It swept against her ear and rolled back to Flora’s. It poured from one to the other, and there it was, the soft hiss she had listened for, wished for, and which she recognized now as the crash of life itself, the steady, reassuring surge and hush of the baby’s breath. The sound lifted her up, and she floated in on its tide.
Flora’s dark hair was matted on her scalp, but she smelt soporific, of warm, sweet milk, and a floral fragrance, pretty as lily of the valley, which her skin seemed to emit and was probably therefore the aroma of intestines bathed solely in milk. What an amazing thing this ear was. Mary gave it another nip. Her lips hovered. She wiped them up and down the baby’s cheek, swallowing the excess saliva, but more saliva kept coming. She had a relentless thirst for the child, which made her wonder: Would her own mother, with her dry pecks and brittle hugs, ever have salivated for her? Footsteps entered the dining room from the garden, and Mary stiffened, unhunching her shoulders only when the steps faded back the way they had come. It was a very simple thing her mouth watered for. She wanted a kiss. Was it OK to kiss someone else’s baby if someone else wasn’t there to see? Stuck here in the quiet hall, Mary felt sneaky, though God knows she had no need, having cared for Flora better than anyone else all afternoon, better than Michelle, better than pregnant Rachel, better (by his own admission) than Mark. Mary looked up, ran her eyes around the cornice. A few cobwebs. No eye watching.
So was it best to kiss the baby somewhere obvious or somewhere hidden? Behind a wall or a door, she heard a woman laugh, and spun her head one way, then the other. She glanced up and down the corridor. Empty hall. Empty kitchen. Silent stairs. She nestled herself against the dining-room door, the darkest spot in the hall, hunkering inside the frame like a vandal at the bus shelter. Hurry up, woman, before someone comes. She was so nervous that when the hand that held Flora’s back began to pulse, it took her a few moments to realize it was her own heart she could feel, hammering through the child’s body and pegging the infant to her palm. She pressed her lips to Flora’s lips.
Flora’s eyes opened.
“Hello, darling,” Mary said. She had not spoken for a while, and her voice came out as a growl. All she had done was kiss the baby, so why did the kiss feel stolen? She had kissed Flora as any motherly person would kiss any child person. Kissed her out of love and kissed her out of craving, and the craving sated gave her courage. She swung open the lounge door with such force that it hit the sofa with a thud. “Thanks for a lovely party,” she called to the ceramic owl. “We’re leaving now.”
She walked to the front door, her sandals clomping on the wooden floor. There would be nothing surreptitious about their departure. Every left step squeaked. She was a walking alarm—but that was good. Noise was collateral. Go ahead, floorboards, and creak your worst. She cleared her throat. “No?” she asked. “No one here?” Anyone would think Eric and Michelle didn’t want their baby. “We’ll get some air, darling,” she said to Flora in the same husky rasp. It hit her only then, this brainwave, that the three of them could spend the evening together, and even though Mary had not shared this thought aloud, Flora smiled. Some strange cord of understanding bound them. The baby’s top lip stretched out in a long, languid M like a seagull in flight. Her fox might be there now, waiting, Mary thought, and a picture of a peaceful family evening hovered before her. She would let him in, and Flora would lie on the sofa between them. She would return to him the funny rag doll, and he could give it to Flora. That would start them all off on a positive footing. As a dare to anyone listening, Mary rattled the letter box. Then she pulled back the latch and thumped the door shut behind her. She had no key. There was no turning back. A trail of saliva gleamed on the baby’s cheek. They were free.
The street was in shade, and it occurred to Mary that instead of finding the exit, they had merely gone deeper into the backstage area. “What have Mummy and Daddy done here then?” she trilled to the baby. “Looks a bit excessive, no?” The lid of Eric and Michelle’s household bin was garlanded with iron chains. “We’ll go home, my darling,” Mary said. “See if Mr. Fox is waiting.” She lowered her voice. “That’s not his real name, by the way. I only call him that when I’m with you.” The truth was, she had thought of countless names and dismissed each one. Red, Sunset, Darcy … She could go on. But he really wasn’t hers to name. In her head she called him “my fox,” because that was what he was. “What do you think?” she said to Flora. “Will it do?” They were walking down the path. At first “Fox” had sounded lacking, but she was beginning to prize the accuracy of the shortcoming. The word, never enough, included her hankering for more. In any case, there was no rush. She would keep trying to think of something better.
At the bottom of the path, they turned left and ambled beside the hedge toward Mary’s own house. She plucked a nice, cool privet leaf and tickled Flora’s cheek. When a shout came from behind, she continued walking. They were so close to her path. Two steps from home. She could make it if she kept going. “Mary!” The word was a dart in her back, and she faltered. Footsteps approached, grew heavier, and when she turned, Eric was hurrying toward them. Staring at her from further down the road, clustered beside a parked car, were Michelle, Farooq, and Rachel. It was Eric who spoke, out of breath from his run.
“Mary, I’m so sorry! You’ve had her for ages! I was meant to relieve you, wasn’t I? I got waylaid saying goodbye to Rachel and Farooq.”
Michelle strode toward them, and Mary heard the car doors bang shut behind her.
“Where were you going?” Michelle asked. Someone had tidied her up, removed the black from under her eyes.
“Looking for you. Couldn’t find you anywhere, could we, Flo?”
“We got caught chatting,” Eric said apologetically. “I think it’s done you good to see friends, hasn’t it?” he said, smoothing his wife’s hair.
Michelle stretched out her arms, but Flora had scrunched Mary’s dress into her fists and screwed her fists to Mary’s left shoulder. Since Mary herself had no experience of passing back a baby, she did what Flora did and held on tight. Together they watched Michelle unpick the lock click by click of each tiny digit until the hands opened. The baby was gone.
“Thanks, Mary. You’ve been heroic,” Eric said.
“No problem!” She pumped her arm to work the stiffness out. Adrenaline took over, and the arm kept pumping. She beamed at Michelle.
“I’m going to take her in for a feed.” Michelle was already unbuttoning her blouse as she turned toward the house. Flora’s little face watched Mary from over her mother’s shoulder. She missed her. And then the face switched back to neutral again.
When they reached the front door, it opened without their needing to knock. Mary caught Michelle’s brisk farewell to the person behind the door, and Mark stepped out.
“They’re going completely mad back there.”
“I can’t deal with that,” Eric said. “They’ll have to work it out of their systems. Knowing Dave, they’re fully coked up.”
“Fair enough. I thought I’d have a go at fixing the gazebo,” Mark said.
“No, mate. Leave it. I’ve seen enough of that bloody thing.” Eric moved to go indoors, but Mark had something on his mind. He said, “There are four ways to get rid of a fox. One, you can trap it. But then you have to release it, and it will probably just come back. Two, you can put down poison. Illegal, but still possible. Though you’d have to keep the cats indoors…”
Eric shot Mary a look.
“Three, spray your garden with deterrent…”
“We’ve already tried that,” Eric said. “Michelle even made me piss down all the holes.”
“… Four, shoot it. No problem there, provided you have the correct license.”
Eric took in this information silently.
“I could probably help you with that one,” Mark said.
Mary glared at him. “I thought you were meant to be keeping things calm.” This was not part of what she had asked him to do. “I think you
’d better leave this to those who live here, don’t you?” She saw Mark raise an eyebrow at Eric. “This is really a discussion for people whose properties adjoin the woods,” she said.
Eric stared at the floor, embarrassed. “Did you buy poison?” he said, finally lifting his eyes to Mary.
She felt her cheeks burn. “I tried. They took the money, but it never arrived.”
After they said goodbye, Mary patted her sides, her pockets. She had the sense she was leaving with less than she should be. She began to walk the short distance to her own front gate, with Mark following. At the foot of her path, he looked up at the house next door, and his question seemed to come at her out of the corner of his eye. “Ever see anyone?”
The two houses were separated by a low wall. As usual, the curtains were drawn. She snorted. “No. But I’m pretty sure someone’s living there at the moment. He’s got a dog. What a stupid pet for a recluse. He can never be taken for a walk.” Then she said, “You don’t really have a gun, do you?”
He smiled. “Don’t worry. Just stay inside tonight, what with the foxes and those loons over the back. Will you be OK?”
She nodded, and he reached to wipe a streak of Flora’s dribble from her shoulder. He left his finger a moment on her bare skin. “I want you back,” he said. She pocketed his words. Some only-child glitch in her reciprocation instinct forbade a reply.
On the other side of the door, Mary lingered at the peephole. Mark’s head bulged on a stick body. It grew larger and larger. He was coming up her path. His head curved around the peephole, so close, his body seemed to melt into the door. She held her breath. And then, just as if he had knocked and found no one home, he walked away. In the fish-eye, the street stretched out behind him. The houses on the other side of the road rose grand and distant, though they were really neither. Mary watched him wheel around the rim of that little circle world, until he passed Tangle Wood and slipped out of the ring.
CHAPTER NINE
“Only me,” she whispered.
Speckles of dust rose. The air rippled with his peaty scent. Mary shut the shed door and waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark.
“I’m going to put on the light,” she murmured, feeling for the torch. She crouched and swept the beam gently around the wooden walls, hoping to ignite the gleam of his eyes. She stayed there for a few minutes, the torch resting in her lap, lighting her thigh through her green cotton dress. The noise in the woods had dropped to a low burble, but there was still no sign of him. She wanted to tell him that it was safe to return, that this place was his place still, but how could she get a message to him, cooped up in here or in the house? Without budging, she strained in her crouch until at last a trickle ran hotly down her bottom and made a small pool on the floor. She didn’t expect anyone else to understand this, but it felt comforting to squat there, her knees against her chest, enjoying the privacy of a message only he would find, and the warmth of it. A trickle was all she could manage. It would have to do. He would understand.
She stayed stooped for a while, and when she finally went indoors, her wet clothes had turned cold. But even the wet kept the thought of finding him close. She went on pulling the cotton away from her body, while she checked the places where she usually saw him. At the wrinkled pane in the lounge she watched the reflection of a passing cyclist disappear into its seam. The sky was aging before her into the beautiful deep blue that precedes true darkness. In the glass, three pairs of eyes, which were really the bulbs of her cheap chandelier, glinted back at her, and she began to cry. The six eyes fuzzed and multiplied. She had lost him, and the loss seemed to bear the ruins of all her other losses, emptiness dug out of emptiness. Flora gone, old Mark gone, then gone again in this new Mark who would not bloody go. Her mother always further away than she should be.
Mary smoothed the bodice of her dress, eyeing in the darkening window the place where Flora’s fist had scrunched the fabric into starbursts. She could pin the silence of the house to a very specific place on her body. It was her front left side that felt empty. “Empty” was such a cliché. She knew that, but knowing it was just another dispossession, as if this kind of wanting stripped all intelligence to an urgent, trite desire. She had never thought of herself as a mother in waiting, nor even as what her own mother had once described as “mother material,” implying that a good eye and a talent for craft would suffice. Her own parents had to take responsibility for this. And where were they? Dad in Spain, with his new family, which was ironic since he’d never much wanted his old one. Mum in Dorset, where Mary herself had never lived, their whole relationship boiled down to a perfunctory weekly call, recently reduced (owing to the presence of a new boyfriend) to a perfunctory weekly answering-machine message, deliberately left at a time when Mary would not be there.
What did it say about any mother, to have given birth to a daughter who did not want—had not wanted—to be a mother herself? Perhaps because her mother had always given the impression that after Mary she had wanted no more (possibly wanted less), as if once Mary had been born, a hole had closed behind her.
It was impossible to be empty, never having been full. But she had held Flora, and holding Flora, some sort of fourth dimension had opened up inside.
She had not wanted to let go.
* * *
UP THE STAIRS she went.
What an idiot she was to have gone to the barbecue. She had broken their fledgling routine, and in the early days, breaking a routine could break a relationship. Now neither of them knew where they stood. What am I doing? she thought as she entered the spare room, the best lookout in the house. All this time we’ve been together, I have talked and talked to him about me, but I know nothing about him. I never ask him how he is. I never ask him why he came because I worry that if I ask he will leave. That has always been my problem. She opened the window, let the smoky edge of the night, of the bonfire, and of him, she hoped, enter the room. The scent and the darkness wafted inside her. “Don’t go,” she said. There. She had let the words out. “Please don’t go.” She hung her arms over the sill, leant into the air as far as she could, opened her mouth, and sucked it all in. Pain and longing climbed in her lungs, and the noise they made was one she could never have made without him. A rising cry of song that stretched and wobbled as it escaped her mouth, her howl whole and precarious as a giant blown bubble, sealed with the end of her breath and sent into the night to see how far it could fly.
She waited, and then she heard his reply.
* * *
THREE YEARS OLD was pretty long in the tooth for a fox. Almost unheard of. To be clear, he was a fox in his prime, but a fox in his prime in these parts was as golden as a free-range chicken. They all died so young. He stretched his jaws a moment, ran his tongue over his lower canine. Prize tooth. If it ever came out, which it wouldn’t, it would show three rings. One for every year. True story. Fox teeth. Grew like tree trunks.
He won this country two summers gone, after his first mate passed, and he smelt a vixen here that he liked. Musky and fruity. That was her scent. For all the blackberries she ate. Slipped through the trees, shaking with the rattle of the first falling leaves. He came in the dark, crossing the stinklines of many foxes, and he fought for her. He waved his tail for victory! The other male was older and smaller. He knew it when he landed on him. But he fought like a cat. They rolled and gekked and spat. Teeth hacked teeth. Made his lip curl. Just thinking of it. The little one’s snout thrusting open his jaws. Whiskers in his eyes. Fur bristling gum. They spun and clawed in the brambles, thorns pulling at his tail, well, let them pull, blackberries bursting. The scent of her. He got to his feet. Reared up and lunged at the little guy. Clawed his shoulders with his paws, swagged him back. He was only one. But big for one. Biggest at home. Biggest now. He didn’t need his teeth. Strength won it. He was the dog. The small fox wiped the ground with his stomach. Yapped. Yes sir, no sir, Beetling backward. He went to him. Stooped. Rubbed himself on the small fox. Made the whole place smel
l him. Then he stood on his hind legs, folded his forelegs across his great white chest, and danced in circles around his new mate. She thumped her tail on the dusty ground and perked him with her ears. He knew how to behave around Females. He scented her too. Neither of them noticed the little guy leave.
The place was all set up for living. Plenty of everything. Salty frogs and dusky rats streaked the air. Scrapes dug under fences. Gardens ripening with human food. Only thing he had to redo was the scent. The first year they had four cubs, all boys, in the earth under the hazel. When the sun sank and cooled and darkness stretched, one left, one left, one left, till they were all gone. Off to fight for their own homes. This year—This year—The pain. No fox, human, Beetle should know. He filled the days, filled the nights, hunting, foraging, lying, resting, sleeping, sunning, curling, uncurling, sitting, watching, digging, filling in, and patrolling; then he double-checked it.
There was only one fox.
She was right about that.
* * *
THE OUTSIDE AIR in the room gave Mary comfort. He had begun to come alive for her again. She shut the window to keep the sense of him inside. It must be late, close to ten maybe, because outside the shrubs were blackening, outlines blurring, shifting into their nebulous nighttime mass. In a window on the far side of the woods a light flicked on yellow, and she blinked at it quickly. Just some random person going about their ordinary Saturday night. Probably it went on every night, and she was not in this room to see it. A shadowy form appeared in the new window; then a blind rolled down quickly, leaving only a thin line of yellow. Mary squinted at it, and the light shot outward, its fine rays like whiskers. Everywhere she looked, there were reminders of him. And then the window snapped black. Mary was sure the houses on Ashland Road had always been invisible in summer. The beginning of a fear twitched between her ribs. She pulled down her blind.
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