“Well, if you change your mind.” Jack zipped his coat back up again and hunched into it. “Sorry I didn’t think of it earlier. We’re getting way too old for expeditions like this.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Hangovers make me feel older.”
“Don’t drink so much then. We had lots of fruit juice. Coke.”
“Fruit juice makes me feel like a kid. How are you feeling?”
“I didn’t drink as much as you did.”
It was true, but only just true. It had been a long time since drinking had felt so illicit to her. Back then it had been the last fluttering ends of her childhood faith nagging at her with stern disapproval, but this was different and felt more transgressive in its way.
Before they’d arrived, Aleyna had promised herself she wasn’t going to drink at all, but once plump-little Mrs Leachy had unlocked the cottage and briskly shown them around, Aleyna had accepted a glass of prosecco from Jack without a thought. After that, she found herself engaged in a game. If Kevin offered her a new drink she would refuse, but if Jack did, she would accept. Three glasses of wine in and she remembered how Jack didn’t really ask. He just leaned in and topped up her glass when he judged it to be low. She had smiled. She had polished off everything he had given her. It would be his fault either way.
They passed a row of three small houses, low slung rooftops and whitewashed walls; each had the appearance of being buried half way into the hillside. A fourth house at the end of the row looked unfinished and a wide aperture in one wall was masked by a canvas sheet that the wind had loosened so it flapped and snapped at them like a chained dog as they passed.
“Where is everyone?” Jack said. “Everywhere looks deserted.”
“They probably think only idiots would go out for a walk in weather like this. Mad dogs and Englishmen.”
“Which of those am I?” he said, turning back to her.
“Mad Englishman.”
“Half-English.”
“No-one’s half-English. When you’re brought up in England, it blots out everything else.” She tapped the side of her head. “Shadow of the Empire, fitted as standard.”
He snorted, glancing up at her as though he was gauging a retort, but then he looked away again, losing his nerve as he always did. “They all looked empty,” he said instead. “Every house we passed looked empty. No lights, no movement.”
“They’re all sleeping in. Nursing their heads like normal people.”
“Even so.”
“It’s fine.”
Perhaps she sounded more confident than she felt, because before they rounded the corner, she glanced back. The houses didn’t seem so empty to her, in fact she was struck by the clear impression that there really was someone there in the unfinished house at the end of the row, standing just out of sight behind the flapping canvas, watching them pass.
Figures moving through the fog, she thought, imagining the homeowners glimpsing their forms emerging from the whiteness like spectres. No wonder everyone had their doors firmly closed.
“Holiday homes, maybe,” she said.
Jack winced, staring ahead unfocussed.
“My mum used to come to these parts in the holidays,” he said. “Back in the fifties, sixties. Near enough anyway. Had cousins round near Bantry, but best I can tell, she spent most of her time being shuffled from one relative to another over the holidays. She said she remembered seeing kids around these parts walking into school barefoot, holding their shoes to save the wear on them.”
He shook his head.
“Seems crazy it should be all holiday homes now. Doesn’t seem right.”
Aleyna touched him on the shoulder and he stopped in surprise.
She leaned forward and kissed him. His lips were edged with a fierce cold, but there was warmth in there too and her hunger for it both surprised and embarrassed her.
It was his turn to gently push her away.
“They could be just ahead of us,” he said.
Aleyna shook her head, but her look remained uncertain. “They’ll be home by now. Lighting a fire. Putting the kettle on.”
Jack laughed. “They won’t be moving that fast. If we pick up the pace we’ll likely catch up with them before we get back.”
“They’re not that slow.”
“Lou is, trust me. And if she’s complaining—and by god, she will be complaining—it’ll slow her down further.”
“You should be nicer to her.”
“I’m a gentleman with her.”
“But behind her back…?”
“In the fog…”
They kissed again, longer, deeper, until Aleyna broke away, sensing some distant movement beyond Jack’s shoulder, a flickering motion like a bird, perhaps, or an animal. She looked back the way they had come, hidden now by the whiteness that had closed behind them like a curtain. Again, she had the distinct sense there was someone there, just out of sight, barely invisible.
“Could they be behind us, maybe?” she said.
“Only if they took a wrong turn.” Jack turned to see where she was looking.
Aleyna called into the fog. “Kev?” she said. “Lou?”
The words felt stunted, abrupt. Cast into the whiteness, they didn’t sound like names to her at all.
“There’s no-one there.” Jack turned back to her, his hand came up to her cheek but she flinched away.
“That last junction,” she said. “Maybe they went straight when they should have turned left? Maybe they backtracked when they realized their mistake?”
“There’s no-one there,” Jack said. “If we carry on, we can catch up with them. Hey.” Again, his hand was at her cheek, but its gear had changed: this wasn’t seduction, it was concern. “Look at me,” he said.
He looked at her, serious as a father.
“You stare into that fog,” he said, “you’re going to see whatever you think you’re seeing. Doesn’t mean it’s really there, though. Trick of the eye. It’s full of shit.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Aleyna said. It was mostly true but still discomforting.
“Come on, you’re cold and soaked through.” She felt his hand on her shoulder, pushing, steering her back down the path. “Let’s get you back to that fire. I’m sorry for delaying us at all.”
“Such a gentleman.”
“Only to your face.”
“Asshole.”
“Cow.”
The path gave way to a tarmac road that descended gradually, zigzagging between the farmland on the left and right. There were drainage ditches on either side, but the roadway was crosshatched with sparkling rivulets of water, chasing their way downwards.
The air felt thicker, denser, and from somewhere, Aleyna imagined a faint smell of wood smoke drifting across on an intermittent breeze.
“You know what this reminds me of?” Jack said.
Aleyna shook her head, but didn’t look at him, moving would only move her coat and it already felt colder and heavier around her. She could feel the dampness had soaked through to the lining and the wool of the jersey she wore beneath. It felt to her like cool fingertips tracing down her arms, hooking around her chest from behind.
“Volumetric fog,” Jack said.
“You’re waiting for me to ask what that is, aren’t you?”
“That game Kevin and I worked on back in the late nineties. It was called Something Invasion, Mutant Invasion? Mutoids? Shit, I don’t know, I’ve tried to block it out. It was one of those third person shooters, trying to cash in on GoldenEye on the N64. Only it was awful. You were walking around this planet, shooting insurgents—you were invading the whole planet single-handed, you know how those computer game plots used to be—and it looked terrible. Crap textures, low poly count. Terrible.
“But the thing with that sort of game is that you’re only shown the landscape your character could see. Nothing else really existed, the hills were all hollow. And even moreso than other games of its type, it was completely unst
able. There was this weird sense that without warning, the player might break free from the point of view and the illusion would fold up just like that. You’d turn around and there’d be nothing there at all. Just blackness.”
He stared out into the fog, his grin only loosely pinned into place.
“The hills were hollow,” he said again, thoughtful. “Anyway, the system was so slow, we could barely show any of the landscape at all, and if we did, everything just ground to a halt like you were wading through treacle.
“So time was short and we cut corners. We cranked up the volumetric fog to hide the fact the scenery was popping-up in the distance and being redrawn when you turned around.”
“What happened?”
“Everyone hated it. Went straight to the bargain bin in Woolworths. Remember Woolworths?”
They walked on in silence for a while.
They had all worked together once. Aleyna had arrived, youthful and enthusiastic from some Lancashire backstreet, flushed with the colors and variety of the capital. The company was one of those little start-ups that grew too fast, too bright and too eager. Before they knew what was happening, before their feet even touched the ground, the company was already gone, snapped up by a bigger fish, scattered to the winds. But the four of them circled each other still, the same workplaces, the same bars. Constantly cycling, over and over and over.
“Is that why you stopped writing the games yourself?” Aleyna said after a while. She’d heard versions of the story before, different variants with different villains as though whoever asked got someone else to blame.
Jack sighed.
“I wasn’t even supposed to write most of that one. In one way, I fucked things up by compromising, in another, I saved the day by actually finishing the bloody thing.” He shrugged. “In the future, I figured I’d leave the coding to the Kevins of the world.”
Aleyna stopped.
“Be nicer,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Jack said. “I mean he’s better at that sort of thing than I am. I bluff my way through, he absolutely gets it. I’m better at the other stuff. Managing, getting funding, talking to people, you know? I’m good at that.”
“Sure. You’re doing a bang up job.”
“You know what I mean. Kevin’s smart. The man’s an artist. But if he didn’t have me watching his back people would be fucking him over at every turn.”
They walked onwards in silence. Aleyna didn’t write code, she wrote copy. Back then she had written documentation and manuals, newsletters that no-one read. These days, she worked freelance for a catalogue company spending her hours coming up with different ways to describe the same things: A dozen ways to say carry cot; one hundred ways to say push chair; one thousand ways to say child, baby, bairn. She tabulated her work in spreadsheets that from a distance didn’t look so different from the pages of code that Kevin would trawl through. Editing, debugging, refining, releasing. The day-to-day dance was familiar to both of them.
On their right, Aleyna and Jack passed the gate to a farm and like the other buildings they had seen, it was a dark and cold looking place. The farmhouse, a low building at the far end of a muddy concrete forecourt, had a melancholy quality accentuated by the collection of faded plastic children’s toys gathered outside. A pink slide pointed downwards to a slick of grey puddle, a squinting swing set with frayed ropes, a rocking horse left on its side. The place felt too empty, too quiet to be fully real. The barn opening out on the yard was a rusted skeleton, crowded with neglected machinery, all spikes and blades, bundled and forgotten like rolls of barbed wire.
“What time is it?” Aleyna said.
Jack shrugged.
“I left my phone in the cottage,” he said. “Looked like it was on the blink this morning anyway. No signal, nothing.” He shot her a glance and tried to look reassuring. “Probably nearly three or so,” he said.
“So late?”
“We started late.” He grinned. “When we said last night how we could walk it off come the morning, I think we were all thinking we’d actually see the morning. Why? What time did you think it was?”
Aleyna turned, looking back up the path. She felt very conscious about how their voices carried. Somewhere, she could hear the gentle hiss of the sea, the clatter and turn of pebbles in a distant tide, but otherwise, it was quiet and still. She found warmth in the way Jack talked, but at the same time, it felt too loud, too impolite. It drew attention in a way that made her uncomfortable.
“I don’t know,” she said. “To be honest, I’m not even sure what day it is.”
Jack laughed.
“Trick question,” he said.
“I don’t know,” Aleyna said again. “It should be New Year’s Day, but how would we know? We haven’t seen anyone else. We could have slept for days for all I know. Months. We woke up and it’s like the world has been emptied while we were asleep.”
Jack didn’t reply, but Aleyna felt his eyes on her, she felt he was studying her, looking for a sign she was joking, a hook on which he could hang a smart remark. Instead, he turned away again and sighed.
“Do not partake of the food they give you,” he said, his tone affected as though he was quoting something from memory.
“Excuse me?”
“Faeries. If they offer you food and you eat it, you’d become trapped in their world and subject to their whims. Don’t look at me like that, I read it somewhere. In a book. So it must be true.”
“I haven’t eaten any faerie food,” Aleyna said, amused despite herself.
“You had one of those scones Mrs O’Landlady left out for us.”
“Mrs Leachy is not a faerie.”
Jack shrugged. “How would we know?”
“I doubt faeries make scones.”
Jack looked skeptical.
“I wish they would,” he said. “I’m getting hungry.”
They walked onwards in silence for a spell and Aleyna hugged her coat tight around her as though she could squeeze more comfort from it, even though the dampness had infiltrated it entirely. Kevin had bought it for her and it seemed so extravagant that she assumed he was apologizing for something he had yet to confess to. He had never been particularly good with choosing gifts for her. On their first Christmas together, he had bought her a second-hand paperback copy of The Siege of Krishnapor, confessing as he did so that it had only cost him two-fifty from one of the vendors under Waterloo Bridge, and that he only bought it because he liked the cover. He made up for it with his cooking, to which he applied the same level of attention he spent on his code. If he was an engineer in the kitchen rather than an artist, there was passion there too: he saw processes and subroutines, his ingredients subjected to functions and iterative loops, but there was love stirred in with each, binding everything together at a level deeper than chemistry.
Aleyna had grown up with good food, but Kevin’s recipes still had the ability to take her by surprise. She hated to imagine how much greyer her life would be without his cooking, without him.
The coat was beautiful and clearly more expensive than he could afford. She’d brought it with her to Ireland to demonstrate how much she appreciated it, but now as it hung heavy and misshapen on her and she wondered if she had ruined it by wearing it for the walk.
“What do you think they’re doing right now?” she said.
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“Maybe they’re back in the cottage after all. Fire lit, feet up.”
“Holding hands?”
“Kissing. Fucking.”
Beside them, the stone wall they’d been following for the past hundred yards gave way to a three-wire fence bordering a broad field that disappeared uphill into whiteness. At its distant edges, Aleyna thought she saw movement again, something dark against the mist. Looking closer, she saw there were several shapes there, too dark to be seagulls, they could have been crows. They moved with a clumsy flapping motion that suggested wings, but at a distance, t
heir size was troubling. Perhaps it was only a trick of perspective, but there was something about them that felt too big for common birds, and the way they moved unsettled her: they stumbled and flustered and flapped about like the loose tarpaulin on the empty house. They rolled and blustered chaotically as they edged slowly down the field towards the fence.
“Lou’s probably asleep by now,” Jack said, his attention elsewhere. “All tucked up and content to have that cramped little bed to herself. She barely slept at all last night. Tossing and turning all the time, it’s a miracle she got as far as she did on the walk.”
“Let’s move quicker then.” Aleyna said.
Jack looked at her, concerned.
“Alright,” he said, and he reached out to take her hand.
She didn’t look back as they hurried down the road together and Jack didn’t speak, making their flight feel more urgent.
She hadn’t been paying attention to their surroundings as the four of them had begun their walk, she’d been talking to Lou, the two of them had been planting one foot in front of the other with little attention spared for the passing landscape.
It always used to bother her that she only knew Lou because of Jack and Kevin. To begin with, she was never entirely sure if she liked her or just felt she should accommodate her for Jack’s sake, but time had brought them closer, sanding down the residual prickliness between them and leaving them with a mutual respect that they were both still there despite everything. Aleyna had never been confident when it came to friend maintenance and working from home as a freelancer had whittled her list of face-to-face colleagues down to the bone. She was grateful she had Lou there, somewhere in the background. An almost-friend was sometimes good enough.
Lou had met Jack when the company had been bought out way back when. She had been the one hired to project manage the transition, breaking the start-up apart to salvage what worked and throw everything else out. Jack, she kept for herself, not in a mercenary move, but an unexpected development, unaccounted for but worked around. That was how Lou worked. Her life was scheduled in Gant charts and dependency diagrams. She had been the one to organize the New Year’s holiday but the walk had never been part of the plan. Little wonder she’d turned back so soon.
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