Wyld Dreamers

make a good navvy. It all sounds like rather hard work. You just enjoy the summer. Seymour won’t mind, he likes people to have fun. Let me get you another. Jackson, stay.’
Before she can refuse, Gerald is buying another round.
‘I won’t be staying beyond the summer,’ she insists. Gerald pushes over a packet of pork scratchings. Suddenly she’s ravenous. ‘I’ve got to go back home. I’m starting a secretarial course in September and I need to earn some money before that.’
‘Why? Is that what you want to do?’
‘I don’t know, I have to do something until…’
‘Until what?’
‘Until I find what it is I really want to do.’
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Gerald downs the rest of his drink. ‘To have as much of a good time as one possibly can in this strange old world.’ He sucks hard on the cigarette, inhales deep into his chest. ‘Shall we go to the farm now?’
Something happens that night and it’s only partly connected with her results (an ‘A’ and two ‘B’ grades) and the gins. There are also the psilocybin mushrooms that Gerald gives out and the huge voice of Grace Slick calling for courage in curiosity. Amy flirts hard with her boyfriend, and gets everybody to join her frenzied dance. The drugs begin to work their magic. Abandonment rockets into elation. Lights trail from their fingertips. The walls ripple and breathe. Weaving as one through the long hectic night to escape the irrelevant past and to reach for a future of wild and wondrous dreams.

9
‘It doesn’t make sense, Mr Stratton is rebuilding that cottage. Surely it’s more sensible to pull the place down?’
Mrs Morle chops fiercely at the onions and reminds herself again not to talk out loud. At least Lynn can’t hear, not with her bedroom radio playing pop music at that volume. The girl had come home from work, closed up the chickens for the night and slunk upstairs without a word. Mrs Morle sighs. At least her daughter goes out to work, not like those layabouts hanging around with Julian.
Pulling on a cardigan, she goes to the shed. Dry and warm even on the cold days, it smells of sawdust and creosote and of her husband though he’s been dead these last twelve years. It was Harry’s domain, the nails on which he’d hung his tools still visible, spaces on the shelves for his brushes and tins, his work bench up against the wall. Big and solid, just like he was.
Harry never regained consciousness from the stroke he suffered one September afternoon. Grey-faced and mumbling, he lay where he fell on the sitting room mat, his lunch congealing at the table. Over an hour it took for the ambulance to arrive. By then he’d fallen silent, his face a congealed red. As the ambulance men struggled to roll him on to a stretcher, Lynn arrived home from school. Mrs Morle bundled her daughter up the stairs. She didn’t want her daughter’s final memory of her father to be his blank green eyes.
It’s a wood shed now. Every so often, Mrs Morle gives one of the farm lads a few pounds to bring a trailer of wood sawn up into lumps suitable for the Rayburn. Tonight she’ll stack up the stove so it gets hot enough for a big bath that she and Lynn can share. She’ll dry the clothes too; it’s the only heated room in the cottage. ‘What you doing out here, Mum?’ Lynn appears at the door.
‘I’ll bring that in for you,’ and she hauls the basket of wood inside.
‘Thanks, love,’ Mrs Morle calls. She’s a good girl really. ‘It’s your favourite for supper…’
Mrs Morle nestles two pieces of liver in a pan of browning onions and checks the potatoes. It’s no business of hers what they get up to in the big house but now that-girl-Amy has returned those boys will likely be eating something more substantial than beans on toast.
That’s what the boys lived on when that-girl-Amy was away, as far as Mrs Morle could tell from the pans and empty tins stacked in the sink. Apparently the girl’s mother died a few weeks back. So why in blazes had she come back to Mr Stratton’s, leaving her father alone with his grief? She’d come knocking on Mrs Morle’s door yesterday asking for advice on making apple chutney. Didn’t have a clue. Nice enough girl but never been properly trained.
Last weekend when Seymour was down he’d roasted a chicken. The bones and skin were left in the fridge. Mrs Morle threw the lot into a pan with some vegetables and barley and cooked them up to make a soup. Why not, when she was cleaning in the house anyway? Seymour blew her a kiss, cheeky man, when he left on Monday morning in his fancy car.
Lynn sits at the table. ‘I’m starving, Mum. Something smells good.’
‘Mr Stratton has got himself a builder. Apparently he wants Bramble Cottage doing up,’ says Mrs Morle, putting down a plate of food.
Her mouth full, Lynn says: ‘Tell ‘im to get in touch if he needs supplies and what not. I’ll get him a deal. Or perhaps I’ll slip across and see him next time he’s down.’ She carefully piles greens and carrots on to her fork.
‘Julian’s going to be doing some of it.’
‘Some of what?’
‘The building work. What Mr Stratton’s hired is a man to keep an eye on things, the tricky stuff like the roof and electrics. Can’t understand it myself, why he wants to renovate that wreck.’
‘Julian don’t know how to build. He’s soft, he’s lazy,’ scoffs Lynn. She pauses to take another bite. ‘He’s a bit weird, isn’t he?’
‘Just a bit lost, love. He can learn. It’s those friends of his staying at the house. Ignorant lot.’
‘They were in the pub last weekend. Clever types but don’t ‘spect they’ll be able to lift a spade. Nice-looking, mind.’
‘You watch yourself, young lady. I don’t want you getting mixed up with that sort. ‘
‘What sort is that?’
‘Spoilt and