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My Dad’s nose is sharp as a knife.
Mam tucked the loaf of bread in her arm, close to her chest. She squished a great dob of butter on it and scraped it all off again, then sawed towards herself with her blunt knife. I thought Dad’s nose would do a better job. But I was only seven and the world was still rich with comedy.
The gulls made me laugh when I scared them away from the pig food. ‘G’way, you wicked bastards!’ I waved my arms, jumping up at them as they screeched into the air, and in return they mocked my flailing stick and the farm dog snapping at their webbed feet. I was proud of my job in summer, out in the pig fields, weekends, before and after school. But in winter wind, wet and cold, I grumbled.
‘You get out there and chase the buggers off,’ Dad ordered. Because in winter the gulls are at their worst, circling, diving, grabbing, ravenous for a meal. ‘Half of ’em’s sick with salmonella.’ He shook his ham-sized fist at the shrieking hordes.
Then there was the pigs themselves. Soft furry babes, up on their feet as soon as they spewed out of the sow’s bum, staggering like drunk schoolboys round her back legs, lured by the smell of milk that they’d never yet tasted. Snuffling and tugging at those small teats cushioned in her milk-swollen flanks. They cut her cruelly with their sharp eye-teeth till we trimmed the gnashers. Later they’d snuffle at the great outdoors before scampering outside, racing, squealing, all ways together in their enjoyment of sun and wind, while the old ladies snorted in their mud wallow.
My Dad was thin as a pig’s squeal, but so strong he could handle a two hundred and fifty pound sow like she was a baby. I learnt how strong on the same day I stopped finding the world funny, the day he slipped in pig muck. His face was blanketed with the stuff so all you could see was the cliff edge of that huge nose between two furious eyes. I laughed. He frothed at the mouth like a boar in lust and swung me round by a leg and an arm till I was dizzy. I hobbled for days. Mam warned me not to shamble like that when Dad was around or I’d get a clout that’d wipe the grin off my face for good. She had a red mark down one cheek. Size of a pig’s ham.
‘What’s up with you?’ my sports teacher asked when I couldn’t play for the under eleven football match that week.
‘Fell in the fattening shed,’ I said. You don’t shop your Dad.
So my high spirits were killed as surely as our pigs. And without benefit of a prior stunning.
He loved his pigs, did my Dad. He knew everyone of his five hundred sows and their back history and their parentage. He talked softer to them than he ever did to Mam.
She was a big woman as I remember her. But she wasn’t always fat. There’s a photo on our sideboard of her with me in her arms, and she was almost thin as Dad.
‘If it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t have all this,’ I heard her say to Dad more than once. It wasn’t an argument. Course it wasn’t. My parents never argued.
At her funeral my aunt, her sister, bore down on me like a black galleon, her pork pie hat cocked crazily on one side. ‘Drat the thing,’ she said, pushing it over to central with fat fingers and a hat pin. ‘Hate ’em, I do.’ I surmised she meant the hat, not the other relatives and local farmers. There were more at Mam’s funeral than ever visited us on the farm.
‘Bought it specially,’ my aunt continued, still fussing with her corn coloured hair. ‘Got to show respect. Now, young man . . .’ She pulled me away from Mam’s open grave and the drunken stones where my ancestors mouldered, towards the far side of the church. It was drizzling and the long grass wet my bare ankles and school trousers, the ones Mam patched on the knee after there was a bit of trouble on the way home from school. They weren’t very clean.
‘Look a mess,’ said Aunty, folding back my jacket’s torn collar. ‘Disrespectful.’
We’d done our best, me and Dad.
‘Shouldn’t of gone like that. Should of gone to her doctor months back. It was him wouldn’t let her. Made her life a misery, he did,’ and she took hold of my shoulder as she whispered in sepulchral tones, ‘He’ll do the same for you, mark my words.’
Not a gravestone wobbled. My relatives underground weren’t listening, or too tight in their coffins to turn over.
If she was so concerned, why hadn’t the old bat ever come over to visit her sister?
As if she’d heard my thoughts she said, ‘He stopped us meeting. A real troublemaker, that’s your Dad, but he can’t stop me coming to the church for the funeral of my own sister.’
She checked he wasn’t in hearing distance. ‘He’d never have had all he’s got without my sister. She was a beauty, so she was. Pride of the neighbourhood. And rich too. Could have had anyone she wanted. Look here,’ and scrabbling through her black plastic handbag she pulled out a photo. Grainy, one corner torn, colours faded to ochres and pinks. Mam as Young Farmers’ Club Pinup. Hourglass shape, slim legs – she kept those to the end – firm shoulders half covered with her long hair. Her head turned as she smiled at someone out of the picture. Dad? She looked like any minute she’d jump down from the dais and rush over to you, arms outstretched, laughing.
But she was never up to tricks like that.
‘Why’d she choose your Dad? A nobody. His family was poor pig farmers. His Dad started with one sow-in-pig when he was working for my granddad.’ Her hat wobbled frantically as she shook her head. ‘Damn the thing,’ she said and she pulled it off so roughly her hair stood up in clumps, like those old pictures of wheat sheaves with guerrilla thistles tangled among the corn spikes. ‘Your granddad couldn’t let her marry into poverty, could he? Set them up proper.’ Grudgingly she admitted, ‘Works hard, I’ll say that for him. Made a go of it. One of the biggest in the area now, aren’t you?’
‘Yeh,’ I said.
She didn’t let me keep the photo.
She didn’t come to the bunfight in the village pub.
We walked there before they started earthing Mam over. Vicar partnered Dad and muttered words of consolation in his unresponsive ear. I guessed he was worried our current pigman was resting up in the straw barn instead of sorting the feeds. He was an idle git, that one.
I was hungry when we got to the King’s Head, but just as I stretched out my hand for a sausage roll, another woman grabbed my arm. Never seen her before in my life. Thinner nose than my Dad’s and the skin round her sharp eyes wrinkled as dried peas. No hat on this one. Hair tinged with orange like an orang-utan. Lips shocking pink. Scraggy as a pig’s tail. Navy suit slopping off her shoulders, baggy round the chest like it was made for a bigger woman.
She’d known me from the cradle, she said. ‘A good man, your Dad. Fingers to the bone just so’s you and that woman – shouldn’t speak ill of – know what I mean? – when all’s said and done . . . ’
This woman had a turn of the head that reminded me of Dad. ‘You related to my father?’ I asked.
She threw up her hands in amazement. ‘His sister, his very own sister as ever is. Don’t you remember me, boy?’
She took a gulp from a glass of red wine. The colour clashed with her lips and her hair. Opening her bag she pulled out a lace handkerchief and wiped her mouth, smudging the lipstick down one side. ‘Well, well, young man. Your Dad’s free at last. Can do everything he’s ever wanted to do.’ She waved a cream bun at me. ‘She had looks back then, I’ll say that for her. He was bowled over. But what else did she have? No sense. Never a mucher, that woman. Went to seed.’
Our wheat’s gone to seed in the top field. Just as it should. Pigfeed.
Dad’s sister shook her head and pulled a face. ‘Was never a happy man, not after he married her. Just look at him.’
He looked the same to me as he’d always done.
‘Couldn’t cook to save her life, could she?’
‘Mam’s orl right.’ I never ate away from home, so how’d I compare her cooking? I was never hungry till she went sick.
I piled into the sandwiches and ignored the old girl.
We’ve got a thousand sows now, my Dad and me. Well, me really. Dad’s never done much since Mam went. Sits in her chair watching telly all day. Fat as a porker.
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