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Authors: Chloe Hooper
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dogs in shouts of “Pushemup!” or “Goaround!” and the occasional angry “Getoutofit!”
I pulled the jacket he’d lent me closer. This farm was as bleak and as dun-colored as home—the fens with some gum trees. On the Norfolk flatlands the wind was personal, trying to get into your brain, to make you give up. Here it felt no different.
The dogs drove the cows—their soft faces concerned, their lumpy bodies jostling—through the gate.
I closed the steel bolt behind them.
Returning to the truck, I was again dodging cowpats and the deeper mud. Something about this farce and the way Alexander sat in the driver’s seat, his shoulders slumped, made me think: You’re crazy, this man is no one to be scared of. He’s a farmer who wishes he wasn’t a farmer. Deeply lonely—like most who need to pay for company—and in flight from his own melancholy.
Shivering from the wind, Isettled back into the passenger seat. Perhaps the two of us weren’t so dissimilar: we were both less than comfortable in our own skin, both had taken pleasure pretending to be people we weren’t.
As we drove off, Alexander turned to me, his smile full of expectation.
Just smile back, I thought,try to be pleasant and get the cash at the end.
The only problem was part of me was starting to feel bad about taking this man’s money. I liked being paid. I liked it very much. After our first meeting, when to my surprise he’d agreed to my higher fee, I found myself making constant calculations of how many hours we’d need to screw before I could pay off my creditors. Debt filled my days with arithmetic. Each note seemed a surrogate for our adventure, and as a means of savoring the experience, I treated them with extra care. The cash was alive when I slipped it into my wallet, and still alive when I checked it the next morning. Finally I was saving money. However, the envelope hidden back in the house now felt like punishment as well as reward. Alexander’s sadness seeped through his clothes, and I was not entirely convinced my fee was well earned, or even, looking around, that he could afford it. But I was trapped by the cash the way one can be trapped by guilt—despite my reservations about keeping his money, I doubted I could actually leave that much of it behind.
“My father never understood the basics—that good-quality stock is the first priority,” Alexander was telling me. He seemed agitated, as though his lecturing were keeping him from doing something more important. “You’ve got to have good bloodlines. I try to conserve the old, well-regarded bloodlines, but also mix things. You see the vigor of a hybrid plant?” He nodded for me. “You want the same in an animal. The purebred is fine, but breeding too pure you get weakness.”
In the distance emerged a cloud of dust: an identical white utility truck was driving toward us, and at the sight of another person, a smile crept over my face.
The driver held his arm up in a wave as he abruptly turned his truck down a different dirt track.
“Is that a neighbor?” I asked.
Alexander shook his head. “That’s the station manager leaving. I’ve given him the long weekend off. No, breeding is an art,” he went on. “In the wild, animals sort themselves out, but on a farm you need to oversee it.” He glanced at me and winked. “Basically I’m always looking for the perfect cross.”
• • •
Other than a narrow rust-red dirt track, the land belonging to Alexander’s nearest neighbor—the national park—had been left uncleared. Out the truck windows there was chaos on either side, the vegetation dense and scrappy. We rushed past bursts of brilliant yellow wattle, bushes with bristling podlike extrusions, and bulbous pygmy trees erupting in countless long green spikes—plants all designed in a radical workshop. Nowhere in England would you move so fast from pastoral land into vast, wild disorder.
“Emu,” Alexander called, hitting the dashboard. Further
I pulled the jacket he’d lent me closer. This farm was as bleak and as dun-colored as home—the fens with some gum trees. On the Norfolk flatlands the wind was personal, trying to get into your brain, to make you give up. Here it felt no different.
The dogs drove the cows—their soft faces concerned, their lumpy bodies jostling—through the gate.
I closed the steel bolt behind them.
Returning to the truck, I was again dodging cowpats and the deeper mud. Something about this farce and the way Alexander sat in the driver’s seat, his shoulders slumped, made me think: You’re crazy, this man is no one to be scared of. He’s a farmer who wishes he wasn’t a farmer. Deeply lonely—like most who need to pay for company—and in flight from his own melancholy.
Shivering from the wind, Isettled back into the passenger seat. Perhaps the two of us weren’t so dissimilar: we were both less than comfortable in our own skin, both had taken pleasure pretending to be people we weren’t.
As we drove off, Alexander turned to me, his smile full of expectation.
Just smile back, I thought,try to be pleasant and get the cash at the end.
The only problem was part of me was starting to feel bad about taking this man’s money. I liked being paid. I liked it very much. After our first meeting, when to my surprise he’d agreed to my higher fee, I found myself making constant calculations of how many hours we’d need to screw before I could pay off my creditors. Debt filled my days with arithmetic. Each note seemed a surrogate for our adventure, and as a means of savoring the experience, I treated them with extra care. The cash was alive when I slipped it into my wallet, and still alive when I checked it the next morning. Finally I was saving money. However, the envelope hidden back in the house now felt like punishment as well as reward. Alexander’s sadness seeped through his clothes, and I was not entirely convinced my fee was well earned, or even, looking around, that he could afford it. But I was trapped by the cash the way one can be trapped by guilt—despite my reservations about keeping his money, I doubted I could actually leave that much of it behind.
“My father never understood the basics—that good-quality stock is the first priority,” Alexander was telling me. He seemed agitated, as though his lecturing were keeping him from doing something more important. “You’ve got to have good bloodlines. I try to conserve the old, well-regarded bloodlines, but also mix things. You see the vigor of a hybrid plant?” He nodded for me. “You want the same in an animal. The purebred is fine, but breeding too pure you get weakness.”
In the distance emerged a cloud of dust: an identical white utility truck was driving toward us, and at the sight of another person, a smile crept over my face.
The driver held his arm up in a wave as he abruptly turned his truck down a different dirt track.
“Is that a neighbor?” I asked.
Alexander shook his head. “That’s the station manager leaving. I’ve given him the long weekend off. No, breeding is an art,” he went on. “In the wild, animals sort themselves out, but on a farm you need to oversee it.” He glanced at me and winked. “Basically I’m always looking for the perfect cross.”
• • •
Other than a narrow rust-red dirt track, the land belonging to Alexander’s nearest neighbor—the national park—had been left uncleared. Out the truck windows there was chaos on either side, the vegetation dense and scrappy. We rushed past bursts of brilliant yellow wattle, bushes with bristling podlike extrusions, and bulbous pygmy trees erupting in countless long green spikes—plants all designed in a radical workshop. Nowhere in England would you move so fast from pastoral land into vast, wild disorder.
“Emu,” Alexander called, hitting the dashboard. Further
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