by Jon McGregor
August was dry and still and a dust rose from the fields and there was a great fear of fire on the hills. The young woodpigeons left the nests and practised their flight, beating up from the trees before cracking their wings into a stiff glide down to the ground. The badgers spent more of the night outside, and ranged closer to the edges of their territory. There was scent-marking, and in the morning small piles of soft scat could be found. In his studio Geoff Simmons wrapped pots in tissue and bubble wrap and sealed them into cardboard boxes. The people who’d ordered them thought they were getting vases or jugs or cups but they were all simply vessels to him. He labelled the boxes and carried them down the lane to the post office. He left the door hanging open all the time now. The Jones house was empty. There was uncertainty about where Jones had gone, and no one could agree on when he’d last been seen. But the house stayed dark and when the leaves fell they blocked the gutter and the rain started spilling under the eaves and staining the render. The post was still being delivered, and could be seen piling up behind the glazed front door. Brief consideration was given as to whether he might in fact be in there, passed. But Brian Fletcher knew where his sister was, and on enquiry was told that he was still visiting her, and so the matter was dropped. What he did with his house was his business, people said. Irene visited once or twice, and tidied the front garden, and arranged for the gutters to be cleared. At the cricket ground the game against Cardwell was lost.
In September Rohan and James came over from Manchester, and Sophie from London, and they met up with Lynsey for the day. They’d talked about it at Christmas and it had taken this long to arrange. The original plan had been to go for a walk, but James was still on crutches so they went for a drive instead. They met at the Hunter place on a Sunday morning, and the four of them sat at the breakfast bar with coffee and croissants. Stuart was working away, but Jess hovered around asking questions and talking about how little time seemed to have passed since they’d been teenagers perching on the same high stools. I don’t suppose you’ve got the time to look at photographs now, have you? she asked. I’ve got some wonderful ones from your last day of school. They were polite but they said they had to get on. She stood in the doorway and watched as they all piled into Sophie’s car. The kitchen shook with quietness behind her. Olivia was already out for the day. She turned, and tidied their breakfast things away. The four of them drove up past the visitor centre and headed for the access roads by the higher reservoirs. They didn’t have much of a plan. Sophie asked James how bad his leg was and he said he wasn’t a total cripple but he couldn’t walk more than a couple of miles. It’ll get better though, will it? As long as I don’t do anything stupid. Like fall off Black Bull Rocks, that sort of stupid? Yeah, that. As long as I don’t do that again I’ll be fine. And as long as we don’t hold you down and jump on your leg? Yeah, that’s not going to help either. Got it. Just checking. Sophie headed up the new access road to the wind turbines, and parked at the top. From here they could see seven of the reservoirs, stepping down towards the village and the river beyond, and in the other direction the motorway. The wind was up and the car was shaking. This should blow the hangover away, Rohan said, and they all opened their doors. James needed a hand to get steady on his crutches, and Lynsey and Rohan walked either side to keep him sheltered from the wind. They made their way along the ridge. The turbine blades whipped round overhead. The clouds were being scattered ragged in the wind and the light around them flickered. Lynsey put her arm through James’s and leant into him slightly as they walked. The three of them moved slowly. Sophie was impatient and kept striding ahead, turning to take pictures of them on her phone and then waiting for them to catch up. The road became a track and the track became a footpath and James started to wince. They could see the old water-board buildings at the top of Reservoir no. 7. They stopped, and he said he thought he’d had enough. There was weather coming from the motorway and they agreed to turn back. Well, it wasn’t exactly the Iron Man challenge, but it’ll do for a first attempt, Rohan said. We’ll try a bit further next time, will we? James was already clenching his teeth with discomfort and didn’t reply. Lynsey kept hold of his arm. Next spring, Sophie said. We’ll do the whole of the Greystone Way, the four of us. All of it? That’s a ten-day walk, at least. Book the time off now then. You’re not scared, are you? That’s a long time to be away, Lynsey said. She didn’t quite say that Guy wouldn’t like it, but they could see that’s what she meant. By the time they’d got back to the car it had been agreed that they would definitely do it in the spring, but only Sophie really believed they would. They went back to Sophie’s so Rohan and Lynsey could drive their cars into town and they had lunch at the pub by the river. The weather had passed and it was just warm enough to sit outside. Rohan talked a bit about how his music was going, and Sophie tried to explain about the start-up she was involved with in London. Lynsey’s phone chirped a few times, and the third or fourth time she said she’d have to get home. James suddenly pointed in alarm at something on the other side of the river. There was nothing there, but while Rohan and Sophie turned to look he leant forward and kissed Lynsey softly on the cheek. She shook her head urgently and he smiled. Let’s go, he said, taking off his shoes and socks and setting them on the table. He didn’t wait for the others to join him and he didn’t count to three, but by the time he’d hobbled over to the water’s edge they were beside him, barefoot, Sophie and Rohan taking an arm each and helping him down the bank. Lynsey carried his crutches. Even at the end of a long summer the water was gasping cold coming down from the hills, and they each caught their breath as they made their way across. In the middle they paused. They’d be setting off in different directions from the car park, and three of them had a long way to go. They weren’t ready to leave. The water washed around their ankles and turned over beneath the bridge. In the beer garden a blackbird poked at the crumbs beneath their table. The river was cold and it kept moving and they stood and looked up into the hills.
The days shortened and the light grew hazy and thick. Garden furniture was taken in. The teasels along the banks of the river stood brown and tall, scratching stiffly at the air. In the evenings through the beech wood the last small coppers were seen, roosting head-down on the grasses beside the track. The sun angled low over the hill as Les Thompson led his cows out of the parlour towards the night-grazing paddock. He closed the gate behind them and headed back to the parlour for washdown. The metallic smell of coming rain rose up and the air felt charged and tight. There was a tingling before the first fat drops fell and they came as a letting go. Susanna Wright gave up her tenancy in the Close and moved in with Ruth Fowler above the shop in Harefield. They’d been together for months now, and those who’d noticed were only surprised it had taken so long. They’d made no great announcement but neither had they troubled to keep it to themselves. They carried on working their own allotments. On changeover days Irene was kept busy at the Hunters’ barn conversions. She bagged the bedding first and opened the windows so the mattresses would air. She mopped and hoovered and wiped, moving back and forth between the three units as the floors dried. She sang as she worked. There was rain forecast but for now the air blowing through was warm and heather-fresh. In the smaller bedroom of the end conversion she stood and said a prayer, as she had done for years now. She felt the old urge to check under the bed. She changed all the sheets and duvets, put welcome baskets on the kitchen counters, arranged fresh flowers in vases and jugs. She pulled the windows to and locked the doors. It was a simple enough job but she made sure it was done well. People knew they could count on her. She pocketed the keys and walked back down the driveway, her feet crunching in the gravel. An hour yet until the bed-and-breakfast guests were due at her place. Time enough to sit. A rare enough treat, still.
At the allotments the first frosts edged the winter crops and broke open the soil. Cathy had thought Richard would be in touch since selling his mother’s house, and might even have found a reason to come back to the vill
age. But there had been nothing, and when she called his number there was a strange dialling tone that suggested he was somewhere abroad. He didn’t answer until the third time she called, and after they’d spoken for a few minutes she said that she missed him. She’d realised she missed him, she said. The river was high and thick with peat and there were grayling in number for those who knew where to look. Ian Dowsett was out in the channel between millponds, working a weighted nymph around the rocks and waiting for the chance to strike. The cold was already seeping inside his waders. It was hard to stay out in the water as long as he once would have done. The reservoirs were high and the wind funnelling down the valley pushed the water in waves over the tops of the dams. At the foot of the churchyard yew the goldcrests pressed close together against the chill. The missing girl had not yet been forgotten. The girl’s name was Rebecca, or Becky, or Bex. She had been looked for, everywhere. She had been looked for in the lambing sheds on Jackson’s farm, people moving through the thick stink of frightened ewes and climbing up into the lofts and squeezing behind the stacks of baled hay, and in the darkness outside great heaving lungfuls of fresh air were taken as people made their way across the field to the other barns. She had been looked for in the caves, and in the quarries, and in the reservoirs and all across the hills. It was no good. Dreams were had about her, still. There were dreams about her catching a bus to a railway station and boarding a train which ran out of control and hurtled off the rails. There were dreams where she ran down to the road and met a man with a car who took her to a ferry. Dreams where she ran and just kept running, to the road, to a bus station, to a city where she could find enough places to hide. There were dreams about finding her on the night she went missing, stumbling across her on the moor in the lowering dark and helping her back to her parents. In the dreams the parents said thank you, briefly, and people muttered something about it being no problem at all.
The clouds skated across the face of the moon and the silver light on the fields flushed in and out of the hollows. A blackbird moved under Mr Wilson’s hedge, poking around in the leaf litter for something to eat. At the river the keeper broke open the ice on the millpond so no children would be tempted to test it out. He had a good length of scaffold pole to pound down and it took a few strikes to crack through. There were slabs of glassy ice turning on the black water. In the eaves of the church the bats were folded deeply in their hibernation and the air around them was still. In his studio Geoff Simmons washed the day’s work from his hands, the hardened clay dissolving in milky streams down the plughole and into the clay trap beneath, the clear water rising to the outlet and flowing cleanly along the open drain outside. The stems of the coppiced willow stools up on the Hunters’ land gleamed red and gold in the narrow winter light. There was carol singing in the church, with candles and the smell of cut yew and holly. Molly Jackson sang a solo verse of ‘Silent Night’, her voice trembling a little while her parents watched from opposite sides of the aisle. When she finished everyone looked down at their sheets to find the words of the second verse. The sound of their singing carried out into the night, down to the river and the school and the cricket ground. The river ran empty and clear, turning beneath the bridge. There were clouds and the evening was dark and people moved through the streets with their heads lowered. From the houses the lights shone warmly and in the square the conversations spilled out from the pub. Car doors slammed and someone called goodnight and the headlights swept across the road, past the allotments, around beyond the beech wood and the visitor centre and away through the hills. The hills were a dark silhouette. The reservoirs were a flat metallic grey. At the quarry the rope-swing hung above the water. From his bed Jackson listened to the singing in the church. All was calm, all was bright.
Acknowledgements
Bamford Quaker Community, Barbara Crossley, Benjamin Johncock, Chris Power, David Jones, Edward Hogan, Éireann Lorsung, Fairholmes Visitor Centre, Gill O’Neill, Gillian Roberts, Helen Garnons-Williams, Jane Chapman, Jin Auh, Julian Humphries, Katrin Moye, Katy Wakelin, Kim Day, Mark Day, Melissa Harrison, Nicky Wilkinson, Nicola Dick, Nigel Redman, Peak District National Park Media Centre, Richard Birkin, Rosie Garton, Sarah-Jane Forder, Superintendent Jonathan Morgan, Tracy Bohan.
About the Author
Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and a story collection. He is the winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literature Prize, Betty Trask Prize and Somerset Maugham Award, and has twice been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nottingham, where he edits the Letters Page, a literary journal in letters. He was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, and now lives in Nottingham.
Also by Jon McGregor
IF NOBODY SPEAKS OF REMARKABLE THINGS
Winner of the Betty Trask Award
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
On a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence – street cricket, barbecues, painting windows … A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever.
Jon McGregor’s first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is an astonishing debut.
‘My book of the year. A magical, spellbinding, profound novel’
Maggie O’Farrell, Daily Telegraph
‘A sensationally accomplished debut … a convincing and moving vision of contemporary Britain’
Sunday Times
‘This is a novel of wonders’
Observer
‘This novel owes as much to poetry as it does to prose in its hypnotic portrait of industrialised society … An assured debut’
The Times
Tap here to buy now …
SO MANY WAYS TO BEGIN
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize
David Carter cannot help but wish for more: that his wife Eleanor would be the sparkling girl he once found so irresistible; that his job as a museum curator could live up to the promise it once held; that his daughter’s arrival could have brought him closer to Eleanor. But a few careless words spoken by his mother’s friend have left David restless with the knowledge that his whole life has been constructed around a lie.
‘Extraordinary’
Daily Mail
‘Subtle, clever and affecting’
Independent on Sunday
‘An homage to ordinary people and ordinary things, to the parts of our lives that often go unspoken … moving and honest’
The Times
‘A book about the search for greater meaning in the strange dance of chance’
Independent
Tap here to buy now …
EVEN THE DOGS
Winner of the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Award
On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man’s body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they’re dead, too. Their bodies found in squats and sheds and alleyways across the city. Victims of a bad batch of heroin, they’re in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying their own particular homage as their friend’s body is taken away, examined, investigated and cremated.
All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives. We meet Robert, the deceased, the only alcoholic in a sprawling group of junkies; Danny, just back from uncomfortable holidays with family, who discovers the body and futilely searches for his other friends to share the news of Robert’s death; Laura, Robert’s daughter, who stumbles into the junky’s life w
hen she moves in with her father after years apart; Heather, who has her own place for the first time since she was a teenager; Mike, the Falklands War vet; and all the others.
Theirs are stories of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives.
Intense, exhilarating and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society – littered with love, loss, despair and a half-glimpse of redemption.
‘A rare combination of profound empathy and wonderful writing’
Mark Haddon
‘A breathtakingly good writer’
The Times
‘Absolutely outstanding … an incredible book’
Colum McCann
‘Jon McGregor treads with unflinching respect through the debris of this dead man’s home … a short, brilliant and beautiful lesson in empathy’
Daily Mail
