by Anna Hope
The heat increases as April passes; by the end of the month it is as hot as July. Each morning, before work, she rises early and goes to the lido and swims – further and further every day. Work is fine, but she knows she is ready for a change. She thinks she might apply for a different job – swapping Farringdon for Lisbon perhaps, or New York. All those jobs she didn’t apply for, all those opportunities she didn’t take, back when she was waiting, treading water. She has no ties – can do anything, go anywhere she likes.
After work, in the still of the flat, Hannah pours herself water and stands at the sink and drinks it, then goes into the little room, takes off her clothes and lies naked in the evening sun. She closes her eyes and lets the light play in purple and red and green across her lids. She feels full, although of what exactly she cannot say.
One evening, lying like this, her phone buzzes with a message.
She lifts it, sees the name – Nathan.
Need to collect some stuff. Is that OK?
She stares at it while long seconds pass. She does not reply. Half an hour later the phone buzzes again.
Would it be OK to come round later?
She puts the phone down, picks it up again.
What time?
Soon? I’m close by.
Her heart beats faster.
OK. Come. I’ll be out.
She stands and pulls on knickers and an old black summer dress; one that has been worn so often it cleaves to her. She leaves her phone behind, in case she is tempted to change her mind and call him, then takes her keys and walks towards the canal. It is still warm. The bars on Broadway Market are full, but she walks away from them, following the canal towards Victoria Park. She takes her time, doing a lap of the evening grass, moving between the lengthening shadows of the trees, and then makes her way back home in the gathering dusk.
She knows he is still inside as soon as she turns her key in the lock – a difference in the quality of the silence, a slight disturbance in the air. She does not see him immediately, as she kicks off her sandals, standing at the doorway in her bare feet. A small sound comes from the little room. She walks over the wooden boards, down the hall, where she pushes open the door. He is standing staring out of the window at the tree.
He turns to her. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to leave.’ His voice is hoarse. There is a small bag at his feet.
She should feel angry, she thinks, but anger is far away.
‘You changed things in here,’ he says. ‘You painted.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s nice.’ He gestures to the plants on the sill, the print on the wall. ‘It’s funny we never touched it, isn’t it? This room. All that time.’
‘I suppose it is.’
Outside there are the sounds of running footsteps, the percussive slap of trainers on pavement, of children playing in the street.
‘How have you been?’ says Nathan.
‘All right,’ she says, and she leans against the wall behind her, sliding slowly down to the floor. She brings her knees towards her, clasps her arms around them. She can feel her breath coming shallowly, in and out. The evening sun is an oblong slice on the carpet between them. ‘Bad, for a long time. Better now.’
Nathan nods.
‘What about you?’ she says.
‘Han,’ he says softly. He takes a small step towards her, but she puts her hand up to stop him.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Don’t come any closer.’
And so he stands there, unmoored, in the middle of the floor.
There are many things she wants to say:
How could you do this to me?
How could you ever show your face here again?
But what she finally says is,
‘How was it?’
‘How was what?’ he says.
‘With Lissa.’
‘Han.’ His face contracts. ‘Don’t.’
She puts her head back on the wall and looks at him. The sadness on his face. How is it, after all of it, that she feels so strong, but sitting here, like this, he looks as though he will break? ‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘I want to know.’
She has been in the fire, all this time – this is how – she has been tempered by the fire.
He turns away. Puts his hand on his bag, lifts it, puts it down, takes his hand away. ‘It was … It felt dangerous,’ he says. ‘And it felt wrong.’
‘And that was good?’ she asks.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘In a way.’
‘Did she come?’
‘What?’ He looks wretched.
‘You heard me. Did she come?’
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Don’t do this.’
‘It’s my right,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did she come?’
‘Yes.’
‘Was she loud? What noise does she make when she comes?’
‘She wasn’t loud,’ says Nathan. ‘No.’
It is as though she is drilling down into something hard and deeply satisfying. ‘How does she fuck? Did she turn you on?’
She slides the straps of her dress off her shoulders; slowly the fabric falls to her waist. Her nipples are hard.
For a long time she does not move, until she slides out of her dress, and now she is just in her knickers. ‘Do you want me?’ she says.
He nods, and his face is slack with desire.
‘Do you want me as much as you wanted her?’
‘More.’
She stays where she is, in the sun, on the floor. The animal in him. The animal in her. ‘Say it again,’ she says.
‘More,’ he says, then slowly crosses the floor towards her. When he reaches her he kneels before her, his head on the ground. Then he lifts his head, pushes her knickers to the side, slides his fingers inside her, and she arches to his touch.
Lissa
They speak little on the train as it makes its way through the western edges of London. They are in an uneasy truce – this trip a peace offering of Lissa’s, accepted by Sarah, the first day they have spent together in weeks. Once they leave Reading the land opens up and there are wider skies, smaller villages. The summer is in full, glorious bloom.
Sarah dozes, her hat beside her on the seat, a novel open on her lap. Lissa studies her mother’s face. She does not look ill – she looks, if anything, more beautiful than ever. The weight she has lost serves only to display more clearly the fine architecture of her face – which in sleep has none of the slackness of age. Her hair is as long and thick as it ever was.
Her mother opens one eye, latches it on to Lissa, and Lissa turns away.
They get down at a country station and cross a river. Sarah walks slowly, leaning on her stick, a red scarf trailing jauntily from her wide-brimmed hat. There are swans in the river – two cygnets that have not yet turned white. They swim closely to each other’s side, their parents close behind. Cows meander in the opposite field. It is lovely, but in the way of certain country roads there is no pavement, only a thin grass verge, and the traffic is fast and loud and harries their backs.
‘Hang on, Mum, wait a sec.’ Lissa puts a hand on her mother’s arm to halt her, then turns back to the road and reaches out her thumb. A man in a Range Rover stops almost immediately. He is pleasant and hearty, and Lissa senses her mother’s silent relief as he drives them up a hill towards the Common, dropping them in a car park, where Lissa helps her mother down. Sarah walks to the fence, where an old control tower still stands. Lissa wanders over to a board, which tells a little of the history of the Common, of the airbase, of the flora and fauna to be found. Greenham Common, it says, restored to lowland heath.
Past grazing by commoners’ livestock has enabled a rare heath plant-life to develop, consisting of heather, gorse and other acid-loving plants.
The removal of the runways and the erection of fencing allows commoners to once again exercise their grazing rights.
She squints. In the middle distance is a concrete pathway – the
old runway – where two girls, young teenagers, stand playing aeroplanes, their arms out to catch the breeze, their laughter high on the air.
‘This way,’ Sarah says. The sandy gravel crunches beneath their feet; heather blooms in all directions, star-like white flowers studding the grasses by the path. They walk parallel to the old runway, past a pond, a fire hydrant. Sarah’s head turns this way and that, occasionally nodding to herself, as though things are falling into place. ‘That was the Blue Gate,’ she says, pointing with her stick, ‘over there.’
Cyclists pass them, families lumbering along together, older men in packs of three or five, wearing their wraparound sunglasses, their helmets. Sarah tuts at them as they shoulder their way over the path. It is warm, getting hotter. Lissa takes water from her bag, offers it to Sarah, who takes it and drinks deeply.
‘There,’ Sarah says suddenly, her eyes fixed on something behind Lissa. ‘There they are. The silos. Where the missiles were held.’
Lissa turns. They are huge, grass-covered. They look, she thinks, like nothing so much as burial mounds, the sort where Bronze Age kings would be interred with all their loot. They make their way slowly over the Common towards them. Triple barbed-wire fences still stand in front of them; someone has painted over them in red paint.
Pussy
Cunt
Fuck
You
A sign still stands amidst overgrown vegetation – Ministry of Defence.
Sarah rattles the fence with her stick. ‘Bolt cutters,’ she says proudly, ‘made short work of this.’ She smiles. ‘We always had our bolt cutters on us.’ Then she throws her head back and begins to make the most extraordinary noise – a ululation – at once utterly earthed and utterly unearthly. Lissa sees some walkers look up, wondering. When Sarah stops there is silence; she smiles a wicked smile. ‘It frightened the daylights out of the soldiers,’ she says. ‘They didn’t know what to make of us.’
‘I’m not surprised. I’d have run for my life.’
‘Did I tell you we danced?’
‘Where?’
‘Over there.’ Sarah gestures with her stick to the silos. ‘We cut the fence, put ladders up, climbed over and danced in the moonlight. It was New Year’s Eve. We made our own music. We danced beneath the moon.’
She is a witch, thinks Lissa, as Sarah begins to sing again, softly this time. My mother is a witch.
She wanders a little away, to where brambles crowd the path. The blackberries are ripe, and she plucks a handful and brings them back to Sarah; an offering held in her palm. ‘Delicious,’ says Sarah, ‘thank you.’ She has found a feather from somewhere, and put it in the band of her hat. ‘We should pick more. Take them home and make a crumble.’
They do so, Lissa lifting the brambles so Sarah can reach in and pick the darkest, ripest berries from the middle of the bush, taking the sandwiches she has packed for later out of their box and filling it instead with the glistening fruit. When the box is full they walk on, through a small, thick copse, where birches and sycamores dapple the light and bracken is chest-high and the silos are invisible. ‘Ah, yes, this way,’ Sarah says, ‘I know this path.’
They reach a tree with many trunks, and Sarah steps off the path towards it, reaching her hands up to it. ‘Hello, old lady, I remember you. This is where I camped,’ she says, ‘just beside this tree.’
‘I remember,’ says Lissa. ‘I was there.’
‘Yes,’ Sarah turns to her. ‘Of course you were. For a short time. I always forget.’
They walk on slowly and emerge again into the sun by a gate. A section of perimeter fence still stands, a concrete panel set behind a newer fence. It is painted with serpents, with a simple green butterfly – they are crudely done, little more than daubs, but they have an eerie power to them. It is like coming across forgotten cave paintings. Beneath the rusted metal, green paint is still visible, flaking with sun and with age. The air feels close, the vegetation pressing at their backs.
‘I remember this,’ Lissa says, threading her fingers through the gate. Tarps slung up in the rain. Women’s ruddy faces. The smell of wool and fire and bodies.
‘Thirty thousand people,’ says Sarah, ‘hand in hand around the base. They came and dragged us from our tents. Told us we were unnatural’ – she laughs – ‘as though it were natural to keep missiles of death on common land.’
‘I remember them coming.’ Lissa’s hands close on the wire of the fence. ‘Taking you from the tent. It frightened me. I hated it. You being here.’
‘Why?’
‘I thought I would lose you. That you would be shot.’
Sarah turns to her. ‘The world is a fearful place,’ she says evenly. ‘It was not my job to lie about that. It was my job to try to make it safer. If you had your own child, you’d know.’
The comment lands. Twists. Does its work.
‘I was pregnant once,’ says Lissa quietly. ‘With Declan.’ She turns back to the fence, where a tiny insect crawls across the flaking green paint. ‘It wasn’t easy. The decision. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t. But I couldn’t have done it. Not with Declan. Not on my own.’
‘My God. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I felt stupid for letting it happen, I suppose.’
‘And why didn’t you keep it?’
Lissa exhales. ‘I was young and selfish and I wanted to have my life. I wanted to work. I didn’t want a child who felt in the way.’
Her mother is silent, then she says quietly, ‘Is that how you felt? Is that how I made you feel?’
‘Sometimes. Often. Yes.’
Sarah shakes her head. ‘That was never how I felt about you.’
‘Really?’
‘Truly.’ Sarah regards her, steadily. ‘But I had to live my life. All my life. Otherwise I would have been no mother at all.’
Lissa nods. ‘I understand,’ she says. And standing here, her hands threaded through this fence, she finds she does.
After a moment she speaks again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, turning towards her mother.
‘What for?’
‘That you’re not a grandmother. You would have been a wonderful grandmother.’
And she would – she would have been magical. That would have been the right distance to love her from. To have been loved.
‘Thirteen,’ says Lissa. ‘My child would have been thirteen.’ And she finds she is crying, properly crying, her shoulders heaving, the sobs coming in shudders. Her mother steps towards her and folds her into her arms.
After a long moment, Lissa pushes the heels of her palms into her eyes and Sarah takes her arms away. Then they turn and walk back through the copse on to the Common and Lissa is glad of the space, the fresh air. In the distance a herd of cows is visible on the flat land. As they grow closer it is clear that they are in the middle of the runway, some standing, some lying. ‘Look at that.’ Sarah chuckles. ‘You wouldn’t get many warplanes past those ladies.’
The wind is high now. Sarah’s hat is whipped off her head; Lissa runs to fetch it from where it has landed in a nearby bush.
As she walks back slowly towards her mother, she thinks, It is here – the catastrophe. My mother is dying. I am losing my mother. Soon my mother will be gone.
‘Hold it a moment, would you?’ says Sarah.
And Sarah steps on to the runway and turns to face the wind, eyes closed, her arms outstretched as though she is flying, and Lissa comes beside her, and does the same, feels the wind beneath her as she lifts her arms.
Hannah
She is tired. The spring has given way to early summer and the heat. Then the weather changes; it grows cooler and begins to rain. She feels tired still.
One day, when she is at work, she puts her head on her desk and falls asleep. When she gets home she climbs into bed and pulls the covers over her head and sleeps deeply. She wakes in the middle of the night thirsty, and goes to get water.
I’m pregnant, she thinks, standing by the sink. The thought seem
s to come from above her, beyond her.
She goes to the bathroom; in the back of the cupboard there is a box of old tests. She pees on one and sits in the darkness. She does not have to wait long; almost immediately a strong line appears in the second box.
She looks at it. She looks and looks and looks.
It is a fizzing in her blood.
It is anxiety.
It is great piercing shafts of joy, joy so pure she has to stand and hold on to something and wait for it to pass.
It is fear.
She has lost before. She knows how losing looks and feels, and what it leaves you with.
She tells no one. Not Nathan. Not her mother. Not Cate. She knows it may not last.
At the weekend she sleeps late, and wakes full of dreams. She lies in the bath and looks at her toes.
Cate
She takes the train to Charing Cross, the Underground to Bethnal Green, and then the old bus route up Cambridge Heath Road, gets down on Mare Street and walks along the canal, past the gas tower, past the gate to Sam’s old studio, right down Broadway Market. It is a Thursday, and the road is fairly quiet, although the tables outside the deli are full. At the top of the road she turns left, following the terrace of Victorian houses to the end, where she stops, looking up at the tall house, the high windows, then walks on, through the park, where the London planes are in full splendid leaf.
The cafe was Lissa’s choice – a bakery in one of the arches by the train station – and Lissa is waiting for her already, sitting outside. She stands hurriedly when she sees Cate approach.
‘I got you a coffee.’ She gestures to the table before her.
‘Thanks,’ Cate says, sitting down.
Lissa is dressed soberly, jeans and a plain T-shirt, no make-up, her hair caught on top of her head. She looks different. Her face, for so long seemingly immune to time, has begun to be claimed by it. There are greys in amongst the blonde of her hair.
