The Leaping

by Tom Fletcher

  I kept my eyes peeled for Fell Road.

  FRANCIS

  Mum and Dad are sleeping in late today. They didn’t even get up to say goodbye to Jack and Jennifer, which is unusual behaviour for them. I sit on one of the two cream-coloured reclining chairs in the living-room. I flick through the music channels on TV but they’re all full of shit. All I want to find is a song that I like. It shouldn’t be this hard, given the stupid number of channels. The choice is nice to have, I guess, or would be, if there was anything to choose between.

  I notice that the other recliner is empty. The empty chair bothers me because the other one is occupied. By me. So I get up and sit on the sofa, leaving both chairs empty, which is better. I carry on flicking through the music channels. I’ll stop when I find something worthwhile. But I don’t. I don’t find anything, I mean. I don’t find anything.

  By the time Mum comes downstairs, I am watching Rocketship X-M. It’s a nineteen-fifties science-fiction film. One of those that sometimes gets read as a Cold War paranoia film. My mum walks in at my favourite moment; the trajectory of the eponymous spaceship is being drawn out. It shows the spaceship heading straight up from the surface of the earth and then, once it has emerged from our atmosphere, turning a ninety-degree angle in order to continue on to the moon.

  ‘What are you watching, hey?’ she says.

  ‘An old film I brought up with me.’ I look across at her. ‘You slept in.’

  ‘We didn’t sleep.’ She sits down on one of the recliners. The same one that I sat in. ‘Have your friends gone?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Where’s dad?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  I look away from her and back at the paused image on the screen. I un-pause it.

  ‘It’s OK, you know,’ she says. ‘It’s OK to sit in the quiet sometimes. Just sit and think. It might help.’

  ‘Mm.’ I don’t look at her. I bite my lip. I try to talk without letting go of it. ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Francis.’ She gets up and sits next to me on the sofa. ‘Francis.’

  ‘Mm. I can’t – I can’t do that.’

  ‘Here.’ She turns the TV off. The house falls completely silent. Apart from the white noise of Dad’s shower, a couple of rooms away. She holds me and I start to shake. ‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘You can only distract yourself for so long.’

  JACK

  We followed Fell Road up the mountainside – the fellside – as it twisted and turned and narrowed and bucked and buckled and burst open over the harder, older rocks beneath it. It hairpinned onwards and upwards, and dead-looking grass encroached upon it, stealthily obfuscating the hard edges over time, and breaking them up with the patient strength of all nature. Every now and again we had to stop because of sheep lying across the uneven way and refusing to move. They stared at me with their disquieting yellow eyes and I felt like they were judging me, each and every time, and only once they had found me worthy did they stand up and shamble off.

  ‘These sheep look strange,’ Jennifer said.

  ‘They’re Herdwick, apparently,’ I said. ‘They have their own sheep species up here. Descended from some that swam ashore after one of the galleons of the Spanish Armada was wrecked near here. A place called Drigg, or something.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I looked the area up in The Lore of the Land. It’s not confirmed, necessarily, but it’s one of the favourite theories. Beatrix Potter thought they were a lot older, though. Here before the Romans, according to her.’

  ‘They look really wild. Dirty, too.’

  ‘Maybe it’s their long wool,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean though. Look at that one!’

  A particularly big sheep stood on a rock to the side of the road, and its front end seemed especially bulky because the wool from its rear end had partly been shaved off and hung behind it like a sloughed skin. It must have dragged the coat around with it all the time. Its eyes were big and yellow and so were its visible teeth, and its head followed our movement as we passed by.

  Eventually, we found the opening of an even narrower, bumpier road – just a dusty track, really – that had a ramshackle metal five-bar gate hung up across it, between two wonky stone gateposts. I pulled over and we got out of the car. The gate put me in mind of a hugely fat drunk man being supported by two slightly less drunk, skinnier men. The name Fell House was daubed across one of the bars of the gate in white paint, which was fading badly. The gateposts were unusual, though – they were each made up of huge shards of slate driven downwards into the ground, with the grain of the stone running from top to bottom. They were pretty vicious-looking things.

  ‘Look,’ Jennifer said, reaching her hand up and running her long fingers delicately over one of the stones. ‘Look at this.’

  Joining her, I saw that the slate gateposts had once been ornately carved, but now the carvings were too weathered – split and splintered – for me to be able to tell what they were, or had been.

  ‘Can you see what they were carvings of?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Too damaged.’

  Beyond the gate, we could see Fell House itself, low and dark grey and ancient and available, I unintentionally reminded myself, and we stood still and silent and I looked across at Jennifer and the sudden breeze picked her hair up and held it out backwards from her, like she was falling forwards.

  It was hard to make out where the house ended and the fell began, partly because of the grey stone that it was made out of, which was the same as the stone around it, as if the house had been carved out of the ground, and partly because it was surrounded by smaller outhouses that were even more rock-like than the house itself. The whole thing just looked so at home there, nestled into the land in a way that it couldn’t have been anywhere else; anywhere else it would have looked crude and ugly and awkward, but there, where it was, it just fited as if the fell had given birth to it.

  Fell House seemed old and heavy with time, and strong, like it had weathered all kind of storms. Strong, but damaged – there was no doubt that the place needed work.

  If I had a decent job, or some sort of financial security, then I would have been thinking of spending it, because the place drew me in.

  Jennifer had money, of course.

  Maybe every generation realises its age through the passing of its parents, and each generation reaches maturity through the death of that before it. I looked across at Jennifer again, but she was still entranced by the house, and her hair was vivid against the sky, which, behind her, was slowly darkening.

  A huge black bird rose up from behind Fell House and flapped lazily around and around. It was followed by another, and another, and another, and another.

  They just kept coming.

  It felt good to be back in my own room, although less good to be back in Manchester. Jennifer had her eyes closed and was breathing regularly by the time I slipped into bed. I reached out and turned off the bedside lamp.

  ‘Francis?’ she murmured.

  ‘What?’ I turned the lamp back on. ‘No, it’s Jack. What do you mean?’

  ‘Jack? Hell, I’m sorry.’ She smiled sleepily and sat up a little. ‘Must’ve been dreaming.’

  ‘Well.’ I didn’t know what to say. I looked around and saw that her eyes were closing again. ‘What were you dreaming about?’

  ‘Francis, I think. I mean that would make sense, right? We did just come back from his parents’ house today. Can’t remember the details, I’m afraid.’ She stretched. ‘Nothing to get so uppity about, though. Nothing sexy.’

  ‘I’m not getting uppity!’

  ‘You are getting uppity.’ She yawned. ‘Hey, I’ve just remembered. He made a pass at me this morning, over breakfast. He wasn’t with it though. He was upset, like, completely wide-eyed and confused.’

  ‘What?!’ I spluttered, sitting bolt upright. ‘He did – what did he do? And you didn’t tell me?’

  ‘I forgot! Jesus, Jack. It’s not a
big deal. He just tried to kiss me. He was so upset. Like I said to him, he wasn’t thinking straight.’

  She was right, so I kept my mouth shut and tried to swallow the anger.

  ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘he should have more self-control. Like me, right now. See? I’m exhibiting self-control right now.’

  ‘Oh, Jack.’ She was dropping off again. ‘I guess he’s just a bit more impulsive than you. It’s not a good thing or a bad thing. Anyway, you’re not always in control, hey? Look at Kenny.’

  My stomach froze and I looked to the window, expecting to see his weird face looming through the glass before I realised that she was making a joke.

  ‘I didn’t push him,’ I said.

  ‘I know that. I was joking.’

  After a short while, I turned the lamp back off and lay next to Jennifer. She shifted so that she was lying on her side, resting her head on my chest. I wanted to be impulsive right then, to kiss her. God knows I wanted to. But I didn’t know if she wanted to sleep. Should I have been running my hands over her stomach, her thighs, trying to instigate something?

  My erection stuck up like something not quite a part of me, and I could feel it too vividly, and it reminded me of something Taylor said sometimes. What was it? A battle with your body is a battle lost, or something like that. I wanted it to just go away.

  I had to get up early as I was working at half eight, and Jennifer woke up with me, the slow violins of the alarm clock drawing us upwards together.

  ‘Sorry about last night,’ was the first thing she said.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ I said, and squeezed her. ‘I know things are hardly normal at the moment.’

  We had breakfast in the basement kitchen, the two of us huddled together in the lowest part of the big, silent house. Everybody else was still in bed.

  ‘She would see other people in the room,’ Jennifer said. ‘Mum would, I mean. She’d say “Look out, Jenny. There’s a girlie behind you, trying to do your hair.” I’d turn around, but there was never anyone there.’

  ‘Was that one of the hallucinations?’ I said, but really I was thinking about ghosts. Did imminent death mean you could see them? Maybe some part of the brain that normally inhibited the sense that perceived these spirits could be damaged. But I didn’t voice the question in case it sounded a bit sick.

  ‘I don’t know about hallucinations,’ Jennifer said. ‘I think she could see souls. I never saw anybody there, but sometimes I did feel a gentle tug-tug-tug at the back of my head, or cold fingers, you know, pressing against – against here. The back of my neck.’ She pointed.

  ‘I didn’t want to say it, but I’ve thought that too.’

  ‘Do you believe in that sort of stuff then?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I do, really.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And me.’ She looked down at the remains of her breakfast: soggy orange flakes floating sadly around in a shallow bowl of milk. ‘I still feel it sometimes. So I’m going to sell the house.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to sell the house,’ she said. ‘Now. As soon as possible.’

  ‘But – can you do that?’

  ‘Of course. She left it to me. Dad paid the mortgage off a long time ago.’ She looked up at me again. ‘I know you probably think I’m some sort of money-grabbing monster. But I just think – it is full of her and the things she imagined. Things stick to places, don’t they? I don’t think I can really bear to stay here.’

  ‘Jennifer. If there’s anything I can do, you know, to help.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t as bad for me as it could have been for somebody else. No, that’s wrong. I mean – I mean I’d been grieving for years. She’d died a million times in my head. I would think about it all the time. All the fucking time. Is it today, you know? Or is it tomorrow?’ She wiped a tear from her eye before it fell. ‘A million times in my head. Sometimes I killed her. Smothered her with a pillow. Honestly. I shouldn’t be telling you this. When she died, it was just how I had imagined it would be. I don’t feel that different to how I did before. Except I don’t have to dread it happening any more.’

  ‘Because I won’t go to work today if it’s getting to you.’

  ‘No!’ she laughed. ‘Listen to me, Jack. Sure it makes me sad sometimes. But I’m fine. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ I stood up and rinsed the bowls and spoons in the sink. ‘Jennifer,’ I said, as I did so, ‘what did your dad do?’

  ‘Lots of things. I’m guessing you mean job-wise, though?’

  ‘Yeah, sorry.’

  ‘He was a high court judge.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know, really. I don’t know if I like the whole idea of judges. I mean, nobody can know everything, right? And I don’t know what he would have made of me.’

  ‘I’m sure he would have been proud, Jennifer,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m sure he was until, you know. Until he died.’

  ‘I like the idea of the sixties, and Mum always says – said – that he didn’t much like the sixties. I want them back, Jack. The soft drugs, the free love. No, I don’t know what he would have made of me. But then I couldn’t be me at all if it wasn’t for the money he made. The freedom I want; I couldn’t have it. You have to have a lot of money to be really free.’ She stood up and stretched. ‘And he was a churchgoer. I hate the church.’

  I hate the church too, I wanted to shout. I wanted to dance naked around a fire and have an orgy beneath the trees. There was something in her that reminded me of a kind of freedom. The acknowledgement of the animal aspect. The kind of freedom that died when people started to wear clothes.

  ‘Speaking of money,’ I said. ‘Well, of day jobs – I’d better be going. You stay here if that’s what you want.’

  ‘If that’s OK.’ She stretched again, and the slow ease with which she moved put me in mind of one of the birds that flapped so slowly through the air above Fell House. ‘You know what I’m thinking, don’t you?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. I looked at her for a moment, then left the room and ascended through the house towards the front door.

  Fell House. That had to be what she was thinking, didn’t it? That would be perfect, or it would be if she asked me to go with her, but she wouldn’t, she probably wouldn’t, not with us being so casual and everything.

  She might, though, mightn’t she? I smiled as I headed for the bus stop. Daylight was starting to show, like something huge and pale slowly arriving out of space, just the other side of the still-dark sky.

  PART TWO

  JACK

  We bought the place with Jennifer’s inheritance. It was dark by the time we got there. Our first night and the rusty moon was low and swollen and we made frantic love in an empty room with peeling wallpaper and her screams scared the feral cats out there in the yard. They scratched and yowled around the loose old five-bar gate that banged and banged against the sandstone wall as the wind picked up and wrapped that full moon in thin sticky strands of black, black cloud.

  Throughout the daytime, the sky above the house was full of large black birds, like splashes of ink after the nib has snapped. They shrieked like hungry babies or like old people struggling to hear themselves. When they were not flapping and wheeling through the air, they sat in the branches of the many dead trees of the old Fell House orchard which lay behind the buildings, but it was unrecognisable as an orchard any more; it was an unruly tangle of lifeless wood, hanging over the ground like wiry mist.

  The place felt different now we’d bought it, even to the extent that it looked different; it looked hungrier, and colder, and at the same time less like a house and more like something living. The exposed, misshapen head of some buried giant. Almost as if, by virtue of owning it, we had changed it. I suppose that once we were responsible for it, we saw it differently – it was no longer a fantasy, but a series of duties, of jobs. Something to maintain, to defend and to keep.

  Fell House was an old house, and it was like some
thing that boiled out of the earth fully formed, rather than something built by human hands. A solid, slate, L-shaped building, three storeys high, including the attic, dark grey and squat against the fellside, side by side with a cavernous barn. The roof was made up of razor-sharp slates, poised to slip away down the slope and plummet over the guttering with enough speed and power to bury themselves almost completely in the mud of the yard. The windows were small and you could tell that the wooden frames had been painted white once upon a time, but now they were split open and rotten, brown streaks open to the elements. The front door, too, was a weird old thing – an uncompromising slab of hundreds of years’ worth of layers of paint, with a dark heart of oak, so that it was an off-white colour with flashes of red and smears of grey, like an unhealthy mouth.

  Inside, the walls were a patchwork of wallpaper and bare plaster, and in places you could see that areas of wallpaper had been peeled off by previous occupants, revealing other patterns beneath, and sometimes beneath those too, as if the wall was made up of layers like the earth and you could dig into it, travelling back in time, discovering fossils and artefacts buried between two different wallpapers. In other places, you could see evidence of damp. Stains like faces.

  There were no carpets; the floors of the house were bare, unvarnished wooden floorboards, apart from in the kitchen, where the floor was hard, cold, evil-looking black slate. In places the skirting-boards and lower walls were broken and cracked, as if kicked repeatedly with steel toecap boots.

  The windows were made of old, brittle glass which was thicker at the bottoms of the panes than at the tops, due to imperfections in the way it was made back in those days – not because it flowed, as many people thought. The house had an electricity supply, but the wiring was bad, installed by some inexpert resident. The light bulbs dangled too low, switches and plug sockets hung off the walls, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, the power flickered on and off – a loose connection, maybe.