well the farmer did find him.
For now, anyroad.
Part One
1
Foul Water
IT WAS A crime, what he was doing, this Roddy Lodge, with his wraparound dark glasses and his whipped- cream smile.
The stories had kept filtering through, like foul water out of sludge, and Gomer Parry had felt ashamed to be part of the same profession. Plant hire was the poorer for shoddy operators like Roddy: wide boys, duckers and divers and twisters and exploiters of innocent people, rich and poor – mostly incomers to the county that didn’t know no better.
Too many blind eyes had been turned, this was it. Too many people – even so-called public servants, some of them – looking the other way, saying what’s it matter if a few Londoners gets taken down the road; they got money to burn.
Bad attitude, sneering at the incomers, ripping them off. They were still people, the incomers. People with dreams, and there was nothing wrong with dreams.
Mostly.
What about Gomer Parry, though? Would he have backed off like the rest or looked the other way, if he’d had any suspicion of how deep it went? What about Gomer? Just a little bloke with wild white hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a sense of what was right and honourable: the plant-hire code, digger chivalry.
No point in even asking the question, because, the way it started, this was just a drainage issue. Just a matter of pipes and shit.
It had seemed odd sometimes to Gomer that his and Roddy’s trenches had never crossed, even allowing for the fact that they operated from different ends of the county. Plant hire: big machinery in a small world.
But it was happening now, no avoiding it on this damp and windy Sunday – a weary old day to be leaving your fireside, and if Minnie had still been alive likely Gomer would’ve put it off. But the old fireside wasn’t the same no more, and she’d sounded near-desperate, this lady, and only up here weekends, anyway.
A Londoner, as you’d expect. Londoners were always looking further and further west in the mad rush to get country air down their lungs, like it was some kind of new drug. Rural properties in Herefordshire never stayed long on the market nowadays, especially the ones that really
Take this one. Classic example, see. What you had was this lovely old farmhouse, with a couple of acres, on the A49 between Hereford and Ross. Built in the rusty stone you got in these parts, and from the front there were good long, open views over flat fields to the Black Mountains.
But before that there was the A49 itself.
Gomer put a match to an inch of ciggy, October rain sluicing down on his cap, as another five cars and a big van came whizzing past – and this was a Sunday. All right, fair play, he spent his own days bouncing around on big, growling diggers, but no way Gomer could live so close to a main road like this, with fast cars and all the ground- shaking, fume-belching, brake- screeching juggernauts heading for the M50 and the Midlands.
Yet for this Mrs Pawson, in her tight white jeans, it was some type of peace, after London.
Walk? Pretty soon, in Gomer’s view, you’d give up going for walks, being as how there was a good two hundred yards of no-pavement between you and the nearest public footpath. For half the price, the Pawsons could’ve got theirselves a modern place, with no maintenance headaches, up some quiet lane.
But modern places weren’t part of the dream.
And private drainage.
The FOR SALE sign lay in the damp gravel at the side of the driveway. Gomer reckoned it’d be back up in the hedge within the year. They’d get their money back, no problem at all – the way Hereford prices were going these days, they’d likely get it back twice over. Even allowing for what it was going to cost them to put this drainage to rights, after what Roddy Lodge had done to it.
Gomer tramped back up the drive, past his bottle-green van. It had GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE on the sides and across both back doors in white. Nev’s idea, this was –
The other side of the van, Gomer could see the top of the installation poking out of the grass not two yards from the property.
Gomer had never even heard of an
As for where Lodge had put it – un-bloody-believable!
‘Mr Lodge showed us several brochures,’ Mrs Pawson had told him earlier, ‘and gave us the telephone numbers of two other people who’d had these particular models installed.’
‘Phone ’em, did you?’
Mrs Pawson hadn’t even looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, we had far too much to think about.’
Woulder made no difference, anyway,’ Gomer conceded. ‘Both be stooges, see. Friends of his, telling you you couldn’t get no finer system anywhere in the country. Load of ole wallop.’
He started scratting about in the fallen leaves, uncovering a meter-thing under an aluminium shield, with another one like it inside the house, to tell you where the shit level in the processing tank was at. Waste of time and money. Folk had got along happily for centuries without knowing where their shit level was at.
Presently, out she came again, under a big red and yellow golfing umbrella.
‘So what’s the actual verdict, Mr Parry?’ Attractive-looking lady, mind, in her sharp-faced way. Fortyish, and a few inches taller than Gomer, but weren’t they all?
‘You wannit straight?’ Gomer took out his ciggy. Mrs Pawson was looking at it like he’d got a bonfire going with piles of old tyres. She took a step back.
