by Jon McGregor
Cathy knocked on Mr Wilson’s door and asked whether Nelson needed a walk, and he told her the kettle was already on. Nelson paced backwards and forwards while they sat in the front room, his tail crashing against the coffee table. Mr Wilson had been baking cakes again. They were really very good, but she knew there was no point asking why he never donated cakes to village events. That’s more of a ladies’ thing, isn’t it? he’d said, the one time she had asked. She’d told him this was nonsense, but knew he wouldn’t change his mind. She couldn’t remember him doing any baking while his wife was alive. But that was a long time ago now. She probably wouldn’t have noticed if he had. Jean had died fifteen years before, or more, when Cathy’s boys weren’t yet at school, and it was all Cathy could have done then to know what day it was. She remembered standing behind the front door with them and counting to ten, regaining her composure, so that she could walk through the village without it being apparent that she’d had to physically wrestle them into their clothes, and clean food off the walls, and scream into a pile of cushions. And then straighten clothes, smile, open door. Be ready to say good morning, be ready to listen to advice from anyone who passed in the street. Mr Wilson hadn’t been elderly then at all, she realised. He possibly hadn’t even retired. And yet she’d always thought of him as that, as elderly. Unconscious association with the word widower, perhaps. Or the distance of youth. Although she hadn’t been as young as all that, and had felt older, so much older all of a sudden, tired all the time. Smile, breathe, straighten clothes, open door. Be ready to agree what a delight the two boys were, to agree that yes they were a handful sometimes but it was worth it in the end, with a chuckle. Always the fucking chuckles, in those days. And keeping it together all the way down the lane because Mr Wilson was so often outside his house, doing something with the flowers or mucking about with his dog – it wasn’t Nelson then, this was a pointer, Franklin – and then collapsing through the front door but not stopping because she couldn’t stop, she could never stop, the boys always needed something else or were breaking something else and the tea needed making and the boys needed putting to bed, please, finally, and Patrick needed something when he got home. She finished her tea, and thanked Mr Wilson for the cake, and went to fetch Nelson’s lead. The sound of a truck came from way up in Hunter’s wood, dragging out timber, the engine over-revving with the strain on the heavy ground. The first snows of the winter fell at the end of the month but they were wet and they didn’t settle.
The Christmas decorations went up in the square and Tony put up a sign saying he was taking bookings for Christmas dinners. There was carol singing on the radio in the tractor shed, and when Gordon Jackson heard Will singing along to ‘Silent Night’ he wouldn’t give over about it for days. He kept breaking into Shepherds quake at the sight every time Will came into the room. Susanna’s ex-husband opened the shop door one afternoon and said hello as though he’d been invited. He seemed relaxed and open-handed, but there was something about the way he shut the door behind him. Susanna, he said. Here you are. Smiling broadly. He was a small man. He was. She nodded. She didn’t trust herself to speak. She looked past him through the window and there was no one outside. People tended not to pass through on this street. He stayed between her and the door and he asked how she’d been. Her phone was on the shelf beside the till, and he was in the way of that as well. It was a small shop. She wanted to ask him to leave but it didn’t feel safe. She felt all her placatory instincts rushing back. Her passive defences. But she kept her posture tall. She tightened her core. She told him she was well and asked what had brought him here. Susanna, relax. You seem tense. Come on. I’m not here to stir anything up. Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not here to win you back. She breathed through the rush of irritation. She shook her head very slightly and he stepped towards her. I’m just here to see Ashleigh. It’s been long enough. She needs a father. She shook her head again. Ashleigh’s at school, she said. I can wait, he replied. This isn’t what we agreed, she told him. You’re not supposed to be here. He took another step towards her, but with his palms held out as though this would make it look like he was stepping back. Susanna, we didn’t agree anything. The way he said the word agree. She stood very still. Her phone was out of reach. The shop was small. She heard his breathing quicken as he stepped towards her.
The pantomime was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Andrew was cast as Baby Bear. He was too old for this but he went along with it because he knew his mother would be happy. He could feel his speech thickening with the anxiety of being on stage, and it was muffled further by the costume’s fluffy head. When he found Olivia Hunter sleeping in his bed, her long blonde plaits trailing over the pillow, he gave up trying to make himself understood and just watched over her. This felt like the right thing to do. There was something peaceful in it, he thought. Jess Hunter was dressed as Mummy Bear and she came rushing on stage to talk. Who’s that sleeping in your bed, Baby Bear? she asked, and even with the fixed features of the bear costume Andrew managed to look baffled. He left the stage sooner than the script required, and afterwards couldn’t be found for a time. Richard Clark came home for New Year’s Eve and his sisters were talking again about their mother moving into a home. The conversations were whispered and fraught and she cottoned on. I’ll be going nowhere, she said. You needn’t worry about that. You’ll have to carry me out in a box. Don’t upset yourself, Mum, Rachel said, raising her voice as though hearing or lack of understanding was one of Mrs Clark’s problems. We just want you to be somewhere you can be a bit more comfortable, Sarah added. Somewhere you can forget about me, you mean. Somewhere we don’t need to be worrying about you every five minutes, Mum, yes. Come on now. Don’t take on. Richard watched the conversation as if he had no part to play. It was as though they were following a script. The decision would be made without him, either way. He had to leave early to get back for a meeting, and when he left they were still discussing it. There were lights seen in the caravan in Fletcher’s orchard, and someone moving around. The brambles began to be cleared. Mike Jackson sorted all the paperwork for his trip to Australia, and was starting to pack a bag. Maisie refused to help him or to even discuss it. You’re breaking your father’s heart, she told him, and he was more or less sure this wasn’t true. He’s just putting on a brave face, Maisie said. The missing girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. In the photo her face was half-turned away from the camera as though she didn’t want to be seen, as though she wanted to be somewhere else. She would be twenty years old by now but she was always spoken of as a girl. It had been seven years, and there was talk that now she would legally have to be declared dead. This turned out to have no basis in law, according to a statement released by the police. Any such declaration would always depend on the circumstances. The girl’s parents had never stopped looking and the police statement confirmed that the case remained open. In the village people looked up to the hills and felt that they’d long known. She could have walked high over the moor and stumbled into a flooded clough and sunk cold and deep in the wet peat before the dogs and thermal cameras came anywhere near, her skin tanned leather-brown and soft and her hair coiled neatly around her. She could have fallen anywhere and be lying there still.
8.
At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks in the rain, and thunder in the next valley. The rain broke over the hill like a wave and blew straight into people’s faces. The river was high and thick and there were grayling in number feeding on the caddis larvae and shrimps. In the morning Ian Dowsett was out with a new box of flies and having a job to keep his footing in the current as he dropped the weighted nymphs into the water. Susanna’s ex-husband appeared again, and this time the altercation was seen. The police were called, and he was arrested. There was a new injunction. Susanna was embarrassed and she didn’t want to talk about it but in the end the story came out. When she’d first moved to the village it had been to get away from him. She’d been living in a refuge with the children, but
he’d found out where they were. His threats hadn’t been enough to have him charged, but there was an injunction. She was offered support to move away from the area. She knew about this village because an aunt had once lived here, and it had seemed as good as any. She’d planned to keep this information to herself. She thought that part of building a new life involved not thinking about what had happened. She’d thought she could leave it behind. But now he’d shown up, and everyone knew. This came out in conversation with Cathy Harris one evening, when Cathy was helping clear up after yoga. Cathy had a way of waiting that made you want to say more, Susanna had found. When she nodded it was as though she already knew what Susanna was going to say. Few people, seeing her husband, had thought him capable of that sort of violence. He didn’t have the build for it; he didn’t seem the type. She’d heard people say this, even after they’d known some of what he was doing. There’d been a time when this had made her think it was her fault; that there must have been something she was doing to provoke such a well-mannered man into behaviour he wasn’t otherwise prone to. That there must have been something she could do to protect him from the storm of his own rages. He was always so apologetic afterwards. Careful to explain just what had gone wrong and what he wanted her to do differently in order to help him not do it again. He had always talked in terms of this loss of control, and yet he was so careful not to leave marks on her face. He had twice broken her arm, and once dislocated her shoulder. She had lied about these injuries at the hospital. He had told her she’d be nothing without him, that people thought she was brash and loud and awkward. He’d told her she needed to lose weight, build strength, dress differently, laugh less loudly, not eat in public, have different friends, be a better mother. When Rohan had asked why they didn’t leave it had been the first time such a thing had even felt possible. He was twelve at the time. He seemed to understand what was happening before she did. She’d told him that his father loved them and was just having a difficult time at work and things would be better soon, and he went and printed out an information sheet about domestic violence and the refuge network. When they left there’d been no relief, and no certainty that she’d done the right thing. Those feelings had only come gradually. But in the village she’d found herself ready for something new. She’d found herself standing taller. Straighter. The yoga had helped.
In February it snowed solidly for a week, and on the hills the drifts were eight feet deep. The road between the village and the town was ploughed, high banks of snow heaped on either side, but beyond the village it was blocked. Jackson’s boys had to go up on foot to pull out as many sheep as they could. Most of them were easy enough to find, pressed in the lee of a drystone wall or huddled around a tree, but the losses were high. On the estate the pheasants were moved from their winter enclosures to the smaller laying pens and their feed was enriched. At the allotment the last of the leeks were yellow against the snow, fat-bodied and toppling, their papery skins peeling away. By the river a willow came down in a storm and carried on growing as though nothing had changed, the branches all bending slowly towards the sky. Molly Jackson had her second birthday. At the party Maisie watched Will and Claire carefully, and afterwards she had questions Will didn’t want to answer. She knew things were going badly again and there was nothing she could do but look out for the children. Shrove Tuesday fell on the fourteenth, and in the kitchen at the Gladstone Olivia Hunter was having a hard time making heart-shaped pancakes. It had been Tony’s idea, and she didn’t think he’d tried it out himself. He’d given her a cookie-cutter to use as a mould, which was fine until it came time to flip them over. She kept burning the tips of her fingers. In the lounge there were jokes made about broken hearts, and Tony was careful to relay these to her when he came into the kitchen. It was a long evening. The next day there were only three people at the Ash Wednesday service, and one of those was Jane Hughes. She suggested they sit together in a circle by the altar, and she ran through the liturgy in a soft murmur that wouldn’t have carried much past the first row of pews. At the close she daubed Irene’s and Brian’s foreheads with ash, and asked Irene to daub hers, and they sat there with the cold marks on their faces. Outside in the late-winter sunlight Sally Fletcher was seen bringing down two mugs of tea from the house and talking to the man who’d been staying in the caravan. He was her brother, it turned out. He’d made a good job with the brambles and the general clearance and was starting to work on the trees. Brian Fletcher had told him to take out the dead wood first and they’d see where to go after that. It wasn’t clear what arrangement they had with the man, but there was an impression he never went into the house. He was sometimes seen standing in the doorway of the caravan, smoking. He had a sullen look about him. There were tattoos.
The widower was settling in at the old Tucker place. He’d done a lot of work in the garden. He’d taken out the paving and planted fruit trees and built up a number of raised beds. It looked more like an allotment than a front garden and there were some who thought words should be had. But under the circumstances it was felt he should be left alone. He’d not been much seen in the village and it was understood that his quietness might be part of the grieving. There was little known about the family he was said to have lost, and nobody wanted to ask. At the allotments Jones planted onions. His rows were straight and there would be no weeds. When he was done he carried his tools back to the house. At the school, heating engineers had gained access to the boilerhouse and condemned the boiler. There was talk of a modern system in the main building. Mrs Simpson told Jones he could still use the boilerhouse as a storeroom and he said nothing in reply. The clocks went forward and the evenings opened out. The buds on the branches were brightening. Irene was having trouble with Andrew. She’d tried talking to the vicar but it was never the right time. There were support groups at the day centre but they weren’t for her. They were for the parents who wanted things to be different, who wanted things fixed. She knew there was no fixing to be done. Just wanted a way of managing. A way of being safe in her house. That was putting it a bit strong, maybe. But he was a big lad now. And he had tempers that came on quick. Like his father. He’d called her terrible names. She didn’t know where he was learning these words. From the computer, it must be. No idea what he was doing on that computer most of the time. Only that when he sat there he was absorbed. Still. But there were days when he wouldn’t move away from it. Days he didn’t get dressed, wouldn’t come to the bus stop. There were dangers on the internet, she knew that; but she didn’t rightly know what they were. She was worried but she didn’t know what she was supposed to be worrying about. She could talk to Cooper. He knew computers. And she could always unplug the thing, if anything bad started happening. Although what would Andrew do then. He was a big lad now. At Reservoir no. 3 the maintenance team worked across the steep face of the embankment, looking for burrows or soggy ground or unexpected vegetation. So far they’d found nothing but they kept looking. The levels were falling quicker than they should be. There were losses that couldn’t be explained. There was a storm in the night and the rain came hard against the windows like gravel.
As the dusk deepened over the badger sett at the far end of the woods, a rag-eared boar called out a sow, pacing around the entrances until she emerged with a soft circling whine and was taken. The woods were thick with the stink of wild garlic and the leaves gleamed darkly along the paths. Jackson’s boys went out to the fields and checked over the sheep. Most of the lambs were on grass now and growing fast. The mothers had lost condition and some were marked out for extra feed. The morning was warm and there was a heady tang of nutrition coming up from the land. The lambs were electric with life and jolting around each other. There was a rare chance to sit on the trailer for a smoke while they watched them. At the weekend Cooper took the twins out for an early walk to give Su a chance to catch up on sleep. She’d been working a lot recently, and coming to bed late. He filled their backpacks with snacks and drinks, and they headed out through the garde
n into the woods. They were excited, running on ahead and swiping at the nettles with sticks. He let them choose the way when they came to junctions in the path, but managed to steer them towards the visitor centre and the track leading up to Reservoir no. 3. It was further than the pair of them had managed before. At one point they passed the locked access hatch to a cave entrance, and were bursting with questions. He explained about the lead mines, and about the natural caves, and told them that yes, there were people who went down there to explore. They asked if it was safe and he said not for them it wasn’t, laughing and walking on as though that would be the end of their interest. They were flagging by the time they crested the hill, so he decided to stop there. They sat on a flat rock and ate their snacks, and Sam asked if it was true that there were houses under the water. Lee called him an idiot for even thinking this, and Cooper explained that there had once been villages down there, that all the reservoirs had been made by flooding the valleys. They looked at him, waiting to see if he was joking. The world didn’t always sound right when it was first explained. There were a few in the village still who could remember the river spilling its banks behind the newly built dams, a slow seeping over that didn’t seem capable of filling the valley in the way the engineers had promised, each day a little higher, the outlines of the demolished villages being lapped over by the waves and the dam making more and more sense until by the time the Duke came to ceremonially open the sluice the water was pouring over the top of the wall. Business at Susanna Wright’s shop wasn’t keeping pace with the projections she’d shown her small-business adviser. She stayed open late and picked up sales from people in the village who needed last-minute birthday cards or gifts, but the walkers who came through mostly had no interest in the candles and crafts she was selling. Ashleigh sometimes worked with her after school but it took some effort to look busy. Geoff Simmons walked past most days with his whippet but he never came in. At the Spring Dance Irene found herself being asked by Gordon Jackson. She couldn’t remember all the steps but found herself falling into them easily enough. She hoped no one was looking. She could feel the thickness of his body beneath his shirt, and found no reason not to think about that. He was holding her as though he might lift her into the air. Twice she felt his legs against her, and the stiffness of his thigh muscles was the memory she carried with her afterwards. He said something she didn’t catch and smiled down at her and for a moment she felt as though he didn’t know anyone else was in the room. This was a talent, she understood. Ted had never looked at her in that way. She had long suspected that Gordon had a reputation and now she understood why that might be. The dance finished and she went to sit down. Gordon was startled by the unwanted possibilities he’d felt stirring in himself. He wouldn’t pursue them but he was worried they’d even arisen. Some people would call it a problem, he knew. He looked around for Susanna Wright.
