by Holly Miller
“Too right. You did something crazy, brave. You should see that tattoo and feel nothing but happiness.” I glance down at her hip again. But it’s when I look back up at her that I feel happiness: the full, synaptic rush of it. “Keep doing crazy stuff,” I say, squeezing her hand.
“Really? Crazy like this tattoo?”
I grin. “Why not? So long as it’s a good kind of crazy. Your kind of crazy.”
“I have a feeling Waterfen’s going to be pretty wild. For me, anyway,” she says, laughing. “What’s next—fancy coming with me to Chile?”
She’s joking, I know that really. But being with Callie is the closest I’ve ever come to escaping life as I know it. Because even just getting to know her is like time spent in a foreign country. Somewhere I’ve often wondered about but never had the courage to explore.
We lean forward at the same time. Fall into a kiss, fly into orbit.
35.
Callie
It’s Esther’s birthday, and she’s invited me and Joel to a party at her house.
“I haven’t been to a house party for years,” he confesses, as we’re getting ready.
“How come?”
“They’re not really my . . . natural habitat.” He says it’s to do with the gradual sliding-away of friendships, his lifelong feeling of being an outsider.
I’m ironing my dress for tonight, the belted navy one that skims my hips just right and goes perfectly with peep-toe heels and a fearless lipstick. “Don’t worry. No one will know.”
He kisses me. “You hope.”
“Well, I don’t care if they do,” I murmur.
I have a feeling Joel and I turning up together is going to be the talk of the party, but he seems nervous, so I decide to keep that to myself.
* * *
• • •
Esther greets us at the door wearing a badge that says FORTY AND FABULOUS.
“Gav’s attempt at irony,” she says, kissing us both. “I’m thirty-six.”
“I’m Joel,” he says, extending a hand.
Esther beams like that’s the funniest thing she’s heard all year. “You. Are. Hilarious. Come on. Everyone’s going to love you.”
As we’re walking down the hall I keep expecting Grace to emerge from a doorway, bright-cheeked and gin-glazed, a full glass in each hand and unlimited kisses for everyone.
* * *
• • •
The nice thing about Joel is that his outgoing warmth belies his hermit mind-set. We’ve barely got drinks in our hands before Gavin pulls him into conversation about sustainability in architecture, which eventually turns into a debate with Esther on attempts by the middle classes to raffle off their homes, and after that I don’t get to speak to him again for ages. Every time I glance over to check that he’s okay, he’s locked in conversation with someone new, and eventually I nearly lose him among a crowd of people I don’t recognize. But our eyes intermittently find each other, satellites across a solar system, and whenever they do, my stomach ripples with stars.
By the time I feel a hand around my waist I realize that one or maybe even two hours have passed.
It’s Esther. “Just wanted to say how proud I am of you.”
“Proud?”
“Yeah, for chasing your dreams. I should have encouraged you more, all these years.”
She did, I think. She always insisted I’d caved too quickly when my initial flurry of interviews and applications after uni came to nothing, refused to let me jettison my dreams. You’re the only person I know who can name a bird from its flight pattern, she would tell me out of nowhere on a crisp winter’s morning, when I’d pointed out the flock of pintails above our heads, a run of stitches against the sky’s puckered fabric. And who else can identify a tree just by looking at its bark? You should pursue your passions, Cal. Life is for living.
But by then my confidence had already taken a beating from that first round of rejections. Ecology was so competitive—it felt safer and less heartbreaking to suspend my ambitions, assure Esther I’d pursue it again soon. So, after a while, she stopped bringing it up.
“You did,” I tell her now. “I just don’t think I was ready to listen at the time.”
“Love that necklace,” she says, nodding at my clavicle. “I was with her when she bought it.”
It’s a tiny pewter acorn, a Christmas gift from Grace not long after she’d met Ben. She was trying to make a point, I think, about acorns and oak trees and getting off my backside.
Esther hugs me again, then lopes off to locate Gavin.
* * *
• • •
Later, I find Joel chatting to Gavin and Esther in the basement kitchen. It’s a relief to see that they don’t appear to be holding against him the way we started, with all the confusion over Melissa. Or that, at the very least, they’ve agreed to wait until tomorrow before ribbing me about it over WhatsApp.
“Hey.” I loop my arms around Joel. He’s shed his jumper somewhere, is warm and soft-skinned in just a T-shirt. His fragrance is familiar already, like the scent of returning blossom. “I lost you.”
“Hey. I lost you, I think.”
“You hang up. No, you hang up,” Esther says. She’s on the red wine now, her lips vermilion.
I smile. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Ben,” Esther says. “He’s on about quitting his job and selling the house, moving away maybe.”
“Really?” I’ve not spoken to Ben much tonight, but he did seem quite tipsy when I saw him in the queue for the downstairs loo.
“We’re trying to decide if we should talk him out of it,” Gavin says.
“No, why?”
Esther bites a fingernail. “Well, in case he’s being rash.”
I curl my arm more tightly around the warm column of Joel’s torso. “But Grace has been gone nearly two years now,” I say quietly.
We all take a moment.
“I mean, it’s great, isn’t it,” I continue, “if Ben’s finally feeling hopeful? He’s not said anything optimistic like that since she died.”
“So long as he’s moving on, as opposed to running away,” Esther says sagely, as, somewhere nearby, a glass smashes.
Gavin sticks his head out of the kitchen doorway to have a look. “That’s Ben. Oh, Christ, he’s retching.”
“Honestly, houseguests,” Esther says, winking as she swigs back the last of her wine. Then she and Gavin exit the room, leaving Joel and me alone.
Outside, the patio forms a black axis across the basement windowpane. The night air is cloudy, milky with mist.
“Think he’ll be okay?” Joel asks me.
“Oh, definitely. Esther’s excellent in a crisis.” I frown. “I just hope . . .”
He waits.
“. . . that Ben’s not worrying about the café. I don’t mean me leaving so much as . . . things changing. Moving on.”
Joel looks thoughtful. “But maybe in the long run, it’ll turn out okay if they do. If he’s already talking about making a fresh start . . .”
I try to smile. “Yeah. I’ll talk to him, I guess. Once he’s recovered from tonight.”
Joel lets his eyes travel the room. “This is a really great place.”
“I know.” I draw my fingers along the notches and grooves in the old oak worktops. “It’s so cozy and traditional.”
He nods. “Like a proper family home.”
“They were trying for a baby,” I say suddenly, without really knowing why. “Esther and Gavin.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No, I know, I just . . .”
“So they were . . .”
“Trying. Before Grace died. But then they stopped.”
“Death does that, I guess. Makes you take stock. Press pause.”
My smile feels weak
as water. “As long as you remember to press play again at some point.”
We both stand still for a second, listening to the anguish of American blues mewl down through the floorboards, before Joel leans across and kisses me. It feels sublime being down here together, tucked away in the warm belly of the house, like marsupials safe from the outside world.
“I smudged you,” he says, when we part momentarily.
His lips are smeared red from mine. “Ditto.” And then I lean forward and kiss him again. Insistent and impassioned, our bodies are soon tight, our mouths wet and hot. We become each other’s pulse right there in the open palm of the kitchen, warmed by the breath of the Aga and sheltered by the creaking, gently steepling walls of the room.
36.
Joel
Callie’s dozed off next to me in bed, all rumpled clothing and ruffled hair. We took our kiss from Esther’s kitchen earlier straight back home. To the front step while I grappled with the key, then into the hallway. Then through the door to my flat and half onto my sofa, before finally we made it to the bedroom. Together we fell against the mattress, mapping each other out with fevered hands. Heartbeats hammering, skin dampening. At one point I knocked the lamp from my nightstand with my foot (how were we that way up?), plunging us deliciously into darkness. I felt her pelvis twitch as she laughed, making me frenzied with desire.
It’s been a week since we first kissed and I’m falling for her, hard. But I want to do this properly. Go slow. Take our time. She means so much to me already that not rushing things just seems to make sense.
Which is how she’s ended up curled against my hip like a cat while I watch a TED Talk about human stampedes, headphones firmly on.
Maybe I feel like this because of Melissa. Because my brain’s trying to draw a line between her and Callie, somehow. Or perhaps I need to believe I won’t mess this up before we do much more than kiss.
Anyway. We’d cut a strange picture, I think, if you were looking down on us from above. Me in my own little world. Callie asleep by my side, fully clothed.
37.
Callie
The sun is an oily flare, high in the sky of a tart early-December morning. It’s my first day at Waterfen and I’m in the middle of marshland, jolting along in the cab of a tractor that, strangely, I appear to be driving. My new boss, Fiona, is on the fold-out seat next to me, a trailer full of fence posts rolling along behind us as a small battalion of other staff members and volunteers track the deep rents of our tire marks on foot.
I clench and unclench the steering wheel a few times, just to check that this is really happening and I haven’t wandered off-piste from my sleep into one of Joel’s dreams.
It’s hard not to be distracted by my surroundings as we drive. The landscape glints with winter, sunlight sparking off crystallized ground. Twice we catch the tawny dart of a deer fleeing through undergrowth, as a hen harrier loops-the-loop against the sky’s flawless easel.
“It’s not possible to get tractors stuck, is it?” We’re approaching a patch of bright wet ground that bears an unnerving resemblance to bog.
“Oh, yes—it is,” Fiona says cheerfully. Dark-haired and ruddy-cheeked, she has the no-nonsense disposition of a midwife.
“So what do you do if you get stuck?”
“Oh, you don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Get stuck,” she says, with a smile. “Do that and you really are screwed.”
I keep my eyes on the quagmire ahead. “Right. Got it.”
She laughs. “Relax. It’s just like driving a car. You’ll feel if you start to lose traction.” I sense her glancing at me. “You do drive a car, don’t you? Forgot to check your license back there.”
I grin and confirm that, yes, I am in fact qualified to drive. After nearly two years of working in the café, where the smallest spill of coffee felt like a TripAdvisor slating waiting to happen, Fiona’s relaxed approach is like permission to breathe. I can already feel my brain switching lanes, a changing-down of gears in my mind. Perhaps I’d even be getting emotional about it, if I weren’t in charge of agricultural machinery and trying to avoid a headfirst plunge into the nearest ditch.
I’ll come to love this tractor in time, Fiona assures me. She describes hypnotic sun-swamped summers of topping and weed-wiping, long meditative afternoons spent circling meadows in the fen, the air mottled with sunlight and sprinkled with butterflies. She tells me I’ve arrived at the worst possible time of year. “Which is actually a good thing,” she adds, “because the way I look at it, the weather can only get better from here on in.”
“I sort of like winter, though,” I tell her.
Her smile is all sympathy. “We’ve not started clearing out the dike system yet.”
* * *
• • •
The morning is spent erecting a fence line with posts and stockproof fencing wire, which is terrifying in a high-tensile kind of way. I’m petrified of getting it wrong and ricocheting one or more of my workmates into the back of an ambulance. But the trepidation invigorates me—it’s an unexpected stimulant, having to focus so hard on not decapitating someone, or driving the tractor into a bog, or losing my footing and falling into a dike. It’s like the adrenaline shot I’ve been craving since the day I started working at the paint-tin company.
* * *
• • •
We take lunch on top of reed stacks, deep in the middle of the fen. Hot and heaving from the morning’s work, we shed fleeces and jackets, even though it’s not far above freezing. We watch the pivot and plunge of a hunting kestrel, the cold air washing like water over our sweating skin. From a nearby belt of bare-branched trees, the chipping of jackdaws falls like rain.
As we inhale our soup and sandwiches, the conversation turns to wanderlust. Dave, a volunteer and recent ecology graduate, is leaving next week to work on a conservation project in Brazil, monitoring and researching wildlife at a state park reserve. I’ve been completely in awe since the moment he told me.
Fiona asks us all for our bucket-list destinations.
“Latvia,” says Liam. Blunt and broad-shouldered, with hair the color of honey, he’s Fiona’s permanent assistant, coming on board five years ago after realizing exactly how bad he was at financial auditing. “Beauty, peace and quiet, no one around to annoy you.”
“You’ve already been to Latvia,” Fiona points out. “That doesn’t count.”
I smile, think of my guidebooks back at the flat, wonder if Liam and I might turn out to have a lot in common.
Liam shrugs. “Don’t want to go anywhere else.”
“Not somewhere more exotic?” Dave says, though the smile in his eyes tells me they’ve had this conversation before. “Africa maybe?”
“Nah. You know I’m cold-blooded. Anyway, I’ve seen as much of the world as I want to see.”
Fiona turns to me. “How about you, Callie? Dream destination?”
“Lauca National Park,” I say. “You know, in—”
“Chile,” everyone choruses.
I lean forward slightly. “There’s this bird there—”
Dave starts laughing. “Ah, the famed diademed sandpiper-plover.”
Liam snorts, upturns his crisps packet toward his mouth. “You’ve got a better chance of seeing a snow leopard.”
“Or a unicorn.” Dave chortles.
“I know someone who’s seen one,” Fiona says.
I nod eagerly, remembering the girl on my course at uni. “So do I.”
Dave smiles. “Well, if you ever get a picture, make sure you send it to me.”
Fiona meets my eye. “Take no notice. My friend says the place is stunning, real once-in-a-lifetime stuff. And that bird would be an epic find.”
“Right,” Liam says, crushing his empty packet and checking his watch. “This is all very nice and everything, but that fence line
needs finishing off.”
“You’ll have to get used to him, I’m afraid,” Fiona says to me, with a wink. “He’s a bit like a husky. Always itching to keep moving.”
I like Liam already—he seems like my sort of guy. So I’m first to jump eagerly down from the reed stack and follow him back to the fence line.
* * *
• • •
I knock on Joel’s door when I get home, smiling as he winches me into a hug. “Sorry—I’m all sweaty and horrible.”
“Sweaty and lovely,” he insists. “Tell me everything.”
I describe my day, show him the blisters peppering my palms. “I didn’t realize how unfit I am. But on the plus side, I did learn how to drive a tractor.”
“On day one? That’s throwing you in at the deep end.”
“Yep. Mind you, at least I didn’t have time to panic first.”
“Nice people?”
“Yes, really nice. Really great.” I smile down at Murphy. “How was he?”
“Well, he did pine for you at first. But I won him round with my killer combination of walks, ball, treats, and tummy rubs.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “Between you and me, I think he’s developed a soft spot for Tinkerbell.”
I laugh. “Tinkerbell’s far too old for him. She’s nearly ten.”
“Hey, don’t knock it. The distraction worked wonders.”
Inside, I feel a slackening of tension, like the sag of a sail as a storm subsides. “Thank you so much.”
“You’re more than welcome. Drink?” He heads over to the fridge, withdrawing a bottle and searching out a corkscrew.
Joel’s flat puts mine to shame—it’s always so clean and orderly, a capsule of calm. In the living room, there’s just a two-seater sofa with a teal-colored throw spread demurely across its shoulders, a decent-sized TV, Bluetooth speaker, and not a lot else—aside from a succulent on the hearth and a coffee table, normally bearing his notebook and pen.
