She reached for his hair while his tongue pushed up inside her, but there was no hair to grab, only hard scalp. The way her hand idled there, coaxing the top of his head, she had the sensation she was petting a dog. She sucked up the last of the wine and shifted her feet a little wider. Mark’s forehead wrinkled, his eyebrows laboring upward. He was wondering how he was doing, how much longer he had to stay there for. As long as I want, Marky. A flurry of arrhythmic clapping out on the street pulled her gaze to the window: a group of kids ambling home from school. She clapped both hands on the sides of Mark’s head, practically boxing his ears, and thrust down. Whose house is it now, eh?
When he finally got up off his knees, his lips and chin glistened, and she smirked because she had left her mark on him and the sight of it, of his subordination, thrilled her.
“Come here, you!” He snatched the empty glass from her hand so the base clipped her fingers, and tossed it out the open window. His hands reached behind her and inside her thighs, and she felt her feet leave the floor.
“Put me down,” she told him. When he did not, she bent her mouth to his neck and bit him.
“Hey,” he said, dropping her on the bed in surprise. “No nasty stuff. OK?”
She clasped his neck with both hands and threw her legs up. He was broader than she remembered, but she hooked her feet around his back and latched her ankles. Try getting out of that one, Marky. His back rocked, obeying the downward kick of her heels. He was still wearing his underwear, and she could see, as his backside rose and dipped, rose and dipped, a fragment of his old blue-checked boxers. He was the same Mark as ever. And she was the one who had changed.
* * *
HE WAS STROKING her hair when she woke. “I hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I didn’t want to leave you.”
“It’s a bit late for that,” she said, propping herself on an elbow. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
Mark looked astounded. “You don’t mean right now, I take it?” he said. “Because obviously I’m here having made love to you and having wanted to hang around to see you afterward.”
She snorted. “I think you’ll find it was the other way round. Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? What are you doing in my house?”
“I already told you,” he said. “Eric was worried.”
“But you haven’t told me what he said. Whether Michelle called the police, what they plan to do. Whether they blame me. I need to know.”
Mark reached behind him for another pillow and plumped it under his head. “As I understand it,” he said calmly, “it’s perfectly straightforward. A fox took the baby. The baby is OK. I don’t think anyone—not Eric, not Michelle, not the police, and certainly not you—needs to hunt around for alternative explanations. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He rolled toward her and kneaded her tummy playfully. “You saved the baby!” He grabbed her hand and flopped it in the air in triumph. “You found her and kept her safe!”
She snatched her hand back. “Is that what Eric said?”
“Eric and I have had a long conversation, and these are the facts as best we can establish them.”
“What the hell does that mean? And what does Michelle think?”
“Michelle is out of consideration here. She has postnatal depression. She’ll be OK.”
“Oh,” she said. “I thought that might be it. Poor Flora. Poor … them. But, I mean, does she believe that the fox did it?”
He ignored her question—or perhaps he thought he was answering it—and said, “Sometimes, Mary, people need to agree a way to tell a story for everyone’s benefit. Do you understand? Relax. Act normal. It was pretty stupid to run away. It made you look guilty. But no one thinks you’re guilty! Just—don’t do it again! OK?”
“So let me get this straight,” she said slowly. “Eric called you because he couldn’t reach me. This alerted you to the possibility that I was in trouble?”
“Yes, but I already knew something was wrong,” he said. “Monday morning and you hadn’t got ready for work.”
“What do you mean, hadn’t got ready for work?”
“No big deal. Only that normally you get ready, and today you didn’t. Did you?”
“How would you know?”
“That’s the next thing. Now. Stay calm.” He reached for her hand again. “I live over the back, on Ashland Road. I thought it would freak you out if you knew. I did want to tell you. Well, did want to show you. I don’t make a habit of spying on you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I just noticed that you didn’t appear in the window this morning. We usually brush our teeth at the same time.”
“What?”
“Can we focus on the important things, Mary? There’s a lot to get through. So, first things first. The baby is OK.”
“I know that.”
“Eric has reported the incident—the fox incident, I mean—to the police and the council. And he’s hired what he calls an eradication professional.”
She bit her lip. “I know that too.”
“You don’t know the best part,” he said, patting her hip. “I gave you an alibi.”
“An alibi?”
“I told them you were with me last night, that you found Flora when you went home. I think they were a bit surprised to hear we were back together.”
“So they really thought I did it?”
“But I’ve fixed it for you. It’s genius, Mary. It’s literally the perfect alibi. Here’s your way out of this mess. My flat’s over the back, you see. It’s got a gate to the woods. You got there without anyone seeing you. We hooked up after the barbecue on Saturday. Thanks so much, Eric and Michelle, for making it happen. Are you following me?”
She nodded.
“Last night you came to find me. You should have seen their faces.”
“Which house?” she said.
“You’re missing the point, Mary. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that.”
“Which house?”
“The one behind yours. Top flat. I can show you from the spare room. I know it’s weird. I almost didn’t take it, thinking it was too weird. But the location is great. It’s only … Well, I’m hoping it’s only temporary.”
“I knew it!”
He started drawing down her flank with a finger.
“Do you see,” he said, “how things need to go if we are to keep Eric and Michelle off your back? I am your alibi. I am your way out of this mess. We stick together.”
She did see. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?” she said.
“Nope. I’m … we—are going to make love again, and then I’m going to fix you something to eat.”
* * *
IT WAS NIGHT in Mary’s dream. She dreamt she was walking down Michelle and Eric’s lawn to the back of their house, past the giant barbecue, the squatting bulldog lamp. She dreamt she climbed the stairs and found Flora in her cot, and that she took her, then changed her mind at her back step and laid the baby there instead.
When she woke, she dressed and followed the smell of melting butter downstairs. Mark was at the oven, shaking a frying pan. Mary was fairly certain that when she woke for the first time today her kitchen had not contained the ingredients for an omelet. Outside, the sky was beginning to deepen. The oven said 21:13, but day and night were all one thing now. It was Monday when she woke this morning. When she woke before that, it was Monday too. It had been Monday for such a long time.
He turned to her and smiled. “Baby, you’re up. Look, there’s something I want to say.”
She made to interject, but he lifted his hand for silence. “Let me speak. Please? The last few months I haven’t stopped thinking about you. I’ve turned over all our arguments, the worst ones, all the things that went wrong. I have changed.” One bicep twitched, but he wished her to understand that he meant more than that. “I don’t want kids…” When he saw she was about to interrupt, he danced across to the sink and began to open and shut the cupboard with a grin. “Look, Mary! I wa
s such a git about that. But see? No child lock!”
A corner of Mary’s mouth lifted. In that swinging door she saw their past and present selves flip. They were as far apart as they had always been, just in opposite places.
He looked relieved when he saw her smile. “New Year’s Day, though, Mary,” he said with a wince. “We have to promise never to go there again.”
“I’m not going there again. There is always in my head—the things you said.”
His eyes widened, but he clamped his lips together. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually. He waited for her to speak, and when she let the silence stretch, he asked, “Aren’t you going to say anything to me?”
She shrugged. He had only been here a few hours, and already her words were locked inside her mouth again. The loss of control, the violence of that argument, obliterated everything she might say.
Mark frowned and checked his reflection in the window. “You have got to be joking!” he said and leapt to the door with the omelet pan.
“What are you doing?” she shouted after him. But he was already outside.
“Here, boy! Here, boy!” he called softly. He was crouching at the edge of the lawn, one hand in the grass to steady himself, the other extending the pan.
“Mary, don’t move,” he whispered. “I want to see how close it will come.”
He, her fox, was standing on the lawn in front of the shed, half formed in the half-light. She sensed his puzzlement in the tension of his body.
“I thought that was my dinner!” she hissed.
“Ssshhh. I’ll make another one. Here, boy. Come to Uncle Mark.”
She shook her head vigorously, but her fox took a step toward the eggs. Mark slowly unfurled a leg from his crouch. What was he going to do—bludgeon him with the fryer? Mary cast frantically around the patio. Sorry, Mr. Frog, she thought, as she kicked the watering can to the concrete with a clatter. “Sorry,” she told Mark. “I didn’t see it.”
When they looked down the garden again, the fox had vanished.
* * *
IN THE LOUNGE, Mark put the plates on the table. Two chairs had miraculously appeared—from upstairs or his flat. “Do you know what I want?” he said. “I want us to sit here and look out the window, just like we did when we first moved in. Remember? Hello!” He bent under the table. “What are you doing there?” he said, straightening the hen doorstop’s gingham comb. “This chicken seems to have taken ‘free-range’ a bit too literally.” He ruffled the tail feathers and sniffed. “Phew! No offense, but it could do with a wash.” He toed the hen to the door. “I always thought you hated that doorstop. It means so much to me that you kept it. Soppy thing.”
“I feel bad for the fox,” she said to this excessively doting Mark, whom she planned to let wash up. Whether it was the sight of him out there, a shadow riffling the fringes of her garden, less substantial-seeming than before; or whether it was a sense that this pact of Mark and Eric’s had created a sort of ghost fox, a thing they agreed upon that was not really what he was … a pretext, a cover-up for Michelle and for her, for the supposedly weak women they thought they needed to protect: for some reason, the events of the day gave her the feeling that he was beginning to fade. She felt desperate to talk about him, as if talking about him would give him substance.
“He likes eggs, you know,” she said sadly.
“Who?”
“The fox. There’s a tree. It’s got a hollow in the trunk, with eggs in it.” Mark raised an eyebrow, so she carried on. “He would probably love omelet.”
“Bizarre,” Mark said, glancing outside again. “Jesus Christ!”
“What?” she said as he raced to the back door, but by the time she reached the kitchen, he was already returning.
“It’s gone. I can’t believe it came back. Why would it do that? What’s its problem?”
He was defiant and brave and alive, and no eradicator was going to outsmart him, that was why. “I found the eggs yesterday,” she said, to change the subject. “When I went for my walk.”
He looked at her, concerned. They had retaken their seats. “You went for your walk today, Mary.”
“Today, then. Nestled in this hollow.”
“Well, that makes sense. That someone’s feeding them.” He thought about her story for a moment. When he finished swallowing, he asked, “Which tree?”
She shrugged again. “Big oak at the eastern end. Near the alley.”
He looked out of the window again. “I don’t fucking believe it,” he said. He walked to the window and laid a fist on the wrinkled pane. “It’s watching me from the shed.”
She went to join him, and her fox’s tail lifted as he registered the sight of her with Mark. She knew he would be worried about her, but she hoped he could see how far she had come with him, how well he was saving her.
“All right. What do you want?” Mark said, staring ahead. And then, because it was irrational to hold a conversation with a fox, he turned to Mary. “I don’t understand. I tell it to leave. It leaves. Then it comes back. It goes, comes back, goes, comes back. Why? Why is it so fucking insubordinate? It’s playing some kind of psychological game with me. Loitering out there like a stalker!” On that word, he thumped the glass.
“No, Mark,” she shouted, running her fingers down the wrinkle to feel for damage. “That’s my window! And this is my house. You have to calm down, or leave.” Her fox stayed put; ears, snout, tail, all his extremities stilled. He was watching to see what Mark would do next. In the dusk her own face glowed back from the glass, next to Mark’s glowering fury, and she knew that Mark would see any sign she made. So she waited till he stormed out of the room and the back door slammed before she lifted her palm to the window and shut one eye, to let her fox know that she was with him. With him in the way that counted. He vanished over the wall, and she watched her former fiancé, she supposed she should call him that, walk slowly to the house, turning every few steps to check he wasn’t being followed.
“You know where we’ll be in ten years?” he said when they finally sat back at the table. “Eating our tea in a hole out there while they make themselves at home inside. We need to fill our plant pot with stones again. By the way, you’re right about someone living next door. He’s out there, calling his dog.” He put on a creepy whisper. “Roxy, Roxy.”
“I know I’m right. But why does everyone hate foxes?” she said. “At least they look you straight in the eye. Unlike squirrels. Squirrels turn their heads in order to look at you sideways.”
Mark raised an eyebrow. “There’s dozens of them out there. How long till they realize that we’re more scared of them than they are of us? You just saw that huge thing in the garden. The one at the barbecue was even bigger. And they don’t know when to stop. Yesterday Eric had to bury the remains of their cat, and he said that he’s already had to rebury it. And the second time there was less of it. That’s how civilized they are.”
“You don’t know that’s a fox,” she said. “And anyway, there aren’t dozens. I only see one.”
“You probably think you’re seeing one, but really there’s loads.”
“Or you think you’re seeing loads, but there’s one, and all this fuss is for nothing.”
“All right, then. What does the one look like?”
She thought about this. “Well. His coat is reddish brown. Redder in the sunlight. There’s a white tip at the end of his tail. His shins are black. One, the front left, has a white rib on it. He has a broad face, a white chest … He’s big. Look. The point is. I could describe you like this—close-cropped hair, blue eyes, six foot one, muscular.” He smiled when she said “muscular”; until then she had given no indication that she’d noticed. “But there are loads of men who answer that description. All I know is, when I see him, I know him. Anyway, I don’t think the fox could have done it,” she said. “I wish I hadn’t said I’d seen him. Do you know what I think? I think Michelle did it.”
Mark rubbed his eyes. He had his own ideas a
bout what had happened. “All things are possible,” he said, beginning to clear the plates.
“Think about it,” she called as he headed to the kitchen. “Were there any signs of a fox in the house?”
For a while she listened to the dutiful clatter of the washing-up, the scrape and ping of the bin. When he returned, he had something on his mind. “Hey. This has been bugging me,” he said, stroking the back of his head. “You haven’t mentioned my hair. What do you think? Do you like it?”
“Yes, though I didn’t know you had a birthmark.”
He laughed in surprise. “Do I? My mum always said I had one when I was born, and then I guess my hair grew. Does it show?”
She pushed back her chair and stood. “Turn around,” she said. “Bend your knees.” He put his hands on his thighs to steady himself. “So there are a few marks. Here.” Mary placed her little finger on the smallest. “One.” Her ring finger settled into the next blotch. “Two.” Without straining, each digit tapped a stain. “Three, four.” Then her wrist rested on the largest mark. Her hand fit so perfectly, it could have made the print. She drummed her fingers on the back of Mark’s head. She could handle him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The next morning, Mark was already showered when the light broke around the edge of the blind and woke Mary. She watched him through slitted eyes, his head bowed over his shirt buttons, pale blue cotton stuck to his shoulders where he had dried in a hurry. He fastened each cuff, then busied himself at the shelf that used to be his. She heard the clunk of glass on wood; then the cologne’s drift of sandalwood began to engulf her. Maybe Mark heard her sniffing, and that’s how he knew she was awake, because he turned to face her with a grin. He was holding the little wooden puzzle. “Less than a minute,” he said, tossing and catching it lightly. “Still got my touch. God, it’s so nice to find some of my old stuff here. Like you knew I’d be back. Like you wanted me back.” Time and again Mary had thought the same. Even two months ago the thought had been a comfort, but hearing the words in Mark’s voice struck her as an enormous trespass.
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