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Sport 39: 2011

Brothers Blind

page 97

Brothers Blind

Nobody used the blind for shooting anymore. Ducks had stopped flying over that way, or maybe they never really did. At least, during the years Joseph lived in his parents’ house he had never heard a gunshot split the air above the marsh. His father liked to say that a few times, before Joseph or his older brother were born, men and their quiet sons had come down the road with rifles, all dressed up in camouflage. Joseph’s father said he talked to them, leaning over the gate as they passed on their way back and they had told him they had shot at nothing, had seen nothing go flying over.

Joseph first started going down to the duck blind in the middle of winter. He had just started high school in the city and his brother had left home, to go to university. It was a lonely time and when he got in from school, two buses later, he liked to go walking through the fields around his house, right down to where they sloped into the marsh and finally into the grey breadth of the sea. Joseph wore a red woollen hat on these walks which he pulled down low over his ears. He would often pick up a stick of a suitable length and swing along with it, pocking the ground beside him as he went.

He had always squinted at the duck blind if he walked down to the edge of the marshland but had never gone out to it. He thought it looked like something an animal would build, a foxes’ den or a woven nest. It had a low roof held up on sapling poles, and it knelt behind a stand of sedge and toi toi. Around the blind the marshland was shaggy with reeds and glasswort. The reeds cast their needled reflections down into the brown water and when you saw them from shore, doubled up like that, they looked like seismograph readings. Joseph’s father said the blind had been there since he had bought the house, back in ′72.

*

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The first time Joseph ever went there it was low tide and the marsh had emptied out of water. He had rubber boots on and walked carefully on the velvet mud, watching the lace crabs hurry into their holes as he went by. The mud sucked at his boot heels, and when he looked behind, silver wedges of water were gathering in each print. The blind was not deep into the marshland and you could walk there at a high tide if you had rubber boots on, as there were clumps of tussock and sod that always remained above the waterline. The sea beyond the blind was very wide and pale, a robe of worn-out silk. Joseph didn’t know exactly why he went there that day, or why he never had before.

When he arrived he saw the blind was raised slightly, and sturdy looking, a different structure from what he had thought he’d seen all those times from the shore. The body of it was held up on poles like a stilt house and it was all lashed together, with a roof made the same way, laid over with manuka brush that peeled in grey ribbons. The ribbons blew in the wind and made a coarse rustling and Joseph stood in the tussock staring. He stood like that for a while, feeling the span of the earth moving out in all directions from his feet.

It was dry when he eventually crept inside and it smelt no different from the marsh because the salty sea wind blew right through its lattice walls. It would not be dry in a storm, Joseph thought, but it was dry that day with the wood creaking and easing as he half crouched to move around inside. There was nothing in the blind apart from an upturned wooden nail box and Joseph sat down on this and stared through at the marsh outside, newly barred by the poles.

Over dinner that night he told his parents he had been walking and had gone out to the duck blind.

His father looked up from his plate, which he was swabbing with a stubbed potato. ‘Anything good?’ he said. ‘I’m surprised it’s still standing.’

‘There was nothing there,’ Joseph said. ‘Just a wooden box.’

His mother looked stern. ‘Joseph,’ she said, ‘please be careful the tide doesn’t come in and leave you stranded.’

‘I walked there on the tussock the whole way, it’s not as far as it looks,’ Joseph said.

His mother was always concerned with the stealthy movements of tides, the marooning of her children.

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‘He could sleep the night there if the tide came in,’ his father said, to annoy her. ‘Snug as a bug—’

‘In a rug,’ Joseph said, capping him and smiling.

His mother frowned. ‘You’d freeze to death.’

‘Men used to come down our road,’ said his father.

‘I know, Dad.’

‘Before you were born, Joseph, you or Edward. It happened a few times. They’d go out there to shoot and come back with nothing, not a single feather. I’ve never seen a duck fly over since we bought this place.’

‘They brought those decoy ducks with them,’ his mother said.

‘That’s right,’ his father said. ‘Plastic decoy ducks. Any of those floating around out there Joseph?’

‘I didn’t see any,’ said Joseph. He pronged a soft strip of carrot with his fork and didn’t say anything else about the duck blind.

*

After his first visit Joseph started going out there whenever he could. If it was a nice day he would hurry from the bus stop to the house and put his boots on, stride down through the marshlands to the blind. He took things and left them there. He took a small wooden chest from the shed and he took binoculars. He took a camping stove and a blanket and some of his father’s old westerns. He would huddle in there, wrapped in the rough blanket, which smelt of summer grass still, and read them in the fading light: To Love a Gun, None but the Fast, No Future for Marshall Cain, Without a Badge.

‘What’s wrong with your bedroom?’ his mother said, when she caught him with new supplies. But his bedroom had nothing to do with it. When Joseph was sitting on the bus he dreamed about the duck blind. He wanted to make it watertight, lace a tarpaulin to its walls. He wanted a real rug for the floor and a set of shelves. If it was watertight he could put pictures on the wall. If it was watertight he could bring a friend out and show it to them. One day he could bring a girl.

There was only one week in the winter term where Joseph didn’t go out to the duck blind. It stormed for four days and poured with rain and the marsh flooded. The sea turned the colour of milky tea, thepage 100 choppy tides and rain chafing at the marsh and mixing the sea waters with the mud.

As soon as the weather cleared and the water fell away Joseph went out, worried that he had forgotten to put the binoculars into the chest or that the westerns might have turned to pulp in the rain. The marsh breathed out as he walked over it, the sun lifting steam and a warm loamy smell.

The blind was damp and steaming too, the sun drawing out curls of vapour from the wood. Some of the brush had been dislodged from the roof and had disappeared, swept out to elsewhere by the tide.

When Joseph went inside he could tell straight away that someone else had been there. There were changes that bad weather couldn’t make. He saw that the chest was shifted from where he kept it flush against the wall and when he opened it the westerns were a mess, like someone had rifled through them and then tossed them back, disappointed. Fuel was spilt from the camp stove and had soaked into the wood. He could smell the naphtha singe of it, sharp above the soft smells of the rain and fresh mud.

And then there was the pig tusk. It was lying on the wooden nail box which Joseph used for a seat. He picked it up and curled his fingers around it. It was a perfect sickle shape and tarnished yellow, like nicotine teeth. He ran his hands over it and felt how it was worn sleek. He thought about how it must have been held and passed from hand to hand and held. He crouched there in his small den, the tusk in one hand. When he left he took it and the binoculars away; they were a nice pair that used to belong to his grandfather and he didn’t want them stolen.

He carried the tusk in his coat pocket the next day and took it to school. On the bus he put his hand around it and grasped it firmly. He thought about the old duck hunters crouched in the blind with their quiet sons. He saw them poke the long rifles through chinks in the brush and resettle their deerstalker hats. During class he dipped his hand to his pocket again and held the tusk and after school he went back out to the blind. His mother called out to him when he was at the end of the driveway but he pretended not to hear. He thought it was conceivable that the wind had plucked her voice away and this was what he told her later, when she chided him. The binoculars hungpage 101 around his neck, banging against his sternum with each step. He wanted to know that the place was as he had left it.

The shadows of gulls chased across the mud as he walked through the marsh. He saw how they were dwindling stretching with the changing contours of the earth. When Joseph got there the blind felt undisturbed. The low, dark room was just as he had left it with the chest tucked against the wall and everything laid neatly inside. He began to think that perhaps it was someone out walking who had come in and had a careless look around on their way past, on the morning that the storm cleared. They wouldn’t have thought of the things in the blind as possessions, instead they would have imagined they were discarded by the duck hunters a long time ago.

Joseph thought about this and felt better. He read for a while, a good book called Whiskey Promises, and then he scanned the marsh with his grandfather’s binoculars. He had been seeing harriers lately, above the fields around his house. He liked how they flew with their wings firm against the up currents, turning and idling; navigating along something that he couldn’t see. The very ends of their wings curled up, like a waxed moustache.

His binoculars were trained up high to find the braced shape of the harriers but as he swept across to further fields with them he caught sight of a boy on the marsh. It was a funny figure to see. The boy looked as tall as a grown man, but he was so narrow that he seemed hardly older than Joseph. He had long wisping hair like a girl’s and he walked with one shoulder pitching up to his ear and dropping again.

Joseph watched through the binoculars and saw the boy advance jerkily to the marsh edge. He was a scarecrow with the stubbled fields broadening like a pan behind him. It looked like he was planning on walking straight to the duck blind and Joseph waited, tense against the wall. When the other boy got to a point where the ground went soft he stopped and kicked about idly in the reeds a bit. Then he looked up at the blind and seemed to see something. Joseph wondered if the binoculars had caught the sun and flared up. He stayed still, pressing the binoculars hard against his eye sockets. His picture of the boy through the binoculars tightened in the middle like a figure eight, draining to black around the edges. The boy looked at the blindpage 102 for a while and then walked off without looking back. Joseph wondered if he didn’t go any further because he was wearing good leather shoes.

As soon as Joseph saw him there on the shore he knew that it was this tall boy who had come into the duck blind. He knew that it was this boy’s tusk that he was carrying in his coat. He felt sure of it and walked home thinking only about him, his long body and the funny pitching walk. No one his age had long hair, or dressed like that.

*

The next day Joseph went out to the blind again, it was a Saturday and so he left after lunch. Walking through the fields he looked behind him to see if the boy was coming. He took string with him and carried some spare planks and white paint. Again, he wore the binoculars on his chest. He was going to make a ‘Keep Out’ sign and as he walked across the marsh he was loaded with the planks, listing to one side with the weight of his equipment. His footprints behind him were deeper on one side, a ridge of mud pushed up by his left instep. At the blind he dropped the planks and pulled his woollen hat off, feeling heat rising from his temples. A scrape came from inside the blind, a scrape and a scuffling sound and Joseph, startled, turned to the low doorway.

He was there, the tall boy, coming out awkwardly with his head first.

‘What are you doing here?’ Joseph said.

‘Just having a look,’ the boy said. ‘I left something here.’ His voice was high and aggrieved sounding.

‘This is my place.’ Joseph tried to make his stance wider. ‘I’ve been coming here all winter.’

‘It used to be mine. My uncles built it, so did my dad.’

‘That’s not true.’

‘It is. They’re hunters.’

‘There aren’t any ducks here,’ Joseph said. He waved an arm at the empty sky.

‘Exactly, that’s why I had it. Now you’ve got it.’ The boy pushed his long hair behind his ears.

Joseph thought the boy had a strange pious face, his eyes looked like they would suit being upturned to heaven and his mouth waspage 103 drawn into a pink knot. If he were at Joseph’s school he would be teased for looking like a girl.

‘I’ll go,’ the boy said. ‘I thought I left something here, that’s all.’ He turned and began walking off.

‘Wait!’ Joseph called. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Rowan,’ the boy said. He had turned around.

‘I’m Joseph. Did your dad really build this?’

Rowan nodded. He walked back to where Joseph stood. He seemed to be trying to control the leaping of his shoulder, tensing his jaw so a line came in his cheek.

‘Is this what you left?’ Joseph drew the sickle tusk from his coat pocket.

When Rowan saw it he started forward and Joseph let him take it from his open palm, feeling a small dismay as the smooth thing left him. Rowan ran his hand over the tusk almost gingerly, the way you would test the sharpness of a knife. ‘So you had it,’ Rowan said. But he said it to himself instead of accusing Joseph.

‘Sorry,’ Joseph said. ‘I just wanted to know who left it.’

‘I didn’t mean to. I came in the storm.’

‘Did your dad really help build this place?’

Rowan nodded. He was looking down at his tusk, still thoughtful. Then he looked back up to Joseph. ‘He helped build it but there aren’t any ducks here anymore, like you said. And you’ve made it better than I ever did.’

‘We could share it,’ said Joseph. He knew that if your father built something, you had a rightful claim to it.

‘If you don’t mind,’ Rowan said. ‘I mean, I don’t.’

Then Joseph told Rowan about the harriers, how he had carried the tusk in his pocket and had seen him on the edge of the marsh in his good shoes. And Rowan told Joseph about getting caught in the storm. He said he tried to read the westerns but it was too dark, that he had tried to light the stove but the rain came in. He said he wondered about the boy who was coming out there, leaving all his things there.

Later, Rowan gave Joseph his hand to shake. His fingers were long and thin and when Joseph shook it it felt like his finger bones were loose and rolling about under the skin.

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‘We have to call ourselves something,’ Rowan said, ‘if this is going to be our place.’

There was something strange about Rowan, but Joseph thought he liked him. He talked nervously and didn’t really laugh. When Joseph said something rough or teasing, the way he would talk with his brother, Rowan would frown slightly. He sat against the wall of the blind and talked instead about how you would go about angling rifles through the walls, pushing his hair behind his ears when it fell forward.

Joseph said that they could call themselves the Blind Brothers and Rowan said Brothers Blind would be better, reversing it like the Brothers Grimm. By then the sun was setting above the marsh and Joseph still hadn’t gone home for dinner. The two boys leaned back against the walls and looked at each other.

‘No one else can come here now,’ Rowan said, ‘and we’re the Brothers Blind.’ His eyes were grey, a strange foil colour.

Joseph remembered how that morning he had watched a grey cat pick its way across the marsh and had laughed at it, the dainty way it walked on mud. When he told her his mother had said that the cat was probably learning to catch the lace crabs.

*

After their first meeting Joseph would see Rowan in the afternoons and on the weekends. They made up ways to meet each other at the duck blind. If Joseph was to meet Rowan there he would leave a sign at the gate, usually a stick stuck up in the ground. If Joseph couldn’t make it out to the blind he would take the stick and break it in half, place the two ends into a cross so Rowan would see the sign before he had walked all that distance out to the blind.

Though Rowan must have lived nearby the boys never talked about their houses. Their friendship started at the fringe of the marshes, and ended there too. Rowan was homeschooled by his mother and so could nearly always get away in the afternoon. Most days when he got home Joseph found the signal stick at his gate and, most days, he left it there instead of breaking it.

Joseph thought that it was for the best that Rowan was homeschooled because he couldn’t imagine him in a normal school, folding his long legs beneath a desk or cutting his hair short. If hepage 105 came pitching and tossing his way down the main drive the other boys would have no mercy.

One night at dinner Joseph’s mother asked him about the boy she had seen idling at the gate, holding a long stick in his hand.

‘A tall blond boy,’ she said. ‘Do you know him Joseph?’

‘That’s Rowan,’ said Joseph carelessly. ‘He comes out to the blind with me sometimes.’

‘Rowan,’ said his mother. ‘Is that Rowan Hock?’

Joseph shook his head, he didn’t know Rowan’s last name.

‘That must be Jack Hock’s son,’ she said. ‘He’s tall like his father was, a nice face too.’

Joseph was surprised at the easy way his mother could place Rowan. He had never really thought of him as someone his parents knew of, or as part of one of the families like his that lived over the saddle, bordering the marsh.

‘Is he a good friend of yours, Jo?’ asked his father.

‘He’s all right. He’s funny.’

‘He’s had a hard time,’ said his mother.

Joseph drank his water so fast it went stiff in his throat. He didn’t want to hear about Rowan like this, at least not in his mother’s concerned voice.

‘His father was killed hunting wasn’t he?’ asked Joseph’s father, without looking up from his plate.

‘That’s what was said,’ said his mother. ‘But I always thought there was something funny about it.’

‘I thought he was mistaken for a pig, took a bullet right through the guts.’

‘We’re eating,’ said Joseph’s mother.

‘Not a nice way to go. I met him once, too. He came down with the hunters to the blind. He didn’t seem the hunting sort.’

‘Well the Hocks are into hunting,’ said his mother. ‘I wonder if he had a choice.’

Joseph excused himself and went to the bathroom, pissing out a torrent of water. When he came back in the phone was shrilling and his mother moving to pick it up. He slid into his seat.

His mother answered the phone and turned around with it held to her ear, her eyes registering surprise. ‘It’s Edward!’ she said into thepage 106 room. She flattened the fraying hairs at her hairline girlishly, leaning into the doorframe.

Joseph cleared the table slowly. His father read the newspaper, pulling the sheets tight and shaking them out after turning each page. Joseph washed the dishes like he always did, placing the plates in the rack, making a row of clean full moons. His mother’s voice came through to him softly, not words but the settling and re-settling of her vowels.

When he finished the dishes he went out to the dining room.

‘Edward’s coming home,’ said his mother when she saw him. ‘He’s coming home for a visit.’

‘Oh,’ said Joseph. ‘I can show him the duck blind.’

‘You can tell him about how we’ve banished you to the marshland,’ said Joseph’s father, ‘your new windy bedroom.’

‘I will,’ said Joseph, ‘I might.’

*

‘What’s your brother like?’ said Rowan. They were walking side by side through the marsh, passing a football back and forth.

‘He’s all right,’ said Joseph. ‘He’s old.’

‘How old?’

‘Oh, twenty.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘Well he’s my brother,’ said Joseph. He kicked the ball to Rowan, who stopped it with his knee.

At his school Joseph had started playing soccer in the Under 15s. It was just the reserve team, but he liked it. After practice the team would wait together for their parents to come and pick them up. Joseph’s father had found Edward’s old shin pads and boots and had given them to Joseph. The shin pads were too big and he would undo the elastic but leave them on while he fooled around waiting to be picked up, feel them shucking up and down masterfully inside his socks.

Rowan’s body would do wild things as they walked, an arm sticking straight suddenly as he ran at the ball, or his head rearing back. He could pass the ball well though, even though his body did that.

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‘Are you the best in the team?’ Rowan asked Joseph.

‘No, I’m all right though. I’m the best at being on the wing.’

‘Who’s the best in the team?’

‘Probably Darren,’ said Joseph.

Rowan liked to hear about the other boys, he wanted to know how they looked and whether they were good at school. Joseph told him that Darren would go to the A team by next season, but right then he was the star. He told Rowan how Darren had a twin sister, Melanie. They had the same curly hair and almost the same face, except hers was a sweeter version. When she came with their mother to pick Darren up from practice some of the older boys would call out ‘Marry me, Melanie!’ as they came in glowing from the field. Darren would run after them and hook his arm around their necks in anger, but Joseph said that he thought that Darren was proud at the same time. He told Rowan how his team called him Knuckles, because of his bony knees. It made him happy when he was flying up the side and someone would call the word out, right before the ball went hurling towards his feet.

‘Do you mind?’ Rowan asked. ‘Being called Knuckle?’

‘Knuckles,’ Joseph said. ‘Ss. Do you mind being called a shit sack?’

‘No one does call me that,’ Rowan said, he looked hurt.

‘I know,’ said Joseph. ‘I was kidding.’

‘Do Darren and Melanie look the same?’

‘Yes, but Melanie’s pretty.’

‘Of course she is. A boy can’t be pretty.’

Joseph looked at Rowan’s face and thought how a boy could easily be pretty, but he would never say that out loud. ‘Melanie is pretty,’ Joseph said.

He hefted the ball to Rowan who dribbled it thoughtfully for a while.‘And Darren’s the best on the team?’

‘By miles,’ said Joseph. ‘He’ll go in the A team for sure but it’s too late to switch now.’

‘Does he mind?’

‘Mind what?’

‘Playing with the dud team?’

‘We aren’t the duds, you shit sack!’ Joseph tackled the ball from Rowan and ran off with it, dribbling between the glasswort clumps.page 108 Gulls flew bleating overhead and Rowan launched himself after Joseph, to catch him up.

‘I was making a joke,’ said Rowan. He came level and grinned sidelong at Joseph.

Inside the blind they leaned back against the walls, feeling the ridges of the wood press through to their backs.

‘We have to bring rifles out here,’ said Rowan. ‘We have to have rifles out here, poke them through the slots.’ This was something he always returned to.

‘There’s nothing to shoot at,’ said Joseph.

‘We could shoot seagulls,’ he said, ‘or make targets.’

‘We haven’t got any guns.’

‘There’s some at my house,’ said Rowan. ‘My dad and my uncles, they have lots of them.’

‘Do you know how to use them?’

‘I’ve seen them used a hundred times,’

Joseph shook his head. ‘There isn’t anything to shoot,’ he said.

Rowan opened his mouth as if to say something and then stopped. Joseph angled his head up and peered out of the vents. By then the evenings were getting lighter, the season turning toward spring. Tiny white flowers were appearing on the marsh pimpernels and he was sick of Rowan’s talk about the guns. The duck blind seemed close about him, a cage, and he hunkered to a crouch and moved out of the low door.

‘I’m going home,’ he said, slithering out. ‘We’re having an early dinner.’

‘Are you coming out tomorrow?’ Rowan asked, still from inside the blind.

Joseph straightened up, and turned his body toward the sea. The evening was sweet and felt like a bed being made around him, the cool dome of it drifting down like a fresh sheet.

‘I don’t know. I’ve got practice tomorrow.’

Rowan followed him out and straightened up into the evening too, ending up a head and shoulders taller than Joseph. ‘What about Saturday?’

‘Edward’s home this weekend,’ he said.

They walked back together, to where the stubbled fields subsidedpage 109 into the marsh, and then they parted.

‘Brothers,’ called Rowan, when he was a stretch away from Joseph. ‘Brothers Blind!’

Joseph turned and waved, but didn’t say it back. He watched Rowan’s tall body move away from him, hop-stepping through the needle grass.

*

After soccer practice Joseph waited with the other boys, sitting on the bleachers at the edge of the school field. He dangled his legs, looking down at where his ruddy knees disappeared into his socks.

When the station wagon pulled up to the border of the field he saw that for a surprise Edward was in the front seat. Edward wound down the window.

‘Are those my boots?’ he asked, as Joseph clopped up, stamping wads of grassy soil onto the concrete as he went.

‘And your shin pads too,’ said Joseph’s father, hooking an arm out the window and giving the coach a brisk salute.

Joseph got into the back.

‘Why didn’t you get him new ones?’ asked Edward. ‘Those are too big.’

‘He’ll grow into them.’

‘He looks like a weed,’ said Edward, ‘like he’s got shields on his shins!’

‘I like them,’ said Joseph. ‘They’re fine.’

They drove home. Edward and his father talked about university. Joseph couldn’t work out if papers were exam papers or essays. He didn’t ask. He looked down at his enormous shins.

Edward had grown a dark beard. It cupped his chin and made him foreign, with his teeth chiming suddenly when he laughed. He dressed differently too. When he lived at home he just wore old T-shirts and loose jeans, spent his time disassembling bicycles in the shed, disappearing in his car on the weekends. Now he wore a buttoned shirt and tighter trousers. Joseph saw how his parents leaned into Edward’s words, nodding before he had even made full sentences.

‘Joseph lives out on the marsh now,’ his father said after dinner. This was an old joke now, one he liked to make.

‘Oh yeah?’ said Edward.

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‘In the old duck blind,’ said his father. ‘He never comes home. He reeks of brine. Eats crabs for every meal.’

Edward laughed. ‘I got a whiff of that in the car,’ he said. He nudged Joseph who smiled tightly into his plate.

‘He’s made a little hut out there,’ said Joseph’s mother. She smiled appeasement at him. ‘He won’t show us it.’

‘You going to take me out there, Jo?’

Joseph tucked his chin in assent.

‘I’ll find my old rifle,’ said Edward. ‘We can shoot the seagulls.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ said his mother.

‘I would,’ said Edward. ‘I make my own rules now.’ He grinned at his mother.

Joseph looked out from under his fringe. ‘You still keep your rifle here?’ he asked.

The next morning Joseph woke up late. He lay in bed listening to the sounds his family made downstairs, the way the pelt of the shower could be felt in the pipes inside his wall, the measured clank of his mother putting last night’s dishes away. When he got up he went directly to his bedroom window. If he angled his body right he could see down to the gate. Like he’d expected there was a long stick set in the ground at the mouth of the driveway, where the verge turned into tarmac. Rowan’s doing. Joseph looked at the admonishing shape it made against the gravel.

His brother teased him for sleeping in, rustling his hair when he appeared in the kitchen. After he had eaten breakfast Joseph slipped on his father’s boots that he kept beside the door and went down to the end of the driveway. His bare feet moved loosely inside the big boots, the grit inside them feeling strange on the soles of his sleepy feet. At the gate he plucked the stick from the soil and snapped it in two, laying it back down in a cross shape on the ground. Joseph thought Rowan must have come by early while he was still curled in sleep and he imagined that long figure paused at the gate, looking down the drive at the house.

Edward found the rifle in a box of his old things kept in the back of the shed. It was a long, lean shape, with potential in its length andpage 111 polish. Joseph handled it carefully when his brother passed it to him, feeling unsure of what it might do of its own accord.

‘You going to show me this duck blind of yours?’ asked Edward. ‘We can set up like hunters.’

‘Ducks don’t fly over there,’ said Joseph. He felt tired of explaining this.

‘We can just have a go,’ said Edward. ‘Set up tin cans to shoot at.’

Edward looked more like his old self, wearing soft jeans he’d found in his bedroom. He had given in to being at home, the varnish slowly fading, and Joseph felt like he could nearly talk to him again.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to shoot seagulls.’

‘Wuss,’ said his brother, but he was kidding.

They walked out along the marsh together. Edward carried the rifle and Joseph snapped off the plumy head of a toi toi and took it with him like a flag. He wore his red hat pulled down low and when Edward let him have a turn carrying the gun he swaggered with it, like a soldier.

He was anxious as they got closer to the blind, realising then that no one had ever been there apart from him and Rowan.

‘I keep Granddad’s binoculars out here,’ he said, ‘so don’t tell Dad.’

‘What do you use binoculars for?’ said his brother. ‘There’s only mud to look at.’

‘There’s harriers here,’ said Joseph. ‘They hunt above the fields. I’ve seen them kill things.’ It was true. He’d often seen them plummet down to the fields and then lift off, something held in their feet. He liked how they flew off modestly, like nothing had happened.

‘We could shoot those,’ said Edward.

‘You can’t shoot birds of prey,’ said Joseph. ‘It’s illegal.’ He didn’t know if it was, but it seemed likely and Edward didn’t disagree.

Edward was impressed by the blind. Even though he was the same height as Rowan his big frame seemed too big for it, Joseph thought, as he watched his brother bend down and lever himself inside. Once he was in Joseph passed him the rifle and Edward eased himself over to lean against the far wall.

‘This is great, Jo,’ he said.

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Joseph followed him in and showed him the things he kept out there, opening the chest and lifting out the camp stove, the binoculars and the blanket.

‘Does Mum know you’ve got that out here?’ asked Edward. ‘She’ll think you’re going to set yourself on fire.’

‘She already thinks I’m going to get swept out to sea.’

‘This place would go up though. Like a funeral pyre.’ Edward ran his hand over the wooden walls. ‘Like a bier,’ he said, ‘like the way they burnt Achilles.’

‘I don’t really use the stove very often,’ said Joseph.

Really, he had never used the stove but liked to have it there in case.

Edward took the binoculars and put them around his neck. He lay the rifle down on the nail box and moved forward to peer out through a chink in the walls.

‘It’s like a stronghold here,’ he said. ‘I wish we had bows and arrows.’

Joseph leaned against the wall and watched his brother scan the marsh. It did feel like a stronghold, with the two of them in there and the slim rifle laid across the nail box. The sunlight filtered into the blind through the brush laden roof and he felt its warm weight on the top of his head.

‘Hang on, who’s this?’ said Edward. He leaned forward into the gap in the walls with the binoculars. ‘Maybe it’s the enemy!’

Joseph moved to his side and peered through the gap. Even without binoculars Rowan’s spindly figure was clear to him. He carried something across his chest and stood at the edge of the marsh. Joseph thought of the snapped stick, waiting at the gate.

‘He’s got a gun!’ said Edward excitedly. ‘He’s a weird looking kid, have a look Joseph.’

Warily, Joseph took the binoculars and looked through them. He could imagine the virtuous expression on Rowan’s face, the small way he held his mouth.

‘See!’ said Edward. ‘Do you think he’ll come out here?’

‘Maybe,’ said Joseph. He didn’t know what to say.

‘He’s walking, he’s coming this way!’ said Edward. ‘I could fire a shot, give him a scare.’

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‘Don’t,’ said Joseph.

‘He’s got a gun too, Jo’ said Edward. ‘It’s practically self defence.’

‘Don’t,’ said Joseph. He watched Rowan get closer. ‘I know him, that’s all.’

‘You know him?’

‘Yeah, he’s come out here a few times with me.’

‘Can he take a joke?’

Joseph shrugged. ‘I don’t think we should shoot him, that’s all.’ He moved toward the entrance of the blind.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m just going to wave to him,’ said Joseph. ‘OK?’

Joseph stood in the mud and watched Rowan walking. When he thought he would hear him, he yelled out his name and waved. Rowan stopped and then saw him and waved back, his movements uncertain. Joseph waved again, his arm swiping. Then a gunshot split the air above the marsh and he ducked involuntarily. In his head the sound was like a tightly closed bud, flying forward. For a moment he couldn’t think about who had fired and then saw the end of Edward’s rifle poking upwards through the chink.

‘What are you doing?’ he said. Edward pushed his face out the door, grinning broadly through his new beard.

‘Just making your friend jump,’ he said.

Joseph looked across the salt meadow. Rowan was standing still, his face still blurred by the distance. The marsh seemed very large between them, the sedge and reeds could have been at least a hundred miles. Then Rowan moved his arms at his side, lifted and turned something.

‘Holy shit!’ said Edward from inside. He sounded gleeful. ‘He’s going for his gun!’

A second splitting shot but the bullet was angled upward and flew way over their heads. Edward moved around inside the blind.

‘Don’t shoot again!’ said Joseph. He watched Rowan who was still standing very still, holding the rifle out in front of him. He wondered what Rowan thought was happening; who he imagined was firing at him.

The marsh seemed silent after the shots and Joseph took a deep shaky breath, held in the smell of salt and mud. Now that the weatherpage 114 was getting warmer he had noticed that the marsh smelled almost sulphurous. On warm days there were constellations of tiny flies that moved above the still water. With one thing and another, Joseph didn’t imagine he would come out here much longer. He saw Rowan turn around and begin walking away. His walk seemed stately, even though his shoulder skipped to his ear. The marsh broadened around him.

‘He’s going,’ said Edward.

‘Yes,’ said Joseph.

‘When you see him, tell him I didn’t mean to scare him,’ said Edward.

‘I will,’ said Joseph, ‘I might.’