The grass died that sweltering, fey summer, and the wildflowers, and the garden tomatoes, and the corn maze Dad had planted in the top field. (Mam said he’d been watching too many American movies; Dad said we had to keep the lights on somehow and everyone had a gimmick these days.) The canal that ran alongside the farm turned green and sluggish and when you breathed near it, a bitter, algal film coated the back of your tongue. The air sat heavy on the land, unstirred by even the suggestion of a breeze, redolent with shit and dried vegetation.
The only things that thrived were the sunflowers.
We had a whole field of them, lush and vigorous, plus a balloon arch and a few select bunches set up near the car park, so visitors could take photos for their Instagram feeds. Mam sat at a foldaway table we’d set up near the entrance, charging a fiver for entry. Dad would put in the occasional appearance and try to nudge a few people toward the corn maze, hoping to show all his planting hadn’t been in vain.
My sister Rosie and I took turns to man the gift shop, which was really another fold-up table with a few jars of jam and Mr Hopkins’s honey on it. Rosie was three years younger than me, waiting for her GCSE results, and working the farm shop was hardly how she wanted to spend the summer holidays.
“This is shit.” Rosie lounged behind the shop table, thumbs flying over her phone. It was early July, heat already starting to spike. Another week or two and everywhere would be overrun with parents and primary-school kids. “Seren’s mam and dad are away for the weekend, so everyone else is over there. Anna’s going, and Iwan, and Jake. Everyone.”
I remembered Seren from Rosie’s year at school, a round-faced kid who was charitably described as bubbly, and less charitably as a gobshite, but the other names rang no bells. I hadn’t been home much since starting uni, for all my promises. How would I know how Rosie spent her days?
A woman walking past stopped beside the nearest row of sunflowers and stepped back, grimacing. “Ugh! Look at all those bugs.”
She collided with the edge of the folding table, sending several jam jars spinning. Rosie glowered up at her. “Watch it!”
I caught a jar before it rolled off the edge of the table and set it back in place, sighing. “Go on,” I said. “I’ll take over for the rest of the afternoon.”
Rosie’s scowl immediately turned to an ear-to-ear grin. “Thanks, bro! You’re the best.”
“Yeah, yeah. Get lost before Mam catches you.”
I sank into the deckchair she’d been using and zoned out, gazing at the sunflowers. The air around them boiled with flies, a stippled haze against the blue day. I’d been surprised, too, when I realised how many insects they attracted. It was hard to blame the clumsy woman for freaking out.
Actually, I’d always thought the middles of sunflowers looked a little insectoid, all those shiny black seeds crammed together like worker bees in a hive. When I caught one out of the corner of my eye, it was easy to imagine they were animate, scuttling, swarming.
I gazed out over the field, and though the sunflowers stood utterly still under the scorching sun, I was suddenly seized by the idea that they might move, uproot themselves and march toward me on dirt-clumped feet. With their thick petals and glossy leaves and abundant clusters of seeds, there seemed too much life in them to stay still.
An object slapped down on the table in front of me. I jumped.
A small girl stood there, gazing at me solemnly from beneath the peak of a Minnie Mouse baseball cap. On the table was a sunflower petal almost the size of her head. I could only imagine the size of the flower it must’ve come from.
“What can I buy with this?” said the kid.
I put out a hand to touch the petal, but stopped at the last minute. It looked oddly fleshy, and I had the stupid feeling it might squirm if I touched it.
“Where did you get this?” I asked, instead.
“Out there. The flowers gave it to me.” She inclined her head toward the field and leaned in toward me, voice dropping to a whisper. “I think they’re hungry.”
“Sara? Sara, where are—oh, thank God!” A harried-looking woman hurried toward us and grabbed her by the hand. “I’m so sorry, she knows she’s not supposed to pick them.”
“It’s fine,” I said, but she was already hustling the kid toward the car park, saying, Come on, we’re going to be late for Nanny and Bamp, and Do you need the toilet before we go? I stared at the petal lying on the tabletop, still not quite willing to touch it.
I didn’t think about it again until the next morning, when we got the tables out of the shed to set back up. Rosie was still in bed, claiming a stomach bug, though when I pressed her she admitted they’d been at Seren’s mam’s Prosecco the night before.
I remembered the time I’d drunk six cans of Bow up the top field before Dad woke me at five to help feed the pigs, and let her sleep.
“Here, what’s this?” Mam ran her hand across the top of one of the folding tables, then pulled a face. “It’s all sticky.”
I went to stand behind her, peering at the tabletop. There was a mark there, in the shape of a huge petal. The plastic looked bubbled, twisted, as though it had melted, and a gooey residue sat on top of the mark, tinged faintly with yellow and giving off a sharp vegetal smell. I bent to look at it more closely.
No, not melted. It was as though the tabletop had softened, turned organic.
“Mam,” I said, and swallowed hard, “I think you’d better go and wash your hands.”
The first day of the summer holidays exhausted us. By the time the crowds cleared, Mam and I were ready to drop, and even Rosie proclaimed herself too tired to go out and slouched off to her room to scroll on her phone or play on the Playstation, or whatever it was she did after deciding the rest of us were too boring to talk to.
Dad was jubilant, though. “I told you!” he kept saying. “Something cheap to do with the kids in the holidays—they were bound to come flocking to us.” He’d managed to herd a handful of visitors into the corn maze, too, the kids playing hide-and-seek among the browning stalks.
“Yeah, alright,” Mam conceded, with a weary smile. “It was a good idea. I’m bloody knackered, though. Let me just check on those hens and I’m putting my feet up.”
“I’ll do it,” Dad offered. “Don’t feel like going inside yet.”
It was late by the time he returned to the house, though he’d always been of the old school: early to bed, early to rise. Twilight lay over the sky, a blue-glass film.
When Mam asked him where he’d been, Dad answered vaguely, “Oh, you know, there’s always something needs doing.” There was an odd distance in his eyes.
Then again, we were all tired.
“Sara!”
I didn’t register the shout at first. Four days into the holidays and I was already learning to tune out the voices of frustrated parents.
“Sara? Sara!”
At the increase in pitch and volume, I glanced up to see a half-familiar face. The mother of the little girl from the other day strode fast toward my table, her face drawn with worry.
I rose to greet her. “Are you alright?”
“No.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I was here the other day, with my little girl.”
“I remember.”
“She loved it so much, she kept on begging to come back, so we did. I looked at my phone for a minute and . . . ”
I did my best to sound reassuring. “Kids go running off all the time. There’s an ice-cream van over in the car park—maybe she went there? Or she could have wandered into the corn maze?”
We searched—desultorily, on my part, at first, but with increasing urgency as our efforts bore no fruit. Sara was nowhere to be found. Her mum looked close to tears, face blotched red with the strain of holding them in.
“Wait here,” I told her, gesturing at the chair I’d vacated. “I’ll get Mam and Dad. Or maybe we should call the police . . . ” I could imagine how Dad would feel about that. Having the coppers turn up and trample everything, maybe having to close the fields and lose a day’s income? He’d be tamping. Still, there was nothing else for it.
But before I’d taken more than a few steps away from the table, a flash of red caught my eye.
A Minnie Mouse baseball cap hung at chest-height, caught on a sunflower leaf a few steps into the field. Swatting away insects, I ducked in to get it. “Is this your kid’s?”
“Yes!” She joined me, peering through the greenery. The sunflowers were packed close together, but a trail of broken leaves marked where a child might have pushed between them. “She must have gone in there.”
Without further ado, Sara’s mum plunged into the field of sunflowers, shouldering her way between the six-foot stalks. I hovered, torn between following her and going to find Mam and Dad.
Then I spotted Rosie, lounging behind the jam table and watching the exchange with interest, though she’d made no move to get off her arse and help. I shook my head in exasperation.
“Go and find Mam, you lazy cow!” I called, and plunged into the field of sunflowers after Sara’s mum.
A few steps in, the hum of chatter and laughter outside faded, replaced by the hypnotic drone of insects. I ducked my head beneath the glossy green canopy of leaves and found it did nothing to lessen the heat. It reminded me of childhood summers when Mam and Dad would let us sleep out in a tent in one of the lower fields. In the evening we’d be giddy with excitement, guzzling sweets and telling ghost stories in our sleeping bags. By morning the temperature would be suffocating, but part of me would still be afraid to unzip the flap, certain some unspecified terror had waited outside all night to catch us in its jaws.
A smell rose up from the earth. Not the smell of dry earth, dead vegetation, and occasional shit that had pervaded the farm since the start of the summer, but a dank smell, rotten and almost animal. I half expected to look down and find my boots crusted with blood and fur.
Sara’s mum crashed through the flowers ahead of me. I hurried to catch up and tried not to think about the damage we were doing.
When she came to a halt, I almost skidded into the back of her. “Hey.” I squinted over her shoulder. “Any sign?”
Slowly, she shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Where she’d stopped, there was a slight indentation in the ground, free from flowers. There was no other sign of a trail—no footprints and no more broken-off leaves to indicate where Sara might have gone.
A rustling sound made me start and look over my shoulder. Sara’s mum followed suit, the hope dying on her face when we saw that it was only Dad hurrying up behind us
“What’s going on here?” he said. “I couldn’t make head or tail of what Rosie told me.”
I stepped back gratefully, letting Sara’s mum explain and Dad take charge of the situation. As I did so, my foot slid into that strange little dip in the ground. It was wet and spongy beneath my boot and sidestepped hastily, wiping my trainer off on the dry grass..
“Come on,” Dad was saying, his voice heavy. “I think it’s time we called the boys in blue.”
He led Sara’s mum back toward the farm buildings, one hand on her shoulder. After a moment, I followed.
That day was the beginning of the end. We called the police, shooed away the visitors with promises of free entry when we reopened, and out went the search parties.
For hours, we combed through the fields, and those of the nearby farms, and the streets of the housing estate. We trekked up and down the canal banks, swallowing apprehension at every oddly-shaped log or oversized bit of rubbish in the water. When dusk fell, we dug out the flashlights and kept searching.
There was no sign of Sara. It was as though she’d simply been beamed up out of the summer crowds and into the ether.
By the time we took a break, the sky was starting to lighten again. In the dark, it had been hard to tell how much damage the search had done, but now I saw the sunflower field half-flattened, stalks splayed every which way like broken limbs and the earth flecked with torn-petal gold.
Dad stood unmoving at the edge of the field, staring out over the broken flowers. He looked limp and half-empty, like a scarecrow cobbled together out of old sacks.
I trudged over to him, leaden with exhaustion. “Dad? You alright?”
“Hm?” For the briefest of intervals, he didn’t seem to recognise me at all. Then he patted my arm. “Fine. Go on, now. Get to bed.”
The dreamy look on his face unnerved me, but I could already feel sleep tugging at me. I decided to leave things until I’d had a few hours’ sleep. Maybe they would look better in the morning.
When I woke, Dad was gone.
There was no clue as to where. The Land Rover was still parked up by the house, his wallet on the kitchen table. The police made ominous noises about our financial situation and the suicide rate among farmers.
Mam refused to believe it. If anything, she said, Dad was the kind of cockeyed optimist who kept trying long after he should’ve given up, coming up with harebrained schemes. I wasn’t sure that was quite it, though. The farm had its ups and downs—more of the downs recently—but Dad’s family had been on the land so long, I didn’t think he’d ever seriously considered the possibility of selling up. Not being here, as far as he was concerned, would’ve meant not being.
But Mam shook her head. “A sunflower field! He bloody loved those stupid flowers. Never would’ve left them in such a state.”
In fact, though the field had looked half-destroyed after the search, the flowers sprang back with unusual vigour. New growth pushed aside the old, dead stalks, and even some of those plants that had looked irreparably broken continued growing at crazy angles. The new leaves grew lush and thick, the petals tonguing the air in meaty profusion. They were so yellow it made me slightly nauseous when I stared too long. That intensity of colour seemed unnatural. The seeds clustered in the centres of the flower-heads glittered like a nest of beetles, and the insects returned in droves.
The only place they didn’t grow back was that dip in the ground. The indentation there had widened, and the ground retained its soggy, rotten quality. The smell was strongest at that spot, too. Perhaps there was a dead mole or a badger under the ground.
Not that I spent too much time wondering about it. Mam was distraught, and Rosie had barely said a word to either of us since Dad vanished, locking herself in her room and cranking up her music as though she was trying to blast the grief and confusion out of her head. I fed the animals, and us, if you considered a diet of non-stop oven chips and frozen pizza adequate nutrition. I chased off rubberneckers from the farm gate. And I drove Mam back and forth to the station so she could badger the coppers for updates. Their efforts seemed half-arsed at best, and I was sure they were counting down the days until they could close the missing persons file.
I wasn’t sure I agreed with Mam either, though. I kept remembering the last night I’d seen Dad and the look in his eyes. If only I’d stayed up another few minutes and asked him what was on his mind.
If only, if only. I spent so much time thinking about the if onlies I lost sight of what was happening before my eyes.
We didn’t reopen the sunflower field. Even if Mam had been in any shape to run things, the place looked a mess. Rosie and her friends had taken to smuggling their bottles of Woodpecker up to the farm and spending their evenings drinking in the fields. Most nights, I’d sit up in the kitchen until she staggered home, feigning indifference, pretending to read or noodle around on my laptop but really unable to relax until everyone was accounted for.
That night, though, the exhaustion had caught up with me. My eyelids drooped over my book and I dragged myself to bed around ten, leaving the back door unlocked so Rosie wouldn’t wake Mam by drunkenly fumbling the key.
I woke to bright sunlight, and Mam yelling.
The sound was coming from the bathroom. I stumbled toward it in my boxers, bleary-eyed.
Rosie knelt on the bathroom floor, puking. Her jeans were coated in wet mud up to the knees, trainers nowhere to be seen. I couldn’t begin to guess where she’d got that filthy; there was no smell of manure, and we hadn’t seen a drop of rain in weeks.
Stranger still was what was coming out of her mouth. Shivering, she heaved up glob after glob of green mulch, like cud. An overpowering smell of greenery filled the room, so bitter it clung in the back of my throat and made me feel faintly nauseous, too.
I swallowed. “What’s going on?”
Mam flung up her hands. “Look at her! Off drinking every night, she’s out of control. You were never this bad when you were her age.”
Actually, I’d just been better at hiding it, but she didn’t need to know that.
“Don’t do that, Mam,” I said. “Compare us. It doesn’t help anything.” Though Rosie was still heaving and didn’t seem to hear a word we said.
Mam sighed. “I’m worried, is all. And with your father still . . . ” She trailed off, mouth clamping shut.
I knelt, putting my hand on Rosie’s shoulder. Beneath the thin t-shirt she was wearing, she felt cold and clammy with sweat. “Rose,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
She gave an affirmative mumble.
“Well, what the bloody hell have you been drinking to throw up this stuff?” I peered into the toilet bowl, trying not to breathe too deeply. “Or . . . eating? Did Seren dare you to eat grass? You know, you don’t have to do stupid shit just because your mates are.”
“Not my mates.” Rosie paused to retch again, though this time only a dribble of clear green fluid came up. “They want me. To be part of them . . . or part of me. ’M not sure.”
Total nonsense. She was clearly still shitfaced. “C’mon,” I said, hooking her arm over my shoulder. “Let’s get you to bed. Find a bowl for her to chuck up in, will you, Mam?”
The sharp, vegetal smell only grew stronger as I half-carried Rosie to her room, and when I pushed the door open with my foot, I saw why.
There was more half-digested plant matter staining the pillow, and the bed and the floor were littered with torn-up greenery and fragments of yellow petal. Mud and sap were trodden into the carpet, and there were even grass-stains smeared on the walls.
I stopped short in the doorway, sagging under my sister’s weight. “Fucking hell, Rose.”
She groaned, finally coming back to herself. “Where’s Mam? I need that bowl.”
We got Rosie tucked under a blanket on the sofa, with the mixing bowl next to her head, plus a glass of water and a packet of paracetamol for when she woke up. It took me and Mam two hours to get her bedroom cleaned up and the loo unblocked. Mam grumbled the whole time, but seemed more alert, more with-it, than she had since Dad went missing. I thought she was secretly glad of the distraction.
Once we’d finished, I went out to feed the chickens. On my way back, I found myself lingering near the edge of the sunflower field, at the spot where I’d last seen Dad. I looked out over the mess of leaning stalks, in the same direction he had that night.
There was a gap in the greenery that hadn’t been there before.
Instinctively, I headed toward it. It surrounded the small dent in the ground I’d noticed while looking for Sara—but the dip had widened and deepened, and was now less an indentation than a sinkhole, sloppy with wet mud.
Where could the water be coming from? I prodded at the edge of the hole with my toe, and an unpleasant shudder went through me at the texture there. It wasn’t like wet ground, but springier, like stone fruit or flesh. Curiosity piqued, I crouched for a closer look.
The wet mud was only a thin layer atop something much stranger.
Beneath the soil sat a tangle of roots wider than my fingers, pale and seeming to pulse with blind, unconscious life. There were other protrusions, too—like the sunflower petals but colourless, as though they’d always been under the earth, and thick as tongues. Fat earthworms and ants bigger than any I’d seen crawled between the roots. I got an impression of overfull ripeness, of life on the edge of rot.
The dank green smell was strong here, but overlaid with a dirty, autumnal mulchiness and so thick it clogged in my throat like wet cotton wool. I had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up my coffee.
How far beneath the sunflower field did this carpet of foetid life stretch? How far down did it go?
The thought made me dizzy, and I stumbled to my feet and back from the edge of the hole. As I did so, I spotted a white shape trapped among the roots.
Holding my breath, I reached back in to retrieve it. I moved gingerly, afraid, for reasons I couldn’t quite name, to touch that living matter.
At last, my fingers closed around the toe and I pulled it out.
It was one of Rosie’s trainers.
She slept through most of the day, emerging from her blanket cocoon on the couch around teatime to eat a bowl of tomato soup and drag herself upstairs to bed. I was grateful she wasn’t out drinking, for once. Mam didn’t need anything else to worry about.
I went to find Mam in the kitchen, where she’d been unloading the dishwasher. It was still open, only half full, but the back door swung wide.
“Mam?” I poked my head out. “You okay? Don’t leave the door open, we’ll get moths inside.”
I heard a noise, which at first I thought was an animal. A low, guttural sort of sound, like a plea, or a groan of pain. I squinted through the dark and a pale, squat shape near the edge of the chicken coop. There was a frightened squawk and a fluttering: something had spooked the birds.
Uneasy now, I edged toward the ghostly shape, wishing I had a spade or a two-by-four to hand. “Hello?” No answer. “Who’s there? If you don’t answer me . . . ”
I trailed into silence as the shape resolved into a familiar figure: Mam. She’d been wearing a grey hoodie and jogging bottoms, which made her look like a phantom in the dark. And there was a strange noise that I couldn’t quite place, a wet grinding sound, and that pungent smell again.
“Mam?” I closed the last of the gap in quick strides. “Are you alright?”
She started to her feet with a cry, as though only now realising I was there. Her hand fluttered over her chest. “Oh! You nearly gave me a heart attack.”
I raised my hands in surrender. “Just wondered what you were doing out here. The back door was open.”
“You know, I can’t remember. It’s those pills the doctor gave me. They make me come over quite strange.”
Mam threaded her arm through mine and we headed back toward the kitchen. As we moved into the light, I noticed a stain at the corner of Mam’s mouth. “Mam, you’ve got something on your face.”
Hastily, she wiped her mouth with her sleeve, but there was no mistaking what I saw. The pale sleeve of her hoodie was smeared with green.
In the morning, Rosie didn’t emerge from her room.
Given her druthers, she’d sleep until eleven, even midday, so at first we had no inkling anything was wrong. When Mam fried up bacon for sandwiches and there was still no sign, though, I started to worry. “Shall I go and give her a shout?”
“Hm? Oh, yes, go on.” Mam had been distant and dreamy since last night, but calmer than I’d seen her in weeks. I hadn’t asked her about what I’d seen out there in the dark. I think I was afraid to rock the boat.
I galumphed upstairs and hammered on Rosie’s bedroom door. “Oh, lazy-arse! If you want a bacon sarnie you’d better come down before they’re all gone!”
No answer—not even a token “piss off.”
“Rose? You up?” I nudged the door open a crack and peered through.
Rosie’s bed was empty, unmade, as though she’d got out of it only a moment ago, but there was no sign of her.
I didn’t hang around to tell Mam she was gone. I ran downstairs, boots clumping, and out into the sunflower field, heedless of Mam yelling behind me.
The sinkhole had spread further overnight. My steps slowed as I approached it, a formless fear rising in my gorge, but I had to look.
Roots that had been thicker than my fingers were now great, fleshy boles, as wide as my forearm and oddly veined. They no longer looked quite plant-like. There was an odd, animal fleshiness about the pulsating mass.
I peered further into the sinkhole, teetering precariously at the edge. Growths shaped like pale fingers emerged from a nest of roots—and there was something like a mouth, still moving, saying—
I can never remember what followed clearly. Mam says that I went to the barn and emerged with a rusty old axe Dad hadn’t touched in years. The look in my eyes frightened her so badly she called 999.
The police found me in the sunflower field, surrounded by ruined plant life, hacking at the ground in clumsy, desperate swings and soaked from head to toe in thick, green sap.
We sold the farm. I’m told there are windmills there now, a mental picture that always makes me uneasy. I picture them turning in the wind and my imagination turns their metal arms to titanic roots, whipping through the air in blind hunger, or to the petals of great, white flowers.
Mam and I bought a house near her sister’s place, miles away in the Rhondda. There are no farms here, unless you count the scruffy smallholding down the lane with a handful of chickens and a solitary goat.
I didn’t go back to uni. The counsellor I spoke to said I should give myself time, and besides, I don’t like to leave Mam on her own for long. She says she’s coping, and for days at a time she seems calm, if quiet.
But some nights I find her out back, leaning over the fence into the thick mountain darkness, and don’t ask what she’s doing. I stand and wait for her to come back inside while the garden fills with the scent of greenery, thick as smoke, heady as a drug, and I try not to notice my mouth watering.
