The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Half-past six this morning, when the boy had phoned him.

‘Hippies,’ he’d said.

Not Danny’s favourite word. There hadn’t been any hippies for over thirty years, but folks in this area loved to hang on to the obsolete. And it was what they’d always called Danny himself. Danny Thomas? Bloody hippy. We all knows what he grows in Bryncot Dingle. If his ole man was alive it’d kill him dead.

Danny had turned off the toaster, lowered the volume on Wishbone Ash and sought some clarification. To some of the old farmers, a hippy was anybody not wearing a tweed cap, wellies and green waterproof trousers.

‘Ole van,’ Jeremy said, ‘with little windows at the top. And a minibus, with one of them funny stars painted on the side.’

‘Pentagram?’

‘Sort of thing.’

‘Just the two vehicles?’

‘Far’s I can see. Could be more in the trees.’

‘You en’t been down to check?’

Jeremy had said nothing. He wouldn’t have gone near, not even after dark when he was known to move around among the sheep and the cattle looking like a poacher, but in fact a guardian. Jeremy never lost a lamb to the fox; it was like he and the fox had come to an agreement.

Greta had come into the kitchen then, flip-flopping across the stained lino. Had on the old pink dressing gown, and there was purple under her eyes, and Danny thought about the stove her’d never asked for and how it wasn’t enough.

He sighed and waited on the phone, until Jeremy coughed and said, real tentative, ‘Only, I thought as how you might… you know?’

‘Aye, I know,’ Danny said.

It had been flattering at one time. When the New Age travellers used to turn up in force, back in the eighties and nineties, the local farmers had felt threatened by the sheer numbers, and it took the police a long time to get the necessary court orders to move them on. Danny had come into his own, then — a farmer who looked like a traveller and was into their music and understood their ways. One summer night, he’d taken his Les Paul and his littlest generator and the Crate mini-amp up to this travellers’ camp by Forest Inn and hung out there jamming till dawn with a bloke called Judas, from Nuneaton. Biggest bloody audience Danny ever had. He’d donated a drum of diesel for the buses and off they’d all trundled next day, no bother.

The farmers were well pleased, even Sebbie Dacre, bigtime magistrate, who’d been about to have the invaders dealt with. Might be a raggedy-haired druggy, Danny Thomas, but he had his priorities right when it come down to it: Danny the negotiator, Danny the diplomat. The hippy- whisperer, some bugger said one night in the Eagle in New Radnor. Not imagining for one moment that when Danny Thomas was up there jamming with the travellers, he’d been screaming inside, Take me with you! Please! Get me out of yere!

And things wasn’t all that bad, then. Nowadays, agriculture was a sick joke, gasping on the life-support of EC grants. Danny wasn’t hardly replacing stock, in the hope that something would come up. Prices were laughable, and he wasn’t even looking forward to the haymaking, which seemed pointless. He was letting the docks grow, and the thistles. He’d even started doing the National bloody Lottery, and that was totally despicable.

‘All right, give me quarter of an hour, boy.’ Danny turned to his wife. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Got travellers in his bottom field.’

‘You makes it sound like a disease,’ Gret said.

Danny smiled and went off to find his classic King Crimson T-shirt.

The problem was not that Jeremy was scared, just that he was plain shy and avoided the company of other men who were cynical about farming and treated their animals like a crop. Never had nothing to do with his neighbour, Sebbie Dacre, gentleman farmer and Master of the Middle Marches Hunt. Even after his mam left the farm, Jeremy ignored the pubs, and the livestock markets when he could. Everybody thought he was coming out of it when he hooked up with Mary Morson — nice-looking girl, solid farming family. Her and Jeremy, they’d go out together, into Kington, and they had the engagement ring from the jeweller’s there — Mary flashing it around, Jeremy proud as a peacock, if peacocks wore work shirts and baggy jeans.

The van was below them now, about seventy yards away, and Danny could see most of it — light blue, with bits of dark blue showing through on the roof. Hard to say what make it was — bit bigger than a Transit, sure to be. And quite old, so that would likely rule out foreign tourists who didn’t know no better than to camp on somebody’s ground. Foreign tourists had classy new camper vans and Winnebagos.

Jeremy was looking tense already, hunched up.

‘Tell you what,’ Danny said. ‘Why don’t I go down there, talk to the buggers on my own?’

It made sense. Jeremy looked grateful and his shoulders relaxed. Flag the dog, sensing a release of tension, lay down in the grass, panting, and Danny went down there on his own, into the dip where the bank was eroded. The stream at the bottom was almost dried up. The blossomy hedge hid the bypass, though not Stanner Rocks, and Danny could still see the faces on the rocks, and the dead giant. Way back, when he was doing acid, he’d once watched the giant’s head rotting into green slime. Jesus Christ, never again.

‘Hello there!’ Danny shouted.

Now he was close up, he could tell this wasn’t travellers in the New Age sense. The van might be old and have windows punched in the sides, but it was tidy, clean and looked-after, with nothing painted on it — no slogans, no pentagrams — and the windows had proper blinds. And it was the only vehicle here. Where was the minibus, then?

Danny stepped over a bunch of elder branches, neatly sawn and stacked and left to rot, on account of Jeremy never burned elder, which was the Devil’s wood and would bring you no luck.

‘Anybody about?’

He walked over to the van and peered inside the cab, remembering how, on his own farm one time, he’d found this car — posh car, BMW — tucked up against a field gate, with the engine running and a length of hose from the exhaust jammed in the window, and a man in a black suit in there, all pink-faced and well dead.

A wood pigeon came blundering out of the hedge, making as much racket as a bunch of yobs with baseball bats. Danny spun round, and saw that they were above him. Both of them.

A woman and a girl. They were standing on the bank, in full sun, and Danny Thomas could see them clearly, and they weren’t exactly what he’d been expecting.

‘How’re you?’ he said mildly. Was he a bit disappointed because they were so ordinary-looking, both in light- coloured tops and jeans and trainers? Because they wasn’t wild-haired creatures with tattoos and chains and rings in their lips?

‘Oh hell.’ The woman scrambled down. ‘I suppose we’re trespassing.’

Danny shrugged.

‘It was late,’ the woman said, ‘and we were exhausted. I’m sorry.’

Danny said, ‘Where’d the other one go?’

The woman blinked, shook out her dark brown hair. The girl came down and joined her, sticking close like Flag, the sheepdog, had with Jeremy. The girl looked about fourteen.

‘Minibus?’ Danny said. ‘Pentagram on the side?’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ The woman had an English accent. ‘They’ve gone. They left early. What happened, we met them last night — a girl and two guys. We both pulled into this garage forecourt, only it was closed, and we were nearly out of fuel and it was getting dark and I’m like, Oh Christ, what are we going to do if they’re all closed? I mean, obviously I don’t know this area too well, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to stop for the night. Then this girl in the bus says, “Oh, we’ve been round here loads of times, we can show you a good campsite.” And that’s how we…’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark and I— We didn’t light a fire or anything. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Is this your farm? Can I pay you?’

Danny became aware of Jeremy Berrows up on the bank.

Danny said. ‘It’s his farm, it is.’