Touch by Graham Mort Page B

beyond theirs. Above theirs, Daniel would say. Not just beyond. His world is up here where the Siberian wind comes to die in moorland grasses, between grouse butts and the harried fleeces of his sheep. He’ll want for nothing.
    At the kitchen table, Daniel takes up a knife. It’s a thin, carbon-steel blade, sharpened a thousand times so that it curves inward. Annie’s doing. Sharpening it with that flick of her wrist. The way she mixed a pudding or a cake. He cuts through the string and throws it into the fire, watching the sealing wax sweat, then melt and sputter into blue flames. That faint drift of incense. Now he tears away the paper and the Sellotape until he’s holding a small envelope. There’s something hard and round inside. It’s wrapped in ridged cardboard, so it feels like he’s rubbing his thumb across a kitten’s ribs.
    Inside is a letter from his sister in Filey. Effie. Effie who married a trawlerman when she was still only eighteen. She’d left home even before that, working in some nursing home on the east coast. Just a few words on a scrap of paper. This is mother’s ring. I want you to have it . And more about her illness, about bearing up. His mother’s ring. Why had she done that, now? What does he want with a ring? Daniel sees Effie swinging from the farm gate in her pigtails, climbing the rope in the pear tree, her knees grazed and dirty. He sees her in a cream marriage gown, holding her husband’s hand. The husband who had even less to say than Daniel. They’d stood awkwardly at the wedding, cupping pints of bitter in their fists, munching sausage rolls. Annie had been pregnant with Peter then. He’d felt proud. Substantial in his gifts. Wanting for nothing.
    But he’d hardly seen his sister since, and anyway, she was an old woman now, not the girl he’d chased across the shaven meadows at hay time. The plain gold ring had worn thin from his mother’s work, then thinner from the years of his sister’s life. It sits snug on his little finger, tight above the swollen knuckle that he’s snagged on gates and walling stone and fencing wire. His little sister, grown old now. Poor Effie. The thought is like a gasp of pain, like the memory of Annie when she was young. A thought he couldn’t bear now. The smell of her hair which he’d slept and breathed in. The taste of sun on her skin when they’d put the farm to rest for the night and made love in the bed his parents had shared.
    Daniel places the ring on the table with the crumpled letter, staring out to the orchard. The sun is touching the branches of damson and apple trees. Making them glow, making them exist. It’s the light of a new day.
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Daniel leaves the house and walks to the shippen. He pours out feed for his cattle, checking their feet for sores, their mouths for blisters. He brings logs to the house, washes down the tractor and goes out into the fields to check the sheep. One of the ewes has lambed in the night. A single, sickly little tup that staggers awkwardly, trailing its thread of umbilical cord, bleating after its mother. Daniel steadies the wriggling little thing between his knees, rapping it sharply between the eyes with his fist. When it connects, he feels the lamb shrink back into his hand. Then something seems to clear and it finds its legs, scuttling under its mother to drag at her teats. His father had shown him that trick, though the vet might have something to say about it these days. The unlambed ewes are swollen and clumsy on the fell. All around him the fields are loud with new life. The sun is looming above the horizon, behind clouds tinged with orange and apricot.
    By afternoon the wind is strengthening from the east. This is the wind of knives. The Russian wind that flays flesh from bone. He’s already listened to the weather forecast over a corned-beef sandwich with pickles and a mug of tea at lunchtime.