by M. T Hill
And there he is again. Her ex. Dickhead, as her mother calls him, not knowing the full truth. Months on, Freya still views what happened to their relationship as a disruption in the surface tension of normality, a corruption of what she expected from the world. Their split came with the resonance of finding a lump, or discovering an unsettling family secret. When it had finished flailing and flensing, and she pawed at her stomach, where the pain was always worst, she found that a kind of hole had been torn there. Somehow, a false life had poured through this hole to smother her. From that point onwards she’d watched as her true, intended life spooled away on a different trajectory.
Through the bungalow’s grey windows, she sometimes glimpses a ghost of what they might’ve been. Freya and Dickhead sitting together on a train that appears from nowhere, runs parallel with the house for a moment, then vanishes again.
Soon it’s eleven o’clock. Freya’s parents head to bed – flicked light switches, twice-flushed toilet, toothpaste spit – and a dead calm renders the bungalow’s windows a shade blacker. She gives up trying to improve her Stephen piece and files it remotely.
Instead of logging off, though, Freya replays the recording from the funeral. Listens again to Stephen’s brother. ‘And Ste was teetotal,’ he’s saying, above a clacking that must be Freya’s heels on the aisle stone. ‘So it doesn’t even make sense. He’d not touched a drop as long as I remember…’
Freya kneads her cheeks. It still doesn’t sit right, even if there’s nothing really to go on. She reloads the browser. Muscle memory for the same sites she’d checked only a couple of hours earlier: her paper’s website, her agency feeds, an inbox full of press releases, tomorrow’s weather forecast (damp). A list of unaffordable flats and flat-shares back in Manchester. A notification for a dating app on which someone has called her a slag for ignoring his sepia-filtered dick-pic.
New tab. New search. And before Freya can second-guess herself, Stephen’s digital life fills her screen again. His public stream, uploads, shared videos and links – mundane statuses that owing to his death now phosphoresce with meaning.
Freya reads the sad messages left by his friends, a community missing one of its own. Very public tributes, lovely most, alongside stunted notices of confusion and shock. The sort of messages she’s seen a thousand times over in her job. But no one here appears to challenge what’s happened – the oddness of a fit, clean-living man dying such a filthy death. Not the way she wants them to, anyway, and certainly not the way Toby had started to in his eulogy. The disconnect is jarring to her, as if the facts have been too readily accepted. Or perhaps it’s awkwardness. Everybody’s thinking it, but nobody wants to speak ill of the dead.
Deeper she goes – searching her way into archived forums, cached pages – until she begins to make out the scene’s boundaries. She’s riveted by the language – familiar words used unfamiliarly, slang like ‘pumpy’ and ‘jugs’ and ‘smear’ and ‘beta’. She’s thrilled by the rigour – so many tutorials on knots and rock types and grades, essays on home treatments for parts of the body she’s never heard of. It leaves her breathless, reeling, jealous of the sport’s physicality. People honing their bodies as you might a cutting tool. What does she have, except for her regular desk and a subsidised car?
The church recording also reminds Freya that Stephen’s hobby crossed into urbex. The overlap is obvious, now she’s learning. In his stream, some friends talk about how they went on ‘explores’ with Stephen. His ballsiness. His sense of fun. That bloody grin. And then she’s leaning forward to learn another set of terms: ‘missions’ and ‘reports’, obscure acronyms for security measures from boards that index mission reports by location, building type and difficulty.
By half-midnight, Freya has a headache coming on. She purges her session and sneaks to her room, thinking about the church as she undresses – her calm deception as she’d spoken to Stephen’s aunt outside. From her single bed, she circles back to Toby and the men who’d been arrested. She falls asleep picturing Stephen’s face, his brow and jaw, and finds herself wishing Stephen hadn’t died at all. This other world – his world – has gripped her. She wants to ask him what happened. Did you fall, Stephen, or did you jump?
The Steeplejack
The Cumbrian coast smells carnal. Shep goes the long way round, leaving the van in Whitehaven’s marina before riding his scrambler along the seafront, visor up and helmet full of brine.
Off the main trunk road, away from lapping black seawater and into the Lakes proper, the scrambler’s headlamp picks out tight verges on a narrowed beam. Shep threads through country lanes, rattling in and out of villages, skirting farmland trenches, towards the dark mass of Scafell Pike. He crests a hill bounded by starlit fields, and catches sight of the uplands that define the territory. Inscrutable fells like waves at the world’s edge.
There, Shep stops at a T-junction to drink water and boot his nav system. His eyes are streaming from the wind, and he’s already sweating in his leathers. He retightens his Bergen straps as he waits. It doesn’t look like the nav will catch a signal here, so he slides down his visor and sets off again, half an eye on the square of noise the nav projects on the visor’s interior. The waterline is now well behind him, and the air has turned bitter. Nettles and berries. He rides deeper into parkland, the road wet and sinuous, and soon the woods’ canopy interlaces above – a different kind of nature swallowing him whole.
Forty-five minutes after leaving the marina, Shep meets his first waypoint: a privatised trail. He manhandles the scrambler through a tight stile and floors it over a pedestrianised apron, grinning madly. Beyond that, another stile for a service road that intersects the hiking trail at several points, its fresh surface quieter under the tyres. For a time, he follows the service road with minimal revs. Cautious so far as the rattly scrambler engine allows. While the risk of being caught is offset by the excitement of exploring a potentially virgin site, it’s odd to Shep that the site lies so close to a commercial trail. Why weren’t there other reports on the forums?
Another mile along, Shep pulls over and leaves the bike idling. The nav’s proving useless, so he takes out his OS map and leans over the headlamp to pencil a path. An animal call pierces the night. The sound is muffled and strange through his helmet, so he kills the engine, switches on his torch and scans the treeline for movement.
Nothing. Shep exhales. Shivers a little. The scrambler’s motor ticks as it cools, and these might be the only sounds in the world. It’s lonely out here, and with that comes the first sharp chill of terror. A primal fear – not only of the dark, the unseeable woodland – but of other people: holed-up drug-runners, bear-headed homeless who don’t want moving along, illegal poachers or preppers with twitchy trigger fingers. Never mind the risk of falling masonry, bad roofing, unstable flooring. Fall over, do for your ankle, then what? No phone, nobody in on the act, no means of contact – who knows where you are?
That same strained noise again. Shep’s ears buzz with it. An animal call, definitely, and not a bird. There’s a rustling, then movement in the near distance. This time behind him, like he’s being circled. Warily, Shep goes to dismount the bike and feels a small object, hard and cold, tumble from his neck to the small of his back. He loses his balance and has to hop away from the scrambler, which falls over with a ringing crash. Swearing under his breath, Shep heaves off his helmet, his racing jacket, his overshirt. Drags his T-shirt out of his waistband. There’s a faint click as the object comes free and meets the ground.
Shep kneels to the road. Trapped in his torch beam is a large, intricately striped beetle, an inch or so long. It’s writhing on its side. It doesn’t have antennae, or a head, or even most of its legs at that. Its back arches unnaturally, acutely, the panels of its carapace spaced to extremes, until it stops moving. For an instant Shep thinks it might be playing dead.
‘Jesus,’ he whispers. And on impulse he draws his boot forward and stamps on it.
Shep stands up, shaken. Check
ing nothing is embedded in his neck, no mouthparts or barbed legs or otherwise. Checking the beetle is really dead before he sorts himself out. Checking there’s nothing watching him from the treeline. He wants to piss, now. Hyperalert, eyes straining and darting from one shadow to the next. His breath ragged. Nightmares can easily mass in the blackness just out of reach, out of sight: things imagined and things real. Now he’s throwing on the shirt, the jacket. Shivers coming on strong. Was it just the helmet? Sounds change when your ears are squashed. But the call was so loud. Another glance at the beetle’s remains, a paste, and Shep’s hairline itches madly. Jesus Christ. It was hardly a threat, this stupid creature – but he loathes the idea it touched him, that it got in through the gap between his helmet and jacket collar. And it was of a size as to be otherworldly, definitely a kind he’s never seen before. He straps on his helmet with his torch between his teeth and heaves up the scrambler. He needs to move, and now – before he bottles it.
The scrambler coughs on with a firm kick. The headlamp flickers and holds. Shep focuses on the lit-up foliage in front. Leaves and branches. Natural things. Dead things…
Off the service road, the earthen trail winds away in gentle switchbacks. He holds to that ribbon of civilisation like nothing else. He reminds himself that you often see pacemaker detectors at the trailheads; that some officious twat will turn you back if they think you’ll keel over on their patch. They’d never let people hike here if there were any real risks involved.
But Shep isn’t hiking – he’s breaking in. He sniffs hard. His nose is running and his eyes are full. He needs to get on top of this. Get a grip. His next waypoint isn’t much further – another few hundred metres before he strikes out into woodland proper. He’s too close for second thoughts. Too committed. He sets his jaw and twists the throttle. The scrambler digs in. He pushes up the stand.
A chirpy jingle plays right into his head.
Shep bursts out laughing. Intravenous relief. ‘You took your time,’ he says.
The nav makes a noise like a seeping fart, then slurs, ‘Coordinates unrecognised.’
‘Unrecognised’ being an understatement. Shep’s helmet contains the brains of a driverless car, complete with inboard sensors and head-up display. The sensors will parse his facial muscles, but the brain won’t suss that it’s been repurposed entirely.
‘No response,’ the nav says. ‘Please confirm: are you driving manually?’
Shep twists the throttle harder.
Another beat, a faint rattling of machine-thinking above the scrambler’s whine. ‘Anonymity is illegal,’ the nav tells him.
‘That’s the point,’ Shep replies.
‘This vehicle’s warranty and insurance will be remotely invalidated.’
Shep smirks. The transplant means he’s fully dark out here, with a kill switch on his phone to brick the system if it comes to it. Whatever the nav thinks it’s capturing, it’s mistaken. Wherever the nav thinks they’re going, it’s already lost.
‘Shush now,’ Shep says, and hits mute. The nav’s wayfinder has started to render directly from a satellite, which is enough to go by. He leaves the beetle and the service road for the last section of trail. In turn he slides deeper into his zone, into reduction, driven by base urges towards some personal wilderness. The hiccup back there is soon forgotten, and so too is the stack, Gunny and his hand, and the blood. There’s no doubt, then: Shep’s basest urge is to be alone, to cross over and seek the stuff left hidden in plain view. Swap his disintegrated work life for the forgotten places, the vaults of memory. Now he can enjoy once more how nature has changed the past.
When the undergrowth gets too thick to ride through, Shep stops the scrambler and starts to push. By his reckoning, the perimeter wall is another hundred feet through the woodland. There, as a last rite, he goes to relieve his bladder against an oak. Except it won’t happen. Even as he tries and squeezes and wills himself to go, his erection says he’s far too eager for that.
The Journalist
In her single bed in the box room, Freya dreams of Stephen. He comes to her as a loose collage of the images she’d scraped from his stream, which means pieces of his head are missing or deformed. These blank spaces reveal internal edges and planes that don’t join up properly; each frame of him crashes into the next, cycling hair lengths and expressions. He glitches towards her, skin gleaming, so that by her feet he lacks all consistency. He smells overripe. He strokes her ankles. His fingers vibrate. ‘What grade are you?’ he asks, probing her shins and knees, before his mouth seals up completely. He opens a small canvas bag and plasters his hands with chalk, and begins to climb her, fingertips strong and pointed, deep between her tendons. It doesn’t hurt so much as it aches. Then his hands are around her waist, his toes splayed on her feet. His face, his sealed mouth, warm and gainful, disappears into her lower abdomen. A tearing sound as he tries to open his jaw, a stuttering as he tries to kiss her on the mound of her pants. She looks away as the kisses grow forceful, sloppy with blood and mucus, and he starts to break open his own face, his whole head. Wider, then wider again.
Freya snaps awake with the fear that a part of her is trapped in another world. The rotting smell lingers briefly, trapped between here and there.
‘No,’ she whispers, because she’s touching herself. Her fingers molten and the sheets stuck to her.
Gritty-eyed, ashamed, she goes to the toilet. By the time she’s flushed, dream-Stephen has lost his primacy, her guilty arousal replaced by the cold morning, her mind moving on to the office. A sadness blooms in her, and she clutches her temples like it might stem the spread. Her hair is dense and waxy, like rough fur, and she stamps a foot in frustration. A final vision of Stephen – the contact of their skin with only chalk as a barrier – and the sadness folds away.
Freya goes to the sink. She brushes her teeth warily, because she’s been spitting blood for a few days. After the dream, her mouth feels different, senses still glowing. She hangs there in the simplicity of it, naked before the mirror, light drawing around her, and watches her blood expand in the toothpaste foam. She spits again. A red emulsion, bright and elastic. She thumbs her gumline and a wire of pain spreads along her jaw. She looks at her thumb. A perfect rubine print.
Freya swears and showers and shaves. Moisturises while she’s still damp. Dresses and eats a slice of dry toast over the kitchen sink, zoning out on the crooked bird table, a wood pigeon watching her from the fence. It’s too early for work, for her parents to be up, but she leaves a see-you-later note and goes regardless – driving the car manually to the industrial estate with her mouth sore and abdomen still tingling.
The same landmarks. The same signs. The same vague greetings from the car park security man. Yet today is different. She has a line of shorthand in mind: Stephen climbed my edges.
Freya wedges the car, clips back her fringe, applies some warpaint.
* * *
The office smells greasy, the leftovers from a sub-editor’s late night. Freya mouths hellos to a few other early-birds and sits down at her workstation. As her system comes on, she idly rotates her chair from side to side.
A door rattles, and the editor rolls in. Bangles and heels in chorus. Freya glances along the row of desks, then back to her own. Where her colleagues keep family portraits and tacky trinkets, she only has a labelled stapler and a pot of black biros, a sun-bleached crib sheet of proofreading symbols. Even her friend Aisha’s desk, vacant since the day after the Christmas party, is still covered in glitter. She’ll tell herself it’s so she’s ready to leave, so there’s nothing to miss, but the months keep passing.
Freya prints last night’s copy and heads for the editor’s office. She knocks on the door.
‘Yep?’
Freya pushes in.
‘The wanderer returns!’
‘Hey,’ Freya says, hovering on the threshold.
‘How did you get on?’ the editor asks.
‘Pretty good, yeah.’
‘And you di
dn’t feel too dirty.’
Freya shrugs.
‘Did much worse for a story in my day,’ the editor says. She motions to Freya’s hand. ‘That your copy?’
‘Yeah. I figured you’d want a quick look.’
The editor taps her desk. ‘Way ahead of you, actually – saw you file last night. Very tidy stuff, Freya. Spotless, in fact. I’m expecting first syndications in the next half hour. Bunch of nationals on for the ten o’clock briefing. Even got a French mag interested – you know this lad had climbing pals over there? A busy day ahead.’
Freya blinks. ‘Really?’
‘Why not? There’s interest in the man – climbing’s like clickbait since that Olympic gold. Add some tragedy, a couple of arrests, and away you go.’ Then, with a mocking smile: ‘I knew this one had legs. He’ll capture the nation’s hearts.’
‘He was popular, definitely,’ Freya says. ‘Hundreds at the service.’
‘There you are, see. It all goes off when you’re an adventuring middle-class boy, killed in your prime. Close your eyes tight enough, and you can actually hear the papers voiding the shelves…’
‘So—’
‘You’ll get your byline, yes.’
Freya gapes, mortified. ‘I meant—’
‘Anything else you need to run by me?’
