Free Ferney by James Long

history as an erogenous zone?’ he said in tones of mock wonder.
    ‘Do you have that effect on all your students?’
    ‘I wish I did,’ he said and kissed her hard.
    They swayed together towards the seat cushions, but the gap was too narrow and the folding table jammed in Mike’s back.
    ‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘The caravan as contraceptive.’
    There were a few seconds of silent hurried work as they collapsed the table into the gap and tried to remember the brain-teasing arrangement of the cushions that more or less added up to a
mattress, then their clothes were on the floor and the caravan was creaking and complaining, semaphoring their lovemaking to the darkening world outside.
    Gally swayed over Mike, leaning down to kiss him as she moved, seeing unbidden in her head a kaleidoscope of faces that would keep superimposing themselves over his, strangers’ faces that
seemed far from strange. At the moment when she should have been centred on the small compass of their own unity, she was seized instead by an overpowering, bewildering and wonderful feeling that
the whole of her surroundings had reached in and drawn the envelope of her body outward so that she encompassed the trees, the stream, the walls and all the diffuse green life that made up the old
farm. It was a wild, pagan moment and as she felt the accelerating stirrings of their movement she looked up and seemed to see straight through the caravan wall to the house front beyond where a
phalanx of unknown friends were silently cheering. In the climax that immediately followed, the old plywood sagged under them, sliding them sideways against the base of the seat and she knew for
absolutely certain in that same second that she was now with child.

CHAPTER FOUR
    It was only when he heard the racket of an unsilenced exhaust approaching down the lane that Mike remembered to tell Gally.
    He poked his head in through the door. ‘Hey! Here’s the guy who’s coming to do the digging. I never thought he’d arrive so early.’ He said it as if she should know
about it.
    Gally put down her coffee mug and went outside. ‘Digging?’ she said.
    ‘You know, to find where the water’s coming from.’
    ‘No, I don’t know. Who is he?’
    He heard the storm warning in her voice, cursed himself for carelessness and sought refuge in evasion.
    ‘He works for that farmer. Surely I told you.’
    A yellow JCB swayed in through the gate in a series of jerks accompanied by blasts of noise punched upwards in gouts of black smoke from its exhaust pipe.
    ‘Hold on, Mike,’ Gally called after him as he went to meet it. ‘We haven’t talked about this. Oh hell,’ she said and went after him.
    The driver was young, with a thin, indoors face. He switched off, ignoring them completely, and began to fiddle with a newspaper and a sandwich box, shielded by the glass walls of his cab. Gally
was appalled by the size and the brutality of the machine. The rusting, bent spikes along the front of its battered shovel spelt violent ruin. This wasn’t the right tool for their first
overture to the house, of that she was sure. This was a tank, a battering ram, a diesel rapist.
    ‘Mike, we can’t do it like this,’ she said. ‘It’s going to make a terrible mess.’
    He looked harassed. ‘What did you expect, love? We can hardly do it with a trowel.’
    ‘You should have asked me. There must be another way. I can use a spade.’
    ‘I did say someone was coming to look at the water.’
    ‘Oh come off it. That’s like saying Genghis Khan was doing voluntary service overseas.’
    Mike looked at her, seeing the extent of her distress and how much further it might go. He was about to reply when the driver finally opened his door and climbed down, silencing them both. He
nodded to them and scratched his chin. There was a lot of it to scratch. Some twist in his DNA had given him far more chin than forehead, giving the impression, confirmed as soon as he began to
talk, that his