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  Re: How strong is my mind?

  Truestory

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 17.01

  In particular I want to know how to control people’s movements with the power of my mind. For instance stopping them from leaving me.

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  Fizzy Mascara

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 17.05

  Nice try Truestory but if someone’s gonna leave you they’re gonna leave you – there’s lots of mad shit on the internet and none of it’s gonna sort that out!

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  JC

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 17.08

  Jesus Christ Almighty taught us to use the power of the mind – it calls upon God the Father to love us and care for us and guide us in our times of need. IT IS CALLED THE POWER OF PRAYER. Try it Truestory and you may find the FIRE OF CHRIST JESUS BURNING IN YOUR BELLY.

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  SpiritLove

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 17.11

  Just click the link here Truestory and come and join us. The Spirit&Soul Spiritual Community is right here waiting.

  Re: How strong is my mind?

  Truestory

  Date: 3 June 2014

  Time: 17.15

  It would have to be accurate though because there are some people I want to leave and some I do not. For instance I do not want my mother to keep leaving me but I would prefer it if my father left me alone all the time.

  Chapter 5

  The cock-up with the cartridge press felt like the last straw. It may not have been the daftest thing Duncan had ever done, or the most expensive, but it was the wrong cock-up at the wrong time.

  He’d wasted a hundred quid on that press and now his gun was knackered. He’d dropped it twenty feet out of the window because of the dodgy cartridges and it would cost a fortune to put right – except we didn’t have a fortune to put anything right.

  I’d brought Sam back from Jeannie’s and I was in the kitchen with Duncan and the stupid cartridge press.

  ‘You never give me a fuckin’ break.’ Duncan ran his hands through his hair. ‘You want things to go wrong so you can be right.’

  ‘Want things to go wrong!’ I spun round to face him. ‘Want things to go wrong! I pray for the day when things round here don’t go bloody wrong.’

  ‘You think you’re so fucking clever,’ said Duncan.

  I crashed a dirty mug into the sink and the handle came off.

  ‘So fucking clever,’ he said again. ‘What do you want me to do, eh? What?’

  I opened my mouth, but the truth was I didn’t have a clue what we should do about the failing farm and the mounting bills. Not a clue. I stood there holding the cup-less handle.

  ‘What?’ yelled Duncan. ‘What the fuck should I do? If you fucking know everything. Fucking tell me.’

  I flung the handle towards the bin. It hit the side and bounced off across the kitchen floor.

  One thing I did know – Duncan should stop wasting time on half-baked schemes and concentrate on the farm proper. I drew breath, but before I could speak he was off again.

  ‘Go on, tell me.’ He was attacking the press with a spanner, clattering and clanging about.

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I grabbed the broken mug and threw that at the bin too. It smashed straight in and the lid crashed to and fro. ‘Shut up!’ I yelled and readied myself for another yell only to see Sam staring at me with his hands clamped over his ears and his bobble hat pulled down past his eyebrows. He walked over to the stove and gazed into the greasy frying pan.

  ‘Where’s my pasta?’

  Duncan threw down his spanner and it clanged and skidded across the kitchen floor.

  ‘I’ll fucking shut up when you’ve told me what the hell we should do.’

  Sam scrunched up the hat into his fists covering his ears.

  ‘I want my pasta with just butter on.’

  ‘Then I’ll fucking shut up!’ Duncan snatched the spanner back and lobbed it into the scabby box next to the press.

  ‘Not tomato sauce, not grated cheese, not Philadelphia, just butter.’ Sam had his eyes shut now as well as his fists over his ears and was speaking extra clearly as if I was deaf or stupid or something.

  As Duncan kicked the scabby box, Sam started bending over as if he was toppling face forward in slow motion.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ I looked from Duncan to Sam. Were they going to drive me into the Royal Bloody Albert after all? Sam peered at me through his crazy mop of hair poking out of the hat and covering half his face. I tried to drag my thoughts back from cartridges and broken guns and wasted money. I looked at Sam.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘For Chrissakes! What time is it?’ Duncan straightened up and looked at the kitchen clock. It was past milking time and the cows would be shouting.

  Duncan strode to the back door and shoved his feet in his boots. Muttering and swearing under his breath he grabbed his jacket and marched out, slamming the door. Sam flinched at the crash of the latch and for a moment he looked as though he might buckle at the knee.

  ‘Just butter,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing else.’

  I squeezed my fingernails into my palm and felt the sting. I must sound calm.

  ‘It’ll be ready in a minute.’

  ‘Pasta takes twelve minutes,’ said Sam. ‘It is now 17:20hrs. And I want it with just butter.’

  He staggered to his place and gazed at me from under his hat.

  I turned back to the stove and took a deep breath. In for three, hold for three, out for five. That’s what the magazines said. It was vital I stayed calm or Sam might have a meltdown himself. I had to pretend everything was all right even though my heart was thumping and my head was spinning.

  I forced a smile. I needed to distract Sam for twelve minutes. I switched the kettle on and said:

  ‘So what did you get up to this afternoon?’ Then I caught sight of the cartridge press and the broken gun. Shit, I didn’t want to go there again. Change the subject. But it was too late; Sam had squeezed his eyes shut and was clinging to the edge of the table and holding his breath.

  I needed a better distraction.

  ‘Here, count out nineteen pieces – you don’t want to end up with the wrong number, do you?’ I held out the bag of pasta and a bowl. Sam’s eyes opened, he looked at the pasta and the bowl, and then he took them. As he picked out the pasta pieces one at a time and placed them quietly in the bowl he started to breathe again.

  And so did I.

  I didn’t say anything that night when Duncan went off to the pub even though he never went to the Dragon on a Tuesday. He sometimes went on a Wednesday and always on a Friday, but never on a Tuesday. I didn’t care. I kept out of the way until I heard the back door crash and the Land Rover pull out of the yard.

  I liked being at home on my own anyway. The fire was lit and I never felt alone when I’d got a fire. Spring was turning into summer outside but it never got very warm inside the stone walls of Backwoods. A fire was nearly always welcome and the way it crackled and shifted in the grate was company. It was mesmerising; I could stare at it for ages.

  Strictly speaking I wasn’t on my own of course: Sam was upstairs, probably on his computer, but I didn’t count Sam as company. He didn’t see the point of conversation. Talking was for passing brief information only and not to be engaged in lightly. Or sometimes it was for a one-sided imparting of lengthy, possibly technical, information whether the audience was interested or not. Unless it was David Attenborough on low volume – so you practically couldn’t hear it – he hated the noise of the telly and the radio too.

  I put my feet up on the range and felt the heat on the back of my legs. I closed my eyes. I was aware of the cartridge press sitting all innocent beside me with the stacks of casings and shot and all the other crap that had come with it. The boxes were bashed up and filthy as though they’d been dumped in som
eone’s garden shed for twenty years waiting for some idiot to come along and buy them.

  Well Duncan was your man – after all he’d bought the caravan that was currently rotting away in the orchard. Five hundred quid he’d given for that. A scabby old tourer, for God’s sake, the thing was forty years old.

  He’d turned up last summer as pleased as Punch with it hooked up behind his Land Rover. It could be rented out for holidays, he said. Lots of people wanted to go to the country on their holidays. Or it could be used for the overspill if the Green Dragon was full. I was speechless and gaped at him as he patted the stupid thing and smiled at it. The pub was four miles away. Did it even take guests? And what about a bathroom? Who the hell went on holiday where there wasn’t a proper bathroom?

  Duncan said we had a bathroom and people could use that or they could use the outside washhouse – people liked it authentic nowadays – and I had to roll up my sleeves and get stuck in if we weren’t going to lose the farm.

  I nearly threw something at him then. In fact I thought I’d heard him wrong. Roll up my sleeves and get stuck in? I was stuck in all right – I was stuck in the middle of home schooling our son, a boy who had refused to leave the farm for over six years and didn’t look like he was planning to leave it any time soon.

  But Duncan ignored that and said it was all about diversifying. Farming was in the doldrums and it wasn’t going to get any better, not now, not ever, and so farmers like him had to explore all the options for maximising income.

  He’d read it in the Farmers Weekly.

  I shook my head and asked when exactly the Farmers Weekly had suggested lumbering yourself with a heap of junk like that old caravan.

  He’d hooked up some long trailing electricity wires to the caravan, and brushed it out and got me to put the curtains through the wash. He’d whistled as he worked like Cinderella or Snow bloody White or whoever it was. Then he’d run over the outside with the power washer. But it still looked shabby and depressing and, despite all the scrubbing, not much cleaner. In fact, all the cleaning had done was to show up the rust spots, the chips and the worn-out bits.

  After a week or two he’d stopped going on about it.

  The caravan was still there mouldering away like the bloody eyesore it was.

  Sam wasn’t allowed to play in it mind you, even if he’d wanted to. Because at the end of the day Duncan said it was an investment and you never knew, you just never knew what opportunities that caravan might throw up.

  He landed back from the pub after midnight and I could hear voices as he opened the kitchen door. I couldn’t imagine who he was talking to. His drinking pals stayed in the pub and he hadn’t brought them back since Sam was tiny and woke at the slightest sound and shrieked at the glimpse of a strange face.

  He stuck his head round the door to see if I was still up and kind of raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement. I wouldn’t have been up if I hadn’t fallen asleep in the armchair and now I had a crick in my neck and a sore back. I struggled up, trying to look awake, as Duncan came in followed by a scruffy bloke I’d never set eyes on before. He was carrying a big rucksack.

  ‘This is Larry Dougal,’ he said, and the homeless-looking bloke raised his hand.

  ‘Could I borrow your lavvie?’ he said. Duncan pointed him to the outside washhouse.

  ‘He’ll be a good help around the place,’ Duncan whispered to me. He looked excited. ‘He reckons he can turn his hand to anything: welding, fencing, anything.’

  ‘Who is he?’ I hissed. ‘And where’s he from?’

  ‘He’s a good bloke,’ he said.

  ‘But who is he?’

  Duncan hummed and hawed but the upshot was the guy was some kind of travelling worker he’d just found in the pub.

  ‘You’ve brought back a bloody tramp?’ I said.

  ‘No, he works here and there. Knows his stuff.’

  ‘So he’s a drifter who’s washed up in the pub on his way to friggin’ nowhere, and you’ve brought him here. Bloody great.’

  Duncan looked pissed off, but hell, I was pissed off too. In fact, I wanted to strangle him.

  ‘What about Sam?’ I said. ‘How’s Sam going to take it?’

  Duncan’s face closed. ‘It’s about time he met a few folk. It’ll do him good.’

  ‘And where the hell’s he going to sleep? Our spare room’s empty except for three buckets catching the rain.’ I fixed Duncan with a hard stare. ‘And he’s not dossing on the sofa.’

  Most of the farmhouse downstairs was taken up with one big room with a massive table in the middle, cooker and kitchen stuff at one side and easy chairs, a sofa, range and a telly at the other. I wouldn’t have put it past Duncan to shack this bloke up in a sleeping bag in the corner.

  ‘He’ll sleep in the caravan.’ A look of triumph passed over Duncan’s face. ‘The caravan will be just right for him.’

  This was worse than holiday makers.

  ‘We can’t afford to pay him,’ I said. ‘We can hardly afford to pay ourselves.’ I muttered this last bit because Larry had come back from the loo. He wandered across to the range to warm his hands over the embers, pretending he couldn’t hear.

  ‘It’s all taken care of, isn’t it, Larry?’ Larry smiled a bit. ‘We’ll explain in the morning,’ said Duncan. ‘We’d better go and get the caravan sorted.’

  When they went outside with torches and a stack of old blankets, Duncan was whistling.

  Larry smiled at me as he pulled the door to and I couldn’t tell if he was smirking or trying to apologise but it didn’t matter; he was leaving first thing in the morning and that was that.

  Chapter 6

  I got up next morning to find Duncan had already finished milking because Larry had been a Good Samaritan since first light.

  They’d got the frying pan out and the minute I came downstairs I was presented with a doorstep bacon butty.

  It was hard to turn down – it had melted butter running out the side and the bacon looked lovely and crispy – but I managed it. They couldn’t buy me with a butty.

  They didn’t seem to register my protest; they cut it in two and polished it off between them. They were deep in conversation about crop yields and optimum temperatures and other farming stuff they seemed to be animated about.

  I leant against the cooker nursing a cup of coffee all knotted up inside worrying about what Sam would do when he came down and saw this bloke with his feet under the table.

  I willed them to talk quietly, not to laugh too loudly, not to ask him any questions, not to pass comment on his food or his appearance or anything else, not to touch him, for God’s sake, not to even look at him.

  I watched the clock tick round to 8.25, straining to hear Sam padding down the stairs. I got his favourite bowl and spoon ready and put them on the table beside the Weetabix and the sugar and milk. I clattered the bowl down and clanged the spoon to show how pissed off I was. Duncan hadn’t even got Larry to sit at the other end of the table, he was sitting right next to Sam’s place.

  When I heard Sam trotting downstairs I froze. What was it going to be? A tantrum? Hiding? Hurting himself? Not eating for 24 hours?

  Sam came through the stair door and stood there for a long, long moment looking at this weird guy with a blue bandana and a gold earring eating a bacon butty with brown sauce dripping out the side, and who had a map partly spread out on the table in front of him.

  Sam glanced at me.

  ‘You’re all right,’ I said. I tried to make it sound like this happened every morning. ‘Come and get your breakfast.’

  He stood stock still, gazing at Larry and his butty and his map.

  ‘Get your Weetabix,’ I said, pushing his bowl as far from Larry as I could. ‘Come on.’

  He sidled up to the table but he did not sit down. He stood as far away as possible and in slow motion put the sugar and milk on his Weetabix then picked up his spoon and mushed it up like he did every day. Except today his eyes were fixed the whole time on Larry
and his map.

  I’d have put money on a scruffy stranger at the breakfast table making Sam do a runner, but no. He took in the bandana round Larry’s head, the stubbly face, the pierced ear, the sunburned arms, the dirt under his fingernails, the partly-folded map, staring and staring like I hadn’t told him a thousand times it was rude.

  Larry didn’t seem to care – or even to notice at first – then he looked up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned at Sam.

  ‘How’s you, son?’

  I froze. Shut up, I thought. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

  But Sam kept staring as he scooped up his Weetabix at arm’s length from the table and posted it into his mouth.

  ‘What are you up to today, then?’ said Larry.

  Duncan bashed his mug down and said:

  ‘Answer him, Sam!’

  Sam took a step back.

  ‘Stop shouting,’ I said. ‘That’s not going to help.’

  ‘Sit down, Sam,’ said Duncan a bit more calmly. ‘And answer him.’

  Sam sank straight to the floor in one rather graceful movement and sat cross-legged, his spoon poised in mid-air. In a faint voice, he said: ‘Those sentences did not make grammatical sense. And I am not his son.’ Duncan scowled but Larry burst out laughing. Pointing at Sam, he said:

  ‘I bet you’re right, son.’

  Sam blinked at him.

  Sam saw next to nobody: the vet and the milk-tanker driver and the odd travelling salesman flogging cow food or whatever. But when they were about he’d only watch from the window keeping his distance so they couldn’t see him. Then there was Jeannie, Dr Watts – when we’d called him out a couple of times – and the bloke from the education department who came to make sure I was teaching him something. That was about it. When other visitors came – and let’s face it there weren’t many after years of not being asked – Sam stayed out of sight.

  Larry tried again. ‘So what you up to today then?’