“It’s the drones,” he said.
I focused on the sheen of sweat coating his upper lip, stubble breaking the surface and reminding me of the years when they burnt the fields after the harvest. The claggy scent of burnt straw, a long way from the cheap, acidic odour of some kind of low-rate deodorant that leached from him.
“They send them,” he said. “Ahead, you know. To see what we have.”
I kicked at a stone in the gravel of his driveway. A middle-English desert. He gesticulated towards his front windows with the spray-gun he had been using to douse the ground with some kind of chemical to keep the undesirables at bay. After all, no-one wants a smattering of colour breaking up the monotone paleness of the gravel expanse.
“Everyone was talking about it at the Terry Flat Dinner,” he said. “We need to do something about it.”
It wasn’t a stone, I realised as I toed it from side-to-side. It was a belemnite. My brother and I had collected them when we were younger, before we left for the city. I considered picking the fossil up. Stashing it as a treasure.
“Tracking,” he said. “That’s what’s needed. We all agreed. At the dinner.”
I decided to leave the long-dead echo of a creature where it lay. It would be tainted by the chemical spray anyway. I wondered whether the stone had memories. Of oceans. I was pretty sure the creature wouldn’t recognise the world it lived in now.
“Law abiding folk,” he said. “The Terry Flat crowd. Understand what needs to be done. To keep us safe.”
Fossickers. There was a name for what we did back then, my brother and I. I scanned the stones. You couldn’t stop looking. Not once you started. There was always the promise of something better, in amongst the uniform, man-made chippings. It was almost a meditation.
“Lucky we have the group,” he said. “They know what’s what. Let us know when that-kind is around in the village.”
As far I could see, there wasn’t much difference between the stones. Neatly raked over. My belemnite was the the only one left, nestling against the scuffed toe of my boot.
“Last thing we need is more of them nearby,” he said. “The Terry Flat crowd reckon we could have an alert set-up. There’s enough of us here. They wouldn’t get away with any of their nonsense.”
The stone had an elegance to it. Long and tapered. It comforted me to think that there was a tough core that made an impact so long after the softness had gone. I wasn’t sure if permanence was the right word. It wasn’t the same thing it had been. It was as if the strongest part of it survived. Despite everything. There was hope in that.
“The Parish Council,” he said. “Has resources. Happy to give them to us. The Chair organised Terry Flat this year. Best one yet. Everyone agreed.”
My boots looked shabby next to his polished loafers, the diamonds of his golf socks creeping up his shin like scales. Gardening clothes. A snort rose up and pushed its way out of me, despite my best intentions. His expression changed.
“I didn’t see you at the Terry Flat,” he said.
His eyes travelled slowly down me, settling on my boots.
“Not last year, either,” he said.
He reached out and grabbed my belemnite, tossed it angrily into the ditch on the other side of the road. I watched it travel into the stagnant water trapped there. Lost.
“Don’t want that messing up the driveway,” he said.
“You’re right, you know,” I said. “It really is the drones that are the problem.”