The Wolf Border

by Sarah Hall

  She takes the baby outside to look at the world. They stand wrapped in coats and scarves. Cumbria is a whiteout, as far as the eye can see. The mountains are brightly coated and seem bigger, amplified. At night, the stars are exceptional, with the lustre of old cracked diamonds. Charlie will remember nothing of it, she knows. She wonders, though, if it is laying something down in him, forming some sensibility? Will he always seek colder places, the beauty of frozen massifs, blue locked into white, the immaculate?

  She keeps the heating high – she is not paying the bills and she does not want to risk a plumbing catastrophe. 1847, the date stone of Seldom Seen reads. The place has been upgraded, and well insulated, but gelid air still makes its way around the windows and under the doors, radiates through the walls. Rachel sleeps with the baby in her bed, against the advice, but she does not want to leave him in the bassinet. She tries to get the Saab out again, but the undercarriage scrapes and grinds; the back end swings out. Finally, it beaches itself at an angle and the wheels spin uselessly. The engine protests. She abandons the car in the lane, takes the baby out of the travel seat, and carries him back to the house. That night, another snowfall: lesser, but substantial enough to cover the treacherous layer of ice. Michael arrives on a quad bike, clad in woollens, Gore-Tex, and agricultural boots. The lurcher is balanced on the seat behind him, tongue out, its breath steaming in the air. He knocks on the door, says nothing about her car blocking the lane, and asks if she needs anything. A lone woman and a baby cannot be abandoned in such conditions, never mind who they are.

  Think I’m OK, she tells him. I stocked up.

  Anything for the little one?

  No. Thanks, though. Incredible weather.

  Expect another good week of it, he says.

  Small talk, about that most English of subjects: weather. It feels like a temporary ceasefire between them. He climbs back on the quad, and she watches him drive away – the dog riding pillion, adjusting its paws as the bike tips and wallows over the polar rifts, at one point springing off into the new snow, then mounting itself up front between Michael’s legs. She doesn’t need anything, not yet. Her cupboards are full. There is ample baby formula, nappies, medicine. There’s still meat in the freezer, unlabelled purple and red packages now mysterious with permafrost, bags of summer berries and green beans. If she was in danger of forgetting the practicalities of a rural Cumbrian childhood, the Pacific Northwest continued her education – and seriously. There is dry wood for the fire. She has cans and jars stacked deep. They will sit it out.

  She keeps the radio on for updates, a lifeline. All over the country airports have closed, schools, hospitals are running skeleton crews; the economy is haemorrhaging. Every day there’s a debate about why England can’t cope with extreme weather conditions, while in Berlin and Kiev and Japan flights leave on time, the workforce remains productive. The government has ordered salt from abroad, which will arrive by tanker ship in May. Not so across the border. Calling in to the morning programme, the new transport minister says Scotland is equipped and faring well. The ploughs are out; the roads are gritted. Glasgow airport is open for business, flights to Heathrow are being redirected there.

  Charlie burbles over the sound of the radio. He wants her attention. She learns to become verbose, to blether. He likes her voice, understands something about it, if not language. She reads to him, all kinds of books when repeating the same baby prose begins to send her crazy, a gory thriller – she stops when the serial killer begins to dismember a victim. His eyes are huge and preverbal. He makes long, purring, grating sounds, trying to talk back. She reads her own book chapter to him, edits it a little as she does so. She even sings, her voice flat, tuneless, but does she not owe him disinhibition, rhymes, the silliness of the nursery? One two, buckle my shoe, three four, open the door . . . If she stops, he protests. She is desperately in need of sensible conversation. She calls Lawrence, but there is no answer. She calls Alexander. Chloe answers.

  Carrick 205, hello, Chloe Graham speaking.

  As if she is answering the phone in the 1950s. The vintage chic of landlines.

  Hi, Chloe; it’s Rachel.

  Hi, Rachel.

  Are you off school?

  There is no school.

  They speak in a friendly fashion for a minute and then Alexander takes the receiver.

  Do you need rescuing?

  No, I’m alright. How’s it there?

  One catastrophe after another. Some idiot crashed through the bridge into the river, had the first responders out with the defibrillator paddles. The pub’s run out of ale. There’ll be a civil war any moment. How’s Charlie?

  He’s fine. He’s driving me nuts. He wants me to talk all the time. I could read the phone book to him and he wouldn’t care.

  There’s laughter down the line.

  Yeah, I remember that stage.

  Shit. He’s awake. I have to go.

  Alright. Call me back if you need rescuing. Or if you want to talk dirty.

  The snow begins to melt and the ice beneath reveals itself like broken glass, the weapons in a Saxon hoard, instruments of havoc. The country begins to move slowly, to right itself again. Then, more snow. Huge white floes, like a nineteenth-century dreamscape. Everything stops.

  In the middle of it, away from the malady of humans, the wolves sit watching the red deer moving across the moor, high-stepping daintily, testing each foothold. They assess the prospects of the hunt, judge the expenditure of energy, the resistance, the lack of traction. The herds keep to the best routes, ground where the snow is thinnest, where they will not have to flounder to escape. Since autumn, their behaviour has changed rapidly. A new nervousness has arrived; the running past has caught up with them. Ra and Merle watch from a high vantage point, ready to accelerate down the slopes and across the valley bottom, muscling through the drifts, bipartisan hunters of the mountains and the plains. But there is a refractory quality to their watching. Below, the deer pass by, single file, ears twitching, eyes glimmering black. They move safely on. A carcass lies close to the entrance of the den; another hunt is not yet necessary. Several times during the month they’ve been locked in a tie, rear to rear: their season of cold union.

  When the weather lifts, it feels as if a dire, convulsive event has passed: miscarriage or seizure. There is a sudden upswing in temperature, ten degrees and more, alarming in its own right. Meltwater flows over the measled remnant snow. The earth is left slack and raw, streams trickle in the road, downhill, into culverts and under cattle grids. Pools of water all over the landscape flicker like poured metal. Rachel brings the baby outside again, a woollen blanket hanging around him like a holy robe. She turns slowly, holding him against her chest, a ritual figurine, showing him all the angles of the sacrificial world. He is the prize of all agonies. A strange little god, incapable and testing, who has taken over her life. She kisses the back of his neck softly, and he squirms and barks. How unlike herself he has made her. That night, reading in bed, she turns to look out the window. The skull of the moon glows, internally, as if tallow-lit, its surface cracked and pitted. A symbolic relic, reminding those beneath that not everything survives. Her mother has been dead for more than a year. She gets up and goes into the baby’s room, watches him sleep for a few minutes, something she has not done since he was newborn. One morning soon after the thaw, a giant toad presents itself on the doorstep like a muddy gift, a messenger. Spring is arriving.

  She drives to the office, most days, weekends also, trying to recover something of her role. She brings Charlie, sets him on a blanket on the floor with a contraption of mirrors and swinging toys above him. He kicks, tries to grab things. She works in efficient bursts. She goes into the enclosure with Huib again, but the wolves are much more reclusive, a good sign, and the decision is made not to disturb them again until later in the year. She studies their transmitter signal patterns. They have been staying near the den site, returning to carcasses more frequently, picking them clean. Biding. Merle’s
movements especially are becoming conservative. When Gregor returns from Nepal, he will leave a discreet, motion-triggered rig by the den, and they will know for sure.

  Work is difficult. Charlie demands time; he demands love and energy. Keeping him is fascinating and acutely boring. There are slow, torturous hours in the middle of the night when he screams dementedly, his face hot and wet, the ridges between his eyes and ears lined with salt, his body taut as a drum. Extreme tiredness begins to wear her down. She wishes she were still breastfeeding; there was comfort in it for both of them. She wishes he would shut up. Shut up, she thinks, and then says it to him, almost shouting, actually shouting. Immediately, she feels wracked with guilt. He cries so much, he vomits. His shit is green. She calls NHS Direct, Jan, Alexander. She takes him to Frances Dunning. He is not sick. It is a stage, then: growth, or an experiment in anguish. He throws his bottle away, knocks things out of her hand, so furious, so inconsolable, his tongue beaking out of his mouth. What, she says, what’s wrong! A malevolent changeling has been exchanged for Charlie, like the gurning, earthen toad on the doorstep. In his face, hatred, scorn, or is she imagining it? She is being punished, of course, for everything she has done wrong, every sin. She takes hold of herself – such thoughts are pure, fatigued irrationality. She walks with him in her arms, backward and forward across the floor, shushing, cooing. He exhausts himself finally, and she collapses back into bed. He wakes in the morning, contented and smooth, smiling, giggling, as if nothing was ever wrong. The following night, the same bawling demon possesses him.

  And then he does get sick. Every week it seems he has a new virus, a cold, or gastric upset, some germ picked up from nowhere, from spores arriving in his cot. An oozing eye infection, yellow crust around the lid. Diarrhoea, evil-coloured and noxious, which brushes through her too, leaving her green-feeling, her insides churning. Then a cough that sounds lethal, hack, hack, choke. She has had the whooping cough vaccination, and Charlie has, too, but she panics. She goes to the doctor again, collects more medicine, antibiotics, which she knows will give him thrush. Frances Dunning administers to him expertly, and Rachel feels like a failure. The doctor is sage.

  Try not to worry; it’s just the way it is. He has to create antibodies. Childhood is about illness, that’s what they don’t tell you.

  Dr Dunning looks at her.

  How are you, Rachel? Are you getting enough support?

  She says she is. But she is exhausted and fuddled, and it shows. When she gets home, she calls Sylvia, asks her to babysit. She goes to bed and sleeps for a few hours, a fatal, unmoving sleep. When she wakes, the room is in focus. The house is beautifully quiet. There’s a note on the table downstairs saying Charlie has been taken out for a walk. She sits at the kitchen table, drinks coffee, thinks of nothing, not even the wolves.

  The baby gets better. The pus dries up, the cough slackens. She begins to relax. She resumes work at the office, recreates the little corner crèche for Charlie, claws her way back through correspondence and administration. She even writes more of her book chapter. Green shoots appear on the trees outside; light expands the day’s length. Everything seems on the up, until Michael’s wife contracts influenza, the dangerous variant sweeping through the country, for which there is no trialled vaccine. When he comes into the office to report on the enclosure, Michael also seems unwell, is pale-looking, sweaty, and breathing hard. Like a condemning harbinger, he breathes over them, stands near the baby. Rachel wants to shove him forcibly out of the office. The following week Lena is hospitalised and Michael recuses himself. Rachel watches the baby, filled with dread. She takes his temperature daily, checks him again and again. She watches over him with the intensity of prayer. It is excruciating. To be so out of control emotionally, to have so much and so little control over another living thing. Had she known it, had she even suspected the debilitation, the decision at Binny’s graveside might have been different. But no. No. There is no retrospective history where children are concerned, no what-ifs. He is here, he is here, he is here. His arms open and reach out, wanting to be picked up. Mammmmum. He is close to saying it, some version of it, and confirming her new identity. She lifts him. He fits against her side. Rightfully made. Unquestionable.

  *

  In April, Lawrence and Emily separate. He calls Rachel to tell her – it is a terrible phone call out of the blue, halting and awkward. She sits at the table. Outside Seldom Seen, a ragged spring evening, with sunlight crashing through the windowpane, then, moments later, rain, soft-knuckling the glass.

  I just thought you should know, he says, flatly. Keep in touch with her if you want – she wants you to stay in touch.

  Lawrence, I’m really sorry.

  Yeah. Thanks. But it was going to happen. She’s had enough. And I have, too.

  There’s a hollow ring to his tone. He is past embarrassment, regret, and apology, is deep into the inevitability of it all – an emotional dead zone.

  For now just use my mobile number. I’m not in the house any more.

  Where are you staying?

  With a friend.

  He gives no more details, no address. She wonders if this friend is the woman with whom he had the affair, whether there has been a rekindling. But now is not the time for reproach.

  Are you alright, Lawrence?

  Yeah, fine, he says. Anyway, there it is.

  She can hear nothing of his usual self in his voice. In the background there’s the sound of cars, many cars, moving fast, a motorway or main road. It’s unnerving to think of him extracted from his home environment, calling from some transient place. He sniffs on the other end of the line. He says nothing more, has no desire to talk it all over, it seems.

  You sure you’re OK?

  Yeah. Just thought I should tell you. OK then, I’ll go now.

  Lawrence, wait a minute.

  He mustn’t hang up. Everything seems precipitous; she’s sure that he is on the verge of some disastrous course, or has already embarked.

  Why not come here? she suggests. Come and stay with me and Charlie for a while. Lawrence?

  Silence from her brother. The lowing of traffic. A passing siren.

  Lawrence?

  I can’t, he says. It’s bad enough at work already. Can’t just disappear.

  Take some personal leave. These things happen. Surely they can manage without you, under the circumstances?

  No, I can’t, he says. There are things I need to do here anyway.

  What things?

  Christ! Just things. Why are you bullying me?

  I’m not bullying you.

  Yes, you are. You always do.

  What?

  Yes, Rachel.

  It’s the first time he’s lost his temper and snapped at her since their reconciliation. She is shocked at the sudden strength of his feelings, the dismantlement of their pact. Cut him some slack, she thinks, he just lost his wife, he doesn’t mean it. But he sounds like a man to whom nothing matters – the way he is saying her name, without warmth, as if tolerating her.

  Have you been drinking? she asks.

  No, Rachel. And even if I had, so what? What’s the problem with that?

  Rain tip-tapping the windowpane of the cottage like fragments of bone.

  Nothing. You just sound strange. I don’t want you to –

  I have to go now. I’m going to go.

  She has heard him speak like this before – a long time ago. The petulance. The perfunctory despair. I’m going to smash John in the head with my stick. Then Mum can come with us to swim in the river. A lost boy, making all the wrong decisions, before he learnt how to make the right ones. Lawrence would never let his marriage dissolve; he would fight harder. Nor would he alienate his sister. Rachel scrambles to keep him on the line.

  Wait, please, she says. Charlie would love to see you – he misses his uncle. Come and see him for a bit.

  It’s a bald, cheap play, using the baby as leverage, but she doesn’t care; it’s vital that he isn’t swept along
in any undertow.

  Lawrence?

  No. I’ve said I can’t.

  OK. We’ll come down there then.

  No, he says.

  I’d be happy to.

  No.

  Her frustration begins to mount. It occurs to her that she should let him go, that her pride is simply being knocked – her authority and influence are not working. He is an adult; he can take care of himself. But deep down, she doesn’t believe that. Her instincts have branched; they have had to as a mother. Whether he wants it or not, Lawrence needs help – and some part of him must know it, he called her, after all. He tries to hang up again. He is late for something, he says, needs to meet a friend. She stops him, asks again – Will you come to stay? Charlie’s favourite uncle . . . – begging almost, but she does not care. His tone softens a fraction.

  I know you’re trying to be nice, Rachel, but don’t. I don’t deserve it. You don’t want me there. I’m a mess. It would be really bad for the baby.

  She ignores the comment. She begins to talk at him. She talks steadily, fluidly – she can do this now, thanks to Charlie, who has broken the seal. He doesn’t want sympathy or absolution, that much is very clear, so she makes the case selfishly, appeals to his old sense of duty: the weak spot. I want you here. Come and help me. I’m really tired. You’re so good with him, and I don’t feel I’m coping. Twice more he tries to extricate himself. His desperation to get away is painful; she droops at the table, feels physically vulnerable. There’s a wound in her now it seems; all the people she cares for can hurt her. She keeps talking, asking her brother to come, for her sake, almost incanting it. He interrupts and his voice cracks.

  Please don’t, Rachel. Don’t. I’ll be no good around a baby. I don’t want to fuck that up, too. Please don’t make me.